CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Secretary of State nominee Marco Rubio's confirmation hearings masked a revolution at the US Department of State, as Trump pushes for a new era of national sovereignty and global resistance to British neo-liberal influence.
A contentious hearing saw Democrats struggle to discredit Bondi as she convincingly defended her qualifications and policy stance.
As the confirmation battles unfold and the fires rage in Los Angeles, the first question to ask is "What is the strategic terrain on which all of this is happening?"
CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Secretary of State nominee Marco Rubio's confirmation hearings masked a revolution at the US Department of State, as Trump pushes for a new era of national sovereignty and global resistance to British neo-liberal influence.
By contrast with Pam Bondi’s Wednesday confirmation hearing, those for Marco Rubio as Secretary of State and John Ratcliffe as CIA Director on Wednesday seemed tame.
Rubio, of course, was a popular Senator on both sides of the aisle. Ratcliffe had already been confirmed once before as Director of National Intelligence in President Trump’s first term by the same panel.
But, as with all good intelligence work, appearances are deceiving.
Rubio’s opening statement was a complete surprise to me, revolutionary in its import. Here’s the key clip:
That is a direct attack on British imperial neo-liberal globalization which has destroyed our country and poisoned our relationships with the world’s other nations. It echoes Trump’s famous defenses of national sovereignty against globalist tyranny at the United Nations in 2019 and at Davos in 2020.
President Donald J. Trump
Trump's speech at the UN in 2019
President Donald J. Trump
Trump's Davos 2020 speech
You can read Rubio’s full opening statement here.
From there, the hearing became less interesting as both Democrats and Republicans reverted to their partisan talking points and Rubio did a bit of obedience to the Washington “consensus.”
Trump has given all of his nominees a unity of purpose and principle. Implement the platform the people of America voted for. No more wars. Rebuild this country. And they are applying their creative energies to that mandate without the play acting and ego power games typical of Washington dynamics.
To compensate for the difficulties inherent in such a radical change at State, however, Trump has appointed special envoys for foreign missions reporting to him alone, like Ric Grennell.
You see the efficacy of this approach in Wednesday’s announcement of the long sought truce in the Middle East, credited by almost every reliable observer to Trump and his emissary Steve Witcoff, not the flailing Biden crew.
Over at the Senate Intelligence Committee both Democrats and Republicans bemoaned the fact that the CIA has produced repeated intelligence failures and left the nation itself insecure and unsafe.
The inability of competent undercover operations to identify and steal the right secrets from foreign adversaries, DEI fixations, and the politicization of intelligence analysis were all discussed at length in the hearing, as was the agency’s horrible lags in technological innovation.
In addition, the Committee seemed markedly obsessed with getting Ratcliffe to endorse reauthorization of Section 702 of FISA, an issue in Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination fight to be Director of National Intelligence.
It turns out that House Speaker Mike Johnson, at Trump’s direction, had just ousted Deep Stater Mike Turner as Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, panicking the intelligence czars in the Senate about what or who comes next. Turner lost all support from Trump because of his adamant support of Section 702 reauthorization, without adequate Constitutional protections for Americans, and his fanatic support for the Ukraine war against Russia.
While Ratcliffe mostly said all the right things in answer to the scripted questions asked of him, [excepting 702], the issues raised miss the forest for the trees.
All competent intelligence work requires a method of thinking which is non-linear. We need to be able to competently identify the patterns and characteristics of current national cultures in foreign countries while forecasting the effects of the dynamic of constant change which characterize emergent reality.
At root, the present international competition is not with China or an axis of “revisionists.” Rather it is between the emergent American System led by Trump and the relics of the British imperial system, our enemy since our revolution.
For example, the collapse of the present economic system world-wide, a looming potential, will instantaneously reorder all international relations. So will the current international competition to harness fusion power and explore and colonize space. The inability to accurately forecast the future by using past pattern analysis is why employing artificial intelligence as a method of intelligence analysis is hugely dangerous.
Similarly, Russia’s development of hypersonic missiles and the ability to mass produce them, completely alters the strategic calculus and may, as Putin indicates, initiate a completely new and more lethal form of war fighting than with nuclear weapons. Washington’s stupidity in assessing Russia to be a “gas station with nuclear weapons” becomes thus, one of the biggest intelligence flubs in modern history.
It should be required that anyone serving in the intelligence community or on oversight committees concerning that community study the successful forecasting methods of Lyndon LaRouche. These methods are rooted in the long Platonic tradition of scientific analysis, creativity, and the cultural and social dynamics portrayed in the true human histories known as classical dramas.
In his prose poem Eureka, Edgar Allen Poe, one of America’s great early spies, characterized his use of a methodology, rooted in the same Platonic tradition, as “soaring” to new discoveries, like those of Johannes Kepler. He contrasted that with the creeping and crawling of the Aristotelians and Francis Bacon who end up swimming in a self-imposed fish bowl.
Similarly, everyone heading or currently serving in this community should watch the film, A Good American That film documents the struggle of a genius team, led by Bill Binney at the NSA, to solve the problems at NSA caused by the transformation from the analog to the digital era of communication. NSA was scooping up everything, as it does today, resulting in analysts being unable to locate actionable intelligence data because they were drowning in irrelevant data.
Binney created a surveillance tool, Thin Thread, based on the community relationships found in metadata. He then built protections into that tool to ensure privacy and Fourth Amendment protections for those his tools captured.
Thin Thread, had it been deployed, would have captured the entirety of the 9/11 plot before it happened. That was proved in a post 9/11 deployment of the program at the NSA. NSA “knew” all about the plot but it was hidden in its massive database.
Instead, SAIC received a multi billion dollar contract from General Michael Hayden for an unworkable and failed program called Trailblazer.
That crime was complemented by the FBI launching a vicious and bogus investigation of everyone on Binney’s NSA team and Diana Roark, the senior staffer on the House Intelligence Committee who had pushed funding for Thin Thread.
To this author’s knowledge, this extraordinarily revealing episode of everything wrong with the present mindset and operation of our intelligence agencies has never been fully aired or resolved.
After all the years of campaigning, Americans have finally come to the agreement that we will Make America Great Again. But, how do we actually implement the intention, and with a minimum of mistakes along the way?
A contentious hearing saw Democrats struggle to discredit Bondi as she convincingly defended her qualifications and policy stance.
As the confirmation battles unfold and the fires rage in Los Angeles, the first question to ask is "What is the strategic terrain on which all of this is happening?"
Pete Hegseth aced his nomination hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee today. Democratic Senators, of both sexual origins, however, staged a full blown banshee show in response.
From the fires in California and the swamp in D.C. to the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, Trump needs his team in on day one.
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