'British “special services,” are a sort of Mini-Me to the Dr. Evil that is the US intelligence apparatus.'
By Dmitry Orlov: In today’s United States, the term “espionage” doesn’t get too much
use outside of some specific contexts. There is still sporadic talk of
industrial espionage, but with regard to Americans’ own efforts to
understand the world beyond their borders, they prefer the term
“intelligence.” This may be an intelligent choice, or not, depending on
how you look at things.
First of all, US “intelligence” is only vaguely related to the game of
espionage as it has been traditionally played, and as it is still being
played by countries such as Russia and China. Espionage involves
collecting and validating strategically vital information and conveying
it to just the pertinent decision-makers on your side while keeping the
fact that you are collecting and validating it hidden from everyone
else.
In recent years, the US intelligence agencies have decided that
torturing prisoners is a good idea, but they have mostly been torturing
innocent bystanders, not professional spies, sometimes forcing them to
invent things, such as “Al Qaeda.” There was no such thing before US
intelligence popularized it as a brand among Islamic terrorists.
Most recently, British “special services,” which are a sort of Mini-Me to the Dr. Evil that is the US intelligence apparatus, saw it fit
to interfere with one of their own spies, Sergei Skripal, a double
agent whom they sprung from a Russian jail in a spy swap. They poisoned
him using an exotic chemical and then tried to pin the blame on Russia
based on no evidence.
There are unlikely to be any more British spy swaps with Russia, and
British spies working in Russia should probably be issued good
old-fashioned cyanide capsules (since that supposedly super-powerful
Novichok stuff the British keep at their “secret” lab in Porton Down
doesn’t work right and is only fatal 20% of the time).
There is another unwritten, commonsense rule about spying in general:
whatever happens, it needs to be kept out of the courts, because the
discovery process of any trial would force the prosecution to divulge
sources and methods, making them part of the public record. An
alternative is to hold secret tribunals, but since these cannot be
independently verified to be following due process and rules of
evidence, they don’t add much value.
A different standard applies to traitors; here, sending them through the
courts is acceptable and serves a high moral purpose, since here the
source is the person on trial and the method—treason—can be divulged
without harm. But this logic does not apply to proper, professional
spies who are simply doing their jobs, even if they turn out to be
double agents. In fact, when counterintelligence discovers a spy, the
professional thing to do is to try to recruit him as a double agent or,
failing that, to try to use the spy as a channel for injecting
disinformation.
Americans have been doing their best to break this rule. Recently,
special counsel Robert Mueller indicted a dozen Russian operatives
working in Russia for hacking into the DNC mail server and sending the
emails to Wikileaks. Meanwhile, said server is nowhere to be found (it’s
been misplaced) while the time stamps on the files that were published
on Wikileaks show that they were obtained by copying to a thumb drive
rather than sending them over the internet. Thus, this was a leak, not a
hack, and couldn’t have been done by anyone working remotely from
Russia.
Furthermore, it is an exercise in futility for a US official to indict
Russian citizens in Russia. They will never stand trial in a US court
because of the following clause in the Russian Constitution: “61.1 A
citizen of the Russian Federation may not be deported out of Russia or
extradited to another state.”
Mueller may summon a panel of constitutional scholars to
interpret this sentence, or he can just read it and weep. Yes, the
Americans are doing their best to break the unwritten rule against
dragging spies through the courts, but their best is nowhere near good
enough.
That said, there is no reason to believe that the Russian spies couldn’t
have hacked into the DNC mail server. It was probably running Microsoft
Windows, and that operating system has more holes in it than a building
in downtown Raqqa, Syria after the Americans got done bombing that city
to rubble, lots of civilians included. When questioned about this
alleged hacking by Fox News, Putin (who had worked as a spy in his
previous career) had trouble keeping a straight face and clearly enjoyed
the moment.
He pointed out that the hacked/leaked emails showed a clear pattern
of wrongdoing: DNC officials conspired to steal the electoral victory in
the Democratic Primary from Bernie Sanders, and after this information
had been leaked they were forced to resign. If the Russian hack did
happen, then it was the Russians working to save American democracy from
itself. So, where’s the gratitude? Where’s the love? Oh, and why are
the DNC perps not in jail?
Since there exists an agreement between the US and Russia to cooperate
on criminal investigations, Putin offered to question the spies indicted
by Mueller. He even offered to have Mueller sit in on the proceedings.
But in return he wanted to question US officials who may have aided and
abetted a convicted felon by the name of William Browder, who is due to
begin serving a nine-year sentence in Russia any time now and who, by
the way, donated copious amounts of his ill-gotten money to the Hillary
Clinton election campaign.
In response, the US Senate passed a resolution to forbid Russians
from questioning US officials. And instead of issuing a valid request to
have the twelve Russian spies interviewed, at least one US official
made the startlingly inane request to have them come to the US instead.
Again, which part of 61.1 don’t they understand?
The logic of US officials may be hard to follow, but only if we adhere
to the traditional definitions of espionage and
counterespionage—“intelligence” in US parlance—which is to provide
validated information for the purpose of making informed decisions on
best ways of defending the country. But it all makes perfect sense if we
disabuse ourselves of such quaint notions and accept the reality of
what we can actually observe: the purpose of US “intelligence” is not to
come up with or to work with facts but to simply “make shit up.”
The “intelligence” the US intelligence agencies provide can be anything
but; in fact, the stupider it is the better, because its purpose is
allow unintelligent people to make unintelligent decisions. In fact,
they consider facts harmful—be they about Syrian chemical weapons, or
conspiring to steal the primary from Bernie Sanders, or Iraqi weapons of
mass destruction, or the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden—because facts
require accuracy and rigor while they prefer to dwell in the realm of
pure fantasy and whimsy. In this, their actual objective is easily
discernible.
The objective of US intelligence is to suck all remaining wealth out of
the US and its allies and pocket as much of it as possible while
pretending to defend it from phantom aggressors by squandering
nonexistent (borrowed) financial resources on ineffective and overpriced
military operations and weapons systems. Where the aggressors are not
phantom, they are specially organized for the purpose of having someone
to fight: “moderate” terrorists and so on.
One major advancement in their state of the art has been in moving
from real false flag operations, à la 9/11, to fake false flag
operations, à la fake East Gouta chemical attack in Syria (since fully
discredited). The Russian election meddling story is perhaps the final
step in this evolution: no New York skyscrapers or Syrian children were
harmed in the process of concocting this fake narrative, and it can be
kept alive seemingly forever purely through the furious effort of
numerous flapping lips. It is now a pure confidence scam. If you are
less then impressed with their invented narratives, then you are a
conspiracy theorist or, in the latest revision, a traitor.
Trump was recently questioned as to whether he trusted US intelligence. He waffled. A light-hearted answer would have been:
“What sort of idiot are you to ask me such a stupid question? Of course
they are lying! They were caught lying more than once, and therefore
they can never be trusted again. In order to claim that they are not
currently lying, you have to determine when it was that they stopped
lying, and that they haven’t lied since. And that, based on the
information that is available, is an impossible task.”
A more serious, matter-of-fact answer would have been:
“The US intelligence agencies made an outrageous claim: that I colluded
with Russia to rig the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. The
burden of proof is on them. They are yet to prove their case in a court
of law, which is the only place where the matter can legitimately be
settled, if it can be settled at all. Until that happens, we must treat
their claim as conspiracy theory, not as fact.”
And a hardcore, deadpan answer would have been:
“The US intelligence services swore an oath to uphold the US
Constitution, according to which I am their Commander in Chief. They
report to me, not I to them. They must be loyal to me, not I to them. If
they are disloyal to me, then that is sufficient reason for their
dismissal.”
But no such reality-based, down-to-earth dialogue seems possible. All
that we hear are fake answers to fake questions, and the outcome is a
series of faulty decisions. Based on fake intelligence, the US has spent
almost all of this century embroiled in very expensive and ultimately
futile conflicts.
Thanks to their efforts, Iran, Iraq and Syria have now formed a
continuous crescent of religiously and geopolitically aligned states
friendly toward Russia while in Afghanistan the Taliban is resurgent and
battling ISIS—an organization that came together thanks to American
efforts in Iraq and Syria.
The total cost of wars so far this century for the US is reported to be
$4,575,610,429,593. Divided by the 138,313,155 Americans who file tax
returns (whether they actually pay any tax is too subtle a question), it
works out to just over $33,000 per taxpayer. If you pay taxes in the
US, that’s your bill so far for the various US intelligence “oopsies.”
The 16 US intelligence agencies have a combined budget of $66.8 billion,
and that seems like a lot until you realize how supremely efficient
they are: their “mistakes” have cost the country close to 70 times their
budget. At a staffing level of over 200,000 employees, each of them has
cost the US taxpayer close to $23 million, on average. That number is
totally out of the ballpark! The energy sector has the highest earnings
per employee, at around $1.8 million per. Valero Energy stands out at
$7.6 million per. At $23 million per, the US intelligence community has
been doing three times better than Valero. Hats off! This makes the US
intelligence community by far the best, most efficient collapse driver
imaginable.
There are two possible hypotheses for why this is so.
First, we might venture to guess that these 200,000 people are grossly
incompetent and that the fiascos they precipitate are accidental. But it
is hard to imagine a situation where grossly incompetent people
nevertheless manage to funnel $23 million apiece, on average, toward an
assortment of futile undertakings of their choosing. It is even harder
to imagine that such incompetents would be allowed to blunder along
decade after decade without being called out for their mistakes.
Another hypothesis, and a far more plausible one, is that the US
intelligence community has been doing a wonderful job of bankrupting the
country and driving it toward financial, economic and political
collapse by forcing it to engage in an endless series of expensive and
futile conflicts—the largest single continuous act of grand larceny the
world has ever known. How that can possibly be an intelligent thing to
do to your own country, for any conceivable definition of
“intelligence,” I will leave for you to work out for yourself. While you
are at it, you might also want to come up with an improved definition
of “treason”: something better than “a skeptical attitude toward
preposterous, unproven claims made by those known to be perpetual
liars.”
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