John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT

 

“Maria Butina: Russian agent who tried to infiltrate the NRA released from prison and deported”

 

Just the headline is ridiculous.

The Independent should be ashamed.

She admitted to what her torturers insisted. Otherwise, she faced never again seeing the light of day.

Imagine, a gun enthusiast from another country who was a university student in the United States being accused of “spying” for joining a private organization that lobbies for gun owners?

The case provides a powerful measure of the extent of America’s Russia-phobia mental disorder. She was effectively tortured and intimidated for months by American officials.

Just absurd… and vicious.

John Chuckman

COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY SCOTT RITTER IN CONSORTIUM NEWS

 

“The Spy Who Failed

“Oleg Smolenkov’s role as a CIA asset and the use of his data by the director of the CIA to cast doubt over the 2016 U.S. presidential election”

 

https://consortiumnews.com/2019/09/14/the-spy-who-failed/

 

Were it not so powerful militarily and financially, the United States would be the laughingstock of the world.

This entire business about a CIA Russian spy is just another avenue travelled in America’s nonstop Russophobia lunatic wanderings.

The DNC material was not hacked as a number of true experts have told us, including the key one now languishing in a British prison.

Putin had no plan because nothing ever happened.

Nothing.

And I think we’ve all seen that when Putin plans something, it happens.

The article is interesting for its laying out of elaborate security procedures – kind of a high-level, almost academic “police procedural” – but I do feel in the end it is not that helpful, much as I respect Scott Ritter expertise.

When nothing has happened, it does seem a bit odd to scrutinize every piece of fiber and bit of dust and to construct a massive scenario of “what ifs.”

Meanwhile, the murder of Seth Rich, a genuine and meaningful event, goes virtually uninvestigated.

No wonder you are in so much trouble, America, and no wonder you make so much trouble for others.

__________________

Response to a comment saying, “Clods like these (add the Clintons) should have their post-employment millions confiscated and put on trial”

Sorry, but “Big Intelligence” is always a failure, and on many levels.

It is not a matter of any “clods.”

It is a matter of the very nature of the institution and the nature of the people who use its output.

The CIA only has a good record at doing bad things.

I refer to its operations side and the havoc and violence they have released through the decades.

They are an army of richly-equipped thugs without uniforms, interfering in the business of others, “lying, cheating, and stealing.”

The true intelligence gathering and evaluating side of things fails and always has to a great extent.

 

https://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2009/05/31/why-the-cia-always-will-be-a-costly-flop/

 

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY CRAIG MURRAY IN RUSSIA INSIDER

 

“UK Releases IMPOSSIBLE Photo of Supposed Russian Suspects in Skripal Case

“Hilarious. You’d think the British gov’t could have produced a photo that is not an obvious fake”

https://russia-insider.com/en/uk-releases-impossible-photo-supposed-russian-suspects-skripal-case/ri24682

 

Great point raised, and truly an important one.

But even were we to accept the photos of the two men, what do they prove?

Nothing, and certainly nothing about the Skripal Affair.

Britain has gone far beyond the photos, too, identifying them as GRU.

Where’s the evidence for that?

But even if we were to accept what Britain asserts, what does it prove?

Still nothing relative to the Skripal Affair.

As with almost everything about the Skripal affair, despite months of publicity, investigations, and charges, we know almost nothing, nothing worth knowing, that is.

We have no explanation for the time sequence of the attack, so very great a length of time between presumed exposure and the pair’s being stricken. That is not the way nerve agents work.

We have no explanation for how it is that an antidote delivered so very late possibly could be effective. These agents require the antidotes to be administered within minutes.

We have no explanation for how doctors and authorities even knew which antidote to administer.

And no explanation for how the substance was identified at the time. Nor where it was identified. Hospital labs couldn’t even attempt such a task.

To my knowledge, you can only make a positive identification with such chemicals if you have a sample. So where did that come from?

And it is not an easy task to identify something like nerve agent, starting from scratch, and not even any evidence to warrant a particular suspicion. Who would ever think of nerve agent to begin with?

And no explanation for where the antidote was obtained.

We have no explanation of events around the discovery of the sick pair on a bench.

A woman doctor said she worked with them for half an hour at the bench location. She noticed nothing that might be a chemical agent, and she herself was not affected although she handled them extensively. And the same for someone else who assisted her, there being two sick people.

The emergency response crew at the bench location suspected a fentanyl overdose, a fairly common event in the town.

We have no explanation for why authorities took so long in warning the town’s people. Or for why the town wasn’t sealed off.

We have no explanation for why the father and daughter have been prevented from seeing reporters, except for that one brief, extremely controlled appearance and statement by the daughter.

We have no explanation for the clear fact that the daughter wasn’t even told what the British government is charging, that the Russian government is being held responsible. The daughter spoke of returning to Russia.

We have no explanation for why a relative has been denied a visa to visit.

We have no explanation for the treatment of the home. The government is buying it.

No explanation about pets in the home. Two Guinea pigs were found dead and a ”distressed” cat (after, euthanized), facts which could be explained simply by their lack of water in a police-sealed house.

We have no explanation for why Theresa May’s government behaved as it did. Again, lacking any real evidence, it made impossibly strong public accusations against another government and started a serious international diplomatic row.

We have no explanation for the British government’s complete lack of cooperation with Russia despite numerous offers of cooperation.

Theresa May has set a new international standard of inappropriate behavior through the entire matter, and British newspapers have done little but run stories around every government assertion as though it were fact. There has been absolutely no investigative reporting despite many possible lines to pursue.

Again, as I’ve said before, I would embrace any outcome of the case which is proven. I completely reject claims made and extreme actions taken without proof. I do confess to a bias for facts.

 

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RUSSIA INSIDER

 

“The Schizophrenic Deep State is a Symptom, Not the Disease”

 

I think there is truth here, but it misses the fundamentals.

First, empires are never sound institutions. They always eventually collapse because they contain from the beginning the seeds of their own destruction, and, truly, they do a whole lot of damaging things along the way.

Men as brilliant as David Hume and Adam Smith said long ago that empires were unsound projects.

They waste great resources in having to maintain huge security and military establishments, which are in and of themselves not economic and not productive. Nothing on earth is less economically productive than the military. The more of it you have, the more economic damage it does.

Wherever military and security culture begin to dominate, liberal values – liberal in the best classical sense of the word – suffer. Military and security organizations are inherently anti-liberal, anti-democratic, anti-human rights – they are authoritarian in nature, and their heavy influence anywhere is rather poisonous.

Empires tend to violate the principles of free trade which are the real source of wealth.

They tend to induce a mercantilist system of trade, and that is a beggar-thy-neighbor system which does not work in the long term. They are much associated with plantation systems, even today, and the maintenance of those systems against reform.

Empires tend to corrupt the leaders running them because they begin to think and act as though they have unique qualities and privileges. We see this very strongly in the United States today with a pervasive sense of entitlement and special privilege. It is always so with empires, and it was quite unpleasantly dominant during the late 18^th century and much of the 19th century in the British Empire.

Empires violate many ethical principals, as those around “might makes right” and “acting the bully” and abusing people and killing people and stealing.

In the end, a nation such as the United States can have either an empire or a decent country, but it cannot have both.

And it very much does not.

Its own people suffer in many cases complete government neglect because the political power establishment is intensely busy with the affairs of empire which can be very rewarding to them personally. And there are no resources left after vast imperial costs to help your own people.

This only enhances the sense of distance between a people and their government, something which has been a notable feature of the United States for a very long time.

A kind of closed political system develops with powerful and influential people and parties working towards empire and its rewards in terms of personal power, wealth, and advancement. It stimulates, too, some of humanity’s ugliest characteristics in terms of selfishness and authoritarianism.

There really isn’t a whole lot of good to say for empire, but it always is something which tempts powerful states and the people who run them. And, as with so many human institutions, people lose all sight of what has been done in the past or think that they can somehow do it better, avoiding the pitfalls.

In late 1770s America, the Redcoats and Britain’s hired German mercenaries, the Hessians, came to be truly hated symbols. How ironic that today, America’s professional (mercenary) army is regarded in the same way in many, many places in the world, and rightly so.

An interesting anecdote around this was the New York Times’ adopting, back during the totally illegal and heavily destructive Iraq invasion, the practice of calling America’s invading army, “GIs,” a ridiculous usage attempting to claim the good feelings of citizen soldiers doing their duty back in the 1940s.

Lord Acton, whom I’ve quoted many times owing to the profound truth of his words on the subject, told us that power tends to corrupt and that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Those are words you can count on. They state a universal human experience, yet that truth is ignored over and over.

America’s Founders were concerned with just such matters which is why they were so concerned with concepts like “checks and balances.” And yet they got a very good deal wrong in the structure of the Constitution that bedevils American society to this day, as, for example, the Electoral College, and it is a very difficult document to change, even if you are minded to do so.

But, over and above what they got wrong, there is the simple fact that if the powers-that-be choose to ignore things, they will be ignored. A consensus of powerful people often and easily ignores the most worthy-sounding paper declarations. And who is in a position to call them on it?

Look at America’s behavior at Guantanamo and in the hideous CIA’s International Gulag of Black Sites. These ignored or deliberately suppressed every principle of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. As though, somehow, if you build dungeons and torture chambers and conduct kidnappings offshore, it’s just fine because the Constitution does not apply there. You can find no better example of completely corrupt imperial thinking in a people supposedly guided by constitutional principles.

And, of course, the entire “War on Terror” is just a reflection of American imperial efforts in the first place. So-called international terror has two main components. One includes the horrible mercenaries the United States itself often hires or subsidizes to do its dirty work abroad (terrorists like al-Nusra in Syria) and, as well, there are the oppressive state forces it supports in many places, as in Israel or Saudi Arabia or Egypt.

The other component is what security people refer to as “blowback.” These are people reacting to what has been done to them or their families or countries with either bombing or Marines or hired mercenary forces. In another context, they would just be called “partisans” or even “freedom fighters,” striking back at oppressors.

In either case, they wouldn’t exist if the United States weren’t up to its armpits in the dirty work of empire.

Imperial activity over time can even change definitions and norms. A few decades back, in the 1970s, Argentina’s military junta carried on with the practice of “disappearing” people. Thousands of them. Pictures of mothers and relatives piteously looking for information about lost loved ones were in our television news regularly, and most people deeply sympathized with them.

It was only much later that we learned that the military junta had a secret program of kidnapping people it did not approve of, drugging them, and flying them out over the ocean where they were thrown out of the plane to drown. They did this to a great many people.

But, of course, while our press either didn’t know or pretended not to know what was going on, the American security forces and State Department very much did know, and they did nothing about it. I’m sure they were secretly pleased that, mainly, the right kind of people were being eliminated.

Today, America has just such a program itself, and it is carried on in public and with little opposition. It was created, to operate on an industrial scale, by the same President Obama, so widely (and mistakenly) regarded as a liberal and a man of good will.

People working in secure CIA control centers sit at monitors to guide drones into position for firing Hellfire missiles at people they don’t even know. The targets have no rights. They are legally guilty of nothing. But they are burned alive by America.

Often others, completely innocent bystanders (“collateral damage” as the Pentagon calls them) are also killed, but even the targets are people guilty of nothing, only accused and accused in a secretive organization by a secretive process. And it has been done thousands of times.

If you see nothing wrong or threatening in all that, I just don’t know how to respond. But you cannot build or maintain any kind of decent society with activity which suppresses every principle of enlightened government we have developed slowly and painfully since the Middle Ages.

Because of the vague and unproved accusation, “terrorist,” actually not all that different than calling someone “witch,” this practice now goes on as though it were perfectly normal. “Say, Johnny, would you pick up a loaf of bread at the store? And, say, Johnny, nice going on that ‘kill’ the other day.”

Well, I’m sure the colonels in Argentina considered their thousands of victims as some equivalent term to terrorist or witch, but it did not make their state terror right. It can never be right, just as with many corrupt practices of empire.

The United States is well into the absolutely-corrupt stage of things in Lord Acton’s dictum. But in addition, its power establishment is keenly aware, though they do not speak of it openly, that the country has been in relative economic decline vis-à-vis the rest of the world.

There are many new and ambitious competitors in the world, and, of course, the traditional competitors who were all flattened for a while after WWII, giving the United States its unique and temporary historical opportunity to enjoy an illusory “American Dream,” now are all booming.

Meanwhile, American workers can’t compete. American management is often not competitive. America cannot even run its own finances on anything approaching a sound basis. And America is saddled with a monstrously unproductive military-security establishment. The best of a trillion dollars a year spent on guys who have little to do but pick their noses and read copies Playboy bought at the PX when they are not bombing and shooting people. Fleets of costly machines that, unlike bulldozers or cranes, accomplish nothing.

America’s elites have decided on the desperate strategy of using the country’s remaining brute force to secure as many future advantages for itself as possible in the world. Of course, many such advantages will be completely uneconomic.

Just take one contemporary example. America is shoving American Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) on Europe to displace Russian gas in conventional pipeline systems. But this is totally uneconomic. LNG costs much more than conventional pipeline gas – as you would expect from the elaborate refrigeration plants needed to prepare it and the special ships needed to haul it and the special ports needed to unload it.

So, Europeans will become that much poorer for buying it. American producers will be encouraged by something that is essentially an artificial subsidy (the Mafia tactics of their government pushing the liquified gas where it is not wanted) into producing more of a product with inadequate free markets. Russia, which has the needed gas at lowest possible cost, has markets stripped from it by bullying. Everyone simply gets poorer in the long run than they otherwise might have been.

This set of acts is just one of the reasons, too, for Washington’s promoting Russophobia, itself a dangerous and unproductive behavior.

This way of doing things sadly represents the future towards which American elites are now hurling themselves enthusiastically across a range of activities. They are driven by pride and arrogance to try keeping on top without genuinely competing.

And because they, so many of them, are corrupt and spoiled, they have no difficulty adopting such a national strategy. It also very much satisfies that base human instinct about dominating others. It is all both dangerous – since it involves threats and the military – and not the kind of activity which increases the wealth of nations.

We face dark times indeed.

 

 

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RUSSIA INSIDER

 

“Trump’s Open Defiance of Washington’s Russophobia Is a Revolutionary Act”

 

This analysis is flawed.

Yes, it is good that Trump is meeting Putin and, yes, that fact flies in the face of many Washington establishment figures.

But please examine the overall record of this man, Trump.

It is loaded with contradictions and downright stupidities.

You cannot count on anything when dealing with someone like that. He is out-of-touch and uninformed on a great many matters. He often is caught making up his own version of something while he speaks or is being interviewed. He listens to almost no one, and he has little patience for most people trying to tell him anything.

He is a total living, breathing America-Firster. Actually, I believe Trump is a Donald Trump-Firster, always and in all things, and America really only comes into the picture because it provides the stage for his hammy and often-blundering acting performance. He is in many ways a rather sick and isolated man.

But he does have a fairly powerful political base, which feeds on the raw meat of xenophobia and fear of migrants and Islamophobia and love of walls, and he uses that base to push back in Washington. He has to push, even his own party, because most of its establishment truly dislike Trump. He’s treated like an unwelcome dinner-party guest who somehow got a genuine invitation by mistake.

With Trump, there’s no substance of which to get hold, just a lot of noise and a massive ego. He betrays friends, insults allies as well as enemies, and is totally for himself and is highly protective of his hermetically-sealed mindset about the world and its people.

This trip for Trump serves another purpose, too, having nothing to do with geo-politics. He is effectively telling the Washington establishment off about Russia because he fears some of the efforts underway by the Special Prosecutor are leading to serious trouble.

Whether the material the Special Prosecutor is gathering from past Trump associates – and several are cooperating – is damning enough ultimately to remove him from office is, in the end, up to the court of public opinion.

Evidence in any legal case of any nature can be interpreted in different ways. And we often end up with either convictions or exonerations which don’t reflect the underlying hard facts.

Humans are fallible and the legal systems they create are fallible. Often, the truth, the kind of truth you would believe if you actually sorted through all the evidence carefully and without partiality, gets tossed into the garbage.

We’ve seen it happen many times – from the phony case made against Lee Oswald in the Kennedy assassination or the manufactured investigation into the downing of TWA Flight 800 to the phony “not guilty” verdict in the O J Simpson murder case. Truth simply does not prevail in an atmosphere thick with interests and influence.

Trump has reason to fear because there’s no denying it, Washington is just totally in the grasp of the Russia-Fear-and-Loathing Crowd. Not just the Democratic Party, but the security services, the Pentagon, and some of the most powerful lobbies, such as the one for Israel.

Yes, Russia maintains pretty good relations with Israel – one of Putin’s great strengths is maintaining good relations with many differing interests – but Israel’s rulers’ deepest feelings are undoubtedly that Russia is intrinsically a barrier.

You see, Israel and its lobby in Washington very much like a hyper-aggressive United States, the kind of United States which has rampaged through the Middle East. They see that kind of United States as a guarantee of Israel’s future. Israel’s position in the Middle East is inherently weak and always has been, but its de facto role as an American colony in the region gives it strength it wouldn’t have on its own as a truly independent nation state, something it emphatically is not.

And no group is more influential in Washington than the Israel Lobby, owing to the sheer fact that it represents so many very successful and influential American businessmen, including those who own or manage all of the high-end national press and broadcasting. Trump has bent over backward trying to please them with stuff like the illegal recognition of Jerusalem as capital of Israel and his total ignoring of Israel’s murderous activity against the people of Gaza, who want nothing but their rights.

He also has his big plan brewing for an “historic final settlement” between Israel and the Palestinians, which is in the hands of his son-in-law, a good friend of Netanyahu, and, by all accounts leaking out, is so biased against Palestinian interests, it is sure to fail, however that does not mean that the effort won’t please members of the Lobby.

The CIA and Pentagon tend to be on side with the Israel Lobby because they see Israel as a strategic asset in the Middle East, and they just basically loathe the only country on earth, Russia, which is capable of destroying the United States. The Democrats are “on side” because they are political opponents of Trump and because they are loyal servants of American imperial interests and because they have pretty much all been politically bought-and-paid-for over many years by the Israel Lobby. But then, so has the Republican Party whose biggest big-shots do not really like Trump.

I do not see any powerful interest group in Washington right now which wants or demands better relations with Russia. It’s a good cause that completely lacks a base of support, because nothing in Washington is decided on the basis of merit. Matters are decided by politics and by imperial geo-politics.

Those groups – Democrats, Republicans, CIA, Pentagon, and powerful lobbies – are all married to the concept of America re-asserting itself in the world through a new kind of multi-faceted and hybrid aggression on almost every front.

They are not satisfied to accept the relative economic decline underway for “the indispensable nation” as states who were not competitors in the past become competitors. They want to push and bully their way into as many advantages in the world as they possibly can. It really is a Mafia-like business model for the country. And that is just what has been happening, with or without Trump, for some years now. Obama, for example, worked full-time towards the goal although you never heard him make speeches about it.

There’s only Trump in Washington saying America needs better relations with Russia – and, of course, he is right, but being right in Washington won’t get you so much as a cup of coffee. There is also the fact, not appreciated by many people abroad, that, in terms of the American Constitution, the President just isn’t all that powerful inside the United States. His only unquestioned power comes in time of war when he is Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. In other matters, it is a constant struggle with other elements of a divided government, one divided by its very design in the American Constitution.

Putin understands this all clearly, I’m sure, and I believe he is using Trump to drive a wedge into the heart of the powerful and dominant anti-Russia coalition in Washington. I don’t think he necessarily sees Trump as Russia’s friend – and, let’s be honest, with an erratic man like Trump, what kind of dependable friendship does he offer to anybody? – but Putin very much sees Trump as a tool to use in a very dark and dangerous game being played inside the United States. This is the way high-level power-politics is played, and Putin is a master at it.