§4. Notes on Making Enemies, April 2013 - Dec 2015
Universal Criminalization
From this arose the imperative of making enemies. Anyone mentioning these unmentionables was made into an enemy. Lt General Michael Flynn, who as DIA chief had identified the missile used to down a U.S. helicopter as a weapon of U.S. origin that had been smuggled into Libya, was fired. Later as Trump National Security Advisor-designate he was entrapped into persuading Russia not to respond to last-minute Obama Administration sanctions in December 2016, in order to tag him with Russia-collusion. Prosecutorial threats against his family forced him to resign after only a short term of office, thus eliminating the prospect of a well-informed investigation into unauthorized CIA / State activities in the Mideast.
As revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013, social media and search firms extracted users' personal data without their permission and provided it to spy agencies. The spy agencies had in effect deputized Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, telephone companies, Internet Service Providers, and others to record email messages, telephone conversations, Web-browsing, and virtually everything else done on-line. Curiously, the bulk of this enormous effort focused on ordinary citizens of whom not the slightest cause for suspicion, let alone the constitutional 'probable cause' standard, existed. While Chinese spies were freely helping themselves to U.S. Defense secrets and valuable industrial technology, U.S. spy agencies assessed the American populace to be their worst enemy, judging by where the spying effort was directed.
The staggering volume of data, measure in petabytes, hoovered up by the spy agencies, far exceeded the analytical capabilities required to find domestic or foreign terrorists -- the ostensible purpose of violating innocent people's privacy. But it was very useful for identifying political opponents -- enemies -- as proved by the tax agency's adroit use of keywords such as 'patriot' to harass Tea Party groups.
Anglo-American cooperation materialized during this period in the unlikely person of an unemployed British spy, named Christopher Steele, with a penchant for self-dramatization; lacking, however, the literary talent required to supply even a hint of verisimilitude to his fanciful reports of life in Moscow. Fortunately for him, a vodka-addled Russian source, Igor Danchenko, in the employ of the Brookings Institution supplied the creative details needed to cobble together a series of notes sold once to a major political party, and then, enterprisingly, the revised edition sold again to the U.S. spy agencies. The cast of characters included an MI5 Director with a name LeCarré might have invented, John Dearlove, supplying a touch of British class without which any spy story would be incomplete.
While the U.S. spy agencies concentrated on domestic political opponents, China pursued a wide-ranging program of industrial espionage, obtaining secrets of advanced aircraft design and materials from the Defense Department, dual-use technologies from commercial acquisitions, and bio-weapons research from U.S. universities, while persuading or threatening Chinese students in U.S. universities to cooperate. Illegal technology transfers obtained through industrial espionage called for protection: Vice President Joe Biden and family came to the rescue. For billions of dollars paid to son Hunter -- as later revealed by extensive emails on his abandoned computer -- Chinese Government agencies purchased immunity from prosecution. China was by far the biggest, but not the only 'customer' paying tribute to the Biden family. Ukraine, Russia, and Kazakhstan did so as well. Unlike the Clintons, the Biden family did not bother with even a veneer of charitable purpose -- a significant advance in international understanding with like-minded officials of other countries.
These years also saw the U.S. ceding of Iraq to Iran, the shutdown of the DEA investigation of Hezbollah (a favor to Iran), NIH funding of research enabling bat viruses to attach to human airways, and the removal of hundreds of top military officers for having failed 'micro-agression' training and their replacement with politically compliant officers. All of these proved extremely consequential later.
Timeline: §4. Making Enemies, April 2013 - December 2015:
