Director of National Intelligence James Clapper Jr. takes his seat to testify before a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on 'Foreign Cyber Threats to the United States' on Capitol Hill, Jan. 5, 2017. (photo: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
Circus
of Liars: How Trump and GOP Are Twisted Into Pretzels Over Putin Hack
By Juan Cole, Informed
Comment
08 January 17
Donald
J. Trump has picked another fight with the elders of his own Republican Party,
over whether Russia engaged in hacking aimed at influencing the US election.
Trump has maintained that it is impossible to trace hacking attempts, that it
isn’t clear who was behind them, and that he knows a lot about hacking and
knows things about these incidents that the rest of us do not know, which he
would reveal last Tuesday or Wednesday (he didn’t).
At one
point, in Trump’s assault on the case for Russian hacking being presented by
the CIA, he cited statements of Julian Assange of Wikileaks:
Julian
Assange said "a 14 year old could have hacked Podesta" - why was DNC
so careless? Also said Russians did not give him the info!
This
reference to Assange, who published Chelsea Manning’s copied State Department
cables and who published emails of the Democratic National Committee and the
Clinton campaign, infuriated official Washington, who would love to render
Assange from the Ecuadoran embassy in London and execute him by firing squad.
At
today’s Senate hearings on the Russian
hacking, Sen. John McCain asked Director of National Intelligence James Clapper whether
Assange has any credibility. Clapper replied by smearing Assange with reference
to the complicated and obscure Swedish sex charges against him, which actually
do not speak to Assange’s credibility on whether the Russians passed him hacked
emails. This ad hominem logical fallacy is typical of the sneaky and
duplicitous way Clapper operates.
McCain
also accused Assange of putting the lives of US intelligence professionals and
their assets in danger. But McCain did not move to impeach former Bush vice president Dick
Cheney, who outed CIA field officer Valerie Plame to punish her
for her husband’s having revealed the emptiness of the WMD case for the
Bush-Cheney illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Trump
was wounded by the charges that he was supporting Assange, and replied,
essentially, that retweets are not endorsements.
The
dishonest media likes saying that I am in Agreement with Julian Assange -
wrong. I simply state what he states, it is for the people....
All
twitter users consider such hedging to be disingenuous; why retweet something
if you deeply disagree with it?
The
entire circus was marked by outlandish self-contradiction and clownish
hypocrisy.
For
instance, Sen. McCain and other national security Republicans have a
longstanding animus against the Putin government and so are eager to accept the
Clapper case that Russia attempted to interfere in the US election.
But
McCain and the other hawkish Republicans don’t want to follow their position to
its logical conclusion, which is that Putin intervened to give us a Trump
presidency.
If
Russia did some hacking and leaking to hurt the Democrats, but did not succeed
in having a big impact on the election outcome, then why is the issue so
important? The Russians were ineffectual.
As for
foreign hacking and spying on the US election, James Clapper for a long time
was personally listening into German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s private cell
phone.
Moreover,
Clapper was listening in to millions Americans on American soil without a warrant,
a gross violation of the fourth Amendment of the Constitution, which promises
us privacy from government prying with regard to our mail and personal effects
unless law enforcement can convince a judge that we are engaged in a specified
crime. For all we know, US officials privy to this illegal form of wiretapping
could have used the information for insider trading or self-aggrandizement or
to smear politicians they didn’t like or even to affect the outcome of
elections. There isn’t really any oversight over this unconstitutional activity
of the Federal government, and even sitting senators who knew about it such as
Ron Wyden were afraid to tell the public lest they be arrested for revealing
classified information (almost everything in Washington is classified as soon
as it is written down).
When
Clapper was asked in Senate testimony whether US intelligence was spying on the
American people, he denied it. “No,” he said.
It was
the lie of our new century, the Big Lie, the ultimate Whopper.
The US
NSA hacked the whole world for many years until Ed Snowden blew the whistle on
them. And that was when the full extent of Clapper’s mendaciousness became
clear. He should have been held in contempt of Congress. He should have been
fired. But no. He got away with it.
It is
extremely unclear why anyone should believe anything this proven and
professional liar says.
Then
Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, was asked about Trump’s tweet
questioning the Russia hacking narrative. He replied that Trump was unwise to take on
the intelligence community, since they had six ways to Sunday to get back at
you.
So
Schumer seems to have been celebrating that we are no longer a democracy, but
that even an elected president has to defer to the intelligence establishment
in Washington or else must fear that they will play dirty tricks on him and
undermine him.
Shouldn’t
the Democratic Party senate minority leader be standing for democratic values,
not advising the president to shut up if he knows what’s good for him?
So to
conclude, this is a sorry spectacle. Yes, Putin is a thug who should not have
unilaterally annexed Crimea, and so created a European crisis that has yet to
be resolved.
But yes, the US has acted thuggishly– the unprovoked and monstrous
invasion of Iraq is a recent example– and US aggressiveness toward Moscow after
the collapse of the Soviet Union bears some of the blame for Russia’s bullying
insecurity. And yes, Russia likely engaged in hacking during the US election
and hoped to tilt the playing field toward Trump; but they likely failed to
have any significant effect on the outcome. And yes, Clapper and other US
intelligence officials have hacked everybody and his brother both abroad and
inside the US, so they are hardly morally superior to Putin.
Now we
have a food fight full of ignorance and hypocrisy or both, in which the
Washington Establishment professes itself shocked, shocked that any hacking of
one country by another could have gone on. Trump has continued his creepy
bromance with the Kremlin and wants to get his information from any source that
agrees with his prejudices. The Democrats have taken advantage of the story to
paint Trump as a Manchurian candidate, and some of them seem to delight in the
idea that Trump may provoke the CIA to do to him what
Oliver Stone thinks it did to JFK.
Nobody
and nothing here to admire.
C 2015 Reader Supported News
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
No comments:
Post a Comment