A country well-known for its nefarious cyber criminal activities falsely claim Russian cyber meddling into the recent US presidential election... :-(
Selected Readers' Comments:
# The root cause is "profit over human life". That is what the rich are practicing. Simple. No moral standards anymore. Out of control capitalism.
# The Empire does not pay any attention to the I.C.C. unless it applies to it's adversaries.
# USA attitude to the world is "do as we say not do as we do".
# They've brainwashed most of the population into believing whatever they're told.
# The US overthru our government here in Australia in 1975...Any election in any country - you can bet the US is involved in one way or another...Total hypocrtites...
# CIA are in meddled election of Slovakia president Kiska. Is suspect that Slovak President Kiska is clear agent of Cia and really is member of Scientology. Really -other way would not be elected kiska as slovacs president.
# Dr. Ron Paul brings forth direct and specific information, there is no political double talk; perhaps newly elected President Trump is able to use Dr. Ron Paul in his cabinet or at the least in his group...
# The CIA effort to recruit American news organizations and journalists to become spies and disseminators of propaganda, was headed up by Frank Wisner, Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, and Philip Graham (publisher of The Washington Post). Wisner had taken Graham under his wing to direct the program code-named Operation Mockingbird and both have presumably committed suicide. Media assets will eventually include ABC, NBC, CBS, Time, Newsweek, Associated Press, United Press International (UPI), Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Copley News Service, etc. and 400 journalists, who have secretly carried out assignments according to documents on file at CIA headquarters, from intelligence-gathering to serving as go-betweens. The CIA had infiltrated the nation's businesses, media, and universities with tens of thousands of on-call operatives by the 1950's. CIA Director Dulles had staffed the CIA almost exclusively with Ivy League graduates, especially from Yale with figures like George Herbert Walker Bush from the "Skull and Crossbones" Society.
# Thank you Ron Paul, for wisdom and truth coming out. THE current US Establishment and alphabet soup agencies have been lying to us and using propaganda to sway the public towards more wars, instead of common sense. Every since NADA 2013 was passed, the MSM has become part of the Governments 4th wind of government the PROPAGANDISTS.... THIS is what is scary, not independent news, but Government deception, smoke and mirrors. MERCY they are evil in DC.
# Ron Paul take of Facebook is simplistic , libertarian blab. Facebook is part of our Government - the Corporatist military-industrial-security-propaganda complex that runs US and the world.
# Not just meddling but organising coup d'états, assassination of progressive leaders, execution by drones, invasions, hacking, subversions, illegal imprisonments, false news to assassinate good character, sending to exile…the list is endless.
# America as we know was born on invasion on native americans. committed genocide, deceptions and violence. Invasion is in its DNA. Foreign policy is an extension of its domestic policy. Denying the past history and expecting this monster to behave differently is just naive. Few honest politicians choose to talk about the aggressive, invasive US foreign policy. Even Bernie never went so far to denounce our foreign policy. He voted against Iraqwar, but voted for funding it. In his primaries he doesn't want to embarass Obama. Ron Paul views exceeded Bernie on foreign policies. We need more people like Ron Paul to condemn this foreign policy.
# CIA,British Intelligence, Isreali Intelligence,French,German other NATO intelligence agencies go around the world. Destabilising countries they mostly do it in the third world, but also everywhere else which serves their agenda put their agents in who start conflicts etc and then the arms companies of the west profit from it. Yes its pure evil but this is what CIA,British Intelligence and friends are always upto. They are the ones who always interfere in the affairs of other countries all over the world. Then they have the gall to blame Russia. Ron Paul thanks for telling these truths counter the bull of western mainstream media.
- - -
Russia’s Involvement in the Email Leaks: The CIA’s Absence of Conviction
I have watched incredulous as the CIA’s blatant lie has grown and
grown as a media story – blatant because the CIA has made no attempt
whatsoever to substantiate it. There is no Russian involvement in the
leaks of emails showing Clinton’s corruption. Yes this rubbish has been
the lead today in the Washington Post in the US and the Guardian here,
and was the lead item on the BBC main news. I suspect it is leading the
American broadcasts also.
A little simple logic demolishes the CIA’s claims. The CIA claim they
“know the individuals” involved. Yet under Obama the USA has been
absolutely ruthless in its persecution of whistleblowers, and its
pursuit of foreign hackers through extradition. We are supposed to
believe that in the most vital instance imaginable, an attempt by a
foreign power to destabilise a US election, even though the CIA knows
who the individuals are, nobody is going to be arrested or extradited,
or (if in Russia) made subject to yet more banking and other
restrictions against Russian individuals? Plainly it stinks. The
anonymous source claims of “We know who it was, it was the Russians” are
beneath contempt.
As Julian Assange has made crystal clear, the leaks did not come from
the Russians. As I have explained countless times, they are not hacks,
they are insider leaks – there is a major difference between the two.
And it should be said again and again, that if Hillary Clinton had not
connived with the DNC to fix the primary schedule to disadvantage
Bernie, if she had not received advance notice of live debate questions
to use against Bernie, if she had not accepted massive donations to the
Clinton foundation and family members in return for foreign policy
influence, if she had not failed to distance herself from some very
weird and troubling people, then none of this would have happened.
The continued ability of the mainstream media to claim the leaks lost
Clinton the election because of “Russia”, while still never
acknowledging the truths the leaks reveal, is Kafkaesque.
I had a call from a Guardian journalist this afternoon. The astonishing result was that for three hours, an article was accessible through the Guardian front page which actually included the truth among the CIA hype:
The Kremlin has rejected the hacking accusations, while the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has previously said the DNC leaks were not linked to Russia. A second senior official cited by the Washington Post conceded that intelligence agencies did not have specific proof that the Kremlin was “directing” the hackers, who were said to be one step removed from the Russian government.
Craig Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, who is a close associate of Assange, called the CIA claims “bullshit”, adding: “They are absolutely making it up.”
“I know who leaked them,” Murray said. “I’ve met the person who leaked them, and they are certainly not Russian and it’s an insider. It’s a leak, not a hack; the two are different things.
“If what the CIA are saying is true, and the CIA’s statement refers to people who are known to be linked to the Russian state, they would have arrested someone if it was someone inside the United States.
“America has not been shy about arresting whistleblowers and it’s not been shy about extraditing hackers. They plainly have no knowledge whatsoever.”
But only three hours. While the article was not taken down, the home
page links to it vanished and it was replaced by a ludicrous one
repeating the mad CIA allegations against Russia and now claiming –
incredibly – that the CIA believe the FBI is deliberately blocking the
information on Russian collusion. Presumably this totally nutty theory,
that Putin is somehow now controlling the FBI, is meant to answer my
obvious objection that, if the CIA know who it is, why haven’t they
arrested somebody. That bit of course would be the job of the FBI, who
those desperate to annul the election now wish us to believe are the
KGB.
It is terrible that the prime conduit for this paranoid nonsense is a
once great newspaper, the Washington Post, which far from investigating
executive power, now is a sounding board for totally evidence free
anonymous source briefing of utter bullshit from the executive.
In the UK, one single article sums
up the total abnegation of all journalistic standards. The truly
execrable Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian writes “Few credible
sources doubt that Russia was behind the hacking of internal Democratic
party emails, whose release by Julian Assange was timed to cause maximum
pain to Hillary Clinton and pleasure for Trump.” Does he produce any
evidence at all for this assertion? No, none whatsoever. What does a
journalist mean by a “credible source”? Well, any journalist worth their
salt in considering the credibility of a source will first
consider access. Do they credibly have access to the information they
claim to have?
Now both Julian Assange and I have stated definitively the leak does
not come from Russia. Do we credibly have access? Yes, very obviously.
Very, very few people can be said to definitely have access to the
source of the leak. The people saying it is not Russia are those who do
have access. After access, you consider truthfulness. Do Julian Assange
and I have a reputation for truthfulness? Well in 10 years not one of
the tens of thousands of documents WikiLeaks has released has had its
authenticity successfully challenged. As for me, I have a reputation for
inconvenient truth telling.
Contrast this to the “credible sources” Freedland relies on.
What access do they have to the whistleblower? Zero. They have not the
faintest idea who the whistleblower is. Otherwise they would have
arrested them. What reputation do they have for truthfulness? It’s the
Clinton gang and the US government, for goodness sake.
In fact, the sources any serious journalist would view as “credible”
give the opposite answer to the one Freedland wants. But in what passes
for Freedland’s mind, “credible” is 100% synonymous with
“establishment”. When he says “credible sources” he means “establishment
sources”. That is the truth of the “fake news” meme. You are not to
read anything unless it is officially approved by the elite and their
disgusting, crawling whores of stenographers like Freedland.
The worst thing about all this is that it is aimed at promoting
further conflict with Russia. This puts everyone in danger for the sake
of more profits for the arms and security industries – including of
course bigger budgets for the CIA. As thankfully the four year agony of
Aleppo comes swiftly to a close today, the Saudi and US armed and
trained ISIS forces counter by moving to retake Palmyra. This game kills
people, on a massive scale, and goes on and on.
The original source of this article is Craig Murray
Copyright © Craig Murray, Craig Murray, 2016
= = =
More Russia Bashing Over Nonexistent Cyber attacks
Global Research, December 10, 2016
On October 7, a joint Department of Homeland
Security/Director of National Intelligence (DHS/DNI) statement charged
Russia with cyberattacks “intended to interfere with the US election
process.”
It was a Big Lie. No evidence was cited because none exists.
Accusations without proof are baseless. It had nothing to do with
hacking DNC emails or interfering in America’s presidential election in
any other way – nor meddling in the internal affairs of any country,
longstanding US practice.
The DHS/DNI joint statement, claiming “confiden(ce)” about Russia
cyberattacking “US political organizations” was politically motivated
lying.
No matter. Obama ordered US intelligence agencies to review nonexistent Russian interference in the 2016 election process, completing a report before he leaves office on January 20.
It’s likely already written – a fictional account of what never
happened. Interviewed by Time magazine after being named its person of
the year, Trump said “I don’t believe it. I don’t believe (Russia)
interfered…(S)ome guy in New Jersey” may have done it.
He called charges politically motivated, adding they “became a
laughing point, not a talking point…Any time I do something, they say
‘Oh, Russia interfered.’ “ Putin and other Russian officials
categorically debunked the false charges.
Obama administration homeland security advisor Lisa Monaco claimed “a
new threshold” was likely crossed, calling it necessary “to conduct
some after-action…”
Deputy White House press secretary Eric Schultz said Obama considers completing the report on his watch “a major priority.”
He’s got nothing better to do than bash Russia.
Last month, the White House declared the November election “free and
fair from a cybersecurity perspective.” If so, why investigate
nonexistent Russian hacking?
Why conduct a recount scam in three states? Why accuse Moscow of election interference when it’s known none occurred?
It’s all about Russia bashing, longstanding plans calling for regime change, installing pro-Western puppet governance, etc.
It also points to powerful interests backing Hillary “remain(ing)
intent upon undermining Trump’s accession to the White House (because
he’s) not entirely in the pocket of the lobby groups,” according to Michel Chossudovsky.
Wanting to get along with Vladimir Putin, including cooperating with
him in combating terrorism, conflicts with powerful interests wanting
adversarial relations maintained, along with supporting ISIS and other
terrorist groups, using them as imperial foot soldiers.
On Friday, Trump’s transition team released a statement, debunking
notions of Russia interfering in America’s political process, saying
“(t)hese are the same people (who) said Saddam Hussein had weapons of
mass destruction. The election ended (weeks ago). It’s now time to move
on and ‘Make America Great Again.’ “
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”
Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.
Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on
the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.
The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © Stephen Lendman, Global Research, 2016
- - -
- - -
CIA meddled in ‘hundreds’ of elections: Ron Paul talks Russia-blaming, fake news and more on RT
RT : 17 Dec, 2016
US government “propagandists” push for a foreign policy of “intervening
around the world,” former presidential candidate and founder of the
Institute for Peace and Prosperity, Dr. Ron Paul, told RT in a
wide-ranging interview that also touched on Syria.
Following reports that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin for personally directing a
cyberattack that cost her the 2016 presidential election, Dr. Paul
shrugged off the allegations as a “fiasco” in an interview with RT’s Neil Harvey.
“I think they're just agitating, because they lost the election. They're throwing out accusations and they have no proof,” the former Republican congressman for Texas said.
“The
same people who are making all these charges, they didn’t seem to be
worried a bit by the secretary of state having a private server,” Paul said, “which made it much easier for Russia or anybody else to know what was going on.”
Paul,
a libertarian advocate of a foreign policy of non-intervention, went on
to explain that ideally, the US should not have to worry about any
other country having an incentive to interfere in US elections. The root
of the problem, Paul believes, is in the US government doing the exact
thing it now accuses Russia of doing.
“The American people
should be worried about the influence of our CIA in other people's
elections, I mean probably hundreds. It's constant,” he said, even going as far as to allude to “domestic assassinations” the CIA has allegedly taken part in.
Paul
then brought his two points together in describing a sort of shadow
government in cahoots with the major media, saying that the anti-Russian
narrative was being promulgated in order to “amplify the arguments between Republicans and Democrats,” which he discounted as political theater.
“Our government doesn't change a whole lot,” Paul explained. “The
people, who behind the scenes control the government, are always the
same. And I consider that to be the case in most governments.”
“The
propagandists are on the side of the people who want us to be
intervening around the world, and I imagine that because Trump has
suggested maybe we ought to do a little bit less of that, maybe they
don’t like that idea, and they want to discredit him for that approach,” Paul said.
Moving to the matter of “fake news,”
another controversial issue heating up after the November election
result, Paul was asked about Facebook unrolling a new policy of
fact-checking, potentially pushing down news stories in its News Feed.
“If it's a private organization,” Paul said, “they
have a right to monitor. And they probably will make mistakes, but that
is so much different than when a company like Facebook works with the
government. That's where the real danger is.”
Selected Readers' Comments:
# The root cause is "profit over human life". That is what the rich are practicing. Simple. No moral standards anymore. Out of control capitalism.
# The Empire does not pay any attention to the I.C.C. unless it applies to it's adversaries.
# USA attitude to the world is "do as we say not do as we do".
# They've brainwashed most of the population into believing whatever they're told.
# The US overthru our government here in Australia in 1975...Any election in any country - you can bet the US is involved in one way or another...Total hypocrtites...
# CIA are in meddled election of Slovakia president Kiska. Is suspect that Slovak President Kiska is clear agent of Cia and really is member of Scientology. Really -other way would not be elected kiska as slovacs president.
# Dr. Ron Paul brings forth direct and specific information, there is no political double talk; perhaps newly elected President Trump is able to use Dr. Ron Paul in his cabinet or at the least in his group...
# The CIA effort to recruit American news organizations and journalists to become spies and disseminators of propaganda, was headed up by Frank Wisner, Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, and Philip Graham (publisher of The Washington Post). Wisner had taken Graham under his wing to direct the program code-named Operation Mockingbird and both have presumably committed suicide. Media assets will eventually include ABC, NBC, CBS, Time, Newsweek, Associated Press, United Press International (UPI), Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Copley News Service, etc. and 400 journalists, who have secretly carried out assignments according to documents on file at CIA headquarters, from intelligence-gathering to serving as go-betweens. The CIA had infiltrated the nation's businesses, media, and universities with tens of thousands of on-call operatives by the 1950's. CIA Director Dulles had staffed the CIA almost exclusively with Ivy League graduates, especially from Yale with figures like George Herbert Walker Bush from the "Skull and Crossbones" Society.
# Thank you Ron Paul, for wisdom and truth coming out. THE current US Establishment and alphabet soup agencies have been lying to us and using propaganda to sway the public towards more wars, instead of common sense. Every since NADA 2013 was passed, the MSM has become part of the Governments 4th wind of government the PROPAGANDISTS.... THIS is what is scary, not independent news, but Government deception, smoke and mirrors. MERCY they are evil in DC.
# Ron Paul take of Facebook is simplistic , libertarian blab. Facebook is part of our Government - the Corporatist military-industrial-security-propaganda complex that runs US and the world.
# Not just meddling but organising coup d'états, assassination of progressive leaders, execution by drones, invasions, hacking, subversions, illegal imprisonments, false news to assassinate good character, sending to exile…the list is endless.
# America as we know was born on invasion on native americans. committed genocide, deceptions and violence. Invasion is in its DNA. Foreign policy is an extension of its domestic policy. Denying the past history and expecting this monster to behave differently is just naive. Few honest politicians choose to talk about the aggressive, invasive US foreign policy. Even Bernie never went so far to denounce our foreign policy. He voted against Iraqwar, but voted for funding it. In his primaries he doesn't want to embarass Obama. Ron Paul views exceeded Bernie on foreign policies. We need more people like Ron Paul to condemn this foreign policy.
# CIA,British Intelligence, Isreali Intelligence,French,German other NATO intelligence agencies go around the world. Destabilising countries they mostly do it in the third world, but also everywhere else which serves their agenda put their agents in who start conflicts etc and then the arms companies of the west profit from it. Yes its pure evil but this is what CIA,British Intelligence and friends are always upto. They are the ones who always interfere in the affairs of other countries all over the world. Then they have the gall to blame Russia. Ron Paul thanks for telling these truths counter the bull of western mainstream media.
- - -
Making Russia ‘The Enemy’. Lobbying the Electors against Trump, Towards a Costly and Dangerous “New Cold War”?
Despite conflicting accounts about who leaked the Democratic
emails, the frenzy over an alleged Russian role is driving the U.S.
deeper into a costly and dangerous New Cold War, writes Robert Parry.
The rising hysteria about Russia is best understood as fulfilling two
needs for Official Washington: the Military Industrial Complex’s
transitioning from the “war on terror” to a more lucrative “new cold
war” – and blunting the threat that a President Trump poses to the
neoconservative/liberal-interventionist foreign-policy establishment.
By hyping the Russian “threat,” the neocons and their
liberal-hawk sidekicks, who include much of the mainstream U.S. news
media, can guarantee bigger military budgets from Congress. The hype
also sets in motion a blocking maneuver to impinge on any significant
change in direction for U.S. foreign policy under Trump.
Some Democrats even hope to stop Trump from ascending to the White House by having the Central Intelligence Agency, in effect, lobby the electors in the Electoral College with scary tales about Russia trying to fix the election for Trump.
The electors meet on Dec. 19 when they will formally cast their
votes, supposedly reflecting the judgments of each state’s voters, but
conceivably individual electors could switch their ballots from Trump to
Hillary Clinton or someone else.
On Thursday, liberal columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. joined the call for electors to flip, writing:
“The question is whether Trump, Vladimir Putin and, perhaps, Clinton’s
popular-vote advantage give you sufficient reason to blow up the
system.”
That Democrats would want the CIA, which is forbidden to operate
domestically in part because of its historic role in influencing
elections in other countries, to play a similar role in the United
States shows how desperate the Democratic Party has become.
And, even though The New York Times and other big news outlets are reporting as flat fact that
Russia hacked the Democratic email accounts and gave the information to
WikiLeaks, former British Ambassador Craig Murray, a close associate of
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, told the London Daily Mail that he personally received the email data from a “disgusted” Democrat.
Murray said he flew from London to Washington for a clandestine
handoff from one of the email sources in September, receiving the
package in a wooded area near American University.
“Neither of [the leaks, from the Democratic National Committee or
Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta] came from the Russians,” Murray
said, adding: “the source had legal access to the information. The
documents came from inside leaks, not hacks.”
Murray said the insider felt “disgust at the corruption of the
Clinton Foundation and the tilting of the primary election playing field
against Bernie Sanders.” Murray added that his meeting was with an
intermediary for the Democratic leaker, not the leaker directly.
[Update: Murray subsequently said his contact with
the intermediary at American University was not for the purpose of
obtaining a batch of the purloined emails, as the Daily Mail reported,
since WikiLeaks already had them. He said the Mail simply added that
detail to the story, but Murray declined to explain why he had the
meeting at A.U. with the whistleblower or an associate.]
If Murray’s story is true, it raises several alternative scenarios:
that the U.S. intelligence community’s claims about a Russian hack are
false; that Russians hacked the Democrats’ emails for their own
intelligence gathering without giving the material to WikiLeaks; or that
Murray was deceived about the identity of the original leaker.
But the uncertainty creates the possibility that the Democrats are
using a dubious CIA assessment to reverse the outcome of an American
presidential election, in effect, making the CIA party to a preemptive
domestic “regime change.”
Delayed Autopsy
All of this maneuvering also is delaying the Democratic Party’s
self-examination into why it lost so many white working-class voters in
normally Democratic strongholds, such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and
Wisconsin.
Rather than national party leaders taking the blame for pre-selecting
a very flawed candidate and ignoring all the warning signs about the
public’s resistance to this establishment choice, Democrats have pointed
fingers at almost everyone else – from FBI Director James Comey for
briefly reviving Clinton’s email investigation, to third-party
candidates who siphoned off votes, to the archaic Electoral College
which negates the fact that Clinton did win the national popular vote –
and now to the Russians.
While there may be some validity to these various complaints, the
excessive frenzy that has surrounded the still-unproven claims that the
Russian government surreptitiously tilted the election in Trump’s favor
creates an especially dangerous dynamic.
On one level, it has led Democrats to support Orwellian/ McCarthyistic concepts, such as establishing “black lists” for Internet sites that question Official Washington’s “conventional wisdom” and thus are deemed purveyors of “Russian propaganda” or “fake news.”
On another level, it cements the Democratic Party as America’s
preeminent “war party,” favoring an escalating New Cold War with Russia
by ratcheting up economic sanctions against Moscow, and even seeking
military challenges to Russia in conflict zones such as Syria and
Ukraine.
One of the most dangerous aspects of a prospective Hillary Clinton
presidency was that she would have appointed neocons, such as Assistant
Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland and her husband,
Project for the New American Century co-founder Robert Kagan, to
high-level foreign policy positions.
Though that risk may have passed assuming Clinton’s Electoral College
defeat on Monday, Democrats now are excitedly joining the bash-Russia
movement, making it harder to envision how the party can transition back
into its more recent role as the “peace party” (at least relative to
the extremely hawkish Republicans).
Trading Places
The potential trading places of the two parties in that regard – with
Trump favoring geopolitical détente and the Democrats beating the drums
for more military confrontations – augurs poorly for the Democrats
regaining their political footing anytime soon.
If Democratic leaders press ahead, in alliance with neoconservative
Republicans, on demands for escalating the New Cold War with Russia,
they could precipitate a party split between Democratic hawks and doves,
a schism that likely would have occurred if Clinton had been elected
but now may happen anyway, albeit without the benefit of the party
holding the White House.
The first test of this emerging Democratic-neocon alliance may come
over Trump’s choice for Secretary of State, Exxon-Mobil’s chief
executive Rex Tillerson, who doesn’t exhibit the visceral hatred of
Russian President Vladimir Putin that Democrats are encouraging.
As an international business executive, Tillerson appears to share
Trump’s real-politik take on the world, the idea that doing business
with rivals makes more sense than conspiring to force “regime change”
after “regime change.”
Over the past several decades, the “regime change” approach has been
embraced by both neocons and liberal interventionists and has been
implemented by both Republican and Democratic administrations.
Sometimes, it’s done through war and other times through “color
revolutions” – always under the idealistic guise of “democracy
promotion” or “protecting human rights.”
But the problem with this neo-imperialist strategy has been that it
has failed miserably to improve the lives of the people living in the
“regime-changed” countries. Instead, it has spread chaos across wide
swaths of the globe and has now even destabilized Europe.
Yet, the solution, as envisioned by the neocons and their
liberal-hawk understudies, is simply to force more “regime change”
medicine down the throats of the world’s population. The new “great”
idea is to destabilize nuclear-armed Russia by making its economy scream
and by funding as many anti-Putin elements as possible to create the
nucleus for a “color revolution” in Moscow.
To justify that risky scheme, there has been a broad expansion of
anti-Russian propaganda now being funded with tens of millions of
dollars in taxpayer money as well as being pushed by government
officials giving off-the-record briefings to mainstream media outlets.
However, as with earlier “regime change” plans, the neocons and
liberal hawks never think through the scenario to the end. They always
assume that everything is going to work out fine and some well-dressed
“opposition leader” who has been to their think-tank conferences will
simply ascend to the top job.
Remember, in Iraq, it was going to be Ahmed Chalabi who was beloved
in Official Washington but broadly rejected by the Iraqi people. In
Libya, there has been a parade of U.S.-approved “unity” leaders who have
failed to pull that country together.
In Ukraine, Nuland’s choice – Arseniy “Yats is the guy” Yatsenyuk –
resigned amid broad public disapproval earlier this year after pushing
through harsh cuts in social programs, even as the U.S.-backed regime
officials in Kiev continued to plunder Ukraine’s treasury and misappropriate Western economic aid.
Nuclear-Armed Destabilization
But the notion of destabilizing nuclear-armed Russia is even more
hare-brained than those other fiascos. The neocon/liberal-hawk
assumption is that Russians – pushed to the brink of starvation by
crippling Western sanctions – will overthrow Putin and install a new
version of Boris Yeltsin who would then let U.S. financial advisers
return with their neoliberal “shock therapy” of the 1990s and again
exploit Russia’s vast resources.
Indeed, it was the Yeltsin era and its Western-beloved “shock
therapy” that created the desperate conditions before the rise of Putin
with his autocratic nationalism, which, for all its faults, has
dramatically improved the lives of most Russians.
So, the more likely result from the neocon/liberal-hawk “regime
change” plans for Moscow would be the emergence of someone even more
nationalistic – and likely far less stable – than Putin, who is regarded
even by his critics as cold and calculating.
The prospect of an extreme Russian nationalist getting his or her
hands on the Kremlin’s nuclear codes should send chills up and down the
spines of every American, indeed every human being on the planet. But it
is the course that key national Democrats appear to be on with their
increasingly hysterical comments about Russia.
The Democratic National Committee issued a statement on
Wednesday accusing Trump of giving Russia “an early holiday gift that
smells like a payoff. … It’s rather easy to connect the dots. Russia
meddled in the U.S. election in order to benefit Trump and now he’s
repaying Vladimir Putin by nominating Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson as
secretary of state.”
Besides delaying a desperately needed autopsy on why Democrats did so
badly in an election against the also-widely-disliked Donald Trump, the
new blame-Russia gambit threatens to hurt the Democrats and their
preferred policies in another way.
If Democrats vote in bloc against Tillerson or other Trump
foreign-policy nominees – demanding that he appoint people acceptable to
the neocons and the liberal hawks – Trump might well be pushed deeper
into the arms of right-wing Republicans, giving them more on domestic
issues to solidify their support on his foreign-policy goals.
That could end up redounding against the Democrats as they watch
important social programs gutted in exchange for their own dubious
Democratic alliance with the neocons.
Since the presidency of Bill Clinton, the Democrats have courted
factions of the neocons, apparently thinking they are influential
because they dominate many mainstream op-ed pages and Washington think
tanks. In 1993, as a thank-you gift to the neocon editors of The New
Republic for endorsing him, Clinton appointed neocon ideologue James
Woolsey as head of the CIA, one of Clinton’s more disastrous personnel
decisions.
But the truth appears to be that the neocons have much less influence
across the U.S. electoral map than the Clintons think. Arguably, their
pandering to a clique of Washington insiders who are viewed as
warmongers by many peace-oriented Democrats may even represent a net
negative when it comes to winning votes.
I’ve communicated with a number of traditional Democrats who didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton because they feared she would pursue a dangerous neocon foreign policy.
Obviously, that’s not a scientific survey, but the anecdotal evidence
suggests that Clinton’s neocon connections could have been another drag
on her campaign.
Assessing Russia
I also undertook a limited personal test regarding whether Russia is
the police state that U.S. propaganda depicts, a country yearning to
break free from the harsh grip of Vladimir Putin (although he registers
80 or so percent approval in polls).
During my trip last week to Europe, which included stops in Brussels
and Copenhagen, I decided to take a side trip to Moscow, which I had
never visited before. What I encountered was an impressive, surprisingly
(to me at least) Westernized city with plenty of American and European
franchises, including the ubiquitous McDonald’s and Starbucks. (Russians
serve the Starbucks gingerbread latte with a small ginger cookie.)
Though senior Russian officials proved unwilling to meet with me, an
American reporter, at this time of tensions, Russia had little
appearance of a harshly repressive society. In my years covering U.S.
policies in El Salvador in the 1980s and Haiti in the 1990s, I have
experienced what police states look and feel like, where death squads
dump bodies in the streets. That was not what I sensed in Moscow, just a
modern city with people bustling about their business under early
December snowfalls.
The police presence in Red Square near the Kremlin was not even as
heavy-handed as it is near the government buildings of Washington.
Instead, there was a pre-Christmas festive air to the brightly lit Red
Square, featuring a large skating rink surrounded by small stands
selling hot chocolate, toys, warm clothing and other goods.
Granted, my time and contact with Russians were limited – since I
don’t speak Russian and most of them don’t speak English – but I was
struck by the contrast between the grim images created by Western media
and the Russia that I saw.
It reminded me of how President Ronald Reagan depicted
Sandinista-ruled Nicaragua as a “totalitarian dungeon” with a
militarized state ready to march on Texas, but what I found when I
traveled to Managua was a third-world country still recovering from an
earthquake and with a weak security structure despite the Contra war
that Reagan had unleashed against Nicaragua.
In other words, “perception management”
remains the guiding principle of how the U.S. government deals with the
American people, scaring us with exaggerated tales of foreign threats
and then manipulating our fears and our misperceptions.
As dangerous as that can be when we’re talking about Nicaragua or
Iraq or Libya, the risks are exponentially higher regarding Russia. If
the American people are stampeded into a New Cold War based more on
myths than reality, the minimal cost could be the trillions of dollars
diverted from domestic needs into the Military Industrial Complex. The
far-greater cost could be some miscalculation by either side that could
end life on the planet.
So, as the Democrats chart their future, they need to decide if they
want to leapfrog the Republicans as America’s “war party” or whether
they want to pull back from the escalation of tensions with Russia and
start addressing the pressing needs of the American people.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many
of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the
1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either
in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
The original source of this article is Consortium News
Copyright © Robert Parry, Consortium News, 2016
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