Pacifica Radio host Dennis Bernstein plays fascinating audiotape of Robert Parry, back in the day, talking about reporting on the Reagan White House/CIA-run Contra operation in Nicaragua under Reagan. Includes the drug epidemic in Los Angeles fed by Contra-provided cocaine, and how mainstream media suppressed that whole story and then crucified journalist Gary Webb for telling it, accurately, in the San Jose Mercury News.
Ray tells a vignette from Bob Parry that illustrates why his employment as a star reporter for Newsweek was so short-lived and why the print and TV media stars of today have to make so many unprincipled, unsavory compromises to stay stars and make a lot of money. Dare we say, again, plus ca change — like all over again? https://kpfa.org/episode/flashpoints-december-13-2018/
Ray speaks between minute 00:35 and 12:20 (the vignette starts at min. 10:00).
Then Bob Parry’s taped interview, with Dennis Bernstein intro, runs to min. 32:40.
After brief interval for a fundraising pitch, Dennis adds highly interesting further commentary from min. 34:05 to 40:20. (Thereafter it is all fundraising.)
Radio host Michael Steven Smith gives Ray a chance to address key aspects of “Russia-gate” on which most Americans have been grossly misinformed — or UNinformed. (Ray has been surprised, for example at how few have even heard of the damning documentary evidence in the Peter Strzok-Lisa Page text exchanges.)
Asked about the MIC (Eisenhower’s “Military-Industrial Complex”), Ray introduces a new acronym that better describes the ever-wider and more serious threat to the Republic — the threat also known as the “Deep State.” It is MICIMATT (with accent on the first syllable): the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-MEDIA-Academia-Think-Tank complex.
And, as Ray has been drumming home for two decades now — in an effort to make the “complex” less complicated — the most significant change (by far) he has seen in more than 55 years in Washington is the lamentable reality that there is, at present, NO FREE MEDIA, in any real sense of the word “free.” That is why the inclusion of MEDIA in the new acronym needs to remain in ALL CAPS. If you don’t get THAT, it is hard to acknowledge that you can be so poorly informed and misled.
Yes, there is a lot of truth in alternative media; but we don’t get on TV or in “mainstream” newspapers, so becoming better informed requires some extra effort. Remember, years after the 2003 attack on Iraq, 70 percent of those in the U.S. still believed what the media led them to believe — that Saddam Hussein played a role in 9/11); the percentage believing today in Russia-gate seems to be about the same.
Ray addresses questions about what the UN has called, twice, the “arbitrary detention” of Julian Assange, and why it is that the Deep State and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo want so much to “get” him. Ray also notes that less than two weeks after President Obama had been fully briefed (by the Clapper/Comey/Brennan/Rogers Gang of Four) on their “assessment” of Russian-hacking-to-Wikileaks, Obama publicly branded one of their key conclusions “inconclusive.”
Last month when Ray publicly asked Clapper to explain who Obama said that, Clapper came a cropper, admitting that he could not explain it. (See: https://consortiumnews.com/2018/11/14/clappers-credibility-collapses/ ) The reference was to one of the most important findings of the so-called “’Intelligence Community’ Assessment” authored by “hand-picked” analysts from only 3 agencies, briefed to Obama on January 5, 2017, and given to president-elect Trump and to the media the following day. That put real adrenaline into Russia-gate.
Here are the lawyerly words Obama chose to use, less than two weeks later, at his final news conference (January 18), answering a question from Jeff Mason of Reuters. Obama: “ … the conclusions of the intelligence community with respect to the Russian hacking were not conclusive as to whether WikiLeaks was witting or not in being the conduit through which we heard about the DNC e-mails that were leaked.”
A 24-minute interview is not enough time to address other key questions that continue to befuddle those malnourished by the drivel in mainstream media, especially those who have drunk freely of the Russia-gate Kool Aid. Like, for instance, this very familiar, actually quite reasonable one: “If James Comey was part of the DOJ/FBI/CIA/NSA operation to ensure that Hillary Clinton won, why did Comey publicly re-open the Clinton (Weiner) email investigation in late October 2016?” This one is easy: the answer can be found in Comey’s pretentious book, “A Higher Loyalty”: “It is entirely possible that because I was making decisions in an environment where Hillary Clinton was sure to be the next president, my concern about making her an illegitimate president by concealing the restarted investigation bore greater weight than it would have if the election appeared closer or if Donald Trump were ahead in all polls. But I don’t know.” What needs to be added here, as a crucial part of the “environment,” is the additional incentive driving Comey upon learning that his sleuths at the New York office were up in arms about not being allowed to do their job on Weiner’s computer, and were about to leak how Washington (Stzrok and accomplices) were trying as hard as they could to keep it all quiet until after Hillary won.
So we’re withdrawing troops from the Middle East. GOOD! What’s the War on Terror death count by now, a half-million? How much have we spent, $5 trillion? Five-and-a-half? For that cost, we’ve destabilized the region to the point of abject chaos, inspired millions of Muslims to hate us, and torn up the Geneva Convention and half the Constitution in pursuit of policies like torture, kidnapping, assassination-by-robot and warrantless detention. It will be difficult for each of us to even begin to part with our share of honor in those achievements. This must be why all those talking heads on TV are going crazy. Unless Donald Trump decides to reverse his decision to begin withdrawals from Syria and Afghanistan, cable news for the next few weeks is going to be one long Scanners marathon of exploding heads. “Today’s decision would cheer Moscow, ISIS, and Iran!” yelped Nicole Wallace, former George W. Bush communications director. “Maybe Trump will bring Republicans and Democrats together,” said Bill Kristol, on MSNBC, that “liberal” channel that somehow seems to be populated round the clock by ex-neocons and Pentagon dropouts. Kristol, who has rarely ever been in the ballpark of right about anything — he once told us Iraq was going to be a “two month war” — might actually be correct. Trump’s decisions on Syria and Afghanistan will lay bare the real distinctions in American politics. Political power in this country is not divided between right and left, and not even between rich and poor. The real line is between a war party, and everyone else. This is why Kristol is probably right. The Democrats’ plan until now was probably to impeach Trump in the House using at minimum some material from the Michael Cohen case involving campaign-finance violations. That plan never had a chance to succeed in the Senate, but now, who knows? Troop withdrawals may push a collection of hawkish Republicans like Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, Ben Sasse and maybe even Mitch McConnell into another camp. The departure of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis — a standard-issue Pentagon toady who’s never met an unending failure of a military engagement he didn’t like and whose resignation letter is now being celebrated as inspirational literature on the order of the Gettysburg Address or a lost epic by Auden or Eliot — sounded an emergency bell for all these clowns. The letter by Mattis, Rubio said: “Makes it abundantly clear we are headed towards a series of grave policy errors which will endanger our nation, damage our alliances & empower our adversaries.” Talk like this is designed to give political cover to Republican fence-sitters on Trump. That wry smile on Kristol’s face is, I’d guess, connected to the knowledge that Trump put the Senate in play by even threatening to pull the plug on our Middle Eastern misadventures. You’ll hear all sorts of arguments today about why the withdrawals are bad. You’ll hear Trump has no plan, which is true. He never does, at least not on policy. But we don’t exactly have a plan for staying in the Middle East, either, beyond installing a permanent garrison in a dozen countries, spending assloads of money and making ourselves permanently despised in the region as civilian deaths pile up through drone-bombings and other “surgical” actions. You’ll hear we’re abandoning allies and inviting massacres by the likes of Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan. If there was any evidence that our presence there would do anything but screw up the situation even more, I might consider that a real argument. At any rate, there are other solutions beyond committing American lives. We could take in more refugees, kick Turkey out of NATO, impose sanctions, etc. As to the argument that we’re abandoning Syria to Russians — anyone who is interested in reducing Russian power should be cheering. If there’s any country in the world that equals us in its ability to botch an occupation and get run out on a bloody rail after squandering piles of treasure, it’s Russia. They may even be better at it than us. We can ask the Afghans about that on our way out of there. The Afghan conflict became the longest military engagement in American history eight years ago. Despite myths to the contrary, Barack Obama did not enter office gung-ho to leave Afghanistan. He felt he needed to win there first, which, as anyone who’s read The Great Game knows, proved impossible. So we ended up staying throughout his presidency. We were going to continue to stay there, and in other places, forever, because our occupations do not work, as everyone outside of Washington seems to understand. TV talking heads will be unanimous on this subject, but the population, not so much. What polls we have suggest voters want out of the region in increasing numbers. A Morning Consult/Politico poll from last year showed a plurality favored a troop decrease in Afghanistan, while only 5 percent wanted increases. Polls consistently show the public thinks our presence in Afghanistan has been a failure. There’s less about how the public feels about Syria, but even there, the data doesn’t show overwhelming desire to put boots on the ground. When Trump first ordered airstrikes in Syria over Assad’s use of chemical weapons, 70 percent favored sanctions according to Politico, while 39 percent favored sending troops. A CBS poll around that time found 45 percent wanted either no involvement period, or airstrikes and no ground troops, versus 18 percent who wanted full military involvement. Trump is a madman, a far-right extremist and an embarrassment, but that’s not why most people in Washington hate him. It’s his foreign-policy attitudes, particularly toward NATO, that have always most offended DC burghers. You could see the Beltway beginning to lose its mind back in the Republican primary race, when then-candidate Trump belittled America’s commitment to Middle Eastern oil states. “Every time there’s a little ruckus, we send those ships and those planes,” he said, early in his campaign. “We get nothing. Why? They’re making a billion a day. We get nothing.” As he got closer to the nomination, he went after neoconservative theology more explicitly. “I don’t think we should be nation-building anymore,” he said, in March of 2016. He went on: “I watched as we built schools in Iraq and they’re blown up. We build another one, we get blown up.” Trump was wrong about a thousand other things, but this was true. I had done a story about how military contractors spent $72 million on what was supposed to be an Iraqi police academy and delivered a pile of rubble so unusable, pedestrians made it into a toilet. The Special Inspector General for Iraqi Reconstruction noted, “We witnessed a light fixture so full of diluted urine and feces that it would not operate.” SIGIR found we spent over $60 billion on Iraqi reconstruction and did not significantly improve life for Iraqis. The parallel body covering Afghanistan, the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction, concluded last year that at least $15.5 billion had been wasted in that country between 2008 and 2017, and this was likely only a “fraction” of financial leakage. Trump, after sealing the nomination, upped the ante. In the summer of 2016 he said he wasn’t sure he’d send troops to defend NATO members that didn’t pay their bills. NATO members are supposed to kick in 2 percent of GDP for their own defense. At the time, only four NATO members (Estonia, Poland, the U.K. and the U.S.) were in compliance. Politicians went insane. How dare he ask countries to pay for their own defense! Republican House member Adam Kinzinger, a popular guest in the last 24 hours, said in July 2016 that Trump’s comments were “utterly disastrous.” “There’s no precedent,” said Thomas Wright, a “Europe scholar” from the Brookings Institute. When the news came after Trump’s election that he’d only read his intelligence briefings once a week instead of every day as previous presidents had dutifully done, that was it. The gloves were off at that point. “The open disdain Trump has shown for the agencies is unprecedented,” said Patrick Skinner, a former CIA official for both George W. Bush and Obama. All that followed, through today, has to be understood through this prism. Trump dumped on basically every segment of the political establishment en route to Washington, running on a classic authoritarian strategy — bash the elites, pose as a populist. However fake he was, there were portions of the political establishment that deserved abuse, the Pentagon most of all. The Department of Defense has been a money pit for decades. It has trillions in expenditures it can’t account for, refused an audit for nearly 30 years and then failed this year (as in failed completely, zero-point-zero, not producing any coherent numbers) when one was finally funded. We have brave and able soldiers, but their leaders are utter tools who’ve left a legacy of massacres and botched interventions around the world. NATO? That’s an organization whose mission stopped making sense the moment the Soviet Union collapsed. We should long ago have repurposed our defense plan to focus on terrorism, cyber-crime and cyber-attacks, commercial espionage, financial security, and other threats. Instead, we continued after the Soviet collapse to maintain a global military alliance fattened with increasingly useless carriers and fighter jets, designed to fight archaic forms of war. NATO persisted mainly as a PR mechanism for a) justifying continued obscene defense spending levels and b) giving a patina of internationalism to America’s essentially unilateral military adventures. We’d go into a place like Afghanistan with no real plan for leaving, and a few member nations like Estonia and France and Turkey would send troops to get shot at with us. But it was always basically Team America: World Police with supporting actors. No wonder so few of the member countries paid their dues. Incidentally, this isn’t exactly a secret. Long before Trump, this is what Barney Frank was saying in 2010: “I think the time has come to reexamine NATO. NATO has become an excuse for other people to get America to do things.” This has all been a giant, bloody, expensive farce, and it’s long since time we ended it. We’ll see a lot of hand-wringing today from people who called themselves anti-war in 2002 and 2003, but now pray that the “adults in the room” keep “boots on the ground” to preserve “credibility.” Part of this is because it’s Trump, but a bigger part is that we’ve successfully brainwashed big chunks of the population into thinking it’s normal for a country to exist in a state of permanent war, fighting in seven countries at once, spending half of all discretionary funding on defense. It’s not. It’s insane. And we’ll never be a healthy society, or truly respected abroad, until we stop accepting it as normal. Incidentally, I doubt Trump really follows through on this withdrawal plan. But until he changes (what passes for) his mind, watch what happens in Washington. We’re about to have a very graphic demonstration of the near-total uniformity of the political class when it comes to the military and its role. The war party is ready for a coming-out party.
Political and legal danger for President Trump may be sharpening by the day, but the case that his campaign might have conspired with the Russian attack on the 2016 election is still unproven despite two years of investigations, court filings and even numerous convictions and guilty pleas. Trump has been implicated in ordering a scheme to silence two women ahead of Election Day in 2016 about the alleged sexual relationships they had with him years before.That is a serious matter, or it might have been in other times, but this scheme is decidedly not a global conspiracy with a foreign power to steal the election. More broadly, the president and his supporters say, the payments to the women in 2016 are penny ante stuff: Breaking campaign finance law, if that did take place, isn’t like committing murder, said one lawyer for the president. The “biased” Justice Department is just grasping at straws to use something against Trump because it hasn’t been able to locate a “smoking gun,” as Trump wrote this week, that would tie his campaign in with Russia’s active measures in 2016.There’s an important kernel of truth in that argument — not only is there no smoking gun, but the Russia case also appears to have been weakening, not strengthening, while America’s eyes have been on the payments. The charges they didn’t make
Item: Cohen ostensibly played a key role in the version of events told by the infamous, partly unverified Russia dossier. He denied that strongly to Congress. He also has admitted lying to Congress and submitted an important new version of other events.But that new story didn’t include a trip to Prague, as described in the dossier. Nor did Cohen discuss that in his interview on Friday on ABC News. Could the trip, or a trip, still be substantiated? Yes, maybe — but if it happened, would a man go to prison for three years without anyone having mentioned it? Item: Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, is on track to be sentenced early next year after his conviction in the Eastern District of Virginia and his guilty plea in Washington, D.C. Prosecutors say that Manafort shouldn’t get any consideration for the information he has given the feds because he has been lying to them; Manafort’s lawyers say he gave the government valuable information. Nonetheless, the crimes for which the feds want Manafort to be locked up aren’t a Russian conspiracy to throw the election. Moreover, Manafort took part in at least one event that has attracted endless discussion: the June 2016 meeting at which he and other top campaign leaders hosted the delegation of Russians following an offer of dirt on Hillary Clinton. But Manafort’s role in that meeting hasn’t figured into either of his federal cases nor been the subject of court documents. Maybe the feds are holding all that back for some kind of big reveal — or maybe there’s no conspiracy here. Further inference:
If Manafort isn’t in any legal jeopardy over his role in the Trump Tower meeting, does that suggest no one else is, either? There were a lot of outside theories that the meeting might have broken federal laws barring U.S. political campaigns from getting opposition research from foreigners. Does the absence of anything about that in Manafort’s case mean the feds actually don’t think there’s anything to prosecute? Item: Former national security adviser Michael Flynn has been a very good witness, the feds say. They say it would be fine with them if, when he is sentenced on Tuesday, a judge gave Flynn no jail time. Does that sound like the attitude they would take with someone who had been serving as a Russian factotum and who had been serving as a foreign agent from inside the White House as national security adviser, steps away from the Oval Office? And on it goes: Will the feds ever charge Trump’s sometime foreign policy adviser, Carter Page, whom they called a Russian agent in the partly declassified application they made to surveil him?National security What You Need to Know About the Much-Discussed Carter Page FISA Document The surveillance began under FBI Director James Comey and was reauthorized into the Trump era, including by his own appointees at the Justice Department. That suggests it was yielding foreign intelligence, but Page has maintained all along that he did nothing wrong. Judging by the absence of any charges and his continued liberty, authorities appear to agree. Shadows and fog Investigators certainly know more than they’re saying — they often repeat as much in court appearances and documents in their various cases. But an ostensible conspiracy between Trump’s campaign and the Russians who attacked the election is nowhere near close to being proven. Not only that, a few recent events may delay the verification of any official theory about such a conspiracy. One important one is that Trump has signaled that he’s open to clemency for people in the Russia imbroglio. If Manafort and others take that as a beacon of hope to stand fast against the feds and fight their cases because they’ll ultimately get a pardon, that could not only add months to this saga but also conceal important facts. Mueller, as usual, is in the driver’s seat. If he presses ahead with criminal cases against people who don’t accept plea deals, the Russia imbroglio could run well into 2019 or beyond. If he opts not to prosecute people on whom he has evidence of wrongdoing and he simply writes what he’s discovered in a notional final report, this saga might end sooner but amount to an abdication of justice. That doesn’t seem like the Mueller that America has come to know.All the Criminal Charges to Emerge So Far From Robert Mueller’s Investivation
Another thing that Americans have come to know about Mueller is that he can keep a secret. So if he has evidence about a geopolitical conspiracy between Trump’s campaign and Russia’s active measures, the public probably won’t learn about it until the moment the special counsel’s office wants that to happen. From what is visible today, however, the case is still Swiss cheese. Unless that changes in a big way, the hottest political story in a generation may lose its place in center stage. The Russia Investigations: Maybe the End is in Sight, Maybe It Isn’t The continued slide of the core Russia “collusion” story, if that is what indeed happens, is politically relevant to the other investigations and potential problems confronting the president. Because the hush money payments and the potential international contributions to the inauguration campaign aren’t about Russia, it provides a talking point to the White House: The “deep state” couldn’t make Russia stick, Trump argues, and so its conspirators have gone on an expedition for other mud to sling. That, he hopes, will mean that none of it sticks.
