Thinking About The Trump Assassination, Also About Nuclear War

First up, I want to highly recommend Larry Johnson’s new conversation with former Secret Service personal protection expert Larry Cunningham. Cunningham presents a detailed picture of what SS protective policy and procedures are supposed to look like, and what the reality was in Butler, PA. To say it wasn’t pretty is an understatement. In fact, Cunningham says the situation at the Trump rally was so bad that any reasonable investigator would have to be looking at the possibility of a conspiracy within the government to create a window of opportunity to get Trump killed. What took place went so far beyond incompetence, in his view, that it approaches criminal misconduct:

Why Did the Secret Service Utterly Fail to Protect President Trump

The video is about an hour in length, and I found it riveting. While there’s a lot of detail on how protective details are supposed to work, here are a few highlights.

There appears to have been a breakdown in communications among the agencies present that is impossible to understand. Even within the SS, it appears that the counter sniper (CS) teams were not in communication with the command center—much less with the local SWAT teams.

Rowe, the guy who is now running SS on an acting basis, was personally responsible for stripping Trump events of meaningful security resources.

There has been a systematic and radically disparate allocation of security resources, all to the detriment of Trump’s security—despite persistently repeated requests for more resources. None of this fit in with the relative threat profiles. For example:

Normally a major presidential or vice presidential candidate is afforded a compliment of agents that almost mirrors the president’s. In this case former president Trump had an excessive number of threats on going for at least two years and just prior to Butler.

…

Apparently Dr Jill Biden was given 12 Secret Service types to supplement her security at a dinner in Pittsburgh the same day, and yet Trump was given one. And then we see all these critical benchmark security measures, advanced security measures, being omitted to the point where it's almost confounding. How could you not think and leave that particular uh [switches mid sentence] if it's not a conspiracy the theory on the table—that we think could well be an option.

Many of the explanations advanced by Rowe simply confound standard security thinking.

Regarding the CS teams, they were assigned to the Trump rally only 24 hours in advance. Please note. My understanding of that is that it was the decision to assign two CS teams (but not the standard three teams) that was made only 24 hours in advance—that does not mean that the CS teams arrived on the site 24 hours before the rally. They almost certainly arrived within some time frame less than 24 hours before the rally. Let me illustrate where that kind of decision making leads.

When we look at the systematic denial of standard security measures to Trump—including CS teams—we have to ask: What led to the last moment change of heart? You might explain the change of heart as resulting from the sudden receipt of highly credible intel of an imminent threat to Trump. But the actions at the actual rally belie that explanation. Rather than heightened security, the security provided to Trump remained so far below normal standards—much less the standards that would be required if critical intel had been received—that Cunningham terms it “criminal.”

On the other hand, if you proceed from the possibility of a conspiracy to place Trump in a position to be assassinated, then you might wonder whether some chain of reasoning/events occurred along these lines. Intel is received: It’s a go! The shooter is ready and will be at the rally. Get two CS teams out there ASAP so they can kill him after he kills Trump. Dead men tell no tales. And make sure nobody competent is in the command center to screw this up.

Regarding that SS SAC from Pittsburgh who was put in charge, and whose identity is being shielded,

Going back to this particular agent that was assigned from Pittsburgh, according to whistleblower information we have right now—I haven't been able to verify beyond that—but I can tell you that the information states that this person did not have the requisite experience to be conducting an advance [site survey, prep], apparently only two years or less. Well, when you couple that with the backdrop and the context of threat that I mentioned to you this is another egregious situation so we have someone that's not capable.

There’s a lot more. Give it a listen.

Switching gears—but, in a sense, only slightly—naked capitalism has a very thought provoking piece out today:

Israel: Armageddon?

Recall that Israel has repeatedly hinted at the possible use of nuclear weapons. Yesterday Doug Macgregor repeated his own oft repeated belief that Israel is incapable of winning a conventional war against either Hezbollah or Iran and will need to resort to nukes. Which will result in a regional—and potentially global—cataclysm. This is one of those don’t-try-this-at-home strategies, and the Neocons—convinced as always of their superior genius—may well think they can pull this trick off: use nukes and pay no consequences. Just like they were gonna destroy Russia with their magic sanctions.

The thesis for the article is simply this:

As we’ll explain, the risk of nuclear war is real and all too high.

The article first sets the stage thusly—reasons to think the Iranian - Hezbollah will be restrained:

The big factor favoring Iran and Hezbollah continuing to exercise restraint is that both their economies are weak, Lebanon’s disastrously so and Iran’s only now reportedly being able to deliver some improvements in living standards.

A second factor, as Chatham House points out, is that neither Hamas nor Hezbollah were hurt much by these attacks. Both organizations have a lot of bench depth in their leadership ranks. And they no doubt also recognize that Israel reverting to assassinations is an admission of weakness, of being caught in a Gaza quagmire and unable to prevail in northern border area despite launching strikes at a far higher rate than Hezbollah.

A third factor is that Iran and Hezbollah have both been calculated and measured in their responses, …

On the other side of the ledger, the US has zero credibility remaining. As Macgregor noted yesterday:

We are viewed as Israel's tool. We are being governed by Israel. Israel is seen as dominating us, not the other way around.

Everyone now knows that the supposed US efforts to mediate a peace or even just a ceasefire have simply been a sham designed to buy more time for Israel to complete its genocide:

Senior White House Adviser [and Israeli citizen] Amos Hochstein led a “diplomatic disinformation campaign” and deceived Lebanese officials into thinking Israel would not attack Lebanon’s capital or its southern suburbs, Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar reported on 1 August.

Hochstein “informed officials in Beirut that the Israeli strike would be outside Beirut and the suburbs. He insisted on leaking this information under what he referred to as ‘the success of American diplomacy,’” according to the newspaper, calling the US official’s talks with the Lebanese state a “deception operation.”

The report adds Hochstein was trying to obtain a guarantee from Lebanese officials that Hezbollah would not respond to any potential Israeli attack in response to the strike on Majdal Shams last weekend, which Tel Aviv pinned on Hezbollah as a pretext for escalation.

The Israeli attack inside Iran has now convinced anyone not previously convinced that “Netanyahu has sent the clearest message yet to Iran and the resistance movements that he wants a regional war.”

The lay of the land is this. Iran has the conventional capability to basically obliterate Israel—but it does not have the ability to eliminate Israel’s ability to strike back with nuclear tipped missiles. Just as Netanyahu appears to have set up the October 7 event to justify outright genocide,

So it looks all too likely that Israel not only will use nuclear, but even worse may be trying to set up events to justify deploying them.

Here’s the longer version:

This scenario may seem a bit linear, when the possible outcomes are bushier. Nevertheless, it seems too likely that if Hezbollah and/or Iran engage in anything more that a proportional response (and per above it is Israel and the US that sit in judgement of where a response is excessive), Israel could use that at a pretext to launch a war in Lebanon, or simply skip “Go” and strike a part of Lebanon it contends to a prime target, as it it claims the strike would significantly damage the Hezbollah tunnel network. If that does happen, it seems far too likely that, as Macgregor anticipates, Iran launches no-holds-barred missile attacks and Israel retaliates with a major nuclear attack.

Read it all and see what you think.

Scott Ritter @RealScottRitter

The same Talmud-infected Israelis who are rioting so that they can rape Palestinians in prison are the ones behind the mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza.

Israel has been exposed for what it has always been: a criminal apartheid enterprise premised on the Jews being God’s “chosen” elite.

For all you American evangelicals out there—when the Talmudic horde says they can rape the Goy without penalty, that means you.

7:35 AM · Jul 30, 2024

Max Blumenthal @MaxBlumenthal

#BelieveIsraeliWomen

Quote

Muhammad Shehada @muhammadshehad2 ·

Jul 31

The wife of the IDF rapist soldier declares full support for her husband violently sodomizing a Palestinian detainee until he was hospitalized with a ruptured intestine, a severe injury to the anus & lungs, & broken ribs".

8:43 PM · Jul 31, 2024