Those who read my memos know I am a devoted reader of The Naval War College Review having attended a few course there decades ago.
Over the years I have watched as their major article focus has become concentrated on China. In the recent publication at least three caught my attention and I hope my brief synopsis will do them justice. (See 1, 1a and 1b below.)
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John Brennan is as unreliable as Comey and certainly has expressed his hatred for Trump . (See 2 below.)
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Warning to Iran:
"Liberman: Syria will not become a forward base for Iran
Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman commented this morning on the recent Iranian threats towards Israel and clarified that the Israeli government will not allow Syria to become a forward base for Iran. He also said that Israel’s prime goal is to prevent the next war.
In a Sunday morning radio interview, Israeli Minister of Defense Avigdor Liberman commented on Iran’s recent threats towards Israel: “Israel is operating only when there’s no alternative, and the situation that we have today is of no alternative. The Iranians are trying to deploy weapon systems in Syria that are only directed against Israel, and there’s a need here to be very determined and consistent. We will not allow Syria to become a forward base for Iran.”
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More leaking over Trump's selection to head the V.A. (Dr. Ronny Jackson) The Democrats continue to slow walk, throw roadblocks in his way and hold up over 200 appointments to flesh out his administration's chart. Merkel is coming soon and Trump does not even have an Ambassador to that country.
When it comes to Dr. Jackson, Trump relied largely upon Obama's vetting of the candidate yet, Demorcats could not come up with smears then.
Once again Democrats apparently place politics over the nation's interests because they cannot swallow Clinton's loss. No wonder, as Trump pointed out today, serving government and getting approval is like a pitched ball waiting to be smashed.
The Senate did not vote on my own Presidential Appointment but I was vetted by the FBI. I am amazed I was approved because I was writing critical memos back then having begun in 1960.
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1)" Beijing's Strategy to Build China Into a Maritime Great Power (MGP)"
By Liza Tobin
Tobin, organizes her essay into three parts.
The first describes the end state Beijing envisions. In other words,China has every intention of becoming a MGP and to do so realizes it must first overcome 600 years of its history of withdrawal from the world scene so has some catching up to accomplish.
The second part of the article discusses China's Comprehensive Strategy's Scope. China is not only prepared to do whatever it takes and has begun. The scope encompasses scientific and technological program, economic incentives, legal development and all relevant institutions of national power including government, Party, military civilian and commercial entities and finally media, diplomatic, cultural, people to people and academic outreach. In other words a determined full court press.
Finally, Tobin discusses the Strategy's Expanding Implications.
Stay tuned because China is on the "maritime move."
1a) "A Maritime Oil Blockade Against China - Tactically Tempting but Strategically flawed."
By Gabriel Collins
In this article Collins discusses the multitude of methods whereby China could be impacted by efforts to blockade access to oil, ie. blockades, interdiction,handling non-compliant vessels, to name a few.
China has available a variety of non-military responses in order to buy time involving supply-side options. These would take several forms, expanding pipeline capacity from Russia, fuel extenders (using extensive available methane indigenous sources.)
Historically, America has controlled the seas and might still be in a position to carry out an effective restraint but out fleet is small and a sustained effort would be impracticable. Meanwhile, China is building up its own fleet.
1b) The third article, "Rockets Red Glare - Why does China oppose THAAD in South Korea and what does it mean for U.S policy?"
By Robert C Watts 1V
China argues that THAAD creates a securit dilemma,upsets strategic stability and THAAD strengthens Northeast Asian Alliances.
America's introduction of THAAD's initial purpose was to send a clear message to N Korea that we would defend S Korea with our very latest equipment.
These three articles send clear messages that The Naval War College realizes China is an emerging Sea Power, will create challenges to our options and how we respond sends clear signals to our allies whether we are reliable and would be effective in carrying out our commitments to them.
I have consistently made this point in prior memos. As China expands her commercial interests her military establishment will have a valid argument they need increased funding to protect the nation's commercial expansions.
Russia is an irritant, China can become a significant and viable threat.
We allowed China to enter various world trade treaties in the hope/belief it would possibly bring about its democratization. This proved wrong because China has taken advantage and its trading partners did not respond. Trump is seeking to rectify what his predecessors allowed.
I believe China will make some modest concessions in order to avoid a more serious trade confrontation at this point. The question is will it be enough to allow Trump to declare victory?
Can we gain leverage over China by threatening we are prepared to take action against N Korea if "Fat Boy" is unwilling to accede to our demands. I fervently believe he will not nor do I believe Trump s ready to go to war. In the end I fear we ultimately lose the stalemate but might eke out enough crumbs to get off the hook if we do not overreach with too much blustering.
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2) John Brennan's Secret Trip to Moscow
The Russians say he did, and while some might say, well, these are the same Russians who helped put together the Steele dossier filled with "salacious and unverified" material, and may once again be playing with us, there is evidence that Brennan, the man who voted for communist Gus Hall for president, did make the trip in March 2016 for purposes unknown:
"It's no secret that Brennan was here," claimed Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Oleg Syromolotov. "But he didn't visit the Foreign Ministry. I know for sure that he met with the Federal Security Service (the successor agency to the Soviet KGB), and someone else."
No further remarks clarify what Brennan was allegedly doing in Moscow or what he discussed with the FSB. Syromolotov insists it had nothing to do with Russia's withdrawal from Syria.
Sputnik News, a Kremlin-controlled propaganda outlet, quotes CIA Director of Public Affairs Dean Boyd as affirming that Brennan did, in fact, discuss Syria during the visit. "Director Brennan," he allegedly said, "reiterated the US government's consistent support for a genuine political transition in Syria, and the need for [President Bashar] Assad's departure in order to facilitate a transition that reflects the will of the Syrian people."
News of the CIA chief's visit to the Russian capital was first made public on Monday by a Russian foreign ministry spokesman and subsequently confirmed by the CIA.
"It's no secret that Brennan was here," the Interfax news agency quoted foreign ministry spokesman Oleg Syromolotov as telling journalists in Moscow.
He added that the visit was not linked to Moscow's decision to start withdrawing military forces from Syria, which President Vladimir Putin announced on March 14.
Dean Boyd, director of the CIA's Office of Public Affairs, confirmed Monday that Brennan visited Moscow.
"Director Brennan traveled to Russia in early March to emphasize with Russian officials the importance of Russia and the Assad regime following through on their agreements to implement the cessation of hostilities in Syria," said Boyd.
He added that Brennan "also reiterated the U.S. government's consistent support for a genuine political transition in Syria, and the need for Assad's departure in order to facilitate a transition that reflects the will of the Syrian people."
Now, there are plenty of legitimate reasons for a CIA director to make a trip to Moscow, but when a Russian deputy foreign minister says he didn't visit the Foreign Ministry itself but did visit the KGB's successor, the Federal Security Service (FSB), it raises some eyebrows.
Consider that John Brennan is a Trump-hating perjurer who lied to Congress about secret surveillance. He is the crown prince of a Deep State fiefdom that has its own agenda. The end justifies the means in their world, and Brennan may have been up to his eyeballs in developing that "insurance policy" against a Trump victory.
Certainly, he ruthlessly defended his CIA turf. The mind hearkens back to the day when an op-ed in the Washington Post, that right-wing rag, called for Brennan to be fired for conducting illegal surveillance of the Senate Intelligence Committee and then lying about it:
Brennan was asked by NBC's Andrea Mitchell whether the CIA had illegally accessed Senate Intelligence Committee staff computers "to thwart an investigation by the committee into" the agency's past interrogation techniques. The accusation had been made earlier that day by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who said the CIA had "violated the separation-of-powers principles embodied in the United States Constitution." Brennan answered:
As far as the allegations of, you know, CIA hacking into, you know, Senate computers, nothing could be further from the truth. I mean, we wouldn't do that. I mean, that's – that's just beyond the – you know, the scope of reason in terms of what we would do. ...
And, you know, when the facts come out on this, I think a lot of people who are claiming that there has been this tremendous sort of spying and monitoring and hacking will be proved wrong.
(You can see the video of Brennan's answer here.)
Now we know that the truth was far different. The Post's Greg Miller reports:
CIA Director John O. Brennan has apologized to leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee after an agency investigation determined that its employees improperly searched computers used by committee staff to review classified files on interrogations of prisoners. ...
A statement released by the CIA on Tuesday acknowledged that agency employees had searched areas of that computer network that were supposed to be accessible only to committee investigators. Agency employees were attempting to discover how congressional aides had obtained a secret CIA internal report on the interrogation program.
Brennan once proudly admitted that he voted for Communist Party leader Gus Hall and openly supports liars and perjurers like Andrew McCabe, James Clapper, and James Comey. The possibility that he went to Moscow to personally obtain a copy of the dossier and similar material is real. As I wrote here recently, Brennan may have colluded with foreign spies to help Hillary Clinton.
There is another scenario as plausible as the one asserting that Team Trump, and perhaps President Trump himself, colluded with the Russians. It is that John Brennan himself colluded with the Russians to help Hillary win to guarantee his continued tenure as CIA director. It involves the infamous anti-Trump dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, used by Brenan and others as a pretext for a Trump investigation bonanza. As the American Spectator reported:
An article in the Guardian last week provides more confirmation that John Brennan was the American progenitor of political espionage aimed at defeating Donald Trump. One side did collude with foreign powers to tip the election – Hillary's.
Seeking to retain his position as CIA director under Hillary, Brennan teamed up with British spies and Estonian spies to cripple Trump's candidacy. He used their phony intelligence as a pretext for a multi-agency investigation into Trump, which led the FBI to probe a computer server connected to Trump Tower and gave cover to Susan Rice, among other Hillary supporters, to spy on Trump and his people[.] ...
The Guardian story is written in a style designed to flatter its sources (they are cast as high-minded whistle-blowers), but the upshot of it is devastating for them, nonetheless, and explains why all the criminal leaks against Trump first originated in the British press. According to the story, Brennan got his anti-Trump tips primarily from British spies but also Estonian spies and others. The story confirms that the seed of the espionage into Trump was planted by Estonia. The BBC's Paul Wood reported last year that the intelligence agency of an unnamed Baltic State had tipped Brennan off in April 2016 to a conversation purporting to show that the Kremlin was funneling cash into the Trump campaign.
Any other CIA director would have disregarded such a flaky tip, recognizing that Estonia was eager to see Trump lose (its officials had bought into Hillary's propaganda that Trump was going to pull out of NATO and leave Baltic countries exposed to Putin). But Brennan opportunistically seized on it, as he later that summer seized on the half-baked intelligence of British spy agencies (also full of officials who wanted to see Trump lose).
The Guardian says that British spy head Robert Hannigan "passed material in summer 2016 to the CIA chief, John Brennan." To ensure that these flaky tips leaked out, Brennan disseminated them on Capitol Hill. In August and September of 2016, he gave briefings to the "Gang of Eight" about them, which then turned up on the front page of the New York Times.
Could it be that Brennan himself is the leaker of classified information and is up to his eyeballs in using foreign sources to gather dirt on President Trump for the purpose of keeping him out of the White House? Brennan's briefing of Sen. Harry Reid, which included information from the Steele dossier, certainly is a key indicator of his participation in the campaign to keep or kick Donald Trump out of the White House:
According to "Russian Roulette," by Yahoo! News chief investigative correspondent Michael Isikoff and David Corn, the Washington bureau chief of the left-wing Mother Jones magazine, Brennan contacted Reid on Aug. 25, 2016, to brief him on the state of Russia's interference in the presidential campaign. Brennan briefed other members of the so-called Gang of Eight, but Reid is the only who took direct action.
Two days after the briefing, Reid wrote a letter to then-FBI Director James Comey asserting that "evidence of a direct connection between the Russian government and Donald Trump's presidential campaign continues to mount.
Reid's letter referred to some public reporting about Trump campaign associates' links to the Kremlin, but he also included a reference to information that may not have been made public at the time. He cited allegations that were included in the infamous Steele dossier about Carter Page, an adviser to the Trump campaign at the time.
It would seem that the trip to Russia we should be investigating is not Carter Page's, but rather John Brennan's.
Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor's Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.
News of the CIA chief's visit to the Russian capital was first made public on Monday by a Russian foreign ministry spokesman and subsequently confirmed by the CIA
"It's no secret that Brennan was here," the Interfax news agency quoted foreign ministry spokesman Oleg Syromolotov as telling journalists in Moscow.
He added that the visit was not linked to Moscow's decision to start withdrawing military forces from Syria, which President Vladimir Putin announced on March 14.
Dean Boyd, director of the CIA's Office of Public Affairs, confirmed Monday that Brennan visited Moscow.
"Director Brennan traveled to Russia in early March to emphasize with Russian officials the importance of Russia and the Assad regime following through on their agreements to implement the cessation of hostilities in Syria," said Boyd.
He added that Brennan "also reiterated the U.S. government's consistent support for a genuine political transition in Syria, and the need for Assad's departure in order to facilitate a transition that reflects the will of the Syrian people."
Now, there are plenty of legitimate reasons for a CIA director to make a trip to Moscow, but when a Russian deputy foreign minister says he didn't visit the Foreign Ministry itself but did visit the KGB's successor, the Federal Security Service (FSB), it raises some eyebrows.
Consider that John Brennan is a Trump-hating perjurer who lied to Congress about secret surveillance. He is the crown prince of a Deep State fiefdom that has its own agenda. The end justifies the means in their world, and Brennan may have been up to his eyeballs in developing that "insurance policy" against a Trump victory.
Certainly, he ruthlessly defended his CIA turf. The mind hearkens back to the day when an op-ed in the Washington Post, that right-wing rag, called for Brennan to be fired for conducting illegal surveillance of the Senate Intelligence Committee and then lying about it:
Brennan was asked by NBC's Andrea Mitchell whether the CIA had illegally accessed Senate Intelligence Committee staff computers "to thwart an investigation by the committee into" the agency's past interrogation techniques. The accusation had been made earlier that day by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who said the CIA had "violated the separation-of-powers principles embodied in the United States Constitution." Brennan answered:
As far as the allegations of, you know, CIA hacking into, you know, Senate computers, nothing could be further from the truth. I mean, we wouldn't do that. I mean, that's – that's just beyond the – you know, the scope of reason in terms of what we would do. ...
And, you know, when the facts come out on this, I think a lot of people who are claiming that there has been this tremendous sort of spying and monitoring and hacking will be proved wrong.
(You can see the video of Brennan's answer here.)
Now we know that the truth was far different. The Post's Greg Miller reports:
CIA Director John O. Brennan has apologized to leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee after an agency investigation determined that its employees improperly searched computers used by committee staff to review classified files on interrogations of prisoners. ...
A statement released by the CIA on Tuesday acknowledged that agency employees had searched areas of that computer network that were supposed to be accessible only to committee investigators. Agency employees were attempting to discover how congressional aides had obtained a secret CIA internal report on the interrogation program.++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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