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American Spectator Ukrainian Delusions

I have to comment on an article written by Owen Matthews in the U.K. version of The Spectator — Putin may seem confident – but Russia’s future is bleak. The lunacy reflected in this piece helps explain why the Brits are so lost as they struggle to come to grips with the fact that Putin is kicking their pompous asses.

Mr. Matthews starts with this nonsense:

And yet, as he prepares for his fifth term, the truth is that Putin is a hollow tsar. He invaded Ukraine to assert Russia’s greatness in its backyard as well as on the international stage. Instead, the war showed that Putin’s much-vaunted army is incapable of defeating a far smaller Ukrainian force. Instead of halting Nato expansion, he has massively extended it to formerly neutral Sweden and Finland. The invasion has erased key sectors of the Russian economy (notably gas exports and automotives), brought foreign investment to an abrupt halt and made Russia an economic vassal of China.

The war has forced up to a million of the country’s best educated and brightest into exile and broken the Kremlin’s implicit contract with Russia’s elites that they would be able to enrich themselves and enjoy their earnings unhindered in exchange for political submission. Most fatefully, war has allowed Putin and the elderly securocrats who surround him to fulfil a dream that many old men may aspire to but very few achieve – to create a future that reflects an idealised version of their country’s past.

Take your pick in selecting the most absurd Matthew’s claim. My favorite is, “The invasion has erased key sectors of the Russian economy (notably gas exports and automotives), brought foreign investment to an abrupt halt and made Russia an economic vassal of China.” Is Matthew’s really this misinformed or is he just a corrupt propagandist who will type what he is told by the MI-6 propaganda team.

Not only has the Special Military Operation energized and dramatically expanded the military industrial sector of Russia, but the rest of the economy is purring along just fine. The war has not “erased” Russia’s gas exports, it has redirected them and expanded them. And then there is the fact that many of the Europeans continue to buy Russian gas, only paying a premium through third-party brokers and ravaging their own economies with inflation. Yes, Western foreign investment has stopped and Russia, without missing a step produced over 4% growth in the last quarter. Poor, poor Russia.

Unlike the United States and the United Kingdom, Russia has not off-shored its industrial capabilities to other countries, like China. And Russia’s own ample supply of oil, gas, aluminum, coal, uranium, bauxite, nickel and rare earth minerals means that it does not have to rely on some prickly foreign country or entity to keep its civilian and military industries churning out product.

The most important result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is that it has exposed NATO as a hollow shell. NATO’s supposedly superior tanks and artillery have been decimated on the Ukrainian steppes and exposed as expensive prima donnas that require expensive maintenance and are unreliable in combat conditions. I guess Mr. Matthews did not see the video of the British Challenger tank stuck in the mud. This video is emblematic of the sorry state of the British military.

The depth of Matthew’s ignorance and hypocrisy is revealed in the following two paragraphs:

But the most significant part of Putin’s speech was not what he said about the war in Ukraine but how little time he devoted to it – just 15 minutes of two hours. The rest was focused on his domestic programme, addressing everything from fixing a deepening demographic crisis to replacing crumbling infrastructure, improving health and education and providing funding for science and research. The nuts and bolts, in short, of everyday administration. And his main message was aimed not at Russia’s wealth creators or elites but squarely at the budzhetniki – the tens of millions of state employees, military and security personnel, pensioners and bureaucrats who rely on the Kremlin for their income and who form the backbone of Putin’s support.

The key question for his political survival is how long he will be able to pay to keep these people onside. Few of the bullish economic forecasts that Putin made in his speech stand up to close scrutiny. Yes, Russian GDP nominally rose more than any G7 country last year. The average Russian household ended 2023 with about 18 per cent more money in the bank than a year earlier. Sberbank, Russia’s largest state-controlled bank, posted a 5.5-fold year-on-year net profit jump to a record high of 1.5 trillion rubles ($16.3 billion). The defence industry employs 3.5 million people and many factories have doubled their workforce since the beginning of the war. But this apparent economic boom is really due to a massive increase of state spending on the war – a form of military Keynesianism that is swallowing 40 per cent of the state budget, and close to 10 per cent of Russia’s GDP.

That’s a hoot. According to Matthews Russia is only experiencing economic prosperity because of defense spending and it is starting to run a “deficit.” Russia is a piker compared to the the United States, which is 35 trillion dollars in the hole (and climbing), has a one trillion dollar defense budge (okay, $900 billion to be precise), no longer produces tanks, failed to produce a functional hypersonic missile, incapable of matching Russia’s output of artillery shells and has become largely a service economy. The latter means the U.S. is no longer an industrial powerhouse.

I think Owen Matthews is going through the Kubler-Ross five stages of grief as he struggles to come to grips with the defeat of Ukraine. He is in the “denial” stage. Next up — anger then bargaining. He has a ways to go to get to “acceptance.”

The post American Spectator Ukrainian Delusions appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

American Spectator Ukrainian Delusions | The Gateway Pundit | by Larry Johnson

I have to comment on an article written by Owen Matthews in the U.K. version of The Spectator — Putin may seem confident – but Russia’s future is bleak. The lunacy reflected in this piece helps explain why the Brits are so lost as they struggle to come to grips with the fact that Putin is kicking th

Jorge Ramos Asks Debbie Wasserman Schultz Why DEMOCRATIC FIELD IS SO WHITE (VIDEO)

Why Torture Is A Failed Policy And Practice

Vince Flynn Thanks Me

Judge Napolitano was the inspiration for doing this post. He wrote an excellent piece in the Daily Wire last week commenting on the apparent collapse of the criminal case against Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9-11 attacks. The Judge wrote:

As the pre-trial hearings in the case of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and others who are charged with masterminding the 9/11 attacks proceed at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba, the government continues to stumble with its own witnesses. In hearings last week, government lawyers tried to demonstrate that statements the defendants made to CIA and FBI agents were voluntary.

When the government’s principal torturer, a now-retired psychologist, had difficulty recalling that during a torture session he threatened one of his victims by offering to slit the throat of the victim’s young son and that he had recounted that threat under oath in previous testimony, it became apparent to all in the courtroom and to those of us who monitor these awful proceedings that the government was encountering a strange and unexpected difficulty in defending the behavior of its torturers.

The Judge’s judicial instincts are spot on. But there is much more to this story. The American public, and much of the world, have been bamboozled into believing that torture is an effective interrogation technique. It is not. It is counter productive.

Hollywood and novelists have played a key role in my view of popularizing torture as a necessary evil. The TV show, 24, featuring Kiefer Sutherland as Jack Bauer, routinely relied to torture to get info out of terrorists. Hell, even Supreme Court Justice Scalia, when he was alive, believed Jack Bauer had the right to torture:

“Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles. … He saved hundreds of thousands of lives,” Judge Scalia said. Then, recalling Season 2, where the agent’s rough interrogation tactics saved California from a terrorist nuke, the Supreme Court judge etched a line in the sand.
“Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?” Judge Scalia challenged his fellow judges. “Say that criminal law is against him? ‘You have the right to a jury trial?’ Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don’t think so.

“So the question is really whether we believe in these absolutes. And ought we believe in these absolutes.”

Then there is the late Vince Flynn. As you can see from the image posted at the top of this piece, I was friends with Vince — at least until he because famous — and helped him with his first five books. His views on torture are his own. I suggested otherwise, but he explains his thinking in this interview with Robert Bidinotto:

Flynn: Yes. Here’s where I sit. It’s real simple. If al Qaeda signed the Geneva Convention, put on a uniform, stuck their flag in the ground, and said, “Let’s meet on the battlefield,” I would say: “Absolutely. Torture—you can’t do it. Period. End of discussion.” But we have an enemy that won’t put on a uniform, has not signed the Geneva Convention, hides behind men, women, and children, and then attacks men, women, and children—civilians.

I think it’s a joke that we are even having this debate, as a nation. I think that torture should take place only for high-value targets where we know they are withholding information that could help us bust up cells, financing, organization, and possible operations.

The problem is that because we are a civilized society, and because we’ve lost our mooring—we’ve lost our attachment to our Judeo-Christian beliefs—we’ve gone off on this little safari with PC. We think that we have to say things so that people will think, “He’s smart, he’s compassionate, he cares, he’s got a good heart.” The reality is that if you were to ask the American people, “When Mitch Rapp starts to torture some bad guy who knows where the nuke is, are you sitting there in the privacy of your home crying and saying, ‘Please stop torturing this guy’? Or are you saying, ‘Get him, Mitch! Get the information out of him!’”

Vince violated the Gannon Rule. Dick Gannon was my boss at State CT. He was a retired Marine Colonel and Vietnam Combat vet. He was fond of saying, “If it feels really good it is probably wrong.” What I tried to tell Vince was no matter how emotionally satisfying torturing a bad guy is for the purpose of entertaining an audience, in the real world it is counter productive and fails to produce reliable intelligence.

Unfortunately, most of the world labors under the false belief fostered by the Jack Bauers and Vince Flynns that the CIA is skilled and practiced in the art of torture. That is a lie. The opposite is true. The CIA training program for case officers offered zero instruction in torture or interrogation. The primary mission of a CIA operations officer is to recruit foreigners to spy for us — i.e., to commit treason against their own country. This process is a seduction, not coercion. If you have convinced someone to betray their country or their cause it better not be based on anger at you for inflicting pain or threatening to harm loved ones. That is a recipe for getting screwed over by your recruited source.

The CIA operations training course at its primary facility in the United States focused on identifying and recruiting sources. Interrogation or sweating a suspect for information is not part of that training. That is why the CIA, in the immediate aftermath of 9-11, turned to two contract psychologists — James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen — to come up with an interrogation program to use on suspected terrorists. This turned out to be a lethal clown show because neither Mitchell nor Jessen “had any experience as an interrogator, any knowledge of al Qaeda, or any science to justify their methods.” They apparently were avid fans of Vince Flynn.

I credit people like former FBI Agent Ali Soufan with trying to bring some sanity to the CIA interrogation program. Unfortunately, he was ignored, smeared and became a target of CIA officers eager to discredit him.

I explain the backstory on much of this in the following video. Enjoy.

The post Why Torture Is A Failed Policy And Practice appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

Why Torture Is A Failed Policy And Practice | The Gateway Pundit | by Larry Johnson

Vince Flynn Thanks Me Judge Napolitano was the inspiration for doing this post. He wrote an excellent piece in the Daily Wire last week commenting on the apparent collapse of the criminal case against Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9-11 attacks. The Judge wrote: As the pre-tria

What Did The CIA Know And When Did It Know It?

Proposed Decolonization of Russia

As Ukraine careens toward a political and military disaster, it is time to ask why did the CIA fail to predict this. “Wait a minute,” you might say, “How do you know the CIA did not?” Fair question. I no longer have access to classified information, but I can read the public statements of DOD and State Department officials as well as remarks by various members of Congress. At no time during the past two years — since the start of the Special Military Operation — have we heard a single discouraging word from anyone with access to CIA briefings on Ukraine’s military prospects suggesting the West embarked on a fool’s errand in trying to destroy Russia.

On the eve of the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the CIA should have provided answers to the following questions:

  1. What is the capability and condition of the Russian armed forces?
  2. What is Russia’s capability to withstand Western economic sanctions?
  3. What are the conditions that must exist that will force President Putin from office?

Here is what we know for certain. Despite repeated entreaties from Vladimir Putin to President Joe Biden and other Western leaders to provide assurances that Ukraine would not be admitted to NATO, the West told Putin to screw off and continued building up Ukraine’s military. The U.S. and its NATO allies believed that Russia’s military was weak and ineffective. Western leaders also believed that Russia’s economy was vulnerable to Western economic sanctions and that an economic collapse in Russia would catapult Putin from power.

The Western plan was simple, audacious and delusional — i.e., using Ukraine as a military proxy, defeat Russia and humiliate Vladimir Putin; apply Western economic sanctions that would devastate the Russian economy and further erode support for Putin; break up the Russia Republic into 41 new countries. Sounds crazy, but take a look at what Angel Vohra wrote in Foreign Policy Magazine in April 2023:

The Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, an independent U.S. government agency with members from the U.S. House of Representatives, Senate, and departments of defense, state, and commerce, has declared that decolonizing Russia should be a “moral and strategic objective.” The Free Nations of Post-Russia Forum, comprising exiled politicians and journalists from Russia, held a meeting at the European Parliament in Brussels earlier this year and is advertising three events in different American cities this month. It has even released a map of a dismembered Russia, split into 41 different countries, in a post-Putin world, assuming he loses in Ukraine and is ousted.

Western analysts are increasingly pushing the theory that Russian disintegration is coming and that the West must not only prepare to manage any possible spillover of any ensuing civil wars but also to benefit from the fracture by luring resource-rich successor nations into its ambit. They argue that when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 the West was blindsided and failed to fully capitalize on the momentous opportunity. It must now strategize to end the Russian threat once and for all, instead of providing an off-ramp to Putin.

Put simply, the United States and its NATO allies were obsessed with the elimination of Russia as a nation and saw the war in Ukraine as their opportunity to carry out this plan. At no time prior to the start of the war in Ukraine in February 2022, or after, did the U.S. intelligence community provide any assessment countering this narrative.

So let’s take a backward look at what was being said in public about the three questions I presented above. I will start with the state of the Russian military. Here is what GIS — a European based “think” tank — was spinning in May of 2022. Note, this assessment was being echoed throughout the U.S. national security establishment:

One month into the war, the tables had been turned. The Ukrainian side had inflicted massive losses on the aggressor and taken the initiative in successful counteroffensives. Badly battered, Russian forces withdrew from northern Ukraine. The implication is that, while Ukraine’s ability to resist had been underestimated, the capability of the Russian war machine had been even more seriously overestimated.

And now, based on early developments on the ground, it seems increasingly likely that the Russian offensive in Donbas will meet the same fate as the failed ambition to take Kyiv. If this turns out to be the case, Ukraine will win the war, albeit at a horrible price. Given that the Russian side will not be allowed to yield until it has little to fight with, one can predict that Russia will emerge out of the war with a badly damaged military force. Such a scenario would have profound long-term implications.

Then we have retired U.S. Army General Ben Hodges offering his wrong-headed assessment in August 2023:

“To me, this is either arrogance, or inexperience, or they just haven’t learned anything,” Hodges continued. “And I think what we’re seeing is even with a multimillion-dollar state-of-the-art attack helicopter, if you have a pilot that is not experienced, then they’re going to be shot down.”. . .

The retired general added during his interview that even “after 18 months” of war, Russia is showing that they are still “really weak” despite having effective and equipped aircraft.

“There’s so much conversation about Ukraine can’t do this, Ukraine can’t do this,” Hodges said. “On the other side … They [Russia] have lost so many pilots, they’ve lost so many tanks, they’ve lost so much artillery, they continue to lose generals. Their logistics system is fragile. So, I think now is the time to really apply pressure on Russia, not to stop or hesitate.”

I would have to write a 500 page book to compile all of the West’s mistaken, erroneous predictions about Russia’s military capability. This represents a monumental intelligence failure.

We see a similar debacle when it comes to Western predictions about the anticipated effect of sanctions on the Russian economy. The Wall Street Journal, for example, put out its analysis on January 26, 2022 in an article titled, Russia’s Attempts to Sanction-Proof Its Economy Have Exposed a Weak Spot.

Experts say the package of retributions drawn by the U.S. and Europe will inflict heavy damage despite Russia’s efforts to insulate its economy. . . .

Now, a raft of harder-hitting measures in case of a renewed incursion into Ukraine could test this approach and experts say they could cause broad economic pain, despite Mr. Putin’s efforts to cushion the blow.

The U.S. on Tuesday said it is prepared to impose sanctions and export controls on critical sectors of the Russian economy. Senior administration officials said the U.S. could ban the export to Russia of various products that use microelectronics based on U.S. equipment, software or technology, similar to the U.S. pressure campaign on Chinese telecom giant Huawei Technologies Co. U.S. officials have previously said that measures under consideration also include cutting off Russian banks’ access to the dollar and possible sanctions on Russian energy exports. . . .

Brian O’Toole, a former Treasury official and an expert on sanctions at the Atlantic Council think tank, said the latest round of sanctions, if adopted, “would cause huge economic dislocation, with massive economic consequences… There will be an immediate economic impact.”. . .

Economic pain could further dent Mr. Putin’s approval rating, which dropped to 65% in December from close to 90% in 2015, according to the independent Russian pollster Levada Center.

Among the hardest-hitting options—and one Western negotiators say isn’t currently on the table—the Biden administration has in the past weighed disconnecting Moscow from the SWIFT international banking system, which is used by more than 11,000 financial institutions in over 200 countries, and preventing Russian financial institutions from using the U.S. dollar.

What a colossal screw up. And the Biden Administration doubled down on this foolish course of action by cutting off Russia’s access to SWIFT. The actual effect of the sanctions led Russia to move quickly to form new economic alliances with China and other major economies in the global south and the sanctions accelerated the development of an alternative payment system that was independent of the U.S. dollar. Either the Biden Administration ignored warnings from CIA analysts that Russia’s enormous reserve of natural resources, oil, gas, coal, aluminum, nickel, nitrogen and rare earth minerals insulated it from Western sanction or the CIA failed to analyze accurately the strength of the Russian economy.

Instead of weakening public support in Russia for Vladimir Putin, his political position became stronger. Instead of isolating Putin, NATO’s proxy war helped Putin solidify and expand relations with China, India, Iran, North Korea, South Africa and Brazil.

The West is caught in its own trap. Russia reactivated a moribund defense industry and is cranking out ammunition, shells, missiles, rockets, artillery, tanks, drones and combat vehicles at a rate the West cannot match. Instead of demonstrating Western superiority, the NATO alliance has been exposed as fractious, impotent lot. The defeat of Ukraine will force the United States and NATO to make a choice — escalate the war with Russia and risk a nuclear conflagration or find a diplomatic off-ramp. While the current rhetoric among many NATO members is bellicose, with France’s Macron trying to whip up support for joining the fight against Russia, the divisions in Europe are growing. Germany certainly is no longer enthusiastic about signing on to France’s suicide mission.

The key to the end of the war resides in Washington, DC. It is an election year and the electorate has no stomach for a direct military confrontation with Russia. Then there is the fact that the Biden Administration is more focused on the war between Israel and the Palestinians, the Houthi closure of the Red Sea and the fear that China will move against Taiwan. There is no good, clean, obvious exit plan for the U.S. to end its support of the proxy war with Russia. The best that the Biden team can hope for is that Ukraine’s Zelensky is overthrown and a new Ukrainian government decides to seek peace with Moscow. At that point, Biden can shrug his shoulders and say, “We tried” and then walk away. That is the outcome I’m hoping for.

The post What Did The CIA Know And When Did It Know It? appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

What Did The CIA Know And When Did It Know It? | The Gateway Pundit | by Larry Johnson

Proposed Decolonization of Russia As Ukraine careens toward a political and military disaster, it is time to ask why did the CIA fail to predict this. “Wait a minute,” you might say, “How do you know the CIA did not?” Fair question. I no longer have access to classified information, but I can read t

Putin Sends NATO Members a Warning

Russian President Vladimir Putin. Photo by: RIA Novosti

If you’re under 55 years of age you probably never heard of EF Hutton. Hutton, a brokerage, made quite a name for itself with a series of ads that carried the tag-line, “When EF Hutton talks, people listen.” Here is one example:

So pay careful attention to Putin’s warning to the West during his annual “The State of Russia” speech.

Putin noted that while accusing Russia of plans to attack NATO allies in Europe, Western allies were “selecting targets for striking our territory” and “talking about the possibility of sending a NATO contingent to Ukraine.”

“We remember the fate of those who sent their troop contingents to the territory of our country,” the Russian leader said in an apparent allusion to the failed invasions by Napoleon and Hitler. “Now the consequences for the potential invaders will be far more tragic.”

In a two-hour speech before an audience of lawmakers and top officials, Putin cast Western leaders as reckless and irresponsible and declared that the West should keep in mind that “we also have the weapons that can strike targets on their territory, and what they are now suggesting and scaring the world with, all that raises the real threat of a nuclear conflict that will mean the destruction of our civilization.”

Putin’s remarks were not “off-the-cuff.” It was a carefully crafted message directed specifically at Biden and NATO leaders and came in the wake off French President Macron’s incredibly tone-deaf speech earlier in the week:

French President Emmanuel Macron said Monday that sending Western troops on the ground in Ukraine is not “ruled out” in the future after the issue was debated at a gathering of European leaders in Paris, as Russia’s full-scale invasion grinds into a third year.

The French leader said that “we will do everything needed so Russia cannot win the war” after the meeting of over 20 European heads of state and government and other Western officials.

“There’s no consensus today to send in an official, endorsed manner troops on the ground. But in terms of dynamics, nothing can be ruled out,” Macron said in a news conference at the Elysee presidential palace.

Macron was not the only European leader with a bad case of foot-in-mouth disease. Olaf Scholz did his share to sow more NATO disunity. While he strongly dismissed Macron’s claim that Europe would deploy troops to Ukraine, he threw the U.K. and France under the bus:

Speaking to journalists in Berlin earlier this week, Scholz justified his continued refusal to send Germany’s Taurus long-range cruise missiles to Ukraine by saying it could require German troops in Ukraine to program them.

That would — in Scholz’s view — make Germany an active participant in the conflict.

“This is a very far-reaching weapon,” Scholz said of the Taurus. “And what the British and French are doing in terms of target control and support for target control cannot be done in Germany.”

Besides Putin’s clear warning to the NATO alliance that it is playing with potential nuclear fire, Russia’ s intelligence service leaked a stunning conversation between German military officers who were discussing plans to attack Russia. According to the transcript, a conversation took place on February 19, 2024 among Grafe (department head for operations and exercises at the Air Force Forces Command of the Bundeswehr), Gerhartz (Bundeswehr Air Force Inspector), Fenske and Frohstedte (employees of the Air Operations Command within the Space Operations Center of the Bundeswehr). There was a detailed discussion of using German missiles to attack targets in Russia, such as the Kerch Bridge in Crimea. You can read the full transcript here.

This was not an accidental leak. It was intended to put the West on notice that Russia is fully aware of what NATO officials across the alliance are saying to each other and is aware of plans to attack Russian targets. This leak coupled with Putin’s remarks the previous day is an unmistakable warning to the West that it is approaching a red-line that, if crossed, will require a strong Russian response. Such a response could include destroying NATO bases used to launch attacks on Russia. Putin is not bullsh*tting. He is serious and the gravity of the matter is underscored by Putin giving the green light to leak intercepted conversations of NATO officers to the media. The West better pay close attention.

The post Putin Sends NATO Members a Warning appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

Putin Sends NATO Members a Warning | The Gateway Pundit | by Larry Johnson

If you’re under 55 years of age you probably never heard of EF Hutton. Hutton, a brokerage, made quite a name for itself with a series of ads that carried the tag-line, “When EF Hutton talks, people listen.” Here is one example: So pay careful attention to Putin’s warning to the West during his annu

NY Times Plays CIA Messenger — Turn Off The Lights, The Party Is Over

Ukraine Intel Chief Budanov

I apologize on not writing about the NY Times article by  Adam Entous and Michael SchwirtzThe Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin, before now but my schedule did not give me the time I needed to do the subject justice. I was inundated with requests for a comment by several media outlets and did my best to accommodate those in radio and TV interviews.

The key thing you need to understand is that this article is a deliberate piece of misinformation that is intended to shape public and policymaking opinion in the United States. The following opening to the article, like all propaganda, is a mixture of fact and fantasy.

the intelligence partnership between Washington and Kyiv is a linchpin of Ukraine’s ability to defend itself. The C.I.A. and other American intelligence agencies provide intelligence for targeted missile strikes, track Russian troop movements and help support spy networks.

But the partnership is no wartime creation, nor is Ukraine the only beneficiary.

It took root a decade ago, coming together in fits and starts under three very different U.S. presidents, pushed forward by key individuals who often took daring risks. It has transformed Ukraine, whose intelligence agencies were long seen as thoroughly compromised by Russia, into one of Washington’s most important intelligence partners against the Kremlin today.

Yes, it is true that U.S. intelligence, along with NATO, supplied Ukraine with intelligence used to carry out missile strikes on Russian positions. Admitting this in the pages of the NY Times is reckless and dangerous. I am pretty sure the Russians already knew this but putting this on the record with U.S. intelligence sources is a casus belli for Russia. Can you imagine the reaction if Russian intelligence confirmed they provided intel to a group or country that attacked the U.S.? Do you think Washington would ignore that and not seek retribution? Of course not.

But the article starts with the big lie by claiming that the CIA relationship with Ukraine started in February 2022 and then piles on with these two whoppers:

Before the war, the Ukrainians proved themselves to the Americans by collecting intercepts that helped prove Russia’s involvement in the 2014 downing of a commercial jetliner, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. The Ukrainians also helped the Americans go after the Russian operatives who meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

The Maidan and the ensuing events in February and March 2014 involved what I believe was a joint U.S./U.K. intelligence operation to remove Ukraine’s President Yanukovich and install a pro-Western government that would be used to attack Russia. The fact of the matter is that the CIA has been dealing with Ukrainian opponents of Russia since at least 1947.

The propaganda purpose of the article is revealed by the decision of the reporters to repeat the specious claims that Russia shot down Malaysia Airlines flight 17 and that Russia “meddled” in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. We have had a slew of revelations over the last two months, principally from Matt Taibbi and Michael Schellenberger, showing that it was the Clinton campaign with the help of the CIA and the FBI who meddled in the 2016 Presidential campaign in a failed effort to defeat Donald Trump. Entous and Schwirtz insert the bogus claim that Ukraine fingered the Russian officer responsible for “election interference.”

In one joint operation, a HUR team duped an officer from Russia’s military intelligence service into providing information that allowed the C.I.A. to connect Russia’s government to the so-called Fancy Bear hacking group, which had been linked to election interference efforts in a number of countries.

No. Fancy Bear was a CIA creation that used Vault 7 tools to create a fake cyber trail that implicated Russian intelligence. I discussed the CIA’s role in this operation four years ago in my piece, DID JOHN BRENNAN’S CIA CREATE GUCCIFER 2.0 AND DCLEAKS? Here is the relevant portion of that piece:

In October 2015 John Brennan reorganized the CIA. As part of that reorganization he created a new directorate–DIRECTORATE OF DIGITAL INNOVATION. Its mission was to “manipulate digital footprints.” In other words, this was the Directorate that did the work of creating Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks. One of their specialties, creating Digital Dust.

We also know, thanks to Wikileaks, that the CIA was using software specifically designed to mask CIA activity and make it appear like it was done by a foreign entity. Wikipedia describes the Vault 7 documents:

Vault 7 is a series of documents that WikiLeaks began to publish on 7 March 2017, that detail activities and capabilities of the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency to perform electronic surveillance and cyber warfare. The files, dated from 2013–2016, include details on the agency’s software capabilities, such as the ability to compromise cars, smart TVs,[1] web browsers (including Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera Software ASA),[2][3][4] and the operating systems of most smartphones (including Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android), as well as other operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, macOS, and Linux[5][6

One of the tools in Vault 7 carries the innocuous name, MARBLE. Hackernews explains the purpose and function of MARBLE:

Dubbed “Marble,” the part 3 of CIA files contains 676 source code files of a secret anti-forensic Marble Framework, which is basically an obfuscator or a packer used to hide the true source of CIA malware.
The CIA’s Marble Framework tool includes a variety of different algorithm with foreign language text intentionally inserted into the malware source code to fool security analysts and falsely attribute attacks to the wrong nation.

Marble is used to hamper[ing] forensic investigators and anti-virus companies from attributing viruses, trojans and hacking attacks to the CIA,” says the whistleblowing site.

“…for example by pretending that the spoken language of the malware creator was not American English, but Chinese, but then showing attempts to conceal the use of Chinese, drawing forensic investigators even more strongly to the wrong conclusion,” WikiLeaks explains.

So guess what gullible techies “discovered” in mid-June 2016? The meta data in the Guccifer 2.0 communications had “Russian fingerprints.”

The goal of the Entous/Schwirtz article is simple — portray the CIA as a great organization that did magnificent work in Ukraine but was not able to complete the mission of destroying Russia because the Republican Congress failed to provide funding and the Ukrainian intelligence service was uncontrollable.

Entous and Schwirtz present an emotional account of CIA and UK spies trying to warn Ukrainian officials that Russia was going to invade. Hell, the Brits even cried. But, despite Ukrainian recalcitrance, the CIA would not abandon Ukraine:

President Zelensky and some of his top advisers appeared unconvinced, even after Mr. Burns, the C.I.A. director, rushed to Kyiv in January 2022 to brief them.

As the Russian invasion neared, C.I.A. and MI6 officers made final visits in Kyiv with their Ukrainian peers. One of the MI6 officers teared up in front of the Ukrainians, out of concern that the Russians would kill them.

At Mr. Burns’s urging, a small group of C.I.A. officers were exempted from the broader U.S. evacuation and were relocated to a hotel complex in western Ukraine. They didn’t want to desert their partners.

We’re then treated to a litany of all the incredible secrets the CIA passed to Ukraine about Russia’s plans to murder the government and military leaders in Kiev. But we’re also told that the CIA trained Ukie intel squads are something of a Rogue Elephant.

At the time, the future head of Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, General Budanov, was a rising star in Unit 2245. He was known for daring operations behind enemy lines and had deep ties to the C.I.A. The agency had trained him and also taken the extraordinary step of sending him for rehabilitation to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland after he was shot in the right arm during fighting in the Donbas.

Disguised in Russian uniforms, then-Lt. Col. Budanov led commandos across a narrow gulf in inflatable speedboats, landing at night in Crimea.

But an elite Russian commando unit was waiting for them. The Ukrainians fought back, killing several Russian fighters, including the son of a general, before retreating to the shoreline, plunging into the sea and swimming for hours to Ukrainian-controlled territory.

It was a disaster. In a public address, President Putin accused the Ukrainians of plotting a terrorist attack and promised to avenge the deaths of the Russian fighters.

“There is no doubt that we will not let these things pass,” he said.

In Washington, the Obama White House was livid. Joseph R. Biden Jr., then the vice president and a champion of assistance to Ukraine, called Ukraine’s president to angrily complain.

Got it? Budanov is a reckless, out of control spy. Message delivered. Entous and Schwirtz then return to the narrative of how great a job the CIA did in protecting Ukraine from the Russians. For example, they recount how the CIA informed Zelensky that Ukraine had stopped the Russian invasion cold at the end of March 2022:

When the Russian assault on Kyiv had stalled, the C.I.A. station chief rejoiced and told his Ukrainian counterparts that they were “punching the Russians in the face,” according to a Ukrainian officer who was in the room.

This is not true. It is a lie. Not a word is written about the negotiations that were underway in Turkey between Russia and Ukraine that had reached an agreement in principle until the U.S. and the U.K. intervened and ordered the Ukrainians to walk away. Can’t have that in this narrative. Nope. Got to find someone else to blame for the unfolding debacle. And Entous and Schwirtz oblige with this off-hand paragraph at the end of their piece:

The question that some Ukrainian intelligence officers are now asking their American counterparts — as Republicans in the House weigh whether to cut off billions of dollars in aid — is whether the C.I.A. will abandon them. “It happened in Afghanistan before and now it’s going to happen in Ukraine,” a senior Ukrainian officer said.

The answer to that question is left hanging. Entous and Schwirtz did their job — they polished up the CIA turd and laid the foundation of blame for the looming defeat at the hands of the Republican Congress and an out-of-control Ukrainian intel chief, Budanov. Once you grasp this you can understand why Kiril Budanov has been on the record in the press this week denying the U.S. claim that Putin killed Russian-dissident Nalvani and that Russia is using Iranian and North Korean missiles. Looks like Budanov understands he can no longer count on the CIA to have his back.

The post NY Times Plays CIA Messenger — Turn Off The Lights, The Party Is Over appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

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