Trump's "fascism forever" Supreme Court pick: shades of Rehnquist by The Wayne Madsen Report

Trump's "fascism forever" Supreme Court pick: shades of Rehnquist 

By The Wayne Madsen Report

President Trump further leads the United States into the depths of fascism in his selection of Neil Gorsuch as the replacement for the late Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court. In the early 1980s, while attending the elite Jesuit-run male-only Georgetown Preparatory school in Washington, DC, Gorsuch founded the "Fascism Forever Club." Gorsuch served as president of the club until his graduation in 1985. At the time he was attending the prep school, Gorsuch's mother, Anne Gorsuch, served as the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under Ronald Reagan.


Gorsuch entry in the 1985 Georgetown Prep School yearbook

Anne Gorsuch was a harbinger for the anti-environmental Scott Pruitt, Trump's pick to head the EPA. As EPA administrator, Gorsuch attempted to quash the Clean Air Act while she smoked two packs of Marlboros a day. She died from cancer in 2004. Although the type of cancer was never disclosed, Gorsuch died at the Aurora Medical Center in Aurora, Colorado, which has top ratings for lung cancer treatment.

The Fascism Forever Club was billed as an anti-faculty group opposed to what it considered were "left-wing" faculty members.


Gorsuch's 1988 Columbia graduation yearbook, in which Gorsuch extols Kissinger's infamous quote about the illegal and the unconstitutional

In his graduation yearbook at Columbia University in 1988, Gorsuch's photograph is shown alongside his favorite quote, one made by Henry Kissinger on August 29, 1967: "The illegal we do immediately, the unconstitutional takes a little longer." Kissinger made the statement while a professor at Harvard, where Neil Gorsuch would eventually attend law school.

Gorsuch's early flirtation with fascism complements other fascist tendencies by the Trump administration, including its disregard for the Constitution and Bill of Rights. On February 2, Trump attended the annual National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, DC, which is sponsored by the secretive Fellowship Foundation led for decades by the 88-year old Douglas Coe. The foundation traces its origins to a Seattle Methodist minister named Abraham Vereide, who advanced anti-labor fascist politics in the post-World War I years. Vereide's anti-union and pro-business prayer breakfast group, a cover for fascist policy-making, soon went nationwide.

In 1989, Coe, who Hillary Clinton once called her "spiritual mentor," said, "Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler were three men. Think of the immense power these three men had... But they bound themselves together in an agreement . . . Jesus said, 'You have to put me before other people. And you have to put me before yourself.' Hitler, that was the demand to be in the Nazi party. You have to put the Nazi party and its objectives ahead of your own life and ahead of other people."

On the day "Punxsutawney Phil," the Pennsylvania groundhog, predicted six more weeks of winter, Trump sat with hundreds of creepy right-wing followers of Coe in the ballroom of the Washington Hilton Hotel. They include senators, U.S. representatives, ambassadors, corporate executives, and leaders of foreign nations.

Trump's nomination of Gorsuch is reminiscent of President Nixon's nomination of William Rehnquist to the Supreme Court in 1972. Two years earlier, Nixon ordered the White House guards to wear ornamental Prussian military-style hats, something befitting Nixon's "imperial presidency," which ultimately led to his resignation over the Watergate scandal. The Prussian hats did not last very long amid ridicule by the press and late-night TV comedians.

Nixon's nomination of Rehnquist shocked many when it was discovered that as a young lawyer in Arizona, Rehnquist held views similar to those of the far-right John Birch Society: Chief Justice Earl Warren and President Dwight Eisenhower were "pinko" leftists, while Associate Justices William O. Douglas and Hugo Black were outright "commies." In the late 1950s, Rehnquist was opposed to desegregation and lamented the fact that whites and "negroes" might have to "glower at one another" over integrated lunch counters. For all Rehnquist's far right-wing views, Nixon did not like Rehnquist when he first met him in the White House. The future Chief Justice was a bureaucratic flunky in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel at the time. Nixon asked his counsel John Dean about Rehnquist, "Is he Jewish? He looks it." Dean replied that he was of Scandinavian descent.

Rehnquist's far-right background did not prevent him from being confirmed by the Senate as both Associate Justice and, later, as Chief Justice. And, although Gorsuch admired fascism and Kissinger in his earlier years, that did not prevent the Senate from confirming him unanimously on a voice vote as a federal appeals court judge in July 2006. 

Trump's "Monday Night Massacre" -- welcome to the constitutional crisis By the Wayne Madsen Report

January 31-February 1, 2017 -- Trump's "Monday Night Massacre" -- welcome to the constitutional crisis By the Wayne Madsen Report
The firing of acting Attorney General Sally Yates by President Trump on the evening of January 30 reminded many seasoned Washington politicos of President Nixon's firing of three top Justice Department officials during the Watergate scandal in October 1973. Nixon fired Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox. After Attorney General Elliot Richardson and his deputy William Ruckelshaus refused to fire Cox, Nixon fired them both. Only Solicitor General Robert Bork was willing to carry Nixon's hatchet.

Yates, a career Justice Department prosecutor, was fired by Trump after she refused to order U.S. attorneys around the country to defend Trump's ban on valid U.S. visa holders entering the United States. In a letter to Justice Department attorneys, Yates wrote; "[F]or as long as I am the Acting Attorney General, the Department of Justice will not present arguments in defense of the Executive Order." In a tweet, Trump falsely accused Yates of being an "Obama AG" when, in fact, she is a nonpolitical career Justice Department civil service official filling in during an administration transition vacancy.

Yates was filling the job of acting Attorney General while Attorney General-designate Jeff Sessions awaits Senate confirmation. Yates was placed in the job because she, as a Justice Department official confirmed for her job by the Senate, was one of the few in the department authorized to sign Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) wiretap requests to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

The firing of Yates came after a sixth federal judge, Dolly Gee of the U.S. District Court of the Central District of California, ordered the Department of Homeland Security to immediately return to the United States an Iranian national who possessed a valid U.S. visa and was deported from Los Angeles to Dubai. The Trump White House continues to insist that Trump's executive order, which bans visitors from seven predominantly Muslim nations, overrides judicial orders. That decision by Trump also has placed the country into a constitutional crisis. Trump's point man on the visa ban, lawyer Stephen Miller, believes that the Trump order is not a "ban on Muslims" when, in fact, they are the target of the order as revealed by former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a Trump insider. Miller, who is Jewish, is a defender of the hate politics espoused by neo-Nazi leader Richard Spencer. Miller and Spencer were colleagues at Duke University where they were both members of the Duke Conservative Union.

There are reports that Trump's son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner, who is also Jewish, is furious over the roles now being played by Miller and political counselor Steve Bannon in crafting extremist policies being signed out by Trump as executive orders. Miller, Bannon, and Trump all insisted that the visa ban order not be cleared with anyone outside or even inside the White House. The Department of Homeland Security and its secretary, John Kelly, was among those not briefed about Trump's order beforehand. In a continuation of the Monday Night Massacre, Trump fired acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement director Daniel Ragsdale and replaced him with Thomas Homan, a Trump sycophant and a former New York City police official under Giuliani. Even the White House Office of Legal Counsel and the Office of Management and Budget were not briefed on the executive order nor were they even asked if it was legal and within budget and regulatory constraints.

During Yates's Senate confirmation hearing to be deputy Attorney General, Senator Sessions, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, pressed her on saying "no" to the president if he asked her to carry out an unlawful or improper order. Of course, Sessions was then referring to President Obama, but Yates made it clear that the Attorney General had an obligation to uphold the law no matter what the president ordered.



Trump's Monday Night Massacre may have also resulted in three Justice Department U.S. Attorneys being passed over

Trump decided on Dana Boente, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia in Alexandria, to succeed Yates. Boente said he would carry out Trump's visa and immigration ban order. However, Trump passed over three other U.S. Attorneys designated to succeed Yates in the event of a vacancy. In a transition order signed by President Obama, succession was to have been passed from Yates to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Channing Phillips, then U.S. Attorney for Northern Illinois Zachary Fardon, and lastly, Eileen Decker, the U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California. It is not known whether the three attorneys were asked to replace Yates and carry out Trump's order and they turned the White House down or whether they were merely passed over in order to select Boente.


DOJ succession order does not include US Attorney Boente, chosen by Trump to succeed Yates as acting AG

January 31 is a significant date in light of Trump's increasingly-unconstitutional power grabs. January 31, 1933 was the day that the German Reichstag made Adolf Hitler the German chancellor.

A week in office, Trump brings on constitutional crisis By Wayne Madsen Report

 

January 30-31, 2017 -- A week in office, Trump brings on constitutional crisis

By Wayne Madsen Report
The much-anticipated constitutional crisis many feared would come about under President Trump's bombastic style of leadership took only one week into his administration to be realized. Trump's Executive Order banning visitors, including U.S. permanent resident "green card" holders and those with valid U.S. visas, was one of the most poorly planned and implemented White House regulation in recent memory.

At airports across the world and at immigration checkpoints at airports across the United States, permanent U.S. residents were held in detention and some were put on planes back to their points of travel origination. When five federal judges issued temporary stays on the implementation of Trump's executive order, the White House balked. For some reason, the Trump administration believes the judiciary is subservient to the executive branch. It took one federal judge, John Sirica, the chief judge for the United States District Court for the District of Columbia and a Republican nominated by Dwight Eisenhower, to show President Richard Nixon that his "imperial presidency" stopped with the federal judiciary. Sirica, who was a close personal friend of boxing stat Jack Dempsey, went several rounds in court with the Nixon administration over the Watergate scandal. In the end, Sirica delivered a knock out punch to several of Nixon's closest advisers and, eventually, Nixon resigned in disgrace.

The difference between Nixon and Trump is that Nixon, a lawyer and a former member of the U.S. House and Senate, understood the brinkmanship in which he was engaging with the courts and the independent special prosecutor. Trump, a pampered real estate mogul who was handed his wealth from his Nazi- and Ku Klux Klan-supporting father, Fred Trump, has not the first idea of what kind of constitutional fire he is playing with by ignoring the orders of five federal judges.

Certain pro-Trump media outlets -- the "usual suspects" -- are claiming the five judges are all Democrats. That is one of Trump's "alternate facts." The first judge to issue a stay on Trump's visa ban executive order was Ann Donnelly, a former New York state prosecutor , who was nominated by Barack Obama to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York in Brooklyn. A native of Michigan and a graduate of Ohio State's Moritz College of Law, nothing suggests that Donnelly is a rank-and-file Democrat. In fact, the Republican Senate voted in 2015 to confirm Donnelly in a 95-2 vote.

When a number of New York City area politicians showed up at JFK International Airport with a copy of Judge Donnelly's order and demanded the release of detainees, clueless Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents feigned ignorance because their ultimate boss, Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly, had not been briefed beforehand about Trump's cockamamie and ill-prepared executive order.

The next judge to issue a temporary restraining order was Leonie Brinkema, a no-nonsense judge sitting on the bench of the national security "Rocket docket" of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in Alexandria. So named the "rocket docket" court because it often sides with the government in national security-related cases, it would normally be the last court where a national security matter would be ruled against. However, Brinkema, who sentenced the "20th hijacker" Zacarias Moussaoui to life imprisonment in the Colorado "Supermax" prison, ruled that Trump's executive order was stayed and that removal of green card holders from Dulles International Airport was suspended for seven days.

Brinkema also ordered lawyers be given access to those being detained at Dulles, an order that was immediately ignored when lawyers and three U.S. House members, Virginia Representatives Don Beyer and Gerry Connolly, and Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin, as well as New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, were denied access to the detained passengers at the airport by members of the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA) police, who are answerable not to the DHS or CPB but to the independent MWAA commission, members of which are appointed by the governors of Maryland and Virginia and the mayor of DC, with only three appointed by the president. The fact that glorified airport rent-a-cops disregarded a federal court order and those of three members of the House and one U.S. senator is a definite troubling bellwether of things to come.

The third judge to issue a stay on the White House order was Thomas Zilly of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington in Seattle. Zilly, who ordered all deportations stopped by Trump, was nominated by President Ronald Reagan. So much for the brain dead meme by Trump supporters that the order was nullified by "Democrat judges," a major "alternate fact" in Zilly's case.

The fourth and fifth judges who temporarily stayed Trump's deportation order were U.S. magistrate judge Judith Dein and District Court judge Allison Burroughs, both of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts in Boston. Dein was nominated by Bill Clinton and Burroughs by Obama. Both were confirmed by Republican-controlled Senates, Dein in 2000 and Burroughs in 2014.

There are comments on a number of dubious pro-Trump websites that are calling for "action" against the five judges. This is where certain Internet keyboard jocks should be very careful. Violence against federal judges by purveyors of the same neo-Nazi hatred advanced by Fred Trump in the 1920s and '30s and by Trump counsel Steve Bannon today is not unknown in the United States. In 1989, U.S. Eleventh Circuit of Appeals judge Robert Vance was assassinated by a mail bomb delivered to his Alabama home. Moody was also convicted for the assassination of civil rights lawyer Robbie Robinson in a mail bomb explosion at his home in Savannah, Georgia. The convicted assassin, Walter Leroy Moody, Jr., was a habitué of Klan meetings throughout the South. In 1979, Judge John Wood, Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, was assassinated by Charles Harrison, a reputed member of the right-wing kill squad that assassinated President John F. Kennedy in Dallas. In 1988, Judge Richard Daronco of the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York in Manhattan was assassinated by retired New York police officer Charles Koster, who then killed himself. The FBI revealed there were several "loose ends" in the case. In 2005, the husband and mother of U.S. Judge Joan Lefkow of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in Chicago were murdered at the judge's Chicago home. Neo-Nazi Matthew Hale had previously been convicted of soliciting a contract hit man to assassinate Judge Lefkow.



New York Times article refers to the Memorial Day 1927 arrest of President Trump's father, Fred Trump, at an anti-Catholic KKK march in Queens. The apple did not fall far from the tree.

The second Trump executive order that has turned the White House upside down is his dictate to demote the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Director of National Intelligence from members of the "Principals Committee" of the National Security Council. The Principals Committee, which normally include both the JCS chair and DNI, normally meet once a week. In fact, JCS chairman, Marine Corps General Joseph Dunford, and DNI-designate Dan Coats, have been relegated to the rank of NSC "deputies." The NSC "Deputies Committee" meets more often than the principals but they carry much less clout. Former CIA director and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told NBC News: "My biggest concern is there are actually, under the law, only two statutory advisers to the National Security Council and that's the Director of Central Intelligence, or the DNI, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I think pushing them out of the National Security Council meetings, except when their specific issues are at stake, is a big mistake." In other words, Trump's order removed the two NSC members whose membership is based on the law. It is strike two for Trump, as far as his ignorance of the law is concerned.

There are reports that two of Trump's closest advisers -- chief of staff Reince Priebus and press secretary Sean Spicer -- have come close to resigning from a White House they believe is operating by the seat of its pants.

In what might be considered strike three, Trump elevated his political counselor Bannon to the Principles Committee of the NSC. George W. Bush's counselor Karl Rove and Obama's counselor David Axelrod sat in on a few NSC meetings but they were not members nor were they permitted to speak.

The NSC decision by Trump did not sit well with General Dunford's old Marine Corps colleague, retired General James "Mad Dog" Mattis. There are rumblings in the Pentagon that Mattis is not at all pleased that his four-star Marine colleague has essentially been replaced on the NSC by Bannon, whose highest rank in the Navy was Lieutenant. At the Washington elite Alfalfa Club dinner on the evening of January 29, Mattis's unhappiness over the treatment of Dunford was the talk of the gossip circuit as was General John Kelly's irate reaction to the implementation of a visa ban order at Homeland Security over which he had zero input. White House sources at the dinner told The Atlantic's Steve Clemons that the visa ban was ordered not to be discussed with anyone outside the White House or, as was the case with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), even within the White House.

Spicer and Priebus, both of whom attended the Alfalfa Club dinner with Trump taking a pass, may have been using the absence of their vitriolic boss to vent their spleens to other attendees over drinks and dinner. Spicer, who, as a former press secretary for the U.S. Trade Representative under George W. Bush, should know what the satirical Onion is, retweeted one of their spoofs concernbing himself:


"The Onion" spoof proclaiming the Trump administration will "provide the American public with robust and clearly articulated misinformation" may not have been a mistaken re-tweet by the embattled press secretary who once worked for Priebus at the Republican National Committee.

The last president who shut the JCS out from the White House's decision-making process was Nixon. That did not work out too well for him in the long run.

There were early concerns about Trump placing so many generals in the Cabinet. So far, the generals -- Mattis and Kelly, with the addition of Dunford at JCS -- may be the only people standing between a would-be dictator and the U.S. Constitution. The clock had longer to tick out on Nixon. Trump's fast-moving clock toward impeachment is now at September 1973 in Nixonian terms.

Trump purges State Dept. of Soros and Israel ally By Wayne Madsen Report

Trump purges State Dept. of Soros and Israel ally By Wayne Madsen ReportIn what appears to be a total housecleaning of top-level diplomats at the U.S. State Department, President Trump fired longtime friend of Israel, Thomas Countryman, as the acting Under Secretary of State for International Security Affairs, an office known simply as the "T" office. In fact, according to a tweet sent out on January 26 by Bathsheba  (Sheba) Crocker, the former Assistant Secretary for International Organizations, Countryman was told to leave office on January 27 while he was en route to Rome for a non-proliferation meeting. Although the name of the meeting was not identified, there is a conference scheduled on Combating Terrorism, sponsored by the Disarmament and International Security Committee (DISEC) Model United Nations at the American University of John Cabot in Rome from January 25-29, 2017. The conference appears to have links to NGOs in Sarajevo, Mostar, Belgrade, Munich, and Bucharest that are financed by George Soros.



Crocker is the daughter of longtime State Department diplomat and the former Assistant Secretary of State Chester Crocker, a close associate and acolyte of Henry Kissinger.

Crocker was also chief of staff to Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg under Hillary Clinton. Steinberg also ensured that Countryman was placed within key State Department elements relating to protection of Israel's nuclear weapons stockpile and furthering the operations of Soros. Countryman has served as special adviser to U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright, liaison to the Clinton National Security Council's pro-Israeli special Middle East envoy Dennis Ross -- described by many Palestinians as "more pro-Israeli than the Israelis," Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs, Deputy Assistant Secretary for European Affairs responsible for the Balkans, and lastly, Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation. Countryman has been serving as the acting head of the "T" office.

Countryman speaks Arabic and Serbo-Croatian, which made him a key player in fronting for Israeli interests in the Arab world and furthering Soros's and the Central Intelligence Agency's destabilization operations in the Balkans.

WMR's sources in the Middle East know Countryman as the primary diplomat at State who bristled at the suggestion that Israel possesses nuclear weapons and always sought to change the subject. WMR learned from U.S. intelligence sources that Countryman was an important link in the covert supply of weapons grade plutonium from the United States for the modernization of Israel's aging nuclear weapons arsenal. Being in charge of nuclear nonproliferation at State was a perfect cover for Israel's nuclear supply operations.

Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria (aka "Toria") Nuland also resigned her position, although there were some reports that the Trump transition team asked her to remain. Nuland was one of the masterminds of the Euromaidan revolution in Ukraine that plunged that nation into a civil war. Nuland is married to the arch-neocon Robert Kagan, a fellow traveler of Countryman and Sheba Crocker at the Brookings Institution.

The purge at State is noteworthy. Although Trump has vowed to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, expressed support for Israeli right-wing prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, and is being advised on Middle East matters by his pro-Likud son-in-law Jared Kushner, someone in the Trump White House is paradoxically purging the State Department of several long-serving pro-Israeli career diplomats. State was long the domain of a number of Arabic-speaking diplomats, known as "Arabists," who made no secret of their slant toward the Arab countries and their antipathy toward Israel. Secretary of State-designate Rex Tillerson, who has close ties to a number of Arab governments owing to his position as CEO of Exxon Mobil, may be trying to steer Foggy Bottom back to a more neutral position on Middle Eastern affairs.

SPECIAL REPORT. McCain chief culprit in Trump "dirty dossier" - By Wayne Madsen Report

SPECIAL REPORT. McCain chief culprit in Trump "dirty dossier" 

- By Wayne Madsen Report
Well-placed sources in the United Kingdom have told WMR that it was Arizona Republican Senator John McCain who was at the center of proffering and manipulating a 35-page opposition research intelligence report on Donald Trump and Russia. The dossier, which has been ascribed to former British Secret Intelligence Service officer Christopher Steele and his private intelligence firm Orbis Business Intelligence, Ltd., alleged that Trump observed Russian prostitutes engaged in a golden shower (urination) performance at the Ritz Carlton hotel in Moscow in 2013.

Trump was in Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant. The dossier alleges that the Ritz Carlton incident and other Trump dalliances with Russian prostitutes were captured on audio and video by hidden microphones and concealed cameras placed by the Russian Federal Security Bureau (FSB) in an effort by Russian President Vladimir Putin to blackmail Trump.

Several Western intelligence professionals have called the dossier a fake. Tony Brenton, a former British ambassador to Moscow, said of the dossier, "There are some things in it that look pretty shaky."

It is known that McCain features prominently in the trafficking of the dossier before it was made public last week.

On November 18, 2016, McCain discussed the dossier with Sir Andrew Wood, a former British ambassador to Moscow, while they both attended the Halifax International Security Forum in Nova Scotia. At about the same time the details of the dossier were being presented by the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to President Obama in a joint intelligence report that had also been chopped by CIA director John Brennan and National Security Agency director Admiral Mike Rogers.

After discussing the contents of the dossier with Wood in Halifax, McCain dispatched his assistant, David J. Kramer, a former Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor under George W. Bush, to a European airport in order to collect the dossier. Out of a scene from a 1960s spy flick, Kramer was told to look for a man holding The Financial Times newspaper. Upon making contact with the "newspaper man," Kramer was driven by the retired British MI-6 agent to his home where they discussed the contents of the dossier before the former agent gave Kramer a copy to take back to Washington. The trip lasted 24 hours.

Kramer is a known Russophobe and an arch neocon. He is also a former senior fellow with the neocon Project for a New American Century. Kramer was also executive director of Freedom House, another bastion for neocons. Kramer is also associated with the Kiev regime and has argued that sanctions on Russia be continued indefinitely.

On December 9, 2016, McCain met with FBI director James Comey without aides being present to hand Comey a copy of the dossier McCain's envoy Kramer picked up from an unknown former MI-6 agent, presumably in England. However, Comey, unbeknownst to McCain, was already in possession of the dossier. It had been handed by Steele to an FBI official in Rome in August 2016.

The involvement of the British government in the dirty dossier is not insignificant. Also present with McCain and Wood in Halifax were the former head of the British Security Service (MI-5) Baroness Pauline Neville Jones, Defense Secretary Michael Fallon, and British military chief Air Chief Marshal Sir Stuart Peach. The government of Prime Minister Theresa May also attempted to slap a DA Notice (Defense Advisory Notice) to prevent the publication of Christopher Steele's name in media reports on the dirty dossier. The government opted not to impose the notice after Steele's name was published by foreign media outlets.

Shortly before the disclosure of the dirty dossier by BuzzFeed.com, British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, who is also responsible for MI-6, flew to New York on January 8 to meet with Trump. Trump snubbed Johnson but had his son-in-law Jared Kushner and adviser Steve Bannon meet with Johnson. The talks were described as "positive but frank." The term "frank" is a diplomatic term for something other than friendly. WMR has been told that Johnson wanted to assuage Trump that the British government, in no way, was connected to the preparation of the dirty dossier. On January 6, a day before Johnson arrived in New York, Clapper, Comey, Brennan, and Rogers briefed Trump on the gist of the dirty dossier at Trump Tower.

Did NSA director Rogers discover a CIA and MI-6 "dirty dossier" conspiracy against president-elect Trump and fly to New York without authorization to warn him?

WMR has been informed that Steele was not the principal author of the dossier and that he has been designated the official "patsy" by MI-6 and its chief, Alex Younger, as well as the May government, because of the political fallout from the dossier that threatens to drive a wedge between London and the Trump administration. Steele, along with his wife and two children, have fled from his £1.5 million home in Wokingham, which is 39 miles west of London, to the south of France. The Steele family is reportedly being accommodated in an MI-6 safe house.

WMR has been told that Steele's name was associated with the dirty dossier after several other British and American elements had provided input, deletions, and additions to the report. Our British sources have revealed that Steele in the "fall guy" to protect others from incurring the wrath of the incoming Trump administration. The other dossier "authors" include political operatives working for the Washington, DC political opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which originally was contracted by the Jeb Bush campaign to dig up dirt on Trump in September 2015. Fusion GPS, in turn, contracted with Steele and Orbis to dig up dirt on Trump. After Trump won the Republican presidential nomination, the Hillary Clinton campaign hired Fusion GPS and, by default, Steele and Orbis.



Steele also met with Mother Jones reporter and MSNBC contributor David Corn, a longtime apologist for the CIA, before the dirty dossier was published by BuzzFeed, a media outlet in which NBC Universal holds a significant investment. It is not known whether Corn received all or part of the Trump dossier but, at the very least, Steele did brief Corn on its contents, which were featured in a Corn article for Mother Jones on October 31, 2016.

There are a number of "chefs" involved in cooking up the dirty dossier. At a minimum, they include McCain; Fusion GPS, which was founded by former Wall Street Journal reporter Glenn Simpson; Comey and the FBI; Clapper and DNI; John Brennan and the CIA; Younger and MI-6; Ambassador Wood; Kramer and the McCain Institute; Steele's Orbis associates and informants; and members of the May government. In addition, the dossier was shared with the government-run British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in October 2016, obviously by official British sources. With such fingerprints on the dirty dossier, Steele, in fact, may be the least of all the contributors to the dubious report.

There is one important postscript to the story of the dirty dossier. On November 18, 2016, NSA director Rogers sneaked off from his headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland to personally meet with Trump at his New York office. Significantly, Rogers had not cleared his meeting with Trump with the Obama White House, which had just been briefed by Clapper, Brennan, and Rogers on the contents of the dossier. It is known that of all the major U.S. intelligence agencies, the NSA held the dossier to a level of low confidence as far as its veracity was concerned. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and Clapper felt inclined to leak to the press, after the Trump-Rogers meeting, that the two had recommended to Obama that Rogers be relieved of his post a few weeks earlier.

The dossier was known to the U.S. Intelligence Community in August 2016. NSA's global intercept capabilities, which are now known as massive, thanks to the revelations of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, means that the identities of those coordinating the black ops against Trump were known to NSA and its allied partners, including its British counterpart, in almost real-time. Rogers would have had possession of the conspiracy against Trump before either Clapper or Brennan, or, for that matter, Obama. Something coaxed Rogers to break ranks with his intelligence community counterparts and independently meet with Trump in November. In this case, the NSA may have stepped in to preserve and protect the U.S. Constitution and the orderly transfer of executive power.

MLK family's doubts about the official version of April '68 events -By The Wayne Madsen Report

MLK family's doubts about the official version of April '68 events

-By The Wayne Madsen Report
Although this editor never had the opportunity to sit down with John F. Kennedy, Jr. in July 1999 to discuss his offer to a small group of journalists he decided to hire to investigate his father's assassination -- Kennedy died in a suspicious plane crash shortly before the interview was scheduled -- there was a surprise opportunity to discuss the matters of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination with his son.

In 2003, in a rather surreal moment, I was sitting in the congressional office of U.S. Representative Cynthia McKinney talking to Martin Luther King, III about the events leading up to his father's assassination in Memphis on April 4, 1968. The purpose of the meeting was McKinney's submission to the House of the MLK Records Act, which would have, if passed and enacted, opened up sealed government files on the assassination before their scheduled release in 2028.

There was a general consensus among those in the meeting that Dr. King was the victim of a wider conspiracy involving not only the U.S. government but members of the African-American community. While I was very familiar with the evidence that pointed to accused assassin James Earl Ray having received assistance from the Central Intelligence Agency, FBI, and members of Army intelligence. But what was astounding was the belief by many in the room that King's assassination involved a member of his own entourage in Memphis, Reverend Bill Kyles. Kyles was an influential preacher among the African-American community in Memphis.


Beginning at 2:05, Kyles recounts the King assassination. The audience reacts audibly with what he slipped up and said about giving the shooter a "clear shot."

It was Kyles who urged a very reluctant King to travel to Memphis to help settle a sanitation workers' strike in the city. King was busy with his national Poor People's Campaign but he accepted Kyles's request and traveled to Memphis. Kyles was in charge of King's schedule while in Memphis and it was Kyles who prompted King, a known procrastinator, to step out on to the balcony in front of room 306 of the Lorraine Motel. It was while King was on the balcony talking to some well-wishers in the parking lot below that a sniper shot and killed King.

Kyles was also close to Jesse Jackson, also believed by some people close to King to have been part of the ruse to coax King to Memphis.

The families and closest friends of America's slain leaders know, more than anyone else, the culprits behind America's most infamous assassinations. The Kennedy family suffered at least three political assassinations: John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and John F. Kennedy, Jr. It is almost never reported that the King family suffered three assassinations, Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968; King's youngest brother, Reverend A. D. King, 39, found dead in a swimming pool on July 21, 1969; and King's mother, Alberta Williams King, shot and killed in Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on June 30, 1974.

A.D. King's sudden death on July 21 and the obvious government set-up of Senator Edward Kennedy in the Chappaquiddick car drowning incident involving Mary Jo Kopechne on the evening of July 20 were all overshadowed by another front page story, man's first moon landing.

Schumer warned Trump of CIA retaliation and it came in a piss squall by The Wayne Madsen Report

Schumer warned Trump of CIA retaliation and it came in a piss squall by The Wayne Madsen Report
After president-elect Donald Trump threw cold water on a rather sketchy U.S. Intelligence Community assessment that Russian intelligence hacked the computers and email of the Democratic National Committee and top Hillary Clinton campaign officials, Trump dismissed the allegations by stating that many nations conduct such hacking operations. On Friday, January 7, John Brennan, James Comey, Admiral Mike Rogers, and James Clapper, the respective heads of the Central Intelligence Agency, FBI, National Security Agency, and Directorate of National Intelligence, entered the Trump Tower to give Trump a classified briefing on the Russian hacking.

Earlier in the week, and this is very key to what the intelligence chiefs told Trump on Friday, New York Senator and Senate Minority Leader warned Trump that his airy dismissal of the allegations against Russia by the U.S. intelligence agencies would come back to haunt him. Schumer, speaking on MSNBC's Rachel Maddow program, warned Trump, "Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you."

And "get back" at Trump they did, when they informed him on Friday that he was the subject of a blackmail operation by the Russian government. The alleged blackmail charge was based on a suspicious 35-page private intelligence report that arrived in the hands of the FBI via the anti-Trump John McCain on December 9. Then-Senate Democratic Minority Leader Harry Reid reportedly passed the same dossier to Comey in October 2016.

One report in the partly-redacted dossier, dated June 20, 2016, alleges that during a 2013 trip to Moscow to attend the Miss Universe pageant, Trump had Russian prostitutes urinate for him in a "golden shower" performance on the same bed in the presidential suite at the Ritz-Carlton hotel that President Obama and Michelle Obama slept in during an earlier state visit to Russia. The report concludes that Russia used the incident to blackmail Trump into granting Russia concessions in the event he was elected president. The report also alleges that, in addition to the Ritz-Carlton incident, Trump's "unorthodox behavior" during a series of other trips to Russia had provided the Russians with additional embarrassing blackmail, including "sex parties" in St. Petersburg, contained on videotapes and audio recordings.

The "report" was said to have originated with an anonymous former British MI-6 clandestine officer who had served in Moscow and who had since retired to form his own private intelligence company. Although the report was said to have been floating around media, intelligence, and federal law enforcement circles since last October, it was not revealed until after the "big four" intelligence chief's meeting with Trump, much too late to have affected the election.

Although the authenticity of the dossier could not be verified, Buzzfeed decided to publish it anyway as "news" in a shocking display of unprofessional journalism. The allegations in the report first surfaced in a Mother Jones article written by Clinton and CIA hack David Corn on October 31, 2016. Corn is the author of "Blond Ghost," a favorable biography of one of the CIA's all-time political dirty tricks operators, Ted Shackley. Corn's article, without any independent verification, claimed "Russian intelligence had 'compromised' Trump during his visits to Moscow and could "blackmail him."

WMR has seen this sort of social networking-based "guilty verdict" before with some of the same players involved. The core group pushing the Trump blackmail story are the typical coterie of neocons, including McCain, Buzzfeed's Ben Smith, former Naval War College professor John Schindler (who was fired by the college for "sexting" a photograph of his penis to a woman not his wife), Louise Mensch (one of Rupert Murdoch's gossip column flunkies in London and an ex-Tory Member of Parliament), and CNN president Jeff Zucker.

WMR's editor was the subject of a similar social media mob campaign, centered around Schindler, Mensch, and The Daily Telegraph of the UK, over an exclusive front page interview given The Observer of the UK on NSA's third party signals intelligence partners in Europe. The neocon spin machine resulted in the interview being pulled from the second print run of The Observer and from the website of its sister newspaper, The Guardian.

The document, titled "US Presidential Election: Republican Candidate Donald Trump's Activities in Russia and Compromising Relationship with the Kremlin," contains a number of clues to indicate that it is a hoax that mixes standard U.S. and British intelligence classified document formatting with obvious fraudulent content. One tell-tale sign of U.S. intelligence and/or federal law enforcement involvement in the production of the document is the use of ALL CAPS for last names. U.S. Attorneys commonly put first and last names in ALL CAPS. This is a common format for CIA and FBI reports, as well as federal indictments. On the other hand, the security caveat "CONFIDENTIAL/SENSITIVE SOURCE" is not standard classification usage for U.S. or British classified documents.

At least part of the raw intelligence on Russian cyber-targeting and human intelligence recruiting effort inside Russia and neighboring countries like Latvia appears to have originated with the British private security firm Orbis Business Intelligence, Ltd., headquartered in London. The business was founded in 2009 by two ex-British Secret Intelligence Service (MI-6) officers, Christopher Steele and Christopher Burrows. Steele is a former deputy to MI-6's Moscow head of station Richard Noble in 1990. In 1991, Steele continued to serve in Moscow under Steele's replacement, John McLeod Scarlett. Scarlett was the head of MI-6 from 2004 to 2009.

More importantly, Scarlett was involved, along with Prime Minister Tony Blair's Communications and Strategy director Alistair Campbell in the preparation of the so-called British "dodgy dossier," also known as the "September Dossier," of September 24, 2002, that wrongfully concluded that Sadaam Hussein possessed chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction. Moreover, in a foreword to the dossier, Blair wrote, "The document discloses that his [Sadaam's] military planning allows for some of the WMD to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them. The 45-minute allegation was used by the British press to falsely claim that Britain was "45 minutes" from doom as a result of an Iraqi chemical attack.

The "dodgy dossier" also falsely claimed that Iraq had sought to obtain significant quantities of uranium from Africa. The "dodgy dossier" was proven to be based on a number of falsehoods that were later debunked. However, Blair used the dossier as justification for Britain to join the United States in the invasion and occupation of Iraq and President George W. Bush used the uranium in Africa charge in his January 2003 State of the Union address.

We now see the same circle of MI-6 officers linked to the dubious report on Trump, some of the contents of which were apparently presented to Trump's rival for the GOP presidential nomination, Jeb Bush, as opposition research on Trump. The same report, in some form, apparently also fell into the hands of the Hillary Clinton campaign after Trump received the GOP nomination in July 2016. With the involvement of Blair's political henchmen with the Orbis group that prepared the report, it is not a stretch to assume that Blair could have been involved in hyping the importance and veracity of the report to Senators Reid and McCain, who passed it on to FBI director Comey.

As for Scarlett, in 2011, he joined the board of Times Newspapers Ltd., owned by Rupert Murdoch's NI Group. It was Murdoch's other newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, that published the identities of Steele and Orbis as the source of the dossier on Trump.

A report dated June 26, 2016, contained in the dossier appears to be a standard report on Russian intelligence cyber-targeting. It deals with Russian "state-sponsored offensive cyber operations" on the "external targets [of] foreign governments and big corporations, especially banks." Nothing in this report mentions Trump. Oddly, the report states that "US citizens of Russian (Jewish) origin" were approached by Russian Federal Security Bureau (FSB) agents while on business trips to Russia. The singling out of Jews for such approaches is an indicator that American Jewish groups may have had some input on the dubious dossier.

The entire dossier appears to be a hybrid, part of it containing U.S. and/or British intelligence information and other parts strongly suggesting bogus information authored by non-intelligence parties.

Another dossier report, dated August 5, 2016, is a tell-tale sign of CIA creation. The report suggests that Russian "Premier MEDVEDEV's office" was furious over Russian intelligence hacking of the DNC." This is clearly an attempt to portray a split between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitriy Medvedev, a longtime goal of the CIA and the Obama administration.

An August 19, 2016 report alleges the Russians had also successfully financed other American figures. The report specifically mentions Lyndon LaRouche, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, Democratic presidential contender Bernie Sanders, Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page, Trump's earlier campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, and former Defense Intelligence Agency chief Michael Flynn. WikiLeaks, long a major target for the CIA, is also implicated as part of the "grand Russian conspiracy" in the dossier, as is Araz Agalarov, an Azeri business associate of Trump.

Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort are accused in the dossier of being agents for the Russian government. An October 20, 2016, report says that a planned meeting between Cohen and a Russian government official scheduled for Moscow in July 2016 were moved to Prague, Czechia, described in the report as a "soft" EU country. The alleged meeting is said to have taken place at the Prague office of the Russian parastatal firm Rossotrudnichestvo. The claim of such a meeting is astounding since Czech intelligence would normally have that particular office under close surveillance.



However, Czechia is also a member of NATO and the location of a number of NGOs controlled by George Soros, so it is anything but "safe." A safer non-NATO country in the EU for such a meeting would have been either Finland, Sweden, or Austria. Nevertheless, Cohen claims he was never in Prague. Cohen is implicated in the affair because his wife is "of Russian descent" and "her father is a leading property developer in Moscow." In another example of the report being a bogus and amateurish product, Trump's attorney Michael Cohen was not in Prague at the time the report indicated but was with his son at the University of Southern California. CNN backtracked on its initial report by claiming it was another Michael Cohen who was in Prague in 2016. This was another example of shoddy journalism with a story that never had any legs to begin with. The dossier is replete with many other examples of pure guilt by association.



The listing of various American citizens, with the insinuation of their being disloyal, is highly reminiscent of the "Red lists" compiled by the FBI during the witch-hunting days of Senator Joseph McCarthy.

The July 30, 2016, report alleges that the Trump team provided Russia with "intelligence activities, business and otherwise, in the US of leading Russian oligarchs and their families." This refers to exiled oligarchs who have been working to overthrow Putin's government by any means and they include Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Leonid Nevzlin, Mikhail Chernoy, and other Russian Jewish billionaires who split their time between Israel, the United Kingdom, and the United States. They have the means and the motives to create a bogus intelligence report implicating Trump, Putin, and others in an election conspiracy.

The inclusion of former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych in the dossier indicates that the Ukrainian government, backed by Ukrainian-Israeli oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, also played a role in the report's preparation. At the same time the dossier was released, there was a report that the Ukrainian government and intelligence service provided covert assistance to the Hillary Clinton campaign to prevent Trump's election. A reference to Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) workers and ethnic Russians in Latvia being targeted to be agents for Russia is an indication that the virulently anti-Russian Latvian government also provided input to the dossier.



During the Cold War, the U.S. State Department maintained an office that routinely discovered bogus documents issued by Soviet intelligence claimed to of official U.S. government origin. However, the State Department often discovered tell-tale clues, some obvious, others not so much, proving the documents were propaganda forgeries. Just as was the case with the crude Soviet forgeries, the Trump dossier contains several glaring clues that point to it being a hoax.

WMR learned from a former CIA clandestine service officer that the CIA engaged in such practices -- producing fake intelligence reports to embarrass political leaders in Third World countries -- during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. He added that the dossier about Trump bore the fingerprints of a Brennan-initiated hoax and that it involved a more general civil war within the U.S. intelligence community between pro- and anti-Trump officials.

A September 14, 2016 report on Russia's Alfa Group, formerly Alfa-Eco, the largest private investment firm in Russia, politically controlling Putin misspells the company as "Alpha Group." This points to the document's authors having military connections to the United States and/or NATO.  The Russian military's special operations (Spetsnaz) group "A" is known as the "Alpha Group," which is consistent with the alpha-numeric nomenclature employed by the U.S. military, intelligence community, and NATO. The error in using "Alpha" instead of "Alfa" indicates a U.S. intelligence and/or military connection to the dossier because the author of the particular section in question, likely a CIA operative, confused Russia's Spetsnaz team with a major Russia corporation. This is a sloppy indicator of the dossier being a fake.

Other signs of fakery include the misspellings of names, such as the three references to "Paul MANNAFORT" in the October 19 report contained in the dossier. The name is spelled "Manafort."

One copy of the dossier cites Barvikha, a town outside of Moscow, as being "reserved for the residences of the top leadership and their close associates." This statement is false. Barvikha is open to any Russians, although many who live there tend to be wealthier citizens. The authors of the dossier appear not to have had extraordinary intelligence on Barvikha but obtained their information from the problematic Wikipedia, which refers to the town as the site of state dachas for the USSR's leading officials and intellectuals during Soviet times. Barvikha has not hosted any Russian leader since Boris Yeltsin. The use of outdated information from open sources represents yet another major sign of a hoax document.

The use of the phrase "plausible deniability" in the July 30 section of the dossier to describe Russian actions in support of Trump is from the CIA's lexicon.

The entire dossier appears to be a fictionalized spy novel complete with tales of sexual blackmail, refuge hangouts in Bulgaria (bolt-holes), Romanian hackers, shady Azerbaijani businessmen, bribed U.S. political advisers, Chinese kickbacks,and clandestine meetings in Volgograd and Prague. However, the entire script is more Austin Powers than James Bond.

What has been lost by the U.S. corporate media in the current furor over alleged Russian intelligence involvement in the U.S. election is the now-proven involvement of senior levels of British intelligence in the election and in having their fingerprints on the Trump dossier. It is always automatically assumed that British intelligence has selfless motives when it comes to the United States. U.S. media buys into that notion by hiring a number of British nationals as reporters and editors, including the New York Times's CEO Mark Thompson, Wall Street Journal editor Gerard Baker, Cosmopolitan editor Joanna Coles (formery with The Guardian), NBC News (which owns BuzzFeed.com) president Deborah Turness, ABC News international editor Jon Williams, CNN anchor Richard Quest, and New York Daily News editor Colin Myler. British native Tina Brown's influence is still felt at The Daily Beast, which she founded. Top British media executives and editors are well-known for their ties to British intelligence.



The chief media cheerleaders pushing the British intelligence-linked Trump dossier all have British connections: Wall Street Journal, Cosmopolitan, The Daily Beast, New York Daily News, CNN, and, especially, NBC's BuzzFeed, which published the dossier without verifying that it was authentic. Don't expect to see any headlines announcing: "British intelligence connections found between Jeb! and Hillary campaigns and anti-Trump dossier."

Unprecedented: CIA attempting to undermine president-elect By The Wayne Madsen Report

 Unprecedented: CIA attempting to undermine president-elect 

By The Wayne Madsen Report
Although the Central Intelligence Agency has had a long history of undermining presidents-elect and prime ministers-elect in other countries, the United States has never witnessed the intelligence agency so blatantly attempting to politically weaken a U.S. president-elect just a few weeks prior to the inauguration. What the CIA is doing in forcing Donald Trump into shifting from his campaign promise of restoring good relations with Russia to one of outright hostility to Moscow -- favored by the CIA, Director of National Intelligence (DNI), and the neo-conservatives within the Republican and Democratic party establishments -- is nothing less than an overt threat to American democracy.

Amid pressure from the CIA, DNI, National Security Agency, and the Department of Defense's under-secretariat for Intelligence, Trump has vowed to revamp the U.S. Intelligence Community. Trump has also questioned the politicization of U.S. intelligence, particularly the January 5 Senate Foreign Relations Committee testimony of DNI James Clapper, NSA director Mike Rogers, and Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Marcel Lettre. Clapper, in particular, not only called out Russia for hacking election-related computers at the Democratic National Committee but also using "fake news, social media and RT to influence the recent US elections." That was a slap at Trump's incoming national security adviser, former Defense Intelligence Agency chief retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who stood accused of re-tweeting, along with his son, "fake news."

Clapper not only used the Senate Armed Service Committee hearing to rant about Russian hacking of U.S. election-related computers but used the occasion to push for a U.S. government propaganda agency to counteract not only Russia but also WikiLeaks, social media, and any news source that disagreed with U.S. government policy. Clapper said, "We could do with having a USIA [U.S. Information Agency] on steroids to fight this information war a lot more aggressively than we’re doing right now." The U.S. has moved so far to the right, it should be recalled that it was uber-conservative Republican Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who pushed for USIA to be eliminated in 1999 because it represented too powerful a U.S. government propaganda arm that was ultimately beholden to the Secretary of State. Now, Clapper does not believe USIA was powerful enough, a stand that would make Helms turn over in his grave.

Clapper had particular disdain for RT, the Russian government-supported global satellite news network. He said, "RT was very active in promoting a particular point of view, disparaging our system, our alleged hypocrisy about human rights, etc. Whatever crack, fissure they could find in our tapestry, they would exploit it." Clapper's statement had nothing to do with the stated purpose of the hearing, Russian cyber-intrusions into the 2016 U.S. election. Under McCain's constipated chairmanship, the hearing devolved into constant Russia-bashing by Clapper, Rogers, Lettre, McCain, Graham, and Senators Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Ben Cardin (D-MD). Cardin intends to propose legislation that will increase sanctions on Russia. Cardin's only interest is to advance the Russia destabilization goals of George Soros and exiled anti-Vladimir Putin Russian tax cheats and oligarchs Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Leonid Nevzlin, all supported by Cardin's puppet masters that include the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and American Jewish Committee. It is also the case that Cardin, Soros, Khodorkovsky, and Nevzlin all happen to be Jewish.

The Bobbsey Twins who advocate nothing less than an all-out U.S.-Russian war, Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC), were prepped by the U.S. Intelligence Community to rattle the sabers against Russia. Before an approving Clapper, Rogers, and Lettre, Graham issued an unprecedented warning to a president-elect about his need to kow-tow before the U.S. Intelligence Community, "Mr. President-elect, when you listen to these people, you can be skeptical, but understand, they’re the best among us, and they’re trying to protect us." As for Russia, Graham, summoning up his usual persona of a hysterical Southern belle with a sudden onset of the vapors, declared, "Ladies and gentlemen, it is time now not to throw pebbles but to throw rocks."

The CIA can easily manipulate the two neo-con senators because of the blackmail it has on both. McCain's intelligence dossier, as previously reported by WMR, contains details of his USS Forrestal flight deck "horseplay" antics with his A-4 fighter. McCain's July 1967 dangerous "wet start" of his A-4 resulted in the deadliest ship fire, not caused by combat, in the history of the U.S. Navy. CIA files are also bulging with still-classified details of the information McCain spilled to his North Vietnamese and Soviet interrogators while a prisoner-of-war from 1967 to 1972. McCain was so loose-lipped about Navy operational schedules and tactics, his fellow POWs nicknamed the son of Navy Admiral John S. McCain, Jr., then the Commander of U.S. Pacific Forces, "songbird."

Then there is the information never publicly revealed by the Senate Ethics Committee about the amount of money McCain illegally took from Lincoln Savings and Loan chairman Charles Keating, enough money to have kicked McCain out of the Senate and into a federal prison. What the CIA has on McCain is enough collateral to ensure that he echoes everything he is told by Langley, including his warning to Trump that Russia's hacking threatens the "unraveling" McCain's precious "world order." However, McCain's "world order" is represented by neo-Nazis and fascists ruling Ukraine, the outbreak of war with Russia in Europe and the Caucasus, Sunni jihadists taking over Syria and Lebanon, a joint U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, illegal migrants continuing to stream into the United States from Mexico and into Europe from the Middle East and North Africa, and a continuing freeze in U.S. relations with Cuba.

As for the goods the CIA has on Graham, homosexuality may no longer be taboo in the U.S. military but it was while Graham served as a reserve officer in the Air Force Judge Advocate General corps for most of his 33 years in the reserve prior to his retirement in 2015. In Graham's home state of South Carolina, gays serving openly in the military has never been a popular cause. Because of South Carolina's large number of military veterans Graham has tried to keep his gay life style a secret from his constituents, but to little avail. Reporters for The State newspaper in Columbia are well aware of Graham's sexual orientation but publicly reporting it because of pressure from the state's Republican Party establishment.

While attending the National Press Club's Fourth Estate dinner honoring CBS newsman Bob Schieffer on October 15, 2010, this editor was on the receiving end of a very drunk Graham, at the very end of the festivities and after Schieffer and his country band stopped playing, leaning on me and asking where "we" would continue to party. I replied that "I" was heading home to Arlington, Virginia and was calling it a night. At about the same time, Graham's aide came up, gave me a rolling eyes apologetic glance, and told the senator his car was outside and that it was time to leave. The warnings about Graham from the reporters with The State all made a world of sense as Graham staggered with his aide from the press club's ballroom. The CIA very likely has photos of Graham, a lifelong bachelor, when he did not leave DC parties unaccompanied.


Lindsey Graham [left] and Bob Schieffer [right] the night in 2010 when Graham was looking for a guy to "party" with after hours. The CIA, which is no stranger to the prostitution game -- female and male -- has probably supplied Graham with a number of after-party companions.

Senator Cotton echoed the anti-Russian theme during the McCain hearing. Cotton also has a problem with CIA blackmail. As WMR previously reported, Cotton, a former Army Ranger who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and a close colleague of Graham, was found to have been running political ads on GRINDR, a smart phone application for gay men looking to hook up with other gay men, during his 2014 senate campaign. WMR also reported that Cotton, both during his time as a member of the U.S. Army's "Old Guard" at Arlington National Cemetery and as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, was a frequent customer of JR's, a well-known gay bar in Washington, DC's primarily-gay Dupont Circle neighborhood. If the CIA continues to follow precedent, it has plenty of incriminating evidence on Cotton, who hastily got married in March 2014 during his Senate campaign in Arkansas. It is no coincidence that the CIA's major anti-Russia activists on the Armed Services Committee are the immensely blackmailable McCain, Graham, and Cotton.

McCain did not have his own way with all the statements by committee members. For example, Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) accurately described America's own sordid track record on influencing foreign elections, stating that the U.S. was responsible for
influencing elections "more than twice as often as Russia has been accused of."




On the House side, the CIA also has its sycophants, including House Homeland Security Committee chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX); Representative Will Hurd (R-TX), a former CIA clandestine operative; and ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff. McCaul is still sore that Trump did not nominate him to be Secretary of Homeland Security. Other Trump administration prospective candidates, apparently rejected because of opposition to their neocon credentials, are also taking the opportunity of the unprecedented rift between Trump and the intelligence agencies to not only continue to bash Russia but also Trump. These include former CIA director James Woolsey, who severed all links with Trump, and former unconfirmed U.S. ambassador to the UN John Bolton, who has not, as widely expected, been tapped to be Deputy Secretary of State under nominee Rex Tillerson. Bolton recently said that sanctions were not enough against Russia and that what Russia needed was to "feel pain." That is directly out of sync with Tillerson's policy of a seeking close detente with Moscow.

Trump's "love" for Israel bears a major blemish By The Wayne Madsen Report

 Trump's "love" for Israel bears a major blemish By The Wayne Madsen Report

While President-elect Donald Trump is sharing his disdain for the United Nations and the UN Security Council abstention by the United States on illegal Israeli West Bank settlements with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Trump's love for Israel has a very practical -- and financial -- limit. As a hotelier, restaurateur, and owner of resorts around the world, Trump, as any other businessman in his position, knows there are limits to graciousness toward Israel and its people, particularly Israelis who travel abroad.

Hotels, resorts, travel bureaus and offices, and resorts around the world have a single perception of Israeli tourists: they are not only known as the rudest in the world but prone to committing more pilferage of hotel, restaurant, and resort assets than any other nationality. These include drapes, bed linens, towels, silverware, decorations -- including local ceramic, woodwork, paintings, and other artifacts -- and even television remote control devices.

Many warnings about Israeli tourists do not originate with "anti-Semites" in the travel and hospitality industries but by Jewish citizens of other countries. On March 31, 2014, Michelle Hites, a Chilean Jew, wrote the following for the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz: "Every month there are more and more headlines, Facebook statuses, and blogs mentioning Israeli tourists. Sadly, they don’t describe Israelis as harmless, friendly and sociable tourists, but as harmful, aggressive, unsociable, disrespectful ones. They demonstrate an astonishing lack of education and respect." Hites continued by describing the scene at the ancient Incan archaeological park in Mulluqocha, Peru, "60 Israelis were found with drugs, alcohol, spray paint and loud music, as well as 21 ancient Incan ceramic pieces."

With a stark warning to Israeli tourists, Hites sums up the frustration of many around the world, "When you come to Latin America, or visit other countries around the world, remember one thing, Israeli tourists: This is not your country. You are in someone else’s home."

Larry Derfner, writing in the Jewish Journal on June 17, 2004, pointed out one sign at a hotel in Thailand: "ISRAELI NATIONALITY (sic) is not welcome to stay in this hotel, because they are problem makers. We cannot accept their behavior."


Bangkok guest house is not alone in saying "no" to Israeli guests. Reason: they steal the hospitality industry blind. From small time guests houses and inns to mega-hotel complexes like those run by Donald Trump, the negative feelings about Israelis are the same the world over.

What the Thais politely refer to as "problem makers" are simply known as thieves to the loss prevention staffs of major hotel and resort chains, such as the many run by the Trump Organization.
When it comes to disdain for sticky-fingered Israeli tourists, Thailand, Chile, and Peru are not alone. The same situation exists in China, Mongolia, Bolivia, Greece, Ecuador, Nepal, Costa Rica, Turkey, Florida, India, Barbados, Sri Lanka, Jordan, Alaska, Kenya, Cuba, Maldives, Cyprus, Mexico, and other tourist destinations around the world. They have all had their share of problems with outbound Israeli tourists packing their luggage with more "goods" than they arrived with.


Hoteliers like those who own the hotel in Greece (above) require hefty security deposits from Israelis for the expectant theft and damage.

In Italy, Israeli tourists have been known to enter hotel breakfast buffets and load up bags with fruit and other food item, denying breakfast to other guests, and opening up private buffets in their rooms for other Israelis in their party. Stung by pilferage from Israeli tourists, Italian hotels began adding surcharges to Israeli guests' credit cards for stolen items:
Sheets - €6 each (about $6.24 per sheet)
Towels - €6 each
Plates, cups and cutlery - €11 ($11.43 for each item)


An Italian hotel in Verona after a stay by Israeli guests. At least they left the table lamp.

Many hotels, villas, and restaurants in Verona simply refuse to serve Israelis since they have been burned so many times. In Cyprus, hotel owners have often had to deal with not only theft by Israeli tourists but vandalism, such as guests defecating in the middle of rooms and in sinks.



Of course, the Israeli government responds to these sanctions by using the tired old dog-whistle canard of "anti-Semitism." But for hospitality industry executives like Mr. Trump, they can put a significant dollar value on the loss experienced from Israeli tourists. Trump will need no reminders of Israeli chicanery and malfeasance when he deals with Netanyahu and his government.

Even in Germany, which is uber-sensitive to charges of anti-Semitism, many guest houses refuse bookings to Israelis. Last month, after a guest house in Baden-Wurttemburg refused rooms to a group of Israelis, Bookings.com dropped the guest house from their website. The guest house did not seem to be bothered one bit by the action. AirBnB has had to drop several accommodations, particularly those in Europe, from its listings because of hosts banning Israelis due to frequent pilferage of items from private rooms and homes.

Hotels in Japan, while mindful that Chinese tourists are often rude, will accept them any day over pilfering Israelis. The Imperial Hotel, a 5-star resort on the Greek isle of Rhodes, began issuing blue wristbands to Israeli guests. Israeli journalists were tipped off about the practice of singling Israelis out with blue wrist bands while guests from other European countries were issued wristbands of all colors in order to have unlimited use of the spa and other hotel facilities. Of course, the hotel engaged in this practice to cut down on theft of goods and items. But for the Israelis, it was all reminiscent of the Nazi-required yellow stars that had to be worn by Jews on their outer clothing. The anti-Semitism refrain ensued.

There is one thing for certain. Donald Trump the hospitality industry magnate has an entirely different opinion of Israel than Donald Trump the pandering politician.

The Second Venceremos Brigade to Cuba in 1970

The Second Venceremos Brigade to Cuba in 1970

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxEZNBZN8yQ&feature=share

Teachers’ Day in Cuba by Stephen Lendman

Teachers’ Day in Cuba

by Stephen Lendman

Each December 22, Cubans celebrate Teachers’ Day, commemorating Fidel’s Literacy Campaign - begun January 1, 1961, successfully completed less than a year later on December 22, an astonishing achievement.

Fidel called 1961 the “year of education” in a nation afflicted by mass illiteracy, most Cubans unable to read or write.

Literacy brigades deployed nationwide changed things, teaching Cuba’s largely agrarian population what they never before knew.

After less than 12 months, over 700,000 Cubans were literate, the nationwide literacy rate increased to around 96%, a remarkable achievement by any standard, unmatched anywhere in the world.

In America, one-fourth of children grow up illiterate. It’s the only developed country where current generation children, adolescents and youths are less educated than their earlier counterparts.

The overwhelming majority of children facing trial in juvenile courts are functionally illiterate. So are more than 60% of US prison inmates.

Free societies require an educated citizenry. America's founders believed it was insurance against loss of liberty.

Jefferson said “(e)very government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories. And to render them safe, their minds must be improved…”

Public education is vital because it serves the public interest - giving meaning to “we the people.” Father of American education Horace Mann called “(t)he common school...the greatest discovery ever made by man.” 

He meant public, not privatized schooling, prioritizing profits over teaching. He believed all students should be educated equally and responsibly.

In America today, they’re intimidated, persecuted and controlled, not taught the way children and youths were when I grew up in inner city Boston long ago. 

Higher education was affordable, extraordinarily cheap by today’s standards. America’s student loan racket didn’t exist - debt-entrapping millions of students repressively, some facing a lifetime of debt bondage.

Standards in those days stressed teaching. Children learned basics, letting them advance to higher education - important preparatory steps for life. Kids today across America have none of the advantages I had. Things today are deplorable by any standard.

US public schools don’t teach. They’re institutions of intimidation and control. They produce uneducated youths, many functionally illiterate, unprepared for the adult world they’re entering - most facing a working lifetime of rotten jobs with poverty wages along with few or no benefits.

No wonder many end up in prison, mostly poor, disadvantaged youths of color. US society is disintegrating and no one gives a damn.

Cuba prioritizes education, free to the highest levels. Fidel stressed its importance, achieving literacy throughout the island state, saying on December 22, 1961:

“No moment is more solemn and exciting, no instant full of legitimate pride and glory than this, in which four and a half centuries of ignorance have been defeated.”

“When we said we would eradicate illiteracy in only one year, it seemed a reckless statement. It seemed impossible. Only a country in revolution would have been capable of deploying the effort and energy necessary to carry out such a gigantic mission.”

Literacy for all Cubans was one of his monumental achievements. Genuinely serving his country made him one of the true giants of his era.

He’s irreplaceable in the hearts and minds of his people, Cuba’s eternal comandante, his remarkable legacy to stand the test of time forever.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. 

"Fake News" and "Fake Intelligence" are the neocon stock-in-trade By Wayne Madsen Report

 "Fake News" and "Fake Intelligence" are the neocon stock-in-trade

By Wayne Madsen Report
If the last name of the individual offering up news or intelligence is Kagan, Friedman, Kristol, Rubin, Brooks, Cohen, Goldberg, Podhoretz, Ledeen, Woolsey, Krauthammer, Goldfarb, Hayes, Senor, Zakheim, or Weiss, it should simply be disregarded as fake.

For decades, these neo-conservative pundits and television commentators have been engaged in peppering the airwaves, printed pages, and web with fakery on a grand scale in order to plunge the United States into wars, usually on the behalf of Israel and/or other vested interests, including the oil industry and Wall Street.

These and other necons have managed to own and operate key members of Congress, including Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, and Tom Cotton, as well as Representatives Paul Ryan, Mike Pompeo (the incoming Central Intelligence Agency director), Steny Hoyer, and Peter King.
The list of fake news and intelligence put forth by these purveyors of lies is a long one. The most egregious on the list are the bogus intelligence on Saddam Hussein's "mobile biological weapons laboratories" and Iraq's program to procure "yellow cake uranium" from Niger. This fake intelligence was used to justify America's entry into one of the costliest and longest conflicts in our history: the invasion and occupation of Iraq, a war that directly led into the "global war on terrorism," which is ongoing to this very day.

And on this date, December 23, in 1981, President Ronald Reagan parroted false news provided to him by the neocon cabal that entered his administration the previous January. Reagan actually told the American people in a Christmas address that the Polish government of General Wojciech Jaruzelski was establishing "concentration camps" in his country after declaring martial law. This is what Reagan told the United States:
"As I speak to you tonight, the fate of a proud and ancient nation hangs in the balance. For a thousand years, Christmas has been celebrated in Poland, a land of deep religious faith, but this Christmas brings little joy to the courageous Polish people. They have been betrayed by their own government."

"The men who rule them [the Polish people] and their totalitarian allies fear the very freedom that the Polish people cherish. They have answered the stirrings of liberty with brute force, killings, mass arrests, and the setting up of concentration camps."



The problem with Reagan's speech was that there were no "concentration camps" in Poland. This was placed in Reagan's speech by Jewish neocons within his administration who wanted to transform the Soviet Union in the minds of the American people into Nazi Germany. In fact, Jaruzelski was already in the process of releasing political detainees after he declared martial law. The neocons also knew that Jaruzelski was reaching out to Polish labor, academia, and Catholics to formulate a "national accord." They knew it from CIA intelligence reports filed from Warsaw. Yet, the neocons continued to lie and convinced Reagan to read a speech about phony Polish concentration camps. The Jewish neocons played the American people for suckers. They figured everyone knew about Nazi Germany's concentration camps in Poland, so why not tell the American people, through the "Reagan puppet," that the Soviet Union and Polish Communist government also had concentration camps in Poland.

And just like today's political gimmicks of wearing purple clothing, turning around copies of The National Enquirer at store checkout lanes (or placing them in other sections of stores), or wearing safety pins, all being promoted by George Soros-financed websites, Reagan and the neocons had their own tricks up their sleeves.

Reagan offered up some political gimmickry to add emphasis to the neocon disinformation that he swallowed, hook, line, and sinker: "On Christmas Eve a lighted candle will burn in the White House window as a small but certain beacon of our solidarity with the Polish people. I urge all of you to do the same tomorrow night, on Christmas Eve, as a personal statement of your commitment to the steps we're taking to support the brave people of Poland in their time of troubles."

Reagan's "candles for Poland" were about as phony as President Gerald Ford's "WIN" (Whip Inflation Now) buttons and George H. W. Bush's "Thousand Points of Light" campaign.

The same neocon elements today are attempting this same gambit in trying to convince the American people, without any evidence, that Russia, through computer hacking, threw the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump. What was false about Russia and Poland in 1981 is false today and the liars behind the lies are some of the same neocons responsible for the false story about the fake Polish concentration camps, Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, and cherry picker trucks being used as gallows on the streets of Tehran.

Neocons are raised and schooled to lie and the more successful their lies, the more they feel emboldened.