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Philip Giraldi

Americans Are Being Led By a Lying Media and Corrupt Political Class

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Each morning I do a quick scan of the headlines coming over the wire services, clear my emails and Facebook entries, and then take a closer look at The New York Times online, paying particular attention to the opinion pages. I usually am not disappointed in my belief that the President Joe Biden Administration as well as ex-President Donald Trump, have been and continue to be collectively destroying what was once an admirable nation, something like flushing us repeatedly down the toilets of their ambition and greed.
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A Personal Journey Through the National Security State

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I am accustomed to opening the New York Times and The Washington Post to find laundry list articles relating to what the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has reportedly been up to. That many of the evidence free allegations are implausible or even quite contrary to known facts about international political developments does not seem to matter as using the initials CIA appears to be enough to make one’s case that there is something either unseemly or even evil going on. And it serves as a convenient scapegoat for the liberal media – “It wasn’t Joe Biden who dunnit, it was the CIA!”

Over the Labor Day weekend I attended an antiwar conference which included remarks by some speakers who proceeded to run through a whole litany of claimed CIA crimes against humanity. It struck me at the time that they did not always know what they were talking about and I began to think about my own 21 year-long involvement with the National Security Community and, more particularly, to what extent that CIA and to a lesser extent military intelligence were quite the out-of-control demons that they have been made out to be.

Indeed, among my generation’s Agency officers who are by now retired, most I know are antiwar, as am I, though those younger officers whom I encounter on occasion that are actively serving generally are more careful about expressing their views or are outspokenly anti-Russian, which is presumably what how current CIA leadership wants them to deport themselves in public.
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Is the Almighty US Dollar About to Take a Fall?

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August 23rd was a big news day all over the world. The western media’s focus on the events of that day was solidly on the unproven claims that Russian President Vladimir Putin was behind the sabotage or shooting down of an executive jet that killed his former associate Yevgeny Prigozhin. In reality, however, there was a far more important story that was coming out of South Africa. In fact, Putin had a far more important job to do on that day due to his desire to make progress in stripping the United States of its dollar hegemony. Putin was engaged by videolink in the discussions taking place in Johannesburg regarding expanding the so-called BRICS monetary union, in part to include measures that would diminish the dominance of the dollar in the world economy. 

That objective would have been damaged severely if Putin had been implicated in the spectacular public assassination of a rival on the same day as the BRICS meeting that would have been not only an embarrassment but also very damaging vis-a-vis his credibility as a statesman. If Putin had really wanted to kill Prigozhin, there were less politically damaging ways to do so and as of this writing the cause of the airplane crash remains unknow. By one theory, the death of Prigozhin was carried out by an airplane bomb planted by US or British intelligence working with Ukrainian agents inside Russia to discredit the Russian leader, knowing that even if he were innocent he would be blamed for the killing, which is precisely how the story has been developing in the US and Europe.

The name BRICS comes from an acronym for Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Goldman Sachs economist Jim O’Neill reportedly coined the term BRIC (without South Africa) in 2001 and the group was set up a few years later using the acronym. Recently, the drive to expand BRICS has gained momentum as a result of the completely avoidable Ukraine war. 


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America’s Domestic Party Politics Fuel the Ukraine Catastrophe

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I am surely not the only one who has noticed that the defensive propaganda lines that are flowing out the Democratic Administration have become more than ordinarily ridiculous of late. One is astonished at the melding of fact and fiction to create narratives that depict the White House and all that pertains to it as forging a new and more wonderful country. Wasn’t “Build Back Better” the battle cry, whatever that is supposed to mean? And the spin is endless, even when a clueless Joe Biden belatedly winds up in Maui to relate to the tragedy in which at least 1,000 died, only to be greeted by surviving local residents saluting the president with their middle fingers upraised.

As the president looked out over the destruction of an entire city by fire he reminisced by recalling his long ago “almost” encounter with a fire in his kitchen. Locals who were screaming for help from government were, in fact, getting almost nothing while the nation’s Chief Executive was in the Oval Office gloating over sending another $23 billion to the arch crook Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, money to fight a war that Biden encouraged and has blithely entered into.

Washington politicians characteristically have no morals and are driven only by their desire to perpetuate their party’s dominance so that the corruption that makes so many of those who adhere to the process rich, including Joe Biden. How do 500,000 dead Ukrainians and Russians matter if a myth about the United States and its values can be exploited to obtain electoral victory for Biden in 2024? As the greatly esteemed monster Madeleine Albright once put it, “I think it is worth it!”
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Some New Developments in the Spy Business

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The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), famed for its hidden agendas and its preference to operate in the shadows, has featured in a couple of recent breaking stories. On July 22nd the White House announced that CIA Director William Burns would be stepping up to cabinet level in the Joe Biden Administration. That means that beyond being in theory a principal government source for reliable information that can be used to make policy, he would himself become a policy maker, co-equal with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Though the gesture is largely symbolic and creates some bureaucratic scrambling of roles and functions, it is not unprecedented. President Ronald Reagan included his CIA Director and close friend William Casey in the cabinet and the inevitable Bill Clinton elevated no less than two Directors, John Deutch and George Tenet.

Interestingly, of the four cabinet level CIA Directors, only Casey was an experienced intelligence officer, having served in the OSS during the Second World War and he became a controversial director who was inclined to support unnecessarily risky operations, particularly in Latin America. Deutch was something like a professional bureaucrat, having worked at the Pentagon before moving on to the Agency. He left CIA after little more than a year in office in December 1996 and it was subsequently learned that he had been keeping classified material on his own laptop computer, which appears to be a Democratic Party trait. Bill Clinton pardoned him before he could be prosecuted for failing to protect classified information. Tenet was a congressional staffer before becoming Director and he, of course, gifted the American people with the massive intelligence failure known as the Iraq War.

Burns likewise is a career diplomat, not a spy, and the two roles are very different, though perhaps not to Joe Biden and whoever is pulling his strings. At the beginning of his administration, Biden engaged Burns as his global trouble shooter—a man with a title and credentials that enabled him to communicate confidentially with foreign leaders outside of normal diplomatic channels.
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Who Stole the 2020 Presidential Election?

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The corruption engaged in by the Democratic Party leadership appears to be never-ending and no one is ever held accountable. A recent report described how Michael Morell, the former acting Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director, colluded with Antony Blinken, who was then a senior official in the 2020 Joe Biden presidential campaign, to prepare and find signatories to a letter to discredit those seeking to exploit the emerging Hunter Biden laptop scandal, which was threatening to do real damage to the Biden electoral prospects. Following in the footsteps of the Hillary Clinton 2016 campaign, which sought to use fabricated information from the Steele dossier to smear Donald Trump and some of his advisors, Blinken suggested that Morell promote the argument that the laptop story involved Russia and should be dismissed as little more than a disinformation operation ordered by President Vladimir Putin. At the time, there was no evidence whatsoever to suggest that Russia had had anything to do with spreading fabricated information regarding Hunter Biden or his laptop, but that was regarded as immaterial.

The conspiracy to use a false narrative to corruptly influence the outcome of the election, for that is what it was, was recently revealed in testimony by Morell to the House Judiciary Committee, led by Republican Representative Jim Jordan. Morell described how he had been instrumental in convincing 50 other former colleagues in the intelligence and national security community to sign on to the letter that he had drafted. Morell told the committee that Blinken acting for the Biden campaign helped to strategize about the timing and distribution for the public release of the letter and he described how his two objectives in drafting and releasing the statement was “to help then-Vice President Biden in the upcoming presidential debate and assist him in winning the election.”
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The End of American 'Exceptionalism'?

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Watching a once great nation commit suicide is not pretty. President Joe Biden does not seem to understand that his role as elected leader of the United States is to take actions that directly or indirectly benefit the folks who voted for him as well as the other Americans who did not do so. That is how a constitutional democracy is supposed to work. 


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Perspectives from Eastern Europe

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Back in the 1970s I was part of the Field Trade Craft course for new Case Officers at the Central Intelligence Agency’s principal training facility, located at Camp Peary, near Williamsburg, Virginia. Peary was and still is referred to by one and all as “the Farm,” though it engaged in animal husbandry only in the most basic sense. One of the instructors had part of a poem by Rudyard Kipling displayed on his office door. It read:

The toad beneath the harrow knows
Exactly where each tooth-point goes:
The butterfly upon the road
Preaches contentment to the toad

Some of the students began referring to themselves as “toads” and were expecting the worst from the instructors to bring them into conformity with Agency expectations, while they also identified the instructors as the butterflies who were telling them to shut up and play along if they wished to be certified to go overseas. Everyone knew it was a matter of perception of one’s role or status, with the students resigned to punishment or worse like the toads, while the instructors, whose viewpoints and expectations were quite different, could blithely assure their victims that everything was proceeding just as it should be.

That there will always be toads and butterflies engaged in national security issues is a given, while perceptions of what is important or significant will vary depending on one’s individual life and cultural experiences. Or, to put it another way, one’s basic views are not predetermined and will depend very much on which side of a fence one is standing on.
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US Foreign Policy Goes 'Woke'?

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It is generally observed that imperial powers like the United States frequently interfere in foreign governments in support of economic or hard political reasons. To be sure, Washington has refined the process so it can plausibly deny that it is interfering at all, that the change is spontaneous and comes from the people and institutions in the country that is being targeted for change.

One recalls how handing out cookies in Maidan Square in Kiev served as an incentive wrapped around a publicity stunt to bring about regime change in Ukraine in 2014 when Senator John McCain and the State Department’s Victoria Nuland were featured performers in a $5 billion investment by the US government to topple the friendly-to-Russia regime of President Viktor Yanukovych.

Of course, change for the sake of a short-term objective might not always be the best way to go and one might suggest that the success in bringing in a new government acceptable to Nuland has not really turned out that well for Ukraine and the Ukrainian people, nor for those Americans who understand that the Biden Administration’s pledge to arm Ukraine and stay in the fight against Russia “as long as it takes” just might not be very good for the United States either.

And the United States continues to be at it, meddling in what was once regarded as something like a war crime, though it now prefers to conceal what it is up to by preaching “democracy” and wrapping the message in “woke-ish progressivism” at every opportunity. An interesting recent trip by a senior government official that was not reported in the mainstream media suggests that the game is still afoot in Eastern Europe.
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America the Feckless

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One would think that the United States military staging an unprovoked “plausibly deniable” covert attack on a nation with which it is not at war would be at least considered newsworthy. That the attack did grave damage to a country with which the US is closely allied would seem to make the aggression even more unthinkable. And, perhaps worst of all, that the attack was set up by the nation’s chief executive using a political bypass that avoided congressional oversight and adherence to the war powers act which might be most reprehensible of all as it cuts to the heart of the nation’s constitutional balance of powers. It is clearly an impeachable offense. And “Yes,” for those who are still wondering, Joe Biden and his team of terrorist emulators have done all that and more, and have capped their performance with a series of flat out lies and evasions to make it appear that they had done nothing wrong.

And the mainstream America media, in its worst performance since the invasion of Iraq, has served as an echo chamber for everything the White House chooses to leak to it. Given all of that, it was perhaps completely predictable that the government-subservient press and TV news would almost completely ignore the devastating report released by top investigative journalist Seymour Hersh on February 8th. Hersh’s article was entitled “How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline” with a secondary headline reading “The New York Times called it a ‘mystery,’ but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now.” The article, which Hersh self-published on the internet, describes in considerable detail the preparations and execution by the US Navy Diving and Salvage Center and Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) Maritime Branch, coordinated and directed by the White House, to sabotage and destroy Russia’s four Baltic Sea Nord Stream gas pipelines, a war crime and terroristic action that moves the United States much closer to direct armed conflict with Russia.
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