The
hysteria over Trump and Russia is in overdrive at the moment. Thank god
there are a few people still asking some relevant, if largely ignored,
questions. Mike Whitney poses them in the linked article.
Justin Raimondo of antiwar.com - private,
meanwhile, is worried that this is turning into a witch-hunt, a revival
of McCarthyism, to preserve the Deep State's new Cold War with Russia.
That, he believes, will provide the pretext to expand the investigations
against Trump to any dissidents who oppose the dangerously
confrontational atmosphere that has been created.
I think he's
right to be wary. Growing opposition to Trump is being exploited to
engineer not just a consensus that he's a bad president but the idea
that there is an evil puppet-master - a real-life James Bond villain -
in the form of Russia's Vladimir Putin.
I suspect we are being herded like sheep again, just as we have been on Iran, Libya and Syria.
Raimondo:
This pernicious campaign is an attempt to criminalize dissent from the
foreign policy “consensus.” It is an effort by powerful groups within
the national security bureaucracy, the media, and the
military-industrial complex to stamp out any opposition to their program
of perpetual war. ... The police state methods utilized by law
enforcement agencies in this country since 9/11 – universal
surveillance, and the whole menu of cyber-spying techniques exposed by
Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks – will be deployed. ...
They intend
to move against the Internet, in the name of guarding against “Russian
influence”: the phony campaign against “fake news” is already
well-advanced, along with legislative efforts to fund a “push back”
campaign against “Russia propaganda.” And I wouldn’t be at all surprised
if some attempt is made to abridge the right to publish material deemed
“pro-Russian,” either with direct legal sanctions or indirect methods,
such as stopping or inhibiting the funding of “suspicious” web sites.
