The Trump administration 2

Alt-right and fake news specialist. Lovely.

Paladin1 wrote:

Rev Pesky wrote:

Yes, Flynn is gone, and the consequences of screwing with the intelligence community are becoming more clear.

Is this the same INT community that gave us those pictures of WMDs in Iraq which we used to justify an invasion? You remember, the grainy satelitte photos with red circles over random blurry things that had all the generals vigourously nodding their heads.

Were the USA intelligence services repsonsible for pushing the USA to invade Iraq? Here's from Wikipedia:

Rationale for the Iraq war

Quote:

...Throughout late 2001, 2002, and early 2003, the Bush Administration worked to build a case for invading Iraq, culminating in then Secretary of State Colin Powell's February 2003 address to the Security Council. Shortly after the invasion, the Central Intelligence Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, and other intelligence agencies largely discredited evidence related to Iraqi weapons as well as links to Al-Qaeda, and at this point the Bush and Blair Administrations began to shift to secondary rationales for the war, such as the Hussein government's human rights record and promoting democracy in Iraq.

...Critics such as Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean charged that the Bush and Blair administrations deliberately falsified evidence to build a case for war. These criticisms were strengthened with the 2005 release of the so-called Downing Street Memo, written in July 2002, in which the former head of British Military Intelligence wrote that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" of removing Saddam Hussein from power.

...An independent assessment by the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that Bush Administration officials did misuse intelligence in their public communications. For example, Vice President Dick Cheney's September 2002 statement on Meet the Press that "we do know, with absolute certainty, that he (Saddam) is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon," was inconsistent with the views of the intelligence community at the time.

...In his January 2003 State of the Union speech, U.S. President George W. Bush said, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." This single sentence is now known as "the Sixteen Words."

...The Washington Post...reported "Dozens of interviews with current and former intelligence officials and policymakers in the United States, Britain, France and Italy show that the Bush administration disregarded key information available at the time showing that the Iraq-Niger claim was highly questionable."With the release of the 2002 NIE report, the Bush administration was criticized for including the statement in the State of the Union despite CIA and State Department reports questioning its veracity.

...In early October 2002, George Tenet called Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley to ask him to remove reference to the Niger uranium from a speech Bush was to give in Cincinnati on 7 October. This was followed up by a memo asking Hadley to remove another, similar line. Another memo was sent to the White House expressing the CIA's view that the Niger claims were false; this memo was given to both Hadley and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. 

It seems pretty clear that USA intelligence services were a lot more circumspect about Iraqi WMD than the admiinstration was.

In any case, what the intelligence services did then is immaterial to this situation. It's just plain old common sense that you listen and learn before you start ranting away. Trump is obviously incapable of doing that, and will pay the price for his stupidity.

Agencies continue to investigate whether there was coordination on the release of information during the campaign.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/14/politics/donald-trump-aides-russians-campa...
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Trump and First Nations:

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2017/02/tribal-radio-stations-d...

Our Intelligence Community is so worried by the unprecedented problems of the Trump administration—not only do senior officials possess troubling ties to the Kremlin, there are nagging questions about basic competence regarding Team Trump—that it is beginning to withhold intelligence from a White House which our spies do not trust. 

http://observer.com/2017/02/donald-trump-administration-mike-flynn-russi...

http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/15/opinions/trump-complains-about-leaks-begal...

Trump's bypassing the media and holding a rally in Florida this weekend

I referred to Trump last year as "the Russian poodle," and we've known for years of Trump's financial ties to Russia, with his son Donald Jr. saying in 2008, "We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia." It's all the more important now that Trump release his tax returns so that we can understand any financial leverage Russia has over him. Yet the same Republicans who oversaw eight investigations of Benghazi shrug at far greater concerns involving Trump and Russia. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/15/opinion/what-did-trump-know-and-when-did-he-know-it.html?_r=0 

The Swamp Strikes Back  -  by Pepe Escobar

http://thesaker.is/the-swamp-strikes-back

"...The 'crime' - according to Deep State factions: talking to a Russian diplomat.

The Made in USA color revolution by the axis of Deep State neocons, Democratic neoliberalcons and corporate media will be pursued, relentlessly, 24/7..."

The Dangerous Precedence of the Hunt Against Flynn...And Trump

https://t.co/z22eo6G1VL

"Trump will now cave in on foreign policy: on Russia, on Syria and everywhere else the borg demands it. He has been put on notice and will either do as he is told to do or he will be the prey in an even bigger hunt.

Flynn is only the appetizer. Trump is the entree..."

NDPP wrote:

Intelligence Agencies Clash With Trump Over Russia Allegations

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/02/16/trum-f16.html

"The litany of unsubstantiated allegations of Russian control over Trump continued...."

 

Democrats Seek to Channel Opposition to Trump Behind Anti-Russia Offensive

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/02/16/pers-f16.html

"Trump's establishment critics are seeking to hijack the opposition of workers and youth to Trump and channel it behind their own imperialist and militarist agenda..."

I think it's a hoot to see these "socialists" twisting themselves into pretzels to defend the least socialist president ever, just because he is either being blackmailed or bribed by Russia.

Trump is even too much for him:

https://twitter.com/dick_nixon/status/832300067218395137

Just to be clear, Flynn did not resign over his contacts with Russian diplomats before the election: the scandal was over his contacts after the election but before Trump assumed office, when Flynn was still a private citizen and purportedly engaged in negoiations with a foreign state against the interest of the US Government (still the Obama Administration).

As to why he may have mis-represented these conversations, - the two most obvious reasons are:

1. They were almost definitely criminal in nature; and 

2. They may well have been at the direction of the incoming president, - who is thus also possibly and criminally complicit. 

Flynn changed story to FBI, no charges expected

http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/16/politics/fbi-not-expected-to-pursue-charge...

EPA employees revolt against Trump's revolting EPA nominee, who is likely to be confirmed today.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/16/us/politics/scott-pruitt-environmenta...

Associated Press also reporting on the draft memo: 

https://apnews.com/5508111d59554a33be8001bdac4ef830?utm_campaign=SocialF...

The White House is denying it, and they'd still have to deal with governors of the states where this is being mobilised. But it's a terrifying idea. It would also necessitate the expansion of detention facilities. Keith Olberman had a video rant on this before the election or just after, where he said that a mass rounding up of undocumented immigrants would result in concentration camps. I find it hard to argue with his reasoning right about now.

Walkom: Are US Spy Agencies Trying to Bring Down Donald Trump?

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2017/02/17/walkom-are-us-spy-...

CrossTalk on Flynn: Palace Coup

https://youtu.be/JxshhObR9Fk

"The resignation of Michael Flynn as National Security Advisor is essentially a political assassination committed by the intelligence community and aided by the liberal mainstream media.

'This is now the contemporary liberal agenda: violations of civil liberties and baying for war against Russia. What surprises me is Donald Trump's lack of fight-back. He hasn't fought back. He has allowed the agenda to be shaped by the media and the intelligence services. And that, I think, is a very dangerous development.'

You know Trump has a problem when even Fox News can't stomach his bull any more:

'Demonstrably, unquestionably, 100 percent false':

Quote:

…this president keeps telling untrue things, and he does it every single time he’s in front of the microphone.

..when it becomes possible i will begin a thread on the resistance to trump and his admin.

Rubio is asked to leave Tampa office over disruption from weekly protests

The owner of Bridgeport Center, a gleaming, nine-story office center at 5201 Kennedy Blvd., notified Rubio's office on Feb. 1 that it will not renew its lease. The reason: The rallies have become too disruptive to the other tenants and a costly expense for the company, said Jude Williams, president of America's Capital Partners.

"A professional office building is not a place for that," Williams said. "I understand their cause, but at the end of the day it was a security concern for us.

Rubio is now faced with the prospect of going without a brick-and-mortar office until a new location can be found. Rubio's annual lease expired in December and he has been renting on a month-to-month basis since then working to negotiate a new agreement, according to his office. The staff needs to leave Suite 530 by Friday and does not have a new location lined up. Negotiations with another building recently fell through....

Donald Trump accuses Barack Obama of “wire tapping”.

Without citing evidence, Donald Trump on Saturday accused Barack Obama of a Watergate-style “wire tapping” of his offices in New York before the US presidential election...

...The unprecedented attack by a president on his predecessor, made in a series of early morning tweets, stoked speculation that Trump’s remarks were prompted by stories circulating in rightwing media, including one that claimed Obama is attempting a “silent coup” against Trump.

...On Saturday, the president launched a series of tweets that began at 5.35am. In one he wrote: “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!”

He followed up with a string of tweets in the next half-hour that claimed Obama had defied a court rejection to tap his office, and invited a “good lawyer” to make a case against the alleged process.

...An hour after his blast at Obama, Trump returned to more trivial matters on Twitter. The former host of the reality TV show The Apprentice commented on his successor’s decision to quit.

“Arnold Schwarzenegger isn’t voluntarily leaving the Apprentice,” Trump wrote. “He was fired by his bad (pathetic) ratings, not by me. Sad end to great show.”

Cue the scary music...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/steve-bannon-camp-of-the-saints-immi...

But the top Trump aide’s repeated references to The Camp of the Saints, an obscure 1973 novel by French author Jean Raspail, reveal even more about how he understands the world. The book is a cult favorite on the far right, yet it’s never found a wider audience. There’s a good reason for that: It’s breathtakingly racist.

“[This book is] racist in the literal sense of the term. It uses race as the main characterization of characters,” said Cécile Alduy, professor of French at Stanford University and an expert on the contemporary French far right. “It describes the takeover of Europe by waves of immigrants that wash ashore like the plague.”

The book, she said, “reframes everything as the fight to death between races.”

Upon the novel’s release in the United States in 1975, the influential book review magazine Kirkus Reviews pulled no punches: “The publishers are presenting The Camp of the Saints as a major event, and it probably is, in much the same sense that Mein Kampf was a major event.”

Thanks, that is an impressive piece of writing.

Cenk Uygur has a piece up about Steve Bannon and his favourite novel, "Camp of the Saints". It's pretty compelling.