We have a breach in our intelligence.
Quite the double entendre.
We have a breach in our intelligence.
Don’t miss the plot.
We have a breach in our intelligence.
Keep your eye on the spy.
Americans are suffering from ADHD - a massive attention deficit disorder. The zone is being flooded with shit. Look at George Santos’ thighs! If it bleeds, it leads! Tonight at 10 - watch media profiteer off brutality and violence on a continual loop! Hey, look over here - Trump is lying on His Propaganda Platform! Watch Jr. lie, too! But don’t pay any attention to what lurks below the fold.
It’s been a week since the biggest spy scandal in American history broke. On January 23, a former FBI special agent, Charles McGonigal, was arrested on charges that he took money to serve the Russian mob. One charge is he took $225,000 from a foreign actor while heading up counterintelligence at the FBI's New York office. Another charge is he took money from Oleg Deripaska, a sanctioned Russian oligarch, after retiring from the FBI.
As Timothy Snyder wrote:
“We are on the edge of a spy scandal with major implications for how we understand the Trump administration, our national security, and ourselves.”
So shouldn’t this be the biggest story of this moment in time? That the Trump administration was a criminal enterprise, aided by a Russian military operation. That Bill Barr - the fixer - was running a protection racket for Trump. Or does it just quietly slip below the fold, buried in an avalanche of newsporn.
As American Kompromat author Craig Unger said on Ep58 of RadPod - which drops later today: “The FBI failed miserably.”
“All these Russian investigations by the FBI were criminal investigations, when they should have been counterintelligence investigations.
“Was it okay for the President of the United States to make a fortune laundering money for the Russian mafia? Shouldn’t that be a scandal? Doesn’t that compromise you? It certainly does with regards to national security, and that’s what counterintelligence is about.”
We have American ADHD. As I wrote yesterday, I believe the cure is nerd immunity - knowledge and empathy - but we’ve got to grow our numbers.
If we keep lurching from crisis to crisis we will miss the bigger operation - the death of democracy.
As Ruth Ben-Ghiat taught us, memory repression is part of early autocracy, as is self-censorship.
Never forget any of this. Keep your eye on the spy.
****
Bette Dangerous is a reader-funded magazine. Thank you to all monthly, annual, and founding members. Thank you as well to all those who support my work with coffee tips and who buy my books! My reflection, Confessions of a ‘Fox Blonde’ was just published in Byline Supplement. In a review of my latest ebook, the erotic novella Fox Undercover, I’ve been called “The punk rock Anaïs Nin.”
Well the story is still unfolding but as we learned from Keir Giles, the Bratva finds weaknesses. https://twitter.com/heidi_cuda/status/1612876356177768449?s=61&t=7agjNO4To5OBEFgTzlDXHA
Well, speaking of ADHD, the zone flooded with shit, lurching from crisis to crisis, and perhaps speaking of Russia again?.....
I’ve been reading much about the NATO negotiations, and that the U.S. and Germany will be sending Leopard 2 and M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine that will be a GAME CHANGER…….but any sort of analysis I find is all over the place with very little agreement…..
Two recent opinions below speculate on what might happen:
“Russia Exiled Them. Big Mistake”
Opinion by LEON ARON
01/29/2023 07:01 AM EST
[“Exiles from Putin’s Russia have a powerful role to play in what comes next in their country. Hundreds of anti-war Russians protested against Putin's war in Ukraine outside the Embassy of Russian Federation in London on the Russian Independence Day.]…..[No matter what Putin tells the Russian people and the world, this is not a war to secure a neutral Ukraine and save Russia from an imminent NATO aggression. It is a war to the bitter end to eradicate a sovereign Ukrainian state whose very existence as an independent, democratic nation is a threat to Putin’s autocracy.]……[a group of exiled politicians called the Congress of People’s Deputies of Russia declared that in addition to ending the occupation of Crimea and other Ukrainian territories, Russia must pay reparations to Ukraine — and give up war criminals for trials. (The Congress was led by Ilya Ponomarev, the only member of Russia’s parliament to vote against the annexation of Crimea in 2014; he’s now living in exile in Ukraine.)]…..[The stakes could not be higher. Another exile organization, the Anti-War Conference of the Free Russia Forum organized by the former world chess champion Garry Kasparov and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former political prisoner, has stated that the conflict is not regional, that Putin’s war is not just with Ukraine but with the liberal Western world order. It is a war over the “basic values” of Western democratic civilization.”]
“We’ve Done Lots for Ukraine, but Winning Will Take Much More”
Opinion by David Rothkopf
Updated Jan. 29, 2023 3:10AM ET Published Jan. 28, 2023
[“The first change required is to recognize that it is time to move toward an even more aggressive approach toward providing Ukraine with weapons, ammunition, and other vital supplies going forward.]….. [That is because we have entered the phase of the war in which Russia is playing for a tie—while Ukraine realizes it can only be safe if it plays to win. What that means is that if Russia can hold on to the 20 percent of Ukraine it has already seized and achieve a stalemate on the battlefield, they believe Western resolve to support Ukraine will ultimately fade and the West will push Ukraine into a negotiations that will translate Russian aggression into the permanent, internationally-accepted control of lands they have illegally occupied.]…….[Ukraine on the other hand, realizes that if they wish to reclaim any of those lands, they will need to be able to make the case on the battlefield and at the negotiating table that prolonging the war will only lead to ever greater Russian losses. They need to reclaim land seized by Russia and credibly assert momentum is on their side. And the only way they can do that given the vastly superior size of Russia’s army is with superior weaponry and an absolutely clear commitment from the West that our support will never falter.]……[ That brings us to the second area in which the Western strategy in support of Ukraine and to reduce the risk posed by a rogue Russia must change. At some point, the current war will come to a halt. It might be a ceasefire. It might be a more comprehensive peace agreement. But given Russia’s history and its serial disregard for past diplomatic arrangements, real lasting stability will require that Ukraine be quickly and successfully rebuilt and integrated into the European and global economy. Ukraine must emerge from this war so much stronger that Russia never dares invade again.”]