TBR News December 10, 2016

The Voice of the White House  

Washington, D.C.  December 10, 2016:”With the election of Donald Trump to the Presidency, the defeated Democrats are howling with rage at their loss and have had the controlled American media pour out all manner of accusations to account for this loss. That the press is indeed controlled is becoming much clearer to the public and the false and often childish accusations of Russian interference and domestic Internet “fake news” is highly counter-productive for the Democrats. The American print and television media are falling into the quarry and the invented stories and accusations only speed their descent.”

Official Government Disinformation Methodology  

December 9, 2016

by Harry von Johnston PhD

Prior to the event of printed, and later television, media, it was not difficult for the world’s power elites and the governments they controlled, to see that unwelcome and potentially dangerous information never reached the masses of people under their control. Most of the general public in more distant times were completely illiterate and received their news from their local priest or from occasional gossip from travellers. The admixture of kings, princes and clergy had an iron control over what their subject could, or could not hear.

During the Middle Ages and even into the more liberal Renaissance, universities were viewed with suspicion and those who taught, or otherwise expressed, concepts that were anathama to the concept of feudalism were either killed outright in public or permanently banished. Too-liberal priests were silenced by similar methods. If Papal orders for silence were not followed, priests could, and were, put to the torch as an example for others to note.

However, with the advent of the printing press and a growing literacy in the piopulation, the question of informational control was less certain and with the growing movements in Europe and the American colonies for less restriction and more public expression, the power elites found it necessary to find the means to prevent unpleasant information from being proclaimed throughout their lands and unto all the inhabitants thereof.

The power elites realized that if they could not entirely prevent inconvenient and often dangerous facts to emerge and threaten their authority, their best course was not censorship but to find and develop the means to control the presentation and publication of that they wished to keep entirely secret.

The first method was to block or prevent the release of dangerous material by claiming that such material was a matter of important state security and as such, strictly controlled. This, they said, was not only for their own protection but also the somewhat vague but frightening concept of the security of their people.

The second method was, and has been, to put forth disinformation that so distorts and confuses actual facts as to befuddle a public they see as easily controlled, naïve and gullible.

The mainstream American media which theoretically was a balance against governmental corruption and abuses of power, quickly became little more than a mouthpiece for the same government they were supposed to report on. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, most American newspapers were little better than Rupert Mudoch’s modern tabloids, full of sound and fury, and signifying nothing but during the First World War, President Wilson used the American entry into the First World War as an excuse for setting up controls over the American public.

Aside from setting up government control over food distribution, the railroads, much industry involved in war production, he also established a powerful propganda machine coupled with a national informant system that guaranteed his personal control. In 1918, citing national security, Wilson arrested and imprisoned critical news reporters and threatened to shut down their papers.

Wilson was a wartime president and set clear precidents that resonated very loudely with those who read history and understood its realities.

During the Second World War, Franklin Roosevelt, another wartime leader, was not as arrogant or highhanded as Wilson (whose empire fell apart after the end of the war that supported it) but he set up informational controls that exist to the present time. And after Roosevelt, and the war, passed into history, the government in the United States created a so-called cold war with Soviet Russia, instead of Hitler’s Germany, as the chief enemy.

Control of the American media then fell into the hands of the newly-formed Central Intelligence Agency who eventually possessed an enormous, all-encompassing machine that clamped down firmly on the national print, and later television media, with an iron hand in a velvet glove. Media outlets that proved to be cooperative with CIA propaganda officials were rewarded for their loyalty and cooperation with valuable, and safe, news and the implication was that enemies of the state would either be subject to scorn and derision and that supporters of the state and its policies would receive praise and adulation.

The methodology of a controlled media has a number of aspects which, once clearly understood, renders its techniques and goals far less effective.

Some of the main tactics used by the mainstream media to mislead the American public are illustrated here:

The American media, both press and television, has long been known for promoting sensationalism over accuracy on the one hand and practicing subservience to

Mainstream media sources (especially newspapers) are notorious for reporting flagrantly dishonest and unsupported news stories on the front page, then quietly retracting those stories on the very back page when they are caught. In this case, the point is to railroad the lie into the collective consciousness.

Once the lie is finally exposed, it is already too late, and a large portion of the population will not notice or care when the truth comes out. A good example of this would be the collusion of the mainstream media with the Bush administration to convince the American public after 9/11 that Iraq had WMDs, even though no concrete evidence existed to prove it.

George W. Bush’s eventual admission that there had never been any WMDs in Iraq (except chemical weapons which the U.S. actually sold to Saddam under the Reagan / Bush administration) was lightly reported or glazed over by most mainstream news sources. The core reason behind a war that killed over a million people was proven to be completely fraudulent, yet there still people today who believe that Iraq had nukes.

Unconfirmed Or Controlled Sources As Fact

Cable news venues often cite information from “unnamed” sources, government sources that have an obvious bias or agenda, or “expert” sources without providing an alternative “expert” view. The information provided by these sources is usually backed by nothing more than blind faith.

Calculated Omission

Otherwise known as “cherry picking” data. One simple piece of information or root item of truth can derail an entire disinfo news story, so instead of trying to gloss over it, they simply pretend as if it doesn’t exist. When the fact is omitted, the lie can appear entirely rational. This tactic is also used extensively when disinformation agents and crooked journalists engage in open debate.

Distraction, and the Manufacture of Relevance

recent push for an audit of the Federal Reserve which was gaining major public support, as well as political support. Instead of reporting on this incredible and unprecedented movement for transparency in the Fed, the MSM spent two months or more reporting non-stop on the death of Michael Jackson, a pop idol who had not released a decent record since “Thriller,” practically deifying the man who only months earlier was being lambasted by the same MSM for having “wandering hands” when children were about.

Dishonest Debate Tactics

Sometimes, men who actually are concerned with the average American’s pursuit of honesty and legitimate fact-driven information break through and appear on T.V. However, rarely are they allowed to share their views or insights without having to fight through a wall of carefully crafted deceit and propaganda.

Because the media knows they will lose credibility if they do not allow guests with opposing viewpoints every once in a while, they set up and choreograph specialized T.V. debates in highly restrictive environments which put the guest on the defensive, and make it difficult for them to clearly convey their ideas or facts.

TV pundits are often trained in what are commonly called “Alinsky Tactics.” Saul Alinsky was a moral relativist, and champion of the lie as a tool for the “greater good;” essentially, a modern day Machiavelli. His “Rules for Radicals” were supposedly meant for grassroots activists who opposed the establishment, and emphasized the use of any means necessary to defeat one’s political opposition. But is it truly possible to defeat an establishment built on lies, by use of even more elaborate lies, and by sacrificing one’s ethics?

Today, Alinsky’s rules are used more often by the establishment than by its opposition. These tactics have been adopted by governments and disinformation specialists across the world, but they are most visible in TV debate. While Alinsky sermonized about the need for confrontation in society, his debate tactics are actually designed to circumvent real and honest confrontation of opposing ideas with slippery tricks and diversions. Alinsky’s tactics, and their modern usage, can be summarized as follows:

1) Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.

We see this tactic in many forms. For example, projecting your own movement as mainstream, and your opponent’s as fringe. Convincing your opponent that his fight is a futile one. Your opposition may act differently, or even hesitate to act at all, based on their perception of your power.

2) Never go outside the experience of your people, and whenever possible, go outside of the experience of the enemy.

Don’t get drawn into a debate about a subject you do not know as well as or better than your opposition. If possible, draw them into such a situation instead. Look for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty in your opposition. This is commonly used against unwitting interviewees on cable news shows whose positions are set up to be skewered. The target is blind-sided by seemingly irrelevant arguments that they are then forced to address. In television and radio, this also serves to waste broadcast time to prevent the target from expressing his own positions.

3) Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.

The objective is to target the opponent’s credibility and reputation by accusations of hypocrisy. If the tactician can catch his opponent in even the smallest misstep, it creates an opening for further attacks.

4) Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.

“Ron Paul is a crackpot.” “Dennis Kucinich is short and weird.” “9-11 twoofers wear tinfoil hats.” “Donald Trump gropes dead kittens.” Ridicule is almost impossible to counter. It’s irrational. It infuriates the opposition, which then reacts to your advantage. It also works as a pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.

5) A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.

The popularization of the term “Teabaggers” is a classic example, it caught on by itself because people seem to think it’s clever, and enjoy saying it. Keeping your talking points simple and fun keeps your side motivated, and helps your tactics spread autonomously, without instruction or encouragement.

6) A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.

Don’t become old news. If you keep your tactics fresh, its easier to keep your people active. Not all disinformation agents are paid. The “useful idiots” have to be motivated by other means. Mainstream disinformation often changes gear from one method to the next and then back again.

7) Keep the pressure on with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.

Keep trying new things to keep the opposition off balance. As the opposition masters one approach, hit them from the flank with something new. Never give the target a chance to rest, regroup, recover or re-strategize. Take advantage of current events and twist their implications to support your position. Never let a good crisis go to waste.

8) The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.

This goes hand in hand with Rule #1. Perception is reality. Allow your opposition to expend all of its energy in expectation of an insurmountable scenario. The dire possibilities can easily poison the mind and result in demoralization.

9) The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.

The objective of this pressure is to force the opposition to react and make the mistakes that are necessary for the ultimate success of the campaign.

10) If you push a negative hard and deep enough, it will break through into its counterside.

As grassroots activism tools, Alinsky tactics have historically been used (for example, by labor movements) to force the opposition to react with violence against activists, which leads to popular sympathy for the activists’ cause. Today, false (or co-opted) grassroots movements use this technique in debate as well as in planned street actions. The idea is to provoke (or stage) ruthless attacks against ones’ self, so as to be perceived as the underdog, or the victim. Today, this technique is commonly used to create the illusion that a certain movement is “counterculture” or “anti-establishment.”

11) The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.

Never let the enemy score points because you’re caught without a solution to the problem. Today, this is often used offensively against legitimate activists, such as the opponents of the Federal Reserve. Complain that your opponent is merely “pointing out the problems.” Demand that they offer a solution.

12) Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. The targets supporters will expose themselves. Go after individual people, not organizations or institutions. People hurt faster than institutions.

The next time you view an MSM debate, watch the pundits carefully, you will likely see many if not all of the strategies above used on some unsuspecting individual attempting to tell the truth.

Internet Disinformation Methods

Because the MSM’s bag of tricks has been so exhausted over such a long period of time, many bitter and enraged consumers of information are now turning to alternative news sources, most of which exist on the collective commons we call the internet. At first, it appears, the government and elitists ignored the web as a kind of novelty, or just another mechanism they could exploit in spreading disinformation. As we all now well know, they dropped the ball, and the internet has become the most powerful tool for truth history has ever seen.

That being said, they are now expending incredible resources in order to catch up to their mistake, utilizing every trick in their arsenal to beat web users back into submission. While the anonymity of the internet allows for a certain immunity against many of Saul Alinsky’s manipulative tactics, it also allows governments to attack those trying to spread the truth covertly. In the world of web news, we call these people “disinfo trolls.” Trolls are now being openly employed by governments in countries like the U.S. and Israel specifically to scour the internet for alternative news sites and disrupt their ability to share information.

Internet trolls, also known as “paid posters” or “paid bloggers,” are increasingly being employed by private corporations as well, often for marketing purposes. In fact, it is a rapidly growing industry.

Trolls use a wide variety of strategies, some of which are unique to the internet, here are just a few:

1) Make outrageous comments designed to distract or frustrate: An Alinsky tactic used to make people emotional, although less effective because of the impersonal nature of the web.

2) Pose as a supporter of the truth, then make comments that discredit the movement: We have seen this even on our own forums — trolls pose as supporters of the Liberty Movement, then post long, incoherent diatribes so as to appear either racist or insane. Here is a live example of this tactic in use on Yahoo! Answers.

The key to this tactic is to make references to common Liberty Movement arguments while at the same time babbling nonsense, so as to make those otherwise valid arguments seem ludicrous by association.

In extreme cases, these “Trojan Horse Trolls” have been known to make posts which incite violence — a technique obviously intended to solidify the false assertions of the notorious MIAC report and other ADL/SPLC publications which purport that constitutionalists should be feared as potential domestic terrorists.

3) Dominate Discussions: Trolls often interject themselves into productive web discussions in order to throw them off course and frustrate the people involved.

4) Prewritten Responses: Many trolls are supplied with a list or database with pre-planned talking points designed as generalized and deceptive responses to honest arguments. 9/11 “debunker” trolls are notorious for this.

5) False Association: This works hand in hand with item #2, by invoking the stereotypes established by the “Trojan Horse Troll.”

For example: calling those against the Federal Reserve “conspiracy theorists” or “lunatics”. Deliberately associating anti-globalist movements with big foot or alien enthusiasts, because of the inherent negative connotations. Using false associations to provoke biases and dissuade people from examining the evidence objectively.

6) False Moderation: Pretending to be the “voice of reason” in an argument with obvious and defined sides in an attempt to move people away from what is clearly true into a “grey area” where the truth becomes “relative.”

7) Straw Man Arguments: A very common technique. The troll will accuse his opposition of subscribing to a certain point of view, even if he does not, and then attacks that point of view. Or, the troll will put words in the mouth of his opposition, and then rebut those specific words. For example: “9/11 truthers say that no planes hit the WTC towers, and that it was all just computer animation. What are they, crazy?”

Sometimes, these strategies are used by average people with serious personality issues. However, if you see someone using these tactics often, or using many of them at the same time, you may be dealing with a paid internet troll.

Government Disinformation Methods

Governments, and the globalists who back them, have immense assets — an almost endless fiat money printing press — and control over most legal and academic institutions. With these advantages, disinformation can be executed on a massive scale. Here are just a handful of the most prominent tactics used by government agencies and private think tanks to guide public opinion, and establish the appearance of consensus:

1) Control The Experts: Most Americans are taught from kindergarten to ignore their instincts for the truth and defer to the “professional class” for all their answers. The problem is that much of the professional class is indoctrinated throughout their college years, many of them molded to support the status quo. Any experts that go against the grain are ostracized by their peers.

2) Control The Data: By controlling the source data of any investigation, be it legal or scientific, the government has the ability to engineer any truth they wish, that is, as long as the people do not care enough to ask for the source data. Two major examples of controlled and hidden source data include; the NIST investigation of the suspicious 9/11 WTC collapses, in which NIST engineers, hired by the government, have kept all source data from their computer models secret, while claiming that the computer models prove the collapses were “natural”. Also, the recent exposure of the CRU Climate Labs and their manipulation of source data in order to fool the public into believing that Global Warming is real, and accepting a world-wide carbon tax. The CRU has refused to release the source data from its experiments for years, and now we know why.

3) Skew The Statistics: This tactic is extremely evident in the Labor Department’s evaluations on unemployment, using such tricks as incorporating ambiguous birth / death ratios into their calculation in order to make it appear as though there are less unemployed people than there really are, or leaving out certain subsections of the population, like those who are unemployed and no longer seeking benefits.

3) Guilt By False Association: Governments faced with an effective opponent will always attempt to demonize that person or group in the eyes of the public. This is often done by associating them with a group or idea that the public already hates. Example: During the last election, they tried to associate Ron Paul supporters with racist groups (and more recently, certain Fox News anchors) in order to deter moderate Democrats from taking an honest look at Congressman Paul’s policies.

4) Manufacture Good News: This falls in with the skewing of statistics, and it also relies heavily on Media cooperation. The economic “Green Shoots” concept is a good example of the combination of government and corporate media interests in order to create an atmosphere of false optimism based on dubious foundations.

5) Controlled Opposition: Men in positions of power have known for centuries the importance of controlled opposition. If a movement rises in opposition to one’s authority, one must usurp that movement’s leadership. If no such movement exists to infiltrate, the establishment will often create a toothless one, in order to fill that social need, and neutralize individuals who might have otherwise taken action themselves.

During the 1960’s and 70’s, the FBI began a secretive program called COINTELPRO. Along with illegal spying on American citizens who were against the Vietnam conflict or in support of the civil rights movement, they also used agents and media sources to pose as supporters of the movement, then purposely created conflict and division, or took control of the direction of the movement altogether.

The NRA is another good example of controlled opposition, as many gun owners are satisfied that paying their annual NRA dues is tantamount to actively resisting anti-gun legislation; when in fact, the NRA is directly responsible for many of the compromises which result in lost ground on 2nd amendment issues. In this way, gun owners are not only rendered inactive, but actually manipulated into funding the demise of their own cause.

6) False Paradigms: Human beings have a tendency to categorize and label other people and ideas. It is, for better or worse, a fundamental part of how we understand the complexities of the world. This component of human nature, like most any other, can be abused as a powerful tool for social manipulation. By framing a polarized debate according to artificial boundaries, and establishing the two poles of that debate, social engineers can eliminate the perceived possibility of a third alternative. The mainstream media apparatus is the key weapon to this end.

The endless creation of dichotomies, and the neat arrangement of ideologies along left/right lines, offers average people a very simple (though hopelessly inaccurate) way of thinking about politics. It forces them to choose a side, usually based solely on emotional or cultural reasons, and often lures them into supporting positions they would otherwise disagree with. It fosters an environment in which beating the other team is more important than ensuring the integrity of your own. Perhaps most importantly, it allows the social engineer to determine what is “fair game” for debate, and what is not.

Alinsky himself wrote: “One acts decisively only in the conviction that all the angels are on one side and all the devils on the other.”

One merely needs to observe a heated debate between a Democrat and a Republican to see how deeply this belief has been ingrained on both sides, and how destructive it is to true intellectual discourse.

Stopping Disinformation

The best way to disarm disinformation agents is to know their methods inside and out. This gives us the ability to point out exactly what they are doing in detail the moment they try to do it. Immediately exposing a disinformation tactic as it is being used is highly destructive to the person utilizing it. It makes them look foolish, dishonest, and weak for even making the attempt.

Internet trolls most especially do not know how to handle their methods being deconstructed right in front of their eyes, and usually fold and run from debate when it occurs.

The truth is precious. It is sad that there are so many in our society that have lost respect for it; people who have traded in their conscience and their soul for temporary financial comfort while sacrificing the stability and balance of the rest of the country in the process. The human psyche breathes on the air of truth, without it, humanity cannot survive. Without it, the species will collapse in on itself, starving from lack of intellectual and emotional sustenance.

Disinformation does not only threaten our insight into the workings of our world; it makes us vulnerable to fear, misunderstanding, and doubt, all things that lead to destruction. It can lead good people to commit terrible atrocities against others, or even against themselves.

Without a concerted and organized effort to diffuse mass-produced lies, the future will look bleak indeed.

Anonymous Leaks to the WashPost About the CIA’s Russia Beliefs Are No Substitute for Evidence

December 10 2016

by Glenn Greenwald

The Intercept

The Washington Post late Friday night published an explosive story that, in many ways, is classic American journalism of the worst sort: the key claims are based exclusively on the unverified assertions of anonymous officials, who in turn are disseminating their own claims about what the CIA purportedly believes, all based on evidence that remains completely secret.

These unnamed sources told the Post that “the CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system.” The anonymous officials also claim that “intelligence agencies have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails” from both the DNC and John Podesta’s email account. Critically, none of the actual evidence for these claims is disclosed; indeed, the CIA’s “secret assessment” itself remains concealed.

A second leak from last night, this one given to the New York Times, cites other anonymous officials as asserting that “the Russians hacked the Republican National Committee’s computer systems in addition to their attacks on Democratic organizations, but did not release whatever information they gleaned from the Republican networks.” But that NYT story says that “it is also far from clear that Russia’s original intent was to support Mr. Trump, and many intelligence officials — and former officials in Mrs. Clinton’s campaign — believe that the primary motive of the Russians was to simply disrupt the campaign and undercut confidence in the integrity of the vote.”

Deep down in its article, the Post notes – rather critically – that “there were minor disagreements among intelligence officials about the agency’s assessment, in part because some questions remain unanswered.” Most importantly, the Post adds that “intelligence agencies do not have specific intelligence showing officials in the Kremlin ‘directing’ the identified individuals to pass the Democratic emails to WikiLeaks.” But the purpose of both anonymous leaks is to finger the Russian Government for these hacks, acting with the motive to defeat Hillary Clinton.

Needless to say, Democrats – still eager to make sense of their election loss and to find causes for it other than themselves – immediately declared these anonymous claims about what the CIA believes to be true, and, with a somewhat sweet, religious-type faith, treated these anonymous assertions as proof of what they wanted to believe all along: that Vladimir Putin was rooting for Donald Trump to win and Hillary Clinton to lose and used nefarious means to ensure that outcome. That Democrats are now venerating unverified, anonymous CIA leaks as sacred is par for the course for them this year, but it’s also a good indication of how confused and lost U.S. political culture has become in the wake of Trump’s victory.

Given the obvious significance of this story – it is certain to shape how people understand the 2016 election and probably foreign policy debates for months if not years to come – it is critical to keep in mind some basic facts about what is known and, more importantly, what is not known:

(1) Nobody has ever opposed investigations to determine if Russia hacked these emails, nor has anyone ever denied the possibility that Russia did that. The source of contention has been quite simple: no accusations should be accepted until there is actual convincing evidence to substantiate those accusations.

There is still no such evidence for any of these claims. What we have instead are assertions, disseminated by anonymous people, completely unaccompanied by any evidence, let alone proof. As a result, none of the purported evidence – still – can be publicly seen, reviewed and discussed. Anonymous claims leaked to newspapers about what the CIA believes do not constitute proof, and certainly do not constitute reliable evidence that substitutes for actual evidence that can be reviewed. Have we really not learned this lesson yet?

2) The reasons no rational person should blindly believe anonymous claims of this sort – even if it is pleasing to believe such claims – should be obvious by now.

To begin with, CIA officials are professional, systematic liars; they lie constantly, by design, and with great skill, and have for many decades, as have intelligence officials in other agencies.

Many of those incidents demonstrate, as hurtful as it is to accept, that these agencies even lie when there’s a Democrat overseeing the Executive Branch. Even in those cases when they are not deliberately lying, they are often gravely mistaken. Intelligence is not a science, and attributing hacks to specific sources is a particularly difficult task, almost impossible to carry out with precision and certainty.

Beyond that, what makes claims from anonymous sources so especially dubious is that their motives cannot be assessed. Who are the people summarizing these claims to the Washington Post? What motives do they have for skewing the assertions one way or the other? Who are the people inside the intelligence community who fully ratify these assertions and who are the ones who dissent? It’s impossible to answer any of these questions because everyone is masked by the shield of anonymity, which is why reports of this sort demand high levels of skepticism, not blind belief.

Most important of all, the more serious the claim is – and accusing a nuclear-armed power of directly and deliberately interfering in the U.S. election in order to help the winning candidate is about as serious as a claim can get – the more important it is to demand evidence before believing it. Wars have started over far less serious claims than this one. People like Lindsey Graham are already beating their chest, demanding that the U.S. do everything in its power to punish Russia and “Putin personally.”

Nobody should need an explainer about why it’s dangerous in the extreme to accept such inflammatory accusations on faith or, worse, based on the anonymous assurances of intelligence officials, in lieu of seeing the actual evidence.

(3) An important part of this story, quite clearly, is inter-agency feuding between, at the very least, the CIA and the FBI.

Recall that the top echelon of the CIA was firmly behind Clinton and vehemently against Trump, while at least some powerful factions within the FBI had the opposite position.

Former Acting CIA Director Michael Morell not only endorsed Clinton in the New York Times but claimed that “Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.” George W. Bush’s CIA and NSA Director, Gen. Michael Hayden, pronounced Trump a “clear and present danger” to U.S. national security and then, less than a week before the election, went to the Washington Post to warn that “Donald Trump really does sound a lot like Vladimir Putin” and said Trump is “the useful fool, some naif, manipulated by Moscow, secretly held in contempt, but whose blind support is happily accepted and exploited.”

Meanwhile, key factions in the FBI were furious that Hillary Clinton was not criminally charged for her handling of classified information; pressured FBI Director James Comey into writing a letter that was pretty clearly harmful to Clinton about further investigating the case; and seemed to be improperly communicating with close Trump ally Rudy Giuliani. And while we are now being treated to anonymous leaks about how the CIA believes Putin helped Trump, recall that the FBI, just weeks ago, was shovelling anonymous claims to the New York Times that had the opposite goal.

One can choose to believe whatever anonymous claims from these agencies with a long history of lying and error one wants to believe, based on whatever agenda one has. Or one can wait to review the actual evidence before forming beliefs about what really happened. It should take little effort to realize that the latter option is the only rational path.

(4) Even just within the leaks of the last 24 hours, there are multiple grounds of confusion, contradictions and uncertainty.

The always-observant Marcy Wheeler last night documented many of those; anyone interested in this story should read her analysis as soon as possible. I want to highlight just a few of these vital contradictions and questions.

To start with, the timing of these leaks is so striking. Even as Democrats have spent months issuing one hysterical claim after the next about Russian interference, the White House, and Obama specifically, have been very muted about all of this. Perhaps that’s becuase he did not want to appear partisan or be inflammatory, but perhaps it’s because he does not believe there is sufficient proof to accuse the Russian Government; after all, if he really believed the Russians did even half of what Democrats claim, wouldn’t he (as some Democrats have argued) be duty-bound to take aggressive action in retaliation?

It was announced yesterday afternoon that Obama had ordered a full review of hacking allegations: a perfectly sensible step that makes clear that an investigation is needed, and evidence disclosed, before any definitive conclusions can be reached. It was right on the heels of that announcement that this CIA leak emerged: short-cutting the actual, deliberative investigative process Obama had ordered in order to lead the public to believe that all the answers were already known and, before the investigation even starts, that Russia was guilty of all charges.

More important is what the Post buries in its story: namely, what are the so-called “minor disagreements among intelligence officials about the agency’s assessment”? How “minor” are they? And what do these conclusions really mean if, as the Post’s sources admit, the CIA is not even able to link the hack to the actual Russian government, but only to people outside the government (From the Post: “Those actors, according to the official, were ‘one step’ removed from the Russian government, rather than government employees”)?

This is why it’s such a shoddy and unreliable practice to conduct critical debates through conflicting anonymous leaks. Newspapers like the Post have the obvious incentive to hype the flashy, flamboyant claims while downplaying and burying the caveats and conflicting evidence. None of these questions can be asked, let alone answered, because the people who are making these claims are hidden and the evidence is concealed.

(5) Contrary to the declarations of self-vindication by supremely smug Democrats, none of this even relates to, let alone negates, the concerns over their election-year McCarthyite behavior and tactics.

Contrary to the blatant strawman many Democrats are railing against, nobody ever said it was McCarthyite to want to investigate claims of Russian hacking. To the contrary, critics of Clinton supporters have been arguing for exactly that: that these accusations should not be believed in the absence of meaningful inquiry and evidence, which has thus far been lacking.

What critics have said is McCarthyite – and, as one of those critics, I fully stand by this – is the lowly tactic of accusing anyone questioning these accusations, or criticizing the Clinton campaign, of being Kremlin stooges or Putin agents. Back in August, after Democrats decided to smear Jill Stein as a Putin stooge, here’s how I defined the McCarthyite atmosphere that Democrats have deliberately cultivated this year.

So that’s the Democratic Party’s approach to the 2016 election. Those who question, criticize or are perceived to impede Hillary Clinton’s smooth, entitled path to the White House are vilified as stooges, sympathizers and/or agents of Russia: Trump, WikiLeaks, Sanders, The Intercept, Jill Stein. Other than loyal Clinton supporters, is there anyone left who is not covertly controlled by or in service to The Ruskies?

Concerns over Democrats’ McCarthyism never had anything to do with a desire for an investigation into the source of the DNC and Podesta hacking; everyone favored such investigations. Indeed, accusations that Democrats were behaving in a McCarthyite manner were predicated – and still are – on their disgusting smearing as Kremlin agents of anyone who wanted evidence and proof before believing these inflammatory accusations about Russia.

To see the true face of this neo-McCarthyism, watch this amazing interview from this week with Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff, one of the party’s leading Russia hawks (he’s quoted in the Post article attacking Obama for not retaliating against Putin). When Schiff is repeatedly asked by the interviewer, Tucker Carlson, for evidence to support his allegation that Putin ordered the hacking of Podesta’s emails, Schiff provides none.

What he does instead is accuse Carlson of being a Kremlin stooge and finally tells him he should put his program on RT. That – which has become very typical Democratic rhetoric – is the vile face of neo-McCarthyism that Democrats have adopted this year, and nothing in this CIA leak remotely vindicates or justifies it.

Needless to say, questions about who hacked the DNC and Podesta email accounts are serious and important ones. The answers have widespread implications on many levels. That’s all the more reason these debates should be based on publicly disclosed evidence, not competing, unverifiable anonymous leaks from professional liars inside government agencies, cheered by drooling, lost partisans anxious to embrace whatever claims make them feel good, all conducted without the slightest regard for rational faculties or evidentiary requirements.

FBI sent planeload of agents to frame Assange in Iceland, got snubbed by minister

December 10, 2016

RT

The US sent a “planeload of FBI agents” to Iceland in 2011 to frame WikiLeaks and its co-founder Julian Assange, according to a former Icelandic minister of interior, who refused them any cooperation and asked them to cease their activities.

In June 2011, Obama administration implied to Iceland’s authorities they had knowledge of hackers wanting to destroy software systems in the country, and offered help, then-Interior Minister Ogmundur Jonasson, said in an interview with the Katoikos publication.

However, Jonasson said he instantly became “suspicious” of the US good intentions, “well aware that a helping hand might easily become a manipulating hand.”

Later in the summer 2011, the US “sent a planeload of FBI agents to Iceland seeking our cooperation in what I understood as an operation set up to frame Julian Assange and WikiLeaks,” Jonasson said.

Icelanders seemed like a tough nut to crack, though.

“Since they had not been authorized by the Icelandic authorities to carry out police work in Iceland and since a crack-down on WikiLeaks was not on my agenda, to say the least, I ordered that all cooperation with them be promptly terminated and I also made it clear that they should cease all activities in Iceland immediately,” the politician said.

So the US were told to leave, and moreover, the politician made things quite clear for them.

“If I had to take sides with either WikiLeaks or the FBI or CIA, I would have no difficulty in choosing: I would be on the side of WikiLeaks,” he said.

Jónasson went on to discuss other whistleblowers like Edward Snowden: the Althing, the Icelandic parliament, debated whether Snowden should have been granted citizenship, but “there hasn’t been political consensus” on the matter.

“Iceland is part of NATO and such a decision would be strongly objected to by the US,” Jonasson said.

Both whistleblowers have spent several years under protection: Assange has been staying in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for about four years, while Snowden was granted asylum in Russia in 2013, and he is still staying at an undisclosed location there.

 

Making COIN

The modern history of an unstoppable bad idea

by Tim Shorrock

The Baffler

Eight years ago, as Washington was making the transition from the nightmare years of George W. Bush to the endless possibilities of Barack Obama, national security elites were transfixed by a military doctrine called counterinsurgency.

The modern counterinsurgency faith stirred to life in the glory days of JFK’s “hearts and minds” campaign in Vietnam. Its champions promised to win over conquered lands by eschewing raw firepower for enlightened social projects. They pledged to use cash, economic aid, and military training to convince locals that America offered their last, best hope for a better life. When they retrofitted the doctrine to help salvage the disastrous 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, they called themselves “COINdinistas.”

Leading the twenty-first-century revival of counterinsurgency was an up-and-coming army general, David H. Petraeus, who had participated in nearly every major U.S. intervention overseas since Vietnam, including those in El Salvador, Haiti, Bosnia, and Iraq. After preaching the COIN gospel for decades on the margins of the national security establishment, Petraeus was appointed in 2007 to command U.S. forces in Iraq. There, he finally got his chance to practice what his followers liked to call the “new American way of war.”

Within a year of Petraeus’s ascension, the Sunni insurgents and the Al Qaeda hardliners had been subdued, and the innovative tactician was suddenly a national hero. According to Washington mythology, Petraeus’s counterinsurgency methods, together with Bush’s exquisitely timed “surge” of thirty thousand troops, finally allowed the Pentagon to extricate the United States from Iraq, and reverse the invasion’s rapid plunge into imperial folly.

Strangely, this myth also won the hearts of many antiwar liberals and Democrats, who seized on the humanitarian ethos that sparks counterinsurgency efforts as the antidote to the neocon model of unilaterally blundering into one “war of choice” after another. “All of them glommed onto this narrative,” Gian Gentile, an Iraq combat veteran and the author of Wrong Turn: America’s Deadly Embrace of Counterinsurgency, told me. “Why? Because it maintains the idea that American wars in foreign lands still work. And the proof in the pudding was in the surge in Iraq.”

But for these liberal strategists, the proving ground for mature counterinsurgency techniques would be Afghanistan—the conflict that President Bush had sidestepped in favor of Iraq and that candidate Obama described as a war of necessity. By 2008, the turnaround was complete and counterinsurgency was now “the coin of the realm,” as Time sardonically put it.

Indeed, president Obama seized the earliest chance during his first year in office to launch his own “surge” in Afghanistan—and along with it, he embraced the hearts-and-minds strategy promoted by Petraeus and his new commander in Kabul, Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Flush from their latest success, the COINdinistas were riding high. David Kilcullen, the Australian Army officer who served as Petraeus’s senior counterinsurgency adviser in Iraq and later Afghanistan, began talking of a “Global COIN” to fight terrorism from Somalia to the Philippines, winning the admiration of CNN’s Peter Bergen and other prominent terrorism experts. A new era of warfare seemed to be upon us.

Hearts and Minds, My Ass

The stage was clearly set for Washington’s military wise men to project themselves, yet one more time, onto the vanguard of history. But the counterinsurgency bubble burst in remarkably short order. By 2012, the Taliban had returned to Afghanistan in force, and corruption was eroding the legitimacy of the country’s U.S.-backed president, Hamid Karzai. Obama, eager to create a peacetime legacy, began to turn away from the daunting challenge of building a viable government in Kabul; now the administration’s goal was simply to get U.S. forces the hell out. Around the same time, the president rejected a proposal from Petraeus—by now director of the CIA—to create a U.S.-trained army in Syria to support the rebellion against the Assad government. Rather than “boots on the ground,” the United States would seek to stomp out unwanted unrest in the Middle East via drones in the air. Hearts and minds would have to look after themselves.

COIN’s critics argued that the game was up. “The counterinsurgency moment has passed, and it’s been rejected both in the political and the military realm,” Andrew J. Bacevich, a professor of international relations at Boston University, told me in 2014. “Back when the Petraeus reputation was at its height, there was an element that persuaded itself that global counterinsurgency somehow provided the template for future national security policy. But since then, the bloom is off the rose.”

In the centers of sober policy making, though, this emerging critical outlook wasn’t about to take hold. Under the tacit social contract that fuels the American national-security consensus, new conflicts will always create a new rationale for aggressive American action. The war in Syria worsened, Libya turned into a disaster, and the Islamic State, known as ISIS, spread its tentacles throughout the region and into Africa. In the wake of these debacles, the idea of mounting another counterinsurgency-type war has gained new currency and foreign-policy cachet. Gen. James Amos, the commandant of the marine corps, got the debate rolling in 2014 when he declared that the marines were “not done with counterinsurgency.” Last July, the army commander in the Pacific, Gen. Robert Brown, warned against “shifting away from COIN,” adding “we made that mistake post-Vietnam.”

Around the same time, the Obama administration appointed Lt. Gen. Sean MacFarland, a veteran of the counterinsurgency campaign in both Iraq and Afghanistan, to be commander of the U.S. campaign against ISIS. Some of the strongest voices in favor of the adoption of COIN in 2009 advised Hillary Clinton in her failed 2016 presidential campaign. And the highly visible role of Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, a COIN specialist and former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, in president-elect Trump’s national security trust means that the idea of counterinsurgency could storm once more into the forefront of U.S. policy.

But is COIN a viable strategy? What is its history, beyond the glossy descriptions peddled by its enthusiasts in the military and the liberal power elite? And how and why was D.C. sold on counterinsurgency in the first place? Here’s the inside story of how a group of ambitious generals, liberal think tanks, and lefty journalists sold both the Bush and Obama administrations on their beguiling dream of a more perfect intervention.

The Real Vietnam Syndrome

American military leaders first adopted mass-scale counterinsurgency—in its official, Pentagon-branded guise—in Vietnam. There it became indelibly linked to two especially cruel initiatives in a war steeped in imperial brutality. First, the “strategic hamlets” built by U.S. forces to separate Vietnamese peasants from local guerrillas drove a destructive wedge into the nationalist insurgency at the heart of Vietnam’s civil war. In the process, the strategic-hamlet program made many ardent recruits for the communist-led forces of the National Liberation Front—the original insurgency in South Vietnam.

Second, the Phoenix Program, the CIA’s capture-and-kill operation that assassinated more than twenty thousand people, made it painfully clear that the United States had precious little interest in promoting independence or self-government for the Vietnamese. After the 1975 collapse in Saigon, COIN was buried, the forgotten detritus of America’s bitter loss in Southeast Asia.

But while Vietnam was where war planners embraced modern counterinsurgency doctrine most fully, it was hardly the first time American forces experimented with the idea. U.S. experience in defeating insurgencies goes back to America’s first colonization program at the outset of the twentieth century—the invasion and subjugation of the Muslim-dominated southern Philippines in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War. This intervention, like the Indian Wars that preceded it, was presented as a humanitarian attempt to win over a local population infected (in the Filipinos’ case) by the fever dream of nationalist independence. But this foray into counterinsurgency warfare was a decidedly violent affair, characterized by water torture, mass killing, and forced relocations.

According to State Department statistics, the war killed forty-two hundred Americans, twenty thousand Filipinos, and two hundred thousand civilians; of the victims, fifteen thousand were Muslims. Memories of this campaign were revived by Donald Trump at a campaign rally last winter, when, as reported by PolitiFact, he “offered a counterinsurgency parable” featuring U.S. Army Gen. John Joseph “Black Jack” Pershing, one of the leaders of the pacification campaign. Trump bragged that Pershing was so tough that he dipped bullets in pig’s blood before executing dozens of insurgents—an intolerable insult to Muslims but apparently an indication of the tactics Trump might adopt now that he has been entrusted with the task of taking on ISIS.

The anecdote was deemed apocryphal by fact-checkers, but at a mythopoeic level, Trump wasn’t wrong to adopt it as a set piece illustrating the vicious course of the U.S. occupation of the Philippines; his main mistake, of course, was to cite it approvingly. But in this, he has good company: in a stunningly frank admission in 2009, Michael O’Hanlon, a COIN proponent at the Brookings Institution, praised the U.S. effort in the Philippines for exemplifying “proper counterinsurgency concepts such as emphasis on protection of the population.” The campaign, he argued, “was conducted with restraint and reasonable precision in the application of force” (those two-hundred-thousand-plus dead Filipinos might disagree).

The next phase of COIN development came after World War I, during America’s ascendancy as a global empire. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, U.S. Marines were deployed to Central America, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and even China, usually on behalf of U.S. oil companies, banking and investment houses, and agricultural interests. (Marine Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler famously reminded Americans about the true beneficiaries of these adventures, concluding, “In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”)

Despite the obvious imperial aims of these interventions, the lessons for future U.S. strategy were codified in 1940 in the Marines’ Small Wars Manual. Sixty years later, according to Marine historian Dick Camp, that booklet “solidified and expanded the doctrine for counterinsurgency in the late twentieth century” and was assigned to officers of the 1st Marine Division before they deployed to Iraq in 2003. It’s no accident that the publication of record for the counterinsurgency enthusiasts of today is called Small Wars Journal.

In the interval between the Second World War and JFK’s hearts-and-minds offensives in Vietnam, the United States accrued additional COIN bona fides vicariously, through the colonial misadventures of its wartime allies Britain and France. Today’s COINdinistas still reverently cite the important lessons they learned from the British suppression of a communist-led rebellion of ethnic Chinese in Malaya in the 1950s (where the concept of strategic hamlets was first introduced) and from the French attempt to defeat an indigenous Islamic uprising in Algeria during the 1950s and early 1960s (which became a stupendously misguided model for U.S. commanders in Iraq).

The United States will “continue to see much more of these small wars” in the future, John Nagl, a retired Army officer and one of the intellectual architects of today’s COIN revival, predicted in 2014. Therefore, “we should draw upon the history of successful counterinsurgency campaigns,” including those in the Philippines, Malaya, and Algeria. He added one caveat: “All the while we should be understanding that the world is far different than it once was.” Unfortunately, when it came to the Middle East, that lesson was swept under the rug.

Three COINS in a Fountain

The resurgence of COIN in the 2000s, and particularly in Afghanistan, was largely the work of three groups: Petraeus and his fellow COINdinistas; the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), the think tank of choice for the Obama administration and hardline Democrats of a Realpolitik persuasion; and a small band of liberals and leftist reporters who opposed Bush’s invasion of Iraq and lionized Petraeus and the new military ideology he represented.

Ultimately, this strange-bedfellows campaign for a hearts-and-minds strategy in Afghanistan was a mirror image of the neocon media offensive that paved the way for Bush’s preemptive invasion of Iraq. But where the Iraq con job was carried out by the right-wing D.C. establishment and its media enablers, the COIN job of the early aughts was chiefly the brainchild of liberal institutions and policy hands. In each case, though, the end result was the same: more blood, more destruction, and a legacy of war that will leave the Middle East an imperial battleground well into this century.

Petraeus had been obsessed with Vietnam since his days at West Point. William Knowlton, his commandant (and future father-in-law) had been a senior official with the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support group, or CORDS. This outfit was a joint venture between the CIA and the U.S. Agency for International Development that would go on to direct the counterinsurgency in South Vietnam. (The CORDS program was far from a rousing success, but Army leaders would emulate its organizing conceits and operational strategies in Central America and Iraq.)

In the 1980s, while at West Point, Petraeus met Nagl, an Army lieutenant colonel whose 2005 book, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam, is the bible of today’s COIN movement. Over the next decade, they and other like-minded military thinkers began reaching out to academics and human rights groups to marshal intellectual support for a new kind of foreign policy that could accomplish ambitious military objectives while staying true to American values of democracy and human rights.

The initial discussions began around the concept of “low-intensity conflict,” a popular term in the 1990s for the smaller-scale interventions Pentagon strategists expected after the big-power confrontations of the Cold War. They picked up speed after the disastrous Battle of Mogadishu in 1993, when a U.S. Special Forces team was ambushed by Somalian militias during a UN-sanctioned snatch-and-grab operation—underscoring the perils of humanitarian interventions. Another key event was President Clinton’s 1994 invasion of Haiti (where Petraeus was chief of operations), which included a massive civil and economic component funded in part by USAID.

Armed Social Work

If these types of U.S. interventions were becoming the norm, Petraeus and his followers reasoned, the military would have to adapt by incorporating social programs into their tactics. The idea was to focus not merely on the logistics of conquest, but also on the far more saleable (and politically palatable) mission of improving the lives of the people they were supposed to “protect,” whether in East Africa, the Caribbean, or the Middle East. Based on their understanding of past wars, the COINdinistas argued that U.S. forces could defeat an insurgency only by “outgoverning” the enemy—that is, by providing enough assistance to persuade the people that the government chosen for them by the United States, be it Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam or Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, was superior to anything offered by the fighting insurgents, be they the Viet Cong or the Taliban. “Employ money as a weapons system,” Petraeus once wrote of the strategy. “Money can be ‘ammunition.’” Kilcullen, the Global COIN advocate, put it this way: counterinsurgency, he said, was “armed social work.”

Just as the CORDS crowd in Vietnam had brought in academics and think-tank intellectuals to help subdue their insurgency, the Petraeus group found allies for future counterinsurgency campaigns at Harvard, the Brookings Institution, and in the media. One of Petraeus’s early recruits was Sarah Sewall, whom he’d met in discussions about Haiti while she was serving as the first deputy assistant secretary of defense for peacekeeping. She went on to direct Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and later joined the Obama administration as undersecretary of state, where her job portfolio included “civilian security.” “There was a constellation of different groups—the ‘expert class,’ mainstream journalists, and a policy contingent of liberal interventionists—who wanted intervention to work,” says Gentile, who led an Army combat brigade in Baghdad after the invasion and later taught history at West Point.

By 2004, the Pentagon had gotten directly involved in the process by organizing a conference on what it was calling “irregular warfare” at the giant Marine base in Quantico, VA. Petraeus, as one of the organizers, “called up the older generation of spies and Special Forces who’d done counterinsurgency in El Salvador and Vietnam,” the journalist Fred Kaplan wrote in The Insurgents, his absorbing but gratingly uncritical account of Petraeus and the rise of COIN. Detractors of the movement were less impressed. “They looked at all these failed counterinsurgencies and decided that we knew why they failed and put together a doctrine about why we would win,” says Christine Fair, a Georgetown professor who has frequently squared off with COIN advocates over the use of drone strikes in Pakistan.

Lovely Little Wars

Kilcullen, one of the stars of the Quantico conference, became, with Petraeus and Nagl, a critical third apostle of the new millennial COIN gospel. He was a retired Australian Army officer with a PhD in anthropology and had spent several years in Indonesia, which was ruled for decades by a murderous but fiercely anti-communist general named Suharto. During the 1990s, Kilcullen was an adviser to Kopassus, a dreaded unit of Indonesia’s Special Forces that had a reputation of extreme brutality going back decades (its record was so horrific that Congress banned U.S. training of Indonesian soldiers for more than ten years). During one of his tours, he encountered Islamic militants on the island of Java opposed to the central government and developed an appreciation for the grievances that lie behind guerrilla wars.

Those experiences, and his writings about them, caught the attention of the Bush administration. In 2004, Kilcullen was invited to advise the Pentagon by Paul Wolfowitz, a former U.S. ambassador to Indonesia and then deputy secretary of defense (they were connected through Nagl, who was a military assistant to Wolfowitz at the time). After his star turn at Petraeus’s conference at Quantico, Kilcullen went on to serve as special adviser for counterinsurgency to secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and as Petraeus’s senior COIN adviser in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Kilcullen’s special contribution was to understand the difference between hardcore jihadis and “accidental guerrillas”—a phrase used in the title of his popular 2009 book. “Kilcullen was about making stricter distinctions between those who needed to be confronted militarily and those who didn’t,” Spencer Ackerman, who covered Kilcullen as a military blogger and is now a national security reporter with the Guardian, told me. “He was by far the most intellectually dexterous of this crowd. His writings were probably the most direct about counterinsurgency as (he probably wouldn’t use this term) an imperial foreign policy. And that was getting short shrift in the media.”

But it certainly was noticed inside the Pentagon. In 2005, Kilcullen and Nagl were asked to write a key section of the Defense Department’s Quadrennial Defense Review, in which they described COIN as a “potentially long-duration irregular warfare campaign.” A year later, in 2006, the Pentagon sponsored another conference at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, where Petraeus had been named commanding general (in charge of the Army’s Command and General Staff College) after returning from serving in Iraq. He underscored the new union between the military and humanitarian interventionists by cosponsoring the event with Sewall and Harvard’s Carr Center. They invited their fellow COINdinistas to come together to draft a new guide for the counterinsurgencies to come.

Their discussions culminated in the December 2006 publication of the famous Army-Marine Counterinsurgency Field Manual. This key strategy directive would become the basis for U.S. nation-building policy in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Nagl was one of its primary authors, but the other contributors made up a virtual Who’s Who of the COIN movement—and later, of Obama’s Pentagon and CNAS. Among them were Kilcullen, Sewall (who wrote the introduction), and Michèle Flournoy, a former Defense Department official from the Clinton administration and a professor at the Pentagon’s National Defense University. Kilcullen later wrote the civilian handbook that USAID officials and contractors used during the occupation phases of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. All this work paved the way for the hearts-and-minds offensive in Iraq, beginning in February 2007, when Petraeus, with Kilcullen at his side, was dispatched to lead the surge.

Like the strategic-hamlets initiative in Vietnam, the Petraeus-Kilcullen plan laid out a combination of “population-centric” social projects and lethal force. A key innovation was the “clear, hold, and build” approach, which was devoted to seizing territory and fiercely defending it from insurgent influence—an approach that was famously adopted by forces in Anbar Province during the initial stage of the war. But for the most part, clear, hold, and build was a grueling hunt and kill operation, masterminded by Petraeus and Kilcullen and assisted by intercepts of enemy communications by the National Security Agency.

Journalist Peter Maass has dubbed these operations part of the overall “Salvadorization of Iraq.” Indeed, in an ominous turn, the U.S. Command brought in former U.S. Special Forces personnel who’d fought the dirty wars in Central America to create what effectively became U.S.-funded death squads to go after insurgents. Kilcullen’s intention was to co-opt the Sunnis, who’d led the initial phase of the insurgency; but some of them had records of such brutality that even U.S. commanders were appalled by America’s new allies (some were “brutal gangsters, monsters,” one general told COIN enthusiast Kaplan).

Still, most reporters bought into what the fast-talking COINdinistas depicted as a model deployment of American “smart power”—with a few significant exceptions. “We took the Shiites’ side in a civil war, armed them to the teeth, and suckered the Sunnis into thinking we’d help them out too,” the late Michael Hastings, who covered the war for Rolling Stone, once wrote. “It was a brutal enterprise—over eight hundred Americans died during the surge, while hundreds of thousands of Iraqis lost their lives during a sectarian conflict that Petraeus’s policies fueled.”

The Golden Surge

After the Iraq surge, with Petraeus moving up the chain of command, Kilcullen became the pet counterinsurgency thinker for the D.C. media and military establishment. Kilcullen’s exploits in Iraq, Pakistan, and other war zones were soon splashed all over the liberal media, from The New Yorker to MSNBC. Thomas Ricks, the former military correspondent for the Washington Post who would later work with Kilcullen at CNAS, was one of his most prominent hagiographers: in a gushing 2009 article in Foreign Policy, he lionized Kilcullen as the “Crocodile Dundee of Counterinsurgency.” Ackerman, who covered Iraq for his own blog and Wired’s Danger Room, did more than any liberal writer to burnish Kilcullen’s reputation. In 2006, he helped created Kilcullen’s bad-boy image by quoting him denouncing Bush’s invasion of Iraq as “fucking stupid.” Then, in dozens of articles over the next four years, he championed Kilcullen as the leading light of “the Counterinsurgents,” as he called the COIN revivalists in a mammoth series he completed just before Obama’s inauguration.

This PR offensive soon bore fruit: in 2008, CNAS offered Kilcullen a national platform that helped him and his fellow COINdinistas drum up support for the expanded war in Afghanistan.

CNAS was founded in 2007 by Michèle Flournoy and other veterans of the Clinton administration seeking to reclaim what they called “the pragmatic center” in national security. “CNAS was a golden opportunity to stand up something that would allow Democrats to be tough, to be hawkish, to be smart again about war,” says Matthew Hoh, a former Marine who had served in Iraq and worked for the State Department in Afghanistan, and who later took on CNAS when he lobbied against the Afghanistan “surge.”CNAS was also funded by the nation’s biggest and most powerful military contractors, including several companies that would greatly benefit from the counterinsurgency war. Among them were SAIC, one of the nation’s largest military companies, which in 2012 won a five-year, $400 million deal with the Army to supply technology and intelligence services to U.S. military commands and Special Forces, mostly in Afghanistan. According to a contract document I obtained, SAIC’s portfolio included “expeditionary warfare, irregular warfare, special operations and stabilization and reconstruction operations.”

DynCorp International, another CNAS donor, went on to become the largest single contractor in Afghanistan. Other CNAS funders ranged from big prime contractors such as Booz Allen Hamilton and Raytheon to more than a dozen smaller, focused firms, such as L-3 MPRI and ManTech International. One CNAS donor, Mission Essential Personnel, eventually became the largest supplier of translators and cultural advisers to U.S. forces in Afghanistan. The company had particularly close ties with the COINdinistas: in 2009, Kilcullen, Nagl, and Sewall were all named to its advisory board. MEP went on to win millions of dollars in contracts from the war, including a $170 million contract with USAID in 2015 and, this past summer, an $8.7 million contract with Army intelligence.

With all this money in play, the new COINdinista establishment started to resemble a D.C.-based interlocking directorate, nimbly moving from public service into corporate-board or think-tank duty, and then back again, without missing a beat. In 2008, Flournoy was appointed undersecretary of defense for policy, the number three spot at the Pentagon. Shortly afterward, Nagl assumed her former post as president of CNAS. He brought Kilcullen in as a senior fellow and adviser, beginning the Australian’s six-year tenure at the organization. (He, too, served on the CNAS board of advisers.) In addition, Nagl hired Andrew Exum, a former U.S. Army captain who served in Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks and later led Army Rangers there on special operations missions. He’d worked with Kilcullen as a member of General McChrystal’s strategic assessment team that visited the region for Obama in the summer of 2009.

Kilcullen and Exum became the primary authors of a CNAS policy paper called “Triage” that would serve as the blueprint for the architects of Obama’s strategy in Afghanistan. As usual, the “people” of Afghanistan were the key focus of a policy designed to end the Taliban insurgency once and for all. In “Triage,” Kilcullen and Exum endorsed a “truly population-centric COIN” in Afghanistan to be supported by a “civilian surge” led by USAID. CNAS unveiled these findings in grand fashion at the think tank’s annual meeting on June 11, 2009, at Washington’s opulent Willard Hotel, where General Petraeus himself was the guest of honor. Thus was the COINdinista circle of policy insiderism elegantly closed, in the heady early days of the Obama administration—and in a suitably bespoke and self-congratulatory setting.

Enter Networking, Stage Left

That fall, the Kilcullen-Exum paper also served as the foundation of a massive lobbying campaign that launched at the behest of CNAS, the Center for American Progress, and the Brookings Institution. This liberal charm offensive sought to convince Congress and the White House to sign off on the counterinsurgency.

This was also, fortuitously, the moment when the left press in Washington—and its idolization of Kilcullen—came to the fore. One incident from 2009 captures this liberal-choreographed phase of the COIN revival in nearly all its particulars. That February, at the height of the internal debate about how the new Obama administration could get its hands around the occupation of Afghanistan, Ackerman mentioned on his blog that Kilcullen was having dinner that night with vice president Joe Biden, heretofore a critic of the COIN strategy.

Twenty-four hours later, Rachel Maddow had Kilcullen on her show on MSNBC and opened her obsequious interview by mentioning the Biden dinner. She contrasted Kilcullen to the “merry bands of Iraq war architects” and hailed him as a seasoned policy thinker “more valuable than a pile of telestrators for understanding what we are doing in Afghanistan and what we’re going to do next.” She asked no questions whatsoever about the history of COIN in Vietnam, its roots in the French and British struggles against their collapsing empires, or the sickening reality of the death squads that made the Iraq “surge” possible.

In short, the message was clear: Iraq was a bad war, Afghanistan was good—or at least could be made over into a good war by adopting some worthy goals for the occupation. By the fall of 2009, President Obama, supported by secretary of state Hillary Clinton, sided with the COIN advocates and deployed thirty-three thousand more troops in Afghanistan. They carried out the plans put forward in the CNAS paper to the letter. “The core of that mission was, in fact, counterinsurgency, albeit with fairly tight geographical and time limits,” Robert Gates recalled in Duty, his 2015 book about his years as secretary of defense.

Anybody at the Pentagon with misgivings simply fell in line, says Tony Shaffer, a retired Army lieutenant colonel with a background in Special Operations who lobbied against the COIN strategy for the conservative Center for Advanced Defense Studies. In 2009, he was advising Paul Brinkley, a deputy undersecretary of defense with authority over stabilization operations. “I’ll say this on the record, and I don’t think he would mind,” Shaffer told me. “Brinkley was completely overwhelmed by Flournoy and the COIN mafia.”

To Hoh, who had just arrived in Afghanistan’s Zabul province to run a State Department Provincial Reconstruction Team during the 2009 surge, the COIN plan was a travesty. “Triage,” he says now, “was a recipe for escalation.”

“At the end of my first tour in Iraq, I knew counterinsurgency was bullshit—that somehow you were going to bridge all kinds of sectarian, or religious, or tribal divides, that you would dispel any grievances against an invader or an occupier, by giving out cash and trying to be nice and putting people like you in charge of the government,” he says. “It just opens the way for a lot more contractors, more services, and more positions for quote unquote ‘smart’ people who know about war. And I didn’t want any part of that.” In October, he quit the State Department and became, at age thirty-six, the first U.S. official to resign over the Afghanistan War.The Future of War

In the end, it was Hoh, and not any of the pro-war intellectuals and liberals, who was proven right about counterinsurgency and its deadly impact on the people it was supposed to protect. By 2014, the Taliban were back with a vengeance, and Afghanistan was mired in the worst violence the country had seen since the initial U.S. invasion in 2001. And sadly for Americans, more than 75 percent of U.S. casualties in Afghanistan occurred in the years after the surge and its COIN component was introduced.

Clearly the counterinsurgency, its economic incentives, and the U.S. pledge to “outgovern” the enemy had failed. And what about all that cash? According to the congressionally mandated Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), corruption by civilian contractors in Afghanistan cost the United States at least $60 billion. The flagrant waste “undermined the U.S. mission in Afghanistan by fueling grievances against the Afghan government and chanelling material support to the insurgency,” SIGAR concluded in a massive report issued this September. Even counterinsurgency proponents seemed to agree. “Karzai used to tell me, ‘When I see big fancy SUVs driving around filled with contractors, I see corruption,’” General McChrystal said in a presentation on COIN to the Brookings Institution in 2014.

By this time, the top guns of the counterinsurgency movement had gone silent. Petraeus, after rising to the directorship of the CIA, was caught sharing classified information with his mistress and in 2015 pled guilty to related misdemeanor charges. Nagl left Washington altogether to become principal of a boys’ school outside of Philadelphia, emerging in Washington once in 2014 to tout his latest book, Knife Fights. Their absence left Kilcullen as the sole “guru of counterinsurgency,” as Noah Shachtman, the executive editor of The Daily Beast, dubbed him in 2011.True to the playbook of D.C.-based warmaking-for-profit, Kilcullen made the most of his ascension into guruhood by launching a consultancy, Caerus Global Solutions, to monetize the counterinsurgency movement. Within months, he had flipped the advisory work he did for McChrystal and Petraeus into a stream of lucrative contracts from the Pentagon, the State Department, USAID, and the NATO-led International Assistance Force in Afghanistan. In 2011, his first year in business, his company’s gross sales were $4.5 million, 97 percent of which came from Pentagon contracts, according to a government audit of Caerus I obtained. Most of that money was devoted to advisory work for ISAF on counterinsurgency and measuring the “stability” U.S. forces had theoretically created. One of his partners was MEP, the big CNAS donor. In 2013, Caerus and MEP teamed up on a Defense Intelligence Agency contract for Afghanistan that involved Caerus analyzing metadata obtained from NSA intercepts for U.S. “combat intelligence teams” in Afghanistan, according to documents I obtained.

But in 2014, Kilcullen’s company came under the scrutiny of the Defense Security Service, the investigative arm of the assistant secretary of defense for intelligence. I later learned that, while working with Petraeus in Afghanistan on a surveillance project funded by the Pentagon, someone in his company had accessed classified information that Kilcullen, as an Australian national, may not have been cleared to use. He denied any breach of classification rules, and told me for good measure, “I don’t see you as a real reporter. I view you as a conspiracy theorist.” But the breach and the audit of his company were confirmed by the Defense Security Service itself, as well as by one of Kilcullen’s business partners.

After the incident, Kilcullen’s media appearances and public-speaking gigs dropped dramatically. For a while, he shifted his focus to Australia, where he’s become one of the fiercest advocates for an expanded Australian military role—together with the United States—in the war against ISIS. By 2015, he’d returned to the think-tank world at the New America Foundation, where he works with his “Global COIN” ally Peter Bergen on an initiative on the “future of war.” And lately, all three men—Petraeus, Nagl, and Kilcullen—have been back in the debate over the future of U.S. military policy.

Up with People

Another U.S.-brokered hearts-and-minds campaign seems most likely in Syria, where U.S. Special Forces are training some of the so-called moderates within the coalition of terrorist and resistance groups fighting the Assad government. As we know, the initial proposal for this initiative came from Petraeus. Kilcullen, too, openly backed the plan, and in 2014 testified about it before the Senate.

“We need to telegraph our willingness to use military means to force that outcome,” Kilcullen said. Even some of the extremist jihadi groups fighting Assad would welcome U.S. support “if we could create a more stable and peaceful environment in Syria.” That sounded an awful lot like COIN.

Petraeus also joined the emerging chorus of COIN revivalists in and around Syria when he took to the Washington Post op-ed section in August to lay out U.S. goals in regions controlled by ISIS. American forces, he wrote, should “ensure post-conflict security; reconstruction and, above all, governance that is representative of and responsive to the people.”

He went deeper at a forum on the future of Afghanistan at the COIN-friendly Brookings Institution in early October. Appearing with a group of former diplomats he’d worked with during the counterinsurgencies he’d directed, Petraeus called for a “comprehensive approach” to the region to counter the influence of the Taliban and ISIS. “It’s always been true that what we were seeking to do was to help the Afghans develop the capacity to secure themselves and to govern themselves,” he said. “That’s been the core of our effort, and it has always been that you could not do this with just a counter-terrorism force operation.” Nodding to his fellow panelists, he added: “this is what each of us participated in in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

To the people. Governing themselves. There they were, those old aphorisms of “protecting the population” from “the enemy,” an idea that stretched back to the U.S. incursion in the Philippines and that served as the watchword for brave new waves of COINdinistas from Vietnam to Iraq. Moreover, Petraeus’s words closely echoed those of Lt. Gen. Flynn, a possible pick for national security adviser in the Trump administration.

In a controversial paper for CNAS in 2010, Flynn sharply criticized U.S. intelligence agencies for focusing too much on counter-terrorism and killing insurgents—tactics he called “anti-insurgency”—and ignoring the needs of soldiers and commanders fighting a hearts-and-minds campaign on the ground. “Employing effective counterinsurgency methods is not an option, but a necessity,” he wrote. He tried to strengthen his point by quoting Gen. McChrystal: “When he states, ‘the conflict will be won by persuading the population, not by destroying the enemy,’ it is not just a slogan, but an expression of his intent,” Flynn wrote. “Too much of the intelligence community is deaf to these directions.”

But any repeat of what the United States tried in Iraq or Afghanistan is bound to fail, critics say. COIN “is premised on a false strategy that a foreign occupying force like the U.S. Army and Marines could put itself on the ground in a relatively short amount of time and do nation-building at the barrel of a gun and outgovern other groups in that place,” Gentile told me. “For us to make that work, we’d have to stay there for generations. We’d basically have to do British imperialism at the second half of the nineteenth century.”

Strangely, the COINdinistas themselves admit as much. In 2014, I questioned Nagl after he read from his latest book Knife Fights at Politics and Prose, a bookstore in the heart of liberal Washington. I asked him whether the United States basically assumed the white man’s burden of imperial conquest from the Brits in the aftermath of World War II. Of course we did, he replied. But the key difference is, he explained, that “the United States is a very unusual empire because it is a democracy.” He then offered a striking analogy. COIN, he said, “has been around since the Roman Empire but has become gradually less violent while still retaining a focus on killing enemies which you can identify.” For that reason, “we need to hold onto [its] lessons, because COIN won’t go away.”

That’s insane, said Matt Hoh, who blew the whistle on counterinsurgency back in 2009. “Of course COIN is the strategy of empire,” he told me in an email. “It’s always been such. The Romans, two thousand years ago, allowed conquered peoples to keep their gods—that was a COIN strategy. Why these guys now think that what we are doing is somehow different, more moral, or smarter, is intellectually, historically, and morally dishonest.”

Hoh also appealed to the more recent historical record:

Look, the French flat-out lost in Algeria. The British “won” by forcibly migrating ethnic Chinese by the hundreds of thousands, and then left Malaya. Before that, we killed hundreds of thousands of Filipinos, “civilizing” them with money. And what did we “win”? You just can’t conveniently forget the atrocities and the mass human sufferings you inflicted in order to justify wars, to color and shade maps like a game of Risk. In the end, counterinsurgency is madness.

Or, as Colonel Kurtz puts it at the end of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, after he’s taken the premises of COIN to their logical extreme: “the horror.”

 

Pentagon’s suppressed waste report only tip of the inefficient machine

December 6, 2016

by William D. Hartung

The Hill

The revelation this week by “The Washington Post” that the Pentagon buried a report that exposed $125 billion in waste in the department’s administrative operations is just the latest indication that it is more interested in padding its budget than spending taxpayer dollars wisely.

Reducing this entrenched bureaucracy should be a top priority for the new administration and the new Congress that take office in January.

This is not the first time the issue of the billions in unnecessary bloat in the Pentagon’s budget has been raised.

A 2010 report by the Defense Business Board uncovered similar problems, citing an “explosion of overhead work because the Department has failed to establish adequate controls to keep it in line.”

And as Gordon Adams, former director of the Office and Management and Budget for defense issues, has noted, the cost of the Pentagon’s back office has “basically doubled per active duty troop since 2000.”

The revelation this week by “The Washington Post” that the Pentagon buried a report that exposed $125 billion in waste in the department’s administrative operations is just the latest indication that it is more interested in padding its budget than spending taxpayer dollars wisely.

Reducing this entrenched bureaucracy should be a top priority for the new administration and the new Congress that take office in January.

This is not the first time the issue of the billions in unnecessary bloat in the Pentagon’s budget has been raised.

A 2010 report by the Defense Business Board uncovered similar problems, citing an “explosion of overhead work because the Department has failed to establish adequate controls to keep it in line.”

And as Gordon Adams, former director of the Office and Management and Budget for defense issues, has noted, the cost of the Pentagon’s back office has “basically doubled per active duty troop since 2000.”

In short, a huge portion of the Pentagon’s buildup in the 2000s has paid for bureaucracy, not combat capability. The business board report made specific recommendations of how to fix the problem, but few were implemented.

In addition to the issue of bureaucracy, a few examples of the other ways the Pentagon wastes our money underscore the point of the need to keep a much closer eye on the Pentagon’s use of our tax dollars.

In February of this year, I issued a report that provided a small sampling of the most egregious examples of Pentagon waste that have occurred in the past few years, from small expenses like Pentagon personnel spending on casinos and strip clubs using their government-issued credit cards to spending $2.7 billion on a surveillance balloon that failed spectacularly when it came free from its moorings and crashed in Pennsylvania.

The new Defense Business Board 2015 report casts doubts on Pentagon claims that it is making progress towards being able to pass an audit, something it has failed to do since 1990, when it was first required by law

The Pentagon now has the dubious distinction of being the only federal agency that cannot pass an audit. As a result, the department often doesn’t know how much equipment it has, or how many contractors it employs. This makes the department extremely vulnerable to waste, fraud and abuse.

The audit issue has gained greater visibility in recent years, including planks in both the Republican and Democratic platforms that promised to do something about the problem. And there were bipartisan bills in both the House and Senate this year that, if passed, would have imposed financial penalties on the Pentagon if it doesn’t get its books in order.

Supporters of the bills ranged across the political spectrum, including Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) and Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Texas) in the House, and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the Senate.

President-elect Donald Trump has also spoken out on the issue of Pentagon waste, promising to clean up the department and “conduct a full audit.” In fact, Trump puts so much stock in reducing Pentagon waste that he has cited it as a major way to offset the costs of the major increases in troops, ships, aircraft and missile defense systems he proposed during the campaign.

Given a price tag that could reach well over $900 billion in additional spending over the next three decades, there is no way President Trump can offset all of the costs of his proposed buildup by cutting waste. But he will certainly have an incentive to squeeze out all the savings he can find.

But even if the Pentagon were able to account for every penny it spends, there would still be a question of whether those funds are being spent on the right things.

There is a broader definition of waste that goes beyond the administrative costs cited by the business board.

This includes the refusal of Congress to support the closure of unnecessary military bases under a Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process; the decision to move full speed ahead on the F-35 fighter program despite its myriad cost and technical problems; and the plan to spend $1 trillion over the next decade on a new generation of nuclear-armed bombers, submarines, and missiles at a time when current systems already exceed what is needed to deter any country from attacking the United States with nuclear weapons.

The plan to spend funds on high-priced nukes makes even less sense when one considers that upgrades of current systems could last for decades without having to throw tens of billions of dollars at systems we don’t need at prices we can’t afford.

Even in times of intense partisan debate on a whole range of other issues, it should be possible for Congress and our next president to come together on the need to eliminate waste at the Pentagon, broadly defined.

Whether or not they do so will be a good test of whether they are willing and able to spend scarce tax dollars efficiently and effectively. This kind of accountability is the least we should ask for as we move into a new, uncertain period in Washington.

The polar vortex is coming. Here’s what that means — and how cold it could get.

December 9, 2016

by Angela Fritz

The Washington Post

Winter’s first polar vortex blast, already taking shape in the Arctic this weekend, targets the Lower 48 next week. By Tuesday, temperatures below zero will plunge south into the northern plains and Midwest. Over the course of a few days, the cold air will blast across the country to the Northeast.

The northern tier has already seen a taste of what this winter has to offer — in fact, the region is already experiencing a significant cold snap. On Thursday morning, the temperature in Billings, Mont., dropped to minus-3. It was the first time the location saw a temperature below zero in 698 days, since Jan. 9, 2015. Almost the entire state of North Dakota is under a wind chill advisory — the National Weather Service is calling for temperatures that feel like minus-35.

Next week’s cold blast will dive farther south and east.

Weather forecast models are suggesting temperatures will nose-dive in the Midwest. All of Minnesota and Wisconsin — plus the Chicagoland area — could see overnight lows plummet into negative territory: minus-15 in Minneapolis, minus-10 in Milwaukee and minus-5 in the Chicagoland area around Wednesday or Thursday.

The forecast is 20 to 35 degrees below average for this time of year.

What will likely be the coldest air since last February will barge into the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast late next week. Daytime temperatures from Washington to Boston will struggle to climb above freezing. Overnight lows will surely be in the single digits and teens, if not below zero in parts of New England.

Through Thursday, 75 percent of the Lower 48 will have experienced a temperature below freezing, including Texas, the Deep South and the Pacific Northwest, based on National Weather Service forecasts.

The frigid air tied up in this polar vortex blast has its origins in Siberia and northern Canada. It will be the coldest air of the season so far for most of the United States. Future cold blasts may be more potent, but we haven’t experienced this since last February.

The polar vortex is not a new thing — it’s a weather term that was popularized in 2014, though it’s always been something meteorologists knew of and referred to among themselves.

It’s a very large, extremely cold air mass over the Arctic (the Antarctic has one, too). The concentrated area of cold air is bound by the jet stream, which is a current of fast-moving air at very high levels of the atmosphere. When the jet stream is strong and keeps the polar vortex area bottled up north, temperatures can fall to minus-100 degrees.

The vortex is always present — even in the summer. But winter is when it really comes alive — not only is Arctic air colder because of the lack of sunlight, this is also when the jet stream plunges south. When that happens, it allows the cold air to spill south, like a freezer with the door left open.

Some of the most historic cold-air outbreaks of the past 30 years have been caused by the polar vortex diving south.