Wikileaks asks you to vote on whether you think CIA is planting stories in media to overthrow the President

CIA staff specialize in overthrowing foreign leaders they don't like by planting stories in the media. Skill now used on US president?

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) February 24, 2017

5 top Russian diplomats die in 3 months--plus Putin's chauffeur died in freak car wreck in September--and former CIA Acting Director Mike Morell told Charlie Rose he would assassinate Russians "to make them pay a price"

100 Strange Russian deaths

Vitaly Churkin, Russia's UN ambassador since 2006,  died unexpectedly at age 64 in the consulate, two days ago.  And while it was said initially that Churkin died of a heart attack, that is not the case, according to his autopsy.

He is the fifth Russian diplomat to die unexpectedly in 3 months.  Turkish ambassador Karlov was shot at an art exhibition in December, Soviet Foreign Ministry officer Polshikov was shot in his Moscow apartment in December, Indian ambassador Kadakin died "from illness" in January, and Greek consul Malanin's death in January is unexplained. 

Putin's chauffeur is the sixth politically important Russian to die recently and suspiciously. 

Don't forget that on Christmas day, a Russian military jet went down over the Black Sea, killing 60 members of the Red Army choir and 33 others.

Sergei Krivov, said to be a security officer, died in the Russian consulate in NY on election day 2016 from an undisclosed cause, possibly head trauma.

The video of Putin's chauffeur crashing and dying (passenger less) looked like no ordinary wreck.

And here is another odd coincidence:  none of the western mainstream media have reported this spate of Russian diplomat deaths, at least not with my Google search.

Churkin's autopsy did not show a heart attack, stroke or pulmonary embolism (all generally easily identifiable).  These are the 3 usual (non-drug) causes of sudden unexplained death. Following the autopsy, the NY Medical Examiner said that toxicology and other studies will need to be performed to determine why Churkin died.

This looks suspiciously like the Deep State (aided by rogue intelligence officers) trying to provoke Russia.  Or at least, send (several) messages to Putin, while sending another interesting message to Trump.

Six ways from Sunday

It appears that Trump may not be in control of his intelligence services, and furthermore, Churkin's death happened in Trump's home town.  Which is also the home of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who said Trump was "really dumb" to threaten the CIA. “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Schumer told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow on January 3, 2016.

Since when do Senators threaten Presidents in such an open manner?  These are no ordinary times.

Who is in control of assassinations of US 'enemies'?  Who designates who our 'enemies' are? Recall that after JFK fired CIA Director Allan Dulles, and said he would destroy the CIA, it was Kennedy who got killed, while the CIA prospered.  

Please watch this short Charlie Rose interview with former CIA Acting Director Michael Morell--it is really scary.  Morell talks about his plan to assassinate Russians ("to make them pay a price") and kill Iranians, and destroy Assad's helicopter or plane, on the ground, to send Assad a warning. The interview was broadcast August 8, 2016. And now, his threats have come true. Will Schumer's also come true?

Last month, on "Meet the Press" Senator Lindsey Graham said Trump should "make Russia pay a price for trying to interfere" in the election.  Are assassinations the price, despite no evidence being proffered that Russia hacked the election--and who is extracting the price? Who is calling the shots? 

Putin will have to do something about this. He has been patient, until now. Who will have to pay the next price?


* Thanks to Cynthia McKinney's twitter feed for the Morell video clip:  https://twitter.com/cynthiamckinney/status/834256390738812929

The Goal of Mainstream Media? / Thx to Zero Hedge

Source: MichaelPRamirez.com

Rogue Elephant Rising: The CIA as Kingslayer/ Counterpunch

FEBRUARY 17, 2017by DAVID PRICE in Counterpunch

With members of the CIA and NSA leaking materials on Michael Flynn’s communications with Russian officials, we are witnessing a slow boiling domestic coup that will transform American governance and the Executive Branch’s relationships with intelligence agencies. It remains to be seen whether these moves signal broader attacks on the Presidency by agencies long accustomed to taking out administrations threatening the Agency’s perceived interests.

This moment tells us more about the CIA revolting against a particular administration than it does about Trump’s people engaging in unusually diabolical-illegal activities designed to undermine an outgoing administration. We know enough about Reagan’s pre-election dealings with Iran to know that the CIA and NSA knew about these transactions, yet these agencies were content to remain silent; apparently glad to see Carter ousted and welcoming a new era of unparalleled “peace time” military and intelligence spending. Similarly, American intelligence agencies knew of Nixon’s efforts to sabotage the Paris peace talks before the 1968 election, and the CIA did nothing to undermine a new president who was going to give the agency the war it wanted. The leaking of Flynn’s information tells us little new about how incoming administrations act, but it suggests something new about US intelligence agencies willingness to take out an administration not to their liking.

To be clear: I see nothing wrong with the leaks themselves. I like intelligence leaks. I think they are generally good for democracy and reveal important truths about power. I am not worried about leaks, I am worried about the CIA and other intelligence agencies making a significant power grab that is not being critically considered. This is a move that no future president will soon forget, and that will make him or her think twice before crossing these agencies.

The left’s widely shared disdain for Donald Trump makes the current rushing national wave of schadenfreude understandable, yet there are few on the left who appear worried about what this domestic CIA coup portends for American democracy. Because of the long history of liberals’ attractions to using the CIA, perhaps we should not be too surprised at this elation, but we need to cautiously think beyond this moment.

It is no secret that many at the CIA hold disdain for Flynn. His years at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and in command of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) coincided with efforts to move many of what had been CIA operational activities and covert operations away from CIA to DIA. With the CIA attacking the Trump administration so soon after the election with leaks of the Russian hacking report there were clear public fissures appearing between the Agency and the new Executive.

I assume that there are lots of reasons why many at the CIA and NSA wish to undermine the Trump administration—I even assume I may share a few of these reasons with them. While the agency is comfortable with much of the corporate looting that Trump appears ready to unleash, few in the agency like the sort of instability that Trump generates—and I suppose some within may take his ongoing barbs and attacks on Agency incompetence seriously.

As it is to many of us on the left, it is obvious to me that Trump is the most dangerous, unqualified, and reckless US President I have ever seen—much less imagined. And while it seems as if he will soon enough seize some opportunity to declare a national security disaster granting himself new unlimited powers, I know no reason to trust the CIA and other intelligence agencies any more than we trust Trump.

This attack on the Executive Branch is like nothing we’ve ever seen before. The most historically interesting element of this moment is the rarity of seeing the CIA operating, in real time, not in its usual historical role as a covert arm of the presidency (which Congressman Otis Pike argued was its primary function), but as the sort of rogue elephant that Senator Frank Church and others long ago claimed it is. As members of the Republic, no matter what momentary joy we might feel watching this rogue elephant canter towards our incompetent Commander and Chief, we must not ignore the danger this beast presents to one and all.

We should welcome calls to investigate Trump, Flynn, Bannon, Pence and others within the administration, but we need to also investigate and monitor the CIA for this latest in its long history of attempted coups.

For Those Who Say the Science is Settled

That is what the Phrenologists thought, too.

US military has failed to publicly disclose potentially thousands of lethal airstrikes conducted since 2001 in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan/ Military Times

The U.S. military under former President Barack Obama quietly hid “potentially thousands of lethal airstrikes” from the American public that likely killed hundreds of civilians in war-ravaged Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, the Military Times has found.

In 2016 alone, U.S. combat aircraft conducted at least 456 airstrikes in Afghanistan that were not recorded as part of an open-source database maintained by the U.S. Air Force, information relied on by Congress, American allies, military analysts, academic researchers, the media and independent watchdog groups to assess each war's expense, manpower requirements and human toll. Those airstrikes were carried out by attack helicopters and armed drones operated by the U.S. Army, metrics quietly excluded from otherwise comprehensive monthly summaries, published online for years, detailing American military activity in all three theaters. 

Most alarming is the prospect this data has been incomplete since the war on terrorism began in October 2001. If that is the case, it would fundamentally undermine confidence in much of what the Pentagon has disclosed about its prosecution of these wars, prompt critics to call into question whether the military sought to mislead the American public, and cast doubt on the competency with which other vital data collection is being performed and publicized. Those other key metrics include American combat casualties, taxpayer expense and the military’s overall progress in degrading enemy capabilities...

U.S. Central Command, which oversees military activity in all three war zones, indicated it is unable to determine how far back the Army’s numbers have been excluded from these airpower summaries. Officials there would not address several detailed questions submitted by Military Times, and they were unable to provide a full listing of annual airstrikes conducted by each of the Defense Department's four military services.  

Now why would the DOD want to publish false information?  Well, it helps in the effort to achieve "plausible deniability" --by denying a US mission took place when the US military commits a potential war crime, like deliberately bombing hospitals or bombing elite counter narcotics forces in Afghanistan, which the USG initially denied.  In fact, an unnamed Army official quoted in the article said he did not consider Apache helicopter attacks airstrikes! While according to Boeing, its manufacturer, “The Apache is the world's best armed, integrated and connected attack helicopter in production and in operational use today. It’s a flying weapons system that is fully integrated. It has options to have missiles, rockets or guns depending on what your enemy is."

If you have no report of thousands of air attacks, instead of bombing ISIS, you can bomb anti-ISIS targets and likely get away with it. There could be so many reasons to hide US military missions.

UPDATE:  From the Sept 7, 2015 Wall Street Journal, we learn that a US "friendly fire" airstrike in southern Afghanistan on Sept 6 "hit a 30 member elite counternarcotics police unit as they were on a mission..." [to stop opium trafficking.  We stopped them all right.]

At least 11 died in "one of the deadliest friendly fire incidents in the country in recent years." Here is the Reuters story. The US denied the strike in Helmand province, but admitted to airstrikes in the adjacent province of Kandahar. According to the Guardian, "The US is the only member of the NATO coalition known to have carried out bombing raids in Afghanistan this year." The AP/WaPo on 9/8/15 reported that, "Brigadier General Shoffner [Deputy Chief of Staff for Communications in Afghanistan] said 'based on information we received [on 9/8], we feel it is prudent to investigate the airstrike our forces conducted in Kandahar.'"

Deliberately falsifying the number of  US airstrikes in Afghanistan makes it impossible to know what was spent, how many Afghanis were killed, and what actually is being "accomplished" in Afghanistan.  

It makes it harder than ever to know why we are in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq, what our targets truly are, and what has been done in our name.  As I discussed here, the US presence in Afghanistan can only be explained as a grab for at least a trillion dollars' worth of oil and minerals, a pipeline, and a renewable resource called heroin.  

On "killers" working for OUR government, Trump spoke the truth—and our "free press" freaked out....

​By Mark Crispin Miller

Attacking everything Trump says as wholly false, just because Trump said it, is just as mindless as Trump's own knee-jerk attacks on everything his critics say.

And since Trump, now and then, surprisingly refutes some Big Lie that no other president—or any other major player in the political establishment (the press included)—has ever dared to question publicly, reflexively dismissing everything he says is not just mindless, but dangerous.

It's dangerous, because those Big Lies that Trump now and then contests in his erratic way have done more harm, by far, than Trump's wild, flagrant and, for the most part, trivial lies could ever do.

That is certainly the case with Trump's (recent) jaw-dropping pushback in the face of Bill O'Reilly's ritual assertion that Putin (just like Stalin) "is a killer": "There are a lot of killers. You think our country's so innocent?"

Well, yeah. Duh. No kidding. Though there is, of course, NO reason to assume that the thin-skinned, revenge-obsessed and Mob-connected Trump has any moral qualms about the state employing "killers" to whack inconvenient persons, there also are NO grounds to doubt Trump's cheeky implication that the US government itself has quite "a lot of killers" on the payroll, and not just on the battlefield abroad, and has had for a very long time.

Anybody who's read much at all about our history since World War 2 knows full well that the dark side of "our" government has (to quote LBJ) "been running a damn Murder, Inc." all over the world—the USA included, despite the old canard that they don't do that here. That they unquestionably do—and that a comprehensive list of their domestic hits would put the dreaded Putin in the deepest shade—is clear enough to anyone who knows even a little bit (as Bill O'Reilly does) about the epic carnival of murder that BEGAN with the assassination of John Kennedy, followed by the hits on Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X; a carnival including the related murders of innumerable witnesses, accomplices and inconvenient journalists and investigators.

Beyond those four "iconic" murders, and the awesome list of further killings consequent upon them (from J.D. Tippit, Lee Oswald, David Ferrie, Jack Ruby, Dorothy Kilgallen and Mary Pinchot Meyer to Johnny Roselli, Sam Giancana, George de Mohrenschildt, Roger Craig and William Sullivan: just to name a few related to JFK's murder alone), the tally of more recent deaths premature, convenient and anomalous enough to be considered probable assassinations by the state (as they would be for sure, if they went down that way in Russia), includes, in no particular order, Michael Hastings, William Colby, Danny Casolaro, Philip Marshall, Athan Gibbs, Ray Lemme, Seth Rich, Gary DeVore, Barry Jennings, Vince Foster (yes), Mike Connell, Gary Caradori, Deborah Jeane Palfrey, Paul Wellstone and maybe (the evidence suggests it) Antonin Scalia, just to name a few.

Only in America, where one succeeds in journalism not just by refusing to investigate such stories, but by learning to stay perfectly UNCONSCIOUS of them, could the press decry Trump's common-sense remark as somehow scandalous.

And that is dangerous indeed; because we'll never overcome the looming dangers to American democracy unless we know exactly what they are, and that Trump/Pence is only one of them.

How little we know about lifestyle and longevity

I recently spent a lot of time in Spain, did a lot of reading about Spain, and got some surprises.

The Spanish are the longest-lived people in Europe (barring tiny places like Monaco and San Marino), and are between the 5th and 10th most long-lived nation in the world, depending on who is counting.

The Spanish live several years longer than Americans, and also exceed Canadians, French, British, Germans, Greeks, Italians.  Estimated life expectancy, per the WHO, is 80 for men and 86 for women.

They spend 9% of their GDP on healthcare, half what the US spends (17-18%).  And because the US has a higher GDP per capita, the Spanish actually spend about 1/3 as much as Americans on healthcare, or $3,000 per person per year, while the US now spends $10,000 pppy.

How do the Spanish do it?  Do they have really healthy diets and lifestyles?

I would answer that what I thought was an optimal diet (mainly fresh fruits and vegetables) may not be.  Or, at least, such a diet does not seem to explain Spanish longevity.

As far as diet goes, the consumption of vegetables in Spain (besides potatoes) is LOW.  The consumption of bread and meat is HIGH.  Most of the meat is ham, from black pigs that ate oak acorns in the wild. Iberian ham is 'dry cured':  soaked in brine and then hung up for 1-3 years.

In The New Spaniards (2006 edition) John Hooper reports that Spaniards spend more on lottery tickets than they do on fruits, vegetables and dairy, combined.

The Spanish eat a lot of pastry, and the pastries are very sweet and very high in saturated fats.  (More so than in the US.)  I have never seen so many pastry and candy shops per capita as in Spain.  It seems the 'evils' of sugar and saturated fats are not causing the Spanish problems.

The Spanish tend to consume smaller amounts at each sitting, eating about 5 times a day.  They definitely eat more (locally grown) olives, olive oil, and almonds than Americans.

They spend a lot of time outdoors, and there is a LOT of sunshine.  Jerez (the sherry capital) gets between 3,000 and 3,200 hours of sunshine each year, for example.

The Spanish drink a lot of coffee and get an hour less sleep per night than the rest of Europe, perhaps because the midday break for 3-4 hours results in late nights.  Thirty per cent are smokers.  Alcohol consumption is about average for Europe.

Spanish city centers tend to be difficult to drive in, and more and more streets have been pedestrianized.  I believe the Spanish walk a lot more than Americans, but could not find data on this. In terms of formal exercise, Spaniards seem like Americans.  The OECD claims there is more obesity in Spain than in most western European countries, while I found the Spanish to be slim.

So, there you have it.  Neither diet, weight, smoking, drinking, sleep or exercise explain Spain's remarkable longevity.

I have to admit that, despite copious study and a professional focus on healthy lifestyle, I have been ignorant.  I apologize for the certainty with which I counseled patients about diet in the past.  OTOH, it is possible that if the Spanish started eating more fruits, veggies and dairy and less pastries, they would live even longer.  But how do you ask the winners of the longevity race to change?

And now excuse me while I grab a sunny table at a cafe and get a Napoletana (a chocolate-filled croissant) and a cafe Americano.