COLEEN ROWLEY, rowleyclan at earthlink.net, @ColeenRowley
Rowley, a retired FBI special agent and division legal counsel whose May 2002 memo to then-FBI Director Robert Mueller exposed some of the FBI’s pre-9/11 failures, was named one of TIME magazine’s “Persons of the Year” in 2002. She appeared on an Institute for Public Accuracy news in 2017: “9/11 Whistleblower Rowley on Mueller’s History of ‘Cover-up.’” Also see her piece “Comey and Mueller: Russiagate’s Mythical Heroes.”
She said today: “The real issue that I and most other ‘Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity’ (see their latest memo) care about is whether any real evidence exists proving Russia meaningfully interfered in the election (regardless of whether that interference was with Trump’s collusion or not). Trump himself should care about that since it insinuates he would not have won except for Russian interference and thus weakens his presidency. As always, Mueller relies without critical questioning or thought upon intelligence agencies’ specious ‘assessments’ similar to how he relied upon Colin Powell’s presentation of false ‘intelligence’ to the U.N. to help the Bush administration gin up their illegal and disastrous war on Iraq. There could be gaping holes in Mueller’s indictment of the 12 Russian GRU agents for hacking the DNC — and indeed independent forensic researchers have challenged some of the hacking evidence he used. Prosecutors like Mueller know they ‘can indict a ham sandwich’ (and indeed Mueller’s been wrong before on several big cases, including misidentifying the Anthrax killer). In this case Mueller could have been even more lax as he was virtually assured that it would be unlikely he would ever need to prove his allegations in court.
“What’s worse is that the U.S. and its economic and military rivals (and even some allied countries) have spent decades in cyber[space], spying and hacking of each others’ communications to gain competitive advantages. This has been going on forever. That’s why the NSA hires so many hackers for heaven’s sake! But doesn’t anyone remember the stuff of John LeCarre novels?! What more people should recognize is that what’s been a constant backdrop on the international scene and occasionally amounted, at most, to some trading of each others’ spies (when caught) has all of a sudden been used to put us on a dangerous war footing between nuclear superpowers and to end freedom of the press (via prosecution of Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange).”
ARUN GUPTA, arun.indypendent at gmail.com
Gupta was featured on an Institute for Public Accuracy news release in December: “Barr as AG? Bush and Trump Dovetail” in which — contrary to conventional wisdom — he showed the parallels between the Trump and George H.W. Bush administrations. He noted that Barr was in the CIA when Bush headed it and that Barr was Bush’s Attorney General when Bush pardoned Elliott Abrams and other officials for illegal activities. In January of this year, Elliott Abrams was the latest Bush administration official to join the Trump administration. See Gupta’s piece “Let’s Talk About George H.W. Bush’s Role in the Iran-Contra Scandal.”Now that it seems to suit their political agenda, some vocal advocates of “Russiagate” are finally highlighting Barr’s role in the Iran-Contra cover-up while they had been depicting him as a straight arrow. Also see IPA news release from December with Dennis Bernstein: “As Bush AG, Trump Nominee Barr Approved Cover-up Pardons.” Also see by Sam Husseini “Triumph of Conventional Wisdom: AP Expunges Iran/Contra Pardons from Barr’s Record” for the media watch group FAIR.
