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CIA Book Revised to Add Scathing Chapter About Trump
(JustPatriots.com)- Last week, the Central Intelligence Agency released a new chapter to its free publication “Getting to Know the President” which is a highly critical account of what it was like to brief candidate and President-elect Donald J. Trump.
The new chapter titled “Chapter 9: Donald J. Trump – a Unique Challenge” is the latest update to the book authored by retired intelligence officer John L. Helgerson. In the chapter, Trump’s transition is described as the most difficult since Richard Nixon.
The chapter does concede that Hillary Clinton and the DNC poisoned the relationship between President-elect Trump and the intelligence community with their garbage dossier. It also described Trump as a serious and engaged consumer of intelligence during his intelligence briefings.
In the introduction to Chapter 9, Helgerson portrays the intelligence community as being “caught up in partisan political disputes” as if the intelligence community itself wasn’t an active participant in these partisan political disputes.
The chapter portrays Trump as combative toward the intelligence community, claiming that his “uniquely rough way of dealing” with the IC made it a struggle to conduct briefings with him. Helgerson claims Trump was harder to work with than Richard Nixon because he was “suspicious and insecure about the intelligence process.”
Gosh, wonder why.
Unlike Richard Nixon who shut out the intelligence community, Helgerson explains Trump engaged with the IC, “but attacked it publicly.”
Again, is it any wonder?
“Getting to Know the President” was first published in 1996. Since then, Helgerson has updated the book to include each additional President. Though it is published by the CIA for US officials, the Central Intelligence Agency argues that the book reflects the author’s opinion and is not the official position of the CIA or any other government agency.
So why post a PDF of it to the CIA’s official website?
In a Twitter thread last week, former senior Trump intelligence official Cliff Sims blasted the CIA calling the chapter on Trump “inappropriate.” Sims argued that releasing this publication “contributes to the perception” that there are those within the intelligence community who act as “partisan attack dogs” against Donald Trump. Sims points out that some current intel officials are privately saying “Trump—A Unique Challenge” is nothing but a hit job.
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Victor Davis Hanson - Biden, Putin Summit: 4 Things To Know interview with Victor Davis Hanson via Fox News
Hoover Institution fellow Victor Davis Hanson discusses the US-Russia relationship.
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Putin holds a full Ukraine deck and dependent upon what he wishes to do will be his alone to determine. Yes we can try and isolate him, we can place penalties on him and drive him further into Xi's arm but eventually Putin is the one with the most leverage unless we choose to go to war, inflict heavy casualties in order to keep Ukraine independent and the odds of that seem very slim
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US - Russia relations worse than ever as the Russian army sets up new camps at the Ukrainian border and prepare to invade
Satellite images leaked off the back of a US intelligence report show large military camps forming outside the Ukrainian border as Putin continues his advance towards Europe, signaling an invasion shortly. At least 3 camps were spotted near the towns of Yelnya and Pogonovo, each approximately 125 mi ...
AND:
New York Post
Russia and China are testing Biden — and so far, he’s failing
By Mark Montgomery
Russia has massed nearly 90,000 troops near its border with Ukraine, while China is reportedly establishing a military base in Equatorial Guinea on the Atlantic Ocean. America’s adversaries are wasting no time in taking advantage of the Biden administration’s disorganized and unfocused national security strategy.
Russia has relentlessly attacked Ukrainian sovereignty since Moscow’s initial invasion in 2014. After illegally annexing Crimea, Russian gray-zone operatives have consistently supported breakaway regimes in eastern Ukraine and conducted disinformation campaigns against the elected government in Kiev.
Russian President Vladimir Putin initiated the current crisis with his decision not to withdraw Russian forces and equipment back to their home bases following “Zapad 21,” a large annual military exercise. These forces now threaten Ukrainian sovereignty and challenge Western assurances to support and defend democracies being targeted by authoritarian states.
Putin has been equally dismissive of President Biden’s warnings to cease and desist cyberattacks on our national critical infrastructure. A senior FBI official testifying to Congress reports that in the four months since Biden gave an ultimatum to Putin to stop harboring and supporting Russian hackers, “we have not seen a decrease in ransomware attacks in the past couple of months originating from Russia.” Russian cyber espionage efforts continue unabated despite Biden’s rhetoric.
China’s challenge is even more concerning. China’s massive and highly successful 20-year military buildup have made US naval and air operations in the Western Pacific extremely risky. China now threatens US citizens in Guam with ballistic and cruise missile systems. The Chinese Navy actually has surpassed the US Navy in number of ships, and given the Chinese Navy’s proximity to potential flashpoints in Taiwan, and the East and South China Seas, this reduces or eliminates remaining US military advantages in technology and experience.
China is now looking to spread its military influence outside East Asia. Beijing has a well-developed military base on the East Coast of Africa in Djibouti (in close proximity to a smaller and less well-equipped US facility). The Chinese have garnered naval and air “access” to many commercial facilities through their Belt and Road Initiative investments, even gaining ownership of facilities following defaults of host nation borrowers. The latest report of Chinese investments in Barbados show Beijing wants to gain access in the United States’ backyard.
The Chinese investment in Equatorial Guinea, on Africa’s Atlantic coast, is a long-term investment and more than the typical BRI “access grab.” This base could provide China with logistics and repair facilities on the Atlantic seaboard. This is not for today’s Chinese Navy (which is still focused on the Western Pacific) but for their navy of the 2030s and 2040s. This strategic investment once again demonstrates China’s extended vision of competition with the Unites States and other democracies throughout the 21st century.
The Biden response to this authoritarian challenge has been both muted as well as anchored in rhetoric about working with allies and partners. This is belied by a “go it alone” decision on Afghanistan that left our allies and partners flatfooted and embarrassed, led to a humanitarian debacle and ignored 20 years of strong partnership. This was followed by the embarrassing treatment of our oldest ally, France, in setting up a pact with Australia and the United Kingdom to deal with issues in the Pacific. This was especially ham-fisted as France is the European country with the largest military footprint in both the Pacific and Africa.
The Biden administration needs to face up to these authoritarian challenges with a more direct and forceful strategy.
First of all, it should continue recent administrations’ efforts to ensure Taiwan is able to defend itself and initiate a formal military financial assistance program to this beleaguered democracy to accelerate the effort. Next, invest in key US military capabilities that put China’s military forces on their back feet, such as expanded submarine production. Hold Russia accountable with tough, high-impact sanctions for its abetting of ransomware attacks and cyber espionage. Specifically, target the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline and advocate for Moscow’s removal from the SWIFT financial transaction system, a crucial link to the global economy.
Finally, we need a national-security strategy that identifies our adversaries clearly, explains the nature of the threats we face and details a long-term investment plan to ensure we can deter the threats and, if deterrence fails, defeat the enemy.
Mark Montgomery is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Finally:
China Will Soon Lead the U.S. in Tech
Beijing pulls ahead in 5G and artificial intelligence, while catching up in semiconductors.
By Graham Allison and Eric Schmidt
Central Intelligence Agency Director Bill Burns announced in October that the agency is establishing two new major “mission centers,” one focusing on China and the other on frontier technologies. This action reflects his judgment that China is the “most important geopolitical threat we face in the 21st century” and that the “main arena for competition and rivalry” between China and the U.S. will be advanced technologies. The question Americans should be asking is: Could China win the technology race?
A new report on the “Great Technological Rivalry” from Harvard’s Belfer Center answers: Yes. The report isn’t alarmist but nonetheless concludes that China has made such extraordinary leaps that it is now a full-spectrum peer competitor. In each of the foundational technologies of the 21st century—artificial intelligence, semiconductors, 5G wireless, quantum information science, biotechnology and green energy—China could soon be the global leader. In some areas, it is already No. 1.
Last year China produced 50% of the world’s computers and mobile phones; the U.S. produced only 6%. China produces 70 solar panels for each one produced in the U.S., sells four times the number of electric vehicles, and has nine times as many 5G base stations, with network speeds five times as fast as American equivalents.
In the advanced technology likely to have the greatest effect on economics and security in the coming decade—artificial intelligence—China is ahead of the U.S. in crucial areas. A spring 2021 report from the National Security Commission on AI warned that China is poised to overtake the U.S. as the global leader in AI by 2030. U.S.-born students are earning roughly as many doctorates each year in AI-related fields as in 1990, while China is on track to graduate twice as many science, technology engineering and mathematics Ph.D.s as the U.S. by 2025. The Harvard report adds that China now clearly tops the U.S. in practical AI applications, including facial recognition, voice recognition and fintech
The U.S. still has a dominant position in the semiconductor industry, which it has held for almost half a century. But China may soon catch up in two important arenas: semiconductor fabrication and chip design. China’s production of semiconductors has surpassed America’s, with its share of global production rising to 15% from less than 1% in 1990, while the U.S. share has fallen from 37% to 12%.
In 5G, the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board reports that China is on track to replicate the economic and military advantages America gained from being the global leader in 4G. China has installed 950,000 base stations to America’s 100,000. By the end of last year, 150 million Chinese were using 5G mobile phones with average speeds of 300 megabits a second, while only six million Americans had access to 5G with speeds of 60 megabits a second. America’s 5G service providers have put more focus on advertising their capabilities than on building infrastructure.
The Chinese Communist Party has made no secret of its ambitions: China intends to become the global leader in the technologies that will shape the decades ahead. The party’s 2013 economic reform plan highlighted technological innovation as the way to avoid the trap of getting stuck as a middle-income country. The celebrated “Made in China 2025” program aims to dominate domestic production of 10 emerging technologies, including 5G, AI and electric vehicles.
China also plans to extend its lead in robotics to sustain its position as the manufacturing workshop of the world. In May, Xi Jinping clearly stated his judgment that “technological innovation has become the main battleground of the global playing field, and competition for tech dominance will grow unprecedentedly fierce.” It is striking how successful China has been in meeting its ambitious technology targets.
In sum, although the U.S. remains the global leader in many important races, including aeronautics, medicine and nanotechnology, China has emerged as a serious competitor. Fortunately, Americans are beginning to wake up to this reality. In June the Senate passed the Innovation and Competition Act with bipartisan support, authorizing $250 billion of investment in science and technology over the next five years. Unfortunately, that legislation has stalled in the House and faces an uncertain future as part of the annual defense bill.
More recent congressional spending proposals, such as the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill and the $1.7 trillion social-spending package, have included investments in research and development in areas like green technologies and energy storage. While these investments are greatly needed, it will take more attention and investment in strategic technologies to compete with China. Unless the U.S. can organize a national response analogous to the mobilization that created the technologies that won World War II, China could soon dominate the technologies of the future and the opportunities they will create.
Mr. Allison, a professor of government at Harvard, is author of “Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?” (2017). Mr. Schmidt was CEO of Google, 2001-11 and executive chairman of Google and its successor, Alphabet Inc., 2011-17 and is a co-author of “The Age of AI: And Our Human Future,” (2021).
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Obama fundamentally transformed the military the way that he did the country.
Editors’ note: This article on the subversion of the American military is one of a series Daniel Greenfield has written on what is probably the greatest and most immediate threat to America’s security and survival. It’s a subject surrounded by silence. See the Freedom Center’s articles on this issue at its new campaign site, Committee for a Patriotic Military. Also make sure to read Daniel Greenfield’s booklet, Disloyal: How the Military Brass is Betraying Our Country.
By the time Barack Obama left office, every branch of the military was smaller than it had been on September 11. But the change in size concealed the true impact of America’s most left-wing president in undermining our national security and weakening us in the face of our enemies.
“I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone,” Obama famously boasted. He used the pen to unleash a blizzard of executive orders and memorandums. Some led to outraged protests, but some of his most devastating penned assaults on our nation’s military flew under the radar.
Read more...T. Belman. France also thought the Maginot Line would protect them. Hamas will now devote their efforts to build a fleet of drones which will fly over the fence. Of course. with the aid of additional funds it will receive for agreeing to calm. Israel would be better off with no such agreement. Achieving temporary calm is not worth it.
As for stopping the tunnel threat, surely Israel could have developed the technology to detect tunnel building in Israeli territory for a small fraction of the cost of building the fence.
IDF chief Aviv Kohavi says new 40-mile above- and below-ground fence is changing the reality along the restive border, where subterranean attacks have dogged the military for years
By Judah Ari Gross, TOI Dec 7, 2021,
An Israeli soldier stands guard during a ceremony opening the newly completed barrier above and below the Israel-Gaza border, Tuesday, Dec. 7, 2021.(AP Photo/Tsafrir Abayov)
NETIV HA’ASARA — Standing in the shadow of a 30-foot-high concrete wall, top defense officials announced Tuesday that Israel had completed construction of a massive barrier running the length of the Gaza Strip both above and, critically, below ground.
The NIS 3.5 billion ($1.1 billion) project has taken over three years to complete and is meant to end the threat of cross-border attack tunnels from the Palestinian enclave, which the Strip’s Hamas rulers have utilized to deadly effect.
Read more...T. Belman. Not only is the number of refugees unlimited, they are unvetted for terrorist ties and are untested for disease including Corona. I wonder if they will get a pass on masks also.
Not only did about 1’3 of the Republican Senators support the plan but only 1/3 GOP voters were not against it.
BY Robert Spencer, JIHAD WATCH
If you wanted to destroy the country, what would you do differently from what Congress and Biden’s handlers are doing? No one knows how many jihadis are among these people; they’re largely unvetted. But the key part of this story is at the end: “The data revealed also that most Afghan arrivals in the U.S. live on welfare.”
That’s the goal. Create a group of people that is utterly dependent upon the government, and will keep on voting for those who will keep the gravy train going.
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