Ben Weingarten

Reader. Writer. Thinker. Commentator. Truth Seeker.

Tag: NSA

Disturbing Admission of Former CIA Director Inadvertently Illustrates Disastrous Politicization

Gen. Michael Hayden, the former NSA and CIA director, has inadvertently revealed the ultimate subtext for the political establishment’s antagonism towards President Trump.

He writes in a recent New York Times editorial:

When asked for counsel these days by officers who are already in government, especially more junior ones, I remind them of their duty to help the president succeed. But then I add: ‘Protect yourself. Take notes and save them. And above all, protect the institution. America still needs it. [Emphasis mine]

This is the buried lede in an essay adapted from Gen. Hayden’s forthcoming book The Assault on Intelligence: American National Security in an Age of Lies.

The focus of his piece is that we are moving into a new “post-truth era,” making it impossible for intelligence agencies to do their job.

But as I show in a new piece at The Federalist, this premise masks the true animating factor behind the words and deeds of the national security and foreign policy establishment in relation to President Trump from the 2016 campaign on.

The establishment has served under presidents before who have not been, to put it politely, paragons of truth and virtue — sometimes to the great detriment of our national security.

What really differentiates the current president from his predecessors is his willingness to speak one major inconvenient truth: The world has gotten progressively more dangerous and chaotic under establishment leadership in the post-Cold War era, in particular under the Obama-Clinton administration.

Calling out this failure, and challenging the worldview that has led to the actions that caused it, is what these individuals cannot abide because it represents an attack on their power, influence and credibility.

“[A]bove all, protect[ing the institution” is a sentiment that would suggest those in our bureaucracies would condone all manner of actions that undermine our constitutional order.

And what have we seen over the last two years in the national security and foreign policy establishment, as well as our justice system?

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John Bolton Rattles the Muslim Brotherhood Echo Chamber

In The Federalist, I write that Ambassador John Bolton’s appointment as National Security Advisor (NSA) is rattling the Muslim Brotherhood echo chamber.

Indeed, attacks on the former ambassador have inadvertently served as some of his strongest endorsements.

One of the largely overlooked but truly revelatory areas of criticism concern Bolton’s positions on Islamic supremacism, which reflect an understanding that jihadists pose a mortal threat that must be countered using every element of national power. You know these attacks are meaningful because they have been made under cover of a smear campaign.

Bolton has been castigated in a flurry of articles as an “Islamophobe” for the thought crime of being a counterjihadist who supports other counterjihadists.

“Islamophobe” is being lobbed at Bolton to try and discredit him and ultimately scuttle policies he supports intended to strike at the heart of Islamic supremacism. The “tell” is that the articles raising such accusations frequently cast counterjihadist policy positions themselves as de facto evidence of Islamophobic bigotry.

As the representative par excellence of the position that America should exit the Iran deal, it should come as no surprise that the Iran deal echo chamber in exile has sprung into action in savaging the ambassador with the most outlandish of insinuations. For the Islamophobia campaign, the lesser-recognized and perhaps more insidious Muslim Brotherhood echo chamber has been re-activated. Bolton is on record as supporting its designation as a terrorist organization, and Brotherhood apologists and true believers cannot abide this.

In The Federalist I expose this smear campaign — a campaign led by a Muslim Brotherhood echo chamber that previously proved successful in apparently dissuading the Trump administration from designating the Brotherhood a terrorist organization — and suggest that the administration should not concede one inch to the Brotherhood and its backers in the national security and foreign policy establishment. Further, I suggest that the specious and slanderous slurs leveled at Bolton precisely because of his keen understanding of the Islamic supremacist threat reflects all the better on his appointment as NSA.

The Left’s Radical Effort to Subvert President Trump, and How He Can Respond

The Obama administration — now doing business as “The Resistance” — is working every angle it can from both within and outside of government not only to undermine Donald Trump’s presidency, but perhaps bring it down altogether.

In so doing, it is creating a destructive precedent with respect to the transition of power, representing a momentous shift one can only appreciate when stepping back from the fog of day-to-day political combat. History will tell us if this is another example of the Left engaging in a practice it will someday come to rue à la Harry Reid’s nuclear option.

I detail these efforts and explain how President Trump can and must go on offense to respond in a new piece at Conservative Review.

As I write in part:

The gloves are off. The Left does not care one iota for any principle except power. The ends justify the means.

As I have emphasized before, Republicans and conservatives must internalize these points and always ask themselves the question: What would Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi do?

We cannot fight according to Queensberry Rules against a political opponent that imposes no such rules on itself — an opponent that, ironically and shamefully, advocates for suicidal rules of engagement for our real warfighters.

As Trump showed to great effect during the 2016 election, we must not give our critics one inch.

We must challenge their narratives with our own, exposing their crusades for supposed justice, fairness, and equality for the hypocritical frauds that they are.

We must go on offense, unafraid of an opponent frothing at the mouth in its Trump Derangement Syndrome, and which sees itself in trouble at the federal, state, and local levels with no successor to Obama in sight.

Beyond overwhelming the Left with a flurry of new policies, draining the swamp and slaughtering the Left’s sacred cows, there is one even bolder option of which the Trump administration could avail itself…

Read on here.

An explosive interview with ex Secret Service agent Dan Bongino, author of ‘Life Inside the Bubble’

In a hard-hitting interview with Blaze Books in connection with his newest title, Life Inside the Bubble, outspoken former Secret Service Agent Dan Bongino provided his insights on a wide array of topics, from his life in law enforcement protecting a Senator and two Presidents, to Barack Obama’s worldview, the government shutdown, the Benghazi and NSA scandals and all things in-between. Below is our interview, which was conducted via phone prior to the release of his book. The interview has been transcribed and edited for clarity.

What inspired you to write Life Inside the Bubble?

Bongino: You know I hate to use the term because as you probably know the political consultant class has all kinds of bad advice for you, but they always say to never talk about frustration or, you know anger. But, I don’t think those are necessarily negative things if you use them for the right reasons. I mean anyone can turn anger or frustration into a negative action, but I was really frustrated and frankly angry at the process, and having been an ideological libertarian, small government conservative my whole life I had this frustration being behind the scenes watching what was going on and seeing what seemed to me at the time like an irreversible trend towards governing principles which – there’s no serious person left that actually believes these governing principles work. You know redistribution, top down bureaucracy, planning based, governing based on what Thomas Sowell calls the vision of the anointed ones, the bureaucrats, and it was frustrating. So I figured if I gave my behind the scenes perspective having seen it, been enmeshed in it for 12 years that it would be, that Siren sound that sometimes people need to motivate them to action. You know action changes the world. Talk is cheap if it doesn’t motivate action.

Why should the man on the street buy your book?

Bongino: Because it’s worse than you know. The government, the administrative state, the bureaucracy, you tell me a problem, you think you see with government from a libertarian or limited government conservative’s perspectiveand I can tell you in the book, which I give some examples on how it’s worse than you actually know it to be. You’ve been sold out. But sometimes you need an example to literally hit you in the gut to say, you know it’s kind of like…hearing about how bad a baseball team is, and then watching a game where they get blown out like 25-1, and you go “wow, they’re really bad, we need to fix something.” That’s why you need to buy the book.

What is the one thing that you hope readers take away from the book?

Bongino: However bad you think it is, it’s worse, and it’s on a bipartisan trajectory getting worse by the day. People think since 2010 we’ve turned it around…we haven’t, we’ve turned nothing around, it’s still getting worse. But you really need to see the examples in the book to punch you in the gut. You need to watch or see the baseball game sometimes to realize just how bad the team really is.

What is the one thing that people on the outside do not appreciate about the job of a Secret Service agent?

Bongino: It is a cerebral exercise. It is not, contrary to Line of Fire or whatever movies or tv shows you may have seen or comic books. It’s not a bodyguard job. It’s not. Ironically, 99% of what you would call bodyguard work or physical security as it’s called in the business is actually done by uniform law enforcement, not us. We’re the ones that design the plan, and the plan is a cerebral exercise that takes literally decades, I kid you not, decades to master. Think about it here. I call it the big six: tactical, medical, chem-bio, IED, airborne and fire, and maybe sometimes geologic. You have to have an A to Z plan to mitigate every one of those threats: a tactical threat, a medical threat, a chem-bio threat, an IED, an airborne threat, a fire, and when I say geologic, sometimes earthquakes depending on where you are. But not just an A-B plan, an A-Z plan. Do you have any idea how complicated that is? With budget constraints and manpower constraints, it is really…it is a cerebral exercise that very few have truly truly mastered. And that’s why very few guys get to the President’s detail, and even after that, very few of those guys eventually even do a lead advance where they’re in charge.

Read more at TheBlaze…

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