Making Russia ‘The Enemy’
By Robert Parry | Consortium News | December 15, 2016
The rising hysteria about Russia is best understood as fulfilling two needs for Official Washington: the Military Industrial Complex’s transitioning from the “war on terror” to a more lucrative “new cold war” – and blunting the threat that a President Trump poses to the neoconservative/liberal-interventionist foreign-policy establishment.
By hyping the Russian “threat,” the neocons and their liberal-hawk sidekicks, who include much of the mainstream U.S. news media, can guarantee bigger military budgets from Congress. The hype also sets in motion a blocking maneuver to impinge on any significant change in direction for U.S. foreign policy under Trump.
Some Democrats even hope to stop Trump from ascending to the White House by having the Central Intelligence Agency, in effect, lobby the electors in the Electoral College with scary tales about Russia trying to fix the election for Trump.
The electors meet on Dec. 19 when they will formally cast their votes, supposedly reflecting the judgments of each state’s voters, but conceivably individual electors could switch their ballots from Trump to Hillary Clinton or someone else.
On Thursday, liberal columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. joined the call for electors to flip, writing: “The question is whether Trump, Vladimir Putin and, perhaps, Clinton’s popular-vote advantage give you sufficient reason to blow up the system.”
That Democrats would want the CIA, which is forbidden to operate domestically in part because of its historic role in influencing elections in other countries, to play a similar role in the United States shows how desperate the Democratic Party has become.
And, even though The New York Times and other big news outlets are reporting as flat fact that Russia hacked the Democratic email accounts and gave the information to WikiLeaks, former British Ambassador Craig Murray, a close associate of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, told the London Daily Mail that he personally received the email data from a “disgusted” Democrat.
Murray said he flew from London to Washington for a clandestine handoff from one of the email sources in September, receiving the package in a wooded area near American University.
“Neither of [the leaks, from the Democratic National Committee or Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta] came from the Russians,” Murray said, adding: “the source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks.”
Murray said the insider felt “disgust at the corruption of the Clinton Foundation and the tilting of the primary election playing field against Bernie Sanders.” Murray added that his meeting was with an intermediary for the Democratic leaker, not the leaker directly.
If Murray’s story is true, it raises several alternative scenarios: that the U.S. intelligence community’s claims about a Russian hack are false; that Russians hacked the Democrats’ emails for their own intelligence gathering without giving the material to WikiLeaks; or that Murray was deceived about the identity of the original leaker.
But the uncertainty creates the possibility that the Democrats are using a dubious CIA assessment to reverse the outcome of an American presidential election, in effect, making the CIA party to a preemptive domestic “regime change.”
Delayed Autopsy
All of this maneuvering also is delaying the Democratic Party’s self-examination into why it lost so many white working-class voters in normally Democratic strongholds, such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Rather than national party leaders taking the blame for pre-selecting a very flawed candidate and ignoring all the warning signs about the public’s resistance to this establishment choice, Democrats have pointed fingers at almost everyone else – from FBI Director James Comey for briefly reviving Clinton’s email investigation, to third-party candidates who siphoned off votes, to the archaic Electoral College which negates the fact that Clinton did win the national popular vote – and now to the Russians.
While there may be some validity to these various complaints, the excessive frenzy that has surrounded the still-unproven claims that the Russian government surreptitiously tilted the election in Trump’s favor creates an especially dangerous dynamic.
On one level, it has led Democrats to support Orwellian/ McCarthyistic concepts, such as establishing “black lists” for Internet sites that question Official Washington’s “conventional wisdom” and thus are deemed purveyors of “Russian propaganda” or “fake news.”
On another level, it cements the Democratic Party as America’s preeminent “war party,” favoring an escalating New Cold War with Russia by ratcheting up economic sanctions against Moscow, and even seeking military challenges to Russia in conflict zones such as Syria and Ukraine.
One of the most dangerous aspects of a prospective Hillary Clinton presidency was that she would have appointed neocons, such as Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland and her husband, Project for the New American Century co-founder Robert Kagan, to high-level foreign policy positions.
Though that risk may have passed assuming Clinton’s Electoral College defeat on Monday, Democrats now are excitedly joining the bash-Russia movement, making it harder to envision how the party can transition back into its more recent role as the “peace party” (at least relative to the extremely hawkish Republicans).
Trading Places
The potential trading places of the two parties in that regard – with Trump favoring geopolitical détente and the Democrats beating the drums for more military confrontations – augurs poorly for the Democrats regaining their political footing anytime soon.
If Democratic leaders press ahead, in alliance with neoconservative Republicans, on demands for escalating the New Cold War with Russia, they could precipitate a party split between Democratic hawks and doves, a schism that likely would have occurred if Clinton had been elected but now may happen anyway, albeit without the benefit of the party holding the White House.
The first test of this emerging Democratic-neocon alliance may come over Trump’s choice for Secretary of State, Exxon-Mobil’s chief executive Rex Tillerson, who doesn’t exhibit the visceral hatred of Russian President Vladimir Putin that Democrats are encouraging.
As an international business executive, Tillerson appears to share Trump’s real-politik take on the world, the idea that doing business with rivals makes more sense than conspiring to force “regime change” after “regime change.”
Over the past several decades, the “regime change” approach has been embraced by both neocons and liberal interventionists and has been implemented by both Republican and Democratic administrations. Sometimes, it’s done through war and other times through “color revolutions” – always under the idealistic guise of “democracy promotion” or “protecting human rights.”
But the problem with this neo-imperialist strategy has been that it has failed miserably to improve the lives of the people living in the “regime-changed” countries. Instead, it has spread chaos across wide swaths of the globe and has now even destabilized Europe.
Yet, the solution, as envisioned by the neocons and their liberal-hawk understudies, is simply to force more “regime change” medicine down the throats of the world’s population. The new “great” idea is to destabilize nuclear-armed Russia by making its economy scream and by funding as many anti-Putin elements as possible to create the nucleus for a “color revolution” in Moscow.
To justify that risky scheme, there has been a broad expansion of anti-Russian propaganda now being funded with tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer money as well as being pushed by government officials giving off-the-record briefings to mainstream media outlets.
However, as with earlier “regime change” plans, the neocons and liberal hawks never think through the scenario to the end. They always assume that everything is going to work out fine and some well-dressed “opposition leader” who has been to their think-tank conferences will simply ascend to the top job.
Remember, in Iraq, it was going to be Ahmed Chalabi who was beloved in Official Washington but broadly rejected by the Iraqi people. In Libya, there has been a parade of U.S.-approved “unity” leaders who have failed to pull that country together.
In Ukraine, Nuland’s choice – Arseniy “Yats is the guy” Yatsenyuk – resigned amid broad public disapproval earlier this year after pushing through harsh cuts in social programs, even as the U.S.-backed regime officials in Kiev continued to plunder Ukraine’s treasury and misappropriate Western economic aid.
Nuclear-Armed Destabilization
But the notion of destabilizing nuclear-armed Russia is even more hare-brained than those other fiascos. The neocon/liberal-hawk assumption is that Russians – pushed to the brink of starvation by crippling Western sanctions – will overthrow Putin and install a new version of Boris Yeltsin who would then let U.S. financial advisers return with their neoliberal “shock therapy” of the 1990s and again exploit Russia’s vast resources.
Indeed, it was the Yeltsin era and its Western-beloved “shock therapy” that created the desperate conditions before the rise of Putin with his autocratic nationalism, which, for all its faults, has dramatically improved the lives of most Russians.
So, the more likely result from the neocon/liberal-hawk “regime change” plans for Moscow would be the emergence of someone even more nationalistic – and likely far less stable – than Putin, who is regarded even by his critics as cold and calculating.
The prospect of an extreme Russian nationalist getting his or her hands on the Kremlin’s nuclear codes should send chills up and down the spines of every American, indeed every human being on the planet. But it is the course that key national Democrats appear to be on with their increasingly hysterical comments about Russia.
The Democratic National Committee issued a statement on Wednesday accusing Trump of giving Russia “an early holiday gift that smells like a payoff. … It’s rather easy to connect the dots. Russia meddled in the U.S. election in order to benefit Trump and now he’s repaying Vladimir Putin by nominating Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson as secretary of state.”
Besides delaying a desperately needed autopsy on why Democrats did so badly in an election against the also-widely-disliked Donald Trump, the new blame-Russia gambit threatens to hurt the Democrats and their preferred policies in another way.
If Democrats vote in bloc against Tillerson or other Trump foreign-policy nominees – demanding that he appoint people acceptable to the neocons and the liberal hawks – Trump might well be pushed deeper into the arms of right-wing Republicans, giving them more on domestic issues to solidify their support on his foreign-policy goals.
That could end up redounding against the Democrats as they watch important social programs gutted in exchange for their own dubious Democratic alliance with the neocons.
Since the presidency of Bill Clinton, the Democrats have courted factions of the neocons, apparently thinking they are influential because they dominate many mainstream op-ed pages and Washington think tanks. In 1993, as a thank-you gift to the neocon editors of The New Republic for endorsing him, Clinton appointed neocon ideologue James Woolsey as head of the CIA, one of Clinton’s more disastrous personnel decisions.
But the truth appears to be that the neocons have much less influence across the U.S. electoral map than the Clintons think. Arguably, their pandering to a clique of Washington insiders who are viewed as warmongers by many peace-oriented Democrats may even represent a net negative when it comes to winning votes.
I’ve communicated with a number of traditional Democrats who didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton because they feared she would pursue a dangerous neocon foreign policy. Obviously, that’s not a scientific survey, but the anecdotal evidence suggests that Clinton’s neocon connections could have been another drag on her campaign.
Assessing Russia
I also undertook a limited personal test regarding whether Russia is the police state that U.S. propaganda depicts, a country yearning to break free from the harsh grip of Vladimir Putin (although he registers 80 or so percent approval in polls).
Red Square in Moscow, Dec. 6, 2016. (Photo by R. Parry)
During my trip last week to Europe, which included stops in Brussels and Copenhagen, I decided to take a side trip to Moscow, which I had never visited before. What I encountered was an impressive, surprisingly (to me at least) Westernized city with plenty of American and European franchises, including the ubiquitous McDonald’s and Starbucks. (Russians serve the Starbucks gingerbread latte with a small ginger cookie.)
Though senior Russian officials proved unwilling to meet with me, an American reporter, at this time of tensions, Russia had little appearance of a harshly repressive society. In my years covering U.S. policies in El Salvador in the 1980s and Haiti in the 1990s, I have experienced what police states look and feel like, where death squads dump bodies in the streets. That was not what I sensed in Moscow, just a modern city with people bustling about their business under early December snowfalls.
The police presence in Red Square near the Kremlin was not even as heavy-handed as it is near the government buildings of Washington. Instead, there was a pre-Christmas festive air to the brightly lit Red Square, featuring a large skating rink surrounded by small stands selling hot chocolate, toys, warm clothing and other goods.
Granted, my time and contact with Russians were limited – since I don’t speak Russian and most of them don’t speak English – but I was struck by the contrast between the grim images created by Western media and the Russia that I saw.
It reminded me of how President Ronald Reagan depicted Sandinista-ruled Nicaragua as a “totalitarian dungeon” with a militarized state ready to march on Texas, but what I found when I traveled to Managua was a third-world country still recovering from an earthquake and with a weak security structure despite the Contra war that Reagan had unleashed against Nicaragua.
In other words, “perception management” remains the guiding principle of how the U.S. government deals with the American people, scaring us with exaggerated tales of foreign threats and then manipulating our fears and our misperceptions.
As dangerous as that can be when we’re talking about Nicaragua or Iraq or Libya, the risks are exponentially higher regarding Russia. If the American people are stampeded into a New Cold War based more on myths than reality, the minimal cost could be the trillions of dollars diverted from domestic needs into the Military Industrial Complex. The far-greater cost could be some miscalculation by either side that could end life on the planet.
So, as the Democrats chart their future, they need to decide if they want to leapfrog the Republicans as America’s “war party” or whether they want to pull back from the escalation of tensions with Russia and start addressing the pressing needs of the American people.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.
Mainstream Assumptions: The CIA, Presidential Elections, and the Russian Connection
By Binoy Kampmark | Dissident Voice | December 15, 2016
Intent and causation are important features in the course of history. The former envisages motive and hope, irrespective of outcome; the latter envisages consequence. Often, these get muddled in the jumbled process of reasoning. An intervention in the affairs of another state goes awry; a historical incident goes belly up with ferocious consequences. Suddenly, in the aftermath, we are wise, we knew better, and we can categorise plans as venal and characters as wicked.
In a world of Clinton-Trump machinations, distinctions about intent and causation have fallen into a soup of conjecture. The stakes to win in November were so high for either candidate, mendacity and assumptions were bound to take centre stage.
From fake news to false modesty, from traditional deception to the exotica of dissimulation, it was a contest that furnished the US political landscape with greater punch and interest than anything offered since the infant days of the Republic.
Central to one allegation of the 2016 presidential election was that Russian hacking efforts, supposedly directed by Moscow’s intelligence managers, had a direct effect on the outcome of the election. WikiLeaks had been roped into the cause, and was duly accused of being a Russian front, or an infatuate of Trump.
Trump has done his bit, as is his wont, to sink these propositions. To begin with, he told Time that he did not believe them as credible. “I don’t believe [Russia] interfered.” Nor did he find CIA assessments in general that credible. He specifically pointed out CIA incompetence, notably in its assessment of Iraq’s famed, and subsequently non-existent stockpile of weapons prior to the invasion of 2003. “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.”
Behind him is Trump’s national security adviser Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn. The CIA, according to Flynn in an interview with the New York Times in October 2015, “lost sight of who they actually work for. They work for the American people. They don’t work for the president of the United States.” In its declining utility, the organisation had become “a very political organisation”.
The intelligence cognoscenti were quick to wonder whether his presidency would be more than troubling for the 16 spying agencies he will have to cope with. “Given his proclivity for revenge combined with his notorious thin skin,” claimed Paul Pillar, former deputy director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism centre, “this threatens to result in a lasting relationship of distrust and ill will between the president and the intelligence community.”
This, at best, is a claim of the disgruntled, but it is one that has attracted its adherents. Linked to the causation argument is the notion that Russia’s Vladimir Putin envisaged the electoral outcome, backing a more sympathetic horse in a far from sympathetic race.
The impact of these claims has been furthered by unquestioning media outlets now termed, euphemistically, the mainstream. These mainstreamers have been keeping a rather pedestrian line on matters, taking a few choice notes from various official sources to build an empire of speculation.
The Washington Post delved out one example last week, engaging in what Glenn Greenwald regarded as “classic American journalism of the worst sort”. This entailed claims from “unverified assertions of anonymous officials, who in turn are disseminating their own claims about what the CIA purportedly believes, all based on evidence that remains completely secret.”
With one step, possibly two removed from the official CIA report, we were left with the view that the agency had “concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the US electoral system.”
This aptly perverse manoeuvre suggests that the very outlets keen to condemn fake news sites themselves become the incubators, and unquestioning disseminators, of unreliable material.
Within the intelligence community, the material on hacking – in so far as it pertains to goals – has also been questioned. Not all have jumped onto the CIA assisted narrative that the Kremlin was dabbling in its own gambling variant of regime change.
According to the Office of the Director of National intelligence (ODNI), more is needed. Yes, there may well have been hacking, but the issue of a Moscow-directed drive to benefit Trump over Clinton in the presidential race would require more heft.
According to Reuters, which similarly adopted the Washington recipe in interviewing three unnamed American officials on Monday, albeit more sceptical ones, “ODNI is not arguing that the agency (CIA) is wrong, only that they can’t prove intent. Of course they can’t, absent agents in on the decision-making in Moscow.” At the very least, such views add a sliver of needed context.
The CIA conclusion had a broader context to it, suggesting a pattern of hacking and penetration that was far from specific to Clinton. In other words, it was, again in the words of one of the three officials, a “judgment based on the fact that Russian entities hacked both Democrats and Republicans and only the Democratic information was leaked.” It was, to that end, “a thin reed upon which to base an analytical judgment.”
When all these factors are considered, Trump’s dismissiveness of the intelligence community, while seemingly flippant, makes that much more sense. Predictably, it has been done by the wave of the hand, a contemptuous move that we will come to see as normal in due course. The intelligence bunglers will be having to do much more to earn their keep.
Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne and can be reached at: bkampmark@gmail.com.
Obama vows ‘action’ in response to alleged Russian hacking
RT | December 16, 2016
Barack Obama has vowed to take retaliatory measures against Russia, both public and covert, accusing Moscow of compromising the “integrity” of the US elections through the DNC email hacks. US intelligence has yet to provide any evidence of Russian involvement.
“I think there is no doubt that when any foreign government tries to impact the integrity of our elections … we need to take action. And we will — at a time and place of our own choosing,” President Obama said in an interview with NPR on Friday.
The US leader did not elaborate on whether the steps would be taken in the five weeks he has left in office.
Neither did he specify what type of action might be taken, saying only that “some of it may be explicit and publicized; some of it may not be.”
While Obama spoke of the Russian government’s alleged role in the hacking of Democratic National Committee (DNC) communications as a proven fact, he fell short of accusing Moscow of purposefully aiding US President-elect Donald Trump without a “final report” from US intelligence agencies.
“And so when I receive a final report, you know, we’ll be able to, I think, give us a comprehensive and best guess as to those motivations,” he said.
Obama argued, however, that even without a comprehensive report it should be obvious that “what the Russian hack had done was create more problems for the [Hillary] Clinton campaign than it had for the Trump campaign.”
At the same time, the outgoing president admitted that although the scandal that ensued from the leaks – and the subsequent way it was reported in the media – “had some impact” on the election campaign, “you never know which factors are going to make a difference.”
Earlier, Trump dismissed as a “conspiracy theory” claims made by anonymous CIA officials, and reported by the Washington Post, that Russian intelligence hacked the DNC emails to propel him to the presidency.
Obama was also wary of accusing the Trump campaign of having anything to do with the leaks, refusing to feed into conspiracy theories, while saying that the Republican candidate’s camp had simply exploited the incident to its maximum benefit.
“They understood what everybody else understood, which was that this was not good for Hillary Clinton’s campaign,” Obama said.
Obama is not the first senior US official to threaten Russia with countermeasures to avenge the alleged hack, involvement in which the Russian government vehemently denies.
Back in October, US Vice President Joe Biden told NBC that Washington would be “sending a message to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin” that “will be executed at the time of our choosing, and under the circumstances that will have the greatest impact.”
At the time, NBC also cited intelligence officials with “direct knowledge of the situation” as saying that the CIA had been ordered to devise a plan for a “clandestine” cyber strike against Russia in order to “embarrass” Moscow. The outlet reported that the agents had already embarked on preparations for a large-scale attack.
On Thursday, “anonymous CIA officials with direct access to information” went as far as to claim that the Russian president himself might have authorized the alleged hacks.
Obama’s deputy national security adviser, Ban Rhodes, reiterated the claims to MSNBC, saying he doesn’t think “things happen in the Russian government of this consequence without Vladimir Putin knowing about it.”
These latest allegations were dismissed by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov as nonsensical.
“I think that the stupidity and hopelessness of such an attempt to convince people of this is obvious,” he said on Thursday.
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), a group of former CIA and NSA agents, doubt the credibility of this version, adding that “harder evidence of a technical nature” suggests it was an inside job and not a hack by “Russians or anyone else.”
VIPS signed a memorandum published by Consortium News on Thursday. One of the letter’s authors, former NSA technician and whistleblower Bill Binney, told RT that “all points point to leaking, not hacking,” noting that if it was indeed a hack, the NSA would have long ago found a trace route.
Taking into account the scope of the NSA’s “extensive domestic data-collection network” uncovered in Edward Snowden’s revelations, “it beggars belief that NSA would be unable to identify anyone – Russian or not – attempting to interfere in a US election by hacking,” the veterans wrote, adding that such proof, if it existed, could be presented by the NSA “without any danger to sources or methods.”
Binney recalled that on a similar occasion with Chinese hackers, the NSA was able to trace the route of the hack to the specific building from which it was launched, which made him think that the accusations against Russia put forward by military intelligence were politically motivated.
Former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan-turned-WikiLeaks operative Craig Murray also challenged the official US version of events, claiming the source of the hacks was an insider who “had legal access to information.”
“The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks,” he told the Daily Mail, claiming that he himself took part in the handover operation in the woods in northwest Washington DC, where a representative of the source of the leaks allegedly gave him a package with the data.
Read more:
Media reporting on hacked DNC emails acted as ‘arms of Russian intelligence’ – White House
The Democratic Party Allies with the CIA
By Renee Parsons | CounterPunch | December 15, 2016
It is nothing short of a massive paradox, bordering on the ridiculous, for the CIA to allege that Russian cyber attacks had influenced the outcome of the recent Presidential election “to favor one candidate over the other” and sought to “undermine confidence in the US electoral system.” Seriously?
For the CIA, of all ‘intel’ sources to make that claim; the least credible, the most culpable of indiscriminate destruction of sovereign nations throughout the world since 1947, some while struggling to become democracies, is directly out of their “How to Initiate Regime Change 101” playbook which has proven so effective in the last sixty years. (See “Legacy of Ashes: History of the CIA” by Tim Weiner) That is sixty years of some of the most unhinged elements in the intelligence gathering world, sixty years of malicious skullduggery as well as unbridled murders and treasonous assassinations including JFK for his efforts to dismantle the Deep State. (See The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of America’s Secret Government” by David Talbot)
And now the CIA has added a new, politically-motivated Chapter entitled ‘Regime Change at Home” including those democratically-challenged Democrats who refuse to accept responsibility for the election loss they themselves created, are now publicly identified as willing pawns and co-conspirators with the CIA. What a way to rebuild the party!
Last Friday, the ever reliable, CIA-accommodating WaPo, published yet another article totally dependent on anonymous sources and quoting from a ‘secret’ CIA assessment report. One might question what is the point of announcing the existence of a ‘secret’ document when the document itself is withheld from the public – presumably, in CIA lingo, purely for propaganda purposes.
While the WaPo reports that ‘intel agencies have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government” and that ‘those officials described the individuals as actors known to the intel community,” yet the public has not been apprised of any arrest warrants being issued or any requests for extradition. What does that tell you?
According to the Post, “CIA officials told Senators it is now quite clear that electing Donald Trump was Russia’s goal.” Fortunately, there is a bulk of the American public who are no longer taken in by the MSM “fake news” or the myopic Democratic party for that matter when it comes to matters of foreign policy.
Speaking of fake news, with the Propornot list identifying 200 websites that ‘reliably echo Russian propaganda” and Turning Point USA’s Professor Watchlist of 200 “left wing extremist” professors implicit as tools for Mother Russia, will those ‘journalist’ whose names appeared in the Podesta email rsvp list from Wikileaks step up and reveal whether they are also on the CIA payroll. Such disclosure would go a long way toward clarifying where Fake News is originating.
Until the ‘secret assessment’ is made available for public review or the factual, annotated evidence is presented regarding Russian electoral influence and specifically how that “influence” was responsible for HRC’s loss, the CIA should, as my grandfather would say, either “put up or shut up.”
The CIA’s allegations and its lack of substance were so unverifiable that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) which is responsible for the nation’s seventeen intel agencies, has refused to endorse the CIA’s assessment ‘due to a lack of conclusive evidence” that Russia intended to elect Trump with the FBI casting doubts on the CIA’s assertions as ‘fuzzy’ and ‘ambiguous’ despite the CIA’s level of “high confidence” with a “consensus” which is another way of saying the assertion was not unanimous.
The distinction here is that while every country in the industrialized world, including Russia and the United States conduct some level of cyber surveillance, there is no way to distinguish the ‘legal intent’ of that surveillance. While the FBI, as a law enforcement agency has a legal evidentiary standard to meet for a court of law, the CIA has no such constraint. In light of the FBI’s reluctance, retiring Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nv) has called for FBI Director James Comey to resign.
Challenging the CIA allegations has also come from former intel analyst and former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray who has called CIA claims “bullshit.” “They are absolutely making it up” and putting himself in a potentially hazardous situation, he has said “I know who leaked them. I’ve met the person who leaked them, and they are certainly not Russian and it’s an insider. It’s a leak, not a hack…” An associate of Julian Assange, Murray further added that “I have watched incredulous as the CIA’s blatant lie has grown and grown as a media story – blatant because the CIA has made no attempt whatsoever to substantiate it. There is no Russian involvement in the leaks of emails showing Clinton’s corruption.”
But those critiques of the CIA assessment have not convinced the Democratic leadership on the House and Senate Intel Committees, Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Cal) and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Cal) from continuing to assert that “Based on briefings we have received, we have concluded that the Russian intelligence agencies are making a serious and concerted effort to influence the U.S. election,” as the Democratic party continues to rally around the CIA in its latest effort to subvert democratic rule.
It is clear where all this is leading… as the December 19th date for the Electoral College vote approaches, the essential point here is the invalidation of an otherwise legal election and the flimsy fomenting of a potential Constitutional crisis. The collusion between the MSM and the Democratic party has instigated an extraordinary crescendo of panic of those willing to have HRC assume the throne of hegemony, wars and international interventions that have become so second nature to the Democratic party.
Here’s a Bulletin: There is no Constitutional basis for the popular vote in Amendment XII (adopted 1804) of the Constitution. In other words, those partisans trying to flip the electoral votes because they don’t like the Nov. 8th result have no legal standing. While Jill Stein’s ill-considered recount attempt, perhaps prompted by her inability to poll more than 1% of the national total, cited a possible ‘foreign state’ hacking the election results came weeks after she sat at Vladimir Putin’s dinner table in Moscow. That recount has gleaned no such evidence.
As Talbot reported In Chessboard, soon after the Bay of Pig fiasco, former President Harry Truman confided to his biographer Merle Miller that “I think it was a mistake. If I’d known what was going to happen, I never would have done it. Eisenhower never paid any attention to it and it got out of hand. It’s become a government all of its own and all secret…that’s a very dangerous thing in a democratic society.” Prophetic words indeed. Truman, of course, was the author of what became the Central Intelligence Agency as authorized with adoption of the National Security Act of 1947.
In response to JFK’s assassination, Truman clearly felt the need to clarify why he set up the CIA with a December 22nd letter to the Washington Post entitled “Limit CIA Role to Intelligence.” Here are some of the most important excerpts beginning his letter with:
“I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency—CIA.”
“I decided to set up a special organization charged with the collection of all intelligence reports from every available source (Departments of State, Defense, Commerce, Interior) and to have those reports reach me as President without department “treatment” or interpretations.”
“… most important thing about this move was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisions—and I thought it was necessary that the President do his own thinking and evaluating.”
“For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.”
“I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue—and a subject for cold war enemy propaganda.”
“But there are now some searching questions that need to be answered. I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President.”
And then in a June, 1964 letter to the managing editor of Look magazine, Truman reiterated that “The CIA was set up by me for the sole purpose of getting all the available information to the President. It was not intended to operate as an international agency engaged in strange activities.”
If President-elect Trump is looking for another swamp ridden quagmire of which to drain, the CIA is a good place to start while restoring its original intent.
Renee Parsons has been a member of the ACLU’s Florida State Board of Directors and president of the ACLU Treasure Coast Chapter. She has been an elected public official in Colorado, an environmental lobbyist and staff member of the US House of Representatives in Washington DC. She can be found on Twitter @reneedove31
Questions for the Electors on Russian Hacking
By Andrew Cockburn | CounterPunch | December 14, 2016
It is being reported that John Podesta, Chairman of the defeated $1.2 billion Clinton presidential campaign, is supporting the call by various officials, including at least forty Electors, that the members of the Electoral College be given a classified intelligence briefing on the alleged Russian hacking before the College votes on December 19.
In the event such a briefing comes to pass, it might be helpful if the Electors had some informed questions to ask the CIA.
1/ The DNC hackers inserted the name of the founder of Russian intelligence, in Russian, in the metadata of the hacked documents. Why would the G.R.U., Russian military intelligence do that?
2/ If the hackers were indeed part of Russian intelligence, why did they use a free Russian email account, or, in the hack of the state election systems, a Russian-owned server? Does Russian intelligence normally display such poor tradecraft?
3/ Why would Russian intelligence, for the purposes of hacking the election systems of Arizona and Illinois, book space on a Russian-owned server and then use only English, as documents furnished by Vladimir Fomenko, proprietor of Kings Servers, the company that owned the server in question, clearly indicate?
4/ Numerous reports ascribe the hacks to hacking groups known as APT 28 or “Fancy Bear” and APT 29 or “Cozy Bear.” But these groups had already been accused of nefarious actions on behalf of Russian intelligence prior to the hacks under discussion. Why would the Kremlin and its intelligence agencies select well-known groups to conduct a regime-change operation on the most powerful country on earth?
5/ It has been reported in the New York Times, without attribution, that U.S. intelligence has identified specific G.R.U. officials who directed the hacking. Is this true, and if so, please provide details (Witness should be sworn)
6/ The joint statement issued by the DNI and DHS on October 7 2016 confirmed that US intelligence had no evidence of official Russian involvement in the leak of hacked documents to Wikileaks, etc, saying only that the leaks were “consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts.” Has the US acquired any evidence whatsoever since that time regarding Russian involvement in the leaks?
7/ Since the most effective initiative in tipping the election to Donald Trump was the intervention of FBI Director Comey, are you investigating any possible connections he might have to Russian intelligence and Vladimir Putin?
Andrew Cockburn is the Washington editor of Harper’s Magazine. An Irishman, he has covered national security topics in this country for many years.
New York Times undermines its own case Russia was behind Clinton leaks
By Alexander Mercouris | The Duran | December 15, 2016
The New York Times has published a lengthy article setting out what it says is the “evidence” that Russia was behind the leaks of the DNC and Podesta leaks by Wikileaks.
The article reveals nothing that is really new, but a number of points did immediately strike me:
(1) The article goes to some lengths to claim that the way the Russians go about carrying out cyber-attacks is far more stealthy than say the Chinese. Thus we read comments like this
“The Russians had not gone away, of course. “They were just a lot more stealthy,” said Kevin Mandia, a former Air Force intelligence officer who spent most of his days fighting off Russian cyberattacks before founding Mandiant, a cybersecurity firm that is now a division of FireEye — and the company the Clinton campaign brought in to secure its own systems.”
and this
“The Russians grew stealthier and stealthier, tricking government computers into sending out data while disguising the electronic “command and control” messages that set off alarms for anyone looking for malicious actions. The State Department was so crippled that it repeatedly closed its systems to throw out the intruders. At one point, officials traveling to Vienna with Secretary of State John Kerry for the Iran nuclear negotiations had to set up commercial Gmail accounts just to communicate with one another and with reporters traveling with them.”
We also learn that the Russians attempted to conceal their responsibility for the leaks by creating the persona of a supposed Romanian hacker called “Guccifer 2.0” who supposedly claimed responsibility for the hacks and warned he would publish the information he got from them.
It is very difficult to understand why in that case these so very “stealthy” and presumably well-resourced Russians failed to make sure that “Guccifer 2.0” was able to speak fluent Romanian. I say this because it is clear that whoever has created the persona of “Guccifer 2.0” obviously does not speak Romanian. See for example this paragraph
“That gave Mr. Franceschi-Bicchierai an idea. Using Google Translate, he sent the purported hacker some questions in Romanian. The answers came back in Romanian. But when he was offline, Mr. Franceschi-Bicchierai checked with a couple of native speakers, who told him Guccifer 2.0 had apparently been using Google Translate as well — and was clearly not the Romanian he claimed to be.”
Presumably Russian intelligence agencies are not short of fluent Romanian speakers they can call on in situations like this?
It becomes even more bizarre when one reads the following
“Cyberresearchers found other clues pointing to Russia. Microsoft Word documents posted by Guccifer 2.0 had been edited by someone calling himself, in Russian, Felix Edmundovich — an obvious nom de guerre honouring the founder of the Soviet secret police, Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky. Bad links in the texts were marked by warnings in Russian, generated by what was clearly a Russian-language version of Word.”
That does not sound at all “stealthy”. On the contrary it suggests that whoever is behind “Guccifer 2.0” was going out of his way to try to implicate Russia’s intelligence agencies in “Guccifer 2.0’s” activities.
That in turn suggests that “Guccifer 2.0” has nothing to do with Russia’s intelligence agencies, and that whoever has created his persona is either trying to cover his tracks by misdirecting investigators towards the Russians, or is engaging in an anti-Russian provocation.
What this means is that if “Guccifer 2.0” is the persona of the person responsible for the leaks, then he almost certainly has nothing to do with Russia’s intelligence agencies, and he may not even be Russian.
As it happens, the fact “Guccifer 2.0” pretends to be Romanian but is apparently unable to speak Romanian points to whoever he is being a private individual rather than an intelligence agency.
(2) A great deal in The New York Times article turns on the fact that the DNC and Podesta hacks were carried out by two groups of hackers identified respectively as Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear.
The connection of either of these two groups of hackers to Russia’s intelligence agencies appears to be inferred from their previous activity rather than based on actual knowledge. However the important point is that whoever they are they were clearly not working together
“To their astonishment, Mr. Alperovitch said, CrowdStrike experts found signs that the two Russian hacking groups had not coordinated their attacks. Fancy Bear, apparently not knowing that Cozy Bear had been rummaging in D.N.C. files for months, took many of the same documents.”
Given the sensitivity of any covert operation to swing the US Presidential election to Donald Trump, it is a certainty that if someone like Putin or Nikolay Patrushev (the secretary of Russia’s Security Council who is believed to coordinate the work of Russia’s intelligence agencies) had ordered it they would have ensured that it was coordinated and kept under tight control.
The fact this was not the case, and that Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear were apparently acting independently of each other and at times even at cross purposes, is an extremely strong reason for doubting such an order was ever given.
If Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear really are run by Russian intelligence agencies, then the fact they were not coordinating with each other suggests they were each engaging in ordinary spying activities and not in anything more sinister.
(3) Lastly, what the New York Times article shows is how exceptionally sloppy cyber security on the part of the DNC and Podesta was, and how extraordinarily complacent they were about the possibility of being hacked.
Whilst that makes it possible they were hacked by Russia’s intelligence agencies, it also leaves open the possibility they were hacked by all sorts of other people, including people within the US. Any one of these people might have been the person or persons behind the persona of “Guccifer 2.0”, or might have been the source of the leaks that were provided to Wikileaks.
In summary, I don’t think this article in The New York Times adds very much. If anything it shows how thin the case the Hillary Clinton campaign and the CIA are making that Russia was behind the leaks in order to swing the election to Donald Trump actually is.
Will Trump Defy McCain & Marco?
By Pat Buchanan • Unz Review • December 13, 2016
When word leaked that Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson, a holder of the Order of Friendship award in Putin’s Russia, was Donald Trump’s choice for secretary of state, John McCain had this thoughtful response:
“Vladimir Putin is a thug, a bully, and a murderer and anybody else who describes him as anything else is lying.”
Yet, Putin is something else, the leader of the largest nation on earth, a great power with enough nuclear weapons to wipe the United States off the face of the earth. And we have to deal with him.
McCain was echoed by the senior Democrat on foreign relations, Bob Menendez, who said naming Tillerson secretary of state would be “alarming and absurd … guaranteeing Russia has a willing accomplice in the (Trump) Cabinet guiding our nation’s foreign policy.”
Sen Marco Rubio chimed in: “Being a ‘friend of Vladimir’ is not an attribute I am hoping for from a Secretary of State.”
If just three GOP senators vote no on Tillerson, and Democrats vote as a bloc against him, his nomination would go down. President Trump would sustain a major and humiliating defeat.
Who is Tillerson? A corporate titan, he has traveled the world, represented Exxon in 60 countries, is on a first-name basis with countless leaders, and is endorsed by Condi Rice and Robert Gates.
Dr. Samuel Johnson’s observation — “A man is seldom more innocently occupied than when he is engaged in making money” — may be a bit of a stretch when it comes to OPEC and the global oil market.
Yet there is truth to it. Most businessmen are interested in doing deals, making money, and, if the terms are not met, walking away, not starting a war.
And here is the heart of the objection to Tillerson. He wants to end sanctions and partner with Putin’s Russia, as does Trump. But among many in the mainstream media, think tanks, websites, and on the Hill, this is craven appeasement. For such as these, the Cold War is never over.
The attacks on Tillerson coincide with new attacks on Russia, based on CIA sources, alleging that not only did Moscow hack into the Democratic Party and Clinton campaign, and leak what it found to hurt Hillary Clinton, but Russia was trying to help elect Trump, and succeeded.
Why would Moscow do this?
Monday’s editorial in The New York Times explains: “In Mr. Trump, the Russians had reason to see a malleable political novice, one who had surrounded himself with Kremlin lackeys.”
Backed by Democratic leader Sen. Chuck Schumer, McCain has announced an investigation. The goal, said the Times, is to determine “whether anyone within Trump’s inner circle coordinated with the Kremlin and whether Moscow spread fake news to hurt Mrs. Clinton.”
What is going on here? More than meets the eye.
The people who most indignantly condemned Trump’s questioning of Obama’s birth certificate as a scurrilous scheme to delegitimize his presidency, now seek to delegitimize Trump’s presidency.
The Times editorial spoke of a “darkening cloud” already over the Trump presidency, and warned that a failure to investigate and discover the full truth of Russia’s hacking could only “feed suspicion among millions of Americans that … (t)he election was indeed rigged.”
Behind the effort to smear Tillerson and delegitimize Trump lies a larger motive. Trump has antagonists in both parties who alarmed at his triumph because it imperils the foreign policy agenda that is their raison d’etre, their reason for being.
These people do not want to lift sanctions on Moscow. They do not want an end to the confrontation with Russia. As is seen by their bringing in tiny Montenegro, they want to enlarge NATO to encompass Sweden, Finland, Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova.
They have in mind the permanent U.S. encirclement of Russia.
They want to provide offensive weapons to Kiev to reignite the civil war in the Donbass and enable Ukraine to move on Crimea. This would mean a war with Russia that Ukraine would lose and we and our NATO allies would be called upon to intervene in and fight.
Their goal is to bring down Putin and bring about “regime change” in Moscow.
In the campaign, Trump said he wanted to get along with Russia, to support all the forces inside Syria and Iraq fighting to wipe out ISIS and al-Qaida, and to stay out of any new Middle East wars — like the disaster in Iraq — that have cost us “six trillion dollars.”
This is what America voted for when it voted for Trump — to put America First and “make America great again.” But War Party agitators are already beating the drums for confrontation with Iran.
Early in his presidency, if not before, Trump is going to have to impose his foreign policy upon his own party and, indeed, upon his own government. Or his presidency will be broken, as was Lyndon Johnson’s.
A good place to begin is by accepting the McCain-Marco challenge and nominating Rex Tillerson for secretary of state. Let’s get it on.
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of the new book “The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose From Defeat to Create the New Majority.”
Copyright 2016 Creators.com
Trump’s Showdown With the CIA
By Finian Cunningham | Sputnik | December 13, 2016
It doesn’t come more scathing than this. On nationwide television, US President-elect Donald Trump rubbished the Central Intelligence Agency as “ridiculous” for making claims that Russian hackers helped get him elected.
The CIA – America’s foremost intelligence apparatus set up after the Second World War by then President Harry Truman – is supposed to be the guiding light for occupants of the White House on all matters geopolitical.
And here we have aspiring White House occupant Donald Trump telling the CIA to shut up.
Over the last week, the spy agency was quoted by both the Washington Post and New York Times as having informed anonymous government officials that there was “high confidence” that Russian-sponsored hackers had interfered in the US presidential election in favor of Trump over his Democrat rival Hillary Clinton.
The alleged modus operandi to sway the election was the leaking of private emails to whistleblower site Wikileaks which implicated Clinton in big business corruption and fomenting foreign wars, among other scandals.
It’s a sensational claim, especially given that the CIA or its unnamed official conduits quoted by the US’ two most prominent newspapers have provided zero evidence to support their contention of Russian malfeasance. Russia has flatly denied the accusations. As has Wikileaks.
In effect, the explosive insinuation is that Trump’s election last month is invalid because voting was marred by foreign manipulation.
In his subsequent slap-down of the CIA, Trump was clearly implying that the supposedly prestigious spy agency was far from competent. He said that the hacking of the Democrat party’s emails could have been carried out by anybody, including “someone sitting in their bed somewhere”.
He also expressed skepticism on the specific claim that Russia was to blame. His campaign team went even further in its dismissal of the CIA, saying: “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.” Adding insult to injury, Trump also disclosed that he is reducing the daily briefings customarily received by presidents to weekly meetings. “I don’t need to hear the same words every day,” he said, adding that “when something changes” then the CIA can call him.
The Trump Wave (Exclusive Interview) Dec 11 2016
In a previous edition of this column it was speculated that the CIA and its secretive Deep State networks might pull off a “digital 9/11” on the day of the November 8 election to scupper a Trump victory. During the long run-up to the ballot, it was abundantly evident that the US political establishment, including the CIA and mass media, favored Clinton to win. Her belligerent foreign policy towards Russia was certainly something that former CIA officials were endorsing.
As it turned out, Trump’s election blindsided the US establishment. The latter were sure Clinton was a shoo-in. The bolt from nowhere may be why the powers-that-be appeared slow to react on Trump’s election.
The latest dredging up of allegations about Russian hackers getting Trump into the White House seems to be part of a retrospective action by the Deep State to call the presidential election in the way that it sees fit.
It is worth noting that from a constitutional viewpoint Trump’s inauguration as 45th president is not finalized. Legal challenges are underway aimed at forcing the decisive Electoral College to overturn earlier votes for Trump.
If enough brouhaha is whipped up over alleged Russian interference in the US election – and large sections of the US corporate media seem all too willing to do that – then a critical number of Electoral College votes might be revoked in Clinton’s favor.
Trump appears to be aware of this stealth agenda. As well as lambasting the CIA’s “Russian hacker” claims as rubbish, he also said that it was a brazen partisan effort by his Democrat rival and her powerful backers to overturn an election result that they did not accept. In short, Trump is inferring an electoral coup attempt.
But even if the CIA and its spooks fail to thwart Trump in taking the White House, an alternative, less controversial option is to smear the next president as a Russian stooge. That charge has already been made during the election campaign when Trump was denigrated by Clinton and media pundits for being a “puppet” of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Following Trump’s election victory, those charges notably disappeared from public discourse.
However, the recent resurfacing of CIA claims that Russia interfered in the election serves to recall earlier smears. That in turn seems designed to curtail Trump’s stated foreign policy objective of normalizing US-Russia relations. In particular, Trump has said he wants to work with Russia on resolving the Syrian and Ukrainian conflicts.
In recent days, Trump has flagged the possibility of appointing ExxonMobil boss Rex Tillerson as the next Secretary of State. The oil tycoon has extensive industry links with Russia as well as reportedly cordial personal relations with president Putin. He has publicly opposed the erstwhile US sanctions policy on Russia as counterproductive. Trump’s consideration of Rex Tillerson for the top diplomat position has provoked disapproving media headlines that such a choice is “proof” of Russia’s hand in steering the US election.
In the wake of sensational CIA claims that Russia interfered to get Trump elected, one can see how his presidency will be dogged by ongoing aspersions that his policies are somehow hostage to the Kremlin’s orchestration.
One way or another, however, whether the Deep State can succeed in thwarting Trump taking the White House or rather confines itself to warping his foreign policy towards Russia, the reality is that Trump seems to be on a collision course with his top spooks.
Trump’s brusque attitude toward the CIA over its claims of Russian subversion suggest that he is prepared for a bruising encounter. So much so that the Washington Post is reporting that personnel within the agency are anxious that Trump in office will exact retribution with mass sackings at the agency’s Langley headquarters.
There was a time when no US president would dare take on the CIA, such was the agency’s fearsome reputation for dirty tricks and political assassinations. Only one president pushed that envelope. John F Kennedy threatened to smash the CIA into a “thousand pieces and throw it to the wind” following the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961. Two years later, the CIA and its mafia contractors had JFK murdered in broad daylight in Dallas, Texas.
If Trump follows through on his showdown with the CIA, he will have to tread carefully. But, as with other tentacles of the US empire, the CIA is no longer the same all-powerful agency it once was.
The American public have become more attuned to how the Deep State operates through its fake news media conduits in order to propagandize and manage perception. That is partly why the US media is currently floundering from a credibility crisis.
Significantly too, the US domestic crime agency, the FBI, has pointedly declined to support the CIA’s reported contentions about Russian interference in the US election. Moreover, quite a few senior US lawmakers in Congress have expressed skepticism over the CIA claims.
The time for muzzling the CIA may be at hand.
It’s Beginning to Smell a Lot Like Totalitarianism, and I Don’t Mean Russia
By F. William Engdahl – New Eastern Outlook – 13.12.2016
If we smell precisely the stench of the totality of steps taken in NATO countries in recent months, especially in the United States and the European Union, we can smell the stench of totalitarian rule or some would call it, fascism, being quietly imposed on our basic human freedoms. Some recent examples give pause for reflection as to where we are allowing our world to drift.
Let’s begin with a most ominous, bizarre, Jesuitical interview that the Roman Catholic Pope Francis gave to a Belgian paper December 7, comparing what he calls defamatory news to what he called the “sickness of coprophagia.” He stated:
QUESTION – A final question, Holy Father, regarding the media: a consideration regarding the means of communication…
POPE – The communications media have a very great responsibility…It is obvious that, given that we are all sinners, also the media can…become harmful… They can be tempted by calumny, and therefore used to slander, to sully people, especially in the world of politics. They can be used as a means of defamation: every person has the right to a good reputation, but perhaps in their previous life, or ten years ago, they had a problem with justice, or a problem in their family life, and bringing this to light is serious and harmful… This is a sin and it is harmful. A thing that can do great damage to the information media is disinformation: that is, faced with any situation, saying only a part of the truth, and not the rest. This is disinformation… Disinformation is probably the greatest damage that the media can do, as opinion is guided in one direction, neglecting the other part of the truth. I believe that the media should… not fall prey – without offence, please – to the sickness of coprophilia, which is always wanting to communicate scandal… And since people have a tendency towards the sickness of coprophagia, it can do great harm.
Coprophilia is defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “marked interest in excrement, especially the use of feces or filth for sexual excitement.” And coprophagia is eating feces by humans, literally, eating shit.
What people precisely, Holy Father, have a “tendency to towards the sickness of coprophagia”? Is this the dominant sickness of the human race? And if not, why do you make such a disgusting likeness between eating shit and citizens who read about politicians and their misdeeds or media that report on same? And who is to judge if factually true dissemination of facts about political figures from their past is relevant or not to help voters judge their character? I would say the comments are a perfect example of what he pretends to condemn.
Were it only a single, off-the-cuff remark by a religious figure, we could dismiss it along with claims such as the papal infallibility declaration proclaimed by the Vatican I on 18 July 1870. However, precisely because of such dogma and of the influence of the Roman Catholic Church and its Pope, notably in the countries of Western Europe, the United States and Latin America, such vague and dangerous remarks ought to be taken seriously as a signal of what lies ahead for the public freedom of speech.
“Fake News”
The papal comments on coprophagia and journalism come amid an explosion of charges in the USA and EU that Russia is planting “fake news” as it is now being called, about Hillary Clinton in the US media by way of certain alternative media. Robby Mook, Hillary Clinton’s former campaign manager, said “fake news” was a “huge problem” the campaign faced in the recent US election: “I still think we have to investigate what happened with Russia here. We cannot have foreign, and I would say foreign aggressors here, intervening in our elections. The Russian were propagating fake news through Facebook and other outlets, but look, we also had… Breitbart News, which was notorious for peddling stories like this.”
Online stories that claimed a Washington D.C. pizza restaurant, Comet Ping Pong, was used by candidate Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager John Podesta for child sex, the so-called “Pizzagate” Scandal, is now being used to drum up popular opinion for censorship of the Internet as well as Facebook and other social media.
Senior New York Times reporter David Sanger wrote a vague, anonymous “according to senior Administration sources,” article on December 9 under the headline, “Russia Hacked Republican Committee but Kept Data, US Concludes.” What we are seeing is precisely the kind of fake news that Hillary Clinton and the Pope talk about. But it is mainstream establishment media doing the fakery.
The fakery is being orchestrated by the highest levels of the mainstream media in collusion with NATO circles and intelligence agencies such as the CIA, which has saturated the ranks of mainstream media with their disinformation agents according to former CIA head William Colby, who once allegedly said, “The CIA owns everyone of any significance in the major media.”
The campaign will continue, likely with some horrendous stories about some psychopath taking a gun and bursting into Comet Ping Pong pizza place shooting innocent customers, because it was said he read in alternative media fake news about the pedophile ring. That already took place, but the man fired no shots. The population is being manipulated to accept extreme censorship of internet and other alternative media, something unimaginable just months ago.
Like clockwork, the “fake news” campaign has spread to the European Union. After announcing she will run again in 2017 for Chancellor, Angela Merkel spoke ominous words suggesting government censorship of independent “populist” (sic) media might be necessary: “Today we have fake sites, bots, trolls — things that regenerate themselves, reinforcing opinions with certain algorithms and we have to learn to deal with them.” She declared, “we must confront this phenomenon and if necessary, regulate it… Populism and political extremes are growing in Western democracies..” Her remarks came after Google and Facebook cut off ad revenue to what they declared to be “fake” news sites.
In the EU, especially Germany, populist has an implicit negative or even fascist connotation as in “right-wing populist” parties who oppose Merkel’s open door to war refugees policies, or who these days oppose almost anything her heavy-handed government puts forward.
War on Cash
Now if we begin to see stealth propaganda preparing us to accept severe clampdowns on the one remaining free media, the Internet and related social media, we can also see an equally ominous, indeed, totalitarian move to create acceptance for the idea we give up the right to hold paper money, giving private, often corrupt, banks total control over our money, and in turn giving government agencies total control over where we spend for what.
This is the so-called cashless society. Arguments put forward are that elimination of cash will be more convenient to consumers or that it will eliminate or greatly reduce organized crime and shadow economy that evades taxation. In the EU, Sweden has already virtually eliminated cash. Sweden cash purchases today are down to just three per cent of the national economy compared to nine per cent in the Eurozone and seven per cent in the US. Public buses don’t accept cash. Three of Sweden’s four largest banks are phasing out the manual handling of cash in bank branches. Norway is following the same path.
In France today, it’s now illegal to do cash transactions over €1,000 without documenting it properly. France’s finance minister Michel Sapin, in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, blamed the attacks on the ability of the attackers to “buy dangerous things with cash.” Shortly after the Hebdo attacks he announced capital controls that included the €1,000 cap on cash payments, down from €3,000, to “fight against the use of cash and anonymity in the French economy.” In high-inflation Eurozone €1,000 is not a huge sum.
Even in conservative Germany, a leading member of the Merkel coalition proposed to eliminate the €500 note and capping all cash transactions at €5,000. Some weeks later the European Central Bank, where negative interest rates are the order of the day, announced it would end issue of €500 notes by December 2018 arguing it made it too easy for criminals and terrorists to act.
And in the United States, as the campaign to sell skeptical citizens on cashless digital bank payments increases, JP Morgan Chase, the largest and one of the most criminal banks in the US, has a policy restricting the use of cash in selected markets. The bank bans cash payments for credit cards, mortgages, and auto loans; and it prohibits storage of “any cash or coins” in safe deposit boxes. So if you have a rare cold coin collection, you better stuff it in the mattress…
Negative Rates and Cashless Citizens
As long as cash–bills and coins of a national currency–are the basis of the economy, the central banks of the USA and EU as well as Japan, are unable to impose a severe negative interest rate policy much beyond the flirtation today by the ECB and Bank of Japan. If central bank rates were to go very negative, banks would be charging customers the absurd charge to make them pay to keep their cash on deposit or in savings at those banks. Naturally, people would revolt and withdraw in cash to invest in gold or other hard, tangible valuables.
Harvard economist and member of the Economic Advisory Panel of the Federal Reserve, Kenneth Rogoff, an advocate of the “war on cash,” noted that the existence of cash “creates the artifact of the zero bound on the nominal interest rate.” In his 2016 book, The Curse of Cash, Rogoff urged the Federal Reserve to phase out the 100-dollar bill, then the 50-dollar bill, then the 20-dollar bill, leaving only smaller denominations in circulation, much like what the mad Modi has just done in India.
Any serious observer of the world economy, especially of NATO nations in Europe and North America since the financial crisis of September 2008, would have to realize the current status quo of zero or negative central bank interest rates to prop up banks and financial markets is not sustainable. Unless cash is eliminated that is.
On April 5, 1933 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 6102, “forbidding the Hoarding of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates within the continental United States.” That was rightly denounced by many as outright theft, confiscation of privately held gold, by the Government.
Radical solutions such as done by President Roosevelt in 1933, yet in a monetary order where gold no longer dominates, is clearly becoming more attractive to the major bankers of Wall Street and the City of London. Rather than confiscate citizens’ gold, today the Gods of Money would have to find a way to steal the cash of citizens. Moving to their “cashless” banking, limiting how much cash can be withdrawn and then eliminating cash entirely as Swedish banks are doing would enable tax authorities to have perfect totalitarian control on every citizen’s use of money. Moreover, governments could decree, as did FDR, that cash above certain levels must be taxed under some or another national declaration of emergency.
As such bold, radical moves advance, they would of course be vociferously attacked not on CNN or The New York Times or Financial Times or other mainstream media tied to those criminal financial institutions, but in alternative media. Keep in mind it was the uncritical New York Times and Washington Post that uncritically retailed the fake news that led to declaration of war on Iraq in 2003, namely that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction aimed at Washington. That war has spread death and destruction of a scale unimaginable. No one complained at the time about that fake news.
The protest over moves to confiscate citizens’ bank holdings would come through alternate, independent media such as Zero Hedge or countless others. Recently, US media uncritically republished a purported list of “fake news” blogs and websites prepared by Assistant Professor of Communications at Merrimack College, Melissa Zimdars. Zero Hedge was on it.
This is not about endorsing or not endorsing any alternative blog or website. It is about the essential freedom of us all to be able to read and decide any and all opinions or analyses and not to have government decide what I am or am not allowed to read. It’s about the freedom to keep privacy about what I choose to buy and not leave a digital trail that my bank could release to the tax authorities or to Homeland Security or the FBI, or sell to profiling consumer operations. Controlling public communication and controlling private money would go a long way to creation of the perfect totalitarian state. Not a good idea, I would say.
F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University.
Hypocrisy Behind the Russian-Election Frenzy
By Robert Parry | Consortium News | December 13, 2016
As Democrats, the Obama administration and some neocon Republicans slide deeper into conspiracy theories about how Russia somehow handed the presidency to Donald Trump, they are behaving as they accused Trump of planning to behave if he had lost, questioning the legitimacy of the electoral process and sowing doubts about American democracy.
US President-elect Donald J. Trump
The thinking then was that if Trump had lost, he would have cited suspicions of voter fraud – possibly claiming that illegal Mexican immigrants had snuck into the polls to tip the election to Hillary Clinton – and Trump was widely condemned for even discussing the possibility of challenging the election’s outcome.
His refusal to commit to accepting the results was front-page news for days with leading editorialists declaring that his failure to announce that he would abide by the outcome disqualified him from the presidency.
But now the defeated Democrats and some anti-Trump neoconservatives in the Republican Party are jumping up and down about how Russia supposedly tainted the election by revealing information about the Democrats and the Clinton campaign.
Though there appears to be no hard evidence that the Russians did any such thing, the Obama administration’s CIA has thrown its weight behind the suspicions, basing its conclusions on “circumstantial evidence,” according to a report in The New York Times.
The Times reported: “The C.I.A.’s conclusion does not appear to be the product of specific new intelligence obtained since the election, several American officials, including some who had read the agency’s briefing, said on Sunday. Rather, it was an analysis of what many believe is overwhelming circumstantial evidence — evidence that others feel does not support firm judgments — that the Russians put a thumb on the scale for Mr. Trump, and got their desired outcome.”
In other words, the CIA apparently lacks direct reporting from a source inside the Kremlin or an electronic intercept in which Russian President Vladimir Putin or another senior official orders Russian operatives to tilt the U.S. election in favor of Trump.
More ‘Group Thinking’?
The absence of such hard evidence opens the door to what is called “confirmation bias” or analytical “group think” in which the CIA’s institutional animosity toward Russia and Trump could influence how analysts read otherwise innocent developments.
For instance, Russian news agencies RT or Sputnik reported critically at times about Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, a complaint that has been raised repeatedly in U.S. press accounts arguing that Russia interfered in the U.S. election. But that charge assumes two things: that Clinton did not deserve critical coverage and that Americans – in any significant numbers – watch Russian networks.
Similarly, the yet-unproven charge that Russia organized the hacking of Democratic National Committee emails and the private email account of Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta assumes that the Russian government was responsible and that it then selectively leaked the material to WikiLeaks while withholding damaging information from hacked Republican accounts.
Here the suspicions also seem to extend far beyond what the CIA actually knows. First, the Republican National Committee denies that its email accounts were hacked, and even if they were hacked, there’s no evidence that they contained any information that was particularly newsworthy. Nor is there any evidence that – if the GOP accounts were hacked – they were hacked by the same group that hacked the Democratic Party emails, i.e., that the two hacks were part of the same operation.
That suspicion assumes a tightly controlled operation at the highest levels of the Russian government, but the CIA – with its intensive electronic surveillance of the Russian government and human sources inside the Kremlin – appears to lack any evidence of such a top-down operation.
Second, WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange directly denies that he received the Democratic leaked emails from the Russian government and one of his associates, former British Ambassador Craig Murray, told the U.K. Guardian that he knows who “leaked” the Democratic emails and that there never was a “hack,” i.e. an outside electronic penetration of an email account.
Murray said, “I’ve met the person who leaked them, and they are certainly not Russian and it’s an insider. It’s a leak, not a hack; the two are different things.”
‘Real News’
But even if Assange did get the data from the Russians, it’s important to remember that nothing in the material has been identified as false. It all appears to be truthful and none of it represented an egregious violation of privacy with some salacious or sensational angle.
The only reason the emails were newsworthy at all was that the documents revealed information that the DNC and the Clinton campaign were trying to keep secret from the American voters.
For instance, some emails confirmed Sen. Bernie Sanders’s suspicions that the DNC was improperly tilting the nomination race in favor of Clinton. The DNC was lying when it denied having an institutional thumb on the scales for Clinton. Thus, even if the Russians did uncover this evidence and did leak it to WikiLeaks, they would only have been informing the American people about the DNC’s abuse of the democratic process, something Democratic voters in particular had a right to know.
And, regarding Podesta’s emails, their most important revelation related to the partial transcripts of Clinton’s paid speeches to Wall Street banks, the contents of which Clinton had chosen to hide from the American people. So, again, if the Russians were involved in the leak, they would only have been giving to the voters information that Clinton should have released on her own. In other words, these disclosures are clearly not “fake news” – the other hysteria now sweeping Official Washington.
In the mainstream news media, there has been a clumsy effort to conflate these parallel frenzies, the leak of “real news” and the invention of “fake news.” But investigations of so-called “fake news” have revealed that these operations were run mostly by young entrepreneurs in places like Macedonia or Georgia who realized they could make advertising dollars by creating outlandish “click bait” stories that Trump partisans were particularly eager to read.
According to a New York Times investigation into one of the “fake news” sites, a college student in Tbilisi, Georgia, first tried to create a pro-Clinton “click bait” Web site but found that a pro-Trump operation was vastly more lucrative. This and other investigations did not trace the “fake news” sites back to Russia or any other government.
So, what’s perhaps most telling about the information that the CIA has accused Russia of sharing with the American people is that it was all “real news” about newsworthy topics.
What Threat to Democracy?
So, how does giving the American people truthful and relevant information undermine American democracy, which is the claim that is reverberating throughout the mainstream media and across Official Washington?
“Corruption” allegations against Yanukovych – pushed by OCCRP – were integral to the U.S.-supported effort to organize a violent putsch that drove Yanukovych from office on Feb. 22, 2014, touching off the Ukrainian civil war and – on a global scale – the New Cold War with Russia.
Yet, in the case of the “Panama Papers” or other leaks about “corruption” in governments targeted by U.S. officials for “regime change,” there are no frenzied investigations into where the information originated. Regarding the “Panama Papers,” there was simply back-slapping for the organizations that invested time and money in analyzing the volumes of material. And there were cheers when implicated officials were punished or forced to step down.
So, why are some leaks “good” and others “bad”? Why do we hail the “Panama Papers” or OCCRP’s “corruption evidence” that damaged Yanukovych – and ask no questions about where the material came from and how it was selectively used – yet we condemn the Democratic email leaks and undertake investigations into the source of the information?
In both the “Panama Papers” case and the “Democratic Party leaks,” the material appeared to be real. There was no evidence of disinformation or “black propaganda.” But, apparently, it’s okay to disrupt the politics of Iceland, Ukraine, Russia and other countries, but it is called a potential “act of war” – by neocon Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona – to reveal evidence of wrongdoing or excessive secrecy on the part of the Democratic Party in the United States.
Shoe on the Other Foot
Russian President Putin, while denying any Russian government attempt to tilt the election to Trump, recently commented on the American hypocrisy about interfering in other nations’ elections while complaining about alleged interference in its own or those of its allies. He described a conversation with an unnamed Western “colleague.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin
Putin said, “I recently had a conversation with one of my colleagues. We touched upon our [Russian] alleged influence on some political processes abroad. I told him: ‘And what are you doing? You have been constantly interfering in our political life.’ And he replied: ‘It’s not us, it’s the NGOs’. I said: ‘Oh? But you pay them and write instructions for them.’ He said: ‘What kind of instructions?’ I said: ‘I have been reading them.’”
Whatever one thinks of Putin, he is not wrong in describing how various U.S.-funded NGOs, in the name of “democracy promotion,” seek to undermine governments that have ended up on Official Washington’s target list.
And another aspect of the hypocrisy permeating Official Washington’s belligerent rhetoric directed toward Russia: Aren’t the Democrats doing exactly what they accused Trump of planning to do if he had lost the Nov. 8 election, i.e., question the legitimacy of the results and thus undermine the faith of the American people in their democratic system?
For days, Trump’s unwillingness to accept, presumptively, the results of the election earned him front-page denunciations from many of the same mainstream newspapers and TV networks that are now trumpeting the unproven claims by the CIA that the Russians somehow influenced the election’s outcome by presenting some Democratic hidden facts to the American people.
Yet, this anti-Russian accusation not only undermines the American people’s faith in the election’s outcome but also represents a reckless last-ditch gamble to block Trump’s inauguration – or at least discredit him before he takes office – while using belligerent rhetoric that could push Russia and the United States closer to nuclear war.
Wouldn’t it be a good idea for the CIA to at least have hard evidence before the spy agency precipitated such a crisis?
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.
Featured Video
US Middle East Policy: The Growing Propensity for Genocide
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
The New Baghdad Pact
By Dr Bouthaina Shaaban | February 23, 2017
A recently declassified CIA document prepared in 1983, and released on 20 January 2017, shows that the United States had at the time encouraged Saddam Hussein to attack Syria, which would have led to a vicious conflict between the two countries, thus draining their resources.
The report, which was then prepared by CIA officer Graham Fuller, indicates that the US tried adamantly to convince Saddam to attack Syria under any pretense available, in order to get the two most powerful countries in the Arab East to destroy each other, turning their attention away from the Arab-Israeli conflict. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Hezbollah denies involvement in deadly attack on UNIFIL in south Lebanon
- The prospect of an expanded and far more violent war
- Canada’s Carney Revives Online Censorship Bill
- Israeli soldiers kill UNICEF truck drivers delivering water to Gaza families
- Iran defends limits on Strait of Hormuz passage
- ‘We warned you’: Hormuz Strait back to pervious state amid US blockade
- Iran rejects uranium transfer, warns of response to naval blockade
- US Middle East Policy: The Growing Propensity for Genocide
- Daniel Davis: Iran Reopens the Strait of Hormuz
- Trump taps military-grade flu pandemic architect to lead CDC amid simultaneous gain-of-function and vax development
- If Americans Knew
- Israel relegates another population to life in tents – Daily Update
- Senate again fails to block weapons to Israel
- Think the Iran war is a disaster? Blame these DC think tanks first.
- Number of Palestinian Prisoners Rises By 83% Since October 2023
- With multiple “ceasefires” in place, Israel keeps on killing in Gaza and Lebanon – Daily Update
- Mearsheimer: Israel Owns Trump
- Mark Levin and Jonathan Pollard Push for Nuking Iran
- TCN: America Enables Israel’s Crimes
- Israel’s Next Leader Will Be Just Like Bibi – but Without the Corruption
- Born into war, raised across borders: The story of Gaza’s premature babies separated from their parents amid Israel’s genocide
- No Tricks Zone
- Reality Check: Maldives Have Actually Grown In Size Or Remained Stable Over Recent Decades
- Abrupt Climate Change Also Occurred NATURALLY In The Past …25 Times During Last Ice Age
- Cave Discovery Reveals Today’s Desert Climates Were Recently Far Warmer, Wetter, Teeming With Life
- German Expert: Heat Dome Led To Record Temps In Western USA…Warmer In 1934, 1936
- New Study: No Linear Warming Or Glacier Retreat Along Northern Antarctic Peninsula Since 1980s
- An Inconvenient Tree: Uncovered In Alps… Europe Much Warmer Than Today 6000 Years Ago
- New Study Reports A 60% Slowdown In Greenland’s Ice Loss Rate In The Last Decade
- Low Intensity Tornado Wrecks Major Solar Farm, Creating A Potential Toxic Dump
- New Study Finds Warming Saves Lives…Cold Temperatures 12 Times More Deadly Than Excess Heat
- German Science Blog Accuses PIK Climate Institute Of Hallucinating Climate Tipping Points
Aletho News 