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Would Eric Holder Have Prosecuted Huma Abedin? |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=36478"><span class="small">John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Saturday, 06 January 2018 09:43 |
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Kiriakou writes: "President Donald Trump called (again) last week for the Justice Department to initiate a criminal investigation of former Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin after the State Department posted thousands of emails and other documents that were found on the laptop of Abedin's estranged husband, former congressman and current federal sex offender Anthony Weiner."
John Kiriakou. (photo: The Washington Post)
Would Eric Holder Have Prosecuted Huma Abedin?
By John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News
06 January 18
 resident Donald Trump called (again) last week for the Justice Department to initiate a criminal investigation of former Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin after the State Department posted thousands of emails and other documents that were found on the laptop of Abedin’s estranged husband, former congressman and current federal sex offender Anthony Weiner. Most mainstream media outlets ran the story for a day, dismissed Trump as being deranged, and moved on to other news. I think there is something more to this.
I want to go on record as saying that I don’t think Huma Abedin should be arrested. She’s already been investigated, and the Justice Department found that she had not committed a crime. Sure, there were classified documents on her husband’s computer, but she did not appear to have had any criminal intent when she put them there. She was sloppy, careless, perhaps lazy. She wanted all of her classified passwords in one place. And that place wasn’t on her classified system; it was at home, on her unclassified system. It’s certainly a fireable offense, but it doesn’t rise to the level of criminal behavior.
Except in the Eastern District of Virginia in the courtroom of Judge Leonie Brinkema.
Judge Brinkema made a ruling in my case that set legal precedent and that was such a dangerous development that virtually anybody with a security clearance could be charged with espionage if the government decided that they didn’t like their politics. (I was charged with three counts of espionage after blowing the whistle on the CIA’s torture program. All of those charges were dropped, and I eventually pleaded guilty to a lesser charge to make the case go away; I was facing 45 years in prison. I served 23 months.)
In United States v. Kiriakou, Brinkema held that in cases involving the Espionage Act, the government need not prove any criminal intent whatsoever. She said that a person could commit espionage “accidentally,” and that intent, or lack thereof, was not a defense. This was in direct contrast to another judge’s ruling in NSA whistleblower Tom Drake’s case, where even if Drake had exposed classified information (which he hadn’t), he lacked any criminal intent. The case against him fell apart and all felony charges were dropped. But Brinkema’s ruling left me with no defense.
Furthermore, Brinkema defined “espionage” as “the provision of any national defense information to any person not entitled to receive it.” “National defense information” is not defined in the federal code. It never has been. The Espionage Act doesn’t refer to “classified” information because the law was written in 1917 to combat German saboteurs during World War I, while the classification system wasn’t invented until 1952. So what is “national defense information?” It’s whatever the prosecutor decides it is.
Let’s look, then, at what Huma Abedin did. As the Washington Post reported on January 2,
“The president’s tweet (calling for Abedin’s arrest) comes just days after the State Department posted online thousands of Abedin’s emails, which were captured on the computer of Anthony Weiner, her estranged husband. Those emails – some of which contained classified information – spurred the FBI in October [2016] to reopen its investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state, although the bureau would ultimately conclude that the messages gave them no reason to change their conclusion not to recommend charges against Clinton or any of her aides.”
Then-FBI director James Comey called Clinton and Abedin “extremely careless” in their handling of classified information. At the very minimum, there’s a possible case against both for misdemeanor “failure to secure classified information.”
That’s all fine and good. But according to Brinkema’s interpretation of the law, Abedin (and Clinton, for that matter) violated the Espionage Act. At its most lenient, this violation calls for up to five years in a federal prison. At worst, it’s life without parole.
That’s preposterous, of course. But so was the Obama administration’s use of the Espionage Act as an iron fist to stamp out dissent within the US intelligence community. Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, prosecuted eight people under the Espionage Act for allegedly giving classified information to the press. That’s nearly three times the number of prosecutions under all previous presidents combined. Trump has, at least so far, continued that policy with the arrest, incarceration, and prosecution of Reality Winner. And with Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III at the Justice Department, we should only expect the worst.
In the meantime, two things need to happen. First, Congress must rewrite the Espionage Act. They have to define what “national defense information” is. They have to allow for an affirmative defense. And they have to ensure that no president is able to use the Espionage Act as a political weapon. But there are no votes or special interest money in Espionage Act reform. Nobody on Capitol Hill has the guts to do it.
Second, Leonie Brinkema must go. Appointed to the federal bench by Reagan and elevated by Clinton, she obviously hasn’t read a law book in a long time. There’s no place for her reactionary judicial activism in today’s America.
John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act – a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration's torture program.
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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America's Shadow War in Africa Is Dangerous and Counterproductive |
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Saturday, 06 January 2018 09:31 |
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Excerpt: "Later this month, the Pentagon is scheduled to release the results of its investigation of the circumstances surrounding the preventable deaths of four U.S. soldiers in Niger last October."
An AFRICOM soldier with US V-22 Osprey in background. (photo: AFRICOM)
America's Shadow War in Africa Is Dangerous and Counterproductive
By Salih Booker and William D. Hartung, The Hill
06 January 18
 ater this month, the Pentagon is scheduled to release the results of its investigation of the circumstances surrounding the preventable deaths of four U.S. soldiers in Niger last October.
Their deaths were a tragedy in their own right, and a thorough assessment of the decisions that put their lives at risk is necessary to prevent similar outcomes in the future.
But the Pentagon’s review begs a larger set of questions. What is the United States doing in Africa? What are the goals and interests driving a policy that is increasingly militarized? And why is the U.S. reducing its commitment to economic development and human rights in Africa? Surely it will be investments in the latter that will determine security and stability across the continent.
The U.S. military footprint is far larger than most members of Congress, much less the American public, could have imagined. The U.S. has over 800 troops in Niger alone, along with one drone base and another under construction.
There are an estimated 6,000 U.S. troops in Africa, and many more rotate through for training missions, military exercises, or mentoring and educational programs.
A Pentagon spokesman told independent journalist Nick Turse that the U.S. military undertook 3,500 such missions in 2016, a nearly twenty-fold increase from when the U.S. Africa Command, known as AFRICOM, was first rolled out nearly a decade ago.
And after a briefing by Secretary of Defense James Mattis, Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) indicated that we should expect more, not less, U.S. military activity in Africa in the months and years ahead. Before we double down on military intervention, we should consider whether this approach is working to promote peace and stability in Africa or simply making a bad situation worse.
U.S. military activism has done little to curb terrorism in Africa. In addition, the focus on building up military forces at the expense of civilian authorities can weaken already fragile democracies, even as it enables corruption. It also increases the flow of deadly weapons to a region already awash in them.
The increase in U.S. military involvement has been paralleled by a weakening of civilian engagement on the continent. The diplomacy deficit starts with a lack of personnel assigned to these tasks: Of the 54 countries in Africa, President Trump has appointed ambassadors to only five. And nearly a year into his administration, there is still no one at the State Department in charge of developing and implementing a coherent U.S. policy for Africa.
Nor are there funds available to carry out a more balanced approach to the challenges posed by the current conflicts in Africa. The Trump administration’s proposals for deep cuts at the State Department, and reductions in support for United Nations humanitarian aid and peacekeeping efforts, leave military action the largest tool in a rapidly shrinking U.S. foreign policy tool box.
In Niger, one of the poorest countries on the planet, the U.S. has spent more in the past two years on unproven counter terrorism strategies ($88 million) than it has contributed to either humanitarian relief ($79 million) or food assistance ($49.9 million).
This comparison doesn’t even include the $100 million the U.S. is spending to build a second U.S. drone base in Agadez, the largest city in central Niger — a volatile area with an increasingly young and unemployed population and is a major trading post for arms, drugs and human trafficking.
The new base — from which the U.S. will operate the deadly MQ-9 Reaper drones — is a massive undertaking described as the largest U.S. Air Force-led construction project of all time. Once the funding for Agadez is added in, the U.S. military investment in solving Niger’s security problems is significantly higher than spending on nonmilitary aid.
It is long past time for a sober assessment of what U.S. policies can and cannot achieve in Africa, and whether our extensive military commitments on the continent need to be rolled back.
It will be up to Congress, the public and the press to take the first steps in reviewing the pros and cons of the current U.S. approach. We should consider alternatives that may better meet the needs of the U.S., its allies — and, most importantly, the people of Africa. Their voices are rarely heard in debates over policies that will have a huge impact on their safety, their economic prospects, and their basic human rights. The sooner this discussion begins, the better.
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The 7 Most Shocking Details From Michael Wolff's Bombshell Trump Book |
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Friday, 05 January 2018 14:20 |
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Kosoff writes: "A book the White House calls 'trashy tabloid fiction' purports to detail the inner workings of a campaign nobody expected - or wanted - to succeed."
President Trump. (photo: Win McNamee/Getty)
The 7 Most Shocking Details From Michael Wolff's Bombshell Trump Book
By Maya Kosoff, Vanity Fair
05 January 18
A book the White House calls “trashy tabloid fiction” purports to detail the inner workings of a campaign nobody expected—or wanted—to succeed.
 n the eve of the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump was already looking ahead to the publicity opportunities that would come in the weeks and months following his inevitable loss to Hillary Clinton. “This is bigger than I ever dreamed of,” Trump told his longtime friend Roger Ailes, according to an excerpt from Michael Wolff’s upcoming Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House. “I don’t think about losing, because it isn’t losing. We’ve totally won.” Then, of course, they actually won, shocking not only the nation but their own campaign, and catapulting a man into the White House whom many of his own staffers saw as unfit.
Trump’s shock election also swept up an unlikely eyewitness. Just after the inauguration, Wolff said he was given “something like a semi-permanent seat on a couch in the West Wing,” conducting hundreds of interviews with White House aides, including “most members of [Trump’s] senior staff.” The result is a book that depicts vivid scenes of Trump’s ineptitude, and the quagmire of infighting that has bogged down the White House since his ascent. And a handful of details, if true, are particularly telling.
Michael Flynn should’ve listened to his friends
Almost everybody on the Trump team, in fact, came with the kind of messy conflicts bound to bite a president once he was in office. Michael Flynn, the retired general who served as Trump’s opening act at campaign rallies, had been told by his friends that it had not been a good idea to take $45,000 from the Russians for a speech. “Well, it would only be a problem if we won,” Flynn assured them.
Trump’s political wherewithal barely rivals that of the average middle-schooler
Those close to the president knew going in that he was startlingly ignorant, but dismissed that fact as irrelevant—after all, he would never be president.
Everybody in his rich-guy social circle knew about his wide-ranging ignorance. Early in the campaign, Sam Nunberg was sent to explain the Constitution to the candidate. “I got as far as the Fourth Amendment,” Nunberg recalled, “before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head.”
Things did not improve when it came time for the president-elect to choose a chief of staff.
Ailes, a veteran of the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush 41 administrations, tried to impress on Trump the need to create a White House structure that could serve and protect him. “You need a son of a bitch as your chief of staff,” he told Trump. “And you need a son of a bitch who knows Washington. You’ll want to be your own son of a bitch, but you don’t know Washington.” Ailes had a suggestion: John Boehner, who had stepped down as Speaker of the House only a year earlier. “Who’s that?” asked Trump.
When Trump floated Jared Kushner for the job, it was conservative pundit Ann Coulter, of all people, who reportedly talked some sense into him. “Nobody is apparently telling you this,” she told him, according to Wolff. “But you can’t. You just can’t hire your children.”
Reince Priebus’s job came with a warning
“Here’s the deal,” a close Trump associate told Priebus. “In an hour meeting with him, you’re going to hear 54 minutes of stories, and they’re going to be the same stories over and over again. So you have to have one point to make, and you pepper it in whenever you can.”
Ivanka regularly dishes on her dad’s hair-care regimen
For Ivanka, it was all business — building the Trump brand, the presidential campaign, and now the White House. She treated her father with a degree of detachment, even irony, going so far as to make fun of his comb-over to others. She often described the mechanics behind it to friends: an absolutely clean pate — a contained island after scalp-reduction surgery — surrounded by a furry circle of hair around the sides and front, from which all ends are drawn up to meet in the center and then swept back and secured by a stiffening spray. The color, she would point out to comical effect, was from a product called Just for Men — the longer it was left on, the darker it got. Impatience resulted in Trump’s orange-blond hair color.
Trump was initially very concerned for the tech industry
After a delegation from Silicon Valley came to visit the president, Trump pal Rupert Murdoch reportedly asked the president how the conversation had gone.
“Oh, great, just great,” said Trump. “These guys really need my help. Obama was not very favorable to them, too much regulation. This is really an opportunity for me to help them.”
“Donald,” said Murdoch, “for eight years these guys had Obama in their pocket. They practically ran the administration. They don’t need your help.”
“Take this H-1B visa issue. They really need these H-1B visas.”
Murdoch suggested that taking a liberal approach to H-1B visas, which open America’s doors to select immigrants, might be hard to square with his promises to build a wall and close the borders. But Trump seemed unconcerned, assuring Murdoch, “We’ll figure it out.”
The president really, really misses Trump Tower
Trump, in fact, found the White House to be vexing and even a little scary. He retreated to his own bedroom—the first time since the Kennedy White House that a presidential couple had maintained separate rooms. In the first days, he ordered two television screens in addition to the one already there, and a lock on the door, precipitating a brief standoff with the Secret Service, who insisted they have access to the room. He reprimanded the housekeeping staff for picking up his shirt from the floor: “If my shirt is on the floor, it’s because I want it on the floor.” Then he imposed a set of new rules: Nobody touch anything, especially not his toothbrush. (He had a longtime fear of being poisoned, one reason why he liked to eat at McDonald’s — nobody knew he was coming and the food was safely premade.) Also, he would let housekeeping know when he wanted his sheets done, and he would strip his own bed.
In the first month of Trump’s presidency, not even White House staffers knew what was going on
To [Katie] Walsh, the proud political pro, the chaos, the rivalries, and the president’s own lack of focus were simply incomprehensible. In early March, not long before she left, she confronted Kushner with a simple request. “Just give me the three things the president wants to focus on,” she demanded. “What are the three priorities of this White House?”
It was the most basic question imaginable — one that any qualified presidential candidate would have answered long before he took up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Six weeks into Trump’s presidency, Kushner was wholly without an answer.
“Yes,” he said to Walsh. “We should probably have that conversation.”
Though White House sources told Axios that they had been ”prepared for the Wolff book to be bad for them,” certain portions seem to have exceeded their expectations. After The Guardian published a portion of the book in which former Trump adviser Steve Bannon was quoted slamming the actions of Donald Trump Jr., the elder Trump shot back with a blistering statement of his own. Meanwhile, Trump allies on the right have already begun a campaign to discredit Wolff, calling him a “total hack” and casting doubt on his reports. As right-wing blogger Mike Cernovich lamented on Wednesday, “This terrible smear piece . . . harms everyone and helps no one.”
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Why Has the CIA's 'Man in Iran' Gone Quiet? |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=31019"><span class="small">Robert Fisk, The Independent</span></a>
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Friday, 05 January 2018 14:10 |
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Fisk writes: "Isn't the man in charge of the CIA's Iran operations taking a serious interest in the latest events in Iran? Surely he is. That's his job, isn't it? But why this silence?"
People gather to protest over high cost of living in Tehran, Iran, December 30, 2017. (photo: Getty)
Why Has the CIA's 'Man in Iran' Gone Quiet?
By Robert Fisk, The Independent
05 January 18
Isn’t the man in charge of the CIA’s Iran operations taking a serious interest in the latest events in Iran? Surely he is. That’s his job, isn’t it? But why this silence?
 ost of us know the extremely rare but slightly creepy feeling of driving down a road or seeing a hill or listening to a conversation and being overcome by the absolute conviction that we’ve seen it or heard it before. Perhaps in an earlier incarnation. Or maybe just a few years ago, though we may not be able to place the experience in a time frame. It took me quite a while before a trusted friend was able to pinpoint why I found Iran’s latest miniature street revolution so weird. And so familiar. And so chilling.
Let’s run through the sequence of events. A large number of young, disenfranchised and poor/unemployed young people take to the streets of a Middle East nation to complain about their poverty, the corruption of the regime, their own lack of freedom – and quickly, they turn against their own leaders. Perfectly justified. But within days, guns are being used against opponents of the government which both claims the people’s right to freedom of speech but warns that those who use violence will pay the price. At least 21 – two of them members of the security forces – are killed as protestors respond to the shoot-to-kill tactics of the governments’ armed supporters.
The most powerful leader – supported by state militias – complains that the unrest is fomented by foreigners, traitors, spies. The most senior leader in the state puts it all down to “money, weapons, politics and intelligence services”. America, Britain and Saudi Arabia are named as the principal suspects. And then vast pro-government crowds – dwarfing in numbers (if not in enthusiasm) the demonstrators, march in their hundreds of thousands to condemn the street protests, holding pictures of their beloved leaders above their heads. The regime calls the protests “finished”.
The parallels are not exact – the similarities much more so – but isn’t this pretty much, word for word, what happened in Syria in 2011? Isn’t this the same scenario, the same stage-play, the same script? A mass of impoverished rural poor – crushed by the madcap agricultural policies of their own government – began to demonstrate against the Assad administration, then against its corruption and then – quickly – demanded its overthrow, just as demonstrators in Iran can today be seen burning posters of Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, and President Hassan Rouhani. The security forces began to shoot down protestors. And – much earlier than we believed at the time – armed opponents of the regime in the spring of 2011 began to attack the Syrian military, along the northern Lebanese border near Homs and in Dera’a.
Bashar al-Assad’s regime immediately claimed that a “foreign hand” was at work behind the ‘terrorists’ – a word not used (yet) by the Iranian government about their armed opponents – and named America and Saudi Arabia as conspiring to bring civil war to Syria. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians loyal to the regime paraded through Damascus each week waving posters of Assad. Repeatedly, the Syrian government referred to the crisis as “finished”.
It was not. But, despite the efforts of America and Saudi Arabia (and Britain’s support for “regime change”), Assad clung on with the same tenacity as the Iranian regime crushed the 2009 protests after the very dodgy presidential election “victory” of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (a man who had a lot in common with Donald Trump).
Now I shall drag forth my favourite, creaking but still relevant institution, the Department of Home Truths. No, Iran is no Western-style democracy when its officials decide who may or may not stand for president. But it does have a genuinely working parliament and after the experience of Trump’s triumph – not to mention a George W.Bush victory of doubtful provenance – comparing Iranian freedoms with American freedoms may not be a great idea right now.
My own concerns lie in the inherent cruelty of a regime which can send a young and innocent woman to the gallows as a prison official yells taunts at her mother on the daughter’s mobile phone. I’ve said before that the gallows stain Iran far more than the centrifuge.
You can negotiate over a nuclear facility. You can’t reboot death. Take, for example, Delara Darabi – only 23 years old – who was dragged to the gallows in 2009, screaming to her mother on her mobile phone: “Oh mother, I can see the hangman’s noose in front of me. They are going to execute me. Please save me.”
Delara had falsely confessed to killing her father’s cousin to save her boyfriend from the hangman. As the poor girl was strung up, her male executioner grabbed her phone and sneered to her mother that nothing could save her daughter now. Then president Ahmadinejad told me the same year that he was against capital punishment. But the Iranian judiciary was “independent” of the government, he announced. “I do not want to kill even an ant.”
He did nothing, of course. Almost 700 human beings were dragged to the gibbet in 2015, another 567 in 2016. Many of the victims, to be sure, were drug dealers. But their trials were shambolic and the executions contaminate the Islamic Republic as surely as they besmirch the authority of Hassan Rouhani, the man whom we were enjoined to trust after the Tehran nuclear agreement.
But now let’s return to those haunting parallels between Iran and Syria. The Israeli war with Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006 was an attempt to destroy Syria’s closest ally in Lebanon and Iran’s protégé. It failed. The Hezbollah claimed they won. They did not, but the Israelis lost. The next target became Syria in 2011. We know only part of the mournful, atrocious story since then. But the West – and Israel – lost again. Assad survived. He has won – with the help of those pesky Russians and the Hezbollah and Iran.
And so now, is it Iran’s turn? Almost the same tactics. The same screenplay. The same enemies Saudi Arabia watches with delight. Britain hums and haws about human rights – that is Boris’s contribution – but the Americans are gung-ho on the side of the innocent (if increasingly dangerous) protestors. “The world is watching.” Sure it is. But what puzzles me is that while Iran makes its usual claims of US conspiracies, the American media – and our own, for that matter – have not in this context once mentioned the name of a US intelligence official who was getting star billing only six months ago as the man appointed by Trump to run the CIA’s Iran operations.
How very odd. For the New York Times, back in June, was profiling the new role of the “Dark Prince” – or “Ayatollah Mike” as he was also apparently dubbed – as one of “a number of moves inside the spy agency that signal a more muscular approach to covert operations” under the leadership of Mike Pompeo. “Iran has been one of the hardest targets for the CIA…” quoth the paper that publishes “all the news that’s fit to print”. “The challenge to start carrying out President Trump’s views falls to Mr D’Andrea, a chain-smoking convert to Islam ... Perhaps no single CIA official is more responsible for weakening al-Qaeda ... Mr Trump has appointed to the National Security Council hawks eager to contain [sic] Iran and push regime change, the groundwork for which would most likely be laid through CIA covert action.”
In the years after the 11 September attacks, the New York Times notes, D‘Andrea was “deeply involved in the detention and interrogation programme, which resulted in the torture of a number of prisoners and was condemned in a sweeping Senate report in 2014 as inhumane and ineffective”. D’Andrea took over the CIA’s Counterterrorism Centre in 2006 and, according to the paper, “operatives under his direction played a pivotal role in 2008 in the killing of Imad Mougniyeh”, one of Hezbollah’s most senior officials (albeit in semi-retirement) in Damascus. D’Andrea was apparently also instrumental in vastly increasing the use of pilotless drone attacks on the Pakistan-Afghan border.
A formidable adversary for the Iranians, therefore – as well as the Syrians – but it’s very odd we haven’t heard any more about him for all these months. Isn’t he taking a serious interest in the latest events in Iran? Surely he is. That’s his job, isn’t it? But why this silence? Are we unable to connect any threads here? Is there perhaps, maybe, by chance alone, nudge-is-as-good-as-a-wink, some link between the “intelligence services” about whom poor old Khamenei waffles in Tehran and the “intelligence services” run by Michael D’Andrea, the man who must start “carrying out President Trump’s views”? I’m not at all sure that “the world is watching”. But it should be.
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few gestures of mutual respect between North Korea and South Korea during the first week of January are a long way from a stable, enduring peace on the Korean peninsula, but these gestures are the best signs of sanity there in decades. On January 1, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un called for immediate dialogue with South Korea ahead of next month’s Winter Olympics there. On January 2, South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in proposed that talks begin next week in Panmunjom (a border village where intermittent talks to end the Korean War have continued since 1953). On January 3, the two Koreas reopened a communications hotline that has been dysfunctional for almost two years (requiring South Korea to use a megaphone across the border in order to repatriate several North Korean fishermen). Talks on January 9 are expected to include North Korean participation in the Winter Olympics that begin February 9 in Pyeongchang, South Korea.
