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By Patrick Martin
 The Deep State and its media shills keep gunning for Trump, but, conceivably, they represent even a worse threat to humanity than the current president. 15 January 2019
[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n the wake of the one-two punch of articles in the New York Times and Washington Post suggesting that President Trump is an agent of the Russian government—or to be precise, that the FBI suspected that he was a Russian agent and opened a counterintelligence investigation (as the Times reports), and that Trump is concealing his private dealings with Putin as president (as the Post claims)—the American media has gone into a McCarthyite hysteria.
In the depths of the anti-Communist witch-hunt of the 1950s, with which the name of Senator Joseph McCarthy is indelibly associated, the question, “Are you now or have you ever been” … a member of the Communist Party, an agent of Moscow, etc., became almost stereotyped. It was leveled at actors, directors, screenwriters, left-wing political activists, even mid-level government officials, who were hauled before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee or McCarthy’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.
When President Trump made a prearranged call in to Jeannine Pirro of Fox News during her Saturday night program, she asked him, in a joking tone, “Are you now or have you ever worked for Russia, Mr. President?” Pirro was clearly phrasing the question as a way to mock the media assault spearheaded by the Times, and Trump responded in kind, denouncing the question as “the most insulting thing I’ve ever been asked.”
The Times and its media chorus responded, however, as Senator McCarthy would have. “Aha,” they declared, “Trump didn’t answer the question directly. He’s hiding something!” The newspaper’s web site noted the exchange with Pirro on Sunday, writing, “Mr. Trump did not directly answer the question.”
This became the media mantra over the next 24 hours.
The Associated Press: “[T]he president avoided directly answering when Pirro asked whether he currently is or has ever worked for Russia.”
The Hill: “President Trump late Saturday declined to directly answer a question from Fox News host Jeanine Pirro about whether he had ever ‘worked for Russia,’ calling it ‘insulting.’”
The Washington Post’s opinion editor, James Downie: Pirro’s question “triggered a two-minute rant, none of which included the word ‘no.’”
Similarly questions were raised on the Sunday television interview programs, with CNN’s Jake Tapper, host of “State of the Union,” playing a tape of the Pirro-Trump exchange and declaring, “The president did not directly answer the question.”
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he media commentary came full circle with a front page report by Peter Baker of the New York Times, published Monday, which began: “So it has come to this: The president of the United States was asked over the weekend whether he is a Russian agent. And he refused to directly answer.”
Baker’s “news analysis,” an editorial in all but name, declared that this question—in effect, whether Trump is guilty of treason, a capital offense—“has hung over his presidency now for two years.”
The obviously concocted frenzy over the “are you now or have you ever been” question is only one aspect of the campaign by the media, the Democratic Party and sections of the military-intelligence apparatus, which the WSWS has characterized as neo-McCarthyite, for good reason.
The “anti-Trump” coalition in ruling circles has brought together the neo-conservative warmongers who bear the main responsibility for the war in Iraq, the liberal imperialists who backed the war in Libya and the current US intervention in Syria, and direct representatives of the military-intelligence apparatus itself. This unholy alliance can be seen in three columns published over the weekend, in the wake of the Times and Post reports, all of them embracing the “Trump is a Russian agent” allegation.
On Monday the Washington Post published an op-ed column by Max Boot, one of the most notorious advocates of the Iraq war, under the scare headline, “Here are 18 reasons Trump could be a Russian asset.” In both style and substance, Boot is echoing McCarthy, who would stand at a podium declaring (always falsely) that he was in possession of a list of 18, or 59, or 240 “known communists” in one or another organization or government department.
Boot enumerates his claimed 18 reasons, mainly a rehash of the now well-publicized contacts between various Trump aides and Russian officials, as well as the Trump organization’s efforts to gain access to the Russian market. But he includes in his list of “reasons,” the fact that “Trump attacks and undermines the Justice Department and the FBI,” that he is “pulling U.S. troops out of Syria, handing that country to Russia and its ally Iran,” and that “Trump is sowing chaos in the government” through the partial shutdown and by installing “acting” appointees at top positions in the Pentagon and Justice Department, “thus furthering a Russian objective of undermining its chief adversary.”
In other words, virtually any action Trump takes in his conflict with the military-intelligence apparatus or the Democratic Party is cited as proof that he is a Russian stooge.
In Politico.com, former Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, the leading anti-Russia operative of the administration of President Bill Clinton, has a column headlined, “It’s Already Collusion.” Talbott dismisses any need to prove, through actual evidence, that Trump is a Russian agent. “It’s staring us in the face,” he argues, from the record of Trump’s foreign policy.
Talbott presents the Putin regime as the full-fledged revival of Stalinism, claiming that “the Cold War is back with several new and ominous features,” the main one being the alignment of the US president with the ruler in Moscow. “Trump is integral to Putin’s strategy to strengthen authoritarian regimes and undermine democracies around the world,” he writes, calling this policy an “unprecedented aberration” that “if it is allowed to persist—it will jeopardize our security.”
He concludes, “Trump has been colluding with a hostile Russia throughout his presidency. We’ll see if it started before that.”
Finally there is the column posted on the CNN website by Asha Rangappa, senior lecturer at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs and Yale University, and a former FBI agent who specialized in counterintelligence operations, working in New York City after the 9/11 attacks.
She writes, “As a former FBI agent who conducted investigations against foreign intelligence services, I know that the bureau would have had to possess strong evidence that Trump posed a national security threat to meet the threshold for opening such an investigation. But the more important question now is not how or why the case was opened, but whether it was ever closed.”
Rangappa notes that closing such an investigation happens in one of two ways, determining that there is no threat to national security (a false alarm), or by taking actions to “neutralize” the threat. The former FBI agent concedes that what she calls the normal methods of neutralizing an intelligence threat—monitoring, denial of access to information, feeding false information, seeking to recruit or bribe the agent, or expelling them from American soil—cannot be carried out against the president of the United States.
The former FBI agent argues that even if Mueller’s investigation has uncovered no criminal actions by President Trump, Mueller could still deliver material to Congress to demonstrate that “the threat to national security is ongoing,” allowing Congress to impeach Trump and remove him from office. She carefully avoids any suggestion of the use of force—certainly among the most common methods used by the intelligence services to “neutralize” targets—perhaps to avoid a visit by the Secret Service. But the implication is nonetheless there.
The resort to anti-democratic and conspiratorial methods by Trump’s opponents within the US ruling elite demonstrates that they are not genuinely hostile to his right-wing, authoritarian policies—the persecution of immigrants, the brazen racism, the militaristic bluster—but rather seek to substitute their own equally right-wing and equally authoritarian perspective, including massive censorship of the internet and stepped-up US military intervention in Syria, Ukraine and other areas along the borders of Russia.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Patrick Martin is a senior editor with wsws.org, a Marxian publication.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS
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 Western media barrage without any evidence: Instant demonisation of Russia, and particularly Putin. It went on and on and on. It never really stopped. Still hasn't and by now most Americans and many people around the world just "know" that the Russians shot down the Malaysian liner.
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he shoot-down of the MH17 Malaysian airliner over the conflict-zone in Ukraine’s civil war, on 17 July 2014, was finally judged, by a panel of five governments, on 24 May 2018. One of these five governments was a major suspect in the case, Ukraine itself. Ukraine had been granted, on 8 August 2014, absolute veto-power over the group’s ultimate verdict. The verdict that was announced on May 24th, was that Russia’s Government, which is hated by Ukraine’s Government, did this shoot-down and mass-murder of the 298 people on that plane. Any verdict that Ukraine had downed the plane was vetoed at the outset by Ukraine, and so Russia was declared guilty on May 24th of last year.
The 8 August 2014 agreement was that there can be no verdict in the case unless, and until, there is a verdict that has “the consent of all the parties” to the investigatory team. The official announcement said that no finding on the MH17 event would be published unless and until there has been “receipt of the consent of all parties who take part in the investigation.”
At that time, the team included four countries: Netherlands, Australia, Belgium, and Ukraine. All four signed it. A fifth member was later added, Malaysia, which likewise (though reluctantly) signed that 8 August 2014 agreement. If any one of those four (now five) Governments dissented from a proposed verdict, then that proposed verdict simply would be impossible to become publicly issued by the judging panel, as the verdict. (NOTE: I had been the only reporter in the English language to translate and report about that 8 August 2014 agreement — an agreement which still has never been made public except for two brief news-reports in Ukraine’s press.)
This panel calls itself the “Joint Investigation Team,” and it issued its verdict against Russia, in its 24 May 2018 presentation, finding that “the 53rd Anti Aircraft Missile brigade … of the Russian army from Kursk in the Russian Federation”, had shot down the airliner, and thus that Russia is guilty of having murdered the 298 people. Immediately, the Washington Post reported that, “Criminal charges against the Russian military or Russia’s government probably would exacerbate tensions between the Kremlin and the West even further, implicating Russian officials in the deaths of European tourists on their way to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.” Then, on the very next day, May 25th, Britain’s Telegraph bannered “Netherlands and Australia call for compensation for MH17 victims as they accuse Russia of downing plane”, and reported that “Australia and the Netherlands have said they hold Russia legally responsible for the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight 17 over Ukraine in 2014 and will seek reparations for relatives of the 298 people killed.”
Never before in history has a suspect in a murder-case — much less in a mass-murder case, such as this was — been granted veto-power over the verdict in the case. This situation is therefore unprecedented, historic.
On December 31st, the final day of 2018, I described in detail the actual case against Ukraine, and emailed it to all newsmedia in The West. The JIT team wasn’t allowed to consider any case against Ukraine, but there it was, for any news-medium to provide to its audience that wishes to do so. (No major news-medium accepted and published it.) Here will be only a summary presentation of that case. A significant portion of the reader-comments, to that article, said that it was too long to read; so, here is a summary:
The first part of the case is that the evidence which the JIT team had presented on May 24th included details that actually convict Ukraine, but that the JIT’s presentation simply ignored, didn’t even consider. In other words, the first part uses the very same objects of evidence that JIT said convict Russia. Therefore, Russia’s case here is built upon identically the same evidence that JIT had used in order to convict Russia.
The JIT’s May 24th presentation said that they had found parts of the missile which had destroyed the passenger plane. These parts were shown in their presentation. The JIT simply claimed that these parts came from the missile that had shot down the plane, but provided no evidence that it did, nor even that that missile had actually been found anywhere near the crash-site or had had anything to do with downing the MH17. They merely said that it did. Furthermore, they failed to present any provenance of the missile, any documentation of that missile’s ownership and control and use throughout the period since it was manufactured in 1986. No conclusion regarding either Russia or Ukraine can legally be reached about those missile-parts without knowing the missile’s provenance — whether it was owned and operated by Russia on 17 July 2014, or instead by Ukraine, or instead by the Ukrainian separatists, or by anyone else.
The transcript of the JIT’s May 24th presentation asserted that the key serial number on the two missile fragments is 1318869032, because “the number 9032 [in that number] is the unique identification number of this specific missile engine.” However, they failed to provide any evidence of the missile’s provenance.
On 17 September 2018, Russia’s Government documented the provenance of that missile, not only by means of the 9032, but by other serial numbers that were shown on the fragments in the JIT team’s May 24th presentation. Russia’s presentation discussed, in detail, 1318869032, 8868720, 886847379 and 9M38. All of those numbers that were visible on the fragments were shown to have been from one-and-the-same Buk missile. It had been manufactured in Russia in December 1986, and promptly sent to Ukraine in 1986, and was never thereafter inside Russia, nor in the possession of the Russian Government. It stayed in Ukraine. For example, the record on 886847379 shows that on 29 December 1986, this missile, which had been assembled only five days earlier, was sent to what today is the 223rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade in Ternopol Ukraine, where it became part of the Ukrainian Armed Forces upon Ukraine’s independence in 1991.
The September 17th video by Russia, in English, describes the missile’s exact provenance, and shows all of the documents on its provenance; and here is a summary of that video, in which the cited timings are marked in parentheses, for ease of the reader’s verification:
The video says (6:00) that the key number on the parts that were shown is actually 8868720, because “the last four digits, 8720, are a unique factory serial number, of this specific missile.” The missile was given (9:49) “military stock number 886847379” and (10:20) “was sent via the railway to military unit 20152 on December 29, 1986.” That military unit’s (10:50) “current name is the 223rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade” in the Ternopol region of Ukraine. (11:35) “Currently, this brigade is equipped with Buk missile systems and is now stationed in the town of Stryi in the Lvov region of Ukraine. What is of particular interest is that since 2014, this unit of the 223rd … has been engaged on an ongoing basis in the so-called anti-terrorist operation in [Ukraine’s war against] the territory of the Donetsk and Lugansk Republics [the breakaway formerly Ukrainian region].”
Consequently, if this Buk did shoot down the MH17, as the JIT claims it did, then Ukraine shot down the MH17.
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he U.S.-allied team never yet has responded to Russia’s documentation of the provenance of that Buk missile. Perhaps the JIT already recognized, at the time of their May 24th presentation, that Russia might possess documentation on that missile’s provenance, and they just didn’t want it. At that time, on May 24th, they said in their detailed news-conference, that they wouldn’t want to “turn to the Russian authorities to obtain information about this subject”. That refusal, in advance, to accept such information from Russia, about this missile’s provenance, provided them an excuse to ignore any documentation that Russia might possess, and could present in response to the JIT’s verdict. Perhaps publication of the present article (this summary of my lengthier presentation) will help to generate a response from the JIT. That is why this article, like its lengthier predecessor, is being submitted to all newsmedia in The West.
On 20 September 2018, just three days after Russia had made its presentation, the Dutch Government headlined that “JIT countries confirm their support for Dutch prosecution of MH17 suspects”, and opened: “On Wednesday in New York the Netherlands, Australia, Belgium, Malaysia and Ukraine confirmed their political support and cooperation with regard to the prosecution of MH17 suspects in the Netherlands.” The Dutch Government now will prosecute Russia for the MH17 downing.
Exactly a year before that, on 20 September 2017, the now 5 countries in the JIT had signed a joint “Memorandum of Understanding”, saying “Arrangements for signatories and other grieving nations to make financial contributions to the national proceedings in the Netherlands will be laid down in a financial memorandum of understanding” and that “This Memorandum will remain in effect for five years and will be automatically extended for successive five-year periods.” So, they intend to continue forever their ‘investigation’ into MH17, until they can present to the world evidence that Russia did it, and they are seeking from the global public, donations to help pay for this ‘investigation’. Apparently, they know that their present ‘case’ stinks. They don’t have any evidence (other than the doctored ‘evidence’ they had already stopped even citing) that Russia had been involved, at all, in this mass-murder.
When that U.S.-allied team had made its May 24th presentation, the serial numbers on the missile-fragments which were shown in the photos they presented, were not documented, at all, as to the missile’s provenance records — its ownership and location throughout its existence. Those numbers were visible on the missile-parts, but were simply ignored as tools by which to identify the missile’s provenance.
The JIT team isn’t asking Russia for the team to examine those logbooks that Russia had shown in its presentation on September 17th, but instead ignores the Russian presentation, perhaps hoping that the public won’t ever get to see this documentation, or even to know about it. But here it is, for anyone who wants to see it.
And here, again, is the lengthier presentation I provided on December 31st, that Ukraine perpetrated the MH17 shoot-down, for anyone who wants to see that.
This is the verdict that Ukraine’s Government vetoes, at the JIT. It certainly is not the JIT’s verdict. It can’t be.
As regards the 8 August 2014 agreement that all members of the JIT signed, the details of it remain secret to the present day. On 20 November 2014, Russian Television bannered “Dutch government refuses to reveal ‘secret deal’ into MH17 crash probe” and reported: “The Dutch government has refused to reveal details of a secret pact between members of the Joint Investigation Team examining the downed Flight MH17. If the participants, including Ukraine, don’t want information to be released, it will be kept secret. The respected Dutch publication [actually leading science publisher] Elsevier made a request to the Dutch Ministry of Security and Justice under the Freedom of Information Act to disclose the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) agreement,” but that request was refused.
The MH17 case was fixed at its start, and the details of how it was, are to remain hidden forever. But the Dutch Government is seeking donations to help it to continue forever its prosecution against Russia, as the perpetrator of the MH17 shoot-down.
What will it take to bring America to live according to its own self image?
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Nuclear Armageddon or peace? That is the question.
