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Paul Merrell

George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography « TARPLEY.net - 0 views

tarpley.net/...ush-the-unauthorized-biography

CIA Bush41 exposed banksters

shared by Paul Merrell on 17 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • By Webster Griffin Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin Table of Contents Introduction — American Caligula Chapter 1 – The House of Bush: Born in a Bank Chapter 2 – The Hitler Project Chapter 3 – Race Hygiene: Three Bush Family Alliances Chapter 4 – The Center of Power is in Washington Chapter 5 – Poppy and Mommy Chapter 6 – Bush in World War II Chapter 7 – Skull and Bones: The Racist Nightmare at Yale Chapter 8 – The Permian Basin Gang Chapter 8b – The Bay of Pigs and The Kennedy Assassination Chapter 9 – Bush Challenges Yarborough for The Senate Chapter 10 – Rubbers Goes to Congress Chapter 11 – United Nations Ambassador, Kissinger Clone Chapter 12 – Chairman George in Watergate Chapter 13 – Bush Attempts The Vice Presidency, 1974 Chapter 14 – Bush in Beijing Chapter 15 – CIA Director Chapter 16 – Campaign 1980 Chapter 17 – The Attempted Coup D’Etat of March 30, 1981 Chapter 18 – Iran-Contra Chapter 19 – The Leveraged Buyout Mob Chapter 20 – The Phony War On Drugs Chapter 21 – Omaha Chapter 22 – Bush Takes The Presidency Chapter 23 – The End of History Chapter 24 – The New World Order Chapter 25 – Thyroid Storm
  • Chapter 1 – The House of Bush: Born in a Bank Chapter 2 – The Hitler Project Chapter 3 – Race Hygiene: Three Bush Family Alliances Chapter 4 – The Center of Power is in Washington Chapter 5 – Poppy and Mommy Chapter 6 – Bush in World War II Chapter 7 – Skull and Bones: The Racist Nightmare at Yale Chapter 8 – The Permian Basin Gang Chapter 8b – The Bay of Pigs and The Kennedy Assassination Chapter 9 – Bush Challenges Yarborough for The Senate Chapter 10 – Rubbers Goes to Congress Chapter 11 – United Nations Ambassador, Kissinger Clone Chapter 12 – Chairman George in Watergate Chapter 13 – Bush Attempts The Vice Presidency, 1974 Chapter 14 – Bush in Beijing Chapter 15 – CIA Director Chapter 16 – Campaign 1980 Chapter 17 – The Attempted Coup D’Etat of March 30, 1981 Chapter 18 – Iran-Contra Chapter 19 – The Leveraged Buyout Mob Chapter 20 – The Phony War On Drugs Chapter 21 – Omaha Chapter 22 – Bush Takes The Presidency Chapter 23 – The End of History Chapter 24 – The New World Order Chapter 25 – Thyroid Storm
Paul Merrell

Obama confidant's spine-chilling proposal - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/...sunstein_2

surveillance state psywar Sunstein Obama

shared by Paul Merrell on 06 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Cass Sunstein has long been one of Barack Obama’s closest confidants.  Often mentioned as a likely Obama nominee to the Supreme Court, Sunstein is currently Obama’s head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs where, among other things, he is responsible for “overseeing policies relating to privacy, information quality, and statistical programs.”  In 2008, while at Harvard Law School, Sunstein co-wrote a truly pernicious paper proposing that the U.S. Government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-”independent” advocates to “cognitively infiltrate” online groups and websites — as well as other activist groups — which advocate views that Sunstein deems “false conspiracy theories” about the Government.  This would be designed to increase citizens’ faith in government officials and undermine the credibility of conspiracists.  The paper’s abstract can be read, and the full paper downloaded, here. Sunstein advocates that the Government’s stealth infiltration should be accomplished by sending covert agents into “chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups.”  He also proposes that the Government make secret payments to so-called “independent” credible voices to bolster the Government’s messaging (on the ground that those who don’t believe government sources will be more inclined to listen to those who appear independent while secretly acting on behalf of the Government).   This program would target those advocating false “conspiracy theories,” which they define to mean: “an attempt to explain an event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who have also managed to conceal their role.”  Sunstein’s 2008 paper was flagged by this blogger, and then amplified in an excellent report by Raw Story‘s Daniel Tencer.
  • There’s no evidence that the Obama administration has actually implemented a program exactly of the type advocated by Sunstein, though in light of this paper and the fact that Sunstein’s position would include exactly such policies, that question certainly ought to be asked.  Regardless, Sunstein’s closeness to the President, as well as the highly influential position he occupies, merits an examination of the mentality behind what he wrote.  This isn’t an instance where some government official wrote a bizarre paper in college 30 years ago about matters unrelated to his official powers; this was written 18 months ago, at a time when the ascendancy of Sunstein’s close friend to the Presidency looked likely, in exactly the area he now oversees.  Additionally, the government-controlled messaging that Sunstein desires has been a prominent feature of U.S. Government actions over the last decade, including in some recently revealed practices of the current administration, and the mindset in which it is grounded explains a great deal about our political class.  All of that makes Sunstein’s paper worth examining in greater detail.
  • Initially, note how similar Sunstein’s proposal is to multiple, controversial stealth efforts by the Bush administration to secretly influence and shape our political debates.  The Bush Pentagon employed teams of former Generals to pose as “independent analysts” in the media while secretly coordinating their talking points and messaging about wars and detention policies with the Pentagon.  Bush officials secretly paid supposedly “independent” voices, such as Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher, to advocate pro-Bush policies while failing to disclose their contracts.  In Iraq, the Bush Pentagon hired a company, Lincoln Park, which paid newspapers to plant pro-U.S. articles while pretending it came from Iraqi citizens.  In response to all of this, Democrats typically accused the Bush administration of engaging in government-sponsored propaganda — and when it was done domestically, suggested this was illegal propaganda.  Indeed, there is a very strong case to make that what Sunstein is advocating is itself illegal under long-standing statutes prohibiting government ”propaganda” within the U.S., aimed at American citizens: As explained in a March 21, 2005 report by the Congressional Research Service, “publicity or propaganda” is defined by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) to mean either (1) self-aggrandizement by public officials, (2) purely partisan activity, or (3) “covert propaganda.”  By covert propaganda, GAO means information which originates from the government but is unattributed and made to appear as though it came from a third party.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Covert government propaganda is exactly what Sunstein craves.  His mentality is indistinguishable from the Bush mindset that led to these abuses, and he hardly tries to claim otherwise.  Indeed, he favorably cites both the covert Lincoln Park program as well as Paul Bremer’s closing of Iraqi newspapers which published stories the U.S. Government disliked, and justifies them as arguably necessary to combat “false conspiracy theories” in Iraq — the same goal Sunstein has for the U.S.Sunstein’s response to these criticisms is easy to find in what he writes, and is as telling as the proposal itself.  He acknowledges that some “conspiracy theories” previously dismissed as insane and fringe have turned out to be entirely true (his examples:  the CIA really did secretly administer LSD in “mind control” experiments; the DOD really did plot the commission of terrorist acts inside the U.S. with the intent to blame Castro; the Nixon White House really did bug the DNC headquarters).  Given that history, how could it possibly be justified for the U.S. Government to institute covert programs designed to undermine anti-government “conspiracy theories,” discredit government critics, and increase faith and trust in government pronouncements?  Because, says Sunstein, such powers are warranted only when wielded by truly well-intentioned government officials who want to spread The Truth and Do Good — i.e., when used by people like Cass Sunstein and Barack Obama
  • Throughout, we assume a well-motivated government that aims to eliminate conspiracy theories, or draw their poison, if and only if social welfare is improved by doing so. But it’s precisely because the Government is so often not “well-motivated” that such powers are so dangerous.  Advocating them on the ground that “we will use them well” is every authoritarian’s claim.  More than anything else, this is the toxic mentality that consumes our political culture:  when our side does X, X is Good, because we’re Good and are working for Good outcomes.  That was what led hordes of Bush followers to endorse the same large-government surveillance programs they long claimed to oppose, and what leads so many Obama supporters now to justify actions that they spent the last eight years opposing.
  • Consider the recent revelation that the Obama administration has been making very large, undisclosed payments to MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber to provide consultation on the President’s health care plan.  With this lucrative arrangement in place, Gruber spent the entire year offering public justifications for Obama’s health care plan, typically without disclosing these payments, and far worse, was repeatedly held out by the White House — falsely — as an “independent” or “objective” authority.  Obama allies in the media constantly cited Gruber’s analysis to support their defenses of the President’s plan, and the White House, in turn, then cited those media reports as proof that their plan would succeed.  This created an infinite “feedback loop” in favor of Obama’s health care plan which — unbeknownst to the public — was all being generated by someone who was receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in secret from the administration (read this to see exactly how it worked).In other words, this arrangement was quite similar to the Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher scandals which Democrats, in virtual lockstep, condemned.  Paul Krugman, for instance, in 2005 angrily lambasted right-wing pundits and policy analysts who received secret, undisclosed payments, and said they lack “intellectual integrity”; he specifically cited the Armstrong Williams case.  Yet the very same Paul Krugman last week attacked Marcy Wheeler for helping to uncover the Gruber payments by accusing her of being “just like the right-wingers with their endless supply of fake scandals.”  What is one key difference?  Unlike Williams and Gallagher, Jonathan Gruber is a Good, Well-Intentioned Person with Good Views — he favors health care — and so massive, undisclosed payments from the same administration he’s defending are dismissed as a “fake scandal.”
  • Sunstein himself — as part of his 2008 paper — explicitly advocates that the Government should pay what he calls “credible independent experts” to advocate on the Government’s behalf, a policy he says would be more effective because people don’t trust the Government itself and would only listen to people they believe are “independent.”  In so arguing, Sunstein cites the Armstrong Williams scandal not as something that is wrong in itself, but as a potential risk of this tactic (i.e., that it might leak out), and thus suggests that “government can supply these independent experts with information and perhaps prod them into action from behind the scenes,” but warns that “too close a connection will be self-defeating if it is exposed.”  In other words, Sunstein wants the Government to replicate the Armstrong Williams arrangement as a means of more credibly disseminating propaganda — i.e., pretending that someone is an “independent” expert when they’re actually being “prodded” and even paid “behind the scenes” by the Government — but he wants to be more careful about how the arrangement is described (don’t make the control explicit) so that embarrassment can be avoided if it ends up being exposed.  
  • In this 2008 paper, then, Sunstein advocated, in essence, exactly what the Obama administration has been doing all year with Gruber:  covertly paying people who can be falsely held up as “independent” analysts in order to more credibly promote the Government line.  Most Democrats agreed this was a deceitful and dangerous act when Bush did it, but with Obama and some of his supporters, undisclosed arrangements of this sort seem to be different.  Why?  Because, as Sunstein puts it:  we have “a well-motivated government” doing this so that “social welfare is improved.”  Thus, just like state secrets, indefinite detention, military commissions and covert, unauthorized wars, what was once deemed so pernicious during the Bush years — coordinated government/media propaganda — is instantaneously transformed into something Good.* * * * *What is most odious and revealing about Sunstein’s worldview is his condescending, self-loving belief that “false conspiracy theories” are largely the province of fringe, ignorant Internet masses and the Muslim world.  That, he claims, is where these conspiracy theories thrive most vibrantly, and he focuses on various 9/11 theories — both domestically and in Muslim countries — as his prime example.
  • It’s certainly true that one can easily find irrational conspiracy theories in those venues, but some of the most destructive “false conspiracy theories” have emanated from the very entity Sunstein wants to endow with covert propaganda power:  namely, the U.S. Government itself, along with its elite media defenders. Moreover, “crazy conspiracy theorist” has long been the favorite epithet of those same parties to discredit people trying to expose elite wrongdoing and corruption. Who is it who relentlessly spread “false conspiracy theories” of Saddam-engineered anthrax attacks and Iraq-created mushroom clouds and a Ba’athist/Al-Qaeda alliance — the most destructive conspiracy theories of the last generation?  And who is it who demonized as “conspiracy-mongers” people who warned that the U.S. Government was illegally spying on its citizens, systematically torturing people, attempting to establish permanent bases in the Middle East, or engineering massive bailout plans to transfer extreme wealth to the industries which own the Government?  The most chronic and dangerous purveyors of “conspiracy theory” games are the very people Sunstein thinks should be empowered to control our political debates through deceit and government resources:  namely, the Government itself and the Enlightened Elite like him.
  • It is this history of government deceit and wrongdoing that renders Sunstein’s desire to use covert propaganda to “undermine” anti-government speech so repugnant.  The reason conspiracy theories resonate so much is precisely that people have learned — rationally — to distrust government actions and statements.  Sunstein’s proposed covert propaganda scheme is a perfect illustration of why that is.  In other words, people don’t trust the Government and “conspiracy theories” are so pervasive precisely because government is typically filled with people like Cass Sunstein, who think that systematic deceit and government-sponsored manipulation are justified by their own Goodness and Superior Wisdom.
  • The point is that there are severe dangers to the Government covertly using its resources to “infiltrate” discussions and to shape political debates using undisclosed and manipulative means.  It’s called “covert propaganda” and it should be opposed regardless of who is in control of it or what its policy aims are. UPDATE II:  Ironically, this is the same administration that recently announced a new regulation dictating that “bloggers who review products must disclose any connection with advertisers, including, in most cases, the receipt of free products and whether or not they were paid in any way by advertisers, as occurs frequently.”  Without such disclosure, the administration reasoned, the public may not be aware of important hidden incentives (h/t pasquin).  Yet the same administration pays an MIT analyst hundreds of thousands of dollars to advocate their most controversial proposed program while they hold him out as “objective,” and selects as their Chief Regulator someone who wants government agents to covertly mold political discussions “anonymously or even with false identities.”
  • UPDATE III:  Just to get a sense for what an extremist Cass Sunstein is (which itself is ironic, given that his paper calls for ”cognitive infiltration of extremist groups,” as the Abstract puts it), marvel at this paragraph:
  • So Sunstein isn’t calling right now for proposals (1) and (2) — having Government ”ban conspiracy theorizing” or “impose some kind of tax on those who” do it — but he says “each will have a place under imaginable conditions.”  I’d love to know the “conditions” under which the government-enforced banning of conspiracy theories or the imposition of taxes on those who advocate them will “have a place.”  That would require, at a bare minumum, a repeal of the First Amendment.  Anyone who believes this should, for that reason alone, be barred from any meaningful government position.
  • Paul Merrell on 06 Apr 14
     
    This is a January 2010 article by Glenn Greenwald. The Sunstein paper referred to was published in 2008 and is at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1084585  Sunstein left the Obama Administration in 2012 and now teaches law at Harvard. He is the husband of U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice,a notorious neocon.  His paper is scholarly only in format. His major premises have no citations and in at least two cases are straw man logical fallacies that misportray the position of the groups he criticizes. This is "academic" work that a first-year-law student heading for a 1.0 grade point average could make mincemeat of. This paper alone would seem to disqualify him from a Supreme Court nomination and from teaching law. Has he never heard of the First Amendment and why didn't he bother to check whether it is legal to inflict propaganda on the American public? But strange things happen when you're a buddy of an American president. Most noteworthy, however, is that the paper unquestionably puts an advocate of waging psychological warfare against the foreign populations *and* the American public as the head of the White House White House OMB Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs from 2008 through 2012 and on Obama's short list for the Supreme Court. Given the long history of U.S. destabilization of foreign nations via propaganda, of foreign wars waged under false pretenses, of the ongoing barrage of false information disseminated by our federal government, can there be any reasonable doubt that the American public is not being manipulated by false propaganda disseminated by their own government?  An inquiring mind wants to know ...   
Gary Edwards

Byron York: Justice Department demolishes case against Trump order | Washington Examiner - 1 views

www.washingtonexaminer.com/...2613988

Byron-York Trump-Immigration-Order

shared by Gary Edwards on 06 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 06 Feb 17
     
    "James Robart, the U.S. district judge in Washington State, offered little explanation for his decision to stop President Trump's executive order temporarily suspending non-American entry from seven terror-plagued countries. Robart simply declared his belief that Washington State, which in its lawsuit against Trump argued that the order is both illegal and unconstitutional, would likely win the case when it is tried. Now the government has answered Robart, and unlike the judge, Justice Department lawyers have produced a point-by-point demolition of Washington State's claims. Indeed, for all except the most partisan, it is likely impossible to read the Washington State lawsuit, plus Robart's brief comments and writing on the matter, plus the Justice Department's response, and not come away with the conclusion that the Trump order is on sound legal and constitutional ground. Beginning with the big picture, the Justice Department argued that Robart's restraining order violates the separation of powers, encroaches on the president's constitutional and legal authority in the areas of foreign affairs, national security, and immigration, and "second-guesses the president's national security judgment" about risks faced by the United States. Indeed, in court last week, Robart suggested that he, Robart, knows as much, or perhaps more, than the president about the current state of the terrorist threat in Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and other violence-plagued countries. In an exchange with Justice Department lawyer Michelle Bennett, Robart asked, "How many arrests have there been of foreign nationals for those seven countries since 9/11?" "Your Honor, I don't have that information," said Bennett. "Let me tell you," said Robart. "The answer to that is none, as best I can tell. So, I mean, you're here arguing on behalf of someone [President Trump] that says: We have to protect the United States from these individuals coming from these countries, and there's no support for that."
Paul Merrell

Iraq joins Iran in opposing U.S.-led military strike in Syria - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...3-8685-5021e0c41964_story.html

war & peace Syria Iraq Iran WMD

shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Iran won Iraqi support for its efforts to oppose a U.S.-led military strike on Syria during a visit to Baghdad on Sunday by the new Iranian foreign minister, highlighting how close the two countries have grown since U.S. forces withdrew in 2011. Speaking during his first visit abroad since he was appointed last month, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javed Zarif warned that U.S. intervention in Syria risks igniting a regionwide war.
  • “Those who are short-sighted and are beating the drums of war are starting a fire that will burn everyone,” Zarif said during a news conference.Standing alongside him, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said all of Syria’s neighbors, including Iraq, would be harmed by American involvement in Syria’s two-year-old conflict. “What I can say conclusively is that Iraq will not be a base for any attack, nor will it facilitate any such attack on Syria,” Zebari told reporters after holding talks with Zarif.
  • Paul Merrell on 10 Sep 13
     
    This would be funny if the consequences of war were not so horrible. Viewing the situation through a very big telescope from Mars, we begin with the Neocons and Zionist Israelis hijacking the U.S. military to invade and conquer Iraq, and thereby break the OPEC oil monopoly by pumping more oil from Iraq and selling  oil cheap on the market. But Big Oil, recognizing the threat to its profits if oil supply is increased and the prices depressed, hires James Baker, chief of White House staff under Reagan and Bush I. Baker has a short meeting with Bush Jr. and the Neocon/Zionist Israeli dream of breaking OPEC and restoring cheap oil is abruptly terminated. The Iraq War is no longer about changes in the oil supply and prices. But  the Neocons in the Bush II administration are stuck with the war they started. They waffle and delay, with the theater of Saddam Hussein's capature and execution, until Barack Obama comes into office, push for a "surge" to save the war effort, then when that fails reluctantly collaborate in U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. Their efforts to maintain a covert military presence hiding under the cover of the world's largest U.S. Embassy comes to a screeching halt when the new Iraqi government they had installed refuses to immunize U.S. soldiers and citizens from criminal prosecution. The U.S. exits Iraq. Now the Iraq government that the Neocon/Israeli Zionists installed aligns itself with Iraq and Syria against the U.S. military strikes on Syria that Israel wants. Iraq and Syria had been the two major remaining obstacles to Israeli hegemony and empire in the Mideast.   Then the Neocons/Israeli Zionists changed Iraq from a secular state to a Shia Muslim state with a for-all-pracitical-purposes-independent Kurdish state in the north. Now suddenly, those two major obstacles become three, as Iraq moves farther from the U.S. and closer toward Shia Iran and secular Syria, because of a sequence of events the Neocon/Israeli Zionists had set in motion ag
Gary Edwards

George W. Bush: Biggest Spender Since LBJ | Cato @ Liberty - 0 views

www.cato-at-liberty.org/...bush-biggest-spender-since-lbj

financial-crisis financial-oligarchs statistism banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 29 Dec 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 29 Dec 09
     
    Good Charts comparing the spending of USA Presidents starting with Eisenhower. Spending in Bush's first year (FY2001) was $1.863 trillion, thus he presided over an 83-percent increase in overall federal spending, which includes defense, domestic, entitlements, and interest. Even without TARP and Fannie/Freddie, spending was up a huge 70 percent under Bush over eight years. By contrast, total spending under eight years of President Clinton increased just 32 percent. These are the overall increases in nominal dollars. Now let's look at the real annual averages. Figure 1 shows the average increase in total spending under recent presidents. Bush II was the biggest spender since LBJ. His spending increases were far larger than the three prior presidents.
Paul Merrell

Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts - New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...16program.html

surveillance state NSA Bush-II spying-history must-read

shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials. Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible "dirty numbers" linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications. The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval was a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad. As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches.
  • Paul Merrell on 10 Feb 14
     
    This is the 2005 article that alerted the nation to the fact that the Bush II Administration had, shortly after 9-11-2001, authorized the NSA to conduct warrantless electronic eavesdropping on Americans. It would later emerge that veteran NSA intelligence analyst Russell Tice, the first NSA whistleblower, was a key source for the article. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russ_Tice Post-Snowden disclosures, Tice went public with even more detail, disclosing that the NSA has also wiretapped top officials in all three branches of government, as well as non-government targets in the U.S. http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/06/nsa-whistleblower-nsa-spying-on-and-blackmailing-high-level-government-officials-and-military-officers.html (for the quoted portions, begin listening at about 44 minutes into the podcast). The third from last paragraph in the article discusses a 2002 Justice Department brief in which DoJ argued that "the Constitution vests in the President inherent authority to conduct warrantless intelligence surveillance (electronic or otherwise) of foreign powers or their agents, and Congress cannot by statute extinguish that constitutional authority." That brief is archived at the FAS web site. https://www.fas.org/irp/agency/doj/fisa/092502sup.html (it's an amazingly arrogant document). 
Paul Merrell

Secret pre-Iraq War talks between Blair and Bush to be published - RT News - 0 views

rt.com/...iraq-communication-release-977

war & peace Blair Bush-II Chilcot-Inquiry government secrecy war crimes wars of aggression

shared by Paul Merrell on 31 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Tony Blair and George Bush exchanged voluminous correspondence prior to the start of military operations in Iraq. Now, the UK is moving to declassify details of the talks for an inquiry into Britain’s involvement in the conflict, British media reported. The release, set for the upcoming year, is expected to include more than 100 documents, described as a collection of notes, records of 200 minutes of ministerial level talks, telephone conversations and private meetings between the British prime minister and American president, The Independent reported. This will give the green light for the Chilcot Iraq Inquiry to publish an account of the conflict, where much attention will be given to decisions made by then Prime Minister Tony Blair. Indeed, the files could play a major part in determining Blair’s historical legacy, which critics say has been stained by the Iraq War. Blair has been criticized for failing to challenge then-US President George W. Bush on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, specifically chemical and biological weapons, which a Joint Intelligence Committee report said in September 2002 “could be ready for firing in 45 minutes.”
  • A senior government official predicted the results of the inquiry will not do Blair any favors: "In the new year it seems the Chilcot inquiry is going to be published. Everyone will be assuming: bad hair day for Tony Blair and Jack Straw." Straw served as Blair’s secretary of state.
  • There has been some speculation, however, as to how effective the Iraq Inquiry can hope to be in determining the British government’s - not to mention Tony Blair’s - position on jumping on board George W. Bush’s Iraq war bandwagon. UK officials said their “intention is to be as open as possible,” yet the final decision on what will be released will be made by cabinet secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood, the same individual who fought against publication of the Blair-Bush correspondence in the first place.
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  • In September 2004, Kofi Annan, then UN Secretary General, expressed his views on the invasion, saying, "I have indicated it was not in conformity with the UN Charter. From our point of view, from the Charter point of view, it was illegal." The Chilcot Inquiry, named after its chairman, Sir John Chilcot, who pushed for the release of the classified documents, is expected to be released by the end of 2014.
  • Paul Merrell on 31 Dec 13
     
    Declassification of these documents has been a years-long battle. It would not surprise me to see them released so heavily redacted that little sense can be made of them. 
Paul Merrell

The White House Has Been Covering Up the Presidency's Role in Torture for Years - The I... - 0 views

firstlook.org/...esidencys-role-torture-4-years

war & peace torture CIA Obama-coverup Bush-II Senate-Intelligence-Committee ACLU FOIA war crimes

shared by Paul Merrell on 15 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • On May 10, 2013, John Brennan presented CIA’s response to the Senate Intelligence Committee Torture Report to the President. Official White House Photo by Pete Souza. The fight between the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee over the Committee’s Torture Report – which Dan Froomkin covered here – has now zeroed in on the White House. Did the White House order the CIA to withdraw 920 documents from a server made available to Committee staffers, as Senator Dianne Feinstein says the agency claimed in 2010? Were those documents – perhaps thousands of them – pulled in deference to a White House claim of executive privilege, as Senator Mark Udall and then CIA General Counsel Stephen Preston suggested last fall? And is the White House continuing to withhold 9,000 pages of documents without invoking privilege, as McClatchy reported yesterday? We can be sure about one thing: The Obama White House has covered up the Bush presidency’s role in the torture program for years. Specifically, from 2009 to 2012, the administration went to extraordinary lengths to keep a single short phrase, describing President Bush’s authorization of the torture program, secret.
  • As Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy, noted  in 2009 – shortly after Hayden revealed that torture started as a covert operation – this means there should be a paper trail implicating President Bush in the torture program. “[T]here should be a Presidential ‘finding’ authorizing the program,” he said, “and [] such a finding should have been provided to Congressional overseers.” The National Security Act dictates that every covert operation must be supported by a written declaration finding that the action is necessary and important to the national security. The Congressional Intelligence committees – or at least the Chair and Ranking Member – should receive notice of the finding. But there is evidence that those Congressional overseers were never told that the finding the president signed on September 17, 2001 authorized torture. For example, a letter from then ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, Jane Harman, to the CIA’s General Counsel following her first briefing on torture asked: “Have enhanced techniques been authorized and approved by the President?” The CIA’s response at the time was simply that “policy as well as legal matters have been addressed within the Executive Branch.”
  • Nevertheless, the finding does exist. The CIA even disclosed its existence in response to the ACLU FOIA, describing it as “a 14-page memorandum dated 17 September 2001 from President Bush to the Director of the CIA pertaining to the CIA’s authorization to detain terrorists.” In an order in the ACLU suit, Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein confirmed that the declaration was “intertwined with” the administration’s effort to keep the language in the Tenet document hidden. When the administration succeeded in keeping that short phrase secret, all effort to release the declaration also ended.
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  • Enduring confusion about this particular finding surely exists because of its flexible nature. As Bob Woodward described in Bush at War, CIA Director Tenet asked President Bush to sign “a broad intelligence order permitting the CIA to conduct covert operations without having to come back for formal approval for each specific operation.” As Jane Mayer described in The Dark Side, such an order not only gave the CIA flexibility, it also protected the President. “To give the President deniability, and to keep him from getting his hands dirty, the finding called for the President to delegate blanket authority to Tenet to decide on a case-by-case basis whom to kill, whom to kidnap, whom to detain and interrogate, and how.” When George Tenet signed written guidelines for the CIA’s torture program in 2003, however, he appeared to have deliberately deprived the President of that deniability by including the source of CIA’s authorization – presumably naming the President – in a document interrogators would see. You can’t blame the CIA Director, after all; Tenet signed the Guidelines just as CIA’s Inspector General and DOJ started to review the legality of the torture tactics used against detainees like Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was threatened with a drill and a gun in violation of DOJ’s ban on mock executions.
  • The White House’s fight to keep the short phrase describing Bush’s authorization of the torture program hidden speaks to its apparent ambivalence over the torture program. Even after President Obama released the DOJ memos authorizing torture – along with a damning CIA Inspector General Report and a wide range of documents revealing bureaucratic discussions within the CIA about torture – the White House still fought the release of the phrase that would have made it clear that the CIA conducted this torture at the order of the president. And it did so with a classified declaration from Jones that would have remained secret had Judge Hellerstein not insisted it be made public. As Aftergood noted, such White House intervention in a FOIA suit is rare. “The number of times that a national security advisor has filed a declaration in a FOIA lawsuit is vanishingly small,” he said. “It almost never happens.” But as ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer noted of the finding, “It was the original authority for the CIA’s secret prisons and for the agency’s rendition and torture program, and apparently it was the authority for the targeted killing program as well.  It was the urtext.  It’s remarkable that after all this time it’s still secret.”
  • President Obama’s willingness to go to such lengths to hide this short phrase may explain the White House’s curious treatment of potentially privileged documents with the Senate now – describing President Bush’s authorization of the torture program and its seemingly contradictory stance supporting publishing the Torture Report while thwarting its completion by withholding privileged documents. After all, the documents in question, like the reference to the presidential finding, may deprive the President of plausible deniability. Furthermore, those documents may undermine one of the conclusions of the Torture Report. According to Senator Ron Wyden, the Senate Torture Report found that “the CIA repeatedly provided inaccurate information about its interrogation program to the White House.” Perhaps the documents reportedly withheld by the White House undermine this conclusion, and instead show that the CIA operated with the full consent and knowledge of at least some people within the White House. Finally, the White House’s sensitivity about documents involved in the torture program may stem from the structure of the finding. As John Rizzo made clear, the finding authorizes not just torturing, but killing, senior al Qaeda figures. Bob Woodward even reported that that CIA would carry out that killing using Predator drones, a program CIA still conducts. And in fact, when the Second Circuit ultimately ruled to let the White House to keep the authorization phrase secret, it did so because the phrase also relates to “a highly classified, active intelligence activity” and “pertains to intelligence activities unrelated to the discontinued [torture] program.” Given what we know about the September 17, 2001 finding, that may well refer to President Obama’s still active drone program.
  • In any case, the White House’s seemingly contradictory statements about the Torture Report might best be understood by its past treatment of CIA documents. By releasing the DOJ memos and other materials, the White House provided what seemed to be unprecedented transparency about what the CIA had done. But all the while it was secretly hiding language describing what the White House has done.
  • Paul Merrell on 15 Mar 14
     
    See also U.N. Convention Against Torture, which the U.S. is a party to. http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/39/a39r046.htm
Paul Merrell

The Agency That Could Be Big Brother - New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...25bamford.html

surveillance state NSA digital-privacy Bamford 2005

shared by Paul Merrell on 15 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • December 25, 2005
  • DEEP in a remote, fog-layered hollow near Sugar Grove, W.Va., hidden by fortress-like mountains, sits the country's largest eavesdropping bug. Located in a "radio quiet" zone, the station's large parabolic dishes secretly and silently sweep in millions of private telephone calls and e-mail messages an hour. Run by the ultrasecret National Security Agency, the listening post intercepts all international communications entering the eastern United States. Another N.S.A. listening post, in Yakima,Wash., eavesdrops on the western half of the country. A hundred miles or so north of Sugar Grove, in Washington, the N.S.A. has suddenly taken center stage in a political firestorm. The controversy over whether the president broke the law when he secretly ordered the N.S.A. to bypass a special court and conduct warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens has even provoked some Democrats to call for his impeachment. According to John E. McLaughlin, who as the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency in the fall of 2001 was among the first briefed on the program, this eavesdropping was the most secret operation in the entire intelligence network, complete with its own code word - which itself is secret.
  • But the agency is still struggling to adjust to the war on terror, in which its job is not to monitor states, but individuals or small cells hidden all over the world. To accomplish this, the N.S.A. has developed ever more sophisticated technology that mines vast amounts of data. But this technology may be of limited use abroad. And at home, it increases pressure on the agency to bypass civil liberties and skirt formal legal channels of criminal investigation. Originally created to spy on foreign adversaries, the N.S.A. was never supposed to be turned inward. Thirty years ago, Senator Frank Church, the Idaho Democrat who was then chairman of the select committee on intelligence, investigated the agency and came away stunned. "That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people," he said in 1975, "and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide." He added that if a dictator ever took over, the N.S.A. "could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back."
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  • Before the Sept. 11 attacks, the N.S.A. normally eavesdropped on a small number of American citizens or resident aliens, often a dozen or less, while the F.B.I., whose low-tech wiretapping was far less intrusive, requested most of the warrants from FISA. Despite the low odds of having a request turned down, President Bush established a secret program in which the N.S.A. would bypass the FISA court and begin eavesdropping without warrant on Americans. This decision seems to have been based on a new concept of monitoring by the agency, a way, according to the administration, to effectively handle all the data and new information. At the time, the buzzword in national security circles was data mining: digging deep into piles of information to come up with some pattern or clue to what might happen next. Rather than monitoring a dozen or so people for months at a time, as had been the practice, the decision was made to begin secretly eavesdropping on hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people for just a few days or a week at a time in order to determine who posed potential threats. Those deemed innocent would quickly be eliminated from the watch list, while those thought suspicious would be submitted to the FISA court for a warrant. In essence, N.S.A. seemed to be on a classic fishing expedition, precisely the type of abuse the FISA court was put in place to stop.At a news conference, President Bush himself seemed to acknowledge this new tactic. "FISA is for long-term monitoring," he said. "There's a difference between detecting so we can prevent, and monitoring.
  • In 2002, it was revealed that the Pentagon had launched Total Information Awareness, a data mining program led by John Poindexter, a retired rear admiral who had served as national security adviser under Ronald Reagan and helped devise the plan to sell arms to Iran and illegally divert the proceeds to rebels in Nicaragua. Total Information Awareness, known as T.I.A., was intended to search through vast data bases, promising to "increase the information coverage by an order-of-magnitude." According to a 2002 article in The New York Times, the program "would permit intelligence analysts and law enforcement officials to mount a vast dragnet through electronic transaction data ranging from credit card information to veterinary records, in the United States and internationally, to hunt for terrorists." After press reports, the Pentagon shut it down, and Mr. Poindexter eventually left the government. But according to a 2004 General Accounting Office report, the Bush administration and the Pentagon continued to rely heavily on data-mining techniques. "Our survey of 128 federal departments and agencies on their use of data mining," the report said, "shows that 52 agencies are using or are planning to use data mining. These departments and agencies reported 199 data-mining efforts, of which 68 are planned and 131 are operational." Of these uses, the report continued, "the Department of Defense reported the largest number of efforts."
  • "I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge," Senator Church said. "I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return." James Bamford is the author of "Puzzle Palace" and"Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency."
  • Paul Merrell on 15 Jun 14
     
    James Bamford's 2005 article in The New York Times that raised public awareness of what the Bush-II administration had done by bypass the FISA Court. 
Paul Merrell

Annals of National Security: The Redirection : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...070305fa_fact_hersh

war & peace Syria Syrian war origins U.S. Hersh

shared by Paul Merrell on 08 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • In the past few months, as the situation in Iraq has deteriorated, the Bush Administration, in both its public diplomacy and its covert operations, has significantly shifted its Middle East strategy. The “redirection,” as some inside the White House have called the new strategy, has brought the United States closer to an open confrontation with Iran and, in parts of the region, propelled it into a widening sectarian conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims. To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.
  • Jumblatt said, “We told Cheney that the basic link between Iran and Lebanon is Syria—and to weaken Iran you need to open the door to effective Syrian opposition.” There is evidence that the Administration’s redirection strategy has already benefitted the Brotherhood. The Syrian National Salvation Front is a coalition of opposition groups whose principal members are a faction led by Abdul Halim Khaddam, a former Syrian Vice-President who defected in 2005, and the Brotherhood. A former high-ranking C.I.A. officer told me, “The Americans have provided both political and financial support. The Saudis are taking the lead with financial support, but there is American involvement.” He said that Khaddam, who now lives in Paris, was getting money from Saudi Arabia, with the knowledge of the White House. (In 2005, a delegation of the Front’s members met with officials from the National Security Council, according to press reports.) A former White House official told me that the Saudis had provided members of the Front with travel documents.
  • Jumblatt then told me that he had met with Vice-President Cheney in Washington last fall to discuss, among other issues, the possibility of undermining Assad. He and his colleagues advised Cheney that, if the United States does try to move against Syria, members of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood would be “the ones to talk to,” Jumblatt said.
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  • Partition would leave Israel surrounded by “small tranquil states,” he said. “I can assure you that the Saudi kingdom will also be divided, and the issue will reach to North African states. There will be small ethnic and confessional states,” he said. “In other words, Israel will be the most important and the strongest state in a region that has been partitioned into ethnic and confessional states that are in agreement with each other. This is the new Middle East.”
  • Nasrallah said he believed that America also wanted to bring about the partition of Lebanon and of Syria. In Syria, he said, the result would be to push the country “into chaos and internal battles like in Iraq.” In Lebanon, “There will be a Sunni state, an Alawi state, a Christian state, and a Druze state.” But, he said, “I do not know if there will be a Shiite state.”
  • Fourth, the Saudi government, with Washington’s approval, would provide funds and logistical aid to weaken the government of President Bashir Assad, of Syria. The Israelis believe that putting such pressure on the Assad government will make it more conciliatory and open to negotiations.
  • Flynt Leverett, a former Bush Administration National Security Council official, told me that “there is nothing coincidental or ironic” about the new strategy with regard to Iraq. “The Administration is trying to make a case that Iran is more dangerous and more provocative than the Sunni insurgents to American interests in Iraq, when—if you look at the actual casualty numbers—the punishment inflicted on America by the Sunnis is greater by an order of magnitude,” Leverett said. “This is all part of the campaign of provocative steps to increase the pressure on Iran. The idea is that at some point the Iranians will respond and then the Administration will have an open door to strike at them.”
  • “It seems there has been a debate inside the government over what’s the biggest danger—Iran or Sunni radicals,” Vali Nasr, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who has written widely on Shiites, Iran, and Iraq, told me. “The Saudis and some in the Administration have been arguing that the biggest threat is Iran and the Sunni radicals are the lesser enemies. This is a victory for the Saudi line.”
  • Paul Merrell on 08 Jan 14
     
    Propaganda issued by the U.S. government has it that the war in Syria began with peaceful protesters seeking reform of the Syrian government. This Seymour Hersh article from 2007 gives us a better glimpse of the truth, that the Neocon-led Bush II Administration worked with Saudi Arabia to undermine the Syrian government using radical Sunnis as their vehicle. That is in line with the Israeli/Zionist long-term plan to Balkanize other nations in the Mideast while expanding Israeli territory and influence. 
Paul Merrell

IPS - Lavrov Reveals Amended Draft Circulated at "Last Moment" | Inter Press Service - 0 views

www.ipsnews.net/...raft-circulated-at-last-moment

war & peace arms-control-law Iran Iranian nukes myth Kerry Obama Israel France Saudis whodunnit

shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Nov 15 2013 (IPS) - Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov revealed a crucial detail Thursday about last week’s nuclear talks with Iran in Geneva that explains much more clearly than previous reports why the meeting broke up without agreement. Lavrov said the United States circulated a draft that had been amended in response to French demands to other members of the six-power P5+1 for approval “literally at the last moment, when we were about to leave Geneva.” Lavrov’s revelation, which has thus far been ignored by major news outlets, came in a news conference in Cairo Thursday that was largely devoted to Egypt and Syria. Lavrov provided the first real details about the circumstances under which Iran left Geneva without agreeing to the draft presented by the P5+1.
  • The full quote from Lavrov’s press conference is available thanks to the report from Voice of Russia correspondent Ksenya Melnikova. Lavrov noted that unlike previous meetings involving the P5+1 and Iran, “This time, the P5+1 group did not formulate any joint document.” Instead, he said, “There was an American-proposed draft, which eventually received Iran’s consent.” Lavrov thus confirmed the fact that the United States and Iran had reached informal agreement on a negotiating text. He further confirmed that Russia had been consulted, along with the four other powers in the negotiations with Iran (China, France, Germany and the UK), about that draft earlier in the talks –- apparently Thursday night, from other published information. “We vigorously supported this draft,” Lavrov said. “If this document had been supported by all [members of the P5+1], it would have already been adopted. We would probably already be in the initial stages of implementing the agreements that were offered by it.”
  • Then Lavrov revealed for the first time that the U.S. delegation had made changes in the negotiating text that had already been worked out with Iran at the insistence of France without having consulted Russia. “But amendments to [the negotiating draft] suddenly surfaced,” Lavrov said. “We did not see them. And the amended version was circulated literally at the last moment, when we were about to leave Geneva.” Lavrov implies that the Russian delegation, forced to make a quick up or down decision on the amended draft, did not realise the degree to which it was likely to cause the talks to fail. “At first sight, the Russian delegation did not notice any significant problems in the proposed amendments,” Lavrov said. He made it clear, however, that he now considers the U.S. maneuvre in getting the six powers on board a draft that had been amended with tougher language – even if softened by U.S. drafters — without any prior consultation with Iran to have been a diplomatic blunder.
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  • “[N]aturally, the language of these ideas should be acceptable for all the participants in this process – both the P5+1 group and Iran,” Lavrov said. The crucial details provided by Lavrov on the timing of the amended draft shed new light on Secretary of State John Kerry’s claim in a press conference in Abu Dhabi on Monday of unity among the six powers on the that draft. “We were unified on Saturday when we presented a proposal to the Iranians.” Kerry said, adding that “everybody agreed it was a fair proposal.” Kerry gave no indication of when on Saturday that proposal had been approved by the other five powers, nor did he acknowledge explicitly that it was a draft that departed from the earlier draft agreed upon with Iran. Lavrov’s remarks make it clear that the other members of the group had little or no time to study or discuss the changes before deciding whether to go along with it.
  • Although the nature of the changes in the amended draft remain a secret, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has charged that they were quite far-reaching and that they affected far more of the draft agreement that had been worked out between the United States and Iran than had been acknowledged by any of the participants. In tweets on Tuesday, Zarif, responding to Kerry’s remarks in Abu Dhabi, wrote, “Mr. Secretary, was it Iran that gutted over half of US draft Thursday night?” Zarif’s comments indicated that changes of wording had nullified the previous understanding that had been reached between the United States and Iran on multiple issues.
  • Zarif’s tweet, combined with remarks by President Hassan Rouhani to the national assembly Sunday warning that Iran’s rights to enrichment are “red lines” that could not be crossed, suggests further that the language of the original draft agreement dealing with the “end game” of the negotiating process was also changed on Saturday. Kerry himself alluded to the issue in his remarks in Abu Dhabi, using the curious formulation that no nation has an “existing right to enrich.” One of the language changes in the agreement evidently related to that issue, and it was aimed at satisfying a demand of Israeli origin at the expense of Iran’s support for the draft. Now the Obama administration will face a decision whether to press Iran to go along with those changes or to go back to the original compromise when political directors of the six powers and Iran reconvene Nov. 20. That choice will provide the key indicator of how strongly committed Obama is to reaching an agreement with Iran.
  • Paul Merrell on 16 Nov 13
     
    The article adds more detail than quoted. The picture that emerges is that John Kerry and French foreign minister Laurent Fabius carried water for the Israelis and Saudis to blow up the negotiation at the last moment, after all sides had preliminarily agreed to a text, by substituting a new and very substantially different text without consulting the other P-5+1 members or Iran. That is a down and dirty negotiation tactic; no wonder the negotiation failed. It should be kept in mind that the Israeli and Saudi governments' real goal is not halting Iran's development of a nuclear industry but is instead to persuade or trick the U.S. into bombing Iran back into the Stone Age, as the U.S. did to Iraq in the early 1990s under Emperor Bush 1 with a repeat performance by Emperor Bush II a decade later.  As to Kerry's preposterous claim that no nation has a right to enrich uranium, in reality every nation has that right jus cogens, with the only limitations being on nations that are members of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which nations still retain the right to enrich up to 20 percent as Iran has been doing. Claims to the contrary are either misinformed or mere false propaganda. See http://armscontrollaw.com/2013/11/07/scope-meaning-and-juridical-implication-of-the-npt-article-iv1-inalienable-right/
Paul Merrell

U.S. Changes Position on Torture Convention-Accepts Ban on Cruelty Applies Abroad | Jus... - 0 views

justsecurity.org/...re-convention-extraterritorial

war & peace torture Obama-Administration CAT-territorial-reach

shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • At a session before the UN Committee Against Torture in Geneva this morning, the Obama administration made a significant shift away from the Bush-era interpretation of the Convention Against Torture. The U.S. delegation stated that the government had “carefully reviewed” the legal issues and “is prepared to clarify its views.” The U.S. affirmed that the obligations in the Convention applying to a State Party in “any territory under its jurisdiction” — including those in Articles 2 and 16 to prevent cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment — apply outside US borders. The government stated that it accepts that these obligations:
  • “extend to certain areas beyond the sovereign territory of the State Party, and more specifically to ‘all places that the State Party controls as a governmental authority.’” The administration also explicitly affirmed that these provisions apply at Guantanamo Bay and to activity on U.S. registered ships and aircraft, on the basis of U.S. governmental control. Moreover, the obligations under the Convention “continue[] to apply even when a State is engaged in armed conflict” notwithstanding the concurrent obligations and prohibitions imposed by the law of armed conflict with respect to the conduct of hostilities and protection of war victims.
  • The government stated: “Although the law of armed conflict is the controlling body of law with regard to the conduct of hostilities and the protection of war victims, a time of war does not suspend operation of the Convention Against Torture, which continues to apply even when a State is engaged in armed conflict. The obligations to prevent torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and punishment in the Convention remain applicable in times of armed conflict and are reinforced by complementary prohibitions in the law of armed conflict.”
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  • check out earlier coverage of these issues at Just Security. You can read a statement on the US change in position by Amnesty International USA here, and by the ACLU here.
  • Paul Merrell on 14 Nov 14
     
    The Administration, which was planning to reaffirm the Bush II Administration position, has buckled to pressure applied by civil libertarians. 
Paul Merrell

Americans Remain Divided on Military Spending - 0 views

www.gallup.com/...divided-military-spending.aspx

war & peace defense spending polls

shared by Paul Merrell on 03 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • As the Obama administration announces plans for further decreases in military spending, Gallup surveys show no broad consensus among Americans that the U.S. is spending too much or too little on the military. Americans' views of the money spent on national defense and the military have held fairly steady in recent years, with 37% now saying the nation spends too much and 28% saying it spends too little. The rest say spending is about right.
  • The most recent data are from Gallup's Feb. 6-9 World Affairs poll. Americans' attitudes on military spending have fluctuated since 1969, with occasional spikes in the "too much" and the "too little" viewpoints. Americans' current views are fairly moderate, with the percentages saying "too much" and "too little" falling about midway in the historical ranges. The complete trend, including the percentage saying spending is "about the right amount," is on page 2. These attitudes have taken on a renewed importance as Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel announced a far-reaching Pentagon defense plan Monday that would, among other things, cut the Army's size to its lowest level since before World War II. Historically, Americans were most likely to believe the nation was spending "too much" on the military in 1969 (52%) and in the early 1970s, just after the peak of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. This belief also reached as high as 50% in 1990 after the major military buildup under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Public concern that military spending was too high rose to 44% in the final year of the George W. Bush administration as the nation's military spending increased for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Americans were most likely to say the government was spending "too little" on the military in January 1981, just as Reagan was taking office after having won the election partly because of his emphasis on the need to build up America's military. Similarly, the "too little" percentage peaked in 2000 and early 2001 as George W. Bush campaigned for and won the presidency after a period of lower military spending during the Clinton administration.
  • As has historically been the case, there are political differences in views on defense spending. Democrats and independents are most likely to believe the nation is spending too much, while Republicans are most likely to say it is spending too little. Even so, current attitudes are not extreme on either side of the political equation, with slightly more than half of Democrats saying there is too much spending, and 49% of Republicans saying there is too little.
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  • Bottom Line U.S. spending on defense as a percentage of GDP has varied substantially in the 70 years since the huge military outlays of World War II. Spending increased from post-World War II levels during the Korean War, stayed relatively high during the Cold War and Vietnam War years that followed, began to fall during the 1970s, rose slightly during the Reagan administration, fell during the Clinton years, rose significantly during the last decade, and has now begun to fall again. The American public's views on military spending have also varied, generally in reaction to these shifts. Americans were most likely to view spending as too high during Vietnam and the 1980s and early '90s, and most likely to view it as too little after the drop in spending in the 1970s and 1990s. Since 2002, Americans' views that the U.S. is spending too much increased concomitant with actual spending increases that followed 9/11 and U.S. involvement in two wars. Now, as the U.S. begins once again to decrease military spending, the public's attitudes are divided. Given these cuts, it would not be unusual if at some point the public once again began to say military spending had dropped too low, potentially making military preparedness a 2016 presidential campaign issue.
Paul Merrell

Feds confirm Bush-era e-mail surveillance - POLITICO.com - 0 views

www.politico.com/...email-surveillance-185283.html

surveillance state NSA Bush-II email digital-privacy

shared by Paul Merrell on 20 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • The U.S. government has acknowledged that it swept up huge volumes of data from emails in the U.S. for several years without any court approval, based solely on the orders of former President George W. Bush. In a court filings on Monday, government lawyers said that the Internet program ran in parallel with a program gathering so-called metadata about telephone calls. The counterterrorism efforts operated under presidential authority before a judge approved them in July 2004, said a 2007 court filing made public Monday by the Justice Department (and posted here.)
  • "After the 9/11 attacks and pursuant to an authorization of the President, [redacted] the NSA [redacted] the bulk collection of non-content information about  telephone calls and Internet communications (hereafter 'metadata') activities that enable the NSA to uncover the contacts [redacted] of members or agents of al Qaeda or affiliated terrorist organizations," a senior NSA official wrote in an October 2007 declaration originally filed under seal as part of an effort to defeat litigation about the snooping Bush ordered. "Specifically, the President authorized the the NSA to collect metadata related to Internet communications for the purpose of conducting targeted analysis to track Al Qaeda-related networks. Internet metadata is header/router/addressing information, such as the 'to,' 'from,' 'cc,' and 'bcc' lines, as opposed to the body or 're' lines, of a standard e-mail. Since July 2004, the collection of Internet metadata has been conducted pursuant to an Order of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court," the still-unidentified official from NSA's Signals Intelligence Directorate continued. The email program was effectively public since June of last year, after contractor Edward Snowden leaked a top-secret National Security Agency inspector general report that described the program.
  • FISC Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly's opinion approving the surveillance was officially released in November 2013. However, the date she issued it was redacted. Many surmised that her opinion followed a dust-up in March 2004, when then-Deputy Attorney General James Comey questioned the legality of some aspect of Bush's post-9/11 surveillance programs and refused to reauthorize that portion of the surveillance. Comey's refusal is said to have put the program into turmoil for a period of months, until officials sought and won the order from Kollar-Kotelly blessing the gathering of both the email and telephone metadata. The publicly released version of Kollar-Kotelly's opinion does not discuss the operation of the program during the period before the application for court approval. The filings Monday came in continuing legal wrangling over obligations pending lawsuits may create for the NSA to hang on to aging metadata that it would ordinarily have been required to erase under FISC orders. A federal judge in San Francisco has required that the NSA preserve that data, at least for now, rather than erasing it.
Paul Merrell

Is the "military option" on Iran off the table? - Baltimore Sun - 0 views

www.baltimoresun.com/...ary-option-20150720-story.html

war & peace U.S.-foreign-policy Iran war-option McGovern

shared by Paul Merrell on 30 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • f, as seems likely, President Barack Obama retains enough support to complete the nuclear deal with Iran, it will be largely because enough members of the House and Senate are persuaded by his argument that the only other real option is war.This was the rhetorical gauntlet the president threw down at his press conference last week. Equally significant, Mr. Obama omitted the until-now obligatory warning that "all options, including the military one, remain on the table."
  • Since then, Israeli media have been pressing hard to restore the military option to its accustomed place "on the table." Flying to Israel Sunday night for a handholding mission with top Israeli officials, U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter tried to make his reception in Tel Aviv less frosty, telling accompanying journalists that the nuclear deal with Iran "does nothing to prevent the military option." The context, however, seemed to be one in which Iran was caught cheating on the nuclear deal.That this kind of rhetoric, even when it is not from the president, is still poison to Tehran was clear in the immediate reaction by Iran's Foreign Minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, who insisted Monday: "Applying force ... is not an option but an unwise and dangerous temptation."
  • Looking for changes in official public statements was my bread and butter during a long tenure as a Kremlinologist. So on Wednesday, as I watched Mr. Obama defend the deal with Iran, I leaned way forward at each juncture — and there were several — where the timeworn warning about all options being "on the table" would have been de rigueur. He avoided saying it. "All options on the table?" The open-ended nature of this Bush/Cheney-esque bully-type warning is at odds with Western international understandings spanning more than three and half centuries — from the treaties of Westphalia (1648), to the Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928) to the post-World War II Nuremberg Tribunal to the UN Charter (1945). Try raising that with Establishment Washington, though, and be prepared to be dismissed as "picky-picky," or as quaint and as obsolete as the Geneva Conventions. Undergirding all this is the chauvinism reflected in President Obama's repeated reminders that the U.S. "is the sole indispensable country in the world."But in the wake of last week's accord with Iran in Vienna, it is possible now to hope that the "military option" is finally off the table — in reality, if not in occasional rhetorical palliatives for Israel.
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  • Most Americans have no idea of how close we came to making war on Iran in 2008, the last year of the Bush/Cheney administration. Nor do they know of the essential role played by courageous managers of intelligence who, for the first time on the Iran nuclear issue, supervised a strictly evidence-based, from-the-bottom-up National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that concluded in November 2007 that Iran had stopped working on a nuclear weapon at the end of 2003 and had not resumed that work. That key judgment issued unanimously and "with high confidence" by all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies played a huge role in strengthening the hand of Mike Mullen, then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other reasonable national security leaders in dissuading President Bush from following Vice President Cheney's prompting to launch a war that would have made the war in Iraq look like a volleyball match between the Quaker School and Ursuline Academy.The juggernaut toward war with Iran was already rolling downhill. Recall that then-CENTCOM commander Adm. William Fallon was abruptly cashiered after saying "we're not going to do Iran on my watch." And Mr. Cheney later admitted churlishly that Mr. Bush had been a big disappointment in giving in to intelligence and military officials on Iran.In Mr. Bush's memoir "Decision Points," he complains bitterly that the NIE "tied my hands on the military side. ... After the NIE, how could I possibly explain using the military to destroy the nuclear facilities of a country the intelligence community said had no active nuclear weapons program?"
  • Paul Merrell on 30 Jul 15
     
    By former CIA senior analyst Ray McGovern. 
Paul Merrell

George Bush was "angry" when US intelligence said Iran hadn't got an active nuclear wea... - 0 views

www.david-morrison.org.uk/...iran-bush-on-nie.htm

war & peace Bush-II Iranian-nukes-myth

shared by Paul Merrell on 23 May 14 - No Cached
  • In the National Intelligence Estimate, Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities, produced in November 2007, the 16 US intelligence services expressed the consensus view that Iran hadn’t got an active nuclear weapons programme at that time.  That is still their view today.   As he revealed in his memoir Decision Points, instead of being pleased that Iran was almost certainly not developing nuclear weapons, President Bush was “angry” that his intelligence services had expressed this view.  He was “angry” because it cut the ground from under his efforts to gain international support for what he termed “dealing with Iran”, which clearly went beyond ensuring that it did not possess nuclear weapons.  The NIE had a big impact, he concluded – and not a good one.   His full comments on the NIE in Decision Points are as follows:
  • In November 2007, the intelligence community produced a National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear program. It confirmed that, as we suspected, Iran had operated a secret nuclear weapons program in defiance of its treaty obligations. It also reported that, in 2003, Iran had suspended its covert effort to design a warhead – considered by some to be the least challenging part of building a weapon.  Despite the fact that Iran was testing missiles that could be used as a delivery system and had announced its resumption of uranium enrichment, the NIE opened with an eye-popping declaration: “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.”   The NIE’s conclusion was so stunning that I felt certain it would immediately leak to the press. As much as I disliked the idea, I decided to declassify the key findings so that we could shape the news stories with the facts. The backlash was immediate. Ahmadinejad hailed the NIE as “a great victory.”  Momentum for new sanctions faded among the Europeans, Russians, and Chinese. As New York Times journalist David Sanger rightly put it, “The new intelligence estimate relieved the international pressure on Iran – the same pressure that the document itself claimed had successfully forced the country to suspend its weapons ambitions.”   In January 2008, I took a trip to the Middle East, where I tried to reassure leaders that we remained committed to dealing with Iran. Israel and our Arab allies found themselves in a rare moment of unity. Both were deeply concerned about Iran and furious with the United States about the NIE. In Saudi Arabia, I met with King Abdullah and members of the Sudairi Seven, the influential full brothers of the late King Fahd.   “Your Majesty, may I begin the meeting?” I said. “I’m confident that every one of you believes that I wrote the NIE as a way of avoiding taking action against Iran.”
  • No one said a word. The Saudis were too polite to confirm their suspicion aloud.   “You have to understand our system,” I said. “The NIE was produced independently by our intelligence community. I am as angry about it as you are.”   The NIE didn’t just undermine diplomacy.  It also tied my hands on the military side. There were many reasons I was concerned about undertaking a military strike on Iran, including its uncertain effectiveness and the serious problems it would create for Iraq’s fragile young democracy. But after the NIE, how could I possibly explain using the military to destroy the nuclear facilities of a country the intelligence community said had no active nuclear weapons program?   I don’t know why the NIE was written the way it was. I wondered if the intelligence community was trying so hard to avoid repeating its mistake on Iraq, that it had underestimated the threat from Iran.  I certainly hoped that intelligence analysts weren’t trying to influence policy. Whatever the explanation, the NIE had a big impact – and not a good one.
Gary Edwards

Birth of an Internet independence movement | CIO - 0 views

www.cio.com/...net-independence-movement.html

internet

shared by Gary Edwards on 04 May 15 - No Cached
  • The arrogance and utter incongruity of declaring Internet and telephone networks equivalent has led a group of friends, all of them reluctant activists, to convene an effort to restore Internet independence. So far, the group of “Tech Innovators” includes John Perry Barlow, Mark Cuban, Tim Draper, Tom Evslin, Dave Farber, Charlie Giancarlo, George Gilder, John Gilmore, Brian Martin, Bob Metcalfe, Ray Ozzie, Jeff Pulver, Michael Robertson, Scott McNealy and Les Vadasz. Through this civic initiative, we hope to defend the remarkable success of the Internet and lead a conversation toward the future — not the past, where laws enacted under FDR must inevitably lead us. The open Internet rules from the FCC end the “permissionless innovation” they purport to protect by inviting the commission to regulate computer networks for the first time. The uncertain benefits and certain unintended consequences of the policy reversal expose the communicating public to unnecessary risk and threaten to upend the success of the past 20 years. The Tech Innovators believe that by recognizing “Internet Independence Day,” Congress can help initiate and advance bipartisan legislation to restore the private-sector framework responsible for of the success of the Internet.
  • Americans today enjoy a thousand-fold improvement from the 56Kbps dial-up modems that 15 million Internet early adopters relied on in the ’90s. The Internet now reaches 3 billion people, and a proliferation of services push communication options far beyond the long-distance phone call of 1995. The FCC plan to impose public utility Title II provisions ends the policies responsible for these accomplishments. Domains subject to telephone-style regulations suffer stagnation without exception. A routine 10Mbps connection available as a nonregulated information service prior to the Open Internet Order would have cost $10,000 per month as a Title II data service in 1995. The insertion of fiat regulatory powers will prove fatal to the entrepreneurial energies responsible for building what FCC Chairman Wheeler calls “the most powerful network in the history of mankind” — a network built beyond the reach of FCC regulatory jurisdiction.
  • The Open Internet Order invents artificial distinctions between content companies, Internet providers and end users for the purposes of regulation. This will lead to the same types of regulatory arbitrage and innovation-deadening consequences as prior distinctions such as “long distance” or “intra-lata.” History demonstrates that asserting artificial market distinctions for purposes of regulation always invites arbitrage and unintended consequences. Resources White Paper 802.11ac: Wireless The Easy Way White Paper Web Application Acceleration: Practical Implementations See All Go The commission obtains jurisdiction by changing the definition of “public switched network” to include networks with IP addresses. The complete transformation of a policy landscape represents a decision the Constitution grants exclusively to Congress.
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  • The coming litigation leaves the Internet ecosystem in jeopardy without regard to the outcome. The preference for a congressional action addressing current conditions and issues relative to the prospects of an 80-year-old regulatory framework should not be controversial. The privatization of the Internet represented an experiment. Restoring Internet independence merely recognizes the remarkable success of the commercial Internet.
  • Gary Edwards on 04 May 15
     
    "The 20th anniversary of the privatization of the Internet deserves recognition by the U.S. Congress and celebration by all Americans as "Internet Independence Day." Two decades ago, on April 30, 1995, the Internet was privatized with the decommissioning of the NSFNET backbone. State of the CIO 2015 More than 500 top IT leaders responded to our online survey to help us gauge the state of the READ NOW The past two decades of Internet-driven success were set in motion with the passage of the High Performance Computing Act of 1991, championed by Sen. Al Gore and signed into law by President George H.W. Bush. That decision of the U.S. government to step back and privatize the Internet led to a thriving and open Internet that provides a remarkable platform for innovation. Ironically, the Federal Communication Commission's recently announced Open Internet Order reasserts government control over the Internet by the means of repurposing Depression-era industrial policy meant to address a monopoly in voice-transmission technology. The FCC went down the dangerous and uncertain legal path of reverting to traditional, utility-style regulation under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934."
Paul Merrell

America's Staggering Hypocrisy | Consortiumnews - 0 views

consortiumnews.com/...americas-staggering-hypocrisy

war & peace foreign policy Ukraine MSM WaPo neocons

shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Since World War II – and extending well into the Twenty-first Century – the United States has invaded or otherwise intervened in so many countries that it would be challenging to compile a complete list. Just last decade, there were full-scale U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, plus American bombing operations from Pakistan to Yemen to Libya. So, what is one to make of Secretary of State John Kerry’s pronouncement that Russia’s military intervention in the Crimea section of Ukraine – at the behest of the country’s deposed president – is a violation of international law that the United States would never countenance?
  • Kerry decried the Russian intervention as “a Nineteenth Century act in the Twenty-first Century.” However, if memory serves, Sen. Kerry in 2002 voted along with most other members of the U.S. Congress to authorize President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, which was also part of the Twenty-first Century. And, Kerry is a member of the Obama administration, which like its Bush predecessor, has been sending drones into the national territory of other nations to blow up various “enemy combatants.” Are Kerry and pretty much everyone else in Official Washington so lacking in self-awareness that they don’t realize that they are condemning actions by Russian President Vladimir Putin that are far less egregious than what they themselves have done?
  • And, what do Hiatt and other neocons at the Washington Post say about confronting the Russians over the Ukraine crisis, which was stoked by neocon holdovers in the U.S. State Department, such as Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland,  and the U.S.-funded National Endowment for Democracy, which was founded in 1983 to replace the CIA in the business of destabilizing targeted governments? [See Consortiumnews.com’s “What Neocons Want from Ukraine Crisis.”] The Post is demanding a new Cold War with Russia in retaliation for its relatively non-violent interventions to protect pro-Russian provinces of two countries that were carved out of the old Soviet Union: Georgia where Russian troops have protected South Ossetia and Abkhazia since 2008 and in Ukraine where Russian soldiers have taken control of Crimea. In both cases, the pro-Russian areas felt threatened from their central governments and sought Moscow’s assistance. In the case of Ukraine, a neo-Nazi-led putsch – representing the interests of the western part of the country – overthrew the democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, who came from the eastern region. Then, under the watchful eye of the neo-Nazi storm troopers in Kiev, a rump parliament voted unanimously or near unanimously to enact a series of draconian laws offensive to the ethnic Russian areas in the east and south.
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  • If Putin is violating international law by sending Russian troops into the Crimea after a violent coup spearheaded by neo-Nazi militias ousted Ukraine’s democratically elected president – and after he requested protection for the ethnic Russians living in the country’s south and east – then why hasn’t the U.S. government turned over George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and indeed John Kerry to the International Criminal Court for their far more criminal invasion of Iraq? In 2003, when the Bush-Cheney administration dispatched troops halfway around the world to invade Iraq under the false pretense of seizing its non-existent weapons of mass destruction, the U.S. touched off a devastating war that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and left their country a bitterly divided mess. But there has been virtually no accountability. And, why haven’t many of the leading Washington journalists who pimped for those false WMD claims at least been fired from their prestigious jobs, if not also trundled off to The Hague for prosecution as propagandists for aggressive war? Remarkably, many of these same “journalists” are propagandizing for more U.S. wars today, such as attacks on Syria and Iran, even as they demand harsh penalties for Russia over its intervention in the Crimea, which incidentally was an historic part of Russia dating back centuries.
  • Though the Russian case for intervention in both Georgia and Ukraine is much stronger than the excuses often used by the United States to intervene in other countries, the Washington Post was apoplectic about Russia’s “violation” of suddenly sacred international law. The Post wrote, “as long as some leaders play by what Mr. Kerry dismisses as 19th-century rules, the United States can’t pretend that the only game is in another arena altogether. Military strength, trustworthiness as an ally, staying power in difficult corners of the world such as Afghanistan — these still matter, much as we might wish they did not.” The Post also laments what it sees as a “receding” tide of democracy around the world, but it is worth noting that the U.S. government has a long and sorry record of overthrowing democratic governments. Just a partial list since World War II would include: Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, Allende in Chile in 1973, Aristide in Haiti twice, Chavez in Venezuela briefly in 2002, Zelaya in Honduras in 2009, Morsi in Egypt in 2013, and now Yanukovych in Ukraine in 2014. The next target of a U.S.-embraced “democratic” coup looks to be Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela. Perhaps the closest U.S. parallel to the Russian intervention in Ukraine was President Bill Clinton’s decision to invade Haiti in 1994 to reinstall Haiti’s elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide to office, though Russia has not gone nearly that far regarding Yanukovych in Ukraine. Russia has only intervened to prevent the fascist-spearheaded coup regime in Kiev from imposing its will on the country’s ethnic Russian provinces.
  • Thus, the overriding hypocrisy of the Washington Post, Secretary Kerry and indeed nearly all of Official Washington is their insistence that the United States actually promotes the principle of democracy or, for that matter, the rule of international law. Those are at best situational ethics when it comes to advancing U.S. interests around the world.
Paul Merrell

Quitting Over Syria | The American Conservative - 0 views

www.theamericanconservative.com/...quitting-over-syria

war & peace Syria WMD Obama lies

shared by Paul Merrell on 15 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • The release of the White House “Government Assessment” on August 30, providing the purported evidence to support a bombing attack on Syria, defused a conflict with the intelligence community that had threatened to become public through the mass resignation of a significant number of analysts. The intelligence community’s consensus view on the status of the Syrian chemical-weapons program was derived from a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) completed late last year and hurriedly updated this past summer to reflect the suspected use of chemical weapons against rebels and civilians. The report maintained that there were some indications that the regime was using chemicals, while conceding that there was no conclusive proof. There was considerable dissent from even that equivocation, including by many analysts who felt that the evidence for a Syrian government role was subject to interpretation and possibly even fabricated. Some believed the complete absence of U.S. satellite intelligence on the extensive preparations that the government would have needed to make in order to mix its binary chemical system and deliver it on target was particularly disturbing. These concerns were reinforced by subsequent UN reports suggesting that the rebels might have access to their own chemical weapons. The White House, meanwhile, considered the somewhat ambiguous conclusion of the NIE to be unsatisfactory, resulting in considerable pushback against the senior analysts who had authored the report.
  • In a scenario unfortunately reminiscent of the lead up to Iraq, the National Security Council tasked the various intelligence agencies to beat the bushes and come up with more corroborative information. Israel obligingly provided what was reported to be interceptions of telephone conversations implicating the Syrian army in the attack, but it was widely believed that the information might have been fabricated by Tel Aviv, meaning that bad intelligence was being used to confirm other suspect information, a phenomenon known to analysts as “circular reporting.” Other intelligence cited in passing by the White House on the trajectories and telemetry of rockets that may have been used in the attack was also somewhat conjectural and involved weapons that were not, in fact, in the Syrian arsenal, suggesting that they were actually fired by the rebels. Also, traces of Sarin were not found in most of the areas being investigated, nor on one of the two rockets identified. Whether the victims of the attack suffered symptoms of Sarin was also disputed, and no autopsies were performed to confirm the presence of the chemical. 
  • With all evidence considered, the intelligence community found itself with numerous skeptics in the ranks, leading to sharp exchanges with the Director of Central Intelligence John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. A number of analysts threatened to resign as a group if their strong dissent was not noted in any report released to the public, forcing both Brennan and Clapper to back down. This led to the White House issuing its own assessment, completely divorcing the process from any direct connection to the intelligence community. The spectacle of CIA Director George Tenet sitting behind Secretary of State Colin Powell in the United Nations, providing him with credibility as Powell told a series of half-truths, would not be repeated. Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, is executive director of the Council for the National Interest.
  • Paul Merrell on 15 Nov 13
     
    More detail about backing up previous reports that the information supplied in the White House "Government Assessment of the Syrian Government's Use of Chemical Weapons on August 21, 2013" cooking of intelligence to justify missile strikes on Syria. Note that the same day the Assessment was published by the White House Offiice of the Press Secretary, active duty intelligence officials passed a message to Obama through veteran intelligence officers that the intelligence in the report was unreliable and that there was strong evidence that it was the "rebels" rather than Syrian government that had used sarin gas. http://www.globalresearch.ca/u-s-military-and-intelligence-officials-to-obama-assad-not-responsible-for-chemical-attack/5348576 Next came a report three days later citing and quoting an anonymous former intelligence official who said the format used and its publication by the White House rather than by the Chief of Intelligence were both strong indications that the document was not the product of the intelligence community. http://www.ipsnews.net/2013/09/obamas-case-for-syria-didnt-reflect-intel-consensus/ Now we learn the reason the White House had to cook its own "public summary of intelligence,"  because many top intelligence threatened to resign if the cherry-picked version of events without reservations explaining the likelihood that it was the rebels who did it. So the Obama Administration, like the Bush II Administration, deliberately lied to the public in an attempt to stampede the nation into another foreign war in the Mideast. The only relevant difference is that Obama didn't get away with launching his own "shock and awe" campaign. Impeachable offense? Yes. Likely to happen? No. Too many hawks in Congress who want war against both Syria and Iran.
Paul Merrell

CT Soldier Demands Apology From Karl Rove; Rove Says No Apology Needed For Iraq War - H... - 0 views

www.courant.com/...r-iraq-war-20150402-story.html

war & peace Iraq Rove

shared by Paul Merrell on 04 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • yan Henowitz says he was 20 years old and a medic with the 2nd Battalion of the 7th Infantry Regiment when he saw his friends “torn apart and Iraqi children screaming for their parents as indiscriminate shrapnel scarred them and us in ways that we will never know,” he told Karl Rove Tuesday at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. “Take responsibility and apologize for your decision in sending a generation to lose their humanity” and “apologize to the millions of fathers and mothers who lost their children on both sides” of the war, Henowitz demanded. WATCH: Karl Rove Calls Sen. Elizabeth Warren 'Pocahontas' Karl Rove calls Sen. Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas” during an event on UConn's Storrs campus Tuesday evening. Karl Rove calls Sen. Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas” during an event on UConn's Storrs campus Tuesday evening. See more videos Rove, former deputy chief of staff and senior adviser to President George W. Bush, who was in Storrs at the invitation of UConn College Republicans, thanked Henowitz for his service and said he was sorry for “what you went through,” but said he would not apologize for the war.
  • “It was right to remove Saddam Hussein from power. ... We should be proud of what we were able to do in Iraq and we should be sorry that we left them alone, because when we left them, things deteriorated,” Rove said.
  • Paul Merrell on 04 Apr 15
     
    Over a million killed in Iraq and that country is in worse turmoil than ever, but Karl Rove is still unrepentant, says that removing Saddam from power was worth it. That war was a highly illegal war of aggression even by the Bush II Administration's own justifications. "Regime change" is not a lawful casus belli. 
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