|
Musical Chairs in the White House
On the job training in the intelligence community
By Philip Giraldi
February 26, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" -
Here in the Land of Oz,
otherwise known as Washington, one continues to run
into people who should know better who insist that
they have a friend in the White House who confirms
that President Donald Trump is really a man of peace
being obstructed as he seeks to withdraw the United
States from senseless wars in Asia. They argue that
the Deep State or Establishment, to include the
media, are so blinded by Trump Derangement Syndrome
that they cannot get behind his policies even when
they would be good for Americans.
The problem with that argument is that there have
been clear instances when the president could have
followed through on pledges to reduce troop levels
or withdraw completely from war zones before
reversing himself and doubling down rather than
doing the right thing. One need only cite the
increases in numbers of combatants in both the
Middle East and Afghanistan and the reversal of an
initial decision to stage a complete withdrawal from
Syria which instead turned into a move to occupy the
country’s oil fields.
Others might argue that Trump reveals himself
through his quixotic decision making and his
willingness to play brinksmanship with powerful
opponents as if he were upping the ante over a real
estate transaction. Withdrawing with the JCPOA
nuclear agreement with Iran was a major blunder,
recognized as such by nearly every country in the
world with the usual exception of Israel, while
Trump’s repeated offers to talk with the Ayatollah
reflect willful ignorance of Iranian political
dynamics. The White House apparently considered the
assassination of an Iranian Major General to be an
inducement to the Persians to come to the table to
discuss a broad range of disagreements.
|
Are You Tired Of
The Lies And
Non-Stop Propaganda?
|
To be sure, there has been a concerted effort to
destroy the Trump administration which started even
before it came into being, a conspiracy that has
included a number of key players in the national
security structure, to include the Directors of both
CIA and the FBI. And Trump has a right to be angered
by the ridiculous impeachment “process,” initiated
by a Democratic Party that has still not figured out
why the unspeakable Hillary Clinton lost in 2016.
But Donald Trump has also been his own worst enemy,
playing into the hands of his critics, with his
divisive tweets, his constant search for subversion
within and outside his own party’s ranks, and his
highly offensive language and demeanor. It is hard
to imagine that anyone can take pleasure from such
an overly-sensitive and essentially ignorant snake
oil salesman actually being president of the United
States, but there you have it.
And Trump will long be remembered as a president who
could not put his own house in order, presiding over
a musical chairs arrangement whereby senior officers
in his administration were appointed and removed at
a whim, often based on “loyalty.” In such an
arrangement, the sycophants inevitably rise to the
top. Even John Bolton, protégé of party funder
Sheldon Adelson, apparently did not suck up enough
and was replaced by Robert O’Brien, who did not have
any relevant experience qualifying for the job.
Prior to his becoming National Security Advisor
O’Brien featured in a taxpayer funded trip to
Stockholm to obtain the release of rapper ASAP
Rocky, who had been arrested after getting involved
in a fist fight. O’Brien had orders to threaten
unspecified retaliation against the Swedish
government if it did not accede to White House
demands. That exercise in international bullying
means that O’Brien is quintessentially Trump’s kind
of guy. He has written a book entitled While America
Slept: Restoring American Leadership to a World in
Crisis, calling on the United States to end any
“appeasement and retreat,” and has described the
basically defunct nuclear agreement with Iran, in
predictable neocon fashion, as a repeat of 1938,
Hitler and Munich.
And there is always Secretary of State Mike Pompeo,
who, like his boss, has discovered that there is no
lie, no matter how preposterous, that is not worth
repeating. Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels
promoted a similar approach back in 1939, saying “It
would not be impossible to prove with sufficient
repetition and a psychological understanding of the
people concerned that a square is in fact a circle.
They are mere words, and words can be molded until
they clothe ideas and disguise.”.
Donald Trump’s latest appointment, guided purely by
malevolence, is, however, in another category
completely, even in an administration where
bullheaded ignorance is considered a virtue. Rick
Grenell, currently the United States Ambassador to
the Federal Republic of Germany, is completely
unqualified to be Director of National Intelligence
(DNI), where he would be the nominal head of the
entire intelligence community (IC), 17 organizations
including the Central Intelligence Agency, National
Security Agency and National Reconnaissance Office.
Just as Grenell had no qualification beyond loyalty
to become an ambassador, he will undoubtedly
continue in that vein as DNI. Among the Office of
National Intelligence (ONI) responsibilities is the
briefing of the president on national security
related issues.
The appointment of Grenell is as an interim “acting”
director for a term of six months because even Trump
knows that he could never be approved by the Senate
in the normal fashion. Even though Grenell has
limited access to intelligence product as a consumer
while ambassador, he has no experience as an
intelligence officer at any level, nor has he ever
been in charge of any large government bureaucracy.
He was the communications director for the American
ambassador to the U.N. under George W. Bush, and,
since May 2018, has served as ambassador to Germany.
Given his lack of experience, Grenell will be unable
to provide objective intelligence and will instead
emphasize briefing on information that supports the
president’s policies while also cheerleading for
those very policies. That is precisely what Trump
would expect from a DNI.
In truth, Richard Grenell has been a ghastly
ambassador, even by the low standards set by the
Trump State Department. Reportedly inclined to
ignore the advice of his professional Foreign
Service staff, he is a non-German speaking protégé
of National Security Adviser John Bolton who would
seem to have enough on his plate defending the
unpopular Trump Administration decisions on climate
change, the Iran nuclear deal, NATO spending, the
Nord Stream-2 Russian gas pipeline project and on
tariffs directed against European Union exports, but
he has apparently gone out of his way to make the
bilateral relationship with a key ally even worse.
After the White House withdrew from the Iran
agreement, Grenell tweeted that German businesses
should “wind down operations immediately” in Iran.
The ineptly worded advice was inevitably taken by
the Germans as a threat.
Nils Schmid, a German Social Democratic Party
foreign policy spokesman, goes so far as to say that
“He does not understand what the role of an
ambassador should be. An ambassador is a
bridge-builder who explains how American politics
works, how the American government works, and at the
same time explains to America how Germany sees
things.” Grenell has, however, “defined his role for
himself, and it is not the traditional role of an
ambassador. … He [works] as a propagandist [for
Donald Trump]”
The New York Times is reporting that Grenell will
continue to be Ambassador to Germany while he is
simultaneously serving as DNI, an arrangement that
is as absurd as it sounds if only due to the
distance between Washington and Berlin. He is
reportedly already assembling his ONI staff and is
“cleaning house,” which has included the firing last
Friday of Maguire as well as ONI number two Andrew
Hallman. It was also reported that even though a
number of senior Republicans had privately advised
Trump to appoint an intelligence professional for
the DNI position, the president is keen to punish a
“disloyal” IC.
The appointment of Grenell appears to be connected
to an incident two weeks ago in which briefers of
the ONI told members of the Democratic Party
dominated House Intelligence Committee that Russia
is planning to interfere in the 2020 presidential
election to help Trump. The evidence for such a
sweeping conclusion was not made public, but Trump
was apparently enraged that ex-Navy Seal
at-that-time DNI Joseph Maguire had allowed the
briefing to take place and rebuked him sharply in an
Oval Office meeting. Trump was particularly angry
because committee chairman Congressman Adam Schiff
was present at the Intelligence Committee briefing.
Trump claimed that Schiff will “weaponize” the
intelligence information to use against him. For
what it’s worth, the office of the DNI is required
to brief appropriate congressional committees on
intelligence matters and national security.
Grenell is also active in promoting worldwide
decriminalization of homosexuality, an agenda that
has Donald Trump’s blessing but which has not please
some administration religious fundamentalists like
Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence. Grenell
objected to Pompeo’s decision not to support the
International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia
and Biphobia, and was also critical of Pompeo’s
blocking of a proposal to fly the gay pride flag
from the same flagpole as the American flag at
embassies across the world. During the recent Pompeo
visit to the Munich Security Conference, Grenell
brought his partner Matt Lashey to the airport to
meet the Secretary of State. The irony is that up
until a few years ago homosexuality was grounds for
denial of a security clearance to perform certain IC
jobs, based on the presumption that homosexuals
might be vulnerable to blackmail by hostile
intelligence agencies. Currently, two of the top
positions in the IC, Director of National
Intelligence and Director of Central Intelligence
are homosexual.
Trump is taking both deserved and undeserved lumps
over the new appointment. Former head of the U.S.
Special Operations Command retired Navy admiral
William McRaven has decried the dismissal of Joe
Maguire because Maguire was “only doing his job.” He
wrote an op-ed which might be regarded to a certain
extent as special pleading on behalf of a former
fellow Seal: “As Americans, we should be frightened
— deeply afraid for the future of the nation. When
good men and women can’t speak the truth, when facts
are inconvenient, when integrity and character no
longer matter, when presidential ego and
self-preservation are more important than national
security — then there is nothing left to stop the
triumph of evil.”
Former CIA Director John Brennan, who is an open
Trump enemy with close ties to the Clintons and
Obama, and who should be in prison for his attempt
to frame the Trump campaign, declared himself
“disturbed.” He inevitably invoked the Russians,
demonstrating that he has not learned anything since
he left office at the end of 2017. He said that “We
are now in a full-blown national security crisis… By
trying to prevent the flow of intelligence to
Congress, Trump is abetting a Russian covert
operation to keep him in office for Moscow’s
interests, not America’s.”
By all means Donald Trump should have a free hand in
cleaning out the Augean stables of top national
security officials like Brennan who have been
politicized and corrupted, but it should not be
carried out by replacing some agency directors with
ignorant cronies who will filter and spin the
information that winds up being shared with
congressional intelligence committees and with the
president. There are plenty of honest people in the
IC that could have been called on and who would have
done a good job in serving national interests.
Grenell is a solution from hell which will only make
it even more likely that the poor decision making on
foreign and national security policies that has
characterized the past two decades will continue
unabated and indefinitely into the future.
Philip Giraldi is a former
counter-terrorism specialist and military
intelligence officer of the United States Central
Intelligence Agency.
Do you agree or disagree? Post
your comment here
| |
|
