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Obama’s Double-Standard on Leaks

November 12, 2015

Obama’s Double-Standard on Leaks

Though President Obama touts America as a nation of laws and evenhanded justice, there is a blatant double-standard regarding how people are punished for national security breaches – whistleblowers are harshly punished but the well-connected get a pass, writes John Hanrahan.

There he goes again. In recently proclaiming Hillary Clinton free of any national security breach — even as the FBI was continuing its investigation of her use of a potentially risky private email server for official business while she was Secretary of State — President Barack Obama continued his disturbing pattern of rendering his personal verdict ahead of legal proceedings in high-profile cases involving classified government information.

From Private Chelsea Manning to General David Petraeus to Edward Snowden and now to Hillary Clinton, the President has sounded off with his opinions on guilt or innocence — and on any alleged damage to national security — in advance of either a trial, or an indictment, or completion of an investigation.

Gen. David Petraeus in a photo with his biographer/mistress Paula Broadwell. (U.S. government photo)

Short version: whistleblowers Manning and Snowden clearly guilty; former high government officials Petraeus and Clinton — no problem.

In April 2011 — two years before court martial proceedings began and almost two years before Manning acknowledged being a source for hundreds of thousands of classified documents released by Wikileaks — Obama proclaimed Manning guilty. The materials Manning provided to Wikileaks exposed diplomatic secrets and U.S. military abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan, including showing greater numbers of civilian casualties than admitted publicly by U.S. officials.

Among the most shocking was the classified “collateral murder video” that showed U.S. military personnel in an Apache helicopter in a Baghdad suburb indiscriminately firing on and killing more than a dozen people — including rescuers and two Reuters employees — and wounding others, including two children.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Six Most Disastrous Interventions of the 21st Century

October 9, 2015

The Six Most Disastrous Interventions of the 21st  Century

hillary-libya

On October 2 President Barack Obama, alluding to Russia’s decision to launch air strikes in Syria, told reporters at the White House that for Russia to view the forces targeted “from the perspective they’re all terrorists [is] a recipe for disaster, and it’s one that I reject.”

In other words, he was saying that Moscow is not (as it claims) really focusing on ISIL and the al-Nusra Front but on the anti-regime opposition in general, which supposedly includes “moderates.”

Never mind that Obama himself as well as Joseph Biden have on occasion pooh-poohed the existence of a moderate armed opposition that controls territory in Syria. Didn’t Biden say last year at Harvard that “there was no moderate middle [in Syria] because the moderate middle are made up of shop-keepers, not soldiers”?

And hasn’t it been shown that maps showing territory in the hands of the “Free Syrian Army” are the figments of propagandists’ imagination? The FSA has no coordinated command structure and its networks overlap those of groups that Washington would not normally define as “moderate” (unless it wanted to rehabilitate al-Qaeda, which having attacked the U.S. on 9/11 and supposedly the cause of all the—disastrous—post-9/11 U.S. military actions in the Middle East), has gradually become my-enemy-against-my-enemy and hence a new found friend.

Seriously. Gen. David Petraeus, architect of the “surge” in Iraq in 2007 and former head of the CIA (until brought down in a sex/email-misuse scandal), has actually suggested that the U.S. support al-Qaeda—the al-Nusra Front—in Syria to defeat the bigger foe that is ISIL. (It does seem one man’s extremist is another man’s “moderate,” especially under confusing crisis circumstances. And that every cable news anchorperson will call “moderate” whatever the State Department demands—without knowing jack-shit about the facts, this not being required by that profession.)

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Bilderberg 2015 – Where Criminals Mingle with Politicians

June 16, 2015

Bilderberg 2015 – Where Criminals Mingle with Politicians

Screen Shot 2015-06-15 at 12.43.46 PM

Out at my car I couldn’t be bothered to get into the whole ‘probable cause’ thing so I flung open the doors and with as much good cheer as I could muster, said: “Help yourself”. They did. While one set of police searched my car with their torches, another lot clustered round me and asked me questions: “Where do you live? What are you doing here?” I’m a journalist and I live in a police state. What about you?

A little while later, bored and a bit cold, I decided to point out to the officers that while they were treating a journalist like a criminal, there were actual criminals about to arrive at the hotel they were guarding. Convicted criminals. Such as disgraced former CIA boss, David Petraeus, who’s just been handed a $100,000 (£64,000) fine and two years’ probation for leaking classified information.

I decided to reward their vigilance with a chat about HSBC. The chairman of the troubled banking giant, Douglas Flint, is a regular attendee at Bilderberg, and he’s heading here again this year, along with a member of the bank’s board of directors, Rona Fairhead. Perhaps most tellingly, Flint is finding room in his Mercedes for the bank’s busiest employee: its chief legal officer, Stuart Levey.

A Guardian editorial this week branded HSBC “a bank beyond shame” after it announced plans to cut 8,000 jobs in the UK, while at the same time threatening to shift its headquarters to Hong Kong. And having just been forced to pay £28m in fines to Swiss regulators investigating money-laundering claims. The big question, of course, is how will the chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne, respond to all this? Easy – he’ll go along to a luxury Austrian hotel and hole up with three senior members of HSBC in private. For three days.

– From Charlie Skelton’s excellent article: Bilderberg 2015: Where Criminals Mingle with Ministers

Charlie Skelton is a Oxford University educated comedy writer, journalist, artist and actor who has covered the Bilderberg meeting for the Guardian since 2009. This year’s meeting took on a particularly eventful twist for Mr. Skelton, something he wrote about in a powerful article published last week.

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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