TBR News October 8, 2018

Oct 08 2018

The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Isaiah 40:3-8

Washington, D.C. October 8, 2018: “The following report is Russian in origin, part of a much larger file now in the process of being scanned for eventual Internet posting. It is concise and, as far as possible to determine, quite accurate:

‘Evaluation of Mr. Trump as an asset for Russian interests

Оценка г-на Трампа как актива для интересов России

Russian intelligence has had an interest in Donald Trump since the year 1977 when we received an alert from a sister unit in Prague.

He was described as impressionable young man with large ambitions and money from his family real estate business.

His marriage to a Czech woman whose father was an element in that countries’ intelligence agency brought him to our attention and we went to some lengths to ascertain his potential value for Russian interests.

The initial impression of Mr. Trump was that he was extremely self-important and egotistical to a remarkable degree.

As our first hand knowledge of him progressed it became evident that Mr. Trump fancied himself as a man to whom beautiful women were attracted.

That they were attracted to his money is more evident.

Although it is true he is a person with whom one could establish good business contacts, Mr. Trump was, and is, an overbearing and intolerant person.

He is subject to mood-swings in that what is acceptable today is not tomorrow.

He is easily led by women to whom he is initially very attentive and once he feels he had their purchased loyalty, proceeds to turn his attentions to other women.

It was our experience with Mr. Trump that by supplying him a number of beautiful Russian women, he became besotted and was willing to agree to almost any proposal presented to him.

As a businessman, Mr. Trump is erratic in the extreme. He owes very large sums of money, for example, to the Deutsche Bank, sums he somehow forgets to pay. He also owes large sums to Russian banks but in this case, he dare not neglect to pay.

Although he and President Putin got on well together, Mr. Trump’s promises ought to be taken very cautiously.

Mr. Trump is so convinced of his superiority to others and so easy to influence that promises to one person could easily be forgotten when making identical promises to another.

His current wife, Melanija Knavs, has produced a son and this boy, quite attractive, is the idol of his mother. She has stated to one of our people that she is not happy with her marriage because of her husband’s constant, and often very obnoxious, persuit of other women and does not want her young son to associate with his father lest he hear Mr. Trump’s constant flow of foul and obscene language or see him grab at some woman’s breasts.

She planned to divorce him and take her son back to Yugoslavia but the scandal would do so much damage to Mr. Trump’s public image that she was dissuaded from divorce by the payment of a large sum of money and promises on the part of Mr. Trump to let his wife rear and be responsible for his son.

Insofar as his use to Russian interests, this is problematical due to Mr.Trump’s disturbed personality. He does recall, however, that we released unpleasant material about Mrs. Clinton and that the same sort of material could very easily be released about him.

On the one hand, he has no problem taking Russian money for his businesses but on the other, he is susceptible to pressure from American power groups such as the Christian religious sector, Jewish groups and the military which have virtual control of current American politics and governance.’”

The Table of Contents

Donald Trump has said 2291 false things as U.S. president: No. 44
The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
Rioting in Germany Exposes the Growing Power of the Far Right
Trump’s Real-Estate Ambitions in Russia
British intelligence now officially a by-word for organized crime
At Secretive Retreat, Evangelicals Celebrate Brett Kavanaugh’s Confirmation
Religion as a means of political control

Donald Trump has said 2291 false things as U.S. president: No. 44

August 8, 2018

by Daniel Dale, Washington Bureau Chief

The Toronto Star, Canada

The Star is keeping track of every false claim U.S. President Donald Trump has made since his inauguration on Jan. 20, 2017. Why? Historians say there has never been such a constant liar in the Oval Office. We think dishonesty should be challenged. We think inaccurate information should be corrected

If Trump is a serial liar, why call this a list of “false claims,” not lies? You can read our detailed explanation here. The short answer is that we can’t be sure that each and every one was intentional. In some cases, he may have been confused or ignorant. What we know, objectively, is that he was not teling the truth.

Last updated: Aug 8, 2018

Dec 20, 2017

“I hate to say this, but we essentially repealed Obamacare, because we got rid of the individual mandate…that was a primary source of funding of Obamacare.”

Source: White House event celebrating passage of tax bill

in fact: The individual mandate is one part of Obamacare, but it is far from the entire thing. Trump did not touch Obamacare’s expansion of the Medicaid insurance program for low-income people, the federal and state Obamacare marketplaces that allow other uninsured people to buy insurance, and the subsidies that help many of them make the purchases. Nor did he touch various Obamacare rules for the insurance market, like its prohibition on insurers denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions. The very day after the tax law passed, the government announced that 8.8 million people had signed up for coverage through the federal marketplace, down by only 0.4 million from last year despite Trump’s efforts to dissuade people from signing up.

Trump has repeated this claim 11 times

“We are going to bring at least $4 trillion back into this country, money that was frozen overseas and in parts of the world, some of them don’t even like us, and they had the money. Well they’re not going to have the money long.”

Source: White House event celebrating passage of tax bill

in fact: Trump’s “$4 trillion” estimate is unsupported by any experts. The U.S. Joint Committee on Taxation released an estimate of $2.6 trillion in August 2016, and experts said they were not aware of a massive jump in the following 12 months. An October 2017 report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) also pegged the number at $2.6 trillion, while Goldman Sachs pegged it at $3.1 trillion the same month. “There’s no world in which it’s $4 trillion,” ITEP senior policy analyst Richard Phillips said in November. “I do not know of anyone who increased the estimate so much recently,” Steven Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, said in August. “Like many things, I assume he made this up on the fly,” said another expert on the subject, who requested anonymity, when Trump made an estimate of $5 trillion in August

Trump has repeated this claim 32 times

“One thing, very important for the farmers, the great farmers and the great small business owners that were forced to sell their businesses at bargain basement numbers: we have provided, for the most part, estate tax is wiped out, so they can keep their farms in the family, and that to me is a very big factor, very big.”

Source: White House event celebrating passage of tax bill

in fact: It is highly misleading to describe the estate tax, which applies only to the wealthiest people, as particularly important to farmers and small business owners. According to the Tax Policy Center, a mere 80 farms and small businesses are among the 5,460 estates likely to pay the estate tax in 2017. The Center writes on its website: “The Tax Policy Center estimates that small farms and businesses will pay $30 million in estate tax in 2017, fifteen hundredths of 1 percent of the total estate tax revenue.” In addition, the Republican tax bill did not “wipe out” the estate tax. Rather, it simply raised the threshold at which the tax kicks in — from $5.5 million to $11.2 million.

Trump has repeated this claim 13 times

“But when you add it all up together, and then you add two things — the individual mandate is being repealed. When the individual mandate is being repealed, that means Obamacare is being repealed because they get their money from the individual mandate…So in this bill, not only do we have massive tax cuts and tax reform, we have essentially repealed Obamacare.”

Source: Remarks at Cabinet meeting

in fact: Both parts of this claim are inaccurate. Repealing Obamacare’s individual mandate is not the same as repealing Obamacare: the individual mandate is one part of Obamacare, but it is far from the entire thing. Trump did not touch Obamacare’s expansion of the Medicaid insurance program for low-income people, the federal and state Obamacare marketplaces that allow other uninsured people to buy insurance, and the subsidies that help many of them make the purchases. Nor did he touch various Obamacare rules for the insurance market, like its prohibition on insurers denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions. Second, the individual mandate — which forces people to pay a penalty if they do not obtain health insurance — was not where “they get their money.” As the Associated Press reported: “The fines on people who don’t carry health insurance only provide a small fraction of the financing for the program. Most of the money comes from higher taxes on upper-income people, cuts in Medicare payments to service providers, and other tax increases. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that fines from uninsured people would total $3 billion this year, while the government’s cost for the coverage provided under the health law would total about $117 billion.”

Trump has repeated this claim 11 times

“One of the great things is bringing back, perhaps, $4 trillion back into our country; $4 trillion of money that we couldn’t get back because of our tax code and because of regulation. We were unable. That money now can flow back into our country and produce jobs and go into our companies where they want to spend it. They want to spend the money here. They weren’t allowed to.”

Source: Remarks at Cabinet meeting

Trump has repeated this claim 32 times

“Well, when we take people that are (diversity visa) lottery — they’re not putting their best people in the lottery. It’s commonsense. They’re not saying, ‘Oh, let’s take our best people and let’s put them into the lottery so that we can send them over to the United States. No. They put their worst people into the lottery. And that’s what we get, in many cases.”

Source: Remarks at Cabinet meeting

in fact: People who enter the U.S. visa-lottery program are not put in this lottery by the governments of their home countries: would-be immigrants sign up on their own, as individuals, of their own free will. Trump has consistently misrepresented the program by suggesting that foreign governments enter the worst of their citizens into it in order to dump them on the United States.

Trump has repeated this claim 21 times

“And through chain migration and through the lottery, the man that ran over people on the West Side Highway in Manhattan a month ago — two months ago — he came in through the visa lottery. We don’t want this group of people anymore. People met him in the neighborhood. They all said he was horrible — nasty, mean, wouldn’t talk to people. They could see it coming. They could actually see it coming. When they went back to his area where he lived, they could see it coming. They said, ‘What’s he doing here?'”

Source: Remarks at Cabinet meeting

in fact: Speaking to news reporters, neighbours of the accused terrorist, Sayfullo Saipov, mostly said they generally saw him as a calm and friendly presence. “Neighbors’ portrait of Sayfullo Saipov: A friendly, devoted dad,” read the headline in Newsday. “Soon after he moved to Paterson this summer, Saipov’s neighbors saw him as a calming presence,” NorthJersey.com reported. Trump’s remark contains kernels of truth: one neighbour said Saipov was unfriendly because he did not respond when people said hello to him, and another neighbour told the Washington Post that he had become suspicious in the weeks before the attack because Saipov appeared to be driving an empty truck around the area. But Trump’s claim that “they all said he was horrible” is inaccurate.

Trump has repeated this claim 3 times

“It makes the vast majority of family farms and small businesses exempt from the estate tax. The estate tax was killing the farmers. They were forced to sell farms at bargain-basement prices. They don’t have to do that anymore.”

Source: Remarks at Cabinet meeting

in fact: The estate tax, which applies only to the country’s wealthiest people, was not “killing the farmers”: only a tiny number of farmers qualify for it. According to the Tax Policy Center, a mere 80 farms and small businesses are among the 5,460 estates likely to pay the estate tax in 2017. The Center writes on its website: “The Tax Policy Center estimates that small farms and businesses will pay $30 million in estate tax in 2017, fifteen hundredths of 1 percent of the total estate tax revenue.”

Trump has repeated this claim 13 times

“So we’re going to have the Republican senators come over, we’re going to have the Republican members of the House come over. And we’re going to have a news conference.”

Source: Remarks at Cabinet meeting

in fact: Trump had not planned a news conference for later that day. Trump and other Republicans simply gave brief speeches celebrating the passage of their tax bill; nobody was allowed to ask questions.

Dec 21, 2017

“House Democrats want a SHUTDOWN for the holidays in order to distract from the very popular, just passed, Tax Cuts.”

Source: Twitter

in fact: Trump’s tax bill is highly unpopular. A CNN poll the week before the bill was passed found 33 per cent of people in favour, 55 per cent opposed; a Quinnipiac University poll the week prior found 26 per cent of people in favour, 55 per cent opposed; a Monmouth University poll that same week found 26 per cent in favour, 47 per cent opposed.

Trump has repeated this claim 2 times

Dec 22, 2017

“We’ve essentially repealed Obamacare.”

Source: Remarks at signing of tax bill

Trump has repeated this claim 11 times

“We’ve spent $7 trillion in the Middle East…$7 trillion.”

Source: Remarks at signing of tax bill

in fact: There is no basis for the “$7 trillion” figure. During the 2016 campaign, Trump cited a $6 trillion estimate that appeared to be taken from a 2013 report from Brown University’s Costs of War Project. (That report estimated $2 trillion in costs up to that point but said the total could rise an additional $4 trillion by 2053.) Trump, however, used the $6 trillion as if it was a current 2016 figure. He later explained that since additional time has elapsed since the campaign, he believes the total is now $7 trillion. That is incorrect. The latest Brown report, issued in late 2017, put the current total at $4.3 trillion, and the total including estimated future costs at $5.6 trillion.

Trump has repeated this claim 5 times

“Something very important to me: the family farmers and small business owners who lost their business because of the estate tax, most of them won’t have any estate tax to pay. It will be a great thing for their families: you can leave your farm to your family, you can leave your small business to your family…they’ll keep their farms and their businesses in the family.”

Source: Remarks at signing of tax bill

in fact: It is highly misleading to suggest that Trump’s tax bill will newly allow farmers to pass on their farms after their deaths without a financial penalty: amost all of them were already doing so. Even before Trump’s bill was passed, the estate tax applied only to the country’s wealthiest people, and only a tiny number of farmers qualified for it. According to the Tax Policy Center, a mere 80 farms and small businesses are among the 5,460 estates likely to pay the estate tax in 2017. The Center writes on its website: “The Tax Policy Center estimates that small farms and businesses will pay $30 million in estate tax in 2017, fifteen hundredths of 1 percent of the total estate tax revenue.”

Trump has repeated this claim 13 times

“Legislative approvals, for which I’m given no credit in the mainstream media, we have — I believe it’s 88. Which is number one in the history of our country…We have more legislative victories than any other president.”

Source: Remarks at signing of tax bill

in fact: Trump is not even close to a record for bills passed and signed — what he means when he says “legislative approvals” — at this point in a presidency. According to legislative tracking website GovTrack, Trump has the fewest bills signed of any president in the last 64 years: fewer than Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, H.W. Bush, Clinton, W. Bush, and Obama.

Trump has repeated this claim 19 times

“We’re going to bring back probably $4 trillion from overseas. Nobody knows the exact number, but it’s massive. It’ll be over $3 trillion. It could be $5 trillion…We think at least $4 trillion is going to be brought back.”

Source: Remarks at signing of tax bill

Trump has repeated this claim 32 times

“With all my Administration has done on Legislative Approvals (broke Harry Truman’s Record), Regulation Cutting, Judicial Appointments, Building Military, VA, TAX CUTS & REFORM, Record Economy/Stock Market and so much more, I am sure great credit will be given by mainstream news?”

Source: Twitter

in fact: Trump is not even close to a record for bills passed and signed — what he means when he says “legislative approvals” — at this point in a presidency. According to legislative tracking website GovTrack, Trump has the fewest bills signed of any president in the last 64 years: fewer than Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, H.W. Bush, Clinton, W. Bush, and Obama.

Trump has repeated this claim 19 times

“At some point, and for the good of the country, I predict we will start working with the Democrats in a Bipartisan fashion. Infrastructure would be a perfect place to start. After having foolishly spent $7 trillion in the Middle East, it is time to start rebuilding our country!”

Source: Twitter

Trump has repeated this claim 5 times

“Our big and very popular Tax Cut and Reform Bill has taken on an unexpected new source of ‘love’ – that is big companies and corporations showering their workers with bonuses.”

Source: Twitter

Trump has repeated this claim 2 times

Dec 23, 2017

“Remember, the Republicans are 5-0 in Congressional races this year.”

Source: Twitter

in fact: Republicans lost two congressional races in 2017: the high-profile Alabama Senate race, in which Democrat Doug Jones beat Republican Roy Moore, and a little-noticed race in California’s 34th House district, in which Democrat Jimmy Gomez beat a field largely consisting of other Democrats. Republicans lost that race so badly that none of them came close to qualifying for the runoff.

Trump has repeated this claim 9 times

“In Senate, I said Roy M would lose in Alabama and supported Big Luther Strange – and Roy lost. ”

Source: Twitter

in fact: Trump never said Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore would lose. He actually said, “Roy has a very good chance of not winning.” That statement falls far short of a prediction of defeat.

Trump has repeated this claim 3 times

“So many things accomplished by the Trump Administration, perhaps more than any other President in first year. Sadly, will never be reported correctly by the Fake News Media!”

Source: Twitter

in fact: Precisely how much Trump has accomplished or not accomplished is subjective, but there is no reasonable case that Trump accomplished more than every single other president in their first year. According to the legislative tracking website GovTrack, Trump signed fewer bills than any full-term president going back to Dwight Eisenhower. One of them was a major bill, his tax-cut legislation; Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed 15 major bills in his first 100 days alone. Trump frequently points to the excellent performance of the stock market in his first year, but it did better in Barack Obama’s first year. Other achievements, such as deregulation and the appointment of conservative judges, are far from enough to make Trump the most accomplished first-year president ever.

Trump has repeated this claim 19 times

“How can FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, the man in charge, along with leakin’ James Comey, of the Phony Hillary Clinton investigation (including her 33,000 illegally deleted emails) be given $700,000 for wife’s campaign by Clinton Puppets during investigation?”

Source: Twitter

in fact: Andrew McCabe was not given any money. Here’s what happened: Jill McCabe, his wife, was running for Virginia’s state Senate in 2015; her campaign received nearly $700,000 from political allies of Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe. McAuliffe is a close ally of Clinton, but the money was not hers, and there is no evidence she even knew of the donations. In addition, Andrew McCabe was not put in charge of the Clinton investigation until three months after his wife’s campaign ended.

Trump has repeated this claim 7 times

The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations

October 5, 2018

by Dr. Peter Janney

On October 8th, 2000, Robert Trumbull Crowley, once a leader of the CIA’s Clandestine Operations Division, died in a Washington hospital of heart failure and the end effects of Alzheimer’s Disease. Before the late Assistant Director Crowley was cold, Joseph Trento, a writer of light-weight books on the CIA, descended on Crowley’s widow at her town house on Cathedral Hill Drive in Washington and hauled away over fifty boxes of Crowley’s CIA files.

Once Trento had his new find secure in his house in Front Royal, Virginia, he called a well-known Washington fix lawyer with the news of his success in securing what the CIA had always considered to be a potential major embarrassment.

Three months before, on July 20th of that year, retired Marine Corps colonel William R. Corson, and an associate of Crowley, died of emphysema and lung cancer at a hospital in Bethesda, Md.

After Corson’s death, Trento and the well-known Washington fix-lawyer went to Corson’s bank, got into his safe deposit box and removed a manuscript entitled ‘Zipper.’ This manuscript, which dealt with Crowley’s involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, vanished into a CIA burn-bag and the matter was considered to be closed forever.

The small group of CIA officials gathered at Trento’s house to search through the Crowley papers, looking for documents that must not become public. A few were found but, to their consternation, a significant number of files Crowley was known to have had in his possession had simply vanished.

When published material concerning the CIA’s actions against Kennedy became public in 2002, it was discovered to the CIA’s horror, that the missing documents had been sent by an increasingly erratic Crowley to another person and these missing papers included devastating material on the CIA’s activities in South East Asia to include drug running, money laundering and the maintenance of the notorious ‘Regional Interrogation Centers’ in Viet Nam and, worse still, the Zipper files proving the CIA’s active organization of the assassination of President John Kennedy..

A massive, preemptive disinformation campaign was readied, using government-friendly bloggers, CIA-paid “historians” and others, in the event that anything from this file ever surfaced. The best-laid plans often go astray and in this case, one of the compliant historians, a former government librarian who fancied himself a serious writer, began to tell his friends about the CIA plan to kill Kennedy and eventually, word of this began to leak out into the outside world.

The originals had vanished and an extensive search was conducted by the FBI and CIA operatives but without success. Crowley’s survivors, his aged wife and son, were interviewed extensively by the FBI and instructed to minimize any discussion of highly damaging CIA files that Crowley had, illegally, removed from Langley when he retired. Crowley had been a close friend of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s notorious head of Counterintelligence. When Angleton was sacked by DCI William Colby in December of 1974, Crowley and Angleton conspired to secretly remove Angleton’s most sensitive secret files out of the agency. Crowley did the same thing right before his own retirement, secretly removing thousands of pages of classified information that covered his entire agency career.

Known as “The Crow” within the agency, Robert T. Crowley joined the CIA at its inception and spent his entire career in the Directorate of Plans, also know as the “Department of Dirty Tricks,”: Crowley was one of the tallest man ever to work at the CIA. Born in 1924 and raised in Chicago, Crowley grew to six and a half feet when he entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in N.Y. as a cadet in 1943 in the class of 1946. He never graduated, having enlisted in the Army, serving in the Pacific during World War II. He retired from the Army Reserve in 1986 as a lieutenant colonel. According to a book he authored with his friend and colleague, William Corson, Crowley’s career included service in Military Intelligence and Naval Intelligence, before joining the CIA at its inception in 1947. His entire career at the agency was spent within the Directorate of Plans in covert operations. Before his retirement, Bob Crowley became assistant deputy director for operations, the second-in-command in the Clandestine Directorate of Operations.

Bob Crowley first contacted Gregory Douglas in 1993 when he found out from John Costello that Douglas was about to publish his first book on Heinrich Mueller, the former head of the Gestapo who had become a secret, long-time asset to the CIA. Crowley contacted Douglas and they began a series of long and often very informative telephone conversations that lasted for four years. In 1996, Crowley told Douglas that he believed him to be the person that should ultimately tell Crowley’s story but only after Crowley’s death. Douglas, for his part, became so entranced with some of the material that Crowley began to share with him that he secretly began to record their conversations, later transcribing them word for word, planning to incorporate some, or all, of the material in later publications.

Conversation No. 101

Date: Tuesday, September 2, 1997
Commenced: 12:56 PM CST

Concluded: 1:20 PM CST

GD: Hello. What’s up today?

RTC: Good morning, Gregory. Another doctor’s visit scheduled for this PM. A damned nuisance but Emily insists. I am not feeling all that well, what with my bad hip and a tendency to misjudge my feet and then falling. I should use a cane in the house but I don’t feel I am ready for a walker yet. Other than those small things, I’m fine. And yourself?

GD: I am also fine. However, dealing with your feeble-minded scumbag friends is getting to be quite a bore. Jesus, what a pack of morons and they have many allies. People like Kimmel who is outraged that a terrible person like myself is interacting with you. He thinks you’re getting gaga and might spill terrible things to me. And, of course, I am a terrible, disrespectful person who, God knows, might blow the gaff on something horrible. And poor Bill wants to run with the hares and hunt with the hounds. When he gets going, it sounds like a Kirby vacuum cleaner what with all the suction.

RTC: Well, the Company people do not like you and yes, they dragged the FBI into it for the reason they are not supposed to operate inside this country. Of course we did, and do, but that is not important. You see, you are considered, as Kimmel says, a loose cannon. No one questions your intelligence, although they publicly question your sanity and character, but they can’t control you. The drill is that these people have gotten to believe that they, and they alone, have the control and the ability to control and that the rest of the peonage are stupid sheep who pay their salaries. And then you come along and rattle their cages. And they try to intimidate you and then realize that doing this only stimulates you to more noise-making so they back off and think of other ways to get at you and shut you up. They also believe that you are in possession or at least control of certain dangerous documents that could cause havoc in certain circles if you ever even hinted at them so they have to make sure you don’t commit unsocial acts. And by unsocial acts I mean shake their trees. Of course they would never just sit down and talk to you like the Army did. We used to do this in the early days but now that we basically control the media and our foreign policy, we have decided that we are far too omniscient and important to descend to actually communicating with our social inferiors. So they turn their pimps and whores loose on you and try to besmirch you to the point where no one will believe you.

GD: They could have one of these sycophants sue me, couldn’t they” Tie me up in endless and devastatingly expensive court litigation? Shut me up that way?
RTC: No, Gregory, because that would codify their fears and might, horrible to contemplate, draw public attention to you. No, you have carte blanche to do as you like and they won’t interfere for fear of the publicity. But, of course, by getting into the Kennedy killing, you will be taking on a whole hog-pen of functioning idiots and fanatics. The Company or Phoebe won’t have to do a thing. Hell, we control some of them…the Farrell woman is ours…and if they attack you, why our hands are clean. I mean you will have far more trouble from these creeps that you ever would have with us. Some self-important twit has a pet theory and supporters thereof and if you dare to publish a word that questions their invented idiot shit, why they will come down upon you, screaming like a drag queen and swinging their purses. Hell, Gregory, if I were you, I would be more concerned about the Jews and the Kennedy nuts than us.

GD: The Jews?

RTC: Oh yes, the vulgar Hebrews again. See, if it gets out and accepted that our government hired all the Nazis they did, why the Jews will have to start wailing and screeching about how dare we do this to them. To them is the operative word here. I mean, how dare you contradict the needs of a Jew? Why, these are God’s very own people, aren’t they? God’s chosen ones?

GD: Well, if you believe the silly holocaust stories, one would have to believe that God chose the Jews to stand in line for the showers.

RTC: (Laughter) Ah yes, the famous showers. But you see the fact that Jews will come after you. Some because only they can moan about their fates and many more to suck up to officialdom, an officialdom that for now at least is dominated by white Christians. It just gets worse..

GD: Well, when Kennedy was running, the Protestants swore that if he got elected, the Pope would move into the White House, or at least Cardinal Cushing. Of course this did not happen but what does the Jew hope for? Their beach blanket flag flying over the Capitol?

RTC: Certainly. They work their way into the system and rise up quickly, gaining influence as they go because they are very clever and our stupid ones get to rely on their intelligence.

GD: Poisoned intelligence. Onwards and upwards. Jesus, if the Jewish community and the art world…actually the same…ever found out what I got from Mueller before he died, and especially what I am doing with it, they would get Congress to pass a law against me.

RTC: What’s that? Something new here?
GD: Yes, actually so. See, I don’t know if you are aware of it but during the war, the Germans looted billions of dollars of art from all over Europe. Hitler wanted to set up a huge museum complex in his home town of Linz and all the Nazi brass fall all over each other to gain the Fuehrer’s interest by stealing from museums, private collections, churches and so on. Billions. And after the war, people like Tommy Howe and others went around to the vast, underground caves and brought out tons of loot. The more important pieces, or the best known, were returned. At least most of them were. I know of a certain Raphael that old Frank brought back from Poland that the Gestapo bagged and Muller had hanging up in his elegant pad in Piedmont. That’s in a safe place and the Polacks will never get it back, believe me. Anyway, Mueller started selling some of this loot that your people took away from the Army after ’48. Did you know about this supplementary income?

RTC: Yes. Go on, please do.

GD: Well, Heini set up a little organization and began to peddle some of this, as I said for cash for your off the books activities. Naturally, he kept his share in front. He had a large garage in Piedmont stuffed full of it. I mentioned the Jews because most of the post-Impressionist pieces came from Jewish collectors. Of course, some of the older pieces too. I saw the Rothschild collection of gold coins before Heini sold it off and I must say it was delightful to look at. And some Russian treasures looted form Tsarskoe Selo…I mean the old Imperial Russian complex south of St. Petersburg….

RTC: In Florida?

GD: Now, Robert, not in Florida, in Russia. The Communists changed it to Pushkin…Let me go on. And items from monasteries all over Europe, especially from Italy after Mussolini fell from power in ’43 and the Germans occupied the country. Von Senger did rescue the very valuable,,. priceless…library from Monte Cassino before Roosevelt ordered it bombed to powder. But a lot of other art loot went to Germany indeed. Anyway, Heini found out I was an art-restorer at one time and knew a good deal about the subject so we got along just fine although I must admit when he took me to his storage facility and turned on the lights, I very nearly had an involuntary bowel movement on the spot. If the Russians, the Italians, the French or the Poles ever saw what was there, there would be a sound like an approaching freight train. Jesus, the uproar, the demands, and on the part of the Jews, wails of possessive anguish. Everyone else would fade away before their wrath…and their demands. No, when Heini died, I made sure the storage warehouse was cleared out and secured elsewhere. You see, his second wife knew nothing about any of this because he didn’t burden her with the knowledge. And if she found it, naturally, she would try to sell it and then these people would come down, howling with rage and armed with legal papers. We couldn’t have that so I executed Heini’s very firm request. Do you know how Mexicans keep the flies out of their bedrooms, Robert?

RTC: Not offhanded but I am certain you will enlighten me.

GD: Oh, always, Robert. Simple. They shit in the hall.

RTC: (Laughter) So very incorrect.

GD: Ah, but so accurate, Robert. In the hall. In huge, festering heaps. Fly nurseries. So we removed what attracts flies and other vermin. Anyway, the post-Impressionist junk started getting sold off, discreetly here and there. Of course the easily recognizable pieces are a different matter although a great amount of things from Catherine the Greats’ palace were relatively easy to peddle, I wouldn’t want to be too public about things from Warsaw or Rome, or even Florence.

And art is entirely subjective. The picture I spoke of earlier by Raphael is a portrait of someone who looks like a raging faggot dressed in a loose blouse and looking for all the world as if he just left a Castro Street bathhouse after an evening of bumbusting. But effeminate men were the ideal when Raphael worked. Now, we have Jackson Pollock who used to spread art canvas on his garage floor, climb up a ladder and toss the contents of various cans of paint he scrounged from the neighbors at yard sales or from the public dump, toss them here and there while giggling to himself. Then, when the enamels dried, he would cut the canvas into sections, mount the sections on stretchers, stick idiot names on each and sell them to the pea brained who considered them art. Now that Pollock is dead, the prices are rising beyond all belief. I personally think Claude Monet and Singer Sargent were the last really good artists of our time. Nowadays, some orange-haired pimp splatters paint all over a canvas and the tasteless rich rush to buy it. It’s better for the dealers if the artist is dead. Probably if he died of an overdose of heroin in a male bathhouse. It takes about a century to winnow the wheat from the chaff and then the trashy art and equally trashy writing falls away and a few beautiful works emerge. Of course, by that time, the idiots are all mooning after someone who plops his hairy ass down on a pallet and then sits on a canvas. Moon over Miami, which, along with Skokie and most of Westchester County is where all the trash ends up. Ah, one must be careful, Robert. For example, I know about a certain cartouche from the Amber Room. Yes. The Prussian state eagle in amber. Heini liked it and so do I.

RTC: Do?

GD: We don’t need to go into semantics. We’ve been going into Semitics all morning here.

RTC: (Laughter) Yes, absolutely. And if they get it into their heads that sacred Jewish treasures are in the hands of the unbelieving, and worse, these treasures are actually worth money, my God, you will have mobs of livid Hebrews chanting in front of your house.

GD: That’s what fire hoses are for, Robert. To put out fires and also to clean off trash from the sidewalks. Anyway, I suppose you don’t know it but I have bank accounts all over Europe and very nice properties in Germany, France and Italy and all filled with lovely pieces. Oh, if I had to depend on selling books, none of that would have happened. And I do enjoy occasional forays into the world of fine art. I really ought to say successful forays because I always return from the hunt with a full game bag or, in my case, more money to enjoy in my retirement years.

RTC: But supposing they are listening to this? Couldn’t someone go to banks and ask about your accounts?
GD: Robert, I had ten different passports and more passable identities than you could guess at. The Foggybottom freaks tried for years to find out whatever negative they could about me so they could nail me and they had to give up. As an aside, one of their investigators started in on me with all the smarmy subtlety of a fart in a spacesuit and I lured him to a site loaded with illegal products and the local authorities, whom I tipped off, nailed him as he was carrying what he thought was devastating evidence against me in sealed boxes, but actually was something entirely different, out to his car. He screamed for help but it didn’t do him any good. Lost his job, his house and got four years in the can for it. Oh my, did I laugh at that one.

RTC: Gregory, naughty boy. Ah, the State people are such mindless assholes anyway.

GD: I sent him sympathy cards from time to time. Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth. What? Fuck them all, Robert. And I would burn the paintings before I gave any of them back, believe it.

RTC: I would tend to believe that, Gregory. I should imagine you are entirely capable of such an act. What they don’t know, they can do nothing about, right?
GD: Oh yes, right. And you can visit me any time at my nice villa in Italy. Partially paid for, one might guess, with the profits from selling looted Italian art. Oh, and Russian and Polish as well. And Heini kept meticulous records which I have and if your people, or anyone else, ever tried to push me, records I would gleefully publish. My, oh my, the American museums, the private collections, the major art auction houses and so on, would be so wonderfully compromised. I love it…

RTC: Yes, but they don’t

GD: No, Robert they really don’t. Most of them are so stupid they couldn’t find either end of themselves in a dark room. You doubt me? Look at some of their children. Either end, Robert, either end. These punks always have to buy new pants because they keep wearing out the knees crawling around on the floor like Mongoloids, while in pursuit of the contents of the cat’s latrine.

RTC: Now, now, you might be speaking about my people.

GD: The ones who harassed you? The ones who harassed Angleton? Those friends? The ones who come to see you and support you now that you have retired? Those friends, Robert?

RTC: Ah, well you have a point there, Gregory. And to use one of your crude expressions, fuck them all. And if they ever find out that I have had my Greg ship off sizzling papers to you, they would certainly renew old friendships.

GD: Wouldn’t you enjoy having so many old friends crowding into your house, Robert? They would shit on the floors and steal anything of value and after molesting your wife and the cat. No, you should follow in my footsteps and leave sleeping dogs, or pigs, lie, Right?
GD: Yes, I reluctantly have to agree with you. Could I have a nice Rembrandt for my living room, Gregory? If and when I die, Emily could have a useful farewell gift.

GD: There were three of his and they have all been sold. How about a Picasso? There are dozens of those. I hate to have to look at Picasso. Or Klee. Or Miro. ‘Oh, Myron! Buy the Picasso! It matches the drapes!’

RTC: (Laughter) Where is the taste with these people?
GD: Up the ass, Robert, up the ass. Along with that wondrous zucchini Aunt Bella shoplifted from the supermarket last month. And always remember, Robert,that Malthus was right and when we run out of food and water, we can start eating each other. I believe the French perfected this technique some time ago but then both parties lived to tell about it. Given some of the fatties I’ve seen waddling around town here, if famine ever strikes, they had best barricade themselves in the root cellar with a shotgun because some of these jiggling lovelies would feed a family of six for a month. Well, it will be back to the caves for the survivors and what will a Picasso be worth then?

(.Concluded at 1:20 PM CST)

Rioting in Germany Exposes the Growing Power of the Far Right

There is now a spirit of mutual accommodation among neo-Nazis, parts of mainstream political parties, and the police.

September 7, 2018

by Jordan Stancil

The Nation

After rioting in the eastern-German city of Chemnitz on August 26 and 27 by neo-Nazis and other forces of the extreme right, many observers are questioning whether far-right sympathies among the security forces allowed things to get out of hand.

The riots broke out in the wake of a fatal stabbing in the city (with a population of about 250,000, it’s the third-largest in Saxony, after Leipzig and Dresden) in the early morning hours of Sunday, August 26, during a brawl at the tail end of a street festival. Two men, an Iraqi and a Syrian, were arrested, and a news website, Tag24, reported that the victim, a German-Cuban man, had been killed while trying to protect a woman from sexual assault. More reputable German media have said that the Tag24 report was false. The details of the incident remain unclear, but the fact of the stabbing and the arrest of two foreigners provided a pretext for the right-wing violence that followed.

The way these riots developed illustrates how right-wing groups and parties in Germany interact, and how they are creating, all together, a sharp rightward shift in the country’s political climate. The first group on the scene was organized by the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which is today the largest opposition party in the German parliament. At 3 o’clock on Sunday afternoon, the AfD gathered about a hundred people peacefully in the city center, but they left after an hour because, according to one of their officials, they did not want to mix with the more violent group that was coming on the scene next.

This next group included Kaotic Chemnitz, a band of soccer hooligans. They came out to riot, not to demonstrate. The hooligans were able to mobilize about 800 people, who showed up around 4:30; video emerged online that appeared to show rioters chasing down people perceived to be immigrants. Chancellor Angela Merkel condemned the “hounding” of people in the streets of Chemnitz, while the police seemed unable to control the situation.

The following day, August 27, a much larger right-wing rally occurred—this time with about 6,000 participants and about 1,000 left-wing counter-demonstrators—organized by a small local political party called Pro Chemnitz, which has three seats on the city council. Participating openly in this rally were neo-Nazi groups such as Third Way, the National Socialists of Chemnitz, and the NPD, a racist political party. The police appeared even more outmanned than they had been on Sunday, with the right-wing forces able at times to actually attack and break through police lines. Eighteen rioters and two police officers were reported injured.

Demonstrations surrounding the stabbing and the response to it continued to roil Chemnitz through the following weekend, with an anti-Nazi leftist rock concert attracting 65,000 people on September 3, dwarfing the right-wing crowds. Two days before, on September 1, an AfD rally had attracted only 4,500 people, who faced 4,000 counter-demonstrators. But even from a position of numerical weakness, the far right seems to be setting the agenda.

The groups that fuel the violence range from the soccer hooligans to a variety of banned or legally questionable neo-Nazi parties and movements. Some of these groups try to distance themselves from the others for tactical reasons, although they all work toward the same disorderly result. Some of the hooligans are just out for violence, and there was some speculation that Kaotic Chemnitz might have rallied because the victim of the stabbing seems to have been an active soccer fan. Some of the demonstrators might not be participants in Nazi or other right-wing parties, and could very well be voters of mainstream parties. But they buy into the idea that the “Volk” has to protect itself from perceived rising crime linked to immigration.

If the groups in the street are responsible for staging violence and chaos, political parties like the AfD, the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU), and even some parts of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) are responsible for helping to encourage, excuse, condone, or accommodate their activities.

So even as we saw the AfD withdraw from the public square in Chemnitz in order to avoid association with the soccer hooligans of Kaotic Chemnitz, one of the AfD’s leaders, Alice Weidel, posted on Facebook on Monday that the stabbing had proved that “the slaughter [by immigrants] continues.” Then there was the tweet by Markus Frohnmaier, an AfD politician who is a member of the German parliament. Frohnmaier’s tweet, issued as a mob was chasing down random nonwhite passersby in the streets of a major German city, said: “When the state can no longer protect its citizens, people will go into the streets and protect themselves. Very simple! Today it is the obligation of the citizen to stop the death-bringing ‘knife migration.’ It could have been your father, son, or brother!”

This tweet went too far, according to another AfD parliamentarian, Jens Maier from Dresden, which was a bit rich since Maier himself has been in trouble for saying that Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik, who killed more than 70 people, was just acting out of “desperation” over high levels of immigration. In any event, the AfD’s co-chairman, Alexander Gauland, praised Frohnmaier’s tweet, saying that “self-defense is not vigilante justice.” The AfD leadership then issued a statement arguing that the problem was the media’s focus on justifiable rioting and not on the stabbing that unleashed it.

Meanwhile, federal Interior Minister Horst Seehofer of the CSU said nothing about the riots until Tuesday, when they were already over. He then expressed, in a statement, his “understanding” of the “dismay of the population”—as though the riots had been a spontaneous outpouring of sympathy for the stabbing victim when they were obviously a well-organized, well-choreographed display of far-right mob violence, driven by a set of actors known to Seehofer’s own ministry for their anti-constitutional, violent, and fascistic agendas. In this context, Seehofer’s pro forma condemnation of “calls to violence or violent rioting” seemed worse than unconvincing.

The ugly truth is that there seems to be in Germany a spirit of mutual accommodation among the neo-Nazis, parts of the mainstream right-wing political parties, the AfD, and even the police. A number of incidents from the past several months point in this direction.

For example, a prison guard in Dresden leaked to right-wing agitators the arrest warrant of one of the suspects in the August 26 stabbing, with enough gory details about the violent crime to fuel a lynch-mob mentality. The warrant appeared on the social-media sites of various provocateurs, including that of Lutz Bachmann, a founder of Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West (PEGIDA), which has been holding anti-migrant marches in Dresden since October 2014. This leak, which was illegal, appears to have helped fuel public anger about the incident.

The premier of Saxony, Michael Kretschmer, of Merkel’s CDU, then tweeted, à la Trump, that as far as he could see, “The only upstanding people in this video [of the incident] are the cops.” Although Kretschmer has strongly condemned the rioting in Chemnitz, he had seemed much more ambivalent about this other incident just a couple of weeks earlier. It is certainly possible that while composing his pro-police tweet, he had, somewhere in the back of his mind, thoughts of next year’s state elections in Saxony, especially with recent polling showing the AfD hard on his heels.

Another example: Earlier in the summer, a tell-all book by a young former AfD member alleged that Hans-Georg Maassen, the head of Germany’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution, an internal security service designed to monitor and stop dangerous political extremists, had met with then-AfD leader Frauke Petry (who is no longer in the party) to advise her on how the party could avoid monitoring. Maassen has denied offering such advice, but there have been calls for a parliamentary investigation.

In July, the trial of a neo-Nazi terror group, the National Socialist Underground (NSU), came to what victims’ advocates and many analysts found to be a very unsatisfying conclusion. The NSU committed 10 murders, two bomb attacks, and several bank robberies between 2000 and 2011. But only one person was charged with (and convicted of) the murders, along with just four others convicted of lesser offenses, leaving serious questions as to who else knew about the crimes—and protected the perpetrators. And in April, in response to a parliamentary inquiry, the German army reported that it was investigating 431 cases of illegal extreme-right activity within its ranks.

The inadequate police response to the rioting in Chemnitz also makes one wonder whether state and local officials are really willing to stand up to right-wing violence. These questions were made even more urgent when it became known, shortly after the riots, that the Office for the Protection of the Constitution had sent warnings to the Chemnitz police that thousands of rightists were going to descend on the city that evening. But the police still let themselves be outmanned by about 10 to one.

The politics of “law and order” play an interesting role in all of this. One of the AfD’s main talking points is that the Merkel government’s immigration policy is “illegal,” that it represents the destruction of the rule of law. The CSU’s Seehofer, though a member of Merkel’s cabinet, has made the same point, most famously in his attack on Merkel for creating “the rule of un-law” (Herrschaft des Unrechts) by allowing unknown migrants into the country.

The idea that the state is somehow not in control in Germany has thus spread far beyond the confines of the extreme-right fringe. In a nationally televised talk show in early July, Giovanni di Lorenzo, the editor in chief of the prestigious left-leaning weekly Die Zeit, summed up and endorsed this view: “There’s an impression of indifference [among the authorities], and from this indifference has developed an impression that the political center is somehow weak.”

Right-wing riots like those in Chemnitz reinforce this impression and are also fueled by it. The rioters are seen as not really at fault for the violence and disorder they create; instead, they are seen as a symptom of the decay of law and order, where the only solution is to give the rioters what they want. This dynamic was on display in the early 1990s, when a series of pogroms against foreigners and asylum seekers helped push the center-left to accept changes that weakened Germany’s asylum law.

The clearest example of how the right-wing framing of the problem can take hold far beyond the political fringes was the comment by Wolfgang Kubicki, deputy chairman of the Free Democratic Party. Kubicki said, “The roots of the riots lie in the ‘we can handle it’ of Chancellor Angela Merkel,” referring to Merkel’s famous assertion that Germany would be able to welcome the wave of refugees that arrived in 2015 and 2016. Now, the FDP is a classically liberal party that prides itself as being pro-business and pro–civil liberties, and Kubicki’s comment was criticized by the chairman of the party, Christian Lindner, and by the leader of the party’s youth wing, Ria Schröder. But if we are debating whether the violence of a Nazi mob was or was not caused by the presence of “too many” foreigners, or whether it is or is not acceptable to riot in “self-defense” when a nonwhite person commits a violent crime, then the extreme right has already won.

And of course we must not ask too many questions about the roots of neo-Nazi violence in eastern states like Saxony. As Christian Hirte, the CDU politician who is the German government’s top official for eastern affairs, reminded everyone in the wake of the Chemnitz riots, Saxony and the good Saxons “deserve our support and not a lecture.” Hirte is undoubtedly correct that there are many good people in Saxony, just like there are everywhere else. Now it’s time for them to show up.

Trump’s Real-Estate Ambitions in Russia

August 29, 2017

by Ryan Lizza

The New Yorker

On October 11, 2015, four months after Donald Trump entered the Presidential race, he offered a notable compliment for Vladimir Putin. At the time, Russia was facing increasing international isolation—and was under economic sanctions—over Putin’s seizure of Crimea and meddling in eastern Ukraine. Earlier that month, President Obama had condemned Putin’s air strikes in Syria. “I think that I would probably get along with him very well,” Trump said of Putin on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” without offering any criticism of the Russian leader. Many wondered why Trump, while running for the Presidential nomination of the anti-Russia Republican Party, was being so obsequious toward a former K.G.B. spy, who has a long record of human-rights abuses.

Perhaps we now have a clue. On October 28, 2015, about two weeks after that interview, Trump signed a letter of intent to build a Trump-branded building in Moscow, according to the Washington Post.

The long-distance romance continued after the letter was signed. Putin reciprocated Trump’s praise in December, calling Trump a “talented person” and “the absolute leader of the Presidential race.” Trump responded with a prepared statement. “It is always a great honor to be so nicely complimented by a man so highly respected within his own country and beyond,” Trump said. “I have always felt that Russia and the United States should be able to work well with each other towards defeating terrorism and restoring world peace, not to mention trade and all of the other benefits derived from mutual respect.”

The encomiums to the Russian President kept coming in the following weeks. In one of the most shocking statements of his campaign (a high bar), Trump seemed to defend Putin allegedly ordering the murder of journalists. “He’s running his country and at least he’s a leader, unlike what we have in this country,” the candidate said on MSNBC, on December 18th. He added, “I think our country does plenty of killing also.”

The Trump Organization’s efforts to build in Moscow finally fell apart, in late January, 2016, because, according to the Post, “they lacked the land and permits to proceed.” But, despite this failure, Trump’s pursuit of the deal while he was campaigning on a platform of friendlier relations with the Russian President—a foreign adversary who controlled the deal’s fate—is scandalous, even without any other context. And additional details, unearthed this week by the Times and the Post, about the Trump Organization’s attempts to secure the deal make the scandal far worse.

As the Times reported, in September, 2015, Felix Sater, the longtime Trump Organization associate who brought the company real-estate deals—including Trump’s SoHo hotel, which was built by Russian developers—e-mailed Michael Cohen, who was then the company’s executive vice-president, pitching a Trump development in Moscow in terms that tied together Trump’s business interests and his political ambitions. “I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected,” Sater wrote. “We both know no one else knows how to pull this off without stupidity or greed getting in the way. I know how to play it and we will get this done. Buddy our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putins [sic] team to buy in on this, I will.”

According to the Post, in mid-January, not long after Trump made his remarks about the murder of journalists, Cohen tried to engage the assistance of Putin’s confidant and spokesman, Dmitry Peskov. “Over the past few months I have been working with a company based in Russia regarding the development of a Trump Tower-Moscow project in Moscow City,” he wrote, to Peskov’s publicly available e-mail address. “Without getting into lengthy specifics, the communication between our two sides has stalled. As this project is too important, I am hereby requesting your assistance.”

These revelations present two obvious problems for the President. First, Trump was taking a policy position—one deeply at odds with his own party—that would benefit him personally. It’s a startling conflict of interest. Second, his statements and actions, and those of his subordinates and their associates pursuing the deal, may fuel the obstruction-of-justice inquiry against Trump that the special counsel, Robert Mueller, began pursuing this spring, after the firing of the F.B.I. director, James Comey. The more it looks like Trump had something to cover up, the stronger an obstruction charge would be.

Meanwhile, as Russia maintains its hold over Crimea, continues its intervention in eastern Ukraine, and flies fighter jets without transponders over the Baltics, the President still refuses to single it out as a notable threat. “I consider many countries as a security threat,” he said on Monday at the White House, when asked by a Finnish reporter about the Russian jets. Trump added, “Hopefully, we won’t have to handle them, but if we do, we will handle them.”

British intelligence now officially a by-word for organized crime

October 8, 2018

by John Wight

An intelligence service given free rein to commit ‘serious crimes’ in its own country is an intelligence service that is the enemy of its people.

The quite astounding revelation that Britain’s domestic intelligence service, MI5, has enjoyed this very freedom for decades has only just been made public at a special tribunal in London, set up to investigate the country’s intelligence services at the behest of a coalition of human rights groups, alleging a pattern of illegality up to and including collusion in murder.

The hitherto MI5 covert policy sanctioning its agents to commit and/or solicit serious crimes, as and when adjudged provident, is known as the Third Direction. This codename has been crafted, it would appear, by someone with a penchant for all things James Bond within an agency whose average operative is more likely to be 5’6” and balding with a paunch and bad teeth than any kind of lantern-jawed 007.

The Pat Finucane Centre, one of the aforementioned human rights groups involved in bringing about this tribunal investigation (Investigatory Powers Tribunal, to give it its Sunday name) into the nefarious activities of Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, issued a damning statement in response to the further revelation that former Prime Minister David Cameron introduced oversight guidelines with regard to the MI5 covert third direction policy back in 2012.

Cameron’s decision to do so, the group claims, was far from nobly taken:

“It can be no coincidence that Prime Minister David Cameron issued new guidelines, however flawed, on oversight of MI5 just two weeks before publication of the De Silva report into the murder of Pat Finucane. The PM was clearly alive to the alarming evidence which was about to emerge of the involvement of the Security Service in the murder. To date no-one within a state agency has been held accountable. The latest revelations make the case for an independent inquiry all the more compelling.”

Pat Finucane, a Belfast Catholic, plied his trade as a human rights lawyer at a time when the right to be fully human was denied the minority Catholic community of the small and enduring outpost of British colonialism in the north east corner of Ireland, otherwise known as Northern Ireland. He was murdered by loyalist paramilitaries in 1989, back when the decades-long conflict euphemistically referred to as the Troubles still raged, claiming victims both innocent and not on all sides.

Unlike the vast majority of those killed and murdered in the course of this brutal conflict, Finucane’s murder sparked a long and hard fought struggle for justice by surviving family members, friends and campaigners. They allege – rather convincingly, it should be said – that it was carried out with the active collusion of MI5.

Stepping back and casting a wider view over this terrain, the criminal activities of Britain’s intelligence services constitute more than enough material for a book of considerable heft. How fortunate then that just such a book has already been written.

In his ‘Dead Men Talking: Collusion, Cover Up and Murder in Northern Ireland’s Dirty War’, author Nicholas Davies “provides information on a number of the killings [during the Troubles], which were authorized at the highest level of MI5 and the British government.”

But over and above the crimes of MI5 in Ireland, what else have those doughty defenders of the realm been up to over the years? After all, what is the use of having a license to engage in serious criminal activity, including murder and, presumably, torture, if you’re not prepared to use (abuse) it? It begs the question of how many high profile deaths attributed to suicide, natural causes, and accident down through the years have been the fruits of MI5 at work?

And what about the possibility of MI5’s involvement in, dare we use the term, false flag operations?

As someone who abhors the premise of conspiracy theory on principle, the fact that more and more are turning to its warm embrace as an intellectual reflex against what is politely described as the ‘official narrative’ of events, well this is no surprise when we learn of the egregious machinations of Western intelligence agencies such as Britain’s MI5.

What we are bound to state, doing so without fear of contradiction, is this particular revelation opens up a veritable Pandora’s Box of grim possibilities when it comes to the potential crimes committed by Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, ensuring that a full and vigorous investigation and public inquiry is now both necessary and urgent.

If any such investigation is to be taken seriously, however, it must include in its remit the power to investigate all possible links between Britain’s intelligence community and organisations such as, let’s see, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group?

The deafening UK mainstream media and political class silence over the trail connecting 2017 Manchester Arena suicide bomber Salman Abedi and MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence agency, leaves a lingering stench of intrigue that will not out. The work of investigative journalist Mark Curtis on this sordid relationship is unsurpassed.

As Curtis writes, “The evidence suggests that the barbaric Manchester bombing, which killed 22 innocent people on May 22nd, is a case of blowback on British citizens arising at least partly from the overt and covert actions of British governments.”

In the same report he arrives at a conclusion both damning and chilling: “The evidence points to the LIFG being seen by the UK as a proxy militia to promote its foreign policy objectives. Whitehall also saw Qatar as a proxy to provide boots on the ground in Libya in 2011, even as it empowered hardline Islamist groups.”

Finally: “Both David Cameron, then Prime Minister, and Theresa May – who was Home Secretary in 2011 when Libyan radicals were encouraged to fight Qadafi [Muammar Gaddafi] – clearly have serious questions to answer. We believe an independent public enquiry is urgently needed.”

In words that echo down to us from ancient Rome, the poet Juvenal taunts our complacency with a question most simple and pertinent: “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” Who will guard the guards themselves?

Edward R Murrow puts it rather more bluntly: “A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.”

Sooner or later, people in Britain are going to have to wake up to who the real enemy is.

At Secretive Retreat, Evangelicals Celebrate Brett Kavanaugh’s Confirmation

October 7, 2018

by Lee Fang

The Intercept

As the Senate prepared to vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court on Saturday afternoon, evangelical Christian leaders were gathered at a secretive retreat in North Carolina to plan the conservative movement’s path forward.

The Council for National Policy, which operates covertly and brings together faith-based conservatives to discuss political strategy, was holding a planning meeting in a second-floor ballroom at the Westin hotel in Charlotte when the Senate confirmed President Donald Trump’s second Supreme Court pick by a 50-48 vote.

After a tumultuous few weeks in which Kavanaugh was accused of sexual assault, the group had remained cautious until the final moments, several participants told The Intercept. Following the Senate’s procedural vote on Kavanaugh’s nomination on Friday, the CNP attendees gathered that evening during dinner to pray that victory was near.

Their prayers, it seems, were answered. Kavanaugh’s confirmation cemented a decadeslong push to cement a conservative majority on the high court, an objective long desired by the CNP.

The agenda for the event featured a veritable who’s who of Christian conservatives, including Ginni Thomas, the spouse of Justice Clarence Thomas; U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley; former Sen. Jim DeMint, the former president of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank; pollster Frank Luntz; and Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, who is seeking a leadership role in the House after Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., retires this year.

The three-day event, which started on Friday, was held largely under the radar. It was closed to the media, attendees were forbidden from recording its proceedings, and even its location was a strictly guarded secret. The Intercept was barred from approaching the areas of the hotel at which the conference was being held, but we were able to interview some attendees in the lobby outside.

To CNP founding member and Texas oil fortune heir T. Cullen Davis, Kavanaugh’s vote on the Supreme Court will help protect the religious liberties that the CNP perceives to be under attack at schools. “On the particular issue of prayer of school, they’re teaching the Muslim religion in school now, but they can’t say the name Jesus,” Davis said. “It’s a tragedy. I would like to see prayer back in school.”

Davis said he was pleased so far with Trump’s leadership but that he remains unsure of Trump’s commitment to the faith. “I really don’t know his relationship to Jesus Christ, but he is not hostile to Christianity like Hillary [Clinton] and [Barack] Obama,” he added.

“He will hold to the Constitution, of course we are happy. It was God’s will,” said another participant who declined to be named. The final vote and the accusations against Kavanaugh were “a test of the faithful,” the participant added.

Others expressed anger at the treatment of Kavanaugh, who was confirmed with the closest Senate vote for a Supreme Court nominee in more than a century.

“It was a liberal media mob,” said radio host Herman Cain, a longtime CNP participant, noting that critics had raised similar allegations about sexual harassment when he ran for the Republican nomination for president. When allegations emerged in 2011 that women had received settlements regarding harassment from Cain during his tenure at the National Restaurant Association, Cain dismissed the reports as a “witch hunt.” He later confirmed the settlements were paid out but denied the nature of the allegations.

Referring to the past controversy, Cain said the media did not want an “articulate black Republican” to win the GOP nomination, so it manufactured a scandal.

The allegations against Kavanaugh, Cain argued, were part of a Democratic plot to spin the media. He said every allegation “couldn’t be corroborated,” and he agreed with Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley’s unfounded contention that liberal billionaire George Soros was likely paying protesters on Capitol Hill.

“Every time I had to watch a report about what they were doing to Kavanaugh, it was like a dagger in my stomach,” said Cain.

Many participants, including CNP executive director Bob McEwen, a former Republican lawmaker from Ohio, were unwilling to speak to The Intercept, citing CNP’s strict rules around media.

The Judicial Crisis Network, a dark money organization that aired at least $12 million in television advertisements in support of Kavanaugh, has sent representatives to recent CPN retreats. At the retreat this weekend, a representative from CRC Public Relations, the public relations firm tapped by Judicial Crisis Network to build support for Kavanaugh’s nomination, was listed on the event program on panels discussing messaging and social media strategies.

Ed Whelan, a conservative legal operative who vets and builds support for Republican nominees, gave a presentation to CNP at the organization’s February 2017 retreat in Orlando on Trump’s strategy for rapidly appointing judges. Last month, Whelan, under guidance from CRC Public Relations, tweeted a false allegation against Christine Blasey Ford, who had accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her when the two were in high school, attempting to undermine her credibility.

The event this weekend also showcased evangelical groups that helped champion Kavanuagh’s nomination. The Family Research Council, a group that sharply opposes LGBT and abortion rights, mobilized evangelical churches to support Kavanaugh. The group sent several representatives, including leader Tony Perkins, to the CNP retreat.

The Faith and Freedom Coalition, another group that presented at the CNP conference, said in an email after the confirmation vote that it had produced more than 800,000 pieces of direct mail, 400,000 peer-to-peer text messages, and 1 million emails to Christian conservative voters in support of Kavanuagh’s confirmation.

CNP has famously focused on challenging the perceived liberal dominance of the judiciary. The 37-year-old organization does not publicize its meetings, but over the years, reporters have gained limited access to learn about its advocacy, including the involvement of prominent Christian right pressure groups that lobby on judicial issues and frequently litigate before the Supreme Court.

In 1999, when George W. Bush addressed the group, rumors swirled that the then-presidential candidate gained evangelical support by promising to support anti-abortion judges to the bench. CNP also reportedly blessed the choice of Sarah Palin as the late Sen. John McCain’s running mate in 2008.

Over the last year, CNP has been involved in efforts to pressure Senate Republicans to rapidly confirm Trump’s judicial nominees. “In delaying the confirmation of President Trump’s appointees, the Senate is directly limiting the President’s effectiveness,” wrote CNP leaders, through an affiliate group, in a widely circulated letter last year.

The organization was formerly led by Christian minister Tim LaHaye, the author of a popular series of books depicting an apocalyptic destruction of the world prophesied in the Bible. LaHaye and his wife also founded Concerned Women for America, the anti-abortion activist group now led by Penny Nance. CWA is a longtime participant in CNP meetings and currently sponsors the ad-hoc group Women for Kavanaugh, which mobilized rallies across the country in support of Trump’s Supreme Court pick. Trump tweeted his praise for the group hours before the confirmation vote.

In the lobby of the Westin hotel on Saturday, conservative activists huddled after a day of meetings. Mathew Staver, the chair of Liberty Counsel, a litigation group that represented Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis when she refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in 2015, was in attendance. Frank Gaffney, the former Reagan official and anti-Muslim activist, was also present.

In an interview, Cain described the presentation he gave to the group on Saturday morning.

During his remarks, he described the biblical battle between Gideon and the Midianites, Cain told The Intercept. God, Cain said, told Gideon not to overwhelm his enemy, and instructed him to pare down his army to only 300 soldiers to face an army of thousands of Midianites.

“Totally outnumbered. God said, this way when you win, and you defeat the Midianites, you know it was because of me,” said Cain. “He defeated the Midianites with 300 men up against thousands and thousands.”

“That’s what this organization is like,” continued Cain, describing CNP. “It’s like Gideon’s army. We’re outnumbered, but we still win. Kavanaugh, the voices against him outnumbered the voices for him, but looks like he’s going to win.”

Religion as a means of political control

October 8, 2018

by Christian Jürs

There are strong parallels between the Evangelical Christians and the Holocaust Jewish religious/political movements.

And these parallels are most certainly there.

Both are oriented to gaining political and economic power.

Both have made extensive use of fictional writings. In the case of the Evangelical Christians, the Rapture and the Battle of Armageddon which are recent inventions (ca 1910) by a Charles Parham Fox and are not in the Bible. Parham Fox was a convicted thief and child molester.

Also, note that none of the Gospels were contemporary with the purported career of Jesus and in the ensuing centuries, have been constantly rewritten to suit current political needs. Further, the mainstay of Evangelical Christians is the so-called ‘Book of Revelations’ purported to have been written by John the Devine, Jesus’ most intimate friend. This was certainly not written by someone living at the time of Jesus’ alleged ministry but over fifty years later. The actual author was one John of Patmos who was resident at the Roman lunatic colony located on the island of Patmos. This particular work is beloved of Evangelicals because it is so muddled, obscure and bizarre that any meaning can, and is, attributed to it.

I refer the reader to “Foundations of Christianity” by Karl Kautsky (a Jewish German early Communist and secretary to Engels)

The nationalistic Zionist movement does not have a great body of historical supportive material so, like the early Christians, they have simply invented it. These fictions include, but certainly are not limited to, “The Painted Bird” by Kosinski, (later admitted by its author to be an invented fraud before his suicide, ) and “Fragments” by “Binjimin Wilkomersky” ( A Swiss Protestant named Bruno Dossecker who was born in 1944) that is mostly copied from the Kosinski book and consists of ‘recovered memory,’ and of course the highly-propagandized favorite “Anne Frank Diary” which was proven, beyond a doubt, by the German BKA(Bundes-Kriminal Amt, an official German forensic agency) as a forgery, made circa 1949 (ball point ink was used on paper made after 1948 and the handwriting completely different from the original Frank girl’s school papers still extant) All of these frauds have been, and still are, considered as seminal truths by the Holocaust supporters and the discovery of fakery loudly denied by them, and questioners accused of being ‘Nazis.’ This closely parallels the same anger expressed by the Evangelicals when their stories about the Rapture or the Battle of Armageddon are questioned by anyone. Here, doubters are accused of being ‘Satanists’ and ‘Secular Humanists.’

I refer the reader to “The Holocaust Industry” by Norman Finkelstein, a Jewish academic and the son of genuine survivors of the German Concentration Camp system.

When confronted with period and very authentic evidence that the death toll among Jewish prisoners never approached even a million, or that there were no gas chambers in use at any prison camp, the standard, and badly flawed counter argument is that while the accuracy of the period German documents is not in question, as everyone knows that 6 millions of Jews perished, therefore the names are on so-called ‘secret lists.’

When asked where a researcher could view these documents (the actual German SS records, complete, are located in the Russian Central Archives in Moscow) the ludicrous response is that because these lists are secret, no one has ever seen them! This rationale does not even bear comment.

The Christians have their Passion of the Christ, which may or may not have happened, (it was in direct opposition to Roman law which governed Judea at the time,) and the Jews have their long agony of the Holocaust, which is an elaborate and fictional construction based on fragmentary facts. A Jewish supporter, Deborah Lipstadt ( a well-known academic) has said repeatedly that the word holocaust must be capitalized and can only be used to discuss the enormous suffering of the Jewish people. The huge genocidal programs practiced by the Turks against Armenian Christians in 1916 and the even larger massacres by Pol Pot in Southeast Asia may never be likened to the absolutely unique Jewish suffering, according to current Zionist-Holocaust Jewish dogma.

Both stress the suffering and death of their icons, in the former case, the leader of their cult, which initially consisted entirely of very poor Jews, and in the second, an entire people. Both sides have enormous public relations machinery in place which is used constantly to promulgate both faiths and both are hysterically opposed to any questioning or debate on any aspects of their faith.

The issues of suffering, death and prosecution are both used to fortify their positions in society and render it difficult for anyone to attack them. These issues are also used to gain political power (for the Evangelicals) and money (for the Zionist-Holocausters)

Both of these groups seek a high moral ground from which to attack any questioning of their faith and because many of the adherents to both beliefs are aware that their houses are based on sand, fight fiercely lest a storm arise, beat upon both houses and thereby cause a great fall (to be Biblical in expression.)

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TBR News October 8, 2018

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