Trump’s ‘neo-neocon’ deep state

Donald Trump represents Version 2.0 of the same neoconservative crowd that dominated the George W. Bush administration. The cabal of pro-corporation, xenophobic, and nationalistic right-wingers, which includes such outliers as the alt-right—a less-threatening title than white nationalist, neo-Nazi, or Ku Klux Klan—are now in the driver’s seat in Washington. Trump is nothing more than a corporate trademark or logo for what can be called the “neo-neocon” movement, which is led by individuals who have long been embedded in the U.S. intelligence community, law enforcement, media, and military.

Many of the neo-neocons in the Trump administration entered the political scene by infiltrating supposed “populist” groups like the Republican Tea Party. Others are longtime players in neocon politics, who have operated under the umbrella of Christian evangelical, Zionist, and neoconfederate organizations. The one common denominator between all these neo-neocon players is that their ultimate financing comes from dubious corporations, hedge funds, and international criminal syndicates, including what the Federal Bureau of Investigation refers to as the “Eurasian Mafia.” These corporations and syndicates have been the source of revenue for the massive electoral psychological operations campaigns conducted by Cambridge Analytica; Cambridge’s parent company, Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL); Karl Rove’s Deep Root Analytics; Trump 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale’s Giles-Parscale of San Antonio, Texas; and such chapeau companies as Facebook and Twitter. All of these neo-neocon deep state operations are now being exposed thanks to the investigations being conducted by Department of Justice Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team and the Democratic minority staff of the House Intelligence Committee.

When Trump and his supporters point to an American “deep state” trying to undermine his administration, what they are actually opposing are elements of the national security state who continue to uphold the U.S. Constitution, the rule of law, and basic civil liberties.

Perhaps no Trump administration official represents the neo-neocon deep state more than the president’s nominee to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Gina Haspel. Very little is publicly known about Haspel, a longtime CIA clandestine operations officer, who joined the agency in 1985. Haspel is known in the CIA as “Bloody Gina,” a reference to her involvement in developing and carrying out the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program of torturing extraordinarily-renditioned detainees in such gulags as Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and a secret “black site” in Thailand code-named “Cat’s Eye.” Haspel served as Cat’s Eye’s chief of base (COB) before serving as the CIA’s chief of station twice in London, where she developed a close relationship with current British Prime Minister Theresa May, the former Home Secretary, who was in charge of the domestic Security Service (MI-5). Haspel and May share the same birthday, October 1, 1956. Haspel also enjoyed close working links with the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI-6).

After Trump’s first choice to head the CIA, former Kansas Republican Representative Mike Pompeo, a member of the Kansas Tea Party, took over the reins at Langley, he appointed Haspel to be his deputy director. In 2013, CIA director John Brennan, another architect of the CIA’s kidnapping and torture program, named Haspel as the CIA’s director of the National Clandestine Service. Although Brennan has been an ardent critic of Trump, he has no problem with Haspel being named as the CIA’s first female director. Haspel and Brennan are merely two sides of the same neo-neocon deep state coin. In 2005, Haspel actually violated federal court orders when she ordered a dozen court-subpoena videotapes—depicting torture sessions, including waterboarding, at the Cat’s Eye site in Thailand—to be destroyed. Haspel ordered the tapes be removed from a classified safe at the CIA station at the U.S. embassy in Bangkok and destroyed. Nevertheless, House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes, one of many neo-neocon deep state operatives serving in Congress, said of Haspel’s nomination to be CIA director, “Gina has worked closely with the House Intelligence Committee and has impressed us with her dedication, forthrightness, and her deep commitment to the intelligence community. She is undoubtedly the right person for the job.” Nunes hails from a family that originally emigrated to California from the Azores. Nunes was born in California in 1973. In 1974, wealthy Azorean-American families like the Nunes’s were relied upon by the CIA to support the Azores independence movement, which was an attempt by Langley to pry the islands, host of an important U.S. military base, away from a new post-fascist government of socialists and communists that took power in Portugal.

Donald Trump has praised the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program and has stated he wants the level of torture increased. Such policies are welcomed by the neo-neocon deep state. CIA torture programs, although eschewed by such presidents as Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton, were restored by George W. Bush and abandoned by Barack Obama. Under Trump, they have been resurrected and supplemented by new methods, some of which were developed over decades and were originally based on research conducted by the Nazis and Japanese in World War II and later by the CIA’s MK-ULTRA and MK-NAOMI projects in test programs conducted in veterans hospitals, mental clinics, the Special Operations Division (SOD) at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland, and South Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camps, under the supervision of the CIA’s Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, John Gittinger, George White, Ewan Cameron, and Ira “Ike” Feldman, as well as in Jonestown in Guyana, under the operational control of the CIA’s Richard Dwyer and “Reverend” Jim Jones, and Grenada’s St. George’s University, under the supervision of Dr. Geoffrey Bourne. Haspel is the operational heir to Gottlieb, Dwyer, Jones, and Bourne.

Haspel also served as the CIA’s chief of station in New York, a facility that mainly targets the United Nations. While in New York, Haspel worked closely with the Israeli Mossad station, which operates under the official cover of the Israeli Consulate-General. Although little is known about Haspel’s religious preference, the name Haspel is a common Ashkenazic Jewish Yiddish and German surname, which means “reel,” as in that used in weaving.

Haspel has also worked as a CIA clandestine services agent in Turkey, Singapore, Ethiopia, and Central Asia. Haspel is seen as working closely, for the past year, with her boss, Pompeo, who was recently nominated by Trump to be secretary of state. Pompeo, whose political campaign was funded by the right-wing Koch Brothers and Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital—major financiers of the neo-neocon deep state—and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, a virtual White House “enforcer” for the neo-neocons who support Israel at all costs, are known to favor for deputy secretary of state the strongly pro-Israel Elliot Abrams. Abrams was one of the architects of the Iran-contra scandal and was a favorite of CIA director William Casey and his short-lived deputy director of operations, Max Hugel. After Hugel was discovered to be sharing classified information with the Mossad, Reagan ordered him sacked. With Haspel taking over at the CIA, the same deep state forces that were curtailed with the firing of Hugel and, which a few years later re-emerged under James Woolsey and John Deutch in the Clinton administration, are in charge again at Langley.

The neo-neocon deep state is supplemented by the U.S. ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, the latter rumored to be a Trump favorite to replace Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The neo-neocon deep state has in its sights Special Counsel Mueller, just as it targeted FBI director James Comey and his deputy, Andrew McCabe. These neo-neocons may soon be joined by war-hawk John Bolton, the only unconfirmed ambassador to have ever served as U.S. ambassador to the UN.

The neo-neocon deep state has muddied the waters by claiming Trump is opposed by a covert deep state that is trying to impeach him from office. This, however, is classic disinformation and propaganda. Such Trump cheerleaders as Alex Jones of Infowars, Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report, and Breitbart News constantly accuse the “deep state” of trying to “overthrow” Trump. However, these Trump advocates are all linked to the neo-neocon deep state. One of the new members of Trump’s legal defense team, Joseph diGenova, a former U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, is one of these deep state conspiracy confabulators. DiGenova, who has complained about the anti-Trump deep state on Fox News, itself, a neo-neocon deep state operation, served as a deep state embed on the staff of Senator Charles Mathias (R-MD). DiGenova ensured that the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities, also known as the Church Committee, headed by Senator Frank Church (D-ID) avoided even deeper probes into the CIA’s MK-ULTRA and other dubious covert programs.

Jones grew up in the suburbs of Dallas, where he was exposed at an early age to the far-right conspiratorial rhetoric of the John Birch Society. John Birch was an Office of Strategic Services (OSS) agent, operating under the official cover of a U.S. Army Air Force captain and non-official cover of a Baptist missionary, in China in 1945. The OSS was the forerunner of the CIA. It is said that Birch was killed by Communist forces in Xuzhou while fighting alongside a group of American, Nationalist Chinese, Imperial Japanese army, and Korean forces against units of the Communist People’s Liberation Army. Named after John Birch, the John Birch Society became a far-right element pushing anti-Communist propaganda against George Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower, and John F. Kennedy, on behalf of elements within the CIA’s mass hysteria programs directed under Operation Mockingbird.

By 1963, the Birch Society was in full swing in Dallas, conducting, in one case, a violent demonstration against U.S. Ambassador to the UN Adlai Stevenson. The Birchers handed out “Wanted dead or Alive” posters featuring a front and side view of President Kennedy.

Among the Dallas-area active Birchers who helped lay the ground for Kennedy’s hostile reception in Dallas on November 22, 1963, were Jones’s parents, Dr. David Jones, a dentist who Alex Jones claimed conducted “medical procedures on high-level CIA people,” and Carol Hamman Jones. Alex Jones has urged his fans to join the John Birch Society. On November 22, 2013, the 50th anniversary of JFK’s murder in Dallas, Alex Jones was prancing around Dealey Plaza with a bullhorn calling for “full disclosure” of files on the Kennedy assassination. This deep state operative, whose father continues to handle the finances for Infowars, is a classic disinformation plant who acts as a megaphone for the pro-Trump neo-neocons now infiltrating the federal government. Moreover, after more legitimate advertisers abandoned Infowars, the “news” site’s advertising revenues are almost exclusively from the naturopathic product line of quack chiropractor “Doctor” Edward Group III, who pushes classic MK-ULTRA fear and auto-suggestive “doomsday prepping” tactics found in his books, “Bloodlines of the Illuminati” and “Controlling the Human Mind.”

Breitbart News, founded by the late Andrew Breitbart, an extreme pro-Israeli member of the far-right, has been financed by hedge fund mogul Robert Mercer and his daughter, Rebekah Mercer. Although the Mercers engineered the ouster from Breitbart of neo-fascist Steve Bannon (who is now trying to create a global “Fascism International” in Europe) they continue to finance social media mass propaganda operations of Cambridge Analytica. In turn, Cambridge has worked closely with the Trump Campaign Digital Operation and CenDyn Corporation of Boca Raton, Florida, a digital marketing firm, and Pentagon and CIA contractor Palantir, to further influence the public’s attitudes on political issues. Cambridge has not limited its political influencing psychographic operations to the United States. It has also been active in elections in Kenya, India, Trinidad and Tobago, Antigua and Barbuda, Moldova, Argentina, Czech Republic, Latvia, Nigeria, St. Kitty-Nevis, Lithuania, Romania, Colombia, Iran, and the Brexit “Leave” campaign in the United Kingdom.

The neo-neocon deep state, using CIA assets and contractors, has decided to abandon globalization and neo-liberalism and free trade, in favor of nationalism, xenophobia, and corporatism, all of which are the underpinnings of fascism. Donald Trump constantly calls out the “deep state” for trying to undermine his presidency. Donald Trump is not the cause of the neo-neocon deep state taking over the halls of power in Washington, London, Moscow, Riyadh, Beijing, Delhi, Buenos Aires, Cairo, and other capitals, but a symptom of the global transition to 1930s-like nationalism and xenophobia. As Shakespeare wrote, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.

Copyright © 2018 WayneMadenReport.com

Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).