Wikileaks has done it again – exposed the abiding corruption of the American deep state.
All major French political parties were targeted for infiltration by the CIA’s human and electronic spies in the seven months leading up to France’s 2012 presidential election. This is according the three CIA documents published by Wikileaks on Thursday. Specifically targeted was the French Socialist Party, the National Front and Union for a Popular Movement, together with current President Francois Hollande, then-President Nicholas Sarkozy, current presidential front-runner Marine Le Pen, and former presidential candidates Martine Aubry and Dominique Strass-Khan.
Mostly these spying orders were focused on finding out the candidates’ attitudes toward the European economy, election strategies, information on internal party dynamics and rising leaders, efforts to influence political decisions, and their views on the United States.
The CIA espionage orders published Thursday are classified and restricted to U.S. eyes only due to “friends-on-friends sensitivities”. The orders state that the collected information is to “support” the activities of the CIA, the Defence Intelligence Agency’s EU section, and the U.S. State Department’s Intelligence and Research Branch.
The CIA operation ran for ten months from 21 Nov 2011 to 29 Sep 2012, crossing the April-May 2012 French presidential election and several months into the formation of the new government.
So I think that should lay to rest any argument that other countries have no right to attempt to influence our elections. Exactly why is it good for our government to do it to other countries, but it’s evil if they do it to us?
aurorawatcherak 
That’s interesting. Do you ever get grief for your writings?
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Yes. I have someone on Twitter right now telling me I’m a fascist. I don’t think he understands the actual meaning of the term. To him, a fascist appears to be anyone to the left of him who disagrees with him on social media. Of course, it’s really easy to get crosswise of someone at 140 characters. You have no space to explain yourself and mine is a complex worldview, especially since I’m striving to correct any conflicting positions I have held in the past.
I mean, I’m a non-Trump supporter who cheers when he gets something write and criticizes when he gets it wrong. Most people on the left just can’t handle that, so I must be a fascist.
But my novels do pretty well and I get emails from libertarians saying “Yes, finally someone is writing fiction from our perspective.”
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Sorry for that. Do you want me to stop tweeting them? I like what you write. We only hear VERY biased reports in Aust, & I really wouldn’t know enough to comment either way. What’s your take on the “false media” talk?
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NO, do NOT stop! I’m not scared of controversy. The more people encounter the other side of an issue, the better for them. Sometimes I’ll post stuff just to see the reaction and to get conversation across the divide going. I appreciate your retweets.
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Ok, no worries.
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There is false media. I was a reporter 25 years ago and even then I complained to my editors about their desire to slant the news to meet their agenda. During the 2008 campaign, CNN (who I had always considered to be balanced between Fox and MSN) ran a series of stories about Sarah Palin, who was governor of Alaska at the time. They didn’t make sense to me, so I researched them. There were about 8 items that became major talking points against her in the election. Alaska has an extremely open public records system, so anyone with a bit of internet research skills could go out and verify the facts in five minutes or less. So imagine my consternation when all but one of those 8 items turned out to have a much different interpretation if you had all the facts instead of just the ones CNN reported.
The fact is that Trump is merely hitting the media with what regular Americans have known for a long time — the media lies to us and thinks it can get away with it. They resent that we no longer believe them.
So, yeah, there’s fake news. How much is fake and can you trust anything anymore … now there’s a question. I don’t trust Trump’s side of things either.
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Wow. Glad I’m not in America. But I think (nearly) everyone, at some stage, wishes they’d been born one. He sure is in the news. Every day.
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Reblogged this on Let me give YOU the Moe-down.
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I’m not in favour of espionage, but is there any real suggestion that the US attempted to influence the French elections? It appears more that they were fact finding as oppose to fixing, to better understand in advance how the outcome would affect the EU, the US and the world.
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The CIA under Obama and Hillary Clinton got caught directly meddling in the Ukrainian election in 2014. But here are some other articles that back up the claim. According to declassified documents, the US has meddled in at least 45 countries to
bring about regime change or sway an election result … and those are just the ones our government admits to.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/10/13/the-long-history-of-the-u-s-interfering-with-elections-elsewhere/?utm_term=.c29ccb384d6f
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/09/07/sure-the-u-s-and-russia-often-meddle-in-foreign-elections-does-it-matter/?utm_term=.d40f16445ecd
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/05/americans-spot-election-meddling-doing-years-vladimir-putin-donald-trump
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-us-has-been-meddling-in-other-countries-elections-for-a-century-it-doesnt-feel-good_us_57983b85e4b02d5d5ed382bd
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/russia-us-presidential-election-ukraine-by-samuel-charap-and-timothy-j–colton-2017-01
Ultimately, the Russians (or whoever it was, because there’s now evidence Ukraine was concurrently working to install Clinton as president http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/ukraine-sabotage-trump-backfire-233446) did not “interfere” with the election. Our elections system is so diffuse as to be just about impossible to rig. They released information the American people had a right to know and the voters decided which candidate they felt would serve them better. Nobody forced Hillary to make the deplorables comment and that, more than anything, added weight to the leaked emails that showed a candidate disconnected from regular people and who really loves restricting liberty, causing wars, and in the front pocket of Wall Street. SHE did that to herself … and to anyone who was supporting her.
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Oh, yeah. Clinton was as bad a candidate as Trump, I won’t argue with that. As for those links, I’ll try and have a read at some point (I’m currently trying to work through stuff relating to the failure of a government in my own country).
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Which country? I checked your blog and the only clue I found was Ciao! If it’s Italy, that’s a warning for America too … for all countries that are carrying too much debt. Government debt is an anchor to the economy.
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I’m English.
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Not for me to tell another country what is good for them, but I don’t think you’ll look back on Brexit with regret. The US was the model for the European Union and we’re coming apart at the seams, in large part because we’re too big and diverse for the bureaucratic one-size-fits-all regulations that such a union demands. IMO.
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Brexit means greater dependency on the US, which means we apparently have to do whatever it takes to keep on Trump’s good side. Brexit is a fuckup of the highest degree.
It also means our government is no longer bound by the European Courts so the rights of the people are no longer protected. As such the government is assembling, in effect, it’s own Gestapo. So yeah, we will look back on Brexit and weep.
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I would point out that Obama tried to bully UK voters into voting against Brexit, which indicates me … having been a close observer of the lecturer-in-chief for 8 years … that he thought it would REDUCE British dependence on the US, which of course he was totally opposed to.
We watch BBC here and your media is as hysterical about Brexit as the US is about Trump.
My opinion – there is no need for hysteria on either front. I wasn’t a Trump supporter, but I recognize my country needs a change of direction. And, economists who I follow think Brexit will, after an initial period of difficulty, give England a much more stable and vibrant economy.
But, of course, looking at short-term effects and with the media beating the “sky is falling” drum, it’s easy to despair.
Like I said, in a decade people will be talking about what a good thing Brexit is. I only hope my own country has had the guts to decentralize by then.
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Yeah, I guess having a better economy in ten years is worth the destruction of our rights… We’ll all be dead or dying by then. Our healthcare system will be run by US corporations, those bold enough to speak out will be in prison, and those too poor to be of any concern to the government will be homeless. But the ££ will be valuable, so woo!
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Wow, very dark predictions there.
Actually, the US out performs the UK in health outcomes. Our media refused to report that during the run-up to Obamacare.
https://aurorawatcherak.wordpress.com/2017/02/17/us-beats-uk-in-lives-saved-by-health-care-ryan-bourne/
Of course, Obamacare is strangling that quality right out of our system, so we’ll see where we are in a decade. If we don’t get rid of it, we’ll either be bankrupt from our insurance premiums or from the taxes that replace it.
I much preferred the competitive-marketplace system of medical care we had before.
Question – What do British people consider to be “rights”?
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Basic human rights, obviously. Free speech. Some degree of privacy. Being innocent until proven guilty. Free healthcare when it is needed. Free education for children, and affordable education for adults. Things like that, I guess.
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When a country sees themselves as policing the world, then it’s okay for them to interfere in the election for other countries but not have the reverse happen. (Consider what is defined as assaulting a police officer and compare it to the definition of a police officer using ‘reasonable’ force.) a One gets to that delusion when a country sees themselves as policing in the name of protecting democracy.
What the US doesn’t realize is that you can’t export democracy. Democracy is organic, it grows out of the needs and understanding of it’s people.
That having said, the US agenda is not to export democracy, but rather to use any guise they can contrive to control the resources and secure them for their own ends by what ever means. The untold amount of spin doctoring via news agencies is to white wash any actions that are taken against the regime of another country or for that matter against it’s own citizens.
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Great observations.
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