Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
JackRiddler » Wed Jan 11, 2017 8:15 pm wrote:Can't say I didn't enjoy SLAD's latest post here.
The War Between Intel Agencies and the President-Elect
BY NADINABBOTT on JANUARY 11, 2017 • ( 2 )
us_dni
Analysis by Reporting San Diego
Jan 11, 2017 (San Diego) During the press conference president-elect Donald Trump said that the release from CNN and Buzzfeed was fake news. He also denied that he was controlled by the Russians. Also, he accused both news outlets and the left in general of attacking his legitimacy. There are reasons for what is happening. They range from what the intelligence community is doing, to Trump. Moreover, they do have a precedent in American history, though the last time we had a president going to war with both the intelligence community and the media, he already had been sworn in.That was Richard, Milhaus Nixon, and the scandal was Watergate.
At the height of the scandal the Nixon administration, and especially John Halderman, started to charge the media as being biased against him. Instead of using the much older appellation of Lugenpresse, lying press, which we saw during the campaign, or fake news, like we saw this morning, Halderman coined the term “liberal press.” To many Americans born well after that period, liberal press might seem a normal thing, but it was not. It was an attack on the veracity of the media, and on the first amendment. So this is the first layer of this war. Trump has declared war on the media and is in the process of delegitimizing any outlet that will cover anything negative. This includes the release from the intelligence agencies that he might be under Russian control. This is just the outer layer of this onion and one that will be popular with Trump supporters who do indeed believe the press is against Republicans in general and Trump in particular.
The Deep State
Then we get into something a tad more complex that usually is limited to the inner corridors of power in Washington. Most people are not even aware of it’s existence. It started to take shape in the 1950s with the rise of the National Security State. In fact, the date of origin is actually 1947 when the National Security Act was signed by President Harry Truman. This is the Deep State, formed by members of the intelligence and military establishment that serve multiple administrations and are part of the civil service. They are the ones that ensure the continuity of foreign policy from one administration to the next, regardless as to what promises were made by presidential candidates. Michale J Glennon writes in the preface to National Security and Double Government the following:
The Obama administration, beyond ending torture, has changed “virtually none” of the Bush administration’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) programs and operations, except that in continuing targeted killings, the Obama administration has increased the number of covert drone strikes in Pakistan to six times the number launched during the Bush administration. The Obama administration has declined to prosecute those who committed torture (after the President himself concluded that waterboarding is torture); approved the targeted killing of American citizens (Anwar al-Awlaqi and a compatriot) without judicial warrant; rejected efforts by the press and Congress to release legal opinions justifying those killings or describing the breadth of the claimed power; and opposed legislative proposals to expand intelligence oversight notification requirements. His administration has increased the role of covert special operations, continuing each of the covert action programs that President Bush handed down. The Obama administration has continued the Bush administration’s cyberwar against Iran (code-named “Olympic Games”) and sought to block lawsuits challenging the legality of other national security measures, often claiming the state secrets privilege.
This is not unusual and reveals a continuation of policy from administration to administration. It is the voter who believes that any new president can deliver and that voter is solely misguided. There are certain things that are sacred to the other half of the government. This is the other half that none of us usually speaks about. They are not elected. Yet, they hold enormous power.
What is strange is that Trump has written in the past that he has a lot of respect for the intelligence professionals that right now he has gone to war with. Perhaps he believes that a change in the top layers will give him what he wants to hear. Given that one of his surprising confidants is Dick Cheney, who got exactly what he wanted before the Iraq war, perhaps he is crazy like a fox. But he has gone to war with the agencies. The rank and file intel professionals who produced the material stating that he might be compromised by the Russians are not the top layer of the agencies. They are, however, part of the deep state. Their political appointees come and go. So unless Trump intends to fire every last one of these civil service servants, this war will just intensify.
The release of the material, through not just a leak to the media, but also to Senator John McCain from Arizona is but a peek into these very dark shadows. It is a war, one that perhaps the president-elect does not realize is hard to win for elected officials. Every president enters the White House under the illusion that they will be able to change Washington. Yet, this president is ill prepared for the deep dark palace intrigue, and we are getting to see it. What the intelligence community is doing is seed doubts to his legitimacy. Never mind that he did not win the popular vote so that alone does it in the minds of many Americans. But why? What is at stake for the alphabet soup agencies that the intrigue is now visible?
The intelligence community relies on a continuation of funding for projects. They have been pushing slowly, but surely, for the continuation of conflict. It is not just the Russians. The chessboard is global. They also are aware that this is not just about conflict, but alliances and Trump is threatening to undo a global order that they have relied upon for over half a century. These agreements include treaties like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, (NATO) that took form first in the heat of World War Two. But also the continuation of many other instruments of economic policy such as opening of trade across borders. This economic order, in their view, has mostly kept the peace since 1945. They do not want to be bothered with the brush wars of the Cold War. Those were necessary to keep that order going and to keep the Soviets at bay.
Russian Intervention
This has become a bette noir for both Trump and Democrats. Trump rightly or wrongly sees it as an attack on his legitimacy as president. Democrats are using it as an excuse not to look into their own failures. It makes a convenient foil to blame all but themselves. The hacking happened. The Russians did run an influence campaign as well, though Russia Today and Sputnik News, not unlike the United States does with Voice of America. They did interfere in the election, not unlike the United States has done in Latin America. If anything, a tool we have used for decades has come home to roost. Many, starting with the president-elect, are having trouble coping with the matter since the US is seldom the target of such an open effort.
The Russians are pursuing empire and see the United States as a country that is in decline, not unlike the Soviet Union was in the 1980s. They see this as a chance to re-establish control over Eastern Europe and other areas of the world. Nor do they believe liberal democracy is good or helpful. So them taking sides and supporting what was objectively the weaker adversary in that global scale was not illogical. We also do this across the world. It is time for Americans to realize that them hacking the Democratic National Committee, and it turns out the Republican National Committee, is not unlike what we regularly do in places like Mexico, or Brazil, or for that matter Ukraine.
However, the reaction to this information by Trump betrays weakness on his part, or an ego even larger than we suspected. It also betrays an inability by multiple leaders in the Democratic Party to deal with the corruption revealed by the hack, or the fact that they have had a major collapse in lower elected levels over the last 8 years. Both matter in the sense that how we deal with this information will be important, not just for elected officials, but also for the future of the country.
By the way, the Russians denying any role in this is not unlike a five-year-old telling mother that they did not take any cookie from the cookie jar. This is standard, regardless of which nation state does it. We would never admit to trying to influence Mexican elections either, for example.
https://reportingsandiego.com/2017/01/1 ... ent-elect/
The British ex-spy behind the Trump dossier was an FBI asset
Yahoo News Michael Isikoff
Chief Investigative Correspondent
Yahoo NewsJanuary 11, 2017
The man behind the sensational story concerning information the Russian government had supposedly collected about Donald Trump is a former British intelligence operative and was a longtime intelligence source for the U.S. government who had assisted the FBI during an investigation into corruption by FIFA, the world soccer association, according to sources familiar with the matter.
The operative — identified today by the Wall Street Journal as Christopher Steele, a former Russian operations officer for Britain’s MI6 intelligence agency — had worked as a consultant for the FBI’s Eurasian organized crime section, helping to develop information about ties between suspected Russian gangsters and FIFA, said one of the sources, who is directly familiar with Steele’s work.
Steele had been hired originally to investigate Trump by his political opponents, and he decided to share his information with the FBI last year. The preexisting relationship between Steele and U.S. officials is one reason the FBI took the operative’s allegations seriously when he first turned over a written dossier, filled with uncorroborated “raw intelligence” about Trump, to one of the bureau’s agents in Rome last summer, the sources said.
The credibility of some of those allegations is now in question after Trump, at a news conference, denounced the claims as completely false and attacked the news media for circulating them — and the intelligence community for including a two-page summary of the explosive charges in a classified briefing that was given to President Obama, to congressional leaders, and to Trump himself.
“It’s all fake news. It’s phony stuff. It didn’t happen,” Trump said at his Trump Tower press conference Wednesday. “It was gotten by opponents of ours. It was a group of opponents that got together. Sick people, and they got together and put that crap together.”
Steele, who now works for a London-based intelligence firm called Orbis Business Intelligence, was hired by a Washington political research firm working for Democrats looking for damaging material on Trump. After flying to Moscow at his client’s expense, he came back with sensational — and unverified — accounts of compromising material that the Russian intelligence service had supposedly obtained about Trump during his 2013 stay in Moscow, when he was overseeing the Miss Universe contest. “Former top Russian intelligence officer claims FSB [the Russian intelligence service] has compromised TRUMP thorough his activities in Moscow sufficiently to be able to blackmail him,” reads one of the operative’s reports, which was published Tuesday night by BuzzFeed.
The operative’s reports also included multiple other claims that are now in question: One of the operative’s reports alleges that Michael Cohen, a top lawyer in the Trump organization, had met with Russian officials in Prague involved in hacking the election. On Wednesday, Cohen denied he had ever been to Prague and produced his passport to prove it. Another of Steele’s reports, first reported by Yahoo News last September, involved alleged meetings last July between then-Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page and two high-level Russian operatives, including Igor Sechin — a longtime associate of Russian President Vladimir Putin who became the chief executive of Rosneft, the Russian energy giant. After initially declining to comment, Page wrote a letter to FBI Director James Comey after the story was published denying that he had ever met with Sechin; the Trump campaign, however, cut its ties to him.
Still, U.S. officials said the allegations were not easily dismissed, in part because Steele was a known quantity who had produced reliable information about Russia in the past. “He’s a meticulous professional, and there are no questions about his integrity,” said one U.S. official who has worked with Steele. “The information he provided me [about Russia] was valuable and useful.”
A senior law enforcement official declined to talk about the nature of Steele’s relationship with the FBI. But the official confirmed that he was known to the FBI and that the bureau had already obtained copies of his reports months before Sen. John McCain handed FBI Director James Comey a dossier of Steele’s material in December. Asked why a two-page summary of the uncorroborated reports was included as part of last week’s intelligence briefing on Russian hacking, the official said that “it was an intelligence community decision” to do so after officials learned that his reports had been widely circulating among members of Congress and journalists. “It seemed very clear that these were going to see the light of day in the next couple of weeks,” the official said. The conclusion was that “it might be a good idea to tell [Trump] about them before they were publicly released.”
The official declined to share U.S. officials’ current thinking about the reliability of the material, saying it is still being investigated. “It’s part of the larger look at the Russian influence campaign,” the official said.
Former CIA Director Michael Hayden said the decision to include the material in the briefing was justifiable in light of the expectation that it was likely to leak. “Are you going to tell the guy?” Hayden said, referring to Trump. “You almost owe it to him.” Besides the news media, other intelligence services were likely to get their hands on the material. “It’s awkward, but duty kind of dictates that you tell him.” Still, Hayden added, the rules about what intelligence to share — or not share — appear to be shifting in the Trump era. “We’re off the map here,” he said.
All that begs the question of what the public should make of Steele’s reports, in light of the “hall of mirrors” atmosphere that surrounds much intelligence reporting about the Kremlin. The format of the reports tracks the writings of professional intelligence reports, with each claim tied to a particular source, even if the sources (per standard procedure) are never identified. Steve Hall, a former top Russia operations officer for the CIA until 2015, said he found aspects of Steele’s reports to be credible, especially as they related to the Kremlin’s plans for hacking the U.S. election.
“I find some of it indeed has the ring of truth,” said Hall. But, he added, “other parts of it are problematic.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/the-man-behi ... 21154.html
Here’s Why Russian Intelligence Bombshell on Donald Trump Might Be Believable
Geoffrey Smith
Updated: 1:04 PM CST
The disputed intelligence dossier compiled for the Democratic Party against Donald Trump is obviously unverifiable. Intelligence work is supposed to work that way. Nobody gives receipts for most salacious of the alleged conduct, and nobody says "of course you can quote me on that." Everything is deniable. And by the time the claims come out, any halfway competent intelligence organization will have ensured that all those who could corroborate it are well out of harm's way, in this world or the next.
Nor is such cynicism a Russian monopoly, it should go without saying. But for all that the dossier says about Trump and members of his campaign team that is untrue, unverifiable, or illogical, it says plenty about Russia under Vladimir Putin that has the ring of truth.
Few would dispute, in retrospect, that Trump had succeeded in making Europe's inadequate contributions to NATO more of a campaign issue than Russia's invasion of Crimea. Few will be surprised by allegations of Putin's obsession with expat Russians in the U.S., always first in line as suspects for sponsoring revolution at home.
Whether such details are just enough to give it a veneer of credibility is another question, because there are also plenty of bits in the dossier that are illogical, or at least contradictory. But then that might equally reflect actual contradictions in the corridors of power in Moscow. It's impossible to know.
The dossier paints a picture of a "Trump support operation" that was conceived and encouraged by the intelligence services from which Putin himself emerged, against the advice of professional diplomats, past and present. That seems plausible enough, given the respective nature of spies and diplomats, and the respective measure of trust he has shown in both since 2000.
So, the dossier claims, when allegations of Russian involvement in the hacking of Hillary Clinton's staff's e-mails exploded, Putin looked for a scapegoat, and found one in his chief of staff, Sergey Ivanov. Ivanov, a long-serving aide who was in any case nearer the end than the start of his career, was indeed sacked in August without any detailed explanation, from Russian media. He was replaced with Anton Vaino, partly because he was not involved in the operation, according to the dossier.
The claim that Putin considered making Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov another scapegoat seems more far-fetched, however. Not only is Lavrov an operator with few equals in world diplomacy, this was all happening when Russia's military involvement in Syria was intensifying. It seems highly unlikely that Putin would have dropped his chief advisor at the most sensitive time for Russian foreign policy since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The dossier also claims (on the basis of three separate sources) that Carter Page, a sometime Trump adviser with extensive past ties to gas giant Gazprom, met in July with Igor Sechin, the U.S.-sanctioned CEO of oil giant Rosneft. (Page insists that such claims are "complete garbage.")
The notion that Sechin, by most people's reckoning the most powerful man in Russia after Putin, had sought the lifting of U.S. sanctions in return for a renewed energy partnership, is entirely logical. Sanctions have severely crimped Rosneft's investment (notably in its joint venture drilling for oil in the Arctic with ExxonMobil), and lifting them would benefit no-one more than Rosneft.
Less credible is the claim that Sechin offered the U.S. a sizeable stake in Rosneft in return. True, there was a stake in Rosneft for sale last year. But the state budget was due to receive the money from it by December, and there was never any chance of selling to a U.S. entity in that timeframe. It eventually went to a consortium of Qatar and Glencore, with financing by Italy's Banca Intesa SanPaolo.
Page, like Trump's campaign manager Paul Manafort, were withdrawn from Trump's team after the spotlight on their Russian connections grew too intense, though even the dossier acknowledges there were other factors at work there, too. But one claim regarding Manafort stands out: That Putin refused to believe the reassurances of Viktor Yanukovych, the disgraced ex-president of Ukraine, that there was no paper trail confirming illicit payments made to Manafort that would discredit him in the U.S. Whatever the truth, and Manafort denies any wrongdoing, Putin's exasperation at Yanukovych's shortcomings is a matter of record.Finally, the dossier's characterization of relations between Putin and Alfa Group is likely on the mark, or close to it. Alfa Bank, it will be remembered, was very loosely linked with Trump by Democrat-leaning publications last year. The dossier paints a picture of a long-standing symbiotic relationship better Alfa Group and the Russian leader, which explains the lack of resistance to Alfa owners Mikhail Fridman and Pyotr Aven looking to move abroad after selling their stake in oil company TNK-BP. The dossier claims that Fridman and Aven have provided Putin with valuable information through their own network of business contacts in the U.S., valued particularly because of the conflicting signals Putin was getting from his diplomats and spies regarding the success of the alleged operation. Fortune reached out but could connect with Fridman and Aven for comment Wednesday.
http://fortune.com/2017/01/11/donald-tr ... e-russian/
The Mystery of Trump’s Man in Moscow
Reports of deep Russian ties swirl around Trump advisor Carter Page. Oddly, nobody in Russia seems to have heard of him.
By JULIA IOFFE September 23, 2016
In March, in a bold “Oh yeah?” moment during an interview with the Washington Post’s editorial board, Donald Trump took the paper’s dare and revealed, then and there, his very short list of foreign policy advisers. There were just five, though he said, “I have quite a few more.” The list was a head-scratcher, a random assortment of obscure and questionable pundits. One of the names, offered without elaboration, was, “Carter Page, PhD.”
Who?
....
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/ ... cow-214283
Russian tech expert named in Trump report says US intelligence never contacted him
WASHINGTON
A Russian venture capitalist and tech expert whose name and company are mentioned in the now-notorious document alleging connections between the Donald Trump campaign and Russian hackers says no intelligence officers have ever contacted him about the accusations, which he says are false.
A report compiled by a former Western intelligence official as opposition research against Trump was made public Tuesday when BuzzFeed posted its 35 pages. The document included unsubstantiated claims of collusion between the Trump campaign team and the Kremlin.
It also alleged that global tech firm XBT Holding, with operations in Dallas, was instrumental in the hack of leaked Democratic Party emails that embarrassed Hillary Clinton and fellow Democrats.
XBT, owner of Dallas-based enterprise-hosting company Webzilla, is run by a successful Russian tech startup expert, Aleksej Gubarev. In a phone interview from Cyprus, where he said he’d lived since 2002, Gubarev said he was surprised to see his name in the report.
“I don’t know why I was there,” Gubarev said, adding that perhaps a competitor sought to discredit him. “I still don’t understand the true reason for this report.”
.
.
.
The report alleges that Gubarev and another hacking expert were recruited under duress by the FSB, the Russian intelligence-agency successor to the KGB. Gubarev said he had not been threatened or blackmailed, nor had his mother, who lives in Russia.
.
.
.
Gubarev suspected he might have been named in the report because of comments to Bloomberg’s Russia business columnist Leonid Bershidsky. Bershidsky wrote on Nov. 1 that Gubarev questioned allegations that the Trump organization maintained a server found to have communicated with two servers at Russia’s Alfa Bank, which is also named in the 35 pages of unproven allegations.
“Bloomberg asked me my expert opinion,” he said, noting it was the only time he’d ever commented about a U.S. election or U.S. politics.
In that column, Gubarev expressed doubt about the conclusions of outside experts who said they had studied the server connections between Alfa Bank and the Trump organization. These experts, Gubarev said, would not have had access to the complete logs of a server they didn’t control.
.
.
.
Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation- ... rylink=cpy
JANUARY 12, 2017
Could Trump Have Been Caught in a Classic “Honey Trap”?
by DAVID MACARAY
Finally, some fun. Finally, something to off set the angst, the fear, the crushing dread of a Trump presidency. Of course, nothing has been verified as yet (and very likely never will be), but given the Soviet Union’s history of espionage, and Trump’s notorious impetuosity, the first reports to leak out have proven to be tantalizingly believable.
Basically, the story going around is that the Russians have compromised Donald Trump. They did it by tricking him into committing some fairly bizarre sexual indiscretions, recording them on film (their standard Cold War modus operandi), and filing them away for future use, which is to say, for blackmail purposes.
All of this is said to have occurred while Trump was in Moscow as part of the 2013 Miss Universe contest. What makes the story so credible—besides men being men, Trump being Trump, and the FBS being the FBS—is the fact that using women as leverage (the “honey trap”) goes back to before Mata Hari. In fact, it can be traced all the way back to the Bible, where Delilah is said to have betrayed Samson to the Philistines.
In an early TV interview, spy writer John Le Carre explained how a garden variety honey trap = was conducted. The KGB (today’s FBS) would set their sights on a married, highly-placed embassy or consulate official, and then go to work. It didn’t have to be an American embassy or consulate; it could be any country whose security the USSR wished to breach.
The operatives would follow the target for several weeks, learn his habits and routine, get a feel for him. They would then arrange to have an attractive woman ingratiate herself. If the honey trap worked according to plan, the woman would eventually seduce the man. The couple would engage in sex in a hotel room designated by the KGB, a room already set up with video equipment.
The official would later be shown graphic photographs of the tryst, and be told that unless he cooperated by betraying his country, the pictures would be shown to everyone—his wife, his children, his parents, his church, his Boy Scout troop, his bowling league, et al—and his life would be effectively ruined.
Not only was the honey trap a very inexpensive and uncomplicated espionage device, it had the additional virtue of being fairly reliable. After all, it was based on the male homo sapiens instinctual susceptibility to naked lust.
But before anyone turns all self-righteous and anti-Russian, let’s be clear as to how big-time espionage is conducted. It’s a dirty business. Our own CIA has used variations of this insidious technique for decades.
In the 1950s, the CIA began staking out gay bars and known haunts in Washington D.C. and New York, shadowing Soviet homosexuals, photographing them, and threatening them with exposure if they did not become “double agents.” Seymour Hersh claimed that a Soviet embassy employee, faced with the prospect of either being “outed” or forced to betray his country, chose to commit suicide.
Again, maybe this whole honey trap scenario involving Trump is as phony as every other fake news story on the Internet. When it comes to sex scandals, it’s not hard to grab the public’s attention. Still, given the clandestine community’s sordid history of mischief, and their obsession with obtaining “leverage,” why on God’s earth would they NOT do it if they had the means?
http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/01/12/ ... oney-trap/
Trump: If Putin likes me, I consider that an asset, not a liability
It remains to be seen whether the report will be confirmed true or turn out to be a fabrication, but one fact is 100 percent verified: Americans mostly think about golden showers, and now they’re thinking about them even more
A Huge Spike: Following The Trump-Russia Dossier, ‘Golden Showers’
Jumped From The Most Googled Term To Far And Away The Most Googled Term In America
Although the recently revealed allegations against Donald Trump are unverified, they’ve already had a major effect on the country’s internet search history: “Golden showers” has skyrocketed from being the most Googled term in the United States to being far and away the most Googled term.
Erotic urination has long been front and center in the national zeitgeist, but the unsubstantiated report about Trump paying prostitutes to pee on each other has brought way more attention to the wet sexual fetish Americans were already obsessed with. This fascinating graph shows a 250 percent spike at 5:20 p.m., the exact time BuzzFeed released its report and turned “golden showers” from a remarkably popular search term into a surging digital powerhouse of unfathomable proportion:
“Golden showers” has consistently been the most Googled term in America ever since it overtook “peeing on another person highly sexual” in 2007, except for one week in 2012 when “Gangam Style pee fucking” briefly held the top spot. But this graph shows just how influential politics can be on web habits, as the salacious report has Americans Googling “golden showers” at an even faster rate than the already blisteringly fast rate they do normally.
Spikes in a specific search term can occasionally be a coincidence, but the timing of the “golden showers” spike leaves little doubt that it’s related to the unproven stories about Donald Trump watching Russian prostitutes urinate on each other. Just minutes after BuzzFeed posted the controversial report on its homepage, Google was inundated with queries like “golden showers + Trump,” “golden showers + Russian bladder spectacle,” and “golden showers + Moscow piss paradise.”
Additionally, related searches like “thrill of pee splashing across face” moved from the sixth-most-Googled phrase to the third, and “nostrils dripping with fun urine” moved from ninth to fifth, just moments following the bombshell report.
Donald Trump has strenuously denied the allegations, and it’s easy to understand why. Without any hard evidence, Americans are already associating the president-elect with the urine-soaked sex act they spend a large portion of the day scouring the internet for.
It remains to be seen whether the report will be confirmed true or turn out to be a fabrication, but one fact is 100 percent verified: Americans mostly think about golden showers, and now they’re thinking about them even more.
http://www.clickhole.com/article/huge-s ... den-s-5319
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 7 guests