Harvard University Bends The Knee To The CIA

By Michael Krieger: Let’s get caught up real quick. On Wednesday, Harvard University announced that Bradley [aka Chelsea] Manning — who leaked evidence of U.S. war crimes in Iraq to Wikileaks and was incarcerated for seven years before being pardoned by Barack Obama — had been named a visiting fellow. I disagree with almost everything Obama did as president, but his pardoning of Manning is something I applaud. Then the CIA complained.
The complaint was swift and two-pronged. First, former acting director of the CIA, Michael Morell, wrote a letter by which he resigned in protest. Then the current CIA director, Michael Pompeo wrote a note of his own, which included support for Morell. Morell’s letter is absolutely incredible if you know some of this guy’s history. I suggest reading the entire thing.
Towards the end of the letter, Morell has the nerve to write:

“I have an obligation to my conscience - and I believe to the country - to stand up against any efforts to justify leaks of sensitive national security information.”

Let’s now take a moment to review this man’s well documented conscience.



Nice cufflinks by the way.
Remarkably, this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Michael Morell. Let’s review some highlights from something I posted back in January.

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.”

Basically, he could’ve prevented 9/11, but he didn’t. Moving on…

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.”

The man is simply overflowing with conscience.
But that’s still not it. What about the following comments he made regarding the faulty intelligence that led to the Iraq war.

Morell was somewhat defensive when asked to discuss why CIA analysts were unable to determine that Iraq had abandoned its weapons program in the 1990s. He compared the analysts to “weather forecasters.”
“This is a very difficult business,” he said. “I don’t know a harder job in the world than trying to get an understanding of what’s the status of the Iran nuclear program. Or, what’s the status of North Korea’s long-range missile system. Or, where does Chinese military modernization stand. Or, what are the plans, intentions, and capabilities of al Qaeda in Yemen.”

Remember that the next time the CIA claims to be confident about something.
So let’s recap what happened. The person above (and his buddy Pompeo) complained that a pardoned whistleblower who informed the American people about their government’s heinous actions in Iraq was named a fellow. Harvard then immediately withdrew the fellowship.
As I noted on Twitter earlier:

You see what the CIA did to Harvard.
What do you think it does behind the scenes with media?

— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) 15 September 2017

The entire affair is quite instructive and should serve as a wake up call to Americans who remain in denial about how power works in this country. It’s also important to understand the similarities between this event and Google throwing its weight around at the New America Foundation by forcing the exile of the anti-monopoly Open Markets Group.
We suffer from a grotesque over concentration of power throughout this country, whether it be in government agencies like the CIA, or private behemoths like Google. These organizations, and others like them, have become too powerful and too unaccountable to the public, and have therefore become a serious threat to freedom and liberty. It’s long past time to do something about it.
I discussed the threat of the over-concentration of power in a recent interview on The Kesier Report. Take a watch if you haven’t seen it yet.

In Liberty,
Michael Krieger

Edited by AA

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