WWII Survivor Tells Her Story, Warns Trump Emulates Hitler Perfectly

That Donald Trump managed to win the election has incensed some, delighted others, and has spawned comparisons to Adolf Hitler.

And while the latter suggestion previously drew scorn and caused eyes to roll — as if Godwin’s law that arguments online inevitably devolve into someone accusing someone else of being a Nazi — a World War II survivor has come forward with a warning the similarities shouldn’t be blithely dismissed.

It is also important to note that this path to despotism was paved by the likes of George Bush and Barack Obama. Between the two of them and their attacks on the constitution, they left a virtual dictatorship up for grabs that would have been assumed and abused by Hilary Clinton or Donald Trump.

NV, an 88-year-old woman who experienced the horrors of Nazi rule, believes Trump summons the specter of the fascist dictator far too clearly for the resemblance to be ignored as hyperbole.

One day in 1940, NV’s life in Antwerp, Belgium, changed forever:

“In early 1940 my mother, grandmother and I lived across the street from an army barracks. In the early morning of May the 10th, we were woken up by the sounds of sirens, heavy artillery, and explosions. We quickly went to the cellar to hide and waited until the bombing had subsided. When we left the house, an unexploded bomb was laying below our living room window.

“When we rounded the corner the most horrible scene presented itself: Almost four complete city blocks had been destroyed, body parts were scattered all over. One scene I will never forget is when I managed to get to where my favorite candy store used to be, there was a severed leg stuck against a remaining wall.”

Often, the passage of time, like water, smooths collective memory to the point atrocities become less tangible — or appear so egregious, we foolishly surmise ‘that could never happen again.’

But history proves otherwise, and that ‘it’ — fascism spawned from failed attempts at loosely democratic systems — can, indeed, happen again is precisely why NV chose to bring her experience to light.

While Trump isn’t literally Hitler, as some people oddly insist, the president keeps company with rumored white nationalists, imposed a suffocating ban on refugees and restrictions on travel, and rearranged his National Security Council in an astonishing manner — downgrading the status of the Director of National Intelligence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — reminiscent of a fascistic power play.

Considering the United States has yet to experience severely concentrated power of the Hitler or Mussolini variety, drastic changes in policy and procedure are viewed by many without the lens of future abuse — but that could be a critical error.

NV, who is Jewish, recalled struggling simply to live under the punishing thumb of Nazi rule:

“We sometimes stood in lines all night just to get a loaf of bread that was made with something other than flour. It was black, looked like uncooked dough, smelled bad, and grew mold within a few hours. We didn’t get sugar, we got saccharine to sweeten; there was no coffee, instead we got some kind of roasted grain the Germans called Kneipp; we didn’t get milk or butter, we got some type of margarine that came with a coloring capsule that had to be kneaded into the margarine to give it color. I went hungry, I was always starving. Once in a while we would get some figs at school or bananas which I would save and take home to share with my mother and grandmother, sometimes I was too hungry and ate them on the way home from school.”

As the Nazi leader rose to power with all the ‘charm’ of a megalomaniac, NV recalled, “we heard Hitler speak on the radio, we also saw him in newsreels before the movies.  I can remember seeing him rant and rave, his face becoming contorted with rage.”

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NV, who literally endured life under Hitler, asserted,

“Donald Trump emulates Hitler to a T.  His actions, speeches and ranting remind me exactly of Hitler. I am afraid that if he is not stopped, he will lead this country into another world war.”

Indeed, Trump’s bluster and belligerence in addressing China led Beijing to prepare for military action under threat of a possible trade war with the U.S. Even more telling, U.S. officials will assess the ‘survivability’ of the governments of China and Russia in the event of a nuclear war — starkly suggestive the potential for world war to turn catastrophic isn’t an outside possibility.

“Unfortunately,” NV continued, “this war will not be waged with conventional weapons, and very few people will survive. And if they do, there will be nothing left to be worth living for!!”

Warnings of the similarities between Trump and Hitler could be facilely rejected when coming from the mouths of millennials — but for a survivor of World War II to sound this alarm holds infinite weight.

It might behoove Americans to consider the admonition and not be led like mice by a seemingly charismatic pied piper straight into nuclear war.

US Now Assessing Effectiveness of Dropping Nukes on Russia & China — Seriously

Amid heightening tensions with China and in the wake of accusations Russia somehow interfered in the election, U.S. Congress has instructed intelligence agencies and the Pentagon’s Strategic Command to assess the ‘survivability’ of Chinese and Russian leaders in the event of an above- or below-ground nuclear strike.

Under ordinary circumstances, such a review could be considered routine, but — given President Donald Trump’s ratcheting up of hostilities with China and the Democratic establishment’s scapegoating of Russia for its own shortcomings — it seems more an indication the U.S. could be preparing for war.

Interestingly, the plan for this analysis came buried in the 2017 NDAA, which former President Barack Obama signed into law two days before Christmas — timing almost certainly intended to deflect attention from several unsavory measures buried in the law’s pages.

This review, had it garnered attention, surely would have set off further debate on the perilous provocation to war with nuclear capable nations.

According to the NDAA, reviewers will perform “an identification of which facilities various senior political and military leaders of each respective country are expected to operate out of during crisis and wartime” and, additionally, the “location and description of above-ground and underground facilities important to the political and military leadership survivability.”

“Key officials and organizations of each respective country involved in managing and operating such facilities, programs, and activities” will also be identified by analysts.

Bloomberg reports, “Under the little-noticed provision in this year’s defense authorization measure, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the U.S. Strategic Command — which plans and would execute nuclear strikes — will evaluate the post-attack capabilities of the two nuclear powers. The law mandates a report on Russian and Chinese ‘leadership survivability, command and control and continuity of government programs.’”

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Strategic Command will also evaluate how Chinese and Russian plans relate to the post-nuclear deployment plans of the United States.

“Our experts are drafting an appropriate response,” Strategic Command spokesman Navy Captain Brook DeWalt told Bloomberg in an email, adding, “it’s premature to pass along any details at this point, we can update you further at a later date.”

Written before Trump took office, the planned analysis nevertheless aligns with the president’s statement the U.S. nuclear arsenal should be strengthened — despite his stated goal of rapprochement with Russia.

In December, he told MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski on Morning Joe, “Let it be an arms race. We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all.” And in a brazen tweet the same month, Trump declared, “The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.”

On Friday, Trump ordered Secretary of Defense James Mattis to “initiate a new Nuclear Posture Review to ensure that the United States nuclear deterrent is modern, robust, flexible, resilient, ready, and appropriately tailored to deter 21st-century threats and reassure our allies.”

Ohio Representative Michael Turner, who sits on the House Armed Service Committee’s Strategic Forces panel, told Bloomberg via email the U.S. “must understand how China and Russia intend to fight a war and how their leadership will command and control a potential conflict. This knowledge is pivotal to our ability to deter the threat.”

China and Russia, he continued, “have invested considerable effort and resources into understanding how we fight, including how to interfere with our leadership’s communication capabilities.

“We must not ignore gaps in our understanding of key adversary capabilities.”

While posturing about Russia being responsible for hacking and otherwise manipulating either the election or the U.S. populace has subsided since Trump took office, the president has intensified hostilities with China over trade, as well as maritime territorial issues in the South and East China Seas.

Russia and the U.S. ostensively possess some 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons — but Moscow has reportedly spent a great deal of time and money upgrading and improving its arsenal, where the U.S. has not.

Assessing the plans of world leaders in the event military action turns nuclear indicates the use of these weapons remains a viable option.

“Nuclear leaders in Russia and China ‘plan to direct nuclear forces from inside command bunkers buried deeply beneath the earth or deeply inside mountains,’ said Bruce Blair, a Princeton University research scholar on nuclear security policy and co-founder of Global Zero, a group devoted to eliminating nuclear weapons,” Bloomberg reports.

With a cascade of contentious executive actions coming nearly every day since Trump took the oath of office, vigilance — particularly concerning bellicose exchanges between the U.S. and China or Russia — is an absolute imperative.

WaPost to Retire ‘Fake News’ Term Because They’re Failing Miserably as it Keeps Exposing Their Lies

After spearheading an unctuous plan to discredit alternative media and reporting not in lockstep with the liberal establishment paradigm, the Washington Post — whose hypocrisy on the matter doomed the campaign from jump street — sanctimoniously declared, “It’s time to retire the tainted term ‘fake news.’”

“So, here’s a modest proposal for the truth-based community,” wrote WaPo’s media columnist, Margaret Sullivan, on Sunday.

“Let’s get out the hook and pull that baby off stage. Yes: Simply stop using it.

“Instead, call a lie a lie. Call a hoax a hoax. Call a conspiracy theory by its rightful name. After all, ‘fake news’ is an imprecise expression to begin with.”

Imprecise is a criminal mischaracterization of the chaos and confusion wrought when the Post threw journalism into a fan late last year.

Of course, that had been journalistic standard operating procedure for time immemorial — until WaPo blazed the precipitous trail into anti-Russia, Fake News propaganda following Hillary Clinton’s crushing electoral defeat — a result catching off guard only corporate outlets who predicted the opposite.

Had mainstream behemoths like the Washington Post and New York Times bothered consistently covering the stupefying corruption infesting the Democrat establishment — as revealed in the contents of documents published by Wikileaks — it’s debatable whether Donald Trump would have won.

Tone-deaf all Hillary, all the time corporate media coverage during this election cycle led swaths of the nation to turn to alternative sources for responsible journalism — whether for fair reporting on emails proving the Dems sought to undermine Bernie Sanders, to get a conservative viewpoint on Trump, or simply for factual reports on Wikileaks publications.

As bewilderment lingered over Clinton’s embarrassing loss, mainstream presstitutes hastened to point fingers at everyone but themselves — and hardest targeted were those outlets who’d failed to blindly lionize the former secretary of state.

In a hapless and immediately viral article on November 24, WaPo proffered a mind-numbingly untenable — and subsequently partially retracted — assertion in a headline stating, “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say.”

Citing the suspiciously nascent organization PropOrNot as one source and known Russophobe Foreign Policy Research Institute as another, the once-illustrious Post — inexplicably eschewing every semblance of journalistic due diligence — refused to name individual researchers or offer even the frailest of explanations of methodology in asserting:

“The flood of ‘fake news’ this election season got support from a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy, say independent researchers who tracked the operation.”

PropOrNot, the Post claimed, a “nonpartisan collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds,” identified “more than 200 websites as routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season.”

So bereft of verifiable evidence was WaPo’s brash ‘hit piece,’ journalist and  Intercept co-founder, Glenn Greenwald, snarkily tweeted,

“Yes, the WashPost is saying: some people who we won’t identify, using methodologies we won’t describe, created This Important Blacklist!”

Yes, the WashPost is saying: some people who we won"t identify, using methodologies we won"t describe, created This Important Blacklist! https://t.co/4D9o5H7eEj

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) November 25, 2016

Compounding the recklessness, after half-heartedly retracting the embarrassing Russian propaganda incident, the Post proceeded to publish a now-notorious article, headlined, “Secret CIA assessment says Russia was trying to help Trump win White House.”

“The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter,” the publication contended — failing to name these ‘officials’ or include a shred of proof their allegations could tread water.

It now appears likely these alleged officials cited by the Post were referencing the only recently published — and equally evidence-barren — putative intelligence community report accusing Russia and President Vladimir Putin, himself, of orchestrating an election meddling campaign.

But, in advance of the public debut of the dubious report as a whole, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security coughed up a disclaimer-emblazoned dispatch under questionable pretenses it offered proof The Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s emails to fork over information to Wikileaks.

Speaking more to tech security firms seeking ways to protect systems from hacking, however, the brief’s imprudent information panicked the unsavvy — and provided yet further kindling for WaPo’s Chicken Little-ism.

“Russian hackers penetrated U.S. electricity grid through a utility in Vermont, officials say,” read the original, altogether alarming, and utterly untrue headline. An order of magnitude more dangerous than wantonly calling out The Russians, had there been an actual hack of the U.S. electrical grid, the Obama administration would have grounds to justify military force against Russia.

But it didn’t happen. At all. No one — Russian or otherwise — hacked Vermont or put Americans in peril.

State officials later said a laptop inside the utility might have been penetrated — but the device wasn’t even connected to the grid. As typical for the Washington Post’s clickbait Fake News, however, the damage had been done.

Because the original now bears only a truncated editor’s note and a delicately retouched headline, stating, “Russian operation hacked a Vermont utility, showing risk to U.S. electrical grid security, officials say” — and, additionally, WaPo buried the full retraction article at the bottom of the front page — millions of readers have been scammed into fearing a non-existent threat.

Corporate media have been the most vocal purveyors of Fake News in all of journalism — and the Washington Post would have done well to consider no entity is ever too big to fail. Indeed, the larger and more imperious the entity, the more likely the downfall will be a spectacle to behold.

WaPo and its ilk outgrew their journalistic expediency when they began the bombastic war against Fake News — while pushing out Fake News as fast as their reporters could misconstrue fact, or fabricate threats based on lies.

And that’s precisely where the Post royally failed — when the outlet began hurling Fake News stones at legitimate independent media organizations under the assumption its own towering glass house of horrendously fraudulent reporting could survive the storm.

Notably, Sullivan’s attempt to rein in the Fake News Russian bear intimates the Post has no intention of following its own advice — her “modest proposal” targets the curiously-termed “truth-based community” — evincing a preemptive bid to ostracize outlets continuing to accurately employ the term against the corporate press.

In short, WaPo doesn’t want to be called on its falsehoods anymore, because — in light of its recent track record — Fake News is both a booming business, as well as an unwinnable war. When reputation hangs in the balance, withdrawing and re-describing your most effective weapon is akin to a Hail Mary — a last ditch shot at wiping the pie from your face before it crusts over.

This war on Fake News, war on information, war on independent media, war on speech — all of this — is a war on dissent. WaPo’s Red Scaremongering and vacuous propaganda don’t pass the litmus test — neither does its feeble effort to shut Pandora’s Box.

Former CIA and NSA Officials Just Joined Forces & Debunked the Russian “Hack” Conspiracy Thoery

In an op-ed for the Baltimore Sun, two former, high-ranking intelligence officials tore apart the Obama administration’s vocal and as-yet unproven claim The Russians interfered with the U.S. election — and hacked systems of the Democratic establishment — to ensure a Donald Trump win.

However, as William Binney, former NSA official turned whistleblower, and Ray McGovern, veteran award-winning CIA officer turned political activist, explained, the utter lack of evidence presented by current intelligence officials to back up the allegations indicates the possibility none exists.

“The long anticipated Joint Analysis Report issued by the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI on Dec. 29 met widespread criticism in the technical community,” they wrote, referring to the sole public disclosure of putative evidence. “Worse still, some of the advice it offered led to a very alarmist false alarm about supposed Russian hacking into a Vermont electric power station.”

Deeming it watered down, “thin gruel,” Binney and McGovern excoriated the disclaimer-emblazoned report’s vapid claims, noting the deafening absence of comment from the NSA, CIA, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

Notorious for disseminating disinformation, Clapper testified before the House Armed Services Committee on Thursday to defend the Russian meddling dogma amid promises a full report from several — but not all — agencies of the intelligence community.

Trusting a word Clapper utters is a game of Russian roulette — pun intended — as Binney and McGovern explained, considering he has a proven record of egregious lies leading to the deaths of millions of innocent people:

“When Pentagon favorites like Iraqi émigré Ahmed Chalabi plied U.S. intelligence with spurious ‘evidence’ on WMD in Iraq, Mr. Clapper was in position to suppress the findings of any imagery analyst who might have the temerity to report, for example, that the Iraqi ‘chemical weapons facility’ for which Mr. Chalabi provided the geographic coordinates was nothing of the kind. Mr. Clapper preferred to go by the Rumsfeldian dictum: ‘The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.’ (It will be interesting to see if he tries that out on the president-elect Friday.)

“A year after the war began, Mr. Chalabi told the media, ‘We are heroes in error. As far as we’re concerned we’ve been entirely successful.’ By that time it was clear there were no WMD in Iraq. When Mr. Clapper was asked to explain, he opined, without adducing any evidence, that they probably were moved into Syria.”

Following that chain of events, arrant devastation first visited Iraq in the military conquest to depose Saddam Hussein — inaccurately portrayed in American corporate media and by U.S. officials for a brutal dictatorship and possessing the aforementioned weapons of mass destruction.

Clapper’s vacuous assertion said nonexistent WMDs found their way to Syria became a critical detail as the U.S. military is currently hell bent on repeating with President Bashar al-Assad the nefarious plot it attempted with Hussien.

Indeed, the head of U.S. Intelligence proffered flagrantly false statements to Congress in March, 2013, on the extent of the NSA’s domestic surveillance programs. When Edward Snowden blew the whistle just four months later — sending a sizable shockwave around the world — Clapper ate crow and apologized to the Senate for his “clearly erroneous” false testimony.

In short, Clapper’s testimony bemoaning Fake News, hackers, and, generally,  The Russians, dangerously — and equally vacantly — echoes of WMDs.

Binney and McGovern, with award-winning and longtime careers in intelligence to bolster their case, note the glaring inconsistency in officials’ reliance on ‘circumstantial’ evidence — overwhelming or not — given the “NSA’s vacuum cleaner sucking up hard evidence galore.”

Until hard evidence comes to light, this narrative bears all the hallmarks of a fanciful, purposeful fabrication. Even Clapper’s claim Democratic systems were hacked and information then given to Wikileaks is strikingly threadbare, as the two veteran intelligence officers continue in detail:

“Hack: When someone in a remote location electronically penetrates operating systems, firewalls or other cyber-protection systems and then extracts data. Our own considerable experience, plus the rich detail revealed by Edward Snowden, persuades us that, with NSA’s formidable trace capability, it can identify both sender and recipient of any and all data crossing the network.

“Leak: When someone physically takes data out of an organization — on a thumb drive, for example — and gives it to someone else, as Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning did. Leaking is the only way such data can be copied and removed with no electronic trace.

“Because NSA can trace exactly where and how any ‘hacked’ emails from the Democratic National Committee or other servers were routed through the network, it is puzzling why NSA cannot produce hard evidence implicating the Russian government and WikiLeaks. Unless we are dealing with a leak from an insider, not a hack, as other reporting suggests. From a technical perspective alone, we are convinced that this is what happened.”

It’s time for Clapper and his devious ilk to provide unassailable evidence proving the dubious Russian election interference theory — preferably with substantive explanation for Russia’s motivation — before the U.S. government capriciously lies its way into yet another war.

BUSTED: FBI Never Even Examined the DNC Servers Over Allegations of Russian Hacking

According to a report, the FBI has never examined the servers of the Democratic National Committee — not even for the six months during which the bureau claimed to be investigating allegations of Russians compromising cyber networks.

In fact, according to unnamed officials who spoke to Buzzfeed News, “the bureau has still not requested access to the hacked servers, a DNC spokesman said. No US government entity has run an independent forensic analysis on the system.”

While it would seem intuitive for the U.S. Intelligence Community to perform a detailed and methodical analysis of its own, Eric Walker, deputy communications director for the DNC, told Buzzfeed,

“The DNC had several meetings with representatives of the FBI’s Cyber Division and its Washington (DC) Field Office, the Department of Justice’s National Security Division, and U.S. Attorney’s Offices, and it responded to a variety of requests for cooperation, but the FBI never requested access to the DNC’s computer servers.”

Although the FBI declined to comment on the report, it’s notable the bureau has relied solely on third-party technology security company, CrowdStrike — whose controversial report early last year noted Russia-linked hackers penetrated DNC systems — for its analysis and assessment, rather than performing one of its own.

But the official who spoke with Buzzfeed — and expressed confidence Russia coordinated the ostensible ‘widespread hacks’ — didn’t exactly add an air of confidence to the CrowdStrike report, noting,

“CrowdStrike is pretty good. There’s no reason to believe that anything that they have concluded is not accurate.”

Relying on a single, ‘pretty good’ organization to examine a putative breach of national security would seem foolhardy, but the unnamed official confirmed that was the case.

“Beginning at the time the intrusion was discovered by the DNC,” Walker explained, “the DNC cooperated fully with the FBI and its investigation, providing access to all of the information uncovered by CrowdStrike — without any limits.”

Reports indicate the DNC discovered their system had been infiltrated in March 2016, but didn’t summon the tech security firm until May — and although the FBI had been given all relevant information concerning the alleged hack, apparently the bureau never investigated further.

According to the outlet, “BuzzFeed News spoke to three cybersecurity companies who have worked on major breaches in the last 15 months, who said that it was ‘par for the course’ for the FBI to do their own forensic research into the hacks. None wanted to comment on the record on another cybersecurity company’s work, or the work being done by a national security agency.”

But the FBI apparently did not do forensic research of the alleged DNC hack on its own — no matter if that is common practice or not.

A subsequent report from the Washington Post — notorious for publishing Fake News — cited unnamed officials from the CIA claiming the U.S. Intelligence Community concluded Russian government-associated actors had performed the hack and handed over documents for Wikileaks to publish.

However, that article contradicted the unanimity it intimated, stating no formal report would be forthcoming from the Intelligence Community as disagreement that conclusion remained. Further, an unnamed counterintelligence official with the FBI came forward rejecting the unnamed CIA officials’ allegations — despite FBI Director James Comey standing in agreement with the report.

Intelligence officials — most of whom remain anonymous — who share the view Russian State actors hacked systems of the Democrat Party infrastructure have yet to proffer conclusive and unassailable evidence to explain their position. Although they assert the supposed hackers sought to undermine Hillary Clinton’s bid for the White House by swaying the vote in favor of Donald Trump, none have explained why that would be a motivation.

If what Buzzfeed reports is indeed true — and the FBI relied only on CrowdStrike and never performed its own standard forensic examination of DNC systems before Comey concluded The Russians threw the election — than questions about the bureau’s political agenda must be raised.

Again, no evidence has been provided to the public for further scrutiny — except for a rough and disclaimer-emblazoned joint report from the FBI and Department of Homeland Security, since criticized for its lack of content damning to the Russian government. That report — although cited by President Obama prior to imposing sanctions and expelling 35 Russian diplomats — largely focused on defensive methods cybersecurity experts could employ in the future, rather evincing details of the alleged hacks.

And, as even mainstream Buzzfeed points out, “Nowhere in the report does it say that the government conducted its own computer forensics on the DNC servers.”

Corporate media has made a mess of the situation, citing that report as if it were indisputable evidence of Russian hackers infiltrating every computer system in the U.S.

But as Leonid Bershidsky wrote for Bloomberg View,

“The confusion has already begun. Last Saturday, The Washington Post reported that ‘a code associated with the Russian hacking operation dubbed Grizzly Steppe’ was found on a computer at a Vermont utility, setting off a series of forceful comments by politicians about Russians trying to hack the U.S. power grid. It soon emerged that the laptop hadn’t been connected to the grid, but in any case, if PAS was the code found on it and duly reported to the government, it’s overwhelmingly likely to be a false alarm. Thousands of individual hackers and groups routinely send out millions of spearphishing emails, meant for an unsuspecting person to click on a link and thus let hackers into his computer. Now, they have a strong incentive to use Russian-made backdoor software for U.S. targets.”

In other words, Russians hacking the election, the DNC, John Podesta, the electrical grid of Vermont, and all other accusations stand hollow and as-yet unproven — making the FBI’s lack of forensic investigation and reliance on a third-party tech security company both alarming and suspicious — and exponentially more so as the lame duck administration repeatedly provokes Moscow in the eleventh hour.

With sanctions in place, diplomats sent packing, and news special forces have been deployed to the Russian border, the public deserves unassailable evidence — conclusive proof — The Russians hacked anything at all.

Amid False Fears Stoked by Fake News, Obama Quietly Deployed Special Forces Along Russian Border

Lithuania — Time after time, the Washington Post continues to churn out fake stories intimating Russia acted aggressively against the United States, but the articles — from branding over 200 independent media organizations as Russian propagandists, to asserting Russian hackers penetrated Vermont’s power grid — contained zero evidence to back the assertions.

“Russian operation hacked a Vermont utility, showing risk to U.S. electrical grid security, officials say,” the Post declared in the headline of its article, since fully retracted — after wrongly warping public perception — for being Fake News.

Parroted relentlessly by additional corporate outlets, the Post’s viral articles fed equally vapid claims from the Obama administration that Russia somehow poses an imminent threat — both to the U.S. and NATO allies along the Russian border.

However, with all of these empty allegations of Russian aggression, even the chairman of the NATO Military Committee, Petr Pavel, denounced the hysteria, stating, “It is not the aim of NATO to create a military barrier against broad-scale Russian aggression because such aggression is not on the agenda and no intelligence assessment suggests such a thing.”

Nevertheless, President Obama has quietly deployed dozens of additional special forces to bolster defense in Lithuania, who ostensibly feels threatened by continued “Russian aggression” after the country ‘took over’ Crimea.

“The United States was the first to offer additional safety assurance measures to the Baltic countries following the deterioration of the security situation in the region after the annexation of the Crimea,” said Asta Galdikaite, Lithuanian Defence Ministry spokeswoman, as cited by the Express.

“US Special Operations Forces presence in Lithuania is one of the deterrents” to thwart aggressive moves by Moscow, she added.

But what the U.S. and allied nations have cited as a military threat from Russia — the deployment of nuclear-capable missile systems to Kaliningrad, which borders Lithuania, in November — more accurately constituted President Vladimir Putin’s defensive response to the rapidly increasing NATO presence along its border with Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Poland.

“They’re scared to death of Russia,” head of the Pentagon’s Special Operations Command, Gen. Raymond T. Thomas, said of the small militaries of the Baltic States, for the New York Times. “They are very open about that. They’re desperate for our leadership,” he continued, adding, “Do the Russians know we’re here? Yes.”

According to the Times,

“In response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the clandestine war in eastern Ukraine, as well as Moscow’s heightened military force on patrol off the coasts of the Baltics and Western Europe, the United States and its NATO allies have bolstered their own military exercises in recent years, and this spring will send battalions of 800 to 1,200 troops to each of the three Baltic States and Poland.”

Moscow has repeatedly warned the rapidly amassing NATO troop presence along Russia’s borders constitutes a direct threat to its sovereignty — and Putin cautioned this could merit a military response.

“If someone threatens our territories, it means that we will have to aim our armed forces accordingly at the territories from where the threat is coming,” he asserted in a press statement in mid-2016. “How else could it be? It is NATO that’s approaching our borders, it’s not like we are moving anywhere.”

However, that admonishment went unheeded by Western nations, and, as The Free Thought Project previously reported,

“Tangibly tempting fate just over a week later, NATO announced the tripling of its 13,000-strong Response Force along member states’ Russian borders to at least 40,000 troops next year — as well as the formation of a new Very High Readiness Joint Task Force, also called Spearhead Force, of an additional 5,000 combat-ready troops.”

With diplomatic relations between the Kremlin and White House sinking to a nadir unprecedented since the time of the original Cold War, deploying an ever-mushrooming number of troops to provoke Russia in the name of defending NATO allies is needlessly playing with fire.

Amid the aforementioned and as-yet unproven allegations The Russians hacked systems of the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta, Obama announced the U.S. would impose sanctions against Russia and expel 35 diplomats.

Thus the world held its breath to see if Moscow would respond in kind — or possibly react militarily — but, despite irate promises from Russian officials for the expulsion of U.S. diplomats, Putin coolly declined diplomatic tit-for-tat.

While Russia and NATO officials might have known these dozens of commandos had been surreptitiously inserted into the military mix in Lithuania, the news has only now been made public knowledge.

Whether or not President-elect Donald Trump will continue increasing U.S. troop numbers in support of this particular NATO operation remains unknown, as he previously expressed ambivalence toward the Baltic states.

Just weeks remain for the outgoing, apparently Russophobic Obama administration — plenty of time for the Washington Post and the rest of corporate media to continue slanting public perception of the situation to fit the U.S.-backed NATO agenda that amounts to aggression against Russia.

Judge Napolitano Exposes Lies On-Air: US Intelligence Was Behind Hacks — Not Russia

Judge Andrew Napolitano, currently being considered by Trump for the Supreme Court, dropped a bombshell in an interview with Fox & Friends Thursday, saying sources within the U.S. intelligence community — not Russia — had provided documents from the DNC and John Podesta for publication by Wikileaks.

“I hope that Josh Earnest was as much in jest with what he just said, as Donald Trump was when he said during the campaign, ‘do all the hacking you want,’” Napolitano said of remarks the White House spokesman gave, suggesting Trump had been aware of Russia’s putative meddling throughout the election cycle. “No one could have taken that seriously.”

Breaking down the absurdly evidence-free claim by unnamed CIA officials that Russian hackers — official state actors — had penetrated Democratic Party systems to expose information damaging to Hillary Clinton, thereby throwing the election in favor of Donald Trump, Napolitano asked several pertinent questions:

“Look, who had an incentive to prevent Mrs. Clinton from becoming President of the United States? Whose agents had their real identities and locations exposed by the reckless manner? … Who had access to all of this material without having to steal any codes?

“The United States Intelligence agents,” the judge answered himself, “who did not want this woman in charge of the federal government and exposing more agents and resources and undercover assets in the Middle East to who they truly are and where they were.”

Napolitano told the Fox & Friends crew one’s feelings about Julian Assange and Wikileaks are irrelevant, given the publishing organization’s track record of authenticity — and that the content of the leaked documents and emails speaks for itself.

Assange “revealed truthful information,” he continued, “no one’s denying that the stuff that he revealed was real […]

“Look, there’s one spy agency, the NSA, it produces the raw data. The FBI looks at it and interprets it one way; the CIA looks at it and interprets it another way. The CIA may have a desire to make Mrs. Clinton look good or Donald Trump look bad …”

“Wait — politics?” one host interrupted.

“Right. Their boss is a Barack Obama appointee … There’s just not enough evidence to point a finger at Moscow.”

Further, on the subject of intelligence assessments, Judge Napolitano noted rivalries between and within agencies, proclivities toward certain political agendas, and competition can color findings and analyses:

“Look, there’s a whole world out there that is below the fold, below the radar scope, that we don’t know about, which is the intelligence community. They have rivalries between them; they have ideological predilections; they have the same shortcomings as the rest of us. And intelligence, raw data — if it were here, it would be difficult for the four of us to interpret it — but I can tell you this: Two groups or two people looking at the same data can read the same thing and interpret it in 180 degrees differently from each other. That’s what happened here.

“So, when Donald Trump says, ‘the Russians did not hack Mrs. Clinton,’ he’s right. Somebody leaked from Mrs. Clinton’s emails — but nobody went in there and altered her operational systems, which is what hacking does.”

Napolitano’s assessment the leaks weren’t hacks — and that someone inside the United States was responsible — is shared by a growing number of people, including former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray.

Murray, a personal friend of Assange, who called the claims of Russian hacking “bullshit” in the Guardian, told the Daily Mail, “Neither of [the leaks] came from the Russians. The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks.”

On his personal blog, Murray elaborated further:

“I have watched incredulous as the CIA’s blatant lie has grown and grown as a media story – blatant because the CIA has made no attempt whatsoever to substantiate it. There is no Russian involvement in the leaks of emails showing Clinton’s corruption. Yes this rubbish has been the lead today in the Washington Post in the US and the Guardian here, and was the lead item on the BBC main news. I suspect it is leading the American broadcasts also.

“A little simple logic demolishes the CIA’s claims. The CIA claim they ‘know the individuals’ involved. Yet under Obama the USA has been absolutely ruthless in its persecution of whistleblowers, and its pursuit of foreign hackers through extradition. We are supposed to believe that in the most vital instance imaginable, an attempt by a foreign power to destabilise a US election, even though the CIA knows who the individuals are, nobody is going to be arrested or extradited, or (if in Russia) made subject to yet more banking and other restrictions against Russian individuals? Plainly it stinks. The anonymous source claims of ‘We know who it was, it was the Russians’ are beneath contempt.”

He added, “The continued ability of the mainstream media to claim the leaks lost Clinton the election because of ‘Russia’, while still never acknowledging the truths the leaks reveal, is Kafkaesque.”

But perhaps the strongest assenting voice to Judge Napolitano came from Julian Assange, himself, who emerged from a near blackout on public appearances in an audio interview with Sean Hannity on Thursday to confirm the documents published by Wikileaks did not come from Russia or any Russian State agent.

“Our source is not the Russian government,” Assange decisively told Hannity.

“In other words, let me be clear,” Hannity clarified, “Russia did not give you the Podesta documents, or anything from the DNC?”

“That’s correct,” the Wikileaks founder replied.

Assange also noted in the interview Murray is not authorized to speak on behalf of Wikileaks, but maintained the two are close, personal friends. Murray, like Napolitano, pointed to Wikileaks’ proven credibility in its leaked documents, and explained,

“Now both Julian Assange and I have stated definitively the leak does not come from Russia. Do we credibly have access? Yes, very obviously. Very, very few people can be said to definitely have access to the source of the leak. The people saying it is not Russia are those who do have access. After access, you consider truthfulness. Do Julian Assange and I have a reputation for truthfulness? Well in 10 years not one of the tens of thousands of documents WikiLeaks has released has had its authenticity successfully challenged. As for me, I have a reputation for inconvenient truth telling.”

Assange even noted coming forward to denounce the Russian hacking allegations constituted an uncomfortable and unpleasant, but highly necessary, decision. Wikileaks, he explained, does not like to reveal any information about its sources unless the situation unequivocally demands it.

“Here, in order to prevent a distraction attack against our publications,” Assange asserted, “we’ve had to come out and say, ‘no, it’s not a State party, stop trying to distract in that way, and pay attention to the content of the publications.’”

Hannity probed, “So, in other words, when you say State party, it wasn’t another State — like Russia, or some other country?”

“Correct.”

Indeed, the provocative accusations being hurled at Russia — and, now, even against Russian President Vladimir Putin — appear to be once again summoning the specter of military conflict with the West. Critical, reasoned assessments of the CIA’s claims of Russians hacking the U.S. elections — like those of Judge Napolitano, Craig Murray, and Julian Assange — are imperative, lest the country be overcome with evidence-devoid Red Scare paranoia similar to 1950s McCarthyism.

“The worst thing about all this is that it is aimed at promoting further conflict with Russia,” Murray pointedly wrote. “This puts everyone in danger for the sake of more profits for the arms and security industries — including of course bigger budgets for the CIA.”

Media Ignores US Rigging of Russia’s Elections As CIA Struggles to Prove Russian Hacking

Mainstream, corporate media and the U.S. political establishment has once again proved the depth of their hypocrisy in thus far unsubstantiated claims Russia directly interfered with the presidential election — because the United States has done so, itself, with multiple countries.

Including Russia.

Twenty years ago, TIME Magazine exclusively reported on the feats of American political consultants who’d managed — much to the joy of the United States government — to ensure Boris Yeltsin won re-election to the Russian presidency.

20 years ago, TIME praised America’s propaganda campaign to elect Yeltsin. Today, they have appeared to change their tone.

Titled Rescuing Boris, TIME’s article bore a subtitle eerily similar to accusations flooding headlines two decades later — for altogether different but parallel reasons — “THE SECRET STORY OF HOW FOUR U.S. ADVISERS USED POLLS, FOCUS GROUPS, NEGATIVE ADS AND ALL THE OTHER TECHNIQUES OF AMERICAN CAMPAIGNING TO HELP BORIS YELTSIN WIN.”

While the U.S. decries “fake news” and dismisses the successes of alternative media’s reporting on corruption in the Democrat Party by collectively deeming it “Russian propaganda,” it would seem the entire country has forgotten American exploits in Russia in 1996.

In fact, these American advisors literally meddled in the Russian election that year — and as TIME, itself, points out, changed the course of the country’s politics forever.

“The outcome was by no means inevitable,” TIME’s Michael Kramer penned on July 15, 1996. “Last winter Yeltsin’s approval ratings were in the single digits. There are many reasons for his change in fortune, but a crucial one has remained a secret. For four months, a group of American political consultants clandestinely participated in guiding Yeltsin’s campaign. Here is the inside story of how these advisers helped Yeltsin achieve the victory that will keep reform in Russia alive.”

Because of increasing authoritarianism and corrupt economic policies, the Russian populace had grown weary of Yeltsin and looked to vote in a more traditional communist leader. But the U.S. sought to maintain the course of reform in Russia, because, as Kramer noted in TIME, Yeltsin “is arguably the best hope Russia has for moving toward pluralism and an open economy.”

Thus, Felix Braynin, a close friend to one of Yeltsin’s aides, helped hatch a plan to sway the election in the president’s favor — one that involved specialized polling, negative ad campaigns, propaganda, and other tools typical of an American election.

But the plan had to remain covert — for obvious reasons.

“Secrecy was paramount,” Braynin told TIME, saying he had been told to “find some Americans” to put the plan into action. “Everyone realized that if the Communists knew about this before the election, they would attack Yeltsin as an American tool. We badly needed the team, but having them was a big risk.”

The TIME article continues:

“To ‘find some Americans,’ Braynin worked through Fred Lowell, a San Francisco lawyer with close ties to California’s Republican Party. On Feb. 14, Lowell called Joe Shumate, a G.O.P. expert in political data analysis who had served as deputy chief of staff to California Governor Pete Wilson. Since Wilson’s drive for the 1996 Republican presidential nomination had ended almost before it began, Lowell thought Shumate and George Gorton, Wilson’s longtime top strategist, might be available to help Yeltsin. They were — and they immediately enlisted Richard Dresner, a New York-based consultant who had worked with them on many of Wilson’s campaigns.”

Dresner, it’s imperative and timely to note, had strong ties to the Clintons — a detail of critical import given the Democrats current hysteria over alleged Russian meddling in the U.S. election. TIME reported:

“Dresner had another connection that would prove useful later on. In the late 1970s and early ’80s, he had joined with Dick Morris to help Bill Clinton get elected Governor of Arkansas. As Clinton’s current political guru, Morris became the middleman on those few occasions when the Americans sought the Administration’s help in Yeltsin’s re-election drive. So while Clinton was uninvolved with Yeltsin’s recruitment of the American advisers, the Administration knew of their existence — and although Dresner denies dealing with Morris, three other sources have told Time that on at least two occasions the team’s contacts with Morris were ‘helpful.’”

It would be difficult to find a more appalling example of ‘it’s only wrong when it doesn’t benefit us’ hypocrisy.

In fact, these American advisors — although watched closely by the Russian intelligence community — carried out their clandestine mission to ensure Yeltsin’s re-election without much discretion.

“The Americans carried multiple-entry visas identifying them as working for the ‘Administration of the President of the Russian Federation,’ a bit of obviousness that constantly threatened to undermine all the supposed secrecy surrounding their real work,” Kramer wrote.

Shumate, Braynin, Dresner, and the others understood the breadth of manipulation necessary to sway Russian voters who were dead set against another term under Yeltsin — just before the team got to work, just 6 percent of Russians saw the president in a favorable light, and even fewer trusted his competency as a leader.

“Stalin had higher positives and lower negatives than Yeltsin,” Dresner told TIME. “We actually tested the two in polls and focus groups. More than 60% of the electorate believed Yeltsin was corrupt; more than 65% believed he had wrecked the economy. We were in a deep, deep hole.”

Ultimately, the team of secretive American political insiders waged a successful information and propaganda war on the otherwise oblivious Russian population, whom they convinced Yeltsin wasn’t so bad, after all.

“We were brought in to help win,” Gorton told TIME, “and that’s what we did. The Russians are prideful and say that people like us won’t be necessary in the future because they’ve learned what to do. You hear that everywhere after the hired guns have done their work — and it may be true. All I know is that for every guy who thinks he can go it alone, there will always be another guy who knows he can’t.”

Make no mistake about it — without U.S. interference and meddling, Yeltsin would not have been victorious in Russia’s 1996 election.

Whether or not Russia interfered in the U.S. election twenty years later — about which no unassailable evidence has yet been presented — shouldn’t really be a matter of consternation for the same political establishment so unconcerned with election ‘rigging’ when the manipulation works in its favor.