PURELY POLITICAL Intelligence
Does the U.S. really need nineteen intelligence-gathering agencies?
They didn’t see this coming… Again
U.S. taxpayers support at least 19 so-called “intelligence” agencies, the cost of which is upwards of $100 billion a year. The tens of thousands of government employees paid for by U.S. taxpayers are supposedly working to develop and analyze intelligence to help protect this country and its allies.
None of those agencies picked up any useful information ahead of time regarding the massacre of Israelis that had apparently been in the planning by Gaza’s governing body, Hamas, for over a year.
Maybe many of those 19 so-called “intelligence” agencies were distracted by the more important mission of surveilling parents objecting to school boards that had allowed teachers and administrators to lie about and deny them access to information about their children.
Intelligence agents must also have been busy surveilling “MAGA extremists”, tracking down and detaining mis-gendering people who refused to use required personal pronouns, or actively surveilling 2nd Amendment advocates and other “dangers to our democracy.”
Too busy, apparently, to pay any attention to what most of them were hired to do: surveille and analyze conditions and activities outside the U.S. where trouble was most likely to occur.
Such as in Gaza.
If there is a Republican victory for president in 2024, it must be remembered that the CIA and other intelligence agencies worked overtime to manipulate, censor, and/or otherwise withhold critical information that led to the election of Joe Biden, and that President Trump, without that interference, would likely have won re-election in 2020. A new president would be smart to dismantle at least half of those agencies, most of which have very little credibility and, judging by the results of the last few decades, virtually no useful intelligence-gathering capabilities.
And, lest we forget, the following group of men and women signed on to an open letter just before the November 2020 election, claiming that the laptop computer left behind in a repair shop by Joe Biden’s son Hunter had “all the classic earmarks” of a Russian disinformation campaign. At the time of the letter, former “intelligence” officials from the CIA and other agencies knew the laptop story, as revealed by the New York Post, was legitimate but signed on to the lie anyway.
Here are the exact words of that Open Letter statement:
“We are all individuals who devoted significant portions of our lives to national security. Some of us served in senior positions in policy departments and agencies, and some of us served in senior positions in the Intelligence Community. Some of us were political appointees, and some were career officials. Many of us worked for presidents of both political parties.
“We are all also individuals who see Russia as one of our nation’s primary adversaries. All of us have an understanding of the wide range of Russian overt and covert activities that undermine US national security, with some of us knowing Russian behavior intimately, as we worked to defend our nation against it for a career. A few of us worked against Russian information operations in the United States in the last several years. Perhaps most important, each of us believes deeply that American citizens should determine the outcome of elections, not foreign governments. All of us agree with the founding fathers’ concern about the damage that foreign interference in our politics can do to our democracy.
“It is for all these reasons that we write to say that the arrival on the US political scene of emails purportedly belonging to Vice President Biden’s son Hunter, much of it related to his time serving on the Board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.
“We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement—just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.
“If we are right, this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this.
“There are a number of factors that make us suspicious of Russian involvement.
“Such an operation would be consistent with Russian objectives, as outlined publicly and recently by the Intelligence Community, to create political chaos in the United States and to deepen political divisions here but also to undermine the candidacy of former Vice President Biden and thereby help the candidacy of President Trump. For the Russians at this point, with Trump down in the polls, there is incentive for Moscow to pull out the stops to do anything possible to help Trump win and/or to weaken Biden should he win. A “laptop op” fits the bill, as the publication of the emails are clearly designed to discredit Biden.
“Such an operation would be consistent with some of the key methods Russia has used in its now multi-year operation to interfere in our democracy—the hacking (via cyber operations) and the dumping of accurate information or the distribution of inaccurate or misinformation. Russia did both of these during the 2016 presidential election—judgments shared by the US Intelligence Community, the investigation into Russian activities by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and the entirety (all Republicans and Democrats) on the current Senate Intelligence Committee.
“Such an operation is also consistent with several data points. The Russians, according to media reports and cybersecurity experts, targeted Burisma late last year for cyber collection and gained access to its emails. And Ukrainian politician and businessman Adriy Derkach, identified and sanctioned by the US Treasury Department for being a 10-year Russian agent interfering in the 2020 election, passed purported materials on Burisma and Hunter Biden to Giuliani.
“Our view that the Russians are involved in the Hunter Biden email issue is consistent with two other significant data points as well. According to the Washington Post, citing four sources, “U.S. intelligence agencies warned the White House last year that Giuliani was the target of an influence operation by Russian intelligence.”
“In addition, media reports say that the FBI has now opened an investigation into Russian involvement in this case. According to USA Today, “. . . federal authorities are investigating whether the material supplied to the New York Post by Rudy Giuliani . . . is part of a smoke bomb of disinformation pushed by Russia.”
“We do not know whether these press reports are accurate, but they do suggest concern within Executive Branch departments and agencies that mirrors ours. It is high time that Russia stops interfering in our democracy.”
All of the above is, how do you say, bull-crap. All the signers of this open letter either knew this was mealy-mouthed bull-poop, should have known it was lawyer-driven bull-swill, or were so ill-informed that they knew nothing.
In the second-to-last paragraph, the letter states that “According to USA Today, “… federal authorities are investigating whether the material supplied to the New York Post by Rudy Giuliani . . . is part of a smoke bomb of disinformation pushed by Russia.”
The “smoke bomb of disinformation” wasn’t Russian; it was made in the U.S.A. by the FBI, which had “leaked” to USA Today that a “federal investigation” was underway, so they could then write that they were “responding” to news reports.
Here are the names (along with their intelligence agency connections and other affiliations) of all the signees:
Leon Panetta (CIA); John Brennan (CIA, NBC, MSNBC), Thomas Fingar (DNI, Stanford University), Rick Ledgett (NSA, M&T Bank), Jim Clapper (DNI, CNN), John McLaughlin (CIA, Johns Hopkins University), Michael Morell (CIA, Beacon Global Strategies), Mike Vickers (DoD, BAE Systems), Doug Wise (DIA), Nick Rasmussen (DNI), Russ Travers (DNI), Andy Liepman (DNI, RAND Corp), John Moserman (CIA), Larry Pfeiffer (CIA, George Mason University), Jeremy Bash (CIA, Beacon Global Strategies), Rodney Snyder(CIA), Glenn Gerstell (NSA, Beacon Global Stragegies), David B. Buckley (CIA), Nada Bakos (CIA, Foreign Policy Research Institute), Patty Brandmaier (CIA), James B. Bruce (CIA, Rand Corp), David Cariens (CIA), Janice Cariens (CIA), Paul Kolbe (CIA, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs), Peter Corsell(CIA, I Squared Capital), Brett Davis (CIA, New North Ventures), Roger Zane George (CIA, Occidental College), Steven L. Hall (CIA), Kent Harrington (CIA), Don Hepburn (CIA, Boanerges Solutions), Timothy D. Kilbourn (CIA), Ron Marks (CIA, George Mason University), Jonna Hiestand Mendez (CIA), Emile Nakhleh (CIA, University of New Mexico), Gerald A. O’Shea (CIA), David Priess (CIA, George Mason University), Pam Purcilly (CIA), Marc Polymeropoulos (CIA, Atlantic Council), Chris Savos (CIA), Nick Shapiro (CIA, Tulane University), John Sipher (CIA, Atlantic Council), Stephen Slick (CIA, University of Texas at Austin), Cynthia Strand (CIA), Greg Tarbell (CIA), David Terry (CIA), Greg Treverton (DNI, USC), John Tullius (CIA, Naval Postgraduate School), David A. Vanell (CIA), Winston Wiley (CIA), Kristin Wood(CIA), and nine other intelligence agency individuals whose names were not revealed.
If you see any of these names attached to something related to intelligence you should know that each of these people were willing and able to lie to you and the rest of the American public about a subject that, had the truth been known, would have decisively turned the 2020 election towards Donald Trump and away from Joe Biden. In other words, the men and women who signed this letter voluntarily helped to manipulate a national election by attesting that something was false that they knew was authentic.
None of these people should be trusted ever again.
Based upon the duplicity of this “open letter” along with the revelations of collusion between intelligence agencies, social media, and the Biden campaign, why would anyone trust anything coming from or “revealed” by these agencies?
A reduction by half in the size and scope of America’s intelligence community should be a top priority of any new administration.
The military/industrial complex, that President Eisenhower warned us about, is what drives these seemingly endless and hugely costly conflicts America seems unable stay out of. Trump vowed to end that cycle. He was, and remains, a huge threat to the deeply vested interests the war machine industry and the deep state in Washington want to preserve. The so called intelligence community aids and abets those interests as well. Hence their willingness to lie to their fellow countrymen when needed. Follow the money, it’s really that simple.
I once believed that my beloved country had honest reporting to its people. Now, we need to censor everything! Is this Democracy lost?
Dana