Unelected Officials Override The President To Continue Wars (But Only Kooks Believe In The Deep State)
Caitlin Johnstone, Nov 14 2020
Outgoing US envoy to Syria James Jeffrey stated in a recent interview with Defense One that US officials have been “playing shell games” about the number of troops in the region to deceive the Trump administration into thinking there has been a military withdrawal. Here are some excerpts:
“We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there,” Jeffrey said in an interview. The actual number of troops in north-east Syria is “a lot more than” the two hundred troops Trump agreed to leave there in 2019. “What Syria withdrawal? There was never a Syria withdrawal,” Jeffrey said. “When the situation in northeast Syria had been fairly stable after we defeated ISIS, he was inclined to pull out. In each case, we then decided to come up with five better arguments for why we needed to stay. And we succeeded both times. That’s the story.” Officially, Trump last year agreed to keep about 200 US troops stationed in northeast Syria to “secure” oil fields held by the US’ Kurdish allies in the fight against ISIS. It is generally accepted that the actual number is now higher than that. Anonymous officials put the number at about 900 today. The precise figure is classified and remains unknown even, it appears, to members of Trump’s administration keen to end the so-called “forever wars.”
Some mass media propagandists find it hilarious that the US war machine used deceit to thwart the president’s attempts to withdraw from its illegal occupation of Syria:
This would not be the first time that Jeffrey, a foreign policy insider with the past three presidential administrations, has admitted to deceiving the public about what’s happening in Syria. Earlier this year he admitted at a Hudson Institute video event that, contrary to the official public narrative of the US military being in Syria to fight terrorism, it’s actually there to create “a quagmire for the Russians.” These Beltway insiders always get extra honest in the company of fellow think-tank denizens. This would also not be the first time we’ve heard reports of the US war machine hiding the facts from the elected commander-in-chief of the most powerful military force ever assembled. Last year the NYT cited anonymous US officials in a report on cyber-intrusion operations against the Russian government that the US military had deliberately kept Trump in the dark about. NYT reports:
Two administration officials said they believed Mr Trump had not been briefed in any detail about the steps to place ‘implants,’ software code that can be used for surveillance or attack, inside the Russian grid. Pentagon and intelligence officials described broad hesitation to go into detail with Mr Trump about operations against Russia for concern over his reaction, and the possibility that he might countermand it or discuss it with foreign officials.”
https://twitter.com/27khv/status/1260488599486836736
Mainstream liberal US discourse has accomplished an amazing feat of Orwellian doublethink with regard to the notion that unelected power structures are running things without the consent of the nation’s official elected government. On the one hand there’s been a nonstop deluge of Daily Beast articles since Trump’s election saying anyone who dares to suggest the existence of a “deep state” in America is a conspiracy kook, but on the other hand there’s also been constant praise for the insider “adults in the room” who ensure from within the administration that Trump doesn’t demolish America’s precious norms while in office. This cognitive two-step became even more reified after comments from Iraq war architect Bill Kristol tweeting that he’d “prefer the deep state to the Trump state,” and the famous anonymous NYT op-ed authored by a “senior official in the Trump administration” (now known to have been former chief of staff at the DHS Miles Taylor) saying administration officials are working together against Trump to “thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.” The understanding of a deep state in America has become even more obfuscated by the other side of America’s fake partisan divide, with Trump supporters now using that term to essentially mean “anyone who doesn’t like Donald Trump.” That erroneous understanding has now become so prevalently associated with the term “deep state” that it has lost all use in meaningful discourse and is better off being avoided altogether if you want to point at something real.
In reality the term deep state is meant to refer not to anyone who opposes Trump, nor to a secret cabal of baby-eating Satanists, but simply to the tendency among government agencies and plutocrats to form loose alliances with each other and collaborate toward common agendas. It’s a term used for political analysis to describe large-scale power agendas that are largely playing out right out in the open, hidden in plain sight. It doesn’t take a ton of investigative reporting and WikiLeaks drops to understand that there’s been a collective of operatives mostly running the Trump administration while the actual elected president tweets and yells at the talking heads on Fox News. It’s also not hard to brush away the insubstantial narrative fluff and see that US policies have remained more or less unbroken regardless of which elected officials have been in office, and it doesn’t take a Nostradamus to predict that that will continue to be the case after Trump is replaced by the next empty husk in the White House. The US government simply is not what Americans were taught it is in school, and it is not what they tell you it is in the news. It’s a mostly unelected power establishment which operates in the interests of imperialist expansionism and oligarchic control, with the official elected government operating sort of like the unplugged video game controller you hand your kid brother to keep him from whining for a chance to play.
All this fuss over who really won the election is missing the point. People are bickering over which oligarchic puppet should be sworn in on Jan 20 when all the evidence we’ve been given shows that nobody gets to become president if they inconvenience real power in any way, and if they do inconvenience real power they are simply ignored. That is the direction we should all be looking. Not at who’s president, but why things stay the same no matter who’s president.
Deep State Member Admits Sabotage Of Trump’s Policies
Moon of Alabama, Nov 13 2020
James Jeffrey was always a part of the ‘deep state’ that tried to sabotage Trump’s policies. As Katie Bo Williams writes in Defense One:
Four years after signing the now-infamous “Never Trump” letter condemning then-presidential candidate Donald Trump as a danger to America, retiring diplomat Jim Jeffrey is recommending that the incoming Biden administration stick with Trump’s foreign policy in the Middle East. But even as he praises the president’s support of what he describes as a successful “realpolitik” approach to the region, he acknowledges that his team routinely misled senior leaders about troop levels in Syria. In a particularly frank moment during an exit interview, departing Syria envoy Jim Jeffrey acknowledged to me that when it came to troop levels there, “We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there.” The actual number of troops in north-east Syria is “a lot more than” the two hundred troops Trump agreed to leave there in 2019. Jeffrey said: “What Syria withdrawal? There was never a Syria withdrawal. When the situation in north-east Syria had been fairly stable after we defeated ISIS, he was inclined to pull out. In each case, we then decided to come up with five better arguments for why we needed to stay. And we succeeded both times. That’s the story.” Officially, Trump last year agreed to keep about 200 US troops stationed in north-east Syria to “secure” oil fields held by the US’ Kurdish allies in the fight against ISIS. It is generally accepted that the actual number is now higher than that. Anonymous officials put the number at about 900 today. The precise figure is classified and remains unknown even, it appears, to members of Trump’s administration keen to end the so-called “forever wars.”
That the Pentagon, the State Department and the various secret services were and are lying to Trump is not new. That one of their guys now openly admits this is refreshing. As Trump now knows this, and recently installed his people in the Pentagon, he may draw the right conclusions from it not only for Syria but also for Afghanistan.
Pres Trump’s decapitation strike on the Pentagon this week is raising fears that the US will accelerate the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, putting newly-installed leaders on a collision course with top generals and others who are urging a more deliberate drawdown. Current and former administration officials say Trump fired Sec Def Mark Esper Monday in part over his opposition to accelerating troop draw-downs world-wide, and especially in Afghanistan. The upheaval accelerated on Tuesday with the resignation of three high-level civilians and the installation of loyalists who are expected to ram through Trump’s agenda, and continued on Wednesday when retired Army Col Douglas Macgregor, an outspoken critic of the war in Afghanistan, was brought on as senior adviser to new acting Sec Def Chris Miller. Any move to accelerate withdrawals would set up a clash with the nation’s top generals and other civilians, who have argued publicly against leaving Afghanistan too quickly while the security situation remains volatile. It would also complicate Biden’s pledge to leave a small number of troops in the country to guard against terror attacks. Marc Polymeropoulos, a retired CIA senior operations officer, said: “A precipitous and what appears to be near total withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan, not on a conditions-based approach advocated by our military, political and intelligence leadership but rather on an old campaign promise by President Trump now carried out by hyperpartisan Trump loyalists installed in a last-minute purge of DoD, is both reckless and will not make America safer.”
The US occupation of Afghanistan began on Oct 7 2001. Nineteen years and an obviously lost war later, the removal of US troops from the country is still ‘precipitous’? Macgregor and Sec Def Miller should draw up a direct order to the commanding general of CENTCOM that tells him to remove all troops from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq within the next 30 days. Trump must sign it. Should CENTCOM fail to follow the order by the Commander in Chief its leader must be replaced and court-martialed. That is how the chain of command should actually work. It would be nice to see it for once happening that way.
As Trump rejects US election, Biden signals continued regime change abroad
Aaron Maté, The Grayzone, Nov 13 2020
With Trump rejecting the US election outcome and the Biden team advocating continued regime change abroad, Max Blumenthal on US hegemony coming home to roost. As President Trump refuses to concede over baseless allegations of widespread fraud, the Biden team has sent signals that there will be little to no transition away from US regime change abroad. The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal discusses Trump’s rejection of democracy at home, and the records of the likely Biden cabinet members who have adopted the same attitude to governments around the world.
What Biden’s election means for Venezuela
Anya Parampil, The Grayzone, Nov 13 2020
Leo Flores of CODEPINK joins Anya Parampil to discuss what the election of Joe Biden will mean for US Venezuela policy, and the importance of Venezuela’s upcoming parliamentary elections in preserving the country’s sovereignty.
Niqnaq 