Media, Military Intelligence Complex, and Other Ramblings

A Letter from 2/22/2020

Greetings Fellow Citizens,

I was asked last night about my sources of news.  I mentioned a few (The Grayzone, Current Affairs, Consortium News, RealClearPolitics -- a news aggregator which includes a variety of sources including both Democratic and Republican leaning publications, i.e. Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, American Greatness, New York Times, TN Star, Fox News, TAP, The Hill, Foreign Affairs, Defense News, Fortune, Las Vegas Review Journal, Vox, RCP, Daily Caller, Washington Post, San Diego Union Tribune, ...).

But the issue when talking to skeptics such as most people I know is that news from little known sources is not convincing.  It's like trying to convince devout Christians that there are flaws in the Bible.  One way of dealing with such situations is to highlights inconsistencies in the mainstream media outlets.  That's one reason why I read the mainstream media, even though I feel that they often spin the news in favor of the vested interests.  If I can point out that Russiagate, for example, has been discredited by even the NY Times, then it carries more weight than if I tell you I get my news from Consortium News.

So here's one example from the NY Times, from December 11, 2019:  We Just Got a Rare Look at National Security Surveillance. It Was Ugly.  This was a report following the Inspector General (Michael Horowitz - a Democrat) report on the FISA authorized wiretapping of Trump associate Carter Page. 

The Justice Department’s independent inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, and his team uncovered a staggeringly dysfunctional and error-ridden process in how the F.B.I. went about obtaining and renewing court permission under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, to wiretap Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser.

But the inspector general found major errors, material omissions and unsupported statements about Mr. Page in the materials that went to the court. F.B.I. agents cherry-picked the evidence, telling the Justice Department information that made Mr. Page look suspicious and omitting material that cut the other way, and the department passed that misleading portrait onto the court.

To give just three examples:

First, when agents initially sought permission for the wiretap, F.B.I. officials scoured information from confidential informants and selectively presented portions that supported their suspicions that Mr. Page might be a conduit between Russia and the Trump campaign’s onetime chairman, Paul Manafort.

But officials did not disclose information that undercut that allegation — such as the fact that Mr. Page had told an informant in August 2016 that he “never met” or “said one word” to Mr. Manafort, who had never returned Mr. Page’s emails. Even if the investigators did not necessarily believe Mr. Page, the court should have been told what he had said.

Second, as the initial court order was nearing its expiration and law-enforcement officials prepared to ask the surveillance court to renew it, the F.B.I. had uncovered information that cast doubt on some of its original assertions. But law enforcement officials never reported that new information to the court.

Specifically, the application included allegations about Mr. Page contained in a dossier compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent whose research was funded by Democrats. In January 2017, the F.B.I. interviewed Mr. Steele’s own primary source, and he contradicted what Mr. Steele had written in the dossier.

The source for Mr. Steele may, of course, have been lying. But either way, officials should have flagged the disconnect for the court. Instead, the F.B.I. reported that its agents had met with the source to “further corroborate” the dossier and found him to be “truthful and cooperative,” leaving a misleading impression in renewal applications.

Finally, the report stressed Mr. Page’s long history of meeting with Russian intelligence officials. But he had also said that he had a relationship with the C.I.A., and it turns out that he had for years told the agency about those meetings — including one that was cited in the wiretap application as a reason to be suspicious of him.

Here's a piece I read by former U.K diplomat Craig Murray.  Murray goes to original source documents (e.g. reports by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons - OPCW).  The Terrifying Rise of the Zombie State Narrative.  In addition to referencing publicly available source documents, Murray includes consideration of OPCW whistleblowers who are not given space in the mainstream media, for the obvious reason that the whistleblower reports contradict the U.S. / British narrative that Russia and Assad used chemical weapons at Douma in Syria.

The ruling Establishment has learnt a profound lesson from the debacle over Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction. The lesson they have learnt is not that it is wrong to attack and destroy an entire country on the basis of lies. They have not learnt that lesson despite the fact the western powers are now busily attacking the Iraqi Shia majority government they themselves installed, for the crime of being a Shia majority government.

No, the lesson they have learnt is never to admit they lied, never to admit they were wrong. They see the ghost-like waxen visage of Tony Blair wandering around, stinking rich but less popular than an Epstein birthday party, and realise that being widely recognised as a lying mass murderer is not a good career choice. They have learnt that the mistake is for the Establishment ever to admit the lies.

The Establishment had to do a certain amount of collective self-flagellation over the non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, over which they precipitated the death and maiming of millions of people...

These situations are now avoided by the realisation of the security services that in future they just have to brazen it out. The simple truth of the matter – and it is a truth – is this. If the Iraq WMD situation occurred today, and the security services decided to brazen it out and claim that WMD had indeed been found, there is not a mainstream media outlet that would contradict them.

The security services outlet Bellingcat would publish some photos of big missiles planted in the sand. The Washington Post, Guardian, New York Times, BBC and CNN would republish and amplify these pictures and copy and paste the official statements from government spokesmen. Robert Fisk would get to the scene and interview a few eye witnesses who saw the missiles being planted, and he would be derided as a senile old has-been. Seymour Hersh and Peter Hitchens would interview whistleblowers and be shunned by their colleagues and left off the airwaves. Bloggers like myself would be derided as mad conspiracy theorists or paid Russian agents if we cast any doubt on the Bellingcat “evidence”. Wikipedia would ruthlessly expunge any alternative narrative as being from unreliable sources. The Integrity Initiative, 77th Brigade, GCHQ and their US equivalents would be pumping out the “Iraqi WMD found” narrative all over social media. Mad Ben Nimmo of the Atlantic Council would be banning dissenting accounts all over the place in his role as Facebook Witchfinder-General.

Does anybody seriously wish to dispute this is how the absence of Iraqi WMD would be handled today, 16 years on?

If you do wish to doubt this could happen, look at the obviously fake narrative of the Syrian government chemical weapons attacks on Douma. The pictures published on Bellingcat of improvised chlorine gas missiles were always obviously fake. Remember this missile was supposed to have smashed through ten inches of solid, steel rebar reinforced concrete (editor's note: there is a photo on linked website showing the missles).

As I reported back in May last year, that the expert engineers sent to investigate by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) did not buy into this is hardly surprising.

The highlights are:

“No nerve agents had been detected in environmental or bio samples”

“The experts were conclusive in their statements that there was no correlation between symptoms and chlorine exposure”

“The experts were also of the opinion that the victims were highly unlikely to have gathered in piles at the centre of the respective apartments, at such a short distance from an escape from any toxic chlorine gas to much cleaner air”.

 We see now how the OPCW managed to produce a report which was the opposite of the truth. Ian Henderson, the OPCW engineer who had visited the site and concluded that the “cylinder bombs” were fakes, had suddenly become excluded from the “fact finding mission” when it had been whittled down to a “core group” – excluding any engineers (and presumably toxicologists) who would seek to insert inconvenient facts into the report.

That the consequences of the fake Douma incident were much less far-reaching than they might have been, is entirely due (and I am sorry if you dislike this but it is true) to the good sense of Donald Trump. Trump is inclined to isolationism and the fake “Russiagate” narrative promoted by senior echelons of his security services had led him to be heavily sceptical of them. He therefore refused, against the united persuasion of the hawks, to respond to the Douma “attack” by more than quick and limited missile strikes. I have no doubt that the object of the false flag was to push the US into a full regime change operation, by falsifying a demonstration that a declared red line on chemical weapon use had been crossed.

There is no doubt that Douma was a false flag. The documentary and whistleblower evidence from the OPCW is overwhelming and irrefutable. In addition to the two whistleblowers reported extensively by Wikileaks and the Courage Foundation, the redoubtable Peter Hitchens has his own whistleblowers inside OPCW who may well be different persons. It is also great entertainment as well as enlightening to read Hitchens’ takedown of Bellingcat on the issue...

None of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the BBC, the Guardian nor CNN – all of which reported the Douma chemical attack very extensively as a real Syrian government atrocity, and used it to editorialise for western military intervention in Syria – none of them has admitted they were wrong. None has issued any substantive retraction or correction. None has reported in detail and without bias on the overwhelming evidence of foul play within the OPCW.

Those sources who do publish the truth – including the few outliers in mainstream media such as Peter Hitchens and Robert Fisk – continue to be further marginalised, attacked as at best eccentric and at worse Russian agents.

What we are seeing is the terrifying rise of the zombie state narrative in Western culture. It does not matter how definitively we can prove that something is a lie, the full spectrum dominance of the Establishment in media resources is such that the lie is impossible to kill off, and the state manages to implant that lie as the truth in the minds of a sufficient majority of the populace to ride roughshod over objective truth with great success. It follows in the state narrative that anybody who challenges the state’s version of truth is themselves dishonest or mad, and the state manages also to implant that notion into a sufficient majority of the populace.

These are truly chilling times.

I (Dan) remember the Douma incident at the time (April 7, 2018) as being highly suspicious.  The Syrian Army was just completing their defeat of Isis/Al Qaeda in southern Syria.  Everyone knew that the Syrians had won and Isis would be retreating.  It certainly seemed to me at the time that it's highly unlikely that Assad would bring out chemical weapons when the battle was already won.  Much more likely, the Isis/Al Qaeda rebels were on the brink of defeat and made a desperate false flag attempt to get the U.S. to intervene. 

Ah well, I could be wrong about all this.

A lot more follow up on our conversation last night.  I don't expect any of you to read this unless you are interested in knowing why I hold heretical (for Democrats) views regarding the role of the mainstream media, Democrats, and the intelligence community with regard to Trump's alleged collusion with Russia, and related threats to democracy.

Regarding the Stone prosecution -- Seeing Through the Lies – US Edition

To finish with Stone, the ludicrous vindictiveness of the prosecutors in pushing for a seven to nine year jail sentence for an offence that was really no more than wasting investigators’ time with his fanatasies, was rightly called out by Donald Trump. The notion that Roger Stone threatened witnesses is problematical. Randy Credico, the only person Stone was convicted of threatening, has written to the judge asking for Stone not to be jailed and making plain he did not feel threatened. He had known Stone for years and was used to his blustering talk, which Randy never took as intended to be a serious threat...

To maintain this stance in the face of all factual evidence requires great skill and dexterity from Guardian journalists. Fortunately for the Guardian it does not lack for fantasist Russophobe fabricators like Luke Harding or for more subtly corrupt spinners like David Smith, who last week wrote of Stone that “He was the sixth former Trump aide to be convicted in cases arising from the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.”

The oleaginous David Smith omitted to note what any half honest human being would consider a very pertinent fact – that not one of those convictions had anything at all to do with Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election, being either entirely unrelated tax and corruption matters turned up while trawling, or as with Stone being questions of process. Stone’s case is unique in that not only did his conviction not relate to any Russian interference, it was for promoting precisely the same ludicrous fantasy that the Guardian is promoting. It was illegal for Stone to persist in telling his lies on oath; there is no legal bar to the Guardian promoting the same Trump/Wikileaks/Russia fantasy ad nauseam.

Yet we have the spectacle of Julian Assange standing before a judge facing extradition to the United States and up to 175 years in jail for “espionage”, when everything Wikileaks has ever published has a 100% record for truth and accuracy.

And from https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/the-roger-stone-sentencing-fiasco/ --

As is his wont, the president went bonkers on Twitter upon learning of the recommendation, calling it “horrible and very unfair” and a major “miscarriage of justice” because “the real crimes are on the other side” — i.e., the Russia-probe investigators — yet “nothing happens to them.” While the Justice Department was obviously aware of the president’s tweet, as well as press reporting about the harshness of the prosecutors’ sentencing recommendation, the DOJ and the White House have had no communications about the case, according to both the president and a spokeswoman for the attorney general.

It seems like Trump has a point.  But, no, he shouldn't be tweeting his opinions as that could be exerting inappropriate pressure on the Attorney General and others.  (I was wrong about this last night, I believe, and … was right.)

From Bill Barr Derangement Syndrome:

Barr allowed the Mueller probe to reach its conclusion unmolested. The extent of his alleged interference was, prior to the release of the report, summarizing its findings in a way that wasn’t harsh or detailed enough for Trump’s critics.

Finally, he declined to prosecute former Department of Justice official and frequent Trump target Andrew McCabe for lying to investigators. If Barr is really Trump’s Roy Cohn, his personal enforcer masquerading as a top law-enforcement official, nailing McCabe would have been his Job One.

So, is Trump right that Democrats caught lying, like McCabe, have not been prosecuted for perjury?  Consider You Can’t Fool All the People All the Time. 

The Horowitz report is not some ordinary rebuke, but an epic assault that has left the FBI reeling. After fawning over the bureau for years, the New York Times tried to salvage a shred of self-respect by declaring that even though it “painted a bleak portrait of the FBI as a dysfunctional agency,” all was not lost because the inspector general uncovered “no evidence that the mistakes were intentional or undertaken out of political bias.”

This was incorrect. Horowitz made it clear in his Dec. 11 appearance before the Senate judiciary committee that while there was “no evidence that the initiation of the investigation was motivated by political bias,” the question gets “murkier” when it comes to subsequent FBI actions like withholding or doctoring evidence. Considering that FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith, the man who allegedly falsified evidence against Page, is a never-Trumper who once texted “viva le resistance,” it’s hard to see how bias could not have been a factor.

The inspector general lists seventeen “significant errors” the bureau made in applying for a secret surveillance warrant. It failed to inform the court that Page had been a CIA informant for years and had been found to have been truthful throughout; that he told an undercover agent that he “literally never met” or “said one word to” Paul Manafort, his alleged co-conspirator, and that Manafort had never responded to any of his emails; that a source for ex-MI6 agent Christopher Steele’s famous “golden showers” dossier was known to be a “boaster” and an “egoist” who may “engage in some embellishment”; and that professional associates of Steele said he “[d]emonstrates lack of self-awareness [and] poor judgment” and “pursued people with political risk but no intelligence value.”

Steele, the man who turned US politics upside down, was a flake in other words while Page was more likely on the up and up. Yet the FBI assumed the opposite. Perhaps the most amazing section in Horowitz’s report concerns a Steele informant who confessed that reports of Trump’s sexual escapades in the Moscow Ritz Carlton were “just talk,” conversations he or she “had with friends over beers,” and statements made in “jest.” Yet the Steele dossier reported them as a real, and a credulous press lapped them all up. Steele’s supposed high-level Kremlin contacts, the source added, were individuals “who may have had access” – and, then again, may not have. Corroboration of Steele’s findings was meanwhile “zero.”

Yet this is the document that the FBI continued using to pursue Page and Trump and convince the public that collusion was genuine.

And Unraveling the Criminal Web at Comey's FBI and Beyond

So, who are the weakest links as Durham’s investigation moves forward? One is surely Kevin Clinesmith, a lawyer in Comey’s FBI who is highlighted in the Horowitz Report (pages 186-190). Sen. Lindsey Graham mentioned those pages in his Tuesday press conference. In them, Horowitz presents evidence that Clinesmith not only altered official documents, he completely changed their meaning. The altered documents painted Carter Page as a foreign spy; the originals said there was no evidence for that. The exculpatory evidence was hidden from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts. The lies helped gain a secret warrant to spy on Page.

How important was the Steele dossier to gaining the warrant? The FBI’s own legal counsel said, in internal documents, “this is essentially a single source FISA” (p. 132). That source was the Steele dossier. (Remember when Comey and all the Democrats denied that? There was lots more evidence in the applications, they said. There wasn’t.) Horowitz underscores the dossier’s significance when he concludes it was “central and essential” to gaining the surveillance warrant (p. 359).

How did the FBI and DoJ know the Steele dossier was garbage? Because they couldn’t substantiate any of its key claims and because they interviewed Steele’s most important source. This “subsource” told them unambiguously that the scandalous claims in the dossier were based on his own statements to Steele but that they were exaggerated and distorted in the dossier. The subsource told the FBI that Steele’s misleading, unverified claims were simply rumors and “bar talk.” Again, the FBI had this damning evidence in hand before it renewed the FISA applications on Carter Page. (It should have had them before the first application, but it didn’t bother.) Again, it lied to the FISA court.

These are serious crimes, not only against Carter Page but against the true target of the spying, Donald Trump’s campaign and presidency -- and ultimately against the American people. Those who committed the crimes must be held to account. 

But as far as I know, none of the FBI officials involved in surveilling Trump based upon these lies have yet been prosecuted. 

Speaking of accountability, I think this article makes some good points regarding Adam Schiff's record:  Adam Schiff's history of inaccuracies, conspiracy theories follows him to Senate floor

Conservatives take a decidedly different view. They wonder on social media why a congressman who floated unproven conspiracies and a false dossier is leading the case against Mr. Trump, and they ask why the liberal media are so uncritical.

As a backdrop: On Jan. 10, 2017, BuzzFeed posted the Christopher Steele dossier, which made a dozen felony charges against Mr. Trump and his allies. A month later, The New York Times reported that the intelligence community owned a year’s worth of phone records and intercepts between the Trump campaign and Kremlin intelligence.

The dossier allegations and Times story were both false.

The next month, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence convened the first major hearing into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election by computer hacking and social media warfare. A key question was whether the Trump campaign was a witting ally.

It was in that media glare that Mr. Schiff began making a series of conspiracy claims as he sat on a committee that is supposed to deal in facts. At the witness table were FBI Director James B. Comey and Navy Adm. Michael S. Rogers, head of the electronic-listening National Security Agency.

Mr. Schiff immediately endorsed the 35-page dossier and praised its author, former British intelligence officer Mr. Steele.

To bolster Mr. Steele’s credibility, Mr. Schiff said this about Trump campaign adviser Carter Page and Russian oil giant Rosneft: “Is it a coincidence that the Russian gas company Rosneft sold a 19% share after former British intelligence officer Steele was told by Russian sources that Carter Page was offered fees on a deal of just that size?”

The only coincidence was that the 19% figure was in the press weeks before Mr. Steele wrote his memo.

Mr. Schiff also quoted Mr. Steele on a purported conspiracy between campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Mr. Page: “According to Steele, it was Manafort who chose Page to serve as a go-between for the Trump campaign and Russian interests.”

Independent evidence shows the two never knew or spoke with each other.

Mr. Schiff also said Mr. Steele was “highly regarded” by U.S. intelligence.

When Mr. Page later appeared before the committee, Mr. Schiff repeatedly quoted the dossier in questioning the former aide, forcing him to disprove what Mr. Steele had written.

Mr. Schiff also tried to use Mr. Page to prove another dossier allegation: that Trump attorney Michael Cohen secretly traveled to Prague to visit operatives of Russian President Vladimir Putin. He asked Mr. Page whether his 2016 trip to Hungary was linked to Cohen.

By November 2017, Mr. Schiff was dismissing critics and sticking by Mr. Steele and his dossier.

“So I think this is a bit of an effort to discredit Christopher Steele, discredit the dossier, ignore how much of it has been corroborated already and ignore the fact that the intelligence community is operating from a broad array of sources as a way of basically calling this all a hoax. And it just doesn’t add up to me,” he said on CNN...

Mr. Schiff said several times that he had seen evidence of Trump-Russia collusion to interfere in the election and it was beyond circumstantial.

He began this talking point in March 2017.

“I can tell you that the case is more than that,” he said on MSNBC. “And I can’t go into the particulars, but there is more than circumstantial evidence now.”

Special counsel Robert Mueller said in his March 2019 report that he did not find a Trump election conspiracy. No Trump associate was charged in such a conspiracy...

As the dossier’s credibility began to fall apart in 2017, Rep. Devin Nunes, California Republican and then-chairman of the House intelligence committee, began an attempt to find out who financed Mr. Steele’s work and to answer this question: Did the FBI use the dossier to obtain a judge’s permission to place a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act wiretap on Mr. Page?

Mr. Schiff, who voted to impeach Mr. Trump for not turning over documents, opposed Mr. Nunes on both fronts.

He fought Mr. Nunes’ bank subpoenas, which forced Democrats to acknowledge in October 2017 that the Hillary Clinton campaign funded the dossier through opposition research firm Fusion GPS and co-founder Glenn R. Simpson.

After Mr. Nunes issued a memo in 2018 disclosing FISA abuses, Mr. Schiff issued a countermemo that proved off-base on several points.

Mr. Schiff titled his Jan. 29, 2018, countermemo “Correcting the Record — The Russia Investigation.”

“FBI and DOJ officials did not ‘abuse’ the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) process, omit material information, or subvert this vital tool to spy on the Trump campaign,” he said.

In fact, Justice Department Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz’s Dec. 9 report found that the FBI did abuse FISA. He found 17 instances in which agents submitted inaccurate information to the judge or omitted exculpatory statements about Mr. Page.

Mr. Horowitz said the warrant could not have been submitted without the Democratic Party-financed dossier. There was no other evidence of a conspiracy.

Mr. Schiff said in his countermemo: “In subsequent FISA renewals, DOJ provided additional information obtained through multiple independent sources that corroborated Steele’s reporting.”

Not true, said Mr. Horowitz. None of Mr. Steele’s reporting in the warrant was ever corroborated. In fact, FBI agents acquired evidence from Mr. Steele’s main source, who placed great doubt in Mr. Steele’s allegations. But the FBI left this evidence out of subsequent warrant renewals.

Mr. Schiff said in his countermemo: “The FBI and, subsequently, the Special Counsel’s investigation into links between the Russian government and Trump campaign associates has been based on troubling law enforcement and intelligence information unrelated to the ‘dossier.’”

In fact, there is no indication in the Mueller or Horowitz reports that agents found evidence — texts, emails, communication intercepts, informants or whistleblowers — that provided evidence of a conspiracy outside of the dossier.

Peace, love, and hugs...