Paul Rigby Wrote:Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire

Kiev officials are scrambling to make amends with the president-elect after quietly working to boost Clinton.

By KENNETH P. VOGEL and DAVID STERN 01/11/17 05:05 AM EST

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/ukraine-sabotage-trump-backfire-233446

Quote:Donald Trump wasn't the only presidential candidate whose campaign was boosted by officials of a former Soviet bloc country.

Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton's allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers, a Politico investigation found...

SOME ELECTION INTERFERENCE IS MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS HOW UKRAINE MEDDLED ON BEHALF OF CLINTON

Published: January 15, 2017

http://www.blacklistednews.com/Some_Election_Interference_is_More_Equal_Than_Others_%E2%80%93_How_Ukraine_Meddled_on_Behalf_of_Clinton/56317/0/38/38/Y/M.html

SOURCE: MICHAEL KRIEGER, LIBERTY BLITZKRIEG

Quote:A couple of days ago, Politico published a fascinating piece describing how factions associated with the current Ukrainian government apparently interfered in the U.S. election on behalf of Hillary Clinton. The findings seem pretty damning, and certainly warrant at least some conversation within the American media given the 24/7 obsession with Russia. Nevertheless, most of you have probably never heard of this saga, since when it comes to the corporate media news cycle, some election interference is more equal than others.

The article is lengthy, and can be confusing at times given all the moving parts, but I highly encourage you to read it. Ukrainian interference in the election can be traced to essentially two sources. First, there was the apparent collaboration between the Ukrainian embassy in Washington D.C. and a highly paid Ukrainian-American DNC consultant, Alexandra Chalupa. The second angle is far more disturbing, and involves the publicization of a so-called ledger demonstrating corruption between Paul Manafort and pro-Russian elements in Ukraine, by a parliamentarian named Serhiy Leshchenko. Bizarrely, the investigation was effectively dropped after Trump won the election, making you wonder if there was anything really there in the first place.

Quote:The first time I heard the word "chalupa" I was standing with my back to the wall of a school hallway, surrounded by a group of students. One of them called me "moscal' and offered me to "try his chalupa" after that they all laughed in anticipation. I had just arrived from Moscow and didn't understand a word they were saying, but their actions spoke louder than words.

I got enrolled into a high school in Kiev, where my dad was deployed. My family moved around a lot, and I was used to attending a new school every couple of years, so this wasn't a big deal. What I didn't count on were the cultural differences between Moscow and Kiev.

I was what we called back then a "botanist"; now the word for people like me is "geek." Nevertheless, I was a trained athlete and volunteered as a stable hand for the local racetrack; in exchange they trusted me with training their horses. I knew how to handle large animals. Having no time for linguistic enquires, I just hit the guy square in his face. They all turned out to be cowards and ran as soon as fists started to fly.

This nagging feeling that something needed to be done with me didn't disappear however, and a couple of months later they got their revenge. Our class was walking down to a school basement for a shooting test when someone pushed me from behind.

Accompanied by healthy laughter, I fell down the steps hands first and sliced my palms opened with some chards of glass that were scattered on the floor. When a couple of minutes later I showed up for class clenching a blood soaked handkerchief, our Basics of Military preparation (NVP) teacher, a retired military officer, screamed at me calling me an idiot and said that I would either shoot for a grade or fail this test, because he wasn't about to set up a shooting test for me alone.

I took a beaten up AK-47 with ten bullets from him, and looked back at the group of my classmates. I couldn't tell who exactly pushed me; the basement was dimly lit with the exception of targets on the wall. I laid down on my stomach, steadied elbows, aimed and fired.

After a cloud of dust and gunpowder had settled, our teacher, an old, skinny man with a turkey neck, told me to put the automat down. "If you shoot me while I am checking your score, consider yourself dead."

"Don't worry," I said. "I am not going to shoot you.'

When he came back, he confirmed that I had hit 99 out of 100. The best score in class. He was curious where I learned to shoot like this, and I explained that my dad had a personal gun and let me practice sometime shooting targets in the woods.

Remarkably, no one tried to challenge me afterwards. A thick rope-like scar still runs across my palm as a reminder of what in any Western democratic country could turn into a mass school shooting.

The next time I came across the word "chalupa" was in the spring of 2014 when after a February "victory of democratic Maidan" but before 400 people were burned alive in Odessa on May 2; a massive influx of cloned insulting images of president Putin flooded the twitter and Facebook.

It was hailed by the likes of CNN as an "expression of democratic outrage with Russia's aggression." I researched to see who was behind this and found that this massive bot-attack was organized by a brand new organization based in the US called "Digital Maidan."

The organization was financed by the Khodorkovky-Soros "Open Russia Foundation" among others and ran by a woman named Andrea Chalupa.

Further research revealed that Andrea Chalupa and her two siblings are actively involved with other sources of digital terrorism, disinformation and spamming, like TrolleyBust com, stopfake org, and informnapalm. Ms. Chalupa kept cooperating with the Khodorovky owned magazine "The Interpreter." Now, it's a part of RFE/RL run by the government funded Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) whose director, Dr. Leon Aron also a director of Russian Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

According to research of leaked John Podesta emails done by The Daily Caller, "Arthur Brooks, president of the conservative nonprofit American Enterprise Institute, helped billionaire Clinton donor Lynn Forester de Rothschild secure the support of Republicans for Hillary Clinton."

Back to our Chalupa… She acted as a moderator for a discussion panel on March 11, 2015 at the Ukrainian Museum in New York City in a "panel of experts" discussing the conflict in Ukraine "in the larger context of United States foreign policy." The panel included Mouaz Moustafa, featured in the "Red Lines," named "the award-winning documentary about Syrian activists lobbying Washington and fighting for democracy," and Michael Weiss, then an editor of "The Interpreter" and now a Senior Editor at The Daily Beast. This crowd shared their insights into "President Obama's foreign policy." Let's not forget that John Schindler also named as a contributor for the Daily Beast.

This historical meeting of liberal and neo-fascists minds was reported to us by Damian Kolodiy a producer for Hromadske International, a TV station organized in 2013. It's said on their Wikipedia page that is it to be funded by the former owner of the Privat Bank, Israeli billionaire Igor Kolomoisky. He is also known for finding Nazi punitive armed formation "Azov" what deploys mercenaries from around the world to specifically carry on a war in Donbass and to terrorize the civilian population of the rest of Ukraine.

"Chalupa" as a last name most likely came from Poland and means ХАЛУПА, which in turn came from Persian kulba, and means a rundown shack in the Southern and Western parts of Russia.

It also can be traced to a Southern Russian dialect usage of a word "chalupa" or "zalupa" as a slang for foreskin, according to the Big Dictionary of Russian language. Also it used to address something incomprehensible and stupid.

As a verb is used to address something that is peeling like paint, flaking and rolling up. Also something that is an annoying waste of time and efforts.

Also, weirdly enough, "ЗАЛ-УПА" Zal UPA means a hall of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. This pun is often used for anecdotes and insults of the Ukrainian fascists being nothing more than an abovementioned part of male anatomy.

This brief linguistic research shows that chalupa' is not a misnomer in the case of Ms. Chalupa.

At the time I knew nothing about the Chalupa siblings and their active role in what is now shaping up to be a large scale anti-Trump conspiracy among the USA foreign policy makers organized by pro-Ukrainian activists.

To see the true extent of the presence of the Ukrainian ultra-Nazi ideology in directing the USA foreign policies see George Ellison's articles published by the Saker:

About the UPA and the OUNb followers in the US politics

Ukrainian Myths and Ukrainian Lies
Will Stepan Bandera III Allow Kiev to Destroy the Bandera Legacy?
Inside The Secret Super Majority that Decide Election 2016 & War with Russia
Emigre Super Bloc Clinton's Jihadis | Will the Super Delegates Vote YES to More Terrorism?
Ukraine was Right! Why Russia is the Biggest Threat in the World!

Recently, Andrea Chalupa, who is herself of Ukrainian origin, and acts in the capacity of an unpaid unregistered foreign agent/lobbyist for the Ukrainian Embassy, came back into political spotlight echoing John Schindler's accusations that Flynn and his son of being paid Russian intelligence service assets. I often wonder about the sources of income of those journalists who have very large social media presences, but write very little or nothing at all.

John Schindler is one of them. After his very public resignation from the USNWC in August 2014, due to alleged sexual improprieties, he keeps his current place of employment in secret.

This however doesn't prevent John Schindler from having to frequently accuse a retired Army Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn of being a Russian intelligence asset due to his accepting some modest payment to attend RT's gala banquet in Moscow, where he spoke briefly with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Flynn has denied accepting any payment directly from RT, but says he was paid by his speakers bureau LAI for the trip to interview with Sophie Shevardnadze, granddaughter of the last Soviet Foreign Minister and first President of an independent Georgia Eduard Shevardnadze.

As reported elsewhere, Schindler and Chalupa's Flynn's a traitor' allegations have been magnified in recent days by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius reporting' that Flynn telephoned the Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak on the day Obama announced the expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats or officers with diplomatic cover. The Trump camp in turn denies that Flynn discussed anything sensitive with Kiselyak beyond condolences over the crash of the TU-154 carrying the Alexandrov Ensemble in the Black Sea on (western calendar) Christmas Day, as well as preliminary planning for the first meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin sometime in 2017.

On January 13th, the plot thickened with the claims of Scott Dworkin, a Senior Advisor-Democratic Coalition and self-proclaimed "#TrumpLeaks creator," that they reported Flynn to the National Security Agency for breaking the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) on 11/18. the FARA Act requires a foreign agent or a lobbyist to register within 10 days of agreeing to become and agent.

Now, this report and the nature of the attacks on Flynn raises the whole slew of questions about the nature of activities of John Schindler, Dmitri Alperovitch, Andrea Chalupa, her siblings, and many others. These people run around like chickens with their heads cut off between the Ukrainian Embassy, the Ukrainian culture centers in New York and Washington, and the Senate and other places populated with the US policy makers, every one of them is acting as unregistered paid or unpaid foreign agent.

Not that their frantic activities ever bring positive results. As someone pointed out recently, as an example of their disastrous involvement in the US foreign policy making, Ms. Chalupa, who met Schindler at the 2015 Lithuanian Embassy event she was the subject of a recent Politico piece about the Ukrainian Embassy lamenting that their partisanship for Hillary and Ukrainian officials insults of the future president elect Donald Trump may have frozen them out of the new Administration.

With a caution that "if it's Ukrainians more than Russians who are interfering with our country, we have a right to know" George Ellison recently published a comprehensive research on the Chalupas and Dmitri Alperovitch, titled "Why Crowdstrike's Russian Hacking Story Fell Apart- Say Hello to Fancy Bear."

Reiterating some Elison's questions, "Ukraine has been screaming for the US to start a war with Russia for the past 2 1/2 years. Is Ukrainian Intelligence trying to invent a reason for the US to take a hard-line stance against Russia? Can you mislead the federal government about national security issues and not get investigated yourself?"

At this point any of us have little doubt that activities of the Chalupas, John Schindler, Dmitri Alperovitch and others amount to what "might be a criminal conspiracy."

I would add that this anti USA Constitution criminal conspiracy to topple the recently elected president is being openly conducted with the participation of the foreign intelligence services.

Estonian foreign intelligence in the spotlight now, claiming that they have many "goods" on Trump

At first they claimed that Trump's lawyer had met Russians in Estonia. They immediately retracted this statement and started claiming that the meeting took place in Prague, and that Estonian intelligence was involved in organizing it. Pure fiction.

A Russian economist and blogger who writes about the Baltic republics wrote several articles about possible political provocation in Latvia that might take place on January 13th, 2017. (In Russian here) and (Here)

Today, on January 15th, it looks like the provocation against Russian that was supposed to take part on the territory of the Baltic republics took the form of "fake news."

Along with the Estonians, there is a massive influx of so-called foreign intelligence agencies claiming to have the "goods" on Trump. Eric Garland, of a twitter fame, the same who on Dec. 11, "fueled by prescription amphetamines and craft beer, Eric Garland disgorged a sprawling 127-tweet thread explaining to America and the world exactly what was going on, how Russia put Trump in power, and what they could do about it."

A new Eric Garland's tweet goes as following; "While Trump screams about *a* dossier, intel agencies around the world are sharing *many* dossiers about his dirt. Link to Buzzfeed article

I got very interested and started looking…. I found the Israeli secret service statements (on Twitter of course, where else) that Trump's lawyer Micheal Cohen is an Israeli citizen, and that he used his Israeli passport while traveling to meet with Konstantin Kosachev in Prague. So what? Who doesn't have a Israeli citizenship? At the very least, the whole thing could be a set up from last year that they did in case of Trump's victory and now decided to use. Anyway, how many people named Micheal Cohen live in Israel?

Another important issue, that the Israeli and Estonian fakers missed is the visa requirements and sanctions. There is no visa requirements for the citizens of Israel entering the Czech Republic, but a Russian citizen would need a visa. Granted that Russian senator Konstantin Kosachev has been on different sanction lists for a while now, and that the Czech Republic has joined the EU sanctions against Russia back in summer 2014, there is serious doubts that they would let him into the country.

They both deny ever meeting in Prague.

What pushed the Estonian foreign intelligence in the spotlight, was an article in Postimees, an Estonian tabloid. An article written so badly, it might had more than three authors.

The whole thing sounds like an attempt to sell their own inept intelligence services, since they lost income from Russian market closures and loss of transfer of goods via railroads and ports. You asked what makes the Estonian secret service so powerful, since no one knew of their existence a day before? Their agents speak "brilliant Russian language"? This and five cents will get them a seat on a bus.

Furthermore, Postimees.is known to publish fakes for their American masters.

For example, in May 2016 they published a disgraced US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul's article that stated that "the leaders of the West declared war" against Russia. The article was published in the Estonian language, and by an Estonian newspaper and basically went unnoticed by general public, and it was done so by design.

Michael McFaul: There was never promised to Russians not to allowed NATO to extend into the Eastern Europe

Incredibly, Mcfaul said that it's Russia's fault that NATO is expanding into Eastern Europe and accumulating on the Russia's borders.

"Russia's behavior is from 2014. the year has been extremely unpredictable and aggressive. Basically, is this why the leaders of the West fortunately, only in words declared a war. Whether the American response to an increased Russian threat to the East Europe has been sufficient?" M. McFaul [my translation]

Granting that NATO was expending for the past 25 years, was it done in anticipation of "2014"? Did NATO knew that this day would come? Is it because they planned a putsch in Ukraine years in advance?

I wrote about this, and it went unnoticed before my old pal tweeted the link to McFaul.

McFaul tweeted to his followers and denied that he ever declared war, he even wrote that it would be illegal from the international law point of view. He also called me a liar.

I tweeted to him all the screenshot I took of the article and translation.

Being a liberal he never responded to me, but the arvamus.postimees.ee had removed the statement about the declaration of war, also it still can be seen via the internet archive.

To summarize, this is an anti-USA Constitution criminal conspiracy against the recently elected president. It's being openly conducted with the participation of the foreign intelligence services.

However, fear not, friends, here comes good news. People who try to topple the US government are the same who organized their putsch in Ukraine, and who tried to topple the government in Russia in 2011, and likely in Turkey in 2016. All the usual suspects. Same ugly old faces.

Quote:The furore in the US and Europe over Trump's relations with Russia is not just a storm in a teacup but the manifestation of a serious fight at the heart of the US foreign policy establishment over how the US should orient strategically to Russia in the context of the chief question that the US confronts internationally the rise of China.

That the rise of China is a threat to the global position of the US and that therefore the US must try to contain China is a premise shared by virtually the entire US foreign policy establishment. It was a priority for the Obama administration as much as it now is for Trump. The difference between Obama and Trump on China is not on their goals, but on tactics. Whereas Obama's administration primarily pursued its anti-China policy through using proxies chiefly Japan and the Philippines to whip up conflicts with China, allowing the US to assume the guise of honest broker', Trump and his team have indicated that the US itself will lead the charge.

Trump's more aggressive tactics towards China were flagged up from the moment he accepted the congratulatory phone call from President Tsai of Taiwan breaching the one China' protocols that have governed US-China diplomatic relations since the Nixon thaw, whereby Taiwan's international status is not as a recognised state, but as a province of the People's Republic. Since the 1970s therefore the president of Taiwan has had the status of a provincial governor, and does not meet with the president of the US.

This step was followed by various threats and provocations including: appointing the extreme anti-China hawk, Peter Navarro, to head trade policy; threatening to impose a 45% tax on Chinese imports; while his nominee for Secretary of State, Tillerson, suggested the US navy might blockade China in the South China Sea. Inter alia, Trump has accused China of currency manipulation, cheating on trade, stealing jobs and failing to help deal with the North Korean nuclear program.

In this context, and contrary to the implications of much of the Western media, Trump's friendly overtures to Putin and Russia are not the addled thinking of an unpredictable maverick, but are a central component of how he proposes to deal with China.

Since 2010, when Obama announced the new turn in US foreign policy priorities towards the Pacific to counter the growing influence of China, a highly influential strand, particularly in the Pentagon, but across US foreign policy circles and beyond has argued that a resetting of US-Russia relations is crucial to this. This cohort argues that the US has to seek a rapprochement with Russia in order to prevent the formation of a China-Russia axis that would be an effective counter to any US strategies against China.

Some of the most intelligent proponents of the US's policy in Asia were therefore strongly opposed to what they saw as the unnecessary alienation of Russia through what was understood as an attempt to expand NATO to include the Ukraine by installing a pro-NATO government in 2014.

As Kishore Mahbubani, an influential Singapore intellectual and foreign policy expert put it at the time: Unwise western expansion of NATO has not enhanced western security. It has only alienated Russia. Yet when the West finally wakes up to deal with a rising China, Russia would provide just the sort of geopolitical heft needed to balance Beijing's power. Today, in direct violation of its own long-term geopolitical interests, the west is driving Russia towards China… This compulsion to act against its own interests perfectly illustrates declining western geopolitical wisdom.'[i]

Or as Zachary Keck, now editor of the National Interest, argued: … at some point the US will have to make a choice about whether the issues in other regions are important enough to scuttle ties with Russia in the Pacific. In the Asian Century, the answer to this question should almost always be no'.'[ii]

The call for a reset on Russia is explicitly based on the lessons of US strategies in the Cold War when US administrations successfully triangulated' relations between the US, Russia and China, ensuring that, apart from a few years immediately after 1949, the two Communist giants were pitted against each other, alternately courted and isolated by the US in the service of its aim to bring both regimes down.

Hence today, as a 2012 article in the Atlantic Sentinel put it, what the US needs is to deploy a reverse "Nixon goes to China"', when in the 1970s, deft American tactics and diplomacy, playing into Sino-Soviet fears and rivalries, had allowed it to draw China into its global Cold War containment of the USSR: …much as Nixon and Kissinger sought the "dragon" to balance against the stronger "bear", the United States must consider the reverse.'[iii]

However any such reorientation of US policy towards Russia was completely blocked under Obama by the dominance of the existing Democrat, Pentagon and security service foreign policy establishment supported particularly by their British counterparts for whom the priority vis-à-vis Russia remained NATO and the US's alliances in Europe, not China. These establishment Atlanticists and their European allies agreed on the need to confront China, but not at the expense of bringing Russia in from the cold. Strategically they feared this would encourage the emergence of a Germany-Russia axis, with support elsewhere in Europe, which in turn would give Germany too much leverage against the US internationally and might even threaten to displace the primacy of the US-Europe alliance in the future.

Germany had long pursued a policy of strategic partnership with Russia, and acted as its advocate in Europe even during the Cold War. Although since coming to power in 2005 Merkel had been more outspoken on human rights issues in Russia than previous German Chancellors, she had essentially continued this traditional German ostpolitik' towards Russia. The Atlanticist hawks in the state department and CIA were looking for an opportunity to bring this to an end.

Thus it was entirely the decisions of the US that led to the breakdown in relations with Putin's Russia and the growth of an increasingly strong China-Russia axis in Asia and internationally.

Putin although a self-professed Russian nationalist was not elected in 2000 on a platform of changing Yeltsin's 1990s policy of orientation the West. He did pledge to take a firmer position against further NATO expansion, preventing the growth of external' i.e. Western, influence in the disputed territories around Georgia, and defeating the challenge in Chechnya. He had good reason to believe that a compromise was possible with the West on such a basis, as Yeltsin had received clear guarantees that NATO would not seek to expand to Russia's borders, Russia and the US had a shared interest in defeating terrorist currents like that operating in Chechnya and the Russian areas around Georgia were far from the US's current sphere of operations or interests.

In 2002 Putin supported the US invasion of Afghanistan despite its proximity to Russia's sensitive Central Asian backyard and even helped broker the agreement to US bases for its Afghanistan operations in the Central Asian states.

However relations with the US broke down progressively after 2002 with NATO's decisions to incorporate the Baltic states and to develop the European Missile Defence Shield' essentially an updated variant of 1980's Reagan's Star Wars' proposal aimed at delivering NATO a first strike nuclear capability.

Early in Obama's presidency he appeared to seek a reset with Russia. With the more superficially pro-Western Medvedev having temporarily replaced Putin as Russian president in 2008, and a new president in the White House the door seemed open to improved relations. Obama's 2009 announcement that NATO missile interceptor deployments in the Czech Republic and Poland would not go ahead seemed a step in this direction. In return for Russian support in persuading China not to veto a 2010 Security Council resolution expanding sanctions on Iran, Obama lifted US sanctions on the Russian arms export agency. Russia, and therefore China, also supported the 2011 UN no-fly zone over Libya.

But Obama took no more fundamental initiative and US relations with Russia continued to be run by the old hands of the CIA and state department, and soon the pattern of tensions had re-emerged with clashes over renewed missile defence deployments, disagreements over the scope of the UN resolution on Libya, and most seriously over Syria. Assad is a key Russian ally, and Russia's interests in Syria include access to the Mediterranean port of Tartus where the Russian navy has a facility.

But it was the threatened expansion of NATO to include Ukraine provoking an inevitable fierce confrontation with Russia that brought relations crashing down. The policy was driven through by the US in the face of pleading by Merkel, who made a special trip to the White House to urge caution, and most of the EU, who preferred a more conciliatory policy. The bullish approach of the US was revealed in a leaked phone-call between US assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland and the US Ambassador in Ukraine at the time, in which her response to the attempts by the EU to defuse the crisis and broker a compromise was to say fuck the EU'.

The upshot was the Ukraine crisis, with predictable Russian intransigence especially over Crimea, creating the excuse for a new round of international sanctions and a breach in relations between Russia and Germany.

But, as the China hawks had feared and predicted, it led also to a sharp turn in the priority Russia attached to its relations with China, with the rapid announcement of a series of new oil pipelines, east-west transport links, greater resources to their existing cooperation on security issues in central and northeastern Asia, more joint military and naval exercises and closer coordination in the UN Security Council.

Trump has signalled a different orientation to this series of interconnected international questions, breaking with the European preoccupations of the current chiefs of the security services and pursuing a policy more in line with that advocated by the Pentagon and the China hawks who now surround him. Essentially this means a reset with Russia, attempting to draw Russia away from its close coordination with China, while also supporting the most explicitly anti-EU forces in Europe to weaken Germany and project a US-Russian alliance to Putin over the heads of the European states. The aim is to free up the US's hands to concentrate on China, while weakening the EU against any potential challenge to US hegemony from that quarter.

As such a pro-Russia policy flies in the face of that pursued by the US foreign policy establishment and the security services since the Cold War, and because they are convinced that soft-pedalling on Russia will allow Germany to strengthen unacceptably, Trump's reorientation on Russia has met an unprecedented and relentless campaign to derail it. This has involved not just the CIA but also the British security services, and has included the claims that Putin interfered in the US presidential elections and the presentation of a dossier, compiled by a British ex-spy, of alleged extraordinary behaviour by Trump in Russia, meant to imply he is therefore susceptible to blackmail by Russia.

So far none of this has made Trump change his mind on how to approach Russia or China. Some of his appointees have been more conciliatory in their confirmation hearings, but Trump himself has been unapologetic. He has ramped up the rhetoric against China, fired shots at the EU and continued to reach out to Russia. If he is determined on this course, then heads will have to roll in the CIA and elsewhere in the US establishment another reason for the breath-taking determination of the campaign to stop it.

Trump ran his campaign on the slogan of making America great again' and while this could mean different things to different people, on one question it was entirely clear: China is a threat to America's global position and to blame for the decline of many of its industries; China is the main enemy and has to be stopped. He sneered at Obama for being weak on China, and promised that at a foreign policy level all other questions were to be subordinated to bringing down China. That included a reset with Putin.

The next months will show whether this Trump reorientation holds or whether the unrelenting campaign against Russia forces a reverse turn.

But even if Trump holds to his course on Russia, a stable deal is far from easy to achieve. There would have to be some agreement over Syria, which does look possible now that much of the opposition has been defeated. But agreements on Iran and Ukraine would also be needed. Trump could back down on his pledge to reimpose sanctions on Iran, but Israel would strongly oppose a settlement in the region that both stabilised Assad in Syria, and allowed a strengthening of Iran. And there is not an obvious deal that could be imposed on Ukraine that both Russia and Germany would accept.

Trump has promised a major turn in US foreign policy in order to concentrate on China. But this is already proving far from easy to carry out.

Quote:The clash between plutocratic President-elect Trump and the CIA is shaping up to be the heavyweight prize fight of the century, and Trump at least is approaching it with all the entertaining bombast of Mohammed Ali at the top of his game. Rather than following the tradition of doing dirty political deals in dark corners, more commonly known as fixing the match, Trump has come out swinging in the full glare of the media.

In that corner, we have a deal-making, billionaire "man of the people" who, to European sensibilities at least, reputedly espouses some of the madder domestic obsessions and yet has seemed to offer hope to many aggrieved Americans. But it is his professed position on building a rapprochement with Russia and cooperating with Moscow to sort out the Syrian mess that caught my attention and that of many other independent commentators internationally.

In the opposite corner, Trump's opponents have pushed the CIA into the ring to deliver the knock-out blow, but this has yet to land. Despite jab after jab, Trump keeps evading the blows and comes rattling back against all odds. One has to admire the guy's footwork.

So who are the opponents ranged behind the CIA, yelling encouragement through the ropes? The obvious culprits include the U.S. military-industrial complex, whose corporate bottom line relies on an era of unending war. As justification for extracting billions even trillions of dollars from American taxpayers, there was a need for frightening villains, such as Al Qaeda and even more so, the head choppers of ISIS. However, since the Russian intervention in Syria in 2015, those villains no longer packed as scary a punch, so a more enduring villain, like Emmanuel Goldstein, the principal enemy of the state in George Orwell's 1984, was required. Russia was the obvious new choice, the old favorite from the Cold War playbook.

The Western intelligence agencies have a vested interest in eternal enemies to ensure both eternal funding and eternal power, hence the CIA's entry into the fight. As former British MP and long-time peace activist George Galloway so eloquently said in a recent interview, an unholy alliance is now being formed between the "war party" in the U.S., the military-industrial-intelligence complex and those who would have previously publicly spurned such accomplices: American progressives and their traditional host, the Democratic Party.

Yet, if the Democratic National Committee had not done its best to rig the primaries in favor of Hillary Clinton, then perhaps we would not be in this position. Bernie Sanders would be the President-elect.

Two-Party Sham

These establishment forces have also revealed to the wider world a fact long known but largely dismissed as conspiracy theory by the corporate mainstream media, that the two-party system in both the U.S. and the U.K. is a sham. In fact, we are governed by a globalized elite, working in its own interest while ignoring ours. The Democrats, openly disgruntled by Hillary Clinton's election loss and being seen to jump into bed so quickly with the spooks and the warmongers, have laid this reality bare.

In fact, respected U.S. investigative journalist Robert Parry recently wrote that an intelligence contact told him before the election that the intelligence agencies did not like either of the presidential candidates. This may go some way to explaining the FBI's intervention in the run-up to the election against Hillary Clinton, as well as the CIA's attempts to de-legitimize Trump's victory afterwards.

Whether that was indeed the case, the CIA has certainly held back no punches since Trump's election. First the evidence-lite assertion that it was the Russians who hacked the DNC emails and leaked them to WikiLeaks: then the fake news about Russia hacking the voting computers; that then morphed into the Russians "hacked the election" itself; then they "hacked" into the U.S. electric grid via a Vermont utility. All this without a shred of fact-based evidence provided, but Obama's expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats last month solidified this dubious reality in Americans' minds.

All this culminated in the "dirty dossier" allegations last week about Trump, which he has rightly knocked down it was desperately poor stuff.

This last item, from a British perspective, is particularly concerning. It appears that a Washington dirt-digging company was hired by a Republican rival to Trump to unearth any potential Russian scandals during the primaries; once Trump had won the nomination this dirt-digging operation was taken over by a Democrat supporter of Hillary Clinton. The anti-Trump investigation was then sub-contracted to an alleged ex-British spy, an ex-MI6 man named Christopher Steele.

The Role of MI6

Much has already been written about Steele and the company, much of it contradictory as no doubt befits the life of a former spy. But it is a standard career trajectory for insiders to move on to corporate, mercenary spy companies, and this is what Steele appears to have done successfully in 2009. Of course, much is predicated on maintaining good working relations with your former employers.

That is the aspect that interests me most how close a linkage did he indeed retain with his former employers after he left MI6 in 2009 to set up his own private spy company? The answer is important because companies such has his can also be used as cut-outs for "plausible deniability" by official state spies.

I'm not suggesting that happened in this case, but Steele reportedly remained on good terms with MI6 and was well thought of. For a man who had not been stationed in Russia for over 20 years, it would perhaps have been natural for him to turn to old chums for useful connections.

But this question is of extreme importance at a critical juncture for the U.K.; if indeed MI6 was complicit or even aware of this dirt digging, as it seems to have been, then that is a huge diplomatic problem for the government's attempts to develop a strong working relationship with the US, post-Brexit. If MI6's sticky fingers were on this case, then the organization has done the precise opposite of its official task "to protect national security and the economic well-being of the UK."

MI6 and its U.S. intelligence chums need to remember their designated and legislated roles within a democracy to serve the government and protect national security by gathering intelligence, assessing it impartially and making recommendations on which the government of the day will choose to act or not as the case may be.

The spies are not there to fake intelligence to suit the agenda of a particular regime, as happened in the run-up to the illegal Iraq War, nor are they there to endemically spy on their own populations (and the rest of the world, as we know post-Snowden) in a pointless hunt for subversive activity, which often translates into legitimate political activism and acts of individual expression).

And most especially the intelligence agencies should not be trying to subvert democratically elected governments. And yet this is what the CIA and a former senior MI6 officer, along with their powerful political allies, appear to be now attempting against Trump.

Chances for Peace

If I were an American, I would be wary of many of Trump's domestic policies. As a European concerned with greater peace rather than increasing war, I can only applaud his constructive approach towards Russia and his offer to cooperate with Moscow to stanch the bloodshed in the Middle East.

That, of course, may be the nub of his fight with the CIA and other vested interests who want Russia as the new bogeyman. But I would bet that Trump takes the CIA's slurs personally. After all, given the ugliness of the accusations and the lack of proof, who would not?

So, this is a world championship heavy-weight fight over who gets to hold office and wield power, an area where the U.S. and U.K. intelligence agencies have considerable experience in rigging matches and knocking out opponents. Think, for instance, Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq in 1953; Chilean President Salvador Allende in 1973; Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in 2003; and Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is wobbly but still standing, thanks to some good corner support from Russia.

However, it would appear that Trump is a stranger to the spies' self-defined Queensbury Rules in which targets are deemed paranoid if they try to alert the public to the planned "regime change" or they become easy targets by staying silent. By contrast, Trump appears shameless and pugnacious. Street-smart and self-promoting, he seems comfortable with bare-knuckle fighting.

This match has already gone into the middle rounds with Trump still bouncing around on his toes and still relishing the fight. It would be ironic if out of this nasty prize fight came greater world peace and safely for us all.

Tracy Riddle Wrote:Let's follow the logic here. Because the CIA has lied in the past (usually via the Operations wing, not the Analysis wing - remember they had to create Team B because the regular analysts weren't hawkish enough about the USSR's military spending), that must mean they lie about everything all the time.

But we also know that Trump lies almost daily (hourly sometimes), and Russian officials have assured us that they have never engaged in the collection of compromising material. No sir, not us!

"Without a doubt, we gather kompromat. . . . In the Kremlin, there's piles of it, as there are in all the security agencies," said Gennady Gudkov, also a former legislator who was forced out of parliament for his opposition to Putin. "As a rule, the special services collect information on everyone, like a vacuum, picking up anything and everything."

But, but, Western intelligence agencies do it too! And so therefore, we must shut off our minds and stubbornly sit in our ideological sandboxes and play with our hobby horses.

Yes, of course the West has been trying to encircle Russia with NATO forces for 20+ years. And if you were Vladimir Putin, how would you respond to that? How would you respond to Hillary's accusations that your party rigged Russian elections in 2011? It's not rocket surgery, people! You would try to do everything you could to defeat her and place a more pro-Russian candidate in power, plus have your trolls feeding fake news stories to idiot Americans' social media. I'd be amazed if Putin didn't respond that way. It's a much more cost-effective way to combat the US than using military power.

Tracy Riddle Wrote:

Dawn Meredith Wrote:So if you don't believe the lying CIA and lying CIA controlled media you are a Russian apologist?

It's really come to that?

I think not.

Dawn, care to elaborate any further? I'm still waiting to hear some intelligent response from someone, instead of just "CIA LIES! CIA MEDIA!"

On the flip side, you don't have to be a Hillary supporter, or a CIA supporter, to see something fishy going on between Trump's people and Putin's people.

Quote:Russia, Trump & Flawed Intelligence
Masha Gessen
US Defense Under Secretary for Intelligence Marcel Lettre, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and National Security Agency Director Michael Rogers testifying before the Senate, Washington, D.C., January 5, 2017
Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
US Defense Under Secretary for Intelligence Marcel Lettre, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and National Security Agency Director Michael Rogers testifying before the Senate, Washington, D.C., January 5, 2017
After months of anticipation, speculation, and hand-wringing by politicians and journalists, American intelligence agencies have finally released a declassified version of a report on the part they believe Russia played in the US presidential election. On Friday, when the report appeared, the major newspapers came out with virtually identical headlines highlighting the agencies' finding that Russian president Vladimir Putin ordered an "influence campaign" to help Donald Trump win the presidencya finding the agencies say they hold "with high confidence."


A close reading of the report shows that it barely supports such a conclusion. Indeed, it barely supports any conclusion. There is not much to read: the declassified version is twenty-five pages, of which two are blank, four are decorative, one contains an explanation of terms, one a table of contents, and seven are a previously published unclassified report by the CIA's Open Source division. There is even less to process: the report adds hardly anything to what we already knew. The strongest allegationsincluding about the nature of the DNC hackinghad already been spelled out in much greater detail in earlier media reports.


But the real problems come with the findings themselves. The report leads with three "key judgments":


"We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election";
"Moscow's influence campaign followed a Russian messaging strategy that blends covert intelligence operationssuch as cyber activitywith overt efforts by Russian Government agencies, state-funded media, third-party intermediaries, and paid social media users or trolls'";
"We assess Moscow will apply lessons learned from its Putin-ordered campaign aimed at the US presidential election to future influence efforts worldwide, including against US allies and their election processes."
It is the first of these judgments that made headlines, so let us look at the evidence the document provides for this assertion. This evidence takes up just over a page and contains nine points. The first four make the argument that Putin wanted Hillary Clinton to lose. I will paraphrase for the sake of brevity and clarity:


Putin and the Russian government aimed to help Trump by making public statements discrediting Hillary Clinton;
the Kremlin's goal is to undermine "the US-led liberal democratic order";
Putin claimed that the Panama Papers leak and the Olympic doping scandal were "US-directed efforts to defame Russia," and this suggests that he would use defamatory tactics against the United States;
Putin personally dislikes Hillary Clinton and blames her for inspiring popular unrest in Russia in 2011-2012.
None of this is new or particularly illuminatingat least for anyone who has been following Russian media in any language; some of it seems irrelevant. (Though the report notes that the NSA has only "moderate confidence" in point number one, unlike the CIA and FBI, which have "high confidence" in it.) The next set of points aim to buttress the assertion that Putin "developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump over Secretary Clinton." The following is an exact quote:


Beginning in June, Putin's public comments about the US presidential race avoided directly praising President-elect Trump, probably because Kremlin officials thought that any praise from Putin personally would backfire in the United States. Nonetheless, Putin publicly indicated a preference for President-elect Trump's stated policy to work with Russia, and pro-Kremlin figures spoke highly about what they saw as his Russia-friendly positions on Syria and Ukraine.


The wording makes it sound as though before June 2016 Putin had been constantly praising Trump in his public statements. In fact, though, Putin had spoken of Trump exactly oncewhen asked a question about him as he was leaving the hall following his annual press conference in December 2015. At that time, he said,


Well, he is a colorful person. Talented, without a doubt. But it's none of our business, it's up to the voters in the United States. But he is the absolute leader of the presidential race. He says he wants to shift to a different mode or relations, a deeper level of relations with Russia. How could we not welcome that? Of course we welcome it. As for the domestic politics of it, the turns of phrase he uses to increase his popularity, I'll repeat, it's not our business to evaluate his work.


Nothing in this statement is remarkable. At the time, Trump, who was polling well in the Republican primary race, was the only aspiring presidential candidate to have indicated a willingness to dial back US-Russian hostilities. The topic was clearly judged not important enough to be included in the main body of Putin's more-than-four-hour press conference but deserving of a boilerplate "we hear you" message sent as Putin literally headed out the door.


The Russian word for "colorful"yarkiycan be translated as "bright," as in a "bright color." That must be how Trump came to think that Putin had called him "brilliant," an assertion that the US media (and, it appears, US intelligence agencies) failed to fact-check. In June 2016, at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, American journalist Fareed Zakaria, moderating a panel, asked Putin, "The American Republican presumptive nominee, Donald Trumpyou called him brilliant,' outstanding,' talented.' These comments were reported around the world. I was wondering what in him led you to that judgment, and do you still hold that judgment?" Of the epithets listed by Zakaria, Putin had used only the word "talented," and he had not specified what sort of talent he had seen in Trump. Putin reprimanded Zakaria for exaggerating. "Look at what I said," he said. "I made an off-hand remark about Trump being a colorful person. Are you saying he is not colorful? He is colorful. I did not characterize him in any other way. But what I did note, and what I certainly welcome, and I see nothing wrong with thisMr. Trump has stated that he is ready for the renewal of a full-fledged relationship between Russia and the United States. What is wrong with that? We all welcome it. Don't you?" Zakaria looked mortified: he had been caught asking an ill-informed question. Putin, on the other hand, was telling the truth for once. As for the American intelligence agencies marshaling this exchange as evidence of a change of tone and moreevidence of Russian meddling in the electionthat is plainly misleading.


The next two points purporting to prove that Putin had a preference for Trump are, incredibly, even weaker arguments:


Putin thought that he and Trump would be able to create an international anti-ISIS coalition;
Putin likes to work with political leaders "whose business interests made them more disposed to deal with Russia, such as former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder."
Number 6 is puzzling. Nominally, Russia and the United States have already been cooperating in the fight against ISIS. The reference is probably to Putin's offer, made in September 2015 in a speech to the UN General Assembly, to form an international anti-terrorist coalition that, Putin seemed to suggest, would stop the criticism and sanctions imposed in response to Russia's war against Ukraine. Obama snubbed the offer then. Then again, this is my conjecture: the report contains no elucidation of this ascertainment of Putin's motives. As for Number 7, not only is it conjecture on the part of the report's authors, it is also anachronistic: Schroeder was a career politician before becoming a businessman with interests in Russia, as his term in political office was drawing to a close.


The final two arguments in this section of the report focus on the fact that Russian officials and propagandists stopped criticizing the US election process after election day and Russian trolls dropped a planned #DemocracyRIP campaign, which they had planned in anticipation of Hillary Clinton's victory. (Notably, according to the intelligence agencies, whatever influence the Russians were trying to exert, they themselves seem to have assumed that Clinton would win regardlessand this is in fact supported by outside evidence.) The logic of these arguments is as sound as saying, "You were so happy to see it rain yesterday that you must have caused the rain yourself."


That is the entirety of the evidence the report offers to support its estimation of Putin's motives for allegedly working to elect Trump: conjecture based on other politicians in other periods, on other continentsand also on misreported or mistranslated public statements.


The next two and a half pages of the report deal with the mechanics of Russia's ostensible intervention in the election. It confirms, briefly, earlier reports that the intelligence agencies believe that the hacks of the Democratic National Committee were carried out by an individual connected to the General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU). It also notes, without elaboration, that "Russian intelligence accessed elements of multiple state or local electoral boards," though, according to the Department of Homeland Security, not the type of systems that are involved in vote tallying. And then the report goes from vague to strange: it lists the elements of Russia's "state-run propaganda machine" that ostensibly exemplify the Kremlin's campaign for Trump and denigration of Clinton. These include RT, the Russian English-language propaganda channel (as well as Sputnik, a state-funded online news site); a Russian television personality; and a fringe Russian politician named Vladimir Zhirinovsky. According to the report:


Pro-Kremlin proxy Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, proclaimed just before the election that if President-elect Trump won, Russia would "drink champagne" in anticipation of being able to advance its positions on Syria and Ukraine.


In the Russian political sphere, Zhirinovsky is far from the mainstream. A man who has advocated mobilizing the Russian military to shoot all migratory birds in order to prevent an epidemic of bird flu, he is a far-right comic sidekick to the Kremlin's straight man. Dictators like to keep his kind around as reminders of the chaos and extremism that could threaten the world in their absence. In Hungary, for example, the extremist Jobbik party allows Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to look moderate in comparison. The particular statement about drinking champagne was made during a televised talk show in which several Russian personalities get together to beat up rhetorically on a former insurance executive named Michael Bohm, who has fashioned a career of playing an American pundit on Russian TV. Here is the exchange that preceded Zhirinovsky's promise to drink champagne:


They threaten to cut Russia off from international financial systems. They can do that! But then we won't give America a single dollar back. That's hundreds of billions of dollars! Hundreds of billions! If they cut us off, they cut off the repayment of all our debts. Hundreds of billions! They are not dumb, so they'll never do it. Never. As for the arms race, sometimes we are ahead and sometimes they are. We've got parity. But there is another danger to America. They have a hundred nuclear power stations. And we can reach all of them. And the destruction of a single nuclear power station kills every living thing on a territory of five hundred thousand square kilometers. That's fifty million square kilometers. But all of America is just ten million square kilometers. So a single explosion will destroy America five times over. Same thing with us. But our stations are on the fringes. Theirs are in densely populated areas. So blowing up their nuclear reactors will kill more people in America. Plus, we have lots of empty space. So they have weighed it: Russia's survival rates will be higher than America's. More of them will die in case of nuclear war.


Host: Remember you also told us about magnetic weapons that will make us stick to our beds and incapable of getting up?


Zhirinovsky: Yes, there is that, too.


[A brief exchange about the arms race between two other participants]


Zhirinovsky: I hope that Aleppo is free of guerrilla fighters before November 8!


Sergei Stankevich [a largely forgotten Yeltsin-era politician]: But then we have to think about what happens November 9, if we've already liberated Aleppo.


Zhirinovsky: We are going to be drinking champagne to celebrate a Trump victory! [to Bohm] And to the defeat of your friend Hillary Clinton!


Remarkably, the report manages not only to offer a few words thrown out during this absurd exchange as evidence of a larger Russian strategy, but also to distort those words in the process: contrary to the report's assertion, Zhironovsky made no mention of being able to advance Russia's positions in Syria and Ukraine following a Trump victory. Of course, he could haveindeed, he could have said anything, given the tenor of the conversation. Whatever he said, it's difficult to imagine how it could be connected to Russia's ostensible influence on the American election.


Other evidence in this part of the report includes the statement, "Russian media hailed President-elect Trump's victory as a vindication of Putin's advocacy of global populist movementsthe theme of Putin's annual conference for Western academics in October 2016." This statement is false. The theme of Putin's annual conference, known as the Valdai Club, was "The Future Begins Today: Outlines of the World of Tomorrow." The program reads like the program of the annual World Affairs Council conference in San Franciscowhich last year, coincidentally, was called "Day One: The World That Awaits." This is not to say that Putin has not supported populist movements around the worldhe demonstrably has. But once again the particular evidence offered by the report on this point is both weak and false.


Finally, the bulk of the rest of the report is devoted to RT, the television network formerly known as Russia Today.


RT's coverage of Secretary Clinton throughout the US presidential campaign was consistently negative and focused on her leaked e-mails and accused her of corruption, poor physical and mental health, and ties to Islamic extremism. Some Russian officials echoed Russian lines for the influence campaign that Secretary Clinton's election could lead to a war between the United States and Russia.


In other words, RT acted much like homegrown American media outlets such as Fox News and Breitbart. A seven-page annex to the report details RT activities, including hosting third-party candidate debates, broadcasting a documentary about the Occupy Wall Street movement and "anti-fracking programming, highlighting environmental issues and the impacts on public health"perfectly appropriate journalistic activities, even if they do appear on what is certainly a propaganda outlet funded by an aggressive dictatorship. An entire page is devoted to RT's social media footprint: the network appears to score more YouTube views than CNN (though far fewer Facebook likes). Even this part of the report is slightly misleading: RT's tactics for inflating its viewership numbers in order to secure continued Kremlin funding has been the subject of some convincing scholarship. That is the entirety of the case the intelligence agencies have presented: Putin wanted Trump to win and used WikiLeaks and RT to ensure that outcome.


Despite its brevity, the report makes many repetitive statements remarkable for their misplaced modifiers, mangled assertions, and missing words. This is not just bad English: this is muddled thinking and vague or entirely absent argument. Take, for example, this phrase: "Moscow most likely chose WikiLeaks because of its self-proclaimed reputation for authenticity." I think, though I cannot be sure, that the authors of the report are speculating that Moscow gave the products of its hacking operation to WikiLeaks because WikiLeaks is known as a reliable source. The next line, however, makes this speculation unnecessary: "Disclosures through WikiLeaks did not contain any evident forgeries."


Or consider this: "Putin most likely wanted to discredit Secretary Clinton because he has publicly blamed her since 2011 for inciting mass protests against his regime in late 2011 and early 2012, and because he holds a grudge for comments he almost certainly saw as disparaging him." Did Putin's desire to discredit Clinton stem from his own public statements, or are the intelligence agencies basing their appraisal of Putin's motives on his public statements? Logic suggests the latter, but grammar indicates the former. The fog is not coincidental: if the report's vague assertions were clarified and its circular logic straightened out, nothing would be left.


It is conceivable that the classified version of the report, which includes additional "supporting information" and sourcing, adds up to a stronger case. But considering the arc of the argument contained in the report, and the principal findings (which are apparently "identical" to those in the classified version), this would be a charitable reading. An appropriate headline for a news story on this report might be something like, "Intel Report on Russia Reveals Few New Facts," or, say, "Intelligence Agencies Claim Russian Propaganda TV Influenced Election." Instead, however, the major newspapers and commentators spoke in unison, broadcasting the report's assertion of Putin's intent without examining the arguments.


The New York Times called it "a strong statement from three intelligence agencies," and followed its uncritical coverage with a story mocking Trump supporters for asking, "What's the big deal?"


"How is it possible, if these intelligence reports are true, to count the 2016 Presidential election as unsullied?" asked New Yorker editor David Remnick in a piece published Friday. But since when has "unsullied" been a criterion on which a democratic process is judged? Standard measures include transparency, fairness, openness, accessibility to all voters and to different candidates. Anything that compromises these standards, whether because of domestic or external causes, may throw a result into doubt. But Remnick's rhetorical question seems to reach for an entirely different standard: that of a process that is demonstrably free of any outside influence. Last month Paul Krugman at The New York Times railed, similarly, that the election was "tainted." Democracy is messy, as autocrats the world over will never tire of pointing out. They are the ones who usually traffic in ideas of order and purityas well as in conspiracy theories based on sweeping arguments and scant, haphazard evidence.


The election of Donald Trump is anomalous, both because of the campaign he ran and the peculiar vote mathematics that brought him victory. His use of fake news, his serial lying, his conning his way into free air time, his instrumentalization of partisanship and naked aggression certainly violated the norms of American democracy. But the intelligence report does nothing to clarify the abnormalities of Trump's campaign and election. Instead, it risks perpetuating the fallacy that Trump is some sort of a foreign agent rather than a home-grown demagogue, while doing further damage to our faith in the electoral system. It also suggests that the US intelligence agencies' Russia expertise is weak and throws into question their ability to process and present informationall this, two weeks before a man with no government experience but with a short Twitter fuse takes the oath of office.


January 9, 2017, 10:17 pm

David Guyatt Wrote:

Tracy Riddle Wrote:Let's follow the logic here. Because the CIA has lied in the past (usually via the Operations wing, not the Analysis wing - remember they had to create Team B because the regular analysts weren't hawkish enough about the USSR's military spending), that must mean they lie about everything all the time.

But we also know that Trump lies almost daily (hourly sometimes), and Russian officials have assured us that they have never engaged in the collection of compromising material. No sir, not us!

"Without a doubt, we gather kompromat. . . . In the Kremlin, there's piles of it, as there are in all the security agencies," said Gennady Gudkov, also a former legislator who was forced out of parliament for his opposition to Putin. "As a rule, the special services collect information on everyone, like a vacuum, picking up anything and everything."

But, but, Western intelligence agencies do it too! And so therefore, we must shut off our minds and stubbornly sit in our ideological sandboxes and play with our hobby horses.

Yes, of course the West has been trying to encircle Russia with NATO forces for 20+ years. And if you were Vladimir Putin, how would you respond to that? How would you respond to Hillary's accusations that your party rigged Russian elections in 2011? It's not rocket surgery, people! You would try to do everything you could to defeat her and place a more pro-Russian candidate in power, plus have your trolls feeding fake news stories to idiot Americans' social media. I'd be amazed if Putin didn't respond that way. It's a much more cost-effective way to combat the US than using military power.

Given the known quality of the numerous and highly respected independent journalists who have reported on how the IC have tried to smear Trump with false Russian hacking stories and/or gone to war against him using the fabricated MI6 report --- many of them have their articles present in this thread: Chris Hedges, Robert Parry, Glen Greenwald, Patrick Cockburn, Peter Hitchins and Peter Oborne amongst them, and given that the nature of the reporting some are relying on - the now thoroughly discredited partisan group-think NYT's and WaPo for example - then it is exceedingly evident that some of us have shut of their minds and are stubbornly sitting in their ideological sandboxes.

Allow me also to add to the foregoing partial list almost every single intelligence whistleblower I can think of-- Annie Machon's article above being typical I should say.

Altogether it is an array of independent free-thinkers versus the established media and the existing order. So far as I can tell not one of them like or wanted Trump - but they recognise he won the election, and they all also recognise that the US neocon faction (both Democrats and Republicans) want rid of him at any cost, including all the usual intelligence community bag of dirty tricks.

Quote:In case you hadn't noticed, uttering a politically incorrect comment is now a bigger crime than decimating thousands in a war.

You can bomb a country into submission and chaos, leaving dead and wounded from shore to shore, and that might be counted as a "mistake in judgment"; but using a few loaded wordsor in this casecriticizing an intelligence agencyis an earthshaking event that could make the planet spin off-course…

Case in point:

The lame-duck outgoing CIA director, John Brennan, lectured Donald Trump Sunday, on FOX. NBC News reports:

"Trump has repeatedly called for a better relationship between the U.S. and Putin's government. He suggested in an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Friday that he'd consider easing the latest sanctions on Russia."

"'I think he has to be mindful that he does not have a full appreciation and understanding of what the implications are of going down that road', Brennan said."

"The CIA chief roundly denounced Trump's approach to Russia and other national security threats, suggesting the president-elect has much to understand before he can make informed decisions on such matters."

"'The world is watching now what Trump says and listening very carefully. If he doesn't have confidence in the [US] intelligence community, what signal does that send to our partners and allies as well as our adversaries?' Brennan said."

Signal?

Mr. Brennan, the signal was sent to our partners, allies, and adversaries decades ago:

The CIA is a criminal agency.

Is that clear enough?

Long ago, the CIA criminally stepped outside its mandate, in order to shape world events it had no business participating in. Is that clear enough?

In that regard, do these names and phrases mean anything to you, Mr. Brennan?

* The Gehlen Org.

* Operation Gladio.

* MKULTRA.

* Operation CHAOS.

* Nugan Hand Bank.

* BCCI Bank.

* Golden Triangle. Asian heroin.

* Air America.

* Central American cocaine. Mena.

* The Contras.

* Henry Luce. William Paley. Arthur Sulzberger. Operation Mockingbird.

* Overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh (Iran).

* Overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz (Guatemala).

* Murder of Patrice Lumumba (Congo).

* Bay of Pigs.

* JFK.

* Diem assassination.

* Rafael Trujillo assassination.

* Sukarno. Suharto.

* East Timor genocide.

* Military coupGreece.

* Allende.

* Gulf of Tonkin.

* Operation Phoenix.

* Laos bombing.

* Sihanouk.

* The Khmer Rouge.

* El Salvador death squads.

On and on it goes…

See Mark Zepezauer's book. The CIA's Greatest Hits.

Overthrow, assassination, regime change, mind control, covert war, mass destruction, drugs, financial theft, co-opting the press…

Do you recall any of this, Mr. Brennan?

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump

Trump (or any president) is sending a negative signal about the US intelligence community to our friends, allies, and adversaries? Are you kidding, Mr. Brennan? Are you telling some kind of inside joke?

People all over the world have known, for decades, what the CIA has been doing.

And you're worried about the effect of a little tweak from Trump?

The murderous history of the CIA has been a cat out of the bag for a long, long time.

Professional amnesia may be your friend, Mr. Brennan, but it doesn't convince the victims and targets of your agency's actions since 1948.