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On Wednesday, August 18, 2021, a retired CIA man, Douglas London, wrote an article for Just Security: ‘CIA’s Former Counterterrorism Chief for the Region: Afghanistan, Not An Intelligence Failure — Something Much Worse’:
Douglas London is that former counterterrorism chief. He worked for the CIA for 34 years. Nowadays, he teaches at Georgetown University, is a non-resident fellow at the Middle East Institute and is author of the book The Recruiter, which details the changes in the CIA post-9/11.
Excerpts follow, emphases mine.
Until his retirement in 2019, he was responsible for preparing security assessments for President Trump about Afghanistan. He volunteered in the same capacity for then-candidate Joe Biden.
Withdrawal — how and when?
He writes that the American withdrawal from Afghanistan has long been predicated with ‘what-if’ scenarios (emphasis in the original, those in purple mine):
The U.S. Intelligence Community assessed Afghanistan’s fortunes according to various scenarios and conditions and depending on the multiple policy alternatives from which the president could choose. So, was it 30 days from withdrawal to collapse? 60? 18 months? Actually, it was all of the above, the projections aligning with the various “what ifs.” Ultimately, it was assessed, Afghan forces might capitulate within days under the circumstances we witnessed, in projections highlighted to Trump officials and future Biden officials alike.
He says that Biden and Trump viewed withdrawal differently, citing Biden’s speech of August 16 (emphases mine):
In his prepared remarks on Monday, President Biden stated, “But I always promised the American people that I will be straight with you. The truth is: This did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated.” That’s misleading at best. The CIA anticipated it as a possible scenario.
By early 2018, it was clear President Trump wanted out of Afghanistan regardless of the alarming outcomes the intelligence community cautioned. But he likewise did not want to preside over the nightmarish scenes we’ve witnessed. Then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was the principal architect of America’s engagement with the Taliban that culminated with the catastrophic February 2020 withdrawal agreement, terms intended to get the president through the coming elections. Pompeo championed the plan despite the intelligence community’s caution that its two key objectives– securing the Taliban’s commitment to break with al-Qa’ida and pursue a peaceful resolution to the conflict — were highly unlikely.
Douglas London outlines the various scenarios:
Scenarios for an orderly withdrawal ranged from those in which the United States retained roughly 5,000 troops and most of the existing forward military and intelligence operating bases, to what was determined to be the minimum presence of around 2,500 troops maintaining the larger bases in greater Kabul, Bagram, Jalalabad and Khost, as well as the infrastructure to support the bases we would turn over to Afghan partners. The larger of these two options was judged more likely to prevent Afghanistan’s collapse for 1-2 years and still provide for a degree of continued U.S. counterterrorism pressure; the smaller footprint was more difficult to assess but allowed flexibility for the United States to increase or further reduce its presence should circumstances rapidly deteriorate. (It would be valuable if commentators and news coverage included a greater appreciation of how such contingency-based assessments work rather than conflating assessments.)
Initially, even a “Kabul only” option included the retention of the sprawling U.S. Bagram Air Base and other intelligence facilities in the greater capital area through which the United States could project force, maintain essential logistical, intelligence and medical support to Afghan operated bases, and retain some technical intelligence collection and counterterrorist capability across the country. But without any U.S. military and intelligence presence beyond the Embassy in Kabul, faced with a Taliban military and propaganda offensive, and undermined by Ghani’s fractious relationship with his own national political partners, the intelligence community warned the government could dissolve in days. And so it went.
Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, a questionable special representative
Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad was America’s special representative during the Trump administration’s negotiations.
In 2018, he was a private citizen who had contacts with a number of Afghans. Douglas London said that the intelligence community did not trust him because he was:
dabbling on his own in 2018 with a variety of dubious Afghan interlocutors against whom the intelligence community warned, trying opportunistically to get “back inside.” Undaunted, his end around to Pompeo and the White House pledging to secure the deal Trump needed which the president’s own intelligence, military and diplomatic professionals claimed was not possible absent a position of greater strength, was enthusiastically received. Our impression was that Khalilzad was angling to be Trump’s Secretary of State in a new administration, were he to win, and would essentially do or say what he was told to secure his future by pleasing the mercurial president, including his steady compromise of whatever leverage the United States had to incentivize Taliban compromises.
Because the withdrawal plan was popular with voters in 2020, the Biden camp also endorsed it:
Moreover, from my perspective, they appeared to believe that negative consequences would be at least largely owned by Trump, the GOP, and Khalilzad, whose being left in place, intentionally or not, allowed him to serve even more so as a fall guy. For the candidate, who had long advocated withdrawal, the outcome was, as it had been with Trump, a foregone conclusion despite what many among his counterterrorism advisors counselled. President Biden himself has said as much in terms of his mind being made up.
There was a rather naïve confidence among Biden’s more influential foreign policy advisors that the Taliban’s best interests were served by adhering to the agreement’s main points. Doing so, they argued, would guarantee the U.S. withdrawal, and leave room for more constructive engagement, possibly even aid, should the Taliban come to power.
The Taliban’s PR offensive
Meanwhile, the Taliban were becoming more aware of the importance of a PR offensive aimed at the West:
The Taliban learned a great deal about the utility of PR since 2001, and maximized their access to Western media as highlighted by Taliban deputy and Haqqani Taliban Network leader Sirajuddin Haqqani’s apparently ghost written New York Times OpEd. The reality, of course, as the intelligence community long maintained, was that the Taliban’s control over the country was predicated on isolation from the rest of the world, rather than integration. International recognition, global financial access, and foreign aid were not going to influence how the Taliban would rule.
Also:
Momentum the Taliban needed to secure their adversaries’ cooperation was facilitated by a robust propaganda machine that, in many instances, successfully manipulated the media into positive, disproportional coverage from the outset of their offensive in casting their conquest as inevitable. Neither the Afghan government nor the United States could ever effectively counter the Taliban’s persistent and savvy media efforts given the need to protect sources and methods, legal restraints, and an unfortunate lack in investment and imagination.
For Afghan politicians, money talks
Greasing palms is part of Afghan life among those in power locally and regionally. Money can also determine one’s political alliances, which can be fluid:
U.S. policy makers were also cautioned that the broad coalition of Afghan politicians, warlords and military leaders across the country benefiting from the money and power that came with a sustained U.S. presence were likely to lose confidence and hedge their bets were U.S. military forces and intelligence personnel to withdraw. Further, that President Ashraf Ghani’s stubborn resistance to the Afghan political practice of buying support and his dismantling of the warlords’ private armies would weaken their incentives to support the government. Switching sides for a better deal or to fight another day is a hallmark of Afghan history. And U.S. policy to impose an American blueprint for a strong central government and integrated national army served only to enable Ghani’s disastrous and uncompromising stewardship.
On that topic, Britain’s talkRADIO has been interviewing another seasoned American counterintelligence specialist, Malcolm Nance, who said that, over the past year at least, the Taliban were co-opting other Afghans, including those from the country’s Western-backed army.
He said that it did not have to be that way, since he went into Afghanistan in November 2001. The US could have done the job in short order, had Bush II not switched priorities to Iraq:
Keeping the money aspect in mind, Douglas London describes how the 2021 debacle unfolded. Al Qa’ida also played a part:
The clock began to accelerate when US military and intelligence elements withdrew from Kandahar on May 13, and thereafter closed remaining forward operating bases and “lily pads,” the term used for temporary staging areas under U.S. or coalition control. By the time Bagram was closed on July 1, the United States and NATO had also departed Herat, Mazar I Sharif, Jalalabad, Khost and other locations I am not at liberty to name. The Taliban was moving in even as we were packing up. They were quite likely joined by the many al-Qa’ida members (some of whom had enjoyed Iranian sanctuary),-if not direct operational support, augmented further by recently released comrades the Taliban set free from Afghan detention at Bagram and elsewhere.
Policy makers were also aware of the Taliban’s effective use of a parallel “shadow government” structure maintained since losing power that provided for reliable lines of communication with local elders across the provinces, as well as government authorities, often owing to shared family or clan connections. To an American it might be surprising, but it was nothing out of the ordinary for an Afghan military commander or police chief to be in regular contact even with those faced daily in combat.
The Taliban was thus well positioned to negotiate and buy rather than fight their way to successive conquests, itself an Afghan tradition. Moreover, the Taliban was prepared to quickly rule and provide services in the territories coming under its control. And by prioritizing the periphery to secure borders and the lines of communication required to sustain an insurgency, striking first from where they were defeated in 2001, the Taliban clearly learned from history, whereas we still have not. But where did the money come from to finance this campaign?
Persuading low level government fighters and functionaries to turnover their weapons and abandon their posts was well within the Taliban’s means, but it was undoubtedly more expensive securing the cooperation of senior officials with the authority to surrender provincial capitals. Layer on that the need to pay the surge of their own fighters, many of them essentially part-time and seasonal. Payroll and care for the families of fighters killed and wounded is often the greatest expense for the Taliban and its terrorist partner groups, and in Afghanistan, likewise the most important incentive to attract fighters.
Where Taliban money comes from
The Taliban finance themselves from a variety of sources, from drug trafficking to donations from other foreign countries:
The Taliban’s finances are complicated, more so by a structure which is not monolithic, and heavily dependent on the vast international criminal network operated by the Haqqani Taliban Network in the East, and somewhat autonomous regional commanders in the West. Revenues are variously drawn from taxes imposed on locals, narcotics trafficking, foreign donations-largely from Arab Gulf countries, real estate (some of which is abroad), the extortion of mining companies operating in areas under their control–many of which are Chinese government parastatals, and other foreign governments. Pakistan has long been a principal backer, but Russia and Iran increased their investments to court the group in recent years. Moreover, both benefited decidedly from the Taliban’s swift, bloodless conquest that expeditiously purged and humiliated the United States, and minimized what might have been a violent, prolonged fight that increased regional instability and the flow of refugees.
Dichotomy between US Department of Defense and CIA
Douglas London noted the disparity of opinion between the Department of Defense and the CIA:
… in grading their own homework, the U.S. defense establishment only exacerbated the problem. While it’s little surprise the Department of Defense was unwilling to objectively evaluate the resolve and capacity of those they trained, equipped, and advised to resist a forthcoming Taliban offensive, their rose-colored depictions of achievement over 20 years flew in the face of reality, and was consistently challenged by the CIA’s more gloomy, albeit realistic projections.
Conclusion
He concludes:
… there was no intelligence failure by the agency in warning either Trump or Biden as to how events would play out. Operating in the shadows and “supporting the White House” will prevent the intelligence community from publicly defending itself. But the failure was not due to any lack of warning, but rather the hubris and political risk calculus of decision makers whose choices are too often made in their personal and political interest or with pre-committed policy choices, rather than influenced by (sometimes inconvenient) intelligence assessments and the full interests of the country.
It is difficult to see how the Afghanistan debacle can ever be rectified now, especially after 20 years.
As to what happens going forward, unfortunately, the grim possibilities are endless.
More on Afghanistan tomorrow.
How could Joe Biden end US involvement in Afghanistan so disastrously?
He made the decision unilaterally, leaving the nation in peril over the weekend, with horrific images unfolding across world media.
That said, by the time the US and UK entered Afghanistan in 2001 to rid the world of Osama bin Laden and terror, everyone knew that any operation there would be futile. The Soviets even pulled out in 1989.
In fact, Afghanistan was always an intractable place, a law unto itself throughout history.
Alexander the Great’s tenuous hold
Military historian Jamie Hayes wrote a gripping history of an ancient and weak conquest of Afghanistan, ‘Unwilling To Stop And Unwilling To Go On: Alexander the Great’s Afghan Campaign’.
Until his invasion of Afghanistan, Alexander the Great believed himself invincible (emphases mine):
Alexander the Great was undeniably the greatest military commander in history. He took over his father’s throne at just 20 years old and immediately began a campaign the likes of which the world has never seen. He fought battle after battle, forging the largest empire on earth—all without losing even once. As he rampaged across Western and Central Asia, he founded countless cities that stand to this day. Millennia after his death, military geniuses like Napoleon painstakingly studied his battles to learn from his success. He unquestionably earned his moniker—Alexander was Great.
With such a spotless military record, Alexander’s conquests seem almost like they were…easy. With his elite troops and unmatched tactical genius, he started from the unassuming Macedon in Northern Greece and wrought the largest empire the world had ever seen, spanning from Greece in the West all the way to India in the East. But while his remarkable conquests in Persia and his far-reaching campaign to India take center stage in the history books, there’s an often-forgotten chapter of Alexander’s legacy that was anything but easy.
Alexander’s campaign in Afghanistan has become a mere footnote in his legacy—perhaps because it was the region where the great warlord saw the least success. Like many other military superpowers would after him, from the British Empire to Russia to NATO, Alexander waltzed into Afghanistan with all the confidence in the world, but he left battered and bruised, with very little to show for it. The region chewed him up and spat him out, and while he never explicitly “lost” any battles in his time there, it’s hard to so he won much of anything either. In fact, historians have claimed that the brutal Afghan campaign marked a shift in Alexander—from infallible Golden Boy to a cruel, paranoid shell of what he once was.
Alexander the Great wanted to topple a man named Bessus, the only obstacle preventing the military commander from becoming king of the Persian Empire. Bessus had toppled Darius III (Darius the Great), the self-styled King of Kings of the Persian Empire. Bessus gave himself a new name, Artaxerxes V.
Incensed, Alexander believed that Artaxarxes V was a usurper and set about to right that perceived wrong. For that, he had to follow the new king into Bactria, which is part of modern-day Afghanistan.
Bactria proved to be highly difficult with regard to the terrain and the men who lived there:
… the conflict here was slow and brutal—guerrilla warfare and sieges that left Alexander and his men exhausted and disillusioned. The frozen mountains and blazing deserts of the region were a far cry from the battlefields they were used to, and “glorious battle” seemed to be a thing of the past.
Alexander spent two agonizing years in Afghanistan, a major chunk of his historic campaign across western and central Asia. Granted, he didn’t leave the brutal landscape empty-handed: His primary goal in Bactria was to capture the traitorous Bessus, and he accomplished that. The rival claimant to the throne of the Persian Empire was dealt with, and Alexander could rightfully call himself the King of Kings. But the price he paid for that luxury was extreme.
Alexander’s most successful enemy in Afghanistan was the land itself. He lost far more men to the frigid peaks of the Hindu Kush or the scorching Northern Afghan desert than to any military resistance he faced. And when he did try to engage enemy forces, he found himself playing a frustrating game of whack-a-mole.
Once he left, his victory was short-lived:
Fighting in Afghanistan was a Sisyphean task, and Alexander’s grip on the region started slipping the moment that he left. While it was considered a part of the enormous Empire that he left after his death, control of the territory was tenuous at best. Revolts began almost the moment that Alexander dropped dead, and they seemingly never truly stopped. Rebellion was simply a reality for any foreign state that attempted to claim sovereignty over the unforgiving landscape.
Nonetheless, he left a legacy with the foundation of several cities, including Kandahar. He also found a wife there:
He founded many cities as he chased Bessus across the region, some of which still exist today. The most notable is the city of Kandahar, which he named Alexandria Arachosia (in fact, it’s believed that the name Kandahar itself is derived from the Persian name for Alexander, Iskandar). He also found his famous bride, the beautiful Roxana, whom he loved above all others, in the region. But while Alexander left his mark on Afghanistan, Afghanistan also left its mark on him.
Centuries later, the British tried to control the country as did the Soviets. Both failed.
That would not stop another British foray nor did it stop the Americans.
The Americans tried their best
I have only a few bookmarks on the Americans’ long-term mission in Afghanistan.
In October 2009, Michelle Malkin found two reports about a deadly attack on US troops. She wrote (emphasis in the original):
An incredible account from ABC News reporter Karen Russo, who notes that wounded troops refused to leave the battlefield this weekend during the deadly siege at Kamdeysh:
Flying into the besieged Afghan base during a nighttime firefight this weekend is a harrowing mix of overwhelming noise, stomach dropping maneuvers and shadows hurrying through the gloom.
When the chopper lifted off moments later with three wounded soldiers, it left behind others who were wounded but refused to be MEDEVACED out of the combat zone so they could return to fight with their buddies.
As fighting at two U.S. outposts raged on the ground this weekend, the MEDEVAC team at a nearby base waited – with both patience and frustration.
Eight soldiers, all from Fort Carson, were killed that night. Malkin cited another report (emphases mine):
In the deadliest day for Fort Carson since Vietnam, eight soldiers from the post’s 4th Brigade Combat Team died in Afghanistan on Saturday when insurgents attacked a pair of remote outposts in Nuristan province …
“My heart goes out to the families of those we have lost and to their fellow Soldiers who remained to finish this fight,” Col. Randy George, the brigade’s commander, said in a statement late Saturday. “This was a complex attack in a difficult area. Both the U.S. and Afghan Soldiers fought bravely together; I am extremely proud of their professionalism and bravery.”
Later that month, when Obama had been in the White House for less than a year, Global Research published ‘America’s Phoney War in Afghanistan’, which posited that the real reasons for being in Afghanistan were far removed from terror. Controlling the opium supply there was one real objective. The second was to maintain a bulwark against Russia and China.
Excerpts follow:
The US military is in Afghanistan for two reasons. First to restore and control the world’s largest supply of opium for the world heroin markets and to use the drugs as a geopolitical weapon against opponents, especially Russia. That control of the Afghan drug market is essential for the liquidity of the bankrupt and corrupt Wall Street financial mafia.
According even to an official UN report, opium production in Afghanistan has risen dramatically since the downfall of the Taliban in 2001. UNODC data shows more opium poppy cultivation in each of the past four growing seasons (2004-2007), than in any one year during Taliban rule. More land is now used for opium in Afghanistan, than for coca cultivation in Latin America. In 2007, 93% of the opiates on the world market originated in Afghanistan. This is no accident.
It has been documented that Washington hand-picked the controversial Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun warlord from the Popalzai tribe, long in the CIA’s service, brought him back from exile in the USA, created a Hollywood mythology around his “courageous leadership of his people.” According to Afghan sources, Karzai is the Opium “Godfather” of Afghanistan today. There is apparently no accident that he was and is today still Washington’s preferred man in Kabul. Yet even with massive vote buying and fraud and intimidation, Karzai’s days could be ending as President.
The second reason the US military remains in Afghanistan long after the world has forgotten even who the mysterious Osama bin Laden and his alleged Al Qaeda terrorist organization is or even if they exist, is as a pretext to build a permanent US military strike force with a series of permanent US airbases across Afghanistan. The aim of those bases is not to eradicate any Al Qaeda cells that may have survived in the caves of Tora Bora, or to eradicate a mythical “Taliban” which at this point according to eyewitness reports is made up overwhelmingly of local ordinary Afghanis fighting to rid their land once more of occupier armies as they did in the 1980’s against the Russians.
The aim of the US bases in Afghanistan is to target and be able to strike at the two nations which today represent the only combined threat in the world today to an American global imperium, to America’s Full Spectrum Dominance as the Pentagon terms it …
Each Eurasian power brings to the table essential contributions. China has the world’s most robust economy, a huge young and dynamic workforce, an educated middle class. Russia, whose economy has not recovered from the destructive end of the Soviet era and of the primitive looting during the Yeltsin era, still holds essential assets for the combination. Russia’s nuclear strike force and its military pose the only threat in the world today to US military dominance, even if it is largely a residue of the Cold War. The Russian military elites never gave up that potential.
As well Russia holds the world’s largest treasure of natural gas and vast reserves of oil urgently needed by China. The two powers are increasingly converging via a new organization they created in 2001 known as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). That includes as well as China and Russia, the largest Central Asia states Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.
The purpose of the alleged US war against both Taliban and Al Qaeda is in reality to place its military strike force directly in the middle of the geographical space of this emerging SCO in Central Asia. Iran is a diversion. The main goal or target is Russia and China.
Officially, of course, Washington claims it has built its military presence inside Afghanistan since 2002 in order to protect a “fragile” Afghan democracy. It’s a curious argument given the reality of US military presence there.
In December 2004, during a visit to Kabul, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld finalized plans to build nine new bases in Afghanistan in the provinces of Helmand, Herat, Nimrouz, Balkh, Khost and Paktia. The nine are in addition to the three major US military bases already installed in the wake of its occupation of Afghanistan in winter of 2001-2002, ostensibly to isolate and eliminate the terror threat of Osama bin Laden.
The Pentagon built its first three bases at Bagram Air Field north of Kabul, the US’ main military logistics center; Kandahar Air Field, in southern Afghanistan; and Shindand Air Field in the western province of Herat. Shindand, the largest US base in Afghanistan, was constructed a mere 100 kilometers from the border of Iran, and within striking distance of Russia as well as China.
Afghanistan has historically been the heartland for the British-Russia Great Game, the struggle for control of Central Asia during the 19th and early 20th Centuries. British strategy then was to prevent Russia at all costs from controlling Afghanistan and thereby threatening Britain’s imperial crown jewel, India.
Afghanistan is similarly regarded by Pentagon planners as highly strategic. It is a platform from which US military power could directly threaten Russia and China, as well as Iran and other oil-rich Middle East lands. Little has changed geopolitically over more than a century of wars.
Afghanistan is in an extremely vital location, straddling South Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Afghanistan also lies along a proposed oil pipeline route from the Caspian Sea oil fields to the Indian Ocean, where the US oil company, Unocal, along with Enron and Cheney’s Halliburton, had been in negotiations for exclusive pipeline rights to bring natural gas from Turkmenistan across Afghanistan and Pakistan to Enron’s huge natural gas power plant at Dabhol near Mumbai. Karzai, before becoming puppet US president, had been a Unocal lobbyist.
By the time the article was posted, there was allegedly little terrorism threat left:
… the National Security Adviser to President Obama, former Marine Gen. James Jones has made a statement, conveniently buried by the friendly US media, about the estimated size of the present Al Qaeda danger in Afghanistan. Jones told Congress, “The al-Qaeda presence is very diminished. The maximum estimate is less than 100 operating in the country, no bases, no ability to launch attacks on either us or our allies.”
That means that Al-Qaeda, for all practical purposes, does not exist in Afghanistan. Oops…
If we follow the statement to its logical consequence we must conclude then that the reason German soldiers are dying along with other NATO youth in the mountains of Afghanistan has nothing to do with “winning a war against terrorism.” Conveniently most media chooses to forget the fact that Al Qaeda to the extent it ever existed, was a creation in the 1980’s of the CIA, who recruited and trained radical muslims from across the Islamic world to wage war against Russian troops in Afghanistan as part of a strategy developed by Reagan’s CIA head Bill Casey and others to create a “new Vietnam” for the Soviet Union which would lead to a humiliating defeat for the Red Army and the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union.
Now US NSC head Jones admits there is essentially no Al Qaeda anymore in Afghanistan. Perhaps it is time for a more honest debate from our political leaders about the true purpose of sending more young to die protecting the opium harvests of Afghanistan.
Nonetheless, terror remained a by-product of the American presence in Afghanistan. One Afghan-American visitor was so affected by his time there that he returned to launch terror attacks of his own in the Chelsea district of Manhattan as well as in a shore town in New Jersey. He was from Elizabeth, New Jersey.
On September 19, 2016, the Boston Herald reported that a friend of the suspect said that the visit to Afghanistan was ‘life-changing’:
A man who described himself as a childhood friend of the 28-year-old busted today in connection with this weekend’s New York-area bombings told the Herald the suspect made a life-changing trip to Afghanistan two years ago.
“At one point he left to go to Afghanistan, and two years ago he came back, popped up out of nowhere and he was real religious,” friend Flee Jones, 27, said of suspect Ahmad Khan Rahami. “And it was shocking. I’m trying to understand what’s going on. I’ve never seen him like this.”
Police this morning released a photo of Rahami, an Afghan immigrant and U.S. citizen, wanted for questioning in the bombings that rocked a Manhattan neighborhood and a New Jersey shore town. Rahami was taken into custody after a gunfight in nearby Linden today at 11:20 a.m. (See that story here…)
The terror suspect’s arrest came after investigators this morning swarmed a chicken restaurant and apartment here in connection with the hunt for Rahami, Elizabeth Mayor Christian Bollwage told the Herald …
Bollwage told the Herald the search began after five people were pulled over on the Belt Parkway last night in connection with the bombing in Chelsea. That led to the search of First American Fried Chicken and the apartment above it in Elizabeth, Bollwage said, but it was unclear how the people detained were connected to the restaurant.
In addition to the blast in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood on Saturday that injured dozens, a pipe bomb exploded in a New Jersey shore town before a charity 5K race and an unexploded pressure cooker device was found blocks away from the explosion site in Chelsea. Yesterday, five explosive devices were discovered at an Elizabeth train station.
FBI agents as well as state and local police were in the eatery and the apartment upstairs, which are cordoned off by yellow crime tape. Investigators towed a black Toyota sedan away from the street in front of the restaurant this morning …
According to an Elizabeth resident, Rahami worked the register at the restaurant and was in charge when his father was gone.
A few months earlier, in June, the father of mass shooter Omar Raheem allegedly supported the Taliban and wanted to become president of Afghanistan. The Daily Mail reported:
Mass shooter Omar Mateen’s father Seddique Mateen recently visited Congress, the State Department and met political leaders during a trip to Washington, DC.
Mateen, who made the trip in April, is seen in social media posts posing in front of the State Department and Democratic Foreign Services Committee offices.
The Afghanistan native, who also regularly writes open letters to President Barack Obama, has expressed gratitude [to the] Afghan Taliban who hosts the Durand Jirga Show on a channel called Payam-e-Afghan, which broadcasts from California …
Dozens of videos are posted under Mateen’s name on YouTube, where he speaks on a range of political subjects in the Dari language.
One video shows him declaring his candidacy for the Afghan presidency.
Posts include topics such as ‘Rise Afghan people against Pakistan’ and ‘Intelligent service and Military of Pakistan real Enemy of the USA (sic)’.
In one video the elder Mateen holds up a sign that reads: ‘ISI Pakistan and Military is Destroying 14 years of US work in Afghanistan to cut AID to killers’.
Meanwhile, the Taliban were still terrorising children, revealing the fact that local government was superior to that from the nation’s capital, Kabul. On June 12, 2010, the Taliban hanged a seven-year-old boy in order to punish his family. The Telegraph reported:
Del Awar, aged seven, was taken at sunset and found hanging in an orchard at sunrise the following day.
Bruises and scratches around the young boy’s neck suggested his murder had been neither quick, nor easy, according to those who saw his slight body after it was cut down.
His death is widely believed to have been punishment for the stand taken by his family against the Taliban in their remote Helmand village.
Reports from the village of Heratiyan in Sangin district said Del Awar’s father, Abdul Qudoos, and grandfather, Abdel Satar, had grown tired of Taliban intimidation and the violence the militants attracted.
The family had either demanded rebel fighters stop using village compounds to stage ambushes or had refused a demand of £400 for machine guns, villagers reported.
The two men had been angrily denounced as Nato or US spies and unknown to them, Del Awar’s cruel fate was sealed.
The Taliban have denied the killing, but in Heratiyan where villagers must live under the reality of complete militant control, many privately doubt their protestations.
Awar’s father, Abdul Qudoos, was a poor man who could not send his children to school and did not have a feud with anyone, explained Maulawi Shamsullah Sahrai, a 50-year-old elder from the village …
For those accused of collaboration with the Nato-led forces or with Mr Karzai’s weak government, Taliban control often means rapid summary execution.
Afghanistan brought other peculiarities involving alliances through sexual relations. In 2014, an American couple sued the United States Marines for allegedly covering up the circumstances of their son’s death in 2012. The New York Post reported:
The shattered family of a Long Island Marine murdered by an Afghan rebel on an American military base in 2012 is suing the corps and top brass for allegedly covering up details of the incident, The Post has learned.
Relatives of Lance Cpl. Greg Buckley Jr., 21, of Oceanside, say his killer served as a “tea boy” for an infamous Afghan police chief who was allowed to operate out of the Helmand province compound despite his perverse reputation, according to the Brooklyn federal suit filed Wednesday.
Ainuddin Khudairaham walked into a gym on the base and shot dead Buckley, Cpl. Richard Rivera and Staff Sgt. Scott Dickinson. He proclaimed himself a jihadist before being arrested.
Khudairaham was employed on the base by Sarwar Jan, a notorious Afghan police chief with a taste for young boys, drug dealing, and trading arms with the Taliban, the suit states.
He had already been ejected from another village for his unsavory activities and the US military compiled a dossier of his ugly exploits long before he arrived at Buckley’s base, court papers state.
Afghan women continued to be terrorised, as the Daily Mail reported on December 28, 2016, after Donald Trump had been elected president:
A woman has reportedly been beheaded by a group of armed men in Afghanistan after she entered a city without her husband.
The horrific act took place in the remote village of Latti in Sar-e-Pul province, which is under Taliban control.
Provincial Governor spokesman Zabiullah Amani told the Nation that the 30-year-old woman was targeted because she went out alone without her husband, who is in Iran.
The Middle East Press reported the woman had gone to the market to shop.
Under Taliban rule women are prohibited from leaving their homes unless accompanied by a close male relative.
They are also banned from working or education and are forced to wear the burqa.
The Taliban have rejected any involvement in this latest incident …
Gateway Pundit carried the story and said that Trump would bring better days:
There is hope, however because Donald Trump has publicly stated that ‘things will be different after January 20th’.
Terrorism persisted in Afghanistan. On April 13, 2017, Trump retaliated with a MOAB, Mother of All Bombs:
Here is a video of the MOAB:
A Fox News article from that time stated that the MOAB had been tested for deployment as early as 2003:
It was first tested in 2003, but hadn’t been used in combat before Thursday.
Pentagon spokesman Adam Stump said the bomb had been brought to Afghanistan “some time ago” for potential use. The bomb explodes in the air, creating air pressure that can make tunnels and other structures collapse. It can be used at the start of an offensive to soften up the enemy, weakening both its infrastructure and morale.
“As [ISIS’] losses have mounted, they are using IEDs, bunkers and tunnels to thicken their defense,” Gen. John Nicholson, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, said in a statement. “This is the right munition to reduce these obstacles and maintain the momentum of our offensive against [ISIS].”
President Trump told media Thursday afternoon that “this was another successful mission” and he gave the military total authorization.
Trump was also asked whether dropping the bomb sends a warning to North Korea.
“North Korea is a problem, the problem will be taken care of,” said Trump.
It was thought that the MOAB was launched in retaliation for the death of a Green Beret soldier. The Daily Mail reported that the Pentagon denied any revenge:
The blast killed 36 militants as it destroyed three underground tunnels as well as weapons and ammunition, a spokesman for the Afghan Ministry of Defense said.
No civilians were hurt, he added.
U.S. forces used a 30-foot long, GPS-guided GBU-43 bomb, at around 7.30pm local time in the Nangarhar Province …
A crater left by the blast is believed to be more than 300 meters (1,000 feet) wide after it exploded six feet above the ground. Anyone at the blast site was vaporized …
The Pentagon is denying that the attack was a revenge strike despite the fact that it came in the same area of Afghanistan where a Green Beret soldier was killed on Saturday.
Staff Sgt. Mark De Alencar of the 7th Special Forces Group was cut down by enemy small arms fire while his unit was conducting counter-ISIS operations.
A WikiLeaks document, quoting a New York Times article, says that the CIA had built those tunnels with the help of their then-ally, Osama bin Laden, who had a degree in civil engineering. He tapped into his family’s construction equipment. They owned the Saudi Binladin Group:
From the White House, Sean Spicer confirmed the MOAB hit. Nearly two-thirds of registered American voters approved.
Weeks later, on May 7, the US confirmed they had taken out Afghanistan’s head of ISIS at the end of April. Reuters reported:
The head of Islamic State in Afghanistan, Abdul Hasib, was killed in an operation on April 27 conducted jointly by Afghan and U.S. Special Forces in the eastern province of Nangarhar, U.S. and Afghan officials said on Sunday.
Hasib, appointed last year after his predecessor Hafiz Saeed Khan died in a U.S. drone strike, is believed to have ordered a series of high profile attacks including one in March 8 on the main military hospital in Kabul, a statement said.
Last month, a Pentagon spokesman said Hasib had probably been killed during the raid by U.S. and Afghan special forces in Nangarhar during which two U.S. army Rangers were killed, but prior to Sunday’s announcement there had been no confirmation.
“This successful joint operation is another important step in our relentless campaign to defeat ISIS-K in 2017,” the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John Nicholson said in a statement from U.S. military headquarters in Kabul.
Late that summer, on August 21, Trump gave a speech on the future of Afghanistan, stating that he was weary of the American presence. He said that the country would need to sort its own governance out. He told the terrorists that America was keeping a close eye on them. He threatened to withdraw funding for Pakistan if they continued to support terrorists. He requested help and support from India. The short version is here, but beware of the language from the person summarising it.
The full transcript of Trump’s speech is here. It is too long to excerpt. He delivered it before the first lady, Mike Pence and a group of American troops.
By October 13, Pakistan was helping the United States. That day, Trump tweeted:
Starting to develop a much better relationship with Pakistan and its leaders. I want to thank them for their cooperation on many fronts.
Nearly one year later, on September 3, 2018 — Labor Day — an American soldier serving in Operation Resolute Support was killed in an attack on NATO forces. He was the sixth American to fall in Afghanistan that year.
Two days earlier, news emerged that China was encroaching on Afghanistan, specifically into the Wakhan Corridor, which connects China’s westernmost province of Xinjiang to Afghanistan. This is a thin tongue-shaped area of land, which you can see in a map here.
On September 1, Lawrence Sellin, a retired colonel in the US Army Reserve, wrote an article for the Indian Center for Diplomatic Studies, ‘China Moves into Afghanistan As Part of Its Global Expansion Mission’.
He wrote that China was seeking to end the Afghan conflict and enhance their own strategic standing:
For many, it was a stunning development. China will build a brigade-size military training facility in the strategic Wakhan Corridor, the land bridge between Tajikistan and Pakistan, which is located in Afghanistan’s northeast Badakhshan province and borders China.
Although Beijing denied the claim that hundreds of Chinese soldiers will be deployed to Afghanistan, a source close to the Chinese military stated, “Construction of the base has started, and China will send at least one battalion of troops, along with weapons and equipment, to be stationed there and provide training to their Afghan counterparts.”
For those who have been closely following growing Chinese influence in Afghanistan, the above report comes as no surprise.
A year earlier on August 14, 2017, Spogmai radio quoted the spokesman for the Afghan Ministry of Defense (translation): “A brigade base will be built to maintain the security of Badakhshan, which will be funded by China.”
The spokesman stated that China has steadily increased its military cooperation with Afghanistan and had, at that point, already provided $73 million in military aid.
Beyond the enormous geopolitical implications of a Chinese military base inside Afghanistan, the Badakhshan installation is the final security link between Tajikistan, vital to China’s commercial interests in Afghanistan, and Pakistan, China’s “all-weather” ally in South Asia.
It was largely unreported that China financed border outposts and deployed troops to Tajikistan’s eastern Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region, which borders Afghanistan’s Badakhshan province and is part of the Wakhan Corridor.
Consolidating a Chinese presence in Badakhshan province, the Afghan Ministry of Information and Technology has discussed signing a contract with China Telecom for a fiber optic network connecting China to the Wakhan Corridor. No doubt, the intention is to couple that system to the larger network linking China with Pakistan, the Middle East and Africa.
China is already Afghanistan’s biggest investor. In 2007 it took a $3 billion, 30-year lease for the Aynak copper mine. China and Pakistan have offered to extend the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) to Afghanistan. Some have concluded that the CPEC invitation is a prelude to positioning China as a mediator to end the Afghan conflict.
I will stop there and continue tomorrow.
Involvement in Afghanistan is an unholy mess, aided and abetted by China and its allies.
In further coverage of what used to be called Operation — or Project — Mockingbird, the diffusion of certain headlines via the media is still alive and well.
On Thursday and Friday, August 2 and 3, 2018, the subject was QAnon, who must have hit a huge nerve among the powers that be.
Here’s the flurry of American headlines from last Thursday:
The following day, a contributor to 8chan’s Q Research board posted the following international stories, all of which are about QAnon fostering Trumpian conspiracy theories:
Anonymous e71061 (4) No.2430466>>2430476 >>2430709
Qanon MSM news exposure went global past 24 hours
Example for several countries
France
https://http://www.20minutes.fr/monde/2316919-20180803-qanon-groupe-pro-trump-adepte-theories-complot
Germany
Netherlands
https://http://www.ad.nl/buitenland/qanon-rukt-op-in-amerika-complotgekkies-of-wakkere-patriotten~aa24a2ab/
Norwegian
https://http://www.dagbladet.no/nyheter/konspirerer-om-at-trump-star-bak-en-kommende-storm/70069810
Spanish
https://http://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-internacional-45053116
Austria
https://derstandard.at/2000084612925/Paedophiler-Tom-Hanks-QAnon-nutzt-uralte-Diffamierungstaktik
Poland
Italy
https://notizie.tiscali.it/esteri/articoli/usa-mistero-qanon-complottisti-che-adorano-trump-00001/
Hungary
https://http://www.express.hr/top-news/poremecena-sekta-za-trumpa-izmisljaju-teorije-zavjera-16966
Czech Republic
China
https://paper.wenweipo.com/2018/08/03/YO1808030018.htm
Russia
https://echo.msk.ru/blog/karina_orlova/2252088-echo/
Korean
https://news.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2018/08/03/2018080300118.html
I read only the French article and the comments. The latter were particularly interesting, as the readers were divided. Someone wrote a characteristically critical remark about President Trump and his supporters, to which someone replied, ‘Inform yourself a bit before commenting. Trump’s doing a great job, especially with the economy’.
Back to the 8chan comment. Q responded (message 1806), emphases mine:
Q !CbboFOtcZs d51ef9 (1) No.2430708
Full attack mode.
Washington Post leading?
[Sample Past 5hrs]
Who owns the Washington Post?
Amazon?
What ABC agency is heavily tied to Amazon?
https://http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-web-services-launches-secret-region-2017-11
https://http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-20/cia-tech-official-calls-amazon-cloud-project-transformational
Q
Why would the rest of the world need — or even want — to know about QAnon and Q-related boards, including Reddit’s greatawakening?
By design, this Nightingale’s song serves only to thoroughly discredit Trump’s followers. What if a false flag were to take place with a fake Q follower? These articles could set the stage. The world would say, ‘Oh, the QAnon story was in the papers. Yeah, crazy people’.
Therefore, this is important:
Interestingly, the Washington Post featured an editorial after the Trump-Putin Helsinki meeting: ‘God bless the “deep state”‘, an image of which is here. It begins with this:
Before this harebrained and reckless administration is history, the nation will have cause to celebrate the public servants derided by Trumpists as the supposed “deep state” …
God bless them. With a supine Congress unwilling to play the role it is assigned by the Constitution, the deep state stands between us and the abyss.
If you appreciate President Trump, please continue to pray for his safety and that of his family and administration.
In November 2017, I wrote about the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird, which ran from the 1950s until the mid-1970s.
In principle, it’s over. However, as with so many other CIA programmes — e.g. MK-Ultra — it probably got another name. MK-Ultra was the name for mind conditioning between the 1950s and 1970s. The Church Committee put an end to both MK-Ultra and Mockingbird.
Does anyone think that the CIA really stopped both of those? Or did they end in name only?
On Tuesday, March 27, 2018, an eagle-eyed contributor to the Q-related Great Awakening board on Reddit put together that morning’s headlines (photo below, courtesy of michaelst2256):
The media allegedly receive their talking points at 4 a.m. Operation Mockingbird is so called because it is the only bird to sing at night, specifically bachelors looking for a mate.
Try this with headlines you see and news broadcasts you hear. Nearly every media outlet runs with the same set of stories and buzzwords each day. I’ve seen this for years. It was good of this man to put together an image as proof.
Warning: some readers might find the second half of this post disturbing.
A lot of confusion surrounds the Florida school shooting that took place on Valentine’s Day 2018.
One thing is certain: gun control is once again the current topic.
A case in point is Philip Mudd:
a deputy director for the FBI’s national security branch and an ex-CIA agent, Philip Mudd has interviewed terrorists and is considered a counterterrorism expert.
Mudd also loathes President Donald Trump, which is useful information in reading what he told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. From USA Today:
“I have 10 nieces and nephews who are talking about bump stocks,” he said. “We’re talking about legislation. A child of God is dead. Cannot we acknowledge in this country that we can’t — we cannot accept this.”
He continued before breaking down in tears: “I can’t do it, Wolf, I’m sorr… — We can’t do it.”
Mudd’s emotional response came after Wednesday’s shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. At least 17 people were killed.
On February 16, a contributor to the CBTS_Stream board on Reddit, a Q discussion site, posted part of a page from the 1990 book, Behold A Pale Horse, written by William Cooper, a distinguished US Navy intelligence veteran. More about him in a moment.
For now, note the following from page 225 of the book (image courtesy of CBTS_Stream):
Mudd’s crying on television is designed to hype up the call for gun control. His mention of God is a particularly cynical move.
Reports say that the suspect in the shooting is a white supremacist. Seems strange for someone whose surname is Cruz.
Once again, the media has hauled out the white supremacist tag as they so often do when a light-skinned person commits a mass shooting.
Psychotropics
What we should be asking is if this young man was taking prescription SSRIs — psychotropics — for a mental health disorder.
On October 9, 2017 — eight days after the Mandalay Bay massacre in Las Vegas — the mental health watchdog, CCHR International, published an excellent article on psychotropics and mass shootings. Excerpts follow, emphases mine.
This is the introduction to the article:
Twenty-seven drug regulatory agency warnings cite psychiatric drug side effects of mania, psychosis, violence and homicidal ideation; 1,531 cases of psychiatric drug induced homicide/homicidal ideation have been reported to the US FDA; 65 high profile cases of mass shootings/murder have been committed by individuals under the influence of these drugs, yet there has never been a federal investigation into the link between seemingly senseless acts of violence and the use of mind-altering psychotropic drugs.
The first part of the article discusses Stephen Paddock’s prescribed Valium use.
The FDA does not receive many reports of homicide/homicidal ideation links to psychotropic drugs (bold emphasis in the original here, purple highlight mine):
… according to the FDA’s MedWatch reporting system for drug side effects, over a 10-year period, the FDA received 1,531 cases of homicidal ideation/homicide attributed to psychiatric drugs, 40% of which were reported by medical professionals. The FDA admits that only 1-10% of drug side effects are ever reported to MedWatch, so taking a medium range of 5%, the number could easily be 30,620 cases of homicidal ideation/homicide attributed to psychiatric drugs.
Regarding the concept that psychiatric drugs could not have been a contributing factor in a case where the perpetrator was involved in extensive planning or preparations, we look to the definition of “homicidal,” which includes homicidal ideation, a similar concept to the “suicidal ideation” black box warning on antidepressant drugs:
“Homicidal … may encompass a broad variety of ideation and behaviors. They may range from globally aggressive thoughts… to a specific lethal plan with available means to carry it out.”
— Emergency Psychiatry journal
The article acknowledges that these drugs can help many people, however, some patients will go off the rails.
The FDA gets so few reports of drug-linked homicide (ideation) because law enforcement is not required to test for the presence of these drugs:
There have been 65 high profile acts of senseless violence, including mass school shootings, mass stabbings, and even the intentional crashing of a commercial airplane, committed by individuals taking or withdrawing from psychiatric drugs, resulting in 357 dead and 336 wounded. Drug proponents argue that there are thousands of shootings and acts of violence that have not been correlated to psychiatric drugs, and that is exactly the point. They have neither been confirmed nor refuted to have been connected to psychiatric drugs, as law enforcement is not required to investigate or report on prescribed drugs linked to violence, and media rarely pose the question.
This is what happened in New York State, where the state Senate attempted to require such testing :
The New York State Senate recognized the lack of reporting correlating mind-altering psychiatric drugs to both suicide and violence as far back as 2000, when the senate introduced a bill which would “require police to report to the Division of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS), certain crimes and suicides committed by persons using psychotropic drugs,” citing “a large body of scientific research establishing a connection between violence and suicide and the use of psychotropic drugs.”
It never passed:
Unfortunately that bill stalled out in the finance committee, yet if that bill had passed, a reporting system would be in place to determine the extent to which violence is committed by those under the influence of mind-altering prescribed drugs.
These mass shootings are Russian Roulette on the American population:
With millions of Americans being prescribed psychiatric drugs, it’s apparent not everyone will experience violent reactions to the drugs, besides which, violence is only one of many documented side effects of psychiatric drugs. But what the drug regulatory agency warnings confirm, is that a percentage of the population will. And no one knows who will be next.
Scopolamine
There are also natural, non-prescription drugs that present a universal danger. One such drug is scopolamine, known as ‘devil’s breath’, which comes from a beautiful flowering tree in Colombia.
A light dusting of it removes a person’s free will. The victim agrees to do the perpetrator’s bidding. Afterwards, the victim might not remember a thing.
In 2012, the Daily Mail had an excellent, if horrifying, article on the power of this drug, based on research from a Vice.com reporter who travelled to Bogota to find out more:
The Mail‘s article says, in part:
According to the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, the drug – also known as hyoscine – causes the same level of memory loss as diazepam.
In ancient times, the drug was given to the mistresses of dead Colombian leaders – they were told to enter their master’s grave, where they were buried alive.
In modern times, the CIA used the drug as part of Cold War interrogations, with the hope of using it like a truth serum.
However, because of the drug’s chemical makeup, it also induces powerful hallucinations.
The tree [is] common around Colombia, and is called the ‘borrachero’ tree – loosely translated as the ‘get-you-drunk’ tree.
It is said that Colombian mothers warn their children not to fall asleep under the tree, though the leafy green canopies and large yellow and white flowers seem appealing.
Experts are baffled as to why Colombia is riddled with scopolamine-related crimes, but wager much of it has to do with the country’s torn drug-culture past, and on-going civil war.
Scary.
Conclusion
The question with mass shootings is NOT gun control or even bump stock control.
The real question, which nearly everyone is ignoring, has to do with psychotropic drugs.
Footnote on William Cooper
Cooper’s Behold A Pale Horse is 500 pages long, but nearly half of that is supplementary documentation. One of those documents is something no one should ever read, yet millions do.
The premise of the book is that, since 1917, there has been a plan to bring about the New World Order by getting the population to believe there is extra-terrestrial life then instilling fear in people about it to the extent that they will willingly do the state’s bidding. That’s a real stretch.
However, it makes one wonder if this is why a lot of Democrats are so interested in ETs, including Hillary Clinton and her campaign supremo John Podesta.
Anyone who thinks there are UFOs will enjoy Cooper’s book. Disclosure: that excludes me.
However, what is of interest is Cooper’s interspersing of historical elements about the American government and intelligence agencies, such as the page highlighted here.
What Cooper wrote must have been true, because his life was often in danger. In his autobiography at the beginning of the book (p. 33), he describes being forced off the road by a black limo in the hills of Oakland, California. The same limo ran into him again a month later, causing Cooper to lose a leg. That happened in the 1970s.
People who read the book commented on the CBTS_Stream thread cited at the top of this post.
Someone wrote:
They trailed him and harassed him for years. When Clinton was president they sicced the IRS on him on some “tax evasion” crap. He denied any of it was legit. They sent armed officers to his house one day to take him in. He probably knew he’d never get out once they had him, and a gunfight broke out (supposedly). Apache County sheriffs deputy killed him. I don’t remember if his wife and daughter were home. Daughter was about +/-4yrs old when they killed him. I don’t know what ever happened to them.
Another added:
In July 2001, Cooper predicted a large scale terrorist attack would occur in a large metropolitan city (for purposes of garnering worldwide attention) and he specifically said it would be blamed on Osama Bin Laden, not that he was psychic but because he knew the dark side (deep state) of government. The Apache Co. Sheriffs Dept. came for him on the fifth of November in 2001. He died the next day from his wounds suffered in the previous evening’s gun battle.
Wikipedia tells us about his death in Arizona:
As Cooper moved away from the UFOlogy community and toward the militia and anti-government subculture in the late 1990s, he became convinced that he was being personally targeted by President Bill Clinton and the Internal Revenue Service. In July 1998 he was charged with tax evasion; an arrest warrant was issued, but Cooper eluded repeated attempts to serve it. In 2000, he was named a “major fugitive” by the United States Marshals Service.[6]
On November 5, 2001, Apache County sheriff’s deputies attempted to arrest Cooper at his Eagar, Arizona home on charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and endangerment stemming from disputes with local residents. After an exchange of gunfire during which Cooper shot one of the deputies in the head, Cooper was fatally shot. Federal authorities reported that Cooper had spent years evading execution of the 1998 arrest warrant, and according to a spokesman for the Marshals Service, he vowed that “he would not be taken alive”.[1]
I feel sorry for William Cooper. It must have been awful to have been so caught up in the Deep State. It does things to the mind.
When I posted on the FISA memo last week, two of my readers asked questions about Christopher Steele, particularly why he is so anti-Trump.
I held off posting on this until now in the hopes that new information would surface about that. Unfortunately, it has not.
Christopher Steele
It is hard to say why Christopher Steele is so opposed to President Donald Trump.
It could be that is his mindset, given his work for and international involvement with security agencies.
In December 2017, Yoichi Shimatsu, a forensic journalist who was also an editor at The Japan Times for ten years, wrote an exclusive for Rense, ‘How A CIA-DOJ-FBI Team Forged The Trump-Russia Dossier’. It is worth reading. I haven’t included some of it, as there seems to be some questionable information about Steele. It is possible that parts that mention ‘Steele’ might be better worded as ‘people working for him’.
What follows is the story of how Steele ended up getting involved in the Russian dossier.
In 2006, Steele headed the MI-6 Russia desk. He retired in 2009 to co-found (emphases mine):
a for-hire investigative firm called Orbis Business Intelligence, which produced a series of 100 reports on the Ukraine-Russia crisis, which erupted in 2014, on contract with the U.S. State Department. In other words, the main author of the Trump-Russia Dossier had a lucrative contract under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton before her presidential campaign.
Shimatsu tells us that Steele might well have met Bruce Ohr, another player in the Trump surveillance scheme, in 2010, when investigating the FIFA scandal. (More about Ohr below.) The FBI went to London for an Orbis briefing on the scandal:
As chief of the DOJ international organized crime bureau, Bruce Ohr likely attended the London briefing, where he would have been first introduced to veteran spy Christopher Steele.
Shimatsu claims that Ohr and Steele met again in 2013. At that time, Ohr was Assistant Deputy Director at DOJ and presented a paper at the third St. Petersburg International Legal Forum:
The Korean-American Ohr presented a paper titled “Criminal Matters and Allegations of Crimes in International Arbitration”, a choice of topic timed to undermine Russian counter-claims in the Magnitsky affair. In hindsight it’s ironic that his lecture synopsis included an apt description of the yet to-be drafted Russia Dossier: “a party (in a dispute) may introduce false testimony or forged documents.”
Moscow and Washington were butting heads over the Magnitsky affair when the conference, sponsored by the Russian Federation’s Justice Ministry:
the Kremlin was locked in a controversy over U.S. congressional retaliation for the 2009 prison death of Russian-Jewish accountant Sergei Magnitsky.
(The Magnitsky Act was signed into US law in 2012.)
Before he was imprisoned, Magnitsky worked for Hermitage Capital, which Bill Browder co-owns. Magnitsky worked as an auditor for the firm:
investigating dozens of Russian tycoons allied with President Vladimir Putin as to their links with organized crime figures.
Ohr had a similar interest, as chief of the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section, in shady businessmen suspected of money laundering. His job also involved tracking international drug trafficking.
Shimatsu says that Steele was in Russia for the conference in St Petersburg, but is there any corroboration for that? See Glenn Simpson’s testimony to the House Intelligence Committee at the end of this post. According to Simpson, Steele had not been in Russia for 17 years. That would tie in with citizen journalists researching when he worked in Moscow: between 1990 and 1992. It is unclear whether he travelled there or was even allowed to enter the country at some point during that time and/or afterwards.
This brings in another Trump surveillance person into the mix, Carter Page. Ohr’s:
cyber-surveillance network would later focus, outside of its authority, on the activities of Trump adviser Carter Page in Russia and Croatia.
The next event, also in 2013, was the Miss Universe Pageant. Donald Trump was the head of the pageant at that time. As US intelligence agencies cannot spy on American citizens abroad, Steele’s — or was it his company’s? — assignment was to make sure the Russian mafia was not involved in skewing the results:
As it turned out, Miss Venezuela was crowned Miss Universe 2013, meaning Ohr had wasted a lot of American taxpayer money on a wild goose chase.
However, something more significant resulted:
That dated information from 2013 was recycled three years later into the Russia Dossier.
In 2016, Steele became involved in compiling the Russian dossier. Before getting to that part, let’s look at Bruce and Nellie Ohr.
Bruce Ohr
Until recently, Bruce Genesoke Ohr was unknown to the American public, including the media. He worked in the inner sanctum of the Robert F. Kennedy Building, the DOJ headquarters:
on the executive 4th floor, just four doors down from the suite of then Deputy Director Sally Quillian Yates, and since late April her replacement Rod Rosenstein … Ohr served as the assistant to Rosenstein, following the latter’s transfer from the Maryland DOJ office, showing the newcomer the ropes and keeping watch on him on behalf of Yates, Loretta Lynch, Holder and, ultimately, Barack Obama and the Clintons.
He lost his associate deputy attorney general title on December 7, 2017.
Also note:
Ohr, in short, is a partisan watchdog for the Democratic establishment, who’s shown absolutely no respect for the Constitution.
Even worse, Shimatsu asserts that Ohr was partly responsible for the corruption at the DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency), because that agency was under the authority of the International Organized Crime Drug office, which he was still in charge of until January 8, 2018:
The DOJ has also ignored nearly the entire CIA-run Afghan drug importation, at least since the Eric Holder years. Cocaine, of course, is being targeted by the DEA/DOJ, but that elite-status drug was never in style with the millennial generation, which prefers depressants like heroin mixed with synthetic opioids, on the path to Nirvana.
In July 2001, Ohr testified to the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, downplaying the infiltration of Indian reservation casinos by organised crime:
What Ohr completely failed to mention is how Indian casinos along the U.S.-Mexico border were becoming money-laundering centers for the Mexican mafia, lucrative enough for the Caesar’s team of Drexel Lambert junk-bond dealer to build a Harrah’s casino resort at Rincon reservation. Caesar’s Entertainment Group spectacularly collapsed two years ago, amid angry charges by institutional investors of fraud, financial crimes on a much greater scale than small-time gangster scams.
Ultimately:
The politically correct attitudes toward ethnic minorities, here again, has enabled massive expansion of the organized crime, which is ultimately detrimental to the minority groups to achieve genuine economic development and security from violence. The DOJ/FBI, run by front-men for crime, is [a] big part of the problem and not the solution.
Also:
That exactly is why and how the DOJ/FBI and CIA are enabling Chinese triads, the Taiwanese mob, Vietnamese mafia, Japanese yakuza and Korean gangsters to run heroin smuggling, prostitution rings and counterfeits products unimpeded into the United States. The fix is in with the Democratic Party, and the bad guys every hour of every day are winning the battle against the industrial economy and ethical principles of the USA.
Now to the 2016 campaign. Shimatsu tells us:
the DNC and Hillary campaign generously forked over up to a half-million dollars for the Trump-Russia fabrication.
Shimatsu explains something interesting about southeast Asians and the Democrats and why big donations are kept quiet:
… the Democratic Party relies so heavily on large unreported donations of cash from the urban Chinese and Korean business communities, suspect Asia-based businessmen and major crime groups. This tradition since the end of the Chinese Exclusion era is a feudal tribute legacy, by which Asian “leaders” (triad or organized crime figures) pay protection money (aka bribery) to Democrat politicians to enable illegal immigration of underpaid laborers, exemption from minimum wage laws and mandatory benefits for employees, unhealthy tenant crowding of buildings, and police neglect of the illicit trade in contraband, including methamphetamines, heroin and more recently synthetic opioids.
Asians, of course, are not alone in groveling before the powers that be, since most immigrants have had to pay their dues to Tammany Hall and dirty cops, from the Irish to the current wave of Arabs. Despite their strong academic performance, East Asians are perpetually under the Democratic Party heel due to the substandard status of the small-business economy. That is changing, for all the wrong reasons, with the pay-for residency by super-wealthy “businessmen” from East Asia, many of them wanted for economic crimes at home, including illicit capital flight. The United States is a sanctuary for Asian fraudsters and gangsters …
Nellie Ohr
As for Bruce’s wife Nellie, Shimatsu says nothing about her father. Her mother, Kathleen Armstrong Hauke, was active in leftist causes in the 1960s. In the 1980s, Hauke taught English in Nairobi, Kenya. She died in 2004.
Nellie has a ham radio licence, which Shimatsu says isn’t that unusual:
Shortwave radio hearkens back to the late Cold War era, when Nellie would have monitored Russian signals for the CIA. Since that Stone Age for telecommunications, Nellie Ohr became part of the CIA cyber-intelligence program known as Open Source Works (OSW), discussed below, which explains her intelligence role inside Fusion GPS, the private investigation group that hired Orbis and Christopher Steele to draft the Trump-Russia Dossier.
Until late 2017, she and her husband shared the same office, indicating that the Ohrs were:
part of a high-level inter-agency intelligence team.
The Ohrs, Steele and the dossier
Shimatsu winds the clock back to 2013 to the St Petersburg conference. However, was it Steele himself or an Orbis representative who attended? Donald Trump arrived in Russia one month later in advance of the beauty pageant:
What a tangled web they weave! The Ohr-Steele encounter in St. Petersburg turned out to be the very seed from which sprang the Trump-Russia Dossier … Just a month later, in June 2013, Donald Trump arrived with his advance team to make the arrangements for the Miss Universe pageant, scheduled for November 2013 at the Crocus hall in the Moscow suburb of Krasnogorsk.
Fast forward to 2016 and Fusion GPS:
the private investigation firm led by three former Wall Street Journal reporters …
… in mid-2016, the Seattle law firm Perkins Coie, representing the Hillary Clinton Foundation and Democratic National Committee, hired Fusion GPS to probe the Russian relationships of Trump and his associates with the aim of discrediting and defeating his presidential campaign …
Fusion GPS, therefore, was hired as a “cut out”, spy terminology for a neutral go-between created to shield the actual perpetrators in an exchange of stolen information. A psychological operation aimed at political intervention at this level required the direct involvement of and authorization from CIA director John Brennan and Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and this was to interfere in the elections in favor of their former colleague at State, Hillary Clinton, and not a matter of national security. Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper should have been aware of these illicit activities and was responsible for shutting down political subversion, meaning that he, too, bears some degree of responsibility for the bureaucratic assault on democracy.
Do readers notice how anti-Trump Brennan and Clapper are whenever they are interviewed on television? YouTube has various videos of them on news programmes and at conferences.
With regard to the dossier, Shimatsu says that Steele provided little of the content. Most of the content:
strongly appears to be based on CIA and NSA intercepts of phone calls and emails, along with human intelligence from informants. There is also an equally strong possibility that many, perhaps most, of the claims in the dossier are fabrications, lies. Nellie Hauke Ohr and her husband at DOJ reviewed and copied from classified files for the dossier in blatant violation of intelligence regulations. The method of direct translation, for example, “Russian regime” without the article “the”, indicates the CIA protocol followed by Nellie Ohr in radio intercepts. The tiny lapse shows that source is not Moscow but Langley, Virginia.
Shimatsu explains the role of Steele and his company, Orbis:
The notes from CIA and DOJ/FBI classified files, which Nellie Ohr compiled during her several months, during summer and autumn 2016, on the payroll of Fusion GPS while in Washington D.C.. Those materials were then “laundered” through Orbis for plausible deniability at the CIA. Fusion GPS paid the London-based firm more than $160,000, meaning the total budget for consultants, services, travel and communication was probably about a half-million dollars from the original source of funding (prior to DNC-Hillary, which was probably provided by a slush fund at the Clinton Foundation. To the heisted CIA material and forged information, Christopher Steele added his recollections from Donald Trump’s Miss Universe visits in 2013, supplemented by whatever hearsay picked up immediately after the contest. Examination of the dossier is similar to the findings from a forensic autopsy on Frankenstein’s monster: A lot of body parts that don’t fit together, laced together and patched with putty.
Nellie Ohr’s inchoate and disorganized editing, in contrast to the minimal standards at any daily newspaper, reveals the sloppiness that’s the norm at her post inside the CIA bureau known as Open Source Works, which itself is highly classified and anything but open …
In summary:
Open Source is now the major enterprise of the CIA in its effort to intimidate world leaders, corporate executives, military officers and media personalities. The Trump-Russia Dossier is an end-product of illicit CIA privacy violations, enhanced by selective editing and outright fabrication to incriminate the victim, in this case the President of the United States. The Frank Church amendments need to be upgraded to deal with terror by fake media, so that the offending bureaucrats and their political patrons can be locked away without access to cyberspace.
Present day
On January 22, 2018, just over a month after Shimatsu’s article was published, the New York Post had a report about the testimony to the House Intelligence Committee from Glenn Simpson, co-founder of Fusion GPS:
Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-South Carolina) asked Steele’s Clinton-paid handler Glenn Simpson, during the House Intelligence Committee’s Nov. 14 closed-door hearing, if Steele had gone “to Russia as part of this project,” to which Simpson replied, “No, sir.” Steele, at the time he compiled the dossier, hadn’t been back to Russia in 17 years.
If true, that clearly contradicts what Shimatsu alleges.
Simpson told the House Intelligence Committee that Steele:
ran a “network of subsources or subcontractors” who traveled around Russia and gathered information for him.
As for the framework of the dossier:
… it turns out the primary subcontractor worked not for Steele but for Simpson at Washington-based Fusion GPS, and he contributed key material for the investigation of Trump underwritten by the Clinton campaign.
Steele’s reputation preceded him:
Simpson says he completely deferred to Steele’s expertise and did not question his findings because of his “sterling reputation.” Simpson has pumped this guy up to be the real-life 007 so deep inside the Kremlin, he didn’t have to corroborate his information, yet Steele was so far out of the hunt, his tradecraft so rusty, he apparently had to rely on a Russian translator who flacked for Putin to gather his so-called intelligence.
These latest revelations make it all the more baffling that the FBI took Steele so seriously. They also suggest the public should not make that mistake.
Since then, a redacted version of Senator Charles Grassley’s memo on the dossier has been made public. More on that next week.
Earlier this week, I posted about an anti-Christmas message from 2014 that the Washington Post recycled this year.
There is more news about WaPo to tell.
A WaPo reader is upset
Jean-Marie Simon, who has read WaPo for 20 years, gave the paper information about her Christmas flight on United. Simon had bought a first-class ticket — seat 1A — only to find that she had been bumped by congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas).
The Daily Mail has the full story with photos and Simon’s relevant Facebook posts. It is not surprising that WaPo did not want to cover it. What is surprising is that Simon, a schoolteacher, thought they would do so (Facebook post courtesy of Reddit):
Here’s another — albeit facetious — view of the situation. Courtesy of 8chan:
One wonders if Simon will continue to read WaPo after this.
Perhaps this incident red-pilled her.
The Post
In other WaPo news, a movie — The Post — made its debut before Christmas. The New York Post gave it three out of four stars.
This film documents how WaPo increased its national prominence as a newspaper.
The story is about the Pentagon Papers, which was a huge exposé in 1971 about how Lyndon Johnson’s administration lied about the Vietnam War. Daniel Ellsberg was the Edward Snowden of his day. He had worked on the papers, a study officially called United States – Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense.
Ellsberg and a friend, Anthony Russo, photocopied the pages in 1969 and approached a few political luminaries to see if they would be interested in disclosing it. Henry Kissinger, who was Richard Nixon’s national security adviser at the time, declined. So did two Democrat legislators.
In 1971, Ellsberg approached a reporter at the New York Times, giving him 43 volumes the following month. These were not published until June 13 that year. The excerpts were dubbed The Pentagon Papers.
The Nixon administration quickly tried — but failed — to stop the NYT from publishing another excerpt on June 14. Although one would have thought Nixon — a Republican — would have relished this as Johnson was a Democrat, Henry Kissinger told him that allowing the excerpts to continue would be dangerous, as nothing would prevent newspapers from publishing dirty laundry from his administration.
Oh, the irony — think Watergate, which WaPo broke with daily coverage from Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
Furthermore, the Nixon administration argued that Ellsberg and his friend Russo were guilty of a felony because they were circulating classified documents.
Attorney General John Mitchell and Nixon obtained a federal injunction forcing the NYT to stop publication after three articles. The NYT appealed and the case New York Times Co. v. United States (403 U.S. 713) quickly ended up in the Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, Ellsberg had given other portions of the study to WaPo reporter Ben Bagdikian, who took them to the paper’s legendary editor, Ben Bradlee. WaPo began publishing the excerpts on June 18.
Assistant Attorney General William Rehnquist asked WaPo to stop publishing, but WaPo refused. Rehnquist tried — but failed — to get an injunction issued in US district court.
Ultimately, the NYT won the case in the Supreme Court on June 30, 1971. Fifteen other newspapers began publishing parts of the Pentagon Papers. In 1973, all charges against Ellsberg and Russo were dismissed — because of theft and bribery by the Nixon administration with regard to the case.
The Post shows how WaPo decided to publish the Pentagon Papers with all the drama involved.
The film also shows the male-dominated world of Katharine Graham, the only female publisher of a notable newspaper at the time. She was WaPo‘s publisher from 1969 to 1979. She then became chairman of the board and CEO before relinquishing the latter position in 1993. She continued to serve as chairman of the board until her death in 2001 at the age of 84.
Graham wisely put investigative reporting front and centre in a successful effort to ensure the NYT would not grab all the big Washington stories, such as the Pentagon Papers and Watergate.
The New York Post‘s review says that, when this film was made, a female occupant of the White House was envisioned for 2017.
So much for that.
The present occupant makes much out of fake news, predominant in today’s WaPo and the NYT.
Philip Graham
Katharine Meyer Graham rose to the top at WaPo because she succeeded her husband Philip. Also of note is that her father, Eugene Meyer, bought the paper in a bankruptcy auction in 1933. Philip Graham succeeded his father-in-law as publisher in 1946.
Philip Graham (1915-1963) was an interesting character with a lot of Deep State connections. Spartacus Educational has a well-researched entry on him. Do read it all, including the footnotes. A summary with excerpts follows.
He was born in a small town in South Dakota. His parents relocated to Florida during his childhood. Graham ended up attending Harvard Law School and edited the Harvard Law Review.
He married Katharine Meyer in 1940, during which time he was a law clerk for the famous Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. Graham joined the Army Air Corps in 1942. He worked for the head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), William Donovan. In 1944:
Graham was recruited into the “Special Branch, a super-secret part of Intelligence, run by Colonel Al McCormick”. He later worked under General George Kenney, commander of the Allied Air Forces in the Southwest Pacific. Graham was sent to China where he worked with John K. Singlaub, Ray S. Cline, Richard Helms, E. Howard Hunt, Mitchell WerBell, Jake Esterline, Paul Helliwell, Robert Emmett Johnson and Lucien Conein. Others working in China at that time included Tommy Corcoran, Whiting Willauer and William Pawley.
From this, we can see that he was incredibly well-connected to power.
After the war, as the publisher for WaPo, he expanded his network further with a group of men known as the Georgetown Set. They included:
Frank Wisner, George Kennan, Dean Acheson, Richard Bissell, Desmond FitzGerald, Joseph Alsop, Stewart Alsop, Tracy Barnes, Thomas Braden, David Bruce, Clark Clifford, Walt Rostow, Eugene Rostow, Chip Bohlen, Cord Meyer, James Angleton, William Averill Harriman, John McCloy, Felix Frankfurter, John Sherman Cooper, James Reston, Allen W. Dulles and Paul Nitze.
Whilst this is showing my age, I grew up hearing and reading a lot of those names.
It is likely that Graham already knew some of those men from the war. Allen Dulles, to name but one, ran the New York OSS office.
Dulles headed the CIA during Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency. Richard Bissell worked with him. Cord Meyer was in the CIA. Meyer was involved with Project, or Operation, Mockingbird, which used big media outlets to drive a government narrative:
According to Katherine Graham, her husband worked overtime at the Post during the Bay of Pigs operation to protect the reputations of his friends who had organized the ill-fated venture.
By the time of the 1960 presidential campaign, Graham did what he could to get Lyndon Johnson in the vice presidential slot for John Kennedy:
Graham met Lyndon B. Johnson in 1953. Graham believed that one day Johnson would make a good president. Graham told Johnson that his main problem was that he was perceived in Washington as someone under the control of the Texas oil and gas industry. Graham added that his attitude towards civil rights was also hurting him with liberals in the North. He was advised to go a “bit beyond (Richard) Russell and yet far short of (Hubert) Humphrey”.
Graham was a supporter of the Democratic Party and did what he could to get Johnson the nomination in 1960. When John F. Kennedy defeated Johnson he sent Clark Clifford to ask Stuart Symington to be his running-mate. Symington accepted the post but said: “I bet you a hundred dollars that no matter what he says, Jack will not make me his running mate. He will have to pick Lyndon”.
In the background Graham and Joseph Alsop were attempting to persuade John F. Kennedy to appoint Lyndon B. Johnson instead. Despite the objection of Robert Kennedy and other leading advisers, Kennedy decided to replace Symington with Johnson.
Once Kennedy was in the White House, Graham succeeded in persuading him to appoint his (Graham’s) buddies to administration positions: Douglas Dillon as Secretary of the Treasury, Arthur Schlesinger (former OSS) as a presidential adviser and David Bruce as ambassador to London.
Graham was able to expand the Washington Post Company by purchasing a radio and a television station as well as Newsweek and two prominent art magazines:
The main person involved in arranging Graham’s takeover of other media companies was Fritz Beebe. He ran the law firm Cravath, Swaine, & Moore. This was the company owned by Al McCormick, who Graham met during the war. Averell Harriman was another one involved in these negotiations.
Behind the scenes, things were less rosy, Even before Eugene Meyer died in 1959, a rift was growing between Philip and Katharine — Kay, to her friends. Graham’s mental state was not very good, either. Meyer wondered whether he should turn the company over to his son-in-law:
The Post publisher took a mistress, Robin Webb, whom he set up in a large house in Washington and a farm outside of the city. A heavy drinker who reportedly had manic-depressive tendencies, Graham, in some respects, was his own worst enemy, stridently abusive to his wife, both privately and publicly.
Katharine Graham’s biographer, Deborah Davis, posited that Graham was beginning to bother the CIA. After his second nervous breakdown he talked openly about how troubling he found Operation Mockingbird in terms of manipulating journalists:
He said it to the CIA… He turned against the newsmen and politicians whose code was mutual trust and, strangely, silence. The word was that Phil Graham could not be trusted. Graham was actually under surveillance by somebody. Davis has noted that one of Graham’s assistants “recorded his mutterings on scraps of paper.”
Others suggest that Graham had been damaged from undergoing CIA and other psychiatric treatments involving mind-altering drugs.
Graham told one of his close friends, WaPo attorney Edward Bennett Williams, that he wanted a divorce and planned on rewriting his will to leave everything — including the Washington Post Company — to his mistress instead of to Kay.
Williams was able to delay a divorce, but Graham rewrote his will three times in the spring of 1963. The last version omitted Kay altogether.
Then, Graham addressed a newspaper publishers convention in Arizona in a tirade about the CIA and Washington:
even to the point of exposing his friend John Kennedy’s affair with Mary Meyer, the wife of a top CIA official, Cord Meyer (no relation to Katharine Graham).
Katharine heard about it and flew to Phoenix:
and snatched up her husband who was captured after a struggle, put in a straitjacket and sedated. He was then flown to an exclusive mental clinic in the Washington suburb of Rockville, Md.
On the morning of Aug. 3, 1963, Katharine Graham reportedly told friends that Philip was “better” and coming home.
Suicides
That day in 1963, Philip Graham killed himself at home while Katharine was napping upstairs. The New York Post gives us this detail that other media outlets often suppress. He:
committed suicide at age 48 by shooting himself with a 28-gauge shotgun in 1963, days after being released from a psychiatric hospital following six weeks of treatment.
As he was not of sound mind when he died, his will was declared invalid. As he died intestate, Katharine assumed control of the Washington Post Company.
On December 20, 2017, one of the Grahams’ sons, William, 69, also committed suicide. He did not work at WaPo. He was a lawyer and law professor at UCLA. In later life, he turned to philanthropy. He died at his home in Los Angeles.
WaPo reported:
The cause was a self-inflicted gunshot wound, said his brother Donald E. Graham, a former Post publisher and chief executive.
Like Philip, William also left behind a wife and grown children. I hope they find comfort in the months ahead.
William did not live to see the national release of The Post.
On December 11, 2017, Politico published an extensive interview with former CIA head Mike Morell, ‘Ex-Spy Chief: Russia’s Election Hacking Was An “Intelligence Failure”‘.
This is an important admission:
So, I don’t think it was a mistake. I think there were downsides to it that I didn’t think about at the time. I was concerned about what is the impact it would have on the agency, right? Very concerned about that, thought that through. But I don’t think I fully thought through the implications.
One downside could have been not expecting Donald Trump to win the election.
Not thinking through the implications could be a way of saying that Americans now know that the CIA (like other security agencies) is politicised.
Here’s another interesting admission:
So, I think there was a significant downside to those of us who became political in that moment. So, if I could have thought of that, would I have ended up in a different place? I don’t know. But it’s something I didn’t think about.
No, because Hillary Clinton was a dead cert to win.
There is a bit more history to Mike Morell. Remember how, after 9/11, then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that the US government had received intelligence briefings weeks before but did not act on them? I do.
National Interest published an article in January 2017 about Mike Morell. This is what it says about 9/11:
On August 6, 2001, Morell served as the CIA debriefer for President Bush’s most critical ever Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB); the one that read, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S.” It was essential that he impress upon Bush the importance of the memo. But he didn’t. Morell recollected in his memoir that NSC staffer Steve Biegun, who accompanied Morell to the Crawford Ranch where Bush was vacationing, apparently relayed to others that he, Morell, had indicated to the president, “there was no need to worry about an Al Qaida attack on the homeland…” Morrell himself directly observed that in retrospect, “I did not treat it as a ‘hair on fire’ or action-forcing piece and the president did not read it that way either.”
Surely Bush was not given the assessment that Morell’s colleague, counter-terrorism expert, Cofer Black, gave to Condoleezza Rice weeks earlier: “An attack is impending” and “this country needs to go on a war footing now.” On 9/11, close to 3,000 people perished in attacks on both New York and Washington.
Despite that, Morell’s career continued its ascent:
The 2003 Iraq War provided an opportunity for Morell to advance his career. Leading a group of CIA analysts, he was assigned to help prepare Secretary of State Colin Powell’s February 5 U.N. Security Council speech.
Justifying the forthcoming invasion of Iraq, a passage in the speech affirmed that Iraq possessed “biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more.” False! We still don’t know who was directly responsible for leaving this passage in Powell’s speech. However, Morell was in charge of the CIA analysts who were vetting it. In 2015, Morell apologized to Powell.
Then came Benghazi in 2012:
Morell, then CIA Deputy Director, quickly learned it was a well-planned terrorist attack. However he also discovered the President and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, with the 2012 November election in mind, were pushing a different interpretation—a “spontaneous demonstration” over an anti-Muslim video. Given his status as a high-ranking official, it would be surprising if he did not receive, or was unaware of, an email from Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes: “The goal: To underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of [our] policy.”
Then Morell was asked to review an important document—the talking points that U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice was to disseminate to the media explaining the attack. Morell complied. He altered the talking points. The doctored, scrubbed and bogus video story was presented by Rice to the U.S. public on TV stations, helping to save Obama’s presidency. Yet, even after the elections, Morell, accompanied by Susan Rice, continued to defend his altered product with three GOP heavyweights, John McCain (R-AZ), Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) and Senator Lindsey Graham (R-NC).
[Senator Lindsay] Graham later reported Morell “did not accept responsibility for changing the talking points. He told me the FBI had done this. I called the FBI—They went ballistic. . . . Within 24 hours, this statement was changed where he [Morell] admitted the CIA had done it.”
Good grief.
This short video explains a lot about CIA activity in recent years, complete with newspaper sources. This is not fabricated:
The description reads:
How do you start a fight when your opponent doesn’t want a fight with you? You force it… you create fear… you create fear and sell another stinkin’ pile of lies til the body count meets your project goals.
There is more analysis on Morell and the CIA at Liberty Blitzkrieg.
