One step back, two steps forward

There was a big and humiliatingly stupid error in my Saturday post on DNI John Ratcliffe's attempts to use selective declassification of classified material to make it look as if Hillary Clinton had engaged in some kind of collusion with Russian intelligence agencies: when I said the meeting at which CIA director John Brennan took the handwritten notes released by Ratcliffe took place on 28 July 2016.

I think I must have gotten it, appropriately enough, from hack attorney Jonathan Turley, who said so in his post of last Wednesday:

Brennan’s handwritten notes would seem extremely serious on their face. It certainly indicates that Brennan considered the issue sufficiently serious to brief the President of the United States on July 28th. The notes state

“We’re getting additional insight into Russian activities from [REDACTED]. . . CITE [summarizing] alleged approved by Hillary Clinton a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service.”

But it also could have come from Dan Friedman at Mother Jones:

Acting on orders from Trump, Ratcliffe on Tuesday declassified notes from former CIA Director John Brennan indicating that on July 28, 2016, Brennan had told President Barack Obama about US intelligence findings related to Russia. These finding included information suggesting that Russian intelligence analysis said that Hillary Clinton had approved “a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service.” This same intelligence was apparently the basis of documents declassified by Ratcliffe last week that describe Russian claims that Clinton’s campaign wanted to highlight Trump’s Russian ties as “a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.”

Both probably got the idea from some bad editing at the Fox News website's version of the story, according to which

Negative Thereness

In Everybody's Autobiography (1937) Gertrude Stein complained about her native Oakland “...what was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there.” But somebody finally supplied one—photo by Joe Sciarillo.

I need to make a confession: I'm the one who started the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. I mean, alongside Paul Krugman, Josh Marshall, CIA director John O. Brennan, and our handlers in Russian intelligence and, frankly, a whole lot of other people, most of whom aren't even aware that we had Russian handlers. If current Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe knows what he's talking about. 

I don't know what he's talking about, but just saying: Krugman's New York Times column ("Donald Trump, the Siberian Candidate") of 22 July 2016, Josh Marshall's blogpost ("Trump & Putin: Yes, It's Really a Thing") of the following day—

Trump appears to have a deep financial dependence on Russian money from persons close to Putin. And this is matched to a conspicuous solicitousness to Russian foreign policy interests where they come into conflict with US policies which go back decades through administrations of both parties. There is also something between a non-trivial and a substantial amount of evidence suggesting Putin-backed financial support for Trump or a non-tacit alliance between the two men.

—and my own post on the 24th ("As a Notorious Billionaire Once Said, Just What in the Hell Is Going On") 

Father John

Photo by Pete Souza via BuzzFeed, May 2009.

Has anyone looked at the mistakes that John Brennan made while serving as CIA Director? He will go down as easily the WORST in history & since getting out, he has become nothing less than a loudmouth, partisan, political hack who cannot be trusted with the secrets to our country!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 18, 2018

Trump's unexpectedly succeeded at something really difficult: making John O. Brennan a truth-telling hero, which is giving something like whiplash to some of our friends, notably Zandar, who remember Brennan from back in 2008 as the person Obama was talked out of naming as CIA director because he had a record from the Bush administration as being not as opposed to torture as a decent person should be, and then wonder why Obama named him chief counterterrorism adviser (a job that doesn't require Senate confirmation) and eventually CIA director anyway.

I, in my usual Obot way, kept thinking there must be some reason Obama likes this guy so much, partly because he looks like a kindly old Irish priest, and ended up concluding just about four years ago that Brennan had been given a really bad rap, that the evidence calling him a torture supporter has been read wrong, and that Obama saw him, rightly, as the right person to fix the troubled CIA:

Here were Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane a little before the inauguration:

Wring out the old

From Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford, "Reenacting the Bay of Pigs Invasion with Pigs", January 2014.

When I tell you all about how Barack Obama and his spiritual director John O. Brennan have been working since 2008 to get the National Clandestine Service, the old CIA Ops division, out of the rightwing paramilitary business and into legitimate intelligence work under presidential supervision, you don't even bother to tell me I'm wrong—you just quietly tiptoe away, but I know what you're thinking.

So what do you think about this, suckers?

John O. Brennan, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, is planning to reassign thousands of undercover spies and intelligence analysts into new departments as part of a restructuring of the 67-year-old agency.... Mr. Brennan’s plan would partly abandon the agency’s current structure that keeps spies and analysts separate as they target specific regions or countries. 

Don't be misled by the annoying business-major language with which he tries to explain it

Got paranoia?

Updates below:

Salvador Dali, Swans Reflecting Elephants, 1937.

So Israeli spies have been listening to Secretary Kerry's telephone calls made on unencrypted phone systems over the past year as he tried to negotiate a deal between Israel and Palestine, along with "at least one other secret service", but you can't find out whose, according to Le Nouvel Observateur:

un autre service de renseignement d’un pays non identifié a lui aussi écouté les communications du chef de la diplomatie américaine lorsqu’il utilisait un téléphone portable non sécurisé au lieu des systèmes cryptés, ce qui lui est arrivé plus d’une fois.

(I assume they looked behind Spiegel's subscription wall to make sure, as I was unwilling to do.)

Well, I'm willing to hazard a guess on the identity of that secret service, too contrarian for Slate, too paranoid for the Firebaggers, and too baroque for anybody but the late Norman Mailer, who might well have written it, and its initials are C.I.A., at war with the Obama administration since January 2009. I'm not even kidding. [8/4/14: It looks like speculation on CIA spying on Kerry is false. See below. Y]

Here were Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane a little before the inauguration:

The curious case of the penitent president. II

Obama's other little signal to the beleaguered but believing left came in an earlier, and more famous Times article, this one by Scott Shane and Jo Becker, portraying the president as he agonizes over his "nominations" to the Kill List of people to be drone-bombed in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia.

Because he doesn't just kill people, we learned*; he has a very thorough and responsible procedure for making sure he only kills the right people. It's not quite due process the way we studied it in middle school, where they never mentioned this extrajudicial type of due process, but it's extremely due, so to speak. He studies their portraits and biographies, flanked by

"I'll be judge, I'll be jury," said cunning old Fury...

his counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, who is variously compared by colleagues to a dogged police detective, tracking terrorists from his cavelike office in the White House basement, or a priest whose blessing has become indispensable to Mr. Obama, echoing the president’s attempt to apply the “just war” theories of Christian philosophers to a brutal modern conflict. [jump]

 *It's the CIA in Pakistan that does that, not to mention going after those who try to rescue the victims, or march in their funerals. Whatever you say about the president, he clearly does a better job in his three countries than they do in their one.

A little intelligence

As we know, President Obama's counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, has backed down a little from his claim a year ago that there had been no civilian deaths in drone strikes since 2010:

Brennan was asked about his claim last June that for almost a year “there hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities we’ve been able to develop.”

On Sunday, he appeared to qualify his statement. "Well, what I said was that over a period of time before my public remarks that we had no information about a single civilian, a noncombatant, being killed," he said. (Los Angeles Times, April 29, 2012)

Now we've learned from the New York Times how they manage to avoid the information: [jump]

Water-ordeal. From Wikipedia.