What happens when the president goes to war with his own spies?
The New Republic
19 March 2018
Phi Beta Iota: Bamford understates the cost of the IC – over eight years Obama spent close to $400 billion, not the $100 billion that Bamford cites. If one includes hidden support costs in other budgets, and offshore (off budget) funding, it is highly likely the secret world has wasted much more than that.
Robert Steele comments below the fold.
Tip of the Hat to Contributing Editor Berto Jongman.
ROBERT STEELE: James Bamford is arguably the finest open source researcher on the topic of the National Security Agency in history. Among his many works the best have been Body of Secrets and Pretext for War. His latest article is an absorbing mix of compelling insights and reckless ignorance. To his credit — but lost in the noise of his vitriolic hatred and defamation against our President, he acknowledges that the US intelligence community is comprised of “deeply problematic institutions.”
William Binney is a personal friend and most respected colleague — certainly Bill has my vote as the next leader of NSA, with a Presidential mandate to dismantle 70% of that worthless agency, while re-engineering the 30% worth saving into a new Directorate for Signals Intelligence (DS) in the sharply reduced and then restructured and expanded Classified Intelligence Agency (CIA) that would also have residuals (new directorates) for imagery, geospatial/processing, and perhaps military decision-support as well since DIA is a monstrous irrelevant cesspool of recycled losers. Together with an Open Source Agency (OSA) this would give the President — and everyone else including the public, Congress, the media, and foreign allies — 100% decision-support on all threats, policies, and costs, instead of the 4% they get now.
For Jim to espouse for even one second the possibility that Bill is wrong and the lies being told by the Obama-Clinton team — lies concocted and led by John Brennan in school-child moronicity reminiscent of Dick Cheney's much more formidable lies leading to the war on Iraq and in Afghanistan (see Charles Lewis, 935 Lies: The Future of Truth and the Decline of America’s Moral Integrity as well as Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq) — suggests that Jim has lost his balance.
It was my civic duty to dismantle John Brennan with respect to the false narrative about Russia, and I will not belabor the facts on that one, only pointing to my Amazon Kindle best seller, The Soft Coup Collapses – Blackmail Revealed – What Next?: CIA was bluffing, produced no evidence – Russians did not “hack” the election. Is this the beginning of the end of the Deep State in the USA? Can Trump clean house & wage peace? (Trump Revolution Book 6), also available free online, and its precursor post listing over 29 contrarians including myself, William Binney, Barack Obama and — yes — James Bamford himself — Robert Steele: US IC Allegations Against Russians Are Crap — Our Own Traitors, Not the Russians, Are the Real Enemy, Fake Evidence & Fake News – UPDATE 22.
For those who do not know me well enough to know that I do not lie and do not make stuff up, let me just offer this little tid-bit from page A-13 of the CIA report embraced by the DCI in his final act of treasonous disservice to the public:
Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact. Assessments are based on collected information, which is often incomplete or fragmentary, as well as logic, argumentation, and precedents.
Seriously. I do not make this shit up. Thankfully, someone at CIA had enough integrity to insist on these two sentences, which we in the business call “truth-tellers.”
There are three gems and three mis-steps in Jim's article:
The gems first.
Gem #1:
there is a great danger to society in overlooking past issues of accountability and the potential harm to civil liberties and instead viewing the FBI and the spy world in a purely positive light.
Gem #2:
Ironically, much of the danger Trump poses can be laid at the feet of Barack Obama. Assuming that past norms would be future norms, Obama created the most powerful surveillance state the world has ever seen. Over eight years, he spent more than $100 billion on everything from eavesdropping satellites encircling the globe, to a million-square-foot building in the Utah desert for storing massive troves of intercepted data, to secret taps on the hundreds of thousands of miles of undersea cables that carry everything from tweets to Google searches to endless chatter. He also unleashed fleets of killer drones around the world, authorized the assassination of Americans without trial, and jailed more whistleblowers than all previous presidents combined.
What Obama apparently never considered was that the Orwellian surveillance tools he created, and the precedents he set of killing and jailing Americans, could one day fall into the hands of a mountebank, demagogic president unrestrained by norms and perhaps even untethered from reality.
Gem #3:
Adding to the concern, at a time when infotainment is replacing hard news, is the fact that much of the press, especially cable news, has also disregarded traditional norms—chief among them the devotion to objective reality and the investment of considerable resources, both human and financial, toward probing the workings of the darkest elements of government. Instead, as Trump charges the FBI with political bias and the intelligence community with acting like Nazis, the media—with the obvious exception of Fox News—seems to have taken on the mantle of defenders and protectors of those deeply problematic institutions.
I cannot over-state the value of these three gems. It's a shame that Jim gave up the opportunity to point out that the President is absolutely correct to be dismissive and distrustful of the US secret intelligence community whose first rule is “lie to the the President if you can get away with it.”
The article suffers from three sucking chest wounds, one that is obvious and two by omission.
First, this article is a media hit job against the President and General Michael Flynn. Describing our President as a “mountebank, demagogic president unrestrained by norms and perhaps even untethered from reality.” is in my view defamatory as well as grotesquely irresponsible. Since Jim does acknowledge that the IC is “deeply problematic,” there is a very strong element of hypocrisy and deliberate mis-representation in this article. When Jim scorns the President for labeling the press as an enemy of the American people,” he is either oblivious of the fact — or in denial of the fact — that the majority of the public shares the President's opinion.
Second, Jim lacks the sources that might have given him an alternative appreciation of all that the President is doing in both the national security arena as well as the domestic prosperity and security arena. While the President has had some mis-steps — his tax legislation is one of them — on balance the President has done more to take down the Deep State, end war, and restore the prospects of a good life for most Americans than any prior President since Ronald Reagan. Jim clearly has not learned of the President's success in unifying the Koreas — to include the denuclearization of North Korea and the demilitarization of South Korea — and is obviously not interested in learning of or sharing “good news” about this President's accomplishments.
Third and finally, Jim, while alluding to the “problematic” nature of the failed IC and the “infotainment” nature of the mainstream fake news media, misses the third leg of the Deep State stool of lies: #GoogleGestapo. There is not a word in this article about the manner in which the Zionist-controlled social media, particularly Facebook, Google, MeetUp, Twitter, and YouTube, maliciously and with knowledge of falsity censored, manipulated, and digitally assassinated facts and personalities in the months leading up to the 2016 election, and continue to do so today, YouTube's “purge” of tens of thousands of conservative voices and videos being but the latest example.
On successive readings, Jim's article can be harvested for value — he clearly understands the failure of both the IC and the media — but he is so obsessive about attacking the President that he has literally shit in his own milk bowl.
Let me end with a few statements on where I think the President needs to go in his totally necessary and justified “war with his own spies.”
01 They are not “his” spies. 70% or more of them are entrenched civil servants and contractors who are loyal to the Deep State and not at all committed to serving the President or the public interest.
02 From the clandestine service that has no unilateral clandestine agents of note to the signals intelligence service that does not process 99% of what it collects and also does not provide tactical signals support to clandestine operations overseas or counterintelligence operations at home to the geospatial service that still cannot do 1:50,000 combat charts for all of Africa to the military intelligence service that is incapable of producing strategic, operational, tactical, and technical intelligence service, the US IC is a massive failure — a very expensive massive failure.
03 The President is aware that an OSA starting with just $125M a year going toward $2-3B a year would immediately give him the 96% of the decision-support he and his Cabinet officers as well as military commanders and governors need to be effective.
04 The President is aware that 2018 is a pivotal year in American history and that the election in 2018 could still be lost to the Deep State as the Democrats join the media in celebrating the spies they once demonized, precisely because the spies, the media, and the Democrats are totally beholden to the Deep State (as is the GOP, but it can be saved). What the President lacks — which an OSA could provide — is a “truth channel” that cannot be censored or manipulated — an end to end replacement for Facebook, Google, MeetUp, Twitter, and YouTube as well as Amazon and Wikipedia.
05 There are wealthy donors beginning to see all of the above and contemplating the creation of a public service Internet and truth channel including radio, television, and perhaps a weekly magazine.
06 There are also wealthy donors contemplating direct funding of “the wall.” While I do not support the wall — I believe 100% use of e-verify combined with the legalization of marijuana, the nationalization of all central banks, and an end of US taxpayer support to dictators and Zionists will achieve the same effect — if the President wants the wall the money can be found off-budget.
07 In my estimation, for all of his warts, and he has many, Donald Trump is a gift from God and has a mandate for change unlike any other president in modern times. For the very first time in over a century, we have a President who is independent of the Deep State and who could, if he embraces the ideas being offered to him, grow his base from 27% to 70% while increasing public participation in the electoral and governance process from 30% (as controlled by the Democratic and Republican parties) to 70% inclusive of Independents, Greens, and Libertarians being elected to Congress in November 2018.
Very few articles these days warrant my attention. It is a credit to Jim that he has put in one place some real gems and it is understandable that he has failed to see the obvious: the President is right, the spies are wrong, there can be only one winner. My money is on the President to win by a length.
Once the Koreas are unified, the restructuring of the failed IC can begin, for it will be obvious to the public that just was with the Soviet Union, the IC has been wrong on every major issue facing America for the last quarter century. This is an IC that does not do holistic analytics, true cost economics, or Open Source Everything Engineering (OSEE), the latter reducing the cost of everything to 10% by scrubbing both waste and excess profit.
Spies wrong, President right.
God Bless America.
