By Ray McGovern, Feb. 12, 2020 His coming political demise, as in New Hampshire yesterday, was easy to see. Joe Lauria and I saw it coming and posted this piece five months ago:
If a former general in India could see how Pelosi and her aged advisers were shooting themselves, and their favorite Joe Biden, in the foot, why was the entrenched Democratic leadership not able to see it?
Is it perhaps because, like Biden himself, they had long since reached the age of “statutory senility”?
Good riddance re Biden; what was he thinking? His erstwhile supporters, though, owe him an apology for political misfeasance. Was Nancy afraid to wake up Steny Hoyer and ask him to quiz the Bidens about their caper in Ukraine?
An Award Ceremony Like No Other: Jeffrey Sterling honored for Integrity By Ray McGovern
Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence (SAAII) annual award is always a poignant occasion to congratulate the winner and to catch up with others, including earlier winners, struggling for Justice against tougher and tougher odds. Coleen Rowley (laureate in 2002) and her team saw to it that this year’s ceremony at Moffat House in Washington on Jan. 15, 2020 was an occasion of exceptional warmth, solidarity, and humor . (More about SAAII can be found on its website: samadamsaward.ch. For more about Jeffrey and this year’s award see: https://consortiumnews.com/2020/01/12/whistleblower-jeffrey-sterling-who-went-through-kafkaesque-trial-wins-2020-sam-adams-award/ )
Below is the link to the video recording of the affair, filmed by Paul Williams of Shoot First Pictures.
With this year’s award, Jeffrey Sterling brings to five the number of award recipients imprisoned for exposing government abuse (not counting 2013 Sam Adams laureate, Ed Snowden, who was made stateless and has been marooned in Russia for more than six years). Worst still, Julian Assange (2010) and Chelsea Manning (2014) remain in prison, where UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer has reported they are both being tortured.
The late Richard Curtiss was a highly decorated US Foreign Service Officer, who witnessed up-and-close much of what he reports. His insights are of particular interest today, looking back on the tragedy of missed opportunities for justice and peace in the Middle East and how they were sabotaged — as prelude to Trump’s attempted give-away of Palestinian rights in the deal he announced last week.
Five days after President Trump took office, I had an opportunity to brace House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff personally about evidence that Russia “hacked” into the DNC. He had repeatedly given that canard the patina of flat fact during an address at the old Hillary Clinton/John Podesta “think tank,” The Center for American Progress Action Fund.
The canard was just barely at the duckling stage back then. So, to give Schiff the benefit of the doubt, he may have put misplaced confidence in the Gang of Three — CIA/Brennan-FBI/Comey-National Intelligence Director/Clapper — con-men all. They were, in any case, telling Schiff what he wanted to hear.
As frequenters of this site are aware, subsequent years have turned up no concrete, technical evidence that the DNC was “hacked” — by Russia, or by anyone else. The DNC emails were copied onto an external storage device before being given to WikiLeaks. Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, whose ranks include two former NSA Technical Directors, have shown this to be the case, relying on the principles of physics and on the forensics that the FBI, for some reason, did not do. (And, please, do not let adjectives like “debunked” be used in attempts to cast doubt on VIPS’ unchallenged — if often unwelcome — conclusions.)
I need to tell you right off the bat that the next video-clip is not from The Onion. Rather, it shows a more recent example of Schiff’s incredible, incurable credulity, as he regaled some equally credulous young folks at the same “think tank” on Oct. 23, 2018 (hat tip to Rosie Memos @almostjingo for tweeting). Chairman Schiff clearly has a nose for hot tips about his bete noire, Russian President Vladimir Putin.
This was abundantly that October day when he addressed a young audience at the same old Clinton/Podesta “think tank”. Schiff said he had been told that Putin has one of his henchmen follow then-Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev around with a pillow to smother him in his sleep if he ever gets out of line. ( See: https://raymcgovern.com/2018/11/24/adam-schiffs-incredible-incurable-credulity/ .)
There is not the slightest hint in the video that Schiff was speaking tongue in cheek. Equally sad, no one in the audience laughed. (Where do they recruit such credulous young folks?).
But who gave Schiff the “intelligence” about the “pillow-carrier” poised to snuff out Medvedev? Which of the Gang of Three might it have been? U.S. Attorney John Durham surely has enough on his plate these days as he looks into the larger Russia-gate canard, of which “the-pillow-carrier-and-Medvedev” is but a small duckling. Nontheless, it seems possible we will learn the identity of the con who whispered the tale of the pillow into Schiff’s impressionable ear.
Impeachment For Cognoscenti, Dummies, and Those In Between
“We took some time today [Dec. 1, 2019] to search raymcgovern.com for some of the key articles on impeachment posted since Jan. 2019. We will group links to these articles chronologically under List A. Then we will compile a shorter (chronological) List B with links to postings of background related to impeachment, for those who may have missed key articles when they were posted here or elsewhere during 2019. You may prefer to go through List A, and List B as well, from the bottom up rather than top-down.”
Doubly interesting in retrospect. Who knows what happened to the Nunes referrals? Will William Barr and John Durham be able to put some spine into the president and persuade him to let it happen this time? Will Establishment media be able to keep pros like Professor Johnathan Turley and former NSA Technical Director William Binney off the TV screen?
After yesterday’s unchallenged rhetoric at the President Trump’s Senate trial, we see a need to re-post the link to Ukraine For Dummies — especially for those who, like us, are skeptical of “flat facts” of the WMD-in-Iraq variety.
It is sad beyond belief that such manufactured “facts” are widely proclaimed, and apparently even believed, by members of Congress who should know better. All are malnourished to the point of starvation on the thin gruel of the corporate media, whose puppeteers profiteer on war.
An Open Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis November 19,1970
Dear Sister:
One might have hoped that, by this hour, the very sight of chains on black flesh … would be so intolerable a sight for the American people, and so unbearable a memory, that they would spontaneously rise up and strike off the manacles. But, now, more than ever, Americans appear to measure their safety in the chains and corpses of others. And so, Newsweek, can put you on its cover, chained.
You look exceedingly alone—as alone, say, as the Jewish housewife in the boxcar headed for Dachau, or as any one of our ancestors, chained together during the ocean passage. …
Well. Since we live in an age in which silence is not only criminal but suicidal, I have been making as much noise as I can, here in Europe, on radio and TV. In fact, I have just returned from a land, Germany, which was made notorious by a silent majority not so very long ago. …
Let me put it this way. As long as white Americans take refuge in their whiteness… they will allow millions of other people to be slaughtered... So long as their whiteness puts so sinister a distance between their own experience and the experience of others, they will never feel themselves sufficiently worthwhile to become responsible for themselves. As we once put it in our black church, they will perish in their sins—that is, in their delusions. … [Emphasis added]
Now we do feel ourselves sufficiently worthwhile to change our fate and the fate of our children! … We know that a person is not a thing and is not to be placed at the mercy of things. We know that air and water belong to all mankind and not merely to the wealthy. We know that a baby does not come into the world merely to be the instrument of someone else’s profit. ..
My dear sister Angela, some of us, white and black, know how great a price has already been paid to bring a new consciousness. If we know that, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own—which it is. We must render impassable with our own bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.
