Posted on 01/16/2017 9:37:51 AM PST by Lorianne
Some thoughts on “Russia’s Influence Campaign Targeting the 2016 US Presidential Election,” the newly released declassified report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
1. The primary purpose of the declassified report, which offers no evidence to support its assertions that Russia hacked the U.S. presidential election campaign, is to discredit Donald Trump. I am not saying there was no Russian hack of John Podesta’s emails. I am saying we have yet to see any tangible proof to back up the accusation. This charge—Sen. John McCain has likened the alleged effort by Russia to an act of war—is the first salvo in what will be a relentless campaign by the Republican and Democratic establishment, along with its corporatist allies and the mass media, to destroy the credibility of the president-elect and prepare the way for impeachment.
The allegations in the report, amplified in breathtaking pronouncements by a compliant corporate media that operates in a non-fact-based universe every bit as pernicious as that inhabited by Trump, are designed to make Trump look like Vladimir Putin’s useful idiot. An orchestrated and sustained campaign of innuendo and character assassination will be directed against Trump. When impeachment is finally proposed, Trump will have little public support and few allies and will have become a figure of open ridicule in the corporate media.
2. The second task of the report is to bolster the McCarthyist smear campaign against independent media, including Truthdig, as witting or unwitting agents of the Russian government. The demise of the English programming of Al-Jazeera and TeleSur, along with the collapse of the nation’s public broadcasting, designed to give a voice to those not beholden to corporate or party interests, leaves RT America and Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! as the only two electronic outlets with a national reach that are willing to give a platform to critics of corporate power and imperialism such as Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Ralph Nader, Medea Benjamin, Cornel West, Kshama Sawant, myself and others.
Seven pages of the report were dedicated to RT America, on which I have a show called “On Contact.” The report vastly inflated the cable network’s reach and influence. It also included a few glaring errors, including the statement that “RT introduced two new shows—‘Breaking the Set’ on 4 September and ‘Truthseeker’ on 2 November—both overwhelmingly focused on criticism of the US and Western governments as well as the promotion of radical discontent.” “Breaking the Set,” with Abby Martin, was taken off the air two years ago. It could hardly be tarred with costing Hillary Clinton the election.
The barely contained rage of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper at the recent Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on foreign cyber threats was visible when he spat out that RT was “promoting a particular point of view, disparaging our system, our alleged hypocrisy about human rights, et cetera.” His anger was a glimpse into how the establishment seethes with hatred for dissidents. Clapper has lied in the past. He perjured himself in March 2013 when, three months before the revelations of wholesale state surveillance leaked by Snowden, he assured Congress that the National Security Agency was not collecting “any type of data” on the American public. After the corporate state shuts down RT, it will go after Democracy Now! and the handful of progressive sites, including this one, that give these dissidents space. The goal is censorship.
3. The third task of the report is to justify the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization beyond Germany, a violation of the promise Ronald Reagan made to the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Expanding NATO in Eastern Europe opened up an arms market for the war industry. It made those businesses billions of dollars. New NATO members must buy Western arms that can be integrated into the NATO arsenal. These sales, which are bleeding the strained budgets of countries such as Poland, are predicated on potential hostilities with Russia. If Russia is not a threat, the arms sales plummet. War is a racket.
4. The final task of the report is to give the Democratic Party plausible cover for the catastrophic election defeat it suffered. Clinton initially blamed FBI Director James Comey for her loss before switching to the more easily demonized Putin. The charge of Russian interference essentially boils down to the absurd premise that perhaps hundreds of thousands of Clinton supporters suddenly decided to switch their votes to Trump when they read the leaked emails of Podesta. Either that or they tuned in to RT America and decided to vote for the Green Party.
The Democratic Party leadership cannot face, and certainly cannot publicly admit, that its callous betrayal of the working and middle class triggered a nationwide revolt that resulted in the election of Trump. It has been pounded since President Barack Obama took office, losing 68 seats in the House, 12 seats in the Senate and 10 governorships. It lost more than 1,000 elected positions between 2008 and 2012 nationwide. Since 2010, Republicans have replaced 900 Democratic state legislators. If this was a real party, the entire leadership would be sacked. But it is not a real party. It is the shell of a party propped up by corporate money and hyperventilating media.
The Democratic Party must maintain the fiction of liberalism just as the Republican Party must maintain the fiction of conservatism. These two parties, however, belong to one party—the corporate party. They will work in concert, as seen by the alliance between Republican leaders such as McCain and Democratic leaders such as Sen. Chuck Schumer, to get rid of Trump, silence all dissent, enrich the war industry and promote the farce they call democracy.
Welcome to our annus horribilis.
He is no fan of Trump, you can be sure, but he is fair IMO about what has been going on and why Trump won.
I call BS on some of this stuff. How does it “discredit Trump”? He won, he’s going to be President, nothing is going to change that. I can’t believe even one person who used to support Trump has stopped doing so because of this fake news Russia garbage.
On the other hand, I am 100% certain that everyone who is pushing this crap has never supported Trump and never will under any circumstances. You can’t discredit someone unless you change hearts and minds and all this does is preach to the nevertrump choir.
"according to some calculations, the Uranium One deal, involving top Clinton donors Frank Guistra and Ian Telfer, has transferred as much as 50 percent of projected American uranium production to Kremlin control."
(snip)
"But wait — the Uranium One deal, as important and stunningly corrupt as it may be, is only the proverbial tip of the iceberg.
As we have been reporting here for years, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been one of Putin’s biggest enablers, facilitating enormous transfers of advanced technology to the Russian regime she now sees as a threat.
It was Secretary Clinton, please recall, who, in May 2009, presented Putin’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov with a red “reset” button, and then mugged with Lavrov in a giggly photo-fest celebrating the U.S.-Russian “convergence” agenda.
Clinton and Lavrov then served as joint coordinators of the U.S.-Russian Bilateral Presidential Commission established in July of that year by President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. The annual reports of the Bilateral Presidential Commission are replete with chummy photos of Clinton-Lavrov, Obama-Medvedev, Biden-Putin, etc., as well as details of the many deals worked out to give technology, knowhow, capital, and other resources to Moscow. ..."
Who paid Bill Clinton's $2.5 million commission and $500k speaking fee for brokering the sale of 20% of America's uranium deposits to Russia?
You are speaking about a really interesting deal that ended up giving Vladimir Putin and the Russians control of one-fifth of all uranium production capacity in the United States.
Since uranium is considered a strategic asset, with implications for national security, the deal had to be approved by a committee composed of representatives from a number of United States government agencies. ..."
As part of just-inaugurated President Obama’s new foreign policy to improve relations between the United States and Russia, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in March 2009. Meeting in her hotel’s Salon Panorama in Geneva, she presented him with a small gift box containing a bright red button symbolizing the Obama administration’s desire to “reset” the relationship between the two governments.
Thus began an effort to transfer American technology to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s own “Silicon Valley,” called Skolkovo. In a report released in late July by the Government Accountability Institute (GAI) entitled From Russia With Money, authors Stephen Bannon and Peter Schweitzer reviewed the long sordid history of the technology transfer from companies such as Google, Intel, and Cisco of hi-tech technology with useful military applications.
The report quoted warnings from the FBI and the U.S. Army Foreign Military Studies Program at Fort Leavenworth that the transfer would work against American interests. Warned the U.S. Army:
[The “reset” would serve as] a vehicle for world-wide technology transfers to Russia in the areas of information technology, biomedicine, energy, satellite and space technology, and nuclear technology.
It was clearly a “quid pro quo” arrangement: 17 of the 28 companies involved in the technology transfer gave millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation or to Bill Clinton for giving some speeches.
When those authors, both of whom are affiliated with Breitbart News, summed up their conclusions, one question remained: “The GAI investigative report says it’s unclear how much, if any, money [John] Podesta made.” Podesta, having served the Clintons for years, first as chief of staff to President Bill Clinton and then as counselor to President Obama and finally as Hillary’s campaign chairman, deserved a payoff.
But it wasn’t clear until the latest batch of e-mails provided by WikiLeaks went public last week that Americans now know. For his efforts Podesta received thousands of shares of common and preferred stock in one of the companies involved in the transfer. The fact came to light when WikiLeaks published e-mails Podesta sent to the company ordering it to transfer his shares to a shell corporation he had created a month earlier.
The e-mails included a letter Podesta wrote to the corporate secretary of that company instructing him to retitle 33,693 shares of preferred stock to Leonidio Holdings, LLC, a corporation that Podesta (or one of his staff) created using a Corporation Service Company to hide the shares from public view.
The company that gave Podesta the stock shares, Joule Unlimited, claims to be a producer of “alternative” energy technology that will eventually be able to produce energy that will be competitive with oil priced at $50 a barrel. It was a recipient of millions of Putin’s rubles as one of the gang of companies working to transfer American technology to Russia, one of America’s enemies.
As Schweizer told the New York Post in an interview in July:
The Clintons, they get their donations and speaking fees in the millions of dollars. The Russians get access to advanced US technology. The tech companies get special access to the Russian market and workforce….
All I ask is that people look at the money. Who made the deals, who benefited from the deals?
Thanks to WikiLeaks the “people” now know the name of at least one of those who participated in the deals and how he benefited from them: John Podesta, Hillary’s campaign manager.
Schweizer explained the “deep ties” the Clintons have to Russia, specifically how in 2010 then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton approved the sale and transfer of 20% of U.S. uranium output to the Russian government ...”
I think he is saying they are trying to discredit Trump ... but it is not working.
I think it’s more sinister than that. The establishment assumed Hillary would win. This is all part of a propaganda campaign that O’s admin set up to lay the ground work for Hillary to start some kind of military confrontation with Russia.
Think about where we would be right now with all of this stuff in the media and Hillary, maybe with some well know neocons in her cabinet, about to take the reigns.
We would be in a scary place right now.
It’s an attempt to discredit even if it’s doomed to failure.
I agree. I think they intend to go through with their war with Russia in spite of Trump.
Carroll Quigley wrote what is probably the best insight of the powers that be in the 20th century, “Tragedy and Hope.”
He is a Prof. at Georgetown, Harvard PhD and the mentor of Bill Clinton. He was allowed to look into the secret archives at the CFR and from it wrote a history of the western powers. He called them the Anglo-American establishment, or the Atlanticist powers.
He wrote that the only enemy of these western powers would be a combined Russia and Germany. With Russia’s pure science and Germany’s engineering and production capabilities they could challenge the current powers.
WW1 and WW2 were started by England to diminish Germany and Russia.
“The best”
“WW1 and WW2 were started by England to diminish Germany and Russia.”
How old are you? You have to be kidding. You aren’t serious. Are You?
Read the book, or Tragedy and Hope 101, or listen to Jay Dyer’s 8 part review of the book.
I’m 50, and I always thought Germany started both (well, at least ww2), but after listening reading the book and listening to 16 hours of the book review, I believe it. Ever heard of Lord Milner or the Clivenden Set? The reparations after ww1 were intended to create a new conflict.
Enghdal in “A Century of War” basically says the same thing. These are both great history books.
The real purpose is to distract from the most immediate enemy, radical Islam financed in the the US by Saudi Arabia, who happens to have purchased many of America’s elite. It is also a purposeful distraction from nuclear Iran.
I would say it’s about defining the narrative...The frame...That what happened was about the Rookies, not the RATs...The source of the emails, not the content.
They are trying to maintain the illusion that the election was stolen from Hillary (even though Trump will take the oath and serve as president). This is critical for those who wish to write the history books; they have to explain how the smartest most compassionate woman in the world lost to the Devil himself - and how the Devil came to follow Obama in the White House.
People think the 2016 election was just a repudiation of Hillary; it was very much a repudiation of Obama as well - and that can’t become part of the historical record. Even before he leaves office, it is very clear that Obama’s obvious legacy is Republican control of all facets of the federal government.
I no longer separate the world wars in terms of historical discussion; they really are two phases of the same war, with sporadic sparring in between. When you look at the events leading up to WWI, it is clear that Britain would never tolerate a rival power (especially a sea power) so war became inevitable. WWI was brewing since Germany’s creation in 1870/1871.
From an American standpoint, the blatant violations of neutrality (arming Britain, respecting the blockade of Germany while ignoring Germany’s blockade of Britain) make it clear that even while Wilson ran on a neutrality platform in 1916 he already knew we were going to war. The silliness of the propaganda 100 years later is laughable; American were led to believe Germany was a threat to democracy while at the time, the sun never set on the British Empire. There is a reason Europeans are so cynical about war (and politics); the continent to this day has never recovered from the population losses of those conflicts.
And now I understand why Europeans capitulate to Islam. You can trace it back to the decimation of the European population.
More specifically, the unwillingness of subsequent generations to have families...
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