Paul Rigby Wrote:DEEP STATE & THE CIA MEDIA MATRIX! DARK JOURNALIST & PETER DALE SCOTT

Published on Mar 24, 2017

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Quote:Professor of the Deep State

In this fascinating Part 1 episode Dark Journalist Daniel Liszt Interviews Deep Politics author, Former Canadian Diplomat and UC Berkeley Professor Peter Dale Scott. Professor Scott has been writing on the covert political system for 50 years, including his seminal and controversial works Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, The Road to 9/11, and American War Machine. His most recent groundbreaking book, The American Deep State, exposes the truth about covert forces that constitute an unelected, unaccountable, shadow system of political power.

Covert Political System

The "Deep State," is a concept that Professor Scott created over decades of research that posits that a covert political system operates alongside the public state and utilizes intelligence contractors, the NSA, CIA assets, Media Companies, Wall Street and Corporate Big Oil funding to manipulate the public with what he refers to as "Deep Events," such as 9/11 and the JFK Assassination and their subsequent coverups, for profit and control.

New McCarthyism of the Media

This shadow system has gone into overdrive since the election of President Trump and has attempted to manage the public narrative with controlled CIA leaks aimed at destabilizing the Trump administration. At the same time the Corporate Media has gone on the assault against the rising popularity of Alternative Media and is attempting to subvert the competition by applying the Orwellian term Fake News' to dispose of their media enemies.

This recent, almost hysterical reaction to their loss of influence, evident in the election of 2016, finds them even going so far as to accuse popular political websites of being connected with the Kremlin in some way and by creating discredited lists of alt journalists with supposed Russian Connections.' Their objectives in trying to reinvent a New McCarthyism seems to be aimed at achieving a new Cold War II with Russia to satisfy the financiers of the Military Industrial Complex and to further inflate the already bloated Defense Budget.

CIA Drug Running

Professor Scott takes a wide angle lens and pulls no punches in his research on the involvement of the intelligence agencies in the flow of profits from the drug trade and their extra constitutional efforts to destabilize other countries when they don't fall in line with the objectives of a hijacked American Foreign policy. He reveals the influence of Wall Street on public policy, Big Oil Companies skirting the laws with congressional help and Military Contractors fueling a worldwide arms trade to make huge profits while peddling illegal political influence.

Media Says The Deep State Doesn't Exist

Professor Scott observes that the Mainstream Media in their battle with President Trump, has become concerned that this theme of the Deep State, which is widely circulated in the Alternative Media, may become well understood by the general public. To stop this momentum they are waging a counter attack by using headlines in the Washington Post and New York Times to try and debunk that the Deep State even exists! This relentless campaign of disinformation is a joint effort by the CIA and the media to thwart the rise of awareness due to the internet and other factors that see their control slipping away. Professor Scott also discusses his concerns that these forces may resort to a False Flag Deep Event to regain control that they have temporarily lost at the ballot box.

Shocking, eye-opening, informative and unnerving, you don't want to miss this crucial Dark Journalist episode

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

Quote:Peter Dale Scott


http://www.defenseone.com/…/us-and-russian-military…/136281/
The Foreign Affairs article posted just below is not the only sign of a possible thaw in U.S.-Russian relations. Perhaps even more important is this article by former Brig. Gen. Peter Zwack -- especially if the meetings he discusses can be related to the apparent shift in America's military focus in Syria from Assad to Raqqa.


A third possible sign was a recent broadcast by Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, March 20, http://www.msnbc.com/…/russia-attacks-to-demonstrate-parity…. Discussing the reports of Russian cyberattacks on the 2016 election campaign, she explained them in terms, not of "expansionism," but (I think more accurately) of "Russia's desire to be seen as equal to the US in the sphere of cyber-power." 
Three swallows by themselves do not demonstrate a new spring.
I encourage readers to share any other harbingers of a possible improvement in U.S.-Russian relations, a matter of concern to the entire world.

Quote:US and Russian Military Leaders Are Meeting Again, Breaking a Long and Dangerous Drought

• BY PETER ZWACKREAD BIO
  

MARCH 19, 2017


[LIST=|INDENT=3]
[*]
[/LIST]
Over three years had passed without direct senior-level contact between the world's preeminent nuclear powers.

The military leaders of the world's most lethal nuclear-tipped states met in February, the first such meeting in three years. The two generals got together again earlier this month, once more in relative obscurity that belied their meetings' tremendous importance.

Long projected, but politically and geographically difficult to finalize, the Feb. 16 meeting was a personal first for Gen. Joseph Dunford and Gen. Valery Gerasimov, respectively the U.S.Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Russia's chief of the General Staff. They met in Baku, Azerbaijan, and frankly but cordially discussed the overall diminished state of U.S. and Russian military relations, the need for better communications between key leaders, and ways to deconflict military activities that could inadvertently put both countries at risk.

Then, remarkably, considering the overall difficult state of U.S.and Russian relations Dunford and Gerasimov met again on March 7. This time, their two days of talks were hosted by the Chief of the Turkish General Staff, Gen. Hulusi Akar, in scenic Antalya. Serious discussions ensued in a conducive environment where the three senior generals also shared meals together. Their positions reflected the varied perspectives and hence different strategies their states pursued with a contentious array of regional allies, proxies, and adversaries that placed their forces in ever-closer, increasingly dangerous proximity in northern Syria, near the cities of Manbij and al Bab. This array includes Russians backing the Syrian government, the U.S. backing the Syrian Democratic Force comprising Arabs and Kurds, and Turks supporting Assad regime opposition while combating Kurdish fighters. All recognize the need to destroy ISIS and capture its de facto capital in Raqqa.

These important meetings occurred against the backdrop of a difficult and fractious U.S. political transition of power, made even thornier by Moscow's disruptive cyber tampering with the recent U.S. presidential campaign, and a Russian resurgence beset by challenges internally and abroad.

Much else had changed since January 2014, when General Gerasimov and Gen. Martin Dempsey, then the JCS chair, met in Brussels to sign the now-canceled annual "Work Plan" of exchanges and exercises between the two militaries. As the senior U.S. military attache in Moscow at the time, I witnessed the entire meeting. While this encounter was also cordial, it reflected the steady post-"Reset" decline in relations that was occurring between our countries. The discussion addressed the deteriorating situation in Ukraine, as well as concerns about Afghanistan, Central Asia, Syria, missile defense, and the spread of Islamist extremist terror, all issues still of contemporary concern for both our nations. Additionally, both military leaders agreed for the need to continue military-to-military exchanges at different levels, an effort that understandably died in February 2014 after the pro-Russian Yanukovych regime in Ukraine collapsed, precipitating Russia's stealth invasion and illegal annexation of Ukraine's Crimea and non-attributed operations supporting proxies in eastern Ukraine. Since then, the two militaries have barely communicated, mostly to deconflict air operations in and around Syria. Just a few terse phone calls were exchanged by the senior generals during these long three years. This lack of contact, less even than during the height of the Cold War, is dangerous to both nations vulnerable to a crisis at the speed of cyber.

Since Dempsey and Gerasimov last met in early 2014, the Russian military has evolved both materially and doctrinally, despite a major international sanctions regime, severe ruble inflation, and fallen oil prices emptying Russia's coffers. The Russians have conducted three distinctly different military operations that have increased their military capability and its out-of-area presence while upping its overall stature in Russian society. Whether the initially surreptitious, almost bloodless invasion of "little green men" and illegal annexation of Ukraine's Crimea, its non-attributed insertion of main force units into Eastern Ukraine and its bold, full blown intervention of high-level, strategically capable conventional assets into Syria, it is evident that President Vladimir Putin sees his improving military as an increasingly reliable policy tool for both coercion and defense. Its relative success the past three years has also been popular in Russia and reinforces the regime's stature domestically.

The consequential period framed by these operations also reveal the vulnerability of the increasingly fragile post-Cold War order. Russian military actions both conventional and difficult-to-attribute yet aggressive hybrid "gray zone" activities have stretched and violated the norms of international law, as well as stressing stability-focused organizations such as the UN, EU, OSCE and NATO. Several European governments, beset by migration challenges and skillfully wielded, societally-corrosive Russian disinformation are adopting increasingly illiberal positions, while Russia declares the rise of a "post-West world order."

This was the setting within which these powerful military leaders recently met in Baku and Antalya after three years of no direct contact. It is imperative that they continue, along with senior U.S.and Russian defense officials and key regional commanders, to find venues to frankly exchange views and perspectives, de-conflict actions and incidents, and directly relay, unfiltered, what they are thinking and doing. Relationships matter, especially during times of tension and serious institutional distrust.


[LIST=|INDENT=3]
[*]Peter Zwack, who recently retired from the U.S. Army as a brigadier general, is the Senior Russia-Eurasia Fellow at the National Defense University's Institute of National Security Studies. From 2012 to 2014, he was the U.S. senior U.S. defense attache to Russia. These are his personal views. FULL BIO
[/LIST]

Lauren Johnson Wrote:Nice interview. He has an interesting comment on Robert Parry refusing to have anything to do with PDS and any supposed conspiracy theory.

Quote:
I encourage readers to share any other harbingers of a possible improvement in U.S.-Russian relations, a matter of concern to the entire world.

David Guyatt Wrote:

Lauren Johnson Wrote:Nice interview. He has an interesting comment on Robert Parry refusing to have anything to do with PDS and any supposed conspiracy theory.

I thought it was also interesting what he said about Sy Hersh too, not only that Americans need to read English Language reports published outside the US (Canada, Australia, the UK etc) to get a better understanding (quite a condemnation about the vaunted "free press" in the US) but that he thought Hersh's book on JFK was "junk" and the result of doing a favour... presumably for the CIA in exchange for leaked stories.

PS, I would add what a nice and genuine guy PDS is - this in respect of his comments about Robert Parry. He has real integrity. It's what makes him such a rarity.

Quote:Virgil: The Beltway Assures Us the Deep State Doesn't Exist


by VIRGIL13 Mar 2017




In parts one and two of our guided tour of the Deep State, we looked at two anchors of the Federal Triangle in downtown DC, the Department of Commerce and the Environmental Protection Agency. And while Virgil looks forward to continuing his tour of the Triangle and other nodes of the Deep State, sometimes breaking news breaks in, and so we should pause to consider the latest.
On March 10, from his podium at the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House, President Trump's press secretary, Sean Spicer, was asked about the Deep State. The question:


Does the White House believe in a "Deep State" that is actively working to undermine the president?


And here's Spicer's answer:


I think that there's no question when you have eight years of one party in office, there are people who stay in governmentand continue to espouse the agenda of the previous administration. So I don't think it should come as any surprise there are people that burrowed into government during eight years of the last administration and may have believed in that agenda and want to continue to seek it. I don't think that should come as a surprise.


In other words, Spicer's answer to the answer to the question was "Yes." So now there can be no doubt that the concept of the Deep State will be discussed for a long time to come. And yet if Virgil might be permitted to quibble with Spicer, he would say that the Deep State is a lot deeper than just the past eight yearswe'll come back to that point.


But first, let's hear from other voices on the issue of whether or not there's a Deep State. As we can see, it's gaining a critical mass of recognition, at least on the right. And that's good, because, as they say, forewarned is forearmed.


On March 5, former House speaker Newt Gingrich made himself clearas he always does:


There is an active Deep State opposition to a populist disruptive reformer. Many [in the government] believe it is their duty to break the law and lie. For Trump to succeed, there will have to be profound overhaul of the bureaucracy.


A few days later, Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA) didn't use the actual words "Deep State," but his point was the same when he described the situation in Powertown: "The same people were there, and they don't think the new owners or the new managers should be running the ship." And then Kelly added this point about former president Barack Obama:


He's only there for one purpose and one purpose only, and that is to run a shadow government that is totally going to upset the new agenda.


So is the 44th president setting up a permanent campaign against the 45th president? Obama denies any such intention; he says that he and his family are remaining in Washington so that his youngest daughter, Sasha, can finish high school. Of course, that explanation doesn't quite tell us why former White House consigliere Valerie Jarrett has moved into the Obamas' 8200-square-foot home in the swanky Kalorama neighborhood, just a couple miles north of the White House.


In fact, the real goal of the relocation, according to The Daily Mail, is to "oust Trump from the presidency either by forcing his resignation or through his impeachment."


Meanwhile, others in Congress, too, are eyeing closely the shadowy armada arrayed against the new administration. In the words of Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), "I think it's really the Deep State vs. the president, the duly elected president."


And on March 9, Fox News' Sean Hannity, was even more direct:


Deep State Obama holdovers embedded like barnacles in the federal bureaucracy are hell-bent on destroying President Trump. It's time for the Trump administration to purge these saboteurs.


Interestingly, by coincidence, or perhaps not, the very next day President Trump's Justice Department ordered the firing of 46 US Attorneys, all Obama holdovers.


Still, some in the Main Stream Media, even now, choose to deny that there is any such thing as a Deep State. One such is David Ignatius, veteran columnist for The Washington Post, who wrote on March 7 that what we're seeing is simply the collision of President Trump and the properly established legal system:


Some [Trump] supporters claim he's facing a secret coup from an intelligence and foreign policy establishment that constitutes a despotic "deep state." But really, Trump is confronting the orderly process we call the "rule of law."


Virgil thinks that it's rich, indeed, for Ignatius to insist that there's nothing going on except the proper rule of law. Why? Because it was Ignatius' own reporting, back on January 12, that demonstrated the extra-legal power of the Deep State. That was the report that revealed that on December 29, Michael Flynn, named as Trump's national security adviser in the new administration, had been intercepted talking on the phone to the Russian ambassador to the US, Sergey Kislyak. And from that first report, events tumbled, and as we all know, Flynn resigned from his White House post on February 13.


And yet a few days after that Ignatius story ran on January 12, Virgil wondered aloud how he got the information about a private phone call: "Now how did Ignatius know that?" That is, how did Ignatius learn about the Flynn-Kislyak conversation? Continuing, Virgil wrote back then, "The Postman won't say, other than that he got his information from a senior US government official.'" Virgil then pointed out that even if was legal to record the callyes, it's smart to surveil Russiansit's not legal to leak such information to the media, especially if it involves an American citizen. "Such disclosures aren't legal," Virgil added with a sigh, "but once again, nobody in Washington, DC, seems to care."


So we can see: In the Flynn case, the power of the Deep State wasn't at all about the "rule of law." It was about just the opposite.


Others, too, take the Ignatius lineeven if their denials are weirdly weak and self-contradicting. Here, for example is a March 9 headline in Politico, the bible of the Beltway: "The Deep State Is a Figment of Steve Bannon's Imagination." The author, Loren DeJonge Schulman, starts out by firing both barrels at Bannon and anyone else who might have suspicions about the Deep State:


Here's a handy rule for assessing the credibility of what you're reading about national security in the Trump era: If somebody uses the term "Deep State," you can be pretty sure they have no idea what they're talking about.


Got that? Nothing to see here: So if you hear Spicer, Gingrich, Kelly, Massie, Hannityor, of course, ol' Virgilnattering on about the Deep State, well, have a dunce cap handy.


So who's the author of this don't-worry-about-a-thing piece? We can see from her bio that Loren DeJonge Schulman, who now works at a Democratic-aligned think-tank in DC, has an extensive background in the politics of the Democratic Party and the Deep State, both.


So maybe it's not so surprising that Schulman wouldn't want anyone nosing around too much in Deep State matters. After all, nobody likes being snooped on, right? In fact, Virgil is reminded of the 1999 Brad Pitt movie, Fight Club, featuring these oft-repeated lines:


Welcome to Fight Club. The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is: you DO NOT talk about Fight Club!


That was Hollywood's way of expressing the most basic wisdom of any secret enterprise: Keep it secret!


So Virgil was surprised to see how Schulman chose to end her denial piece. After nearly 2000 words of mercilessly mocking the idea that there was any such thing as a Deep State, Schulman closed by . . . outing herself as a Deep Stater:


So the next time you hear someone using the term Deep State, send them a copy of this article. Ask them to stop using it. Tell them the term betrays their ignorance, and obscures and misleads far more than it illuminates. And if that doesn't work, well, we Deep Staters will take matters into our own hands. [emphasis added]


One supposes that Schulman would say that her final words were just her way of being funny: What an arch sense of humor she has! And no doubt she got some yuks from her pals in Cleveland Park, Crystal City, and Chevy Chase. Meanwhile, other Americans, curious about how they are being governed, might wonder what's so funny about being threatened by a well-connected Beltway apparatchik.


Yes, an attempt at humor, however ominous, is one possible explanation for Schulman's close. Another possibility is that she is, in fact, proud to be a Deep Stater, and that her pride shines right through her feigned irony. That is, she is eager to signal to her friends and colleagues in the Deep State that she is truly one of them, even as she laughs it off.


Was her Politico piece a successful stratagem? Did Schulman succeed in playing her double game? That is, proving that she is one of the cool kids, even as she convinced readers that only dopes and paranoids worry about the Deep State? Virgil reports, you decide.

Quote:What is really behind the deep-state infighting over the U.S. elections and the "wire tapping" of the Trump campaign? Why was the CIA-Neocon axis vehemently lobbying against Trump? What foreign interests and what money is involved in this? Answers to these questions are now emerging.

The former director of the CIA under Clinton, James Woolsey, went to the Wall Street Journal and offered some information (likely some true and some false) on the retired General Flynn and the lobbying businesses he was involved in. Woolsey is an arch-neoconservative. He had worked on the transition team of Trump but got fired over "growing tensions over Trump's vision for intelligence agencies." Flynn is the former National Security Advisor of Trump who later also got fired. Woolsey was a board member of Flynn's former lobbying company FIG.

Woolsey claims: In September 2016 he took part in a meeting between Flynn and high level Turkish officials, including the Turkish foreign minister and the energy minister who is the son-in-law of the Turkish president Erdogan. During the meeting, Woolsey claims, a brainstorming took place over how the Turkish cult leader Fethullah Gülen could -probably by illegal means- be removed from the U.S. and handed over to Turkey.

Gülen is accused by the Erdogan mafia of initiating a coup attempt against it. The U.S. claims officially that there is no evidence for such an accusation and that Gülen can therefore not be rendered to Turkey. Gülen is an old CIA asset that helped the U.S. deep state to control Turkey. Erdogan divorced from the Gülen organization after it became useless for his neo-Ottoman project.

Here is the WSJ report on the Woolsey claims and a video clip with parts of his WSJ interview. Woolsey also went on CNN where he repeated his WSJ story.

Flynn was accused by the anti-Trump campaign to have worked for Russia. He had taken several $10,000 for speeches he gave in Moscow. He also, at times, had argued for better U.S. relations with Russia. But Flynn's pro-Russia stand was probably honest. (Or the bribes involved were just smaller than the ones paid by others.) The money he got on the speaker circus was rather small for a man in his position.

Flynn's real corruption was on another issue. After having been fired from the Trump administration, Flynn retroactively filed under the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA). His lobbying firm had a contract over $530,000 to work for a company near to the Turkish president Erdogan:

In its filing, Mr. Flynn's firm said its work from August to November "could be construed to have principally benefited the Republic of Turkey." The filing said his firm's fee, $530,000, wasn't paid by the government but by Inovo BV, a Dutch firm owned by a Turkish businessman, Ekim Alptekin.
This lobbying, not the alleged Flynn-Putin relation, is the real scandal and part of the Trump/CIA/Clinton deep-state in-fighting.

The meeting Woolsey described was under the "Turkish" Flynn contract. The Turkish business man, and owner of Inovo, Ekim Alptekin is a member of the Erdogan gang. But hidden at the very end of the WSJ story is the real key to understand the shady network:

Inovo hired Mr. Flynn on behalf of an Israeli company seeking to export natural gas to Turkey, the filing said, and Mr. Alptekin wanted information on the U.S.-Turkey political climate to advise the gas company about its Turkish investments.
It was the Israeli gas company, not the Alptekin outlet, that drove the issue.

The Leviatan (and Tamar) gas fields in the Mediterranean along the Israeli coast are a huge energy and profit resource IF the gas from them can be exported to Europe. Several companies are involved in the exploration and all are looking for ways to connect the fields to the European gas network. There are (likely true) rumors that huge bribes have been payed in Israel, Jordan and elsewhere to win exploration contracts and to sell the gas. Negotiations between Israel and Turkey over the pipeline have been on and off. They depend on a positive climate towards Israel in the Turkish government which again depends on the often changing political position of the Erdogan gang.

The picture evolving here (lots of sleuthing and sources) is this:

An Israeli company (or whoever is behind it) wants a gas pipeline to Turkey. It hires Flynn and Alptekin to arrange a positive climate for the Leviathan pipeline within the Turkish government. It offers Flynn more than half a million for a little (4-month long) influence work. His job is to create a "friendly atmosphere" for the deal by using his influence in the U.S. to accommodate Erdogan. A major point that is expected from Flynn is to arrange the handover of Gülen, by whatever means, from the U.S. to Erdogan.

After accepting the (lobbying) bribe Flynn-the-whore suddenly changes his former anti-Turkish, pro-Russian, pro-Kurdish political position into a pro-Turkish, neutral-Russian and anti-Kurdish one. (His lobbying firm also makes some smaller payments related to the Clinton email-server scandal. This may be related to links between the Clinton family and the Gülen school empire.) He has a meeting with the Turkish government/Erdogan officials part of which is a discussion of a removal of Gülen to Turkey. He pens a pro Erdogan anti-Gülen op-ed which is published on the day of the election and he denigrates the Pentagon plan to work with the Kurds in Syria.

The NSA, CIA and the FBI are listening to Flynn's conversations with Turkish and Israeli interests. (For the old and long history of such "wiretapping" of Turkish and Israeli connections and various dirty and criminal deals they revealed read and ask Sibel Edmonds.)

The projects which Flynn is involved in, especially removing Gülen, are against the long term interests of the (neoconservative-driven) CIA. Selected tapes of his talks are transcribed and distributed within the anti-Trump campaign. This is the origin of the "wiretapping" of the Trump Tower the U.S. president lamented about. The stuff the CIA dug up about Flynn's dealing was and is used against Trump.

Woolsey is caught up in this as he also worked for Flynn's lobbying firm. (His neocon-pro-Zionist history suggests that he is the senior Israeli watchdog over Flynn in all this.) He is now engaged in damage control and is "coming clean" and selectively leaking his anti-Flynn stuff to exculpate himself. (There is probably also some new, better deal involved that will pay off from him.)

The Israeli-Turkish pipeline and the related deep-state fight are not the only issue involved in the campaign against Trump. There are also British interests and British intelligence involvement especially with the accusations against Russia of "hacking" of the DNC. If and how these fit in with above has not yet been revealed.

Quote:Everyone agrees that Trump is an agent. But who's agent is he? Thousands of words have been spilled discussing the issue. The opinions differ:

Polls Find Most Americans Think Trump Is an Agent of Change
Garry Kasparov: Trump Is Putin's "Agent Of Chaos"
Is Donald Trump a Democratic secret agent? - BBC News
Former CIA chief: Putin sees Trump as 'unwitting agent'
Is Donald Trump an Agent of Divine Judgment? - The Federalist
Is Donald Trump a Foreign Agent?
Donald Trump: secret Jesuit agent for Commander-in-Chief
Trump Is An Enemy Agent.
Is Trump a Russian Agent? A Legal Analysis - Lawfare
Is Donald Trump a Double Agent? | The Huffington Post
Donald Trump for President -- Double Agent for the Left
Washington Monthly | Trump As An Agent of Chaos
Trump Is the NRA's Agent of Chaos - Bloomberg View
TRUMP: DEM AGENT PROVOCATEUR STRUTTING IN OPEN SIGHT
Editorial: Trump is the change agent America needs
Busta Rhymes calls Trump "Agent Orange" and slams Muslim ban
Donald Trump: Soros' Useful Idiot or Agent Provocateur?
Is Trump a Democratic Party Agent?
Is Donald Trump a Sleeper Agent for Moscow?
The question seems to be difficult. Luckily we have have the paper of record and its eminent next-six-months columnist Thomas Friedman who finally provides the clear and banal answer:

Trump Is a Chinese Agent: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/29/opinion/trump-is-a-chinese-agent.html?ref=opinion&_r=0

I though you would like to know that.

More seriously. My impression is that there is only one person for whom Donald Trump is willing to act as an agent. That person is Donald Trump.

So the person Trump works for is not very knowledgeable, not very smart and not very likeable.

I would have been nice if the U.S. electorate had had a chance to vote for a better one. But that was - unfortunately - not the case. The result has to be accepted. Fighting it is useless. The war on issues has begun.

Could someone go and tell the Democrats?

Quote:An irony of the escalating hysteria about the Trump camp's contacts with Russians is that one presidential campaign in 2016 did exploit political dirt that supposedly came from the Kremlin and other Russian sources. Friends of that political campaign paid for this anonymous hearsay material, shared it with American journalists and urged them to publish it to gain an electoral advantage. But this campaign was not Donald Trump's; it was Hillary Clinton's.

And, awareness of this activity doesn't require you to spin conspiracy theories about what may or may not have been said during some seemingly innocuous conversation. In this case, you have open admissions about how these Russian/Kremlin claims were used.

Indeed, you have the words of Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, in his opening statement at last week's public hearing on so-called "Russia-gate." Schiff's seamless 15-minute narrative of the Trump campaign's alleged collaboration with Russia followed the script prepared by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele who was hired as an opposition researcher last June to dig up derogatory information on Donald Trump.

Steele, who had worked for Britain's MI-6 in Russia, said he tapped into ex-colleagues and unnamed sources inside Russia, including leadership figures in the Kremlin, to piece together a series of sensational reports that became the basis of the current congressional and FBI investigations into Trump's alleged ties to Moscow.

Since he was not able to go to Russia himself, Steele based his reports mostly on multiple hearsay from anonymous Russians who claim to have heard some information from their government contacts before passing it on to Steele's associates who then gave it to Steele who compiled this mix of rumors and alleged inside dope into "raw" intelligence reports.

Lewd Allegations

Besides the anonymous sourcing and the sources' financial incentives to dig up dirt, Steele's reports had numerous other problems, including the inability of a variety of investigators to confirm key elements, such as the salacious claim that several years ago Russian intelligence operatives secretly videotaped Trump having prostitutes urinate on him while he lay in the same bed in Moscow's Ritz-Carlton used by President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama.

That tantalizing tidbit was included in Steele's opening report to his new clients, dated June 20, 2016. Apparently, it proved irresistible in whetting the appetite of Clinton's mysterious benefactors who were financing Steele's dirt digging and who have kept their identities (and the amounts paid) hidden. Also in that first report were the basic outlines of what has become the scandal that is now threatening the survival of Trump's embattled presidency.

But Steele's June report also reflected the telephone-tag aspects of these allegations: "Speaking to a trusted compatriot in June 2016 sources A and B, a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure and a former top level Russian intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin respectively, the Russian authorities had been cultivating and supporting US Republican presidential candidate, Donald TRUMP for a least 5 years.

"Source B asserted that the TRUMP operation was both supported and directed by Russian President Vladimir PUTIN. Its aim was to sow discord and disunity both within the US itself, but more especially within the Transatlantic alliance which was viewed as inimical to Russia's interests. … In terms of specifics, Source A confided that the Kremlin had been feeding TRUMP and his team valuable intelligence on his opponents, including Democratic presidential candidate Hillary CLINTON, for several years. …

"The Kremlin's cultivation operation on TRUMP also had comprised offering him various lucrative real estate development business deals in Russia, especially in relation to the ongoing 2018 World Cup soccer tournament. However, so far, for reasons unknown, TRUMP had not taken up any of these."

Besides the anonymous and hearsay quality of the allegations, there are obvious logical problems, especially the point that five years ago, you could have gotten astronomical odds about Trump's chances to win the U.S. presidency, although perhaps there is more an astrological explanation. Maybe the seemingly logical Putin went to some stargazing soothsayer to see the future.

There also may have been a more mundane reason why Trump's hotel deal fell through. A source familiar with those negotiations told me that Trump had hoped to get a half interest in the $2 billion project but that Russian-Israeli investor Mikhail Fridman, a founder of Russia's Alfa Bank, balked because Trump was unwilling to commit a significant investment beyond the branding value of the Trump name.

Yet, one would assume that if the supposedly all-powerful Putin wanted to give a $1 billion or so payoff to his golden boy, Donald Trump, whom Putin just knew would become President in five years, the deal would have happened.

Whetting the Appetite

Despite the dubious quality of Steele's second- and third-hand information, the June report appears to have won the breathless attention of Team Clinton. And once the bait was taken, Steele continued to produce his conspiracy-laden reports, totaling at least 17 through Dec. 13, 2016.

The reports not only captivated the Clinton political operatives but influenced the assessments of Obama's appointees in the U.S. intelligence community. In the last weeks of the Obama administration, I was told that the outgoing intelligence chiefs had found no evidence to verify Steele's claims but nevertheless believed them to be true.

Still, a careful analysis of Steele's reports would have discovered not only apparent factual inaccuracies, such as putting Trump lawyer Michael Cohen at a meeting with a Russian official in Prague (when Cohen says he's never been to Prague), but also the sort of broad conspiracy-mongering that the mainstream U.S. news media usually loves to ridicule.

For instance, Steele's reports pin a range of U.S. political attitudes on Russian manipulation rather than the notion that Americans can reach reasonable conclusions on their own. In one report dated Sept. 14, 2016, Steele claimed that an unnamed senior official in President Vladimir Putin's Presidential Administration (or PA) explained how Putin used the alleged Russian influence operation to generate opposition to Obama's Pacific trade deals.

Steele wrote that Putin's intention was "pushing candidate CLINTON away from President OBAMA's policies. The best example of this was that both candidates [Clinton and Trump] now openly opposed the draft trade agreements, TPP and TTIP, which were assessed by Moscow as detrimental to Russian interests."

In other words, the Russians supposedly intervened in the U.S. presidential campaign to turn the leading candidates against Obama's trade deals. But how credible is that? Are we to believe that American politicians running the gamut from Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren through former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to President Donald Trump have all been tricked by the Kremlin to oppose those controversial trade deals, which are also broadly unpopular with the American people who are sick and tired of trade agreements that cost them jobs?

Steele's investigative dossier suggests that we can't really think for ourselves. We are all Putin's puppets.

Greater Skepticism?

Normally, such a ludicrous claim along with the haziness of the sourcing would demand greater skepticism about the rest of Steele's feverish charges, but a curious aspect of the investigations into Russia's alleged "meddling" in Election 2016 is that neither Steele nor the "oppo research" company, Fusion GPS, that hired him reportedly with funding from Clinton allies has been summoned to testify.

Usually, official investigations begin with testimony from the people who are making the allegations, so their credibility and motives can be tested in an adversarial setting. Plus, some baseline information should be established: Who, for instance, paid for the contract? How much was the total and how much went to Steele? How much did Steele then pay his Russian contacts and did they, in turn, pay the alleged Russian insiders for information? Or are we supposed to believe that these "insiders" risked being identified as spies out of a commitment to the truth?

None of these answers would necessarily discredit the information, but they could provide important context as to whether this "oppo" team had a financial motive to sex-up the reports to keep Clinton's friends coming back for more. Arguably the funders of this "oppo" research should be called to testify as well regarding whether they would have kept ponying up more money if Steele's reports had concluded that there were no meaningful contacts between Trump's people and the Russians. Were they seeking the truth or just dirt to help Hillary Clinton win?

Since last November's election, Steele has ducked public inquiries and Glenn Simpson, the former Wall Street Journal journalist who heads Fusion GPS, has refused to divulge who hired his firm or answer other relevant questions. That means we still don't know which Clinton friends paid for the dirt and how much money was given to subcontractors like Steele and his Russian associates. (One source told me it may have totaled around $1 million.)

According to various press reports, Fusion GPS first worked for a Republican opponent of Trump's, but then switched over to the Clinton side after Trump won the Republican race. With Steele generating his reports every few days or every few weeks, people close to Clinton's campaign saw the Russia allegations as a potential game-changer. They reached out to reporters to persuade them to publish Steele's allegations even if they could not be verified.

Before the election, a longtime Clinton operative briefed me on aspects of Steele's investigation, including the "golden shower" allegations, and urged me to at least publish the accusations as a rumor citing the fact that some major news organizations were looking into the charges, an offer that I declined.

In a different setting when Gov. Bill Clinton was seeking the presidency and Republican "oppo" researchers were pushing various wild and salacious allegations about him the Clinton team dismissed such claims and the motivations of the people behind them as "cash for trash."

Following the Storyline

Yet, Schiff's opening statement at the hearing on March 20 relied heavily on Steele's narrative and the supposed credibility of the ex-British spy and his anonymous Russian sources, even to the point of naming Americans who presumably joined in a scheme to collaborate with the Russians to help rig the U.S. election, an act that some commenters have compared to treason.

The California Democrat said, "Russian sources tell [Steele] that [Carter] Page [a Trump foreign policy adviser who made a public trip to Russia in early July 2016] also had a secret meeting with Igor Sechin, CEO of Russian gas giant Rosneft. … According to Steele's Russian sources, Page is offered brokerage fees by Sechin on a deal involving a 19 percent share of the company."

These "Russian sources" also tell Steele, according to Schiff, that "the Trump campaign is offered documents damaging to Hillary Clinton, which the Russians would publish through an outlet that gives them deniability, like Wikileaks. The hacked documents would be in exchange for a Trump Administration policy that de-emphasizes Russia's invasion of Ukraine and instead focuses on criticizing NATO countries for not paying their fare share."

Schiff continued: "Is it a coincidence that the Russian gas company Rosneft sold a 19 percent share after former British Intelligence Officer Steele was told by Russian sources that Carter Page was offered fees on a deal of just that size? Is it a coincidence that Steele's Russian sources also affirmed that Russia had stolen documents hurtful to Secretary Clinton that it would utilize in exchange for pro-Russian policies that would later come to pass?"

However, is it also not possible that Steele and his profit-making colleagues made their reports conform to details that already were known or that they had reason to believe would occur, in other words, to match up their claims with independently known facts to give them greater credibility? That is a classic way for conmen to establish "credibility" with marks who are either gullible or simply want to believe.

Also, clever prosecutors in presenting a "circumstantial case" as Schiff was doing on March 20 can make innocent coincidences look suspicious. For instance, though Trump's resistance to escalating tensions with Russia were well known through the primary campaign, Schiff made a big deal out of the fact that Trump's people opposed a plank in the Republican platform that called for shipping lethal military supplies to Ukraine for the government's war against ethnic Russian rebels in the east. Schiff presents that as the quo for the quid of the Russians supplying purloined emails from the Democratic National Committee to WikiLeaks (although WikiLeaks denies getting the emails from the Russians).

In his opening statement, Schiff said: "In the middle of July, Paul Manafort, the Trump campaign manager and someone who was long on the payroll of pro-Russian Ukrainian interests, attends the Republican Party convention. Carter Page, back from [a business meeting in] Moscow, also attends the convention.

"According to Steele, it was Manafort who chose Page to serve as a go-between for the Trump campaign and Russian interests. [Russian] Ambassador [Sergey] Kislyak, who presides over a Russian embassy in which diplomatic personnel would later be expelled as likely spies, also attends the Republican Party convention and meets with Carter Page and additional Trump Advisors J.D. Gordon and Walid Phares. It was J.D. Gordon who approved Page's trip to Moscow.

"Ambassador Kislyak also meets with Trump campaign national security chair and now Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Sessions would later deny meeting with Russian officials during his Senate confirmation hearing. Just prior to the convention, the Republican Party platform is changed, removing a section that supports the provision of lethal defensive weapons' to Ukraine, an action that would be contrary to Russian interests.

"Manafort categorically denies involvement by the Trump campaign in altering the platform. But the Republican Party delegate who offered the language in support of providing defensive weapons to Ukraine states that it was removed at the insistence of the Trump campaign. Later, J.D. Gordon admits opposing the inclusion of the provision at the time it was being debated and prior to its being removed."

Problems with the Conspiracy

So, not only is Schiff relying on Steele to provide key links in the conspiracy chain but Schiff ignores the surrounding reality that Trump had long opposed the idea of escalating the confrontation with Russia in Ukraine as, by the way, did President Obama who resisted pressure to send lethal military hardware to Ukraine.

Plus, Schiff ignores other logical points, including that party platforms are essentially meaningless and that the savvy Putin would not likely take the huge risk of offending the odds-on winner of the presidential race, Hillary Clinton, for something as pointless as a word change in the GOP platform.

There is also the point that if Trump were a true "Manchurian candidate," he would have taken the more politically popular position of bashing Russia during the campaign and only reverse course after he got into the White House. That's how the scheme is supposed to work. (And, of course, all embassies including American ones have spies assigned to them, so there is nothing unusual about Ambassador Kislyak presiding at an embassy with spies.)

Other independent-minded journalists have noted various chronological problems with Steele's narrative, such as Marcy Wheeler at her emptywheel.net Web site.

In other words, there are huge holes in both the evidence and the logic of Schiff's conspiracy theory. But you wouldn't know that from watching and reading the fawning commentary about Schiff's presentation in the mainstream U.S. news media, which has been almost universally hostile to Trump (which is not to say that there aren't sound reasons to consider the narcissistic, poorly prepared Trump to be unfit to serve as President of the United States).

The journalistic problem is that everyone deserves to get a fair shot from reporters who are supposed to be objective and fair regardless of a person's popularity or notoriety or what the reporter may personally feel. That standard should apply to everyone, whether you're a foreign leader despised by the U.S. government or a politician detested for your obnoxious behavior.

There is no professional justification for journalists joining in a TV-and-print lynch mob. We also have seen too often where such wrongheaded attitudes lead, such as to the groupthink that Iraq's hated dictator Saddam Hussein was hiding WMDs, or in an earlier time to the McCarthyism that destroyed the lives of Americans who were smeared as unpatriotic because of their dissident political views.

So, yes, even Donald Trump deserves not to be railroaded by a mainstream media that wants desperately along with other powerful forces in Official Washington to see him run out of town on a rail and will use any pretext to do so, even if it means escalating the risks of a nuclear war with Russia.

And, if mainstream media commentators truly want a thorough and independent investigation, they should be demanding that it start by summoning the people who first made the allegations.

Quote:Last week, I published two posts on cyber security firm CrowdStrike after becoming aware of inaccuracies in one of its key reports used to bolster the claim that operatives of the Russian government had hacked into the DNC. This is extremely important since the DNC hired CrowdStrike to look into its hack, and at the same time denied FBI access to its servers.

Before reading any further, you should read last week's articles if you missed them the first time.

Credibility of Cyber Firm that Claimed Russia Hacked the DNC Comes Under Serious Question

What is CrowdStrike? Firm Hired by DNC has Ties to Hillary Clinton, a Ukrainian Billionaire and Google

Now here are the latest developments courtesy of Voice of America:


U.S. cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike has revised and retracted statements it used to buttress claims of Russian hacking during last year's American presidential election campaign. The shift followed a VOA report that the company misrepresented data published by an influential British think tank.

In December, CrowdStrike said it found evidence that Russians hacked into a Ukrainian artillery app, contributing to heavy losses of howitzers in Ukraine's war with pro-Russian separatists.

VOA reported Tuesday that the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), which publishes an annual reference estimating the strength of world armed forces, disavowed the CrowdStrike report and said it had never been contacted by the company.

CrowdStrike was first to link hacks of Democratic Party computers to Russian actors last year, but some cybersecurity experts have questioned its evidence. The company has come under fire from some Republicans who say charges of Kremlin meddling in the election are overblown.

After CrowdStrike released its Ukraine report, company co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch claimed it provided added evidence of Russian election interference. In both hacks, he said, the company found malware used by "Fancy Bear," a group with ties to Russian intelligence agencies.

CrowdStrike's claims of heavy Ukrainian artillery losses were widely circulated in U.S. media.

On Thursday, CrowdStrike walked back key parts of its Ukraine report.

The company removed language that said Ukraine's artillery lost 80 percent of the Soviet-era D-30 howitzers, which used aiming software that purportedly was hacked. Instead, the revised report cites figures of 15 to 20 percent losses in combat operations, attributing the figures to IISS.

Finally, CrowdStrike deleted a statement saying "deployment of this malware-infected application may have contributed to the high-loss nature of this platform" meaning the howitzers and excised a link sourcing its IISS data to a blogger in Russia-occupied Crimea.

In an email, CrowdStrike spokeswoman Ilina Dmitrova said the new estimates of Ukrainian artillery losses resulted from conversations with Henry Boyd, an IISS research associate for defense and military analysis. She declined to say what prompted the contact.

Dmitrova noted that the FBI and the U.S. intelligence community have also concluded that Russia was behind the hacks of the Democratic National Committee, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the email account of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign manager.

Here's the problem. Yes, the FBI has agreed with CrowdStrike's conclusion, but the FBI did not analyze the DNC servers because the DNC specifically denied the FBI access. This was noteworthy in its own right, but it takes on vastly increased significance given the serious errors in a related hacking report produced by the company.

As such, serious questions need to be asked. Why did FBI head James Comey outsource his job to CrowdStrike, and why did he heap praise on the company? For instance, back in January, Comey referred to CrowdStrike as a "highly respected private company."

In a hearing with the Senate Intelligence Committee Tuesday afternoon outlining the intelligence agencies' findings on Russian election interference, Comey said there were "multiple requests at different levels" for access to the Democratic servers, but that ultimately a "highly respected private company" was granted access and shared its findings with the FBI.

Where does all this respect come from considering how badly it botched the Ukraine report?

Something stinks here, and the FBI needs to be held to account.