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The Trump White House's Laughable Spin That the Release of the Nunes Memo Is All About 'Transparency' |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=25952"><span class="small">Aaron Blake, The Washington Post</span></a>
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Friday, 02 February 2018 14:43 |
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Blake writes: "President Trump is just trying to be forthcoming, you see. He wants to get it all out there! Except he clearly doesn't."
Trump in the Oval Office. (photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
The Trump White House's Laughable Spin That the Release of the Nunes Memo Is All About 'Transparency'
By Aaron Blake, The Washington Post
02 February 18
 he Trump White House and GOP leaders have zeroed in on one main justification for releasing the controversial Devin Nunes memo: It's all about transparency. "I've always believed in the public's right to know," Vice President Pence said Thursday. “We have said all along, from day one, that we want full transparency in this process,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told CNN Wednesday.
White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly leaned into it even harder Wednesday on Fox News Radio: “Frankly, in every other case that I can remember in my lifetime where a president was in some kind of trouble, the president, the White House attempted to not release things. This president has said from the beginning .?.?. 'I want everything out. I want this thing, I want the American people to know the truth.'”
President Trump is just trying to be forthcoming, you see. He wants to get it all out there! Except he clearly doesn't.
There are two gaping holes in this argument: The first is that the White House has shunned transparency in plenty of ways previous administrations haven't, and the second is that its line for transparency in this case is completely arbitrary — and completely self-serving.
People can feel how they will about the memo, which was released by the House Intelligence Committee Friday afternoon. But the argument that the release was driven primarily by a desire for transparency is a pretty laughable one. The fact is that the White House and GOP leader approved the release of a memo based upon classified information that just so happens to serve their purposes — it reportedly calls into question the FBI's case for surveilling a former Trump adviser — and they have been conspicuously unwilling to release other documents that don't.
Perhaps the White House's biggest anti-transparency move has been withholding President Trump's tax returns, breaking with a practice followed by every president since Jimmy Carter. Trump initially said during the 2016 campaign that he would do so, only to reverse course and claim that his electoral victory was proof that people didn't actually care to see them. (Never mind that a Washington Post-ABC News poll last month showed that 74 percent of all Americans, and even 49 percent of Trump supporters, say they want to see the returns.)
Here are some other anti-transparency moves of varying degrees of importance:
- The chief outside group supporting Trump's agenda, America First Policies, doesn't disclose its donors. It isn't required to, but President Barack Obama's outside group did so voluntarily.
- The Trump White House doesn't share visitor logs as the Obama White House did.
- It has violated its own lobbying ban without disclosing waivers that were given to aides working on issues on which they had previously lobbied.
- During the 2016 campaign, Trump declined to substantiate his claims of “tens of millions” of dollars donated to charity.
- Democrats have accused the Trump administration of ignoring their requests for information from agencies related to their legislative duties.
- The White House tried to block former acting attorney general Sally Yates, whom Trump fired for refusing to defend his travel ban, from testifying before Congress.
- More recently, it has sought to withhold information in both Donald Trump Jr.'s and Stephen K. Bannon's testimonies, citing attorney-client privilege and executive privilege, respectively.
- It still refuses to disclose or confirm when the president goes golfing, leaving reporters to deduce that's what he's doing.
This is a necessarily incomplete list. But it shows that the White House has hardly gone above and beyond on transparency — even in cases where it would be easy to do so.
But perhaps the biggest strike against the White House's spin here is that fact that we're only going to see the memo crafted by House Intelligence Committee Republicans. The Democrats have crafted their own memo, but the GOP-controlled committee voted not to release it. The committee could also release the FISA warrant or other documentation if it wanted to. If transparency is truly the goal, why release more than just one party's argument about the underlying facts? And for that matter, why even classify information in the first place?
The second question is facetious, but it's a key point. It's important for the government to classify certain things, of course, and every decision to disclose classified information is a cost-benefit analysis — a decision that putting the information out there will serve more of a purpose than keeping it classified.
But the White House's argument here doesn't allow for that kind of nuance. It suggests that releasing basically any information is good because it's being “transparent.” And it suggests its own cost-benefit analysis includes a heaping mound of political gain on the benefit side.
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I Was a Guantanamo Detainee - This Is What I Think of Trump's Plan to Keep It Open |
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Friday, 02 February 2018 14:40 |
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Begg writes: "Sixteen years ago today, at midnight, agents of the Pakistani intelligence agency, ISI, and the CIA kidnapped me at gunpoint in front of my family. They took me on a torturous odyssey of secret prisons that ended in the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay."
Detainees at Guantanamo Bay military prison. (photo: NBC)
I Was a Guantanamo Detainee - This Is What I Think of Trump's Plan to Keep It Open
By Moazzam Begg, The Independent
02 February 18
Trump has suggested that new prisoners from the conflict in Syria and Iraq may be sent to Guantanamo. If that happens then the clock will be set back 16 years and we can expect to see more Western citizens dressed in orange jumpsuits before they are horrifically executed, as Isis and others have done
 ixteen years ago today, at midnight, agents of the Pakistani intelligence agency, ISI, and the CIA kidnapped me at gunpoint in front of my family. They took me on a torturous odyssey of secret prisons that ended in the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay.
Earlier this month, the US government declared that it would be cutting all security-related funding to Pakistan because it had not done enough to “fight terrorism”. In reality, Pakistan has been hosting US military bases and CIA operatives and vigorously implementing much of US policy in the region for decades.
I was handed over to US military custody in contravention of Pakistani extradition laws and not based on any evidence but for bounty money – just like hundreds of others, most of whom ended up in Guantanamo. Far from doing little to fight terrorism, thousands of Pakistanis have been killed and vast parts of the nation destabilised in pursuit of the US-led “War on Terror”. In truth, Pakistan sold its very soul to America.
My own ordeal was over after only three years, without charge or trial, and is well documented. However, that wasn’t the case for several hundred Muslim prisoners from over 40 nations. Sixteen years on, 41 of the original 779 prisoners remain.
It was shortly after my return that I joined the organisation CAGE to campaign against every cruelty I had endured and witnessed, and to call for an end to the abuse.
As news filtered through today that President Trump had signed an executive order to keep the military prison open at Guantanamo, I was not surprised. The move is congruent with the man and his administration.
But it is the attitude of the public that raises questions. Like many of the views on Guantanamo, the US appears bipolar – alternating between the vastly different views of both presidents.
Some people think Guantanamo shut down in 2009 when Obama came in to power and signed his own executive order to close the prison facility within a year.
The harsh truth is that many Americans care little for the negative effects Guantanamo has on the reputation of America. During his election campaign, Trump said he’d “load up” Guantanamo with more prisoners and would reintroduce the medieval torture technique of waterboarding and “a whole lot more”. Last year, he contemplated reopening the CIA torture sites and caused great controversy when he declared his belief that “torture works”.
Trump said that one of the consequences of releasing prisoners from Guantanamo was the emergence of dangerous “recidivists” like Islamic State (Isis) leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Of course, the so-called caliph was not imprisoned in Guantanamo. He was a result of the “Guantanamo-isation” of Iraqi prisons under US occupation, specifically at the notorious Camp Bucca.
The US invaded Iraq on the basis of the tortured false testimony of Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi. Al Libi, an alleged al-Qaeda member, had “confessed that they were working with Saddam Hussein on obtaining chemical weapons”. This information was presented to the US at the UN Security Council in 2003 as “credible” and a key justification for the invasion.
But it is now a commonly accepted fact that al-Qaeda only came to Iraq because of the US occupation and there were no chemical weapons.
It was from the US prisons at Camp Bucca that most of the Isis leaders eventually emerged, with a renewed hatred of a country that committed the atrocities in Abu Ghraib and beyond. In 2015, President Obama admitted that Isis was an “unintended consequence” of the invasion.
Donald Trump has suggested that new prisoners from the conflict in Syria and Iraq may be sent to Guantanamo. If that happens then the clock will be set back 16 years and we can expect to see more Western citizens dressed in orange jumpsuits before they are horrifically executed, as Isis and others have done.
It was Obama’s failure to follow through on his promise to shut Guantanamo and to prosecute those involved in gross human rights violations that allowed Trump to flagrantly endorse war crimes.
The truth, however, is that imprisonment without trial and torture will remain crimes of the very worst kind no matter which US President justifies them.
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FOCUS: Trump Has Picked a Fight With the FBI. He'll Be Sorry. |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=8625"><span class="small">Eugene Robinson, The Washington Post</span></a>
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Friday, 02 February 2018 12:41 |
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Robinson writes: "Presidents don't win fights with the FBI. Donald Trump apparently wants to learn this lesson the hard way."
Donald Trump. (photo: Getty)
Trump Has Picked a Fight With the FBI. He'll Be Sorry.
By Eugene Robinson, The Washington Post
02 February 18
 residents don’t win fights with the FBI. Donald Trump apparently wants to learn this lesson the hard way.
Most presidents have had the sense not to bully the FBI by defaming its leaders and — ridiculously — painting its agents as leftist political hacks. Most members of Congress have also understood how unwise it would be to pull such stunts. But Trump and his hapless henchmen on Capitol Hill, led by Rep.?Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), have chosen the wrong enemy. History strongly suggests they will be sorry.
The far-right echo chamber resounds with wailing and braying about something called the “deep state” — a purported fifth column of entrenched federal bureaucrats whose only goal in life, apparently, is to deny America the greatness that Dear Leader Trump has come to bestow. It is unclear who is supposed to be directing this vast conspiracy. Could it be Dr. Evil? Supreme Leader Snoke? Hillary Clinton? This whole paranoid fantasy, as any sane person realizes, is utter rubbish.*
The bureau has no political ax to grind, and the attempt by Nunes and others to portray it as some kind of liberal cabal is comical. But it does have great institutional cohesion, a proud sense of mission, and a culture that inculcates the “us vs. the world” attitude that is so common among law enforcement agencies.
I’m old enough to remember the days when J. Edgar Hoover ran the place like his own private Stasi — wiretapping civil rights leaders such as the Rev.?Martin Luther King Jr., infiltrating anti-Vietnam War groups with informers and provocateurs, seeking or manufacturing damaging “evidence” against those he targeted, keeping copious files on the peccadilloes of the politicians who were theoretically his masters. Presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt through Richard Nixon coexisted warily with Hoover, afraid to fire him for fear of all the beans he might spill.
Harry S. Truman was an especially bitter opponent. “We want no Gestapo or secret police. The FBI is tending in that direction,” he said. “They are dabbling in sex-life scandals and plain blackmail. .?.?. J. Edgar Hoover would give his right eye to take over, and all congressmen and senators are afraid of him.”
But when Truman left office, Hoover was still FBI director. He held on to the job from the FBI’s founding in 1935 until his death in 1972 — six weeks before the Watergate break-in.
The day after what Nixon’s spokesman would call “a third-rate burglary attempt” took place, the FBI’s major-crimes duty officer, a supervisor named Daniel Bledsoe, opened a federal wiretapping investigation. According to Bledsoe, he received a phone call from Nixon aide John Ehrlichman ordering him to shut down the probe. His simple reply: “No.”
It was another FBI man — Mark Felt, then an assistant director — who became the famous source Deep Throat, secretly meeting Post reporter Bob Woodward in a parking garage to guide the paper’s illumination of the president’s crimes.
In 2004, according to journalist Tim Weiner’s book “Enemies: A History of the FBI,” President George W. Bush was confronted by the man he had appointed to lead the bureau: Robert S. Mueller III. In Weiner’s telling, Mueller threatened to resign unless Bush curtailed some aspects of the domestic electronic surveillance that was taking place in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Bush reportedly agreed to put the program on a more legal footing.
Now comes Trump. His oafish attempts to neutralize the FBI director he inherited, James B. Comey — trying to extract a Godfather-style loyalty pledge, asking him to drop the investigation of Michael Flynn, ultimately firing him — are potential fodder for what may be an obstruction-of-justice case against Trump being assembled by Mueller.
Comey wrote everything down. The FBI always writes everything down.
Do you see a pattern here? The idea that the likes of Trump and Nunes are going to put a scratch on the FBI with ludicrous innuendo — we’re supposed to believe the bureau is a nest of Bolsheviks? — and selectively edited memos would be laughable, if Mueller and his team were the laughing kind. Which they’re not.
The Trumpists were so proud of themselves when they found evidence that Peter Strzok, an FBI agent originally on Mueller’s team, thought Trump would be a bad president. Now, however, someone has leaked to CNN that Strzok drafted the “October surprise” Comey letter that reopened the bureau’s investigation into Clinton’s emails — without which Trump probably would have lost the election.
Trump and his minions seem to think they can out-leak the FBI. Obviously they haven’t been paying attention.
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FOCUS: GOP Memo Criticizing FBI Surveillance Is Released |
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Friday, 02 February 2018 12:14 |
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Excerpt: "A GOP memo alleging surveillance abuses by the FBI has been released, intensifying a fight between the White House and Republican lawmakers, on one side, and the nation's top law enforcement agency over whether the origins of a probe into Russian interference in 2016 were tainted by political bias."
The memo was written by Republicans on the committee, led by chairman Rep. Devin Nunes of California. (photo: Doug Mills/The New York Times)
GOP Memo Criticizing FBI Surveillance Is Released
By Devlin Barrett, Karoun Demirjian and Josh Dawsey, The Washington Post
02 February 18
 GOP memo alleging surveillance abuses by the FBI has been released, intensifying a fight between the White House and Republican lawmakers, on one side, and the nation’s top law enforcement agency over whether the origins of a probe into Russian interference in 2016 were tainted by political bias.
President Trump had approved release of the memo without redactions Friday morning.
The four-page, newly declassified memo written by the Republican staffers for the House Intelligence Committee said the findings “raise concerns with the legitimacy and legality of certain (Justice Department) and FBI interactions with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC),’’ calling it “a troubling breakdown of legal processes established to protect the American people from abuses related to the FISA process.’’
The memo accuses former officials who approved the surveillance applications – a group that includes former FBI Director James B. Comey, his former deputy Andrew McCabe, former deputy attorney general Sally Yates and current Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein — of signing off on court surveillance requests that omitted key facts about the political motivations of the person supplying some of the information, Christopher Steele, a former intelligence officer in Britain.
The memo says Steele “was suspended and then terminated as an FBI source for what the FBI defines as the most serious of violations — an unauthorized disclosure to the media of his relationship with the FBI.’’
The memo is not an intelligence document and reflects information the committee has gathered, which Democrats, the FBI and Justice Department have criticized as incomplete and misleading.
Current and former law enforcement officials said a major concern inside the FBI is that the rules governing classified information will impede their ability to respond to the memo’s accusations when it becomes public.
The president told reporters in the Oval Office, “I think it’s a disgrace what’s happening in our country. .?.?. A lot of people should be ashamed of themselves and much worse than that.”
The FBI and the Justice Department had lobbied strenuously against the memo’s release. In a statement Wednesday, the FBI had said it was “gravely concerned” that key facts were missing from the memo, which, it said, left an inaccurate impression of how the agency conducted surveillance under the authority of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
Friday morning, the president tweeted in anticipation of the memo’s release, saying: “The top Leadership and Investigators of the FBI and the Justice Department have politicized the sacred investigative process in favor of Democrats and against Republicans - something which would have been unthinkable just a short time ago.’’ He added: “Rank & File are great people!”
Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, tweeted in response, “No, Mr. President it’s worse than that. The country’s top elected leader has agreed to selectively and misleadingly release classified info to attack the FBI — that’s what would have been unthinkable a short time ago.”
The memo has been the subject of intense debate in Congress, but the fight ratcheted up this week when the House Intelligence Committee voted along party lines to make the document public under a process that gives the president up to five days to block its release. The committee Republicans also voted not to release a Democratic rebuttal memo, saying they would allow that document to be made public in the future.
It is highly unusual for the White House and the FBI to be publicly at odds over a matter of national security, and it is unclear what impact the disagreement might have on the standing of FBI Director Christopher A. Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, two Trump appointees who went to the White House on Monday in an unsuccessful bid to urge that the memo not be released.
Law enforcement officials have expressed fear that Trump may try to use the memo’s release as justification to fire Rosenstein, who is overseeing Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III and the Russia interference probe.
The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) has accused the FBI of stonewalling lawmakers on matters related to the Russia probe for nearly a year.
“It’s clear that top officials used unverified information in a court document to fuel a counter-intelligence investigation during an American political campaign,” he said. “Once the truth gets out, we can begin taking steps to ensure our intelligence agencies and courts are never misused like this again.”
The memo describes some of the details of how information from a British former spy named Christopher Steele, who compiled a controversial dossier of allegations against then-candidate Donald Trump, was used as part of an application to the FISA court to conduct surreptitious surveillance on Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser, according to people familiar with the matter.
The FBI statement said federal agents carefully adhere to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which provides a legal framework for national security investigations.
“The FBI takes seriously its obligations to the FISA Court and its compliance with procedures overseen by career professionals in the Department of Justice and the FBI,” the statement said. “We are committed to working with the appropriate oversight entities to ensure the continuing integrity of the FISA process.”
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ormer hippies across the United States have been put in the unbearable position of rooting for the F.B.I., hippies have confirmed.
