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www.infowars.com
Allen Highsmith • 7 months ago
We have been saying that for years that Isis was created and funded by the US ( Obama) he should have been impeached years ago and to this day he needs to impeached and locked up for life for all the lives he has killed and for all the crooked deals he has done behind our backs! He is not even a citizen of the US! Please God help us all!Two of a Kind Turds • 7 months agoISIS is al-Qaeda re-branded and is supported by Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and the Western military alliance. Obama didn't technically 'create' them. Nor did he do anything to stop them. When ISIS first emerged, the US State Department said they were caught completely "flat -footed". ISIS emerged like a mirage in the Iraq desert, fully equipped, fully armed and driving a convoy of matching Toyota trucks!
At least Trump is telling part of the truth.
We all know why Hillary and Obama get away with literally murder and treason. The reason is that it is leverage over them by their puppet masters to ensure they stay on course with the New World Order agenda. When it is feared that they are getting a bit off script leaks occur of their heinous crimes and they get back on script. Both of these pathetic scum bags know what awaits them if they turn away from their puppet master's wishes. At the least prison for life and the worse is death in so many possible ways that it would be a replay of Kennedy with different patsies. This is why Hillary has a Cheshire cat grin and Obama plays more golf than any other president. They know they have a get out of jail free pass.Mahboob Khan • 7 months agoI would like to say that Obama and Hillary Clinton were too weak or complacent to stop the Neoconservatives/Zionists/Establishment from creating ISIS. It was their way of toppling the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and helping Israel to tighten the grip over stolen land.Elapoides Mahboob Khan • 7 months agoI would like to say watch the "Yuri Bezmenov" interviews, and realize there is no difference between the democrats and establishment GOP, they are the same thing. The cancer of the democrat party bled into the GOP, hence the establishment, and organ of the democrat party. I was able to see through GW Bush, other establishment RINOs, and was honest enough to see the fraud.I used my intellect, my brains, to see what was going on, and left the republican party many years ago. YOU are still defending the democrat party, Obama, and Hillary. Pathetic.
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Jun 16, 2016 | breitbart.com
The origins of Daesh, known commonly as the Islamic State or ISIS, tie back directly to Obama and Clinton policy delusions and half measures of the Iraq and Syria conflicts.
With the recent release of an August 2012 classified intelligence memo to then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton detailing the presence of the organization that became ISIS among the Syrian oppositional forces supported by the West, it's important to remember the history of exactly how the Islamic State arose from the ashes of a failed Obama/Clinton foreign policy.
The Syrian "Arab Spring" agitations that began in March 2011, where majority Sunnis rebelled against an Assad run Alawite Shia Ba'th Party, quickly dissolved into a multi sided proxy war. Clinton State Department policy grew into helping these Sunni rebels under the banner of the "Free Syrian Army (FSA)" with weapons, money and diplomatic support.
However, the reality is that the FSA existed only in the minds of the State Department leadership. The FSA exerted zero control over the dozens of rival militias fighting each other and the Assad regime in Damascus. The Syrian Rebel groups were like dozens of hungry baby vultures in a nest all competing for resources, and the worst and meanest destroyed their counterparts using the aid given them by their misguided American benefactors.
The Sunni Arab Gulf states piled on behind the U.S. government to help their Sunni brethren with more arms and cash. The result was a true race to the bottom of Syrian Rebel groups. All the while the Assad regime's traditional allies of Russia and Iran provided weapons, training, and even thousands of fighters themselves to combat the U.S. supported Sunni rebels. The Obama/Clinton team couldn't even do a proxy war correctly.
The chaos sewn globally by ISIS today grew directly from the bad seeds planted by the Clinton/Obama failures in the basics of statecraft.
... ... ...
Obama/Clinton continued to approach the Middle East with the same naivety that led the Bush Administration into Iraq in the first place. For all of the criticism that Obama levied on Bush, he continued to apply a deeply delusional Washington perspective to Middle Eastern politics and culture - ignoring all we should have learned in 13 years of Iraq conflict and warfare.
Erik Prince is a former Navy SEAL, founder of Blackwater, and currently a frontier market investor and concerned parent.
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www.nakedcapitalism.com
zapster , August 13, 2016 at 11:04 pm
Lambert Strether Post author , August 12, 2016 at 5:02 pmAnd again, everyone is just pretending that the monumental election fraud that just occurred is completely irrelevant. I'm mystified as to why. To me, it's a national catastrophe that a party can simply suspend democracy completely, flip machine counts, deregister or reregister hundreds of thousands of Bernie voters (and yes, it was very specifically Bernie voters), subtract votes during the count and add them to Clinton in real time–and everyone accepts this as entirely legitimate?
Doesn't the complete cancellation of democracy by a dynastic family bother anyone??? Why even vote?
dcblogger , August 12, 2016 at 7:11 pmYou're confusing the left with Democrats. One of the clarifying things about this year is how clear it is that's not true.
aab , August 12, 2016 at 7:23 pmYou're confusing the left with Democrats. One of the clarifying things about this year is how clear it is that's not true.
so good, it had to be repeated
pretzelattack , August 13, 2016 at 6:31 amToday's reminder that the Democratic Party (which, as Lambert points out below, is NOT the same as "the left") did not nominate an Iraq War supporter through any kind of democratic process. There is ample evidence that a solid majority of those identifying as or tending to generally vote Democratic (not quite the same as party registration, but in less openly corrupt and weird times, that was how polling defined D voters) rejected Hillary Clinton as a candidate, but were prevented from knowing about her opponent, being able to vote in the primary, or having their completed ballot counted as they had marked it.
Mark John , August 12, 2016 at 6:03 pmthe dnc's contempt for it's own voters takes a backseat to nobody! usa! usa!
rich , August 12, 2016 at 6:50 pmMy question is why should a progressive vote for Hillary Clinton?
If a progressive wants to show the strength of her movement and also the number of folks who represent her values, a progressive would vote for Stein.
Perhaps it could be argued that if a certain progressive lives in a swing state, she should consider voting for Clinton to prevent Trump from taking office, but that is no most progressive voters.
But, in general, a progressive voting for a candidate such as Clinton who is so actively courting big money and establishment Republicans. . .that would dilute and weaken the progressive presence in my view.
Arizona Slim , August 12, 2016 at 7:11 pmNow that HRC released her taxes can we expect the transcripts, too? Hillary Clinton has been looking into releasing her transcripts for paid speeches to Wall St. and other special interests for 189 days http://iwilllookintoit.com/
Steve C , August 12, 2016 at 8:26 pmBernie's endorsement should have been tied to the release of those speeches. After all, he made quite a big deal about those speeches during his campaign appearances.
Pavel , August 13, 2016 at 1:09 amThat sure would have been gutsy, and a great idea.
Kim Kaufman , August 12, 2016 at 7:34 pmThey got to Bernie somehow. Cf the scene in Godfather II where the mobster sees his Sicilian relative sitting in the back of the room and changes his story.
Lambert Strether Post author , August 13, 2016 at 2:25 amMore details of the organizing efforts: A Bernie Sanders Delegate Tells a Very Different Story About the DNC to the one We've Been Fed
There's another side to the story… http://www.lifeandnews.com/articles/a-bernie-sanders-delegate-tells-a-very-different-story-about-the-dnc-to-the-one-weve-been-fed-by-the-party-and-media-at-large/
That's very good. We're getting a lot of stories like this, including from our own #SlayTheSmaugs. At some point, I'd like to aggregate them. Readers, do you know of any other field reports from Philly?
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Aug 12, 2016 | www.counterpunch.org
From The Day After Election Day by Rob Urie
Those frightened at the prospect of Donald Trump being elected need to explain precisely where they were when Democrats launched their three-decade-long class war against the great majority of the American people. The Clintons passed NAFTA in 1994 after Republicans had been unable to get it passed because of (righteous) opposition from organized labor. They 'freed' Wall Street from social accountability while making it more dependent than ever on government bailouts. They cut social spending while increasing the economic vulnerability of the poor. Both the dotcom stock bubble and the housing bubble began under the Clintons and were caused by their finance-friendly policies. The Clintons are singularly responsible for the Democrats' turn toward finance capitalism that has dispossessed the middle class, immiserated the working class and left the poor to fight over the crumbs that fall to them.In the abstract, but never-the-less relevant, terms of economic theory the Clintons separated claims on economic production from that-which-was-produced. The claims went to one group- connected financiers, as the task of economic production remained with a freshly diminished working class. This politicized money system can be seen most clearly in the distance between those who received 'free' money in the Wall Street bailouts and those who didn't.
Bankers, hedge funds and private equity received billions in low interest 'non-recourse' loans while the American political establishment urged austerity as the moral antidote appropriate for the rest of us. The spectacle of bankers, with the support of leading figures in the Obama administration, claiming that their clearly defrauded borrowers presented a 'moral hazard' to them would be as implausible in fiction as it was true in fact.
Graph: the liberal economists who support Clinton-Obama-Clinton-omics have long claimed that job losses in 'low value-added' occupations like manufacturing would be made up for in the high value-added industries. In fact, employment for the prime-age workers who must work to live has plummeted since NAFTA was passed as low-wage and increasingly contingent service sector jobs have replaced manufacturing employment. This has required the robots-stole-their-jobs fallacy as productivity (the 'benefit' of automation) has fallen to five-decade lows. Source: St. Louis Federal Reserve.
The political establishment now circling the wagons around Hillary Clinton feeds at the trough of money creation and depends on the misdirection that in 'normal' circumstances nature ties its distribution to economic product produced. Upon his election in 1992 Bill Clinton claimed to have inherited an 'unexpectedly' large budget deficit that tied his hands with respect to social spending. The result was that Mr. Clinton abandoned his political program except inasmuch as the 'private' economy that included Wall Street, arms manufacturers, pharmaceutical and telecommunications companies and the insurance industry were 'freed' from social accountability as government funds and privileges continued to be directed to them. The money was somewhere 'found' to bomb Iraq for eight years but that needed to keep the poor living indoors and eating regular meals had to be cut because the Federal budget deficit required it.
Upon election Barack Obama did essentially the same thing claiming a fiscal emergency in 2010 that required cutting Social Security and Medicare as he spent $6 trillion – $14 trillion to save Wall Street. That unlimited funds were found for Wall Street but none could be found to restore the fortunes of the victims of Democratic 'trade' agreements and the predatory finance of Wall Street renders evident the class-war being perpetrated by the Democrats. Liberal economists- court jesters dressed in the garb of storied academics, prattled on about the 'zero-lower bound' (cartoon monetary economics) as the Clintons and Barack Obama forewent the power of the public purse that FDR used to create the Federal jobs programs that brought tens of thousands of desperate citizens out of the misery of the Great Depression.
When Hillary Clinton outlined her 'economic' program she claimed that upon election she would direct Congress to create ten million jobs rebuilding infrastructure without explaining how this jibed with her public career as a deficit hawk, how rebuilding infrastructure would create ten million jobs when Mr. Obama's program created at best a few thousand and why this wouldn't be just one more Clinton scam to shove public resources to their cronies? As the Wall Street bailouts demonstrated, the public purse is virtually bottomless when social emergencies require rectification. The problem is that Hillary Clinton has spent her career poisoning the well for public expenditures in the public interest through both the misdirection that taxes are a binding constraint on public expenditures and by corrupting the public realm to the point where nothing works as advertised.
Graph: The Clinton's state-capitalism works for their Wall Street patrons by transferring a larger piece of an economy in decline to it while using identity politics to divide working class interests. Liberal economists understood that resurgent capitalism would redistribute income and wealth upward but argued that 'we all benefit' from the rich being made richer. This was derided as 'trickle-down' economics when Ronald Reagan re-introduced the concept. As history has it, the actual result is broad economic decline where the already wealthy use state power to immiserate the 'bottom' 80% – 90% of the population. Source: St. Louis Federal Reserve.
Bill Clinton and / or Barack Obama could have created government jobs programs to employ dispossessed workers at living wages just like FDR did. They could have even claimed the economic emergencies they helped create as reasons for doing so. Mainstream economic theory has 'free-trade' beneficiaries compensating those displaced by it. However, the Clintons and Mr. Obama chose instead to promote the right-wing lie of a binding budget constraint to limit and / or preclude increased social spending more effectively than the old-line Republican misery squad could have ever imagined possible. So the question for Hillary Clinton is: will she prove her husband and Barack Obama to be ruling class tools for lying about Federal budget constraints on social spending or will she maintain the lie to renege on her promise of creating ten million jobs?
Jay Gould once speculated that he "could hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half." Rising liberal vitriol directed against working class supporters of Donald Trump pits the near-precariat with 'private' health insurance, pensions and recovered home equity against those without them with little apparent understanding of the broadly declining circumstances for all but the very rich (graph above). Democrats sold trade agreements, deregulation, privatization and balanced budgets as ways to 'grow the economic pie.' With history having demonstrated otherwise, the Party leadership now wants to change the subject. Barack Obama is selling the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) 'trade' agreement as a geopolitical endeavor. Hillary Clinton now claims she will recover the ghost of FDR that national Democrats spent the last forty-years exorcising. In the parlance: whatever.
The day after Election Day will be like any other in the sense that the problems of looming environmental catastrophe, gratuitous wars and long-term economic decline will remain profit-generating 'opportunities' in the realm of official concern. The American political establishment is calcified and out of ideas. The problem is that the residual rationales and institutional tendencies lean toward catastrophe generation. Democrats saved Wall Street in particular, and finance capitalism more generally, to kill again. The most destructive militarists in modern history have attached themselves to Hillary Clinton and the American war machine. Unless functional politics are recovered and asserted outside the electoral system more of the same is the outcome that Western political economy is designed to produce.
Rob Urie is an artist and political economist. His book Zen Economics is published by CounterPunch Books.
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Feb 28, 2016 | The Washington Post
spkpost, 2/28/2016 2:37 PM EST
In the South China Sea, China is doing it's China thing. Krauthammer's answer? Bomb them.
In Syria, the minds of the 7th century are doing their 7th century thing. Krauthammer's answer? Bomb them (read: assassinate Assad).
In the Ukraine, another group of mid 18th Century thinking is doing their 18th century thing. Krauthammer's answer? Bomb them.
In Iran, the Iranians are doing what any sovereign nation would do when threatened by outside forces (i.e. Israel and the US)- arm themselves in order to create a deterrent to invasion or worse. Krauthammer's answer? Bomb them, destroy the deterrent, and invade.
As far as Cuba is concerned, bomb them too (I guess).
These right wing neocon chickenhawks like Krauthammer and the politicians who ascribe to the "Just bomb 'em, invade 'em, and disband their military" school of thought are precisely the reason the world is in such "disarray". The sooner these blood thirsty miscreants are no longer influential, the sooner things might turn around. Certainly the security of the civilized world is at stake but bombing the heck out of everything (especially if they have brown skin) is not the answer. And given the damage the GHWB/Cheney and li'l bush/Cheney catastrophe CAUSED, the "sooner" part of the equation is likely to take another 100 years. Thanks neocons. Thanks for nothing but fear, blood, destruction, and grief.
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Aug 05, 2016 | YouTube
Neo McCarthyism witch hunt against Trump instead of debate of a proper national policy is a sign of corrupted neoliberal media. They want the preservation and expantion of thier global empire at any cost for american people.
Reckless branding of Trump as Russian agent is coming from Clinton campaign and it needs to stop
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Dec 15, 2015 | counterpunch.org
There is, on the other hand, something wonderfully refreshing about Donald Trump's gleeful deployment of the S-word.
"She is the one that caused all this problem with her stupid policies," Trump said, referring to Hillary Clinton. "You look at what she did with Libya, what she did with Syria. Look at Egypt, what happened with Egypt, a total mess. She was truly - if not the - one of the worst secretaries of state in the history of the country. She talks about me being dangerous. She's killed hundreds of thousands of people with her stupidity."
Trump is absolutely right. Hillary voted for the invasion of Iraq, which killed a million people. As I've pointed out, it wasn't just an immoral decision - it was a stupid one, since anyone with a half a brain could see at the time that Saddam probably didn't have WMDs, and that Bush's war would be a disaster.
As secretary of state, Clinton never met a war she didn't love. Under her watch and following her counsel, the United States armed radical jihadis who are now terrorists, helped topple Moammar Gaddafi, expanded a civil war that has killed hundreds of thousands of Libyans and reduced one of the most advanced nations in Africa into a failed state. Then she turned around and did the same exact thing to Syria.
Stupid.
Let Hillary's supporters take offense. How is unfair, wrong or intemperate to call out a foreign policy record that fits the dictionary definition of "stupid" - doing the same thing over and over, even though it never works? Stupid is as stupid does. Hillary is stupid, especially on foreign policy, and Trump is right to say so.
Winner or loser, Trump has done political debate in America a huge favor by freeing "stupid" from the rhetorical prison of words and phrases polite people aren't allowed to use.
Interestingly, stupid people aren't all losers and losers aren't always stupid in Trumpworld. Hillary Clinton has one hell of a resume, which she has parlayed into a big pile of cash. She is, by Trump standards, a winner (albeit a stupid one). If I met Trump, I'd ask him if a smart person can be a loser (possible example: he called the obviously smart Russell Brand a loser, but also a "dummy").
Pre-Trump, American politics and culture suffered from a lack of stupid-calling. I am serious.
"There has been a long tradition of anti-intellectualism in America, unlike most other Western countries," Ray Williams wrote last year in Psychology Today. Insults reflect a society's values. Americans value macho masculinity, good looks and youth, so our top slurs accuse their victims of being effeminate, weak, ugly, fat, old and outdated. In France, where the life of the mind is prized so much that one of the nation's top-rated TV shows featured philosophers and auteurs discussing politics and culture over cigarettes, there are few things worse than being called stupid and having it stick. A society that ranks "stupid" as of its worst insults lets it be known that being smart is at least as important as being tough or hot or buff.
So, Donald Trump, thanks for dropping those S-bombs.
Ted Rall, syndicated writer and the cartoonist for ANewDomain.net, is the author of the book "Snowden," the biography of the NSA whistleblower.
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www.zerohedge.com
fishpoem Jacksons Ghost Aug 12, 2016 11:38 AM
Yep. Yet another convenient "accident," eh? https://www.theguardian.com/law/2016/may/01/john-rwd-jones-obituary
NumberNone Jacksons Ghost Aug 12, 2016 11:39 AM
It wasn't yesterday but it was determined to be suicide by train...because a brilliant attorney could not think of any easier way to commit suicide than throw himself in front of a moving train.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/archives/news/1138414/britains-top-human-rights...
SokPOTUS Jacksons Ghost Aug 12, 2016 11:51 AM
Happened April 22, 2016; but yes. Unless this is yet a second Assange lawyer to hit a train in the face this year....
http://www.hamhigh.co.uk/news/renowned_lawyer_who_represented_julian_assange_died_after_being_struck_by_train_in_west_hampstead_1_4507283 OverTheHedge Jacksons Ghost Aug 12, 2016 1:00 PM
I can forsee a number of FBI agents also being hit by trains in the near future.
Lots of new job openings for young millennial who want to make a difference.
Sigh
ebear OverTheHedge Aug 12, 2016 3:30 PM "
I can forsee a number of FBI agents also being hit by trains in the near future."
If they've had the proper training they won't be standing near the track or watching the train as it approaches. If they've had the proper training, the person who tries to push them will go under the train.
Martial arts, firearms, pursuit and evasive driving, general situational awareness - all part of FBI training. Not as easy as bumping a lawyer or journalist.
N0TME Jacksons Ghost Aug 12, 2016 1:10 PM
Died in an apparent suicide? I say pushed, but what do I know.
http://www.hamhigh.co.uk/news/renowned_lawyer_who_represented_julian_assange_died_after_being_struck_by_train_in_west_hampstead_1_4507283
ebear I've never understood people who stand toes to the line when a train enters the station. You know it's going to stop, so what's the rush? Situational Awareness demands that you stand well back from any potential danger, near an exit, facing the entrance, etc.
Police and military are well aware of these principles - even in defensive driving you have the slogan "where is the present danger?" Walk facing oncoming traffic, step out and away from dark doorways, back alleys, bridge pillars etc.
Take the stairs sometimes, take the elevator other times - drive to work one route, drive a different route home - mix them up. Take a taxi, get out at a random location and take a bus the rest of the way. Eat at different restaurants at different times. Do not establish a pattern. At all times carry a firearm.
These principles should be part of basic lawyer training, especially when taking on dangerous cases. Same goes for journalists. There are professional courses that deal with these subjects. Take one.
Whatever your goals in life, you can't achieve them if you don't survive. Last night I passed a fatal traffic accident where it was obvious the person turning left was killed by someone running a red light. Don't move off on the green right away.... pause and look around. That person is dead because he didn't follow that basic rule. So much for his life goals.
I'm preaching to the choir here, but maybe someone who doesn't know will read this and it will help them survive. As the Donald said, it's all about winning and you can't win if you don't survive.
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www.nakedcapitalism.com
"In the past three decades, the share of U.S. citizens who think that it would be a 'good' or 'very good' thing for the 'army to rule'-a patently undemocratic stance-has steadily risen. In 1995, just one in sixteen respondents agreed with that position; today, one in six agree. While those who hold this view remain in the minority, they can no longer be dismissed as a small fringe, especially since there have been similar increases in the number of those who favor a 'strong leader who doesn't have to bother with parliament and elections' and those who want experts rather than the government to 'take decisions' for the country.
Nor is the United States the only country to exhibit this trend. The proportion agreeing that it would be better to have the army rule has risen in most mature democracies, including Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. … Lower support for democracy seems especially high among younger adults." [ Conversable Economist ] ( original ).
I'm sure that for many Trump will spring to mind, but it's also noteworthy that the Democrat nomenklatura just spent a solid year stamping out a movement that was struggling for democratic norms through the electoral process . Not perhaps the best of tactics, if a healthy democracy, as opposed to a well-funded Democrat Party, is your goal.
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www.moonofalabama.org
MadMax2 | Aug 7, 2016 7:02:32 AM | 50
jfl | Aug 7, 2016 7:43:54 AM | 52- YouTube Did he get it?Nope
Youtube:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mCMyHJJrdDw
Source:
https://twitter.com/shekunchik/status/762055101930475520V. Arnold | Aug 7, 2016 8:51:16 AM | 57@50 mm2
Stephen Cohen got it. He got shut down. And the talking head at CNN made a note never to have this guy on again. CNN's just had all the conversation - and then some - that they ever want to have with this guy. We'll never see Stephen Cohen on TNC TV again.
jfl | Aug 7, 2016 8:08:41 AM | 56
Yes, both. I'm well aware of the long and somewhat "bumpy" history going back decades (many) and see this as a mutual joust against a common enemy/hegemon. Russia is well aware of it's vast area and consequent resources making it a prize like no other on the planet.
It's Russia's curse and wealth at the same time. It's there's to lose if they play badly.
I know a bit about Russian people and one thing I know is this; the U.S. is ignorant of their culture, values and intelligence; a gross miscalculation of an adversary.
Together they (PRC and Russia) are the perfect foil to the U.S. aggression.
The neo-cons are crazy (like rabid dogs) but not overtly suicidal, I think (not sure actually).
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Aug 4, 2016 | Reuters
National attention is focused on Russian eavesdroppers' possible targeting of U.S. presidential candidates and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Yet, leaked top-secret National Security Agency documents show that the Obama administration has long been involved in major bugging operations against the election campaigns -- and the presidents -- of even its closest allies.The United States is, by far, the world's most aggressive nation when it comes to cyberspying and cyberwarfare. The National Security Agency has been eavesdropping on foreign cities, politicians, elections and entire countries since it first turned on its receivers in 1952. Just as other countries, including Russia, attempt to do to the United States. What is new is a country leaking the intercepts back to the public of the target nation through a middleperson.
There is a strange irony in this. Russia, if it is actually involved in the hacking of the computers of the Democratic National Committee, could be attempting to influence a U.S. election by leaking to the American public the falsehoods of its leaders. This is a tactic Washington used against the Soviet Union and other countries during the Cold War.
In the 1950s, for example, President Harry S Truman created the Campaign of Truth to reveal to the Russian people the "Big Lies" of their government. Washington had often discovered these lies through eavesdropping and other espionage.
Today, the United States has morphed from a Cold War, and in some cases a hot war, into a cyberwar, with computer coding replacing bullets and bombs. Yet the American public manages to be "shocked, shocked" that a foreign country would attempt to conduct cyberespionage on the United States.
NSA operations have, for example, recently delved into elections in Mexico, targeting its last presidential campaign. According to a top-secret PowerPoint presentation leaked by former NSA contract employee Edward Snowden, the operation involved a "surge effort against one of Mexico's leading presidential candidates, Enrique Peña Nieto, and nine of his close associates." Peña won that election and is now Mexico's president.
The NSA identified Peña's cellphone and those of his associates using advanced software that can filter out specific phones from the swarm around the candidate. These lines were then targeted. The technology, one NSA analyst noted, "might find a needle in a haystack." The analyst described it as "a repeatable and efficient" process.
The eavesdroppers also succeeded in intercepting 85,489 text messages, a Der Spiegel article noted.
Another NSA operation, begun in May 2010 and codenamed FLATLIQUID, targeted Pena's predecessor, President Felipe Calderon. The NSA, the documents revealed, was able "to gain first-ever access to President Felipe Calderon's public email account."
At the same time, members of a highly secret joint NSA/CIA organization, called the Special Collection Service, are based in the U.S. embassy in Mexico City and other U.S. embassies around the world. It targets local government communications, as well as foreign embassies nearby. For Mexico, additional eavesdropping, and much of the analysis, is conducted by NSA Texas, a large listening post in San Antonio that focuses on the Caribbean, Central America and South America.
Unlike the Defense Department's Pentagon, the headquarters of the cyberspies fills an entire secret city. Located in Fort Meade, Maryland, halfway between Washington and Baltimore, Maryland, NSA's headquarters consists of scores of heavily guarded buildings. The site even boasts its own police force and post office.
And it is about to grow considerably bigger, now that the NSA cyberspies have merged with the cyberwarriors of U.S. Cyber Command, which controls its own Cyber Army, Cyber Navy, Cyber Air Force and Cyber Marine Corps, all armed with state-of-the-art cyberweapons. In charge of it all is a four-star admiral, Michael S. Rogers.
Now under construction inside NSA's secret city, Cyber Command's new $3.2- billion headquarters is to include 14 buildings, 11 parking garages and an enormous cyberbrain - a 600,000-square-foot, $896.5-million supercomputer facility that will eat up an enormous amount of power, about 60 megawatts. This is enough electricity to power a city of more than 40,000 homes.
In 2014, for a cover story in Wired and a PBS documentary, I spent three days in Moscow with Snowden, whose last NSA job was as a contract cyberwarrior. I was also granted rare access to his archive of documents. "Cyber Command itself has always been branded in a sort of misleading way from its very inception," Snowden told me. "It's an attack agency. … It's all about computer-network attack and computer-network exploitation at Cyber Command."
The idea is to turn the Internet from a worldwide web of information into a global battlefield for war. "The next major conflict will start in cyberspace," says one of the secret NSA documents. One key phrase within Cyber Command documents is "Information Dominance."
The Cyber Navy, for example, calls itself the Information Dominance Corps. The Cyber Army is providing frontline troops with the option of requesting "cyberfire support" from Cyber Command, in much the same way it requests air and artillery support. And the Cyber Air Force is pledged to "dominate cyberspace" just as "today we dominate air and space."
Among the tools at their disposal is one called Passionatepolka, designed to "remotely brick network cards." "Bricking" a computer means destroying it – turning it into a brick.
One such situation took place in war-torn Syria in 2012, according to Snowden, when the NSA attempted to remotely and secretly install an "exploit," or bug, into the computer system of a major Internet provider. This was expected to provide access to email and other Internet traffic across much of Syria. But something went wrong. Instead, the computers were bricked. It took down the Internet across the country for a period of time.
While Cyber Command executes attacks, the National Security Agency seems more interested in tracking virtually everyone connected to the Internet, according to the documents.
One top-secret operation, code-named TreasureMap, is designed to have a "capability for building a near real-time interactive map of the global Internet. … Any device, anywhere, all the time." Another operation, codenamed Turbine, involves secretly placing "millions of implants" - malware - in computer systems worldwide for either spying or cyberattacks.
Yet, even as the U.S. government continues building robust eavesdropping and attack systems, it looks like there has been far less focus on security at home. One benefit of the cyber-theft of the Democratic National Committee emails might be that it helps open a public dialogue about the dangerous potential of cyberwarfare. This is long overdue. The possible security problems for the U.S. presidential election in November are already being discussed.
Yet there can never be a useful discussion on the topic if the Obama administration continues to point fingers at other countries without admitting that Washington is engaged heavily in cyberspying and cyberwarfare.
In fact, the United States is the only country ever to launch an actual cyberwar -- when the Obama administration used a cyberattack to destroy thousands of centrifuges, used for nuclear enrichment, in Iran. This was an illegal act of war, according to the Defense Department's own definition.
Given the news reports that many more DNC emails are waiting to be leaked as the presidential election draws closer, there will likely be many more reminders of the need for a public dialogue on cybersecurity and cyberwarfare before November.
(James Bamford is the author of The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA From 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America. He is a columnist for Foreign Policy magazine.)
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original.antiwar.com
August 03, 2016 | Antiwar.comWashington is preparing to increase US aid to Israel by billions of dollars, with a ten-year ironclad agreement that couldn't be altered by President Obama's successor. But that isn't good enough for Bibi Netanyahu. He wants more. Much more.
Unlike the case with other countries, the US engages in protracted and often difficult negotiations with Israel over how much free stuff they're going to get come budget time. This year, the talks are taking on a particularly urgent tone because of … you guessed it, Donald Trump. While Trump is fervently pro-Israel, he has said that the Israelis, like our NATO allies, are going to have to start paying for their own defense (although with him, you never know what his position is from one day to the next ). This uncertainty has the two parties racing to sign an agreement before President Obama's term is up in January. And it also has inspired the inclusion of a novel clause: a ten-year guarantee that aid will remain at the agreed level, with no possibility that the new President – whoever that may be – will lower it.
The Israelis currently receive over half the foreign aid doled out by Uncle Sam annually, most of it in military assistance with an extra added dollop for "refugee resettlement." That combined with loan guarantees comes to roughly $3.5 billion per year – with all the money handed to them up front, in the first weeks of the fiscal year, instead of being released over time like other countries.
So how much is this increase going to amount to? With negotiations still ongoing, the US isn't releasing any solid figures, although Bibi, we are told, is demanding $5 billion annually. The New York Times is reporting the final sum could "top $40 billion." What we do know is that the administration told Congress in a letter that they are prepared to offer Tel Aviv an aid package "that would constitute the largest pledge of military assistance to any country in US history." In addition, it would guarantee US aid for Israel's missile defense, taking it out of the annual appropriations song-and-dance, and immunizing it from any cuts.
Aside from the "haggling" – as the Times put it – over the amount, there is another issue: the Israeli exception to a rule that applies to all other recipients of American aid. Other countries must spend their welfare check in dollars – that is, they must buy American. Not the Israelis. They're allowed to spend up to 25% of their aid package at home: which means that US taxpayers have been subsidizing the Israeli military-industrial complex to the tune of multi-billions since the 1980s, when this special arrangement was legislated. However, in an era where "America First" is now a popular political slogan – popularized by You Know Who – the Obama administration is trying to end this exception to the rules. Naturally, the Israelis are resisting, but, according to Ha'aretz :
"The Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth said the White House was prepared to let Israel keep the arrangement for the first five years of the new MOU but it would be gradually phased out in the second five years, except for joint U.S.-Israeli military projects."
If the rabidly pro-Israel Hillary Clinton takes the White House, you can expect that this concession will be re-negotiated: in any case, the Israel lobby will wield its considerable resources to get Congress to pressure the White House.
In their letter to Congress, national security honcho Susan Rice and OMB chief Shaun Donovan evoke the Iran deal as justification for this new and sweeter aid package. Yet this argument undermines the administration's contention that the agreement with Iran doesn't endanger Israel – because if it doesn't, then why do the Israelis need billions more in aid in the first place?
What the letter tiptoes around is the fact that this aid package is extortion, pure and simple. It's a purely political attempt by the Obama White House to appease the Israelis, and mobilize the Israel lobby behind the Democrats in a crucial election year. It's important to keep Haim Saban happy.
As Glenn Greenwald points out in The Intercept , the Israelis have cradle-to-grave health care. Their life-expectancy is nearly a decade longer than ours. Their infant mortality rate is lower. By any meaningful measure, their standard of living is higher. They should be sending us aid: instead, the opposite is occurring.
What in the heck is going on here?
We made possible the Israeli Sparta : a state armed to the teeth which thrives on the misery and enslavement of its dispossessed Palestinian helots. Furthermore, our policy of unconditional support for Israel has encouraged the growth and development of a polity that is rapidly going fascist. And I don't use the "f"-word lightly. I've been chronicling Israel's slide toward a repulsive ethno-nationalism for years , and today – with the rise of ultra-rightist parties that openly call for the expulsio n of Arabs and the expansion of the Israeli state to its Biblically-ordained borders – my predictions are coming true.
The "special relationship" is a parasitic relationship: the Israelis have been feeding off US taxpayers since the Reagan era. This in spite of the numerous insults , slights, and outright sabotage they have directed our way. It's high time to put an end to it. To borrow a phrase from You Know Who: it's time to put America first.
What this means in practice is: 1) End aid to Israel, 2) Call out the Israelis for their shameful apartheid policies, and 3) end the power of the Israel lobby by enforcing the Foreign Agents Registration Act and compelling AIPAC and its allied organizations to register as foreign agents. Because that's just what they are.
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The Unz Review
The mass migration of apparently hundreds of nominally GOP neocon apparatchiks to the Hillary Clinton camp has moved Democratic Party foreign policy farther to the right, not that the presidential nominee herself needed much persuading. The Democratic convention platform is a template of the hardline foreign policy positions espoused by Clinton and the convention itself concluded with a prolonged bout of Russian bashing that could have been orchestrated by Hillary protégé Victoria Nuland.
The inside the beltway crowd has realized that when in doubt it is always a safe bet to blame Vladimir Putin based on the assumption that Russia is and always will be an enemy of the United States. Wikileaks recently published some thousands of emails that painted the Democratic National Committee, then headed by Hillary loyalist Debbie Wasserman Schultz, in a very bad light. Needing a scapegoat, Russia was blamed for the original hack that obtained the information, even though there is no hard evidence that Moscow had anything to do with it.
Those in the media and around Hillary who were baying the loudest about how outraged they were over the hack curiously appear to have no knowledge of the existence of the National Security Agency, located at Fort Meade Maryland, which routinely breaks into the government computers of friends and foes alike worldwide. Apparently what is fair game for American codebreakers is no longer seen so positively when there is any suggestion that the tables might have been turned.
Republican nominee Donald Trump noted that if the Russians were in truth behind the hack he would like them to search for the 30,000 emails that Hillary Clinton reportedly deleted from her home server. The comment, which to my mind was sarcastically making a point about Clinton's mendacity, brought down the wrath of the media, with the New York Times reporting that "foreign policy experts," also sometimes known as "carefully selected 'Trump haters,'" were shocked by The Donald. The paper quoted one William Inboden, allegedly a University of Texas professor who served on President George W. Bush's National Security Council. Inboden complained that the comments were "an assault on the Constitution" and "tantamount to treason." Now I have never heard of Inboden, which might be sheer ignorance on my part, but he really should refresh himself on what the Constitution actually says about treason, tantamount or otherwise. According to Article III of the Constitution of the United States one can only commit treason if there is a declared war going on and one is actively aiding an enemy, which as far as I know is not currently the case as applied to the U.S. relationship with Russia.
Another interesting aspect of the Russian scandal is the widespread assertion that Moscow is attempting to interfere in U.S. politics and is both clandestinely and openly supporting Donald Trump. This is presumably a bad thing, if true, because Putin would, according to the pundits, be able to steamroll "Manchurian Candidate" President Trump and subvert U.S. foreign policy in Russia's favor. Alternatively, as the narrative continues, the stalwart Hillary would presumably defend American values and the right to intervene militarily anywhere in the world at any time against all comers including Putin and those rascals in China and North Korea. Professor Inboden might no doubt be able to provide a reference to the part of the Constitution that grants Washington that right as he and his former boss George W. Bush were also partial to that interpretation.
And the alleged Russian involvement leads inevitably to some thoughts about interference by other governments in our electoral system. Israel and its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did so in a rather heavy handed fashion in 2012 on behalf of candidate Mitt Romney but I don't recall even a squeak coming out of Hillary and her friends when that took place. That just might be due to the fact that Netanyahu owns Bill and Hillary, which leads inevitably to consideration of the other big winner now that the two conventions are concluded. The team that one sees doing the victory lap is the state of Israel, which dodged a bigtime bullet when it managed to exploit its bought and paid for friends to eliminate any criticism of its military occupation and settlements policies. Indeed, Israel emerged from the two party platforms as America's best friend and number one ally, a position it has occupied since its Lobby took control of the Congress, White House and the mainstream media around thirty years ago.
Donald Trump, who has perversely promised to be an honest broker in negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, has also described himself as the best friend in the White House that Tel Aviv is ever likely to have. In addition to Trump speaking for himself, Israel was mentioned fourteen times in GOP convention speeches, always being described as the greatest ally and friend to the U.S., never as the pain in the ass and drain on the treasury that it actually represents.
No other foreign country was mentioned as often as Israel apart from Iran, which was regularly cited as an enemy of both the U.S. and – you guessed it – Israel. Indeed, the constant thumping of Iran is a reflection of the overweening affection for Netanyahu and his right wing government. Regarding Iran, the GOP foreign policy platform states "We consider the Administration's deal with Iran, to lift international sanctions and make hundreds of billions of dollars available to the Mullahs, a personal agreement between the President and his negotiating partners and non-binding on the next president. Without a two-thirds endorsement by the Senate, it does not have treaty status. Because of it, the defiant and emboldened regime in Tehran continues to sponsor terrorism across the region, develop a nuclear weapon, test-fire ballistic missiles inscribed with 'Death to Israel,' and abuse the basic human rights of its citizens."
The final written Republican platform for 2016 as relating to the Middle East, drawn up with the input of two Trump advisors Jason Greenblatt and David Friedman, rather supports the suggestion that Trump would be pro-Israel rather than the claim of impartiality. The plank entitled "Our Unequivocal Support of Israel and Jerusalem," promises to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, praises Israel in five different sections, eulogizing it as a "beacon of democracy and humanity" brimming over with freedom of speech and religion while concluding that "support for Israel is an expression of Americanism." It pledges "no daylight" between the two countries, denies that Israel is an "occupier," and slams the peaceful Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement (BDS), which it describes as anti-Semitic and seeking to destroy Israel. It calls for legal action to "thwart" BDS. There is no mention of a Palestinian state or of any Palestinian rights to anything at all.
The Democratic plank on the Middle East gives lip service to a two state solution for Israel-Palestine but is mostly notable for what it chose to address. Two Bernie Sanders supporters on the platform drafting committee James Zogby and Cornel West wanted to remove any illegal under international law affirmation that Jerusalem is the undivided capital of Israel and also sought to eliminated any condemnation of BDS. They failed on both issues and then tried to have included mild language criticizing Israel's occupation of the West Bank and its settlement building. They were outvoted by Hillary supporters on all the issues they considered important. Indeed, there is no language at all critical in any way of Israel, instead asserting that "a strong and secure Israel is vital to the United States because we share overarching strategic interests and the common values of democracy, equality, tolerance, and pluralism." That none of that was or is true apparently bothered no one in the Hillary camp.
The Democratic platform document explicitly condemns any support for BDS. Hillary Clinton, who has promised to take the relationship with Israel to a whole new level, has reportedly agreed to an anti-BDS pledge to appease her principal financial supporter Haim Saban, an Israeli-American film producer. Clinton also directly and personally intervened through her surrogate on the committee Wendy Sherman to make sure that the party platform would remain pro-Israel.
But many Democrats on the floor of the convention hall have, to their credit, promoted a somewhat different perspective, displaying signs and stickers while calling for support of Palestinian rights. One demonstrator outside the convention center burned an Israeli flag, producing a sharp response from Hillary's spokeswoman for Jewish outreach Sarah Bard, "Hillary Clinton has always stood against efforts to marginalize Israel and incitement, and she strongly condemns this kind of hatred. Burning the Israeli flag is a reckless act that undermines peace and our values." Bill meanwhile was seen in the hall wearing a Hillary button written in Hebrew. It was a full court press pander and one has to wonder how Hillary would have felt about someone burning a Russian flag or seeing Bill sport a button in Cyrillic.
Team Hillary also ignored chants from the convention floor demanding "No More War" and there are separate reports suggesting that one of her first priorities as president will be to initiate a "full review" of the "murderous" al-Assad regime in Syria with the intention of taking care of him once and for all. "No More War" coming from the Democratic base somehow became "More War Please" for the elites that run the party.
The Democratic platform also beats down on Iran, declaring only tepid support for the nuclear deal while focusing more on draconian enforcement, asserting that they would "not hesitate to take military action if Iran violates the agreement." It also cited Iran as "the leading state sponsor of terrorism" and claimed that Tehran "has its fingerprints on almost every conflict in the Middle East." For what it's worth, neither assertion about Iran's regional role is true and Tehran reportedly has complied completely with the multilateral nuclear agreement. It is the U.S. government that is failing to live up to its commitments by refusing to allow Iranian access to financial markets while the Congress has even blocked an Iranian bid to buy Made-in-the-U.S.A. civilian jetliners.
So those of us who had hoped for at least a partial abandonment of the hitherto dominant foreign policy consensus have to be disappointed as they in the pro-war crowd in their various guises as liberal interventionists or global supremacy warriors continue to control much of the discourse from left to right. Russia continues to be a popular target to vent Administration frustration over its inept posturing overseas, though there is some hope that Donald Trump might actually reverse that tendency. Iran serves as a useful punchline whenever a politician on the make runs out of other things to vilify. And then there is always Israel, ever the victim, perpetually the greatest ally and friend. And invariably needing some extra cash, a warplane or two or a little political protection in venues like the United Nations.
If you read through the two party platforms on foreign policy, admittedly a brutal and thankless task, you will rarely find any explanation of actual American interests at play in terms of the involvement of the U.S. in what are essentially other people's quarrels. That is as it should be as our political class has almost nothing to do with reality but instead is consumed with delusions linked solely to acquisition of power and money. That realization on the part of the public has driven both the Trump and Sanders movements and, even if they predictably flame out, there is always the hope that the dissidents will grow stronger with rejection and something might actually happen in 2020.
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M of A
The Clinton campaign and some pseudo experts assert that Russia is somehow guilty of hacking the Democratic National Committee and of revealing DNC emails via Wikileaks. There is zero hard evidence for that. The Clinton campaign also claims that Trump asked Russia to hack Clinton's emails. That is also not the case.
But two "liberal" computer experts, who are taken serious in the security scene, now build on those false assertions to say that Russia might manipulate voting machines in the November 9 elections. It would do so, presumably, to change the vote count in favor of Trump.
A Bruce Schneier op ed in today's Washington Post is headlined: By November, Russian hackers could target voting machines .
That headline alone is already dumb. ANY hacker could target and manipulate the easy to deceive voting machines - should those be connected to the Internet. Local administrators of such machines can manipulate them any time.
Schneier is, untypically for him, in war mongering mode.
If the intelligence community has indeed ascertained that Russia is to blame, our government needs to decide what to do in response. This is difficult because the attacks are politically partisan, but it is essential. If foreign governments learn that they can influence our elections with impunity, this opens the door for future manipulations, both document thefts and dumps like this one that we see and more subtle manipulations that we don't see.The U.S. manipulates foreign elections all the time, according to Bush administration lawyer Jack Goldsmith. It may not feel nice to suddenly be the target of manipulation attempts instead of the perpetrator, but manipulation attempts in elections are normal everywhere and no reason to start a war or other "response" measures.
Schneier:
[W]e need to secure our election systems before autumn. If Putin's government has already used a cyberattack to attempt to help Trump win, there's no reason to believe he won't do it again - especially now that Trump is inviting the "help."What a joke. Trump has not invited Russian "help" to manipulate voting computers. Trump also did not ask Russia to "hack" the Clinton email sever. That server no longer exists. If the Clinton email-server was secure, as Clinton asserts, and if the emails in question have been deleted, as Clinton also asserts, how could Russia "hack" for them?
Trump made a FOIA request for emails that, Hillary Clinton claims, have been deleted. What does she fear about that? Trump asked Russia to give the deleted Clinton emails to the FBI, should it by chance have a copy of them. Such a Freedom of Information Act request usually goes to a part of the U.S. administration. But the Obama administration says it does not have those emails. Trump then made a joke in directing the request to Russia.
Trump did get the furious media "outrage" response he intended to get. He thereby ruined the PR effect of the last night of the Democratic Convention. That was likely the sole intention of his stunt and again shows his marketing genius.
But back to the Schneier op-ed. That one is now joined by a piece at Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow. Doctorow is like Schneier a famous person in the computer scene. He quotes the Schneier piece and adds:
Voting machines are so notoriously terrible that they'd be a very tempting target for Russia or other states that want to influence the outcome in 2016 (or merely destabilize the US by calling into question the outcome in an election).The Doctorow sentence neglects, like Schneier, that the entities with the most obvious interest and capabilities to manipulate U.S. voting machines are not foreign countries. U.S. presidential candidates and their parties have much more at stake. The candidates and the money and interests behind them have stronger motives as well as more potential to change the voting results.
Why do we see such an orchestrated attempt to preemptively accuse Russia of potentially manipulating U.S. voting? This without ANY evidence that Russia ever has or would attempt to do so? Are there already plans for such manipulations that need a plausible foreign culprit as cover up story? Or is there a color revolution in preparation to eventually disenfranchise the election winner?
Cory Doctorow also sees destabilization as a possible motive and outcome of voting manipulations. Already back in March John Robb warned of a scenario this fall in which election results come into serious doubt and where a conflict over voting results escalates into a civil war.
I do not foresee such a scenario (yet). But should large scale voting manipulations take place, and be blamed on Russia, more than a civil war enters the realm of possibilities.
Posted by b at 02:21 PM | Comments (130)anon | Jul 28, 2016 3:00:23 PM | 4
"hacking", or rather, snooping and leaking, is business as usual... remember when the Sanders and Clinton campaigns were fighting over DNC server data?Bruno Marz | Jul 28, 2016 3:01:16 PM | 5
https://berniesanders.com/press-release/statement-jeff-weaver/The source of the DNC email leak is irrelevant. The Orwellian chant "Putin bad; US good!" is the point of the whole thing, and the media is just a bullhorn for the party/parties. The voting machine rumor is probably aimed at the actual corruption in some places that was designed to favor republicans in swing states. (ironic!) watch them call for more honest verification this time around.
But I do look forward to the show when the emails Trump referred to are released. What is Hillary afraid of? it's not like nobody knows what she's done... and wants to do next.
For all intents and purposes, the United States has been a failed state from the perspective of voting integrity from at least 2000. The lunatics are running the asylum here and we voters are only allowed to participate as a hollow form of placation.jawbone | Jul 28, 2016 3:16:03 PM | 7Our famous "free press," so totally controlled by Big Corporations. Always looking for a way to try to persuade the public that any political and social actions is bad and of no importance. ACK!Alaric | Jul 28, 2016 3:22:04 PM | 9On Tuesday night, iirc, but could have been Wednesday, the discussion mentioned Occupy as a failed political/social movement. PBS's Gwen Ifill said that it was "crushed by its own weight." It was part of the MCM (Mainstream Corporate Media) declaring the Sanders' promoted political revolution dead and nearly buried.
My immediate thought was of the White House managed meetings with mayors of cities where Occupy was very much not "crushed," and how they coordinated their attacks by knocking down tents, dumped books into dupsters, which were part of the free lending library in some cities, and forcing people out of sites long occupied with the persuasion of threatened force and physical harm.
But her statement was part and parcel of how the actual left of any type is dismissed and disrespected by the Corporatist Dems and their Repub allies.
we know the neocons intend to cheat to get Hillary elected. Sounds like a warning to Russia to keep out of the way or else.Mick McNulty | Jul 28, 2016 3:55:30 PM | 11The neo-cons realized how easy it was to rig the election in 2000 after which both sides do it. Now it's down to who who rigs it best. It's a one-party state anyway, two cheeks on the same ass, but every politician wants to be the one who does the telling not the told.likklemore | Jul 28, 2016 4:03:55 PM | 12I think the neo-cons impeached Clinton to ruin the Democrat run because 9/11 was ready to go, and they needed to be in power or they risked being uncovered by the security services of a Gore White House. When the impeachment failed they had no choice but to go in and steal it, because they'd have gone down for their treason. Look what it did to the world.
Thanks b for your persistence in shining the torchlight.. Unfortunately for Bruce Schneier, Mr. James Clapper is not readytom | Jul 28, 2016 4:08:55 PM | 13US Intelligence Not Ready to Name Party Behind DNC
http://sputniknews.com/us/20160728/1043732561/usa-intel-not-ready-dnc-hack.htmlUS Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said that the US intelligence authorities are not ready to say who is responsible for hacking the Democratic National Committee emails.
I do not think we are quite ready yet to make a call on attribution," Clapper stated at the Aspen Security Forum.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Why not and when will he be ready? Oh never mind. If Schneier is so concerned the election voting machines can be hacked -(Notice no mention of pre-programmed votes) - let's return to paper ballots and pencils. And who counts the votes?
Oh wait... the Supreme Court may issue a decree to stop the count as they did on December 12, 2000.
In a desperate attempt for bs stupid assertion of Trumps genius, b refuses to give a link for what Trump actually said. B also refuses to give us a sentenced quote from Trump. How weak.likklemore | Jul 28, 2016 4:10:36 PM | 14This video below shows that the pressure of the Russian hacking lies worked on Trump. What kind of genius is that b ?
Trump: Putin has no respect for the US. Starts at 1min 20 sec : https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=riuduXz5Y2ITrump on Russia finding Hillays emails : https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gNa2B5zHfbQ
If Trump is such a genius then why would he make so many idiotic and contradictory statements, and then cave it so easily into pressure of lies like this against Russia ? Immediately antagonizing Russia.
Also if trump really understands how corrupt the US voting system is, then what kind of genius would not hedge himself against that voting corruption surely to be done against Trump and for Hitlery - by saying insanely incessant stupid moronic things that expose him to attacks.
Wouldn't you hedge yourself by keeping on core message and not dragging yourself back into the pack with stupidity.
Trump said that Putin called Trump a genius, and pathetically that's all b needs to know.
@ Steve 1ian | Jul 28, 2016 4:43:38 PM | 20Oh my. That was quick, even before HRC's acceptance tonight. Bernie has left the Democratic Party, back to being an Independent
Bernie Sanders Leaves The Democratic Party
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-07-28/bernie-sanders-leaves-democratic-party
I am totally confused. What about his supporters?
The problem with the 'Trump as Manchurian Candidate' narrative is that most people (even Democrats) deep down, probably don't really believe it. It runs right into his 'America First' that the same people have been complaining about. In the absence of hard evidence, actually shared with the public, the Putin connection will eventually fall apart.MRW | Jul 28, 2016 4:58:51 PM | 21Trumps MO is to say something that generates a lot of outrage that dominates the news cycle at opportune moments. He does this when there is something else he doesn't want you to pay attention to. Remember when Trump University was in the news? He comes back with those statements about the judge. Last night, you had the president, the vice-president among the heavy hitters - what better time to pull a stunt like that? For a party that prides themselves as being the 'smart' one, the Democrats have been remarkably slow in figuring this out.
Trump probably won't pull anything like this with Hillary - the thing with her is that the more people see her, the less they like her - so let her have her hour of shouting a speech at us.
For voting machine issues, watch the Stephen Spoonamore series on YouTube. Each segment is about 3-4 minutes. Think there are eight segments. The series is 10 years old but extremely timely. Velvet Revolution Interviews Stephen Spoonamore (segment 1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAyEfovA404Noirette | Jul 28, 2016 5:00:20 PM | 23THEN watch his 2008 series, search YouTube. Warning: Annoying white noise in background. His solution to vote fraud specified in the later segments is ingenious. Spoonamore was the guy American Express and major banks called when they are hacked.
I *always* disliked that guy Scheneir now b has given me cause, thanks. (No that I know anything about hacking.) Some US rulings:nr23 | Jul 28, 2016 5:02:10 PM | 24Here the kicker:
A cyber attack has been given the status of a conventional military attack by NATO on 14th June in a major policy change that increases the likelihood of a world war against Russia.
Bruce Schneier has been having a neolibcon bias for years with a blind spot for NSA activities. I stopped reading his stupid blog, with little to no added value regarding security news, when it became too obvious.virgile | Jul 28, 2016 5:22:06 PM | 25PS: when will you remove the embedded links to google, yahoo, ...?
The democrats are warning loud and clear that Russia may hack the voting machines in favor of Trump. In fact, they are preparing the terrain to use this argument in case Trump is elected. To make such stupid statements, it shows that the dems are seriously worried that Hillary is quickly loosing ground.jfl | Jul 28, 2016 6:05:56 PM | 28@27 cresty, 'The only reason not to have paper copies is to allow fraud.'MRW | Jul 28, 2016 6:10:02 PM | 29Very well and concisely put. Except for the 'copies' bit. The only reason not to have paper ballots is to allow fraud.
To me the answer seems obvious: voters registered and elections administered, ballots tallied and stored at the precinct level.
There are about 175,000 precincts in the USA, each composed of 1,000 to 2,000 people. A workable size for real, participatory democracy, the basis for all constituencies - municipal, county, state, federal - erected upon them. First come the people , then come our governments.
Watch: New: Spoonamore - Sep 2008 - Part 8 - "What part don't you understand...paper ballots please."lysias | Jul 28, 2016 6:52:40 PM | 32
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WTe8ppEIic
2:47 minutes .2004, not 2008. Obama and Dems won Ohio in 2008. The Republicans' computer expert in Ohio died afterwards in a fishy small plane accident just as he was about to testify.crone | Jul 28, 2016 6:41:21 PM | 30from Russia (with Love). Russia To US: "Sort Out Your Own Hacking Scandal; It Is Not Our Headache" As the silly farce over whether Russia hacked the DNC continues, earlier today the Kremlin had some harsh words for the US.Jen | Jul 28, 2016 6:55:21 PM | 33Russia told the United States on Thursday to get to the bottom of of its own hacking scandal. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said accusations of a Russian hand in hacking Democratic Party emails bordered on "total stupidity" and were motivated by anti-Russian sentiment. Suggestions of Russian involvement riled the Kremlin, which has categorically denied this and accused U.S. politicians of seeking to play on Cold War-style U.S. fears of Moscow by fabricating stories for electoral purposes.
"As regards these (email) batches, that is not our headache. We never poke our noses into others' affairs and we really don't like it when people try to poke their nose into ours," he said.
"The Americans needs to get to the bottom of what these emails are themselves and find out what it's all about."
"... Trump made a FOIA request for emails that, Hillary Clinton claims, have been deleted. What does she fear about that? Trump asked Russia to give the deleted Clinton emails to the FBI, should it by chance have a copy of them. Such a Freedom of Information Act request usually goes to a part of the U.S. administration. But the Obama administration says it does not have those emails. Trump then made a joke in directing the request to Russia ..."Yonatan | Jul 28, 2016 7:47:18 PM | 34What Clinton fears is that the deleted emails are emails related to the work she did (or supposedly did) while she was US Secretary of State and therefore they would be proof that she violated federal US laws on recordkeeping. Some of these emails might cast light on the 2012 Benghazi consulate attack and whether she can be held partly responsible for the deaths of four Americans during that attack.
Jessia @3. Schneier is an insider - Harvard and the US DoD. It is also ironic that he wrote a book titled: Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive.Macon Richardson | Jul 28, 2016 8:00:44 PM | 35Way to go, Bruce!
Bruno Marz @ 5V. Arnold | Jul 28, 2016 8:57:12 PM | 37If voter fraud is the criterion of a failed state (and why not), the US failed in 1960 when John Kennedy not only stole the Democratic nomination through voter fraud in West Virginia but also stole the general election through voter fraud in Illinois.
Tricky Dick Nixon was urged to contest the Illinois vote and contest the outcome of the election. He pointedly refused to do so saying that a contested election would do more harm to the country than allowing a fraudulent victory for JFK.
Nixon was quite a complicated person.
Well, it does appear the U.S. is in full Loon mode (my apologies to the bird). The Clinton campaign is doing a fantastic job of deflection and distraction and the idiots are falling for it. It would seem Russia's Pres. Putin is indeed omnipotent.ProPeace | Jul 28, 2016 9:02:14 PM | 39The missing Hitlary Killton's deleted emails would reveal most probably that the current war against Libya, Syria, Iraq has been mostly her private endeavor (plus Petreaus, CIA, Raytheon) at the request of her Bilderberg/City of London Crown Corporation masters, outside Obama's control.ProPeace | Jul 28, 2016 9:17:30 PM | 40@23 Thank you Noirette for that missing piece of the puzzle.ProPeace | Jul 28, 2016 9:24:29 PM | 41I forgot abut that in my reply on earlier thread.
The scenario deep state/global criminal cabal has been preparing against the US people and the world would go like this:
- Hitlary looses to Trump
- Russia is blamed with fabricated evidence for rigging the election
- civil unrest in incited (Israeli snipers shooting civilians at random + police trained by the Israeli advisors brutalizes protesters)
- hot spots in conflict zones (Turkey, Ukraine, Pribaltica) are set on fire - blamed on Russia (Phillipines blamed on China)
- nukes going off in Chicago
- NATO considers "Russian cyber attack" as an act of war and responds
In order to avoid this at this point anybody who supports the Hell Bitch should be boycotted and ostracized, including all the celebrities (who obviously pay their dues for their dark, secret deals) not only that filth Sarah Silverman and alike, who lower themselves to such a sewer level, also companies, local politicians and so on...
Let's not forget Karl Rove case witness killed in plane crash, sisters want answersProPeace | Jul 28, 2016 9:33:51 PM | 42Web guru was potential witness in Ohio voting fraud caseShannon Connell of Madison says her brother Michael rarely talked about work. She knew he ran an Ohio company called New Media Communications that set up websites for Republicans including former President George H.W. Bush and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. But it wasn't until after he died last December, when the small plane he was piloting crashed, that she learned via the Internet of his tie to a voter fraud case and to allegations that presidential adviser Karl Rove had made threats against him.
"At first, it was really hard for me to believe Mike was dead because somebody wanted him dead," says Shannon, a buyer for a local children's resale shop. "But as time goes on, it's hard for me not to believe there was something deliberate about it."
A native of Illinois, Shannon moved to Madison in 2002, the same year as her sister, Mary Jo Walker. Walker, a former Dane County Humane Society employee, has similar concerns about their brother's death: "It doesn't seem right to me at all."
Michael Connell - who died at age 45, leaving a wife and four kids - was a computer networking expert who lived near Akron. Last July 17, an attorney who's filed a federal civil rights lawsuit alleging a conspiracy to rig elections in Ohio held a press conference at which he identified Connell as a principal witness.
The attorney, Cliff Arnebeck of Columbus, Ohio, tells Isthmus he doesn't believe Connell was engaged in criminal activity but may have been a "data-processing implementer" for those who were. "I was told he was at the table when some criminal things were discussed."
A week after the press conference, on July 24, Arnebeck wrote U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey seeking protection for Connell, whom he said had been "threatened" by Rove, a key player in the campaigns of George W. Bush. Arenebeck says Connell was told through an intermediary that unless he agreed to "take the fall" for election fraud in Ohio, his wife [and New Media partner] faced prosecution for lobby law violations. There was no claim of a threat on Connell's person.
Arnebeck was permitted to depose Connell last Nov. 3. The portion of this deposition that dealt with the alleged threats was sealed, but Arnebeck is preparing a motion to make it all public. He affirms that Connell denied any involvement in voter fraud, but thinks Rove still had reason to regard him as a threat.
"The problem that Mike Connell represented is [he was] a guy of conscience," says Arnebeck. "If it came right down to it, he would not commit perjury." Arnebeck "absolutely" would have called Connell as a witness in his lawsuit.
Shannon and Mary Jo both say their brother, a devout Catholic, seemed upset in the weeks before his death. Mary Jo feels he was "stressed out and depressed" on his birthday last November; Shannon says he atypically did not respond to an email she'd sent.
On Dec. 19, Connell flew alone in his single-engine Piper Supercub from a small airport near Washington, D.C. The plane crashed on its final approach to his hometown Akron-Canton Airport, between two houses. The cause is still under investigation but is presumed accidental.
The blogosphere refuses to accept this. "Mike was getting ready to talk," writes one online journalist who labels Connell a source. "He was frightened."
DEMEXIT Is REAL and Is Gaining Steam. Interactive Map To Re-Registerlikklemore | Jul 28, 2016 9:44:13 PM | 43Going viral and encouraging disgruntled Democrats to leave the party in all states without upcoming primaries. This does not mean that a percentage of these people won't still vote Democrat in the general election but there is also an active effort coming from the Green Party to recruit these people. Sanders very publicly leaving the Democrat Party to return to Independent was very significant and a signal to his supporters to give the Demexit go sign. Many states have a deadline of August 1st for pre-election party switches, so that leaves only a couple days for many.The interactive map and Demexit instruction page being circulated is here. As is customary with the left, alot of work and coordination went into putting this together.
@ ProPeace 38,39likklemore | Jul 28, 2016 10:17:16 PM | 47Question being asked in Vermont on party affiliation
Is Bernie Sanders an Independent or a Democrat?
Sanders is an Independent in the Senate but also a member of the Democratic Party, according to his spokesman, Michael Briggs.
Notice Biggs said member?
= = = =
the missing deleted emails would most likely also reveal the innards of the Clinton family Foundation. Not really missing. It would be a great disappointment if copies are not in a few 3 letter agencies.
@ ProPeace 44ProPeace | Jul 28, 2016 10:37:33 PM | 48Putin did It. with a bowl of popcorn and using one finger. More Hacking – And is said to be of "Great Concern"
Reuters Exclusive: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-cyber-democrats-exclusive-idUSKCN1082Y7?il=0
FBI investigates hacking of Democratic congressional group – sources
[.] Jim Manley, a Democratic strategist who once worked for Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, said the possibility of the DCCC being hacked was cause for great concern.
"Until proven otherwise, I would suggest that everyone involved with the campaign committee operate under the assumption Russians have access to everything in their computer systems," Manley said.
[. ] The disclosure of the DCCC breach is likely to further stoke concerns among Democratic Party operatives, many of whom have acknowledged they fear further dumps of hacked files that could harm their candidates. WikiLeaks has said it has more material related to the U.S. election that it intends to release.[.]
= = = =
"They fear" Wikileaks intends to release the big one?
Great George Carlin probably did not know many actual names of the "big owners" when he wroteProPeace | Jul 28, 2016 10:55:20 PM | 49...The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice you don't.
You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own, and control the corporations. They've long since bought, and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear.
They got you by the balls.
They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying lobbying, to get what they want Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I'll tell you what they don't want they don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking...
Blackstone is one of them, others being Fidelity, PIMCO, StateStreet...
Hillary Clinton Talks Tough on Shadow Banking, But Blackstone Is Celebrating at the DNC
Blackstone, the giant Wall Street private equity firm, will hold an invitation-only reception before the final night of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. The event, at the swanky Barnes Foundation art museum, includes the usual perks for attendees: free food, drink, and complimentary shuttle buses to the final night of the convention.What's unusual is that the host is precisely the kind of "shadow banker" that Hillary Clinton has singled out as needing more regulation in her rhetoric about getting tough on Wall Street.
But Blackstone President and Chief Operating Officer Hamilton "Tony" James doesn't seem the least bit intimidated...
... The head-scratcher here is that James runs a private equity firm, exactly the kind of "shadow bank" that Clinton has derided as a scourge to the financial system. Shadow banks are financial institutions that do bank-like activities (such as lending or investing for clients) but aren't chartered as banks, existing outside of the traditional regulatory perimeter.
Clinton argued during the primaries with Bernie Sanders that they were more dangerous than the big banks, because of the lack of scrutiny on their risk-taking. That was the linchpin of her argument that Sanders's plan was too myopic, and thather plan, which sought to crack down on shadow banking and deny it sources of funds, was more comprehensive.
James has not only actively engaged in defending the whole concept of shadow banking, he created the original private equity trade group, formerly known as the Private Equity Council. The group later quietly changed its name to the more innocuous-sounding American Investment Council.
In 2014, James penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed where he called shadow banking an "Orwellian term that can undermine critical thought." It was the regulated entities, not shadow banks, that were "the source of almost all the systemic risk in the financial crisis," he wrote. James explicitly sought to steer policymakers away from "regulations that undermine the many thousands of companies and jobs that need market-based financing to survive and grow."
That term, "market-based financing," is a Tony James original. He prefers it because it removes the more sinister connotations associated with the shadows. "Private equity sounds bad, but shadow banking is worse," he told NPR.
Blackstone operates in leveraged buyouts, asset management, and real estate transactions. It is the largest real estate private equity firm in the world, holding over $103 billion in assets. After the housing bubble collapsed, Blackstone bought 43,000 single-family homes over a two-year period, at one point buying more than $100 million worth of homes per week. They converted most of these into rentals, becoming one of the largest landlords in the world.
Renters have sued Blackstone's real estate unit, Invitation Homes, for renting out homes in shoddy condition. They've also been accused of jacking up rents to satisfy investors, charging as high as 180 percent of the market rent value. Nevertheless, Blackstone plans to spin off Invitation Homes with an initial public offering next year.
James's company also benefits from taking business lines from regulated banks, such as one of the trading businesses of global firm Credit Suisse. Blackstone then runs that company without government interference; assets in the Credit Suisse group have doubled since 2013.
@likklemoreCho Nyawinh | Jul 29, 2016 12:14:16 AM | 50So Clapper did not call it, but Manley has already "suggestion" blaming Russia... LOL. The perfidy of Manly is that he does not say how to _prevent_ possible breaches, but creates perception of "Russians having access to everything" instead. So he does not really care about solving the problem, but about maintaining the notion that the problem magically persist.
Obviously to use that notion/perception later for some sinister goals.
This is just agitprop disinformation. Since the 'hanging chad' soft coup, all US voting machines have backdoors to allow thevotes to be flipped, and since the Patriot Act, an Israeli subcontractor and AT&T have had an NSA contract to 'hack' all US cell phone and internet traffic, but now there is no need...GOOG and FB have apps on your tablet, your phone, and your sports band that record and database all your thoughts and actions.If you following computing, significant breakthroughs have been made in database manipulation, to where terabytes of information can now be ground down to streaming focus group metrics on the entire herd of so-called Little People. They can literally 'read your mind'.
'Russia' is just a Zionist mind-meld 'shiney object' whatever cognitive dissociation memes they need to blunt-force eye-socket rape we and our children have to endure ... FOREVER
psychohistorian | Jul 29, 2016 1:01:50 AM | 53
Formerly T-Bear | Jul 29, 2016 3:10:37 AM | 56And to further make my point about the emails there is this quote from a Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov:
"As regards these (email) batches, that is not our headache. We never poke our noses into others' affairs and we really don't like it when people try to poke their nose into ours," he said. "The Americans needs to get to the bottom of what these emails are themselves and find out what it's all about."
And DUH! the attribution for that last quote....
sigh....
Zico | Jul 29, 2016 4:08:12 AM | 57The toxicity of this (2016) election has only been equalled by the election of 1860. Republicans and Democrats were involved then also though the rôles have substantially changed, the results are yet to be seen. What will 156 years of experience bring?
Look everybody, over there.. The Russians are everywhere!!!!tod | Jul 29, 2016 4:34:07 AM | 58Gotta hand it to the msm, though. They've managed to turn this Democrats match fixing to "It must be the Russians".. As always, the joke's on us :)
It is worth to mention that Bruce Schneier is part of the "Tor Project" board of directors since July 2016.tSinilats | Jul 29, 2016 5:59:56 AM | 59The DNC was "hacked "by some of Killary's Israeli chums/clients... Lets look at the proffered "evidence" for a Russian Hack.. The hackers "seem to have been following a schedule of "Russian" holdiays... Half (or more) of the people in Israel follow that same schedule of holdiays... There are "clues" 'suggesting connections" with known Russian hacker groups..right..again, any Russian hacker group "known" this well and this long, is not an active hacker group any more... Except when Israelis, or whoever, are gaslighting them....The rest of the evidence, where any one has even bothered to offer it, is just as weak, or even weaker.From The Hague | Jul 29, 2016 7:00:43 AM | 60It will be a landslide. So, the outcome can't be manipulated. Or, who will vote for Killary?Enrico Malatesta | Jul 29, 2016 7:22:40 AM | 61MR @ 35Yonatan | Jul 29, 2016 7:46:47 AM | 62A small quibble, but words matter - what is going on is not Voter Fraud, it's Election Fraud.
psychohistorian @52.Yonatan | Jul 29, 2016 7:51:29 AM | 63"Nowhere on the intertubes that I frequent are stories about implications of the CONTENT of the DNC emails. The only angle of the story that is allowed to be covered in excruciating detail is who done it."
That is the whole point of the 'Putin did it' exercise. It is to distract the people from the content. Contrast with the Panama Papers release where the target, Putin, was immediately targeted indirectly in carefully selected releases. There was very little interest in who was behind the hack. The info was publicly released via a US-government funded entity.
psychohistorian @52.Noirette | Jul 29, 2016 8:02:47 AM | 64It should also be seen in context of the earlier public declaration that such hacking would constitute an act of war. Trump has played into USG hands creating a 'reality' that 'Putin did it' - after saying that "Russia should release the emails, if it has them". Was this done wittingly or unwittingly?
ian @ 20: The problem with the 'Trump as Manchurian Candidate' narrative is that most people (even Democrats) deep down, probably don't really believe it.From The Hague | Jul 29, 2016 8:20:46 AM | 65I agree! .. hogwash. Trump is the Donald and not more. Yet, after thinking about ian's post, there is an oblique argument to be made: that this election is in fact IS all about Putin. Not Putin as Vladimir, but Putin as a stand-in for Russia. The central issue, the ginormous elephant in the room that is not being discussed is foreign policy - it only shows up in some remarks and many are oblivious to it.
camps
- Killary and escalation - the continuation of Bush-Obama foreign policy on speed + steroids, which involves destroying places and going for one 'enemy' after another and flailing about (e.g. Iraq) - now aimed at the higher-stake ones (e.g. weakening Europe, dividing it from Russia, and attacking Russia with all means at hand.) The backers are neo-cons, neo-libs, the MIC, Wall Street (gingerly), and others, long list, some/many are criminal enterprises. Going on strong is the meme.
- Trump, with a nationalistic bent (partly calculated and not the most important) shows at the same time an isolationist stance (as opposed to conquering position) e.g. walls, anti-globalization on trade (ostensibly), America first of a certain flavor, and going so far! as to question the existence of NATO and to have a neutral or positive attitude towards the latest green-clawed fire-breathing devil. Reversing decline is the meme.
Arguably, foreign policy in terms of life/death of its citizens is the most crucial point, but it is sub rosa. That is partly why all the talk/analysis in terms of ethnicity-race-religious identities / values in this election (black / brown voters, abortion..), class (economic), tribal political belonging, has become utterly confused, as these archaic divisions become meaningless, while upheld in political discourse (with endless switcheroos) by all, to confuse and gather votes here 'n there.
The US public is left adrift with two despised candidates, who do or might represent two very different paths forward if one can even contemplate 'the forward' at present.
ProPeace, 40, that is scary indeed.
@64 Noirettefast freddy | Jul 29, 2016 8:24:31 AM | 66People hoped 8 years ago that Obama was camp 2. But he was a traitor.
Noirette 64Les | Jul 29, 2016 8:32:26 AM | 67Your summary is excellent. Reading it, the choice between the two (excluding 3rd choices) is clear. There exists a chance for peace or the guarantee of perpetual war.
Article on Gen. Breedlove: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/breedlove-network-sought-weapons-deliveries-for-ukraine-a-1104837.html Defense contractors, think tanks, and Breedlove feared Congress would cut U.S. troop levels in Europe.jfl | Jul 29, 2016 9:27:18 AM | 68@64 noirette, 'two despised candidates, who do or might represent two very different paths forward if one can even contemplate 'the forward' at present.'Joe Stalin | Jul 29, 2016 9:52:09 AM | 69Yeah. Absolutely. My italics on the might. Hillary has a record. She can lie, but not to me. Trump has ... a mouth. When he says reasonable things - given Hillary - people are desperate to believe him. I can't.
I don't think we can, or should. Trump seems far more likely to be another Obama than not. I think we have wasted far too many of these quadrennial exercises and that the time to do something different is now. Look what happened in Libya. That could happen in Russia ... and a lot more people than a US Ambassador will die. The Europeans are mad not to abrogate the US at this point. The Americans are beginning to tell themselves another 'real' war will solve their problems ... look at the DNC convention ... and it'll be OK because it will be another war 'over there'. It won't be over there, it'll be right here no matter where that is.
Concerted action by our atomized selves is the only option left open to us. Let us Americans envision a different future and simply effect it. No to Clinton, not to Trump . Let's emulate a higher life form . We can make it we try.
Bruce Schneier used to charge the Chinese in every hacking incident, I guess there is now a "pivot" in the propaganda world.Angry Panda | Jul 29, 2016 10:17:14 AM | 70It is obvious that our elections are hacked: Florida in 2000, Ohio 2004, and now Brooklyn, Nevada, Arizona, California and other locations this year. They were hacked by our own crooks who would never allow Rooskies to muscle in on the action. Few polling stations in crowded districts, removing names from voter lists, private companies contracted to "count", voter suppression ID laws, jailing of voting populations, gerrymandering, etc. The Rooskies can only bring a rubber chicken to a gun fight.
I keep dreaming of a "dream" (or a "nightmare") scenario in which a) Trump wins on the election night, just, maybe by 10-20 electoral votes; and b) on the day the Electoral College actually meets, 10-20 electors from "Trump" states, quote, "vote their conscience", end quote, and Hillary becomes president. Which, legally, they can do - remember the electors aren't formally bound by anything other than "tradition" (read: what their local party officials would do to them were they to change their vote).lysias | Jul 29, 2016 10:25:26 AM | 71I know, I know, slim chance. But it would be a thing of beauty to behold were it to actually happen. For those of us who revel in chaos and anarchy, of course, the types who wished for a Sarah Palin presidency just for the sheer amount of comedy material involved; the rest of the population might well differ. In any event, the "Russian voting machine fraud" story would fit in very well with this particular sequence of events - the electors "voting their conscience" could then be portrayed as patriotic anti-communists (or whatever), for example.
For those 10-20 electors to vote for Hillary would be regarded as a betrayal of the system and make her an illegitimate, crippled president.rg the lg | Jul 29, 2016 10:35:56 AM | 72What those 10-20 electors could do instead is to vote for some third candidate. Say, Gary Johnson or John Kasich. When no candidate wins a majority of electors, the election is thrown into the House of Representatives, in which each state's delegation has one vote and the vote must be among the three candidates who got the greatest number of electoral votes.
Get a life! Then read: http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/blues | Jul 29, 2016 10:55:11 AM | 75He makes a good point: " From inception, America proved itself the cruelest, most ruthless nation in world history, harming more people over a longer duration than any other. Tens of millions of corpses attest to its barbarity."
"If elected, Hillary risks committing greater high crimes of state than her predecessors, including possible nuclear war - why it's crucial to defeat her in November. Humanity's fate hangs in the balance."
All the rest is just rhetoric ... and the primary reason AmeriKKKans have Clinton as President in the first place. AmeriKKKans know that their best interests, even when jobless, are with continued murder, rape and theft!
Proof? You want proof? Each of you AmeriKKKans who post to this site. Not that other are blameless, they just don't vote.
I have stated here and "everywhere" that automated elections are not really elections at all. While the USA buys more and more election computers, most of the rest of the (ostensibly democratic) world has tossed out election computers, and moved to using had counted paper ballots.nr23 | Jul 29, 2016 1:55:10 PM | 76I have said many times: "We must abolish election machines, such as voting computers. If they make casting and tallying 10 times faster, they make organized cheating 10 times easier as well. Which can we truly afford?"
I read several computer programmer's blogs, and comments almost every day, and I am sure most of these professionals are aware of the fact that their machines can never be made safe for use in elections. Yet, they virtually never come out and say that. Job security trumps having democracy for nearly all of them. Most of these programmers are depressing examples of self-centeredness.
@58 "It is worth to mention that Bruce Schneier is part of the "Tor Project" board of directors since July 2016."PhilK | Jul 29, 2016 2:11:16 PM | 78That's indeed worth mentioning since one of the TOR founders, Jacob Appelbaum, was ejected from the board in June by a phony sex scandal identical to the one of Julian Assange. There was also the recent departure in July of one of the major TOR contributors, Lucky Green, who didn't disclose a lot about his reasons ("I feel that I have no reasonable choice left within the bounds of ethics") http://thehackernews.com/2016/07/tor-anonymity-node.html . The departures of Jacob Appelbaum and Lucky Green and the welcoming of sellout Bruce Schneier who's opinions were always in line with US foreign policy spell doom and gloom for TOR's security reliability.
A lot of people outside the US are probably unaware of some very important features of federal elections here. Many of these people may assume that the US has a single presidential election, run by the federal government, as is the case in their own countries (Australia, for example). But in reality, there are 51 presidential elections, and only one of them (the one in the District of Columbia) is run by the federal government.shadyl | Jul 29, 2016 3:25:23 PM | 80Each state has its own way of collecting and counting ballots, and its own laws about voter eligibility, absentee voting, ballot access for third parties, voting procedures, etc. Because the counties within each state actually run the polling places, these state election laws are mainly instructions for county election officials. So there are ample opportunities for election fraud at the county and state levels, but not at the federal level (except for mass media mind control).
In unusual situations, state election laws can be challenged in federal courts. In my home state of Tennessee, Republicans and Democrats many years ago passed a law that essentially makes it impossible for third parties to appear on the ballot. And for all those many years, the Tennessee Green Party has routinely gone to federal court, claiming that the state law unreasonably restricts Tennesseans' voting rights, and the court routinely rules in their favor. Thus my ability to vote for Jill Stein exists only because a federal court has intervened in Tennessee's election system. But judicial intervention like this is essentially the only power the federal government can exercise over voting.
I can't for the life of me understand why so many hawks in the State Dept and elsewhere are sooooo afraid of Putin. They still mad he nationalized oil companies?dorcus | Jul 29, 2016 4:22:50 PM | 81Edward | Jul 29, 2016 10:24:21 PM | 85Just suppose the emails of the DNC were released by the Clinton Machine, what a creative tactic, and certainly there is no reason to doubt that...a great media firestorm ensues, DWS had to fall on her sword but quickly gets hoisted on the Clinton petard..as a campaign manager
It is possible that Schneier and Doctorow may not have an anti-Russia agenda but are using the Russia angle because then the U.S. press will report on the security problems with electronic voting. Russia should just tell the U.S. to switch to mechanical voting if they are worried. How is Russia responsible for our insecure voting?Penelope | Jul 29, 2016 11:49:31 PM | 86ProPeace,ThatDamnGood | Jul 30, 2016 12:06:16 AM | 88Thanks for so much intelligent commentary this thread.
Your comment, "As I have often mentioned on these pages previously, I do believe pedophiles and various other perverts are actively recruited into positions of power so that they can be compromised and controlled by the criminal cabal." I don't think that the pedophiles are recruited into power so that they can be controlled by fear of disclosure. In fact nothing happens to them when they're found out: the records are "lost", evidence is "insufficient", etc. Rather, the explanation I think is that the secret societies and higher levels of Masonry all use sexual deviancy as a means of bonding their initiates into a criminal cabal outside of the norms of society. There is a philosophical embracing of the destruction of innocence just as there is a glorification of the chaos produced by war.
The evil that we face is an alternate philosophical position which rejects all the moral tenets of the world's 7 great religions. The goal is the rule of a tiny sect which imagines itself a godhead over humanity. Their main tools against us are informational and moral. Many of the novels of the 20s, the 30s and especially the late 19th century reveal by contrast how greatly they've degraded the very idea of living one's life informed by a moral ideal.
The examined life has been swept away, replaced by the exclusively material and physical. Did you know that one of the early objectives was to control the appointment of divinity school teachers? The Rockefellers personally championed Unitarianism, which helped to trivialize religion. Without religion or an organized system of moral limits and the complete absence of the idealization of the moral and the possession of moral purpose, that great generational sink of morality once so vibrant among the American people has long-since sprung a leak now become a torrent. One looks in vain for that which would nourish the soul of the very young. The moral ideal has vanished from our culture. How could it not? The Rockefellers alone control over 2,000 domestic NGOs, foundations and think tanks. Even the culturally trivial is now being replaced by the overtly destructive. The human eclipsed by the bestial.
Enough people, armed simply with knowledge and the resolution to look for the truth wherever it leads, can still stop it.
Hillary to be president by hook or crook.Election preparation underway, they are taking a page from the playbook used in Malaysia.
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James Donald
Charles PriceThe problem wit this comment is why it was made at all. You do not announce forthcoming explosive information for several reasons: 1. You may be assassinated. 2. You may be blackmailed. 3. You allow the people time to respond 4. The information may be stolen. Think about it. When has an individual promised ahead of time a release of blockbuster info, and then delivered. Perhaps Assange is waiting to be paid off not to release the information.
The NWO is the only benefiting entity of war. Who owns the companies that manufactures and sells all armament to both side? the same ones that supplied WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, the American Civil war, and revolutions all over the world for the last two-hundred years... need I go on. They have made trillions on weapons, armament, and armored vehicles to lock down America and take everything. The biggest land grab in history. Who always comes out on top in every Wall Street crash? They keep pushing for war because its the only means for unending power and profit. Know one wants a war because no one sees a need. We are all saner than the NWO thugs. You realize, there are 7.5 billion of us in the world, all manipulated, killed, and blamed for all those thugs do. They are only a drop in the toilet. WE don't comply, their reality vaporizes over night. Know where they are right now? under ground. Their scared to death because they've been discovered and tracked. They should be. Don't believe the network media. Rely on your own best judgement. Nothing can fall that we can't rebuild stronger and better. Who needs them? Is humanity better off without the Devil? There's only one answer.Daly Jones
I randomly found this video and realized that you made one of my favorite documentaries!!!! I try to get everyone I know to watch it....The Money Masters! It's one of the best/horrifyingly true documentaries I've ever watched. Thank you sir! You have just earned another subscriber
Rudy Hassen
Question: why do entrenched entities hate dissemination of information? As reference....see North Korea......or DNC.
Rudy Hassen
BTW....unlikely Russia is behind the leaks. Putin is a much better chess player the Obama, Clinton and probably Trump as well. Don't he surprised if it's DNC insiders behind this.
Da Guy
How can anyone trust someone that lied, cheated and conned to get the nomination, just because they now say they won't lie, cheat and con anymore now that they got what they wanted by lying, cheating and conning & got caught w/evidence proving it, otherwise they would still be denying it. All I hear and see now is how Hillary and the DNC can spin what they got caught & proven doing to get votes from the very people they lied to, cheated and conned. I would no longer trust anything Hillary or the DNC said or promised unless someone like Bernie cleaned it up of corrupt people. Why isn't the FBI investigating/attacking/prosecuting this coup??? The email leaks, college & research analysis of elections and results did a lot of their job already.
If a con, lied, cheated and conned you out of your life savings, would you trust them a few days later w/your kids life savings just because they say: sure that guy exposed our personal communications that proved we lied, cheated & conned you out of your life saving but were different now and you can trust us w/your kids life savings, now that we got what we wanted. (note to self): make sure no one can get a hold of our personal communications in the future so no one can prove anything we do, this way we can blame anything &/or anyone else for the loss of their kids life savings. "take Hillary's lead, delete and scrub the memories so nothing is retrievable and all released info has to go through our lawyers. We can tell them our lawyers are looking out for their best interest not ours". Once a con, always a con. This is an attempted theft of a country or a coup.
I would not only feel a traitor to my Country, kids & future generations if I just accepted this and joined the coup: I WOULD BE A TRAITOR. If this coup fails and Trump gets elected, it's on you, the collaborators and coup member, not anyone else. Look what the leaders or the head person of other countries do to the people that attempt a coup in their country. We pretend it's not happening. And if this coup succeeds, we all live under false pretenses and have allowed our country to betray what it's supposed to stand for "again", the spiral down from there will be easy. I've never been so ashamed of my country & worried about the future of this planet as I am now.
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Chuck Todd, Establishment Gatekeeper and Chief Presstitute. He proves that the Fourth Estate needs a total overhaul, and that the MSM needs to be broken-up like the banks & other institutions need to be in order to become truly competitive rather than in name only. The tightening grip of oligarchs must be pried apart! Assange is doing his part to expose the powers that oppress us, and should be commended for his work!Loki7072
This interviewer is obviously a democrat , trying to blame the Russians for the content of the emails , so sad the democratic corruption in this country runs so deep
Charles W
According to the leaked emails, he, Chuck Todd, is part of the rigging process.
Anthony Marin
Chuck Todd isn't a journalist, just another government PR person. Corporate media is a joke.
Rafael Reyes
Their Motive is to tell the truth. Clearly that why they released the information before the convention and delegates still went forward with corruption. That defies the DNC, case closed.
Now do the constituents of that party still have faith in staying with that party? That's totally up to the ppl. Whether of not it was domestic or foreign info isn't important, due to the fact that the information was authentic and proven true by our own officials who investigated the digital encryption of the files.
Frank Rizzo
Because we've never interfered in another government or anything right? what a joke!
Notecrusher
So what if the Russian government was the source? I have gratitude to WHOEVER provided the leak. Now we know the truth about the DNC's crimes and corruption. I hope they burn.
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Kremlin
MOSCOW (Sputnik) - US presidential candidate Hilary Clinton's statements on Russia's alleged involvement in the Democratic Party hacking scandal are "absurd" and based on emotions, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Monday.
"Such statement by Mrs. Clinton are part of the pre-election rhetoric and do not include any specifics, because, of course, accusing Russian hackers of certain actions is not the same thing as accusing Russia's leadership or government. Statements that Russia is behind the actions of certain hackers are quite absurd as well, because Russia is a country," Peskov said.
"Accordingly, there are no specifics in her accusations. Therefore we believe that they are of an emotional character. Of course, Russian government agencies are not, have not and will never be involved in cyberterrorism," he underlined.
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www.theguardian.com
varyat
Joe Biden's son has major business interests in Ukraine. Is that why Biden is so supportive of Ukraine? Paul Manafort is a rat, like all the major league campaign operatives. All that is important to them is the win and those that can jump over each other to rent their expertise around the globe to whatever scumbag has money. It is a bipartisan gig. To spin this in such a partisan manner when the entire political machinery on both sides operates like this is is either knowingly deceitful or just plain ignorant. When it is nearly impossible to just get straight balanced news from a newspaper, when the coverage is just so obviously slanted, real journalism is dead. This style of news by innuendo and the selective parsing of fact is shoddy reportage. Shame.
macmarco
Under globalism, it is only natural for corporations and their CEOs to have more contact with foreign entities and their leaders. Apple and CEO Tim Cook has made a huge commitment to communist China, one that he told President Obama will not be shaken or reduced.
US tax laws that allow 'profit centers' to be claimed anywhere around the world will almost certainly bring corporate leaders and foreign leaders closer together as their interests merge and intertwine.
Political parties will have difficulty claiming this or that country is now an enemy depending on how much corporate investment and profit holdings were made in the new 'enemy'. One could see the enormous difficulty the DNC/Hillary would have if they had to make a case against communist China hacking their emails. Apple, Walmart etal would be working overtime to protect the relationship at all costs.
notindoctrinated
Has it ever occurred to you Yanks that Putin may be playing global political chess. I'm sure he is shrewd enough to realize that open support to Trump could be a "kiss of death". A Democratic presidency may be in Russia's long-term interest, if they want the US to go further down the drain:
- Overrunning of the US by Hispanics, as well as Muslims from North Africa and the Mideast, the latter resulting in increasing insecurity and terrorist attacks at home
- Destruction of US economy by the pursuit of green fanatic policies.
Of course a trigger-happy Clinton presidency increases the risk for WW3, therefore Putin's finger will never be far from the nuke-button.
Lee Van Over -> notindoctrinated
1. This will not happen, please see below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7U-t3GetV_Q2. The number one US economic strain is War.....not windfarms.
3. Clinton is a bit more hawkish than I would like, but she is far from trigger happy. Also, she can handle an insult without declaring the need to punch someone in the face :p
Sam3456I love the entitled Hillary fans are trying to stifle any dissent of the Queen with "You're a Putin Bot, You're a commie, your a Trumpster."
Stifling dissent allows for corruption and abuse of power and is what got us into the Iraq War.
Their condescending attitude is what we can expect from a Clinton Administration?
JohnManyjars
Putin bashing idiots...choke on your spittle! At least he puts the interests of his country first, unlike US/UK sell outs to Israel-First traitors.
R. Ben Madison -> JohnManyjars
Yet another antisemitic diatribe from the Hillary-haters.
Lee Van Over -> JohnManyjarsLol, the US supports Israel because its in the best interests of the US, not Israel. They, unfortunately, are our little forward base of operations in the Mid-east.
John SmithBurisma is the largest non-governmental gas producer in Ukraine, it was incorporated in 2006 and is based in Limassol, Cyprus - a European tax haven
April 18, 2014, Burisma Holdings announced us VP Biden's son Hunter Biden appointed to the boardAleksander Kwaśniewski,took up in a director's post named in January.[27] Kwaśniewski was President of the Republic of Poland from 1995 to 2005 permitted the CIA torture ops in Poland during the G. W. Bush presidency
Chairman of Burisma is the Wall Street former Merrill Lynch investment banker Alan Apter
Devon Archer, Hunter Biden's partner at the US investment firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners, and a manager of the family wealth fund of Secretary of State John Kerry's wife Theresa Heinz Kerry,
And all friends together in a company that should be helping Ukraine recover nestled away in a tax haven!
The director of the US-Ukraine Business Council Morgan Williams pointed to an "American tradition that frowns on close family members of government working for organizations with business links to active politics". Williams stated Biden appears to have violated this unwritten principle: "... when you're trying to keep the political sector separate from the business sector, and reduce corruption, then it's not just about holding down corruption, it's also the appearance.
Blatant yankee cronyism beyond words! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burisma_Holdings
http://www.theguardian.com/business/shortcuts/2014/may/14/hunter-biden-job-board-ukraine-biggest-gas-producer-burismaJoe Biden's son was booted from the military after failing a drug test, it was revealed Thursday.
Hunter Biden, the youngest son of the vice president, was discharged from the Navy Reserve in February after he tested positive for cocaine, the Navy said.
http://nypost.com/2014/10/16/bidens-son-hunter-kicked-out-of-the-navy-after-failing-cocaine-test/John Smith
This is all so entertaining for as much as they try they cannot lay a finger on Putin.. the PBS special on Putin wealth ended an hour of innuendo with this.. ''How much is a matter of speculation and some educated guesswork.''
And thats what it was speculation & guesswork!
he may be the richest man on the planet.. he may be richer than god... but they just can't find it.. they can't find a bankstatement with billions or trillions in it they can't even find the shoebox with all his cash under his bed... they got nothing!
MtnClimber -> John Smith
They found Putin's money. It's cared for by "friends". One is a concert cellist with over a billion dollars. They must pay musicians well in Russia.
You seem to like dictators. Do you like the complete censorship of the media in Russia? Do you like the new laws that allow Putin to jail anyone that denounces him or Russia?
Given that Russians are only allowed to post good things about Putin, what do you expect to see from them?
John Smith -> MtnClimber
there were plenty of russians in that PBS 'show' complaining about putin and they are still alive n well..
the only time russian critics become endangered is when they are of no further use to the yankee and then they come to a sticky end and then the finger gets pointed at putin.. then they have fully 'outlived' their usefulness.. more useful dead!annberk
It is obvious that Trump will benefit financially from being nice to Putin and his inner circle. Trump combs the world for projects and money and Russia must be seen as a target. Win or lose the election he'll be seen as a friend who deserves to be rewarded. At some point in the next year or so, the Trump Corporation will announce at least one landmark Russian hotel/condo tower. I'd bet money on it. Meanwhile, poor old Hillary who has devoted her life to doing good, is being bullied and lied about by the serfs who want to elect him. (Read 'Dark Money' to see what I mean by serfs. Trump's adherents won't benefit in the slightest from his policies.)
Sam3456
I have family in the military and the last thing we need is Clinton leading us into another cold war.
delphicvi
What a lame lead in i.e. "Donald Trump and Russia: a web that grows more tangled all the time.
Donald Trump travelled to Moscow in 2013 to meet Vladimir Putin hoping to discuss plans for a Trump Tower near Red Square."
Did it really take four 'journalists' viz. Peter Stone, David Smith, Ben Jacobs, Alec Luhn and Rupert Neate to write this fluff? More worthy of a supermarket check out rag than a serious newspaper. This facile attempt to stitch together the incongruous and the bizarre is downright amazing for a paper that puffs itself as the leaker of truth. By the bye, Ukraine is not Russia. And Russia is not Ukraine.
Sam3456
The Director of National Intelligence says Washington is still unsure of who might be behind the latest WikiLeaks release of hacked Democratic National Committee emails, while urging that an end be put to the "reactionary mode" blaming it all on Russia.
"We don't know enough to ascribe motivation regardless of who it might have been," Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said speaking at Aspen's Security Forum in Colorado, when asked if the media was getting ahead of themselves in fingering the perpetrator of the hack.
John Smith -> Sam3456
Anonymous have been quietly busy in the background... laughing at the merkins blaming everything on Russia..
clintons corrupt... and its Russia's fault??''The State Department misplaced and lost some $6 billion due to the improper filing of contracts during the past six years, mainly during the tenure of former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, according to a newly released Inspector General report.
The $6 billion in unaccounted funds poses a "significant financial risk and demonstrates a lack of internal control over the Department's contract actions," according to the report.'' http://nation.foxnews.com/2014/04/07/6-billion-went-missing-hillary-clintons-state-departmentwhere-did-money-go
I know billions don't mean much today after the american laundering of Trillions of $s worth of their bad mortgage debt causing the 2008 crash....... BUT SURELY $6 Billion missing must count for something!
sejong -> John Smith
John SmithClinton: corruption you can believe in.
So again...
what really happened in Benghazi? in September 2012
Were they sending gaddafi's weapons to unsavouries in Syria and Assad got wind of it & sent a team to stop it?
Because it was not a youtube vid or some people on a friday night out deciding to kill americans as clinton would have us believe. What we have is a clandestine operation.. a democrat version of reagans ''Arms for Iran''.. or shall we say 'Arms for ISIS' Did they get Ollie North out of retirement for this??
Having failed this gun running operation...
They then went to Plan B..
''claimed 3,000 tons of weapons dating back to the former Yugoslavia have been sent in 75 planeloads from Zagreb airport to the rebels, largely via Jordan since November (2012).'' 3000 tons of weapons!!...... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/9918785/US-and-Europe-in-major-airlift-of-arms-to-Syrian-rebels-through-Zagreb.htmlBut When they arrived in Jordan..
''Weapons shipped into Jordan by the Central Intelligence Agency and Saudi Arabia intended for Syrian rebels have been systematically stolen by Jordanian intelligence operatives and sold to arms merchants on the black market, according to American and Jordanian officials.'' I mean can the CIA be that incompetent? or is this incompetence covering up something else...?
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/27/world/middleeast/cia-arms-for-syrian-rebels-supplied-black-market-officials-say.html?_r=1
So who did those weapons go to if not legit Rebel Syrians... I can only think of one other organisation..ISISThen we have the $500,000,000 to train 54 rebel Syrians to fight Assad.
do we really think the US military or special forces are that dumb?''The Pentagon's $500 million (£300 million) Turkey-based training programme has fallen well short of expectations. Announced in June 2014 as Isil seized swathes of Iraq, it took almost a year to get off the ground and had until recently produced only 54 out of the 5,000 fighters it had intended to train within a year.'' http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/11878048/75-US-trained-rebels-enter-Syria-from-Turkey.html
''US-trained Division 30 rebels 'betray US and hand weapons over to al-Qaeda's affiliate in Syria' Pentagon-trained rebels are reported to have betrayed US and handed weapons over to Jabhat al-Nusra immediately after entering Syria'' http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/11882195/US-trained-Division-30-rebels-betrayed-US-and-hand-weapons-over-to-al-Qaedas-affiliate-in-Syria.html
So what was that HALF BILLION DOLLARS really spent on??
I am still calling Shenanigans!ClaudiaLucarelli
There is MORE of a connection between Hillary and RUSSIA:
Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/us/cash-flowed-to-clinton-foundation-as-russians-pressed-for-control-of-uranium-company.htmlSam3456 -> DCBill0
Well looks like Hillary has stared the cold war again before she ever got into office. This is worse than anything Trump could do...but very beneficial to her military/security industrial complex backers.
Hillary Clinton = Dick Cheney.
Oldiebutgoodie
With all the tension and volatility in the world, we need mature, rational people leading our countries. Let's hope that's what we get -- * Vote thoughtfully.
While we watch campaign circuses, a serious situation is taking place in Turkey that will effect Europe, the West, and the Middle East.
- Erdogan has taken control of, and is purging all sectors of Turkish society.Scary stuff going on there.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/31/turkey-to-shut-military-academies-as-it-targets-armed-forces-for-cleansing-War in Iraq is escalating- gas depots being destroyed.
These things have ripple effects for the rest of us.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/31/militants-storm-iraqi-oil-facility-bai-hassanHenrychan -> Wanda Bowen
Julian Assange is not a Republican. He's an Australian with no vested interest in the election. I'd be worried if I were a Clinton supporter.
spraydrift
'Trump's links to Russia are under scrutiny after a hack of Democratic national committee emails,'
The extremely well informed Israeli website Debkafile is confident that the Russians didn't hack the DNC or any aspect of the Democrats. Debka believes the signatures on the hack are so easy to find and so obviously intended to be found that the real culprit lies somewhere within an anti-Clinton faction of the Democrats. Now who might that be?
Greg Popa -> spraydrift
Wired.com's Noah Shachtman wrote in 2001 that the site "clearly reports with a point of view; the site is unabashedly in the hawkish camp of Israeli politics".[4] Yediot Achronot investigative reporter Ronen Bergman states that the site relies on information from sources with an agenda, such as neo-conservative elements of the US Republican Party, "whose worldview is that the situation is bad and is only going to get worse," and that Israeli intelligence officials do not consider even 10 percent of the site's content to be reliable.[1] Cornell Law professor Michael C. Dorf calls Debka his "favorite alarmist Israeli website trading in rumors."[5]
The site's operators, in contrast, state that 80 percent of what Debka reports turns out to be true, and point to its year 2000 prediction that al-Qaeda would again strike the World Trade Center, and that it had warned well before the 2006 war in Lebanon that Hezbollah had amassed 12,000 Katyusha rockets pointed at northern Israel.[1]
mandzorp
This is a fantasy article, pie in the sky stuff. I can't stand Trump and I am sure neither can the Russian government, he's unpredictable, unstable, what he says today he changes his mind on tomorrow and so on. Now, Clinton isn't much better all said. Anyone who would trust either needs to see a psychiatrist urgently. Russia is but a bystander in the US presidential race, except for the conspiracy theorists at The Guardian.
errovi
"The coordinator of the Washington diplomatic corps for the Republicans in Cleveland was Frank Mermoud, a former state department official involved in business ventures in Ukraine via Cub Energy, a Black Sea-focused oil and gas company of which he is a director. He is also on the board of the US Ukraine Business Council."
So a former official of that russophobic neocon infested State Department which ran both the 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2014 coup in Kiev also member of the US-Ukraine business council is now supposed to have helped Yanokovich in 2010 and be in bed with Putin. How gullible do you think we are?
Oldiebutgoodie -> errovi
Seems every news media outlet and reporter is looking into his Russian business dealings and funding.
Brian Burman
Stop the presses! Trump and people associated with him have had dealings with people from the LARGEST country in the world. If that doesn't prove he's an active Manchurian candidate on The Kremlin payroll, then nothing will.
What it really proves is that by going the low road of McCarthyist red-baiting, the Democrats seemed determined to blow another election by not running a campaign on Hillary's supposed merits and attacking Trump for rational, verifiable reasons.
John Smith -> MentalToo
drivel.. Nuland admitted/boasted about spendin $5 billion in ''bring democracy to ukraine..
$5 Billion is a lot of money in Ukraine..
Did they build schools No
Did they build hospitals No!
They just destabilised the country...
So $5 billion wasted and the yanks wonder why they don't really have a space program... coz $5 Billion would have bought 3 Space shuttles!jezzam -> John Smith
The US spent 5 billion over 25 years - trying to encourage the basic institutions of democracy in Ukraine. Without these corruption cannot be eliminated. Without the elimination of corruption, none of the things you mention are possible. Non-coincidentally such institutions have been eliminated in Russia since Putin came to power.
Brian Burman -> jezzam
Yes, those NGOs encouraged democracy so well that they instigated a violent coup against the elected government. Halt, you say, that government was corrupt!?! But by all standards, the current government is more corrupt than the one that was overthrown, and polls in the last year show that Ukrainians are convinced of that fact. Infact, the man hand-picked by Victoria Nuland to be Prime Minister, "Yats" Yatesenyuk, had to resign under accusations of corruption. Andbthe current Kiev reginme continues to bomb the civilian population of Donbass and terrorize them with neo-Nazi militias...ah, the wonders of US funded "democracy".
Виктор Захаров
I wonder, if you say that you are democrats why you are not interested in truth about Malaysian Boing? Now in the West, Merkel, Obama etc, no one worried about this tragedy because now it's clear that Ukrainian authorities did it. It's barbarian blasphemous....
Henrychan
Hello all Hillary supporters,
You are all a school of piranhas waiting to tear the flesh of anyone who is against 'Her'. I have noticed your comments towards any rational reply is met with condescending and abusive tones. You've probably realised I am poorly educated. However, I have common sense which I believe most of you don't. Most of you comment in order to receive recognition and votes in order to make you feel good because of low self esteem and belonging issues.
I believe we in the west currently live in a pluralist society for now. If Hillary is elected I reckon she will lay the foundation for sharia law, Merkel is doing her bit. Anyway, how can anyone vote for this vile human being?
You must be either:
Ignorant
Misinformed
Lack common sense or
Mentally illHillary Rodman Clinton does not care about YOU! Its all about her wanting power to control YOU. Have you ever asked yourself why does she want to be President? What is her motivation?
Comment all you like, you Hillary supporter are defending a witch. I'm not with HER.
Oilyheart
Bernie Sanders visited the USSR. Does that make him a communist? Bernie Sanders visited the Vatican. Does that make him a Catholic? Gen. Flynn visited RT. Does that make him Scott Pelley? Bill visits a lot of places.
Виктор Захаров
First of all why Obama calls yourself democrat? It's nonsense, by definition democrats those who against the coup! Having lied once who would believe you ( Russian saying ). Obama continued to lie. Malaysian Boing had been shot down by Ukrainian jet, radars neither in Dnepro nor in Rostov hadn't seen buk missile, buk missile weighs 700 kg radar could not to see it. But radars had seen Ukrainian jet, Ukrainian authorities restricted access to records....
Oilyheart
Oh, come on, Hillary has all 30 of the admirals and generals that previously endorsed Jeb. Can't Donald have one general? The US military is in schism between the moderates (represented by Flynn) and the hawks (represented by Allen, presumably). Hillary's hawks got booed off the stage at the convention. Allen was trying to shout down the protesters but they were pretty feisty. Try not to bogart all the retired general officers, Democrats. The moderates are trying to de-escalate tensions with Russia, is that so wrong? Does gangsterism have to proliferate all over the place? Does the whole world have to break bad like Walter White into gangsterism and chaos because it's cool?
GODsaysBRESCAPE
Clinton wants a new cold war with Russia, forget the real enemy the Islamists. She is showing her warmongering stripes again already. Shame on you Sanders for your betrayal of your supporters, that will now be your ever lasting and shameful legacy.
Sam3456 -> GODsaysBRESCAPEFollow the money. The Clinton elite and the military/security industrial complex will MAKE BILLIONS with a new cold war. As much as they made off of Iraq and MORE!
HRC is Dick Cheney in a pants suit.
GODsaysBRESCAPEThe media, big business and the pentagon: "a web that grows more tangled all the time"
dikcheneyI have to do this. #canthackHillary.
I cant hack her lies
I cant hack her faux ignorance of IT security
I cant hack her unbelievability
I cant hack her attacks on any challenger
I cant hack the cloth she didn't use to wipe her server
I cant hack the way she puts USA security at risk to protect her "private" shenanigans
I cant hack her capacity to corrupt any decent process associated with democray
I cant hack her network of "get out of jail free cards"
I cant hack her transparent deceptions
I cant hack her associates
I cant hack her war criminal mentors
I cant hack her media admirers and shills
I cant hack her Wall Street buddies
I cant hack her mate ObamaIs there anyone out there who can hack Hillary?
Shatford Shatford -> dikcheney
You left out Clinton Foundation donors who receive lucrative contracts in disaster zones or in African dictatorships.
nnedjo
Julian Assange showed to the DNC who they are, but they are not angry at him, they are angry at Donald Trump. Of course, how can anyone be angry at the mirror because it has shown its ugly face.:-)))
Shatford Shatford -> nnedjo
Bless cognitive dissonance for keeping everyone from seeing the truth.
Shatford Shatford -> NewWorldWatcherI'm sure once Hillary cheats her way into the White House, she'll sick the IRS on him since she does that to all of her enemies. And naturally, all of her and her husband's crimes will go unpunished as they always have. Her husband almost got impeached. Not for getting a hummer from an intern, but because there was so much other bullshit they wanted to nail him on and lying under oath was the only thing they could use because the Clintons are very good at buying people off.
nnedjo
The Democratic Party and its vassal media proves for the umpteenth time that they have nothing to do with democracy. If the opposition is called traitors and accused of collaboration with foreign governments without any evidence, then it is not a democracy, it is called a dictatorship.
So if they think they have evidence that Trump is a traitor, they should arrest him. Otherwise, they have to admit that Donald Trump is genuine representative of American democracy, and that they would rather belong to a kind of dictatorship.gondwanaboy -> nnedjo
So if they think they have evidence that Trump is a traitor, they should arrest him.
They don't have any evidence. This is mud slinging and a diversion from the DNC email corruption scandal that actually has proof
miri84
Analysts suggest three primary motivations for the WikiLeaks email dump, quite probably overlapping: doing harm to the US political process to undermine its credibility; doing harm to Clinton (WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is no friend); and boosting Trump
The hack would not have succeeded in any of these areas, had the DNC been conducting its operations fairly and with integrity.
guest88888
Donald Trump and Russia: a web that grows more tangled all the time
Only if you're full of BS, and lack even a shred of journalistic integrity.
McCarthy would be proud. After years of pretending otherwise, it seems the US government has finally returned to its old and proud tradition of smearing anyone it finds undesirable as in cahoots with the ever-changing 'enemy.'
All of this is merely a diversion to avoid talking about the mountain of corruption revealed about both parties in recent days. Not to mention a diversion from talking about the key issue, that the US is increasingly antagonizing nuclear armed powers like Russia and China, which if not stopped will lead to a war capable of killing millions.
selvak
I am not Trump but I would much rather ally with Russia than Saudi Arabia. Both have plenty of oil by the way. Only one is spreading a Death cult over the Globe but still Presidents Bush and Obama bowed for the Saudi king. More money the be made out of Arab oil for a few uber rich in the US Establishment I guess. Less 'competition" for the Pentagon from Riyadh too.
sejong -> selvak
Bibi and King Salman will get joint custody of Clinton, so don't worry.
PCollens
100% bullshit, lies and a psy-op being fed to us from all sides on this.
Seriously Graun, what gives with this bullshit? Confirms my conclusion that the Graun, like the rest of the MSM, has been infiltrated by an Operation Mockingbird as well.
So many psychopaths - GOP, DNC, Trump, the US deep state petro-nazis, the oligarchs in all countries - all panicking more and more now, out of control.
Here comes some kind of armagedon. Sorry, sheeple - but its bad news for us all.Alec Dacyczyn
It's worth mentioning the context of the "the US would not automatically come to the aid of Nato allies" thing. He wants for other Nato countries to either pull their own weight militarily (2% of GDP) or pay to cover the costs of other countries for defend them. The threat of willingness to "walk away" is negotiating leverage. He's making a gamble that they will capitulate rather than be left defenseless.
I believe it's a reasonable safe bet. So until these Nato countries indicate that they'd rather not spend that much on their militarizes I reject the argument that a President Trump would result in a weaker Nato alliance and that Putin want Trump to win for that reason (I suspect Putin would indeed prefer Trump, but because he views Clinton as a neo-con warmonger who would rather bomb someone than negotiate a deal).
Bruno Costa Alec Dacyczyn
I hate Trump, but this is a VERY safe bet.
Russia will not invade Poland or the Baltic. The world change. Putin has an agenda different from Ivan the Terrible...
NATO countries will pay their bills and psychopaths like Erdogan will think twice before put down a Russian fighter.
That was insane. The most dangerous act since the 80's!
Made by a religious fanatical dictator who is ending Turkey secular tradition.
If Russia had responded, protecting Erdogan would've been fair? NATO starting 3rd WW because of a authoritarian guy that should be expelled is reasonable?Sam3456
A vote against Hillary is not a vote for Trump any more than a vote against the Iraq War was a vote for Saddam Hussein.
niftydude
Hilarious. This Red Scare is ridiculous, will only carry weight with the over 60s. It is just one of the many missteps in Hillary's tone deaf campaign which is going to cost her the presidency.
livingstonfc
Not a Trump supporter, but this shitty rag attacks everyone except the Red Queen...who is responsible for many acts of terror and murder...documented.
BSchwartz
Trump is married to a woman who grew up under communism. Some his closest advisors have worked for communists. Many of his own business dealings are with Russians. He has claimed a relationshp with Putin and says he admires him. He has amended Republican policies to favour Russia. He called on the Russian's to undertake espionage into Hillary Clinton. There is a pattern here.
A man like Trump, who believed in the conspiracy theory that Obama was Kenyan, should understand that conspiracies grow as evidence build. There was no evidence to sustain Trump's conspiracy regarding Obama.
But Trump himself provides much evidence to sustain the theory that his interests are closer to the Russians than to much of America.
Sam3456 -> BSchwartz
Really? Democrats red baiting and calling people "commies" how shameful and ignorant of you history. What next Hillary comes out with a "list of Trump/Putin sympathizers"? Shame.
Bruno Costa -> BSchwartz
Hahahahahahahahahaha OMG! Are you going beyond Manchurian Candidate and saying that Trump is communist? Do you really understand how funny this is?
PCollens -> BSchwartz
A-ha! I see it now! Trump is a commie Manchurian candidate, cleverly hidden as a son of a rich guy who became a billionaire, spreading capitalist ideology to the masses as a front for his USSR commie masters. Its obvious! Wake up sheeple!
Gem59
The Clinton-Media machine in full force....Those Russians are in bed with Trump! It must be the barbarians! Shame on you traitor Donald! Whatever it takes, corrupted Media! Here is an interview with Julian Assange who argues there is no evidence of any hacking by Russians
Matronum
A wee bit...creepy!
Russian literature, the language, the culture...all quite beautiful. OK, and maybe the women too. But this 'relationship' between Trump and Russia makes me feel uncomfortable. I'm willing to admit that I may simply be conditioned to be wary of Russian involvement because of all those Cold War years. Still...creepy!
Pork Mistret -> Matronum
See a doctor . A case of severe russophobia
Heathenlullaby
US Military Caught Manipulating Social Media, Running Mass Propaganda Accounts
http://www.storyleak.com/us-military-caught-social-media-running-mass-propaganda-accounts/
HauptmannGurski -> Heathenlullaby
Ta, much of the information, especially what Tom Curley (formerly AP chief) revealed, has been removed from the net. I wish I had saved the pdf of his Kansas speech before it vanished everywhere. There was also something on a British server, but that stopped being fed.
Often we could see it on the posters' string, how many in how many hours, hence the attempts to hide it through multi ID facility. For disqus, they block the string. We know we are being manipulated. And very few people take things at face value these days, or do they?
Ping2fyoutoo
"experts argue Vladimir Putin has attempted in the past to damage western democracy."
That single sentence exposes the Guardian as a completely fraudulent news reporting medium. With tears in my eyes I ask you "How does Putin releasing e-mails about the secret and illegal American electoral shenanigans amount to an attack on western democracy?"
It doesn't. It's something the western mainstream media should be doing to enlighten the people about the depths of the crookedness and the evil chicanery surrounding "western democracy" (as practised today in the US). That omission is what weakens and threatens western democracy.
The old saying "you can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time" is demonstrated by the Guardians reporting without sources, other than anonymous so-called "experts". Your journalistic integrity is little higher than the height of Hillary Clinton's honesty, or the level of the Donald's business ethics. Shame on you. Double shame for being so blatantly easy to expose.
The western media, controlled by special interest groups, are driving your low-level sputum which tries to pass for accurate and unbiased reportage.
And please let us know who these "experts" are that you say that you are quoting.
Alexander Dunnett -> Ping2fyoutoo
On the whole I would have to agree with you. The picture painted by the Western News Media is that the US is the White Knight when it comes to democracy, they never interfere in other countries political affairs, never try to break into computer systems of other countries, try to topple or assassinate leaders of other countries. They never carry out torture and they ignore the 30m on the poverty line in their own country.
PCollens -> Ping2fyoutoo
Agreed. There is a Deep State mole inside the Graun.
Its Operation Mockingbird for sure.normankirk
So Starbucks is in Russia,sinister? or is it just that globalisation means financial interests are worldwide.
And why is no one mentioning that James Clapper head of the NSA, who should know, says that he is "taken aback by the media's hyperventilations" and that no one knows who was behind the hack of the DNC.Suga
Whatever Lies you believe or even think of HRC...
Clinton is our only hope of keeping the White House from The Insane Republican Party!.
Please...Check-out this excellent interview with Michael Ruppert, who tracked exactly what took place under The Horrible Bush/Cheney Reign Of Terror that brought down America on 9/11!(Ruppert supposedly committed suicide in 2014) It's amazing this interview is still available...it will absolutely shock you into realizing that we cannot give the White House back to the GOP...they are surrounded by Pure Evil!
9/11 and the Cheney Conspiracy with Michael Ruppert
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kW5qiuLb8jY
PCollens SugaBrilliant! - Bless you. Mike Ruppert is the greatest hero to emerge from all this.
Copy-paste the following - it is pure fact, forensic level evidence, of the most serious issues, yet it always gets taken down. I've concluded that this is by the moles in the MSM, including the Graun, sadly:
AE911Truth Experts Speak Out
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YW6mJOqRDI49/11 Trillions: Follow The Money
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3xgjxJwedA9/11 Pentagon Attack - Behind the Smoke Curtain - Barbara Honegger
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fvJ8nFa5QkChapter and verse on the drills of terror attacks being run on 911 which removed the air defences – an coordinated by Cheney: 9/11 Synthetic Terror
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ar6I0jUg6VsThe Chief CIA back-channel asset who exposed the fore-knowledge of 911 survived the attempts to rub her out, and finally told the truth:
CIA WhistleBlower Susan Lindauer EXPOSES Everything - "Extreme Prejudice"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68LUHa_-OlAIf you only have 5 minutes, this is a great distillation:
https://youtu.be/yuC_4mGTs98poststructuralist
Well at least Trump is fostering positive relations with Russia - Hillary Clinton is pushing us to the brink of nuclear war with them. You Tube it. Wishing Good Luck to all people of courage and honesty.
Eddie2000
Reds under the bed! Reds under the bed! Surely they can beat Trump without resorting to this nonsense?
woof92105****warning - This comment area is infested with russian trolls. It becomes easy to spot their bizarre but consistent pro-putin statements. They reply to each other and uprate each other, etc. These people are in Russia and are paid by Putin's cronies.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html?_r=0sejong -> woof92105
Accuracy score 1/10.
normankirk -> woof92105
and how do we know you aren't part of the cyber warrior force thats become a growth industry in the US and UK?
Gina Mihajlovska -> woof92105
Your an idiot. It's not about Putin it's about how the public is being played. No matter where the leak came from the dnc is corrupt.focus on the prize. Not on the BS....
shaftedpig
Trump might have his faults, like being a motor mouth but he's not even in the same category as GW Bush or HR Clinton when it comes to corruption, the Democrats haven't got much on Trump, so they resort to tin-foil hat conspiracy theories, when what is staring at us directly in the face is out-and-out full-on corruption by HRC.
This is not about left vs right, it's about right vs wrong. Read any book by investigative journalist, Roger Stone who nails HRC. If you're on the left and feel let down by Bernie, at least consider Gary Johnson or Jill Stein, I can't for the life of me understand why Americans revere corrupt officials when you got decent potential presidents who aren't in the pockets of banksters like HRC.
ClearItUp
Reuters/Ipsos changed it polling methodology as soon as they saw a 17 point swing in favor of Donald the Drumpf. When the methodology by their own admission was under reporting Trump support and over reporting Hillbilly's numbers they did nothing. So don't believe any polls. There is no enthusiasm for Hillbilly in the Democratic party, so the Democratic turn out will be low, on the other hand people want to shake things up, they will vote for Drumpf. I just wished Donald had half a brain in his head to see how much good he could do, with the opportunity he has.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-poll-reutersipsos-idUSKCN10910T
Tim Cahill
So the dreaded ruskies are trying to help Trump? Oh my goodness!
Meanwhile, Clinton's big love for Israel remains unmentioned during most of the Primaries and even now. I've done a lot of work around the Middle East. The reason certain people hate us is because the US has vetoed all UN efforts to right the wrongs committed by Israel against the Palestinians. And with Netanyahu in his 4th term, gelding the news media, and rolling more completely fascist, we can expect more rubber stamping of territory occupation (that seems like a very simple and illegal act, but since the USA - and only the USA - disagrees, it's okay) and abuses that will further fuel hatred from people who'd, at minimum, appreciate it if justice could apply to them.
Let the candidate without sin cast the first stone of superiority!
BTW - What the Russians want is more cash for their wealthiest, trusted oligarchs. That's exactly what Clinton and Trump are working to do. So why can't they all just be friends?
ahmedfez
A lot of associations and coincidences have been listed here. But no hard evidence linking the hacking to Putin, nor Putin to Trump. It sounds like a load of muckraking.
shaftedpig -> ahmedfez
True. If it was the other way round, Guardian journalists and establishment shills would be screaming 'tin-foil' when they should be holding that woman to account.
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Fox News
MOSCOW – To understand what the Kremlin thinks about the prospect of Hillary Clinton becoming the U.S. president, it was enough to watch Russian state television coverage of her accepting the Democratic nomination.
Viewers were told that Clinton sees Russia as an enemy and cannot be trusted, while the Democratic Party convention was portrayed as further proof that American democracy is a sham.
In her acceptance speech, Clinton reaffirmed a commitment to NATO, saying she was "proud to stand by our allies in NATO against any threat they face, including from Russia."
In doing so, she was implicitly rebuking her rival, Republican nominee Donald Trump, who has questioned the need for the Western alliance and suggested that if he is elected president, the United States might not honor its NATO military commitments, in particular regarding former Soviet republics in the Baltics.
While Trump's position on NATO has delighted the Kremlin, Clinton's statement clearly stung.
"She mentioned Russia only once, but it was enough to see that the era of the reset is over," Channel One said in its report.
As U.S. secretary of state, Clinton in 2009 presented her Russian counterpart with a red button intended to symbolize a "reset" in relations between the two countries, one of U.S. President Barack Obama's initiatives. In Russia, the gesture is best remembered for the misspelling of the word in Russian, while the reset itself failed in the face of Putin's return as Russian president in 2012 and Russia's seizure of Crimea from Ukraine two years later.
Clinton once compared the annexation of Crimea to Adolf Hitler's moves into Eastern Europe at the start of World War II, a comparison that was deeply offensive in Russia, where the country's victory over Nazi Germany remains a prime source of national pride.
Trump, on the other hand, told ABC's "This Week" in a broadcast Sunday that he wants to take a look at whether the U.S. should recognize Crimea as part of Russia. "You know, the people of Crimea, from what I've heard, would rather be with Russia than where they were," Trump said.
This runs counter to the position of the Obama administration and the European Union, which have imposed punishing sanctions on Russia in response to the annexation.
"And as far as the Ukraine is concerned, it's a mess. And that's under the Obama's administration with his strong ties to NATO. So with all of these strong ties to NATO, Ukraine is a mess," Trump said. "Crimea has been taken. Don't blame Donald Trump for that."
Putin was outraged by U.S. support for Ukraine and by U.S. military intervention around the world, particularly in Libya, on Clinton's watch. But it was what he saw as interference in Russia that really rankled.
When Clinton described Russia's 2011 parliamentary elections as rigged, Putin said she was "sending a signal" to his critics. He then accused the U.S. State Department of financially supporting the protests that drew tens of thousands of people to the streets of Moscow to demand free elections and an end to Putin's rule.
In the years since, the Kremlin has defended Russian elections in part by implying they are no different than in the United States, a country it says promotes democracy around the world while allowing its business and political elite to determine who wins at home.
The Democratic Convention, which ended Friday morning Moscow time, was given wide coverage throughout the day on the nearly hourly news reports on state television, the Kremlin's most powerful tool for shaping public opinion.
Channel One began its report by introducing Clinton as "a politician who puts herself above the law, who is ready to win at any cost and who is ready to change her principles depending on the political situation." The anchorwoman couched the description by saying that was how Clinton is seen by Trump's supporters - but it was a nuance viewers could easily miss.
The reports ran excerpts of Clinton's speech, but the camera swung repeatedly to a sullen Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, her Democratic challenger, and his disappointed supporters. The Rossiya channel also showed anti-Clinton protesters outside the convention hall who it said "felt they have been betrayed after the email leak that showed Bernie Sanders was pushed out of the race."
Russia is a prime suspect in the hacking of Democratic National Committee computers, which led to the release of emails showing that party officials favored Clinton over Sanders for the presidential nomination.
The Kremlin has denied interfering in the U.S. election. A columnist at Russia's best-selling newspaper, however, said it would have been a smart move.
"I would welcome the Kremlin helping those forces in the United States that stand for peace with Russia and democracy in America," Israel Shamir wrote in Komsomolskaya Pravda.
Trump, meanwhile, has encouraged Russia to seek and release more than 30,000 other missing emails deleted by Clinton. Democrats accused him of trying to get a foreign adversary to conduct espionage that could affect this November's election, but Trump later said he was merely being sarcastic.
whollop
Putin has tried to remind the world what a mistake break up of Yugoslavia was and corruption involved and lies, no one listens. Next leader of Russia might not be so restrained and patient. Sad we are letting such bad minds lead US now. What is it about Clinton's that make ppl so gullible?
whollop
Read "how the srebrenica massacre redefined US policy," by US professor. Media distorts truth everywhere, all the time. Bought and paid for.
Russians didn't start last 2 WW's either. You can bet if ISIS attacks Russia, Pres O won't go to their aid.
This constant demonizing of Russia has pushed them closer to China. Obama and Clinton and Bill Clinton (from earlier and beyond) have made a mess of the world because their values are built on wrong philosophy. German rationalism does not mesh with American freedom and love of law.
Trump17
Her and Obama interfered in their affairs and now without any proof they are blaming Russia for a hacking of the DNC. Back in March the FBI told the DNC it was hacked and wanted information to conduct an investigation which Hillary of course blocked. Now they are crying the blues..
HmmIsee
Dems have hated Russia ever since Reagan disbanded their beloved USSR
teabone
Russia and the U.S. used to have a common enemy, radical/extremist Islamism.
Not anymore since Obama and Clinton loves Muslims more than they like American citizens.
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www.theguardian.com
Clinton answered tough questions on Benghazi, her emails and her campaign and policies, and focused her own attack on her opponent's alleged links to Russia and Putin.
"We know that Russian intelligence services hacked into the DNC," Clinton said, in her first interview with Fox in more than five years. "And we know that they arranged for a lot of those emails to be released and we know that Donald Trump has shown a very troubling willingness to back up Putin, to support Putin."
Asked if she believed Putin wanted Trump to win the presidency, Clinton said she would not make that conclusion. "But I think laying out the facts raises serious issues about Russian interference in our elections, in our democracy," she said.
The US would not tolerate that from any other country, Clinton said, adding: "For Trump to both encourage that and to praise Putin despite what appears to be a deliberate effort to try to affect the election, I think, raises national security issues."
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Jul 28, 2016 | The Washington Post
In their zeal to portray Donald Trump as a dangerous threat to national security, the Clinton campaign has taken a starkly anti-Russian stance, one that completes a total role reversal for the two major American parties on U.S.-Russian relations that Hillary Clinton will now be committed to, if she becomes president.
The side switching between the parties on Russia is the result of two converging trends. U.S.-Russian relations have gone downhill since Russian President Vladimir Putin came back to power in 2012, torpedoing the Obama administration's first term outreach to Moscow, which Clinton led. Then, in the past year, Trump's Russia-friendly policy has filled the pro-engagement space that Democrats once occupied.
And now, for mostly political reasons, the Clinton campaign has decided to escalate its rhetoric on Russia. After Trump suggested Wednesday that if Russia had indeed hacked Clinton's private email server it should release the emails, the Clinton campaign sent out its Democratic surrogates to bash Russia and Trump in a manner traditionally reserved for Republicans.
"This has gone from being a matter of curiosity, and a matter of politics, to being a national security issue," Clinton senior foreign policy adviser Jake Sullivan said.
Set to one side that Trump was probably joking. Russia clearly does not need Trump's permission to hack U.S. political organizations or government institutions. And there's no consensus that Russia released the Democratic National Committee emails in order to disrupt the presidential election. In fact, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who has his own personal vendetta against Clinton, claimed that he alone chose the timing of the release of the DNC emails.
Regardless, the idea that a GOP presidential nominee would endorse Russian cyber-espionage was too tempting for the Clinton campaign to resist, especially on the day their convention was dedicated to painting Trump as dangerous on national security.
At an event on the sidelines of the convention Wednesday, several top Clinton national security surrogates focused on Trump's latest comments to argue that they embolden Russia in its plan to destabilize and dominate the West. Former national security adviser Tom Donilon said that Russia is interfering with elections all over Europe and said Trump is helping Russia directly.
"The Russians have engaged in cyberattacks in a number of places that we know about, in Georgia, in Estonia and in Ukraine. . . . In the Russian takeover of Crimea, information warfare was a central part of their operations," Donilon said. "To dangerously embrace a set of strategies by the Russian Federation that are intent on undermining key Western institutions . . . is playing into the hands of Russian strategy."
Former defense secretary and CIA director Leon Panetta said that if Donilon was still in the White House, he would have tasked the CIA to retaliate against Moscow. Panetta then doubled down on Sullivan's argument that Trump's comments by themselves are making the United States less safe.
"This is crazy stuff, and yet somehow you get the sense that people think it's a joke. It has already represented a threat to our national security," Panetta said. "Because if you go abroad and talk to people, they are very worried that someone like this could become president of the United States."
In 2008, the Russian government was definitely not rooting for the Republican candidate for president. Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) had made a feature of his campaign a pledge to stand up to Russian aggression and dispatched two top surrogates to Georgia after the Russian invasion.
In 2012, Mitt Romney warned that Russia was the United States' "number one geopolitical foe." Then-Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John F. Kerry mocked Romney at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, saying that Romney got his information about Russia from the movie "Rocky IV."
This year, the Clinton team is accusing Putin of waging information warfare against the Democratic candidate in order to help elect the Republican candidate. Clinton is also running ads claiming she stood up to Putin. Meanwhile, Trump is called for a weakening of NATO and his staff worked to remove an anti-Russia stance on Ukraine from the GOP platform.
Now that the Democrats are the tough-on-Russia party, they should explain exactly what that means. What would Clinton do about Russia's increasingly aggressive cyber-espionage and information warfare in Europe and around the world? Would she expand sanctions on Russia in response to the hacks? Would she use U.S. cyber forces to retaliate? Would she abandon President Obama's plan to deepen U.S.-Russian military and intelligence cooperation in Syria?
The Clinton team hasn't said. For now, they are content to use Trump's statements about Russia to make the argument that he's not commander-in-chief material. But if Clinton wins, she will be committed to implementing the anti-Putin, tough-on-Russia policy she is running on and Democrats will need to fall in line . If Putin wasn't rooting for Trump before, he is now.
NotaClinton , 7/28/2016 6:25 PM EDT
So TRUMP is threat to NATIONAL SECURITY for asking RUSSIA for the emails she destroyed? Because they would be the one likely to have them since she completely ignored Security protocol while in Russia? WOW they get better every day. They have already explain Russia could have been in and out of her accounts all along because of her complete lack of security of her devises. She had less security than a commercial account using the private server the way she did. And she did cause a breach in national security. She fwd classified email to an intern and it did get hacked. Whether or not Russia got any info from her we will never know. Because the lack of security on her server Russia could have got her password and and the info leaving no tracks.
NotaClinton , 7/28/2016 5:22 PM EDT
People agree with PUTIN you know like the ones in CRIMEA and SYRIA. I'd rather see a PUTIN TRUMP ticket. I like what I see in PUTIN doing in the world. He seems to be the one SAVING people around the world. Assad let the people have freedom of religion. These Sunni the USA is arming want to force Sharia law. I don't approve of my tax dollars being spent arming those terrorists nor do I consider Saudi Arabia an ally!!! I would rather see a TRUMP PUTIN ticket and add 75 more stars to our flag. Than what the current government is. Although I would more so like to see the USA government take a much more democratic stance. Change our government to be more like Switzerland Norway and the Netherlands. Who were inspired by the USA constitution. Our constitution and democracy has been lost to corruption!!!!
George1955, 7/28/2016 5:08 PM EDT
I am not a national security expert but it does not look intelligent to antagonize Russia and China at the same time. But I think it is unfair to blame Hillary for this, Obama has been antagonizing Russia and China for some time now. He has being very successful at that, for the first time in many years now Russia and China are BFF doing naval exercises together. Maybe there is a very profound strategy in that (everybody says that Obama is a genius) but I cannot see what is the logic of provoking at the same time the two biggest military powers apart of the United States while weakening our military forces with budget cuts.
Aleksandar Malečić, 7/28/2016 5:16 PM EDT
It's meant to be profitable, not intelligent. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww_z6Teynow
chayapartiya, 7/28/2016 5:21 PM EDT
It is the worst foreign policy since the Arab Spring brought us ISIS. They are incapable of intelligent policy. Their whole idea was to "not do stupid stuff" and here they are. They just can't help themselves.
chayapartiya, 7/28/2016 5:01 PM EDT
The only thing standing between a highly productive US/Russian relationship are the other relationships the United States has, both institutional and personal among our elites.
Russia is the sworn enemy of many US allies and has barred our richest citizens from taking charge of large sectors of the Russian economy. That is the source of our new Cold War.
Lacking Communist ideology Russia will never be an existential threat to the United States or our way of life. On the other hand, Islam is. On the other hand, Red China is.
You have to be willing to abandon the entire US foreign policy establishment to turn our relationship with Russia around, and if we did maintaining our relationships with Poland, the Baltics, Georgia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and more would become vastly more difficult.
But the idea is too good of one to abandon, Russia is far too influential to ignore. I'm glad one major party is going to recognize that now.
invention13, 7/28/2016 5:01 PM EDT
"This has gone from being a matter of curiosity, and a matter of politics, to being a national security issue," Clinton senior foreign policy adviser Jake Sullivan said.
In other words, her use of a homebrew email server constituted a threat to national security?
I'm finding this whole flap just too funny. The whole point was probably to step on the news coverage of the convention on the night that the president and vice president were to speak. Trump is happy to fan the flames a bit. This is what he does when there is something he doesn't want people to pay attention to (whether it is unfavorable coverage of Trump University, or a convention). He throws out something outrageous that sucks the oxygen out of the news cycle. This whole thing will die down, simply because in the absence of hard evidence, most people don't believe it is true that Trump is Putin's agent. He may admire him, but work for him? I doubt it.
NotaClinton, 7/28/2016 5:44 PM EDT
Her actions DID once agains threaten NATIONAL SECURITY there was no doubt about that. She fwd classified email to her interns who got hacked. That is definitely a threat to national security. She carried her Blackberry and laptop into countries while acting as head of state. Which was not recommended for anyone to do even if there devices were secured by the state. She took hers to countries with her personal server that had zero security less than a commercial account. Then there was the fact she deleted and kept her business out of reach of FOIA. Zero respect for those laws. All federal employees are allowed to have a personal email for there person life. But Hilary decides she is above the law. Those federal laws don't apply to her and got away with it. When Comey was asked about that. He said he wasn't asked to investigate whether she broke those federal laws. He wasn't investigating whether she broke the law. But only if he should charge her for violating security. His conclusion was yes she violated the law. But he sees the law meant nothing so why file a criminal charge.
Trump only requested information that they very well may have. Because Hilary handed it to them. it's hard to believe the Russians hacked the DNC. They most likely had the passwords from Hilary's accounts. Which would leave no footprints.
OswegoTex , 7/28/2016 2:54 PM EDT
The Dems and their Washington Post surrogates are apoplectic over Donald Trump's supposed affinity for the Russians. Russia is now America's mortal enemy in the current Dem narrative. Wasn't Romney ridiculed by a snarky and arrogant Obama and his press sycophants for identifying Russia as a major geopolitical threat in the 2012 election cycle. What happened? Oh-- I know--- the Clinton/Obama "reset".
stella blue, 7/28/2016 2:45 PM EDT
Very interesting article. Hillary is a neocon. She never saw a war she didn't like. I don't know what would be so wrong with having good relations with Russia. Wasn't that what Hillary's stupid reset button was all about?
NotaClinton, 7/28/2016 6:11 PM EDT [Edited]
I admire PUTIN and so do a lot of people. If you are a Citizens and believe in our values and the constitution. He held a democratic Legal election in Crimea. Where the people voted unanimously in favor of Belonging to Russia, A Vote that would be exactly the same today. The USA invades Syria with terrorists from countries whose own people wouldn't vote them in.
All I have seen Putin do is save people. He saved Syria finally. i don't know what took him so long. Maybe WMDs he knew the opposition would use and some more dirty filthy rotten tricks that have been happening there. He turned the war around on less money than a shipment of weapons and training to the rebels forces costed the USA. those shipments and training was going on since before the conflict broke out. What was the point?
Why has the USA spent a dime in that country other than they should have immediately neutralized, destroyed or recovered all the military equipment that was stolen from Iraq. I you like Russian your anti american? If you don't like illegal Immigrants your a racist. That is to be expected from those educated Hilary Voters...
Nikdo, 7/28/2016 4:26 PM EDT
Mook's claim of Russian involvement would be more convincing if he had offered any proof. Otherwise it just looks like pure deflection and distraction and disinformation.
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Jun 08, 2016 | Consortiumnews
... But former Secretary of State Clinton has made it clear that she is eager to use military force to achieve "regime change" in countries that get in the way of U.S. desires. She abides by neoconservative strategies of violent interventions especially in the Middle East and she strikes a belligerent posture as well toward nuclear-armed Russia and, to a lesser extent, China.
Amid the celebrations about picking the first woman as a major party's presumptive nominee, Democrats appear to have given little thought to the fact that they have abandoned a near half-century standing as the party more skeptical about the use of military force. Clinton is an unabashed war hawk who has shown no inclination to rethink her pro-war attitudes.
As a U.S. senator from New York, Clinton voted for and avidly supported the Iraq War, only cooling her enthusiasm in 2006 when it became clear that the Democratic base had turned decisively against the war and her hawkish position endangered her chances for the 2008 presidential nomination, which she lost to Barack Obama, an Iraq War opponent.
However, to ease tensions with the Clinton wing of the party, Obama selected Clinton to be his Secretary of State, one of the first and most fateful decisions of his presidency. He also kept on George W. Bush's Defense Secretary Robert Gates and neocon members of the military high command, such as Gen. David Petraeus.
This "Team of Rivals" – named after Abraham Lincoln's initial Civil War cabinet – ensured a powerful bloc of pro-war sentiment, which pushed Obama toward more militaristic solutions than he otherwise favored, notably the wasteful counterinsurgency "surge" in Afghanistan in 2009 which did little beyond get another 1,000 U.S. soldiers killed and many more Afghans.
Clinton was a strong supporter of that "surge" – and Gates reported in his memoir that she acknowledged only opposing the Iraq War "surge" in 2007 for political reasons. Inside Obama's foreign policy councils, Clinton routinely took the most neoconservative positions, such as defending a 2009 coup in Honduras that ousted a progressive president.
Clinton also sabotaged early efforts to work out an agreement in which Iran surrendered much of its low-enriched uranium, including an initiative in 2010 organized at Obama's request by the leaders of Brazil and Turkey. Clinton sank that deal and escalated tensions with Iran along the lines favored by Israel's right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a Clinton favorite.
Pumping for War in Libya
In 2011, Clinton successfully lobbied Obama to go to war against Libya to achieve another "regime change," albeit cloaked in the more modest goal of establishing only a "no-fly zone" to "protect civilians."
Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi had claimed he was battling jihadists and terrorists who were building strongholds around Benghazi, but Clinton and her State Department underlings accused him of slaughtering civilians and (in one of the more colorful lies used to justify the war) distributing Viagra to his troops so they could rape more women.
Despite resistance from Russia and China, the United Nations Security Council fell for the deception about protecting civilians. Russia and China agreed to abstain from the vote, giving Clinton her "no-fly zone." Once that was secured, however, the Obama administration and several European allies unveiled their real plan, to destroy the Libyan army and pave the way for the violent overthrow of Gaddafi.
Privately, Clinton's senior aides viewed the Libyan "regime change" as a chance to establish what they called the "Clinton Doctrine" on using "smart power" with plans for Clinton to rush to the fore and claim credit once Gaddafi was ousted. But that scheme failed when President Obama grabbed the limelight after Gaddafi's government collapsed.
But Clinton would not be denied her second opportunity to claim the glory when jihadist rebels captured Gaddafi on Oct. 20, 2011, sodomized him with a knife and then murdered him. Hearing of Gaddafi's demise, Clinton went into a network interview and declared , "we came, we saw, he died" and clapped her hands in glee.
Clinton's glee was short-lived, however. Libya soon descended into chaos with Islamic extremists gaining control of large swaths of the country. On Sept. 11, 2012, jihadists attacked the U.S. consulate in Benghazi killing Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other American personnel. It turned out Gaddafi had been right about the nature of his enemies.
Undaunted by the mess in Libya, Clinton made similar plans for Syria where again she marched in lock-step with the neocons and their "liberal interventionist" sidekicks in support of another violent "regime change," ousting the Assad dynasty, a top neocon/Israeli goal since the 1990s.
Clinton pressed Obama to escalate weapons shipments and training for anti-government rebels who were deemed "moderate" but in reality collaborated closely with radical Islamic forces, including Al Nusra Front (Al Qaeda's Syrian franchise) and some even more extreme jihadists (who coalesced into the Islamic State).
Again, Clinton's war plans were cloaked in humanitarian language, such as the need to create a "safe zone" inside Syria to save civilians. But her plans would have required a major U.S. invasion of a sovereign country, the destruction of its air force and much of its military, and the creation of conditions for another "regime change."
In the case of Syria, however, Obama resisted the pressure from Clinton and other hawks inside his own administration. The President did approve some covert assistance to the rebels and allowed Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the Gulf states to do much more, but he did not agree to an outright U.S.-led invasion to Clinton's disappointment.
Parting Ways
Clinton finally left the Obama administration at the start of his second term in 2013, some say voluntarily and others say in line with Obama's desire to finally move ahead with serious negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program and to apply more pressure on Israel to reach a long-delayed peace settlement with the Palestinians. Secretary of State John Kerry was willing to do some of the politically risky work that Clinton was not.
Many on the Left deride Obama as "Obomber" and mock his hypocritical acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009. And there is no doubt that Obama has waged war his entire presidency, bombing at least seven countries by his own count. But the truth is that he has generally been among the most dovish members of his administration, advocating a "realistic" (or restrained) application of American power. By contrast, Clinton was among the most hawkish senior officials.
A major testing moment for Obama came in August 2013 after a sarin gas attack outside Damascus, Syria, that killed hundreds of Syrians and that the State Department and the mainstream U.S. media immediately blamed on the forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
There was almost universal pressure inside Official Washington to militarily enforce Obama's "red line" against Assad using chemical weapons. Amid this intense momentum toward war, it was widely assumed that Obama would order a harsh retaliatory strike against the Syrian military. But U.S. intelligence and key figures in the U.S. military smelled a rat, a provocation carried out by Islamic extremists to draw the United States into the Syrian war on their side.
At the last minute and at great political cost to himself, Obama listened to the doubts of his intelligence advisers and called off the attack, referring the issue to the U.S. Congress and then accepting a Russian-brokered deal in which Assad surrendered all his chemical weapons though continuing to deny a role in the sarin attack.
Eventually, the sarin case against Assad would collapse. Only one rocket was found to have carried sarin and it had a very limited range placing its firing position likely within rebel-controlled territory. But Official Washington's conventional wisdom never budged. To this day, politicians and pundits denounce Obama for not enforcing his "red line."
There's little doubt, however, what Hillary Clinton would have done. She has been eager for a much more aggressive U.S. military role in Syria since the civil war began in 2011. Much as she used propaganda and deception to achieve "regime change" in Libya, she surely would have done the same in Syria, embracing the pretext of the sarin attack – "killing innocent children" – to destroy the Syrian military even if the rebels were the guilty parties.
Still Lusting for War
Indeed, during the 2016 campaign – in those few moments that have touched on foreign policy – Clinton declared that as President she would order the U.S. military to invade Syria. "Yes, I do still support a no-fly zone," she said during the April 14 debate. She also wants a "safe zone" that would require seizing territory inside Syria.
But no one should be gullible enough to believe that Clinton's invasion of Syria would stop at a "safe zone." As with Libya, once the camel's nose was into the tent, pretty soon the animal would be filling up the whole tent.
Perhaps even scarier is what a President Clinton would do regarding Iran and Ukraine, two countries where belligerent U.S. behavior could start much bigger wars.
For instance, would President Hillary Clinton push the Iranians so hard – in line with what Netanyahu favors – that they would renounce the nuclear deal and give Clinton an excuse to bomb-bomb-bomb Iran?
In Ukraine, would Clinton escalate U.S. military support for the post-coup anti-Russian Ukrainian government, encouraging its forces to annihilate the ethnic Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine and to "liberate" the people of Crimea from "Russian aggression" (though they voted by 96 percent to leave the failed Ukrainian state and rejoin Russia)?
Would President Clinton expect the Russians to stand down and accept these massacres? Would she take matters to the next level to demonstrate how tough she can be against Russian President Vladimir Putin whom she has compared to Hitler? Might she buy into the latest neocon dream of achieving "regime change" in Moscow? Would she be wise enough to recognize how dangerous such instability could be?
Of course, one would expect that all of Clinton's actions would be clothed in the crocodile tears of "humanitarian" warfare, starting wars to "save the children" or to stop the evil enemy from "raping defenseless girls." The truth of such emotional allegations would be left for the post-war historians to try to sort out. In the meantime, President Clinton would have her wars.
Having covered Washington for nearly four decades, I always marvel at how selective concerns for human rights can be. When "friendly" civilians are dying, we are told that we have a "responsibility to protect," but when pro-U.S. forces are slaughtering civilians of an adversary country or movement, reports of those atrocities are dismissed as "enemy propaganda" or ignored altogether. Clinton is among the most cynical in this regard.
Trading Places
But the larger picture for the Democrats is that they have just adopted an extraordinary historical reversal whether they understand it or not. They have replaced the Republicans as the party of aggressive war, though clearly many Republicans still dance to the neocon drummer just as Clinton and "liberal interventionists" do. Still, Donald Trump, for all his faults, has adopted a relatively peaceful point of view, especially in the Mideast and with Russia.
While today many Democrats are congratulating themselves for becoming the first major party to make a woman the presumptive nominee, they may soon have to decide whether that distinction justifies putting an aggressive war hawk in the White House. In a way, the issue is an old one for Democrats, whether "identity politics" or anti-war policies are more important.
At least since 1968 and the chaotic Democratic convention in Chicago, the party has advanced, sometimes haltingly, those two agendas, pushing for broader rights for all and seeking to restrain the nation's militaristic impulses.
In the 1970s, Democrats largely repudiated the Vietnam War while the Republicans waved the flag and equated anti-war positions with treason. By the 1980s and early 1990s, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush were making war fun again – Grenada, Afghanistan, Panama and the Persian Gulf, all relatively low-cost conflicts with victorious conclusions.
By the 1990s, Bill Clinton (along with Hillary Clinton) saw militarism as just another issue to be triangulated. With the Soviet Union's collapse, the Clinton-42 administration saw the opportunity for more low-cost tough-guy/gal-ism – continuing a harsh embargo and periodic air strikes against Iraq (causing the deaths of a U.N.-estimated half million children); blasting Serbia into submission over Kosovo; and expanding NATO to the east toward Russia's borders.
But Bill Clinton did balk at the more extreme neocon ideas, such as the one from the Project for the New American Century for a militarily enforced "regime change" in Iraq. That had to wait for George W. Bush in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. As a New York senator, Hillary Clinton made sure she was onboard for war on Iraq just as she sided with Israel's pummeling of Lebanon and the Palestinians in Gaza.
Hillary Clinton was taking triangulation to an even more acute angle as she sided with virtually every position of the Netanyahu government in Israel and moved in tandem with the neocons as they cemented their control of Washington's foreign policy establishment. Her only brief flirtation with an anti-war position came in 2006 when her political advisers informed her that her continued support for Bush's Iraq War would doom her in the Democratic presidential race.
But she let her hawkish plumage show again as Obama's Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013 – and once she felt she had the 2016 Democratic race in hand (after her success in the southern primaries) she pivoted back to her hard-line positions in full support of Israel and in a full-throated defense of her war on Libya, which she still won't view as a failure.
The smarter neocons are already lining up to endorse Clinton, especially given Donald Trump's hostile takeover of the Republican Party and his disdain for neocon strategies that he views as simply spreading chaos around the globe. As The New York Times has reported, Clinton is "the vessel into which many interventionists are pouring their hopes."
Robert Kagan, a co-founder of the neocon Project for the new American Century, has endorsed Clinton, saying "I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy. If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue it's something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else." [See Consortiumnews.com's "Yes, Hillary Clinton Is a Neocon."]
So, by selecting Clinton, the Democrats have made a full 360-degree swing back to the pre-1968 days of the Vietnam War. After nearly a half century of favoring a more peaceful foreign policy – and somewhat less weapons spending – than the Republicans, the Democrats are America's new aggressive war party.
[For more on this topic, see Consortiumnews.com's "Would a Clinton Win Mean More Wars?']
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America's Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
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YouTube
aspiesresearchmom1 week agoThis video should be viral. #KweenKrookedKillary and her moronic minions don't have a chance when Bernie's voters get on board the #TrumpTrain2016Oxymoron2How can anyone vote for that corrupt warmonger? Seriously, can someone explain why she has 50% of the votes in the USA. Unbelievable.gspotjazzKillary, like Barry, loves killing people. Psychopaths--both of them.Jim MooneyFunny the Dems are so hot for Hillary and don't recognize she's a regime-changing warmonger on a par with Bush, responsible for millions of dead and displaced in Libya, Syria, and Ukraine.Bad DogExactly how nuts do you have to be to think you can go to war with Russia? Even if you come out on top, what's the environment going to be like? Is emerging from your bunker with 70% of the population dead and no atmosphere left considered a win? FUCK HILLARY RAW.Alex O.I honestly don't care if Trump wins. I don't think it will be good, but whatever. But I know for a fact that no matter what, Hillary must not win. She's bad news.Tina SizWE ARE WITNESSING THE MOST CORRUPT, MAFIA-LIKE.. ANTI AMERICAN WOMAN IN HISTORY OF POLITICS. THERE ARE REASONS WHY SCANDALS AND LIES AND DEATHS HAVE FOLLOWED HER FOR YEARS.Truth Archives
Oy Vey! It's funny how Liberals, most Muslims etc are offended by Trump but not offended by the direct policies of the same old warmongers resulting in the deaths of millions of people in the Middle East for a decade and on going in the sham war on t3rror. The fuck?
2eyesofhorus
Hillary has become in effect, a NeoConservative, not a Democrat-she votes for war continually
Aisha K
1800 PupusasActually a lot of Muslims don't support Hillary or Trump and prefer Bernie because Bernie really did vote against the war in Iraq, while Trump only claims he was once against it. Regardless of that fact, Trump makes a powerful argument against voting for Hillary because of her warmonger record in Iraq, Libya and any other place she gets involved in, and the damage it has caused the entire world, including USA.
De SelbyI'm Hispanic but I prefer Trump
NSA Spyingshe will literally say anything to benefit herself. the country will be ruined if she is elected president.
oanimalinho2Hilary Clinton is our generation's Henry Kissinger.
Christopher Horton+NSA Spying No, she isn't. She is much worse than that.
This Trump ad gives us a taste of what the Democrats will be up against if we have to try to mobilize the voters behind Hillary to stop him. And why so many of us won't be able to put our hearts into it. Because on this issue he is absolutely right. Hillary's record on foreign policy is reprehensible - and terrifying. But it's not just on this issue - she has been lying about many things, among them the state of the economy. With no public voting record to defend, no fundamental commitment to the truth or reality, with a prostitute press that selectively forgets what he said yesterday, Trump can be selectively right - and righteous - on any issue he chooses. Until it no longer suits him.Do I think Trump would be better than Clinton on issues of war and peace? Not for a minute. Would he be worse? Maybe - I'm honestly not sure...
Garou
Take it from me .. She's a monster.
gamira007
+PeaceAndJustice Yes absolutely she is propped up by the MSM and the Corporate death machine. The Majority do know this woman is pure evil but our rulers hand pick who is prez here cause if voting did really matter then it would be illegal.
PeaceAndJustice
+Philo Beddoe
Her 'support' is driven by the MSM which is completely controlled by the PRC (Predatory Ruling Class). Basically the people that believe the television think she is just a swell lady.
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turcopolier.typepad.com
Of interest:
Two "liberal" IT luminaries today pick up the (totally unproven) assertion that Russia hacked and published via wikileaks the DNC shennigens of preferring Clinton.
The used this to (preemptively) accuse Russia of manipulating the U.S. election via voting computers on November 9.
Bruce Schneier
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/07/27/by-november-russian-hackers-could-target-voting-machines/By November, Russian hackers could target voting machines >
Cory Doctorow
http://boingboing.net/2016/07/27/russia-and-other-states-could.htmlhttp://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2016/03/how-the-us-ends-up-in-a-civil-war.htmlRussia and other states could hack the US election by attacking voting machines
This is curious as both are usually much more carefully about attribution of such hacks.
Could this be a "preemptive" attempt to find Russia guilty should the November 9 result come into question?
John Robb warned earlier that such a scenario could lead to civil war
Valissa -> b, 28 July 2016 at 02:02 PM
I think this is a sign that both Schneier and Doctorow are democrats who fear Trump. Tribal allegiance exerts a very powerful, and irrational, force on the so-called rational mind.The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation, by Drew Westen https://www.amazon.com/Political-Brain-Emotion-Deciding-Nation/dp/1586485733/
Warning, Westen is a Democrat and he basically wrote this book to try and help Democrats win more presidential election, though the research portion in the beginning of the book shows how people in both parties are biased in their interpretation of political events based on their political party allegiance.
When Obama first ran in 2007-2008, Westen had clearly been drinking the glorious pro-Obama koolaid as was evident in some HuffPo articles he wrote at the time.
Then a year or two later he wrote some follow up articles whining and complaining about how disappointed he was in Obama not being much different from Bush, etc, etc.
Clearly this man was so caught up in his tribal allegiance he couldn't recognize the very biases his research showed. Btw, he is still a consultant to the Democrats... attempting to be the Frank Luntz of the left.
different clue -> Valissa, 28 July 2016 at 08:58 PM
rjj -> b, 28 July 2016 at 03:11 PMThe fact that Mr. Western could wake up to Obama's basic Bushness in only one or two years means that Mr. Western had a freer mind than most Obama supporters.
guessing they are setting the scene to invalidate an unfavorable vote count and take it to House of Representatives.Cee -> b, 28 July 2016 at 03:15 PMwriters could be persuaded they were Doing Good.
B,Good find. Yes and yes. They never stop manipulating. Now the MSM will finally have to admit that the machines are compromised ONLY when it serves the interests of th few.
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Jul 29, 2016 | yahoo.com
michaelmichael
Reading the comments it is hard to understand what is wrong with a lot of you commenters. You seem to swallow whole one side or the other and march off the cliff just like lemming. This argument is a few sentences and is about proper handling of the leaks, not the leaks themselves. The leaks show Hillary supporters helped steal the primary votes from Sanders when the DNC was supposed to be neutral. That is a crime against democracy, an attack on you, it is third world corruption. If you believe Hillary is for you than you are just hopeless.
DoctorNoDoctorNo
At what point in civilization did the truth become unethical? No one is denying that the information contained in these e-mails is not true. All the noise about Russian plots and secret agendas is a bit ironic as it seems the truth is that the DNC and their presidential candidate are the ones with a secret agenda that was made public.
We have one presidential candidate under IRS, FBI and State Department investigation and another who opens their mouth only to change feet placing the American voter in an untenable position come November.
fudmer
@ Tim Schultze Humanity refuses to be ruled by the few! ¨
The collapse of the government and Google as a-censor is imminent. ¨ Everyone is switching to Duckduckgo.com
Enough Oligarch monopoly and control. Yesterday 40 civilians bombed to death and 50 more injured in Syria by US Air force and marines killed in actions in Yemen. What the hell is the USA doing in Syria or Yemen?
Democracy is freedom of movement, action and thought, not controlled, restricted and regulated movement, not punishment for each action that challenges the established monopolies, and not mind control and media propaganda as a total cultural environment.
Everywhere world wide humanity, Christian, Jew, Hindu, or Moslem [except the wabahi Sunni] are rising to the challenge the few.
nobodynobody
"The DNC email leak has backfired on WikiLeaks, and arguably Russia and Trump, because theorizing about who leaked these emails has been far more intriguing to journalists and the general public than the emails themselves."
How this backfire ??? We just get proof how the DNC establishment nominate what candidate they want not what people want. If after this Sanders supporters will still vote for Hillary, they just simply give the establishment green lite to do it same thing anytime they want and democracy really is just the empty word......
AlitaAlita,
Wikileaks only confirms that DNC has rigged the primaries to help Hillary Clinton, that's why Debbie W. Schultz had to resign her Chair. Whether that will cost Clinton her election depends on how many of the Bernie Sanders supporters are angry enough to boycott the election.
JohnJohn
The problem in America is that we have a two party political system that can be easily manipulated by the wealthy and those with evil intent .When that happens you have basically one party speaking double talk , controlled by the few and sewing confusion among the voters in order to divide and polarize the country . Which leads to a lack of unity and everyone for him or her self . What we need is not more or fewer political parties but a more informed public
Scotty P.Scotty P.It is interesting (albeit unsurprising) that since the leak makes Hillary Clinton's backers in the DNC look bad, the media is so interested in the motives of the leakers. This was never the case with the anti-Bush crowd in the 2000's. Going back a bit further, anyone involved in exposing the Watergate break-in is practically treated like a national hero. Suddenly, the "truth to power" crowd has become the "can't handle the truth" crowd.
Similarly, Edward Snowden proudly violated national security laws, in the name of exposing government corruption. But now that someone else has done it to a politcal base Snowden finds more tolerable (he's a known liberal), he takes issue with it? Get over yourself, Ed. You're no better than WikiLeaks, and your agenda is no more "pure" than theirs.
Lastly, the author of this article saying the leak has "backfired" is truly rich. This isn't the 90's, when feckless partisans tried to take down the Clintons, only to have disgraced themselves- although Newt Gingrich still ATTEMPTS to be relevant. (But I digress.) This time, the Clintons have angered a lot of people on the left, who see that the Democrats are no more a "party of the people" than the Republicans are- although anyone paying attentions wouldn't need WikiLeaks to tell them that.
SomeSome
Talk about playing it down, this proved media collusion further evidenced by the blackout of delegates lack of media coverage when over 1,000 walked out after roll call and stormed the media tents. (Video's all over YouTube)
My Revolution brothers and sisters, even though we are separated by #DemExit, I understand and appreciate your fight from within. I am fighting to build a new home in the Green party. We are still together even when we are apart.
- If you can't fly then run,
- If you can't run then walk,
- If you can't walk then crawl,
But whatever you do you have to keep moving forward!
michael
Another is a long line of distortion and lies by the establishment to make the establishment Queen elected. The lies just never stop. Snowden tweeted a sentence and Wikileaks tweeted by another. from this a whole pyramid of lies and distortions was written. There is zero evidence the Russians government hacked these emails, zero, nada, nothing. What is important is the DNC was for Hillary and was trying to sabotage another Democrat, Sanders, running for the same office. That is corruption pure and simple, nothing less. Third world corruption going on at the DNC.
TimmyTimmy
This #$%$ article is just ridiculous! "Oh, well, the leak hasn't revealed anything important". Hello! Wake up! It has shown how crooked the DNC was during this election cycle, and in truth the RNC probably isn't any better. But here we have PROOF of just how crooked hilary and her cronies are, and they are all getting a free pass. No one sees a problem with this?
Gordon
Did you notice there's no (By-Line) for this article? Because what is IN the emails is most important. Firstly, they blame the Russians. Then they blame Trump. Then they blame the Russians and Trump. Now they don't know who to blame. But, the FBI said for certain the server was hacked and there were indications of who hacked it. This was established in a couple of short weeks - or less. The FBI had Hillary's server for a year and couldn't make a determination.
Too much of this just doesn't add up. The Democrats went into immediate Damage Control mode when the emails came out and Not ONE person was screaming, "This ain't True!". Nope, not even a whisper. We can't tell who's pulling the strings on this. But, there's dammed sure someone behind the curtain.
Richard
The most important question to ask is about the motives of American Journalists is there report a distraction from the truth are they in fact trying to do damage control are they being controlled by a political party as these E-MAILS seem to suggest . The motive of the leaker is less important than the truth. Wiki-leaks hates Clinton , Russia hacked the DNC server that is another subject . The fact weather or not the DNC acted in a unethical manner is the subject.
JULEA
There is nothing wrong with Transparency. We need MORE of it. How long did WE Hack and Spy on Germany, Merkel? They were suing US. What ever happened about this? We ALSO need more transparency about TPP and who can be sued for some Corporation losing profits..even if they are doing wrong to make their profits. I think something falls on States, counties, even citizens. Even SCIENCE for proving harmful things involved. We just need Transparency and who is giving money to who and why. The DNC became VERY Undemocratic and this just a BIG BIG BIG No to every Liberal and should not be covered up for anything. WE HACK EVERY COUNTRY.
DickDick
Nobody except America's enemies wants vital secrets that jeopardize our well being hacked. On the other hand we have a national interest in finding out what our leaders have been hiding that jeopardize our liberties. Snowden exposed extreme violations of the fourth amendment by the NSA. Wikileaks exposed political chicanery by the democrat central committee. Hiding information like this is harmful and only benefits those who are trying to cover up something just to protect themselves. Both Snowden and wikileaks have done good deeds.
Snowden, who risked his life to spill the beans, said he would reveal all in return for immunity. But too many people have reason to fear the truth so I doubt if he will be granted it. A shame.
mike
Democrat or Republican they both pull this kind of #$%$. The only answer is to vote all of them out of office and put term limits in place . We need to stop the Life long politicians who are in it for their own riches. And we know its "All" of them, they find out how easy it is to rip the American people off and get by with it.
DavidSDavidS
This attempt to paint Clinton the victim is sooooo over played. She has been the "victim" all her life. Focus on just how corrupt she and everyone around her is. DWS didn't get punished for what she did (or allowed), she was rewarded. Doesn't that speak volumes about Clinton? The more corrupt you are, the more she and hers will reward. Wake up people, there was a time when a single lie told to the public was a career ending blotch. Now it's who can tell the biggest.
Ron
I love how this story tries to downplay the content of the emails and focus on the hackers. The emails exposed a coordinated effort to rob Bernie. Journalists may be having more fun speculating on who hacked them, but Bernies followers could care less. They know the old man got robbed.
Lord Doom
The Leak disclosed how the main stream media has bias with the DNC. Yahoo news wants to blow down the story and mask its importance it seems to me.
Idontwanngiveit
Dan Seitz.... Do you practice being a political dolt or does it come naturally?
The DNC had to hire actors at $50 a pop by advertising on Craigslist so Hillary Clinton wouldn't look like the clown she is in front of a half-empty DNC stadium during her acceptance speech.
The exodus of hundreds, if not thousands, of Bernie Sanders supporters from the convention made crystal clear the extent of discord among Democratic voters.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out the devastating fall-out of the WikiLeaks e-mail dump on Hillary Clinton's election bid. She is the No. 1 casualty -- albeit "collateral damage" -- inflicted by the party upon itself!
Prior to the WikiLeaks e-mail showing how Bernie got jerked around by a rigged system, most of his supporters would have held their nose and grudgingly voted for Hillary in November. Now, since learning how party officials conspired against them, they want and deserve blood!
The disgruntled masses who stormed out of the DNC represent a microcosm of the equally disgruntled masses of Democrats nation-wide who are incensed over the party's machinations and shenanigans. The ones in Pennsylvania and those watching on TV, following events on the Internet and reading newspapers at home are fully informed about what took place and will now do one of three things:
- Sit out the election entirely our of frustration over a status-quo system that's patently rigged against them, which benefits Donald Trump.
- Vote for a third-candidate, which splits the Democratic ticket and, again, benefits Trump.
- Vote for Donald Trump directly out of shear spite to show the Democratic Party exactly what it deserves for screwing with them, which also Trump.
Even if all those people constitute just 5 or 10 percent of the Party's voting base, their loss and its effect on Hillary's chances of winning the White House will be devastating!
So, as a staunch Trump supporter myself, Thank you, Julian Assange! Thank you very much for your generous and very helpful assistance in securing the Oval Office for Donald J. Trump on Nov. 8.
Oh yeah. And one other thing.... Please keep those Democratic Party internal e-mails coming. They're absolutely fascinating!
Joseph
It's a sad state of affairs in that we are depending on Julian Assange to save the Republic from corrupt Hillary and the Clinton foundation. If Clinton becomes President she will basically place the United States up for sale so that the globalists can destroy what little remains of the American middle class. America will truly become a third world nation with only rich and poor.
We can not allow this to happen. Trump may be a little "rough around the edges" however he is a true American who will bring back jobs, try his best to eliminate illegal immigration, and take America back from the globalists. This will help middle class Americans to thrive -- Vote Trump for President in 2016 !
Elizabeth
I think most commenters are missing the point that Snowden made: what is the intent of the leak? If the intent is to expose corruption then that is doing a public service. Leaking private information like credit card numbers and SS numbers only makes the victims vulnerable to thieves and does not fall in the "need to know" category. Wiki could have edited the leak to expose the DNC while protecting private information.
joanjoan
All look at the bang up job the FBI did with Clinton's email wrong doings. She broke the law and lied and the FBI tip toed around it by not taking her statements under oath so she wouldn't be charged.
A Yahoo reader
What could be more hypocritical of this pro-Clinton commentary questioning the objectivity of documents released with no commentary at all. Any rational person appreciates being provided the truth. It's of no consequence that the truth provider doesn't like Clinton. There's no law that says people have to like Clinton, at least not yet.
alfredalfred
Nice try to discredit the emails. They happened. She resigned. Democrats are terrible people. They get away with it because we are stupid and believe everything this media tells us.
Danny
OK, you won't listen to a guy (Edward Snowden) about issues, when he releases information that the public NEEDS to know, but "MAY BE" detrimental to the people in National Security, you put him on the World's MOST WANTED LIST, take his citizenship away. So what is his choice, he HAS NO CHOICE, he goes on the offense, obtaining and releasing even more information, and working with whomever will protect him.
There is no evidence Russia is holding him prison, just protecting him. There is no evidence he can't leave anytime he wants, even come back to his own country. Yet our government continues to villanize Snowden.
Look at the data released - It is true, it proves ALL the crooks are in our own government and politics, there is no evidence Russia is doing anything but helping people find, obtain and release material our politicians create.
So, Killary, DNC, Obama, one and all attack Snowden and Russia, even adding Trump to the mix. I think we need to pack up all these crooked Democrats, including Obama, and ship them off to another country and tell them to GET A JOB. Then, let Snowden back into his country and let him do his job of protecting the United States of America. And Trump doesn't have anything to do with Killary, Obama and DNCs crooked politics.
krainkrain
VernyVernyThen there is the language issue. "I hate being attributed to Russia," the Guccifer 2.0 account told Motherboard, probably accurately. The person at the keyboard then claimed in a chat with Motherboard's Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai that Guccifer 2.0 was from Romania, like the original Guccifer, a well-known hacker. But when asked to explain his hack in Romanian, he was unable to respond colloquially and without errors. Guccifer 2.0's English initially was also weak, but in subsequent posts the quality improved sharply, albeit only on political subjects, not in technical matters-an indication of a team of operators at work behind the scenes.
The government is protecting Hillary and the Clinton Gang, so "leaks and hacks" are the only methodology of showing Americans the truth about Hillary, the most corrupt politician in American history.Jayster b
Another article to divert from the content of the emails, which were so damning that the DNC used all their Media contacts to create the "Russia Hack" scenario and then accused Trump of conspiring with Russia. As of yet not one DNC official has denied the facts or content in the e-mails. So, Assange scored in this first round so much that Debbie is no longer head of the DNC, and the FBI has demanded access to the DNC server to analyze it, meaning they will have access to all the donor information from foreign countries that are helping the Democrats steal the nomination from Bernie. What a crazy world. Assange 1, DNC 0
TomTom
I found it interesting you didn't mention that Politico was found in cahoots with the DNC as well in the emails.. Just like the mainstream media didn't hardly cover the protesters at the DNC convention but surely did at the RNC convention. You pick & choose what you want to report don't you.
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theintercept.com
As my colleague Glenn Greenwald told WNYC on Monday, while there may never be conclusive evidence that the Democratic National Committee was hacked by Russian intelligence operatives to extract the trove of embarrassing emails published by WikiLeaks, it would hardly be shocking if that was what happened.
"Governments do spy on each other and do try to influence events in other countries," Glenn noted. "Certainly the U.S. government has a very long and successful history of doing exactly that."
Even so, he added, given the ease with which we were misled into war in Iraq by false claims about weapons of mass destruction - and the long history of Russophobia in American politics - it is vital to cast a skeptical eye over whatever evidence is presented to support the claim, made by Hillary Clinton's aide Robby Mook, that this is all part of a Russian plot to sabotage the Democrats and help Donald Trump win the election.
The theory gained some traction , particularly among Trump's detractors, in part because the candidate has seemed obsessed at times with reminding crowds that Russian President Vladimir Putin once said something sort of nice about him (though not, as Trump falsely claims , that the American is "a genius"). Then last week, Trump's campaign staff watered down a pledge to help Ukraine defend its territory from Russian-backed rebels and the candidate told the New York Times he would not necessarily honor the NATO treaty commitment that requires the United States military to defend other member states from a direct attack by Russia.
Since Trump has refused to release his tax returns, there are also questions about whether or not his businesses might depend to some extent on Russian investors. "Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets," Trump's son Donald Jr. told a real estate conference in 2008, the Washington Post reported last month. "We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia."
Paul Manafort, who is directing Trump's campaign and was for years a close adviser of a Putin ally, former President Viktor Yanukovych of Ukraine, called the theory that Trump's campaign had ties to the Russian government "absurd." (On Monday, Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News reported that a DNC researcher looking into Manafort's ties to pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine in May had been warned that her personal Yahoo email account was under attack. "We strongly suspect that your account has been the target of state-sponsored actors," the warning from the email service security team read.)
Unhelpfully for Trump, his most senior adviser with knowledge of the world of hacking, retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told Bloomberg View that he "would not be surprised at all" to learn that Russia was behind the breach of the DNC network. "Both China and Russia have the full capability to do this," he said.
Later on Monday, Trump himself then attributed the attack on the DNC to "China, Russia, one of our many, many 'friends,'" who "came in and hacked the hell out of us."
Since very few of us are cybersecurity experts, and the Iraq debacle is a reminder of how dangerous it can be to put blind faith in experts whose claims might reinforce our own political positions, there is also the question of who we can trust to provide reliable evidence.
One expert in the field, who is well aware of the evidence-gathering capabilities of the U.S. government, is Edward Snowden, the former Central Intelligence Agency technician and National Security Agency whistleblower who exposed the extent of mass surveillance and has been given temporary asylum in Russia.
"If Russia hacked the #DNC, they should be condemned for it," Snowden wrote on Twitter on Monday, with a link to a 2015 report on the U.S. government's response to the hacking of Sony Pictures. In that case, he noted, "the FBI presented evidence" for its conclusion that North Korea was responsible for the hacking and subsequent release of internal emails. (The FBI is now investigating the breach of the DNC's network, which officials told the Daily Beast they first made the committee aware of in April.)
What's more, Snowden added, the NSA has tools that should make it possible to trace the source of the hack. Even though the Director of National Intelligence usually opposes making such evidence public, he argued, this is a case in which the agency should do so, if only to discourage future attacks.
Edward Snowden
✔ @SnowdenEven if the attackers try to obfuscate origin, #XKEYSCORE makes following exfiltrated data easy. I did this personally against Chinese ops.
Edward Snowden
✔ @SnowdenEvidence that could publicly attribute responsibility for the DNC hack certainly exists at #NSA, but DNI traditionally objects to sharing.
Edward Snowden
✔ @SnowdenThe aversion to sharing #NSA evidence is fear of revealing "sources and methods" of intel collection, but #XKEYSCORE is now publicly known.
Edward Snowden2 Verified account ?
@Snowden
Without a credible threat that USG can and will use #NSA capabilities to publicly attribute responsibility, such hacks will become common.
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Jul 28, 2016 | katehon.com
The Russian theme has expectedly become one of the most important in the US presidential election. Democrats are unsurprisingly engaged in anti-Russian hysteria. Donald Trump says that he will establish good relations with Russia and is ready to discuss the issue of recognition of the referendum in the Crimea.
Noise and hysteria
Mass hysteria on the part of the Democrats, neocons, ultra-liberals and plain and simple Russophobes, was provoked by the recent statements of Donald Trump. Speaking at a press conference in Florida, Trump called on Russia to hand over the 30,000 emails "missing" from the Hillary Clinton's email server in the US. Their absence is a clear sign that Clinton destroyed evidence proving that she used her personal e-mail server to send sensitive information. Democrats immediately accused Trump of pandering to Russian hackers, although in reality the multi-billionaire rhetorically hinted that the data that Clinton hid from the American investigation is in the hands of foreign intelligence services. So, Clinton is a possible target for blackmail.Trump's statement that he is ready to discuss the status of Crimea and the removal of anti-Russian sanctions caused even more noise. This view is not accepted either in the Democrat or in the Republican mainstream. Trump also said that Vladimir Putin does not respect Clinton and Obama, while Trump himself hopes to find a common language with him. Trump appreciates Putin's leadership and believes that the US must work together with Russia to deal with common threats, particularly against Islamic extremism.
The establishment's tantrum
Both Democrats and Republicans are taking aim at Trump. The vice-presidential candidate, Mike Pence, made threats to Russia. The head of the Republican majority in Congress, Paul Ryan, became somewhat hysterical. He said that Putin is "a thug and should stay out of these elections."It is Putin personally, and the Russian security services, who are accused of leaking correspondences of top employees of the National Committee of the Democratic Party. This unverified story united part of the Republicans and all of the Democrats, including the Clinton and Barack Obama themselves. Trump supporters note that the Russian threat is used to divert attention from the content of these letters. And these show the fraud carried out during the primaries which favored Hillary Clinton.
The pro-American candidate
The "Russian scandal" demonstrates that on the one hand the thesis of the normalization of relations with Russia, despite the propaganda, is becoming popular in US society. It is unlikely that Donald Trump has made campaign statements that are not designed to gain the support of the public in this election. On the other hand - Trump - a hard realist, like Putin, is not pro-Russian, but a pro-American politician, and therefore the improvement of relations with Russia in his eyes corresponds to the US's national interests. Trump has never to date done anything that would not be to his advantage. Sometimes he even said he would order US fighter jets to engage with Russian ones, and declared he would have a hard stance in relations with Russia.Another thing is that his understanding of US national interests is fundamentally different from the dominant American globalist elite consensus. For Trump, the US should not be the source of a global liberal remaking of the world, but a national power, which optimizes its position just as efficiently as any commercial project. And in terms of optimizing the position of the United States, he says there should be a normal American interaction with Putin and Russia in the field of combating terrorism and preventing the sliding of the two countries into a global war. He claims this is to be the priority instead of issues relating to the promotion of democracy and the so-called fight against "authoritarian regimes".
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Jun 06, 2014 | original.antiwar.com
On May 23, 2012, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went to the Special Operations Forces Industry Conference (SOFIC) trade show in Tampa, Florida to share her vision of "smart power" and to explain the State Department's crucial role in extending the reach and efficacy of America's growing "international counterterrorism network."
First, there is such a thing as a "Special Operations Forces Industry Conference trade show." Without some keen reporting by David Axe of Wired, that peculiar get-together might've flown completely under the radar – much like the shadowy "industry" it both supports and feeds off of like a sleek, camouflaged lamprey attached to a taxpayer-fattened shark.
Second, "special operations" have officially metastasized into a full-fledged industry. United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) is located at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa and, therefore, conveniently located near the special operations trade show, which happened again this year at the Tampa Convention Center. The theme was "Strengthening the Global SOF Network" and the 600,000-square-foot facility was filled with targets of opportunity for well-connected and well-heeled defense contractors.
According to the SOFIC website, this year's conference afforded attendees "the opportunity to engage with USSOCOM Program Executive Officers, Science and Technology Managers, Office of Small Business Programs and Technology & Industry Liaison Office representatives, and other acquisition experts who will identify top priorities, business opportunities, and interests as they relate to USSOCOM acquisition programs."
Third, Hillary's widely-ignored speech marked a radical departure from the widely-held perception that the State Department's diplomatic mission endures as an institutional alternative to the Pentagon's military planning. Instead, Secretary Clinton celebrated the transformation of Foggy Bottom into a full partner with the Pentagon's ever-widening efforts around the globe, touting both the role of diplomats in paving the way for shadowy special ops in so-called "hot spots" and the State Department's "hand-in-glove" coordination with Special Forces in places like Pakistan and Yemen.
Finally, with little fanfare or coverage, America's lead diplomat stood before the shadow war industry and itemized the integration of the State Department's planning and personnel with the Pentagon's global counter-terrorism campaign which, she told the special operations industry, happen "in one form or another in more than 100 countries around the world."
If this isn't entirely unexpected, consider the fact that under then-Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, the State Department fought attempts by the Pentagon to trump its authority around the globe and, as reported by Washington Post, "repeatedly blocked Pentagon efforts to send Special Operations forces into countries surreptitiously and without ambassadors' formal approval."
But that was before Hillary brought her "fast and flexible" doctrine of "smart power" to Foggy Bottom and, according to her remarks, before she applied lessons learned from her time on the Senate Armed Services Committee to launch the first-ever Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, which she modeled on the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review. That Pentagon-style review spurred the creation of the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations to "advance the U.S. government's foreign policy goals in conflict areas."
According to a Congressional Research Service analysis, the initial intent of the Conflict Bureau was to replace the ineffectual Office of the Coordinator of Reconstruction and Stabilization, which was created in 2004 to help manage "stabilization" efforts in two nations the US was actively destabilizing – Afghanistan and Iraq.
But the new, improved bureau does more than just react to messes made by unlawful invasions or direct costly remediation efforts in war zones – it also collaborates with "relevant partners" in the Department of Defense and NATO "to harmonize civilian and military plans and operations pertaining to conflict prevention, crisis response, and stabilization."
This integrated relationship between State and Defense was confirmed by US Special Operations chief Admiral William McRaven shortly after Hillary's speech. When asked about the "unlikely partnership," McRaven assured DefenseNews that SOCOM has "an absolutely magnificent relationship with the State Department" and that SOCOM doesn't "do anything that isn't absolutely fully coordinated and approved by the US ambassador and the geographic combatant commander."
As David Axe aptly described it in Wired, "Together, Special Operations Forces and State's new Conflict Bureau are the twin arms of an expanding institution for waging small, low-intensity shadow wars all over the world."
In fact, during Hillary's time as America's chief diplomat, the State Department embraced the shadowy edge of US foreign policy where decision-makers engage in activities that look like war, sound like war and, if you were to ask civilians in places like Yemen and Pakistan, feel a lot like war, but never quite have to meet the Constitutional requirement of being officially declared as war.
The Whole-of-Government Shift
Once upon a time, "low-intensity shadow wars" were the Congressionally-regulated bailiwick of the Central Intelligence Agency. But 9/11 changed everything. However, the excesses of the Bush Administration led many to hope that Obama could and would change everything back or, at least, relax America's tense embrace of "the dark side."
Although the new administration did officially re-brand "The War on Terror" as "Overseas Contingency Operations," Team Obama employed an increasingly elastic interpretation of the 9/11-inspired Authorization for Use of Military Force and expanded covert ops, special ops, drone strikes and regime change to peoples and places well-beyond the law's original intent, and certainly beyond the limited scope of CIA covert action.
Obama's growing counter-terrorism campaign – involving, as Secretary Clinton said, "more than 100 countries" – took flight with a new, ecumenical approach called the "Whole-of-Government" strategy. Advanced by then-Secretary of Defense Bill Gates and quickly adopted by the new administration in early 2009, this strategy catalyzed an institutional shift toward interagency cooperation, particularly in the case of "state-building" (a.k.a. "nation building").
During remarks to the Brookings Institution in 2010, Secretary Clinton explained the shift: "One of our goals coming into the administration was to begin to make the case that defense, diplomacy and development were not separate entities, either in substance or process, but that indeed they had to be viewed as part of an integrated whole and that the whole of government then had to be enlisted in their pursuit."
Essentially, the Whole-of-Government approach is a re-branded and expanded version of Pentagon's doctrine of "Full-Spectrum Dominance." Coincidentally, that strategy was featured in the Clinton Administration's final Annual Report to the President and Congress in 2001. It defined "Full-Spectrum Dominance" as "an ability to conduct prompt, sustained, and synchronized operations with forces tailored to specific situations and possessing freedom to operate in all domains – space, sea, land, air, and information."
In 2001, Full-Spectrum Dominance referred specifically to 20th Century notions of battlefield-style conflicts. But the "dark side" of the War on Terror stretched the idea of the battlefield well-beyond symmetrical military engagements. "Irregular warfare" became the catchphrase du jour, particularly as grinding campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq exposed the reality that the full spectrum still wasn't enough.
An assessment by the Congressional Research Service identified the primary impetus for the Whole-of-Government "reforms" embraced by Team Obama as the "perceived deficiencies of previous interagency missions" during the military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. Those missions failed to address a myriad of problems created – culturally, economically and politically – by the wholesale bombing and occupation of those countries. The Full-Spectrum was half-baked. Lesson learned.
But the lesson wasn't that the US should avoid intervention, regime change or unleashing nascent civil, ethnic or religious conflicts. Instead, the lesson was that the "Whole-of-Government" must be marshaled to fight a worldwide array of Overseas Contingency Operations in "more than 100 countries."
This Whole-of-Government shift signaled a renewed willingness to engage on variety of new fronts – particularly in Africa – but in a "fast and flexible" way. With other agencies – like the State Department – integrated and, in effect, fronting the counter-terrorism campaign, the military footprint becomes smaller and, therefore, easier to manage locally, domestically and internationally.
In some ways, the Whole-of-Government national security strategy is plausible deniability writ-large through the cover of interagency integration. By merging harder-to-justify military and covert actions into a larger, civilian-themed command structure, the impact of the national security policy overseas is hidden – or at least obfuscated – by the diplomatic "stabilization" efforts run through the State Department – whether it's the Conflict Bureau working against Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army in Central Africa, "stabilizing" post-Gaddafi Libya or spending $27 million to organize the opposition to Bashar al-Assad's Syrian regime.
The Pass Key
The cover of diplomacy has traditionally been an effective way to slip covert operators into countries and the State Department's vast network of embassies and consulates still offers an unparalleled "pass-key" into sovereign nations, emerging hot spots and potential targets for regime change. In 2001, the Annual Report to the President and Congress foresaw the need for more access: "Given the global nature of our interests and obligations, the United States must maintain the ability to rapidly project power worldwide in order to achieve full-spectrum dominance."
Having the way "pre-paved" is, based on Hillary's doctrinal shift at State, a key part of the new, fuller-spectrum, Whole-of-Government, mission-integrated version of diplomacy. At the SOFIC's Special Operations Gala Dinner in 2012, Hillary celebrated the integration of diplomatic personnel and Special Operations military units at the State Department's recently created Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications – a "nerve center in Washington" that coordinates "military and civilian teams around the world" and serves "as a force multiplier for our embassies' communications efforts."
As with most doors in Washington, that relationship swings both ways and mission-integrated embassies have served as an effective force multiplier for the Pentagon's full spectrum of activities, particularly around Africa.
In his 2011 testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee Subcommittee on Africa, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Don Yamamoto noted the "significantly expanded the number of DoD personnel who are integrated into embassies across the continent over the past three years," and read a surprisingly long laundry list of collaborative efforts between State and the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM), including: "reduction of excess and poorly secured man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS); Defense Sector Reform in Liberia, DRC, and South Sudan; counterpiracy activities off the Somali coast; maritime safety and security capacity building; and civil-military cooperation."
It seems that "civil-military cooperation" is a primary focus of the State Department in Africa. Most notably, Yamamoto told Congress that "embassies implement Department of State-funded Foreign Military Financing (FMF) and International Military Education and Training (IMET) programs, which further US interests in Africa by helping to professionalize African militaries, while also assisting our African partners to be more equipped and trained to work toward common security goals."
As the ever-vigilant Nick Turse recently reported, US presence on the continent has only grown since that testimony was given in 2011. On TomDispatch.com, Turse identified the infamous attack on Benghazi on September 11, 2012 as the catalyst for "Operation New Normal" – the continent-wide response to, quite ironically, the political potboiler still simmering around Secretary Clinton. Whether or not Congressional Republicans find anything more than incompetence at the root of Benghazi, the US military certainly finds itself in a "new normal" of increased activity in response to the forces – and the weaponry – unleashed by U.S.-led regime change in Libya. According to Turse, the US is "now conducting operations alongside almost every African military in almost every African country and averaging more than a mission a day."
Those missions are, of course, integrated with and augmented by the State Department's Conflict Bureau which has used a variety of state-building programs and its diplomatic "pass key" in places like Libya, Nigeria, Kenya, South Sudan, Somalia, Democratic Republic of the Congo and six other African nations, all to develop a growing roster of "host country partners."
Establishing "host country partners" is the nexus where the State Department, its Conflict Bureau and the AFRICOM meet – implementing the Whole-of-Government strategy in emerging or current conflict zones to fuse a mounting counter-terrorism campaign with stabilization, modernization and state-building initiatives, particularly in oil and resource-rich areas like the Niger River Delta, Central Africa and around AFRICOM's military foothold on the Horn of Africa.
As Richard J. Wilhelm, a Senior Vice President with defense and intelligence contracting giant Booz Allen Hamilton, pointed out in a video talk about "mission integration," AFRICOM's coordination with the Departments of State and Commerce, USAID is the "most striking example of the Whole-of-Government approach."
And this is exactly the type of "hand-in-glove" relationship Secretary Clinton fostered throughout her tenure at State, leveraging the resources of the department in a growing list of conflict areas where insurgents, terrorists, al-Qaeda affiliates, suspected militants or uncooperative regimes threaten to run afoul of so-called "US interests".
Ultimately, it became a hand-in-pocket relationship when Clinton and Defense Secretary Gates developed the Global Security Contingency Fund (GSCF) to "incentivize joint planning and to pool the resources of the Departments of State and Defense, along with the expertise of other departments, to provide security sector assistance for partner countries so they can address emergent challenges and opportunities important to US national security."
Although he's been criticized as feckless and deemed less hawkish than Secretary Clinton, President Obama's newly-proposed Counterterrorism Partnership Fund (CTPF) is the logical extension of the Clinton-Gates Global Security Contingency Fund and epitomizes the Whole-of-Government shift.
The $5 billion Obama wants will dwarf the $250 million pooled into the GSCF and will, the President said at West Point, "give us flexibility to fulfill different missions including training security forces in Yemen who have gone on the offensive against al Qaeda; supporting a multinational force to keep the peace in Somalia; working with European allies to train a functioning security force and border patrol in Libya; and facilitating French operations in Mali."
That "flexibility" is exactly what Hillary Clinton instituted at State and touted at the SOFIC conference in 2012. It also portends a long-term shift to less invasive forms of regime change like those in Yemen, Libya, Syria and Ukraine, and an increased mission flexibility that will make the Authorization for the Use of Military Force functionally irrelevant.
Normalizing the War on Terror
The ultimate outcome of this shift is, to borrow from Nick Turse, yet another "new normal" – the new normalization of the War on Terror. What the adoption of the Whole-of-Government/mission integration approach has done is to normalize the implementation of the re-branded War on Terror (a.k.a. Overseas Contingency Operations) across key agencies of the government and masked it, for lack of the better term, under the rubric of stabilization, development and democracy building.
It is, in effect, the return of a key Cold War policy of "regime support" for clients and "regime change" for non-client states, particularly in strategically-located areas and resource-rich regions. Regimes – whether or not they actually "reflect American values" – can count on US financial, military and mission-integrated diplomatic support so long as they can claim to be endangered not by communists, but by terrorists.
And because terrorism is a tactic – not a political system or a regime – the shadowy, State Department-assisted Special Ops industry that fights them will, unlike the sullen enthusiasts of the Cold War, never be bereft of an enemy.
JP Sottile is a freelance journalist, radio co-host, documentary filmmaker and former broadcast news producer in Washington, D.C. His weekly show, Inside the Headlines w/ The Newsvandal, co-hosted by James Moore, airs every Friday on KRUU-FM in Fairfield, Iowa and is available online. Visit his website.
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sputniknews.com
This is an English translation of an article that I wrote for the German magazine, Compact. I was encouraged by the high level of intelligent discourse that Compact brings to its readers. If only the US had more people capable of reaching beyond entertainment to comprehending the forces that affect them, there might be some hope for America.
Compact brings hope to Germany. The German people are beginning to understand that their country is not sovereign but a vassal of Washington and that their chancellor serves Washington's hegemony and American financial interests, and not the German people.Hillary Clinton is proving to be the "teflon candidate." In her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, she has escaped damage from major scandals, any one of which would destroy a politician.
Hillary has accepted massive bribes in the form of speaking fees from financial organizations and corporations.
She is under investigation for misuse of classified data, an offense for which a number of whistleblowers are in prison. Hillary has survived the bombing of Libya, her creation of a failed Libyan state that is today a major source of terrorist jihadists, and the Benghazi controversy. She has survived charges that as Secretary of State she arranged favors for foreign interests in exchange for donations to the Clintons' foundation.
And, of course, there is a long list of previous scandals: Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate. Diana Johnstone's book, Queen of Chaos, describes Hillary Clinton as "the top salesperson for the ruling oligarchy."
'I Pray for Sanders' - Oliver Stone Condemns Clinton's 'Corrupt' PolicyHillary Clinton is a bought-and-paid-for representative of the big banks, the military-security complex, and the Israel Lobby. She will represent these interests, not those of the American people or America's European allies.The Clintons' purchase by interest groups is public knowledge. For example, CNN reports that between February 2001 and May 2015 Bill and Hillary Clinton were paid $153 million in speaking fees for 729 speeches, an average price of $210,000.
As it became evident that Hillary Clinton would emerge as the likely Democratic presidential candidate, she was paid more. Deutsche Bank paid her $485,000 for one speech, and Goldman Sachs paid her $675,000 for three speeches. Bank of American Morgan Stanley, UBS, and Fidelity Investments each paid $225,000.
Despite Hillary's blatant willingness to be bribed in public, her opponent, Bernie Sanders, has not succeeded in making an issue of Hillary's shamelessness. Both of the main establishment newspapers, the Washington Post and the New York Times have come to Hillary's defense.
Hillary is a warmonger. She pushed the Obama regime into the destruction of a stable and largely cooperative government in Libya where the "Arab Spring" was a CIA-backed group of jihadists who were used to dislodge China from its oil investments in eastern Libya. She urged her husband to bomb Yugoslavia.
She has pushed for "regime change" in Syria. She oversaw the coup that overthrew the democratically elected president of Honduras. She brought neoconservative Victoria Nuland, who arranged the coup that overthrew the democratically elected president of Ukraine, into the State Department. Hillary has called President Vladimir Putin of Russia the "new Hitler." Hillary as president guarantees war and more war.
In the United States government has been privatized. Office holders use their positions in order to make themselves wealthy, not in order to serve the public interest. Bill and Hillary Clinton epitomize the use of public office in behalf of the office holder's interest.
For the Clintons government means using public office to be rewarded for doing favors for private interests. The Wall Street Journal reported that "at least 60 companies that lobbied the State Department during her [Hillary Clinton's] tenure as Secretary of State donated a total of more than $26 million to the Clinton Foundation."
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Jul 04, 2016 | Reason.com
In an era of endless military conflict, anti-war sentiment abides among Democrats. In 2004, their presidential nomination went to John Kerry, who was strongly critical of George W. Bush's handling of the war in Iraq. In 2008, they chose Barack Obama, largely because he had opposed that war. This year, 12 million people cast ballots for Bernie Sanders, who voted against it.
According to Gallup, 68 percent of Democrats think the Iraq War was a mistake-compared with just 31 percent of Republicans. Two in three reject the use of ground combat troops against Islamic State.
Then there is Hillary Clinton, who will be this year's nominee. Few Democrats have more consistently favored the use of military force. She voted for the Iraq War. As secretary of state, she urged President Obama to escalate the war in Afghanistan.
New York Times correspondent Mark Landler, author of the new book Alter Egos: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Twilight Struggle Over American Power, told me her aides have told him she favored shipping lethal defensive military equipment to the government of Ukraine after the Russian invasion, something Obama rejected.
She pushed for U.S. intervention in Libya. She proposed similar action in Syria. She has recounted her advice to her husband in dealing with Serbia in 1999: "I urged him to bomb."
Most Democrats, particularly Obama, have learned to be wary of entangling the United States in wars of choice. But not Clinton. Despite the disaster in Iraq, the failure in Afghanistan and the chaos in Libya, she remains a hawk at heart.
Landler, who covered Obama and Clinton for The New York Times, sees a clear difference between her approach to foreign policy and that of the president she served. Obama believes "the United States resorts too readily to military force to defend its interests," he writes. Clinton thinks "that American intervention does more good than harm, and that the writ of the United States properly reaches, as George W. Bush once declared, into 'any dark corner of the world.'"
Robert Gates, who was defense secretary under Obama, likes and admires Clinton. But when she pressed Obama to bomb Moammar Gadhafi's forces-which Landler says he probably would not have done otherwise-Gates resisted, arguing that Libya was not a vital U.S. interest and that there was no telling what would happen next. "In meetings, I would ask, 'Can I just finish the two wars we're already in before you go looking for new ones?'" he wrote later.Clinton has gotten endless criticism for her handling of the 2012 attacks on a U.S. facility in Benghazi. She deserves more, but has gotten far less, for recommending an intervention that led to that attack and left Libya in violent turmoil that continues today.
The question is why a child of the 1960s, whose husband strenuously avoided being drafted for the Vietnam War, would grow so fond of military power. Obama needs a compelling reason to use force. Clinton needs a compelling reason not to.
Landler attributes this bias to several factors, including her conservative Midwestern upbringing, her rapport with generals and, in the words of one staffer, "a textbook view of American exceptionalism."
Other reasons come to mind. She saw Democratic senators politically damaged by voting against the 1991 war against Iraq, and she was not about to take the risk of opposing the next one. As a woman, she doubtless has felt the need to demonstrate that she can be as tough-as that term is typically defined in American politics-as any male leader.
Obama made the mistake of intervening in Libya, but in a recent interview with The Atlantic, he admitted, "It didn't work," and "Libya is a mess." Clinton, however, has never expressed second thoughts. During his recent visit to Chicago, I asked Landler about her ability to confront the possibility she was wrong.
"I don't find the same evidence of a learning curve with her," he said. "I would have liked to see a little more introspection from her on that, because I think that's the key case where she led the charge, it didn't go the way they hoped it would and there are some really important lessons to be drawn."
In that instance, she apparently didn't learn from our failed military intervention. If she becomes president, I'm guessing, she'll get another chance.
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Oct 18, 2010 | Dissident Voice
"Could you have one of our U-2s shot down?"
Madeleine Albright is infamous for her reply to the question posed by 60 Minutes' Lesley Stahl about the sanctions against Iraq in May 1996."We have heard that a half million children have died," stated Stahl. "I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?"
"I think this is a very hard choice," replied Albright, "but the price–we think the price is worth it."
Albright, who served as Bill Clinton's Secretary of State from 1997 to 2001, had a cruel disregard for the lives of Iraqis, Serbs, and others. But she apparently had a callous attitude towards the lives of U.S. servicemen and servicewomen too. In his new memoir, General Hugh Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1997 to 2001, writes about a White House breakfast in late 1997. (The account is cited by Justin Elliott in Salon .)
Early on in my days as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, we had small, weekly White House breakfasts in National Security Advisor Sandy Berger's office that included me, Sandy, Bill Cohen (Secretary of Defense), Madeleine Albright (Secretary of State), George Tenet (head of the CIA), Leon Firth (VP chief of staff for security), Bill Richardson (ambassador to the U.N.), and a few other senior administration officials. These were informal sessions where we would gather around Berger's table and talk about concerns over coffee and breakfast served by the White House dining facility. It was a comfortable setting that encouraged brainstorming of potential options on a variety of issues of the day.
During that time we had U-2 aircraft on reconnaissance sorties over Iraq. These planes were designed to fly at extremely high speeds and altitudes (over seventy thousand feet) both for pilot safety and to avoid detection.
At one of my very first breakfasts, while Berger and Cohen were engaged in a sidebar discussion down at one end of the table and Tenet and Richardson were preoccupied in another, one of the Cabinet members present leaned over to me and said, "Hugh, I know I shouldn't even be asking you this, but what we really need in order to go in and take out Saddam is a precipitous event - something that would make us look good in the eyes of the world. Could you have one of our U-2s fly low enough - and slow enough - so as to guarantee that Saddam could shoot it down?"
The hair on the back of my neck bristled, my teeth clenched, and my fists tightened. I was so mad I was about to explode. I looked across the table, thinking about the pilot in the U-2 and responded, "Of course we can …" which prompted a big smile on the official's face.
"You can?" was the excited reply.
"Why, of course we can," I countered. "Just as soon as we get your ass qualified to fly it, I will have it flown just as low and slow as you want to go."
The official reeled back and immediately the smile disappeared. "I knew I should not have asked that…."
"No, you should not have," I strongly agreed, still shocked at the disrespect and sheer audacity of the question. "Remember, there is one of our great Americans flying that U-2, and you are asking me to intentionally send him or her to their death for an opportunity to kick Saddam. The last time I checked, we don't operate like that here in America."
Imagine that! A Cabinet official suggesting a deliberate provocation endangering a military pilot's life in order to justify a war: "…but what we really need in order to go in and take out Saddam is a precipitous event - something that would make us look good in the eyes of the world." Is this mere amoral pragmatism? Machiavellianism? It is in any case evil.
(I'm reminded of how the key neocon text "Rebuilding America's Defenses" authored by Paul Wolfowitz for the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) "thinktank" in Sept. 2000, states that the "process of transformation" to the kind of super-militarized aggressive state the neocons hoped for "will be a long one absent some catastrophic event like a new Pearl Harbor." And as the Deputy Secretary of Defense he warned of another Pearl Harbor in his speech at West Point in June 2001. After 9-11, widely compared in the media to the Pearl Harbor attack of 1941, he immediately set about preparations for war with Iraq.)
On January 31, 2003 President George W. Bush in a meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair seriously proposed provoking Saddam to shoot down a U.S. aircraft. According to notes taken my Blair advisor David Manning (the accuracy of which has never been challenged), Bush suggested "flying U-2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted with UN colors. If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach" of UN resolutions. Maybe then the UN, which had refused to endorse the plan to attack Iraq and was sceptical about the justifications given by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, would endorse war. (Perhaps the military brass opposed the plan, which was never carried out.)
At the Clinton White House breakfast described by Gen. Shelton, Berger, Cohen, Tenet and Richardson were involved in separate conversations. The other cabinet members were Robert E. Rubin (Treasury), Janet Reno (Attorney General), Bruce Babbit (Interior), Dan Glickman (Agriculture), Mickey Kantor (Commerce), Alexis Herman (Labor), Donna E. Shalala (Health and Human Services), Andrew M. Cuomo (Housing and Urban Development), Rodney Slater (Transportation), Richard W. Riley (Education), Jesse Brown (Veteran's Affairs), Federico F. Pena (Energy), and Albright.
Out the 14 members of the Cabinet, there were four women. The fact that Shelton deliberately avoids indicating the gender of his interlocutor may hint that it was one of them. It is hard to believe that Attorney General Reno would suggest sacrificing an airman to the head of the Joint Chiefs at a White House breakfast. Or the Secretary of Labor, or Secretary of Health and Human Services. It's hard to believe anyone on the above list would so–except Albright.
Albright in her memoirs expresses regret for her "it was worth it" statement in the 1996 interview. And she told Newsweek in 2006, "I'm afraid that Iraq is going to turn out to be the greatest disaster in American foreign policy-worse than Vietnam." But she bears partial responsibility for the December 1998 bombing of Iraq ("Operation Desert Fox"), a prelude to the 2003 invasion. She helped produce the disaster.
And she helped produce disaster in the former Yugoslavia. As violence rose in the Serbian province of Kosovo, between the Kosovo Liberation Army and security forces, she (and Cohen) deliberately exaggerated the Kosovar Albanian death toll and demanded the U.S. right to intervene. She arranged the de facto alliance with the KLA, earlier labelled "terrorist" by U.S. officials. In March 1999 at the Rambouillet talks between Serbia and the Kosovar rebels, along with the U.S., its European allies and Russia, the U.S. demanded that the whole of Serbia (and other states within what was left of Yugoslavia) submit to virtual occupation by NATO. Yugoslavia had proudly remained outside the Warsaw Pact and had prided itself on participation in the Non-Aligned Movement. No government in Belgrade could have complied with Albright's demands.
The so-called Rambouillet Agreement was rejected outright by the Serbs as well as their Russian allies. But Albright immediately stated, "We accept the agreement"–as though there was any agreement. The bullying was conducted in such a smug fashion that the French Foreign minister accused the U.S. of becoming a hyperpuissance–not a mere superpower but a "hyperpower."
John Pilger wrote , "Anyone scrutinizing the Rambouillet document is left with little doubt that the excuses given for the subsequent bombing were fabricated. The peace negotiations were stage managed and the Serbs were told: surrender and be occupied, or don't surrender and be destroyed."
This was indeed Albright's plan (and that of Bill Clinton, egged on by Hillary, who has confessed, "I urged him to bomb"), resulting in the deployment of NATO to bomb a European capital for the first time since 1945, killing at least 500 civilians (Human Rights Watch) and maybe ten times that number.
A Republican official later told a think tank that a certain "top official" had told him: " We intentionally set the bar too high for the Serbs to comply. They need some bombing, and that's what they are going to get." Don't we see a pattern here?
Throughout the last decade the neoconservatives have been the leading warmongers. But they have no monopoly on imperialist arrogance, contempt for truth and indifference to human life. Madeleine Albright is proof of that.
Gary Leupp is a Professor of History at Tufts University, and author of numerous works on Japanese history. He can be reached at: [email protected] . Read other articles by Gary .
This article was posted on Monday, October 18th, 2010 at 7:00am and is filed under Imperialism .
John Andrews said on October 19th, 2010 at 12:04am #
It's difficult to know whether this particular breakfast conversation ever took place – not that it would surprise me if it did – but what I found quite interesting was the good general's response, as apparently recorded by himself. His supposed outrage is wholly directed towards the welfare of the pilot – the morality of the request itself (to cynically provoke a sovereign country to commit an act of war) completely escapes his notice. Would that be because it's too common an occurrence to remark on?
Mulga Mumblebrain said on October 20th, 2010 at 4:33am #
I think John Andrews has it. The nabobs of the 'Real Evil Empire' couldn't give a stuff what happens to the losers who are imperial cannon fodder, or the untermenschen victims.. This story is probably some convoluted settling of accounts between two psychopaths.
Hue Longer said on October 20th, 2010 at 9:22am #
Good Point, John
If most of US Americans suffer from selective morality, I'm fairly sure most its leaders also suffer from it if not amorality.
I'm sure some top military do get selectively misty eyed regarding the deaths of US troops…I got the feeling (could be wrong)Westmoreland did when he said, "The Oriental doesn't put the value on human life that we do in the West". Shelton sounds like he's selling himself to troop loving US Americans but maybe he really is a quality guy like Westmoreland seemed to be.
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The People's Summit in Chicago June 17-19 dramatically displayed both the strengths and the vulnerabilities of what has emerged in 2016 as one of the most potentially powerful movements for fundamental change in the United States in many decades. The event, which brought together 3,000 committed movement activists to rally in support of the "political revolution" given impetus by Bernie Sanders' campaign, was an opportunity to ensure that the movement will not dissipate in the wake of Hillary Clinton's clinching the Democratic nomination.The leaders of the movement sought to use the summit to reconcile conflicting activist views on the relationship between movement organizations and electoral politics. The summit may have succeeded in keeping the coalition of those who privilege electoral politics and those who see it as a distraction from their local struggles from splitting up. But despite the political sophistication and pragmatism of the organizers, the gathering failed to deal seriously with the problem of the "permanent war state" -- the central power bloc in the US government that looms menacingly over everything the movement hopes to accomplish.
The permanent war state is the 800-pound gorilla in US society and political life. As the old joke goes, the answer to the question, "Where does an 800-pound gorilla eat?" is, "Anywhere he likes." As long as the organs of "national security" continue to retain the extraordinary power to appropriate budgetary resources and to involve the United States in foreign conflicts without real accountability, US politics will be grotesquely distorted to the profound disadvantage of the movement for fundamental change. The Pentagon, the CIA and the National Security Agency will continue to control most of the $1.1 trillion federal discretionary spending budget, crowding out programs that would benefit people. And beyond wielding that obvious financial power, by maintaining the premise that the United States must continue to make war indefinitely, they will also wield an ideological weapon that helps the economic elite maintain the status quo.
But that fundamental obstacle to change was not even mentioned by any of the speakers who introduced the main themes of the conference on the first night. On the second day, US Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) strongly denounced moves by powerful interests for a new war for regime change in Syria, but she did not address the underlying system of institutional interests and power that keeps the United States at permanent war. There was one breakout session entitled "Healthcare Not Warfare," which highlighted what people already know -- that spending for war and preparation for war robs the people of resources needed to build a more prosperous and equitable society. But it was evidently an afterthought for conference organizers, and did not interest many of the attendees, drawing perhaps 30 people.
The permanent war state is the 800-pound gorilla in US society and political life.
The Sanders campaign never explicitly raised the issue of the permanent war state during the primary election contest, either. He did present a sharp contrast to Hillary Clinton when they debated foreign policy, effectively demolishing her position urging a more militarily aggressive policy in Syria. He called for a policy that "destroys ISIS" but "does not get us involved in perpetual warfare in the quagmire of the Middle East."But he never talked about ending the unprecedented power that national security institutions have seized over the resources and security of the American people.
It is not difficult to see why Sanders did not take on that larger issue. The power of the military-industrial-congressional complex that has morphed into a permanent war state has long been the real "third rail" in US politics, which anyone aspiring to national office touches only at the risk of being branded "anti-American." News media coverage constantly reinforces the idea that US global military presence and aggressiveness are legitimate responses to foreign threats. So, for politicians, explaining why the power of that combination of institutions is a danger not only to people's economic interests, but also to their physical security is seen as extremely difficult and fraught with political risk. Sanders, who had no problem opposing specific wars, undoubtedly feared that an effort to deal with the interests and power behind the wars that most Americans oppose would force him to respond to attacks from the Clinton camp and the corporate media, and thus interfere with his populist message.
The permanent war state also appears to be outside the political comfort zone of National Nurses United, the single most influential organization in planning and funding the People's Summit. As a senior official of National Nurses United explained, the organization is able to talk about corporate control of the health care system because nurses constantly see the consequences in their own work, but most have no such personal experiences enabling them to talk about the war system.
But despite these understandable reasons for taking a pass on the issue, the leadership of the movement inspired by the Sanders campaign is making a big mistake by failing to take on the problem of the permanent war state. The popular organizations represented in Chicago understand this, but they have hesitated to go up against the most powerful combination bureaucratic interests the world has ever known, in part because they have not had any clear idea about how those interests could be defeated. What has been not been tried, however, is a strategy that attacks the war system where it is most vulnerable -- the fact that the war system bureaucrats have systematically pursued their own personal and institutional interests at the expense of the American people.
The publicly available records of US intervention and war, especially since the beginning of the Cold War, reveal an endless succession of policies and programs that were utterly useless and provoked reactions from states and from non-state actors that threatened the safety of the American people. But the policy makers preferred those policies, because they gave them and their organizations more power, more budgetary resources, more people under their command, more new technology, more foreign bases and perquisites, and more lucrative jobs and contracts when they leave the government for private companies.
All the services were looking for a boost in military appropriations when they pushed Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson to intervene militarily in Vietnam. The US Air Force sold its "shock and awe" strategy for regime change in Iraq to then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in order to capture a larger share of the military budget. The CIA got control over a major new mission when it convinced President George W. Bush to launch a drone war in Pakistan.
But the American people suffered the direct and indirect consequences of these wars in each case.
The fundamental conflict between the national interest and the personal and bureaucratic interests of the policy makers of the permanent war state explains why the system has continued to produce uniformly disastrous policies decade after decade.
So the strategy of the movement that the Sanders campaign has mobilized must include a broadly concerted campaign that explains to young people, disaffected working-class people and others how the permanent war state produces winners and losers. The winners are the national security organs themselves, as well as those who make careers and fortunes from the permanent state of war. The losers are those who must suffer the socioeconomic and other consequences of such reckless policies. Such a campaign should aim at nothing less than taking away the flow of money and the legal authority that the permanent war state has seized on the pretext of "threats" that are largely of its own making.
Even though the permanent war state seems to be at the peak of its power, like all essentially hollow institutions, it has a serious political vulnerability. Millions of Americans know that the wars the war-state agencies have wrought over the past half century -- from the Vietnam War to the war in Afghanistan -- were worse than useless. So the legitimacy of the permanent war state is extremely tenuous. A determined campaign to challenge that legitimacy, carried out with sufficient resources over a few years with the participation of a broad coalition, could shake it to its roots. Such a campaign must be included in the work to open up new political spaces and propel the movement for change. Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission .
Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and historian writing on US national security policy. His latest book, Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare , was published in February of 2014. Follow him on Twitter: @GarethPorter .
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thevorlon -> newyorkred , 2016-05-06 17:59:00
Most politicians these days don't care about the people and this ridiculous cycle is repeating every 4 years! Candidates who actually want to make progress get dumped by the corrupt system and the parties that are being controlled by their corporate masters and their money to do as they want to return the more money to them later when they have the office!John Kennedy -> Allan Burns , 2016-05-06 17:35:46At the end, the brainwashing media convince the people to vote for the "bad choice" instead of the worst (which is Trump in this case). You don't need to have any plans or anything, just repeat "Trump bad, Trump bad, Trump bad, Me good" and the sheeple will follow! This strategy has been so successful that almost everywhere around the world are using it to win all types of elections! xD
Maybe Trump becoming president is necessary for the people to realize once and for all that this cycle of mistakes and corruption needs to stop and fundamental changes need to happen! Starts with the USA and the world will follow over time. I personally am done with following these corrupt political systems and their media and do as they tell me to (same goes for the financial system but there's no escaping this one in the near future with corps and banks being in total control of the society).
She should be a felon by now, and only her name protects her from jail.Ilupi Ilupi -> EagleOMC , 2016-05-06 17:05:43Establishment baby.Kevin P Brown -> MeereeneseLiberation, 2016-05-06 09:53:20http://foreignpolicy.com/2011/04/07/was-there-going-to-be-a-benghazi-massacre /Kevin P Brown -> MeereeneseLiberation , 2016-05-06 09:50:28"As Alan Kuperman of the University of Texas and Stephen Chapman of the Chicago Tribune have now shown, the claim that the United States had to act to prevent Libyan tyrant Muammar al-Qaddafi from slaughtering tens of thousands of innocent civilians in Benghazi does not stand up to even casual scrutiny.
Although everyone recognizes that Qaddafi is a brutal ruler, his forces did not conduct deliberate, large-scale massacres in any of the cities he has recaptured, and his violent threats to wreak vengeance on Benghazi were directed at those who continued to resist his rule, not at innocent bystanders. There is no question that Qaddafi is a tyrant with few (if any) redemptive qualities, but the threat of a bloodbath that would "stain the conscience of the world" (as Obama put it) was slight. "
"If humanitarian intervention is to remain a live possibility, there must be much more public scrutiny, debate and discussion of what triggers that intervention and what level of evidence we can reasonably require. Did administration officials have communications intercepts suggesting plans for large-scale killings of civilians? How exactly did they reach their conclusion that these reprisals were likely? It should be no more acceptable to simply accept government claims on this score than it was for previous administrations.
As I've argued previously, the term "humanitarian crisis" is desperately imprecise and the informed public's ability to distinguish between civil strife (which is always bloody) and outright massacres and extermination campaigns is weak. Walt's certainty notwithstanding, the debate about the humanitarian rationale in this case has not been settled. In fact, it's barely begun."
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/oct/26/libya-war-saving-lives-catastrophic-failureKevin P Brown -> MeereeneseLiberation , 2016-05-06 09:40:10So no, we should have not intervened.
"David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy won the authorisation to use "all necessary means" from the UN security council in March on the basis that Gaddafi's forces were about to commit a Srebrenica-style massacre in Benghazi. Naturally we can never know what would have happened without Nato's intervention. But there is in fact no evidence – including from other rebel-held towns Gaddafi re-captured – to suggest he had either the capability or even the intention to carry out such an atrocity against an armed city of 700,000 .
What is now known, however, is that while the death toll in Libya when Nato intervened was perhaps around 1,000-2,000 (judging by UN estimates), eight months later it is probably more than ten times that figure. Estimates of the numbers of dead over the last eight months – as Nato leaders vetoed ceasefires and negotiations – range from 10,000 up to 50,000. The National Transitional Council puts the losses at 30,000 dead and 50,000 wounded.
Of those, uncounted thousands will be civilians, including those killed by Nato bombing and Nato-backed forces on the ground. These figures dwarf the death tolls in this year's other most bloody Arab uprisings, in Syria and Yemen. Nato has not protected civilians in Libya – it has multiplied the number of their deaths, while losing not a single soldier of its own.
For the western powers, of course, the Libyan war has allowed them to regain ground lost in Tunisia and Egypt, put themselves at the heart of the upheaval sweeping the most strategically sensitive region in the world, and secure valuable new commercial advantages in an oil-rich state whose previous leadership was at best unreliable. No wonder the new British defence secretary is telling businessmen to "pack their bags" for Libya, and the US ambassador in Tripoli insists American companies are needed on a "big scale".
But for Libyans, it has meant a loss of ownership of their own future and the effective imposition of a western-picked administration of Gaddafi defectors and US and British intelligence assets. Probably the greatest challenge to that takeover will now come from Islamist military leaders on the ground, such as the Tripoli commander Abdel Hakim Belhaj – kidnapped by MI6 to be tortured in Libya in 2004 – who have already made clear they will not be taking orders from the NTC.
Libya:Kevin P Brown -> MeereeneseLiberation, 2016-05-06 09:34:01An interesting article. Note I trust Cockburn as a journalist.
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/the-arab-spring-reported-and-misreported-foreign-intervention-in-libya-and-the-last-days-of-colonel-a6992726.html"Explanations of what one thought was happening in these countries were often misinterpreted as justification for odious and discredited regimes. In Libya, where the uprising started on 15 February 2011, I wrote about how the opposition was wholly dependent on Nato military support and would have been rapidly defeated by pro-Gaddafi forces without it. It followed from this that the opposition would not have the strength to fill the inevitable political vacuum if Gaddafi was to fall. I noted gloomily that Arab states, such as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies, who were pressing for foreign intervention against Gaddafi, themselves held power by methods no less repressive than the Libyan leader. It was his radicalism – muted though this was in his later years – not his authoritarianism that made the kings and emirs hate him.
This was an unpopular stance to take on Libya during the high tide of the Arab Spring, when foreign governments and media alike were uncritically lauding the opposition. The two sides in what was a genuine civil war were portrayed as white hats and black hats; rebel claims about government atrocities were credulously broadcast, though they frequently turned out to be concocted, while government denials were contemptuously dismissed. Human rights organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch were much more thorough than the media in checking these stories, although their detailed reports appeared long after the news agenda had moved on."
And then in another note, why do people like you condemn the Taliban but give a free pass to the Saudi's who have a lot to do with the state of fundamentalism in Afghanistan, and essentially operate the same as the Taliban? Why are we not intervening in Saudi Arabia to free the people? Nah. Do people die from either side in Afghanistan? Yes. Excusively the Taliban? no. The western press prefers the narrative of Taliban extremism. The western press ignores and fails to report killings by US troops, one incident I know of personally in Kabul. Never reported in the press.Kevin P Brown -> MeereeneseLiberation, 2016-05-06 09:33:31So I suggest you educate yourself on the complexities of Afghanistan before you sound off with smugness. It is obvious you have no idea of what really goes on there.
Have you ever visited Saudi Arabia? Want a litany of the horrors there? No, you don't. You have a narrative which I suspect is ill informed.
the Taliban were winning against the Northern Alliance for various reasons, one was that a lot of people supported them. We turned a blind eye to the destabilising effects of Saudi and Pakistan support of the Taliban as well. We set this up for failure a long time ago. Riding in like the calvary and handing out billions to the Northern Alliance was not very helpful for stability.
"was if ending Taliban rule had made things better"You try to simplify a very complex situation. In fact there was never absolute rule by the Taliban. You seem to forget there was a civil war in the country before 9/11. There was the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. There was Pakistan and the ISI ( Pakistan of course if often supported by the US, then we had Saudi Arabia, again supported by us). Before 9/11 The northern alliance was about to be defeated. On both sides was indiscriminate killings. You also had a complex mix if Pashtun Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras. You had multiple political alliances which I will not bother to list. Kabul was destroyed by the fighting. Atrocities on both sides.
You had Dostum with the Northern Alliance and Massod as well. Massod was reasonable, Dostum was an animal worse than the Taliban.
What people related to me was this: The Taliban were more predictable. Dostum was not predictable. Both were bad, but as Clinton fans love to highlight, the lessor of two evils must be selected. The Taliban also represented the Pashtun who were the largest ethnic bloc in Afghanistan. So in essence the people mostly supported the Taliban. The Northern Alliance had the support of Russia, and you might recall the Afghans did not have fond memories of them.
So, you want to simplify the Taliban atrocities and ignore the rest. Afghans did not have the luxury of this. They had to choose the lesser evil. Had Massood not been entangled with Dostum, perhaps things would have been different.
We came in and supported the Northern Alliance, which did NOT sit well with a lot of people. The majority? I don't have statistics exactly pointing this out. The Pashtun felt pushed out of affairs by the minority remnants of the Northern Alliance. Every ..... and I mean every government office had photos of Massood on the wall. Not Karzai. Karzai was seen as irrelevant by all sides, he was seen as the American imposed choice. ( I will not even discuss the "election" but I was on the ground dealing with Identity cards before the UN arrived, had meetings with the UN team about approaches to getting ID cards out to all voters, and there is a stink over aspects of the participation in the elections).
"And seeing a self-described leftist explaining that life under the Taliban wasn't all that bad if you just grew a beard [!] and fell in line is really sort of pathetic."
Your smug simplistic statement indicates you have no idea of the horrors enacted on both sides. I was told this time and time again as how people decided to survive by picking a side where there were rules and they could survive the rules.
But lets put aside my anecdotal evidence and look at the people of Afghanistan:
"Looking at Afghans' views on reconciling with the Taliban does not appear to bear out the concerns over ethnic divisions shared by Jones and Kilcullen. When asked whether the Afghan central government should negotiate a settlement with the Taliban or continue fighting the Taliban and not negotiate, a recent national survey of Afghanistan found that roughly three- quarters (74%) of Afghans favor negotiating with the Taliban .74 This is in line with previous studies, such as a series of polls sponsored by ABC News which found that the number of Afghans favoring reconciliation had risen from 60% in 2007 to 73% in 2009."
""Do you think the government in Kabul should negotiate a settlement with Afghan Taliban in which they are allowed to hold political offices if they stop fighting, or do you think the government in Kabul should continue to fight the Taliban and not negotiate a settlement?""
77% of men and 70% of women agree with this.
Here is the ultimate point. We intervened and we had no fucking idea what we were doing. The Afghans saw the money flowing to Beltway Bandits rather than flowing to real aid and needs. They saw this! They were not stupid. They saw that the Pashtuns were pushed out of Government, ( hence the Massod images in ALL government offices [My project of reform dealt with EVERY government offices and I visited a fair few personally and finally had to ask abut why each office had Masood an not Karzai)
My opinion? I see indications that the Taliban would have handed over Bin Laden. We refused. Is this disputed? Yes. Were we right to favour the Northern Alliance? No. They were as bad as the Taliban, but more ..... unpredictable.
Given our support of Saudi and knowing their interventions, as well as Pakistan, we were stupid to intervene.
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