What Mueller won't find

Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff

What Mueller won't find

Postby conniption » Sat Jul 14, 2018 7:01 pm

caucus99percent

What Mueller won't find

Submitted by Bob In Portland
Tue, 06/12/2018


In the 1950s, when the science fiction genre started making itself felt in movies, there was always the pivotal scene where the protagonist discovers the dark secret but no one will believe him: a flying saucer hidden under the sand in a field, truckloads of pod people to replace real people, or that the friendly aliens' book "To Serve Man" wasn't a guide to helping humans, but a cookbook. It's that moment of sudden realization that no one will believe the hero because it sounds too crazy to believe.

Granted, to the uninitiated, coming to a realization so shocking and threatening to your current mental construction of the world can appear like paranoia. It becomes a question of the discoverer's knowledge and senses over what everyone else believes. Everyone else seems to be allowing him or herself to be absorbed into the great growing evil.

Today many of us, certainly readers here at Caucus99, are finding ourselves in similar positions. Our political structure is a lie, the people who are supposed to represent us and our interests don't, our law enforcement protects the property of the rich, not our lives, and often are in cahoots with the criminals from whom we are supposed to be protected. I am sure that many of our old friends and acquaintances have been alienated from some of us here when we began talking about Hillary's track record during the Presidential campaign, for example. In our current pasteboard world, if you are a Republican or Democrat you must assume that your designated political party, maybe with a couple of exceptions, are there to look after you.

And there that crazy friend goes, yelling about cookbooks.

I suppose my introduction to the corruption of those in power, at thirteen, was the assassination of JFK. Not actually the assassination, but the murder of Oswald two days later, in the basement of the Dallas police headquarters. I had slept overnight at a friend's and we came back from shooting basketballs to watch the transfer of Oswald to another facility. That was the moment that I realized all wasn't what it seemed. But, like most kids my age, the Beatles came along in a month or so and I was swept into the world of rock and roll, which kept me occupied until I began noticing girls. Until 1968. I was still noticing girls and rock and roll, but I was also noticing the number of progressives being gunned down by "lone nuts". And I was noticing Vietnam.

I'm not sharing this to explain to you how I became (that loathsome term) a "conspiracy theorist". I just want to explain to you that the democracy of the United States, and all the characters running across the stage in Washington, D.C., are the cookbook.

I wrote an essay here back in April of 2017 explaining how the Russiagate scandal had been designed to give Hillary Clinton a casus belli for her future war against Russia, and that what we were seeing since she lost has been a recycling of it to get Trump in line with the goals of the Deep State. So far nothing much has happened that has moved me from that belief. Now that the Deep State seems to have persuaded our Dear Leader that he can go on being himself as long as he understands the actual hierarchy and doesn't get in the way the Deep State, everything seems to be back on track. At least until Donald's next tweet.

But in order to understand the depth of criminality in our system one has to understand how things are done. After World War II a lot of social awareness began putting pressure on the old system that had driven the world into the Great Depression. FDR had demonstrated that the government could look out for the poor, could give them jobs when there were no other jobs to be had. The GI Bill sent millions of vets to college and helped to create the middle class we used to have. Unions had real power in negotiating wages and terms of service. Government could create a system to help the elderly. The African Americans, coming back home from fighting a war against fascism, refused go to the coloreds only water fountains. In short, the United States were in for some growing pains.

What happened? As I mentioned above there was a rash of murders of progressive political candidates and leaders in the sixties. But in order for the forces behind a return to the old rules to keep a lid on any revolutions there had to be something better than shooting every progressive who raised his head above the lectern. Thus the wave of recruitment of agents and assets in the late sixties by the CIA, FBI and other agencies. Although I didn't know it directly at the time, arriving on campus in 1968 it was evident that there was a "presence" of people looking over the shoulders of student activists.

Which brings me to another great revelation. It's not just politicians and political parties that are serving the Deep State. Any agency that can be corrupted by power will be, eventually.

Which brings us to the courts.

There are certain things that must be preserved for a ruling class to remain legitimate in the eyes of the public. Some people don't think much beyond the flag. But there are other things. The media is better than ever at keeping uncomfortable truths from the majority of Americans. But what happens where the criminality of the Deep State collides with our judicial system?

Let me introduce you to the man of the hour in Washington, Robert Swann Mueller III. Robert was born into the upper crust in our American class system. At one point in his education in private schools John Kerry was a classmate. (Kerry was also a fellow Bonesman with the Bushes.) Mueller met his eventual bride, Ann Cabell Standish, at one of the dances they attended. They married in 1966, three years after John Kennedy's assassination. If you have read much about the JFK assassination you would recognize her middle name. Her grandfather, Charles Cabell, had been second in command at the CIA when John Kennedy was elected President. In the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy fired three men from leadership positions at the CIA: Director Allen Dulles, Cabell and Richard Bissell. Charles Cabell was Ann's grandfather. Her grand uncle, Earle Cabell, was the mayor of Dallas at the time of Kennedy's murder there. Recently declassified JFK documents revealed that Mayor Cabell was also an asset of the CIA at the time. Small world. You could say that Mueller married into the CIA, except that his great uncle was Richard Bissell. So between his family and his wife's family Mueller had two of the three people that Kennedy fired before he was assassinated by a "lone nut", as well as the mayor who hosted the assassination. The third man fired was Allen Dulles, who sat on the Warren Commission and managed to keep the CIA out of the investigation into JFK's murder. Perhaps Dulles was a guest at the wedding.

Soon thereafter Mueller decided to go to Vietnam because, he said, a classmate had died there and patriotism and so forth. He became an officer and eventually ended up as an aide-de-camp for the 3rd Marine Division's commanding general, General William K. Jones. Something else was going on in Vietnam. The CIA had installed its Phoenix Program. I cannot do justice to the Phoenix Program and won't considering Doug Valentine's work on it is available for everyone, but the Phoenix Program was the CIA's attempt to totally control the Vietnamese population. Besides massacres of villages, the program assassinated suspected leaders and spies for the Vietcong, coerced others into being their agents, and kept up files on all the relevant Vietnamese down to the village level. Like in later wars, the CIA incorporated torture, murder and psychological techniques in order to control their targets. As an aide-de-camp to a commanding Marine general, there is no way that Mueller didn't know about the Phoenix Program. He probably saw daily briefings.

When he came back to the US he studied law and quickly became a federal prosecutor.

One of the things to mark his career was to deny a pardon to Patty Hearst for her part in the whole Symbionese Liberation Army's "terror" campaign. What did the SLA have to do with anything? A short history: Donald DeFreeze, a small-time criminal in Los Angeles agreed to become an informant for the LAPD in order to stay out of jail. After awhile he got tired of ratting out others and asked to get out of the program. Instead, DeFreeze was incarcerated at the Vacaville Medical Facility for criminally insane prisoners in the California penal system. There DeFreeze met Colston Westbrook who gave classes for the "Black Cultural Association", an experimental behavior modification unit inside the prison. Who was Westbrook? He was a CIA agent, trained in psychological warfare and part of the Phoenix Program. DeFreeze was modified by Westbrook and company for two years. Soon thereafter, he was transferred to Soledad Prison, from which he "escaped" and became the infamous "Cinque". Then came the Symbionese Liberation Army, a caricature of a black militant group filled with mostly white people with military backgrounds. The murder of Marcus Foster, a progressive black leader in the San Francisco East Bay, was done by white men in blackface, according to eyewitnesses. The SLA claimed credit for it. The SLA kidnapped Hearst, subjected her to torture, rape, sensory deprivation and mind control tactics, just like the CIA did in the Phoenix Program in Vietnam. Then came the bank robberies.

I bring up the Patty Hearst case because, in 2000, decades after her prison sentence had been commuted, Mueller still opposed her pardon. Guess what he didn't notice when he rejected her pardon? This has been his pattern throughout his career. We'll return to Patty Hearst shortly.

Mueller has presided over many cases where it's been important for the prosecutor to overlook the fingerprints of the CIA. He prosecuted what was known in the San Francisco Bay Area as the "drug tug" case which had connections to an island in Panama. It was a drug smuggling case and had tentacles into things like bank frauds in Northern California. He prosecuted Manuel Noriega's drug-smuggling without noticing Oliver North's drug-smuggling, arms running and money laundering through Panama as a part of Iran-contra.

Mueller would invariably land on cases with Deep State intelligence connections.

For example, he prosecuted Pan Am 103. Initially, and then later confirmed by an insurance investigator's report, the bomb that brought down the airliner was believed to be placed onboard by baggage handlers working at the Frankfurt Airport. They were given the bomb by a terrorist cell who in turn got it from one Monzer al-Kassar, who was a very large heroin dealer, estimated at supplying twenty percent of the US's heroin at the time. A big operator. And, in fact, one of the passengers on the plane was a drug mule for al-Kassar. Al-Kassar also happened to be a part of the Iran-contra operation, supplying weapons for North's Enterprise. The operation was, according to the early reports, carried out by a cell of Palestinian terrorists based in Frankfurt, the Palestinian Liberation Front-General Command, who got the bomb from al-Kassar and put the bomb on that airline.

Mueller, put in charge of the case, pursued an entirely different direction, accusing two Libyans of bombing the plane. At the time Libya and Khadafy were getting blamed for a lot of terrorist activity, but the case against the two was so weak as to hardly be circumstantial.

There were other questions arising from Pan Am 103. A top official in the FBI, Oliver "Buck" Revell, rushed onto the tarmac in London to pull his son and daughter-in-law off of Pan Am 103 before it went on to explode over Lockerbie, Scotland. Also changing flight plans were South African President Pik Botha and his negotiating team. Apparently, someone that Revell and Pik Botha knew gave them the warning.

There was one group that didn't get warned. That was the McKee Team, an assembled group of US intelligence agents tasked to investigate American hostages in Beruit. They allegedly discovered a link between the hostage takers, drug traffickers and the CIA. They were returning to the US, against orders, presumably to spill the beans. This was essentially a clean-up operation, tying up loose strings of the Iran-contra operation. So was Noriega's prosecution.

That's why Mueller got the case. He knew where to look and where not to look.

He also prosecuted ancillary Iran-contra cases. He prosecuted John Gotti for dealing cocaine in the New York City area. The cocaine he sold was part of the the Iran-contra (CIA) plan where Southern Air Transport flew weapons to Latin America for the contras (whom Congress had voted against aiding) and bringing back cocaine from Latin America on its return flights, to include Mena, Arkansas. One of the CIA's pilots, Barry Seal, bragged that he had a "get-out-of-jail" letter written for him by then-Governor Bill Clinton. At the time, Asa Hutchinson was the federal prosecutor for that corner of Arkansas. He also didn't notice all that cocaine. Hutchson later served as George W. Bush's first "drug czar" before going into politics. How coincidental.

Mueller, who had been appointed Assistant U.S. Prosecutor under GHW Bush, became FBI Director under George W. Bush just in time not to see the CIA fingerprints on 9/11, which should not be surprising considering whom he didn't see when he investigated BCCI. As head of our country's biggest law enforcement agency Mueller did not pursue the House of Saud's part in 9/11 even though fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were from Saudi Arabia and a number of them could be traced to Saudi intelligence, and the money chain could be traced to Saudis living in the US, some of whom flew out of the US while all other US flights were grounded. He did not investigate Mohammed Atta's time in Frankfort, Germany, where he was employed by a front company for the BND, West Germany's equivalent to the CIA. Nor did Mueller investigate Huffman Aviation where Mo Atta and another hijacker matriculated in flying planes into buildings. Huffman is interesting because while Mo was studying in Huffman's Venice, Florida aviation school a Huffman plane was busted in Orlando with 43 pounds of heroin. Curiously, the pilot walked away from the DEA without being charged and no one was prosecuted at Huffman.

Ask Colleen Rowley about Mueller's leadership in the 9/11 investigation.

Additionally, Mueller oversaw the anthrax letter case, never investigating Battelle Memorial Corporation, which had a building within a mile of the mailbox where the letters had been mailed. (Battelle Memorial's corporate motto is "It Can Be Done".) Instead, he centered FBI investigations on scientists in government labs in Fort Detrick, Maryland, who had neither the expertise nor the equipment to make the weaponized military grade anthrax found in the letters. One scientist sued and won millions. The other allegedly "committed suicide". Battelle is noteworthy because it handles the US military's anthrax program. Mueller had no interest that two of the targets who received anthrax letters were at the time the most vociferous opponents of the Bush Administration's Patriot Act.

Perhaps his greatest accomplishment aiding the Deep State as FBI Director was his shutting down of Operation Green Quest, the FBI's investigation into the funding behind 9/11 and the terrorist network behind it. Names began popping up like Grover Norquist, the Muslim Brotherhood, old Nazis and the royal family of Luxembourg. Nothing to see here. Move along.

A closer examination of Robert Mueller would probably find a lot more of these cases and I encourage others to continue the search. For example, it's been alleged that Mueller sent innocent men to jail for crimes committed by Whitey Bulger for the benefit of someone or something within the government and that this allowed Bulger to continue his criminal activities for years.

***

It's been seventy years since the CIA was created, fifty years since JFK was most likely murdered by them. In order to avoid any consequences for their crimes more and more institutions have had to be infiltrated and corrupted by them. Many of the heroes of the Left have turned out to be purveyors of "modified limited hangouts" which served the Deep State. Ramsey Clark, who was given the mantle of "good guy" by the media of the Left, was active as LBJ's Attorney General in blocking Jim Garrison's investigation into the JFK assassination and was named by Doug Valentine in his THE CIA AS ORGANIZED CRIME as a major proponent of the CIA's OPERATION CHAOS and the FBI's COINTELPRO. While the media spent a good deal of time talking about how great they were in releasing the Pentagon Papers to the public, the hero who exposed the military, Daniel Ellsberg, turns out to have been CIA, operating with CIA black ops in Vietnam. And while the Pentagon Papers exposed our military's great errors in Vietnam the CIA was generally spared. Again. Bob Woodward, our hero of Watergate, had been a courier for the Office of Naval Intelligence only a few years earlier. Thus, the CIA and Deep State, which had soured on Nixon, orchestrated that President's departure.

I raise this because Robert Mueller's current task is the investigation of our sitting President. No matter how much you dislike Trump you can't help but notice that the "evidence" against him conspiring with Putin and Russia is thin gruel. And while Trump, like most politicians who ascend to the big seat, has a lot of questionable, even indictable business connections around him, the great dangers of a Putin-Trump conspiracy trumpeted by the media have been fading because, apparently, there was never a there there. Thus, as Mueller oversees this case, he will find people surrounding Trump who have lied to FBI agents, who have perhaps not registered as foreign agents, and other crimes that routinely happen out of the public spotlight and aren't prosecuted. What was obvious to me from the start, that this was a psyop that involved U.S. intelligence, Ukrainian intelligence, Clinton and the DNC, will not be obvious to Mueller. Thus, as his career has shown, Mueller has been put in place not merely to prosecute those around Trump as a means of pressure on his administration, but to not see the CIA's hand in it.

When one begins examining high-profile court cases in post-1963 America one sees a cast of people who keep popping up. Prosecutors, judges, defense attorneys, coroners, witnesses, reporters, authors. This ensemble keeps reappearing in these show trials. We may not know what Mueller will find, but we know what he won't find.

There was a review at Truthdig back in 2016 of Jeffrey Toobin's book on Patty Hearst, AMERICAN HEIRESS (Toobin himself worked as an associate counsel to Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh during the investigation Iran–Contra affair and Oliver North's criminal trial). In part it reads: "Toobin features the characters who populated the edges of Hearst’s story. Robert Shapiro, who would later work with [F. Lee] Bailey on the O.J. Simpson case, makes a cameo appearance. Lance Ito, the judge in that case, briefly shared a shooting range with a machine-gun toting SLA member. Reverend Jim Jones offered to help with the food distribution effort; that enterprise also employed Sara Jane Moore, who served 32 years for attempting to assassinate President Gerald Ford during his 1975 visit to San Francisco. Congressman Leo Ryan, who represented Randy and Catherine Hearst’s district, endorsed the commutation of Patty’s sentence. “Off to Guyana,” he wrote Patty in 1978. “See you when I return. Hang in there.” Jim Jones’ henchmen shot and killed Ryan before he could board his flight home. Robert Mueller, the U.S. Attorney in San Francisco before taking over as FBI director, strenuously opposed Hearst’s pardon, claiming that her attitude, born of wealth and social position, “has always been that she is a person above the law.”"

When Mueller wrote that line he must have laughed out loud.

https://caucus99percent.com/content/wha ... -wont-find
conniption
 
Posts: 2480
Joined: Sun Nov 11, 2012 10:01 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: What Mueller won't find

Postby Elvis » Sat Jul 14, 2018 7:29 pm

Whoa, great stuff!

We've needed a Mueller thread for a long time.

Plus just some interesting data that previously escaped my attention:

Mueller met his eventual bride, Ann Cabell Standish, at one of the dances they attended. They married in 1966, three years after John Kennedy's assassination. If you have read much about the JFK assassination you would recognize her middle name. Her grandfather, Charles Cabell, had been second in command at the CIA when John Kennedy was elected President. In the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy fired three men from leadership positions at the CIA: Director Allen Dulles, Cabell and Richard Bissell. Charles Cabell was Ann's grandfather. Her grand uncle, Earle Cabell, was the mayor of Dallas at the time of Kennedy's murder there. Recently declassified JFK documents revealed that Mayor Cabell was also an asset of the CIA at the time. Small world. You could say that Mueller married into the CIA, except that his great uncle was Richard Bissell.


No proof of "guilt" by those associations, but damned interesting!


And I forgot that Mueller handled the PanAm 103 case:

There were other questions arising from Pan Am 103. A top official in the FBI, Oliver "Buck" Revell, rushed onto the tarmac in London to pull his son and daughter-in-law off of Pan Am 103 before it went on to explode over Lockerbie, Scotland. Also changing flight plans were South African President Pik Botha and his negotiating team. Apparently, someone that Revell and Pik Botha knew gave them the warning.

There was one group that didn't get warned. That was the McKee Team, an assembled group of US intelligence agents tasked to investigate American hostages in Beruit. They allegedly discovered a link between the hostage takers, drug traffickers and the CIA. They were returning to the US, against orders, presumably to spill the beans. This was essentially a clean-up operation, tying up loose strings of the Iran-contra operation.


That's my understanding of PanAm 103. The Libyan connection was a complete sham.


But I'm surprised at no mention of Mueller's role in gagging Sibel Edmonds, I'd like to know more detail about his role in that.
“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
User avatar
Elvis
 
Posts: 7412
Joined: Fri Apr 11, 2008 7:24 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: What Mueller won't find

Postby Grizzly » Sat Jul 14, 2018 8:01 pm

WOW! Where's the popcorn eating emoji, when you need it? Not that I would use it here (in this instance) but anything else seems trite. Interesting read. Thanks.
“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

― Joseph mengele
User avatar
Grizzly
 
Posts: 4722
Joined: Wed Oct 26, 2011 4:15 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: What Mueller won't find

Postby Elvis » Sat Jul 14, 2018 9:28 pm

Interesting link on the caucus99percent page in the comments; it seems as if Mueller didn't expect the 13 indicted Russians to actually show up in court to defend themselves and he's now trying to limit evidence and delay their participation.

Mueller Scrambles To Limit Evidence After Indicted Russians Actually Show Up In Court

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-06- ... show-court



ZH cites Bloomberg, which sees it from a slightly different angle:

Russia Keeps Meddling, Mueller Says in Bid to Guard Evidence

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... 6-campaign


The Bloomberg piece is accompanied by a video paean, titled, "Why Mueller Is Seen as the Perfect Man for the Job"...

Good question!
“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
User avatar
Elvis
 
Posts: 7412
Joined: Fri Apr 11, 2008 7:24 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: What Mueller won't find

Postby conniption » Sun Jul 15, 2018 3:40 am

conniption » Sat Jul 14, 2018 4:01 pm wrote:
caucus99percent

What Mueller won't find

Submitted by Bob In Portland
Tue, 06/12/2018
...


...Ask Colleen Rowley about Mueller's leadership in the 9/11 investigation.


...


~~~

consortiumnews


Russia-gate’s Mythical ‘Heroes’

June 6, 2017 • 83 Comments


The mainstream U.S. media sells the mythical integrity of fired FBI Director Comey and special Russia-gate prosecutor Mueller, but the truth is they have long histories as pliable political operatives, writes ex-FBI official Coleen Rowley.

By Coleen Rowley

Mainstream commentators display amnesia when they describe former FBI Directors Robert Mueller and James Comey as stellar and credible law enforcement figures. Perhaps if they included J. Edgar Hoover, such fulsome praise could be put into proper perspective.

Although these Hoover successors, now occupying center stage in the investigation of President Trump, have been hailed for their impeccable character by much of Official Washington, the truth is, as top law enforcement officials of the George W. Bush Administration (Mueller as FBI Director and James Comey as Deputy Attorney General), both presided over post-9/11 cover-ups and secret abuses of the Constitution, enabled Bush-Cheney fabrications used to launch wrongful wars, and exhibited plain vanilla incompetence.

TIME Magazine would probably have not called my own disclosures a “bombshell memo” to the Joint Intelligence Committee Inquiry in May 2002 if it had not been for Mueller’s having so misled everyone after 9/11. Although he bore no personal responsibility for intelligence failures before the attack, since he only became FBI Director a week before, Mueller denied or downplayed the significance of warnings that had poured in yet were all ignored or mishandled during the Spring and Summer of 2001.

Bush Administration officials had circled the wagons and refused to publicly own up to what the 9/11 Commission eventually concluded, “that the system had been blinking red.” Failures to read, share or act upon important intelligence, which a FBI agent witness termed “criminal negligence” in later trial testimony, were therefore not fixed in a timely manner. (Some failures were never fixed at all.)

Worse, Bush and Cheney used that post 9/11 period of obfuscation to “roll out” their misbegotten “war on terror,” which only served to exponentially increase worldwide terrorism.

Unfulfilled Promise

I wanted to believe Director Mueller when he expressed some regret in our personal meeting the night before we both testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee. He told me he was seeking improvements and that I should not hesitate to contact him if I ever witnessed a similar situation to what was behind the FBI’s pre 9/11 failures.

A few months later, when it appeared he was acceding to Bush-Cheney’s ginning up intelligence to launch the unjustified, counterproductive and illegal war on Iraq, I took Mueller up on his offer, emailing him my concerns in late February 2003. Mueller knew, for instance, that Vice President Dick Cheney’s claims connecting 9/11 to Iraq were bogus yet he remained quiet. He also never responded to my email.

Beyond ignoring politicized intelligence, Mueller bent to other political pressures. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Mueller directed the “post 9/11 round-up” of about 1,000 immigrants who mostly happened to be in the wrong place (the New York City area) at the wrong time. FBI Headquarters encouraged more and more detentions for what seemed to be essentially P.R. purposes. Field offices were required to report daily the number of detentions in order to supply grist for FBI press releases about FBI “progress” in fighting terrorism. Consequently, some of the detainees were brutalized and jailed for up to a year despite the fact that none turned out to be terrorists.

A History of Failure

Long before he became FBI Director, serious questions existed about Mueller’s role as Acting U.S. Attorney in Boston in effectively enabling decades of corruption and covering up of the FBI’s illicit deals with mobster Whitey Bulger and other “top echelon” informants who committed numerous murders and crimes. When the truth was finally uncovered through intrepid investigative reporting and persistent, honest judges, U.S. taxpayers footed a $100 million court award to the four men framed for murders committed by (the FBI-operated) Bulger gang.

Current media applause omits the fact that former FBI Director Mueller was the top official in charge of the Anthrax terror fiasco investigation into those 2001 murders, which targeted an innocent man (Steven Hatfill) whose lawsuit eventually forced the FBI to pay $5 million in compensation. Mueller’s FBI was also severely criticized by Department of Justice Inspector Generals finding the FBI overstepped the law improperly serving hundreds of thousands of “national security letters” to obtain private (and irrelevant) metadata on citizens, and for infiltrating nonviolent anti-war groups under the guise of investigating “terrorism.”

For his part, Deputy Attorney General James Comey, too, went along with the abuses of Bush and Cheney after 9/11 and signed off on a number of highly illegal programs including warrantless surveillance of Americans and torture of captives. Comey also defended the Bush Administration’s three-year-long detention of an American citizen without charges or right to counsel.

Up to the March 2004 night in Attorney General John Ashcroft’s hospital room, both Comey and Mueller were complicit with implementing a form of martial law, perpetrated via secret Office of Legal Counsel memos mainly written by John Yoo and predicated upon Yoo’s singular theories of absolute “imperial” or “war presidency” powers, and requiring Ashcroft every 90 days to renew certification of a “state of emergency.”

The Comey/Mueller Myth

What’s not well understood is that Comey’s and Mueller’s joint intervention to stop Bush’s men from forcing the sick Attorney General to sign the certification that night was a short-lived moment. A few days later, they all simply went back to the drawing board to draft new legal loopholes to continue the same (unconstitutional) surveillance of Americans.

The mythology of this episode, repeated endlessly throughout the press, is that Comey and Mueller did something significant and lasting in that hospital room. They didn’t. Only the legal rationale for their unconstitutional actions was tweaked.

Mueller was even okay with the CIA conducting torture programs after his own agents warned against participation. Agents were simply instructed not to document such torture, and any “war crimes files” were made to disappear. Not only did “collect it all” surveillance and torture programs continue, but Mueller’s (and then Comey’s) FBI later worked to prosecute NSA and CIA whistleblowers who revealed these illegalities.

Neither Comey nor Mueller — who are reported to be “joined at the hip” — deserve their current lionization among politicians and mainstream media. Instead of Jimmy Stewart-like “G-men” with reputations for principled integrity, the two close confidants and collaborators merely proved themselves, along with former CIA Director George “Slam Dunk” Tenet, reliably politicized sycophants, enmeshing themselves in a series of wrongful abuses of power along with official incompetence.

It seems clear that based on his history and close “partnership” with Comey, called “one of the closest working relationships the top ranks of the Justice Department have ever seen,” Mueller was chosen as Special Counsel not because he has integrity but because he will do what the powerful want him to do.

Mueller didn’t speak the truth about a war he knew to be unjustified. He didn’t speak out against torture. He didn’t speak out against unconstitutional surveillance. And he didn’t tell the truth about 9/11. He is just “their man.”

Coleen Rowley, a retired FBI special agent and division legal counsel whose May 2002 memo to then-FBI Director Robert Mueller exposed some of the FBI’s pre-9/11 failures, was named one of TIME magazine’s “Persons of the Year” in 2002. Her 2003 letter to Robert Mueller in opposition to launching the Iraq War is archived in full text on the NYT and her 2013 op-ed entitled “Questions for the FBI Nominee” was published on the day of James Comey’s confirmation hearing. This piece will also be cross-posted on Rowley’s Huffington Post page.)

Relevant links:

http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,1 ... 03,00.html

http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/repo ... rt_Ch8.pdf

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/21/us/na ... saoui.html

http://www.truth-out.org/archive/compon ... -worldwide

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... -year.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/05/polit ... eller.html

https://oig.justice.gov/special/0306/full.pdf

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/18/us/i ... vived.html

https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/1970/ ... story.html

http://www.ocregister.com/2017/05/21/co ... -together/

https://www.mintpressnews.com/anthrax-r ... rn/228317/

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/governme ... act_03-09/

http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/DOJ/story?id=4444329

https://www.aclu.org/news/fbi-counterte ... test-group

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/09/opini ... minee.html

https://theintercept.com/2016/02/25/fbi ... an-iphone/

http://www.newsweek.com/ali-soufan-brea ... ence-77243

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/05/ ... unsel.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the ... 091053795m

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/mor ... 989d7a3635


.~
https://consortiumnews.com/2017/06/06/r ... al-heroes/
conniption
 
Posts: 2480
Joined: Sun Nov 11, 2012 10:01 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: What Mueller won't find

Postby Elvis » Sun Jul 15, 2018 4:32 am

Thanks, I had not seen that piece by Coleen Rowley, it's good to see her going strong.

It would be Cheney who hired Mueller as FBI director. I've often figured it made sense for Cheney to bring in someone like Mueller, who presumably didn't have a clue, a week before the attacks, to be gobsmacked and just react accordingly. On the other hand, it's hard to say what Mueller knew or didn't know.


Mueller reminds me of "Wild Bill" Donovan, the WWI war hero and big-time lawyer who formed the OSS. Donovan's record as an upright, corruption-busting district attorney during Prohibition included having his own men's club raided (for its ample booze). His friends called him a "class traitor" but he brushed them off. "I warned you!" he told them.

But he went on to organize the OSS, breaking every rule in the book and establishing the 'CIA' mindset that still plagues us today.
“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
User avatar
Elvis
 
Posts: 7412
Joined: Fri Apr 11, 2008 7:24 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: What Mueller won't find

Postby Grizzly » Mon Jul 16, 2018 2:12 pm

let's not leave out, Former FBI Director Louis Freeh.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Freeh

Many members of US intelligence/military end up with Golden Parachutes in the defense, financial, media, cyber security and industrial sectors. Former FBI Director James Comey cashed in at Lockheed Martin--enough of a reason for him to be forced to recuse himself from any Russia investigation IMO. (
https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/8z8ukt/many_members_of_us_intelligencemilitary_end_up/
“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

― Joseph mengele
User avatar
Grizzly
 
Posts: 4722
Joined: Wed Oct 26, 2011 4:15 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: What Mueller won't find

Postby RocketMan » Tue Jul 17, 2018 6:43 am

Aaannnnd crickets here, while TRAITOR TRUMP CONGRESS MUST INVESTIGA threads proliferate and expand... Quelle surprise.

One of the most infuriating aspects of the Trump the Russia-Colludin' Traitor discourse is the sudden willingness of supposedly leftist, discerning people to suddenly trust the US intelligence apparatus so willingly. I mean WTF.
-I don't like hoodlums.
-That's just a word, Marlowe. We have that kind of world. Two wars gave it to us and we are going to keep it.
User avatar
RocketMan
 
Posts: 2812
Joined: Mon Mar 10, 2008 7:02 am
Location: By the rivers dark
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: What Mueller won't find

Postby Sounder » Tue Jul 17, 2018 7:30 am

Yes, it is absurd in a WTF kind of way, but then again, when propaganda is calibrated closely with the belief sets of the targeted, it is quite an effective tool.
All these things will continue as long as coercion remains a central element of our mentality.
Sounder
 
Posts: 4054
Joined: Thu Nov 09, 2006 8:49 am
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: What Mueller won't find

Postby elfismiles » Tue Jul 17, 2018 9:36 am

As always I advocate for an excluded middle / agnostic approach.

Seems like there is ample evidence of shenanigans but yeah, we always gotta question 'authoritie'
User avatar
elfismiles
 
Posts: 8511
Joined: Fri Aug 11, 2006 6:46 pm
Blog: View Blog (4)

Re: What Mueller won't find

Postby Belligerent Savant » Tue Jul 17, 2018 10:59 am

RocketMan » Tue Jul 17, 2018 5:43 am wrote:Aaannnnd crickets here, while TRAITOR TRUMP CONGRESS MUST INVESTIGA threads proliferate and expand... Quelle surprise.

One of the most infuriating aspects of the Trump the Russia-Colludin' Traitor discourse is the sudden willingness of supposedly leftist, discerning people to suddenly trust the US intelligence apparatus so willingly. I mean WTF.



Indeed.

Great OP article, which essentially renders any mainstream-derived content pertaining to the 'Trump Investigation' as largely (if not entirely) irrelevant -- at least with respect to an interest in getting to the truth, rather than the plebe-facing politics, of the issues in play -- as a few of us have been alluding from the start.

Thanks for sharing it, conniption. It should rightly be blasted across the twitterverse, where it'd likely be ignored and/or derided.
User avatar
Belligerent Savant
 
Posts: 5215
Joined: Mon Oct 05, 2009 11:58 pm
Location: North Atlantic.
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: What Mueller won't find

Postby RocketMan » Tue Jul 17, 2018 11:14 am

...and the concomitant spread of odious "My country right or wrong" type nationalist, patriotic sentiments in self-proclaimed skeptics of power.
-I don't like hoodlums.
-That's just a word, Marlowe. We have that kind of world. Two wars gave it to us and we are going to keep it.
User avatar
RocketMan
 
Posts: 2812
Joined: Mon Mar 10, 2008 7:02 am
Location: By the rivers dark
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: What Mueller won't find

Postby Belligerent Savant » Sat Sep 08, 2018 3:25 pm

.

Bump via suplex... RIWF is on!


Image
User avatar
Belligerent Savant
 
Posts: 5215
Joined: Mon Oct 05, 2009 11:58 pm
Location: North Atlantic.
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: What Mueller won't find

Postby conniption » Fri Dec 14, 2018 5:32 am

Spectator
(embedded links)

Why has late night swapped laughs for lusting after Mueller?

Going after Trump is the least subversive act in comedy

Michael Tracey
December 10, 2018


Image
Lambasting Trump and pining for Mueller is a defining feature of most of Stephen Colbert’s monologues

For those desperately awaiting the Trump presidency’s spectacular collapse, Robert Mueller has acquired an almost mythic status – forever looming in the background with astonishing ‘bombshells’ that could drop at any moment. Mueller himself never speaks, except through terse court filings, which lends his aura a mystical quality. His newfound fans have been known to light votive candles in his honor, wear apparel sporting his heroic visage, and spend day after day speculating on the internet about the time, date, and profundity of his next miraculous intervention.


Michael Tracey
‏Verified account @mtracey

I was not joking about the proliferation of worshipful objects featuring Robert Mueller's saintly visage https://devotionaldemocracy.com/product ... nal-candle
Image


Hopes for Mueller as a savior-figure are perhaps expressed most fervently in the realm of TV comedy, where the unifying theme is universal contempt of Trump. Hating the president is one thing: that’s natural, and perhaps even healthy. But the hate exhibited by contemporary late night comedians is so predictable and banal that it feels like a dreary commercial monoculture, with nothing interesting or surprising ever said. Firing off zesty jokes about Trump’s personal vulgarities is, today, the farthest thing from subversive humor, and generally evokes not laughter but a keen awareness that the joke-tellers are all operating from the same wearisome premise. So in search of a comic foil, the TV hosts have latched eagerly onto Mueller, the former FBI director and George W. Bush appointee.

The pinnacle of Trump-era comedic banality, Saturday Night Live, set a new standard for worshipful absurdity last week when they offered up a Mueller holiday tribute song, ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You,’ professing their anxious desire for him to issue a Final Report that lands Trump in the Big House. ‘I just want to sleep at night. Please make sure your case is tight,’ the assembled comediennes sang, while a portrait of Mueller wearing a Santa hat levitated overhead. The cutesy carol made reference to Trump-Russia bit-players such as Roger Stone and Alex Van Der Zwaan – the latter a man so obscure that you have to be a real obsessive to have the slightest idea who he is. It says much that SNL writers apparently assume their viewers are as fanatically invested in every minute twist-and-turn of this saga as they evidently are.

SNL’s tribute came almost a year to the day after the Late Show with Stephen Colbert debuted its own suspiciously similar segment, entitled ‘Robert Mueller’s 12 Days of Christmas’, in which a holiday choir also expressed holiday-themed anxieties related to the Special Counsel’s prosecutorial progress. ‘On the first day of Christmas, Bob Mueller gave to me, a Michael Flynn guilty plea,’ sang the choir, while the live audience compliantly roared. Whether the audience at home roared similarly seems doubtful. At this point, Colbert’s paeans to Mueller are as regular a feature of his program as interviews with boring celebrities. In another chortling segment, ‘‘Tis The Season For Treason: A Very Mueller Christmas,’ Stephen himself sings a short lyric commemorating the arrest of Paul Manafort, and expresses optimism about the yuletide cheer his imprisonment could inspire.

'Tis The Season For Treason: A Very Mueller Christmas

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbXO52kWT9g

The sheer volume of late night material centered on extolling Robert Mueller raises questions about whether every network comedy writer lives in the same over-priced Manhattan apartment complex and brainstorms together in the laundry room. Jimmy Fallon of the Tonight Show once heralded Mueller by reprising the classic Bruce Springsteen Christmas hit, ‘Robert Mueller’s Comin’ to Town.’ James Corden, a lesser chat show host unfortunately imported from the UK, once sang a song in which he fantasized about himself transforming into Mueller and announcing to a grateful nation that their ‘prayers are answered,’ with Trump having been indicted for ‘treason and treachery.’

Robert Mueller's Indictment Song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUcGGVTme3w

Aside from the strange fact that all contemporary late night hosts apparently see themselves as impressive amateur singers, there is a depressing strain of lame commonality that runs through their collective shtick. None of these routines reflect original thinking, comedic imagination, insightful satire, or even the kind of crotchety cynicism once embodied (imperfectly) by David Letterman. They are simply taking the conventional news narratives blasted everyday across cable news and Twitter, and putting a trite quasi-humorous spin on it. Which would be nothing new: it’s not like Jay Leno was some fight-the-power comedic renegade. But no one ever thought Leno was leading the charge against the establishment, and certainly no one ever looked to him as a political role model. This current crop of late nighters, in contrast, tend to style themselves as rabble-rousing truth-tellers standing up to the big mean government, while parroting an anti-Trump line that has its genesis in the literal establishment, namely the FBI. They feign subversiveness as a marketing strategy, because there’s nothing legitimately subversive about anything they ever do. In fact, they lend credence to the silly idea that backing Trump is actually the real subversive act, as Americans rightly observe that almost all major mainstream cultural institutions are implacably arrayed against him.

Sometimes this pro-Mueller yearning can take on genuinely creepy overtones. Just last week, hostess Samantha Bee, in yet another segment that concluded with a Christmas wish for the entire Trump family to be incarcerated, admitted that she feels ‘turned on’ by Mueller. The bit was promoted by Bee’s social media producers with the YouTube description, ‘Mueller’s been dropping sentencing memos like he’s frickin’ Beyoncé!’ Part of the journalistic calling is to have empathy for people with differing life experiences, but I struggle deeply to relate to anyone who sincerely enjoys this crap.

Mueller? Mueller? | December 5, 2018 Act 1 | Full Frontal on TBS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vOVnT1Z6Yc

If the late night ‘comedy’ of the Trump era has something resembling a ‘message,’ it’s that large segments of the nation’s liberal TV viewership are nervously tracking every Russia development with a passion that cannot be conducive to mental health – or for that matter, political efficacy. One feature of the Mueller saga is the enormous amount of energy that has been expended on venerating and defending him; energies which, at least theoretically, could have been directed toward doing something useful. The trend seems to reflect the total political enervation of this class of people – elite liberal culture-producers and consumers – who are still whipsawing between two-bit schemes to topple Trump, while in the process glossing over (or ignoring, or ridiculing) the structural forces which gave rise to Trump in the first place. Their expressions of comedic angst actually render them more and more politically impotent. Democrats’ success in the midterms may have given the false assurance that a critical mass of the country actually respects this drivel.

To understand how late night comedy got so uniquely tedious, it’s instructive to consider Colbert in particular. He first emerged as a protegée of Jon Stewart, whose Daily Show received such adulation in the early-and-mid 2000s because Stewart appeared to be doing something different and, yes, subversive – castigating the media for its illogical deference to power, a sorely needed antidote in the years of George W. Bush. (Whether this schtick was truly subversive is another question, but it did at least seem that way for a time.) The popular TV comedians of today, conversely, are the polar opposite of subversive. Nothing about their daily pillorying of Trump challenges conventional wisdom, because unrestrained personal animus for Trump is the defining characteristic of conventional wisdom. When Bush was waging the Iraq War, he did so bolstered by a media consensus that cast him and his cause in an honorable light, and depicted his critics as screeching anti-war freaks. Even before he was inaugurated, Trump has been heaped with a level of scorn so ferocious that it would have made Dick Cheney blush.

As his popularity dwindled, Bush surely got made fun of in the wider press, and there’s no denying that contempt for him in popular comedic media was relatively robust. But Stewart still had a knack for identifying frivolous media narratives, and mocking the absurd pretensions which undergirded them. Now the Daily Show sensibility is the entertainment media’s chief pretension, having seeped into the rest of the TV atmosphere. You can now watch what seems like several dozen multi-millionaire comedians doing the same cheeky news-rundown every day, in a style that clearly harkens to Stewart but lacks any of the dynamism that made what he did appear fresh.

Colbert’s show, if you can sit through it, often comes across as the closest thing on network TV to an outright Democratic Party advocacy program. Everyone knew Stewart was a liberal, and that liberals likely comprised the entirety of his writing staff, but his liberalism was not the defining feature of the show. The defining feature was media critique; the deconstructing of stuffy journalistic pathologies that made the 2000s political landscape so ridiculous and maddening. Stewart’s approach was far from 100 percent noble, and it often came packaged with certain hoary pretensions of its own. But at least it was something new, and seemingly, necessary. Now the latter-day Colbert style – shorn of everything that once made it unique – has become the status quo, and not only is it unnecessary (and unfunny), it’s a stale emblem of everything wrong with the wider cultural reaction to Trump.

https://spectator.us/late-night-lusting-mueller/
conniption
 
Posts: 2480
Joined: Sun Nov 11, 2012 10:01 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: What Mueller won't find

Postby Belligerent Savant » Fri Dec 14, 2018 10:21 am

.

Good stuff. Thanks for sharing, conniption.

Michael Tracey:
If the late night ‘comedy’ of the Trump era has something resembling a ‘message,’ it’s that large segments of the nation’s liberal TV viewership are nervously tracking every Russia development with a passion that cannot be conducive to mental health – or for that matter, political efficacy. One feature of the Mueller saga is the enormous amount of energy that has been expended on venerating and defending him; energies which, at least theoretically, could have been directed toward doing something useful. The trend seems to reflect the total political enervation of this class of people – elite liberal culture-producers and consumers – who are still whipsawing between two-bit schemes to topple Trump, while in the process glossing over (or ignoring, or ridiculing) the structural forces which gave rise to Trump in the first place. Their expressions of comedic angst actually render them more and more politically impotent. Democrats’ success in the midterms may have given the false assurance that a critical mass of the country actually respects this drivel.
User avatar
Belligerent Savant
 
Posts: 5215
Joined: Mon Oct 05, 2009 11:58 pm
Location: North Atlantic.
Blog: View Blog (0)

Next

Return to General Discussion

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 43 guests