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We discuss not only the fascinating history of the Monroe Doctrine (Abe Lincoln was the first to invoke it) but why it is applicable to Venezuela. This article was listed as one of the top Google stories.
By Jiri and Leni Friedman Valenta
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 500, June 17, 2017
“…if the campaign is protracted, the resources of the State will not be equal to the strain.”
– Sun Tzu
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: “America will not lead from behind. America First does not mean America alone. It is a commitment to protecting and advancing our vital interests…” So wrote President Donald Trump’s NSA, General H.R. McMaster, with Gary Cohn, head of the National Economic Council, in the Wall Street Journal. What follows is a discussion of US leaders’ failed strategies in several wars, Trump’s team of generals, and the emerging Trump doctrine, which is here termed “strategic savvy”.
1964 Vietnam War; “Lies that Led to Vietnam”
Bullet-headed Lt. General H.R. McMaster, the US National Security Adviser, is not just a brave warrior. Like his mentor, General David Petraeus, he is a prominent military intellectual. Both men wrote their PhD dissertations on the lessons of Vietnam. In The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam, Petraeus concluded, “…significant emphasis should be given to counterinsurgency forces, equipment and doctrine.” McMasters’s thesis, Dereliction of Duty, addressed the roles of LBJ and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. His subtitle was “Lies that Led to Vietnam.”
On August 4, 1964, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was pushed through Congress authorizing military action against North Vietnam as “vital” to US national interests. It sought to punish Hanoi for an allegedly unprovoked attack by three torpedo boats on a US destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin. In fact, it had not been unprovoked; the US had made repeated prior attacks on the North Vietnamese coast.
The major reason for the American war against North Vietnam, asserts McMaster, was the then-upcoming 1964 presidential election. To Johnson, the prime enemy that summer was not the North Vietnamese but his GOP opponent, Barry Goldwater, who had accused the president of being soft on communism. In response, LBJ and McNamara misrepresented the facts and the pretext for sending US ground forces to Vietnam, and deliberately concealed the costs of war. McNamara’s thinking was shaped by his “whiz kids,” DOD civilian nerds, who lacked combat experience and arrogantly believed quantitative statistical analysis could compensate for their deficits in geopolitics, history, and military strategy.
Boasting that he had won his election “bigger than anybody had won ever,” LBJ endorsed McNamara’s strategy of gradual pressure on Hanoi, seeking to wear it down by “attrition.” To McMaster, this was “not a strategy but a lack of it … reinforcing arrogance, weakness, lying in the pursuit of self-interest and above all dereliction of duty to the American people.”
2001 War of Necessity in Afghanistan
In this century, the one war the US won – at least in its initial stage – was Afghanistan. There, following the 9/11 attack on the US homeland, President George Bush defended America’s vital national interests. Nor was this a regular DoD operation by the US army. US forces consisted of CIA operators, Special Forces, and an anti-Taliban Afghan resistance, the Northern Alliance. The 1st Marine Expeditionary Brigade was also involved, commanded by the current Defense Secretary, then Major General James Mattis, USMC. In addition, the US was given logistical help by Russian President Vladimir Putin, then Bush’s strategic partner. Within three months, the US had defeated its foe, liberated Kabul, and changed the regime.
2003 War of Choice in Iraq
But afterwards, as Paula Broadwell observed, the initial brilliant success in Afghanistan “was squandered when the US marched headlong into Iraq in early 2003.” Instead of finishing the war of necessity in Afghanistan, Washington entered into a war of choice with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein – who had had nothing to do with 9/11.
Why? In the words of historian Jean Edward Smith, the president tried to sell the war on the basis of “the flimsy notion that he was removing a potential threat to the United States” because Saddam might have WMD. That threat proved to be nonexistent. In addition, as a born-again Christian, Bush believed he was divinely guided to bring democracy to the Iraqi people.
On August 4, 2002, the 38th anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, Senator Chuck Hagel, a distinguished Vietnam veteran, told Congress, “We didn’t ask any questions before we got into Vietnam … this is why it’s important to do so now.” Two senior members of Bush’s team did so: Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill, who questioned the costs of war in Iraq; and Secretary of State General (ret.) Colin Powell, who prophesied ethnic divisions and insurgency. Both were subsequently marginalized by the Bush administration.
Like McNamara, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his two principal assistants, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, lacked the combat experience necessary to make sound military decisions. In the end, the one who did have it – Powell – was proven right. He and Bob Richer, then head of the CIA’s Middle East Division, also blamed Bush’s NSA, Condoleezza Rice, for the subsequent attempt at instant democratic nation-building. As Richer explained, “Rice’s vision that Iraq had to look like us overnight was catastrophic.” The president, he observed, “was a realist, but he listened to her and was swayed.”
US forces were sufficient to topple Saddam following a major invasion. But instead of liberating the Iraqis, the Americans became hated occupiers. This gave rise to a Sunni insurgency, during which the US fired the Iraqi military without setting up a stipend program for the soldiers and their families (thus compelling them to subsist on nothing for five long weeks). The US then fired all Baath Party members down to Level 4 without any agreed reconciliation process. This gave tens of thousands of influential Iraqis – often Western-educated – an incentive to oppose the new Iraq rather than support it.
In the ensuing struggle over leadership, a virtual civil war erupted between Sunnis and Shiites, with Kurds in the mix as well – not to mention al-Qaeda, which was rising in the Sunni community in Iraq. The unfinished war in Afghanistan and the unending, Vietnam-like quagmire in Iraq produced two growing insurgencies.
The Surge of Petraeus and his “Shipmate” Mattis
Before he became, in early February 2007, Commander of Multi-National Forces in Iraq, General David Petraeus worked with Mattis to lead a prominent team of US Army and Marine experts on an Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Referred to as “King David’s Bible,” this manual became an outstanding social science study of insurgencies and counter-insurgencies, as well as a guide to how to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis (and Afghans).
Those principles and techniques were applied by the forces under Petraeus in Iraq for over 19 months in 2007-08. The Surge, as the effort was known (due to the deployment of well over 25,000 additional American forces), ushered in a new strategy that was a 180-degree shift from the previous one, which had been assessed as failing in December 2006 by then-commander and ambassador Ryan Crocker.
The result was an 85% reduction in the level of violence and significant progress in a host of areas. President Bush deserves enormous credit for supporting the deployment of additional forces and for backing Petraeus and Crocker.
In late 2011, after some three years of further progress and additional reductions in violence, President Barack Obama decided to withdraw the remaining US combat forces and the last four-star US commander, leaving only a modest training mission. He reportedly was concerned that there would not be an Iraqi parliament-approved Status of Forces Agreement. Iraqi PM Maliki subsequently pursued ruinous sectarian measures – orchestrating legal charges against the Sunni Arab Vice President and his security detail, and later targeting the Sunni Arab Finance Minister and a prominent Sunni Arab parliamentarian. He returned to Iraqi military and police units abusive Iraqi leaders whom General Petraeus had insisted be removed before US support would be provided, then had those forces put down peaceful Sunni demonstrations very violently. He stopped honoring agreements to provide various forms of assistance to tens of thousands of former Sunni insurgents who had reconciled with the government during the Surge.
Tragically, these actions undid much of what coalition and Iraqi forces had sacrificed to achieve, and the Sunni insurgency in Iraq began to rise again. Islamic State arose out of the ashes of the defeated al-Qaeda in Iraq.
2011: Obama‘s Leading from Behind in Libya
In 2011, to make matters even worse, Obama and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, began to militate for yet another war, this time in Libya at the height of the “Arab Spring.” They did not heed Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s strenuous objections that it did not encompass “our vital national interests,” especially amidst two ongoing wars in the Middle East. Nor did Obama consider the war’s costs. Once again, the naysayer was ignored. Nine days later, Gates resigned.
Like LBJ and McNamara in Vietnam and Bush and Rice in Iraq, Obama and Clinton engaged in deceit about the real purpose of the war. Clinton argued that a NATO intervention was urgently needed to avert a massacre of Libyan civilians by Muammar Qaddafi’s troops. But her subsequently hacked e-mails substantiated that the real objective was regime change in the service of democratic nation-building.
After the rebels murdered Qaddafi, Libya, like Iraq earlier, became a paradise for tribal fighters and jihadists, and there ensued a significant flow of migrants to Europe. None of this chastened Clinton. She began to support secretly arming the Syrian rebels in a proxy war with both its dictator Assad and his patron, Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
Obama’s Strategic Patience
On June 11, 2011, Obama announced that he would withdraw 10,000 troops from Afghanistan by the end of December 2011 and the rest of the 30,000-member surge force by July 2012 (i.e., before the Democratic Party convention). Once again there arose a troublesome naysayer.
General David Petraeus objected to the premature withdrawal. Aware as he was of the actual situation on the ground, he was adamant that the projected timing of the draw-down would jeopardize the progress made in the previous year of the surge in Afghanistan. Obama was forced to compromise, but did not forget Petraeus.
Rahm Emmanuel, Obama’s chief of staff and one of the president’s loyalists, suspected that Petraeus was contemplating his own presidential run in 2016. It did not help that Petraeus emphatically told Emmanuel he wasn’t. Two days after the 2012 presidential election, Petraeus resigned his post as CIA director because of an affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell. (The mishandling of classified information did not surface until months later.) When historian Smith queried “whether the Obama administration had taken advantage of his affair to cut his head off,” Petraeus smiled, but did not reply.
Towards Strategic Savvy
If there is any solace for Washington’s numerous follies in the Middle East, it is Donald Trump’s selection of an outstanding national security team: Mattis, McMaster, and General John Kelly (Homeland Security). With Trump’s election, America saw the dawn of a new doctrine to replace “strategic patience,” leading from behind, and the absence of strategy. We call the new approach “strategic savvy,” meaning the judicious use of military force, diplomacy, and economic instruments. Petraeus describes it as a “comprehensive and sustainable commitment” in defense of American vital national interests. The president and his security team seek to overturn policies that have produced only failed states, Islamist-fed chaos, growing terrorist attacks in Europe, and catastrophic debt.
We have witnessed the first actions defining this emerging doctrine. On April 7, 2017, US navy destroyers carried out a missile strike on a Syrian airfield in retribution for Assad’s use of chemical weapons against his subjects. A tactical move, it bore profound strategic significance, since it used judicious force to accomplish what Obama had failed to do in 2013 despite his own declared red line. So did the dropping of the “Mother of All Bombs” (MOAB, or Massive Ordnance Air Blast), the largest conventional bomb in the US arsenal, on ISIS fighters in Afghanistan on April 14.
Facing what Mattis has called a “clear and present danger” from North Korea, Trump’s team did not put the problem off in the manner of the past three US administrations. He is meeting it head on with an unprecedented deployment of three carrier groups with massive naval and air power. This is intended to send a clear message on the need to stop a maniacal leader from accomplishing a nuclear weaponization and delivery system that could eventually reach American shores. President Trump has communicated this need to Chinese President Xi very clearly as well. The era of Obama’s “strategic patience” is finally over.
Future presidents should consider replicating Trump’s placement of national security responsibilities in the hands of individuals with combat experience. America’s future leaders should be men and women with such experience combined with intellectual prowess.
In the meantime, the saga continues. Americans are transfixed by Russo-gate, much as they were by Watergate. President Trump’s political opponents seek to undo the results of the 2016 election by painting him as Putin’s Manchurian candidate.
Trump should now do what Obama did not: pardon Petraeus, whom Gates called “one of the nation’s great battle captains.” As Senator Rand Paul observed, Petraeus showed his personal journals, which did contain classified material, to only one person, an Army reserve intelligence officer with a top secret clearance. Her book was thoroughly checked for classified information and any sensitive political items by the then head of West Point’s Social Sciences Department, Colonel Mike Meese. The negligent Hillary Clinton, still unpunished, revealed classified material to the multitudes through her unsecured server.
Petraeus sympathizes with the beleaguered Trump’s predicament, but only to a certain extent. Like the authors, he realizes that Trump, a novice at presidential politics, has made big mistakes and then repeated them, making things worse.
In his final address as a general, Petraeus quoted Teddy Roosevelt’s 1910 Men in the Arena speech. The words are now surely applicable to both of them:
It is not the critic who counts … the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood … who errs and comes up short again and again … but who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotions, who spends himself for a triumph of high achievement and … if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.
The authors are indebted to General David Petraeus for his comments and suggestions.
Dr. Jiri Valenta and his wife, Leni, are the principals of The Institute of Post Communist Studies and Terrorism (jvlv.net). They are authors of a forthcoming book on Russia and US interventions in the 21st century. A prominent author and speaker, Jiri served for decade as a professor and coordinator of Soviet and East European Studies at the US Naval Post-Graduate School and former consultant to senior members of Reagan administration.
BESA Center Perspectives Papers are published through the generosity of the Greg Rosshandler Family
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 520, July 6, 2017
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The July 2015-February 2017 interviews with Vladimir Putin by US filmmaker Oliver Stone, now streaming on Showtime, provide surprising insights into the mind of the Russian leader. “We like President Trump,” Putin admits, recalling that during the election campaign Trump was open to a new relationship with Moscow. Further progress was stalled by Russo-gate. Trump should not buy Putin’s reasons for his Ukrainian and Syrian interventions, but would be wise to be open to renewing a limited partnership with Russia against Islamic terrorism and Pyongyang’s rogue regime.
2016 Russo-gate and 2012 America-gate
President Trump must remind the Russian leader that his election intervention denials have been exposed as false, as US intelligence was able to record his June 2016 orders to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails. However, he should also address Putin’s charges that twice – during the 2000 and particularly the 2012 Russian elections – Washington aggressively rallied the opposition and funded anti-Putin events. Putin also accuses US diplomats of supporting, controlling, and funding NGOs seeking to influence the outcome of elections. He thus implies that his interference in the 2016 US elections was payback of sorts.
“Dostoevsky character”
Henry Kissinger has described Putin as a “cold calculator of Russia’s national interest” and a “Dostoevsky character.” Indeed, much like Dostoevsky, the Russian president underwent a Kafkaesque metamorphosis from young, progressive revolutionary to conservative thinker and fierce defender of empire and orthodoxy. Stone makes clear, however, that he does not know what to make of Putin’s repeated references to God or his stance as defender of the Orthodox faith, which the Russian leader addresses when he takes him into his private chapel at his dacha.
In fact, Putin has genuinely embraced God, Russian orthodoxy, nationalism, and patriotism – but is humble about it. “I didn’t make the church popular … it was done by the Russian people,” he says. “The communist ideology ceased to exist and there was an ideological vacuum. The vacuum could be filled by nothing else but religion.”
Repudiation of chaotic Gorbachev-Yeltsin reforms
After the 1989 East German revolution, Putin, based in Dresden as a KGB lieutenant colonel, returned to his native city, St. Petersburg. At that time, Moscow maverick Boris Yeltsin and Putin’s former law professor, Anatoly Sobchak, were unleashing revolution from below in the form of free elections and economic reforms. Putin helped Sobchak become the city’s mayor and served as his deputy for foreign economic relations. He can thus raise a glass with Trump on the common ground of economics, investment, and trade. (It will have to be a non-alcoholic toast, as neither of them drinks.)
During the August 1991 coup, Putin joined Yeltsin and Sobchak in fighting the Communist putschists and resigned from the KGB. “I didn’t agree with the actions undertaken by the Communists in the attempted coup against Gorbachev,” he says. Moving to Moscow in 1996, he worked for Yeltsin in his legal department, finally becoming head of the FSB, the KGB’s successor. When Yeltsin became ill, he appointed Putin, known for his hard work and loyalty, as prime minister and then as acting president. “In four years I was acting president,” Putin recalls. It was “an incredible story.”
Eventually Putin concluded, however, that privatization and the transformation of Russia to capitalism under Yeltsin were too chaotic. Thus, he came to preside over state capitalism and a highly controlled market economic system. Trump should not be confused by Putin’s skillful selling of Russia as a genuine democracy. It is not.
“Russia should think about joining NATO”
An important issue covered in Stone’s interviews is how the new Cold War began. “In the 1990s,” Putin says, “we assumed the Cold War was over.” He recalls half-jokingly telling President Bill Clinton that “Russia should think about joining NATO.” Clinton responded, “Why not? I think it’s possible.” But when Clinton brought up the idea with his team, “They were bewildered and frightened.” Putin himself began to have misgivings. He ultimately concluded that “There are only two opinions in NATO: the American opinion and the wrong opinion.”
Nevertheless, Trump should explore closer cooperation between Moscow and NATO. Can the partnership with Russia that prevailed during the early George W. Bush years in Afghanistan be restored? And if so, how?
Against regime change
The above question must begin with an examination of American follies in Iraq, Libya, and Syria. Like Trump, Putin did not agree with the US intervention in Iraq. “We had exact data there were no WMDs whatsoever in Iraq,” he says. “The most depressing thing is to change the regimes in that part of the world with the hope the next day there will be American-style democracy.”
Americans were happy when the Libyan dictator was killed in 2011, but, as in Iraq, the war in that country became a catastrophe. Before Qaddafi’s death, there were few terrorists in Libya – but they came in as US-armed rebels, some of whom were jihadists, gained control of the country. Something similar could have happened in Syria, but the 2015 Kremlin intervention saved Assad from Qaddafi’s fate.
Putin, McCain, and “Carthago delenda est”
John McCain will be shocked if he watches the Stone interviews. Putin reveals another side of his character when he professes to like the perennial hawk. “I like him because of his patriotism, and I can relate to his consistencies in his own fighting for the interests of his country.”
Putin cites the motto of Marcus Porcius Cato, the elder of ancient Rome: “Cartego delenda est [Carthage must be destroyed].” The wars between Rome and Carthage, he explains, were exploited by barbarians who took advantage of the feud and eventually succeeded in destroying Rome. The lesson? “If these cities had not fought one another and had agreed on fighting a common enemy … they would have both survived.”
By citing history in this way, Putin again makes the case for a new partnership with America. “We’ve been supporting the US fight for independence. We were allies in WWI and WWII,” he says. “Right now there are common threats we are both facing like international terrorism [the modern barbarians].”
Why Putin didn’t conclude a 2016 Syria agreement with Obama
The agreement on Syria with the Obama administration was that the two powers were supposed to perform strikes jointly there on designated terrorist targets. Putin blames the US for giving up on the agreement for political reasons. He also maintains that Moscow held discussions with the Obama administration on resolving the Syrian crisis, only to conclude in October 2016 that time had run out. The Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs would talk instead to the incoming US administration.
The “art of the deal” on Ukraine
Trump should not take seriously Putin’s explanation that the intervention in Georgia happened simply because of the aggressiveness of Georgian leader Saakashvili . This is only part of the story. Nor should he buy Putin’s convoluted expositions on the conflicts in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, both of which began with Russian military intervention. Trump should lift western sanctions only if Putin volunteers to withdraw his forces from Ukraine and to recognize its territorial integrity and neutrality.
On Israel and the Jews
Putin is perhaps the first Russian leader in history who is not anti-Semitic. He knows that some 40% of Israel’s Jews or their ancestors hail from Russia. He compares the initiators of Russo-gate to anti-Semites who always blame the Jews for their own failures. He clearly does not support the Palestinians, recalling former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s words: “Mr. President, right now you are in a region where no one can ever be trusted on any matter.”
For Trump it is America First. For Putin, it is Russia First
The crescendo of the interviews comes when Stone argues that he himself is neither pro-American nor pro-Russian; he is pro-peace. Putin lectures the Hollywood leftist, “…You’re a man of peace. And I am pro-Russian … You are too anti-American, and I don’t want to be dragged into it.” Clearly this is a message for Trump that Putin understands his strategy of “America First.” Trump defends his country’s vital national interests, and so does Putin. Russia First! The art of the deal is to reconcile the interests the two powers have in common. This will not be easy.
The North Korean crisis makes partnership with Russia a necessity
Putin does not reveal the details of his phone conversations with Trump on North Korea, which launched its first ICBM on America’s Independence Day. This move will likely be met by a strong, perhaps military, response by the US. But no matter what response Trump chooses, he will need Beijing’s and Moscow’s strong cooperation on both North Korea and Syria.
Trump should use his skills at the art of deal-making to end the new Cold War with Putin. America and Russia need each other.
Dr. Jiri Valenta is a noted expert on Russia, the US, national security, and terrorism. Author of Soviet Intervention in Czechoslovakia 1968 and co-editor and contributor to Soviet Decision-making for National Security, he is a former tenured associate professor and coordinator of Soviet and East European Studies at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is indebted to his partner and wife, Leni Friedman Valenta, editor-in-chief of jvlv.net and CEO of the Institute of Post Communist Studies and Terrorism, with whom he recently published Washington and Moscow: Confrontation or Cooperation? at the BESA Center.
BESA Center Perspectives Papers are published through the generosity of the Greg Rosshandler Family
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 418, March 6, 2017
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The FBI has concluded that ousted National Security Advisor (NSA) Mike Flynn’s contact with Russian ambassador Sergei Kisliak was not, in fact, illicit. Prior NSAs, aware that the Kremlin can influence close elections, have courted its “vote” for their candidates. Flynn acted as his predecessors did while protecting his back channel and his loyalty to Trump. The ongoing witch-hunt is emblematic of an unprecedented political power struggle in the US that reflects widely divergent policies toward Russia, the Middle East, and Ukraine.
Why was General Mike Flynn, Donald Trump’s National Security Adviser, fired? Did he do anything out of the ordinary by communicating with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak during and shortly after the 2016 elections?
Former Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, as well as former acting KGB resident in America Oleg Kalugin, have both revealed in their memoirs that during close US presidential elections there were debates in the Kremlin about whom to “vote” for. The preferred candidate was whichever of the contenders was the less menacing for Russia and had the greater potential to unleash a new era of partnership. Moreover, aides to US presidential candidates have been known to actively court the Kremlin’s favor on behalf of their candidates. Election tampering goes in both directions.
As Dobrynin describes in In Confidence, in the tight 1968 elections, he viewed Democrat Vice President Hubert Humphrey as far preferable to the Republican candidate Richard Nixon, whom he described as “an anti-Soviet, Cold War warrior.” Based on Dobrynin’s reports, the Kremlin took the “unprecedented” step of “secretly” offering Humphrey financial aid. Dobrynin conceded that this was a “dangerous venture … if discovered it would have certainly backfired.”
Humphrey wisely turned the offer down, satisfying himself with “Moscow’s good wishes,” and never revealed it to anyone. Why did he not inform the FBI of the offer? Because had he done so, Nixon would have labeled him the Manchurian candidate.
But Humphrey was not the Soviets’ only choice. In The First Directorate, Kalugin reveals, “We in the KGB took a different view … We liked Nixon,” who could “take giant steps” towards improving Soviet-US relations. The reason for this, as the former KGB official explains, was that “no one could accuse Nixon of being soft on communism.” Kalugin had his man, Boris Sedov, develop a back channel with Henry Kissinger. Sedov then conveyed to the Kremlin that Nixon should be their man in Washington.
As the election approached, however, Humphrey was still the Kremlin’s choice. And so, as Clark Clifford showed in Counsel to the Presidents, Humphrey’s chief fan in the Kremlin, Premier Alexei Kosygin, helped Lyndon B. Johnson instigate an “October Surprise.” On October 30, 1968, LBJ, acting in concert with the Kremlin, agreed to a ceasefire in Vietnam. Meanwhile, Kosygin prodded Hanoi to open negotiations in Paris with the US and Saigon. Peace now beckoned – and with it, perhaps, a Humphrey victory.
But Nixon correctly interpreted Johnson’s move as a political stunt and torpedoed it. He instructed his emissary to persuade the South Vietnamese government not to participate in the negotiations on the grounds that they would get a better deal if Nixon was elected. Nixon thus squeezed out an election victory. Sedov continued meeting with Nixon’s aide, Richard Allen, for the next two years.
During the 1976 elections, the Kremlin had a slight preference for Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, who was a known quantity. However, on October 30, 1976, Ford’s NSA, General Brent Scowcroft, felt compelled to inform Dobrynin why the president had sent a virtual ultimatum to the Kremlin demanding that it permit Jewish emigration from the USSR. He revealed apologetically that, following Carter’s example, Ford had yielded to the demands of American Jewish leaders and asked Dobrynin for “patience and understanding for another 48 hours, until this madhouse is over.” After November 2, he promised, “everything was going to be back to normal.”
But Carter won, and the “madhouse” continued. Carter’s human rights policy would plague the Kremlin for the next four years.
Fast forward to March 1979. Richard Allen again courted the Kremlin, this time on behalf of Ronald Reagan. So did Scowcroft. Allen, drawing “a parallel between Reagan and Nixon,” indicated that a reset of the superpowers’ relationship was likewise possible under Reagan. Scowcroft advised that if the USSR “gave no trumps to Carter,” Reagan had a good chance of winning.
On October 16, 1980, Zbigniew Brzezinski came courting for Carter. He promised Dobrynin that Carter would adopt a soft line toward Moscow’s clients Angola, Vietnam, and Cuba. A US-Sino military alliance was also “absolutely out of the question.’’ The message was clear: Moscow should do nothing to diminish Carter’s election chances “and might even help a bit.”
On October 22, it was Kissinger’s turn. Now a private citizen, but acting with Reagan’s consent, he told Dobrynin that “The Reagan camp was fairly confident of victory absent some last minute surprise.” Moreover, Reagan “was not the mad, anti-Soviet right-winger” they may have thought he was.
In the end, the Kremlin “voted” to “stay on the fence.” Reagan won the elections and eventually embarked on a reset with Mikhail Gorbachev.
In 2012, President Barack Obama did his own marketing, promising outgoing President Dmitri Medvedev that “After my election I [will] have more flexibility.” Meanwhile, Mitt Romney declared that Russia “is, without question, our number one geopolitical foe,” a viewpoint that was openly mocked by Obama. The Kremlin’s “vote” was for Obama, although Putin was already blaming Hillary and her State Department for provoking protests during Russia’s December 2011 parliamentary elections.
In 2016, Hillary’s hacked e-mails revealed her as having been a major proponent of arming the rebels who killed Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi. As former defense secretary Robert Gates concluded in Duty, the Russians, who lost Libyan oil contracts, realized they had been tricked. They had not blocked a NATO intervention in Libya because it had been sold to them at the UN as a “humanitarian” effort to rescue civilians during the country’s civil war.
In 2015, having learned that Washington had been arming Syrian rebels against his client, Bashar Assad, Putin intervened militarily in Syria. He had watched Iraq and Libya become failed jihadist states after the deaths of their dictators, and was resolved to save Assad. It was not just oil contracts and future pipelines that were at stake, but also Russia’s heavy investments in upgrading Syria’s Port of Tartus.
The turning point may have come in the summer of 2016, when Hillary associate Mike Morell, her likely CIA Director had she won, advocated “killing Russians” in Syria. In marked contrast, Donald Trump expressed a desire to work jointly with Moscow against the Islamists. Thereafter, the Russians sought to help Trump, their preferred candidate.
The unprecedented witch-hunt of Flynn-gate, now extended to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, is symptomatic of the enormous political power struggle in Washington, coupled with the deepening crisis of confidence in national institutions. It is also related to persistent divisions within US government bureaucracies over American relations with Russia, Syria, and Ukraine.
The new NSA, Gen. H.R. McMaster, can be expected to try to bridge these differences within a new unified framework. We recommend that the Trump administration not contemplate the lifting of sanctions without linking them to the conflicts in both Syria and Ukraine, and insisting on Russia’s compliance with the Minsk agreements.
The purge of Flynn is only the hors d’oeuvres. The calls for Sessions’s resignation and for the naming of a special prosecutor indicate that the sharks are hoping for the chef d’oeuvre – Trump – as the Manchurian candidate.
Dr. Jiri Valenta and his wife, Leni, are the principals of The Institute of Post Communist Studies and Terrorism (jvlv.net). They are authors of a forthcoming book on Russia and US interventions in the 21st century. A prominent author and speaker, Jiri served for decade as a professor and coordinator of Soviet and East European Studies at the US Naval Post-Graduate School and former consultant to senior members of Reagan administration.
BESA Center Perspectives Papers are published through the generosity of the Greg Rosshandler Family
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 418, March 6, 2017
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The FBI has concluded that ousted National Security Advisor (NSA) Mike Flynn’s contact with Russian ambassador Sergei Kisliak was not, in fact, illicit. Prior NSAs, aware that the Kremlin can influence close elections, have courted its “vote” for their candidates. Flynn acted as his predecessors did while protecting his back channel and his loyalty to Trump. The ongoing witch-hunt is emblematic of an unprecedented political power struggle in the US that reflects widely divergent policies toward Russia, the Middle East, and Ukraine.
Why was General Mike Flynn, Donald Trump’s National Security Adviser, fired? Did he do anything out of the ordinary by communicating with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak during and shortly after the 2016 elections?
Former Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, as well as former acting KGB resident in America Oleg Kalugin, have both revealed in their memoirs that during close US presidential elections there were debates in the Kremlin about whom to “vote” for. The preferred candidate was whichever of the contenders was the less menacing for Russia and had the greater potential to unleash a new era of partnership. Moreover, aides to US presidential candidates have been known to actively court the Kremlin’s favor on behalf of their candidates. Election tampering goes in both directions.
As Dobrynin describes in In Confidence, in the tight 1968 elections, he viewed Democrat Vice President Hubert Humphrey as far preferable to the Republican candidate Richard Nixon, whom he described as “an anti-Soviet, Cold War warrior.” Based on Dobrynin’s reports, the Kremlin took the “unprecedented” step of “secretly” offering Humphrey financial aid. Dobrynin conceded that this was a “dangerous venture … if discovered it would have certainly backfired.”
Humphrey wisely turned the offer down, satisfying himself with “Moscow’s good wishes,” and never revealed it to anyone. Why did he not inform the FBI of the offer? Because had he done so, Nixon would have labeled him the Manchurian candidate.
But Humphrey was not the Soviets’ only choice. In The First Directorate, Kalugin reveals, “We in the KGB took a different view … We liked Nixon,” who could “take giant steps” towards improving Soviet-US relations. The reason for this, as the former KGB official explains, was that “no one could accuse Nixon of being soft on communism.” Kalugin had his man, Boris Sedov, develop a back channel with Henry Kissinger. Sedov then conveyed to the Kremlin that Nixon should be their man in Washington.
As the election approached, however, Humphrey was still the Kremlin’s choice. And so, as Clark Clifford showed in Counsel to the Presidents, Humphrey’s chief fan in the Kremlin, Premier Alexei Kosygin, helped Lyndon B. Johnson instigate an “October Surprise.” On October 30, 1968, LBJ, acting in concert with the Kremlin, agreed to a ceasefire in Vietnam. Meanwhile, Kosygin prodded Hanoi to open negotiations in Paris with the US and Saigon. Peace now beckoned – and with it, perhaps, a Humphrey victory.
But Nixon correctly interpreted Johnson’s move as a political stunt and torpedoed it. He instructed his emissary to persuade the South Vietnamese government not to participate in the negotiations on the grounds that they would get a better deal if Nixon was elected. Nixon thus squeezed out an election victory. Sedov continued meeting with Nixon’s aide, Richard Allen, for the next two years.
During the 1976 elections, the Kremlin had a slight preference for Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, who was a known quantity. However, on October 30, 1976, Ford’s NSA, General Brent Scowcroft, felt compelled to inform Dobrynin why the president had sent a virtual ultimatum to the Kremlin demanding that it permit Jewish emigration from the USSR. He revealed apologetically that, following Carter’s example, Ford had yielded to the demands of American Jewish leaders and asked Dobrynin for “patience and understanding for another 48 hours, until this madhouse is over.” After November 2, he promised, “everything was going to be back to normal.”
But Carter won, and the “madhouse” continued. Carter’s human rights policy would plague the Kremlin for the next four years.
Fast forward to March 1979. Richard Allen again courted the Kremlin, this time on behalf of Ronald Reagan. So did Scowcroft. Allen, drawing “a parallel between Reagan and Nixon,” indicated that a reset of the superpowers’ relationship was likewise possible under Reagan. Scowcroft advised that if the USSR “gave no trumps to Carter,” Reagan had a good chance of winning.
On October 16, 1980, Zbigniew Brzezinski came courting for Carter. He promised Dobrynin that Carter would adopt a soft line toward Moscow’s clients Angola, Vietnam, and Cuba. A US-Sino military alliance was also “absolutely out of the question.’’ The message was clear: Moscow should do nothing to diminish Carter’s election chances “and might even help a bit.”
On October 22, it was Kissinger’s turn. Now a private citizen, but acting with Reagan’s consent, he told Dobrynin that “The Reagan camp was fairly confident of victory absent some last minute surprise.” Moreover, Reagan “was not the mad, anti-Soviet right-winger” they may have thought he was.
In the end, the Kremlin “voted” to “stay on the fence.” Reagan won the elections and eventually embarked on a reset with Mikhail Gorbachev.
In 2012, President Barack Obama did his own marketing, promising outgoing President Dmitri Medvedev that “After my election I [will] have more flexibility.” Meanwhile, Mitt Romney declared that Russia “is, without question, our number one geopolitical foe,” a viewpoint that was openly mocked by Obama. The Kremlin’s “vote” was for Obama, although Putin was already blaming Hillary and her State Department for provoking protests during Russia’s December 2011 parliamentary elections.
In 2016, Hillary’s hacked e-mails revealed her as having been a major proponent of arming the rebels who killed Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi. As former defense secretary Robert Gates concluded in Duty, the Russians, who lost Libyan oil contracts, realized they had been tricked. They had not blocked a NATO intervention in Libya because it had been sold to them at the UN as a “humanitarian” effort to rescue civilians during the country’s civil war.
In 2015, having learned that Washington had been arming Syrian rebels against his client, Bashar Assad, Putin intervened militarily in Syria. He had watched Iraq and Libya become failed jihadist states after the deaths of their dictators, and was resolved to save Assad. It was not just oil contracts and future pipelines that were at stake, but also Russia’s heavy investments in upgrading Syria’s Port of Tartus.
The turning point may have come in the summer of 2016, when Hillary associate Mike Morell, her likely CIA Director had she won, advocated “killing Russians” in Syria. In marked contrast, Donald Trump expressed a desire to work jointly with Moscow against the Islamists. Thereafter, the Russians sought to help Trump, their preferred candidate.
The unprecedented witch-hunt of Flynn-gate, now extended to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, is symptomatic of the enormous political power struggle in Washington, coupled with the deepening crisis of confidence in national institutions. It is also related to persistent divisions within US government bureaucracies over American relations with Russia, Syria, and Ukraine.
The new NSA, Gen. H.R. McMaster, can be expected to try to bridge these differences within a new unified framework. We recommend that the Trump administration not contemplate the lifting of sanctions without linking them to the conflicts in both Syria and Ukraine, and insisting on Russia’s compliance with the Minsk agreements.
The purge of Flynn is only the hors d’oeuvres. The calls for Sessions’s resignation and for the naming of a special prosecutor indicate that the sharks are hoping for the chef d’oeuvre – Trump – as the Manchurian candidate.
Dr. Jiri Valenta and his wife, Leni, are the principals of The Institute of Post Communist Studies and Terrorism (jvlv.net). They are authors of a forthcoming book on Russia and US interventions in the 21st century. A prominent author and speaker, Jiri served for decade as a professor and coordinator of Soviet and East European Studies at the US Naval Post-Graduate School and former consultant to senior members of Reagan administration.
BESA Center Perspectives Papers are published through the generosity of the Greg Rosshandler Family
Unafraid, Bi-partisan, Uphold U.S. and Freedom
Editorial Note: (By Leni Friedman Valenta)
In light of the brouhaha over the temporary Muslim ban imposed by President Trump, we make the following observation. There are two words Obama could not bring himself to say, “Radical Islam.” There are also two that Trump, for obvious reasons, cannot allow himself to presently say-- “Sharia law.”
In our view, the temporary ban was not meant just for potential terrorists. Though he cannot say it yet, we believe Trump hopes to somehow prevent a constitutional crisis here over the very definition of religion. Islam is a beautiful religion as practiced today by the majority of Muslims, but sharia law, a throwback to the 7th century, cannot and must not be permitted here. Like Nazi fascism, it is exactly what U.S. law is not. The reasons are made manifest by the personal testimony of analyst Jake Neuman, who lives in Germany.
December 31, 2016; The Day the Music Stopped
Jake Neuman
Gone are the days of the German Oompah bands. The days are now long past that the music stopped. The rapid Jihad sweeping Germany culminated at New Years Eve celebrations in Stuttgart, Cologne and Hamburg. It manifested as Taharrush - the Arabic word for the phenomenon whereby women are encircled by groups of men and sexually harassed, assaulted, groped -- and even raped.
In Stuttgart, upwards of 1,000 drunk and aggressive Muslim men of Arab or North African appearance attacked German women in the train stations. German media and police, after much delay, were finally forced to report this horror because an incredible 516 women came forward to report it. (And how many didn’t, out of fear?) The scale of the attacks shocked Germany. City police chief Wolfgang Albers called it "a completely new dimension of crime."
Yet not one media outlet explained that under sharia law, kafir [infidel]women are granted by God to Muslim men as their sexual slaves and can be raped with impunity for their pleasure. What happened in Germany is not a crime to a Muslim. Under Sharia law, rape is not just a holy act, it is ordained by Allah as a weapon of war!
To understand Taharrush you must view this You Tube video on on the violence in Cologne, Germany: https://youtu.be/uepAJ6-GrrU
Women were also targeted in Hamburg, But the Cologne assaults - near the city's iconic cathedral - were the most serious. There, under the eyes of more than 200 policemen, women were sexually and massively harassed by Arab invaders. A large number of young women were also attacked on the Reeperbahn. As in Cologne , the victims were encircled by a group of attackers who called them "sluts," groped their breasts and buttocks, and attacked them in their genital areas. "The girls were like hunted animals," said a witness. Some, according to police, were saved by the bouncers of bars and clubs.
What is wrong with leaders like Germany’s Merkel, but also David Cameron? He too allows Muslim Jihadists into Britain who have raped and gang-raped tens of thousands of young girls. In Sweden rape is also a horrific problem. Incredibly, women in these three countries are being sacrificed on the altar of political correctness.
VERSE 33:50: “O Prophet! surely We have made lawful to you your wives whom you have given their dowries, and those [slaves] whom your right hand possesses out of those whom Allah has given to you as prisoners of war….”.
The term "possessions of the right hand" means “slaves.” It is expressly stated that Muhammad's slaves are given to him by Allah himself to be taken out of his share of the captives in war. The above verse is only a few out of numerous such verses scattered throughout the Quran. (4.24, 4:3, 4:25, 23:1-6, 24:33, 70:22-30, 70: 29-35) Tell me, what could be more unethical than owning slaves and raping slave girls? Yet some Muslims living under Sharia, believe that God graciously allows them to do so.
In past centuries, having sex slaves was one of the main factors in the spread of Islam. Indeed it was a pillar of Islam! Having murdered the kafir woman’s man, a Muslim male could feel sanctioned by the law of God to complete her final humiliation; the domination of her body. Today, under Sharia in some countries, a raped Muslim woman must be able to provide four male witnesses who witnessed her being raped; otherwise she is accused of zina - unlawful sexual intercourse — and jailed as a result.
Qur’an 24:4: “And those who accuse honorable women but bring not four witnesses, scourge them (with) eighty stripes and never (afterward) accept their testimony – They indeed are evil-doers”
Can you tell us how a man whom Muslims claim was the apostle of God – the prophet of peace – was authorized by God – to own and rape slaves and allow their purchase sale, and sexual abuse? Yet where is the outrage against the purveyors of Nazi-like, horrific, Sharia law? Against the males who believe that rape is obeying the teachings and practices of Muhammad? Moreover, there is also a total correlation between the Quran and the Hadith, recording Muhammad’s acts. One is the mirror image of the other.
As if these sexual outrages aren’t enough for one to stomach, the female Mayor of Cologne, Henriette Reker, blames the women, stating that they should have a code of conduct to prevent future assaults. They must be properly dressed, and keep themselves at arms length from strange men. As you will also read, in Vienna, the Mayor and Police Chief are calling on German women to obey Sharia law.
When Islam enters a country in force, the rights that citizens have fought for so long and so hard in the West are systematically destroyed. Our cities are now the playground of violent invaders and the women they attack are scarred with a lifelong trauma that they can never forget. And yet there are some leaders who call for accommodation to what should never, ever in the first place, be allowed
Welcome to the the new Germany, the multicultural, leftist Paradise!
By Jiri Valenta with Leni Friedman Valenta
February 15, 2017
Unafraid, Bi-Partisan, Uphold U.S. and Freedom
Unsurprisingly, in light of Michael Flynn’s resignation, there is a heated, nationwide debate ongoing over President’s replacement of Flynn and its significance. We forget Ronald Reagan went through several NSAs during his tenure.
As during WWII and the turmoil that followed, we are living in times of great disorder and chaos. For Trump, General David Petraeus would be a uniquely excellent choice as NSA for these dangerous times. A warrior, but also a military intellectual, he possesses multiple capabilities in both the arts of war and the peace making.
He also has specific experience in the Middle East. In 2003 his 101st contributed centrally during the fight to Baghdad and then air assaulted north to Mosul, where he and his troopers pioneered a strategy of winning minds and hearts of Iraqi people. He returned after that year to establish the so-called train and equip effort as a three-star general. His powerful manual on counter -insurgency, written together with then-LtGen James “Mad Dog” Mattis, was put to good use when Petraeus admirably commanded the 2007-8 Surge in Iraq. If Petraeus is appointed, the troika of 4-star generals Mattis-Petraeus-and DHS John Kelley would be the bedrock of our national security apparatus.
Petraeus has no close relations with Russian counterparts. And he is unusually nonpartisan-- like Ike. During the 2016 election he neither became a cheerleader for Hillary, as did his colleague General Allen, nor a cheerleader for Trump, like Flynn, declaring “lock her up.” And he has stayed very much in the mix, testifying for three hours most recently two weeks ago before the HASC on “The State of the World.”
With the strongest support among both Democrats and Republicans in the Senate, Petraeus would likely pose no confirmation problem – and, in fact, no confirmation is needed for National Security Advisor. Generally well regarded by the Democrats, he is also admired by another national hero, prominent Republican Senator John McCain. Thus he could help to smooth out uneasy relations between the president and the senator.
David has one other essential quality --a propensity to speak his mind to his superiors. A military intellectual, he had a 14-month stint as CIA Director, 2011-1012. His resignation because of his affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, a fellow West Point graduate and reserve intelligence officer with whom he was later shown to have improperly shared his personal journals, which contained classified material – albeit none of which she included in her biography.
Again, none of what was improperly shared appeared in her book, entitled All In. In fact, West Point military intellectual, now-Brigadier General (Ret) Michael Meese, Petraeus’ deputy chief of staff in Afghanistan, reviewed the manuscript before publication to confirm that it did not contain any possible national security secrets. Damn good book! The naysayers should read it.
Unlike Hillary, the general did not use an illegal private server with thousands of negligent official e-mails, that surely revealed our national security secrets to our friends and foes alike.
We also know that unlike Hillary acolyte, former Deputy Director of the CIA Mike Morell, he was not enthusiastic about the famous, scrubbed talking points prepared for Susan Rice on Benghazi-gate. He did not reveal any of this to us, yet from other reliable sources it appears he objected to them. Was that why he was replaced by the author of those alterations, Mike Morell?
We also know the general stood up to his commander-in-chief, Barack Obama, when the President, for political reasons, tried to withdraw our troops from Afghanistan prematurely due to coming 2012 election. He objected even more vehemently than Defense Secretary Robert Gates!
Petraeus admits he made a mistake with Broadwell. Yet his was mistake of the heart, something we used to tolerate, as in the case of another brilliant commander -- General Ike Eisenhower. Ike’s affair with his Scottish military chauffeur, Kay Sommersby, was well known. Imagine if FDR had treated Ike as Obama did David. We might have jeopardized Operation Overlord -- the 1944 Liberation of Europe
General Petraeus, the patriotic soldier believes that if an American president calls upon you to serve the country, you don’t have any choice but to accept. If Trump is wise, he will make the call.
Prominent national security expert, Dr. Jiri Valenta is the author/editor of several books, and a long-standing member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He, with his co-writer, Yaleite Leni Friedman Valenta, editor-in-chief of their institute’s website, jvlv.net, is working on a forthcoming book, Four Follies of American Foreign Policy-Making.
JUST PUBLISHED IN THE NATIONAL INTEREST!
http://nationalinterest.org/feature/who-michael-morell-19072
Jiri Valenta and Leni Friedman Valenta
January 15, 2017
Far from protecting American security, Morell has repeatedly undermined it.
“No doubt Putin is playing Trump!” Yes, former CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell is indeed at it again. During the presidential campaign he repeatedly attacked Donald Trump as an “unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.” In the same vein, anonymous CIA officials have supposedly provided evidence of our new president’s nefarious dealings with the Kremlin and its agents.
Didn’t Trump’s own lawyer, Michael Cohen, meet in Prague with a Kremlin agent in August 2016? And isn’t this final proof of the ongoing secret liaisons between the tycoon and the tyrant? ‘Fraid not. But it is déjà vu. Fifteen years ago, Morell vetted and took to the White House, a preliminary report that 9/11 hijacker, Mohamed Atta, met with an Iraqi intelligence officer, Ahmad Samir, Al-Ani at the Iraqi embassy in Prague on April 9, 2001. Both reports have turned out to be bogus.
On August 6, 2001, Morell served as the CIA debriefer for President Bush’s most critical ever Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB); the one that read, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S.” It was essential that he impress upon Bush the importance of the memo. But he didn’t. Morell recollected in his memoir that NSC staffer Steve Biegun, who accompanied Morell to the Crawford Ranch where Bush was vacationing, apparently relayed to others that he, Morell, had indicated to the president, “there was no need to worry about an Al Qaida attack on the homeland...” Morrell himself directly observed that in retrospect, “I did not treat it as a ‘hair on fire’ or action-forcing piece and the president did not read it that way either.”
Surely Bush was not given the assessment that Morell’s colleague, counter-terrorism expert, Cofer Black, gave to Condoleezza Rice weeks earlier: “An attack is impending” and “this country needs to go on a war footing now.” On 9/11, close to 3,000 people perished in attacks on both New York and Washington.
The 2003 Iraq War provided an opportunity for Morell to advance his career. Leading a group of CIA analysts, he was assigned to help prepare Secretary of State Colin Powell's February 5 U.N. Security Council speech.
Justifying the forthcoming invasion of Iraq, a passage in the speech affirmed that Iraq possessed "biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more.” False! We still don’t know who was directly responsible for leaving this passage in Powell’s speech. However, Morell was in charge of the CIA analysts who were vetting it. In 2015, Morell apologized to Powell.
The most egregious part of Morell's toadying, however, was the terrorist attack that took place on the U.S. consulate and CIA annex in Benghazi on another September 11—this in 2012.
Morell, then CIA Deputy Director, quickly learned it was a well-planned terrorist attack. However he also discovered the President and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, with the 2012 November election in mind, were pushing a different interpretation—a “spontaneous demonstration” over an anti-Muslim video. Given his status as a high-ranking official, it would be surprising if he did not receive, or was unaware of, an email from Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes: “The goal: To underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of [our] policy.”
Then Morell was asked to review an important document—the talking points that U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice was to disseminate to the media explaining the attack. Morell complied. He altered the talking points. The doctored, scrubbed and bogus video story was presented by Rice to the U.S. public on TV stations, helping to save Obama's presidency. Yet, even after the elections, Morell, accompanied by Susan Rice, continued to defend his altered product with three GOP heavyweights, John McCain (R-AZ), Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) and Senator Lindsey Graham (R-NC).
Graham later reported Morell “did not accept responsibility for changing the talking points. He told me the FBI had done this. I called the FBI—They went ballistic. . . . Within 24 hours, this statement was changed where he [Morell] admitted the CIA had done it.”
Morell’s new excuses were his concern about compromising the FBI investigation and being “unprofessional” by exposing the State Department (understand Hillary). He also said he removed the word “Islamic” to describe the “extremists,” because he didn’t want to upset the Islamic world. Handsomely rewarded for his loyalty by Obama, he was asked to serve on the NSA Review Panel, the president’s advisory review board. He also became a television commentator and received a book deal, not to mention a cushy job at Beacon Global Strategies. Nor is this all. In August 2016, Morell proposed “killing Russians and Iranians” in Syria--a recommendation that might well have led to war with Russia. In a separate op-ed August 5 in the New York Times, he had declared that he believed Hillary “will deliver on the most important duty of a president: keeping our nation safe.” Hillary cheered his words in an August 7, 2017 tweet. Likely, he would have been a victorious Clinton’s CIA Director.
Now President-elect Trump is once again under attack by a loyal supporter of the former Clinton team. But as Morell’s record amply confirms, it is he who has, again and again, constituted the actual threat to our national security.
Jiri Valenta is President of the Institute of Post-Communist Studies and Terrorism. He is the recipient of numerous fellowship, including from Brookings, CFR, Woodrow Wilson Rockefeller, Peace Institute, and Fulbright. He is also the author of Soviet Intervention in Czechoslovakia, 1968, Anatomy of a Decision and other books.
Leni Friedman Valenta is the CEO of the Institute of POst-Communist Studies and Terrorism. She is co-writer and editor-in-chief of its Web site, jvlv.net. She has contributed to scholarly publications such as the National Interest, the Aspen Review, the Miami Herald, Kyiv Post, Georgian Messenger (Tbilisi) and the Tico Times, San Jose, Costa Rica.
By Jiri Valenta with Leni Friedman Valenta
Unafraid, Bi-partisan, Uphold U.S. and Freedom
FBI Director James Comey’s dramatic, deus ex machina before the 2016 election clarifies we are again facing a constitutional crisis as during Watergate. Then, FBI Deputy Director Mark Felt secretly revolted against President Richard Nixon, becoming reporter Bob Woodward’s “Deep Throat,” and eventually helping to bring down a lawless presidency
At his July press conference, Comey presented enough evidence to indict Hillary for gross negligence in handling national security classified material and many expected that would happen. However, Comey, an honorable man like Felt earlier, learned that our popular president, Barack Obama, a passionate advocate of Hillary as his successor, had communicated with her 18 times on her insecure, illegal server and lied about it! Even more than during Watergate, there developed an ongoing battle between the FBI and the Justice Department, whose political appointees seek to protect Hillary and without whom there can be no indictment.
Also of importance is that this is the second indictment seriously considered against Hillary. In the late 1990’s, as former First Lady she was involved in a crooked Whitewater real estate deal with two former Rose Law Firm partners and facing charges. One of her partners, Webb Hubbel, Associate Attorney General in Clinton’s administration, was indicted and went to jail. The other, Vince Foster, facing testimony over Whitewater files in his charge at Clinton’s White House, ended up dead in a Washington Park. It was declared suicide, but many still wonder why no other motivation was considered.
Yet, another factor in this case was significant pressure from Comey’s patriotic and irate agents, flooding his desk with a growing pile of resignations.Thus, nine days before the general election, when opportunity belatedly knocked, Comey bravely reopened the investigation. The chance came as his people were investigating the Clinton Foundation and an unrelated affair concerning Arthur Wiener, the husband of Hillary’s principle aide, Huma Abedin. Searching for evidence about Wiener’s sexting a minor, they came across a windfall -- thousands of State Department e-mails downloaded by Abedin on her husband’s computer.
Comey also faced complaints from Hillary’s DNC and campaign manager, John Podesta, that Donald Trump, had presumed ties with Russia and was a national security risk. The available evidence suggests that Russia’s foreign intelligence, with its cybernetic department, facilitated the hacking of the Wiki-leaks by sponsoring the key actor in this process; one Julain Assange.. A mysterious, Australian-born hacker, Assange is still holed up in the Ecuador Embassy of London to escape extradition for a presumed sexual offense. Repeatedly, Hillary has cited 17 U.S. intelligence agencies who believe the Russians were behind the Wiki-leaks. Yet, so far there is no proof whatsoever of any Trump ties with the Kremlin.
Below we seek to answer key questions nobody has raised or answered. If Russia has furnished hacked e-mails to Assange, why has Hillary Clinton been chosen as the cybernetic target of Putin’s foreign intelligence? And what should be the response of the U.S. Government and of course, the American people? How should they vote on November 8th?
Benghazi-gate Bigger than Watergate:
First, be aware that Benghazi-gate, where a surprise attack on the U.S. Mission and adjacent CIA annex in Benghazi took the lives of four Americans, isn’t over.They died because Hillary, despite many requests from one of the dead, Ambassador Chris Stevens, failed to adequately secure the consulate. Then, during the attack, Obama and Hillary declined to rescue those who died. Concerns about the impact of the attack on the upcoming 2012 election were put before their lives.
President Obama and Hillary then engaged in a variety of deceptions to cover up what really happened at Benghazi, including the famous, anti-Muslim video tale. But that’s only the iceberg’s misleading tip. The “consulate” and its adjacent CIA annex were really part of a U.S. secret mission whose objective has not been officially clarified until now.
Hillary’s War in Libya
Let’s begin with Hillary’s 2011 war in Libya. If not for Hillary’s Wiki-leaked e-mails, historians would have had to accept at least some of Hillary’s memoir account that this war and the demise of Libyan dictator, Moammar Gaddafi, came about because of Gaddafi’s plans to massacre his own people. Hillary’s principle aides, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, and National Security aide Samantha Powers, passionately argued, “We had a responsibility to protect civilians…”
What massacre? There was civil war, yes, but no massacre. That was the sales pitch used, above all, to get the Russians to abstain on a NATO intervention at the U.N. Security Council. It was delivered to them by Rice along with Hillary adviser, Sid Blumenthal’s artful tale that Gaddafi was distributing viagra to his troops for mass rape.
The true U.S. and French motives, exposed by Hillary’s leaked e-mails and other sources, however were of an economic nature-- Libya’s oil, and Gaddafi’s huge reserves of gold and silver. But for Hillary it was the opportunity for making money, partly by pay for play with Middle East governments seeking influential connections, but also by arming the Libyan insurgents. Thus she entered into secret dealings with arms dealers in Qatar, Saudi Arabia and other countries as well as with Clinton allies in western firms with the object of arming the anti-Gaddafi rebels and killing Gaddafi.
“We came, we saw, he died,” chuckled Hillary with a reporter.
Mention of humanitarian concerns, however, was absent both in the Wiki-leaks and in Hillary's TV presentation as the news came Gaddafi has been killed. “We came, we saw, he died,” she chuckled with a reporter. Never mind that many of the Libyan rebels she armed, were,or became, as Gaddafi had warned, committed jihadists. Recall that Hillary was formerly one of the most enthusiastic Democratic senators supporting the Iraq war. Small wonder that she basically repeated in Libya, George W. Bush’s and Condi Rice’s nation building mistake in Iraq. A better policy would have been to seek national reconciliation as long as that option existed. And it did. It was proposed by Dr. Kilari Anand Paul, a prominent Indian diplomat, who found Gaddafi wholly amenable to a peace deal.
But Hillary was not moved by reports that Gaddafi had given up his research for WMD and was working with the U.S. to fight Islamic terrorism. As we learned, she was furious at him for supporting Barack Obama instead of her in the 2008 U.S. election. Then the Libyan strong man refused to donate to the Clinton Foundation as requested by her proxies. Thus he had to die.
With the well advertised killing of Gaddafi, as Paul pointed out, Hillary had taught Middle East rulers an important Maffia lesson. You pay for play with the Godmother, so make sure you pay your tribute to the Clinton Foundation. Of course, with Gaddafi dead, Hillary did not play Godmother. While visiting Benghazi she exulted, “I am proud to stand here on the soil of a free Libya ..." whose opportunity now was, "... to stand as a model for democracy and freedom” [in the Middle East.]
But in Libya, as in Iraq earlier, with no legacy of Western democratic political culture, all hell exploded. Many Hillary-backed rebels-turned jihadists, under the cover of a Western intervention, tortured and massacred Gaddafi loyalists and foreign workers. The huge Muslim exodus to Italy ensued. There is nothing to suggest that Hillary had given thought to the consequences of either Saddam’s or Gaddafi’s deaths. Some democracy and freedom!
Convinced they were Tricked in Libya, Russians Decide to Defend Assad
Hillary wasn’t finished. Now she turned America’s foreign policy apparatus towards Syria. CIA Director General David Petraeus was ordered to design and implement a plan for arms transfer from Libya to “our” rebels in Syria. But some insiders justifiably wondered who “our” rebels really were.
Petraeus developed a working relationship with Ambassador Chris Stevens, also working on the arms transfer. A man with extensive experience in Libya, he had spent months with the Libyan resistance in Benghazi. Was Hillary asked this question during the closed Congressional hearings, “Isn’t it true that a partly damaged document found in the U.S. consulate showed that the last person Ambassador Stevens met this day in the city was the Turkish consul -- a military intelligence operator with whom he discussed an arms shipment?
Meanwhile, something dramatic changed in the Kremlin. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates recalled it well. “...as the list of [NATO] bombing targets steadily grew, it became very clear … that NATO was not on any "humanitarian" mission, but intent on getting rid of Qaddafi. Convinced they had been tricked, the Russians would subsequently block any such future resolutions, including against President Bashar al-Assad in Syria.” [Emphasis added] .
Are you surprised that the Kremlin was not going to make the same mistake in Syria that befell Iraq and Libya?Why would they, when they had developed supporting naval facilities at the Port of Tartus and the backing for a planned development of oil pipelines from Iran through Syria to Russia’s European markets?.
Did we Almost Get Into Open War With Syria Based Perhaps on False Intelligence?
Nor were conventional arms all that was being supplied to the anti-Assad rebels. Pulitzer prize-winning reporter Seymour Hersh, in reports largely banned in the U.S, concluded there was a great likelihood that the 8/21/13 use of sarin gas against civilians, was not by Assad’s army, but by the Islamist rebels with the help of Turkish intelligence. The sarin tested as being from Libya. Curiously too, the attack happened while U.N. inspectors were visiting Damascus. As pointed out by a prominent Russian specialist we know, this was surely not a good time for Assad’s army to launch a sarin gas attack. The evidence points to the rebels, who had the objective of inducing an Obama military intervention to reinforce the Red Line he had established earlier.
Resulting military conflict between NATO and Syria almost happened. At the last minute, Obama, may have well have decided against a Syria intervention because U.S. military intelligence seriously questioned the origins of the sarin. Here we would like to appeal to the next president to establish a reputable, bi-partisan commission on America and wars in Libya and Syria to uncover the truth.
For sure we know that with Gaddafi’s death the Russians lost economic and military contracts in Libya and the country fell to chaos and the Islamists. Thus originated Putin’s mounting a defense of Russian military and economic investment in Syria, while building a logistic supply line between Syria and the Russian main naval base, Sevastopol, in the Crimea.
Hillary’s debacles in Libya and Syria and Obama’s doctrines of leading from behind and strategic patience, became incentives for Putin to use military force both in the Crimea, 2014 and Syria, 2015 as we wrote in “Why Putin Wants Syria,”The Middle East Quarterly and “Divining Putin’s Intentions, Why We Must Lose ‘Strategic Patience,’” Aspen Review.
“All the Perfumes of Arabia Will Not Sweeten This Little Hand”
Both of the U.S. intervenions in Libya and Syria, as well as in Iraq, were of choice, not necessity, disregarding our vital national interests. Here we must mention the enormous suffering and loss of lives in these countries. But there is no reference to these and other humanitarian concerns in Hillary’s e-mails hacked by Wiki-leaks. What stands out above all is Hillary’s boast about her victory in Libya and its consequences. Thus we recall Shakespeare’s most famous female villain, Lady Macbeth. “Here’s the smell of blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.”
While reading her hacked emails Putin, as well as the leaders of a few other nations with cybernetic capabilities, must have realized the western chief motivations were primarily to further French economic interests in Francophone Africa; and U.S. economic interests in Libya, a country rich in oil and minerals. However, one must not forget the personal interests of the Clintons; to fill their Clinton Foundation coffers with arms dealing and other business profits, with the final objective of amassing resources for Hillary’s glorious, 2016 return to the White House
.Will American voters be able to understand that both her military interventions in Libya and Syria conditioned the 2015 Russian intervention in Syria and the continuous humanitarian catastrophe in that country, best symbolized by the destruction of the city of Aleppo, Syria’s Stalingrad?
While Richard Nixon had some redemptive Quaker conscience, and “W” a southern Baptist one, Hillary fits the role of Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, the harsh, calculating wife who subordinates everything to the path of power. This is the woman who said, “What difference does it make?” (how four Americans died in Benghazi.) It is also the woman who in 2011, furious with Assange and his Wiki-leaks, suggested to her State Planning Council, “Can’t we just drone him?” The initial laughter died as they realized she meant it !
This is not to exalt Vladimir Putin as any great humanist. To us, Putin has been Russia’s Christian autocrat, much able to use force in a limited way both at home and abroad. Trump should not be naive. The Kremlin leader is siding with Donald not because the Wiki-leaks help Trump’s drive for the presidency or the cause of freedom.
Do you blame Putin for simply trying to stymie Hillary, a corrupt and hawkish candidate whom he has rightfully come to see as the primary cause of two Middle East wars and making the whole region into Dante’s inferno. Hillary’s greed and desire to return to the White House helped to create the Islamists rise in both Libya and Syria and has the strong potential to impact on Russia Muslim regions in the northern Caucasus.
Hillary’s Domestic Politics
However, in our judgment, besides her catastrophic failures in foreign policy making, there are also powerful domestic reasons why Hillary should not be elected president of the United States.
The Supreme Court: Hillary would appoint judges to the high court that would support her radical agenda on immigration, sanctuary cities, Obamacare and would be hostile to the second amendment in which many Americans believe.
Immigration: Hillary’s immigration policies are deeply injurious to both our vital national interests at home and abroad. Unlike Trump she does not favor securing our borders. As she revealed to Brazilian magnates, she supports an unlimited open space clear through to South America. This means thousands of illegals streaming over our borders from around the world. All this increases the threats of narcotics, crime and narco-terrorism.
Hillary is also planning to dramatically increase immigration from Syria over what has been allowed under Obama, while Trump wants to limit such immigration because some jihadists will likely be included. We suspect Hillary supports accepting illegals in the belief they will vote Democratic and thereby will further already existing demographic changes that will eventually turn some of the red (GOP) states purple.
Hillarycare- turned Obamcare: Unlike Trump, Hillary seeks to continue expanding social programs at a time of our huge indebtedness. Americans must reject Obamacare, the outgrowth of Hillarycare, a similar but failed effort of hers in 1993-94. She is personally committed to Obamacare without taking into account the recent 25% increase in premiums as well as deductions. Obamacare is an unwieldy program hastily conceived and sold through the president’s prevarications to Congress and the American people. One of the programs’s intellectual fathers, Dr. Jonathan Gruber, is on record as saying it only became law because “Americans are stupid.”
Hillary’s colleague, Bradford Delong, Democrat and former Deputy Assistant to the Treasury Secretary in 1993, explained why Hillarycare didn’t work. “Heading up health-care reform was the only major administrative job she ever tried to do and she was a complete flop at it. She had neither the grasp of policy substance, the managerial skills, nor the political smarts to do the job she was then given.”
The Donald Alternative
Most importantly the Donald has significant executive experience in business. Above all he appreciates the dire fiscal conditions of our republic, that make it necessary to end costly military interventions in the Middle East. In the same spirit of cost cutting, he seeks to replace Obamacare with a truly affordable medical program. The building of the wall at our southern borders is a revolutionary change motivated by his instincts and executive experience that uncontrolled immigration poses an untennable challenge to our already shaken security systems.
Nixonian Dirty Tricks: In temperament, Hillary is a Nixon disciple -- without his statecraft brilliance and Quaker conscience. Like him she embraces dirty tricks to deal with domestic opponents. Let’s mention some: As revealed by the Wiki-leaks, her DNC officials used anti-Semitic innuendos to undermine Bernie Sanders with Christians in Kentucky and West Virginia.
Most significantly, she created a sort of analogue to Nixon’s “plumbers” -- units designed to fight domestic opponents. This brings us to one Robert Creamer, a veteran Democratic Party, Chicago activist, consultant and convicted felon. Creamer has had a relationship with the White House since 2008 and has visited it some 340 times. Last March he successfully arranged the disrupting of Trump rallies in Chicago and elsewhere, secretly recorded by one James O’Keefs, of Project Veritas Action a conservative, not-for-profit group.
The film recorded Trump “supporters” punching people to incite violence. Eventually Scottt Foval, co-founder of Democracy Partners, acknowledged that mentally ill people were paid $1500 a day to create a climate of chaos around Trump.
Clinton's dirty tactics are also evident in the DNC’s collusion with the pro-Clinton media. The best example is prominent Democratic official Donna Brazile, who replaced Wasserman-Shultz as DNC Chairwoman. Now we know that Brazile engaged in illegal activities, obtaining debate questions for Hillary in advance of her faceoff with Bernie Sanders in the spring. Brazile was fired by CNN, but there are many others journalists and media personalities who openly or clandestinely work for Hillary Clinton.
Finally, Hillary has questionable ties with various organizations that are undermining the foundation of our democracy. One of these is Black Lives Matters, the group that publicly chants in favor of killing police. The mothers of some Black hoodlums who were killed have joined to create an anti-Hillary atmosphere in the FBI. Hillary would thus be the a divisive president and her unpopularity with, and dislike of the FBI will only deepen and poison our law enforcement ties with the future White House.
Coming Constitutional Crisis if Hillary is Elected
Hillary’s former supporter, Democrat and patriot Doug Schoen is correct. As he posited, if she is elected, despite all evidence that she is not qualified for the office, her victory would lead to a constitutional crisis. With a a Milhouse inferno in the White House, Congressional gridlock and public turmoil, there will be a call for the appointment of a chief prosecutor to investigate her misdeeds. She could be indicted and impeached. All that will lead to our geopolitical retreat as it did during 1973 Watergate.
So why not say it? This old anti-Soviet and anti-communist cold warrior and his partner bless the Wicki-leaks for helping us to uncover the real reasons for our war in Libya. We bless them for exposing a woman whose long history of scandals has now evolved into raketeering and corruption with her husband on an almost unthinkable international level. We give Assange kudos for exposing the monstrous Clinton cartel, composed of her private “hedge fund,” the Clinton Foundation, her corrupt, U.S. State Department acolytes, U.S. fat cats, and her unsavory, anti-woman, network of Middle East supporters and rulers who pay to gain influence and access to our national decision-making.
Donald Trump, is surely an imperfect figure with lack of any practical experience in the U.S. government.We have repeatedly criticized him for his gaffes, public insults and offensive remarks. Trump, imperfect as he is, nevertheless is a true patriot, and an uncommon man with unique experience in business and reality TV shows. In spite of his lack of experience in U.S. government, and maybe because of it, he has become our nation’s agent of change from two terms of Obama and a virtual third Obama term under Hillary. Nevertheless not only to Putin, but to us Americans he is a better choice for the presidency than his opponent with all her baggage at home and abroad. The struggle was best dramatized in Donald’s rally in Miami a few weeks ago.Trump appeared amidst the music of Les Miserables, a film featuring the French people fighting the royal nomenclature.
“Hillary: An Abyssmal President”
Again recall the words of Secretary Bradford Delong: “Hillary Rodham Clinton has already flopped as a senior administrative official of the executive branch-- the equivalent of an under-secretary …” As we saw, she also flopped as Secretary of State. All that she has accomplished in that role was the most extensive ever, worldwide global travel. But what she brought upon us were the disastrous wars in Libya and Syria and tragic Benghazi-gate. In the words of Edward Klein, “Hillary seeks power because she has unrealistically high self esteem. With Hillary, we are dealing with a woman whose needs for dominance is far more pathological than Nixons. As he prophetically put it in 1993, “… there is no reason to think that she would be anything but an abysmal president.”
By Jiri Valenta and Leni Friedman Valenta
“Unafraid, Bi-Partisan, Uphold U.S. and Freedom”
Although we have been equal opportunity writers in attacking politicians of both stripes, we readily confess that we are presently supporting Donald Trump as the agent of peaceful revolution we need.
Nevertheless, we have viewed sympathetically the campaign of Bernie Sanders, a decent man who has been grinding many of the same axes against a “rigged System” as Trump. Thus, not eager to see the ring of Mordor placed on corrupt Hillary’s finger, we share the anger of the Sanders supporters at the DNC’s hugely unfair treatment of him.
Some DNC e-mails hacked from Hillary’s private server by the famous Guciffer, confirm the conclusion of former Editor-in-Chief of the New York Times Edward Klein. His book, The Truth About Hillary, pictures, “a Nixon disciple of hardball politics.” Agreeing is Bob Woodward, who broke the Watergate case, and has repeatedly compared her to Nixon.
The content of some of the DNC hacked e-mails now retrieved, confirm our earlier warnings to Bernie Sanders. DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz is Hillary’s instrument, just as Haldeman and Erlichmann, the famous Watergate duo, were Nixon’s. Like Nixon, Hillary does not get her own hands dirty, but she is in charge.
One of the hacked emails is from DNC CFO Brad Marshall dated May 5 2016, that reads as follows: “From:MARSHALL@dnc.org To: MirandaL@dnc.org, PaustenbachM@dnc.org, DaceyA@dnc.org Date: 2016-05-05 03:31 Subject: No shit."
“It might may no difference, but for KY and WVA can we get someone to ask his belief. Does he believe in a God? He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist. This could make several points difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist”.
We consider this remark offensive to Southern Baptists, Kentuckians, West Virginians and Jews. One of us worked closely with Southern Baptists. They are unmatched in their support for Israel, regarding the Jews as God’s chosen people. Debbie was working with Brad Marshall. Didn’t she know his “dirty tricks,” Nixonian line of thinking?
In response to Debbie’s own hardball tactics, Mika Brzezinski, one of the anchors of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, suggested several weeks ago the DNC chairwoman had been unfair to Sanders and should step down. Meanwhile Sanders himself demanded her ouster.
On May 18, enraged Debbie tried to punish Mika for her demand. “This is the LAST straw,” wrote Debbie to DNC Communications Director, Luis Miranda. Please call [MSNBC President] Phil Griffin. This is outrageous. She needs to apologize.” Despite Debbie’s demand for “heavy manners,” Mika has not done so to date.
On May 21, Wasserman Schultz also wrote to Miranda that the very idea Sanders would oust the DNC leader from her position if he is elected was silly, because Sanders would not be the nominee. How did she know then?
We have also warned Bernie how Hillary and her hench-people operate . In our November 13, 2015 “Open Letter to Bernie Sanders: Bolshevik vs Menshevik,” we urged him to hit back the hardballs or lose. Essentially, Hillary, the acolyte of 60’s radical Saul Alinsky is what Clinton aide Paul Bengala called her-- a “Bolshevik.” He was referencing her uncompromising oppressive management of her White House team under her.
The latest leaked DNA e-mails confirmed the biased, rigged and unethical election operation, managed by Ms. Wasserman-Schultz -- surely following Hillary’s guidelines.
In our Open Letter to Bernie voiced our suspicions about a media person, who asked Sanders during the campaign if he had dual citizenship in Israel. The reporter, WAMU liberal Radio Host Dianne Rehm, said she had seen his name on a list circulated on the internet and that someone on Facebook said to ask the question. Did that person work for Hillary, Debbie or cunning Bill?
Sanders, who had spent some younger years on a kibbutz, bristled when questioned by Rehm, and affirmed he was an American citizen only. Rehm apologized to viewers, but we still wonder if the question was asked to reveal his Jewish background in the effort to hurt his chances with some voters.
From the get-go, Debbie has run the DNC in politically correct Bolshevik fashion for her sponsor, Hillary. Students of Russian politics, we were reminded of Lenin and his allies management style in coping with Central Committee’s opponents. The nomination was rigged from the start with the almighty super delegates, much resembling the so-called “hundred reds” appointed by Mikhail Gorbachev’s for the Congress of People Deputies. Super delegates do not exist in the GOP.
We are not suggesting that our Florida congresswoman, Wasserman Schultz, Jewish herself, has anti-Semitic proclivities. Perhaps Debbie herself is not aware that congenital liar Hillary is not the supporter of Israel she pretends to be, but a long-time advocate of the Palestinian cause.
All new converts to Hillary-ism, some of them prominent American Jews and unrepentant defenders of” W”-Condi’s catastrophic, 2003 invasion of Iraq, should review Ed Klein’s findings. He reports how Hillary, running for Senator of New York in 2000, “… had attended secret fund -raisers sponsored by Muslim groups, some of which were dedicated to destruction of Israel” and “realized she had painted herself into a corner!” Added Klein, “She was “booed” off the stage during a Solidarity for Israel rally at the Israeli consulate in New York.”
She and Obama not only supported Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi, they punished the new leader, Al Fatah El Sisi, who saved Egypt from another Islamist regime. Both, she and her running mate, Tim Kane have ties with Muslim radical groups, and vigorously support the disastrous 2015 nuclear deal with Shiite Iran.
In light of all this, we agree with writer Barbara Olson’s judgment of Hillary, “The supreme irony is that Hillary, a 1960’s liberal, … has become even more darkly Nixonian in her outlook and methods – though without Nixon’s knowledge, statesmanlike substance and redemptive Quaker conscience.”
Leni Friedman Valenta, a Brandeis and Yale-educated playwright, is a former Democratic Municipal Chair of Westwood N.J., contributor with Jiri to scholarly journals and editor of our jvlv.net, Institute of Post-Communist studies and Terrorism website. Dr. Jiri Valenta, a former Brookings Fellow, prominent author and present member of Council on Foreign Relations, has served for more than a decade as a member of the National Committee on Soviet Jews with Nathan Sharansky, Ellie Wiesel and Richard Pipes.
"Unafraid, Bi-Partisan, Uphold U.S. and Freedom" By Jiri and Leni Friedman Valenta
Donald, some of us who support you are not sycophants. Your tendency to dwell on a case like the Mexican-American judge and the stupid star war, are killing your candidacy! You must put the social media under strict control and review. There should be no tweets sent that can be exploited by Hillary’s crowd.
Now it's time to counterpunch Like Obama, Hillary is no friend of Israel despite her protestations. She long supported the Palestinian cause. As Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and New York Times Magazine editor Ed Klein explained, in The Truth About Hillary, during her 2000 senate campaign in New York:
“... when it was revealed that she had attended secret fund-raisers sponsored by Muslim groups, some of which were dedicated to the destruction of Israel, Hillary realized she had painted herself into a corner… That Hillary was courting radical Muslim groups did not remain a secret for long. And when she showed up to march in the annual Israel Day Parade, the crowds roundly booed her.”
The star war affair was poorly handled by your staff. It required an immediate response with a properly forged tweet and left alone! We know you are no anti-Semite. It is outrageous your opponents make such a claim. You opened your golf clubs to Jews and Blacks before almost anyone else in Florida. To deal promptly with this issue, you have the best possible spokesperson and you didn’t use her – your daughter, Ivanka, married to an Orthodox Jew, should have explained your friendly relationship with American Jewry and Israel over the weekend.
Unfortunately, people you have sent to the TV medias were well meant but not as Impressive and well-spoken as Ivanka. Turn her and her husband into major spokespersons on issues related to Jewry. If you don’t, Hillary, who is mistrusted much more than you by most of Americans, will win the election
Jiri Valenta and Leni Friedman Valenta
Follow us on LInkedin and Twitter @JiriLeniValenta. We also blog at the Council on Foreign Relations, N.Y. Member Wall. (Jiri is a member) and at the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC), Moscow.
By Jiri and Leni Valenta
Unafraid, Bi-Partisan, Uphold U.S. and Freedom
Donald Trump: “I don’t bring it [Vince Foster’s death] up because I don’t know enough to really discuss it … I will say there are people who continue to bring it up because they think it was absolutely a murder. I don’t do that because I don’t think it’s fair.”
The Donald, but also Bernie, sees behind Hillary a political treasure trove of scandals. Yet to prove her guilt is hard. Brilliant and power hungry Hillary has advanced with Bill’s and his friends’ super delegates on the road to the land’s highest office. Yet, each new level of power has aided her in covering up the scandals of the last one. Repeatedly she has lied and prevaricated only to escape the legal fallout.
Concluded the late New York Times, Pulitzer’s prize winning reporter, William Safire, two decades ago in “Blizzard of Lies,” “She had good reasons to lie; she is in the longtime habit of lying; and she has never been called to account for lying herself or in suborning lying in her aides and friends.”
Hillary’s mendacity, corrupt practices and obstruction of justice were already evident in idyllic Little Rock, Arkansas when Bill was governor. With his help she speculated in cattle futures through a corrupt broker and turned a $1000 into $100,000. She said she studied the Wall Street Journal, but it was likely a disguised bribe. The Journal of Economics and Finance investigated the odds of anyone gaining a hundred-fold return in cattle futures – “at best 1 in 31 trillion.”
Then came 1979 Whitewater. Hillary was working for the Rose Law Firm, with two partners Vince Foster and Webb Hubbell. In Safire’s words, “The records show she denied actively representing a criminal enterprise known as the Madison S.& L., and indicate she may have conspired with Web Hubbell's father-in-law to make a sham land deal that cost taxpayers $3 million.”
With Bill elected president in 1992, Hillary took both Foster and Hubbell with her to Washington. Foster became deputy White House counsel, in charge of Hillary’s Whitewater documents. Hubbell became Deputy Attorney General.
Meanwhile, a new White House scandal erupted, “Travelgate.” As Safire wrote, Hillary used the FBI and Justice Department “to harass, intimidate and replace the employees of the [White House] travel office with her cronies… Now we know, from a memo long concealed from investigators that there would be hell to pay’ if the furious First Lady's desires were scorned.”
But Whitewater still wasn’t over. In 1993 Foster’s body turned up dead in a Washington Park with a bullet in his head. Several investigations, the last under special prosecutor Ken Starr, declared the death a suicide and attributed it to Foster’s depression over Travelgate concerns. Yet, prominent doubters seriously questioned the cause of death. Was it really suicide—or worse? Describing the “Keystone Kop” activities of the park police at the death scene, Safire wondered at the fact that key Whitewater documents were cleaned out of Foster’s White House office by several of Hillary’s aides and hidden even before the police arrived!
Neither did Safire accept Foster’s death as “suicide.” Foster, working on the Clintons' tax returns was in a sweat over Whitewater; “A can of worms you shouldn't open." Moreover, numerous irregularities in the forensics surrounding Foster’s death smelled of fish. A more recent report shows that Foster spoke to Hillary hours before his death. He had been called to testify to Congress about records she had refused to turn over.
Only in 2009, however, did we learn more. A memo by Ken Starr’s lead prosecutor, unearthed by two researchers in the National Archives, confirmed there was not one bullet wound, but two -- a second one in Foster’s neck. That finding put a “suicide” in doubt. Hillary’s Whitewater partners, Hubbell, and a businessman, Jim McDougal, were eventually indicted for Whitewater and went to jail. An indictment for the First Lady was also drafted, but not pursued.
Two years after Foster’s death, the missing Rose Law Firm papers all under subpoena -- were mysteriously found in three places; Hillary's closet, the personal files of Bill’s secretary, and Hubbell's basement before his felony conviction. Magically they turned up shortly after Hillary’s subpoena expired!
By then the Clintons had a new scandal, “File gate.” First detected by the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee investigating Travelgate, File gate involved the Clintons illegally obtaining FBI files on adversaries for the purpose of creating an enemies list. Vintage Nixon!
So does all this still matter? Besides the Vince Foster material uncovered in the National Archives, Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch has reported newly discovered prosecution memos from Whitewater that are “damning and dramatic” and suggest “if she weren't first lady, she would have been successfully prosecuted in federal court.” Clearly both Foster’s death and Whitewater are still playing although diminuendo and not fortissimo. But they are worth studying as bedrock for the two latest scandals. And they do raise the question about what, with a Hillary presidency, we can expect.
The two latest scandals are Benghazi-gate and Server-gate. As Secretary of State under Obama, Hillary became the chief advocate of a military intervention in Libya. We also learned from her e-mails that her decision was much influenced by intelligence primarily from a most unlikely source – a man known as “Sid Vicious.”
A former prolific journalist turned Bill’s special White House assistant, Sid Blumenthal earned his pseudo name for the gusto with which he went after Monica Lewinsky and other “bimbos.” In the 2008 campaign, he also went after Obama and was thereafter banned from employment at the State Department. Employed by Hillary’s Clinton’s Foundation, however, loyal attack dog Sid became Hillary’s chief advisor on Libya, double-dipping also with military contractors eager to sell arms to Libyan rebels. Although the U.S. ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, had been begging for weeks for reinforcements to his Libyan consulate, he was not provided with Hillary’s private email address. Sid not only had it, but used it extensively.
It was with Sid’s help that Hillary conducted a secret war, arranging the purchase of arms from Qatar and the Saudis and supplying them to the Libyan rebels via Chris Stevens’ Benghazi’s CIA annex. Indeed, when Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi was killed, Hillary was jubilant. “We came, we saw and we killed him,” she crowed. This accomplished, she worked with Stevens and his men to transport arms to U.S.-supported rebels in Syria via Turkey.
Then an unexpected crisis! On September 11, Ansar al-Shariah, an al Qaeda affiliate, using a demonstration over an anti-Muslim video as cover, carried out a long- planned attack on the Benghazi consulate. Stevens and three other Americans, Tyrone Woods, Sean Smith and Glen Doherty were killed. Amidst a several hours’ attack, no rescue attempt was made by U.S. forces. Stand down orders were given to all U.S. personnel who wanted to help.
At 6.49 P.M., the same night, Hillary e-mailed the Libyan president,Mohamed Yusef al Magariaf to ask him for additional security because of “a gun battle going on, which I understand Ansar as Sharia is taking responsibility for.” At eleven P.M. she e-mailed her daughter, Chelsea: “Two of our officers were killed in Benghazi by an Al Qeada-like group.” The following day, in a phone conversation with then-Egyptian Prime Minister Hisham Qandil, she stated, “We know the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film.”
On September 14, the coffins containing the four Americans killed in the attack were flown to Andrews Air Force base. There they were received by the President, Hillary and the families of the dead. Unlike Obama, who couldn’t look Charles Woods in the eye, Hillary was composed. Woods, father of dead Tyrone, recorded her promise to him in his diary: “We are going to have the filmmaker arrested who was responsible for the death of your son.” Hillary later repeatedly lied to several media outlets she had never said any such thing. Sean Smith’s mother, Pat, responded by dedicating to her “a special place in hell.”
Thereafter, talking points – embellishing the video story, but with no mention of the long-planned, al Qaeda affiliate, terrorist attack, were subsequently forged by a White House team. On it was Ben Rhodes, Obama’s chief White House spinner, both on Libya and Iran as we now know. As Rhodes explained in his e-mail to Hillary: “The goal: To underscore that these protests are rooted in [an] Internet video and not a broader failure of [our]policy.”
Only two months away was the 2012 election and nothing was to jeopardize Obama’s victory. Presidential rival Mitt Romney was already sniffing around Benghazi. If exposed, the truth could seriously undermine Obama’s chief campaign myth -- Osama bin Laden is dead; al Qaeda decimated. But Mitt was no Donald. He coasted rather than fought.
Months of investigation followed crude attempts by the White House to whitewash the whole affair. Then came the Benghazi House Committee hearing and once again, thanks to friendly media, Hillary got a pass.
But then came a fly in the spam. In the course of its own investigation, the House Committee on Benghazi, discovered what Hillary had never intended they would find. Not only did she use a private -email account, she had an unauthorized, and unapproved by the government private server in her closet (as with Whitewater).
That brings us to the present scandal, “Server gate. “ In its search for truth, The State Department’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG), published in May 2016 a highly critical analysis of her email practices, completely demolishing Hillary’s chief prevarication “I fully complied with every rule I was governed by.”
“At a minimum,” stated the report, “Secretary Clinton should have surrendered all e-mails in dealing with Department business before leaving government service.” She didn’t and lied that she did. Arrogantly she also refused a request for an interview unlike four other Secretaries of State, Colin Powell, Condi Rice and John Kerry. So did her principle assistants Her defenders repeatedly evoked Powell who used private e-mail –but did not have a private server. Moreover, there is currently evidence of two Security breaches, including one by Russian hackers. The Russians claim to have 20,000 e-mails and their government agencies are debating how to use them.
Also under investigation now is the Clinton Foundation. Besides some charitable work, another function of her foundation has been to build a robust war chest for Hillary’s 2016 presidential campaign. Friend Sid has been very helpful in this endeavor. Whenever Hillary was about to decide on licenses for foreign entities, Bill was invited to share his wisdom for mammoth speaker’s fees. Examination of the Clinton Foundation has revealed circumstantial evidence of massive influence peddling, including machinations that appear to have allowed Russia to wind up with 20% of our uranium.
Follow the money! The advice provided to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward by “Deep Throat” during Watergate, seems very apropos. Hillary’s long hidden e-mails must have also recalled to Woodward the thousands of hours of secret tapes resulting in Nixon’s downfall. “This has to go on a long, long time,” predicted the Watergate veteran,“ and the answers are probably not going to be pretty.”
Pretty? Hillary’s horrific career has been long in the making. A brilliant but corrupt individual, she has gotten away with misdeeds for which her partners and others have been indicted and jailed. Now, while awaiting FBI findings on her latest capers, she is facing the opportunity to rise to the penultimate position of power, the presidency!
Neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump, nor Bernie Sanders are perfect presidential candidates. Trump can be vulgar, direct and abrasive. However, he has very positive qualities of patriotism, forthrightness and strong negotiating skills. He also has definite plans on how to fix the economy, which Hillary wants to leave to her partner in her crime, husband Bill! Bernie is an honest and genuine democratic socialist, but in the past he had illusions about Sandinista Nicaragua and still has them about the European social democracy that has evolved.
Electing Hillary, however, would give the highest office in the land to a woman whose word could never be trusted; a leader like Richard Nixon continually involved in obstruction of justice and without his foreign policy brilliance. Bernie and many Democrats know it and are getting increasingly critical of her. He is just waiting for the FBI report.
Above all, both Democrats and Republicans should remember what Watergate taught us; that a president immersed in and weakened by impeachable scandals at home is pray to our foes abroad. Thus we believe that either Donald or Bernie, in spite of their own weaknesses, would be far better for this nation than Hillary. This country is at a critical turning point. Let us pray that in their collective wisdom American voters, will not turn the White House into another Millhouse inferno!
Dr. Jiri Valenta is author and co-editor of several books dealing with Russian and American national security. Contributor to the New York Times, Washington Times, Foreign Policy, International Security, The Middle East Quarterly, The National Interest, and more he is a long-standing member of the Council on Foreign Relations, NY. Leni Friedman Valenta is the CEO and co-writer of their post-communist studies and terrorism institute and website, jvlv.net. She is also a blogger at the Russian International Affairs Council, the think tank of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Valentas are authors of a forthcoming book, Four Follies of American Foreign Policy, dealing with 9/11, the Iraq Invasion, Benghazi-gate and the Iran nuclear deal.
CONDI RICE ADMITTED IGNORING VLADIMIR PUTIN’S WARNINGS OF 9/11 “TIME BOMB”. SHE MUST NOT BE VP!
By Leni Friedman Valenta
April 27, 2014
Someone please warn Donald Trump. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is not qualified to be a heartbeat from the presidency. She has the politically correct gender and race, but she lacks the judgment. He could lose the general election because of her vociferous support of the 2003 Iraq War, but even more, her neglecting the warning of Vladimir Putin, and the repeated warnings of CIA Director George Tenet, counter-terrorism expert Dick Clarke, Gary Hart and others. Moreover, she denied the truth during her testimony before the 9/11 commission. This will come to haunt her along with the 28 pages about the Saudi’s involvement in the preparation of 9/11, also hidden by “W” and Condi.
Rice is often criticized as one of the architects of the 2003 war of choice and that is surely true. She was part of the group think that rushed to war on suspect and insufficient British intelligence. Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, was the former head of the State Dept. Planning Council in 2002. He has recalled how she came to him and told him, “The decision has been made,” i.e., no further vetting was needed. Haass later excoriated the Iraq war as one of choice not necessity and indeed, the mistakes of “W” were only made worse by Obama, who pulled out too soon.
But there’s more and much worse regarding Condi. Just read the memoirs of key people involved with our 9/11 tragedy. Clarke believes Rice was primarily responsible for the deaths of almost 3,000 people who died on September 11, 2001. Our research is summed up in our published article in The National Interest, “Why Trump is Right About Bush’s 9/11 Record.” We applaud Trump for his bipartisan explanation of our government’s folly, although some might consider it sacrilege. True is, Condi, as NSA, was not up to the job and “W” was not informed enough about foreign policy to know that she wasn’t as knowledgeable as he thought; surely not on the Middle East.
“…I was taken aback by Putin’s alarm and vehemence,” wrote Condi in her own memoir, “…. Putin though, was right; The Taliban and al Qaeda were time bombs that would explode on September 11, 2001.”
