NYTimes | Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, on Thursday delivered a pointed speech on the Senate floor excoriating Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel as a major obstacle to peace in the Middle East and calling for new leadership in Israel, five months into the war.
Many Democratic lawmakers have condemned Mr. Netanyahu’s leadership and his right-wing governing coalition, and President Biden has even criticized the Israeli military’s offensive in Gaza as “over the top.” But Mr. Schumer’s speech amounted to the sharpest critique yet from a senior American elected official — effectively urging Israelis to replace Mr. Netanyahu.
“I believe in his heart, his highest priority is the security of Israel,” said Mr. Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in the United States. “However, I also believe Prime Minister Netanyahu has lost his way by allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel.” Mr. Schumer added: “He has been too willing to tolerate the civilian toll in Gaza, which is pushing support for Israel worldwide to historic lows. Israel cannot survive if it becomes a pariah.”
The speech was the latest reflection of the growing dissatisfaction among Democrats, particularly progressives, with Israel’s conduct of the war and its toll on Palestinian civilians, which has created a strategic and political dilemma for Mr. Biden. Republicans have tried to capitalize on that dynamic for electoral advantage, hugging Mr. Netanyahu closer as Democrats repudiate him. And on Thursday, they lashed out at Mr. Schumer for his remarks.
Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, said on the Senate floor that it was “grotesque and hypocritical” for Americans “who hyperventilate about foreign interference in our own democracy to call for the removal of the democratically elected leader of Israel.” He called Mr. Schumer’s move “unprecedented.”
“The Democratic Party doesn’t have an anti-Bibi problem,” Mr. McConnell said, referring to Mr. Netanyahu by his nickname. “It has an anti-Israel problem.”
Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, called Mr. Schumer’s remarks “earth-shatteringly bad” and accused him of “calling on the people of Israel to overthrow their government.” And House Republicans, gathered in West Virginia for a party retreat, hastily called a news conference to attack Mr. Schumer for his comments and position themselves as the true friends of Israel in Congress.
Mr. Schumer’s remarks came a day after Senate Republicans invited Mr. Netanyahu to speak as their special guest at a party retreat in Washington. Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, the No. 3 Republican, asked Mr. Netanyahu to address Republicans virtually, but he could not appear because of a last-minute scheduling conflict. Ambassador Michael Herzog, Israel’s envoy to the United States, spoke in his place and also addressed the House G.O.P. gathering on Thursday.
In his speech at the Capitol, Mr. Schumer, who represents a state with more than 20 percent of the country’s Jewish population, was careful to assert that he was not trying to dictate any electoral outcome in Israel. He prefaced his harsh criticism of Mr. Netanyahu with a long defense of the country, which he said American Jews “love in our bones.”
roburie |While the Washington Post has long been considered the mouthpiece of the CIA,
the New York Times has been more effective at carrying water for it in
recent years. The recent longish Times article entitled The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin
contains recitation of CIA-friendly talking points that portrays it as
indispensable to ‘our’ ability to commit pointless, petty atrocities
against Russia as the US sacrifices more Ukrainians in its misguided
war. Missing from the piece is any conceivable reason for the US to
continue the war.
The oft ascribed motive (and here)
for the CIA’s existence is to act as the US President’s secret army
abroad. The wisdom of this arrangement has been debated over the years.
Former US President Harry Truman, who oversaw the founding of the CIA
from its predecessor, the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), later regretted the decision
and argued that the CIA should be brought to heel. Later, the Cold War
presented cover for the CIA to act badly under the cover of national
defense.
In Stephen Kinzer’s book, All the Shah’s Men,
the CIA paid people to pretend to be communists so as to convey the
fiction that the CIA’s effort was about ‘fighting communism’ rather than
stealing Iran’s oil. Similarly, in the US coup that ousted
Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz for daring to raise the minimum wage
paid by foreign-owned industries in Guatemala, also featured fake
communists intended to convince the American press that the CIA was
fighting for freedom and democracy rather than to steal wages from poor
people for the benefit of rich Americans.
Together, these
imply that fake communists had been more effectively demonized by
Federal agencies than other available out groups because of the threat
they didn’t pose to American capital. Recall, in 1919 Woodrow Wilson
sent the American Expeditionary Force to join the Brits, French, and
Japanese in trying to reverse the Russian Revolution. Later, through the
Five Eyes Alliance, ‘the West’ spent the post-War era attacking the
Soviets while alleging that they were responding to political violence
that they (Five Eyes) started.
Oddly, given recent history,
the claim that the CIA is the President’s secret army still appears to
be the received wisdom in Washington and New York. This is odd because
while the CIA appears to be acting as Joe Biden’s secret army
in Ukraine and Israel, it went to war with (the duly elected President
of the US) Donald Trump for his entire four years in office. While Mr.
Trump played the victim of the US intelligence agencies to perfection,
he didn’t do what many normal humans would have done in his
circumstance--- clear out the top few levels of management at CIA, the
FBI, and NSA and see where this leaves ‘us.’
Implied
is a reversal of political causality whose proof can only be deduced. Is
Biden directing the CIA, or is the CIA directing Biden? For instance,
while Biden was Barack Obama’s point-man in Ukraine before, during, and
after the US-led coup there in 2014, Mr. Obama was publicly arguing
that Ukraine was of no strategic value to the US. With Donald Trump
following Mr. Obama as President, the CIA likely saw its 2014 coup in
Ukraine going to waste. This interpretation sheds a different light on
the Hunter Biden laptop fraud perpetrated by 51 current and former CIA employees.
(FBI informant Alexander Smirnov has been convicted of nothing
related to the new charges of ‘Russian interference.’ As was proved
with Russiagate, charges are easy to make, difficult to prove. No one---
not a single person, was convicted on the now antique charges of
Russian collusion. Those who were convicted were convicted on process
charges unrelated to the collusion charges. This use of the law as a
political weapon is called lawfare).
The view in this piece
is that Donald Trump was elected in 2016 because Barack Obama threw
several trillion dollars at the malefactors on Wall Street who blew up
the global economy while he pissed on the unemployed, the foreclosed
upon, and every working person in the US. In so doing, an income and
wealth chasm was rebuilt between the public welfare recipients who run
Wall Street and Big Tech and the former industrial workers whose jobs
were sent abroad as the final solution to the ‘problem’ of organized
labor.
With the current panic in the US over the rise of the BRICS
(China and Russia), the same politicians and economists who thought it
wise in 1995 to gut the industrial base with NAFTA are now busy
launching WWIII. These people never learn from their mistakes. For
instance, it apparently never occurred to them that outsourcing military
production might come back to bite when geopolitical tensions
inevitably flared again. Likewise, just-in-time production and inventory
management produced economic brittleness / fragility that created
problems when the Covid-19 pandemic hit.
So,
where is this going? With the CIA’s and FBI’s undermining of the
elected President’s (Trump) political agenda and its open efforts to rig
the 2020 election in favor of his opponent (Biden), it certainly
appears that the CIA is now running the US. Biden’s foreign policy
team---Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, and Victoria Nuland emerged from
the Clintonite death cult buried deep within the bowels of the American
foreign policy establishment, That they appear to be as uninformed and
arrogant as their policy outcomes to date suggest they are is only a
surprise inside Washington and New York.
However, this is at best a
partial explanation. What is surprising about US foreign policy is how
ignorant of world history, US history, basic diplomacy, military
tactics, economic relations, and basic human decency the American
political leadership is. It’s almost as if the answer to every foreign
policy conundrum of the last century has been to bomb civilian
populations, kill a whole lot of people, and then pretend it never
happened. Vietnam? Check. Nicaragua? Check. Syria? Check. Iraq? Check.
Ukraine? How can the body counts be hidden from beleaguered, clueless,
citizens so effectively?
Some recent history: the US launched a war against Russia when it (the US) invaded Ukraine in an unprovoked coup there in 2014 (see here, here, here)
and ousted its elected government. The Russians had taken issue with
the US / NATO surrounding it with NATO-allied states (maps below). Years
earlier, as Russian President Vladimir Putin stated in his recent interview
with Tucker Carlson, Mr. Putin had approached former US President Bill
Clinton about Russia joining NATO. Mr. Clinton ‘spoke with his people’
before telling Mr. Putin no to joining NATO as he reneged on George H.W. Bush’ s promise to keep NATO away from Russia’s border.
A
bit of additional history is needed here. The USSR was dissolved in
1991 to be replaced by non-communist Russia surrounded by former Soviet
states. Ukraine is one such state. The political – economic reference
point of post-Soviet Russia was an anachronistic form of neoliberalism.
Recall, Americans had been told since at least the early twentieth
century that ‘communism’ was the ideological foe of Western liberalism.
Current Russian President Vladimir Putin is proudly anti-communist. But
the US MIC (military-industrial complex), of which the CIA is a part,
needs enemies to justify its existence.
Following the
dissolution of the USSR (1991), there was discussion inside the US
regarding a ‘peace dividend,’ of redirecting military spending inflated
by the Cold War towards domestic purposes like schools, hospitals, and
civilian infrastructure. However, the CIA had been so hemmed in by
Federal budget constraints that it had inserted itself into
the international narcotics trade forty years prior in apparent
anticipation of just such an event. With the (George H.W.) Bush
recession of 1991, an election year, the peace dividend was rescinded.
thecradle |
British Defense Minister James Heappey informed parliament that Israeli
military operatives are “currently … posted in the UK,” both within Tel
Aviv’s diplomatic mission “and as participants in UK defense-led
training courses.” This hitherto unacknowledged arrangement amply
demonstrates how, despite
recent calls from
officials in London for Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to exercise
restraint in its genocide of Gaza – if not institute a ceasefire – the
UK remains international Zionism’s covert nerve center.
Mere days earlier, Heappey likewise admitted that
nine Israeli military aircraft landed in Britain since Operation Al
Aqsa Flood on 7 October last year. Investigations by independent
investigative website Declassified UK show that Royal Air Force
aircraft have flown to
and from Israel in the same period, along with 65 spy plane missions
launched from the UK’s vast, little-known military and intelligence base in Cyprus.
The
purpose of those flights and who and/or what they carried are a state
secret. Freedom of Information requests have been denied, Britain's
Ministry of Defense has refused to comment, and local media is by and
large silent.
Nonetheless, in July 2023,
British ministers admitted that the UK's training of Israeli military
personnel includes battlefield medical assistance, “organizational
design and concepts,” and “defense education.” It is unknown if that
“education” has in any way informed the slaughter of more than 30,000 Palestinians since 7 October.
British military presence in occupied Palestine
Yet,
indications that London has long provided a highly influential guiding
hand to Tel Aviv in its oppression and mass murder of Palestinians are
unambiguous, even if hidden in plain sight. For example, in September 2019, the Israeli air force participated in a joint combat exercise with its British, German, and Italian counterparts.
The
Israelis deployed F-15 warplanes for the purpose, which have been
blitzing Gaza on a virtually daily basis since 7 October,
indiscriminately flattening schools, hospitals, businesses, and homes
and killing untold innocents.
A year earlier, in October 2022, it was quietly admitted in
parliament that London maintains several “permanent military personnel
in Israel,” all posted in the British Embassy in Tel Aviv:
“They
carry out key activities in defense engagement and diplomacy. The
Ministry of Defense supports the HMG Middle East Peace Process Programme
in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and Israel. The program aims to
help protect the political and physical viability of a two-state
solution. We would not disclose the location and numbers of military
personnel for security reasons.”
'Joint activity'
Netanyahu
and other Israeli officials have openly and repeatedly boasted of their
personal role in blocking Palestinian statehood. We are thus left to
ponder what these British operatives are truly concerned about – it
certainly isn’t protecting “the political and physical viability of a
two-state solution,” as that entire project was evidently never
“viable,” by design. It could be those “permanent military personnel”
who are present under the auspices of a highly confidential December 2020 military cooperation agreement inked by London and Tel Aviv.
British
Ministry of Defense officials describe the agreement as an “important
piece of defense diplomacy,” which “strengthens” military ties between
the pair while providing “a mechanism for planning our joint activity.”
Its
contents are nonetheless concealed not only from the public but also
from elected lawmakers. Speculation can only abound that the agreement
compels Britain to defend Israel in the event it is attacked. Such
suspicions are only compounded by the visible presence of the UK’s elite SAS forces in Gaza today.
As a December 2023 investigation by The Cradle revealed,
this apparent deployment is protected from media and public scrutiny by
a dedicated Ministry of Defense-issued D-notice, as are other ominous
indicators Britain is shaping the theater and setting the stage in West
Asia for a full-blown, protracted region-wide war.
This included an as-yet-failed effort to pressure Beirut into
allowing armed British soldiers total, unrestricted freedom of movement
within Lebanon, along with immunity from arrest and prosecution for
committing any crime.
The monarchy's departure from neutrality
At countless protests the
world over in solidarity with Palestinians since last October,
demonstrators have brandished banners and signs imploring US President
Joe Biden to impose a ceasefire in Gaza, if not order Netanyahu to seek
peace. It is a noble demand, yet potentially misdirected. The true power
to halt Tel Aviv’s current push to fulfill Zionism’s genocidal founding
mission may not lie in Washington DC but in London – specifically,
Buckingham Palace.
An
extraordinary and largely unremarked upon development since Israel’s
military assault on Gaza began has been the British monarchy’s shameless
abandonment of “political neutrality” over Israel.
Queen
Elizabeth II, publicly at least, refrained from commenting on current
affairs or appearing to take “sides” on any issue throughout her 70-year
reign. However, her recently coronated son has apparently, without
fanfare, comprehensively shredded that longstanding convention.
King Charles the Zionist
Within hours of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’s eruption, King Charles openly condemned Hamas,
saying he was “profoundly distressed” and “appalled” by the “horrors
inflicted” by the resistance group and its “barbaric acts of terrorism.”
Hamas is not recognized as a terrorist entity by a majority of
countries internationally, while the BBC – which has relentlessly manufactured consent for genocide in Gaza every step of the way – rejects the designation’s use.
In the years immediately prior to taking the throne, Charles made his Zionism abundantly clear,
breaking with his mother’s unspoken policy of not visiting Israel,
secretly attending the funerals of former Israeli leaders Yitzhak Rabin
and Shimon Peres. In the latter instance, in 2016, he also visited the graves of
his grandmother, Princess Alice, and her aunt, Grand Duchess Elisabeth,
in a cemetery on Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives, near the world’s largest
Jewish cemetery. Both were Christian Zionists.
The Jerusalem Post approvingly dubbed Charles’
Zionist sympathies and familial connection to the Mount “a problem for
Palestinians,” arguing he has a clear view of “who the city and the
country belong to.” Meanwhile, the Times of Israel has hailed him as “a friend” to Jewry “with special and historic ties to Israel.” One such “tie” was an intimate friendship with Britain’s former chief Rabbi and President of United Jewish Israel Appeal, Jonathan Sacks.
darkfutura |The one seeming contradiction is that these elites
predominantly “live in zipcodes exceeding a population density of 10,000
people per square mile.” This misleading implies they live in large
cities like New York, where they would in fact be
forced to endure daily commingling with the peasantry. In reality, we
know they sit entrenched in highly sequestered aristocrats’ quarters
within these cities—like the Upper East Side in Manhattan, or Kalorama
in D.C. Being shuttled in swank car service to and fro, they rarely
deign to cross paths with the commoners for whom they have nothing but
contempt, apart from some token quick-grab at the corner coffee-and-bun
kiosk to reassure themselves that they’re ‘in touch’ with the slipstream
of society.
In many respects, this is an age-old problem: elites have
always existed in parallel societies. However, the advent of digital and
social media technologies have allowed them to encase themselves in an
ever-impermeable confirmation bias bubble like never before. Listen to
interviews with top Washington policymakers, corporate bigwigs, etc.,
and note how they exclusively mainline the most
mainstream corporate publications like WaPo, NYTimes, etc. It becomes
its own hermetic self-referencing feedback loop increasingly shut-off
from the real outside world of human experience.
As the earlier NYPost article described:
If
America is to avoid a tailspin into this toxic feedback loop, its
elites will need to step outside their bubble, stop conforming in an
effort to blend in with their myopic peers and start addressing the
legitimate grievances of their fellow Americans.
This
explains such things as the elites’ obsession with climate change, as
that is one issue that exists solely ‘on paper’—as an abstraction—and is
not realistically felt in the common quarters. The aristos who
repeatedly reflect their own shrill echochamber alarmism on this issue
get increasingly radicalized, particularly given that—as reported
earlier—they put far more store in institutions of authority than the
average prole. This results in the calcification of their blind belief
in specters like climate change, despite their paying only lip service
to it, and not acting accordingly in light of such an existential
‘threat’.
The problem is exacerbated by social ills which create
divisions along gender lines, disproportionately giving weight to
female-centric concerns, as per the Longhouse theory:
The
Longhouse refers to the remarkable overcorrection of the last two
generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine
methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior.
Women
are naturally wired to be more sympathetic—and thus suggestible—to the
social engineering imperatives co-opting the current narrative. Men are
being increasingly pushed out from higher education, which means that
even among the elites funnelled upward, the stances skew increasingly to
the ‘Longhouse’:
This feminization of the managerial class can be seen from a variety of vantage points:
As
everyone is now aware, unmarried women by far make the most
disproportionate jump into Democrat Land, as well as increasingly
radicalized hyperliberal policies—which reflects in other interesting
ways:
As an aside, one X user had a topically cogent comment about the screenshot below:
Most
of the bluecheck unpacking of the collapsing male college enrollment
story focuses on how worrisome it is that these men won't espouse elite
political opinions
But one of the most
revealing disparities in the Rasmussen survey showed just how out of
touch the elites are specifically to economic issues which affect the
plebs most—as opposed to the airy abstractions of fringe intellectual
culture war issues:
Victoria Nuland has let me know that she intends to step
down in the coming weeks as Under Secretary of State for Political
Affairs – a role in which she has personified President Biden’s
commitment to put diplomacy back at the center of our foreign policy and
revitalize America’s global leadership at a crucial time for our nation
and the world. ... [I]t’s Toria’s leadership on Ukraine that
diplomats and students of foreign policy will study for years to come.
Her efforts have been indispensable to confronting Putin’s full-scale
invasion of Ukraine, marshaling a global coalition to ensure his
strategic failure, and helping Ukraine work toward the day when it will
be able to stand strongly on its own feet – democratically,
economically, and militarily. ... President Biden and I have
asked our Under Secretary for Management John Bass to serve as Acting
Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs until Toria’s replacement
is confirmed.
She will be remembered for handing out cookies to anti-government demonstrators in Ukraine and for installing the 2014 coup regime.
That has been her main project in the State Department. But the 2014
Maidan putsch that turn the Ukraine into a battering ram against Russia,
has ended in a complete failure.
Neither was Russia 'weakened'
by the war nor has Ukraine any perspective to survive but as some
Russian controlled land-locked backwater country in Europe's east.
Given that billions were spent on Ukraine with little controls and
nothing to show for Nuland, and her family, have certainly made a bit on
the side. One wonders if any of the ongoing and coming investigations
into the black hole Ukraine will leave them unscarred.
As even Guardian commentators are now waking up to the mess they helped create it is high time for European politicians to also finally accept this reality:
Western Europe has no conceivable interest in escalating the
Ukraine war through a long-range missile exchange. While it should
sustain its logistical support for Ukrainian forces, it has no strategic
interest in Kyiv’s desire to drive Russia out of the majority
Russian-speaking areas of Crimea or Donbas. It has every interest in
assiduously seeking an early settlement and starting the rebuilding of
Ukraine.
As for the west’s “soft power” sanctions on Russia, they have failed
miserably, disrupting the global trading economy in the process.
Sanctions may be beloved of western diplomats and thinktanks. They may
even hurt someone – not least Britain’s energy users – but they have not
devastated the Russian economy or changed Putin’s mind. This year
Russia’s growth rate is expected to exceed Britain’s.
The crass ineptitude of a quarter of a century of western military
interventions should have taught us some lessons. Apparently not.
humanevents | Jack Posobiec hosted guest Mike Benz on Human Events Daily
Thursday to hear his take on the New York Times article that detailed
the CIA's involvement in Ukraine prior to the Russia invasion, which
Benz said will reveal itself to be "the largest operation in CIA
history."
The pair unpacked the reasoning behind the New York Times releasing
their story which essentially agreed with what conservative commentators
such as Posobiec have been saying since the war began.
"This is actually such a shocking moment in American journalist
history," Benz stated. "These are highly highly, highly classified
operations."
He said that "It's my contention that when the dust settles on this, the
Ukraine skirmish in the aftermath of the 2014 Maidan coup is going to
ultimately be the largest operation in CIA history."
Compared to the CIA's Syrian operation under Barack Obama, which was
revealed to be the most expensive operation up to this point, Ukraine
will blow it out of the water once all said and done, Benz said.
Posobiec clarified that Benz was implying the NYT article was a "limited
hangout" when "an operation becomes so compromised, or public knowledge
or public interest becomes so obvious around something," that the CIA
begins to unveil pieces of the big picture, like an "onion."
When the US involved itself in Ukraine in the Barack Obama, Hillary
Clinton, and John Brennan era, "We were riding high and riding dirty.
And that's what this was, we thought we were unstoppable and we could
just coup anyone we wanted, there'd never be any repercussions, and no
one would ever stand up for themselves, and Russia would never actually
backstop it," Benz said.
This, however, was a "serious miscalculation."
"And when it turned out that their own population didn't support these
dirty tricks, either in the form of the rise of a populace presidential
candidate like Donald Trump who was running on putting America first in
domestic priorities over foreign policy," he explained, "then all hell
broke loose."
I hope everyone appreciates what this means. The CIA disclosed highly classified intelligence to hand-picked journos in order to fight a PR war against Republicans in Congress who want to scale back Ukraine war funding.
dailycaller | Karine Jean-Pierre has turned over her spotlight to Admiral John
Kirby in an “unprecedented” way as the White House barrels toward a
pivotal election season, a Daily Caller review of briefing data reveals.
Since
Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, Kirby has been a mainstay at briefings
alongside Jean-Pierre to answer reporters’ questions about the foreign
conflict. Though Americans have indicated the war is not their top
concern, Kirby has remained at the briefings — only missing three since
the start of the year through Oct. 7. Of the briefings he has attended
in 2024, 19 out of the 22 total held, Kirby has fielded questions for
almost the exact same amount of time as Jean-Pierre.
As of Feb. 27, Jean-Pierre has spent about 11 hours and 31 minutes at
the White House press briefing podium this year across 22 briefings.
Kirby has answered questions for just under nine hours and two minutes
in 19 briefings. In those 19 briefings when Kirby and Jean-Pierre were
together, the press secretary spoke for just shy of nine hours and 11
minutes — almost a perfect fifty-fifty split with her counterpart.
“There
is no precedent for this. Press secretaries always bring guests, right.
It’s like, ‘Hey, we’re gonna have the OMB [the Office of Management and
Budget] guys brief you on the budget and talk to you about that.’
That’s normal,” Sean Spicer, one-time press secretary for former
President Donald Trump, told the Daily Caller. “That’s as old as the
job. But this idea that you have a co-press secretary is unprecedented.”
Some
other names have made appearances at briefings and gaggles, either
alongside Jean-Pierre or Kirby: deputy press secretary Olivia Dalton,
National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, White House spokesman for
oversight and investigations Ian Sams and a few other policy-specific
officials from the administration.
But none have appeared nearly as often as Kirby, who Jean-Pierre was reportedly concerned
might usurp her as press secretary when she first got the job. Biden
“awkwardly” added that Kirby would be joining Jean-Pierre’s team when
the president gave her the press secretary position in 2022, leaving her
“upset and confused,” according to Axios.
Jean-Pierre’s appointment was lauded
as historic and powerful when she got the job — she’s the first black
press secretary, and is also a lesbian woman of immigrant parents. From
the beginning, things have reportedly been rocky, though — Biden also
allegedly said that Jean-Pierre didn’t need to worry because she’d “have
an admiral looking over your shoulder,” a comment that was not received well by the new press secretary.
Amid the tension between Kirby and Jean-Pierre, the latter’s top deputy, Dalton, is reportedly ditching the White House for a gig at Apple.
That
leaves a clear path to the top job for Kirby. He has told some around
the White House he’s interested in the position, according to Axios, but
other White House officials denied those accounts.
When it comes
to gaggles, Kirby has appeared at more as of late, speaking at seven of
them between the start of the year and Feb. 16 for a total of more than
an hour and seven minutes. The pair has attended four gaggles together,
with Jean-Pierre answering questions for more than 41 minutes.
“I
don’t think the dynamic is awkward to begin with. I think they did it
under the presence, under the guise of national security and foreign
affairs. But the reality is, Kirby has really taken over a lot more, for
obvious reasons,” Spicer said. “The press secretary should be able to
handle all of the issues and it’s pretty obvious that there’s a level of
competence that just doesn’t exist.”
scheerpost | The New York Times on February 25 published an explosive story of
what purports to be the history of the CIA in Ukraine from the Maidan
coup of 2014 to the present. The story, “The Spy War: How the CIA
Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin,” is one of initial bilateral
distrust, but a mutual fear and hatred of Russia, that progresses to a
relationship so intimate that Ukraine is now one of the CIA’s closest
intelligence partners in the world.
At the same time, the Times’ publication of the piece, which
reporters claimed relied on more than 200 interviews in Ukraine, the US,
and “several European countries,” raises multiple questions: Why did
the CIA not object to the article’s publication, especially with it
being in one of the Agency’s preferred outlets? When the CIA approaches
a newspaper to complain about the classified information it contains,
the piece is almost always killed or severely edited. Newspaper
publishers are patriots, after all. Right?
Was the article published because the CIA wanted the news out there?
Perhaps more important was the point of the article to influence the
Congressional budget deliberations on aid to Ukraine? After all, was
the article really just meant to brag about how great the CIA is? Or
was it to warn Congressional appropriators, “Look how much we’ve
accomplished to confront the Russian bear. You wouldn’t really let it
all go to waste, would you?”
The Times’ article has all the hallmarks of a deep, inside look at a
sensitive—possibly classified—subject. It goes into depth on one of the
intelligence community’s Holy of Holies, an intelligence liaison
relationship, something that no intelligence officer is ever supposed to
discuss. But in the end, it really isn’t so sensitive. It doesn’t
tell us anything that every American hasn’t already assumed. Maybe we
hadn’t had it spelled out in print before, but we all believed that the
CIA was helping Ukraine fight the Russians. We had already seen
reporting that the CIA had “boots on the ground” in Ukraine and that the U.S. government was training Ukrainian special forces and Ukrainian pilots, so there’s nothing new there.
The article goes a little further in detail, although, again, without
providing anything that might endanger sources and methods. For
example, it tells us that:
There is a CIA listening post in the forest along the Russian
border, one of 12 “secret” bases the US maintains there. One or more of
these posts helped to prove Russia’s involvement in the 2014 downing of
Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. That’s great. But the revelation exposes
no secrets and tells us nothing new.
Ukrainian intelligence officials helped the Americans “go after” the
Russian operatives “who meddled in the 2016 US presidential election.”
I have a news flash for the New York Times: The Mueller report found that there was no meaningful Russian meddling in the 2016 election. And what does “go after” mean?
Beginning in 2016, the CIA trained an “elite Ukrainian commando
force known as Unit 2245, which captured Russian drones and
communications gear so that CIA technicians could reverse-engineer them
and crack Moscow’s encryption systems.” This is exactly what the CIA is
supposed to do. Honestly, if the CIA hadn’t been doing this, I would
have suggested a class action lawsuit for the American people to get
their tax money back. Besides, the CIA has been doing things like this for decades. The CIA was able to obtain important components of Soviet tactical weapons from ostensibly pro-Soviet Romania in the 1970s.
Ukraine has turned into an intelligence-gathering hub that has
intercepted more Russian communications than the CIA station in Kiev
could initially handle. Again, I would expect nothing less. After all,
that’s where the war is. So of course, communications will be
intercepted there. As to the CIA station being overwhelmed, the Times
never tells us if that is because the station was a one-man operation at
the time or whether it had thousands of employees and was still
overwhelmed. It’s all about scale.
And lest you think that the CIA and the U.S. government were on the
offensive in Ukraine, the article makes clear that, “Mr. Putin and his
advisers misread a critical dynamic. The CIA didn’t push its way into
Ukraine. U.S. officials were often reluctant to fully engage, fearing
that Ukrainian officials could not be trusted, and worrying about
provoking the Kremlin.”
It’s at this point in the article that the Times reveals what I
believe to be the buried lead: “Now these intelligence networks are more
important than ever, as Russia is on the offensive and Ukraine is more
dependent on sabotage and long-range missile strikes that require spies
far behind enemy lines. And they are increasingly at risk: “If Republicans in Congress end military funding to Kiev, the CIA may have to scale back.” (Emphasis mine.)
scheerpost | We can start, logically enough, with that desperation evident among
those dedicated to prolonging the war. The outcome of the war, in my
read and in the view of various military analysts, does not depend on
the $61 billion in aid that now hangs in the balance. But the Biden
regime seems to think it does, or pretends to think it does. The Times’s
most immediate intent, so far as one can make out from the piece, is to
add what degree of urgency it can to this question.
Entous and Schwirtz report that the people running Ukrainian
intelligence are nervous that without a House vote releasing new funds
“the CIA will abandon them.” Good enough that it boosts the case to cite
nervous Ukrainians, but we should recognize that this is a
misapprehension. The CIA has a very large budget entirely independent of
what Congress votes one way or another. William Burns, the CIA
director, traveled to Kyiv two weeks ago to reassure his counterparts
that “the U.S. commitment will continue,” as Entous and Schwirtz quote
him saying. This is perfectly true, assuming Burns referred to the
agency’s commitment.
More broadly, The Times piece appears amid flagging enthusiasm for
the Ukraine project. And it is in this circumstance that Entous and
Schwirtz went long on the benefits accruing to the CIA in consequence of
its presence on the ground in Ukraine. But read these two reporters
carefully: They, or whoever put their piece in its final shape, make it
clear that the agency’s operations on Ukrainian soil count first and
most as a contribution to Washington’s long campaign to undermine the
Russian Federation. This is not about Ukrainian democracy, that figment
of neoliberal propagandists. It is about Cold War II, plain and simple.
It is time to reinvigorate the old Russophobia, thus—and hence all the
baloney about Russians corrupting elections and so on. It is all there
for a reason.
To gather these thoughts and summarize, This piece is not journalism
and should not be read as such. Neither do Entous and Schwirtz serve as
journalists. They are clerks of the governing class pretending to be
journalists while they post notices on a bulletin board that pretends to
be a newspaper.
■
Let’s dolly out to put this piece in its historical context and
consider the implications of its appearance in the once-but-fallen
newspaper of record. Let’s think about the early 1970s, when it first
began to emerge that the CIA had compromised the American media and
broadcasters.
Jack Anderson, the admirably iconoclastic columnist, lifted the lid
on the agency’s infiltration of the media by way of a passing mention of
a corrupted correspondent in 1973. A year later a former Los Angeles
Times correspondent named Stuart Loory published the first extensive
exploration of relations between the CIA and the media in the Columbia
Journalism Review. Then, in 1976, the Church Committee opened its famous
hearings in the Senate. It took up all sorts of agency
malfeasance—assassinations, coups, illegal covert ops. Its intent was
also to disrupt the agency’s misuse of American media and restore the
latter to their independence and integrity.
The Church Committee is still widely remembered for getting its job
done. But it never did. A year after Church produced its six-volume
report, Rolling Stone published “The CIA and the Media,”
Carl Bernstein’s well-known piece. Bernstein went considerably beyond
the Church Committee, demonstrating that it pulled its punches rather
than pull the plug on the CIA’s intrusions in the media. Faced with the
prospect of forcing the CIA to sever all covert ties with the media, a
senator Bernstein did not name remarked, “We just weren’t ready to take
that step.”
We should read The Times’s piece on the righteousness of the CIA’s
activities in Ukraine—bearing in mind the self-evident cooperation
between the agency and the newspaper—with this history in mind.
America was just emerging from the disgraces of the McCarthyist
period when Stuart Loory opened the door on this question, the Church
Committee convened, and Carl Bernstein filled in the blanks. In and out
of the profession there was disgust at the covert relationship between
media and the spooks. Now look. What was then viewed as top-to-bottom
objectionable is now routinized. It is “as usual.” In my read this is
one consequence among many of the Russiagate years: They again plunged
Americans and their mainstream media into the same paranoia that
produced the corruptions of the 1950s and 1960s.
Alas, the scars of the swoon we call Russiagate are many and run deep
WSJ | Democratic and Republican congressional leaders struck an optimistic tone that they would avert a government shutdown this weekend
after a White House meeting in which lawmakers also stepped up pressure
on House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) to allow a long-stalled vote on
Ukraine aid to go forward.
Johnson
is expected to put forward legislation in coming days that would keep
the government fully open, but the details remained uncertain. The
Congress has until Saturday at 12:01 a.m. to fund the departments of
Veterans Affairs, Transportation, Agriculture, Energy and several other
agencies that have been operating on temporary extensions since Sept.
30. The funding for the rest of the federal government expires after
March 8.
The
main holdup has been in the Republican-led House, where Johnson is
managing a rowdy GOP conference that has taken a hard line on spending
and is increasingly skeptical of foreign aid, even as the
Democratic-controlled Senate has been ready for months to move forward.
Emerging
from the meeting, Johnson said he was “very optimistic” about
government- funding talks. Leaders think “we can get to agreement on
these issues and prevent a government shutdown,” he said. He didn’t take
questions.
The
other congressional leaders at the sit-down—Senate Majority Leader
Chuck Schumer, (D., N.Y.), Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) and
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.)—also sounded upbeat
about avoiding a shutdown.
“We
are making good progress,” said Schumer, adding there was some “back
and forth on some issues that different people want.” But he said, “I
don’t think those are insurmountable.” He indicated that the most likely
path was a short-term spending patch to give negotiators more time to
complete the full fiscal-year bills.
McConnell
said everyone was on the same page regarding the need to keep the
government funded. “I think we can stop that drama right now before it
emerges,” he said.
The
leaders sat down in the Oval Office, with Biden and Vice President
Kamala Harris positioned in armchairs near a crackling fire.
Congressional leaders sat on sofas arranged around a coffee table.
Those gathered for the meeting, including McConnell, pressed Johnson to allow a House vote on a Ukraine aid package.
Central Intelligence Agency Director William J. Burns gave a
presentation laying out the difficult conditions for Ukrainian soldiers
on the battlefield, with troops running out of munitions.
The
Senate passed a $95.3 billion package this month that contained a fresh
round of aid for Ukraine and funds for Israel and Taiwan. Johnson has
declined to put it on the House floor. House Republicans are divided on
Ukraine aid, with a little more than half on the record opposing it in
the past, including Johnson before he became speaker. The Senate bill
would need significant Democratic support to pass.
Schumer
said the discussion on Ukraine was “the most intense I have ever
encountered in my many meetings in the Oval Office.” He said he told
Johnson he would “regret it for the rest of his life” if he blocked assistance for Kyiv.
Johnson “said he wanted to get Ukraine done, and he had to figure out the best way to do it,” Schumer recalled.
In
the meeting, McConnell, a strong advocate for Kyiv, told Johnson the
House’s best path forward on Ukraine is to pass the Senate bill, because
making any changes would further delay the aid. “We have a time problem
here,” he told reporters.
Johnson
said he continued to insist on steps to secure the southern U.S. border
before passing any foreign-aid package. The House “is actively pursuing
and investigating all the various options” on the Ukraine package, he
said, but “the first priority of the country is our border.” Earlier
this year, Republicans blocked a bipartisan Senate deal linking aid to
Ukraine with changes at the border, saying it wasn’t tough enough.
House
Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.), speaking with reporters after meeting
with President Biden and other congressional leaders, said he thought a
government shutdown could be averted. Photo: Evan Vucci/Associated Press
The
White House meeting started shortly before noon and lasted about an
hour. Johnson briefly spoke one-on-one with the president after the
meeting ended. White House officials declined to say what the two men
discussed, other than explaining that the conversation wasn’t scheduled
in advance.
Afterward,
Biden told reporters a “bipartisan solution” was needed to fund the
government. Regarding Ukraine, he said “the need is urgent” for
additional funds. “I think the consequences of inaction in Ukraine are
dire,” Biden said.
Such
White House summits are high-profile opportunities for both sides to
show they are fighting for their parties’ priorities, rather than
nitty-gritty policy negotiations. But the moment was particularly
challenging for Johnson, a formerly little-known conservative who
leapfrogged from the lower ranks of House Republican leadership to
assume the speakership in October, after a group of GOP dissidents ousted his predecessor, former Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.).
Unlike other senior leaders on Capitol Hill, Johnson has almost no pre-existing relationship with Biden.
For
months, the Republican House and Democratic Senate have deferred on
Congress’s responsibility to set new spending levels and priorities for
the federal government for fiscal year 2024, instead passing a series of
stopgap measures by repeatedly extending spending levels set back in
December 2022.
Johnson has a number of options.
none of which will satisfy all House Republicans. He could seal a deal
with congressional Democrats and try to pass fresh full-year spending
legislation at a two-thirds threshold, bypassing Republican holdouts.
Johnson could put it off a few days or weeks with a short-term
patch—again with Democrats’ help. Or he could try to rely on his narrow
Republican majority to pass another stopgap bill through September,
triggering automatic across-the-board spending cuts; such a move would
be almost certain to lead to a shutdown because any such measure would
be dead on arrival in the Senate.
Beneath the surface of the spending fight,
a tug of war is playing out inside the House Republican conference
between military hawks and conservatives opposed to further spending,
with Johnson caught in the middle. The military hawks want to avoid the
defense cuts that would be triggered if Congress fails to enact new
full-year spending measures by April 30. The critics of more spending
benefit from congressional inaction, because it brings them closer to
the date when across-the-board cuts would be activated under a provision
in last year’s Fiscal Responsibility Act.
Some
GOP lawmakers have said in recent days they wouldn’t mind a shutdown,
while other figures including McConnell have warned that shutdowns are
bad policy—and bad politics.
SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS
Is Congress doing enough to avoid a partial government shutdown? Join the conversation below.
People
familiar with the negotiations between Johnson and Democrats said that a
key sticking point is how much money to appropriate for the Special
Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children.
Democrats are asking for $7.03 billion, more than the $6.3 billion
previously sought by the Senate and requested in Biden’s budget. But the
GOP-led House passed a measure including $6 billion for the program,
which provides food and health assistance.
Another
obstacle, these people said, is a provision to block the VA from
reporting the names of veterans who need help managing their benefits to
a national background-check system used to screen gun purchases.
Democrats want the language to be stripped out.
Even
if those issues get resolved, Johnson must sell the deal to his
factious conference after House lawmakers return Wednesday to
Washington. A House Republican meeting is scheduled for Thursday.
A
Friday conference call for GOP lawmakers did little to assuage raw
feelings as Johnson sought for an hour to manage the expectations of his
conference, fielding more than a dozen questions. The speaker told
lawmakers not to expect a home run or grand slams in the spending bills,
but instead singles or doubles, according to people on the call.
Johnson said such expectations reflected the reality of divided
government, and that some Republicans’ willingness to block routine
procedural votes—essentially paralyzing the floor—had hurt Republicans’
leverage in talks with Democrats.
Some
Republicans complained that he had offered little information about the
substance of any of the spending bills, raising fears that Johnson was
setting the stage for another episode in which he would rely on
Democratic votes to clear must-pass legislation through the House.
So
far, Johnson has passed five major bills at a two-thirds threshold with
the help of Democrats: two previous stopgap spending bills; the annual defense-policy bill; a temporary reauthorization of the Federal Aviation Administration; and a bipartisan tax bill.
McCarthy’s
willingness to pass a stopgap bill with Democratic votes in September
triggered the rebellion that led to his removal. The same fate could
await Johnson if at least three House Republicans were willing to vote
with all Democrats to fire him from the speakership, given the narrow
majority in the House.
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