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    Default Re: Trump: The Great American Reset

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    Contents
    Press Release
    Analysis
    Examples
    Frequently Asked Questions

    Press Release

    Today, Tuesday 7 March 2017, WikiLeaks begins its new series of leaks on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Code-named "Vault 7" by WikiLeaks, it is the largest ever publication of confidential documents on the agency.

    The first full part of the series, "Year Zero", comprises 8,761 documents and files from an isolated, high-security network situated inside the CIA's Center for Cyber Intelligence in Langley, Virgina. It follows an introductory disclosure last month of CIA targeting French political parties and candidates in the lead up to the 2012 presidential election.

    Recently, the CIA lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal including malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized "zero day" exploits, malware remote control systems and associated documentation. This extraordinary collection, which amounts to more than several hundred million lines of code, gives its possessor the entire hacking capacity of the CIA. The archive appears to have been circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.

    "Year Zero" introduces the scope and direction of the CIA's global covert hacking program, its malware arsenal and dozens of "zero day" weaponized exploits against a wide range of U.S. and European company products, include Apple's iPhone, Google's Android and Microsoft's Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones.

    Since 2001 the CIA has gained political and budgetary preeminence over the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). The CIA found itself building not just its now infamous drone fleet, but a very different type of covert, globe-spanning force — its own substantial fleet of hackers. The agency's hacking division freed it from having to disclose its often controversial operations to the NSA (its primary bureaucratic rival) in order to draw on the NSA's hacking capacities.

    By the end of 2016, the CIA's hacking division, which formally falls under the agency's Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI), had over 5000 registered users and had produced more than a thousand hacking systems, trojans, viruses, and other "weaponized" malware. Such is the scale of the CIA's undertaking that by 2016, its hackers had utilized more code than that used to run Facebook. The CIA had created, in effect, its "own NSA" with even less accountability and without publicly answering the question as to whether such a massive budgetary spend on duplicating the capacities of a rival agency could be justified.

    In a statement to WikiLeaks the source details policy questions that they say urgently need to be debated in public, including whether the CIA's hacking capabilities exceed its mandated powers and the problem of public oversight of the agency. The source wishes to initiate a public debate about the security, creation, use, proliferation and democratic control of cyberweapons.

    Once a single cyber 'weapon' is 'loose' it can spread around the world in seconds, to be used by rival states, cyber mafia and teenage hackers alike.

    Julian Assange, WikiLeaks editor stated that "There is an extreme proliferation risk in the development of cyber 'weapons'. Comparisons can be drawn between the uncontrolled proliferation of such 'weapons', which results from the inability to contain them combined with their high market value, and the global arms trade. But the significance of "Year Zero" goes well beyond the choice between cyberwar and cyberpeace. The disclosure is also exceptional from a political, legal and forensic perspective."

    Wikileaks has carefully reviewed the "Year Zero" disclosure and published substantive CIA documentation while avoiding the distribution of 'armed' cyberweapons until a consensus emerges on the technical and political nature of the CIA's program and how such 'weapons' should analyzed, disarmed and published.

    Wikileaks has also decided to redact and anonymise some identifying information in "Year Zero" for in depth analysis. These redactions include ten of thousands of CIA targets and attack machines throughout Latin America, Europe and the United States. While we are aware of the imperfect results of any approach chosen, we remain committed to our publishing model and note that the quantity of published pages in "Vault 7" part one (“Year Zero”) already eclipses the total number of pages published over the first three years of the Edward Snowden NSA leaks.

    Analysis

    CIA malware targets iPhone, Android, smart TVs

    CIA malware and hacking tools are built by EDG (Engineering Development Group), a software development group within CCI (Center for Cyber Intelligence), a department belonging to the CIA's DDI (Directorate for Digital Innovation). The DDI is one of the five major directorates of the CIA (see this organizational chart of the CIA for more details).

    The EDG is responsible for the development, testing and operational support of all backdoors, exploits, malicious payloads, trojans, viruses and any other kind of malware used by the CIA in its covert operations world-wide.

    The increasing sophistication of surveillance techniques has drawn comparisons with George Orwell's 1984, but "Weeping Angel", developed by the CIA's Embedded Devices Branch (EDB), which infests smart TVs, transforming them into covert microphones, is surely its most emblematic realization.

    The attack against Samsung smart TVs was developed in cooperation with the United Kingdom's MI5/BTSS. After infestation, Weeping Angel places the target TV in a 'Fake-Off' mode, so that the owner falsely believes the TV is off when it is on. In 'Fake-Off' mode the TV operates as a bug, recording conversations in the room and sending them over the Internet to a covert CIA server.

    As of October 2014 the CIA was also looking at infecting the vehicle control systems used by modern cars and trucks. The purpose of such control is not specified, but it would permit the CIA to engage in nearly undetectable assassinations.

    The CIA's Mobile Devices Branch (MDB) developed numerous attacks to remotely hack and control popular smart phones. Infected phones can be instructed to send the CIA the user's geolocation, audio and text communications as well as covertly activate the phone's camera and microphone.

    Despite iPhone's minority share (14.5%) of the global smart phone market in 2016, a specialized unit in the CIA's Mobile Development Branch produces malware to infest, control and exfiltrate data from iPhones and other Apple products running iOS, such as iPads. CIA's arsenal includes numerous local and remote "zero days" developed by CIA or obtained from GCHQ, NSA, FBI or purchased from cyber arms contractors such as Baitshop. The disproportionate focus on iOS may be explained by the popularity of the iPhone among social, political, diplomatic and business elites.

    A similar unit targets Google's Android which is used to run the majority of the world's smart phones (~85%) including Samsung, HTC and Sony. 1.15 billion Android powered phones were sold last year. "Year Zero" shows that as of 2016 the CIA had 24 "weaponized" Android "zero days" which it has developed itself and obtained from GCHQ, NSA and cyber arms contractors.

    These techniques permit the CIA to bypass the encryption of WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Wiebo, Confide and Cloackman by hacking the "smart" phones that they run on and collecting audio and message traffic before encryption is applied.

    CIA malware targets Windows, OSx, Linux, routers

    The CIA also runs a very substantial effort to infect and control Microsoft Windows users with its malware. This includes multiple local and remote weaponized "zero days", air gap jumping viruses such as "Hammer Drill" which infects software distributed on CD/DVDs, infectors for removable media such as USBs, systems to hide data in images or in covert disk areas ( "Brutal Kangaroo") and to keep its malware infestations going.

    Many of these infection efforts are pulled together by the CIA's Automated Implant Branch (AIB), which has developed several attack systems for automated infestation and control of CIA malware, such as "Assassin" and "Medusa".

    Attacks against Internet infrastructure and webservers are developed by the CIA's Network Devices Branch (NDB).

    The CIA has developed automated multi-platform malware attack and control systems covering Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris, Linux and more, such as EDB's "HIVE" and the related "Cutthroat" and "Swindle" tools, which are described in the examples section below.

    CIA 'hoarded' vulnerabilities ("zero days")

    In the wake of Edward Snowden's leaks about the NSA, the U.S. technology industry secured a commitment from the Obama administration that the executive would disclose on an ongoing basis — rather than hoard — serious vulnerabilities, exploits, bugs or "zero days" to Apple, Google, Microsoft, and other US-based manufacturers.
    Serious vulnerabilities not disclosed to the manufacturers places huge swathes of the population and critical infrastructure at risk to foreign intelligence or cyber criminals who independently discover or hear rumors of the vulnerability. If the CIA can discover such vulnerabilities so can others.

    The U.S. government's commitment to the Vulnerabilities Equities Process came after significant lobbying by US technology companies, who risk losing their share of the global market over real and perceived hidden vulnerabilities. The government stated that it would disclose all pervasive vulnerabilities discovered after 2010 on an ongoing basis.

    "Year Zero" documents show that the CIA breached the Obama administration's commitments. Many of the vulnerabilities used in the CIA's cyber arsenal are pervasive and some may already have been found by rival intelligence agencies or cyber criminals.

    As an example, specific CIA malware revealed in "Year Zero" is able to penetrate, infest and control both the Android phone and iPhone software that runs or has run presidential Twitter accounts. The CIA attacks this software by using undisclosed security vulnerabilities ("zero days") possessed by the CIA but if the CIA can hack these phones then so can everyone else who has obtained or discovered the vulnerability. As long as the CIA keeps these vulnerabilities concealed from Apple and Google (who make the phones) they will not be fixed, and the phones will remain hackable.

    The same vulnerabilities exist for the population at large, including the U.S. Cabinet, Congress, top CEOs, system administrators, security officers and engineers. By hiding these security flaws from manufacturers like Apple and Google the CIA ensures that it can hack everyone &mdsh; at the expense of leaving everyone hackable.

    'Cyberwar' programs are a serious proliferation risk

    Cyber 'weapons' are not possible to keep under effective control.
    While nuclear proliferation has been restrained by the enormous costs and visible infrastructure involved in assembling enough fissile material to produce a critical nuclear mass, cyber 'weapons', once developed, are very hard to retain.

    Cyber 'weapons' are in fact just computer programs which can be pirated like any other. Since they are entirely comprised of information they can be copied quickly with no marginal cost.
    Securing such 'weapons' is particularly difficult since the same people who develop and use them have the skills to exfiltrate copies without leaving traces — sometimes by using the very same 'weapons' against the organizations that contain them. There are substantial price incentives for government hackers and consultants to obtain copies since there is a global "vulnerability market" that will pay hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars for copies of such 'weapons'. Similarly, contractors and companies who obtain such 'weapons' sometimes use them for their own purposes, obtaining advantage over their competitors in selling 'hacking' services.

    Over the last three years the United States intelligence sector, which consists of government agencies such as the CIA and NSA and their contractors, such as Booz Allan Hamilton, has been subject to unprecedented series of data exfiltrations by its own workers.

    A number of intelligence community members not yet publicly named have been arrested or subject to federal criminal investigations in separate incidents.

    Most visibly, on February 8, 2017 a U.S. federal grand jury indicted Harold T. Martin III with 20 counts of mishandling classified information. The Department of Justice alleged that it seized some 50,000 gigabytes of information from Harold T. Martin III that he had obtained from classified programs at NSA and CIA, including the source code for numerous hacking tools.

    Once a single cyber 'weapon' is 'loose' it can spread around the world in seconds, to be used by peer states, cyber mafia and teenage hackers alike.

    U.S. Consulate in Frankfurt is a covert CIA hacker base

    In addition to its operations in Langley, Virginia the CIA also uses the U.S. consulate in Frankfurt as a covert base for its hackers covering Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

    CIA hackers operating out of the Frankfurt consulate ( "Center for Cyber Intelligence Europe" or CCIE) are given diplomatic ("black") passports and State Department cover. The instructions for incoming CIA hackers make Germany's counter-intelligence efforts appear inconsequential: "Breeze through German Customs because you have your cover-for-action story down pat, and all they did was stamp your passport"

    Your Cover Story (for this trip)
    Q: Why are you here?
    A: Supporting technical consultations at the Consulate.

    Two earlier WikiLeaks publications give further detail on CIA approaches to customs and secondary screening procedures.

    Once in Frankfurt CIA hackers can travel without further border checks to the 25 European countries that are part of the Shengen open border area — including France, Italy and Switzerland.

    A number of the CIA's electronic attack methods are designed for physical proximity. These attack methods are able to penetrate high security networks that are disconnected from the internet, such as police record database. In these cases, a CIA officer, agent or allied intelligence officer acting under instructions, physically infiltrates the targeted workplace. The attacker is provided with a USB containing malware developed for the CIA for this purpose, which is inserted into the targeted computer. The attacker then infects and exfiltrates data to removable media. For example, the CIA attack system Fine Dining, provides 24 decoy applications for CIA spies to use. To witnesses, the spy appears to be running a program showing videos (e.g VLC), presenting slides (Prezi), playing a computer game (Breakout2, 2048) or even running a fake virus scanner (Kaspersky, McAfee, Sophos). But while the decoy application is on the screen, the underlaying system is automatically infected and ransacked.

    How the CIA dramatically increased proliferation risks

    In what is surely one of the most astounding intelligence own goals in living memory, the CIA structured its classification regime such that for the most market valuable part of "Vault 7" — the CIA's weaponized malware (implants + zero days), Listening Posts (LP), and Command and Control (C2) systems — the agency has little legal recourse.

    The CIA made these systems unclassified.

    Why the CIA chose to make its cyberarsenal unclassified reveals how concepts developed for military use do not easily crossover to the 'battlefield' of cyber 'war'.

    To attack its targets, the CIA usually requires that its implants communicate with their control programs over the internet. If CIA implants, Command & Control and Listening Post software were classified, then CIA officers could be prosecuted or dismissed for violating rules that prohibit placing classified information onto the Internet. Consequently the CIA has secretly made most of its cyber spying/war code unclassified. The U.S. government is not able to assert copyright either, due to restrictions in the U.S. Constitution. This means that cyber 'arms' manufactures and computer hackers can freely "pirate" these 'weapons' if they are obtained. The CIA has primarily had to rely on obfuscation to protect its malware secrets.

    Conventional weapons such as missiles may be fired at the enemy (i.e into an unsecured area). Proximity to or impact with the target detonates the ordnance including its classified parts. Hence military personnel do not violate classification rules by firing ordnance with classified parts. Ordnance will likely explode. If it does not, that is not the operator's intent.

    Over the last decade U.S. hacking operations have been increasingly dressed up in military jargon to tap into Department of Defense funding streams. For instance, attempted "malware injections" (commercial jargon) or "implant drops" (NSA jargon) are being called "fires" as if a weapon was being fired. However the analogy is questionable.

    Unlike bullets, bombs or missiles, most CIA malware is designed to live for days or even years after it has reached its 'target'. CIA malware does not "explode on impact" but rather permanently infests its target. In order to infect target's device, copies of the malware must be placed on the target's devices, giving physical possession of the malware to the target. To exfiltrate data back to the CIA or to await further instructions the malware must communicate with CIA Command & Control (C2) systems placed on internet connected servers. But such servers are typically not approved to hold classified information, so CIA command and control systems are also made unclassified.

    A successful 'attack' on a target's computer system is more like a series of complex stock maneuvers in a hostile take-over bid or the careful planting of rumors in order to gain control over an organization's leadership rather than the firing of a weapons system. If there is a military analogy to be made, the infestation of a target is perhaps akin to the execution of a whole series of military maneuvers against the target's territory including observation, infiltration, occupation and exploitation.

    Evading forensics and anti-virus

    A series of standards lay out CIA malware infestation patterns which are likely to assist forensic crime scene investigators as well as Apple, Microsoft, Google, Samsung, Nokia, Blackberry, Siemens and anti-virus companies attribute and defend against attacks.

    "Tradecraft DO's and DON'Ts" contains CIA rules on how its malware should be written to avoid fingerprints implicating the "CIA, US government, or its witting partner companies" in "forensic review". Similar secret standards cover the use of encryption to hide CIA hacker and malware communication (pdf), describing targets & exfiltrated data (pdf) as well as executing payloads (pdf) and persisting (pdf) in the target's machines over time. CIA hackers developed successful attacks against most well known anti-virus programs. These are documented in AV defeats, Personal Security Products, Detecting and defeating PSPs and PSP/Debugger/RE Avoidance. For example, Comodo was defeated by CIA malware placing itself in the Window's "Recycle Bin". While Comodo 6.x has a "Gaping Hole of DOOM".

    CIA hackers discussed what the NSA's "Equation Group" hackers did wrong and how the CIA's malware makers could avoid similar exposure.

    Examples

    The CIA's Engineering Development Group (EDG) management system contains around 500 different projects (only some of which are documented by "Year Zero") each with their own sub-projects, malware and hacker tools.

    The majority of these projects relate to tools that are used for penetration, infestation ("implanting"), control, and exfiltration.

    Another branch of development focuses on the development and operation of Listening Posts (LP) and Command and Control (C2) systems used to communicate with and control CIA implants; special projects are used to target specific hardware from routers to smart TVs.

    Some example projects are described below, but see the table of contents for the full list of projects described by WikiLeaks' "Year Zero".

    UMBRAGE

    The CIA's hand crafted hacking techniques pose a problem for the agency. Each technique it has created forms a "fingerprint" that can be used by forensic investigators to attribute multiple different attacks to the same entity.

    This is analogous to finding the same distinctive knife wound on multiple separate murder victims. The unique wounding style creates suspicion that a single murderer is responsible. As soon one murder in the set is solved then the other murders also find likely attribution.

    The CIA's Remote Devices Branch's UMBRAGE group collects and maintains a substantial library of attack techniques 'stolen' from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation.

    With UMBRAGE and related projects the CIA cannot only increase its total number of attack types but also misdirect attribution by leaving behind the "fingerprints" of the groups that the attack techniques were stolen from.

    UMBRAGE components cover keyloggers, password collection, webcam capture, data destruction, persistence, privilege escalation, stealth, anti-virus (PSP) avoidance and survey techniques.

    Fine Dining

    Fine Dining comes with a standardized questionnaire i.e menu that CIA case officers fill out. The questionnaire is used by the agency's OSB (Operational Support Branch) to transform the requests of case officers into technical requirements for hacking attacks (typically "exfiltrating" information from computer systems) for specific operations. The questionnaire allows the OSB to identify how to adapt existing tools for the operation, and communicate this to CIA malware configuration staff. The OSB functions as the interface between CIA operational staff and the relevant technical support staff.

    Among the list of possible targets of the collection are 'Asset', 'Liason Asset', 'System Administrator', 'Foreign Information Operations', 'Foreign Intelligence Agencies' and 'Foreign Government Entities'. Notably absent is any reference to extremists or transnational criminals. The 'Case Officer' is also asked to specify the environment of the target like the type of computer, operating system used, Internet connectivity and installed anti-virus utilities (PSPs) as well as a list of file types to be exfiltrated like Office documents, audio, video, images or custom file types. The 'menu' also asks for information if recurring access to the target is possible and how long unobserved access to the computer can be maintained. This information is used by the CIA's 'JQJIMPROVISE' software (see below) to configure a set of CIA malware suited to the specific needs of an operation.

    Improvise (JQJIMPROVISE)

    'Improvise' is a toolset for configuration, post-processing, payload setup and execution vector selection for survey/exfiltration tools supporting all major operating systems like Windows (Bartender), MacOS (JukeBox) and Linux (DanceFloor). Its configuration utilities like Margarita allows the NOC (Network Operation Center) to customize tools based on requirements from 'Fine Dining' questionairies.

    HIVE

    HIVE is a multi-platform CIA malware suite and its associated control software. The project provides customizable implants for Windows, Solaris, MikroTik (used in internet routers) and Linux platforms and a Listening Post (LP)/Command and Control (C2) infrastructure to communicate with these implants.

    The implants are configured to communicate via HTTPS with the webserver of a cover domain; each operation utilizing these implants has a separate cover domain and the infrastructure can handle any number of cover domains.

    Each cover domain resolves to an IP address that is located at a commercial VPS (Virtual Private Server) provider. The public-facing server forwards all incoming traffic via a VPN to a 'Blot' server that handles actual connection requests from clients. It is setup for optional SSL client authentication: if a client sends a valid client certificate (only implants can do that), the connection is forwarded to the 'Honeycomb' toolserver that communicates with the implant; if a valid certificate is missing (which is the case if someone tries to open the cover domain website by accident), the traffic is forwarded to a cover server that delivers an unsuspicious looking website.

    The Honeycomb toolserver receives exfiltrated information from the implant; an operator can also task the implant to execute jobs on the target computer, so the toolserver acts as a C2 (command and control) server for the implant.

    Similar functionality (though limited to Windows) is provided by the RickBobby project.

    See the classified user and developer guides for HIVE.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    Why now?

    WikiLeaks published as soon as its verification and analysis were ready.

    In Febuary the Trump administration has issued an Executive Order calling for a "Cyberwar" review to be prepared within 30 days.

    While the review increases the timeliness and relevance of the publication it did not play a role in setting the publication date.

    Redactions

    Names, email addresses and external IP addresses have been redacted in the released pages (70,875 redactions in total) until further analysis is complete.
    1. Over-redaction: Some items may have been redacted that are not employees, contractors, targets or otherwise related to the agency, but are, for example, authors of documentation for otherwise public projects that are used by the agency.
    2. Identity vs. person: the redacted names are replaced by user IDs (numbers) to allow readers to assign multiple pages to a single author. Given the redaction process used a single person may be represented by more than one assigned identifier but no identifier refers to more than one real person.
    3. Archive attachments (zip, tar.gz, ...) are replaced with a PDF listing all the file names in the archive. As the archive content is assessed it may be made available; until then the archive is redacted.
    4. Attachments with other binary content are replaced by a hex dump of the content to prevent accidental invocation of binaries that may have been infected with weaponized CIA malware. As the content is assessed it may be made available; until then the content is redacted.
    5. The tens of thousands of routable IP addresses references (including more than 22 thousand within the United States) that correspond to possible targets, CIA covert listening post servers, intermediary and test systems, are redacted for further exclusive investigation.
    6. Binary files of non-public origin are only available as dumps to prevent accidental invocation of CIA malware infected binaries.

    Organizational Chart

    The organizational chart corresponds to the material published by WikiLeaks so far.

    Since the organizational structure of the CIA below the level of Directorates is not public, the placement of the EDG and its branches within the org chart of the agency is reconstructed from information contained in the documents released so far. It is intended to be used as a rough outline of the internal organization; please be aware that the reconstructed org chart is incomplete and that internal reorganizations occur frequently.

    Wiki pages

    "Year Zero" contains 7818 web pages with 943 attachments from the internal development groupware. The software used for this purpose is called Confluence, a proprietary software from Atlassian. Webpages in this system (like in Wikipedia) have a version history that can provide interesting insights on how a document evolved over time; the 7818 documents include these page histories for 1136 latest versions.

    The order of named pages within each level is determined by date (oldest first). Page content is not present if it was originally dynamically created by the Confluence software (as indicated on the re-constructed page).

    What time period is covered?

    The years 2013 to 2016. The sort order of the pages within each level is determined by date (oldest first).

    WikiLeaks has obtained the CIA's creation/last modification date for each page but these do not yet appear for technical reasons. Usually the date can be discerned or approximated from the content and the page order. If it is critical to know the exact time/date contact WikiLeaks.

    What is "Vault 7"

    "Vault 7" is a substantial collection of material about CIA activities obtained by WikiLeaks.

    When was each part of "Vault 7" obtained?

    Part one was obtained recently and covers through 2016. Details on the other parts will be available at the time of publication.

    Is each part of "Vault 7" from a different source?

    Details on the other parts will be available at the time of publication.

    What is the total size of "Vault 7"?

    The series is the largest intelligence publication in history.

    How did WikiLeaks obtain each part of "Vault 7"?

    Sources trust WikiLeaks to not reveal information that might help identify them.

    Isn't WikiLeaks worried that the CIA will act against its staff to stop the series?

    No. That would be certainly counter-productive.

    Has WikiLeaks already 'mined' all the best stories?

    No. WikiLeaks has intentionally not written up hundreds of impactful stories to encourage others to find them and so create expertise in the area for subsequent parts in the series. They're there. Look. Those who demonstrate journalistic excellence may be considered for early access to future parts.

    Won't other journalists find all the best stories before me?

    Unlikely. There are very considerably more stories than there are journalists or academics who are in a position to write them.

    VAULT 7 SOURCE




    .
    Last edited by turiya; 8th March 2017 at 02:52.

  2. Link to Post #322
    Australia Avalon Member BMJ's Avatar
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    Default Re: Trump: The Great American Reset

    Quote Posted by norman (here)
    Quote Posted by norman (here)
    Quote Posted by BMJ (here)
    The Deep State War on Trump

    Published on 3 Mar 2017

    The real story behind the Russia hysteria.
    I just tried to send a link for this video to an old friend. within seconds I got a bounce notification.

    Quote The response from the remote server was:

    552 Spam Message Rejected
    I've NEVER had such a notification before. Spam is Spam. It goes into someone's spam folder. It DOES NOT get bounced, as if undeliverable.

    As the email account I sent it from is itself google, I even wonder if the notification is a lie and that they themselves filtered it out for rejection.

    Paul Watson on Infowars has just confirmed that there is a new "SPAM" categisation for articles and videos that expose the lies or tell the truth.

    Alex, on the foolish side of things immediately said "so there you go listeners, share all the links with everyone you know"....

    Alex, you ninkumpoop, That's the whole point !. The links are now SPAM!.

    Email accounts will either dump them in the spam bin or reject them completely ( as happened to me ).
    Hi Norman,
    Click the "share" function, located on the same line where you have the thumbs up or down icon below the youtube video, copy and paste the address, see link below, and choose the format you want to download the video in. Save to file and then share as you wish.

    Link: http://www.clipconverter.cc/

    or https://www.onlinevideoconverter.com/
    Last edited by BMJ; 8th March 2017 at 09:48.

  3. Link to Post #323
    Avalon Member norman's Avatar
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    Default Re: Trump: The Great American Reset

    Quote Posted by BMJ (here)
    Hi Norman,
    Click the "share" function, located on the same line where you have the thumbs up or down icon below the youtube video, copy and paste the address, see link below, and choose the format you want to download the video in. Save to file and then share as you wish.

    Link: http://www.clipconverter.cc/

    or https://www.onlinevideoconverter.com/
    That's doable but not very practical or accessible for most people. I already find myself trying to inform tech idiots as it is. Moving large chunks of data ( videos ) around the net is going to fill up everyone's email accounts in no time. Links are the way to go. Even idiots with hand held devices can deal with that.

    The old friend I was trying to send the Paul Watson video link to is a technophobe. Even instruction emails baffle him. That, combined with the fact he believes Oswald shot Kennedy and the BBC never lies etc etc, makes it essential that whatever I try to share with him is very very easy and simple. He already thinks I've lost the plot.

    Why bother ?, you might ask......... I'm short of friends
    ..................................................my first language is TYPO..............................................

  4. The Following 4 Users Say Thank You to norman For This Post:

    BMJ (8th March 2017), fourty-two (8th March 2017), genevieve (8th March 2017), turiya (8th March 2017)

  5. Link to Post #324
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    Default Re: Trump: The Great American Reset

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFfK7qI-OgA thought this was interesting.

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    Default Re: Trump: The Great American Reset

    The Ohama Titanic Syndrome Indicates
    A Major Economic Crisis Is On The Horizon

    Episode 1222a
    (Published on Mar 7, 2017)
    _______________________________

    California Tent Cities Grow Massively!
    (Published on Mar 6, 2017)
    _______________________________

    Vault 7... Russian Hacking fake, phony & false... UMBRAGE... Valerie Jarrett directing the Trump wiretap? ... Trump has evidence.... CNN Spying footage on WH meeting...


    Phase IV Of The Deep State's Plan
    Is Now Being Executed

    Episode 1222b
    (Published on Mar 7, 2017)


    OVAL OFFICE VIDEO OF MEETING
    BETWEEN TRUMP AND BANNON

    (Published on Mar 7, 2017)

    Last edited by turiya; 8th March 2017 at 17:49.

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    Default Re: Trump: The Great American Reset

    Monetized Silver coins for Mexico... flight to real money... nice idea... March 15 is coming - interest rate increase...

    Hugo Salinas Price- Apocalypse Is Upon Us

    (Published on Mar 7, 2017)

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    Default Re: Trump: The Great American Reset

    X22 Report.... Greece... the IMF: "Oh, We're here to help..." ...police vs the farmers...

    The Central Bank Is Ready & Prepared
    To Trigger The Economic Crisis... Trade War: Mexico vs the U.S....

    Episode 1223a
    (Published on Mar 8, 2017)
    __________________________

    Jim Willie: US Will Be Forced To Accept A Devalued
    Domestic Dollar, That's When The Crisis Hits

    (Published on Mar 8, 2017)



    Last edited by turiya; 9th March 2017 at 21:52.

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    Default Re: Trump: The Great American Reset

    The Russians Did it meme...

    Judicial Watch sues CIA for
    unclassified 2015 Russia report

    (Published on Mar 9, 2017)


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    Default Re: Trump: The Great American Reset

    The Conflict Within The Deep State
    Just Broke Into Open Warfare




    The battle raging in the Deep State isn't
    just a bureaucratic battle - it's a war for
    the soul, identity and direction of the nation.

    by Tyler Durden
    Mar 10, 2017 10:41 AM

    Via Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,

    The battle raging in the Deep State isn't just a bureaucratic battle - it's a war for the soul, identity and direction of the nation.

    When do the unlimited powers of the Intelligence/Security agencies threaten America's domestic and global national interests? The CIA and its political enablers claim the agency's essentially unlimited powers, partially revealed by Wikileak's Vault 7, pose no threat to America's interests, since they are intended to "defend" American interests.

    This is the rationale presented by neocon CIA allies in both political parties: the CIA can't possibly threaten America's interests because the CIA defines America's interests.

    This is the wormhole down which civil liberties and democracy have drained. It is an extraordinarily defining moment in American history when the director of the FBI publicly declares that there is no such thing as "absolute privacy" in the U.S.

    In effect, privacy is now contingent on the level of interest the Security State has in the private conversation/data. If we read the U.S. Constitution, we do not find such contingencies: civil liberties are absolute. Post-1790 presidents have temporarily mooted civil liberties in time of war, and the CIA-led camp of the Deep State has justified its unlimited powers by effectively declared "a state of war is now permanent and enduring."

    So what's left to defend if America has become the enemy of civil liberties and democracy, i.e. become a totalitarian state ruled by Security Services and their political henchmen and apologists?

    I have long suggested that the tectonic plates of the Deep State are shifting as the ruling consensus has eroded. Some elements of the Deep State--what I call the progressive wing, which is (ironically to some) anchored in the military services-- now view the neocon-CIA (Security State)-Wall Street elements as profoundly dangerous to America's long-term interests, both domestically and globally.

    Is the Deep State Fracturing into Disunity? (March 14, 2014)

    I have suggested that this "rogue Deep State" quietly aided Donald Trump (by subtly undermining Hillary Clinton's campaign) as the last best chance to save the nation from the neocon's over-reach that the Establishment's Wall Street-funded leadership (Bush, Clinton, Obama, et al.) has overseen--including granting the CIA and its allies virtually unlimited powers unhindered by any effective oversight.

    Does a Rogue Deep State Have Trump's Back? (January 18, 2017)

    This profound split in the Deep State has now broken into open warfare. The first salvo was the absurd propaganda campaign led by Establishment mouthpieces The New York Times and The Washington Post claiming Russian agents had "hacked" the U.S. election to favor Trump.

    This fact-free propaganda campaign failed--having no evidence didn't work quite as well as the NYT and Wapo expected-- and so the propaganda machine launched the second salvo, accusing Trump of being a Russian patsy.

    The evidence for this claim was equally laughable, and that campaign has only made the Establishment, its propaganda mouthpieces and the neocon Deep State look desperate and foolish on the global and domestic stages.

    The desperate neocon Deep State and its Democratic Party allies went to absurd lengths to undermine Trump via the "Boris ad Natasha" strategy of accusing Trump of collaborating with the Evil Russkies, even going so far as to briefly exhume former President G.W. Bush from deep-freeze to make a fool of himself, saying the Trump-Evil Russkies connection should be "investigated."

    Now the rogue elements have launched a counterstrike--Vault 7. Here is one example of how quickly the CIA's over-reach has been absorbed by the body politic:


    I highly recommend reading Wikileak's summary of Vault 7:
    Vault 7: CIA Hacking Tools Revealed.
    We now know that the CIA maintained a special program (UMBRAGE) to mimic Russia-based hackers and create false trails back to fictitious "Russian hackers." A number of highly experienced analysts who reviewed the supposed "Russian hacks" had suggested the "evidence" smelled of false trails-- not just bread crumbs, but bread crumbs heavy-handedly stenciled "this is Russian malware."

    The body count from Vault 7 has not yet been tallied, but it wouldn't surprise me if former President Obama and his team eventually end up as political casualties. Non-partisan observers are noting all this over-reach occurred on Obama's watch, and it hasn't gone unnoticed that one of Obama's last executive orders stripped away the last shreds of oversight of what could be "shared" (or invented) between the Security Agencies.

    Indeed, the entire leadership of the Democratic Party seems to have placed all their chips on the increasingly unviable claim that the CIA is the squeaky clean defender of America.

    Vault 7 is not just political theater--it highlights the core questions facing the nation: what is left to defend if civil liberties and democratically elected oversight have been reduced to Potemkin-village travesties?

    If there are no limits on CIA powers and surveillance, then what is left of civil liberties and democracy? Answer: nothing.

    The battle raging in the Deep State isn't just a bureaucratic battle--it's a war for the soul, identity and direction of the nation. Citizens who define America's interests as civil liberties and democracy should be deeply troubled by the Establishment's surrender of these in favor of a National Security State with essentially no limits.

    Americans tasked with defending America's "interests" globally should be asking if a CIA/NSA et al. with unlimited power is detrimental to America's soft and hard power globally, and toxic to its influence.

    The answer is obvious: a CIA with unlimited power and the backing of a corrupt Establishment and media is more than detrimental to America's soft and hard power globally--it is disastrous and potentially fatal to America's interests, standing and influence.

    Those of us on the sidelines can only hope that the progressive wing of the Deep State, the rogue elements who see the terrible danger of an unlimited National Security State, will succeed in undermining the powerful political support for this toxic totalitarian regime.

    ZEROHEDGE
    Last edited by turiya; 10th March 2017 at 17:23.

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    Default Re: Trump: The Great American Reset

    Is the Deep State Fracturing into Disunity?
    (March 14, 2014)
    I recently discussed the Deep State and "throwing Wall Street under the bus" with my friend and colleague Jim Kunstler. When we speak of The Powers That Be or the Deep State, this ruling Elite is generally assumed to be monolithic: of one mind, so to speak, unified in worldview, strategy and goals.

    In my view, this is an over-simplification of a constantly shifting battleground of paradigms and political power between a number of factions and alliances within the Deep State. Disagreements are not publicized, of course, but they become apparent years or decades after the conflict was resolved, usually by one faction winning the hearts and minds of decision-makers or consolidating the Deep State's group-think around their worldview and strategy.

    History suggests that this low-intensity conflict within the ruling Elite is generally a healthy characteristic of leadership in good times. As times grow more troubled, however, the unity of the ruling Elite fractures into irreconcilable political disunity, which becomes a proximate cause of the dissolution of the Empire if it continues.

    I recently proposed the idea that Wall Street now poses a strategic threat to national security and thus to the Deep State itself:
    Who Gets Thrown Under the Bus in the Next Financial Crisis? (March 3, 2014)
    Many consider it "impossible" that Wall Street could possibly lose its political grip on the nation's throat, but I suggest that Wall Street has over-reached, and is now teetering at the top of the S-Curve, i.e. it has reached Peak Wall Street.

    Consider what the extremes of Wall Street/Federal Reserve predation, parasitism, avarice and power have done to the nation, and then ask if other factions within the Deep State are blind to the destructive consequences:
    How The Fed Has Failed America, Part 2 (March 12, 2014)
    The Fed Has Failed (and Will Continue to Fail), Part 1 (March 11, 2014)
    Can anyone not in Wall Street or the Fed look at this chart and not see profound political disunity on the horizon?


    source: Poll Shows Why QE Has Been Ineffective (STA Wealth Mgmt)

    I recently discussed the Deep State and "throwing Wall Street under the bus" with my friend and colleague Jim Kunstler: here's the resulting podcast, which you can download or listen to on whatever device you are using at the moment: KunstlerCast 250 — Chatting with Charles Hugh Smith
    Jim's trademark wit and clarity guide the discussion, and he kindly lets me blather on about the Deep State. I think you'll find the discussion of interest; you certainly won't hear this topic being aired elsewhere.

    I have covered the Deep State and profound political disunity for many years:
    Going to War with the Political Elite You Have (May 14, 2007)
    The Shape of Things To Come (July 8, 2011)
    The Master Narrative Nobody Dares Admit: Centralization Has Failed (June 21, 2012)
    AUDIO (CLICK to LISTEN)
    SOURCE

    __________________________________________

    Does a Rogue Deep State Have Trump's Back?

    January 18, 2017

    Rather than being the bad guys, as per the usual Liberal world-view, the Armed Forces may well play a key role in reducing the utterly toxic influence of neocon-neoliberals within the Deep State.

    Suddenly everybody is referring to the Deep State, typically without offering much of a definition.

    The general definition is the unelected government that continues making and implementing policy regardless of who is in elected office.

    I have been writing about this structure for 10 years and studying it from the outside for 40 years. Back in 2007, I called it the Elite Maintaining and Extending Global Dominance, which is a more concise description of the structure than Deep State. Going to War with the Political Elite You Have (May 14, 2007).

    I've used this simplified chart to explain the basic structure of the Deep State, which is the complex network of state-funded and/or controlled institutions, agencies, foundations, university research projects, media ties, etc.

    The key point here is you can't separate these network nodes: you cannot separate DARPA, the national labs (nukes, energy, etc.), the National Science Foundation, DoD (Department of Defense), the National Security State (alphabet soup of intelligence/black budget agencies: CIA, NSA, DIA, etc.), Silicon Valley and the research universities: they are all tied together by funding, information flows, personnel and a thousand other connections.


    For the past few years, I have been suggesting there is a profound split in the Deep State that is not just about power or ideology, but about the nature and future of National Security: in other words, what policies and priorities are actually weakening or threatening the long-term security of the United States?

    I have proposed that there are progressive elements within the sprawling Deep State that view the dominant neocon-neoliberal agenda of the past 24 years as a disaster for the long-term security of the U.S. and its global interests (a.k.a. the Imperial Project).

    There are also elements within the Deep State that view Wall Street's dominance as a threat to America's security and global interests. (This is not to say that American-based banks and corporations aren't essential parts of the Imperial Project; it's more about the question of who is controlling whom.)

    So let's dig in by noting that the warmongers in the Deep State are civilians, not military. It's popular among so-called Liberals (the vast majority of whom did not serve nor do they have offspring in uniform--that's fallen to the disenfranchised and the working class) to see the military as a permanent source of warmongering.

    (It's remarkably easy to send other people's children off to war, while your own little darlings have cush jobs in Wall Street, foundations, think tanks, academia, government agencies, etc.)

    These misguided souls are ignoring that it's civilians who order the military to go into harm's way, not the other way around. The neocons who have waged permanent war as policy are virtually all civilians, few of whom served in the U.S. armed forces and none of whom (to my knowledge) have actual combat experience.

    These civilian neocons were busily sacking and/or discrediting critics of their warmongering within the U.S. military all through the Iraqi debacle. now that we got that straightened out--active-duty service personnel have borne the brunt of civilian planned, ordered and executed warmongering--let's move on to the split between the civilian Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the DoD (Department of Defense) intelligence and special ops agencies: DIA, Army Intelligence, Navy Intelligence, etc.

    Though we have to be careful not to paint a very large agency with one brush, it's fair to say that the civilian leadership of the CIA (and of its proxies and crony agencies) has long loved to "play army". The CIA has its own drone (a.k.a. Murder, Inc.) division, as well as its own special ops ("play army" Special Forces), and a hawkish mentality that civilians reckon is "play army special forces" (mostly from films, in which the CIA's role is carefully managed by the CIA itself:
    How the CIA Hoodwinked Hollywood (The Atlantic)
    Meanwhile, it's not exactly a secret that when it comes to actual combat operations and warfighting, the CIA's in-theater intelligence is either useless, misleading or false. This is the result of a number of institutional failings of the CIA, number one of which is the high degree of politicization within its ranks and organizational structure.

    The CIA's reliance on "analysis" rather than human agents (there's a lot of acronyms for all these, if you find proliferating acronyms of interest), and while some from-30,000-feet analysis can be useful, it's just as often catastrophically wrong.

    We can fruitfully revisit the Bay of Pigs disaster, the result of warmongering civilians in the CIA convincing incoming President Kennedy that the planned invasion would free Cuba of Castro's rule in short order. There are many other examples, including the failure to grasp Saddam's willingness to invade Kuwait, given the mixed signals he was receiving from U.S. State Department personnel.

    Simply put, if you are actually prosecuting a war, then you turn to the services' own intelligence agencies to help with actual combat operations, not the CIA. This is of course a sort of gossip, and reading between the lines of public information; nobody is going to state this directly in writing.

    As I have noted before:
    If you want documented evidence of this split in the Deep State--sorry, it doesn't work that way. Nobody in the higher echelons of the Deep State is going to leak anything about the low-intensity war being waged because the one thing everyone agrees on is the Deep State's dirty laundry must be kept private.
    As a result, the split is visible only by carefully reading between the lines, by examining who is being placed in positions of control in the Trump Administration, and reading the tea leaves of who is "retiring" (i.e. being fired) or quitting, which agencies are suddenly being reorganized, and the appearance of dissenting views in journals that serve as public conduits for Deep State narratives.

    Many so-called Liberals are alarmed by the number of military officers Trump has appointed. Once you realize it's the neocon civilians who have promoted and led one disastrous military intervention (either with U.S. Armed Forces or proxies managed by the CIA) after another, then you understand Trump's appointments appear to be a decisive break from the civilian warmongers who've run the nation into the ground.

    If you doubt this analysis, please consider the unprecedentedly politicized (and pathetically childish) comments by outgoing CIA director Brennan against an incoming president. Even if you can't stand Trump, please document another instance in which the CIA director went off on an incoming president-- and this after the CIA spewed a blatant misinformation campaign claiming a hacked Democratic Party email account constituted a successful Russian effort to influence the U.S. election--a surreal absurdity.

    Let me translate for you: our chosen Insider lost the election; how dare you!

    A number of observers are wondering if the CIA and its Deep State allies and cronies will work out a way to evict Trump from office or perhaps arrange a "lone gunman" or other "accident" to befall him. The roots of such speculations stretch back to Dallas, November 1963, when a "long gunman" with ties to the CIA and various CIA proxies assassinated President Kennedy, an avowed foe of the CIA.

    Setting aside the shelfloads of books on the topic, both those defending the "lone gunman" thesis and those contesting it, the unprecedented extremes of institutionally organized and executed anti-Trump campaigns is worthy of our attention.

    Given my thesis of a profound disunity in the Deep State, and the emergence of a progressive element hostile to neocons and neoliberalism (including Wall Street), then it's not much of a stretch to speculate that this rogue Deep State opposed to neocon-neoliberalism has Trump's back, as a new administration is pretty much the only hope to rid the nation's top echelons of the neocon-neoliberal policies that have driven the U.S. into the ground.

    Rather than being the bad guys, as per the usual Liberal world-view, the Armed Forces may well play a key role in reducing the utterly toxic influence of neocon-neoliberals within the Deep State.

    If you have wondered why academics like Paul Krugman and the CIA are on the same page, it's because they are simply facets of the same structure. Krugman is a vocal neoliberal, the CIA is vocally neocon: two sides of the same coin. I invite you to study the chart above with an open mind, and ponder the possibility that the Deep State is not monolithic, but deeply divided along the fault lines of Wall-Street-Neocons-Neoliberals and the progressive elements that rightly view the dominant neocon-neoliberals as a threat to U.S. national security, U.S. global interests and world peace.

    We can speculate that some of these progressive elements view Trump with disdain for all the same reasons those outside the Deep State disdain him, but their decision tree is simple:
    if you want to rid America's Deep State of toxic neocon-neoliberalism before it destroys the nation, you hold your nose and go with Trump because he's the only hope you have.
    Of Two Minds
    .
    Last edited by turiya; 10th March 2017 at 19:04.

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    Default Re: Trump: The Great American Reset

    Greg Hunter Weekly News Update...
    Greg Hunter of USAWatchdog.com looks back at the top stories in the past week in the Weekly News Wrap-Up.


    Greg Hunter-Weekly News Wrap-Up
    (3.10.17)

    Last edited by turiya; 11th March 2017 at 01:56.

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    Default Re: Trump: The Great American Reset



    Our Age Of Folly
    — Paul Craig Roberts
    March 9, 2017 | Categories: Articles & Columns
    The United States has been growing progressively insane for a long time. For my generation, the realization descended upon us in the 1960s when the military/security complex convinced Americans that if we permitted Vietnamese nationalist leader Ho Chi Minh to unify Vietnam, the dominoes would fall until the Communist World Revolution had us in its grip. This despite the fact that Stalin had killed off the Trotskyist world revolutionaries and declared “Socialism in one country.”


    Nationalists in the West’s colonies, such as Vietnam and Cuba, misinterpreted the talk about making the world safe for self-determination as applying to them. Ho Chi Minh helped the US against Japan during World War 2. His requests for US help for Vietnamese independence from France were cold-shouldered by the Truman administration. He did not turn against the US until Washington turned against him. http://www.historynet.com/ho-chi-minh-and-the-oss.htm


    OSS Deer Team members pose with Viet Minh leaders Ho Chi Minh and
    Vo Nguyen Giap during training at Tan Trao in August 1945.

    America’s participation in the Vietnam War lasted for a decade or thereabouts. The extraordinary carnage and war crimes served no interest other than the power and profit of the military/security complex and the paranoia of the arbiters of US foreign policy.

    No lesson learned, we have spent the entirety of the 21st century to date repeating the mistake. This time it is stateless Muslim terrorists who somehow were merged in official US propaganda into the governments of seven countries in the Middle East and North Africa. After 17 years of murdering women, children, and village elders, destroying the infrastructure of countries, and bombing weddings, funerals, children’s soccer games, schools and hospitals, Washington has surpassed its criminal record in Vietnam.

    The folly of the Vietnam War was not explicated for us until the war’s aftermath. However, the folly of our 21st century crusade against evil was presented to us in monthly installments as the folly unfolded by Lewis Lapham’s articles in Harper’s and later in the Lapham Quarterly. These essays have been collected together in a book, Age of Folly: America Abandons Its Democracy (Verso, 2016).


    Lapham is one of the remaining “men of letters” who date from a time when some Americans still existed who preferred the red pill to the blue pill. In the 21st century, awareness has been out of fashion, and there were few to learn from Lapham’s demonstrations of our folly.

    Lapham’s book should be titled “Our Age of Folly.” As I read Lapham, every age has been one of folly, and America has been abandoning its democracy from day one, if America ever had a democracy to abandon.

    Few remember that the Iraq War, ongoing since 2003, was supposed to be a “cakewalk” that would last three weeks. The war would not be the multi-trillion dollar event it turned out to be. We were assured the war would cost only $70 billion and be paid for with Iraqi oil revenues. George W. Bush fired his White House economist, Lawrence Lindsey for saying that the war could cost $200 billion. The only beneficiaries of the war are the recipients of the profits of the military/security complex and the police state agencies that the “war on terror” was used to justify.

    Lapham finds in Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney’s announcement that the US was launching a “war of liberation to remove Saddam’s regime from Iraq” the same hubris, arrogance, and hegemonic aspirations that caused ancient Athens to ruin itself in the Peloponnesian War. Reading Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, Lapham reports, “was as if I were reading the front page of the New York Times or the Pentagon’s Defense Planning Guidance.”

    Being a man of letters, Lapham can make words dance and bite, and many are bitten. Michael Ignatieff, “a brand-name foreign-policy intellectual recruited from the faculty of Harvard University,” writes in behalf of Washington’s exercise of America’s imperial power “sententious and vacant prose, most of it indistinguishable from the ad copy for an Armani scarf or a Ferragamo shoe. Too much direct quotation from the professor’s text might be mistaken for unkindness.”

    Lapham describes the transformation by the media and national security experts of the ragged, lightly armed Taliban into “an Arab host gathered on the plain of Armageddon under the glittering banners of militant Islam.” He relates policy arguments in which one expert declared that it is time to “flip” Iran. No said Dimitri Simes, president of the Nixon Center, it is the moment to drop a nuclear bomb on Afghanistan for the “very strong demonstration effect” that would get the entire Middle East in line with Washington’s orders. Challenged by someone who thought this prescription displayed a cavalier disregard for human life, Simes responded that “the NATO victory in Serbia was not won against the Serbian military ‘but because we were effective against the Serbian civilian infrastructure.’”

    Ah, the morality of Americans. Winning is all that counts.

    Few movers and shakers could resist hitching their wagon to the pursuit of Osama bin Laden, who died from renal failure in December 2001 before the hunt for him was well underway. Lapham reports that Geraldo Rivera, not to be outdone in the patriotic show of hunting down evil, “went off to the Khyber Pass with a pistol in his luggage, informing his viewers on FOX News that he would consider killing Osama bin Laden if the chance presented itself somewhere on the snowy heights of Tora Bora.”
    Lapham’s essays walk us through the period from arrogance to quagmire to defeat covered up with a declaration of victory. In 2015 the Russians had to come in to clear up the mess Washington made of the Middle East, a favor for which we have not forgiven them.

    Lapham thinks that the readers of Harper’s could have done a better job of running US foreign policy than the supervisors of the empire in Washington. I am sure that he is right, and so could have my own readers.

    For Lapham the US government is a font of folly. He sees the 21st century American government in the way that Winston Churchill saw the British government in 1904:
    “A party of great vested interests, banded together in a formidable confederation; corruption at home, aggression to cover it up abroad . . . sentiment by the bucketful; patriotism and imperialism by the imperial pint; the open hand at the public exchequer; the open door at the public house; expensive food for the millions, cheap labour for the millionaire.”
    Lapham doesn’t get everything correct. He doesn’t give Reagan a fair break or credit for ending stagflation and the Cold War. Instead, Lapham portrays Reagan as just another servant of the rich. Lapham doesn’t catch on until late about 9/11, but neither did most others, including architect Richard Gage, founder of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, now 3,000 strong. Lapham never says 9/11 was an inside job, but he artfully describes how the orchestra and chorus were miraculously ready to play the required tune, just as somehow the US military was ready and able to invade Afghanistan less than one month after 9/11. In other words, the invasion force was assembled awaiting the pretext, and the orchestra and chorus were awaiting the 9/11 conductor’s baton.

    Lapham spares no one, least of all his own class. As a young man Lapham was a member of the upper class and remains today a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He could expect a career guaranteed by the preferments bestowed on his class. Returning from Cambridge University, he secured an interview with the CIA, looking forward to an exciting life as a spy serving the cause of freedom and democracy. In a passage that is perhaps the most amusing in the book, he describes boning up for the interview by “reading about Lenin’s train and Stalin’s prisons, the width of the Fulda Gap, the depth of the Black Sea. Instead of being asked about the treaties of Brest-Litovsk or the October Revolution, I was asked three questions bearing on my social qualifications for admission into what the young men at the far end of the table clearly regarded as the best fraternity on the campus of the free world.”

    His fellow Yalies wanted proof of his upper class bonafides and relied on three questions that would reveal if Lapham were the real goods. Lapham had to answer the question, which club does one take from the golf bag when standing on the thirteenth tee at the National Golf Links in Southampton, followed by the question of the direction at dusk in late August of the prevailing wind on final approach under sail into Hay Harbor on Fishers Island, followed by “Does Muffy Hamilton wear a slip?”

    Muffy was a very beautiful, very rich young socialite “much admired for the indiscriminate fervor of her sexual enthusiasms,” which those with bonafides would have experienced. Lapham correctly answered the first two questions. His experience with Muffy was limited to mixing her a drink at the New Haven Fence Club. He knew only by second hand authority that her underclothes consisted of Belgian lace.

    The questions, Lapham reports, killed his interest in a CIA career. He apologized for having misread the job description and walked out of the interview. So much “smug complacence, self-glorifying certainty and primogeniture crowed into so small a room” offended Lapham and revealed to him an attitude “not well positioned for intelligence gathering.”

    The failure of intelligence, not only the CIA’s, but also the failure of the intelligence of the leadership class, politicians, media, and a goodly chunk of the American people, explains the folly that has devoured our civil liberties and the economic prospects of our people and has left us with children unfamiliar with the world both past and present, making them “easy marks for the dealers in totalitarian politics” of which our country has an excess supply.

    In this digital age in which wordsmiths are extinct, to read a Lapham essay is a delight for those of us old enough to appreciate the performance. One of Lapham’s virtues is that he is a delight to read whether or not one agrees with him. His other virtue is that in his sarcasm is a true picture of our era of folly.

    Paul Craig Roberts
    Last edited by turiya; 11th March 2017 at 16:16.

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    Default Re: Trump: The Great American Reset

    X22 Spotlight interviews Bix Weir... starts w/ Vault 7...

    Bix Weir: The Economic Crisis Will Hit This Summer,
    Banks Will Crash, Currency Won't Exist

    (Published on Mar 11, 2017)


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    Default Re: Trump: The Great American Reset

    Cross-posted on another thread...

    Here's something interesting from Steve Pieczenik's website regarding what's recently going on in Syria:
    Keep in mind, Trump has previously said that he would be initially focusing on Domestic policy, thus trusting his military generals to do what they have more, supposedly, expertise in dealing with - the foreign situation.
    It seems to me, that Steve is attempting to communicate a message to General Mattis & McMaster...
    From his recent article (below)...
    Quote Steve Pieczenik:

    I beseech both Generals James Mattis and HR McMaster to cease and desist this madness falsely entitled:
    "training and assistance" ASAP!
    You were placed in your respective positions by those who created and fought this Second American Revolution. We supported Trump and his team because we did not want any more of our brave men and women to end up in the mess that Clinton, Bush Jr, and Obama created. It’s time for you ex-generals to start thinking strategically. We have no political, economic, nor military reasons to be in any of those countries that we have been in for that past two decades. (Emphasis mine.)

    Let me invoke the great plea of our great POTUS General Eisenhower:
    “Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron!”
    Let me emphasize what another outstanding military strategist, Gen. Douglas Mac Arthur, repeatedly warned:
    “It is fatal to enter a war without the will to win it.”



    Stop these Useless Wars! Raqqa Syria!
    March 10, 2017 Dr. Steve R. Pieczenik, MD, PhD

    11th Marine Expeditionary Unit [Artillery Battery] Placed in Harm’s Way Fighting Against Islamic State [ISIS] in Raqqa, Syria!

    WTH? What’s the Strategy??

    Answer: None
    Once again, we are confronted by the unexplained implant of American soldiers in distant lands where we do not belong. Nothing has been more exasperating for me and other military veterans than the deployment of American soldiers in 770+ bases in over 220 different countries. On top of that expansive network of wasted money, citizens are presented with a military fait-accompli where our kids are deployed into combat zones which have absolutely no national security value to the USA.

    Witness the major military defeats of past/present centuries: Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, Libya, Syria… We have become a major player in minor conflagrations which have been fostered by our rapacious military/industrial complex. Our well-intentioned military elites have been consistently mistaken in formulating any winning strategies or effective tactics.

    Hear the echoes of Vietnam redux: NYTimes, March 9, 2017:
    “U.S. Sending 400 More Troops to Syria”, by Michael R. Gordon.
    • “We are preparing logistical and fire support to enable a successful assault on Raqqa…”
      ***
    • “… they will provide artillery support, training, and protection for improvised explosives..”
      ***
    • “..The USA has already carrying out airstrikes [more than 30 per day]in Syria… and has deployed surface-to-surface rockets in northern Syria.”
    I will be damned, the US military has no idea which group they are supporting, given the reality of over 100 shifting terrorist cells fighting in Syria over a five year period. Our generals are at a loss of how America can define our specific role; other than ‘deter, intensify, and intercede’ among the different Russian, Kurdish, Turkey, Russian and Syrian troops.
    “The Trump administration, however, has yet
    to make clear which fighters will seize Raqqa.”
    Really ?

    Gen. Joseph L. Votel, the head of US Central Command [CENTCOM] repeated the words I heard Gen. Westmoreland once pronounce:
    “I am concerned about maintaining the momentum.”
    After Westmoreland said those fateful words, my first assignment in the Nixon Administration was to prepare for the eventual evacuation of Vietnam and SE Asia.

    Today, some of our soldiers have come home from Djibouti where they too were involved in ‘assistance and training’. Translated into every day terms, our American soldiers were involved in major firefights in Sudan, Yemen, and elsewhere in Africa. Yet Obama never declared a state of war. As usual, our cowardly congressional representatives never informed their constituents (the American taxpayers) exactly why we were spending countless billions of dollars in wars that are self-defeating and wasteful. We know that many leaders in Congress are graced with big bucks from weapons suppliers. Its time to vote these whores out of office.


    Unfortunately, our military leaders are falling into the very trap that Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, the present National Security Advisor, wrote about in his PhD thesis—“Dereliction Of Duty”. McMaster postulated correctly that all the relevant political/military elite lied which resulted in a unwinnable war.
    Sounds familiar?
    Most of present day generals have very little experience in formulating a strategy for complete regime change. That is not to say, that each in his own time may have won a battle or two. Yet, not one of them has won a war. Or in the parlance of strategic singletons,
    ‘they never succeeded in changing one regime into another one successfully’.

    The Iraq War was a complete disaster. There was no reason to invade Iraq. Predictably, the pathetic neocons under Rumsfeld [Wolfowitz, Perle, Khalizad, Feif, Bremer] never elaborated a coherent strategy for the post-invasion scenario.

    That absence of a winnable strategy, according to “Dereliction of Duty,” was the fault of our present and retired generals.
    • Some history for you……
      Against my professional advice, Lawrence Eagleburger agreed with the Pentagon and POTUS Reagan to send a similar Marine deployment to Beirut, Lebanon. I had been professionally involved with PLO leader Arafat and the IRG, I warned the senior military/civilian leadership that if we sent the 1st Battalion 8th Marines [Battalion Landing Team –BLT 1/8] to Beirut in any capacity, especially as so-called “UN/MNF peacekeepers” we would rue the day. I was in the business of working with and against my constant enemy/friendly companions:
    • Iranians
    • Hezbollah
    • PLO
    • PFLP
    • Christian Phalangists
    Kissinger already lost one ambassador in the Lebanese Civil War and there would be increasingly more fatalities if we were to send our warriors into Harm’s Way. On October 23 1983, two suicide bombers attacked and killed 241 US Marines, 58 French 9th Parachute Chasseur Regiment and six civilians.

    That was then.

    Today we have the same enemies: Iran, IRG, Syria, Hezbollah—plus different factions of the Kurds who are being destroyed by our presumable friends, the Turks. Our potential ally, Russia, is supporting Dr. Bashar Assad and the IRG. This five year conflagration has killed over 500,000 civilians and displaced another 4 million refugees. Remember that ISIS was created by our illustrious CIA and it’s natural paterfamilias:
    • Salafist Saudi Arabians
    • Hashemite Jordanians
    • corrupt UAE [oops, don’t forget the Mossad, IDF].
    Could anything be more complicated?

    I think not!!



    I beseech both Generals James Mattis and HR McMaster to cease and desist this madness falsely entitled:
    "training and assistance" ASAP!
    You were placed in your respective positions by those who created and fought this Second American Revolution. We supported Trump and his team because we did not want any more of our brave men and women to end up in the mess that Clinton, Bush Jr, and Obama created. It’s time for you ex-generals to start thinking strategically. We have no political, economic, nor military reasons to be in any of those countries that we have been in for that past two decades.

    Let me invoke the great plea of our great POTUS General Eisenhower:
    “Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron!”
    Let me emphasize what another outstanding military strategist, Gen. Douglas Mac Arthur, repeatedly warned:
    “It is fatal to enter a war without the will to win it.”

    Steve Pieczenik Talks
    Last edited by turiya; 12th March 2017 at 18:18.

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    Default Re: Trump: The Great American Reset

    Trump Attorney General Jeff Sessions just getting warmed up...

    Sessions Considering "Outside Special Counsel" To Review "Highly Politicized" Actions Of Obama DOJ


    In a recent interview with Hugh Hewitt, Attorney General Jeff Sessions vowed to do whatever necessary to "restore the independence and professionalism of the Department of Justice" and said he "would have to consider whether or not some outside special counsel is needed" to review the heavily politicized actions of the DOJ under Loretta Lynch and Eric Holder.
    • Mar 10, 2017 11:15 PM
    Jeff Sessions Asks All Remaining Obama-Appointed U.S. Attorneys To Resign


    "As was the case in prior transitions, many of the United States Attorneys nominated by the previous administration already have left the Department of Justice. The Attomey General has now asked the remaining 46 presidentially appointed U.S. Attorneys to tender their resignations in order to ensure a uniform transition." - DOJ
    • Mar 11, 2017 12:32 AM
    US Attorney Preet Bharara Refuses To Resign, "Will Make Trump Fire Him"


    According to various press reports from both the NYT and CNN, Bharara is refusing the Trump administration's demand to resign, and as CNN reporter Jeff Zelezny adds, Bharara "will make Donald Trump fire him."
    • Mar 11, 2017 1:57 PM
    Trump Fires US Attorney Preet Bharara After He Refuses To Quit


    "I did not resign. Moments ago I was fired. Being the US Attorney in SDNY will forever be the greatest honor of my professional life."
    • Mar 12, 2017 12:42 AM
    George Webb Throws in his 2cents Regarding Preet Bharara
    Day 138 Pt1


    Day 138 Pt2

    Preet Bharara Fans Speculation: 'He Was Probing Trump When He Was Fired'


    "now I know what the Moreland Commission must have felt like."
    • Mar 12, 2017 4:42 PM

    Dismissal of US attorneys draws media outrage
    (Published on Mar 12, 2017)
    .
    Last edited by turiya; 13th March 2017 at 13:55.

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    Default Re: Trump: The Great American Reset

    X22 Reports continues...

    It's Not Going To End Well,
    We Are On The Path To A Collapse
    Episode 1225a
    (Published on Mar 10, 2017)

  18. Link to Post #337
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    Default Re: Trump: The Great American Reset

    Regarding post 334 Steve Pieczenik should not be so worked up and back up a minute.

    Trump is following through on his pledge to get ride of ISIL/DASHA terrorists, hence the action in Syria.

    But having said that "The Don" should have the decency to give President Bashar al-Assad of Syria a call and make arrangements for a sleep over instead of just crashing for the night.
    Because it seems they both have more in common than first thought, President Bashar al-Assad hates fake news and ISIL/DASHA just as much as "The Don" and could see himself working with him.

    So the "The Don" needs to make a phone call to President Bashar al-Assad.

    Interview below: Bashar al-Assad interview (Phoenix Chinese Channel, 2017.03.11.) @ 6.00minute mark.

    Last edited by BMJ; 13th March 2017 at 05:01.

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    Default Re: Trump: The Great American Reset

    For all WE know, someone in the Trump admin may have made that phone call. Politics is politics, they don't have to tell us every last little detail, It's better, with these kinds of things, if they don't feed the MSM with tomorrow's Trump bashing headlines.

    edit:

    ...or tell isis ahead of time what's coming.
    Last edited by norman; 13th March 2017 at 09:57.
    ..................................................my first language is TYPO..............................................

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    Default Re: Trump: The Great American Reset

    Regarding the Syria issue...

    Not sure where this strategy will end up... I would think that simply cutting off the funding of the "Syrian Rebels" (as was done by the Obama admin) & getting U.S. troops out of the M.E. altogether would be enough for ISIS, etc., to dissolve away on its own... placing actual troops on the ground in Syria makes for the possibility of this whole thing blowing up in one's own face... but, then again, what do I know... as there are others that have a so-called "expertise" on such matters...

    Gen. Jack Keane on Pentagon's strategy to fight ISIS
    (Published on Mar 12, 2017)
    Last edited by turiya; 13th March 2017 at 13:38.

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    Default Re: Trump: The Great American Reset

    Quote Posted by norman (here)
    For all WE know, someone in the Trump admin may have made that phone call. Politics is politics, they don't have to tell us every last little detail, It's better, with these kinds of things, if they don't feed the MSM with tomorrow's Trump bashing headlines.

    edit:

    ...or tell isis ahead of time what's coming.
    I agree Norman, for example O-Bumer televised count down to a US raid against ISIL is one of the most idiotic things I have ever seen.

    Maybe behind closed doors a phone conversation between presidents went like this:

    POTUS Trump: "Hello President Bashar al-Assad we have a common enemy in ISIL do you need assistance?"

    President Bashar al-Assad: "Yes President Trump it seems we do have a common enemy in ISIL/DASHA, would you care to join Syria and Russia in this venture."

    POTUS Trump: "Most definitely President Bashar al-Assad, what can I bring to the party?"

    President Bashar al-Assad: "A six pack of whip ass would be nice, thank you."

    POTUS Trump: "I think I can arrange that , thank you President Bashar al-Assad for the invitation I'll see you soon."

    Beyond that it's good to here from the face of Syria, and know that President Bashar al-Assad has no love for ISIL/DASHA or CNN fake news, so he is anti new world order.

    Also to put the situation in perspective just because "The Don" walked into Syria does not mean he is invading to take Syria but more likely completing the objective, that is the elimination of ISIL/DASHA.

    So Steve Pieczenik, love your work, but please take a few deep breaths and relax a little and refocus your thoughts no need to panic the masses.
    Last edited by BMJ; 14th March 2017 at 08:28.

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