The real significance of the ODNI report on “Russia’s election election interfering”
8
January, 2017
I
have to confess that my first reaction was to simply ignore this
report as an irrelevant load of nonsense. Then I listed to a
Ukrainian blogger, Anatoli Sharii, making
fun of this report for over 10 minutes.
Listening to him my first reaction was “can’t be – Sharii is in
overkill mode”. But then Sharii began quoting the report at
length and I simply could not believe my eyes (I reading the original
English text which Sharii had translated into Russian): every word
Sharii said was true. That’s when I decided to download this
document and read it. Here it is embedded for you to read.
Please do
read the full text.
It is absolutely amazing:
Before
we go into the details, I also recommend that you go through the
following two examples of how the US corporate media “helpfully”
provided their readers with a “guide” to better
understand/interpret this report:
Again,
even if it is painful, I recommend that you read the full text of the
“guides” provided by these media outlets.
Now
let’s turn to the contents.
First,
remember what the stated goal of this report was: to convince
President-Elect Donald Trump that the Russians had actively
interfered in the US Presidential elections. Since Donald Trump
openly and repeatedly expressed his deepest skepticism about this
entire issue, this report is the best the Neocons got to try
to make him change his mind.
Second,
there is this key sentence in the first page of the report: “while
the conclusions in the report are all reflected in the classified
assessment, the declassified report does not and cannot include the
full supporting information, including specific intelligence and
sources and methods“.
Translated in plain English this means this: “while we cannot tell
you exactly how we know what we know, lest the bag guys find out
about a super-secret intelligence gathering methods, we promise you
that the conclusions made public today are supported by our
research. In other words, while “sources and methods” are
kept secret, the conclusions made public do faithfully summarize our
findings. In even simpler words we could say “our conclusions
are exhaustive, there are no other findings kept secret, only our
methods and means have been classified”. Basically this means
that, this
is all the Neocons got.
So
what does the report say:
- The Russians were critical of the US democracy process (page ii)
- Putin & Co preferred Trump over Clinton (page ii)
- The Russian media (state and private) was critical of Clinton (page ii)
- The Russian military intelligence agency GRU is behind well know hackers (page ii and iii)
- The Russians obtained access to US electoral boards but that did not affect the vote count (page iii)
- The Russians will use that experience in the future against US allies (page iii)
That’s
it. Seriously. That’s all they got. The rest of
the report is just a kind of vague discussion filled with “we
assess”, “we believe” and other such “estimative language”
(explained on page 13 of the report). The most amazing thing is
that in the 25 pages of the report there is not ONE SINGLE ELEMENT OF
PROOF. Absolutely nothing. What we have are
what I can only call “political complaints” (points 1 through 3
above) and totally unsubstantiated allegation of illegal monitoring
of various US servers/networks/computers. And that, my friends,
is absolutely stunning. Why? Because in the first
instance the US intel agencies are complaining that the Russians are
using their God given right to express their opinions and preferences
and while in the second instance the US complains that Russia is
doing exactly that which the biggest US intel agency – the NSA –
has been officially (and secretively) created to do: monitor others.
About
half the report is basically a long, paranoid rant about how
effective RT and Sputnik are and how popular they have become in the
West. Seriously, they are trying to convince Trump that the
Russians are bad bad bad by saying that RT has good talkshows!
This simply blows my mind.
As
for whether the GRU is in any way linked to Guccifer or DCLeaks.com –
this is plain laughable and they might as well claim that the Martian
intelligence services are linked to Wikileaks or that Russian
time-travel machines were involved in the assassination of JFK.
Frankly, this is as lame as it is pathetic.
I
don’t know what Trump was thinking when he listened to this load of
bovine excreta, but I know that had I been in his position I would
have literally kicked the folks presenting this report down the
stairs of my house and that I would have immediately fired all the
persons and offices linked to the drafting of this text. Why?
Because
as somebody who wrote analytical reports himself I know that this
report is so bad and vague that it would have been unacceptable even
coming from a first year junior analyst, nevermind top intelligence
officials. Second, because this report contains absolutely no
actionable intelligence whatsoever. So the Russian don’t like
Hillary and they say so. What’s the big deal? Hillary
was the most incompetent and russophobic Secretary of State in US
history and had she been elected the risks of thermonuclear war would
have been immense. Does it really surprise anybody that most
Russians (including yours truly) absolutely hate, despise and fear
her? What is Trump suppose to do now: call Putin and tell him
“Vladimir, please tell RT not to criticize US public figures?!”.
And what was Trump supposed to answer if Putin replied to him
“Donald, the USA has been deeply interfering inside Russia, you ran
our country in the 1990s, you rigged out elections, your snipers shot
our people from the roof of your embassy in 1993 and your media has
been demonizing me personally for years now – and you want me to
tone down RT?!”.
The
good news is that Trump did the right thing: he ridiculed this
absolutely laughable report and reiterated his desire for a good
relationship with Russia:
However,
this should not be the end of the story. Not only is this
report a botched and pathetic attempt at serving the narrow political
interests of the Neocons, it is also am immense stain on the already
battered reputation of the US intelligence community. We
already Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons, we already had the
zig-zaging nonsense about the Iranian military nuclear program, and
now we have this Kindergarten level direct interference in internal
US politics. If the USA was some kind of tiny and irrelevant
country like, say, Estonia, that would be no big deal. But when
the US tax payer spends many billions to fund not one, not two or
three, but 16 intelligence agencies and all they can produce is this
kind of total crap, this is a problem. A problem made worse by
the fact that this kind of “intelligence” is what the President
will use to have to make critical decisions, including the one to go
to war or even to use nuclear weapons.
So
funny as this all is, this is also scary. It appears that the
US intelligence community has been so totally politicized that it is
unable to fulfill its most important task: inform US decision makers.
Yet
again I come to the same conclusion: Trump needs to crack down hard,
very hard, on the US intelligence community, especially the CIA.
The entire community must be reformed and dramaticallyreduced
in size. In intelligence matters, bigger is not better, and a
bloated immense intelligence community of 16 agencies is something
not a single country in history has every tried. This is not
only a total waste of resources, this is outright dangerous.
For
years now the Russian have been complaining about what they politely
called the “lack of professionalism” of their US colleagues.
No doubt that now they will openly begin to deplore the “lack of
professionalism” of the US intelligence services. Why?
Because Russia’s security very much depends on the US intelligence
community truthfully and competently reporting about Russia to the US
President. A competent US intel community would tell the
President that Russia is no threat whatsoever and the working with
Russia on the basis of healthy self-interest, basic common sense and
mutual respect would be in the interest of both countries. But
right now the US intel community is only making matters worse, and
that harms both the USA and Russia.
Trump
should appoint somebody at the head of the FBI with “a cold head, a
burning heart and clean hands” (to borrow the expression of Felix
Derzhinskii) and order a massive crack-down on Congress, the US media
and the US intelligence community. Just like Putin did it in
Russia, and how the US dealt with the likes of Al Capone, he can
probably get most of them on charges of corruption, obstruction of
justice, fraud, abuse of power, criminal conspiracy to defraud, etc.
Congress (which always felt above the law) and the intel community
(which uses secrecy to hide corruption) should be especially
vulnerable to such tactics.
For
Trump and, I would argue, for the USA as a country, it is vital to
purge the top levels of power from such incompetent and dishonorable
clowns. Besides, they will not leave Trump alone nor will they
give him a fair chance to prove himself. And the Neocons cannot
be appeased, they always want more. Unless Trump takes
immediate action against them as soon as he enters the White House
his Presidency will be doomed, as will the future of the USA.
The
Saker
Here Abby Martin and her brother deconstruct the report
Here Abby Martin and her brother deconstruct the report
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