05/19/16

Dopes, Doping, and the Russian-Iranian Nuclear Threat

By: Cliff Kincaid | Accuracy in Media

Russia

The Russians have been doping their athletes, but we are the dopes. In a scandal worse than failing to deal with ISIS, the Obama administration has been caught facilitating the nuclear buildups of Russia and Iran. The lives of millions of Americans and Israelis hang in the balance.

Playing a pivotal role over the years in America’s decline and the rapid rise of Russia and China stands Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state who met for an hour with Donald J. Trump on Wednesday. Kissinger has also served as a “tutor” to Hillary Clinton in foreign affairs. “I was very flattered when Henry Kissinger said I ran the State Department better than anybody had run it in a long time,” Mrs. Clinton remarked during one of the Democratic debates.

What some conservatives have cynically called the “invisible government,” as represented by the Council on Foreign Relations and such figures as Kissinger, seems well-positioned to come out on top in November no matter who wins.

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05/11/16

Times Article on Ben Rhodes Exposes White House Contempt for the Press and Public

By: Roger Aronoff | Accuracy in Media

Ben Rhodes

A recent article by David Samuels for the New York Times Magazine demonstrates how President Obama and his Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes have been exploiting the media’s willingness to repeat and promote the Obama administration narrative of the day. In the interview Rhodes irreverently nicknames the foreign policy establishment “the Blob” and states that most reporters the administration deals with on foreign affairs are only 27 years old and know nothing. The Blob includes not only top media people, but also “Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates and other Iraq war promoters from both parties who now whine incessantly about the collapse of the American security order in Europe and the Middle East.”

Carlos Lozada of The Washington Post describes the Times’ piece as so sycophantic that it has become “gross” through excess chumminess, hypocrisy and absurdity. For example, Lozada writes, “It is the blindness of a writer who declares that Rhodes is ‘not an egotist’ while offering countless examples of that subject’s gargantuan self-regard, and not bothering to note the contradiction.”

Michael Grunwald has also criticized Samuels in an article for Politico. His point is that Samuels is a hawk who opposed the Iran deal, and ignored the nuances in the Rhodes/Obama foreign policy, which Grunwald clearly finds admirable.

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12/28/15

In From The Cold And Out Again… How The CIA Was Duped And Their Double Agent Failure

By: Terresa Monroe-Hamilton

InFromTheCold

Bill Gertz at the Washington Free Beacon has written a fascinating piece on the CIA being fooled by scores of double agents who pledged their loyalty to the agency, but instead reported back to the communists during the Cold War right on up into the present day. As I have said for years… the Cold War never ended, it shifted. Now Benjamin B. Fischer, the CIA’s former chief historian, analyst and operations officer, is verifying what I have long said. That is cold comfort, I assure you.

The duping of the CIA included at least 100 fake recruits in East Germany, Cuba and Russia. For decades, these double agents supplied false intelligence to senior U.S. policymakers that ranged all the way to the presidency. And it’s still happening. Fischer writes, “During the Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency bucked the law of averages by recruiting double agents on an industrial scale; it was hoodwinked not a few but many times.” Is anyone surprised by this? Trevor Loudon and I have both said for years that the agencies and our governmental leaders couldn’t pass a background check to clean a toilet. It was true then and it is true today. These double agents weren’t thoroughly vetted. They were hurriedly turned and because of sloppiness, we invited the enemy into the midst of our intelligence agencies. It’s mind boggling. In an article last week, Fischer stated, “The result was a massive but largely ignored intelligence failure.” How’s that for national security? Feeling warm and fuzzy yet?

Fischer wrote in the International Journal of Intelligence that this wreaked havoc within the agency. I’ll bet. What’s worse is that the CIA dismissed the infiltration by communists and the disinformation as insignificant. No one, including congressional oversight committees, pushed for reform in the agency when this was uncovered either. Their vetting processes still suck and they aren’t listening to the likes of Fischer. The man was a career CIA officer. He joined in 1973 and worked in the Soviet affairs division during the Cold War. He sued the CIA in 1996, charging he was mistreated for criticizing the agency for mishandling the 1994 case of CIA officer Aldrich Ames, a counterintelligence official, who was unmasked as a long time KGB plant. It was a case of blaming the messenger instead of the spy. This was during the Clinton Administration, so it does not come as a surprise.

From Bill Gertz:

Critics have charged the agency with harboring an aversion to counterintelligence — the practice of countering foreign spies and the vetting of the legitimacy of both agents and career officers. Beginning in the 1970s, many in the CIA criticized counter-spying, which often involved questioning the loyalties of intelligence personnel, as “sickthink.”

The agency’s ability to discern false agents turned deadly in 2009 when a Jordanian recruit pretending to work for [the] CIA killed a group of seven CIA officers and contractors in a suicide bombing at a camp in Afghanistan.

Double agents are foreign nationals recruited by a spy service that are secretly loyal to another spy agency. They are used to feed[ing] false disinformation for intelligence and policy purposes and to extract secrets while pretending to be loyal agents.

Double agents are different than foreign penetration agents, or moles, who spy from within agencies while posing as career intelligence officers.

Lord only knows how many moles we have within our agencies.

Predictably, the first major double agent failure was in Cuba. The Cubans are notorious for using a variety of traps for agents from honey traps to straight up blackmail. Cuban intelligence officer Florentino Aspillaga revealed a massive failure when he defected to the CIA in 1987. No less than four dozen recruits over 40 years had been secretly working for communist Cuba while on the dole of the CIA. They easily supplied disinformation to the CIA, endangering agents and scuttled operations left and right. This is the same government – Castro’s government – that Obama just reinstated relations with. Now, instead of being made fools by the communists, we just crawl into bed with them. It’s the other definition of coming in from the cold. Then came the revelation on Cuban state television which confirmed the existence of 27 fake CIA agents. You would think that would have set off alarms in the agency and caused them to adjust their vetting procedures. But you’d be wrong. Instead, the intelligence failure was covered up by congressional intelligence committees. You see, the enemies within go way back. We willingly let the enemy in our doors and let them set up shop in our intelligence agencies and abroad. Is it any wonder we now have a Marxist in power who colludes with communist dictators and tyrants, as well as Islamists?

In East Germany, all the recruited CIA agents working there were found to be double agents working secretly for the Ministry of State Security spy service, also known as the Stasi. All. Of. Them. Noodle that for a moment. According to Stasi officers, they failed at placing agents in the CIA. But there wasn’t a single CIA op on their turf that they weren’t able to detect using double agents and counterespionage operations. Fischer said the controlled East German assets “rendered U.S. intelligence deaf, dumb and blind.”

Markus Wolf was an East German spymaster. He wrote in the late 1980’s: “We were in the enviable position of knowing that not a single CIA agent had worked in East Germany without having been turned into a double agent or working for us from the start.” Wolf brashly claimed that, “On our orders they were all delivering carefully selected information and disinformation to the Americans.” He tagged a CIA officer working in West Germany and then dispatched double agents for him to recruit. Nifty.

Evidently this double agent snafu spanned move than 20 years and I contend, it is still occurring. Fischer said that former intelligence officials such as Bobby Ray Inman, who was a CIA director, confirmed the intelligence failure as did former CIA Director Robert Gates. He came right out and said that the CIA was “duped by double agents in Cuba and East Germany.” Wolf had complete control from 1961 to 1989 on the intelligence that the CIA garnered from the communists there. He played us.

And then there was the Russian double agent screw-up. The last one took place after the Soviet Union collapse in 1991. This came to light after the 1994 arrest of CIA counterintelligence officer Aldrich Ames, who spied for the Ruskies from the 1980’s until he was caught. He actively assisted the KGB and made fools of the CIA by exposing all Soviet and Eastern European intelligence operations. The Russians passed a mixture of false and accurate data through a series of double agents. Ames’ operation began in 1986 and went on until 1993.

While that was going on, the KGB sent a false defector to the CIA named Aleksandr Zhomov. He easily hoodwinked the CIA into thinking he could give them information on how the KGB had unmasked and arrested almost all CIA recruited agents during the mid-1980’s. We paid this plant an estimated $1 million. The whole front played out by Zhomov was to protect Ames from being discovered.

More from Bill Gertz:

In 1995, the CIA admitted that for eight years since 1986, it produced highly classified intelligence reports derived from “bogus” and “tainted” sources, including 35 reports that were based on data from double agents, and 60 reports compiled using sources that were suspected of being controlled by Moscow.

The false information reached the highest levels of government, including three presidents — Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton.

The CIA’s inspector general urged reprimands for several senior CIA officers and directors William H. Webster, Robert M. Gates, and R. James Woolsey.

The three former directors claimed they should not be blamed for the compromises because they were unaware of them.

Fischer said the CIA defended its recruitment of bogus agents by asserting that even while controlled the doubles provided some good intelligence.

Are you beginning to see why I say you cannot trust the Russians or the Cubans? And you can’t trust those who form alliances with them such as Barack Obama. The CIA has been broken for some time. There are good people there even now. But the bureaucratic policies in place are strangling them and keeping them from doing competent work. To survive as a nation, we must have spies and we must have verifiable and trustworthy intelligence. Otherwise, we become sitting ducks for our enemies. You’d think we would have learned that by now, but some of these people are so stupid, they have reached rock-bottom and have started to dig.

One of the problems for the CIA concerning their Soviet operations was that they could not recruit agents to work for the agency. They had to take walk-ins and volunteers. They compounded this by not vetting them thoroughly. It was a prime opportunity for moles and double agents to infiltrate and they did. It’s bad enough this was taking place during the “Cold War,” but it is still going on. That’s unforgivable.

It gets worse… the CIA knew these agents were fraudulent and they allowed the division in charge of Soviet affairs to cover up the loss of all its bona fide agents. No one was held accountable either. No real inquiry was conducted.

“Mitigating the dismay at the total corruption — moral, intellectual, and political — of the agency is my surprise that a man in Fischer’s position saw the reality so very clearly and so reports it,” said Angelo Codevilla, senior fellow at the Claremont Institute and professor emeritus of International Relations at Boston University.

Kenneth E. deGraffenreid, a former senior White House intelligence official during the Reagan administration, said Fischer and other former intelligence officials have revealed that large-scale communist intelligence service operations to undermine the CIA show “the story of Soviet-era espionage operations that we’ve understood to this point is probably deeply flawed.” Ya think? Many of us have been screaming this for years. They should read Trevor Loudon, Diana West, Cliff Kincaid and James Simpson’s works.

“What we thought was true from the Cold War spy wars was largely wrong, and that says that the counterintelligence model we had was wrong,” said deGraffenreid. “And therefore because we’ve not corrected that problem we’re in bad shape to deal with the current challenges posed by terrorists and spies from Iran, Russia, China and others.”

Bill Gertz should be applauded for bringing this travesty to light and exposing it. He’s done incredible work here.

Take it from the CIA themselves: “Intelligence officers have a saying that the only thing worse than knowing there is a mole in your organization is finding the mole.” The same goes for leadership. How can we defend our country if we can’t even police our own intelligence agencies? And it goes far beyond them as well. All our government agencies and the federal government itself are infiltrated with communists and Islamists… from NASA, to our universities, to our military, to the seats of power in Congress… the U.S. is facing an existential problematic threat from within. The CIA is not the only one that has been duped here. The whole nation has been by Barack Obama and his comrades.

06/5/15

“Happy Pride Month” From the Media

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

The coming out of Bruce as Caitlyn Jenner is happening as various sexual minorities are celebrating “Pride Month.” It used to be “Gay Pride Month,” but the number of oppressed sexual minorities seems to be growing at an amazing pace. Without a scorecard, it is hard to keep up.

Sooner or later, pedophilia will emerge as just another orientation.

One of the leading enforcers of political correctness in the media, the site known as BuzzFeed, is coming down hard on “misgendering” by other outlets. It is not permissible, according to this way of thinking, to refer to “Bruce Jenner” anymore, or to call him a male.

The BuzzFeed literary editor has published a quiz titled, “How Transphobic Are You?” That’s right: “transphobia” is the new catchword, designed to silence those of us who still believe in the scientific, biological and traditional definitions of the sexes.

Publications such as BuzzFeed and The Huffington Post, as well as the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association (NLGJA), represent the forces of cultural Marxism, designed to highlight and affirm what seems like an endless stream of sexual minorities objecting to their oppression by pro-traditional forces in society.

In a similar vein to what the NLGJA has directed in terms of acceptable coverage of transgenders, the ACLU has gotten into the business of telling the media how to report and what to think. The Daily Caller refers to it as the ACLU going “full fascist,” though it would be more accurate to label it as a Marxist way of thinking.

In any case, ACLU official Casey Strangio has declared, “Words matter, and erasing the identity of trans people by calling them by their birth names and birth-assigned sex is an act of hatred—one that is inextricable from the brutal violence that so many trans people, particularly trans women of color, encounter just for existing in the world.”

Strangio goes on, “There is no need to mention what her name used to be or what sex she was assigned at birth. And as writer and activist Janet Mock brilliantly explained to Piers Morgan, neither Janet nor Caitlyn were ‘born boys.’ They were born babies and they are women—brave and fabulous women.”

This is really beyond the pale. Babies are not born male or female anymore, just babies? What’s more, we are supposed to wait years or decades, in order to determine what they are, or at least what they claim to be.

“Caitlyn Jenner still has her penis” is the headline over a Richard Johnson story in the New York Post. That seems to make him still a man, at least in my book.

What’s more, Jenner still has male DNA. He can never eliminate that.

Nevertheless, “Caitlyn Jenner” is being honored with the Arthur Ashe Courage Award at The 2015 ESPYS on ABC on July 15.

At the same time, CNN has announced that some “activists” are objecting to the “misgendering” of Caitlyn Jenner when people in the media label “her” as a “him.” These activists “say that when news anchors and commentators purposefully use a male pronoun for Jenner, such as ‘he,’ they are misgendering her, thereby insulting her and the transgender community more broadly,” CNN reports.

CNN adds, “News outlets are generally striving to be sensitive. Many journalists immediately adopted ‘she,’ and ‘her’ in articles and discussions.”

Count me a member of the “insensitive” group of journalists and commentators. I still believe in the science and biology of DNA.

The propaganda barrage comes as President Barack Obama has officially designated June as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Month.

Interestingly, however, the Defense Department is highlighting “the achievements and sacrifices of LGB service members and LGBT civilians.” That’s because transgenders cannot yet officially join the combat services.

DoD News reports that Air Force General Counsel Gordon O. Tanner, a gay attorney, said he plans to do two things in celebrating LGBT Pride Month—“set new mentoring goals to mentor more rising young LGB leaders, and visit the gravesite of former Air Force Tech Sgt. Leonard Matlovich in the Congressional Cemetery on Capitol Hill.”

“Sergeant Matlovich was the first to fight the ban on gays serving in the military,” Tanner told DoD News. “His picture was on the cover of Time Magazine in 1975; NBC made a movie about his life.”

Matlovich died of AIDS in 1988.

The Washington Blade reports that Tanner is the first-ever presidential appointee confirmed by the Senate who’s not only openly gay and married to a same-sex spouse, but also a military veteran. He was confirmed by the Senate by voice vote last September without any dissent.

Much has happened in the intervening years, to the point where the Council for Global Equality recently marked the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia (IDAHOT). I am not sure what “biphobia” is.

The Council for Global Equality was a recent co-sponsor of the “Conference to Advance the Human Rights of and Promote Inclusive Development for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Intersex (LGBTI) Persons.” The term “intersex” is apparently another new addition to the list of politically correct gender identity categories. I’m not really sure what it means, either.

What’s important, of course, is that in addition to the Obama administration, a lot of big liberal money is backing this international campaign for new “rights” for various sexual minorities.

The Council reports that it has been “generously funded” primarily by the Arcus Foundation, Sigrid Rausing Trust, the Open Society Foundations, Ford Foundation, and an anonymous source.

The executive director of the Arcus Foundation is Kevin Jennings, the former Assistant Deputy Secretary of Education in the Obama administration, while the Open Society Foundations are funded by billionaire hedge fund operator George Soros.

You may recall that Jennings’ activism was “inspired” by Harry Hay, the Communist Party member and “Radical Faerie,” who believed in the power of the occult. Hay was also a supporter of the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA).

Now that Robert Gates, the former defense secretary and current president of Boy Scouts of America, has called for the organization to open itself to homosexual Scoutmasters, can the acceptance of pedophilia as just another sexual orientation be far behind?

NAMBLA operates in the open, with a website devoted to “the benevolent aspects of man/boy love” and advocating “sexual liberation and youth liberation.”

In the past, the ACLU has defended NAMBLA, saying it goes to bat for “unpopular organizations” and believes in “robust freedom of speech for everyone.”

On the other hand, if you call Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner a he, which is how he was born, you are denounced by the ACLU as being guilty of hatred and possibly provoking violence. That’s enough to intimidate most of the media.

This is how a society spirals out of control, with the media afraid or unwilling to tell the truth any longer. Young people are clearly being singled out as the next victims, with sexual abuse being defined as love.

You might think, based on the media’s preoccupation with the terrible sexual abuse that has been documented in the Duggar family, that the media would oppose the sexual exploitation of children. But this scandal seems to be a convenient way for many in the media to make fun of the Duggars’ professed Christianity.

Our media have no principled objection to making children into sex objects. Otherwise, they would campaign to close down NAMBLA and expose the evil campaign to make sexual exploitation into just another sexual orientation.

The next phase of this sick campaign will be to present kids claiming to benefit from having sex with adults. If you object, you will be labeled as insensitive.