Quote:For all the talk of obstruction and interference by the Trump camp, it's neither Donald Trump Jr. nor Paul Manafort who are challenging their scheduled testimony in the Senate next Wednesday, but rather the man who according to many started the whole "Trump Russia collusion" narrative, who is doing everything in his power to avoid testifying next week.

http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/imageroot/2017/07/20/glenn%20simpson_0_0.jpg

On Friday, attorneys for Glenn Simpson, a former WSJ reporter who now runs the infamous Washington political intelligence firm Fusion GPS - best known for compiling the salacious "dossier" of unverified research about President Trump - told the Senate Judiciary Committee in a letter that their client was on vacation through July 31 and traveling abroad through August 3, and would be unavailable for next week's hearing. Perhaps for writers of opposition research fiction, vacations take precedence over being summoned to Congress.

As a reminder, Simpson's Fusion GPS is the firm which hired former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, and his London-based Orbis Business Intelligence, to conduct opposition research on then presidential candidate Donald Trump, resulting in a 35-page dossier that was widely shared in political and media circles during and after the 2016 election. Steele and Orbis are currently being sued in the U.S. and U.K. by Aleksej Gubarev, a Russian tech executive who says he was falsely accused in the dossier of hacking the Democratic National Committee's email systems.

McClatchy News recently reported that Steele filed new documents in that lawsuit. In one, dated May 18, Steele says that he was instructed by Fusion GPS to meet with reporters at various outlets in order to publicize some of the allegations made in the dossier. It has been widely known that Fusion GPS and Steele were in contact with reporters to discuss the dossier. It has been reported that rumors of the dossier were floating around in Washington, D.C. political and journalist circles for months prior to BuzzFeed's decision to publish it on Jan. 10.

Intelligence agencies made the existence of the dossier known to Trump in a January meeting. The dossier contains unverified, hyperbolic and in some cases, disproven, information about Trump's activities and engagement with Russians. It served as a the basis for many of the ongoing allegations of Trump camp collusion with Russia.

In any case, Simpson's attorneys asked that their client be excused from appearing, adding that allegations he had failed to register as a foreign agent were "nothing more than an effort to smear him." The lawyers also said that they were "profoundly disturbed" that the hearing had been expanded due to "partisan agendas" to include allegations of Russian meddling in the U.S. election and possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. The letter also said they were prepared to fight a subpoena and invoke Mr. Simpson's constitutional right not to give testimony if compelled to appear.

According to the WSJ, the letter explaining Simpson's refusal to appear cites his obligations to keep his client information confidential and his First Amendment right under the Constitution to engage in political speech and political activity, as well as his Fifth Amendment reight to refuse self-incriminating testimony, also known as the "I admit I am guilty" option.

His gambit did not work however, and late on Friday the Committee issued a subpoena to compel Simpson to testify next Wednesday.

Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley and the committee's top Democrat, Dianne Feinstein, in a joint statement said: "Glenn Simpson, through his attorney, has declined to voluntarily attend Wednesday's Judiciary Committee hearing regarding compliance with the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Therefore, a subpoena has been issued to compel his attendance. Simpson's attorney has asserted that his client will invoke his Fifth Amendment rights in response to the subpoena."

Yet while the vacation-challenged Simpson is afraid of revealing the true identity of his "client(s)" who commission the Trump smear piece, also on Wednesday appearing in the Senate will be Donald Trump Jr. and Paul Manafort, along with Russia sanctions activist and businessman Bill Browder. The Judiciary Committee said Messrs. Trump Jr. and Manafort are providing documents to the committee and are still negotiating the terms of their testimonies.

As the WSJ adds, in addition to the dossier compiled on Trump, Grassley has alleged that Simpson's firm has worked with a Russian-American lobbyist on a campaign against a package of Russian sanctions that was being considered by Congress. That lobbyist was present in a meeting in Trump Tower in June 2016 with the younger Mr. Trump. Grassley has raised questions about whether Simpson's firm should have registered as a foreign agent for its work on the Russia sanctions.

And while Simpson's attorney called those questions and allegations "nothing more than an effort to smear him and his firm", many are curious to find out just who it was that worked with Fusion GPS to launch the narrative that Trump's victory in the elections was the result of Kremlin interference.

Paul Rigby Wrote:A couple of notorious Russian pranksters called up Congresswoman Maxine Waters.

They pretended to be the phoning from the office of the "Prime Minister" of post-coup Ukraine, set up "official" phone contact, and spent approximately 20 minutes getting her to believe increasingly insane claims.

This proved a piece of cake:

[video=youtube_share;u2KZaD7hFSM]http://youtu.be/u2KZaD7hFSM[/video]

Quote:In Washington DC, post-electoral stress disorder has generated a hysteria still amply manifest after eight months: the "Russian candidate" impeachment campaign implies that any contact with any Russian by anyone with any connection to Donald Trump was ipso facto treasonous. The quality press is doing its valiant best to pursue this story, but it is a bit much to claim "collusion" a secret conspiracy given that, during the election campaign, Trump very publicly called on the Russians to hack and leak Hillary Clinton's missing emails. And it did not seem especially surprising when the latest target, Donald Trump Jr, promptly released all his emails to and from the Russians to confirm that he did indeed try to help his dad by finding dirt on the other guy. As for the other impeachment track underway, triggered by the ex-FBI director James Comey's accusation of attempted obstruction of justice, Comey's failure to accuse Trump until he was himself fired will make it easier for the Republicans who control the House to dismiss an otherwise plausible accusation as a naive error.

For all its vacuity, however, the hysteria is certainly understandable, because President Trump has defied all expectations by actually trying to do what he promised that he would try to do. But another reason is that the major cause of last November's electoral outcome has remained mostly unexplored, even un*discovered. That is not due to intellectual laziness, but rather reflects the refusal of almost all commentators to contend with the political economy that determined the outcome of the election. Long-term processes of income redistribution from working people to everyone else, non-working welfare recipients as well as the very rich, had been evident for at least two decades. (I explored the phenomenon in my book The Endangered American Dream, 1993.) Those changes called for a painful party realignment (which would have cost the Democrats their ample Wall Street funding) that never happened not even when Bernie Sanders arrived to be its instrument. The Democratic Party officials and leading lights of the media elite who helped to deny the nomination to Sanders, and thus very likely the White House, understandably have a guilty conscience, because they truly did everything possible to stop him, including ever so discreet anti-Semitic messaging very precisely aimed at black voters wavering in their pre-ordained fealty to Hillary Clinton.

As it was, of course, the victory of the Democratic establishment merely ensured the victory of the only Sanders counterpart on the Repub*lican side with whom Sanders differed sharply on almost everything except for the only thing that really mattered to both: the urgent need to mobilize government policies to increase American jobs and wages, in firm opposition to all the competing international and planetary priorities continuously proffered by elite Americans and their core institutions, along with Pope Francis and other leading figures.

In the dramatic crescendo of the 2016 elections that gave Trump to the United States and the world, very possibly for sixteen years (the President's re-election committee is already hard at work, while his daughter Ivanka Trump is duly apprenticed in the White House that, according to my sources, she means to occupy as America's first female President), none of the countless campaign reporters and commentators is on record as having noticed the car "affordability" statistics distributed in June 2016 via http://www.thecarconnection.com. Derived from very reliable Federal Reserve data, they depicted the awful predicament of almost half of all American households. Had journalists studied the numbers and pondered even briefly their implications, they could have determined a priori that only two candidates could win the Presidential election Sanders and Trump because none of the others even recognized that there was problem if median American households had been impoverished to the point that they could no longer afford a new car. This itself was remarkable because four wheels and an engine might as well be grafted to Homo americanus, who rarely lives within walking distance of his or her job, or even a proper food shop, who rarely has access to useful public transport, and for whom a recalcitrant ignition or anything else that prevents driving often means the loss of a day's earnings, as well as possibly crippling repair costs. But even that greatly understates the role of automobiles in the lives of the many Americans who do not have private jets and do not live in New York City or San Francisco, for whom a car provides not only truly essential transport, but also the intensely reassuring sense of freedom depicted in countless writings and films, which reflect the hard realities of labour-mobility imperatives even more than the romance of the open road.

Instead of recognizing that the political implications of the income redistribution of globalized capitalism made Sanders and Trump the only two valid candidates, the leading commentators did the very opposite: they asserted in tones of unassailable certainty that both men were irremediably unelectable. That was, admittedly, a perfectly reasonable conclusion, given that neither happened to have a party to support them, which was then still considered the presumed prerequisite of electoral victories. And it was also true enough that Sanders could not hope for party support because of the professional contempt of with-it Democratic officials for the ageing socialist, who stubbornly failed to recognize the absolute centrality of identity politics in the third millennium, and who therefore persisted in talking of rich and poor, instead of African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, Aleuts, Asian-Americans, LGBT Americans, even white ones, if quietly.

That rejection was perfectly matched by the class contempt of respectable Republicans for the ageing Don Juan with his hopelessly vulgar blue-collar tastes, in everything from his hairstyle to his food. Anne Toulouse recognizes as much in her resolutely non-negative Dans la Tête de Donald Trump, whose own authentically feminine sensibility is openly on display when she writes, "arrive le Donald comme un bison dans la prairie, comme un taureau dans le rodéo, comme le shérif dans un western". Instead of dutifully pretending to enjoy the hot dog that is the unavoidable price of campaigning at state fairs, while actually longing for arugula, endives and quinoa salads, candidate Trump positively relished his frequent stops at Domino's, KFC and McDonald's, where he went for Big Macs with a large order of french fries. That was an offence almost up there with crotch-grabbing for foodie Republicans such as the widely cited David Frum, who persistently argued that it was better to have a very imperfect Clinton in the White House than an impossibly vulgar Trump. That was a view shared by almost all office-holders in past Republican administrations, whose loud "never Trump" proclamations now rigorously exclude them from the posts they were longing for during President Obama's eight years, resulting in the strange spectacle of empty quasi-ministerial offices all over Washington.

But this consensus was nullified by the insubstantial nature of the Republican Party, which is only a nominal entity, not an actual top-down organization, consisting as it does of amorphous clusters of adherents and office-holders in each county and state. Hence even the near-unanimity of prominent Republicans on Trump's non-electability, notably including the two previous Republican candidates, John McCain and Mitt Romney, had no perceptible influence on the outcomes of the State primaries. Bemused observers (and that is all that P. J. O'Rourke's How the Hell Did This Happen? has to offer, intermittently and feebly: humorous bem*usement) first witnessed the considerable success of Ben Carson, a black neuro*surgeon who had never before campaigned for anything, and whose especial popularity among conservatives exposed the prejudice of all those who continue to presume that conservative white Republicans must be racist.

Then came the very rapid decline of the nomination candidates most qualified for the presidency ex officio, because of their prior executive experience as state governors: the respected centrist John Kasich of Ohio; Jeb Bush of Florida, both affable and competent as well as reassuringly (for some) dynastic; the energetic Chris Christie of New Jersey; the Bible-belt favourite Mike Huckabee of Arkansas; the highly respectable Jim Gilmore of Virginia; the extremely effective Rick Perry of Texas; the hero of the anti-union Right Scott Walker of Wisconsin; the very able Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, who might attract other non-whites; and George Pataki of New York, whose own executive experience as the State governor ranged from the supervision of the New York City subways to the discretionary command of considerable army, air force and naval national guard forces, in addition to all the usual administrative categories. Even the least of these candidates was altogether better prepared for the White House than Trump and it did not matter a bit, because he had the political economy of the race just right (as did Sanders) while none of the governors was ready to steal his lines.

Next came the sequential defeat of two sitting senators, including Marco Rubio, not only good-looking and eloquent, but also the most obviously intelligent politician in the race on either side. None of these qualities could overcome Trump's inelegant repertoire of complaints, threats and insult, because Rubio too failed to contend with the political economy of the 2016 election.

That left Trump as the only man standing, who simply could not be denied the nomination that was widely expected to bring down Republican candidates all over the country, along with himself. As it was, Trump's march to victory also helped to elect Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, and two more Republican governors (raising their number to thirty-three, a record unmatched since 1922). The near-unanimity of the commentariat in forecasting the disastrous impact of candidate Trump on all other Republican candidacies in the House, Senate and in gubernatorial elections, chiefly because of his presumed inability to attract female voters, is one more colossal intellectual failure that remains unredeemed and is entirely unexplained in Susan Bordo's The Destruction of Hillary Clinton. Bordo, a professional feminist who teaches gender and women's studies at the University of Kentucky, blames Clinton's defeat entirely on misogyny, along with the electoral vote system, without recognizing the contrary implication of the victories of many other female candidates in the same election season.

Like many others, Bordo makes altogether too much of Clinton's victory in the popular vote, without recognizing that the Trump campaign's disciplined focus on winning the state-by-state electoral votes, the only ones that counted in the election, would have been redirected to win the popular vote if that had been the system. There were certainly many votes to be gained by campaigning in upstate California and New York, downstate Illinois and in the many other places where Trump was and is very popular, but given the system, his campaign wasted no efforts on those states.

It was the great misfortune of the Democrats that they did have a veritable organization in their Democratic National Committee, a top-down structure with a normal chain of command, which in the 2016 campaign was headed by the extremely determined Clinton loyalist Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and later by Donna Brazile, whose own especially intense loyalty reportedly compelled her to pass leaked television debate questions to her heroine, who duly came out with perfectly worded, instantaneous answers when the occasion arrived, while Sanders had to rely on his wits. Wasserman Schultz and then Brazile with their disciplined DNC teams devoted all the attention and all the money to Clinton, thereby disfavouring Sanders in spite of his remarkable primary victories, after altogether freezing out the candidacies of the former governors Martin O'Malley and Lincoln Chafee and of the former senator James Webb all of them theoretically equal claimants on DNC resources, along with Bernie Sanders, until nomination day.

Moreover, the Clintonites could even intervene to change the outcome of the primaries because of the remarkably undemocratic Democratic practice of unelected super-delegacies, 712 actual and former party officials amounting to some 15 per cent of total convention votes, alongside 4,051 properly elected delegates. The Republicans had no "super-delegates", nor any other device to dilute the power of the great unwashed in the selection of their candidate.

In theory, the super-delegates could have gone either way, but Sanders was lucky to get 44.5 of those votes as compared to Clinton's 570.4, because going against Clinton meant losing access to the river of money flowing from the many-headed Clinton money fountain, the enormously well-funded campaign proper, the Clinton Foundation with its vast array of generous funders, the for-profit Teneo advisory company, and the super-PACs established by Clinton sympathizers, who would cut off anyone who supported Sanders. It was a river of Amazonian proportions: in the final reckoning, filed at the end of January 2017, the Clinton campaign had spent some $1.4 billion (as compared to Trump's $948 million), and required yet more tribute from exasperated donors because only a measly $323,300 remained in hand to pay the millions in left-over bills (Trump still had $7.6 million with all bills paid).

The likes of Wasserman Schultz and Brazile remained entirely unswayed by the mounting accumulation of poll data that projected the relative electoral superiority of Sanders over Trump: politics is their profession in a perfectly Weberian sense, and a Bernie-led party would depend on trade union and individual contributions, without access to the big money that demands loyalty to ever-intensifying globalization, as well as to any donor-specific lobbying needs. In spite of the much-celebrated success of his innovative online fundraising, Sanders topped out at $240 million, not even a fifth of the Clinton total that paid the ample fees of a great many field operatives, pollsters and publicists, as well as entire teams of "strategists", including Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton's closest companion by far (Bill did not even come near).

That gathering of lean and hungry Clint*onians is the world mercilessly exposed in Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's doomed campaign by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes. Meticulously researched and strenuously un*biased, it is the most useful book published so far on the 2016 Presidential election as a whole, as well as the Clinton campaign specifically. It certainly convinced me that Clinton did not understand in what country she was running for election: not one populated by black women (they dominated her convention), environmental activists, patriotic Muslims, vegans, committed free-traders and social engineers, but chiefly a country of car owners and bitterly frustrated would-be new car owners, a far better categorization than Clinton's own "deplorables".

That is why the car affordability numbers revealed in June 2016 were so vastly significant in determining the outcome of the elections. Going by metropolitan areas, they extracted maximum affordable car prices from median incomes. The latter ranged from the stellar $87,210 of San Jose in the opulence of California's Silicon Valley, all the way down to the $24,701 of deindustrialized Cleveland, Ohio, numbers that in turn yielded maximum affordable price limits of $32,855 in San Jose, and $7,558 in Cleveland not actually the lowest number, which was Detroit's $6,174, owing to high average insurance costs in that crime-afflicted city (at $1,131.40 per annum, as compared to Cleveland's $659.47).

What made these seemingly obscure numbers nothing less than momentous was that the cheapest new car on sale in the United States in 2016 was the Nissan Versa sedan at $12,825, twice the level that average households could afford in Detroit or Cleveland, and more than average households could afford in cities ranging from Philadelphia, Orlando, Milwaukee, Memphis, Providence, New Orleans, Miami and Buffalo, as well as, a fortiori, in a very great number of smaller localities across the United States, even in high-income states such as California and Oregon, as well much more commonly in the lower-income Southern and rust-belt states.

The mass exclusion of Americans from new car ownership is the result of two converging phenomena, only one of which was recognized by Hillary Clinton, though scarcely emphasized in her identity-focused campaign: wage stag*nation. Sanders and Trump did not hesitate to blame that relative impoverishment on the exposure of the least agile of Americans to international competition, with the resulting de-industrialization that translated millions of Americans from $20-to-40-an-hour factory jobs to miserably paid service jobs. Beholden to the sanctity of free trade, the Clinton crowd even more than the candidate herself blamed the lethargy of the TV-watching, beer-drinking, gun-owning, church-going, and cigarette-smoking "deplorables", who unaccountably failed to avail themselves of the wonderful opportunity to leave boring assembly-line jobs or downright dangerous coal-face or oil drilling jobs to become fashion designers, foreign-exchange traders, software engineers, or even political campaign operatives.

It was the other phenomenon, the other blade of the scissors that cut off the possibility of new car ownership for more and more Americans that Trump squarely attacked as Sanders did not and could not: the regulatory regime that has been relentlessly forcing up new car prices from the 1977 average of $4,317, equivalent to $17,544 in 2016, to an actual average price today that exceeds $30,000. Those regulations prescribe that American cars must be very, very safe, and steadily more demanding safety requirements have been forcing up manufacturing costs: the latest addition is the provision of rear-view cameras in all cars that will be mandatory in 2018, the result of an Obama decree prompted by the campaign started by a wealthy driver who had suffered the tragedy of killing his own young daughter while reversing. Because of his suffering, and his energetic lobbying, and because of Barack Obama's enthusiasm for promulgating more regulatory decrees, in 2018 the additional cost of those rear-view cameras only a few hundred dollars will deprive thousands more households of the chance to buy a new car.

Also costly are the ever-more stringent fuel conservation norms and pollution restrictions that mandate pricy engine ancillaries, and that strongly favour inherently more expensive hybrid cars, as well as drastically more expensive all-electric cars. And both those purposes are much more costly to achieve than they could have been because they are subverted by the safety norms that prohibit the much lighter vehicles I happily drive in Japan, whose K-cars merrily drive up steep mountain roads in spite of their minuscule engines, and that also prohibit the several small cars sold in Europe for much less than the $12,825 of the cheapest US car.

What, one may ask, is wrong with the pursuit of automobile safety, fuel economy and pol*lution control? Only this: mandatory regulations that prohibit choices between better and cheaper cars force the average household in too many parts of the United States to drive second-hand, third-hand or simply very old cars that are drastically less safe, less fuel efficient and also more polluting than the prohibited cheaper new cars would be. Trump's position was and is entirely forthright: he opposes the regulation of economic activities in principle unless unquestionably and very urgently necessary, as the control of climate change is not depending on your definition of "urgent". That was the clearest choice of all between Trump and Clinton, whose stance implicitly favoured $60,000 Tesla cars for the sake of the environment, as well as solar and wind power of ever increasing efficiency to be sure, but still now more costly than coal or gas.

Historians tell us that Marie Antoinette never said that those who could not afford to eat bread could eat brioche instead but the regulatory restrictions that grew enormously under Obama, and that Clinton promised to increase even more (the luxuriously funded Sierra Club environmental agency gleefully anticipated the forthcoming demise of natural gas extraction in the wake of the destruction of coal mining), faithfully reflected the mentality of the French queen of legend: who wants to be a miner anyway? And never mind that the closing of a mine also destroys the value of the mining town's houses, the only wealth possessed by most miners. Then there was the mechanically repeated assertion that, in any case, it is the declining cost of natural gas that is killing off the coal industry. That might well be true in the future, but it is plainly not so in the present, because otherwise President Obama would not have dedicated his final months in office to a slew of new decrees calculated to increase costs and restrict production to finally strangle the industry. (Trump has already revoked most of them.)

What was true of coal mining is just as true of much else that also directly attacks the interests of the American working classes, a categor*ization revived by Sanders explicitly and by Trump substantively and it was the forty-fifth President's grim inaugural speech warning that he would not forget them or their pressing needs, as the cynical had confidently assumed he would (the ex-economist Paul Krugman wrote that particular column several times in the New York Times during the campaign), that triggered the vehement panic of the elite Americans who are now trying to drive Trump from office. For those pressing needs include the restriction of competing labour inflows, and ever so liberal Silicon Valley tycoons would be totally lost without their Mexican gardeners, Asian chefs, Filipino childminders, and assorted immigrant dog-walkers and cleaners, along with their Indian programmers under special visas. Even more intolerable for the elite is the fact that the needs of the American working classes also require the correction of certain chronic trade imbalances and the abolition of environmental and cognate regulations that excessively increase production costs, all of them very direct attacks against the current elite ideology.

What happens next depends on the fate of that other vector of the Trump strategy his $1.3 trillion infrastructure plan which a White House team is striving to convert into an actual programme that specifies what is to be built where, and with what sort of funding, whether public or private. If the resulting employment generation kicks in fully by 2020, Trump will coast to re-election, especially if by then he can claim that the Mexican border is "sealed", which will then result in his ordering the automatic legalization of all tax-paying and non-felonious illegal immigrants, giving him a chunk of the Hispanic vote as well, after decades of unfulfilled promises, including Obama's.

Even a developer very fond of fast food at its worst, and who enjoys boasting about his crotch-grabbing, is still a developer, who very naturally thinks in six-year blocks from site scoping to finance to design to construction and disposal, as opposed to the two-year horizon of American politics. That is why Trump registered his "Make America Great Again" slogan in 2010, six years in advance of his planned campaign, and why he is now focused not on the next mid-terms, but on the 2022 mid-terms, after his 2020 re-election, because it is only then that he can launch his daughter's candidacy, while serving his own last two years in office. In the meantime, he is securing his base by striving hard to keep his promises: withdrawal from the Paris agreement that the US Congress never voted on (Obama approved it with a decree that seemed secure under President Hillary), the Muslim entry restrictions, the "sealing" of the Mexican border that will make universal legalization acceptable, and above all, his sorely needed infrastructure programme that is now being prepared by wholesale deregulation at present, newly aggravated environmental rules almost exactly double road, bridge and tunnel construction costs as compared to France, in spite of its thirty-five-hour working week, and Japan, in spite of its extreme space restrictions.

As for Ivanka, in addition to her unique on-the-job training, lately pursued at the G20 meeting, in which she was a real participant, she is also preparing herself by carefully dif*fer*entiating her personal views on a number of electorally important issues from those of her beloved father who seems to accept her publicized dissents with paternal equanimity. No wonder that leading Democrats and non-Trumpers continue to act hysterically even eight months after the election. President Trump's plan threatens to exclude them all from office until long past their retirement age.

Quote:Have you ever seen a photograph of yourself from the past and laughed or grimaced at the way you were dressed or your hair style? It's a common experience. But few people draw the obvious conclusion about the present: that our present appearance might be equally laughable. The personal past seems to be "over there," an object to be understood and dissected for its meaning, while the present seems opaque and shape-shifting or just taken-for-granted okay. "That was then," says the internal voice, "but I am wiser now." Historical perspective, even about something as superficial as appearance, rarely illuminates the present, perhaps because it makes us feel ignorant and unfree.

This is even truer with political and social history.

In recent years there has been a spate of books and articles detailing the CIA's past Cold War cultural and political propaganda efforts, from the creation of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) with its string of magazines, to its collaboration with many famous writers and intellectuals, including Peter Matthiessen, George Plimpton, Richard Wright, Irving Kristol, et al., and its penetration and working relationships with so many publications and media outlets, including The New York Times, the Paris Review, Encounter, etc. These exposés show how vast was the CIA's propaganda network throughout the media and the world, and how many people participated in the dirty work.

Joel Whitney, in his recently published book, Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World's Best Writers (the word "tricked" ignores the eager accomplices), tells this scandalous story in illuminating detail. His account informs and nauseates simultaneously, as one learns how the CIA penetrated NGOs, television, universities, magazines, newspapers, book publishing, etc., finding willing collaborationists everywhere scoundrels eager to spy on and betray even their friends as they deceived the public worldwide; how well-meaning leftist writers such as Ernest Hemingway and Garcia Marquez were tricked into lending their names and work to propaganda publications; how leftists were set against leftists in an elaborate effort to sow paranoia and confusion that could be used to put the Soviet Union in the worst possible light; and how many front organizations were created to secretly funnel money to support these endeavors and make and break careers. The story makes your skin crawl.

But that was then. What about now? Whitney doesn't say, presumably because he doesn't know; doesn't have documentary evidence to name names. This is not a criticism. He does say that "we understand vaguely that our media are linked to our government still today, and to government's stated foreign policy," and he wonders if the ideology that drove the CIA's past endeavors "remains with us. (I am reminded of Emerson's words: "What you do (or don't) speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say."). Despite his use of tepid language about the present, especially that word "vaguely," it seems that Whitney thinks similar propaganda activities are going on today, which is why a blurb for Finks at his publisher's website (OR Books) and at amazon.com by James Risen of the New York Times, who has written two books about the CIA, strikes such an odd note. It reads:

It may be difficult to believe that the American intellectual elite was once deeply embedded with the CIA. But with Finks, Joel Whitney vividly brings to life the early days of the Cold War, when the CIA's Ivy League ties were strong, and key American literary figures were willing to secretly do the bidding of the nation's spymasters.

"Difficult to believe." For whom?

"Once." When? In the bad old days?

"When the CIA's Ivy League ties were strong." Does the CIA now recruit from community colleges?

Are these the good old days? Such language usage makes one wonder: is it just a quickly scribbled blurb or carefully chosen words?

The Future is Now

No doubt the archives and sealed documents will be pried loose through repeated FOIA requests in thirty or forty years and the moans and groans about today's bad old days will fill the air. How could they have done such things? It's just outrageous! But that was then, not now. It's different now; we are older but wiser.

It's hard to suppress a sardonic laugh, so I won't. Today we are obviously drowning in CIA propaganda throughout the corporate mainstream media, and in the alternative online media as well. One has only to see "what they do, or don't." The documentation is in the doing, and it doesn't take a genius to grasp how blatant it is. It is in no way "vague." But it does take good faith, and a passion for truth, which is sorely lacking. Why this is so is a key issue I will return to.

As in the past, some propaganda is obvious and other subtler and indirect. Yet it is relentless. There may or may not be a comparable Congress for Cultural Freedom today, but with advanced technology and the internet, it may not be needed. Methods may change; intentions remain the same. What was once done surreptitiously is now done blatantly, as I wrote in January: the deep state has gone shallow. Fifty years ago the CIA coined the term "conspiracy theory" as a weapon to be used to dismiss the truths expressed by critics of its murder of President Kennedy, and those of Malcom X, MLK, and RFK. All the media echoed the CIA line. While they still use the term to dismiss and denounce, their control of the MSM is so complete today that every evil government action is immediately seconded, whether it be the lies about the Attacks of September 11, 2001, the wars against Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, etc., the coup in Ukraine, the downing of the Malaysian jetliner there, drone murders, the looting of the American people by the elites, alleged sarin gas attacks in Syria, the anti-Russia bashing everything. The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, NPR, etc. all are stenographers for the deep state.

Denying Existential Freedom

One of the first things an authoritarian governing elite must do is to convince people that they are not free. This has been going on for at least forty years, ever since the Church Committee's revelations about the CIA in the mid-seventies, including its mind-control programs. Everyone was appalled at the epiphany, so a different tactic was employed. Just have "experts," social, psychological, and biological "scientists," repeat ad infinitum that there is no longer any mind control since we now know there is no mind; it is an illusion, and it all comes down to the brain. Biology is destiny, except in culturally diversionary ways in which freedom to choose is extolled e.g. the latest fashions, gender identity, the best hair style, etc. Create and lavishly fund programs for the study of the brain, while supporting and promoting a vast expansion of pharmaceutical drugs to control people. Do this in the name of helping people with their emotional and behavioral problems that are rooted in their biology and are beyond their control. And create criteria to convince people that they are sick.

We have been told interminably that our lives revolve around our brains (our bodies) and that the answers to our problems lie with more brain research, drugs, genetic testing, etc. It is not coincidental that the U. S. government declared the 1990s the decade of brain research, followed up with 2000-2010 as the decade of the behavior project, and our present decade being devoted to mapping the brain and artificial intelligence, organized by the Office of Science and Technology Project and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. How convenient! George H. W. Bush, Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama, Trump what a difference! But this is science and the welfare of the world. Science for idiots.

Drip by drip, here and there, articles, books, media reports have reiterated that people are "determined" by biological, genetic, social, and psychological forces over which they have no control. To assert that people are free in the Satrean sense (en soir, condemned to freedom, or free will) has come to be seen as the belief of a delusional fool living in the past , a bad philosopher, an anti-scientist, a poorly informed religionist, one nostalgic for existential cafes, Gauloises, and black berets, but being totally out of it. One who doesn't grasp the truth since he doesn't read the New York Times or watch CBS television.

The conventional propaganda I almost said wisdom created through decades-long media and academic (don't forget the pathetic academy) repetition, is that we are not free. Let me repeat: we are not free.

Investigator reporter John Rappoport has consistently exposed the propaganda involved in the creation and expansion of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) with its pseudo-scientific falsehoods and collusion between psychiatrists and the pharmaceutical industry. As he correctly notes, the CIA's MKULTRA mind-control program has morphed into modern psychiatry, both with the same objectives of disabling and controlling people by convincing them that they are not free and are in need of a chemical brain bath.

Can anyone with an awareness of this history doubt there is a hidden hand behind this development? Once you have convinced people that they are not free in the most profound sense, the rest is child's play. Convinced that they are puppets, they become puppets to be played. Who would want to get people to believe they were not free?

Terrified to See the Current Truth?

There are many excellent writers who, because they are truth seekers, have used logical analysis to deconstruct the patent propaganda of deep state forces and their media scribes. They do so through close reading (a skill once taught in schools) and historical knowledge without waiting for documentation, though sometimes it arrives from sources such as Wikileaks, FOIA requests, or government leakers like Edward Snowden or Chelsey Manning. While not always definitive, many of these analyses clearly raise disturbing questions that give the lie to the presstitutes' claims of innocent objectivity. Their arguments are laid bare so the CIA's and deep-state's handiwork shines through. Robert Parry, Michel Chossudovsky, Paul Craig Roberts, John Pilger, James Petras, David Ray Griffin, Graeme MacQueen and many others have so demolished the propaganda that the question of why so many liberals and left-leaning people still refuse to accept the obvious echoes in the ears of those familiar with the Congress for Cultural Freedom's machinations to set leftists and liberals against each other through media manipulation. While left and right-wing disinformation collaborationists are everywhere and the CIA obviously has its people placed throughout the cultural and media landscape, it is clear to me that there is something else involved.

So much of the ongoing propaganda travels under the banner of "the war on terror," which is, of course, an outgrowth of the attacks of September 11, 2001, appropriately named and constantly reinforced as 9/11 in a wonderful example of linguistic mind-control: a constant emergency to engender anxiety, depression, panic, and confusion, four of the symptoms that lead the DSM "experts" and their followers to diagnose and drug individuals. The term 9/11 was first used in the New York Times on September 12, 2001 by Bill Keller, the future Times' editor.

Douglas Valentine, a true expert on the CIA and author of The CIA as Organized Crime and The Phoenix Program, has shown that the CIA's highly structured assassination program in Vietnam the Phoenix Program is the template for "the war on terror." In other books he has shown how the CIA's role in drug trafficking is directly linked to the massive increased usage of heroin and other street drugs, another face of the drugging of the country. Thus the "institutional" structure and consequent practices of one of the most ruthless propaganda and terrorist organizations of the United States' deep-state (the Phoenix program) continues to this day here and abroad. To think that the Agency's handiwork once carried on under the banner of the Committee for Cultural Freedom does not continue today would take extreme naïveté, the inability to reason, historical ignorance, plain bad faith, or a combination thereof.

Which brings me back to the issue of why so many "liberal" Democrats those whose bibles are the New York Times, NPR, The Washington Post, Democracy Now, etc. can only see propaganda when they can attribute it to Donald Trump or the Russians. Why has this group, together with their Republican and conservative fellow travelers, embraced a new McCarthyism and allied itself with the deep-state forces that they were once allegedly appalled by? It surely isn't the policies of the Trump administration or his bloviating personality, for these liberals allied themselves with Obama's anti-Russian rhetoric, his support for the U.S. orchestrated neo-fascist Ukrainian coup, his destruction of Libya, his wars of aggression across the Middle East, his war on terror, his trillion dollar nuclear weapons modernization, his enjoyment of drone killing, his support for the coup in Honduras, his embrace of the CIA and his CIA Director John Brennan, his prosecution of whistle-blowers, etc. The same media that served the CIA so admirably over the decades became the media that became liberals' paragons of truth. Why?

Let me try to answer by referring to two articles that appeared side-by-side in The New York Times Magazine for May 28, 2017. Their content, style, and juxtaposition suggest an answer to the schizoid subtleties of master manipulators, and how cultural/political propaganda works in oblique ways off the front pages.

The cover story for that issue, "Aleppo After the Fall," accompanied by the words "Life And Loss Amid The Ruins of Syria's Fractious And Devastating Civil War" and a photo of a demolished Aleppo district, sets the tone, especially the lie in the words "civil war." The war was started under President Obama in March 2011 by the United States/NATO/Israel with the arming of Islamist "freedom fighters" in an effort to overthrow President Bashar al Assad. But the Sunday morning Times reader is immediately told otherwise, as they have been for the past six years of carnage. Most probably don't notice the deception as they flip to the table of contents where they see a photo of cream puffs and coffee.

As they sip their morning coffee and think about cream puffs, let's imagine our readers turning to the first major story preceding the Aleppo piece by Robert F. Worth, a contributing writer for the magazine. It is an article titled "Empire of Dust" by Molly Young, also a contributing writer. It is a title that suggests further disintegration of a most serious nature (no, not the American Empire), yet it is an article about Amanda Chantal Bacon and the rise of the wellness industry. A photo of this "beatific" 34 year old entrepreneurial guru in a flowing white gown in a half-lotus position, seated on a marble kitchen countertop surrounded by some "magical" rocks, takes up an entire page. The photo, a Barthian signifier if ever there were one, is clearly meant to be deciphered by the Times' clientele for secrets to the beautiful, luxurious, and peaceful life due to one of means and exquisite taste, one who will spend five dollars on a newspaper and live a balanced, Epicurean life of self-care and sophistication. Bacon's massive light-filled kitchen with its marble countertops a sine qua non of today's "good life" serves the usual elitist function of drawing in readers with a discerning, moneyed eye.

Alternately fawning and critical, Young begins by telling the reader, "The amount of time I waste finding and consuming alternative-medicine supplements for brain function' has made me at least 10 percent dumber, and that paradox is not lost on me. It was that impulse that made me pause last year at a fancy store in Brooklyn when I spotted a glass jar labeled Brain Dust'." From there Young takes us to Los Angeles, where she interviews the lifestyle guru Bacon, and we hear about Spirit Dust, Beauty Dust, Sex Dust, vaginal steaming, spirit truffles, and sunbathing the vagina, and to the Hamptons where she again spots Brain Dust in an expensive store that also sells "boeuf-bourguignon-flavored dog biscuits." Young, having traversed the golden triangle Brooklyn, L.A., and the Hamptons tells us how Bacon captures her imagination even as she "was ashamed of its capture." She drinks Power Dusted coffee with the Moon Juice founder who tells her, "I was told growing up in NYC that I had learning disabilities and mental illness. That was all the rage in the 90s." (Presumably they are raging no longer.) After offering mild criticisms' and writing that after visiting Bacon's house she "wanted to move to California and eat bee pollen," Young covertly orders bee pollen from her phone and ends by telling us that the Moon Juice bee pollen she has ordered "would arrive in two to four business days." The reader is left to wonder who is dumber or smarter despite or because of the Brain Dust.

But if one is feeling brain dead, one can move or jump-cut to the next article, a piece of cosmopolitan gravitas meant to clarify who are the good guys and who the bad in the Middle East, specifically Syria.

Turning to this article on Aleppo, a juxtaposing of pornographic proportions, one is greeted with a two page photo of totally destroyed buildings in front of which walk a woman pushing a toddler in a stroller and a man pushing another toddler in a makeshift wooden cart covered in plastic sheeting. One flips from "Sex Dust" to disgust and heartbreak in a page turn. The reader is walked step-by-step into a piece of political propaganda, as Robert Worth tells us that "The Syrian tragedy started in a moment of deceptive simplicity, when the peaceful protesters of the 2011 Arab Spring seemed destined to inherit the future." This deception is then quickly followed with the claim that Assad used "chemical weapons in the town of Khan Sheikhoun in early April," an assertion backed by no evidence and clearly refuted by Seymour Hersh, among others. Worth tells us that "the Syrian regime (note the sly use of the word regime, a staple of linguistic mind-control) and its Russian allies repeatedly bombed hospitals and civilian areas," and that in the United States such actions were "widely deplored as a war crime comparable to the worst massacres of the Bosnian war during the 1990s." One has to give credit to Worth for a masterful double-deception here, first by accusing the Syrians and Russians but not the United States of repeatedly bombing hospitals and civilian areas, and then segueing to the "Bosnian" war with nary a mention of the U.S./NATO conspiracy to dismantle Yugoslavia through proxies and the subsequent massive bombing of Serbia and Serbian civilians that were clearly war crimes committed by the liberal saint, Bill Clinton. Throughout this piece Worth repeatedly accuses the Assad government of war crimes and atrocities while whitewashing the United States. Immediately following his assertion of Syrian war crimes, he tells the Sunday Times' readers that " the State Department released satellite photographs suggesting that the regime is burning the bodies of executed prisoners in a crematory at the Sednaya prison complex, north of Damascus, in an alleged effort to hide evidence." This claim is based on a totally discredited claim made in February 2017 by Amnesty International, and Worth, knowing that there is no evidence for this, cagily uses the words "suggesting" and "alleged." But juxtaposed with the war crimes assertions, only a careful reader searching for truth would notice the trick, surely not a Time Magazine reader already predisposed by the daily Times's constant flow of government lies. Quoting a speech by Assad in which he claimed there was a "huge conspiracy" to dismantle and destroy Syria, Worth dismissively rejects this obvious truth by quoting an anonymous former regime official (a common tactic) who says he was shocked by the speech. If Assad had given a different speech, Worth notes, "the past six years would have unrolled very differently, and oceans of blood might have been spared." This is the imperial mindset at its finest, all rolled into an extensive New York Times Magazine article meant to enlighten and inform its alleged sophisticated readers.

Stylish Substance Abuse

What I am suggesting with these magazine examples is that the old trick perfected by the Congress for Cultural Freedom to juxtapose cultural pieces with political ones is alive and well today, even if the CCF or its equivalent doesn't exist, since it isn't needed. Illiteracy has become the norm and stupidity the rule as the electronic revolution has destroyed people's ability to concentrate or stay focused long enough to realize they are being taken for a ride by propagandists and that they are being purposely overloaded with information meant to create a felt need for "Brain Dust." This has been going on for so long that to admit one is still being taken for a ride is equivalent to admitting to gullibility so profound that it must be denied. It is one thing criticize the politicians you hate George W. Bush and Donald Trump for liberal Democrats and Bill Clinton and Obama for conservative Republicans and to call them liars; but to contemplate the fact that the CIA has been lying to you through all these mouthpieces and your vaunted news sources are stenographers for the intelligence agencies is too much reality to bear. "I might have looked funny in that old photograph, but today I am with it and stylish."

Sure.

Everything has become style today, and no doubt the CIA has learned that the trick is to hide truthful substance behind the style. Evidence is beside the point. Just assert things in a slick style. Assert them repeatedly, even when they have been proven false or fraudulent. Sex Dust and Power Dust may be absurd con jobs, but they sell. They meet a "need," a need created by the society that has slyly equated power with sex for a population that has been convinced they have neither and need drugs to endow them with both. A piece about Brain Dust may not have the drawing power of a Paris Review interview with Ernest Hemingway or Boris Pasternak, but then there were no "lifestyle gurus" in those days when people read real literature, not today's New York Times best sellers. Propaganda was more literary in those days; it had to have substance. In a "wellness culture," it has to have style. Today the only time you hear the word substance, is in "substance abuse," which is fitting.

The CIA is in the styling business; they've gone shallow. Everyone looks great that way, or so they think.

Quote:Introduction

For those who are unaware of the research I've carried out and reported on over the last six months, please check this site's homepage out before proceeding (FAQs at the bottom and the information available in the additional articles are all worth considering too).

Likewise, if you haven't heard of the Forensicator and his analysis, please check out Disobedient Media's article on his work and check out the Forensicator's blog (it's worth checking out the comments there as well as he directly answers a lot of questions from those challenging his conclusions).

Contents

1. Status Update
2. Forensicator & VIPS Memo
3. Common Logical Fallacy Attacks
4. Technobabble & Debunking Delusions
5. Meta Manipulation
6. Seth/Awan/G2 Conflation

Paul Rigby Wrote:Guccifer 2.0: Game Over - Six Months In

By Adam Carter --- August 4th, 2017

http://g-2.space/sixmonths/

Quote:Introduction

For those who are unaware of the research I've carried out and reported on over the last six months, please check this site's homepage out before proceeding (FAQs at the bottom and the information available in the additional articles are all worth considering too).

Likewise, if you haven't heard of the Forensicator and his analysis, please check out Disobedient Media's article on his work and check out the Forensicator's blog (it's worth checking out the comments there as well as he directly answers a lot of questions from those challenging his conclusions).

Contents

1. Status Update
2. Forensicator & VIPS Memo
3. Common Logical Fallacy Attacks
4. Technobabble & Debunking Delusions
5. Meta Manipulation
6. Seth/Awan/G2 Conflation

Quote:Published on August 7, 2017 Comments 27
Seymour Hersh Cracks RussiaGate' as CIA-Planted Lie Revenge Against Trump
by Eric Zuesse


During the later portion of a phone-call, by the world's greatest investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh, Hersh has now presented "a narrative [from his investigation] of how that whole fucking thing began," including who actually is behind the RussiaGate' lies, and of why they are spreading these lies.


In a youtube video upload-dated August 1st, he reveals from his inside FBI and Washington DC Police Department sources now, long before the Justice Department's Special Counsel Robert Mueller will be presenting his official findings' to the nation that the charges that Russia had anything to do with the leaks from the DNC and Hillary Clinton's campaign to Wikileaks, that those charges spread by the press, were a CIA-planted lie, and that what Wikileaks had gotten was only leaks (including at least from the murdered DNC-staffer Seth Rich), and were not from any outsider (including 'the Russians'), but that Rich didn't get killed for that, but was instead shot in the back during a brutal robbery, which occurred in the high-crime DC neighborhood where he lived. Here is the video, and here is the transcript of it:


I'll tell you what I know. (Mumble) comes off an FBI report, don't ask me how, I can figure out, I've been around long enough:


The kid gets I don't think he was murdered [because of this] I don't think he was murdered because of what he knew, the kid was a nice boy, 27, he was not an ITS person, he learned stuff, he was a data-programmer, but he learned stuff, and so he was living on one street, somewhere, he was living in a very rough neighborhood, and in the exact area where he lived, there had been about, I am sure you know, there had been about 8 or 9 or 10, violent robberies, most of them with somebody brandishing a gun, and I am sure you know, his [the kid's] hands were marked up, the cops concluded [HERSH SAW THE POLICE REPORT] he fought off the people, he tried to run, and they shot him twice in the back with a 22, small-caliber, and then the kid that did it ran, he got scared.


So, the cops do this, here's what nobody knows, what I am telling you, now maybe you do know something about it: When you have a death like that, DC cops, as you're [dealing now with a person who is] dead, you generally don't zip and go, yep I know, what's the motive, what's going on, you have to get to the kid's apartment and see what you can find. If he's dead, you don't need a warrant, but most cops get a warrant because they don't know if the guy has a roommate, so they get a warrant, I'm just telling you, there is such a thing. They go in and can't do much with his computer, [to find the] password, the cops don't know much about it, so the cops have a cyber unit in DC, and they're more sophisticated, they come in and look at it.


The idea is maybe he has had a series of exchanges with somebody who said I am going to kill you motherfucker' over a girl, and they can't get in, the cyber guys are a little better, but they can't make sense of it, so they call the FBI cyber unit. The DC unit, the Russian[-monitoring] and field office is a hot-shit unit. The guy running the Washington field office, he's like a three-star at an army-base, he's ready [mumble], you know what I mean, he's going to do a top job. There's a cyber unit there that's excellent. What you get in a warrant, the public information you get in a warrant doesn't include the affidavits underlying why you are going in, what the reason was. That's almost never available, I can tell you that the thesis of a warrant as a public document 99% of the time.


So they call in the feds, the feds get through, and here's what they find [HERSH SAW THE FBI REPORT]. This is according to the FBI report. What they find is, first of all you have to know some basic facts, one of the basic facts is there is no DNC or protected email that exists beyond May 22nd, the last email from either one of those groups. So, what the report says, is:


(2:50) At some time in late spring, which we're talking about in June 21st, I don't know, just late spring early summer, he makes contact with Wikileaks, that's in his computer, and he makes contact. Now, I have to be careful because I met Julian [Assange] in Europe ten twelve years [ago], I stay the fuck away from people like that. He has invited me and when I am in London, I always get a message, come see me at the Ecuadorean' [Embassy], and I am fucking not going there. I have enough trouble without getting photographed. He's under total surveillance by everybody.


They found, what he had done, he [Seth Rich] had submitted a series of documents, emails from DNC and, by the way, all this shit about the DNC, you know, was it a hack' or wasn't it a hack' whatever happened, it was the Democrats themselves wrote this shit, you know what I mean? All I know is that, he offered a sample, he sends a sample, you know, I am sure dozens of emails, and said I want money'. Later Wikileaks did get the password [SETH RICH DID SELL WIKILEAKS ACCESS INTO HIS COMPUTER.] He had a drop-box, a [password-]protected drop-box, which isn't hard to do.


I mean you don't have to be a whiz at IT [information technology], he was not a dumb kid. They got access to the drop-box. This is all from the FBI report. He also let people know with whom he was dealing, I don't know how he dealt, I'll tell you all about Wikileaks in a second, with Wikileaks the mechanism, but according to the FBI report, he shared his box with a couple of friends, so If anything happens to me, it's not going to solve your problem', okay? I don't know what that means.


But, anyway, Wikileaks got access. And, before he was killed, I can tell you right now, [Obama's CIA Director John] Brennan's an asshole. I've known all these people for years, Clapper is sort of a better guy but no rocket-scientist, the NSA guys are fuckin' morons, and the trouble with all those guys is, the only way they'll get hired by SAIC, is if they'll deliver some [government] contracts, it's the only reason they stayed in. With Trump, they're gone, they're going to live on their pension, they're not going to make it [to great wealth]. I've gotta to tell you, guys in that job, they don't want to live on their pension. They want to be on [corporate] boards like their [mumble] thousand bucks [cut].


I have somebody on the inside, you know I've been around a long time, somebody who will go and read a file for me, who, this person is unbelievably accurate and careful, he's a very high-level guy, he'll do a favor, you're just going to have to trust me, I have what they call in my business, long-form journalism, I have a narrative, of how that whole fucking thing began.


(5:50) It's a Brennan operation. It was an American disinformation, and the fucking President, at one point when they even started telling the press they were back[ground]-briefing the press, the head of the NSA was going and telling the press, the fucking cocksucker Rogers, telling the press that we [they] even know who in the Russian military intelligence service leaked it. All bullshit. They were telling. I worked at the New York Times those fucking years, they're smart guys, but they're totally beholden on [to] sources. If the President or the head of the CIA tells them something, they actually believe it. I retired at the Times at the end of the Vietnam War 1972, because they were just locked-in. So that's what the Times is, these guys run the fuckin' Times, and Trump's not wrong, I wish he would calm down, get a better press secretary, you know, not be so Trump's not wrong to think they all fucking lied about him.
UPDATE:


The media-coverage of this matter is focusing on allegations that Seth Rich was murdered in order to silence him. All such media-coverage ignores much of what Hersh said on the phone (where Hersh makes clear that Rich was, indeed, murdered in a regular robbery), and therefore should be viewed as an example of what the Washington Post and others in the mainstream press call fake news', but which actually applies to themselves, on both the left and right, above all.


The purpose of those distorting news' stories might be a desire, on the part of both the Democratic Party aristocrats and the Republican Party aristocrats, to distract the public's attention away from the far deeper understanding that drives the "narrative" that Hersh, in that clip, is describing: rot by the U.S. aristocracy, which controls both of America's political Parties, to deceive the American public. The objective is to protect the aristocracy. That's not publishable; it is American samizdat. Corruption rules America. The public do not. This fact is what Hersh is describing in the above account.

Quote:

Intel Vets Challenge Russia Hack' Evidence

July 24, 2017

In a memo to President Trump, a group of former U.S. intelligence officers, including NSA specialists, cite new forensic studies to challenge the claim of the key Jan. 6 "assessment" that Russia "hacked" Democratic emails last year.
Editor's Note: This VIPS Memo included two mistaken dates. Neither affected the Memo's main conclusion; i.e., that the July 5, 2016 intrusion into DNC emails that was blamed on Russia could not have been a hack by Russia or anyone else. The portions of the Memo affected by the mistaken dates have been corrected.
A short explanation of the corrections:
-(1) June 14, 2016 (not the 15th, as the VIPS memo erroneously stated) was the day Crowdstrike said malware had been found on the DNC server and claimed there was evidence the malware was injected by Russians. (On the following day the 15th) "Guccifer 2.0" claimed responsibility for the "hack" and claimed to be a WikiLeaks source.)
-(2) Although the VIPS Memo indicated, correctly, that on June 15, 2016, "Guccifer 2.0" … posts a document that the forensics show was synthetically tainted with Russian fingerprints,'" other language in the Memo was mistaken in indicating that evidence of such tainting was also found in the "Guccifer 2.0" metadata from the copying event on July 5.
MEMORANDUM FOR: The President
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
SUBJECT: Was the "Russian Hack" an Inside Job?
Executive Summary
Forensic studies of "Russian hacking" into Democratic National Committee computers last year reveal that on July 5, 2016, data was leaked (not hacked) by a person with physical access to DNC computer. After examining metadata from the "Guccifer 2.0" July 5, 2016 intrusion into the DNC server, independent cyber investigators have concluded that an insider copied DNC data onto an external storage device.

Then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper (right) talks with President Barack Obama in the Oval Office, with John Brennan and other national security aides present. (Photo credit: Office of Director of National Intelligence)

Key among the findings of the independent forensic investigations is the conclusion that the DNC data was copied onto a storage device at a speed that far exceeds an Internet capability for a remote hack. Of equal importance, the forensics show that the copying was performed on the East coast of the U.S. Thus far, mainstream media have ignored the findings of these independent studies [see here and here].
Independent analyst Skip Folden, who retired after 25 years as the IBM Program Manager for Information Technology, US, who examined the recent forensic findings, is a co-author of this Memorandum. He has drafted a more detailed technical report titled "Cyber-Forensic Investigation of Russian Hack' and Missing Intelligence Community Disclaimers," and sent it to the offices of the Special Counsel and the Attorney General. VIPS member William Binney, a former Technical Director at the National Security Agency, and other senior NSA "alumni" in VIPS attest to the professionalism of the independent forensic findings.
The recent forensic studies fill in a critical gap. Why the FBI neglected to perform any independent forensics on the original "Guccifer 2.0" material remains a mystery as does the lack of any sign that the "hand-picked analysts" from the FBI, CIA, and NSA, who wrote the "Intelligence Community Assessment" dated January 6, 2017, gave any attention to forensics.
NOTE: There has been so much conflation of charges about hacking that we wish to make very clear the primary focus of this Memorandum. We focus specifically on the July 5, 2016 alleged Guccifer 2.0 "hack" of the DNC server. In earlier VIPS memoranda we addressed the lack of any evidence connecting the Guccifer 2.0 alleged hacks and WikiLeaks, and we asked President Obama specifically to disclose any evidence that WikiLeaks received DNC data from the Russians [see here and here].
Addressing this point at his last press conference (January 18), he described "the conclusions of the intelligence community" as "not conclusive," even though the Intelligence Community Assessment of January 6 expressed "high confidence" that Russian intelligence "relayed material it acquired from the DNC … to WikiLeaks."
Obama's admission came as no surprise to us. It has long been clear to us that the reason the U.S. government lacks conclusive evidence of a transfer of a "Russian hack" to WikiLeaks is because there was no such transfer. Based mostly on the cumulatively unique technical experience of our ex-NSA colleagues, we have been saying for almost a year that the DNC data reached WikiLeaks via a copy/leak by a DNC insider (but almost certainly not the same person who copied DNC data on July 5, 2016).
From the information available, we conclude that the same inside-DNC, copy/leak process was used at two different times, by two different entities, for two distinctly different purposes:
-(1) an inside leak to WikiLeaks before Julian Assange announced on June 12, 2016, that he had DNC documents and planned to publish them (which he did on July 22) the presumed objective being to expose strong DNC bias toward the Clinton candidacy; and
-(2) a separate leak on July 5, 2016, to pre-emptively taint anything WikiLeaks might later publish by "showing" it came from a "Russian hack."
* * *
Mr. President:
This is our first VIPS Memorandum for you, but we have a history of letting U.S. Presidents know when we think our former intelligence colleagues have gotten something important wrong, and why. For example, our first such memorandum, a same-day commentary for President George W. Bush on Colin Powell's U.N. speech on February 5, 2003, warned that the "unintended consequences were likely to be catastrophic," should the U.S. attack Iraq and "justify" the war on intelligence that we retired intelligence officers could readily see as fraudulent and driven by a war agenda.

Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the United Nations on Feb. 5. 2003, citing satellite photos which supposedly proved that Iraq had WMD, but the evidence proved bogus.

The January 6 "Intelligence Community Assessment" by "hand-picked" analysts from the FBI, CIA, and NSA seems to fit into the same agenda-driven category. It is largely based on an "assessment," not supported by any apparent evidence, that a shadowy entity with the moniker "Guccifer 2.0" hacked the DNC on behalf of Russian intelligence and gave DNC emails to WikiLeaks.
The recent forensic findings mentioned above have put a huge dent in that assessment and cast serious doubt on the underpinnings of the extraordinarily successful campaign to blame the Russian government for hacking. The pundits and politicians who have led the charge against Russian "meddling" in the U.S. election can be expected to try to cast doubt on the forensic findings, if they ever do bubble up into the mainstream media. But the technical limitations of today's Internet are widely understood. We are prepared to answer any substantive challenges on their merits.
You may wish to ask CIA Director Mike Pompeo what he knows about this. Our own lengthy intelligence community experience suggests that it is possible that neither former CIA Director John Brennan, nor the cyber-warriors who worked for him, have been completely candid with their new director regarding how this all went down.
Copied, Not Hacked
As indicated above, the independent forensic work just completed focused on data copied (not hacked) by a shadowy persona named "Guccifer 2.0." The forensics reflect what seems to have been a desperate effort to "blame the Russians" for publishing highly embarrassing DNC emails three days before the Democratic convention last July. Since the content of the DNC emails reeked of pro-Clinton bias, her campaign saw an overriding need to divert attention from content to provenance as in, who "hacked" those DNC emails? The campaign was enthusiastically supported by compliant "mainstream" media; they are still on a roll.
"The Russians" were the ideal culprit. And, after WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange announced on June 12, 2016, "We have emails related to Hillary Clinton which are pending publication," her campaign had more than a month before the convention to insert its own "forensic facts" and prime the media pump to put the blame on "Russian meddling." Mrs. Clinton's PR chief Jennifer Palmieri has explained how she used golf carts to make the rounds at the convention. She wrote that her "mission was to get the press to focus on something even we found difficult to process: the prospect that Russia had not only hacked and stolen emails from the DNC, but that it had done so to help Donald Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton."
Independent cyber-investigators have now completed the kind of forensic work that the intelligence assessment did not do. Oddly, the "hand-picked" intelligence analysts contented themselves with "assessing" this and "assessing" that. In contrast, the investigators dug deep and came up with verifiable evidence from metadata found in the record of the alleged Russian hack.
They found that the purported "hack" of the DNC by Guccifer 2.0 was not a hack, by Russia or anyone else. Rather it originated with a copy (onto an external storage device a thumb drive, for example) by an insider. The data was leaked to implicate Russia. We do not know who or what the murky Guccifer 2.0 is. You may wish to ask the FBI.
The Time Sequence
June 12, 2016: Assange announces WikiLeaks is about to publish "emails related to Hillary Clinton."
June 14, 2016: DNC contractor Crowdstrike, (with a dubious professional record and multiple conflicts of interest) announces that malware has been found on the DNC server and claims there is evidence it was injected by Russians.
June 15, 2016: "Guccifer 2.0" affirms the DNC statement; claims responsibility for the "hack;" claims to be a WikiLeaks source; and posts a document that the forensics show was synthetically tainted with "Russian fingerprints."
We do not think that the June 12, 14, & 15 timing was pure coincidence. Rather, it suggests the start of a pre-emptive move to associate Russia with anything WikiLeaks might have been about to publish and to "show" that it came from a Russian hack.
The Key Event
July 5, 2016: In the early evening, Eastern Daylight Time, someone working in the EDT time zone with a computer directly connected to the DNC server or DNC Local Area Network, copied 1,976 MegaBytes of data in 87 seconds onto an external storage device. That speed is much faster than what is physically possible with a hack.
It thus appears that the purported "hack" of the DNC by Guccifer 2.0 (the self-proclaimed WikiLeaks source) was not a hack by Russia or anyone else, but was rather a copy of DNC data onto an external storage device.
"Obfuscation & De-obfuscation"
Mr. President, the disclosure described below may be related. Even if it is not, it is something we think you should be made aware of in this general connection. On March 7, 2017, WikiLeaks began to publish a trove of original CIA documents that WikiLeaks labeled "Vault 7." WikiLeaks said it got the trove from a current or former CIA contractor and described it as comparable in scale and significance to the information Edward Snowden gave to reporters in 2013.

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton at the third debate with Republican nominee Donald Trump. (Photo credit: hillaryclinton.com)

No one has challenged the authenticity of the original documents of Vault 7, which disclosed a vast array of cyber warfare tools developed, probably with help from NSA, by CIA's Engineering Development Group. That Group was part of the sprawling CIA Directorate of Digital Innovation a growth industry established by John Brennan in 2015.
Scarcely imaginable digital tools that can take control of your car and make it race over 100 mph, for example, or can enable remote spying through a TV were described and duly reported in the New York Times and other media throughout March. But the Vault 7, part 3 release on March 31 that exposed the "Marble Framework" program apparently was judged too delicate to qualify as "news fit to print" and was kept out of the Times.
The Washington Post's Ellen Nakashima, it seems, "did not get the memo" in time. Her March 31 article bore the catching (and accurate) headline: "WikiLeaks' latest release of CIA cyber-tools could blow the cover on agency hacking operations."
The WikiLeaks release indicated that Marble was designed for flexible and easy-to-use "obfuscation," and that Marble source code includes a "deobfuscator" to reverse CIA text obfuscation.
More important, the CIA reportedly used Marble during 2016. In her Washington Post report, Nakashima left that out, but did include another significant point made by WikiLeaks; namely, that the obfuscation tool could be used to conduct a "forensic attribution double game" or false-flag operation because it included test samples in Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Farsi.
The CIA's reaction was neuralgic. Director Mike Pompeo lashed out two weeks later, calling Assange and his associates "demons," and insisting; "It's time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is, a non-state hostile intelligence service, often abetted by state actors like Russia."
Mr. President, we do not know if CIA's Marble Framework, or tools like it, played some kind of role in the campaign to blame Russia for hacking the DNC. Nor do we know how candid the denizens of CIA's Digital Innovation Directorate have been with you and with Director Pompeo. These are areas that might profit from early White House review.
Putin and the Technology
We also do not know if you have discussed cyber issues in any detail with President Putin. In his interview with NBC's Megyn Kelly, he seemed quite willing perhaps even eager to address issues related to the kind of cyber tools revealed in the Vault 7 disclosures, if only to indicate he has been briefed on them. Putin pointed out that today's technology enables hacking to be "masked and camouflaged to an extent that no one can understand the origin" [of the hack] … And, vice versa, it is possible to set up any entity or any individual that everyone will think that they are the exact source of that attack."

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at a media conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. (Photo credit: New Media Days / Peter Erichsen)

"Hackers may be anywhere," he said. "There may be hackers, by the way, in the United States who very craftily and professionally passed the buck to Russia. Can't you imagine such a scenario? … I can."
Full Disclosure: Over recent decades the ethos of our intelligence profession has eroded in the public mind to the point that agenda-free analysis is deemed well nigh impossible. Thus, we add this disclaimer, which applies to everything we in VIPS say and do: We have no political agenda; our sole purpose is to spread truth around and, when necessary, hold to account our former intelligence colleagues.
We speak and write without fear or favor. Consequently, any resemblance between what we say and what presidents, politicians and pundits say is purely coincidental. The fact we find it is necessary to include that reminder speaks volumes about these highly politicized times. This is our 50th VIPS Memorandum since the afternoon of Powell's speech at the UN. Live links to the 49 past memos can be found at https://consortiumnews.com/vips-memos/.


FOR THE STEERING GROUP, VETERAN INTELLIGENCE PROFESSIONALS FOR SANITY
William Binney, former NSA Technical Director for World Geopolitical & Military Analysis; Co-founder of NSA's Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center
Skip Folden, independent analyst, retired IBM Program Manager for Information Technology US (Associate VIPS)
Matthew Hoh, former Capt., USMC, Iraq & Foreign Service Officer, Afghanistan (associate VIPS)
Larry C Johnson, CIA & State Department (ret.)
Michael S. Kearns, Air Force Intelligence Officer (Ret.), Master SERE Resistance to Interrogation Instructor
John Kiriakou, Former CIA Counterterrorism Officer and former Senior Investigator, Senate Foreign Relations Committee
Linda Lewis, WMD preparedness policy analyst, USDA (ret.)
Lisa Ling, TSgt USAF (ret.) (associate VIPS)
Edward Loomis, Jr., former NSA Technical Director for the Office of Signals Processing
David MacMichael, National Intelligence Council (ret.)
Ray McGovern, former U.S. Army Infantry/Intelligence officer and CIA analyst
Elizabeth Murray, former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Middle East, CIA
Coleen Rowley, FBI Special Agent and former Minneapolis Division Legal Counsel (ret.)
Cian Westmoreland, former USAF Radio Frequency Transmission Systems Technician and Unmanned Aircraft Systems whistleblower (Associate VIPS)
Kirk Wiebe, former Senior Analyst, SIGINT Automation Research Center, NSA
Sarah G. Wilton, Intelligence Officer, DIA (ret.); Commander, US Naval Reserve (ret.)
Ann Wright, U.S. Army Reserve Colonel (ret) and former U.S. Diplomat