The Bad Losers (And What They Fear Losing)
Photo by Cliff | CC BY 2.0
By Diana Johnstone | December 19, 2016
Paris – If the 2016 presidential campaign was a national disgrace, the reaction of the losers is an even more disgraceful spectacle. It seems that the political machine backing Hillary Clinton can’t stand losing an election.
And why is that?
Because they are determined to impose “exceptional” America’s hegemony on the entire world, using military-backed regime changes, and Donald Trump seems poised to spoil their plans. The entire Western establishment, roughly composed of neoconservative ideologues, liberal interventionists, financial powers, NATO, mainstream media and politicians in both the United States and Western Europe, committed to remaking the Middle East to suit Israel and Saudi Arabia and to shattering impertinent Russia, have been thrown into an hysterical panic at the prospect of their joint globalization project being sabotaged by in ignorant intruder.
Donald Trump’s expressed desire to improve relations with Russia throws a monkey wrench into the plans endorsed by Hillary Clinton to “make Russia pay” for its bad attitude in the Middle East and elsewhere. If he should do what he has promised, this could be a serious blow to the aggressive NATO buildup on Russia’s European borders, not to mention serious losses to the U.S. arms industry planning to sell billions of dollars worth of superfluous weapons to NATO allies on the pretext of the “Russian threat”.
The war party’s fears may be exaggerated, inasmuch as Trump’s appointments indicate that the United States’ claim to be the “exceptional”, indispensable nation will probably survive the changes in top personnel. But the emphasis may be different. And those accustomed to absolute rule cannot tolerate the challenge.
Bad Losers On the Top
Members of the U.S. Congress, the mainstream media, the CIA and even President Obama have made fools of themselves and the nation by claiming that the Clintonite cabal lost because of Vladimir Putin. Insofar as the rest of the world takes this whining seriously, it should further increase Putin’s already considerable prestige. If true, the notion that Moscovite hacking could defeat the favorite candidate of the entire U.S. power establishment can only mean that the United States’ political structure is so fragile that a few disclosed emails can cause its collapse. A government notorious for snooping into everybody’s private communication, as well as for overthrowing one government after another by less subtle means, and whose agents boasted of scaring the Russians into re-elected the abysmally unpopular Boris Yeltsin in 1996, now seems to be crying pathetically, “Mommy, Vlady is playing with my hacking toys!”
Of course, Russians would quite naturally prefer a U.S. president who openly shies away from the possibility of starting a nuclear war with Russia. That doesn’t make Russia “an enemy”, it is just a sign of good sense. Nor does it mean that Putin is so naïve as to imagine that Moscow could throw the election by a few dirty tricks. The current Russian leaders, unlike their Washington counterparts, tend to take a longer view, rather than imagining that the course of history can be changed by a banana peel.
This whole miserable spectacle is nothing but a continuation of the Russophobia exploited by Hillary Clinton to distract from her own multiple scandals. As the worst loser in American electoral history, she must blame Russia, rather than recognize that there were multiple reasons to vote against her.
The propaganda machine has found a response to unwelcome news: it must be fake. The Washington conspiracy theorists are outdoing themselves this time. The Russian geeks supposedly knew that by revealing a few Democratic National Committee internal messages, they could ensure the election of Donald Trump. What tremendous prescience!
Obama promises retaliation against Russia for treating the United States the way the United States treats, well, Honduras (and even Russia itself until blocked by Putin). Putin retorted that so far as he knew, the United States was not a banana republic, but a great power able to protect its elections. Washington is loudly denying that. The same mainstream media who brought you Saddam’s “weapons of mass destruction” are now bringing you this preposterous conspiracy theory with straight faces.
When intelligence agencies become aware of the activities of rival intelligence agencies, they usually keep the knowledge to themselves, as part of the mutual spook game. Going public with this wild tale shows that the whole point is to persuade the American public that Trump’s election is illegitimate, in the hope of defeating him in the electoral college or, if that fails, of crippling his presidency by labeling him a “Putin stooge”.
Bad Losers On the Bottom
At least the bad losers on the top know what they are doing and have a purpose. The bad losers on the bottom are expressing emotions without clear objectives. It is false self-dramatization to call for “Resistance” as if the country had been invaded by extraterrestrials. The U.S. electoral system is outmoded and bizarre, but Trump played the game by the rules. He campaigned to win swing states, not a popular majority, and that’s what he got.
The problem isn’t Trump but a political system which reduces the people’s choice to two hated candidates, backed by big bucks.
Whatever they think or feel, the largely youthful anti-Trump protesters in the streets create an image of hedonistic consumer society’s spoiled brats who throw tantrums when they don’t get what they want. Of course, some are genuinely concerned about friends who are illegal immigrants and fear deportation. It is quite possible to organize in their defense. The protesters may be mostly disappointed Bernie Sanders supporters, but whether they like it or not, their protests amount to a continuation of the dominant themes in Hillary Clinton’s negative campaign. She ran on fear. In the absence of any economic program to respond to the needs of millions of voters who showed their preference for Sanders, and of those who turned to Trump simply because of his vague promise to create jobs, her campaign exaggerated the portent of Trump’s most politically incorrect statements, creating the illusion that Trump was a violent racist whose only program was to arouse hatred. Still worse, Hillary stigmatized millions of voters as “a basket of deplorables, racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it.” These remarks were made to an LGBT rally, as part of her identity politics campaign to win over a clientele of minorities by stigmatizing the dwindling white majority. The identity politics premise is that ethnic and sexual minorities are oppressed and thus morally superior to the white majority, which is the implied oppressor. It is this tendency to sort people into morally distinct categories that divides Americans against each other, every bit as much – or more – than Trump’s hyperbole about Mexican or Islamic immigrants. It has served to convince many devotees of political correctness to regard white working class Americans in the “fly-over” regions as enemy invaders who threaten to send them all to concentration camps.
Terrified of what Trump may do, his opponents tend to ignore what the lame ducks are actually doing. The last gasp Clintonite campaign to blame Hillary’s defeat on “fake news”, supposedly inspired by The Enemy, Russia, is a facet of the growing drive to censor the Internet – previously for child pornography, or for anti-Semitism, and next on the pretext of combating “fake news”, meaning whatever goes contrary to the official line. This threat to freedom of expression is more sinister than eleven-year-old locker-room macho boasts by Trump.
There will and should be strong political opposition to whatever reactionary domestic policies are adopted by the Trump administration. But such opposition should define the issues and work for specific goals, instead of expressing a global rejection that is non-functional.
The hysterical anti-Trump reaction is unable to grasp the implications of the campaign to blame Hillary’s defeat on Putin. Do the kids in the street really want war with Russia? I doubt it. But they do not perceive that for all its glaring faults, the Trump presidency provides an opportunity to avoid war with Russia. This is a window of opportunity than will be slammed shut if the Clintonite establishment and the War Party get their way. Whether they realize it or not, the street protesters are helping that establishment delegitimatize Trump and sabotage the one positive element in his program: peace with Russia.
Adjustments in the Enemy List
By its fatally flawed choices in the Middle East and in Ukraine, the United States foreign policy establishment has driven itself into a collision course with Russia. Unable to admit that the United States backed the wrong horse in Syria, the War Party sees no choice but to demonize and “punish” Russia, with the risk of dipping into the Pentagon’s vast arsenal of argument-winning nuclear weapons. Anti-Russian propaganda has reached extremes exceeding those of the Cold War. What can put an end to this madness? What can serve to create normal attitudes and relations concerning that proud nation which aspires primarily simply to be respected and to promote old-fashioned international law based on national sovereignty? How can the United States make peace with Russia?
It is clear that in capitalist, chauvinist America there is no prospect of shifting to a peace policy by putting David Swanson in charge of U.S. foreign relations, however desirable that might be.
Realistically, the only way that capitalist America can make peace with Russia is through capitalist business. And that is what Trump proposes to do.
A bit of realism helps when dealing with reality. The choice of Exxon CEO Rex W. Tillerson as Secretary of State is the best step toward ending the current race toward war with Russia. “Make money not war” is the pragmatic American slogan for peace at this stage.
But the “resistance” to Trump is not likely to show support for this pragmatic peace policy. It is already encountering opposition in the war-loving Congress. Instead, by shouting “Trump is not my President!” the disoriented leftists are inadvertently strengthening that opposition, which is worse than Trump.
Avoiding war with Russia will not transform Washington into a haven of sweetness and light. Trump is an aggressive personality, and the opportunistic aggressive personalities of the establishment, notably his pro-Israel friends, will help him turn U.S. aggression in other directions. Trump’s attachment to Israel is nothing new, but appears to be particularly uncompromising. In that context, Trump’s extremely harsh words for Iran are ominous, and one must hope that his stated rejection of “regime change” war applies in that case as well as others. Trump’s anti-China rhetoric also sounds bad, but in the long run there is little he or the United States can do to prevent China from becoming once again the “indispensable nation” it used to be during most of its long history. Tougher trade deals will not lead to the Apocalypse.
The Failure of the Intellectual Establishment
The sad image today of Americans as bad losers, unable to face reality, must be attributed in part to the ethical failure of the so-called 1968 generation of intellectuals. In a democratic society, the first duty of men and women with the time, inclination and capacity to study reality seriously is to share their knowledge and understanding with people who lack those privileges. The generation of academics whose political consciousness was temporarily raised by the tragedy of the Vietnam war should have realized that their duty was to use their position to educate the American people, notably about the world that Washington proposed to redesign and its history. However, the new phase of hedonistic capitalism offered the greatest opportunities for intellectuals in manipulating the masses rather than educating them. The consumer society marketing even invented a new phase of identity politics, with the youth market, the gay market, and so on. In the universities, a critical mass of “progressive” academics retreated into the abstract world of post-modernism, and have ended up focusing the attention of youth on how to react to other people’s sex lives or “gender identification”. Such esoteric stuff feeds the publish or perish syndrome and prevents academics in the humanities from having to teach anything that might be deemed critical of U.S. military spending or its failing efforts to assert its eternal domination of the globalized world. The worst controversy coming out of academia concerns who should use which toilet.
If the intellectual snobs on the coasts can sneer with such self-satisfaction at the poor “deplorables” in flyover land, it is because they themselves have ignored their primary social duty of seeking truth and sharing it. Scolding people for their “wrong” attitudes while setting the social example of unrestrained personal promotion can only produce the anti-elite reaction called “populism”. Trump is the revenge of people who feel manipulated, forgotten and despised. However flawed, he is the only choice they had to express their revolt in a rotten election. The United States is deeply divided ideologically, as well as economically. The United States is threatened, not by Russia, but by its own internal divisions and the inability of Americans not only to understand the world, but even to understand each other.
Diana Johnstone is the author of Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions. Her new book is Queen of Chaos: the Misadventures of Hillary Clinton. She can be reached at diana.johnstone@wanadoo.fr
Is the United States facing a coup d’etat?
By Annie Machon | RT | December 18, 2016
I fear that soon the curtain will finally be brought down on the puppet show that passes for democracy in America, and those who for decades have been pulling the strings will come raging into the light, red in tooth and claw.
The illusion that the people really have a choice of president every four years will be irreparably shattered.
The old British truism that “it does not matter whom you vote for, the government always gets in” can also be applied to the US presidency – usually all candidates are approved and massively funded by the modern incarnation of Eisenhower’s infamous “military-industrial complex” and then assiduously supported by cheerleaders in the old corporate media, leaving the electorate with damn little meaningful choice.
This has been true from Reagan to Bush the First, from Clinton the First to Bush the Second and then on to Obama (the First?). It was supposed to have been true in the most recent election, where the elite’s choice pointed towards a contest between Bush the Third or Clinton the Second, either one of whom would have worked to the interests of Wall Street and continued the increasingly dangerous, interventionist, and hawkish global US foreign policy.
As a little aside, since when did the USA fall for the concept of inherited political power, a de facto new monarchy? But then an oxymoronic billionaire “man of the people” crow-barred his way into the contest and slashed all the strings of puppetry and privilege. Enter, stage left, the bullish, seemingly bigoted, and bemusingly successful Donald Trump.
As a Brit, currently cut adrift in a pre-Brexit Europe, I hold no brief for the dangers he may or may not pose to the much-vaunted American way of life in the good ol’ homeland. However, as I have stated before, with The Donald’s apparent determination to follow a strategy of US isolationism, to cut a deal in Syria, and effect a rapprochement with Russia, the wider world may just have dodged a nuclear bullet or at least an era of unending war.
Plus, the American people appear to have wanted a change, any change, from the hereditary privilege of the Washington elite. That change could well have come from another outsider, Bernie Sanders, if he had been given a fair chance. However, as we know from the leaked Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Podesta emails, the Democratic Party would stop at nothing to ensure the anointing of the chosen one – Clinton the Second.
So why do I think that there may be a coup d’etat looming in America’s very near future?
Trump was elected on the promise of “draining the swamp” of the Washington political and corporate elites – this is deeply threatening to the vested interests, not least the CIA, whose daily briefings have been spurned by Trump, thereby rupturing the co-dependent relationship between the president and the politically compromised intelligence agencies that has existed since 9/11 and which has caused so much global harm, starting with the ill-informed and illegal rush to war in Iraq in 2003. I shall return to the CIA later.
The American elite is facing the inauguration of a self-professed outsider who is threatening all their easily-bought privileges, one who seems more interested in cutting deals with countries than bombing them. Nor do they like his nominees to high office, especially that of Rex Tillerson, the current CEO of ExxonMobil, to the post of Secretary of State – after all, he has a track record of cutting deals too and with the Russians no less. Such a person as the top US diplomat might, gasp, help to bring to a close the new not-so-Cold War that is so important to the hawkish warmongers and their masters in the thriving US arms and security industry.
Therefore, once Trump had been declared the official Republican nominee, the establishment push-back was all too predictable. The story of “Russian hacking” was initially trailed merely as media bait to divert the press from the real story – Hillary Clinton’s potentially illegal use of a private web server while acting as Secretary of State.
Then in November Wikileaks began to release even more damaging emails from the DNC and the Podesta files, which demonstrated quite how the Democrats had stitched up the candidacy of Bernie Sanders. The Democrats immediately cried foul – it must indeed be the Russians hacking their files and handing the information to Wikileaks (now cast as a ‘Russian stooge’ – a move extremely useful in America’s ongoing attempts to frame the prosecution of Wikileaks editor Julian Assange as “espionage”, even though he is an Australian publisher stuck in Europe).
Unusually, Assange went on the record to say the emails Wikileaks published did not come from the Russians: Wikileaks traditionally refuses to discuss its sources.
Then former UK Ambassador and Wikileaks ally, Craig Murray, went public by saying that, while he was in Washington earlier this year, he was given files that were then published on Wikileaks. His view is that the information came from a Democrat whistleblower with legal access – it was a leak by an insider, not a hack by an outsider.
Also earlier this week a group of former senior US intelligence officials, including the former Technical Director of the NSA, wrote an open letter to Congress explaining that, if indeed the Russians had hacked the DNC, the NSA would have been able to provide evidence to to prove this. Yet, at such a time of potential constitutional crisis, none has been forthcoming, either directly or via the CIA, even in the face of calls for the usual congressional hearings and special investigations.
So there is apparently no substantive evidence of Russian hacking during the election. However, there does appear to be some evidence around the issue of Clinton’s illegal server.
Eleven days before the American election the Director of the FBI, in the wake of the Anthony Weiner sexting case, reopened the investigation into the Clinton server scandal and published the fact, as he said, in the national interest. This caused howls of rage from the Democrats, and again “Russian hacking” was hyped in the media, thereby easily conflating the concept of the illegal server, the alleged hacks, the Russians, into one big lump of geek-speak that most people would not have the will to disentangle. Two days before the election, James Comey backed down, but the hacking seed had germinated.
Now it is coming into bloom – last week the CIA re-entered the fray, with reports about Russian hacking leaked to both the Washington Post and the New York Times. Since then, nameless “intelligence sources” and grandstanding politicians have been falling over themselves to speak to this subject, but it all remains very evidence-lite.
Plus there is apparently by no means a consensus among all seventeen of the US intelligence agencies with regards to the CIA’s claims. Indeed, until recently the FBI has directly contradicted them, and the FBI is in the business of pulling together evidence to prosecute a case under law.
That, now, is all changing. Only recently it was reported that the FBI is now supporting the CIA’s “beliefs”. I was puzzled about this volte face until I read this prominent op-ed by Clinton campaign manager, John Podesta, in the Washington Post where, in addition to blaming the Russians for “hacking the election” (note, no longer just the DNC emails and his own), he is attacking the FBI and its head, James Comey, and suggesting that the organisation is broken and “what’s broken in the FBI must be fixed and quickly”. Perhaps, for whatever reason, Comey can see the overturning of the election result as a real possibility now and is desperately rowing back.
In parallel, it seems that the CIA is fearful of retaliation if, against all their endeavors, Donald Trump does indeed get sworn in as the 45th president of the USA on 20th January next year. That goes some way to explaining why they are challenging the election result by pushing this line that the Russians “hacked the election”, the new headline that has morphed through the global MSM over the last couple of days from belief to established fact, with no evidence produced.
The CIA claims that Russian “hackers” were delving around in the emails of both the Democratic National Congress as well as the Republican equivalent for months before the November election. And yet only the Democrat emails were, the CIA asserts, passed on to Wikileaks and thereby published to order to sway the election result. Where is the proof? They have produced no evidence, in the face of of expert testimony from former senior intelligence officers as well as direct assertions from Wikileaks about the source of the DNC leaks. Indeed, the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, is refusing to brief the Congressional intelligence committees, despite repeated requests from the members.
That has not stopped the global mainstream media from whipping up an imagined new truth: that the Russians “hacked the election”. And the media frenzy has grown exponentially over the last few days.
This is why I fear an American coup d’etat, possibly starting as soon as 19th December, the date when the Electoral College meets to ratify the election of Trump. All this Cold-War, anti-Russian hysteria is being used as a stick to beat the Electoral College members into ignoring their duty and vote in the way directed by the majority of the people of their state whom they are pledged to represent. Plus, who knows what juicy carrots may also have been offered?
If enough prove faithless to the electorate, then the election result will be overturned and Clinton the Second could ascend to the American throne. Even if the Electoral College does its sworn duty to the people, I fear that the CIA anti-Trump campaign may now have gathered so much momentum that the establishment may still find a way, any way possible, to stop Trump’s inauguration as president – after all we still have five weeks to get through before 20th January.
Trump is a known unknown and retains potential possibilities intriguing to the wider world. However, if the Electoral College starts a coup d’etat on Monday and against all constitutional norms the coronation of Clinton proceeds, we know all too well what lies ahead: war.
Annie Machon is a former intelligence officer for MI5, the UK Security Service, who resigned in the late 1990s to blow the whistle on the spies’ incompetence and crimes with her ex-partner, David Shayler. Drawing on her varied experiences, she is now a public speaker, writer, media pundit, international tour and event organiser, political campaigner, and PR consultant. She is also now the Director of LEAP, Europe. She has a rare perspective both on the inner workings of governments, intelligence agencies and the media, as well as the wider implications for the need for increased openness and accountability in both public and private sectors.
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.
THE CIA MOVES TO INVALIDATE U.S. PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS BY BLAMING RUSSIAN HACKING
By The_Real_Fly | ZeroHedge | Dec 10, 2016
It’s happening. After careful analysis of all the media punditry and the ‘leaks’ coming out from the CIA, I can only conclude that there is a concerted effort taking place to invalidate the U.S. elections, in an effort to unseat Donald Trump. Last night the Washington Post reported a leak from inside the CIA, saying they had a report that showed evidence that Russia hacked the elections in order to elect Donald Trump. They’re being very specific about that point. Pay attention.
Source: Reuters
The CIA has concluded that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help President-elect Donald Trump win the White House, and not just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, the Washington Post reported on Friday.
Citing U.S. officials briefed on the matter, the Post said intelligence agencies had identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and others, including the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, to WikiLeaks.
The officials described the individuals as people known to the intelligence community who were part of a wider Russian operation to boost Trump and reduce Clinton’s chances of winning the election.
“It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,” the Post quoted a senior U.S. official as saying. “That’s the consensus view.”
The Post said the official had been briefed on an intelligence presentation made by the Central Intelligence Agency to key U.S. senators behind closed-doors last week.
The CIA, in what the Post said was a secret assessment, cited a growing body of evidence from multiple sources. Briefers told the senators it was now “quite clear” that electing Trump was Russia’s goal, the Post quoted officials as saying on condition of anonymity.
In October, the U.S. government formally accused Russia of a campaign of cyber attacks against Democratic Party organizations ahead of the Nov. 8 presidential election.
President Barack Obama has said he warned Russian President Vladimir Putin about consequences for the attacks. But Russian officials have denied all accusations of interference in the U.S. election.
A CIA spokeswoman said the agency had no comment on the report.
In response to the Washpo article, the Trump campaign issued the following statement.
“These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction,” Trump’s representatives said in a statement attributed to the transition team. “The election ended a long time ago … It’s now time to move on and ‘Make America Great Again.'”
Bob Baer, former CIA and current ‘Hunting Hitler’ shill, said in an interview today that if the evidence regarding Russia hacking the elections are true, then the only logical thing to do is to hold new elections.
‘If the evidence is there, I don’t see any other way than to vote again.’
Bear in mind, this is all in response to the Wikileaks revelations about the abject corruptness of both the DNC and the Hillary Clinton camp, via the Podesta emails. Instead of offering an explanation for their egregious actions, the elite cadre inside of the Clinton camp have instead gone on the offensive to blame the messenger. The media is running with this story with long strides, not only suggesting that Russia hacked the elections, but also saying Trump was — in fact — a ‘witting asset’ of Moscow. What’s next, an arrest order for Trump and his campaign staff for being covert Russian spies?
‘This nation was attacked by a cyber warfare operation.’
Whatever happened to the smug certainty that the elections wouldn’t be rigged? I suppose what Obama meant was they wouldn’t be rigged had Hillary won, yes?
Paul Joseph Watson offers some valuable insight, in regard to the naked hypocrisy of America’s ruling elite:
Russia interfered in the election! (no evidence).
LEFT FREAKS OUT.
Saudi Arabia provably bankrolled Clinton’s campaign
MEH
Trump’s Son-In-Law Funds Israeli Settlement Projects
MEMO | December 6, 2016
In recent years, the parents of Jared Kushner, the son-in-law and trusted confidant of US President-elect Donald Trump, have donated tens of thousands of dollars to organisations and institutions located in illegal West Bank settlements, according to their tax forms.
Kushner’s family donates a few million dollars a year on average to charitable causes through the Charles and Seryl Kushner Foundation, which Jared sits on the board of along with his brother and two sisters. The foundation was established in 1997.
Among organisations and institutions in the occupied West Bank that receive funding from the Kushner family, the American Friends of Beit El Yeshiva (religious school) received $20,000 in 2013.
Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reported that the president of American Friends of Beit El Yeshiva, whose offices are located in New York, is David Friedman, Trump’s senior adviser on Israel affairs. Friedman, who has served as Trump’s real estate lawyer for the past 15 years and is considered to be very close to the president-elect, has expressed interest in becoming the next US ambassador to Israel, Haaretz added.
Freidman is also seen as a top contender for the former Arkansas governor and presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, who was also keynote speaker at last year’s fundraising dinner for the Beit El Yeshiva American friends group.
The list of organisations that received donations from Kushner’s family foundation has included the Etzion Foundation, whose US fundraising offices are located in New Jersey. The foundation supports Yeshivat Har Etzion, Kibbutz Migdal Oz and the Herzog College teachers’ training institution – all are located in the illegal Gush Etzion settlement bloc outside Jerusalem. In 2012, the Kushner family foundation donated $5,000 to the Etzion Foundation, in addition to another $10,000 in 2013.
Another recipient of Kushner funding in Gush Etzion, which headquartered in the settlement of Efrat, is Ohr Torah Stone which received $5,000 in 2011.
The Od Yosef Chai yeshiva, a religious school in the occupied West Bank, was granted $500 by the Kushner family. According to Haaretz, this particular school did not receive any funding from the Israeli government, as it had been involved in launching violent attacks against nearby Palestinian villages and Israeli security forces.
In 2014, the Kushner family pledged $18 million to the Shaare Zedek Medical Centre in Jerusalem, in addition to the $2 million it had already committed earlier. The Kushners have a history of supporting hospitals – both in Israel and the United States – but this was by far the largest gift given by the family to a single medical institution, Haaretz noted.
Another key beneficiary of Kushner charity in Israel is the Israeli army. Between 2011 and 2013, the foundation donated a total of $315,000 to Friends of the IDF, on whose board Jared serves.
Among other institutions and organisations the Kushners have supported in Israel in the past four years, are the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra ($2,500); the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design ($1,000); United Hatzalah ($70,000); the Israel Cancer Research Fund ($10,000); Meir Panim Lachayal, another organisation that supports Israeli soldiers ($4,000); the Shalva Children’s Centre ($20,000); Ma’ayanei Yeshua Hospital ($25,000); and the Rabin Medical Centre ($23,000).
In the United States, the family foundation supports many Jewish day schools, charities and cultural centres. In recent years, it has contributed close to $30,000 to various institutions operated by Chabad – the ultra-Orthodox outreach organization.
One of the single largest beneficiaries of Kushner contributions in recent years has been the Ramaz School in Manhattan which received $250,000. Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, the former principal of Ramaz, supervised Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka’s conversion before she married Jared.
Last November, the Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely welcomed suggestions that US President-elect Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner could be appointed as a special envoy to broker peace in the Middle East.
Trump Calls For Punishing Those Who Burn The American Flag
By Jonathon Turley | November 29, 2016
Donald Trump has set off a new controversy with a signature early morning tweet. Trump lashed out at those who burn American flags and said that they should be punished for their actions. The problem is that this question was already answered by the Supreme Court, which found that such acts (while despicable) are constitutionally protected under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Early this morning, Trump went on Twitter to say: “Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag – if they do, there must be consequences – perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!”
I have long been critical of those who burn our flag, which I view as a symbol of our constitutional freedoms and the sacrifice of generations to preserve this Republic. However, there are many things that people say or do that I find disturbing or insulting. That does not alter the fact that they are protected expressions of free speech.
President-Elect Trump does not appear to see it that way. Yet, both the Constitution and the Supreme Court stand in the way of punitive measures for flag burners. Having said that, Trump’s view has been shared by various justices in history including such liberal icons as Chief Justice Earl Warren in his dissenting opinion in Street v. New York, 394 U.S. 576 (1969). Likewise, Hillary Clinton supported such a law in 2005.
Nevertheless, in the United States, the destruction of the flag is a protected form of free speech. In Texas v. Johnson, 491 U.S. 397 (1989), the Supreme Court voted 5-4 that flag burning was protected speech under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. It is considered one of the core cases defining free speech in the United States. Brennan was joined by Marshall, Blackmun, Scalia, and Kennedy (Kennedy wrote a concurrence). I agree with the decision as did conservatives like Scalia, who Trump has expressed great admiration for. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote a powerful concurrence where he famously stated:
Justice Kennedy wrote a concurrence with Brennan’s opinion.[3] Kennedy wrote:For we are presented with a clear and simple statute to be judged against a pure command of the Constitution. The outcome can be laid at no door but ours. The hard fact is that sometimes we must make decisions we do not like. We make them because they are right, right in the sense that the law and the Constitution, as we see them, compel the result. And so great is our commitment to the process that, except in the rare case, we do not pause to express distaste for the result, perhaps for fear of undermining a valued principle that dictates the decision. This is one of those rare cases.
Though symbols often are what we ourselves make of them, the flag is constant in expressing beliefs Americans share, beliefs in law and peace and that freedom which sustains the human spirit. The case here today forces recognition of the costs to which those beliefs commit us. It is poignant but fundamental that the flag protects those who hold it in contempt.
Congress has shown the same opposition to the decision as Trump. It passed the 1989 Flag Protection Act to make it a federal crime to desecrate the flag. That law was struck down in United States v. Eichman, 496 U.S. 310 (1990). The Court ruled that “the Government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.”
Various congressional members have also sought to pass a constitutional amendment on flag desecration but the proposed amendment has failed in the Senate. It has been ten years since the last serious effort has been made for an amendment on the issue. Trump aides might argue that he was not questioning the legitimacy of the decision but supporting a constitutional amendment.
I understand Trump’s anger and I indeed share it when I see the flag burned. However, you do not protect the flag by diminishing the very thing is represented: our constitutional freedoms.
Of course, while Trump cannot change the meaning of the Constitution, he can change the make up of the Court (or support a Flag-Desecration Amendment). Ironically, by replacing Scalia with someone who does not hold as strong a belief in First Amendment rights, he could shift the vote toward a reversal of the 1989 precedent. I hope that that is not the case. It could place this country on a slippery slope of criminalized speech. I prefer to live in a country where tweets and protests are both given ample protection.
Trump taps school vouchers proponent Betsy DeVos to be secretary of education
RT | November 23, 2016
President-elect Donald Trump will nominate Michigan philanthropist and chair of the education organization American Federation of Children Elisabeth ‘Betsy’ DeVos to be his secretary of education.
Trump called his pick “a brilliant and passionate education advocate.”
“Under her leadership we will reform the U.S. education system and break the bureaucracy that is holding our children back so that we can deliver world-class education and school choice to all families,” the president-elect said in a statement.
DeVos is a former chair of the Michigan Republican Party who has never worked in public education. Her children attended private Christian schools. As the chairwoman of American Federation of Children, she is a proponent of the school choice movement, which calls for vouchers that allow families to use federal funds to cover the cost of education at private schools. She is also in favor of charter schools, but not of state regulation of them. Michigan’s charter schools are among the least regulated in the country, thanks to the DeVos family influence, Chalkbeat reported.
“There are a lot of schools that are doing poorly and charter authorizers do not seem to be taking the necessary actions to either improve performance or close those underperforming charters,” current US Secretary of Education John King told Chalkbeat about Michigan in October.
If confirmed, DeVos would replace King, who was confirmed in March 2016.
Although Trump has vocally stated his opposition to the Common Core curriculum ‒ shared learning standards adopted by most states ‒ DeVos says she supports “high standards, strong accountability, and local control,” but is opposed to how the curriculum got turned into “a federalized boondoggle.” However, she is on the board of the Foundation for Excellence in Education, a group founded by former Florida Governor Jeb Bush that promotes both school choice and Common Core.
DeVos met with Trump on Saturday in New Jersey, and the president-elect’s team said that the conversation “focused on the Common Core mission, and setting higher national standards and promoting the growth of school choice across the nation,” according to Education Week.
Her brother is Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, a notorious mercenary company. Her father-in-law, Richard DeVos, co-founded Amway ‒ a multi-level marketing company that mainly sells health, beauty and home care products ‒ and also owns the Orlando Magic basketball team in Florida.
In 1980, the Department of Education was spun off from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, which was created in 1953. Its mission is “to promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness by fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access.”
Agencies under its purview include Federal Student Aid, the Center for Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships, and several White House initiatives. Notable secretaries of education include William Bennett (1985-1988), now Senator Lamar Alexander (R-Tennessee; 1991-1993) and Arne Duncan (2009-2016). The secretary of education is 16th in the presidential line of succession.
The National Education Association decried the nomination, arguing that DeVos “has consistently pushed a corporate agenda.”
DeVos’ “efforts over the years have done more to undermine public education than support students,” NEA President Lily Eskelsen Garcia said in a statement. “She has consistently pushed a corporate agenda to privatize, de-professionalize and impose cookie-cutter solutions to public education. By nominating Betsy DeVos, the Trump administration has demonstrated just how out of touch it is with what works best for students, parents, educators and communities.”
Read more:
Media falsely spins Trump’s NYT climate comments – Trump cited Climategate, restated skepticism of ‘global warming’
By Marc Morano – Climate Depot – November 23, 2016
The media spin on President Elect Donald J. Trump’s sit down with the New York Times on November 22, can only be described as dishonest. Trump appears to soften stance on climate change & Donald Trump backflips on climate change …
The ‘fake news’ that Trump had somehow moderated or changed his “global warming” views was not supported by the full transcript of the meeting. […]
Trump also told resident NYT warmist Tom Friedman: ‘A lot of smart people disagree with you’ on climate change. (Note: Friedman has some wacky views: Flashback 2009: NYT’s Tom Friedman lauds China’s eco-policies: ‘One party can just impose politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward’)
Trump’s climate science view that there is “some connectivity” between humans and climate is squarely a skeptical climate view. Trump explained, “There is some, something. It depends on how much.”
Trump’s views are shared by prominent skeptical scientists. University of London professor emeritus Philip Stott has said: “The fundamental point has always been this. Climate change is governed by hundreds of factors, or variables, and the very idea that we can manage climate change predictably by understanding and manipulating at the margins one politically selected factor (CO2) is as misguided as it gets.” “It’s scientific nonsense,” Stott added. Stott is featured in new skeptical climate change documentary Climate Hustle.
Once again, Trump was 100% accurate as very prominent scientists are bailing out of the so-called climate “consensus.”
Green Guru James Lovelock reverses belief in ‘global warming’: Now says ‘I’m not sure the whole thing isn’t crazy’ – Condemns green movement: ‘It’s a religion really, It’s totally unscientific’
Politically Left Scientist Dissents – Calls President Obama ‘delusional’ on global warming
Trump cites correctly Climategate scandal: ‘They say they have science on one side but then they also have those horrible emails that were sent between scientists… Terrible. Where they got caught, you know, so you see that and you say, what’s this all about.’ See: Watch & Read: 7th anniversary of Climategate – The UN Top Scientists Exposed
Trump cited his uncle, a skeptical MIT scientist: ‘My uncle was for 35 years a professor at M.I.T. He was a great engineer, scientist. He was a great guy. And he was … a long time ago, he had feelings — this was a long time ago — he had feelings on this subject.’ (Yes, other MIT scientists are very skeptical as well. See: MIT Climate Scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen Mocks 97% Consensus: ‘It is propaganda’
It is also worth noting that Trump’s often cited 2012 tweet about climate change stating “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive,” was clearly a joke and he has said it was a joke. It is further worth noting that climate skeptics do not believe the concept of “climate change” was “created” by China.
And in what has been described as “fake news”, the publisher of NYT tried to sell CO2-induced storms to Trump; but Trump refused to accept the claim.<
NYT’s Arthur Sulzberger: ‘We saw what these storms are now doing, right? We’ve seen it personally. Straight up.’
Trump countered: ‘We’ve had storms always, Arthur.’
Trump is accurately citing the latest climate science by noting that extreme weather is not getting worse. See: 2016 ‘State of the Climate Report’
- The U.S. has had no Category 3 or larger hurricane make landfall since 2005 – the longest spell since the Civil War.
- Strong F3 or larger tornadoes have been in decline since the 1970s.
- Sea level rise rates have been steady for over a century, with recent deceleration.
- Droughts and floods are neither historically unusual nor caused by mankind, and there is no evidence we are currently having any unusual weather.
Trump’s claim to have an “open mind” on U.S. climate policy and his comment that “I’m going to take a look at” withdrawing from the UN Paris agreement are more nuanced than his previous blunt statements that the U.S. will cancel the UN agreement. But those comments in the context of the interview are hardly a flip-flop or major signal of changing views on the issue. … Full transcript
Draining the Swamp at State
Photo by thierry ehrmann | CC BY 2.0
By Renee Parsons | CounterPunch | November 22, 2016
If there is one hopeful sign in the Presidency of Donald Trump, it is his pledge to ‘drain the swamp’ as it relates to those special insider interests who run the show and those outsider interests who own the show.
It is a hugely ambitious task and hardly achievable in four short years but there is a branch of the Federal government where the President-elect (PE) would find immediate results and bring the satisfaction that American foreign policy would no longer be dependent on globalization or spreading unwinnable wars on wasteful adventurism overseas. If the PE is, in fact, favorable towards a non-interventionist role, the opportunity for a thorough housecleaning and a reshape of the State Department is Now. According to current reports, the struggle is underway within the transition team for the soul of the State Department and ultimately the Trump Administration.
As HRC continued her crazed war talk about Syria and defended NATO encroachment on Russian borders while uttering unprovoked attacks on Russian President Vladimir Putin, there was every reason to believe that minutes after concluding her inaugural address, HRC would have walked off the stage and signed the order initiating a No-Fly Zone over Syria, right then and there. And bingo-bango-bongo, Putin would have responded. I knew it as sure as I know my own name. At some point it became clear, as Green Party candidate Jill Stein said so precisely, HRC would be more dangerous than Donald Trump.
Even as he talked about modernizing the US military, Trump’s campaign rhetoric about disentangling from foreign entanglements, making NATO nations pay their fair share and dialogue with Putin rather than the usual “Blame it on the Russians” bombast, struck a chord; there was reason for hope. Unlike Bernie Sanders who has proven to be just another Democrat, Trump dared to question whether there were any ‘moderate’ rebels (aka terrorists) in Syria, the mythical existence of which justified the Obama administration’s lust to overthrow the Assad government. Trump’s positions, limited elucidation though there was, were always far more reasonable than HRC’s inflammatory saber rattling and aggressive militarism that stirred justified fears of WW III. If anyone bothered to listen, Trump was voicing foreign policy concerns that not one Democrat in Congress has dared to articulate in the last eight years.
While I am in the ‘wait and see’ category of pragmatists regarding the PE, I agree with Robert Parry’s point that Trump has the opportunity to be a truly great president IF, and it’s a big IF, he uses his inner grit and a street savvy to break the globalist/neoliberal/neocon stranglehold (with its links to shadow government) on foreign policy at the State Department, a concept that President Barack Obama never understood or even aspired to. The PE appointment for Secretary of State which is currently an intense subject of debate within the transition will indicate which direction the PE will take US foreign policy.
In the early days after the election Trump communication advisor Jason Miller offered reassurance with the following:
“There will be non-traditional names, a number of people who have had wide-ranging success in a number of different fields; wide-ranging success in business … People will be excited when they see the type of leaders the President-elect brings into this administration.”
One not so non-traditional and not so exciting appointment is that of Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS), a member of the House Intelligence Committee and the Select Committee on Benghazi, as Director of the CIA. Pompeo, who graduated first in his class at West Point and then Harvard Law School and was a backer of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fl) during the primaries, would hardly qualify as anything more than the ‘same old’ school of CIA Directors that have dominated the agency for decades under the Republicrats. Pompeo, known as a rabid political ideologue, is not expected to break with the past and can be expected to continue the agency’s widespread unconstitutional violations with an unabashed torture program as if that ever revealed reliable ‘actionable intelligence’ or curtailed dedicated terrorists. So what message does that appointment send?
During their interview, it would be interesting to know if there was discussion that PE Trump’s opposition to the Iran nuclear treaty has been largely based on non-inclusive trade concerns. If, in fact, the PE’s view of foreign policy includes trade as a legitimate tool for negotiations, the House of Representatives recent party-line vote in rejection (a plum for Israel) of the sale of Boeing and Airbus commercial jets to Iran would be considered a diplomatic setback (under a Trump Administration).
Yet to be determined is whether Trump will roll over and appoint his good friend Rudy Giuliani who has no diplomatic experience whatsoever to qualify him and will inevitably be utterly lost in the State Department’s bureaucracy and political snake pit – or will the President-elect allow himself to be pressured to accept former Bush UN Ambassador, the wacky conniving John Bolton who will owe his allegiance to the professional warmongering neocons. Sen. Rand Paul (R-SC) who frequently shows some good Libertarian common sense on foreign policy issues, has announced his intention to block either nomination.
While former Presidential candidate Mitt Romney who has been recently added to the list for Secretary of State would add a certain gravitas, he is another not non-traditional name with little first hand, on the ground knowledge of today’s foreign policy complexities. More importantly, does Romney know how to clean house?
As soon as the votes were counted, certain neo-cons jumped Clinton’s sinking ship without so much as a fond adieu and, being shy, retiring types, sought to elbow their way onto the Trump Ship of State. More recently, Eliot Cohen’s attempts at a tryst soured as he expressed displeasure after having ‘made the case that young conservatives should volunteer to serve” now concluded he ‘was wrong’.
Other neo-con names floating as transition team members have been the especially slimy, Richard Perle known appropriately as the Prince of Darkness, foreign policy analyst Michael Ledeen who supports the use violence to spread democracy and noted Islamaphobe Frank Gaffney, who denied he was on the transition team and had ever been contacted.
If the PE and his closest aides are naïve enough to believe that a conciliatory gesture will engender cooperation from the foreign policy establishment, they are woefully misguided. If Trump fails to rein in the neocons and war hawk neolibs (including assistant secretaries, deputy assistant secretaries and lower level staff) with dispatch, they will quickly discover that if you get into the swamp with alligators, you had better be prepared to wrestle alligators.
At the same time, the reality is that the estimated hundreds of embedded neocons and neolibs at State have the potential, as they clean out their desks, to pilfer (an ultra serious legal violation) the last decade worth of top secret and confidential memos, notes and reports, contacts and network names and other vital information necessary for the transition of foreign policy to the Trump administration. It would not be surprising for a situation to develop similar to some months ago when fifty plus State mid level careerists ‘leaked’ an internal memo criticizing President Obama’s policy on Syria without any apparent repercussions. If the Trump Administration takes foreign policy in a new, improved direction, how will the new President deal with being subtly, or not so subtly, undermined by his own staff? There is no reason to believe that the most virulent elements of the US foreign policy establishment closely tied to Israel will ‘go quietly into that good night.’
Less than a week after the election, PE had his first phone conversation with Putin and they reportedly talked extensively about Syria and promised a face-to-face in the near future. Moscow reported that Putin told Trump he was ready for “dialogue of partnership based on principles of equality, mutual response and non-interference in the internal affairs of each other.” The Trump transition team statement said that the PE told Putin ‘he is very much looking forward to having a strong and enduring relationship with Russia and the people of Russia” which is considerably more encouraging than what HRC would have told Putin if she had been elected.
In a Wall Street Journal interview three days after the election, Trump suggested a shift from Obama’s foreign policy objectives regarding support for the Syrian opposition and its insistence on ousting Syrian president Bashar al Assad. “We’re backing rebels against Syria and we have no idea who these people are.”
Not unexpectedly, Trump named retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (2012-2014), as his National Security Adviser succeeding Obama NSA Susan Rice. Flynn resigned or was pushed out of the DIA because of a public difference of opinion regarding the Obama Syria strategy which was to support those mythical ‘moderate’ Syrian rebels to oust Assad rather than focus on the destruction of ISIS. Flynn is being portrayed by the NY Times and others as ‘hotheaded’ and irresponsible with ‘poor judgment’ as well as an “alarming pick” for NSA.
In an interview with Fareed Zakaria in 2015 which was replayed on CNN since his appointment, Flynn spoke about threats from ISIS: “We are not winning, we are participating. We need to do more to defeat this problem than just go kill a couple more radical Islamists.” Flynn took the discussion beyond a military solution citing the need for an “economic transformation beyond building schools” while creating “other aspects of energy to achieve that economic transformation” and the use of “water as a means to increase the economic health of the region.”
Zakaria debunked Flynn’s thoughts with “that would require a huge transformation of the whole region” and would be “incredibly costly, laborious and generational. I think the Obama Administration would say it’s not worth the effort; not the kind of existential threat to the US that would warrant that massive expenditure of time, money and resources.” As if the US war-related $20 trillion deficit is peanuts.
Currently, Flynn is being criticized for comments referring to radical Islamists as ‘a political ideology hiding behind the notion of it being a religion” which brings to mind a discussion re the true tenets of Islam that I had with a Florida Imam. His comparison was that as certain fundamental Christians have distorted Christianity to suit their political agenda; so too have certain Moslems used their religion to justify their ideology. The fact that Flynn sees that distinction is encouraging.
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
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Is Israel Uniquely Evil?
By Irfan Chowdhury | Palestine Chronicle | July 18, 2020
… Israel has been carrying out the longest-running military occupation in modern history and the longest-running siege in modern history. These two facts alone render Israel unique in terms of the scope of its brutality and criminality.
There are other respects in which Israel stands out from other countries in its use of terror and violence; for example, it is one of the most aggressive countries in the world, having waged wars of aggression against Lebanon in 1978, 1982, 1993, 1996 and 2006, and against Gaza in 2004, 2006, 2008/9, 2012 and 2014, killing huge numbers of civilians in the process (all while issuing threats and carrying out various covert attacks against Iran, which are all in violation of the UN Charter). … continue
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