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Thread: How The Vlad and Donald Show Got Gaskets Popping All Over the Imperial City

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    Default How The Vlad and Donald Show Got Gaskets Popping All Over the Imperial City

    Tuesday, July 17, 2018

    How The Vlad and Donald Show Got Gaskets Popping All Over the Imperial City



    By David Stockman

    The Vlad and Donald show in Helsinki yesterday was simply brilliant and breathtaking---
    we'd say even a beautiful thing to behold.

    Between them, they left CNN's nattering nabobs of neocon nonsense sounding like the
    shrieking monkeys they actually are. And that's to say nothing of the fools they made out
    of the newly minted liberal and progressive war-mongers on the Dem side of the aisle in
    Washington or the so-called journalists who fill 90% of the space in the so-called
    mainstream media with endless pro-war propaganda.

    But most of all it was the single greatest blow to the War Party since it turned
    Imperial Washington into a colossal menace bent on global hegemony when the Soviet Union
    slithered off the pages of history in 1991.

    We have said all along that Putin and Russia have been demonized because the Warfare
    State desperately needs an "enemy" to justify its $800 billion annual mugging of
    America's taxpayers. Yet today's spontaneous chorus by the two leaders in behalf of
    détente, dialogue and diplomacy puts the kibosh on that Big Lie more completely than
    could 100 Ted Talks or a year's worth of pro-peace op eds in the Washington Post.
    So Flyover America will have no trouble seeing the good of the Helsinki Summit. Trump
    and Putin just killed it on every topic where the War Party and its shills in the press
    wanted to drive a wedge.

    That is to say, cooperation on Syria, arms control, terrorism, North Korea, Ukraine;
    friendly competition on supplying natural gas to Europe; an invitation to Mueller to
    send his legal sleuths to Russia to participate in the interrogation of the 12 GRU ham
    sandwiches named in the indictment; and best of all, a reciprocal notion that Russian
    prosecutors come here to question Deep State operatives about how they helped one of
    the greatest scoundrels of modern times, Bill Browder, abscond from Russia with almost

    $1.5 billion skimmed from its people and on which he and his posse paid zero taxes
    both there and here.

    Indeed, the debunking of the false mainstream narrative about Russia's nefarious
    intentions and doings was so complete that the Deep State apparatchiks were reduced to
    sputtering hysterically. For instance, here is the bile issued by the central architect of the
    Russian collusion lie, former CIA director John Brennan:

    Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki rises to & exceeds the
    threshold of “high crimes & misdemeanors.” It was nothing short of treasonous. Not
    only were Trump’s comments imbecilic, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin. Republican atriots: Where are you???
    Then again, when you actually read the transcript of the joint press conference, you will
    find the very words, phrases and tonalities that harken back to the courageous efforts of
    liberal democrats like Senators George McGovern and Frank Church and even President
    Jimmy Carter to promote diplomacy and detente during the height of the Cold War
    confrontation when each side had 9,000 nuclear warheads on hair-trigger alert.

    And exactly what was John Brennan doing circa 1976?

    Why, he voted for the communist candidate for President, Gus Hall, because he thought
    Jimmy Carter was too much of a cold warrior!

    In other words, the guy is a demented partisan hack who arose to power during a 25
    year career in the CIA that began in 1980, and during which he sold his soul to the
    Warfare State in pursuit of position, power and pelf.

    But beyond our joy in hearing the gaskets popping all over the Imperial City we can say
    this: In the course of that press conference the Donald threw down the gauntlet to the
    Deep State in a manner so explicit and unequivocal that there is now no turning back.
    Either he will rally the undoubtedly dazed GOP troops on Capitol Hill and his base in
    behalf of rapprochement with Russia and an end Washington's arrogant Imperial
    hegemony---or they will indeed put him on the Dick Nixon Memorial Helicopter for a
    final ride to Gonesville.

    At this point we are at a loss---50 years of studying the Imperial City notwithstanding---
    to know which way it will go.

    But we have no doubt that the Deep State and its shills, assigns and
    nomenklatura throughout the Imperial City will now escalate their war against the
    Donald to red hot intensity. The signal for that was in the very first words that came
    off Anderson Cooper's viperous tongue the instant the press conference was finished:
    “You have been watching perhaps one of the most disgraceful performances by an
    American president at a summit in front of a Russian leader, that I have ever seen”.

    But just call it fever pitch on steroids. That's the condition that CNN had already worked
    itself into after a full weekend of near-hysterical gumming about Robert Mueller's latest
    gambit.

    We are referring, of course, to his Friday indictment of 12 alleged election meddlers
    slathered in Russian dressing.

    But wasn't that just another Deep State "insurance policy"?

    Wasn't that a desperate, bald-faced effort to sabotage yesterday's summit in Helsinki?

    After all, why did these indictments come down on Friday afternoon July 13?

    Did Mueller and Rosenstein need to hurry-up their indictments and make lightening
    perp-walk style arrests so that their targets wouldn't flee the country in the dead of
    night?

    Not at all. The 12 indictees were already long gone. In fact, these particular Russians
    were never here, if they actually exist at all.

    So let's call a spade a spade. Friday afternoon's action by his own Justice
    Department was a brazen shot across Donald Trump's bow by the Deep State the likes of
    which we have never before seen; and which after today's rebuke of its entire false
    RussiaGate narrative will undoubtedly prove to be a mere token of the pounding attacks
    yet to come.

    Even then, Friday's bald-faced attempt to sabotage the summit in itself raises deeply
    troubling questions about whether even the veneer of democratic self-government has
    much shelf-life left in America.

    That's because Friday's theatrics amounted to a frontal attempt to nullify the 2016
    election. If the Donald said anything about his agenda during the 2016 campaign that
    was remotely coherent (besides building the Mexican Wall) it was that he would seek a
    rapprochement deal with Putin.

    Needless to say, the War Party is dead set against constructive engagement with
    Russia because the Fake Enemy represented by its risible demonization of Putin is
    literally its authorization to continue squandering $800 billion per year on "national
    security"; and that, in turn, is the very life-blood of Imperial Washington's malodorous
    prosperity.

    So what happened even before today's press conference demarche was a profoundly
    anti-democratic and unconstitutional attempt by the permanent government to thwart
    Trump's effort to pursue his self-evident mandate from the US electorate.

    But for crying out loud. Friday's indictment of 12 ham sandwiches from the GRU
    (Russian military security agency) had nothing to do with justice or Mueller's mandate;
    and even less so with genuine national security.

    As to the former, there will never be any arrests, let alone a trial or conviction. That's
    because the source of the purported "evidence", memorialized in the indictment's 29
    pages of spurious exactitude, is presumably classified and would never be presented in
    open court.

    Indeed, the CNN bobbleheads are always remonstrating about the sanctity of the rule of
    law, but exactly what do they think Mueller's grandstanding stunt was other than
    an insult to exactly that?

    They surely can't claim that Mueller's hired political assassins were faithfully
    administering regular-way justice when the guilt or innocence of the charged cannot
    possibly ever be adjudicated. How could it be when there can never be a legitimate trial
    with empty defendants' chairs and no admissible evidence that the government is
    willing to present in a public proceeding?

    In fact, the despicable Rod Rosenstein made absolutely clear that the indictment is
    going directly into the dead letter file, with nary a passing swipe by Robert Mueller's
    vaunted prosecutors:

    “The special counsel’s investigation is ongoing and there will be no comments by the
    special counsel at this time ... we intend to transition responsibility for this indictment
    to the Justice Department’s National Security Division (NSD) while we await the
    apprehension of the defendants.”
    Really?

    Either the DOJ is fixing to send Seal Team Six into Moscow to snatch the 12 GRU
    operatives or it expects the Kremlin to dispatch them to Washington handcuffed to their
    seats on a Russian air force jet at the very next opportunity.

    As it happened at the press conference, both the Donald and Vlad put the fork in even
    that absurdly improbable prospect.

    That is, Putin referenced a 1999 cooperation agreement between the two countries on
    criminal matters and welcomed Mueller's grand inquisitors to come to Moscow to
    participate in an interrogation of the defendants; and the Donald welcomed it as a
    creative approach on the matter.

    Likewise, the timing of Friday's action had no national security purpose whatsoever. If
    the Deep State apparatchiks really wanted Putin confronted on the matter---then in any
    rational universe they would have armed the Donald with the indictment's particulars
    and sent him into the meeting to confront Putin before it became public.

    Either that, or the Donald was briefed but un-persuaded and therefore refused to do
    their bidding. So Mueller and the DOJ simply "leaked" the charges via the clownish
    device of an un-implementable indictment in order to blow-up the summit.

    That is, their purpose was to countermand the decision of the US president to pursue
    the very objectives he promised the American electorate. And since Brennan and his
    Deep State ilk have brought up the "treason" word, we leave it to Justin Raimondo to
    appropriately turn the tables:
    Yet the brazenness of this borderline treason is what makes it so ineffective.
    The American people aren’t stupid: to the extent that they’re paying attention to this
    Beltway comic opera they can figure out the motives and meaning of Mueller’s
    accusations without too much difficulty.
    The indictment reads like a fourth-rate spy thriller: we are treated to alleged “real
    time” transcripts of Boris and Natasha in action, draining the DNC’s email system as
    well as our precious bodily fluids. This material, perhaps supplied by the National
    Security Agency, contains no evidence that links either Russia or the named
    individuals to the actions depicted in the transcripts. We just have to take Mueller’s
    word for it.

    After today's post-press conference hail of calumny at the Donald by a endless line of
    Dem pols it is perfectly clear that the alleged Russian election meddling is a sideshow. In
    fact, the Dems are so distraught and un-reconciled to their loss to surely the
    weakest presidential candidate ever fielded by the GOP (including Alf Landon and Barry
    Goldwater) that they have subordinated rationality itself to their pursuit of vendetta.
    So doing, they have made the Democratic party the new handmaids of the Warfare
    State, as Justin Raimondo further aptly observed:

    The disgusting – and depressing – response of the Democrats to the Helsinki summit
    has been a concerted campaign to ... cancel it. Yes, that’s how myopic and in thrall to
    the Deep State these flunkies are: world peace, who cares? Never mind that we’re still
    on hair-trigger alert, with our nukes aimed at their cities and their nukes targeting
    ours. The slightest anomaly could spark a nuclear exchange – the end of the world, the
    extinction of human life, and probably of most life, for quite some time to come.
    And yet — what does the survival of the human race matter next to the question of how
    and why Hillary Clinton was denied her rightful place in history? I mean, really!
    After the announcement on Friday, John Podesta smirked "they caught the witches".
    But as George Washington law professor Jonathan Turley observed,
    In other words, if there were a real hunt for election witches, we (the US and its
    intelligence apparatus) would find ourselves at the head of the line to the pillory.
    At the end of the day, this is not about a national security threat at all because Russia
    isn't one. Let us again observe that even in its current state of alleged disrepair and
    under-spending that the NATO-29 (including the US) have a combined GDP of $36
    trillion and military budget of $1 trillion.

    Those figures are 24X Russia's GDP of $1.4 trillion and 16X its military budget of
    $61 billion. Accordingly, there is not a snow balls' chance in the hot place that the
    perfectly rational leader of what is actually a pint-seized nation who stood alongside the

    Donald at today's press conference has any illusions (or intentions) whatsoever about
    military aggression.

    But now that he has thrown the gauntlet at the Deep State, we can hope that the Donald
    will reclaim his powers as the dully elected President of the United States and order an
    examination of the DNC computer that has been AWOL during this entire witchunt;
    and, even more to the point, declassify every single NSA intercept on which Mueller's
    comic book indictment was based.

    We are perfectly willing to believe that operatives in the GRU went spear-phishing at the
    DNCC and DNC, and that like millions of everyday folks who fall for these gambits daily
    on the global internet that some naïve or stupid DNC staffers, as the case may be,
    opened their digital kimono's to the intruders.

    But so what?

    None of the shenanigans and skull-doggery inside the Dem apparatus that were revealed
    to the American electorate were untrue. So how did the truth of the matter undermine
    America's democratic process of selecting a leader?

    The only thing the indictment proves---even if it is accurate to the chapter and verse
    cited----is that if you live in a glass house, don't start throwing stones.

    The US spends $75 billion per year on a colossal globe-spanning surveillance, hacking
    and internet intruding operation that makes the indictment's alleged GRU tom foolery
    look trite by comparison.

    The recently renamed TAO (tailored access operations) alone consists of a

    dozen sprawling buildings in Maryland, Texas, Hawaii, Georgia and Colorado chock-a-
    block with a veritable army of military and civilian computer hackers, intelligence
    analysts, targeting specialists, computer hardware and software designers, and electrical
    engineers. And their job is to do a thousand times over to foreign governments, elections
    and political processes exactly what the Mueller indictment charges against the GRU.
    Indeed, TAO is the Typhoid Mary of the global internet, infecting systems
    of friend and foe alike with a continuous tsunami of implanted

    malware. While originally chartered as an eavesdropping agency, the NSA has
    embraced hacking as an especially nifty way to spy on foreign targets.

    The intelligence collection is often automated, with malware implants — computer code
    designed to find material of interest — left sitting on the targeted system for months or
    even years, sending files back to the NSA.

    According to the diligent 2013 investigation published by a leading German news site,
    Hamburg based Spiegel ONLINE, and based on leaked NSA documents, the US engages
    in massive malware implanting activities which are far more menacing than the
    primitive "phishing" operations described by Mueller's latest comic book:

    One of the hackers' key tasks is the offensive infiltration of target computers with so-
    called implants or with large numbers of Trojans. They've bestowed their spying tools
    with illustrious monikers like "ANGRY NEIGHBOR," "HOWLERMONKEY" or
    "WATERWITCH." These names may sound cute, but the tools they describe are both
    aggressive and effective.
    According to details in Washington's current budget plan for the US intelligence
    services, around 85,000 computers worldwide are projected to be infiltrated by the
    NSA specialists by the end of this year. By far the majority of these "implants" are
    conducted by TAO teams via the Internet.

    Nevertheless, TAO has dramatically improved the tools at its disposal. It maintains a
    sophisticated toolbox known internally by the name "QUANTUMTHEORY." "Certain
    QUANTUM missions have a success rate of as high as 80%, where spam is less than
    1%," one internal NSA presentation states.

    A comprehensive internal presentation titled "QUANTUM CAPABILITIES," which
    SPIEGEL has viewed, lists virtually every popular Internet service provider as a
    target, including Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter and YouTube.
    Finally, why do we think these indictments were an utterly desperate move by Mueller?

    Because the indictments go out of their way to preclude any Americans having any
    involvement in these ‘hacking events’ at all.

    As Tom Luongo cogently observed:
    Now with Trump prepared to sit down with Putin and potentially hammer out a major
    agreement on many outstanding issues like Syria, arms control, NATO’s purpose,
    energy policy and terrorism the Deep State/Globalist/Davos Crowd needed something
    to saddle him with to prevent this from happening.
    The reasoning will be (if not already out there as I write this) that Trump would be a
    traitor for sitting down with Putin after these indictments.
    Tom Luongo could not have been more clairvoyant. The wolf-pack is out howling
    already---dripping with blood in tooth and claw.

    In that context, we never thought we'd see the occasion when the Donald was actually
    lyrical, but he sure was today. Shame on Imperial Washington for its shrill attacks on a
    President who is actually seeking peace with a rival who has done us no harm.

    Said the Donald
    I would rather take a political risk in pursuit of peace than risk peace in
    pursuit of politics.
    Truer words were never spoken.

    David Stockman served as the Director of the Office Management and Budget (1981-1985) under President Ronald Reagan. The above originally appeared at David Stockman's Contra Corner.

    http://www.targetliberty.com/2018/07/how-vlad-and-donald-show-got-gaskets.html?m=1



    People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

    George Orwell



    Police dog 1, bad guy nothin':

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    ROFL !

    Putin Drops Bomb on Mueller: Russia Seeks Charges Against Obama-Era U.S. Ambassador & U.S. Intel Agents Allegedly Linked to Browder

    Posted on July 18, 2018 by admin

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    The Prosecutor General’s Office of Russia named the names of employees of special services and US officials suspected of involvement in the illegal activities of the founder of the British Hermitage Fund William Browder, reports Interfax . Among them was the former US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, to whom Russian investigators want to ask a number of questions.

    The names of Americans who are interested in the Russian investigation were voiced by the head of the Office of the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation Alexander Kurennoy. “I will mention some of them: they are employees of the US National Security Agency: Todd Hyman, he signed an oath in the US court, according to Browder, Svetlana Engert took the stolen materials of the criminal case from Russia, Alexander Shvartsman, who was in charge of Browder during his stay in the US , Jim Roht, a CIA agent who in fact was and is the financial manager of Browder, Robert Otto, until January 2017, the Deputy Chief of the US Intelligence Agency, David Kramer.

    According to him, among the persons of interest are also “well-known Michael McFaul, former US ambassador to Russia.”
    “Under his leadership in 2009-2010, compiled reports to the US State Department from Moscow,” which referred to the progress of the investigation in the Magnitsky case.

    Kurennoy also mentioned “those same brothers Ziff – recipients of illegal income, American financiers,” TASS reports. The representative of the Prosecutor General’s Office also called them “long-standing partners in the criminal business of William Browder.”

    Asked whether the list was exhaustive, Kurennoy replied: “Of course not.” “There are quite a large number of people who should be questioned with the participation of Russian investigators: they are people from among special services, congressmen, US senators, their assistants, various civil servants,” Kurennoy said. According to him, special services of states can enter this list. “For example, we would very much like to talk with Christopher Still.” Also not an unknown person is an agent of the British Mi-6, for a long period of time he had contacts with a group of lobbyists of the Magnitsky Act, and interestingly, it was through this person that an investigation was initiated by the special prosecutor Miiller who everyone is known under the name “Trump file”, – added the head of the Office of the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation Alexander Kurennoy.

    Recall, on Monday at a press conference in Helsinki, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Russian law enforcement officers can interrogate accused of interfering in US elections at the request of the United States and send a response to Washington. At the same time, he added, the Russian side in that case would expect from the American “that they interrogate those representatives of the US special services whom Moscow suspects of illegal actions on the territory of the Russian Federation, in the presence of Russian investigators.”

    Vladimir Putin mentioned the so-called case of Hermitage Capital, a fund headed by financier William Browder, convicted in Russia of fraud.

    “According to our investigation, Mr. Browder and his business partners earned more than $ 1.5 billion illegally, neither in Russia nor in the US, they paid the money, and $ 400 million was sent to Mrs. Clinton’s election campaign. These are official data, which are present in their reports, “the head of the Russian Federation noted.

    According to him, “perhaps it was done legally, but the money was received illegally.” “We have reason to believe that some US intelligence officials accompanied these transactions illegally,” Putin said.

    READ MORE:

    https://truepundit.com/putin-drops-b...ed-to-browder/
    "At that time there shall arise Michael, the great prince, guardian of your people; It shall be a time unsurpassed in distress since nations began until that time." (Dn 12:1)

    www.call2holiness.org/iniquity.htm

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    Mueller's response: [crickets]

    "Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever ...."

    Thomas Jefferson

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    Mansour: If You Think U.S. Intelligence Is Never Wrong, I Have Some Yellowcake for You


    SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images 18 Jul 201866 The remonstrations of history are rarely heeded in moments of mass hysteria, and the current frenzy to punish Russia for “stealing” the election from Hillary Clinton is no different.

    While it’s nice to see the Party of Alger Hiss finally take America’s side in a conflict with Russia, their new bellicosity seems a bit cynical. As Ann Coulter mused, it would have been nice to have “this fighting spirit about 50 years ago when the Soviet Union sought total world domination and Stalin’s spies were crawling through the U.S. government.” But, hey, I’m old enough to remember when Democrats believed the greatest threat to world peace was “climate change.” At least now they’re not tilting at windmills!

    But before these new Cold Warriors and their neocon fellow travelers lead us into a crusade based on an FBI report about a computer server the bureau never got to inspect, perhaps we should consider the track record of U.S. intelligence in times of war.

    It’s worth asking: Do the experts the establishment relies on—people like communist-turned-CIA-director John Brennan—actually know what they’re doing? How much can we trust the War Party’s judgment?

    My point here is not to impugn the honor of the United States or our military heroes—many of whom died in wars following erroneous judgments—nor is it to necessarily accuse our intelligence officials of bad faith. The lesson here is that intelligence gathering and evaluating is a difficult and imperfect task. We should be humble and judicious in using it when lives are at stake. As Aesop said, measure twice, cut once.

    The following is a (partial) chronological list of U.S. intelligence SNAFUS:

    1861 — Johnny Will Come Marching Home Again in Just 90 Days!

    At the onset of the Civil War, the Union’s civilian and military leadership expected the entire conflict to be over in roughly three months. As historian Ernest B. Furgurson recounts:

    On July 4, Lincoln asked a special session of Congress for 400,000 troops and $400 million, with legal authority “for making this contest a short, and a decisive one.” He expressed not only the hope, but also the expectation of most officials in Washington. Many of the militia outfits rolling in from the North had signed on in April for just 90 days, assuming they could deal with the uppity Rebels in short order. Day after day, a headline in the New York Tribune blared, “Forward to Richmond! Forward to Richmond!” a cry that echoed in all corners of the North.
    The first battle soon put an end to those sentiments, and one anecdote from that day perfectly illustrates the failure of the political class in Washington, DC, to grasp the magnitude of the conflict. During the First Battle of Bull Run, “[s]warms of civilians rushed out from the capital in a party mood, bringing picnic baskets and champagne, expecting to cheer the boys on their way.” The revelers would eventually flee the field in panic as the battle turned bloody. One New York Congressman barely escaped with his life. When the dust settled on July 21, 1861, there were 4,700 casualties and four long years of war ahead.

    But while the Union’s civilian leadership under-estimated the challenge, its military intelligence famously over-estimated it.

    In November 1861, President Lincoln appointed George B. McClellan as commanding general of the Union forces. In the ensuing months, he became notable for his extreme reluctance to engage the enemy, which some would characterize as cowardice. But as a very partial defense of McClellan, it should be noted that he was advised by his spies that Confederate general Robert E. Lee had 100,000 troops. In fact, Lee had just 54,000 men.

    And that was just one of many mis-estimates during the conflict. As the CIA says in its own history, “The intelligence officer who has a due regard for his own morale will do well to pass over the history of the American Civil War.”

    1898 — “Remember the Maine” … Which Wasn’t Blown Up by Spain

    On February 15, 1898, the American warship the USS Maine blew up in Havana Harbor, leaving 260 Navy men dead and sparking outrage back home. At the time, Cuba was a Spanish colony, and so the immediate verdict was that the dastardly Spaniards had destroy our naval vessel using a mine or torpedo.

    “Remember the Maine!” was Uncle Sam’s rallying cry, as President McKinley launched the Spanish-American War.

    The war against Spain was brief and victorious. However, the subsequent counter-insurgency to put down the insurrectos in the former Spanish colony of the Philippines—which was ceded to the United States by Spain—lasted for years and cost 10 times as many American lives as the original war with Spain, as well as the lives of some 200,000 Filipinos.

    Much later, in 1974, a definitive investigation found that the cause of the USS Maine explosion was coal dust inside the ship. Spain had nothing to do with it. Oops.

    1941 — The Infamy of a Sneak Attack We Should Have Seen Coming

    Knowing that the Imperial Japanese were up to no good, the Australians, our close allies, broke the Japanese military code in 1939—two years before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

    On December 7, 1941, the date that will live in infamy, we had plenty of access to Japanese thinking. In fact, three days before the sneak attack, the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence issued a 26-page memo, focusing in on Japanese surveillance of Hawaii.

    Yet as we all know, American forces were completely unprepared at Pearl Harbor, and 2,355 Americans died. Ironically, the lesson seems to be that the U.S. had too manyintelligence reports, and we couldn’t sort out the better ones from the worse ones. We had indications that the Japanese might attack American forces all over the Pacific, but we just couldn’t figure out which forces were in danger. To use the intelligence parlance, our analysts couldn’t separate the “signal” from the “noise.”

    1957 — Mind the Missile Gap

    In 1957, a blue-chip Pentagon advisory panel, the Gaither Committee, concluded that the Soviet Union had ten intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM), whereas the U.S. had none.

    Senator John F. Kennedy, gearing up to run for president as a hawkish Cold Warrior, coined the term “missile gap” to described the supposed U.S. deficit. In the meantime, the number of alleged Russian missiles grew, from 10, to 100, to 500. But we would later learn that the actual number of Soviet ICBMs was four, and that included prototypes of unknown effectiveness.

    Interestingly, two decades later, in the mid-1970s, another “missile gap” was “discovered.” And once again, reports of Red military muscle proved to be greatly exaggerated.

    1961 — The Bay of Pigs

    On April 17, 1961, some 1,500 anti-communist Cubans, backed by U.S. logistics and airpower, landed at the Bay of Pigs in Fidel Castro’s Cuba, hoping to liberate the island. The mission was a catastrophic failure. The CIA, which had guided the operation all along, hoped the Cuban people would immediately welcome the invaders; instead, the Cuban military fought them off, liquidating the entire invasion force within three days.

    The courage of the anti-communist Cubans can’t be questioned. However, the wisdom of the CIA’s mission and planning is very much to be unquestioned.

    For instance, one of the enduring controversies of the Bay of Pigs operation is whether or not President John F. Kennedy ignored or reneged on a promise to supply sufficient air support for the Free Cubans. Critics argue that JFK got cold feet toward the end, thus dooming the mission. If so, that’s a reminder that intelligence must always be accompanied by sound leadership.

    1968 — The Holiday from Hell

    On January 30, 1968, during the Tet holiday in Vietnam, American forces were taken by surprise when the communist forces of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese army (as a practical matter, the two forces were one and the same, both directed from Hanoi) attacked all across South Vietnam. The enemy even fought his way inside the U.S. embassy in Saigon.

    The Americans and their South Vietnamese allies ultimately prevailed, but the fact remained that the U.S. was taken by surprise. We had badly underestimated the communists’ ability to launch such a wide-ranging offensive.

    In fact, the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, Ellsworth Bunker, declared just two weeks before Tet, “The past year has been one of sustained and unremitting effort and I believe has seen enough achievements to give us every encouragement to continue along the present lines.” Continuing in that happy-talking vein, Bunker added,“[The enemy] has been thwarted in his attempts at penetration south of the DMZ.”

    1979 — The Shah’s “Island of Stability” Meets a “Revolutionary Situation”

    On December 31, 1977, President Jimmy Carter toasted New Year’s eve with the Shah of Iran in Tehran. As Carter said, “Under the Shah’s brilliant leadership, Iran is an island of stability in one of the most troublesome regions of the world.”

    In August 1978, the CIA declared, “Iran is not in a revolutionary or even a pre-revolutionary situation.”

    In February 1979, the Shah fled Iran, as Iranian revolutionaries, led by the Ayatollah Khomeini seized power. Oops.

    1998 — A ‘Colossal Failure’ of Nuclear Proportions

    The whole theory of arms control—including the disastrous “deal” with Iran that President Trump wisely terminated—is that it’s possible for an external observer to know what a country is doing, or not, with its nuclear capabilities.

    However, on May 11, 1998, the U.S. government was caught flat-footed. We had no idea that India was about to set off their first nuclear device. The New York Times headline put it well: “U.S. Blundered On Intelligence, Officials Admit.” the paper quoted the then-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Richard Shelby, decrying “a colossal failure of our nation’s intelligence gathering.”

    1998 — Bill Clinton’s Aspirins of Mass Destruction

    On August 20, 1998, in response to Al Qaeda attacks on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, President Bill Clinton ordered a cruise missiles strike to destroy what his administration believed was a factory for making of weapons of mass destruction in Khartoum, Sudan.

    We later learned that the destroyed site was actually an aspirin factory. Oops.

    As we know, the threat from Al Qaeda was deadly real, and this wasn’t the last bad call we’d make in regard to Bin Laden’s terrorists.

    September 11, 2001 — The “Shock” That “Should Not Have Come as a Surprise”

    Hundreds of books, reports, and monographs have been published about the failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks. In the words of the 9/11 Commission, “The 9/11 attacks were a shock, but they should not have come as a surprise.”

    The Commission painted a scenario reminiscent of the challenges confronting the U.S. prior to Pearl Harbor: “The combination of an overwhelming number of priorities, flat budgets, an outmoded structure, and bureaucratic rivalries resulted in an insufficient response to this new challenge.” In other words, they had more noise than signal.

    And yet even so, despite these difficulties, the Intel Community managed to get this extremely direct warning into the President’s Daily Brief on August 6, 2001: “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US.” The briefing even included a warning about “suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.”
    As we know, the Bush administration wasn’t ready on 9/11. As the 9/11 Commission Report showed, we had all the pieces to the puzzle before us, including warnings that Bin Laden’s followers might be training at U.S. flight schools and that Al Qaeda was fixated on bringing down the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers.

    Thus another harsh lesson: We can have good intelligence reports, but if we have bad intelligence in our leaders, it’s all for naught.

    2003 — The Difference Between Yellowcake and a Cakewalk

    We’re all familiar with the multiple intelligence failures of Iraq, but we can pause over three.

    First, the wrong-headed idea that Saddam Hussein had WMD. Yes, for sure, he was an evil man, but he was no threat to the U.S. And so, for example, the allegations that Iraq had sought to buy uranium oxide, aka, yellowcake, proved to be bogus.

    Second, we were told by the Bush-Cheney administration that U.S. forces would be “greeted as liberators.” The invasion would be, as one giddy neocon put it, a “cakewalk.” Yeah, not quite. In fact, U.S. fatalities in that conflict have totaled nearly 4,500, with another 32,000 injured.

    Third, we were told by President Bush, backed up by his neocon brainiacs, that Operation Iraqi Freedom would touch off a wave of democratization across the Middle East. Instead, it’s touched off a wave of civil wars and genocidal ethnic cleansing of ancient Christian communities, such that it’s likely that soon there won’t be any Christians in the region that gave birth to Christianity.

    I could go on. I could wrote ten volumes on the intelligence mistakes of Hillary Clinton alone—she, who voted for the Iraq War, was eager to “liberate” Libya, and left our ambassador defenseless in Benghazi.

    Or I could write about Senator John McCain—who also voted for the Iraq War, cheer-led every dumb move in Libya, and has supported every other vainglorious exercise, from the former Soviet republic of Georgia to Syria. He never met a foreign conflict he didn’t want to send Americans to die in.

    But as we can see, even after all these blunders, there are plenty of Hillary and McCain wannabes in Washington, and they just can’t wait to make the exact same mistakes all over again.

    Follow Rebecca Mansour on Twitter @RAMansour.


    https://www.breitbart.com/big-govern...wcake-for-you/
    "At that time there shall arise Michael, the great prince, guardian of your people; It shall be a time unsurpassed in distress since nations began until that time." (Dn 12:1)

    www.call2holiness.org/iniquity.htm

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