— by Odysseus
The subtle police state and corruption that has infected America’s institutions began with — and thrived — in the darkness of secrecy and obscurity. The Trump revolution must find a better way to deal with the self-serving traitors and corruption of the Deep State, and the best weapon it has at its disposal is the truth. More specifically, the exposure to it. If Donald Trump is to save the Republic, he must do something drastic. Any other solutions would lead to both tyranny and the destruction of the Republic from the attempted cure.
Trump enjoys the support of not only a plurality of the (non-Californian) American people who elected him, but his governing ideology is well established in the history of the America that he is trying to restore. As a 70-year-old billionaire, Trump’s aims do not include personal enrichment or enjoyment of a prolonged lifetime of wielding power, unlike his Democratic opponent Hillary Rodham Clinton. He can be the outsider reformer that America desperately needs.
If Trump were the despot that unhinged liberals accuse him of being, he would use raw government power to arrest, imprison or murder his enemies. Unlike Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan or Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, Trump has no need to use government force to subdue his political enemies. He can vanquish his foes like a vampire hunter. He merely needs to expose every part of them, their identities, every move they make and have made, their methods, and their actions to purification by sunlight. He should make their objectives and agenda public.
Trump’s reform should begin with exposing how the Deep State served former President Barack Hussein Obama. The April 5, 2017 article in The Hill by former intelligence official Scott Uehlinger titled “How the Intel Community Was Turned into a Political Weapon Against President Trump” (http://bit.ly/2oJyUyO) details how America’s intelligence community was corrupted. By showing the American people what the Deep State did to protect Obama personally and to further advance his radical agenda, Trump can dramatically demonstrate the power and tentacles of the Deep State octopus they are up against and drive it from the shadows.
As part of “Operation Sunlight”, Trump needs to make public the heretofore secret life of his predecessor in office, including Obama’s college transcripts, records of his travels abroad, Social Security numbers, the FBI files on his associations with known leftist radicals like Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers, race agitator Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and communist Frank Marshall Davis. The disclosures should not be merely that Obama knew them, but the contents of the intelligence files themselves about their radical anti-American ideologies and their subversive actions.
Further, the Trump team needs to expose the documentation of how the national security apparatus and its disinformation engines were used to protect and shield the former president from embarrassing scrutiny of both his background and his radical leftist actions while President. As an ex-president, Obama’s information is no longer a matter of national security, but merely a matter of national pride in America’s first African-American President. He is now a part of American history. Concealing his enigmatic history from scrutiny is not an option, and the country should be willing to accept some international embarrassment as the cost of regaining some of its lost reputation for at least being a trustworthy nation. The time to come clean is now.
We here at The Cassandra Times understand and are aware that coming clean may temporarily hamper America’s national security apparatus by exposing its operatives’ technical capabilities and methods. However, at this date and time, there is no greater threat to the safety and security of the American Republic than the threat from within. This national cancer has been allowed to subvert these national security capabilities and methods for the Obama administration’s own corrosive and partisan purposes.
One of the chief reasons that Donald Trump won the presidency was that a large percentage of the citizens of the United States realized that America no longer has much of a representative republic. Many Americans came to the realization that they had no voice with a distant and aloof elite, which controlled the levers of power in Washington. During the Obama years, the arrogant, pretentious, and smug ruling elites dropped all pretense of representing the interests of their subjects. They brazenly abrogated all of the nation’s time-honored customs, norms, and traditions, and contorted its laws and logic like pretzels to impose their social engineering fantasies on an unwilling public.
The Obama administration shamelessly perpetrated bald-faced lies and then publicly bragged about its ability to get away with them. Some examples include MIT economist Jonathan Gruber and Obama assistant Ben Rhodes who deceived the American public about Obamacare and the disastrous nuclear accord with Iran, respectively. Worse yet, during the Obama years, the complicit news media and the infotainment industry of Washington, D.C., New York, and Los Angeles, happily peddled the leftist party line about everything, from the fantasy of a growing economy whose riches nobody other than the elites knew to the illusion that the dangers from an influx of hostile foreign nationals were insignificant, which everybody other than the elites knew to be false.
The election of Donald Trump was a revolt against the ruling establishment of both political parties. The ruling class was mortified by the election, then terrified about their gravy train coming to its end, then galvanized into action. They decided that they will not accept Trump’s election by lesser Americans and they do not have to accept his affront to their rule or agenda. They have long enjoyed the state’s instruments and trappings of power, including a national security apparatus which has been unleashed domestically through the Patriot Act.
This infection of the body politic runs deep, impacting not only the government officeholders and their staff who rise to power with their party after an election, but the infection also courses through the giant federal bureaucracy of permanent middle bureaucrats, as well the court system and judges. Many members of the political elite and the permanent bureaucracy of the Deep State are cultural Marxists and they will not tolerate any interference with their leftist agenda. That they are immune to the wishes of the majority of America’s heartland should come as no surprise because they were never interested in serving the will of the people. They serve a progressive philosophical, economic, and political agenda, and have always sought to impose their agenda on the unwilling populace that they view as unenlightened rubes. Even many of the so called “conservative” elites only deviate from leftist elites and their progressive agenda by disagreeing only about the degree or speed of the transition to their imagined oligarchical utopia.
Although the voters have turned over both the upper and lower chambers of Congress and the Presidency, as well as the overwhelming majority of governorships and state legislatures, to the Republicans whom they believed would advance a conservative agenda, this means nothing to arrogant ruling mandarins. That the public chose elected leaders whom they trusted would roll back unprecedented government intrusion into their lives, their faiths, and their wallets, including government restrictions on what they were supposed to believe or publicly say, is of no consequence to the mandarins. The institutional virus has no intention to go away quietly and now fights back against the medicine at all levels.
Trump’s team must go outside the traditional methods of post-World War II domestic politics to fight the infection because he is fighting a hostile infiltration of the Washington Beltway. He does not need to use McCarthy-style arrests or criminal charges when investigation and public exposure will suffice. Investigation and prosecution of political opponents are the province of third world countries. Historically, these dictatorial measures have not ended well for the countries that choose such course of action even if they were in a fight to protect themselves from a communist/leftist takeover.
A different and better course of action would be to publicly expose the left’s machinations, methods, and the government machinery it used to advance its agenda, including the unacknowledged domestic propaganda organs. As in the modern classic movie “The Matrix”, Trump needs to give the American people “the red pill” of reality. He must force even the unwilling to wake up from the comfortable mass illusion of the Matrix. It is time for America to wake up, grow up, and face the ugly truth. The country cannot begin to heal until this is done.
Other countries have also faced the need to deal with massive internal infestation and corruption of its organs of government. This situation is not unique, and, is, in fact, historically common in countries other than the United States. The type of deep persistent infiltration that is now afflicting America has long afflicted third world countries across the globe and it has been part of the communists’ standard playbook for more than a hundred years.
Throughout the Cold War, American allies often fought to recapture their countries from a communist insurgency and had to deal with this type of infiltation of their countries’ institutions. Non-communist reformers frequently adopted use of force and domestic spying and law enforcement to root out the subversive communist elements that threatened them. In the third world, their methods were often vicious and devolved into a rule of terror, much like what the Communists imposed when they were in power. In a brutal tit for tat, institutions that were supposed to represent order, the rule of law, and equal justice simply became instruments of power, to be wielded by whichever side managed to achieve control over the command deck. The corrosive effect such methods had on their legitimacy has left much of the former colonial world as merely autocracies, with no chance at economic, social, or political development because their populations viewed their governments as merely the warlord of today to be replaced by tomorrow’s warlord.
We must be very careful not to let that happen in the United States. The Obama administration was only too happy to politicize and pervert every court, department, and agency, from the Internal Revenue Service to the Environmental Protection Agency, from the National Security Agency to NASA, to implement its radical agenda and for domestic political purposes. The same measures taken by the Trump administration — even in an effort to reverse the excesses of the Obama administration — would only further corrode and destroy the American polity.
What is unique in the United States is the great degree to which the leftist/communist agenda has benefited from the shadows of the Cold War Security State. The United States is and has long been a “center/right” country. Leftist social engineering has never been widely popular in the United States. Its unpopularity has forced its proponents to work secretly and to push their radical agenda under other names or as a poison pill that is slipped into programs ostensibly intended for other purposes. They have cloaked their leftist agenda under such bromides as “social justice” or “fairness” or “care” when their actual goal is the massive expansion of the government’s power to capriciously pick winners and losers in every aspect of American life. Their secondary agenda is to entrench leftist politicians to empower and enrich themselves, their supporters, and their families. Whenever their sheep’s clothing deceives voters and elevates them to elected office, leftists are drawn like bees to honey to any opportunities to use the secrecy of the sub-rosa world of espionage and intelligence to advance their leftist covert agenda.
Trump’s Attorney General Jeff Sessions could investigate and prosecute Obama administration figures such as former National Security Advisor Susan Rice, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Evelyn Farkas, former Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes, and former Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner for their crimes and to deter others. Their denials notwithstanding, the recent revelations by Rice and Farkas expose to any thinking person the inescapable fact that the Obama administration used the domestic security apparatus, including its internal spying and propaganda organs, for partisan political purposes to spy on the Trump campaign, both before and after the election. Likewise, Rhodes was involved in spying on Congress and opponents of his disastrous nuclear accord with Iran. Lois Lerner used her office to investigate and suppress conservative and libertarian non-profit organizations and their political speech prior to the 2012 elections.
In more peaceful times in our Republic, these corrupt government apparatchiks would and should be arrested, prosecuted, and imprisoned. However, their arrest and prosecution would tear the country apart. The alternative approach proposed here would actually accomplish much the same while bringing the country together in our shared love of liberty. The Trump administration and, more importantly, the country would greatly benefit from simply exposing to the light of day both the facts and events that truly took place during the Obama years and the machinations by which they were accomplished. This exposure should be done in two steps.
The first step has been dictated by former president Obama himself. Since he has chosen to remain the leader of a shadow government of leftist agents and provocateurs, seeded throughout the government, he has made himself a necessary target. For the sake of the nation, he must not be prosecuted regardless of what it turns out that he has done. However, that does not mean he cannot be investigated, for both his past actions, and his ongoing present actions. Whatever is uncovered must be exposed for all to see, even if it reveals national secrets. Modesty is a virtue we can no longer afford.
After the true history of Obama, including his shadowy past, his radical leftist mentors, the shenanigans that led to his elections, and his subversive actions while in office have been revealed to the American people, he and his close associates must remain under investigation. The investigation should not be for his prosecution or arrest, but to protect the nation from further termite-like destruction of America’s institutions by his loyalists. Sadly, these continuing measures are as necessary as the de-Baathification of Iraq, after many decades of Saddam Hussein’s corrupting influence on Iraq’s institutions.
If Obama’s every contact, movement, and communication, both by him and by his close associates like Valerie Jarret and Michelle Obama were exposed widely to the American public, he could not maintain command and control over his subversive network. He could not longer be America’s shadow president. These protective measures would not constitute the use of national resources for domestic politics for two reasons. The first is that Obama can never run for the presidency again. The second is that no one would be prosecuted. It would merely be to expose the connections and and methods so the American public could learn what was going on and the voters could draw their own conclusions.Like WikiLeaks and the purloined but true e-mails of Hillary Clinton’s consigliere John Podesta, if the truth hurts, so be it.
The public deserves to know the truth, and, when seeking to drive public policy, one has zero right to “privacy”. Obama should not be legally prosecuted, but he should be figuratively made to live naked in a glass house, just like his NSA and CIA have subjected ordinary Americans. Trump should release all the deeply-buried records on Obama’s background, his early life in leftist, anti-American countries, his school records, his travel, his radical mentors, and his whole life before his ascent to the presidency. The American people — not only historians many decades after the fact– deserve an accurate history of their 44th President.
Obama’s Washington, D.C. Kalorama mansion should be turned into something like the Soviet Embassy circa 1958. Nobody should be permitted to come in or go near without full surveillance and personal investigation . . . and, then, it should all be put to the public. Then, as each plot is hatched, there would be no need to interfere because everybody in America would get to watch it. Obama’s life should become a reality show, like paparazzis on Hollywood celebrities.
The surveillance and exposure of Obama and his network would not even be necessary if America’s so-called Fourth Estate, the press and news organs and real paparazzis, were actually doing their jobs of keeping an eye on and honestly reporting on the Obama administration’s shenanigans. It is the media’s monumental failure to vet and then its eight years of slobbering defense of everything Obama that have now made all of these measures necessary.
The specific way this surveillance and exposure would work in practice would be something like this: The government paparazzis could let the public see Obama’s confidante Valerie Jarret get in her cab to meet a man who works at the Justice Department. Everyone would hear her conversation with him recorded via parabolic microphones. The government paparazzis would let the public see Obama board a plane to meet on the airport runway with Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, and hear their conversation. The public would be allowed to watch Michelle Obama hand a brown manila envelope to somebody who works for the NSA and then expose the changes in the Obama Charitable Foundation’s bank account 2:20 minutes later. The public could be shown the signed check within the next couple of days. The same “sunshine” treatment could be applied to Bill and Hillary Clinton and their foundation and network of interlocking organization.
The abuse and misuse of the covert world’s “dark arts” for domestic purposes has become corrosive to the Republic. When a weapon’s danger vastly outweighs its usefulness, which this weapon does in a world with no existential threat to the United States, this weapon needs to be either destroyed, locked up or, at the very least, placed under glass for constant close scrutiny. Exposing to the American people how the Obama administration was propped up, would be the best, high profile way to both demonstrate the problem, to begin to curtail it, and to restore the confidence of the American people in their government and public institutions.
How the Intel Community Was Turned into a Political Weapon Against President Trump
Scott Uehlinger
The Hill
April 5, 2017
The U.S. intelligence community is in the midst of a severe crisis. It has been used, or perhaps allowed itself to be used, as a tool of political destruction, against some of the same U.S. citizens it was created to protect.
What I am talking about is the continuing “Wiretapgate” debacle. We are seeing the widespread abuse of intelligence by an incumbent administration to target political opposition. Long a technique in the developing world — a tactic I often witnessed as a CIA station chief working abroad — the Third World has come to roost in the United States. It is a tragedy of the first order.
The danger of politicization is widely accepted throughout the intelligence community as the greatest hazard, in theory, to the intelligence profession. If an intel service cannot be accepted as an unbiased arbiter, it loses the trust of its people, and risks becoming irrelevant and unheeded. History is littered with intel failures; one need only look to the invasion of Iraq to see how politicization can lead to costly failure and a “trust gap” that can take years to bridge and resolve.
Truth, despite the naysayers, is objective and absolute. The intelligence community has a responsibility to provide the most informed truth to the president. The truth, warts and all, will always be the soundest basis for any foreign policy. This is what our multibillion-dollar intel leviathan owes the American people and its government.
It has become clear to the American public, however, that intelligence leadership learned long ago to stop listening to its own philosophy.
The twin serpents of politicization and political correctness — a Soviet term, by the way — walk hand in hand throughout the intelligence community, as well as every other government agency. The PC mindset that now dominates every college campus is also positioned firmly throughout our government — particularly within the intelligence community, which saw its greatest personnel influx ever in the post-9/11 environment. Today’s intelligence community, the average age of which I would estimate at 32, was raised under the beleaguered Bush administration and reached professional maturity primarily under the Obama administration, immersed in a PC environment.
In this PC world, all diversity is embraced — except diversity of thought. Federal workers have been partisan for years, but combined with the rigid Obama PC mindset, it has created a Frankenstein of politicization that has never been seen before.
Watching Evelyn Farkas admit on TV that the Obama administration wanted the intelligence community to “get as much information as you can” before Donald Trump took office resembles some sort of social science experiment gone bad — and it frames the problems wrought by PC/political brainwashing. Here a mid-level official, permanently dwelling in a bubble of progressive liberalism, acknowledged being complicit in the breaking of U.S. ethics rules and perhaps law — because, as she explained, that’s what they needed to do!
Farkas has all the right credentials: a Ph.D. and a career shuttling between academia, the government and the press that is the hallmark of the anointed “Washington insider” class. What is lacking, however, is any level of self-awareness, common sense or judgment. She is emblematic of the denizens of the Deep State that everyone in Washington likes to tell us doesn’t exist.
I am here to tell you, having served in the CIA and the Naval Reserve, that the Deep State does indeed exist. And it’s not a bunch of centrally controlled drones in black robes meeting at midnight. The Deep State is made up of thousands of similarly credentialed, remarkably “un-diverse” civil servants and political appointees who saw themselves promoted rapidly during the eight years of the Obama administration. The appointees have left, but make no mistake — the progressive civil servants remain.
There is little doubt that intel leadership saw Obama’s relaxation of rules regulating the sharing of NSA raw intelligence — for which there is NO operational justification — and did nothing. They also saw the Obama administration’s demand for “incidental” collection on the Trump campaign at an unprecedented level — and still they did nothing.
Like some binary poisonous reagent, these dynamics combined to foster an environment ripe for political abuse and leakage — a fairly transparent attempt, from the point of view of any discerning intelligence officer. This weaponization of intelligence for the sake of discrediting the political opposition I have seen in Kosovo, Azerbaijan, Moldova and elsewhere — sadly, it is now on our shores. [also what I’ve seen, and informs my views]
The present culture of the intelligence community and the shameless political shenanigans of the Obama administration combined to create this disaster. In earlier times, such a gambit would have failed; CIA leadership famously stood up to the Nixon administration when asked to domestically spy on Justice during Watergate, for example. It seems that today we lack the character and the competence to ensure that the intelligence community honors the trust of the American people.
Scott Uehlinger is a retired CIA station chief and naval officer. A Russian speaker, he spent 12 years working in the former Soviet Union for CIA. In addition to teaching at NYU, he is a frequent TV commentator on National Security and is co-host of the weekly podcast “The Station Chief,”