The CIA Democrats: Warsocialist Welfare Trash Flooding Midterm Elections...,

wsws |  An extraordinary number of former intelligence and military operatives from the CIA, Pentagon, National Security Council and State Department are seeking nomination as Democratic candidates for Congress in the 2018 midterm elections. The potential influx of military-intelligence personnel into the legislature has no precedent in US political history.

If the Democrats capture a majority in the House of Representatives on November 6, as widely predicted, candidates drawn from the military-intelligence apparatus will comprise as many as half of the new Democratic members of Congress. They will hold the balance of power in the lower chamber of Congress.

Both push and pull are at work here. Democratic Party leaders are actively recruiting candidates with a military or intelligence background for competitive seats where there is the best chance of ousting an incumbent Republican or filling a vacancy, frequently clearing the field for a favored “star” recruit.

A case in point is Elissa Slotkin, a former CIA operative with three tours in Iraq, who worked as Iraq director for the National Security Council in the Obama White House and as a top aide to John Negroponte, the first director of national intelligence. After her deep involvement in US war crimes in Iraq, Slotkin moved to the Pentagon, where, as a principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, her areas of responsibility included drone warfare, “homeland defense” and cyber warfare.

CIA Needn't Subvert Mainstream Media News Any Longer...,

realclearinvestigations |  House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes next plans to investigate the role former CIA Director John Brennan and other Obama intelligence officials played in promoting the salacious and unverified Steele dossier on Donald Trump -- including whether Brennan perjured himself in public testimony about it.

In his May 2017 testimony before the intelligence panel, Brennan emphatically denied the dossier factored into the intelligence community’s publicly released conclusion last year that Russia meddled in the 2016 election "to help Trump’s chances of victory.”

Brennan also swore that he did not know who commissioned the anti-Trump research document (excerpt here), even though senior national security and counterintelligence officials at the Justice Department and FBI knew the previous year that the dossier was funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Last week, Nunes (R-Calif.) released a declassified memo exposing surveillance “abuses” by the Obama DOJ and FBI in their investigation of Trump’s ties to Russia. It said the agencies relied heavily on the uncorroborated dossier to take out a warrant to secretly surveil a Trump adviser in the heat of the 2016 presidential election, even though they were aware the underlying “intelligence" supporting the wiretap order was political opposition research funded by Clinton allies — a material fact they concealed from FISA court judges in four separate applications.

Nunes plans to soon release a separate report detailing the Obama State Department’s role in creating and disseminating the dossier -- which has emerged as the foundation of the Obama administration's Russia “collusion” investigation. Among other things, the report will identify Obama-appointed diplomats who worked with partisan operatives close to Hillary Clinton to help ex-British spy Christopher Steele compile the dossier, sources say.

“Those are the first two phases” of Nunes' multipart inquiry, a senior investigator said. “In phase three, the involvement of the intelligence community will come into sharper focus.”

The aide, who spoke only on condition of anonymity, said Nunes will focus on Brennan as well as President Obama’s first CIA director, Leon Panetta, along with the former president’s intelligence czar, James Clapper, and national security adviser, Susan Rice, and security adviser-turned U.N. ambassador Samantha Power, among other intelligence officials.

“John Brennan did more than anyone to promulgate the dirty dossier,” the investigator said. “He politicized and effectively weaponized what was false intelligence against Trump.”

Attempts to reach Brennan for comment were unsuccessful.  Fist tap Ken.

A Governor Tailor-Made, Hand-Picked, and Fully Funded By Missouri Elites...,

CounterPunch |  Beneath the surface of meanness by the political elite are the needs of corporate masters who anoint them to be our leaders.  An essential characteristic of twenty-first century capitalism is unending war to complete the pillaging of resources from every corner of the Earth.  Those wars are best carried out by politicians who hate not just their opponents but everyone around them.  An economically destructive system encourages, molds and rewards those individuals who are most vile to their fellow humans.

Though Greitens is currently being investigated by St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner, it is not  clear if criminal charges will be filed.  While local press are on his trail like a hound dog, the still unidentified woman who reports being tied up, photographed and blackmailed is currently protecting her identity by not pressing charges.  Missouri Republicans are saying it is “too early” to tell if the entire affair will blow over.  Greitens, who admits to an extramarital affair while denying taking a photo for blackmail, is going to each GOP legislator and personally apologizing for the Trump-like insults that he hurled at them during the first year of his reign.

Also disturbing is the revelation that before his election Greitens had reserved “Greitens for President” websites, revealing the ego-maniacal core of his soul.  Before the bondage scandal,  Republicans across the country were eyeing Greitens.  They could still end up thinking that someone who could escape prosecution for terrorizing a woman and glorify gun-toting and union-smashing would, in fact, have what it takes to be their man for the white house.

What could be more frightening?  It’s the possibility that Greitens would lose a presidential race to a Democrat who was worse.  Isn’t it time to put aside the fantasy that demonstrating the contemptible nature of a Republican somehow proves that a Democrat is “better?”

Meanwhile, In The Cruel and Cutthroat World of Spy vs. Spy...,

Haaretz |  Washington gave Israel a green light to assassinate Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force, the overseas arm of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Jarida reported on Monday.

TheAmericanConservative |  Speaking at the annual Reagan National Defense Forum, CIA Director Mike Pompeo recently disclosed that he sent a direct communication to Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani, the longtime commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force division responsible for Iran’s overseas paramilitary and intelligence activity. “What we were communicating to him in that letter was that we will hold he and Iran accountable for any attacks on American interests in Iraq by forces that are under their control,” Pompeo told the audience. “We wanted to make sure he and the leadership in Iran understood that in a way that was crystal clear.”

To some who have operated in the clandestine and murky world of intelligence tradecraft, Pompeo’s maneuver was a surprise. Former CIA director Mike Hayden told Newsweek that he couldn’t recall ever doing such a thing during his tenure, while others labeled Pompeo’s move a too-clever-by-half strategy to signal toughness to Soleimani, who retains enormous power and influence within the Iranian political system. 

Aesthetic Relativism > Moral Relativism > Cultural Assassination...,

Counterpunch |  In contrast, an ongoing exhibition at the Chicago Art Institute shows the early Soviet arts in all their bustling contradiction and coming-to-be. The CIA could not have produced anything on this scale, which required a world-shaking collision of forces and a belief uncomfortably close to the religious. Malevich, Dziga Vertov, El Lissitzky, Lenin, Mayakovsky… The US, too, had considerable forces at its disposal (Buster Keaton, first and foremost). The strange thing is that this exhibition, mounted in a refreshingly no-nonsense and rather cool style, still manages to inspire, as if the past was waiting for the present to catch up to it. This power lies not so much in the myriad forms of the works, which may be bound in time, but in the pure electricity of their still-disarming presence. Against the morose ideas of ends, the grand mortuary they call ‘history’, against the relegation of past works of art to nostalgia and price, something else appears beside the collages, constructivist paintings, fabrics and living spaces constructed for the great new socialist world. We are always told that Stalin was the culmination of this moment in time. Who says? And who paid him to say it? The answer is obvious. They say that here is only one modernism; that there is only one history (and one power able to declare that it is over); that there is only one self to express; that there is only one public and one art which can express it (sometimes fearfully, it has to be admitted). If this sums up the most banal kinds of socialist realism, it is equally applicable to the art the CIA promoted in the middle of last century. Behind the paintings was the logic of pacification.

Alan Dulles’ influence extends far beyond his admittedly meagre artistic output. The CIA’s most recent work of criticism is the destruction of San’a and Aleppo, where the Agency has taken to task outmoded theories of architecture in an imperial inversion of the Situationists’ support for the Watts riots. And The Intercept informsus that Erik Prince, infamous Blackwater capo, and that old has-been Oliver North are setting up a parallel intelligence agency to defend the embattled President against a rogue CIA. Thus, the old rivalry between Classical and Romantic has returned with a swinging post-modern, mercenary twist. Although painting seems to be off the radar for now, the ideas behind the Abstract Intelligence school await resurrection in another form whose inelegance may delight or offend, depending on the myths necessary for the murder of both the Image and its reflection.

Lotta Restless Unemployed Killers Out'Chere Yo!

theintercept  |  The White House press secretary did not directly dispute the revelation that Blackwater founder Erik Prince and former Iran-Contra figure Oliver North pitched a plan to develop a private spy network to members of the Trump administration.

The plan, detailed in a story broken by The Intercept on Monday, is to develop a private intelligence network to counter perceived “deep state” enemies within the ranks of government. Prince denied the report, and North did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

“I’m not aware of any plans for something of that definition or anything similar to that at this time,” said White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders, in response to a question from CBS News’s Major Garrett about the story.

Garrett followed up to ask if President Donald Trump “would be opposed” to an outside spy network operating on his behalf. Sanders said she was unaware.

Garrett asked to Sanders to confirm whether any administration official had been briefed on such a network.

“I’m not going to answer some random hypothetical. Did some random person off the street come in and say something? I don’t know,” Sanders said.

And finally, Garrett asked if it was an idea Trump would consider.

“Again, I haven’t asked him, but its not something that’s currently in the works,” Sanders replied.

A White House official later told New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman that the proposal was indeed pitched to the Trump administration, but that there is no sign the president himself was briefed.

Wonder Why Weaponized #MeToo Hasn't Snatched A Real Baller Yet...,

pagesix |  A source familiar with the purchase said: “While everyone in New York wants a doorman, Eric specifically said he didn’t want one. He doesn’t want anyone to see him and his guests coming in and out. He insisted on his own elevator.” 

Schmidt has also spent millions getting the 6,250-square-foot duplex — which has four bedrooms and a large entertainment area with a wet bar opening onto a 3,300-square-foot terrace — soundproofed, claiming he “doesn’t sleep well,” but also affording him complete privacy.

Other sources say that earlier this summer, the tech mogul was embarking on a tour of the French Riviera and asked his aides to find alluring female companions to “decorate his yacht.”

Schmidt, who’s worth $8.2 billion, bought the 195-foot Oasis for about $72.3 million in 2009. The source said, “He had one of his aides approach beautiful and intelligent women that Schmidt never met before, saying, ‘Eric would like to invite you to his yacht,’ which was cruising around the Riviera.”

He was spotted in St. Tropez earlier this month, and later sailed to the Cap d’Antibes, and we’re told that some of the women approached by his aides had agreed to join Schmidt onboard.

Wendy Schmidt, who lives in Nantucket, said in an interview last year that they started living separate lives because she felt like “a piece of luggage” following him around the world. 

A rep for Schmidt didn’t respond last night. 

In case y'all forgot exactly who this is...,

Categorical Violation of JFK's Limits of Official Concealment

countercurrents |  REFLECTIONS ON HOW LITTLE IS REVEALED BY JUST-RELEASED JFK ASSASSINATION DOCUMENTS AND JUST SOME OF THE MANY REASONS WHY THERE HAD TO BE A CONSPIRACY

In the recent, and supposedly last, release of files pertaining to the Kennedy assassination, most of the corporate press did not dwell on the fact that the most important and secret files were kept from the public, but, of course, that was actually the big story.

Now, I say that not knowing just what was not released or indeed whether the unreleased files even contain any serious information. You see, in the world of state secrets, secrecy is often used to hide embarrassing incompetence or even criminality. The unreleased documents may be just as uninformative as much of what has been released. So much of what has been released over recent decades is of little hard value to the case. We may legitimately ask, why was a lot of this junk ever declared national secrets to be squirreled away for a half century and more?

I can’t answer that question, but exactly the same question may be asked about so very many things and activities pertaining to the assassination. Of course, it shouldn’t be that way, but it is, and that fact alone screams that important things always were, and still are, hidden. Are the key facts really that unbelievably sensitive? Are they even known?

The question might even be asked whether the authorities themselves ever really understood accurately what happened. The FBI and CIA not even knowing what happened might itself be a worthy state secret, reflecting on the sheer competence of these two massively-funded and often abusive security agencies. God knows, they both have long records of embarrassing and destructive failures at home and abroad.

And, it must be remembered that outfits like CIA always have fallback positions ready for major activities should the first story spring some unexpected leak. So, even if records were maintained of actual events – something which is not always certain going by CIA’s past record, as in the case of the coup in Guatemala against a democratic government, an event whose files could not be found at their scheduled release date – whatever is eventually released to the public may reflect a fallback narrative. The complexity of filing systems at a place like CIA permits some amazing antics, and no one from the outside is able to check. That of course is just one of the dangers of having such powerful, secret, and largely unaccountable agencies.

The facts of a murder case – no matter who the victim was, a rather simple murder actually if you believe the Warren Report, a murder by one disgruntled man with a rifle and no accomplices of any kind – should be public information in a free society. What possibly warrants secrecy in such a case? Nothing, of course. Yet we know we have had secrecy and still have it, massively so, and since the earliest days after the crime.

We still face a huge, impenetrable, blank wall, much resembling something from an ancient mysterious tomb, when it comes to this history-changing event.

If the assassination of an elected President can be effectively covered-up, what cannot? And a great many terrible events have happened in the United states since that crime. Vietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria plus many other bloody awful things that make little sense and have never been honestly explained to the people by government.

The press still is very fond of the term, “conspiracy theory,” and it is easy to find articles weekly which employ it, but the term should always serve as a red flag for astute readers. It is said to have been coined by a CIA publicist/disinformation officer in 1967 as a way to express ridicule of those doubting the Warren Report, a document in fact riddled with errors and inconsistencies.

America's Unpeakable Filth Not-Seeism...,

theweek  |  There are industries and careers with access to vulnerable children, which criminologists tell us attract predators like water rolling downhill. The Catholic Church runs schools and orphanages. Hollywood churns through countless child actors and would-be actors, most often away from home, whose parents must navigate a highly strange and sophisticated environment.

There is the problem of an illustrious institution that aspires to moral leadership in a culture war context. Sympathizers don't want to think the unthinkable about "the good guys." Insiders don't want to give ammunition to the "the other side." Bishops wrapped themselves in moralistic rhetoric to brush off allegations of moral turpitude; Weinstein thought he could distract from his alleged depredations by picking a fight with the NRA.

Most of all, there are the dynamics around power, money, and glory. They enable the abuse even as they prompt the coverup, since the institution and its prestige must be protected. Those around the perpetrators become accomplices, actively or passively. The system becomes self-sustaining. The more abuse, the more coverup. The more coverup, the more abuse. Everyone looks the other way because everyone looks the other way. No one will speak up because no one will speak up. Bit by bit, isolated incidents that might happen in any context metastasize into a monstrous system that feeds on itself. The guilt of a few becomes the guilt of all, as the system is sustained by its own rottenness.

If the Catholic Church, which is at least nominally committed to a grand moral vision, could fall prey to these dynamics, why should we believe that Hollywood, which at the end of the day is a for-profit industry, should be any different? Don't get me wrong: I'm absolutely sure that plenty of people in Hollywood believe in art and not profit, and sincerely hold their industry's professed humanistic values. But that's the point: The systemic dynamics are bigger than that. Even staunch anti-Catholics will concede that plenty of priests are upstanding people. We won't understand those systemic dynamics if we don't grapple with the fact that the same institution that produced Mother Teresa could produce what later churchmen called "the filth."

None of what I'm saying can be presented in a court of law. I have no smoking gun, no bombshell revelation. But nor am I hallucinating. That all the signs are there is not speculation. It is fact. We know for a fact that there are serious allegations, and that allegations about other forms of sex abuse in the same context not only turned out to be true, but much worse than we imagined. We know for a fact that some of these allegations get suspiciously ignored, and we know there is the motive and the capability for coverups. Go back to the old saw about criminal investigations: means, motive, opportunity. Check, check, check.

Children's lives are at stake. When will we as a society start seriously asking questions?

Malta Car Bomb kills Panama Papers Journalist

Guardian |  The son of the murdered Maltese investigative journalist and blogger Daphne Caruana Galizia has described finding parts of his mother’s body around the blazing car in which she died and attacked the island as a “mafia state” run by “crooks”. 

“My mother was assassinated because she stood between the rule of law and those who sought to violate it, like many strong journalists,” Matthew Caruana Galizia, who is also an investigative reporter, wrote in a moving and at times graphic Facebook post.

“But she was also targeted because she was the only person doing so. This is what happens when the institutions of the state are incapacitated: the last person left standing is often a journalist. Which makes her the first person left dead.”

Dutch forensic experts were due to arrive in Malta to help police in the EU’s smallest state investigate the killing of Daphne Caruana Galizia, who led the Panama Papers investigation into corruption on the island. 

She died on Monday afternoon when her Peugeot was destroyed by an explosive device so powerful it blew the car into a nearby field. One witness driving up the road behind her said her heard two loud and distinct blasts. 

Several thousand people gathered at an impromptu candlelit vigil in Sliema, near the island’s capital Valletta, on Monday night to mourn the journalist, described as a “one-woman WikiLeaks” whose blogs were as fiercely critical of the island’s politicians as they were of its organised crime gangs.

The European commission said it was horrified by the murder, praising the journalist for her her “dedication to the truth” and pioneering investigative work: “The right of a journalist to investigate, ask uncomfortable questions and report is at the heart of our values and needs to be guaranteed at all times,” it said.

Matthew Caruana Galizia said he would never forget “running around the inferno in the field, trying to figure out a way to open the door, the horn of the car still blaring, screaming at two policemen who turned up with a single fire extinguisher to use it”.

One of the policemen said: “Sorry, there is nothing we can do,” he wrote. “I looked down and there were my mother’s body parts all around me. I realised they were right, it was hopeless. ‘Who is in the car?’, they asked me. ‘My mother is in the car. She is dead. She is dead because of your incompetence.’” 

Caruana Galizia, 53, ran a hugely popular blog relentlessly highlighting cases of alleged high-level corruption among politicians across Malta’s party lines. “There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate,” she wrote in a post published barely half an hour before the bomb exploded. 

The BackSide Stories of Kings, Titans of Industry, Degenerates One-and-All...,

bitterqueen |  The New York Police Department and District Attorney's Office in 1975 launched an investigation dubbed Operation Together which looked into the mob control of gay bars and underage boy sex rings, and among its disturbing allegations was that Hollywood film director and writer James Bridges hosted notorious sex parties which were stocked with jail bait and attended by household names in the entertainment industry according to a retired NYPD officer with whom I spoke several years ago who worked undercover on the case.

Although some results from my interview with the retired officer previously have been published on Friends of Ours and in my book The Mafia and the Gays, to this point I have resisted identifying the names of those allegedly involved in the pedophile ring uncovered in Operation Together. However, as I continue to read about the plaintive pleas from 1980s child star Corey Feldman for a thorough investigation into a pedophilia problem among the Tinseltown crowd, I no longer will remain silent about allegations that have come to my attention from credible law enforcement investigations.

gayinfluence | Arkansas native James Bridges (1936-1993) was an Oscar-nominated screenwriter and film director who got his start as a writer for the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. One episode, An Unlocked Window (1966), won an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America.

Bridges went on to write and direct a number of feature films, including The Baby Maker (1970), The Paper Chase (1973), September 30, 1955 (1977), The China Syndrome (1979), Urban Cowboy (1980), Mike’s Murder (1984), Perfect (1985), and Bright Lights, Big City (1988).

For a number of years he was a mentor to actress Debra Winger. In fact, Bridges nearly quit the production of Urban Cowboy, because Paramount didn't want Debra Winger to play the role of John Travolta's love interest, the independent cowgirl Sissy.

From 1958 until his death in 1993, he was life partner to actor Jack Larson (b. 1928, photo at right), best known for his portrayal of Jimmy Olsen in the TV series Adventures of Superman. Prior to his commitment to Bridges, Larson had been in a relationship with actor Montgomery Clift.

Bridges and Larson shared the historical Frank Lloyd Wright-designed “George Sturges” house (1939) in Brentwood Heights, CA, where Larson still resides. It is the only southern California example of the modest modern style house called "Usonian" by Wright (photo below). This example boasts extreme cantilevers to deal with the steeply  sloped lot, and it has been impeccably maintained by Larson. 

Organized Crime Cannot Exist Without Public Corruption

wehoville |  Ed Buck, the well-known local Democratic Party donor under investigation for possible involvement in the death from a drug overdose of Gemmel Moore, a young African-American sex worker, has come out of hiding with a  verbal attack by his lawyer tonight on WeHo City Councilmember Lindsey Horvath.

Buck’s attorney, Seymour Amster, appeared before the West Hollywood City Council to say he is demanding an investigation of comments that Horvath made about Buck. Amster apparently was referring to Horvath’s statement at the Aug. 21 City Council meeting that she had contacted the L.A. County District Attorney’s Office and the Sheriff’s Department and asked them to “take the necessary steps to make it possible for anyone with information pertinent to this case to safely come forward. I want all facts surrounding this case to be known.”

Amster said that Horvath in making her comments did not disclose that Buck opposed her election and had campaigned against her.  He said he wanted a grand jury to look at Horvath’s private emails and telephone records to “determine if she has been involved in instigating, promoting or financing the character attack on Mr. Buck.”

In her comments at the Aug. 21 City Council meeting, Horvath said: “I am sad to hear the news of his tragic passing and I’m deeply disturbed by the accounts in local reports. As you have heard, the case involves someone well-known to this community and in LGBT and local political circles. In full disclosure, I have not received contributions from that individual but I want to state clearly that it shouldn’t matter who the subject of an investigation is – an investigation must be conducted thoroughly and without prejudice.”

“Our local (Sheriff’s) station needs to be a refuge for victims of crime regardless of skin color or immigration status, regardless of whether they’re under the influence of drugs or alcohol, regardless of the circumstances that brought them into the station – all victims of crime need to be heard,” Horvath said. “And I ask that both LASD and the L.A. County District Attorney’s office take the necessary steps to make it possible for anyone with information pertinent to this case to safely come forward. I want all facts surrounding this case to be known.”

Why Didn't Any Of The Intersectional Allies Tell On Evil Ed Buck?

wearyourvoicemag |  Gemmel Moore didn't break into Buck’s condo and overdose on meth while Ed was at Whole Foods shopping for Kale and Vitamin Water. It’s customary for Ed to hire black male escorts and pay them to heavily sate themselves with meth as he records them and pleasures himself.

Just because Moore was an escort who was under the influence does not absolve Buck from liability. Moore was flown into town and brought directly to Buck’s home. I doubt that on his flight into LA Moore smuggled meth past the TSA, let alone enough to overdose on.

There’s no doubt in my mind the drugs found in his system were supplied by Buck so he could fulfill his fantasy of getting Moore high beyond his limits while engaging in a host of fetishes. Buck also smokes meth and occasionally shoots up and alludes to this in his Adam4Adam profile.

Buck’s fatal fetishization teeters on the cusp of snuff. The thought of Buck pleasuring himself as Moore took his last breath is deeply disturbing. What’s all the more disturbing is the willingness of cis-hetero black folks who may not agree with Moore’s sexuality, and city officials who’ve accepted money from Buck in the past to look the other way.

Moore’s death is centered around power dynamics, a wealthy white politico and his deadly fetishization of disenfranchised black men. Moore’s vulnerability and inability to free himself from an economically sunken place awakened Buck’s predatory instincts. Exploiting sex workers who are jobless (in the traditional sense), homeless, poverty stricken and chronically addicted adds four more inches to Buck’s erections.

Such form of racial fetishization is a modern day version of “buck breaking” (no pun intended). Instead of whips and chains, the “master” now employs needles and pipes to bring his slaves into submission. Buck’s obsession with destroying black bodies for his own pleasure is an extension of colonial imperialism.

Burn Hollywood Burn..., (Oh and Hollywood for Ugly People Too!)

thefreethoughtproject |  When Bill Clinton was at the height of the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal, Hollywood was by his side, offering donations for his legal fees, and one significant donor was a man who is now going through his own sex scandal—Harvey Weinstein.

More than 20 women have publicly accused Weinstein of sexual harassment, sexual assault or rape. After the New York Times and the New Yorker published in-depth stories detailing the testimonies of women who have been abused by Weinstein—and in many cases, paid off with airtight non-disclosure agreements—the stories have continued to come to light.

Former President Bill Clinton is no stranger to sex scandals. The scandal that received the most media attention came about in the late 1990s after former Arkansas state employee Paul Jones filed a civil lawsuit against him for sexual harassment when he was the state’s governor. During the discovery phase of the case, in which Jones’ legal team was searching for Clinton’s inappropriate relationships, the name of a White House intern surfaced: Monica Lewinsky.

In August 1998, a report from the Washington Post noted that Clinton was being accused of perjury and obstruction of justice regarding his testimony about his conduct with Lewinsky. At the same time, influential members of Hollywood were coming to Clinton’s defense.

The report noted that according to Clinton’s legal defense fund, a total of more than $2.2 million was raised in six months, which was notably more than was collected in funding during the previous four years of his presidency—combined.  Fist tap Bro. Makheru.

Hollywood Pedophilia the Next Shoe to Drop in Babylon...,

ibankcoin  |  Six years ago, former child star Corey Feldman admitted that he and fellow child actor Corey Haim, who died in 2010 from Pneumonia, were sexually molested by adult males throughout Hollywood during their time in the limelight. Haim is said to have received far more brutal abuse – raped at age 11 by a producer, while Feldman was groomed and abused by a man employed by his father at the age of 15.

In a 2011 interview with ABC, Feldman said Pedophilia was the Number 1 problem for child stars, saying “I was surrounded by [pedophiles] when I was 14 years old. … Didn’t even know it. It wasn’t until I was old enough to realize what they were and what they wanted … till I went, Oh, my God. They were everywhere.”

And in a 2016 interview – days after actor Elijah Wood gave an interview in which he said “Hollywood has a Pedophilia Problem,” Feldman revealed that he was ‘molested and passed around‘ by men in the industry. The former child actor has refused to name his abusers, citing legal reasons.

Feldman has also written about Corey Haim’s time with Hollywood child-actor manager Martin Weiss, an agent primarily for children who appeared on Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel – who enjoyed sleepovers and road trips with his clients. Weiss was arrested in 2011 and plead no contest to eight felony counts of molesting young actors – sentenced to a year in jail but released for time served.

Weiss raped a child actor 30 to 40 times until the age of 15, according to the police report. In an affidavit obtained by the Los Angeles Times, the victim told police that Weiss said what they were doing was ‘common practice in the entertainment industry.’

Weiss was caught when the 15 year old victim went to his apartment in November of 2011 and recorded a conversation in which Weiss admitted to the abuse.

Barbara’s Genuine Outrage – at Feldman…

NBC News Sitting On Ronan Farrow's Weinstein Story IS A Scandal

thedailybeast |  By the time Farrow pitched New Yorker Editor in Chief David Remnick in August, according to multiple sources, he and NBC News investigative unit producer Rich McHugh, among others, had been pursuing Weinstein’s alleged serial groping—and worse—of young actresses and female staffers since the previous December.

Over the course of several months, scripts were prepared and vetted, and Farrow’s and McHugh’s reporting was subjected to various layers of both fact-checking and legal reviews, insiders said, and at one point a senior producer on NBC News’ Friday night show Dateline carefully re-interviewed many of their sources and witnesses, and concluded they were solid.

The vetting process lasted weeks and weeks, through much of the summer, but ended shortly after Kimberley D. Harris, executive vice president and general counsel of NBC Universal, subjected the material to her own review. Since Harris oversees the in-house lawyering of all the company divisions, an NBC source said it would not be unusual for her to review news division material for potential exposure to litigation. And although Harris reports to NBC Universal Chief Executive Steve Burke, a source insisted Burke wasn’t involved in the decision to spike the Weinstein story.

Indeed, according to this account, Harris never formally weighed in, because NBC News had already pulled the plug by the time she finished examining Farrow’s work.

With two such wildly contradictory versions of why and how NBC News spiked Farrow’s Weinstein story, it’s difficult to determine what objectively occurred.

But author and New Yorker media writer Ken Auletta, who has been covering Weinstein for decades and is among the legions of journalists who’ve tried and failed to document his casting-couch behavior, also sat for an NBC interview; at one point, according to witnesses, he turned to the camera and declared: “This evidence is so overwhelming that if NBC News sits on it, that will be a scandal.”

Meet NBCUniversal Counsel and Former Obama Deputy Counsel Kimberly D. Harris

comcast |  Harris provides legal advice to the NBCUniversal senior management team and supervises the legal function, which handles legal matters for all of NBCUniversal’s business units. She also coordinates NBCUniversal’s global regulatory and legislative agenda.

Harris joined NBCUniversal in 2013 from Davis Polk & Wardwell, where she was a partner in the litigation department.

From 2010 to 2012, Harris served in the White House Counsel’s Office, and became the principal Deputy Counsel and Deputy Assistant to the President in 2011. At the White House, she advised senior Executive Branch officials on congressional investigations and executive privilege issues. In addition, Harris developed and implemented the White House response to congressional investigations, and managed litigation matters relating to the President.

From 2009 to 2010, she was Senior Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General, U.S. Department of Justice, Criminal Division.

Harris first joined Davis Polk & Wardwell as an associate in 1997 and was named a litigation partner in 2007. From 1996 to 1997, she served as a law clerk to the Honorable Charles S. Haight, Jr., U.S. District Court, S.D. New York.

She serves on the boards of directors for Advocates for Children of New York, an organization that provides legal and advocacy services to at-risk students in the New York City school system, and the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. Harris is also a member of the Advisory Board for the Yale Law School Center for the Study of Corporate Law.

Harris graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University, and holds a law degree from Yale Law School. She lives in Westchester County, New York with her husband and three sons.

Organized Crime Branch of the U.S. Government: Everything the CIA Does is Illegal

Counterpunch |  LS: Is the war on drugs also a war on blacks? Let me give you some framework for this question, because John Ehrlichman, a former top aide to Richard Nixon, supposedly admitted that: “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” (1) And I can quote from H. R. Haldeman’s diaries in this respect, of course. In the early stages of his presidency, more specifically on April 28, 1969, Nixon outlined his basic strategy to his chief of staff: “[President Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.” (2) So, is the war on drugs that started under Nixon also a war on blacks? And if so, what does this tell us about the United States?

DV: America is a former slave state and a blatantly racist society, so yes, the war on drugs, which is managed by white supremacists, was and is directed against blacks and other despised minorities as a way of keeping them disenfranchised. The old Bureau of Narcotics was blatantly racist: not until 1968 were black FBN agents allowed to become group supervisors (Grade 13) and manage white agents.

I interviewed former FBN Agent William Davis for my book about the FBN, The Strength of the Wolf. Davis articulated the predicament of black agents.  After graduating from Rutgers University in 1950, Davis, while visiting New York City, heard singer Kate Smith praising FBN Agent Bill Jackson on a radio show. “She described him as a black lawyer who was doing a fine job as a federal narcotic agent,” Davis recalled, “and that was my inspiration. I applied to the Narcotics Bureau and was hired right away, but I soon found out there was an unwritten rule that Black agents could not hold positions of respect: they could not become group leaders, or manage or give direction to whites. The few black agents we had at any one time,” he said bitterly, “maybe eight in the whole country, had indignities heaped upon us.”

Davis told how Wade McCree, while working as an FBN agent in the 1930s, created a patent medicine.  But McCree made the mistake of writing to Eleanor Roosevelt to complain that prosecutors in the South were calling black agents “niggers.”  As a result, the FBN’s legal staff charge McCree with using FBN facilities to create his patent medicine. McCree was fired with the intended ripple effect: his dismissal sent a clear message that complaints from black agents would not be tolerated.

In an interview for The Strength of the Wolf, Clarence Giarusso, a veteran New Orleans narcotic agent and its chief of police in the 1970s, explained to me the racial situation from local law enforcement’s perspective. “We made cases in Black neighborhoods because it was easy,” he said. “We didn’t need a search warrant, it allowed us to meet our quotas, and it was ongoing. If we found dope on a Black man we could put him in jail for a few days and no one cared. He has no money for a lawyer, and the courts are ready to convict; there’s no expectation on the jury’s part that we even have to make a case.  So rather than go cold turkey he becomes an informant, which means we can make more cases in his neighborhood, which is all we’re interested in. We don’t care about Carlos Marcello or the Mafia. City cops have no interest in who brings the dope in. That’s the job of federal agents.”

Anyone who thinks it is any different nowadays is living in a fantasy world. Where I live, in Longmeadow, MA, the cops are the first line of defense against the blacks and Puerto Ricans in the nearby city of Springfield. About 15 years ago, there was a Mafia murder in Springfield’s Little Italy section. At the time, blacks and Puerto Ricans ere moving into the neighborhood and there was a lot of racial tension. The local TV station interviewed me about it, and I said the Al Bruno, the murdered Mafia boss, was probably an FBI informant. The next day, people I knew wouldn’t talk to me. Comments were made. Someone told me Bruno’s son went to the same health club as me. In a city like Springfield and its suburban neighborhoods, everyone is related to or friends with someone in the Mafia.

A few years before Bruno’s murder, I had befriended the janitor at the health club I belong to. By chance, the janitor was the son of a Springfield narcotics detective. The janitor and I shot pool and drank beers in local bars. One day he told me a secret his father had told him. His father told him that the Springfield cops let the Mafia bosses bring narcotics into Springfield and in exchange, the hoods named their black and Puerto Ricans customers. That way, like Giarusso said above, the cops keep making cases and the minority communities have a harder time buying houses and encroaching on the established whites in their neighborhoods. This happens everywhere in the US every day.

LS: Is it ironic to you that the whole drug trade wouldn’t exist as it does today if the drugs were not illegal in the first place?

DV: The outlawing of narcotic drugs turned the issue of addiction from a matter of “public health” into a law enforcement issue, and thus a pretext for expanding police forces and reorganizing the criminal justice and social welfare systems to prevent despised minorities from making political and social advances. The health care industry was placed in the hands of businessmen seeking profits at the expense of despised minorities, the poor and working classes. Private businesses established civic institutions to sanctify this repressive policy. Public educators developed curriculums that doubled as political indoctrination promoting the Business Party’s racist line. Bureaucracies were established to promote the expansion of business interests abroad, while suppressing political and social resistance to the medical, pharmaceutical, drug manufacturing and law enforcement industries that benefited from it.

It takes a library full of books to explain the economic foundations of the war on drugs, and the reasons for America’s laissez faire regulation of the industries that profit from it. Briefly stated, they profit from it just like the Mafia profits from it. Suffice it to say that Wall Street investors in the drug industries have used the government to unleash and transform their economic power into political and global military might; never forget, America is not an opium or cocaine producing nation, and narcotic drugs are a strategic resource, upon which all of the above industries – including the military – depend. Controlling the world’s drug supply, both legal and illegal, is a matter of national security. Read my books for examples of how this has played out over the past 70 years.

LS: In what form and fashion is the Phoenix program alive today in America’s homeland?

DV: Karl Marx explained over 150 years ago how and why capitalists treat workers the same, whether at home or abroad. As capitalism evolves and centralizes its power, as the climate degenerates, as the gap between rich and poor widens, and as resources become scarcer, America police forces adopt Phoenix-style “anti-terror” strategies and tactics to use against the civilian population. The government has enacted “administrative detention” laws, which are the legal basis for Phoenix-style operations, so that civilians can be arrested on suspicion of being a threat to national security. Phoenix was a bureaucratic method of coordinating agencies involved in intelligence gathering with those conducting “anti-terror” operations, and the Department of Homeland Security has established “fusion centers” based on this model around the nation. Informant nets and psychological operations against the American people have also proliferated since 9-11. This is all explained in detail in my book, The CIA as Organized Crime.

LS: How important is mainstream media for the public perception of the CIA?

DV: It’s the most critical feature. Guy Debord said that secrecy dominates the world, foremost as secret of domination. The media prevents you from knowing how you’re being dominated, by keeping the CIA’s secrets. The media and the CIA are same thing.

What FOX and MSNBC have in common is that, in a free-wheeling capitalist society, news is a commodity. News outlets target demographic audience to sell a product. It’s all fake news, in so far as each media outlet skews its presentation of the news to satisfy its customers. But when it comes to the CIA, it’s not just fake, it’s poison. It subverts democratic institutions.

Any domestic Phoenix-style organization or operation depends on double-speak and deniability, as well as official secrecy and media self-censorship. The CIA’s overarching need for total control of information requires media complicity. This was one of the great lesson defeat in Vietnam taught our leaders. The highly indoctrinated and well rewarded managers who run the government and media will never again allow the public to see the carnage they inflict upon foreign civilians. Americans never will see the mutilated Iraqi, Afghani, Libyan, and Syrian children killed by marauding US mercenary forces and cluster bombs.

On the other hand, falsified portrayals of CIA kidnappings, torture, and assassinations are glorified on TV and in movies. Telling the proper story is the key. Thanks to media complicity, Phoenix has already become the template for providing internal political security for America’s leaders.

LS: Is the CIA an enemy of the American people?

DV: Yes. It’s an instrument of the rich political elite, it does their dirty business.

MSNBC All-In For Trump's Purity of Essence

Counterpunch  |  Only the great Terry Southern could’ve scripted it: an American madman standing in front of the nations of this world in all his naked, toxic, Other-hating Old Glory, for all intents and purposes telling the assembled dignitaries that yes, women seek his life essence, but he denies it to them, because of that feeling of emptiness which follows the physical act of love…

…And by the way, I may want to kill twenty-five million people.

You wondered how this sickest of all sick Trump tropes would be dissected by those scalpel-wits at MSNBC.  Surely this would be an opportunity for them to have some cheap pulpy fun at Trump’s expense? After all, this is the network that employs Joy Reid, who is so desperate to red-bait Trump that she insists on pretending that Russia is still a communist country.  Surely they would seize upon Trump’s genocide threat to lay bare the horror of the entire speech.

Actually, they loved it.

Brian Williams—the man who contorted a Leonard Cohen lyric so he could rhapsodize about the beauty of American bombs—had two “experts” on to break down the speech.  And how Williams’ voice quavered with patriotic fervor as he announced them—-we are in the presence of greatness!—-“John Negroponte and Colonel Jack Jacobs.”

Negroponte, of course, is famous for being Our Man in Honduras in the 1980s, a tough job that required a lot of co-ordinating with death squads and torturers, many of whom spoke limited English.  He always played dumb when called to testify before Congress, but as The National Catholic Register reported, he “deceptively downplayed human rights violations, and played a key role in supporting the activities of Battalion 316, a CIA-backed Honduran-based regional counterinsurgency unit subsequently found to be among the cruelest of the cruel.”

Oh, in addition to his crimes against humanity, Negroponte also endorsed Hillary Clinton, who obviously shared his interest in perpetuating mass suffering among nonwhite, non-loyal Hondurans. And she trumpeted his endorsement loudly, as she did with Henry Kissinger. Not that there’s anything tone-deaf about that.

It turns out that old John Negroponte was very impressed with Trump’s speech—only Benjamin Netanyahu was more girlish in his excitement.  But surely Jack Jacobs, decorated war hero, would call out the insanity of threatening to commit war crimes in a speech at The United Nations.  And Williams teed it up for him, asking Jacobs how America could start to “walk back” Trump’s Jack D. Ripper idiocy.

I don’t think we do want to walk it back, said Colonel Jacobs.  He too felt good about the speech.  The way it showed our toughness.  Our resolve.

Our bipartisan resolve, he might’ve added, because it turns out that he too was a Hillary supporter.  And wasn’t Hillary the one who threatened to “obliterate” Iran?

Look, MSNBC, I understand: it’s been a tough week for you.  Hurricanes and earthquakes have occasionally forced you to steal time and attention from the latest Robert Mueller deposition.   But you may have inadvertently done us a great service: in real time, you helped us connect the genocidal madness of Donald Trump, via the connections of two neo-con hacks, directly back to Hillary Clinton.  Which is a fancy way of saying-—heck, we’re all Americans, at the end of the dayTo quote a great American,  “God willing, we will prevail, in peace and freedom from fear, and in true health, through the purity and essence of our natural bodily fluids.”

Kevin Shipp: The Deep State and the Shadow Government

activistpost |  “The shadow government controls the deep state and manipulates our elected government behind the scenes,” Shipp warned in a recent talk at a Geoengineeringwatch.org conference.

Shipp had a series of slides explaining how the deep state and shadow government functions as well as the horrific crimes they are committing against U.S. citizens.

Some of the revelations the former CIA anti-terrorism counter intelligence officer revealed included that “Google Earth was set up through the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and InQtel.” Indeed he is correct, the CIA and NGA owned the company Google acquired, Keyhole Inc., paying an undisclosed sum for the company to turn its tech into what we now know as Google Earth. Another curious investor in Keyhole Inc. was none other than the venture capital firm In-Q-Tel run by the CIA according to a press release at the time.

“The top of the shadow government is the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency,” Shipp said.

Shipp expressed that the CIA was created through the Council on Foreign relations with no congressional approval, and historically the CFR is also tied into the mainstream media (MSM.) He elaborated that the CIA was the “central node” of the shadow government and controlled all of other 16 intelligence agencies despite the existence of the DNI. The agency also controls defense and intelligence contractors, can manipulate the president and political decisions, has the power to start wars, torture, initiate coups, and commit false flag attacks he said.

As Shipp stated, the CIA was created through executive order by then President Harry Truman by the signing of the National Security Act of 1947.

According to Shipp, the deep state is comprised of the military industrial complex, intelligence contractors, defense contractors, MIC lobbyist, Wall St (offshore accounts), Federal Reserve, IMF/World Bank, Treasury, Foreign lobbyists, and Central Banks.

In the shocking, explosive presentation, Shipp went on to express that there are “over 10,000 secret sites in the U.S.” that formed after 9/11. There are “1,291 secret government agencies, 1,931 large private corporations and over 4,800,000 Americans that he knows of who have a secrecy clearance, and 854,000 who have Top Secret clearance, explaining they signed their lives away bound by an agreement.

He also detailed how Congress is owned by the Military Industrial Complex through the Congressional Armed Services Committee (48 senior members of Congress) giving those members money in return for a vote on the spending bill for the military and intelligence budget.

He even touched on what he called the “secret intelligence industrial complex,” which he called the center of the shadow government including the CIA, NSA, NRO, and NGA.

Shipp further stated that around the “secret intelligence industrial complex” you have the big five conglomerate of intelligence contractors – Leidos Holdings, CSRA, CACI, SAIC, and Booz Allen Hamilton. He noted that the work they do is “top secret and unreported.”