Trump Treads Dangerously By Dissing National Security State

Trump's explosive personality disorder - in many ways similar to Adolf Hitler's -  has now antagonized the entire intelligence community to our nation's detriment.

Yet another alarm bell has sounded for those state electors still debating whether to allow the Trump extravaganza and circus to continue on to inauguration on January 20th. The latest alarm bell has been a comprehensive report signed by 17 intelligence agencies - basically the national security state if you will - indicting Russian operatives as interfering in the 2016 general election. As The Washington Post reported on Friday, the CIA (among other agencies) had determined these operatives interfered not just to make mischief but to toss the election to Trump.

The core as well as ancillary documentation is still to be released in special report authorized by President Obama before January 20th  The investigation itself will be led by Director of National Intelligence, James R. Clapper, and the objective will be to arrive at a definitive judgment about the Russian role in the election including its extent. But all 17 networked intel agencies have already signed on to the initial findings and pledged their further cooperation.

Whether the actual released report (Obama aides pledge as much as possible will be released) turns out to be a 'slam dunk'  is now not so much the issue as Trump's reaction to the intelligence agencies behind the report. That is, he has essentially mocked it as untrue, eliciting a gasp even from former NSA Director Michael Hayden who marveled how this ignorant twit could put his own unsupported assumptions above what 17 agencies have validated to their satisfaction.

Trying to turn the issue around to make the CIA the scapegoat, Trump's transition team actually put the new report in the same league as the claim Saddam had WMD.    However, we now know then CIA Director George Tenet was played by an Iraqi expatriate and defector  who went by the name "curve ball". He invented the whole WMD baloney in order to trigger regime change. You can read more about this imp (Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi)  here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/curveball-man-who-lied-about-wmds-comes-clean/2012/04/03/gIQAUdditS_blog.html?utm_term=.98430badaeb5


Trump, going on the record actually discredited himself as any commander-in-chief when he said in an interview that CIA had discredited itself over the Iraqi WMD over a decade ago.  Meanwhile, his current attack on the agency's credibility is unique in our history, as the WSJ has noted:

"Mr. Trump’s attack on the CIA’s credibility appears to be a unique historical event, according to scholars. Some presidents have come into office suspicious of the intelligence community and even hostile to it. Richard Nixon knew that the intelligence agencies had collected information about his campaign’s contacts with the government of South Vietnam, declassified documents later showed."


To say the agency-  particularly the men and women who work tirelessly in it -  are upset, would be to put it mildly. To say the national security state is treating this episode casually is not to understand that state and how its power now ought to make any would -be president tremble. For if anyone can find out anything - dig anything up - from Trump's checkered background, the CIA, NSA and DIA  can.  Hell, they can now dig so much up they don't even have to resort to an executive action, say if it they desired to remove an especially obstreperous and dangerous figurehead leader regarded as a foremost national security threat.

According to a WaPo account published Saturday:

"U.S. intelligence officials described mounting concern and confusion about how to proceed in an administration so openly hostile to their function and role."

Paul Pillar, former deputy director of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, quoted in the piece, said:

"Given his proclivity for revenge combined with his notorious thin skin, this threatens to result in a lasting relationship of distrust and ill will between the president and the intelligence community.

He added:

"Everything Trump has indicated with regard to his character and tendencies for vindictiveness might be worse than that displayed by Richard Nixon."

An even more head scratching and appalling ongoing farce is Trump's unwillingness to read and process the PDBs or President's Daily Briefs, now being delivered to him as a courtesy. In addition, as the WaPo piece notes, "Trump has attended only a limited number of intelligence briefings - and he appointed as his national security adviser Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn"

That was the clown  - who with his goofy son, Michael G. - invented all the idiotic fake news stories to do with "Pizzagate". Is this a clown who can even be trusted with delivering pizza?

More to the point, if Trump is prepared to display such a cavalier attitude to national security issues, how the hell can he even be trusted to defend and protect the nation in case of a possible terror attack? He refuses to read the PDBs and he is clashing nonstop with the whole intelligence community to the extent he doesn't even trust them.

To jog memories, recall that good old George W. Bush was also cavalier with the PDBs. The most sensational Daily Brief of all was that dated August 6, 2001 and headed: Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US . Bush received this while at his Crawford, TX retreat. (He took more vacations than any other president in his first year alone.) How did Bush respond to this? He gave a quick glance then went to clear some ....bush. But what ought to have made his eyeballs pop out was the short paragraph reading (9/11 Commission Report,  ‘The System was Blinking Red’, p. 255-56):

"An Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) operative told an [—] service at the same time that Bin Ladin was planning to exploit the operative’s access to the US to mount a terrorist strike."


Of course, hindsight is always 20-20 as they say, but one is left to wonder how less devastating those 9/11 attacks might have been had Bushie boy paid more attention to the PDBs.

Now, however, we have a clown who is of such intellectual ineptitude and emotional regression he can't even be bothered to read them.  Trump's transition team - according to the Post - insists his "unwillingness to make time for intelligence briefings is a consequence of his busy schedule"  Yeah, right! Going on 'victory tours' to brag to his voter dopes: "I don't even need your votes any more!"

See e,g.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHYaN_Jq3w0

 Or appointing former female wrestlers and other dunderheads to agency positions, meanwhile conducting "Apprentice" style hours long dinners with Mitt Romney and the like - to discern more appointment picks.  All this reckoned as more critical than intelligence briefings that could hold clues to a future attack.

What will it be like if he actually becomes commander-in-chief? Some naïve folks might  may well say: "Well, once he gets into office he will read them!"  But I'm not sure. If past is prologue why on earth should we expect anything different in his behavior than we behold now?

After all, a man with Trump's severe character deficits, e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2016/10/narcissism-pre-moral-mind-and-donald-j.html

doesn't suddenly acquire stable temperament or moral character he never possessed in the first place. It simply doesn't happen.  To believe so is to reject all the fundamental tenets of modern neuroscience and psychology.

That means there is no basis to expect a President Trump will do anything different from the President Elect version.  In addition, we can expect - from all that's been revealed thus far-  the contretemps with the intelligence agencies will continue and metastasize like a cancer, reaching a point that our collective security is in peril. (And if an attack should occur in Trump's 1st term,  he is not below placing the blame on Muslims, or liberals, analogous to Hitler blaming the Jews for the Reichstag fire.)

The very fact this character is at odds with the national security state charged to protect the country tells me in no uncertain terms he has no business holding the highest office in the land.

This is yet one more reason for the Electoral College electors to send this unhinged dolt packing on December 19th. Let him have free, unencumbered reign to run his business empire without having to divest it, since this is what he truly wants. But at least he won't be running our nation....into the ground.

See also:

http://www.salon.com/2016/12/12/did-russia-hack-the-election-trump-doesnt-care-and-the-peril-grows/

And:
http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/harvey-wasserman/70225/electoral-college-must-not-vote-until-russian-hacks-of-our-election-are-fully-investigated

Do NOT Believe the Lying CIA Torture Apologists!

The lying swine Cheney - ought to have been hung by now.

"If you are in favor of the torture, fine. But I am begging you, spare me any sermons about the law ever, ever again." - Chris Hayes, last night on MSNBC

After the aborted Bay of Pigs operation in 1961, John F. Kennedy loudly proclaimed that he wanted to "smash the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the four winds."  If he had expeditiously gone through with that intent, we'd likely not now be having to digest a revolting summary report of CIA tortures - debasing our nation, our claimed aspirations, our claim to being a "nation of laws" and exceptional in the world.  Kennedy's mistake was in trying to rope in the CIA incrementally, using 17 proposed oversight rules and creating an alter-agency - the DIA or Defense Intelligence Agency. The spooks got onto him and well, the rest is history.

Most of the day yesterday, the CIA  - as per its wont, and as they did 40 years earlier with "Operation Mockingbird" - trotted out their lying PR flunkies to try to tell the American people that what was done in our name wasn't torture. But they were exposed for the fucking liars and tools they are, as on Rachel Maddow's show last night - using historical documents as well as the actual report.

This was good because as numerous moral philosophers have observed, all that is often needed to commit mass moral outrage is to alter the language. This tends to alter thought so the weak -minded will succumb as the amoral employ euphemisms to try to justify what is a moral outrage. And so the Nazi scum referred to "cleansing" when they herded Jews into the gas chambers,  just as now these miscreant apologists are adopting the euphemism "enhanced interrogation" to try to make us believe what they did was A-ok. No it wasn't. And anyone who buys into this crap- including into former CIA Director George Tenet's denial of euphemism-  is guilty of normalizing the torture that these rats seek to justify retrospectively. They then arguably aren't any better than the perpetrators. Such is the case with that screeching harpy and former BushCo operative, Nicolle Wallace - who almost climaxed-  yapping about why we "need"  CIA torture the other day. Maybe she's into torture porn too! Who knows?

Not so with Norah O'Donnell who surely got it this morning on CBS Early Show when scumbag and tool Mike Morell was being interviewed. While the weasel and liar Morell tried to claim that what his men did "wasn't torture", Norah,  to her credit- wasn't having any of it. She said:

"I don't understand how waterboarding someone one hundred eighty three times isn't torture. I don't understand how giving forced enemas isn't torture."

The monkey Morell actually replied with a straight face that on "pouring over' the program he was even more convinced that it "was effective in getting information that stopped plots that would have killed Americans".  Which is arrant horse pockey.

Gail King then asked Morell to respond to the issue of morality- never mind the dubious authorizations from the Bush Justice Dept. which we now know were fabricated out of whole cloth - as Maddow showed - and I will get to. Morell responded it is "the central question" but then added this is what we "should be debating as a society - was this right or was this wrong?". Uh no! We don't need any debate because it was patently wrong! Morally evil! Never mind the claimed ends  - a first moral principle is that the ends NEVER justifies the means. I don't care if 10,000 might have been killed you don't use these abhorrent methods to obtain  suspect info. (Which is never reliable given the extreme methods used when the tortured will cop to anything under duress - as records show occurred!)

Even the CIA's 1989 Report to the then Senate Intelligence Committee flatly observed:

"Inhumane physical or psychological techniques are counterproductive because they do not produce intelligence and will result in false answers."

So Morell asking if this was really wrong is like asking if  herding Jews into gas chambers was wrong. Yes it emphatically was!  I mean, good God, the Senate report even documented CIA officers choking and vomiting as well as crying and some having to leave the scene of some of the tortures. This only occurs, my friends, when one's moral conscience so recoils at actions that a sense of revulsion overtakes the person. Most humans possess this moral sense, but clearly most of the CIA's torturing fiends didn't. Many howled with laughter when the "rectal feedings" they delivered caused the person to crap all over themselves as they hung upside down!

These rat vermin were even afraid to broach what they were doing to Colin Powell because they thought he'd "blow his top". Well, yes he would because though he's a military man he's also a moral man and would recognize evil if he saw or heard of it!

I ask, when considering what these CIA monsters did, to think of your own loved ones in those torture scenes - which I will examine shortly.

Rachel Maddow merits many kudos for her segment on the history of CIA torture including the creation of its first torture manual in July, 1963. Most savvy researchers of the JFK era and the conspiracy to kill him agree Kennedy was unaware of the manual, and would have really "smashed the CIA" if he knew of it but was already overwhelmed with fighting off their attempts to undermine him -including his implementing curbs on their covert actions. (Kennedy was also likely unaware of the ZR/Rifle assassination program, and especially the Staff D CIA connections which would be used later to turn it against him).

Maddow's piece showed how the CIA manual was used to torture former KGB man Yuri Nosenko who defected to the U.S. in late 1963. During his debriefing he evidently gave the spooks cause to subject him to assorted "enhanced measures" - but officially called torture at the time, including: sleep deprivation, being forced to stay nude for long periods at a time, pummeling and punching -including his kidneys, sleeping on stone floors and being fed a ghastly gruel.

The spooks didn't believe his debrief that Lee Harvey Oswald was of zero or minor import to the KGB.  (Sadly, Maddow again muddied her otherwise impeccable reporting by recirculating the canard that "the other thing that happened right before he (Nosenko) got there was the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The man who killed President Kennedy was Lee Harvey Oswald". Uh no he wasn't,  Rachel, and you need to clean up your act to confer more gravitas on your historical reporting).

Maddow went on to claim:  "Lee Harvey Oswald had spent time in the Soviet Union before killing President Kennedy" which is again, only partly true, part lie. He spent time in the Soviet Union - most likely as a CIA contract agent, according to his CIA CI/SIG files- before returning to the U.S. in 1962 when - interestingly - he was removed from the FBI's Watch List.

Nosenko was one of the KGB agents who interviewed Oswald, and claimed Oswald was unfit for any kind of spy work. Of course, as later released records showed, this story didn't jibe with what the CIA wanted at the time - which was to paint Oswald as a Soviet agent out to kill Kennedy- which could then be used to justify aggression- against Russia as well as Cuba. (Peter Dale Scott has uncovered most of this and interested readers can find more details in my  two October, 2013 posts on the pre-assassination framing of Oswald.)

Anyway, what Maddow did get right is that Nosenko was locked up in 1964, at Camp Peary, given no sensory stimulus whatsoever - except for a light kept on in his room 24/7. He was given nothing to read, and given purposefully revolting food. When he did have human contact it was to abuse him - described by one author (Tim Weiner, 'Legacy of Ashes') as "the same treatment his fellow Russians received in the Gulag."

In 1967, he was released to some unknown location in the south when the spooks realized he really was a defector.  And only when he was 81 years old, in 2008, did another lying CIA worm -Michael Hayden - come to apologize to him - likely because he knew the shit would hit the fan with the next election: either a former Constitutional lawyer elected, or a former prisoner of war who himself underwent torture.

As Maddow points out, the CIA in the wake of the wrongful torture of Nosenko realized that they couldn't afford to make such costly mistakes again. There followed, in 1978, a formal study of what went wrong with the conclusion that "the agency's handling of the Nosenko case was an abomination"

The CIA then got rid of the interrogation manual and as Maddow put it:

"Not because it's not tempting to use fear, and degradation and solitary confinement to try to get information out of people- when you're sure they're lying to you, and you're sure its a very dangerous situation and the country is very upset.and stressed out about it's safety. Not that it isn't tempting, it's tempting, But it doesn't work. It's a bad idea. We tried it and it's a bad idea."

Maddow further notes that despite the initial rejection there remained those CIA personnel who still wanted to be able to use torture from time to time, including one who "dug up the old manual" in 1983. The manual was then used in the 1980s (during the Reagan era)  in Latin America. In Honduras as well as Guatemala hundreds of thousands were tortured by the methods in the manual. The methods came to also be associated with those from "death squads" in those countries, as well as in Nicaragua.

At last in 1988 a new CIA report declared again: "Physical abuse or other degrading treatment was rejected not only because it was wrong but it has historically been proven to be ineffective."

Maddow then put up on the screen a portion of a memo released in November, 2001 right after the 9/11 attacks. It reads:

" A policy decision must be made with regard to U.S. use of torture."

Note the word used: torture - NOT "enhanced interrogation".

The sentence was written by CIA lawyers in the office of the CIA General Counsel. So much then for the horse shit that what was presented in the Senate report wasn't torture!

Maddow notes the CIA didn't have prisoners in custody at the time, but was only thinking prospectively - e.g. "ahead" - to what  the agency could do if and when prisoners came into their hands. They then batted it around how they could justify it, including:

"CIA could argue torture was necessary"

This was the CIA now, early 2001 - likely under pressure from the criminal Bushies- cooking up a new policy to justify torture though they rejected it earlier. Again, this was no accusation that others made about them it was what THEY called it themselves - TORTURE!  And to this end, the need for psyops as part of the operations, two psychologists were recruited: Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell. (Which showed the spooks firmly believed psychology wasn't entirely useless!). This pair developed the manual to help captured U.S. troops survive torture from enemies, then extracted the tortures those troops might face to use on U.S. "enemies".

And what kind of tortures are we talking about when these fiends finally got their hands on prisoners (up to 26% of whom they (CIA) didn't even know why they were being held, or what they had done)? Chris Hayes elaborated some of it on his own 'ALL IN' show:

- Threats to sexually abuse the mother of a detainee and also to cut her throat

- Abu Zubaydah lost his left eye while in CIA custody - from being gouged out slowly.

-Two detainees were shackled in stress positions after their bones were broken (this was also often used by the Inquisition on apostates)

- One CIA officer played Russian roulette with a detainee

- Another held a gun and power drill to the detainee's head threatening to let his brains leak out

- Five detainees were subjected to rectal rehydration - a  method also used by the Gestapo to try to wrest information, as my friend Kurt Braun told me. In this method of torture massive amounts of fluid -water are pumped into the colon until the victim feels as if his innards will burst open. The pain is agonizing  - and most people would be vaguely aware of what that is like if they allowed themselves to be fully awake during a colonoscopy (the difference being that gas is pumped into the colon in the latter case)

- Rectal feeding - wherein a blenderized mix of humus, pasta and pureed raisins are forced into the rectum causing an exploding sensation in the bowels. Anyone who's ever had a barium enema  - and the agony produced for even five minutes holding it - would be aware of this one.

Another asshole, who forced a detainee to sit naked on a bare floor in a freezing room for 24 hours and who later died of hypothermia, was given a $2,500 award for his "superior work". In another case, the top torture director was an immature goofus, lacking solid experience, putting the lie to Michael Hayden's malarkey the interrogators were all "well trained". No they were not!

The program was also subject to incompetence, including one case where two victims were subject to sleep deprivation and dietary manipulation and later found out to be CIA assets!

Can we say delirious assholes here? Yes we can! And yet these pieces of refuse want to try to justify what they did as preserving freedom or preventing another 9/11. Sadly, a majority of dopey, dumbass Americans agree (in recent polls) which confirms my suspicions too many are zombies who are unable to put themselves in the position of others.. Next time these yahoos get a colonoscopy I want them to do it with no sedation  - then imagine something ten times worse being done to them - and tell me they are pro torture! Damned fools and hypocrites!

Don't believe it! These are filth and maggots acting under their own arrogant, inhuman banner and have no connection to the rest of us who are sane and moral. Their own people performing these atrocities were often brought to the point of such revulsion they cried, choked and vomited. So don't ever tell me these vermin were doing the "right thing".

If true justice reigned all would be hung by the neck, as well as the Bushie assholes who contrived to let them get away with it by fiddle-fucking with the laws and interpretations thereof. Hell, if it were up to me I'd let Colin Powell be the presiding judge. Line 'em all up, including the 3 former directors spewing justifications in yesterday's WSJ piece, and hang 'em en masse or one at a time. I don't give a shit which.

But we can't let this sorry episode ever be normalized or come back to haunt us again. Strangely, or maybe not, the only person on the Right that seems to get it is John McCain. But maybe that's because he once experienced torture at the hands of the North Vietnamese. He said on the Senate floor yesterday:

"I know from personal experience, that the abuse of prisoners will produce more bad than good intelligence. I know that the use of torture compromises that which most distinguished us from our enemies. Our belief that all people, even captured enemies, possess basic human rights which are protected by international conventions- the United States not only joined but for the most part authored. "

Well said. Let us also bear in mind above all, that declaring torture of any kind off limits means when our own personnel are captured they will be less likely to be exposed to it. It therefore redounds to our benefit to take the higher moral ground rather than take the lower ground of rats and vermin - including defending it after the fact.

See also more proof we are not a nation of laws:

http://www.salon.com/2014/12/10/torture_reports_big_bombshell_how_a_glaring_double_standard_was_exposed/