Deep Politics Forum

David Guyatt Wrote:

Paul Rigby Wrote:

Cliff Varnell Wrote:

David Guyatt Wrote:This is the real concern. Like you I'm no supporter of Trump and would gladly see him derailed in any other circumstances. But applauding and backing the Deep State's regime change in the US is so dangerous and throws opens the door for a complete loss of even minimal democracy in the future. The though of having Clinton replacing Trump, or anyone of the other neocon candidates who will willingly act out the desired war with Russia will be a living nightmare.

But I rather fear this is what's going to happen now.

If "the Deep State" desires war with Russia why did they allow Trump to win in the first place?

I can only refer you to the work of the original Cliff Varnell who sagely insisted that the Deep State is a mansion with many rooms, in which dwell some supporters of the Trumper.

Should we send out a search party for the original; or merely content ourselves with arranging a meeting between you?

Honestly, Tooth! You beat me to it again. ::

But apparently you now have been assigned your own "deep state"by his Nibs, and I'm sure I must also have my own "deep state" - and every one of Two Cliff's "deep state's" are now apparently "nuanced" to mean whatever Two Cliff's wants them to mean when asked.

I hate being left out of new exciting trends, so I'm now officially making my "deep state" nuanced too.

In fact, I think it best if I make all my future "statements" nuanced so I can shift, modify or reverse the original emphasis as required.

Yours most sincerely,

"Two David's Orwell Guyatt"
Chief Executive Officer
All Words Are Malleable (AWAM)
C/O The New York Times
Washington Post Building
Langley, Virginia
USA

Founder of Quotation Marks Publishing

Yes, we all have our own vision of what constitutes "the Deep State."

I put the question to you as well, David.

According to YOUR understanding of "the Deep State" why was Trump allowed to win in the first place?

Bob Hope on the Democrat-as-zombie, 1940

[video=youtube_share;I5PInhXkfvs]http://youtu.be/I5PInhXkfvs[/video]

Trump Derangement Syndrome, 2017

[video=youtube_share;fmLfCHF3skk]http://youtu.be/fmLfCHF3skk[/video]

Russia: The Conspiracy Trap

Masha Gessen

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/03/06/...racy-trap/

Quote:What's so terrible about Russia? Serious question.

Among the things that unite President Trump and his cabinet picks is their propensity for lying. ProPublica recently offered a list of lies made by Trump nominees in confirmation hearings in Congress, mostly under oath. Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt lied when he claimed not to have used a private email account as Oklahoma attorney general (Vice President Mike Pence used one too, as governor of Indiana); Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price lied about a suspect stock purchase; Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin lied about his firm's history of profiting from the housing crisis; Education Secretary Betsy DeVos lied that she was not involved in her family foundation, which has supported anti-LGBT causes and funded a variety of conservative think tanks and colleges, though tax filings show she has been its vice president for seventeen years. And, as we now know, Attorney General Jeff Sessions lied about contacts with the Russian ambassador.

Lying to Congress is a criminal offense. But Pruitt was confirmed in a 52-46 vote, with two Democrats voting in favor; Price got confirmed 52-47; Mnuchin's tally was 53-47; and even DeVos, whose utter lack of knowledge about public education led two Republicans to vote against her, squeaked through with a 50-50 vote broken by Vice President Pence. These affirming votes took place despite the fact that it was clear before the decision that the candidates had misled Congressand despite the fact that each of them supports policies that are deeply threatening to large numbers of Americans.

Lies about Russia are a different matter. Trump's national security adviser, Mike Flynn, was forced to resign less than four weeks into the new presidency after it emerged that he had lied to Pence about meeting with the Russian ambassador; and Sessions, under bipartisan fire for having lied to Congress about the same thing, now faces calls to step down.

I am, of course, merely pretending not to know what makes Russia so special. For more than six months now, Russia has served as a crutch for the American imagination. It is used to explain how Trump could have happened to us, and it is also called upon to give us hope. When the Russian conspiracy behind Trump is finally fully exposed, our national nightmare will be over.

A great many journalists and pundits have been convinced of the Russia conspiracy since December, some since October, a few since July. That conviction helps "connect the dots" as more and more dots seem to appear. Every new story makes the evidence pile up, even if it later turns out to be apparently unrelatedas in the case of the cybersecurity experts who were arrested and charged with treason by Russian authorities in December. In January The New York Times, Rachel Maddow, and a slew of other outlets reported on rumors that the charges of treason stemmed from disclosures about the Russian hacking of the US election. But a month later, when Reuters reported that the arrests were the result of an unrelated seven-year-old case, few other publications followed up on the story. The fact is, the Russian justice system is so opaque and so corrupt that it is virtually impossible to know why these men were arrestedbut the arrests have long since taken their place in the narrative.

The backbone of the rapidly yet endlessly developing Trump-Putin story is leaks from intelligence agencies, and this is its most troublesome aspect. Virtually none of the information can be independently corroborated. The context, sequence, and timing of the leaks is determined by people unknown to the public, which is expected to accept anonymous stories on faith; nor have we yet been given any hard evidence of active collusion by Trump officials. As a paragraph deep into a New York Times analysis noted on Friday,

vigorous reporting by multiple news media organizations is turning up multiple contacts between Trump associates and Russians who serve in or are close to Mr. Putin's government. There have been courtesy calls, policy discussions and business contacts, though nothing has emerged publicly indicating anything more sinister….Former diplomats and Russia specialists say it would have been absurd and contrary to American interests for the Trump team to avoid meetings with Russians, either during or since the campaign.

Given that the story has been driven by the intelligence community and the media, it is perhaps unsurprising that each subsequent revelation creates the sense of pieces falling into place. It builds like an old-fashioned television series, dispensed in weekly episodes with no binge-watching allowed. What remains from the earliest installments is not so much information as mood. Take, for example, one of the earliest revelations: in July an opinion piece in The Washington Post claimed that the Trump campaign "worked behind the scenes" to block a platform amendment that would have called for providing lethal aid to Ukraineincluding weapon systems, mortars, grenade launchers, ammunition, and other armaments. The article was slightly misleading: it made it seem like Trump's people made the party abandon a plank that would have called for maintaining or increasing sanctions and lethal aid. In fact, the sanctions part of the plank stayed in the platformit was the lethal-aid amendment, a step that had hitherto not been taken, even during the height of the Ukraine war in 2014, that was tabled. The issue is far from a clear-cut one: few people in Washington, whether Republicans or Democrats, are on record as favoring lethal aid.

Now, the Republican convention is back in the news because one of the conversations the Russian ambassador had with Sessions, who was at the time an adviser to the Trump campaign, occurred in Cleveland, at a diplomacy panel timed to run alongside the convention. On March 2, USA Today reported that two more members of the Trump campaignJ.D. Gordon and Carter Pagespoke to the Russian ambassador at the same panel. When CNN picked up the story, it reported that "Gordon said that he was a part of the effort that was part of the Trump campaign to put some language in the GOP platform that essentially said that the Republican Party did not advocate arming the Ukrainians in their battle against pro-Russian separatists." Correspondent Jim Acosta continued,

Of course, that was a big issue that was flaring up at the time. That effort was ultimately successful. They were successful in having that language in the Republican Party platform. I asked J.D. Gordon, Well, why is that? Why did you go ahead and advocate for that language?' He said this is the language that Donald Trump himself wanted and advocated for back in March at the meeting at the unfinished Trump Hotel here in Washington, D.C. J.D. Gordon said then-candidate Trump said he did not want to, quote, go to World War III over Ukraine.' And so, as J.D. Gordon says, at the Republican convention in Cleveland he advocated for language in that Republican Party platform that reflected then-candidate Trump's comments.

He then briefly noted that Gordon denied that any inappropriate conversation had occurred between him and the Russian ambassador.

The report sounded damningunless one knew, of course, that the "language" to which Acosta managed to refer four times in the space of thirty seconds did not existno statement on Ukraine was inserted into the Republican platform by the Trump campaignand that the sentiment ostensibly ascribed to candidate Trump falls squarely in the foreign-policy mainstream and was, in fact, the position held by the Obama administration. The "meetings" that sounded so sinister were in fact public encounters that occurred during a panel and, later, a cocktail partyschmoozing, which is both the ambassador's and campaign advisers' jobs. But all of Friday-evening punditry on CNN and MSNBC was from that point on occupied with connecting the imaginary dots of the Russian ambassador-Trump campaign cabal at the Republican convention. CNN also ran with an unsubstantiated report that the Russian ambassador is a "spy master," an outrageous assertion that mirrored Russian propaganda about Obama's Moscow ambassador, Michael McFaul.

A later building block in the story, which has become its virtual cornerstone, is the joint intelligence report on Russian interference in the campaign, which was released in December and is, plainly, laughable. Is it possible that there is a trove of yet-unleaked classified information that proves that a Russian conspiracy existed, and succeeded in hijacking the American election? Yes, it is. Is it also possible that a few, or many, intelligence officials, who feel, understandably, both insulted by Trump, who has openly and repeatedly denigrated the intelligence establishment, and terrified of what he might do to the country, are using scant or inconclusive evidence to try to undermine his credibility? Yes. What is indisputable is that the protracted national game of connecting the Trump-Putin dots is an exercise in conspiracy thinking. That does not mean there was no conspiracy. And yet, a possible conspiracy is a poor excuse for conspiracy thinking.

The most solid part of the story to date is the hack of the Democratic National Committee, apparently carried out by people connected to Russian intelligence. Hacking, releasing email, and spreading disinformation has been a standard Russian strategy for a number of years. Domestically, these tactics are used to discredit opponents of the regime. Internationally, they are usedand have been used repeatedly in numerous European countries as well as the United Statesto disrupt and undermine public trust in Western democracies. This strategy predates email and the Internet and even contemporary Russiait goes back to the cold war, when the Soviet Union aimed to sow disinformation and build alliances with marginal political playersperhaps not so much because they were the best possible conduits for disruption as because they were the only ones Soviet spies could reach.

For most of its history, the strategy was a colossal waste of money and human resources, probably because Soviet understanding of Western political systems was exceedingly poor. Judging from the memoirs of Soviet defectors, their masters imagined the West exactly as it was portrayed in Soviet propaganda. In a popular 1984 miniseries called "TASS is Authorized to Declare," for example, a heroic KGB officer exposes an American spy in Moscow. The spy's handler, an American named John Glabb, not only organizes pro-American military coups in small African countries but also traffics in heroin, which he smuggles in the bodies of babies purchased from impoverished families and killed for CIA purposes. Modern Russian spymasters get their ideas about the West from the West itselfthey are generally convinced that the American political system is accurately portrayed by House of Cards. If Russian disruption efforts were more successful during the 2016 American election, it was not because the Russians have become so much better at what they do or have finally developed a sophisticated understanding of American politicsit is because American politics have come to resemble the TV caricatures.

Trump and his entire campaign team are precisely the kinds of fringe characters that Russians have traditionally cultivated, to no measurable effect. Even the insiders on Trump's team were outsiders: Jeff Sessions was seen by his Senate colleagues as a crank and an extreme outlier on immigration and other issues; General Mike Flynn had been fired by the Obama administration for insubordination that stemmed from his penchant for conspiracy theories. Others, like foreign policy adviser Carter Page, had never been allowed at the grown-up table before. One-time campaign manager Paul Manafort, for all his supposed Republican/Washington credentials, was basically a paid hack for a succession of the world's crooks. And Steve Bannon, above all, had turned being a fringe character into a profession.

And then this campaign staffed with bottom-feeders won, and talk of Russia's influence on the outcomethough the Kremlin itself by every indication seems to have assumed a Clinton presidencyhas finally reached the point of pushing leading members of Congress to call for an investigation by a special attorney. If a causal relationship between Russian interference and Trump's 70,000-vote, three-county edge exists, the likelihood that such a relationship can be proved is vanishingly small. Failing that, what might an investigation find? Undoubtedly, it can find that Trump's associates lied about their contacts with Russian officialsas they lie, habitually, about a great many things. What makes the Russia lies worse than any other?

The answer is intuitive: Republicans in the House and Senate cannot be compelled to call out the Trump administration's other lieseven when they break the law. And they will do everything in their power to avoid having to, since, as terrible as Trump is, his administration is the best chance in years to push through some of their most far-reaching policy goals, from dismantling health care to lowering taxes and reversing banking reforms. In addition, their constituents voted for Trump, who will unleash a Twitter firestorm in response to any slight, real or imagined. But the fear of being seen as ignoring a primary threat to national security, indeed, as disloyal to the country may, if the media buildup continues, force them to respond to the allegations.

Russia has become the universal rhetorical weapon of American politics. Calls for the release of Trump's tax returnswhich the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) hopes to have subpoenaed as a result of its lawsuit alleging the violation of the Emoluments Clauseare now framed in terms of the need to reveal Trump's financial ties to Russia. And the president himself is recapturing the campaign debate's "No, you are the puppet" moment on Twitter, trying to smear Democratic politicians Charles Schumer and Nancy Pelosi with Russia.

The dream fueling the Russia frenzy is that it will eventually create a dark enough cloud of suspicion around Trump that Congress will find the will and the grounds to impeach him. If that happens, it will have resulted largely from a media campaign orchestrated by members of the intelligence communitysetting a dangerous political precedent that will have corrupted the public sphere and promoted paranoia. And that is the best-case outcome.

More likely, the Russia allegations will not bring down Trump. He may sacrifice more of his people, as he sacrificed Flynn, as further leaks discredit them. Various investigations may drag on for months, drowning out other, far more urgent issues. In the end, Congressional Republicans will likely conclude that their constituents don't care enough about Trump's Russian ties to warrant trying to impeach the Republican president. Meanwhile, while Russia continues to dominate the front pages, Trump will continue waging war on immigrants, cutting funding for everything that's not the military, assembling his cabinet of deplorableswith six Democrats voting to confirm Ben Carson for Housing, for example, and ten to confirm Rick Perry for Energy. According to the Trump plan, each of these seems intent on destroying the agency he or she is chosen to runto carry out what Steve Bannon calls the "deconstruction of the administrative state." As for Sessions, in his first speech as attorney general he promised to cut back civil rights enforcement and he has already abandoned a Justice Department case against a discriminatory Texas voter ID law. But it was his Russia lie that grabbed the big headlines.

The unrelenting focus on Russia has yielded an unexpected positive result, however. Following Flynn's resignation, Trump designated Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, a thoughtful and highly respected military strategist, as his national security adviser. And Fiona Hill, probably the most knowledgeable American scholar of Putin's Russia, is expected to take charge of Russia policy at the National Security Council. Hill has been a consistent and perceptive critic of Putin, and a proponent of maintaining sanctions imposed by the United States following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Both of these appointmentsand the fact that sanctions remain in place six weeks into Trump's fast-moving presidencycontradict the "Putin's puppet" narrative (as does the fact that Russian domestic propaganda has already turned against Trump). But such is the nature of conspiracy thinking that facts can do nothing to change it.

Imagine if the same kind of attention could be trained and sustained on other issueslike it has been on the Muslim travel ban. It would not get rid of Trump, but it might mitigate the damage he is causing. Trump is doing nothing less than destroying American democratic institutions and principles by turning the presidency into a profit-making machine for his family, by poisoning political culture with hateful, mendacious, and subliterate rhetoric, by undermining the public sphere with attacks on the press and protesters, and by beginning the real work of dismantling every part of the federal government that exists for any purpose other than waging war. Russiagate is helping himboth by distracting from real, documentable, and documented issues, and by promoting a xenophobic conspiracy theory in the cause of removing a xenophobic conspiracy theorist from office.

March 6, 2017, 10:16 am

David Guyatt Wrote:

Paul Rigby Wrote:

Cliff Varnell Wrote:

David Guyatt Wrote:This is the real concern. Like you I'm no supporter of Trump and would gladly see him derailed in any other circumstances. But applauding and backing the Deep State's regime change in the US is so dangerous and throws opens the door for a complete loss of even minimal democracy in the future. The though of having Clinton replacing Trump, or anyone of the other neocon candidates who will willingly act out the desired war with Russia will be a living nightmare.

But I rather fear this is what's going to happen now.

If "the Deep State" desires war with Russia why did they allow Trump to win in the first place?

I can only refer you to the work of the original Cliff Varnell who sagely insisted that the Deep State is a mansion with many rooms, in which dwell some supporters of the Trumper.

Should we send out a search party for the original; or merely content ourselves with arranging a meeting between you?

Honestly, Tooth! You beat me to it again. ::

But apparently you now have been assigned your own "deep state"by his Nibs, and I'm sure I must also have my own "deep state" - and every one of Two Cliff's "deep state's" are now apparently "nuanced" to mean whatever Two Cliff's wants them to mean when asked.

I hate being left out of new exciting trends, so I'm now officially making my "deep state" nuanced too.

In fact, I think it best if I make all my future "statements" nuanced so I can shift, modify or reverse the original emphasis as required.

Yours most sincerely,

"Two David's Orwell Guyatt"
Chief Executive Officer
All Words Are Malleable (AWAM)
C/O The New York Times
Washington Post Building
Langley, Virginia
USA

Founder of Quotation Marks Publishing

I have in my hands, er, an undated clipping from that esteemed organ, The Belfast Gleaner, which charts one possible solution to the Varnell Conundrum of how to handle inconvenient past comments:

Quote:The Law Bites

By John Knox

Sir Herbert Tooth has successfully applied for a super-injunction against himself in the court of Ballydrivel. "Everything I wrote in the run-up to President Trumper's election cannot now be accessed or quoted, particularly by myself, on pain of an enormous fine and/or prison," he announced, with evident relief, at the conclusion of a hearing the controversial Tory grandee insisted was nothing less than "a matter of professional life-or-death" for him. "If the Yanks freeze me out, I'm off the goggle box, the wireless and reduced to appearing in the pages of the Daily Torygraph or similarly absurd fringe rags," he pleaded. "It is essential that I ingratiate myself with the new overlords."

Announcing the judgment, his cousin, Lord Justice Oswald Tooth, commented that Sir Herbert had made a thoroughly convincing case that he is, in his own words, "a venal, idle and unprincipled shit" who had received large amounts of money from the British media for "hackneyed old Clintonista rope" almost all of which had been written by ghosts, many of whom were under the influence of drugs, glue, or, even worse, the DNC, at the time of composition.

Sir Herbert argued that had been led in to temptation by sinister anti-democratic forces who had ruthlessly exploited his well-known weaknesses: "Senior reptiles, all of them from impeccably neo-conservative institutions such as the BBC, The Grauniad, and The New Statesman would get on the blower, inform me that some twelve year-old member of Team Podesta had banged out another epistle to their European colonies, and dangle easy money before me. Put your name to this latest establishment farrago,' was the standard pitch, and there's a data packet of readies winging its way to the Cayman account.'" Sir Herbert wept openly in court as he admitted, "I was putty in the hands of these experienced presstitutes." Lord Justice Cottager of Kincora, sitting with Lord Oswald, laughed audibly in response, insisted Sir Herbert drop the large onion he sought to conceal in his outsized handkerchief, and pointed out that Sir Herbert had played a rather more active role than he would have the court believe.

"You sought to conceal your true role through the unconventional application of large quantities of Domestos," Cottager went on, "in a desperate, half-baked and likely alcohol-fuelled attempt to purge your hard drive of relevant evidence, but you fool no one: you did not merely put an inebriated signature to the tenth-rate propaganda you received, as you would have this court believe, you were, rather, paid to spice up a succession of rather dreary American texts with as a many insults, libels and smears as you could get past the reptiles' legal people. It is clear that your true role was both active and tawdry in the extreme. I nevertheless find for you in this matter, on the ground that you are one of us." A visibly relieved Sir Herbert eagerly agreed and vowed to reform, though not necessarily in this lifetime.

Sir Herbert urged readers of Wayback-type cache sites to make the following substitutions:

1) For "slavering serial rapist" read "hard-driving ladies man"
2) For "bouffanted buffoon" read "leonine maned"
3) For "tax-dodging fraudster" read "prudent international businessman"
4) For "vain lunatic" read "disinterested maverick"
5) For "agent of the Kremlin" read "geo-political seer firmly within the America First tradition"
6) For "sinister hooded klavern" read "the new cabinet"
7) For "sordid porn star" read "fragrant first lady"

::coffeesplutter::::

Lauren Johnson Wrote:::coffeesplutter::::

Ditto

What a thoroughly wonderful piece of reporting. I must immediately get a subscription to the Belfast Gleaner, which seems to me to be a very sensible newspaper. This is especially so because I have long been an ardent admirer of Lord Justice Cottager. The oral judgements he reaches are always immensely enjoyable... if a little tiring.

By the way, was the application of a self injunction painful or pleasurable or both?

Paul Rigby Wrote:the Varnell Conundrum of how to handle inconvenient past comments:

I made no such comment. I asked you a perfectly reasonable question.

If "the Deep State" desires a war with Russia, why did they allow Trump to win in the first place?

You responded by implying I asked myself that question.

If nuance is a bridge too far, how about a modicum of coherence?

Quote:Fresh Doubts about Russian Hacking'
March 8, 2017

Exclusive: The gauzy allegations of Russia "hacking" the Democrats to elect Donald Trump just got hazier with WikiLeaks' new revelations about CIA cyber-spying and the capability to pin the blame on others, reports Robert Parry.




By Robert Parry


WikiLeaks' disclosure of documents revealing CIA cyber-spying capabilities underscores why much more skepticism should have been applied to the U.S. intelligence community's allegations about Russia "hacking" last year's American presidential election. It turns out that the CIA maintains a library of foreign malware that could be used to pin the blame for a "hack" on another intelligence service.




WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at a media conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. (Photo credit: New Media Days / Peter Erichsen)
That revelation emerged from documents that WikiLeaks published on Tuesday from a CIA archive that WikiLeaks said had apparently been passed around within a community of former U.S. government hackers and contractors before one of them gave WikiLeaks some of the material.


The documents revealed that the CIA can capture the content of encrypted Internet and cell-phone messages by grabbing the material in the fraction of a second before the words are put through encryption.


Another program called "Weeping Angel" can hack Samsung "smart" TVs with built-in Internet connections, allowing the CIA and British intelligence to covertly use the TVs as listening devices even when they appear to be turned off.


Besides the 1984-ish aspects of these reported capabilities Orwell's dystopia also envisioned TVs being used to spy on people in their homes the WikiLeaks' disclosures add a new layer of mystery to whether the Russians were behind the "hacks" of the Democratic Party or whether Moscow was framed.


For instance, the widely cited Russian fingerprints on the "hacking" attacks such as malware associated with the suspected Russian cyber-attackers APT 28 (also known as "Fancy Bear"); some Cyrillic letters: and the phrase "Felix Edmundovich," a reference to Dzerzhinsky, the founder of a Bolsheviks' secret police look less like proof of Russian guilt than they did earlier.


Or put differently based on the newly available CIA material the possibility that these telltale signs were planted to incriminate Moscow doesn't sound as farfetched as it might have earlier.


A former U.S. intelligence officer, cited by The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, acknowledged that the CIA's "Umbrage" library of foreign hacking tools could "be used to mask a U.S. operation and make it appear that it was carried out by another country…. That could be accomplished by inserting malware components from, say, a known Chinese, Russian or Iranian hacking operation into a U.S. one."


While that possibility in no way clears Moscow in the case of the Democratic "hack," it does inject new uncertainty into the "high confidence" that President Obama's intelligence community expressed in its assessment of Russian culpability. If the CIA had this capability to plant false leads in the data, so too would other actors, both government and private, to cover their own tracks.


Dubious Forensics


Another problem with the U.S. intelligence community's assessment is that the forensics were left to private contractors working for the Democrats, not conducted independently by U.S. government experts.




Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
That gap in the evidentiary trail widens when one notes that CrowdStrike, the Democratic Party's consultant, offered contradictory commentary about the skills of the hackers.


CrowdStrike praised the hackers' tradecraft as "superb, operational security second to none" and added: "we identified advanced methods consistent with nation-state level capabilities including deliberate targeting and access management' tradecraft both groups were constantly going back into the environment to change out their implants, modify persistent methods, move to new Command & Control channels and perform other tasks to try to stay ahead of being detected."


In other words, CrowdStrike cited the sophistication of the tradecraft as proof of a state-sponsored cyber-attack, yet it was the sloppiness of the tradecraft that supposedly revealed the Russian links, i.e. the old malware connections, the Cyrillic letters and the Dzerzhinsky reference.


As Sam Biddle wrote for The Intercept, "Would a group whose tradecraft is superb' with operational security second to none' really leave behind the name of a Soviet spy chief imprinted on a document it sent to American journalists? Would these groups really be dumb enough to leave cyrillic comments on these documents? Would these groups that constantly [go] back into the environment to change out their implants, modify persistent methods, move to new Command & Control channels' get caught because they precisely didn't make sure not to use IP addresses they'd been associated [with] before?


"It's very hard to buy the argument that the Democrats were hacked by one of the most sophisticated, diabolical foreign intelligence services in history, and that we know this because they screwed up over and over again."


Sources and Methods


The WikiLeaks' disclosures on Tuesday also demonstrate that the pro-transparency Web site has a well-placed source with access to sensitive U.S. intelligence data.




WikiLeaks logo
That reinforces the suggestion from WikiLeaks' associate, former British Ambassador Craig Murray, that the emails purloined from Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman John Podesta originated from U.S. intelligence intercepts and were then leaked by an American insider to WikiLeaks, not obtained via a "hack" directed by the Russian government.


Podesta's association with the international lobbying firm, the Podesta Group, could justify U.S. intelligence monitoring his communications as a way to glean information about the strategies of Saudi Arabia and other foreign clients.


Murray suggested that the earlier WikiLeaks' release of Democratic National Committee emails came from a Democratic insider, not from Russia. In addition, WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange has denied that Russia was the source of either batch of Democratic emails, although he refused to say who was.


Of course, it would be possible that Russia used American cutouts to launder the emails without WikiLeaks knowing where the material originated. And some cyber-experts, who were cited in press reports about the new WikiLeaks' disclosures on Tuesday, speculated, without evidence, that perhaps Russia was the source of them, too.


Still, there are now fresh reasons to doubt the Official Narrative that Russia "hacked" into Democratic emails in a covert operation intended to throw the U.S. election to Donald Trump.


Those doubts already existed or should have because the U.S. intelligence community refused to release any hard proof that the Russians were responsible for the purloined Democratic emails.


On Jan. 6, just one day after Director of National Intelligence James Clapper vowed to go to the greatest possible lengths to supply the public with the evidence behind the accusations, his office released a 25-page report that contained no direct evidence that Russia delivered hacked emails from the DNC and Podesta to WikiLeaks.


The DNI report amounted to a compendium of reasons to suspect that Russia was the source of the information built largely on the argument that Russia had a motive for doing so because of its disdain for Democratic nominee Clinton and the potential for friendlier relations with Republican nominee Trump.


A Big Risk


But the DNI's case, as presented, was one-sided, ignoring other reasons why the Russians would not have taken the risk.




Russian President Vladimir Putin, following his address to the UN General Assembly on Sept. 28, 2015. (UN Photo)
For instance, while it is true that many Russian officials, including President Putin, considered Clinton to be a threat to worsen the already frayed relationship between the two nuclear superpowers, the report ignores the downside for Russia trying to interfere with the U.S. election campaign and then failing to stop Clinton, which looked like the most likely outcome until Election Night.


If Russia had accessed the DNC and Podesta emails and slipped them to WikiLeaks for publication, Putin would have to think that the National Security Agency, with its exceptional ability to track electronic communications around the world, might well have detected the maneuver and would have informed Clinton.


So, on top of Clinton's well-known hawkishness, Putin would have risked handing the expected incoming president a personal reason to take revenge on him and his country. Historically, Russia has been very careful in such situations, holding its intelligence collections for internal purposes only and not sharing them with the public.


While it is conceivable that Putin decided to take this extraordinary risk in this case despite the widely held view that Clinton was a shoo-in to defeat Trump an objective report would have examined this counter argument for him not doing so.


But the DNI report was not driven by a desire to be evenhanded; it was, in effect, a prosecutor's brief, albeit one that lacked any real evidence that the accused is guilty.


Though it's impossible for an average U.S. citizen to know precisely what the U.S. intelligence community may have in its secret files, some former NSA officials who are familiar with the agency's eavesdropping capabilities say Washington's lack of certainty suggests that the NSA does not possess such evidence.


That's the view of William Binney, who retired as NSA's technical director of world military and geopolitical analysis and who created many of the collection systems still used by NSA.


Binney, in an article co-written with former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, said, "With respect to the alleged interference by Russia and WikiLeaks in the U.S. election, it is a major mystery why U.S. intelligence feels it must rely on circumstantial evidence,' when it has NSA's vacuum cleaner sucking up hard evidence galore. What we know of NSA's capabilities shows that the email disclosures were from leaking, not hacking."


Released last summer around the time of the Democratic National Convention the DNC emails revealed senior party officials showing a preference for former Secretary of State Clinton over Sen. Bernie Sanders although the DNC was supposed to remain neutral.


Later in the campaign, the Podesta leak exposed the contents of speeches that Clinton gave to Wall Street banks, which she wanted to keep secret from the American voters, and the existence of pay-to-play features of the Clinton Foundation.


News articles based on the WikiLeaks' material embarrassed the DNC and the Clinton campaign, but the rupture of secrets was not considered a very important factor in Clinton's loss to Donald Trump. Clinton herself blamed that surprising outcome on FBI Director James Comey's last-minute decision to briefly reopen the investigation into her improper use of a private server for her emails as Secretary of State.


After Comey's move, Clinton's poll numbers cratered and she seemed incapable of reversing the trend. More generally, Clinton faced criticism for running an inept campaign that included her insulting many Trump supporters by calling them "deplorables" and failing to articulate a clear, hopeful vision for the future.


However, after the shock of Trump's stunning victory began to wear off, the outgoing Obama administration and angry Democrats began singling out Putin as a chief culprit in Clinton's defeat.


Despite the appearance that they were scapegoating America's old adversary the Russkies liberals and Democrats have used the allegations to energize their base and put the young Trump administration on the defensive, even though hard evidence to support the accusations is still lacking.


The liberals and Democrats also don't seem to care that they are using these dubious allegations to ratchet up tensions between the world's two nuclear superpowers, thus putting the future of the world at risk.

Source

The Deep State & Trump Budget Politics with Richard Dolan

The Solari Report on March 2, 2017 at 6:03 am

https://solari.com/blog/the-deep-state-t...ard-dolan/

"The Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army (Financial Management & Comptroller) and the Defense Finance and Accounting Service Indianapolis did not adequately support $2.8 trillion in third quarter journal voucher (JV) adjustments and $6.5 trillion in yearend JV adjustments made to AGF data during FY 2015 financial statement compilation." ~ Inspector General, US Department of Defense, "Army General Fund Adjustments Not Adequately Documented or Supported," July 26, 2016

By Catherine Austin Fitts

Quote:The deep state is expensive: secret space programs, underground bases, and invisible weaponry require both an enormous investment and ongoing overhead. How do you finance two civilizations using the budget of only one?

Since the passage of the National Security Act in 1947, the national security infrastructure has grown dramatically, funded by a two-tier tax system. One tax is sent to the IRS every April by millions of citizens and companies. The money is then spent without accountability trillions have disappeared. The other tax is extracted daily by financial fraud, narcotics trafficking and other criminal activities and is combined with the profits of invisible skimming throughout the banking, brokerage, mortgage, and other financial transaction systems. That money is also spent without accountablility.

When politicians are elected to fix an economy devastated and drained by this financial harvesting, a major conflict arises. How can the deep state fund its secret cash flows after a new administration stops crime and rebuilds our infrastructure and communities? This conflict is the real clash of civilizations.

This conflict is not just a confrontation in Washington. This conflict relates to "full vertical power" because the swamp extends, in fact, from "sea to shining sea." Companies and employees operating throughout America are dependent on the purchases and contracts that flow from this financial machinery and from US military and intelligence dominance throughout the world, in order to extract natural resources globally while enjoying the dollar status as a global reserve currency. In turn, stock market investors depend on earnings that flow from these companies. The people and banks managing and profiting from narcotics trafficking, mortgage fraud, and sex slavery live and work in every one of 3,100 American counties.

Leading author, publisher and scholar Richard Dolan joins me this week to review the history of the black budget and how the goals of the Trump administration may bring matters to a head. The men who built the national security state appear to have no intention of allowing their secrets to be told or their privileges to be compromised. With the credibility of the corporate media disappearing, what will these men dare to do next? Is the deep state racing to tear up the US Constitution before its deep and hidden system of finance and its mysterious source of privilege are both compromised?

In Money & Markets this week I will discuss the latest in financial and geopolitical news, including the effort by the White House to establish a safe, secure communications system. It turns out that the President of the United States has the same problem that we all have: trying to function with digital systems that have no integrity.

In Let's Go to the Movies, I recommend an excellent interview with two highly capable gentlemen who have fearlessly risked life and limb to return integrity to our digital infrastructure, NSA whistleblowers Bill Binney & Kirk Wiebe.

[video=youtube_share;HLPSYFJM_SI]http://youtu.be/HLPSYFJM_SI[/video]

Among many other topics, Binney and Wiebe address the corruption of our communications systems:

"The NSA and the intelligence agencies are exempt from auditing by the US Government….You're head of the NSA and you're handed somewhere between $10-15 billion a year to spend any way you see fit and nobody will check on how you spend it. It means that you can take $1 million home a month without nobody missing it and even if they did they would not follow up to see what you did with it. It's a set up for corruption and that's exactly what is going on." ~William Binney, retired NSA officer

The deep state can track us and our money in real time but we can't "see" them or their financial statements. On April 15, however, Americans are expected to keep paying even if the President does not have a secure phone line. This is another reason why it is time to enforce the financial provisions of the US Constitution no expenditures without an appropriation and published accounts.

Please e-mail or post questions for Ask Catherine.

Talk to you Thursday!

Related Reading:

The Financial Coup d'État & Missing Money: Links
False Flags with Richard Dolan
What's Up Underground? with Richard Dolan
UFO's for 21st Century Minds with Richard Dolan