Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

Trump Should Withdraw Haspel Nomination, Intel Vets Say

Consortium News | March 25, 2018

MEMORANDUM FOR: The President

FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

SUBJECT: Request to Withdraw Nomination of Gina Haspel

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

With respect, we veteran intelligence officers from CIA and other agencies urge you to withdraw the nomination of Gina Haspel for CIA director. From what is already known of her leading role in CIA torture 16 years ago, she has disqualified herself.

Gina Haspel

In 2002 Haspel supervised the first CIA “black site” for interrogation, where cruel and bizarre forms of torture were applied to suspected terrorists. And when the existence of 92 videotapes of those torture sessions was revealed, Haspel signed a cable ordering their destruction, against the advice of legal counsel at CIA and the White House.

Does Torture ‘Work?’

We are confident that if you set aside some time to read the unredacted portions of the Senate Intelligence Committee report of 2014 on the torture ordered and supervised by Haspel and other CIA managers, you will change your mind about her nomination. The five-year Senate investigation was based primarily on original CIA cables and other sensitive documents.

In addition to revealing clear violations of the UN Convention Against Torture, the Senate investigation shows that claims by senior CIA officials that torture is effective are far from true. The US Army — in which many of us have served — has been aware of the ineffectiveness of torture for decades.

General John Kimmons, head of Army Intelligence, drove home that point on September 6, 2006 — approximately an hour before President George W. Bush publicly extolled the virtues of torture methods that became known as “enhanced interrogation techniques.”  Gen. Kimmons stated: “No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years — hard years — tell us that.”

We believe that Defense Secretary James Mattis’ lack of enthusiasm for torture reflects lessons drawn from the historical experience of the Marine Corps, as well. Not to mention the twin reality that torture brutalizes the brutalizer, and that US use of torture puts our own troops in serious jeopardy when captured. Moreover, there is no more effective recruitment tool than torture to attract more terrorists.

International and Domestic Law

Please also be aware that many signatories to the UN Convention Against Torture take seriously their obligations under the principle of “universal jurisdiction,” which applies when those who authorize or practice torture are not brought to justice by authorities in their home countries.

George W. Bush experienced a precarious brush with this reality in 2011, when he had to abruptly cancel a visit to Geneva, Switzerland, after discovering that plans were in place to arrest him as soon as he stepped onto Swiss soil. [See “America’s Stay-at-Home Ex-President”] The widely respected European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights already has made no secret of its intention to proceed quickly against Haspel, should she set foot in Europe.

We believe that CIA’s activities and general focus have become severely unbalanced, with the lion’s share of funding and energy going to the paramilitary-prone operational side — where the potential for human rights abuses is not given sufficient consideration.

That trend has gone on steroids in more recent decades, and it is a safe bet that Gina Haspel would accelerate it. We would also observe that if most of the talent and funding goes to CIA paramilitary operations, then the by-products will necessarily include a tendency to engage in politically motivated — and therefore shabby — analysis. That means that senior policymakers like you will be poorly informed, particularly with respect to complex world issues — including biased perspectives on Russia and its newly re-elected president, Vladimir Putin.

* * *

We Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) are extremely concerned at the possibility that Gina Haspel might become the next Director of the CIA. Haspel actually supervised a CIA “black site” codenamed “Cat’s Eye” in Thailand where a number of suspected terrorists were tortured. She subsequently collaborated in destroying all 92 videotapes of the torture sessions, effectively covering up what were likely serious war crimes.

There should be no question about the illegality of torture. It has been universally condemned and banned by both the Geneva Conventions and United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which was signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1988 and ratified by the Senate in 1994.

The UN Convention defines torture “as any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him, or a third person, information or a confession…” and makes clear that “no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”

The Convention’s Article 2 requires signatories to take effective measures to prevent torture in any territory under their jurisdiction. The complete prohibition of torture is absolute.  Under international law, officials cannot receive immunity in cases involving torture and governments that have signed the Convention are obligated to bring torturers to justice.  US domestic law was brought in line with the Convention once the US became a signatory and ratified it.

In the wake of the Abu Ghraib revelations, torture, to include its variations that have been euphemistically described as “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EIT), is now explicitly banned by the US military in its training manuals. A number of soldiers were tried and imprisoned in the wake of Abu Ghraib, although the “upper ranks” — in civilian as well as military spheres — who approved torture managed to escape serious consequences.

Some in the Pentagon clearly took seriously allegations of torture and were willing to file criminal charges against those involved, though Department of Defense leadership never saw fit to assume responsibility for having set up a policy environment that quite clearly condoned EIT.

There is also another significant historical and legal precedent that demonstrates that the United States government has by its own actions agreed that what is today being called “enhanced interrogation” is a war crime. In 1946-1948, Japanese officers who tortured Allied soldiers — including what is now referred to as waterboarding — were tried at the Tokyo post-war tribunals for that crime, found guilty, and executed.

Heinous

More recently, the meticulously documented unclassified 528 page Executive Summary of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) report on the CIA’s secret Rendition, Detention and Interrogation (RDI) program is remarkable for its candor. That five-year investigation was based on original CIA cables and other documents.

In blunt language, the Senate report describes the horrors of the black site secret prisons and the efforts that were made to get terrorist suspects to talk. It demonstrates that the interrogations were brutal — worse than anyone had been led to believe — and also that they did not produce any information that might not have been developed otherwise or, in many cases, any actionable intelligence whatsoever. The full classified text of the report — which names names of the actual torture perpetrators redacted in the summary — runs to almost 7,000 pages.

Moreover, coercive interrogation frequently produced misleading or fabricated intelligence that wasted resources by having to be meticulously checked before being used.  This conclusion was also arrived at by former FBI interrogator Ali Soufan — who deplored CIA methods — as well as by a review conducted by CIA’s then-Inspector General (IG), John Helgerson, in 2004. The “Helgerson Report” condemned both CIA leadership and Langley’s on-the-ground management of questionable programs driven by “analytical assessments that were unsupported by credible intelligence” — programs which quickly became abusive.

It is our collective judgment that the loathsome physical abuses that included beatings, repeated waterboardings and anal violations referred to as “rectal feeding” — as well as physical threats to family members — cannot be whitewashed with the convenient euphemism of “enhanced interrogation.” All of those are acts of torture — plain and simple.

And while there are undoubtedly many good moral arguments against torture, there are practical considerations as well. Despite what the media would have Americans believe, torture does not work.

We recall the unambiguous remarks of then-commander of Army intelligence, Gen. John Kimmons, who held a Pentagon press conference on Sept. 6, 2006 — the same day President George W. Bush announced what he called “an alternative set of procedures” for interrogation (which later morphed into the term “enhanced interrogation techniques”). Anticipating that Bush would claim the EITS to be necessary and effective, Gen. Kimmons told the media: “No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years — hard years —tells us that.”

Colin Powell Mousetrapped by ‘Intelligence’ From Torture

Worse still, intelligence officials have used information, which they knew was gained from torture, to mislead the most senior US officials on issues of war and peace. One of the signatories below was eyewitness to how CIA Director George Tenet persuaded Secretary of State Colin Powell to tell the UN of a “sinister nexus” between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.

Tenet did not tell Powell that this “intelligence” came from a source, Abu Yahya al-Libi, who had been “rendered” to, and waterboarded by, Egyptian intelligence. The Defense Intelligence Agency had deemed this intelligence unreliable, but Tenet chose to ignore DIA and never informed Powell.  Al-Libi recanted less than a year later, admitting that he fabricated the story about Saddam and al-Qaeda in order to stop his torture.

Moreover, when you wink at torture, you motivate enemies of the United States to do the same to captured US soldiers, diplomats and travelers while also providing a propaganda bonanza for terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS.

Indeed, the only reason why CIA torturers have not been tried and sentenced to prison for the damage they have done to the nation is that an intimidated President Barack Obama — who once proclaimed that “nobody is above the law” — balked at allowing the judicial process to run its course, thereby whitewashing the Bush Administration’s many crimes related to the so-called “global war on terror.” Obama attempted to justify his inaction as looking forward rather than backward, but it is more likely that he feared opening up a Pandora’s Box of shameful government secrets that no doubt would have emerged.

Promoting Haspel in spite of her tainted record would send a message to both intelligence and military personnel that embracing practices like torture — indisputably a war crime — can be a path to promotion.

Haspel’s involvement with torture began when she accepted the assignment to go to Thailand — which she could have turned down — to run the “black site” where the interrogations were being conducted. She was, at the time, the deputy in CIA’s Counter Terrorism Center (CTC), working for Jose Rodriguez.

She was in charge of the secret Thailand base in late 2002 while Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri and possibly more suspects were being tortured in a process that included slamming victims’ heads against walls, subjecting them to painful stress positions, regularly depriving them of sleep, confining them to small, coffin-like boxes, and waterboarding.

The “confinement boxes” were of two types; one was coffin-sized, and the other was smaller and less than waist-high. Both had strong claustrophobic effects. A prisoner would be forced into the smaller box as an extreme form of stress positioning, creating excruciating pain. To maximize psychological distress and exploit phobias, insects were sometimes placed in the pitch-black “coffin” alongside the victim.

Destroying the Evidence

In 2005, after returning to CIA headquarters at Langley, she acted on instructions from Rodriguez and drafted the order to destroy the 92 videotapes that had been made of the interrogations. It has been reported that she was a “strong advocate” for the destruction. This was contrary to instructions provided by CIA Counsel John Rizzo and the White House.  Thus, her act may have constituted destruction of evidence — a felony.

Jose Rodriguez was investigated for destruction of evidence by a Special Prosecutor who eventually ruled against charging him. An aide to CIA Executive Director Kyle “Dusty” Foggo later revealed Rodriguez’s rationale for shredding the tapes, writing in an email that “the heat from destroying [them] is nothing compared with what it would be if the tapes ever got into public domain – he [Rodriguez] said that they would make us look terrible; it would be devastating to us.” Gina Haspel ensured that these tapes — important, damning evidence of US government torture — would never see the light of day.

Haspel’s defenders claim that she was not the creator of the torture program and only served as a willing executor of a government initiative that she believed to be legal. That may be true as no one has access to the CTC documents that might prove otherwise. Nevertheless, it does not provide her a free pass under international law, where it is generally referred to as the “Nuremberg Defense” — a thoroughly discredited “defense” that harkens back to the era of Nazi atrocities and those who attempted to justify them by claiming perpetrators were “just following orders.”

‘Nuremberg Defense’ Didn’t Work at Nuremberg

Several former CIA leaders have supported her, saying that she was “implementing the legal orders of the president,” but many of them may be concerned about their own reputations or questionable decisions they may have made in the name of the “war on terror.” And the UN’s International Law Commission says something quite different in its codification of the legal options surrounding torture, writing that “the fact that a person acted pursuant to an order of his government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.”

It is also claimed that Gina Haspel was working for the CIA Chief of Station (COS) in Bangkok and acting under the COS’s orders, but those of us who have worked in and led CIA bases would dispute that that type of tight control was common, particularly since in this case, she was reporting directly to the Counterterrorism Center at Langley. Haspel would have been the boss and would have had independence in the field in executing directives from CIA Headquarters and the Counterterrorism Center — some of which she herself had a hand in drafting.

If Haspel is confirmed and wishes to travel abroad, she may have to restrict herself to countries not party to the UN Convention Against Torture because of her widely known involvement in the “black site” in Thailand. The 42 countries that have signed and ratified the Convention include the US and most of its allies. All take on a legal obligation to enforce the prohibition against torture, based on the principle of “universal jurisdiction,” when necessary.  In other words, they are empowered to act when the accused’s home country refuses to do so.

Not Too Late to Do the Right Thing

If you do not withdraw the nomination of Gina Haspel and she is confirmed, this will cast a moral stain on the vast numbers of patriotic and ethically upright Americans who serve their country in the field of national security. It will also be a continuation of the steady erosion of human rights standards and rule of law post-9/11.

Apparent widespread support for torture among the US public — enabled largely by the false message of Hollywood, the media and the Cheney family that it “works” — is deplorable. It might have been headed off by the prosecutions of Haspel, Rodriguez and others by former President Obama, together with graphic exposure of the evidence. You have an opportunity to reverse this wrong.

Withdrawing Haspel’s nomination now would be a step in the right direction. Confirming her as Director of CIA would signal that Washington embraces what then-Vice President Dick Cheney referred to as the “dark side.” Regrettably, torture was once part of US policy. Indeed, one of this Memorandum’s signatories spent nearly two years in federal prison because he revealed that.  But torture cannot be relied upon to yield accurate intelligence. It remains an internationally condemned malignancy that must be excised, never to return.

* * *

For the Steering Group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)

Jean Maria Arrigo, PhD, member of 2005 American Psychological Association task force evaluating the role of psychologists in U.S. intelligence and military interrogations of detainees (associate VIPS)

William Binney, former NSA Technical Director for World Geopolitical & Military Analysis; Co-founder of NSA’s Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center (ret.)

Richard H. Black, Senator of Virginia, 13th District; Colonel US Army (ret.); Former Chief, Criminal Law Division, Office of the Judge Advocate General, the Pentagon (associate VIPS)

Bogdan Dzakovic, former Team Leader of Federal Air Marshals and Red Team, FAA Security (ret.) (associate VIPS)

Philip Giraldi, CIA, Operations Officer (ret.)

George Hunsinger, Professor, Princeton Theological Seminary; Founder, National Religious Campaign Against Torture (associate VIPS)

Michael S. Kearns, Captain, USAF (ret.), Intelligence Officer & ex-Master SERE Instructor

John Kiriakou, Former CIA Counterterrorism Officer and former senior investigator, Senate Foreign Relations Committee

Karen Kwiatkowski, Lt. Col., USAF (ret.)

Linda Lewis, WMD preparedness policy analyst, USDA (ret.) (associate VIPS)

Edward Loomis, NSA Cryptologic Computer Scientist, ret.

Ray McGovern, former US Army infantry/intelligence officer & CIA analyst; CIA Presidential briefer (ret.)

Elizabeth Murray, former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East, National Intelligence Council & CIA political analyst (ret.)

Todd E. Pierce, MAJ, US Army Judge Advocate (ret.)

Diane Roark, Republican Professional Staff, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, 1985-2002 (ret.) (associate VIPS)

Coleen Rowley, FBI Special Agent and former Minneapolis Division Legal Counsel (ret.)

Greg Thielmann, former Director, Office of Strategic, Political, and Military Affairs, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, State Department; Former staff member, Senate Intelligence Committee

Peter Van Buren, US Department of State, Foreign Service Officer (ret.) (associate VIPS)

Kirk Wiebe, former Senior Analyst, SIGINT Automation Research Center, NSA

Lawrence Wilkerson, Colonel, US Army (ret.), former Chief of Staff for Secretary of State; Distinguished Visiting Professor, College of William and Mary (associate VIPS)

Valerie Wilson, former operations officer, CIA (associate VIPS)

Sarah G. Wilton, CDR, USNR, (ret.); Defense Intelligence Agency (ret.)

Robert Wing, former Foreign Service Officer (associate VIPS)

Ann Wright, Colonel, US Army (ret.); also Foreign Service Officer who resigned in opposition to the US war on Iraq

 

* * *

 

ANNEX

 

MEMORANDA from VIPS to President Barack Obama Regarding Torture

 

1 —

https://consortiumnews.com/2016/09/16/us-media-ignores-cia-cover-up-on-torture/embed/#?secret=D6z5ho1AYV

September 16, 2016

MEMORANDUM FOR: Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Vice Chairman, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence

FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)

SUBJECT: U.S. Media Mum On How Your Committee Faced Down Both CIA and Obama

 

2 —

https://consortiumnews.com/2015/09/14/us-intel-vets-decry-cias-use-of-torture/embed/#?secret=Wr60oiiQOF

September 19, 2015

MEMORANDUM FOR: The President

FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)

SUBJECT: Intelligence Veterans Challenge CIA’s “Rebuttal” on Torture

 

3 —

https://consortiumnews.com/2014/12/29/udall-urged-to-disclose-full-torture-report/embed/#?secret=K9Sqid3A5g

December 29, 2014

MEMORANDUM FOR: Senator Mark Udall

FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)

SUBJECT: Time to Speak Out on Floor of Congress to Stop Torture

 

4 —

https://consortiumnews.com/2009/092809a.html

September 27, 2009

MEMORANDUM FOR: The President

FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)

SUBJECT: There Must be Accountability for Torture

 

5 —

https://consortiumnews.com/2009/042909e.html 

April 29, 2009

MEMORANDUM FOR: The President

FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)

SUBJECT: Torture: An Accumulated Evil (see Nuremberg): John Brennan Publicly Defended “Extraordinary Rendition” Knowing Its Purpose Was Torture

March 25, 2018 Posted by | Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

“Why 55 U.S. Senators Voted for Genocide in Yemen”

By Michael S. Rozeff | LewRockwell.com | March 24, 2108

That’s the headline of a blog. It’s a good question. There are six factors involved: Iran, sales of arms, Israel, the CIA, indifferent cruelty, and the system of empire. These are all bad reasons that shouldn’t persuade right-thinking and honorable U.S. senators, but votes for genocide do not come from right-thinking and honorable senators.

Iran. The idea is that Saudi Arabia is thwarting Iran in Yemen. The evidence for this is very, very thin, but even if the Saudis want to thwart Iran somehow in Yemen, that doesn’t justify either a war initiated by Saudi Arabia, a war of the type and scale being waged by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, and a U.S. presence in that war.

Sales of arms. Huge sales to the Saudis are being made by U.S. companies who influence senators.

Israel. Israel is anti-Iran and in league with Saudi Arabia. Senators are influenced by the Israel lobby.

Notice that in none of these factors or those to follow does the American public play a part. The Senate is only remotely under the control of Americans on this issue, and why would it be? Americans are little affected by what their government does in Yemen, and the U.S. role is kept quite hidden. The visible and well-heeled Israel lobby is more influential than the invisible “pro-American public” lobby.

The CIA. The CIA operates an anti-al Qaeda operation inside Yemen. The war has allowed al-Qaeda to expand. This justifies an expanded CIA presence there. This benefits the CIA.

Indifferent cruelty. The lives of Yemenis count for little to those who vote for genocide. This is a characteristic of fallen man that is sometimes ameliorated by moral teachings and the threat of punishments or worse blowback, but only now and then. The institutional customs and mechanisms to control this trait are not strong enough to stop genocides.

The system of empire. Habitual cruelty is a feature of the U.S. empire. Empires enforce “order”, actually control and dominance, over broad domains that they seek to extend. They use killing to accomplish their expansion in most cases. Their victims are not counted as costs.

March 24, 2018 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Irishmen subjected to CIA-style ‘5 techniques’ by British not tortured – European court

RT | March 20, 2018

A European court has rejected a request to find that a group of 14 men detained during internment in Northern Ireland suffered torture. The prisoners were subjected to white noise, sleep and food deprivation as well as beatings.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) rejected the Irish government petition to revise a 1978 judgement against the UK and find that the prisoners, known as the ‘hooded men’ were subjected to torture.

The men were exposed to methods known as the “five techniques” – hooding, white noise, stress positions, sleep deprivation, and food deprivation. The practice was applied over an unknown period of four to seven days for an unspecified number of hours at a time. Similar interrogation techniques have since been deployed by the CIA and outlined in a 2014 Senate Torture report.

The men, who were all Catholic, were detained in 1971 at the height of The Troubles after Northern Ireland used the Special Powers Act to introduce internment without trial for those suspected of being involved in violence. They were hooded and flown by helicopter to a secret location, later revealed as a British Army camp outside Derry in Northern Ireland. Before landing they were dangled out of the helicopter and told they were high in the air, although they were close to the ground. None of the individuals were ever convicted of wrongdoing.

In 1978 the ECHR found that the British authorities’ actions amounted to inhuman and degrading treatment, but not torture. Following a TV documentary in 2014, which brought archived files to light, the Irish government requested a revision of the original judgment.

The Irish government submitted that a psychiatrist who gave evidence as an expert for the British government misled the Commission by saying that the effects of the ill-treatment were short-lived when he knew that the use of the five techniques had long-lasting and severe effects. The government cited archived documents that allegedly revealed the British authorities had tried to prevent the court from accessing the full truth about the five techniques.

Overall, the court found that the documents did not demonstrate facts which were unknown at the time. It added that it could also not be said that such knowledge might have had a decisive influence leading to a finding of torture, noting that the original judgment had made no reference to the issue of such long-term effects. The revision request was dismissed by a chamber of seven judges by six votes to one.

Amnesty International, who visited the detainees in 1971 and stated then there was evidence of torture at the camp, described today’s decision as “disappointing.” It noted that the ruling is not a statement that the ‘five techniques’ do not constitute torture as it is legally defined today.

“What has been revealed in the files withheld by the UK government cannot be denied. These men were tortured, and with approval at the highest levels of government. The record of what these men endured in those interrogation rooms 47 years ago, and the devastating impact on them afterwards, still stands,” Amnesty said.

March 21, 2018 Posted by | Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Former CIA Chief Brennan Running Scared

By Ray McGovern | Consortium News | March 19, 2018

What prompted former CIA Director John Brennan on Saturday to accuse President Donald Trump of “moral turpitude” and to predict, with an alliterative flourish, that Trump will end up “as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history”? The answer shines through the next sentence in Brennan’s threatening tweet: “You may scapegoat Andy McCabe [former FBI Deputy Director fired Friday night] but you will not destroy America… America will triumph over you.”

Former CIA Director John Brennan

It is easy to see why Brennan lost it. The Attorney General fired McCabe, denying him full retirement benefits, because McCabe “had made an unauthorized disclosure to the news media and lacked candor — including under oath — on multiple occasions.” There but for the grace of God go I, Brennan must have thought, whose stock in trade has been unauthorized disclosures.

In fact, Brennan can take but small, short-lived consolation in the fact that he succeeded in leaving with a full government pension. His own unauthorized disclosures and leaks probably dwarf in number, importance, and sensitivity those of McCabe. And many of those leaks appear to have been based on sensitive intercepted conversations from which the names of American citizens were unmasked for political purposes. Not to mention the leaks of faux intelligence like that contained in the dubious “dossier” cobbled together for the Democrats by British ex-spy Christopher Steele.

It is an open secret that the CIA has been leaking like the proverbial sieve over the last two years or so to its favorite stenographers at the New York Times and Washington Post. (At one point, the obvious whispering reached the point that the Wall Street Journal saw fit to complain that it was being neglected.) The leaking can be traced way back — at least as far as the Clinton campaign’s decision to blame the Russians for the publication of very damning DNC emails by WikiLeaks just three days before the Democratic National Convention.

This blame game turned out to be a hugely successful effort to divert attention from the content of the emails, which showed in bas relief the dirty tricks the DNC played on Bernie Sanders. The media readily fell in line, and all attention was deflected from the substance of the DNC emails to the question as to why the Russians supposedly “hacked into the DNC and gave the emails to WikiLeaks.”

This media operation worked like a charm, but even Secretary Clinton’s PR person, Jennifer Palmieri, conceded later that at first it strained credulity that the Russians would be doing what they were being accused of doing.

Magnificent Diversion

On April 6, 2017 I attended a panel discussion on “Russia’s interference in our democracy” at the Clinton/Podesta Center for American Progress Fund. In my subsequent write-up I noted that panelist Palmieri had inadvertently dropped tidbits of evidence that I suggested “could get some former officials in deep kimchi – if a serious investigation of leaking, for example, were to be conducted.” (That time seems to be coming soon.)

Palmieri was asked to comment on “what was actually going on in late summer/early fall [2016].” She answered:

“It was a surreal experience … so I did appreciate that for the press to absorb … the idea that behind the stage that the Trump campaign was coordinating with Russia to defeat Hillary Clinton was too fantastic for people to, um, for the press to process, to absorb….

“But then we go back to Brooklyn [Clinton headquarters] and heard from the — mostly our sources were other intelligence, with the press who work in the intelligence sphere, and that’s where we heard things and that’s where we learned about the dossier and the other story lines that were swirling about; and how to process … And along the way the administration started confirming various pieces of what they were concerned about what Russia was doing. … So I do think that the answer for the Democrats now … in both the House and the Senate is to talk about it more and make it more real.”

So the leaking had an early start, and went on steroids during the months following the Democratic Convention up to the election — and beyond.

As a Reminder

None of the leaking, unmasking, surveillance, or other activities directed against the Trump campaign can be properly understood, if one does not bear in mind that it was considered a sure thing that Secretary Clinton would become President, at which point illegal and extralegal activities undertaken to help her win would garner praise, not prison.

But she lost. And a month ago, House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes (R-CA) threw down the gauntlet, indicating that there could be legal consequences, for example, for officials who misled the FISA court in order to enable surveillance on Trump and associates. His words are likely to have sent chills down the spine of yet other miscreants. “If they need to be put on trial, we will put them on trial,” he said. “The reason Congress exists is to oversee these agencies that we created.”

John Brennan is widely reported to be Nunes’s next target. Does one collect a full pension in jail?

Unmasking: Senior national security officials are permitted to ask the National Security Agency to unmask the names of Americans in intercepted communications for national security reasons — not for domestic political purposes. Congressional committees have questioned why Obama’s UN ambassador Samantha Power (as well as his national security adviser Susan Rice) made so many unmasking requests. Power is reported to have requested the unmasking of more than 260 Americans, most of them in the final days of the administration, including the names of Trump associates.

Deep State Intimidation 

Back to John Brennan’s bizarre tweet Saturday telling the President, “You may scapegoat Andy McCabe but you will not destroy America … America will triumph over you.” Unmasking the word “America,” so to speak, one can readily discern the name “Brennan” underneath. Brennan’s words and attitude are a not-so-subtle reminder of the heavy influence and confidence of the deep state, including the media — exercised to a fare-thee-well over the past two years.

Later on Saturday, Samantha Power, with similar equities at stake, put an exclamation point behind what Brennan had tweeted earlier in the day. Power also saw fit to remind Trump where the power lies, so to speak. She warned him publicly that it is “not a good idea to piss off John Brennan.”

Meanwhile, the Washington Post is dutifully playing its part in the deep-state game of intimidation. The following excerpt from Sunday’s lead article conveys the intended message: “Some Trump allies say they worry he is playing with fire by taunting the FBI. ‘This is open, all-out war. And guess what? The FBI’s going to win,’ said one ally, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid. ‘You can’t fight the FBI. They’re going to torch him.’” [sic]

The Post, incidentally, waited until paragraph 41 of 44 to inform readers that it was the FBI’s own Office of Professional Responsibility and the Inspector General of the Department of Justice that found McCabe guilty, and that the charge was against McCabe, not the FBI. A quite different impression was conveyed by the large headline “Trump escalates attacks on FBI” as well as the first 40 paragraphs of Sunday’s lead article.

Putting Down a Marker

It isn’t as though Donald Trump wasn’t warned, as are all incoming presidents, of the power of the Deep State that he needs to play ball with — or else. Recall that just three days before President-elect Trump was visited by National Intelligence Director James Clapper, FBI Director James Comey, CIA Director John Brennan, and NSA Director Michael Rogers, Trump was put on notice by none other than the Minority Leader of the Senate, Chuck Schumer.  Schumer has been around and knows the ropes; he is a veteran of 18 years in the House, and is in his 20th year in the Senate.

On Jan. 3, 2017 Schumer said it all, when he told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, that President-elect Trump is “being really dumb” by taking on the intelligence community and its assessments on Russia’s cyber activities:

“Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Schumer told Maddow. “So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb to do this.” Did Maddow ask Schumer if he was saying President of the United States should be afraid of the intelligence community? No, she let Schumer’s theorem stand.

With gauntlets now thrown down by both sides, we may not have to wait very long to see if Schumer is correct in his blithe prediction as to how the present constitutional crisis will be resolved.

Ray McGovern works for Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington.  He served as a CIA analyst under seven Presidents and nine CIA directors and is now on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

March 19, 2018 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

‘High-ranking people’ protected Clinton from indictment – Former FBI asst. director

RT | March 19, 2018

Former FBI Assistant Director James Kallstrom alleged Sunday that there was a conspiracy in Washington to protect Hillary Clinton from indictment. He added that ongoing chaos in Trump’s cabinet may be a symptom of the plot.

“Do you think somebody was directing them or do you think they just came to the conclusion on their own, this leadership at the FBI and the Department of Justice, that they wanted to change the outcome of the election?” Fox News host Maria Bartiromo asked Kallstrom, as cited by The Washington Examiner.

“I think we have ample facts revealed to us during this last year-and-a-half that high-ranking people throughout government – not just the FBI – high-ranking people had a plot to not have Hillary Clinton, you know, indicted,” Kallstrom, a 27-year veteran of the agency, replied.

Kallstrom alleged both inter-departmental collusion in addition to a complicit media apparatus within the fourth estate that helped to undermine the Trump campaign and subsequent cabinet, while also repeatedly highlighting the Russiagate narrative.

Among others, Kallstrom pointed the finger at Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan, an extremely vocal critic of the Trump administration.

“My sources tell me that he was leaking almost weekly and daily. He was taking that bunch of phony crap supposedly from Russia, and peddling that through the Congress, all his buddies in the media, he was one of the active people. I’ve known him a long time.”

Brennan vehemently condemned Trump’s firing of former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.

“When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America… America will triumph over you,” Brennan tweeted.

Trump was vocal in his mistrust of McCabe and even openly criticized him for taking money from Clinton associates.

Kallstrom alleges that the repeated reshuffling in Trump’s cabinet is the result of a high-level conspiracy to help former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton win the 2016 presidential election.

“They had a backup plan to basically frame Donald Trump and that’s what’s been going,” Kallstrom said. “I think it goes right to the top. And it involves that whole strategy – they were gonna win, nobody would have known any of this stuff, and they just unleashed the intelligence community. Look at the unmaskings. We haven’t heard anything about that yet. Look at the way they violated the rights of all those American citizens.”

March 19, 2018 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception | , , , | Leave a comment

Jane Mayer, the New Yorker, and the Art of the Big Russia Lie

David Remnick’s New Yorker, where Masha Gessen is always welcome, is Exhibit A in the Jewish media’s relentless lying about and demonizing of Russia, Putin, and Russiagate.

By Philip Giraldi | Russia Insider | March 15, 2018

The latest salvo in the Russiagate saga is a 15,000 word New Yorker article entitled “Christopher Steele the man behind the Trump dossier: how the ex-spy tried to warn the world about Trump’s ties to Russia” by veteran journalist Jane Mayer. The premise of the piece is clear from the tediously long title, namely that the Steele dossier, which implicated Donald Trump and his associates in a number of high crimes and misdemeanors, is basically accurate in exposing an existential threat posed to our nation by Russia. How does it come to that conclusion? By citing sources that it does not identify whose credibility is alleged to be unimpeachable as well as by including testimony from Steele friends and supporters.

In other words, the Mayer piece is an elaboration of the same “trust me” narrative that has driven the hounding of Russia and Trump from day one. Inevitably, the Trump haters both from the left and the right have jumped on the Mayer piece as confirmation of their own presumptions regarding what has allegedly occurred, when, in reality, Trump might just be more right than wrong when he claims that he has been the victim of a conspiracy by the Establishment to discredit and remove him.

Mayer is a progressive and a long-time critic of Donald Trump. She has written a book denouncing “the Koch brothers’ deep influence on American politics” and co-authored another book with Jill Abramson, formerly Executive Editor of the New York Times. Abramson reportedly carries a small plastic replica of Barack Obama in her purse which she can take out “to take comfort” whenever she is confronted by Donald Trump’s America. Mayer’s New Yorker bio-blurb describes her as a journalist who covers national security, together with politics and culture.

The problem with the type of neo-journalism as practiced by Mayer is that it first comes to a conclusion and then selects the necessary “facts” to support that narrative. When the government does that sort of thing to support, one might suggest, a war against Iraq or even hypothetically speaking Iran, it is called cherry picking. After the facts have been cherry picked they are “stovepiped” up to the policy maker, avoiding along the way any analysts who might demur regarding the product’s veracity. In journalistic terms, the equivalent would perhaps be sending the garbage up directly to a friendly editor, avoiding any fact check.

Mayer tries to take the high road by asserting that the Republicans are “trying to take down the intelligence community.” It is an odd assertion coming from her as she has written a book called “The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals,” a development which was pretty much implemented by the intelligence community working hand-in-hand with Congress and the White House. But she is not the first liberal who has now become a friend of CIA, the FBI and the NSA as a response to the greater threat allegedly posed by Donald Trump.A Steele friend describes the man as a virtual Second Coming of Jesus, for whom “fairness, integrity and truth… trump any ideology.” Former head of MI-6 and Steele boss Sir John Dearlove, who once reported how the intelligence on Iraq had been “sexed-up” and “fixed around the policy” to make the false case for war, describes Steele as “superb.” Other commentary from former American CIA officers is similar in nature. Former CIA Deputy Director John McLaughlin, who himself was involved in lying to support America’s journey into Iraq, similarly sees Steele as honest and credible in his claims, while a former CIA Station Chief in Moscow is called upon to cast aspersions on the “Russian character” that impels them to engage in lies and deception.

My review of the Mayer rebuttal of criticism of Steele revealed a number of instances where she comes to certain conclusions without presenting any real supporting evidence or accepts “proof” that is essentially hearsay because it supports her overall narrative. She asserts that Russia and WikiLeaks were working together on the release of the Democratic National Committee/Hillary Clinton emails without providing any substantiation whatsoever. She surely came to that judgement based on something she was told, but by whom and when?

Another major blooper in the Mayer story relates to how one unnamed “senior Russian official” reported that the Kremlin had blocked the appointment of Mitt Romney, a noted critic of Russia, as secretary of state. How exactly that was implemented is not clear from the Steele reporting and there has been no other independent confirmation of the allegation, but Mayer finds it credible, asserting that “subsequent events could be said to support it.” What events? one might ask, though the national media did not hesitate and instead reported Mayer’s assertion as if it were itself a credible source in a forty-eight hour news cycle frenzy relating to Romney and Trump.

Steele’s work history also raises some questions. He served in Moscow as a first tour officer for MI-6 under diplomatic cover from 1990 to 1993. Russia was in tumult and Mayer describes how “Boris Yeltsin gained ultimate power, and a moment of democratic promise faded as the KGB -now called the FSB-reasserted its influence, oligarchs snapped up state assets, and nationalist political forces began to emerge.” Not to go into too much detail, but Mayer’s description of Russia at that time is dead wrong. Yeltsin was a drunkard and a tool of American and European intervention and manipulation. He was no agent of “democratic promise” and only grew more corrupt as his time in office continued into the completely manipulated election of 1996, when the IMF and U.S. conspired to get him reelected so the looting, a.k.a. “democratization,” could go on. Mayer goes on to depict in negative terms a “shadowy” former “KGB operative” Vladimir Putin who emerged from the chaos.

Mayer also cites a Steele report of April 2016, a “secret investigation [that] involved a survey of Russian interference in the politics of four members of the European Union,” but she neither produces the report itself or the sources used to put it together. The report allegedly concluded that the “Kremlin’s long-term aim …was to boost extremist groups and politicians at the expense of Europe’s liberal democracies. The more immediate goal was to destroy the E.U…” The precis provided by Mayer is a bit of fantasy, it would seem, and is perhaps a reflection of an unhealthy obsession on the part of Steele, if he actually came to that conclusion. As it stands it is hearsay, possibly provided by Steele himself or a friend to Mayer to defend his reputation.Mayer also reports and calls potentially treasonous Steele’s claims that “Kremlin and Trump were politically colluding in the 2016 campaign…’to sow discord and disunity both with the U.S.’ and within the transatlantic alliance.” And also, “[Trump] and his top associates had repeatedly accepted intelligence from the Kremlin on Hillary Clinton and other political rivals.” As Robert Mueller apparently has not developed any information to support such wild claims, it would be interesting to know why Jane Mayer considers them to be credible.

Sweeping judgements by Mayer also include “[Steele’s] allegation that the Kremlin favored Trump in 2016 and was offering his campaign dirt on Hillary has been borne out. So has his claim that the Kremlin and WikiLeaks were working together…” As noted above, the WikiLeaks/Kremlin allegations have not been demonstrated, nor have the claims about Kremlin provision of information to discredit Hillary, who was doing a find job at the time discrediting herself.

The account of Donald Trump performing “perverted sexual acts” in a Moscow hotel is likewise a good example of what is wrong with the article. Four sources are cited as providing details of what took place, but it is conceded that none of them was actually a witness to it. It would be necessary to learn who the sources were beyond vague descriptions, what their actual access to the information was and what their motives were for coming forward might be. One was allegedly a “top-level Russian intelligence officer,” but the others were hotel employees and a Trump associate who had arranged for the travel.

Finally, from an ex-intelligence officer point of view I have some questions about Steele’s sources in Russia. Who are they? If they were MI-6 sources he would not be able to touch them once he left the service and would face severe sanctions under the Official Secrets Act should he even try to do so. There are in addition claims in the Mayer story that Steele did not pay his sources because it would encourage them to fabricate, an argument that could also be made about Steele who was being paid to produce dirt on Trump. So what was the quid pro quo? Intelligence agents work for money, particularly when dealing with a private security firm, and Steele’s claim, if he truly made it, that he has sources that gave him closely held, highly sensitive information in exchange for an occasional lunch in Mayfair rings hollow.

Jane Mayer’s account of the Steele dossier seems to accept quite a lot on faith. It would be interesting to know the extent to which Steele himself or his proxies were the source of much of what she has written. Until we know more about the actual Russian sources and also about Mayer’s own contacts interviewed for the article, her “man behind the Trump dossier” will continue to be something of a mystery and the entire Russiagate saga assumption that Moscow interfered in the 2016 U.S. election must be regarded as still to be demonstrated.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is http://www.councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.

March 18, 2018 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | , , , | Leave a comment

Syria: The Horrible End Versus the Endless Horror

By Randy Shields • Unz Review • March 17, 2018

Neocon Max Boot now says it’s better for the Syrian people if Assad stays in power. But we still can’t get the American left to come to its senses about Syria.

Louis Proyect says in Counterpunch that the suffering coming out of East Ghouta is “on a massive scale reminiscent of Leningrad in 1941.”

According to Wiki, a million and a half people died during the Leningrad siege. According to the authoritative-sounding Syrian Observatory for Human Rights — one anti-Assad guy in a Coventry flat, relying mostly on reports from anti-Assad fighters — 1,000 people have been killed in East Ghouta, horrible to be sure but not Leningrad. In Leningrad, people were reduced to cannibalism. There was cannibalism in Syria in 2013: a commander for the left’s beloved Free Syrian Army cut the lungs out of a Syrian Army soldier and ate them on camera. A “moderate” rebel eminently worthy of CIA dollars — and spicy recipes.

While bringing up Lou-dicrous comparisons to 1941 Leningrad, Proyect fails to mention the US-destroyed Raqqa and Mosul from which dead bodies are still being found and dragged out of the rubble. Rest assured that the Great Satan will not rebuild those cities as Assad is doing with Palmyra and Aleppo. To the colonized mind of the American left, the crimes of America’s enemies are always worse and more worth talking about than the crimes of America itself. US airstrikes were responsible for most of the 40,000 dead civilians in Mosul and over 3,000 in Raqqa.

By the way, two thirds of the casualties in Syria have been Syrian soldiers and anti-government fighters. The anti-Assad left and the mockingbird media would have us believe that all 345,000 Syrian deaths have been civilians who Assad and Putin deliberately, personally and exclusively killed. The pressitutes tell us how unpopular the Alawite Assad is while the entire world sees a Sunni majority army fighting to the death for him and the rest of Syria by killing off Wahhabist Sunni fanatics. Huh? (Syria has never been a “civil war” or a “sectarian conflict” — it’s been a pre-planned destruction led by the US, piggy-backing on legitimate grievances of the Syrian working class.)

Interestingly, the anti-Assad left never tells us the names of the armed opposition groups that it supports. Why? Is it because they are al-Qaeda offshoots? Is it because they are so tiny and few in number that they are inconsequential and/or the Syrian working class majority don’t support them? Is it because they collaborated with the most regressive fundamentalist groups and/or got wiped out by them? The anti-Assad left seems to live in an ivory tower that got destroyed somewhere around 2012 — they never say what should be done now.

Then Proyect makes a false equivalency between Israel bombing Gaza in response to Hamas’ largely ineffectual rockets and the Syrian government bombing terrorists in East Ghouta who have been shelling Damascus for years with howitzers, mortars and GRAD rockets, killing and wounding thousands of civilians. Gazans are occupied and have legitimate rights under international law to resist, including violently.

Proyect quotes Counterpunch’s Jeffrey St. Clair that aerial bombing of cities is a war crime. I couldn’t agree more and I’ll raise you an aerial bombing of jungles also. And I think shooting a barrage of GRAD rockets into downtown Damascus is a war crime too. (What parts of war aren’t a crime?) So, where does that put us? It puts “us” safely and snugly in the belly of the beast. It puts the Syrian working class majority wanting its government to protect them from a minority of al-Qaeda metastases, funded and armed by the most reactionary regimes on earth, trying to win violently what they can’t win intellectually, socially or politically. The left just won’t cut its intellectual (“moderate” rebels) or political (Russia-gate) losses. And isn’t it interesting how so much of what the left does is in harmony with what the Pentagon, the CIA and the empire wants.

And since Proyect brought up Gaza and the Palestinians… It was the Palestinian Liwaa al-Quds force who stormed the al-Shaaher roundabout in Aleppo on September 24, 2016 which liberated the Handaraat Camp which turned around the battle for Aleppo which turned around the fight for Syria which is turning the American empire upside down with indispensable help from Russia and Iran. On that memorable September day eastern Aleppo residents were cheering on Liwwa al-Quds, Hezbollah and the Syrian Arab Army as they hunted down and killed the members of the CIA-funded Nour al-Din al-Zenki who beheaded the 12-year-old Palestinian boy on film. The Syrian working class doesn’t actually like the 31 flavors of takfiri terrorists that some western leftists find so sweet.

In fact, during the December 2016 liberation of Aleppo, Syrians who lived for years under the rule of the fanatics were outraged that the Syrian army put the terrorists on buses to Idlib instead of killing them outright. A day later it was discovered that, just before they surrendered, the terrorists had summarily executed over 100 hostages and prisoners in basement prisons, including many Syrian soldiers.

Then Proyect attempts to make a case for the fanatics in East Ghouta by contrasting their poverty-stricken area with wealthier Damascus. A splendid insight. Now, how about you leading the charge of South Central against Beverly Hills? Oh, that’s right — the impotent defeated American left has been on the run for 40 years and can only mind the business of the Assads, Saddams, Gadaffis and the ayatollahs — all Israeli enemies and sitting atop large energy resources [allowing economically viable resistance]  — while “our” own government remains the chief engine of destruction in the world. Blessedly, the brown working classes of the world don’t give a flying fuck about what white western leftists think because they know they aren’t going to get any help from us. We’re irrelevant. Ask a Yemeni, ask a Honduran, ask a Congolese.

Christmas and New Years have been celebrated for the last two years in Aleppo and some semblance of normalcy is returning. Right now, in liberated areas of East Ghouta, people are welcoming the return of the Syrian Arab Army and telling the media how they’ve been used as human shields. In non-liberated areas, civilians are demonstrating against the terrorists and negotiating with them to leave. As with Aleppo in 2016, people in East Ghouta have been telling the SAA the locations of terrorist commanders, ammo dumps, jails and headquarters. Also, as with Aleppo, terrorists are sniping and shelling humanitarian corridors so civilians have difficulty leaving. There are also now civilians rallying in Raqqa for the occupying American monster to GTFO.

The future of the world is being fought for in Syria — that’s why the propaganda of the mockingbird media has been unrelenting in its lies, hypocrisy, hysteria and demonization for seven years. Tel Aviv and Riyadh are going crazy and they are making sure Mordor-on-the-Potomac goes crazy with them. Putin is killing off America’s regime-changing terrorist mercenary army although, characteristically, he’s been too slow and cautious and Daesh has now set up shop in Afghanistan to harass, delay and destroy China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Assad and Putin are bringing a horrible end to the carnage in Syria as opposed to the Saudi, Israeli and US-preferred endless horror.

One last thing. People have not been paying proper attention to the written transcript of several lines toward the end of Putin’s March 1st address to the Russian Federal Assembly: “I should note that our military doctrine says Russia reserves the right to use nuclear weapons solely in response to a nuclear attack, or an attack with other weapons of mass destruction against the country or its allies, or an act of aggression against us with the use of conventional weapons that threatens the very existence of the state. This all is very clear and specific. As such, I see it as my duty to announce the following. Any use of nuclear weapons against Russia or its allies, weapons of short, medium or any range at all, will be considered as a nuclear attack on this country. Retaliation will be immediate, with all the attendant consequences.”

An attack with other weapons of mass destruction against Russia or its “allies.” Who does Russia consider allies? China, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela? Turkey? The Donbass? Did Putin just tell the criminal neocon filth who rule America to never attack Iran and North Korea — or ever attack the Syrian government again? No sane person in the world should test that out. Perhaps the previously mentioned neocon Max Boot is one of the first to “listen.”

The last time no one paid careful attention to Putin was his September 28, 2015 address to the United Nations where he condemned the US use of terrorists to further its regime change operations throughout the world, saying “We can no longer tolerate the current state of affairs in the world.” Two days later Russia began bombing hundreds of ISIS oil tankers in Syria that US satellite surveillance had been contentedly watching grow for years. Wake up, Americans. “Retaliation will be immediate, with all the attendant consequences.” The three horses’ asses of the apocalypse — Trump, Satanyahoo and Saudi Clown Prince Mohammad bin Salman — are leading the world to disaster.

Randy Shields can be reached at music2hi4thehumanear@gmail.com. His writings and art are collected at RandyShields.com.

March 17, 2018 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Wars for Israel | , , , | Leave a comment

Operation Mongoose and North Korea

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | March 15, 2018

In reporting on President Trump’s nomination of CIA Director Mike Pompeo for Secretary of State, the New York Times made a remarkable admission:

Mr. Pompeo has consistently taken one of the most hawkish lines on dealing with Pyongyang. He appears focused on regime change as the one sure way to resolve the North Korean problem. This week, he told Fox News that “never before have we had the North Koreans in a position where their economy was at such risk, where their leadership was under such pressure.” The United States, he says, should make “no concessions” in any negotiations.

Unfortunately, while many U.S. officials would look upon that paragraph nonchalantly, it actually goes a long way to explain why North Korea embarked on a program to acquire nuclear weapons.

To understand the import of the point that the Times makes about Pompeo, it is helpful to examine a top secret document of the U.S. national-security establishment, a document that was kept secret from the American people for more than 40 years. In fact, the only reason that we are able to see it now is because of the JFK Records Act, which mandated that the Pentagon, CIA, and other federal agencies release to the public all their records relating to the assassination of President Kennedy. This particular document wasn’t released until 1998.

The document related to Operation Mongoose, which was a top-secret regime-change plan of the U.S. national security establishment, one intended to oust the communist regime in Cuba, headed by Fidel Castro, and replace it with a pro-U.S. dictatorship, similar to the Fulgencio Batista regime that Cuban revolutionaries ousted from power in their 1959 revolution.

Keep in mind one important factor: Although Cuba was ruled by a communist regime, it never attacked the United States or even threatened to do so. It also never assassinated anyone in the United States. And it never committed any act of sabotage in the United States.

Nonetheless, that top-secret document starts out with the following sentence: “The U.S. objective is to help the Cubans overthrow the Communist regime from within Cuba and to institute a new government with which the United States can live in peace.”

Live in peace? The Cuban regime was living in peace with the United States. It simply wasn’t bowing and kowtowing to the United States and following its orders on how things were going to operate inside Cuba. That’s what the Pentagon and CIA considered not “living in peace” with the United States. That’s why they wanted to effect regime change in Cuba. It’s, in fact, why they are still dead set on regime change in North Korea.

Among the methods employed to effect regime change in Cuba was the infliction of massive economic suffering among the Cuban populace. The document even refers to this as “economic warfare.” That’s what the U.S. embargo was (and is) all about. The idea was that when the Cuban people were suffering enough, perhaps even dying, they would oust the Castro regime and replace it with a pro-U.S. regime. It’s also what the sanctions against North Korea are all about.

Needless to say, there was no concern expressed for the Cuban people suffering or dying from the embargo. They were considered a means to an end.

In fact, many years later, we saw this same phenomenon in Iraq, when U.S. officials were killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children with their sanctions on that country. Their indifference to that suffering was reflected by what the U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright publicly stated — that the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children were “worth it.” By “it” she meant regime change in Iraq.

Sabotage of Cuban industries was another method to bring about regime change. One idea was to introduce a corrosive element in locomotive fuel. Much more ominous, given the increased likelihood that people would die, was a plan to introduce corrosive elements into Cuban jet fuel.

The document also refers to other U.S. actions to foment dissent and revolution against the Castro regime, to be followed by U.S. military action to assist them.

Unmentioned in the document was the top-secret assassination partnership that the CIA had entered into with the Mafia without the consent or knowledge of President Kennedy, whose brother Robert was, at the same time, prosecuting the Mafia in federal court for criminal activity. The CIA’s notion was that it wielded the legitimate moral and legal authority to murder anyone who it deemed was a threat to U.S. “national security.” The Mafia, of course, was chagrined that Castro had nationalized the Mafia’s casinos in Havana and put an end to its lucrative (and illegal) U.S drug import business, much of which operated through Cuba.

That top-secret Operation Mongoose, regime-change document is dated January 8, 1962.

There is another top-secret document that came out in the 1990s thanks to the JFK Records Act. It was dated March 13, 1962. That document detailed Operation Northwoods, which called for plane hijackings and terrorist attacks on American soil carried out by U.S. agents secretly posing as Cuban communists. The idea was to provide President Kennedy with an official (and false) pretext for attacking and invading Cuba and effecting regime change there. It was unanimously endorsed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. To his everlasting credit, Kennedy rejected the plan, earning him ever deeper enmity from his national-security establishment. (See FFF’s ebooks JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated by Douglas Horne and Regime Change: The JFK Assassination by Jacob G. Hornberger.)

The Cubans invited the Soviets to install nuclear weapons later that year, in October 1962. While U.S. officials have long described the missiles as “offensive,” the Cuban position was actually quite defensive: If — and only if — you attack and invade us, we will defend ourselves with our Soviet-provided nuclear weapons.

Fortunately for the United States and the world, President Kennedy ended up “blinking” by agreeing not to invade Cuba (to the deep anger and rage of the Pentagon and the CIA, which were pressuring him to attack and invade during the entire crisis). Given that the threat of invasion was over, the Soviet Union, in turn, removed its nuclear missiles from Cuba.

Does anyone think that North Korea hasn’t familiarized itself with Operation Mongoose, Operation Northwoods, the CIA-Mafia assassination partnership, and these particular documents that were kept secret for more than 40 years? They know what the U.S. national-security establishment is up to in Korea. They know what the New York Times has pointed out about CIA Director’s Mike Pompeo’s desire for regime change in North Korea. They are not stupid. They know that nuclear weapons are the best way to deter against a U.S. regime-change operation in North Korea.

March 16, 2018 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , | Leave a comment

The U.S. Government Is the Problem in Korea

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | March 13, 2018

There are differing opinions regarding President Trump’s decision to meet with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un in an attempt to resolve the ongoing crisis in Korea.

Some people are happy that the two rulers are meeting because of the possibility that it will result in a peaceful resolution of a crisis that has gotten precariously close to breaking out into renewed warfare. What’s wrong with talking? this group says.

Others are saying that Trump acted too impulsively in accepting the invitation, arguing that summits should be held only after lower-echelon bureaucrats have determined that such a meeting is likely to result in positive developments. These people are suggesting, perhaps accurately, that if the talks fail to arrive at a solution, the situation could be made worse given that “talking” might no longer be viewed as an option for resolving the crisis.

Most people in both groups fail to see something important: that it is the U.S. government, not North Korea, that is the crux of the problem in Korea. Given such, how likely is it that a meeting between Trump and Kim Jong-un is going to arrive at a solution? I hope that I will be proven wrong but my hunch is: Not very likely at all.

The U.S. government has two aims in Korea, both of which are related.

Its principal aim is regime change. It wants to oust the communist regime in North Korea and install a pro-U.S. regime in its place, one that will then “invite” the Pentagon and the CIA into the country to construct U.S. military bases and install U.S. missiles along the Korea-China border.

For many people, the Cold War ended in 1989. Not for the Pentagon and the CIA. Caught off guard by the dismantling of the Soviet Union, the U.S. national-security establishment nonetheless continued viewing communist-socialist countries like Russia, North Korea, and Cuba as official enemies of the United States and threats to U.S. “national security.”

That’s why U.S. officials broke their promise to Russia not to expand NATO. Almost immediately after the Cold War ended, NATO proceeded to absorb Eastern European countries that had been members of the Warsaw Pact, with the aim of placing U.S. military bases and missiles ever closer to Russia. The last step was to incite regime change in Ukraine, with the aim of replacing a pro-Russia regime with a pro-U.S. regime, which would then “invite” the Pentagon and the CIA into the country, where they could install military bases and missiles on Russia’s border and even take over Russia’s longtime military base in Crimea. Russia, of course, forestalled that plan with its takeover of Crimea.

It’s also why U.S. officials have maintained their decades-long embargo against Cuba, a country that has never attacked the United States or even threatened to do so. The aim continues to be to oust the Castro regime and replace it with another pro-U.S. dictatorship, much like the Fulgencio Batista regime that Fidel Castro and Cuban revolutionaries ousted from power in 1959.

That’s their aim with North Korea — regime change, the same aim they had for 11 years with Iraq, which they tried to achieve through 11 years of brutal sanctions, much like the sanctions that the U.S. has been enforcing against North Korea for several years. When the Iraq sanctions failed to succeed in achieving regime change in Iraq, President Bush ordered the Pentagon and the CIA to attack, which then succeeded in ousting Saddam from power and replacing him with a pro-U.S. regime.

The aim is no different in Iran. There are few things U.S. national-security state officials would love more than regime change in Iran, one that replaces the current regime with a pro-U.S. dictatorship, much like that of the Shah of Iran, who CIA officials installed into power in a coup in 1953.

Don’t forget: Prior to the U.S. regime change in Iraq, U.S. officials labeled Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as members of an “axis of evil.”

The U.S. government’s second aim is to have North Korea abandon and dismantle its nuclear-weapons program, which, needless to say, would make it less costly to pursue a U.S. regime-change operation against North Korea.

But North Korean officials are not dumb. They know that in a conventional war against the United States, North Korea wouldn’t stand a chance, any more than Iraq stood a chance when the U.S. government invaded it. Given the overwhelming military might of the U.S. government, virtually no Third World countries can defeat the U.S. in a war. (North Vietnam was a rare exception.)

The North Koreans know that there is only one way that would be likely to deter a U.S. attack on North Korea — nuclear weapons.

How do they know that? Easy. They know about Cuba. During the JFK administration, the Pentagon and the CIA were exhorting President Kennedy to undertake a full-scale invasion of Cuba because, they said, Cuba (like North Korea) posed a grave threat to U.S. “national security.” To create the false appearance that such an invasion was “defensive” in nature, the Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously proposed Operation Northwoods to the president, which called for terrorist attacks and plane hijackings carried out by CIA agents secretly posing as Cuban communists.

Even though Kennedy rejected Operation Northwoods, the Pentagon and the CIA kept pressing for a regime-change invasion of Cuba. That’s when Castro invited the Soviets to install nuclear missiles on the island. The idea was that the missiles would hopefully deter U.S. officials from attacking Cuba in a regime-change operation.

The plan worked. Kennedy “blinked” and entered into a deal with the Soviets in which he vowed that the U.S. would not invade Cuba and in which he also secretly agreed to withdraw U.S. nuclear missiles aimed at Russia from Turkey. In return, the Soviets withdrew their missiles from Cuba, confirming that their purpose was deterrence and defense.

How could North Koreans not be impressed with that outcome? Compare the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which did not have nuclear missiles.

Why would North Korea ever agree to give up its nuclear weapons? There is only one slight chance of that happening — if North Korea can be convinced that the U.S. government has permanently abandoned its aim of regime change. But that could only happen if the U.S. government totally withdrew all U.S. forces from Korea and vowed never to attack North Korea (or create an Operation Northwoods type of false pretext attack).

How likely is that? I would say not very likely at all. The Pentagon and the CIA need an ongoing crisis in Korea (and others against Russia, terrorists, Muslims, Syria, the Taliban, drug dealers, etc.) to help justify their ever-growing budgets. Anyway, for them to exit North Korea would, in their minds, constitute “appeasement” in the face of the supposed communist threat to U.S. “national security.”

There is another complication for North Korea — the fact that the U.S. government cannot be trusted to keep its word. Sure, U.S. officials can point to Cuba and argue that succeeding U.S. regimes have complied with Kennedy’s vow not to invade Cuba. But others can point to the U.S. double-cross of Russia with respect to NATO expansion. Or to the U.S. double-cross of Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, who ended up dead in a U.S. regime-change operation after agreeing to give up his nuclear program. Or to President Trump’s vow to break the U.S. agreement with Iran after it agreed to give up its nuclear program.

Thus, the big problem at the upcoming meeting with Trump and Kim Jong-un is that they are holding what are essentially intractable and irreconcilable positions: U.S. officials wants North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons but refuse to abandon their aim of regime change. Even if they promised to give up regime change, they couldn’t be trusted, especially if U.S. forces remained in Korea. North Korea, on the other hand, will never give up its nuclear weapons so long as the threat of regime change persists.

The real solution to the Korea crisis? Forget a meeting between Trump and Kim Jong-un. It’s not necessary. Simply bring all U.S. forces home, immediately. The Korea civil war is none of the U.S. government’s business. Never has been, never will be. (Neither was Vietnam’s civil war.)

Might North Korea attack South Korea after the U.S. is gone in an attempt to forcibly unite the country? It’s certainly possible. President Lincoln invaded the Confederacy in a successful attempt to unify the country. But given South Korea’s strong economic base and powerful military, it is a virtual certainty that South Korea would end up winning such a war.

Might North Korea use nuclear weapons in a war against South Korea? Why would it? If it is attacking to unify the country, what good would it do to have a unified country if the southern half is radiated for the next hundred or so years, along with much of the north as well?

The U.S. government and the interventionist-imperialist philosophy it stands for are the real problem in Korea. Lift U.S. sanctions, bring all U.S. troops home now, and leave Korea to the Koreans. That’s the solution to the crisis in Korea.

March 14, 2018 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

What Secretary of State Tillerson’s Firing Means

By Paul Craig Roberts | Institute for Political Economy | March 13, 2018

Senator Chuck Schumer (D, NY) says Tillerson’s firing indicates that the Trump administration is disintegrating. I understand why Senator Schumer sees it that way, especially following all the other dismissals and resignations.

I see it differently. The firing of Secretary of State Tillerson, the movement of CIA Director Pompeo to Secretary of State, and the promotion of Gina Haspel, who oversaw the secret CIA torture prisons in Thailand, indicate that the military/security complex has closed its grip on the Trump regime. There will be no more talk of normalizing relations with Russia.

The combination of the Israel Lobby, the neoconservatives, and the military/security complex have proven to be too powerful for peace to be established between the two nuclear powers. If you look at Trump’s administration, the above three forces are those in charge.

Israel remains determined to use the US military to destabilize Syria and Iran in order to isolate Hezbollah and cut off the milita’s support and supplies. The neoconservatives both support Israel’s interest and their own desire for Washington’s hegemony over the world. The military/security complex intends to hold on to the “Russia threat” as a justification of its budget and power.

The presstitutes are in complete harmony with the scheme. Although Russiagate has been proven to be false charges orchestrated by the DNC, FBI, and CIA, the presstitutes continue to repeat the charges as if evidence exists that proves the charges to be true. The “stolen election” is fiction turned into fact. And now we have a new charge, that Putin ordered a former British spy in England to be eliminated while sitting on a park bench with the use of a highly unlikely form of military poison. The charge is preposterous, but that is not preventing the fiction from becoming fact.

Having served in Washington for a quarter century and having known members of the British government, I do not believe that any of them believe the Russiagate and Skripal poisoning stories. What is happening is that an agenda has taken precedence over truth.

This is an extremely dangerous agenda. Russia’s new weapons easily give Russia military superiority over the US. As China and Iran see the situation similarly to the Russians, the US is greatly out-classed. Yet, Washington and its vassals persist in making violent and false charges and threats against Russia, Iran, and on occasion China. Russia, Iran, and China know that these charges are false. Confronting an endless string of false and hostile charges, they prepare for war.

The world is being driven to war, which would be nuclear, by a tiny minority: Israeli Zionists, neoconservatives, and the US military/security complex. We are witnessing the most reckless and irresponsible behavior in world history. Where are the voices against it?

March 14, 2018 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , , , , | Leave a comment

Intel Committee Rejects Basic Underpinning of Russiagate

By Ray McGovern | Consortium News | March 14, 2108

Let’s try to make this simple: The basic rationale behind charges that Russian President Vladimir Putin interfered in the 2016 U.S. election to help candidate Donald Trump rests, of course, on the assumption that Moscow preferred Trump to Hillary Clinton. But that is wrong to assume, says the House Intelligence Committee, which has announced that it does not concur with “Putin’s supposed preference for candidate Trump.”

So, the House Intelligence Committee Republican majority, which has been pouring over the same evidence used by the “handpicked analysts” from just the CIA, FBI, and NSA to prepare the rump Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) of Jan. 6, 2017, finds the major premise of the ICA unpersuasive. The committee’s “Initial Findings” released on Monday specifically reject the assumption that Putin favored Trump.

This puts the committee directly at odds with handpicked analysts from only the FBI, CIA, and NSA, who assessed that Putin favored Trump – using this as their major premise and then straining to prove it by cobbling together unconvincing facts and theories.

Those of us with experience in intelligence analysis strongly criticized the evidence-impoverished ICA as soon as it was released, but it went on to achieve Gospel-like respect, with penance assigned to anyone who might claim it was not divinely inspired.

Until now.

Rep. K. Michael Conway (R-Texas), who led the House Committee investigation, has told the media that the committee is preparing a separate, in-depth analysis of the ICA itself. Good.

The committee should also take names — not only of the handpicked analysts, but the hand-pickers. There is ample precedent for this. For example, those who shepherded the fraudulent National Intelligence Estimate on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq 15 years ago were named in the NIE. Without names, it is hard to know whom to hold accountable.

Here’s the key ICA judgment with which the House committee does not concur: “We assess Putin, his advisers, and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump over Secretary Clinton.” Not to be picky, but if House investigators have been unable to find enough persuasive evidence to convince them that “Putin’s supposed preference” was Trump, there is little reason to take seriously the ICA’s adolescent observations — like Putin held a “grudge” against Clinton because she called him nasty names — and other tortured reasoning in an Intelligence Community Assessment that, frankly, is an embarrassment to the profession of intelligence analysis.

I recall reading the ICA as soon as it was published. I concluded that no special expertise in intelligence analysis was needed to see how the assessment had been cobbled together around the “given” that Putin had a distinct preference for Trump. That was a premise with which I always had serious trouble, since it assumed that a Russian President would prefer to have an unpredictable, mercurial, lash-out-at-any-grievance-real-or-perceived President with his fingers on the nuclear codes. This – not name-calling – is precisely what Russian leaders fear the most.

Be that as it may, the ICA’s evidence adduced to demonstrate Russian “interference” to help Trump win the election never passed the smell test. Worse still, it was not difficult to see powerful political agendas in play. While those agendas, together with the media which shared them, conferred on the ICA the status of Holy Writ, it had clearly been “writ” to promote those agendas and, as such, amounted to rank corruption of intelligence by those analysts “handpicked” by National Intelligence Director James Clapper to come up with the “right” answer.

Traces of the bizarre ideological — even racial — views of Intelligence Dean Clapper can also be discerned between the lines of the ICA. It is a safe bet that the handpicked authors of the ICA were well aware of — and perhaps even shared — the views Clapper later expressed to NBC’s Chuck Todd on May 28, 2017 about Russians: “[P]ut that in context with everything else we knew the Russians were doing to interfere with the election,” he said. “And just the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique. So, we were concerned.”

Always Read the Fine Print

What readers of the intelligence assessment might have taken more seriously was the CYA in the ICA, so to speak, the truth-in-advertising cautions wedged into its final page. The transition from the lead paragraph to the final page — from “high confidence” to the actual definition of “high confidence” is remarkable. As a reminder, here’s how ICA starts:

“Putin Ordered Campaign To Influence US Election: We assess with high confidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election, the consistent goals of which were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. …”

But wait, the fair warning on page 13 explains: “High confidence … does not imply that the assessment is a fact or a certainty; such judgments might be wrong. … Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that show something to be a fact. Assessments are based on collected information, which is often incomplete or fragmentary, as well as logic, argumentation, and precedents.”

Questionable Logic

The “logic” referred to rests primarily on assumptions related to Trump’s supposed friendliness with Putin, what Clinton Campaign Manager John Podesta called in 2015 a “bromance.” It assumes that Trump has been more than willing to do the Kremlin’s bidding from the White House, whether due to financial relationships Trump has with the Russians, or because he “owes them” for helping him get elected, or whether he is being blackmailed by “the pee tape” that Christopher Steele alluded to in his “dodgy dossier.”

This is the crux of the whole “treason” aspect of the Russiagate conspiracy theory – the idea that Trump is a Manchurian (or as some clever wags among Russiagaters claim, a Siberian) candidate who is directly under the influence of the Kremlin.

Even as U.S.-Russian relations drop to historic lows – with tensions approaching Cuban Missile Crisis levels – amazingly, there are still those promoting this theory, including some in the supposedly “progressive” alternative media like The Young Turks (TYT). Following Putin’s announcement on developments in Russia’s nuclear program earlier this month, TYT’s Cenk Uygur slammed Trump for not being more forceful in denouncing Putin, complaining that Trump “never criticizes Putin.” Uygur even speculated: “I’m not sure that Trump represents our interests above Putin’s.”

This line of thinking ignores a preponderance of evidence that the U.S posture against Russian interests has only hardened over the past year-plus of the Trump administration – perhaps in part as a result of Trump’s perceived need to demonstrate that he is not in “Putin’s pocket.”

The U.S. has intensified its engagement in Syria, for one thing, reportedly killing several Russians in recent airstrikes – a dangerous escalation that could lead to all-out military confrontation with Moscow and hardly the stuff of an alleged “bromance” between Trump and Putin. Then there was the Trump administration’s recent decision to provide new lethal weapons to the Ukrainian military – a major reversal of the Obama administration’s more cautious approach and an intensification of U.S. involvement in a proxy war on Russia’s border. The Russian foreign ministry angrily denounced this decision, saying the U.S. had “crossed the line” in the Ukraine conflict and accused Washington of fomenting bloodshed.

On other major policy issues, the Trump administration has also been pushing a hard anti-Russian line, reiterating recently that it would never recognize Crimea as part of Russia, criticizing Russia for allegedly enabling chemical attacks in Syria, and identifying Moscow as one of the U.S.’s major adversaries in the global struggle for power and influence.

“China and Russia,” the administration stated in its recent National Security Strategy, “challenge American power, influence, and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity.” In the recently issued Nuclear Posture Review, the U.S. identifies Russia as a “contemporary threat,” and has a chapter outlining “A Tailored Strategy for Russia.” The document warns that Russia has “decided to return to Great Power competition.”

How does this in any way indicate that Trump is representing “Putin’s interests” above “ours,” as Uygur claims?

In short, there is no evidence to back up the theory that Putin helped Trump become president in order to do the Kremlin’s bidding, and no one pushing this idea should be taken seriously. In this respect, the Republicans’ “Initial Findings” – particularly the rejection of “Putin’s supposed preference for candidate Trump” have more credibility than most of the “analysis” put out so far, including the Jan. 6, 2017 ICA that has been held up as sacrosanct.

Democrats Angry

The irrepressible Congressman Adam Schiff, Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee, and his fellow Democrats are in high dudgeon over the release of the Committee’s “Initial Findings” after “only” one year of investigation.  So, of course, is NBC’s Rachel Maddow and other Russiagate aficionados. They may even feel a need to come up with real evidence — rather than Clapperisms like “But everyone knows about the Russians, and how, for example, they just really hated it when Mrs. Clinton called Putin Hitler.”

I had the opportunity to confront Schiff personally at a think tank in Washington, DC on January 25, 2017. President Obama, on his way out of office, had said something quite curious at his last press conference just one week earlier about inconclusive conclusions: “The conclusions of the intelligence community with respect to the Russian hacking were not conclusive” regarding WikiLeaks. In other words, the intelligence community had no idea how the DNC emails reached WikiLeaks.

Schiff had just claimed as flat fact that the Russians hacked the DNC and Podesta emails and gave them to WikiLeaks to publish. So I asked him if he knew more than President Obama about how Russian hacking had managed to get to WikiLeaks.

Schiff used the old, “I can’t share the evidence with you; it’s classified.” OK, I’m no longer cleared for classified information, but Schiff is; and so are all his colleagues on the House Intelligence Committee. The Republican majority has taken issue with the cornerstone assumption of those who explain Russian “hacking” and other “meddling” as springing from the “obvious fact” that Putin favored Trump. The ball is in Schiff’s court.

Last but not least, the committee’s Initial Finding that caught most of the media attention was that there is “no evidence of collusion, coordination, or conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russians.” This, of course, poured cold water on what everyone listening to mainstream media “knows” about Russian “meddling” in the 2016 election. But, in the lack of persuasive evidence that President Putin preferred candidate Trump, why should we expect Russian “collusion, coordination, conspiracy” with the Trump campaign?

Ah, but the Russians want to “sow discord.” Sounds to me like a Clapperism.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington.  During his 27-year career at CIA, he was Chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and preparer/briefer of the President’s Daily Brief under Nixon, Ford, and Reagan.  He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

March 14, 2018 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | Leave a comment

‘Bomb Iran & execute Snowden’: Brief history of Pompeo’s foreign policy rhetoric

RT | March 13, 2018

Newly-installed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo doesn’t have a huge amount of experience as a diplomat so what can we expect from the former Kansas congressman now that he is heading US foreign policy?

Pompeo landed the top job in the State Department on Tuesday after US President Donald Trump ousted Rex Tillerson. Here’s a flavor of his previous comments on the most pressing foreign policy issues.

Russia

Pompeo was appointed CIA director in November 2016. He began his tenure by talking tough on Russia, describing it as a major threat to US interests. “[Russia] has reasserted itself aggressively, invading and occupying Ukraine, threatening Europe, and doing nearly nothing to aid in the destruction and defeat of ISIS.”

He continued with the hawkish rhetoric throughout his time in the CIA. On Sunday he said that Americans are safe from Russia because it has weapons to counter any Russian threat.

“Americans should rest assured that we have a very good understanding of the Russian program and how to make sure that Americans continue to be kept safe from threats from Vladimir Putin,” the then-CIA chief said.

China

However Russia isn’t the only ‘bad guy’ out there, according to Pompeo. In a revealing interview with the BBC the then-US spy chief attacked alleged Chinese efforts to exert covert influence in the West. He claimed China attempts to post spies in schools and hospitals, as well as trying to steal information from US companies.

“We can watch very focused efforts to steal American information, to infiltrate the United States with spies – with people who are going to work on behalf of the Chinese government against America,” according to Pompeo. “We see it in our schools. We see it in our hospitals and medicals systems. We see it throughout corporate America. It’s also true in other parts of the world… including Europe and the UK.”

North Korea

After becoming CIA director Pompeo spoke of a desire to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula because of the danger of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un possessing weapons of mass destruction. In recent days he reaffirmed this position, asserting that the Trump administration has “its eyes wide open” on North Korea as Kim agreed to pause nuclear testing ahead of forthcoming negotiations between the two nations.

“The pressure will continue to mount on North Korea,” he told CBS. “There is no relief in sight until the president gets the objective that he has set forth consistently during his entire time in office.”

Iran

Pompeo, who, like Trump, had a career as a businessman before turning to politics, has reserved his strongest rhetoric for Iran and the nuclear deal signed by former US President Barack Obama.

His opposition dates back to his time as a congressman when he said that the deal “won’t stop Iran from getting a nuclear bomb and places Israel at more risk.” Pompeo also criticized the Obama administration for not demanding that Iran cease calling for Israel’s destruction as part of the deal.

Before becoming CIA director Pompeo broached the possibility of using force to destroy Iran’s nuclear capacity. “In an unclassified setting, it is under 2,000 sorties to destroy the Iranian nuclear capacity,” he said in 2014. “This is not an insurmountable task for the coalition forces.”

Edward Snowden

Pompeo’s dramatic comments on Iran pale in comparison to the fate he thinks National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden deserves. The new secretary of state said that Snowden, who leaked classified NSA information, should be brought back to the US and sentenced to death.

“[He] should brought back from Russia and given due process, and I think the proper outcome would be that he would be given a death sentence,” Pompeo said in February 2016. He also lashed out at Snowden’s appearance via video link at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, in 2014, fearing it would cause “lawless behavior” in the crowd. The talk went ahead without incident.

Pompeo also had harsh words about WikiLeaks, referring to the whistleblowing organization as a “hostile intelligence service” in April 2017.

March 13, 2018 Posted by | Militarism, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »