We frequently hear people say they have nothing to hide—-so
surrendering privacy and constitutional rights to the Surveillance State may
not be such a big deal if it helps catch a terrorist or two. But with each
passing day in the RussiaGate drama we are learning that this superficial
exoneration is dangerously beside the point.
We are referring here to the unrelenting witch hunt that has
been unleashed by Imperial Washington against the legitimately elected
President of the United States, Donald J. Trump. This campaign of lies, leaks
and Russophobia is the handiwork of Obama’s top national security advisors, who
blatantly misused Washington’s surveillance apparatus to discredit Trump and to
effectively nullify America’s democratic process.
That is, constitutional protections and liberties were
systematically breached, but not simply to intimidate, hush or lock up citizens
one by one as per the standard totalitarian modus operandi. Instead, what has
happened is that the entire public debate has been hijacked by the shadowy
forces of the Deep State and their partisan and media collaborators.
The enabling culprits are Obama’s last CIA director,
John Brennan, his national security advisor Susan Rice and UN Ambassador
Samantha Power. There is now mounting evidence that it was they who illegally
“unmasked” NSA intercepts from Trump Tower; they who confected the Russian
meddling narrative from behind the protective moat of classified intelligence;
and they who orchestrated a systematic campaign of leaks and phony intelligence
reports during the presidential transition—-all designed to delegitimize Trump
before he even took the oath of office.
So all
three of them should be lockedup—-that’s
for sure. But the more urgent solution would be to unlock and make public all the innuendo,
surmises, assessments, half-truths and boilerplate intelligence chatter on
which the entire false narrative about Russian meddling and collusion is based.
Stated differently, without the nation’s massive intelligence
apparatus and absurd system of secrecy and classified information to hide
behind, the RussiaGate witch hunt would have never gotten off the ground.
In truth, as we will essay below, there is no there, there. So
what this new chapter in McCarthyite hysteria actually demonstrates is that the
Imperial City’s far-flung, 17-agency, $75 billion Intelligence Behemoth is a
plenary threat not just to individual liberty, but to the very constitutional
democracy on which the latter depends.
To appreciate the
severity of the threat, it is necessary to recognize that the post-9/11 Deep
State has lowered a double whammy on our system. That is, it unconstitutionally
collects the entirety of all internet based communications of America’s 325
million citizen, while at the same time it has effectively disenfranchised 98%
of the 535 members of the House and Senate who have been elected to represent
them.
Accordingly, behind the Surveillance State’s vast wall of
secrecy and so-called “classified” information, there operates a Dark
Government that is unaccountable to the public and largely unconstrained by
normal constitutional limits, which the Patriot Act and secret FISA courts have
more or less suspended.
In the realm of this Dark
Government, the heart of American democracy—-the US Congress—has been
completely usurped. Almost everything behind the secrecy wall is off limits to
the rank and file. Only a handful of intelligence committee members and the
House and Senate leadership gets sworn into the classified intelligence.
Yet just consider the hideous asymmetry of this arrangement. The
so-called “Gang of Eight,” comprising the heads of the intelligence oversight
committees and their respective party leadership, gets orally briefed in a
secure “vault”, where they can’t take notes or carry-out any documents.
Moreover, this select handful of legislators consists of the
incessantly mobilized and frazzled potentates of Capitol Hill who are always
knee-deep in a thousand other distractions—-including a heavy quotient of
politicking, fund-raising, and campaign trail excursions.
On the inside of the Surveillance State wall, by contrast, there
are 600,000 employees or contractors with “top secret” security clearances
alone; and more than 4 million total operatives who spend night and days
feasting on the $75 billion Intelligence Community (IC) budget and carrying out
projects and missions designed to justify their existence and keep the
budgetary gravy train flowing.
For example, in the National Security Agency (NSA) there is a
subsidiary entity called TAO (Targeted Access Operations) with a budget of
several billions and more than 1,000 employees. The latter predominately
consist of high-powered civilian and military hackers, computer geeks,
intelligence analysts, targeting specialists, computer hardware and software
designers and electrical engineers—-whose job it is to do exactly what Russia is
being accused of.
Namely, to
hack and electronically infiltrate the communications and operations of nearly
every government on the planet, and most especially those of IC designated
enemies and adversaries such as Russia and Iran.Indeed, TAOs motto says it all:
“Your data is our data, your equipment is
our equipment anytime, any place, by any legal means.”
In any given 24-hour day, the TAO hacks and deposits more
disinformation and malware into its targeted foreign networks than all the low
level Russian probes that were intercepted by NSA during the entire
Presidential campaign.
In other words, Washington is the mother of all hackers and
cyber-warfare operations, and what Russia and other nations do is only a small
potatoes version of the same. Yet the overwhelming share of these digital cloak
and dagger operation by all sides is a huge waste of national resources; and
most especially it is of no value at all to the safety of the American people.
That because Russia, China
and Iran—-the principal targets of the IC’s massive surveillance and cyber
warfare activities—are no threats whatsoever to America’s security.
Iran has zero military capacity to attack the American homeland,
and the claim that it is the leading sponsor of terrorism is pure bunkum. That
hoary claim has been concocted by the Washington neocons and the Netanyahu
political machine—both of which need demonized enemies in order to nurture the
public fears on which their power is based.
Likewise, Russia has one 40-year old smoke-belching aircraft carry
and a fleet of rowboats—–neither of which are capable of launching an assault
on the New Jersey shores. True, it does have about 1,00o nuclear warheads; but
where is the evidence that cool-hand Vlad is contemplating national suicide by
using them against the US or Europe?
The purported Chinese threat is even more ludicrous.
Notwithstanding the fertile imaginations of the Deep State fear-mongers who
believe the South China Sea is actually an American Lake, the Red Suzerains of
Beijing know fully well that without the continuous custom of Wal-Mart and
Amazon warehouses, the Red Ponzi would collapse in a heartbeat. And that they
would be hung by angry mobs from the CCTV (China Central Television) Tower
shortly thereafter.
In fact, we don’t need the $75 billion Surveillance State to
deal with the Taliban, the jihadist warlords of Somalia or any of the warring
Sunni vs. Shiite (Houthis) parties of Yemen, either. They do not threaten
America’s security in the slightest.
Nor did the government of Khadafy in Libya after he turned in
his nukes. Likewise, the Assad regime has never, ever threatened to harm
America—-despite the non-stop vilification from Washington.
At most, Washington needs modest local and theatre level
capacity to monitor the fading remnants of the Islamic State—-a temporary
scourge in the mostly the impoverished Sunni villages of the Upper Euphrates,
which would not even exist in the first place had it not been fostered and
armed with the weapons the US Army left behind in the fiasco of Iraq.
So consider the contrafactual. In the absence of a vast Warfare
State apparatus and associated Surveillance State wall of secrecy what would
RussiaGate amount to?
The answer
is straight-forward: It was nothing more than a politically motivated plot
orchestrated by former CIA director Brennan to undermine the Presidential
campaign of a rambunctious outsider. That is, the Donald was unschooled in the
groupthink of the Imperial City and had enough common sense to realize that
Putin is not our enemy, that NATO is obsolete, that regime change has been a
fiasco and that foreign policy should be based on homeland security first, not
the perpetuation of an American Empire abroad.
Those inchoate impulses were the Donald’s original sin, and it
was unverified and self-serving “intelligence” from the Latvian security
service—-of all things—- that provided the pretext for Brennan to launch the
Deep State’s own version of jihad against Trump.
What this dubious intelligence did was to finger Vlad Putin
himself and that was crucial. It permitted Brennan to puff-up the evidence of
run-of-the-mill cyber intrusions by the Russian security services—-or even
unconnected Russian hackers and profiteers— into a sweeping but phony narrative
about an attack on American democracy with Putin at the very center.
As Scott Ritter—- the weapons expert who blew the whistle on the
IC’s trumped up claims about Saddam’s WMDs—-succinctly explained in a recent
article, Brennan proceeded to turn a dubious molehill into a vertiable
mountain:
According
to reporting from the Washington Post, sometime during this period, CIA
Director John Brennan gained access to a sensitive intelligence report from a
foreign intelligence service. This service claimed to have technically
penetrated the inner circle of Russian leadership to the extent that it could
give voice to the words of Russian President Vladimir Putin as he articulated
Russia’s objectives regarding the 2016 U.S. Presidential election — to defeat
Hillary Clinton and help elect Donald Trump, her Republican opponent. This
intelligence was briefed to President Barack Obama and a handful of his closest
advisors in early August, with strict instructions that it not be further
disseminated.
The
explosive nature of this intelligence report, both in terms of its sourcing and
content, served to drive the investigation of Russian meddling in the American
electoral process by the U.S. intelligence community. The problem, however, was
that it wasn’t the U.S. intelligence community, per se, undertaking this investigation,
but rather (according to the Washington Post) a task force composed of “several
dozen analysts from the CIA, NSA and FBI,” handpicked by the CIA director and
set up at the CIA Headquarters who “functioned as a sealed compartment, its
work hidden from the rest of the intelligence community.”
The
result was a closedcircle of analysts who operated in complete isolation from
the rest of the U.S. intelligence community. The premise of their work — that
Vladimir Putin personally directed Russian meddling in the U.S. Presidential
election to tip the balance in favor of Donald Trump — was never questioned in
any meaningful fashion, despite its sourcing to a single intelligence report
from a foreign service.
President
Obama ordered the U.S. intelligence community to undertake a comprehensive
review of Russian electoral meddling. As a result, intelligence analysts began
to reexamine old intelligence reports based upon the premise of Putin’s direct
involvement, allowing a deeply disturbing picture to be created of a
comprehensive Russian campaign to undermine the American electoral process.
Here’s the thing. Vlad didn’t do it. The only interference in
the electoral process that he has been associated with is with respect to what
Imperial Washington did next door while he was basking in glory at the Sochi
Olympics in February 2014.
To wit, the violent coup on the streets of Kiev was organized by
agents and organs of the US government; overthrew a constitutionally elected
President who had decided to make an economic and security deal with Russia
rather than Europe and NATO in keeping with Ukraine’s economic propinquity to
the former and its 700- years of history as an integral part of Greater Russia;
and which imposed a new government, hand-picked by the Obama State Department,
which was dominated by Ukrainian nationalists and neo-Nazis who were
demonstrably hostile to the Russian speaking populations of Crimea and the
Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.
Stated differently, Imperial Washington is the world
champion meddler in other peoples’ politics and elections. Since the CIA
sponsored coup against the Mosaddegh government in Iran in 1953, it has
sponsored more than eighty incidents ranging
from election bag money to military coups.
By contrast, the putative Russian
attack on American democracy consists of three specific accusations—all of
which are readily refutable.
In the first place, Podesta’s password was “password” and could
have been hacked by any fat guy, or not, on any computer plugged into the
worldwide web anywhere.
Moreover, Julian Assange of Wikileaks, who makes a living
disclosing the truth, not propagating lies as does the IC, says it did not come
from Russian state agents; and that it was in fact leaked, not hacked, by
disgruntled Democrat insiders.
In any event, if it had actually been hacked by either Russian
agents or the proverbial fat guy, there would be a digital imprint stored in
NSA’s vast server farms. The fact that it hasn’t leaked amidst all the rest of
the anti-Russian innuendo and intelligence hearsay proves beyond much doubt
that no such record exists and no such Russian intrusion ever happened.
As for the DNC emails, the smoking gun there still smolders in
plain sight. The FBI apparently never even took custody of the DNC computer—–farming
out the job to an outfit named Crowdstrike. Alas, the latter is a DNC
contractor and wannabe silicon valley IPO run by some fanatical Russian ex-pats
looking for fame and fortune. It’s no wonder they didn’t want the FBI second
guessing their conclusions.
Finally, there is the Latvian “intelligence” morsel about
Putin’s personal direction of the election meddling campaign. If the Donald had
any common sense he would declassify said report forthwith.
But never mind. It surely doesn’t exist anyway—-or it too would
have leaked long ago.
And that’s all she wrote. The rest is pure spin leaked by
Trump’s enemies in the Deep State and canonized by its collaborators in the
main stream media.
Unfortunately, the Donald
doesn’t seem to recognize that he is actually President. If he did, he would
have the Justice Department launch a prosecution against the faithless
officials—-Brennan, Rice and Power—-who concocted the whole RussiaGate
defamation in the first place.
Reprinted
with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.
Former
Congressman David A. Stockman was Reagan's OMB director, which he wrote about
in his best-selling book, The Triumph of Politics. His latest book
is The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in
America. He's the editor and publisher of the new David Stockman's
Contra Corner. He was an original partner in the Blackstone Group, and reads
LRC the first thing every morning.
Copyright © 2017 David Stockman
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