The attempted Clinton-CIA coup against Donald Trump

[Peter Lemkin]

,

[David Guyatt]

Last Minute Change in Security at Inauguration Reminiscent of JFK in Dealey Plaza

Published on 15 Jan 2017

Without explanation and just a week before inauguration, President Obama has suddenly announced he is removing the Major General in charge of the DC National Guard who helped plan and was set to oversee event security that day, effective right in the middle of the ceremony the very minute after Donald Trump is sworn in as president.

The termination is unprecedented and out of decorum with such a high state function taking place, raising serious concerns about the vulnerabilities and gaps in security on such an important day. Not saying that anything is going to happen, but it's hard not to notice and raise questions when the scenario is being made plausible.

[video=youtube_share;6quFfUj2boU]http://youtu.be/6quFfUj2boU[/video]

Sloppy post, but the usefulness of this thread is an even larger question.

::face.palm::

The plan has been obvious. I do not understand the combination of resolve and head scratching I have read of in this thread. Whatever the shortcomings were in the existing
order, rejecting it and replacing it with this is obviously much worse and experience indicates it likely will be catastrophic and irreversible.

Give me a break, will ya.

You're crying into your milk about Hilary? Bless. Thank fuck she's gone, I say. A worse nightmare of imminent destruction I could not imagine than having her finger on the nuclear trigger.

The view you articulate seem to be that of a make-believe phantasmagoria world favoured by Walt Disney. The only advantage of such a false construct is that it allows simple people to simply avoid reflecting upon (and accepting responsibility for) the destruction and blood-letting that would've result from the continuation of the American Project to, er... Project the American Shadow in perpetual warfare thousands of miles away from home. That way the millions of deaths of "non-people" since 9/11 never really happened and never really were reported and so can be happily ignored - and therefore do not count interfere with righteous living of those at home.

God Bless America!

Just remember that it was in America that you were presented with the stark choice between a neoliberal future and a fascist future. There's no one to blame but yourselves for decades of shirking responsibility for the subversion of your political class and the shredding of your Constitution and other protections.

It happened on your watch.

[Dawn Meredith]

Perhaps it's only me who sees all of this as symptomatic that the great US neoliberal empire is crashing and burning and that its time is passing.

Nero, fiddle, fire.

::::thumbsdown::::boom::

Nope it's not only you. However I am stunned by how many politically aware people are hanging on to the fake CIA story. People who should know better. And of course the real story here is the content of those emails. That has been lost in translation. Hillary lost because she was outed for who and what she is. What the DNC did to Bernie causing many Bernie supporters to refuse to support her at the polls.

Terrific articles Paul.

Yep, me too Dawn. Frankly, I'm staggered and it has opened my eyes quite a bit to the blinding effect of partisanship in politics. And yep, the whole point of the Russian did it campaign was, and remains, to deflect from the content of the emails. Now we have a new Russia did it campaign that also has zero factual validity and again the same people are falling over themselves to buy into that also.

::facepalm::

I cannot stand to watch the late night talk shows as they are all over this lie and last night SNL was as well. I'd love nothing better than to watch old Law and Order episodes at bedtime but hubby hates that show. I have started unfriending people on facebook pushing this false narrative. Just don't want to see it in my feed.

[Paul Rigby]

Pannell Beaters…

Mark Doran

15th January 2017

https://markdoran.wordpress.com/2017/01/...l-beaters/

I wasn't intending to return to this blog's media criticism' sideline for at least a few more weeks; but it's a fact of blogging life that events sometimes call for a revision of such plans all the more so when it seems that one is able to diagnose and describe things that pretty well no-one else is going to. By the time we finish, we'll have returned to the British Broadcasting Corporation and the criminal damage it does to UK democracy; to begin with, I want to move to a sick and corrupted pseudo-democracy further from home…

Various friends of mine smart folks, every one of them! are telling me that they expect Donald Trump to be Grassy Knolled' by elements of the US deep state' before he even graduates from President-Elect' to President'. I myself don't think that such an event is especially likely … as, to me, it is far more probable that he and the people around him will be disciplined' by various powerful forces not least those that act through state-corporate media to the extent that his administration simply mutates into another cookie-cutter' US government dedicated to neo-imperial violence and corporate empowerment.

The media-based disciplining' to which I refer actually has two aspects to it and both of them can already be discerned without the slightest difficulty: first, there is the smacking; secondly, there is the silence. The smacking' is what you get when something you have done, or are merely said to have done, is used as something for which you can be hammered in so many contexts that your own planned agenda is simply submerged; the silence' is what you encounter when something you do that is of possible value finds itself effectively unreported, in spite of all your efforts to communicate it. What I want to do at this point is concentrate upon the latter by highlighting the fact that the man who, for a year and more, has been castigated by media organisations and outraged liberals everywhere for supposedly saying things that aren't true (What's that? A man seeking election telling lies?!?) has now said at least a couple of things that are actually truths of genuine importance and has not been given the remotest credit for them. Let's have a quick look at what they were…

It was last Wednesday that Trump gave a press conference that I was soon seeing described in the most negative terms. According to the UK Guardian it was Trump's trainwreck press conference'; in the words of the US Globe and Mail it was his train-wreck press conference'; while in a Twitter message by American horror author Stephen King, it was a trainwreck'. Me being me, I ignored the lot of them and simply listened to the entire thing for myself (video and transcript here).

[video=youtube_share;SUyAk0bYps0]http://youtu.be/SUyAk0bYps0[/video]

Appalled as I am by the US corporatecare healthcare system coming soon to a UK hospital and GP practice near you! I have waited decades for a ranking US political figure to venture anywhere near the topic of big pharma' and the corruption-driven stranglehold it has over medicine-related decision-making in the stinking sewer of US politics. Yet here was Trump in what was his very first press conference after winning the election! not merely alluding to the problem but also proposing what, to a right-wing brain (of which there must be more than two hundred million in the US), is the most obvious market-based' solution…

And was that truth-and-solution bombshell a topic of discussion in our proudly independent media? Was it celebrated as a potentially positive development by previously hostile US liberals appalled by the cost and iniquity of their healthcare system and the wasteful, corporate-serving sham that is Obamacare'? From where I sit, it certainly doesn't appear to have been…

(And just to reinforce the extent to which Trump's bit of truth-telling placed him at odds not only with the corporate carpetbagger elite but also with the bought-and-paid-for parasites on both sides of the US's notional political divide, literally two days later I saw that this had happened.)

All right, let's move on. Here's the bit where PEOTUS Trump refused to take a question from the CNN staffer at the event for reasons connected with the monumental absurdity of what future generations (should there be any) will refer to as the golden shower' dossier:

[video=youtube_share;SUyAk0bYps0]http://youtu.be/SUyAk0bYps0[/video]

My point here is that, once again, what Trump said is absolutely true: any media-savvy critic who has, over time, examined the content and conduct of Cable News Network' the cable and satellite television channel owned by the Turner Broadcasting System division of Time Warner knows that CNN is terrible, and CNN is fake news'. Of course, CNN is far from alone in being either; but that doesn't invalidate what Trump is saying and doing! on this specific occasion. Once again: truth telling and of no little significance, at least potentially.

And, in any case, more and for me! better was still to come on this very topic. Here's my transcript of a little exchange that took place a few moments later…

TRUMP: […] Go ahead. Go ahead. You've been waiting. Go ahead.

QUESTION: As far as we understand, the intelligence community are…

TRUMP: Stand up, please.

QUESTION: Ian Pannell from BBC news. Ian Pannell from BBC news.

TRUMP: BBC news. That's another beauty…

[Laughter]

Here's the full clip:

[video=youtube_share;SUyAk0bYps0]http://youtu.be/SUyAk0bYps0[/video]

Now, I have been following the actions of the BBC's news services for long enough to know that, yet again, Trump was speaking unvarnished and ungainsayable truth, however sarcastic and indirect the phraseology. What makes the exchange richly amusing in addition is the presence of Ian Pannell. For it was Pannell as you may or may not remember who on 29 August 2013 produced a BBC News report whose aim was to convince audiences that a Syrian fighter jet had dropped an incendiary bomb on a school playground in Aleppo. Not only was it very suspiciously the case that the report and its three-day-old footage aired while the UK House of Commons was voting on a possible UK military assault against Syria meaning that, had the vote been in favour, the item would have acted as a perfect focus for the transformation of shocked outrage into bloody warfare but the footage itself went on to form the basis of a Panorama programme (Saving Syria's Children', 30 September 2013) whose manifest fraudulence has seen the BBC fighting ever since to prevent copies and extracts remaining on YouTube…

[video]https://bbcpanoramasavingsyriaschildren.files.wordpress.co m/2014/04/ezgif-com-optimize.gif?w=510[/video]

(For Robert Stuart's sterling work in unmasking a quantity of sheer fakery that in a sane society would have turned this BBC broadcast into a career-ending scandal, see here.)

From all of which I think it is pretty clear that Donald Trump is not going to get the credit for anything he says that is true, nor for anything he seeks to do that is good: the simple fact is that he was not the establishment's intended victor, and he can look forward to nothing except full-spectrum opposition from the media guardians of established power right up until the point where he has given in to them on every important issue (and possibly not even then).

And if that doesn't remind you of the leader of the UK's Labour Party, it really ought to. For the full-spectrum media assault on Jeremy Corbyn has not let up even a little since I first drew attention to it in these electronic pages not long after he won the leadership election he was not supposed to win.

Let's have a look at what happens over here. On January 10 just one day before Trump gave his supposed train-wreck' press conference Jeremy Corbyn gave a speech in Peterborough that, likewise, was presented by the media as a debacle. And, as in the case of Trump's press conference, the truthful and valuable content was either misrepresented or ignored.

Here are three things that in that single day! the BBC did to distract attention from Corbyn's message and to toxify him as a individual. I present them in the order in which I happened to see them as the day wore on…

First, a BBC TV News animation in which one of the 12 stars of the European Union flag detaches itself in a reference to so-called Brexit'…

https://markdoran.files.wordpress.com/20...=475&h=269

This star then turns red…

https://markdoran.files.wordpress.com/20...=476&h=273

And lands in the centre of Corbyn's cap…

https://markdoran.files.wordpress.com/20...=476&h=301

(All three images saved by Anthony, to whom I send sincere thanks.)
See what they did there? Corbyn by any rational analysis a mild social democrat who has never even proposed so basic a socialist policy as workers' control of the means of production' is here made to look like Mao Zedong: he gets a Chinese People's Liberation Army cap and a quick bit of toxification in terms of those decades of far-away tyranny and destruction, the millions killed, the dogmatic political inflexibility, etc.

Isn't that a remarkable thing for the BBC to have done? Why would they do something like that, d'you think…?

A little time passes, and what do I see next? Ah! I see something online that features Laura Kuenssberg the Political Editor' of BBC News, and very obviously the head of the Corporation's Anti-Corbyn Unit. Let's look closely…

https://markdoran.files.wordpress.com/20...dline2.jpg

There are in fact three fascinating elements there. First, there's the choice of headline: without there being a quotation mark in sight, and whatever his half-hour speech was really about, Corbyn is credited IN BIG PRINT with saying the one thing that is guaranteed to constitute a red rag to many millions of working class voters whom the Labour Party is currently seeking to win back. (And this, let me remind you, comes from the BBC which has allowed Nigel Farage of the anti-immigration party UKIP no fewer than 31 appearances on Question Time since November 2000: ever wondered what a broadcaster's attempt to split the working class anti-Tory vote would look like…?)

Secondly, there is what follows it: Labour's leader denies…'. See that? That's what you write when you want to place an idea in people's minds while still being able to claim that you weren't really trying to place the idea in people's minds. (So, for example: Corbyn denies that he kills tiny and helpless kittens using a big hammer'. See? He denies it; and it's not true anyway but you still felt a feeling and saw an image that I created for you.)

Thirdly, there's the framing and cropping of the photo. See how Kuenssberg appears as a huge and dominating visual element, filling almost a third of the image? And how Corbyn, by contrast, is presented as a tiny and distant figure and, on top of that, shown as literally in a corner'…?

Isn't that a remarkable thing for the BBC to have done? Why would they do something like that, d'you think…?

And then there's Newsnight. Less than eight hours after I saw the BBC making Corbyn stink like a long-dead Chinese communist, viewers saw the BBC change tack and make Corbyn stink like today's liberal hate-figure, Donald Trump…

See how they did it? They did it by producing and broadcasting for an extended period a photograph of something that has never, ever happened: Corbyn wearing a Donald Trump-type hat…

https://markdoran.files.wordpress.com/20...bynhat.jpg

Consider what had to happen for that image to have come into existence. Someone in charge of a budget and able to give instructions to a skilled photoshop operator will actually have sent out an order: Look, stop what you're doing: we need something for 10.30pm. Get a photo of Donald Trump in his red hat. Take him out of the picture so you've only got the hat. Re-write the words on it so that they say Make Britain Great Again'. Got that? Then find a high-resolution photo of Jeremy Corbyn, seen and lit from the same sort of angle, and put the hat on it so it looks like he's wearing it. Is that clear…?

Isn't that a remarkable thing for the BBC to have done? Why would they do something like that, d'you think…?

Nor was this the end of that day's BBC onslaught. Before long, they had gone to Twitter and were advertising one of Newsnights interviews in the following terms…

https://markdoran.files.wordpress.com/20...=338&h=352

If you can't tell what attracted my attention to that, simply take a look through the programme's Twitter timeline and see if you can see the pattern in who has, and who has not, been described as getting grilled'…

I spoke earlier of the twin media mechanisms of smacking' and silence', and of their role in shaping political events rather than merely reporting' them. In connection with Corbyn, I want to underline my point by presenting the entire text of his Peterborough speech which you can see here. When UK readers have read it (or watched the video below), I hope they will be so kind as to consider this question:

On January 10, Corbyn featured in the BBC's news and current affairs output over and over again: he and his speech were referred to, and discussed, during the day, in the evening, and late into the night. As you'll see from the video, the BBC as it was obliged to! actually broadcast the whole speech live (albeit on a news channel most people don't watch at a time when most people are busy working anyhow). Yet how much of what he said in that long speech did you yourself actually encounter in all of that studio-based coverage'…? Or, for that matter, in our proudly free' billionaire-owned press…? In other words, when you came to read the text linked to above or to watch the speech as recorded how much of it still came as a complete surprise to you…?

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

[Paul Rigby]

In certain instances, unquestionably.

Just listen to the bonkers cobblers emanating from someone called Coco Soodek:

[video=youtube_share;B7VrgZfIU8E]http://youtu.be/B7VrgZfIU8E[/video]

Coco Spacekadet, more like.

[Tracy Riddle]

Perhaps it's only me who sees all of this as symptomatic that the great US neoliberal empire is crashing and burning and that its time is passing.

Nero, fiddle, fire.

::::thumbsdown::::boom::

Nope it's not only you. However I am stunned by how many politically aware people are hanging on to the fake CIA story. People who should know better. And of course the real story here is the content of those emails. That has been lost in translation. Hillary lost because she was outed for who and what she is. What the DNC did to Bernie causing many Bernie supporters to refuse to support her at the polls.

Terrific articles Paul.

Yep, me too Dawn. Frankly, I'm staggered and it has opened my eyes quite a bit to the blinding effect of partisanship in politics. And yep, the whole point of the Russian did it campaign was, and remains, to deflect from the content of the emails. Now we have a new Russia did it campaign that also has zero factual validity and again the same people are falling over themselves to buy into that also.

::facepalm::

I cannot stand to watch the late night talk shows as they are all over this lie and last night SNL was as well. I'd love nothing better than to watch old Law and Order episodes at bedtime but hubby hates that show. I have started unfriending people on facebook pushing this false narrative. Just don't want to see it in my feed.

I'll repost this, since no one was able/willing to respond to it.

Let's just take off our blinders here and use our common sense. We know that Trump has a real weakness for attractive females, especially young ones. How many times has he talked about wanting to date his own daughter (if she wasn't his daughter)?

In a 2001 episode of The Howard Stern Show that circulated online Wednesday, discovered by viral-video editor Vic Berger of Turner-owned Super Deluxe, former New York Daily News gossip writer A.J. Benza tattles on Trump, all to host Howard Stern's delight.
Trump, meanwhile, is listening in on a phone line, denying the conversation ever transpired. (Trump was single at the time; he would marry current wife Melania Trump in 2005.)
"He bangs Russian people," says Benza.
"Who are you talking about, A.J.?" asks Trump. "I don't know anything."
Benza persists over Trump's protests: "He used to call me when I was a columnist and say, 'I was just in Russia. The girls have no morals. You gotta get out there.' "

Is it really so hard to believe that when Trump went to Moscow in 2011 to host the Miss Universe contest, he enjoyed the local scenery (so to speak), and the Russians photographed and recorded the whole thing? This is standard procedure for pretty much any intelligence agency. That means the Russians would have blackmail material to hold over Trump's head. That plus the Russian business ties of many of his associates. Exxon has drilling rights to 63 million acres in Russia, but they are being prevented by the sanctions. There's a LOT of Russian smoke around Trump, so you don't have to blame the deep state if there's some actual fire.

I don't know why there are so many Russian apologists on this forum. Russia today is not the alleged Marxist regime it was under the Soviets. It is actually more of a reactionary regime with ties to white nationalists, oligarchs and mobsters. Putin deserves credit for holding the country together against NATO expansion, but that's as far as I'll go in praising him. Otherwise he is a thug and a murderer, and likely the architect of the 1999 apartment bombings which were blamed on the Chechens.

[Tracy Riddle]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/...er-steele/

Christopher Steele | A career in the shadows

[/FONT]
Christopher Steele, who wrote reports on compromising material Russian operatives allegedly had collected on US President-elect Donald Trump, is a former officer in Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, according to people familiar with his career.[/FONT]
Former British intelligence officials said Steele spent years under diplomatic cover working for the agency, also known as MI6, in Russia and Paris and at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London.[/FONT]
After he left the spy service, Steele supplied the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) with information on corruption at FIFA, international soccer's governing body.[/FONT]
It was his work on corruption in international soccer that lent credence to his reporting on Trump's entanglements in Russia, US officials said on Wednesday.[/FONT]
Emails seen by Reuters indicate that, in the summer of 2010, members of a New York-based FBI squad assigned to investigate "Eurasian Organized Crime" met Steele in London to discuss allegations of possible corruption in FIFA, the Swiss-based body that also organizes the World Cup tournament.[/FONT]
People familiar with Steele's activities said his British-based company, Orbis Business Intelligence, was hired by the Football Association, Britain's domestic soccer governing body, to investigate FIFA. At the time, the Football Association was hoping to host the 2018 or 2022 World Cups. British corporate records show that Orbis was formed in March 2009.[/FONT]
Amid a swirl of corruption allegations, the 2018 World Cup was awarded to Moscow and Qatar was chosen to host the 2022 competition.[/FONT]
The FBI squad whose members met Steele subsequently opened a major investigation into alleged soccer corruption that led to dozens of US indictments, including those of prominent international soccer officials.[/FONT]
Senior FIFA officials, including long-time president Sepp Blatter, were forced to resign.[/FONT]
Steele was initially hired by FusionGPS, a Washington, DC-based political research firm, to investigate Trump on behalf of unidentified Republicans who wanted to stop Trump's bid for the GOP nomination. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) reported that Steele was initially hired by Jeb Bush, one of Trump's 16 opponents in the 2016 Republican primary. It was not immediately possible to verify the BBC's report.[/FONT]
He was kept on assignment by FusionGPS after Trump won the nomination and his information was circulated to Democratic Party figures and members of the media.[/FONT]
Steele's dealings with the FBI on Trump, initially with the senior agent who had started the FIFA probe and then moved to a post in Europe, began in July. However, Steele cut off contact with the FBI about a month before the Nov. 8 election because he was frustrated by the bureau's slow progress.[/FONT]
The FBI opened preliminary investigations into Trump and his entourage's dealings with Russians that were based in part on Steele's reports, according to people familiar with the inquiries.[/FONT]
However, they said the Bureau shifted into low gear in the weeks before the election to avoid interfering in the vote. They said Steele grew frustrated and stopped dealing with the FBI after concluding it was not seriously investigating the material he had provided.[/FONT]
Steele's reports circulated for months among major media outlets, including Reuters, but neither the news organizations nor US law enforcement and intelligence agencies have been able to corroborate them.[/FONT]
BuzzFeed published some of Steele's reports about Trump on its website on Tuesday but the President-elect and his aides later said the reports were false. Russian authorities also dismissed them.[/FONT]
Associates of Steele said on Wednesday he was unavailable for comment. Christopher Burrows, a director and co-founder of Orbis with Steele, told The Wall Street Journal, which first published Steele's name, that he could not confirm or deny that Steele's company had produced the reports on Trump.[/FONT]
[/FONT]

[Dawn Meredith]

So if you don't believe the lying CIA and lying CIA controlled media you are a Russian apologist?

It's really come to that?

I think not.

[Tracy Riddle]

So if you don't believe the lying CIA and lying CIA controlled media you are a Russian apologist?

It's really come to that?

I think not.

Dawn, care to elaborate any further? I'm still waiting to hear some intelligent response from someone, instead of just "CIA LIES! CIA MEDIA!"

On the flip side, you don't have to be a Hillary supporter, or a CIA supporter, to see something fishy going on between Trump's people and Putin's people.

[Paul Rigby]

"Deep State" Ultimatum to Trump: Play Ball or Else

By Stephen Lendman

Global Research, January 16, 2017

http://www.globalresearch.ca/deep-state-...se/5568802

Since announcing his presidential bid in mid-June 2015, Trump prevailed over long odds, overcoming huge obstacles to reach the brink of becoming America's 45th president on January 20 an astonishing story, where it goes from here yet to be determined.

With no public record on which to judge him, his agenda is as much guesswork as likely expectations with one thing known for certain.

US presidents are fronts for powerful interests running America, intolerant of anyone changing longstanding policy.

Trump is under enormous pressure and threats to continue dirty business as usual or else. Defiance could get him undermined, impeached or assassinated hardline globalist Mike Pence in the wings to replace him, an easy to control establishment figure.

We'll know more about Trump's intentions during his first hundred days in office, much more months later. Campaign rhetoric is one thing, presidential decision-making another.

Lofty promises are meaningless without supportive actions. Trump's domestic policy largely looks easy to predict, socially and economically conservative, including:

business-friendly regulatory reform;

tax cuts for the rich, including repealing estate taxes for high-net worth households;

rebuilding America's infrastructure;

repealing and replacing Obamacare;

unlimited energy exploration, development and production; and

rejecting one-sided trade deals like TPP, responsible for offshoring millions of America's best jobs.

With Republicans controlling both houses of Congress, he'll likely get domestic agenda support though given budget constraints, perhaps less infrastructure spending than he'd like.

His geopolitical agenda is largely uncertain until his policies become apparent. It's clear he wants already bloated military spending increased, including expanding America's nuclear arsenal unless he and Putin agree to nuclear reduction.

While saying he wants a new role for NATO focused on combating terrorism, he's unlikely to change how the alliance operated from inception.

Important questions await answers. Will he cooperate with Putin responsibly or maintain longstanding adversarial relations?

Will he combat "radical Islamic terrorism" as promised, or support it like the Clintons, Bush/Cheney and Obama?

He'll continue drone wars, he said, mostly killing noncombatant men, women, children, the elderly and infirm threatening on one.

He'll maintain Guantanamo (and likely America's global torture prison network) instead of shutting it down. He'll introduce ideological screening tests to suspend immigration from certain countries.

He claims wars on Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya were mistakes he opposed after supporting them earlier. He called failure to seize Iraq's oil fields poor judgment. "In the old days when we won a war, to the victor go the spoils," he blustered.

He failed to explain all wars violate core international, constitutional and US statute laws without Security Council authorization. US presidents and Congress have no right to wage them without it especially against nations posing no threat to America or any other countries.

All ongoing US direct and proxy wars are illegal acts of aggression. Will Trump continue or end them? Will he be a warrior or peace president?

Will he favor diplomacy over endless conflicts? He complained about wasting trillions of dollars, turning the Middle East into a mess, instead of using the funding to rebuild America.

"(W)e don't have the money because it's been squandered on so many (wrong) ideas," he said. Will he change things enough to matter or largely continue current policies?

It's unknown until he begins serving. He'll need congressional support to approve his agenda.

Neocon dark forces in Washington will challenge anything diverging from longstanding policy.

Perhaps no matter what he does, he'll face endless obstacles along the way, his administration seen in hindsight as the most turbulent in US history for as long as it lasts not a very encouraging assessment for what may lie ahead.