Quote:By now it goes without saying or objection in most quarters of a once freedom-loving and democratic society that our lives, liberties, and pursuits of happiness are closely monitored by a paranoid surveillance apparatus possessed of the fond hopes and great expectations embedded in the fifteenth-century Spanish Inquisition. Our local fire departments don't grant permits for burnings at the stake, but our federal intelligence agencies (seventeen at last count, staffed by more than 100,000 inquisitors petty and grand) make no secret of their missionary zeal.

Four months after the fall of the World Trade Center and President George W. Bush's preaching of holy crusade against all the world's evil, the Pentagon established an Information Awareness Office, adopting as an emblem for its letterhead and baseball cap the all-seeing eye of God. Under orders to secure the American future against the blasphemy of terrorist attack, the IAO's director, Rear Admiral John Poindexter, presented plans for programming its hydra-headed computer screens and databanks to spot incoming slings and arrows of outrageous fortune well in advance of their ETA overhead the Washington Monument or Plymouth Rockto conduct "truth maintenance" and deploy "market-based techniques for avoiding surprises"; to defeat and classify every once and future hound from hell on a near or far horizon; no envelope or email left unopened, no phone untapped, no suspicious beard or suitcase descending unnoticed from cruise ship or Toyota.

Thirteen years further along the roads to perdition, the dream of a risk-free future under the digital umbrellas of protective fantasy is the stuff of which our wars and movies now are made, the thousand natural shocks to which the flesh is heir, projected day and night on the hundred million screens that text and shred our collective consciousness, herd our public and private livesthe latter no longer distinguishable from the formerinto the shelters of heavy law enforcement and harmless speech.

This issue of Lapham's Quarterly looks for the when and why did the lout's game of espionage become the saving grace that makes cowards of us all. I'm familiar with at least some of the story because I'm old enough to remember the provincial and easygoing American republic of the 1940swisecracking, open-hearted, not so scared of the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns. I also can remember the days when people weren't afraid of cigarette smoke and saturated fats, when it was possible to apply for a job without submitting a blood or urine test, when civil liberty was a constitutional right and not a political favor, the White House unprotected by concrete revetments, and it was possible to walk the streets of New York without making a series of cameo appearances on surveillance camera.

Espionage in the ancient world was for the most part reconnaissance of a declared or foreign enemy in the field. The ancient Chinese military sage Sun Tzu recommends the use of spies in the fifth century BC to "ascertain the enemy's situation and condition" because they know things beforehand that "cannot be obtained from ghosts or spirits." He doesn't regard spies as "masters of victory," but if deployed in all five of their applications ("local, inside, double, dead, and live"), they construct "a divine net" that is the "ruler's treasure."

So they served the Greeks in their war against the Trojans, the Periclean Greeks against the Persians. The rulers of ancient India employed spies to watch not only thieves and desperadoes on the roads outside the city but also, inside the city, strangers "who spend lavishly...in drinking houses without having a known source of income." The instruction is specific in the Arthashastra, a teaching on governance circa 150 BC that suggests the disguising of clandestine agents as blind lunatics and deaf idiots as well as minstrels, jugglers, and fortune tellers.

The searching out of metaphysical threats to the safety of the soul is the work of the papal Inquisition established by the medieval Catholic Church "to root up from the midst of Christian people the weed of heretical wickedness." Ad extirpanda, the mission statement released by Pope Innocent IV in 1252, consecrates torture as an effective gardening tool, affixes the Vatican's seal of approval to the techniques recently in use by the U.S. military rooting up the weed of Islamic terrorism.

Spycraft becomes statecraft during the religious wars that afflicted Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the lines of physical and metaphysical investigation strenuously intertwined by
Sir Francis Walsingham, the Elizabethan progenitor of England's Secret Intelligence Service, who was tasked with objectives both spiritual and temporal: defense of the Protestant Reformation against the Catholic Counter-Reformation, holding of the body of Queen Elizabeth harmless against assassination by papist agents. A devout Puritan and shrewd diplomat, Walsingham ensnared Mary, Queen of Scots, for a plot of treason that warranted her beheading, subjected prisoners to renditions on the rack and interrogations that stretched their awareness of God along lines drawn and quartered by Martin Luther and John Calvin. He purportedly numbered among his agents the playwright Christopher Marlowe, possibly also his son-in-law, the poet Sir Philip Sidney. Within the networks of his informants it was said that "he waited upon men's souls with his eye, discerning their secret hearts through their transparent faces."

So did Shakespeare, who was Walsingham's contemporary. The plays wait upon the assumed and masked identities behind which move the palace intrigue that was the pith and moment of Elizabethan politics, the world known to Walsingham at the court of the virgin queen doubling for the one in which Iago plays his game against Othello and Desdemona, and who therefore cannot wear his heart upon his sleeve because "I am not what I am."

America's variant of a police state emerges from the Espionage Act of 1917, carried into law to accommodate President Woodrow Wilson's wish to cleanse the world of its impurities. The self-glorifying son of a Presbyterian minister captivated at an early age by delusions of spiritual grandeur, Wilson engineered America's late entry into World War I in order that he might play the part of savior statesman.

Wilson never doubted it was America's duty to save the world, and during his eight years as instrument of divine will in office as president of the United States, he sent American troops to Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico "to teach the South American republics to elect good men." In the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, Wilson dispatched troops briefly to Russia to defend its people against the communism proscribed by Robert Lansing, Wilson's secretary of state, as "the most hideous and monstrous thing that the human mind has ever conceived," refuge of "the criminal, the depraved, and the mentally unfit."

The Fourteen Points of good behavior that Wilson brought to the Paris Peace Conference pledged America to consequences foreseen by John Quincy Adams, who spoke as secretary of state in 1821 against sending the U.S. Navy to dismantle Spain's colonial empire in Colombia and Venezuela. America, he said, "goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy." Were the country to embark on such a foolish adventure,

she would involve herself, beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. She might become the dictatress of the world; she would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit. So it has come to pass. America, the dictatress of the world, no longer the ruler of her own spirit, which passes out of the hands of its people and society into the safekeeping of the state.

The transfer of power was set in zealously administrative motion by J. Edgar Hoover, a young Justice Department operative eager to destroy monsters wherever foundin body and mind, on land, at sea, in or on the air. Wilson, in his war message to Congress in 1917, said there were "millions of men and women of German birth and native sympathy who live among us," and "if there should be disloyalty, it will be dealt with with a firm hand of stern repression." Wilson's admonition was Hoover's command. On January 2, 1920, as deputy to Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, Hoover organized the largest mass arrest in American history, rounding up an estimated 10,000 disloyalists immigrants of all nations, citizens of German descent, subversive liberals, and suspected anarchists as well as communists. The Red replaced the Hun as the barbarian at the gate and in the closets, and by that same year Hoover had dossiers on 60,000 people suspected of illicit dealings with Karl Marx.

During his long and relentless term as director of the FBI (from 1924 until his death in 1972) Hoover remained convinced that communism was not a political idea but a malignant and evil way of life, akin to a disease. Often and easily enraged, fanatical in his paranoid imaginings, Hoover for fifty years harried the always larger legions of his fear and prejudice (liberals, Negroes, homosexuals, Jews, hippies) with illegal arrests and detentions, break-ins, burglaries, beatings, murders, wiretaps, blackmail, suborned evidence and testimony, coerced confessions. The bureau in the 1960s opened operations against the civil rights and antiwar movements and assembled a list of more than 26,000 individuals to be summarily detained in the event of a "national emergency." By his admirers Hoover was seen as a visionary genius, by his detractors as a "goddamn sewer," by Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis as an armed and dangerous enemy of the American people and Constitution.

Justice Brandeis could have as easily brought the same charges against the eminent American statesman who organized the Central Intelligence Agency to fight the Cold War with the Russians. President Harry Truman established the agency under the National Security Act of 1947, and for the next six years the government spent a great deal of money on bureaucratic organization and reorganization of the agency, separating its covert military operations from its clerical intelligence gathering, acquiring thousands of volunteers in all of the applications named by Sun Tzuuniformed military officers, artists and poets, Ivy League academics and Wall Street stockbrokers, State Department diplomats, German agents released on waivers by the Gestapo. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his first inaugural address in January 1953, vouched for troop movements in the vicinity of Armageddon"forces of good and evil are massed and armed, and opposed as rarely before in history. Freedom is pitted against slavery, lightness against the dark"but he was concerned about the readiness of the CIA to combat the forces of darkness.

For clear definition of the agency's mission, President Eisenhower turned to Air Force General Jimmy Doolittle, friend and companion-in-arms, who had flown the heroic mission over Tokyo in 1942. Doolittle in 1954 provided Ike with his top-secret report:

It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever costs. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, longstanding American concepts of "fair play" must be reconsidered. We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage, and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated means than those used against us. It may become necessary that the American people be made acquainted with, understand, and support this fundamentally repugnant philosophy.
Doolittle went on to describe the agency as "ballooned out into a vast and sprawling organization" housing unskilled, undisciplined, and incompetent "dead wood...at virtually all levels," overly fond of covert operations "beyond its capacity to perform."

The sorry state of affairs showcased the temperament of Allen Dulles, appointed director of the CIA by Eisenhower early in 1953. Dulles was the man from whom it can be fairly said the agency acquired the character of the lawless, incompetent, and deluded enterprise that is with us still, as lost in its cloud of unknowing overhead the Syrian desert in 2015 as it was asleep under the tents of its weatherproof fantasy in the rainforests in South Vietnam in 1968.

At the age of sixty in 1953 Allen Dulles (State Department intelligence officer in World War I, active in the Office of Strategic Services in World War II) was five years younger than his brother, John Foster, whom Eisenhower that same year appointed secretary of state. Both brothers regarded force, not liberty, as the fundamental maxim of American policy. They had been taught by the severe Presbyterian minister who was their father that Christians are weapons in the hands of God, executors of his providential will; they saw the word made flesh in the person of Woodrow Wilson, whom they accompanied to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 as bright young Princeton graduates helping out with the platitudes and the maps.

John Foster was puritanical and direct; Allen, like Iago, was not who he pretended to be. In his own mind a hero modeled on his reading of Ian Fleming novels, he cultivated a surface of sophisticated charm, affable and gregarious, good with the ladies and small sailboats on Long Island Sound. He smoked a pipe, dressed in tweed, told witty stories about his days in the OSS subverting the Nazi occupation of Europe.

Behind the mask of easy upper-class insouciance, Allen was a devout proponent of the fundamentally repugnant philosophy noted by Doolittle and presumably deployed by the Soviet enemy. Often moved to predatory fury well beyond "hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct," Allen during his eight years in charge of the CIA directed the elimination of regimes he identified as communist in Iran, Guatemala, and the Congo. The identifications were forgeries in visibly paranoid ink. Leaders of the regimes in question were socialist and nationalist, their objective to escape the bonds of European colonial empire. But Dulles didn't let facts get in the way of his hatreds. On the strength of his lying risk assessments Eisenhower authorized the CIA to assassinate Patrice Lumumba in the Congo and Fidel Castro in Cuba, to begin covert military operations in South Vietnam.

Dulles' enthusiasm for subversion, sabotage, and destruction was boundless. So was the unskilled, undisciplined incompetence of an agency that sixty years later still hasn't discovered that the Statue of Liberty cannot be made to stand on the pedestals of criminal violence. The record is in equal parts short-term comic farce and long-form geopolitical tragedy.

The game at the beginning looked to be easy and fun. The agency played with sending an émigré army to capture the lost kingdom of Albania, but once parachuted into the Balkan darkness the advance scouts were never seen or heard from again because the CIA's head of secret ops was unwittingly coordinating the event with a Soviet double agent providing the KGB with the map coordinates of the intended drop zones. To discredit Sukarno as president of Indonesia in the mid-1950s, the CIA planned to incite popular envy and resentment of his sexual prowess, shooting a propaganda film entitled Happy Days showing Sukarno (played by a Mexican actor wearing a mask) in bed with a Soviet agent (played by a California actress wearing a wig). To assassinate Fidel Castro the agency drew up plans to present him with an exploding cigar and poisoned scuba gear. The bungled invasion of the Bay of Pigs in 1961 assumed a crowd of joyful Cuban peasants rising from the sugar cane and marching gloriously to Havana.The cadre of Cuban exiles was landed at the wrong tide on the wrong boats, soon to be confronted by Castro at the head of a column of tanks. In what came to be known as the Iran-Contra affair (running guns to the mullahs in Iran in return for money to fund a thuggish junta in Nicaragua) the "enterprise" deposited $10 million in the wrong Swiss bank account, hired drunken aircraft mechanics in El Salvador, and dropped munitions into the wrong jungles in Nicaragua.

The geopolitical consequences of the CIA's covert derring-do have for the most part proved to be both dismal and unexpected.The overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh's elected government in Iran in 1953 installed the vicious and corrupt tyranny of the Shah of Shahs, which in 1979 led to an Islamist revolution and the regime that now stands as America's most formidable enemy in the Middle East. By encouraging the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon in 1963, the U.S. allied itself with a policy of realpolitik no less cynical than the one which it was seeking to correct. Accepting the CIA's analysis and methodology, four American presidents defined the expedition to Southeast Asia as a prolonged covert action and systematically lied to the American people about the reason for our presence in a country with which we never declared ourselves at war. As a result our effort to rid Indochina of communism, Vietnam became a unified communist state. As a result of our effort to teach the world the lessons of democracy, we sent 58,000 American soldiers to death under a false flag and taught a generation of American citizens to think of their own government as an oriental despot.

The CIA's failures as an intelligence-gathering operation during the second half of the century billed as America's own have borne out Doolittle's early warning of "dead wood at virtually all levels." The agency evidently didn't foresee the Soviet explosion of an atomic bomb in 1949, the invasion of South Korea in 1950, the popular uprisings in Eastern Europe in the 1950s, the installation of Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962, the Vietcong Tet Offensive in 1968, the Arab-Israeli war in 1973, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the explosion of an atomic bomb by India in 1998, the attacks on New York and Washington in 2001, the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003.

Reports of the CIA's blunders tend to show up on the record well after the fact. I've been reading them with interest over the past fifty years, but they don't come as a surprise. Long ago and in another country, America in 1957, I sought enlistment in the CIA and sat for an interview with a credentials committee ordained by God and country and Allen Dulles. From that day forward I've never doubted the agency's talent for making a mess of almost any operation, overt or covert, beyond its capacity to perform.

In 1957 I was recently returned from a year at Cambridge University in England, where I had come to know several students who in October 1956 went to Budapest to join the uprising against the regime holding Hungary hostage to communist domination. Two of the young men died in the street fighting, and I didn't need to be told by General Eisenhower that the communist hordes were at the gate of Western civilization. In my last year at Yale I had been tipped to the agency by an English professor (Shakespeare scholar, Tyrolean hat, former OSS), who passed on a phone number to call if I was prepared to take a shot at the dark. At the age of twenty-two I was willing to leave at once, preferably at night, with trench coat and code name, on the next train to Berlin.

In Washington the written, physical, and psychological examinations occupied the better part of a week before I was summoned to an interview with five operatives in their late twenties, all of them graduates of Yale and not unlike President George W. Bush in appearance and manner. The interview took place in a Quonset hut near the Lincoln Memorial. The design of the building imparted an air of urgent military purpose, as did the muted, offhand bravado of the young men asking the questions. Very pleased with themselves, they exchanged knowing nods to "that damned thing in Laos," allowed me to understand that we were talking life and death, whether I had the right stuff to play for the varsity team in the big game against the Russians.

Prepared for nothing less, I had spent the days prior to the interview reading about Lenin's train and Stalin's prisons, the width of the Fulda Gap, the depth of the Black Sea. None of the study was called for. Instead of being asked about the treaties of Brest-Litovsk or the October Revolution, I was asked three questions bearing on my social qualifications for admission into what the young men at the far end of the table clearly regarded as the best fraternity on the campus of the free world:

1. When standing on the thirteenth tee at the National Golf Links in Southampton, which club does one take from the bag?

2. On final approach under sail into Hay Harbor on Fishers Island, what is the direction (at dusk in late August) of the prevailing wind?

3. Does Muffy Hamilton wear a slip?

The first and second questions I answered correctly, but Muffy Hamilton I knew only at a distance. In the middle 1950s she was a glamorous figure on the Ivy League weekend circuit, very beautiful and very rich, much admired for the indiscriminate fervor of her sexual enthusiasms. At the Fence Club in New Haven I had handed her a glass of brandy and milk (known to be her preferred drink by college football captains in five states) but about the mysteries of her underwear my sources were unreliable, my information limited to rumors of Belgian lace.

The three questions, however, put an end to my interest in the CIA. The smug complacence of my examiners was as smooth as their matching silk handkerchiefs and ties. When I excused myself from the interview (apologizing for having misread the job description and wasted everybody's quality time) I remember being frightened by the presence of so much self-glorifying certainty and primogeniture crowded into so small a room. Here were people like Woodrow Wilson before them, after them Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who knew more about what was good for the world than the worldpoor, lost, unhappy, un-American worldhad managed to learn on its own. Even at the age of twenty-two I was old enough to recognize the attitude as not well positioned for intelligence gathering. It was better suited to the projection of monsters on the screens of deluded fantasy than to their destruction in a forest or a swamp.

People accustomed to knowing they know everything worth knowing resent having to turn away from the mirror. The resentment framed the Bush administration's response to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Although there had been many warnings of terrorist attacks somewhere on the horizon, the signals had been lost in the maze of a national security apparatus "ballooned out into a vast and sprawling" clutter of undisciplined incompetence many orders of magnitude beyond the one reconnoitered by General Doolittle in 1954. Not knowing who, why, or wherefrom the airplanes overhead the Hudson and Potomac rivers, the Bush administration declared war on an unknown enemy and an abstract noun, set to work forging the shields of invincible paranoia, bringing up to combat strength the levels of fear and trembling within the American body politic. In time for Halloween, Congress passed the Patriot Act, claiming the government's right to arrest without charge American citizens marked as enemy combatants; the Department of Homeland Security produced its color-coded alerts, hands in the air, off with shoes and belts when passing go at the airport. The Justice Department in May 2002 named as its "first and overriding priority" the defense of the American people against terrorist intrusion and distributed a fact sheet shifting the FBI's mission from "prosecution to prevention." The supplementary power points testified to brave, bold, and expensive shuffling of bureaucratic paper (refocusing task forces, expanding alert systems, recruiting professional criminals as informants). Still, the bureau's director, Robert Mueller III, was careful to establish plausible deniability. As compensation for its past and future failures the bureau asked to be rewarded with more money, more police power, more flow chartsnot to annihilate the threat of incoming grief but to strengthen the fear of looming apocalypse. Mueller gave a speech the week before the fact sheet was released to say "there will be another terrorist attack. We will not be able to stop it."

A couple of weeks later at a meeting of the NATO allies in Brussels, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld observed that one never knows who the terrorist attackers are or where they might be coming from: "The message is that there are no knowns.' There are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns...and each year, we discover a few more of those unknown unknowns...There's another way to phrase that, and that is that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."

Which was the line of thinking and investigationparanoid, delusional, clouded in Adams' "individual avarice, envy, and ambition"on which the Bush administration in March 2003 mounted its chase of the monster to destroy in Iraq. No evidence of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction in Babylon (land steeped in Old Testament sin), but then again no reason to doubt their existence in the eye of God or Rear Admiral Poindexter's Information Awareness Office. The admiral in the summer of 2002 was busy programming a magic mirror in which to see not only the unknown future but also to step up the scrutiny of an American citizenry classified as a prospective enemy, known unknowns maybe harboring evil intentions and therefore targeted by the admiral's wizard databanks

and computer screens, cross-examining medical and bank records, website visits, and credit card transactions, tapping everybody's phones, opening anybody's mail. The all-seeing eye of God emblazoned on the IAO's letterhead and baseball cap was perched atop an Egyptian pyramid and buttressed by the rendition in Latin of the phrase, "Knowledge is power." The phrase is subject to questioning: What sort of power? Power over whom? To do what?

On the evidence gathered in this issue of Lapham's Quarterly, knowledge positioned as espionage is not only a lout's game, but also a sucker's game in which all present at the peepholesspy and spied upon, informant and counterinformant, whistleblower, courier, cutout, moledraw a losing card.

Over the past decade, the federal government has devoted $533 billion to the acquisition of what former vice president Al Gore in 2013 described as "the essential apparatus of a police state"a police state unable to protect the American homeland, people, or idea but striving, criminally and mightily, to preserve and glorify itself. The IAO's fond hopes and great expectations have been incorporated into the vast complex of federal intelligence missions. More than 3,000 government and private organizations are involved in intelligence activities at 17,000 locations across the U.S., and the CIA's operations have been folded into those of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The megalith at Bluffdale, Utah, houses the U.S. government's global-information grid, but a report filed by Dana Priest, an investigative journalist granted access to one of the Pentagon's classified workstations, suggests that the divine net of conspiracy-minded computers (annually spilling forth 50,000 separate serialized intelligence reports under 1,500 titles) doesn't know how to connect the dots, cannot make meaning or sense out of a vast, sprawling sound and fury signifying nothing. The systems are too big to do anything else but fail. The NSA loses its files to Edward Snowden; the Office of Personnel Management gives up to Chinese hackers the records of 22 million Americans; a teenager claims to have invaded CIA director John Brennan's email account. At the higher echelons of unquotable authority in Washington it is said that America has no defense against the cyberwarfare destined to wreak havoc on the country's energy and communication grids.

Ask why so poor a return on so rich an investment, and the answer shows up in John le Carré's novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. An old connoisseur of the world's secrets tells a fellow agent that their best informationacquired at large expense and with heavy loss of lifeis probably false. The ancient spy poses his judgment as a question: "Ever bought a fake picture?...The more you pay for it, the less inclined you are to doubt it." Le Carré understands that covert actions usually take place at the not very important margins of not very important events, and that when extended over a period of more than four days they hide nothing from anybody except the people paying the bills. He elsewhere understands that the "magic formulas and hocus-pocus of the spy world" recommend themselves to "declining powers," to men and institutions losing their strength and becoming fearful of shadows. "When the king is dying," he says, "the charlatans rush in."

Knowledge as magic formulas and hocus-pocus is a power of not much use against monsters in a foreign field, but as power for distribution to the folks at home it is the propaganda that makes cowards of us all, classifies democracy as behavior uncivil and unsafe, and changesnot insensibly but deliberatelythe fundamental maxims of American policy from liberty to force. A cowed citizenry is the cornerstone of a police state (even an incompetent police state) and the going abroad for monsters to destroy is the making at home of a monstrous sorcerer's apprenticerocked in the cradle of the 1917 Espionage Act, swaddled in what the American historian Richard Hofstadter defined as the paranoid style of American politics, nurtured in adolescence by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, ripened in the repugnant psychopathology of the Cold War, developed by the war on terror into a fully adult hysteric.

John Quincy Adams, like Francis Walsingham and William Shakespeare, read the future by discerning men's "secret hearts through their transparent faces." So did Reinhold Niebuhr, the great Protestant theologian serving with John Foster Dulles at the end of World War II on the Commission on a Just and Durable Peace. Dulles held to a view of a world divided between forces of good and evil, the threat to America headquartered in the communist menace.

Niebuhr was more clear-sighted and better informed. "If we should perish," he wrote in 1952, "the ruthlessness of the foe would be only the secondary cause of the disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle; and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or history but by hatred and vainglory."

Quote:Which side are you on President Trump's oligarchy or the deep state? If you answered, "None of the above," score one for democracy. Neither side has the interest of the American people at heart only its own power. They are behemoths bloated on their own ego and entitlement, and like the mighty showdown between Godzilla and Mothra, it's impossible to cheer for either one, because democracy could be crushed beneath their monstrous, scaly feet in the process.

The battle between these titanic forces reached a new fever pitch last week, starting with Trump's explosive Twitter charges that President Barack Obama wiretapped his phones and spiraling into another round of counter-allegations about a Trump-Vladimir Putin plot to steal democracy.

I happen to think there is some truth to both sides' charges. Despite the outraged denials from the Obama camp, Trump might indeed have been tapped during the presidential campaign. On the eve of the November election, an intriguing national security blogger named Louise Mensch a former Conservative Party member of British Parliament with strong intelligence ties reported that the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which authorizes government spying, had granted a warrant for the FBI to conduct surveillance of certain Americans as part of the bureau's investigation into possible links between Russian banks and Trump's corporate empire.

That story was later picked up by the BBC and the Guardian in London, and more recently by the McClatchy news agency. So it's unclear why most media outlets keep insisting there is no evidence to back up Trump's allegations, which as usual were cartoonishly worded but still might contain a kernel of validity.

Likewise, despite the Trump camp's sound and fury, it's clear there were numerous contacts between his campaign and Russian officials and at least in Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn's case, they were dodgy enough to cause his hurried exit from the administration.

So there's some truth on both sides in this Washington smackdown. And there's plenty of distortion, disinformation and outright lies. After all, that's how both sides roll. Trump's entire presidency is built on fakery from Obama birther conspiracy-mongering to bogeymen immigrants to magical health care solutions.

And the national security agencies at war with Trump? Well, let's just say their own credibility from Saddam Hussein's missing weapons of mass destruction to the latest WikiLeaks revelations about CIA hacking of consumer technology is not exactly solid. There were waves of laughter across the land when the agency responded to last week's embarrassing document dump by claiming it never spies on Americans.

Most of us here in deep-blue California believe just about any accusation, no matter how sleazy or criminal, that is made against Trump. We are awash in leaks and tweets these days, a tsunami of headlines that the American people have no way of independently verifying. Which stories are fake news? Who knows? The media are providing little insight or guidance.

Nearly the entire media circus from the New York Times to BuzzFeed has been caught up in the shadow war between Trump and the national security establishment. And much of the media reporting on this beat is closely aligned with the security agencies. "If the Deep State can rid us of the blighted presidency of Donald Trump, all I can say is Go, State, go,'" merrily wrote Vanity Fair columnist James Wolcott.

MSNBC has turned its nightly news lineup into a propaganda arm of the national security state, with a constant parade of former spooks and armchair generals foaming about the "Russian connection" and how Trump has handed our nation to the Kremlin. In today's strange looking-glass world, the liberals have become the new red-hunters, sniffing for traitors everywhere from Trump Tower to "alt-left media" (as Wolcott calls it) such as Glenn Greenwald's online publication, the Intercept.

It's understandable why the Hillary Clinton wing of the Democratic Party wants to blame its humiliation on scheming Russians, instead of faulting its own clueless campaigning and corporatist politics. Clinton's campaign manager, Robby Mook, was quick to jump on the anti-Putin bandwagon, warning in a recent Guardian opinion essay that the Mad Genius of Moscow was out to destroy every democracy in the world. Cue mad cackle.

Democrats' obsessive focus on the Russian menace wildly exaggerates Moscow's impact on the presidential election. Even if the Putin regime did hack the Democratic National Committee, the relatively unsurprising email revelations about Clinton and her associates should not have been enough to sink her campaign, particularly in comparison with the grotesque stories that were made public about Trump.

When it comes to sabotaging democracies, Russia is a rank amateur compared with the U.S. Just ask the people of Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, Brazil, Chile, Nicaragua, Honduras and even France, where the CIA backed a right-wing military coup attempt in 1961 to overthrow President Charles de Gaulle, a national hero.

The Democrats' Russian fixation has also hijacked our democracy. It's become a massive distraction as Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan go about dismantling the health care system, civil rights, environmental protections and just about everything else in Washington that maintains some decency in American life. During the 2016 campaign, the media were all about Trump's latest outburst, real or not now they're all about Putin's latest chess move, real or not. Lost in all of this are the urgent issues of American decline and planetary crisis raised by leaders like Bernie Sanders. Remember him?

The American people need to maintain a healthy skepticism as we are bombarded with allegations from both sides of the Trump-deep state divide. We need to remind ourselves that the first casualty of war is truth. And make no mistake about it America is at war with itself.

Quote:The Democrats' Dangerous Diversion
March 12, 2017

Exclusive: The Democrats won't admit that they lost to Donald Trump because they ran a deeply flawed, corporate-oriented candidate, so they blame Russia instead, a very dangerous diversion, says Nicolas J S Davies.




By Nicolas J S Davies


The current debate over "fake news" has reminded me of a conversation I had several years ago with a former citizen of East Germany, now living in the United States. He explained that, in East Germany, everybody knew that what the media told them about their own country was a bunch of lies and propaganda. So they assumed that what the media told them about the West was just propaganda, too.




Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton addressing the AIPAC conference in Washington D.C. on March 21, 2016. (Photo credit: AIPAC)
Now living in the U.S., he had come to realize that a lot of what the East German media said about life in the U.S. was actually true. There really are people living on the street, people with no access to healthcare, widespread poverty, a lack of social welfare and public services, and many other problems, as the East German media accurately reported, and as the Chinese government also noted in its latest report on human rights in the U.S.


My friend wished he and his countrymen had understood the difference between what their media told them about their country and what they reported about the West. Then they could have made more intelligent choices about which aspects of life in the West to adopt, instead of allowing Western experts to come in and impose the entire neoliberal model on their country.


In the West, of course, the state media of East Germany and other Communist countries were held up to ridicule. I remember hearing that people in the U.S.S.R. would open their newspapers in the morning and have a good laugh at the latest "fake news" in Pravda. But, as my German friend eventually understood, there was some truth amongst the propaganda, and the hidden danger of such a corrupted media system is that people end up not knowing what to believe, making informed democratic choices almost impossible.


In the end, people all over Eastern Europe were cornered into a false choice between two ideological systems that both came as top-down package deals, instead of being able to take charge of their own societies and democratically decide their own future.


In the U.S., we live under a two-party political system, not a one-party system as in East Germany, and our media reflect that. As each of our two main political parties and our media have fallen more totally under the sway of unbridled plutocratic interests, our mass media has devolved into a bifurcated version of what my friend observed in East Germany, triply corrupted by commercial interests, partisan bias and ideological and nationalist propaganda.


Down the Rabbit Hole


Since the 2016 election campaign, our political system seems to have devolved into something like the nonsense world of Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland, with Donald Trump as the Queen of Hearts, Hillary Clinton as Humpty Dumpty, the Republicans and Democrats as Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the election as the Caucus Race (which Lewis Carroll based on U.S. political caucuses) and the whipsawed American public as the permanently baffled Alice.




The Mad Hatter's Tea Party in Walt Disney's "Alice in Wonderland."
In Lewis Carroll's Caucus Race, an assortment of creatures ran randomly around a racetrack with no start or finish line, until the Dodo called the race over, declared them all winners and told Alice (the public?) she had to give them all prizes.


In similar fashion, the 2016 election between two of the most unpopular presidential candidates in U.S. history seems to have no finish line, but to live on in round-the-clock campaigns to corral the public into one of its two camps. The artificial, top-down nature of both these campaigns should be a warning that, like the election campaigns they grew out of, they are designed to corral, control and direct masses of people, not to offer real solutions to any of the serious problems facing our country and the world.


On one hand, we have President Trump, Republican Congressional leaders, Breitbart, Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, spouting nonsense worthy of Lewis Carroll, even in major presidential speeches, while dismissing criticism as "fake news."


The Trump camp will never acknowledge that only a quarter of voting-age Americans voted for him, nor that even less of us share his views or the interests he represents. In this corrupt two-party system, no effort or expense is spared to persuade the public that we must vote for one of the two major party presidential candidates, whether we agree with either of them or not. But that cuts both ways, leaving most of the public unrepresented no matter who wins, and depriving any new government of a genuine popular mandate.


But Republican leaders play a more straightforward winner-take-all game than the Democrats. So they will try to ride Trump's victory and their Congressional majorities as far as they will take them on all fronts: more tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations; more draconian cuts in social spending; more privatization of healthcare, education and other public services; more detention and deportation of immigrants; a more aggressive police response to social problems and public protest; more destruction of the natural world and the climate; and more increases in a military budget that already broke post-WWII records under Bush and Obama, to fuel a more openly aggressive and dangerous war policy in other words, more of all the things that most Americans would agree we have already had too much of.


On the other side, Democratic Party leaders and the CIA, supported by the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC, have conjured up unproven charges that Russia stole the election for Trump as the heart of their campaign against him. In Trump, history has handed them a political opponent with a piñata of vulnerabilities, from unprecedented conflicts of interest to policies that benefit only his own wealthy class to willful ignorance of how almost everything he is responsible for as president really works.


And yet the cabal formerly known as the Clinton campaign shows little interest in pointing out that our new Emperor has no clothes on, let alone in seriously resisting his repressive, plutocratic policies, and is instead obsessed with convincing the public that a birthmark on his naked bum looks like a hammer and sickle.


A Saving Grace?


Paradoxically, if Trump really reduced tensions between the U.S. and Russia, as his hawkish Democratic opponents fear, that could be the saving grace of his entire presidency. George W. Bush's and Barack Obama's regime change wars, NATO expansion and the U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine have ignited a new Cold War that many respected scientists believe has raised the risk of human mass extinction to its highest level since the 1950s.




Barack Obama and George W. Bush at the White House.
In the pursuit of false security based on post-Cold War triumphalism and a fleeting mirage of military supremacy, our corrupt leaders have jeopardized not just our security but our very existence, leaving us at two and a half minutes to midnight on the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS)' Doomsday Clock.


As Jonathan Marshall at Consortiumnews.com reported on March 10, experts from the Federation of American Scientists, the Natural Resources Defense Council and MIT wrote in a recent BAS article that new "super-fuzes" installed on U.S. nuclear warheads since 2009 have significantly increased the danger of nuclear war by giving the U.S. the ability to destroy all Russia's fixed land-based nuclear missiles with only a fraction of U.S. own weapons.


Coupled with President Obama's deployment of a formerly illegal ABM (anti-ballistic missile) system on Aegis missile destroyers and at bases in Eastern Europe, the authors wrote that this upgrade to U.S. nuclear warheads is "exactly what one would expect to see if a nuclear-armed state were planning to have the capacity to fight and win a nuclear war by disarming enemies with a surprise first strike." They concluded that "Russian planners will almost surely see the advance in fuzing capability as empowering an increasingly feasible U.S. preemptive nuclear strike capability."


In the case of a suspected Russian nuclear missile launch, the U.S. satellite-based early warning system can give President Trump 30 minutes to judge whether we are really facing a nuclear attack or not. But Russia's land-based early warning system is not so generous. In the case of a suspected U.S. nuclear launch targeting Russia, President Putin would have as little as 7 to 13 minutes to decide whether Russia was really under nuclear attack and whether to retaliate.


In the midst of escalating tensions over Syria, Ukraine, Iran or some other new crisis, a realistic fear of a U.S. first strike could force a hasty decision by Russian officials and seal the fate of humanity. The BAS authors believe that this predicament leaves Russia little choice but to pre-delegate its nuclear launch authority to lower levels of command, increasing the risk of an accidental or mistaken launch of nuclear weapons.


In an epitome of understatement, they point out that, "Forcing this situation upon the Russian government seems likely to be detrimental to the security interests of the United States and its Western allies."


While U.S. officials are largely silent about the dangers of these developments in U.S. nuclear weapons policy, President Putin has spoken frankly about them and expressed dismay that the U.S. has rejected every Russian offer of cooperation to reduce these risks. Talking to a group of journalists at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in June 2016, he concluded, "I don't know how this is all going to end. … What I do know is that we will need to defend ourselves."


But despite the existential dangers of deteriorating relations with Russia, Democratic Party leaders have grasped the CIA's unproven "assessments" that Russia may have tried to influence the outcome of the U.S. election as a lifeline by which to salvage their positions of power after their party's electoral implosion.


Since the leadership of the Democratic Party was taken over by the corporate-backed Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) a generation ago, it has followed an unwritten rule that it must never accept responsibility for losing an election, nor respond to signs of public disaffection with any weakening of its commitment to pro-corporate, neoliberal policies. In its desperation to prevent the democratic reform of the Democratic Party, it is aggressively tarring nuclear-armed Russia with the same brush it used to tar and feather Ralph Nader after the 2000 election.


The mortal aversion of Democratic Party leaders to progressive reform suggests that they prize their own control of the party even above winning elections, the rational purpose of any political party. Their ugly smear campaign against Keith Ellison, the progressive candidate for Democratic National Committee (DNC) chair, mirrored the DNC's corrupt campaign to undermine Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries and the DLC cabal's bare-knuckles response to progressive challengers for the past 30 years.


For the DLC Democrats to snatch defeat from the jaws of the long-term victory that the country's shifting demographics seem to guarantee their party requires a truly historic level of corruption.


Their unshakable commitment to fight tooth and nail for the interests of their wealthy campaign contributors over those of poorer, younger and darker-skinned voters in every election, every national, state and local party committee and on every issue, even as they pretend they are doing the exact opposite, could only be a viable political strategy in Lewis Carroll's Wonderland. In the real world, their demonstrated disdain for the people from whose votes they derive their power is a strategy for political suicide.


Different Kind of Politics


These corrupt party leaders and their corporate media cheerleaders dare not remind us that Bernie Sanders's candidacy for president inspired more enthusiasm and drew bigger crowds than Trump's or Clinton's, despite one eightieth of the early media promotion lavished on Trump by some corporate media and the fact that almost the entire Democratic Party establishment lined up against him.




A sign at a Bernie Sanders rally in Washington D.C. on June 9, 2016. (Photo credit: Chelsea Gilmour)
For decades, DLC Democrats have run on vague messages about "values" to avoid being cornered into explicit progressive policy positions that might alienate their wealthy patrons. Sanders was greeted with open arms by younger voters ready for a renaissance of real politics based on actual policies that solve real problems, like universal healthcare, free college tuition, progressive taxation to pay for it all and a more cautious approach to U.S.-backed "regime change" in other countries.


By contrast, an analysis of campaign messaging by the Wesleyan Media Project found that "Clinton's message was devoid of policy discussions" when compared to other recent presidential campaigns, including even Trump's, and that this was a critical factor in her failure.


According to opinion polls, Bernie Sanders may now be the most popular politician in America. Polls consistently showed that Sanders was likely to beat Trump in the general election if the Democratic Party allowed him to get that far, but the DNC fundraising machine pulled out every trick in the book to make sure that didn't happen. If truth be told, Sanders's success was probably a more accurate reflection of the evolving political views of a majority of Americans in 2016 than the billion-dollar auction of the presidency between the Game Show King and the Queen of Chaos.


These two camps represent factions of the powerful interests that have controlled American politics for decades, from the military-industrial complex and the CIA to the dirty energy and for-profit "healthcare" industries, to say nothing of the commercial media industry itself, which covered this election all the way to the bank and for whom the show must go on and on and on … and on.


Lies of Both Sides.


Like the people of East Germany in the 1980s, we now face the challenge of a society in crisis, compounded by a treacherous media environment, with not just one, but two competing camps presenting us with false, self-serving interpretations of the multi-faceted crisis their corruption has spawned. While they compete for our trust, they share a common interest in insisting that one of the two mythological worldviews they have staked out must be right.


But as Cornel West recently told the students at my local high school in Miami in a Black History Month speech, "You don't have to choose between the lies on one side and the lies on the other side." So the question becomes where to turn for something other than lies, and how to recognize the truth when we stumble across it.


The paradox of our Internet age is that we nearly all have access to a wider range of media than ever before, yet we are still exposed and susceptible to corporate, partisan and ideological propaganda. In theory, we no longer have to be victims of for-profit media whose business models prioritize their profits over their duty to inform the public. But in reality, we do not form our views of the world as independently as we think we do.


This is easier to grasp in the case of commercial advertising than in the arena of political or ideological indoctrination. There is a well-known dictum in the business world that goes, "I know that half the money we spend on advertising is wasted. I just don't know which half." The flip-side of this is that the other half is not wasted.


So the advertising industry in the United States spends $220 billion per year, $700 for each man, woman and child in the country, to sell us products and services. And yet we still like to think that we make independent, rational choices about our spending, based on enlightened self-interest and cultivated tastes, not on the work of copywriters churning out pitches, images and jingles in ad agency cubicles.


One of the by-products of the mass monetization of American politics since the 1980s is that politics has become a profitable new arena for advertising, marketing and public relations firms. Its practitioners apply the techniques and experience they've developed in other areas to the world of politics, helping politicians and parties to convert the money they raise from wealthy campaign contributors into votes, and ultimately into power over all our lives. So we should be just as wary of political marketing and advertising as of the commercial variety. We should also be more humble in recognizing our own vulnerability to these profitable forms of persuasion and deception.


My copy of Alice in Wonderland has a quotation from James Joyce in the front of the book: "Wipe your glasses with what you know." What we know is often our best protection against being misled by advertisers, politicians and pundits, if we will only remember what we know and trust it over the misinformation that surrounds us.


"Wiping our glasses with what we know" can provide a reality check on the current Russophobia campaign. We know very well that the U.S. and Russia possess the bulk of the world's nuclear weapons, and that war between our two countries would likely mean death for ourselves and our families and the end of life as we know it for people everywhere.


We also know that it is our country and its allies, not Russia, that have launched invasions, military occupations, bombing campaigns, coups and drone wars against at least ten countries in the past 20 years, while Russia only recently become engaged in two of these conflict zones when its interests were directly impacted by our actions.




A wintery scene in Moscow, near Red Square. (Photo by Robert Parry)
So we can see that the greatest danger in this relationship is not the threat of some unprovoked and unprecedented act of Russian aggression. The more real and serious danger is that a confrontation with Russia over one of the hot spots we have ignited will lead to an escalation of tensions in which a mistake, a misunderstanding, a miscalculation, a bluff called, a "red line" crossed or some other kind of failed brinksmanship will trigger a war that will escalate to the use of nuclear weapons, and from there to Armageddon.


Even with the lines of communication set up after the Cuban missile crisis and the stabilization of the Cold War balance of terror by the principle of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), we now know that we came very close to Armageddon many times, including simply by accident.


Instead of being corralled by either side in the "Russia did it" campaign, we should be urging our leaders to sit down and talk seriously with Russia's leaders, to stop taking dangerous actions that exacerbate tensions, uncertainties and mutual isolation, and to return to serious negotiations to leave our children and grandchildren a peaceful world, free of nuclear weapons, where these dangers will no longer threaten them.


Amid lies and distortions on all sides, the corruption of politics and media by commercial interests and the billion dollars per year our government spends directly on public relations and propaganda, James Joyce's advice can still serve us well. Make sure to wipe your glasses with what you know as you read or watch "news" from any source or listen to politicians of any party, and we may just find a way out of this rabbit hole before the roof crashes in on us.

Quote:The Democrats' Dangerous Diversion
March 12, 2017

Exclusive: The Democrats won't admit that they lost to Donald Trump because they ran a deeply flawed, corporate-oriented candidate, so they blame Russia instead, a very dangerous diversion, says Nicolas J S Davies.

...Amid lies and distortions on all sides...

Quote:Rejecting populism for hegemony

There's a superb scene in the movie Syriana where CIA bureaucrats distance themselves from one of their agents, Bob, played by George Clooney, who has become a troublesome asset for the agency. Terry, the pack leader, begins to extemporize a narrative to his subordinates. With cool detachment, he tells them: "Put some space between us and Bob. Bob has a long history of entrepreneurial operations. We haven't really had a handle on Bob for years. After 9/11, some people got a lot of leeway, let their emotions get the best of them. These are complex times. There's already an active investigation into Bob's activities in…help me out here."

At this point, the group flesh out the details of how they're going to burn the agency's connection to Bob, painting him as an agent gone rogue, slipping the net of agency supervision, defying protocol, and ultimately selling himself to unsavory elements that want a U.S. asset killed. In this way, the leviathan spits out a loyal servant, rendering him obsolete with a fable and a slander, sanctified by the imprimatur of the officialdom.

We should note the importance of the media in all this storyline, albeit fictional. The dark arts of propaganda aren't overtly mentioned, but they are the pivotal tools that will animate the destruction of Bob's career. All sound strangely familiar? It should. It's pretty much the script the intelligence community uses as its modus operandi when it needs to deal with an inconvenient public servant.

Theater of the Absurd

With rumors of detente crackling through the ether, the imperialist machinery of anti-Russian foreign policy has cranked into high gear, leveraging leaks and the press to mute Trump's overtures of peace. Leaks to the The Washington Post were leveraged in last month's excommunication of National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. Flynn was rather easily vanquished by a leak from within the American intelligence community outing him as a confabulator and, in pundit spin, a man vulnerable to blackmail by the Kremlin.

After Flynn's unceremonious ouster, Attorney General Jeff Sessions was the next target, pilloried by Democrats for his contacts with the Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, something he declined to mention in his confirmation hearings. A third interaction has now been surmised, with tantalizing rumors Sessions was in the same room as Kislyak during a cocktail party. Did they conspire over canapes? Smuggle thumb drives wrapped in prosciutto? Exchange piquillo peppers stuffed with nuclear codes? The possibilities blossom like a mushroom cloud. Can you feel the frisson of treason?

Of course, the FBI has been investigating more mundane contacts between the Trump team and Moscow, a project that will either result in Trump's impeachment for some manner of treason or his complete and utter subjection to the foreign policy whims of the foreign policy establishment. A Times article reported that the Obama administration furiously laid the foundation for this investigation by disseminating innuendo that Trump was under Russian influence during the peace laureate's last days in office. Typically, the unofficial commentariat in the comments thread praised Obama's patriotism, as though this wanton Wall Street servant was doing anything other than performing last-minute janitorial services for his venal party.

A few weeks ago, a Congressman (Rep. Darrell Issa) obscurely called for the appointment of a special prosecutor. But now Lindsey Graham has embraced the call, suggesting one be named if contact between Trump aides and Moscow were found, regardless of the content of that contact. It reminds one of the proverb that Caesar's wife must be above even unfounded suspicion, let alone actual wrongdoing. In any event, Graham and his monomaniacal bedmate, John McCain, continue their lurid press junket, now looking to subpoena intelligence agencies for wiretaps of Trump phone calls, though former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper refuted the wiretap rumor, as did FBI Director James Comey, albeit by the oblique means of asking the Justice Department to do so. In any event, the banishment of Flynn, the tarring of Sessions, and the net of suspicion cast over the Trump administration are fierce warnings from a rattled foreign policy community, a modern equivalent of the severed heads of Roman soldiers set on pikes as a message from Visigoth hordes.

The enveloping of the president in a cacophony of innuendo is likely a collaborative effort between the Justice Department, the National Intelligence Agency, the CIA, and crucially, the mainstream press. Beyond the corridors of the Capitol Hill, civil-society organizations like the George Soros-funded MoveOn.org and Barack Obama's robust Organizing for Action (OFA) are turning up the heat on the streets, creating the visible signs of unrest, sometimes violent, that have capsized governments from Venezuela to Ukraine at the behest of Western oligarchs.

In recent weeks, President Donald Trump's appointment of delusional hawk H.R. McMaster as National Security Advisor, a call for an unnecessary $54 billion dollar expansion of the military budget, his sudden demand for the return of Crimea to Ukraine, his fulminant echoes of Bush administration hysteria over Iran, among other hawkish developments, can be read as an unsettled president's efforts to appease a foreign policy establishment that is ruthlessly using the media to undermine, and reign in, a wayward steward of empire.

Full-Spectrum Dominance vs. Clear-Headed Detente

But why is Russia such a perennial target of Washington's? Why are peaceful overtures toward Moscow so scorned? As the Trump administration found out, de-escalation is a no-no in Washington. Russia, along with China, are the leading targets of American long-term foreign policy. They represent the only two nations that might seriously rival the U.S. in Eurasia, which is considered the fulcrum of the 21st century global economy. Preventing the rise of new rivals is long-standing U.S. policy, most explicitly articulated by Paul Wolfowitz on behalf of the Clinton administration in early 1990s.

None of this should come as a surprise. Consider what was at stake. At the macro level, the entire program for global hegemony is under threat. Outlined over decades by foreign policy luminaries such as George Kennan, Allen Dulles, Wolfowitz, and Zbigniew Brzezinksi, the general plan is for full-spectrum dominance, meaning control of land, sea, air, and space, on a planetary basis, with a special emphasis on "Eurasian landmass," as the ghoulish McMaster called it in a recent anti-Russian speech.

If history is any guide, it is unacceptable for a U.S. president to thaw relations with Russia unless that thaw consists of Russia capitulating to American demands. Mikhail Gorbachev's trusting dismantling of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact led to a decade of Western looting of Gorbachev's country. Vladimir Putin has since restored a measure of Russia's economic and military strength. Where Gorbachev was exploited, Putin is proving resistant to such entreaties, except on the economic front, where he appears to have bought into some of Western neoliberal policy.

Instead, Putin is posing a threat to the forward progress of Washington's neoconservative foreign policy. He has actively promoted a variety of pipeline projects that would speed Russian oil and gas to Western Europe, undercutting profits of Western multinationals and addicting NATO nations to the energy teat of the Russian Federation. And he has conducted a few military maneuvers that have enraged the Washington elite, which are used to being conciliated by effete comprador elite in developing nations. This is different. A nuclear nation that can't be overrun or bombed into submission. And it shows.

After successfully dismembering Yugoslavia, Congo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, the West-led spread of chaos across the Middle East stalled in Syria. After happily expanding NATO throughout Eastern Europe with little opposition, expansion hit a wall in Ukraine. In both instances, it is Moscow behind the holding action preventing the American project of global dominion from advancing. That's why Putin has replaced Hugo Chavez as the West's most demonized public figure.

Worryingly for covetous D.C. schemers, there's a lot of new economic activity afoot in Eurasia, little of it involving the U.S. This activity includes plans for a Eurasian Union headed by Russia, a metastasizing Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), and the rapidly advancing One Belt, One Road vision of the Chinese. The latter would effectively be a New Silk Road stretching from Vladivostok to Lisbon, animating Chinese and Russian economic influence across the Asian and European continents, and lifting countries like Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. This is Washington's nightmare scenario, since no serious geo-strategist believes global hegemony is feasible short of dominion in Central Asia. This understanding fuels the underlying animus toward Moscow and Beijing. It has nothing to do with ceaseless repeated lies about Russian aggression in Eastern Europe and Chinese aggression in the South China Sea. And it has nothing to do with lies about Moscow rigging the election for Donald Trump or Michael Flynn lifting sanctions in a nefarious quid pro quo.

The Deep State vs. the Nation State

Long-time Congressional staffer Mike Lofgren refers to the murky agencies at work to ensure this planetary plan stays on track as the "deep state," in his book of the same name. He writes that it includes key elements of the national security state, which ensure continuity of policy despite the superficial about-faces from one administration to the next. The deep state is effectively a warlike oligarchy, hell-bent on full spectrum dominance, driven by a lust for wealth and power, and anxious to inscribe its name in history. Specifically, Lofgren says, the deep state includes the Department of Defense, the State Department, the National Intelligence Agencies, Wall Street, the defense industry, and the energy consortium, among other major private players. They share common agendas, operate a revolving door of employees, and have a collective distaste for democracy, transparency, and regulation. The deep state is the link between military interventions and trans-pacific trade deals, between sanctions and IMF loans. All of these tools, be they arms or loans or legal structures, serve a single purpose: the overarching control of world resources by a global community of corporate elites. One can also see how these three instruments of policy and power all do tremendous damage to a particular entity, the nation-state. It is the nation-state that is considered by elites to be the sole remaining barricade between populations in nominal democracies and their unfettered exploitation by multinationals, although one might reasonably argue that the state more often abets exploitation rather than deters it.

The Dystopia to Come

So where is this all headed? Aside from the theatrics of the Trump presidency and its sequestration or removal. What would full-spectrum dominance look like? Probably something like a one-world market, populated by enfeebled states, ruled by a worldwide raft of interlocking investor rights agreements that allowed private capital to plunder natural resources free of state restraints, such as labor safeguards, environmental protections, reasonable tax regimes, capital controls or border tariffs. Faceless multinationals would pillage the planet, their anonymous appointees manning the joysticks of power behind the reflective glass of their cloud-draped spindles, unreachable and unelected by the armies of the destitute that prowled the wastelands below. The amalgamated forces of corporate elitism would coolly play labor arbitrage across continents, threaten and destroy defiant economies through currency flight and commodity manipulation, and continue to consume an outsized percentage of the world's resources. This would fulfill the hegemonic dreams of former State Department Director of Policy Planning Kennan, who once argued that we must dispense with humanitarian concerns and "deal in straight power concepts," the better to control and consume an outsized portion of the world's resources, presumably a privilege reserved for elite whites, and a selection of mandarins from other ethnicities with special clearances.

A criminal corporate commonwealth, supported by a fiat dollar as global reserve currency enforced by threat of war and economic collapse, will be deaf to protest from below, its weaponized satellites aimed at populations like sunlit magnifiers at a column of ants. Currency itself would be wholly digitized. This move would be sold as a positive advance as it would provide better tax accountability and therefore fund future programs of social uplift. Rather it will be employed as a means of totalitarian financial control over populations. Their wealth will be institutionalized. The concept of withdrawal will fade along with the fiction of ownership.

Terrorism will become the chosen tool of this elite power (insofar as it isn't already). Surgical strikes, be they military, economic, or news-driven, will "keep the rabble in line" as all societies become subservient to the portents of war, the fear of inaccessible funds, and the black smears of an amoral media. The deep state' will become an obsolete term, as the nation-state will recede in memory as a relic of a strife-ridden dark age.

After all, the laissez faire cult of the beltway actually believes the planet would prosper sans nation-states. As another scene from Syriana reminds us, elite capital has a very different worldview from the majority of labor, who continue to believe the state has a role to play defending their interests. At one point in the film, Texas oil man Danny Dalton lectures lawyer Bennett Holiday on the true definition of corruption, "Corruption!? Corruption is government interference in market efficiencies in the form of government regulation. That's Milton Friedman! He got a goddamn Nobel Prize!" The U.S. already practices free-market militarism, refusing to recognize borders, legal constraints, or geostrategic jurisdiction. Why not free-market finance and trade?

The good news is that, if you can clamber into the top one percent of the U.S. population, for instance, serving as a parasite on the grizzled hide of the corporate beast, you might yet partake of unimaginable luxuries, high in the clouds, sipping Mimosas as you transit between the ring-fenced metropoles of the world, where stateless elites intermingle.

Quote:When Disinformation' Is Truth


March 13, 2017

Exclusive: Democrats and liberals have climbed into bed with the neocons to push the "Russia-did-it" conspiracy theory as a way to "get Trump," but this New McCarthyism has grave dangers, writes Robert Parry.




By Robert Parry


The anti-Russian McCarthyism that has spread out from the United States to encompass the European Union, Canada and Australia has at its core an implicit recognition that neoliberal economics and neoconservative foreign policy have failed.




A scene from "Dr. Strangelove," in which the bomber pilot (played by actor Slim Pickens) rides a nuclear bomb to its target in the Soviet Union.
When I recently asked a European journalist why this anti-Russian hysteria had taken root among mainstream European political parties, he answered with a question: "Do you think they can run on their success in handling the recession and the refugees?"


In other words, European voters are angry about the painful economic conditions that followed the Wall Street crash of 2008 and the destabilizing surge of immigrants fleeing from Western "regime change" wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan.


So, like the Democratic Party that doesn't want to engage in a soul-searching self-examination about Donald Trump's victory, the European "establishment" parties need a handy excuse to divert criticism and that excuse is Russia, a blame-shifting that has allowed nearly every recent criticism of an establishment government official to be sloughed off as "Russian disinformation."


It doesn't even matter anymore that the criticism may be based on solid fact. Even truthful information is now deemed "Russian disinformation" or Russian-inspired "fake news."


We saw that in the Canadian mainstream media's denunciations of Consortiumnews.com for running an article that pointed out that Canada's Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland had misrepresented her family history to white-out her maternal grandfather's role editing a Nazi newspaper in Poland that demonized Jews and justified the Holocaust.


Virtually every mainstream outlet in Canada rallied to Freeland's side when she dismissed our article as Russian disinformation. Only later did a few newspapers grudgingly acknowledge that our story was true and that Freeland knew it was true. Still, the attacks on us continued. We were labeled "Russian disinformationists," with no evidence needed to support the slander and no defense allowed.


Though arguably a small example, the Freeland story reflects what is happening across the Western mainstream news media. Almost every independent-minded news article that questions the establishment narratives on international affairs is dismissed as "Russian propaganda." The few politicians, academics and journalists who don't march in the establishment's parade are "Moscow stooges" or "Putin apologists."


The Russian Resistance


This anti-Russian hysteria began some years ago when Russian President Vladimir Putin made clear that Russia would no longer bow to dictates from Washington and Brussels. Russia bristled at the encroachment of NATO on its borders, rejected the neoconservative agenda of "regime change" wars in Muslim countries, and resisted the U.S.-backed putsch ousting Ukraine's elected president in 2014.




Hillary Clinton speaking at a rally in Phoenix, Arizona, March 21, 2016. (Photo by Gage Skidmore)
But the anti-Russian frenzy gained unstoppable momentum with the U.S. election in 2016. The Democrats, liberals and neoconservatives were horrified at the shocking upset of their presidential choice, Hillary Clinton, by the boorish and buffoonish Donald Trump.


After this bitter defeat, the losers looked for scapegoats rather than order up a serious autopsy on how they lost to the "unelectable" Trump, i.e, by choosing a corporate candidate who was associated with neoliberal economics and neoconservative war policies. Blaming Russia became the easy excuse that could unify the various pro-Clinton camps.


So, the Obama administration in an unprecedented step sought to poison the well for its successor by having the U.S. intelligence community put out evidence-lacking allegations about Russian "meddling" in the U.S. election to elect Trump.


The promoters of this Russia-did-it narrative merged with the "#Resistance" movement to do whatever was necessary to push Trump out of office. It didn't seem to matter that there was very little evidence that the Russians actually did meddle in the election.


The chief claim was that the Russians gave WikiLeaks the Democratic emails revealing the Democratic National Committee's sabotage of Sen. Bernie Sanders's campaign and the emails of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta exposing the contents of Clinton's hidden speeches to Wall Street and some pay-to-play features of the Clinton Foundation.


WikiLeaks denied getting the material from the Russians, but more to the point there was no evidence of collusion between Moscow and the Trump campaign, as even Obama's Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman have acknowledged. (The WikiLeaks disclosures also were not a major factor in Clinton's defeat, which she primarily blamed on FBI Director James Comey briefly reopening the investigation of her using a private email server while Secretary of State.)


Still, the absence of evidence has not deterred Democrats, liberals and neocons from spinning a vast Russian conspiracy theory that ties together Trump's past business dealings in Russia with the notion that somehow Putin foresaw that Trump would become U.S. president, an eventuality that nearly every American pundit considered an impossibility as recently as last year.


But skeptics of the Trump/Russia conspiracy if they dare note that Putin would have needed the world's best Ouija board to foresee Trump's victory must then prove that they are not "Russian propaganda/disinformation agents" for having these doubts.


New McCarthyism and Maddow


Given the emergence of this New Cold War, I suppose it made sense that we would soon have a New McCarthyism, although it may have come as a surprise that this witch-hunting is being led by the liberals and the mainstream media, albeit with important assistance from the neoconservatives who have long engaged in smearing the patriotism of anyone who doubted their geopolitical genius.




MSNBC host Rachel Maddow.
Remember back in 1984 when U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick, an early neocon, denounced traitorous Americans who would "blame America first."


But it appears now that many liberals and even progressives are so blinded by their hatred of Trump that they haven't thought through the wisdom of their new alliance with the neocons or the fairness of smearing fellow Americans as "Putin apologists."


Meanwhile, mainstream news organizations have abandoned even the pretense of professional objectivity in their propagandistic approach toward anything related to Russia or Trump. For instance, I would defy anyone reading The New York Times' coverage of Russia to assess it as fair and balanced when it is clearly snarky and sneering.


It also turns out that this New McCarthyism has become profitable for its leading practitioners. The New York Times reported on Monday that the ratings for MSNBC's Rachel Maddow are soaring with her frequent anti-Russian rants.


"Now, rattled liberals are surging back [to network television], seeking catharsis, solidarity and relief," the Times wrote, citing a Kentucky woman explaining why she has become a devotee of Maddow: "She's always talking about the Russians!"


Frankly, for the past dozen years, I've wondered about Maddow. I first heard her on the radio in August 2005 when she was a summer fill-in at Air America reporting on President George W. Bush's Katrina fiasco, which she partly blamed on the deployment of Louisiana National Guard units to Iraq, so they couldn't help evacuate flooded New Orleans.


It was clear that Maddow was talented and her excoriation of the Iraq War was on point, although by summer 2005 it didn't require a huge amount of journalistic courage to slam Bush over the Iraq War. As I watched her career rise through a regular Air America gig to her show on MSNBC and then to stardom as an anchor on the network's election coverage, I always wondered whether she would put her lucrative corporate acceptance at risk and go against the grain at a tough journalistic moment.


Now, Maddow's behavior in becoming a modern-day mainstream-media Joe McCarthy has put my doubts to rest. She is riding high in the ratings by keeping her whip hand coming down hard on the bash-Russia steed. She is putting her career or her politics ahead of journalism.


Like so many other Democrat/liberal/neocon activists, Maddow not only ignores the evidentiary gaps in the Russia-did-it conspiracy theory but she seems oblivious to the dangers of her opportunism. By stirring up this McCarthyistic frenzy, she and her "never-Trump" allies make a rational policy toward nuclear-armed Russia nearly impossible. Thus, she is contributing to the real risk of a hot war with Russia that could lead to the annihilation of life on the planet.


Thin-Skinned Trump


One of the bitter ironies here is that Trump's critics correctly noted that his thin-skinned temperament made him unfit to possess the nuclear button, but they are now egging him into a mano-a-mano confrontation with Putin. If Trump doesn't get the better of Putin in every situation, Trump will face renewed pummeling for "selling out" to the Russians.




President Donald Trump being sworn in on Jan. 20, 2017. (Screen shot from Whitehouse.gov)
Already, neocon Sen. Lindsey Graham has declared, "2017 is going to be a year of kicking Russia in the ass in Congress." If Trump doesn't go along, he will face battering from the likes of Maddow, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and pretty much every mainstream news outlet. So, Trump may have no political choice but to get tough. But what happens when Putin pushes back?


In the past when I've made this point about the recklessness of Russia-bashing, I've been told that I'm being alarmist, that "kicking Russia in the ass" and baiting Trump to join in the kicking won't lead to a nuclear war, that the Russians aren't that stupid.


While on the upside of this anti-Russia strategy, the anti-Trump activists insist it is the most promising route to get rid of Trump, which they view as justifying almost any action. It's not for them to prove that Trump did conspire with Putin to rig the U.S. presidential election; it's enough to raise the suspicion and use it to push for Trump's impeachment.


As someone who has covered national security scandals since the 1980s, I am familiar with the kind of evidence that should be required for making serious allegations. For instance, when Brian Barger and I wrote the first story about Nicaraguan Contra drug trafficking in 1985 for The Associated Press, we had about two dozen sources, plus documents. Most of the sources were insiders i.e., inside the Contra movement and inside the Reagan administration who described how the operation was run. We had this evidence before we made any public accusation.


In the case of the Russia-Trump conspiracy theory, the U.S. intelligence community has presented almost no evidence of Russian "hacking" and admits that it has no evidence of Trump's collusion with the Russians. As far as we know, there is no insider who has described how this alleged conspiracy occurred.


That is not to say that some evidence might not eventually surface that confirms the Russia-Trump suspicions, but that is true of all conspiracy theories. Who knows, maybe Joe McCarthy was right about all those Communists inside the U.S. government secretly working for the Kremlin? Maybe he did have a real list of names. But that is what "witch hunts" are all about investigations designed to prove a point whether true or not.


In this current case, however, the downside is not "just" the destruction of people's careers and a few imprisonments. The downside of playing chicken with nuclear-armed Russia is the end of life as we know it. At such a moment, journalists and politicians should demand the highest standards of proof, not no proof at all.


Sometimes, I envision the argument that I would hear as the mushroom clouds begin rising over U.S. and Russian cities. If not incinerated in the first moments of the cataclysm, the "smart" people of the mainstream U.S. media (and their liberal and neocon allies) would be insisting that it wasn't their fault; it was someone else's fault; blame-shifting to the end.


So, as the Democrats and liberals join with the neocons in launching this New McCarthyism over Russia and with people like Rachel Maddow leading the charge what is arguably the most depressing fact is that there appears to be no Edward R. Murrow, a mainstream journalist with a conscience, anywhere on the horizon.

Quote:

The Kagans Are Back; Wars to Follow

March 15, 2017

Exclusive: The neocon royalty Kagans are counting on Democrats and liberals to be the foot soldiers in the new neocon campaign to push Republicans and President Trump into more "regime change" wars, reports Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
The Kagan family, America's neoconservative aristocracy, has reemerged having recovered from the letdown over not gaining its expected influence from the election of Hillary Clinton and from its loss of official power at the start of the Trump presidency.

Former Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, who pushed for the Ukraine coup and helped pick the post-coup leaders. (She is the wife of neocon theorist Robert Kagan.)

Back pontificating on prominent op-ed pages, the Family Kagan now is pushing for an expanded U.S. military invasion of Syria and baiting Republicans for not joining more enthusiastically in the anti-Russian witch hunt over Moscow's alleged help in electing Donald Trump.
In a Washington Post op-ed on March 7, Robert Kagan, a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century and a key architect of the Iraq War, jabbed at Republicans for serving as "Russia's accomplices after the fact" by not investigating more aggressively.
Then, Frederick Kagan, director of the Critical Threats Project at the neocon American Enterprise Institute, and his wife, Kimberly Kagan, president of her own think tank, Institute for the Study of War, touted the idea of a bigger U.S. invasion of Syria in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on March 15.
Yet, as much standing as the Kagans retain in Official Washington's world of think tanks and op-ed placements, they remain mostly outside the new Trump-era power centers looking in, although they seem to have detected a door being forced open.
Still, a year ago, their prospects looked much brighter. They could pick from a large field of neocon-oriented Republican presidential contenders or like Robert Kagan they could support the establishment Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, whose "liberal interventionism" matched closely with neoconservatism, differing only slightly in the rationalizations used for justifying wars and more wars.
There was also hope that a President Hillary Clinton would recognize how sympatico the liberal hawks and the neocons were by promoting Robert Kagan's neocon wife, Victoria Nuland, from Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs to Secretary of State.
Then, there would have been a powerful momentum for both increasing the U.S. military intervention in Syria and escalating the New Cold War with Russia, putting "regime change" back on the agenda for those two countries. So, early last year, the possibilities seemed endless for the Family Kagan to flex their muscles and make lots of money.
A Family Business
As I noted two years ago in an article entitled "A Family Business of Perpetual War": "Neoconservative pundit Robert Kagan and his wife, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, run a remarkable family business: she has sparked a hot war in Ukraine and helped launch Cold War II with Russia and he steps in to demand that Congress jack up military spending so America can meet these new security threats.

Prominent neocon intellectual Robert Kagan. (Photo credit: Mariusz Kubik, http://www.mariuszkubik.pl)

"This extraordinary husband-and-wife duo makes quite a one-two punch for the Military-Industrial Complex, an inside-outside team that creates the need for more military spending, applies political pressure to ensure higher appropriations, and watches as thankful weapons manufacturers lavish grants on like-minded hawkish Washington think tanks.
"Not only does the broader community of neoconservatives stand to benefit but so do other members of the Kagan clan, including Robert's brother Frederick at the American Enterprise Institute and his wife Kimberly, who runs her own shop called the Institute for the Study of War."
But things didn't quite turn out as the Kagans had drawn them up. The neocon Republicans stumbled through the GOP primaries losing out to Donald Trump and then after Hillary Clinton muscled aside Sen. Bernie Sanders to claim the Democratic nomination she fumbled away the general election to Trump.
After his surprising victory, Trump for all his many shortcomings recognized that the neocons were not his friends and mostly left them out in the cold. Nuland not only lost her politically appointed job as Assistant Secretary but resigned from the Foreign Service, too.
With Trump in the White House, Official Washington's neocon-dominated foreign policy establishment was down but far from out. The neocons were tossed a lifeline by Democrats and liberals who detested Trump so much that they were happy to pick up Nuland's fallen banner of the New Cold War with Russia. As part of a dubious scheme to drive Trump from office, Democrats and liberals hyped evidence-free allegations that Russia had colluded with Trump's team to rig the U.S. election.
New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman spoke for many of this group when he compared Russia's alleged "meddling" to Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor and Al Qaeda's 9/11 terror attacks.
On MSNBC's "Morning Joe" show, Friedman demanded that the Russia hacking allegations be treated as a casus belli: "That was a 9/11 scale event. They attacked the core of our democracy. That was a Pearl Harbor scale event." Both Pearl Harbor and 9/11 led to wars.
So, with many liberals blinded by their hatred of Trump, the path was open for neocons to reassert themselves.
Baiting Republicans
Robert Kagan took to the high-profile op-ed page of The Washington Post to bait key Republicans, such as Rep. Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee who was pictured above the Post article and its headline, "Running interference for Russia."

Gen. David Petraeus posing before the U.S. Capitol with Kimberly Kagan, founder and president of the Institute for the Study of War. (Photo credit: ISW's 2011 Annual Report)

Kagan wrote: "It would have been impossible to imagine a year ago that the Republican Party's leaders would be effectively serving as enablers of Russian interference in this country's political system. Yet, astonishingly, that is the role the Republican Party is playing."
Kagan then reprised Official Washington's groupthink that accepted without skepticism the claims from President Obama's outgoing intelligence chiefs that Russia had "hacked" Democratic emails and released them via WikiLeaks to embarrass the Clinton campaign.
Though Obama's intelligence officials offered no verifiable evidence to support the claims and WikiLeaks denied getting the two batches of emails from the Russians the allegations were widely accepted across Official Washington as grounds for discrediting Trump and possibly seeking his removal from office.
Ignoring the political conflict of interest for Obama's appointees, Kagan judged that "given the significance of this particular finding [about Russian meddling], the evidence must be compelling" and justified "a serious, wide-ranging and open investigation."
But Kagan also must have recognized the potential for the neocons to claw their way back to power behind the smokescreen of a New Cold War with Russia.
He declared: "The most important question concerns Russia's ability to manipulate U.S. elections. That is not a political issue. It is a national security issue. If the Russian government did interfere in the United States' electoral processes last year, then it has the capacity to do so in every election going forward. This is a powerful and dangerous weapon, more than warships or tanks or bombers.
"Neither Russia nor any potential adversary has the power to damage the U.S. political system with weapons of war. But by creating doubts about the validity, integrity and reliability of U.S. elections, it can shake that system to its foundations."
A Different Reality
As alarmist as Kagan's op-ed was, the reality was far different. Even if the Russians did hack the Democratic emails and somehow slipped the information to WikiLeaks an unsubstantiated and disputed contention those two rounds of email disclosures were not that significant to the election's outcome.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders. (NBC photo)

Hillary Clinton blamed her surprise defeat on FBI Director James Comey briefly reopening the investigation into her use of a private email server while serving as Secretary of State.
Further, by all accounts, the WikiLeaks-released emails were real and revealed wrongdoing by leading Democrats, such as the Democratic National Committee's tilting of the primaries against Sen. Bernie Sanders and in favor of Clinton. The emails of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta disclosed the contents of Clinton's paid speeches to Wall Street, which she was trying to hide from voters, as well as some pay-to-play features of the Clinton Foundation.
In other words, the WikiLeaks' releases helped inform American voters about abuses to the U.S. democratic process. The emails were not "disinformation" or "fake news." They were real news.
A similar disclosure occurred both before the election and this week when someone leaked details about Trump's tax returns, which are protected by law. However, except for the Trump camp, almost no one thought that this illegal act of releasing a citizen's tax returns was somehow a threat to American democracy.
The general feeling was that Americans have a right to know such details about someone seeking the White House. I agree, but doesn't it equally follow that we had a right to know about the DNC abusing its power to grease the skids for Clinton's nomination, about the contents of Clinton's speeches to Wall Street bankers, and about foreign governments seeking pay-to-play influence by contributing to the Clinton Foundation?
Yet, because Obama's political appointees in the U.S. intelligence community "assess" that Russia was the source of the WikiLeaks emails, the assault on U.S. democracy is a reason for World War III.
More Loose Talk
But Kagan was not satisfied with unsubstantiated accusations regarding Russia undermining U.S. democracy. He asserted as "fact" although again without presenting evidence that Russia is "interfering in the coming elections in France and Germany, and it has already interfered in Italy's recent referendum and in numerous other elections across Europe. Russia is deploying this weapon against as many democracies as it can to sap public confidence in democratic institutions."

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, flanked by Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria "Toria" Nuland, addresses Russian President Vladimir Putin in a meeting at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, on July 14, 2016. [State Department Photo]

There's been a lot of handwringing in Official Washington and across the Mainstream Media about the "post-truth" era, but these supposed avatars for truth are as guilty as anyone, acting as if constantly repeating a fact-free claim is the same as proving it.But it's clear what Kagan and other neocons have in mind, an escalation of hostilities with Russia and a substantial increase in spending on U.S. military hardware and on Western propaganda to "counter" what is deemed "Russian propaganda."
Kagan recognizes that he already has many key Democrats and liberals on his side. So he is taking aim at Republicans to force them to join in the full-throated Russia-bashing, writing:
"But it is the Republicans who are covering up. The party's current leader, the president, questions the intelligence community's findings, motives and integrity. Republican leaders in Congress have opposed the creation of any special investigating committee, either inside or outside Congress. They have insisted that inquiries be conducted by the two intelligence committees.
"Yet the Republican chairman of the committee in the House has indicated that he sees no great urgency to the investigation and has even questioned the seriousness and validity of the accusations. The Republican chairman of the committee in the Senate has approached the task grudgingly.
"The result is that the investigations seem destined to move slowly, produce little information and provide even less to the public. It is hard not to conclude that this is precisely the intent of the Republican Party's leadership, both in the White House and Congress. …
"When Republicans stand in the way of thorough, open and immediate investigations, they become Russia's accomplices after the fact."
Lying with the Neocons
Many Democrats and liberals may find it encouraging that a leading neocon who helped pave the road to war in Iraq is now by their side in running down Republicans for not enthusiastically joining the latest Russian witch hunt. But they also might pause to ask themselves how they let their hatred of Trump get them into an alliance with the neocons.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, following his address to the UN General Assembly on Sept. 28, 2015. (UN Photo)

On Wednesday in The Wall Street Journal, Robert Kagan's brother Frederick and his wife Kimberly dropped the other shoe, laying out the neocons' long-held dream of a full-scale U.S. invasion of Syria, a project that was put on hold in 2004 because of U.S. military reversals in Iraq.
But the neocons have long lusted for "regime change" in Syria and were not satisfied with Obama's arming of anti-government rebels and the limited infiltration of U.S. Special Forces into northern Syria to assist in the retaking of the Islamic State's "capital" of Raqqa.
In the Journal op-ed, Frederick and Kimberly Kagan call for opening a new military front in southeastern Syria:
"American military forces will be necessary. But the U.S. can recruit new Sunni Arab partners by fighting alongside them in their land. The goal in the beginning must be against ISIS because it controls the last areas in Syria where the U.S. can reasonably hope to find Sunni allies not yet under the influence of al Qaeda. But the aim after evicting ISIS must be to raise a Sunni Arab army that can ultimately defeat al Qaeda and help negotiate a settlement of the war.
"The U.S. will have to pressure the Assad regime, Iran and Russia to end the conflict on terms that the Sunni Arabs will accept. That will be easier to do with the independence and leverage of a secure base inside Syria. … President Trump should break through the flawed logic and poor planning that he inherited from his predecessor. He can transform this struggle, but only by transforming America's approach to it."
A New Scheme on Syria
In other words, the neocons are back to their clever word games and their strategic maneuverings to entice the U.S. military into a "regime change" project in Syria.
The neocons thought they had almost pulled off that goal by pinning a mysterious sarin gas attack outside Damascus on Aug. 21, 2013, on the Syrian government and mousetrapping Obama into launching a major U.S. air assault on the Syrian military.
But Russian President Vladimir Putin stepped in to arrange for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to surrender all his chemical weapons even as Assad continued to deny any role in the sarin attack.
Putin's interference in thwarting the neocons' dream of a Syrian "regime war" moved Putin to the top of their enemies' list. Soon key neocons, such as National Endowment for Democracy president Carl Gershman, were taking aim at Ukraine, which Gershman deemed "the biggest prize" and a steppingstone toward eventually ousting Putin in Moscow.
It fell to Assistant Secretary Victoria "Toria" Nuland to oversee the "regime change" in Ukraine. She was caught on an unsecured phone line in late January or early February 2014 discussing with U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt how "to glue" or "to midwife" a change in Ukraine's elected government of President Viktor Yanukovych.
Several weeks later, neo-Nazi and ultranationalist street fighters spearheaded a violent assault on government buildings forcing Yanukovych and other officials to flee for their lives, with the U.S. government quickly hailing the coup regime as "legitimate."
But the Ukraine putsch led to the secession of Crimea and a bloody civil war in eastern Ukraine with ethnic Russians, events that the State Department and the mainstream Western media deemed "Russian aggression" or a "Russian invasion."
So, by the last years of the Obama administration, the stage was set for the neocons and the Family Kagan to lead the next stage of the strategy of cornering Russia and instituting a "regime change" in Syria.
All that was needed was for Hillary Clinton to be elected president. But these best-laid plans surprisingly went astray. Despite his overall unfitness for the presidency, Trump defeated Clinton, a bitter disappointment for the neocons and their liberal interventionist sidekicks.
Yet, the so-called "#Resistance" to Trump's presidency and President Obama's unprecedented use of his intelligence agencies to paint Trump as a Russian "Manchurian candidate" gave new hope to the neocons and their agenda.
It has taken them a few months to reorganize and regroup but they now see hope in pressuring Trump so hard regarding Russia that he will have little choice but to buy into their belligerent schemes.
As often is the case, the Family Kagan has charted the course of action batter Republicans into joining the all-out Russia-bashing and then persuade a softened Trump to launch a full-scale invasion of Syria. In this endeavor, the Kagans have Democrats and liberals as the foot soldiers.

David Guyatt Wrote:A reprise of Friday the 13th "Freddie's Back! - Robert Parry's below article revels the return of the notorious war-mongering Kagan family, who seem to think the time is ripe to put Trump under pressure to restart the Neocon war machine again.

A study in how to bring the nation together again ---- war, war, war... profit,profit, profit.

I was particularly struck with the two following paragraphs of the Kagan's.

"American military forces will be necessary. But the U.S. can recruit new Sunni Arab partners by fighting alongside them in their land. The goal in the beginning must be against ISIS because it controls the last areas in Syria where the U.S. can reasonably hope to find Sunni allies not yet under the influence of al Qaeda. But the aim after evicting ISIS must be to raise a Sunni Arab army that can ultimately defeat al Qaeda and help negotiate a settlement of the war.


"The U.S. will have to pressure the Assad regime, Iran and Russia to end the conflict on terms that the Sunni Arabs will accept. That will be easier to do with the independence and leverage of a secure base inside Syria. … President Trump should break through the flawed logic and poor planning that he inherited from his predecessor. He can transform this struggle, but only by transforming America's approach to it"

In other words, first we fabricate and create an as yet non-existent Sunni Army and propel it into war in Syria as our proxy. Then we tell it what it's aims are and make it requote these aims again and again to our captured media. And finally, we tell the Syrians what terms the Sunni Army require to a settlement of the war we just started, namely, Assad should go and Syria submit to our demands ---- all the while pretending that we, the US, are bystanders.

Yeah, that'll work. Nobody will see through it even though we've just laid it out in plain sight, because we'll spin the media accordingly, who'll happily accommodate our needs.

Ain't Neo-con-ery a marvellous thing.

Quote:The Kagans Are Back; Wars to Follow

March 15, 2017

Exclusive: The neocon royalty Kagans are counting on Democrats and liberals to be the foot soldiers in the new neocon campaign to push Republicans and President Trump into more "regime change" wars, reports Robert Parry.

Source

Quote:What would happen if Washington gave up on the jihad?
by Thierry Meyssan
President Trump's desire to fight Daesh and to put an end to international terrorism is going to be extremely difficult to implement. Indeed, it will cause damage to the states who organised it, and implies a reorientation of international politics. The new President of the United States does not seem ready to give his troops the order to attack until he has found and sealed new alliances.


VOLTAIRE NETWORK | DAMASCUS (SYRIA) | 21 MARCH 2017
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The opposition against President Donald Trump is so strong that the plan to fight Daesh, which is scheduled to be presented on 22 March during a Coalition summit in Washington, is still not ready. Its political direction is still vague. Only the objective of eradicating jihadism has been agreed upon, but none of the implications of the plan have been resolved.


General Joseph Votel, the head of CentCom, still has not presented the options on the ground. He should do so only at the beginning of April.


On the ground, the plan is restricted to the exchange of information from the United States on one hand, and Russia and Iran on the other. In order to maintain the status quo, the three powers have agreed to prevent any confrontation between the Turks and the Kurds. And intensive bombing campaigns are being carried out against al-Qaïda in Yemen and against Daesh in Iraq. But nothing decisive. Orders are to hold.


The weapon of international terrorism has been managed on behalf of London and Washington by the Muslim World League since 1962. It includes both the Muslim Brotherhood (composed of Arabs) and the Order of the Naqshbandis (mostly composed of Turko-Mongols and Caucasians).


Until the war in Yemen, the military budget of the League was greater than that of the Saudi army, which meant that the League was the biggest private army in the world, a long way ahead of Academi/Blackwater. Even if it was only a land army, it was all the more efficient in that its logistics came directly from the Pentagon, and because it also had many suicide combatants.


It was the League that is to say the Sauds who furnished London and Washington with the personnel to organise the second «Great Arab Revolt», in 2011, on the model of the Revolt of 1916, but called this time the «Arab Spring». In both cases, the aim was to apply pressure on the Wahhabis in order to redefine the regional frontiers to the benefit of the Anglo-Saxons.


The point is not simply to abandon the weapon of terrorism, but also: to shatter the alliance between London and Washington for the control of the Greater Middle East; to deprive Saudi Arabia and Turkey of the weapon they have been developing on behalf of London and Washington for half a century; to determine the future of Sudan, Tunisia and Libya.


Besides which, it is also necessasry to come to an agreement with Germany and France, who have been sheltering the leaders of the Brotherhood since 1978, and who have financed the jihad.


As of now, we may note that the United Kingdom doesn't see things in the same way. It turns out that it was the GCHQ (British Signal Intelligence) which wire-tapped Trump Tower during the electoral campaign and the period of transition. And according to Petra, the Jordanian news agency, Saudi Arabia secretly financed a third of Hillary Clinton's electoral campaign against Donald Trump.


This is why President Trump seems to be looking for new allies who will enable him to impose the changes he wants.


He is currently organising a meeting with President Xi Jinping during which he would be able to plan the membership of his country in the Chinese Investment Bank. He would therefore be placing his allies before the fait accompli if the United States participate in the construction of the Silk Roads, it would become impossible for the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Germany and France to continue the jihad in Iraq, Syria and Ukraine.