Mike Flynn’s out. He resigned as Trump’s advisor this evening after a chorus of calls for him to step down for an alleged relationship with the Russians. This fits the narrative used by Democrats since the election: Putin and the Russians influenced the vote somehow, although nobody can tell us how exactly. Trump and his supporters are in league with them, according to the narrative.
Flynn will be replaced by retired Gen. Keith Kellogg.
Kellogg has an interesting history. In addition to his disastrous mismanagement of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, Kellogg was president of Abraxas, a wholly owned subsidiary of Cubic Corporation. Cubic provides diversified systems and services to the transportation and defense markets worldwide, according to MarketWatch.
In 2006, The LA Times reported on Abraxas:
In the burgeoning field of intelligence contractors, an especially aggressive upstart is Abraxas Corp., a privately held company that has assembled a deep roster of CIA veterans to handle a wide range of clandestine assignments — including secret work for an elite team of overseas case officers.Abraxas is right down the street from the CIA.
The company was founded by a group of former high-ranking agency employees, led by Richard “Hollis” Helms, a longtime overseas officer in the Middle East and onetime head of the CIA’s European division, and Richard Calder, who was the agency’s deputy director for administration.
The company occupies an unmarked, third-floor office suite in McLean, Va., two miles from CIA headquarters. It has mainly specialized in providing veteran operatives and reports officers for positions in overseas stations and at CIA headquarters.Abraxas is responsible for TrapWire, a tech company that develops a homonymous predictive software system designed to find patterns indicative of terrorist attacks.
The secretive project was discovered through a WikiLeaks disclosure in 2012 after emails were hacked from Strafor, often described as a shadow version of the CIA.
TrapWire uses a series of surveillance cameras around the country and also abroad to detect “suspicious behavior.” The system is reportedly located in every high-value target in New York City.
The system is sold to local law enforcement. From RT:
PrivacySos reports that a website maintained by the US Homeland Security Department’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) includes TrapWire as a product for sale to law enforcement agencies and first responders. It’s there that the background and operational concept of the system are described in detail and direct curious customers to AbraxasCorp.com for more information. When a link to the URL is clicked, the banner at the top of the developer’s homepage described Abraxas as “A Cubic Company.” On the FEMA page, the product information is detailed as provided directly by Abraxas Applications.Sounds pretty much like a CIA front organization operation.
If Kellogg replaces Flynn, we can undoubtedly expect an expansion of the surveillance state and its associated industries.
In late 2015, Trump said in an interview he tends “to err on the side of security” and restoring parts of the Patriot Act that have been amended would “be fine.”
Trump’s CIA director, Mike Pompeo, introduced legislation to block the USA FREEDOM Act in 2015. The act enacted on June 2, 2015 restored in modified form several provisions of the Patriot Act, which had expired.
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