The attempted Clinton-CIA coup against Donald Trump

[David Guyatt]

"The so-called permanent government of Washington and its complicit mainstream media what some call the Deep State have taught Trump a lesson and have learned a lesson, too. They now can be expected to redouble their march toward war and more war, ironically with progressives and leftists in tow."

Aye.

Trump Caves on Flynn's Resignation
February 14, 2017

Exclusive: President Trump's acceptance of National Security Advisor Flynn's resignation marks Official Washington's first big success in neutering Trump and killing hopes for a détente with Russia, reports Robert Parry.




By Robert Parry


The neocon-dominated U.S. foreign policy establishment won an important victory in forcing the resignation of President Trump's National Security Advisor Michael Flynn over a flimsy complaint that he had talked to the Russian ambassador during the transition.




Army Lieutenant General Michael Flynn speaks at the Defense Intelligence Agency change of directorship at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling, July 24, 2012. (DoD photo by Erin A. Kirk-Cuomo)
The Washington Post, the neoconservatives' media flagship, led the assault on Flynn, an unorthodox thinker who shared the neocons' hostility toward Iran but broke with them in seeing no strategic reason to transform Russia into an implacable enemy.


After Flynn's resignation on Monday evening, the Post gloated over its success in achieving the first major crack in Trump's resistance to Official Washington's establishment. The Post cited Flynn's "potentially illegal contacts" with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, a reference to the Logan Act, a 1799 never-enforced law that forbids private citizens from negotiating with a country in dispute with the U.S. government.


Though no one has ever been prosecuted under the Logan Act, it has been cited in recent decades as an excuse to attack American citizens who disagree with U.S. government policies while traveling abroad and having contacts with foreign leaders.


Often those accusations are aimed at Americans seeking to peacefully resolve disputes when a U.S. president is eager to escalate a conflict, such as President Ronald Reagan's denunciations of civil rights leader Jesse Jackson for visiting Cuba and House Speaker Jim Wright for exploring ways to end the Contra war in Nicaragua.


In other words, the Logan Act is usually exploited in a McCarthyistic fashion to bait or discredit peace advocates, similarly to how it has now been used to destroy Flynn for daring to look for ways to reduce the dangerous tensions between Washington and Moscow.


But the media-driven attacks on Flynn are particularly curious since he was the National Security Advisor-designate of an incoming administration at the time of the calls and as such he would be expected to make contacts with important foreign officials to begin laying the groundwork for relations with the new president.


Whether U.S. sanctions against Russia were mentioned or not, the notion that an elected president or his designees during a transition can have no meaningful contact with diplomats whom they may need to deal with in a matter of weeks represents a particularly contentious interpretation of a law that has never been tested in a court of law and may well represent an unconstitutional infringement on free speech and dissent.


An Expanding Hysteria


Indeed, referencing the Logan Act appears to be an excuse to continue and expand Official Washington's hysteria over Russia, which has become the useful villain to blame for every U.S. foreign policy debacle and even Hillary Clinton's disastrous presidential run.




Donald Trump and Governor Mike Pence of Indiana speaking to supporters at an immigration policy speech at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona. August 31, 2016. (Flickr Gage Skidmore)
Flynn's more egregious offense in this case may have been to mislead Vice President Mike Pence on exactly what was discussed, but Trump's White House has not seemed previously overly concerned with the precise accuracy of its statements.


Indeed, Trump and his team have tangled themselves up for weeks by promoting "alternative facts" that Donald Trump's inaugural crowd was bigger than Barack Obama's and that Trump would have won the popular vote if not for three million to five million illegal votes. Though these absurd claims pertain more to Trump's ego than to anything important, he and his representatives have continued fighting these fights on Twitter and TV appearances and show no signs of stopping.


So, the ouster of Flynn for failing to provide a complete readout on some telephone conversations in December stands out as even more significant in the context of the deluge of falsehoods that have poured forth from Trump's White House.


Flynn's real "offense" appears to be that he favors détente with Russia rather than escalation of a new and dangerous Cold War. Trump's idea of a rapprochement with Moscow and a search for areas of cooperation and compromise has been driving Official Washington's foreign policy establishment crazy for months and the neocons, in particular, have been determined to block it.


Though Flynn has pandered to elements of the neocon movement with his own hysterical denunciations of Iran and Islam in general, he emerged as a key architect for Trump's plans to seek a constructive relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Meanwhile, the neocons and their liberal-interventionist sidekicks have invested heavily in making Putin the all-purpose bête noire to justify a major investment in new military hardware and in pricy propaganda operations.


The neocons and liberal hawks also hated Flynn because as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency he oversaw a prescient 2012 analysis that foresaw that their support for the Syrian insurgency would give rise to "a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria."


The DIA report, which was partially declassified in a lawsuit over the 2012 killing of the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other U.S. personnel in Benghazi, Libya, embarrassed the advocates for an escalation of the war in Syria and the ouster of secular President Bashar al-Assad.


Flynn even went further in a 2015 interview when he said the intelligence was "very clear" that the Obama administration made a "willful decision" to back these jihadists in league with Middle East allies, a choice that looked particularly stupid when Islamic State militants started beheading American hostages and capturing cities in Iraq.


A Beloved Regime Change'


But "regime change" in Syria was dear to the neocons' hearts. After all, Israeli leaders had declared Assad's removal central to smashing the so-called "Shiite crescent" reaching from Tehran through Damascus to Beirut.




U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Aug. 30, 2013, claims to have proof that the Syrian government was responsible for a chemical weapons attack on Aug. 21, 2013, but that evidence failed to materialize or was later discredited. [State Department photo]
The neocons and liberal hawks had come very close to getting the direct U.S. military intervention that they so wanted to destroy Assad's army after a mysterious sarin gas attack outside Damascus on Aug. 21, 2013. The Obama administration quickly pinned the atrocity on Assad even though a number of U.S. intelligence analysts suspected a "false flag" attack carried out by jihadists.
Still, despite those doubts, it appeared a bombing campaign against Assad was in the offing, except that Obama delayed its implementation and Putin then proposed an alternative in which Assad would surrender all his chemical weapons.


Putin's interference in the neocon/liberal-hawk war plans made him the new prime target and Ukraine became ground zero for the effort to explode the cooperative relationship between Obama and Putin.


On Sept. 26, 2013, only weeks after the aborted U.S. bombing campaign against Syria, Carl Gershman, the neocon president of the U.S.-government-funded National Endowment for Democracy, took to the Post's op-ed page to declare "Ukraine the biggest prize" and suggest that winning it could ultimately lead to toppling Putin inside Russia.


Key U.S. government neocons, such as Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland and Sen. John McCain, then began pushing for the violent right-wing coup that in February 2014 ousted Ukraine's elected President Viktor Yanukovych and touched off the new Cold War with Russia.


Amid these heightened tensions, the mainstream media in the United States and Europe joined in the full-scale Russia/Putin-bashing. All rational perspective on the underlying reality was lost, except for a handful of independent Internet journalists and foreign-policy outsiders who rejected the over-the-top propaganda.


A Few Dissenters Too Many


But even a few dissenters was a few dissenters too many. So, to enforce the new groupthink holding Russia at fault for pretty much everything a new McCarthyism emerged, deeming anyone who dared disagree a "Moscow stooge" or a "Russian propagandist."




Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaking with supporters at a campaign rally in Phoenix, Arizona, March 21, 2016. (Photo by Gage Skidmore)
The ugliness penetrated into the U.S. presidential campaign because Democrat Hillary Clinton took a belligerent line toward Russia while Trump broke with the Republican establishment and called for improved ties between Washington and Moscow. Clinton called Trump Putin's "puppet" and after Clinton's stunning loss the Obama administration floated unproven allegations that Putin had intervened in the election to put Trump in the White House.


This hysteria over Russia gained added strength because Democrats were so angry over Trump's election that liberal and progressive operatives saw a chance to build a movement and raise lots of money by pushing the Trump-Putin accusations.


This opportunism has turned much of the liberal/progressive community into a pro-New Cold War constituency willing to engage in a new breed of McCarthyism by demanding intensive investigations into alleged connections between Americans and Russians.


From the neocon side, The Washington Post has gone so far as to promote baseless accusations from an anonymous group called PropOrNot that 200 Internet sites, including Consortiumnews.com and other important independent news sources, are guilty of spreading Russian propaganda. Congress approved a new $160 million bureaucracy to combat such "propaganda."


However, since Trump's inauguration, the focus has shifted to Flynn, as the personification of the effort to cool off the New Cold War, because he had phone conversations with the Russian ambassador that presumably were intercepted by U.S. intelligence.


Because Flynn supposedly misrepresented some details of the calls to Vice President Mike Pence, senior Justice Department holdovers from the Obama administration concocted an argument that Flynn might be vulnerable to Russian blackmail.


The argument is dubious because the Russians would know that the U.S. government knew exactly what the conversations entailed, so how would the blackmail work? But this "blackmail" argument is another throwback to the earlier McCarthy days when gays were barred from sensitive government jobs because of their alleged susceptibility to blackmail.


But the gambit to get Flynn worked. Amid frenzied coverage on CNN, MSNBC, The Washington Post, The New York Times and the rest of the mainstream media, Flynn and the Russia détente that he stood for were not expected to be long for this world of Official Washington.


Flynn's resignation and its acceptance by Trump also prove that these tactics work and that "tough-guy" Trump is not immune to them. While the President may battle to the end over pointless questions about the size of his inaugural crowd and his belief that he should have won the popular vote, he will cave when the pressure builds on a matter of genuine substance and real importance to the future of the world.


The so-called permanent government of Washington and its complicit mainstream media what some call the Deep State have taught Trump a lesson and have learned a lesson, too. They now can be expected to redouble their march toward war and more war, ironically with progressives and leftists in tow.

Source

[Paul Rigby]

"He will die in jail" - Intelligence apparatus admits going nuclear on Trump

15.02.2017

https://sputniknews.com/us/2017021510507...war-trump/

A former National Security Agency analyst and counterintelligence officer tweeted on Wednesday that the intelligence community will now be "going nuclear" against Trump.

John Schindler, a national security columnist for the Observer and former NSA analyst, published an article on Sunday titled "The Spy Revolt Against Trump Begins," which asserts that the Intelligence Community is rebelling against Trump over some of his senior officials having alleged ties to the Kremlin. The situation is so bad, according to Schindler, that they are now beginning to withhold intelligence from the White House.

Echoing this "blame the Russians" narrative the New York Times on Tuesday night published a story, accusing Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort of ties to Russian intelligence officials. Mr. Manafort's business ties with Ukrainian politicians as their political consultant never were a secret, and the FBI has yet to accuse him of any wrongdoing. Even the article itself states that "it's not unusual for American businessmen to come in contact with foreign intelligence officials, sometimes unwittingly," and that "it is also unclear whether the conversations had anything to do with Mr. Trump himself." Nevertheless, the piece under catchy headline "Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence" was used by mainstream outlets as new line of attack on Trump's alleged Kremlin connections.

After President Trump angrily denounced the New York Times reporting, blaming the intelligence apparatus for illegal leaks, Schindler took his attacks to a whole new level.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/stat...wsrc%5Etfw

​On Wednesday, he was asked on Twitter, "what do you think is going on inside NatSec right now after Trump's intelligence' tweet this morning?"

He responded saying that a "senior Intelligence Community friend" had messaged him promising to retaliate against the president.

https://twitter.com/20committee/status/8...wsrc%5Etfw

"Now we go nuclear. IC war going to new levels. Just got an EM fm senior IC friend, it began: He will die in jail,'" Schindler tweeted.

[Paul Rigby]

The Swamp Strikes Back

Pepe Escobar

15 Feb 2017

https://sputniknews.com/columnists/20170...ion-swamp/

The tawdry Michael Flynn soap opera boils down to the CIA hemorrhaging leaks to the company town newspaper, leading to the desired endgame: a resounding victory for hardcore neocon/neoliberalcon US Deep State factions in one particular battle. But the war is not over; in fact it's just beginning.

Even before Flynn's fall, Russian analysts had been avidly discussing whether President Trump is the new Viktor Yanukovych who failed to stop a color revolution at his doorstep. The Made in USA color revolution by the axis of Deep State neocons, Democratic neoliberalcons and corporate media will be pursued, relentlessly, 24/7. But more than Yanukovych, Trump might actually be remixing Little Helmsman Deng Xiaoping: "crossing the river while feeling the stones". Rather, crossing the swamp while feeling the crocs.

Flynn out may be interpreted as a Trump tactical retreat. After all Flynn may be back in the shade, much as Roger Stone. If current deputy national security advisor K T McFarland gets the top job which is what powerful Trump backers are aiming at the shadowplay Kissinger balance of power, in its 21st century remix, is even strengthened; after all McFarland is a Kissinger asset.

This call won't self-destruct in five seconds

Flynn worked with Special Forces; was head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA); handled highly classified top secret information 24/7. He obviously knew all his conversations on an open, unsecure line were monitored. So he had to have morphed into a compound incarnation of the Three Stooges had he positioned himself to be blackmailed by Moscow.

What Flynn and Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak certainly discussed was cooperation in the fight against ISIS/ISIL/Daesh, and what Moscow might expect in return: the lifting of sanctions. US corporate media didn't even flinch when US intel admitted they have a transcript of the multiple phone calls between Flynn and Kislyak. So why not release them? Imagine the inter-galactic scandal if these calls were about Russian intel monitoring the US ambassador in Moscow.

No one paid attention to the two key passages conveniently buried in the middle of this US corporate media story. 1) "The intelligence official said there had been no finding inside the government that Flynn did anything illegal." 2) "…the situation became unsustainable not because of any issue of being compromised by Russia but because he [Flynn] has lied to the president and the vice president."
Recap: nothing illegal; and Flynn not compromised by Russia. The "crime" according to Deep State factions: talking to a Russian diplomat.

Vice-President Mike Pence is a key piece in the puzzle; after all his major role is as insider guarantor at the heart of the Trump administration of neocon Deep State interests. The CIA did leak. The CIA most certainly has been spying on all Trump operatives. Flynn though fell on his own sword. Classic hubris; his fatal mistake was to strategize by himself even before he became national security advisor. "Mad Dog" Mattis, T. Rex Tillerson both, by the way, very close to Kissinger and most of all Pence did not like it one bit once they were informed.

A "man of very limited abilities"

Flynn was already compromised by his embarrassingly misinformed book co-written with neocon Michael Ledeen, as well as his juvenile Iranophobia. At the same time, Flynn was the point man to what would have been a real game-changer; to place the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff under White House control.

A highly informed US source I previously called "X", who detailed to Sputnik how the Trump presidency will play out, is adamant "this decision makes Trump look independent. It is all going according to script."

"X" stresses how "the NSA can penetrate any telephone system in the world that is not secure. Flynn was a man of very limited abilities who talked too much. You never hear from the real powers in intelligence nor do you know their names. You can see that in Flynn's approach to Iran. He was disrupting a peace deal in the Middle East relating to Russia, Iran and Turkey in Syria. So he had to go."

"X" adds, "the Russians are not stupid to talk among themselves on unsecured lines, they assumed that Flynn controlled his own lines. Flynn was removed not because of his Russian calls but for other reasons, some of which have to do with Iran and the Middle East. He was a loose cannon even from the intelligence perspective. This is a case of misdirection away from the true cause."
In direct opposition to "X", an analytical strand now rules there's blood on the tracks; the hyenas are circling; a vulnerable Trump has lost his mojo; and he also lost his foreign policy. Not yet.

In the Grand Chessboard, what Flynn's fall spells out is just a pawn out of the game because the King would not protect him. We will only know for sure "draining the swamp" the foreign policy section is doomed if neocons and neoliberalcons continue to run riot; if neoliberalcons are not fully exposed in their complicity in the rise of ISIS/ISIL/Daesh; and if the much vaunted possibility of a détente with Russia flounders for good.

What's certain is that the fratricide war between the Trump administration and the most powerful Deep State factions will be beyond vicious. Team Trump only stands a chance if they are able to weaponize allies from within the Deep State. As it stands, concerning the Kissinger grand design of trying to break the Eurasian "threat" to the unipolar moment, Iran is momentarily relieved; Russia harbors no illusions; and China knows for sure that the China-Russia strategic partnership will become even stronger. Advantage swamp.

[David Guyatt]

I haven't yet seen it said that Ray McGovern is a Russian agent, but there's still a long way to go on the "Russians did it" meme before it finally expires from the lack of evidence. It will continue to have oxygen breathed into it by the shadowy players of neocon central.

But no one ever need be in fear of seeing any solid evidence backing it up. It is sufficient only that the callous, hypocritical and prejudiced blind amongst the walking dead of America grab it with both hands.

Meanwhile, inconvenient articles like this will disappear down the memory rabbit hole quicker than Alice ever could.

German Intel Clears Russia on Interference
February 15, 2017

Exclusive: Mainstream U.S. media only wants stories of Russian perfidy, so when German intelligence cleared Moscow of suspected subversion of German democracy, the silence was deafening, says ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.




By Ray McGovern


After a multi-month, politically charged investigation, German intelligence agencies could find no good evidence of Moscow-directed cyber-attacks or a disinformation campaign aimed at subverting the democratic process in Germany. Undaunted, Chancellor Angela Merkel has commissioned a new investigation.




President Barack Obama talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the G7 Summit at Schloss Elmau in Bavaria, Germany, June 8, 2015. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
Last year, Berlin's two main intelligence agencies, the BND and BfV (counterparts of the CIA and FBI) launched a joint investigation to substantiate allegations that Russia was meddling in German political affairs and attempting to shape the outcome of Germany's elections next September.


Like the vast majority of Americans malnourished on "mainstream media," most Germans have been led to believe that, by hacking and "propaganda," the Kremlin interfered in the recent U.S. election and helped Donald Trump become president.


German intelligence agencies rarely bite the hand that feeds them and realize that the most bountiful part of the trough is at the CIA station in Berlin with ultimate guidance coming from CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. But this time, in an unusual departure from past practice, analysts at the BND and BfV decided to act like responsible adults.


Whereas former CIA Director John Brennan prevailed on his analysts to resort to anemic, evidence-light reasoning "assessing" that Russia tried to tip the U.S. election to Donald Trump, Berlin's intelligence agencies found the evidence lacking and have now completed their investigation.


Better still, the conclusions have been reported in a mainstream German newspaper, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, apparently because a patriotic insider thought the German people should also know.


Lemmings No Longer?


If BND President Bruno Kahl thought that his own analysts could be depended upon to follow their American counterparts lemming-like and find evidence Curveball-style to support the U.S. allegations, he now has had a rude awakening.




CIA Director John Brennan at a White House meeting during his time as President Barack Obama's counterterrorism adviser.
When the joint investigation was under way with his analysts doing their best to come up with reliable evidence of Russian perfidy, Kahl had behaved like his BND predecessors, parroting the charges made by his CIA counterpart, that the Russians were fomenting uncertainty and instability in Germany and elsewhere in Europe.


In a rare interview with the mainstream newspaper, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, on Nov. 28, 2016, Kahl went out on what he probably thought was a safe limb, denouncing subversive "interference" by the Russians ("as they did in the U.S."). He was just a few months into his job and may have been naïve enough to consider what John Brennan said as gospel truth. (If he really is that gullible, Kahl is in the wrong profession.)


In the interview, Kahl played the puppet-doll Charlie McCarthy with Brennan in the role of Charlie's ventriloquist Edgar Bergen. Kahl told the Sueddeutsche that he agreed with the U.S. intelligence "assessment" that the Kremlin was behind the cyber attacks aimed at influencing the U.S. election.


He added: "We know that cyber attacks are taking place and that they have no purpose other than to produce political instability. … Not only that. The perpetrators are interested in delegitimizing the democratic process itself. … I have the impression that the outcome of the American election has evoked no sadness in Russia so far. …


"Europe is [now] the focus of these disruption experiments, and Germany especially. … The pressure on the public discourse and on democracy is unacceptable." Sound familiar?


Still, one might excuse the novice BND president for assuming his analysts would remember which side their bread is buttered on and follow past precedent in coming up with conclusions known to be desired by their masters in Berlin and the CIA.


So it must have come as an unwelcome surprise to Kahl when he found out that, this time, BND analysts would stand on principle and refuse to be as malleable as their Washington counterparts. His analysts could find no proof that the Kremlin was working hard to undermine the democratic process in Germany, and said so.


Worse still from the U.S. point of view, the two German intelligence agencies resisted the usual pressure from some senior leaders in Berlin (perhaps including Kahl himself) to jam whatever innocuous information they could find into the anti-Russian mosaic that Washington was constructing, a kind of Cubist version of distorted reality.


And So, a Do-Over


So, what do powerful officials do when the bureaucracy comes up with "incorrect" conclusions? They send the analysts and investigators back to work until they come up with "correct" answers. This turned out to be no exception. Absent evidence of hacking directed by the Kremlin, the Germans now have opted for an approach by which information can be fudged more easily.




CIA seal in lobby of the spy agency's headquarters. (U.S. government photo)
According to the Sueddeutsche, "Chancellor Merkel's office has now ordered a new inquiry. Notably, a psychological operations group' jointly run by the BND and BfV will specifically look at Russian news agencies' coverage in Germany." We can expect that any articles that don't portray Vladimir Putin in a devil's costume will be judged "Russian propaganda."


For guidance, Merkel may well give the new "investigators" a copy of the evidence-free CIA/FBI/NSA "Assessment: Russia's Influence Campaign Targeting the 2016 US Presidential Election." Released on Jan. 6, the report was an eyesore and embarrassment to serious intelligence professionals. The lame "evidence" presented, together with all the "assessing" indulged in by U.S. analysts, was unable to fill five pages; filler was needed preferably filler that could be made to look like analysis.


And so, seven more pages were tacked onto the CIA/FBI/NSA Assessment, even though the information presented in them had nothing to do with the cause celebre of Russian hacking. No problem: The additional seven pages bore the ominous title: "Annex A: Russia Kremlin's TV Seeks To Influence Politics, Fuel Discontent in US."


The extra pages, in turn, were then used to support the following indictment: "Russia's state-run propaganda machine contributed to the influence campaign by serving as a platform for Kremlin messaging to Russian and international audiences."


Did an Insider Leak?


It is not clear how the German daily Sueddeutsche acquired the conclusions of the joint investigation or even whether it has the full 50-page copy of the final report. The newspaper did make it clear, though, that it now realizes it was played by Kahl with his unsupported accusations last November.




Russian President Vladimir Putin answering questions from Russian citizens at his annual Q&A event on April 14, 2016. (Russian government photo)
From what the newspaper was told, the analysts seemed willing to give the boss what he had already declared to be his desired conclusion, but the evidence simply wasn't there. The article quotes one security expert saying, "We would have been happy to give Russia a yellow card," a soccer metaphor referring to improper conduct. A cabinet source lamented, "We found no smoking gun."


Initially, the BND and BfV planned to release excerpts of their still classified inquiry, the Sueddeutsche reported, but it's now not clear when, if ever, the full report will be released.


The day after the Sueddeutsche story appeared, some other media outlets reported on it briefly. Newsweek and Politico gave the scoop all of three sentences each. Not fitting with the preferred "Russia-is-guilty-of-everything" narrative, it then died a quick death. I have been unable to find the story mentioned at all in major U.S. "mainstream media" outlets.


If Americans became aware of the story, it was probably via RT the bête noire of the abovementioned CIA/FBI/NSA report condemning Russian "propaganda." Can it become any clearer why RT America and RT International are despised by the U.S. government and the "mainstream media?" Many Americans are slowly realizing they cannot count on American network and cable TV for accurate news and are tuning in to RT at least for the other side of these important stories.


It was from a early morning call from RT International that I first learned of the Feb. 7 Sueddeutsche Zeitung report on Germany's failed hunt for evidence of Russian electoral interference.


Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. An intelligence analyst for 30 years, McGovern was CIA's senior representative to the Analysis Department of the BND during the late 1970s.

Source

[Lauren Johnson]

Long kniving Flynn maybe a trap?

It sounds outlandish from a plebeian point of view. But the question should be proffered: was the whole Flynn fiasco a ruse, getting the left and the media going crazy, chasing their tails over a non existent Russian conspiracy, an operation to expose disloyal leakers inside the administration and/or intelligence agencies?A few things to consider.
Contrary to what the mental midgets on twitter tell you, both Bannon and Trump are brilliant strategists. If you need proof of this, accept the fact that Hillary spent $1.6b to lose to Trump's twitter account. Ok?
General Flynn has been in intelligence almost his entire professional career. Of course he knew they were monitoring his communications with Russia. That's a non starter. Taking into consideration that Dr. Steve Pieczenik is blantantly saying it was the plan the whole time to have Flynn gone very early during the Trump administration, coupled with the fact that Rep. Chaffetz is calling for an investigation into the leaks, I think the Machiavellian angle here is worth considering.
This morning Trump tweeted about catching low life leakers, pointing out the NY Times was complicit in the scandal.

The Trump administration had to know they were surrounded by jackals when they planted a flag inside the White House. Trump has been discussing government corruption and dishonest intelligence reports for years. It's also worth reminding you of his cryptic address to the CIA after he first took office, telling them he'd like to remove the columns inside the buildings, perhaps a reference to the fifth column theory aka shadow government.
You'll know this theory is true should we start to see heads roll over the coming weeks and months.

[Paul Rigby]

Game On - East vs. West, again

From the January 2015 issue

By Andrew Cockburn

http://harpers.org/archive/2015/01/game-on/

On February 28, 2014, Russian troops effortlessly seized control of Crimea. Two days later, Congressman Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, denounced the Obama Administration's weak response to the crisis. "Putin is playing chess and I think we are playing marbles, and I don't think it's even close," Rogers said on Fox News Sunday. Not long afterward, as the crisis escalated, Rogers hosted a breakfast fund-raiser in downtown Washington.

As befitted an overseer of the nation's almost $70 billion intelligence budget, Rogers attracted a healthy crowd, largely composed of lobbyists for defense contractors. Curious as to how the military-industrial complex was reacting to events abroad, I asked a lobbyist friend who had attended (but was loath to reveal his identity and thus his communication with a liberal magazine) about the mood at the meeting. "I'd call it borderline euphoric," he said.

Just a few months earlier, the outlook for the defense complex had looked dark indeed. The war in Afghanistan was winding down. American voters were regularly informing pollsters that they wanted the United States to "mind its own business internationally." The dreaded "sequester" of 2013, which threatened to cut half a trillion dollars from the long-term defense budget, had been temporarily deflected by artful negotiation, but without further negotiations the defense cuts were likely to resume with savage force in fiscal 2016. There was ugly talk of mothballing one of the Navy's nuclear-powered carriers, slashing the Army to a mere 420,000 troops, retiring drone programs, cutting headquarters staffs, and more.

Times had been dark before, sometimes rendered darker in the retelling. Although defense budgets had actually increased in the post-Vietnam 1970s, for example, veterans of the era still shared horror stories about the "hollow" military in the years following the final withdrawal from Saigon. That cloud had lifted soon enough, thanks to sustained efforts via the medium of suitably adjusted intelligence assessments to portray the Soviet Union as the Red Menace, armed and ready to conquer the Free World.

On the other hand, the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union had posed a truly existential threat. The gift that had kept on giving, reliably generating bomber gaps, missile gaps, civil-defense gaps, and whatever else was needed at the mere threat of a budget cut, disappeared almost overnight. The Warsaw Pact, the U.S.S.R.'s answer to NATO, vanished into the ash can of history. Thoughtful commentators ruminated about a postCold War partnership between Russia and the United States. American bases in Germany emptied out as Army divisions and Air Force squadrons came home and were disbanded. In a 1990 speech, Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, revered in those days as a cerebral disperser of military largesse, raised the specter of further cuts, warning that there was a "threat blank" in the defense budget and that the Pentagon's strategic assessments were "rooted in the past." An enemy had to be found.

For the defense industry, this was a matter of urgency. By the early 1990s, research and procurement contracts had fallen to about half what they'd been in the previous decade. Part of the industry's response was to circle the wagons, reorganize, and prepare for better days. In 1993, William Perry, installed as deputy defense secretary in the Clinton Administration, summoned a group of industry titans to an event that came to be known as the Last Supper. At this meeting he informed them that ongoing budget cuts mandated drastic consolidation and that some of them would shortly be out of business.

Perry's warning sparked a feeding frenzy of mergers and takeovers, lubricated by generous subsidies at taxpayer expense in the form of Pentagon reimbursements for "restructuring costs." Thus Northrop bought Grumman, Raytheon bought E-Systems, Boeing bought Rockwell's defense division, and the Lockheed Corporation bought the jet-fighter division of General Dynamics. In 1995 came the biggest and most consequential deal of all, in which Martin-Marietta merged with Lockheed.

The resultant Lockheed Martin Corporation, the largest arms company on earth, was run by former Martin-Marietta CEO Norman R. Augustine, by far the most cunning and prescient executive in the business. Wired deeply into Washington, Augustine had helped Perry craft the restructuring subsidies for companies like his own essentially, a multibillion-dollar tranche of corporate welfare. In a 1994 interview, he shrewdly predicted that U.S. defense spending would recover in 1997 (he was off by only a year). In the meantime, he would scour the world for new markets.

In this task, Augustine could be assured of his government's support, since he was a member of the little-known Defense Policy Advisory Committee on Trade, chartered to provide guidance to the secretary of defense on arms-export policies. One especially promising market was among the former members of the defunct Warsaw Pact. Were they to join NATO, they would be natural customers for products such as the F-16 fighter that Lockheed had inherited from General Dynamics.

There was one minor impediment: the Bush Administration had already promised Moscow that NATO would not move east, a pledge that was part of the settlement ending the Cold War. Between 1989 and 1991, the United States and the Soviet Union had amicably agreed to cut strategic nuclear forces by roughly a third and to withdraw almost all tactical nuclear weapons from Europe. Meanwhile, the Soviets had good reason to believe that if they pulled their forces out of Eastern Europe, NATO would not fill the military vacuum left by the Red Army. Secretary of State James Baker had unequivocally spelled out Washington's end of that bargain in a private conversation with Mikhail Gorbachev in February 1990, pledging that NATO forces would not move "one inch to the east," provided the Soviets agreed to NATO membership for a unified Germany.

The Russians certainly thought they had a deal. Sergey Ivanov, later one of Vladimir Putin's defense ministers, was in 1991 a KGB officer operating in Europe. "We were told . . . that NATO would not expand its military structures in the direction of the Soviet Union," he later recalled. When things turned out otherwise, Gorbachev remarked angrily that "one cannot depend on American politicians." Some years later, in 2007, in an angry speech to Western leaders, Putin asked: "What happened to the assurances our Western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them."

Even at the beginning, not everyone in the administration was intent on honoring this promise. Robert Gates noted in his memoirs that Dick Cheney, then the defense secretary, took a more opportunistic tack: "When the Soviet Union was collapsing in late 1991, Dick wanted to see the dismantlement not only of the Soviet Union and the Russian empire but of Russia itself, so it could never again be a threat to the rest of the world." Still, as the red flag over the Kremlin came down for the last time on Christmas Day, President George H. W. Bush spoke graciously of "a victory for democracy and freedom" and commended departing Soviet leader Gorbachev.

But domestic politics inevitably dictate foreign policy, and Bush was soon running for reelection. The collapse of the country's longtime enemy was therefore recast as a military victory, a vindication of past imperial adventures. "By the grace of God, America won the Cold War," Bush told a cheering Congress in his 1992 State of the Union address, "and I think of those who won it, in places like Korea and Vietnam. And some of them didn't come back. Back then they were heroes, but this year they were victors."

This sort of talk was more to the taste of Cold Warriors who had suddenly found themselves without a cause. The original neocons, though reliably devoted to the cause of Israel, had a related agenda that they pursued with equal diligence. Fervent anti-Communists, they had joined forces with the military-industrial complex in the 1970s under the guidance of Paul Nitze, principal author in 1950 of the Cold War playbook National Security Council Report 68 and for decades an ardent proponent of lavish Pentagon budgets. As his former son-in-law and aide, W. Scott Thompson, explained to me, Nitze fostered this potent union of the Israel and defense lobbies through the Committee on the Present Danger, an influential group that in the 1970s crusaded against détente and defense cutbacks, and for unstinting aid to Israel. The initiative was so successful that by 1982 the head of the Anti-Defamation League was equating criticism of defense spending with anti-Semitism.

By the 1990s, the neocon torch had passed to a new generation that thumped the same tub, even though the Red Menace had vanished into history. "Having defeated the evil empire, the United States enjoys strategic and ideological predominance," wrote William Kristol and Robert Kagan in 1996. "The first objective of U.S. foreign policy should be to preserve and enhance that predominance." Achieving this happy aim, calculated these two sons of neocon founding fathers, required an extra $60$80 billion a year for the defense budget, not to mention a missile-defense system, which could be had for upward of $10 billion. Among other priorities, they agreed, it was important that "NATO remains strong, active, cohesive, and under decisive American leadership."

As it happened, NATO was indeed active, under Bill Clinton's leadership, and moving decisively to expand eastward, whatever prior Republican understandings there might have been with the Russians. The drive was mounted on several fronts. Already plushly installed in Warsaw and other Eastern European capitals were emissaries of the defense contractors. "Lockheed began looking at Poland right after the Wall came down," Dick Pawloski, for years a Lockheed salesman active in Eastern Europe, told me. "There were contractors flooding through all those countries."

Meanwhile, a coterie of foreign-policy intellectuals on the payroll of the RAND Corporation, a think tank historically reliant on military contracts, had begun advancing the artful argument that expanding NATO eastward was actually a way of securing peace in Europe, and was in no way directed against Russia. Chief among these pundits was the late Ron Asmus, who subsequently recalled a RAND workshop held in Warsaw, just months after the Wall fell, at which he and Dan Fried, a foreign-service officer deemed by colleagues to be "hard line" toward the Russians, and Eric Edelman, later a national-security adviser to Vice President Cheney, discussed the possibility of stationing American forces on Polish soil.

Eminent authorities weighed in with the reasonable objection that this would not go down well with the Russians, a view later succinctly summarized by George F. Kennan, the venerated architect of the "containment" strategy:

Expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the post cold-war era. Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.

In retrospect, Kennan seems as prescient as Norm Augustine, but it didn't make any difference at the time. When he wrote that warning, in 1997, NATO expansion was already well under way, and with the aid of a powerful supporter in the White House. "This mythology that it was all neocons in the Bush Administration, it's nonsense," says a former senior official on both the Clinton and Bush National Security Council staffs who requested anonymity. "It was Clinton, with the help of a lot of Republicans."

This official credits the persuasive powers of Lech Wa?e sa and Václav Havel at a 1994 summit meeting with Clinton's conversion to the cause of NATO expansion. Others point to a more urgent motivation. "It was widely understood in the White House that [influential foreign-policy adviser Zbigniew] Brzezinski told Clinton he would lose the Polish vote in the '96 election if he didn't let Poland into NATO," a former Clinton White House official, who requested anonymity, assured me.

To an ear as finely tuned to electoral minutiae as the forty-second president's, such a warning would have been incentive enough, since Polish Americans constituted a significant voting bloc in the Midwest. It was no coincidence then that Clinton chose Detroit for his announcement, two weeks before the 1996 election, that NATO would admit the first of its new members by 1999 (meaning Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary). He also made it clear that NATO would not stop there. "It must reach out to all the new democracies in Central Europe," he continued, "the Baltics and the new independent states of the former Soviet Union." None of this, Clinton stressed, should alarm the Russians: "NATO will promote greater stability in Europe, and Russia will be among the beneficiaries." Not everyone saw things that way; in Moscow there was talk of meeting NATO expansion "with rockets."

Chas Freeman, the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs from 1993 to 1994, recalls that the policy was driven by "triumphalist Cold Warriors" whose attitude was, "The Russians are down, let's give them another kick." Freeman had floated an alternate approach, Partnership for Peace, that would avoid antagonizing Moscow, but, as he recalls, it "got overrun in '96 by the overwhelming temptation to enlist the Polish vote in Milwaukee."

In April 1997, Augustine took a tour of his prospective Polish, Czech, and Hungarian customers, stopping by Romania and Slovenia as well, and affirmed that there was great potential for selling F-16s. Clinton had spoken of NATO being as big a boon for Eastern Europe as the Marshall Plan had been for Western Europe after the Second World War, and many of the impoverished ex-Communist countries, some with small and ramshackle militaries, were eager to get on the bandwagon. "Augustine would look them in the eye," recalls Pawloski, the former Lockheed salesman, "and say, You may have only a small air force of twenty planes, but these planes will have to play with the first team.' Meaning that they'd be flying with the U.S. Air Force and they would need F-16s to keep up." Actually, Augustine had rather more going for him than this simple sales pitch, including a lavish dinner for Hungarian politicians he threw at the Budapest opera house.

Meanwhile, back in Washington, a new and formidable lobbying group had come on the scene: the U.S. Committee to Expand NATO. Its cofounder and president, Bruce P. Jackson, was a former Army intelligence officer and Reagan-era Pentagon official who had dedicated himself to the pursuit of a "Europe whole, free and at peace." His efforts on the committee were unpaid. Fortunately, he had kept his day job working for Augustine as vice president for strategy and planning at the Lockheed Martin Corporation.

Jackson's committee stretched ideologically from Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle (known as the neocon "Prince of Darkness") to Greg Craig, director of Bill Clinton's impeachment defense and later Barack Obama's White House counsel. Others on the roster included Ron Asmus, Richard Holbrooke, and Stephen Hadley, who subsequently became George W. Bush's national-security adviser.

When I reached Jackson recently at his residence in Bordeaux, he reiterated what he had always said at the time: his efforts to expand NATO were undertaken independently of his employer. He suggested that they had even imperiled his job. "I would not say that senior executives supported my specific projects," Jackson said. "They thought I should be free to do what I wanted politically, provided I did not associate [Lockheed] with my personal causes. In short, they did nothing to stop me, and suggested to other employees to leave me alone so long as I did not drag LMC into politics or foreign policy. I finally left because I enjoyed my nonprofit work more than my day job."

In this atmosphere of disinterested public service, Jackson and his friends devoted their evenings to cultivating support for congressional approval of Polish, Czech, and Hungarian membership in NATO, followed by further expansion. The setting for these efforts was a large Washington mansion not far from the British Embassy and the vice-presidential residence: the home of Julie Finley, a significant figure in Republican Party politics at that time who had, as she told me, "a deep interest in national security." A friend of hers, Nina Straight, describes Finley as someone who "knows how to be powerful and knows how to be useful." As Finley relates, she noted in late 1996 that NATO expansion was facing opposition in Washington. "So I called Bruce Jackson and Stephen Hadley and Greg Craig and said, Holy smokes, we have to get moving!' "

"We always met at Julie Finley's house, which had an endless wine cellar," Jackson reminisced happily. "Educating the Senate about NATO was our chief mission. We'd have four or five senators over every night, and we'd drink Julie's wine while people like [Polish dissident] Adam Michnik told stories of their encounters with the secret police."

Meanwhile, other European countries were experiencing a less congenial form of lobbying. Romania, for example, was among those hoping to join the alliance and enjoy the supposed fruits of this latter-day Marshall Plan. But the country was in ruins, with an economy that had barely recovered from the levels induced by the demented economic policies of Nicolae Ceausescu, the tyrannical ruler who had been overthrown and executed in 1989. A 1997 World Bank report noted that "the majority of the poor live in traditional houses made of mud and straw, do not have access to piped water and have no sewage facilities." Such dire conditions made little impression on visiting arms salesmen. Representatives of Bell Helicopter Textron, manufacturer of the Cobra attack helicopter, persuaded the Romanian government in 1996 to agree to a $1.4 billion deal for ninety-six Super Cobra helicopters, to be manufactured locally and rechristened the Dracula.

This presented Daniel Daianu, a respected economist appointed Romania's finance minister in December 1997, with a problem. His country didn't have the money. "There were huge payments, billions, coming due in '98 and '99, in external debt payments," he told me. "That was why I was so against the deal." In response, the United States applied leverage. Picking his words carefully, Daianu explained that Americans in Washington and Bucharest "intimated to me with clarity that this was the way to get easier access into NATO" in the first round, along with Poland and the others.

Daianu was learning some interesting things about the way Washington works. He found himself the object of "gentle pressure" from "American businesspeople and people who were a sort of conduit between the American administration of the time and the companies involved in this deal." As he stuck to his principles, the pressure from such people "intimated" that "this is the way to take care of your retirement, and your children's."

At the same time, there was pressure back in Washington, some of it not so gentle. Romania was heavily dependent on an IMF loan guarantee, which gave the fund considerable leverage over the country's budget. As it happened, Karin Lissakers, the U.S. executive director on the IMF's board during the Clinton Administration, knew a lot about the sales practices of arms corporations she had worked during the 1970s for Senator Frank Church's Subcommittee on Multinational Corporations. The subcommittee had delved into the unwholesome sales techniques of U.S. arms corporations abroad, uncovering many egregious cases of bribery. So when a Textron representative came calling to demand that the fund remove the block it had effectively imposed on the Romanian deal, she was not impressed.

Her visitor, Richard Burt, had been a New York Times reporter specializing in national-security issues before moving over to the State Department, where he ultimately served as ambassador to West Germany. After leaving government service in 1991, he found steady employment as a high-powered consultant. Among his clients was the Textron Corporation (he sat on the firm's international advisory council), and he had a separate connection to Bell Helicopter, from which a company he chaired, IEP Advisors, had collected $160,000 between 1998 and 1999 for lobbying. Meanwhile, Burt maintained a useful foothold in the Pentagon, serving on the influential Defense Policy Board.

"Rick Burt came to see me and said the IMF was being completely unreasonable in blocking the helicopter deal," Lissakers told me. "He wanted me to pressure the IMF country team, pressure them to approve the loan. His tone was bullying the implication was that I was accountable to Congress and would suffer consequences. This was at a time when hospitals in Bucharest had no running water! I always regret I didn't throw him straight out of my office."

"She's full of shit, and that's on the record," responded Burt heatedly when I relayed Lissaker's comments. "That's not at all what I was doing. I was not pimping for this at all." He insisted that he himself always thought the helicopter deal was a bad idea, and was simply sounding out the IMF position. He also insisted that the $160,000 IEP Advisors was paid in 199899 was merely for "advice not lobbying."

Daianu resigned and the helicopter deal was canceled, but Romania did finally make it into NATO, in 2004, along with six other countries. By that time, Lockheed had scored a major payoff with a $3.5 billion sale of F-16s to Poland, and the newly enlarged NATO had proved its military usefulness in the U.S.-led coalition that bombed Serbia, a Russian ally, for seventy-seven days in 1999 on behalf of Kosovo separatists. "The Russians were humiliated in Kosovo," Jackson said, "and that was the first time they showed militant opposition to NATO."

Their protests made little difference. " Fuck Russia' is a proud and long tradition in U.S. foreign policy," Jackson pointed out to me. "It doesn't go away overnight." Consequently, no one in Washington appeared to care very much about the Russian reaction when NATO's eastward flow began spilling into the territory of the former Soviet Union, especially once George W. Bush was in the White House with Dick Cheney by his side.

With the momentum of expansion carrying NATO ever closer to the Soviet heartland, it was no longer realistic to presume Russian indifference. Yet the movement was hard to stop. Even farther to the east, in Georgia, a charismatic young U.S.-trained lawyer, Mikheil Saakashvili, took power in 2003 and straightaway began offering a welcome embrace to Washington and pleading to join the alliance. As I have previously described (in a post on the Harper's website), to bolster his standing in the American capital, Saakashvili hired Randy Scheunemann, a Republican lobbyist and the executive director of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a neocon group formed in 2002 under the chairmanship of none other than Bruce Jackson.

Privately, Washington players felt a little nervous about their hyperactive protégé, suspecting that he might get everyone into trouble. As one of them told me, Saakashvili "needed a course of Ritalin to shut him up." But in public, it was easy to get swept away. In 2005, George W. Bush stood in Tbilisi's Freedom Square and told the crowd they could count on American support:

As you build a free and democratic Georgia, the American people will stand with you. . . . As you build free institutions at home, the ties that bind our nations will grow deeper, as well. . . . We encourage your closer cooperation with NATO.

Saakashvili worked hard at ingratiating himself with the friendly superpower, supplying a Georgian contingent for the U.S.-led coalitions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and offering hospitality to various American intelligence operations in Georgia itself, where NSA interception facilities began appearing on suitably sited hilltops. Although he may have had less appeal among European leaders, in Washington the Georgian president basked in bipartisan favor among influential figures such as Richard Holbrooke, as well as White House aspirant Senator John McCain and his adviser (and Saakashvili lobbyist) Randy Scheunemann.

Unfortunately, the burgeoning relationship promoted a dangerous overconfidence on Saakashvili's part. By 2008, he was unabashedly provoking Moscow, apparently confident that he could win a war with his immense neighbor. Receiving Bruce Jackson, who by now was heading up yet another entity, the Project on Transitional Democracies, Saakashvili demanded immediate shipment of various weapons systems, including, remembers Jackson, "a thousand Stingers." Jackson said that would not happen. "Go fuck yourself," snapped the Georgian leader.

Matters came to a head at a NATO summit in Bucharest in April 2008. Vladimir Putin flew in to say that the alliance's expansion posed a "direct threat" to Russia. President Bush, accompanied by National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, took Saakashvili aside and told him not to provoke Russia. Sources privy to the meeting tell me that Bush warned the Georgian leader that if he persisted, the United States would not start World War III on his behalf.

Bush had arrived in Bucharest eager for an agreement on rapid NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine, but he backed off in the face of protests from European leaders. In an awkward compromise, NATO released a statement forswearing immediate membership, but also stating: "We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO." Putin duly took note.

Buoyed by hubris and undeterred by warnings (possibly undermined by back-channel assurances from Dick Cheney that he had U.S. support for a confrontation), Saakashvili pressed on, ultimately assaulting the separatist region of South Ossetia, which was disputed by Russia. Russian forces swiftly counterattacked and were soon deep in Georgian territory, making sure along the way to destroy all those U.S. listening posts.

Despite this debacle, appetite for engagement on the fringes of Russia itself did not go away. Cheney and the rest of the Bush Administration were shortly to make way for the new broom of Obama and his team or nearly new. As is so often the case in important matters, policy proved to be bipartisan. Thus Dan Fried, a senior foreign-policy official under Clinton and Bush, was still in office to welcome the Obama Administration, and currently supervises the sanctions regime directed at Russia for the State Department. Victoria Nuland, wife of Robert Kagan and chief of staff to Clinton's deputy secretary of state, Strobe Talbot, served Cheney as deputy national-security adviser, then resurfaced as Hillary Clinton's spokesperson in the first Obama term before transitioning to assistant secretary of state for Europe in the second.

Reacting to the news that the United States had put $5 billion into democracy-building projects in Ukraine, Putin, whose popularity at home had been sagging, pressured Ukraine's elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, to forgo a trade agreement with the European Union. In its place he offered $15 billion in economic assistance. The rest, as they say, is history. When street protests in Kiev threatened to overthrow the corrupt Yanukovych, Nuland hurried to the scene, distributed bread to the protesters, and later incautiously discussed her plans for installing a new government on an open phone line ("that would be great, I think, to help glue this thing . . . and, you know, fuck the EU"), remarks that were intercepted and promptly leaked. Even a politician far less paranoid than the Russian leader might have found grounds for suspecting that the Americans were up to something, and Putin promptly responded by seizing control of Crimea. Since that moment, as news anchor Diane Sawyer announced in March, it has been "game on" for the United States and Russia.

for many of its original protagonists, NATO expansion has proved an unblemished success. "I see no empirical evidence that enlargement was threatening to Russia," Jackson told me firmly. "You can't prove that." On the other hand, he is no great enthusiast for the economic warfare against Russia levied by the Obama Administration in support of Ukraine. "The moral defense of international intervention is the improvement of the freedom and prosperity of the people in question," he wrote me recently. "I suspect sanctions will lead to the impoverishment of all concerned, most particularly the Ukrainians [whom] the sanctions policy purports to defend."

In any event, the vision of Augustine and his peers that an enlarged NATO could be a fruitful market has become a reality. By 2014, the twelve new members had purchased close to $17 billion worth of American weapons, while this past October Romania celebrated the arrival of Eastern Europe's first $134 million Lockheed Martin Aegis Ashore missile-defense system.

The ebullience expressed by defense lobbyists at Mike Rogers's breakfast back in March has been amply justified. "Vladimir Putin has solved the sequestration problem for us because he has proven that ground forces are needed to deter Russian aggression," declared Congressman Mike Turner, an Ohio Republican and chair of an important defense subcommittee, in October. Meanwhile, the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington entity that numbers, inevitably, Norm Augustine among the panjandrums adorning its board of directors, sponsored a panel on "Ensuring a Strong U.S. Defense for the Future." Michèle Flournoy, defense undersecretary for policy during Obama's first term, warned the panel, "You can't expect to defend the nation under sequestration." Fellow panelist and former Cheney adviser Eric Edelman, who preceded Flournoy in the Pentagon post, echoed her theme. Other speakers demanded that NATO members increase their defense budgets.

At the end of October 2014, as European economies quivered, thanks in part to the sanctions-driven slowdown in trade with Russia, the United States reported a gratifying 3.5 percent jump in gross domestic product for the quarter ending September 3. This spurt was driven, so government economists reported, by a sharp uptick in military spending.

[Paul Rigby]

General Flynn's resignation raises fresh dangers

JAMES O'NEILL

17 February 2017

http://johnmenadue.com/blog/?p=9478

As is now customarily the case, the mainstream media both failed to put Flynn's actions in their proper context, and even more seriously failed to understand the significance of this week's events.

Late on Monday 13 February 2017 General Michael Flynn, President Trump's National Security Adviser, resigned. The ostensible reason for the resignation was that he had "lied" to Vice President Pence about the content of telephone conversations Flynn had had with Russia's UN Ambassador Sergey Kislyok in December last year, after the election but before Trump was sworn in as President or Flynn confirmed as National Security Adviser.

As is now customarily the case, the mainstream media both failed to put Flynn's actions in their proper context, and even more seriously failed to understand the significance of this week's events.

We need to go back before the US Presidential election in November 2016. It was widely anticipated (and hoped) by the mainstream media that Hillary Clinton, the favoured candidate of the neocons that have dominated US foreign policy for at least the last three presidencies, would win.

The first shock to the neocons was that Trump won. To compound their alarm, Trump refused to join in the demonization of Russia that had reached ridiculous depths during the campaign.

Instead, Trump recognized that Russia was a better friend than enemy, and that Russia's assistance was vital to effectively combatting Islamic terrorism. The fact that the terrorist threat owed more than a little to US foreign policy, particularly since 2001, was not something the neocons were willing to acknowledge.

In speeches and interviews after the election Trump reiterated that he hoped to "get along" with Vladimir Putin. The apogee of neocon dismay came with Trump's interview with Fox News' Bill O'Reilly last week when he openly acknowledged that America's hands were not exactly clean when it came to killing people.

This simple undisputed fact caused an uproar in the American commentariat. For people very quick to criticize Trump for his use of "alternative facts", they showed a remarkable reluctance to acknowledge what was an unvarnished truth.

America has an unparalleled record for killing more people in more countries through actions ranging from assassinations, to bombings, material support for terrorism and outright invasion and occupation than any other group or country by a very large margin. Part of the self-image of the exceptional country is to exempt oneself from an acknowledgement of this uncomfortable fact.

The neocons were clearly not going to take their electoral defeat in November as the end of the matter. Plan B, if Clinton was not elected, was already in place, with Trump's Vice President, Pence, their man in waiting.

To suggest, as the mainstream media have, that Flynn misled Pence over the telephone conversations he had with Ambassador Kislyok is absurd. Those conversations with in accordance with Trump's stated policies to which Pence was a party in formulating.

Secondly, the telephone conversations were intercepted (the term hacked' only being used when done by the other side). That fact itself seems immune from comment by the mainstream media. Pence has the highest possible security clearance. If there had been anything in those telephone conversations that was a cause for national security concern, then Pence would have been briefed on their content.

From the scant details made available thus far, it seems that Kislyok and Flynn discussed the latest sanctions imposed on Russia by Obama in the dying days of his administration. Those sanctions were allegedly in response to Russian "hacking" of the US election.

The transcript of the telephone call now released makes it clear that the Russian ambassador raised the issue of the sanctions. Flynn replied that the whole of US-Russia policy, including the sanctions, would be reviewed by the new administration after the inauguration. Nothing more, nothing less.

That entirely fact free allegation of Russian hacking filled hectares of mainstream media newsprint, although in all the breathless coverage the absence of evidence, logic or common sense in the allegations was entirely missing from the analysis.

Similarly, the overblown hyperbole about Flynn's alleged "treason" has consumed the mainstream media. Once again, the actual facts bear little or no resemblance to reporting.

The fact that Flynn and Kislyok's telephone conversations have come out two months after the event is significant for two reasons in particular.

The first is that the information was leaked to the New York Times and the Washington Post, both of whom have been virulently anti Trump and anti Russia from the outset of the campaign for the Presidency.

The leaking must have been done by someone with access to classified information, and the motive for the leaking (itself a criminal offence) was with the clear motive of embarrassing and undermining both Trump and his foreign policy initiatives spearheaded by Flynn. The most important of these initiatives was an attempted rapprochement with Russia.

The second fact of importance is what the leak tells us about the determined effort by the neocons to shatter any attempt by Trump to normalize relations with Russia.

Their first overt foray in this direction was in the UN Security Council when US ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley was given a piece of paper while she was on her feet that she then read into the record. That part of her speech was an attack upon Russia and its policy with Crimea and Ukraine.

The comments were not only absurd and contrary to the facts on the ground; they were also directly contrary to everything that Trump himself had been saying in the preceding days and weeks. It is doubtful that Trump even knew about what Haley had been given to read.

The forced resignation of Flynn through the manufactured crisis of telephone conversations with the Russian UN Ambassador on an open line is therefore a major victory for the neocons. Trump's policies viz a viz Russia have been compromised, possibly irretrievably.

When one considers that Trump's policies posed a very real prospect of breaking the stalemate in US-Russia relations, any reversal is not something to be welcomed.

Trump showed some resilience to the neocons in resisting the imposition of either or both of John Bolton and Elliot Abrams, two arch reactionaries and anti-Russian diehards, from his foreign policy team.

He is going to have to be even more resilient in the face of the latest provocative outrage by people who clearly favour confrontation and war with Russia to more rational alternatives. For these reasons the forced resignation of Flynn represents a new and dangerous step that brings the prospect of war even closer.

James O'Neill, Barrister at Law and geopolitical analyst. He may be contacted at joneill@qldbar.asn.au

[Cliff Varnell]

Fake President Trump is at global war against women's reproductive rights.

FP Trump is at war against Islam.

FP Trump is at war against undocumented immigrants.

FP Trump is at war against the corporate news media.

FP Trump is at war against the judiciary.

FP Trump is at war against environmental and financial regulations.

FP is at war against the Democratic Party.

FP Trump is at war against Bernie's people.

...Oh! I almost forgot, FP Trump is at war against the intelligence community.

If I understand correctly one can make a bet in the UK on the odds Trump serves a full term.

I advise a wager on the "unders," if you know what I mean.

[Paul Rigby]

Obama Should Be "Held Accountable" For The "Soft Coup" Against Trump

by Tyler Durden

Feb 18, 2017 11:15 AM

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-02-18...inst-trump

In light of the recent flurry of leaks by the so-called "deep state", which includes such agencies as the NSA and FBI and which last week lead to the resignation of James Clapper after a phone recording of his phone conversation with the Russian ambassador was leaked to the WaPo and other anti-Trump publications, an article published on January 12 by the NYT has generated renewed interest. One month ago, the NYT reported that "In its final days, the Obama administration expanded the power of the National Security Agency to share globally intercepted personal communications with the government's 16 other intelligence agencies before applying privacy protections."

The new rules significantly relax longstanding limits on what the N.S.A. may do with the information gathered by its most powerful surveillance operations, which are largely unregulated by American wiretapping laws. These include collecting satellite transmissions, phone calls and emails that cross network switches abroad, and messages between people abroad that cross domestic network switches. The change means that far more officials will be searching through raw data. Essentially, the government is reducing the risk that the N.S.A. will fail to recognize that a piece of information would be valuable to another agency, but increasing the risk that officials will see private information about innocent people.

While previously the N.S.A. filtered information before sharing intercepted communications with another agency, like the C.I.A. or the intelligence branches of the F.B.I. and the Drug Enforcement Administration, and furthermore N.S.A.'s analysts passed on only information they deemed pertinent, screening out the identities of innocent people and irrelevant personal information, following passage of Obama's 11th hour rule, "other intelligence agencies will be able to search directly through raw repositories of communications intercepted by the N.S.A. and then apply such rules for "minimizing" privacy intrusions."

In other words, what until recently was a trickle of private data captured about US individuals by the NSA with only a handful of people having full, immersive access, suddenly became a firehose with thousands of potential witnesses across 16 other agencies, each of whom suddenly became a potential source of leaks about ideological political opponents. And with the universe of potential "leaking" culprits suddenly exploding exponentially, good luck finding the responsible party.

However, the implications are far more serious than just loss of privacy rights.

According to civil right expert and prominent First Amendement Supreme Court lawyer, Jay Sekulow, what the agencies did by leaking the Trump Administration information was not only illegal but "almost becomes a soft coup", one which was spurred by the last minute rule-change by Obama, who intentionally made it far easier for leaks to propagate, and next to impossible to catch those responsible for the leaks.

This is his explanation:

There was a sea-change here at the NSA with an order that came from president Obama 17 days before he left office where he allowed the NSA who used to control the data, it now goes to 16 other agencies and that just festered this whole leaking situation, and that happened on the way out, as the president was leaving the office.

Why did the Obama administration wait until it had 17 days left in their administration to put this order in place if they thought it was so important. They had 8 years, they didn't do it, number one. Number two, it changed the exiting rule which was an executive order dating back to Ronald Reagan, that has been in place until 17 days before the Obama administration was going to end, that said the NSA gets the raw data, and they determine dissemination.

Instead, this change that the president put in place, signed off by the way by James Clapper on December 15, 2016, signed off by Loretta Lynch the Attorney General January 3, 2017, they decide that now 16 agencies can get the raw data and what that does is almost creates a shadow government. You have all these people who are not agreeing with President Trump's position, so it just festers more leaks.

If they had a justification for this, wonderful, why didn't they do it 8 years ago, 4 years ago, 3 years ago. Yet they wait until 17 days left.
One potential answer: they knew they had a "smoking gun", and were working to make it easier to enable the information to be "leaked" despite the clearly criminal consequences of such dissemination.

As this point Hannity correctly points out, "it makes it that much more difficult by spreading out the information among 16 other agencies, if they want to target or take away the privacy rights, and illegally tap the phones, in this case General Flynn, it's going to be much harder to find the perpetrator."

Sekulow confirms, noting that back when only the NSA had access to this kind of raw data, there would be a very small amount of people who have access to this kind of data. "But this change in the Obama Administration was so significant that they allowed dissemination to 16 other agencies, and we wonder why there's leaks."

The lawyer's conclusion: "President Obama, James Clapper, Loretta Lynch should be held accountable for this.

[video=youtube_share;KLfUXH20Od8]http://youtu.be/KLfUXH20Od8[/video]

[Paul Rigby]

Who Really Rules The United States?

How bureaucrats are fighting the voters for control of our country

BY: Matthew Continetti

February 17, 2017 11:32 am

http://freebeacon.com/columns/rules-united-states/

Donald Trump was elected president last November by winning 306 electoral votes. He pledged to "drain the swamp" in Washington, D.C., to overturn the system of politics that had left the nation's capital and major financial and tech centers flourishing but large swaths of the country mired in stagnation and decay. "What truly matters," he said in his Inaugural Address, "is not which party controls our government, but whether our government is controlled by the people."

Is it? By any historical and constitutional standard, "the people" elected Donald Trump and endorsed his program of nation-state populist reform. Yet over the last few weeks America has been in the throes of an unprecedented revolt. Not of the people against the governmentthat happened last yearbut of the government against the people. What this says about the state of American democracy, and what it portends for the future, is incredibly disturbing.

There is, of course, the case of Michael Flynn. He made a lot of enemies inside the government during his career, suffice it to say. And when he exposed himself as vulnerable those enemies pounced. But consider the means: anonymous and possibly illegal leaks of private conversations. Yes, the conversation in question was with a foreign national. And no one doubts we spy on ambassadors. But we aren't supposed to spy on Americans without probable cause. And we most certainly are not supposed to disclose the results of our spying in the pages of the Washington Post because it suits a partisan or personal agenda.

Here was a case of current and former national security officials using their position, their sources, and their methods to crush a political enemy. And no one but supporters of the president seems to be disturbed. Why? Because we are meant to believe that the mysterious, elusive, nefarious, and to date unproven connection between Donald Trump and the Kremlin is more important than the norms of intelligence and the decisions of the voters.

But why should we believe that? And who elected these officials to make this judgment for us?

Nor is Flynn the only example of nameless bureaucrats working to undermine and ultimately overturn the results of last year's election. According to the New York Times, civil servants at the EPA are lobbying Congress to reject Donald Trump's nominee to run the agency. Is it because Scott Pruitt lacks qualifications? No. Is it because he is ethically compromised? Sorry. The reason for the opposition is that Pruitt is a critic of the way the EPA was run during the presidency of Barack Obama. He has a policy difference with the men and women who are soon to be his employees. Up until, oh, this month, the normal course of action was for civil servants to follow the direction of the political appointees who serve as proxies for the elected president.

How quaint. These days an architect of the overreaching and antidemocratic Waters of the U.S. regulation worries that her work will be overturned so she undertakes extraordinary means to defeat her potential boss. But a change in policy is a risk of democratic politics. Nowhere does it say in the Constitution that the decisions of government employees are to be unquestioned and preserved forever. Yet that is precisely the implication of this unprecedented protest. "I can't think of any other time when people in the bureaucracy have done this," a professor of government tells the paper. That sentence does not leave me feeling reassured.

Opposition to this president takes many forms. Senate Democrats have slowed confirmations to the most sluggish pace since George Washington. Much of the New York and Beltway media does really function as a sort of opposition party, to the degree that reporters celebrated the sacking of Flynn as a partisan victory for journalism. Discontent manifests itself in direct actions such as the Women's March.

But here's the difference. Legislative roadblocks, adversarial journalists, and public marches are typical of a constitutional democracy. They are spelled out in our founding documents: the Senate and its rules, and the rights to speech, a free press, and assembly. Where in those documents is it written that regulators have the right not to be questioned, opposed, overturned, or indeed fired, that intelligence analysts can just call up David Ignatius and spill the beans whenever they feel like it?

The last few weeks have confirmed that there are two systems of government in the United States.

The first is the system of government outlined in the U.S. Constitutionits checks, its balances, its dispersion of power, its protection of individual rights. Donald Trump was elected to serve four years as the chief executive of this system. Whether you like it or not.

The second system is comprised of those elements not expressly addressed by the Founders. This is the permanent government, the so-called administrative state of bureaucracies, agencies, quasi-public organizations, and regulatory bodies and commissions, of rule-writers and the byzantine network of administrative law courts. This is the government of unelected judges with lifetime appointments who, far from comprising the "least dangerous branch," now presume to think they know more about America's national security interests than the man elected as commander in chief.

For some time, especially during Democratic presidencies, the second system of government was able to live with the first one. But that time has ended. The two systems are now in competition. And the contest is all the more vicious and frightening because more than offices are at stake. This fight is not about policy. It is about wealth, status, the privileges of an exclusive class.

"In our time, as in [Andrew] Jackson's, the ruling classes claim a monopoly not just on the economy and society but also on the legitimate authority to regulate and restrain it, and even on the language in which such matters are discussed," writes Christopher Caldwell in a brilliant essay in the Winter 2016/17 Claremont Review of Books.

Elites have full-spectrum dominance of a whole semiotic system. What has just happened in American politics is outside the system of meanings elites usually rely upon. Mike Pence's neighbors on Tennyson street not only cannot accept their election loss; they cannot fathom it. They are reaching for their old prerogatives in much the way that recent amputees are said to feel an urge to scratch itches on limbs that are no longer there. Their instincts tell them to disbelieve what they rationally know. Their arguments have focused not on the new administration's policies or its competence but on its very legitimacy.

Donald Trump did not cause the divergence between government of, by, and for the people and government, of, by, and for the residents of Cleveland Park and Arlington and Montgomery and Fairfax counties. But he did exacerbate it. He forced the winners of the global economy and the members of the D.C. establishment to reckon with the fact that they are resented, envied, opposed, and despised by about half the country. But this recognition did not humble the entrenched incumbents of the administrative state. It radicalized them to the point where they are readily accepting, even cheering on, the existence of a "deep state" beyond the control of the people and elected officials.

Who rules the United States? The simple and terrible answer is we do not know. But we are about to find out.