Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
Did Clinton’s Emails Expose CIA Agents?
June 5, 2016
Even as Hillary Clinton closes in on the Democratic nomination, facts continue to emerge indicating that her sloppy email practices may have endangered secrets, including the identities of covert operatives, writes Peter Van Buren.
By Peter Van Buren
These are facts. You can look at the source documents yourself. This is not opinion, conjecture, or rumor. Hillary Clinton transmitted the names of American intelligence officials via her unclassified email.
From a series of Clinton emails, numerous names were redacted in the State Department releases with the classification code “B3 CIA PERS/ORG,” a highly specialized classification that means the information, if released, would violate the Central Intelligence Act of 1949 by exposing the names of CIA officials.
The Freedom of information Act (FOIA) requires the government to release all, or all parts of a document, that do not fall under a specific set of allowed exemptions. If information cannot be excluded, it must be released. If some part of a document can be redacted to allow the rest of the document to be released, then that is what must be done. Each redaction must be justified by citing a specific reason for exclusion.
But don’t believe me. Instead, look at page two of this State Department document which lists the exemptions.
Note specifically the different types of “(b)(3)” redactions, including “CIA PERS/ORG.” As common sense would dictate, the government will not release the names of CIA employees via the FOIA process. It would — literally — be against the law. What law? Depending on the nature of the individual’s job at CIA, National Security Act of 1947, the CIA Act of 1949, various laws that govern undercover/clandestine CIA officers and, potentially, the Espionage Act of 1917.
Yet Hillary’s emails contain at least three separate, specific instances where she mentioned in an unclassified email transmitted across the open Internet and wirelessly to her Blackberry the names of CIA personnel. Here they are. Look for the term “(b)(3) CIA PERS/ORG” Click on the links and see for yourself: CIA One; CIA Two; CIA Three
There are also numerous instances of exposure of the names and/or email addresses of NSA employees (“B3 NSA”); see page 23 inside this longer PDF document.
Why It Matters
— These redactions point directly to violations of specific laws. It is not a “mistake” or minor rule-breaking.
— These redactions strongly suggest that the Espionage Act’s standard of mishandling national defense information through “gross negligence” may have been met by Clinton.
— There is no ambiguity in this information, no possible claims to faux-retroactive classification, not knowing, information not being labeled, etc. Clinton and her staff know that one cannot mention CIA names in open communications. It is one of the most basic tenets taught and exercised inside the government. One protects one’s colleagues.
— Exposing these names can directly endanger the lives of the officials. It can endanger the lives of the foreigners they interacted with after a foreign government learns one of their citizens was talking with the CIA. It can blow covers and ruin sensitive clandestine operations. It can reveal to anyone listening in on this unclassified communication sources and methods. Here is a specific example of how Clinton likely compromised security.
— These redactions show complete contempt on Clinton’s part for the security process.
BONUS: There is clear precedent for others going to jail for exposing CIA names. Read the story of John Kiriakou. A Personal Aside: I just remain incredulous about these revelations seeming to mean nothing to the world. They’re treated in the media as almost gossip.
OpEdNews
Bringing Back Bill
By Jim Hightower
6/5/2016
Reprinted from Nation of Change
What's past, as Shakespeare has told us, is prologue.
2016 has been a wild political season. This year, despite the unnerving presidential freak show the Republicans are putting on, Hillary Clinton is the one who recently stunned me. Attempting to convince very wary working class families that she will stand against the abuses of her Wall Street financial backers, while also lifting up the poor and shoring up the middle class, Clinton made this horrifying, spine-tingling declaration: She'll Bring Back Bill! Specifically, Hillary promises that her former-president husband will be put "in charge of revitalizing the economy."
Good grief! Isn't Bill the big galoot who turned his economic policy over to Wall Street's Machiavellian, Robert Rubin? Yes. And didn't Bill break his 1992 campaign promise to raise the minimum wage in his first year, putting it off until his fourth year, and even then providing only a token increase that still left the working poor mired in poverty? Yes, again. And didn't he push into law a "welfare reform" bill that has shredded the safety net for America's poorest, most-vulnerable people? Afraid so.
So let's flashback only two decades ago to that defining achievement of President Bill Clinton's presidency: "[The] end of welfare as we know it." What sounded good in theory was detrimental to millions of Americans. Bill was awfully proud of teaming up with Republican ideologues to reverse FDR's historic commitment of providing "Aid to Families With Dependent Children." While there were some problems and some abuses with this poverty-alleviation program, Clinton signed-on to the right wing's fantasy that simply gutting it would magically make welfare recipients self-sufficient through "the dignity, the power, and the ethic of work."
But his faith in the work ethic lacked any actual ethics. Where were the jobs -- much less decent-paying jobs -- that were supposed to empower poor people? Bill had no plans for that, except a feeble request that major corporations commit to hiring a number of former-welfare recipients. Surprise -- they didn't!
Now, fast-forward 20 years, with millions of poor people -- especially single mothers -- having no jobs, no cash earnings, and no social safety net to protect them. Clinton's empty promise of jobs for the poor totally disappeared in the smoke of Wall Street's 2008 crash of our economy. Plus, he had handed the remains of our national poverty program over to states that are now run by right-wing politicos who've shriveled the benefits to Dickensian levels.
Thus, the United States of America -- the wealthiest country in the history of the world -- now has a "poverty program" that largely consists of the poor being homeless, selling their blood plasma for income, and scrounging our alleys and highway medians for aluminum cans.
Moreover, wasn't it Bill who literally rammed NAFTA down our throats, creating that job-sucking sound that continues to devastate today's middle-class? Yep, he's the one. And didn't he also collude with laissez-faire ideologues and plutocratic Republicans to deregulate Wall Street so global speculators could wreck our economy by playing casino games with our bank deposits and home mortgages? Yes, him again.
By the way, since leaving office, Bill has amassed a personal fortune through smarmy, often-secret deals with Wall Street banks and global corporations. Why would Hillary threaten workaday Americans with another poke in the eye from this Big Money con man? Instead, she should use Bill's gift of gab by making him her official "Walmart Greeter" for White House visitors. Bill fixed our economy the same way a veterinarian fixes your dog.
off-guardian
Published on June 11, 2016
The Agenda is Set: Elect the War-Hawk for the Sake of “Progress”
by Kit
Hillary Clinton is the most qualified person to “rule the world”, if she can get around the “insane” US Constitution
With the democratic nomination now officially all but certain (Sanders, quite obviously, never had a chance), the Guardian has thrown their full editorial weight – such as it is – into a pre-emptive defence of Hillary’s record and an hysterical celebration of the “progress” that the election of this particular bank-backed, corporate-bought, war-hawk would (apparently) demonstrate.
First there was Jonathan Freedland’s anaemic plea that Sanders’ voters get in line and stand with Clinton against the “true enemy”, Jill Abramson followed with gushing sentiment and simpering praise. And then? Then came Polly Toynbee, going full Guardian. Never go full Guardian.
The headline:
Those out to demonise Hillary Clinton should be careful what they wish for”
“Demonise”, in this instance, seems to mean “accurately describe her political career and possible criminal activities”. If you can demonise someone by holding a mirror up to their face, chances are that person is a demon.
The choice of the next US president is now so stark that it’s time the left put aside its sneers and pray that this strong woman will get to rule the world”
“Rule the world?” Does the US president rule the world? ...
continued...
off-guardian
Published on August 7, 2016
Comments 12
The Elective Affinities of Hillary Clinton
by Liciana Bohne, via CounterPunchGod has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-contemplation and self-admiration. . . . He has made us adept in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples.”
Senator Albert J. Beveridge of Indiana, during the US annexation of the Philippines, 1898.
A grotesque power-fest at the Democratic Party Convention in Philadelphia left me feeling about Hillary Clinton the way P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster felt about his Aunt Agatha—“the one who chews broken bottles and kills rats with her teeth.” There is something disquieting and secretively lascivious about her open-mouthed cackle. She doesn’t so much laugh as lusts. She reminded me, too, of the mythical basilisk in the bestiary at the convention—the queen among the serpents. The basilisk of legend, wearing a king’s crown on his head, is only twelve-fingers long, but his venom withers all living plants in his wake. His gaze is enough to kill, according to Pliny the Elder. Only the droppings of a weasel have the potent odor to kill him, but it didn’t work with this basilisk. Her weasel endorsed her, embraced her, kissed her. His odor and her venom neutralized each other and merged into the unity party of the Serpent and the Weasel.
Her party’s opponent is Charybdis, “a huge bladder of a creature whose face was all mouth and whose arms and legs were flippers” according to Jorge Luis Borges’ Book of Imaginary Beings (1957). As if that were not enough, this Charybdis is reputed to be the troll of a foreign monster, Mandrake, the Demon in the Kremlin. Neither the basilisk’s party nor Charybdis’ own party, a sort of mollusk like the Kraken, likes him. See here and here.
I’m raving, you say? This is the Age of Empire, and empire breeds monsters. We live with them now. Imperialism is our political and economic reality. Nothing material or substantial can be reformed within this colossal juggernaut. Yet, we continue to pretend that this has no bearing on our lives. In 2003 alone, the Iraq invasion cost $60 billion, three times the yearly budget for education, yet, we wonder why schools are starving for funds. When we clamor for reforms without mentioning imperialism, it is as if we were told we would be dead in three weeks and reacted by scheduling an appointment for a facelift.
A facelift is exactly what elections have produced in the last two decades. Bill Clinton’s Nero, saxophone in lieu of harp; George Bush’s Claudius, malapropisms for stutters; Obama’s Titus, fortunate son, charm and treachery—they are all faces of imperialism, exceptionalism, hegemony, capital penetration, globalization, neoliberal reconolization, “full spectrum dominance,” “rebalance.” They are the CEOs of international capitalism in the White House. Their charge is to do away with the sovereignty of nations, economically when possible, militarily when necessary. They destabilize and destroy whole countries through open, economic, proxy, or clandestine wars; they organize and train terrorist organizations; they foment regime change; they privatize the public wealth; they impose deadly economic reforms on countries they indebt in perpetuity; they launch economic sanctions, often in tandem or in the run-up to war. The goal they serve is the domination of the planet to extract resources, secure markets, and depress wages. In Haiti, workers are paid 62 cents per hour. Why would any sane investor hire an American worker for $7 per hour when a Haitian, whose dependent country has stripped him/her of all workers’ protection rights, works for pennies?
We are the Lotus Eaters, if we don’t know the cost and suffering of imperialism.
In this predatory process, the masters of the world—the economic elite—have amassed mountains of money over tree decades, and are desperate for “opportunities” for investment. They know that money must move, or it dies. At this stage of disinvestment in industrialization in the capitalist centers because of diminished returns, money becomes the chief export commodity. To secure astronomical returns, lands and resources that belong to other people must be seized and controlled. To achieve this goal, they need a strong, autocratic, and authoritarian state and an appointed dictator. An imperator, head of the army, whose rule is characterized by weak legislative and judicial branches.
Ruthless, ambitious, violent, and conniving, Hillary Clinton’s Roman imperial analog is Agrippina, Nero’s mother and Claudius’ niece and murderous wife. Her ferocious chemistry makes her kindred by choice to the ferocity of the empire. The two are bound by “elective affinities”– Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809) of Goethe’s third novel, which examines the possibility that human passions are ruled by chemical affinities , the preference of one substance for another. I am convinced that the imperial candidate with the most affinities with the ruling elite is Hillary Clinton. If Donald Trump is sincere in saying he wants peace with Russia, he would have to be a Titan to reverse a centenary robotic American foreign policy by 360 degrees. That would go against all the laws of political motion, including inertia, which were set down at the birth of the United States. The prize was always to be fabled Eurasia—“he who controls Eurasia controls the world,” wrote that other cobra-eyed basilisk, Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzezinsk, the veteran Zbiggus Dickus of foreign lunacy at the State Department and the NSA.
And so this woman, the Agrippina on the Potomac, will sit behind the “grand chessboard,” playing with human pawns. She will make a good empress, even though less than 40 percent of the country’s voters consider her “trustworthy.” But the people’s trust is irrelevant. They are themselves untrustworthy. Having come out from under the spell of “charming” Obama to realize that he was a magician’s trick, the people are spinning off center—the “extreme center,” as Tariq Ali wittily calls it. The people need whipping back into the herd. For that, a virago will do. She will ride rough-shod with Sin and Death, the moral allies of the empire, over hurdles of sovereignties and international law. She will further ravish the already enfeebled Constitution before eating it whole because the inevitable cost of an expansionist foreign policy is the loss of economic and political freedom at home.
They all trust her. She has affinities with them all.
continues ...here.
TRUTHstreammedia
Published on Aug 5, 2016
Hillary will stop at nothing to claw her way into the White House; unfortunately, people are dropping dead left and right in her path and, in the case of the last two found dead earlier this week, the mainstream media is pretending not to even notice they are gone...
conniption » Thu Aug 11, 2016 12:08 pm wrote:What I Learned from the DNC
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHD_bj5fXO0
TRUTHstreammedia
Published on Aug 11, 2016
Searcher08 » Thu Aug 11, 2016 9:48 am wrote:conniption » Thu Aug 11, 2016 12:08 pm wrote:What I Learned from the DNC
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHD_bj5fXO0
TRUTHstreammedia
Published on Aug 11, 2016
@conniption
Thank you for this, this is seven shades of awesome.
counterpunch
August 12, 2016
Finally: the Eruption of the Clinton Foundation Scandal
by Gary Leupp
“It’s getting really hard to know where any lines were drawn.”
-CNN
I confess I’d been looking forward to this. My son, following the Judicial Watch website, has been saying for months that the big email scandal will involve the State Department-Clinton Foundation ties and Hillary’s use of her office to acquire contributions from Saudi and other donors. As someone opposed to World War III (beginning in Syria and/or Ukraine), I was hoping that they (and he) were right.
It might not be all that immediately clear to many why this is another big deal. After all, it follows Hillary’s ongoing private server email scandal, involving not just issues of the Secretary’s “judgment” and so-called “national security” but also revealing details about Clinton’s key role in the bloody destruction of Libya and her hawkish views in all circumstances.
CNN commentators assure us that the FBI investigation “went nowhere” because the FBI decided she’d committed no crime. (Just move on, folks; this was political all along.)
These new revelations come just after the scandal of the DNC rigging the primaries for Hillary, revealed by email leaks (from an unknown source) provided through Wikileaks. The content of these has been avoided like the plague by mainstream media, which is in Hillary’s camp and is generally protecting her. The focus instead is on alleged Russian efforts to influence the U.S. election, and the imagined Putin-Trump “bromance.” Respectable news agencies have been announcing, as fact, the idea that Wikileaks got the emails from Russia; and that Moscow is trying to swing the election towards Trump (because he’ll accept an invasion of Estonia, wreck NATO etc.). It’s (or it should be) obvious bullshit, an effort to change the subject while exploiting the McCarthyite paranoid sentiments of the most backward.
The headlines are so far cautious. “Emails renew questions about Clinton Foundation and State Department Overlap.” “Newly released Clinton emails shed light on relationship between State Dept. and Clinton Foundation.” They are not (yet) shrieking, “Sheik bought State Dept. favors from Clinton Foundation donation” but we shall see.
What do the emails show so far? Two examples have been highlighted by the conservative Judicial Watch, which requested the email transcripts through the FOIA. In the first, in 2009, Gilbert Chagoury, a Lebanese-born billionaire who has given the foundation up to five million dollars and used its assistance to build a project in Nigeria, and is one of the foundation’s top donors, contacted Doug Band, head of the foundation’s Clinton Global Initiative, asking to be put in touch with a high ranking State Department official connected to Lebanon.
Band emailed Hillary’s top aide Huma Abedin and advisor Cheryl Mills, expressing a need. He writes: “We need Gilbert Chagoury to speak to the substance person re Lebanon. As you know, he’s a key guy there and to us and is loved in Lebanon. Very imp.”
A key guy to us. To the Clinton Foundation? The U.S.A.? Abedin did not ask that question before responding, “It’s jeff feltman. I’m sure he knows him. I’ll talk to jeff.” Feltman had been U.S. ambassador to Lebanon from July 2004 to January 2008 but was apparently still seen as the go-to guy. So Hillary’s chief aide took it upon herself to contact the former ambassador to tell him Chagoury (whom she might mention is a major contributor to the Clintons) needed to talk with him.
Nothing illegal there, they will say. Why shouldn’t the State Department arrange contact between a billionaire Lebanese Clinton donor, loved in Lebanon, and the ex-ambassador, if it contributes to regional stability or U.S. national security? And the hard-core Hillary supporters will nod their heads, and maybe point out that Feltman has denied any “meeting.” (Maybe Huma just passed on his address and they chatted online.)
(CNN I notice is showing a video of Bill Clinton with Chagoury in Nigeria, inaugurating a multi-billion dollar waterfront development on the coastline established “under the umbrella of the Clinton Global Initiative.”)
The other instance of “overlap” central to the discussion so far is a request of Band to Abedin and Mills for “a favor.” Someone who had recently been on a Clinton Foundation trip to Haiti wanted a State Department job. He indicated that it was “important to take care of” this person. Abedin, apparently without questioning Band about why this person was important, got right back to him: “We all have him on our radar. Personnel has been sending him options.” So the head of the Clinton Foundation could snap his fingers, again stressing how “important” his demand was, and Hillary aides Huma and Cheryl paid by your tax dollars would snap into action.
A CNN report deplores “the intermingling of emails between State and Clinton Foundation and others, giving the overall effect that it’s getting really hard to know where any lines were drawn.”
Maybe nothing illegal here. But there is an ongoing FBI investigation, no longer about Hillary’s multiple phones and private server, nor about the content of the communications (revealing her hawkish savagery), but about the routine trade-off of foundation connections for political rewards.
Those transactions are mere corruption, not war crimes. But the U.S. mass media never targets politicians for their bloodiness, and they love the conventional corruption scandal. So let there be more leaks that will absorb the attention of the talking heads! Let’s see clearer pay-for-play evidence! And let’s see more details about how the DNC midwifed Hillary’s nomination, actively sabotaging a supposedly democratic process.
Let the American people see how thoroughly rotten both candidates are, and how thoroughly rotten the system that barfed them up.
Bernie in a fair process would be the Democratic nominee now. Clinton didn’t so much steal the election as buy it in advance, arranging the details through lackey Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Trump would not be the Republican nominee but for the editorial decisions of cable news producers to—from the very inception of his campaign—announce BREAKING NEWS and cover his nearly identical rants every time he held a rally.
This gratuitous coverage obviated the need for any (other) Trump advertising. Even as the anchors, commentators and other talking heads ridiculed, denounced and appeared puzzled about the Trump phenomenon, the networks made the viewers imbibe his vapid rants. They hooked the most reactionary elements of the population on this blowhard billionaire nut case.
In the Democrats’ case, Wall Street and Wasserman Schultz controlled the primaries. In the Republican case, the corporate news media (for its immediate profit motives) advertised a total dick who happened to be a billionaire and represent the One Percent every bit as much as Hillary.
So they’re now in our faces, day after day. Hideous people with their news-anchor supporters, and cable commentators so ready to dismiss serious issues, put the very best face on their candidate, and change the subject to attack the other candidate. In the end it comes down to: We have a two-party system. The parties made their choices. So you HAVE to choose one.
Julian Assange described the U.S. presidential race as a choice between cholera and gonorrhea. Why should the people of this great country of 310,000,000 people—many with great creativity, integrity and intelligence—be assigned this sick choice of Clinton or Trump by the One Percent that controls everything?
Why should any Bernie supporter so debase himself or herself as to say, “Okay, I know the primaries were fixed and that Bernie could not win because the cards were stacked against him. And despite the fact that I put passion and effort into an anti-Wall Street campaign, now I’ll support the Wall Street candidate, who’s also a liar, who’s going to flip-flop again on TPP and bomb Syria to produce regime change, and provoke Russia in Syria and Ukraine—because well anyway she’s better than Trump, and we all have to vote, don’t we”?
But why should anybody have to hold their nose while they vote? The whole process has been exposed as never before as a farce. Why participate at all in something so corrupt? Do you want to vote just to vote, to publicly display the fact that you believe in the system itself, like the North Koreans who routinely go to the polls patriotically to vote for the options available? (As you may know, in some elections in the DPRK you can vote for a candidate of the Workers’ Party of Korea, Chondoist Chogu Party, Korean Social Democratic Party or independent. There is the manicured appearance of multiparty democracy—just like here. And no doubt some people feel good after the voting, knowing they’ve done their civic duty in a system they believe in. But what if you’ve woken up and don’t believe in the system anymore?)
Why not think bigger, and beyond? Either Clinton or Trump will likely take office in January, as the most unpopular newly elected president of all time. Either will have been brought to power by a manifestly anti-democratic, corrupt process that, more than in past years, is well exposed this time. Either will be vulnerable to mass upheaval, in the wake of Mexico wall construction or the announcement of a Syrian no-fly zone. Appalled by the election choices and result, the majority could maybe consider targeting the rigged system itself.
Just a suggestion. Massive demonstrations in Washington on Inaugural Day by people who have come to reject its legitimacy itself, knowing that it’s run by the One Percent to whom black lives don’t matter, drone warfare is cool and global warming is a hoax. Posters and banners with the curt, easy-to-understand and undeniably true popular slogan: THE WHOLE SYSTEM IS RIGGED!
Imagine a huge rally Jan. 20 demanding its overthrow, or at least the immediate resignation of the system’s illegitimate new executive, even if we don’t know what comes next. Imagine the admiration that would invite throughout the world, the hope it would inspire should the people of this country rise up to challenge not just a war, policy or person but the corrupt (capitalist and imperialist) system under which we live.
***
Now I read that the FBI, directed by James Comey (who recommended no charges for Clinton for her private cell phone use but left open the prospect of recommending criminal charges against Clinton for abusing her office to profit the Clinton Foundation) in fact has recommended charges against Hillary.
But the Department of Justice headed by Clinton loyalist Loretta Lynch rejected the recommendation. Because—don’t you see?—Hillary has to be the next president. To stop Trump, at all costs! And to stop Putin, that aggressive Putin. And to keep together the “Clinton Coalition.”
Good job, Loretta! But regardless of your effort, Hillary’s Pinocchio nose grows longer by the day, while the whole system is exposed as a cancer requiring the most aggressive treatment.
_______
Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, (AK Press). He can be reached at: gleupp@tufts.edu
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