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FOCUS: Apparently Repealing Obamacare Could Violate International Law |
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Wednesday, 26 April 2017 11:40 |
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Milbank writes: "We've already seen that repealing Obamacare is politically perilous. Now there's a new complication: It may also violate international law."
Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan with President Trump. (photo: Getty)
Apparently Repealing Obamacare Could Violate International Law
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
26 April 17
 e’ve already seen that repealing Obamacare is politically perilous. Now there’s a new complication: It may also violate international law.
The United Nations has contacted the Trump administration as part of an investigation into whether repealing the Affordable Care Act without an adequate substitute for the millions who would lose health coverage would be a violation of several international conventions that bind the United States. It turns out that the notion that “health care is a right” is more than just a Democratic talking point.
A confidential, five-page “urgent appeal” from the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner on Human Rights in Geneva, sent to the Trump administration, cautions that the repeal of the Affordable Care Act could put the United States at odds with its international obligations. The Feb. 2 memo, which I obtained Tuesday, was sent to the State Department and expresses “serious concern” about the prospective loss of health coverage for almost 30 million people, which could violate “the right to social security of the people in the United States.”
The letter urges that “all necessary interim measures be taken to prevent the alleged violations” and asks that, if the “allegations” proved correct, there be “adequate measure to prevent their occurrence as well as to guarantee the accountability of any person responsible.”
OHCHR requested that copies of the letter be shared with majority and minority leadership in both chambers of Congress and proposed that “the wider public should be alerted to the potential implications of the above-mentioned allegations.”
Apparently that didn’t happen. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s office and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer’s office said they didn’t receive the letter, and officials in House Speaker Paul D. Ryan’s and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s offices said Tuesday that they were unaware of it. The letter did make its way to the Department of Health and Human Services, where an employee leaked it to congressional Democratic leadership. A State Department spokesman said my inquiry was “the first I’m hearing of this.”
A spokesman for the U.N.’s human rights office in Geneva confirmed the authenticity of the letter, which was sent by Dainius Puras, a Lithuanian doctor who serves the United Nations under the absurdly long title “Special Rapporteur on the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health.”
The spokesman, Xabier Celaya, said Puras cannot comment on his Obamacare inquiry until it becomes public at the next session of the Human Rights Council in June.
None of this, of course, will deter President Trump and congressional Republicans, who are again attempting to get a repeal bill through the House. They scoff at lectures from U.N. bureaucrats, particularly on domestic affairs, and the world body has no practical way to impose its will on Congress. There’s also a logical question: If repealing Obamacare violates international law, wasn’t the country in violation before Obamacare? Puras addresses this by writing that the U.N. Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights “notes that there is a strong presumption that retrogressive measures taken in relation to the right to health are not permissible.”
Though of questionable legal value, the U.N. letter is at least a bit of moral support for those defending Obamacare. Those attempting to deny health care to tens of millions of Americans would hurt their own constituents in a way that falls short of the standards we hold for ourselves and other countries.
Specifically, Puras writes that Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights “establishes everyone’s right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being, including food, medical care and necessary social services.” He notes that Article 5(e) of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, ratified by the United States in 1994, calls on states to “guarantee the right of everyone,” including “the rights to public health, medical care, social security and social services” without regard to race or color.
The special rapporteur also cites Article 12 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, under which states have “the core obligation to ensure the right of access to health facilities, goods and services on a non-discriminatory basis, especially for vulnerable or marginalized groups.” The agreement was signed but not ratified by the United States, which is still “obliged to refrain from acts that would defeat the covenant’s object or purpose, in conformity with Article 18 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.”
The Trump administration has shown its contempt for such considerations by failing to pass along the U.N. letter to congressional leaders. But you don’t have to care about international law to know that the essence of the OHCHR criticism is true: Taking away health coverage from millions without an adequate replacement is abject cruelty.
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FOCUS: Jeff Sessions, Julian Assange, and the First Amendment |
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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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Wednesday, 26 April 2017 10:40 |
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Pierce writes: "I don't care what you think of Julian Assange, and I don't care which side you were on during the 2016 Democratic primaries. (In fact, I wish you'd all shut the hell up about that.) Unleashing Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III on the Bill of Rights is a ghastly prospect that should be fought at every turn."
Jeff Sessions and Julian Assange. (photo: Getty Images)
Jeff Sessions, Julian Assange, and the First Amendment
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
26 April 17
This is a terrible idea.
 realize that Julian Assange isn't high on anyone's Christmas card list after he and WikiLeaks played monkey-mischief with the 2016 presidential election, largely through the dissemination of hacked emails in which was exposed the interior monologue of the Democratic National Committee. I realize that his defenders—Bernie Bros or not—can be completely insufferable and a plague upon Twitter feeds.
However, this is a truly terrible idea that should scare the socks off anyone committed to the free exercise of the First Amendment. From The Guardian:
Hours later it was reported by CNN that authorities have prepared charges against Assange, who is currently holed up at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Donald Trump lavished praise on the anti-secrecy website during the presidential election campaign - "I love WikiLeaks," he once told a rally - but his administration has struck a different tone. Asked whether it was a priority for the justice department to arrest Assange "once and for all", Sessions told a press conference in El Paso, Texas on Thursday: "We are going to step up our effort and already are stepping up our efforts on all leaks. This is a matter that's gone beyond anything I'm aware of. We have professionals that have been in the security business of the United States for many years that are shocked by the number of leaks and some of them are quite serious."
This is a terrible idea for three reasons.
1) The Espionage Act is a terrible law, a monster out of the Wilson administration through which the spirit of A. Mitchell Palmer still stalks the halls of the Department of Justice. It should have been repealed years ago.
2) I can't see any way for the DOJ to proceed in a prosecution like this without threatening to subpoena journalists, or to actually charge them. The Obama administration's assault on leakers and the people to whom they leak was the worst part of that administration's record on law enforcement. They made the lives of reporters miserable. But this would be a giant step beyond anything that administration did. And, finally…
3) It's these guys. This is the lens through which any action this administration takes must be judged. The president* is Donald Trump. The attorney general is Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. The presumption of incompetence on the one hand, and authoritarianism on the other, must always control in any action this administration takes. The Espionage Act is a terrible law. JeffBo is a terrible AG. This is the ironclad context in which any action taken should be judged.
I don't care what you think of Julian Assange, or Glenn Greenwald, or The Intercept, and I don't care which side you were on during the 2016 Democratic primaries. (In fact, I wish you'd all shut the hell up about that.) Unleashing Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III on the Bill of Rights is a ghastly prospect that should be fought at every turn. The only court in which Assange rightly should appear is in Sweden.
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CIA Chief Declares War on Truth |
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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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Wednesday, 26 April 2017 08:41 |
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Boardman writes: "Mike Pompeo made it clear that he has little regard for truth, for personal decency, or for the Constitutional protections for free speech or for the free exercise of religion."
Mike Pompeo. (photo: Eric Thayer/Reuters)
CIA Chief Declares War on Truth
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
26 April 17
“… the American people deserve a clear explanation of what their Central Intelligence Agency does on their behalf…. we are an organization committed to uncovering the truth and getting it right…. And sure—we also admit to making mistakes…. But it is always our intention—and duty—to get it right. And that is one of the many reasons why we at CIA find the celebration of entities like WikiLeaks to be both perplexing and deeply troubling.”
– CIA Director Mike Pompeo, April 13, 2017
hile the snippets above provide a reasonable summary of the substance of Mike Pompeo’s first speech as head of the CIA, they don’t begin to capture the full demagoguery of the CIA head’s rambling 3700-word blather of ad hominem attacks, false claims, hyperbolic rhetoric, irrelevancies, straw man arguments, and political deflections. In other words, Pompeo made it clear that he has little regard for truth, for personal decency, or for the Constitutional protections for free speech or for the free exercise of religion. It was an altogether chilling debut for a spy agency head in a country that still imagines itself enjoying some basic freedoms.
Pompeo started with an anecdotal biography of former CIA agent Philip Agee, without mentioning that Agee resigned from the CIA in 1968 and died in 2008. Nor did Pompeo mention that Agee resigned, despite CIA entreaties to stay, because Agee could no longer countenance the Agency’s support for brutal dictatorships across Latin America. Instead of confronting the substance of Agee’s life and actions, Pompeo reiterated the official CIA demonization of the man who founded the anti-CIA magazine Counterspy and revealed many CIA secrets. As the CIA has done for decades, Pompeo blamed Agee for the assassination of CIA agent Richard Welch in Greece in 1975. Barbara Bush made this same claim in her 1994 memoir. After Agee sued her for libel, the claim was removed from the paperback edition.
As a lawyer who knows he can’t libel the dead, Pompeo is unmitigatedly dishonest in his portrait of Agee, concluding it with: “Meanwhile, Agee propped up his dwindling celebrity with an occasional stunt, including a Playboy interview. He eventually settled down as the privileged guest of an authoritarian regime.” That was a reference to Cuba, where Agee died, but until the very end of his life he also spent time in Germany, his wife’s home country. Pompeo utterly fails to meet his duty to get it right. He comes nowhere near the truth, that Agee’s life represents the struggle faced by a man of conscience when he realizes the agency he works for also commits horrendous crimes, not just mistakes. An honest historian would put this account of a man’s life within the context of the US Senate’s 1975 Church Committee, which documented a number of CIA crimes and led, for awhile at least, to significant CIA reform.
Having framed his talk with a false version of Philip Agee, Pompeo spent the rest of it mixing CIA boilerplate promotional material with his main purpose, attacking WikiLeaks on the basis of a big lie:
WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service. It has encouraged its followers to find jobs at CIA in order to obtain intelligence. It directed Chelsea Manning in her theft of specific secret information. And it overwhelmingly focuses on the United States, while seeking support from anti-democratic countries and organizations. It is time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is – a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.
Pompeo offers no analysis or evidentiary support for these assertions. There is no public evidence that WikiLeaks is anything like an intelligence service in purpose, structure, or functioning. According to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, WikiLeaks has the same mission as the Washington Post or New York Times: “to publish newsworthy content. Consistent with the U.S. Constitution, we publish material that we can confirm to be true irrespective of whether sources came by that truth legally or have the right to release it to the media.” The Times famously did that very thing in 1971 when it released the Pentagon Papers, which affirmed the disastrous dishonesty that produced the Vietnam War.
The record of WikiLeaks is the opposite of most any intelligence service, certainly of the CIA. WikiLeaks is available as a resource for people to publish government secrets. WikiLeaks vets the material it is offered and, so far, has never had to make a retraction. Everything WikiLeaks has offered is true. The CIA lies all the time, although not everything it says is false. What Pompeo says about Chelsea Manning looks like a bald-faced lie. But he needs that lie to undercut the reality that Manning was a soldier with a conscience who objected to US random slaughters of Iraqi civilians, men, women, children, journalists.
Pompeo’s reference to “state actors like Russia” is shamelessly hilarious. The best known WikiLeaks project allegedly involving Russia is the massive release of Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails during the 2016 campaign. These were significantly damaging to Hillary Clinton, and Mike Pompeo at the time was saying things like this:
Well, it’s classic Clinton, right? When you find out you got a problem, you deflect, you deny, you create a contretemps where there really is none. Frankly, it’s pretty clear who invited the Russians to do damage to America, and it was Hillary Clinton. She put classified information on a private server, inviting the Chinese, the Iranians, the Russians, all to have access to it. I hope they didn’t get it, but even the former director of the CIA said he thinks they probably did. So, the person who’s put American national security risk isn’t Donald Trump, it’s Hillary Clinton.
So in July 2016, WikiLeaks was innocent, and Russia was irrelevant? Can you say find the truth and get it right? Can you say serial hypocrite? Or can you say, along with candidate Trump last October, “This just came out. Wikileaks. I love WikiLeaks”?
At the time of Pompeo’s speech, mainstream media paid more attention to the so-called “mother of all bombs” dropped on Afghanistanthan they did to this much more powerful political bombshell dropped on the US. Recently some mainstream media have been taking another look, as in this headline from Newsweek: “CIA CHIEF POMPEO TAKES AIM AT THE FREE PRESS.”
What can and should CIA, the United States, and our allies do about the unprecedented challenge posed by these hostile non-state intelligence agencies?... First, it is high time we called out those who grant a platform to these leakers and so-called transparency activists…. We know the danger that Assange and his not-so-merry band of brothers pose to democracies around the world. Ignorance or misplaced idealism is no longer an acceptable excuse for lionizing these demons.
Once again the high hilarity of the deceitful surfaces in Pompeo’s calling Assange a threat to democracy. If that is in any sense true, then Mike Pompeo owes his CIA job to the success of Assange’s “threat.” The real threat is to those who “grant a platform” to WikiLeaks, and those would be all American media for starters. But the scarier part is that Pompeo is not only comfortable demonizing people like Agee or Assange, he literally calls them “demons,” and this is not standard political talk, this is fundamentalism Christian visualizing the devil’s work. When some of the highest officials in the US government are busy chasing “demons,” then US Constitutional government is at serious risk.
Mike Pompeo, 53, the present director of the Central Intelligence Agency, is a West Point trained military veteran, a Harvard trained lawyer, and a self-expressed, profound “Christian” bigot and hypocrite. He has no experience in intelligence. The radical former Tea Party congressman from Kansas was confirmed for his CIA role by a 66-32 Senate vote despite his lengthy, fact-free obsession with the Benghazi attack of 2012, or his avid denial of climate change, or his ardent support for keeping Guantanamo and other torture prisons open (he has called torturers “patriots”). He has advocated covert surveillance to collect “all metadata” on Americans, a program that is currently illegal. Pompeo not only magnifies the threat of terrorists like ISIS, he views that threat through a religious lens and apparently believes in the Manichaean formulation that there is currently “a conflict between the Christian west and the Islamic east.”
After his April 13 address, Pompeo took questions, one of which was about President Trump’s relationship with the CIA and the other 16 agencies in the intelligence community. The question apparently referred to such things as President Trump’s tweets earlier this year, blaming leaks on “the intelligence community (NSA and FBI?). Just like Russia” and later saying “Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to ‘leak’ into the public. One last shot at me. Are we living in Nazi Germany?” The supposedly “fake news” had exposed multiple Russian contacts with Trump campaign agents as early as 2015, revelations that led directly to the resignation of Trump national security advisor Gen. Michael Flynn. The question of Russian involvement in electing President Trump remains unresolved.
Despite this context, Pompeo answered the question about the president’s relations with the intelligence community simply: “It’s fantastic.”
The audience laughed. Pompeo added: “Don’t laugh, I mean that.”
Good to know that the head of Central Intelligence believes in fantasy. Reassuring to know that the CIA head wants to “make sure that we know that Jesus Christ our savior is truly the only solution for our world.”
A nation formed by the ideas of the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is now at least partly in the hands of a Christian Taliban.
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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Obama's Barrage of Complete Sentences Seen as Brutal Attack on Trump |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=9160"><span class="small">Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Tuesday, 25 April 2017 14:45 |
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Borowitz writes: "In an appearance at the University of Chicago on Monday, former President Barack Obama unloaded a relentless barrage of complete sentences in what was widely seen as a brutal attack on his successor, Donald Trump."
Barack Obama. (photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Obama's Barrage of Complete Sentences Seen as Brutal Attack on Trump
By Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
25 April 17
 The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report." 
n an appearance at the University of Chicago on Monday, former President Barack Obama unloaded a relentless barrage of complete sentences in what was widely seen as a brutal attack on his successor, Donald Trump.
Appearing at his first public event since leaving office, Obama fired off a punishing fusillade of grammatically correct sentences, the likes of which the American people have not heard from the White House since he departed.
“He totally restricted his speech to complete sentences,” Tracy Klugian, a student at the event, said. “It was the most vicious takedown of Trump I’d ever seen.”
“About five or six sentences in, I noticed that all of his sentences had both nouns and verbs in them,” Carol Foyler, another student, said. “I couldn’t believe he was going after Trump like that.”
Obama’s blistering deployment of complete sentences clearly got under the skin of their intended target, who, moments after the event, responded with an angry tweet: “Obama bad (or sick) guy. Failing. Sad!”
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he New York Times has been defending the paper's hiring of a 
