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Trump tweet:
Many dead, including women and children, in mindless CHEMICAL attack in Syria. Area of atrocity is in lockdown and encircled by Syrian Army, making it completely inaccessible to outside world. President Putin, Russia and Iran are responsible for backing Animal Assad. Big price…
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 8, 2018
The basic ideas here is that Trump was supposed to make relationship with Russia better, and counter a narrative that Russia was a problem, and responsible for things. The narrative being pushed is Russia is doing it. Word is a Deep State wanted this. I am not sure of Deep States meddle in policies of other nations, but I guess the idea is they didn’t.
Well, now this is about. If Russia did try to do things, and expected they could end up making Trump a puppet, it isn’t happening apparently.
Anyhow, this is the latest.
"I am my own thang. Any questions?" - Davis S Pumpkins.
The CIA Takeover of the Democratic Party : Part 3 of 4 [1]
by Patrick Martin
March 8 2018Y – I am posting this series because the Congressional mid-terms this year will change the balance of power if Republicans do not come out in force to vote their candidates.
The main reason is obvious – a majority to stonewall whatever is left of the Trump administration. I believe a real and present danger is also to be directed at the Second Amendment of the Constitution. The battle lines have been set and with continued false flags for gun ownership repeal – the end result is evident if Congress changes hands.
Patrick Martin researched and wrote an important series of articles on the crop of Democratic candidates for House races this year that I am reposting here ad-verbatim as Parts 2 to 4 of this series. His findings reveal a major shift “from being the party for the Pentagon and CIA to become the party of the Pentagon and CIA”.
Read on and come to your own conclusions! – Y

An extraordinary number of former intelligence and military operatives from the CIA, Pentagon, National Security Council and State Department are seeking nomination as Democratic candidates for Congress in the 2018 midterm elections.
The potential influx of military-intelligence personnel into the legislature has no precedent in US political history.
If the Democrats capture a majority in the House of Representatives on November 6, as widely predicted, candidates drawn from the military-intelligence apparatus will comprise as many as half of the new Democratic members of Congress.
They will hold the balance of power in the lower chamber of Congress.
Both push and pull are at work here. Democratic Party leaders are actively recruiting candidates with a military or intelligence background for competitive seats where there is the best chance of ousting an incumbent Republican or filling a vacancy, frequently clearing the field for a favored “star” recruit.
There are 57 candidates for the Democratic nomination in 44 congressional districts who boast as their major credential their years of service in intelligence, in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, at the State Department, or some combination of all three.
They make up the largest single occupational group running in the Democratic primaries that began March 6 in Texas and extend through mid-September, selecting the candidates who will appear on the general election ballot on November 6.
First: The number of candidates who openly proclaim their role in the CIA or military intelligence. In years past, such activities would be considered confidential, if not scandalous for a figure seeking public office. Not only would the candidates want to disguise their connections to the spy apparatus, the CIA itself would insist on it, particularly for those who worked in operations rather than analysis, since exposure, even long after leaving the agency, could be portrayed as compromising “sources and methods.”
This is no longer the case. The 2016 candidates drawn frm the shadow world of espionage, drone murders and and other forms of assassination positively glory in their records. And the CIA and the Pentagon have clearly placed no obstacles in their way.
Agents – No longer secret
We’ve already reviewed the cases of Elissa Slotkin, running in Michigan’s 8th District, who served three tours with the CIA in Baghdad, and Gina Ortiz Jones, an Air Force intelligence officer in Iraq, running for the Democratic nomination in the 23rd District of Texas. There are many others.
Abigail Spanberger, seeking the Democratic nomination in a district in the suburbs of Richmond, Virginia, has the following declaration at the top of her campaign website: “After nearly a decade serving in the CIA, I’m running for Congress in Virginia’s 7th District to fight for opportunity, equality and security for all Americans. My previous service as a law enforcement officer, a CIA officer, and a community volunteer has taught me the value of listening. Indeed!
Jesse Colvin, running in the 1st District of Maryland, spent six years in Army intelligence, including four combat deployments to Afghanistan and a year near the Demilitarized Zone between North Korea and South Korea.
His biography continues: “…As a Ranger, my four combat deployments in Afghanistan took place within a Joint Special Operations Task Force. I led intelligence teams whose work facilitated capture/kill missions of Taliban, al-Qaeda and other terrorist leaders. I managed a lethal drone program. I ran human intelligence sources. Every day, my team and I made dozens of decisions whose outcomes carried life and death consequences…”
Jeffrey Beals, seeking the Democratic nomination in the 19th District of New York, is now a school teacher, but writes on his website, “After beginning my career as a CIA intelligence officer, I joined the State Department … I answered the call to help our country in Iraq in 2004 and became one of the longest serving US diplomats of the Iraq War. Fluent in Arabic, I faced down nsurgents to set up the first diplomatic talks between our ambassador…and was decorated by both the US Army and the State Department.
Unfortunately for Beals, his fundraising is dwarfed by that of another military-intelligence rival for the nomination Patrick Ryan, a West Point graduate with two tours of duty in Iraq, “including a tour as the lead intelligence officer for an infantry battalion of 1,000 soldiers and officers responsible for ground operations in Mosul,” according to his campaign website, seeking to challenge two-term Republican incumbent John Faso in the Hudson Valley district.
Jonathan Ebel, running in the 13th District of Illinois, served four years as a naval intelligence officer, including on the staff of the US European Command n Stuttgart, Germany during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He now teaches religion at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Then there is Shelly Chauncey, seeking the Democratic nomination in the 5th District of Pennsylvania, in the Philadelphia suburbs. Her website strikes a feminist note
“Shelly served her nation for more than a decade with the Central Intelligence Agency. She began her career as a secretary and worked her way up to become a counter-intelligence officer. Shelly served as an undercover officer with the CIA in Latin America, East Asia and throughout the United States, providing logistical and counter-intelligence support to operatives abroad.”
Another campaign website touches on the domestic operations of the US spy machine. Omar Siddiqui, running in California’s 48th District describes his background as follows: “On the front lines of national defense, Mr. Siddiqui serves as a private advisor and consultant to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on issues of national security counter-terrorism and was formerly an advisor and community partner with the CIA.Mr. Siddiqui is presently director of special projects of the FBI National Citizens Academy Alumni Association…”
Commanders and Planners of the Iraq War
Barack Obama won the Democratic presidential nomination and the 2008 election in large measure by presenting himself as an opponent of the war in Iraq launched under George W. Bush. Once in office. However, he retained Bush’s defense secretary, former CIA Director Robert Gates, and continued the war for another three years, as well as escalating the long-running US war in Afghanistan.
It is noteworthy in this context that so many of the military-intelligence candidates for Democratic congressional nominations boast of their roles in the war in Iraq and even, in some cases, present it as the high point of their professional and even personal lives.
Dan McCready a Marine Corps veteran turned clean energy millionaire backed by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the 9th district of North Carolina.
The Iraq War veterans are either officers, giving them command responsibility in one of the great crimes of the 21st century, or served in special forces units like the Army Rangers and the Navy SEALs, engaging in covert operations that were among the bloodiest and most brutal of the war, or had high-level responsibility at the Pentagon or the NSC.
Daniel Helmer, running in Virginia’s 10th Congressional District against five other well-financed candidates—including former State Department official Alison Friedman, who has already topped the $1 million mark – says remarkably little about what he did in Afghanistan and Iraq.
But Helmer boasts perhaps the most extensive list of endorsements by retired national security officials of any candidate in the country, including eight generals and admirals, two former deputy directors of the CIA, Avril Haines and David Cohen, and Michele Flournoy, former under secretary of defense for policy. What he did to earn their support is left to the imagination.
Richard Ojeda, elected as a West Virginia state senator in 2016, seeking the Democratic nomination in the 3rd Congressional District. covering the southern third of the state.
As the WSWS has reported Ojeda has based his political career on more than two decades in the US Army Airborne, including repeated tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. His last post was as executive director of Army recruiting in Beckley, seeking to convince youth in West Virginia and Virginia to become cannon fodder for the Pentagon.
Josh Butner, running in the 50th District of California against Republican Duncan Hunter, Jr., “served for 23 years in the United States Navy where he saw multiple combat deployments, most recently in Iraq and Afghanistan.” The career Navy SEAL says almost nothing about what he actually did in the top military assassination unit, but that is to be expected.
Dan Feehan is running to succeed incumbent Democrat Walz in the 1st Congressional District of Minnesota after Walz announced his candidacy for governor of that state. Feehan served as an active duty soldier and completed two combat tours of duty as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He then joined the Obama administration, first as a White House aide, then as an acting assistant secretary of defense in the Pentagon.
Andy Kim, running in the 3rd District of New Jersey, has actually raised more money than the incumbent Republican, Tom MacArthur. Kim worked at the Pentagon and as a strategic adviser to generals David Petraeus and John Allen while they were in command of US forces in Afghanistan. He then moved to the National Security Council, where he was Obama’s director Iraq for two years.
Maura Sullivan, seeking the Democratic nomination in New Hampshire’s 2nd District, where incumbent Democrat Carol Shea-Porter is retiring, was a Marine Corps officer, rising to the rank of captain and deploying to Fallujah, Iraq, scene of some he bloodiest battles and most horrific US war crimes of that war. She too joined the Obama administration as a civilian administrator at both the Department of Veterans Affairs and Pentagon.
Jason Crow is running in Colorado’s 6th Congressional District against incumbent Republican Mike Coffman, where he was selected by the DCCC as one of its top candidates in the Red-to-Blue program. He is a veteran of the 82nd Airborne Division,
then joined the Army Rangers and served two tours in Afghanistan as part of the Joint Special Operations Task Force.Matthew Morgan had a 20-year career in the Marine Corps ‘where I would deploy routinely overseas, culminating in several senior staff roles where I’d provide counsel to numerous military leaders, including the secretary of defense. Now he is the unopposed candidate for the Democratic nomination in Michigan’s 1st Congressional District, and is currently held by first-term Republican Jack Bergman.
End of Part 3
[Y : The list will continue in Part 4 with a conclusion – Y]
Citation:
[1] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/03/08/dems-m08.htmlThe comment was that the tower was “well built”, but the apartment the man died in, didn’t have fire sprinkler systems. As per the Fox News article, the article stated that officials in the Guiliani Administration in NYC said it would of been too expensive to retrofit the apartment on the upper levels with a sprinkler system.
"I am my own thang. Any questions?" - Davis S Pumpkins.

