Stop the
CIA Coup
The Deep State versus Donald Trump
By Justin Raimondo
December 12, 2016
"Information
Clearing House"
- "AntiWar"
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The CIA is up to its old tricks: overthrowing a
democratically elected government. Only this time it’s
our government.
As they are now
legally allowed to do ever since the law against
covert CIA propaganda in the United States was repealed,
the Agency has leaked to the Washington Post
reports –
via anonymous third parties – of its alleged
assessment of a Russian campaign to hand Donald Trump
the White House:
“The CIA has
concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened
in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the
presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in
the U.S. electoral system, according to officials
briefed on the matter.
“Intelligence agencies have identified individuals with
connections to the Russian government who provided
WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails from the
Democratic National Committee and others, including
Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, according to US
officials. Those officials described the individuals as
actors known to the intelligence community and part of a
wider Russian operation to boost Trump and hurt
Clinton’s chances.
“’It is the
assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s
goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to
help Trump get elected,’ said a senior US official
briefed on an intelligence presentation made to US
senators. “That’s the consensus view.”
The reaction of
the Trump transition team was swift and cutting: “These
are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons
of mass destruction. The election ended a long time ago
in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in
history. It’s now time to move on and ‘Make America
Great Again.’”
This reference
to the “intelligence failure” that led us into the most
disastrous war in our history is not mere rhetoric: if
you’ll recall, there was plenty of dissent within the
intelligence community over the Bush administration’s
conclusion that Iraq had WMD, and was getting ready to
deploy, but this was
stripped from the public documents. Dick Cheney and
Scooter Libby made several trips to Langley to browbeat
analysts into submission and give the administration the
talking points they wanted to justify the invasion.
It’s important
to note that this leak was published just as President
Obama announced he was ordering a full-scale review of
the intelligence: the Washington Post story was
an effort to get out ahead of that and put the CIA’s
conclusions on the record before the review could be
made public. This is obliquely alluded to in the Post’s
story:
“The
CIA presentation to senators about Russia’s intentions
fell short of a formal
US assessment produced by all 17 intelligence agencies.
A senior US official said there were minor disagreements
among intelligence officials about the agency’s
assessment, in part because some questions remain
unanswered.” [emphasis added]
As we get down
into the weeds, these unspecified “minor disagreements”
seem a bit more major than the reporters at the Post
would have us believe:
“Intelligence agencies do not have specific intelligence
showing officials in the Kremlin ‘directing’ the
identified individuals to pass the Democratic emails to
WikiLeaks, a second senior US official said. Those
actors, according to the official, were ‘one step’
removed from the Russian government, rather than
government employees.”
What does it
mean to be “one step removed” from the Russian
intelligence apparatus? Well, it means anything the CIA
wants it to mean: it is clearly a subjective judgment,
akin to the “criteria” by which the web site
propornot.com identifies “Russian agents”: if you
hold certain views, you must be “Putin’s puppet.”
Another similarity to the propornot scam is that the
“officials” cited throughout the Post piece are
anonymous: we don’t know their motives, their positions,
or whatever other information is necessary to evaluating
their credibility.
What is missing
from the Post’s story is any evidence: it is
simply a series of assertions, offered without proof of
any kind. That the Democrats, the
warmonger wing of the GOP, and the media (or do I
repeat myself?), are seizing on this was all too
predictable. What separates this out from the usual
rhetorical overkill that has characterized this election
season is that it is being invoked as a reason for the
Electoral College to vote for someone other than
President-elect Trump.
“Ex”-CIA
analyst Bob Baer – the unofficial media spokesman for
the Deep State – is calling for “a
new election,” although he wants to “see the
forensics first.” (Guess what, Bob,
there are no reliable “forensics”!).
John Dean, White House counsel under former
president Richard Nixon, “called for the intelligence
report on Russia’s role to be made available to the 538
members of the electoral college before 19 December,
when they formally vote to elect the next president.”
Retiring Senate minority leader Harry Reid accused the
FBI of covering up the intelligence assessment, and
called on director Comey to resign. The “progressive”
Twitterverse
lit up with hysterical accusations of “treason,” and
not so subtle hints that the Electoral College must
repudiate Trump.
Meanwhile,
former British diplomat Craig Murray threw a monkey
wrench into the coup plotters’ campaign by asserting
what I’ve been saying in this space all along: that
publication of the DNC and John Podesta emails weren’t
hacks, but rather were leaks. Murray, a close associate
of Julian Assange,
had this to say to the Guardian:
“Craig
Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, who is a
close associate of Assange, called the CIA claims
‘bullshit,” adding: ‘They are absolutely making it up.’
“’I know who
leaked them,’ Murray said. ‘I’ve met the person who
leaked them, and they are certainly not Russian and it’s
an insider. It’s a leak, not a hack; the two are
different things.
“’If what
the CIA are saying is true, and the CIA’s statement
refers to people who are known to be linked to the
Russian state, they would have arrested someone if it
was someone inside the United States. America has not
been shy about arresting whistleblowers and it’s not
been shy about extraditing hackers. They plainly have no
knowledge whatsoever.”
Of course we
had to go to the British media in order to read this.
Let’s be clear
about what we actually know – and, just as importantly,
what we don’t know — about the WikiLeaks email
releases:
1) There is not
a lick of evidence that the Russians, or anyone else,
“hacked” the DNC/Podesta emails. That is, we don’t know
if someone used electronic means to obtain them, or if
it was an insider, i.e. a person with access who
subsequently turned them over to WikiLeaks
2) It is nearly
impossible to trace the source of a hack using
“scientific,” i.e. purely technical, means. As
cyber-security expert Jeffrey Carr
puts it, the methods of the professional
cyber-security industry are essentially what he calls
“faith-based attribution.” Furthermore, the methodology
that firms such as CrowdStrike used in supposedly
uncovering the “Russian hackers” in the DNC case are
classic examples of confirmation bias and laughably
inadequate.
3) Julian
Assange denies that the Russians are the source of the
emails, and although he refuses to identify the person
or persons responsible, someone he has worked closely
with and his known to have his confidence,
Craig Murray, is now telling us that it wasn’t a
hack, it was an insider who leaked the documents. That
this is being steadfastly ignored in the American media
is hardly surprising: after all, it was WikiLeaks that
exposed the “mainstream” media’s active collaboration
with the Clinton campaign, and the media was clearly in
Clinton’s camp.
4) A key
element of the CIA campaign is that the Republican
National Committee was also hacked by the same Russian
spooks, and yet nothing was posted on WikiLeaks Note how
this assumes the premises of the conspiracy theorists:
that it was the Russians who hacked the DNC/Podesta
emails and that WikiLeaks is merely an extension of the
Kremlin. Also note that the Republican National
Committee
denies it was hacked, and furthermore please note
the fact that
Colin Powell’s emails were indeed posted by DC
Leaks, along with routine emails from various GOP
operatives that had no particular significance.
So what is
going on here?
When Trump
supporters
opined that the “Deep State” would
never allow the populist real estate mogul to take
office, I was skeptical. This seemed to me like a
made-for-television movie script rather than a real
possibility: after all, what could they actually do,
aside from using force to prevent him from taking the
oath of office?
However, as the
campaign progressed, and the Clintonites became
progressively more unhinged in their attacks on Trump,
the Russian angle became more prominent: former acting
CIA Director Mike Morell’s
accusation that Trump is an “unconscious agent” of
the Kremlin, and “not
a patriot,” seemed over the top at the time, but in
retrospect looks more like it was laying the groundwork
for the current CIA-driven propaganda campaign.
But why would
the CIA, in particular, have a special aversion to
Trump? Marcy Wheeler, whose analytical abilities I
respect despite our political disagreements, has
this to say:
“First, if
Trump comes into office on the current trajectory, the
US will let Russia help Bashar al-Assad stay in power,
thwarting a 4-year effort on the part of the Saudis to
remove him from power. It will also restructure the
hierarchy of horrible human rights abusing allies the US
has, with the Saudis losing out to other human rights
abusers, potentially up to and including that other
petrostate, Russia. It will also install a ton of people
with ties to the US oil industry in the cabinet, meaning
the US will effectively subsidize oil production in this
country, which will have the perhaps inadvertent result
of ensuring the US remains oil-independent even though
the market can’t justify fracking right now.
“The CIA is
institutionally quite close with the Saudis right now,
and has been in charge of their covert war against
Assad.”
The Saudis,
having
given millions to the Clinton Foundation, along with
their Gulf state
allies, were counting on a Clinton victory. The CIA
has a longstanding relationship with Riyadh, and
together they have been working assiduously to not only
overthrow Assad in Syria but to forge a “moderate” Sunni
alliance that will effectively police the region while
establishing the Saudis as the regional hegemon. This
was the Clintonian strategy while Hillary was at the
helm of Foggy Bottom: Libya, Syria, the alliance with
the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, are all examples of
this utterly disastrous “Sunni turn.”
Trump
represents a threat to this grand design, and therefore
has to be stopped by whatever means necessary. His
desire to “get along with Russia,” his opposition to
regime change in Syria, his critique of the Libyan
misadventure, his foreign policy stance in general – all
this meant that he would come to power and “drain the
swamp” of the CIA and the State Department.
The irony here
is that the accusation leveled at Trump – that his
historic victory represents a successful attempt by a
foreign power to take control of the White House – is a
classic case of projection. What we are witnessing is a
joint CIA-Saudi operation to overthrow the duly elected
President of the United States.
In a recent
speech given on his “victory tour,” Trump said
the following:
“We will
pursue a new foreign policy that finally learns from the
mistakes of the past. We will stop looking to topple
regimes and overthrow governments. Our goal is stability
not chaos.”
For the whole
of its existence, the CIA has been in the business of
toppling regimes that didn’t bow to Washington’s
dictates, from Guatemala to Iran to Chile and on and on.
The production of chaos is their whole reason for
existing. Trump would effectively put them out of
business. No wonder they want to destroy him.
We have heard
much about how the CIA “assessment” needs to be made
public, at least partially: of course, the details will
never be published so that ordinary Americans can see
them. It’s the old “we have to protect sources and
methods” excuse. But cries – from both those who support
the CIA and the few
skeptics – for an “investigation” into the charges
are simply playing into the hands of the Langley crowd.
For an investigation assumes that the premises of the
CIA’s case – that WikiLeaks is a Russian front, that the
emails were actually hacked rather than leaked, and that
there is some validity to the assertion that Trump is a
“Russian puppet,” as Mrs. Clinton put it – are anything
other than the basis of a smear campaign designed to
undermine our democratic institutions. We might as well
have an “investigation” into “Pizza-gate”
or the belief that the moon landing
was faked.
Yes, we do need
an investigation – into this brazen attempt by the CIA
to subvert our democratic institutions, and undermine
the office of the President. When Trump takes the oath
of office, the very first thing he must do is to launch
that probe – and clean house at the CIA. The cancer of
subversion that is festering at the core of the national
security bureaucracy must be excised, and Trump is just
the man to do it.
Justin
Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com, and a
senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute. He is a
contributing editor at The
American Conservative, and writes a monthly
column for Chronicles. He is the author
of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost
Legacy of the Conservative Movement [Center for
Libertarian Studies, 1993; Intercollegiate Studies
Institute, 2000], and An Enemy of the State: The
Life of Murray N. Rothbard
[Prometheus Books, 2000].
The views
expressed in this article are the author's own and do
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