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by Luther Blissett » Fri Nov 11, 2016 9:52 am
by seemslikeadream » Fri Nov 11, 2016 10:05 am
8bitagent » Fri Nov 11, 2016 3:49 am wrote:Anyone predicting the elite will encourage/stoke/stage a massive "Islamic terror" attack in America during Trumps first term, to bring to life the fear
of a Trump fascist era?
by 2012 Countdown » Fri Nov 11, 2016 10:41 am
by seemslikeadream » Fri Nov 11, 2016 10:56 am
by seemslikeadream » Fri Nov 11, 2016 1:13 pm
ELECTION 2016
The Architect of the Most Racist Law in Modern American History Has Been Named to Trump's Team
One more sign of the really bad things to come.
By Jen Hayden / Daily Kos November 11, 2016
Kris Kobach, the extremely controversial Kansas secretary of state, has been named to Donald Trump's transition team.
Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach has been asked to join President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team.
The team will advise Trump on policy issues leading up to his swearing-in in January, preparing him to begin his first 100 days in office. It’s an unpaid position for Kobach.
Kobach called the transition from Obama’s presidency to Trump’s “one of the sharpest transitions we’ve seen,” a 180-degree turn for the country.
Why should this terrify you? Because Donald Trump has just named one of the most racist politicians in all of America to his transition team. Kris Kobach was the architect of the most racist law in modern American history. SB 1070 passed in Arizona in 2010. What did it mean? If you have brown skin or an accent, police had a right to stop you, detain you and demand you prove your citizenship.
Arizona’s S.B. 1070 compels police to ask for papers from anyone they have a reasonable suspicion of being without status. Under this law any person of color, or anyone with a foreign accent, can be required to prove their status and be jailed—regardless of whether they are a citizen or an immigrant—until they can do so. The Supreme Court indicated that prolonged detention would be impermissible, but people’s rights will likely be violated before that limitation can be enforced.
By targeting certain groups of people living within the state, the Arizona law amounts to an ethnically divisive and deeply hostile social policy. It raises the specter of states treating people differently based solely on their appearance rather than on their actions. Every person in Arizona and states that pass S.B. 1070-like legislation will be required to carry proof of their legal status at all times or face the possibility of being detained. In practice it will be people of color that bear the brunt of these policies.
It was nicknamed the “Papers Please” law and thanks to Kris Kobach and the right-wing ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), two dozen copycat bills quickly spread to other conservative states. Can you imagine walking down the street and police having the power to stop you and your children and throw you in jail on the suspicion alone that maybe you don’t belong? Because you have brown skin or an accent? Terrifying, right?
What if I told you that same man, Kris Kobach, spoke to a group of White Nationalists just last year?
On Oct. 25, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach was a featured speaker at a “writers' workshop” put on by the white nationalist The Social Contract Press (TSCP), according to a report from the Center for New Community. For an elected official, this is a problem.
The Social Contract Press is a Michigan-based publishing house that routinely puts out race-baiting articles penned by well known white nationalists. The press is a program of U.S., Inc., the foundation created by John Tanton, the racist founder and principal ideologue of the modern nativist movement and TSCP’s publisher. Tanton has assiduously cultivated relationships with Holocaust deniers, eugenicists and various other extremists over the years. And he’s clear about his racism: “I’ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.”
Before becoming the secretary of state in Kansas, Kobach worked for an organization the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated as a hate group:
Kobach’s closeness to hate groups runs far deeper than speaking to TSCP. For years, Kobach has worked as a lawyer for the legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). The Southern Poverty Law Center has listed FAIR as a hate group since 2007—and for good reason.
Tanton founded FAIR, and its current President Dan Stein has said, among other things, “Immigrants don’t come all church-loving, freedom-loving, God-fearing … Many of them hate America, hate everything that the United States stands for.” In another instance, Stein said that the 1965 Immigration Act, which undid four decades of explicitly racist immigration policy in the United States, “was a great way to retaliate against Anglo-Saxon dominance and hubris…and it’s a form of revengism, or revenge, that these forces continue to push the immigration policy that they know full well are [sic] creating chaos and will continue to create chaos down the line.”
Kris Kobach is also extremely dedicated to making sure that minorities, women and low-income voters can’t participate in elections. His outrageously unconstitutional laws and actions were struck down by the federal courts last month. From the Kansas City Star:
Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach has suffered another stinging, embarrassing loss in court. And that’s a victory for the rights of voters in the Sunflower State.
Kobach’s anti-voter efforts were slapped down Friday by a federal appeals court in the District of Columbia.
The editorial went even further:
Earlier this year, the often-smug Kobach had assured people that the courts would uphold his attempt to make it harder to vote.
But that hasn’t happened at any step of the way, as courts often have ruled against Kobach’s disdainful attitude toward voters — especially those who have low incomes or are minorities.
This is a repulsive signal from Donald Trump. If this is a sign of things to come, buckle up. We are going to have to fight like hell to save this democracy.
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/a ... rumps-team
by RocketMan » Fri Nov 11, 2016 6:19 pm
by DrEvil » Fri Nov 11, 2016 7:45 pm
by brekin » Fri Nov 11, 2016 8:13 pm
DrEvil » Fri Nov 11, 2016 6:45 pm wrote:^^Sooo.. A whole bunch of lunatics plus his son in law, his daughter and his two eldest sons.
Jesus Christ. If Clinton was a dumpster fire then Trump is a burning dumpster full of evil clowns and toxic hair products being thrown out of a plane over an elementary school.
by seemslikeadream » Fri Nov 11, 2016 9:29 pm
Intelligence community is already feeling a sense of dread about Trump
The lobby of CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. (Larry Downing/Reuters)
By Greg Miller November 9
The election results were only hours old Wednesday when a sober team of intelligence analysts carrying black satchels and secure communications gear began preparing to give President-elect Donald Trump his first unfiltered look at the nation’s secrets.
The initial presentation — to be delivered as early as Thursday — is likely to be a read-through of the President’s Daily Brief, the same highly classified summary of security developments delivered every day to President Obama. After that, U.S. intelligence officials are expected to schedule a series of meetings to apprise Trump of covert CIA operations against terrorist groups, the intercepted communications of world leaders, and satellite photos of nuclear installations in North Korea.
The sessions are designed to bring a new president up to speed on what the nation’s spy agencies know and do. But with Trump, the meetings are likely to be tense encounters between wary intelligence professionals and a newly minted president-elect who has demonstrated abundant disdain for their work.
[75 retired senior diplomats sign letter opposing Trump for president]
A palpable sense of dread settled on the intelligence community Wednesday as Hillary Clinton, the candidate many expected to win, conceded the race to a GOP upstart who has dismissed U.S. spy agencies’ views on Russia and Syria, and even threatened to order the CIA to resume the use of interrogation methods condemned as torture.
How the world is reacting to results of the U.S. election
View Photos People around the globe watched as Donald Trump was elected the 45th president of the United States.
“It’s fear of the unknown,” said a senior U.S. national security official. “We don’t know what he’s really like under all the talk. . . . How will that play out over the next four years or even the next few months? I don’t know if there is going to be a tidal wave of departures of people who were going to stay around to help Hillary’s team but are now going to be, ‘I’m out of here.’ ”
“I’m half dreading, half holding my breath going to work today,” said the official, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the subject.
Michael Hayden, the retired Air Force general and former CIA director who in 2008 briefed a highly skeptical President-elect Obama on the agency’s counterterrorism operations, said that intelligence officials are likely to approach their initial meetings with Trump with professionalism, but also consternation.
“I cannot remember another president-elect who has been so dismissive of intelligence received during a campaign or so suspicious of the quality and honesty of the intelligence he was about to receive,” Hayden said in a telephone interview Wednesday. The initial meetings with Trump in the coming weeks are likely to be professionally conducted, he said, but characterized by “a little caution, a little concern.”
[Former CIA chief: Trump is Russia’s useful fool]
Trump has already received at least two preliminary briefings, arranged during the campaign by Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. But those were done out of tradition and courtesy, providing both candidates broad overviews of security issues while holding back secrets about drone strikes, eavesdropping capabilities and other covert programs.
Intelligence officials were deeply troubled early in the campaign when Trump declared that he might be inclined to instruct the CIA to resume operations to capture terrorism suspects and subject them to brutal interrogation measures, including waterboarding. That agency program was dismantled in 2009, and measures passed since then would make its resumption illegal.
We asked people around the world for their reaction to Trump's victory Play Video1:30
In Mexico, China, Russia and Israel we ask people what they think of the election of Donald J. Trump as the 45th president of the United States. (Jason Aldag/The Washington Post)
Trump subsequently backed away from those comments, which were interpreted by some as empty saber-rattling.
“He could revive a program of secret prisons” overseas, said John Rizzo, former acting general counsel of the CIA, but would be likely to find it difficult to get any foreign country to agree to host one.
[Senate report on CIA program details brutality, dishonesty]
His other problem would be convincing the workforce at the CIA to carry out his wishes. “There would be such pushback,” said Rizzo, whose confirmation as general counsel was derailed because of his participation in crafting the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques used on al-Qaeda suspects in the early 2000s. “Given what it cost the agency” in terms of reputation, “there would be extremely strong resistance,” he said.
More recently, U.S. intelligence officials have been disturbed by Trump’s positions on Russia — his statements encouraging Moscow to seek to steal Clinton’s emails and his refusal to accept the intelligence community’s conclusion that the Kremlin was behind a cyberespionage campaign targeting Clinton and the Democratic Party.
That finding was presented to Trump in one of his early intelligence briefings and then reinforced last month when Clapper’s office took the rare step of issuing a public statement declaring Russia complicit in the hacks.
[Trump praises Putin at national security forum]
Trump treated that determination as unfounded rumor. “I don’t know if they’re behind it, and I think it’s public relations, frankly,” Trump said last month.
Trump has vowed to obliterate terrorist groups including the Islamic State but has offered few specifics on how he would deploy the principal entities in that fight: the CIA and the military’s elite Joint Special Operations Command.
The Obama administration spent years developing guidelines for counterterrorism operations, requiring multiagency approval on most drone-strike targets and “near certainty” that no civilians would be harmed.
That “playbook” is spelled out in presidential orders that will remain in effect unless Trump specifically moves to scrap them, administration officials said. Trump could rescind the procedures or issue his own orders setting out revised rules governing the use of drones and commando teams. But officials said a decision to throw out the Obama playbook risks sparking backlash from career professionals at the Pentagon and the CIA who have been implementing the rules since they were put in place.
The absence of seasoned national security officials on Trump’s campaign staff has been a source of concern at the CIA, the Pentagon and other agencies. His most prominent adviser with intelligence-related credentials is retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who was forced out of his job as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and dined with Russian President Vladimir Putin last year.
Speculation on where Flynn and former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani might serve in a Trump administration added to the unease among national security officials Wednesday. “Is Giuliani going to be our attorney general?” one official asked.
Some officials drew comparisons to earlier eras — including the administration of Richard Nixon — that were characterized by White House hostility toward key departments and agencies, noting that the Justice Department, Pentagon and CIA survived.
What Trump has said about the CIA and the military has “put us in a difficult position, but the flip side is there is an institutional ability to survive,” said a second senior U.S. official. “Bureaucracies chug along and take lumps and have conflicts. If you ask about rank and file, for a long time there has been a sense that [presidents and administrations] come and go, but we’re still here. You’ve got to assume that the Foreign Service at State, generals at the Department of Defense have that belief. There’s an institutional stability built into the system that can withstand spasms.”
Dana Priest and Adam Entous contributed to this report.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/na ... story.html
by RocketMan » Sat Nov 12, 2016 1:02 am
Intelligence officials were deeply troubled early in the campaign when Trump declared that he might be inclined to instruct the CIA to resume operations to capture terrorism suspects and subject them to brutal interrogation measures, including waterboarding. That agency program was dismantled in 2009, and measures passed since then would make its resumption illegal.
“He could revive a program of secret prisons” overseas, said John Rizzo, former acting general counsel of the CIA, but would be likely to find it difficult to get any foreign country to agree to host one.
His other problem would be convincing the workforce at the CIA to carry out his wishes. “There would be such pushback,” said Rizzo, whose confirmation as general counsel was derailed because of his participation in crafting the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques used on al-Qaeda suspects in the early 2000s. “Given what it cost the agency” in terms of reputation, “there would be extremely strong resistance,” he said.
by 8bitagent » Sat Nov 12, 2016 5:28 am
DrEvil » Fri Nov 11, 2016 6:45 pm wrote:^^Sooo.. A whole bunch of lunatics plus his son in law, his daughter and his two eldest sons.
Jesus Christ. If Clinton was a dumpster fire then Trump is a burning dumpster full of evil clowns and toxic hair products being thrown out of a plane over an elementary school.
by 8bitagent » Sat Nov 12, 2016 5:34 am
RocketMan » Sat Nov 12, 2016 12:02 am wrote:Intelligence officials were deeply troubled early in the campaign when Trump declared that he might be inclined to instruct the CIA to resume operations to capture terrorism suspects and subject them to brutal interrogation measures, including waterboarding. That agency program was dismantled in 2009, and measures passed since then would make its resumption illegal.
I mean what the actual fuck. First they get to torture with impunity and then they get to clamber up on a high horse about it? Jeeesus Christ.
Also:“He could revive a program of secret prisons” overseas, said John Rizzo, former acting general counsel of the CIA, but would be likely to find it difficult to get any foreign country to agree to host one.
His other problem would be convincing the workforce at the CIA to carry out his wishes. “There would be such pushback,” said Rizzo, whose confirmation as general counsel was derailed because of his participation in crafting the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques used on al-Qaeda suspects in the early 2000s. “Given what it cost the agency” in terms of reputation, “there would be extremely strong resistance,” he said.
by seemslikeadream » Sat Nov 12, 2016 8:18 am
Donald Trump May Select an Architect of Bush’s Torture Program to Run CIA
Lee Fang
November 11 2016, 10:14 a.m.
Donald Trump may select Jose Rodriguez, one of the primary architects of the George W. Bush torture program, to run the Central Intelligence Agency, according to a law firm with close ties to Trump.
Rodriguez, the former director of the National Clandestine Service, helped developed the CIA black sites, secret prisons operated in foreign countries where interrogators used a range of torture tactics, including the use of “waterboarding,” the simulated drowning technique once used by the Khmer Rouge and Nazi agents to glean information from detainees.
At least 136 individuals were detained and tortured by the CIA. Interrogation tactics also included forced nudity, sleep deprivation while being vertically shackled, and confinement in a small box.
Rodriguez is unapologetic about his role in the program, telling 60 Minutes that “we did the right thing for the right reason,” even if it meant “going to the border of legality.”
The suggestion that Rodriguez may head the CIA was made in a post-election prediction document published by Dentons, a law and lobbying firm where Trump confidant Newt Gingrich serves as a senior advisor. Dentons was also retained by Make American Number 1, one of the primary Super PACs supporting Trump’s candidacy.
Dentons’s Public Policy and Regulation team, the division that employs Gingrich, published the prediction document. The firm did not respond to a request for comment.
WASHINGTON, DC - NOVEMBER 18: Jose Rodriguez, Former head of CIA's Counterterrorism Center, attend the red carpet and private screening of Showtime's documentary "The Spymasters - CIA In The Crosshairs" at The National Press Club on November 18, 2015 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Paul Morigi/Getty Images for Showtime) Jose Rodriguez, the former head of the CIA’s the former director of the National Clandestine Service, at the National Press Club on Nov. 18, 2015, in Washington, DC. Photo: Paul Morigi/Getty ImagesTrump has said he will bring back waterboarding and argued that he doesn’t believe the tactic “is tough enough.” Last summer, during an interview in New Hampshire, Trump announced that he we needed to “get much tougher as a country,” arguing that he would encourage interrogation tactics, including “things that are unthinkable almost.”
Rodriguez not only crafted the Bush torture program, but played a key role in the cover up. Following revelations of the effort, Rodriguez worked directly to get rid of the evidence and destroyed 92 video tapes revealing the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times.
In destroying the tapes, Rodriguez claimed that he was simply protecting agents in the field from reprisals from terrorists. But as one declassified email noted, Rodriguez was in fact concerned about public backlash from the brutal visuals. “Heat from destroying is nothing compared to what it would be if the tapes ever got into [the] public domain — he said that out of context, they would make us look terrible; it would be ‘devastating’ to us,” the email noted.
Rodriguez has defended his tenure at the CIA, telling Amy Davidson of the New Yorker that his interrogation techniques were “sometimes harsh, but fell well short of what is torture.” Rodriguez argued that such methods were valid because they were reviewed by government lawyers and certain members of Congress were briefed.
Other former Bush officials may snag positions in the new Trump administration. Stephen Hadley, the former National Security Advisor to Bush and current board member to Raytheon, could serve as Secretary of Defense, the Dentons memo predicts. Chris Christie, a former prosecutor in Bush’s Department of Justice, may win an appointment as Attorney General. Christie, notably, has staked much of his law enforcement claim to fame on his prosecution of three brothers over a plot to attack the Fort Dix military base. An investigation by The Intercept’s Murtaza Hussain a range of problems in the prosecution, with much of the evidence supplied by highly paid informants who coerced the defendants into making vague statements that were later maliciously interpreted by prosecutors.
On CNN on Wednesday, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., a key Trump supporter on Capitol Hill and a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, appeared to lay the groundwork for the return of waterboarding, claiming to host Wolf Blitzer that the technique “isn’t torture.” The International Committee of the Red Cross, which oversees the Geneva Conventions, declared in 2014 that the waterboarding meets the definition of torture under U.S. and international law.
https://theintercept.com/2016/11/11/trump-cia-torture/
by seemslikeadream » Sat Nov 12, 2016 12:30 pm
by 8bitagent » Sun Nov 13, 2016 3:12 am
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