A new report has found that the intelligence community regularly distorts their own findings to fit in the with policies of the administration in power – and they’re doing it for both Democrats and Republicans. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: A new report’s found that intelligence communities regularly distort their own findings to fit into the political policies of the administration in power. And they’re doing it for both Democrats and Republicans. And they’ve been doing it for generations, haven’t they?
Farron Cousins: Yes, they have.
Mike Papantonio: Pick up this story.
Farron Cousins: So what the folks at The Intercept found via this new RAND study that came out was that it doesn’t matter who was in the White House. And it actually, what they said is it kind of turns the tables on the whole deep state theory, which is the intelligence community’s not necessarily the deep state. It is the person in the White House. Because specifically they looked at both the Trump years and the Obama years, and they found that what the intelligence community actually had, the real intelligence ran counter to what the administration’s narrative of the day was. With Obama, they found all this horrible stuff about Russia, but he was trying to make peace with Moscow, open up relations. So they went to him and said, okay, uh, it’s not that bad. Things are actually pretty good. They left all the real intelligence of the horrible things Putin was doing behind and just told him, hey, they love your policies. You’re doing wonderful. Good job, Mr. President.
Mike Papantonio: And then when they needed it, when Hillary Clinton lost the election, and they had to say, well, God, that’s because of the Russians. They turned all that. But that was driven by the White House, is the point.
Farron Cousins:: Yeah. And with Trump, it was with the Khashoggi murder.
Mike Papantonio: Exactly.
Farron Cousins: He wanted to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia. They had all this intelligence that they murdered Khashoggi
Mike Papantonio: Oh, yeah. Murdered him, dismembered him while the Prince was sitting there watching it on television. And so the agency comes out and says, well, you know, we can’t be sure. We don’t know. The, we don’t know is always the safe haven isn’t it?
Farron Cousins: Right.
Mike Papantonio: We don’t know. But we do know this. We know that that soulless, shameless psycho Cheney manipulated the intelligence organizations to verify that, yes, we need to go bomb the hell out of Iraq, that had nothing to do with 9/11. They manipulated that, they manipulated all the agencies and those agencies came to Cheney and Bush at that point and said, well, what is it you want? Well, we want weapons of mass destruction. It was an absolute lie. The agency knew it was a lie. I mean, the articles that are coming out, books that are coming out now, say, yeah, we knew it was a lie. We knew when we showed up at the UN and talked about these tubes, that was all. We knew that. But that is manipulation. That’s the kind of manipulation we’re talking about. And Cheney was able to kill a million people. The soulless freak of a person was able to kill 1 million people by manipulating these gutless wonders at the CIA and the NSA and the FBI. That’s the headline to this story, I think.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And I think it created a bit of a culture change within those agencies, rather than Cheney having to direct them, make your intelligence fit around this, they learned, and the generation that came up after them that did serve in Obama and Trump administrations, they knew, okay, rather than us having to be told to cook the intelligence, let’s cook it first.
Mike Papantonio: Is he still alive, by the way? Is he still? The last time they gave him a pig heart or some kind of mechanical heart, he’s like Darth Vader. Is he still alive?
Farron Cousins: He is.
Mike Papantonio: I mean, my God, what does it take for this guy just to move on? The ugliest story in American history was the product of this very concept in this story. That is the White House manipulating intelligence and a million people, a million deaths because this shameless psychopath freak Cheney took advantage of that and said, yeah, we need to invade Iraq, even though he knew it was an absolute lie.
Suspicious Activity: That it had helped dirty money flow through its branches around the world, including at least 800. Plaintiffs allege that the defendants provided money and medical goods to terrorist groups, Hezbollah and Jaysh al-Adl. This is a well organized business for these individuals that carry out these attacks. Terrorism is a business and they run it like a business. They knew about what was going on for a decade. They absolutely, absolutely no question about it knew that HSBC was washing money. They had every reason to understand it was for terrorism and it was for drug cartels. Took no action whatsoever.
These banks are involved, their accounts are connected, and they’re using them to mask the transactions. The more complicated they can make the transactions, the more distance they could put between the bad guys and a seemingly legitimate purpose of these funds. They pay $1.9 billion, which is a drop in the bucket compared to what they’ve made. And nobody goes to prison. These CEOs, these bankers that made this decision, they’re safe at home. They know what they’ve done. They know it’s resulted in the death of Americans, contractors and soldiers, not just hundreds but thousands. And we look the other way because they don’t look like criminals. The die cast, the people that are responsible for it, are on Wall Street. And they don’t look like criminals. It’s almost a suspension of disbelief. Sometimes I’ll have people call me and say, is this, is this real? Do they really get away with this? Yeah, they do.
