From Langley, With Love.
NEVER BEFORE have the puppet-masters’ strings been more exposed. Clearly, something very close to a full-scale civil war is raging across the dark institutions of the American Deep State.
In the days immediately preceding the 8 November presidential election we witnessed the critical intervention of the New York Office of the FBI. Faced with the near certainty of “strategic leaking” by his own agents should he refuse, the hapless FBI Director, James Comey, agreed to inform Congress (and the world) that the Bureau was re-opening the investigation into the Clinton E-mail Scandal.
At the time it seemed reasonable to speculate that the FBI’s New York Office was a hot-bed of Trump supporters gone “rogue”. But, as Glen Greenwald’s recent posting on The Intercept makes clear, the true motivation for the New York Office’s political intercession was very probably the CIA’s own political interventions on behalf of the Clinton campaign.
The FBI’s disdain for the CIA’s legally questionable (to say the least!) rules of engagement is well known in US national security circles. In the lurid light of the strategically leaked “Russian Dossier”, the re-ignition of the Clinton E-Mail Scandal is beginning to look more and more like a pre-emptive FBI strike.
That such a politically compromising document – unsourced and unverified – has been injected into the bloodstream of the American body politic just eight days before Trump’s inauguration as the 45th President of the United States is as unprecedented as it is alarming. As Greenwald rightly states: “The threat of being ruled by unaccountable and unelected entities is self-evident and grave. That’s especially true when the entity behind which so many [Trump opponents] are rallying is one with a long and deliberate history of lying, propaganda, war crimes, torture, and the worst atrocities imaginable.”
Just how this overt effort to undermine the duly-elected President-Elect of the USA plays out will depend largely on how most Americans view the role and conduct of the CIA. On the one hand, there is what might be called the “Jason Bourne” view of the agency, and, on the other, the view inspired by the television series “Homeland”.
The Jason Bourne CIA is presented as a murderous law unto itself. Unrestrained and unaccountable, this version of the Agency would not hesitate to cobble together a damning dossier and use it to weaken, perhaps fatally, the administration of a president deemed (by itself) to be a person inimical to the USA’s long-term strategic interests.
The Homeland CIA offers a much more nuanced view of America’s national intelligence agency. Above all else, the Agency’s operatives are portrayed as patriots. Their contradictory obligations: to remain loyal to the US Constitution; and to take whatever steps are necessary to protect America’s interests; repeatedly reduce characters like Carrie Mathison, Peter Quinn and Saul Berenson to guilt-ridden wrecks.
Of the two views, the Homeland CIA is by far the more dangerous. By painting over the blood-red crimes of the Agency with reassuring coats of ambivalent grey, the series’ writers encourage the view that although it is often necessary to uphold the Constitution by subverting it, and to preserve America’s international reputation by tarnishing it, the agents responsible never, ever, stop loving the United States.
One could almost say that the Jason Bourne CIA is how American liberals view the Agency when the evil Republicans are in power; while the Homeland version provides them with the excuses they need when the CIA’s misdeeds are authorised by a Democrat. So, if the Russian Dossier really is a CIA concoction, then, as far as Trump’s liberal opponents are concerned, it’s from Langley, with love.
Greenwald rails against this anything-to-rid-America-of-Trump double standard: “There are solutions to Trump. They involve reasoned strategizing and patient focus on issues people actually care about. Whatever those solutions are, venerating the intelligence community, begging for its intervention, and equating their dark and dirty assertions as Truth are most certainly not among them. Doing that cannot possibly achieve any good, and is already doing much harm.”
Greenwald’s sterling defence of the US Constitution, notwithstanding, the situation in Washington may already have moved beyond the power of the most conscientious journalist to remedy. Regardless of Trump’s ultimate fate, the men he has nominated to defend US interests are quietly reassuring their Senate interlocutors that the continuity of America’s military, foreign relations and national security policy is not about to be upended by 3:00am tweets from the White House.
The unchanging priorities of the American Deep State crowd around Trump like ancestral ghosts: hemming him in; whispering in his ear; by turn inflaming and freezing his untutored political heart. His supporters should not be surprised. Though they may not know it, making America great has never, ever, been the President’s job.
The Daily Blog has done it again, well done
He’s beginning to learn that ” You can’t always get what you want” even when you have accidentally been elected president of the United States of America . But the reaction of the deep state to his election is a striking indication that a lot of serious people are very worried that he might fulfil some of his promises for working class America. And stop making wars all over the world,so staving the military/industrial industry.
Cheers David J S
Perhaps Trump could start with his own workers, David;
ref: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/30/us/trump-hotel-workers-campaign-for-a-union-over-the-bosss-objections.html?_r=0
Donald Trump cares as much for the Working Class as patrons at a KFC outlet have for free-range chickens.
Frank
To survive in business it is necessary to exploit the advantages the law opens to you. All your competitors will be doing so , hence ‘needs must when the devil drives’. All the criticisms to be levelled at Trump in respect of his maximising profits are covered automatically in identifying him as a successful businessman. Once you run a public company you are legally obliged to maximise profit on behalf of shareholders. So the question is; Can a businessman become an altruistic leader? or has his (her) history in business proven that they are psychologically unsuitable? It is going to depend on the individual isn’t it .
Trump’s history of studying and exploiting the national and international rules of the game mean that he understands better than most where the rules are screwing middle America and what to do about it. We all have to wait and see if this is what he does in fact , but clearly the US 1% establishment is very concerned about it.
Cheers D J S
Investing in people is dangerous, because people lie
David, I see no evidence to back up such an assertion. In fact, if anything, Trump’s willingness to screw his own workers suggests he cares very little about the working class and 100% about his own profit-making.
Which is what you have alluded to;
To survive in business it is necessary to exploit the advantages the law opens to you. All your competitors will be doing so , hence ‘needs must when the devil drives’. All the criticisms to be levelled at Trump in respect of his maximising profits are covered automatically in identifying him as a successful businessman. Once you run a public company you are legally obliged to maximise profit on behalf of shareholders.
You ask if whether “a businessman can become an altruistic leader?”
I ask you what he’s done in the past to suggest he can be altruistic. Thus far: nothing.
In fact, if previous millionaire-leaders are any indication, your faith in Trump is mis-placed. Just look at John Key and Silvio Berlusconi.
How ‘altruistic’ was John Key when it came to undermining trade union power; driving down wages; ignoring child poverty; demonising welfare beneficiaries; and over-seeing a rise in homelessness?
If we’re going to rely on a bloated billionaire, who is essentially a card-carrying member of the One Percent, to improve the lot of workers and the Middle Class – I think you’ll be waiting an awful long time.
And it’s worth nothing mentioning that all millionaire policy is designed to do, is make inefficient business practice profitable. So all they do is scale up proven companies that are already huge, so there is no real growth. If you want good gains, you have to take an honest look at weaknesses so you can take good gains first.
David, the 1% are cannibalising themselves. Perhaps this is a natural reaction to diminishing resources and wealth accumulating in few and fewer hands. Sooner or later the 1% turn on each other. It is inevitable.
Trump is simply one faction of the 1% and doesn’t deserve any support or sympathy from the Left. The sooner he and his ilk are swept away, the better for us all.
On the contrary. Trumpism will be around long enough to destroy Thatcherism
The entire western world is drowning in the ocean of lies that emanate from governments and their agencies.
It’s all panning out much as predicted, unfortunately, with collapse of the environment underway and collapse of the energy system imminent, and those in power using every dirty trick imaginable to hold on to power.
I totally agree, I would not trust the existing administration one bit, I would also not trust Trump and his mercenaries. The US is a lost soul territory, that is unless the ones who care for it take a stand and start a true revolution.
So far the US is fucked beyond recognition.
That does not justify the calls by others, who blindly trust Putin and Russia, that government and country are equally fucked.
We need to get back to our roots, that was shown with the anti nuclear protests in the 1980s, New Zealand’s only chance as a messenger and a serious player is to get back to such decisiveness and damned honesty. Fuck America, Fuck Russia, Fuck China, we need none of them, we must stand up and show OUR principles and ideas. All else will be a sell out of the same we have had for years.
Kia Kaha.
“And we said we would all go down together”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CABCIseO8Zo
Just Wait!!! Take nothing for granted???
In my view, America, with Trump and his appointees, is being run for the very first time from within. CIA and FBI are at one another’s throats as we all await the official announcement of the return to the Republic and its original Constitution. The lies have and are being exposed. The intentions of the NWO most certainly will never come to pass. What is irritating are the minions so desperately clinging with false hope that they can protect their positions or receive amnesty for their crimes against humanity or indeed even run off to Hawaii or for others to hightail it to the Sth Island or various islands.
http://www.theeventchronicle.com/intel/deep-state-defeated-new-world-order-halted/#