Jeff Carter

Soleiman was Iran’s top military man, and a revered figure - not just famous, or accomplished, but revered - in what is known as the Arc of Resistance (the mid-east’s largely Shia resistance bloc allied against Zionist / US neo-conservative hegemonic ambitions). To put the possible consequence of this assassination in perspective - the Israelis had long wished his demise but considered an overt move far too dangerous. Apparently this was the brainchild of SecState Pompeo and SecDef Esper, and sold to Trump as a quick fix. The leader of Hezbollah declared today all US military personnel legitimate targets until all US forces are expelled from the region. But US/NATO policy in the region starts from an assumption of effectively permanent force positioning. Interestingly, Soleimani directed forces in alliance with America twice - in Afghanistan against the Taliban and in Iraq against ISIS. It’s not 2003 - the Arc of Resistance have extensive missile capability and now a revered martyr whose death will provide years of focussed motivation. Plus the Russians and Chinese are well-positioned to assume the mantle of rational alternative major players for the region.

Michael Hudson wrote a sobering big-picture view of these events, in respect of long-term strategic interests: https://w ww.counterpunch.org/2020/01/06/america-escalates-its-democratic-oil-war-in-the-near-east/ These long-term policies are the antithesis of the foreign policy views harshly repudiated by unelected power blocs in the 1960s.

Very interesting post re: Foucault. See also Life Magazine’s February 1964 issue (backyard photo cover) with Oswald biography anticipating the later WC conclusions. The asserted narrative obliterates any necessity of factual grounding.

FYI - completely denounce this utterly bat———- crazy move. I’m not a “ trumpenlink” and neither are the others you mentioned, as has been repeatedly stated. your inability to process that is widely shared I have noticed.

That’s completely ridiculous. There was no “violation of the Logan Act” - it was a pretext to set Flynn up in a perjury trap, as the late great Robert Parry explained two years ago: https://consortiumnews.com/2017/12/01/the-scalp-taking-of-gen-flynn/

Horowitz’s mandate was to investigate the FISA issues, and did no independent review of alleged Russian election interference. The extent he expressed “agreement” was limited to referral to conclusions made by other bodies - conclusions which are not supported by the evidence in the record and which therefore consist of opinion or belief. To the extent such opinions have appeared in legal proceedings, they have withered, as well described by Craig Murray: https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2019/08/in-the-world-of-truth-and-fact-russiagate-is-dead-in-the-world-of-the-political-establishment-it-is-still-the-new-42/

The Horowitz IG Report frequently refers to the Steele dossier in terms of its unverified and false attributes, and makes note that the FBI was specifically warned its status as a DNC/Clinton funded opp research exercise would create exactly the compromised disaster it created.

Bob, the relevant insignificance of the campaign can be determined by the dollar figures available for the IRA’s program, and the numbers of tweets and Facebook posts it generated as compared to total election related activity during the time period in question. These numbers can be found in Mueller Report, testimony by Twitter and Facebook representatives to Congressional committees, and the Symantec analysis - all of which is available online. There is no evidence that any kind of targeted effort directed at identified undecided voters took place. Everything about the IRA program is consistent with a commercial clickbait marketing scheme, which is exactly what the IRA does and did previously as conceded by all the available information, and there is no evidence that such a program was piggybacked with a malign voter influence campaign by Russian state agents. The idea that it was does not rise above a simple unproved and uncorroborated assertion - which nonetheless has achieved the mantle of “settled fact” with serious consequence (international tensions, arms buildups, censorship programs, generalized paranoia).

You misunderstand the study and the IRA campaign which it describes. There was no significant qualitative difference between the content presented in 2016 and 2017, and the content which referred specifically to election ’16 politics was just a small fraction of the overall effort (see Symantec analysis for detail). That is why the intelligence and congressional reports focussed on efforts to “sow discord” through the disparate push-button messaging. The academic analysis found that the IRA accounts “mostly interacted with those who were already highly polarized” with “strong ideological homophily within their Twitter network”. There was very little interaction with “independent” or swing voters because the messaging was tuned to the polarized already-decided blocs. If you believe there was a significant qualitative difference between the polarized public in 2016 and the polarized public in 2017, you are advancing such theory with no evidence. The IRA’s methods are entirely onsistent with methods used by cyber marketing firms, as the Mueller Report concedes. There is no “Putin Gerasimov cyber warfare strategy” - that’s something you read in a Politico article. The IRA campaign was comparatively minuscule to overall Twitter and Facebook activity, to the point of statistical irrelevance. It did not “fracture American society.” These ridiculous notions are fact-free assertions which do not withstand objective analysis.

The authors are careful to address all possible variables, which adds credibility to their report. The sentence which you highlight is not representative of the accumulated analysis. And, again, notably, neither the intelligence community or the congressional committees refer to or commissioned any analysis whatsoever before asserting their maximalist interpretations, which in turn rely on describing statistically insignificant activity as somehow “massive” and “extensive”.

But Russian trolls did not effect the 2016 election in any meaningful way, except in the fevered imaginations of partisan true believers. Here is a recently published American/Danish academic study: https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2019/11/20/1906420116.full.pdf “Using Bayesian regression tree models, we find no evidence that interaction with IRA accounts substantially impacted distinctive measures of political attitudes...” In other words, the messaging was distributed largely through clusters of already decided voters. If you know of a differing analysis please share as nothing of the sort was ever referred by the intelligence agencies and congressional committees which were the main generators of the election interference theories. Otherwise, your logic holds only to the extent of its self-directed limitations, meaning it doesn’t hold at all.

For someone who is often materially factually incorrect on items ranging from the “Gerasimov Doctrine” to the Steele Dossier, your sarcasm seems misplaced, as is your attribution of speculation I’ve never engaged in. If you have an issue with the information I shared, it is best addressed to William Binney and his VIPS colleagues. Otherwise you are just engaging in generalized hypothetical half-informed dismissals.

In an interview published last week, William Binney says that a metadata comparison of emails released separately by Guccifer 2.0 and Wikileaks show the so-called Russian fingerprints by which the US Intelligence community assessed the emails were obtained by a GRU hack appear only in the Guccifer 2.0 versions - “which directly implies that Guccifer 2.0 was inserting these files to make it look like the Russians did this hack…In other words, it looked like the CIA did this, and that it was a matter of the CIA making it look like the Russians were doing the hack...we have a really extensive shadow government here at work, trying to keep the understanding and knowledge of what’s really happening away from the public of the United States…And the mainstream media is a participant in this.” https://off-guardian.org/2019/12/18/nsa-whistleblower-mueller-report-based-on-fabricated-evidence/

So it’s Greenwald’s pompous authorial tendencies and not the FBI’s abusing “it’s power in severe ways to subvert and undermine U.S. democracy” that’s the takeaway here... Along with the dismal performance of most of the American mainstream media, the past three years have seen concerted efforts to impose censorship on internet platforms and social media. Google and Twitter are aggressively removing or marginalizing information from both left and right margins as well as antiwar and anti-imperialist groups. Facebook came under concerted attack just a few weeks ago for its reluctance to do the same. This censorship regime is justified by reference to false narratives of Russian interference, conspiracy theory and fake news, against which the public must be “protected.” Soon enough it will be the democratic system itself that citizens need be protected from. Its been a psychic meltdown promoted by lies. (realize that sounds pompous too, but its still the case)

Seriously? This is unprecedented? As an observational fellow North American, I hope I am not exceeding my lowly northern status by noting that America faces an inevitable reset in its global position due to the following policies instituted by previous administrations: the “war on terror” with its $6 trillion and counting price tag 2) the Patriot Act, which gives the corrupt establishment the tools to identify and neutralize all opposition 3) weaponizing the US dollar, using extra-territorial sanctions as a blunt tool of statecraft. this has already led to the irreversible momentum to supplant the dollar as world’s reserve currency, a status on which America entirely depends

That might be a bit too inside baseball, and associative, but it would not be surprising. The supposed Downer/Papadopoulos meeting seems too flimsy and dependent on hearsay to serve as a convincing predicate sparking a huge counter-intelligence probe. The origin of Crossfire Hurricane seems a cover story masking something else then. The Russian angle is just hot air - as Lavrov again pointed out in a press briefer yesterday.

When this incident started to leak out two years ago - that the Republican presidential campaign was subject to extensive surveillance by agents of the state based on unverified opposition research funded by the Democrats - it appeared a major political scandal. The details are actually far worse than anticipated, not least the extremely flimsy standards by which domestic surveillance could be initiated, a situation which the intelligence mavens insisted could never happen. Still no word on what motivated Mifsud’s interaction with Papadopoulos. If it turns out to have been at the initiative of someone like Halper, then any notion of a good faith predicate - the current fall-back - is null.

Svetlana Lokhova, who Stepan Halper deceitfully identified as a Russian honeypot agent assigned to compromise Michael Flynn, identifies Halper as a key malign figure in this imbroglio, in context of the IG report which will be released this week. Lokhova stated today: The origins of this report are the tense stand off between then Chair of House Intel Committee Nunes and acting AG Rod Rosenstein. Nunes wanted to see the Halper papers. The IC were never going to let him. This investigation and report are the compromise. The scope was narrow to avoid revealing the toxic nature of Halper’s work. The report took so long because it was hoped the scandal would go away before it was completed. The scandal just grew. Halper’s dubious intelligence is a key component of the invasive FISA applications. Halper lures Page to the Cambridge (England) on July 11-12, 2016. Page appears in the Steele Dossier with false "intelligence" about secret Kremlin meetings on July 19, 2016. Halper's fingerprints all over that. First FISA on Page is based on this false information. Halper had frequent contact with Page for months starting in July 2016 thru 2017. Contact intensified around time of each FISA renewal. The contact ended with the lapse of the final FISA. Yes, that’s right surveillance on Trump's team continued long after the election. Remember there was no collusion. The eavesdropping found nothing. Instead Halper found exculpatory evidence of innocence. That evidence was kept from the Court. While Steele’s nonsense captures the headlines because it ties Comey up in knots, the crimes stem from Halper. His whole suite of intelligence on Flynn, Trump etc was just lies.

Bob - I think you need to broaden your sources of information. Much information has been developed since the summer of 2018, including the revelation that Crowdstrike never shared anything beyond a draft version of their work. Slagging persons such as William Binney and Craig Murray exemplifies the distinct neo-McCarthy-ite tone exhibited by one side of this conversation. To state that Binney is a “self-proclaimed expert” or that Murray “got conned” strongly suggests that you have a rather tentative grasp of the factual record. Instead of always quoting from biased partisan editorials, why don’t you look up some of the critiques of same and tell us in your own words why they are wrong. For example, go to Consortium News and search “DNC email hack leak” and see what they have to say. I at least have read the critiques you cite, and the Mueller Report, and the Senate Subcommittee Report, and can explain in my own words why I believe they are flawed.

And rather than representing the opinions of Trump supporters or fascist enablers, the phoniness of the narrative has been baked right in, starting with the mendacious ICA in January 2017 and continuing with the obvious paucity of evidence developed since.

A 17 month old Computer Weekly article with an obvious predisposition to proclaiming “case closed” is not, and has not been, the last word. As is now known, the entire theory of a “Russian hack” relies almost entirely on a draft version of Crowdstrike’s analysis - a decidedly partisan source. VIPS represents a peer review which continues the status of a contested analysis. Furthermore, Wikileaks continues to insist their source was not Russia, with strong hints that it was a source inside DNC. Former British diplomat Craig Murray, who has acknowledged integrity, was directly involved in the retrieval of the emails and he adamantly declares the “Russian hack” theory is incorrect.

Nice deflection. But honestly, where in your list of deceit do you believe a cooperative, coordinated or conspiratorial effort involving election-interference activities was exposed? The only “catalogue of collusion” you have identified is three items from in a Time Magazine article, all of which were investigated thoroughly by the Mueller team with no resulting legal referral or even a description of resulting election-interference activity. No conspiratorial trail has been uncovered via the polling data. Flynn’s “lying” is well described in his indictment and it has nothing whatsoever to do with election-interference. Roger Stone knew no one at Wikileaks and had no back-channel. So what exactly are you driving at with your inferences? You seem to be insisting that something connected to Mueller’s purview was actually uncovered, but all you’ve got to show for it is persons tied to the Trump campaign communicating with persons with Russian surnames. I thought it was about alleged election interference, but it seems you are moving the goalposts to take in any petty and/or inconsequential activity by a motley collection of influence peddlers. Isn’t that a different discussion? This might seem arcane, but there is an epistemological issue here which is both current and cuts across the arguments over the JFK assassination and historical truth. Addendum: Cliff’s furious reargusrd action, fueled by the Time Magazine article, is a form of Denial akin to the Iraqi WMD true believers. The claim went on for several years that WMD was either actually found or spirited to Syria. Gradually the argument gave way to acceptance that the WMD never existed, but the proponents were simply mistaken but acted in good faith. Still in phase one of denial in this instance.

Could you explain what or where exactly in your long and disparate list of mundane deceits, evidence of “cooperation” or “conspiracy” arise, particularly as relates to the 2016 US election. Otherwise, you are not talking of “collusion.”

I’m sorry, but neither polling data, phone call with Russian ambassador, or the non-existent communications with Wikileaks constitutes “collusion”. The polling data belonged to the Republican Party not the US government, and if the campaign chair decided to share it with a business associate then that is a private matter and nothing illegal, suspicious or nefarious could be established about the incident. The phone call with the ambassador occurred after the election, the government had full access to transcripts of the call, and nothing illegal, suspicious or nefarious occurred. There were no direct contacts between Wikileaks and the Trump campaign. So the “long-time Fed attorneys” neither identified or catalogued anything approaching “secret or illegal cooperation”, nor did they offer explanations why they considered the above incidents as representing “collusion” when they clearly do not. Not at all. The wording in the paragraph precisely establishes the basis for the investigation, and suggests that the “series of contacts” and/or benefitting “electorally” served as grounds for suspicion, but the investigation did not ultimately “establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with he Russian government.” Note that the carefully worded paragraph does not associate either the “contacts” or the electoral “benefit” directly with the alleged “election interference activities.” I didn’t ignore that Kilimnik was an influence peddler. We agree he is - so what? Flynn did not discuss “lifting sanctions” and did not materially misrepresent the content of his conversations. Roger Stone had no contact whatsoever with Wikileaks and everything he knew of Wikileaks releases was based on publicly available information such as Wikileaks press releases. Legally, to be unable to “establish” a case serves to “discredit” an accusation in the sense that the accusation can be said to be unreliable or unsupported by the available evidence. Who, exactly, are his “homies”? The problem with relying on inference in these matters is that the tactic has been in play since January 2017 and has produced very little except gross misunderstandings. You are welcome, of course, to fantasize whatever you wish, although it doesn’t rise above speculation no matter how “obvious” it may appear.

This is what you said: You're taking the quote out of context. https://www.lawfareblog.com/full-text-mueller-reports-executive-summaries Mueller, emphasis added: The social media campaign and the GRU hacking operations coincided with a series of contacts between Trump Campaign officials and individuals with ties to the Russian government. The Office investigated whether those contacts reflected or resulted in the Campaign conspiring or coordinating with Russia in its election-interference activities. Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities. </q> Mueller catalogued the Trump collusion without finding grounds for charging conspiracy. That's a long, long way from a "discredit." I responded that no "collusion" had been identified or catalogued. Neither the "series of contacts" or the Campaign's expectation "it would benefit electorally" constitutes an active process of "collusion". The investigation could not find any information "that “reflected or resulted in the Campaign conspiring or coordinating with Russia.” The paragraph is very clear. Your assertion that "Mueller catalogued the Trump collusion" has no basis of fact. I directly challenged the article's assertion that polling data, phone call with Russian ambassador, or non-existent communications with Wikileaks constituted "collusion". Clearly they did not because the Mueller Report states "the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities." Despite the author's credentials, it should be obvious. The point about Kilimnik is that his status as a longtime routine contact with officials representing the US State Department was omitted in favour of playing up an identity as a "GRU operative" which doesn't exist much beyond rumour. The omission allowed an inference that something nefarious was at play, which, as Matt Taibbi noted, led to reams of speculation in the media which was deliberately stoked by Mueller's associate Weissman back in January. So that strongly suggests that the Mueller investigation was deliberately deceptive about Kilimnik.