Dear Friends,

The hype on television yesterday about “13 Russians Indictment” was like a flash bomb on both CNN and Fox news channels.

Please note that voices of wisdom are quickly speaking up. This one is by Peter Van Buren, a highly respected former U.S. foreign service officer. Van Buren spoke out prior to the Iraq war and has since disengaged himself from failed intelligence and policies. I suspect we will see a wealth of pushback to yesterday’s hype in the coming days.

More to follow,

Sharon Tennison
Center for Citizen Initiatives

Institute for Public Accuracy
February 16, 2018

“13 Russian” Indictment

PETER VAN BUREN, info at wemeantwell.com, @WeMeantWell Available for a limited number of interviews, Peter Van Buren is a former State Department foreign service officer who spent time in Iraq. Now in Washington, he writes at his blog, We Meant Well. His first book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People.

He said today: “Just did a quick read of the ’13 Russian’ indictment. Missing are a) any connections between the 13 and the Russian government and/or Trump campaign; b) any discussion of the impact (if any) their social media efforts had. It describes them buying Facebook ads, but nothing about if it affected votes; c) no connection shown between any of this and DNC, Wikileaks, hacking of emails; d) no discussion of motive; e) assumption that anything anti-Clinton was defacto pro-Bernie and/or pro-Trump. And all indicted persons are Russians, and outside the U.S., so highly unlikely this is going anywhere further legally.

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Dear CCI Friends,

The best informed and recent “Paul Revere-like national crier,” is Professor Stephen F. Cohen, a world-renown U.S. – Soviet/Russia historian. Once again Cohen amasses the facts available regarding the pseudo-fake news that blames Russia for every ill that Democrats and most Republicans have leveled at Vladimir Putin.

All of this in order to cover their own bad judgments and covert actions. If you have time to only scan the first five paragraphs, please do so; better yet, read it all. It is vitally important that as many Americans as possible understand what is going on.

All the best,

Sharon Tennison
Center for Citizen Initiatives

Consortium News

The Scary Void Inside Russia-gate

Despite a lack of evidence at its core – and the risk of nuclear conflagration as its by-product – Russia-gate remains the go-to accusation for “getting” the Trump administration, explains Russia scholar Stephen F. Cohen.

By Stephen F. Cohen  December 15, 2017

The foundational accusation of Russia-gate was, and remains, charges that Russian President Putin ordered the hacking of Democratic National Committee e-mails and their public dissemination through WikiLeaks in order to benefit Donald Trump and undermine Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, and that Trump and/or his associates colluded with the Kremlin in this “attack on American democracy.”

As no actual evidence for these allegations has been produced after nearly a year and a half of media and government investigations, we are left with Russia-gate without Russia. (An apt formulation perhaps first coined in an e-mail exchange by Nation writer James Carden.) Special counsel Mueller has produced four indictments: against retired Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump’s short-lived national-security adviser, and George Papadopolous, a lowly and inconsequential Trump “adviser,” for lying to the FBI; and against Paul Manafort and his partner Rick Gates for financial improprieties. None of these charges has anything to do with improper collusion with Russia, except for the wrongful insinuations against Flynn.

Instead, the several investigations, desperate to find actual evidence of collusion, have spread to “contacts with Russia” — political, financial, social, etc. — on the part of a growing number of people, often going back many years before anyone imagined Trump as a presidential candidate. The resulting implication is that these “contacts” were criminal or potentially so. [Continue Reading]

Dear Friends,

Professor Stephen F. Cohen, America’s leading scholar of Russian history––both the Soviet era and today’s emerging Russia––brings to bear in this 25-minute video, his knowledge and thinking about Vladimir Putin as a leader at home and abroad.

Cohen’s perspectives are very different from the routine demonization of Putin that we encounter so often in our U.S. political-media establishment.  His “Rethinking of Putin” may help all of us to think more clearly about U.S.-Russian relations since 2000 and, of course, today.

https://www.thenation.com/article/rethinking-putin-a-talk-by-professor-stephen-f-cohen/

I’m interested, given what has been gleaned by other sources about Putin, how does this analysis fit in for you?

Sharon Tennison
Center for Citizen Initiatives