If you think some former US intelligence officials have been harsh in their criticism of President Donald Trump, well, they’re getting harsher. In the wake of the mail-bomb arrest and the Pittsburgh synagogue shootings, James Clapper and Michael Hayden are likening Trump’s political rhetoric to radicalization tactics used by terrorists.
Clapper, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and addressee of one of the bombs mailed to CNN, told a Virginia audience on Wednesday, “It’s not unlike what we experienced with ISIS where you have a group using social media to recruit and radicalize their supporters.”
While former CIA director John Brennan has attacked Trump’s character, Clapper and Hayden have tried to restrict themselves to issues of policy. No more. The US president is acting like a recruiter for a terrorist organization, and a few among his supporters are acting like terrorists, the former spy chiefs say.
Former CIA and National Security Agency director Michael Hayden, who appeared with Clapper at George Mason University, added, “I don’t want to say the two groups are equivalent, but there are parallels.”
Hayden proceeded to spell them out.
“At CIA when our people looked at radicalization, I asked, ‘Is it the ideology of al-Qaeda or ISIS that attracts them? Or are these unhappy young males, who don’t have a job, have disappointments, are unattached, and are looking to attach themselves to a larger cause?
“In this country,” said Hayden, “what you get are individuals who are unhappy, violence-prone on their own, with a great sense of grievance, who now get legitimization and justification for their grievance by attaching it to something larger themselves…. And here’s what’s new. They now have a set of grievances to which they can attach themselves that have been articulated by the president of the United States of America.”
The charge is severe, but the most recent evidence lends credence to the claim.
“If you look at the bomber, it was all there on his van,” Hayden said. “If you look at the incident in Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh, [the shooter who killed 11 people had] a latent anti-Semitism, but the proximate cause was his belief that international Jewry was sponsoring the invasion of America by that caravan which is still a thousand miles from the US border. That has been a constant theme coming from the White House.”
‘We don’t have eight years’
Both men said Trump’s attacks on the press, the FBI and his critics are damaging the United States’ democratic institutions, perhaps irretrievably. “We have four years to stop him,” Hayden said. “We don’t have eight.”
And both men were pessimistic that the situation would change any time soon.
In a sardonic reference to Trump’s description of himself, Clapper said, “As long as the ‘stable genius’ continues to use his kind of rhetoric, we will see radicalization.”
Clapper’s and Hayden’s assessment might be the most ominous intelligence warning since a CIA briefer told then-US president George W Bush in August 2001 that Osama bin Laden was “determined to strike in the United States.” Except now the threat comes from the president himself.
This article was produced by the Deep State, a project of the Independent Media Institute, which provided it to Asia Times.
It has not been the constant theme coming from the Whote House, that ""international Jewry was sponsoring the invasion of America"". The view that it might be sponsered by a single person or a group with a wish to damage Trump has been coming from several sides. So why mention it as a fact that the White House has been supporting this antisemite view?
I would not take too serious any notice of CIA, since they were involved in what Australian Prime Ministers in the mid-1970’s knew of their activities and threats as genuine during our involvement in the Vietnam War. When an ALLY (USA) allows it’s CIA to threaten to BOMB AUSSIE TROOPS who were winning battles that could actually stop the NVRA and end the war, that is like TREASON against an ally! – I was handling messages from officers making complaints against CIA abuse against our troops back then when the Messages were routed to the Aussie Leaders. The end result was an order for a total PULLOUT of all out troops from VN. Of course, the Leaders did not want to make TOO much of a stir, saying it was an economic matter etc. But the fact is… WE LEFT VN because the war was "manufactured" by CIA. So, again, I would never trust CIA ever again to do what is honourable, and tend to think that the whole stinking CIA is corrupted enough, so that any moral, ethical leader of the uSA would be well advised to shut it down long enough to get rid of the subversives within. But now it looks as those subverting the cause, have surfaced minus their bosses.
I would not take too serious any notice of CIA, since they were involved in what Australian Prime Ministers in the mid-1970’s knew of their activities and threats as genuine during our involvement in the Vietnam War. When an ALLY (USA) allows it’s CIA to threaten to BOMB AUSSIE TROOPS who were winning battles that could actually stop the NVRA and end the war, that is like TREASON against an ally! – I was handling messages from officers making complaints against CIA abuse against our troops back then when the Messages were routed to the Aussie Leaders. The end result was an order for a total PULLOUT of all out troops from VN. Of course, the Leaders did not want to make TOO much of a stir, saying it was an economic matter etc. But the fact is… WE LEFT VN because the war was "manufactured" by CIA. So, again, I would never trust CIA ever again to do what is honourable, and tend to think that the whole stinking CIA is corrupted enough, so that any moral, ethical leader of the uSA would be well advised to shut it down long enough to get rid of the subversives within. But now it looks as those subverting the cause, have surfaced minus their bosses.
You get what you sow.
You get what you sow.