TBR News July 14, 2016
The Voice of the White House
Washington, D.C. July 14, 2016 “I know nothing about the so-called K2 imitation marijuana but the sheepies will try anything.
They all rush to text message, Twitter, gabble like mindless geese on Facebook and ignore the ruthlessness of living.
Heroin pure will kill so it has to be cut. If it isn’t, the user is dead with the needle still in the vein.
Regular pot has no such problems.
That having been said, governmental agencies are in support of legal pot because they can regulate its growth and make huge money taxing it.
I well recall the ’60s when half the population staggered around, glassy-eyed and torpid.
“Stoners” we used to call them.
Sat around in very shabby apartments with orange-crate furniture mumbling to each other.
Too spaced out to work, they would steal from garbabe cans to survive.
Electronic toys have replaced pot to a large degree and the new Stoners spend half their time playing key-punched games.
Unemployment (over 25%!) is upon us so the fascination with the world of electronic escapism is rampant.
“Too lazy to work; too stupid to steal” is what we used to call the sheepies.
The so-called ‘for profit’ ‘universities’ and ‘colleges’ deliberately shove ‘student loans’ off on legions of those who attend their business ventures.
These loans, thanks to the crooked Clinton, cannot be discharged in bankruptcy so the student will never be free from large monthly payments.
And the interest on these loans always builds, month by month.
I wonder how much pay off Clinton got under the Oval Office desk?
The students are told about the Golden World that exists just outside the institution of lower learning and the student is assured that with a degree in advanced bird watching, they will be welcomed upon graduation with screaming hordes of employers waving frantically at them.
Of course the schools know this will never happen so PhDs are scrubbing tables at Taco Bell and living at home with Mom and her cat.
But there will not be Stoners because even pseudo chemical pot costs too much.
They end up dumpster-diving.
With an army of 30 million Mexican and Central American illegals packing the countries’ job market, an army willing to work for $2.00 an hour without complaint and off the corporate book, the mortar-boarders are shit out of luck.
But just down the street lurk new electronic toys and other thrilling distractions so the unwashed and semi-literate masses shuffle onwards towards infirmity and the edge of the quarry.”
The Müller Washington Journals 1948-1951
At the beginning of December, 1948, a German national arrived in Washington, D.C. to take up an important position with the newly-formed CIA. He was a specialist on almost every aspect of Soviet intelligence and had actively fought them, both in his native Bavaria where he was head of the political police in Munich and later in Berlin as head of Amt IV of the State Security Office, also known as the Gestapo.
His name was Heinrich Müller.
Even as a young man, Heini Müller had kept daily journals of his activities, journals that covered his military service as a pilot in the Imperial German air arm and an apprentice policeman in Munich. He continued these journals throughout the war and while employed by the top CIA leadership in Washington, continued his daily notations.
This work is a translation of his complete journals from December of 1948 through September of 1951.
When Heinrich Müller was hired by the CIA¹s station chief in Bern, Switzerland, James Kronthal in 1948, he had misgivings about working for his former enemies but pragmatism and the lure of large amounts of money won him over to what he considered to be merely an extension of his life-work against the agents of the Comintern. What he discovered after living and working in official Washington for four years was that the nation¹s capital was, in truth, what he once humorously claimed sounded like a cross between a zoo and a lunatic asylum. His journals, in addition to personal letters, various reports and other personal material, give a very clear, but not particularly flattering, view of the inmates of both the zoo and the asylum.
Müller moved, albeit very carefully, in the rarefied atmosphere of senior policy personnel, military leaders, heads of various intelligence agencies and the White House itself. He was a very observant, quick-witted person who took copious notes of what he saw. This was not a departure from his earlier habits because Heinrich Müller had always kept a journal, even when he was a lowly Bavarian police officer, and his comments about personalities and events in the Third Reich are just as pungent and entertaining as the ones he made while in America.
The reason for publishing this phase of his eventful life is that so many agencies in the United States and their supporters do not want to believe that a man of Müller¹s position could ever have been employed by their country in general or their agency in specific.
ENVOI
It is an unfortunate fact of life that historical works which question officially established orthodoxy are only accidentally published by major book producers. In our era of political correctness, more realistically known as craven and servilely compliant behavior, the vast majority of works found on the shelves of national bookstores are written by authors who wish to have their work published and therefore slavishly follow the dictums set forth by those who control an increasingly consolidated American print media.
The average national chain book outlet is packed with a plethora of large-print bodice rippers and glossy photo books dealing with geography, old aircraft, doll collecting, dead movie stars and appealing baby animals. The history sections of these literary soup kitchens are crammed with reprints of entirely safe subjects, almost all of which are so bland and innocuous as to be nothing more than literary custard. The frantic determination of publishers and retailers not to offend anyone under any circumstances has resulted in a profound lack of progress in uncovering and bringing important historical truths to a mass audience.
Even after the fall of world communism from the world stage, there are few books published critical of its practice and practitioners. There are two reasons for this regrettable fact. First, most academics, who have the easiest entree into the offices of publishers, are liberals with amazingly similar worldviews and none of whom are hostile to the theories of Messers Marx and Engels. Second, the universal dedication to the theory of political correctness has ushered in an age of quivering cowardliness by the publishers themselves. Terrified lest they might offend any political or religious entity that might voice objections to what the entity could personally consider an offending subject, they print bland books which recycle old, safe themes by writers who have a vested interest in keeping the historical status quo entirely secure.
A writer, for example, who has firmly endorsed the view that President Roosevelt had no prior knowledge of the impending Japanese air attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, would view any refutation of his pet thesis as tantamount to treason and would expend a great deal of effort to either deny the revisionistic arguments or to attack the author of them.
Bookshelves bulge with tales of the worker¹s paradise created by Stalin, but there are almost no references to the bloodbaths he initiated. Next to those titles are huge stacks of the latest monthly book on the holocaust, next to an even larger stack of books dealing with the psychopathic cruelty of all Germans in general. These books only sell to a very limited audience but their appearance in large numbers gives the false impression that such titles have wide general interest and an even wider sales range.
Further complicating the search for historical truth is that books concerning the latter two subjects are guaranteed to find an eagerly sympathetic audience with most American and British book reviewers and editors. Works containing more realistic depictions of the holocaust are ignored and their authors victimized by smear campaigns, should the books have any degree of accuracy, or total silence if their thesis cannot be refuted.
Much of this response is not due to ideology of the critics but rather, to the entirely acceptable premise that no commercial venture tolerates anything that would minimize its profits.
While orthodox views of wars from the American Revolution to the Gulf War are regularly lavished with high praise in publications such as the New York Times, critical examinations of those events usually go begging for attention.
One recent book, a winner of many in-house prizes, was purported to be an account of a Jewish child from the Baltic region who spent his formative years in a series of Nazi death camps. After laurels were heaped upon the book and its author, it was discovered that the writer was not Jewish, had never been in a camp of any kind and was far too young to have participated in the hecatombs of the Second World War. The book was published and extensively promoted in the United States even though those facts had come to light before it was first published in Europe.
The journey to historical truth is a long and exhausting one, and writers searching for truth are further handicapped because it takes a great deal of time and effort to research and write such books. Genuinely serious historians who do not write to an idea, take on a task which is far more complicated, and because of the political correctness factor, are far less likely to be accepted by a mainstream publisher than the generally ideological and plagiarized fictions which are inaccurately called history by their writers and publishers.
While there is still great interest in the Second World War in general, and Hitler in particular, the historical playing field is so tilted that there is but one direction for writers to run. The steady, and seemingly unstoppable, downhill course has encouraged and rewarded sophistry at the expense of facts and truth.
However, there very often is too much of a bad thing and the boy who persisted in shouting about non-existent wolves was eventually eaten by them. And every few years, even though it seems to be by accident rather than design, the search for historical truths wins a hearing in the public arena. “The Bell Curve,” published in 1994, contained convincing detail that empirically proved class structure and IQ test scores are intimately linked. Somehow, it broke through the protective screens and highly negative criticisms of knee-jerk liberal reviewers, and reached the higher rungs of the national best-seller lists.
However, it was quickly followed by several rapidly prepared works of a more politically acceptable view which claimed it is actually not IQ which matters but “emotional intelligence,” or more graphically “street smarts” which is really the important factor in sociological and economic development. This specious and predictably dimwitted argument entirely missed the point the authors of “The Bell Curve” made, namely there is indeed a well-documented and proven connection between class and intelligence. Socially correct writers have a standing aversion to inconvenient facts and lack the courage to critically examine their own prejudices.
A best-selling work by British author Colin Simpson about the sinking of the Lusitania in 1914, correctly attributed the rapid sinking of the passenger liner, containing many neutral Americans, to the explosion of her cargo of a quarter million pounds of illegal explosives. The book was greeted by outrage in official England and a book in response was hastily cobbled together by two Stanford University instructors. The authors claimed that the sinking was due entirely to Teutonic barbarity and coal dust. This defense was necessary because the orthodox point of view was that Churchill would never have indulged in such terrible behavior as to permit the loading of a quarter million pounds of high explosives onto a passenger ship and knowingly permit her to sail into an area where German U-Boats were known to be operating, and to compound this by ordering her escorts withdrawn. But the facts, as stubborn and inconvenient as they often are, show he did.
It is an established fact that at least 80% of the American public believes that the assassination of President Kennedy was the result of a conspiracy of some type and not the aberrated actions of the lone gunman so frantically supported by officialdom and the so-called mainstream media.
In 1993, Gerald Posner authored “Case Closed.” In this work, he slavishly presented and promoted, in toto, the official government version of Kennedy¹s assassination as accomplished and immutable fact. Unlike the large number of books chronicling various conspiracy theories, Posner¹s book received high and frequent praise from the media because he trumpeted the version of events agreed upon by the government and the print media. Fortunately for historical accuracy, the effort sold very badly.
Posner followed this disaster with another book, again setting forth and supporting the official version, on the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Like the Kennedy work, it too was trumpeted by the media as being the brilliant final word on a painful subject and like the Kennedy book, it too sold badly.
In general, it might be said with some accuracy that unautographed copies of officially approved and sponsored history books are considered rare in the used book market.
In spite of, or more likely because of, constant assaults by writers acting as unofficial governmental public relations outlets on their intelligence, the American public has grown to distrust their government and the media, and its public-relations firm.
In the very rare occurrence when a controversial book that deals with official misconduct or disastrous error is published by a mainstream printing house, it is never quite believed until officially denied by Washington officials. The axiom is that the higher the level of the deniers, the greater the degree of belief.
Canadian writer James Bacque wrote “Other Losses” in which he made an excellent case for the complicity of Gen. Eisenhower in the death by disease, starvation and neglect of tens of thousands of German prisoners of war. His book was followed by a work by Stephen Ambrose, a fierce and well-paid defender of the Allied Supreme Commander. Ambrose tried to refute Bacque¹s thesis, but did so by editing a tome of great moral outrage, almost as if he was trying to defend himself from the accusations, rather than searching for historical truth.
The facts, which are available in numerous official archives, tend to strongly support Bacque¹s basic thesis, if not every detail of it, and it must be of some satisfaction to the author and those who hunger for historical truth that his book sold out far more quickly than his critic¹s works did.
The law of vested interest is often paramount in the production and marketing of historical works.
By every accepted definition of political correctness, this series of books about the wartime and postwar activities of Heinrich Müller, once a general in Hitler¹s SS and the head of the German secret political police, the Gestapo, violate all of the practiced codes of acceptability. At the center of the series is the basic premise that Müller survived the endgame of the Second World War, escaped to neutral Switzerland, and in 1948 was recruited by the fledgling CIA as its chief specialist on Soviet Intelligence. It is the expressed view of a number of specialists in this field that for American intelligence to have merely had knowledge of the postwar whereabouts of Müller, then being actively hunted by West German authorities for his role in suppressing the internal enemies of the Third Reich, would have been bad enough. If one considers that many of those persecuted managed to survive his attentions and were subsequently part and parcel of the Bonn government, the reasons for maintaining the strictest secrecy about U.S. knowledge of Gestapo Müller¹s whereabouts are entirely understandable. Also, the Soviet Union, whose minions Müller tracked down and either shot or transported to the concentration camps, would have a propaganda field day if they were to obtain substantive evidence that one of their greatest enemies was now performing the same services for the American President which he once performed for the German Führer.
That Müller may actually have prospered in his employment and enjoyed good fortune would only add insult to injury.
These reasons, which are entirely self-evident, are why no substantive mention is ever made in any historical work on the Cold War, the McCarthy era, the Truman Administration or any of the American intelligence or counter-intelligence agencies functioning in 1948, of former SS-Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller.
Technically, Müller worked for the United States Army because his actual employers, the CIA, were not permitted to operate inside the United States. Ever since its inception in 1948, the Central Intelligence Agency has maintained an icy and detached attitude towards their actions and also towards writers who have the temerity to question either their motivations or their results.
Presidential orders to that agency to open their files on long-ago happenings have been met with the immediate incineration of these files and a continued refusal to comply with official, and entirely reasonable, orders for disclosure of old historical records.
At its inception, this agency strove to be the official foreign policy arm of the U.S. government. By cloaking its clandestine activities behind the slogan of national security, the CIA has been directly responsible for thousands of deaths, political assassinations, revolutions, economic disasters, and gross and repeated violations of international law. If these actions had succeeded, all would be forgiven. But if one considers the cynical dictum that the end always justifies the means, then in the towering majority of its clandestine activities, the CIA has failed in its goals disastrously.
They fomented and launched the Hungarian revolt in 1956 which resulted in tens of thousands of deaths and was an utter fiasco, accomplishing nothing except the consolidation of power by Moscow over their puppet Hungarian government.
There were their private wars against Cuba and several nations in Central and South America which resulted in terrible regional bloodbaths which had no appreciable laurels for American foreign policy. Those ill-advised policies had the added effect of making the United States a hated entity in many countries which might otherwise have been more friendly.
The wave of terrorism which has arisen at the end of the twentieth century has its roots, not in the theoretical evils of Marxism, but in the concrete evils promulgated by the renegade socialites of Langley. Their attempts at inflicting their ill-informed and short-sighted will on those whom they perceived to be their personal enemies (to include the Congress of the United States and the office of the President), has sown a crop of hatred and complete distrust which is still bearing bitter fruit.
There were also the uprisings in Indonesia, the removal of Philippine President Marcos, and many bloody wars on the African continent which are still in progress. The CIA has, by its own admission, interfered with legitimate elections in foreign countries, assassinated inconvenient people whom they disliked, including heads of state and military leaders.
Although Canada was, and is, considered an ally and a friendly neighbor, CIA officials clandestinely supported the Quebec separatist movement, a support which consisted of supplying the movement with explosives and money.
At one point, although England was once considered to be a valuable ally, they supported the Irish Republican Army with explosives and money in order to protect U.S. business investments in England from IRA attack. If the provo wing of the IRA blew up Lord Mountbatten or a building in the City of London, the primary concern was that neither the lord nor the building were connected to Standard Oil.
When the legitimately elected leader of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbanez Guzmán, who was certainly not a communist, attempted after his election in November of 1950 to nationalize United Fruit Company holdings in his country, it took only a call from the directors of that company to launch a CIA-controlled internal revolt by the usual well-bribed military dissidents to topple the government. The reason given for this action was that the government was now in the hands of the dreaded communists and no doubt Mexico would fall next. The nationalization projects immediately stopped but when the CIA-designate government head, Castillo Armas, began to view them with some favor, he was immediately assassinated and the matter was permanently shelved.
While United Fruit Company was secure, the same could not be said of the general population of Guatemala which was subsequently plunged into a state of virtual anarchy. Units of the CIA-supported Guatemalan armed forces spent decades slaughtering anyone who even looked as if they could disagree with them. The legions of slaughtered peasants, which included women and children, were listed as communist agents in official reports to Congress which was then asked to vote higher appropriations to continue protecting the lives and sacred honor of their constituents.
An identical CIA-paid rebellion was fomented against legally-elected President of Chile, Salvador Allende Goosens in 1973. During the course of this campaign, the Chilean economy was wrecked, unions and military factions bribed and on September 11 of that year, Allende was machine-gunned to death in his office. This was later termed a suicide in recently-released official CIA reports, so there cannot be any reason to doubt its accuracy.
Neither of these two illegal interferences with legitimate foreign governments was due to a threat of communism, although unlike the Guatemalan, Allende was an intellectual Marxist. They were instituted and executed solely because both governments had nationalized, or threatened to nationalize, American businesses in their country.
The business community, which had long suffered under the reign of Franklin Roosevelt, was delighted to finally find an ally in a government agency which could be completely relied upon to defend their foreign investments and with the added pleasure of knowing that the costs of this defense would be entirely borne by the American taxpayers.
When the CIA wanted information on Swiss bank accounts, information which the Swiss authorities were legally forbidden to reveal, one of their leading bankers was seized at the New York airport when arriving for a conference and locked up in a remote precinct jail until he was willing to cooperate.
There has been much pointless speculation on the reasons for American involvement in Vietnam, an ill-advised war which cost over 50,000 American lives. The expression “domino theory” has seriously been put forward as the best description why the United States became involved in a bloody and useless war which it ultimately lost. This bit of fatuous nonsense held that if only one country fell under communist influence, all its neighboring countries would be at terrible risk and would likely fall into the hands of the Soviets.
The actual history behind American involvement in Vietnam, as in so many other global razzias, has its roots in business, not politics. French Indo-China had long been a very profitable colony for France. After World War II, France was not able to maintain control over the country and fought an exhausting and ultimately futile campaign to keep this control. When the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was being developed, America wished the support of France. General DeGaulle, then head of state, disliked and distrusted Americans based on his personal experiences with them during World War II and refused to cooperate unless, and until, America agreed to support and protect their economic holdings in their former colony.
Aside from huge, untapped offshore oil fields, the rubber plantations alone were of great value and it was then that the vested interest theory mutated into the domino theory. After all, there were a number of American firms who also had interests in Vietnam and who would enjoy substantial profits if the offshore oil fields could be developed, preferably by American interests instead of French.
The methods used by a mixture of elite American military units and CIA specialists to remove any suspect Communists from the population of Vietnam, the so-called Operation Phoenix, is of such a nature as to preclude its being published in a work that might be accessible to women or children. And somewhat earlier, there was the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company business which cannot really be called a scandal at this point in time because American involvement has not yet been disclosed. That hitherto unacknowledged business will receive detailed coverage in the following volume of Müller¹s journals and should give a much clearer reason why the people of Iran are so anti-American.
One of his associates once said to Hitler, knowing his detestation of them, that it was too bad that any Jews existed in the world at all. Hitler¹s purported response was that if the Jews, whom he saw as a unifying force for German opinion, did not exist, he would have to invent them.
Instead of heaping further indignities on the long-persecuted Jews, the CIA chose as its pet devil, the Soviet Union, its allies and the communist parties which existed throughout the world in the immediate postwar period. These entities, who were quite as rapacious and bloodthirsty as their American opponents, were credited with every inherently evil design on an innocent world.
When communism finally imploded, its most sincere mourners were its former enemies who now had to find other reasons for their existence, and more important, justification to Congressional fiscal committees for their enormous operational budgets. It was a well-founded fear of prosecution, not seeming modesty, which precluded full, or any, disclosure of the actual use of these budgetary fundings.
A vague, serious mention of national security was always good for a billion or more added to the previous year¹s bloated allowance, but now with Moscow reduced to rattling a cup full of pencils in Red Square, other justifications needed to be found.
It can be noted that the once-mighty, self-proclaimed skill of the CIA as the eternal watchdog of American liberties seems to have become chipped and broken in recent years. Amazingly, their multi-billion dollar satellites, paid for by the American public, and smugly touted as the ultimate defense of the same public, were somehow unable to observe a number of atomic explosions on the Indian sub-continent and we have also been treated to the destruction, by long range rockets, of a pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan which the CIA said was producing deadly components for chemical warfare. Subsequent to the attack, which killed a number of people and wrecked the complex, an investigation was begun by outsiders which has disclosed that this plant was certainly not involved in making any chemicals of mass destruction.
In spite of the fact that the investigators were from a reputable American professional organization, the CIA still states that one of their secret agents had discovered positive proof of their contentions which led to their advice to the U.S. government to launch a surprise attack. No evidence has ever been produced in support of their thesis or likely ever will be. In this matter, as in so many others, the CIA counts on the short attention span of the American public and the fact that a new crisis will hopefully bury it in the print media.
Such activities, promulgated obviously for the purposes of image-enhancing, have had a negative impact on the population of a large part of the world and should they continue, as they obviously will, the prophets of doom who see clandestine chemical warfare attacks on the United States will live to see their prophecies materialize.
More cynical observers have noted that this attack happened just as President Clinton was involved in serious legal and media problems in Washington and the question has been asked if in this case, the tail did not wag the dog.
When Heinrich Müller was hired by the CIA¹s station chief in Bern, Switzerland in 1948, he had misgivings about working for his former enemies but pragmatism and the lure of large amounts of money won him over to what he considered to be merely an extension of his life-work against the agents of the Comintern. What he discovered after living and working in official Washington for four years was that the nation¹s capital was, in truth, what he once humorously claimed sounded like a cross between a zoo and a lunatic asylum. His journals, in addition to personal letters, various reports and other personal material, give a very clear, but not particularly flattering, view of the inmates of both the zoo and the asylum.
Müller moved, albeit very carefully, in the rarefied atmosphere of senior policy personnel, military leaders, heads of various intelligence agencies and the White House itself. He was a very observant, quick-witted person who took copious notes of what he saw. This was not a departure from his earlier habits because Heinrich Müller had always kept a journal, even when he was a lowly Bavarian police officer, and his comments about personalities and events in the Third Reich are just as pungent and entertaining as the ones he made while in America.
The reason for publishing this phase of his eventful life is that so many agencies in the United States and their supporters do not want to believe that a man of Müller¹s position could ever have been employed by their country in general or their agency in specific.
In response to the numerous whispered remarks, classified (but not necessarily unknown) inter-office round robins and strained, glacial silences, it has been decided to devote more time to Müller in America as opposed to Müller in Germany.
He had forty-eight years as a German resident and not quite as much as an American, but since the German government has officially banned all of this series in their country, it seems more fitting to address the larger, and available, audience.
In addition to being a prolific journal-keeper, Müller was a man who was intensely ambitious and extremely aggressive in his ambitions. He was a man of high intelligence who came from a poor Bavarian family. He had to leave school as a boy of fourteen and work in a factory. The war rescued him from spending his life as a mechanic and launched him on his career.
Müller was not a Nazi but a strong supporter of the Bavarian People¹s Party, a right wing movement which was close to the Catholic Church. In point of fact, the BVP was the strongest party in Bavaria until the advent of Hitler and Müller had married the daughter of the party¹s newspaper publisher. Instead of dismissing Müller when they came to power, the Nazi government of Bavaria welcomed him into their ranks as a very effective persecutor of communists. In doing so, they pragmatically overlooked his equally intense persecution of the early Nazi Party in Bavaria.
Himmler¹s intelligence chief, Reinhard Heydrich, put Müller in charge of a small branch of the Prussian State Police, the Gestapo. Working ferociously seven days a week in the beginning, Müller slowly built this small counter-intelligence group into the most comprehensive and efficient agency of its kind in the world. It rivaled, and often surpassed, its Soviet counterpart, the NKVD. Müller, who had no difficulty in learning from his enemies, made a long and careful study of Stalin¹s internal police.
He took what he needed from that terrible agency, modified it to suit both his intentions and German law, and by the end of the war, his Gestapo had at the least (he had the personnel records destroyed in 1945) forty thousand regular agents in place throughout Germany and in foreign countries.
Müller lived modestly with his wife and two children in a respectable but not ostentatious Berlin neighborhood, disliked being photographed, and aside from his work, enjoyed chess, reading, landscape painting in water colors, classical music, his motorcycle and his younger, long-term mistress, Anna Schmidt to whom he wrote long, affectionate letters.
In his private life, and in his office, Müller was remarkable for his lack of pomposity.. He was loyal to his old friends from the Munich police and enjoyed nothing more than going out with them to a local tavern and talk about their younger days over steins of beer. Although Müller could be absolutely ruthless in the pursuit of what were perceived as enemies of the state, he was generally a fair-minded person and was easily approached by outsiders seeking a redress of their ills. Part of the fiction about the Gestapo is that they were responsible for the persecution of Jews and spent much of their time persecuting, jailing and killing these unfortunates. The only thing that the Gestapo had to do with the Jewish population of Germany was to physically oversee their transportation, either out of Germany to foreign countries before the war or to detention camps during it.
Müller¹s main occupation was counter-intelligence with special reference to communists. Before Hitler came to power in 1933, Germany had been a hunting ground for Stalin¹s agents and Müller once estimated that he had located and jailed over 20,000 of them. Of course, by doing so, he earned the undying hatred of not only the communists but the Socialists and the liberal Jewish communities of Germany.
Although the name of Heinrich Müller was unknown outside of Germany, his organization, the Gestapo, was singled out by propagandists as the most terrible agency of its kind in the history of Western Civilization. Those who write in this vein are undoubtedly correct. The even more ferocious and murderous NKVD who killed at least forty million Russian citizens during Stalin¹s salad days, were not, and never could have been, a part of Western Civilization. One would think, however, that historical writers might take some note of their activities instead of pointing at the mote in the eyes of others while ignoring the beam in the eye of an entity they doubtless feel an affinity for.
When Müller came to Washington in 1948, he had rarely moved among the mighty or directly engaged in counseling those who charted the nation¹s course. For the first time, he saw the inner working of a democratic government and began to find out how easy it was to make his way, a friendly wolf trotting through pens of hogs and sheep.
His journals show with clarity his rapid acclamation to this new situation as well as the increase of his fortune by dealing in stolen art, and after the outbreak of the Korean War, as a classical war profiteer in the same mold as those great captains of industry who got their phenomenal beginnings during the American Civil War.
Müller met, courted and married a woman from the upper levels of main line Washington society, and lived in a large estate in the neighboring state of Virginia, a mansion he filled with fine art, interesting guests and all the authentic trappings of the landed gentry.
Although his reason for existence was to hunt down communist spies, one of his better friends was a man whom Müller identified as a top NKVD agent. Müller was not an ideologue but certainly was a pragmatist and he had no problem discussing shop with men like Kim Philby and his Soviet-cum-Canadian friend, Viktor. By doing this, Müller does not reveal himself to be a traitor to his new employers, but rather a genuine professional.
Although Müller had two wives, this did not stop him from having a series of affairs with some of the wives of his co-workers at the CIA, as well as other women in Washington society. There is no question that his wife was aware of at least some of this (women always are), but she ignored it because they were a genuinely affectionate couple and she was less conventional than he was. Müller, who maintained the best relationships with his former lovers, used to say in explanation of his popularity, that he always began an affair with a smile and ended it the same way.
In his description of American foreign policy at the turn of the twentieth century, Teddy Roosevelt referred to walking softly but carrying a big stick. Müller was not always as soft a walker but unlike Teddy, he carried a small weapon in his hip pocket. This weapon consisted of the files and records he kept on his employers and their friends, and he had no hesitation in reminding his putative enemies that he was a crack shot. For those not given to intelligent understanding, there were always the attentions of his close associate, Arno, or others.
In their dreams of empire, the leadership of the new CIA were certain of their deadliness. They believed that they were the state and all would perish who opposed them. Müller believed nothing so grandiose and nonsensical but knew what he could and would do to anyone who actively opposed him and this, of course, is an excellent example of fact versus fiction.
In the final analysis, those official agencies who claim that the Müller works are fictional in nature have the greatest reason for so stating but also the greatest experience in fabricating their own history.
There is a line found in Shakespeare, that it is the “galled jade that winces.” For those readers not conversant with Elizabethan usage, it might be more American to say that it is the kicked dog that yelps.
It is not possible for an author to prepare a work on any historical subject in a vacuum. Records have to be searched for and consulted, leads tracked down and verified, and individuals who might have important information contacted. Because of this, an author¹s activities may be muffled but are certainly not impossible to observe for those who have a vested interest in doing so.
The basic thesis of these books is acutely disturbing for a number of people, most of whom live or work in Washington or one of its suburbs. Those who wish to protect their own professional reputations as well as the reputation of their agency, spend a good deal of time and money, supplied by the taxpayers, in attempting to neutralize or discredit that which cannot be accepted.
Certainty is illusion and there are individuals who work for the same agencies and supply the author with an increasing flow of inside information concerning the subject of the late Heinrich Müller. As a case in point, there has been an on-going series of high-level communications between senior members of the CIA in Langley, Virginia, and senior officials inside the intelligence agencies of the Russian Republic. Almost all of this traffic is directed to one Vyacheslav Ivanovich Trubnikov in Moscow. Mr. Trubnikov was head of Russian Foreign Intelligence and is on excellent terms with his opposite numbers in the United States. All intelligence agencies maintain cordial professional relations with their purported enemies and will regularly cooperate with their rivals in various matters, and the Müller case is certainly one of them.
The author has a copy of a report which constitutes a request from an official in the CIA to his counterpart in Russia dealing with the subject of Müller. This report, one of a number on the same subject, is under the date of December 19, 1998. It is a request that the Russian intelligence agency provide some support in discrediting the allegations that Heinrich Müller survived the war and worked for the Americans in the postwar period. The words “quid pro quo” and “…shared mutual concerns in this very unpleasant matter” are contained in the American request which goes on to state that: “…and we feel at this point that it is necessary to absolutely prove that Subject (Müller) either died at the end of the war, or was discovered by Soviet troops in Berlin and was captured, taken to Russia and either shot or imprisoned.”
A senior aide to Mr. Trubnikov responded on January 21, 1999 that: “…among other matters, it is not advisable for us to support the theory that Muller (sic) worked for us at any time.” And in the third paragraph, one can find: “We have a journalist, (here the name is included in the text), one of yours, who is working on the Wallenberg story and will also prepare a story about Muller (sic) as you have requested.” The story, slated for release as the result of these negotiations, is that an American journalist working with former KGB files gained access to very secret papers found “in Stalin¹s personal vault” which show that Heinrich Müller was captured by the Russians and died in a camp in 1946!
The exact nature of the quid pro quo (tit for tat) is not mentioned in the Russian document but will certainly have been decided upon in advance. The publication of the Müller journals, containing as they do insights into the early activities of the CIA, is most certainly not to the liking of that agency but it is somewhat disappointing that the same story created by a Czech journalist in 1995, that Müller had been captured in Argentina in 1950, flown to Moscow and shot, should be exhumed from its grave, deodorized and put into a new dress.
In view of the fact that Müller¹s grave was recently located by an American news magazine in St. Mary¹s cemetery in Oakland, California (Müller and his wife had a home in Piedmont, California in the 1980s), one must assume that if the “secret files of Josef Stalin” are correct, they must have kept the late General Müller in a freezer for thirty years and then, as an act of courtesy, flown the body to America and had it buried in a marked California grave in 1985!
Not only has the U.S. Army acknowledged and released a thick intelligence file on Müller to the public but the FBI has an equally thick file on Müller¹s activities in the 1950s and 1960s. This file is being sought under FOIA and, in conjunction with other concrete evidence, makes a mockery of recently-fabricated reports on Czech and former Soviet intelligence agencies. In the case, as in so many others, the word ³intelligence² in connection with both the CIA and their Russian counterparts is entirely oxymoronic in nature.
There is still the question of return favors and one will have to speculate on their nature.
It is always the backstairs gossip which more correctly defines what actually transpired in an age, than the pious mouthings of paid government historians.
Death of Islamic State’s Shishani may damage foreign recruitment
July 14, 2016
by Stephen Kalin and Phil Stewart
Reuters
BAGHDAD-The death of Islamic State’s “minister of war” may disrupt its operations, a senior U.S. military officer said on Thursday, and an Iraqi security expert said it could damage IS’s important recruitment efforts in ex-Soviet republics.
Abu Omar al-Shishani (the Chechen), a close military adviser to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was killed in combat in the Iraqi district of Shirqat, south of Mosul, Amaq, a news agency that supports IS, said on Wednesday.
It was the first confirmation of Shishani’s death, which the Pentagon said in March had probably occurred as a result of a U.S. air strike in eastern Syria.
Hisham al-Hashimi, who advises Iraq’s government on Islamist armed groups, said Shishani had been wounded in the March attack but was treated at a hospital in Shirqat, an Islamic State stronghold about 250 km (160 miles) north of Baghdad.
He said Shishani was killed earlier this week in a nearby village along with an aide by an air strike during combat with U.S.-backed Iraqi forces closing in on the area.
The commander of the U.S.-led coalition battling Islamic State, U.S. Army Lieutenant General Sean MacFarland, expressed confidence in the intelligence that led to the recent strike on Shishani in the Tigris River valley where Shirqat is located, but declined on Thursday to declare him dead.
“We’re being a little conservative in calling the ball on whether or not he’s actually dead or not. But we certainly gave it our best shot,” MacFarland told reporters in Baghdad, joking that Shishani might be the “Rasputin of this conflict.”
Iraqi military officials had no immediate comment.
Some analysts speculated that Shishani might in fact have died in March but Islamic State delayed its announcement to allow time to line up a successor.
Yet there was no immediate word from IS about who would take over for the ginger-bearded jihadist who held as many as three senior posts and was a strong force for recruitment from Russia’s mainly Muslim North Caucasus region and Central Asia.
“(IS) lost something important: the charisma that he had to inspire and seduce Salafists from Chechnya, the Caucasus and Azerbaijan – the former Soviet republics,” Hashimi said.
Asked about the potential impact, MacFarland said it could disrupt Islamic State operations if Shishani were indeed dead. “They would have to figure out who’s going to pick up his portfolio,” he said.
IMPORTANT COHORT OF RUSSIAN SPEAKERS
Born in 1986 in Georgia, then still part of the Soviet Union, Shishani once fought with Chechen rebels against the Russian military in the Caucasus province. He then joined independent Georgia’s military in 2006 and fought in its brief war with Russia two years later before receiving a medical discharge, according to U.S. officials.
Shishani was one of only a few Islamist leaders with a professional military background and had several hundred fighters, mostly from ex-Soviet republics, under his command when he came to prominence in a 2013 battle against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces in northern Syria.
His role in the capture of Menagh air base, which since has been ceded to regional Kurdish forces, was one of the first big victories by Russian-speaking militants in Islamic State’s rapid capture of large swathes of territory in Syria’s civil war.
Hashimi said it was not clear who Islamic State would choose to replace Shishani, but it was likely to be someone with a similar ethnic background.
“The replacement must be Chechen because there was an agreement between (IS) and the Army of Muhajireen and Ansar that this position must be filled by a Chechen,” said Hashimi, referring to a Syria-based militant group that split when Shishani pledged allegiance to Baghdadi.
According to photographs circulated online, road signs erected in areas controlled by Islamist State are sometimes written in three languages – Arabic, English, and Russian – testifying to the important role of Russian speakers.
In many cases these rebels have been influenced by Islamist insurgencies at home, pushed out of their own countries by security crackdowns, and won advancement in Islamic State through their military skills and ruthlessness.
In June, a Russian official said up to 10,000 militants from ex-Soviet republics were fighting in the ranks of jihadist groups in the Middle East.
Shishani’s group grew to about 1,000 fighters by the end of 2013, according to a notice issued by the U.S. government, which offered up to $5 million for any information that would help to track him down.
Shishani also may have helped Islamic State seize the Iraqi city of Mosul in 2014, the victory which established the group as the most potent Islamist security threat in the Middle East.
The suspected attackers in last month’s attack on Istanbul airport had ties to Islamic State and were from Russia and the formerly Soviet Central Asian states of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, Turkish officials say.
(Reporting by Stephen Kalin; editing by Mark Heinrich)
ISIS battlefield numbers plummet, global attacks increase – leaked intel report
July 14, 2016
RT
The number of foreign Islamic State fighters has halved in just one year, according to a classified White House intelligence report seen by NBC News. The data, however, says these fighters are now carrying out attacks across the world.
The number has dropped to just 12,000 fighters, which is about half what it was in early 2015, according to the intelligence report recently sent to the White House. NBC published its findings on Wednesday.
The figure comes just as Islamic State (IS, ISIS/formerly ISIL) released its own statistics, boasting of 5,200 people killed in attacks worldwide. According to its Al Naba website, the figure includes also those attacks where allegiance was given to IS – such as the Pulse nightclub in Florida.
Hundreds alone died earlier this month in Baghdad and Saudi Arabia attacks, and Turkey lost 45 people at its main international airport in late June. While it is impossible to verify whether the attacks were indeed carried out or plotted by the militant group, the report reveals IS sympathizers return home and may conduct operations there.
“A stunning 30 percent of those who have fought in the war zone have now returned to their home countries – at a rate of 3,000 ISIS adherents per month,” NBC says.
Solving the problem of radicalizing Western youths only went so far, as countries lying outside of the immediate warzone of Syria and Iraq have simply made it harder for would-be fighters to make the journey – they did not eliminate the threat altogether.
The loss of IS fighters, coupled with the rising number of terrorist attacks worldwide, for some means that a new phase of the war against the group has been entered. According to terror expert Malcolm Nance, who spoke with NBC, this is a direct result of the group’s loss of territory in Syria and Iraq.
“The effect that’s going to happen now is like stepping on a ball of mercury,” said Nance, a former intelligence analyst and head of the Terror Asymmetrics Project. “You step on a ball of mercury, all the pieces break up and spread around the world.” He says that, as this new phase of confrontation is underway, “We are creating, essentially, a ghost caliphate” with no central location.
As far as preventing trips to warzones goes, that plan isn’t entirely fool-proof either, as 500 Western nationals continue to travel to Syria and Iraq every month to fight for the terrorist group. This is in spite of crackdowns at home in the US and Europe.
According to the report, 1,200 French nationals are currently fighting abroad, as well as 335 Britons and 145 Americans. For the former Soviet republics, that number is 2,400 current fighters, and the data says it doubled in the past year. A large portion of those fighters are from the Caucasus region and have a history of militant activity.
Chinese businessman jailed for almost four years for hacking US military contractors
A Chinese national has been sentenced to three years and 10 months in prison for hacking American defense contractors to steal trade secrets. Beijing has denied any involvement in the hacking.
July 14, 2016
DW
Su Bin, who went by the names Stephen Su and Stephen Subin, was handed the sentence in a Los Angeles court on Wednesday, where he was also ordered to pay a $10,000 fine.
The 51-year-old admitted in March to conspiring with two unnamed military officers in China in a bid to obtain plans for F-22 and F-35 fighter jets and Boeing’s C-17 military transport aircraft.
According to court documents, the trio succeeded in stealing sensitive data by hacking into the computer networks of major defense contractors before sending the information to China.
‘Undermine national security’
Between 2008 and 2014, Su allegedly traveled to the US at least 10 times. He admitted to the court that he sent emails to his two accomplices with guidance on which persons, companies and technologies to target. Once the data was stolen, Su translated it into English before trying to sell it.
Su, who ran a China-based aviation and aerospace company from Canada, was arrested in July 2014. After waiving extradition, he was transferred to the US to face charges.
“Over the course of years, this defendant sought to undermine the national security of the United States by seeking out information that would benefit a foreign government and providing that country with information it had never before seen,” prosecutor Eileen Decker said in a statement.
‘Gratitude and respect’
Beijing has repeatedly denied any involvement in the hacking case. The country’s state-run media lauded Su’s spying exploits, however, describing him as a hero.
“We are willing to show our gratitude and respect for his service to our country,” said a March editorial in the Global Times, a nationalistic newspaper with close ties to the ruling Communist Party.
“On the secret battlefield without gunpowder, China needs special agents to gather secrets from the US,” it added.
US-China tensions
Washington and Beijing have repeatedly clashed over what the US describes as rampant cyberspying by the Chinese government on US industry.
A report by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission last year found that China’s increasing use of cyber espionage has already cost US companies tens of billions of dollars in lost sales and expenses in repairing the damage from hacking.
In many cases, the report by the federal commission says stolen trade secrets have been turned over to Chinese government-owned companies.
Last year, the US indicted five Chinese military officers on charges of cyberspying.
In the 1990s, Taiwanese-American Wen Ho Lee was accused of spying for the Chinese government, but eventually pleaded guilty to only one minor charge in an embarrassing debacle that ended in an apology from then US President Bill Clinton.
Chinese-born US citizen Chi Mak was jailed for 24 years in 2008 for conspiring to smuggle sensitive US submarine technology to China.
Prosecutions of illegal entry a driving force in mass incarceration in US – report
Mexican nationals account for 15% of federal prison population as illegal entry prosecutions make up half of all criminal cases in US federal court system in July
July 14, 2016
by Renée Feltz
The Guardian
The Obama administration’s prosecution of immigrants who cross the border into the US is a driving force in mass incarceration, according to a new report.
Cases against immigrants for having illegally entered the country, known as illegal entry and re-entry, accounted for half of all criminal cases in the US federal court system last year, a report from Justice Strategies and Grassroots Leadership found. Non-citizens currently make up nearly a quarter of the total federal prison population, with Mexican nationals alone accounting for 15%.
Now several US judges who sentenced thousands of immigrants say the zero-tolerance policy for such cases they helped enforce was ineffective and should end.
“The only thing we have done is destroyed the lives of many people whose only crime is a desire to exercise their human rights to feed and care for themselves and their families,” said retired judge Felix Recio, who served as a federal magistrate from 1999 to 2013 in Brownsville, Texas, across the border from Matamoros, Mexico.
Recio is one of five retired federal judges, along with former prosecutors and public defenders from border districts in Texas and Arizona, who are featured in the report that critically examines a decade-old immigration enforcement initiative called “Operation Streamline”.
Federal law says migrants who improperly enter the country on what amounts to a misdemeanor trespass offense can face six months in prison. Those charged with felony re-entry face a maximum of two years, or more with prior offenses.
These laws were rarely enforced until a 2005 directive under George W Bush that was expanded by the Obama administration. As a result, the civil process of detaining and deporting tens of thousands of immigrants each year now begins only after they have finished a prison sentence.
Since 2005, nearly 750,000 people have been prosecuted in federal courts for improper migration. Their criminal records will likely make them ineligible for any legal path to citizenship.
The number of improper-entry prosecutions peaked at 54,175 in 2009 and 53,822 in 2013, after Obama’s election and re-election campaigns. The latest data available is from 2015 and shows prosecutions have fallen to 35,770.
“Prosecutions are tied to political directives, not migration patterns,” said Judith Greene of Justice Strategies, who co-authored the report with Grassroots Leadership. “So we might very well expect another spike in 2016.”
Most were picked up by US border patrol officers, and soon brought to court where they were tried in leg chains by the dozen. They received a hearing that strains due process by collapsing into a single event their arraignment, guilty plea and sentencing. In their pleas deals, they are usually required to waive their right to appeal. Still, the migrants keep returning.
“I don’t give many lectures to them about why they should not be coming back,” said retired federal judge Charles Pyle, of those who appeared before his court along the border in Tucson, Arizona. “Because I just don’t think that what I have to say has much impact compared to: ‘But my wife and my children are up in Kansas’ or ‘I was about to be killed back in Michoacán.’”
Almost as if to underscore the initiative’s failure, felony re-entry cases now outnumber those for first time crossers in many federal court districts along the US-Mexico border.
“We have an idea in this country that giving progressively higher sentences is a deterrent. It is not,” said Donna Coltharp, a federal public defender in Texas. “We need a different paradigm for the ‘revolving door’ people” who have US citizen families they want to reconnect with and support.
The report’s authors plan to ask the US attorney general, Loretta Lynch, to de-prioritize and ultimately end improper entry and re-entry prosecutions.
“The way to deal with this is to decriminalize it,” Recio said. “I think we should abandon the policy we have.”
Hillary Clinton and Personal Honesty
July 14, 2016
by Andrew P. Napolitano
AntiWar
When FBI Director James Comey publicly revealed his recommendation to the Department of Justice last week that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton not be prosecuted for espionage, he unleashed a firestorm of criticism from those who believe that Clinton was judged by different standards from those used to judge others when deciding whether to bring a case to a grand jury.
The FBI investigation had a bizarre ending to it. FBI recommendations are never made public as this one was. Attorney General Loretta Lynch had been compromised by her politically disastrous but legally consequential meeting out of the view of the media with Bill Clinton just one week before Comey’s announcement. Whatever they discussed, the overwhelming public impression was such that Lynch removed herself and her senior aides from the case, effectively leaving the FBI to have the final say. This is unheard of in the post-Hoover FBI.
The Comey announcement itself gave two reasons for recommending against indictment. One was that “no reasonable prosecutor” would take the case. That is not a judgment the FBI gets paid to make. The FBI’s job is to gather, present and evaluate facts and evidence, not predict what prosecutors might do with it. The other stated reason for recommending against indictment was that though Clinton may have been “extremely careless” in handling state secrets, she was not “grossly negligent,” which is the standard required by the espionage statute.
Yet Comey also acknowledged that Clinton sent state secrets to nongovernmental colleagues who lacked national security clearances, that those people were hacked by hostile intelligence services and that she used her numerous non-secure mobile devices recklessly while inside the territorial borders of those hostile governments. If all that is somehow extremely careless but not grossly negligent, then many who have done far less than Clinton – and have been prosecuted and convicted – were wrongly prosecuted.
Since Comey’s announcement last week, several new factors have come to light. One is that the DOJ never presented any evidence to a grand jury. It never sought subpoenas from a grand jury. This is unheard of in major criminal investigations because the FBI alone has no subpoena power and needs a grand jury to issue subpoenas for it.
The absence of a sitting grand jury also makes one wonder about the circumstances under which and the purpose for which the DOJ obtained immunity for Bryan Pagliano, Clinton’s internet technology adviser. She paid him $5,000 to migrate her public and her secret State Department email streams from the government’s secure servers to her own non-secure servers. Immunity, which is essentially the pre-indictment permanent forgiveness of criminal behavior, cannot be given lightly and can only be given in return for testimony – usually to a grand jury or a trial jury. Strangely, that was not the case here.
Nevertheless, Clinton’s persistent problems with personal honesty have brought her face to face with three more criminal investigations. One is for public corruption. The second is for perjury. And the third is for misleading Congress.
The public corruption investigation has been underway for a few months. The allegations are that she exercised the powers of her office as secretary of state to enrich her husband and herself. The evidence here is ample. There are dozens of documented instances in which foreign governments and individuals received beneficial treatment from her State Department – usually exemptions from compliance with American laws or regulations – and then collectively gave hundreds of millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation at a time when it was not a registered lawful charity.
The second investigation Clinton faces is for perjury. This arises out of a Freedom of Information Act civil lawsuit during which she swore in writing and under oath, citing the phrase “under penalty of perjury,” that she surrendered all of her work-related emails to the State Department. When she left the State Department, she effectively took all of her emails with her. Then, when the FOIA cases began, she returned about half of what she had taken, claiming that the other half was personal.
The FBI found that she failed to return thousands of work-related emails, some of which she and her lawyers attempted to destroy and some of which they succeeded in destroying. Who ordered the destruction?
Finally, Clinton will most likely be confronted with charges of misleading Congress. Misleading Congress consists of intentionally creating a false impression in response to material congressional questions. She did this when she denied to the House Select Committee on Benghazi that she had sent or received emails via her home servers that contained state secrets.
The FBI found 110 emails in that category, at least two dozen of which were at the highest level of protection that the government accords its secrets. She also told that same committee that she had surrendered all her work-related emails to the State Department.
Former New York Yankees pitching great Roger Clemens was tried twice (after a trial that ended with a hung jury, he was ultimately acquitted) for misleading Congress when he was forced to speak to a House committee about the contents of his blood and urine as a baseball player. Clinton has misled Congress about her lawful obligations as secretary of state, and she skates free.
Back in the Whitewater days, when the propensity of both Bill and Hillary Clinton to lie routinely and naturally first became apparent to the media and the public, the late, great New York Times columnist William Safire referred to Mrs. Clinton by a moniker that enraged her husband. He became so fearful of the truth and so furious with Safire that he publicly threatened to punch Safire in the nose.
Safire called Hillary Clinton a congenital liar. He was right. That was 20 years ago. Some people never change.
U.S. presidential race tied, Clinton hurt by emails: poll
July 14, 2016
by Doina Chiacu
Reuters
The U.S. presidential race is tied going into the major parties’ national conventions and Democrat Hillary Clinton has been damaged by the FBI investigation into her email use while secretary of state, a new opinion poll showed on Thursday.
The New York Times/CBS News poll showed 67 percent of voters surveyed said Clinton was not honest and trustworthy, up 5 percentage points from a CBS poll conducted last month before the FBI made its findings public.
As Donald Trump prepares to accept the Republican presidential nomination next week, the poll showed him in a dead heat with Clinton in a general election matchup. Each candidate drew 40 percent of the vote, compared with the 6 percentage point lead enjoyed by Clinton in last month’s survey, the poll showed.
The margin of error was 3 percentage points in the CBS News/New York Times poll, which was conducted by telephone July 8-12 among a random sample of 1,600 adults nationwide, including 1,358 registered voters.
The survey showed 62 percent of voters surveyed distrust Trump as well.
“But Mrs. Clinton’s shifting and inaccurate explanations of her email practices at the State Department appear to have resonated more deeply with the electorate,” the Times wrote.
FBI Director James Comey said last week Clinton was “extremely careless” in the handling of classified information but the investigation found no evidence she or her colleagues intended to violate laws.
The Times/CBS poll echoes the finding of a Quinnipiac Poll released on Wednesday that showed Trump pulling just ahead of Clinton in the so-called swing states of Florida and Pennsylvania as the former U.S. senator and first lady lost ground on honesty and moral standards.
In contrast to the New York Times/CBS News poll, a Reuters/Ipsos online opinion poll released on Tuesday showed Clinton leading Trump by 13 points at a national level, with 46 percent to Trump’s 33 percent support among likely voters. The election is on Nov. 8.
(Reporting by Doina Chiacu; Editing by Frances Kerry)
Russian Foreign Policy: ‘We Are Smarter, Stronger and More Determined’
Relations between Russia and NATO are deteriorating. Kremlin foreign policy advisor Sergey Karaganov speaks with SPIEGEL about the risk of war, NATO’s aggressive posturing and the West’s inability to understand Russian values.
Interview conducted by Christian Neef
July 13, 2016
Spiegel
SPIEGEL: Sergey Alexandrovich, NATO is boosting its presence in Eastern Europe in reaction to recent Russian advances. Western politicians have warned that the two sides could stumble into a situation that might result in war. Are such warnings excessive?
Karaganov: I was already speaking of a prewar situation eight years ago.
SPIEGEL: When the war in Georgia broke out.
Karaganov: Even then, trust between the great powers was trending toward zero. Russia began rearming its army and, since then, the situation has worsened considerably. We warned NATO against approaching the borders of Ukraine because that would create a situation that we cannot accept. Russia has stopped the Western advance in this direction and hopefully that means that the danger of a large war in Europe has been eliminated in the medium term. But the propaganda that is now circulating is reminiscent of the period preceding a new war.
SPIEGEL: You are hopefully referring to Russia.
Karaganov: The Russian media is more reserved than Western media. Though you have to understand that Russia is very sensitive about defense. We have to be prepared for everything. That is the source of this occasionally massive amount of propaganda. But what is the West doing? It is doing nothing but vilifying Russia; it believes that we are threatening to attack. The situation is comparable to the crisis at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s.
SPIEGEL: You are referring to the stationing of Soviet intermediate-range ballistic missiles and the American reaction?
Karaganov: Europe felt weak at the time and was afraid that the Americans might leave the continent. But the Soviet Union, though it had already become rotten internally, felt militarily strong and undertook the foolishness of deploying the SS-20 missiles. The result was a completely pointless crisis. Today, it is the other way around. Now, fears in countries like Poland, Lithuania and Latvia are to be allayed by NATO stationing weapons there. But that doesn’t help them; we interpret that as a provocation. In a crisis, we will destroy exactly these weapons. Russia will never again fight on its own territory …
SPIEGEL: Rather, if I understand you correctly, you will pursue the strategy of forward defense.
Karaganov: NATO is now 800 kilometers (497 miles) closer to the Russian border, weapons are completely different, strategic stability in Europe is shifting. Everything is much worse than it was 30 or 40 years ago.
SPIEGEL: Russian politicians, including President Vladimir Putin, are trying to convince their population that the West wants war in order to fragment Russia. But that’s absurd.
Karaganov: Certainly there has been some exaggeration. But American politicians have openly said that the sanctions are aimed at bringing about regime change in Russia. That’s aggressive enough.
SPIEGEL: The evening news on Russian television seems to be even further removed from reality. Even a Moscow-based newspaper recently wrote of the “illusion of an external threat.”
Karaganov: The political elite in Russia don’t want domestic reform, they aren’t ready for it. As such, they welcome an external threat. You have to remember that Russia rests on two national concepts: defense and sovereignty. We approach the question of security much more reverentially than other countries do.
SPIEGEL: Your council has presented foreign and defense policy premises that speak of reclaiming a position of leadership in the world. Russia, the message is clear, does not want to see its power eroded. But what proposals have you put forth?
Karaganov: We want to prevent further destabilization in the world. And we want the status of being a great power: We unfortunately cannot relinquish that. In the last 300 years, this status has become a part of our genetic makeup. We want to be the heart of greater Eurasia, a region of peace and cooperation. The subcontinent of Europe will also belong to this Eurasia.
SPIEGEL: Europeans see current Russian policy as being rather enigmatic. The intentions of the leadership in Moscow are unclear.
Karaganov: We currently find ourselves in a situation where we don’t trust you in the least, after all of the disappointments of recent years. And we are reacting accordingly. There is such a thing as tactical surprise. You should know that we are smarter, stronger and more determined.
SPIEGEL: The partial Russian withdrawal from Syria was a surprise, for example. You intentionally left the West guessing how many troops you were withdrawing and whether you would secretly redeploy some of them. Such tactics don’t exactly create trust.
Karaganov: That was masterful, that was fantastic. We take advantage of our preeminence in this area. Russians aren’t good at haggling, they aren’t passionate about business. But they are outstanding fighters. In Europe, you have a different political system, one that is unable to adapt to the challenges of the new world. The German chancellor said that our president lives in a different world. I believe he lives in a very real world.
SPIEGEL: It has been difficult to ignore the Russian pleasure at the problems Europe is currently facing. Why is that?
Karaganov: Many of my colleagues view our European partners with derision and I always warn them not to be cocky and arrogant. Some among the European elite have sought out confrontation with us. As a consequence, we won’t help Europe, although we could do so when it comes to the refugee question. A joint closure of borders would be essential. In this regard, the Russians would be 10 times more effective than the Europeans. Instead, you have tried to make a deal with Turkey. That is a disgrace. In the face of our problems with Turkey, we have pursued a clear, hard political line — with success.
SPIEGEL: You have said that you are disappointed with Europe because it has betrayed its Christian ideals. In the 1990s, Russia wanted to be part of Europe — but the Europe of Konrad Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle.
Karaganov: The majority of Europeans want that Europe too. For the next decades, Europe will not be a model that is attractive to Russia.
SPIEGEL: In its premises, your council demanded the use of military power when “important interests of the country are clearly” threatened. Ukraine was such an instance?
Karaganov: Yes. Or a concentration of troops that we felt posed the risk of war.
SPIEGEL: The stationing of NATO units in the Baltics isn’t sufficient?
Karaganov: This chatter that we intend to attack the Baltics is idiotic. Why is NATO stationing weapons and equipment there? Imagine what would happen to them in the case of a crisis. The help offered by NATO is not symbolic help for the Baltic states. It is a provocation. If NATO initiates an encroachment — against a nuclear power like ourselves — it will be punished.
SPIEGEL: On Wednesday, the NATO-Russia Council is to meet for the second time since the Crimean crisis. You also don’t think that a resumption of this dialogue platform is worthwhile?
Karaganov: It is no longer a legitimate body. Plus, NATO has become a qualitatively different alliance. When we began the dialogue with NATO, it was a defensive alliance of democratic powers. But then, the NATO-Russia Council served as cover for and the legalization of NATO expansion. When we really needed it — in 2008 and 2014 — it wasn’t there.
SPIEGEL: You mean during the Georgian war and the Ukraine conflict. In papers issued by your council, terms like national dignity, courage and honor often appear. Are those political categories?
Karaganov: They are essential Russian values. In Putin’s world, and in mine, it is inconceivable that women be harassed and raped in public.
SPIEGEL: Are you referring to the sexual assaults that took place in Cologne on New Year’s Eve?
Karaganov: If men were to do something like that in Russia, they would be killed. The mistake is that Germans and Russians haven’t spoken seriously about their own values in the last 25 years — or they didn’t want to understand each other on the topic. During Soviet times, we too claimed there were only universal values, just as the West is doing now. It scares me when the Europeans demand more and more democracy. It sounds like times past, when people here demanded more and more socialism.
SPIEGEL: Where do you think Russian foreign policy has gone wrong?
Karaganov: In recent years, we didn’t have a political strategy for dealing with our immediate neighbors, the former Soviet republics. We didn’t understand what was really happening there. The only thing we did was subsidize these countries and buy their elite — with money that was then stolen, likely together. As a result, it wasn’t possible to prevent the Ukraine conflict. The second problem: Our politics was focused for too long on fixing past mistakes — fixing the mistakes made in the 1990s.
SPIEGEL: In the Russian press, there has been some conjecture that Russia will send out signals of rapprochement following parliamentary elections in September. Is such conjecture justified?
Karaganov: We believe that Russia is morally in the right. There won’t be any fundamental concessions coming from our side. Psychologically, Russia has now become a Eurasian power — I was one of the intellectual fathers of the eastward pivot. But now I am of the opinion that we shouldn’t turn away from Europe. We have to find ways to revitalize our relations.