Read part 1
The explanation for the kind of soft-power aggression embedded in Washington globe-spanning "sanctions" regime, as we detailed in Part 1, is not national security: It’s simply what Imperial Washington does for a living.
In the same vein, the billions of taxpayer money being pumped through the foreign policy agencies, NGOs, think tanks, advocacy organizations and sleazy lobbying operations like those of the Podesta brothers and Paul Manafort finance there own raison d’être.
Stated differently, the recipients of this fabulous supply of fiscal largesse create their own reason for being in the form of manufactured dangers and fake threats to the security and liberty of the American homeland.
Indeed, when it comes to the Empire’s great beltway beehive of national security operations, you could well paraphrase Stalin’s brutal secret police chief, Lavrenti Beria, who once boasted, "show me the man and I’ll show you the crime".
The Imperial City operates on the same principle: Show the agencies, contractors, NGOs, foreign aid lobbyists and the rest of the vast gang the money and they will show you the threat.
Needless to say, it does not occur to the busybodies of the Imperial City beehive that their meddling and interventions are not welcome or that the big sacks of walking around money they dispense end up being plundered arbitrarily by whichever faction of local bandits gets Washington’s ear first.
In short, Washington’s hands are so deep in the meddling business that blowback and political resentment abroad are absolutely certain to happen. In the case at hand, Putin has become deeply miffed about Washington’s claim of a divine right to meddle in the political processes of any country it deems in need of being straightened out or uplifted, and especially when they form a ring around his own territory.
Still, the Brennan/CIA report not only takes Russia’s legitimate pushback against Imperial Washington’s machinations on its borders (and within, too) as proof of Putin’s bad intentions; it actually leaps to the conclusion that Russia has retaliated in kind – with all the proof hidden behind a top secret classification stamp.
Putin most likely wanted to discredit Secretary Clinton because he has publicly blamed her since 2011 for inciting mass protests against his regime in the late 2011 and early 2012, and because he holds a grudge for comments he almost certainly saw as disparaging him"
And well he should, but so what?
Exactly, how does that prove the intent and fact of a secret nefarious plot to meddle in America’s 2016 election? Besides, you didn’t need any heavy lifting spooks on the ground in Moscow or internet hackers at NSA to understand Putin’s minimum regard for Hillary Clinton; you could find chapter and verse about it on Google.
Likewise, does anyone with a pulse need a phalanx of CIA spooks and analysts to dig up the following remarkable insight, and why does such roundhouse philosophizing matter, anyway?
"…the Kremlin sought to advance its longstanding desire to undermine the US-led liberal order, the promotion of which Putin and other senior Russian leaders view as a threat to Russia and Putin’s regime."
But here’s the meat of the matter. The Deep State is so insular and intolerant of policy dissent when it comes to the projects of Empire that it apparently viewed Trump’s far more rational views on Syria and Ukraine as a reason for suspecting that Putin was trying to throw the electoral college vote Trump’s way:
"…Putin publicly indicated a preference for President-elect Trump’s stated policy to work with Russia, and pro-Kremlin figures spoke highly about what they saw as his Russia-friendly positions on Syria and Ukraine. Putin publicly contrasted the President-elect’s approach to Russia with Secretary Clinton’s ‘aggressive rhetoric".
Again, are we supposed to believe that Putin’s fully logical public views are evidence that he plotted secretly to influence and alter the on-the-ground reality during America’s election?
In fact, there is but a single proposition in the entire ten-pages of political opinionating contained in the Brennan report of January 2017 that relates to an actual Russian intrusion (other than the ridiculous St. Petersburg troll farm which we have debunked elsewhere) in the American electoral process. That’s the completely discredited notion that the Russian GRU hacked the DNC emails and handed them off to WikiLeaks:
"We assess with high confidence that the GRU used the Guccifer 2.0 persona, DCLeaks.com, and WikiLeaks to release US victim data obtained in cyber operations…..We assess with high confidence the GRU relayed material it acquired from the DNC and senior Democratic officials to WikiLeaks…."
No, not at all.
As we detail below, William Binney, who is the father of modern NSA internet spying technologies, says that the DNC emails were leaked on a thumb-drive and couldn’t have been hacked as a technical matter; and equally competent analysts have shown that Guccifer 2.0 is almost surely a NSA contrived fiction based on the oldest trick in the police precinct station house – planting evidence, in this case telltale Cyrillic letters and the name of a notorious head of the Soviet secret police.
Yet that’s all they’ve got. To wit, an "assessment" that the Russian state caused some Democrat political skullduggery to get into the public domain based on "classified" evidence that they are not sharing, but if made public would easily disprove the charge.
And that gets us to the meat of the matter. If the Donald had had the experience and good sense to understand that the Brennan report – that was thrown in his face on the eve of his inauguration – was a political attack document, not an intelligence community product, he would have released the classified version in its entirety on January 21, 2017.
That would have been the end of RussiaGate then and there because there is absolutely no there, there; and that the entire collusion hoax embodied in the Brennan Report is really nothing more than a dimwitted attempt to conjure up a Russian assault on American democracy that absolutely did not happen.
And, to be clear, we are referring not just narrowly to the question of collusion by the Trump campaign or the Donald himself, but to the whole cock-and-bull story that there was some kind of sweeping, sinister and efficacious Russian influence operation during the 2016 election that impacted voters and reflected a hostile intent by Putin to "undermine the US-led democratic order".
Alas, the scam only got worse after the January 6th launch of the Deep State sabotage campaign. The Donald didn’t get the joke then – so they just kept piling on, building the whole RussiaGate narrative on an insidious (and ludicrous) game of hide the ball behind a veil of classified secrets.
For crying out loud, the whole modus operandi of the Deep State in disenfranchising the open processes of American democracy is to hide everything from Congress and the American public behind a wall of secrecy. Thus, it was recently revealed that DOJ had classified a document which disclosed the $70,000 cost of a new conference table for former FBI deputy director, Andrew McCabe; and when it was forced to turn over the document under Congressional pressure, DOJ actually redacted the $70k cost on national security grounds!
Indeed, the absurdity of the whole secrecy wall behind which Deep State operatives hide is stunningly evident in the very mandate from Rod Rosenstein, which established the Special Counsel and gave Mueller his marching orders, charter, remit etc. To wit, parts of the damn thing (the August 3, 2017 addendum) are classified as "secret"!
That’s right.
Supposedly, American democracy itself was imperiled by traitorous acts of Donald Trump and his campaign via collusion with Russia to rig the outcome of the 2016 election. Consequently, it was alleged that the extraordinary step of a Special Counsel investigation was necessary to protect the integrity and transparency of US elections, and that Mueller was to be the people’s tribune charged with uncovering the corruption and treason.
Yet "the people" cannot even read the terms of Mueller’s charter. And, indeed, a Federal judge presiding over the Manafort trial in Virginia had to literally pound the table to get his own private access to the document.
So the Deep State just keeps playing rope-a-dope with the Donald, attempting to nullify his election based on Fake Evidence hidden behind a wall of official secrecy. And yet he continues to eschew using the unquestioned powers of his office to declassify the whole shooting match.
In this context, consider two items that point to the absurdity of the secrecy wall Washington is throwing in the Donald’s face.
First, as we indicated previously, the only thing that even remotely qualifies as "influencing" the 2016 election was the release of the highly compromising emails from the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta.
But if the Russians did it – from a troll farm in St. Petersburg or the Kremlin itself – the fingerprints from any remote hacking operation would be all over the computers involved. Moreover, the National Security Agency (NSA) would have a record of the breach stored at one of its server farms because it does capture and store everything that comes into the US over the Internet
Said record, of course, would amount to the Smoking Intercept. So the only thing the Donald really needs to do is call the head of NSA to the carpet and tell him to put up or shut-up. That is to say, if Russia did hack the DNC – then declassify and publish the NSA intercept.
In the alternative, if NSA has no such record, confiscate the DNC computers – which have never even been inspected by the FBI let alone taken into custody – and determine whether William Binney is right.
The latter is a 30-year NSA veteran and actually the father of much of today’s NSA Internet spying capability. Binney says that the recorded download speed of the DNC emails could only have been done by plugging a thumb-drive into the machines on site. That is, nothing downloads across 5,000 miles of digital expanse at the recorded 22.7 megabytes per second.
So figuratively speaking, the Donald only needs to dial-up Vlad on the red phone and offer him a chance to prove that Russia didn’t do it. All that would be required is for him to give Putin the DNC’s IP address and invite him to run a test to see if the Kremlin’s hackers can sprint at 22.7 megabytes per second.
How simple is that!
And failing this kind of bold theatrics, just have some reliable and competent people test the DNC servers. If the Russians hacked them, the evidence is all there in the hard drives; and if they didn’t, the entire RussiaGate hoax could be shutdown once and for all.
Cyber Garbage From the St. Petersburg Troll Farm
After all, the only other part of the meddling narrative that remotely qualifies is the pitiful efforts of the Russian troll farm called the Internet Research Agency (IRA). The latter is work place of the 13 ham sandwiches that Mueller wasted the taxpayers’ dollars indicting.
The pure grandstanding nature of this blow against the purported election meddling of the nefarious Russians is more than evident in the 3,000 ads IRA bought on Facebook for about $100,000 – many of which were posted after the election.
These ads have now been released by the Congressional investigators. So here’s a typical example of how the Russians stormed into America’s sacred election space – even if according to Facebook this particular ad got less than 10,000 "impressions" and the mighty sum of 160 "shares".
For crying out loud, it didn’t take any nefarious Russian intelligence agent to post this kind of cartoonish Islamophobia. There are millions of American xenophobes more than happy to do it with their own dime, time and bile.
Still, the fact that these Facebook ads and the St. Petersburg troll farm are taken seriously shows how insidious the Deep State’s RussiaGate campaign has been. In order to prove that their writ and rule will not be denied by the American electorate, they have cynically fostered a mindless public hysteria that makes the work of Joe McCarthy appear benign by comparison.
Yet the Donald can’t seem to target his arrows where they belong. When these ads were released earlier this spring, the White House coms operation should have been all over them like a wet blanket, burying them in ridicule and derision – enlightening the American public to the utter farce of the whole notion that $100k worth of stupid Facebook ads had any impact whatsoever on an election campaign in which more than $20 billion was spent one way or another.
And during a period, by the way, when the 80,000 Facebook posts attributable to IRA were up against the 33 trillion messages posted on that fetid network by its billions of users.
Indeed, talk about shooting fish in a barrel. Even Keeping Up With The Kardashians voters would get a pretty good yuck from the example displayed below.
A post called "Power to the people!" was typed out by some troll farm operative in St. Petersburg, whose $4 per hour pay probably was not worth the effort: It was shared by the grand some of 20 people, who might well have been algos, anyway!
The fact is, the "evidence" for Russian meddling is nonsense, and if there was no "meddling", how could there have been "collusion" to accomplish something which didn’t happen?
What we are saying is that the Trump White House has been totally asleep at the switch. The public release of these ludicrous Facebook posts should have been accompanied by the wholesale declassification of the trove of evidence held by agencies of the Deep State with respect to the Russian troll farm.
It would have shown how Brennan & Co. literally manufactured the RussiaGate narrative from wholecloth; illegally and abusively used the nation’s intelligence apparatus to meddle in a domestic election campaign; and then leaked to the press like a sieve to thwart Trump’s election before November 8 and savage his legitimacy afterwards.
To be sure, Trump is undoubtedly bombarded constantly with the old canard that declassification would jeopardize "sources and methods". But every U.S. friend, foe, enemy and fake ally on the planet knows that the massive $75 billion intelligence agency complex intercepts and captures everything which moves and everything which stands still on the entire worldwide web.
So virtually everything which is captured electronically could be declassified with no harm done – except to reveal the nightmarish insanity of what the 17 intelligence agencies do day in and day out.
Likewise, virtually any and all internal government communications which are now hiding behind a "Secret" stamp – such as the Obama White House’s "unmasking " requests in the run-up to the election and after – could and should also be declassified.
After all, you can’t have a workable democracy and rule by the people if the permanent ruling class in the Imperial City can hide behind a massive and impenetrable wall of secret documents, communications, projects and procedures.
In fact, other than in the utmost special circumstances, no intergovernmental communications should ever be classified as "Secret". Full stop.
That gets us, of course, to the ballyhooed issue of protecting HUMINT (human intelligence) and the purportedly courageous CIA operatives spread around the world conducting good old fashioned spycraft and skullduggery.
Needless to say, if Washington didn’t pretend to be the global hegemon and seat of the Indispensable Nation there are precious few places that it would actually need clandestine spies. The Islamic State is no more, for instance, and Syria, Iraq and Yemen are none of Washington’s business.
Apparently, we do have a few spies on the ground in Iran, but what good are they? Washington had no clue whatsoever in 2013 that the middle of the road statesman, Hassan Rouhani, was going to win the presidential election.
Likewise, a peace deal with Putin would do far more for American security than whatever dozens of spooks Washington now has running around the fleshpots of Moscow.
And the same goes for China. Open sources on the ground, satellites in the sky and NSA’s Internet dragnet tell Washington all it needs to know about the Red Ponzi’s tottering tower of debt – the very survival of which requires that its economy keeps shipping $500 billion per year of exports to America.
By contrast, attacking 4,000 US Wal-Marts and their surrounds would be suicidal for Beijing’s communist ruling party, and at least that much about economics even the Red suzerains of Beijing surely know.
The Stefan Halper Caper – Same Old, Same Old
Anyway, consider the cause celebre of a few months ago – professor Stefan Halper, who apparently befriended some low level Trump campaign flunkies (Carter Page and George Papadopoulos) at the behest of the CIA. This man both literally and figuratively would be hard to hide – since he has been an open source CIA asset since at least the late 1970s.
Even after all Haper’s dirty laundry came out, the Deep State handmaids at CNN refused to speak his name on the air for fear of what – jeopardizing his life and safety?
C’mon. During the last several years alone, Halper has harvested $1 million in consulting contracts from a nasty little DOD operation called the "Office of Net Assessment".
But these utterly wasteful contracts – which came in $250,000 installments – are published in a government register of contract awards. That is, Halper is a publicly disclosed parasite, not a valuable secret "asset" doing heroic work in behalf of homeland security.
Indeed, this man is hiding nowhere and is a secret to exactly nobody. And as to his 40 years of open air service as an asset of the Deep State, we can attest from personal experience.
Our entry into the cabinet of Ronald Reagan as a young Michigan congressman way back in 1980 was a fluke happenstance owing to having been chosen to play the role of Jimmy Carter during a week of mock debate rehearsals with the Gipper.
And we, apparently, came across during those practice sessions as a standout in the eyes of the soon to be president of the United States. But mainly, as it happened, because we had the advantage of preparing for the rehearsals with a stolen copy of Jimmy Carter’s debate briefing book!
And, yes, we mention this because the pilfering act that landed Carter’s briefing book on our doorstep in Georgetown was the fruit of a Reagan campaign operation populated with CIA types and run by, well, Stefan Halper!
Moreover, when we subsequently got the job as director of OMB and needed a deputy director for national security programs we tried to recruit Halper, who was the son-in-law of a legendary CIA operative at the time named Ray Cline.
Alas, even then the Deep State functioned as an old boys network, and the latter did not trust the egomaniacal incoming Secretary of State, Al Haig.
So it told us, no dice on Halper and, instead, sent him over to the State Department to man a post where he could keep a close eye on General Haig.
Professor Stefan Halper, 73
In any event, the Donald is being flummoxed and then some in his true mission as the Great Disrupter because he fails to use the tools that would make a difference. That is, he should be firing the Deep State operatives and their patsies who are systematically undermining his presidency and declassifying their nefarious doings, which are now hidden behind the phony veil marked "Secret".
David Stockman was a two-term Congressman from Michigan. He was also the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan. After leaving the White House, Stockman had a 20-year career on Wall Street. He’s the author of three books, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America and TRUMPED! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin… And How to Bring It Back. He also is founder of David Stockman’s Contra Corner and David Stockman’s Bubble Finance Trader.
