Tag Archives: William Burns

Be Careful How Much You Skim

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On Sunday, Zero Hedge posted an article with the following headline:

Ukraine Gets Their Billions Despite CIA Director Reportedly Warning Zelenksy To Stop Stealing So Much Money

I think this comes under the heading “You can’t make this stuff up.” Democrats in Congress have consistently blocked an audit of how money sent to Ukraine is spent, so Americans really have no idea where their tax dollars are going.

The article reports:

As Seymour Hersh recently reported, CIA Director Burns had to warn Zelensky to stop stealing so much money.

The issue of corruption was directly raised with Zelensky in a meeting last January in Kiev with CIA Director William Burns.

His message to the Ukrainian president, I was told by an intelligence official with direct knowledge of the meeting, was out of a 1950s mob movie.

The senior generals and government officials in Kiev were angry at what they saw as Zelensky’s greed, so Burns told the Ukrainian president, because “he was taking a larger share of the skim money than was going to the generals.”

Burns also presented Zelensky with a list of thirty-five generals and senior officials whose corruption was known to the CIA and others in the American government.

Zelensky responded to the American pressure ten days later by publicly dismissing ten of the most ostentatious officials on the list and doing little else.

“The ten he got rid of were brazenly bragging about the money they had—driving around Kiev in their new Mercedes,”the intelligence official told me.

Zelensky’s half-hearted response and the White House’s lack of concern was seen, the intelligence official added, as another sign of a lack of leadership that is leading to a “total breakdown” of trust between the White House and some elements of the intelligence community.

The article concludes

But, remember, the first rule of sending money to corrupt Ukraine is… you don’t talk about how corrupt Ukraine is (or you get impeached).

 

This Book Is Worth Reading

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On October 1, The Center for Security Policy posted a brief book review of The Arab Spring Ruse: How the Muslim Brotherhood Duped Washington in Libya and Syria, by investigative journalist John Rossomando.

The book review includes the following:

The new book, The Arab Spring Ruse: How the Muslim Brotherhood Duped Washington in Libya and Syria, by investigative journalist John Rossomando and published by the Center for Security Policy offers a definitive account ̶ derived from interviews with Syrian and Libyan opposition figures and a top Obama administration official, Hillary Clinton’s emails, social media posts, Arabic-language news accounts, and never before reported documents ̶ of the foreign policy disaster in Syria and Libya that placed the U.S. government on the same side as al-Qaida-aligned jihadists. Those countries have never recovered from these policies that led to the rise of ISIS and still on-going civil wars.

Now-familiar names, such as Antony Blinken, William Burns, Samantha Power, Susan Rice, and Lloyd Austin, make appearances as Rossomando details how the Obama administration opened the door to Muslim Brotherhood propagandists secretly aligned themselves with pro al-Qaida jihadists in Syria and Libya.

“With the unfortunate collapse of Afghanistan, this book could not be timelier,” said Kyle Shideler, the Center’s Director of Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, “The Biden administration’s reliance on cooperation with the Taliban, falsely characterized as growing in moderation, is a mirror image of the failed Libya and Syria policies that John extensively documents.”

The Arab Spring Ruse details how liberal Arab opposition figures were snubbed in favor of the hardcore pro-jihadist figures, who allied with al-Qaida and ISIS, while being sold to Washington as “moderates.”

Emails to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from Sidney Blumenthal highlight how the Obama-Biden Administration knew about links between Muslim Brotherhood leaders in Libya and Egypt and al-Qaida figures during the so-called Arab Spring, but chose to support jihadist rebels anyway.

The book also details the role of U.S.-based Muslim Brotherhood-aligned leaders in influencing U.S. policy towards Syria and Libya. Operating out of a Northern Virginia mosque famous for being led by Al Qaida cleric Anwar Awlaki and hosting two of the 9/11 hijackers, Islamist leaders created lobby groups that targeted Libya and Syria and served as a conduit to deceptively pass jihadists off as moderate supporters of democracy and human rights.

The Biden administration is simply the third term of the Obama administration and includes and will amplify all of the failures of the Obama administration. We can expect to see massive government overreach and a loss of many of the freedoms we take for granted over the next three years.