TBR News April 10, 2019
The Voice of the White House Washington, D.C. April 10, 2019: “Working in the White House as a junior staffer is an interesting experience.
When I was younger, I worked as a summer-time job in a clinic for people who had moderate to severe mental problems and the current work closely, at times, echos the earlier one.
I am not an intimate of the President but I have encountered him from time to time and I daily see manifestations of his growing psychological problems.
He insults people, uses foul language, is frantic to see his name mentioned on main-line television and pays absolutely no attention to any advice from his staff that runs counter to his strange ideas.
He lies like a rug to everyone, eats like a hog, makes lewd remarks to female staffers and flies into rages if anyone dares to contradict him.
His latest business is to re-institute a universal draft in America.
He wants to do this to remove tens of thousands of unemployed young Americans from the streets so they won’t come together and fight him.
Commentary for April 10: Trump is a person who is determined to have his way, regardless of any problems that might arise, regardless of public opinion and regardless of lack of decency.
As a case in point, Trump, who detests Latin Americans, is determined not only to prevent any of them ever entering the United States via our southern border regions (legal or otherwise) but as well wants to deport any and all Latin Americans (legal or otherwise) from the country.
That he cannot get away with this means nothing to him.
If he can’t force it one way, he will try another until eventually, the stress will make something go pop inside his head and they will take him out of the White House in a rubber bag.”
The Table of Contents
- Trump administration moves spark fears of new immigration crackdown
- The Draft is coming! Fewer Americans want to serve in the military. Cue Pentagon panic
- Explainer: Did he or didn’t he? What might an obstruction case against Trump look like?
- Encyclopedia of American Loons
- Stephen Phelan
- Jesse Lee Peterson
- The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
- Israeli election: Netanyahu appears on track for victory despite tied result
Trump administration moves spark fears of new immigration crackdown
Trump denies plans for ‘big’ action but officials suggest otherwise, raising prospect of renewed family separations
April 10, 2019
by Tom McCarthy in New York
The Guardian
Donald Trump flatly denied on Tuesday that he was planning a “big” new crackdown on migrants at the southern border, even as senior administration officials briefed reporters on the details of such a plan in the works, leaders in charge of immigration policy were shuffled, and insiders described Trump in private as apoplectic over a recent increase in migrant arrivals.
A senior official told reporters the White House was crafting a plan that would target asylum-seekers anew and possibly bring back a version of Trump’s deeply unpopular policy of family separations.
Under a prospective policy the administration calls “binary choice”, migrant parents would be forced to choose between being detained with their children in jail-like facilities or agreeing to a separation under which children would be taken out of detention and placed with a guardian or in a shelter, the senior official said.
Immigration rights groups warned that the proposals could lead to egregious new violations of international obligations and constitutional law.
“We’re obviously very disturbed to hear these reports,” said Charanya Krishnaswami of Amnesty International USA, speaking to the Guardian from near the San Ysidro port of entry in California.
“There’s already been a relentless, multi-faceted attack on asylum seekers. The idea that they’re somehow going to enact greater restrictions and make it worse, it’s just hard for me to imagine what that would even look like.”
Trump’s gathering initiative at the southern border, which was signaled on Sunday by the announcement that the homeland security secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, would be stepping down, appeared to be the result of presidential frustration, possibly the election calendar and the news last week that 103,000 migrants had arrived at the border in March, the highest total in more than a decade.
In one White House meeting last month, an anonymous attendee told CNN, Trump was “ranting and raving, saying border security was his issue” and demanding a port of entry at El Paso, Texas, be closed, only to have Nielsen talk him out of it.
Then the firings started. On Sunday, Trump tweeted that Nielsen was out. On Monday, Trump fired a second top homeland security official, the director of the secret service. Last week, Trump withdrew his nominee to head US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), saying he wanted someone “tougher”.
In spite of the visible churn and the background briefings, Trump denied before the cameras, in a spontaneous exchange with reporters at the White House on Tuesday, that he was planning a significant new move on immigration.
“We have to close up the borders,” Trump said, during a meeting with Egyptian president Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi. “We’re not doing anything very big.”
Trump also denied he was considering a new family separations policy, saying: “We’re not looking to do that.”
But the exchange with reporters was otherwise so saturated with falsity and misdirection that the actual state of play was left in doubt.
Trump claimed to have ended the family separation policy, as opposed to implementing it, saying: “President Obama had child separation. Take a look. The press knows it, you know it, we all know it. I didn’t have, I’m the one that stopped it. President Obama had child separation.”
Trump also described the family separation policy favorably: “Now I’ll tell you something, once you don’t have it, that’s why you see many more people coming. They’re coming like it’s a picnic, because, ‘Let’s go to Disneyland.’”
Any unilateral move on immigration policy in the form of an executive order or presidential proclamation is sure to run into legal challenges. A judge in San Francisco on Monday blocked a Trump policy from January of returning asylum seekers to Mexico while their cases are processed, a wait that could take months or years.
The “remain in Mexico” policy lacked sufficient protections to ensure migrants do not face “undue risk to their lives or freedom” in Mexico, the judge, Richard Seeborg, said.
Without action by Congress, which has declined to join Trump in most every one of his immigration initiatives, the administration’s legal options for altering policy are limited, said the Cornell University Law School professor Stephen Yale-Loehr, co-author of a 21-volume immigration law treatise.
The quickest legal way for Trump to accelerate the deportation of asylum-seekers, said Yale-Loehr, could be by expanding a process known as expedited removal, which could allow for deportations of migrants arrested within 100 miles of the border up to 14 days after crossing.
“But they would have to do that through a rule – they couldn’t just announce it,” Yale-Loehr said. “And so it would take some time to go through the rule-making process.”
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a policy analyst at the American Immigration Council, said it was hard to discern the Trump administration’s overarching legal strategy.
“They’ve certainly been engaging with Congress on this,” Reichlin-Melnick said, “but it’s hard to say, with the chaos going on in the administration right now, whether they’re truly focused on finding solutions inside the [Department of Homeland Security], or whether they’re really hanging their hat on Congress as their only hope.”
Yale-Loehr said: “This administration doesn’t seem to have a coherent policy.
“It seems that the president simply wants to score political points by seeming to be tough on immigration without really thinking through the best way to get to the root cause of why people are fleeing violence in Central American countries to come to the United States.
“The rules are already stacked against immigrants in trying to stay in the United States, and this administration is trying to make it even harder but without thinking through the consequences.”
The Draft is coming!
Fewer Americans want to serve in the military. Cue Pentagon panic
Declining interest in service has reached levels that should alarm – or delight – those who care about the nation’s health
April 10, 2019
William M Arkin
The Guardian
Donald Trump’s three-quarters of a trillion dollar defense budget request submitted to Congress last month contains a dirty secret, one that should make us all think twice about perpetual war and public support for it.
The youth of America don’t want to serve in the military anymore.
The situation has become so dire that just to maintain America’s ground forces – the army and Marine Corps – the two services are resorting to unprecedented pay raises, bonuses and socialist trappings.
And things are going to get worse. This year, for the first time ever, Americans born after 11 September 2001 will be able to enlist in the armed forces. It’s a sobering reminder both of how long we’ve been at war but also how distant those very wars have become from America’s youth. And yet official military polling shows that fewer and fewer young Americans consider the military as a career or as a transitional step – only some 12.5% – the lowest number in a decade.
The 12.5% is bracing, but based on a complex math that balances losses from deaths and injuries, retirements, attrition, and discharges, the army and Marine Corps only needs about 100,000 recruits to maintain current force levels. That’s just 2.4% of the 4.2 million Americans who will celebrate their 18th birthday this year. And yet the military is looking at its third or fourth year in a row where it will struggle to even find these numbers.
In order to attract a sufficient number of those who are able to serve, the Pentagon spends $1.6bn on recruiting. And this year, the army is offering new recruits bonuses of up to $40,000, as well as incentives that include student loan repayments.
Those bonuses have been markedly increasing. In 2013, the Army spent $121m on sign-up bonuses, a number that more than doubled to $290m in 2017. The final numbers aren’t in for 2018, but the estimate is that the number will be closer to $600m , doubling the bonuses again in a single year.
After decades of consistently managing to fill its ranks, even the Marine Corps has had to start offering cash enlistment bonuses. And in 2017, the Marine Corps lowered its standard and handed out 25% more medical, mental health, recreational drug and misconduct waivers to be able to reach its enlistment goals.
These sweeteners are all required even though nearly three-fifths of service members and their families have at least two other immediate family members who serve or have served in the military, according to a survey by Blue Star Families, a non-profit founded by military spouses in 2009. But even that pool of “legacy” recruits is dwindling. The 2017 Blue Star Families Military Family Lifestyle Survey shows that a growing number of military families are no longer willing to recommend that their children join the service.
That’s why Donald Trump’s budget includes a 3.1% military pay raise, the largest in 10 years. The budget, according to the Pentagon, will also provide another $8bn for housing, schooling, youth programs and even day care.
To compensate for so many awol’s in the civilian population, this year the army has cut its projected growth in half, giving up on its goal to reach 500,000 active duty soldiers after it failed to grow at all in 2018.
The army and Marine Corps have also revised their advertising campaigns, focusing more on social media and trying to rebrand. For the marines, that means “Battles Won” advertisements that focus on military history instead of the current go nowhere wars. To appeal to women, the Marine Corps also is trying “Battle Up,” its first commercial ever to feature a female fighter. Meanwhile, the army has adopted the new slogan “Warriors Wanted” to replace “Army Strong”.
Sure everyone agrees that the military needs techies and the cyber savvy and the happy talk from the Pentagon is that the numbers are down because the armed forces are looking for quality. But here we’re talking about just attracting basic infantry. We might debate drones and cyber and space, but this is the human guts of the military.
There have been other times that the public had been less interested in military service. Enlistments have gone up and down with the economy, or when lots of soldiers are dying – such as during the darkest days of the Iraq war. But this rate of sustained declining interest in military service, even among military families, has reached levels that should alarm – or delight – those who care about the nation’s health.
Explainer: Did he or didn’t he? What might an obstruction case against Trump look like?
April 10, 2019
by Jan Wolfe
Reuters
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A key element of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiry into Russia’s role in the 2016 U.S. election was whether President Donald Trump unlawfully acted to impede the investigation, a crime known as obstruction of justice.
According to U.S. Attorney General William Barr, Mueller’s nearly 400-page report on his findings presents evidence on both sides of the question, and while it “does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”
But Barr, two days after Mueller submitted the confidential report on March 22, told U.S. lawmakers in a four-page letter that he as attorney general concluded that the evidence amassed by the special counsel “is not sufficient” to establish that Trump committed criminal obstruction of justice.
Federal law defines obstruction of justice as actions that “corruptly or by threats or force, or by any threatening letter or communication, influences, obstructs, or impedes, or endeavors to influence, obstruct, or impede, the due administration of justice.”
The public may soon get a chance to make its own conclusions. Barr on Tuesday said in congressional testimony he plans to release the report within a week, with portions blacked out to protect certain categories of sensitive information.
Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s numerous contacts with Russia and whether he committed obstruction of justice has cast a cloud over his presidency heading into his 2020 re-election bid.
Here is an explanation of key events relating to whether Trump committed obstruction of justice.
OVAL OFFICE MEETING WITH COMEY
Then-FBI Director James Comey and other U.S. intelligence officials attended a Valentine’s Day counterterrorism briefing at the White House on Feb. 14, 2017. After the briefing, Trump, who had taken office just weeks before on Jan. 20, asked everyone but Comey to leave the room, according to testimony Comey gave to Congress in June 2017.
According to Comey, Trump said he wanted to talk about Michael Flynn, who had resigned under pressure a day earlier amid revelations about his contacts with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Sergei Kislyak, while Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama was still president.
“I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” Trump told Comey, according to memos Comey wrote about the conversation.
Comey testified that he interpreted that as Trump giving him a “direction” regarding an FBI investigation into Flynn’s false statements about his Russian contacts: to drop the inquiry. It was one of handful of private conversations between Comey and Trump in early 2017. Trump repeatedly said he expected loyalty, Comey said. Comey said he viewed the conversations as unusual given the FBI’s long history of independence from the White House.
In March 2017, Trump held a private meeting with Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo, now secretary of state, and asked them to intervene and get the FBI to back off its Flynn investigation. Despite these conversations, the FBI continued to investigate the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia during the 2016 election.
TRUMP FIRES COMEY
Trump fired Comey on May 9, 2017. The public explanation given by the White House was that Comey had mishandled a 2016 investigation into the use of a private email account and server by Hillary Clinton, Trump’s 2016 Democratic opponent. Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Justice Department No. 2 official Rod Rosenstein signed letters recommending Comey’s firing on those grounds.
The next day, Trump had a private White House meeting with visiting Russian officials. “I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job,” Trump said, according to reporting by the New York Times. “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off,” Trump added.
On May 11, 2017, Trump again appeared to tie Comey’s firing to the Russia investigation in an interview with Lester Holt of NBC News. Trump told Holt he was going to fire Comey regardless of Rosenstein’s recommendation. “And in fact when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story,’” the president said.
The weekend before firing Comey, Trump dictated to an aide a meandering four-page letter explaining his reasons for firing Comey, which was never sent, according to the New York Times. That letter, which Mueller has obtained, stated Trump’s displeasure with Comey’s handling of the Russia investigation, the Times reported.
TRUMP ORDERS MUELLER’S FIRING
Rosenstein appointed Mueller as special counsel to take over the Russia investigation after Trump fired Comey. In June 2017, news reports surfaced that Mueller was also investigating possible obstruction by Trump.
Trump ordered White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Mueller, citing alleged conflicts of interest, but McGahn refused and threatened to quit, the New York Times reported in January 2018. McGahn was concerned that firing Mueller would fuel accusations that the White House was trying to obstruct the investigation, and McGahn’s refusal prompted Trump to back off the order, the Times reported.
STATEMENT ON TRUMP TOWER MEETING
Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., set up a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower in New York with a Kremlin-linked lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, and other Russians who had offered the campaign damaging information on Clinton. After being promised “dirt” on Clinton, Trump Jr. wrote in an email, “I love it.”
When news of the meeting broke in July 2017, Trump Jr. issued a misleading statement saying the meeting was set up to discuss adoption policy, not politics, before later admitting he had been expecting intelligence on Clinton. At issue is his father’s role in drafting the statement. White House advisers later acknowledged that the president dictated the statement put out in his son’s name, after initially denying his involvement. Misleading journalists and the public is not a crime, but the shifting explanations could be seen as evidence of Trump’s intent to impede the investigation, legal experts said.
PRESIDENTIAL PARDONS
Trump lawyer John Dowd in 2017 repeatedly broached the idea of Trump giving presidential pardons to former advisers charged by Mueller, the New York Times reported in March 2018. Some legal experts have said that dangling a pardon in front of witnesses in hopes of influencing their testimony could constitute obstruction of justice.
TRUMP ASSAILS SESSIONS OVER RECUSAL
Normally, the U.S. attorney general would have overseen the Russia inquiry. But Sessions in March 2017 recused himself because of his own contacts with Kislyak, the Russian ambassador, while serving as a Trump campaign adviser. Oversight fell to Rosenstein, who subsequently appointed Mueller.
The New York Times reported that Trump had pressured Sessions not to recuse himself and erupted in anger when the attorney general did so. Sessions wrote a resignation letter, but Trump rejected it on the advice of advisers, according to news reports.
In July 2017, Trump on Twitter called Sessions “beleaguered” and accused him of taking “a VERY weak position on Hillary Clinton crimes.” In June 2018, Trump tweeted: “The Russian Witch Hunt Hoax continues, all because Jeff Sessions didn’t tell me he was going to recuse himself.” In September 2018, Trump told an interviewer, “I don’t have an attorney general. It’s very sad.” Trump ousted Sessions in November 2018.
Trump’s hectoring of Sessions could be cited by Mueller as evidence of an intent to obstruct the probe, legal experts said.
Reporting by Jan Wolfe; Editing by Will Dunham
Encyclopedia of American Loons
- Stephen Phelan
Oh yes, another fundie nutter. Stephen Phelan is the communications director for Human Life International, putatively “the largest international pro-life organization and missionary worldwide”, however they measured that. Of course, much of Phelan’s efforts go toward anti-abortion issues, but as Phelan sees it, demons, evil spirits and Satan are everywhere, and he caught our eye primarily for his criticisms of a pink version of the popular Ouija board game issued by Hasbro in 2010. As Phelan sees it, the game, designed for girls aged 8 and up, is no mere toy but a “dangerous spiritual game” that opens anyone, but particularly Christians, up to attacks on their soul. “There’s a spiritual reality to it and Hasbro is treating it as if it’s just a game,” said Phelan. “It’s not Monopoly. It really is a dangerous spiritual game and for [Hasbro] to treat it as just another game is quite dishonest.” As he points out, the Bible explicitly states “not to mess with spirits”.
What distinguished the game from, say, Harry Potter-themed merchandise, “is that the Ouija board is actually is a portal to talk to spirits and it’s hard to get people to understand that until they actually do it. I don’t pretend to know how it works, but it actually does.” Moreover, the pink version of the game is explicitly marketed to young girls who may want to partake in “something dangerous” during a late-night sleepover.
Diagnosis: Someone evidently has some problems distinguishing teen scream flicks from reality, and it is not girls aged 8 and up. Don’t let this guy watch Harry Potter on his own without a trusted adult nearby.
- Jesse Lee Peterson
Jesse Lee Peterson is a right-wing pundit, minister, author (e.g. SCAM: How the Black Leadership Exploits Black America), and media personality – host of The Jesse Lee Peterson Show and The Fallen State TV web series – as well as president and founder of BOND (Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny), which is ostensibly dedicated to “rebuilding the family by rebuilding the man.” He is also a friend of Sean Hannity, and often appears on the latter’s show, as well as a national advisory board member of Accuracy in Media, former board member of the California Christian Coalition and self-appointed personal nemesis of Jesse Jackson. Peterson is, basically, a representative of all that is sad and bad, evil, delusional and insane in the world today.
Civil Rights and welfare
In 2005 Peterson penned a column for WND claiming that the majority of the African-American people stranded in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina were “welfare-pampered”, “lazy” and “immoral”, and therefore presumably got what they deserved. Elsewhere Peterson has claimed that he would like to see black people put “back on the plantation so they would understand the ethic of working… They need a good hard education on what it is to work.”
Yes, Peterson thinks slavery was a good thing, and is on record thanking “God and white people” for the institution of slavery. After all, Peterson pointed out, were it not for the slave trade, blacks might have never made it to the United State. Then he described traveling on slave ships as akin to “being on a crowded airplane”. Traveling on slave ships was not akin to being on a crowded airplane. At least, as Peterson sees it, picking cotton “makes a man out of you”.
Now, Peterson has indeed recognized that racism is a big problem. In 2009, for instance, he told Hannity that he thought 96 percent of black voters were racist toward whites and that “I think we all agree that Barack Obama was elected by, mostly by black racists and white guilty people.” Weighing in on the Trayvon Martin case, Peterson declared that the outrage over his death was not about justice but rather “about getting even with whites and gaining political power”: “This is black hatred of white people and a result of more than fifty years of brainwashing by racist civil-rights leaders” by demonic aggressors like MLK, as Peterson sees it. Of course, officially Peterson is a fan of MLK, but it is unclear what he associates with him: For the commemoration of 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, for instance, which called for “a national minimum wage act” and “a massive federal program to train and place all unemployed workers” in jobs, Peterson accused Obama and everyone else of twisting the message of the original march to spread anti-white racism and socialism by “call[ing] for a minimum wage increase” and pushing “socialist ideas.” “[T]he 50th anniversary commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic march and speech looked like a Ku Klux Klan rally!”, said Peterson, and “an outright attempt to rewrite history – and use King’s name to advance an anti-American political agenda.” He did not try to explain what he thought the original march was about.
It’s a general pattern of course. Together with Oprah, President Obama is “encouraging these blacks to attack whites” and inflaming “black thugs [to] attack unsuspecting whites” through “racial demagoguery” and “race baiting” to “encourage division and hatred between races;” they are therefore to blame for the much-hyped “knockout game.” It’s all, in fact, a conspiracy. The 2015 Baltimore protests, for instance? Well, Peterson saw through it and found Obama standing behind it all: Obama was intentionally fomenting unrest as part of his secret evil plot to take over all the nation’s police forces and redistribute wealth. As for Black Lives Matter, Peterson has characterized the movement as “evil,” “wicked,” and “worse than the KKK”; the movement is “led by white anarchists, communists, black homosexuals and lesbians. They hate families and God – two things blacks need most”.
In 2015, Peterson linked, in a column titled “Dear White People: Your Days Are Numbered”, protests over the treatment of students of color at the University of Missouri to the Paris terrorist attacks. While “Europe has been in the process of handing their continent over to Muslims … white Americans are handing over their country to black malcontents – and Muslims,” said Peterson; “[s]omewhere along the way, whites in Europe and America have lost their connection to God and have decided to give up defending their communities and freedoms,” and it is accordingly “time for whites in America, and in Europe, to stop the madness.” (“[t]he greatest civilizations in the world are being destroyed by the godless” and the gays concluded Peterson after a diatribe blaming Muslims, who seem to the untrained eye to be neither godless nor particularly gay.
But what about racism against people of color? In 2015, Peterson said that “[m]y hope is that we are able to dispel the idea of racism being real. It is an illusion. Racism does not exist. It has never existed. It’s a lie.” This sentiment – which he has repeated and expanded upon on several occasions, including his book The Antidote: Healing America From The Poison of Hate, Blame and Victimhood– probably partially explains why, in a 2016 interview on a white supremacist show, he cited the 1954 desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education as evidence that “liberalism is evil” and that “[t]he people who are liberals are children of the lie, their father is Satan,” reminding his listeners that “the battle is a spiritual battle between good and evil, right versus wrong, so liberals are children of the darkness, and we need to understand that they are doing exactly what their father’s nature is, and that is to destroy good.” We know we should be careful about labeling anyone an Uncle Tom, but it is hard to find a more suitable candidate for the title than Jesse Lee Peterson; here is another illuminating exchange (Peterson explaining that African American voters didn’t support Ben Carson’s presidential bid because they’re in an “evil state” and “prefer evil over good”). Here is Peterson declaring that white people, as a group, “represent the goodness of America”. And here is Peterson claiming that Nelson Mandela was evil and South Africa better off under apartheid. Indeed, he “can’t think of one thing” that “black people have gone into and made better.”
Of course, Peterson is dimly aware that some people disagree with him, and has published an open letter to (then) Attorney General Eric Holder that advocates the arrest of such people.
Feminism
In a 2012 video Peterson asserted his belief that “one of the greatest mistakes America made was to allow women the opportunity to vote,” ostensibly because many women disagree with him and democracy doesn’t work if people keep voting differently than he wants them to vote: “We should’ve never turned this over to women. And these women are voting in the wrong people. They’re voting in people who are evil who agrees with them who’re gonna take us down this pathway of destruction […] And this probably was the reason they didn’t allow women to vote when men were men. Because men in the good old days understood the nature of the woman.” Explaining further, Peterson stated that women simply can’t handle “anything” and that – in his experience – “you walk up to them with a issue, they freak out right away. They go nuts. They get mad. They get upset, just like that. They have no patience because it’s not in their nature. They don’t have love. They don’t have love.” Which might tell you quite a bit more about Peterson and his behavior than he seems to realize. Also, women are whores: “I don’t know if you noticed or not, but the liberal Democrat womens are calling themselves whores [Peterson is referring to advocating contraception coverage]. They came out with their so called group of women who are within the Democrat party, and they are admitting that they’re whores and they are saying that they are proud of it.”
After claiming that women are whores who shouldn’t have the right to vote, Peterson complained that “liberal women” and feminists are “destroying our nation day by day” because they’re “fascists in pantsuits.” He did not attempt to define “fascist”. (It means “people I don’t like and therefore you shouldn’t like them either,” of course.)
A rather radical MRA activist, Peterson has called for “the end of one-sided defense,” and for men to re-take the right to physically strike women: “While I certainly do not sanction men attacking women, neither is it right for men to allow themselves to be beaten by a woman,” he wrote. “It’s time for men to re-assert their right to self defense.” Here is a fascinating segment in which Peterson asks a clinical psychologist whether the man should be the head of the wife; the psychologist says that no, they should be partners, whereupon Peterson asserted that the word “partner” is gay and any man who is not the “head of the wife” is “weak.”
As expected, Peterson is a vehement critic of Planned Parenthood, alleging that Planned Parenthood is responsible for killing “over 1,500 black babies” every day.
Sex
As Peterson sees it, the only reason for people to have sex is if they are “trying to make a baby,” and he insists that any man who has sex before marriage will eventually cheat on his wife. “I just want to make that point … What’s the need for having sex if you’re not trying to make a baby?” said Peterson, a question that might conceivably explain some of the frustration Peterson expresses elsewhere.
It probably comes as little surprise that Peterson is no fan of homosexuals. Having seen a man (Michael Sam) kiss another man on TV, Peterson claimed that it would destroy free speech and turn other men gay and cause the end of America. “In America today,” said Peterson, “good is mocked and evil is rewarded. People who speak out against the immorality in the culture are accused of being hateful and judgmental” just because they are being hateful and judgmental (“We expect this kind of assault on individual freedom in communist North Korea, not in the United States!” said Peterson). And of course there is a conspiracy: “GLADD and other LGBT homosexual groups are using Michael Sam’s race and his sexuality to force black Americans and, by extension, all Americans to accept an abnormal lifestyle. This is not about tolerance or diversity – it’s an attack on masculinity and the traditional family.” So, not only are LGBT rights destroying America; they’re doing so deliberately.
And if you ever wondered whether one can be born gay, Peterson is ready to explain: “if the mother was mad while being pregnant, that can happen yes, because she can pass that spiritual to her children while in the womb.”
Now, LGBT groups complain about discrimination, but Peterson sees right through the ploy (“Discrimination: noun discrim·ina·tion: The ability to recognize the difference between things that are of good quality and those that are not – Merriam Webster Dictionary,” offers Peterson in an unusually feeble attempt to achieve a gotcha moment): “LGBT groups have been effective in linking their immoral cause to the noble civil rights movement [it would be interesting to hear what Peterson thinks is noble about the civil rights movement given that he supports apartheid]. In reality, gays never wanted equality. They wanted society to accept their sinful lifestyle, or else. LGBT groups – to be blunt – act like fascists. Just like militant Islam demands Shariah law, homosexual pressure groups demand ‘sodomy law.’” Apparently this is what counts as “insightful enough to be worth sharing” in Peterson’s mind. It’s sad, really.
Meanwhile, people who remarry after getting a divorce “deserve to suffer”. Except for people who agree with Peterson on politics, of course.
Theology and politics
Entirely unsurprisingly, Peterson is “certain without a doubt that Barack Hussein Obama is NOT a Christian,” which says more about Peterson cognitive abilities than it does about Obama. And Obama’s election in 2008 was the work of Satan and the result of Satan’s own candidate selection, a move in a “spiritual war” in which “Satan is targeting the U.S.” As evidence, Peterson pointed out that Obama is “evil” and “an American-hating Socialist” who is “more in harmony with Muhammad than he is with Christ.” Satan’s primary selection criterion was, however, race: “Evil understands that most white Christians have been intimidated and are too afraid to stand up to it,” said Peterson. Perhaps it was a perceived failure of his revelation to gain traction that made Peterson go one step further in 2014 and declared that “I can’t say that [Obama] is Satan, but I definitely am convinced he is the son of Satan.” Then he said that Obama is probably Satan. And if Obama is not the Antichrist, Peterson said, he is, at most, “one step away” from being the Antichrist. Here is further evidence that Obama “hates Christianity”.
A recurring them when Peterson talked about Obama was, unsurprisingly and as mentioned above, the idea that Obama is “racist” against white people (he wants to “replace the white man” with “some black person that agrees with him”), ostensibly partially because his mother “hated being white.” In a 2012 speech to the John Birch Society Peterson said that President Obama and his “angry black female” wife want to “take power away from the white man and give it to people who [want] handouts, with socialism mentalities.” As for Michelle Obama: “We have an angry black female in control and if you want to know what an angry black female can do to you, go to the Post Office.” One could imagine some reasons why Peterson might end up experiencing anger a lot of places.
In 2016 he summed up Obama’s presidency: “America has been hell” and “a nightmare” under President Obama, who has turned the country “into a ghetto,” said Peterson. The reason is apparently that Obama, as a black man, “lacks character” and “has a ghetto personality” that makes him want to destroy things (“the sould is dead, he is an evil man”).
Meanwhile, President Trump is pretty much Jesus (or “a strong example of Christ on Earth”): “as Christians, we are supposed to be the light of the world and the salt of the earth. We are to be ‘cunning as serpents and innocent as doves.’ President Trump appears to be a living example of this;” if you didn’t vote for him, then “Satan is your father”. Peterson was, in fact, an early Trump supporter: “we already have” a race war that’s “happening to white folks by so-called people of color and especially black people,” said Peterson in 2016, asserting that a real Republican like Trump would be the only one able to stop it. Moreover, Trump is “uniquely able to unite America” because “this is a man’s game. The other Republicans are playing it like women – and losing,” and “the only politician who truly loves the people, including black people.” More recently, Peterson has been fond of calling Trump the “great white hope”. Now, Trump was, at one point, accused of sexual assault, but Peterson warned us against focusing on that, since “generation after generation of young girls have been taught” to falsely accuse men of assault and “Trump’s ‘Sexual Assault’ Accusers Are Literally Satan’s Daughters” (the text to an image on his show accompanying a picture of Bill Cosby). That leftists don’t fancy Trump is no wonder: “The left hates God, and it hates real men who display Godly authority. For leftist males, the contrast between President Trump’s strength and their weakness is just too painful. For leftist females, the president represents the masculine force that limits their irrational excesses, such as their hell-bent desire to kill unborn children.”
That Democrats are not of God but the children of Satan is not an empirical claim but treated axiomatically by Peterson; that is, as an assumption through which other events ought to be understood. Naturally, this yields some interestingly bizarre results.
Miscellaneous
Peterson has actually said that critical thinking is a tool of the devil; not that he has the faintest idea what critical thinking might involve. Accordingly, he has little love for intellectuals: “I notice that the people who are really into the intellect are nutcases. Absolute nutcases” said Peterson. And that is no coincidence: using intellect leads to Satan and homosexuality: “Because of this intellectual thing taking over and the people rule us, we now have so-called same-sex marriage. That wouldn’t happen if we weren’t into the intellect. Common sense would dictate that is not going to happen and common sense wouldn’t care what you thought about it because we would know that that’s wrong.”
Here is Peterson failing coherence while arguing that the American dream is “fading” because pro-immigration elected officials are “trying to stay in power, so they’re trying to appease the Hispanics” and also arguing that undocumented immigrants (he claims to know some) don’t even want citizenship. The argument could perhaps seem to make more sense when you remember that Peterson hates reason and use of the intellect, but it doesn’t really.
There’s a fine Jesse Lee Peterson resource here.
Diagnosis: A good candidate for the title “most deranged person alive”.
The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
April 10, 2019
by Dr. Peter Janney
On October 8th, 2000, Robert Trumbull Crowley, once a leader of the CIA’s Clandestine Operations Division, died in a Washington hospital of heart failure and the end effects of Alzheimer’s Disease. Before the late Assistant Director Crowley was cold, Joseph Trento, a writer of light-weight books on the CIA, descended on Crowley’s widow at her town house on Cathedral Hill Drive in Washington and hauled away over fifty boxes of Crowley’s CIA files.
Once Trento had his new find secure in his house in Front Royal, Virginia, he called a well-known Washington fix lawyer with the news of his success in securing what the CIA had always considered to be a potential major embarrassment.
Three months before, on July 20th of that year, retired Marine Corps colonel William R. Corson, and an associate of Crowley, died of emphysema and lung cancer at a hospital in Bethesda, Md.
After Corson’s death, Trento and the well-known Washington fix-lawyer went to Corson’s bank, got into his safe deposit box and removed a manuscript entitled ‘Zipper.’ This manuscript, which dealt with Crowley’s involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, vanished into a CIA burn-bag and the matter was considered to be closed forever.
The small group of CIA officials gathered at Trento’s house to search through the Crowley papers, looking for documents that must not become public. A few were found but, to their consternation, a significant number of files Crowley was known to have had in his possession had simply vanished.
When published material concerning the CIA’s actions against Kennedy became public in 2002, it was discovered to the CIA’s horror, that the missing documents had been sent by an increasingly erratic Crowley to another person and these missing papers included devastating material on the CIA’s activities in South East Asia to include drug running, money laundering and the maintenance of the notorious ‘Regional Interrogation Centers’ in Viet Nam and, worse still, the Zipper files proving the CIA’s active organization of the assassination of President John Kennedy..
A massive, preemptive disinformation campaign was readied, using government-friendly bloggers, CIA-paid “historians” and others, in the event that anything from this file ever surfaced. The best-laid plans often go astray and in this case, one of the compliant historians, a former government librarian who fancied himself a serious writer, began to tell his friends about the CIA plan to kill Kennedy and eventually, word of this began to leak out into the outside world.
The originals had vanished and an extensive search was conducted by the FBI and CIA operatives but without success. Crowley’s survivors, his aged wife and son, were interviewed extensively by the FBI and instructed to minimize any discussion of highly damaging CIA files that Crowley had, illegally, removed from Langley when he retired. Crowley had been a close friend of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s notorious head of Counterintelligence. When Angleton was sacked by DCI William Colby in December of 1974, Crowley and Angleton conspired to secretly remove Angleton’s most sensitive secret files out of the agency. Crowley did the same thing right before his own retirement, secretly removing thousands of pages of classified information that covered his entire agency career.
Known as “The Crow” within the agency, Robert T. Crowley joined the CIA at its inception and spent his entire career in the Directorate of Plans, also know as the “Department of Dirty Tricks. ”
Crowley was one of the tallest man ever to work at the CIA. Born in 1924 and raised in Chicago, Crowley grew to six and a half feet when he entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in N.Y. as a cadet in 1943 in the class of 1946. He never graduated, having enlisted in the Army, serving in the Pacific during World War II. He retired from the Army Reserve in 1986 as a lieutenant colonel. According to a book he authored with his friend and colleague, William Corson, Crowley’s career included service in Military Intelligence and Naval Intelligence, before joining the CIA at its inception in 1947. His entire career at the agency was spent within the Directorate of Plans in covert operations. Before his retirement, Bob Crowley became assistant deputy director for operations, the second-in-command in the Clandestine Directorate of Operations.
Bob Crowley first contacted Gregory Douglas in 1993 when he found out from John Costello that Douglas was about to publish his first book on Heinrich Mueller, the former head of the Gestapo who had become a secret, long-time asset to the CIA. Crowley contacted Douglas and they began a series of long and often very informative telephone conversations that lasted for four years. In 1996, Crowley told Douglas that he believed him to be the person that should ultimately tell Crowley’s story but only after Crowley’s death. Douglas, for his part, became so entranced with some of the material that Crowley began to share with him that he secretly began to record their conversations, later transcribing them word for word, planning to incorporate some, or all, of the material in later publication.
Conversation No. 64
Date: Monday, February 10, 1997
Commenced: 11:02 AM CST
Concluded: 11:35 AM CST
GD: Good morning, Robert. What’s going on back there on a nice cold Monday?
RTC: Not very much, Gregory, and after a lifetime of excitement, I rather like it that way.
GD: Are you still in touch over there?
RTC: Sometimes, Gregory, sometimes. A casual conversation here, a visit there. You know how it is. Gone and soon forgotten.
GD: And no memoirs, either.
RTC: No, the code of omerta is with all of us retirees.
GD: But never having worked for your people, I have no such caveat, do I?
RTC: No, you do not.
GD: But Corson never worked for you, did he?
RTC: No, not actually. He wanted to, but he never did. He has been involved in various things but only on the periphery.
GD: People love to dream and eventually, they begin to fantasize and after those take hold, begin to lie in public and later, in print.
RTC: Cruel, Gregory, but close to the truth.
GD: Do you know what really disturbs me, Robert? I mean the CIA people who do not like me writing that the head of the Gestapo worked for them. What I find bad is their utter stupidity. I can appreciate intelligence, even if it is directed towards or against me, but when your people drag up dismal failures like Wolfe who calls himself Doctor when he isn’t, and Landreth who calls himself a television producer when he isn’t. And all the pathetic and utterly predictable kindergarten games they play, trying to lure me into some kind of a trap or to find out what documents I have from a man they claim did not exist….pathetic, Robert, really pathetic. Wolfe is a second-level librarian with delusions of literary grandeur and Landreth claims to run a television company and actually runs a wino soup kitchen in Los Angeles. Can’t Langley find someone with an IQ higher than their belt size?
RTC: Now, Gregory, you are getting loquacious again. I don’t think it’s because these people are stupid, but that you are too intelligent for your own good. Certainly for theirs. You annoy Kimmel, whose middle-class morality is offended by your callous treatment of his station in life, and Bill is terrified of you. I don’t mean he thinks you are going to lure him outside on garbage can night and split his skull with an axe, but Bill is like so many other creative liars; he’s afraid someone like you will come on the scene and expose him.
GD” I don’t do this on purpose, you know.
RTC: Oh, I think there is some malice in what you do, Gregory. I don’t find you either stupid or unkind, but you have a very active streak of destruction in your nature. Why, Gregory, bother to shoot butterflies with a rifle?
GD: Point, but then I don’t put up with these morons gladly. Now, an intelligent and creative approach might get some positive reaction from me, but all of this transparent bleating just annoys me. And after I have dispatched one with withering words or, better, making a fool out of them, why here comes another one down the path, wearing the top half of a clown suit and waving a fan. Jesus wept. You know, their reaction time is marvelous, Robert. I did the first Mueller book in ’95 and just now they are starting to leak negative stories about me. Do they sleep in refrigerators at night? Slow on the draw, Robert. In the Old West of blessed fiction, they would be full of holes. I wonder what sort of attack they will try next? There never was a Heinrich Mueller? I am really a practicing vampire? I misspelled a name once so I can’t be right about anything? Do you think some broken-down academic who teaches animal husbandry at an Arkansas community college will come forward and produce a book showing that Mueller was eaten by Stalin? They did a story like that once about Mueller living in Panama but it turned out to be a huge joke. Then some senile Czech intelligence person’s son claimed his father said Mueller was shot in Moscow. Of course, when the press tried to talk to the father, he was too far gone to do anything but wet himself.
RTC: I don’t think a book, Gregory. And after what you did to that Hungarian Jewess in London, I doubt if any reporter will dare to attack you again.
GD: Fear is a wonderful deterrent, Robert. Pick the loudest of the pack, stick a knife in them and gut them in front of everybody and the rest of the piebald apes run back to the security of the deep forest.
RTC: Well, you don’t fit the mold, Gregory. You were supposed to turn all of Mueller’s highly incriminating material over to that jerk from Time magazine and then they would be done with you. I don’t think the boobery understands that hiring General Mueller, bringing him over here and putting him to work was a very, very sensitive business. After all, FDR’s propaganda machine depicted Mueller’s Gestapo as pure evil…
GD: Which they were not…
RTC: No, just professionals. But necessary targets. And in light of the propaganda, how could we dare to hire the man who personally shoved millions of Jews into the enormous gas chambers that could have been seen from the moon? No, a very private matter indeed. That’s why Jim Critchfield is terrified of you and wants to kill you. If it ever got into the Jewish and far left community…
GD: The same thing…
RTC: Yes, and if it did, Jim would be toast. Therefore, you lie like a rug and no one should ever listen to you. Of course, given your volatile and creative personality, such jabber only gets you angrier and that results in more very ugly mischief. Not to be impudent, Gregory, but how much money have you skinned these people out of?
GD: About a hundred and ten thousand, give or take a few cents. Book advance fees, television rights, outright bribes and so on.
RTC: And what did they ever get for all the taxpayer’s money?
GD: A number ten shoe in their scrotum, Robert.
RTC: It seems that way. Well, I don’t know what their next move will be, but I have seen this all before. The usual method of dealing with people like you, aside from the convenient heart attack or car accident, is to hire worthless but hungry scribblers to submit articles to obedient newspapers, marginalizing you, misspelling your name and, in general, treating you like someone on ticket of leave from a nut house. And then on to other, more important, matters. You know, we have an entire department that invents news stories to feed to our toadies in the press in order to disguise something very bad we just pulled off. We kill the head of the UN and then start a story going about the Yeti being seen in downtown Detroit.
GD: That’s a familiar pattern. How controlled is it?
RTC: Gregory, the US government owns the press, the newspapers, the magazines and the television. They print what we tell them to and they ignore that which we wish them to ignore. We wanted to get rid of Nixon, who was becoming a loose cannon, so the press obliged by daily attacks. We kill Kennedy and suddenly, legions of conspiracy nuts emerge from under their damp rocks with tens of thousands of books filled with more shit than a Christmas turkey.
GD: Are they on the payrolls?
RTC: God no, Gregory. Most of these slime merchants are on their own and we would never dare to pay them…at least not directly. But what we do accomplish is to get their cloaking nuttiness published and distributed through our friends in the media. You know, big New York publishing house does a book that Kennedy was only shot by Oswald, number one on The New York Times book list, even though they only sold three copies, talk show babbling on friendly TV networks and on and on. And the more the literary nut fringe sees and hears others braying like donkeys in public and, very important here, getting attention, they go at it again by proving some Secret Service agent was hiding in the trunk of Kennedy’s car and shot him through the trunk lid.
GD” (Laughter)
RTC: No, don’t laugh. They’re armies of the ignorant out there who believe such crap. You know that.
GD: Yes, I do. And since we’re on the topic, how much of all this insanity is planned?
RTC: Oh, we start it, that’s for certain, but there are many who carry on the good work quite for free. Actually for free. Most of them are pathetic losers and they lust after attention…for recognition…for something other than their bleak and unrewarding existence. They become keepers of great secrets, Gregory, and smug in their inner knowledge.
GD: They delude themselves.
RTC: Yes, but they also delude the public which is often very important.
GD: Why must the CIA, or the Pentagon, or the White House, use such garbage to advance their evil ends?
RTC: I never said we didn’t need rubber gloves and Lysol, dealing with our sources, Gregory. But these twits have produced so much silly garbage about the Kennedy business that our worries are over.
GD: I recall a cartoon in Playboy. A bunch of ancient Hebrews were standing around at the base of a mountain and down the path came a man with a long beard and a little bottle in his hand. One of those below had his head turned to his neighbor and the caption said, as I recall it, ‘Our headaches are over. Here comes Moses with the tablets!’ It said Aspirin on the little bottle.
RTC: (Laughter) Naughty boy, Gregory.
GD: Here, I never did see the cartoon. I’m just commenting on it. All of this reminds me of a scenario. A small child sees a stallion mounting a mare in a pasture and points to it. ‘Mommy, what’s the big horsy doing to the little one?’ ‘Oh,’ said the shocked mother, ‘just look over there, Jimmy! See the nice donkey?’ ‘Why,’ said the entranced child, ‘what’s the donkey doing to cousin Muriel?’ Ah well, Robert, in seeking to avoid Scylla, we fall upon Charybdis.
RTC: Pardon?
GD: A classical Greek nautical problem, Robert.
Concluded at 11:35 AM CST
Israeli election: Netanyahu appears on track for victory despite tied result
Major parties neck and neck but incumbent has path to form majority government with right-wing allies
April 10, 2019
by Oliver Holmes in Tel Aviv
The Guardian
Benjamin Netanyahu was on track on Wednesday morning to become Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, despite his Likud party winning the same number of seats as his rivals.
With 97% of votes counted, both Likud and the Blue and White party, led by former army general Benny Gantz, had won 35 seats in the 120-seat parliament, the Knesset.
However, results showed Netanyahu would be in a much better position to form a majority governing coalition made up of nationalist, far-right and religious allies. Gantz had fewer potential factions to partner with.
Reelection would give Netanyahu a boost as he faces the looming prospect of three damning corruption indictments, with a pre-trial hearing set to begin in the coming weeks. A continuation of his 10-year rule also deadens hopes of an end to the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.
Senior Palestinian official Hanan Ashrawi said Israelis had “chosen an overwhelmingly rightwing, Xenophobic and anti-Palestinian parliament to represent them”.
Final results might not be in until Wednesday afternoon, or later, and the coalition building process could take weeks.
Hours before it was clear what the result would be, both Netanyahu and Gantz declared victory to their supporters, buoyed by exit polls showing they had strong figures.
Netanyahu said Tuesday was “a night of tremendous victory” and that he had already started talking to right-wing parties, who he said had agreed to recommend to the Israeli president that he form the next government.
Less than an hour prior, Gantz had also made a premature victory cry: “In elections there are losers; in elections there are winners; and we are the ones who won.”
Seeking a fifth term despite accusations of graft, the 69-year-old prime minister has faced stiff competition. Gantz had sought to present a unifying and centrist alternative to Netanyahu, who has spent ten consecutive years in power
The prime minister’s campaign had focused on how his government – one he claims has made Israel safe and prosperous – was in danger of falling to “leftists”. Israel left-wing and centrist parties, including the once-dominant Labor party, all appeared to have lost influence during the 2019 polls.
As in previous national elections, Netanyahu was also accused of exploiting anti-Arab sentiment and siding with extremist factions accused of racism against minorities.
Unlike Palestinians under military rule in the occupied West Bank, almost a fifth of Israel’s population is Arab and have the right to vote. But following calls within the community for an election boycott, Arab parties appeared to have lost three seats in the Knesset.
Likud was censured on Tuesday for sending monitors with body-cameras to polling stations with Arab constituents, which Arab politicians condemned as voter intimidation. A Likud party official defended the move, saying the cameras were deployed to ensure there would be no vote rigging.
In partial poll results, Jewish ultra-Orthodox parties seem to have gained three seats, while an new alliance of far-right parties took five seats. With a stable coalition, Netanyahu will this summer break a record set by the country’s founding father, David Ben-Gurion, to become Israel’s longest-ever serving leader.
Ahead of election day, Gantz had hoped the prime minister might falter under the weight of the three separate corruption cases, allegations Netanyahu dismisses as a “witch-hunt”.
But it was not clear if the calls for indictments, supported by the Israeli police, were enough to convince Israelis to turn away from “King Bibi”, the leader who has served on-off in high office since 1996.
“I know some things Bibi did are wrong. But I’m not looking for a rabbi. I’m looking for a leader,” said Yaakov Lemash, 76, at a polling station in Jerusalem on Tuesday. “It was the first time in my life that I voted Bibi,” said Yaakov, who had previously backed religious parties. “I want to tell Bibi, thank you … no government did what Bibi did for Israel.”
To hold on to voters, one of Netanayhu’s key messages had been how he managed to attain major concessions from Donald Trump. In the past two years, the US president has implemented the key demands of Israel’s hardline rightwing lobby, drastically slashing humanitarian aid to the Palestinians, declaring the contested city of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and shuttered Palestinian diplomatic offices in Washington.
In a move largely seen in Israel as an election gift to Netanyahu, Trump also recently recognised Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights, which Israel captured from Syria in 1967, breaking from global consensus that forbids territorial conquest during war.
In a pre-election interview, Netanyahu held up the Golan Heights declaration Trump signed and said: “Look at this, look at what we just got … this is what I did in one week.”
On the weekend ahead of the polls, Netanyahu energised his ultranationalist rightwing base, vowing to envelop Israeli sovereignty over Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, a move that Palestinians say would end their dreams for a state.
“From my perspective, any point of settlement is Israeli, and we have responsibility, as the Israeli government,” he said. “I will not uproot anyone, and I will not transfer sovereignty to the Palestinians.”
Zvi Pakter, a 64-year-old voter who lives in the settlement of Efrat in the occupied West Bank, said the annexation promise was “all election spin”. But he added recent developments such as Trump’s Jerusalem embassy declaration made him think Netanyahu might move ahead.
He said: “We have seen things we never thought would happen.”
Comment:
Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu was born October 21 1949 in Tel Aviv, to Tzila Segal ( August 28 1912 – January 31, 2000) and Prof. Benzion Netanyahu (1910–2012)
Between 1956 and 1958, and again from 1963 to 1967, his family lived in the United States in Cheltenham Township, Pennsylvania,* a suburb of Philadelphia, where he attended and graduated from Cheltenham High School and was active in a debate club.
Bibi, then a cross-dresser, worked for a time for the Bonwit-Teller department store in Philadelphia. The Bonwit-Teller store has been located at 17th and Chestnut streets in Philadelphia. Bibi, using the name Esther Nitai, modeled women’s undergarments for this firm in 1965.
He speaks fluent English, with a noticeable Philadelphia accent.
Netanyahu returned to the United States in late 1972 to study architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology eventually completed an S.B. degree in architecture
At MIT, Netanyahu graduated near the top of his class, and was recruited as a management consultant for the Boston Consulting Group in Boston, Massachusetts, working at the company between 1976 and 1978.
In 1975 he earned an S.M.degree from the MIT Sloan School of Management in 1977. Concurrently, he studied political science at Harvard University.
At that time he officially changed his name to Benjamin Ben Nitai (Nitai, a reference to both Mount Nitai and to the eponymous Jewish sage Nittai of Arbela, was a pen name often used by his father for articles.)