Jun 05

Today’s News 5th June 2017

  • Stocks, Bonds, Euro, and Gold Go Up, Report 4 June, 2017

    The jobs report was disappointing. The prices of gold, and even more so silver, took off. In three hours, they gained $18 and 39 cents. Before we try to read into the connection, it is worth pausing to consider how another market responded. We don’t often discuss the stock market (and we have not been calling for an imminent stock market collapse as many others have).

    The initial reaction in the US equities market (futures, as this was before the opening bell) was down. But it was muted, and then in a few hours turned around and the market ended even higher.

    Each stock represents a business. Presumably, if jobs growth was disappointing then this is bad for stocks on two grounds. One is that companies hire based on their revenue expectations. Slow or no hiring means slow or no revenue growth. The other is that people who aren’t hired don’t buy as much, and so there is a feedback loop into sluggish business revenue growth.

    However, the stock market disagreed. It said let’s cut the earnings yield a bit more, from 3.94% to 3.93%. This presumably means that earnings are set to take off (or it could mean that everyone from wage-earners who pour their surplus into the stock market to older speculators are not thinking about earnings yield).

    Not only did the stock market go up, so did the euro. As did US Treasury bonds. And, finally, gold and silver. What is the one thing that these all have in common?

    It is possible to borrow to buy these assets.

    We read this as a garden-variety day of credit expansion. Folks, this is how the monetary system is supposed to work, according to mainstream economic thought. Based on <insert story du jour>, people borrow to buy assets. This creates a wealth effect, as rising asset prices makes people (at least those who own those assets) feel richer. When they feel richer, they go out to eat more, buy more Rolexes and Porsches, and that employs everyone else. Or so their theory goes.

    Stock analysts have a wealth of material to study the fundamentals of public companies. We leave that work to them. We have a theory, model, and now a robust software platform to study and calculate the fundamentals of gold and silver.

    We will show charts of the fundamental prices we calculate. But first, a look at the prices of the metals and gold-silver ratio.

    letter-jun-04-prices

    Next, this is a graph of the gold price measured in silver, otherwise known as the gold to silver ratio. It moved up a bit, though down on Friday.

    letter-jun-04-ratio

    In this graph, we show both bid and offer prices. If you were to sell gold on the bid and buy silver at the ask, that is the lower bid price. Conversely, if you sold silver on the bid and bought gold at the offer, that is the higher offer price.

    For each metal, we will look at a graph of the basis and cobasis overlaid with the price of the dollar in terms of the respective metal. It will make it easier to provide brief commentary. The dollar will be represented in green, the basis in blue and cobasis in red.

    Here is the gold graph.

    letter-jun-04-gold

    We had a dropping price of the dollar (the mirror image of the rising price of gold), and a slightly falling abundance (the basis) and slightly rising scarcity (the cobasis).

    Our old model shows an increase in the gold fundamental price of $19 ($1,267 to $1,286). Our new software also shows an increase, though smaller and at a higher level ($1,330 to $1,334). We plan an article to discuss this difference.

    Now let’s look at silver.

    letter-jun-04-silver

    In silver, there is a slight increase in abundance and decrease in scarcity as the price has risen.

    Our old model shows an increase in the silver fundamental price of $0.05 ($16.12 to $16.17). Our new software, however, shows a decease and not a small one ($17.97 to $17.62). Here is a graph.

    letter-jun-04-ag-fund

    Note that the fundamental price (new software platform) is rangebound from early March. It is considerably less volatile than the market price, which is what we would hope for.

     

    Keith will be in London the week of June 19, and in New York the week of June 26. If you’re interested in attending a Monetary Metals seminar on GOFO and transparency in the gold market in either city, or to meet with Keith to discuss gold investment, please click here.

     

    © 2017 Monetary Metals

  • Accept Islamic Terror As The New Normal?

    Authored by Nonia Darwish via The Gatestone Institute,

    • "The use of terror under this doctrine [Targhib wal tarhib, "luring and terrorizing"] is a legitimate sharia obligation." — Salman Al Awda, mainstream Muslim sheikh, on the Al Jazeera television show "Sharia and Life".
    • Part of the tarhib or "terrorizing" side of this doctrine is to make a cruel example of those who do not comply with the requirements of Islam. That is the reason Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, and entities such as ISIS, intentionally hold ceremonial public beheadings, floggings, and amputation of limbs.
    • Islamic jihad has always counted on people in conquered lands eventually to yield, give up and accept terrorism as part of life, similar to natural disasters, earthquakes and floods.

    After terror attacks, we often hear from Western media and politicians that we must accept terrorist attacks as the "new normal."

    For Western citizens, this phrase is dangerous.

    Islam's doctrine of jihad, expansion and dawah (Islamic outreach, proselytizing) rely heavily on the use of both terror and luring. Targhib wal tarhib is an Islamic doctrine that means "seducing (luring) and terrorizing" as a tool for dawah, to conquer nations and force citizens to submit to Islamic law, sharia. It amounts to manipulating the instinctive parts of the human brain with extreme opposing pressures of pleasure and pain — rewarding, then severely punishing — to brainwash people into complying with Islam.

    Most ordinary Muslims are not even aware of this doctrine, but Islamic books have been written about it. Mainstream Muslim sheikhs such as Salman Al Awda have discussed it on Al Jazeera TV. On a show called "Sharia and Life," Al Awda recommended using extremes "to exaggerate… reward and punishment, morally and materially… in both directions". "The use of terror under this doctrine,"' he said, "is a legitimate sharia obligation."

    People in the West think of terror as something that Islamic jihadists inflict on non-Muslims, and it is. But terror is also the mechanism for ensuring compliance within Islam. Under Islamic law, jihadists who evade performing jihad are to be killed. Terror is thus the threat that keeps jihadists on their missions, and that make ordinary Muslims obey sharia.

    An online course for recruiting jihadists contains this description:

    "Individual Dawa depends on eliciting emotional responses from recruits (and building a personal relationship). Abu 'Amr's approach illustrates a recruitment concept called al-targhib wa'l-tarhib, which is a carrot-and-stick technique of extolling the benefits of action while explaining the frightening costs of inaction. The concept was introduced in the Qur'an and is discussed by many Islamic thinkers exploring the best way to call people to Islam (several scholars, for example, have written books titled al-targhib wa'l-tarhib). According to Abu 'Amr, recruiters should apply the concept throughout the recruitment process, but emphasize the benefits of action early in the process and the costs of inaction later."

    In other words, recruiters of jihadists should start by emphasizing the "good stuff" first, the "lure" — the future glory, supremacy and fulfillment of every lustful wish, such as virgins in heaven. Later, they should threaten the recruits with "terror" and shame — the consequence if they fail to participate in jihad.

    Part of the tarhib or "terrorizing" side of this doctrine is to make a cruel example of those who do not comply with the requirements of Islam. That is the reason Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, and entities such as ISIS, intentionally hold ceremonial public beheadings, floggings, and amputation of limbs. Countries such as Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey are more discrete, but they tolerate and support honor killings; killing apostates; beating women and children, and torture and murder in their jails. The doctrine of targhib and tarhib is alive and well, not just in Islamic theocracies but also in the so-called "moderate" Muslim countries.

    Islam has been using these "pleasure and pain" brainwashing techniques, and cruel and unusual punishment, from its inception and until today. While the Bible — the Western Judeo-Christian tradition — is in harmony with, and nurtures, kindness in human nature, Islam does the opposite: it uses the human instincts for self-preservation and survival to break the people's will and brainwash them into slavish obedience.

    Like the majority of Muslims, I never heard of this foundational Islamic doctrine when I was growing up in Egypt, but have felt the impact of this doctrine on my life — in every aspect of Islamic culture; in Islamic preaching, in my Islamic family relations; in how Islamic governments operate and how people of authority, in general, treat the people under them.

    The Islamic doctrine of "lure and terror" has produced a culture of toxic extremes: distrust and fear, pride and shame, permission to lie ("taqiyya"), and rejecting taking responsibility for one's actions.

    Having lived most of my life under Islam, I am sad to say that people the West calls "moderate Muslims" are frequently, in fact, citizens who have learned to live with and accept terror as normal. For centuries, many have made excuses for terror, condemned victims of terror, remained silent or equivocal, and have even compromised with the terrorists to survive. The Islamic culture in which I lived looked the other way when women were beaten. When girls were honor-murdered, the question was "what did she do?" instead of "how could that be?" When Christians were killed and persecuted, many blamed the Christians for their own persecution at the hands of Muslims. The normal Islamic response to terror became: "None of my business."

    And now the Islamic doctrine of Targhib wal Tarhib, has moved to the West and aims at changing Western humanistic culture. It would replace respect for human rights, caring for one's neighbor and the values of freedom and peace, with the values of bondage, terror, tyranny and fear.

    Islamic jihad has always counted on people in conquered lands eventually to yield, give up and accept terrorism as part of life, similar to natural disasters, earthquakes and floods.

    It did not take long for the Islamic doctrine of Targhib wal Tarhib to work on the psyche of Western leaders and media, who are now telling us to live with it as the "new normal." Islam counts on turning everyone into "moderate" Muslims who will eventually look the other way when terror happens to the person next to you.

    The new normal? Police help survivors of the terrorist attack on London Bridge, June 4, 2017. (Photo by Carl Court/Getty Images)

  • Saudi Arabia, Egypt, UAE, & Bahrain Cut Diplomatic Ties, Shut All Borders With Qatar

    Just days after president Trump left the region, a geopolitical earthquake is taking place in the Middle East tonight as the rift between Qatar and other members of the (likely extinct) Gulf Cooperation Council explodes with Bahrain, UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt cutting all diplomatic ties with Qatar accusing it of "speading chaos," by funding terrorism and supporting Iran.

    The dispute between Qatar and the Gulf's Arab countries started over a purported hack of Qatar's state-run news agency. It has spiraled since, and appears to be climaxing now… just days after President Trump left the region.

    As Al Arabiya reports, Bahrain has announced it is cutting diplomatic ties with Qatar, according to a statement carried on Bahrain News Agency.

    The statement on Monday morning said Bahrain decided to sever ties with its neighbor “on the insistence of the State of Qatar to continue destabilizing the security and stability of the Kingdom of Bahrain and to intervene in its affairs”.

     

    The statement also said Qatar’s incitement of the media and supporting of terrorist activities and financing groups linked to Iran were reasons behind the decision.

     

    “(Qatar has) spread chaos in Bahrain in flagrant violation of all agreements and covenants and principles of international law Without regard to values, law or morals or consideration of the principles of good neighborliness or commitment to the constants of Gulf relations and the denial of all previous commitments,” the statement read.

     

    Qatari citizens have 14 days to leave Bahraini territories while Qatari diplomats were given 48 hours to leave the country after being expelled. Meanwhile, Bahrain has also banned all of its citizens from visiting or residing in Qatar after the severance of ties.

    Additionally, Bahrain has has closed both air and sea borders with Qatar.

    Saudi Arabia then confirmed the same – cutting ties and shutting down all sea, airspace, and land crossings with Qatar as well as dissolving Qatar's role in the Saudi-led coalition fighting against Yemen. Emirates, Etihad, Saudia, Gulf Air, and Egypt Air are no longer allowed to fly to Qatar and Saudi Arabia is providinhg facilities, services to Qatari pilgrims

    Egypt then followed, confirming it was cutting diplomatic ties with

    Then UAE confirmed it would cut ties, shut down all sky, water, and land crossings, and expel all Qataris within 48 hours.

    The Maldives also just cut diplomatic ties with Qatar.

    All of this happens within 24 hours of Iran calling out 'The West' for ignoring the real sponsors of terrorism around the world and UK's Labor party leader outright name-shaming Sauid Arabia's funding of terrorism.

    Qatari officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    As a reminder, documents obtained by Middle East Eye show strategic alliance includes pledge by Ankara to protect Gulf state from external threats…

    In December 2015, Turkey announced, to the surprise of many, that it planned to establish a military base in Qatar. Behind the scenes, the agreement was about forming a major strategic alliance.

     

    After a 100-year hiatus, Turkey is militarily back in the Gulf and ramping up its presence overseas. In January, Ankara announced that it would also establish a military base in Somalia.

     

    Specific details about the Qatar agreement, which Turkey described as an alliance in the face of "common enemies", remain scant, but Middle East Eye has acquired copies of the agreements, as well as further details, which include a secret pledge by Ankara to protect Qatar from external threats.

    Did Qatar just get scapegoated in the 'war on terror'? One thing seems clear, support for a Syrian gas pipeline will be dwindling and with it the need for a Syrian war.

    Notably, this raises further doubts about OPEC's stability. As Bloomberg notes, while Middle East ructions have historically added risk premia to oil prices, discord here could theoretically put downward pressure on prices as OPEC members struggle to maintain unity and compliance on production cuts.

  • Tesla Furious After AAA Hits Carmaker With Higher Premiums Due To "Abnormally High Claims"

    AAA is raising premiums on Tesla vehicles by 30% after data showed that owners of Model S and Model X cars filed claims at abnormally high rates, and that those claims cost more compared with other cars in the same class, Automotive News reported.

    Tesla, of course, is disputing the insurer's analysis.

    "This analysis is severely flawed and is not reflective of reality," the electric-vehicle maker said in a statement emailed to Automotive News. "Among other things, it compares Model S and X to cars that are not remotely peers, including even a Volvo station wagon."

    AAA’ chief actuary said the insurer noticed the anomaly in its own data before confirming it with data provided by a second source, the Highway Loss Data Institute.

    "Looking at a much broader set of countrywide data, we saw the same patterns observed in our own data, and that gave us the confidence to change rates," he said.

    Other large insurance companies, including State Farm and Geico, said that claims data is a major factor in calculating premiums. But they would not disclose if their Tesla-owning customers would also see rates rise.

    The Highway Loss Data Institute report covered the 2014-2016 model years. Vehicles are divided into classes based on size, weight and competing models. The frequency and severity of claims are compared with overall average claims. The report found that the frequency, and cost, of claims related to Tesla vehicles was much higher.

    "Teslas get into a lot of crashes and are costly to repair afterward," said Russ Rader, spokesman for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, which is the Highway Loss Data Institute's parent organization. "Consumers will pay for that when they go to insure one."

    Tesla said the Highway Loss Data Institute's system placed it with the wrong competitors. If it were compared with similar rivals, the company argued, its crash data would not stand out negatively.

    Tesla said the high rate of acceleration in both the Model S and Model X make it "false and misleading" to compare against vehicles such as the XC70, adding that the Model S also holds the lowest likelihood of injury, according to an evaluation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

    "We expect Model X to receive the best score for any SUV ever tested," a Tesla spokesperson said.

    Collision damage claims for large luxury vehicles are reported 13 percent more frequently than average, and those claims cost about 50 percent higher than average, the Highway Loss Data Institute said. The rear-wheel-drive Tesla Model S is involved in 46 percent more claims than average, and those claims cost more than twice the average, it said.

    In the large luxury SUV class, where collision coverage claim frequency is the same as the average for all vehicles and the cost of claims is 43 percent above average, the owners of the Model X file for claims 41 percent more often than average, and those claims cost 89 percent more than average, according to the institute.

    New approaches to calculating premiums may eventually benefit Tesla owners, Automotive News reported. Root is an insurance startup that sets premiums based on individual driving behavior. Customers download the Root app and drive with their smartphone in the car for two weeks. Rates are determined from the habits observed over that period.

    Semi-autonomous driving features help bring rates down, said Root CEO Alex Timm. The company gives a special discount for Tesla vehicles equipped with Autosteer — part of Tesla's suite of Autopilot semi-autonomous tech — which NHTSA found reduced crash rates by 40 percent.

    "Insurance premiums should reflect risk," Timm said. "Autonomous vehicles are safer and will continue to get safer. It's proven in the data."

    Tesla said that it is working with insurance companies to properly evaluate the benefits of Autopilot.

    "As part of the Insure My Tesla program, Tesla is working with leading insurers resulting in lower prices for Tesla insurance, not higher," Tesla said in its statement. "These leading insurers also appreciate the added safety benefit of Autopilot."

    The big question, of course, is that if Tesla owners have to pay considerably higher insurance premiums, what happens to the marginal new Tesla car sale?

  • CNN Host Calls Trump "Piece Of Shit… Embarrassment To Humankind"

    Update: late on Sunday afternoon, Aslan apologized, tweeting “I should not have used a profanity to describe the President when responding to his shocking reaction to the #LondonAttacks.”

    His statement

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    * * *

    Shortly after Saturday’s latest Islamic terrorist attack in London, when Trump was once again bashed for assuming that it was, well, a terrorist attack – which in retrospect turned out to be accurate – a CNN host slammed Trump for his kneejerk reaction to the attack and his renewed call for a travel ban. As noted last night, Trump took to Twitter Saturday evening, saying, “We need to be smart, vigilant and tough. We need the courts to give us back our rights. We need the Travel Ban as an extra level of safety!”

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    Trump’s tweet prompted numerous angry responses including one from the ACLU which said that “glad we both agree the ban is a ban,” but by far the most triggered was CNN’s Reza Aslan, a vocal Trump critic and host of Believer, who as the American Mirror pointed out first, lashed out with his own tweet half an hour later:

    “This piece of shit is not just an embarrassment to American and a stain on the presidency. He’s an embarrassment to humankind.”

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    This in turn prompted the now traditional twitter back and forth in which conservative media pundit Mark Dice responded: “CNN host more upset about trump denouncing the attack than the attack itself.”

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    It quickly devolved from there into a partisan name-calling back and forth.

    This was not the first time a CNN host has used profanity to criticize the president. Fareed Zakaria repeatedly used the term “bulls***” to describe Trump during an appearance on CNN Tonight back in March. The network also cut ties with comedian Kathy Griffin last week after she shared a graphic image of herself holding a severed, bloody head meant to resemble President Trump.

    NBC News was also unimpressed with the president’s Twitter feed Saturday night. In addition to his comments about his immigration order, Trump also re-tweeted a link from The Drudge Report that suggested the incident was a terrorist attack long before police made that determination.

    In an unprecedented move, NBC News’ twitter feed followed up with its own dismissive comment:

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    Aslan used the statement by NBC News to criticize Trump even further, calling him a “man baby” and urging his followers to ignore the president.

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    It was not clear if NBC did relay the president’s tweet later when “the info” was confirmed.

    “Trump is in a position to be the most-informed person in the world,” Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold said on CNN Saturday night,  yet he keeps relying on “third-hand info.” In this case Trump was right.

  • When Mother Jones Was Investigated For Spreading "Kremlin Disinformation"

    Authored by Mark Ames via ExiledOnline.com,

    Mother Jones recently announced it’s “redoubling our Russia reporting”—in the words of editor Clara Jeffery. Ain’t that rich. What passes for “Russia reporting” at Mother Jones is mostly just glorified InfoWars paranoia for progressive marks — a cataract of xenophobic conspiracy theories about inscrutable Russian barbarians hellbent on subverting our way of life, spreading chaos, destroying freedom & democracy & tolerance wherever they once flourished. . . . because they hate us, because we’re free.

    Western reporting on Russia has always been garbage, But the so-called “Russia reporting” of the last year has taken the usual malpractice to unimagined depths — whether it’s from Mother Jones or MSNBC, or the Washington Post or Resistance hero Louise Mensch.

    But of all the liberal media, Mother Jones should be most ashamed for fueling the moral panic about Russian “disinformation”. It wasn’t too long ago that the Reagan Right attacked Mother Jones for spreading “Kremlin disinformation” and subverting America. There were threats and leaks to the media about a possible Senate investigation into Mother Jones serving as a Kremlin disinformation dupe, a threat that hung over the magazine throughout the early Reagan years. A new Senate Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism (SST for short) was set up in 1981 to investigate Kremlin “disinformation” and “active measures” in America, and the American “dupes” who helped Moscow subvert our way of life. That subcommittee was created to harass and repress leftist anti-imperial dissent in America, using “terrorism” as the main threat, and “disinformation” as terrorism’s fellow traveller. The way the the SST committee put it, “terrorism” and “Kremlin disinformation” were one and the same, a meta-conspiracy run out of Moscow to weaken America.

    And Mother Jones was one of the first American media outlets in the SST committee’s sights.

    Adam Hochschild, the founding editor of Mother Jones (and author of some great books including King Leopold’s Ghost), responded publicly to the threats coming out of the Senate in the early Reagan years. In a New York Times op-ed published in late 1981, “Dis-(Mis-?)Information”, Hochschild wrote about a Republican Senate mailer sent out to 290 radio stations that accused Mother Jones of being Kremlin disinformation dupes. The mailer, on Senate letterhead, featured a tape recording of an interview between the chairman of the SST subcommittee, Sen. Jeremiah Denton of Alabama, and a committee witness— a “disinformation expert” named Arnaud de Borchgrave, author of a bestselling spy novel called “The Spike” — about a fictional Kremlin plot to subvert the West with disinformation, and thereby rule the world.

    Here’s how Hochschild described the Republican Senate mailer in his NYTimes piece:

    “In it, the writer Arnaud de Borchgrave accuses Mother Jones, the Village Voice, the Soho News, the Progressive magazine of serving as disseminators of K.G.B. ‘disinformation’ – the planting of false or misleading items in news media.
     
    “Mr. de Borchgrave provided no specific examples of facts or articles. But, then, the trouble with the K.G.B. is that you don’t know what disinformation it is feeding you because you don’t know who its myriad agents are. So the only safe thing is to distrust any author or magazine too critical of the United States. Because anyone who is against, say, the MX or the B-1 bomber could be working for the Russians.”

    Here, the Mother Jones founder describes the menacing logic of pursuing the “Kremlin disinformation” conspiracy: any American critical of US military power, police power, corporate power, overseas power . . . anyone critical of anything that powerful Americans do, is a Kremlin disinformation dupe whether they know it or not. That leaves only the appointed accusers to decide who is and who isn’t a Kremlin agent.

    Hochschild called this panic over Kremlin disinformation another “Red Scare”, warning,

    “[T]o accuse critical American journalists of serving as its unwitting dupes makes as little sense as Russians accusing rebellious Poles of being unwitting agents of American imperialism. When Mr. de Borchgrave accuses skeptical journalists of being unwitting purveyors of disinformation, the accusation is more slippery, less easy to definitively disprove, and less subject to libel law than if he were to accuse them of being conscious Communist agents.
     
    "…Although if you believe the K.G.B. is successfully infiltrating America’s news media, then anything must seem possible.”

    It’s a damn shame today’s editorial staff at Mother Jones aren’t aware of their own magazine’s history.

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    Then again, who am I fooling? Mother Jones wouldn’t care if you shoved their faces in their own recent history — they’re way too donor-deep invested in pushing this “active measures” conspiracy. Trump has been a goldmine of donor cash for anyone willing to carry the #Resistance water.

    This is quite literally the case with Mother Jones, which has been a little coy about the deal it cut to “redouble” its “Russia reporting.” That deal involves partnering with a straight-up Red-baiting, Cold War-mongering website project called “PutinTrump” featuring a scary Soviet hammer and sickle in case the Cold War mongering wasn’t clear enough — with no mind to history and the fact that Russia is a neoliberal dystopia with a flat 13% income tax rate hailed as a “miracle” by the Heritage Foundation.

    PutinTrump was a project set up last fall by tech plutocrat Rob Glaser, CEO and founder of RealNetworks, to scare voters into believing that voting for Trump is treason. God knows I can’t stand Trump or his politics, but of all the inane campaign ideas to run on — this?

    One would’ve thought that the smart people would learn their lesson from the election, that running against a Kremlin conspiracy theory is a loser. But instead, they seem to think the problem is they didn’t fear-monger enough, so they’re “redoubling” on the Russophobia. Donor money is driving this — donor cash is quite literally driving Mother Jones’ editorial focus. And it really is this crude.

    Take for example a PutinTrump section titled “Russian Expansion” — the scary Red imagery and language are lifted straight out of the Reagan Cold War playbook from the early-mid 80s, when, it so happens, Mother Jones was targeted as a Kremlin dupe. Featuring a lot of shadowy red-colored alien soldiers over an outline of Crimea, Mother Jones’ donor-partner promotes a classic Cold War propaganda line about Russian/Soviet expansionism—a lie that has been the basis for so many wars launched to “stop” this alleged “expansionism” in the past, wars that Mother Jones is supposed to oppose. Here’s what MJ’s partner writes now:

    RUSSIAN EXPANSION

     

    Through unknowing manipulation, or by direct support, Trump will become an accessory to the continual expansionism committed by Putin.

     

    Might does not equal right—and it never has for Americans—but Putin’s Russia plays by different rules. Or maybe no rules at all.

    The communist/leftist imagery is there for a reason. In case you haven’t noticed, Clinton supporters have waged a crude pr campaign to blame their candidate’s loss on leftists, whom they equate with neo-Nazis and Trump. I’ve been smeared as “alt-left” by a Vanity Fair columnist, who equated me with Breitbart and other far-right journalists, for the crime of not sufficiently supporting Hillary Clinton. The larger goal of this crude PR effort is to equate opposition to Hillary Clinton with treason and Nazism. Which was exactly the goal of Reagan’s “Kremlin disinformation” hysteria — the whole point was to smear critics of Reagan and his right-wing politics as pro-Kremlin traitors, whether they knew it or not.

    * * *

    What’s kind of shocking to me as someone who was alive in the Reagan scare is how unoriginal this current one is. Even the words and the terminology are plagiarized from the Reagan Right witch-hunting campaign — “Kremlin active measures”; “Kremlin disinformation”; “Kremlin dupes” — terms introduced by right-wing novelists and intelligence hucksters, and repeated ad nauseam until they transformed into something plausible, giving quasi-academic cover to some very old-fashioned state repression, harassment, surveillance . . . and a lot of ruined lives. That’s what happened last time, and if history is any guide, it’s how this one will end up too.

    Today we’re supposed to remember how cheerful and optimistic the Reagan Era was. But that’s now how I remember it, it’s not how it looked to Mother Jones at the time — and it’s not how it looks when you go back through the original source material again and relive it. The Reagan Era kicked off with a lot of dark fear-mongering about the Kremlin using disinformation and active measures to destroy our way of life. Everything that the conservative Establishment loathed about 1970s — defeat in Vietnam, Church Committee hearings gutting the CIA and FBI, the cult of Woodward & Bernstein & Hersh, peace marchers, minority rights radicals — was an “active measures” treason conspiracy.

    As soon as the new Republican majority in the Senate took power in 1981, they set up a new subcommittee to investigate Kremlin disinformation dupes, called the Senate Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism. Staffers leaked to the media they intended to investigate Mother Jones. Panic spread across the progressive media world, and suddenly all those cool Ivy League kids who invested everything in becoming the next Woodward-Bernsteins — the cultural heroes at the time — got scared. The image at the top of this article comes from a lead article in Columbia University’s student newspaper, the Spectator, published a few weeks after Reagan took office, on SST committee’s assault on Mother Jones. The headline read:

    The New McCarthyism / Are You Now, Or Have You Ever Been…

    and the the full-page article begins,

    If you subscribe to Mother Jones, give money to the American Civil Liberties Union, or support the Institute for Policy Studies, Senator Jeremiah Denton’s new Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism may be interested in you.

    It describes how in the 1970s Americans finally got rid of HUAC and the Senate Internal Security Committee, the Red Scare witch-hunting Congressional committees — only to have them revived one election cycle later in the Reagan Revolution.

    By the end of Reagan’s first year in office, there was still no formal investigation into Mother Jones, but the harassment was there and it wasn’t subtle at all — such as the Republican Senate mailer accusing the magazine of being KGB disinformation dupes. At the end of 1981, MJ editor/founder Adam Hochschild announced he was stepping aside, and in his final note to readers and the public, he wrote:

    “To Senator Jeremiah Denton, chair of the Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism: If your committee investigates Mother Jones, a plan hinted at some months ago, I demand to be subpoenaed. I would not want to miss telling off today’s new McCarthyites.”

     

    So here we are a few decades later, and Mother Jones’ editor Clara Jeffery is denouncing WikiLeaks — yesterday’s journalism stars, today’s traitors — as “Russia[’s]…willing dupes and propagandists” while Mother Jones magazine turned itself into a mouthpiece for America’s spies peddling the same warmed-over conspiracy theories that once targeted Mother Jones.

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    Jeremiah Denton — the New Right senator from Alabama who led the SST committee investigation into Kremlin “disinformation” and its dupes like Mother Jones — believed that America was being weakened from within and had only a few years left at most to turn it around. As Denton saw it, the two most dangerous threats to America’s survival were a) hippie sex, and b) Kremlin disinformation. The two were inseparable in his mind, linked to the larger “global terrorism” plot masterminded by Moscow.

    To fight hippie sex and teen promiscuity, the freshman senator introduced a “Chastity Bill” funding federal programs that promoted the joys of chastity to Americans armies of bored, teen suburban long-hairs. A lot of clever people laughed at that, because at the time the belief in linear historical progress was strong, and this represented something so atavistic that it was like a curiosity more than anything — Pauly Shore’s “Alabama Man” unfrozen after 10,000 years and unleashed on the halls of Congress.

    Less funny were Denton’s calls for death penalty for adulterers, and laws he pushed restricting women’s right to abortion.

    Jeremiah Denton was once a big name in this country. Americans have since forgotten Denton, because John McCain pretty much stole his act. But back in the 70s and early 80s, Denton was America’s most famous Vietnam War hero/POW. Like McCain, Denton was a Navy pilot shot down over Vietnam and taken prisoner. Denton spent 1965-1973 in North Vietnamese POW camps—two years longer than McCain—and he was America’s most famous POW. His most famous moment was when his North Vietnamese captors hauled him before the cameras to acknowledge his crimes, and instead Denton famously blinked out a Morse code message: “T-O-R-T-U-R-E”.

    In the 1973 POW exchange deal between Hanoi and Nixon, “Operation Homecoming,” it was Denton who was the first American POW to come off the plane and speak to the American tv crews (McCain was on the same flight, but not nearly as prominent as Denton). I keep referring back to McCain here because not only were they both famous Navy pilot POWs, but they both wind up becoming the most pathologically obsessive Russophobes in the Senate. Just a few days ago, McCain said that Russia is a bigger threat to America than Islamic State. Something real bad must’ve happened in those Hanoi Hiltons, worse than anything they told us about, because those guys really, really hate Russians — and they really want the rest of us to hate Russians too.

    Everything they loathed about America, everything that was wrong with America, had to be the fault of a hostile alien culture. There was no other explanation for what happened in the 1970s. The America that Denton came home to in 1973 was under some kind of hostile power, an alien-controlled replica of the America he last saw in 1965. Popular morality had been turned on its head: Hollywood blockbusters with bare naked bodies and gutter language! Children against their parents! Homosexuals on waterskis! Sex and treason! Patriots were the enemy, while America-haters were heroes! Denton re-appeared like some reactionary Rip Van Winkle who went to sleep in the safe feather-bed world of J Edgar Hoover’s America — only to wake up eight years later on Bernadine Dohrn’s futon, soaked in Bill Ayers’ bodily fluids. For Denton, the post-60s cultural shock came on all at once — as sudden and as jarring as, well, the shock so many Blue State Americans experienced when Donald Trump won the election last November.

    Sex, immorality & military defeat—these were inseparable in Denton’s mind, and in a lot of reactionaries’ minds. Attributing all of America’s social convulsions of the previous 15 years to immorality and a Kremlin disinformation plot was a neat way of avoiding the complex and painful realities — then, as now.

    “No nation can survive long unless it can encourage its young to withhold indulgence in their sexual appetites until marriage.” — Jeremiah Denton

    What hit Denton hardest was all the hippie sex and the pop culture glorification of hippie sex. It’s hard to convey just how deeply all that smug hippie sex wounded tens of millions of Americans. It’s a hate wound that’s still raw, still burns to the touch. A wound that fueled so much reactionary political fire over the past 50 years, and it doesn’t look like it’ll burn out any time soon.

    Back in 1980, Denton blamed all that pop culture sex on Russian active measures, and he did his best to not just outlaw it, but to demonize sex as something along the lines of treason.

    Just as so many people today cannot accept the idea that Trumpism is Made In America—so Denton and his Reagan Right constituents believed there had to be some alien force to explain why Americans had changed so drastically, seeming to adopt values that were the antithesis of Middle America’s values in 1965. It had to be the fault of an alien voodoo beam! It had to be a Russian plot!

    And so, therefore, it was a Russian plot.

    A 1981 Time magazine profile of the freshman Senator begins,

    “Denton believes that America is being destroyed by sexual immorality and Soviet-sponsored political ‘disinformation’—and that both are being promoted by dupes, or worse, in the media. By the mid-1980s, he warns, ‘we will have less national security than we had proportionately when George Washington’s troops were walking around barefoot at Valley Forge.’”

    Sexual immorality—it’s a common theme in all the Russia panics of the past 100 years—whether the sexually liberated Emma Goldmans of the Red Scare, the homosexual-panic of the McCarthy witch-hunts, the hippie orgies of Denton’s nightmares, or Trump’s supposed golden shower fetish with immoral Russian prostitutes in our current panic. . . .

    To fight the Kremlin disinformation demons, Denton set up the Senate Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism (SST), with two other young Republican senators—Orrin Hatch, who’s still haunting Capitol Hill today; and John East of North Carolina, a Jesse Helms protege who later did his country a great service by committing suicide in his North Carolina garage, before the end of his first term in office in 1986.

    Sen. East’s staffers leaned Nazi-ward, like their boss. One Sen. East staffer was Samuel Francis — now famous as the godfather of the alt-Right, but who in 1981 was known as the guru behind the Senate’s “Russia disinformation” witch hunt. Funny how that works — today’s #Resistance takes its core idea, that America is under the control of hostile Kremlin disinformation sorcerers — from the alt-Right’s guru, Samuel Francis.

    Another staffer for Sen. East was John Rees, one of the most loathsome professional snitches of the post-McCarthy era, who collected files on suspected leftists, labor activists and liberal donors. I’ll have to save John Rees for another post — he really belongs in a category by himself, proof of Schopenhauer’s maxim that this world is run by demons.

    These were the people who first cooked up the “disinformation” panic. You can’t separate the Sam Francises, Orrin Hatches, John Easts et al from today’s panic-mongering over disinformation — you can only try to make sense of why, what is it about our culture’s ruling factions that brings them together on this sort of xenophobic witch-hunt, even when they see themselves as so diametrically opposed on so many other issues. I don’t think this is something as simple as hypocrisy — it’s actually quite consistent: Establishment faction wakes up to a world it doesn’t recognize and loathes and feels threatened by, and blames it not on themselves or anything domestic, but rather on the most plausible alien conspiracy they can reach for: Russian barbarians. Anti-Russian xenophobia is burned into the Establishment culture’s DNA; it’s a xenophobia that both dominant factions, liberal or conservative, view as an acceptable xenophobia. When poorer “white working class” Americans feel threatened and panic, their xenophobia tends to be aimed at other ethnics — Latinos and Muslims these days — a xenophobia that the Establishment views as completely immoral and unacceptable, completely beyond the pale. The thought never occurs to them that perhaps all forms of xenophobia are bad, all bring with them a lot of violence and danger, it just depends on who’s threatened and who’s doing the threatening…

    The subversion scare and moral panic were crucial in resetting the culture for the Reagan counter-revolution. Those who opposed Reagan’s plans, domestically and overseas, would be labeled “dupes” of Kremlin “active measures” and “disinformation” conspiracies, acting on behalf of Moscow whether they knew it or not. The panic incubated in Denton’s subcommittee investigations provided political cover for vast new powers given to the CIA, FBI, NSA and other spy and police agencies to spy on Americans. Fighting Russian “active measures” grew over the years into a massive surveillance program against Americans, particularly anyone involved in opposing Reagan’s dirty wars in Central America, anyone opposing nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants, and anyone involved in providing sanctuary to refugees from south of the border. The “active measures” panic even led to FBI secret investigations into liberal members of Congress, some of whom wound up in a secret “FBI terrorist photo album”.

    I’ll get to that “FBI Terrorist Photo Album” story later. There’s a lot of recent “Kremlin disinformation” history to recover, since it seems every last memory cell has been zapped out of existence.

    After Reagan’s inauguration (the most expensive, lavish inauguration ball in White House history), Senator Denton sent a chill through the liberal and independent media world with all the talk coming out of his committee about targeting activists, civil rights lawyers and journalists. Denton tried to come off as reasonable some of the times; other times, he came right out and said it: “disinformation” is terrorism:

    “When I speak of a threat, I do not just mean that an organization is, or is about to be, engaged in violent criminal activity. I believe many share the view that support groups that produce propaganda, disinformation or legal assistance may be even more dangerous than those who actually throw the bombs.”

    Congratulations Mother Jones, you’ve come a long way, baby!

    Next post, I’ll recover some of the early committee hearings, and the rightwing hucksters, creeps and spooks who fed Denton’s committee.

  • Putin Hints JFK Was Murdered By The "Deep State" Which Is Now After Trump And Russia

    In Megyn Kelly’s much anticipated interview with Vladimir Putin for her debut episode of NBC’s “Sunday Night with Megyn Kelly”, the Russian President said he never met Donald Trump during his business trips to Russia (including Trump’s 2013 visit to Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant), stated that he was unaware of any proposal from Jared Kushner to set up an alleged “secret line” of communications between the Trump administration and the Russian government, and that it’s “nonsense” to say Russia has collected compromising material about Trump among many other topics covered in the 7 minute interview (see below).

    “I am not aware of such a proposal,” Putin said referring to Kushner’s alleged proposal. “No such proposal ever reached me.” Putin said many CEOs of major U.S. companies visit Russia and then asked rhetorically, “do you think we’re gathering dirt on all of them right now or something?” Putin asked, before saying: “Have you all lost your mind?”

    While previously the NYT and WaPo reported that Kushner discussed the idea of creating a secret channel to discuss the crisis in Syria, with Russian ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak in December, the line was never established, according to a source cited by Bloomberg. A secret line with Russia – which H.R. McMaster said is a normal thing in diplomatic relations with international counterparties – could have allowed the Trump transition team and Russian officials to communicate outside of the scrutiny of the departing Obama administration. It’s become a centerpiece of the questions swirling around Trump and his campaign and possible ties to Russia.

    Putin also said that his nation had no channels of communication with the campaigns of either Trump or Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, but that there may have been official contacts, which he called a “standard diplomatic practice.”

    * * *

    Putin also said he’d never met Trump, including during a visit by Trump to Moscow for the 2013 Miss Universe pageant, and called the existence of a secret Russian dossier on Trump “just another piece of nonsense.”

    “There was no relationship whatsoever. Yes, he visited Moscow in his day. But, you know, I never met him,” Putin says, according to transcript.

    Putin also said that he’s not aware of any meetings between Kislyak and officials from the Trump campaign, and that he doesn’t talk to Russian ambassadors every day. He called the allegations “domestic political squabbles” and a line of attack against Trump.

    “Well, this is just another load of nonsense,” Putin said in response to a question about Kislyak meeting Trump campaign officials. “Because if there had been something meaningful, he would have made a report to the minister, and the minister would have made a report to me. There weren’t even any reports” the Russian president said cited by Bloomberg. And despite saying there had been no reports, Putin volunteered that “there was not even a specific discussion of sanctions or something else.” In a discussion moderated by Kelly on Friday, Putin said it was “nuts” to suggest the Trump administration had moved to ease economic sanctions on Russia.

    * * *

    Additionally, as previewed earlier in the day by Reuters, Putin also said that he barely interacted with Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, during a dinner in Moscow in 2015 when the pair were seated together. Flynn, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant general and former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, was paid $45,000 to speak at the anniversary gala for the Russia Today television network.

    “You and I personally have a much closer relationship than I had with Mr Flynn…. When I came to the event for our for our company, Russia Today, and sat down at the table, next to me there was a gentleman sitting on one side. I made my speech. Then we talked about some other stuff. And I got up and left… afterwards I was told, ‘You know there was an American gentleman, he was involved in some things. He used to be in the security services.’ ….That’s the extent of my acquaintance with Mr Flynn.” As a reminder, the payments Flynn received from RT, and his appearance next to Putin at the dinner, have been raised frequently amid speculation about his relationship with the Kremlin.

    Asked whether all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies that concluded Russia interfered with the election are lying, Putin said “they have been misled” and said he has not seen “any direct proof of Russia’s interference.”

    “What fingerprints or hoot-prints or horn-prints, what are you talking about,” he said. Putin even suggested that former President Barack Obama “started having doubts” when they spoke about it. The pair met on the sidelines of the APEC summit in Peru in November, weeks after Trump’s upset election win.

    The Russian president accused the U.S. of “actively interfering in electoral campaigns of other countries” while denying that Russia has any motive to do so. “Even if we wanted to, it wouldn’t make any sense for us to interfere,” Putin said.

    Meanwhile, Putin accused the US of doing precisely what Russia has been charged with doing in the US: “Put your finger anywhere on a map of the world, and everywhere you will hear complaints that American officials are interfering in internal electoral processes,” he said, adding that “every action has an equal and opposite reaction. But, I repeat, we don’t even have to do that. Presidents come and go, and even the parties in power change, but the main political direction does not change.”

    Putin claimed that Russia has a preference in an election but only reacts to the “political direction” that the United States seems to be heading in. “It wouldn’t make sense for us to interfere,” he said.

    * * *

    But the most notable highlight of the interview was Putin’s tongue in cheek hint that the Deep State – the same entity that may have been behind the Kennedy assassination according to the Russian president – is now behind the attempt to topple Trump and the ongoing push to sour ties with Russia:

    “There is a theory that Kennedy’s assassination was arranged by the United States intelligence services. So if this theory is correct, and that can’t be ruled out, then what could be easier in this day and age than using all the technical means at the disposal of the intelligence services and using those means to organize some attacks, and then pointing the finger at Russia.”

    Full interview below.

  • Mission Accomplished? Civilian Casualties In Afghanistan Are Mounting

    A massive Truck bomb shook the center of Kabul, killing at least 80 and injuring up to 400 civilians on Wednesday. Attacks against civilians have been on the rise in recent years, causing more than 11,400 deaths and injuries in 2016, according to the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA).

    Infographic: Civilian Casualties in Afghanistan are Mounting | Statista

    You will find more statistics at Statista

    As Statista's Dyfed Loesche notes, the figure has almost doubled compared to 2009.

    “This appalling conflict destroys lives and tears communities apart in every corner of Afghanistan. Real protection of civilians requires commitment and demonstrated concrete actions to protect civilians from harm and for parties to the conflict to ensure accountability for indiscriminate and deliberate acts of civilian harm.”

    -Tadamichi Yamamoto, United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Afghanistan, Kabul, February 2017.

     

    “Children have been killed, blinded, crippled – or inadvertently caused the death of their friends – while playing with unexploded ordnance that is negligently left behind by parties to the conflict. Women continue to be brutally punished in parallel so-called ‘justice’ processes while religious minorities are targeted as they pray in their mosques. The consequences of each act of violence ripple through families and entire communities that are left broken, unable to sustain themselves and largely failing to obtain any semblance of justice or reparation. After nearly 40 years of constantly evolving armed conflict in Afghanistan, a Daesh franchise has now surfaced as an additional, deadly component. It is about time the various parties to the conflict ceased the relentless commission of war crimes and thought about the harm they are doing to their mothers, fathers, children and future generations by continuing to fuel this senseless, never-ending conflict.”

    -Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Geneva, February 2017.

    Especially in conflicts like in Afghanistan, where the warring factions do not all wear uniforms, most notably the Taliban, it can be hard to make a clear distinction between civilians and non-civilian combatants.

  • Hillary Clinton's Deceptive Blame-Shifting

    Authored by Robert Parry via ConsortiumNews.com,

    Hillary Clinton has grown even more insistent that she was not at fault for her stunning election defeat last November, claiming that 1,000 Russian “agents” and their American collaborators were a decisive factor, a bizarre twist that further locks the Democrats into their evidence-light “Russia-gate” obsession.

    Hillary Clinton at the Code 2017 conference on May 31, 2017.

    In comments at a California technology conference on Wednesday, Clinton also repeated one of her favorite falsehoods – that all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies unanimously concluded that Russia hacked Democratic emails and ran a covert influence campaign against her.

    Referring to a report released by President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence (DNI) on Jan. 6, Clinton asserted that “Seventeen agencies, all in agreement, which I know from my experience as a Senator and Secretary of State, is hard to get. They concluded with high confidence that the Russians ran an extensive information war campaign against my campaign, to influence voters in the election. They did it through paid advertising we think; they did it through false news sites; they did it through these thousand agents; they did it through machine learning, which you know, kept spewing out this stuff over and over again. The algorithms that they developed. So that was the conclusion.”

    But Clinton’s statement is false regarding the unanimity of the 17 agencies and misleading regarding her other claims. Both former DNI James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan acknowledged in sworn testimony last month that the Jan. 6 report alleging Russian “meddling” did not involve all 17 agencies.

    Clapper and Brennan stated that the report was actually the work of hand-picked analysts from only three agencies – the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation – under the oversight of the DNI’s office. In other words, there was no consensus among the 17 agencies, a process that would have involved some form of a National Intelligence Estimate (or NIE), a community-wide effort that would have included footnotes citing any dissenting views.

    Instead, as Clapper testified before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on May 8, the Russia-hacking claim came from a “special intelligence community assessment” (or ICA) produced by selected analysts from the CIA, NSA and FBI, “a coordinated product from three agencies – CIA, NSA, and the FBI – not all 17 components of the intelligence community,” the former DNI said.

    And, as Clapper explained, the “ICA” was something of a rush job beginning on President Obama’s instructions “in early December” and completed by Jan. 6. Clapper continued: “The two dozen or so analysts for this task were hand-picked, seasoned experts from each of the contributing agencies.”

    However, as any intelligence veteran will tell you, if you hand-pick the analysts, you are really hand-picking the conclusion since the agency chiefs would know who was, say, a hardliner on Russia and who could be trusted to deliver the desired product.

    On May 23, in testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, former CIA Director John Brennan confirmed Clapper’s account about the three agencies involved.

    “It wasn’t a full inter-agency community assessment that was coordinated among the 17 agencies, and for good reason because of the nature and the sensitivity of the information trying, once again, to keep that tightly compartmented,” Brennan said.

    In other words, Clinton’s beloved claim that all 17 intelligence agencies were in agreement on the Russian “hacking” charge – an assertion that the “fact-checking” group Politifact has certified as “true” and that has been repeated endlessly by the mainstream U.S. news media – is not true. It is false. Gee, you might even call it “fake news.”

    The Mysterious ‘Agents’

    But Clinton’s false claim about the intelligence consensus was not her only dubious assertion. Her reference to the 1,000 Russian “agents” is not contained in the Jan. 6 report, either. It apparently derived from unconfirmed speculation from Sen. Mark Warner, D-Virginia, who mentioned this claim at a news conference on March 30, admitting that he didn’t know if it was true.

    President Donald Trump being sworn in on Jan. 20, 2017. (Screen shot from Whitehouse.gov)

    Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said:

    “We know about the hacking, and selective leaks, but what really concerns me as a former tech guy is at least some reports – and we’ve got to get to the bottom of this – that there were upwards of a thousand internet trolls working out of a facility in Russia, in effect taking over a series of computers which are then called botnets, that can then generate news down to specific areas.

     

    “It’s been reported to me, and we’ve got to find this out, whether they were able to affect specific areas in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, where you would not have been receiving off of whoever your vendor might have been, Trump versus Clinton, during the waning days of the election, but instead, ‘Clinton is sick’, or ‘Clinton is taking money from whoever for some source’ … fake news.”

    Of course, many stories about Clinton being sick or her taking money from special interests weren’t “fake news.” In late 2012, she suffered from a blood clot and – during the 2016 campaign – she was staggered by a bout of pneumonia. She also was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for speeches to Wall Street and other groups.

    Warner didn’t specify where his information about the “trolls” came from but it paralleled a claim by freelance journalist Adam Chen who asserted in a podcast with Longform that Russian “trolls” began writing favorably about Trump in late 2015. (The CIA/FBI/NSA report also apparently alluded to the same report without mentioning the name of the journalist or specifying the number of alleged “trolls.”)

    “I created this list of Russian trolls when I was researching,” Chen said, referring to a 2015 reporting project that he turned into a rather thinly sourced New York Times Magazine article accusing a Russian oligarch of funding a professional “troll” operation in St. Petersburg, Russia. “I check on it once in a while, still. And a lot of them have turned into conservative accounts, like fake conservatives. I don’t know what’s going on, but they’re all tweeting about Donald Trump and stuff.”

    Although such “troll” and “hacking” complaints are treated as a one-way street – coming only from the evil Russians – the reality is that U.S. intelligence agencies, their allies and U.S.-government-funded “non-governmental organizations” have mounted similar operations against Russia and other targets.

    It is always difficult to nail down precisely where such operations are originating, but the Russians have cited previous cases of malicious hacking aimed at senior officials, including Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev, whose accounts were hacked in 2013 and 2014 including publication of a false resignation and a confession of wrongdoing.

    In 2015, the “Panama Papers,” a vast trove of documents purloined from a Panamanian law firm, became an investigative project that involved a USAID-funded news outlet and led to attacks on President Vladimir Putin for corruption even though his name did not appear in the documents.

    So, this high-tech spy-vs.-spy game – if that’s what it is – does not appear to be originating entirely from the Russian side of the street. But the U.S. intelligence community is not going to divulge what it knows about the attacks against Russia, only what it can “assess” about Russia’s possible attacks against Western targets.

    No Self-Criticism

    Neither, of course, are Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party eager to engage in a serious self-criticism about how they managed to blow an extremely winnable race against an extraordinarily flawed candidate in Donald Trump. Rather than look at their own missteps and misjudgments, they are presenting themselves as innocent victims.

    U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry listens to Russian President Vladimir Putin in a meeting room at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, at the outset of a bilateral meeting on July 14, 2016. [State Department Photo]

    In Wednesday’s interview – after misrepresenting what the Jan. 6 report actually said – Clinton suggested that the Trump campaign must have colluded with the Russians in “weaponizing” the data.

    “How did they know what messages to deliver?” Clinton asked. “Who told them? Who were they coordinating with, or colluding with? … [The Russians] were conveying this weaponized information and the content of it. … So the Russians — in my opinion and based on the intel and the counterintel people I’ve talked to — could not have known how best to weaponize that information unless they had been guided. … Guided by Americans and guided by people who had polling and data information.”

    Although Clinton lacked any proof of this convoluted accusation, she cited as her “best example” the fact that “within one hour, one hour of the ‘Access Hollywood’ tapes being leaked [in which Trump was caught boasting about groping women], within one hour, the Russians — let’s say WikiLeaks, something — dumped the John Podesta emails.”

    However, if you changed the context of this claim slightly – and made a similar jump in logic – you would surely be labeled a nutty conspiracy theorist, but instead Clinton has drawn nods of agreement for this wholly unsubstantiated speculation.

    Yet, besides blaming the Russians and WikiLeaks for her loss, Clinton spread the blame even wider, for instance, to The New York Times for focusing too much on her decision to use a private email server while Secretary of State – “they covered it like it was Pearl Harbor” – and for the Times’ Nate Silver publishing optimistic odds on her chances for victory. “I also think I was the victim of a very broad assumption I was going to win,” she said.

    Clinton also placed blame on the Democratic National Committee for lacking money and sophisticated technology. “I get the nomination. So I’m now the nominee of the Democratic Party. I inherit nothing from the Democratic Party,” she said. “I mean it was bankrupt; it was on the verge of insolvency; its data was mediocre to poor, nonexistent, wrong. I had to inject money into it.”

    Yet, when Clinton was asked about some of her own “misjudgments,” she slipped back into the defensive posture that contributed to her troubles as a presidential candidate. For instance, regarding why she gave lucrative speeches to Goldman Sachs between her time leaving the State Department and announcing her White House run, she answered coyly, “They paid me.”

    When pressed on the point, Clinton retreated behind the sanctity of the 9/11 terror attack and the issue of women’s rights. Reminded that “you’re not somebody who needed that money for the next week’s shopping, and you knew you might run, so why do it?” – she responded:

    “The most common thing that I talked about in all those speeches was the hunt for Bin Laden. You know, that was one of the central missions that I felt from the time the towers fell on 9/11 as a Senator from New York.”

    Then, Clinton added, “you know, men got paid for the speeches they made. I got paid for the speeches I made. And it [the paid-speech issue] was used, and I thought it was unfairly used.”

    Blocking Witnesses

    So, while the Democrats dig themselves deeper into the so-far empty pit of blaming Russia for their electoral disaster, the Russia-gate investigation continues to take on other curious aspects, such as an unwillingness to hear from some of Donald Trump’s advisers who have been named in accusations and who have volunteered to testify publicly.

    Former Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page.

    On Wednesday, Carter Page, a Navy veteran and businessman who had lived in Russia, announced that his plans to defend himself in testimony next week before the House Intelligence Committee had been placed on hold by the Democrats.

    Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the ranking Democrat on the committee and a major sparkplug powering the investigation, offered a curious denial of Page’s complaint while confirming the truth of it.

    The New York Times, which has been another advocate for blaming Russia, phrased the postponement of Page’s testimony as if Page were the unreasonable one, reporting:

    “Representative Adam Schiff … dismissed accusations from Carter Page, another Trump adviser who is under scrutiny, that the committee is preventing him from testifying. Mr. Schiff …. said the investigation would first review relevant documents before interviewing witnesses.”

    In other words, Page, who has been portrayed via intelligence leaks to the news media as essentially a traitor, won’t be given the opportunity to defend his reputation until Schiff and the other Democrats decide the time is ripe.

    Yet, it’s not as if the House Intelligence Committee has not taken public testimony about Russia-gate. For instance, former CIA Director Brennan was allowed to speak indirectly about Page and other possibly treasonous Americans amid media reports naming Page as one of those suspected Russian “agents.”

    Normal investigations grant the people under attack at least the opportunity to defend themselves and their reputations in a timely fashion, rather than make them live under the cloud of suspicion without having a chance to state their case.

    If their sworn testimony is later undermined by evidence developed by investigators, the witnesses can be called back and called out on possible perjury. So, it’s not as if Schiff and the other Democrats are surrendering prerogatives by letting Page testify now rather than later. Indeed, Page would be putting himself in legal jeopardy if he is caught lying.

    Even the Republican-driven “Benghazi investigation,” which also had the look of an over-the-top “witch hunt,” gave Secretary of State Clinton and other Obama administration officials multiple opportunities to explain their response to the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate.

    But, so far, a similar courtesy has not been extended to the targets of the Russia-gate investigation.

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