Lazy Saturday Reads

Posted: December 10, 2016 | Author: | Filed under: Barack Obama, Foreign Affairs, morning reads, Republican politics, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , | 93 Comments

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Good Morning!!

So now we know for certain what many of us have believed for months: Russia interfered in the 2016 election in order to put Donald in the White House. Not only that, we know that Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and other GOP leaders knew this and argued against release that information to the American public. We now know that Mitch McConnell told President Obama that if the administration. And perhaps just as troubling, we know that President Obama chose not to release the information even after James Comey put his own finger on the scale in order to elect .

The Washington Post: Secret CIA assessment says Russia was trying to help Trump win White House.

The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter.

Intelligence agencies have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and others, including Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, according to U.S. officials. Those officials described the individuals as actors known to the intelligence community and part of a wider Russian operation to boost Trump and hurt Clinton’s chances.

“It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,” said a senior U.S. official briefed on an intelligence presentation made to U.S. senators. “That’s the consensus view.”

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This was made very clear to the President Obama and to Congressional leaders well before the election. And James Comey knew all about it too.

The Obama administration has been debating for months how to respond to the alleged Russian intrusions, with White House officials concerned about escalating tensions with Moscow and being accused of trying to boost Clinton’s campaign.

In September, during a secret briefing for congressional leaders, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) voiced doubts about the veracity of the intelligence, according to officials present.

The response of the transition team was a series of blatant lies.

The Trump transition team dismissed the findings in a short statement issued Friday evening. “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It’s now time to move on and ‘Make America Great Again,’ ” the statement read.

Here is what #tRump told Time Magazine in their “person of the year” interview:

I don’t believe they interfered. That became a laughing point, not a talking point, a laughing point. Any time I do something, they say ‘oh, Russia interfered.’

Why not get along with Russia? And they can help us fight ISIS, which is both costly in lives and costly in money. And they’re effective and smart.

It could be Russia. And it could be China. And it could be some guy in his home in New Jersey.

I believe that it could have been Russia and it could have been any one of many other people. Sources or even individuals.

As we all know, is not even taking his daily intelligence briefings, and his transition team has not even been in contact with the intelligence officials who need to help them get up to speed on how these government functions work. It seems pretty clear that plans to get his security briefings from Vladimir Putin.

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Where are the Democrats? This is a constitutional crisis. It is hundreds of times more serious than Watergate, and yet our so-called “leaders” are ho-humming and getting ready for their long winter vacations. We need immediate public investigations not only of the Russian interference but also of FBI Director James Comey. And Mitch McConnell needs to be forced to answer some tough questions STAT.

The New York Times reported this morning that Russia also hacked the RNC but held onto the data, probably for future use. They’ll be able to blackmail Republicans to prevent serious investigations.

American intelligence agencies have concluded with “high confidence” that Russia acted covertly in the latter stages of the presidential campaign to harm Hillary Clinton’s chances and promote Donald J. Trump, according to senior administration officials.

They based that conclusion, in part, on another finding — which they say was also reached with high confidence — that the Russians hacked the Republican National Committee’s computer systems in addition to their attacks on Democratic organizations, but did not release whatever information they gleaned from the Republican networks.

In the months before the election, it was largely documents from Democratic Party systems that were leaked to the public. Intelligence agencies have concluded that the Russians gave the Democrats’ documents to WikiLeaks.

Republicans have a different explanation for why no documents from their networks were ever released. Over the past several months, officials from the Republican committee have consistently said that their networks were not compromised, asserting that only the accounts of individual Republicans were attacked. On Friday, a senior committee official said he had no comment.

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But that’s not what the intelligence community says.

It is possible that in hacking into the Republican committee, Russian agents were simply hedging their bets. The attack took place in the spring, the senior officials said, about the same time that a group of hackers believed to be linked to the G.R.U., Russia’s military intelligence agency, stole the emails of senior officials of the Democratic National Committee. Intelligence agencies believe that the Republican committee hack was carried out by the same Russians who penetrated the Democratic committee and other Democratic groups.

The finding about the Republican committee is expected to be included in a detailed report of “lessons learned” that Mr. Obama has ordered intelligence agencies to assemble before he leaves office on Jan. 20. That report is intended, in part, to create a comprehensive history of the Russian effort to influence the election, and to solidify the intelligence findings before Mr. Trump is sworn in.

Too little, too late. Perhaps if some Republicans discover some patriotic feelings in their hearts, we will get investigations. Meanwhile the Electoral Colleges votes on December 19.

AP Big Story: Obama orders review of election-season hacking.

President Barack Obama has ordered intelligence officials to conduct a broad review of election-season cyberattacks, including the email hacks that rattled the presidential campaign and raised fresh concerns about Russia’s meddling in U.S. elections, the White House said Friday.

The review, led by intelligence agencies, will be a “deep dive” into a possible pattern of increased “malicious cyber activity” timed to the campaign season, White House spokesman Eric Schultz said. The review will look at the tactics, targets, key actors and the U.S. government’s response to the recent email hacks, as well as incidents reported in past elections, he said.

The president ordered up the report earlier this week and asked that it be completed before he leaves office next month, Schultz said.

“The president wanted this done under his watch because he takes it very seriously,” he said. “We are committed to ensuring the integrity of our elections.”

Just not seriously enough to do it before the election.

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Aaron Blake at The Fix on the situation Republicans are in now:

The report highlights and exacerbates the increasingly fraught situation in which congressional Republicans find themselves with regard to Russia and Trump. By acknowledging and digging into the increasing evidence that Russia helped — or at least attempted to help — tip the scales in Trump’s favor, they risk raising questions about whether Trump would have won without Russian intervention.

Trump, after all, won by a margin of about 80,000 votes cast across three states, winning each of the decisive states by less than one percentage point. So even a slight influence could have plausibly made the difference, though we’ll never be able to prove it one way or another.

While saying that Russia clearly tried to help Trump doesn’t inherently call into question the legitimacy of Trump’s win —earlier Friday, the White House made sure to emphasize that it’s not making that case — it’s not hard to connect the dots. And Trump and his party know it. The Post’s report cited Republicans who expressed skepticism about the available evidence when presented with it in September, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

In addition, any GOP effort to dig into the matter risks antagonizing the president-elect, who has said flatly that he doesn’t believe Russia interfered with the election, despite receiving intelligence briefings to the contrary. And he’s proved more than willing to go after fellow Republicans who run afoul of him.

On the other hand, if Republicans play down the issue, they risk giving a pass to an antagonistic foreign power that significant majorities of Americans and members of Congress do not trust and which, if the evidence is accurate, wields significant power to wage successful cyberwarfare with the United States.

176294_600 one hero in all this is Harry Reid, who wrote an explosive letter to James Comey in October. From the WaPo:

Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid on Sunday accused FBI Director James B. Comey of breaking federal law in disclosing possible new evidence in the Hillary Clinton email investigation.

Reid (D-Nev.) said in a letter sent to Comey that his disclosure to Congress, made 11 days before the election, might have violated the Hatch Act, which prohibits partisan politicking by government employees.

“Your actions in recent months have demonstrated a disturbing double standard for the treatment of sensitive information, with what appears to be a clear intent to aid one political party over another,” Reid wrote. “I am writing to inform you that my office has determined that these actions may violate the Hatch Act, which bars FBI officials from using their official authority to influence an election. Through your partisan actions, you may have broken the law.”

Reid did a telephone interview with Joy Reid this morning, and if you didn’t hear it, please check it out. Reid’s entire show this morning was “must watch TV.”

Please post your thoughts and links in the comment thread and enjoy your weekend. We don’t have much longer before our government is turned over to an authoritarian puppet of Russia.

Pakistan May Have Outed Chief of CIA’s Islamibad Station

Posted: December 17, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Central Intelligence Agency, Foreign Affairs, Pakistan | Tags: , , , , , | 12 Comments

Things seem to be getting pretty dicey for the U.S. in Pakistan. The Guardian UK reports that:

The CIA has pulled its station chief from Islamabad, one of America’s most important spy posts, after his cover was blown in a legal action brought by victims of US drone strikes in the tribal belt.

The officer, named in Pakistan as Jonathan Banks, left the country yesterday, after a tribesman publicly accused him of being responsible for the death of his brother and son in a CIA drone strike in December 2009. Karim Khan, a journalist from North Waziristan, called for Banks to be charged with murder and executed.

In a rare move, the CIA called Banks home yesterday, citing “security concerns” and saying he had received death threats, Washington officials told Associated Press. Khan’s lawyer said he was fleeing the possibility of prosecution.

Banks may have only a business visa, and so wouldn’t have diplomatic immunity if he were required to testify in the trial. According to the article, recalling a station chief is extremely rare. Although the Pakistani government supposedly supports U.S. drone strikes, many Pakistanis are understandably outraged by them.

The recall comes at a sensitive moment for Washington. This week’s Afghanistan policy review brought fresh focus on Taliban safe havens in Pakistan’s tribal belt. Meanwhile CIA drone attacks – which are co-ordinated from the Islamabad embassy – have reached a new peak. Three drones struck targets in Khyber, a previously untouched tribal agency, on Friday, reportedly killing 24 people and signalling a widening of the CIA covert campaign….There have been over 100 strikes so this year, twice as many as in 2009.

The Guardian says there are rumors that Banks may have been outed by someone in the Pakistani intelligence agency (the ISI), because “several senior ISI officials were named in a New York legal action brought by relatives of the 2008 Mumbai attacks.”

The New York Times also has posted an article about this.

On Thursday and Friday, the United States appeared to make good on promises to expand its own efforts to attack the militants, with drone strikes for the first time hitting Khyber agency in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas. Most drone strikes this year have targeted North Waziristan. Pakistani government officials said at least 26 militants were killed in the most recent attacks.

The outing of the C.I.A. station chief is tied to the spy agency’s campaign of drone strikes, which are very unpopular in Pakistan, although the government has given its tacit approval for them.

Gee, no kidding. I mean who wants to have their house blown up unexpectedly by agents of a foreign power? Interestingly, the Times avoided telling its readers the outed agent’s name, even though the Guardian had already published it. The Times is truly the Obama administration’s house organ. According article,

The intensifying mistrust between the C.I.A. and I.S.I., two uneasy but co-dependent allies, could hardly come at a worse time. The Obama administration relies on Pakistan’s support for the armed drone program, which this year has launched a record number of strikes in North Waziristan against terror suspects.

“We will continue to help strengthen Pakistani capacity to root out terrorists,” President Obama said on Thursday. “Nevertheless, progress has not come fast enough. So we will continue to insist to Pakistani leaders that terrorist safe havens within their borders must be dealt with.”

Not being an expert on foreign affairs, I’m not sure if this statement triggered anger in Pakistan or not. Maybe President Obama should leave diplomacy to his Secretary of State.

What Devil Did Obama Make a Deal With?

Posted: November 15, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Black Agenda Report, just because, Team Obama, The Bonus Class | Tags: , , , , , , | 67 Comments

Barack Obama speaking at 2007 fundraiser in New York

As Dakinikat pointed out in her latest post, Paul Krugman used his column today to describe (and bemoan) Barack Obama’s negotiating style and his apparent lack of ideology. Krugman argues that the problem we face now (emphasis added) is:

…the contrast between the administration’s current whipped-dog demeanor and Mr. Obama’s soaring rhetoric as a candidate. How did we get from “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for” to here?

But the bitter irony goes deeper than that: the main reason Mr. Obama finds himself in this situation is that two years ago he was not, in fact, prepared to deal with the world as he was going to find it. And it seems as if he still isn’t.

In retrospect, the roots of current Democratic despond go all the way back to the way Mr. Obama ran for president. Again and again, he defined America’s problem as one of process, not substance — we were in trouble not because we had been governed by people with the wrong ideas, but because partisan divisions and politics as usual had prevented men and women of good will from coming together to solve our problems. And he promised to transcend those partisan divisions….the real question was whether Mr. Obama could change his tune when he ran into the partisan firestorm everyone who remembered the 1990s knew was coming. He could do uplift — but could he fight?

So far the answer has been no.

Although Krugman has come a long way from the days when he defended Obama’s health care “reform” bill, he is still clinging to the notion that Obama is a well-meaning, although hopelessly weak and gullible liberal. But what if Obama never intended to keep his campaign promises? What if he always planned to help cover up the Bush administration’s crimes and continue their wars?

In a recent post, I linked to this article at Common Dreams: Obama Was Used, And Is Now Used Up, by Robert Freeman. Freeman writes:

Barack Obama was used. Of course, he knew he was being used when he made the deal. But what he didn’t know was how quickly he would be used up. Now he has to face two years of humiliation knowing that he betrayed the people and the country he claimed to champion – and knowing that everyone else knows it as well – but also knowing that he’s gotten what’s coming to him.

Obama made a deal to get the job in the first place. The deal was that he would carry on with Bush’s bailout of the banks, with Bush’s two wars, with Bush’s suppression of civil liberties, that he wouldn’t prosecute or even investigate any of the enormous fraud that had brought down the country, or the lies that had railroaded it into war.

I haven’t been able to learn very much about Freeman. According to the description on one of his earlier Common Dreams pieces,

he teaches history and economics at Los Altos High School in Los Altos, CA. He is the founder of One Dollar For Life, a national non-profit that helps American students build schools in the developing world through contributions of one dollar.

He has been contributing to Common Dreams since at least 2004. Freeman doesn’t say with whom Obama supposedly made a deal, or why that entity would want the U.S. to continue the Bush administration’s policies. For all I know, Freeman could be just talking through his hat when he makes this unsourced claim; but isn’t it something many of us have wondered about for the past several years? I know I have.

Still, Why would Obama do that? Why would he campaign on high-minded generalities, leading gullible “progressives” and even well-meaning liberals to believe he would transform Washington DC and reverse Bush policies like torture, indefinite detention, and concentration of power in the executive branch?

Why did the financial community back him so strongly? Wasn’t it most likely their desire to get their hands on the Social Security trust fund? Perhaps they made a deal with Obama to engineer an assault on Social Security, Medicare, and other social programs, but would the financial community also demand that Obama continue the Bush policies of torture, detention, and endless war?

Now let’s look at the latest article by Bruce Dixon at The Black Agenda Report: Barack Obama, Social Security and the Final Irrelevance of the Black Misleadership Class. Dixon also claims that Obama’s betrayal of all that is liberal was foreordained because of a deal to make him President.

The masters of corporate media proclaim that their raid on social security, is a done deal. “Entitlements,” their code word for Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, will be cut in the lame duck session of Congress, with Democratic president Barack Obama taking the lead. Though the outlines of this raid have been clear for months, what passes for black America’s political leadership class have been silent. As far as we know, they have not been ordered to shut up. They have silenced themselves, in abject deference to the corporate black Democrat in the White House.

It took a Republican Richard Nixon to open relations with China in the seventies. It took Democrat Bill Clinton to impose draconian cuts in welfare and end college courses for prisoners in the nineties. And today, only a black Democratic president can sufficiently disarm Democrats, only a black Democrat can demobilize the black polity completely enough for the raid on “entitlements” to be successful.

Dixon then points out a fact that many white “progressives” are missing:

Many among the current Congressional Black Caucus are utterly unprepared to stand against the corporate onslaught to gut social security because it is backed by the same forces who have made their political careers possible, and spearheaded by a black Democrat in the White House. The NAACP and similar advocacy organizations too have neutered themselves with a generation of corporate financing and the “reward” of regular meetings with White House officials

Some “progressives” are discussing as possibilities for a primary challenger to Obama in 2012 or, alternatively, a third party challenger. Both of these efforts will fail, because any challenger to Obama will not win the black vote. Dixon implies that Obama’s “deal with the devil” was a sellout to corporate interests.

Inflicting a fatal wound on social security has been the aim of America’s business class for generations. It is a project upon which some of them have spent billions. Thanks to our lack of a functioning black press, or electronic media that address black audiences, most African Americans don’t know who billionaire Pete Peterson is.

Peterson is a billionaire who announced his intention almost 20 years ago to spend every last dime of his net worth to kill social security…. [Peterson has] push[…] the fraudulent notion that social security is “a Ponzi scheme,” unsustainable, a drain on the nation’s finances, and won’t be there when people currently in their thirties and forties get old anyhow. A decades-long campaign of fear, uncertainty and doubt has been waged against the American people to prepare for the final undoing of the New Deal and Great Society programs of social security, Medicaid and Medicare. But it’s a campaign most of us are barely aware of.

Is Dixon right? Did Obama sell out in order to destroy social security? Then who demanded that Obama continue all of the Bush policies and block any close examination of Bush administration crimes?

I’m not suggesting any vast, all-encompassing conspiracy–clearly Obama’s corporate and political backers had differing goals in mind when they gave him their money. They probably didn’t all gather in a large room and deliberately plan to make Obama President. Some, like Teddy Kennedy, probably believed that Obama would really follow in JFK’s footsteps, inspiring a new generation to enter politics and change the system in radical ways. Read the rest of this entry »