1. Here’s an essential one: “We assess that Iranian leaders did not orchestrate nor had foreknowledge of the HAMAS attack against Israel.”

After the horrid October 7 attacks by Hamas on Israelis, the majority of them innocent civilians, the usual suspects went wild blaming Iran. The Wall Street Journal, a bizarre hybrid of Rupert Murdoch conspiracy theories and sterling reporting, erred on the side of the former with lurid allegations that Iran trained and put Hamas fighters up to the terrorist attack. The Iran War Lobby swung into action. And yet. The ODNI says all that was a fever dream.

2. It should come as no surprise that the Israeli response, which the International Court of Justice found plausibly genocidal, has given a fillip to al-Qaeda and ISIL, and that the ODNI expects it to provoke terrorism against the US. This conclusion, which seems fairly obvious, contradicts the favored inside-the-Beltway meme that Israel is an asset to US security. Its current government’s dedication to policies that produce starving children is likely to lead to anti-US terrorism.

3. But the assessment also says, “The Nordic Resistance Movement—a transnational neo-Nazi organization—publicly praised the attack, illustrating the conflict’s appeal to a range of threat actors.”

This ugly neo-Nazi movement, by the way, celebrated noisily when Trump won in 2016 and saw it as the beginnning of a global far right revolution.

The European and North American far right is confused about Arab-Israeli conflicts. On the one hand, some of them see Israel as “white” and so side with it against Arabs. But in this case apparently they were willing to idolize Hamas if only it would kill innocent Jews.

4. Another important observation: “Israel probably will face lingering armed resistance from HAMAS for years to come, and the military will struggle to neutralize HAMAS’s underground infrastructure, which allows insurgents to hide, regain strength, and surprise Israeli forces.”

In other words, the stated goal of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, of wiping out Hamas, is impossible. Hamas will pose a danger for “years to come.” Likewise, Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s support for the far right Netanyahu government’s total war on Gaza is misplaced, since he said he believes it is waged “so that this never happens again.” Combine points 2, 3, and 4 we can conclude that Netanyahu is virtually assuring that it does happen again.

5. Then there is this:

“• Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has publicly stated his opposition to postwar diplomacy with the Palestinian Authority (PA) toward territorial compromise.”

First, the ODNI is saying that there isn’t an icicle’s chance in hell of there being a two-state solution as long as Netanyahu is prime minister. This conclusion contradicts everything President Biden keeps saying about the future of the Palestinians, and his tired mantra about the imaginary “two-state solution.”

Well, you could say, if the problem is Netanyahu, he may not be there very long. But what the assessment doesn’t say is that the entire Knesset just voted against a Palestinian state. So it isn’t just Netanyahu. It is the Israeli mainstream.

Times of India: “Netanyahu Out? U.S Intel’s Stark Assessment Of Israeli President’s Political Career I Key Details”

6. Speaking of Netanyahu not being there:

“• Netanyahu’s viability as leader as well as his governing coalition of far-right and ultraorthodox parties that pursued hardline policies on Palestinian and security issues may be in jeopardy. Distrust of Netanyahu’s ability to rule has deepened and broadened across the public from its already high levels before the war, and we expect large protests demanding his resignation and new elections. A different, more moderate government is a possibility.”

Note that US intelligence concurs that the Netanyahu government is extremist, which is the only way to understand the hope for a more moderate successor. Netanyahu gets between 17% and 19% approval in opinion polls, and keen observers of the Israeli political scene believe that his far right Likud Party and its extremist allies (Religious Zionism and Jewish Power) will take a bath in the next parliamentary elections. So US intelligence is not telling us here anything we don’t already know.

Making this assessment public, however, is surely intended to give courage to Netanyahu’s political opponents and to signal that the US intelligence community thinks America would be better off with a different leader.

Before Russiagate, the former national security advisor was an operative for Turkey, tilting foreign policy against the Kurds.

(48hills.org) – Trump’s Justice Department wants to drop all charges against former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn despite his having admitted to being guilty. Twice. The judge in his case has so far refused to knuckle under and is investigating whether Flynn’s conviction should stand.

In 2017, Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about a secret phone call with Russia’s ambassador to the US. Lost in the hubbub over Russiagate, however, was Flynn’s slimy role as a lobbyist for Turkey. A Turkish businessman paid Flynn $530,000 in 2016 to push pro-Turkey, anti-Kurd policies in hopes of influencing the Trump Administration.

The American public has mostly forgotten about Flynn’s Turkey connections, says Steven A. Cook, senior fellow for Middle East and Africa Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C.

“There’s more going on with Turkey than people may realize,” Cook tells me.

Flynn’s money-driven opportunism is just one example of the operations of Washington’s foreign policy lobbyists. As a candidate, Donald Trump correctly criticized the Washington swamp, but as President, instead of draining it, he has shoveled in more muck.

I’ve dipped my toe into the swamp on occasion by attending conferences and press events populated by Washington’s elite. I’ve rubbed elbows with the likes of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Chaney’s former chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby. Believe me, these folks are just as evil in person as they appear on TV.

Washington swamp creatures are easily identified by their black pinstriped suits, wingtip oxfords, and red power ties. Two kinds of people attend these events: those in power and those hoping to seize it.

Washington is crawling with former diplomats, intelligence officers, and business executives eager to influence policy and make a buck. And so enters former army Lieutenant General Michael Thomas Flynn, poster boy for the military-industrial complex.

Flynn’s checkered past

Flynn, who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, came to Washington during the Obama Administration as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He was forced to resign for insubordination in 2014, whereupon he joined the Washington swamp by forming the Flynn Intel Group.

In 2016, Flynn hitched his wagon to candidate Donald Trump, giving a fiery speech at the Republican National Convention in which he echoed the call to “lock up” Hillary Clinton for her handling of State Department emails.

Behind the scenes, however, the Flynn Intel Group signed a contract totaling $600,000 with a Turkish businessman who had close ties to authoritarian Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Erdoğanwanted Washington to extradite Fethullah Gulen, a political opponent living in Pennsylvania since 1999. Gulen is a rival political Islamist who had a falling out with Erdogan.
The Turkish president accuses Gulen of organizing the unsuccessful July 2016 coup. At the time Flynn spoke favorably about the military trying to overthrow Erdogan. He also criticized Turkey for allowing terrorists to cross the border into Syria.

But after receiving the contract to help Turkey, he did a 180-degree turn and supported Erdogan’s policies.

“Flynn believes whatever is good for Flynn is good for America,” Kani Xulam, director of the American Kurdish Information Network, tells me. “The minute they put money in his bank account, he became pro-Turkey. That was the shocking part.”

Kidnapping

In September 2016, Flynn arranged a meeting between former US officials and Turkish leaders, including the country’s foreign minister, energy minister, and Erdogan’s son-in-law.

Participants at the meeting talked about kidnapping Gulen and bringing him to Turkey. Former Central Intelligence Agency Director James Woolsey, who attended the meeting, said they discussed “a covert step in the dead of night to whisk this guy away.”

In December, Flynn wrote an op-ed for the influential Washington publication The Hill in which he compared Gulen to both Osama bin Laden and Ayatollah Khomeini. According to analyst Cook, the op-ed could have been written in Ankara: “It was all Turkey’s talking points.”

Flynn didn’t tell The Hill editors that he was a paid lobbyist for Turkey.

Flynn became part of Trump’s transition team after November 2016, and he used the position to push anti-Kurdish policies. At that time, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces were on the verge of taking control of the ISIS-controlled city of Raqqa, Syria. He told the Obama Administration not to provide arms to the SDFand implemented that policy when Trump came to power in 2017.

But Flynn’s stint as National Security Advisor lasted for only three weeks. He was forced to resign after revelations of his phone call to the Russian ambassador. In March, Flynn registered as a foreign agent for Turkey.

In 2019, a federal jury convicted Flynn’s business associate, Bijan Kian, on two felonies: conspiracy to violate lobbying laws and failure to register as a foreign agent for Turkey. Flynn was scheduled to testify against Kian but changed his story at the last minute, causing problems for the prosecution. The judge later tossed the verdict, saying the prosecution didn’t prove its case.

As part of an overall deal with federal prosecutors, Flynn was never charged in connection with his lobbying for Turkey. It seems unlikely that he ever will be.

Corrupt world

Flynn’s activities are just one example of the corrupt world of foreign lobbying. Recently, The New York Times exposed how defense contractor Raytheon pressured the Trump Administration to sell sophisticated weapons to Saudi Arabia, which were then used to slaughter civilians in Yemen.

The Yemen war, which began in 2015, has killed an estimated 100,000 people and displaced 80 percent of the population. Saudi air bombardment of hospitals, schools, and other civilian targets helped create one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. US arms manufacturers such as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon have profited handsomely from the slaughter.

Until recently, Raytheon’s vice president for government relations was a former career army officer named Mark Esper. Today Esper is Secretary of Defense.

Crawling into bed with lobbyists is bipartisan activity. The Obama Administration sold $10 billion in arms to Saudi Arabia and its allies. Trump has openly boasted that US arms sales provide corporate profits and jobs at home.

“Trump has been more forthcoming praising US relations with Saudis because they want to buy more weapons,” Kurdish activist Xulam tells me. “He doesn’t care what Saudis do with the weapons.”

Analyst Cook says the entire system of foreign lobbying needs major reform. “It’s a scandal that needs to be cleaned up,” he says. “It’s legalized foreign influence peddling.”

Via 48hills.org

—–

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Justice Department Asks Judge To Drop Michael Flynn Prosecution | MSNBC

When President Donald Trump likened a whistleblower’s White House sources to spies and made a lightly veiled reference to execution, he highlighted a longstanding peril facing those who come forward to alert the public to governmental wrongdoing.

In many instances, whistleblowers find the abusive power they have revealed turned against them, both ending their careers and harming their personal lives.

In the private sector, whistleblowers are often ignored and told their concern is not part of their job description – and are commonly retaliated against by being demoted or fired.

When a whistleblower is in the U.S. intelligence and national security sphere, they’re often speaking out about misdeeds by powerful figures – and, as a result, have frequently faced death threats, physical attacks, prosecution and prison.

The new whistleblower report that alleges wrongdoing by the president is a reminder of the vital importance of holding wrongdoers accountable, regardless of their level of power. When those acts affect national security, whistleblowing is even more important. But as I’ve found in my whistleblowing research, whistleblowers in this arena have far fewer legal protections from retaliation than those in corporate settings or elsewhere in government.

Targets of retaliation

The consequences for government whistleblowers in the last 20 years have been harsh, in part because laws about classified information have made it difficult for people to publicize wrongdoing on sensitive issues.

After William Binney and J. Kirk Wiebe alleged in 2002 that their employer, the National Security Agency, mismanaged intelligence-gathering software that potentially could have prevented 9/11, their homes were raided and ransacked by the FBI as their families watched. Ultimately, the NSA revoked their security clearances and they were forced to sue to recover the confiscated personal property.

Another NSA whistleblower, Thomas Drake, alleged in 2002 that the agency’s mass-surveillance programs after 9/11 involved fraud, waste and violations of citizens’ rights. He became the subject of one of the biggest government leak investigations of all time and was prosecuted for espionage, which he ultimately settled through a plea agreement.

A third NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden has spent years in exile, fearing an unfair trial should he return to the U.S.

Former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning has spent years in federal prison for releasing classified documents regarding U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Difficult consequences can come not just from the government but also from the public and the media. The New York Times has come under criticism for revealing identifying details about the current whistleblower’s position.

Few protections

Most laws governing federal whistleblowers lay out a procedure for coming forward with concerns, offer protections for confidentiality, and prevent recipients of information from harassing, threatening, demoting, firing or discriminating against the person raising the complaint.

Whistleblowers reporting securities law violations to the Securities and Exchange Commission have those protections. So do whistleblowers who report on fraudulent billing or claims against the government, such as Medicare or Medicaid fraud.

It can be difficult to find a balance between the government’s need to protect highly sensitive classified information and the public’s interest in uncovering wrongdoing. As a result, protections for whistleblowers in the intelligence community lack robust protections. The Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act of 1998 outlines a process for whistleblowers in the intelligence community to raise concerns, but doesn’t explicitly protect the whistleblower from retaliation or being publicly identified. Two executive-branch directives, created during the Obama administration, do bar retaliation against whistleblowers. However, they create a conflict of interest, because the person who determines whether there has been retaliation may be the person doing the retaliating.

Those Obama-era directives also prevent the whistleblower from seeking an independent court’s review. They do not specify whether and exactly how aggrieved whistleblowers are entitled to back pay or reinstatement of employment, which are common whistleblower remedies.

It’s no surprise, then, that in the first 10 years after the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act was enacted, no intelligence whistleblower was compensated for retaliation. While there have been no subsequent inquiries or information to determine whether intelligence whistleblowers have fared better since 2009, the law as it stands makes it nearly impossible for them to be protected.

Whistleblowers bring much-needed attention to matters of interest and importance to the public. Their courage – and willingness to face professional and personal peril – helps bring to light information that others would prefer to keep secret. That helps society as a whole fight injustice, waste, corruption and abuse of power, rather than passively and blindly accepting it.

Jennifer M. Pacella, Assistant Professor of Business Law and Ethics, Indiana University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The debate over how to reauthorize certain NSA surveillance authorities has seen a whirlwind of activity, culminating in the major news that the House Rules Committee postponed a vote today to potentially expand NSA spying powers.

As we wrote yesterday:

“According to reports published Tuesday evening by Politico, a group of surveillance hawks in the House of Representatives is trying to ram through a bill that would extend mass surveillance by the National Security Agency. We expect a vote to happen on the House floor as early as [December 20], which means there are only a few hours to rally opposition.

The backers of this bill are attempting to rush a vote on a bill that we’ve criticized for failing to secure Americans’ privacy. If this bill passes, we will miss the opportunity to prevent the FBI from searching through NSA databases for American communications without a warrant. Worse, nothing will be done to rein in the massive, unconstitutional surveillance of the NSA on Americans or innocent technology users worldwide.”

With the House Rules Committee’s postponed vote, this crisis is currently avoided. But the fight isn’t over.

We do not know the exact steps House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes, who authored the bill (H.R. 4478), will take this week. We do not know if other bills to reauthorize Section 702, originally enacted as part of the FISA Amendments Act—the NSA’s powerful surveillance authority scheduled to sunset in less than two weeks—will be introduced for a House floor vote.

But we do know that our voices are being heard. And we still know that we stand against attempts to expand NSA surveillance by hitching it to separate efforts to fund the government, a strategy that some members of Congress have considered.

As we wrote previously:

“[It] is completely unacceptable for Congressional leadership to shove Section 702 reauthorization into an end-of-year funding bill. This program invades the privacy of an untold number of Americans. Before it can be reauthorized, Congress must undertake a transparent and deliberative process to consider the impact
this NSA surveillance has on Americans’ privacy.”

You can speak up. Call your representatives and let them know that it is unacceptable to attach H.R. 4478—or S. 2010—to any year-end spending bills. Attempts to sneak expanded NSA surveillance powers into entirely separate legislation are attempts to rob surveillance reform of its own needed debate. This hurts the American people and it removes the opportunity for open, transparent discussion.

Call today. Your efforts are working.

Call Now

Call Your Representatives

Via Electronic Frontier Foundation

[This piece has been adapted and expanded from the introduction to Alfred W. McCoy’s new book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power.]

In the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks, Washington pursued its elusive enemies across the landscapes of Asia and Africa, thanks in part to a massive expansion of its intelligence infrastructure, particularly of the emerging technologies for digital surveillance, agile drones, and biometric identification. In 2010, almost a decade into this secret war with its voracious appetite for information, the Washington Post reported that the national security state had swelled into a “fourth branch” of the federal government — with 854,000 vetted officials, 263 security organizations, and over 3,000 intelligence units, issuing 50,000 special reports every year.

Though stunning, these statistics only skimmed the visible surface of what had become history’s largest and most lethal clandestine apparatus. According to classified documents that Edward Snowden leaked in 2013, the nation’s 16 intelligence agencies alone had 107,035 employees and a combined “black budget” of $52.6 billion, the equivalent of 10% percent of the vast defense budget.

By sweeping the skies and probing the worldwide web’s undersea cables, the National Security Agency (NSA) could surgically penetrate the confidential communications of just about any leader on the planet, while simultaneously sweeping up billions of ordinary messages. For its classified missions, the CIA had access to the Pentagon’s Special Operations Command, with 69,000 elite troops (Rangers, SEALs, Air Commandos) and their agile arsenal. In addition to this formidable paramilitary capacity, the CIA operated 30 Predator and Reaper drones responsible for more than 3,000 deaths in Pakistan and Yemen.

While Americans practiced a collective form of duck and cover as the Department of Homeland Security’s colored alerts pulsed nervously from yellow to red, few paused to ask the hard question: Was all this security really directed solely at enemies beyond our borders? After half a century of domestic security abuses — from the “red scare” of the 1920s through the FBI’s illegal harassment of antiwar protesters in the 1960s and 1970s — could we really be confident that there wasn’t a hidden cost to all these secret measures right here at home? Maybe, just maybe, all this security wasn’t really so benign when it came to us.

From my own personal experience over the past half-century, and my family’s history over three generations, I’ve found out in the most personal way possible that there’s a real cost to entrusting our civil liberties to the discretion of secret agencies. Let me share just a few of my own “war” stories to explain how I’ve been forced to keep learning and relearning this uncomfortable lesson the hard way.

On the Heroin Trail

After finishing college in the late 1960s, I decided to pursue a Ph.D. in Japanese history and was pleasantly surprised when Yale Graduate School admitted me with a full fellowship. But the Ivy League in those days was no ivory tower. During my first year at Yale, the Justice Department indicted Black Panther leader Bobby Seale for a local murder and the May Day protests that filled the New Haven green also shut the campus for a week. Almost simultaneously, President Nixon ordered the invasion of Cambodia and student protests closed hundreds of campuses across America for the rest of the semester.

In the midst of all this tumult, the focus of my studies shifted from Japan to Southeast Asia, and from the past to the war in Vietnam. Yes, that war. So what did I do about the draft? During my first semester at Yale, on December 1, 1969, to be precise, the Selective Service cut up the calendar for a lottery. The first 100 birthdays picked were certain to be drafted, but any dates above 200 were likely exempt. My birthday, June 8th, was the very last date drawn, not number 365 but 366 (don’t forget leap year) — the only lottery I have ever won, except for a Sunbeam electric frying pan in a high school raffle. Through a convoluted moral calculus typical of the 1960s, I decided that my draft exemption, although acquired by sheer luck, demanded that I devote myself, above all else, to thinking about, writing about, and working to end the Vietnam War.

During those campus protests over Cambodia in the spring of 1970, our small group of graduate students in Southeast Asian history at Yale realized that the U.S. strategic predicament in Indochina would soon require an invasion of Laos to cut the flow of enemy supplies into South Vietnam. So, while protests over Cambodia swept campuses nationwide, we were huddled inside the library, preparing for the next invasion by editing a book of essays on Laos for the publisher Harper & Row. A few months after that book appeared, one of the company’s junior editors, Elizabeth Jakab, intrigued by an account we had included about that country’s opium crop, telephoned from New York to ask if I could research and write a “quickie” paperback about the history behind the heroin epidemic then infecting the U.S. Army in Vietnam.

I promptly started the research at my student carrel in the Gothic tower that is Yale’s Sterling Library, tracking old colonial reports about the Southeast Asian opium trade that ended suddenly in the 1950s, just as the story got interesting. So, quite tentatively at first, I stepped outside the library to do a few interviews and soon found myself following an investigative trail that circled the globe. First, I traveled across America for meetings with retired CIA operatives. Then I crossed the Pacific to Hong Kong to study drug syndicates, courtesy of that colony’s police drug squad. Next, I went south to Saigon, then the capital of South Vietnam, to investigate the heroin traffic that was targeting the GIs, and on into the mountains of Laos to observe CIA alliances with opium warlords and the hill-tribe militias that grew the opium poppy. Finally, I flew from Singapore to Paris for interviews with retired French intelligence officers about their opium trafficking during the first Indochina War of the 1950s.

The drug traffic that supplied heroin for the U.S. troops fighting in South Vietnam was not, I discovered, exclusively the work of criminals. Once the opium left tribal poppy fields in Laos, the traffic required official complicity at every level. The helicopters of Air America, the airline the CIA then ran, carried raw opium out of the villages of its hill-tribe allies. The commander of the Royal Lao Army, a close American collaborator, operated the world’s largest heroin lab and was so oblivious to the implications of the traffic that he opened his opium ledgers for my inspection. Several of Saigon’s top generals were complicit in the drug’s distribution to U.S. soldiers. By 1971, this web of collusion ensured that heroin, according to a later White House survey of a thousand veterans, would be “commonly used” by 34% of American troops in South Vietnam.

None of this had been covered in my college history seminars. I had no models for researching an uncharted netherworld of crime and covert operations. After stepping off the plane in Saigon, body slammed by the tropical heat, I found myself in a sprawling foreign city of four million, lost in a swarm of snarling motorcycles and a maze of nameless streets, without contacts or a clue about how to probe these secrets. Every day on the heroin trail confronted me with new challenges — where to look, what to look for, and, above all, how to ask hard questions.

Reading all that history had, however, taught me something I didn’t know I knew. Instead of confronting my sources with questions about sensitive current events, I started with the French colonial past when the opium trade was still legal, gradually uncovering the underlying, unchanging logistics of drug production. As I followed this historical trail into the present, when the traffic became illegal and dangerously controversial, I began to use pieces from this past to assemble the present puzzle, until the names of contemporary dealers fell into place. In short, I had crafted a historical method that would prove, over the next 40 years of my career, surprisingly useful in analyzing a diverse array of foreign policy controversies — CIA alliances with drug lords, the agency’s propagation of psychological torture, and our spreading state surveillance.

The CIA Makes Its Entrance in My Life

Those months on the road, meeting gangsters and warlords in isolated places, offered only one bit of real danger. While hiking in the mountains of Laos, interviewing Hmong farmers about their opium shipments on CIA helicopters, I was descending a steep slope when a burst of bullets ripped the ground at my feet. I had walked into an ambush by agency mercenaries.

While the five Hmong militia escorts whom the local village headman had prudently provided laid down a covering fire, my Australian photographer John Everingham and I flattened ourselves in the elephant grass and crawled through the mud to safety. Without those armed escorts, my research would have been at an end and so would I. After that ambush failed, a CIA paramilitary officer summoned me to a mountaintop meeting where he threatened to murder my Lao interpreter unless I ended my research. After winning assurances from the U.S. embassy that my interpreter would not be harmed, I decided to ignore that warning and keep going.

Six months and 30,000 miles later, I returned to New Haven. My investigation of CIA alliances with drug lords had taught me more than I could have imagined about the covert aspects of U.S. global power. Settling into my attic apartment for an academic year of writing, I was confident that I knew more than enough for a book on this unconventional topic. But my education, it turned out, was just beginning.

Within weeks, a massive, middle-aged guy in a suit interrupted my scholarly isolation.  He appeared at my front door and identified himself as Tom Tripodi, senior agent for the Bureau of Narcotics, which later became the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). His agency, he confessed during a second visit, was worried about my writing and he had been sent to investigate. He needed something to tell his superiors. Tom was a guy you could trust. So I showed him a few draft pages of my book. He disappeared into the living room for a while and came back saying, “Pretty good stuff. You got your ducks in a row.” But there were some things, he added, that weren’t quite right, some things he could help me fix.

Tom was my first reader. Later, I would hand him whole chapters and he would sit in a rocking chair, shirt sleeves rolled up, revolver in his shoulder holster, sipping coffee, scribbling corrections in the margins, and telling fabulous stories — like the time Jersey Mafia boss “Bayonne Joe” Zicarelli tried to buy a thousand rifles from a local gun store to overthrow Fidel Castro. Or when some CIA covert warrior came home for a vacation and had to be escorted everywhere so he didn’t kill somebody in a supermarket aisle.

Best of all, there was the one about how the Bureau of Narcotics caught French intelligence protecting the Corsican syndicates smuggling heroin into New York City. Some of his stories, usually unacknowledged, would appear in my book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. These conversations with an undercover operative, who had trained Cuban exiles for the CIA in Florida and later investigated Mafia heroin syndicates for the DEA in Sicily, were akin to an advanced seminar, a master class in covert operations.

In the summer of 1972, with the book at press, I went to Washington to testify before Congress. As I was making the rounds of congressional offices on Capitol Hill, my editor rang unexpectedly and summoned me to New York for a meeting with the president and vice president of Harper & Row, my book’s publisher. Ushered into a plush suite of offices overlooking the spires of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, I listened to those executives tell me that Cord Meyer, Jr., the CIA’s deputy director for covert operations, had called on their company’s president emeritus, Cass Canfield, Sr. The visit was no accident, for Canfield, according to an authoritative history, “enjoyed prolific links to the world of intelligence, both as a former psychological warfare officer and as a close personal friend of Allen Dulles,” the ex-head of the CIA. Meyer denounced my book as a threat to national security. He asked Canfield, also an old friend, to quietly suppress it.

I was in serious trouble. Not only was Meyer a senior CIA official but he also had impeccable social connections and covert assets in every corner of American intellectual life. After graduating from Yale in 1942, he served with the marines in the Pacific, writing eloquent war dispatches published in the Atlantic Monthly. He later worked with the U.S. delegation drafting the U.N. charter. Personally recruited by spymaster Allen Dulles, Meyer joined the CIA in 1951 and was soon running its International Organizations Division, which, in the words of that same history, “constituted the greatest single concentration of covert political and propaganda activities of the by now octopus-like CIA,” including “Operation Mockingbird” that planted disinformation in major U.S. newspapers meant to aid agency operations. Informed sources told me that the CIA still had assets inside every major New York publisher and it already had every page of my manuscript.

As the child of a wealthy New York family, Cord Meyer moved in elite social circles, meeting and marrying Mary Pinchot, the niece of Gifford Pinchot, founder of the U.S. Forestry Service and a former governor of Pennsylvania. Pinchot was a breathtaking beauty who later became President Kennedy’s mistress, making dozens of secret visits to the White House. When she was found shot dead along the banks of a canal in Washington in 1964, the head of CIA counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton, another Yale alumnus, broke into her home in an unsuccessful attempt to secure her diary. Mary’s sister Toni and her husband, Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, later found the diary and gave it to Angleton for destruction by the agency. To this day, her unsolved murder remains a subject of mystery and controversy.

Cord Meyer was also in the Social Register of New York’s fine families along with my publisher, Cass Canfield, which added a dash of social cachet to the pressure to suppress my book. By the time he walked into Harper & Row’s office in that summer of 1972, two decades of CIA service had changed Meyer (according to that same authoritative history) from a liberal idealist into “a relentless, implacable advocate for his own ideas,” driven by “a paranoiac distrust of everyone who didn’t agree with him” and a manner that was “histrionic and even bellicose.” An unpublished 26-year-old graduate student versus the master of CIA media manipulation. It was hardly a fair fight. I began to fear my book would never appear.

To his credit, Canfield refused Meyer’s request to suppress the book. But he did allow the agency a chance to review the manuscript prior to publication. Instead of waiting quietly for the CIA’s critique, I contacted Seymour Hersh, then an investigative reporter for the New York Times. The same day the CIA courier arrived from Langley to collect my manuscript, Hersh swept through Harper & Row’s offices like a tropical storm, pelting hapless executives with incessant, unsettling questions. The next day, his exposé of the CIA’s attempt at censorship appeared on the paper’s front page. Other national media organizations followed his lead. Faced with a barrage of negative coverage, the CIA gave Harper & Row a critique full of unconvincing denials. The book was published unaltered.

My Life as an Open Book for the Agency

I had learned another important lesson: the Constitution’s protection of press freedom could check even the world’s most powerful espionage agency. Cord Meyer reportedly learned the same lesson. According to his obituary in the Washington Post, “It was assumed that Mr. Meyer would eventually advance” to head CIA covert operations, “but the public disclosure about the book deal… apparently dampened his prospects.” He was instead exiled to London and eased into early retirement.

Meyer and his colleagues were not, however, used to losing. Defeated in the public arena, the CIA retreated to the shadows and retaliated by tugging at every thread in the threadbare life of a graduate student. Over the next few months, federal officials from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare turned up at Yale to investigate my graduate fellowship. The Internal Revenue Service audited my poverty-level income. The FBI tapped my New Haven telephone (something I learned years later from a class-action lawsuit).

In August 1972, at the height of the controversy over the book, FBI agents told the bureau’s director that they had “conducted [an] investigation concerning McCoy,” searching the files they had compiled on me for the past two years and interviewing numerous “sources whose identities are concealed [who] have furnished reliable information in the past” — thereby producing an 11-page report detailing my birth, education, and campus antiwar activities.

A college classmate I hadn’t seen in four years, who served in military intelligence, magically appeared at my side in the book section of the Yale Co-op, seemingly eager to resume our relationship. The same week that a laudatory review of my book appeared on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, an extraordinary achievement for any historian, Yale’s History Department placed me on academic probation. Unless I could somehow do a year’s worth of overdue work in a single semester, I faced dismissal.

In those days, the ties between the CIA and Yale were wide and deep. The campus residential colleges screened students, including future CIA Director Porter Goss, for possible careers in espionage. Alumni like Cord Meyer and James Angleton held senior slots at the agency. Had I not had a faculty adviser visiting from Germany, the distinguished scholar Bernhard Dahm who was a stranger to this covert nexus, that probation would likely have become expulsion, ending my academic career and destroying my credibility.

During those difficult days, New York Congressman Ogden Reid, a ranking member of the House Foreign Relations Committee, telephoned to say that he was sending staff investigators to Laos to look into the opium situation. Amid this controversy, a CIA helicopter landed near the village where I had escaped that ambush and flew the Hmong headman who had helped my research to an agency airstrip. There, a CIA interrogator made it clear that he had better deny what he had said to me about the opium. Fearing, as he later told my photographer, that “they will send a helicopter to arrest me, or… soldiers to shoot me,” the Hmong headman did just that.

At a personal level, I was discovering just how deep the country’s intelligence agencies could reach, even in a democracy, leaving no part of my life untouched: my publisher, my university, my sources, my taxes, my phone, and even my friends.

Although I had won the first battle of this war with a media blitz, the CIA was winning the longer bureaucratic struggle. By silencing my sources and denying any culpability, its officials convinced Congress that it was innocent of any direct complicity in the Indochina drug trade. During Senate hearings into CIA assassinations by the famed Church Committee three years later, Congress accepted the agency’s assurance that none of its operatives had been directly involved in heroin trafficking (an allegation I had never actually made). The committee’s report did confirm the core of my critique, however, finding that “the CIA is particularly vulnerable to criticism” over indigenous assets in Laos “of considerable importance to the Agency,” including “people who either were known to be, or were suspected of being, involved in narcotics trafficking.” But the senators did not press the CIA for any resolution or reform of what its own inspector general had called the “particular dilemma” posed by those alliances with drug lords — the key aspect, in my view, of its complicity in the traffic.

During the mid-1970s, as the flow of drugs into the United States slowed and the number of addicts declined, the heroin problem receded into the inner cities and the media moved on to new sensations. Unfortunately, Congress had forfeited an opportunity to check the CIA and correct its way of waging covert wars. In less than 10 years, the problem of the CIA’s tactical alliances with drug traffickers to support its far-flung covert wars was back with a vengeance.

During the 1980s, as the crack-cocaine epidemic swept America’s cities, the agency, as its own Inspector General later reported, allied itself with the largest drug smuggler in the Caribbean, using his port facilities to ship arms to the Contra guerrillas fighting in Nicaragua and protecting him from any prosecution for five years. Simultaneously on the other side of the planet in Afghanistan, mujahedeen guerrillas imposed an opium tax on farmers to fund their fight against the Soviet occupation and, with the CIA’s tacit consent, operated heroin labs along the Pakistani border to supply international markets. By the mid-1980s, Afghanistan’s opium harvest had grown 10-fold and was providing 60% of the heroin for America’s addicts and as much as 90% in New York City.

Almost by accident, I had launched my academic career by doing something a bit different. Embedded within that study of drug trafficking was an analytical approach that would take me, almost unwittingly, on a lifelong exploration of U.S. global hegemony in its many manifestations, including diplomatic alliances, CIA interventions, developing military technology, recourse to torture, and global surveillance. Step by step, topic by topic, decade after decade, I would slowly accumulate sufficient understanding of the parts to try to assemble the whole. In writing my new book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, I drew on this research to assess the overall character of U.S. global power and the forces that might contribute to its perpetuation or decline.

In the process, I slowly came to see a striking continuity and coherence in Washington’s century-long rise to global dominion. CIA torture techniques emerged at the start of the Cold War in the 1950s; much of its futuristic robotic aerospace technology had its first trial in the Vietnam War of the 1960s; and, above all, Washington’s reliance on surveillance first appeared in the colonial Philippines around 1900 and soon became an essential though essentially illegal tool for the FBI’s repression of domestic dissent that continued through the 1970s.    

Surveillance Today

In the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, I dusted off that historical method, and used it to explore the origins and character of domestic surveillance inside the United States.

After occupying the Philippines in 1898, the U.S. Army, facing a difficult pacification campaign in a restive land, discovered the power of systematic surveillance to crush the resistance of the country’s political elite. Then, during World War I, the Army’s “father of military intelligence,” the dour General Ralph Van Deman, who had learned his trade in the Philippines, drew upon his years pacifying those islands to mobilize a legion of 1,700 soldiers and 350,000 citizen-vigilantes for an intense surveillance program against suspected enemy spies among German-Americans, including my own grandfather. In studying Military Intelligence files at the National Archives, I found “suspicious” letters purloined from my grandfather’s army locker.  In fact, his mother had been writing him in her native German about such subversive subjects as knitting him socks for guard duty.

In the 1950s, Hoover’s FBI agents tapped thousands of phones without warrants and kept suspected subversives under close surveillance, including my mother’s cousin Gerard Piel, an anti-nuclear activist and the publisher of Scientific American magazine. During the Vietnam War, the bureau expanded its activities with an amazing array of spiteful, often illegal, intrigues in a bid to cripple the antiwar movement with pervasive surveillance of the sort seen in my own FBI file.

Memory of the FBI’s illegal surveillance programs was largely washed away after the Vietnam War thanks to Congressional reforms that required judicial warrants for all government wiretaps. The terror attacks of September 2001, however, gave the National Security Agency the leeway to launch renewed surveillance on a previously unimaginable scale. Writing for TomDispatch in 2009, I observed that coercive methods first tested in the Middle East were being repatriated and might lay the groundwork for “a domestic surveillance state.”  Sophisticated biometric and cyber techniques forged in the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq had made a “digital surveillance state a reality” and so were fundamentally changing the character of American democracy.

Four years later, Edward Snowden’s leak of secret NSA documents revealed that, after a century-long gestation period, a U.S. digital surveillance state had finally arrived. In the age of the Internet, the NSA could monitor tens of millions of private lives worldwide, including American ones, via a few hundred computerized probes into the global grid of fiber-optic cables.

And then, as if to remind me in the most personal way possible of our new reality, four years ago, I found myself the target yet again of an IRS audit, of TSA body searches at national airports, and — as I discovered when the line went dead — a tap on my office telephone at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Why? Maybe it was my current writing on sensitive topics like CIA torture and NSA surveillance, or maybe my name popped up from some old database of suspected subversives left over from the 1970s. Whatever the explanation, it was a reasonable reminder that, if my own family’s experience across three generations is in any way representative, state surveillance has been an integral part of American political life far longer than we might imagine.

At the cost of personal privacy, Washington’s worldwide web of surveillance has now become a weapon of exceptional power in a bid to extend U.S. global hegemony deeper into the twenty-first century. Yet it’s worth remembering that sooner or later what we do overseas always seems to come home to haunt us, just as the CIA and crew have haunted me this last half-century.  When we learn to love Big Brother, the world becomes a more, not less, dangerous place. 

Alfred W. McCoy, a TomDispatch regular, is the Harrington professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of the now-classic book The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, which probed the conjuncture of illicit narcotics and covert operations over 50 years, and the forthcoming In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power (Dispatch Books, September) from which this piece is adapted.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, as well as John Feffer’s dystopian novel Splinterlands, Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt’s Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Copyright 2017 Alfred W. McCoy

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Alfred McCoy’s new Dispatch Book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, won’t officially be published until September, but it’s already getting extraordinary attention.  That would include Jeremy Scahill’s powerful podcast interview with McCoy at the Intercept, a set of striking prepublication notices (Kirkus Reviews: “Sobering reading for geopolitics mavens and Risk aficionados alike”), and an impressive range of blurbs (Andrew Bacevich: “This is history with profound relevance to events that are unfolding before our eyes”; Ann Jones: “eye-opening… America’s neglected citizens would do well to read this book”; Oliver Stone: “One of our best and most underappreciated historians takes a hard look at the truth of our empire, both its covert activities and the reasons for its impending decline”).  Of him, Scahill has said, “Al McCoy has guts… He helped put me on the path to investigative journalism.”  In today’s post, adapted by McCoy from the introduction to In the Shadows of the American Century, you’ll get a taste of just what Scahill means.  So read it and then pre-order a copy of the latest book from the man who battled the CIA and won.

Via Tomdispatch.com

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

ABC News: “Edward Snowden Full Interview on Trump, Petraeus, & Having ‘No Regrets'”

Ever since the November election, Democrats have been looking for a reason to take down President Trump and vindicate Clinton’s loss. Refusing to acknowledge how flawed the candidate and campaign were, the focus has been on the allegation of the “Russians Hacking the Election.” With the FBI’s announcement of investigating the President and his campaign staff’s connections to Russia, the calls have become even more bold. Many Democrats are supporting Michael Moore’s call to shut down government activity.

“The Democratic Party needs to declare a National Emergency. For the first time in our history, the President of the United States and his staff are under investigation for espionage. This announcement, by the head of the Trump-friendly FBI, is a shock to our democracy. The Democratic leadership in the House and Senate needs to bring a halt to all business being done in the name of this potential felony suspect, Donald J. Trump. No bill he supports, no Supreme Court nominee he has named, can be decided while he is under a criminal investigation. His presidency has no legitimacy until the FBI – and an independent investigative committee — discovers the truth. Fellow citizens, demand the Democrats cease all business. ‘The American people have a right to know if their President is a crook.’ – Richard Nixon”

So rather than focus on filibustering horrible bills and unqualified nominees, as the Democrats have finally announced they will do with Neil Gorsuch, they would rather set a horrible precedent. The thesis is a mere allegation of wrongdoing justifies effectively shutting down a government. Yet do Michael Moore and Democrats believe the Republicans would not make or even fabricate allegations and use the same tool going forward? This precedent is especially questionable considering how much the Democrats complained about the Republicans not working with President Obama for eight years.

Furthermore, the Democrats are not learning the lesson of setting precedents. Consider for example, that while Obama was bombing 7 Muslim countries without a single declaration of war, Trump has now turned Obama’s campaigns into overdrive.

Moving to the investigation, we still have not seen any evidence of wrongdoing. We have only seen repeated allegations on the mainstream media. So to suggest shutting down the government on allegations alone is essentially adopting the principle guilty in the media until proven innocent.

The supporters of the Trump investigation are forgetting this FBI is still essentially the same political organization that was created by J. Edgar Hoover. Have we forgotten so quickly how the FBI’s COINTELPRO worked to crush dissent? Today, the FBI spends tens of millions of dollars on identifying POTENTIAL terrorist suspects, giving them a plot to execute and the resources to do so, and then arresting them to show they are stopping terrorists.

Last, let’s not forget that while the FBI investigates Trump and his campaign’s allegedly illegal ties to Russia, for connections and business dealings in and of themselves are not by definition illegal, the FBI has done nothing to investigate the Bush Administration’s War Crime of starting a war of aggression against Iraq when all of the reasons for the invasion were fabricated.

So why are all these Democrats cheering on the deep state?

———
Ian Berman is an entrepreneur and former corporate banker at leading global banks in New York City. He now focuses on renewable energy, financial advisory services and writing about representative government, equitable public policies and ending American militarism and Israel’s continuing colonization of Palestine.

Author notice: © 2017. All rights reserved. Permission provided for publication with attribution.

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

The Young Turks: “Oops: Devin Nunes Backpedals Spying Claims”

The hysteria about Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee servers and the phishing scam run on Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta, is short on evidence and high in self-righteousness. Much of the report issued Friday was old boilerplate about the Russia Today cable channel, which proves nothing.

My complaint is that American television news reports all this as if it is The First Time in History Anyone has Acted like This. But the head of the Republican Party in the early 1970s hired burglars to do the same thing– break into the Watergate building and get access to DNC documents in hopes of throwing an election. Dick Nixon even ordered a second break-in. And it took a long time for Republican members of Congress to come around to the idea that a crime had been committed; if it hadn’t been for the Supreme Court, Nixon might have served out his term.

In the past decade and a half, the US National Security Agency has been deployed for hacking purposes not, as the cover story would have it, for counter-terrorism (there isn’t much evidence that they’re any good at that), but to gain political advantage over allies.

So, for instance, George W. Bush had German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s personal cell phone hacked to monitor his position on the Iraq War that Bush wanted to launch illegally.

Then Director of National Intelligence James Clapper had Schoeder’s successor’s personal cell phone put under surveillance. Angela Merkel’s personal cell phone. An ally . It may just have been face-saving for President Obama, but the White House leaked that Obama was surprised and disturbed that her personal phone had been targeted. This leak tells us that Clapper and the NSA were acting without the president’s knowledge. Yet no one was fired over it. It makes you think maybe the US cyberspies are an authority unto themselves and this elected democracy thing is so eighteenth century.

But it wasn’t just Germany. The NSA hacked into the private and government communications of French Presidents Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Francois Hollande. Sarkozy even wanted to sign a bilateral US-France intelligence cooperation agreement. (Gee, that might be useful in preventing terrorist attacks in the two countries). But he was frustrated, because the US wouldn’t sign if it meant promising to give up spying on . . . France and Sarkozy!

The BBC writes,

“One of the files, dated 2012, is about Mr. Hollande discussing Greece’s possible exit from the eurozone. Another one – from 2011 – alleges that Mr Sarkozy was determined to resume peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, possibly without US involvement.”

Then there is Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and all of his cabinet members and the CEO of Mitsubishi, all of whom US cyber-spies hacked systematically and continuously.

And as for the hacking being aimed at influencing Japan’s direction and policy, IBTimes wrote:

“Today’s publication shows us that the US government targeted sensitive Japanese industry and climate change policy,” [Sarah] Harrison [of Wikileaks] said. “Would the effectiveness of Japan’s industry and climate change proposals be different today if its communications had been protected?”

These stories were above the fold front page news only 18 months ago! Yet the breathless hyperventilating about Russian hacking (from what we can tell, far, far less intrusive and far less effective) neglects to bring up the US hacking of allies at all. French and German troops were part of the NATO military force in Afghanistan. The French fought alongside US troops and took hundreds of casualties. Germans were more in the peacekeeping mode but were often in substantial danger. Japan is an ally with whom the US does joint military exercises.

If we started going into the dozens of times the US has casually switched out other people’s governments since WW II, despite the lack of any direct threat to the United States, this would be a very long blog entry.

——-

Related video added by Juan Cole:

The Young Turks: “Trump On Russian Hacking”

On Thursday multiple mainstream media outlets reported that U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has picked former Republican Senator Dan Coats, an outspoken advocate of illegal domestic surveillance programs, to be director of national intelligence.

While yet to be formally announced, anonymous Trump transition team members told multiple outlets that the pick would be formalized in the coming days.

RELATED:
Will Trump Bring in a New Era of Surveillance and Torture?

As director of national intelligence, Coats – who served as an Indiana senator for a total of 17 years, with stints as U.S. ambassador to Germany and corporate lobbyist for Google and General Electric in between terms – would head the umbrella agency in charge of all 16 U.S. intelligence organizations, including the CIA and the National Security Agency.

While a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Coats was an outspoken supporter of the NSA’s illegal domestic spying programs revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden, writing in an op-ed that the programs were “legal, constitutional and used only under strict oversight,” claims which were all proven false by multiple federal judges. After the programs were declared illegal by several federal courts, he voted against legislation to rein in domestic surveillance operations.

Coats has also advocated for the continued use of the Guantanamo Bay torture center, calling it “a valuable tool in our counter-terrorism efforts,” and said a massive 2014 Senate report which condemned the extensive U.S. torture program was “unconstructive.”

He has publicly supported Trump’s xenophobic calls for “extreme vetting” of all migrants coming to the U.S. as well as an “extensive review” of refugee and asylum policies.

The one area where he appears to differ from Trump is on his views on Russia. While Trump has suggested the U.S. needs to strengthen relationships with Vladimir Putin, Coats said he was “honored” to be on a list of U.S. officials permanently banned from Russia.

If confirmed, Coats would replace current Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who notoriously lied under oath about the NSA spying programs while giving testimony to a Senate hearing. Edward Snowden has said that it was Clapper’s baldfaced lie to democratically-elected officials during televised hearings that prompted him to ultimately reveal the illegal domestic spying program.

Via TeleSur

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

Senator Dan Coats Is Donald Trump’s Leading National Intelligence Candidate | MSNBC

Donald J. Trump has picked another fight with the elders of his own Republican Party, over whether Russia engaged in hacking aimed at influencing the US election. Trump has maintained that it is impossible to trace hacking attempts, that it isn’t clear who was behind them, and that he knows a lot about hacking and knows things about these incidents that the rest of us do not know, which he would reveal last Tuesday or Wednesday (he didn’t).

At one point, in Trump’s assault on the case for Russian hacking being presented by the CIA, he cited statements of Julian Assange of Wikileaks:

Julian Assange said "a 14 year old could have hacked Podesta" – why was DNC so careless? Also said Russians did not give him the info!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 4, 2017

This reference to Assange, who published Chelsea Manning’s copied State Department cables and who published emails of the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign, infuriated official Washington, who would love to render Assange from the Ecuadoran embassy in London and execute him by firing squad.

At today’s Senate hearings on the Russian hacking, Sen. John McCain asked Director of National Intelligence James Clapper whether Assange has any credibility. Clapper replied by smearing Assange with reference to the complicated and obscure Swedish sex charges against him, which actually do not speak to Assange’s credibility on whether the Russians passed him hacked emails. This ad hominem logical fallacy is typical of the sneaky and duplicitous way Clapper operates.

McCain also accused Assange of putting the lives of US intelligence professionals and their assets in danger. But McCain did not move to impeach former Bush vice president Dick Cheney, who outed CIA field officer Valerie Plame to punish her for her husband’s having revealed the emptiness of the WMD case for the Bush-Cheney illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Trump was wounded by the charges that he was supporting Assange, and replied, essentially, that retweets are not endorsements.

The dishonest media likes saying that I am in Agreement with Julian Assange – wrong. I simply state what he states, it is for the people….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 5, 2017

All twitter users consider such hedging to be disingenuous; why retweet something if you deeply disagree with it?

The entire circus was marked by outlandish self-contradiction and clownish hypocrisy.

For instance, Sen. McCain and other national security Republicans have a longstanding animus against the Putin government and so are eager to accept the Clapper case that Russia attempted to interfere in the US election.

But McCain and the other hawkish Republicans don’t want to follow their position to its logical conclusion, which is that Putin intervened to give us a Trump presidency.

If Russia did some hacking and leaking to hurt the Democrats, but did not succeed in having a big impact on the election outcome, then why is the issue so important? The Russians were ineffectual.

As for foreign hacking and spying on the US election, James Clapper for a long time was personally listening into German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s private cell phone.

Moreover, Clapper was listening in to millions Americans on American soil without a warrant, a gross violation of the fourth Amendment of the Constitution, which promises us privacy from government prying with regard to our mail and personal effects unless law enforcement can convince a judge that we are engaged in a specified crime. For all we know, US officials privy to this illegal form of wiretapping could have used the information for insider trading or self-aggrandizement or to smear politicians they didn’t like or even to affect the outcome of elections. There isn’t really any oversight over this unconstitutional activity of the Federal government, and even sitting senators who knew about it such as Ron Wyden were afraid to tell the public lest they be arrested for revealing classified information (almost everything in Washington is classified as soon as it is written down).

When Clapper was asked in Senate testimony whether US intelligence was spying on the American people, he denied it. “No,” he said.

Ron Wyden: “DNI Clapper tells Wyden the NSA does not collect data on millions of Americans”

It was the lie of our new century, the Big Lie, the ultimate Whopper.

The US NSA hacked the whole world for many years until Ed Snowden blew the whistle on them. And that was when the full extent of Clapper’s mendaciousness became clear. He should have been held in contempt of Congress. He should have been fired. But no. He got away with it.

It is extremely unclear why anyone should believe anything this proven and professional liar says.

Then Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, was asked about Trump’s tweet questioning the Russia hacking narrative. He replied that Trump was unwise to take on the intelligence community, since they had six ways to Sunday to get back at you.

So Schumer seems to have been celebrating that we are no longer a democracy, but that even an elected president has to defer to the intelligence establishment in Washington or else must fear that they will play dirty tricks on him and undermine him.

Shouldn’t the Democratic Party senate minority leader be standing for democratic values, not advising the president to shut up if he knows what’s good for him?

So to conclude, this is a sorry spectacle. Yes, Putin is a thug who should not have unilaterally annexed Crimea, and so created a European crisis that has yet to be resolved. But yes, the US has acted thuggishly– the unprovoked and monstrous invasion of Iraq is a recent example– and US aggressiveness toward Moscow after the collapse of the Soviet Union bears some of the blame for Russia’s bullying insecurity. And yes, Russia likely engaged in hacking during the US election and hoped to tilt the playing field toward Trump; but they likely failed to have any significant effect on the outcome. And yes, Clapper and other US intelligence officials have hacked everybody and his brother both abroad and inside the US, so they are hardly morally superior to Putin.

Now we have a food fight full of ignorance and hypocrisy or both, in which the Washington Establishment professes itself shocked, shocked that any hacking of one country by another could have gone on. Trump has continued his creepy bromance with the Kremlin and wants to get his information from any source that agrees with his prejudices. The Democrats have taken advantage of the story to paint Trump as a Manchurian candidate, and some of them seem to delight in the idea that Trump may provoke the CIA to do to him what Oliver Stone thinks it did to JFK.

Nobody and nothing here to admire.