Quote:All states lie, and all states kill. This is a truth every adult is aware of, but one easily forgotten in free countries such as our own, where citizens are so safe in their opinions that they can easily persuade themselves that our government never willfully does wrong, it only makes mistakes. So when Bill O'Reilly recently asked President Trump how he can respect Vladimir Putin, even though "Putin is a killer," the president shocked the gatekeepers of orthodox opinion in our land by responding, "There are a lot of killers. We have a lot of killers. Well, you think our country is so innocent?"

A comparison is not the same thing as an equivalence. President Trump was not saying that political murders in Russia are morally identical to the Iraq War, which was the example he gave of killings connected to our government. Rather, the president was deflating the presumption that U.S.-Russia relations should be conducted as if between a confessor and a penitent or a jailer and an inmate. Killers come in many different kinds, but they all have to mingle in the prison yard. That's the nature of relations between states, and respect is called for, though moral approval certainly is not.

The New York Times editorial board is among the authorities to take exception to this. The paper's objections are, however, a study in democratic delusionnot about the nature of Putin's Russia, which is indeed increasingly illiberal and deadly dangerous for Putin's critics, but about the U.S. government's moral standing and what Washington can accomplish by adorning its policies with a tinsel halo.

The Times calls catastrophic initiatives like the Iraq War "terrible mistakes." But the editorial pardons "presidents who took military action" whenever "driven by the desire to promote freedom and democracy"as if the ends justify the means. This is confused thinking, a mixture of mythology and half-understood Realpolitik. The successful examples the Times gives are those of Japan and Germany being democratized after World War II. But the United States did not enter the Second World War to promote democracy or freedomthe United States got into the war because it had been attacked. Even before Pearl Harbor, U.S. policy was not primarily ideological but interest-based: the United States had the most practical of concerns about Japanese and Nazi supremacy in Asia and Europe. More ideologically driven wars have been less successful.

That leads to a second point that must be driven home: in reality, the ends only justify the means when the means are successful, or at least have excellent odds of success. (This is in fact a criterion of traditional just-war theory.) To go to war in the way George W. Bush did in Iraq, without anything other than wishful thinking as a contingency plan for dealing with an insurgency or whatever else might go wrong, is worse than a mistake; it's morally criminal.

The myth of the United States as an almost angelic enforcer of justice, if sometimes an inept one, gives rise to much mischief, in the press as well as in the policy realm. It creates the temptation to overlook difficult details in the name of simple moral clarity. Journalists pressure one another, and together pressure officeholders, to substitute dudgeon for careful calculation. Moral mythologizing also creates a misleading impression of what states really are and what they are capable of doing. Even the most liberal, democratic and benign of states is not designed for the promotion of values; rather, what states excel at, when they excel at anything, is establishing security for themselves. President Trump plausibly claims that Russia can be beneficial to American security in the fight against ISIS. The president's critics would forgo that benefit and pursue a moral objective instead. That would be appropriate for a church, or indeed a newspaper. But for a state, it's a misplaced priority.

There is a grave need for more realistic and historically grounded thinking from the press and policymaking class, and more self-awareness, too. It's hard to imagine there would have been such uproar if President Trump had said he respects China's Xi Jinping. Would Bill O'Reilly have replied that Xi is a killer? Yet China's human-rights abuses dwarf those of Russia: there is good reason to think the regime executes Falun Gong religious dissenters and harvests their organs, a horror less comparable to Putin's Russia than to Stalin's USSR. The Chinese, however, are economically indispensable to the West, and indeed have much closer business relations with Western media, and the companies that advertise in print and on the air, than the Russians do.

The selective outrage in which our media indulges is not really moral at all, it's in part merely faddishonce a critical mass of pundits adopt a message, too many others parrot alongand in part self-deceiving, arising from a failure to be honest about the ugliness of power politics always and everywhere. There is also a cynical selectivity engaged in by outright ideologues and partisans who favor (or disfavor) some repressive regimes over others. Russia is a particular target for multifarious reasons, not least the residual Cold War enmity that persists in neoconservative and liberal hawk circles.

Our media is on a firm footing in criticizing all oppressive regimesas well as in holding our own government to account for its abuses, no matter how noble we wish to believe its motives to be. But in examining relationships between states, power and history can never be afterthoughts. A president cannot afford to place ideals first and security second. And while the press is never wrong to condemn injustice, wherever it occurs, the press also has a duty to inform the public about just how complex and distant the relationship between statecraft and morality can be. In each of the past two administrations, the president's moral reach far exceeded his practical graspleading to debacles in places like Iraq and Libya. President Trump seems to have learned from his predecessors' mistakes, but it's not clear that his critics have.

Quote:The notion that America needs to divide Russia from China (or Iran) for strategic reasons (though one probably embraced by some of his team) is essentially "old think." It belongs to the neoconservative era, which held that America must remain as a global defense and financial hegemon. And therefore must contain and weaken any contending rising power.

Quote:Trump's Embattled Revolution'
February 25, 2017

President Trump's domestic "revolution" on behalf of "forgotten" Americans requires a complementary foreign policy of reduced warfare and a weaker dollar, explains ex-British diplomat Alastair Crooke.




By Alastair Crooke


Pat Buchanan perhaps the U.S. politician with the greatest feel (as a thrice-times U.S. presidential candidate himself) for what President Trump is trying to achieve tells us compellingly, just why Trump is now the US President:




A sign supporting Donald Trump at a rally at Veterans Memorial Coliseum at the Arizona State Fairgrounds in Phoenix, Arizona. June 18, 2016 (Photo by Gage Skidmore)
[Simply,] …"He [Trump], read the nation and the world, better than his rivals. He saw the surging power of American nationalism at home, and of ethno-nationalism in Europe. And he embraced Brexit. While our bipartisan establishment worships diversity, Trump saw Middle America recoiling from the demographic change brought about by Third World invasions. And he promised to curb them.


"While our corporatists burn incense at the shrine of the global economy, Trump went to visit the working-class casualties. And those forgotten Americans in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin, responded. And while Bush II and President Obama plunged us into Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Trump saw that his countrymen wanted to be rid of the endless wars, and start putting America first. [And] He offered a new foreign policy … Putin's Russia is not our number one geopolitical foe.'"


That's it. That's Trump's domestic, and his foreign policy, in one.


What we all presently are obsessed with, is the bellicosity and hysteria to which Trump and his agenda has given rise: Is détente with Russia now effectively dead, as a consequence of the new Russo-phobic McCathyism? Or, is that which we are witnessing nothing more than "a mere tantrum by a clutch of spooks' whose jobs are under threat … along with the liberal press having a parallel tantrum': [not believing] that they lost the election to Donald Trump" as one American commentator told MK Bhadrakumar? Or, are we seeing a brittle American Establishment splitting apart, in a more profound way?


We do not know the answer. The notion of removing Trump from office seems somewhat far-fetched (see here). Certainly, America is deeply divided: Trump plainly evokes strong, emotional reactions. Three-fourths of Americans react to him strongly either positively or negatively.


The Pew Research Center's latest survey shows that only eight percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents approve Trump's job performance, which is the lowest rating for any new president from the opposing party in more than three decades. But interestingly, Pew also finds that 84 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaners, regard Trump's initial job performance as president "favorably."


A Divided Administration


But then, Gilbert Doctorow relates, as the new Administration got underway, "came a stunning about-face in the early roll-out of Donald Trump's new foreign policy, which looked a lot like Barack Obama's old foreign policy. We heard presidential press secretary Sean Spicer say Trump expected the Russian government to … return Crimea' to Ukraine.




Donald Trump at CPAC 2011 in Washington, D.C. (Flickr Gage Skidmore)
"Then we heard Defense Secretary James Mattis in Brussels (NATO headquarters), Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in Bonn (G20 Foreign Ministers meeting) and Vice President Pence in Munich (Security Conference) collectively pledge unswerving loyalty to the NATO alliance, insist that any new talks with Russia must be conducted from a position of strength,' and vow to hold Russia accountable for the full implementation of the Minsk Accords, meaning all sanctions stay in place pending that achievement which the Ukrainian government has consistently blocked, while blaming Moscow.


"Amid these signals of surrender from the Trump Administration suggesting continuation of the disastrous foreign policy of the last 25 years the newly revived enemies of détente on Capitol Hill added more anti-Russian sanctions and threats. In response to alleged violations by the Kremlin of the Treaty on Intermediate and Short-range Missiles (INF) dating back to 1987, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Arkansas, introduced a bill enabling the re-installation of American nuclear-tipped cruise missiles in Europe. If enacted, this would undo the main achievements of disarmament from the Reagan years, and bring us back to a full-blown Cold War."


This has unnerved Trump supporters; apparently disappointed some in Moscow; and also failed to reassure anxious Europeans at the Munich Security Conference. They are puzzling over which Administration faction to believe more correctly reflects future U.S. policy: the Pence/Mattis/Haley wing', that Europeans would like to hope is dominant; or, the Trump/Bannon/Miller triumvirate, which Steve Bannon hints views the European Union as a flawed construct, and who foresees conducting future relations with Europe, on a bilateral basis.


Which of these two, reflects America's likely path, more accurately? Has the Establishment now succeeded in walking-back Trump's agenda? Who now speaks for the President?


The answer is not hard to fathom: return to Pat Buchanan's clear explanation of how Trump became President: "He saw the surging power of American nationalism at home, and of ethno-nationalism in Europe. And he embraced Brexit. While our bipartisan establishment worships diversity, Trump saw Middle America recoiling from the demographic change, brought about by Third World invasions. And he promised to curb them."


Obviously, it is the Trump-Bannon wing. Were Trump to abandon his reading of the nation and of the Europeans that brought him to the Presidency, he might as well throw in the towel now. He will not be re-elected.


Weakening the Dollar


And Mr. Trump is showing no signs of reversing (for all the mixed messaging that has emanated from his diverse team). So, back to basics. What then is his foreign policy? Simply this: If President Trump wishes to keep his 84 percent (Republican) approval rating and stay elected there is only one way that he can do that: he must continue to carry "the working-class casualties and those forgotten Americans" (as Buchanan called them) of the Midwest, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.




The run-down PIX Theatre sign reads "Vote Trump" on Main Street in Sleepy Eye, Minnesota. July 15, 2016. (Photo by Tony Webster Flickr)
And the only way to do that is to bring back manufacturing jobs to this (white), Middle America, (hurting) constituency. And the only way you can bring those jobs back, is with a weak dollar. A strong dollar would be deadly to Trump's project.


Today, the dollar is too strong to allow any real return of manufacturing to the U.S. Trump needs to staunch any propensity for the dollar to rise. And, in his very first interview upon taking office (with the Wall Street Journal), Trump's main point, was that he wanted the U.S. dollar "down."


Here it is, then: Trump's main foreign policy objective is the return of jobs to Middle America and that means, in practical terms, avoiding a strong dollar. Secondly, the ultimate point of détente with Russia apart from Trump's reading that Middle America is experiencing war fatigue is that détente can release a "peace dividend" which would be vital for the task of rebuilding America's frayed infrastructure. (His tax proposals ultimately will have to be revenue neutral if Trump is to avoid an ugly row with his Tea Party supporters, who are aggressively fiscal conservative.)


Again, détente with Russia is a domestic need, required to attend to the re-building of the frayed structures of the communities who voted him into office. It is not anchored in any particular foreign policy ideology, but merely in a sense of peoples' fatigue.


Of course, wanting a weaker dollar and wanting détente with Russia, does not mean that Trump will get either; he will continue to face stiff internal resistance and filibustering. But these two aims, as it were, may be seen to constitute the overriding prism by which Trump views his foreign policy aims, in the longer term.


In the shorter term perhaps what we are seeing now, is a tactical pause, dictated by the malicious leaks from within the system, and by the unrelenting "war" being waged by the mainstream media a pause to allow Trump to get on with sorting out his Administration purging the leaks, putting in place his people, and contending with certain of the mainstream media.


It seems the purge is slowly happening (it must be a huge process, and be imposing a heavy demand on time). It is however, simply not very realistic for Trump to pursue an accord with either Russia or China while he is under siege, and when his very survival is being widely questioned. And, as is now widely known, Trump believes in negotiating from a position of strength, and not weakness. Pence and Mattis may well have been dispatched to Europe to apply some anaesthetizing balm, while the difficulties of the first month are being resolved.


So, how might this "foreign policy" be conducted in practice? Well, if Trump were to impose protectionist measures on other states (China, say), this would likely result in their currencies depreciating, as a consequence. A 30 percent tax might result in a 30 percent currency devaluation. We have seen something of the sort happening with the peso, in the case of Mexico. And, ipso facto, if the Mexican or Chinese currency weakens, the dollar appreciates (thus weakening U.S. capacity to compete).


There are two possible routes ahead: one is for Trump to negotiate bilaterally with (say) Germany, Japan, China and others, to warn them that either they revalue their currencies (or, at minimum, hold their foreign exchange value stable), or else to suffer the consequences of a U.S.-imposed protectionism, which would badly damage the health of their economies.


Or, Trump can revert to the Reagan tactic of the mid-1980s, when the then the U.S. President pulled together all the main global central banks and finance ministers in Paris, to instruct that the dollar was not to be allowed to rise in value any further (after its rapid appreciation in the early 1980s). This was known as the "Plaza Accord."


Going with Bilateralism'


It seems that Trump will pursue the first course (bilateralism), as he has already made it clear that he wants to negotiate on a fuller field than just the stability of foreign exchange values. Specific trade deals, and inward investment into the U.S., will be on the agenda as well as his declared aim of leveraging U.S. defense provision as a bilaterally negotiated quid pro quo, in return further economic benefit to the U.S. rather than having the U.S. defense umbrella being provided as a highly subsidized "good."




President-elect Donald Trump and his running mate Mike Pence thank their supporters for the upset victory on Nov. 8, 2016. (Photo from donaldjtrump.com)
The implications of this bilateral approach are significant. It does not imply, per se, that Trump should want to split Russia from China. Trump, by his own logic, would not want, ultimately, to resort to protectionism against China (other than as a negotiating ploy). Imposing punitive tariffs on China would likely lead to a strengthening of the dollar, and risk a devaluation of the yuan even possibly a maxi-devaluation of the yuan. Rather, he wants a deal. One that would bring additional jobs and Chinese infrastructure investment to America.


The notion that America needs to divide Russia from China (or Iran) for strategic reasons (though one probably embraced by some of his team) is essentially "old think." It belongs to the neoconservative era, which held that America must remain as a global defense and financial hegemon. And therefore must contain and weaken any contending rising power.


Russia will not, in any case, break with China. But in the Trumpian logic, why should that matter, so long as Trump has achieved satisfactory commercial deals with each? (Kissinger though, may try to persuade Trump otherwise.)


Again, pursuing the war on radical Islam (for which Trump has called for proposals from the Pentagon) would not necessarily call for decisive military U.S. interventions in the Middle East, on this logic. A change in policy, and in ethos, by a reformed CIA away from using radical Islam as "a tool" by which to pursue its "interests" (as it has from Afghanistan in the 1980s to Syria in recent years), would in and of itself, bring about a profound change. It would quickly percolate through to European intelligence services and more slowly marinate Gulf thinking.


Changing the Group Think'


Pat Lang, a former senior U.S. Defense Intelligence officer, notes how a small shift in bureaucratic "group think" from one paradigm to another can bring crucial change, simply by virtue of approaching a problem from a different direction:




A protest placard in the Kafersousah neighborhood of Damascus, Syria, on Dec. 26, 2012. (Photo credit: Freedom House Flickr)
"1. General Dunford, USMC, the uniformed head of the US armed forces, is meeting the week at Baku in Azarbaijan with General Gerasimov, the head of the Russian General Staff.


"2. My sources tell me that US and Russian air forces are increasingly coordinating and de-conflicting their air actions in Syria and Iraq. This can clearly be seen in USAF and US Navy air attacks on moderate' (in fact jihadi forces) in Idlib Province. These obviously have been coordinated with Russian air defenses.


"3. The CIA has stopped providing assistance to aforesaid moderate' jihadi and FSA forces in Syria. They would not have done that without instructions from outside and above CIA.


All of that tells me that sanity reigns in the Trump Administration no matter what lunatics like Schumer, Waters and McCain may do, think or say." (emphasis added).


What then are the major risks to the Trump "paradigm"? They are not negligible. Any increase in international tension usually will lead to a flight to the "safety" of the U.S. dollar thus to a "strengthening" of the dollar. (One good reason why Trump may stick with rhetoric against Iran, rather than action).


Secondly, although Trump has been trying to "talk down" the value of the U.S. dollar, most of his policies (de-offshoring of corporate cash, de-regulation and tax cuts) are seen as inflationary and therefore are pushing the dollar upwards. So, too, are pronouncements by the Federal Reserve about the prospects for an interest rate hike next month. It is not clear that Trump will be able to keep the dollar weak, against a general sense that interest rates are heading upwards. David Stockman's inflation index for the U.S., which uses more realistic values for energy, food, shelter and medical insurance than the official CPI index, is now rising at better than a 4 percent annual rate.


And thirdly, China may yet undo Trump's plans. As one well-versed economic commentator notes:


"I strongly contend that a more than one-half Trillion ($) one-month Chinese Credit expansion in early 2017 will exert divergent inflationary impacts to those from early 2016…


"Inflationary biases evolve significantly over time…Liquidity will tend to further inflate the already inflating asset class(s); hot money' will chase the hottest speculative Bubble. Inflationary surges in Credit growth can, as well, have profoundly different impacts depending on inflationary expectations, economic structure and the nature of financial flows.


"I would argue that Chinese officials today face a more daunting task of containing mounting financial leverage and imbalances than just a few months ago. The clock continues to tick, with rising odds that Beijing will be forced to take the types of forceful measures that risk an accident."


These inflationary risks threaten Trump, more than the unlikely prospect of impeachment. He has been consistent in warning that whomsoever won this Presidential election, would, sooner or later, face a financial crisis and then possibly a concomitant social crisis. Like most revolutions, Trump's revolution cannot afford to stand still: if it cannot, or does not, go forward, it will go backwards. We will return to the past. Trump, no doubt, grasps this.


Alastair Crooke is a former British diplomat who was a senior figure in British intelligence and in European Union diplomacy. He is the founder and director of the Conflicts Forum.

Lauren Johnson Wrote:

Quote:Thanks to the president's press conference last weekbroadcast live from the bridge of USS Caine ("Ahh, but the strawberries that's… that's where I had them…")the only political topic of conversation that matters is when and how President Donald Trump will leave office.

Conventional thinking has the Republican majority in Congress rising up in indignation, pouring over purloined tax returns for princely emoluments from some suspect foreign power, and then joining the Democrats to remove Trump from the highest office.

Those who like their morning coffee with some conspiracy have Trump going down as a Manchurian president, done in by the revelation not just that Putin tilted the electoral wheels with the connivance of the disgraced General Michael Flynn, but that Trump's entourage is a cell of fellow travellers, in office to pay off the venture capital that Putin spread around Trump Inc. when Donald had to turn to the Russian mob for a payday loan.

The problem with both paths from power is that they assume an orderly transition, based on precedent and succession clauses in the Constitution, not an assassination worthy of Cesarian Rome ("Et tu, Mitch?") or some of the slow poisons mixed into the sacraments that have been known to speed change among the popes.

Alas, palace intrigue in Washington is as American as the Bill of Rights, which may explain why so many plotters come as if a well-armed militia.

* * *

According to the storyboards used in most high schools (not to mention by cable commentators), American democracy is the last, best-hope on earththe munificent bequest of the founding fathersand a paradise exempt from palace revolutions, coups, putsches, cabals, nights of the long knives, and seizures of the radio station. After all, we're not Guatemala or Sierra Leone.

Consistent with the brochures passed out at Independence Hall, the United States only replaces its leaders after sober deliberations and presidential debateswith Wolf Blitzer moderating.

If Trump is to leave office before his term expires, it should only be according to the rules established in the Constitution, which has two sections dealing with the removal of the president from office. Article Two states:

The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Then there is the 25th Amendment, which, in part, reads:

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Since 1789, when the Constitution was ratified, no president has been convicted of "Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors."

Nor since 1967, when the 25th Amendment passed, has a president been deemed incompetent and removed by a cabinet camarilla (plus a doctor's note).

That said, the United States has turned palace revolutions into a political art, so that many presidencies have been swept away, as if by Medici daggers. In the last 238 years, presidentsmany as incompetent as Donald Trump, if not worsehave been shot, blackmailed, threatened, and bullied until they left office.

One in three presidencies have ended before their time, which explains how and why many of those who have risen to the highest office have done so on the back of illness, assassination, black ops, and other instruments of the putsch.

I know, I know, you want to believe that American democracy is among the oldest on the planet, and that our leaders are descended from Athenian idealism, not Bohemian defenestration.

The norm for much of American history, however, is that when some elements of the republic don't like the choice made at the ballot box, they overthrow the presidentby fair means or murder most foul.

By Trump's reasoning, he's serving on a four-year contract, as called for in the Constitution. In truth, he has the job security of an NFL cornerback, who can be cut anytime "to clear cap space" for the ruling class.

* * *

For those who don't buy the theory that the United States is a gated, banana republic, let's have a review of a few presidencies, starting with Abraham Lincoln's, that came to premature endings:

As everyone knows, Lincoln was assassinated, and the co-conspirators of gunman John Wilkes Booth could well have filled another Ford Theater, as they included not just fellow assassins (who also shot William Seward), but horse handlers, doctors, and proprietors of safe houses in rural Maryland and Virginia.

Andrew Johnson, after Lincoln, served out his term, although he was impeached and only survived because his supporters set up a slush fund of $150,000 to buy swing votes at theSenate impeachment trial. (Not something you read about in Profiles in Courage.)

The presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes was over almost as it began, as true ballot fraud (not those mythical buses rolling into New Hampshire) put him in office.

James Garfield, who succeeded Hayes, was shot early in his term by Charles Guiteau, who (at least in his deranged fantasies) was closely allied with Vice-President Chester Arthur's patronage party.

When he pulled the trigger at the Baltimore and Potomac railroad station in Washington, D.C., Guiteau shouted: "I am a Stalwart, and Arthur will be President!" And he was, to the delight of fix-it man Roscoe Conkling.

An anarchist from the Midwest, Leon Czolgosz, murdered President William McKinley in 1901, allowingin the words of political boss Mark Hanna"that damned cowboy" (Teddy Roosevelt) to become president.

Roosevelt, himself, while campaigning in 1912 against William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson, was shot but not killed.

Warren Harding died in office in summer 1923, while barnstorming the country. His quackish doctor, Charles "Doc" Sawyer, at first thought he had eaten bad shellfish in Alaska. Others thought maybe he was poisoned, although later it became evident that Harding suffered from heart disease.

Conspiracists, however, do wonder why the ailing U.S. president got so little professional care in the last days of his life (he died in a San Francisco hotel suite), as was the case in 1945 when President Franklin Roosevelt became ill and died in Warm Springs.

President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, in November 1963. Even though his alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had connections to the FBI, CIA, Russia, and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (if not Ted Cruz's father), he was consigned to the dustbin of history as a "lone gunman," a species of agitation unique to American politics.

In summer 1974, Richard Nixon resigned during his second term, the victim of his own paranoia and Watergate-related crimes, but with a shove out the door from unelected co-conspirators in the FBI (see Throat, Deep), CIA, the Washington Post, and other stalwarts in the capital.

The Iranian hostage crisis cost Jimmy Carter his presidency, and in 1981 another assassin (also of the lone gunman persuasion) shot and seriously wounded President Ronald Reagan, although he survived and stayed in office.

Technically a cabal did not remove President George W. Bush but lifted him to power, thanks to the good offices of a compliant Supreme Court, which did not trust Floridians to recount the contested ballots in the 2000 presidential election.

My point with all these examples is that, for a country that prides itself on the so-called "democratic process" and all that Inauguration Day, CNN hogwash about "the peaceful transfer of power," many presidencies have begun or ended because of assassins, conspirators, plotters, stalwarts, witch doctors, or bureaucratic coups d'état, all of which ought to give Trump pause whenever bad shellfish are on the menu at Mar-a-Lago or an anarchist heads his way.

* * *

What are the chances that someone will shoot Trump? Let's hope they are poor. In the bloodstream of democracy, assassinations are a toxin, more fit for Czarist Russia or some African country with a near-endless supply of ambitious colonels.

What is remarkable in American history is that the republic has survived so many gun attacks on its highest elected officials. Overall, there have been more than twenty attempts on the lives of American presidents.

The hope is that the president travels safely in the bubble of Secret Service protection. That said, I am sure Trump's erratic behavior, in his first month of office, has given pause to his protectors, who no doubt have had to scramble whenever he decides to dump his press pool and, say, play golf or head to a local restaurant.

Nor can I imagine that the Secret Service is happy that his weekend residences are a Florida beach club (still raffling membership to anyone with two-hundred grand) and a New York apartment building, where it must be difficult to endlessly check visitors and their guests (as opposed, say, to Camp David on its own military reservation).

I could well imagine that a growing preoccupation among Trump's security detail is how to keep him safe from armed drones, which presumably can find U.S. officials as easily as they can the ISIS or Taliban leadership. If Amazon or UPS can send a drone to your front door, so, too, presumably, can other retailers of anarchy.

* * *

More likely than a physical attack is that Trump will find himself at the sharp end of a silent coup, the kind of sting that the FBI and others in Washington ran against Richard Nixon. In that case, an embarrassing series of leaks were orchestrated to agitate the press and Congress to remove the President from office.

Who might organize such a plot against Donald Trump?

At the moment high on the list of potential conspirators would be the so-called Deep State of the intelligence agencies and corporate black holes around Washington that have a variety of grievances against Trump.

For starters, both the NSA and the CIA are now subject to criminal investigations over leaks that revealed compromising phones calls between General Flynn and the Russians.

Someone in one of the agencies leaked the contents of a phone call between Flynn and the Russian ambassador to Washington, revealing that the general had, in fact, discussed sanctions against Russia that the Obama administration had imposed after election tampering was confirmed in an FBI investigation.

I assume that nearly all of the intelligence agencies around Washington (there are some seventeen) are tapping the phone of the Russian ambassador (why else have bugs?), so that the search for the leaker will not be easy.

But when the usual suspects are rounded up and paraded to the stockade, you can be sure that the conflict will draw even sharper battle lines between Trump and the Parallax Corporation, the deadly front company at the center of the 1974 Alan Pakula political thriller.

More accomplices to the intrigue? Democrats in oppositiondespairing that they don't have the votes in the House to impeach (i.e., indict) or the votes in the Senate to convictwill no doubt turn to far-flung sources to find a "throw-down gun," that is, "supplied" evidence that would make a conflict-of-interest conviction a lot easier.

For some conspirators the lowest-hanging dirt is probably the dealings of the Trump campaign in Russia, which is already the subject of an FBI investigation and various headline-chasing congressional committees. FBI Director Comey's limousine, parked ominously in front of the capitol, cannot have been reassuring to the administration.

Some cabalists are hopeful that, by forcing the release of Trump's taxes, other smoking guns might be found. Personally, I doubt anything in his taxes will bring down his presidency. Embarrass him? Sure, especially if he is not as rich as he boasted to those eager apprentices or if his taxes are a mountain of losses carried forward, from those moments when the "art of the deal" was to con shareholders, hedge funds, banks, et al. into paying for his many blunders.

The release of his tax forms would, however, give Trump's opponents a road map to his fortune or to favors outstanding, especially if any foreign governments view the president as an in-the-money option.

More likely, there is be found among his many partners (his business model is to franchise the Trump brand name for a 30 percent stake in large projects) quasi-governmental pools of money from the Persian Gulf and Asia, so-called "sovereign" funds, which is how many emerging nations stash their money along Fifth Avenue.

What better place to hide money than in New York real estate, and who better to front the transaction than cable's-own Donald Trump?

The emoluments clause in the Constitution, drafted in 1789, did not understand the essence of Russian flight capital in 2017 or how a New York real estate empire could be built on hot money from around world. But James Madison was well acquainted with earlier Donald Trumps, as when he wrote:

The stockjobbers will become the pretorian band of the Government, at once its tool and its tyrant; bribed by its largesses, and overawing it, by clamours and combinations.

Madison might have the explanation why the speculator is now betting on politics.

* * *

How does Trump go down?

For starters, expect to see street demonstrations continue to flourish (some may be spontaneous, others may have sponsors) and that many will target members of the House and Senate in vulnerable constituencies.

At the same time articles will circulate, mostly on the Internet, about Trump's mental incapacitieshis narcissism, fragmented speech patterns, paranoia, and detachment from reality. Get ready for a parade of online medical experts testifying about his dictatorial fantasies.

Aides will do their best to keep him from looking like Charles Foster (aka Citizen) Kane ("There's only one person in the world who's going to decide what I'm going to do and that's me…") or Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle ("Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets"), but the real Trump will never be offline for long.

Meanwhile, the White House will increasingly come to resemble Fort Apache or Little Bighorn, a lonely redoubt in Indian country. By that point, all those corporate CEOs in the cabinet will be taking long lunches and gossiping with their staff, while the government becomes a subsidiary of Trump, his immediate family, Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, and the Steve Miller band of one true believer.

Every day in the press will come various leaks and documents all of which will be designed to make Trump look like a Russian dupe, swindler, inside trader, riverboat gambler, or confidence man.

Some of the leaks will become subject to congressional investigation at which point the many officials that Trump has fired (Flynn et al.) will take to the microphones with primetime anecdotes about his vanity, use of the Oval Office to peddle influence and condos, or sweethearts.

Just so the storyline is clear to a majority of Americans, Ben Affleck will direct a blockbuster movie about a president gone mad in office (Original Intent), and the country saved only by a crusading CIA agent (Ben Affleck), who has orders from shadowy bosses to take down the tyrant (Michael Douglas) and his mole of a Russian wife (Angelina Jolie, but without all the tatts).

Lacking a smoking gun indicating that the President actively conspired with Russia during the election or that he was personally aware of a Putin shell company with investments in a Trump development, Congress will cite numerous presidential aides for contempt of Congress until an independent prosecutor, Benjamin Civiletti, of Watergate fame, is appointed. (The revenge of the Democrats for Whitewater and Monica's dress.)

On slow days for news, tearful women with Flashdance hairdos who now work as "personal trainers" will parade before the cameras and tell how Trump tried to entice them into the steam room at Mar-a-Lago.

Fed by every Trump-hating agency in Washington, the special prosecutor will have a field day picking apart the offal of Trump's real estate speculations, not to mention the public company that fleeced investors of almost $1 billion.

Trump will refuse to allow either his family or senior staff to testify before Congress or the special prosecutor, citing executive privilege and even Abraham Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus to justify his refusal to cooperate, in what he deems to be "wartime". To emphasize the point he will start wearing a uniform.

Although Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will be long gone, the Bannon praetorian guard will announce that Iran has concrete plans to attack Israel with long-range missiles, some of whichno one is quite suremight be tipped with tactical nuclear weapons.

Several U.S. Navy fleets will be dispatched to the Persian Gulf while a Marine Corps brigade is flown into western Pakistan, between Quetta and the Iranian border. At the same time the CIA and several other intelligence agencies will leak to the press that the Trump administration has fabricated the readiness of Iranian missiles or that government's rumors of war.

With the Supreme Court hearing evidence in the case Trump v. United States of America about the extent of executive privilege and how it applies to members of a president's immediate family, the swing vote in the case will belong to the newest Supreme Court justice, Neil Gorsuch, who has made it known to his clerks that James Madison thought presidents "ought to be accountable" to the people (original intent?), through the Congress.

Before the Supreme Court gives its opinion, Trump will resign, blaming the Clintons, Barack Obama, CNN, the "failing" New York Times, the Washington Post, the CIA and NSA, the FBI, the Democratic leadership in Congress, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, "overrated actress" Meryl Streep, Jake Tapper, Oprah Winfrey, Paul Krugman, mullahs in Iran, and the Russians. It's the mother of all rants.

In the last scene of the movie, after Ben Affleck has brought down the president (although for whom and why he's unsure), the camera focuses on two men talking quietly about Trump at the bar of the Cosmos Club in Washington.

"You know," one of them is heard to say, "he's right."

Quote:The Deep State Goes Shallow: A Reality-TV Coup d'etat in Prime Time
by Edward Curtin


In irony a man annihilates what he posits within one and the same act; he leads us to believe in order not to be believed; he affirms to deny and denies to affirm; he creates a positive object but it has no being other than its nothingness."
Jean-Paul Sartre


It is well known that the United States is infamous for engineering coups against democratically elected governments worldwide. Voters' preferences are considered beside the point. Iran and Mosaddegh in 1953, Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, Indonesia and Sukarno in 1965-7, Allende in Chile in 1973, to name a few from the relatively distant past. Recently the Obama administration worked their handiwork in Honduras and Ukraine. It would not be hyperbolic to say that overthrowing democratic governments is as American as apple pie. It's our "democratic" tradition like waging war.


What is less well known is that elements within the U.S. ruling power elites have also overthrown democratically elected governments in the United States. One U.S. president, John F. Kennedy, was assassinated because he had turned toward peace and opposed the forces of war within his own government. He is the lone example of a president who therefore was opposed by all the forces of imperial conquest within the ruling elites.


Others, despite their backing for the elite deep state's imperial wars, were taken out for various reasons by competing factions within the shadow government. Nixon waged the war against Vietnam for so long on behalf of the military-industrial complex, but he was still taken down by the CIA, contrary to popular mythology about Watergate. Jimmy Carter was front man for the Tri-Lateral Commission's deep-state faction, but was removed by the group represented by George H. Bush, William Casey, and Reagan through their traitorous actions involving the Iran hostages. The emcee for the neo-liberal agenda, Bill Clinton, was rendered politically impotent via the Lewinsky affair, a matter never fully investigated by any media.


Obama, CIA groomed, was smoothly moved into power by the faction that felt Bush needed to be succeeded by a slick smiling assassin who symbolized "diversity," could speak well, and played hoops. Hit them with the right hand; hit them with the left. Same coin: Take your pick heads or tails. Hillary Clinton was expected to complete the trinity.


But surprises happen, and now we have Trump, who is suffering the same fate albeit at an exponentially faster rate as his predecessors that failed to follow the complete script. The day after his surprise election, the interlocking circles of power that run the show in sun and shadows what C. Wright Mills long ago termed the Power Elite met to overthrow him, or at least to render him more controllable. These efforts, run out of interconnected power centers, including the liberal corporate legal boardrooms that were the backers of Obama and Hillary Clinton, had no compunction in planning the overthrow of a legally elected president. Soon they were joined by their conservative conspirators in doing the necessary work of "democracy" making certain that only one of their hand-picked and anointed henchmen was at the helm of state. Of course, the intelligence agencies coordinated their efforts and their media scribes wrote the cover stories. The pink Pussyhats took to the streets. The deep state was working overtime.


Trump, probably never having expected to win and as shocked as most people when he did, made some crucial mistakes before the election and before taking office. Some of those mistakes have continued since his inauguration. Not his derogatory remarks about minorities, immigrants, or women. Not his promise to cut corporate taxes, support energy companies, oppose strict environmental standards. Not his slogan to "make America great again." Not his promise to build a "wall" along the Mexican border and make Mexico pay for it. Not his vow to deport immigrants. Not his anti-Muslim pledges. Not his insistence that NATO countries contribute more to NATO's "defense" of their own countries. Not even his crude rantings and Tweets and his hypersensitive defensiveness. Not his reality-TV celebrity status, his eponymous golden tower and palatial hotels and sundry real estate holdings. Not his orange hair and often comical and disturbing demeanor, accentuated by his off the cuff speaking style. Surely not his massive wealth.


While much of this was viewed with dismay, it was generally acceptable to the power elites who transcend party lines and run the country. Offensive to hysterical liberal Democrats and traditional Republicans, all this about Trump could be tolerated, if only he would cooperate on the key issue.
Trump's fatal mistake was saying that he wanted to get along with Russia, that Putin was a good leader, and that he wanted to end the war against Syria and pull the U.S. back from foreign wars. This was verboten. And when he said nuclear war was absurd and would only result in nuclear conflagration, he had crossed the Rubicon. That sealed his fate. Misogyny, racism, support for Republican conservative positions on a host of issues all fine. Opposing foreign wars, especially with Russia not fine.


Now we have a reality-TV president and a reality-TV coup d'etat in prime time. Hidden in plain sight, the deep-state has gone shallow. What was once covert is now overt. Once it was necessary to blame a coup on a secretive "crazy lone assassin," Lee Harvey Oswald. But in this "post-modern" society of the spectacle, the manifest is latent; the obvious, non-obvious; what you see you don't see. Everyone knows those reality-TV shows aren't real, right? It may seem like it is a coup against Trump in plain sight, but these shows are tricky, aren't they? He's the TV guy. He runs the show. He's the sorcerer's apprentice. He wants you to believe in the illusion of the obvious. He's the master media manipulator. You see it but don't believe it because you are so astute, while he is so blatant. He's brought it upon himself. He's bringing himself down. Everyone who knows, knows that.


I am reminded of being in a movie theatre in 1998, watching The Truman Show, about a guy who slowly "discovers" that he has been living in the bubble of a television show his whole life. At the end of the film he makes his "escape" through a door in the constructed dome that is the studio set. The liberal audience in a very liberal town stood up and applauded Truman's dash to freedom. I was startled since I had never before heard an audience applaud in a movie theatre and a standing ovation at that. I wondered what they were applauding. I quickly realized they were applauding themselves, their knowingness, their insider astuteness that Truman had finally caught on to what they already thought they knew. Now he would be free like they were. They couldn't be taken in; now he couldn't. Except, of course, they were applauding an illusion, a film about being trapped in a reality-TV world, a world in which they stood in that theatre their world, their frame. Frames within frames. Truman escapes from one fake frame into another the movie. The joke was on them. The film had done its magic as its obvious content concealed its deeper truth: the spectator and the spectacle were wed. McLuhan was here right: the medium was the message.


This is what George Trow in 1980 called "the context of no context." Candor as concealment, truth as lies, knowingness as stupidity. Making reality unreal in the service of an agenda that is so obvious it isn't, even as the cognoscenti applaud themselves for being so smart and in the know.
The more we hear about "the deep state" and begin to grasp its definition, the more we will have descended down the rabbit hole. Soon this "deep state" will be offering courses on what it is, how it operates, and why it must stay hidden while it "exposes" itself.


Right-wing pundit Bill Krystal tweets:




Liberal CIA critic and JFK assassination researcher, Jefferson Morley, after defining the deep state, writes:


With a docile Republican majority in Congress and a demoralized Democratic Party in opposition, the leaders of the Deep State are the most perhaps the only credible check in Washington on what Senator Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) calls Trump's "wrecking ball presidency."


These are men who ostensibly share different ideologies, yet agree, and state it publically, that the "deep state" should take out Trump. Both believe, without evidence, that the Russians intervened to try to get Trump elected. Therefore, both no doubt feel justified in openly espousing a coup d'etat. They match Trump's blatancy with their own. Nothing deep about this.


Liberals and conservatives are now publically allied in demonizing Putin and Russia, and supporting a very dangerous military confrontation initiated by Obama and championed by the defeated Hillary Clinton. In the past these opposed political factions accepted that they would rotate their titular leaders into and out of the White House, and whenever the need arose to depose one or the other, that business would be left to deep state forces to effect in secret and everyone would play dumb.


Now the game has changed. It's all "obvious." The deep state has seemingly gone shallow. Its supporters say so. All the smart people can see what's happening. Even when what's happening isn't really happening.


"Only the shallow know themselves," said Oscar Wilde.

Quote:The American media is ignoring a story from London about the abrupt resignation of Robert Hannigan, the head of Britain's highly secretive Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), which is the codebreaking equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). Hannigan's resignation on January 23 surprised everyone, with only a few hours' notice provided to his staff. He claimed in a press release that he wanted to spend more time with his family, which reportedly includes a sick wife and elderly parents. Given the abruptness of the decision, it seems likely to be a cover story.

The British media is speculating that Hannigan was pushed out because he was resistant to sharing sensitive intelligence with the Trump White House, but that story makes no sense. The UK's formidable GCHQ does indeed have significant resources that make it the most valued partner for the NSA, but the bilateral flow of information is predominantly from Washington to London, making the relationship more valuable to Britain than to the U.S., no matter who is president.

Hannigan, who is only 51, was a senior civil servant brought into GCHQ in November 2014 for an anticipated four-year tour of duty. He was tasked with initiating reforms in the wake of the Snowden revelations. Hannigan promised more openness and accountability. But one of his first moves was to condemn attempts by mostly U.S. technology companies to restrict government access to their messaging systems, making them "the command and control networks of choice" for terrorists. More recently, he has authorized public relations demonstrations, including illuminating his headquarters building in the rainbow colors of the LGBTQ flag.

For those who have been following such developments, the European media's feeding frenzy regarding Donald Trump and his administration has made any but the most rabid U.S. news outlets look highly civilized by way of comparison. The British press has been a leader in that effort and anti-Trump demonstrations are both large and frequent in London and other cities. Hostility to Trump is consequently strong both within the British government and among the people, including motions in Parliament and petitions to ban the American president from Britain.

Britain, like the U.S., has three principal intelligence agencies: GCHQ corresponds to NSA; the Secret Intelligence Service (MI-6) is the British CIA; and MI-5 works on internal security like America's FBI. The CIA and NSA report to the president, while MI-6 and GCHQ answer to the UK foreign secretary, who in turn is accountable to the prime minister. MI-5 is under the British government's Joint Intelligence Committee, while the FBI is directed by the U.S. attorney general.

The heads of CIA, NSA, the FBI, GCHQ, MI-6, and MI-5 together constitute what is likely to be the world's most exclusive club. Though most intelligence is shared with the other "Five Eyes" English-speaking countries (Canada, New Zealand, and Australia), it is the Anglo-American relationship that drives the process and produces most of the information. As the Downing Street memo demonstrated in its assertion that the Iraq War intelligence and facts "were being fixed around the policy," Brits and Americans are frequently inclined to do each other favors, even when they know that the enterprise they might be engaging in is not "going by the book."

The Hannigan resignation is not occurring in a vacuum, and some in the large and highly networked retired intelligence community have come to believe that it is connected to the investigation and downfall of Trump's first national-security advisor, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy has detailed exactly how the Flynn case does not appear to fit into any acceptable category that would have mandated an investigation and interrogation by the FBI. Surveillance of a Russian official would be authorized under FBI guidelines, but to extend that type of monitoring or investigation to a U.S. citizen would require specific authority from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court to issue a warrant based on probable cause.

There is no evidence that that was ever done. Flynn was not an actual or suspected foreign intelligence agent, and it would be ridiculous to suggest that he might be so inclined. Nor was he engaged in any criminal activity or unwittingly connected to an ongoing investigation. Indeed, apart from possibly dissimulating over what he said, he basically did nothing wrong. There were no grounds for him to be questioned ("grilled" according to the New York Times) by the FBI, and whether or not he misled Vice President Pence over the content of his December phone calls with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak is a matter for the president and his advisers to sort out from a political perspective, which is indeed what eventually took place.

Regarding the actual development of the investigation of Flynn, recall for a moment that we are dealing with at least some individuals at the top levels of national-security organizations who did not hesitate to break the law, leaking information to the media on the highly classified telephone intercepts. Some government employees have gone to jail for doing just that. That revelation alone might be considered a major security breach, since the Russians learned they were being intercepted and have likely tightened up their communications procedures, meaning there will be no more freebies.

Why would these leakers do it? The investigation of Flynn was initiated by high-level Obama officials who had access to tightly controlled and normally inaccessible information. "Obama advisers" were reportedly working directly with the FBI to investigate Flynn. Many of those advisers and other high officials had lost much in the electoral outcome and some might certainly have been seeking payback, while the lame-duck White House could have been looking for ways to preemptively weaken the incoming administration.

The FBI or NSA would have been recording the conversations of the Russian ambassador as a legitimate exercise of their authority, but the normal procedure involving inadvertent intercept of a soon-to-be high-ranking American would be to redact that part of the conversation or otherwise "minimize" it to conceal his or her identity. Leaking the classified information thus obtained to the media portraying Flynn, and by extension Trump, in a bad light would require reconstruction of the original documents and might be risky to carry out. Even if the enterprise could be seen as a good move politically if one were a Democrat, it would not pay to do it too directly, as someone might eventually backtrack and find out the source.

That being so, it might not be too preposterous to consider discreetly asking the Brits what they might have in a folder somewhere on calls and other contacts made by Flynn. As Flynn was known to be in touch with senior government officials all over the world, GCHQ might well have content or corroboration that NSA could have missed. Pull together enough "foreign sourced" stuff that way, imply something possibly untoward about all of it, send it on over to the CIA liaison, and you have a prima facie case that would satisfy the admittedly willing-to-be-convinced Obama Justice Department that Flynn might be up to something that could potentially damage national security.

Enter the FBI at that point to open an investigation. And focus on the Russian aspect as it supports the official Democratic Party narrative that "Putin stole the election"and also satisfies the many in Congress, the intelligence community, and the media who are opposed to any détente with Moscow. It all looks and smells good because key evidence comes from outside the system and doesn't appear to derive from dedicated players harboring agendas on this side of the Atlantic. Pull it all together and it accomplishes three things: it enables an investigation of Flynn, provides cover for media leaks, and both embarrasses and weakens the authority of the new administration.

Yes, I know this is largely speculation, but former colleagues and I have come to suspect something does not smell right with the Hannigan resignation and would seem to be quite plausibly related to Flynn. It also explains how and why the investigation proceeded as aggressively as it did: information derived from a major foreign intelligence partner could not be easily dismissed or ignored and would have to be acted upon.

Hannigan's exit is almost certainly more than it seems, and the Flynn dismissal also would appear to have aspects that have not yet surfaced and, in truth, might never see the light of day. It is not unreasonable to argue that it can all be connected. Aggrieved senior officials closely tied to the outgoing White House might have surreptitiously sought assistance from a "special relationship friend" in a foreign government to make a case that would humiliate and ultimately bring down an unlovable and abrasive incoming national-security advisor. Of course, one still needs to learn who those senior officials were and consider whether they should be allowed to walk away from what they have done.

As for Hannigan, did the Trump White House discover what had occurred and did it back channel to British Prime Minister Theresa May demanding that someone's head roll? Or did May learn of the maneuvering independently and respond appropriately? However it is playing out right now, someday the whole story almost certainly will be leaked and whatever contrivance or sequence of events enabled the attack on Flynn will become public. You can be sure of that.

Quote:In its last months the Obama administration ordered the intelligence agencies to collect and distribute information of contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia. This to prevent any change by the Trump administration of the hostile policy towards Russia that the Obama administration instituted. The intent was also gives the intelligence services blackmail material to prevent any changes in their undue, freewheeling independence.

The above is reported in a rather short New York Times piece published yesterday. The reporting angle captured in the headline is biased to set the Obama efforts into a positive light. But the Obama Administration Rushed to Preserve Intelligence of Russian Election Hacking.

But make no mistake. Not single shred of evidence has been provided that "Russia hacked the election" or had anything to do with various leaks of Clinton related emails. A lot of fluff and chaff was thrown around but not even one tiny bit of evidence.

The effort was clearly to sabotage the announced policy of the incoming administration of seeking better relations with Russia. Obama intended to undermine the will of the voters by abusing instruments of the state.

Excerpts from the piece:

In the Obama administration's last days, some White House officials scrambled to spread information about Russian efforts to undermine the presidential election and about possible contacts between associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump and Russians across the government. Former American officials say they had two aims: to ensure that such meddling isn't duplicated in future American or European elections, and to leave a clear trail of intelligence for government investigators.
It is completely normal for any campaign, and especially an incoming administration, to have contacts with foreign government officials.

Such contacts are needed to prepare policies and to get the facts right to plan and run a consistent foreign policy. I am very sure that there were hundreds of talks between Trump campaign and incoming administration officials with Israeli, European and Arab officials. These are regular contacts and they do not violate any law. There was and is no reasons at all to pick out talks with Russian officials as something sinister or even illegal. Again - no evidence has been provided that Russia somehow interfered in U.S. elections. None at all. There was no sound reason to give special treatment to campaign contacts with Russia.
American allies, including the British and the Dutch, had provided information describing meetings in European cities between Russian officials and others close to Russia's president, Vladimir V. Putin and associates of President-elect Trump, according to three former American officials who requested anonymity in discussing classified intelligence.
Separately, American intelligence agencies had intercepted communications of Russian officials, some of them within the Kremlin, discussing contacts with Trump associates.

Here the NYT is divulging "sources and methods" - usually the holy grail for the intelligence community. U.S. intelligence is intercepting communication "within the Kremlin"? That is surely of interest to Russian counter-intelligence. One also has to ask who ordered the European intelligence services to watch over U.S. contacts with Russia. Were similar orders given to the Dutch secret services to report on contacts of the Clinton campaign with Israeli officials? Undue influencing attempts of Israeli politicians on U.S. policies are legend. Were they watched? If not why not?

Mr. Trump has denied that his campaign had any contact with Russian officials, and at one point he openly suggested the American spy agencies had cooked up intelligence suggesting that the Russian government had tried to meddle in the presidential election. Mr. Trump has accused the Obama administration of hyping the Russia story line as a way to discredit his new administration.
Guess what - Trump is right. The "Russian hacking" story is not backed by any evidence at all. It IS cooked up. And to say Trump "accused" the Obama administration of attempts to "discredit his new administration" is quite weak. The article says exactly that. How else could one interpret the following section?

As Inauguration Day approached, Obama White House officials grew convinced that the intelligence was damning and that they needed to ensure that as many people as possible inside government could see it, even if people without security clearances could not. Some officials began asking specific questions at intelligence briefings, knowing the answers would be archived and could be easily unearthed by investigators including the Senate Intelligence Committee, which in early January announced an inquiry into Russian efforts to influence the election.
At intelligence agencies, there was a push to process as much raw intelligence as possible into analyses, and to keep the reports at a relatively low classification level to ensure as wide a readership as possible across the government and, in some cases, among European allies. This allowed the upload of as much intelligence as possible to Intellipedia, a secret wiki used by American analysts to share information.

There was also an effort to pass reports and other sensitive materials to Congress. In one instance, the State Department sent a cache of documents marked "secret" to Senator Benjamin Cardin of Maryland days before the Jan. 20 inauguration.

The "intelligence community", it is specifically the CIA here which campaigned on the Clinton side, manipulated the classification of secrets for the sole purpose of instigating witch-hunt investigations against the incoming Trump administration. Such secrets were then used to decapitate the Trump administration with the first casualty being his selected national security advisor Flynn. We currently see an attack on the administration's attorney general Session for a routine talk with the Russian ambassador. This based on "Justice department officials", i.e. FBI flunkies. Why would they know who Session legitimately met in his function as U.S. Senator?

Slandered intelligence analysis was classified in low categories with the aim of distributing it far and wide and to practically guarantee that it would "leak" to the media. The real facts though were hidden as much as possible to provide no material for the Trump administration's defense.

The opposite happened with the most sensitive intelligence, including the names of sources and the identities of foreigners who were regularly monitored. Officials tightened the already small number of people who could access that information. They knew the information could not be kept from the new president or his top advisers, but wanted to narrow the number of people who might see the information, officials said.
Everyone was to receive the slander "analysis" the intelligence services provided but no one was supposed to know the sources and the real facts. This would make sure that the anti-Russia and anti-Trump "analysis" would leak but not the weak bits of facts it is based upon.

To repeat: The Obama administration and the intelligence services spared no effort to sabotage the policies of the incoming Trump administration and prepared the grounds for baseless investigation against it. A lot of dirt is now thrown based on that effort and the hope is that some may stick.

The whole effort by the Obama administration started only after Trump was elected:

In early December, Mr. Obama ordered the intelligence community to conduct a full assessment of the Russian campaign.
In the weeks before the assessment was released in January, the intelligence community combed through databases for an array of communications and other information some of which was months old by then and began producing reports that showed there were contacts during the campaign between Trump associates and Russian officials.

Again - there is nothing illegal with such contacts. These are routine and happen all the time. U.S. ambassadors all over the world routinely talk with local politicians in foreign countries. The Russian ambassadors do nothing different. This is known as diplomacy. There was no reason for the incoming administration to avoid such contacts with German, South African, Japanese or Russian officials or semi-officials. They intelligence community knows that there is no evidence that Russia interfered in the election. If it had any it would have long provided it. The ffort is specifically against the announced Russia policy.

Trump was election in part because he promised better relations with Russia. What the intelligence services do here is to undermine the will of the people.

As Joanne Leon opined:

Need to recognize this for what it is. The incumbent president used SkyNet to try to rig election and as blackmail tool on his successor
Building on the illegal moves of the Cheney administration Obama installed and empowered the intelligence instruments and the precedence for such manipulations. Not since the worst days of J. Edgar Hoover has the U.S. seen such an interior assault on politicians and policies.

Trump now hired some partisan Russia expert from the Clinton aligned Brookings to run Russia policy in the NSC. She will institute anti-Russian bias in his policies. This would not have happened under a national security advisor Flynn. For now the Obama assault on Trump's announced policy has succeeded. Those who voted for Trump for a change in Russia policies have been disenfranchised.

I do not prefer Trump policies. Flynn was a maniac and Session is a crazy fossil. But that does not justify this anti-democratic abuse of the foreign policy instruments of the state against the political opponents within the country.

Obama created these tools and now left them for the Trump administration to use. They will come back to haunt the Democrats. What will they say and do when the Trump administration will use these against them?

Quote:Hillary Clinton was actively trying to start a hot war with Russia. Anyone who says she wasn't is either delusional or lying. She was promising to set up a no-fly zone in Syria, knowing (as testified by top military officials) that this would necessarily entail shooting down Russian military planes and starting a war with Russia. She also openly pledged "military responses" to the alleged (and still unproven) Russian "cyber attacks", another act of war. This woman, who already had an extensive history of actively pushing for disastrous acts of military intervention seemingly at every opportunity, campaigned on this language. I'm no Trump supporter, but I must admit I breathed a sigh of relief when she failed to win the election, saying, "Ahh, well at least that Russia nonsense is over and done with."

I was horrifyingly wrong. The corporate media and the US intelligence community, both of which are considered major components of the deep state power institution, began working together to keep cranking up the heat on the Russia hysteria higher and higher through "anonymous sources" providing information to deeply pro-establishment outlets like the CIA-funded Washington Post. If anyone in the Trump transition team did anything that looked even remotely friendly toward Russia, the corporate media would squeal and ring alarm bells for days. When they started keeping their acts of Russian diplomacy a secret, the intelligence community leaked it to the corporate media, who then started babbling about treason charges under something called the Logan Act, an obscure piece of legislation that has literally never once been used to prosecute anyone despite having existed for hundreds of years.

They babbled about "election hacking," a blatant psy-op which as of December had deceived half of all Hillary voters into believing that Russia had actually tampered with election machines. They babbled about Crimea, despite its annexation (which the Crimean people overwhelmingly favored) having happened in 2014. They babble about Trump "selling America out" to Putin, without ever explaining what that means or what it would look like. They advanced thousands of troops toward Russia's border and then started babbling about blackmail and urinating Russian prostitutes, saying that if Trump withdraws the troops after inauguration then it proves he's being blackmailed. They don't explain what amassing troops at Russia's border has to do with "election hacking," but Americans are so twisted up, down and all around with the constant psychological pummeling of McCarthyism and Russia fearmongering that they don't even bother to ask what's up with that.

http://i.imgur.com/FkQGa7Z.png?1

The push toward war never even lost momentum after Clinton's loss. For whatever reason (theories abound), the deep state is clearly trying to escalate tensions with Russia, and the Democratic establishment (along with their neocon buddy John McCain and his sidekick Lindsey) is helping them do it. They're either working with the deep state to try and force the President's hand or trying to keep things as tense and escalated as possible until they can regain power and do it themselves, but they're definitely pushing for escalations into either a cold war or a hot one.

Don't believe me? Are you sitting there now thinking "Yeah, nah Caito, you got this one wrong, they don't want a war with Russia, no one wants a war with Russia! That would be stupid." Well good, glad to hear you think it's stupid, but just for strategy's sake, please do ask them yourself. Go to town halls with federal Democratic officials and ask them if they want a war with Russia, and when they say they don't, ask them to promise to work against any attempts to start a new cold war or military confrontation with Russia. Record their responses and publish them on social media. Go ahead and tag me too; I'll share them on my own platform to help us all keep track of where they're at with this thing. If you can get them to respond to emails, tweets or social media comments, pass those on to me as well. If they're willing to promise the American people that they'll do everything they can to keep us out of a potentially world-ending situation, we should be keeping track of those promises and making everyone aware of who said them. This is one of those occasions where I'd rather be a big wrong loudmouth about it than a meek right know-it-all. If us asking uncomfortable questions is what it takes to get them to not do it just to prove us wrong, then I'll take that. I'll be wrong and alive any day over right and dead. And I'd love to be wrong about this, because the last cold war brought us within an inch of total annihilation on more than one occasion.

There are too many things that can go wrong when tensions escalate between nuclear superpowers. In 1962, at the most dangerous point in the last cold war, President John F. Kennedy needed to make a tremendous amount of concessions to deescalate the Cuban Missile Crisis, including removing Jupiter missiles from NATO bases in Italy and Turkey which were within striking distance from Moscow. Could you imagine the uproar and accusations of treason if Trump ever tried to make such concessions? If tensions escalated to the point where a nuclear deployment was an imminent threat, the media, the politicians, and a great number of the brainwashed public would be actively fighting any move he made to deescalate things. Kennedy had to deal with some hefty, hefty stuff, but even he never had to deal with negotiating a detente while his own country fought him tooth and claw on it every step of the way. This is extremely dangerous.

After former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn drew glass-shattering shrieks of outrage from the political left for speaking to Russian officials during the transition period (which former ambassador to Russia Jack Matlock says is actually standard practice), he was fired for keeping those calls on the down-low and replaced with a largely unknown fellow from the Army named Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster. There were a number of think pieces written by various publications in which political commentators took guesses as to who Flynn's replacement might be, but I never saw a single one which predicted McMaster. The guy came totally out of left field, and not much is known about him, but we do know this: his Ph. D. thesis was titled "Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam," and he has publicly warned of the dangers of the military industrial complex, stating "the military-industrial complex may represent a greater threat to us than at any time in history."

Interestingly, a Democrat (the anti-war kind, not the establishment kind) was also in the news recently denouncing this same military industrial complex and warning of its push toward a new cold war with Russia. Former Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich appeared on FOX Business Network's Mornings with Maria with a very urgent and sobering message in response to the intelligence maneuver that led to Flynn's resignation.

"There are people trying to separate the US and Russia so that this military industrial-intel axis can cash in," Kucinich said, adding, "There's a game going on inside the intelligence community where there are those who want to separate the U.S. from Russia in a way that would reignite the Cold War."

And now Trump brings in a Lieutenant General and Ph. D. out of left field to help him navigate matters of national security, whose area of study just happens to focus on the lies the deep state uses to dupe America into war and who just so happens to have an open disdain for the military industrial complex that President Eisenhower tried so urgently to warn us about in his farewell address upon leaving office fifty-six years ago.

Yesterday, Trump told Congress in a speech that was so successful and widely praised that Democratic congressional leader Nancy Pelosi looked like this while watching it, "America is willing to find new friends, and to forge new partnerships, where shared interests align. We want harmony and stability, not war and conflict. We want peace, wherever peace can be found."

I said earlier that I am not a Trump supporter. But there is quite literally nothing worse than nuclear war, and toward his stated goal of peace he has nothing but my unequivocal support. Let's get rid of everyone who feels otherwise.