Caroline Glick
The United States is sailing
in uncharted waters today as the intelligence-security community wages an
all-but-declared rebellion against President Donald Trump.
Deputy Attorney-General Rod
Rosenstein’s decision on Wednesday to appoint former FBI director Robert
Mueller to serve as a special counsel charged with investigating allegations of
“any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals
associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump,” is the latest and so
far most significant development in this grave saga.
Who are the people seeking to
unseat Trump? This week we learned that the powers at play are deeply familiar.
Trump’s nameless opponents are some of Israel’s greatest antagonists in the US
security establishment.
This reality was exposed this
week with intelligence leaks related to Trump’s meeting with Russian Foreign
Minister Sergei Lavrov. To understand what happened, let’s start with the facts
that are undisputed about that meeting.
The main thing that is not in
dispute is that during his meeting with Lavrov, Trump discussed Islamic State’s
plan to blow up passenger flights with bombs hidden in laptop computers.
It’s hard to find fault with
Trump’s actions. First of all, the ISIS plot has been public knowledge for
several weeks.
Second, the Russians are
enemies of ISIS. Moreover, Russia has a specific interest in diminishing ISIS’s
capacity to harm civilian air traffic. In October 2015, ISIS terrorists in
Egypt downed a Moscow-bound jetliner, killing all 254 people on board with a
bomb smuggled on board in a soda can.
And now on to the issues that
are in dispute.
Hours after the Trump-Lavrov
meeting, The Washington Post reported that in sharing information about ISIS’s
plans, Trump exposed intelligence sources and methods to Russia and in so
doing, he imperiled ongoing intelligence operations carried out by a foreign
government.
The next day, The New York
Times reported that the sources and methods involved were Israeli. In sharing
information about the ISIS plot with Lavrov, the media reported, Trump
endangered Israel.
There are two problems with
this narrative.
First, Trump’s National
Security Adviser H.R. McMaster insisted that there was no way that Trump could
have exposed sources and methods, because he didn’t know where the information
on the ISIS plot that he discussed with Lavrov originated.
Second, if McMaster’s version
is true – and it’s hard to imagine that McMaster would effectively say that his
boss is an ignoramus if it weren’t true – then the people who harmed Israel’s
security were the leakers, not Trump.
Now who are these leakers?
According to the Washington Post, the leakers are members of the US
intelligence community and former members of the US intelligence community,
(the latter, presumably were political appointees in senior intelligence
positions during the Obama administration who resigned when Trump came into
office).
Israel is no stranger to this
sort of operation. Throughout the Obama administration, US officials illegally
leaked top secret information about Israeli operations to the media.
In 2010, a senior defense
source exposed the Stuxnet computer worm to the New York Times. Stuxnet was
reportedly a cyber weapon developed jointly by the US and Israel. It was
infiltrated into the computer system at Iran’s Bushehr nuclear reactor. It
reportedly sabotaged a large quantity of centrifuges at the installation.
The revelation of Stuxnet’s
existence and purpose ended the operation. Moreover, much of Iran’s significant
cyber capabilities were reportedly developed by reverse engineering the
Stuxnet.
Obama made his support for the
leak clear three days before he left office. On January 17, 2017, Obama
pardoned Marine Gen. James Cartwright for his role in illegally divulging the
Stuxnet program to the Times.
In 2012, US officials told the
media that Israel had struck targets in Syria. The leak, which was repeated
several times in subsequent years, made it more dangerous for Israel to operate
against Iranian and Hezbollah forces in Syria.
Also in 2012, ahead of the
presidential election, US officials informed journalists that Israel was operating
in air bases in Azerbaijan with the purpose of attacking Iran’s nuclear sites
in air strikes originating from those bases.
Israel’s alleged plan to
attack Iran was abruptly canceled.
In all of these cases, the
goal of the leak was to harm Israel.
In contrast, the goal of this
week’s leaks was to harm Trump. Israel was collateral damage.
The key point is that the
leaks are coming from the same places in both cases.
All of them are members of the
US intelligence community with exceedingly high security clearances. And all of
them willingly committed felony offenses when they shared top secret
information with reporters.
That is, all of them believe
that it is perfectly all right to make political use of intelligence to advance
a political goal. In the case of the anti-Israel leaks under Obama, their
purpose was to prevent Israel from degrading Iran’s nuclear capacity and military
power at a time that Obama was working to empower Iran at Israel’s expense.
In the case of the
Trump-Lavrov leak, the purpose was to undermine Israel’s security as a means of
harming Trump politically.
What happened to the US
intelligence community? How did its members come to believe that they have the
right to abuse the knowledge they gained as intelligence officers in order to
advance a partisan agenda? As former CIA station chief Scott Uehlinger
explained in an article published in March in The Hill, the Obama
administration oversaw a program of deliberate politicization of the US
intelligence community.
The first major step toward
this end was initiated by then-US attorney general Eric Holder in August 2009.
Holder announced then that he
intended to appoint a special counsel to investigate claims that CIA officers
tortured terrorists while interrogating them.
The purpose of Holder’s
announcement wasn’t to secure indictments. The points was to transform the CIA
politically and culturally.
And it worked.
Shortly after Holder’s
announcement, an exodus began of the CIA’s best operations officers. Men and
women with years of experience operating in enemy territory resigned.
Uehlinger’s article related
that during the Obama years, intelligence officers were required to abide by
strict rules of political correctness.
In his words, “In this PC
world, all diversity is embraced – except diversity of thought. Federal workers
have been partisan for years, but combined with the rigid Obama PC mindset, it
has created a Frankenstein of politicization that has never been seen before.”
Over the years, US
intelligence officers at all levels have come to view themselves as soldiers in
an army with its own agenda – which largely overlapped Obama’s.
Trump’s agenda on the other
hand is viewed as anathema by members of this powerful group. Likewise, the
notion of a strong Israel capable of defending its interests without American
help and permission is more dangerous than the notion of Iran armed with
nuclear weapons.
Given these convictions, it is
no surprise that unnamed intelligence sources are leaking a tsunami of
selective and deceptive intelligence against Trump and his advisers.
The sense of entitlement that
prevails in the intelligence community was on prominent display in an
astounding interview that Evelyn Farkas, a former deputy assistant secretary of
defense, gave to MSNBS in early March.
Farkas, who resigned her
position in late 2015 to work on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign,
admitted to her interviewer that the intelligence community was spying on Trump
and his associates and that ahead of Obama’s departure from office, they were
transferring massive amounts of intelligence information about Trump and his
associates to Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill in order to ensure that
those Democratic politicians would use the information gathered to harm Trump.
In her words, “The Trump
folks, if they found out how we knew what we knew about the Trump staff’s
dealings with Russians… would try to compromise those sources and methods,
meaning we would no longer have access to that information.”
Farkas then explained that the
constant leaks of Trump’s actions to the media were part of the initiative that
she had urged her counterparts to undertake.
And Farkas was proud of what
her colleagues had done and were doing.
Two days after Farkas’s
interview, Trump published his tweet accusing former president Barack Obama of
spying on him.
Although the media and the
intelligence community angrily and contemptuously denied Trump’s assertion, the
fact is that both Farkas’s statement and information that became public both
before and since Trump’s inauguration lends credence to his claim.
In the days ahead of the
inauguration we learned that in the summer of 2016, Obama’s Justice Department
conducted a criminal probe into suspicions that Trump’s senior aides had
committed crimes in their dealings with Russian banks. Those suspicions, upon
investigation, were dismissed. In other words, the criminal probe led nowhere.
Rather than drop the matter,
Obama’s Justice Department decided to continue the probe but transform it into
a national security investigation.
After a failed attempt in July
2016, in October 2016, a FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) court
approved a Justice Department request to monitor the communications of Trump’s
senior advisers. Since the subjects of the probe were working from Trump’s
office and communicating with him by phone and email, the warrant requested –
which the FISA court granted – also subjected Trump’s direct communications to
incidental collection.
So from at least October 2016
through Trump’s inauguration, the US intelligence community was spying on Trump
and his advisers, despite the fact that they were not suspected of committing
any crimes.
This brings us back to this
week’s Russia story which together with the media hysteria following Trump’s firing
of FBI director James Comey, precipitated Rosenstein’s decision to appoint
Mueller to serve as a special counsel charged with investigating the
allegations that Trump and or his advisers acted unlawfully or in a manner that
endangered the US in their dealings with Russia.
It is too early to judge how
Mueller will conduct his investigation. But if the past is any guide, he is
liable to keep the investigation going indefinitely, paralyzing Trump’s ability
to conduct foreign policy in relation to Russia and a host of other issues.
This then brings us to Trump
and Israel – the twin targets of the US intelligence community’s felonious and
injurious leaks.
The fact that Trump will be
coming to Israel next week may be a bit of fortuitous timing. Given the stakes
involved for Trump, for Israel and for US national security, perhaps Trump and
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can develop a method of fighting this cabal
of faceless, lawless foes together.
How such a fight would look
and what it would involve is not immediately apparent and anyways should never
be openly discussed. But the fact is that working together, Israel and Trump
may accomplish more than either can accomplish on their own. And with so much
hanging in the balance, it makes sense to at least try.
Caroline Glick, 22-5-2017
Relacionados:
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário
Não publicamos comentários de anônimos/desconhecidos.
Por favor, se optar por "Anônimo", escreva o seu nome no final do comentário.
Não use CAIXA ALTA, (Não grite!), isto é, não escreva tudo em maiúsculas, escreva normalmente. Obrigado pela sua participação!
Volte sempre!
Abraços./-