Saturday, May 12, 2018
Bill Clinton Instructed Tom Perez to Stop Bernie Sanders’ Influence
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqlTPUn4nXI
Haspel Says CIA Won’t Torture Again as Ray McGovern is Dragged Out of Hearing
May 10, 2018
By Joe Lauria
Instead of facing a judge to
defend herself against prosecution for violating U.S. law prohibiting torture,
33-year CIA veteran Gina Haspel on Wednesday faced the Senate Intelligence
Committee in a hearing to confirm her as director of the Central Intelligence
Agency.
Haspel does not look like
someone who would be associated with torture. Instead she would not be out of
place as your next door neighbor or as a kindly grade-school teacher. “I think
you will find me to be a typical middle-class American,” she said in her
opening statement.
Haspel is the face of America.
She not only looks harmless, but looks like she wants to help: perhaps to
recommend a good gardener to hire or to spread democracy around the globe while
upholding human rights wherever they are violated.
But this perfectly typical
middle class American personally supervised a black site in Thailand where
terrorism suspects were waterboarded. It remains unclear whether she had a
direct role in the torture. The CIA said she arrived at the black site after
the waterboarding of senior al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah had taken
place. Some CIA officials disputed that to The New York Times. The
newspaper also reported last
year that Haspel ran the CIA Thai prison in 2002 when another suspect, Abd
al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was waterboarded.
Even if she did not have a
direct hand in overseeing the torture, she certainly acquiesced to it. And if
that were not bad enough, Haspel urged
the destruction of 92 videotaped CIA “enhanced interrogations,” conducted at
the prison in Thailand, eliminating evidence in a clear-cut obstruction of
justice to cover-up her own possible crimes.
At her public hearing Haspel
refused to say that the torture was immoral. Instead she tried to romanticize
her nefarious past in adolescent language about the spy trade, about going to
secret meetings on “dark, moonless nights,” in the “dusty back alleys of Third
World capitals.”
Haspel claimed to have a
“strong moral compass.” We really can’t know because we only found out about
what she did in Thailand in 2002 because of press reports. Just about
everything else she did during her three decades at the agency remains shrouded
in secrecy because she refused to declassify almost all of her record for the
committee.
“Bloody Gina,” as some CIA
colleagues called her, told the hearing she would not re-institute the
“enhanced interrogation” program if she became director. One wonders if the US
were attacked again like on 9/11 if she would keep her vow, especially as she admitted
nothing wrong with “enhanced interrogation” the first time.
Haspel testified that the U.S.
has a new legal framework that governs detentions and interrogations forbidding
what she refused to call torture. But the U.S. already had a law on the books against
it when the Senate ratified the international Convention Against
Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment on
October 21, 1994. Every time the U.S. “tortured some folks” after that, as
Barack Obama put, it broke U.S. law.
In speaking about it in a
folksy way, Obama was minimizing the enormity of the crime and justifying his
decision to not prosecute any American who may have taken part in it. That
includes Haspel. So instead of facing the law she’s facing a career promotion
to one of the most powerful positions in the United States, if not the world.
McGovern Speaks Out
Haspel tried to wiggle out of
relentless questioning about whether she thought torture was immoral, let alone
illegal. Completely ignoring U.S. ratification of the Convention Against
Torture, Haspel clung to the new Army Field Manual, which contains a loophole
in an annex added after 9/11 that justifies cruel punishment, but not
specifically torture.
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who
was tortured in Vietnam, had no doubts about Haspel. After the hearing he
issued a statement saying, “Ms. Haspel’s role in overseeing the use of torture
by Americans is disturbing. Her refusal to acknowledge torture’s immorality is
disqualifying.”
Because
she wasn’t giving any straight answers, Ray McGovern, a CIA veteran of 27 years
and frequent contributor to Consortium News, stood up in the hearing room and
began asking his own questions. Capitol police were immediately ordered by the
chairman, Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC), to physically remove McGovern from the
room. As he continued turning towards the committee to shout his questions,
four officers hauled him out. They ominously accused him of resisting arrest.
Once they got him into the hallway, rather than letting him go his way, four
policemen wrestled him to the ground, re-injuring his dislocated left shoulder,
as they attempted to cuff him.
After spending the night in
jail, McGovern, 78, was to be arraigned on Thursday. He has not responded to
several voice message left on his mobile phone. A police officer at Central Booking
told Consortium News McGovern was no longer under their control and had been
sent to court. According to DC Superior Court, he has been charged with
Unlawful Disruption of Congress and Resisting Arrest. Ray returned home
Thursday night.
McGovern was one of several
people arrested before and during the hearing for speaking out. The spectacle
of citizens of this country, and in Ray’s case a veteran CIA officer, having to
resort to disrupting a travesty of a hearing to put an alleged torturer in
charge of the most powerful spy agency in the world is a disturbing indicator
of how far we have come.
A Different Kind of Hearing
In 1975, Sen. Frank Church
(D-ID) conducted hearings that revealed a raft of criminality committed by the
CIA, the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation over
a period of thirty years from the end of the Second World War. It has been more
than 40 years since that Senate investigation. After the release of the CIA
Torture Report by the Senate in 2014 and the revelations about the NSA by
Edward Snowden, a new Church Committee-style expansive probe into the
intelligence agencies is long overdue.
A central question it should
ask is whether the CIA really serves the interests of the American people or
rather the interests of its rulers, which the agency has done from its founding
by Wall Street elites, such as its first director, Allen Dulles.
While the
Republican-controlled intelligence committee may have partisan motives to
launch such a new Church-like commission to look into the agencies’ shenanigans
in the Russia-gate fiasco, the majority of Republicans are hawks on
intelligence matters and many support torture and want Haspel to be the next
CIA director. For instance, Burr told Haspel: “You are without a doubt the most
qualified person the president could choose to lead the CIA and the most
prepared nominee in the 70-year history of the agency. You have acted morally,
ethically and legally over a distinguished 30-year career.”
None of this bodes well for
the nation.
Friday, May 11, 2018
Follow The Money: Three Billionaires Paved Way For Trump’s Iran Deal Withdrawal
President Donald Trump has
just fulfilled a campaign pledge to tear up the Obama administration’s
signature foreign policy achievement, a multilateral agreement constraining
Iran’s nuclear enrichment (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA). In
doing so, the president went against the
advice of, among many others, his secretary of defense, House Foreign
Affairs Committee Chairman Ed
Royce (R-CA), Washington’s three most important European allies, and
almost-two thirds of Americans who believe that the U.S. should not withdraw
from the deal, according to a
CNN poll released on Tuesday morning.
Trump appears absolutely
determined to undo as much of what Barack Obama accomplished as possible. In
addition, the sheer perversity of his personality may well explain today’s
action. But it may also be useful to follow the apochryphal advice that
Watergate’s famous “Deep Throat” offered to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
in All the President’s Men, particularly in the unbelievably corrupt swamp
of the Trump era.
Indeed, today’s unpopular
announcement may have been exactly what two of Trump’s biggest donors, Sheldon
Adelson and Bernard Marcus,
and what one of his biggest inaugural supporters, Paul Singer,
paid for when they threw their financial weight behind Trump. Marcus and
Adelson, who are also board members of the Likudist Republican
Jewish Coalition, have already received substantial returns on their
investment: total alignment by the U.S. behind Israel, next week’s move of the
U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, and the official dropping of “occupied
territories” to describe the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Adelson, for his part, was
Trump and the GOP’s biggest campaign supporter. He and his wife Miriam
contributed $35 million in outside spending to elect Trump, $20 million to the
Congressional Leadership Fund (a super PAC exclusively dedicated to securing a
GOP majority in the House of Representatives), and $35 million to the Senate Leadership
Fund (the Senate counterpart) in the 2016 election cycle.
Trump, who had previously
complained that Adelson was seeking to “mold [Marco Rubio] into the perfect
little puppet,” quickly snapped
around and echoed Adelson’s hawkish positions on the
Israeli-Palestinian peace process and moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem
after Trump won the Republican nomination and secured Adelson’s backing.
Politico reported that
the most threatening line in Trump’s October UN speech—that he would cancel
Washington’s participation in the JCPOA if Congress and U.S. allies did not
bend to his efforts to renegotiate it—came directly from John Bolton,
now Trump’s national security advisor, and with the full weight of Trump’s
biggest donor. The hawkish language was not in the original remarks prepared by
Trump’s staff.
The line was added to Trump’s
speech after Bolton, despite Kelly’s recent edict [restricting Bolton’s access
to Trump], reached the president by phone on Thursday afternoon from Las Vegas,
where Bolton was visiting with Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson. Bolton
urged Trump to include a line in his remarks noting that he reserved the right
to scrap the agreement entirely, according to two sources familiar with the
conversation.
Adelson, for his part,
has advocated
launching a nuclear weapon against Iran as a negotiating tactic and
threatening to nuke Tehran, a city with a population of 8.8 million, if Iran
does not completely abandon its nuclear program.
Newt Gingrich,
a huge recipient of Adelson’s financial largesse during his failed 2012
presidential campaign, said
that Adelson’s “central value” is Israel.
And Adelson isn’t alone in
holding radical views about Iran and having the ear of the president, or at
least significant financial leverage.
Home Depot cofounder Bernard
Marcus, Trump’s second largest campaign contributor, contributed
$7 million to pro-Trump Super PACs, $500,000 to the Congressional
Leadership Fund (CLF), and $2 million the Senate Leadership Fund (SLF).
In a 2015 Fox Business
interview, Marcus compared the JCPOA to “do[ing] business with the devil.” He
went on to clarify, “I think Iran is the devil.”
Adelson and Marcus also share a
common affinity for the hawkish Foundation
for Defense of Democracies (FDD’s Reuel Marc
Gerecht may have set a record by publishing no less than three
anti-JCPOA columns for The Atlantic in the past week.) Adelson
contributed at least $1.5 million to the group by the end of 2011 (a year that
saw a sharp rise in tensions and rumors of war by Israel against Iran)
according to FDD’s 2011 Schedule
A tax disclosure, and Marcus, the group’s biggest donor, contributed at
least $10.7 million.
FDD says Adelson is no longer
a contributor, but Marcus continues to give generously, contributing $3.25
million in 2015, the last year for which his foundation’s grants are known.
Hedge Fund billionaire Paul
Singer contributed at least $3.6 million to FDD by the end of 2011, making him
the group’s second biggest donor after Marcus at the time.
Employees of Singer’s firm,
Elliott Management, were the second largest source of funds supporting the 2014
candidacy of the Senate’s most outspoken Iran hawk, Sen. Tom Cotton
(R-AR) and Singer contributed $1.9 million to the CLF and $6 million
to the SLF. He was a holdout in supporting Trump’s candidacy and financed the
initial research by Fusion GPS that turned into the Steele Dossier detailing
alleged ties between Trump’s campaign and businesses with Moscow. But he came
around before Trump’s inauguration and contributed $1 million to the
festivities.
Between
them, the three billionaires account for over $40 million in pro-Trump
political money. In the 2016 cycle, the three were also the source of 44% of
individual contributions to the CLF and 47% of those received by the SLF, the
biggest spending campaign finance vehicles for House and Senate Republicans.
Trump and the GOP are deeply
indebted to anti-Iran deal billionaires who aren’t afraid to advocate for
policies that push the country closer to another war in the Middle East.
Trump’s decision to back out
of the JCPOA might come across as a renegade president bucking conventional
wisdom and following through on a poorly thought-out campaign promise to undo
the work of his predecessor.
But another explanation is
that Trump and the Republican Party are effectively captive to a small cohort
of hawkish billionaires dead set on steering the country away from any sort of
detente with Iran, even a multilateral agreement that ensures limits on
enrichment and subjects the Islamic Republic to invasive inspections of its
nuclear facilities.
Both explanations may be true.
And, as if on cue, The
Washington Post‘s Ashley Parker reports that
Adelson will visit with Trump on Wednesday. It’s “described as a
‘friendly,” long-planned meeting, not related to today’s Iran news.”
Thursday, May 10, 2018
Paul Robeson’s politics may have cost him his life and career
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOHV_O0uXsQ
NBC Guest Compares Jeremy Corbyn To Sex Predator And Racist
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhlLPzZCKco
POLL: Money In Politics Despised By Americans Across The Spectrum
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XPneSTMdxc
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