Accusing Russia of practicing a "scorched-earth policy" in Syria is utterly hypocritical of CIA Director John Brennan who himself is largely responsible for nursing "moderate" rebels and plunging the country into chaos, former CIA officer Ray McGovern has told RT.

CIA Director John Brennan recently slammed Russia's anti-terrorism efforts in Syria as a "scorched-earth policy" far from "something that the United States would ever do." Russian Defense Ministry spokesman, Major General Igor Konashenkov, on Thursday agreed that the operation indeed differs from the US coalition actions which are focused on "methodically and steadily destroying Syrian economic infrastructure."

RT: What are your thoughts on this suggestion that Russia uses "scorched-earth" tactics in Syria?

Ray McGovern: I would say that John Brennan's record for credibility or even veracity is rather thin. It's really a case of people in glass houses not throwing stones or the pot calling the kettle black. These are crocodile tears. Brennan is largely responsible for the chaos in Syria. He's the one that led Obama by the nose in response to the Saudi and to the Israeli interests there to keep the revolts going. He and Defense Secretary Ashton Carter were against the ceasefire. Ashton Carter sent his air force to scuttle the ceasefire that was agreed to between Secretary Kerry and Lavrov in September. So for Brennan to shed crocodile tears now, well I might say, it's giving hypocrisy a bad name.

Three pieces in the same leading newspaper show how little changes with "hacking" stories when the powers-that-are decide that some country is now the "enemy."

1. By NYT staff reporter Erich Lichtblau: Increase in Electronic Attacks Leads to Warning on Hackers and U.S. Safety

Intelligence officials are concerned that a recent rise in electronic attacks against government and military computer networks in the United States may be the work of pro-[country] hackers and could signal a "potential crisis" in national security, according to a classified F.B.I. assessment.

The assessment, prepared last week by the National Infrastructure Protection Center at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, warned intelligence officials that the attacks, which have been relatively limited, are likely to grow more widespread and "more dangerous" as tension over a possible war against [country] grows.

American intelligence analysts say they have long been concerned by the notion that Al Qaeda could use computers to wage terror -- disrupting water treatment plants or nuclear facilities, for instance. Experts say the link between [country] and computer hacking may have been underestimated and poses a growing threat to United States security.

"[Country] is certainly among the places in the world that we think a cyberattack might well be launched from," Representative Robert E. Andrews of New Jersey, a Democrat on the House Armed Service Committee who has been active on cyberwarfare issues, said in an interview.

Mr. Andrews noted that computer attacks were difficult to trace and could be damaging, which he said met 's goals. "A cyberattack really fits [country]'s [leader] paradigm for attacking us," he said.

One day following the Russian Navy's arrival in the Philippines to run regional threat-assessment drills, Russian Ambassador Igor Khovaev expressed Moscow's enthusiasm to equip the island nation with high-tech military hardware.

While Russia will operate "in full compliance with international law," Khovaev said that Russia is "ready to supply small arms and light weapons, some aeroplanes, helicopters, submarines, and many, many other weapons. Sophisticated weapons. Not the second-hand ones."

Duterte has made good on his promise to weaken ties with Washington after welcoming Russian warships for unprecedented navy-to-navy maritime exercises between Moscow and Manila. Russian Rear Admiral Eduard Mikhailov indicated that the war games would focus on two scenarios most likely to destabilize the region's waters, maritime piracy and terrorism.

Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte's pivot from ties with the US launched into overdrive in October 2016, when he said in a speech that US President Barack Obama to "go to hell" for treating the country "like a doormat."

From the deck of the anti-submarine cruiser Admiral Tributs, Khovaev emphasized a stronger Moscow-Manila bond did not have to be at the expense of souring ties with Washington, suggesting that economic cooperation can bring mutual benefits to the parties involved, and diversifying one's foreign partners is simply smart economics. "It's not a choice between these partners and those ones. Diversification means preserving and keeping old traditional partners and getting new ones. So Russia is ready to become a new reliable partner and close friend of the Philippines," he said.

It is, of course, worth knowing what involvement any other country might have had in the US election, but elite media's consumption with the Russia-did-it storyline so far is discouraging to say the least.

The Intercept's Sam Biddle (12/14/16) has a breakdown of what public evidence there is that Russia was behind hacks of DNC email accounts. He concludes that while it's plausible that Russians or even Russia was involved, it's a very long way from proven, different agencies dispute it, all the sources we're reading are anonymous and the assessments themselves are secret.


It should go without saying that the repercussions of such an accusation are serious. As Biddle writes:

What we're looking at now is the distinct possibility that the United States will consider military retaliation (digital or otherwise) against Russia, based on nothing but private sector consultants and secret intelligence agency notes. If you care about the country enough to be angry at the prospect of election-meddling, you should be terrified of the prospect of military tensions with Russia based on hidden evidence.

Dana Rohrabacher, the long-serving Republican congressman from California has announced he will be leading a Congressional delegation on an official visit to Russia next month. There he will meet with his Russian counterparts from the Russian parliament (the Duma).

Well OK so an unspecified number of American legislators will travel to Moscow to speak to Russian MPs. Who cares, right? After all it is not as if any of them get to direct foreign policy.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) let slip a terrifying reality when it comes to the power of our nation's president over "executive branch" agencies like the CIA. In an interview Tuesday with MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, Schumer said President-elect Donald Trump is "being really dumb" by taking on the intelligence community because if he does "they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you."

Just let that soak in for a minute.

One of the most powerful senators just admitted that it is "stupid" for a president to oppose the intelligence community, which he is in charge of, because it will "[get] back at you."

Maddow, perhaps realizing the gravity of what he just said, questioned Schumer further asking skeptically: "what do you think the intelligence community would do, if they were motivated to?"

"I don't know... but from what I am told, they are VERY upset with how he has treated them and talked about them...," Schumer said.

I've been researching the CIA for over 30 years and I've interviewed over 100 CIA officers. So naturally, people often wonder how I prepare myself. In one of the interviews that's included in my new book, James Tracy asked me how I know where to look for information that's pertinent to a given story.

I told James that's it's complicated, that my experience is different from most other CIA researchers and writers. I didn't follow the usual career course. I didn't go to the Columbia School of Journalism. I'm a college dropout who climbed trees for a living for ten years. But I did want to be a writer, and my philosophy of life is based on the study of language and literary criticism. I take a very broad approach. When I went to college, I studied Greek and Roman literature, read the Norton anthologies of English and American literature, and took courses in classical myth and the Bible.

Doug Valentine's new book, The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World, is a compilation of newly updated articles and recent interviews. The book, which discusses a part of history that is rarely mentioned nowadays but is vital to understand as we enter the Trump era, is divided into four sections. The first covers the CIA's Phoenix program in Vietnam; the second looks at how the agency manages the War on Drugs; the third reviews how the Phoenix program became the model for Homeland Security and the War on Terror; and the fourth takes a look at the the CIA's influence on the media.

The CIA created the Phoenix program in South Vietnam in 1967 as a means of identifying, capturing, detaining, interrogating and assassinating the civilian leaders of the insurgency. As detailed in the book, the program has become the template for Homeland Security, as well as for waging the War on Terror and the War on Drugs.

The following edited excerpt, which focuses on the CIA's illegal domestic spying program, Chaos, was omitted from the book. It is taken from an interview Valentine did with Guillermo Jimenez in November 2014, originally titled "The CIA Has Become the Phoenix."

Cloaked in secrecy, the CIA is rarely written about and poorly understood. But while researching the infamous Phoenix program, Valentine managed to penetrate the agency and interview dozens of agency officers. His Phoenix research materials are available to the public at the National Security Archive. His interviews with several CIA officers are available online here and here.

In early November, without warning, the Indian government declared the two largest denomination bills invalid, abolishing over 80 percent of circulating cash by value. Amidst all the commotion and outrage this caused, nobody seems to have taken note of the decisive role that Washington played in this. That is surprising, as Washington's role has been disguised only very superficially.

US-President Barack Obama has declared the strategic partnership with India a priority of his foreign policy. China needs to be reined in. In the context of this partnership, the US government's development agency USAID has negotiated cooperation agreements with the Indian ministry of finance. One of these has the declared goal to push back the use of cash in favor of digital payments in India and globally.

On November 8, Indian prime minster Narendra Modi announced that the two largest denominations of banknotes could not be used for payments any more with almost immediate effect. Owners could only recoup their value by putting them into a bank account before the short grace period expired at year end, which many people and businesses did not manage to do, due to long lines in front of banks. The amount of cash that banks were allowed to pay out to individual customers was severely restricted. Almost half of Indians have no bank account and many do not even have a bank nearby. The economy is largely cash based. Thus, a severe shortage of cash ensued. Those who suffered the most were the poorest and most vulnerable. They had additional difficulty earning their meager living in the informal sector or paying for essential goods and services like food, medicine or hospitals. Chaos and fraud reigned well into December.

In the West Junk Information And Junk Judgment Prevail

The Western world and that part of the world that partakes of Western explanations live in a fictional world.

We see this everywhere we look—in the alleged machinations of Russia to elect Donald Trump president of the US, in claims that Saddam Hussein and his (nonexistent) weapons of mass destruction were a threat to the United States (a mushroom cloud over American cities), that Assad of Syria used chemical weapons against his own people, that Iran has a nuclear weapons program, that a few Saudi Arabians outwitted the entirety of the US, EU, and Israeli intelligence services and delivered the greatest humiliation to the "world's only superpower" in the history of mankind, that Russia invaded Ukraine and could at any moment invade the Baltics and Poland, that the US rate of unemployment is 4.6%, that China's trade surplus with the US is due to Chinese currency manipulation, and so on and on.

Allegedly we live in a scientific era of information, but what good can come from faulty orchestrated information? As long as fake news delivered by presstitutes serves powerful private and governmental interests, how can we know the truth about anything?

For example, consider the claim found everywhere in US government and US media statements that the massive US trade deficit with China is the result of Chinese currency manipulation, keeping the yuan underpriced relative to the US dollar.

This false claim, which is widely accepted as truth even by Russian writers on Russian websites, is nonsense. China's currency is pegged to the US dollar. It moves with the dollar. China pegged its currency to the US dollar in order to create confidence in the Chinese currency. Over the past decade China has adjusted the peg of its currency to the dollar and permitted a rise in the value of the Chinese currency from 8.1 yuan to 6.9 yuan to the US dollar. (The yuan reached a strength of 6 to the dollar, but a rising dollar was pulling up the yuan, causing China to widen the float in order to avoid undue appreciation because of the US dollar's rise to other Asian and European currencies.) How is a rising yuan "currency manipulation"? Don't expect an answer from the presstitute financial media or the junk economists who comprise the neoliberal economics profession.