Live feeds from Capitol Hill would seem old news for television watchers and no longer brand new for web watchers, but it is something to have the option of witnessing national affairs as members of the media have attended these events for years. Perhaps greater opportunities will develop for remote “desktop-based” journalists to ask questions in the venue of choice.
Flag-waving Americans love their FBI and have — or have had — the highest regard for the nation’s preeminent law enforcement institution. This — and I’m listening now to Comey’s answers to inquiry — is going to be awfully tough for the more strident of American conservatives to favorably “deconstruct” with credibility. Plainly, President Trump asked for loyalty to himself and by extension his power and his designs. Our top police officer listened very carefully to that talk, and now we are all listening carefully. On the table: the public’s judgement of the integrity of our Federal government.
After only a few minutes at the podium, however, the transmission of his speech was interrupted without warning.1 President Maduro had ordered a blanket broadcast across all radio and television stations–what is known in Spanish as a cadena nacional. These presidential broadcasts resemble a US Oval Office address in style, but in Venezuela the law obliges both state‑owned and private media to carry the transmissions, which have lasted as long as eight hours. When Maduro invoked this law to interrupt Torrealba’s speech, Venezuelans had no choice but to listen to Maduro or simply switch off their TVs and radios.
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Nothing like waking up to an alert from Facebook! And having no idea why this time you have been blocked-from everything! Can’t post or receive messages. Can’t like or love a post. Can’t post! Totally stifled.
I tried to find out why I was blocked. I sent a request-because I thought it was a mistake. I don’t use foul language. I don’t post pornographic photos or death threats. I don’t attack people- I do attack their facts.
I received the usual response-Nothing.I was “deleted” either because of my latest post Islam on the March:Part 1 or I may have insulted some Liberals (sadly so easy to do).
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was poised to ride this momentum into Northeast Asia last week, but instead sustained a series of self-inflicted wounds. Before even departing Washington, he broke tradition by not inviting the State Department press corps on his plane, needlessly damaging relations with the media and forgoing the opportunity to better explain the contours of his mission. (“I’m not a big media press access person,” he said later, as if the only purpose of talking to reporters would be to serve his own agenda. “I personally don’t need it.”)
“People knew that he represented various countries, but I don’t think he represented Russia, but represented various countries,” Mr. Trump said at a news conference in February. “That’s what he does. People know that. That’s Mr. Manafort, by the way, a respected man, a respected man, but I think he represented the Ukraine or Ukraine government or somebody, but everybody knew that.”
BackChannels thought the comment obfuscating and vague, the verbal equivalent of a bully’s shrug (“I don’t know nothin’ about it; I didn’t do nothin'”).
Here’s the source of the quotation:
And here is a little bit more about the very respected Paul Manafort:
If you click on the link — or either of the links in this section — you may soon know more about Paul Manafort than the dissembling President of the United States a) either knows or b) cares to share with the public.
Here’s a potential positive spin: could Manafort have been urging his clients away from “political absolutism” and toward the graces of the modern democratic and rule-of-law world?
Anything’s possible — but how would the public know with the curtain drawn closed with mumbles?
Let’s move on to something thornier.
In its apprehension of geography and history, where is America’s voting public?
How ignorant a people are we?
How well informed?
Should the public know so many of the details of deals — like “Uranium One”, which took years to form during a period in which Moscow and Washington appeared to be at peace and not running headlong into a Cold War sequal — and policies that well may not be so much a part of its daily cultural (and intellectual) experience?
Or is the public sufficiently active and informed in all of the dimensions of public interest and well deserving of engagement with its Administration by way of responsible 24/7 press coverage?
If the ignorance proves vast, well then perhaps Americans deserve the development of a “privatized government” in the hands of “people who know best” and who need not be forthcoming as regards their goals, ideas, strategies, or tactics.
In fact, is there anything wrong with the idea of a paternal government packed with powerful actors — CEOs and generals — that within its own ranks chooses to operate with autonomy behind a curtain of increasing silence?
The question is trick: ask Orwell — there’s a lot wrong with the notion of government left to unchecked elites, and it’s that thought prompted the title of this post (and as generally true around here, a title a little larger than the content intended to support it). Sigh.
Back to Tillerson’s comment at the top of the post — here’s another tack and one especially appropriate to relations between Moscow and Washington, both nerve centers attached to the prospect of nuclear war: perhaps for Tillerson and others, private no-access space is of necessity for national security as well as consideration and quiet. After all, the press appears welcome to hound officials at their destinations. Getting cozy, getting the scoop, getting the inside skinny in flight — do the “journos” or public need that unknown moment so badly?
Give it break, guys and gals, and let the real “Fake News!” people, the writers of fiction, have their turn.
Journalism affords practitioners flexibility in methods of attribution. The most general options involving acquisition or interview for information are these:
On the record (for dissemination) / off the record (for background only)
For attribution (use the name) / not with attribution (use “official” or “spokesman”)
For a sophisticated businessman to complain that that a news item lacked a named source would seem not only disingenuous but contemptuous of the audience as well.
Another suggested BackChannels question: who is — who was — “they”?
And when will we know that “they” have cleaned up their respective acts?
BackChannels readers may keep in mind that the editor interprets America’s political polarization with the model “Brown v Red-Green” and with that division between Republican “New Nationalists” and Democratic “Old Comrades and Neo-Islamists”, the use of so much polemic would seem of equal opportunity.
Most likely, elements in the press would have dogged Clinton too, and she would have bit back.
It so happens, the “New Nationalist” won, and what he’s doing in the above video is not slamming lowly bloggers cutting and pasting cyberspace junk from remote shores but calling out CNN and similar others and thereby degrading confidence in the reporting and opining of the strongest part of the Fourth Estate.
At 6:25 p.m. on Jan. 2, Nick Kouvalis sent out a tweet suggesting that the Canadian government was, among other things, directly funding known terrorist groups. Kouvalis, who is campaign manager of Conservative leadership candidate Kellie Leitch, has a history of posting provocative, absurd and often completely false information. He does so, he says, “to make the left go nuts.”
A Facebook friend on the Traditional Far Left — the Aesthetic Left, the Left of guitar players and poets and magical brownies — shared with me this morning the World News Daily piece. The look-up that followed brought a host of similar put-ups from the alley off the mainstream of everything. BackChannels let the matter drop for a few hours — and then thought to look again for the shocker to emerge in the staid BBC or ever respectable Reuters — and so far, so good: the “news” shared to BackChannels this morning by the perhaps Naive Aesthetic Left appears a true paste-up.
Fusion GPS had been hired by Republican opponents of Mr Trump in September 2015. In June 2016 Mr Steele came on the team. He was, and continues to be, highly regarded in the intelligence world. In July, Mr Trump won the Republican nomination and the Democrats became new employers of Mr Steele and Fusion GPS.
In the same month Mr Steele produced a memo, which went to the FBI, stating that Mr Trump’s campaign team had agreed to a Russian request to dilute attention on Moscow’s intervention in Ukraine. Four days later Mr Trump stated that he would recognise Moscow’s annexation of Crimea. A month later officials involved in his campaign asked the Republican party’s election platform to remove a pledge for military assistance to the Ukrainian government against separatist rebels in the east of the country.
This scandal that has come out of the shadows — by way of the findings of the former MI6 agent Christopher Steele as a consultant of highest repute; by way of the associated imprimatur of the highly experienced and respected former British ambassador Sir Andrew Wood — may not be returned to them.
The story appears to be taking off, a BackChannels’ opinion based on so many options for searching up the “Trump Kompromat” story.
The political mobs, among other interests, seldom appreciate hearing how they have been snookered, but they may have to hear as much as more comes to light.
As well acknowledged by the press, American President Elect Trump has moved to dismiss Steele’s report as fiction concocted by his political enemies, first within the Republican Party, and after his nomination, then in the Democratic Party that picked up on the availability of the consulting firm Fusion GPS (URL references Daily Mail, January 13, 2017).
Be that as it may, British MI6 — in fiction and film, James Bond’s outfit — has, as may America’s CIA, the deepest imaginable investment in producing for the state’s highest and most information privileged officials, clear, accurate, and complete intelligence in service to the state’s defense and interests. The highest integrity — and loyalty — may be expected of such agents. It is against that tradition that Trump throws chafe.
Trump and others may have been better off citing Moscow’s KGB history of “Active Measures” and “Disinformation” as a potential cause for Steele’s findings, i.e, Steele had been “played” by Moscow. That would have taken the story into the parallel universe of espionage and just as well — at the some future date — into the theaters.
This day may be too late for merely dumping Steele’s outrageous claims — ah, but Steele has behind him a terrific reputation for integrity — on Moscow’s prowess at playing “Spy vs Spy”.
President Elect Trump may be counted on to play “Trust me” with his developing authority as an American president, but there’s an old guard too of Federal government employees and an American Press — the “Fourth Estate” — known for its extraordinary tenacity when challenged by an especially curious political scandal and mystery.
Reference
The response to the information from the FBI, he recalled, was “shock and horror.” After a few weeks, the bureau asked him for information on his sources and their reliability and on how he had obtained his reports. He was also asked to continue to send copies of his subsequent reports to the bureau. These reports were not written, he noted, as finished work products; they were updates on what he was learning from his various sources. But he said, “My track record as a professional is second to no one.”
After he left the spy service, Steele supplied the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation with information on corruption at FIFA, international soccer’s governing body.
It was his work on corruption in international soccer that lent credence to his reporting on Trump’s entanglements in Russia, U.S. officials said on Wednesday.
To some, the dossier’s errors and far-out claims stand in stark contrast to Steele’s usual approach to intelligence-gathering. West noted that only one intelligence officer was listed as a direct source.
“Nobody is saying he believes in any of this,” West said. “What he was hired to do was write a series of reports based on info he could glean from his contacts. His contacts are very good but they’re more in the business community than the intel community.”
In 2001 Allason sued Random House, the publishers of The Enigma Spy, the autobiography of the former Soviet agent John Cairncross. Allason claimed he had ghostwritten The Enigma Spy in return for the copyright and 50 per cent of the proceeds. However, Allason lost the case and was ordered to pay costs of around £200,000. In passing judgment the trial judge said that Allason was “a profoundly dishonest man” and “one of the most dishonest witnesses I have ever seen”.[9][10][11] In September 2005, Allason was threatened with prison for contempt of court in relation to paying the damages from the 2001 case.[12][13][14]
Sigh.
In an alarming Twitter post, the Russian embassy in London suggested Steele was still working for MI6 and ‘briefing both ways’ against Mr Trump and Moscow.
A Russian embassy spokesman said the tweet – which said ‘MI6 officers are never ex’ – ‘reflected the mood in Russia’.
“The whole affair is Kafkaesque,” Mr. Bukovsky said in an interview. “You not only have to prove you are not guilty but that you are innocent.” He insisted that he was the victim of a new and particularly noxious form of an old K.G.B. dirty trick known as kompromat, the fabrication and planting of compromising or illegal material.
Old-style kompromat featured doctored photographs, planted drugs, grainy videos of liaisons with prostitutes hired by the K.G.B., and a wide range of other primitive entrapment techniques.
Incidentally, BackChannel’s sources have suggested the Kremlin employs more than 800,000 Russians in its Information Warfare capacity. What that may mean for those invested in integrity and truth-telling worldwide, and whether for business, government, or personal conscience, is that Russia maintains a veritable army of professed liars whose paid mission is to confuse, disinform, and disrupt the processes of reason itself in each mind across hundreds of millions of souls.
In the world in which the latest Trump scandal is unfolding, there appears both a natural limit to what the public may know with certainty and a stranger-than-fiction aspect that fairly begs credulity. Nonetheless: as regards President Elect Trump, the American electorate certainly heard the ” . . . grab them by the pussy” comment released as an information grenade only weeks before the general election, and it has by now accumulated awareness of the President’s character in business in ways possibly unsurpassed in history. If ever an American President were examined like an organism, this one has been diced, sliced, smeared, and laid out on the slide bed of the highest resolution political microscope ever imagined.
The multiple images of damage — offhand remarks; a relationship with the world’s foremost political consultant to dictatorships (Paul Manafort); family relationships that go back to the Soviet Era and include fluency in Russian — then too, the family is immensely gifted with multilingual talent; possible Russian real estate interests as a matter of “business empire” deeply invested in real estate development — may continue to accumulate even though the truth remains sketchy — or held close by governments plunged into a different kind of war.
Trump’s “Russian Phantoms” — Manafort, Manafort-Kilimnik (relationship), Millian and any related business that has or may come to light — have already dogged the incoming Administration, and more may come to light as the Inauguration approaches.
Searches applied while developing this post: “KGB, Kompromat”; “Russian Influence Operations”; “Trump, Compromised”; “Trump, Russian Fluency”; “Trump Family, Russian Fluency”.
“The ultimate goal of Kremlin hostile influence and disinformation operations is to weaken its opponents’ will to resist,” Jakub Janda, deputy director of nonpartisan think tank European Values, explained in an email from Prague. “Simply to manipulate the West, its politicians and its societies to stop resisting invasions of the Russian Federation to foreign countries.
In Europe, the East StratCom Task Force issues a “Disinformation Review” every week, giving a round-up of pro-Kremlin disinformation in Europe and beyond.
In its most lurid allegation, the report alleges that Trump defiled a hotel suite in which the Obamas had stayed during a Moscow visit. Trump allegedly brought prostitutes to the Ritz Carlton suite, bugged by the FSB, the KGB’s successor. There, Trump allegedly ordered the prostitutes to perform “golden showers” in front of him.
“The whole affair is Kafkaesque,” Mr. Bukovsky said in an interview. “You not only have to prove you are not guilty but that you are innocent.” He insisted that he was the victim of a new and particularly noxious form of an old K.G.B. dirty trick known as kompromat, the fabrication and planting of compromising or illegal material.
Old-style kompromat featured doctored photographs, planted drugs, grainy videos of liaisons with prostitutes hired by the K.G.B., and a wide range of other primitive entrapment techniques.
