This Can't Be Happening!

Retired CIA Sr. Analyst Ray McGovern, who used to give presidents back to Ronald Reagan the CIA’s daily briefing, and who later co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), talks with host Dave Lindorff about the CIA’s claim –which he calls “a crock” — that the Russians and Vladimir Putin were behind the release of Democratic National Committee and Clinton Campaign Chair John Podesta’s emails, in an effort to throw the election to Donald Trump.

Listen to a full podcast of the interview on the Progressive Radio News program ‘This Can’t Be Happening!”

Retired CIA Sr. Analyst Ray McGovern, co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)

 
The War I Survived Was Vietnam: Collected Writings of a Veteran and Antiwar Activist
By Michael Uhl
McFarland Publishers
 
The journalistic “beat” that Michael Uhl covered over the years in the essays and reviews collected in his just-published anthology of short works is that realm of thought that survives the relentless American capacity for forgetting history. You can look at a book like this as a tool of memory, in this case, focused on the Vietnam War from the perspective of a veteran who came to see his war as a shameful war of aggression and a crime.

Michael Uhl and his new anthology of short works

This war on memory began during the war and is on-going now. “The GI resistance and antiwar Vietnam veteran’s movements of the Sixties and Seventies, so unique in the annals of warfare, became prime targets for erasure in this new and approved version of the war the Pentagon hopes to fashion.” This is from a 2012 essay on the Pentagon’s 13-year, multi-million dollar program to sanitize the Vietnam War known as the 50th Commemoration Project, which was launched that year with a speech by President Obama at the Vietnam Wall in Washington D.C.

The Vietnam War will always be controversial and subject to politics. “But the specific history of the organized opposition to the war is more vulnerable.” Uhl is referring to the political opposition mounted by veterans of the war like himself, a young intelligence officer. Moral opposition by veterans becomes “more and more abstract and remote to younger generations as it recedes into the past.” For veterans of the war like Uhl, none of it is “abstract” or “remote.” They began building a moral case against the war when they found themselves trapped in it. When they returned to “the world” they took their case up in the streets and in the halls of government.

Uhl does not accept President Obama’s “consoling fiction that Vietnam Veterans as a whole ‘were blamed for the misdeeds of a few.’ ” We all know the drill: Although bad things happen in all wars; the Vietnam War was a noble cause. Uhl’s response is direct: “I am too wedded to my own truths about the evils of that war to ever be consoled, and Obama’s lies on this particular occasion infuriate me. I went to Vietnam. I lived the war. It horrified me. I came home and actively opposed it. Like tens of thousands of other Vietnam veterans, I witnessed or participated in atrocities. I saw the routine use of torture. These were not the ‘misdeeds of a few’: they were the essence of that war.”

The incredible “group-think” that has seen the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, President Obama, the Clinton campaign and most of the corporate media braying that Vladimir Putin scandalously upended American democracy and threw the election to his favored candidate Donald Trump is based on a ludicrous premise. That premise: that the election went Trump’s way because several tens of thousands of voters in a few states — Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — switched away from Clinton to Trump because of an alleged (and factually unproven) Russian “hack” of Democratic National Committee and of Hillary campaign chair John Podesta’s emails.

According to this conspiracy theory — and that is what it is — the “Russian” hack fully explains those narrow Trump wins in three key swing states. Its proponents argue that as a result of the alleged hacks allegedly passed on to Wikileaks (which denies it was a hack or that their source was Russian), and of the subsequent release of emails that showed that the DNC had conspired to throw the primary election to Clinton, and that revealed the contents of Clinton’s secret sycophantic quarter-million-dollar speeches to Wall Street banks, those states normally securely Democratic went for Trump.

What is ludicrous about this alleged conspiracy theory is that Sanders supporters already knew the DNC was in bed with the Clinton campaign. They’d already learned that first hand from Hawaiian Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), who quit in disgust as DNC vice-chair back in late February, explaining that the DNC was secretly undermining Sanders and working for Clinton. As for the bank speeches, Clinton did all the damage herself first by making them, then by refusing to disclose what she’d said in those extravagantly paid gigs, and by getting caught in a lie that she couldn’t release the texts because they were “under the control” of the banks (she actually owned the copyrights). She also hurt herself by lying and saying during one debate that she hadn’t asked for the high fees when in fact her agent had demanded them. This infuriating information was all out there way before Wikileaks started releasing the documents in had in its possession.

The truth is that it was Clinton’s own actions that lost her the support of Sanders voters. There was her repeating lying about Sanders positions during the campaign (for example the repeated claim that he wanted to end the ACA and leave people with no medical insurance), and her gratuitous dissing of Sanders and his supporters even after it was becoming clearer that she would win the primary because of the corrupt support she had lined up from the party’s unelected so-called “super delegates.” Then there was her decision in the fall, after winning the nomination, to ignore the 13 million Sanders voters from the primary and instead to pursue the support of what she hoped were disenchanted Republican voters upset that Donald Trump had won the Republican nomination, all doomed her in the general election.

The anger among Sanders backers by the time of the convention at the end of July was palpable and was demonstrated when over 700 Sanders delegates walked out of the convention en masse, many tossing their convention credentials over the tall security fence. Clearly they were not going to back Hillary Clinton in November. Remember, those delegates were Sanders activists who represented millions of voters back in their home states, and they were going back to talk to them.

Clinton’s lies and distortions about Sanders and his positions infuriated millions of Sanders voters, dooming her candidacy in the general election
 

Hillary Clinton didn’t lose Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and most importantly Florida because a small percentage of voters switched from her to Trump in those states. She lost those states because millions of Sanders voters nationally, and hundreds of thousands of Democrats and independent progressives in those crucial states, decided they couldn’t vote for her because they were disgusted by both her and the Democratic Party. Some voted Green, some wrote in Sanders’ name, which in most states meant their votes weren’t counted, and some just got fed up and didn’t vote at all, or just skipped the presidential line on their ballot. Total turnout, which in an election with Trump as the alternative should have been at 2008’s record levels, was closer to 2012, when Obama only eked out a narrow victory.

 
Where the pipe ends
 
The pipe ends at Standing Rock.
That is also where
We Dream the end to oil.
 
I’ve been thinking a lot about Dreaming (big), as opposed to small ‘d’ dreaming. We have a lot to learn from events at the tribal gathering at Standing Rock which serves as as an example of a people Dreaming large. By stepping into our abilities to Dream large we tap into a great reserve of strength and vision that is always there, that comes with being human. I like to think that all cultures have their own way of tapping into their Dreaming as source, as grounding for engaging in a life of greater meaning and monumental action. Dreaming is Dreaming together, as one. But how do we Dream collectively without behaving like soldiers or termites or worker-bees, being ruled by a rigid programmatic closed-ended Dreaming as depicted in the film, “The Matrix”? Dreaming together consciously calls for a vision. It is sharing a vision that allows us to tap our Dreaming which sustains that vision. And I am also talking about letting in more light! Dreaming together means expanding our consciousness together. Consciousness is a form of light. Who questions where the light comes from in dreams?! It’s not the sun, it’s consciousness!
 
The young might be able to contribute to that deeper collective focus or awareness in a very meaningful way. At our last sweat lodge the younger generation was powerfully present and D. spoke, very emotionally, about his desire for our, his Elder’s, teaching . . . but he also spoke of having things to teach us. That was very poignant. True Dreaming includes all the generations. In working with students I see how a big part of their vision has to do with working for sustainable community and toward a peacefully functioning planet. A war economy is clearly not sustainable. The younger generation (the so-called Millennials) might put it differently, but to my way of thinking, my generation needs to reboot our working vision . . . We need to envision a world that doesn’t have to be at war to generate wealth and trade, but first we will have to Dream it. I think the young, as they begin to articulate their vision, can help us do this. Let us Dream ourselves out of this, together.
 
I just wrote the following to a fellow blogger: I find that when I work with people as a dream-worker or as a shamanic practitioner, a familiar firewall comes up. When people start unlocking the power of their emotions and imagination they get cold feet. They say, “but isn’t it ‘just’ my imagination?”. . . And that attitude diminishes the credibility of their experience, including their experience of poetry and art and dreams and vision and nature etc. Well, of course it is, but imagination is nothing less than our interface with “reality”, with nature, with Dreaming, with archetypes, with life! If we can’t trust, and depend on, our imaginations to inform us, what do we have? It narrows everything down to a life stripped of emotional engagement with the universe. I look at a fracked landscape and I feel intensely for that landscape. It makes me want to weep and cry out! A world without imagination is a padded cell, a sterile laboratory.
 
Imagination, like Dreaming, is no small thing once we embrace it.
 
 
—Gary Lindorff

Owing to the Democratic Party’s all-to-clever subversion of the primaries, party leaders’ insistence, rank-and-file be damned, on making Hillary Clinton their candidate for president, and the terrible campaign their terrible candidate ran, we now face the prospect of a solidly Republican Congress and the sociopathic Donald Trump as president. It’s a toxic situation in which whatever laws the most whacked out Republicans want to pass, whatever programs they want to eliminate, they can push through, and President Trump will sign it into law.

It seems like a desperate situation, one that will lead to accelerating climate change, gutting of our civil liberties and important rights like abortion and equality for all, and probably to mass deportations of so-called “illegals.”

But there is a way to fight back. There is, at this moment, one branch of the federal government that the Republicans and the new president don’t control, and that could block many of the worst actions of the branches that they do control: the US Supreme Court.

Thanks to the gluttonous behavior of the porcine and paleo-conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, who overate on one of his many put-it-on-the tab junkets and died in the splendor of his free presidential bedroom, the court is currently split 4-4 between arch conservatives and liberal justices.

Scalia has his day in court before Justice St Peter…
 

All that has to happen now is for the four liberal justices to stay healthy for the next four years, and for the four conservatives — or at least one of them — to follow in Scalia’s heavy footsteps, whether by retirement or mortality, and we’d have a liberal 4-3 court.

Well, okay, I oversimplified. This ideal scenario actually requires one more thing: an uncharacteristically feisty and determined Democratic bloc in the Senate that simply refuses to approve any new picks for the Supreme Court, and that instead leaves things as they are as justices die off or retire.

The New York Times and Washington Post, the nation’s two top national newspapers, have been breathlessly reporting of late, with little sign of any appropriate journalistic skepticism, on a purported massive and successful Russian conspiracy to throw the US election to their “favored” candidate, Donald Trump. But the Chicago Tribune has weighed in with a more measured piece, suggesting that while the CIA, a particularly secretive and politically driven organization, may be making that claim, the FBI is not convinced.

While even the Tribune sometimes ignores inserting the requisite “alleged” that should precede any reference to unproven claims that Russia is behind the hacking of the Democratic Party’s (and the Republican Party’s) email server, the paper does also note that Democrats in particular are “frustrated” by the “murky nature” of the FBI’s analysis, with outgoing Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), calling on FBI Director James Comey to resign.

The reason for the Democrats’ frustration is also made clear. As the Tribune reports:
 

With so much of the evidence about Russia’s alleged role in the election shrouded in secrecy because of strict classification rules, Democrats and Republicans in Washington who have access to the underlying intelligence say they have struggled to make their respective cases, leaving an already deeply divided public convinced that both sides are shading their conclusions to help the candidate they backed on Election Day.
 

The reality is that the CIA has presented no hard evidence that Russia is behind the hacking of the DNC’s or or Clinton’s private home server. The excuse is given that the Agency doesn’t want to disclose any of its sources, so the reader is left with the pathetic plea, from both the Agency and the White House: “Trust us.”

The CIA and the FBI don't agree on a Russian role in skewing the election in favor of Trump
 

But why would anyone trust the CIA or the White House on anything? We’re talking about an agency and a Executive Branch that between them are known to have lied (during the GW Bush years) about anthrax labs in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, lied about what were actually just irrigation-grade aluminum tubes imported to make short-range rockets being evidence of high-grade cast-aluminum uranium-purifying centrifuge parts, lied about Iran’s links to Al Qaeda, and (during the Obama years) lied about Syria’s government using Sarin gas on its own people in Damascus, lied about the details of the killing of Osama Bin Laden, lied about the role of a murderous CIA agent captured by Pakistani police while posing as a US consular employee, lied about the extent of National Security Agency Spying both at home and abroad, and lied about Russia invading Ukraine and shooting down a civilian Malaysian jumbo jet.

As the Hillary Clinton campaign slogged toward victory in the long primary campaign against Sen. Bernie Sanders, word came from WikiLeaks that it had scored a trove of hacked emails to and from the Democratic National Committee. Among other things, they proved that DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, along with their organizations, had been working hand-in-glove to skew the primaries in Clinton’s favor.

The day before the party’s convention opened in Philadelphia on July 24, Wasserman-Schultz had to resign her post or face a floor revolt. Sanders delegates were so angry at what they were learning from WikiLeaks about the sabotage of their candidate that hundreds walked out on the second day of the convention, tossing away their delegate credentials over the security fence and vowing never to support Clinton.

In short order, the DNC and the Obama administration-led intelligence establishment began claiming, with no hard evidence, that the source of WikiLeaks’ explosive emails was “the Russians.” While denied by WikiLeaks, it was a charge that Clinton made ad nauseum on the campaign trail and in her three televised debates with Trump, using it as an all-purpose excuse for tough questions about her self-dealing as secretary of State, her lucrative off-the-record speeches to Wall Street bankers, or the DNC’s thumb on the scale in the primaries.

Washington Post red-baiter in residence: reporter Craig Timberg, published an anonymous group's list of 200 "Russian propaganda-peddling news site
 

Mainstream news organizations were quick to adopt this “Russia did it” trope, which despite the lack of proof has only grown more widely accepted since Trump’s stunning election-night victory.

Then the Washington Post(11/24/16) took things a giant step further, publishing an explosive exposé claiming that, as its headline put it, “Russian Propaganda Effort Helped Spread ‘Fake News’ During Election, Experts Say.”

The Post’s story was based on a long list of online news sites purported to be either working directly for Moscow or else “useful idiots” unwittingly spreading Russian propaganda. Incredibly, the list included respected sites like Polk Award-winner Robert Parry’s Consortium News, former LA Times journalist Robert Sheer’s Truthdig, the news aggregator site Truth-Out.org and the highly regarded financial news site Naked Capitalism.

When she opened the letter and saw it was a $1,471 bill for her recent visit to a hospital emergency room – a visit that lasted around four hours from admission to discharge –- she got sick.

That bill itself made her physically sick: triggering an intense headache, upsetting her stomach and leaving her with an overall queasy feeling.

It arrived in the mail weeks after she had received a copy of the whopping $14,000+ bill submitted by the hospital to her medical insurance company by the hospital in New Jersey where that ER visit had occurred.

Her medical insurance covered that initial $14,000 bill in full. But now she was supposed to cough up the $1,471 herself.

Now that additional $1,471 bill was making her emotionally sick: a sickening anger that compounded her being sick-and-tired of being sick-and-tired about outrageous medical care costs that surgically dig deeper into her pocketbook seeking to excise more money beyond what she pays monthly for the medical insurance coverage through her spouse’s employer.

It didn’t help that the four-hour stay she was still being billed for had not resulted in the hospital’s ER staff making a determination of the cause of her medical issue or offering a course of care.

These bills –- for $14,000+ and $1,471 — are vivid examples of the acute toxicity coursing through the veins of America’s bloated profit-based health care system.

President-elect Donald J. Trump has offered the post of nationalsecurity adviser to retired three-star Gen. Michael T. Flynn, aneoconservative war hawk with anti-muslim views.

The National Security Advisor is a president’s main foreign policy person and plays a key role as coordinator of implementing thepresident’s foreign policy decisions. Bearing that in mind, Gen. Flynn, seen as one of Trump’s closest and most trusted advisors, takes the view that the U.S. is in a global war, not just against Islamic jihadists but against Islam itself. It’s not really a religion, Flynn argues, but a dangerous political ideology. Flynn has called Islam a “cancer” and has said, “Fear of Muslims is rational.” In April 2015 he told Fox News, “I’ve been at war with Islam, or a component of Islam, for the last decade.”

According to Dana Priest in the New Yorker, “The greatest accomplishment of Flynn’s military career was revolutionizing the way that the clandestine arm of the military, the Joint Special Operations Command, undertook the killing and capture of suspected terrorists and insurgents in war zones.”

Trump's National Security Advisor pick, ex-Gen. Michael Flynn, carries on a trend of blood-thirsty security advisors
 

The position of National Security Advisor has been held in the past by among others Henry Kissinger, who was responsible for numerous war crimes and the death of millions under President Richard Nixon. Under President Ronald Reagan, National Security Advisor John Poindexter was convicted of lying to Congress about the Iran-Contra affair along with another Reagan National Security Advisor, Robert McFarlane, who later pleaded guilty to withholding information from Congress regarding arm sales to Iran and was spared being scarred by that conviction record only thanks to a pardon by President George H.W. Bush in 1992.

Gen. Flynn as Trump’s National Security Advisor will be a “critical gatekeeper for a president with little experience in military or foreign policy issues” according to the New York Times. Flynn, a registered Democrat, served as Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency under President Barack Obama but was reportedly fired for his ultra-right pro-war views aimed at Iran at a time when the Obama administration was negotiating a deal with that nation on shutting down its uranium enrichment program. Flynn is a bitter enemy of Iran and has advocated toppling Iran’s government as the only way toprevent that nation from becoming a major power in the Middle East.

Flynn argues that the U.S. shouldn’t be restrained by human rights,international law, rules of engagement, or other forms of “political correctness” but should ruthlessly fight this “existential enemy.”

Donald Trump’s cabinet choices are suggesting a governing philosophy along the lines of a corrupt municipal police force relying on gangsters to help it keep street crime held in check.

Trump has been naming top Wall Street bankers and hedge fund owners to staff his Commerce Department (former Rothschild banker and billionaire Wilbur Ross), Treasury (former Goldman Sachs executive and hedge fund executive Steve Mnuchin), and more recently, as top “economic strategy advisors”, Blackstone Group CEO Steven Schwartzman and JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, the bank chief who, together with Goldman Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein and other too-big-to-fail bank leaders almost single-handedly cratered the US economy in 2008 with their casino betting on derivatives, .

The president-elect has actually demonstrated a predilection for considering people who have played the “rigged system’ and even actual criminals (albeit unindicted ones in some cases) in his cabinet and White House advisory staff. Dimon, of course, heads a TBTF bank that was one of five that pleaded guilty last year to federal felony charges involving a huge currency manipulation conspiracy. Dimon had his bank cop a plea and pay a $5.6-billion fine that allowed him to avoid facing criminal charges himself for the bank’s admitted criminal behavior and even to stay on in his lucrative top spot running the felonious institution . Meanwhile, Trump is reportedly considering naming as secretary of state the disgraced former General David Petraeus, who in 2015 also copped a guilty plea to a misdemeanor charge of “mishandling top-secret information” while he was CIA director (a post he had to resign), in order to avoid more serious felony charges of providing national security secrets to his paramour and biographer Paula Broadwell, and of potentially of lying about it to FBI investigators, also a felony. Petraeus, who did not have to do jail time under the plea deal, is still on two-year’s probation through April 23, 2017 though, and if appointed Secretary of State would have to report his new job to his probation officer, and also obtain advance permission for any work-related travel until that date — a historic first for a top federal government appointee. It would be kind of equivalent to the election of the epically corrupt Mayor James Michael Curley, who back in the early 20th century was elected and served one of his four terms as mayor of the city while in jail after serving time for felony corruption.

Either that or Trump, once inaugurated President, would have to pardon Petraeus before appointing him.

David Petraeus and Jamie Dimon, both felony prosecution dodgers and Trump White House appointment prospects
 

Could the idea of putting the gangsters in charge of national economic and foreign policy and economic regulation in order to fix what Trump calls a “rigged system” work as a governing philosophy?

I guess you’d have to ask how well having a crooked, mob-linked police force in New York, Philadelphia, Boston or Chicago worked in years past at keeping crime in check in those cities. The evidence is not particularly good, I would suggest, having lived in several of those venues.

We should also note that Trump’s idea of appointing top Wall Street weasels to key cabinet posts involved in regulating the economy is hardly unique to him. We can be sure that had the recent election been won by Hillary Clinton, who raked in millions of dollars both in personal gifts (excuse me: speaking “fees”) and in campaign contributions and donations to her family “charity” both before and during the campaign, would have also placed top bankers and capitalists in key cabinet posts, just as Presidents Obama, Bush II and Bill Clinton did in their presidencies.