Category Archives: CIA
Killing Putin
In his Super Bowl interview with President Trump, Bill O’Reilly accused the Russian President of killing people. Trump’s response? “You think our country’s so innocent?”
That made me think of one of my favorite exchanges between Michael Corleone and Kay Adams:
Michael: My father is no different than any powerful man, any man with power, like a president or senator.
Kay: Do you know how naive you sound, Michael? Presidents and senators don’t have men killed.
Michael: Oh. Who’s being naive, Kay?
Except Trump is president, not a mob boss. Now who’s being naive?
Putin
Anyway, I got the idea for this cartoon from a Holman Jenkins column in the WSJ.
His assessment of Trump’s comments was, “unwise, spoken by somebody with a thin grasp of his circumstances.” But he went on to say, “Trump, clumsily, was actually keeping up a longstanding U.S. policy of covering up for Mr. Putin.” Then Jenkins detailed the Ryazan bombing plot by Putin security thugs to frame Chechen terrorists. It rarely gets mentioned by American officials. Jenkins thinks that’s because everybody wants to make a deal with Putin.
He concludes, “Read a certain way, Mr. Trump’s comments make him the first U.S. president to address Mr. Putin’s real nature.”
BTW: Not climbing on the assassination chic bandwagon or anything here with the title. Just having a little fun with a commentator’s line of books.
Political Intelligence Dossier Dosey Doe
The CIA has a “high degree of confidence” that Putin hacked the election in favor of Trump. CNN reported that intelligence agencies had briefed Trump about an incriminating dossier. The document, compiled by a former British spy, implies Trump could be manipulated by Russia. BuzzFeed published a whiz bang story revealing the dossier’s unverified contents.
Intelligence
Meanwhile FBI Director James Comey is being investigated by the inspector general.
Democrats are enraged about a letter, damaging to Hillary Clinton, that Comey sent to Congress days before the election. It’s against FBI policy to comment on its investigations. But the same Democrats were thrilled by Comey’s earlier comment that Hillary shouldn’t be prosecuted.
There is no investigation of Comey’s boss AG Loretta Lynch concerning her secret meeting with Bill Clinton last summer on an airport tarmac.
And now civil rights legend John Lewis says Trump is an illegitimate president-elect. Naturally, the MSM narrative was about Trump’s tweeted response to Lewis’s attack on his legitimacy.
Bob Woodward thinks Trump has a right to be pissed.
iPhone Smarter Than Uncle Sam
Michael Hayden, the former head of the NSA, is on Apple’s side in the fight over cracking the iPhone of dead terrorist Syed Rizwan Farook. So is Ted Olson, former Solicitor General for George W. Bush. His wife was killed in the original 9/11 attack.
iPhone Smarter Than Uncle Sam
The FBI says Apple’s reluctance to co-operate is a marketing stunt. The government’s computers can be hacked but the government can’t hack Apple’s phone.
Seems hard to blame Apple for wanting us to know about it.
Donald the Truther
The Donald is now The Truther. He blames Bush for 9/11.
I like Trump because he’s politically incorrect. That doesn’t mean he’s getting a valuable Bokbluster endorsement, but as a cartoonist you gotta admire anybody with the guts to take on the pc movement. Well, maybe not all cartoonists feel that way.
Anyway, birthers believe Obama is a foreign born Muslim and ineligible to be president. His father was a foreign born Muslim (according to some, that makes Barack an apostate eligible for beheading) but he has a Hawaiian birth certificate and an American mother. Cruz was born in Canada of an American mother and Cuban father.
Donald the Truther
Truthers believe 9/11 was an inside job. Trump claims it was Bush’s fault because because he didn’t act on intelligence to prevent the attack. The 9/11 commission says that’s not so. Further, the Clinton administration had established a wall between the FBI and CIA that prevented information sharing that might have helped prevent the attack.
Doctored Intelligence
Two weeks ago the NYT reported that intelligence analysts claim their superiors at Centcom doctored their reports to make ISIS appear more jv than varsity.
Daily Beast says more than “50 spies claim intelligence was cooked”.
Former CIA analyst, Fred Fleitz in National Review, wants to know where the rest of the intelligence community is. He thinks this is only a tip of the iceberg.
