John Brennan Drones On

You have to hand it to Donald Trump. Not only is he an expert at controlling the media he only pretends to despise as "fake," he also knows how to stir up corporate churnalism to a sustained furious boil, salted liberally with outrage from a can.

It took a Trump to turn George Bush's torture architect and Barack Obama's drone assassination guru into Resistance, Inc's latest action hero. John Brennan, former CIA director, has now usurped Omarosa Manigault's top spot in the daily news cycle. Not only does he merit the top left corner of the New York Times homepage, he's also glommed onto the upper right plot with the newspaper's lead editorial. I guess that makes him an extreme centrist.

Refusing to become another victim of the cartoon president, Brennan vows that Donald Trump will never silence him. This is pretty rich, given that his Times op-ed tacitly attempts to silence what he calls dupes of Russia. True spook that he is, though, he doesn't bother naming any names: (He no doubt has them all written down on a piece of  paper which he keeps cosily in his pocket.)

Before, during and after its now infamous meddling in our last presidential election, Russia practiced the art of shaping political events abroad through its well-honed active measures program, which employs an array of technical capabilities, information operations and old-fashioned human intelligence spycraft. Electoral politics in Western democracies presents an especially inviting target, as a variety of politicians, political parties, media outlets, think tanks and influencers are readily manipulated, wittingly and unwittingly, or even bought outright by Russian intelligence operatives. The very freedoms and liberties that liberal Western democracies cherish and that autocracies fear have been exploited by Russian intelligence services not only to collect sensitive information but also to distribute propaganda and disinformation, increasingly via the growing number of social media platforms....

 They troll political, business and cultural waters in search of gullible or unprincipled individuals who become pliant in the hands of their Russian puppet masters. Too often, those puppets are found.

The implicit message is that independent media dissent against the status quo should be suspect, if not of Russian origin... unless proven otherwise. This is the very same rationale that Brennan used when devising his Kill List during the Obama years. All Muslim males in the prime of life are deemed to be militants until (never) proven otherwise.

And of course he doesn't mention the CIA's own role in fomenting dissent and crafting intelligence in other countries besides our own. 

It is really quite stunning that the Times gifted Brennan with its prime real estate on the very same day it moralistically published a free press manifesto from the nation's newspapers. Even more stunning, and disheartening, is that the vast majority of reader comments on Brennan's op-ed are overflowing with praise and gushing, fawning thanks for his courage, patriotism and service.

My own deeply buried comment:

How does Trump deflect the public's attention from the Omarosa book, with its juicy revelations of racism and corruption?

He trolls John Brennan and other exiled military/surveillance actors, revoking some arcane thing called "security clearance."

Brennan, who couldn't even be confirmed by the Democratic majority during Obama's first term because of his alleged role in Bush's torture program, has thusly become the #1 hero of Resistance, Inc. The comments section is awash with gratitude for his patriotism and service to his country.

The condemnation that the CIA under his watch garnered for its admitted burglary of Senate computers during the torture investigation is but a hazy memory now, thanks to the common enemy named Trump.

The American values which John Brennan holds so dear include the program he dubbed the Disposition Matrix, aka the rationale for droning suspected terrorists - defined by him at the time as any Middle Eastern male in the prime of his life. We still don't have a full accounting of those killed and maimed by Predator drones, so I look forward to an op-ed from Mr, Brennan giving us the full information we deserve.

As a latter-day free press champion in the Age of Trump, Mr. Brennan has certainly come a long way from his advocating censorship of the Egyptian media during the Arab Spring..

Meanwhile, where is the outrage over Trump's complicity in the Saudi genocide in Yemen, which includes the recent bombing of a school bus full of children?

Lying Through Their Fangs

Only a day after President Obama huffily and falsely accused Elizabeth Warren of lying (for what he called purely selfish and political reasons) about the democracy-gutting measures in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, he was exposed for allegedly telling a pretty gruesome lie of his own.

According to Pulitzer-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, Obama essentially ordered the execution of Osama bin Laden while he was a prisoner of the Pakistanis. Bin Laden wasn't holed up in a heavily weaponized and guarded secret bunker, plotting the next al Qaeda attack. He was alone, helpless, feeble and unarmed, and Navy Seals were allowed  to simply traipse on in and blow him to bits with the full complicity of Pakistani security state authorities. The American taxpayers paid for the killing privilege with a bribe/reward of millions of dollars. Oh, and our military didn't bury him at sea in a respectful Muslim ceremony as the White House later claimed. They unceremoniously dumped his mangled body parts from a helicopter as it flew over an inaccessible Afghan mountain range. 

If we are to believe Seymour Hersh, Obama lied about the less-than-courageous details of the assassination of bin Laden for purely political reasons. He needed to glorify himself for his upcoming re-election campaign. He need to portray himself as a hero who grappled with the moral dilemma of putting our troops in harm's way on a mission from hell.

Hersh's version of the bin Laden execution is like a scenario that would have Obama sending Special Ops assassins into the secure prison cell of Boston marathon bomber Dzokhar Tsarnaev, and then telling the world that he was killed while he was on the lam after a daring escape. It's like storming Gitmo to blow away all those dangerous emaciated terrorists hooked up to their forced feeding tubes, and then claiming they'd taken over their own island prison. 

So his Mothers Day insult to Elizabeth Warren-- that "she is a politician, just like everybody" -- is rendered all the more loathsomely ironic. Because, if we are to believe Seymour Hersh's account, Barack Obama himself is a singularly loathsome politician for the ages. And a damned good liar, because Hersh's blockbuster account is getting little to no play in the mainstream media. Both The New Yorker and the Washington Post had also passed on another Hersh blockbuster from last year, exposing the White House's lies on the Syria Sarin attacks.

And so the gaslighting of Hersh continues, with the White House-friendly Vox helpfully pointing out that he is old and decrepit, that his sourcing is thin and anonymous, and that he is unable to supply incontrovertible photographic proof of the bin Laden killing/coverup conspiracy, as he did with his Abu Ghraib torture scoop. In other words, he didn't act like a New York Times propaganda flack. Instead of using anonymous sources to aggrandize government liars, Hersh used anonymous sources to bring government liars down a peg. Hersh and Elizabeth Warren are only the latest victims of what might be called the Cornel West Treatment.

The mainstream media are no longer in the business of speaking truth to power, or admitting that they've been dupes of mendacious politicians.

***

Speaking of truthiness, Paul Krugman is at it again. He manages to defend Dodd-Frank and Elizabeth Warren against the predations of Republicans and Wall Street vampires while giving the corporate Democrats their usual free pass. And of course, he blithely ignores the fact that Obama spent part of his Mothers Day weekend publicly shaming Elizabeth Warren and shilling for the Wall Street vampires.

My published comment: (I'm tweaking this a bit due to typos/clumsy grammar in the original)

Vampire bankers can't undo Dodd-Frank in the bad publicity-inducing light of day, so they're going the darkness route, otherwise known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Elizabeth Warren is striking fear into their venal little hearts because she has pointed out, rightly, that this trade deal could effectively gut Dodd-Frank reforms without our even knowing it. Congress is allowed to see this, but the Obama administration has already threatened to prosecute our reps should they reveal the classified details to their constituents.

Vampires love darkness and secrecy because showing their ugly fangs might endanger feasting on their human meal. The meal might run away or revolt.

The TPP's leaked portions show that investor state tribunals would grant "market access protections" to transnationals, and could theoretically rule that Dodd-Frank's protections against risky derivatives unfairly restrict the global banking cartels' ability to suck even more lifeblood from our economy. This has been strongly denied by Obama and Trade Rep. Michael Froman, who got a multimillion dollar bonus from Citigroup upon spinning through the revolving doors to act in somebody's best interests.

But they refuse to hand over the evidence -- and meanwhile, Obama can ostentatiously veto more blatant GOP efforts to kill Dodd-Frank and smarmily call Elizabeth Warren a liar for bravely speaking truth to pathocratic power.

She is a human stake through the financial vampire's heart. We are lucky to have her.