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Brennan Comes In From the Cold |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=63"><span class="small">Marc Ash, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Wednesday, 22 August 2018 08:28 |
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Ash writes: "It was interesting to see former CIA director John Brennan sitting down with Rachael Maddow, doing his best to be engaging and sincere. It's a new look for him."
Then CIA Director John Brennan on Capitol Hill during testimony. (photo: Cliff Owen/AP)
Brennan Comes In From the Cold
By Marc Ash, Reader Supported News
22 August 18
 t was interesting to see former CIA director John Brennan sitting down with Rachael Maddow, doing his best to be engaging and sincere. It’s a new look for him. Brennan’s been a pretty aloof guy over the years. He always gave you the impression he knew more than you knew, and you knew all you needed to know.
The CIA has been a very secretive organization throughout its history. That has been necessary for reasons both good and bad. That secrecy is explicitly endorsed by Congressional overseers to a degree that has kept the American people largely in the dark, when sunlight would have allowed them to see the great harm being done.
On a good day, the CIA monitors and counters the activities of foreign governments and non-governmental players who are actively attempting to undermine US national security, and many are. On their bad days, they coordinate assassinations of foreign leaders and dissidents, orchestrate the overthrow of democratically elected governments who do not kowtow to “US interests,” and generally look for new and ever more inventive ways to justify diminishing the Constitution in the name of national security.
The apex of harm in which the CIA was complicit occurred during the 1970s and 1980s in South America. The overthrow of Chilean president Salvador Allende that led to the bloody reign of right-wing strongman General Augusto Pinochet was emblematic of the role the CIA played in supporting right-wing autocrats and suppressing left-leaning leaders, governments, and supporters throughout Latin America. Pinochet was later convicted of human rights violations relating to the abuse of power that the US and the CIA helped him achieve. But such operations continue today and were on full display in the overthrow and assassination of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. The Libya affair was on Brennan’s watch.
Some have suggested that what Donald Trump is doing somehow reforms the national intelligence community or is at least justified by the misdeeds of the national security professionals on his enemies list. That’s not the criteria for inclusion on the Presidential Enemies List.
The Presidential Enemies List
To be included on the Presidential Enemies List, you have to threaten in a material way Trump’s grip on power. Specifically, you have to have or have had direct access to and knowledge of classified evidence of Trump’s collusion and conspiracy with players in Vladimir Putin’s orbit. The Presidential Enemies List is exactly that, a who’s who of people who have direct knowledge of the classified evidence.
Reforming the US Intelligence Community
Yes, the US intelligence community needs to be confronted. My colleague, frequent RSN contributor, and friend John Kiriakou, former CIA Counterterrorism Operations officer, courageously spoke out about the CIA’s role in the Bush-era torture program. According to Kiriakou, Brennan was the catalyst, the driving force behind the Obama administration’s unprecedented whistleblower campaign.
The story Kiriakou tells is a hair-raising one. Brennan was obsessed with whistleblowing and whistleblowers. As CIA director, he pressed the administration and President Obama directly to make leak-plugging a top Justice Department priority. Over the next few years, they would embark on the most aggressive campaign of whistleblower prosecution the country has ever seen. In cases like Bradley (Chelsea) Manning, Edward Snowden, Thomas Drake, Jeffrey Sterling, Stephen Kim, and Kiriakou himself, the Obama administration, the Justice Department and the courts steamrolled whistleblower protection statutes.
Brennan Now Becomes the Whistleblower
In a simple twist of fate, Brennan now finds himself treated by the White House as a whistleblower and dissident. It is now Brennan whose actions, statements, and public revelations are depicted as a threat to “all Americans” by the president and his loyalists. Brennan is now the one harassed, badgered, marginalized and threatened. Now Brennan fully understands the price of speaking out as his conscience so compelled him. Now Brennan comes in from the cold, of his own volition or not. It’s an object lesson in the abuse of power, the value of whistleblowers, and the importance of the laws specifically designed to protect them.
Corrupt Intent
There’s a temptation here to see some benefit in Trump’s confrontation of Brennan and the others on his Presidential Enemies List. That would be a serious miscalculation. Trump acts and has always acted exclusively in what he believes to be his own personal self-interest. Donald Trump is under criminal investigation for the most serious crimes an American president has ever been suspected of. He is using the power of the presidency to wage war on the members of law enforcement tasked with investigating those suspected crimes. It is in Trump’s own interest and his interest alone that he acts.
The “reform” that Trump seeks is an intelligence community, an entire US government beholden to him and him alone.
Brennan’s newfound struggle is the struggle all whistleblowers have fought throughout time. Now he knows. It is time we know too.
Marc Ash is the founder and former Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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The US Helped Massacre Yemeni Schoolchildren |
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Written by
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Wednesday, 22 August 2018 08:27 |
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Fernández writes: "The slaughter of forty Yemeni schoolchildren was the direct result of US imperialism and the profit-hungry arms industry."
Mourners carry the coffin of a child at the funeral procession for those killed in an airstrike on a bus in Yemen. (photo: Mohammed Hamoud/Getty Images)
The US Helped Massacre Yemeni Schoolchildren
By Belén Fernández, Jacobin
22 August 18
The slaughter of forty Yemeni schoolchildren was the direct result of US imperialism and the profit-hungry arms industry.
 ack in 2010, New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman descended briefly upon Sanaa, the capital of Yemen, where he “took part in a ‘qat chew’” with Yemeni officials, businessmen, and other elites.
Qat, Friedman explained to his uninitiated readership, was “the mildly hallucinogenic leaf drug that Yemeni men stuff in their cheek after work.” Though Friedman himself “quit after fifteen minutes,” he still managed to devise the following “new rule of thumb” for US involvement in the country: “For every Predator missile we fire at an Al Qaeda target here, we should help Yemen build fifty new modern schools that teach science and math and critical thinking — to boys and girls.” This magical “ratio of targeted killings to targeted kindergartens” was, Friedman felt, America’s best bet “to prevent Yemen from becoming an Al Qaeda breeding ground.”
Fast forward to August 2018, and the concept of targeted kindergartens has acquired rather more sinister connotations following the recent slaughter of at least forty Yemeni children on a school bus. The perpetrators: the US-backed, Saudi-led coalition that, since 2015, has been terrorizing Yemen in the name of fighting terror. Among the coalition partners is the United Arab Emirates, glitzy land of ski slope–equipped malls, modern-day slavery, and love affairs with Blackwater founder Erik Prince. Additional coalition backing is provided by the UK and other friendly Europeans.
On August 17, CNN reported that the munition responsible for the school bus massacre was a five-hundred-pound “laser-guided MK 82 bomb made by Lockheed Martin,” pillar of the US military-industrial complex. The bomb’s provenance is not enormously surprising given the $110 billion US-Saudi defense deal to which Donald Trump gave birth last year in Riyadh.
Shortly after the airstrike on the bus, a journalist asked US defense secretary James Mattis for his thoughts on the US role in the conflict in Yemen given that such operations are conducted “with US training, US targeting information, US weapons.”
The transcript of Mattis’s response, which appears on the Defense Department website, includes such insights as: “There, I would tell you that we do help them plan what we call — what kind of targeting? I’m trying to trying of the right word.”
Whatever the word was, Mattis remained of the opinion that “we are not engaged in the civil war” and that “we will help to prevent, you know, the killing of innocent people.”
Of course, anyone familiar with the United States’ track record will be aware that protecting innocents is never really the name of the game. In addition to out-and-out killing sprees, more subtle modes of human elimination also come to mind — as when reports in 1996 that half a million Iraqi children had died because of US sanctions elicited the assessment from then-US ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright: “We think the price is worth it.”
In the case of Yemen, the United States has presided over plenty of DIY forms of carnage beyond its support for the Saudi-led coalition. As of 2015, the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism calculated that the United States had killed up to 1,580 people in Yemen since the inauguration of its covert action program there in 2002.
Prominent on the greatest hits list was the deadly US drone strike on a Yemeni wedding in 2013, which further underscored the US knack for wiping out matrimonial festivities in Arab/Muslim territories while also highlighting some potential questions for the strategist behind the targeted killings-targeted kindergartens scheme — like, why doesn’t al-Qaeda just build classrooms after blowing shit up?
In November 2017, the New Yorker noted that “Saudi armed forces, backed by more than $40 billion in American arms shipments authorized by the Trump and Obama administrations, have killed thousands of civilians in air strikes” in Yemen. The war has also spawned what Mattis referred to as “I believe … the largest cholera outbreak we’ve ever seen,” as well as a famine threatening millions of people.
In a recent essay, University of Richmond professor and Yemen scholar Sheila Carapico slams as “poppycock” the notion that the Houthis — the coalition’s adversaries in Yemen — are a “proxy” of Iran, and that “forty months of relentless bombing and blockade” somehow qualifies as “self-defense.” Noting that mass protests in Yemen in 2011 — “led, incidentally, by women” — had propelled the panties of the “Gulf patriarchies” into a royal bunch, Carapico goes on to affirm that the victims of the onslaught on Yemen, far from being Iranian Revolutionary Guard surrogates, are “starving children under attack by filthy-rich monarchies wielding the most advanced weapons Britain and the United States have to sell.”
So much for innocence.
Which brings us back to the issue of US complicity in the whole gruesome business. Chatham House’s Micah Zenko has taken to the pages of Foreign Policy to argue that, in Yemen, “America Is Committing War Crimes and Doesn’t Even Know Why,” serving as a “willing co-combatant in a war without any direction or clear end state.”
But while Zenko insists that America must “never again go to war, or support other’s wars, without purpose or objectives,” this sort of overlooks the fact that a central purpose of American bellicosity is to generate big bucks for the arms industry — whether or not nobler objectives like freedom- and democracy-proliferation are trotted out. The longer Yemen is made to suffer, the better it is for an industry that flourishes in accordance with influxes of Saudi oil money and general regional conflict.
We’d best get to work on those kindergartens.
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RSN: ICE Agents Are Kidnappers and Sociopaths, So Trump Honors Them |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=20877"><span class="small">William Boardman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Tuesday, 21 August 2018 13:41 |
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Boardman writes: "US immigration agencies have been committing crimes against humanity for decades. The Obama administration raised immigration ruthlessness to a new level, earning the president the derogatory title of deporter-in-chief, balanced by no redeeming effort to resolve an issue more rooted in hate than harm."
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents making an arrest. (photo: Soluciones Magazine)
ICE Agents Are Kidnappers and Sociopaths, So Trump Honors Them
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
21 August 18
In June of 2014, the ACLU and the International Human Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School filed complaints with the Department of Homeland Security. And the complaints documented the cases of 116 unaccompanied children, ranging in age from 5 years old to 17. According to these organizations, a quarter of the children said they were physically or sexually abused. They said they’d been placed in so-called stress positions and were at times subjected to beatings by Customs officials. More than half of the kids reported receiving death threats from U.S. government agents.
— Reporter Jeremy Scahill, The Intercept podcast, Intercepted, May 30, 2018
 S immigration agencies have been committing crimes against humanity for decades. The Obama administration raised immigration ruthlessness to a new level, earning the president the derogatory title of deporter-in-chief, balanced by no redeeming effort to resolve an issue more rooted in hate than harm. Now the Trump administration has taken official viciousness and stupidity to a whole new level, prompting Human Rights Watch to object strenuously to US immigration policy and practice:
Misdemeanor illegal entry (for entering the US without authorization) and felony illegal reentry (for reentering the US after deportation) have been crimes since the early 20th century. But prosecutions were limited to immigrants with serious prior criminal histories or repeat offenders. In 2005, Operation Streamline was introduced in Del Rio, Texas, permitting rapid-fire mass prosecutions of migrants.
The Trump administration’s policy is the first to target parents traveling with children for prosecution and to couple criminal prosecution of asylum seekers with policy changes intended to restrict eligibility for asylum to those who enter the US illegally. Penalizing asylum seekers for entering without authorization is a violation of international refugee law. [emphasis added]
How inhumane can the US government get before a majority of the American people begin to care? Why should Americans tolerate law-breaking that should be an impeachable offense? How long before a majority of us have zero tolerance for official cruelty, abuse, and lawlessness?
Abusive treatment of a woman about to give birth should shock anyone’s conscience, but it hasn’t, apparently. For now, ICE (the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) can get away with almost any atrocity.
On the morning of August 15, in San Bernardino, California, Joel Arrona-Lara, 36, was driving his nine-months-pregnant wife to the hospital to give birth by C-section. Two ICE SUVs surrounded their car at a convenience store, for no apparent reason except racial profiling. The ICE agents did not know who they were stopping and first asked the wife, Maria del Carmen Venegas, for her ID, which she had. She and her husband have lived in the US for 12 years and have four other children, three of whom are citizens.
When the ICE agents turned to the husband, the driver, for identification, he didn’t have it with him, having left hurriedly for the hospital. He had his ID at home, a few blocks away. His wife pleaded with the ICE agents to let him get his ID. The ICE agents didn’t care enough to check it out. Instead they handcuffed Joel Arrona-Lara and took him into custody. They searched the car, finding nothing amiss. With two vehicles available, the ICE agents could easily have escorted the wife to the hospital. They didn’t. They left her alone to drive herself, which she managed to do. The baby was later born safely.
The ICE agents still have no reason for arresting Joel Arrona-Lara other than his not having proper ID on his person. The surveillance camera video of this arrest went viral online and was picked up by media. On Friday, ICE officials claimed Joel Arrona-Lara had been arrested for “illegally residing in the United States,” an assertion patently false, since he was arrested before ICE knew who he was. According to ICE’s Friday statement, ICE considered Joel Arrona-Lara someone “who poses a threat to national security, public safety and border security.”
On Saturday, under media scrutiny, ICE officials issued another probably false claim, that Joel Arrona-Lara was arrested for an outstanding homicide warrant in Mexico. This not only fails to persuade for its belated timing, as well as ICE not knowing who he was when they arrested him, but there’s no evidence yet that such a warrant even exists. Joel Arrona-Lara said he knows of no warrant, his attorney has seen no warrant. The Mexican consulate has said it has no warrant. Maria del Carmen Venegas, 32, says her husband has never had trouble with the law, not even a traffic ticket. She said his brother had done jail time in Mexico, maybe that was the source of confusion.
(Elsewhere, in fake news, Tucker Carlson of Fox News lied on Monday about the homicide warrant, claiming other media coverage omitted it. They did omit it for awhile, but only until ICE changed its story and added the alleged warrant. To be fair to Tucker Carlson, maybe he didn’t lie, maybe he’s just incompetent. He’s right about the story being propaganda, but it’s ICE propaganda. Over on Fox & Friends, the headline was “Media Slams ICE Over Illegal Immigrant Arrest” with nice ambiguity, while misrepresenting the facts and trying to justify this arrest because some other unrelated person was killed in a head-on car crash with an illegal immigrant. This message was delivered by a well-programmed “angel mom” who said that “there’s an American victim for every illegal alien criminal who’s in our country.” Really? Twelve million victims? Almost all going unreported? Now, THAT’s propaganda.)
The fact remains that ICE arrested someone before they knew who he was, they didn’t explain why they were arresting him, and then they changed their story about why he was arrested. That is fundamentally corrupt. ICE has been an invitation to corruption since it was created, since it is not accountable to the US Justice Department but to the Department of Homeland Security which was created to run both sides of the law to protect us from “terrorists.”
The legally dubious arrest is bad enough, and common enough for ICE, but leaving a nine-months-pregnant woman to fend for herself by the side of the road is a new cruelty for ICE. “ICE acted in total disregard for the health and wellbeing of the mother,” said attorney Emilio Amaya Garcia.
To ICE’s credit, perhaps, the ICE agents did not take the mother and unborn child into custody, even though the mother is also undocumented. ICE can always go after the mother later and do untold damage to this harmless, self-supporting family. Meanwhile, ICE can take pride in having created a situation in which an American-born child may never get to meet his father.
That seems unlikely, according to Russell Jauregui, staff attorney for the San Bernardino Community Service Center, who represents Joel Arrona-Lara, currently being held in the Theo Lacy detention center:
He does have a right to a bond hearing before an immigration judge in immigration court. He does have the right to counsel. We’re going to represent him pro bono. He does have the right to pursue a bond hearing to see, determine if he can be released. We’re hoping that he can, given his length of time here in the United States and the fact that he does have three U.S. citizen children. And then, if he is, hopefully, released on bond, then his case will continue with the immigration courts, where he’ll be pursuing his, hopefully, relief during a removal hearing before an immigration judge, where he’ll have to prove that, you know, his U.S. citizen kids will suffer exceptional and extreme and unusual hardships without him if he’s removed…. And this process could take one or two years.
Politicians of both major parties have demagogued the immigration issue for decades, numbing the public to the unlawful and inhumane treatment of a vast, undefined victim class that includes citizens and non-citizens alike. Even more horrific abuses of immigrant children under the Trump administration have finally sparked some outrage, but nowhere near enough to change the police-state practices of ICE. Sadistic, perverted, police-state abuses of children by American border police that flourished during the Obama administration, whose foreign policy drove millions of people to seek asylum from their American-sponsored Central American police states. Under Trump, it’s all the same only worse. Now the US policy is to take children hostage – and then abuse them and lose track of them. As far as immigrants go (“They’re not people – these are animals”), President Trump is betting there’s to limit to what atrocities Americans will tolerate as long as his demonized victims are non-white. So far, he’s winning that bet.
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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FOCUS: If I Didn't Keep Hearing Brett Kavanaugh Is Such a Nice Guy I Might Think He's a Republican Hack |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
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Tuesday, 21 August 2018 11:26 |
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Pierce writes: "The National Archives has begun the release of documents pertaining to the previous government service of Brett Kavanaugh, Really Great Guy and nominee for the Supreme Court."
Brett Kavanaugh. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty)
If I Didn't Keep Hearing Brett Kavanaugh Is Such a Nice Guy I Might Think He's a Republican Hack
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
21 August 18
Of course, that would involve looking at his actual record.
 he National Archives has begun the release of documents pertaining to the previous government service of Brett Kavanaugh, Really Great Guy and nominee for the Supreme Court. As we have been told, over and over again, Kavanaugh doesn't much approve of the idea of independent counsels and their ability to make presidents uncomfortable. This, of course, despite the fact that Kavanaugh was intimately involved in the Great Penis Hunt of 1998 on behalf of special counsel Kenneth Starr.
Boy howdy, was Kavanaugh intimately involved. One might even say he was intimately involved intimately. From The Washington Post:
The memo was written Aug. 15 to Starr and “All Attorneys,” with the subject line: “Slack for the President?” It was Kavanaugh advice for the type of questioning for Clinton that would occur by Starr’s associates, who were trying to determine whether the president had committed perjury in a civil suit. “After reflecting this evening, I am strongly opposed to giving the President any ‘break’ in the questioning regarding the details of the Lewinsky relationship” unless he “resigns” or “confesses perjury,” Kavanaugh wrote, continuing: “He has required the urgent attention of the courts and the Supreme Court for frivolous privilege claims — all to cover up his oral sex from an intern. He has lied to his aides. He has lied to the American people. He has tried to disgrace you and the Office with a sustained propaganda campaign that would make Nixon blush.”
Here's the memo itself, in case you'd forgotten how much fun those days actually were.
As should be obvious, Kavanaugh, as Really Nice Guys will, pushed very hard to include in the record certain details:
If Monica Lewinsky said you masturbated into a trash can in your secretary's office, would she be lying?
If Monica Lewinsky said you ejaculated into her mouth on two occasions in the Oval Office area, would she be lying?
If Monica Lewinsky says that you inserted a cigar into her vagina while you were in the Oval Office area, would she be lying?
If Monica Lewinsky says that on several occasions you had her give her oral sex, made her stop, and then ejaculated into the sink in the bathroom off the Oval Office, would she be lying?
Christamighty, it's a good thing he's a Really Nice Guy, or else I'd think he was a bed-sniffing hypocrite and a sanctimonious yahoo who's spent his entire career as a Republican hack.
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hen Michael Cohen entered the courtroom on the 20th floor in the federal courthouse in the Southern District of New York at just after four P.M. on Tuesday, his eyes darted to the small crowd that had gathered to watch the former personal attorney to the president of the United States plead guilty to eight counts of tax evasion, lying to a bank, and campaign finance violations. He took a seat at a long table by himself, in a black suit and gold tie—Trump colors. Four months earlier, more than three dozen agents had executed search warrants for Cohen’s home, hotel room, and office, carting off more than 3 million documents and beginning a formal investigation of Cohen, who worked as Donald Trump’s fixer and a Trump Organization attorney, for criminal wrongdoing. In the ensuing months, Cohen went from a man who 
