Tag: Russia

World Class Trolling, Vlad

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Love him or hate him, you have to appreciate the Russian President’s mastery of the art of the troll:

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday he would be willing to provide the U.S. Congress a record of President Trump’s meeting with top Russian envoys, bringing scoffs on Capitol Hill that the Kremlin could help shed light on the disclosures of reportedly highly classified intelligence.

The provocative offer for the Kremlin to share evidence with U.S. oversight committees about the Oval Office meeting came with the caveat that the request for the transcript would have to come from the Trump administration.

Presenting a transcript is the Kremlin’s latest gambit in denying that Trump shared classified secrets last week with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russia’s ambassador to the United States during an Oval Office meeting.

But the tactic may have more to do with attempts to sow further chaos in Washington than assuage suspicions about the talks.

I have come across my share of trolls, but the elegance of this troll is truly a thing of beauty.

Pass the Popcorn

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Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein just appointed Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate alleged coordination between Russia and the 2016 Trump Campaign.

There is basically no difference difference between a special counsel and special prosecutor. The former term came into use largely through the notoriety of the latter term during Watergate.

Both are appointed by, and can be removed by, the Attorney General or his designee, who also gives the special counsel/prosecutor his remit.

An independent counsel (IC) is a completely different kettle of fish: They are appointed by a 3 judge panel, cannot be removed by the Attorney General, and their remit is pretty much unlimited.

The law that enabled the appointment of an IC expired in 1999, following the excesses of Kenneth Starr in his pursuit of Bill Clinton’s penis.  (Starr went on to become President of Baylor, where he covered up a rape culture among its athletes.)

This should be interesting.

This is the One Case Where the “Tricky Dick Defense” Actually Works

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Everyone is having conniptions because Donald Trump had a discussions with Russian officials describing credible reports that he had received regarding of ISIS plans to use a laptop bomb to take down a plane.

This may be stupid, but it’s not illegal, because POTUS is the ultimate classification authority in the United States, which means that he can tell whoever he wants whatever secrets he wants, and it’s legal, “Because the President is doing it.”

This does not apply to the multitude of crimes that Richard Milhous Nixon actually committed, but it does apply here.

His decision to go into detail about this with the Russians is a matter of politics and policy, but there is no violation of the law here, though there would be if any other individual in the US did so without authorization.

The President can authorize any release of classified data that is not constrained by other laws (For example, if there were a release of medical data, he might be in violation of the HIPAA statute).*

That is the beginning and the end of the law here.

This does not mean that his discussion wasn’t f%$#ing stupid, it appears that the intel came from another nation,† and his behavior would make other nations more reticent about intelligence sharing, but it is not illegal.

This is a tempest in a teapot over what is what I would call masturbatory intelligence outrage:

President Trump revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in a White House meeting last week, according to current and former U.S. officials, who said Trump’s disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State.

 The information the president relayed had been provided by a U.S. partner through an intelligence-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government, officials said.

 The partner had not given the United States permission to share the material with Russia, and officials said Trump’s decision to do so endangers cooperation from an ally that has access to the inner workings of the Islamic State. After Trump’s meeting, senior White House officials took steps to contain the damage, placing calls to the CIA and the National Security Agency.

 “This is code-word information,” said a U.S. official familiar with the matter, using terminology that refers to one of the highest classification levels used by American spy agencies. Trump “revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.”

………

Trump went on to discuss aspects of the threat that the United States learned only through the espionage capabilities of a key partner. He did not reveal the specific intelligence-gathering method, but he described how the Islamic State was pursuing elements of a specific plot and how much harm such an attack could cause under varying circumstances. Most alarmingly, officials said, Trump revealed the city in the Islamic State’s territory where the U.S. intelligence partner detected the threat.

The Post is withholding most plot details, including the name of the city, at the urging of officials who warned that revealing them would jeopardize important intelligence capabilities.

“Everyone knows this stream is very sensitive, and the idea of sharing it at this level of granularity with the Russians is troubling,” said a former senior U.S. counterterrorism official who also worked closely with members of the Trump national security team. He and others spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the subject.

That “Former senior U.S. counterterrorism official who also worked closely with members of the Trump national security team?”

That would be former SecDef Bob Gates, the unofficial mascot of what Ben Rhodes calls “The Blob”, the interventionist foreign policy conventional wisdom, which is itching for some sort of war with Russia.

With all the damage that Trump and his Evil Minions™ are doing to our economy, our environment, and our civil rights, the hysteria of America’s always wrong foreign policy establishment should not be a primary concern.

*I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!
†My guess is that the source is Israel, simply because it sounds like the sort of thing that the Mossad would catch, but this is a completely uninformed guess.

Cold War: The Sequal

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We now have credible reports that Russia is relaunching production of its Tu-160 Strategic Bomber:

The serial production of the upgraded Tupolev Tu-160M2 (NATO reporting name: Blackjack) strategic bomber will begin in 2020, a source in Russia’s defense and industrial sector told TASS.

There are plans to produce two or three Tu-160M2 planes annually, the source added.

“Work to manufacture the plane has begun. Under the contract signed between the United Aircraft Corporation and the Defense Ministry, the Tu-160M2 plane is expected to perform the first flight in 2018,” the source said.

“The Gorbunov Aircraft Plant in Kazan [an affiliate of the Tupolev Company] is expected to launch the serial production of the plane in 2020. It will produce two or three strategic bombers for the Aerospace Force annually,” the source added.

According to the source, it will be an absolutely new plane.

“The upgraded Tu-160M2 plane will retain only the airframe of the baseline model, which meets all modern standards. The plane’s equipment, including its avionics, electronics, cockpit, communications and control systems and a number of weapons, will be replaced. This will considerably improve the plane’s operational capabilities, in particular, the thrust of the NK-32 engines and the unrefueled range,” the source added.

What a waste, and our response will be more waste.

To quote Ike,  “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

Matt Taibbi Agrees With Me

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He refers to the current hysteria over potential ties between the Trump campaign and Russia as, “Putin Derangement Syndrome.

I think that the major impetus for this is that no one likes to admit that they have screwed this badly, and anyone who supported the Clinton campaign in a meaningful way is using this as a way to avoid admitting that they completely screwed the pooch:

………

Perhaps it will come off just the way people are expecting. Perhaps Flynn will get a deal, walk into the House or the Senate surrounded by a phalanx of lawyers, and unspool the whole sordid conspiracy.

He will explain that Donald Trump, compromised by ancient deals with Russian mobsters, and perhaps even blackmailed by an unspeakable KGB sex tape, made a secret deal. He’ll say Trump agreed to downplay the obvious benefits of an armed proxy war in Ukraine with nuclear-armed Russia in exchange for Vladimir Putin’s help in stealing the emails of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and John Podesta.

I personally would be surprised if this turned out to be the narrative, mainly because we haven’t seen any real evidence of it. But episodes like the Flynn story have even the most careful reporters paralyzed. What if, tomorrow, it all turns out to be true?

What if reality does turn out to be a massive connect-the-dots image of St. Basil’s Cathedral sitting atop the White House? (This was suddenly legitimate British conspiracist Louise Mensch’s construction in The New York Times last week.) What if all the Glenn Beck-style far-out charts with the circles and arrows somehow all make sense?

This is one of the tricks that keeps every good conspiracy theory going. Nobody wants to be the one claiming the emperor has no clothes the day His Highness walks out naked. And this Russia thing has spun out of control into just such an exercise of conspiratorial mass hysteria.

………

But when it comes to Trump-Putin collusion, we’re still waiting for the confirmation. As Democratic congresswoman Maxine Waters put it, the proof is increasingly understood to be the thing we find later, as in, “If we do the investigations, we will find the connections.”

But on the mass hysteria front, we already have evidence enough to fill a dozen books. And if it doesn’t freak you out, it probably should.

As I have noted before, I think that a lot of this is a desperate attempt by the Democratic Party intelligentsia to avoid any sort of introspection, which would otherwise reveal them to be complete prats.

Lessons Not Learned

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Specifically, the old saying that, “It ain’t the crime, it’s the coverup.”

It appears that one Jefferson Beauregard Sessions has not learned this lesson:

Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Thursday that he will recuse himself from investigations related to the 2016 presidential campaign, which would include any Russian interference in the electoral process.

 Speaking at a hastily called news conference at the Justice Department, Sessions said he was following the recommendation of department ethics officials after an evaluation of the rules and cases in which he might have a conflict.

 “They said that since I had involvement with the campaign, I should not be involved in any campaign investigation,” Sessions said. He added that he concurred with their assessment and would thus recuse himself from any existing or future investigation involving President Trump’s 2016 campaign.

 The announcement comes a day after The Washington Post revealed that Sessions twice met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the campaign and did not disclose that to the Senate Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearing in January.

(emphasis mine)

“Did not disclose,” is pretty mealy mouthed. Session explicitly denied any contact with Russian officials at the hearing.

Of course, IOKIYAR,* so nothing is going to happen to him.

*It’s OK If You’re A Republican.

This Should Surprise No One

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Russia has just completed an agreement with Syria expanding their access to the Syrian port of Tartus:

Russia and Syria have signed an agreement this week to expand Russia’s sole foreign base – a naval repair facility in Syria – into a larger naval base capable of permanently hosting 11 ships, according to the agreement issued by the Russian government.

The agreement — signed on Wednesday – would allow the Tartus installation to expand to berth larger surface combatants and submarines, according to Russian state-controlled press reports.

“The deal stipulates that 11 Russian vessels can be present in the harbor of Tartus at once, including the ships equipped with nuclear marine propulsion, provided that nuclear and environmental safety guidelines are respected,” read a report in the Kremlin-controlled Sputnik wire.

“Russia promises to send to Syria, at its request, specialists to help restore Syrian warships and will help organize the defense of the harbor of Tartus and help mount search and rescue operations in Syrian waters.”

This is not surprising.

There was always going to be a quid pro quo for Russia’s support of the Assad regime.

Snark of the Day

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The most remarkable thing about the government’s assessment released on Friday is that more than a quarter of the report is merely an annex dedicated to the colossal significance of the RT (Russia Today) television network. These seven pages written by the U.S. intelligence community comprise what is perhaps the greatest and most generous Christmas gift in the history of Russian Orthodoxy, which celebrates the birth of Christ on Saturday, Jan. 7.

—Moscow Times. American Unintelligence on Russia (Op-ed)

Heh.

The Fake News Problem at 1301 K Street NW

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The Original Hed

Friday night, the US State Security Apparatus’ favorite outlet for fake news, the Washington Post unleashed a bombshell, that Russia had hacked into Vermont’s power grid.

It was a real bombshell.

The only problem was that it was not even remotely true, and within 48 hours, the Post issued a mealy mouthed retraction:

Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that Russian hackers had penetrated the U.S. electric grid. Authorities say there is no indication of that so far. The computer at Burlington Electric that was hacked was not attached to the grid.

They also changed the headline to read, “Russian operation hacked a Vermont utility, showing risk to U.S. electrical grid security, officials say.”

Malware was found on a single laptop, and the malware is publicly available, and written by Ukrainians.  (It’s also an old version of the software.

The Post wrote a followup article, which led with, “As federal officials investigate suspicious Internet activity found last week on a Vermont utility computer, they are finding evidence that the incident is not linked to any Russian government effort to target or hack the utility, according to experts and officials close to the investigation.”

Forbes unleashed a can of whup ass on the WaPo as well.

I’ve not looked at the physical paper, but my guess is that it was not on the front page.

Someone’s laptop was surfing with its shields down, and it got hacked.

Some people in Congress and/or the White House then sold it as the end of the world.

As Marcy Wheeler pithily notes, “Some of these security professionals are the same ones who’ve been saying for months that the DNC hack can be reliably attributed to the Russian state.

This sort of hysteria undercuts the credibility of our cyber experts and the narrative that they are pushing.

Yeah, This is My Take Too

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I’m with Matt Taibb when he says, “Something About This Russia Story Stinks,” and that this bears some very real similarities with the failure of US media before the invasion of Iraq:

In an extraordinary development Thursday, the Obama administration announced a series of sanctions against Russia. Thirty-five Russian nationals will be expelled from the country. President Obama issued a terse statement seeming to blame Russia for the hack of the Democratic National Committee emails.

 “These data theft and disclosure activities could only have been directed by the highest levels of the Russian government,” he wrote.

 Russia at first pledged, darkly, to retaliate, then backed off. The Russian press today is even reporting that Vladimir Putin is inviting “the children of American diplomats” to “visit the Christmas tree in the Kremlin,” as characteristically loathsome/menacing/sarcastic a Putin response as you’ll find.

 This dramatic story puts the news media in a jackpot. Absent independent verification, reporters will have to rely upon the secret assessments of intelligence agencies to cover the story at all.

 Many reporters I know are quietly freaking out about having to go through that again. We all remember the WMD fiasco.

 “It’s déjà vu all over again” is how one friend put it.

………

 But we don’t learn much at all about what led our government to determine a) that these hacks were directed by the Russian government, or b) they were undertaken with the aim of influencing the election, and in particular to help elect Donald Trump.

 The problem with this story is that, like the Iraq-WMD mess, it takes place in the middle of a highly politicized environment during which the motives of all the relevant actors are suspect. Nothing quite adds up.

 If the American security agencies had smoking-gun evidence that the Russians had an organized campaign to derail the U.S. presidential election and deliver the White House to Trump, then expelling a few dozen diplomats after the election seems like an oddly weak and ill-timed response. Voices in both parties are saying this now.

 ………

 Now we have this sanctions story, which presents a new conundrum. It appears that a large segment of the press is biting hard on the core allegations of electoral interference emanating from the Obama administration.

 Did the Russians do it? Very possibly, in which case it should be reported to the max. But the press right now is flying blind. Plowing ahead with credulous accounts is problematic because so many different feasible scenarios are in play.

 On one end of the spectrum, America could have just been the victim of a virtual coup d’etat engineered by a combination of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, which would be among the most serious things to ever happen to our democracy.

 But this could also just be a cynical ass-covering campaign, by a Democratic Party that has seemed keen to deflect attention from its own electoral failures.

 The outgoing Democrats could just be using an over-interpreted intelligence “assessment” to delegitimize the incoming Trump administration and force Trump into an embarrassing political situation: Does he ease up on Russia and look like a patsy, or escalate even further with a nuclear-armed power?

 ………

 We ought to have learned from the Judith Miller episode. Not only do governments lie, they won’t hesitate to burn news agencies. In a desperate moment, they’ll use any sucker they can find to get a point across.

(emphasis mine)

It’s not just me and Mr. Taibbi who sees the evidence presented as thing, both reporters on the technical side of the national security beat, and William Binney the creator of the NSA’s data dragnet is profoundly unimpressed with the report:

I expected to see the IP’s or other signatures of APT’s 28/29 [the entities which the U.S. claims hacked the Democratic emails] and where they were located and how/when the data got transferred to them from DNC/HRC [i.e. Hillary Rodham Clinton]/etc. They seem to have been following APT 28/29 since at least 2015, so, where are they?

 Further, once we see the data being transferred to them, when and how did they transfer that data to Wikileaks? This would be evidence of trying to influence our election by getting the truth of our corrupt system out.

 And, as Edward Snowden said, once they have the IP’s and/or other signatures of 28/29 and DNC/HRC/etc., NSA would use Xkeyscore to help trace data passing across the network and show where it went. [Background.]

 In addition, since Wikileaks is (and has been) a cast iron target for NSA/GCHQ/etc for a number of years there
should be no excuse for them missing data going to any one associated with Wikileaks.

 ***

 Too many words means they don’t have clear evidence of how the data got to Wikileaks.

The continuing (for lack of a better term) red baiting by elements of the Democratic Party who failed but want to keep their “Phony Baloney Jobs” is rather deafening.

Obama finally took actions, expelling a few diplomats and shutting down two Russian facilities used largely by vacationing embassy staffer’s children, and in a tit for tat, Putin responded by inviting diplomatic children to (Orthodox) Christmas and New Years parties at the Kremlin.

Wait, that’s not a tit-for-tat retaliation:

On a day when everyone expected him to go low, Russian President Vladimir Putin took the high road, bowing out of a growing diplomatic showdown with the administration of President Obama in a gambit to woo his successor, Donald Trump.

In a rare, and calculated, break from the diplomatic tradition of reciprocal punishment, Putin opted to do nothing after the United States said it would expel 35 Russian diplomats and close a pair of Russian-owned properties in retaliation for Moscow’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

Putin said he would wait to see how U.S.-Russian relations develop under the new Trump administration before planning “any further steps” on the issue.

Until Putin’s surprise decision Friday, all signs pointed toward the familiar, hard-nosed Kremlin response of years past. In 2012, when Russia was slapped with U.S. sanctions over the death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, Putin shot back by signing a ban on all foreign adoptions of Russian children, just days after Christmas, sparking outrage.

But this time, with the Kremlin bidding farewell to Obama and betting that a friendly Trump administration will bring fresh opportunities to escape sanctions and make a grab for greater power status, Putin waxed magnanimous.

“We will not create any problems for U.S. diplomats,” Putin said in a statement late Friday afternoon. “We will not expel anyone. We will not prevent their families and children from using their traditional leisure sites during the New Year’s holidays.”

Instead of sending the U.S. diplomats home, Putin invited their kids over for “the New Year and Christmas children’s parties in the Kremlin.”

Obama just got trolled something fierce.

I am With Marcy Wheeler on This

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In the New York Times, noted national security journalist Marcy “Emptywheel” Wheeler observes that. “I Despise Donald Trump, but He’s Right to Be Skeptical of C.I.A. Leaks.”

She also calls out the Gray Lady for its fake news in the lead-up to the Iraq war, in its own pages.

I’m thinking that the editors had a fit over that:

………
 Trump is not quite right when he claims that, “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.” Neither the entire intelligence community nor even everyone at the C.I.A. was wrong about the Iraq intelligence. Rather, leaks like the ones we’re seeing now ensured elected officials didn’t hear from the skeptics who got it right.

That time, as members of Congress were demanding the Bush administration show its case for war, anonymous officials told this newspaper that aluminum tubes purchased by Iraq could only be used for nuclear enrichment. By the time Congress got a report, a month later, saying that might not be the case most members never read it; they had already been convinced that the case for war was a “slam dunk.” 

 ………

These leaks are important. By all means, take them seriously. But they raise questions about why the C.I.A. wants to short-circuit the deliberation Obama ordered as much as they raise alarm about Putin’s role in Trump’s victory. Letting the C.I.A. dictate outcomes with leaks corrupts any democratic accountability it has.

Putin must not get to pick our next president. At the same time, elected representatives — whether Congress, President Obama, the 538 electors or the person who takes a vow to protect and defend the Constitution on Jan. 20 — must maintain control over our powerful intelligence community, even while alarming leaks attempt to wag the dog. 

(emphasis mine)

Her theory (see her blog) is that someone in the CIA is trying to obscure the likely origins of Russian operations: Hostile actions taken by the US state security apparatus, particularly the CIA, intended to destabilize and overthrow Russian allies.

It’s pretty clear that the CIA never stopped making war on Moscow after the end of the USSR, and it appears that the Russian state security apparatus is now returning the favor.

OK, This Has Completely Blown Up

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There has been poo flung all over the place over the past few days regarding allegations of efforts of the Russians to influence the US elections.

With the exception of Marcy Wheeler’s astute observation that the CIA is studiously avoiding the obvious, that this is blowback against US regime change efforts against Russia and its allies:

The most logical explanation for the parade of leaks since Friday about why Russia hacked the Democrats is that the CIA has been avoiding admitting — perhaps even considering — the conclusion that Russia hacked Hillary in retaliation for the covert actions the CIA itself has taken against Russian interests.

Based on WaPo’s big story Friday, I guessed that there was more disagreement about Russia’s hack than its sources — who seemed to be close to Senate Democrats — let on. I was right. Whereas on Friday WaPo reported that it was the consensus view that Russia hacked Hillary to get Trump elected, on Saturday the same journalists reported that CIA and FBI were giving dramatically different briefings to Intelligence Committees.

………

Remarkably, only secondary commenters (including me, in point 13 here) have suggested the most obvious explanation: The likelihood that Russia targeted the former Secretary of State for a series of covert actions, all impacting key Russian interests, that at least started while she was Secretary of State. Those are:

  • Misleadingly getting the UN to sanction the Libya intervention based off the claim that it was about protecting civilians as opposed to regime change
  • Generating protests targeting Putin in response to 2011 parliamentary elections
  • Sponsoring “moderate rebels” to defeat Bashar al-Assad
  • Removing Viktor Yanukovych to install a pro-NATO government

Importantly, the first three of these happened on Hillary’s watch, with her active involvement. And Putin blamed Hillary, personally, for the protests in 2011.

So, it’s pretty clear that IF Russia actively meddled in our election (and the operative word is if) it appears that their actions were fare less intrusive than what we did. in Libya, Syria, Russia, or the Ukraine, where we have supported jihadists and (not a term of art) fascists.

In determining the veracity of the CIA’s assertions there are a couple of articles to review.

First, an article from The Guardian that quotes Craig Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, and close associate of Assange:  (See also more extensive comments from Mr. Murray here.)

Craig Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, who is a close associate of Assange, called the CIA claims “bullsh%$”, adding: “They are absolutely making it up.”

“I know who leaked them,” Murray said. “I’ve met the person who leaked them, and they are certainly not Russian and it’s an insider. It’s a leak, not a hack; the two are different things.

“If what the CIA are saying is true, and the CIA’s statement refers to people who are known to be linked to the Russian state, they would have arrested someone if it was someone inside the United States.

“America has not been shy about arresting whistleblowers and it’s not been shy about extraditing hackers. They plainly have no knowledge whatsoever.”

(%$ mine)

Note that in ALL the articles, this is the only absolute claim that is made on the record.

Also note that FBI and CIA have given conflicting briefings to lawmakers: (Also see here.)

In a secure meeting room under the Capitol last week, lawmakers held in their hands a classified letter written by colleagues in the Senate summing up a secret, new CIA assessment of Russia’s role in the 2016 presidential election.

 Sitting before the House Intelligence Committee was a senior FBI counterintelligence official. The question the Republicans and Democrats in attendance wanted answered was whether the bureau concurred with the conclusions the CIA had just shared with senators that Russia “quite” clearly intended to help Republican Donald Trump defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton and clinch the White House.

 For the Democrats in the room, the FBI’s response was frustrating — even shocking.

 During a similar Senate Intelligence Committee briefing held the previous week, the CIA’s statements, as reflected in the letter the lawmakers now held in their hands, were “direct and bald and unqualified” about Russia’s intentions to help Trump, according to one of the officials who attended the House briefing.

 The FBI official’s remarks to the lawmakers on the House Intelligence Committee were, in comparison, “fuzzy” and “ambiguous,” suggesting to those in the room that the bureau and the agency weren’t on the same page, the official said.

I’m with what Glenn Greenwald wrote for The Intercept, “Anonymous Leaks to the WashPost About the CIA’s Russia Beliefs Are No Substitute for Evidence.”

Though I would include the caveat/cliché that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

I would also note the following paragraph buried in the original Washington Post story, which relied entirely on anonymous sources:

The CIA presentation to senators about Russia’s intentions fell short of a formal U.S. assessment produced by all 17 intelligence agencies. A senior U.S. official said there were minor disagreements among intelligence officials about the agency’s assessment, in part because some questions remain unanswered.

(emphasis mine)

So, the actual facts of the matter are not clear, though people of different political bents are doing their best impression of blind men and an elephant.

Certainly, Russia has an interest in undermining faith in the Democratic process in the United States.

Additionally, Hillary Clinton’s record with Russia as Secretary of State was implacably and reflexively hostile to Russian concerns, so I could see how Russia might find the proverbial inverted traffic cone as a preferable alternative.

This means that the assertions are plausible, but by no means persuasive, particularly since the CIA appears to be flying solo with these assertions.

Additionally, the anonymous sourcing might imply that someone well into the “No f%$#s left give” category **cough** retiring Senator Harry Reid **cough* might simply be throwing some shade Donald Trump’s way.

I’m not sure what to believe, but even if all the allegations against Putin are true, they are far less aggressive than what the Obama administration, and the Hillary Clinton State Department were doing with Russia.

In any case, this all falls firmly in the “Sauce for the Gander” category for me.

From the Former Kaplan Test Prep Company, Now a Subsidiary of Amazon.com

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The Washington Post quoting an anonymous group of “experts” comes up with a blacklist of Russian propaganda sites.

It is, as Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept notes, a mishmash of dubious methodology juxtaposed with calls for “official investigations”.

If you want a point by point take-down of the facts, or lack therof, in the WaPo story and its pet anonymous bloggers (see attached Herblock cartoon), read Greenwald, but if you want moral outrage done right, I would suggest that you read Matt Taibbi’s commentary in Rolling Stone, who meticulously dissects how the Post ignored even the most basic of journalistic due diligence.

Last week, a technology reporter for the Washington Post named Craig Timberg ran an incredible story. It has no analog that I can think of in modern times. Headlined “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say,” the piece promotes the work of a shadowy group that smears some 200 alternative news outlets as either knowing or unwitting agents of a foreign power, including popular sites like Truthdig and Naked Capitalism.

The thrust of Timberg’s astonishingly lazy report is that a Russian intelligence operation of some kind was behind the publication of a “hurricane” of false news reports during the election season, in particular stories harmful to Hillary Clinton. The piece referenced those 200 websites as “routine peddlers of Russian propaganda.”

 The piece relied on what it claimed were “two teams of independent researchers,” but the citing of a report by the longtime anticommunist Foreign Policy Research Institute was really window dressing.

The meat of the story relied on a report by unnamed analysts from a single mysterious “organization” called PropOrNot – we don’t know if it’s one person or, as it claims, over 30 – a “group” that seems to have been in existence for just a few months.

It was PropOrNot’s report that identified what it calls “the list” of 200 offending sites. Outlets as diverse as AntiWar.com, LewRockwell.com and the Ron Paul Institute were described as either knowingly directed by Russian intelligence, or “useful idiots” who unwittingly did the bidding of foreign masters.

………

What this apparently means is that if you published material that meets their definition of being “useful” to the Russian state, you could be put on the “list,” and “warrant further scrutiny.”

………

Any halfway decent editor would have been scared to death by any of these factors. Moreover the vast majority of reporters would have needed to see something a lot more concrete than a half-assed theoretical paper from such a dicey source before denouncing 200 news organizations as traitors.

But if that same source also demanded anonymity on the preposterous grounds that it feared being “targeted by Russia’s legions of skilled hackers”? Any sane reporter would have booted them out the door. You want to blacklist hundreds of people, but you won’t put your name to your claims? Take a hike.

………

Most high school papers wouldn’t touch sources like these. But in November 2016, both the president-elect of the United States and the Washington Post are equally at ease with this sort of sourcing.

………

Even worse, the Post apparently never contacted any of the outlets on the “list” before they ran their story. Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism says she was never contacted. Chris Hedges of Truthdig, who was part of a group that won the Pulitzer Prize for The New York Times once upon a time, said the same. “We were named,” he tells me. “I was not contacted.”

………

Helping Beltway politicos mass-label a huge portion of dissenting media as “useful idiots” for foreign enemies in this sense is an extraordinarily self-destructive act. Maybe the Post doesn’t care and thinks it’s doing the right thing. In that case, at least do the damn work.

Also, note that Mark Ames notes that whoever is running their official Twitter account is a Ukranian fascist:  (I am not using metaphor here, I am talking real fascists)

Wow. The @washingtonpost anonymous source for blacklisting US journalists recently tweeted 1940s Ukrainian fascist “Heroiam Slava!” salute pic.twitter.com/vGvhAIjgTl

— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) November 26, 2016

It appears to be that the Washington Post could not even be bothered to read this guy’s Twitter feed.

They cited someone who is blogging in his pajamas who lives in his parents’ basement.

How about a nice cup of shut the F%$# Up, Johnnie?

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One of the truisms of the DC political scene is that John McCain thinks that he should be President, and that whoever has become President had better listen to him, or he will throw a tantrum and hold his breath until he passes out.*

The press, largely because of McCain’s tradition of giving them booze and palling around with them, seems to think that this is “Mavericky”, but it appears to be an exercise in arrested development to me.

Case in point, the overcooked potato from the state of Arizona is trying to dictate Russia policy:

Sen. John McCain, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, sent his first shot across the bow of President-elect Donald Trump’s national security plans Tuesday, saying that any attempt to “reset” relations with Russia is unacceptable.

 “With the U.S. presidential transition underway, Vladi­mir Putin has said in recent days that he wants to improve relations with the United States,” McCain (R-Ariz.) said in a statement released by his office.

It’s really depressing what qualifies as an elder statesman in DC.

*No sh%$. At age 2, the only way that his parents could get him to stop was to put him in an bathtub full of cold water.

We’ve Just Seen a Real World Consequence of Trump’s Policy Shift

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The day after Putin and Trump have a conversation about, “Regulating conflict,” the Russians and the Syrians began a major new offensive in Syria:

Pro-Assad forces have intensified attacks on Syrian rebels, launching a fierce aerial bombardment of besieged eastern Aleppo and missile strikes from a Russian aircraft carrier stationed off the coast, the day after Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin spoke on the phone.

The US president-elect and Russian president discussed “regulating the conflict in Syria” and the need to combat “international terrorism and extremism”, Putin’s office said in a statement.

This is a message from both Trump and Putin that the attempts to Persian Gulf potentiates and tje US state security apparatus to engineer regime change that this Great Game sh%$ needs to end.

I am sick to death of hair brained regime change schemes.

I don’t know why this is happening, whether it’s some sort of man-crush of Trump on Putin, or if it’s that he has looked at Syria and decided that it is a losing proposition, but in either case,  this is a positive development for everyone but the foreign Jihadists in Syria.