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Three Years after Guilt-Trip Ambush: Germany to Enhance Societal Destabilization on Path to Self-Destruction

By D. E. Steil  |  Aletho News | March 13, 2018

I – Introduction – Merkel to continue leadership that has thus far been a colossal failure in numerous instances

Tomorrow Angela Merkel is expected to be elected in the Bundestag to a fourth term as Germany’s federal chancellor, a position she has continuously held for over a dozen years. Below is an analysis of the current political situation in Germany, which has been dominated by the ongoing migration crisis. This report contains details about specific events during the past few years, especially in 2015, which led to a crisis condition. Sufficient background information plus thirty links are contained for the reader to understand important developments in a proper context. The impact of certain flawed elements of German society, its media organizations, the political party landscape, the judicial structure, and popular sentiment, which, through their interactions, contribute to an ongoing erosion of community and increasing strife, are highlighted with specific examples. Some of the facts included here are being presented for the first time in English, though most people in Germany have also been completely unaware of them. The report is subdivided into 18 different sections to delineate various interrelated themes and facilitate legibility.

Often a contemporary joke, not unlike a political cartoon drawing, succinctly encapsulates poignant realities and may elicit mirth. Have you heard the latest one, about a particular type of dog encountering a rare bird?

Question: What type of creature do you get when you cross-breed a poodle on a leash with a parrot in a birdcage?

Answer: A German Supporter of Merkel, even if only implicitly. (Cumulatively, that’s a majority of adult Germans).

On Sunday, March 4, 2018, it was announced that a majority of nearly two thirds of the voting members of Germany’s oldest political party, the Social Democrats (SPD), gave permission for its party leaders to proceed with a coalition agreement they had negotiated a few weeks ago with party representatives of the Christian Democratic Union (SDU), headed by Angela Merkel, and the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU), headed by Horst Seehoferfor more for than ten years until his resignation earlier today, after which he moves to Berlin to take on the position of Minister of the Interior. This means that Germany will finally form a majority government nearly half a year after federal elections were held last September. These three parties had already constituted the previous coalition government for four years, though with a more substantial majority of seats than is the case now. Based on the parameters of the new coalition agreement, which party leaders of CDU and CSU have already ratified without a popular vote of its registered party members, one thing is certain: Societal destabilization – triggered in the summer of 2015 by a historically unprecedented influx of illegal migration to Germany upon Merkel’s open-ended invitation, which has not been rescinded so that it continues at a rate of a few hundred newcomers on a daily basis – will be significantly exacerbated.

The previous Merkel coalition government has been a colossal failure, not only regarding the all-important migration crisis but also in its dealing with the euro currency crisis, the lingering European banking crisis, the Greek bankruptcy crisis, the governmental spying scandal, the Ukrainian government coup, the diesel emission fraud scandal, a breakdown in diplomatic and commercial relations with Russia, the supply and preparedness scandal in the German military, increasing impoverishment of many among the older generation (Altersarmut) receiving meager pensions, critical urban housing shortages brought on by a combination of negligent planning, speculative foreign investment in urban real estate, and demand by migrants from eastern Europe and beyond, who have chosen to live in high density population centers, which have resulted in skyrocketing property and rental prices. No matter what the critical issues have been, actual solutions were not provided; the specific situations remain unresolved, they were either made worse or deferred. For instance, to highlight that general affluence is purely a myth, it was recently announced by a European statistical agency that the acute risk of becoming poor due to unemployment was over 70% in Germany, significantly higher than in any of the 28 countries of the EU. Though Germany’s labor agency claims a low unemployment rate, such figures are artificial, as they are known to be in the US too. It is remarkable that Merkel still remains sufficiently popular with a substantial portion of the population so that rival politicians have not dared to oust her from office, even though it must be evident by now that she actually dislikes her country – and its flag – to such an extent that she is allowing the gradual deterioration of social cohesion to progress, yet the population appears to oblivious. Like sheep or cattle, millions of people are eagerly or just blindly following her into the abyss.

II – Forced immigration and social stratification are unfair to citizens because they induce alienation and conflict

For many centuries societies built fortified walls around their settlements to keep out unwanted invaders. Even today dwellers build fences or walls, with gates, around their homes, and it is a common feature of entrance doors to come with locks. Social progress brought on the concept of the nation state, which was based on basic commonalities and affinities of the people they represented, same language, related ethnicities or a common heritage such as religious beliefs. Until recently external borders in European countries had border crossings or checkpoints, as continues to be the case in most countries in the world. Maintaining open borders was subjected to negotiated treaties and agreements among countries with a similar social structure and political values, premised on external borders continuing to be subject to rigid controls. This system worked rather well until 2015, in which year the system broke down, through malicious subterfuge and ultimately, the egregious and illegal decision by Merkel, as will be explained below, with the complicity of party colleagues and the media. Millions of foreign people (with different ethnicities, different languages, different customs, different religions, from economically underdeveloped societies) have been resettled, purportedly temporarily, but in reality with the repeatedly professed intent to somehow permanently “integrate” them into the indigenous population. From many decades of social experiments already conducted elsewhere, it should be understood what the consequences of such a large-scale resettlement effort will likely be.

It must be noted that this new German “experiment”, which is preordained to fail calamitously – as have previous German social experiments last century that were attempted under some flavor of “Humanism”, as described by Yuval Noah Harari  – is in clear violation of the preamble and spirit of the North Atlantic Treaty of 1949:

The parties to this treaty… are determined to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilization of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.

This acknowledges the very basic right of a society or country to maintain and preserve such cultural commonalities. Contrary to what the treaty stipulates, the common heritage and civilization of the German people, who are being invaded, is not being safeguarded at all but being intentionally destroyed over time through the demographic effects that will ensue. Though such basic societal aspects have been instinctively understood for centuries, it has been established beyond dispute by Robert D. Putnam, a social researcher at Harvard University, that mixing newcomers into a society results in mutual distrust. A sense of social cohesion gets replaced by increasing stratification, conflict, societal corrosion. This must certainly be evident to anyone who has ever visited such cities as New York, London, and Paris, among the larger centers where such phenomena are constantly on display. The migration processes leading to these phenomena came about by enacting certain laws that allowed such migration to occur.

What forces or impulses led to the drafting, introducing, and lobbying for such legislation is equally well documented but is rarely discussed in the popular media, if at all. Triggered by their paranoia, Jewish elites living in the galut, sought to become more visibly inconspicuous in their respective environments. They were concerned about their safety from collective historical experiences of expulsion, of which there had been many. Rarely reflecting honestly exactly what about their conduct or behavior might have prompted such animosities, they reflexively blamed their host population, which limited the remedies they would consider. By altering the ethnic and racial make-up of modern western societies in North America and Western Europe, their fear factor is decreased because they can more easily blend in with the indigenous population with whom they share more similarities, genetically and culturally, than, say, migrants who have come from sub-Saharan Africa or East Asiatic regions. With regard to the US situation in Europe, this has been very well documented by psychology researcher Kevin MacDonald (Jewish Involvement in Shaping American Immigration Policy, 1881–1965: A Historical Review). With regard to the situation in Sweden, Barbara Lerner Spectre, who had moved from Wisconsin to Israel to Stockholm, has been rather candid about acknowledging this too, in videos that went viral a few years ago. With regard to the situation in Germany, Jewish leaders have played a significant role too, most explicitly in May 2015, through psychological coercion (guilt-tripping), as is documented farther below in Section IX.

III – A combination of lacking freedom of speech and tight media control effectively enhances social conformity

The legislative period prior to last September’s parliamentary election had been a disaster for the common people in Germany, though the powerful television and print media, who shape the cognitive framework of the majority of the population, have been very successful in covering up this fact, through distorted reporting, lies of omission, and other tricks that generate a result that is known under the generic term “fake news”. In Germany critical intellectuals refer to them as the “lying press” (Lügenpresse). The degree of uniformity they display when reporting on the critical issues concerning the country has been even tighter in Germany than what has been in evidence by the US media in its nearly universal support for Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election season and thereafter. The German media, which lack the healthy and thriving alternative Internet media landscape evident in the US, tend to be even more ideologically driven than the US corporate media. Unlike in the US, German journalists do not make a pretense of being unbiased, for they see it as their duty to project a selective and slanted interpretation of actual events or developments (Deutungshoheit) and incidentally also function as a type of thought police (Gedankenpolizei) by vilifying those whose views might stray too far from permitted opinion. In Germany, as nearly everywhere else, freedom to publicly express any opinion is not constitutionally guaranteed, as is the case in the US. Under the fuzzy pretext of cherishing human “dignity” as a paramount value, certain paragraphs in the German penal code forbid anybody to publicly insult or disparage others too strongly (Beleidigung), which in the US might be an actionable civil matter under libel and slander laws. Criminalizing such kinds of opinion fosters superficial politeness, lest some influencial individual, whose feelings were allegedly hurt, files a criminal complaint to investigate the matter. An incidental effect is that powerful crooks and liars are less likely to be strongly criticized. In the absence of freedoms of speech that Americans take for granted, the level of social conformity and acquiescence, to whatever standards of thought the media set, increases. The higher one’s social standing, correlating strongly with educational level, the farther down one could fall upon stepping out of line with an unpopular opinion, due to an effect known as public shaming, that can be achieved through negative media reinforcement. This leads to the paradoxical situation, witnessed in US towns with top universities, namely that very well educated people often publicly project themselves as ignoramuses by professing opinions on social issues that they ought to know are contrived. Such attitudes are a reflection of the cognitive dissonance they develop as a consequence of political correctness overload, as they learn what they dare not mention openly. In Germany and Sweden the traditional media have been very effective in maintaining this behavioral control mechanism while incrementally yet constantly narrowing the scope of opinions that will avoid possible ostracism.

IV – Manipulating public perceptions by obfuscating basic facts and lying with false and misleading terminology

As was revealed late 2014 in a book by a former journalist, turned to whistleblower, Udo Ulfkotte, formerly employed by Germany’s preferred newspaper read by top level decision makers, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, prominent and influential journalists in Germany are “bought” (Gekaufte Journalisten) to serve special interest groups and also collaborate with the CIA, which tells them what to write. Though this admission is hardly shocking, given the power of the press, it is nonetheless helpful for prior presumptions to have been confirmed by a person, who was part of this practice, to then come clean and publicly apologize for his own involvement before  his death, last year. A concrete example from the German media’s methods of “perception management” – the contemporary term for what used to be referred to as “thought control” or “mind control” or simply “brainwashing” – has been the persistent use of the word Flüchtlinge (i.e. refugees, more precisely “those who are fleeing”) when referring to the assortment of migrants who have arrived overland in Bavaria by way of Austria and other countries farther south before that, either from Africa or the Middle East. According to Germany’s own basic law, as well as international treaties and agreements, by the time the migrants arrive at Germany’s border they have relinquished any possible refugee status that may have obtained elsewhere, based on strict criteria. Therefore, they have no legal right whatsoever to apply for – much less receive – asylum in Germany. An orderly procedure to deal with their presence would involve refusing them entry or immediately deporting them if they had already crossed the border. Repeatedly using this particular word and its derivations in that manner, for instance “refugee crisis” (Migrationskrise), is simply a bold lie and a tacit insult at least to Austria, because the implication, if the word were used correctly, would have to be that these migrants had all incurred individual political persecution by the Austrian government, from which jurisdiction they were compelled to taking flight, as it were. Yet both Austria and Sweden had actually taken in a higher percentage of alien migrants, relative to their respective populations, than has Germany. Using this term also entails a degree of arrogance because it tacitly suggests some moral superiority or high-minded benevolence on the part of Germany for providing refuge to those economic migrants who have come so far. On a psychological level, this makes those people who are perpetually burdened by self-hatred and unearned guilt, to feel a little better. In practice, this misleading term has also been used by the media to even pertain to those migrants whose asylum requests were rejected, and whose continued residency is simply “tolerated” (geduldet) by the local governments instead of being deported.

V – Falsely invoking “humanitarian” reasons as a pretense for a historically unprecedented and criminal decision

As Europeans have witnessed, the established legal premises and procedures for dealing with a mass influx into Germany, by migrants who are not members of the European Union (EU), had been unilaterally abandoned by Merkel in early September 2015, with no prior consultations with members of her own government. This unilateral action constituted a major crime. It was done under a false guise simply by invoking the magic word “humanitarian”, a useful lie that somehow causes people’s brains to lock up, causing any rational or critical thinking to be automatically aborted by the population. Practice has shown that it is possible to trick a people into accepting the most reprehensible acts, including waging war and killing hundreds of thousands of people, so long as these crimes are summarily packaged as somehow being humanitarian. The assertion “We had to destroy the village [Ben Tre] to save it” from the era of the Vietnam war is an example of such a purportedly humanitarian gesture, as was the US bombing campaign against Serbia a few decades thereafter. However, Merkel did not just accept a few trains filled with migrants coming from Hungary through Vienna as a special exception, she subsequently went on to publicly invite any and all migrants to come to Germany and receive an enthusiastic public welcome (Willkommenskultur). They were primarily young males, of whom many had previously been ‘Islamist’ mercenaries driven out by the Syrian troops. This was likely the most ominous and stupid decision yet made this century, which has led to a completely novel situation, unprecedented in human history. As will be explained in detail below in Section IX, there is plenty of evidence that this was definitely not an ad hoc response to an unforeseen emergency situation, as the media have deceptively portrayed it to have been, but the consequence of an orchestrated destabilization campaign, one of the various modes of asymmetric warfare, planned months ahead of time, which not only high officials but even the general public had been warned about, months before, as being imminent unless appropriate counter-measures would be adopted. Though even the alternative media have neglected to do so, due to a lack of information, it is possible, within a contextual chronology of events in the first half of 2015, to trace back the origin of Merkel’s commitment to break the laws on a grand scale – also to have the Bavarian minister to go along with it – and thereby permanently alter the future demographics of the population within Germany, possibly even in other countries. Her determination to betray her country and its population was triggered by listening to a fateful speech given in early May 2015 north of Munich, at a ceremony commemorating the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp by US troops.

VI – The symbiosis between the authoritarian and elite “leftist” Green Party and Merkel’s shifting policy positions

Nowadays a substantial proportion of German journalists sympathize with the Green Party, which during its inception a few decades ago primarily promoted their desired legalization of pederasty (for which they have apologized only decades later) and the banning of nuclear power generation plants, which is in the process of being implemented. They were very supportive of so-called “humanitarian bombings” in the Balkans, solar and wind power, and more recently, taking cues from the Obama regime, have been obsessed with advocating or promoting divisive cultural Marxist issues (gender identity, homosexual marriage, ethnic multiculturalism through unchecked mass migration, political correctness, global warming alarmism, open borders, self-hatred, abolishing national sovereignty, opposing free speech, and fighting vocally against “the right”). The Green Party is most popular among school teachers and petty bureaucrats, who enjoy special privileges in German society, students and people who got university degrees in sociology, psychology, journalism, political science, and pedagogy. Given the fact that they are German, those seven political parties that were elected to the Bundestag last September have an authoritarian bent, but the Green Party is the most authoritarian of them all, which is not surprising since their roots lie in the doctrinaire “New Left” movement that derived from the Frankfurt School of Social Research. Their leading functionaries are the most eager to dictate what the behavior of everybody else ought to be, yet are most zealous in filing criminal complaints because they felt personally insulted by some criticism or crude remark. Most memorable is their proposal, a few years ago, to force cafeterias to serve veggie burgers at least once a week because eating beef consumed more resources. Since they do not object to economic neo-liberalism, they have become an important pillar of contemporary “One World” Globalism of open borders. Accordingly, their support among those who might consider themselves “working class” laborers in the industrial and service sectors is miniscule.

As one might expect, a party with such a dubious pedigree as the Green Party is characterized by hypocrisy and internal contradictions. For instance, while its leadership professes to be strongly “anti-fascist”, representatives have no problems with Germany maintaining close relations with such quintessentially fascist regimes that are currently in power in Israel, Ukraine, Turkey, and China. Though the word “Green” refers to environmentalism, the consequences of their advocacy has harmed the environment. The Green Party strongholds are primarily in the southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg, which is headed by a Green Party member. The mayors of the university towns of Tübingen and Freiburg are from the Green Party. Only in two of nearly three hundred voting districts did the Green Party exceed a vote of 20% – in Freiburg, with their strongest showing at 21.2%, and in one of the central districts in Berlin. The mayor of the capital city, Stuttgart, is also from the Green Party. Stuttgart happens to be a bastion of the automotive industry. Daimler, the maker of Mercedes cars, Porsche, manufacturer of sporty vehicles, both have their headquarters, respective museums, and some manufacturing facilities in Stuttgart, as does Bosch, the largest automotive supplier. In part due to its topography, Stuttgart residents continue to suffer some of Germany’s worst air pollution. In their zeal to limit carbon dioxide emissions, as if they were toxic, the Green Party has wound up promoting diesel vehicles simply because they are slightly more efficient than gasoline engines, while ignoring the far more serious health effects of carbon particulate matter and harmful nitrogen oxides coming from diesel combustion, as if people were not already aware of this fact from the serious incidences of smog experienced in Tokyo and Los Angeles forty years ago. Suddenly, however, anyone who drives a diesel car is a sucker (one third of registered cars in Germany have diesel motors), since a few days ago Germany’s top administrative court ruled that city administrators are permitted to ban diesel cars due to their obligation to curtail excessive air pollution, at least two thirds of which is caused by diesel vehicles. Thirdly, in a most incredible exercise in self-deception, self-righteous adherents of the German Green Party tout the coexistence of radical feminism with misogynist practices of men from Asian and African societies because “it’s part of their culture”. Though such antithetical concepts are not subject to debate, some people are beginning to wonder, resulting in a loss of support for this party, which used to have a much stronger following a decade ago. Since the professed desire by politicians for unspecified cultural integration is a delusion, the only way to synthesize such opposing concepts is to support the creation of parallel societies (Parallelgesellschaften), essentially ghettos, or “no-go” zones where police do not venture into. From a class analysis perspective, elitists do not regard such a development as a problem because they have the resources to live in more affluent enclaves and send their children to private schools, while the less financially endowed sectors of society are left to deal with reduced employment and housing opportunities, high crime, and other manifestations of social ferment.

In the federal election last September (with over 76% participation rate) the Green Party received less than nine percent of the total vote. That was less than those who voted for the Left Party (proponents of the traditional economic Marxism; their legacy comes from the near-totalitarian East German society, though they now also support unconstrained mass migration) as well as those who voted for the Free Democratic Party (FDP), which appeals mainly to managers, bankers, physicians, entrepreneurs, attorneys, affluent and wealthy individuals. It would be fair to say that the majority of tax dodgers and evaders have a strong political affinity toward the FDP. Generally, this party is the least authoritarian of the seven parties.

What is important to understand is that during the course of more than a dozen years as Germany’s chancellor, Merkel has continuously drifted toward adopting positions that have been traditionally dear to the Green Party. Thereby, she has effectively become the Green Party’s “secret” leader, or top ally. So as not to be eclipsed by her shifting, the Green party has advocated more extremist and self-destructive positions. These views were not necessarily shared by the vast majority of the population but passively tolerated. In principle, most Green Party voters can be considered to be Merkel supporters because they take pride in her having gravitated toward their side. If they had been too far apart the Green Party would not have been willing to engage in lengthy coalition talks after the election to form a coalition government under Merkel’s leadership. The same could be said of the FDP, which joined with the Green Party to engage in these negotiations, which ultimately failed. Those who voted for the FDP did so in the hopes of influencing certain liberal economic policies and were comfortable in having some of these accents being implemented under a Merkel leadership.

VI – The new leader of the Free Democratic Party missed a rare opportunity to oust Merkel on election night

A few hours after the September election results became evident, the SPD announced that they would not join another coalition under Merkel. At that point the relatively new leader of the FDP, Christian Lindner, could have easily announced that, almost likewise, while the FDP was not opposed to joining a coalition with her party, he would only entertain this prospect under a different personal leadership, that is, not with Merkel. Such a firm statement would have surely led to Merkel’s inevitable resignation, arising from internal pressure. Four years earlier the FDP had missed the 5% threshold to remain in the Bundestag and had re-emerged that evening with over 10% of votes. Had Lindner not been so cautious (some might say spineless), Merkel could have been ousted from her domineering role on election night because the only realistic alternative would have forced her into a minority government, which is not uncommon in Nordic and western European countries. Such a constellation requires hard work – true leadership – by patching together temporary coalitions, depending what the specific issues happen to be. However, Merkel is apparently too lazy, clumsy, and vain to pursue such an endeavor. Moreover, she is too obsessed with wanting to maintain full control and has ruled out leading a minority government.

VII – Social Democratic Party leaders obsessed with preferring Israeli interests to those concerns of its core voters

As Merkel’s junior partner in the past government, the SPD received only slightly more than one fifth of the popular vote last September. Due to this collapse in popularity, compared to their standing only a decade ago, the leader until a few weeks ago, Martin Schulz, said on election night that the reason for not intending to enter into another coalition with Merkel’s Union parties (one, CSU, representing Bavaria, the other, CDU, everywhere else) was a need to re-group and regain a distinct profile, which could better be cultivated in the opposition. Yet, just as Merkel was completely detached from reality after more than a decade as chancellor, beholden to Globalists, media elites, and corporate executives, so also was Martin Schulz, a top-level EU commissar from Brussels, and former alcoholic, who may have never awakened from what appeared to be a perpetual utopian delirium. If an outsider might think that Merkel was completely nuts, this guy seemed to be a certified lunatic. For a person wanting to become the next German chancellor, his particular hobby-horse issues were rather peculiar and definitely contrary to the interests of the party’s core clientele:

– Abolishing nation states and their associated sovereignty within the EU; consequently Germany would merely be yet another region among many others with a centralized (Soviet totalitarian style) Europe;

– A longstanding position that “for me, the new Germany exists only in order to ensure the existence of the State of Israel and the Jewish people”, which he basically reiterated in the only – bland and stale – election debate with Merkel last year;

– After negotiation agreements for a coalition of Green Party and FDP with Merkel had broken down, he expropriated an ongoing Green Party obsession, namely to permit endless chain migration from the MENA region, specifically those related to migrants whose asylum requests had been rejected in Germany and had received temporary (subsidiary) protection but were technically subject to forced repatriation in the very near future. Some politicians associated with Merkel’s alliance parties were already demanding these deportations occur without any further delay yet Schulz and his colleagues demanded that these individuals, subject to deportation, should be allowed instead to bring their family members to Germany too, and so on, which would mean they would all be allowed to remain in Germany forever.

Interestingly, for weeks earlier this year the German media regularly reported that reaching an agreement on the issue of allowing family members of these migrants subject to deportation to join them in Germany, thus completely nullifying the prospect of implementing these repatriations back to their home countries, was a contentious issue and appeared to be the major stumbling block toward achieving a comprehensive agreement, yet never were the SPD functionaries ever called upon to provide a cogent rationale for insisting so staunchly on such a counterproductive demand that was clearly not in the interest of the German people, since, as was shown earlier in this report, enticing and accommodating even more people from foreign cultures, who will likely never assimilate, is not only an unnecessary drain on the budget and a strain on public infrastructure, especially housing, it results in higher crime rates and distrust between newcomers and the indigenous population. Social cohesion, such as it exists, is replaced by increasing stratification, conflict and corrosion. Obviously this conspicuous failure by the media to elicit an explanation by the SPD – and the Green Party before that – to justify their stance was because the true reason would have been a huge embarrassment, another taboo theme that dare not be publicly explained. The best that these supporters of unrestrained migration could deliver was an unconvincing cliché reference to this being the moral or “Christian” thing to do, as if though these cynical politicians were suddenly pretending to be virtuous and benevolent spokespersons for the Catholic and Protestant religious establishments, both of which have become so mentally corrupted that they now indulge in and propagate a most pernicious form of pathological altruism.

Their rationale for enhancing societal destabilization is not rooted in any religious epiphany but derives from the fact that the SPD has jumped onto the bandwagon to please Israeli and Jewish interests, specifically merging or synthesizing the long term goals of the Israeli Oded Yinon Plan, published in 1982, to enable Zionist expansion by destroying its Arab neighbor countries, the desired implementation of which served as the inspiration for the attacks on the World Trade towers to provoke US led wars on Israel’s behalf, with the intended realization of an expanded Coudenhove-Kalergi “Plan” – or vision – published in 1925, according to which the indigenous European populations would universally intermarry with Black Africans and transform themselves over time to a new type of mixed race, to be ruled over by a spiritual nobility of Jews. By destroying Syria and causing a depopulation of its inhabitants, Israel could eventually take over more of this territory with only slight resistance at an opportune moment, while at the same time resettling much of the population in Europe would cause its desired destabilization and weakening, ultimately destroying its culture. While it is understandable that supporting such a fantastical endeavor must sound wonderful to Zionist Jews, the eagerness with which European leaders would want to actively facilitate such a development is quite appalling, an indicator of a treasonous or mentally deranged frame of mind.

VIII – Merkel concedes to adopt even more extremist positions on migration to maintain power in a new coalition

The result of the negotiations on allowing family members of those individuals subject to deportation from Germany to join them and resettle in Germany, presumptively in perpetuity, was a rather fuzzy formulation with numerous contingencies and loopholes, so that all parties then claimed their own public stance had prevailed while the other side had conceded. In reality, the SPD had prevailed on this issue, so the door will soon be open to additional mass migration, along with generous financing for it, though it is impossible to foresee just how significant it will turn out to be in the longer term. This concession by Merkel, with the CDU giving up the finance ministry to the SPD, while the SPD gives up the economics ministry to the CDU, was characterized by a political cartoon on the cover of Germany’s largest newsweekly magazine as a big sellout – a huge exaggeration that was surely intended to sway the vote by the SPD party to endorse the coalition deal. With regard to a second dispute during the negotiations, very dear to a majority of the population, namely modifying the medical insurance scheme in such a manner that the dual track structure (the privileged few, affluent people and public bureaucrats, get preferred treatment while everybody else gets regular treatment) would eventually be abolished and transformed to a more equitable construct, the SPD simply caved in; they accepted that a commission would be formed to study the issue – everyone familiar with government knows what that means. The message is clear: Health insurance issues, of concern to the general public, are subsidiary to debased elites of a party preceded by the adjective “Social” in a quest to placate Israel, while parties whose names are preceded by the adjective “Christian” endorse an accelerated tendency for the society to become more Islamic. Applied Orwellian terminology has been on full display. In reality, of course, not just Merkel but the German political leadership despises the common population, even if they are of the same ethnicity. In general, to put it abstractly, the government would prefer its people to die as soon as possible upon having served their usefulness as laborers and consumers, to avoid paying them pensions from public funds upon their retirement. This attitude explains why the German government raised the retirement age to 67 a few years ago and why in Europe only Germany, along with Bulgaria, still permits billboard advertising for cigarettes, which tend to target young women, who still have a higher statistical life expectancy. It is surely just a matter of time until the pharmaceutical opium epidemic will also hit Germany, so that various people may be compelled to prematurely end their misery pursuant to maintaining their dignity. A few days after the agreement was reached and subjected to SPD party member votes, Schulz resigned his position after he came under criticism. He now has no functionary role in the SPD.

IX – A chronology of key milestones that led to the mass invasion of migrants and Islamic jihadists into Europe

In order to contradict the common misconception that the unpleasant invasion of Germany through mass migration came as a sudden surprise and could not possibly have been anticipated in the scope that occurred, so that authorities would have been unprepared to avert it in any case, a few informative milestones preceding this ominous development are presented below, with attendant commentary or analysis:

In October 2010 a widely discussed book, by an SPD member and high official of the German Federal Bank, Thilo Sarazin, with the provocative title “Germany Abolishes Itself” (Deutschland Schafft Sich Ab), led to him being reviled by the media and forced to resign his position. He predicted and warned about the emerging problems of migration and development of parallel societies from foreign cultures and their detrimental effects on social cohesion. Heavily footnoted and rationally argued, his thesis was hard to contradict, so instead of engaging with the issues raised, the media vilified him personally as a “racist”, misrepresented his assertions, or constructed straw-man allegations that were easy to refute.

In October 2014 public concern about creeping societal transformation in Germany due to “Islamic” radicalization, of larger segments of the migrant population and their descendents, a reality already in evidence in such European cities as London, Birmingham, Paris, Marseille, Brussels, and Malmö, among others, led to weekly Monday evening protest marches through Dresden, by a patriotic group under the name PEGIDA, to express their dissatisfaction about such an ominous trend also taking hold in Germany. Without addressing their published points of concern, the thousands of marchers were summarily denounced by the media as “Nazis” or “xenophobes” or “radical right-wingers”.

In early January 2015, just a few days after a shooting attack in the offices of a Charlie Hebdo publication in Paris, a Bavarian offshoot of PEGIDA announced plans to demonstrate in Munich. In response, the city government and local media demanded a huge public turnout for a counter-demonstration. This constituted a spectacular 180° reversal, a true display of extreme hypocrisy, according to the double standard principle of Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi: Just a few days before top politicians from all over, including Merkel, had congregated to march in a staged parade in Paris (“We are Charlie”) to express solidarity for the right of a publication to criticize Islam – including depicting the mythical prophet Mohammad as a cartoon character – yet a planned march in Munich, in which people also wished to express dissatisfaction with creeping Islamic tendencies in the Occident, not unlike Charlie Hebdo had projected, was characterized as evil. Other German cities, including Cologne, also saw mass demonstrations that month, counteracting the feared popular acclaim of an emerging PEGIDA movement by supporting what they were against. Professing the desire to welcome any and all refugees from anywhere came more as a reactionary response to the PEGIDA challenge, which the German media had vilified as Neo-Nazi, than as an expression of wanting to be invaded by migrants, but expressing a derivative sentiment by being against a group that was against something (anti-anti) was hardly a compelling inspiration to motivate people to march out in the cold weather. Some of the huge and professionally done banners being carried should have made it obvious to onlookers that some group with deep pockets was operating behind the scenes to pay for this. By this time “Refugees Welcome” signs displayed by protesters were becoming ubiquitous. Images of these types of demonstrations were later leveraged or amplified by spreading them on the Internet. Credulous individuals were made to feel they had a duty to recite these slogans to prove they were “tolerant”, while impoverished individuals around the world who saw such images may have easily gotten the impression they would be loved if they migrated over to Germany. It is unclear how many people were actually paid by non-governmental organizations to show up. In any case, Germans tend to be extremely easy to manipulate into being politically correct simply by guilt-tripping and using a few trigger words. For many years a most infantile and therefore very effective slogan, “Fight Against the Right” (Kampf gegen Rechts), had been cultivated, initially by the SPD led government to target narrow groups, before Merkel rose to power, but expanded in scope thereafter, so all that was necessary to incite the population against some group was merely for the media or some politician to assert (no evidence needed) that this or that organization met this loose criterion of being “Right”. As was demonstrated more than sixty years ago by the famous conformity experiments by Solomon Asch, there is a tendency by a large segment of any society to knowingly contort their publicly expressed opinion to conform to some imagined norm. However, this phenomenon of submissive conformity is much more strongly in evidence amid Germans than in other European societies, though perhaps not quite as much as in some East Asian cultures. This serious behavioral weakness was basically a major factor that contributed to the strong support that Adolf Hitler enjoyed in the 1930s, and it appears that Germans have not learned enough from history. The social conditioning is being deployed by propagandists to have the German public reflexively repeating nonsensical slogans or lies, like a parrot, against their own interest. Of course, the specific ideological content being promoted now is different from what was prevalent eighty years ago, but this is secondary. What matters most is whatever sentiment is being established and reinforced as the standard for others to conform to. Though it may be a conjectural proposition, it seems very plausible that the Green Party “leftist” who blindly parrots the media cues today, if transformed back through time into a propaganda setting that prevailed eight decades ago, would have analogously wanted to conform to what was popular back then.

In mid February 2015 British and Italian media reported that the terror militia organization ISIS (organized and operated by Israel; financed and ideologically trained by Saudi Arabia to embrace Wahhabism, a puritanical flavor of Sunni Islam; and supplied with offensive weaponry by the US), which was operating mainly within Syria and Libya, would be sending half a million migrants to Europe as part of a psychological warfare effort to create chaos and would embed its own fighters, who would pose as migrants. From the Daily Mail:

ISIS threatens to send 500,000 migrants to Europe as a ‘psychological weapon’

“… letters from jihadists show plans to hide terrorists among refugees”

In early March 2015, an explicit threat was made by the Greek defense and foreign ministries in the wake of ongoing disputes between the Greek government versus the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission, and the European Central Bank (the Troika). However, this Troika constellation was a fancy way of providing cover to publicly conceal the heart of the conflict, which was between the Greek government and Deutsche Bank, which had speculated on Greek bond price developments and was on the verge of losing significant money, possibly leading to bankruptcy, if Greece would be unable to make good on their debt. Due to options bets by other banks, additional financial institutions would also be adversely impacted. Greece was put under painful austerity supervision to make binding commitments in return for being lent more money, which they in turn would pay back to Deutsche Bank for the Greek bonds they held. Throughout this dispute the German finance minister in particular was regarded to have behaved very arrogantly toward Greece. From the Telegraph:

Greece’s defence minister threatens to send migrants including jihadists to Western Europe

“Greece will unleash a ‘wave of millions of economic migrants’ and jihadists on Europe unless the eurozone backs down on austerity demands, the country’s defence and foreign ministers have threatened.”

The most convenient way for migrants to pass into central Europe was through Greece, past Salonika, then farther to the north toward Macedonia. It appears that Germany didn’t take the threat so seriously. It is obvious that government ministers making threats of this nature must at least have already known that they were in a position to follow through, which implies a degree of prior cooperation with non-governmental organizations and Turkey to facilitate such a “wave of millions of economic migrants”. In other words, the basic organizational structure to follow through was already in place by then. With regard to the mention of “jihadists” joining in with the migrants, this term may sound abstract but one must have surely been aware of what type of people were being referred to. Mainly mercenaries, their occupation as rag-tag fighters entailed such activities as riding around the back of Japanese pickup trucks and indiscriminately spraying high caliber ammunition from belts through the smoking hot barrels of heavy machine guns mounted to them on tripods, operating shoulder-held missile launchers aimed at tanks, feeding mortars or grenade launchers whose explosives landed inside villages, shooting assault rifles with high capacity banana clips in urban combat scenarios, occasionally singing religious songs of jihad, engaging in the massacres of sickly village elders, learning how to make improvised bombs at a “workshop” in the desert, gang raping teenage girls and young women, stealing archeological artifacts and selling them to middlemen, occasionally decapitating their conquered enemies with a sharpened blade, stacking their heads atop a wall for public display to show off how tough they are and send the message “don’t mess with us”. As these murderous jihadists were being dislodged from their occupational positions by the Syrian army attempting to slowly regain territorial control, they could either fight to their deaths or drop their weapons and make a getaway to some other region far away, mingle with other members of a displaced population, likely they would be unwelcome in Turkey where they might be found out, maybe trim their beards and get a haircut, head out farther away for new adventures, toward central Europe to re-group with comrades already living there; rumor had it that Sweden and Germany were being overly generous – “refugees welcome” and all that, no questions asked – free housing with running water.

On a rainy weekend in early May 2015 the head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Josef Schuster, born in Haifa during the 1950s, gave a prepared speech at the former Dachau concentration camp near Munich to commemorate its liberation by US forces 70 years earlier, just a few days before Germany’s surrender. In attendance were chancellor Merkel and Bavarian minister Seehofer sitting next to each other. His speech featured vituperative comments against the PEGIDA movement, along with the usual well-known complaints one would imagine at such an event, including references to their standard atrocity narrative. One of the key passages was the following, in which He doth commanded:

“Germany has foisted so much disaster upon the world. It stands so deeply indebted to so many countries – we are the last country that can afford to reject refugees and those who are persecuted!”

This particular passage was subsequently amplified by the newspaper Die Welt, as follows: “Germany Must Not be Allowed to Reject Any Refugees”. The event was significant inasmuch as Dachau was Germany’s first concentration camp and because Merkel had previously not attended such a commemoration elsewhere that year. There was virtually no coverage in the US media, and the aforementioned cryptic command pertaining to the orchestrated deluge of migrants, including jihadists, was not cited by any of the two English language publications that reported on the event through the Internet. In writing about the ceremony, The Times of Israel cited the following assertion made by Merkel later that day in her weekly podcast message:

“We Germans have a particular responsibility here to handle what we [sic] perpetrated in the period of National Socialism attentively, sensitively and also knowledgeably”.

If the translation is correct, then Merkel has apparently accepted the dubious concept of collective and inherited guilt that may be transferred to subsequent generations of Germans and imposes an unearned burden upon them. The faulty logic seems to be: Because a few of Germany’s ancestors ran concentration camps more than seven decades ago, that now obliges Germany’s current generation to now accept and pamper militant jihadists and impoverished migrants, as well as their eventual descendents, for life. Such a proposition is irrational and unacceptable and should be firmly rejected rather than embracing it. This date was surely one of the most significant milestones in the ongoing mass migration crisis. The causality between Schuster’s commands that day and Merkel and Seehofer’s utter disregard for the law from September 2015 onward right until this day, is beyond question because Merkel herself had cited the rationale of Germany’s past as a justifications for not controlling the country’s border crossings and repeatedly refusing to set an upper limit on the number of migrants that Germany would be willing to take in annually. It is for this stubborn stance that her fiercest critics have characterized her as a traitor of the people (Volksverräter). By contrast, Seeohofer repeatedly postured publicly about the need to set a limit, thereby consenting to ignoring the laws, but it soon became apparent that he was just puffing hot air (Dampfplauderer). For this his Bavarian CSU party lost much support in the election, and as a consequence he will not be heading the party in this year’s regional election in Bavaria. Instead, he will be the minister of the Interior in the cabinet of Merkel’s new coalition government.

Early June 2015, a month after Merkel seems to have made a private commitment to never automatically reject any migrants coming to Germany, contrary to what the law stipulates, she hosted the G7 Summit in southern Bavaria at the base of the Alps. Like an obedient poodle, Merkel is eager to please her nominal Globalist masters, in this case Obama, who in reality was himself just a puppet figurehead. As a reward for her obsequiousness she got countless puff pieces in the media that stroked her ego. The media put her on a pedestal and crafted a light personality cult, so how could she ever even think about disappointing their increasing expectations? Though Merkel has no children, the German media have referred to her as “Mommy” (Mutti) to concoct the impression that she cared so much about the German people, which is contradictory to reality. She had invited numerous leaders of African countries to also make an appearance at the summit conference the next day. (Might they have been encouraged to empty their jails and send the freed prisoners north, to board flimsy boats to Europe and then be accepted by Germany?) A few days later the annual Bilderberg meeting took place only a few miles away in Tyrol, near Innsbruck, where the migrant issue was one of numerous agenda items. The impending “Operation Deluge”, as one might call it, must certainly have been a topic of private conversation by insiders, according to their Chatham House rules.

By early September 2015 the Ayn Rand Institute, based in Irvine, California, had registered – and was operating – a German language web site in India. The web site specialized in providing encouragement and organizational tips on how to smuggle migrants into Germany inside the personal vehicles of Germans coming back from vacations, particularly from Italy. A professionally produced video on their web site presented such illegal activities as morally heroic. Another video featured a Black African in the back seat of a car, asserting that all borders should be open (one world) and that anybody had a human right to go anywhere they wanted. On September 2, 2015 a little Syrian boy, Alan Kurdi, whose parents were trying to get to Canada, was found drowned and washed ashore at a Turkish beach. Photos of his lifeless body appeared on the front pages of nearly all major newspapers because this mishap provided them a perfect opportunity to sentimentalize the developing migration crisis while detracting from the fact that it was being actively orchestrated by various organizations behind the scenes. Normally publishing such pictures of corpses would be considered in bad taste and therefore newspapers would refrain from publishing them. The fact that nearly every newspaper published some version of him, shot from all angles by the same Turkish photographer, including even one of his face visible with open eye, cannot be a mere coincidence and points toward prior coordination. The media exploited this mishap in order to soften up the public into viewing the entire migration phenomenon in an emotional manner. By focusing on the dead toddler they were able to detract from the mass exodus of murderous jihadists escaping toward Europe from their eroding military positions before the Syrian army closed in on them. A couple of days later, on September 4, a group of migrants had set out from the Budapest train station to walk toward Austria on the highway because train traffic between Budapest and Vienna had been discontinued. The migrants could have sought refugee status in Hungary or in other countries along the way before that but were determined to reach Germany instead because international organizations working behind the scenes had steered them in that direction. Operating on a Friday night in the immediate emotional wake of the images of Alan Kurdi, Merkel arranged to have numerous trains filled with migrants to come to Munich directly from Hungary through Vienna. From September 5 onward, the deluge was unstoppable. A detailed chronology of what happened during those two days is available at Zeit Online:

The Night Germany Lost Control – “What happened on September 4, 2015? What intentions, failures and misunderstandings led to a situation in which hundreds of thousands of refugees came to Germany?”

Though the hordes of migrants – at least four fifth of which were young men traveling alone – began arriving at Munich’s main train station on Saturday morning, even though the public could not possibly have known or anticipated just 12 hours earlier that Merkel would be illegally arranging a mass transfer of many thousands of migrants in the middle of the night, there “just happened to be” a huge “spontaneous” welcoming crowd of do-gooders already in place, with banners and stuffed animals available for the few children – which the photographers and cameramen focused on, to convey a selectively distorted impression to the public. The sentiment being conveyed was something to the effect of: “Hey look, we’re such wonderful people”. (In Munich over 17% voted for the Green Party last September to make it the city’s second strongest party.) Anybody who would want to deny that this whole episode in Munich was not a meticulously orchestrated ambush operation must surely be a hard-core coincidence theorist! It would have been interesting to know which organization was primarily involved in the welcoming ceremony and how much per hour these mysterious do-gooders (mobs on demand) were getting paid, but local media know not to report on such details in case they bothered to inquire. Those working at the top level of this sophisticated transfer operation from Syria to Munich must have been amused by Merkel’s subservient compliance. Hundreds of Covert Islamic Jihadist Escapees Receive Enthusiastic Welcome at Munich Train Station might have been an appropriate headline to present.

X – Speculation about a possible Nobel Peace Prize award to create the perception that Merkel acted honorably

One must wonder whether the planners had promised to use their influence to propose Merkel for getting the Nobel Peace Prize just a month later. In any case, in following up after the floodgates had already been open for a few weeks, the media in Germany and elsewhere reinforced the notion that her fateful decision had been the bold and correct thing to do by suggesting that she was the favorite to win this prize. Only hours before the official award announcement, the Telegraph wrote:

Speculation is mounting that Angela Merkel will win this year’s Nobel Peace Prize for her handling of the European refugee crisis and the war in Ukraine…

The German Chancellor has emerged as the firm favourite for the 2015 peace prize, the winner of which will be announced by the Norwegian Nobel Committee on Friday.

Mrs Merkel was the favourite in late betting on Thursday night…

Over the years the Norwegian Nobel Committee had come under criticism and ridicule for having made dubious choices by having conferred this prestigious award to assorted war criminals. In an attempt to recover from their reputation it would have been folly to announce that yet another public criminal would be publicly honored.

XI – Efforts by other European countries to curtail steady migration flow as Merkel prolongs her open invitation

Many of the jihadists continued onward toward Copenhagen, from where they took a train across the water to Malmö in Sweden. Early January 2016 Swedish authorities were compelled to implement border controls for traffic coming from Denmark for the first time in over sixty years to stem the migration flow. Since Merkel had been publicly encouraging anyone in need to come to Germany, which in turn created new waves of migration, including from poor regions in the Balkans, it was up to other leaders to finally take the initiative to curtail this flow. On February 24, 2016 the Austrian foreign minister, Sebastian Kurz, now chancellor, arranged a high-level conference in Vienna. He invited 18 leaders, including interior and foreign ministers, from six countries: Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia, and Slovenia. The purpose was to coordinate border management between these countries. Explicitly not invited were Merkel or representatives from Greece, clearly a diplomatic snub to the two countries most responsible for having encouraged this mess. Merkel expressed disappointment that the migration flow would be curtailed.

XII – Extreme displays of arrogance by Merkel and EU Commissars trying to force other countries to accept migrants

The height of German arrogance nowadays, coming from Merkel and president of the European Commission, Jean Claude Juncker, began soon thereafter, when they and other top EU bureaucrats repeatedly demanded that countries in Eastern Europe be required to take in substantial numbers of these migrants, which she had invited in and accepted illegally, even though neither the migrants wanted to resettle in these countries nor did these countries want to accept them. Media constantly and deceptively use the word “integrate”, as if though it were possible for these mainly Islamic migrants to ever be fully integrated into these respective Slavic societies, or, for that matter also Germany or elsewhere in Europe. Merkel says these countries need to take in “their fair share” and “show solidarity”, which really means they are now being coerced to be complicit in her illegal activity and sheer stupidity. The leaders of these European continue to refuse this outrageous demand. The Austrian chancellor, Kurz, took their side in December 2017, shortly after he took office. The matter has been deferred for a few more months. In July 2018 Austria will have the European rotating presidency until the end of the year, so Kurz will host numerous high-level European conferences. If Merkel and Juncker continue their arrogant stance to force illegal migration onto all the other countries too through a redistribution scheme, future conflict will be assured. Not only will Merkel then likely be reviled all over Europe, as she already is in Greece and Russia, by extension Germans in general may be strongly disliked too when they go abroad.

XIII – Emerging signs of public animosity to Merkel now countered by Antifa goons on her behalf in Hamburg

In a few days Merkel is expected to be reelected to become the chancellor for a fourth four-year term. Any leader heading a state after so many years in office has basically lost contact with the public. Merkel may enjoy ongoing popularity among most Germans, but many strongly dislike her. During the election campaign last year she was frequently jeered loudly at public squares where she appeared and called a traitor. Only a few days prior to the election, during the Oktoberfest, she was jeered so loudly at Munich’s main square that her speech could no longer be heard, despite heavy amplification through loudspeakers. Some demonstrators had even brought along plastic horns, vuvuzelas, used to make noise during soccer matches in South Africa, Brazil, and Iberia. Videos with audio of this public square rejection of Merkel went viral. Some leaders whose terms are not constitutionally limited may convince themselves of their own indispensability and usually do not know when to quit or ignore warning signals, as appears to be the case with Merkel, who has received numerous polite but explicit hints in the European media during the past six months, that her time is up. History has repeatedly shown the possible consequences of such stubbornness. Leaders wound up being ousted through parliamentary intrigue to force their resignation, perhaps they were sent into exile, but sometimes this process of removal occurred violently. In contemporary times, mobs of common people no longer oust their rulers by force but instead provide the collective message of popular resentment. While such messages have already been expressed, they do not represent the majority mood, yet the dynamics of political trends are hard to predict. Long suppressed sentiments tend to erupt suddenly, without warning, like some surprise volcanic eruptions or urban riots. There will then be a tendency for such expressions to be suppressed, in hopes of counteracting the likelihood of spreading.

An interesting example of how public resentment can spread almost like wildfire was demonstrated a few weeks ago in Hamburg. In late January Uta Ogilvies, a Mom who was fed up with Merkel during the ongoing coalition negotiations at the time, walked in the center of Hamburg one evening alone, holding a simple sign saying “Merkel Must Go” (Merkel muss weg). This is the stationary equivalent of a group of demonstrators parading and chanting “hay-hay, hoe-hoe, whatever it is has got to go”. Exactly one week later there were about sixty demonstrators who had come out to support her. One week after that the number had doubled to 120, she claims. Then the hooded Antifa affiliated agitators started to show up. They found out where she lives, and somebody threw paint through her window at home into her kid’s room. Last week, Hamburg’s newspaper reported 350 demonstrators showing up to protest against Merkel, with roughly a thousand counter-demonstrators. Understanding that the event is potentially volatile, the police have been showing up in force too, including with armored water cannons. Counter-demonstrators have been able to mobilizing in the usual way, by crying “wolf”, claiming that opponents of Merkel are “right-wingers” or worse. Yesterday a city official attempted to intimidate those wanting to demonstrate against Merkel by asserting that they should be aware of their commonality with right wing extremists. These developments underscore that Merkel is no longer considered as “conservative” but has become the new darling of the “left”. More importantly, it shows that Merkel now has lumpen thugs of black clad street fighters who will reliably come out to counter those who would openly support her resignation. Hitler had his notorious Brown-Shirts (Braunhemden), derived from Mussolini’s Black-Shirts, and now Merkel has her Antifa Black-Hoods. Nobody can predict with any certainty how rapidly or severely future conflict will escalate. The still localized phenomenon of hooded goon squads could spread from Hamburg to other cities.

XIV – New waves of mass migration by organized transfers of Africans on ships directly to Hamburg easily possible

Other things could be happening in Hamburg this year too. Some experts have warned that there are millions of migrants in Africa, but only a small portion of them, almost exclusively young males, manage to arrive in Italy, either a few dozen by inflatable raft or a few hundred at a time by wooden boat, yet it is not difficult to imagine a new scenario, especially in light of Italian general elections on March 4, 2018, the results of which makes it more likely that the Italian navy will no longer graciously accept these African migrants and will send them back instead of processing them in Italy and then distributing them. Of the more than a hundred cruise liners owned or operated by one or the other Israeli mogul, at some point an overhaul or refurbishing is necessary at the dry dock. Hamburg and other shipyards in northern Germany have dry docks. In the summer of 1980 Fidel Castro opened his jails and freed all he prisoners, who took boats to southern Florida. Officials in some African countries would be glad to release their violent male prisoners if a Big Sugar Daddy would guarantee their transfer out of the country. Packed tightly, a big multi-level cruise liner could transport between ten to twenty thousand people, they could be filled up and embark from such places as Lagos, Monrovia, and Dakar. Then all of a sudden, in the middle of the night, the ships have quietly arrived in the port of Hamburg, and thousands of young African males have arrived on land and are hungry, truly a humanitarian crisis, some will surely need medical care. They all apply for asylum because they have been unfairly “persecuted”, they will claim. Having arrived by ship from Africa, they cannot be sent back, as would have to be the case if they had come to Bavaria from Austria and Merkel decided to follow the law. Hamburgers are so open and welcoming; they are used to seeing African sailors roaming about town. Roughly half of Hamburgers voted either for the Green Party or the SPD or the Left Party; all of these parties want not just more migrants, but the newly arrived young African men must then also be allowed to bring their entire families and clans, ad infinitum, and if citizens should object then Merkel’s Black-Hoods will mobilize to show up. That such a scenario has not yet occurred is not so much because nobody would dare to make it happen, but more likely because simply threatening to do so – words like blackmail or extortion come to mind – can achieve other benefits to those who have the connections to organize such an operation.

XV – None of Germany’s seven Bundestag parties offer the winning mix of positions on economic and social issues

Of the seven political parties represented in Germany’s current parliament (Bundestag), all but two of them have either accepted or embraced continued mass migration into Germany of impoverished individuals. The FDP would like to see selective migration of qualified people with useful skills according to the Canadian model. Only Alternative for Germany (AfD), a new party, rejects migration from outside Europe due to issues of cultural incompatibility. US President Donald Trump recently reflected this position when he reportedly complained that so many immigrants are coming from “shithole” countries instead of from advanced countries like Norway. After many decades of social engineering and economic policy experiments, it has been empirically proven that maintaining a viable and affluent social state for the benefit of public well-being is incompatible with mass immigration, though so many people whose perspective is ideologically driven are in denial about this. Furthermore, the economic neo-liberalism flavor of capitalism being pursued today (Chicago School, Milton Friedman) ever since it was initially adopted under Margaret Thatcher, then implemented in numerous other countries, results in high levels of wealth inequality, which is also a destabilizing force in the long run. With rampant speculation in an expanded financial sector at the expense of taxpayers after bailouts and decreasing disposable income of an increasingly greater part of the population, due to low wages or higher unemployment in conjunction with inflated rental and real estate prices, declining economic wellbeing for the broad public becomes inevitable. Though the Left Party rejects the adverse excesses of economic neo-liberalism and advocates the type of social market capitalism that was successful in Germany under Willy Brandt in the early 1970s, but also in Scandinavia, yet was abandoned by the SPD under Chancellor Schroeder, on the other hand the Left Party completely neutralizes and discredits itself by embracing open borders and unlimited migration because the former policy cannot work if you also entertain the latter. Only one prominent and increasingly popular politician from the Left Party, who regularly appears on the political talk show circuit, seems to have understood this. For having strayed from the self-contradictory Left Party position, Sahra Wagenknecht, was punished at a Left Party Congress in 2016 by receiving a creamy pie shoved in her face by a fellow “leftist”, yet an attempt to dethrone her from leadership ranks has failed.

Additionally, an important prerequisite for democracy to work well is for the population to be both well educated and well informed, in an environment that respects free speech that allows a variety of opinions and ideas, so they are encouraged to participate in the process and make well-informed decisions when voting, as opposed to having their perceptions and perspectives manipulated by carefully crafted lies. Most importantly, the legal framework must be sophisticated to enhance fairness and discourage as well as punish corruption. However, none of the parties in Germany even state these basic ideals as worthwhile to pursue and attain. Any party exclusively pursuing such goals has the potential to achieve an absolute majority because a society based on such basic premises is one that most citizens would want to be a part of. Since the AfD is still new and ridiculed in the press as an opportunistic one-trick pony capitalizing on public resentment of Merkel’s open border policy, it has not yet developed a full spectrum of policy advocacy, so it could attain the first-mover advantage by embracing sensible positions because it would not entail back-tracking or having to reverse themselves, as other parties would have to do. At least theoretically, they could become Germany’s strongest party in four years, as they already are in Saxony.

XVI – Numerous significant flaws in Germany’s antiquated and corrupted judicial system impede basic fairness

To highlight one key element of a well functioning society, cited above, that is not so well known about, even within Germany, namely its judicial system, it needs to pointed out that important criteria by which to evaluate such a system are how well it is structured with regard to its laws and its procedural rules, as well as how accessible it is for the general public, as opposed to just affluent individuals and corporations. The German system fails on all these aspects. It should be understood and acknowledged that it is extremely flawed – primitive and inherently (structurally) corrupt, a complete sham. It lacks the most elementary elements that are taken for granted in the US legal system. Its inadequacies prevent the functioning of reliable justice and a fair society. For instance, to be specific by citing at least ten structural peculiarities: This antiquated and byzantine system has numerous different court venues (Criminal, Administrative, Labor, Family, Commerce, Social, Youth, Agriculture, etc.) with differing procedural regulation, judicial proceedings are not recorded, there is no jury, class action suits are not permitted, appellate levels require representation by attorneys, whose mandatory fees are strictly regulated, pro bono public representation is uncommon, contingency fees are a novelty and uncommon, court fees are excessive and a severe impediment to seeking redress, requests for waivers of fees and legal representation when bringing a complaint in civil cases are subject to a much higher standard (hard evidence of favorable outcome, to be decided by – and routinely rejected – by the same judge who would then take the case) than they are elsewhere in Europe (showing that a suit is neither malicious nor frivolous), and especially incomprehensible, a first level appellate judge may decree that his or her decision may not be subject to a higher level appeal, and any attempt at circumventing such a stipulation is practically impossible; if a dispute is not considered potentially relevant or instructive for a wide domain of other people that could be potentially affected but simply too specific or individual, then accepting an appeal can be ignored.  These flaws make it very easy for judges to deviate from other norms that should be followed, without taking accountability for failing to follow guidelines. Basic rules of deductive logical reasoning need not be followed because truth or evidence are deemed subjective, exculpatory evidence can be ignored if the judges decide not to take note of it in the record. Even the basic constitutional guarantee, to have relevant arguments heard and addressed, is routinely ignored if a judge did not deem it relevant.

Though these numerous flaws are known among practicing attorneys, who themselves are often frustrated by the corrupt system they have chosen to operate in, they have an interest in allowing things to remain as they are. Since public calls for comprehensive judicial reform of this system come not even from the academic realm, it is fair to conclude that this must be another of various German taboos, such as advocating for free speech. Within this wider judicial milieu of judges, attorneys, and law professors there exists a conspiracy of silence to not rock the boat, for which, if they had a conscience, they ought to be ashamed of for doing nothing and thus perpetuating a very flawed system. In order to make the point, that if even in a very high profile case, subject to coverage by international reporters, a panel of judges fails to provide justice and conducts a show trial instead, transparent foe all to see, one can safely assume that such a corrupt practice is completely routine in such cases that enjoy no public scrutiny at all, highlighting a specific instance from the John Demjanjuk trial, that took place in Munich over the course of a few years, is very instructive.

XVII – The Demjanjuk show trial and its shameful perversion of justice proves needs for reforms that remain taboo

John Demjanjuk has been falsely accused in a show trial in Israel for allegedly having been “Ivan the Terible” at the Treblinka concentration camp and was sentenced to death in 1988, but this verdict was overturned five years later after new evidence cast reasonable doubt on his culpability. This did not deter zealous prosecutors with an axe to grind, so in the summer of 2009 he was deported from Cleveland to Munich to stand trial for allegedly having been accessory to murder in Sobibor on nearly 28 thousand counts. These charges were based on testimony of dubious credibility and purported evidence, an ID card that was deemed to have most likely been forged. Demjanjuk had denied having been a guard in Sobibor and his presence there was never proved. Essentially, the court required proof of a negative proposition, which is a logical impossibility unless one can prove an alternative proposition that is mutually exclusive of the first. This is the principle of being guilty as charged by default unless and until one can prove innocence, a violation of basic principles in US jurisprudence. Aside from that, alone the charge that he was present at Sobibor automatically entailed the presumption, without any need for this to be proved, that he was an accessory to so many murders. Cited in Wikipedia:

An 11 August 2010, Esquire magazine article written and researched by Scott Raab questioned the whole idea of Demjanjuk’s trial, crime, and punishment, pointing out many of the absurdities of this particular case, stating specifically “Worse, Demjanjuk is essentially on trial not for anything he did, but simply for being at Sobibor. No specific criminal acts need be alleged, much less proved. Page through transcripts of previous Nazi trials and you’ll find a rigorous focus on particulars, because that is what should be required to convict a defendant. No one in any such trial ever was convicted simply on the basis of being present at the scene.

Leaving aside the question of whether Demjanjuk had been in Sobibor or not and assuming for the sake of argument that he had been there, though in this case he would have been a prisoner too, though functioning involuntarily as a guard with a weapon, the prosecution basically reasoned that it was incumbent on him to flee. On March 16, 2010 the court heard expert testimony from Dieter Pohl, an expert at Munich’s Ludwig Maximilian University, Institute for Contemporary History, as was widely reported at the time in the international media covering the trial, including from Cleveland, Demjanjuks’ former home. A particular finding presented orally in court by Pohl was essentially of an exculpatory nature:

Pohl said that some Trawniki men did successfully escape, but conceded that if they had fled with their weapons and were recaptured, they faced certain execution.

As Pohl had asserted this, the defense attorney submitted a motion to the court to have that particular passage by Pohl be submitted into the record. It was close to lunchtime so the chief judge said that the court would adjourn and announce the decision after the recess. After the recess the full court denied the motion to take official note of that evidence, so it was not included in the record. Thus, anybody following the proceedings knew what the court itself refused to acknowledge.

More than a year later Demjanjuk was sentenced anyway. His appeal was pending when he died. From Wikipedia:

Christiaan F. Rüter, Professor of Law and expert on NS trials in Germany, who researched the subject at the University of Amsterdam for 40 years, expressed reservations against the commencement of proceedings stating that to him “it is a complete mystery, how anyone who knows the German jurisdiction up to now, would be able to assume that Demjanjuk could be sentenced based on the given evidence.

It was understood by everyone that the facts and evidence were irrelevant to the court. So much for the concept of “human dignity” if authorities determine that somebody does not deserve it for reasons of political expediency. This set an important precedent and sent the signal to judges that they will surely get away with perversion of justice (Rechsbeugung), which is technically a criminal offense in Germany, though a judge will virtually never gets indicted for it, much less prosecuted and convicted. Nobody who was initially hoping to enjoy some kind of hateful revenge could have been placated by the verdict since it was evident that the proceedings were a complete farce. From Wikipedia:

Yoram Sheftel, the lawyer who represented Demjanjuk during the Israel trial in the 1980s, criticized the German court for conducting a show trial. “There was a shameful farce here”, he said. “Certainly the German court did not believe its own ruling.” “Nothing has changed since then”, he said. “Even during the trial in Germany, there was not one person who testified that Demjanjuk was Ivan from Sobibor, by virtue that he was seen there, and as such the conviction is a farce.”

Months ago one of the high profile leaders of the AfD party was accused of having asserted in an e-mail to somebody that the German legal system was corrupt, which she subsequently denied she had written, though she did not deny the system was corrupt. When looking at the slick web site of the AfD, it is apparent that the party takes absolutely no position on the need to reform Germany’s legal system. The issue remains outside the bounds of legitimate criticism or discussion.

XVIII – Summary – Germany has not yet matured to engender trust; Merkel’s legacy will incur infamy and shame

It should be evident from the serious shortcomings within its society, alluded to above, that, as a whole, Germany has not matured sufficiently for its neighboring countries to feel comfortable if it were no longer under supervision through its ongoing de facto occupation. Its leadership has failed to live up to the ambitious desire to become a model nation, and a majority of its citizens have been led astray. It is up to Germans themselves to continue on their self-destructive path or otherwise attain the sophistication that engenders lasting trust and respect from peers and adversaries alike. Surely, once the younger generations recognize the long-term societal damage that will have been caused by and blamed on Merkel’s decisions and policies – the adverse effects from which they may themselves be suffering and coping with – then they may covertly be ashamed for the rest of their lives because the disaster unfolded while they could have actively insinuated themselves to challenge these policies rather than being indifferent or passively acquiescent. In recognizing this situation and taking a pivotal turn away from the current course, before it is too late, Germans may still avert future disaster if they change course under a new leadership.

March 13, 2018 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | Leave a comment

America’s Troll Farm Media

By Gerald Sussman | CounterPunch | March 9, 2018

Despite all the smoke and mirrors, most Americans seem to see where the stenographers of corporate capitalism are taking us. A recent Gallup poll found that while 84% of Americans see media as “critical” or “very important” to democracy, only 28% see the corporatist mainstream news media (MSM) as actually supporting democracy. They’re right on both counts of course. The quality of a democracy is only as good as the information people have to make informed judgements about public policy and politicians.

Even as the mainstream news media continue to lose street cred, they persist in a rumor-saturated full court press against the “Trump-Putin presidency,” which only further exposes their lack of professionalism and increasing vulgarity. MSM management and their boardroom bosses have long understood that as long as they spice up their “nothing burger” news, ratings and advertising rates will keep them in business and please their commercial and government clients. Tabloid journalism, which can describe most American mainstream media these days, even when wrapped up as “all the news that’s fit to print,” is in constant search of sensation, scandal, gossip, and profit – and only occasionally in public-oriented investigative integrity.

What else does the citizenry have to say? A mere 18% have “a lot” of trust in the MSM, while 74% see them as “biased” (Pew Research, July 2016). A study by the Harvard-Harris polling organization in May 2017 confirmed this, finding that 65 percent of Americans consider the so-called “free press” biased, obsessed with scandal, and full of “fake news” and therefore cannot be trusted. Among the concurring are a majority of both Democrats (53%) and Independents (60%) as well as 80% of Republicans. Amongst the “informed public,” trust in American institutions in general, that is, the government, business, NGOs, and the MSM, is going through the worst crisis in recorded history, according to the marketing firm Edelman in 2018. The US is the lowest rated of the 28 countries surveyed by the firm on this measure. This is not consistent with the image of a serious “democracy.”

On the MSM coverage of national politics, Americans are equally skeptical. A June 2017 Rasmussen survey of likely American voters indicated that 50% think most reporters are prejudiced against the president, and only 4% believe most reporters are biased in Trump’s favor. Although this is weighted by the 76% of Republicans who support this view, the study also found that 51% of independent voters and even 24% of Democrats also agree. Aided by the billions of dollars of free, almost all negative, publicity the MSM provided, with apparent reverse effect during the presidential campaign, Trump’s standing is also supported by the 47 million American shock troops that faithfully follow him on Twitter.

On January 27, 2018, the Washington Post editorial board issued this statement: “A foreign power interfered in the 2016 presidential election. U.S. law enforcement is trying to get to the bottom of that story. Congress should be doing everything possible to make sure the investigation can take place.” Obviously referring to Russia, the Post’s declaration, as the late investigative journalist Robert Parry and many other independent and respected writers have pointed out, was and remains without a shred of evidence. It’s WMD time all over again, only this time the propaganda is being trumpeted mainly by the Democrats. It would better serve the cause of democracy to investigate the Post for its covert coalition and collusion with the deep state and the Clinton (right) wing of the Democratic Party. The Post and the rest of their pack have constructed a wicked Russia foil in order to undermine Moscow’s presumed ally Trump and boost bigger Pentagon budgets. It’s an extremely dangerous game that is headed toward military confrontation and massive annihilation by the yahoos in government and the liberal media.

But it’s not a new game, because despite their “free press” claims, American major news media have long been instruments of state propaganda. In the 1970s, Carl Bernstein exposed the fact that the overseas branches of US MSM had long served as eyes and ears of the CIA’s “Operation Mockingbird,” and it’s very likely than many amongst their ranks remain agency assets. Back then, Philip Graham, publisher of the Post, ran the agency’s media industry operations, a fact not mentioned in the currently showing eponymous film. During the GW Bush presidency, the Pentagon recruited over 75 military generals to spread propaganda in the mass media, fed in camera by leaders at the Defense Department, the State Department, the Justice Department, and the White House. Their responsibilities included their employment as “objective” foreign policy and war analysts for major network and cable news channels, many of them concurrently receiving pay by military contracting firms. The Pentagon referred to the on-air military propagandists as “surrogates” and “message force multipliers.”

The Russians are Coming

In February 2018, former CIA director John Brennan, the man who fed the Russian “hacking” story to the House Intelligence Committee, became a senior national security and intelligence analyst for NBC and MSNBC in what has become standard revolving door practice between government and the corporate world. Brennan was a well-known advocate for the CIA’s rendition and torture program, spying on its critics, and its use of drone bombings and assassinations in the Middle East. And he certainly knows something about hacking, as he was forced to admit, after first lying about it, that his CIA hacked the computers of Senate staffers who were investigating the agency’s role in torturing prisoners. A man the MSM apparently regard as having impeccable credentials for truth telling.

If the Russia “hacking” story has no legs, the more interesting piece of news is the organized efforts of the Democrats and some Republicans to bring down Trump and turn over the White House to theocrat Mike Pence. Mainstream pundits and reporters are churning out unsubstantiated speculations about Russia and Trump by the hour. A number of Democrats, military brass, and mercenary journalist (and former country club caddy) Thomas Friedman have characterized alleged Russian intervention as a new “Pearl Harbor” or “9/11,” thereby building a case for war and for treason against the president. There’s no downside to making even the most absurd claims about Russia and Trump, no penalty for fabrications, misrepresentations, or getting facts wrong. If they were honest, their ledes might read: “This fictional news report is loosely based on a true story.” Or: “Any resemblance in this story to real people and events is merely coincidental.”

There’s room in the inferno for the Democrats’ deep state allies. Starting in mid-2015, Peter Strzok, the FBI’s H. Clinton personal email scandal investigator before taking the lead in the probe of Russian election interference, sent emails to his lover, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, which  clearly revealed that both of them were actively working for the Clinton campaign to undermine Trump in any way possible. The pair also exchanged references to a “secret society” that was operating within the Department of Justice and the FBI to block a Trump victory. Until their exposure, Strzok had been Robert Mueller’s right hand man on the Trump-Russia investigation.

Meanwhile, two years later, the hunt for the smoking Kalashnikov continues. The best the MSM have come up with is that a St. Petersburg outfit called Internet Research Agency (IRA) placed $100,000 in ads on Facebook (compared to the $81 million Facebook ad spending by the Trump and Clinton campaigns), some of the Russian ads actually directed against Trump. As Jeffrey St. Clair pointed out in the pages of CounterPunch, in the key states where Clinton lost the election, the traditional Democrat strongholds of Michigan ($832 spent on token IRA buy ads), Pennsylvania ($300), and Wisconsin ($1,979), all but $54 of this amount was spent before the party primaries even started.

Facebook’s vice president for advertising Rob Goldman said that in fact most of the total Russian ad buys occurred after the presidential election. “We shared that fact,” he tweeted, “but very few [news] outlets have covered it because it doesn’t align with the main media narrative” about Trump’s election victory. Winning the election for Trump was simply not the Russian objective, Goldman says. Alex Stamos, Facebook chief security officer, concurred. The ads, he said, were more about sowing discord, with messages about guns, immigrants, and racial strife, than on pushing a particular candidate. Think about all the blockbuster American (and British) movies that portray Russians as sinister, violent, and criminal. For starters, remember über-teutonic Ivan Drago, Sgt. Yushin, the many sadistic “Russian” mafia nogoodniks, along with the Cold War-for-children cartoon characters, Boris Badanov and Natasha Fatale? Among the many Russophobic films and TV shows over the decades: The Americans, Air Force OneThe Peacemaker, The Saint, Rambo III, Red Dawn, Red Heat, the James Bond flicks, and the 2018 Oscar for documentaries, Icarus. Soviet and Russia-era films, not well tutored in ethnic caricatures, have no comparable stereotypical American counterparts.

There are a few signs of life in mainstream journalism. New York Times correspondent Scott Shane was one of the few journalists who happened to notice that the US intelligence agency (the CIA, NSA, and FBI) report of January 6, 2017 on Russian “hacking” actually offered no evidence. “Instead,” he said, “the message from the agencies essentially amounts to ‘trust us.’” It took the mainstream media 6 months before they acknowledged that the Obama administration claim that 17 intelligence agencies backed the hacking claim was false, the real number was only 3, and even the NSA had only “moderate confidence” in the finding. Last January, the NSA made a significant alteration in its mission statement: it removed the words “honesty” and the pledge to be truthful from its list of priorities.

Even if there were genuine evidence that Russian officials had hacked the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign manager John Podesta emails, as originally claimed by the intelligence agencies, one should put this in context of the long history of the CIA’s efforts to overthrow many democratically elected leaders who had the temerity to stand up to the superpower. These would include Allende, Arbenz, Mossadeq, Lumumba, Chavez, Goulart, Ortega, and others. The list of US interventions in foreign elections just since 1948 (Italy) is voluminous. Do the mainstream media suffer amnesia about Victoria Nuland and John McCain’s presence in the Maidan, egging on the coup against Yanukovych or her infamous leaked phone call to the US ambassador in Kiev in which she dictated the ousted president’s successors? And is it reasonable to expect Russia to be passive about a hostile NATO putting troops along its borders and reacting to efforts to install an anti-Russian regime next door in the Ukraine? In this recent historical context, US accusations of Russian political interference smack of complete hypocrisy.

A study by Carnegie Mellon professor Dov Levin found that between 1946 and 2000 alone, the US intervened in foreign elections 81 times, which does not include its invasions, blockades, sanctions, assassination attempts, and other regime change initiatives. “The U.S. is no stranger to interfering in the elections of other countries,” he wrote. In 1996, the US intervened in the Russian election to prevent the Communist Party from returning to power. Have the MSM also forgotten the lies the government and the CIA told about Saddam Hussein’s WMD and connections to terrorist movements? Or that, thanks to Edward Snowden’s exposés, we know that Obama’s NSA bugged the phones of 35 foreign political leaders?

If the MSM are still confused, perhaps they should listen to former CIA director James Woolsey. Interviewed by Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, Woolsey was asked directly whether the US ever interfered with other countries’ elections. He initially said, “probably, but it was for the good of the system in order to avoid the communists from taking over.” Ingraham followed up with the question, “We don’t do that now?” To this Woolsey responded, “nyum, nyum, nyum, nyum, nyum, only for a very good cause,” a rather frank admission that merely amused Ingraham, who failed to follow up with this obvious statement of US double standards. After leaving the CIA, Woolsey became chairman of Freedom House, a right-wing government-supported private NGO that putatively supports human rights causes and has been active in regime change operations around the world – far more actively than merely doing Facebook postings.

William Binney, formerly with NSA as a high-level intelligence operative, subsequently becoming a whistleblower on the agency’s illegal surveillance operations, called the alleged Russian attacks on the DNC “a charade.” Speaking to Daniel Bernstein at Consortium News, Binney said that had any bulk transmissions come from across the Atlantic, the NSA would have known about it, as they tap every communication from abroad. The data from “Guccifer 2.0,” was a download “not a transfer across the Web,” which “won’t manage such high speed.” The intelligence agencies “have been playing games with us.  There is no factual evidence to back up any charge of hacking here.” It was likely no more than a USB transfer, he said.

Is there any hope for the mainstream media to change? It would take a revolution to get the MSM to become more democratic. A Harvard Shorenstein Center report found that media coverage of the 2016 US party conventions contained almost no discussion of policy issues and instead concentrated on polling data, scandals, campaign tactics, and Trump and Russia bashing. Leslie Moonves, CEO of CBS, spoke for the media establishment: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS …. The money’s rolling in …. It’s a terrible thing to say. But bring it on, Donald.”

As Walter Cronkite would say, “And that’s the way it is.”

Gerald Sussman is professor of urban studies and international and global studies at Portland State University. He is the author and editor of several books, including The Propaganda Society: Promotional Culture and Politics in Global Context (2011).

March 10, 2018 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Deep Blue State: Democrats fielding unprecedented number of ex-CIA candidates

RT | March 9, 2018

Democrats are running a surprising number of former spies in competitive districts in the US 2018 midterms. If successful, as many as half of all new congressional Democrats could come from the national security apparatus.

One quarter of all the Democratic challengers in competitive House of Representative districts have intelligence, State Department or National Security Council backgrounds. This is the revelation of an analysis conducted by the World Socialist Web Site, which reviewed Federal Election Commission reports filed by all the Democratic candidates in 102 competitive House districts. The report reviewed the campaign websites of challengers, which provided their biographical details.

The mere presence of CIA alumni among the Democratic candidates is not news per se: the Washington Post praised it back in October 2017, saying that CIA Democrats were “alarmed by President Trump and galvanized by Russian interference in the 2016 election.”

The sheer number of candidates with a national security background is new, however. Of the 102 primary elections to choose the Democratic nominees in these competitive districts, 44 involve candidates with a “military-intelligence” or State Department background, with 11 districts having two such candidates, and one district having three. The WSWS analysis revealed that 57 candidates claim to have been national security operatives, compared to the 45 who were state and local government officials or the 35 lawyers.

Democrats believe fielding ex-intelligence personnel in tight congressional races will project an impression of pragmatism and efficiency which could sweep up GOP votes, the analysis says.

The report takes a ‘military-intelligence’ background to mean those who formerly had an operational role in the CIA, Pentagon, National Security Council or State Department.

Elissa Slotkin, a former CIA operative and Iraq director for the National Security Council, is one such Democrat hopeful. At the Pentagon she oversaw drone warfare, homeland defense and cyber warfare but is now setting her sights on the Eighth Congressional District of Michigan, a Republican-held seat that the Democrats hope will swing blue in 2018.

Another spook-turned-politico is Jeff Beals, who spent four years as a CIA intelligence officer before moving to the State Department to work on the Middle East in 2002. He’s hoping to oust Republican Rep. John Faso in  New York’s Hudson Valley.

He’s not the only spy in that particular race, however. Also hoping to scoop the Democratic nomination for Hudson Valley is Patrick Ryan, who served two combat tours in Iraq and acted as lead intelligence officer for an infantry battalion in Iraq.

Regionally, the Northeast has the highest proportion of military-intelligence candidates seeking Democratic nominations, with 21 of the 31 seats targeted. In the majority of races, the military-intelligence candidates are well placed to win the Democratic nomination, say WSWS.

Democrats have long accused President Donald Trump of being “at war” with the US intelligence community, after he refused to unquestioningly accept the January 2017 report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) accusing Russia of meddling in the 2016 presidential election, but offering no evidence for the claim.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) went so far as to warn Trump that he should not cross the spies.

“Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Schumer told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow in January 2017. “So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb to do this.”

During the 2016 election, the so-called NeverTrump wing of the Republican party actually ran an ex-CIA spy Evan McMullin as a spoiler candidate. In the end, he received 700,000 votes nationwide and placed third in Utah.

March 9, 2018 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception | , | Leave a comment

The Skripal Incident-Another Anti-Russian Provocation

By Christopher Black – New Eastern Outlook – 09.03.2018

The British government is talking war with Russia over a mysterious incident that is claimed to have taken place on Sunday March 4, just a few kilometres from the secrecy shrouded British biological and chemical warfare research and development facility at Porton Down in Wiltshire. I say claimed since we have very little information confirming what exactly took place outside of government statements and we have seen no photographs of the alleged victims in their hospital beds to convince us that the alleged victims did fall ill and are being treated. However, let us assume that the incident as described did take place.

The mystery consists in the fact that the victims, former Russian colonel of military intelligence, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter, were not under any known threat from Russia. Skripal was charged and convicted in Russia in 2006 of being an asset of the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, and handing over secret information to the British. He was jailed, but in a spy swap in 2010 was pardoned and allowed to leave Russia for Vienna, then Britain, where he has been living ever since. Why he was pardoned is difficult to determine, unless it was necessary legally to effect the swap with the British. In any even the Russians had washed their hands of him but it seems the British had other uses for him, as their expendable man for a provocation against Russia.

The facts as the British government states them are that Skripal and his daughter, visiting from Russia, met for lunch in Salisbury, the town outside of which Porton Down is located. The purpose of the daughter’s visit is not known. According to ever changing media accounts witnesses in a restaurant reported that Skripal appeared to be agitated and angry and left in that state with his daughter following. Agitated and angry about what we do not know.

Half an hour later it is said that the two of them were found slumped over on a public bench. Some early media accounts state that it was thought they had taken too much fentanyl and were vomiting and that their illness may have been self-induced. But very quickly the British government claimed that they had been poisoned by some chemical or nerve agent and immediately cast the blame on Russia though the investigation had just begun. The incident was immediately taken out of the hands of the local police and handed over to the Counter-Terrorism Police, formerly known as Special Branch, though the government refused to call it a terrorist incident. A meeting of the British government high-level emergency committee, Cobra, was called. Why this was done for what appears to be an assault or attempted murder or a self-induced accident is a good question. But the answer lies in the immediate propaganda campaign mounted in the British press against Russia.

On Thursday the 8th of March the British government claimed that they had identified a “nerve agent” as the substance used. Yet the BBC quotes on the same day a woman physician who attended at the scene saying that she found Mrs. Skripal slumped unconscious on a bench vomiting and fitting. She had lost control of her bodily functions. The physician, who asked not to be named, told the BBC she moved the daughter into the recovery position and opened her airways as others tended to her father. The doctor stated that the she treated her for almost 30 minutes, saying there was no sign of any chemical agent on her face or body and that though she had been worried she would be affected by a nerve agent so far she “feels fine.”

Yet, the British media published on Thursday a photograph of a police officer who they say attended the scene and who they claim was made ill and placed in intensive care but is now stable and recovering. The two stories do not add up, as it would seem the doctor was in closer physical contact with the two victims than the police officer yet the doctor has suffered no symptoms at all.

The Guardian quoted Andrei Lugovoi, another former Russian agent, accused of Litvinenko’s murder by the British as stating that Skripal had been pardoned in Russia so no one from there is after him:

“I don’t rule out that this is another provocation by British. Whatever happens on British territory, they start yelling: ‘He was killed, he was hung, he was poisoned!’ and that Russia is to blame for everything. This is to their advantage.” Igor Sutyagin, yet another Russian traitor flown to Russia in 2010 in an exchange of spies-also said, “I don’t think that Mr. Skripal would be targeted, because he was pardoned.”

To add to the mystery the British government refuses to name the alleged nerve agent. To create more drama the British Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, stated that it was not Sarin or VX but something “very rare.” I think we can expect that they will choose the right dramatic moment to name something and state that only Russian labs can make it. That is their modus operandi. They certainly do not want to state that VX was involved since VX was developed in 1952 at Porton Down near the sight of the incident; for that would lead to necessary investigations into security at that facility and whether personnel there were involved. However, despite the fact that Porton Down is in the business of manufacturing chemical warfare agents including nerve agents and that logic would dictate that the Porton Down authorities would be barred from being investigators into a case in which they could be involved the British government immediately assigned Porton Down to identify the substance that might have been used.

That the Russians may be correct that this incident is another NATO arranged provocation must be seriously considered. Despite the fact there is no evidence whatsoever that Russia had anything to do with this incident, the British government was quick to label Russia as the villain of the piece and the mass media dutifully acted in lock step and put out the word. Boris Johnson called Russia a “malign and disruptive force’ and made threats about pulling the UK out of the World Cup to be held in Russia this year. The attempts by the NATO alliance to throw Russia out of the Olympics on trumped up doping charges were largely successful and now we see another attempt to disrupt a sports event that is important to world football fans and to Russia. Johnson added that Britain would act “robustly’ of Moscow is found to be involved.

The Russian embassy in London stated the allegations of Russian involvement are untrue and that the “script of yet another anti-Russian campaign has already been written.” It seems so and the script has some pages to run yet. One has to wonder what the role of the British intelligence services is in this for the BBC also reports that Skripal still kept the company of British intelligence agents. So one has to ask, for what reason? What was his continuing role as an asset of MI6? What was their role on that day?

But that line of inquiry will not be followed. All the British media are linking this incident to the case of Alexander Litvinenko, another Russian who was supposedly poisoned with radioactive tea. Evidence that cronies of his were involved were ignored in favour the line that Russia was behind it though no evidence has ever been put forward to support that claim. They are also making the claim that this “very rare” substance must be from a state military stockpile, so the statements to come from the British government can be predicted.

This incident has echoes of the case of Georgi Markov, the Bulgarian dissident killed in London in 1978 by a ricin pellet injected into his leg by means of an umbrella it was said, though it was no doubt done with an air pistol. That murder was quickly blamed on the KGB and Bulgarian government agents but there is evidence that in fact the murder was arranged by MI6 as was the murder of media magnate Robert Maxwell in 1991, who had documents relating to the Markov murder in his possession, according sources such as Richard Cottrell in his book Gladio and accounts by former British intelligence agent Gordon Logan.

The Skripal incident also brings to mind the death of Dr. David Kelly in 2003 whose mysterious death in woods near his home, was officially attributed to “suicide.” He is thought by many to have been assassinated by the British secret services and CIA to keep him from revealing secrets about the war in Iraq. He worked at Porton Down as head of microbiology.

He in turn is connected to other scientists at Porton Down who have died under questionable circumstances, for instance, Dr. Richard Holmes, whose body was found in the same woods as Dr. Kelly, in 2012, two days after going for a walk, and one month after resigning from Porton Down, and to Vladimir Pasechnik’s death in November 2001, another Russian defector, who allegedly died of a stroke. His death was not announced until a month later and by British intelligence. Dr. Kelly had been involved in his debriefing when he left Russia.

Sir Edward Leigh, a member of the Parliamentary Defence Committee, in the British Parliament stated, “the circumstantial evidence against Russia is very strong. Who else would have the motive and the means?” The answer to that of course is that the British government has the motive and the means. What would Russia benefit from harming a has-been like Skripal and causing all this fuss? None. What benefit does Britain have and NATO? The answer again is provided by Sir Richard who went on to state “The only way to preserve peace is through strength,” carefully echoing Trump’s foreign policy. He continued, “and if Russia is behind this, this is a brazen act of war, of humiliating our country and defence is the first duty and spending 2% of the budget on defence is not enough.” There is the motive right there. To justify an increase on defence spending and to hit Russia yet again with propaganda warfare to justify NATO’s continuing aggression against Russia.

Russia has volunteered to cooperate in the “investigation” but to what end? The script is already written, the drama will unfold, the consequences will flow and they will lead not to peace and cooperation but to more hostility and war.

Christopher Black is an international criminal lawyer based in Toronto. He is known for a number of high-profile war crimes cases and recently published his novel “Beneath the Clouds.

March 9, 2018 Posted by | Deception | , , , | Leave a comment

Establishment alarmed as Trump threatens to gut US ‘democracy promotion’ racket

RT | March 7, 2018

The foreign policy establishment in Washington is crying foul after the Trump administration proposed to cut funding for organizations responsible for “promoting democracy abroad,” often in the guise of color revolutions.

The 2019 State Department budget request cuts the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) budget and separates it from the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI). Funding for the institutes would be moved to the State Department, where NDI and IRI would have to compete with private contractors, according to the Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin, who described the proposal as “an assault not only on their organizations but also on the pro-democracy mission they are dedicated to.”

“If implemented, the proposal would gut the program, force crippling layoffs and the symbolic meaning would also be shattering, sending a signal far and wide that the United States is turning its back on supporting brave people who share our values,” NED President Carl Gershman told Rogin.

“The work our government does to promote democratic values abroad is at the heart of who we are as a country,” Senator John McCain (R-Arizona), chairman of the IRI’s board of directors, told Rogin. The NDI board is chaired by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

McCain actually wrote a letter protesting the proposal to the Office of Management and Budget in December. It was signed by four other senators, including McCain’s close ally Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) and Marco Rubio (R-Florida).

Trump’s people “just don’t believe it’s America’s business to push democracy abroad,” Rogin concluded.

His article quickly made the rounds of the Washington establishment circles, where it received praise from former CIA agent and failed presidential candidate Evan McMullin and New Republic columnist Jeet Heer. Nicholas Burns, who served as State Department spokesman under Albright, said the revelations will “make your blood boil.”

.@joshrogin: The Trump administration’s assault on democracy promotion can be expected to continue. Dictatorships are presenting their model as preferable for the developing world. Human rights abuses are rising. Basic freedoms are under attack. https://t.co/IRDT91JZAt

— Evan McMullin (@Evan_McMullin) March 5, 2018

It was Burns’s tweet in particular that attracted derision from critics of US foreign policy, such as journalists Glenn Greenwald, Chris Floyd and Jon Schwarz, and former diplomat Peter Van Buren:

This is the kind of blatant, jingoistic historical revisionism that the Trump era has made fashionable again. The idea that the US had been devoted to “democracy promotion” before Trump – and that this was pioneered by tyrant-hugging Reagan – is simply laughable: https://t.co/JrVqWt3CP7

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 6, 2018

The confusing thing about Harvard, Yale, etc. is that the job of people working there in the hard sciences actually is to describe reality accurately, whereas the job of many humanities professors like Nicholas Burns is to lie about reality https://t.co/e5EQhQfL5O

— Jon Schwarz (@schwarz) March 6, 2018

As well as a number of rank-and-file Twitterati:

The NED was founded in 1983, under the Reagan administration. It is theoretically a non-governmental organization, though the bulk of its funding is provided by the US government and American taxpayers. The status has given NED and its institutes plausible deniability against accusations that the US has been meddling in the politics of other countries.

“A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,” one of the endowment’s founders, Allen Weinstein, told the Washington Post in September 1991.

One example is the wave of “color revolutions,” starting from Serbia in 2000 to the “Arab Spring” revolts of 2011. Ukraine was subjected to this twice, in 2004 and in 2014. During the unrest in Kiev in November 2004, The Guardian’s Ian Traynor described the process, while heaping praise on the people behind it.

“The operation – engineering democracy through the ballot box and civil disobedience – is now so slick that the methods have matured into a template for winning other people’s elections,” Traynor wrote. “The Democratic party’s National Democratic Institute, the Republican party’s International Republican Institute, the US state department and USAid are the main agencies involved in these grassroots campaigns as well as the Freedom House NGO and billionaire George Soros’s open society institute.”

Though campaigns funded by all these external actors are more astroturf than grassroots, there were few objections, as it was all in the name of democracy.

Traynor concluded his 2004 story by saying the “places to watch” were Moldova and Central Asia. Sure enough, the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan went through a “Pink revolution” in February 2005, while the “Grape revolution” took place in Moldova in April 2009.

The Washington establishment’s obsession with democracy may also be explained by the belief that any non-democratic government is automatically anti-Western, as Luis Fleischman of the neoconservative Center for Security Policy argued last month.

If the regime is pro-American, however, it doesn’t matter whether it’s actually democratic or not. On Tuesday, the director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies Mark Dubowitz tweeted that “inclusive authoritarianism” might be a better fit for Middle Eastern countries, as long as they were “tolerant, respectful of individual liberties & minority rights & pro-American.”

Btw, I said a more “inclusive authoritarianism” *might* be better alternative. Tolerant, respectful of individual liberties & minority rights & pro-American. I suggested should be discussed. So spare me the invective & explain why worse than failed M/E democracies. https://t.co/yQJWKQ5V3z

— Mark Dubowitz (@mdubowitz) March 7, 2018

Read more:

‘US is allowed to meddle’: Democracy promotion is ‘US policy’, TV panel concludes

March 8, 2018 Posted by | Corruption | , , , , | Leave a comment

Why Russia’s New Strategic Capabilities Come As a Shock to US Intelligence Community

By Philip M. GIRALDI | Strategic Culture Foundation | 08.03.2018

The United States of America spends something like $80 billion annually on intelligence gathering and analysis. When the CIA was founded by the National Security Act in 1947 the intention was to create a mechanism that would warn about an imminent threat. The memory of Pearl Harbor in 1941, when Japan attacked the U.S. naval base was still fresh, and the legislation was popularized by the slogan “no more Pearl Harbors.”

In spite of the dedication of considerable resources and manpower, there have been some major intelligence failures in the past seventy years, starting with the inability to anticipate the breakout of the Korean War and including the embrace of false intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. But the most recent failure is perhaps more consequential than either Korea or Iraq.

On March 1st, Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke before his country’s Federal Assembly plus a large group of both local and foreign journalists, outlining his plans for the economy and also dealing with other domestic issues should he be reelected later this month. The final third of the presentation was on national defense and, in its substance, was clearly directed at a global audience, particularly the United States.

He explained:

“During all these years since the unilateral U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty [in 2001] we have been working intensively on advanced equipment and arms, which allowed us to make a breakthrough in developing new models of strategic weapons.”

He was referring to the RS-28 Sarmat ballistic missile, which has almost unlimited range and ultra-high speed, enabling it to employ trajectories including strikes coming over the South Pole that can defeat existing American Anti-Ballistic Defense systems. Russia has also produced and deployed a hypersonic glider weapon system Avangard.

But the real game changer is the Russian ability to negate America’s ability to project power through its navy. The already deployed air-launched Kinzhal anti-ship missile has a range of 2000 kilometers and a hyper-sonic speed that makes it nearly impossible to intercept. The development has made America’s thirteen aircraft carrier groups obsolete. President Putin made clear that Russia now has an overwhelming military advantage in cruise and ballistic missiles that are capable of penetrating U.S. defenses.

The new reality may or may not impel policymakers in Washington to approach Moscow and seek a new round of negotiations for arms control, but the real shock deriving from the Putin announcement is the failure of the intelligence community to anticipate the developments and advise their significance. Some of the new systems were hardly secret, with development of the Sarmat, for example, known to western governments for a number of years.

There will no doubt be a blame game in Washington over the inability to learn of Russia’s arms programs, but the questions that probably will not be asked relate to the intelligence agencies themselves and their capabilities, or lack thereof. It is no secret that organizations like the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have seen their basic missions change since 2001. An organization that used to pride itself on its ability to conduct classic espionage operations involving recruiting and running spies suddenly heard from policymakers that those skills were no longer in demand. Many officers who were made redundant or forced to retire were precisely those individuals who had cut their teeth on running operations directed against the old Soviet Union. They had the language and cultural skills necessary to collect information on Russia. With their departure, those capabilities also largely vanished.

Instead of spying, American intelligence agencies working mostly against what was broadly described as “terrorism,” used technology to locate potential targets and kill them. The CIA’s Clandestine Services, once the haven of its spies, became under President Barack Obama, a largely paramilitary operation focused on military solutions rather than espionage. This process was accelerated under Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan, who worked assiduously to reduce the influence of the former spies within the Agency. Brennan reportedly had once wanted to become a spy but was kicked out of the training program as “unsuitable.”

So, has America learned that its intelligence agencies are doing all the wrong things and that the national defense strategy is unsustainable because the Russian-American relationship is now on a new footing? Possibly, but it is perhaps more likely that Washington will avoid asking the hard questions.

March 8, 2018 Posted by | Aletho News | , , | Leave a comment

‘Progressive’ Journalists Jump the Shark on Russiagate

By Ray McGovern | Consortium News | March 7, 2018

Russiagate’s sensationalist media coverage

Jane Mayer of The New Yorker and Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks are the latest progressives to jump on the anti-Trump, pro-Russiagate bandwagon. They have made it crystal clear that, in Mayer’s words, they are not going to let Republicans, or anyone else, “take down the whole intelligence community,” by God.

Odd? Nothing is too odd when it comes to spinning and dyeing the yarn of Russiagate; especially now that some strands are unraveling from the thin material of the “Steele dossier.”

Before the 2016 election, British ex-spy Christopher Steele was contracted (through a couple of cutouts) by the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee to dig up dirt on candidate Donald Trump. They paid him $168,000. They should ask for their money back.

Mayer and Uygur have now joined with other Trump-despisers and new “progressive” fans of the FBI and CIA – among them Amy Goodman and her go-to, lost-in-the-trees journalist, Marcy Wheeler of Emptywheel.net. All of them (well, maybe not Cenk) are staying up nights with needle and thread trying to sew a silk purse out of the sow’s-ear dossier of Steele allegations and then dye it red for danger.

Monday brought a new low, with a truly extraordinary one-two punch by Mayer and Uygur.

A Damning Picture?

Mayer does her part in a New Yorker article, in which she – intentionally or not – cannot seem to see the forest for the trees.

In her article, Mayer explains up front that the Steele dossier “painted a damning picture of collusion between Trump and Russia,” and then goes on to portray him as a paragon of virtue with praise that is fulsome, in the full meaning of that word. For example, a friend of Steele told Mayer that regarding Steele, “Fairness, integrity, and truth, for him, trump any ideology.”

Now, if one refuses to accept this portrait on faith, then you are what Mayer describes as a “Trump defender.” According to Mayer, Trump defenders argue that Steele is “a dishonest Clinton apparatchik who had collaborated with American intelligence and law enforcement officials to fabricate false charges against Trump and his associates, in a dastardly (sic) attempt to nullify the 2016 election. According to this story line, it was not the President who needed to be investigated, but the investigators themselves.”

Can you imagine!

I could not help but think that Mayer wrote her piece some months ago and that she and her editors might have missed more recent documentary evidence that gives considerable support to that “dastardly” story line. But seriously, it should be possible to suspect Steele of misfeasance or malfeasance – or simply telling his contractors what he knows they want to hear – without being labeled a “Trump supporter.” I, for example, am no Trump supporter. I am, however, a former intelligence officer and I have long since concluded that what Steele served up is garbage.

Character References

Mayer reports that Richard Dearlove, head of MI6 from 1999 to 2004, described Steele as “superb.” Personally, I would shun any “recommendation” from that charlatan. Are memories so short? Dearlove was the intelligence chief who briefed Prime Minister Tony Blair on July 23, 2002 after a quick trip to Washington. The official minutes of that meeting were leaked to the London Times and published on May 1, 2005.

Dearlove explained to Blair that President George W. Bush had decided to attack Iraq for regime change and that the war was to be “justified by the conjunction of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.” Dearlove added matter-of-factly, “The intelligence and facts are being fixed around the policy.”

Another character reference Mayer gives for Steele is former CIA Deputy Director John McLaughlin (from 2000 to 2004) who, with his boss George Tenet, did the fixing of intelligence to “justify” the war on Iraq. State Department intelligence director at the time, Carl Ford, told the authors of “Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War” that both McLaughlin and Tenet “should have been shot” for what they did.

And then there is CIA veteran spy John Sipher who, Mayer says, “ran the Agency’s Russia program before retiring, in 2014.” Sipher tells her he thinks the Steele dossier is “generally credible” in “saying what Russia might be up to.” Sipher may be a good case officer but he has shown himself to be something of a cipher on substance.

Worse still, he displays a distinct inclination toward the remarkable view of former National Intelligence Director James Clapper, who has said that Russians are “typically, almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever.” If Mayer wanted to find some ostensibly authoritative figure to endorse the kind of material in Steele’s dossier, she surely picked a good one in Sipher.

Mayer notes, “It’s too early to make a final judgment about how much of Steele’s dossier will be proved wrong, but a number of Steele’s major claims have been backed up by subsequent disclosures. She includes, as flat fact, his claim that the Kremlin and WikiLeaks were working together to release the DNC’s emails, but provides no evidence.

Major Holes

Mayer, however, should know better. There have been lots of holes in the accusation that the Russians hacked the DNC and gave the material to WikiLeaks to publish. Here’s one major gap we reported on Jan. 20, 2017: President Barack Obama told his last press conference on Jan. 18, that the U.S. intelligence community had no idea how the Democratic emails reached WikiLeaks.

Using lawyerly language, Obama admitted that “the conclusions of the intelligence community with respect to the Russian hacking were not conclusive as to whether WikiLeaks was witting or not in being the conduit through which we heard about the DNC e-mails that were leaked.”

It is necessary to carefully parse Obama’s words since he prides himself in his oratorical constructs. He offered a similarly designed comment at a Dec. 16, 2016 press conference when he said: “based on uniform intelligence assessments, the Russians were responsible for hacking the DNC. … the information was in the hands of WikiLeaks.”

Note the disconnect between the confidence about hacking and the stark declarative sentence about the information ending up at WikiLeaks. Obama does not bridge the gap because to do so would be a bald-faced lie, which some honest intelligence officer might call him on. So, he simply presented the two sides of the chasm – implies a connection – but leaves it to the listener to make the leap.

It was, of course, WikiLeaks that published the very damaging Democratic information, for example, on the DNC’s dirty tricks that marginalized Sen. Bernie Sanders and ensured that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would win the Democratic nomination. What remained to be demonstrated was that it was “the Russians” who gave those emails to WikiLeaks. And that is what the U.S. intelligence community could not honestly say.

Saying it now, without evidence, does not make it true.

Cenk Also in Sync

Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks at once picked up, big time, on the part of Mayer’s article that homes in on an “astonishing” report from Steele in late November 2016 quoting one “senior Russian official.” According to that official, “The Kremlin had intervened to block Trump’s initial choice for secretary of state, Mitt Romney.” Steele’s late November memo alleged that the Kremlin had asked Trump to appoint someone who would be prepared to lift Ukraine-related sanctions and cooperate on security issues like Syria.

Mayer commented, “As fantastical as the memo sounds, subsequent events could be said to support it.” Fantastical or not, Uygur decided to run with it. His amazing 12-minute video is titled: “New Steele Dossier: Putin PICKED Trump’s Secretary of State.” Uygur asks: “Who does Tillerson work for; and that also goes for the President.”

Return to Sanity

As an antidote to all the above, let me offer this cogent piece on the views of Joseph E. diGenova, who speaks out of his unique experience, including as Counsel to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (the Church Committee). The article is entitled: “The Politicization of the FBI.”

“Over the past year,” diGenova wrote, “facts have emerged that suggest there was a plot by high-ranking FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) officials in the Obama administration, acting under color of law, to exonerate Hillary Clinton of federal crimes and then, if she lost the election, to frame Donald Trump and his campaign for colluding with Russia to steal the presidency.”

He pointed out that nearly half of Americans, according to a CBS poll, believe that Mueller’s Trump-Russia collusion probe is “politically motivated.” And, he noted, 63 percent of polled voters in a Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll believe that the FBI withheld vital information from Congress about the Clinton and Russia collusion investigations.

This skepticism is entirely warranted, as diGenova explains, with the Russiagate probe being characterized by overreach from the beginning.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He served in Army and CIA intelligence analysis for 30 years and, after retiring, co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

March 7, 2018 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | , , , , , | Leave a comment

State Dept has $120mn war chest for Russia-bashing – and ex-envoy McFaul wants to spend it

RT | March 7, 2018

There is $120 million in funding for “countering Russian propaganda” stashed somewhere in the State Department. There are “Russia experts” willing to blame Russia for everything. The two are meant to be together.

The $120 million, of which Rex Tillerson’s diplomatic corps has failed to spend a cent, is funding for the Global Engagement Center – a task force originally meant to counter jihadist propaganda online. In the late days of the Obama administration, it was tasked with countering “Russian and Chinese propaganda” aimed against America’s democratic institutions. The State Department is yet to spend any of that money.

The State Department was granted $120 million to fight Russian meddling. It has spent $0.https://t.co/JT1Jmnd7po

— The New York Times (@nytimes) March 6, 2018

For people failing to read past the New York Times headline, the failure to spend these funds would appear to be a clear indicator that Tillerson and the rest if the Trump administration have no interest in doing anything against Russia. There are memes about it, and people crying “Treason!” on Twitter.

Those who do read the story will discover the small print. For instance, the Pentagon and the State Department have been wrangling for the first annual installment of $60 million for months, and have agreed on $40 million, which is not expected until April. The US military previously lead online counterpropaganda – a coordinated effort by several departments – because they also fought jihadists with more tangible means like drones. The inclusion of Russia and China put the diplomats in charge.

Also, this money is just a tiny portion of what the US government spends on its own soft power, including promoting narratives that counter those favored by Moscow. The Broadcasting Board of Governors, the parent body for outlets like Radio Free Europe and Voice of America, requested over $685 million of taxpayers’ money for FY2018. The Trump administration also wants to allocate $527 million this year for the State Department’s assistance to Europe, which is meant to strengthen “European resilience to Russian meddling,” according to the NYT. This is significantly lower than the $1.3 billion last year, set aside under the Obama administration, but can hardly be considered petty cash.

Still, there is that pile of anti-Russian money that the State Department has not spent, and there are always people who would offer their services in spending Uncle Sam’s millions. One former diplomat has already come up with a public offer.

Is the @StateDept wants to contract out its assignment to spend $120 million to combat Russian propaganda, Im sure I could put together a great team ! (& I speak Russian!)

— Michael McFaul (@McFaul) March 7, 2018

“Is [sic] the @StateDept wants to contract out its assignment to spend $120 million to combat Russian propaganda, I’m sure I could put together a great team! (& I speak Russian!)” tweeted Michael McFaul, the former ambassador to Russia under the Obama administration.

McFaul’s tenure in Moscow was somewhat awkward. He infamously invited Russian opposition leaders to the embassy in one of his first moves, more or less ensuring their reputation as American stooges in the eyes of many Russians. After returning to academia, he wrote a book on Russia, available from Amazon.com on May 8.

An avid social network poster, he recently pledged to never share anything in Russian – after he showed his audience a video clip of mass protests with a caption in Russian inciting people to kill security officials. Even worse, the video was shot in Bahrain and erroneously claimed by the original poster to be from the latest mass protest in Iran.

Fair point Dmitry ! Ill change that on my CV. I haven’t used Russian for over four years now, since I left in 2/14. Getting a little rusty. https://t.co/FKutqSWquU

— Michael McFaul (@McFaul) March 7, 2018

Good question. I just did a live tv interview in Russian. But Im sure listeners would poke holes in all of my grammatical mistakes (forgetting that hardly any Americans show respect for Russian language/history/culture & dare do interviews in Russian.) https://t.co/jTlalo2E9I

— Michael McFaul (@McFaul) March 7, 2018

Of course, there are many other people in the West who wrote books about Russia and are willing to offer their expert opinions on why it poses such a danger to the US, and how it can be stopped. So there will be quite a competition for this $120 million stash, if State Department chooses to spend it.

March 7, 2018 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Contradictions In Seth Rich Murder Continue To Challenge Hacking Narrative

By Tyler Durden – Zero Hedge – 03/02/2018

As rumors swirl that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is preparing a case against Russians who are alleged to have hacked Democrats during the 2016 election – a conclusion based solely on the analysis of cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike, a Friday op-ed in the Washington Times by retired U.S. Navy admiral James A. Lyons, Jr. asks a simple, yet monumentally significant question: Why haven’t Congressional Investigators or Special Counsel Robert Mueller addressed the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich – who multiple people have claimed was Wikileaks’ source of emails leaked during the 2016 U.S. presidential election?

Mueller has been incredibly thorough in his ongoing investigations – however he won’t even respond to Kim Dotcom, the New Zealand entrepreneur who clearly knew about the hacked emails long before they were released, claims that Seth Rich obtained them with a memory stick, and has offered to provide proof to the Special Counsel investigation.

On May 18, 2017, Dotcom proposed that if Congress includes the Seth Rich investigation in their Russia probe, he would provide written testimony with evidence that Seth Rich was WikiLeaks’ source.

In addition to several odd facts surrounding Rich’s still unsolved murder – which officials have deemed a “botched robbery,” forensic technical evidence has emerged which contradicts the Crowdstrike report. The Irvine, CA company partially funded by Google, was the only entity allowed to analyze the DNC servers in relation to claims of election hacking:

Notably, Crowdstrike has been considered by many to be discredited over their revision and retraction of a report over Russian hacking of Ukrainian military equipment – a report which the government of Ukraine said was fake news.

In connection with the emergence in some media reports which stated that the alleged “80% howitzer D-30 Armed Forces of Ukraine removed through scrapping Russian Ukrainian hackers software gunners,” Land Forces Command of the Armed Forces of Ukraine informs that the said information is incorrect.

Ministry of Defence of Ukraine asks journalists to publish only verified information received from the competent official sources. Spreading false information leads to increased social tension in society and undermines public confidence in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. –mil.gov.ua (translated) (1.6.2017)

In fact, several respected journalists have cast serious doubt on CrowdStrike’s report on the DNC servers:

Pay attention, because Mueller is likely to use the Crowdstrike report to support the rumored upcoming charges against Russian hackers.

Also notable is that Crowdstrike founder and anti-Putin Russian expat Dimitri Alperovitch sits on the Atlantic Council – which is funded by the US State Department, NATO, Latvia, Lithuania, and Ukranian Oligarch Victor Pinchuk. Who else is on the Atlantic Council? Evelyn Farkas – who slipped up during an MSNBC interview with Mika Brzezinski and disclosed that the Obama administration had been spying on the Trump campaign:

The Trump folks, if they found out how we knew what we knew about the Trump staff dealing with Russians, that they would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we would not longer have access to that intelligence. –Evelyn Farkas

Odd facts surrounding the murder of Seth Rich

“The facts that we know of in the murder of the DNC staffer, Seth Rich, was that he was gunned down blocks from his home on July 10, 2016. Washington Metro police detectives claim that Mr. Rich was a robbery victim, which is strange since after being shot twice in the back, he was still wearing a $2,000 gold necklace and watch. He still had his wallet, key and phone. Clearly, he was not a victim of robbery,” writes Lyons.

Another unexplained fact muddying the Rich case is that of a 40 caliber Glock 22 handgun stolen from an FBI agent’s car the same day Rich was murdered. D.C. Metro police said that the theft occurred between 5 and 7 a.m., while the FBI said two weeks later that the theft had occurred between Midnight and 2 a.m. – fueling speculation that the FBI gun was used in Rich’s murder.

Furthermore, two men working with the Rich family – private investigator and former D.C. Police detective Rod Wheeler and family acquaintance Ed Butowsky, have previously stated that Rich had contacts with WikiLeaks before his death.

“According to Ed Butowsky, an acquaintance of the family, in his discussions with Joel and Mary Rich, they confirmed that their son transmitted the DNC emails to Wikileaks,” writes Lyons.

While Wheeler initially told TV station Fox5 that proof of Rich’s contact with WikiLeaks lies on the murdered IT staffer’s laptop, he later walked the claim back – though he maintained that there was “some communication between Seth Rich and WikiLeaks.”

Wheeler also claimed in recently leaked audio that Seth Rich’s brother, Aaron – a Northrup Grumman employee, blocked him from looking at Seth’s computer and stonewalled his investigation.

Wheeler said that brother Aaron Rich tried to block Wheeler from looking at Seth’s computer, even though there could be evidence on it. “He said no, he said I have his computer, meaning him,” Wheeler said. “I said, well can I look at it?…He said, what are you looking for? I said anything that could indicate if Seth was having problems with someone. He said no, I already checked it. Don’t worry about it.”

Aaron also blocked Wheeler from finding out about who was at a party Seth attended the night of the murder.

“All I want you to do is work on the botched robbery theory and that’s it,” Aaron told Wheeler –Big League Politics

Perhaps the most stunning audio evidence, however, comes from leaked audio of a recorded conversation between Ed Butowsky and Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who told him of a “purported FBI report establishing that Seth Rich sent emails to WikiLeaks.”

As transcribed and exclusively reported on by journalist Cassandra Fairbanks last year:

What the report says is that some time in late Spring… he makes contact with WikiLeaks, that’s in his computer,” he says. “Anyway, they found what he had done is that he had submitted a series of documents — of emails, of juicy emails, from the DNC.”

Hersh explains that it was unclear how the negotiations went, but that WikiLeaks did obtain access to a password protected DropBox where Rich had put the files.

All I know is that he offered a sample, an extensive sample, I’m sure dozens of emails, and said ‘I want money.’ Later, WikiLeaks did get the password, he had a DropBox, a protected DropBox,” he said. They got access to the DropBox.”

Hersh also states that Rich had concerns about something happening to him, and had

“The word was passed, according to the NSA report, he also shared this DropBox with a couple of friends, so that ‘if anything happens to me it’s not going to solve your problems,’” he added. “WikiLeaks got access before he was killed.”

Brennan and Russian disinformation

Hersh also told Butowsky that the DNC made up the Russian hacking story as a disinformation campaign – directly pointing a finger at former CIA director (and now MSNBC/NBC contributor) John Brennan as the architect.

I have a narrative of how that whole f*cking thing began. It’s a Brennan operation, it was an American disinformation, and the fu*kin’ President, at one point, they even started telling the press – they were backfeeding the Press, the head of the NSA was going and telling the press, fu*king c*cksucker Rogers, was telling the press that we even know who in the Russian military intelligence service leaked it.

Listen to Seymour Hersh leaked audio: 

(full transcription here and extended audio of the Hersh conversation here

Hersh denied that he told Butowsky anything before the leaked audio emerged, telling NPR “I hear gossip… [Butowsky] took two and two and made 45 out of it.

Techincal Evidence

As we mentioned last week, Dotcom’s assertion is backed up by an analysis done last year by a researcher who goes by the name Forensicator, who determined that the DNC files were copied at 22.6 MB/s – a speed virtually impossible to achieve from halfway around the world, much less over a local network – yet a speed typical of file transfers to a memory stick.

The big hint

Last but not least, let’s not forget that Julian Assange heavily implied Seth Rich was a source:

Given that a) the Russian hacking narrative hinges on Crowdstrikes’s questionable reporting, and b) a mountain of evidence pointing to Seth Rich as the source of the leaked emails – it stands to reason that Congressional investigators and Special Counsel Robert Mueller should at minimum explore these leads.

As retired U.S. Navy admiral James A. Lyons, Jr. asks: why aren’t they?

March 3, 2018 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | Leave a comment

How ‘Operation Merlin’ Poisoned U.S. Intelligence on Iran

Former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling, left, leaves the Alexandria Federal Courthouse on Jan. 26, 2016 with his wife Holly, center, and attorney Barry Pollack. Photo: Kevin Wolf/AP
By Gareth Porter | Consortium News | March 3, 2018

Jeffrey Sterling, the case officer for the CIA’s covert “Operation Merlin,” who was convicted in May 2015 for allegedly revealing details of that operation to James Risen of the New York Times, was released from prison in January after serving more than two years of a 42-month sentence. He had been tried and convicted on the premise that the revelation of the operation had harmed U.S. security.

The entire case against him assumed a solid intelligence case that Iran had indeed been working on a nuclear weapon that justified that covert operation.

But the accumulated evidence shows that the intelligence not only did not support the need for Operation Merlin, but that the existence of the CIA’s planned covert operation itself had a profound distorting impact on intelligence assessment of the issue. The very first U.S. national intelligence estimate on the subject in 2001 that Iran had a nuclear weapons program was the result of a heavy-handed intervention by Deputy Director for Operations James L. Pavitt that was arguably more serious than the efforts by Vice-President Dick Cheney to influence the CIA’s 2002 estimate on WMD in Iraq.

The full story of the interaction between the CIA operation and intelligence analysis, shows, moreover, that Pavitt had previously fabricated an alarmist intelligence analysis for the Clinton White House on Iran’s nuclear program in late 1999 in order to get Clinton’s approval for Operation Merlin.

Pavitt Plans Operation Merlin

The story of Operation Merlin and the suppression of crucial intelligence on Iran’s nuclear intentions cannot be understood apart from the close friendship between Pavitt and CIA Director George Tenet. Pavitt’s rise in the Operations Directorate had been so closely linked to his friendship with Tenet that the day after Tenet announced his retirement from the CIA on June 3, 2004, Pavitt announced his own retirement.

Soon after he was assigned to the CIA’s Non-Proliferation Center (NPC) in 1993 Pavitt got the idea of creating a new component within the Directorate of Operations to work solely on proliferation, as former CIA officials recounted for Valerie Plame Wilson’s memoir, Fair Game. Pavitt proposed that the new proliferation division would have the authority not only to collect intelligence but also to carry out covert operations related to proliferation, using its own clandestine case officers working under non-official cover.

Immediately after Tenet was named Deputy Director of the CIA in 1995, Pavitt got the new organization within the operations directorate called the Counter-Proliferation Division, or CPD. Pavitt immediately began the planning for a major operation targeting Iran. According to a CIA cable declassified for the Sterling trial, as early as March 1996 CPD’s “Office of Special Projects” had already devised a scheme to convey to the Iranians a copy of the Russian TBA-486 “fireset” – a system for multiple simultaneous high explosive detonations to set off a nuclear explosion. The trick was that it had built-in flaws that would make it unworkable.

A January 1997 declassified cable described a plan for using a Russian émigré’ former Soviet nuclear weapons engineer recruited in 1996 to gain “operational access” to an Iranian “target.” The cable suggested that it would be for the purpose of intelligence on the Iranian nuclear program, in the light of the fact that the agency had not issued a finding that Iran was working on nuclear weapons.

But in mid-March 1997 the language used by CPD to describe its proposed covert operation suddenly changed. Another declassified CPD cable from May 1997 said the ultimate goal was “to plant this substantial piece of deception information on the Iranian nuclear weapons program.” That shift in language apparently reflected Tenet’s realization that the CIA would need to justify the proposed covert operation to the White House, as required by legislation.

With his ambitious plan for a covert operation against Iran in his pocket, Pavitt was promoted to Associate Deputy Director of Operations in July 1997. On February 2, 1998, CPD announced to other CIA offices, according to the declassified cable, that a technical team from one of the national laboratories had finished building the detonation device that would include “multiple nested flaws,” including a “final fatal flaw” ensuring “that it will not detonate a nuclear weapon.”

An official statement from the national lab certifying that fact was a legal requirement for the CIA to obtain the official Presidential “finding” for any covert operation required by legislation passed in the wake of the Iran-Contra affair.

Pavitt obtained the letter from the national laboratory in mid-1999 a few weeks after it was announced he would be named Deputy Director of the CIA for Operations.

But that left a final political obstacle to a presidential finding: the official position of the CIA’ s Intelligence Directorate remained that Iran did not have a nuclear weapons program. The language of the CIA’s report to Congress for the first half of 1999, which was delivered to Congress in early 2000, contained formulations that showed signs of having been negotiated between those who believed Iran just have a nuclear weapons program and those who did not.

The report referred to nuclear-related projects that “will help Iran augment its nuclear technology infrastructure, which in turn would be useful in supporting nuclear weapons research and development.” The shift from “will” to “would” clearly suggested that nuclear weapons work was not yet an established fact.

A second sentence said, “expertise and technology gained, along with the commercial channels and contacts established-even from cooperation that appears strictly civilian in nature-could be used to advance Iran’s nuclear weapons research and developmental program.” That seemed to hint that maybe Iran already had such a nuclear weapons program.

That was not sufficient for Tenet and Pavitt to justify a covert nuclear weapons program involving handing over a fake nuclear detonation device. So the dynamic duo came up with another way around that obstacle. A new intelligence assessment, reported in a front page article by James Risen and Judith Miller in the New York Times on January 17, 2000, said the CIA could no longer rule out the possibility that Iran now had the capability to build a bomb – or even that it may have actually succeeded in building one.

Risen and Miller reported that Tenet had begun briefings for Clinton administration officials on the new CIA assessment in December 1999 shortly after the document was completed, citing “several U.S. officials” familiar with it. The Tenet briefings made no mention of any evidence of a bomb-making program, according to the sources cited by the Times. It was based instead on the alleged inability of U.S. intelligence to track adequately Iran’s acquisition of nuclear technology and materials from the black market.

But the new assessment had evidently not come from the Intelligence Directorate. John McLaughlin, then Deputy Director for Intelligence, said in e-mail response to a query that he did not recall the assessment. And when this writer asked him whether it was possible that he would not remember or would not have known about an intelligence assessment on such a high profile issue, McLaughlin did not respond. Pavitt and Tenet had obviously gone outside the normal procedure for an intelligence assessment in order to get around the problem of lack of support for their thesis from the analysts.

A declassified CIA cable dated November 18, 1999 instructed the Russian émigré to prepare for a possible trip to Vienna in early 2000, indicating that Tenet hoped to get the finding within a few weeks. Clinton apparently did give the necessary finding in early 2000; in the first days of March 2000 the Russian émigré dropped the falsified fireset plans into the mail chute of the Iranian mission to the United Nations in Vienna.

Pavitt Suppresses Unwelcome Iran Nuclear Intelligence

Pavitt’s CPD was also managing a group of covert operatives who recruited spies to provide information on weapons of mass destruction in Iran and Iraq. CPD not only controlled the targeting of the operatives working on those accounts but the distribution of their reports. CPD’s dual role thus represented a serious conflict of interest, because the CPD had a vested interest in an intelligence estimate that showed Iran had an active nuclear weapons program, and it could prevent intelligence analysts from getting information that conflicted with that interest.

That is exactly what happened in 2001. One especially valuable CPD operative, who was fluent in both Farsi and Arabic, had begun recruiting agents to provide intelligence on both Iran and Iraq since 1995. His talents had been recognized by the CPD and by higher levels of the Operations Directorate: by 2001 he had been promised an intelligence medal and a promotion to GS14 – the second highest grade level in the civil service.

But that same year the operative reported very important intelligence on the Iran nuclear issue that would have caused serious problems for Pavitt and CPD and led ultimately to his being taken out of the field and being fired.

In a November 2005 court filing in a lawsuit against Pavitt, the unnamed head of CPD and then CIA Director Porter Goss, the operative, identified only as “Doe” in court records, said that one of his most highly valued “human assets” – the CIA term for recruited spies – had given him very important intelligence in 2001. That information was the subject of three crucial lines of the key paragraph in the operative’s complaint that were redacted at the demand of the CIA. For years “Doe” sought to declassify the language of that had been redacted, but the CIA had fought it.

It was assumed in press accounts at the time that the redacted lines were related to Iraq. But the lawyer who handled the lawsuit for “Doe,” Roy Krieger, revealed to this writer in interviews that the redacted lines revealed that the CIA “human asset” in question was an Iranian, and that he had told “Doe” that the Iranian government had no intention of “weaponizing” the uranium that it was planning to enrich.

It was the first intelligence from a “highly-valued” U.S. spy – one who was known to be in a position to know he claimed to know – on Iran’s intentions regarding nuclear weapons to become available to the U.S. intelligence community. “Doe” reported what the spy had said to his supervisor at CPD, according to the court filing, and the supervisor immediately met with Pavitt and the head of CPD. After that meeting the CPD supervisor ordered “Doe” not to prepare any written report on the matter and assured him that Pavitt and the head of the CPD would personally brief President Bush on the intelligence.

But “Doe” soon learned from his own contacts at CIA headquarters that no such briefing ever took place. And “Doe” was soon instructed to terminate his relationship with the asset. After another incident involving intelligence he had reported on WMD in Iraq that had also conflicted with the line desired by the Bush administration, CIA management took “Doe” out of the field, put him in a headquarters job and denied him the intelligence medal and promotion to GS-14 that he had been promised, according to his court filing. The CIA fired “Doe” without specifying a reason in 2005.

Pavitt did not respond to requests for an interview for this story both at the Scowcroft Group and, after he retired, at his home in McLean, Virginia.

The intervention by Pavitt to prevent the intelligence from Doe’s Iranian asset from circulating within the U.S. government came as the intelligence community was working on the 2001 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on the Iranian nuclear program. That NIE concluded that Iran was working on a nuclear weapon, but the finding was far from being clear-cut. Paul Pillar, the CIA’s National Intelligence Officer for the Middle East and North Africa, who was involved in the 2001 NIE, recalled that the intelligence community had no direct evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program. “We’re talking about things that are a matter of inference, not direct evidence,” Pillar said in an interview with this writer.

Furthermore he recalls that there was a deep divide in the intelligence community between the technical analysts, who tended to believe that evidence of uranium enrichment was evidence of a weapons program, and the Iran specialists, including Pillar himself, who believed Iran had adopted a “hedging strategy” and had made no decision in favor or a nuclear weapon. The technical analysts at the CIA’s Weapons Intelligence Non-Proliferation and Arms Control (WINPAC), were given the advantage of writing the first draft not only on Iranian technical capabilities but on Iranian intentions – a subject on which it had no real expertise – as well, according to Pillar.

The introduction of the intelligence from a highly credible Iranian intelligence asset indicating no intention to convert its enriched uranium into nuclear weapons would arguably have changed the dynamic of the estimate dramatically. It would have meant that one side could cite hard intelligence from a valued source in support of its position, while the other side could cite only their own predisposition.

Pillar confirmed that no such intelligence report was made available to the analysts for the 2001 NIE. He noted just how rarely the kind of intelligence that had been obtained by “Doe” was available for an intelligence estimate. “Analysts deal with a range of stuff,” he said, “from a tidbit from technical intelligence to the goldmine well-placed source with an absolutely credible account,“ but the latter kind of intelligence “almost never comes up.”

After reading this account of the intelligence obtained by the CPD operative, Pillar said he is not in a position to judge the value of the intelligence from the Iranian asset, but that the information from the CPD Iranian asset “should have been considered by the NIE team in conjunction with other sources of information.”

That lead to a series of estimates that assumed Iran had a nuclear weapons program.

In 2004, a large cache of purported Iranian documents showing alleged Iranian research related to nuclear weapons was turned over to German intelligence, which the Bush administration claimed came from the laptop of an Iranian scientist or engineer. But former senior German Foreign Official Karsten Voigt later revealed to this writer that the whole story was a fabrication, because the documents had been given those documents by the Mujahedin-E Khalq, the Iranian opposition group that was known to have publicized anti-Iran information fed to it by Israel’s Mossad.

Those documents led directly to another CIA estimate in 2005 asserting the existence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program, which in turn paved the way for all the subsequent estimates – all of which were adopted despite the absence of new evidence of such a program. The CIA swallowed the ruse repeatedly, because it had already been manipulated by Pavitt.

Operation Merlin is the perfect example of powerful bureaucratic interests running amok and creating the intelligence necessary to justify their operations. The net result is that Jeffrey Sterling was unjustly imprisoned and that the United States has gone down a path of Iran policy that poses serious – and unnecessary – threats to American security.

Gareth Porter is an independent journalist and winner of the 2012 Gellhorn Prize for journalism. He is the author of numerous books, including Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare (Just World Books, 2014).

March 3, 2018 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Weaponization of Social Media

corbettreport | March 1, 2018

Now openly admitted, governments and militaries around the world employ armies of keyboard warriors to spread propaganda and disrupt their online opposition. Their goal? To shape public discourse around global events in a way favourable to their standing military and geopolitical objectives. Their method? The Weaponization of Social Media. This is The Corbett Report.

TRANSCRIPT AND MP3: https://www.corbettreport.com/?p=25740

March 2, 2018 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular, Video | | Leave a comment

Did the CIA Sabotage Russia at the Olympics?

By Rick Sterling | American Herald Tribune | February 26, 2018

There is something very fishy about the Anti Doping Rule Violations (ADRVs) pinned on the Russian curler and Russian bobsledder during the final week of the Peyongchang Winter Olympics.

It makes no logical sense that an athlete would do a one-time consumption of a chemical that is of no value in circumstances where it is almost certain to be detected with huge negative consequences.

That is precisely the situation. The Russian Mixed Curling bronze medal winner, Alexander Krushelnitsky, had to give up his medal, plus that of his partner wife, because traces of meldonium were found in his urine sample. He had previously tested clean. Meldonium is a medication which helps keep the heart healthy by increasing blood flow. That would be of no benefit in a sport like curling which requires accuracy, strategy and focus but is not taxing physically. The “sweeping” to help guide the rock down the ice lasts only 20 seconds or less. International curlers were astounded at the news and bemused at the idea of performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) for curling. The skip of the Danish curling team said ”I think most people will laugh and ask, ‘what could you possibly need doping for?”

Krushelnitsky strongly denies taking banned drugs. “I am categorically opposed to doping …. never, at any time that I have been involved in sport, have I ever used prohibited substances”.

Similar curious circumstances apply in the second ADRV. Russian bobsledder Nadezhda Sergeeva had numerous negative (clean) tests before she was tested positive for banned trimetazidine. Bobsledding is another sport which requires physical and mental skill but not physical endurance.

In the February 25 IOC meeting to close the Pyeongchang Winter Games, the head of the IOC Implementation Group, Nicole Hoevertz, said the Russian athletes had been tested “more than any other athletes”. She and her group were convinced that the 168 member Russian athletic team was clean. At about 82:00 in the video, she says the two Russian doping violations were “very peculiar.” She introduced the Director of the IOC Medical and Scientific Commission, Dr. Bludgett, to provide more detail. He suggested that meldonium would not be of benefit in curling. He then went further and suggested the ADRV regarding trimetazidine may be in error. He said trimetazidine “is a substance where there is a parent compound which is a common headache migraine treatment available particularly in China and Japan and if that is found then it is not considered an ADRV. And if there is a very low level, as there was in this case, that is a possibility.”

Sergeeva denies ever taking banned drugs and even went on social media with a T-shirt declaring her commitment to clean sport.

In summary, it seems highly unlikely that two different Russian athletes would intentionally take medications that have no benefit but which are almost guaranteed to be detected resulting in huge harm to them and their team.

Who Benefits?

Another possibility is that meldonium or trimetazidine powder was surreptitiously put in the food of the athletes. This one time consumption would cause a positive test.

In fact there are forces on the international scene who are pleased that Russia has been battling defamation and charges of “state sponsored doping” for the past two years. They want the current denigration and punishments of Russia to continue, perhaps influencing Russia’s upcoming national election and undermining Russia’s hosting of the Football World Cup this summer.

One such group is the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The CIA has a long history of big and small criminal deeds. Presumably it would not be difficult for them to infiltrate Olympic facilities or bribe a corrupt individual to put traces of meldonium or another powder in someone’s food or drink.

Those who quickly dismiss this possibility probably also thought that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in 2002. That was a false claim supported by evidence fabricated by the CIA.

It is well documented the CIA carries out murders, coups and major sabotage. The CIA has documented some of their methods in “The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception”. They don’t just carry out assassinations and coups. In the book “In Search of Enemies”, former CIA officer John Stockwell documented how the CIA created a false story about Cuban soldiers raping Angolan women to defame Cuba.

Corrupt police forces sometimes plant evidence on a suspect they wish to convict. It would be essentially the same thing to get a Russian athlete to ingest spiked food or beverage. The CIA has motive and expressed intent:

* In contrast with Russian leaders who call the US a “partner”, US officials increasingly call Russia an “adversary”. The latest US National Security Strategy explicitly says they intend to respond to Russia as an adversary: “The United States will respond to the growing political, economic and military competitions we face around the world. China and Russia challenge American power, influence, and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity.”

* Despite the lack of clear evidence, there is widespread belief that Russia “meddled” in the US election. The anti-Russia sentiment has been fanned into the exaggerated claim that the unproven Russian action was “an act of war, an act of hybrid warfare”.

* Neoconservative forces openly talk about “punishing” Russia. The former Deputy Director of the CIA, Michael Morrell, said “We need to make the Russians pay a price”. He confirmed on public television that means killing Russians (and Iranians) in Syria. This is the 33 year veteran CIA leader who publicly campaigned for Hillary Clinton.

Did the CIA plant the doping evidence? We don’t know for certain but it should not be dismissed out of hand. The CIA has the means, opportunity and above all the motive to falsely implicate Russians in new doping cases with the goal of preventing Russia from getting beyond the international sporting sanctions and punishments.  They have done vastly more deceitful, manipulative, and outrageous things than this.

Media Bias

Unfortunately, western media will not investigate this possibility. Western media cannot even accurately report on events like the IOC meeting yesterday. The fact that the head of the IOC Implementation Group warmly praised the Russian participation at the Pyeongchang Olympics is not mentioned in western media. The fact that Dr. Bludgett raised questions about the accuracy of the ADRVs against Russia is not mentioned in reports from NY Times, the UK Guardian or Inside the Games. Instead, the writer at Inside the Games once again exaggerated the voice of critics of Russia as he downplayed the voices of international athletes who want to put the doping scandal behind and move forward.

Western media have reported deceptively that the Russian athletes have “admitted” to the violations. In fact, both Russian athletes strongly deny taking banned drugs.

Western media bias is also shown in the focus on alleged Russian doping and minimization or ignoring of other possible violations. For example the story about the Norwegian cross-country ski team and their use of banned asthmatic medications. They get around the restrictions by having their doctor claim that most of their athletes are asthmatic. This situation is a result of the inconsistent rules and regulations. A Therapeutic Use Exemption (TUE) can be given to any athlete designated by a doctor and in secrecy. They are not required to publicly disclose this, giving incentive to corruption and misuse.

Richard McLaren’s Bias

The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has also been biased. Over one year ago, their investigator Richard McLaren claimed “over one thousand Russian athletes benefited” from the alleged Russian conspiracy to cheat the ant-doping system. McLaren said the proof would be provided to the various sport federations. In September 2017 it was revealed that charges had been filed against 96 athletes. Of these, WADA cleared 95 athletes of wrongdoing; only one athlete was proven to be in violation. More recently, the Court of Arbitration in Sport completely overturned the bans on 28 Russian athletes. In summary, it appears that McLaren’s accusation about “over one thousand athletes benefiting” was a huge exaggeration or fabrication.

Where Do Things Go From Here?

The IOC Executive Board has indicated they intend to lift the suspension of the Russian Olympic Committee if no more “anti-doping rule violations” are found in the last batch of athlete samples from the Pyeongchang Olympics. The results are expected in a few days.

Another ADRV may appear. If so, that will greatly complicate the effort to reintegrate Russian athletics. Even if the final tests are all clean, those who oppose Russia will continue trying to delay or prevent the full integration of Russia within the world sporting Community.

The former Moscow Laboratory Director Grigory Rodchenkov is the primary weapon in the campaign accusing Russia of “state sponsored doping”. “Icarus” is a movie about him which has received huge funding and promotion. It is nominated for an an Oscar Academy award. This will serve the campaign well.

The Russian have been accused of trying to murder Rodchenkov. But if he suddenly dies one day, it is more likely to be by the CIA. At this point, Rodchenkov has done all the damage he can to Russian sports. The only thing he could possibly do is to recant or fall apart. His handlers have prevented him from appearing before the various committees looking into the accusations. At this point, Rodchenkov could be more valuable dead than alive. His death would be a powerful weapon to disrupt the normalization of relations with Russia.

In conclusion, going back to the Pyeongchang Olympics, there should be caution before assuming the guilt of the Russian athletes who received ADRVs. It makes no sense that two Russian athletes would take useless medications knowing they will be tested and found out.

The doping incident serves the interests of those in the West who seek more not less conflict and seek to weaken Russia through “hybrid” warfare. It is possible the CIA has a hand in the latest incidents, just as they have a hand in Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov. They have the means, opportunity and motive. They have the experience and history.

If this is true, it’s another example of the dangerous descent in international relations. The Olympics movement has the goal of fostering peaceful relations. The sad truth is there are forces who want to prevent that. They prefer to demonize and divide in a quest for economic and geopolitical supremacy over “adversaries”. International sports is just another arena for them.

February 26, 2018 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , | Leave a comment