Opinion

The Russia report reveals that MI5 and MI6 have lost their way

f you listened to Boris Johnson on Wednesday, you would have got the idea that the Russia report was nothing but an attempt to subvert Brexit. But it wasn’t – in fact, the intelligence and security committee report is far more original and important than anyone expected. The real story it has uncovered isn’t even primarily about Russia. It’s about the UK intelligence agencies themselves.

 The Russia report points to wilful negligence by the British government

Dominic Grieve

 

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The report’s main narrative is not new or hard to understand. Post-Soviet Russia wishes to be treated as a great power. It uses its intelligence services to damage western states such as Britain in order to advance that goal. Its tools include poisoning, cyber disruption, disinformation, financial influenceand spying. And, as Britain’s foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, admitted in relation to the 2019 election, it never stops trying.

But the big reveal in the Russia report is about Britain, not Russia. It’s that shortsighted British politicians have encouraged this to happen. It’s that UK intelligence agencies chose to watch from the sidelines while it went on. In the report’s three key phrases, the agencies regarded the defence of Britain’s democracy as too much of a “hot potato” to intervene; they were so busy on anti-terrorist work that they “took their eye off the ball”; and this all happened because the government in general, not just the agencies, fostered a “somewhat laissez-faire policy approach” to Russia.

Opinion

Top intelligence officials release statements criticizing leaking of Russian bounties information

Top U.S. intelligence officials released statements Monday criticizing leaks to the media as the Trump administration continues to defend against allegations that it knew Russia had offered bounties to incentivize Taliban-linked militants to kill coalition troops in Afghanistan.

CIA Director Gina Haspel and Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe released similar statements Monday night slamming leaks as detrimental to intelligence investigations.

“The selective leaking of any classified information disrupts the vital interagency work to collect, assess, and mitigate threats and places our forces at risk. It also, simply put, a crime,” Ratcliffe said in a statement.

Haspel said that “leaks compromise and disrupt the critical interagency work to collect, assess, and ascribe culpability.”

Neither official directly addressed the reported intelligence assessing Russia had offered bounties to militants to kill U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

“We are still investigating the alleged intelligence referenced in recent media reporting and we will brief the president and congressional leaders at the appropriate time,” Ratcliffe said.

Opinion

Think we have military primacy over China? Think again.

Here’s a fact that ought to startle every American who assumes that because we spend nearly $1 trillion each year on defense, we have primacy over our emerging rival, China.

“Over the past decade, in U.S. war games against China, the United States has a nearly perfect record: We have lost almost every single time.”

That’s a quote from a new book called “The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare,” the most provocative critique of U.S. defense policy I’ve read in years. It’s written by Christian Brose, former staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a close adviser to late senator John McCain (R-Ariz.). The book isn’t just a wake-up call, it’s a fire alarm in the night.

Brose explains a terrible truth about war with China: Our spy and communications satellites would immediately be disabled; our forward bases in Guam and Japan would be “inundated” by precise missiles; our aircraft carriers would have to sail away from China to escape attack; our F-35 fighter jets couldn’t reach their targets because the refueling tankers they need would be shot down.

Opinion

Think This Pandemic Is Bad? We Have Another Crisis Coming

On the last Friday in March, I lost hope.

I have always believed in America: not in our inherent goodness — I am too black for that — but in our sheer animal will to survive. Crisis after crisis, our country has evolved to meet the moment, even if that meant changing the way we thought the world worked or striving to upend the imbalance of power. But on that Friday, I was on my couch working when the messages started to pour in. Friends sent me video after video of Republican senators debating stimulus measures to address the coronavirus crisis, standing in the Senate chamber, saying that the Green New Deal — a proposal that I helped create — was the reason millions of Americans would not receive the help that they need.

I was furious. Of the nearly $2 trillion in aid proposed in that first version of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, known as the CARES Act, $500 billion went toward a business-relief fund with little to no oversight. Fifty-eight billion of this was earmarked for airlines, and a lax definition of eligible businesses created a loophole for oil and gas. The bill included no climate protections, so the claim that it was being held up over Green New Deal provisions was absurd. And the changes proposed by Democrats — emissions reductions for airlines, limiting bailouts for fossil fuel industries, protections for airline workers — were modest...

Opinion

Trump's chaotic response to COVID-19 reveals major national security weakness

If the world is high school, The United States is the most popular girl: hated by many, worshipped by some and watched by all. Nothing goes unnoticed. This nation's response to the COVID-19 virus has been broadcast to the world and closely observed. Each misstep, every reversal of policy and each statement of misinformation, along with the ways in which our states and the federal government are not in communication or cohesion, projects highly valuable information to the world, and to our enemies in particular. 

When I worked undercover as a CIA officer assigned to the Counterterrorism Center, specifically the biological weapons group, I was acutely aware of what information the administration was broadcasting to the terrorists I was tracking. In order to fully understand these terrorists I had to fully understand how and why they saw the United States and Americans as the enemy. Knowing exactly what they perceived as our vulnerabilities helped me suss out their plots to kill massive amounts of people with singular and simple deployment. My thinking as I sought to shut down chemical plans was not only to know the enemy but also to know how the enemy knows us. 

Opinion

Covid-19 Brings Out All the Usual Zombies

Let me summarize the Trump administration/right-wing media view on the coronavirus: It’s a hoax, or anyway no big deal. Besides, trying to do anything about it would destroy the economy. And it’s China’s fault, which is why we should call it the “Chinese virus.”
Oh, and epidemiologists who have been modeling the virus’s future spread have come under sustained attack, accused of being part of a “deep state” plot against Donald Trump, or maybe free markets.
Does all this give you a sense of déjà vu? It should. After all, it’s very similar to the Trump/right-wing line on climate change. Here’s what Trump tweeted back in 2012: “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing noncompetitive.” It’s all there: it’s a hoax, doing anything about it will destroy the economy, and let’s blame China.

Opinion

Robert Steele: Presidential Primer on Holistic Analytics (Bring Out Your Dead, Fake Pandemic Crashing a 20 Trillion Economy for 685 Dead) + Virus 5G RECAP

From a counterintelligence point of view — I was the first to put it all together in my break-through article for Tehran Times (no US media will publish me because they are all controlled and refuse to consider me an annoying truth-teller to be avoided). This should have been treated as an act of war from day one, with immediate massive counterintelligence investigations into Gates, bio-engineered drops in Wuhan, Milan, and Qom; 5G, insider trading, and media manipulation and incentivizing toward crying fire in a crowded  theater.

We have wrecked a 20 trillion a year economy, and the 2 trillion in hand-outs is going to make it worse.

The President has not yet taken on 5G as a triggering causes (both lowering immunity and activating bio-engineering nano virus agents).

Not available to me before, are the two below graphics from American Intelligence Media, that should be immediately added to the investigation into Israel, Germany, England, and all others including rogue US elements — associated with biological warfare.

Opinion

Former Ambassador Jon Huntsman Jr. says Russia 'shaking in their boots' as oil prices tank

Russia is "shaking in their boots" as oil prices continue to plunge, Utah Republican gubernatorial candidate and former U.S. Ambassador Jon Huntsman Jr. stated Tuesday.

Triggered by the multiplying threat of coronavirus, oil prices fell 30 percent at the start of the week, the largest one-time drop since the 1991 Gulf War.

In an interview on "Fox & Friends" with host Brian Kilmeade, Huntsman said Russia and President Vladimir Putin are concerned about the United States taking more of their market share but they love that America is suffering because of the oil price drop.

"They want to see us divided. They want to drive a wedge into our politics," Huntsman said.

"But, I've always argued," he told Kilmeade, "that the greatest weapon we have against the Russians is our ability to be energy self-sufficient."

Opinion

The worst day for counterterrorism since 9/11

Sept. 11, 2001, was a national tragedy, the most consequential attack on the United States since Pearl Harbor. The Clinton administration had negotiated with the Taliban and accepted the radical group’s counterterrorism assurances. The deaths of almost 3,000 people in New York City, 125 people at the Pentagon, and 265 more onboard the hijacked airplanes underscored the fallacy of that approach. The Taliban violated both its agreement to quarantine al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and to close its terror training camps.

The agreement which Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced on Friday represents willful amnesia and magical thinking. It is compounded by the U.S. government’s deliberate undermining of Afghanistan’s elected government and, more recently, its electoral process, by ignoring massive fraud in order to avoid a second round in presidential elections.

Here are the basic problems with the Taliban deal: Withdrawal is not calibrated to the success of intra-Afghan dialogue. The Taliban are not a unitary organization, and there is no mechanism to prevent the Taliban from playing good-cop-bad-cop by simultaneously holding out an olive branch while ordering supposedly rogue units to attack.

Opinion

The U.S. Military Is Not Ready for a Constitutional Crisis

I spent nine years on active duty in the U.S. Navy. I served as an aircraft commander, led combat reconnaissance crews, and taught naval history. But the first thing I did upon joining the military, the act that solemnized my obligation, was swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution. How strange, then, that despite all of my training, the millions of taxpayer dollars devoted to teaching me how to fly, lead, and teach, not once did I receive meaningful instruction on the document to which I had pledged my life.

For most of my time in uniform, my lack of understanding about the Constitution was entirely academic. No one I served with imagined that we would ever find ourselves choosing between following orders and upholding our oath. Some were dimly aware that our compatriots long ago had wrestled with these issues. As an instructor at the Citadel, I taught my students about the My Lai massacre, and about the obligation to disobey an unlawful order. But it was theoretical. To my students, Vietnam was a faint echo...

Opinion

‘We are not a banana republic’: National security adviser defends Vindman dismissals

National security adviser Robert O’Brien on Tuesday defended the dismissal of Lt. Cols. Alexander and Yevgeny Vindman from the National Security Council, suggesting that the officials were trying to undermine the president.

“We’re not a country where a bunch of lieutenant colonels can get together and decide what the policy is of the United States,” O’Brien said during an event at the Atlantic Council think tank. “We are not a banana republic.”

O’Brien also insisted that the twin brothers — one of whom, Alexander, was a crucial witness against President Donald Trump in the investigation that led to his impeachment on a charge of abuse of power — were “absolutely” not retaliated against.

But Trump tweeted on Saturday that Alexander Vindman was “OUT” because he was “insubordinate” and had reported the contents of Trump’s July phone call with the Ukrainian president “incorrectly.” It also still isn’t clear why Yevgeny Vindman, an NSC ethics lawyer who was not involved in the impeachment process at all, was fired.

Opinion

Editorial: Trump is winging it with Iran. The results do not look good

There were plenty of reasons for U.S. officials (among others) to want to be rid of a man whom David Petraeus, the former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, once described as “a truly evil figure.” But Suleimani wasn’t the leader of a stateless terrorist group; he was a top government official of a sovereign state. As one defense analyst observed, “This is the equivalent of Iran killing the U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the director of the Central Intelligence Agency and then taking credit for it.” The potential consequences are therefore much bigger than those when U.S. forces killed Osama bin Laden and Abu Bakr Baghdadi.

Opinion

Warren Questions if Soleimani Strike Linked to Impeachment — ‘Look at the Timing’

...Warren said, “Look, I think that people are reasonably asking about the timing and why it is that the administration seems to have all kinds of different answers. In the first 48 hours after this attack, what did we hear? Well, we heard it was for an imminent attack, and then we heard, no, no, it is to prevent any future attack, and then we heard that it is from the vice president himself and no, it is related to 9/11, and then we heard from president reports of people in the intelligence community saying that the whole, that the threat was overblown. You know, when the administration doesn’t seem to have a coherent answer for taking a step like this. They have taken a step that moves us closer to war, a step that puts everyone at risk, and step that puts the military at risk and puts the diplomats in the region at risk. And we have already paid a huge price for this war. Thousands of American lives lost, and a cost that we have paid domestically and around the world. At the same time, look at what it has done in the Middle East, millions of people who have been killed, who have been injured, who have been displaced. So this is not a moment when the president should be escalating tensions and moving us to war. The job of the president is to keep us safe, and that means move back from the edge...”

Opinion

Russia in 2020. Like 2019, But More So

In many ways, Putin’s recent marathon press conference set the tone for the new year. It felt like a four hours and eighteen minutes long trailer to a new series of a long-running TV franchise that has run out of new ideas. There was a hint of a resolution of the perennial question of succession, but only a hint, such that it could still go in any direction. There were the usual complaints about how Russia is treated by the rest of the world. There were suggestions that the economy and people’s quality of life would improve in due course, but no real ideas. In short, it was a re-run rather than a re-boot.

This is probably going to prove a decent encapsulation of 2020 for Russia: like 2019, but more so. Of course, making predictions about the future is an activity inevitably leading to disappointment and error, and Putin and Russia is, like everyone else, subject to the whims and vicissitudes of fate and the rest of the world. Stuff happens. Yet the irony is that while Putin’s power within the system and also Russia’s agency in the world are still relatively great, the ideas, the resources, the courage to do much that is different largely appear to be lacking.

Opinion

Impeachment, Brought to You by the CIA

Whatever one thinks of Donald Trump and impeachment, it is the political establishment that is trying to bring him down. That the ‘whistleblower’ is a CIA officer who has since returned to active duty at the agency isn’t lost on Mr. Trump’s supporters. As much as the NPR tote bag set believes that it is the fount of wisdom and truth, they, along with the CIA, inflicted three years of the cynical farce of Russiagate on us and came up empty handed.

The CIA was the central protagonist in Russiagate. The origins of the New Cold War are found in Bill Clinton’s first term, when administration neo-cons looted, plundered and moved NATO against a prostrate Russia in contradiction to explicit guarantees not to do so made by the George H.W. Bush administration. Vladimir Putin’s apparent crime was to oust the Clintonites from Russia and restore Russian sovereignty.

Opinion

Impeachment…or CIA Coup?

You don’t need to be a supporter of President Trump to be concerned about the efforts to remove him from office. Last week House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced impeachment proceedings against the President over a phone call made to the President of Ukraine. According to the White House record of the call, the President asked his Ukrainian counterpart to look into whether there is any evidence of Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 election and then mentioned that a lot of people were talking about how former US Vice President Joe Biden stopped the prosecution of his son who was under investigation for corruption in Ukraine.

Democrats, who spent more than two years convinced that “Russiagate” would enable them to remove Trump from office only to have their hopes dashed by the Mueller Report, now believe they have their smoking gun in this phone call.

It this about politics? Yes. But there may be more to it than that.

It may appear that the Democratic Party, furious over Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss, is the driving force behind this ongoing attempt to remove Donald Trump from office, but at every turn we see the fingerprints of the CIA and its allies in the US deep state.

In August 2016, a former acting director of the CIA, Mike Morell, wrote an extraordinary article in the New York Times accusing Donald Trump of being an “agent of the Russian Federation.” Morell was clearly using his intelligence career as a way of bolstering his claim that Trump was a Russian spy – after all, the CIA should know such a thing! But the claim was a lie...

Opinion

Ex-MI6 chief says British spies are angry with John Le Carré for making them look heartless and immoral

He has written some of Britain’s best-loved espionage novels, filled with Cold War double agents inspired by real people he met while spying for the British Government in West Germany.

John Le Carré, whose real name is David Cornwell, left MI6 in 1963 and built a new career on secret plots of a fictional kind.

But the novelist has been accused by a real-life spymaster of being "obsessed" with his secret service career, despite having only serving for three years, and writing "corrosive" books that undermine the UK’s intelligence services.

Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, said Le Carré’s novels are “exclusively about betrayal” and trade on the author’s limited experience as an intelligence officer to make spying seem immoral.

Speaking yesterday to an audience at Cliveden Literary Festival, Sir Richard said MI6 spies were angry with Le Carré, now 87, for portraying them as duplicitous and untrustworthy.

Opinion

Military Scenario Possible After Saudi Oil Attacks - Russian Foreign Intelligence Chief

Two drones attacked Saudi Aramco's oil fields last Saturday, causing major fires and partially disrupting oil production. Although the attacks were claimed by Yemen's Houthis, the US blamed the incident on Iran but the accusations were strongly rejected by Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif as 'pointless'.

A 'military scenario' is possible after attacks on Saudi Arabia's oil facilities but hopefully the issue will be resolved peacefully, the Director of Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service Sergey Naryshkin has said. 

"There is a threat [of a military scenario]. But I hope for a peaceful resolution," Naryshkin told reporters.

Two oil facilities owned by state-run oil giant Saudi Aramco were attacked by drones on Saturday night, cutting the kingdom's oil output in half to around 5.7 million barrels per day and causing turmoil on international markets.  

Opinion

Putin is the greatest gift to NATO since the end of the Cold War, ex-CIA chief says

Russian President Vladimir Putin has given NATO a “reason to live again” and is one key factor behind the resurgence and improved capability of the military alliance.

Speaking at the Ambrosetti Forum in Italy on Friday, Gen. David Petraeus, a former CIA director, said that NATO is now more capable than it was even just a few years ago.

He explained that recent friction between member nations had actually galvanized cooperation and led to increased spending on defense, but he also said there were two other major factors at play.

“One is the greatest gift to NATO since the end of the Cold War and that’s Valdimir Putin and his aggressive actions which have given NATO a reason to live again, if you will, in a very significant way,” he told CNBC’s Steve Sedgwick.

“And also that the European countries, however fragile the economy of the EU may be now, certainly (they) have long since come out of the euro crisis, so they could donate money to NATO as well.”

Opinion

US military complex is a ‘malignant virus’ that's evolved to defend itself – Andrew Cockburn

The US military industrial complex has grown into a self-sustaining organism with an immune system that attacks and smothers any threat to its food supply – the taxpayers' money, writes renowned defense analyst Andrew Cockburn.

Cockburn outlines the process that allows US defense contractors to thrive despite repeatedly missing deadlines and producing overpriced, subpar equipment. The system has evolved to be very good at defending itself – while leaving the country, “in reality so poorly defended,” he writes in his latest think piece for Harper's Magazine titled ‘The Military-Industrial Virus: How bloated defense budgets gut our armed forces’.

Cockburn, whose 40+ years of experience include numerous books and publications on the US' military complex, its foreign wars and adversaries, looks at the current state of America's armed force – from the overpriced “disaster” that is the F-35 fighter, to the few “dilapidated” minesweepers, to faulty personal protection and radios American soldiers are equipped with – and compares it to the exorbitant defense bills the taxpayer has to foot.