 Okay, thank you very much for having me and I think the sponsors of this event as well and Lou Rockwell all of it The title of the speech of course corrupt political influence on military intelligence and its fundamental role in state propaganda And that's a long title, but hopefully I'll be able to cover it It's often noted that the phrase military intelligence is an oxymoron The US intelligence community collects data on the whole world But only when that data becomes important to the US state is a deep analysis and targeted collection performed While intelligence in wartime can and should be driven by decentralized requests from the field and field commanders The intelligence community has long been organized around serving the ruling state and giving the state what it asks for This makes sense because the US Congress has not declared war in over 80 years At the same time this makes no sense at all because arguably the US state has been at war continually for the past 80 years the implication of this dichotomy and Confirmation of the very title of this talk was demonstrated in a typical way on May 3rd of this year When sent com commander general Eric Carilla rushed to tweet that his command had conducted a unilateral strike in northwest Syria targeting a senior al Qaeda official 12 days later sent com itself Investigated and discovered that they had actually targeted and killed a Syrian shepherd and father of 10 and that there were no al Qaeda Any of the bad guys near the area? first response was to delete the tweet 20 days after the tweetable event CNN reported well, it's too bad But at least some of his staff had urged Carilla to hold off on the tweet until they knew who they actually killed Let's think about that for a minute The lesson learned here was hold off on the tweet Notwithstanding what another famous shepherd in the Middle East may have concluded the US military in its intelligence system Serves only one master the state and its propaganda In my time at the Pentagon 1998 to 2003 I was a consumer of intelligence not a producer of it Intelligence is always a consumer product, but the orders are placed from above or from the center One or more of the 17 plus federal level agencies seek out the information that's been requested and Provide an intelligent product up the chain to the overarching state intelligence boss the director of national intelligence Who then informs the big guy? The big guy unless his name is Trump always gets what he wants Incidentally this office of the DNI the director of national intelligence was created only in 2005 Before then the CIA filled that post since 2005 there have been only seven confirmed DNI's and for acting DNI's President Trump himself burned through two confirmed DNI's and for acting DNI's President Trump Sorry, the seventh and current DNI is Avril Haines She was introduced to Congress during her confirmation almost three years ago as committed to Bringing non politicized truth to power and restoring trust and confidence in the intelligence community and the American public Haines went from bookstore owner to national security expert and today leads and coordinates the 17 plus intelligence agencies Yet she was well prepared for her role. It is based on what her buyers want dependent on the satisfaction of her state employer 17 agencies is a lot We're talking about the CIA and NSA the DIA Army Air Force and Avian Marine Corps and Special Operations Command intelligence agencies homeland defense and FBI Department of Energy National Reconnaissance Office National Geospatial Intelligence Agency DEA Treasury Department of Justice Department of State Bureau for Intelligence and Research and most recently the National Space Intelligence Center Given the militarized nature of the domestic agencies that have intelligence functions and the subordination of the State Department to Economic social informational and literal warfighters. I consider all of these 17 agencies part of military intelligence And every one of these agencies is corrupted by their political bosses slash customers These intelligence agencies were made infamous by the New York Times in 2016 when it reported Hillary Clinton's false claim that all 17 U.S. Intelligence agencies verified a Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee emails the Times retracted this some years later Only three of the 17 agencies had ever agreed to this electioneering tripe And that was three too many because most of us and most of the rest of the world knew the Clinton New York Times Claim was false. We knew because of the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich in the summer of 2016 Who according to those who would know was the source of the leaked DNC emails? We knew because of the ceaseless work of 27-year CIA veteran Ray McGovern and others who understood the evidence rationally We knew because most of the world recognizes the New York Times and the Washington Post as pure state media U.S. peacetime intelligence is a 200 billion dollar project growing bigger each year That's a hundred billion in the published budget and another 100 billion in CIA and defense black budgets All of these intelligence agencies with some variation in technology and expertise use much of the same Unclassified and classified sources to inform their agencies conduct analyses and make their reports While the U.S. Isn't engaged in any declared or legal wars to paraphrase the famous warfighter and soldier Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. What's the point of having it if you can't use it? And it is not used and it is used not to defend the country but to defend and preserve the state Intelligence spending is the third largest part of the discretionary federal budget after the defense offense budget and Interest on the federal debt it consumes more than any other non-military department more than agriculture Veterans benefits education with its massive student loan debt mill more than the departments of housing transportation foreign affairs energy labor We don't think of intelligence spending separately because it's hidden like an internal parasite within the overall defense budget If we want to consider if we want to understand corrupt political influence on military intelligence We need to consider the financial scope of the U.S. Investment in state intelligence. It is significant We need to think about who the customer is U.S. Political figures and power players our elite ruling class and that ruling class national and international Is that war with the people us for its very survival in war you use what you have And the elite owns every one of our military and official intelligence producers. It's their military intelligence not ours Before I go on let's consider what technology computing and AI advances have done to military intelligence battlefield and battle space knowledge and responses are in many cases post human if You can imagine computer games if you can play them. This has become much of modern warfare The intelligence for targeting is through sensors and data and the priorities are rarely the result of a thinking human But rather just choosing from a set of options delimited by logistics and calculated probability the pilots who fly the F-35s are really quite optional It's not your granddad's war fighting at least at the general and admiral level and boy Oh boy, do we have a lot of generals and admirals more per capita than ever before in our history One cannot even imagine most of our current flag officers anywhere near the front line of battle And of course there isn't really a front line to stand on the US hasn't fought a war in decades That has made us better fighters better strategists better ethicists better novelists or better leaders Instead we play war games and our political leaders get to watch them live from a safe room somewhere Because of these trends traditional intelligence that informs the strategy of war for war fighters and soldiers Is simply not needed not requested and not produced the computer is faster And we've been playing war this way for politicians and their cronies for decades For the vast intelligence sector to stay relevant it has to offer what the customer wants and What the customer wants isn't defense or even better war fighting it wants legitimate confirmation of its pre-existing Prejudices an information that supports a favorite or dominant political narrative or agenda It wants to stay in power and to do that the people must believe the state the only real you meant The intelligence community seems to do anymore is aimed at how to better read the political tea leaves in Washington and maintain budget share as we have seen with the Snowden revelations the National Security Agency for example does not have to obey the Constitution or federal law unless and until it gets caught even then with a wink and a nod It continues to violate the law We see similar behavior in the DOJ FBI and Homeland Security, of course, and this has been a consistent habit of The CIA for decades starting with its first director Allen Dulles The bureaucratic imperative is to grow influence and outcompete the other 16 agencies for favor credibility and budget share in theory these agencies do not compete don't overlap and willingly share information and technology between them But in fact they compete with each other for relevance their missions overlap in many ways and they Jealousy guard their information sources and technologies often ironically and sometimes hilariously Nearly all of what these agencies gather and produce is accessible and available in the open information system often with far more accurate analysis I Mentioned the sent com case earlier to show how the lap dogs in the military compete like golden retrievers for some political love But Congress itself parties and state media behave like canines as well panting and slobbering over Credible patriotic Americans doing their part for national security narratives consider the first Trump impeachment a Uniformed military officer in the NSC Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman blew the whistle Over the perceived intent and tone of a July 25 2019 phone conversation between Trump and the now infamous Volodymyr Zelensky Strangely enough Trump was concerned about Ukrainian corruption and he mentioned barisma Unlike military and civilian whistleblowers and truth-tellers I don't know like the late Daniel Ellsberg Ray McGovern Colleen Riley Catherine Gunn Sabelle Edmonds Bill Benny Thomas Drake Edward Snowden Chelsea Manning Jeff Sterling Jessica Raddock and the list goes on and on unlike these intelligence Professionals and American patriots instead of being harassed to fame targeted imprisoned or exiled Somehow the US Congress and state media bent the knee in all of the devotion to truth and justice Exhibited by Vindman and his co-petitioners It's almost funny today to look back given what the Congress and the media had been forced to acknowledge about Ukraine The corrupt US government interaction with the puppet government it put in place there And of course what we all now know about the Biden crime syndicate My own experience with politicized intelligence or the intelligence producers and product being manipulated to support a political agenda Was in the run-up to the second invasion of Iraq a Decade earlier during the first invasion of Iraq a desert storm in 1991 I did not realize that much the same thing was happening Then as in 2002 instead of intelligence guiding our politicians It was being used to shape the public opinion at home to support a long-standing neocon and DC agenda in 1991 as in 2002 the war was driven more by ideology and petro dollar politics than a physical threat to the United States After 9 11 a day when some very strange things happened in our country New requests for intelligence came down from the political leadership Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld was yelling find everything you can about Iraq and Saddam Hussein and Vice President Cheney started making visits to talk with CIA analysts in their offices It didn't take long for the Intel community to understand It had a job to do who their customer was and what he she they wanted Where I worked in the Near East South Asia director of OSD plans We had a senior executive service civilian intelligence officer signed from DIA Who oversaw staff of regional intelligence specialists our top DIA officer found out the hard way What happens when you provide actual intelligence and objective analysis to a political appointee who wants something different than that? After several workplace confrontations and some interesting verbal abuse the senior career intelligence officer was fired and sent back to the DIA a More compliant replacement eventually was found but as I recall there was not a big rush Because political appointees in my office and the office of special plans would simply take information From wherever they could find it and create a story. They wanted to go up and out I worked next to a guy who for a time who was not attached to DIA intelligence at all But who happened to be an Arabic reader? He was told by the political appointees to scour the internet and find things that were being said and Written in Arabic media that would please our boss and his bosses and support the mission He enthusiastically did just that Intelligence Military and otherwise is not like truth where the truth serves only itself its own goal and its own reward Intelligence must have an audience it must be needed and wanted and ideally acted upon and utilized if not It is consequently buried Unwanted and not acted upon something that the intelligence bureaucracy itself Recognizes as dangerous to its continued relevance and funding Thus responding to the customer and yes, this is the language we use in intelligence Can easily become a slippery slope of simply tailoring truth guesses and possible lies into a presentable and acceptable package Now in defense of most intelligence professionals I knew and knew of in and after 9-eleven There was pushback and there were complaints But what we didn't have then were loud and proud patriots perhaps like a lieutenant colonel Vendement to uniform up and present his grave concerns to the media and to Congress Perhaps if someone like lieutenant colonel Vendman had come forward with sincere complaints about the state of national security Because of the actions of politicians and their political appointees in the Pentagon telling the truth about fake intelligence Cherry-picked factoids the firing and sidelining of intelligence professionals who tried to stop it and the direct pressures Placed on lowly analysts by senior elected and appointed officials Well, maybe things would have been different It's so sad that we didn't have someone like lieutenant colonel Vendman when we could have really used him Of course, I'm I'm being facetious and sarcastic. We had plenty of people who saw what was happening The problem was if intelligent if honest intelligence analysis had been wanted it was there But it wasn't wanted because honesty would have gotten in the way of the DC narrative. I Don't want to play back the sordid history of the manipulation of intelligence that preceded 9-11 and that Promulgated the Patriot Act or that perverted the investigation into the letters sent by key sent to King congressmen and senators and media Letters containing US manufactured and patented anthrax spores I don't want to review the sick and incredible destruction of Iraq as a unified country and the perversion of our own law At the behest of government and others our industries and their think tanks Then as now neo-conservatives promote promoted the mandate of democracy Another oxymoronic idea that provides top cover for the real agenda of Washington DC Which I think is to control the world's reserve currency and by extension the actions decisions and resources of the rest of the world and to maintain maintain their own elite dominance as The politicians and ideologues see it using military intelligence as tailored Politicized storytelling is a good thing They see this as patriotic in a truly fascist way To use the entire energies of the state to energize the population of that state to expansive and never-ending war To seize and shape the imagination of over 300 million Americans and over 600 million NATO stonies is seen as necessary It is beyond necessary. It is the very key to the survival of the state And if that isn't a good use of military intelligence the salivating sweaty pale-faced neocons don't know what is I Do want to spend a little time on Ukraine? And how to use a phrase from the title of this talk the corrupting political influence has come into play First if military intelligence is an oxymoron corrupting and political our repetition a few years ago Then vice president Robin Ware or maybe it was Robert L. Peters famously told an audience How he got the anti-corruption prosecutor general of Ukraine Victor Shokin removed He threatened to withhold from then-president Poroshenko a billion dollars in loan guarantees and gave him a couple of hours to decide You've all heard it before but it's too much fun not to say it again Biden told us all well son of a bitch he got fired Biden's threat came in late 2015 and Shokin's firing was in March 2016 So as usual Biden exaggerated for comedic purposes at the time Shokin himself did not think Biden was why he had been fired He came to believe that only later because he was thinking about looking into barisma holdings Incidentally when Trump decided to ask if anyone would look into barisma. He too almost got himself fired So no looking into barisma people Do we have intelligence and surveillance in one or more of our 17 agencies that would clear all this up? Of course we do but our corrupted politicians don't want it There was a reason Trump went through so many directors of national intelligence and it's the same reason the deep state fears his possible return to DC It's life or death for them. It's their intelligence bureaucracy not yours not mine not Trump's nor will it be Bobby Kennedy's But barisma jokes aside there was another and very real reason Biden carrying the water for the deep state wanted Shokin fired Shokin was actively investigating US involvement into the 2014 uprising Specifically he wanted to find out who planned an orchestrated sniper fire into the demonstrating crowd in the center of Kiev on February 20th We know it today is the Maidan massacre You'll think I'm crazy, but it turns out there was US involvement in the ouster of the Ukrainian president Yanukovych Thanks to a leaked phone conversation between State Department under Secretary Vicki Newland and then US ambassador to Ukraine Jeffrey Piat The US neocons wanted the realistic and Russia friendly Yanukovych out They wanted him blamed for the massacre and they were working to ensure their guy was put in place as the interim leader in advance of the coming May elections in Ukraine Newland chose Arsene Yatsenak or Yats as she called him Later that year after a few months in Yats's capable hands the pro-nado pro-US and pro-EU Poroshenko was elected president with 56% of the vote Significantly this election was preceded by Independence referendums in Crimea and parts of the Donbass admits effectively what was and has remained a civil war This is all verifiable, but there's more and Shokin was all over it Fantastic stories abound about an infamous US sniper Brian Boynger who trained Ukrainians in the same time frame Boynger is implicated in assisting Ukrainian and American coup plotters in taking down Yanukovych government including the preplanned use of snipers around the Kiev Square To make sure it went the way the US needed it to go. I Share this story in part because we don't know all of it and because I'm very confident that the US intelligence Community does know all of it and likely contributed to it Shokin was looking into the snipers of the Maidan massacre a year after it happened and Obama's State Department could not let that happen I share this story because the EU leadership at the time knew about the US coup in Ukraine and Some of them were not in we're not supportive of it Intercepted phone calls showing that among others Estonian Foreign Minister Hermes Piat and EU high representative for foreign policy Katherine Ashton were aware and Concerned that Ambassador Piat and US Secretary of State for European and your Asian Affairs Victoria Newland were deeply involved in the coup And were specifically responsible for the Maidan massacre Did Ambassador Piat make sure former US soldier and maybe still on the US dime Brian Boynger? Was able to enter Ukraine just in time for a little sniper action our intelligence community knows it probably assisted EU's Katherine Ashton and her vocal concerns among other EU cautions and resistance to the US cowboying in Kiev is Precisely the kind of thing Newland was reacting to when she made her infamous epithet f the EU I'm not telling you anything that you don't already know This is what the US government does and it does so using the intelligence community which it owns Those 17 agencies work hard to justify legitimize and cover up the ongoing corruption of our so-called Republic because that's what their bosses tell them to do We could choose a country a political movement and an era in US history and fill in encyclopedia on How this has worked and how it works today Someone is getting their $200 billion worth, but I'm pretty confident it is not the American people a System where no one can accurately determine the real value of goods and services is exactly what we have in the US government And we can see this specifically in the state intelligence sector Mises explained how a planned economy cannot make rational calculations Rationality is only possible where there's a free market. He writes in In their role as consumers the market Participants determine the rankings of good ready to be used in consumption in their role as producers Businessmen select those capital goods that promise to render the highest yield This way not only is not only the consumer goods, but also the production goods receive a ranking According to the present urgencies in the given state of the production technology the interplay of the two Evaluation processes ensures that the economic principle prevails everywhere in consumption as well as in production He notes that this interplay of two Evaluation processes is not possible in a socialist economy And yet that's exactly what we have evolved in the military and state intelligence apparatus today a socialist economy a Planned economy of presumably for important accurate and timely government knowledge for the defense of the nation And it does not work. It cannot work That it is politically corrupted is more than a symptom. That's actually the point The great Seymour Hirsch wrote an essay just last week Entitled when the intelligence is inconvenient. What goes wrong when politics suppresses the truth Hirsch has spent a lifetime documenting and reporting Inconvenient intelligence and he has watched how the political and elite wagons have circled and locked down Decades earlier he and truth seekers like him won Pulitzer Prizes and were published on the most trusted of newspapers Today state media is united against him defaming him and spiking his reports Hirsch writes The DIA defense intelligence agencies assessments are now The intelligence of choice inside the White House He goes on to show that some of the actual intelligence gathered and assessed Inside the US system and within DIA had accurately put forth the likelihood that the sarin attack in Syria in 2013 10 years ago was conducted not by the Assad government, but by the US government's ally the al-Nusra front this actual intelligence at the time was rejected and DIA was being taught a lesson That the customer desires drive the product not objective facts or honest analysis Our political customers do not want to be informed. They want to be obeyed Ten years later. We find DIA is now the preferred White House source of intelligence all hail DIA has learned its lesson first and always satisfy the customer Hirsch worries as do all moral and thinking people that the way this system works is taking the US Russia and the world into full-blown war possibly nuclear war Having multiple intelligence sources all vying for a pat on the head by ideologues Psychopaths and idiots who hold political power is not an accident Emergent totalitarian states tend to develop systems with competitive spies both domestic and foreign intelligence Elites and political oligarchs want intelligence agencies to compete for their approval This is the one this is one of the easiest ways to find out which people and which organizations are loyal It's not complicated. It's happened predictably everywhere. There's tyranny and tyrannical government Seymour Hirsch wrote his latest essay now because he sees the same politicization of intelligence happening in Ukraine He marvels at the sheer uninformed and simply wrong beliefs and assessments of guys like Blinken and Sullivan And those still supporting Biden's a hundred billion proxy war against Russia Politicization of intelligence corrupt intelligence production that supports the state narrative rather than the God's honest truth is the reason Along with many of you. I thought that general Eric Kurilla's premature Twitter ejaculation last May about his latest drone strike was both sad and psychopathic, but sad psychopathic and ridiculous is the rule these days Last week retiring chief of the joint chiefs of staff general Mark Milley Took the CBS news crew into the Pentagon op-center where he runs the US proxy war in Ukraine CBS very earnestly broadcasted the live Ukrainian force strengths and locations shown on a flat screen on the top secret military ops center In this impenetrable basement of the Pentagon as Milley contentedly explained what he does all day set aside for a minute whether or not this is a growth a gross breach of Classification and whether the DOJ will indict the general spoiler alert. They won't This Milley news story was pure war theater versus actual war We're ensuring our generals know and use verifiable honest truth is an imperative more valuable than gold Milley tells CBS that he speaks with the general's illusiony his Ukrainian live-action roleplay counterpart three times a week We watch in disbelief and horror as one deaf and blind general Cheerfully advises another in the name of neo-conservative ideology and a shared strategy of I hope this works out Meanwhile, Ukraine is being steadily destroyed and the Ukrainians themselves slaughtered named impoverished and forced into diaspora All of this is the direct and predictable result of the political corruption of intelligence Curiously we can still talk about this in public and we as people Communities organizations and businesses have a fantastic ability to gather information Test and check our theories our ideologies and prejudices actual data Contact with and first-hand information from experts around the world is available on nearly every subject to almost anyone who wishes to have it Access to history whether a thousand years ago or last week is at our fingertips today There is nothing in this world that is truly stopping any of us from thinking evaluating Judging and learning we have that power US decision-makers politicians and Intel customers on the other hand Imagine they have a monopoly on honest information and truth and that they can shape truth to justify their ambitions The billion spent each year on information gathering and analysis by government is wasted on these politicians and ideologues And it is a waste of money for the American people who truth be told are at least as well informed today as your average politician With far better instincts and ethics. I have talked mostly this afternoon about the corrupt political influence on intelligence and I haven't really Directly address the fundamental role of the so-called intelligence community in shaping and strengthening state propaganda But in every case I mentioned today state propaganda was always served and never exposed by the intelligence apparatus The intelligence community has given and gives credence to the state's near constant efforts to fool and Confuse Americans and the world and it does this because it is rewarded by the state for doing so Punished when it fails to comply and the state is their only customer There are thousands of examples of how this has worked in previous years and decades For example, we just discovered that the CIA bribed and pressured its own scientific analyst to support the state propaganda campaign around the origins of the COVID-19 virus All aspects of state messaging are must be and will be aggressively supported by state intelligence agencies There is light at the end of this tunnel for Americans and the rest of the world Demographic and technological change in our society favors both peace and truth the rapid decline of US economic and political power abroad is both parallel and Precursor to an even more rapid decline in the state's economic and political control here at home The rest of the world is no longer going to finance our quality of life our blind spots and the American regime's militarism I doubt coming generations of Americans are going to pay for it either corrupt straight narratives Posing as wisdom and truth with the backing of a captive and subservient intelligence apparatus Cannot prosper or persist in a free market of information And all of us here today and millions more around the world are living proof that that market is unstoppable