WHY MICHAEL FLYNN MATTERS
The duty of a true Patriot is to
protect his country from its government.”
―
Maxims and
clichés enter language as insights with bromide potential. Just as often, repetition
turns a platitude into a cultural virtue. Indeed, many a cliché is just an
asserted conclusion masquerading as wisdom.
For the American
Intelligence Community, the perennial virtue signal is usually some version of the
need to “speak truth to power.” Alas, hearing a spy master pontificate about
truth today is a little like hearing about chastity from a hooker.
Intelligence
agencies, and their contractors, foreign or domestic; lie, distort, cheat,
steal, kill, misrepresent, deceive, or even perjure while draped in the flag or
the Kevlar of national security.
Nearly all
of what contemporary Intelligence does anywhere is illegal, if not immoral,
somewhere. Spies and analysts lie because it’s what they are trained to do. It’s
what they get paid to do. It’s what they get rewarded for doing.
James
Angleton, a legendary CIA station chief, made his bones and career at Langley by
orchestrating a regime change operation in Italy after WW II. Rome at that
point was an American ally. And yes, we are talking about the same James Jesus who
subsequently wined and dined double agent Kim Philby during the Cold War at the
Army Navy Club in Washington. CIA has been running regime change campaigns ever
since. Ukraine and Libya are just two of the most recent.
Intelligence
is not a profession where morals or legality matters anyway. The only ethic
that counts today is political loyalty. Albeit, what’s good for the foreign
goose is not necessarily good for the domestic gander.
Double
agents Robert Hanssen (2001) at the FBI and Aldrich Ames (1994) at CIA are
echoes of the Angleton mole hunt in the wake of the Philby caper. The FBI and
CIA are perpetually vulnerable because they are too large, too naïve and, too
unprofessional. Russians shoot double agents for prudent reasons. Neither side
can trust a double. Dead men tell no tales.
Hansen and
Ames now get three hots, cots, and indefinite celebrity at American taxpayer
expense, hardly a prophylaxis for sleepers
or future traitors.
Lying to a
foreigner or enemy is just another tactic in the IC playbook. Intelligence
operatives also lie to domestic audiences; say a cops, legislatures or courts. There
mendacity becomes a personal hazard. You can go to jail for lying to the FBI. Just
ask Mike Flynn. The FBI can fabricate or deceive at will and have little to
fear from the law or courts. The various domestic plots against Donald Trump
will never be aired or tried because the American left has a bigger apparatchik
constituency and thus a bigger thumb on federal scales.
Deceit or perjury
is just a “misunderstanding” for a federal cop with a law degree in any case. Truth
today is political play dough, a shape shifter; any ruse you can get away with
– or believe. National Intelligence and federal police apparatchiks are literally
above the law, raising the perennial question of “who polices the police?” at
the federal level.
The honest answer
is, nobody.
Congress is,
by statute, the agent of oversight and accountability. In practice, with rare
exception, the US Congress seldom has the access (not to be confused with security
clearances) to understand, no less police, any Intelligence operation or top
cop-shop like the FBI. The Intelligence Community is just too big, too
compartmented, too opaque, too well-funded, and, these days, too partisan to be
restrained.
In practice,
American agencies and cabinet departments don’t trust Congress with sensitive
information because the people’s representatives are free to leak at will, with
little fear of prosecution.
IC briefings
on the Hill and congressional delegations (CODELs) to far-flung bases are often
characterized as “feeding the animals.” Nothing gives a station chief, base, or
installation heartburn quicker than an alert with a subject line that reads
“CODEL inbound”.
Congressional
travel at taxpayer expense is called a “junket” for a reason. Oversight is a fig
leaf, usually just serial boondoggles on the public dime. Adding insult to
injury, Intelligence czars deceive either house of Congress in open session and
still kept their jobs.
Just ask
General Jim Clapper.
For years,
under J. Edgar Hoover, the Congress was hostage to dirty federal cops. The Hoover
“dossier” threat against leading politicians was the worst kept secret in
Washington. Given the recent PRISM and “unmasking” revelations, it’s safe to
assume that the capability, if not content of NSA/FBI “dossiers” today is light
years ahead of Hoover’s paper files.
The FBI
cannot open your Christmas cards. But, NSA can capture and archive your emails and
search history for future reference. Out in Utah, at Bluffdale, troves about
your personal or private life are called “metadata.”
And when attributable
dirty tricks might be too embarrassing, the contractor (aka cutout) card is
played, again at taxpayer expense. The creation and/or dissemination of weaponized
scat is a kind of official misinformation. The Steele dossier is just the most
recent example of manufactured smut pedaled to a gullible Congress and partisan
media by CIA and the FBI.
Intelligence
is fond of barnyard metaphors. Chickenfeed is innocuous or phony data; bullshit
is weaponized chickenfeed.
Contractors
usually get the call when IC oligarchs need “plausible deniability” for black
ops at home or abroad. Fake news is officially underwritten by fake Intelligence
inside the Washington Beltway today.
Flynn’s
Sins
General
Michael Flynn is the exception that proves the new rule, or should we say
deficit, of truth in Washington.
Alas, Flynn’s
hot water was at a boil prior to 2016. Recall those late Obama years, when
Flynn was a candor casualty at the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Apparently,
Flynn believed that Islam should be judged on the behavior of its adherents,
not the selective reading of history, the Koran, or Hadith. Flynn saw Islam as
politics wearing the burka of religion and dared to say as much. He saw the
various global wars, so-called “small wars” on terror, to be part of larger war
with Islam, an existential kinetic and cultural clash of civilizations.
Flynn was brutally
honest about the politics and aims of Islamism. He claimed the struggle was
global and should be called a war, a war that Flynn thought America and the
West was losing by any measure.
With such
candor, General Flynn went from apostate to heretic overnight in the “woke” era
of snowflakes and global appeasement. Heresy was compounded when Flynn allowed
that, with the fall of the Warsaw Pact, the Russians were no longer ten feet
tall.
After the
2016 election, Flynn arose again like a vampire, surely a nightmare for team
Obama. Flynn could have been a major player in “draining the DC swamp.” With 30
years of experience in the deep state, Flynn knew where the bodies were buried.
The surprise election of Donald Trump, however, mobilized like-minded deep
state liberals at the White House, National Security Council, the IC, and
Justice Department to “get Flynn,” a predicate to discrediting and removing a
parvenue president.
As irony
would have it, General Flynn provided his critics with the rope from which he
would be hung. By all accounts, he was “dangerous,” indeed an alleged traitor
on two grounds. Flynn dared finger the Islamic menace whilst diminishing the threat
from Moscow. Flynn knew that exorbitant Intelligence, profligate Defense, and a
superfluous NATO alliance could not be justified without a perennial Russian threat
in Europe, real or imagined.
After 2016,
an alarmed national security establishment concluded that the Cold War in
Europe had to stay, Islam had to be appeased, and Mike Flynn had to go.
The FBI trapped
(trick fu**ed in Intelligence jargon) the general with some insignificant interview
contradictions. Flynn and family were subsequently tortured into bankruptcy for
three years by a corrupt Justice Department and a cooperating district judge,
Emmet G. Sullivan, a Clinton era appointee.
This state
sponsored hit squad endorsed by President Barack Obama and led by James Clapper
(DNI), James Comey (FBI), and John Brennan (CIA) didn’t try to argue the merits
Flynn’s assessments of Russia or Islam. Instead, they sought to shoot the
messenger, using a partisan FBI and corrupt Justice Department.
The subject
was Flynn, but the target was always Trump.
Ironically,
both left the national stage in January. Before too much time passes then,
let’s do what team Obama never did, examine the merits of Flynn’s assessments
of Russia and Islam.
The Take on
Russia
Flynn’s assessment
of Russia is self-evident. Muslim militants, not Russians, are killing Americas
today. Russians are not bombing newspapers, sporting events, gay bars, or flying
commercial airliners into American skyscrapers.
After 1990, Russia
ceased to be the Soviet Union, nor was Moscow captive to Communism anymore. The
Warsaw Pact, and its combined armed forces were history too, along with any illusions
of empire. Vladimir Putin may be an autocrat, but he is not Khrushchev or
Stalin.
While national
security Russophobes, right and left, sought to resuscitate the Cold War, the unreformed
Communist threat, China, stole or bought, the strategic initiative; underlining
Flynn’s critique of an unfocused and inept, if not incompetent, US American Intelligence
Community.
Indeed, after
1990, Beijing was able to checkmate Washington in just two decades with an
assist from imprudent debt, Big Tech dependencies, and a servile Democrat Party
distracted and obsessed since 2016 with fake “enemies” like Flynn and Trump. General
Flynn understood too well that the Intelligence Community was collecting data omnivorously
at the expense of objective and prudent analysis.
Withal, Flynn’s
take on Russia was spot on. Moscow, warts and all, makes a better social, cultural,
or strategic ally today than either Beijing, Mecca, or Tehran.
The war with
Islam
Flynn’s
assessment of Islam and Islamists was a veritable cold shower of candor and reality
too.
“Prepare”
He tried to
point out that Islamism was a global religious crusade, not a series of
unrelated local terror campaigns. Instead of playing tactical “whack-a-mole,”
Flynn suggested that the jihad needed to be seen as a war, a strategic ideological
and kinetic threat.
Surely all
Muslims are not jihadists, but just as surely, all jihadists are Muslims. Cultural
ideology is the strategic problem. Terror is simply a tactic used by militant
Islam, those so-called “extremists.”
Alas, if
only 15 percent of Muslims world-wide are radicals or Islamists; the army of
God, the jihad, has 150-million-foot soldiers worldwide.
The
unwillingness of American Intelligence to publicly acknowledge and confront Muslim
state sponsors of Islamism, and related terror, has allowed Islamism to
flourish, indeed triumph at the nation/state level.
Theocracy,
not democracy is trending in the Ummah, the Muslim world.
Strategic disasters
since the theocratic coup in Iran in 1979 include Afghanistan, Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon,
Libya, Yemen, Ethiopia, Sudan, Egypt, Afghanistan and a host of north African
nations now at risk, all plagued by Islamicist fanaticism or religious terror.
Iran was a lost to theocracy in a single
religious coup in 1979. The CIA and Jimmy Carter were clueless or indifferent
about Shia Islamism in Persia.
Afghanistan, after 40 years, is about to go over
to the Sunni Taliban, again, in 2021. Iraq, after two wars with the US,
is now a permanent sectarian US dependency. Shia Hezbollah now pulls the
strings for Lebanon puppets. Turkey, now a neo-Ottoman trojan
horse, went from janissary to Sunni theocracy in 2014 without a whimper or
demure from Brussels or Washington. Libya went, after an American
sponsored regime change, from the wealthiest secular nation in Africa to a
sectarian sierra hotel overnight. Yemen is a permanent civil/sectarian
basket case. Egypt keeps Al Ikhwan and the theocratic wolf
at bay with permanent martial law. The Horn of Africa and North Africa are now
persistent religious war zones.
In Europe,
the Clinton era sectarian division of Yugoslavia created two new Muslim
majority states, Kosovo and Bosnia, the source we might add, of
most European born ISIS terrorists and jihadists in the Levant.
Russia,
China, Thailand, Myanmar,
the Philippines are plagued with jihadists of all stripes too, a problem
which DOD and the US State Department insists on minimizing as regional insurgencies
or isolated civil disturbances.
Losses to
theocrats in the Ummah are so bad, that no one inside the Beltway dares keep
score anymore. Withal, Michael Flynn’s threat assessment of Islam was prescient.
The West, Europe and American are losing the military and ideological war with
Mecca and Tehran.
Good luck to
us now with an imperial China on the march. Beijing now sponsors a new “ism,”
capital Communist colonialism, on several continents.
Whence
Israel?
Many analysts
and pundits are euphoric about the recent denouement between Israel and the
Arab world. Some might argue that the thaw in the Middle East spikes General Flynn’s
assessments of the Ummah and Islam.
Surely any political
progress in the Middle East, even at the margins, benefits Israel. Just as
surely, Sunni Arab politics and motives are more about survival than cultural
or political sea changes.
Islamism
is a direct strategic threat to autocratic Muslim regimes, Arab tribal royalty especially.
Israel and
the West, at best, are secondary targets. When Arabs Improve relations with
Israel, they underwrite good will in Washington. Uncle Sam continues to fight Islam’s
battles in all those small wars that threaten the Muslim establishment. The Islamic
refugee flow continues to be a one-way street too - at American and European
expense.
The great
irony of modern history is the spectacle of watching euphonous “free-world”
policy energize the Socialist left in Europe and Communist China whilst appeasing
the totalitarian Muslim religious right. Schizophrenic foreign policy never
ends well. Indeed, Muslim refugee
crusaders of the 21st Century may do tomorrow what Suliman’s
Ottomans could not do at the Gates of Vienna in 1683.
Europe is at
risk again. Terror is just the punctuation for the perennial if not historical jihad
narrative.
America now carries
both the burden and consequences of all those small wars in the Muslim world.
Indeed, the Muslim immigrant/refugee diaspora to Europe, then America, under a
humanitarian flag is a bonus for Muslim absolutist and jihadist alike. Islam is
exporting its social, ideological, and extremist excesses to the West whilst
clinging to authoritarian, if not totalitarian, repression at home.
There are no
refugees nor refugee camps in Mecca, Medina, Tehran - or Beijing for that
matter.
Key
Judgements
Washington
is cursed by the best and most expensive Intelligence collection and the worst
analysis in the developed world, a systemic step-child of entrenched liberal
politics and “woke” (nee politically correct) national
security analysis.
The purpose
of Intelligence today is to confirm the conventional wisdom. Truth is now
power’s bitch.
Anything
positive about Russians, is likely to be labeled collaboration or treason. Concurrently,
anything negative about Islam, worse still religious fascism, evokes knee-jerk
charges of bigotry. The Communist Chinese threat is, for the most, ignored or
minimized for reasons too obvious to discuss here. Suffice it to say that Beijing
now purchases all the American good will necessary to stay under the existential
threat radar.
Gaslighting,
not National Intelligence Estimates, is the gold standard for analysis in the
American Intelligence Community today.
In sum, three
streams of modern moral superiority (nee Imperialism) are on the move today.
The American/European globalist left is moving East. The Islamic religious
right is moving West. When the dust settles from the clash between the two,
China, yea capital Communism, is well-positioned to pick over the choice bits
that survive.
Surely,
being correct about these matters is small comfort to General Flynn and family.
Ironically, “speaking truth to power,” was
Flynn’s great offense, the mortal sin, the penalty for which is excommunication.
In a culture
where truth is toxic, candor is a fatal dish. Albeit, when facts do not alter
minds, they do not alter reality either. Intelligence analysis that fails understand
or recognize truth, undermines policy designed to deal with realty.
Ignorance,
shabby analysis, and even bias have remedies.
Stupidity is
incurable.
Addendum:
Any candid discussion
of Islam today, like race, is a political, if not social, minefield. Three
distinctions are important. Islam is the religion, periodically
militant, but often benign. Islamism is the political or imperial propagation
of Islam which tolerates no alternatives, sacred or profane. Islamofascism
is the kinetic or military incarnation of Islamism that uses jihad
(literally “struggle”), terror, coups, insurrections, small or large wars to
achieve political goals.
Fascism, even the Islamic variety, is predicated on force,
coercion, and violence. Groups like al Qaeda (Muslim Brotherhood), Black
September, ISIS, Islamic Jihad, Hizballah (Party of God), and the Taliban
are just a few of the many global agents of Islamism and Islamofascism.
All are
bound by the same strains of imperial religious zeal, all in God or Mohamed’s
name.
-----------------------
G. Murphy
Donovan writes about the politics of national security.
Key Words; Michael Flynn, American
intelligence, gaslighting, Vladimir Putin, Russia, Islam, Islamism,
Islamofascism, Capital Communism.
Images:
https://www.broeckers.com/Wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/JJAngleton-700x466.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Muslim_Brotherhood_Logo.png
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