deceiving trump to prevent peace...

deception, trickery, extortion, theft in broad daylight...

If you’re anything like me, you’ve been absolutely apoplectic this past week watching the United States orchestrate a coup in Venezuela. It has been truly horrifying to watch these things play out in real time. How bold and brazen these thugs have become! They are doing this right out in the open, they hardly even try to hide it.

Sure, they try to whitewash it with their typical propaganda. They obfuscate key facts. They paint Maduro as a criminal. They pass around cheap slogans. Where once we heard, “You’re either with us, or you’re with the terrorists”, now it’s, “either you stand with the forces of freedom, or you’re in league with Maduro and his mayhem”. It’s disgusting.

It’s disgusting and horrifying and saddening, but if there is one thing we gain by watching this tragedy unfold, it is a certain clarity about the state of affairs in the world. It makes it clear that conflict is inevitable. I’m not talking about conflict in Venezuela, although conflict is likely to unfold there too, I’m talking about a much larger conflict. I’m talking about a global conflict that must eventually occur between two ideologically incompatible groups.

There is one group of people which considers war both necessary and routine. Some members of this group make their money building and selling bombs and guns and tanks and missiles. These people need wars, otherwise they don’t make any money. Other members of this group make their money by taking and selling the natural resources of other weaker nations. These members need wars to ensure they get easy access to the resources they want. Other members of this group make their money enslaving the poorest people in these subservient conquered nations, putting them to work in factories with inhumane working conditions for inhumane wages. Other members of this group are facilitators, working in government or media. They plan, organize, fight, and sell these wars to a largely unwitting public. All these groups of people have formed a close knit coalition, working together to control and exploit the people of the world for their own collective material gain.

But there is second group of people which is the polar opposite of this first group. These people hate war and love peace. They hate the idea of exploiting the poor. They hate the idea of destroying lives for profit. These people cannot and will never accept such exploitative behavior. Period.

Herein lies the conflict. One group wages wars for profit, the other cannot bear to see people slaughtered. One group exploits the poor, the other cares for the poor. One group destroys the environment and pollutes the earth, the other cares about sustainability and the health of the planet. One group rules by might, the other by principles of individual sovereignty, equality and justice.

This is the inevitable conflict which must eventually occur. These two groups will eventually clash, because there is no way for the one to reconcile with the other. As long as one group is making war, killing people for profit, the other group must struggle against them.

By Gus Leonisky at 1 Feb 2019 - 4:17pm
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kindergarten intelligence...

US presidents normally meet with their intelligence officials on a daily basis in order to discuss the most pressing national security issues.

The White House called off President Donald Trump's daily intelligence briefing on Wednesday a day after CIA Director Gina Haspel and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, as well as a handful of other top intelligence officials presented their assessment of national security threats in front of Congress that appeared to contradict the administration's recent claims, The Daily Beast reported.

Speaking before the Senate intelligence committee on Tuesday, Haspel said that Iran was fulfilling its obligations under the nuclear deal, which Trump has repeatedly blasted as a "one-sided and terrible" agreement.

Coats, for his part, stated that Daesh* remained a threat — an observation that appears to contradict Trump's statements that the US had crushed the terrorist group in Syria.

The following day, the White House cancelled the daily briefing, while POTUS hit Twitter with a lengthy message, saying that "perhaps intelligence should go back to school".

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By Gus Leonisky at 1 Feb 2019 - 4:55pm
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their truth is getting better traction that our lies...

US Defense Department officials are pushing for an escalation of “information warfare,” urging the military to think outside the box of traditional conflicts as hysteria over adversaries’ “influence operations” persists.

“Our adversaries have weaponized disinformation and propaganda to their advantage,” warned Andrew Knaggs, deputy assistant secretary of defense for Special Operations and Combating Terrorism, speaking to the National Defense Industrial Association’s Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict symposium.

Rather than hiding from the transparency afforded by the 24-hour news cycle and pervasive social media, our adversaries embrace that cycle and they use it to their advantage

He emphasized the importance of “controlled messaging and other influencing tools” over the counter-terrorism missions that have been the Pentagon’s bread and butter for the past 17 years, spilling over from one country into the next to the point that the US now has “counterterrorism” missions in 40 percent of the world’s countries.

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By Gus Leonisky at 7 Feb 2019 - 5:59pm
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collusion to manufacture fake news...

Do the American intelligence services knowingly plant false stories in mainstream newspapers? Do reporters for mainstream news agencies know of this practice? Do they approve of it? Yes, yes and yes.

A 2014 story by The Intercept (which I ran across recently) revealed the collusion and kowtowing of an LA Times reporter (now at AP) in his dealings with the CIA, the agency he was supposed to be covering as one of ever-fierce watchdogs of out freedom-loving Fourth Estate. Drawing on a trove of emails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, the Intercept’s story lays out the embarrassing work of Ken Dilanian, as he sent whole stories off to his “guys” at the CIA seeking their pre-publication approval and often softening and shifting stories at their request. He constantly expresses his ardent desire to make the CIA look better and to downplay any bad press the agency might be getting from, say, drone-bombing carloads of civilians or destroying information about the agency’s torture programs.

But beyond the brown-nosing (which went far beyond the usual courting and cultivating of journalistic sources), I was most struck by a paragraph that was buried deep in the report. It seemed to me to confirm and exemplify one of the most shocking elements of the American system today: the casual, unquestioning acceptance that our intelligence services routinely manufacture news stories to advance their given agenda of the day. Not only is this accepted by our “fierce watchdogs” — they think it’s, like, really cool!

Read this paragraph, then explain why you would ever approach even a “liberal” mainstream newspaper or media report with relaxed confidence in its veracity and independence:

"On March 14, 2012, Dilanian sent an email to the press office with a link to a Guardian story that said Bashar Al-Assad’s wife had been buying a fondue set on Amazon while Syrian protesters were gunned down. 'If this is you guys, nice work,' he wrote. 'If it’s real, even better.'”

There it is, the whole rotted, corroded, corrupt system laid bare: “If this story is bullshit propaganda that ‘you guys’ planted in one of the world’s most highly regarded news organisations, that’s great! Well done! And if it’s actually true — although, in the end, who cares? — that’s even better, because it helps advance our common agenda of demonizing the government’s enemy du jour!”

For be sure: if the US power structure had wanted to support Assad during the beginning of the uprising, then we would have seen this:

“On March 4, 2012, Dilanian sent an email to the press office with a link to a Guardian story that said Bashar Al-Assad’s wife broke down in tears during a hospital visit to the families of law enforcement officers killed by extremists in recent rioting. ‘If this is you guys, nice work,’ he wrote. ‘If it’s real, even better.’”

I just can’t get that phrase out of my mind: “If this is you guys, nice work.” The puppy-dog, tail-wagging eagerness to praise the CIA “guys” for planting a false story in the mainstream press. The unconscious, unexamined assumption that this would be a good thing, that it’s what should be done: that our intelligence apparatchiks should manipulate the media and shape public opinion according to secret agendas never revealed to or debated by a democratic society. And this from a journalist, working at the highest levels of our most “respectable” media institutions — institutions whose work is considered automatically credible and objective by millions of people who would consider themselves educated, thoughtful, keen-eyed, liberal.

But this is the real system, and these are its real underlying assumptions and working methods. And the watchdogs supposedly keeping guard on our behalf are all too often lapdogs curling up with the thugs who have looted our house and murdered our neighbors.

CORRECTION: I ran across this Intercept piece on Twitter recently, but didn't notice that it was from 2014, so the original blog post here described it as a "recent story." The main point still stands -- even more so today perhaps -- but apologies for the inaccuracy on the timing.

Don't worry about the timing, Chris... Fake news has been going on for at least 4,000 years in the Judeo/Christian/Abrahamic world... and the "authorities" still find ways to create PLENTY MORE... because fake news pay off...

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By Gus Leonisky at 17 Feb 2019 - 7:17pm
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more bullshit from US intelligence...

Acting US defense secretary Patrick Shanahan announced on Monday the deployment of about 1,000 additional troops to the Middle East for what he said were “defensive purposes”, citing concerns about a threat from Iran.

“The recent Iranian attacks validate the reliable, credible intelligence we have received on hostile behavior by Iranian forces and their proxy groups that threaten United States personnel and interests across the region,” Shanahan said in a statement.

Reuters first reported plans to send US additional troops to the Middle East earlier on Monday.

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One can smell the fakery 5000 miles away...

By Gus Leonisky at 18 Jun 2019 - 11:13am
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the double-agent russian sausage...

The US extracted “one of its highest-level covert sources inside the Russian government” in 2017, it was reported on Monday, in part because of concerns that mishandling of classified intelligence by Donald Trump and his administration could jeopardise the source’s safety.

CNN cited “multiple Trump administration officials with direct knowledge” of the matter and said “a person directly involved in the discussions” said the move was made because Trump and his officials could not be fully trusted.

Describing a “culmination of months of mounting fear within the intelligence community”, CNN said the decision to carry out the extraction was made shortly after a now infamous Oval Office meeting in May 2017 in which Trump, who had recently fired the FBI director, James Comey, discussed highly sensitive intelligence concerning Isis in Syria with the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, and the then ambassador to the US, Sergey Kislyak.

The report also said US officials had been alarmed by Trump’s private meeting with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, in Hamburg in July that year.

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Gus: Knowing the way these "things" operate, the CIA highest-level covert source inside the Russian government would have been a double-agent being fed bullshit on both sides...

By Gus Leonisky at 10 Sep 2019 - 6:26am
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the entrails of a dead cat...

When the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) failed to prevent the September 11, 2001 attacks, many asked whether more could have been done. But the true reason why the agency was blind to the signs may be a diversity problem, writes Matthew Syed.

The failure of the CIA to spot the warning signs of the 9/11 plot has become one of the most hotly contested issues in the history of intelligence. There have been commissions, reviews, internal investigations and more.

On the one side are those who say that the CIA missed obvious warning signs. On the other are those who argue that it is notoriously difficult to identity threats in advance, and that the CIA did everything they reasonably could.

But what if both sides are wrong? What if the true reason why the CIA failed to detect the plot is more subtle that either side has realised. And what if this problem extends beyond intelligence and silently afflicts thousands of organisations, governments and teams today?

Short presentational grey line

While many of the inquiries focused on particular judgements in the frenetic build-up to 9/11, few took a step back to examine the internal structure of the CIA itself and, in particular, its hiring policies. At one level, these were state of the art. Potential analysts were put through a battery of psychological, medical and other exams. And there is no doubt they hired exceptional people.

"The two major exams were a SAT-style test to probe a candidate's intelligence and a psychological profile to examine their mental state," says a CIA veteran. "The tests filtered out anyone who was not stellar on both tests. In the year I applied, they accepted one candidate for every 20,000 applicants. When the CIA talked about hiring the best, they were bang on the money ."

And yet most of these recruits also happened to look very similar - white, male, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant Americans.

This is a common phenomenon in recruiting, sometimes called "homophily": people tend to hire people who think (and often look) like themselves. It is validating to be surrounded by people who share one's perspectives and beliefs. Indeed, brain scans suggest that when others reflect our own thoughts back to us, it stimulates the pleasure centres of our brains.

In their study of the CIA, the intelligence experts Milo Jones and Phillipe Silberzahn write: "The first consistent attribute of the CIA's identity and culture from 1947 to 2001 is homogeneity of its personnel in terms of race, sex, ethnicity and class background (relative both to the rest of America and to the world as a whole)."

An inspector general's study on recruitment found that in 1964, one branch of the CIA, the Office of National Estimates, "had no black, Jewish, or women professionals, and only a few Catholics".

By 1967, the report said, there were fewer than 20 African Americans out of some 12,000 non-clerical CIA employees, and the agency maintained the practice of not hiring minorities from the 1960s through the 1980s. And until 1975, the US intelligence community "openly barred the employment of homosexuals".

Talking of his experience of the CIA in the 1980s, one insider wrote that the recruitment process "led to new officers who looked very much like the people who recruited them - white, mostly Anglo-Saxon; middle and upper class; liberal arts college graduates". There were few women and "few ethnics, even of recent European background".

"In other words, not even as much diversity as there was among those who had helped create the CIA."

Diversity was squeezed further after the end of the Cold War. A former operations officer said that the CIA had a "white-as-rice culture".

In the months leading up to 9/11, the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence commented: "From its inception, the Intelligence Community [has been] staffed by the white male Protestant elite, not just because that was the class in power, but because that elite saw itself as the guarantor and protector of American values and ethics."

The the CIA fabricated "Saddam has weapons of mass destruction" for the pleasure of one George W Bush to have a little war...

But before 9/11, Putin had warned th US agencies and the president of imminent crap coming thre US way:

Russian President Vladimir Putin had warned his US counterpart George W. Bush about an imminent terrorist threat two days before the 9/11 attacks took place, a former CIA analyst has reportedly revealed.

The warning is mentioned by George Beebee, a senior Bush-era CIA analyst, in his book titled “The Russia Trap: How Our Shadow War with Russia Could Spiral into Nuclear Catastrophe,” which was released earlier this week, according to RT.

“Putin had telephoned President Bush two days before the attacks to warn that Russian intelligence has detected signs of an incipient terrorist campaign, ‘something long in preparation,’ coming out of Afghanistan,” reads part of the book.

Although Moscow’s warning to Washington has been public knowledge for years as top Russian intelligence officials talked about them shortly after the incident, Beebee suggested Bush had been warned by Putin personally meaning that it was not just limited to exchange between the intelligence agencies.

The September, 11, 2001 attacks, also known as the 9/11 attacks, were a series of strikes in the US which killed nearly 3,000 people and caused about $10 billion worth of property and infrastructure damage.

US officials assert that the attacks were carried out by 19 al-Qaeda terrorists but many experts have raised questions about the official account.

They believe that rogue elements within the US government, such as former Vice President Dick Cheney, orchestrated or at least encouraged the 9/11 attacks in order to accelerate the US war machine and advance the Zionist agenda.

By Gus Leonisky at 10 Sep 2019 - 10:35am
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