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Gary Edwards

Stasi in the White House - Paul Craig Roberts - 0 views

www.thedailybell.com/...berts-Stasi-in-the-White-House

Paul-Craig-Roberts End-of-America Obammunism Stassi ruling-class-elites

shared by Gary Edwards on 25 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • On June 19, 2013, US President Obama, hoping to raise himself above the developing National Security Agency (NSA) spy scandals, sought to associate himself with two iconic speeches made at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. Fifty years ago, President John F. Kennedy pledged: "Ich bin ein Berliner." In 1987, President Ronald Reagan challenged: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." Obama's speech was delivered to a relatively small, specially selected audience of invitees. Even so, Obama spoke from behind bullet proof glass.
  • Obama's speech will go down in history as the most hypocritical of all time. Little wonder that the audience was there by invitation only. A real audience would have hooted Obama out of Berlin.
  • Obama spoke lofty words of peace, while beating the drums of war in Syria and Iran. Witness Obama's aggressive policies of surrounding Russia with missile bases and establishing new military bases in the Pacific Ocean with which to confront China.
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  • This is the same Obama who promised to close the Guantanamo Torture Prison, but did not; the same Obama who promised to tell us the purpose for Washington's decade-long war in Afghanistan, but did not; the same Obama who promised to end the wars, but started new ones; the same Obama who said he stood for the US Constitution, but shredded it; the same Obama who refused to hold the Bush regime accountable for its crimes against law and humanity; the same Obama who unleashed drones against civilian populations in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen; the same Obama who claimed and exercised power to murder US citizens without due process and who continues the Bush regime's unconstitutional practice of violating habeas corpus and detaining US citizens indefinitely; the same Obama who promised transparency but runs the most secretive government in US history.
  • The tyrant's speech of spectacular hypocrisy elicited from the invited audience applause on 36 occasions.
  • Here was Obama, who consistently lies, speaking of "eternal truth."
  • Here was Obama, who enabled Wall Street to rob the American and European peoples and who destroyed Americans' civil liberties and the lives of vast numbers of Iraqis, Afghans, Yemenis, Libyans, Pakistanis, Syrians − and others, speaking of "the yearnings of justice."
  • Obama equates demands for justice with "terrorism."
  • Here was Obama, who has constructed an international spy network and a domestic police state, speaking of "the yearnings for freedom."
  • Here was Obama, president of a country that has initiated wars or military action against six countries since 2001 and has three more Muslim countries − Syria, Lebanon, and Iran − in its crosshairs and perhaps several more in Africa, speaking of "the yearnings of peace that burns in the human heart," but clearly not in Obama's heart.
  • Obama has turned America into a surveillance state that has far more in common with Stasi East Germany than with the America of the Kennedy and Reagan eras. Strange, isn't it, that freedom was gained in East Germany and lost in America?
  • At the Brandenburg Gate, Obama invoked the pledge of nations to "a Universal Declaration of Human Rights," but Obama continues to violate human rights both at home and abroad.
  • Obama has taken hypocrisy to new heights. He has destroyed US civil liberties guaranteed by the Constitution.
  • In place of a government accountable to law, he has turned law into a weapon in the hands of the government.
  • He has intimidated a free press and prosecutes whistleblowers who reveal his government's crimes. He makes no objection when American police brutalize peacefully protesting citizens.
  • Obama kept Bradley Manning in solitary confinement for nearly a year assaulting his human dignity in an effort to break him and obtain a false confession. In defiance of the US Constitution, Obama denied Manning a trial for three year
  • Obama sends in drones or assassins to murder people in countries with which the US is not at war, and his victims on most occasions turn out to be women, children, farmers and village elders.
  • His government intercepts and stores in National Security Agency computers every communication of every American and also the private communications of Europeans and Canadians, including the communications of the members of the governments, the better to blackmail those with secrets.
  • On Obama's instructions, London denies Julian Assange free passage to his political asylum in Ecuador. Assange has become a modern-day Cardinal Mindszenty.
  • Gary Edwards on 25 Jun 13
     
    Wow.  I remember Paul Craig Roberts writing on the backpage of NewsWeek Magazine, back in the late 1960's.  Wow, we've come a long way since the days of protesting the Vietnam War, the socialism behind LBJ's Great Society, and the outrageous coup d'état that took place with the in-your-face-America assassination of JFK.  The circle is almost complete. The American Constitution hangs by a thread.  The anger and heart ache of Paul Craig Roberts says it all. I wonder who will win this years "Dancing with the Stars" competition?
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.
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  • 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

Saul Alinsky Leaves the White House | The American Spectator - 0 views

spectator.org/alinsky-leaves-the-white-house

Obama

shared by Gary Edwards on 19 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 19 Jan 17
     
    "When Barack Obama leaves the White House tomorrow, he leaves with his worst dreams unrealized. Still, what he leaves behind is awful. Thank goodness he'll be gone. The very day after Obama was elected in 2008, I predicted in this space that his team would steal the Senate by hook and crook (see: Al Franken); nuke the filibuster at least for judicial nominees; liberalize voting laws (or enforcement thereof) to make fraud easier while charging opponents with "vote suppression"; drum up spurious allegations of civil rights violations; punish anti-abortion protesters; enact "copious new regulations, especially environmental, to be used selectively to ensnare other conservative malcontents"; invasively use the IRS to harass conservative organizations; and tacitly encourage civil unrest in furtherance of Obamite goals. All those predictions of course came true. Obama and company also waged bureaucratic war against independent inspectors general; tried their hardest (even illegally) to hobble fossil fuels industries; evaded Congress's intent by sending cash and uranium to a near-nuclear-ready Iran; fumbled and stumbled while veterans suffered virtually criminal neglect; wasted hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars on projects that were not "shovel-ready" and did not create many jobs; oversaw an economy in which the workforce participation rate dropped to historically low levels while real median household income also fell and personal debt rose, and in which food stamp rolls grew to a number larger than the population of Spain; horrendously politicized the Justice Department; and saw race relations worsen for the first time in decades. In what should have been treated by the media as major scandals (or more major than the media represented them), the Obama administration encouraged illegal gun-running to Mexican cartels, with untold numbers of resultant deaths; failed to provide adequate security before or rescue during the Benghazi tragedy; provide
Gary Edwards

The GOP Should Be Mindful Of August And Take Back Up Holding the Line | RedState - 0 views

www.redstate.com/...-take-back-up-holding-the-line

Obama-downgrade redstate cut-cap-balance Ryan-Budget

shared by Gary Edwards on 08 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 08 Aug 11
     
    The White House no longer has a commander in chief in charge, but a professional victim. Last week, it was the Arab Spring, those damn Europeans, Mother Nature, etc. Now it is all about those evil tea partiers. For three years, Barack Obama has blamed George W. Bush for all his ills. Yes, it is true, Barack Obama inherited an economy sliding backward. But it is also true Barack Obama inherited a AAA credit rating from George W. Bush. Obama's policies have exacerbated a bad economy and caused us to lose our credit rating. But still, expect a full court press to blame the GOP and Tea Party. So I have some quick advice for the GOP. Back when S&P said it was considering a down grade, it set out two criteria to avoid losing the downgrade: (1) at least $4 trillion in cuts and (2) bipartisan support. Only the tea party movement came up with such a plan - Cut, Cap, and Balance. It received bipartisan support in the House, came within five votes of a majority in the Senate, and not only cut $4 trillion, but put caps on future government spending and balanced the federal budget. No other plan, including the public grand bargain and Barack Obama's own super-double-top-secret plan that no one has ever seen did that. Were I in Republican Leadership in Washington, I would haul my butt back to D.C. right now and start fighting again for Cut, Cap, and Balance. 66% of Americans support the plan. It is the only plan that would have avoided a credit decline. Go back and pick up the fight on the front lines for freedom. And if they just can't, they they better point out to the new Super Committee that it was, in fact, possible to cut $4 trillion without enacting job killing tax increases and encourage them to send back as its package Cut, Cap, and Balance.
  • Gary Edwards on 08 Aug 11
     
    The Tea Party passed two plans to restore USA crdibility and good standing: The Ryan Balanced Budget and the Cut, Cap & Balance plan. Both plans passed the House with bipartisan support. Both plans were acceptable to the credit rating agencies, including Standard & Poor. Both plans were blocked by the Democrats in the Senate, and, threatened with a veto from Obama. The people with no plan blocked the only plans that would have saved the USA credit rating. Rush made the point this morning that if Obama and the Democrats cared about this country, they would be insisting that both the Tea Party plans, the Ryan Balanced Budget and the Cut, Cap & Balance plans be put forward in the Senate immediately for a vote, with the full backing of Obama. Rush pointed out that if Obama and the Democrats didn't do this, or didn't come forward with a proposal of their own that actually qualified and met the credit ratings agencies $4 Trill - stop the reckless spending criteria debt concerns, then our worst fears would be confirmed. Our worst fears being that Obama and the Democrats are worse than mere incompetent socialist ideologues. That they are in fact out to destroy the goose that laid the golden egg: Constitutional Capitalism, American exceptionalism, and our God given right to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness that under-girds the extraordinary story of American prosperity. So Obama has a choice today. He either complies with the demands that the USA Government get it's finances in order by supporting the credit ratings approved Tea Party plans. Or, explain why his vision of a downgraded, prosperity bereft and indentured debt bound America is the way forward. Time to start demanding resignations. The fish rots from the head.
Paul Merrell

Obama, Biden are war criminals under UN Charter: Analyst - 0 views

www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33348.htm

war & peace war crimes U.S. International Criminal Court

shared by Paul Merrell on 18 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • Most Americans, their minds focused at the moment on the tragic slaughter of 20 young children aged 5 and 6, along with five teachers and a school principal in Connecticut by a heavily-armed psychotic 21-year-old, are blissfully unaware that their previous president, George W. Bush, along with five key members of his administration, were recently convicted in absentia of war crimes at a tribunal in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. They are unaware because the US corporate media have ignored the story, just as that same corporate media have failed to note that the crimes of which Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and five White House lawyers, were convicted all could apply equally well to current President Barack Obama and his administration. Bush, Cheney, White House counsel (and later Attorney General) Alberto Gonzalez and others were found guilty earlier this month of war crimes and crimes against humanity relating to the executive orders that launched the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as of authorizing and failing to punish torture and other war crimes by US forces, including the military and the CIA.
  • But as international law expert Francis Boyle, a professor of law at the University of Illinois, notes, under the Geneva Convention, failing to take action to prosecute those guilty of war crimes such as the “Crime against Peace” (invading a country that does not pose an imminent threat to the attacker), and torture, are war crimes in and of themselves. Speaking last week at a Summit Conference on Human Rights held at the University of the Sacred Heart in the US island colony of Puerto Rico, Boyle said US authorities, including President Obama, are engaged in an “ongoing criminal conspiracy under international law” both to cover up and protect criminals like Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, and to continue the commission of war crimes by the US government.
  • Obama, when initially campaigning in 2008 for the presidency, vowed that he wanted to restore the respect for the law and the Constitution, once elected President, he and his attorney general Eric Holder quickly made it clear that they were “looking forward, not backward,” and that there would be no prosecutions or indictments for war crimes of any Bush administration people.   The thing is, at that moment, both President Obama and AG Holder became war criminals themselves under the UN Charter and the Nuremberg Principles, which declare that covering up war crimes by prior government and military leaders, and failure to prosecute such war crimes, are in themselves war crimes.
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  • But as Boyle noted in his address in San Juan, P.R., Obama, Vice President Joseph Biden, and the various secretaries of defense and state, the head of the CIA and the Pentagon Chiefs of Staff, as well as other Obama administration personnel, are also guilty of perpetrating ongoing war crimes themselves. Boyle accuses the Obama administration of continuing to conduct a “bogus” war on “international terrorism” including the ever escalating campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen and other jurisdictions. He termed the president’s program of “targeted killings,” in which President Obama himself draws up the “kill list,” to be simply a case of “pure murder” under both traditional British common law and international law, and says these attacks constitute a “Crime against Humanity under Article 7(1)(a) of the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court.”
  • Paul Merrell on 18 Dec 12
     
    While the charge that Obama and other administration officials committed crimes under the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court might seem odd because the U.S. never acceded to that treaty or to the jurisdiction of the ICC, the statute applies to those who commit war crimes within the jurisdictions of nations that have acceded to the treaty and to their superiors who either knew of should have known that such crimes would be committed and did not act to prevent them.  Pakistan  and Yemen have acceded to the treaty. The Rome treaty requires the arrest of those classified as war criminals under that treaty if they set foot in any nation that has acceded to the treaty. So just as Bush administration figures have done, Obama and crew will need to restrict where they travel after he leaves office.
  • Paul Merrell on 18 Dec 12
     
    The linked article should have mentioned that it was a mock tribunal, without legal authority or powers.
Gary Edwards

75 Economic Numbers From 2012 That Are Almost Too Crazy To Believe - 0 views

theeconomiccollapseblog.com/...re-almost-too-crazy-to-believe

economic-collapse Obammunism Obamanomics

shared by Gary Edwards on 13 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 13 Jan 13
     
    Thanks to Marbux we have this extraordinary collection of facts and figures describing the economic catastrophe that has hit the USA.  excerpt: "What a year 2012 has been!  The mainstream media continues to tell us what a "great job" the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve are doing of managing the economy, but meanwhile things just continue to get even worse for the poor and the middle class.  It is imperative that we educate the American people about the true condition of our economy and about why all of this is happening.  If nothing is done, our debt problems will continue to get worse, millions of jobs will continue to leave the country, small businesses will continue to be suffocated, the middle class will continue to collapse, and poverty in the United States will continue to explode.  Just "tweaking" things slightly is not going to fix our economy.  We need a fundamental change in direction.  Right now we are living in a bubble of debt-fueled false prosperity that allows us to continue to consume far more wealth than we produce, but when that bubble bursts we are going to experience the most painful economic "adjustment" that America has ever gone through.  We need to be able to explain to our fellow Americans what is coming, why it is coming and what needs to be done.  Hopefully the crazy economic numbers that I have included in this article will be shocking enough to wake some people up. The end of the year is a time when people tend to gather with family and friends more than they do during the rest of the year.  Hopefully many of you will use the list below as a tool to help start some conversations about the coming economic collapse with your loved ones.  Sadly, most Americans still tend to doubt that we are heading into economic oblivion.  So if you have someone among your family and friends that believes that everything is going to be "just fine", just show them these numbers.  They are a good summary of the problems that the U
Paul Merrell

America Is Guilty if We Don't Prosecute Obama Washington's Blog - 0 views

www.washingtonsblog.com/...ilty-dont-prosecute-obama.html

impeachment Obama Democratic-party

shared by Paul Merrell on 17 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • I write both as a Democrat (which Barack Obama merely claims to be, but shows by his actions that he is not) and as an American (which he, unfortunately, actually is, but which Republicans often deny), in the hope of preserving the honor not just of my Country, but of my Party, both of which he violates routinely. When President Obama refused to allow the prosecution of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for their manifest crimes, after they had been in office (their having lied this country into invading a country that was no imminent threat to the United States, tortured people, violated the 4th Amendment by unleashing the NSA against the American public, unleashed Wall Street crooks against the American people via MBS frauds, etc.), Obama thereby took upon himself Bush’s and Cheney’s crimes, as being his own. Those crimes still need to be prosecuted — now by America prosecuting Obama himself, for his covering them up: he still does it, after all of these years. Those crimes are no less heinous and, indeed, no less treasonous, now that a so-called “Democrat” is hiding them, than they were when his self-acknowledged Republican predecessors, and now in some cases even the fake “Democrat” Obama himself, were and have been and still are perpetrating them.
  • On 11 July 2014, Rebecca Gordon at rinf.com bannered, “America: Where the ‘Good Guys’ Torture,” and she noted that: There are several important reasons why the resurgence of torture remains a possibility in post-Bush America:     Torture did not necessarily end when Obama took office.     We have never had a full accounting of all the torture programs in the “war on terror.”     Not one of the senior government officials responsible for activities that amounted to war crimes has been held accountable, nor were any of the actual torturers ever brought to court. She documented each one of her points, the last two of which are urgent indicators of the necessity for Democrats (yes, Democrats, since Obama claims to be one of us) to bring forth in the U.S. House of Representatives an impeachment resolution and proceedings against the worst “Democratic” President in U.S. history, or else we shall be implicitly accepting his crimes as being unpunished crimes by our Party, in the person of Obama, just like the Republican Party accepts Bush’s and Cheney’s crimes as being unpunished crimes by their Party, in the persons of Bush and Cheney. And, if Obama’s crimes are acceptable by our Party, then our Party is an embarrassment to our country and should be dissolved,
  • However, there are two more reasons why Obama needs to be impeached, removed from office, and then prosecuted for treason: PROTECTING BANKSTERS:
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  • PERPETRATING ETHNIC CLEANSING ABROAD: Finally, just as President Bush defiled the Presidency by unwarrantedly invading Iraq in 2003 and lying through his teeth all the way there and afterward about it, Obama has defiled the Presidency in 2014 by overthrowing the democratically elected President of Ukraine and lying through his teeth all the way and afterward, about that. And Obama’s crime in Ukraine is even worse than Bush’s crime in Iraq, because it’s much more dangerous, with even bigger stakes and risks (all of which are purely downside for both the American and the Ukrainian peoples — much as Bush’s Iraq-invasion also was, for both Americans and Iraqis).
  • DO-OR-DIE TIME FOR DEMOCRATS: If Democrats don’t initiate impeachment proceedings against Obama, then the Democratic Party will be at least as dishonored as the Republican Party is after George W. Bush, for their protecting him; and I, for one, will quit it and urge its replacement, hoping for a leader like Abraham Lincoln to emerge, who had quit the Whig Party and who succeeded at replacing it by the new (and, tragically, only briefly progressive) Republican Party (which tragically then became taken over by northern aristocrats the very moment when Lincoln was assassinated). Either Democrats need to retake our Party, or else to end it, now. We have tolerated Obama’s outrages too long, as it is. For Democrats to retake the Party, requires Democrats to impeach President Obama.
Paul Merrell

And The Benghazi Media Circus Plays On… | Global Research - 0 views

www.globalresearch.ca/...5380682

war & peace Benghazi Obama Hillary lies

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 May 14 - No Cached
  • A recent article written by this writer for Global Research posted last Saturday – “The Benghazi Scandal Is Obama’s Watergate But Worse” – was written in an effort to seek and uncover the truth. Accurate reporting on major world events is a challenge in today’s world where propaganda and disinformation are mainstream media norms and where virtually all major players in American politics simply lie through their teeth every time they open their mouths in constant effort to look good and cover up the truth. The American public knows this pathetic and sobering fact that deception has come to rule in the world of both politics and the media. People today neither believe their newscasters nor their political leaders. That is why examining the content of the tidal wave of assertions and opinions spewing forth from politicians and pundits in the aftermath of the latest Benghazi revelations must be taken with a grain of salt. Again, truth in today’s world is hard to come by. But as an investigative reporter, presenting a brief overview of recent comments and statements for any informed citizen to process and digest seems a worthwhile and important enterprise.
  • A timeline of recently unfolding events: On 10/12/12 exactly one month after the Benghazi incident, the legal conservative group Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking documents related to the Benghazi attack on September 11th, 2012 that killed the US Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. Obama, who had campaigned on a promise of transparency in the criminal wake of the Bush regime, has proven to be anything but open and transparent. Having to sue the US government for access to the records, on April 18th, 2014, a full year and a half later, the Obama administration’s stonewalling ultimately failed and Judicial Watch successfully got hold of 41 State Department Benghazi related documents. Emails between high level White House officials discussing damage control strategies in the immediate aftermath of the Benghazi assault were released last week. Jubilant Republicans are now calling one of those emails their “smoking gun,” believing it is so incriminating that it will do in their would-be opponent Hillary Clinton from potentially competing in the 2016 presidential election.
  • The newly declassified email written by Obama’s then Deputy Strategic Communications Adviser Ben Rhodes specifically directed then UN Ambassador Susan Rice in preparation for her Sunday morning talk show appearances on September 16th, 2012 to explain the administration’s take on what it knew of the Benghazi murders. Rhodes advised Rice to attribute the Benghazi uprising as “rooted in an Internet video, and not a failure of policy,” pushing talking points designed to bolster Obama’s presidential image as a cool-as-a-cucumber-under-fire kind of wise and benevolent leader and statesman. The major emphasis of the email instructed Rice to blame the bogus anti-Moslem video as inciting a spontaneous protest like in other countries in the region that apparently grew violently out of control, of course all the while knowing that that was a boldface lie. This crucial piece of evidence proves that President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton both knew that the video did not cause the attack but that they chose to willfully deceive the American public in order to protect their own political careers and hence was born the infamously never ending Benghazi cover-up. Obama and Hillary withheld this damning email evidence even from the House Oversight Committee led by Congressman Darrel Issa (R-CA) requesting all documents pertaining to Benghazi more than a year ago. With the presidential election less than two months away at the time of the attack, Obama and Hillary were determined at all cost to keep hidden from Americans the real truth of criminal Benghazi activity they were guilty of engaging in during the months leading up to the attack. Last Thursday an angry Issa subpoenaed current Secretary of State John Kerry to appear before the committee on May 21st to further explain why those critical State Department records recently given to Judicial Watch were not among the 3200 documents originally handed over to his committee well over a year ago.
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  • Investigative reporter Kenneth R. Timmerman as author of a new forthcoming book entitled ‘Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi’ states: We know that orders were issued, then recalled, to deploy a 50-man Special Forces unit from Croatia that could have reached Benghazi within hours.Timmerman concludes that to date no documents revealing the person who ordered that unit to stand down have yet to surface.
  • Within hours of the general’s testimony came rebukes from both the senior Republican and Democrat on the powerful House Armed Services Committee making claims backing the administration’s that the military was incapable of responding in time to assist the ill-fated Americans in Benghazi. Because they represent the military in Congress that had already drawn the conclusion that nothing tactically could have been done to save the four Americans, they were quick to rebut the general’s testimony. Yet the day before 9/11 every year since 9/11/01 including on 9/10/11, the president meets with top military and security personnel to ensure that US embassies around the globe are bolstered with much needed extra security for 9/11 readiness. Yet the Benghazi compound was so insecure despite repeated requests, both Obama and the military apparently failed to have any military units on standby that could reach Benghazi to be of service on the night of 9/11/12. And this comes after intelligence sources have been reporting insufficient security at the Benghazi embassy compound.
  • Another disclosure at last Thursday’s House Oversight Committee hearing further damaging the credibility and actions of the Obama administration came from retired Air Force General Robert Lovell who at the time of Benghazi was in Germany serving as the senior African Command deputy director for intelligence. Lovell testified, “We should have sent help,” adding that the White House decision not to attempt military assistance due to the time factor was unacceptable. Lovell also stated unequivocally that the military knew that the Benghazi attack had nothing to do with the video falsely used by the administration to explain away the tragedy. The ex-general felt his military should have intervened and was waiting all night long for the call that never came from his bosses in Washington. Clearly he feels a sense of remorse and regret over the passivity imposed on him by his commander-in-chief Obama and State Department head Clinton.
  • Meanwhile, last week in a heated exchange with ABC correspondent Jon Karl a visibly agitated White House Press Secretary Jay Carney insisted that Rhodes’ email was not related to Benghazi at all but referred to the Moslem protests generally taking place in the region in response to the video. The next day Fox reporter Ed Henry engaged Carney on the same issue, eliciting the same haranguing reaction. All this appears to be yet more desperate lies in a feeble attempt to cover his bosses’ Obama and Hillary’s asses called criminal guilt, and by so doing committing his own. Carney had been among the original recipients of Rhodes’ email. Carney further explained that the same Rhodes talking points echoed those delivered earlier to Congress and the White House by deputy CIA director Mike Morell who a month ago claimed he received no pressure or influence from anyone in the Obama administration in coming up with his version of what most likely transpired on 9/11/12 based on all CIA intelligence sources available at the time. Yet on his own Morell admitted to toning down the intelligence reports leading up to the Benghazi attack purposely so as to not appear to be an “I told you so” gesture that would offend Hillary and her State Department. That said, Hillary’s underling and rising star Victoria Nuland (the later promoted to profanity-speaking Assistant Secretary of State who played such a key role in the recent US backed fascist Ukrainan coup) objected to Morell’s talking points that in her mind leaned too heavily toward blaming her boss and their State Department for insufficient security at the Benghazi compound. Her words:
  • Why do we want Hill to start fingering Ansar Al Sharia [the known al Qaeda affiliated attackers that murdered the four Americans], when we aren’t doing that ourselves until we have the investigation results…and the penultimate point could be abused by Members to beat the State Department for not paying attention to Agency warnings so why do we want to feed that?… Concerned.Observe how the exclusive focus of all post-Benghazi interdepartmental correspondence from Rhodes’ to Morell’s to Nuland’s all center on appearance and potential perception to avoid CYA blame. Furthest down on their priority list is honest and truthful disclosure and self-accountability. Again, the name of the game in the world of politics is passing the buck whenever possible to minimize potential heat that comes with looking bad and maximizing looking good by any means or lies necessary. Benghazi perfectly illustrates all of this.
  • Based on the information finally coming to light all last week, last Friday House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) called for a special select committee not unlike the one for Watergate to further investigate Benghazi. Representative Trey Gowdy (SC-R) has already been selected as its lead investigator. This grandstanding ploy seems a bit superfluous and redundant since the House Oversight Committee has ostensibly been trying to get to the bottom of Benghazi for nearly a year and a half, albeit thus far ineffective in its results, no help from the State Department’s prior email omissions. Not only is Benghazi the hot topic buzzing here in America, on that same day last Friday, more bullets was buzzing in Benghazi as well. Nine police security soldiers were gunned down by, you guessed it, the same murderers still remaining at large that were behind the 9/11/12 Benghazi attack – the militant group the US has for years labeled an al Qaeda affiliated terrorist organization Ansar al-Sharia. After massacring 31 peaceful demonstrators protesting outside the militants’ headquarters last June, last week’s massacre is a powerful statement showing that the terrorists are still in charge in Benghazi and immune from any accountability from the US installed puppet government either in Tripoli or Washington. They remain free men at large despite Obama’s promise to hunt them down and bring them to justice.
  • The senior Democratic House Intel Committee Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) typifies the partisan Obama-Hillary politics games of each side racing to the media to point fingers at each other in their same old, same old blame game. On Sunday Schiff stated he does not want any Democrats to participate in the newly forming select committee that the Republican House Speaker Boehner has just recently called for, already naming its GOP chair. That is simply a game the Dems will refuse to play. Why? Because Republicans cannot make them. Sound familiar? Perhaps your 7-year old child might employ this same game strategy. Insider Dems like former White House advisor turned ABC analyst (and another original recipient of Rhodes’ infamous email) David Plouffe conveniently took to ABC’s Sunday morning On This Week with George Stephanopoulos crying foul even louder with their familiar “conspiracy” chant they customarily use to discredit any criticism leveled at the Obama administration. His cries reaching desperation this week accuse a “very loud, delusional minority” of Republicans of an obsessive politics game over Benghazi. Another all too familiar grade school tactic, whatever misbehavior you are accused of, simply accuse your enemy of the same offense, an old early childhood trick that you never need outgrow in the world of politics.
  • Still another indignant reaction hardcore defenders of Hillary and Obama are now quick to cite are the thirteen embassy attacks that occurred as so called “Benghazi’s on Bush’s watch” when not a peep was ever heard from the press. This straw house strategy is designed to show how Republicans and Fox News are hypocritical in their obsession to find dirt on Benghazi where they deny any exists. Yet this accusation seems to omit one very significant fact. Not one of those embassy attacks during the Bush regime resulted in any murdered Americans, much less four of them and one being a US Ambassador, something that has not happened in the last 32 years before Benghazi. The media circus demonizing partisan politics players on both sides epitomizes why the US government is so utterly broken, horribly dysfunctional, morally bankrupt and totally ineffective in addressing any and all of the most pressing problems facing America and the world today. The blame game is all they know. Yet in all their exaggeration, lies, name calling and finger pointing, not one of them is even addressing the pink elephant in the room.
  • Obama, Hillary and then CIA Director retired General Betrayus Petraeus were/are international gun running criminal outlaws of the worst kind, working with the very same al Qaeda terrorist bunch that murdered those four nearly forgotten Americans. US tax dollars were/are going into the pockets of Ansar al-Sharia and al Qaeda mercenaries that looted Muammar Kaddafi’s gold cache and enormous weapon arsenal that included chemical weapons as well as surface to air missiles. And Obama, Petraeus and 2016 presidential heir apparent Hillary were in deep over their heads under Hillary and Stevens’ State Department cover, shipping them from Benghazi through Turkey to Syria to covertly fight a war by proxy against Assad’s government forces. After more than three bloody years, to this day the US is still bent on destroying another sovereign nation posing absolutely no security threat to America. These are the war crimes constantly being committed by Obama, Petraeus and Hillary and their lies upon lies are unraveling at an accelerated clip with each passing month. Thus, expect to see more desperate acts of aggression from desperate despots who know that their jig is up. Yet desperate despots do not care how many humans they will take down with them. But justice for these longtime perpetrators of multiple crimes against humanity will be served in the end.
Paul Merrell

Obama Knew Arming Rebels Was Useless, But Did It Anyway - The Intercept - 0 views

firstlook.org/...w-arming-rebels-useless-anyway

war & peace ISIL Obama political-cowardice

shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • What’s worse: Launching a disastrous military campaign under false pretenses to achieve goals you wrongly believe are attainable? Or launching a disastrous military campaign you know is doomed in order to help your party win an election? I ask in light of today’s New York Times story about how President Obama asked the CIA a while back whether arming rebel forces – pretty much the agency’s signature strategy — had ever worked in the past. He was told that it almost never has. But then in June, once the political pressure for intervention in Syria got too great, he did just that — sending weapons to rebels fighting the Syrian military. Yes: He knew better, but he did it anyway.
  • Obama’s biggest such decision killed a lot of American servicemembers who he sent to fight and die in Afghanistan. During his 2008 presidential campaign, which was marked by his opposition to the war in Iraq, then-Senator Obama’s vow to re-engage in Afghanistan was seen by many as a ploy to avoid being cast as a dove, first by Hillary Clinton and then by John McCain. What’s not clear to this day is precisely when Obama knew better; when he realized that the war in Afghanistan was hopeless. By inauguration time, that conclusion seemed fairly obvious to many foreign-policy watchers. So why not him?
  • But one month into his presidency, Obama announced he was sending more troops there – 30,000, as it would turn out. Despite the obvious lack of what he himself had frequently described as a must — an exit strategy – he increased the number of troops in Afghanistan by 50 percent. And the monthly death tolls shot up. Over 1,600 American servicemembers  have died in Afghanistan since the summer of 2009 — well over half of all the dead during the entire war – along with countless Afghans. There were public signs in November 2009 that Obama was “rethinking” his plan. David Sanger, in his book Confront and Conceal, wrote that Obama actually began a “reassessment of whether the war was as necessary as he first believed” even earlier, in the summer of 2009. (At an off-the-record June 2009 dinner with historians the “main point” his guests tried to make was “that pursuit of war in Afghanistan would be for him what Vietnam was to Lyndon Johnson,” Garry Wills wrote  later.)
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  • And according to Sanger’s murky sources, the recognition that things were hopeless came at the latest by June 2011. But it wasn’t for three more long years —  until this May — that Obama finally announced U.S. troops would be out of Afghanistan by the end of 2016. Which brings us to the question I raised at the top. George W. Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq sent vastly more people to their deaths than anything Obama did – nearly 5,000 U.S. servicemembers, plus over 100,000 Iraqi civilians – and left as many as half a million U.S. servicemembers wounded or otherwise permanently damaged
  • (Obama’s latest doomed-to-fail show of force explicitly keeps U.S. servicemembers out of harm’s way. ) But Bush at least thought the war in Iraq would do some good. He was incredibly wrong, mind you. He was both delusional — and actively manipulated by neocons like Dick Cheney (who believe the application of American power is always and inherently a good thing). He intentionally misled the public about his real reasons for going to war (the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were an excuse, not a reason; there were no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction). His eventual goal was both unachievable (a sudden flowering of pro-Western democracy in the Middle East) and perverse (American control of Iraqi oil fields). His methods (firing all the Baathists; trying to install a corrupt puppet) were spectacularly misguided. Much of the rest of his presidency was consumed with sectarian warfare in Iraq and new lies to  cover up the old ones at home. And the end result was a massive human rights catastrophe, including torture of U.S. detainees, a refugee crisis, mass casualties, social disorder and – finally – the Islamic State.
  • Bush also certainly saw – and exploited — the political upside of being a war president. But he didn’t let loose the dogs of war simply because his political operatives told him it would poll well.
Paul Merrell

40 Years of Economic Policy in One Chart » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Nam... - 0 views

www.counterpunch.org/...f-economic-policy-in-one-chart

economy class warfare productivity income wealth-transfer

shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Growth of Real Hourly Compensation for Production/Nonsupervisory Workers and Productivity, 1948–2011
  • Is America in the throes of a class war? Look at the chart and decide for yourself. It’s all there in black and white, and you don’t need to be an economist to figure it out. But, please, take some time to study the chart, because there’s more here than meets the eye. This isn’t just about productivity and compensation. It’s a history lesson too. It pinpoints the precise moment in time when the country lost its way and began its agonizing descent into Police State USA. That’s what it really means.
  • Did you know that inequality has actually gotten worse under Obama? Much worse. It’s true. He might proclaim his determination to “tax millionaires” in one of his blustery orations, but it’s all just rhetorical fakery. The fact is, the 1 percenters have done better under Obama than they did under Bush. Check this out from Naked Capitalism:
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  • Are we there yet? Pretty close, I’d say. The only way to preserve democracy is by keeping one hand firmly clasped around the windpipe of every rich bastard in the country. If you can’t keep your tycoons in check, you’d might as well throw in the towel and accept a life of indentured servitude now, because that’s where you’re headed anyway. Here’s a short rundown of the changes that took place in the ’70s by economist Lawrence Mishel:
  • Yup, under Bush, the 1% captured a disproportionate share of the income gains from the Bush boom of 2002-2007. They got 65 cents of every dollar created in that boom, up 20 cents from when Clinton was President. Under Obama, the 1% got 93 cents of every dollar created in that boom. That’s not only more than under Bush, up 28 cents. In the transition from Bush to Obama, inequality got worse, faster, than under the transition from Clinton to Bush. Obama accelerated the growth of inequality.” (Growth of Income Inequality Is Worse Under Obama than Bush, Matt Stoller, Naked Capitalism) 93 cents of every buck has gone to the 1 percenters under Obama. And you wonder why Wall Street loves this guy? It’s because he’s bent over backwards to make them richer, that’s why.
  • But as bad as Obama may be, the problem didn’t start with him. It goes back decades as the first chart indicates.
Paul Merrell

Bush Administration Convicted of War Crimes - Dr. Francis Boyle #N3 | Next News Network... - 0 views

nextnewsnetwork.com/...war-crimes-dr-francis-boyle-n3

war & peace war crimes Bush Admjnistration international law

shared by Paul Merrell on 05 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Former U.S. President George W. Bush recently dedicated his Presidential Library in Dallas. The ceremony included speeches by President Obama, ex-President Bush, and every other living ex-president. But none of the speeches so much as mentioned to Iraq war — the undertaking that dominated George W. Bush’s presidency, and will define his historic legacy. This omission might be due, at least in part, to the fact that Mr. Bush is now a convicted war criminal who dares not travel abroad out of fear of being arrested. In February 2011, Bush was forced to cancel a scheduled appearance in Geneva, Switzerland after human rights groups filed a criminal complaint charging him with violating international treaties against torture. His trouble increased dramatically a year ago when Bush — along with former Vice President Dick Cheney, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and several other top Bush administration officials — were convicted of war crimes in absentia by a special war crimes tribunal in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
  • The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission was convened and conducted according to internationally recognized procedures and rules of evidence, and the week-long hearing ended with the five-member panel unanimously delivering guilty verdicts. What is the significance of that tribunal? Is its verdict legally binding? Are there troublesome aspects to the idea that a foreign tribunal can sit in judgment of a U.S. President — whatever we may think of his actions? We will discuss these vitally important questions with Dr. Francis Boyle, a professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law. He served as a prosecutor at the tribunal.
  • Paul Merrell on 05 Jun 13
     
    I did not bookmark the news about this tribunal's decision last year because I mistakenly assumed that it was a mock trial, that it had no legal force.  But in this interview with renowned international law professor Francis Boyle, who served as co-prosecutor, I learned that the trial was legally constituted, and that international law requires other nations to either extradite Bush and his top officials or independently try them for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Note that Boyle gives Obama no points either, calling for his impeachment and prosecution. So we might look forward to a similar prosecution of Obama and his top officials after he leaves office. 
Paul Merrell

Committee to Protect Journalists issues scathing report on Obama administration | Glenn... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...pi-report-press-freedoms-obama

surveillance state Obama transparency freedom-of-the-press

shared by Paul Merrell on 11 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • It's hardly news that the Obama administration is intensely and, in many respects, unprecedentedly hostile toward the news-gathering process. Even the most Obama-friendly journals have warned of what they call "Obama's war on whistleblowers". James Goodale, the former general counsel of the New York Times during its epic fights with the Nixon administration, recently observed that "President Obama wants to criminalize the reporting of national security information" and added: "President Obama will surely pass President Richard Nixon as the worst president ever on issues of national security and press freedom."Still, a new report released today by the highly respected Committee to Protect Journalists - its first-ever on press freedoms in the US - powerfully underscores just how extreme is the threat to press freedom posed by this administration. Written by former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie, Jr., the report offers a comprehensive survey of the multiple ways that the Obama presidency has ushered in a paralyzing climate of fear for journalists and sources alike, one that severely threatens the news-gathering process.The first sentence: "In the Obama administration's Washington, government officials are increasingly afraid to talk to the press."
  • It quotes New York Times national security reporter Scott Shane as saying that sources are "scared to death." It quotes New York Times reporter David Sanger as saying that "this is the most closed, control freak administration I've ever covered." And it notes that New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan previously wrote that "it's turning out to be the administration of unprecedented secrecy and unprecedented attacks on a free press."Based on all this, Downie himself concludes:The administration's war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I've seen since the Nixon administration, when I was one of the editors involved in The Washington Post's investigation of Watergate. The 30 experienced Washington journalists at a variety of news organizations whom I interviewed for this report could not remember any precedent."And this pernicious dynamic extends far beyond national security: "Ellen Weiss, Washington bureau chief for E.W. Scripps newspapers and stations, said 'the Obama administration is far worse than the Bush administration' in trying to thwart accountability reporting about government agencies." It identifies at least a dozen other long-time journalists making similar observations.
  • The report ends by noting the glaring irony that Obama aggressively campaigned on a pledge to usher in The Most Transparent Administration Ever™. Instead, as the New Yorker's investigative reporter Jane Mayer recently said about the Obama administration's attacks: "It's a huge impediment to reporting, and so chilling isn't quite strong enough, it's more like freezing the whole process into a standstill."
  • Paul Merrell on 11 Oct 13
     
    Note how Obama is not winning over the press with his legislation to give reporters for mainstream media a special privilege from some types of surveillance. When last I checked, that effort had bogged down in the effort to define "journalist" in a way that did not include every blogger on the planet. Small wonder: the Supreme Court has repeatedly held that there is no constitutional basis for a special protection for journalists *because the lone, anonymous pamphleteer has the same Freedom of the Press that mainstream journalists have.* I rarely make absolute predictions about what courts will do in the future, but this is black-letter First Amendment law. The legislation is doomed to be voided by the courts even if passed. Big, big denial of equal protection by the First Amendment. There is no alternative to ending the government surveillance except forfeiture of our freedoms.   
Paul Merrell

Reported US-Syrian Accord on Air Strikes | Consortiumnews - 1 views

consortiumnews.com/...s-syrian-accord-on-air-strikes

war & peace Syria ISIL U.S.-foreign-policy limited-truce

shared by Paul Merrell on 17 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • Exclusive: A problem with President Obama’s plan to expand the war against ISIS into Syria was always the risk that Syrian air defenses might fire on U.S. warplanes, but now a source says Syria’s President Assad has quietly agreed to permit strikes in some parts of Syria, reports Robert Parry.
  • The Obama administration, working through the Russian government, has secured an agreement from the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad to permit U.S. airstrikes against Islamic State targets in parts of Syria, according to a source briefed on the secret arrangements. The reported agreement would clear away one of the chief obstacles to President Barack Obama’s plan to authorize U.S. warplanes to cross into Syria to attack Islamic State forces – the concern that entering Syrian territory might prompt anti-aircraft fire from the Syrian government’s missile batteries.
  • In essence, that appears to be what is happening behind the scenes in Syria despite the hostility between the Obama administration and the Assad government. Obama has called for the removal of Assad but the two leaders find themselves on the same side in the fight against the Islamic State terrorists who have battled Assad’s forces while also attacking the U.S.-supported Iraqi government and beheading two American journalists.
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  • The usual protocol for the U.S. military – when operating in territory without a government’s permission – is to destroy the air defenses prior to conducting airstrikes so as to protect American pilots and aircraft, as was done with Libya in 2011. However, in other cases, U.S. intelligence agencies have arranged for secret permission from governments for such attacks, creating a public ambiguity usually for the benefit of the foreign leaders while gaining the necessary U.S. military assurances.
  • Just last month, Obama himself termed the strategy of arming supposedly “moderate” Syrian rebels “a fantasy.” He told the New York Times’ Thomas L. Friedman: “This idea that we could provide some light arms or even more sophisticated arms to what was essentially an opposition made up of former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth, and that they were going to be able to battle not only a well-armed state but also a well-armed state backed by Russia, backed by Iran, a battle-hardened Hezbollah, that was never in the cards.” Obama’s point would seem to apply at least as much to having the “moderate” rebels face down the ruthless Islamic State jihadists who engage in suicide bombings and slaughter their captives without mercy. But this “fantasy” of the “moderate” rebels has a big following in Congress and on the major U.S. op-ed pages, so Obama has included the $500 million in his war plan despite the risk it poses to Assad’s acquiescence to American air attacks.
  • In a national address last week, Obama vowed to order U.S. air attacks across Syria’s border without any coordination with the Syrian government, a proposition that Damascus denounced as a violation of its sovereignty. So, in this case, Syria’s behind-the-scenes acquiescence also might provide some politically useful ambiguity for Obama as well as Assad. Yet, this secret collaboration may go even further and include Syrian government assistance in the targeting of the U.S. attacks, according to the source who spoke on condition of anonymity. That is another feature of U.S. military protocol in conducting air strikes – to have some on-the-ground help in pinpointing the attacks. As part of its public pronouncements about the future Syrian attacks, the Obama administration sought $500 million to train “vetted” Syrian rebels to handle the targeting tasks inside Syria as well as to carry out military ground attacks. But that approach – while popular on Capitol Hill – could delay any U.S. airstrikes into Syria for months and could possibly negate Assad’s quiet acceptance of the U.S. attacks, since the U.S.-backed rebels share one key goal of the Islamic State, the overthrow of Assad’s relatively secular regime.
  • Without Assad’s consent, the U.S. airstrikes might require a much wider U.S. bombing campaign to first target Syrian government defenses, a development long sought by Official Washington’s influential neoconservatives who have kept “regime change” in Syria near the top of their international wish list. For the past several years, the Israeli government also has sought the overthrow of Assad, even at the risk of Islamic extremists gaining power. The Israeli thinking had been that Assad, as an ally of Iran, represented a greater threat to Israel because his government was at the center of the so-called Shiite crescent reaching from Tehran through Damascus to Beirut and southern Lebanon, the base for Hezbollah.
  • The thinking was that if Assad’s government could be pulled down, Iran and Hezbollah – two of Israel’s principal “enemies” – would be badly damaged. A year ago, then-Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren articulated this geopolitical position in an interview with the Jerusalem Post. “The greatest danger to Israel is by the strategic arc that extends from Tehran, to Damascus to Beirut. And we saw the Assad regime as the keystone in that arc,” Oren said. “We always wanted Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran.” He said this was the case even if the other “bad guys” were affiliated with al-Qaeda. More recently, however, with the al-Qaeda-connected Nusra Front having seized Syrian territory adjacent to the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights – forcing the withdrawal of UN peacekeepers – the balance of Israeli interests may be tipping in favor of preferring Assad to having Islamic extremists possibly penetrating directly into Israeli territory.
  • In the longer term, by working together to create political solutions to various Mideast crises, the Obama-Putin cooperation threatened to destroy the neocons’ preferred strategy of escalating U.S. military involvement in the region. There was the prospect, too, that the U.S.-Russian tag team might strong-arm Israel into a peace agreement with the Palestinians. So, starting last September – almost immediately after Putin helped avert a U.S. air war against Syria – key neocons began taking aim at Ukraine as a potential sore point for Putin. A leading neocon, Carl Gershman, president of the U.S.-government-funded National Endowment for Democracy, took to the op-ed pages of the neocon Washington Post to identify Ukraine as “the biggest prize” and explaining how its targeting could undermine Putin’s political standing inside Russia. “Ukraine’s choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents,” Gershman wrote. “Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.” At the time, Gershman’s NED was funding scores of political and media projects inside Ukraine.
  • The Russian Hand Besides the tactical significance of U.S. intelligence agencies arranging Assad’s tacit acceptance of U.S. airstrikes over Syrian territory, the reported arrangement is also significant because of the role of Russian intelligence serving as the intermediary. That suggests that despite the U.S.-Russian estrangement over the Ukraine crisis, the cooperation between President Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin has not been extinguished; it has instead just gone further underground. Last year, this growing behind-the-scenes collaboration between Obama and Putin represented a potential tectonic geopolitical shift in the Middle East. In the short term, their teamwork produced agreements that averted a U.S. military strike against Syria last September (by getting Assad to surrender his chemical weapons arsenal) and struck a tentative deal with Iran to constrain but not eliminate its nuclear program.
  • Direct attacks on Israel would be a temptation to al-Nusra Front, which is competing for the allegiance of young jihadists with the Islamic State. While the Islamic State, known by the acronyms ISIS or ISIL, has captured the imaginations of many youthful extremists by declaring the creation of a “caliphate” with the goal of driving Western interests from the Middle East, al-Nusra could trump that appeal by actually going on the offensive against one of the jihadists’ principal targets, Israel. Yet, despite Israel’s apparent rethinking of its priorities, America’s neocons appear focused still on their long-held strategy of using violent “regime change” in the Middle East to eliminate governments that have been major supporters of Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Palestine’s Hamas, i.e. Syria and Iran. One reason why Obama may have opted for a secretive overture to the Assad regime, using intelligence channels with the Russians as the middlemen, is that otherwise the U.S. neocons and their “liberal interventionist” allies would have howled in protest.
  • By early 2014, American neocons and their “liberal interventionist” pals were conspiring “to midwife” a coup to overthrow Ukraine’s elected President Viktor Yanukovych, according to a phrase used by U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt in an intercepted phone conversation with Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, who was busy handpicking leaders to replace Yanukovych. A neocon holdover from George W. Bush’s administration, Nuland had been a top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney and is married to prominent neocon Robert Kagan, a co-founder of the Project for a New American Century which prepared the blueprint for the neocon strategy of “regime change” starting with the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
  • The U.S.-backed coup ousted Yanukovych on Feb. 22 and sparked a bloody civil war, leaving thousands dead, mostly ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine. But the Gershman-Nuland strategy also drove a deep wedge between Obama and Putin, seeming to destroy the possibility that their peace-seeking collaboration would continue in the Middle East. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Neocons’ Ukraine-Syria-Iran Gambit.”] New Hope for ‘Regime Change’ The surprise success of Islamic State terrorists in striking deep inside Iraq during the summer revived neocon hopes that their “regime change” strategy in Syria might also be resurrected. By baiting Obama to react with military force not only in Iraq but across the border in Syria, neocons like Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham put the ouster of Assad back in play.
  • In a New York Times op-ed on Aug. 29, McCain and Graham used vague language about resolving the Syrian civil war, but clearly implied that Assad must go. They wrote that thwarting ISIS “requires an end to the [civil] conflict in Syria, and a political transition there, because the regime of President Bashar al-Assad will never be a reliable partner against ISIS; in fact, it has abetted the rise of ISIS, just as it facilitated the terrorism of ISIS’ predecessor, Al Qaeda in Iraq.” Though the McCain-Graham depiction of Assad’s relationship to ISIS and al-Qaeda was a distortion at best – in fact, Assad’s army has been the most effective force in pushing back against the Sunni terrorist groups that have come to dominate the Western-backed rebel movement – the op-ed’s underlying point is obvious: a necessary step in the U.S. military operation against ISIS must be “regime change” in Damascus.
  • That would get the neocons back on their original track of forcing “regime change” in countries seen as hostile to Israel. The first target was Iraq with Syria and Iran always meant to follow. The idea was to deprive Israel’s close-in enemies, Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Palestine’s Hamas, of crucial support. But the neocon vision got knocked off track when Bush’s Iraq War derailed and the American people balked at extending the conflict to Syria and Iran. Still, the neocons retained their vision even after Bush and Cheney departed. They also remained influential by holding onto key positions inside Official Washington – at think tanks, within major news outlets and even inside the Obama administration. They also built a crucial alliance with “liberal interventionists” who had Obama’s ear. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Dangerous Neocon-R2P Alliance.”]
  • The neocons’ new hope arrived with the public outrage over ISIS’s atrocities. Yet, while pushing to get this new war going, the neocons have downplayed their “regime change” agenda, getting Obama to agree only to extend his anti-ISIS bombing campaign from Iraq into Syria. But it was hard to envision expanding the war into Syria without ousting Assad. Now, however, if the source’s account is correct regarding Assad’s quiet assent to U.S. airstrikes, Obama may have devised a way around the need to bomb Assad’s military, an maneuver that might again frustrate the neocons’ beloved goal of “regime change.”
  • Paul Merrell on 17 Sep 14
     
    Robert Parry lands another major scoop. But beware of government officials who leak government plans because they do not invariably speak the truth.  I am particularly wary of this report because Obama's planned arming and training of the "moderate Syrian opposition" was such a patent lie. The "moderate Syrian opposition" disappeared over two years ago as peaceful protesters were replaced by Saudi, Qatari, Turkish, and American-backed Salafist mercenaries took their place. Up until this article, there has been every appearance that the U.S. was about to become ISIL's Air Force in Syria. In other words, there has been a steady gushing of lies from the White House on fundamental issues of war and peace. In that light, I do not plan to accept this article as truth before I see much more confirmation that ISIL rather than the Assad government is the American target in Syria. We have a serial liar in the White House.
Paul Merrell

The Stunning Hypocrisy of the U.S. Government | Washington's Blog - 0 views

www.washingtonsblog.com/...-hypocrisy-versus-honesty.html

surveillance state NSA hypocricy

shared by Paul Merrell on 25 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Congress has exempted itself from the prohibition against trading on inside information … the law that got Martha Stewart and many other people thrown in jail. There are many other ways in which the hypocrisy of the politicians in D.C. is hurting our country. Washington politicians say we have to slash basic services, and yet waste hundreds of billions of dollars on counter-productive boondoggles. If the politicos just stopped throwing money at corporate welfare queens, military and security boondoggles and pork, harmful quantitative easing, unnecessary nuclear subsidies, the failed war on drugs, and other wasted and counter-productive expenses, we wouldn’t need to impose austerity on the people. The D.C. politicians said that the giant failed banks couldn’t be nationalized, because that would be socialism. Instead of temporarily nationalizing them and then spinning them off to the private sector – or breaking them up – the politicians have bailed them out to the tune of many tens of billions of dollars each year, and created a system where all of the profits are privatized, and all of the losses socialized. Obama and Congress promised help for struggling homeowners, and passed numerous bills that they claimed would rescue the little guy. But every single one of these bills actually bails out the banks … and doesn’t really help the homeowner.
  • The Federal Reserve promises to do everything possible to reduce unemployment. But its policies are actually destroying jobs. Many D.C. politicians pay lip service to helping the little guy … while pushing policies which have driven inequality to levels surpassing slave-owning societies. The D.C. regulators pretend that they are being tough on the big banks, but are actually doing everything they can to help cover up their sins. Many have pointed out Obama’s hypocrisy in slamming Bush’s spying programs … and then expanding them (millions more). And in slamming China’s cyber-warfare … while doing the same thing. And – while the Obama administration is spying on everyone in the country – it is at the same time the most secretive administration ever (background). That’s despite Obama saying he’s running the most transparent administration ever.
  • Glenn Greenwald – the Guardian reporter who broke the NSA spying revelations – has documented for many years the hypocritical use of leaks by the government to make itself look good … while throwing the book at anyone who leaks information embarrassing to the government. Greenwald notes today: Prior to Barack Obama’s inauguration, there were a grand total of three prosecutions of leakers under the Espionage Act (including the prosecution of Dan Ellsberg by the Nixon DOJ). That’s because the statute is so broad that even the US government has largely refrained from using it. But during the Obama presidency, there are now seven such prosecutions: more than double the number under all prior US presidents combined.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The irony is obvious: the same people who are building a ubiquitous surveillance system to spy on everyone in the world, including their own citizens, are now accusing the person who exposed it of “espionage”. It seems clear that the people who are actually bringing “injury to the United States” are those who are waging war on basic tenets of transparency and secretly constructing a mass and often illegal and unconstitutional surveillance apparatus aimed at American citizens – and those who are lying to the American people and its Congress about what they’re doing – rather than those who are devoted to informing the American people that this is being done.
  • Similarly, journalists who act as mere stenographers for the government who never criticize in more than a superficial fashion are protected and rewarded … but reporters who actually report on government misdeeds are prosecuted and harassed. Further, the biggest terrorism fearmongers themselves actually support terrorism. And see this. In the name of fighting terrorism, the U.S. has been directly supporting Al Qaeda and other terrorists and providing them arms, money and logistical support in Syria, Libya, Mali, Bosnia, Chechnya, Iran, and many other countries … both before and after 9/11. And see this. The American government has long labeled foreigners as terrorists for doing what America does. Moreover, government officials may brand Americans as potential terrorists if they peacefully protest, complain about the taste of their water, or do any number of other normal, all-American things.
  • This is especially hypocritical given that liberals like Noam Chomsky and conservatives like the director of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan (Lt. General William Odom) all say that the American government is the world’s largest purveyor of terrorism. As General Odom noted: Because the United States itself has a long record of supporting terrorists and using terrorist tactics, the slogans of today’s war on terrorism merely makes the United States look hypocritical to the rest of the world. These are just a couple of ways in which the D.C. politicians are hypocrites.
Gary Edwards

You Won't BELIEVE What's Going On with Government Spying on Americans - BlackListedNews... - 1 views

www.blacklistednews.com/...M.html

NSA-Patriot-Act-NDAA NSA-Whistleblower Edward-Snowden Tyranny-by-Executive-Order spying

shared by Gary Edwards on 20 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 20 Aug 13
     
    "New Revelations Are Breaking Every Day" This web page is very well sourced and filled with links where you will get lost for hours. Excellent reference document ............................ Revelations about the breathtaking scope of government spying are coming so fast that it's time for an updated roundup: - Just weeks after NSA boss Alexander said that a review of NSA spying found not even one violation, the Washington Post published an internal NSA audit showing that the agency has broken its own rules thousands of times each year - 2 Senators on the intelligence committee said the violations revealed in the Post article were just the "tip of the iceberg" - Glenn Greenwald notes:  "One key to the WashPost story: the reports are internal, NSA audits, which means high likelihood of both under-counting & white-washing".(Even so, the White House tried to do damage control by retroactively changing on-the-record quotes) - The government is spying on essentially everything we do. It is not just "metadata" … although that is enough to destroy your privacy - The government has adopted a secret interpretation of the Patriot Act which allows it to pretend that "everything" is relevant … so it spies on everyone - NSA whistleblowers say that the NSA collects all of our conversations word-for-word - It's not just the NSA … Many other agencies, like the FBI and IRS - concerned only with domesticissues - spy on Americans as well - The information gained through spying is shared with federal, state and local agencies, and they are using that information to prosecute petty crimes such as drugs and taxes.  The agencies are instructed to intentionally "launder" the information gained through spying, i.e. to pretend that they got the information in a more legitimate way … and to hide that from defense attorneys and judges - Top counter-terror experts say that the government's mass spying doesn't keep us
Gary Edwards

U.S. Federal Deficits, Presidents, and Congress - 1 views

home.adelphi.edu/...deficits.html

Banksters national-debt-Ceiling Bush-Obama Presidential-debt banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 31 Jul 11 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 31 Jul 11
     
    Last updated 6/30/2011.  Awesome tabulation of the numbers.  Stephen Boch runs the deficit spending - deficit numbers for each President going back to 1911, about the time when the Federal Reserve, the IRS, and the Income Tax were first conceived.  He also adjust for inflation.  Not surprisingly, the Obama-Bush 2008-2009 debacle rattles the teeth.  The conversion of private Bankster debt into national "public" debt that took place during that shared fiscal year is something else.  Although Mr. Boch is primarily concerned about War and Budgets, Presidential and Congressional party affiliations, and their impact on the debt; there is nothing in the history of the USA that compares to what the Banksters have done.  Even if you add up the total debt of Bush and Obama, it doesn't come close to the $23 Trillion the Banksters sacked us with.  But then, without the full and complete complicity of Bush and Obama, and their Congresses, the Banksters could not have pulled this off.
Paul Merrell

Obama Pins Fate of Nuclear Pact on Documents From an Iranian "Curveball" - 0 views

www.truth-out.org/...ents-from-an-iranian-curveball

war & peace Iran Iranian-nukes-myth Israel neocons Iran-negotiations

shared by Paul Merrell on 27 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Obama administration officials insist "possible military dimensions" of Iran’s nuclear program must be resolved to the satisfaction of the IAEA to complete a nuclear agreement. But the term refers to discredited intelligence from suspect sources. One of the issues Obama administration officials are insisting must be resolved to the satisfaction of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) before any nuclear agreement may be concluded involves "possible military dimensions." That term refers to documents long discredited by German intelligence but which the United States and the IAEA have maintained came from a covert Iranian nuclear weapons program. A former senior German official has now revealed that the biggest collection of documents cited as evidence of such a covert Iran program actually came from a member of the Iranian terrorist organization Mujihedin-E-Khalq (MEK) and that German intelligence sought to warn the George W. Bush administration that the source of the documents was not trustworthy.
  • The use of those documents to make a case for action against Iran closely parallels the Bush administration's use of the testimony of the now-discredited Iraqi exile called "Curveball" to convince the US public to support war against Iraq. The parallel between the two episodes was recognized explicitly by the German intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), according to Karsten Voigt, who was the German Foreign Office's coordinator of North American-German relations. Voigt provided details of the story behind the appearance of the mysterious Iran nuclear documents in an interview with this writer last March for a book on the false narrative surrounding Iran's nuclear program that is newly published, Manufactured Crisis. 
  • In 2004, Powell and his State Department team still regarded the MEK as a disreputable terrorist organization, but the neoconservatives in the administration viewed it as useful as an anti-regime tool. The MEK was known to have served the interests of Israel's Mossad by providing a way to "launder" intelligence claims that Israel wanted to get out to the public but didn't want identified as having come from Israel. In the best-known case, the group's political front organization, the National Council of Resistance in Iran, had revealed the location of the Iranian uranium enrichment facility at Natanz in an August 2002 press conference, but it had been given the coordinates of the construction site by Israeli intelligence, according to both a senior IAEA official and an Iranian opposition group source, cited by Seymour Hersh and New Yorker writer Connie Bruck, respectively. The purported Iranian documents conveyed by the MEK to Western intelligence also displayed multiple indications of having been fabricated by an outside actor. The clearest and most significant anomaly was that the drawings of efforts to redesign the Shahab-3 missile to accommodate a nuclear weapons showed a missile that had already been abandoned by Iran's Defense Ministry by the time the drawings were said to have been made, as was confirmed by former IAEA deputy director general for safeguards, Olli Heinonen, in an interview with this writer. The Iranian abandonment of the earlier missile design became known to foreign analysts, however, only after Iran flight-tested a completely new missile design in August 2004 - after the "laptop documents" had already been conveyed to the BND by its MEK source. Whoever ordered those drawings was unaware of the switch to the new missile design, which would rule out a genuine Iranian Defense Ministry or military program.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • A former IAEA official familiar with those documents recalled in interview with Truthout that senior officials at the IAEA were immediately suspicious of the entire collection of documents given to the agency in 2005. "The documents were never really convincing," said the former official. The creators of the documents had taken publicly available information about people, organizations and location and had "woven their own narrative" around them, he said. Furthermore, he recalled finding anomalies in the stamps and signature blocs of documents. The fabricated documents, depicting Iran as redesigning their missile reentry vehicle to accommodate a nuclear weapon, among other things, fit into a Bush administration strategy - coordinated with Israel - that was aimed at justifying a military confrontation with Iran. The working assumption, as was revealed by David Wurmser, special assistant to Bolton and then to Cheney, in October 2007, was that the United States would probably need to use force to bring about that change once Iraq was brought under control. Bolton recalls in his memoirs that his aim was to move the Iran nuclear issue out of the IAEA to the United Nations Security Council, where the Bush administration would call for international action against Iran, and failing that, take unilateral action.
  • The IAEA got more documents and intelligence directly from Israel in 2008 and 2009 claiming Iranian work on nuclear weapons, according to then-IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei. The intelligence passed on by Israel included the claim that Iran had installed a large metal cylinder for high explosives tests at its Parchin military facility in 2000, which it intended to use for hydrodynamic tests of nuclear weapons designs. But the IAEA never revealed the information had come from Israel, covering up the primary fact relevant to its reliability and authenticity. The Safeguards Department had been prepared as early as 2009 to publish a dossier on what it called the "possible military dimensions" of the Iranian nuclear program that would accept all the intelligence reports and documents provided by Israel as genuine and accurate. But ElBaradei's successor, Yukiya Amano, waited to do so until November 2011, when the Obama administration was ready to organize an international coalition for harsh sanctions against Iran's oil export sector. The Obama administration returned to the "possible military dimensions" last November, insisting on a provision in the interim Iran nuclear agreement that required Iran to "resolve" all the "concerns" about that issue. A "senior administration official" briefing the press on the agreement November 24 said there would be no final agreement unless Iran showed that it had "come into compliance with its obligations under the NPT and its obligations to the IAEA."
  • In response to a request from Truthout for a confirmation or denial of the revelation by Karsten Voigt of the MEK role in transmitting the purported Iranian documents to the BND in 2004, NSC officials declined to comment on the matter, according to NSC spokesperson Bernadette Meehan. Some observers believe US negotiators hope to get Iran to admit to having had a nuclear weapons program. However, Iran is certainly not going to admit that the documents and intelligence reports it knows to be fabrications are true. But the Obama administration may well believe so strongly in the Iran nuclear narrative it inherited from the Bush administration and in the idea that the sanctions against Iran confer ultimate negotiating leverage on the United States that it sees an Iranian confession as a realistic goal. In any case, the decision to introduce the falsified evidence of the past into the final negotiations is bound to bring them to an impasse unless the United States is prepared to back down.
  • Paul Merrell on 27 Feb 14
     
    Neocons in the Obama administration are at it again, fueling the Iranian nukes myth with fabricated intelligence on behalf of Israel. 
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

U.S. First Shields Its Torturers and War Criminals From Prosecution, Now Officially Hon... - 0 views

theintercept.com/...ion-now-officially-honors-them

war & peace torture Cheney war crimes

shared by Paul Merrell on 05 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • As vice president, Dick Cheney was a prime architect of the worldwide torture regime implemented by the U.S. government (which extended far beyond waterboarding), as well as the invasion and destruction of Iraq, which caused the deaths of at least 500,000 people and more likely over a million. As such, he is one of the planet’s most notorious war criminals. President Obama made the decision in early 2009 to block the Justice Department from criminally investigating and prosecuting Cheney and his fellow torturers, as well as to protect them from foreign investigations and even civil liability sought by torture victims. Obama did that notwithstanding a campaign decree that even top Bush officials are subject to the rule of law and, more importantly, notwithstanding a treaty signed in 1984 by Ronald Reagan requiring that all signatory states criminally prosecute their own torturers. Obama’s immunizing Bush-era torturers converted torture from a global taboo and decades-old crime into a reasonable, debatable policy question, which is why so many GOP candidates are now openly suggesting its use.
  • But now, the Obama administration has moved from legally protecting Bush-era war criminals to honoring and gushing over them in public. Yesterday, the House of Representatives unveiled a marble bust of former Vice President Cheney, which — until a person of conscience vandalizes or destroys it — will reside in Emancipation Hall of the U.S. Capitol. At the unveiling ceremony, Cheney was, in the playful words of NPR, “lightly roasted” — as though he’s some sort of grumpy though beloved avuncular stand-up comic. Along with George W. Bush, one of the speakers in attendance was Vice President Joe Biden, who spoke movingly of Cheney’s kind and generous soul
  • Yesterday, the U.S. government unambiguously signaled to the world that not only does it regard itself as entirely exempt from the laws of wars, the principal Nuremberg prohibition against aggressive invasions, and global prohibitions on torture (something that has been self-evident for many years), but believes that the official perpetrators should be honored and memorialized provided they engage in these crimes on behalf of the U.S. government. That’s a message that most of the U.S. media and thus large parts of the American population will not hear, but much of the world will hear it quite loudly and clearly. How could they not?
Paul Merrell

Asia Times Online :: Middle East News, Iraq, Iran current affairs - 2 views

www.atimes.com/...MID-03-090913.html

war & peace Syria Obama Pipelinestan U.S.-credibility

shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Sep 13 - No Cached
Gary Edwards liked it
  • There is nothing tragic about the Obama presidency, capable of drawing the analytical talents of a neo-Plutarch or a neo-Gibbon. This is more like a Pirandello farce, a sort of Character in Search of An Author. Candidates to Author are well documented - from the Israel lobby to the House of Saud, from a select elite of the industrial-military-security complex to, most of all, the rarified banking/financial elite, the real Masters of the Universe. Poor Barack is just a cipher, a <a href='http://asianmedia.com/GAAN/www/delivery/ck.php?n=a9473bc7&cb=%n' target='_blank'><img src='http://asianmedia.com/GAAN/www/delivery/avw.php?zoneid=36&cb=%n&n=a9473bc7&ct0=%c' border='0' alt='' ></a> functionary of empire, whose ''deciding'' repertoire barely extends to what trademark smile to flash at the requisite photo-ops. There's nothing ''tragic'' about the fact that during this week - marking the 12th anniversary of 9/11 - this presidency will be fighting for its bombing ''credibility'' trying to seduce Republican hawks in the US Congress while most of the warmongers du jour happen to be Democrats.
  • Republicans are torn between supporting the president they love to hate and delivering him a stinging rebuke - as much as they are aching to follow the orders of their masters, ranging from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to military contractors. Once again, this is farce - caused by the fact that a man elected to finish off wars is eager to start yet another one. And once again without a United Nations vote. The White House ''strategy'' in this crucial negotiating week boils down to this; to convince the US Congress that the United States must start a war on Syria to punish an ''evil dictator'' - once again, as bad as Hitler - for gassing children. The evidence? It's ''indisputable''. Well, it's not ''irrefutable''. It's not even ''beyond-a-reasonable-doubt''. As Obama's Chief of Staff Denis McDonough admitted, with a straight face, it boils down to ''a quite strong common sense test, irrespective of the intelligence, that suggests that the regime carried this out''. So if this is really about ''common sense'', the president is obviously not being shown by his close coterie of sycophants this compendium of common sense, compiled by a group of top, extremely credible former US intelligence officials, which debunks all the ''evidence'' as flawed beyond belief. To evoke a farce from 12 years ago, this clearly seems to be a case of ''facts being fixed around the policy''.
  • The Arab street doesn't buy it because they clearly see through the hypocrisy; the desperate rush to ''punish'' the Bashar al-Assad government in Syria while justifying everything the apartheid state of Israel perpetrates in occupied Palestine. The Muslim world doesn't buy it because it clearly sees the demonization only applies to Muslims - from Arafat to bin Laden to Saddam to Gaddafi and now Assad. It would never apply to the military junta in Myanmar, which was clever enough to engineer an ''opening''; the next day Westerners were lining up to kiss the hem of Burmese longyis. It would never apply to the Islam Karimov dictatorship in Uzbekistan because ''we'' always need to seduce him as one of our bastards away from Russia and China. It eventually applies, on and off, to the Kim dynasty in North Korea, but with no consequences - because these are badass Asians who can actually respond to an US attack. Informed public opinion across the developing world does not buy it because they clearly see, examining the historical record, that Washington would never really be bothered with the sorry spectacle of Arabs killing Arabs, or Muslims killing Muslims, non-stop. The 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war is a prime piece of evidence.
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  • Then there's the ''credibility'' farce. The Obama administration has convoluted the whole world in its own self-spun net, insisting that the responsibility for the ''red line'' recklessly drawn by the president is in fact global. Yet the pesky ''world'' is not buying it.
  • At the Group of 20 summit last week, the BRICS group of emerging powers - Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa - as well as Indonesia and Argentina, clearly stressed that a war on Syria without UN Security Council approval would qualify Obama as a war criminal. Even among the European poodles ''support'' for the White House is extremely qualified. Germany's Angela Merkel and even France's attack dog Francois Hollande said the primacy is with the UN. The European Union as a whole wants a political solution. It's enlightening to remember that the EU in Brussels can issue arrest warrants for heads of EU governments guilty of war crimes. Someone in Paris must have warned attack dog Hollande that he would not welcome the prospect of slammer time. ''Evil'' as a political category is something worthy of the brain dead. The key question now revolves around the axis of warmongers - Washington, Israel and the House of Saud. Will the Israel lobby, the more discreet but no less powerful Saudi lobby, and the Return of the Living Dead neo-cons convince the US Congress to fight their war?
  • And then there's the curioser and curioser case of al-Qaeda - essentially the Arabic denomination for a CIA database of US-Pakistani-Saudi trained mujahideen during the 1980s: the oh so convenient transnational bogeyman that ''legitimized'' the Global War On Terror (GWOT) of the George W Bush years; the ''opening'' for al-Qaeda to move to Iraq; and now, no middle men; the CIA and the Obama administration fighting side-by-side with al-Qaeda in Syria. No wonder the denomination ''al-CIAeda'' has gone viral. With farce after farce after farce piling up in their own Tower of Babel, the much-vaunted ''US credibility'' is in itself the biggest farce of all. Politically, no one knows how the vacuum will be filled. It won't be via the UN. It won't be via the BRICS. It won't be via the G-20 - which is seriously divided; at least new multipolar players are carrying way more weight than US poodles. Much would be made to restore ''US credibility'' if the Obama administration had the balls to force both the House of Saud and Qatar (''300 people and a TV station'', in the epic definition of Saudi Arabia's Prince Bandar Sultan - aka Bandar Bush) to end once and for all their weaponizing of hardcore ''rebels'' and ultimately hardcore jihadis, and accept Iran in the negotiating table for a real Geneva II peace process in Syria. It won't happen because this bypasses farce. Once again; helpless Barack is just a paperboy. The plutocrats in charge are getting extremely nervous. The system is melting - and they need to act fast.
  • They need a Syria as docile as the Arab petro-monarchies. They want to hit Russia bad - and then discuss missile defense and Russian influence in Eastern Europe from a position of force. They want to hit Iran bad - and then continue to issue ultimatums from a position of force. They want to facilitate yet another Israeli attempt to capture southern Lebanon (it's the water, stupid). They want a monster gas pipeline from Qatar for European customers bypassing Iran and Syria as well as Gazprom. Most of all, this is all about control of natural resources and channels of distribution. These are real motives - and they have nothing to do with farce. Farce is only deployed to kill any possibility of real diplomacy and real political discussion. Farce is a theatrical mask - as in ''humanitarian'' imperialism - the ''acceptable'' version of the Dick Cheney-run years. It's as if Dick Cheney had never left the building; paperboy Barack is Dick Cheney with a ''human'' face. The only good outcome in this multi-sorrowful tale is that the real ''international community'', all around the world, has seen the naked Emperor in all its (farcical) glory.
  • Paul Merrell on 12 Sep 13
     
    What can I say? The iconoclastic Pepe Escobar strikes again. 
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Sep 13
     
    Outstanding article Paul. Wow! Watching the 911 link now. But here's one for you: Massimo Mazzucco's new 5-hour documentary "September 11- The New Pearl Harbor" summarizes 12 years of public debate on 9-11, looking at the events from all sides. Watch a trailer for the film here: http://goo.gl/M5c0dj Full five hours available here: http://www.luogocomune.net/site/modules/sections/index.php?op=viewarticle&artid=167 I listened to a two hour interview with Massimo last night. Awesome stuff.
  • Paul Merrell on 13 Sep 13
     
    A 5-hour documentary will have to wait for tomorrow. I'm about 7 hours away from a deadline for the current development cycle's Help file. :-) I do think Pepe is a off on a couple of details in this article. The Neocons were mostly silent on this one and Rumsfeld came out against the intervention, saying that Obama hadn't made a valid case for war. That's most likely because the Neocons are joined at the hip with Israeli government and that government is a house divided this time around, with only factions supporting the military strike. The current thinking in Tel Aviv/Jerusalem is, in line with the Israeli right's long term strategy, that it's just fine with them to have Muslims running around killing each other in Syria. That long-term strategy is to destabilize Israel's Arab neighbor states while Israel builds its economic empire and military hegemony in the region. Israeli government isn't exactly thrilled by the prospect of Obama delivering fulfillment of the Saudi goal of transforming Syria from a secular state into a non-secular Islamic state run by Wahabi extremists. Such a state, armed to the teeth by the U.S. and/or the Saudi-Qatari zillionaires could be very bad news for Israel. Notably, the very strongest case thus far that the August 21 chemical attack was conducted by the opposition forces with the U.S. and Syria in on it to create a false flag attack, has been delivered in installments by Yossef Bodansky, an Israeli-American uber-scholar of Islamic "terrorism" and Soviet/Russian weaponry who is incapable of criticising Israel's decades-long terrorism inflicted on the Palestinian people and Israel's continuing unlawful occupation of Palestine plus parts of Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. Bodanysky sits at the center of an intelligence web of intelligence professionals from nations worried about Islamic "terrorism." In other words, he's extremely pro-Israeli and to boot, very close to Mossad and Israel's IDF intelligence forces. Israel's AIPAC lobby d
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