by William Skink

Late last month Cy Hersh made an appearance on Jeremy Scahill’s podcast, Intercepted. While he was primarily there to sell his memoir, Reporter, he let a teaser slip about a story he’s been onto for years:

Let’s just start with this premise: After 9/11, before he invaded Iraq, we were told by the American intelligence community that they had high confidence, that phrase was said again and again, that Saddam Hussein had WMDs. They’re saying now the same thing about Russia.

I have been reporting something, I’ve been watching something since 2011 in Libya, when we had a secretary of state that later ran for president, and I will tell you: Some stories take a long time. And I don’t know quite how to package it. I don’t know how much to say about it. I assure you that there’s no known intelligence that Russia impacted, cut into the DNC, Podesta e-mails. That did not happen. I can say that.

I can also say Russia learned other things about what was going on in Libya with us and instead of blowing — oh God, this is too tantalizing. Why are you asking me these questions?

Cy Hersh is not some blogger in Montana saying this, he is part of a dying breed of truth-seeking journalist with decades of experience and carefully cultivated sources. People who want to know the truth about how certain political players have been operating should not ignore the hints being dropped here by Hersch.

It’s not too difficult to make some educated guesses about what Hersh is referring to. After Gaddafi was deposed by the R2P nuts surrounding Obama, there were a lot of weapons floating around the country. For years there has been speculation that weapons were being funneled from Libya to Syria to arm the jihadists tasked with keeping the regime-change trains chugging along. According to this scenario, the CIA was exploiting diplomatic cover in Benghazi to accomplish moving weapons along their ratline and that was the backdrop to the attack, not the lies that were initially told about a spontaneous uprising because Muslims were pissed off about a movie.

I understand why our brilliant intelligence agencies prefer to arm terrorists covertly. It’s a big pain to come up with different names for the same terrorists when you are funneling weapons in an official capacity. Also, it’s kind of embarrassing to have to shrug off report after report of those same weapons suddenly showing up in the hands of the terrorists who didn’t get the name-change memo.

A draw-back to doing things covertly is you don’t want anyone to know what you’re doing, otherwise it wouldn’t be covert. Cy Hersh is claiming Russia found out about something that was happening in Libya. I suspect it had to do with arming jihadists, the movement of money and the Clinton Foundation, for starters.

The indictments that got rolled out Friday by the DOJ are a useful distraction to confirm a false narrative for partisans, who eat this shit up, and a way to poison the upcoming Trump/Putin summit. Will it work? Probably. Up to this point the Russiagate campaign has successfully kept the focus away from what really matters.