Durham Report Findings Unsurprising to Those Who Have Had their Eyes Wide Open

The conclusions of the Durham report are not surprising to those of us who follow independent new media. For years, we've seen shoddy story after shoddy story revealing that the driving motivation of the two dominant flavors of corporate media is to serve as the PR Departments of the two dominant political parties. It has also long been clear (e.g., from the Twitter Files and the coverup regarding Hunter Biden's laptop) that the FBI & CIA are partisan organizations. Many people I know don't mind being played. They would rather think about short-term results than the long term damage that continues to be inflicted on American institutions. No matter who you prefer to be president, these revelations should be immensely disturbing.

From the National Review: "This was one of the dirtiest political tricks in American history. The damage it has done to American trust in the FBI and our intelligence agencies is incalculable."

Here is another straight-forward account from The National Review, a conservative leaning media outlet that vigorously opposed Donald Trump: "FBI Lacked ‘Any Actual Evidence of Collusion’ between Trump Campaign, Russia When Crossfire Hurricane Launched, Durham Finds":

The Department of Justice and the FBI did not have “any actual evidence of collusion” between Russian officials and Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and began their Crossfire Hurricane probe of Trump’s campaign based on “raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence,” according to a report released on Monday by special prosecutor John Durham.

Durham scolded federal law enforcement and counter-intelligence officials for failing to “uphold their important mission of strict fidelity to the law” as part of their investigation.

He wrote that at least one FBI agent criminally fabricated language in an email that was used to obtain a FISA surveillance order. And he accused FBI leaders of displaying a “serious lack of analytical rigor” and relying significantly on “investigative leads provided or funded (directly or indirectly) by Trump’s political opponents,” referring to staffers and allies of Hillary Clinton, then the Democratic presidential nominee, whose campaign funded the Steele dossier through its law firm Perkins Coie.

Continue ReadingDurham Report Findings Unsurprising to Those Who Have Had their Eyes Wide Open

Judiciary and Intelligence Committees: CIA and Biden’s own Campaign Interfered with 2020 Election

From the WSJ article, "Biden’s CIA Assist in the 2020 Presidential Election: The agency, not only retirees, turns out to have worked on the Hunter excuse letter."

Even new habits are hard to break, and that’s the case with a federal intelligence apparatus that can’t keep its fingers out of elections. It seems President-elect Biden on Nov. 4, 2020, owed thanks not only to a cabal of former intelligence officials, but to the Central Intelligence Agency.

That’s the big takeaway of this week’s interim report from House committees detailing the origins of the October 2020 disinformation letter about Hunter Biden’s laptop. An earlier release revealed that Joe Biden’s campaign helped engineer a statement from 51 former U.S. spies that claimed the laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” That letter provided Democrats, journalists and social-media companies the excuse to dismiss and censor evidence of Hunter’s influence peddling, removing an obstacle from his father’s path to victory.

Now we find out that, according to a written statement supplied to the committee, an active CIA official joined the effort to solicit more signers to the letter. The campaign to elect Joe Biden extended into Langley.

The report (issued jointly by the Judiciary and Intelligence committees and the Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government) tells the sordid story of the letter, beginning with a call from Biden campaign official Antony Blinken to former Deputy CIA Director Mike Morell three days after the New York Post published its laptop scoop. Mr. Morell told the committees that Mr. Blinken wanted his “reaction” to the laptop news, but another signer said Mr. Morell put it to him bluntly: the Biden campaign “asked” for the letter.

Continue ReadingJudiciary and Intelligence Committees: CIA and Biden’s own Campaign Interfered with 2020 Election

Hollowed-Out

I propose this as a metaphor for a large country whose institutions are being hollowed out.

Continue ReadingHollowed-Out

Bad Leakers and Good Leaks.

A recent document leak on Discord shows that the U.S government is lying to Americans. The contents of this leak make it clear that U.S. troops are already on the ground in Ukraine, a situation that dramatically increases the risk of direct confrontation of the U.S. and Russia, which could be cataclysmic given the current situation, already hair-trigger dangerous. The U.S. corporate news is refusing to discuss the new revelations, both the White House dishonesty and the danger on the ground in Ukraine. Why? It's entire predictable.

When the corporate news media likes the content of a leak, they don't give a rat's ass about who leaked it. On other  occasions, the corporate news media finds the leak content inconvenient, in which case they zero in, laser-like, to destroy the reputation of the leaker, harping on the illegality of the leak and simultaneously suppressing the content of the leak. This protocol is in their standard playbook, as discussed by Glenn Greenwald in "The Same Establishment Playbook is Used to Malign the Character of Leakers and Distract Attention From the Substance of the Revelations."

On a virtually daily basis, one can find authorized leaks in The New York Times, The Washington Post, on CNN and NBC News: meaning stories dressed up as leaks from anonymous sources that are, in fact, nothing more than messaging assertions that the CIA, FBI, Homeland Security and the Pentagon have instructed these subservient media corporations to disseminate. When that happens, the leaker is never found or punished: even when the leaks are designated as the most serious crimes under the U.S. criminal code, such as when The Washington Post's long-time CIA spokesman David Ignatius in early 2017 published the contents of the intercepted phone calls between Trump's incoming National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Most of Russiagate was constructed based on authorized leaks, a generous way of describing official propaganda from the U.S. Security State laundered in the American corporate press.

But when it comes to unauthorized leaks -- which result in the disclosure of secret evidence showing that the U.S. Security State lied, acted corruptly, or broke laws -- that is when the full weight of establishment power comes crashing down on the head of the leaker. They are found and arrested. Their character is destroyed. And now -- in a new and genuinely shocking escalation -- it is the largest media corporations themselves, such as the Times and the Post, that actually do the FBI's work by hunting down the leaker, exposing him, and ensuring his arrest.

This playback is always used in such cases and is easily recognized. The point is to shift attention from the substance of the embarrassing and incriminating disclosures onto the personal traits of the person who exposed them, so as to make the public forget about what they learned and come to see the leaker as so unlikeable that they want nothing to do with the disclosures themselves.

Glenn's System Update Episode #70 further explores the media's treatment of the Discord leaker.

Continue ReadingBad Leakers and Good Leaks.

Clowns to the Left of Me, Joker’s to the Right . . .

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Continue ReadingClowns to the Left of Me, Joker’s to the Right . . .