The Swamp Need A Super Big Drain

 

 

The Swamp Need A Super Big Drain

THE SWAMP – I’M JUST SAYIN’ … WE’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER DRAIN

By Norman Ball – Like most extended metaphors, draining the swamp works until it doesn’t. A swamp is an anomalous patch of geography whose swampiness can only be drained and dissipated provided there’s a preponderance of surrounding dry land to absorb the muck. Straining an already-swamped metaphor, what happens when the swamp becomes the preponderance?

In fact, when the scale of displacement approximates the Seven Seas (or as we’ll see, the Five Eyes) swamp-draining requires a whole ‘nother planet’s worth of real estate. Then there’s the real Sysyphian kicker: if you’ve gotta move everything then you might as well leave everything alone.

Relax, we’ve got the outside covered. How? We brought it inside.

With the swamp closing in, our sympathies renew for Mia Farrow’s claustrophobic predicament in the final scene of Rosemary’s Baby. If everyone’s in the coven, then Evil ceases to be an aberrant condition, graduating to ubiquitous atmosphere. Good becomes a mythic outpost. After all the universe can’t be a wall-to-wall pejorative.

One day looking back, we might wonder, did evil ever really exist or was it always just a fragmentary bad dream before they drew the 5G curtain around us? The present pens the past. Authentic retrospectives pose a diminishing threat. In time, Winston Smith makes peace with Big Brother.

For the moment there are still pockets of fear and loathing held up by faith. We right-wing conspiracy aficionados were right. There was in fact a tightly coordinated, multi-departmental Deep State effort aimed at denying Donald Trump the White House. Moreover Trump Russia collusion was concocted to substantiate this effort. Slowly the mainstream is getting its arms around the stunning magnitude of these Big Lies.

This has been a dominant theme of thought-leader The Conservative Treehouse for over two years. In their own words:

“You can call it a soft-coup, or you can call it politicization of the DOJ and FBI, but the end result is the same – [there was an] intentional effort to manipulate, influence, and ultimately subvert an election for the Presidency of the United States.”

An intentional effort, to be sure. But an international effort no less. The coven is growing. The coven is the swamp with its eyes on the world.

There’s every reason to suspect The Five Eyes (FVEY) intelligence consortium (since morphed to at least fourteen cooperating Eyes) played a commanding, if not an initiatory, role in the attempted coup. At the least, a number of Russian collusion players have relationships with FVEY affiliates: Stefan Halper (CIA, MI6), Joe Mifsud (MI6), Christopher Steele (MI6), Alexander Downer (ASIS, MI6), Robert Hannigan (GCHQ).

Some will ask what FVEY is. Here’s Wikipedia:

“The “Five Eyes” (FVEY) refers to an alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. These countries are bound by the multilateral UKUSA Agreement for joint cooperation in signals intelligence, military intelligence, and human intelligence.”

FVEY’s key threat of course is that it opens up the possibility of neatly circumventing the domestic spying prohibitions imposed by statute on all national intelligence agencies. Under FVEY, New Zealand spies for Canada, The UK spies for the US, etc. Add enough Eyes and you’ve got the outside covered.

This nightmare of seamlessness plays havoc with the received notions of divisible sovereignty and actionable national borders. It’s all the same battle. The geographic is the conceptual draped in maps and cartographers’ once-solid lines. Where’d the outside go? Or has Peter Sutherland’s ‘absolute illusion’ finally retired to a tired old shibboleth near you?

In their essay ‘Unmasking the Five Eyes’ Global Surveillance Practices’Privacy International’s Carly Nyst and Anna Crowe offer up a chilling synopsis. An excerpt appears below. Notice the heavy emphasis on cooperationindistinguishabilityjoint collection and overlapping staff. The seamless canopy is closing in overhead. Where’s the sky for the clouds? If Australia looks, for all the world, like Canada, then world-citizenry has become our lot by default. Relax comrade, no one sent me a referendum ballot either.

Donald Trump’s on the outside-coming-in with all the loneliness (and stamina) of a long-distance runner. Sensing his outsider-disdain, even the usual knee-jerk jerks, the Swamp creatures, are obliged to disdain him right back. In fact his presence is so disruptive and unsettling, no one can resume the traditional bad-kabuki with any conviction. He unleashes waves of self-consciousness. Kayfabe is broken. Prior to Trump, politics was a sleepwalk. Everybody knew what to do.

This examination would be remiss were it not to cite the school of thought that Trump is an ever-more cunning insider dressed up as an outsider, that is, a Pied Piper of patriotic fervor who may still yet disappoint his nationalist base of support and regress to the mean. William Engdahl comes to mind. For the moment, Trump’s America First rhetoric has borne real fruit in terms of redirected trade policy, domestic employment and re-industrialization. That NATO’s provocations grow increasingly reckless in the Trump era (at seeming odds with the President’s overtures towards Putin) is duly noted. The tectonic forces pressing WW3 ultimately derive from sources beyond the purview of even the most stridently contrarian US President of the post-WW2 era.

Precious little has come from America’s God-AWfully Ostensible Left (AWOL), such as it is (and it ain’t much), for decades. (In this riveting account of ‘what went wrong’ Ralph Nader traces the American Left’s last unabashed legislative victory to 1976’s Toxic Chemical Prevention Bill. That’s quite a dry spell.)

For those who have forgotten or weren’t born yet, the Left once railed convincingly against CIA excesses in Central America and elsewhere. Battling a seditious and runaway Surveillance State would be a golden ticket to renewed relevancy. Instead, a pregnant radio silence rules the Blue Wave at points where it could really crash against the shore. Trump has spoiled the Leftist experience, such as it might have been. No one wants to be seen lending him assistance, even if it means acquiescence to Panopticon consolidation.

With the exception of Alan Dershowitz’ routine tongue-lashings of the ACLU over its myriad Trump-era derelictions, the American Left has veered shamelessly partisan like the beaten-down Clintonian Stockholm Syndromers they are. Cowardice makes for absent bedfellows. It’s not just a meme. There is something trance-like going on with these folks. Their autonomy long since dead, they now wander the political landscape in zombie-fied, Trump-deranged stupefaction.

In short, Trump should expect no help from those who should be helping unless of course he’s prepared to swap Mike Pompeo at CIA for Maxine Waters. But why belabor one side of a traitorous spectrum? Practically everyone with a claim to power detests Trump. Much stems from envy born of self-loathing. Trump didn’t have to debase himself for political power. He helicoptered in.

Former US Attorney Joseph DiGenova, a long-term Trump confidante and Swamp nemesis who was onto the Obama coup early (see here at 14:24) has clearly been handed Trump lawyer Rudy Guiliani’s speaking role in recent weeks. That’s a good thing, since Rudy makes the loquacious sound parched for words, a tendency that’s come close to imperiling his star client on more than one television interview.

DiGenova’s known to speak with Trump frequently though unofficially. His October 15 radio interview offers a series of bombshells, one of them being that former CIA Director John Brennan reached across the Atlantic to enlist GCHQ assistance (the British equivalent of NSA and a FVEY agency) in perpetrating the Trump coup. That’s pretty huge. He wasn’t the first. As far back as March 2017 Fox News’ Judge Napolitano said much the same.

Curiously enough, GCHQ head Robert Hannigan retired three days after Trump’s inauguration at the ripe old age of 51, a mere two years into the job, in order to spend more time with his “ever patient and understanding family” For those who’ve ever helped mount a coup against a key ally’s duly elected leader, it can be a time-devouring monster. Failed coups exert an even greater psychic toll. In the end, a family’s patience is not infinite.

Americans will recall the battle royale that ensued over ratification of the 28th Amendment establishing the Global Panopticon as America’s fourth branch of government. No? To be honest, neither do I. Actually all that Constitutional Convention malarkey got skipped because they came up with an even better idea.

With the Trumanite Network (a Michael Glennon term from his hugely important book, National Security and the Double Government) furnishing a steady stream of compliant and compromised Presidents, those pesky Madisonian exactitudes were easily skirted. Translation? She was supposed to win.

While the term ‘Deep State’ has seized the public imagination, which is not a bad thing, Michael Glennon’s Double Government formulation possesses superior explanatory power. Glennon argues that our ‘Madisonian institutions’ have been hollowed out by the ‘Trumanite network’ i.e. the security state whose origins can be traced to the 1947 National Security Act.

In Glennon’s formulation, as this writer attempts to extrapolate it anyway, Trump is a Madisonian revivalist intent on wresting back full Constitutional sovereignty from the usurping Security State, the latter having long since morphed into an unbeholden supra-national entity. Prior to Trump, all Presidents in the post-war era acceded to their increasingly pro forma status (with the notable exception of, ahem, JFK).

The Old Blighty arrived at split-screen governance far earlier than America, making the former an apt tutor. No doubt an unwritten Constitution assists the bait-and-switch since it’s easier playing shell-games with thin air. Walter Bagehot’s formative spade work comes via his 17th century tome, The English Constitution. A quote appears below:

Then Trump the Unbeholden Disruptor appeared.

All apple-carts got overturned. Of course this is precisely what the coup sought to avert and how in a sense the plotters were right to fear Trump’s ascent. Defying the most rudimentary legal advice, Brennan sputters regularly on Twitter. He can’t help it. His world is upside-down.

All Trump has to do (a veritable walk in the park!) is summon the US government back to its explicit Constitutional coordinates whereupon he, America and an alleviated world-at-large could begin to normalize along prior nationalist forms.

The Trumanites’ key vulnerability is that they don’t exist, Constitutionally at least, on paper. Their legitimacy hinges on the illicit consent of the Madisonian State. Supreme hubris caused them to think they’d forever battened down the Oval Office hatches to hostile interlocutors i.e. Madisonian revivalists with the temerity to insist the CIA still worked for them.

Mr. Smith was never supposed to come to Washington again. All office-seekers would be vetted for actionable blackmail material. The Trumanite Network got beat by a skilled insurrectionist. Trump slipped in on a massive wave of economic populism and media contempt. It won’t happen again. They’ll make sure of that. Not that it matters because there’s only one Trump.

 

Expressing surprise months ago at Trump’s perilous naivete (for such a self-professed ‘hard-nosed businessman’) Senator Chuck Schumer managed to tip everyone off to the CIA’s essential autonomy when he revealed the intelligence establishment has six ways from Sunday of subverting Presidents who seek to re-assert their Constitutional prerogatives over an apparatus long since graduated to a supra-sovereign, trans-national configuration. Da sheer nerve of dat Trump guy!

But it’s bigger even than that. It will be shown that Brennan was merely an emissary acting on the express instructions of Obama, not an autonomous or rogue agent, as the post facto National Security Advisor Susan Rice memo of January 20th 2017 feebly –and proactively– attempts to memorialize; that is, in case the you-know-what ever threatened to hit the fan –something that it’s imminently poised to do.

This letter (seen below) deserves some attention.

Beyond its odd and belated timing (15 days after the meeting itself and within minutes of Trump’s hand being placed on the inaugural Bible), the entire posture of the letter conveys the sense that Biden (a future presidential contender with plausible deniability needs) and Rice (authorial license assigns a premium to self-protection) are ‘merely present’ like unindictable ghosts in the woodwork. The rest are attendees, which is to say tomorrow’s leg-ironed co-conspirators.

Of the memo’s three areas of concern –Intelligence, Law Enforcement and National Security– Rice isolates and dwells upon the third. A sizable redaction follows it.

This brings us to what, in many ways is the core rationale behind the entire Trump-Russia misdirection campaign.

On the first day of the Trump Presidency, January 21st, the day after Inauguration and the Rice letter, Sally Yates, an Obama holdover –and Trump’s acting Attorney General until she’s fired on January 31st– signs the first 90-day renewal of the Carter Page FISA warrant, a veritable Trojan Horse (by virtue of the ominous ‘two-hop-rule’) into the entire workings of the Trump Campaign, Transition Team and White House staff.

(Note: In order to obtain a Title I warrant from The FISA Court, law enforcement must show no less than probable cause that the subject is an agent of a foreign power, i.e. that Page, a Trump campaign foreign policy volunteer, was a demonstrable operative for Russia. Page to this day has never been charged. Nor will he ever. Page was a FISA patsy.)

Suddenly the cover-your-ankle import of the Rice letter becomes clear. In essence, a departing Administration was carrying forward an extensive and highly questionable surveillance operation (i.e. beyond the campaign phase) for the continued monitoring of its successor Administration after the latter, needless to say, had assumed active governance over said surveillance operations! If this doesn’t evoke creepy Deep State Continuity of Government (COG) imagining, then nothing will. (For an examination of COG’s decades-long history, see Peter Dale Scott here.)

As for those who found the Obamas’ plan to remain in DC post-election both rather odd and without precedent, surely anxiety over the lingering surveillance op being conducted against the incoming President played a part in wishing to hang around town. Frankly, has there ever been another instance in American history of a prior Administration failing to transfer a full portfolio to its successor? Perhaps the election-impervious power allotment enjoyed by the Five Eyes/Trumanite faction has carved out a sovereign safe harbor, exempt from the venerable American tradition of transition of Presidential powers?

Fired FBI Director Comey has since admitted that in his January 6th meeting with Trump (the day after the memorialized meeting) he kept all but the most salacious parts of the Steele Dossier (the fraudulent yet primary rationale for the Page FISA warrant in the first place) from the President-elect, as he did the very existence of the FISA warrant itself.

When the FISA operation commenced on October 21, 2016 Comey was, in effect, spying on Candidate Trump. By the time of his firing, he had moved on to spy actively on his boss, the President of the United States.

One can only assume Obama was cognizant and accepting of his role within the transnational command structure. He was simply reporting up his Trumanite chain-of-command.

Inevitably there will be a tendency, fueled by partisan point-scoring, to blame Obama for breaching Constitutional parameters in the manner of rogue elephant. Clearly he and his Administration broke the law and should be punished severely.

At the same time, he was fulfilling a role which had, of its own institutional volition, evolved into an embrace of the Double Government’s formulation. Obama was a willing occupant to be sure, just not the architect of the Surveillance State’s decades-long eclipse of Madisonian primacy. Nothing is fixed, in short, with Obama’s departure.

The Rice memo was an attempt to fit her boss back into his formal Constitutional role on their last day at work. Think of the Rice letter as the dry-cleaning bill for Obama’s equivalent of the Lewinsky-stained-dress.

Obama was America’s first fully-realized, supra-national, extra-Constitutional President. Russia is a Five Eyes nemesis so they lashed it to Trump hoping to kill two birds with one stone. A potential beneficiary? Vladimir Putin who manages to depart one Most Wantedroster, though he’s not gonna slip the Dealey Plaza suspect list quite so easily, not on this go-round anyway.

In recent weeks, a measure of apprehension has crept into some pro-Trump ranks (as well as key Congressional allies) that the President’s reversal on desperately sought Deep State redactions related to the Trump-Russia debacle he’d been adamant in previously demanding, might not come to light after all. On the contrary, Trump is amassing leverage to be used at the most propitious time and on a vastly expanded international scale.

Five Eyes participation seems clear. Trump will seek his pound of flesh at a time, place and context of his choosing even if it shakes the ranks of America’s ‘steadfast allies’. His 9/20/18 interview here all but says this (at 2:50 below):

 

trump talk

Imagine the conniptions that will ensue among UK and Australian should the following headlines (as posed previously on Ft Russ here) appear:

“UK and Australian Governments Revealed as Central Players in Attempted Coup of US President”

OR

“Seeking to Avoid an NSA Imprimatur, President Obama Directly Sought GCHQ Intervention in an Effort to Subvert His Elected Successor, Trump”

Transnational abrogation of the US Constitution is the final kimono to fall in this wending Obama coup saga. Having forged an international configuration impervious to nation-state and electoral constraint, the Trumanites are like a strung-together confederacy of listening posts suspended from the roof of the world. Who can chastise them? Who dares reel them in?

Like it or not (and many don’t), Trump is our imperfect vessel-of-the-moment. Meanwhile the outside is succumbing like a besieged Amazon rain forest to the ravages of inwardness and power-lust. The world should wish this consummate outsider well.

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http://www.fort-russ.com/2018/10/the-swamp-im-just-sayin-were-gonna-need-a-bigger-drain/