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customer of fake and covert "intelligence" to become the chief grocer of said...
WASHINGTON — President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. has selected William J. Burns, a career State Department official who led the U.S. delegation in secret talks with Iran, to run the C.I.A.
In selecting Mr. Burns, Mr. Biden is turning to an experienced diplomat with whom he has a long relationship. The two men have worked together on foreign policy issues, not just during the Obama administration, but also while Mr. Biden led the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Mr. Biden said Mr. Burns’s first task would be to make sure intelligence collection and analysis were not influenced by politics after years of President Trump’s attacks on the intelligence agencies.
In a statement early Monday, the president-elect said that Mr. Burns, 64, “shares my profound belief that intelligence must be apolitical and that the dedicated intelligence professionals serving our nation deserve our gratitude and respect.”
Mr. Biden has told his national security advisers that he wants to ensure that the C.I.A. is collecting, analyzing and providing intelligence without political spin, former officials said. Mr. Burns has a reputation for nonpartisanship and has held key diplomatic posts in both Democratic and Republican administrations, experience that should make his confirmation by the Senate relatively straightforward.
Under Mr. Trump there have long been allegations that intelligence has been politicized.His directors of national intelligence have taken on a partisan edge that has enveloped all of the intelligence agencies in controversy. (Although the C.I.A. is nominally overseen by the director of national intelligence, the agency operates with a large degree of autonomy.)
Mr. Burns has worked with C.I.A. officers throughout his career, though his experience is as a consumer of intelligence, not as a producer.
But former agency officials have asserted that the most important quality in a director is not expertise in intelligence, but a relationship with the president and his top national security team, which Mr. Burns has. He and Mr. Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, worked together on the Iran nuclear deal.
“He will have the ear of the national security adviser and the president,” said Jeremy Bash, who served as a senior intelligence official in the Obama administration. “That’s what you want in a director.”
John O. Brennan, the former C.I.A. director in the Obama administration, noted that Mr. Burns had long experience working with the agency during his ambassadorial postings and senior State Department posts. Mr. Brennan recounted how he and Mr. Burns gave a classified briefing to the Senate Intelligence Committee on a C.I.A. covert action program.
Read more:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/11/us/politics/cia-biden-burns.html
- By Gus Leonisky at 12 Jan 2021 - 7:27am
- Gus Leonisky's blog
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after years of fake intelligence...
Yes, after years of President Trump’s attacks on the intelligence agencies, we need a bit of respite... One problem with Trump is that he knew the "intelligence" agencies have been bullshitting to his administration. As Brennan recounted how he and Mr. Burns gave a classified briefing to the Senate Intelligence Committee on a C.I.A. covert action program. Recently, or say as far as the late 1990s, the CIA was bullshitting or preparing the bullshit about Saddam's WMDs... Then it was the turn towards Libya and Syria, with the CIA or the like funding rebels (including Al Qaeda and Daesh) to topple leaders the US did not like. Covert operations and other stuff, including DISINFORMATION FOR the consumption of the Main Stream Media to spread shit over the populace, are the bread and butter of the CIA et al....
I stand by my cartoons:
and many more...
james jeffrey should crush his own nuts (gonads)...
President Donald Trump’s policy in the Middle East delivered “clear results” and Joe Biden shouldn’t change it, the US ex-envoy to the anti-terrorist coalition operating in Syria and Iraq argued in the pages of Foreign Affairs.
Trump opted to abandon the “transformational campaigns” pursued by the Bush and Obama administrations in favor of “working primarily through partners on the ground” to advance American interests, argued James Jeffrey in the essay published on Friday. Jeffrey was the US special envoy for Syria and the coalition against Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) from 2018 to his retirement in November 2020.
"Biden Doesn’t Need a New Middle East Policy"By Amb James JeffreyJeffrey expands on US success in"crushing the Syrian economy with sanctions"as part of its Maximum Pressure campaign against Iran. Recommends Biden continue it.https://t.co/uRDmVQ4Lojvia @ForeignAffairs
Read more:https://www.rt.com/news/512703-trump-biden-syria-iran-jeffrey/Read from top.
The US should leave Syria alone. The US should sanction themselves for being nuts and nasty.
run for the covers...
Biden’s choice of William Burns as CIA director indicates that for the USA, foreign policy objectives have not changed and that the world will continue to face a perilous future, writes Dr William Briggs.
WHEN Donald Trump became President, he was seen by some as a joke and by a few as dangerous. A smaller minority saw Trump as symptomatic of political decay. He represented something that had been building for decades.
Does Joe Biden offer anything like hope?
Trump’s coup plot has been treated by many in the media as the last gasp of a deranged political despot, but we are told that American democracy remains strong and that a new day is dawning. Had the news been coming from almost anywhere else in the world the headlines might have been different. We would have been reading about a "failed state".
It is highly unlikely that America will stop tearing itself apart and equally unlikely that the world beyond the borders of the USA will be able to breathe any easier following Biden’s promise that America is back and will lead the world.
Little attention has been given to the leadership team that Biden has been putting in place to "lead the world". The anti-China thrust of some of the appointees is disturbing. Antony Blinken, the incoming secretary of state, in the words of the New York Times, ‘will try to coalesce sceptical international partners into a new competition with China’.
Katherine Tai, the new U.S. Trade Representative, regards her role as seeking to build a global anti-China cabal and to use the World Trade Organisation to exert extra pressure on China.
William Burns, Biden’s choice as director of the CIA, is even more worrying for the world. Burns was a senior state department official under presidents Reagan, Bush Senior, Clinton, Bush Junior and Obama. He was closely involved with the U.S. war on Iraq and had responsibility for U.S. State Department operations in Iraq after the invasion. He was similarly involved in the intervention on Libya, the coup in Egypt and the intervention in Syria.
Read more:
https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/the-usa-cia-and-a-poor-nights-sleep-for-the-world,14709
Read from top.
See also: the game was played to win the moment...in questions arise for holding congress' open day when the members were discussing joe biden becoming president...
"unsavoury" additions to the transition team...
President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team in recent weeks has quietly brought aboard alumni of Wall Street titan Goldman Sachs, tech giants Google and Facebook, and notorious consulting firm McKinsey, heightening alarm among watchdog groups that have urged the incoming administration to steer clear of the corrupting influence of corporate America.
Without the public announcements that accompanied the president-elect’s cabinet picks and original members of the transition, Team Biden has added to its agency review groups Monica Maher, vice president for cyber threat intelligence at Goldman Sachs; Eric Goldstein, an 18-year Goldman Sachs veteran; and Josh Zoffer, a former engagement manager at McKinsey who now works at private equity firm Cove Hill Partners.
On or around Thanksgiving, Politico reported, Biden’s transition also “quietly added four Facebook and Google employees to its agency review teams,” despite pressure on the president-elect to resist Big Tech’s efforts to “co-opt” his administration. As Reuters pointed out earlier this month, there are currently “more tech executives than tech critics on Biden’s transition team.”
Eleanor Eagan, research assistant at the Revolving Door Project (RDP), an initiative that scrutinizes executive branch appointees, told Common Dreams Tuesday that the Biden team appears to have been counting on “people not paying quite as much attention” to later additions to the transition team.
“This move by the transition team to slip in these revolving-door figures later in the game certainly is a troubling indication of what could be to come” as Biden begins staffing lower-profile but powerful positions in his administration, said Eagan.
As part of its ongoing effort to shine light on industry influence on the upper reaches of the federal government, RDP on Tuesday morning unveiled a Personnel Map that aims to visualize and track “the breadth and depth of corporate America’s interest in the executive branch.”
Read more:
https://consortiumnews.com/2020/12/21/biden-quietly-adds-goldman-sachs-big-tech-officials-to-transition/
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IN MEMORIAM ROBERT PARRY (1949-2018)