Saturday, July 14, 2018

Imperialist Deep State agents plot to derail Trump’s Peace Train




War is a Racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. It has been estimated by statisticians and economists that the war yielded $16 Trillion in Profits. That is how the 21,000 Billionaires and millionaires got that way. This $16 Trillion in Profits is not to be sneezed at. It is quite a tidy sum. ~~ Smedley D Butler


The Deep State’s agents who infest the various Stink Tanks who advocate for endless war with the enemy du jour have become mighty rich and will not allow the taxpayer funded spigot to be shut off.  There’s gold in them thar war hills.  Since George W. Bush was installed by five crooked partisans on the Supreme Court which has become an extension of the RNC and DNC, America has been involved in endless, non-declared wars across the globe.  With each RAND Corporation instigated conflict the profits rise exponentially and America sinks deeper into a sea of debt. 

President Donald J. Trump is a threat to those ill-gotten gains.  Trump has rolled out his Peace Train and is gathering steam as he rumbles down the tracks.  Now the Deep States agents are dynamiting the tracks with endless attacks based on lies to derail the peace train.  From Consortium News:


Excerpt:

Evidence Will Probably Never Be Produced in Indictments of ‘Russian Agents’

The indictment of 12 Russian ‘agents,’ which included no collusion with Trump’s team, is essentially a political and not legal document because it is almost certain the U.S. government will never have to present any evidence in court, reports Joe Lauria.

Charges against 12 Russian intelligence agents for allegedly hacking emails from the Democratic Party during the 2016 presidential election were announced by the U.S. Justice Department on Friday at the very moment President Donald Trump was meeting Queen Elizabeth II at Windsor Castle and just days before a summit between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki.

A central claim of Russia-gate has been that the Russian government with help from the Trump campaign stole emails from the Democratic Party and the Hillary Clinton campaign and then gave those emails to WikiLeaks for publication to damage Clinton’s quest for the White House.

Until Friday however, the investigation into the allegations had produced no formal indictment of Russian government interference in the election. Like previous U.S. government accusations against Russia for alleged election meddling, the indictment makes assertions without providing evidence. Under U.S. law, indictments are not considered evidence. And it is highly unlikely that the government will ever have to produce any evidence in court…

Clinging to ‘Collusion’

The lack of evidence that the Trump campaign was colluding with Russia has never stopped Democrats and their media outlets from believing unnamed U.S. intelligence sources for two years about such collusion. “Collusion” is the title of a best-selling book about the supposed Trump-Russia conspiracy to steal the election, but such a charge is not to be found…

But even after Friday’s indictments failed to charge anyone from Trump’s team, the Democratic media continued to insist there was collusion… If Russia is indeed guilty of remotely hacking the emails it would have had no evident need of assistance from anyone on the Trump team, let alone a public call from Trump on national TV to commence the operation…

The timing of the announcement was clearly intended to embarrass Trump as he was meeting the Queen and to undermine his upcoming meeting with Putin on July 16. The indictments may also have been meant to embarrass Russia two days before the World Cup final to be held in Moscow.

Pressure was immediately brought on Trump to cancel the summit in light of the indictments, which may have been the main aim in the timing of their announcement. “Glad-handing with Vladimir Putin on the heels of these indictments would be an insult to our democracy,” Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said in a statement less than an hour after the indictments were announced. “President Trump should cancel his meeting with Vladimir Putin until Russia takes demonstrable and transparent steps to prove that they won’t interfere in future elections,” Schumer said.

With no apparent irony, The New York Times reported, “The timing of the indictment … added a jolt of tension to the already freighted atmosphere surrounding Mr. Trump’s meeting with Mr. Putin. It is all but certain to feed into the conspiratorial views held by the president and some of his allies that Mr. Mueller’s prosecutors are determined to undermine Mr. Trump’s designs for a rapprochement with Russia.”

The Russian government on Friday strongly denied the charges. In a statement, the Foreign Ministry called the indictments “a shameful farce” that was not backed up by any evidence. “Obviously, the goal of this ‘mud-slinging’ is to spoil the atmosphere before the Russian-American summit,” the statement said.  The Ministry added that the 12 named Russians were not agents of the GRU.

“When you dig into this indictment … there are huge problems, starting with how in the world did they identify 12 Russian intelligence officers with the GRU,” said former CIA analyst Larry Johnson in an interview with Consortium News. Johnson pointed out that the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency was not allowed to take part in the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment on alleged interference by the GRU.

Only hand-picked analysts from the FBI, the NSA and the CIA were involved. “The experts in the intelligence community on the GRU … is the Defense Intelligence Agency and they were not allowed to clear on that document,” Johnson said…

The indictment makes clear the evidence of an alleged hack of the DNC and DCCC computers did not come from the FBI, which was never given access to the computers by the DNC, but instead from the private firm CrowdStrike, which was hired by the DNC. It is referred to as Company 1 in the indictment…

Dimitri Alperovitch, a CrowdStrike co-founder, is also a senior fellow at the anti-Russian Atlantic Council think tank…  CrowdStrike claimed the alleged Russian intelligence operation was extremely sophisticated and skilled in concealing its external penetration of the server. But CrowdStrike’s conclusion about Russian “fingerprints” resulted from clues that would have been left behind by extremely sloppy or amateur hackers–or inserted intentionally to implicate the Russians…

Other apparent sources for information in the indictment are intelligence agencies, which normally create hurdles in a criminal prosecution…  If the U.S. invoked the states secret privilege so that classified evidence could not be revealed in court a conviction before a civilian jury would be jeopardized.

Such a trial is extremely unlikely however. That makes the indictment essentially a political and not a legal document because it is almost inconceivable that the U.S. government will have to present any evidence in court to back up its charges. This is simply because of the extreme unlikelihood that arrests of Russians living in Russia will ever be made…

It is not only allies of Trump, as the Times thinks, who believe the timing of the indictments, indeed the entire Russia-gate scandal, is intended to prevent Trump from pursuing detente with nuclear-armed Russia.  Trump said of the indictments that, “I think that really hurts our country and it really hurts our relationship with Russia. I think that we would have a chance to have a very good relationship with Russia and a very good chance — a very good relationship with President Putin.”

There certainly appear to be powerful forces in the U.S. that want to stop that.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Wall Street rushed in behind Boris Yeltsin and Russian oligarchs to asset strip virtually the entire country, impoverishing the population. Amid widespread accounts of this grotesque corruption, Washington intervened in Russian politics to help get Yeltsin re-elected in 1996. The political rise of Vladimir Putin after Yeltsin resigned on New Year’s Eve 1999 reversed this course, restoring Russian sovereignty over its economy and politics.

That inflamed American hawks whose desire is to install another Yeltsin-like figure and resume U.S. exploitation of Russia’s vast natural and financial resources. To advance that cause, U.S. presidents have supported the eastward expansion of NATO and have deployed 30,000 troops on Russia’s border.

In 2014, the Obama administration helped orchestrate a coup that toppled the elected government of Ukraine and installed a fiercely anti-Russian regime. The U.S. also undertook the risky policy of aiding jihadists to overthrow a secular Russian ally in Syria. The consequences have brought the world closer to nuclear annihilation than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.

In this context, the Democratic Party-led Russia-gate appears to have been used not only to explain away Clinton’s defeat but to stop Trump — possibly via impeachment or by inflicting severe political damage — because he talks about cooperation with Russia.

Yep, the indictments are just another load of crap delivered by Mueller to derail the Trump Peace Train.  The indictments are thin gruel with no evidence, just unsubstantiated allegations.  This is really an indictment of the highly politicized America’s intelligence agencies ushered in by George W. Bush and Barack Obama.  If the intelligence agencies were serious about investigating collusion in the 2016 Presidential election they’d be looking at the DNC, the CIA and the Queen’s MI6.  From Black Agenda Report:

Excerpt:

Freedom Rider: British Collusion and Criminality
    
“Collusion continues not between Trump and Russians, but between intelligence agencies, the media and American politicians with hidden agendas.”

Most people believe that Donald Trump owes his presidency to Russian activity because they have been told this repeatedly for the past two years. There was indeed high level collusion taking place in the 2016 presidential campaign but it wasn’t carried out by Trump. It was Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee who acted in concert with intelligence assets in the United States and in the United Kingdom.

The British government continues to manufacture false flag incidents, force international agencies to do its bidding, and push for regime change in Syria. Having failed to defeat Trump, they kept up the campaign to cover their tracks, escape blame for Hillary Clinton’s failure, and maintain the foreign policy status quo.

A law firm retained by the Democratic National Committee paid for the opposition research undertaken by former MI6 agent, Christopher Steele. Steele produced a dossier alleging that Trump was compromised by the Russian government and shopped it to the FBI, CIA, influential journalists and politicians like Senator John McCain. The dossier was used to obtain a FISA surveillance warrant against Trump aide Carter Page but the DNC connection was not disclosed to the judge.

“Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee acted in concert with intelligence assets in the United States and in the United Kingdom.”

Steele isn’t the only British spook in the story. A man named Richard Dearlove, former head of MI6, is a business partner of Stefan Halper, a CIA asset who also spied on Donald Trump. Halper had contacts with Page and George Papadopoulos, two men now under indictment by Robert Mueller’s special investigation. The lesser lights of the Trump team were no match for seasoned professionals who get protection from the New York Times. The Times calls Halper “an FBI informant ” and tries to claim that is somehow different from being a spy…

While Russia is vilified at every turn the British government conducts very public and very shady business which could conceivably impact both countries. The case of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal has the British government’s finger prints all over it. There is no reason for Russia to poison a former spy whom they had swapped eight years earlier.

The only logical conclusion is that the act was carried out with the goal of embarrassing Vladimir Putin and creating a possible pretext for war. The Skripal case was soon followed by questionable reporting of yet another chemical weapons attack in Syria which resulted in a short lived United States, British and French attack on that country…

It is the British who use lies and trickery to sway public opinion into supporting a wider war in Syria. Three months after the Skripals were attacked another pair of Britons are said to have been poisoned with Novichok, a chemical weapon originally produced by Russia but which now can be made anywhere. One of the victims died and the claims of Russian involvement have suddenly become much more dangerous.

This second poisoning took place less than one week after the UK pressured the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to take on the role of judge and juror. No longer will the OPCW just determine if chemical weapons have been used, but they will also be tasked with assigning blame, too. Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson proudly stated, “The U.K. has led the diplomatic efforts to secure this action.”

Collusion continues not between Trump and Russians, but between intelligence agencies, the media and American politicians with hidden agendas. While the public are fed a steady diet of tales of an unfree press in Russia, it is the British press which has been censored by its government…

While Americans are given endless misinformation making Russia look like the foreign interloper in their nation’s affairs it is actually the British deep state that is well connected to American media and politicians.

The Russiagate purveyors constantly say, “Connect the dots.” If there are any dots to connect they run from the DNC to former MI6 spies to CIA assets to Russian double agents to American intelligence to alleged chemical weapons attacks used to justify war or to stop the upcoming Trump and Putin summit. It is all being used to further the now obligatory anti-Russian propaganda that is pervasive on both sides of the Atlantic.

Trump would be wise to revisit his campaign stance on the boondoggle known as NATO.  That relic is a complete and total waste of money.  NATO is a destabilizing force in the world and there is no place for it in today’s world, especially for peace-loving nations.  From Lew Rockwell.com:

Excerpt:

No Need For Nato

A NATO summit approaches that brings Donald Trump to Europe and then on to these shores, and brings the usual clamour for more of the taxpayers’ money to be given to arms manufacturers. 

Yet NATO is a demonstrably useless institution. It’s largest ever active military deployment, for 12 years in Afghanistan, resulted in military defeat throughout 80% of the country, the installation of a pocket regime whose scrip does not run further than you can throw the scrip, and a vast outflow of heroin to finance the criminal underworld throughout NATO countries…

In invading Afghanistan and boosting the heroin warlords, NATO countries destabilised themselves. 

NATO’s second biggest military operation ever was the attack on Libya, where NATO carried out an incredible 14,200 bombing sorties using high explosive munitions and devastated Libya’s infrastructure and entire cities. Here is Sirte after NATO “liberation”.

The direct result of the devastation of Libya and destruction of its government infrastructure has been the massive untrammeled exodus of migrants, especially from West Africa, through Libya and across the Mediterranean on boats. This has not only led to the appalling exploitation and tragic death of many migrants, it has fundamentally weakened the governments and indeed governing public ethos of European NATO member states and led to a right wing populist surge throughout much of the EU.

In short, in destroying Libya, NATO members destabilised themselves.  Now NATO is focusing once more on the original “threat” it was supposed to combat, a Russian invasion of Western Europe.  Russia has absolutely no intention of invading Western Europe. The very notion is ludicrous. It does not require NATO to deter a threat that does not exist…

Russia does have disproportionate military power for its size – but not that much. Russia’s defence spending is one sixth that of NATO defence spending, though it is slightly more efficient because, despite corruption, less of Russia’s defence spending goes into the pockets of arms company shareholders, lobbyists, politicians and other fatcats than happens in the West. But that cannot outweigh Russia’s massive economic disadvantage. Nothing can. Russia is very well placed to defend itself, but in no position to attack major powers.

Russia’s foreign policy successes – in Crimea, Syria and Georgia – have been based not on massive military strength – the NATO powers far outweigh Russia there – but simply on much better statecraft. And NATO, for all the trillions western taxpayers spend on it, has been unable to do anything about it…

In fact if anybody has not worked out by now that our famed nuclear arsenal is a chocolate teapot, then they have not been paying attention. In none of the recent foreign policy crises – including the North Korean nuclearisation issue – nobody, anywhere, ever has mentioned Trident missiles as part of the solution. They are utterly worthless.

The threat of a Russian attack on NATO itself is non-existent. The EU is not officially a military alliance but the idea that any part of EU territory could be subject to invasion without the rest of the EU reacting is a political impossibility...  So NATO’s role of defence against Russia is otiose, and its wider military adventures have been a total disaster…

Ahh, yes the neocon war mongers are going crazy.  They will do anything to derail Trump’s Peace Train stop in Helsinki to meet with Vladimir Putin.  The closer the meeting gets the more unhinged the neocon controlled media gets.  They are completely coming off the rails.  From Tyler Durden:

Excerpt:

Neocons Panic as Trump-Putin Meeting Could Mark Close of Syrian Proxy War
They're raging, warning an pleading -- it all looks very desperate

When multiple op-ed pieces appear in the pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, and the CFR-owned Foreign Affairs authored by neocons simultaneously pleading with Trump Don't Get Out of Syria(!) all within the same week, this is typically an indicator that the president is about to do something good.

Trump is set to meet with Putin one-on-one this coming Monday in Helsinki after a contentious NATO summit and a sufficiently awkward visit with Theresa May, and mainstream pundits' heads are exploding. 

The Post's Josh Rogin warns, Trump and Putin may be about to make a terrible deal on Syria, and Susan Rice suddenly emerges from obscurity and irrelevance to say in the Times that Trump Must Not Capitulate to Putin while urging the administration not to "prematurely withdraw United States forces [from Syria], thus thus ceding total victory to Russia, Mr. Assad and Iran." From North Korea to Afghanistan to Syria to Ukraine, Rice advises the typical regime change script of "harsh additional sanctions" anywhere the dictates of Washington are not strictly adhered to.

Similarly, Eli Lake links together the main regime change wars begun under Obama while lamenting their potential winding down as a result of Putin and Trump meeting as indicative of living in "some alternate universe". "The price of Russian cooperation in Syria cannot be U.S. capitulation on Crimea," Lake writes, and further calls such a possibility "the most dangerous possible outcome."

The Kagan-led neocon think tank ISW, meanwhile, is outraged(!) the administration appears to lack "the will to use" America's military might to counter Assad, Iran, and Russia, saying "the United States should invest now in building leverage for future decisive action."

And then there's Senator Lindsey Graham's meltdown on Twitter this week in reaction to both the Syrian Army victoriously raising the national flag over Daraa and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu telling President Vladimir Putin during a summit that Israel has no problem with Assad staying, so long as Israel can preserve "freedom of action" if attacked.

In a significant change of posture toward Damascus, Netanyahu told reporters in Moscow, “We haven't had a problem with the Assad regime, for 40 years not a single bullet was fired on the Golan Heights.”

In the past months there's been widespread reporting on a "secret" deal brokered between Russia, Israel, and Syria, which reportedly involves the Syrian Army agreeing to keep Iranian forces away from the ongoing successful campaign along the Israeli and Jordanian borders, especially the contested Golan Heights.

Netanyahu now says, fresh off his Moscow visit, that Putin agreed to restrain Iran in Syria, but that ultimately Assad will take back all of Syria. The New York Times reports this hugely significant acknowledgement and surprising change of tune from the Israeli PM:

Israel, he said, did not object to President Bashar al-Assad’s regaining control over all of Syria, a vital Russian objective, and Russia had pushed Iranian and allied Shiite forces “tens of kilometers” away from the Israeli border…

The neocon pundits' last hope for military intervention in Syria has remained Netanyahu, and to see him fold must feel like a swift unexpected punch in the stomach, but more crucially the Syrian diplomatic cards have fallen in place just days before Monday's Trump-Putin meeting.

President Assad has long vowed to liberate "every inch" of sovereign Syrian territory, something which but two years ago appeared impossible, yet which now looks increasingly inevitable. Should the Trump-Putin summit result in a green light that ensures Moscow and Damascus remain in the driver's seat and set the terms for Syria's stabilization, we could be witnessing the final diplomatic chapter in this dark seven-year long proxy war.

However, Trump continues to be urged from various corners of the beltway foreign policy establishment to salvage and preserve what he can of the open-ended US troop presence in eastern Syria: the US must "preserve its interests in the conflict, namely... constraining Iranian influence in the country" as one Foreign Policy essay argues.

For months now, Trump has talked of US military withdrawal from the country — which the Pentagon in public statements has put at over some 2000 troops — a proposal which hawks within his administration have pushed back against every time.

And then there's the clearly observable pattern that seems to repeat whenever the administration announces it is poised to pull out of Syria. Indeed it seems to occur every time the Syrian Army is on a trajectory of overwhelming victory: an ill-timed and strategically nonsensical mass chemical attack on civilians supposedly ordered by Assad — inevitably giving the West an open door for military intervention, new rounds of crippling sanctions, and yet more international media condemnation heaped on Damascus…

Should Trump and Putin ultimately come to a lasting settlement on the Syria issue which results in US troop withdrawal from Syria, will the international proxy war come to a close?  Or will we witness yet another last minute "mass casualty event" or other other provocation that pulls the US, Israel, and Russia into yet deeper direct military confrontation?

Hopefully Trump will not be bamboozled by this political circus and will keep the Peace Train on the tracks.  America has nothing to lose and everything to gain by boarding the Trump Peace Train.   From Russia Insider:

Excerpt:

All Aboard the Trump Peace Train! He's Taking the Fight to the War Party
He wants out of Korea, Germany, Syria – and NATO!

"You have to be blind not to see that Trump wants to radically reduce the US presence overseas – and you’re part of the problem if you find that worrisome"  Justin Raimondo

There’s never a dull moment with the Trump administration, which means: never a moment of rest for the War Party. Trump keeps throwing fast balls at the pundits and assembled “experts,” and they keep striking out, bigtime, as the ball whizzes past their heads and lands, with a thwack!, in the catcher’s mitt.

“Steee-rike one!” 

First it was the meet up with Korean leader Kim Jong-un. The media and their attendant policy wonks weren’t ready for Singapore, where the President gave Kim a glimpse of what his country could achieve if it would only come in from the cold and allow the warm embrace of the international community. And while the North Koreans have repeatedly pledged to give up their nukes, that’s not good enough for the universally negative “experts,” some of whom aren’t experts at all but merely former bloggers with history degrees.

Now they’re citing fake news from NBC claiming that no less than eight anonymous “US officials” have stated that the North Koreans are covertly building up their nukes at a super-duper top secret site and it’s all a commie trick to – do what? Provoke an attack from an easily provoked Trump? Start World War III? Commit mass suicide?

The icing on the cake is that the author of this nonsense is none other than Ken Dilanian, the former national security reporter for the Los Angeles Times, who was fired for having a “collaborative relationship” with the CIA. Yes, that got him fired from the Times, but it’s a qualification rather than a negative as far as NBC is concerned.

“Steee-rike two!”

If the Singapore summit hit them in an unexpected place – who knew that, months after the exchange of bloodcurdling threats between Trump and Kim, they’d be shaking hands and making peace? – then the Helsinki summit with Putin is the knockout punch. And the howls of pain arising from our hateful warmongering media, the Democratic party politicians they’re in thrall to, and the phony “human rights” scamsters, are getting louder by the minute. We should all revel in their misery.

Trump campaigned on making peace with Russia: he has a mandate to do so. That, however, matters little to the “intelligence community” and their media camarilla, which is up in arms at the very prospect of a Russo-American partnership for peace. The national security bureaucracy and the laptop bombardiers who inhabit Think-tank World have a vested interest in maintaining a cold war status quo that should’ve ended when the Berlin Wall fell. They are horrified by Trump’s “America First” foreign policy views, and they are out to stop him by any means necessary – because his victory meant the end of their worldview and their careers.

Our “allies” are in a panic because the free ride is over – that’s why the German Marshall Fund is utilizing their extensive propaganda assets to mobilize elite opinion against the President. This is the kind of foreign “meddling” that’s okay with our media, and, apparently, fine with law enforcement…

Which is why I was thrilled to see that Trump is raising the issue of the 35,000 American troops in Germany: what, he wants to know, are they doing there? And how much is it costing us? The Washington Post sullenly reports:

“The Pentagon is analyzing the cost and impact of a large-scale withdrawal or transfer of American troops stationed in Germany, amid growing tensions between President Trump and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, according to people familiar with the work.

“The effort follows Trump’s expression of interest in removing the troops, made during a meeting earlier this year with White House and military aides, U.S. officials said. Trump was said to have been taken aback by the size of the US presence, which includes about 35,000 active-duty troops, and complained that other countries were not contributing fairly to joint security or paying enough to NATO.

“Word of the assessment has alarmed European officials, who are scrambling …”

Oh yes, they’re scrambling, the poor dears: not just our gormless “allies,” but also their amen corner in Washington, which is going into an outright meltdown –- and what a glorious sight it is!

“Steee-rike three!”

Finally an American president has woken up to the fact that World War II, not to mention the cold war, is over: there’s no need for US troops to occupy Germany.  Vladimir Putin isn’t going to march into Berlin in a reenactment of the Red Army taking the Fuehrer-bunker – but even if he were so inclined, why won’t Germany defend itself?

So let’s take inventory of our President’s recent pronouncements:

He wants US troops out of Germany.  He wants US troops out of Korea, or else he wants Seoul to start paying the bill.  He wants US troops out of Syria – and this is bound to come up during the Helsinki summit.

He wants out of NATO, telling our “allies” at the recent G-7 summit that “NATO is as bad as NAFTA. It’s much too costly for the US…”

I don’t care about his other views, quite frankly. They are irrelevant. Because if and when he implements his “isolationist” policies, the size, scope, and expense of government will radically shrink. That’s because the rationale for big government will be very much weaker: the political class won’t have the “national security” angle to justify universal surveillance and huge taxpayer outlays to foreign ingrates.

If he manages to lift the burden of empire from the weary shoulders of the American people, the federal government will get smaller despite the intent of the Trump administration or its successors: the process will be as near to automatic as any human activity can possibly be.

You have to be blind not to see that Trump wants to radically reduce the US presence overseas – and you’re part of the problem if you find that worrisome. It’s time to get on the Trump peace train – because it’s riding into history whether you like it or not.

All aboard!  The Trump Peace Train is scheduled to roll into Helsinki on Monday and let’s hope peace prevails.  The Neocon Terrorists that seized control of America in 2000 will be just a bad memory.  Drain the neocon swamp, Mr. President.  Gain steam and roll on down the tracks.  Make way for the Trump Peace Train.  God speed, Mr. President. 



By Patricia Baeten


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