TBR News April 5, 2017

Apr 05 2017

The Voice of the White House

Washington, D.C. April 5, 2017: “The Internet has proven to be the greatest source of information since lunatic Christians burnt down the library of Alexandria. Anything being sought, be it an address or an in-depth analysis of Dead Sea scrolls, is there and is the main reason that the famous Encyclopedia Britannica has gone out of business.

At the same time, because it is open to one and all, the Internet is also a breeding ground for a legion of strange persons with a frantic desire to air their pet theses, and boost themselves and their friends.

We see earnest discussions about the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy, , the Sinister Truth about Hurricane Katrina, Tesla Death Rays used to bring down the buildings of the WTC, balanced with other information proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that Russian bombers were used. We also discover the evil plottings of the Illuminati, a group that has been long gone, or that the Rothschild banking house had taken over the whole world. And from one source, now long  vanished, we discover that Houston was destroyed by a nuclear bomb set off by Jewish radicals or that the Fukishima disaster was really caused by an Israeli submarine, using German-made nuclear torpedoes! We also learn that President Trump microwaves kittens for his friends or that Saint Hillary the Divine is leaving her cave to be of comfort to the nation.

Yes, the Internet can entertain as well as inform.

But the fact that the Internet has many independent news sites means the diminution of the print media and the television news stations. Since these are the propaganda control for the oligarchy, there is great distress in board rooms and from them to the halls of Congress. They would like to shut off the Internet so that the stupid, and tax-paying public can only see what they are supposed to and not what might be the truth.

Obama and Cass Sunstein tried to shut down anyone who dared to interfere with the propaganda machinery but they were not successful. Even a furious defeated candidate, Hillary and her decaying machinery could not do it and if these differently-abled fungus people continue to try, there will be very serious public reactions indeed.”

Table of Contents

  • Anti-Trump headlines in the Washington Post, Jeff Bezos’ cat box liner, for April 5.
  • Tensions stoke fears of a first strike against North Korea
  • Boomerang: ‘Russia-gate’ Turns Into ‘Spy-gate’
  • Warrantless Cellphone Searches at the U.S. Border
  • By Jingo, an “Act of War!”
  • US Army Investigator Accuses National Security Adviser McMaster of War Crimes in Iraq
  • Abrupt Sea Level Rise Looms As Increasingly Realistic Threat
  • Rebel warehouse with chem weapons hit by Syrian airstrike in Idlib – Russian MOD
  • Bill O’Reilly loses even more advertisers amid sexual harrassment allegations

 Anti-Trump headlines in the Washington Post, Jeff Bezos’ cat box liner, for April 5.

 

  • The Trump administration’s bizarre line of attack
  • Who is that masked man in the White House?
  • Trump says he has the ‘best words.’ Merriam-Webster disagrees.
  • In Trump’s world, is it okay to use chemical weapons? Now we will find out.
  • Former Trump adviser admits to 2013 communication with Russian spy
  • Please, can someone brief the president on the unemployment rate?
  • Trump administration to eliminate its funding for U.N. Population Fund over abortion
  • In Trump’s America, who’s protesting and why? Here’s our February report.
  • Trump has signed repeal of the FCC privacy rules. Here’s what happens next.

If a viewer attempts to look at a WP story, he gets a message telling him to subscribe to their wonderful paper or get lost.

Here is the heart-warming message:

“You obviously love great journalism!

With special savings on our National Digital package, you’ll never miss a single story again.”

‘Special savings’ here usually means an initial billing of only three dollars for the first month and once they have your credit card information, the next month is $45.00.

And a newspaper that was once a dignified national news entity, the Post has degenerated into a mass of badly-written propaganda stories about Trump, interlaced with thrilling news about minor car accidents, backed-up DC sewers (no, not Congress) lost cats squashed on the street, new pizza restaurants and dead babies found wedged under seats in local buses. One can get much more important, and accurate (‘Kennedy’s Ghost Bites Old Lady!’) news from the supermarket’s National Enquirer and it’s far more absorbent in the cat box (or in the bird cage). But for those who like stories headlined: “Trump and Putin Plot to Ban Virgins!” then the WP is your paper. And don’t let your lips move when you read it.

Tensions stoke fears of a first strike against North Korea

Repeated warnings have so far failed to veer Pyongyang off its missile development course. As regional tensions spike, some in the South fear they will be the biggest losers if fighting breaks out.

April 5, 2017

by Julian Ryall

DW

North Korea fired what appears to have been an intermediate-range ballistic missile into waters between the Korean peninsula and Japan early on Wednesday morning. The launch further heightens tensions in the region shortly before US President Donald Trump is scheduled to hold talks with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in Florida this week.

The South Korean government reacted by convening its National Security Council and ordering its troops to a higher state of readiness, while the Japanese government issued a strongly worded condemnation of Pyongyang’s latest act of provocation.

But what grabbed the attention of many was the terse press release from the US Department of State, underlining the sense of resignation over the question of North Korea that appears to be gaining traction in Washington.

‘No further comment’

The statement read: “North Korea launched yet another intermediate-range ballistic missile. The United States has spoken enough about North Korea. We have no further comment.”

There are some who say that the response, together with other comments coming from the administration, shows President Trump believes there is no other way to bring North Korea to heel other than the application of military force.

“Even in South Korea, there are a lot of people who fear that President Trump will do something as dangerous as a first strike against the North,” said Song Young-chae, a professor in the Center for Global Creation and Collaboration at Seoul’s Sangmyung University.

“It is not clear how dangerous this might be for the people of South Korea, but it is worrying,” he told DW.

“If a first strike is a success and is able to neutralize all the weapons that Kim Jong Un has, then that would be good for us and the rest of the region,” he said. “But if some weapons were well-hidden and not destroyed, or if the North Koreans could use them before they were destroyed, then they would probably fall on South Korea, which is extremely worrying.”

Military analysts point out that the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq was able to conceal short-range tactical missiles from the US during the invasion of Iraq, and they stress that North Korea’s terrain lends itself far more readily to the concealment of missiles and other weapons.

Learning from others’ mistakes

Experts add that the North Korean military will have studied and learned from the mistakes of Saddam Hussein’s military. As an added complication, the North has the largest per capita standing army – estimated at one million personnel – as well as stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.

There have been indications that the new US president’s patience is wearing thin over an issue that has proved intractable to a succession of administrations in Washington.

On Sunday, in an interview with the Financial Times, Trump said China should resolve the issue of North Korea by using “the great influence” that it has over Pyongyang.

The American leader went on to add, “If China is not going to solve North Korea, we will.”

Pre-emptive strike?

And he is not alone in issuing such thinly veiled threats. In mid-March, Republican Representative Devin Nunes said in an interview with Fox News that a pre-emptive strike was under consideration.

“The closer that the North Korean regime gets to being able to deliver a nuclear weapon, we’re going to have to be in a position to take some type of pre-emptive strike,” he said. “We hope that it doesn’t come to that. But this is an unhinged regime.

“At the end of the day here, something may have to be done because we can’t afford to let a nuclear weapon go off in Seoul or Tokyo or the United States for that matter,” he added.

Robert Park, a human rights activist who was held in North Korea for 43 days in late 2009, said in a column in The Korea Herald in mid-March that the result of a first strike against North Korea would be catastrophic.

“Without question, those who would suffer most horrifically through the direct consequences of such a strike would be Korean civilians,” he said. “The South Korean government must be firm, forthright and unwavering in opposing the reckless and unhelpful scheme.”

Park is a founding member of the Worldwide Coalition to Stop Genocide in North Korea, which warned in a statement to DW that “Seoul will be sacrificed” if a first strike should go ahead.

Other residents of the South Korean capital agree that the rhetoric on both sides is “unusually high,” but they anticipate that cooler heads will prevail over the longer term.

A ‘high level of tolerance’

“The South Korean people have a very high level of tolerance for the North’s rhetoric, and that has served them well for decades,” said Sokeel Park, director of research and strategy for the Liberty in North Korea NGO.

“It is new for a US government to act in a similar way, but I don’t see people in Seoul going out and stocking up on rice,” he said.

Professor Song said he certainly hoped that the present crisis might blow over instead of temperatures rising to the point whereby one side orders their military onto the offensive – although, like a good number of South Koreans, he has not always been completely opposed to the concept.

“It is too late now because the North Koreans have developed a lot of weapons and they are ready to use them, but there were opportunities in the past when the international community would have been able to carry out a first strike without the North being able to respond or retaliate,” he said. “That would have been the time to launch such an attack.”

Boomerang: ‘Russia-gate’ Turns Into ‘Spy-gate’

Confirmed: Obama administration spied on Trump team

April 5, 2017

by Justin Raimondo

AntiWar

It’s the Boomerang Effect – an investigation that exposes the investigators. That’s what we’re witnessing as the “Russia-gate” probe reveals that the real evildoers at the heart of this ginned-up brouhaha are those who accused President Trump of “treason.”

Now we know the real treason — to the Constitution — is that committed by members of the Obama administration, starting with former National Security Advisor Susan Rice, who, as the Daily Caller reports:

“[O]rdered U.S. spy agencies to produce ‘detailed spreadsheets’ of legal phone calls involving Donald Trump and his aides when he was running for president, according to former US Attorney Joseph diGenova.

“’What was produced by the intelligence community at the request of Ms. Rice were detailed spreadsheets of intercepted phone calls with unmasked Trump associates in perfectly legal conversations with individuals… The overheard conversations involved no illegal activity by anybody of the Trump associates, or anyone they were speaking with,’ diGenova said. ‘In short, the only apparent illegal activity was the unmasking of the people in the calls.’”

The Susan Rice connection was first reported by Trump supporter Mike Cernovich, but his article received little notice. However, when Bloomberg reporter Eli Lake wrote about it, Fox News followed up and the story began to break all over the media map. Lake reported that:

“White House lawyers last month learned that the former national security adviser Susan Rice requested the identities of US persons in raw intelligence reports on dozens of occasions that connect to the Donald Trump transition and campaign, according to US officials familiar with the matter.”

Monitored conversations had nothing to do with Trump’s alleged ties to Russian officials, but instead, according to numerous reports, involved detailed information about the Trump campaign. As Lake put it:

“The intelligence reports were summaries of monitored conversations – primarily between foreign officials discussing the Trump transition, but also in some cases direct contact between members of the Trump team and monitored foreign officials. One US official familiar with the reports said they contained valuable political information on the Trump transition such as whom the Trump team was meeting, the views of Trump associates on foreign policy matters and plans for the incoming administration.”

When monitored conversations involve a US person, the protocol is supposed to mandate the “minimization” of that person’s identity. There are, however, ways to get around this, and the Obama administration apparently relaxed the rules to enable not only the “unmasking” of the US persons involved in these conversations but also to make it possible for the information to be disseminated to top administration officials, including not only Ms. Rice but also, according to Fox, “to all those at the National Security Council, some at the Defense Department, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and then-CIA Director John Brennan – essentially, the officials at the top, including former Rice deputy Ben Rhodes.”

This went on for “up to a year.”

So here is what we now know: The Obama administration was spying on “Trump, his team, and his family,” as the report cited above puts it, for a year before he took office, and feeding the information to the media. This goes far beyond the legendary Watergate scandal, which merely involved a single bungled break-in at Democratic party headquarters: this is Watergate times one-hundred.

And here’s the real kicker: as Lake points out, “The standard for senior officials to learn the names of US persons incidentally collected is that it must have some foreign intelligence value, a standard that can apply to almost anything. This suggests Rice’s unmasking requests were likely within the law.”

Lake trenchantly skewers this nonsense about how a “foreign connection” is required to legalize the unmasking of Americans’ communications, including their Internet activities, as did this 2013 incident. James Risen and Laura Poitras made this same point in a New York Times op ed piece back in 2013:

“Since 2010, the National Security Agency has been exploiting its huge collections of data to create sophisticated graphs of some Americans’ social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions and other personal information, according to newly disclosed documents and interviews with officials.

“The spy agency began allowing the analysis of phone call and e-mail logs in November 2010 to examine Americans’ networks of associations for foreign intelligence purposes after N.S.A. officials lifted restrictions on the practice, according to documents provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor.

“The policy shift was intended to help the agency ‘discover and track’ connections between intelligence targets overseas and people in the United States, according to an N.S.A. memorandum from January 2011. The agency was authorized to conduct ‘large-scale graph analysis on very large sets of communications metadata without having to check foreignness’ of every e-mail address, phone number or other identifier, the document said. Because of concerns about infringing on the privacy of American citizens, the computer analysis of such data had previously been permitted only for foreigners.”

Something quite similar to this “graphical analysis” is apparently what Rice asked for and received, and it was all perfectly “legal.”

As I wrote at the time that Snowden revealed the nature and extent of NSA surveillance:

“They can map out your whole life: your friends, your family, your finances, your enemies, your politics, your love affairs, your consultations with a doctor or a psychiatrist, and your location at any given time. They don’t need a warrant: they don’t need a judge: they just need to establish a ‘foreign connection’ – and, as we have seen, that’s real easy.”

It was inevitable that these capabilities would be used for political espionage. That it is the “liberals” who are now defending these practices in the service of blatantly partisan ends comes as no surprise. The irony is that this is part of an assault on a conservative administration that came into office vowing to increase these capabilities – little knowing that, even as Donald Trump was defending and calling for the expansion of the NSA’s ability to snoop on Americans’ phone conversations, our spooks were spying on the President-to-be.

As “Russia-gate” turns into “Spy-gate,” one wonders: will the Trump administration learn the lesson of this incident and do an about-face on the issue of government surveillance? I wouldn’t bet the farm on it, but it’s possible. More importantly, it looks like conservatives and some Republicans are now becoming the biggest defenders of civil liberties – and that’s a big turnaround

Warrantless Cellphone Searches at the U.S. Border

April 4 2017

by Cora Currier

The Intercept

Four members of Congress have introduced legislation that would require border agents to get a warrant to search through someone’s cellphone or laptop, bringing privacy rights at ports of entry closer to those that courts have recognized for the rest of the country.

The bill makes it illegal to access the contents of a device belonging to a U.S. citizen or permanent resident without probable cause and a warrant, and specifies that border agents can’t hold people for more than four hours to try to get them to unlock their phone or give up their data. It was simultaneously introduced on Tuesday in the Senate by Ron Wyden of Oregon and Rand Paul of Kentucky and in the House by Jared Polis of Colorado and Blake Farenthold of Texas. Wyden and Polis are Democrats while their co-sponsors are Republicans.

The government has historically claimed it has broad authority to conduct searches at the border, to seize devices, and to copy their contents. Travelers have reported being detained for hours while agents try to convince them to surrender their social media accounts and demand that they unlock their phones; they are also routinely asked about their political or religious beliefs and pressured to become informants. So far, court challenges to these practices have been unsuccessful, but the new legislation cites a 2014 Supreme Court decision that found that police need additional authority to search the cellphone of someone who has been arrested, recognizing that such devices hold massive amounts of private information.

The bill states that accessing without a warrant electronic equipment, the contents of an online account, or information about someone’s online life is a violation of the Fourth Amendment. Border agents are not allowed to deny someone entry for refusing to provide a password or unlock their information, a protection the bill clarifies. It does include an exception for emergency situations.

“Whether you are at home, walking down the street, or at the border, we must make it perfectly clear that our Fourth Amendment protections extend regardless of location,” Representative Polis said in a statement. “This bill is overdue, and I am glad we can come together in a bicameral, bipartisan manner to ensure that Customs and Border Patrol agents don’t continue to violate essential privacy safeguards.”

Neema Singh Giuliani, legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, said that “if the bill is passed it would effectively prohibit CBP from doing what it does now, which is searching and seizing devices of U.S. persons.” She added that the bill has “good language to address cases where people have supposedly consented to searches, requiring documentation that they actually did consent.”

The number of cell phone searches at points of entry to the United States has risen dramatically in the past two years, jumping from 5,000 in 2015 to 25,000 in 2016. There were 5,000 in February of 2017 alone. In February, Wyden asked the Department of Homeland Security to send him information on CBP searches, including how often travelers are asked to unlock their phones or laptops, or turn over social media passwords; in his letter, he said he was concerned that CBP was “short-circuiting… vital checks and balances” with “indiscriminate” searches. He said he expected business travelers to start using burner devices when traveling — and indeed, since Trump took office, guides on how to secure your data when crossing borders have proliferated. It’s also not clear how widely the information that the CBP collects may be shared with other law enforcement or intelligence agencies.

The bill does not add any protections for travelers to the United States who are not citizens or permanent residents. Late last year, the CBP began asking travelers from certain countries for their social media handles, and the Trump administration has indicated it will take this much farther. The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that the administration’s plans for “extreme vetting” of visa applicants would include asking them to turn over their cellphones so U.S. authorities could look at their contacts, and to provide social media account names and passwords. The changes would apply even to travelers coming on short trips and from Europe and other countries covered by the visa waiver program. The State Department has also reportedly instituted “mandatory social media checks” for any visa applicant that has spent time in territory controlled by ISIS.

Demands for social media passwords at the U.S. border constitute “a direct assault on fundamental rights” of travelers and expose their social networks to “unjusitifed scrutiny,” a coalition of 131 groups, including entities focused on civil liberties, human rights, activism, and trade, declared in a joint statement last month. The statement added that the social media scans will discourage travel for both business and pleasure.

By Jingo, an “Act of War!”

More chickenhawks on parade for war with Russia

April 4, 2017

by Philip Giraldi

The Unz Review

The latest Democratic Party shill to demonize Russia is, I am ashamed to say, my state of Virginia’s Senator Mark Warner, who, on Thursday said “Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a deliberate campaign carefully constructed to undermine our election.” Last Thursday, Warner was the top Democrat on a Senate Intelligence Committee panel investigating Moscow’s alleged interference in last year’s presidential election. The panel inevitably included carefully selected expert witnesses who would agree with the proposition that Russia is and was guilty as charged. There was no one who provided an alternative view even though a little Googling would have surfaced some genuine experts who dispute the prevailing narrative.

Warner joined many of his esteemed colleagues in Congress who have completely accepted the allegations that Russia meddled in the election in spite of the failure of the Obama Administration to provide any indisputable evidence to that effect. Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland has called Moscow’s claimed interference an “attack” and labeled it a “political Pearl Harbor.” A number of other congressmen, to include Bonnie Watson Coleman of New Jersey and Eric Swalwell of California have called it an act of war. And then there are echo chambers Senators John McCain and Mark Rubio on the Republican side of the aisle while former Vice President Dick Cheney was speaking at a business conference in New Delhi saying the same thing. Yes, that Dick Cheney. Why anyone in India would pay to hear him speak on any subject escapes me.

Democrat Adam Schiff of California is leading the charge for his party as he is the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. He outlined his case against Russia two weeks ago, providing a heap of minimally factual “information”, relying heavily instead on supposition and featuring mostly innuendo. And again, it was largely evidence-free. One assertion is almost comical: “In July 2016, Carter Page, one of Trump’s former national security advisers, traveled to Moscow after being approved to do so by the Trump campaign. While there, Page gave a speech in which he was critical of the U.S. and its efforts to fight corruption and promote democracy.”

Almost everyone I know who follows such matters is also critical of U.S. (hypocritical) efforts to promote democracy, a formulation wildly popular among Hillary Clinton style Democrats to enable attacking Muslim countries that have somehow offended either Israel or the Washington Establishment. But what is particularly disturbing about the constant denigration of Russia and Vladimir Putin in the media and among the political class is the regular invocation of war doctrine, that hacking a server by a foreign power, if it took place, is in the same category as the attack on Pearl Harbor. That World War 3 would be a nuclear holocaust does not seem to have occurred to politicians seeking a punchy line so they can get cited in The Washington Post. It leads one to the inevitable conclusion that war is far too serious a business to be left to politicians.

But what particularly offends me personally about those eager to go toe to toe with the Russians is their complete venality and fundamental cowardice. As a Vietnam era vet, I understand full well how it feels to have your life disrupted to go off and possibly die to fight a war that was totally meaningless. Our crowd of politicians is fond of talking about war as if it were some kind of diversion being featured on a monopoly board and that is precisely because they have no skin in the game. They somehow fancy that a shooting war will somehow not happen, that Russia will back down in a confrontation with force majeur, and they deep down feel completely immune to the consequences that might result from their ill-advised actions. And they are unfortunately in large part correct to feel so, as no one was ever held accountable for Iraq. Consequences that apply to the “little people” in the U.S. do not apply to them.

Under the rule of our bipartisan war-loving elites the United States has evolved from a bumbling giant into something far more threatening. The completely useless wars since 9/11 have killed nearly 10,000 American soldiers and contractors as well as hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of the inhabitants of the countries that we have attacked. I would hold Congress, the White House and the mainstream media as directly responsible for those deaths. As former Ambassador Chas Freeman puts it, “America has now chosen publicly to redefine itself internationally as the foreign relations equivalent of a sociopath – a country indifferent to the rules, the consequences for others of its ignoring them, and the reliability of its word. No nation can now comfortably entrust its prosperity or security to Washington, no matter how militarily powerful it perceives America to be.”

Which inevitably leads to the subject of Dick Cheney. When it comes to hypocrisy over war as a constant state for the American Republic with absolutely no consequences for those who lead, no one takes a back seat to good old Dick. Dick had five deferments during Vietnam and he has explained that he had had “other priorities.” He and his consigliere Scooter Libby, together with Paul Wolfowitz at the Pentagon, might have had more to do with America’s march to war in Iraq than any other individuals in the Bush Administration. And none of them paid any price except Libby who was convicted of having committed perjury connected to his apparent outing of CIA officer Valerie Plame as revenge for her husband’s refutation of claims about Iraq buying uranium from Niger. Libby was sentenced to 30 months in prison but had his jail time commuted by President George W. Bush.

One might even suggest that the architects of devastating policies were actually rewarded, most particularly Wolfowitz, who was named president of the World Bank before having to resign over a sex scandal that he initiated. Today Wolfowitz is a Visiting Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and Libby is a Senior Vice President at the neocon Hudson Institute. Cheney is retired comfortably on the somewhere between $19 and $86 million he made, mostly while working for five years at defense contractor Halliburton. His truly frightening daughter Liz is in congress representing Wyoming, continuing the family legacy of bone headed knee jerk reactionaryism combined with egregious self-aggrandizement that Dick is best known for.

Note that neither Cheney, nor Wolfowitz nor Libby ever served in the U.S. military, exhibiting thereby their willingness to let other American die for the dreadful policies that they initiated. That pattern also holds true for the Democrats who seem to have found Russia as a useful scapegoat for their failure to elect Hillary Clinton president. If the Kremlin did it then the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign are off the hook, aren’t they? And even better if one can simultaneously discredit Donald Trump by implying that he or his associates might be subjected to blackmail by Moscow, making them little more than agents of Vladimir Putin and therefore traitors to the United States.

Senator Mark Warner, a lawyer by training, founded a venture capital firm called Columbia Capital before being elected Governor of Virginia and then Senator in 2008. He is reported to be the wealthiest U.S. Senator, worth $200 million. He has a 15 acre farm in Rappahannock County Virginia where he produces wine as a hobby.

Warner has three daughters who will never serve in the U.S. military, which is precisely the problem. The more our “ruling class” in Washington has little or nothing to do with the average American or, to be more precise, the class of Americans called upon to fight and die in the wars that are constantly being promoted, the more we will engage in senseless wars and sabre rattling. As Warner appears willing to use the threat of war to pillory Trump, he perhaps should step back, take a deep breath, and try to think of the consequences of the politically loaded claims that he is promoting.

Ben Cardin and Adam Schiff are a lot like Warner in that they are reliable partisan Democrats who are seeking to milk as much benefit out of beating on Russia as they can. Both are unimpeachable liberals who wrap their arguments in the good old American flag by claiming that Moscow is seeking to threaten our democracy while completely ignoring the fact that the U.S. intelligence agencies have been regularly overthrowing governments and corrupting elections since the Second World War. They both have children who will never serve in uniform or see the inside of a barracks. War for them is an abstraction which serves as a useful tool, in this case, for bringing down Donald Trump. And they are bringing down with Trump any hope of rapprochement with Russia, a readjustment in policy that is desperately needed.

I am reminded frequently of the ancient Greek way of war. Armor was expensive and only the wealthy and powerful could afford it. And those with the armor stood in the front line as they were most able to engage in the cutting and thrusting and still survive. Armor was also heavy and they could not run away, so wars were only fought when vital interests were at stake and they were fought to the death for most of those on the battlefield. I fancy a phalanx of hoplites with Warner, Cardin, Schiff, Wolfowitz, Cheney and Libby arrayed on the front line in their fine armor manufactured by Halliburton. That way they could have all the war they want and experience it first-hand. I doubt they would last very long as they are both moral and physical cowards, but given that reality, they just might think a bit harder about promoting the type of fearmongering that will only end by sending the children of other Americans off to war.

US Army Investigator Accuses National Security Adviser McMaster of War Crimes in Iraq

April 4, 2017

by Jared Labell

libertarianinstitute

Former commander in charge of US Army Military Police in Iraq says President Trump’s new National Security Adviser, Gen. H.R. McMaster, ‘ordered’ criminal abuse of hundreds of Iraqi detainees in 2005

“Detainees were abused at Tal Afar under orders and command and control of H.R. McMaster,” said Col. Arnaldo Claudio, a retired senior U.S. Military Police officer who served as 18th Airborne Corps Provost Marshal and Chief of Police of the Multinational Coalition Forces in Iraq in 2005.

During his conversation with Scott Horton, managing director of the Libertarian Institute and host of the Scott Horton Show, Claudio elaborated on his recent interview with Univision News, where he first publicly revealed his accusations against Gen. McMaster. Claudio explained how in his capacity as chief of all Military Police in Iraq he was ordered by Gen. J.R. Vines to investigate complaints regarding the treatment of detainees made against the U.S. Army command fighting in Tal Afar in northwestern Iraq in 2005, led by President Trump’s current National Security Adviser, then-U.S. Army Col., H.R. McMaster

Claudio and his team reported back to Gen. Vines, providing information and recommendations to the commanding general, dedicating a portion of their report to details of then-U.S. Army Col. McMaster’s violations of the Geneva Conventions and the Detainee Operations Standard Operating Procedures found at Tal Afar.

Presently, Claudio is the Technical Compliance Adviser (TCA), selected by the Department of Justice and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, to oversee reform of their police forces, a position he has held since June 2014.

The Investigation Begins

Col. Claudio was stationed in Iraq from March 16, 2005 through late January 2006. He was tasked to ensure that all detainee operations were being conducted in accordance with the Geneva Conventions and Standard Operating Procedures in compliance with U.S. laws and military regulations.

Claudio told Horton that the number of admissions and releases of detainees from the small detention facility in Tal Afar didn’t seem to add up. It appeared the admitted number of detainees exceeded the maximum capacity. Claudio and his investigative team traveled to Tal Afar to investigate further, where they discovered detainees were held in conditions that were both shocking and illegal. Detainees were being deprived of food and water for days while bound together with plastic handcuffs. Hundreds were also being held without shelter. All of this was in violation of military law, according to Col. Claudio.

Claudio and his investigative team were given very specific orders by Vines. “If this guy is doing anything wrong, you need to report back,” Claudio was told. “And if he gets out of hand, just bring him back with you.”

Claudio did not mince words about his orders. “They were pretty simple. And remember, we just had gotten out of…the scandal of Abu Ghraib.”

The Abu Gharib prisoner abuse scandal of 2004 was a prime recruiting tool for Iraqi insurgents and other militant groups taking up arms against U.S. forces there. Claudio said that another similar scandal breaking so close to the significant Abu Gharib torture revelations “would have been devastating for our national security and it would be devastating for the Army, and to our nation as a whole.”

The Investigation in Tal Afar: “My God, what is this?”

Claudio’s interactions with McMaster were brief. “It was a very short conversation. He basically didn’t want me there. And he says, ‘Get on with your duty and get out of here.’”

But Claudio responded, “Not so fast. I’m here, I have orders, and if you are in fact violating the standards of how to take care of detainees, you’re going back with me. Period.”

In a detention camp designed to hold 250 detainees, Col. McMaster held over 900 people in brutal conditions, left outdoors without food, water, or shelter from the sun in their own feces and urine.

Claudio told Horton, “As I was approaching the area where the detainees were, I already knew something was really wrong.”

“There was about three to four hundred of them outside…As soon as I got outside of the vehicle, I mean, you could smell the urine and defecation in the atmosphere. It was like, ‘my God, what is this?’”

Alongside one of his medics, Claudio inspected the conditions of the hundreds of detainees before finding even more detainees kept in similarly poor circumstances in other tents being used as temporary detention facilities.

Through interviews with detainees and interpreters, Claudio and his team were told that detainees “had been beaten with sticks in order to take them to the latrine.”

Gerardo Reyes, in the story he first broke for Univision, reported that Claudio’s allegations were confirmed by another military officer who participated in the investigation, although he asked to remain anonymous.

“They weren’t only tied by the hands to each other, when they took them to the latrines they beat them with a stick,” the second source told Univision.

According to the commander of that operation, McMaster had ordered the “good detainee behavior program,” which meant that unless a detainee gave actionable intelligence to be used by the U.S. military, they were to be held indefinitely. Therefore, ironically, the so-called “good detainee behavior program” was in effect an indefinite program in violation of the law. Detainees were supposed to be released after fourteen days at the facility, either transferred to other authorities or set free, but McMaster was holding men for months in horrendous conditions.

According to Col. Claudio, there is no question that then-Col. McMaster himself gave the orders for the treatment of detainees at Tal Afar. “He knew because the orders of the ‘good behavior program’ were instituted by him,” Claudio told Horton.

About 120 detainees were released soon after Claudio’s team began restructuring the facility and taking care of the detainees’ basic needs, with hundreds more following over the next week.

Col. Claudio was unable to find Col. McMaster after he and his team surveyed the facilities. When pressed by Horton as to whether or not he would have arrested McMaster if he had been found, Claudio responded, “I would have asked him nicely to come with me. Because it never happened, I’m not going to speculate, but I’m pretty sure I would have done that.”

The Investigation Disappears

Claudio and his team reported back to Gen. Vines, providing information and recommendations and dedicating a portion of the report to detailing the violations of the Geneva Conventions and the Detainee Operations Standard Operating Procedures.

Apparently, nothing ever became of the report. Claudio would not be involved again until he saw McMaster’s name on the list to be promoted to brigadier general in July 2008. Claudio then contacted the Inspector General of the Department of the Army. He resubmitted his report, and the Inspector General’s office conducted follow up interviews with Claudio and other eyewitnesses, including a U.S. Army Sergeant named John Savo. “I write and I tell him the story I’m telling you today. They did contact me. They contacted other eyewitnesses to that.”

To the best of Claudio’s knowledge, nothing ever became of the Inspector General’s investigation.

Col. McMaster was promoted to brigadier general in August 2009, by his friend, Gen. David Petraeus.

President Donald Trump appointed Gen. McMaster as his National Security Advisor in February 2017.

 Abrupt Sea Level Rise Looms As Increasingly Realistic Threat

Ninety-nine percent of the planet’s freshwater ice is locked up in the Antarctic and Greenland ice caps. Now, a growing number of studies are raising the possibility that as those ice sheets melt, sea levels could rise by six feet this century, and far higher in the next, flooding many of the world’s populated coastal areas.

May 5, 2016

by Nicola Jones

Yaleedu

Last month in Greenland, more than a tenth of the ice sheet’s surface was melting in the unseasonably warm spring sun, smashing 2010’s record for a thaw so early in the year. In the Antarctic, warm water licking at the base of the continent’s western ice sheet is, in effect, dissolving the cork that holds back the flow of glaciers into the sea; ice is now seeping like wine from a toppled bottle.

The planet’s polar ice is melting fast, and recent satellite data, models, and fieldwork have left scientists sobered by the speed of the sea level rise we should expect over the coming decades. Although researchers have long projected that the planet’s biggest ice sheets and glaciers will wilt in the face of rising temperatures, estimates of the rate of that change keep going up. When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) put out its last report in 2013, the consensus was for under a meter (3.3 feet) of sea level rise by 2100. In just the last few years, at least one modeling study suggests we might need to double that.

Eric Rignot at the University of California, Irvine says that study underscores the possible speed of ice sheet melt and collapse. “Once these processes start to kick in,” he says, “they’re very fast.”

The Earth has seen sudden climate change and rapid sea level rise before. At the end of the planet’s last glaciation, starting about 14,000 years ago, sea levels rose by more than 13 feet a century as the huge North American ice sheet melted. But researchers are hesitant about predicting similarly rapid climate shifts in our future given the huge stakes involved: The rapid collapse of today’s polar ice sheets would erase densely populated parts of our coastlines.

“Today, we’re struggling with 3 millimeters [0.1 inch] per year [of sea level rise],” says Robert DeConto at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, co-author of one of the more sobering new studies. “We’re talking about centimeters per year. That’s really tough. At that point your engineering can’t keep up; you’re down to demolition and rebuilding.”

Antarctica and Greenland hold the overwhelming majority of the world’s ice: Ninety percent of the planet’s freshwater ice is locked up in Antarctica’s ice cap and nine percent in Greenland’s. Today, the ice sheet that’s inarguably melting fastest is Greenland. That giant block of ice, which has the potential to raise global sea levels by 23 feet if it melts in its entirety, is losing some 200 billion tons of ice each year. That rate has doubled from the 1900s to the 2000s.

We are seeing changes in Greenland in all four corners, even in the far north,” says Rignot. Many of the outlet glaciers that flow down fjords into the sea, which were “on the fence” about retreating or advancing over the past decade, are now “starting to fall apart,” he says.

And they’re moving fast. “The flow speeds we talk about today would have been jaw-dropping in the 1990s,” says Ted Scambos of the University of Colorado’s National Snow and Ice Data Center. Greenland’s Jakobshavn Glacier dumped ice into the sea at the astonishing rate of 150 feet per day in the summer of 2012. The most dramatic action in Greenland is simply from surface melting, as temperatures there and across the Arctic have soared in the last four decades. In 2012, Greenland lost a record 562 billion tons of ice as more than 90 percent of its surface melted in the summer sun.

Many questions remain about the physics of Greenland’s ice loss, such as whether meltwater gets soaked up by a ‘sponge’ of snow and ice, or trickles down to lubricate the base of the ice sheet and speed its seaward movement. Most modeling work has been about how Greenland’s melt tracks rising air temperatures; far less is known about how warming waters might eat away at the edges of its ice sheet. Rignot is part of a team now launching the Oceans Melting Greenland project (with the intentionally punny acronym OMG) to investigate that. These uncertainties make Rignot think that estimates of Greenland’s melt — contributing as much as 9 inches of global sea level rise by 2100, according to the 2013 IPCC report — have been far too conservative. Assuming that the Greenland ice sheet’s demise “will be slow is wishful thinking,” Rignot says.

But most scientists say there shouldn’t be too many serious surprises about the physics governing Greenland’s ice loss. Although the ice sheet can be expected to steadily melt in the face of rising temperatures, Greenland’s ice cap shouldn’t rapidly collapse, because most of its ice sits safely on rock far above sea level. “Greenland is more predictable and straightforward,” says DeConto.

For fear of rapid, runaway collapse, the research community turns its eyes south.

Antarctica is, for now, losing ice more slowly than Greenland. The latest data from the GRACE project — twin satellites that measure mass using gravity data — say Antarctica is losing about 92 billion tons of ice per year, with that rate having doubled from 2003 to 2014. But Antarctica is vast — 1.5 times the size of the United States, with ice three miles thick in places — and holds enough ice to raise global sea levels by roughly 200 feet.

The sizeable western half of Antarctica holds some of the fastest-warming areas on the planet.

The larger, eastern half lies mostly above sea level and remains very cold; researchers have typically considered its ice stable, though even that view is beginning to change. The sizeable western half of the Antarctic, by contrast, has its base lying below sea level, and holds some of the fastest warming areas on the planet. “You look at West Antarctica and you think: How come it’s still there?” says Rignot.

Warming ocean water licking at the underside of the floating edges of the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet is eating away at the line where the ice rests on solid rock. Much of the bedrock of the Antarctic slopes downward toward the center of the continent, so as the invading water flows downhill it seeps further and further inland, causing ever-larger chunks of glaciers to flow faster into the sea. This so-called “grounding line” has been eroding inland rapidly, in some parts of West Antarctica at rates of miles per year. In 2014, satellite radar images revealed just how vulnerable five massive glaciers flowing into the Admundsen Sea are from this effect. And a 2015 paper showed that the same thing is happening more slowly to Totten Glacier, one of the biggest glaciers in the east.

Such dramatic processes have been the bane of Antarctic modeling and the reason why scientists have been loathe to put a number on sea level contributions from a melting southern continent. Then in March came a report in Nature that some say represents a step change in our ability to do that. DeConto and David Pollard of Pennsylvania State University put into their ice sheet model two basic phenomena: meltwater trickling down to lubricate glacier flow, and giant walls of ice (created when the ends of glaciers snap off) simply collapsing under their own weight. These new modeling parameters gave DeConto and Pollard a better understanding of past sea level rise events. For the Pliocene era 3 million years ago, for example — when seas were dozens of feet higher than today — older models estimated that a partially melting Antarctic added about 23 feet to global sea level rise. The new model increased Antarctica’s contribution to sea level rise during the Pliocene to 56 feet.

Turning their model to the future, DeConto and Pollard project more than three feet of sea level rise from Antarctica alone by 2100 — assuming growing greenhouse gas emissions that boost the planet’s temperature by about 4 degrees C (7 degrees F). That is far more than the last IPCC estimate in 2013, which projected less than eight inches of sea level rise from a melting Antarctic by 2100, with a possibility for inches more from the dramatic collapse of Antarctic glaciers.

Even DeConto admits that, under the model used in his paper, the timing and pace of Antarctica’s ice loss is “really uncertain” — it could be a decade or two, or three or four, before these dramatic processes start to kick in, he says. “The paper just shows the potentials, which are really big and really scary,” says DeConto. But Scambos and other observers call DeConto’s numbers “perfectly plausible.”

Researchers could better pin down their models if they could track the rate of sea level rise from polar ice sheet collapse in the past, but this has proven hard to do. When seas rose a whopping 13 feet per century at the end of the last glaciation (the current record-holder for known rates of sea level rise in the past), much of the water came from an ice sheet over North America, where there isn’t one today. “I wouldn’t use that as an analogue for the future,” says paleo-geologist Andrea Dutton of the University of Florida, who wrote a recent review of past records of sea level rise. “But it has important lessons for us nonetheless — that ice sheets can retreat suddenly and in steps instead of gradually.”

For a better analogue of what’s going on today, researchers often look to the last interglacial period, about 120,000 years ago, when temperatures were about a degree warmer than pre-industrial levels and seas were 20 to 30 feet higher than today. Ice cores from Greenland have suggested that much of that water must have come from the Antarctic. To find out just how fast sea levels rose at that time, Dutton is now looking at old corals in Mexico, Florida, and Australia; corals can be used to track sea level, since they grow in shallow waters to capture sunlight. A map of sea level rise around the world, and how it was higher in one place than another, could be used to infer where the water came from. Success isn’t guaranteed; corals are notoriously difficult to date. And whatever they find, notes Scambos, it will still be hard to draw a parallel to the modern world.

“That was a natural warming period in Earth’s history,” Scambos says. “We’re putting our pedal to the metal today; we’re driving the system very hard.”

James Hansen, a climatologist at Columbia University, summarized the evidence for rapid sea level rise in a recent controversial paper, raising some eyebrows at its stark warnings of catastrophe. Though many researchers have taken issue with the dramatic tone and specific details of that paper, its conclusion — that multi-meter sea level rise is possible in the next 50, 100, or 200 years — does not seem so alarmist in the face of other recent work.

“I think a lot of us who work on paleo records are all aware that a lot of change can happen very quickly — I’m always looking at big numbers,” says Dutton, who hasn’t been startled by recent studies like DeConto’s. “It’s always going to be a difficult question to answer. Maybe we need to accept we’re always going to have this uncertainty and just prepare for the worst.”

Rebel warehouse with chem weapons hit by Syrian airstrike in Idlib – Russian MOD

April 4, 2017

RT

The Syrian Air Force has destroyed a warehouse in Idlib province where chemical weapons were being produced and stockpiled before being shipped to Iraq, Russia’s Defense Ministry spokesman said.

The strike, which was launched midday Tuesday, targeted a major rebel ammunition depot east of the town of Khan Sheikhoun, Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Major-General Igor Konashenkov said in a statement.

The warehouse was used to both produce and store shells containing toxic gas, Konashenkov said. The shells were delivered to Iraq and repeatedly used there, he added, pointing out that both Iraq and international organizations have confirmed the use of such weapons by militants.

The same chemical munitions were used by militants in Aleppo, where Russian military experts took samples in late 2016, Konashenkov said.

The Defense Ministry has confirmed this information as “fully objective and verified,” Konashenkov added.

According to the statement, Khan Sheikhoun civilians, who recently suffered a chemical attack, displayed identical symptoms to those of Aleppo chemical attack victims.

Hasan Haj Ali, commander of the Free Idlib Army rebel group, rejected Russia’s version of the incident, saying the rebels had no military positions in the area.

“Everyone saw the plane while it was bombing with gas,” he told Reuters.

“Likewise, all the civilians in the area know that there are no military positions there, or places for the manufacture [of weapons]. The various factions of the opposition are not capable of producing these substances,” he added.

At least 58 people, including 11 children, reportedly died and scores were injured after a hospital in Khan Sheikhoun was targeted in a suspected gas attack on Tuesday morning, Reuters reported, citing medics and rebel activists. Soon after a missile allegedly hit the facility, people started showing symptoms of chemical poisoning, such as choking and fainting.

The victims were reportedly also seen with foam coming out of their mouths. While the major Syrian opposition group, the Syrian National Coalition, and other pro-rebel groups put the blame on the attack onto President Bashar Assad’s government, the Syrian military dismissed all allegations as propaganda by the rebels.

“We deny completely the use of any chemical or toxic material in Khan Sheikhoun town today and the army has not used nor will use in any place or time, neither in past or in future,” the Syrian army said in a statement.

The Russian military stated it did not carry out any airstrike in the area either.

However, EU foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini, commenting on the incident, was quick to point to the Syrian government as a culprit, saying that it bears responsibility for the “awful” attack.

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson echoed Mogherini, accusing the Syrian government of perpetrating the attack calling it “brutal, unabashed barbarism.” He argued, that besides the Syrian authorities, Iran and Russia should also bear “moral responsibility” for it.

Bill O’Reilly loses even more advertisers amid sexual harassment allegations

April 4, 2017

by Jon Street

the blaze

More advertisers have removed spots from Fox News host Bill O’Reilly’s show in the wake of a New York Times investigation that found Fox News and O’Reilly paid off even more alleged sexual harassment victims than initially thought.

One of O’Reilly’s top advertisers, Mercedes-Benz announced Monday that it would not run any more commercials during O’Reilly’s show. The automaker instead “reassigned” its advertising to other Fox News spots.

“Yes, we had advertising running on ‘The O’Reilly Factor’ (we run on most major cable news shows) and it has been reassigned in the midst of this controversy,” Donna Boland, Mercedes-Benz corporate communications manager, said in a statement. “The allegations are disturbing and, given the importance of women in every aspect of our business, we don’t feel this is a good environment in which to advertise our products right now.”

Since the announcement by Mercedes-Benz, 10 more advertisers have followed suit. Advertisers refusing to be associated with O’Reilly in the wake of the sexual harassment lawsuits include automakers BMW, Hyundai, and Mitsubishi; pharmaceutical manufacturers GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi Consumer Products; email marketing company Constant Contact;  men’s clothing line Untuckit; Ainsworth Pet Nutrition; insurance agency Allstate; and asset management firm T. Rowe Price, NBC News reported.

A representative for Hyundai clarified to CNN that it does not currently advertise on O’Reilly’s program, but that as a result of the “recent and disturbing allegations,” it has reversed its decision to run upcoming commercials.

The 11 companies have not withdrawn their money from Fox News altogether. The companies only said their advertisements will no longer run during the 8-9 p.m. Eastern Time slot, when the “The O’Reilly Factor” airs.

“We value our partners and are working with them to address their current concerns about the O’Reilly Factor. At this time, the ad buys of those clients have been re-expressed into other FNC programs,” Paul Rittenberg, executive vice president of advertising sales at Fox News, said.

The business decisions came just days after the New York Times reported Fox News and O’Reilly paid as many as five women up to $13 million to settle sexual harassment lawsuits. The five complaints were in addition to multiple allegations made last year against ousted Fox News chairman Roger Ailes. O’Reilly was named in one of the lawsuits against Ailes and the company, although O’Reilly was not a defendant.

O’Reilly, for his part, has pushed back on the allegations, but seemed to admit paying to settle at least some of the claims.

“Just like other prominent and controversial people, I’m vulnerable to lawsuits from individuals who want me to pay them to avoid negative publicity,” O’Reilly said in a statement released over the weekend, according to NBC News.

O’Reilly later added: “I have put to rest any controversies to spare my children.”

21st Century Fox, which is Fox News’ parent company, noted that none of the women who alleged sexual harassment called the company’s anonymous hotline but said it “takes matters of workplace behavior very seriously.” The network has renewed O’Reilly’s contract for an undisclosed period of time.

O’Reilly’s show generated more than $446 million in advertising revenue from 2014-2016.

“The O’Reilly Factor” is currently the highest-rated show on cable news, averaging around 4 million viewers per night.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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