The attempted Clinton-CIA coup against Donald Trump

[Paul Rigby]

Indict Clinton For the Russian DNC Hack

Posted on January 16, 2017 by George Eliason

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2017/01/64990.html

As if neo-liberal sensibilities weren't hurt enough, it's time to get to the bottom of the Russian hacks. The problem is no matter what direction you investigate the hacks from, it always goes back to the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC. They are the responsible parties for the hacks that were done.

Based on the real evidence, both the Clinton campaign and the DNC are never more than one connection away from the Ukrainian Intelligence operatives that claim their hack changed the course of world politics during the past months. How many hacks claim that laurel in 2016?

This raises questions like why is the Clinton campaign working with a foreign government to change the course of the election? This assessment comes from the Clinton campaign and their hired hands as being the real result that the DNC hack caused. It's just that they didn't count on the possibility of going to trial for it themselves.

If the Clinton campaign and the DNC are shown clearly to be working with a foreign country to influence the outcome of the election, should the country be sanctioned? By the end of this, the case is made that Ukraine should undergo every sanction that has been proposed for Russia. This is because their Intel services are clearly capable of and responsible for the hacking that Obama has laid at the feet of the Russian government. The hackers in question from the group KievHunta, RUH8 (Sean Townsend) should be investigated and extradited.

Given the facts questions to the Clinton campaign and the DNC should include:

How much information have you given these ultra-nationalist Pravy Sektor operatives?
How far does their reach go into US government networks?
Why were you working with a cyber security firm (Crowdstrike) that has strong ties to Ukrainian terrorist groups like Pravy Sektor and was working for Ukrainian Intelligence? Is there an apparent conflict of interest?
When did you know Crowdstrike's Russian attribution was based on poorly manufactured evidence? Why didn't you release that information publically?
The reason for the second question is that contact with members of the Clinton campaign or DNC would have opened up members of Congress to the Ukrainian Intelligence/ neo-nazi hackers.

The reason for the third question is that previously shown, Crowdstrike is tied at the hip to neo-nazi terrorists that make their living finding civilians to put on kill lists at Ukraine's notorious Peacemaker site.

The reason for the fourth question is that there is no longer any doubt that Crowdstrike fabricated the evidence it gave to the FBI and ODNI (Office of the Director of National Intelligence). The claim for attributing the cyber attack to Russia by Crowdstrike was based on the same hacker using the same tools to target Ukrainian artillerymen. These tools are supposed to be unique to this single hacking group. This is what makes the DNC hack and the Ukrainian artillery hack inseparable. Without one of them, the other didn't happen.

That's why Crowdstrike blamed Russia for the DNC hack because Crowdstrike said Russia did the same thing to Ukrainian artillerymen using the same custom tools. Unless you are Dimitri Alperovitch, there just aren't many people that buy this lie anymore.

Just to make this point embarrassingly clear to Dima Alperovitch, in an interview with Voice of America, Alperovitch claims to get artillery figures for Ukrainian losses from International Institute for Strategic Studies(IISS), a London-based think tank. It turns out that the one thing Dimitri Alperovitch is really good at is lying.

Alperovitch did 2 interviews with US propaganda papers RFE/RL and VOA (Voice of America) one day apart from each other. RFE/RL carried the Crowdstrike story just like Alperovitch laid it out. VOA on the other hand fact checked and agreed with the Ukrainian government and Ukrainian military that the Alperovitch story about Russia hacking Ukrainian artillery positions was a lie.

According to Alperovitch "The malware used to track Ukrainian artillery units was a variant of the kind used to hack into the U.S. Democratic National Committee (DNC) during the presidential election this year said CrowdStrike co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch."

When VOA asked Crowdstrike about the sources they responded "We cited the public, third-party reference source that was quoted," VOA was told. "But the source referenced in the CrowdStrike report on its website is not the site of the actual IISS, but an article on The Saker, a site that presents a largely pro-Russian version of events in Syria and Ukraine."

VOA goes on to say the article was a translation of the Russian blogger Colonel Cassad who was the only one to quote the IISS report directly. This is how careful cyber security giant Crowdstrike and its CTO are in research and judging information. This information is the backbone of the Russian hacking story. If one little bit is wrong or not vetted, that is multiplied across the entire DNI report because it's all that supports Russian Hacking.

How careful is Crowdstrike and Alperovitch with information? After all, they were dealing with Ukrainian Intelligence directly. Alperovitch even has a twitter social relationship with Ukraine's hackers.

The chain of information went like this: IISS Report(think tank) >Colonel Cassad (Russian blogger)> the Saker(analytical blog/ translator)>Alperovitch/ Crowdstrike(information purposely misquoted to create Russian hacker) >FBI>CIA>ODNI (DNI report)-> You scratching your head wondering who makes this intel crap up. This is one of the DNI report's secret sources and one that the whole report rests on.

I contacted the Saker about this. If you haven't heard of him, he describes himself as "a blogger, born in Europe in a family of Russian refugees, ex-military analyst, now living in the USA. He was a member of The International Institute for Strategic Studies, IISS, before resigning in protest against the IISS's systematically uncritical pro-NATO stances"

When I told him he was one of the "Russian hack" secret sources the ODNI uses, he responded, "If by that you mean that they read my blog then yes, I am comfortable. But if they misquote or misinterpret what I wrote, then I am most uncomfortable about it."

Dimitri Alperovitch recently did an interview with the Spy Museum in Washington DC to push his case for Russian hackers and his company's expertise. They billed him as America's cyber-special-forces. At 19 minutes into the interview, he claims that Russia influenced and changed Ukraine's 2014 election results. Doesn't he know there was a coup and Petr Poroshenko was elected in the subsequent farce that followed? Poroshenko' government has been trying to get the US to invade Russia, but why confuse Dima with the facts.

At 22 minutes, he claims the Russian hacks were to discredit the US elections. That much we all can agree on. At 29 minutes he reaffirms the hacking of Ukrainian artillery as the proof of Russians doing the DNC hack and at 29 minutes is the clincher.

Alperovitch states that in September, president Obama took Russia to task over the Russian hacks. If there was no proof, Obama wouldn't have done that. Countries don't take countries to task (sanctions, threats) without proof. That is what's known as round-robin credibility. Alperovitch says the Russians did it. And Obama uses his information and says the Russians did it. Lie or no lie. Alperovitch says president Obama (hence, the intel community) agree with me, so I am right.

According to the Washington Times " As recently as Nov. 17, James Clapper, the nation's top intelligence officer, told Congress his agencies "don't have good insight" into a direct link between WikiLeaks and the emails supposedly hacked by a Russian operation from Democrats and the Hillary Clinton campaign."

This shows that Obama was willing to walk up to the line and risk war over the statements of an inveterate liar. No real intelligence work needed. No intellect is necessary to figure out how little your children's lives mean to Crowdstrike either. A cyber attack is an act of war. Because Obama is blinded by ethnic bigotry, we are that close. We now have 3500 troops crowding the Russian border and 3000 tanks in Poland because of this. Russia is responding in kind.

Crowdstrike was working for the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign. The DNC was less than friendly when the FBI wanted to investigate their "hacks." I wonder why? Another curious point is made by Marcy Wheeler @emptywheel about the timing of Alperovitch's proof. It came less than 2 weeks after Obama opened a review on intelligence about the DNC hack. Wheeler is worth the read.

The other major source that the DNI rested on to show Russian intent was the Atlantic Council. According to journalist Robert Parry, the Atlantic Council would have taken senior positions in a Clinton White House. Dimitri Alperovitch is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.

What's important about this is simple. If Crowdstrike faked the one piece of evidence that they said definitely shows this was a Russian hack, the Russians did not hack the DNC either. There was no Russian hack. There was a hack, we'll get to that shortly. First, pay attention to the credentials of Kenneth Geers.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald "It is possible that we are seeing the first example of mutually assured doxing," said Kenneth Geers, Kiev-based Senior Research Scientist at COMODO, referring to the practice of hacking and publishing private emails.

Geers, who is also an ambassador for the NATO Cyber Centre, said the Surkov leak may hint at an emerging behavioural norm between nation states.

Within hours of the leak the Atlantic Council (of which Geers is also a member(senior fellow)) published a thorough analysis of the information, suggesting that it is authentic.

"Nearly every email in the leak is insignificant, and thus far no one has found a grand slam' email that would rock the Kremlin to its core," the Washington, DC-based think-tank wrote, based in part on the mundane nature of many of the emails.

When compared to this January 6 Intel statements on CNN "Officials said this was just one of multiple indicators to give them high confidence of both Russian involvement and Russian intentions. Officials reiterated that there is no single intercepted communication that qualifies as a "smoking gun" on Russia's intention to benefit Trump's candidacy or to claim credit for doing so."

And noted in the DNI report about Russian communication we have another "secret source." The ODNI could have at least had the presence of mind not to quote the Atlantic Council hot words directly.

In the US there are 17 Intelligence Agencies that answer to the ODNI. Why are they basing intelligence that puts Russia in a bad light by one of the think tanks that want to start a war with Russia?

The Atlantic Council made the Ukrainian hackers part of the "secret intelligence source." As shown at least one group is ultra-nationalist Pravy Sektor that want to start a war and take western facing Russian land in the name of Bandera and Ukraine.

The Sidney Morning Herald closes the article with this. "One analyst said privately that hackers in Ukraine were likely piling on any tension between the US and Russia."

The Atlantic Council and not just Dimitri Alperovitch are maintaining relationships with the Ukrainian hackers. Since the Atlantic Council would have taken senior positions, this line of investigation puts the hackers one step away from Hillary Clinton, the DNC, and the Clinton campaign.

Let's not forget the Chalupas. Alexandra Chalupa made the DNC hack a big story. She was a Clinton campaign staffer and was the emigre groups leader. Chalupa and her sister Andrea have a direct connection to the hackers from working with the ultra-nationalist Ukrainian website Euromaidan.press.

Because of her proximity to Clinton, this puts the Ukrainian Intelligence hackers inside the Clinton campaign. The third Chalupa, Irene, is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and runs Ukrainian propaganda channel Stopfake. This site is also part of the network Ukraine's hackers work with.

The hackers in Kyberhunta are both extremists and Ukrainian Intelligence operatives. Why did the DNC and the Clinton Campaign allow them to compromise their security?

These hackers, RUH8 in particular, are the only group outside of Crowdstrike that are known to have the X Agent tool used in the DNC hack. In their own words, one of their favorite hacking techniques is spear-fishing which was done at the DNC. RUH8 has all but admitted to doing the DNC hack in specific terms shown above and in previous articles. Because they are now part of the proof of a Russian hack, is it any wonder they laugh at US Intel Agencies?

According to a RFE/RL interview, "RUH8 says the Cyber Alliance uses "all tools and methods" at its disposal to hack into their perceived foes' accounts. In particular, he says, spear-phishing using messages that mimic those of legitimate companies along with a request and link to change personal security information "is quite efficient. People readily give up their passwords and personal info," he says. "They receive something in their [e-]mail like, Your account will be suspended if you don't confirm [your security details].' They click that link and we have them."

According to Reuters "Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said on Tuesday the U.S. intelligence community's report concluding that Russia orchestrated hacks during the 2016 presidential campaign was based on a mix of human sources, collection of technical data and open-source information."

The people listed above represent most of the chain of evidence the DNI uses. These groups are the only groups surrounding the DNC hack. There is no doubt that part of the ODNI report data was given by Pravy Sektor hackers through the Atlantic Council. This is incredible since the probability of convicting them for the hacks is high given the evidence.

There is further evidence not yet in ODNI possession. After Donald Trump sits agency chiefs and replaces the pro- Ukrainian OSCE representative, he might want to send the OSCE to Lugansk, LNR (Lugansk Peoples Republic) to investigate the failed Republican Party hack. All they need to do is verify or falsify information, nothing too taxing. A hat tip to LNR MGB. I can't think of a better way to introduce the republic than helping to solve international crises.

In LNR, criminal proceedings have started for Edward Nedelyaev under articles 335 spying' and 343 inciting hatred or enmity." He is a member of the Aidar battalion. They have been cited for torture and murder. Although the translation isn't available on the linked video the MGB (LNR equivalent to the FBI) ask Nedelyaev about his relationship with Ukraine's SBU. After answering a few questions the MGB officer asks him if the Ukrainian SBU asked him if he received tasks from the SBU [Security Service] that he didn't want to or didn't carry out.

Yes, Nedelyaev answers. The SBU asked him to hack US presidential candidate Donald Trump's election headquarters and he refused. Asked if this was through convictions, he says no, explaining that he is not a hacker. The video was published on January 10, 2017

According to Reuters "Russia hacked Republican state campaigns but not Trump's: FBI head."

When you look at his twitter profile @Edward_Lugansk, I suppose it might be easy to misidentify him as a hacker. It has computer chips. The professionals at the SBU were done away with after the coup and replaced by Valentyn Nalyvaichenko with Ukrainian ultra-nationalists. They are not exactly the sharpest tools in the shed.

Every serious avenue of approach to an investigation of the DNC hacks and the Clinton campaign hacks, and now the Republican hacks lead back to the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign. Did Ukraine interfere in the US elections? At this point, that is the understatement of the year. It's time to investigate. Donald Trump needs to push this up on the agenda to rid American politics of the Ukrainian foreign stain.

The UCCA (Ukrainian Congressional Committee of America) which is sitting behind this needs to be investigated. When Ukraine's guilt becomes clear in a court of law, their 5013C status needs to be revoked.

Their ability to lobby Congress needs to be revoked. UCCA leaders need to be investigated for working with a foreign government to overthrow a democratic election. The same goes for members of the CEEC (Central and Eastern European Coalition).

According to the Wall Street Journal in KIEV, UkraineJoe Biden is on his fifth trip to Ukraine as vice president, pressing the pro-Western government to root out widespread corruption, but activists here say that message is being undermined as his son receives money from a former Ukrainian official who is being investigated for graft.

On January 16, 2017, Joe Biden flew into Kiev for 2 hours to thank them for not prosecuting his son Hunter for corruption. Has Kiev been holding Hunter Biden as leverage over the Obama administration?

Hillary Clinton and the DNC should be indicted by the Department of Justice and investigated by a Grand Jury given the facts when they are laid bare. This isn't about party politics. This is about criminal actions. All the threads of the national security threat revolve around and lead back them. It's time neo-liberals and their fascist friends understand there is a rule of law in America and they are not exempt.

[Paul Rigby]

A Demand for Russian Hacking' Proof

January 17, 2017

https://consortiumnews.com/2017/01/17/a-...ing-proof/

More than 20 U.S. intelligence, military and diplomatic veterans are calling on President Obama to release the evidence backing up allegations that Russia aided the Trump campaign or admit that the proof is lacking.

MEMORANDUM FOR: President Barack Obama

FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)

SUBJECT: A Key Issue That Still Needs to be Resolved

As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take the oath of office Friday, a pall hangs over his upcoming presidency amid an unprecedentedly concerted campaign to delegitimize it. Unconfirmed accusations continue to swirl alleging that Russian President Vladimir Putin authorized "Russian hacking" that helped put Mr. Trump in the White House.

As President for a few more days, you have the power to demand concrete evidence of a link between the Russians and WikiLeaks, which published the bulk of the information in question. Lacking that evidence, the American people should be told that there is no fire under the smoke and mirrors of recent weeks.

We urge you to authorize public release of any tangible evidence that takes us beyond the unsubstantiated, "we-assess" judgments by the intelligence agencies. Otherwise, we as well as other skeptical Americans will be left with the corrosive suspicion that the intense campaign of accusations is part of a wider attempt to discredit the Russians and those like Mr. Trump who wish to deal constructively with them.

Remember the Maine?

Alleged Russian interference has been labeled "an act of war" and Mr. Trump a "traitor." But the "intelligence" served up to support those charges does not pass the smell test. Your press conference on Wednesday will give you a chance to respond more persuasively to NBC's Peter Alexander's challenge at the last one (on Dec. 16) "to show the proof [and], as they say, put your money where your mouth is and declassify some of the intelligence. …"

You told Alexander you were reluctant to "compromise sources and methods." We can understand that concern better than most Americans. We would remind you, though, that at critical junctures in the past, your predecessors made judicious decisions to give higher priority to buttressing the credibility of U.S. intelligence-based policy than to protecting sources and methods. With the Kremlin widely accused by politicians and pundits of "an act of war," this is the kind of textbook case in which you might seriously consider taking special pains to substantiate serious allegations with hard intelligence if there is any.

During the Cuban missile crisis, for instance, President Kennedy ordered us to show highly classified photos of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba and on ships en route, even though this blew sensitive detail regarding the imagery intelligence capabilities of the cameras on our U-2 aircraft.

President Ronald Reagan's reaction to the Libyan terrorist bombing of La Belle Disco in Berlin on April 5, 1986, that killed two and injured 79 other U.S. servicemen is another case in point. We had intercepted a Libyan message that morning: "At 1:30 in the morning one of the acts was carried out with success, without leaving a trace behind." (We should add here that NSA's dragnet SIGINT capability 30 years later renders it virtually impossible to avoid "leaving a trace behind" once a message is put on the network.)

President Reagan ordered the U.S. Air Force to bomb Col. Muammar Qaddafi's palace compound to smithereens, killing several civilians. Amid widespread international consternation and demands for proof that Libya was responsible for the Berlin attack, President Reagan ordered us to make public the encrypted Libyan message, thereby sacrificing a collection/decryption capability unknown to the Libyans until then.

As senior CIA veteran Milton Bearden has put it, there are occasions when more damage is done by "protecting" sources and methods than by revealing them.

Where's the Beef?

We find the New York Times- and Washington Post-led media Blitz against Trump and Putin truly extraordinary, despite our long experience with intelligence/media related issues. On Jan. 6, the day after your top intelligence officials published what we found to be an embarrassingly shoddy report purporting to prove Russian hacking in support of Trump's candidacy, the Times banner headline across all six columns on page 1 read: "PUTIN LED SCHEME TO AID TRUMP, REPORT SAYS."

The lead article began: "President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia directed a vast cyberattack aimed at denying Hillary Clinton the presidency and installing Donald J. Trump in the Oval Office, the nation's top intelligence agencies said in an extraordinary report they delivered on Friday to Mr. Trump." Eschewing all subtlety, the Times added that the revelations in "this damning report … undermined the legitimacy" of the President-elect, and "made the case that Mr. Trump was the favored candidate of Mr. Putin."

On page A10, however, Times investigative reporter Scott Shane pointed out: "What is missing from the public report is what many Americans most eagerly anticipated: hard evidence to back up the agencies' claims that the Russian government engineered the election attack. That is a significant omission."

Shane continued, "Instead, the message from the agencies essentially amounts to trust us.' There is no discussion of the forensics used to recognize the handiwork of known hacking groups, no mention of intercepted communications between the Kremlin and the hackers, no hint of spies reporting from inside Moscow's propaganda machinery."

Shane added that the intelligence report "offers an obvious reason for leaving out the details, declaring that including the precise bases for its assessments' would reveal sensitive sources and methods and imperil the ability to collect critical foreign intelligence in the future.'"

Shane added a quote from former National Security Agency lawyer Susan Hennessey: "The unclassified report is underwhelming at best. There is essentially no new information for those who have been paying attention." Ms. Hennessey served as an attorney in NSA's Office of General Counsel and is now a Brookings Fellow in National Security Law.

Everyone Hacks

There is a lot of ambiguity whether calculated or not about "Russian hacking." "Everyone knows that everyone hacks," says everyone: Russia hacks; China hacks; every nation that can hacks. So do individuals of various nationalities. This is not the question.

You said at your press conference on Dec. 16 "the intelligence that I have seen gives me great confidence in their [U.S. intelligence agencies'] assessment that the Russians carried out this hack." "Which hack?" you were asked. "The hack of the DNC and the hack of John Podesta," you answered.

Earlier during the press conference you alluded to the fact that "the information was in the hands of WikiLeaks." The key question is how the material from "Russian hacking" got to WikiLeaks, because it was WikiLeaks that published the DNC and Podesta emails.

Our VIPS colleague William Binney, who was Technical Director of NSA and created many of the collection systems still in use, assures us that NSA's "cast-iron" coverage particularly surrounding Julian Assange and other people associated with WikiLeaks would almost certainly have yielded a record of any electronic transfer from Russia to WikiLeaks. Binney has used some of the highly classified slides released by Edward Snowden to demonstrate precisely how NSA accomplishes this using trace mechanisms embedded throughout the network. [See: "U.S. Intel Vets Dispute Russia Hacking Claims," Dec. 12, 2016.]

NSA Must Come Clean

We strongly suggest that you ask NSA for any evidence it may have indicating that the results of Russian hacking were given to WikiLeaks. If NSA can produce such evidence, you may wish to order whatever declassification may be needed and then release the evidence. This would go a long way toward allaying suspicions that no evidence exists. If NSA cannot give you that information and quickly this would probably mean it does not have any.

In all candor, the checkered record of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper for trustworthiness makes us much less confident that anyone should take it on faith that he is more "trustworthy than the Russians," as you suggested on Dec. 16. You will probably recall that Clapper lied under oath to the Senate Intelligence Committee on March 12, 2013, about NSA dragnet activities; later apologizing for testimony he admitted had been "clearly erroneous." In our Memorandum for you on Dec. 11, 2013, we cited chapter and verse as to why Clapper should have been fired for saying things he knew to be "clearly erroneous."

In that Memorandum, we endorsed the demand by Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner that Clapper be removed. "Lying to Congress is a federal offense, and Clapper ought to be fired and prosecuted for it," said Sensenbrenner in an interview with The Hill. "The only way laws are effective is if they're enforced."

Actually, we have had trouble understanding why, almost four years after he deliberately misled the Senate, Clapper remains Director of National Intelligence overseeing the entire intelligence community.

Hacks or Leaks?

Not mentioned until now is our conclusion that leaks are the source of the WikiLeaks disclosures in question not hacking. Leaks normally leave no electronic trace. William Binney has been emphasizing this for several months and suggesting strongly that the disclosures were from a leaker with physical access to the information not a hacker with only remote access.

This, of course, makes it even harder to pin the blame on President Putin, or anyone else. And we suspect that this explains why NSA demurred when asked to join the CIA and FBI in expressing "high confidence" in this key judgment of the report put out under Clapper's auspices on Jan. 6, yielding this curious formulation:

"We also assess Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump's election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him. All three agencies agree with this judgment. CIA and FBI have high confidence in this judgment; NSA has moderate confidence." (Emphasis, and lack of emphasis, in original)

In addition, former U.K. Ambassador Craig Murray has said publicly he has first-hand information on the provenance of the leaks, and has expressed surprise that no one from the New York Times or the Washington Post has tried to get in touch with him. We would be interested in knowing whether anyone from your administration, including the intelligence community, has made any effort to contact Ambassador Murray.

What to Do

President-elect Trump said a few days ago that his team will have a "full report on hacking within 90 days." Whatever the findings of the Trump team turn out to be, they will no doubt be greeted with due skepticism, since Mr. Trump is in no way a disinterested party.

You, on the other hand, enjoy far more credibility AND power for the next few days. And we assume you would not wish to hobble your successor with charges that cannot withstand close scrutiny. We suggest you order the chiefs of the NSA, FBI and CIA to the White House and ask them to lay all their cards on the table. They need to show you why you should continue to place credence in what, a month ago, you described as "uniform intelligence assessments" about Russian hacking.

At that point, if the intelligence heads have credible evidence, you have the option of ordering it released even at the risk of damage to sources and methods. For what it may be worth, we will not be shocked if it turns out that they can do no better than the evidence-deprived assessments they have served up in recent weeks. In that case, we would urge you, in all fairness, to let the American people in on the dearth of convincing evidence before you leave office.

As you will have gathered by now, we strongly suspect that the evidence your intelligence chiefs have of a joint Russian-hacking-WikiLeaks-publishing operation is no better than the "intelligence" evidence in 2002-2003 expressed then with comparable flat-fact "certitude" of the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Obama's Legacy

Mr. President, there is much talk in your final days in office about your legacy. Will part of that legacy be that you stood by while flames of illegitimacy rose willy-nilly around your successor? Or will you use your power to reveal the information or the fact that there are merely unsupported allegations that would enable us to deal with them responsibly?

In the immediate wake of the holiday on which we mark the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., it seems appropriate to make reference to his legacy, calling to mind the graphic words in his "Letter From the Birmingham City Jail," with which he reminds us of our common duty to expose lies and injustice:

"Like a boil that can never be cured as long as it is covered up, but must be opened with all its pus-flowing ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must likewise be exposed, with all of the tension its exposing creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured."

For the Steering Group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)

William Binney, former Technical Director, World Geopolitical & Military Analysis, NSA; co-founder, SIGINT Automation Research Center (ret.)

Marshall Carter-Tripp, Foreign Service Officer (ret) and former Office Director in the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research

Thomas Drake, former Senior Executive, NSA

Bogdan Dzakovic, Former Team Leader of Federal Air Marshals and Red Team, FAA Security, (ret.) (associate VIPS)

Philip Giraldi, CIA, Operations Officer (ret.)

Mike Gravel, former Adjutant, top secret control officer, Communications Intelligence Service; special agent of the Counter Intelligence Corps and former United States Senator

Matthew Hoh, former Capt., USMC, Iraq & Foreign Service Officer, Afghanistan (associate VIPS)

Larry Johnson, former CIA Intelligence Officer & former State Department Counter-Terrorism Official, ret.

Michael S. Kearns, Captain, USAF (Ret.); ex-Master SERE Instructor for Strategic Reconnaissance Operations (NSA/DIA) and Special Mission Units (JSOC)

Brady Kiesling, former U.S. Foreign Service Officer, ret. (Associate VIPS),

John Kiriakou, Former CIA Counterterrorism Officer and former Senior Investigator, Senate Foreign Relations Committee

Karen Kwiatkowski, former Lt. Col., US Air Force (ret.), at Office of Secretary of Defense watching the manufacture of lies on Iraq, 2001-2003

Linda Lewis, WMD preparedness policy analyst, USDA (ret.)

David MacMichael, National Intelligence Council (ret.)

Ray McGovern, former US Army infantry/intelligence officer & CIA analyst (ret.)

Todd E. Pierce, MAJ, US Army Judge Advocate (ret.)

Elizabeth Murray, former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Middle East, CIA (ret.)

Scott Ritter, former MAJ., USMC, former UN Weapon Inspector, Iraq

Coleen Rowley, FBI Special Agent and former Minneapolis Division Legal Counsel (ret.)

Peter Van Buren, U.S. Department of State, Foreign Service Officer (ret.) (associate VIPS)

Kirk Wiebe, former Senior Analyst, SIGINT Automation Research Center, NSA (ret.)

Robert Wing, former Foreign Service Officer (associate VIPS)

Ann Wright, U.S. Army Reserve Colonel (ret) and former U.S. Diplomat

[Tracy Riddle]

Oh look, here's why the Russians might think it was a good idea to begin gathering compromising material on Trump many years ago:

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/01...H6Ig9IrKyc

Czechoslovakia secret police file on Ivana says Trump felt he could win presidency in 1996

AP

• [*=left]JAN 13, 2017
  

PRAGUE Nearly 30 years ago, Donald Trump was confident he would win the U.S. presidential election as an independent in 1996, according to recently uncovered files from Czechoslovakia's Communist-era secret police.
Czechoslovakia was the home nation of Trump's first wife, Ivana, a model, athlete and businesswoman who became the mother of his three oldest children: Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric.
A year before the 1989 collapse of communism in many parts of Europe, details about Ivana Trump's 1988 visit back to her homeland were recorded in a classified police report. The Oct. 22, 1988, report claimed that Trump refused to run for president in 1988 despite alleged pressure to do so because he felt, at 42, he was too young. But the secret report said he intended to run in the 1996 U.S. presidential race as an independent, when he would be 50.
"Even though it looks like a utopia, D. TRUMP is confident he will succeed," the police report said, based on information from an unspecified source who talked to Ivana Trump's father, Milos Zelnicek, about her visit.
It was unclear where the alleged "pressure" was coming from.
The report is interesting because, in the United States, there was little public knowledge that Trump would consider a presidential run until a 1988 interview on "The Oprah Winfrey Show."
"I would never want to rule it out totally," he said then.
"I think I'd win," he added. "I wouldn't go in to lose."
But Trump didn't create an exploratory committee until about a decade later, when he launched a bid for the Reform Party nomination ahead of the 2000 presidential election. He dropped that effort about four months later.
Trump's first wife was born Ivana Zelnickova in 1949 in the Czechoslovak city of Gottwaldov, the former city of Zlin that just had been renamed by the Communists, who took over the country in 1948. She married Trump, her second husband, in 1977. As she kept traveling home across the Iron Curtain on a regular basis, Ivana became a tempting target for the powerful, deeply feared Czechoslovak secret police agency known as the StB.
"The State Security was constantly watching (Czechoslovak citizens living abroad)," said Libor Svoboda, a historian from the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes in Prague. "They were coming here, so they used agents to follow them. They wanted to know who they were meeting, what they talked about. It was a sort of paranoia. They were afraid that these people could work for foreign intelligence agencies. They used the same approach toward their relatives as well."
The StB's specific file on Ivana had a registry number but it is not available. Historians believed it was destroyed. But other documents from the Security Service Archive in Prague, especially a file on her father, who used to visit her in the United States, showed they were both closely watched by spies and informants.
Svoboda said there's no indication of a secret police file on Donald Trump. He didn't travel to Czechoslovakia under communism, unlike his children, who used to spend summer vacations there.
Due to such attention, the secret police reports contain detailed information about Ivana Trump's trips to Czechoslovakia, including dates, telephone numbers she called, people she met, what they discussed and other details about her life with her husband. One of the reports claims the couple had a wedding deal in which Trump allegedly stated he wanted to have at least three children with her.
The Associated Press visited the archive in Prague and obtained copies of all available documents about Ivana Trump. Some of the content has also been reported by Czech media and Germany's Bild newspaper.
The 1988 secret police report in particular suggested that Ivana Trump was nervous, "which is not common for her" after her father picked her up at Prague's international airport after traveling in from Paris, where she visited a fashion house. Trump did not join her on this trip.
Only after she and her father arrived in her hometown did Ivana Trump reveal that the U.S. ambassador to Prague at the time, Julian Martin Niemczyk, twice invited her to visit the embassy, which she declined to accept, according to a police source that met with her father on Oct. 11, 1988. Ivana Trump allegedly said she believed U.S. embassy staffers were following her. The fact that she was supposed to meet with a Czechoslovak security official during the trip added to her nervousness, the police file stated.
She didn't give any details about that meeting, the report said. But it added that she said "as a wife of D. TRUMP she receives constant attention because he is pressured to run for the office of U.S. president … and any mistake she would make could have immense consequences for him."
Born in 1946, Trump planned to make history in 1996 as an independent candidate despite the fact that both the Democrats and the Republicans were allegedly wooing him to join them, the report said. A note at the end suggested that Ivana Trump's trips home could be possibly used to reveal agents among the U.S. embassy's staffers.
"The StB thought there was a chance that the U.S. intelligence agencies could use (Ivana Trump). And also they wanted to use Trump to gather information on U.S. high society," Svoboda said.
Trump did travel to Zlin in 1990 with his wife to attend the funeral of her father. The couple divorced in 1992.
A year later, Czechoslovakia peacefully split into two nations: the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
After Trump's presidential win in November, Ivana Trump expressed interest in becoming the new U.S. ambassador to Prague a possibility heartily welcomed by Czech President Milos Zeman.

[Tracy Riddle]

CIA director slams Trump for slamming CIA

by Jon Rappoport

January 17, 2017

https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2017/...mming-cia/

In case you hadn't noticed, uttering a politically incorrect comment is now a bigger crime than decimating thousands in a war.

You can bomb a country into submission and chaos, leaving dead and wounded from shore to shore, and that might be counted as a "mistake in judgment"; but using a few loaded wordsor in this casecriticizing an intelligence agencyis an earthshaking event that could make the planet spin off-course…

Case in point:

The lame-duck outgoing CIA director, John Brennan, lectured Donald Trump Sunday, on FOX. NBC News reports:

"Trump has repeatedly called for a better relationship between the U.S. and Putin's government. He suggested in an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Friday that he'd consider easing the latest sanctions on Russia."

"'I think he has to be mindful that he does not have a full appreciation and understanding of what the implications are of going down that road', Brennan said."

"The CIA chief roundly denounced Trump's approach to Russia and other national security threats, suggesting the president-elect has much to understand before he can make informed decisions on such matters."

"'The world is watching now what Trump says and listening very carefully. If he doesn't have confidence in the [US] intelligence community, what signal does that send to our partners and allies as well as our adversaries?' Brennan said."

Signal?

Mr. Brennan, the signal was sent to our partners, allies, and adversaries decades ago:

The CIA is a criminal agency.

Is that clear enough?

Long ago, the CIA criminally stepped outside its mandate, in order to shape world events it had no business participating in. Is that clear enough?

In that regard, do these names and phrases mean anything to you, Mr. Brennan?

* The Gehlen Org.

* Operation Gladio.

* MKULTRA.

* Operation CHAOS.

* Nugan Hand Bank.

* BCCI Bank.

* Golden Triangle. Asian heroin.

* Air America.

* Central American cocaine. Mena.

* The Contras.

* Henry Luce. William Paley. Arthur Sulzberger. Operation Mockingbird.

* Overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh (Iran).

* Overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz (Guatemala).

* Murder of Patrice Lumumba (Congo).

* Bay of Pigs.

* JFK.

* Diem assassination.

* Rafael Trujillo assassination.

* Sukarno. Suharto.

* East Timor genocide.

* Military coupGreece.

* Allende.

* Gulf of Tonkin.

* Operation Phoenix.

* Laos bombing.

* Sihanouk.

* The Khmer Rouge.

* El Salvador death squads.

On and on it goes…

See Mark Zepezauer's book. The CIA's Greatest Hits.

Overthrow, assassination, regime change, mind control, covert war, mass destruction, drugs, financial theft, co-opting the press…

Do you recall any of this, Mr. Brennan?

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump

Trump (or any president) is sending a negative signal about the US intelligence community to our friends, allies, and adversaries? Are you kidding, Mr. Brennan? Are you telling some kind of inside joke?

People all over the world have known, for decades, what the CIA has been doing.

And you're worried about the effect of a little tweak from Trump?

The murderous history of the CIA has been a cat out of the bag for a long, long time.

Professional amnesia may be your friend, Mr. Brennan, but it doesn't convince the victims and targets of your agency's actions since 1948.

Trump doesn't give a flying squirrel's ass about any of that stuff. He'll appoint his own CIA director, and then it will be TRUMP'S CIA, and then he'll think everything is fine and dandy.

[Paul Rigby]

I Have Come to the Conclusion the Country Does Not Need a CIA

By John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News

17 January 17

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/...need-a-cia

President-elect Donald Trump is accusing CIA Director John Brennan of being the source of "fake news" about him, essentially calling our new supreme leader a Russian stooge and accusing him of taking part in a sexual kink in full view of Russian intelligence cameras in a Moscow hotel room several years ago.

I have no idea whether or not Trump, during a visit to Moscow in 2010, hired prostitutes to urinate on a Four Seasons Hotel Presidential Suite mattress because the Obamas had once slept there. I don't care. I also have no idea if the Russian government "hacked" the Democratic National Committee and stole Clinton campaign manager John Podesta's emails. I have not seen any CIA, FBI, or NSA evidence, so I have come to the personal conclusion that the hacking story is overblown. All countries spy on each other. It's a fact of life. The U.S. spies on just about everybody in the world. So I have a problem with the righteous indignation that I'm seeing from so many of my friends and former CIA colleagues about the Russians.

With that said, the Russia hacking story distracts from real and important issues surrounding the CIA and its future in U.S. policy.

One of those real issues is that the CIA has consistently lied to the American people for many, many years. Why would Trump conclude that Brennan was spouting fake news? Well, in the past 15 years, the CIA said that it was not torturing its prisoners. That was a lie. The CIA said that it had not created an archipelago of secret prisons where it was holding hundreds of people, including innocent civilians. That was a lie. The CIA said that it had not created and used a dungeon torture center called the "Salt Pit" in Afghanistan. That was a lie. The CIA said that it was not sending prisoners to third world countries to undergo torture with a wink and a nod from the CIA's leadership. That was a lie. The CIA said that it had not hacked into computers belonging to investigators of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence while they were writing the definitive report on the CIA torture program. That was a lie.

I won't even get into CIA protestations that it hasn't overthrown governments, influenced elections, committed assassinations, or otherwise mucked up U.S. foreign policy since the late 1940s.

I'm no fan of Donald Trump. At all. But he does have a good and important point when he complains about the Intelligence Community. When Trump said recently that the CIA was bloated and inefficient, he was right. When he said that it needed to be pared down and restructured, he was right.

First, it's good for the country that in a few short days John Brennan will be out of a job. Brennan has been a disaster for the CIA. His ill-advised "restructuring" of the organization two years ago, which did away with geographical "divisions" and created 10 new "fusion centers" that paired operators and analysts, was ill-advised and typical of somebody with no operational experience. It diluted expertise, forced the CIA to rely more on electronic eavesdropping, and pushed human source intelligence collection to the side.

Second, try as he might, Brennan was never able to, and indeed, should not have been able to, deny his role in the Bush administration's torture program. He was Bush's Deputy Executive Director of the CIA the organization's fourth-ranking officer from 2001 to 2003 and director of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center from 2003 to 2004. He was in the center of the CIA action and up to his neck in counterterrorism in the Agency's darkest days. To say that he had no idea there was a CIA torture program at the time is utterly laughable.

Third, I have no idea what kind of CIA director Michael Pompeo will be. I'm not optimistic. But with that said, if he does only one thing during his tenure, I hope he would clean house by forcing out every CIA officer who ever had anything to do with the torture program, every officer who had anything to do with the Senate hacking scandal, and every officer who has ever provided false information to the oversight committees. As my CIA recruiter told me in 1989, "The CIA wants honest people, not perfect people." Well, even all these years later, the dishonest people have to go.

Fourth, we can certainly have a discussion about whether or not the country even needs a CIA. I have come to the conclusion that it does not. The excellent civil servants in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research can do the analysis. The Pentagon's Defense Humint Services can recruit and run human sources around the world. A myriad of DoD and other civilian offices and bureaus can do the science and technology development.

In the meantime, however, the job of the CIA ought to remain simple: To recruit spies to steal secrets. When it can't do that, when a majority of CIA officers are sitting fat and happy in Langley, Virginia, there's a problem. They are doing the American taxpayer a disservice. The top leadership has to go. Employees who don't respect U.S. and international law have to go. The purge should start on January 20.

John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration's torture program.

[David Guyatt]

Let's follow the logic here. Because the CIA has lied in the past (usually via the Operations wing, not the Analysis wing - remember they had to create Team B because the regular analysts weren't hawkish enough about the USSR's military spending), that must mean they lie about everything all the time.

But we also know that Trump lies almost daily (hourly sometimes), and Russian officials have assured us that they have never engaged in the collection of compromising material. No sir, not us!

"Without a doubt, we gather kompromat. . . . In the Kremlin, there's piles of it, as there are in all the security agencies," said Gennady Gudkov, also a former legislator who was forced out of parliament for his opposition to Putin. "As a rule, the special services collect information on everyone, like a vacuum, picking up anything and everything."

But, but, Western intelligence agencies do it too! And so therefore, we must shut off our minds and stubbornly sit in our ideological sandboxes and play with our hobby horses.

Yes, of course the West has been trying to encircle Russia with NATO forces for 20+ years. And if you were Vladimir Putin, how would you respond to that? How would you respond to Hillary's accusations that your party rigged Russian elections in 2011? It's not rocket surgery, people! You would try to do everything you could to defeat her and place a more pro-Russian candidate in power, plus have your trolls feeding fake news stories to idiot Americans' social media. I'd be amazed if Putin didn't respond that way. It's a much more cost-effective way to combat the US than using military power.

Given the known quality of the numerous and highly respected independent journalists who have reported on how the IC have tried to smear Trump with false Russian hacking stories and/or gone to war against him using the fabricated MI6 report --- many of them have their articles present in this thread: Chris Hedges, Robert Parry, Glen Greenwald, Patrick Cockburn, Peter Hitchins and Peter Oborne amongst them, and given that the nature of the reporting some are relying on - the now thoroughly discredited partisan group-think NYT's and WaPo for example - then it is exceedingly evident that some of us have shut of their minds and are stubbornly sitting in their ideological sandboxes.

Allow me also to add to the foregoing partial list almost every single intelligence whistleblower I can think of-- Annie Machon's article above being typical I should say.

Altogether it is an array of independent free-thinkers versus the established media and the existing order. So far as I can tell not one of them like or wanted Trump - but they recognise he won the election, and they all also recognise that the US neocon faction (both Democrats and Republicans) want rid of him at any cost, including all the usual intelligence community bag of dirty tricks.

I think for myself, David. I've read these articles, and so far I haven't been overly impressed with their arguments. The basic problem is, you've got a guy (Trump) who is so far up Putin's ass, you'd have to be blind not to see it. But apparently a lot of very smart people are not able or willing to see it.

Has it ever occurred to you that maybe all those smart people are seeing it but you're not, Tracy.

[David Guyatt]

Oh look, here's why the Russians might think it was a good idea to begin gathering compromising material on Trump many years ago:

::

Thanks for that, Tracy. I need a bit of a giggle this morning.

[Magda Hassan]

Oh look, here's why the Russians might think it was a good idea to begin gathering compromising material on Trump many years ago:

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/01...H6Ig9IrKyc

Czechoslovakia secret police file on Ivana says Trump felt he could win presidency in 1996

Except it is hardy a secret. Trump has been all over the media for decades being interviewed about the possibility of running for president. I remember seeing him on Oprah, iirc, years and years ago.

[Magda Hassan]

I think for myself, David. I've read these articles, and so far I haven't been overly impressed with their arguments. The basic problem is, you've got a guy (Trump) who is so far up Putin's ass, you'd have to be blind not to see it. But apparently a lot of very smart people are not able or willing to see it.

Tracey what do you find unimpressive about their arguments? And so what if Trump has a hard on for Vlad? Alpha male to alpha male respect. How does that prove Russian hacking? There just i no evidence that has been presented that there has been any hacking by any one.

[David Guyatt]

Oh look, here's why the Russians might think it was a good idea to begin gathering compromising material on Trump many years ago:

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/01...H6Ig9IrKyc

Czechoslovakia secret police file on Ivana says Trump felt he could win presidency in 1996

Except it is hardy a secret. Trump has been all over the media for decades being interviewed about the possibility of running for president. I remember seeing him on Oprah, iirc, years and years ago.

The real fallacy of the argument/story is that this happened 30 years ago, when the fawning, vodka-laced, US backed plunderer, Boris Yeltsin, was in placed in power by G H W Bush.

At that time the KGB and Russian military were selling every weapon and every secret file they could to the US and others --- and US intelligence had additionally also paid Yeltsin to allow American intelligence operatives go through the secret KGB archives and filet/remove those files that might've proved embarrassing to the US and NATO.

For me, this story is yet another in the growing muck pile that we've seen to date --- the Russians hacked the DNC email; the Russians hacked the US electric grid; the Russians supplied an MI6 operative with lurid and scandalous stories about Trump's alleged sexual proclivities. None of these fake news stories are backed by a shred of evidence.

It's all sheer journalistic flummery that is readily bought into by the wilful blind, the intellectually gullible and those who prefer scandal to facts because it suits their agenda.