President Donald J. Trump took a pounding this week, even from his "beloved" Fox News, over his comments at his joint press conference Monday with Russian President Vladimir Putin. This stemmed from his statement questioning the so-called "intelligence" of our intelligence community – namely that Russia is the culprit for hacking the servers of the Democratic National Committee and by extension the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. The president cited the obvious fact that the intelligence agencies, comprised of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) – all overseen by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) – never bothered to seize, inspect or analyze the actual DNC servers. Contrary to the misleading reports this week of the leftist Daily Beast and "Never Trumper" Ben Shapiro that custody of the actual server was not necessary to glean Russian hacking, the president made a strong case for being suspicious of the intelligence community's claimed assessment.
Ironically, if one looks at American history in the last seven decades, the intelligence community has consistently been implicated in criminal behavior itself and/or, at a minimum, spewed false information to our presidents and the public, frequently causing serious miscalculations and catastrophe.
Let's take a short journey through this history, beginning with the faulty intelligence, to put it most kindly, that caused President John F. Kennedy to confidently order the invasion of the Bay of Pigs in Cuba. Tragically ending in a brutal massacre of Cuban exiles on Fidel Castro's beaches, the CIA in particular, which orchestrated the invasion, walked off scot-free of any consequences, as is usual for the establishment in the nation's capital.
Then, a few years later, after one of the worst presidents in American history, Lyndon Baines Johnson, took the helm after the Kennedy assassination – which many think was at the hands in part of this same CIA, which viewed JFK as weak on communism and was livid over his criticism of the agency for having caused the Bay of Pigs disaster – our entry full-throttle into the Vietnam War occurred after a conjured up and phony Gulf of Tonkin attack. Johnson, citing American intelligence that the North Vietnamese were responsible, relied on or intentionally used this falsity as a pretext to commit the United States to virtually all-out war, eventually resulting in over 55,000 needless deaths of U.S. servicemen and hundreds of thousands maimed and permanently wounded.
Wikipedia discloses what we all learned was the truth about the Gulf of Tonkin attack many years after the fact. It writes:
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"The Gulf of Tonkin incident … was an international confrontation that led the United States engaging more directly in the Vietnam War. It involved either one or two separate confrontations involving North Vietnam and the United States in the Gulf of Tonkin. The original American report blamed North Vietnam for both incidents, but eventually became very controversial with widespread belief that at least one and possibly both incidents were false, and deliberately so."
Then during the Nixon presidency, there was CIA involvement in the infamous Watergate break-in and resulting scandal, which led to the president's eventual resignation. Several of the Watergate burglars had ties to the intelligence community and lied about it.
Later, during the Carter administration, poor intelligence that the shah of Iran was vulnerable to a coup by radical Islamists under the arm of the maniacal Ayatollah Khomeini led to his overthrow, with the grave nuclear consequences we see today.
During the Reagan era, the intelligence community initially provided faulty intelligence that failed to forecast that the evil empire was on the throes of economic collapse, causing the United States to step up the arms race and take a more confrontational approach than probably was necessary under the circumstances. President Reagan cannot be blamed; the intelligence community deceived him. In any event, no thanks to the CIA the Soviet Union later collapsed of its own weight during the subsequent administration of President George H.W. Bush. Thus, whatever the positive result, the intelligence community did Reagan no favors!
Then there was the Iran-Contra scandal, where as a result of the CIA's duplicity about secretly supporting the Nicaraguan contras, its then director, William Casey, was forced to resign in the wake of congressional hearings and prosecutions.
The presidency of George H.W. Bush also ironically experienced the incompetence of the intelligence agencies (ironically, Daddy Bush had previously been CIA director) when it failed to predict that Saddam Hussein was planning an invasion and takeover of Kuwait. This lack of warning contributed to our having to commit troops to clean up this mess, as large oil reserves were at stake for the Western alliance.
During the Clinton presidency, notwithstanding Slick Willy's penchant to "wag the dog" during his impeachment proceedings, the intelligence agencies provided false intelligence that Osama bin Laden was headquartered at a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, resulting in an unwarranted U.S. military attack that killed many civilians and humiliated the nation.
And, later, when George W. Bush assumed the presidency, the intelligence community missed all the signs of bin Laden's tragic Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Towers and then lied about Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction, triggering the disastrous Iraq War, which has led not just to so many deaths and maiming of U.S. servicemen, but also has destabilized further all of the Middle East.
To top it all off, during the Obama years, the intelligence agencies stepped up their illegal mass surveillance of hundreds of millions of innocent Americans, under the guise that this was necessary to fight terrorism. In fact, in successful cases I brought against the NSA, the court found that none of this Orwellian unconstitutional spying had been shown by our so-called government to stop even one terrorist attack. To add insult to injury, the FBI and the intelligence community as a whole then proceeded to wiretap the Trump Tower, create phony dossiers to trigger the current Russian collusion investigation, and unmask the overseas calls of Trump associates and confidants, all with the obvious intent either to prevent the Donald from becoming president, or as an "insurance policy," in the words of disgraced FBI special agent Peter Strzok, to take him down should Trump win.
As I discuss on my radio show this week, "Special Prosecutor with Larry Klayman" (see www.freedomwatchusa.org for local listings), in light of the foregoing, President Trump's refusal to accept wholesale the intelligence implicating the Russians in the hacking of DNC servers is more than understandable. To call him a traitor for honestly questioning their suspect analysis – which attacks were even amplified within his own party and on Fox News – is in fact the real treason.
Freedom Watch and I support this president and will do all we can, with the citizens' support, to make sure that those who are trying to destroy him are themselves legally eliminated! Go to www.freedomwatchusa.org to join our Justice League and participate in our citizens grand juries.