09/20/17

Can You Hear This? Castro’s Intelligence Operation Inside the United States

By: Denise Simon | Political Vanguard

The Castro brothers of Cuba have been running spy operations inside the United States for decades and only a few have been detected and caught. The FBI has a division devoted to tips, clues and investigations for tracking the evidence and bringing prosecutions. It is tedious work, after all, it is a clandestine craft on both sides.

Cuba has a revenue base of selling intelligence and the global buyers include Iran, Russia, China and even Syria.

In 1998, a group of ten Cuban spies were arrested.

Ten people were charged in the largest Cuban spy ring ever uncovered in the United States since Fidel Castro came to power nearly 40 years ago.

According to the FBI, the spy ring had been under surveillance in south Florida for three years.

The eight men and two women tried to penetrate U.S. military bases, infiltrate anti-Castro groups and manipulate U.S. media and political groups, federal investigators said Monday. One suspect was a civilian employee at the U.S. Naval Air Station in Key West, Fla.

Ana Montes was arrested in 2001 spying for Cuba. She held a key position at the Defense Intelligence Agency where she had access to the most sensitive information within government. Montes shared information with Cuba for an estimated 16 years. Montes was so valuable that she was included in a proposed spy and people swap deal under the Obama administration.

In the successful effort by President Barack Obama to normalize relations with Cuba, a huge swap did happen, where Cuba received all the benefits.

In 2009, yet another Cuban operative case was discovered and investigated at the U.S. State Department, where again very sensitive, classified and top secret information was provided to Cuba.

An indictment and criminal complaint unsealed today in the District of Columbia charges Walter Kendall Myers, 72, a.k.a. “Agent 202,” his wife, Gwendolyn Steingraber Myers, 71, a.k.a. “Agent 123” and “Agent E-634,” with conspiracy to act as illegal agents of the Cuban government and to communicate classified information to the Cuban government. Each of the defendants is also charged with acting as an illegal agent of the Cuban government and with wire fraud.

Kendall Myers was known as Fidel Castro’s personal spy and Hillary Clinton ordered a damage assessment to take place to determine the extent of the damage. Such a report was not forthcoming.

Cuba has deployed the same information tactics as other adversarial government’s intelligence operations and that is to place recruiters and operatives in academia. As higher education employs leftist professors and the syllabus has grown more anti-West, sympathizing more with Marxism and Socialism, campuses across America are ripe incubation centers.

All this brings more of a challenge to the Trump administration and to Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, with the 15-month health scandal in Havana known as some kind of sonic weapon that has resulted in hearing loss and traumatic brain injury for U.S. diplomatic staff on duty in Cuba. Tillerson is considering closing the U.S. embassy in Cuba which is long past due.

Between the corruption, the spying and the health risk to an estimated 21 U.S. personnel, what is the Trump administration waiting for to order operations in Cuba shuttered?

The U.S. said in August it had expelled two Cuban diplomats from the country’s embassy in Washington, D.C., after it revealed details of the suspected attack. Donald Trump’s administration said it had taken the measure in response to Cuba’s failure to protect the U.S. officials under the Vienna Convention.

U.S. officials told the Associated Press last week that the incidents had focused with “laser-like specificity” on rooms or even parts of rooms in houses and a hotel where U.S. staffers were present.

“None of this has a reasonable explanation,” Fulton Armstrong, a former CIA official who served in Havana before America reopened an embassy there in 2015, told the AP. “It’s just mystery after mystery after mystery.”

The FBI, Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Cuban authorities have launched investigations into the attacks.

A group of five Republican senators have written to Tillerson, requesting that the U.S. again shutter its Havana embassy, which Barack Obama opened toward the end of his presidency.

One can only wonder if President Trump will do so.

09/20/17

Let’s Be Honest: Trump’s U.N. Speech Was a Disaster

By: Cliff Kincaid

President Trump in his U.N. speech failed to mention that Russia and China are responsible for North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. What’s worse, Trump actually thanked Russia and China for helping to somehow restrain North Korea through the ineffective United Nations.

The “America First” president said, “The United Nations Security Council recently held two unanimous 15-0 votes adopting hard-hitting resolutions against North Korea, and I want to thank China and Russia for joining the vote to impose sanctions, along with all of the other members of the Security Council.  Thank you to all involved.”

Trump should have denounced China and Russia for making a nuclear North Korea possible. Then, he should have announced a U.S. withdrawal from “The House That Hiss Built.”

Peter Vincent Pry, the chief of staff of the congressional EMP Commission who served in the CIA, points out, “There are many examples of technology transfers from Russia and China to North Korea, proving they have helped accelerate Pyongyang’s nuclear missile programs. North Korea’s nuclear missile threat is built upon Russian and Chinese technology.”

So Trump is thanking the Russians and Chinese for making North Korea into a nuclear weapons threat and bringing the world to the point of a nuclear exchange.

Hard-hitting resolutions? It’s bad enough that we stayed in the U.N. after we found out that its founder and first acting Secretary-General Alger Hiss was a Soviet agent and spy. Now this organization Trump says was founded on “noble aims” has brought the world to the point of war.  In this case, the stakes involve the lives of tens of millions of Americans and South Koreans.

Conservatives are apparently so used to seeing American interests sold out by politicians like Barack Hussein Obama that they greeted Trump’s “tough” speech at the U.N. In fact, he was notoriously soft on Russia and China.

It was entertaining for Trump to talk about the failures of socialism and communism, except for the fact that China has perfected a system of Communist Party control and expansion financed by Western capitalism. The result is an emerging communist superpower that is driving an alliance of anti-American countries known as BRICS and pursuing its own global trade apparatus, the Belt and Road development initiative, financed by a world currency other than the dollar.

By the way, the current U.N. Secrerary-General, António Guterres, is a former head of the Socialist International. And yet Trump bashed socialism while congratulating him for leading the fight for “U.N. reform?” Does Trump really believe this? Does he expect us to believe this?

Continuing to waste tens of billions of mostly American dollars on the U.N. in the name of “reform” is one thing. Setting the stage for the mass murder of millions of Americans by pretending the U.N. will do something about it is something else.

Pry notes, “The latest evidence North Korea’s nuclear missile program is being helped by Russia and China is their successful H-bomb test on Sept. 2…The demonstrated yield of North Korea’s H-bomb is reportedly estimated by the U.S. intelligence community to be 120 kilotons (160 kilotons according to Japan), or about 12-16 times more powerful than the Hiroshima A-bomb, comparable in power to two-stage H-bombs of the United States.”

He adds,“Unfortunately, North Korea’s own description of its nuclear missile capabilities has consistently been more reliable than U.S. intelligence community estimates. These estimates have wrongly assumed North Korea is working on its own, without help from China and Russia.”

So the situation is probably worse than what we are being told. How many intelligence failures do we suffer to suffer through as a nation before we conclude that the incompetence constitutes treason?

The ultimate objective of the communist-Muslim alliance, as we explain in our book The Sword of Revolution, is the destruction of the United States and Israel. In the meantime, they aim to neutralize South Korea as a U.S. ally and integrate the free nation into one Korea under communist domination. That has been their objective all along. They tried it militarily. Now they’re going to do it diplomatically.

Trump said, “It is time for North Korea to realize that the denuclearization is its only acceptable future.” The time is past. A real “America First” policy, as noted by Pry, is that “We cannot live with a nuclear-armed North Korea because someday the evil regime in Pyongyang will fall, and they will want to drag us with them, down into darkness. We must strike and disarm North Korea of at least those few nuclear assets that can threaten U.S. cities, before it is too late.”

The alternative offered by Trump is to remain under the threat of nuclear blackmail from Communist North Korea and its backers and then retaliate once millions of Americans are dead. That is the threat we are now under. And we have Russia, China, and the Obama Administration to “thank” for that dire predicament.

Based on what we heard from Trump at the U.N., Pry’s advice will not be taken.

The “denuclearization” may indeed take place but under a plan devised by Communist China and Russia and supported by the same Deep State operatives who allowed North Korea to go nuclear.

The plan was all laid out in Selig S. Harrison’s book, Korean Endgame: A Strategy for Reunification and U.S. Disengagement.

The last word in that title, “disengagement,” is the key. The U.S. will disengage, leaving the North Korean regime in place and South Korea at the mercy of North Korea’s backers. The book, published in 2002, asked, “Should the U.S. get out of Korea once and for all?”  It’s taken a while but the answer is upon us.

When an “America First” President like Trump thanks Russia and China and the U.N. for a disaster in the making on the Korean peninsula, you know we are in deep trouble.

Japan will be the next U.S. ally to be abandoned. It will have to rearm, and quickly.

Over in the Middle East, Israel will have to consider the consequences. Trump talks tough about Iran, too, but the Iranian nuclear deal is still in effect.

The difference between South Korea and Israel is that Israel has nuclear weapons. That’s a big difference. It could make all the difference in the world – for Israel’s survival.

As for the United States, honest U.S. military leaders are seeing a “multi-polar” world and “multi-domain” threats emerge from Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and others. We may be too weak to save ourselves. Meanwhile, Trump’s military advisers are sending thousands of more U.S. troops into the no-win war in Afghanistan, where Russia is arming the Taliban killing our soldiers.

Yet Trump thanks Russia for voting for another resolution on North Korea, only the latest in a series of ineffective statements from the world body.

Trump’s first National Security Advisor, retired Lt. General Michael T. Flynn, recognized the dangers. He talked about an “enemy alliance” against America. He wanted to clean out the traitors from the Intelligence Community. That’s why Flynn was forced to resign, after a Deep State leak, and he is facing mounting legal bills in response to Russia-gate Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller’s “investigation.” It’s a probe that ultimately targets Trump himself.

Trump’s supporters have to be honest. “America First” sounds good but it only masks our sharp decline. His U.N. speech excited some members of his base anxious for red meat but in fact symbolizes an attempt at a truce with the Deep State, in the hope that he will be permitted to serve out his term.

We are  entering a period of history in which we can only hope and pray that a communist madman will not oblitate our fellow citizens in a massive nuclear strike. Our own lives now hang in the balance while Trump tries to save his own skin.

God bless America indeed.

09/20/17

Mainstream Political Polls Commit Fraud

By: James Simpson | Bomb Throwers

The credibility of mainstream political polls took a serious hit following the 2016 election. Most predicted an easy victory for Hillary Clinton. The entire political class believed she was a shoo-in, and that the election would be a mere formality. But the polls and the pundits were wrong, glaringly so.

It appears they are wrong again, because they persist in making the same mistakes they have been making for years.

Most pollsters and pundits report that President Trump’s approval ratings are in the tank — consistently in the mid- to upper-30 percent range. His disapproval rates average a whopping 57 percent, according to the polls cited below.

The following table reveals why.

In every poll, Democrat respondents outnumbered Republicans by significant amounts. The Economist poll was the worst. Only 24 percent of respondents (360) were Republicans compared to 38 percent (570) Democrats – which means that 58 percent more Democrats were polled than Republicans, as shown in the %D/R column. On average, in these seven widely recognized national polls, only 29 percent (409 people) of the total 1,383 polled were Republicans, while 37 percent (518) were Democrats. Another way of saying it is that, on average, 29 percent more Democrats than Republicans were polled.

This occurs because of the way these polls are constructed. Most use a methodology that queries a random sample of adults. That sounds “fair” and one would expect it to produce roughly equivalent numbers of Republicans and Democrats, but it does not.

All of these polls were taken in August except Gallup, which does not make public the political party composition of its polling samples. Gallup’s May poll — a three-day moving average — was listed instead because Gallup provided political party breakdown. Its latest poll, however, puts Trump’s approval/disapproval rate at 38 percent/56 percent, which isn’t much different from the May poll cited.

Gallup was contacted twice to provide demographic information for its latest poll, but refused to do so. One must question why one of the most widely quoted polling organizations does not allow people to easily discover the political party breakdown of poll respondents.

According to pollster John McLaughlin of McLaughlin Associates, using random samples of adults without further stratification tends to include more young people and females — both groups more likely to be Democrats. Because it is random, it may even include non-citizens. Using this survey methodology, Independents are more likely to poll like Democrats. By using the random sample method, pollsters know they will get a disproportionate number of Democrats and/or people who respond like Democrats, but since few people delve into the weeds to examine polling demographics, the polls are taken to be legitimate.

This is also the least expensive way to poll, providing another reason why so many polls skew the results to the left — independent of any deliberate bias.

Quoted in an article by the Daily Caller, Raghavan Mayur, president of TechnoMetrica, an independent polling organization, said:

I do know inherently there is a Democratic bias in the polls. And most [pollsters] will deny it… Typically, the mainstream media and the major polling companies will never admit their bias to you. This is like an alcoholic not admitting to using alcohol. They are in denial.

Quoted in the same article, independent pollster John Zogby said, “I am a liberal Democrat, but I always felt that other polls over-sampled Democrats and under-sampled Republicans.”

A few polls query registered voters, which may eliminate non-citizens and improve the results somewhat. The Politico poll, for example, queries registered voters. It shows only a 4 percentage point spread between Republicans and Democrats and provides one of the highest Trump approval ratings of all polls listed in the table.

But this is not always a reliable measure, either. For example, the Economist poll claims to query “registered voters,” however, voter registration is not verified by directly questioning poll respondents. It is calculated using Census Bureau estimates of the overall registered voter population. So the veracity of the “registered voters” figure is questionable in this poll. Only 24 percent of respondents were Republicans, while 38 percent were Democrats.

Using registered voters is not the best measure, either, because many registered voters never actually vote. McLaughlin says that polling likely voters, while more expensive and time consuming, produces more accurate and representative poll numbers. Voter turnout in the last four elections averaged 32 percent Republican and 34 percent Democrat.

McLaughlin told me that any poll that departs significantly from those averages will bias the results.

As McLaughlin explains:

For example, in our recently completed national poll, Republicans approve the job the President is doing 90% to 8% disapprove. In contrast among Democrats only 17% approve of the President while 80% disapprove. So for each point you take away from a poll’s Republican affiliation, you’re taking a point away from the President’s job approval. Conversely, when you add five points more Democrats, you’re adding four points to the President’s disapproval. It’s that simple.

McLaughlin Associates uses likely voters, as does Rasmussen. Using this method, Trump’s approval ratings are significantly better, currently averaging 46 percent, while the disapproval rate is lower. Similarly, the breakdown of Republicans versus Democrats reflects how people would likely vote if an election were held today, as opposed to a random sample or even a sample of registered voters.

The left-wing bias embedded in most national polls also skews poll responses on virtually all partisan issues, giving an inaccurate reading of public sentiment on everything from taxes to school choice, from immigration to national defense.

McLaughlin says:

Not only does it affect [Trump’s] job rating and favorable rating, it also affects the policies and issues these polls purport to measure. Maybe this is why so many Republicans, Independents and Trump voters seem to disregard media polls. It appears the media is once again sacrificing its credibility for its liberal, anti-Trump bias.

The McLaughlin poll had many other results that should get Congress, and congressional leadership in particular, to sit up and take notice:

  • Only 21 percent believe congressional leadership is helping “drain the swamp.” Forty-nine percent said that congressional leadership supports the swamp.
  • Sixty-three percent believe House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell should be replaced.
  • Only 15 percent said they would support the reelection of Speaker Ryan and Majority Leader McConnell.
  • A majority of those who support Ryan and McConnell are Democrats.
  • More people (21 percent) support Antifa street thugs than Ryan and McConnell.
  • Forty-six percent are more likely to vote for their member of Congress if they support Trump’s immigrant vetting policies; 38 percent are more likely to vote for them if they don’t.
  • Fifty-two percent are more likely to vote for their member of Congress if the lawmaker supports Trump’s ban on transgenders in the military: 28 percent are less likely to vote for their member if the lawmaker supports transgenders in the military.
  • Fifty-six percent of voters favor repealing and replacing Obamacare; 39 percent oppose.
  • Fifty percent are less likely to vote for their member of Congress if the lawmaker refuses to repeal Obamacare mandates and taxes, while 36 percent are more likely to vote for their lawmaker.
  • Fifty-three percent of voters favor less government; only 32 percent want more.Congress recently held a hearing on curtailing free speech. The McLaughlin poll reveals that:
  • Eighty-five percent believe freedom of speech is a fundamental right. Only 9 percent believe it should be restricted when offensive.
  • Despite the fallout from Charlottesville, Virginia, 85 percent believe the Constitution supports the rights of everyone to freedom of speech, no matter how offensive. Only 8 percent believe it should be restricted.
  • Sixty-three percent oppose Antifa efforts to silence people they disagree with.
  • Forty-three percent oppose Internet companies using the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) “hate list.” This blacklist names many mainstream conservative groups the SPLC disagrees with politically.
  • Only 32 percent supported using the SPLC’s list.

This poll suggests that many more voters support conservative ideas and policies than mainstream media polls claim. Congress should take a very close look at this poll, because it is a much better indication of those policies and candidates a majority is likely to support.

James Simpson is an economist, businessman and investigative journalist. His latest book is The Red Green Axis: Refugees, Immigration and the Agenda to Erase America. Follow Jim on Twitter & Facebook.