“Conspiracy theory” is a term that at once strikes fear and anxiety in the hearts of most every public figure, particularly journalists and academics. Since the 1960s the label has become a disciplinary device that has been overwhelmingly effective in defining certain events off limits to inquiry or debate. Especially in the United States raising legitimate questions about dubious official narratives destined to inform public opinion (and thereby public policy) is a major thought crime that must be cauterized from the public psyche at all costs.

CIA Conspiracy Theory’s acutely negative connotations may be traced to liberal historian Richard Hofstadter’s well-known fusillades against the “New Right.” Yet it was the Central Intelligence Agency that likely played the greatest role in effectively “weaponizing” the term. In the groundswell of public skepticism toward the Warren Commission’s findings on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the CIA sent a detailed directive to all of its bureaus. Titled “Countering Criticism of the Warren Commission Report,” the dispatch played a definitive role in making the “conspiracy theory” term a weapon to be wielded against almost any individual or group calling the government’s increasingly clandestine programs and activities into question.

This important memorandum and its broad implications for American politics and public discourse are detailed in a book by Florida State University political scientist Lance deHaven-Smith, Conspiracy Theory in America. Dr. deHaven-Smith devised the state crimes against democracy concept to interpret and explain potential government complicity in events such as the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the major political assassinations of the 1960s, and 9/11.

CIA Document 1035-960 was released in response to a 1976 FOIA request by the New York Times. The directive is especially significant because it outlines the CIA’s concern regarding “the whole reputation of the American government” vis-à-vis the Warren Commission Report. The agency was especially interested in maintaining its own image and role as it “contributed information to the [Warren] investigation.”

The memorandum lays out a detailed series of actions and techniques for “countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists, so as to inhibit the circulation of such claims in other countries.” For example, approaching “friendly elite contacts (especially politicians and editors)” to remind them of the Warren Commission’s integrity and soundness should be prioritized. “[T]he charges of the critics are without serious foundation,” the document reads, and “further speculative discussion only plays in to the hands of the [Communist] opposition.”

The agency also directed its members “[t]o employ propaganda assets to [negate] and refute the attacks of the critics. Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose.”

1035-960 further delineates specific techniques for countering “conspiratorial” arguments centering on the Warren Commission’s findings. Such responses and their coupling with the pejorative label have been routinely wheeled out in various guises by corporate media outlets, commentators and political leaders to this day against those demanding truth and accountability about momentous public events.

NEW YORK — Documents released on Saturday related to the wiretapping of former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page reveal information that contributed to the government’s application to monitor Page originated with the State Department under the Obama administration in October 2016.

By Aaron Klein
Breitbart.com

That detail may be particularly relevant since numerous officials from John Kerry’s State Department have been fingered for playing roles in the distribution – and in one case, possibly also the compilation – of the largely discredited, 35-page anti-Trump dossier which focused in significant part on Page.

Much of the interaction between the State Department and the dossier author took place just prior to the October 2016 date mentioned in the newly released Page documents. Dossier author Christopher Steele, a former British spy, was commissioned to produce the questionable document by the controversial Fusion GPS opposition research firm, which was paid for its anti-Trump work by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

ZeroHedge.com

The Wall Street Journal continues to counter  the  liberal mainstream media's Trump Derangement Syndrome, dropping uncomfortable truth-bombs and refusing to back off its intense pressure to get to the truth and hold those responsible, accountable (in a forum that is hard for the establishment to shrug off as 'Alt-Right' or 'Nazi' or be 'punished' by search- and social-media-giants).

And once again Kimberley Strassel - who by now has become the focus of social media attacks for her truth-seeking reporting - does it again this morning, as she points out - after his 'treasonous' outbursts, that Obama's CIA Director John Brennan acknowledges that it was him egging on the FBI's probe of Trump and Russia.

By Sidney Powell | Former federal prosecutor
TheDailyCaller.com

The frenzied furor and fomented outrage over President Donald Trump’s reluctance to express blind trust for our “intelligence community” defy reason and reality. In their choreographed cries of contempt for Mr. Trump, the “left’s” increasingly shrill proclamations of political apocalypse make “Chicken Little” look rational. At least we’ve moved on from the impending annihilation from the nuclear war with North Korea.

Power is the only thing leftists worship, and they are unraveling in front of our eyes without it. They can’t control Mr. Trump. That alone drives them insane. They have no policies that work. Cities and states they control are criminal sanctuaries and bankrupt cesspools. Check out San Francisco, Portland and Chicago.

Each of the president’s remarkable accomplishments — from unprecedented high employment, our booming economy and the tax cuts to his historic summit with Kim Jong-un — highlights their abject failures and serves to prick their narcissistic egos. The country is doing better without them every day. Even worse, they are desperate to keep their countless crimes and abuses covered up.

We know that there are many honorable, dedicated and legitimate members of our multiple intelligence and law enforcement agencies who strive to protect us the right way every day. So, why might any of us not just declare blind trust for our “intelligence community” writ large? Let me count the ways.

William Binney, former Technical Director of NSA goes over the proof that the DNC emails published by Guccifer 2.0 were downloaded locally and not hacked remotely, as perpetrated by the Establishment politicians, the US Department of Justice and in an Intelligence Community Assessment Report by selected analysts from NSA, CIA and FBI issued in January 24, 2017.

Binney takes us back to the chaos of the summer of 2016, during the height of the presidential campaign, with leaks and hacks being reported and published virtually every week. Binney says, “First of all, the original Guccifer was Romanian hacker who was picked up and arrested…then, in July [2016], when WikiLeaks was getting ready to publish a lot of the emails, all of a sudden, Guccifer 2.0 appeared. The original Guccifer thought that this Guccifer 2.0 was a fabrication…

“Guccifer 2.0 started claiming that he hacked the DNC and he had data from the DNC and he was doing it for the Russians. So he then later on, put this data out on the web as the data that he’d hacked from Russia from the DNC.”

Binney continues, “So, he [Guccifer 2.0] claimed that. So now we had some data to look at, forensically to look and see exactly what we could tell from the data, itself; what it meant and whether or not it was really a hack – and that’s exactly what we did.”

Binney says the highest transfer rate was 49.1 megabytes per second, which is much faster than possible from a remote online connection. He says some colleagues challenged this assumption and ran various tests, from the Netherlands, Albania, Belgrade and in the UK and he says, “The fastest rate we got was from a data center in New Jersey…to a data center in the UK and that was 12 megabytes per second, which is less than a fourth of the rate necessary to transfer the data, as it was listed from Guccifer 2.0…However, it is the perfect download rate for a thumb drive.” He says their findings don’t prove who did it but they do prove that the data breach was local and did not consist of an overseas hack.

The next observation made by Binney seems to mesh with statements recently made by alleged Seth Rich murder witness, “Luke” who claims that US Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had long been running an operation to monitor and to manipulate the DNC’s emails.

Guccifer 2.0 posted data on July 5th and on September 1st, 2016. “If you looked at it and you ignored the hour and the date but looked at minutes seconds and milliseconds, those two datasets merged just like that. So, that meant that Guccifer 2.0 was manipulating the data. He was taking one file down, splitting it into two parts, issuing one for the 5th of July and one for the 1st of September; so he’s fabricating…this shows he’s manipulating and and changing the data and so, the whole thing about Guccifer 2.0 is a fabrication…it’s worse than that, though…”

Binney makes a face and describes how the FBI and the CIA were basing their whole case about Russian hacking on this fabricated data and more embarrassingly for him, since he worked there for decades, NSA officially stated that it had “moderate confidence” that the emails were authentic.

Binney says NSA has access to all Internet traffic and are able to categorically say who hacked what from where. The fact that they never came forward with these details is what initially told him that the US Government’s allegations about the DNC emails are false.

Former FBI Director James Comey, former CIA Director John Brennan and other members of the US political establishment are using this fabricated Guccifer 2.0 data as evidence of Russian hacking. Their chicanery is based on digital manipulation that is easy for anybody to understand. Even worse, they and other establishment Democrats keep repeating that “17 US intelligence agencies” have vouched for the authenticity of these Guccifer 2.0 logs, which is a lie.

Meanwhile, WikiLeaks publisher, Julian Assange has offered to give proof from his end that the DNC emails were not hacked by the Russians and Kim Dotcom, New Zealand founder of MegaUpload has offered to provide evidence that Seth Rich was the leaker.

Binney confirms that an FBI report exists, which says that Seth Rich’s computer had information going back and forth to WikiLeaks and that NSA would easily be able to substantiate this report.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes sat for an interview with his Wisconsin colleague Sean Duffy. The interview was recorded for Rep. Duffy’s Plaidcast. Adam Kredo reports on the interview for the Washington Free Beacon in “Intel Chair: FBI, DOJ Obstructing Trump Probe in Hope of Dem Takeover in Congress.” I have tracked down an embeddable version of the podcast and posted it below (about 30 minutes).

I have found Rep. Nunes to be a reliable guide to the issues culminating in the appointment of Robert Mueller as Special Counsel. Although the interview covers some of the same ground that Nunes went over with Maria Bartiromo on FNC’s Sunday Morning Futures earlier this week, I think this is also worth your time.

Quotable quote: “After seven or eight months of stonewalling, we realized they
[the FBI and DOJ] had no intelligence in the opening of that
[counterintelligence] investigation.”
 

These events should anger any red-blooded American who believes in representative democracy and the importance of the rule of law
 

By Willis L. Krumholz
TheFederalist.com

The intelligence bureaucracies spied on the Donald Trump campaign: Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants were granted because of a Hillary Clinton-funded and unverified document, national-security letters were issued to allow warrantless spying, and the unprecedented but not-illegal-per-se unmasking of Trump officials’ conversations with non-U.S. persons was shockingly routine.

Yet the news of a CIA-connected human source operating as far back as April or May of 2016 is about more than just spying. It is the latest example in what now looks to be a long line of attempted setups by the Clinton team, many times aided and abetted by our intelligence bureaucracies.

These events should anger any red blooded American who believes in representative democracy and the importance of the rule of law. Let’s review eight examples.

1. CIA And FBI ‘Human Intelligence’

We’ve just learned about Stefan Halper, a CIA-connected Cambridge professor who — working for the FBI — contacted Trump advisers Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, and Sam Clovis during the 2016 election, to investigate what they might know about suspicions of collusion with Russia. Former Trump campaign aide Michael Caputo has claimed that he was approached by an unknown second U.S. intelligence community asset in early May of 2016.

The FBI says that the Russia investigation began in July, because of something Papadopoulos said to an Australian diplomat in May. Papadopoulos had supposedly told the Australian diplomat something about Russia having information that “could be damaging” to Clinton. Papadopoulos allegedly heard this from Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese-born professor who allegedly claimed to have close ties with Russia.

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team charged Papadopoulos — unconvincingly — with lying to investigators, because Papadopoulos said his contacts with Mifsud began before he was on the Trump campaign. Actually, the contacts started after he “learned he would be a foreign policy advisor for the campaign,” but before the campaign made a public announcement that he was to be an advisor.

Mifsud is strangely now in hiding, possibly fearing for his life. Lee Smith details Mifsud’s ties to Western intelligence agencies, and Margot Cleveland suspects Mifsud may have been a U.S. intelligence plant along with Halper.

Glenn Greenwald helps unpack the Intelligence Agencies spying on the Trump campaign BEFORE RussiaGate.