The CIA Versus the Kennedys
By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | August 18, 2020
Former Congressman Ron Paul and his colleague Dan McAdams recently conducted a fascinating interview with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., which focused in part on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, who was Kennedy Jr.’s uncle. The interview took place on their program the Ron Paul Liberty Report.
Owing to the many federal records that have been released over the years relating to the Kennedy assassination, especially through the efforts of the Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s, many Americans are now aware of the war that was being waged between President Kennedy and the CIA throughout his presidency. The details of this war are set forth in FFF’s book JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated by Douglas Horne.
In the interview, Robert Kennedy Jr. revealed a fascinating aspect of this war with which I was unfamiliar. He stated that the deep animosity that the CIA had for the Kennedy family actually stretched back to something the family patriarch, Joseph P. Kennedy, did in the 1950s that incurred the wrath of Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA.
Kennedy Jr. stated that his father had served on a commission that was charged with examining and analyzing CIA covert activities, or “dirty tricks” as Kennedy Jr. put them. As part of that commission, Kennedy Jr stated, Joseph P. Kennedy (Kennedy’s Jr.’s grandfather) had determined that the CIA had done bad things with its regime-change operations that were destroying democracies, such as in Iran and Guatemala.
Consequently, Joseph Kennedy recommended that the CIA’s power to engage in covert activities be terminated and that the CIA be strictly limited to collecting intelligence and empowered to do nothing else.
According to Kennedy Jr., “Allen Dulles never forgave him — never forgave my family — for that.”
I wasn’t aware of that fact. I assumed that the war between President Kennedy and the CIA had begun with the CIA’s invasion at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba. The additional information added by Kennedy Jr. places things in a much more fascinating and revealing context.
Upon doing a bit of research on the Internet, I found that the commission that Kennedy Jr. must have been referring to was the President’s Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities, which President Eisenhower had established in 1956 through Executive Order 10656. Eisenhower appointed Joseph Kennedy to serve on that commission.
That year was three years after the CIA’s 1953 regime change operation in Iran which destroyed that country’s democratic system. It was two years after the CIA’s regime-change operation in Guatemala that destroyed that country’s democratic system.
Keep in mind that the ostensible reason that the CIA engaged in these regime-change operations was to protect “national security,” which over time has become the most important term in the American political lexicon. Although no one has ever come up with an objective definition for the term, the CIA’s power to address threats to “national security,” including through coups and assassinations, became omnipotent.
Yet, here was Joseph P. Kennedy declaring that the CIA’s power to exercise such powers should be terminated and recommending that the CIA’s power be strictly limited to intelligence gathering.
It is not difficult to imagine how livid CIA Director Dulles and his cohorts must have been at Kennedy. No bureaucrat likes to have his power limited. More important, for Dulles and his cohorts, it would have been clear that if Kennedy got his way, “national security” would be gravely threatened given the Cold War that the United States was engaged in with the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, North Korea, and other communist nations.
Now consider what happened with the Bay of Pigs. The CIA’s plan for a regime-change invasion of Cuba, was conceived under President Eisenhower. Believing that Vice President Nixon would be elected president in 1960, the CIA was quite surprised that Kennedy was elected instead. To ensure that the invasion would go forth anyway, the CIA assured Kennedy that the invasion would succeed without U.S. air support. It was a lie. The CIA assumed that once the invasion was going to go down in defeat at the hands of the communists, Kennedy would have to provide the air support in order to “save face.”
But Kennedy refused to be played by the CIA. When the CIA’s army of Cuban exiles was going down in defeat, the CIA requested the air support, convinced that their plan to manipulate the new president would work. It didn’t. Kennedy refused to provide the air support and the CIA’s invasion went down in defeat.
Now consider what happened after the Bay of Pigs: Knowing that the CIA had played him and double-crossed him, John Kennedy fired Allen Dulles as CIA director, along with his chief deputy, Charles Cabell. He then put his younger brother Bobby Kennedy in charge of monitoring the CIA, which infuriated the CIA.
Now jump ahead to the Cuban Missile Crisis, which Kennedy resolved by promising that the United States would not invade Cuba for a regime-change operation. That necessarily would leave a permanent communist regime in Cuba, something that the CIA steadfastly maintained was a grave threat to “national security”— a much bigger threat, in fact, than the threats supposedly posed by the regimes in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954.
And then Kennedy did the unforgivable, at least insofar as the CIA was concerned. In his famous Peace Speech at American University in June 1963, he declared an end to the entire Cold War and announced that the United States was going to establish friendly and peaceful relations with the communist world.
Kennedy had thrown the gauntlet down in front of the CIA. It was either going to be his way or the CIA’s way. There was no room for compromise, and both sides knew it.
In the minds of former CIA Director Allen Dulles and the people still at the CIA, what Kennedy was doing was anathema and, even worse, the gravest threat to “national security” the United States had ever faced, a much bigger threat than even that posed by the democratic regimes in Iran and Guatemala. At that point, the CIA’s animosity toward President Kennedy far exceeded the animosity it had borne toward his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, several years before.
Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education.
Twitter ‘accidentally’ suspends satirical site Babylon Bee after it mocked Kamala Harris and USPS conspiracies
RT | August 17, 2020
Twitter suspended the account of parody news site The Babylon Bee after it mocked Democrat VP candidate Kamala Harris and ‘mail vote suppression’ conspiracies. It was shortly restored amid protests about censorship.
The Bee went dark around 6 pm on Monday. Archives showed that their last tweet was a story about President Donald Trump “riding around in an SUV” smashing mailboxes “to make it impossible for people to mail in their ballots.”
The tweet before that one was about Harris proposing a “housing plan” where “everybody gets free 10’x10’ room and three meals a day” – a clear reference to prison, as Harris had been a prosecutor before getting elected to the Senate.
One conservative commentator pointed out that Twitter spokesman Nick Pacilio was previously the press secretary for Harris’s abortive presidential campaign.
The publication’s editor in chief Kyle Mann shared a screenshot of the email from Twitter, telling him the account was suspended for “violating rules against platform manipulation and spam.”
According to Twitter’s own rules, behavior that “that manipulates or disrupts people’s experience” is out of bounds. The company defines manipulation as “using Twitter to engage in bulk, aggressive, or deceptive activity that misleads others and/or disrupts their experience.”
Before anyone could figure out if that covers censorship of satire, however, the Bee’s account was back up – only with a greatly diminished follower count. The publication was free to share its latest story, about how the Democrats have reversed their position on the USPS after Trump had his face put on all stamps.
The Bee’s stinging mockery of mainstream media news coverage has made it a lot of enemies over the years, including CNN and the “fact checkers” at Snopes, who argued that Americans are too stupid to realize this kind of content is satire.
Mann and the Bee’s defenders have countered that the site clearly labels stories as satire. If the mainstream media reporting has become so ridiculous that the audience can’t tell it apart from ridicule, that’s not the Bee’s problem but their own, they say.
In a message to another Bee editor, Twitter said the account was “flagged as spam by mistake” by “systems” tasked with doing that, without specifying whether it was a computer algorithm or a person that made the call.
Don’t Forget Trump’s Deal with the CIA on the JFK Records
By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | August 17, 2020
In April 2018, President Trump issued an order to the National Archives to continue keeping thousands of CIA records relating to the John Kennedy assassination secret from the American people. The new deadline, which could be extended again by either Trump or a President Biden, was set for October 2021.
Since the order was issued early in the Trump regime, no doubt he felt confident that there would be no adverse political consequences flowing from his order. But now that Trump is engaged in a heated race with Joe Biden, he ought to be called upon to explain and justify his order for continued secrecy in an assassination that took place almost six decades ago.
Given the official narrative of the Kennedy assassination, the massive secrecy in which the Pentagon and the CIA engaged after the assassination has never made any sense.
The official narrative says that a lone nut former U.S. Marine communist killed Kennedy with no apparent motive. The most that proponents of the lone-nut theory have ever come up with on a possible motive is that a little man wanted to become a big man by killing a big man. The big problem with that theory is that the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, denied that he did it and even contended that he was being framed for the crime. If a little man wanted to become a big man by killing a big man, wouldn’t he be acknowledging that he did it and even boasting about it?
IN 1991, Oliver Stone come out with his movie JFK, which posited that Kennedy had been assassinated as part of a U.S. domestic regime-change operation intended to protect “national security” from a president who had declared an end to the Cold War and an intention to establish peaceful and friendly relations with the Soviet Union and the rest of the communist world. (See FFF’s book JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated by Douglas Horne, who served on the staff of the ARRB.)
At the end of JFK, Stone inserted a blurb pointing out the continued secrecy of federal agencies with respect to records relating to the Kennedy assassination some 30 years after the assassination in what had been presented as nothing more than a lone-nut murder of a president.
While the mainstream media was poo-pooing Stone’s movie, the American people were outraged over the continued secrecy. Public pressure caused Congress to enact the JFK Records Collection Act in 1992, which mandated the release of all assassination-related records of federal agencies, including the Pentagon and the CIA.
To enforce the law, Congress called into existence the Assassination Records Review Board. In its four years of operation, the ARRB secured the release of tens of thousands of records relating to the assassination, some of which pointed to the fraudulent nature of the autopsy that the U.S. military conducted on the president’s body. (See my books The Kennedy Autopsy and The Kennedy Autopsy 2.)
There were two strange parts of the JFK Records Act:
1. The law expressly prohibited the ARRB from investigating any aspect of the JFK assassination. Doesn’t that seem to be a rather strange provision? If a matter that had intentionally been kept secret for 30 years needed to be investigated, wouldn’t you think that Congress would want it investigated? The no-investigation provision was strictly enforced on the ARRB staff by the ARRB board of trustees.
2.The law permitted federal agencies to keep their records secret for another 25 years, a provision that the CIA took advantage of. Given that this was supposedly just a lone-nut murder, why was secrecy necessary in the first place? What “national security” concern would there have been? And wouldn’t a lapse of 30 years be sufficient for any such “national security” concern? Why another 25 years, especially since continued secrecy would only serve to buttress Stone’s thesis in JFK?
Back in the 1990s, 25 years must have seemed like a long time away, long enough that the CIA and the Pentagon could rest easy. Anyway, by the time those 25 years expired, there was a good chance that no one would care anyway, especially within the mainstream press.
But when that deadline rolled around in 2018, there were people who still cared. They were demanding that Trump release the records.
That’s not what Trump did. Instead, he granted the CIA’s request for at least another 3 1/2 years of secrecy.
Back in 2018, Trump didn’t have to justify his decision, but now that he’s running for reelection, he should be made to account for what he did by being asked the following questions:
1. How could the release of the CIA’s long-secret JFK-assassination-related records possibly pose a threat to “national security”?
2. Why not order an immediate release of those long-secret records now rather than wait until October of next year?
3. If the CIA has nothing to hide, why is it still hiding it almost 60 years after the Kennedy assassination?
The big problem, of course, is the deep loyalty that the mainstream press, Democrats, Republicans, and even some conservative-oriented libertarians have toward the CIA, not to mention the deep fear of being labeled a “conspiracy theorist.” That is why it is unlikely that Trump will be required to justify his deference to the CIA and its desire for continued secrecy in the Kennedy assassination.
Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education.
Despite normalization, Israel pressing US not to sell UAE F-35 jets
Press TV – August 18, 2020
Israel has kept up the pressure on the United States not to provide the United Arabs of Emirates (UAE) with F-35 stealth fighter jets despite a recent normalization deal reached between Tel Aviv and Abu Dhabi.
Two unnamed Israeli officials, familiar with the moves to establish diplomatic relations with the UAE, told Haaretz on Monday that Tel Aviv had pressured Washington to block the sale of the advanced fighter planes fearing that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his confidants may have made a secret agreement without consulting military officials.
Since the announcement of the normalization pact last week, several sources, who had been previously involved in contacts between the two sides, raised concerns that as part of the new understandings, Netanyahu may have abandoned Israel’s traditionally vehement opposition to the sale of sensitive military equipment and technology to the UAE, particularly F-35 fighter jets.
According to the report, during the secret talks led by Netanyahu and Netanyahu confidants Mossad head Yossi Cohen, Israeli Ambassador to the United States Ron Dermer and National Security Adviser Meir Ben Shabbat, there may have been a secret agreement made on this issue without informing Israel’s top military officials, who were excluded until now from the talks.
The Israeli sources said that the Persian Gulf Arab states, including the UAE, had pressed Israel numerous times to lift its objections so that such deals could go through.
They said that the normalization agreements would not change Israel’s long-standing objection to the sale of American F-35 fighter jets to Abu Dhabi.
Under understandings dating back decades, Washington has refrained from Middle East arms sales that could blunt Israel’s “qualitative military edge” (QME). This has applied to the F-35, denied to Arab states, while Israel has bought and deployed it.
Reports say that the driving factor for the UAE to sign the agreement with Israel has been a US weapons deal to the tune of tens of billions of dollars, including supplying F-35 jets, advanced UAVs and other arms.
A day after the normalization deal, Amos Yadlin, a former general in the Israeli air force and the ex-head of the Israeli military tweeted, “It is important to remember that Abu Dhabi seeks to acquire very sophisticated weapons from the United States.”
In an interview with Israel’s Kan Bet public radio on Sunday, Yadlin said, “We know they are asking for very sophisticated weapons from the Americans and the Israelis, and what’s stopping this is that there is no peace treaty between the countries and the Israeli qualitative edge. And it could be, and that’s what I was warning about in my tweet”.
In a statement on Tuesday, Netanyahu’s Office said that Israel has not softened its opposition to any US arms sales to the UAE that could diminish its military superiority as part of the US-brokered normalization pact.
“In the talks (on the UAE normalization deal), Israel did not change its consistent positions against the sale to any country in the Middle East of weapons and defense technologies that could tip the (military) balance,” Netanyahu’s office said.
The statement followed a report in Israel’s Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper that the Trump administration planned a “giant” sale of advanced F-35 jets to Abu Dhabi as part of the Persian Gulf country’s move last week to normalize ties with Israel.
The Trump administration has signaled that the UAE could clinch unspecified new US arms sales after last Thursday’s normalization announcement.
Under pressure from Israel and the Israeli lobby in Washington, the US Congress had earlier blocked a plan for such a sale.
The US has sold the warplanes to a range of allies, including South Korea, Japan, and Israel, but experts say sales to the Persian Gulf Arab states require a deeper review due to US policy for Israel to maintain a qualitative military edge in the Middle East.
Democrats’ election platform demands end to ‘forever wars’ — most of which were launched last time Biden held office
By Helen Buyniski | RT | August 17, 2020
The Democratic Party’s 2020 electoral platform includes a call to end the US’ “forever wars” – which sounds great, except that a Democratic president started many of those wars and the party has stonewalled efforts to end them.
“Democrats know it’s time to bring nearly two decades of unceasing conflict to an end,” the platform, released in draft form on Monday and expected to be approved by Democratic leaders later this week, reads.
It’s a relatively uncontroversial statement in itself: at nearly 19 years and counting, the US war in Afghanistan is the longest conflict in American history. The various satellite wars that have sprung up as part of the “War on Terror” have devastated large swathes of the Middle East – and the US itself, which has spent upwards of $6 trillion on fighting them while much of the country slid into a permanent recession – over the past two decades.
However, the responsibility for many of those satellite conflicts lies with Democrat Barack Obama’s administration, which liberally bombed Syria, Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia in addition to Afghanistan and Iraq, turning the already-disastrous two-front War on Terror of his predecessor George W. Bush into a regional quagmire. Democratic candidate Joe Biden was Obama’s vice president, cheering those wars on and defending his boss’ decisions. Now, the party wants Americans to believe only he can put an end to them.
The 2020 platform promises a “durable and inclusive political settlement in Afghanistan” along with an end to US support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen and a repeal of the threadbare 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) that has been repeatedly (mis)used to excuse US interventions in the Middle East under the guise of fighting terrorism. All great ideas, but the party has been here before.
Despite receiving the Nobel Peace Prize shortly after his inauguration, Obama didn’t bring the peace he promised in his 2008 campaign – he just made war more palatable to the liberals who had previously protested against it. By dramatically expanding the US drone program and cloaking murderous airstrikes in the warm fuzzy rhetoric of spreading democracy and “responsibility to protect,” Obama, his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and the Democrats in his administration took the wars out of sight, and out of mind for the average American.
Even while taking credit for “ending” the war in Iraq, launched in 2003 on the fraudulent pretext that leader Saddam Hussein was amassing weapons of mass destruction and/or was somehow involved in the 9/11 terror attacks, Obama subsequently returned US troops to Iraq under the pretext of fighting the Islamic State terror group (IS, ISIS/ISIL). However, IS is widely considered an outgrowth of the US’ botched Iraq policy, which destabilized the region by flooding the country with many of the suddenly-unemployed (but still well-armed) remnants of Saddam Hussein’s military. At the same time, the CIA has a long history of supporting terror groups that dovetail with its political aims, from arming and training al-Qaeda’s predecessors to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan to arming and training so-called “moderate rebels” whose tactics are often indistinguishable from ISIL or al-Qaeda to take out the Syrian government. Terrorism has thrived amid the war “against” it.
That the Democrats should campaign in 2020 on ending forever wars suggests they might have learned something from 2016, when then-candidate Donald Trump pledged to do just that, luring disaffected liberals who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for notorious warmonger Hillary Clinton. Her flippant dismissal of the brutal murder of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi – “We came, we saw, he died!” – remains chilling years after she helped reduce the country with the highest standard of living on the African continent to a failed state where slaves are sold in open markets.
But while Trump has profoundly failed to keep his end-the-wars promise, instead increasing the number of drone strikes beyond Obama’s sky-high levels, even Trump’s minimal efforts to withdraw troops from Syria and Afghanistan have been ferociously opposed by the Democrats.
Indeed, the only foreign policy acts the self-styled #Resistance has praised from their political nemesis have been his bombings of Syria in response to extremely dubious reports of gas attacks by the Assad government. CNN’s Fareed Zakaria claimed the strike represented the day Trump “became president of the United States.”
The disingenuous call to end the military quagmires is far from the only lofty pledge embedded in the Democrats’ platform, which alternates between eye-rolling social-justice pandering and common-sense measures with broad appeal.
The party has also pledged to “end the Trump Administration’s politicization of the armed forces,” improve healthcare for veterans, “root out systemic racism from our military justice system,” and “prioritize more effective and less costly diplomatic, intelligence and law enforcement tools” over military invasions in conducting foreign policy.
It remains to be seen which, if any, of those promises they will keep.
Helen Buyniski is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Twitter @velocirapture23
US intelligence saying IRAN is paying bounties to kill Americans in Afghanistan is pure parody
By Scott Ritter | RT | August 18, 2020
It was Russia in June, now it’s Tehran. Don’t US analysts understand that Taliban fighters really don’t need any more motivation to target American troops? This is simply politicized (un)intelligence that isn’t fooling anyone.
According to CNN, the Iranian government has paid “bounties” to the Haqqani network, a terrorist group with close links to the Taliban, for six attacks on US and coalition forces in Afghanistan in 2019, including one on December 11 which targeted Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul, which wounded four US personnel.
This explosive allegation was contained in a Pentagon briefing document which was reviewed by CNN. While the bounties mentioned were attributed to an unnamed “foreign government,” CNN claims that sources “familiar with” the intelligence named the country as Iran. These bounties, and the attacks on US personnel they underwrote, played a role in the deliberations that led to the assassination of Major General Qassem Soleimani, the head of the Iranian Quds Force, by US forces in early January 2020, the network reported.
The CNN report comes on the heels of similar allegations regarding “bounties” paid by Russian military intelligence to the Taliban, likewise for the purpose of underwriting attacks on US and coalition personnel in Afghanistan. The Russian bounty story has since turned out to have been based upon uncorroborated raw intelligence deemed by senior US officials as being too poorly sourced to be actionable by the president or his senior advisers. The intelligence was leaked to the press regardless, in what appeared to be an effort to undermine President Trump’s ongoing efforts to forge a peace agreement with the Taliban and to embarrass him in the leadup to the 2020 presidential election.
At first blush, it appears that the CNN reporting is cut from the same cloth as was the Russian “bounty” story. First and foremost (as the CNN reports notes), the Haqqani network did not, and does not, need financial incentives from outside agencies to motivate it to carry out attacks against US and/or coalition targets. As such, even if payments were in fact sent from Iran to the Haqqani network, the likelihood that they were linked to the December 11 attack, or any other, is virtually nil.
The linkage attributed to the December 11 attack on Bagram Air Base and the decision by the US to assassinate Qassem Soleimani is likewise tenuous. In the days, weeks and months following the Soleimani assassination, the Trump administration was called to task by Congress and the media about its justification for the Soleimani strike. While a great deal of weight was given to a rocket attack on K-2 Air Base in Iraq on December 27 that killed a US civilian contractor, there was no mention at any time about any Iranian “bounty” scheme ongoing inside Afghanistan, despite the fact that a direct correlation between such a “bounty” and the need to kill Soleimani would have been a stronger argument in favor of the attack on the Iranian general.
US intelligence has claimed that Iran has been providing “modest” amounts of armaments to the Taliban on an ongoing basis since 2007, something both the Taliban and Iran deny. According to statements made by US intelligence spokespersons in November 2019, this assistance was beefed up in 2015 to assist the Taliban in confronting Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) inside Afghanistan. No mention was made of any “bounty” scheme, although Secretary of State Mike Pompeo did link the Iranian assistance to an attack on US forces in May 2019.
While there is evidence to suggest that Iran and the Taliban enjoyed some sort of a relationship dating back to 2007, this relationship seemed focused on supporting Taliban forces based out of western Afghanistan, along the border with Iran; there was no evidence that this relationship included the payment of “bounties” for targeting US personnel.
Moreover, there was no suggestion that at the time of the December 27, 2019 attack on Bagram Air Base, Iran was providing support to the Haqqani network, a Sunni terrorist organization with close links to Pakistani intelligence and which operates out of the Pakistani city of Quetta. Indeed, the first indication of an Iranian connection to the Haqqani network came in the aftermath of the signing of the US-Taliban peace agreement in February 2020, when fringe elements of the Taliban, including allies within the Haqqani network, broke away in order to continue the struggle against the US in Afghanistan.
Even this reporting is sketchy – the alleged Iranian-Taliban-Haqqani cooperation was in the “early stages of forming,” not indicative of the kind of maturity that would have had to exist to sustain any viable bounty scheme. Moreover, any cooperation that was still in its infancy in February 2020, could not have been the basis of an arrangement regarding an attack that took place in December 2019. Finally, an Iranian-Haqqani bounty scheme would fly in the face of the public commitment by the Haqqani network in support of the US-Taliban peace agreement. In short, the CNN report fails on matters of fact and logic.
The timing of the CNN report provides the greatest insight as to why such a poorly sourced and thinly argued claim would be made against Iran at this time, coming as it does on the heels of the US losing a major vote in the UN Security Council concerning the lifting of an arms embargo against Iran.
This embarrassing defeat, in which the US was only able to garner a single additional vote in support of its resolution, has set the stage for an even greater confrontation at the UN over so-called “snap-back” sanctions the US seeks to impose on Iran.
The Iran-Haqqani bounty allegation was leaked by persons in the US intelligence community who have no qualms about injecting manufactured and/or misleading intelligence into the American news cycle at a critically sensitive time, with less than 90 days remaining until the 2020 US presidential election. Instead of seeking to embarrass President Trump, this leak is designed to bolster the Trump administration’s argument that Iran is a threat worthy of sustaining a major confrontation at the Security Council which could threaten the legitimacy and viability of that organization.
In the end, the motives behind an intelligence leak are irrelevant. The US intelligence community, through its repeated use of well-timed leaks to influence policy by deceiving the American public about the truth, has shown itself to be a highly politicized institution that operates at the whim of nameless partisan operatives, and not in the best interests of the United States.
That it can still ask for and receive a budget in excess of $80 billion per year is a harsh indictment of just how decrepit the US system of government has become, where a blind eye continues to be turned when it comes to the blatant abuse of intelligence for purposes other than what it was intended for.
Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ‘SCORPION KING: America’s Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump.’ He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector. Follow him on Twitter @RealScottRitter
Wolves Prowl Team Biden Borders, Scenting Opportunities
By Alastair Crooke | Strategic Culture Foundation | August 17, 2020
The choice of Vice-President, of course, is primarily about U.S. domestic needs. With BLM and wokeness pervasive in the western sphere, Joe Biden needed to, and committed himself to choosing a black woman, (Kamala Harris is half Indian and Jamaican), since the support of black voters will be crucial in November. But equally importantly, Harris, a career prosecutor, is very aggressive in her speeches — and that’s what Biden needs: i.e. someone with sharp elbows.
She is ‘woke’ on social issues, yet has been notably zealous in incarcerating pot-smoking LA youths, and paradoxically, drew “very little black support in the primaries”. However, in this era of mass protest, Harris will plausibly gild Biden’s ticket – as a Law and Order Vice-President. That counts. And the ‘woke’ contingent on Wall Street, they love her. That counts too.
But down to ‘brass tacks’: Does this tell us anything about Biden’s probable foreign policy, were he to prevail in November? Harris indeed has not adopted war and militarism as her platform – however she hasn’t offered a major foreign policy speech, either. Nonetheless, hers, is no blank page – she has very discernible stances.
Her ‘signature stance’ has been a strong commitment to Israel and to AIPAC: In March 2017, she told the AIPAC Policy Conference: “Let me be clear about what I believe: I stand with Israel – because of our shared values, which are so fundamental to the founding of both our nations.” At the 2018 AIPAC conference, Harris gave an off-the-record speech in which she recounted how, “As a child, I never sold Girl Scout cookies, I went around with a JNFUSA (The Jewish National Fund) box, collecting funds to plant trees in Israel”. And her husband is Jewish. (She skipped the 2019 conference, along with several other Presidential candidates.)
Apart from unwavering support for Israel (which the more panglossian amongst us may see simply as the entry-price to office in the U.S.), Harris has been noted for bellicose rhetoric toward North Korea and Russia, and for her reluctance to co-sponsor legislation aimed at preventing war with Venezuela and North Korea. In short, on such military intervention issues, she’s in line with—and sometimes to the right of—a hawkish Democratic establishment.
‘Move along: Nothing to see here!’ might seem the appropriate riposte: She’s just ‘boilerplate’ Democrat. Maybe that’s right. But to focus on this would be to miss the wood for the trees – for the foreign policy real action is happening almost unnoticed elsewhere.
Executive editor of The American Conservative, Kelly Beaucar Vlahos, warns that we might miss noticing the Neo-con “wolves, dressed in NeverTrumper clothing, sniffing around Joe Biden’s foreign policy circle, bent on influencing his China policy – and more” (emphasis added):
“Never-Trumper Republicans have been worming their way into the Biden campaign, offering to flesh out his “coalition” ahead of the election and pushing their way into the foreign policy discussions, particularly on China. Given their shared history with liberal interventionists already in the campaign, don’t for a second think that there aren’t hungry neoconservatives among them trying to get a seat at the table.
“Some hawkish Democrats may see the neocons as convenient allies in preserving an outdated interventionist mindset,” offers Matt Duss, who is Sen. Bernie Sanders’ longtime foreign policy advisor, who maintains close ties with the Democratic campaign to replace President Trump. “And of course, neocons are desperate for any opportunity to salvage their own relevance.””
A Daily Beast report at the end of last month quoted unnamed “individuals who work for conservative think tanks in Washington” acknowledging that they were “informally speaking with members of the Biden team in recent weeks”.
Their focus is said to be on the ‘failing China trade deal’, and Trump’s supposedly ‘weak posture’. Reportedly, they are “so frustrated with the U.S-China trade deal, and the Administration’s efforts to hold Beijing accountable, that they are willing to offer counsel to the Democratic nominee”. And moreover, are proposing not just support to the Democratic candidate, but also to provide guidance on ways to formulate a tough economic posture toward Beijing, (in order to undermine Trump).
In a later update, the Daily Beast says that with the election less than 100 days away, some members of Trump’s own inner circle are pushing him too in the hawkish direction – urging him to make a new bet: Rather than to put his chips on the trade deal, Trump would hit the electoral jackpot (they counsel) were he just to ‘blow it up’.
Four people knowledgeable about the issue told The Daily Beast that in the past three weeks, an internal campaign has intensified within the Trump administration to convince the president ‘to nuke’ the China trade deal.
The ‘back-story’ here is Biden’s campaign to expand its months of back-channel outreach to Republicans – with the goal of hitting President Trump on his signature campaign issue: China.
Interviews with several of the most prominent NeverTrump Republicans reveal that for now, the nascent effort to mobilise a ‘Republicans for Biden’ movement – alongside the extant Lincoln Project – is loosely defined, and could ultimately take a variety of forms. Essentially, however, Team Biden is being pressed by the Republican strategists to ‘out-Hawk’ Trump on China policy by taking a tougher line than the President. In other words, the campaign is setting up to be about who will be tougher – and will be fought out on the President’s key platform.
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos opines that: “It’s hard to think that real hardline conservative hawks on China, like Steve Bannon and the folks at the Committee on the Present Danger: China [see here] are involved in the Biden collusion. Some of them are certainly neoconservative … They’d be pushing for cold – if not hot – war from Trump’s Right – [and therefore would] not be hedging bets with Biden”. Vlahos continues:
“No, it can only be the establishment Republican types, perched at places like Brookings and AEI, who now see some sort of opening on the D-team. But if they seem like the mushy end of the Right flank, think again. These guys are charter members of the Washington foreign policy consensus, mixed in with neoconservative NeverTrumpers, like Eliot Cohen and Robert Kagan (his wife Victoria Nuland was a top neo-con official in the Clinton State Department) and who have despised Trump from the beginning. They think his America First foreign policy is “deeply misguided” and leading the country to “crisis.””
Ah – It is precisely here where the link back to the choice of Kamala Harris becomes more obvious. She is not likely to bring the Progressive Dems constituency to the Biden campaign (It would take Elizabeth Warren as VP to do that), and she has not had an impressive record of attracting the Black vote in LA. But, she would mesh-in seamlessly with the ‘Washington foreign policy consensus’, whilst still giving ‘the ticket’ a veneer of wokeness.
She thus could be an effective point person for NeverTrumper Republicans. This is a path down which Biden, it seems, is already embarked – at least as far as China is concerned. On domestic issues – such as energy – Biden tilts more towards Sanders, and even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (the latter sits on his advisory panel).
And Biden – if elected in November – may not last (or, at least, not attempt a second term). In which case, Harris could theoretically be front-runner for 2024 Presidential contest. And here is the point: If there is one area where these neo-con entryists despise ‘policy weakness’ as much as they do on China, it is Iran. On that issue, Harris is clear. She is an unreserved Israeli partisan.
Anyone therefore hoping for a softening of U.S. policy towards Iran, should Biden win, may be pinning too much hope on Bernie Saunders or ‘The Squad’ being able to ‘round off the sharp edges from U.S. foreign policy stances’ – they may be being overly-optimistic. It is just too obvious: As China veers towards Iran and the Middle East in search of energy-supply security, the temptation of any success with forcing a hawkish stance on China will be to link the two (Iran and China), and to try to push for a ‘kill-two-birds-with-one-stone’ policy stance.
Keep the eyes fixed on the neo-con ‘wolves’, not on Harris.
Managing the Narrative
Corporations and government use internet to control information
By Philip Giraldi • Unz Review • August 18, 2020
Some Americans continue to believe that when they go to the internet they will get a free flow of useful information that will guide them in making decisions or coming to conclusions about the state of the world. That conceit might have been true to an extent twenty years ago, but the growth and consolidation of corporate information management firms has instead limited access to material that it does not approve of, thereby successfully shaping the political and economic environment to conform with their own interests. Facebook, Google and other news and social networking sites now all have advisory panels that are authorized to ban content and limit access by members. This de facto censorship is particularly evident when using the internet information “search” sites themselves, a “service” that is dominated by Google. Ron Unz has observed how when the CEO of Google Sundar Pichai faced congressional scrutiny on July 29th together with other high-tech executives, the questioning was hardly rigorous and no one even asked how the sites are regulated to promote certain information that is approved of while suppressing views or sources that are considered to be undesirable.
The “information” sites generally get a free pass from government scrutiny because they are useful to those who run the country from Washington and Wall Street. That the internet is a national security issue was clearly demonstrated when the Barack Obama Administration sought to develop a switch that could be used to “kill it” in the event of a national crisis. No politician or corporate chief executive wants to get on the bad side of Big Tech and find his or her name largely eliminated from online searches, or, alternatively, coming up all too frequently with negative connotations.
Google, for example, ranks the information that it displays so it can favor certain points of view and dismiss others. Generally speaking, progressive sites are favored and conservative sites are relegated to the bottom of the search with the expectation that they will not be visited. In late July, investigative journalists noted that Google was apparently testing its technical ability to blacklist conservative media on its search engine which processes more than 3.5 billion online searches every day, comprising 94 percent of internet searching. Sites targeted and made to effectively disappear from results included NewsBusters, the Washington Free Beacon, The Blaze, Townhall, The Daily Wire, PragerU, LifeNews, Project Veritas, Judicial Watch, The Resurgent, Breitbart, Drudge, Unz, the Media Research Center and CNSNews. All the sites affected are considered to be politically conservative and no progressive or liberal sites were included.
One has to suspect that the tech companies like Google are working hand-in-hand with some regulators within the Trump administration to “purge” the internet, primarily by removing foreign competition both in hardware and software from countries like China. This will give the ostensibly U.S. companies monopoly status and will also allow the government to have sufficient leverage to control the message. If this process continues, the internet itself will become nationally or regionally controlled and will inevitably cease to be a vehicle for free exchange of views. Recent steps taken by the U.S. to block Huawei 5G technology and also force the sale of sites like TikTok have been explained as “national security” issues, but they are more likely designed to control aspects of the internet.
Washington is also again beating the familiar drum that Russia is interfering in American politics, with an eye on the upcoming election. Last week saw the released of a 77 page report produced by the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) on Russian internet based news and opinion sources that allegedly are guilty of spreading disinformation and propaganda on behalf of the Kremlin. It is entitled “Understanding Russia’s Disinformation and Propaganda Ecosystem” and has a lead paragraph asserting that “Russia’s disinformation and propaganda ecosystem is the collection of official, proxy, and unattributed communication channels and platforms that Russia uses to create and amplify false narratives.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, The New York Times is hot on the trail of Russian malfeasance, describing the report and its conclusions in a lengthy article “State Dept. Traces Russian Disinformation Links” that appeared on August 5th.
The government report identifies a number of online sites that it claims are actively involved in the “disinformation” effort. The Times article focuses on one site in particular, describing how “The report states that the Strategic Culture Foundation [website] is directed by Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the S.V.R., and stands as ‘a prime example of longstanding Russian tactics to conceal direct state involvement in disinformation and propaganda outlets.’ The organization publishes a wide variety of fringe voices and conspiracy theories in English, while trying to obscure its Russian government sponsorship.” It also quotes Lea Gabrielle, the GEC Director, who explained that “The Kremlin bears direct responsibility for cultivating these tactics and platforms as part of its approach of using information and disinformation as a weapon.”
As Russia has been falsely accused of supporting the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the existence of alternative news sites funded wholly or in part by a foreign government is not ipso facto an act of war, it is interesting to note the “evidence” that The Times provides based on its own investigation to suggest that Moscow is about to disrupt the upcoming election. It is: “Absent from the report is any mention of how one of the writers for the Strategic Culture Foundation weighed in this spring on a Democratic primary race in New York. The writer, Michael Averko, published articles on the foundation’s website and in a local publication in Westchester County, N.Y., attacking Evelyn N. Farkas, a former Obama administration official who was running for Congress. In recent weeks, the F.B.I. questioned Mr. Averko about the Strategic Culture Foundation and its ties to Russia. While those attacks did not have a decisive effect on the election, they showed Moscow’s continuing efforts to influence votes in the United States…”
Excuse me, but someone writing for an alternative website with relatively low readership criticizing a candidate for congress does not equate to the Kremlin’s interfering in an American election. Also, the claim that the Strategic Culture Foundation is a disinformation mechanism is overwrought. Yes, the site is located in Moscow and it may have some government support but it features numerous American and European contributors in addition to Russians. I have been writing for the site for nearly three years and I know many of the other Americans who also do so. We are generally speaking antiwar and often critical of U.S. foreign policy but the contributors include conservatives like myself, libertarians and progressives and we write on all kinds of subjects.
And here is the interesting part: not one of us has ever been told what to write. Not one of us has ever even had a suggestion coming from Moscow on a good topic for an article. Not one of us has ever had an article or headline changed or altered by an editor. Putting on my ex-intelligence officer hat for a moment, that is no way to run an influencing or disinformation operation intended to subvert an election. Sure, Russia has a point of view on the upcoming election and its managed media outlets will reflect that bias but the sweeping allegations are nonsense, particularly in an election that will include billions of dollars in real disinformation coming from the Democratic and Republican parties.
Putting together what you no longer can find when you search the internet with government attempts to suppress alternative news sites one has to conclude that we Americans are in the middle of an information war. Who controls the narrative controls the people, or so it seems. It is a dangerous development, particularly at a time when no one knows whom to trust and what to believe. How it will play out between now and the November election is anyone’s guess.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
Senate chairman subpoenas FBI Director, ex-State official as Russia-Ukraine probe intensifies
John Solomon Reports | August 17, 2020
A powerful Senate committee chairman has subpoenaed FBI Director Chris Wray and a former State Department official in an intensifying investigation into possible U.S. corruption in Russia and Ukraine and declared there is evidence Joe Biden’s family engaged in a “glaring conflict of interest.”
Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee Chairman Ron Johnson announced the actions Monday, strongly accusing Democrats of levying false allegations against him and other GOP investigators to distract from the evidence his committee has gathered about Joe and Hunter Biden’s dealings in Ukraine.
“We didn’t target Joe and Hunter Biden for investigation; their previous actions had put them in the middle of it,” Johnson wrote in a letter released Monday that provided a detailed timeline of Joe Biden’s Ukraine policy actions and his son’s hiring with the Ukraine natural gas company Burisma Holdings.
“Many in the media, in an ongoing attempt to provide cover for former Vice President Biden, continue to repeat the mantra that there is ‘no evidence of wrongdoing or illegal activity’ related to Hunter Biden’s position on Burisma’s board,” the senator wrote. “I could not disagree more.”
Johnson noted evidence gathered by his committee showed Joe Biden met with his son’s business partner, Devon Archer, in April 2014 and within a month the vice president then visited Ukraine and both his son Hunter and the business partner were put on the Burisma board as the firm faced multiple corruption investigations.
“Isn’t it obvious what message Hunter’s position on Burisma’s board sent to Ukrainian officials?” Johnson asked. “The answer: If you want U.S. support, don’t touch Burisma. It also raised a host of questions, including: 1) How could former Vice President Biden look any Ukrainian official (or any other world leader) in the face and demand action to fight corruption? 2) Did this glaring conflict of interest affect the work and efforts of other U.S. officials who worked on anti-corruption measures?”
You can read Johnson’s letter here:
File 2020-08-09 RHJ letter re Investigation history purpose goals 1805.pdf
Sources familiar with Johnson’s investigation say the committee has secured testimony from at least one State Department official who worked in Ukraine saying the Bidens’ conduct created the appearance of a conflict of interest and undercut U.S. efforts to fight corruption in Kiev.
Johnson also divulged that late last week he issued a formal subpoena to Wray demanding he immediately surrender records from the Russia collusion probe that the committee has been seeking for months.
The subpoena gives Wray until 5 p.m. on Aug. 20 to comply and demands all records from the probe known as Crossfire Hurricane, including those provided for a damning report by the Justice Department inspector general.
You can view the subpoena here:
Johnson also announced his committee has prepared a subpoena for Jonathan Winer, a former Obama State Department official who had extensive contact with British intelligence operative Christopher Steele, the author of a flawed dossier that helped propel the FBI probe into now disproven Trump-Russia collusion.
“Mr Winer‘s counsel has not responded since Thursday as to whether he would accept service of the subpoena,” Johnson said. “If he does not respond by tomorrow, we will be forced to effect service through the U.S. Marshals. More subpoenas can be expected to be issued in the coming days and weeks.”
Johnson and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley have been pursuing a two-track investigation for more than two years, examining both failures and corruption in the FBI’s Russia probe as well as the issue of the Bidens’ conflicts in Ukraine.
As the 2020 election draws nearer and the committee’s evidence mounts in the Biden portion of the probe, Democrats have repeatedly attacked Johnson and Grassley accusing them of accepting evidence with Ukrainian officials tied to Russia.
In his letter, Johnson adamantly denies he has talked with or received documents from the Russian-tied Ukrainians, accusing Democrats like Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut of knowingly fomenting disinformation.
“The only problem with their overblown handwringing is that they all knew full well that we have been briefed repeatedly, and we had already told them that we had NOT received the alleged Russian disinformation,” Johnson wrote. “The very transparent goal of their own disinformation campaign and feigned concern is to attack our character in order to marginalize the eventual findings of our investigation.”
Johnson’s letter identifies 14 questions he believes Joe Biden should answer and said the dealings documented by his committee — all from U.S. government documents — follow a larger pattern of family members appearing to cash in on the vice president’s policymaking.
“The appearance of family profiteering off of Vice President Biden’s official responsibilities is not unique to the circumstances involving Ukraine and Burisma,” the senator wrote. “Public reporting has also shown Hunter Biden following his father into China and coincidentally landing lucrative business deals and investments there.
“Additionally, the former vice president’s brothers and sister-in-law, Frank, James and Sara Biden, also are reported to have benefited financially from his work as well. We have not had the resources to devote investigatory time to these other allegations, but I point them out to underscore that Ukraine and Burisma seem more of a pattern of conduct than an aberration.”
Johnson’s announcement follows one day after Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham released a document Sunday he says shows the FBI misled senators on the Intelligence Committee during the Russia probe by falsely suggesting Steele’s dossier was backed up by one of his key sources.
“Somebody needs to go to jail for this,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) the panel’s chairman, told the Fox News program Sunday Futures with Maria Bartiromo. “This is a second lie. This is a second crime. They lied to the FISA court. They got rebuked, the FBI did, in 2019 by the FISA court, putting in doubt all FISA applications.”
The document in question contains the draft talking points the FBI used to brief the Senate Intelligence Committee in February 2018, including an assessment that the primary sub-source of the information contained in the Steele dossier had backed up the former MI-6 agent’s reporting.
The primary sub-source “did not cite any significant concerns with the way his reporting was characterized in the dossier to the extent he could identify it,” the FBI memo claimed. “… At minimum, our discussions with [the Primary Sub-source] confirm that the dossier was not fabricated by Steele.”
In fact, by the time the FBI provided senators the briefing, agents had already interviewed Steele’s primary sub-source, who disavowed much of what was attributed to him in the dossier as in “jest” or containing uncorroborated allegations.
You can read the FBI memo Graham released here:
The curious case of George Kent: State Department’s Belarus “Color Revolution” expert and “Never Trump” impeachment witness
revolver | August 16, 2020
One of the most frustrating features of the Trump Administration is its tendency to hire, and even promote, personnel who are either indifferent or actively opposed to President Trump and the America First agenda he ran on in 2016.
Although the Administration remains crawling with such subversives, saboteurs, and so-called “Never Trumpers,” one especially interesting case is State Department employee George Kent.
George Kent was a star witness at the Trump impeachment hearings, in which he described Trump’s actions in Ukraine and the United States as “injurious to the rule of law.”
Highlights of his testimony include defending fellow star impeachment witnesses Marie Yovanovitch, Fiona Hill, and Lt. Col. Vindman, and accusing the President’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, of conducting a “campaign of lies.” Perhaps most damningly, Kent directly attacked President Trump on precisely the issue at question in the impeachment trial when he gave a second-hand description of President Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelinsky.
Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, was so unusual that a National Security Council official — Lt. Col. Alex Vindman, who also has testified for the inquiry — didn’t want to get into the details with Kent. That call is now at the heart of the impeachment inquiry.
“It was different than any read-out call that I had received,” Kent told investigators. “He felt — I could hear it in his voice and his hesitancy that he felt uncomfortable. He actually said that he could not share the majority of what was discussed because of the very sensitive nature of what was discussed.”
Kent told investigators that, based on his conversations with other senior American diplomats, Gordon Sondland relayed that Trump “wanted nothing less than President Zelensky to go to microphone [sic] and say investigations, Biden, and Clinton.” [Politico ]
Unlike his former boss and star impeachment witness Yovanovitch, or his fellow impeachment witnessses Lt. Colonel Vindman and William Taylor, George Kent was not fired from his position within the Trump Administration. Far from being fired, Kent was promoted within the Trump Administration’s State Department subsequent to his impeachment testimony against the President.
George Kent, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs at the State Department, testifying as an impeachment witness.
That Kent not only kept his job but was promoted after providing such impeachment testimony is a surprising and lamentable fact, especially given the President’s strong and largely successful commitment to clean house in the aftermath of impeachment proceedings in which many State Department officials connected with Ukraine and Eastern Europe testified as witnesses against the President.
That a key impeachment witness against the President not only remains within the Trump Administration, but was actually promoted, is remarkable enough. He should be removed from his position just like his colleagues and fellow impeachment witnesses Yovanovitch, Vindman, and Taylor.
But once one takes a look at what George Kent’s job actually is at the State Department, the story becomes far more suggestive—even explosive. Kent just happens to be Deputy Assistant Secretary in the European and Eurasian Bureau. This bureau is generally known as the State Department hub for so-called “Color Revolutions,” through which the State Department, together with covert agencies and a constellation of allied NGOs influence, and at times overturn, elections in foreign countries. Indeed, one former senior state department official has told Revolver News that Kent is a “color revolution expert” — a designation that has been corroborated to Revolver by two current senior State Department sources.
Prior to his current role, Kent served as Deputy Chief of Mission in Kyiv, Ukraine (2015-18), working directly under the ousted star-impeachment witness Ambassador Yovanovitch. Prior to this, Kent was working as a “deputy political counselor” in Ukraine during the infamous “Orange Revolution” — arguably the most famous of the State Department and NGO-facilitated “Color Revolutions.” In essence, the Orange Revolution refers to a continuous barrage of protests, mass demonstrations, and other acts of civil disobedience in Ukraine in response to the contested election of Russia aligned Viktor Yanukovych, who defeated the Western-backed Viktor Yushchenko.
What is relevant here is not whether Yanukovych rigged the election, or whether he would have been a better ruler for Ukraine. What is relevant is that the State Department’s preferred candidate did not win, and the State Department, with the help of its constellation of friendly NGOs, helped to facilitate the overthrow of Yanukovych by contesting the legitimacy of the election, organizing mass protests and acts of civil disobedience, and leveraging media contacts to ensure favorable coverage to their agenda in the Western press — all tactics eerily similar to those used against President Trump beginning the day after he was elected.
Of course, the principal figure associated with this Orange Revolution in the US Government is none other than Victoria Nuland, who served as President Obama’s point person on Russia during the Color Revolution in Ukraine.
Nuland was a year into her role as Obama’s assistant secretary for Europe. She had been in Kiev, frantically working behind the scenes to put in place a new governing coalition in Ukraine as it teetered on the brink of revolution against its Russia-backed leader, Viktor Yanukovych. [Politico ]
Nuland took the extraordinary step of personally speaking to the mass of protesters organized against the Russian-backed President Yanukovych.
Nuland’s highly symbolic appearance in the square came a day after Secretary of State John Kerry issued a strong statement, expressing the United States’ “disgust with the decision of Ukrainian authorities to meet the peaceful protest … with riot police…” [CBS News]
“Peaceful protest” sounds mighty familiar, doesn’t it? That’s because organizing mass demonstrations against a target government and criticizing and provoking that target government into cracking down on said protests is part and parcel of the Color Revolution playbook.
Careful observers of recent events will note that it is no coincidence that this is precisely the playbook being run right now in Belarus.
Indeed, the entire constellation of State Department-aligned and Atlanticist-aligned NGOs have been questioning in advance the legitimacy of the newly-elected Lukashenko, who won decisively with over 80 percent of the vote, compared to his rival, who received less than 10 percent.
These same State Department and NGO-aligned groups have been encouraging mass protests against Lukashenko. Perhaps most notably, they’ve referred to the demonstrators specifically as “peaceful protestors,” and used any attempts to control the riots as a pretext to further undermine the legitimacy of the target government. … Full article
Narrative control tightens as panicked anti-Trump aristocrats crank up media gaslight machines
By Mitchell Feierstein | RT | August 17, 2020
Orange Man Bad. It’s a narrative that is being made harder to question every day, even as Democrat-controlled cities descend into chaos and Americans are being fed the same old status quo from the Obama and Clinton era.
The middle and lower classes have been eviscerated, and America’s big cities have been decimated and destroyed by the mob. And who is the mob? They are Antifa, BLM, ideologues (aka Democratic elites) and their multi-million-dollar-a-year media propaganda mouthpieces. The mob and its supporters are creating extreme tribalism that is ripping America apart.
Disgracefully, Democratic Party members of the US Congress are actively calling for “unrest in the streets” and the Democratic Party’s presidential dream team of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris condone this anarchy, chaos and violence by their silence, as they dance to the mob’s tune saying and doing anything to grab power through instilling more fear, terror and uncertainty amongst the voters. Democrats have not denounced the surge in murders, looting, and violence infecting America’s biggest cities, but many are instead actively working to defund the police during a massive crime wave. People have to “shoplift some bread,” as New York City’s member of Congress Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez explains.
The Democratic cabal headed by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi from California and New York Congressman Jerry Nadler, the chairman of the Congressional Judiciary Committee, have actively denied the murders, arson, looting, and violent crime as buildings burn and jobs disappear (here). It’s all because of America’s systemic racism and white privilege – but don’t believe me, just ask the intelligentsia.
To throw petrol on the arsonists’ blaze, the media have whipped up more unnecessary fear and panic by disproportionately sensationalizing everything as being part of Covid even if their ‘fake facts’ directly contradict the science. This falls perfectly in line with the psyops alleged in the scandalous Millie Weaver documentary ‘Shadowgate’, and before that in Patrick Bergy’s book ‘Victim of the Swamp’ – a fear-based narrative control operation called Interactive Internet Activities, or IIA. It’s your call to what extent you want to believe them, but the expedience with which Shadowgate was censored online (for ‘hate speech’ of all things) and Weaver reportedly got arrested certainly is telling.
Last week, project fear version 2.0 for election 2020 was kicked off by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris demanding that all “patriotic” Americans wear masks for the next three months, claiming it will save 40,000 lives. Biden and Harris refused to cite even a scintilla of scientific evidence or answer any questions. Their policy? Just shut up and obey.
I have discussed at length and how Amazon, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Apple, Netflix and YouTube could manipulate the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. The US two-party system looks content to sit silently and allow the Wall Street-financed Silicon Valley oligarchs to rig the 2020 election and implement a cancel culture with fear and obedience as its main features. Freedom of speech, democracy and liberty will be vaporized. Congratulations, Wall Street – Biden/Harris are ready to do whatever you command.
The rule of law has already been cast aside, along with statues and history, as a ‘racist relic’ created by old white men. In the minds of the mob, the United States is being transformed into a virtue-signaling utopia, which, in reality, has become a lawless banana republic run by a small shrieking violent minority of coastal elites funded by plutocrats with IIA to solidify their rule. Welcome to Wokeistan and its cult-like indoctrination run by omnipotent ‘diversity trainers’.
New York’s ‘Gray Lady’ the New York Times is a prime example, having now morphed into a liberal left echo chamber that tells its readers what to think. It has dropped all journalistic neutrality and has ‘evolved’ into a biased editorial paper that displaces critical analysis, reason, logic and facts. The Times now claims a monopoly on ‘progressive thought’ that is veering sharply from any journalistic integrity and heading down a dark path of ‘woke ideologies’ that distort the truth and include insane platforms such as censorship-based ‘cancel culture’ and ‘abolishing the police’. In conjunction with Hollywood billionaire Oprah Winfrey’s production company Lionsgate, the ‘Narrative Lady’ seeks to put a dishonest spin on history and cancel anyone who dares resist. Why is America’s broken judicial system allowing a dialogue that will enable ANYONE to criticize, discriminate or attack people for the way they were born? Discrimination law is clear – it is illegal to treat people differently based upon their immutable characteristics of skin color, sex, age, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or political inclination.
The overthrow began 30 years ago when the Clintons came into power and academics became more interested in indoctrination than in education. Education has been overrun by cultural Marxism. As George Orwell warned: “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery and Ignorance is Strength.” Today’s mantra is ‘Diversity is our strength’. If you dispute this, you are racist, sexist, homophobic and a despicable person who the mob will ensure is censored, fired, humiliated, shunned from society and permanently canceled for not subscribing to the dictates.
The left demanded that Joe Biden’s VP pick be a woman of color – not the most qualified person for the job, but a woman of color because of Biden’s Senate record and history on race. In advance of Biden’s capitulation, left-leaning groups crafted and sent all major news outlets 32 pages of guidelines with veiled threats of cancelation if anyone dared question the narrative. If you step over the line, you will be considered racist, sexist and a slew of ‘ists’ too many to name.
Following Harris’s nomination, there was even more magical thinking from coastal academic elites and purveyors of fake news. The New York Times was widely mocked for its rebirth of Kamala Harris and for its revisionist history when it called Kamala Harris a pragmatic moderate. GovTrack rated Harris as the fourth most liberal US senator in the 115th Congress. Harris’ track record as a California prosecutor shows her to be anything but a progressive prosecutor. Harris did not protect victims of sexual predators. Harris failed to prosecute alleged pedophile priests. However, Harris did accept a $50,950 campaign contribution from “board members of San Francisco Catholic archdiocese-related organizations and their family members,” as well as lucrative pay-to-play board appointments. Nothing to see here, look away.
Senator Kamala Harris will do or say anything in her quest for power. Before determining any factual basis for Jussie Smollett’s fake ‘hate crime’, Harris had no problem posting the divisive, inflammatory race-baiting tweet below.
When overwhelming evidence revealed how Jussie Smollett faked this ‘hate crime’, Harris refused to retract her statements and remove this incendiary tweet. Is that leadership? Where is the condemnation? Is Harris someone we want a heartbeat away from the presidency?
This presidential election will be the most consequential for the survival of the republic.
The US is no longer a democracy; it is an oligarchy. Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the media propagandists and the coastal elites demand regime and societal change as well as a cultural shift. Let the book burning begin! Is this what the majority of America wants? Does either political party care about the people they represent?
‘Orange man bad’ is the totality of the Biden/Harris ticket. No questions allowed and any debates are unlikely. Forget the facts that Democrat-controlled cities are currently infested with crime and are borderline uninhabitable, that the wealth inequality gap has never been wider, that tens of thousands of Americans die yearly from opioid addiction, that about 40 million Americans are unemployed and that the Federal Reserve keeps bailing out bankers with a debt tsunami while the bread and circuses of the empire in decline hits a fever pitch. These are minor details because: ORANGE MAN BAD! Rinse, repeat ORANGE MAN BAD!
A Biden/Harris ticket ensures the oligarchy’s agenda will be accelerated, the rich will get richer and everyone else will get screwed – again.
Mitchell Feierstein is the CEO of Glacier Environmental Fund and author of ‘Planet Ponzi: How the World Got into This Mess, What Happens Next, and How to Protect Yourself.’ He spends his time between London and Manhattan. Join Mitch on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook – @Planetponzi
The Abyss of Disinformation Gazes Into Its Creators
By Patrick Armstrong | Startegic Culture Foundation | August 17, 2020
He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you. – Friedrich Nietzsche
The other day the U.S. State Department published “Pillars of Russia’s Disinformation and Propaganda Ecosystem“. The report should have a disclaimer like this:
Everything you read in the NYT or hear Rachel Maddow say about Russia is true: Putin is a murderer, a thief and a thug, he shot down MH17, poisoned the Skripals, elected Trump, invaded Georgia and stole Crimea. If you question any part of this, you are controlled and directed by Russian Disinformation HQ.
Freedom of speech does not entitle you to doubt The Truth.
The methodology of all of these things – this is one of several – is uncomplicated. Paul Robinson has commented on the dependence of so much comment about Russia, and this report in particular, on the myth of central control.
- Anything anywhere on Russian social media, whether sensible or crazy, was personally put there by Putin to sow discord and weaken us. All social media or websites based in Russia are 100% controlled by Putin.
- The Truth about Russia is found in the West’s official statements and in the “trusted source media”. Anyone who questions it benefits Putin, who wants to bring us down, and is therefore acting as a servant of Russian Disinformation HQ.
The argument really is that simple and can be found in its baldest (and stupidest) version on the EU vs DiSiNFO site, The NATO Centre of Excellence is pretty bad while The Integrity Initiative seems to have been embarrassed into silence. Note the “disinfo”, “excellence” and “integrity” bits – that’s called gaslighting. Who funds these selfless truth seekers? The EU, NATO and the British government. But they’re good and truthful, unlike those tricky Russians.
In this particular effusion they look at seven websites, six of which are registered in Russia and one in Canada. The report declares that they are in an ecosystem directed from Russian Disinformation HQ. In reality they are sites which publish writers who – to take one example – think that it is a bit unusual that a deadly nerve agent smeared on a door handle requires the roof of the house to be replaced. But doubt, these days, is the outward sign of an inward Putinism.
Door handle!
Yeah, OK, but why the roof?
Putinbot!
One of the websites mentioned in the report is the one you’re reading now – Strategic Culture Foundation.
Could these be the officials who told the NYT about the bounties? Or gave it the photos it had to walk back a few days later? Or said their sources had “mysteriously gone quiet?” Or told it all 17? Or said it was probably microwave weapons? Or gave us years of scoops about how Mueller was just about to lock him up? Or told the NYT that Russia’s “economy suffers from flat growth and shrinking incomes“? Probably, but you’re not supposed to ask these questions.
The report has a good deal of speculation about who backs Strategic Culture Foundation (p 15). Personally I don’t much care who runs it (and I very much doubt that the Kremlin understands the point of running an opinion website). I’ve been in the USSR/Russia business for some time and what I think hasn’t changed much since 1986 or so. I’ve written for a number of sites which have faded away and I will not permit having what I write changed; the one time it happened twelve years ago, I immediately switched my operations elsewhere. Strategic Culture Foundation has never changed anything I’ve submitted and only twice suggested a topic – this one and Putin’s weaponised crickets. (And the warning is still up at the U.S. State Department site!) The other writers on the site whom I know haven’t changed their views either. Strategic Culture Foundation hasn’t created something that didn’t exist before, it’s collected something that already existed. What do we writers have in common? Well, Dear Reader, look around you. Certainly we question The Truth. Or maybe SCF is a place where people “baffled by the hysterical Russophobia of the MSM and the Democratic Party since the 2016 election” can find something else? Or maybe it’s part of Madison’s “general intercourse of sentiments”?
There was a theory in the Cold War that the two sides would eventually converge. I often think that they met and then kept on going and passed each other. In those days the Soviets did their best to block what they considered to be – dare I suggest it? – disinformation. And so RFE/RL, BBC, Radio Canada and so on were jammed. We, on our side, didn’t care who listened to Radio Moscow or read Soviet publications. Today it’s the other way round. Which fact prompts the easy deduction that the side that’s confident that it has a better connection to reality and truth doesn’t waste effort trying to block the other. In a fascinating essay, the Saker describes Russian propaganda for its home audience: “give as much air time to the most rabid anti-Kremlin critiques as possible, especially on Russian TV talkshows”. They even took the trouble to dub Morgan Freeman’s absurd “we are at war” video. That’s brilliant – we won’t tell you they hate you, we’ll let them tell you they hate you.
The report talks as if this “ecosystem” were big and influential. But it’s a tiny mouse next to a whale. Total followers on Twitter of all seven sites are 156 thousand (p65). That’s nothing: the NYT has 47.1 million Twitter followers, BBC Breaking News 44.8, WaPo 16.1. Why even Rachel Maddow has ten million followers eager to hear her explain how Russia is going to turn off your furnace next winter. So the rational observer has a choice to make after reading this report: either the report ludicrously over-exaggerates the influence of this “ecosystem” or 156,000 website followers are astonishingly influential and I, with my Strategic Culture Foundation pieces, personally control several Electoral College votes.
The real message of “Pillars of Russia’s Disinformation and Propaganda Ecosystem“, to someone who isn’t invested in spinning – ahem – theories about a Kremlin disinformation conspiracy, is that the “pillars” are feeble and the “ecosystem” small: Maddow alone has three times the followers of these seven plus the RT (3 million) the “all 17” report spent nearly half its space irrelevantly ranting about. Or maybe it’s saying that American voters are so easily influenced that “the Lilliputian Russians, spending a pittance compared to the Goliaths of the Clinton and Trump campaigns, was the deciding factor in 2016“.
Ironically this thing appeared at the same time as two that suggest Washington’s view of Moscow needs some work: It’s Time to Rethink Our Russia Policy and The Problem With Putinology: We need a new kind of writing about Russia. Good to see titles like that but they aren’t really rethinking anything: they still agree that Putin’s guilty of everything that Maddow says he is. Real re-thinking might get a toehold, for example, were people to contemplate why it is imbecilic to say that Moscow holds military exercises close to NATO’s borders. But you’ll only see that sort of thing on Strategic Culture Foundation and the others.
But now the abyss gazes back
Clinton loses an election, blames Russia, the intelligence agencies pile on, the media shrieks away. Americans are told patriotic Americans don’t doubt. And now we arrive at the next stage of insanity. William Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, informs us that “Russia is backing Donald Trump, China is supporting Joe Biden and Iran is seeking to sow chaos in the U.S. presidential election…”. I guess that means that Russia and China will cancel each other out and that he’s telling us that Iran will choose the next POTUS. Who would have thought that the fate of the “greatest nation in earth” (as Presidents Trump, Obama, Bush Jr, Clinton, Bush Sr and Reagan like to call it) would be hidden under a turban somewhere in Iran?
So, American, know this: your “trusted sources” are telling you not to bother to vote in November – it’s not your decision.
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From the Archives
The Great Recycling Scam
By Dr. Vernon Coleman – 21st Century Wire – September 2, 2022
Recycling was introduced, worldwide, as a tool to teach citizens to become compliant.
Forcing citizens to sort their rubbish into up to nine separate bags or boxes every week had absolutely nothing to do with ‘saving the planet’ and everything to do with teaching citizens (through a mixture of fines and shame) to behave ‘responsibly’ i.e. to do as they were told without looking too closely at the rationale of what they were being told to do.
The recycling never had anything to do with protecting the planet, of course. Most of the rubbish sorted, washed and collected in the UK was taken abroad, by lorry or ship or train, and burnt or dumped. It was, quite simply, impractical and not cost effective to recycle the material that had been collected. And, of course, collecting the sorted rubbish involved massive costs in terms of cash and pollution.
Today, the recycling business has reached an apogee of lunacy. Councils introduce ever more complex rules and fees. They refuse to take away much of the waste that is collected. And those wanting to take their rubbish to a ‘recycling’ centre will probably have to make an appointment and answer a host of questions.
It is no surprise that fly-tipping has become a major problem. The biggest causes of plastic in the sea are dumped fishing gear and plastic waste (much of it officially designated as recycled) which has been dumped by ships.
The good news, however, is that in Britain, recycling rates are falling. More and more people have become aware that the whole recycling movement was just another piece of manipulative trickery.
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- Voters Don’t Want the Old GOP
- Former US officials who resigned over Gaza urge 2028 presidential candidates to reject architects of Biden-era policy
- Wired for War Crimes: Israeli spy-tech firm targeted Starlink users – researchers
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- If Americans Knew
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- DAILY UPDATE: Latest essential news on Palestine, Israel, & region
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- Voters Don’t Want the Old GOP
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- DAILY UPDATE: Latest essential news on Palestine, Israel, & region
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- Germany’s Green Energy Debacle: High Energy Costs Force Kahla Porzellan to Close After 182 Years!
- New Study: 50 Years Of The Most Aggressive ‘Net Zero’ Policies Can Only Affect The Global Climate By 0.03°C
- US September “Heat” Was No Record…Many Records Set Decades Ago
- Latest European Green Energy Debacle; Portugal’s Largest Flagship Solar Park Insolvent!
