Catholic, Apostolic & Roman


June-July 2017

Trump Watch ...

1. 100+ Days

Last January, amid the press frenzy that greeted the new presidency, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee asked: "Is everything that President Trump does going to be treated by the media as an unprecedented outrage?".

Although rhetorical, even he might have hoped that things would settle down a little. But more than four months later, the desperate Corporate Media Matrix of Unreality [CMMU] continues to spew misinformation about President Trump and his administration. These mock headlines reflect its hysterical coverage:

Trapped in the Matrix, the hapless hoi-polloi are not even offered "fake news" but parodies of "fake news" — 24/7. Unfortunately, they will never see this headline, which sums up the puerile CMMU and its betrayal of objective journalism:  

Its fantastical 'Trump-Russia collusion' narrative still dominates public discourse.

After all this time, does anyone truly believe that even the faintest whiff of actual evidence of Team-Trump collusion with Team-Putin would not have become Nixon-on-steroids?

The reality (thinly reported then buried by the false narrative), is that anti-Trumpers repeatedly admit there is no evidence. On 3 May, for instance, asked by CNN if she has seen anything to make her believe there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, one of the President's most fanatical foes, Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, replied: "Not at this time."

This is the crafty stock reply trotted out for a year. It concedes that there is no evidence of any conspiracy whatsoever, while suggesting it will appear in the course of time (read: as long as it takes to fabricate yet another fake scandal/false flag that gains traction).

As for the recent hysteria about the President sacking FBI Director Comey, it should have been one of the first presidential acts! Comey's disgraceful conduct and presentation of Mrs Clinton's email server investigation before Congress not only ensured his dismissal, it should lead to his investigation for conspiratorial "collusion."

Indeed, just about every leading anti-Trump figure in the Washington swamp is more worthy of such investigation than Donald Trump.

Moreover, if the press were not pathologically incapable of giving credit where it is due to anti-globalist interlopers who disrupt the plans of their corporate paymasters, they would admit that Trump has refreshed a political landscape levelled by the likes of Tony Blair.

The 'Bliar' was feted for supposedly obliterating ideology and cleverly enshrining pragmatism as the political 'middle way'. In fact, he entrenched a thoroughly oppressive liberal ideology. Trump, on the other hand, eschews ideology for (on the whole) sensible political pragmatism.

As one Catholic commented: "We would prefer a principled political programme around Christ the King, But it’s something. An improvement."

Indeed it is. Especially on the vital pro-life front where he has delivered a rapid succession of hitherto unimaginable victories and advances — prompting the National Right to Life Committee to give him an "A" grade for his first 100 days in office.

Considering the intolerable pressure brought to bear by the CMMU, the blitzkrieg of organised "deep state" opposition he and his administration face every single day, together with hostile liberal Republicans and some self-defeating Neocon appointments of his own, the good he has achieved across the domestic board, in such a short time, on such a steep learning curve, is more remarkable still.

And he is 70-years-old, for heaven's sake! He should be the poster boy for septuagenarians! Never mind the wall-to-wall opposition, his daily work schedule alone would crush people half his age. His spirit, energy and staying power is otherworldly. He will not bow to the all-powerful media conglomerates.

Just hours before the annual self-congratulatory White House Correspondents' dinner on 29 April, which he had signalled his refusal to attend months earlier, President Trump again took the press to task on Twitter:

Mainstream (FAKE) media refuses to state our long list of achievements, including 28 legislative signings, strong borders & great optimism!

The first president to skip the event since 1981, when President Reagan stayed away while he recovered from gunshot wounds received during an assassination attempt, Trump's stand was a righteous one. According to a Media Research Center analysis in early April, for example, a whopping 89% of the news about the Trump administration on nightly newscasts on ABC, CBS and NBC were negative stories. On the Russia-Trump collusion probe, no less than 97% of a combined 223 minutes of coverage was negative. His two attempts at temporarily halting immigration from countries where terrorism has a heavy presence also elicited 93% negative stories.

These are Stalinist propaganda figures!

Against such flagrant bias, in an interview on NBC News' Meet The Press, Vice-President Mike Pence elaborated on the defiant Trump tweet, declaring that President Trump "has already signed more bills in the first 100 days than any president since Harry Truman," going on to say that the President:

literally each and every day has been out there fighting to keep his word to the American people. And he's, frankly, been fighting against the gale-force wind of the establishment here in Washington, D.C., and frankly, fighting against the gale-force wind of many in the national media who would constantly like to change the subject away from the president's relentless promise to the American people.

Leaving the dishonest hacks and their celebrity pals to enjoy their backslapping Dinner without him, Trump preferred instead to mark his 100th day in office by attending a rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. There, he addressed another huge and enthusiastic gathering of the sort of ordinary working people despised by Hillary and her media cheersquad:

My administration has been delivering every single day for the great citizens of our country. We are keeping one promise after another and, frankly, the people are really happy about it. They see what's happening. We are not going to let other countries take advantage of us anymore, because it's going to be America first.

"As you may know, there's another big gathering taking place tonight in Washington," he went on, as the crowd booed:

A large group of Hollywood actors and Washington media are consoling each other in a hotel ballroom in our nation's capital. They are gathered together for the White House Correspondents' Dinner without the president. I could not possibly be more thrilled than to be more than 100 miles away from the Washington swamp — spending my evening with all of you.

In a speech lasting nearly an hour, President Trump laid out his accomplishments — occasionally jabbing the press for not fairly covering them — and also revealed his non-ideological outlook, explaining how the realities of governing have caused him to rethink some his campaign promises. On China, for instance:

I've been a big critic of China — and I've been talking about currency manipulation for a long time. But China is helping us possibly, or probably, with the North Korean situation, which is a great thing. I honestly believe that it is not an easy situation for China, but we have somebody there [i.e., Kim Jun Un] who is causing a lot of trouble for the world. We have China, who is really trying to help us.

Having vowed during his campaign to renegotiate or withdraw from NAFTA should the U.S. not obtain better terms, he said

Two people that I like very much, the president of Mexico [Enrique Peña Nieto] and the prime minister of Canada [Justin Trudeau] — they called up. They said, 'Could we renegotiate?' Yes, we can renegotiate. We'll start a renegotiation — and, hopefully, it will be fair for everybody.

The speech was interrupted by the usual professional protesters — whose calls were drowned out by supporters chanting "USA!" ("Get 'em out," Trump growled as the Soros rent-a-mob were removed by local police.)

After citing a bevy of other achievements, Trump restated his pledges to destroy ISIS, to repeal and replace Obamacare, to rebuild the nation’s military, and to build the wall along the U.S. border with Mexico to stop illegal immigration.

We'll have the wall. Don't worry about it. We need the wall to stop the drugs and the human trafficking. We need the wall — and we will build the wall as sure as you are standing there tonight.

As for Barack's unsustainable socialistic healthcare 'legacy', Trump ripped the Obama administration for bequeathing the country "a mess," and simply said: "We're going to give Americans the freedom to purchase the healthcare plans they want, not the healthcare forced on them by the government."

He closed out his 100-days speech by pledging that "cities small and large will see a rebirth of hope, safety, and opportunity":

America's children will be taught to love their country and take pride in our great American flag. Other countries, and you see that happening, will finally treat America and our citizens with the respect that our country and our citizens deserve. It's time for all of us to remember that we are one people with one great American destiny and that – whether we are black or brown or white – we all bleed the same red blood of patriots. We all share the same glorious freedoms of our magnificent country. We are all made by the same almighty God. As long as we remember these truths, we will not fail. We will never fail.

It was all great stuff. Yet just imagine how the hacks at that Washington Dinner would have misrepresented and falsified the rally and the talk! "Jingoistic", "right-wing", "inflammatory," "racist" ... Yawn ….

Whatever reservations one fairly holds about President Trump, and the present writer has his serious share, the truth of the matter was voiced by Vice President Pence, who, in introducing him to the crowd, said that "across the board, our new president is doing exactly what he said he would do. It's driving all of them a little bit crazy. In just 100 days, President Trump has turned America around — and he's just getting started."

We should pray that the President and his administration go from strength to strength, without too many Syrian-style missteps. Always bearing in mind that after 100 days of President Hillary, World War III would be well into its third month.

- The Editor

* * * 

The sort of real, "deep state" collusion ignored by the compromised corporate media
— in which dark dealings British Intelligence always seems to loom large.

Thanks to The American Spectator, 19 April 2017.

2. Brennan/Brits Target Trump

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 [National Security Adviser] Susan Rice, among other Hillary supporters, to spy on Trump and his people.

John Brennan’s CIA operated like a branch office of the Hillary campaign, leaking out mentions of this bogus investigation to the press in the hopes of inflicting maximum political damage on Trump. An official in the intelligence community tells The American Spectator that Brennan’s retinue of political radicals didn’t even bother to hide their activism, decorating offices with “Hillary for president cups” and other campaign paraphernalia.

A supporter of the American Communist Party at the height of the Cold War, Brennan brought into the CIA a raft of subversives and gave them plum positions from which to gather and leak political espionage on Trump. He bastardized standards so that these left-wing activists could burrow in and take career positions. Under the patina of that phony professionalism, they could then present their politicized judgments as “non-partisan.”

The Guardian story is written in a style designed to flatter its sources (they are cast as high-minded whistleblowers), 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” [eight members of Congress who must be briefed by the executive branch on matters of intelligence - Ed. CO] about them, which then turned up on the front page of the New York Times.

All of this took place at the very moment Brennan was auditioning for Hillary. He desperately wanted to keep his job and despised Trump for his alleged “Muslim ban,” a matter near and dear to Brennan’s heart. Not only was he an apologist for the Muslim Brotherhood, but Brennan’s Islamophilia dated to his days in college, when he spent a year in Cairo learning Arabic and taking courses in Middle Eastern studies. He later got a graduate degree with an emphasis in Middle Eastern studies. In 1996, his ties to the Islamic world tightened after he became the CIA’s station chief in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He once recalled that “during a 25-year career in government, I was privileged to serve in positions across the Middle East — as a political officer with the State Department and as a CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia. In Saudi Arabia, I saw how our Saudi partners fulfilled their duty as custodians of the two holy mosques of Mecca and Medina. I marveled at the majesty of the Hajj and the devotion of those who fulfilled their duty as Muslims by making that privilege — that pilgrimage.”

Out of this Islamophilia came a special dislike of Michael Flynn, who had planned to rip up the Obama-era “reset” with Muslim countries. Furious with Flynn for his apostasy from political correctness, Brennan and other Obama aides couldn’t resist the temptation to take him out after rifling through transcripts of his calls with the Russian ambassador. They caught him in a lie to Mike Pence and made sure the press knew about it.

Were the media not so completely in the tank for Obama and Hillary, all of this political mischief would make for a compelling 2016 version of All the President’s Men. Instead, the public gets a steady stream of Orwellian propaganda about the sudden propriety of political espionage. The headline writers at Pravda couldn’t improve on this week’s official lie, tweeted out by the Maggie Habermans: “Susan Rice Did Nothing Wrong, Say Both Dem and Republican House Aides.”

Liberals pompously quote the saying — “the bigger the lie, the more it will be believed” — even as their media enshrine it. Historians will look back on 2016 and marvel at the audacity of its big lie: whispers of an imaginary Trump-Russia collusion that wafted up from the fever swamps of a real collusion between John Brennan and foreign powers seeking Trump’s defeat.

- George Neumayr

* * * 

The "chemical weapons" attack that never was. The latest ruse of the Anglo-America war party.
From Australian Alert Service, 12/4/17.

3. Khan Sheikhoun: The Facts

President Donald Trump's 7 April missile strike against Syria was an illegal and unprovoked act of war against a country that, despite ample cause, has committed no hostile acts against the United States. Worse still — for Trump — the "chemical weapons" attack that prompted  his rash and foolish action never actually happened.

According to the version of events upon which Trump based the reversal of his previous, long-standing policy of non-intervention, Syrian President Dr Bashar Al-Assad supposedly ordered his Air Force to drop munitions containing sarin gas on civilian homes in the jihadist-occupied town of Khan Sheikhoun, in the Idlib Governorate of western Syria, south of Aleppo. The Syrian authorities are alleged to have withheld some amount of sarin, one of the world's deadliest nerve agents, when they turned over their chemical weapons stockpiles for destruction in 2014. Why they would waste such a resource on a militarily worthless target, earning international condemnation in the process, when they are already winning the war, is never discussed.   

By contrast, the Russia Defence Ministry's version is actually plausible. As quoted by state news agency TASS, Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov stated that "the Syrian aviation carried out an airstrike on the eastern outskirts of Khan Sheikhoun, targetting a major ammunition storage facility of terrorists and a cluster of military hardware. The territory of this storage facility housed workshops to produce projectiles stuffed with toxic agents. From this major arsenal, chemical-laden weapons were delivered by militants to Iraq. Their use by terrorists was confirmed on numerous occasions by international organisations and official authorities of the country." All relevant information, he added, has been forwarded to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) for study.

Several retired US military and intelligence officers have spoken in support of Russian's claim. Former US Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) middle-east expert Col. Pat Lang, on his blog Sic Semper Tyrannis, published the following analysis by a colleague who writes under the alias "Publius Tacitus", known to AAS's American associates as a reliable source:

Donald Trump's decision to launch cruise missile strikes on a Syrian Air Force base was based on a lie. The Intelligence Community knew that Syria did not drop a military chemical weapon on innocent civilians in Idlib. Here is what happened:

1. The Russians briefed the United States on the proposed target. This is a process that started more than two months ago. There is a dedicated phone line that is being used to coordinate and deconflict (i.e., prevent U.S. and Russian air assets from shooting at each other) the upcoming operation.

2. The United States was fully briefed on the fact that there was a target in Idlib that the Russians believed was a weapons/explosives depot for Islamic rebels.

3. The Syrian Air Force hit the target with conventional weapons. All involved expected to see a massive secondary explosion. That did not happen. Instead, smoke, chemical smoke, began billowing from the site. It turns out that the Islamic rebels used that site to store chemicals, not sarin, that were deadly. The chemicals included organic phosphates and chlorine and they followed the wind and killed civilians.

4. There was a strong wind blowing that day and the cloud was driven to a nearby village and caused casualties.

5. We know it was not sarin. How? Very simple. The so-called 'first-responders' handled the victims without gloves. If this had been sarin they would have died. Sarin on the skin will kill you. How do I know? I went through 'Live Agent' training at Fort McClellan in Alabama.

There are members of the US military who were aware this strike would occur and it was recorded ... the Defence Intelligence Agency knows that this was not a chemical attack.

Retired CIA officer Ray McGovern, founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, confirmed this analysis to Breitbart News reporter Lee Stranahan on 8 April, from his sources among serving military personnel in the Syria/Iraq theatre.

Photographic evidence abounds that civilians at Khan Sheikhoun were indeed killed by poison after the 4 April air raid. Both the provenance and the content of these photographs, however, tend to disprove the story — "Assad gassed his own people" — that they have been used to support.

First, any "evidence" emerging from Khan Sheikhoun is immediately suspect because, as former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter wrote in 9 April's Huffington Post, "Khan Sheikhoun is ground zero for the Islamic jihadists who have been at the centre of the anti-Assad movement in Syria since 2011", and was in fact occupied by Liwa al-Aqsa, an affiliate of the so-called Islamic State (ISIS), until February this year. Any "activist" or "local media" still operating there is certainly a propagandist for jihadists.

The evidence in this case is doubly suspect because it comes mostly from the "White Helmets", the supposed volunteer search-and-rescue group founded in Turkey in 2013 by "former" British army intelligence officer James Le Mesurier, and funded by the British Foreign Office. White Helmet operatives have been photographed wielding AK-47s and waving al-Qaeda flags to celebrate jihadist victories. They are most famous (they even won an Oscar) for their Aleppo branch's false heroics and incompetent propaganda videos, some of which depict them "rescuing" the same children several times from different bombed buildings.

Worse, Prof. Marcello Ferrada de Noli, chairman of Swedish Doctors for Human Rights, charged in the March 2017 issue of The Indicter magazine that 2015 video footage of White Helmets "saving" children actually showed them using children's dead bodies as props, and possibly killing others on-camera. De Noli showed the footage to well-known Swedish paediatrician and author Dr Leif Elinder, who said: "After examination of the video material, I found that the measures inflicted upon those children, some of them lifeless, are bizarre, non-medical, non-lifesaving, and even counterproductive in terms of life-saving purposes." De Noli writes that when another doctor witnessed a White Helmet clumsily inject adrenaline into an infant's heart, she exclaimed that if it were not already dead the child would certainly have been killed. These are the people whose photographs of murdered children Trump claims turned him against the Syrian government. 

 

 

 

Back to Top | Features 2017