Category: Barack Obama

Obama Must Hate Warren Right Now

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Elizabeth Warren’s campaign against Wall Street insider Antonio Weiss’ nomination for undersecretary for domestic finance for the US Treasury is picking up steam:

Under pressure from progressive groups to reject Wall Street influence, three more Senate Democrats yesterday turned against the nomination of Antonio Weiss for a senior post at the U.S. Treasury Department.

President Barack Obama’s choice of Weiss, an investment banker at Lazard Ltd. (LAZ), has put him at the center of an ideological fight within the Democratic Party over the finance industry’s clout in Washington.

The attacks are coming from Democrats who say the Obama administration relies too much on Wall Street veterans to fill important regulatory posts. They are criticizing Weiss, in particular, for his role in engineering tax-lowering inversion deals for U.S. companies.

The opposition yesterday from Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and Al Franken of Minnesota further complicates the nomination for the administration and Democratic leaders. After defending Weiss’s Democratic bona fides and accepting his campaign contributions, they’ll have to turn to Republicans to get him into office.

“This fits the administration’s pattern of choosing Wall Street insiders to senior policy positions instead of those with strong consumer protection or community bank and credit union experience,” Manchin said on the Senate floor yesterday.

There are now note enough Democratic votes to 

Neither Shaheen nor Manchin are representatives of the “Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party,” and the fact that they are bucking the President is a big deal.

It appears that the idea that someone who has no background in domestic finance is a good selection for the undersecretary for domestic finance, simply because they are a big Democratic donor, and they have a background in the financial industry is no longer as universally held as it used to be.

It also appears that people are finally getting the idea that multimillion dollar payouts from the financial industry for people who go into government service is implicitly corrupt.

Good.

Any discomfort that Barack Obama might experience because a portion of the Democratic Party has realized that he is Wall Streets biggest fan is well deserved.

We Finally Got the Torture Report. It is Actually a Bit Worse than I Expected.

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Understand that we are talking about an executive summary (PDF) that spans 525 pages(!), and I have not read it in detail.

But here are the basic points from the report:

  1. The CIA’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining co-operation from detainees.
  2. The CIA’s justification for the use of its enhanced interrogation techniques rested on inaccurate claims of their effectiveness.
  3. The interrogations of CIA detainees were brutal and far worse than the CIA represented to policymakers and others.
  4. The conditions of confinement for CIA detainees were harsher than the CIA had represented to policymakers and others.
  5. The CIA repeatedly provided inaccurate information to the Department of Justice, impeding a proper legal analysis of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program.
  6. The CIA has actively avoided or impeded congressional oversight of the program.
  7. The CIA impeded effective White House oversight and decision-making.
  8. The CIA’s operation and management of the program complicated, and in some cases impeded, the national security missions of other executive branch agencies.
  9. The CIA impeded oversight by the CIA’s Office of Inspector General.
  10. The CIA coordinated the release of classified information to the media, including inaccurate information concerning the effectiveness of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques.
  11. The CIA was unprepared as it began operating its Detention and Interrogation Program more than six months after being granted detention authorities.
  12. The CIA’s management and operation of its Detention and Interrogation Program was deeply flawed throughout the program’s duration, particularly so in 2002 and early 2003.
  13. Two contract psychologists devised the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques and played a central role in the operation, assessments, and management of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program. By 2005, the CIA had overwhelmingly outsourced operations related to the program.
  14. CIA detainees were subjected to coercive interrogation techniques that had not been approved by the Department of Justice or had not been authorized by CIA headquarters.
  15. The CIA did not conduct a comprehensive or accurate accounting of the number of individuals it detained, and held individuals who did not meet the legal standard for detention. The CIA’s claims about the number of detainees held and subjected to its enhanced interrogation techniques were inaccurate.
  16. The CIA failed to adequately evaluate the effectiveness of its enhanced interrogation techniques.
  17. The CIA rarely reprimanded or held personnel accountable for serious and significant violations, inappropriate activities, and systemic and individual management failures.
  18. The CIA marginalised and ignored numerous internal critiques, criticisms, and objections concerning the operation and management of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program.
  19. The CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program was inherently unsustainable and had effectively ended by 2006 due to unauthorized press disclosures, reduced cooperation from other nations, and legal and oversight concerns.
  20. The CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program damaged the United States’ standing in the world, and resulted in other significant monetary and non-monetary costs.

First, I curse the people who jade me agree with John McCain, when he said that he suspected that, “The objection of those same officials to the release of this report is really focused on that disclosure: torture’s ineffectiveness.”

It is the nature of secret organizations to misuse the classification process to avoid embarrassment and for bureaucratic and budgetary infighting.

BTW, John “I Opposed Torture, I Pinkie Swear” Brennan is saying that we should the ignore this document, because torture really worked.

He keeps slicing that bullsh%$, and Barack Obama keeps a swallowing it.

Here are some things have been observed by people who have read the report in more detail than I have been able to yet:

Note the Obama had to be dragged kicking and screaming into releasing this report.

For all of his assertions that the President wants to ensure that this will not happen again, the people who did this, people who were rewarded with promotions and prestige, will suffer no consequences.

We will torture again, and we will do this soon, because people in senior positions at the US state security apparatus are in those positions because they either tortured or facilitated torture.

Fire Brennan.  He supports torture, and he lied to Congress.

Fire Clapper.  He lied to congress.

Pull the security clearances of those involved in the torture program, particularly Jose Rodriguez, for moral turpitude.

Get the contractors out of the intelligence committee.  They are a cancer on an already dysfunctional culture.

I So Wish She Were Running for President

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Elizabeth Warren just opened up a serious can of whup ass on the Obama toadies who are pushing for the nomination of Antonio Weiss for Treasury undersecretary for domestic policy:

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) made clear on Tuesday that she is not swayed by supporters of Obama administration nominee for Treasury undersecretary for domestic policy Antonio Weiss. Warren upped the ante in the unusually heated nomination fight, even mocking his defenders who point out that he supports “poetry.”

………

Warren, in her speech at an event hosted by the Economic Policy Institute, the Roosevelt Institute and Americans for Financial Reform, ticked off the most common points defenders of Weiss have made about his nomination.

“He spent the last 20 years at the investment bank Lazard and has been named to be under secretary for domestic finance at the Treasury Department. He is focused on international corporate mergers — companies buying and selling each other,” Warren said. “Now, it may be interesting, challenging, but it does not sufficiently qualify him to oversee consumer protection and domestic regulatory functions at the Treasury Department.”

………

Weiss’s nomination contradicts the Obama administration’s opposition to bringing in personnel who won’t have conflicts of interest with Wall Street, Warren said.

“Now, this matters because at the end of the day the administration undercuts its own opposition to this practice by nominating someone who was involved in a high profile, cross boarder inversion and who, by the way, made $15 million in the last few years, working for Lazard, a firm that did three of the four major announced inversions,” Warren said “And by the way, Lazard isn’t an American company anymore either. It already moved to Bermuda to cut its taxes.”

Recent profiles of Weiss, oddly, have included the fact that he’s been involved in publishing the Paris Review in ticking off his Democratic bona fides. That wasn’t lost on Warren.

“Third, and maybe you can help me understand this argument, people say opposition to Weiss is unreasonable because, wait for it, he likes poetry,” Warren said. “I’m actually not kidding on this one. Supposedly because he helps publish a literary magazine called the Paris Review we should trust that he will zealously pursue financial reform. Now I confess, I don’t read many literary magazines but, really?”

In leaving Lazard, Warren noted that Weiss would receive a golden parachute of about $20 million.

“For me, this is just one spin of the revolving door too many. Enough is enough,” Warren said. “The response to these concerns has been, let’s say, loud. First his supporters say ‘come on, he’s an investment banker so of course he should be qualified to oversee complicated financial work at treasury. But his defenders haven’t shown his actual experience that qualifies him for this job at treasury.”

One of the more substantive arguments against Warren’s opposition to Weiss is that he’s as good as could possibly be gotten in a nominee for a top treasury position. Warren said she has supported qualified people with ties to Wall Street but that’s not what Weiss is.

“Look, when I set up the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau I interviewed, I hired, and I worked alongside many people with Wall Street experience and I was glad to do so. In the Senate I have voted for plenty of nominees with Wall Street experience,” Warren said. “But we need a balance. Not everyone who swoops in through the revolving door should be offered a top job without some serious examinations. Qualifications matter and Weiss doesn’t have them.”

Ouch.

Instead, I’m going to have to hold my nose and vote for some corporate Democrat.

Unless Bernie Sanders run.

Run Bernie!!! Run!!!

“Most Transparent Administration Ever,” my Ass!!!

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So, the administration, via the gentle words of John Kerry, has asked that the unclassified summary of the torture report release be delayed:

Secretary of State John Kerry personally phoned Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Friday morning to ask her to delay the imminent release of her committee’s report on CIA torture and rendition during the George W. Bush administration, according to administration and Congressional officials.

 Kerry was not going rogue — his call came after an interagency process that decided the release of the report early next week, as Feinstein had been planning, could complicate relationships with foreign countries at a sensitive time and posed an unacceptable risk to U.S. personnel and facilities abroad. Kerry told Feinstein he still supports releasing the report, just not right now.

 “What he raised was timing of report release, because a lot is going on in the world — including parts of the world particularly implicated — and wanting to make sure foreign policy implications were being appropriately factored into timing,” an administration official told me. “He had a responsibility to do so because this isn’t just an intel issue — it’s a foreign policy issue.”

Bullsh%$.

If this gets delayed, then Richard Burr (R-NC) is head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and the distinguished gentleman from North Carolina has made it clear that he is opposed to any release of any information regarding torture by the committee.

The Obama administration, which has been thoroughly captured by the most repulsive elements of the US state security apparatus, would be fine with that.

Worst Constitutional Law Professor Ever.™

Your Moment of Eric Arthur Blair

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The Obama administration is claiming that US human rights law does not apply to the mercenary rebels that the US is training and arming in Syria:

Buried down in a report about Pentagon plans to train more mercenaries to fight against Syria we find this declaration of intend by the Obama administration to (again) break the law:

The military screening plan came together after the Obama administration determined that the training program for the Syrians would not be subject to what are known as the Leahy laws, which typically govern U.S. security assistance to foreign forces.

Under those laws, a small office at the State Department works with U.S. embassies overseas to ensure that recipients of State or Defense Department security assistance aren’t linked to major human rights abuses.

…

Because the Syrian rebels will not be part of a state-sponsored force, the laws will not apply, U.S. officials said.

Wait a second. The U.S. congress has set aside $500 million to train, equip and pay these fighters. The U.S. military will do the training. And the Obama administration claims that these are not “state-sponsored forces”? Is the U.S. no longer a nation state?

 Besides that the Leahy law as codified for the Pentagon in Section 8057 of the 2014 Omnibus bill does not say anything about “state-sponsored forces”:

(1) None of the funds made available by this Act may be used for any training, equipment, or other assistance for the members of a unit of a foreign security force if the Secretary of Defense has credible information that the unit has committed a gross violation of human rights.

(2) The Secretary of Defense, in consultation with the Secretary of State, shall ensure that prior to a decision to provide any training, equipment, or other assistance to a unit of a foreign security force full consideration is given to any credible information available to the Department of State relating to human rights violations by such unit.

There is nothing about “state-sponsored” in the Pentagon relevant portion of the Leahy law. Will these trained be “foreign”? Yes. Will they be “security forces”? Arguably because they will likely bring more insecurity to Syria than security. But they will have weapons, will be organized in units and will fight. That seems to fit the expression “foreign security force”.

………

All the groups the CIA has trained and equipped to fight against Syria have committed major human rights violations. But the Leahy law does not apply to the CIA. Now as the Pentagon takes over the training of such groups the Leahy law becomes relevant. I dare anyone to find a group of Syrian insurgents fighting against the Syrian government that has not indiscriminately shelled civilians and not committed other major human rights abuses. There is none.

The Obama administration wants to avoid the applicability of the Leahy law because applying it would leave the Pentagon without any potential recruits to train as mercenaries against the Syrian government. It decided to break the law by using an interpretation that actually not covered by the laws wording. It has thus decided to break the law.

Barack Obama, who was a critic of the expansive view of the Unitary Executive advanced by the Bush administration, has become one of its biggest fans.

Worst Constitutional law professor ever.

Bush With Tan ……… Again

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Yes, it turns out that our exit from Afghanistan won’t be an exit:

President Obama decided in recent weeks to authorize a more expansive mission for the military in Afghanistan in 2015 than originally planned, a move that ensures American troops will have a direct role in fighting in the war-ravaged country for at least another year.

Mr. Obama’s order allows American forces to carry out missions against the Taliban and other militant groups threatening American troops or the Afghan government, a broader mission than the president described to the public earlier this year, according to several administration, military and congressional officials with knowledge of the decision. The new authorization also allows American jets, bombers and drones to support Afghan troops on combat missions.

………

The decision to change that mission was the result of a lengthy and heated debate that laid bare the tension inside the Obama administration between two often-competing imperatives: the promise Mr. Obama made to end the war in Afghanistan, versus the demands of the Pentagon that American troops be able to successfully fulfill their remaining missions in the country.

Once again, we see the pattern.

Obama knows what the right thing to do is, but he has to accommodate the ones who f%$%#ed up in the first place, much like he did with Obamacare.

I understand the desire to be a conciliator, particularly given Obama’s life story, but the role of POTUS is to be the adult in the room, because the Pentagon cannot be.

The generals, and the civilian side of the defense establishment, is simply incapable of making the call to cut their losses and leave.

They subscribe to the Green Lantern theory of Geopolitics, in which the limits of American military might are limited only by the will, and where any realistic examination of the risks and rewards are assiduously eschewed.

This is insane.

More of This

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At a hearing before the Senate Banking Committee, the senior Senator from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts cut Mel Watt, the Chairman of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, a well deserved new asshole:

What started as a dry, lame-duck session hearing on the Federal Housing Finance Agency in the Senate Banking Committee on Wednesday, got heated when U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., went guns blazing after the FHFA director.

Warren, an outspoken progressive and a likely candidate for the 2016 Democrat presidential nomination, went on the attack during FHFA Director Melvin Watt’s first hearing before the committee, saying that he’s never done anything to help homeowners who are underwater and facing foreclosure.

The hearing started benignly enough, with Watt’s prepared remarks delivered in a measured tone. That soon ended, when Warren took the mic.

Warren is known for aggressively grilling witnesses, but this was an unusual case of a “blue on blue” attack, as Watt is a former congressional Democrat and Obama appointee, and considered a strong advocate for affordable housing and homeowner assistance.

It does not matter what Watt was.

If you are working on housing in the Obama administration, your role is to coddle the criminals working for Wall Street at the expense of the ordinary American citizen, even if it costs the taxpayer money:

Five million families lost their homes during the financial crisis and millions more are still struggling,” Warren said, prefacing her questions to Watt. “According to the latest data from CoreLogic…another 5.3 million homeowners remain underwater on their homes. And people are continuing to lose their homes every day in foreclosure.

“We talk a little bit about the law here, now one of your duties under the law. One of your duties is to conserve the assets of Fannie and Freddie, but another duty given equal importance by Congress … is to implement a plan that seeks to maximize assistance for homeowners and take advantage of available programs to minimize foreclosures,” Warren said.

She went on to recite that Congress explicitly included reduction of loan principal as an option for the FHFA to use.

“Principal reduction is often a win-win that both helps Fannie and Freddie and helps a family,” she said.

She cited a 2013 Congressional Budget Office study found that even a modest principal reduction plan for Fannie and Freddie mortgages could help 1.2 million underwater homeowners, prevent 43,000 defaults and save Fannie and Freddie about $2.8 billion.

………

Watt appeared a little shaken by the line of attack.

“It’s probably an overstatement to say it’s not been a priority,” Watt stammered. “It’s just a very difficult issue. The reason it is difficult is because we are looking for exactly what you said – a win-win situation. We have to do this in a way that is responsible, otherwise we just reduce principal for everybody across the board…is not what anybody I think is advocating for, so then we have to decide what is a responsible way to do that—”

Warren cut him off.

“Chairman Watt, you have had a year to do that, you have known for five years before that what the problem was, we have two studies coming out showing that Fannie and Freddie could make money by doing this,” she said. “In the meantime you have done the reps and warranties, the buyback policy, private mortgage insurance rules, a whole list of tough technical things, and I applaud you for doing that, but people have lost their homes in the last year and every day that you delay more families lose their homes. There are 5.4 million families out there underwater so I want to know when are you going to have an answer on this?”

See my earlier comment about Obama’s priorities.

For all the flak that I have thrown at exiting Attorney General Eric “Place” Holder, the buck stops at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and the reason that nothing has been done to fix the cesspools of corruption is because Barack Obama does not want the swamps drained.

More of This

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Elizabeth Warren has announced that she is opposing the nomination of Antonio Weiss as Treasury undersecretary, because he is a creature of the corrupt Wall Street establishment who arranged a huge “inversion” deal to avoid US taxes:

Sen. Elizabeth Warren plans to oppose President Barack Obama’s nomination of Antonio Weiss, a Wall Street investment banker, to be Treasury Undersecretary for Domestic Finance, another sharp-elbowed move by the progressive movement’s most prominent leader.

Weiss, head of global investment banking at Lazard, is widely respected on Wall Street. But he advised on Burger King’s acquisition of Canadian doughnut chain Tim Horton’s, a so-called “tax inversion deal.” Defenders say the deals are commonplace across Wall Street and Weiss did not advise on the tax portion. Such arguments have not swayed the Massachusetts Democratic senator, a persistent Wall Street critic who appears headed to a leadership role in the next Congress.

A Warren adviser told POLITICO: “She is a no on Antonio Weiss. She was a Treasury official herself, she cares a lot about who is in the domestic finance role. It oversees Dodd-Frank implementation and other core economic policy-making.”

The adviser added that Warren “agrees with Senator Grassley that his past work with corporate inversions is a major issue, and she’s had growing concerns with the Administration being loaded with so many appointees from Wall Street rather than more people who would bring different perspectives.”

The adviser also argued that Weiss’ mergers and acquisitions background on Wall Street was not a good fit for the domestic finance post. “She also doesn’t believe that his investment banking background – which focuses almost entirely on Europe and on international mergers and acquisitions – puts him in a good position to oversee domestic issues like consumer protection and US financial regulation,” the adviser said.

The fact that Obama has nominated is a Wall Street type who is unsuited, and probably disinclined, to protect consumers from the banksters is not an unintentional oversight.

Neither it is Obama practicing eleventy dimensional chess.

If the past 6 years have shown anything, it is that Barack Obama and Eric “Place” Holder have put the wealth and impunity of the financial sector above all other policy concerns.

And the Other Shoe Drops on Net Neutrality

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Former Cable TV Lobbyist, and Barack Obama’s FCC chairman, just told Barack Obama to go Cheney himself on net neutrality:

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler is not convinced that the FCC should treat consumer broadband service as a utility despite President Obama urging him to do so.

A report last night in The Washington Post says Wheeler met Monday with Web companies including Google, Yahoo, and Etsy and told them that he wants to find a compromise that addresses the concerns of Internet service providers such as Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and AT&T. Wheeler was formerly a lobbyist for the cable and wireless industries.

“What you want is what everyone wants: an open Internet that doesn’t affect your business,” Wheeler told attendees of the meeting, according to the Post’s sources. “What I’ve got to figure out is how to split the baby.”

Obama argued that reclassifying consumer broadband service as a utility is the best way to implement net neutrality rules that prevent ISPs from blocking or throttling Web services or prioritizing traffic in exchange for payment. Obama noted that the FCC is an independent agency that can vote however it wants, a message Wheeler apparently has taken to heart.

“I am an independent agency,” Wheeler said repeatedly during the meeting, according to the Post’s sources.

While the Post story said Wheeler is “moving in a different direction” from the president’s plan, it did not provide any details as to what that direction is. Before Obama’s call for a full reclassification of broadband as a utility, Wheeler was reportedly close to settling on a hybrid approach in which the service ISPs offer to content providers would be treated as a utility while the service ISPs offer to consumers would remain a lightly regulated information service.

“Wheeler worries that the president’s more drastic approach is too simplistic, according to people familiar with his thinking,” the Post wrote. “With his long experience in the telecommunications industry, Wheeler is well aware of concerns that ill-considered regulations could stifle innovation and slow the growth of the country’s broadband infrastructure, those people said. And he worries that the White House is being naive about the ripple effects of changing how a major piece of national infrastructure is governed.”

I guarantee you that Wheeler got a heads up before Obama made the statement.

In fact it was probably more than just a heads up.  I think that Obama knew what Wheeler’s response would be before he made his statement.

When I doubted Obama’s sincerity, and worried that he would, “find a way to f%$# the ordinary guy and benefit the big corporations again,” it appears that I was right.

He gets to pretend to be on our side, while siding with the oligarchs.

Well, Here is a Shocker

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When the Department of Justice investigated CIA torture, they never interviewed its victims:

As the US government prepares to defend its record on torture before a United Nations panel, five Libyan men once held without charge by the CIA say the main criminal investigation into allegations of detainee abuse never even interviewed them.

 The Libyans’ accusation reopens controversy over the 2012 pre-election decision by the prosecutor in the case not to bring charges against anyone involved in CIA abuse – an episode the US State Department has held up as an example of its diligence in complying with international torture obligations.

On Wednesday, a United Nations committee in Geneva is scheduled to hear a US delegation outline recent measures Washington has taken to combat torture. It will be the first update the US has provided to the committee since 2006, when the CIA still operated its off-the-books “black site” prisons. Human rights campaigners who have seen the Obama administration repeatedly decline to deliver justice for US torture victims consider it a belated chance at ending what they consider to be impunity.

 ………

That high-profile inquiry, conducted by assistant US attorney John Durham, wrapped in 2012 without bringing criminal charges against anyone involved in the deaths of two detainees in CIA custody. That decision, heralding the end of federal investigations for post-9/11 detainee abuse, was preceded by Durham’s 2011 announcement that he would not proceed past a “preliminary review” for 99 out of 101 cases of suspected CIA torture.

The State Department, in a 2013 written submission to the UN committee, referred to Durham’s team as “experienced professionals” that found the “admissible evidence would not be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt.”

But the Libyans say that neither Durham nor his staff “ever sought or requested our testimony”.

What a surprise.  Obama and Holder’s “investigation” was a sham.

This is a feature, not a bug, just like his refusal to prosecute financial fraud of Wall Street.

Worst ……… Constitutional ……… Law ……… Professor ……… Ever

Barry, Why the F%$# Did you wait Until After the Election

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Barack Obama just came out in favor of Title 2 regulation of broadband providers:

U.S. President Barack Obama on Monday said Internet service providers should be regulated more like public utilities to make sure they grant equal access to all content providers, touching off intense protests from cable and telecoms companies and Republican lawmakers.

 Obama’s detailed statement on the issue of “net neutrality,” a platform in his 2008 presidential campaign, was a rare intervention by the White House into the policy setting of an independent agency.

 Shares of major Internet service providers Comcast Corp and Time Warner Cable Inc fell sharply after Obama said ISPs should be reclassified to face stricter regulations and banned from striking paid “fast lane” deals with content companies.

 The president also said the Federal Communications Commission’s new rules should apply equally to mobile and wired ISPs, with a recognition of special challenges that come with managing wireless networks.

 “Simply put: No service should be stuck in a ‘slow lane’ because it does not pay a fee,” Obama, currently in Asia, said in a statement released by the White House. “That kind of gate keeping would undermine the level playing field essential to the Internet’s growth.”

It’s a remarkably strong statement, and he included mobile providers in it.

that being said, it’s mind-bogglingly stupid timing, as Charlie Pierce so aptly observed:

Where in the name of god was this before a midterm election when, because the kidz stayed home, the average age of the voter was approximately half-past the Hallmark Channel? Yeesh.

He’s right.

The average Fox News viewer barely understands email, and would not understand, nor would Fox be able to work them into a frenzy, over network neutrality.

Meanwhile, the younger Democratic voters are disgusted and dispirited, and were expecting to get f%$#ed like a drunk sorority girl by Obama’s former cable lobbyist FCC chairman.

A statement like Obama’s would have driven a more turnout.

Seriously, both Barack Obama, and the Democratic political establishment seem to be paralyzed by fear of offending people who go to Sally Quinn’s cocktail parties.

BTW, I still expect Obama to find a way to f%$# the ordinary guy and benefit the big corporations again, just like he did with Wall Street.

I hope to be wrong about this, but I fear that I won’t.

Text of White House Statement follows:

Statement by the President on Net Neutrality

An open Internet is essential to the American economy, and increasingly to our very way of life.  By lowering the cost of launching a new idea, igniting new political movements, and bringing communities closer together, it has been one of the most significant democratizing influences the world has ever known.

“Net neutrality” has been built into the fabric of the Internet since its creation — but it is also a principle that we cannot take for granted.  We cannot allow Internet service providers (ISPs) to restrict the best access or to pick winners and losers in the online marketplace for services and ideas.  That is why today, I am asking the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to answer the call of almost 4 million public comments, and implement the strongest possible rules to protect net neutrality.

When I was a candidate for this office, I made clear my commitment to a free and open Internet, and my commitment remains as strong as ever.  Four years ago, the FCC tried to implement rules that would protect net neutrality with little to no impact on the telecommunications companies that make important investments in our economy.  After the rules were challenged, the court reviewing the rules agreed with the FCC that net neutrality was essential for preserving an environment that encourages new investment in the network, new online services and content, and everything else that makes up the Internet as we now know it.  Unfortunately, the court ultimately struck down the rules — not because it disagreed with the need to protect net neutrality, but because it believed the FCC had taken the wrong legal approach. 

The FCC is an independent agency, and ultimately this decision is theirs alone.  I believe the FCC should create a new set of rules protecting net neutrality and ensuring that neither the cable company nor the phone company will be able to act as a gatekeeper, restricting what you can do or see online.  The rules I am asking for are simple, common-sense steps that reflect the Internet you and I use every day, and that some ISPs already observe.  These bright-line rules include:

  • No blocking.  If a consumer requests access to a website or service, and the content is legal, your ISP should not be permitted to block it.  That way, every player — not just those commercially affiliated with an ISP — gets a fair shot at your business.
  • No throttling.  Nor should ISPs be able to intentionally slow down some content or speed up others — through a process often called “throttling” — based on the type of service or your ISP’s preferences.
  • Increased transparency.  The connection between consumers and ISPs — the so-called “last mile” — is not the only place some sites might get special treatment.  So, I am also asking the FCC to make full use of the transparency authorities the court recently upheld, and if necessary to apply net neutrality rules to points of interconnection between the ISP and the rest of the Internet.
  • No paid prioritization.  Simply put: No service should be stuck in a “slow lane” because it does not pay a fee.  That kind of gatekeeping would undermine the level playing field essential to the Internet’s growth.  So, as I have before, I am asking for an explicit ban on paid prioritization and any other restriction that has a similar effect.

If carefully designed, these rules should not create any undue burden for ISPs, and can have clear, monitored exceptions for reasonable network management and for specialized services such as dedicated, mission-critical networks serving a hospital.  But combined, these rules mean everything for preserving the Internet’s openness.

The rules also have to reflect the way people use the Internet today, which increasingly means on a mobile device.  I believe the FCC should make these rules fully applicable to mobile broadband as well, while recognizing the special challenges that come with managing wireless networks. 
To be current, these rules must also build on the lessons of the past.  For almost a century, our law has recognized that companies who connect you to the world have special obligations not to exploit the monopoly they enjoy over access in and out of your home or business.  That is why a phone call from a customer of one phone company can reliably reach a customer of a different one, and why you will not be penalized solely for calling someone who is using another provider.  It is common sense that the same philosophy should guide any service that is based on the transmission of information — whether a phone call, or a packet of data.

So the time has come for the FCC to recognize that broadband service is of the same importance and must carry the same obligations as so many of the other vital services do.  To do that, I believe the FCC should reclassify consumer broadband service under Title II of the Telecommunications Act — while at the same time forbearing from rate regulation and other provisions less relevant to broadband services.  This is a basic acknowledgment of the services ISPs provide to American homes and businesses, and the straightforward obligations necessary to ensure the network works for everyone — not just one or two companies.

Investment in wired and wireless networks has supported jobs and made America the center of a vibrant ecosystem of digital devices, apps, and platforms that fuel growth and expand opportunity. Importantly, network investment remained strong under the previous net neutrality regime, before it was struck down by the court; in fact, the court agreed that protecting net neutrality helps foster more investment and innovation.  If the FCC appropriately forbears from the Title II regulations that are not needed to implement the principles above — principles that most ISPs have followed for years — it will help ensure new rules are consistent with incentives for further investment in the infrastructure of the Internet.

The Internet has been one of the greatest gifts our economy — and our society — has ever known.  The FCC was chartered to promote competition, innovation, and investment in our networks.  In service of that mission, there is no higher calling than protecting an open, accessible, and free Internet.  I thank the Commissioners for having served this cause with distinction and integrity, and I respectfully ask them to adopt the policies I have outlined here, to preserve this technology’s promise for today, and future generations to come.

Good Point

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It bears reading, but in the The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf makes a point about Barack Obama that I have been making since 2007:

But here’s what I find alarming: Confronted with a president who 1) spied on every American; 2) covered up torture; 3) continued a War on Drugs ruinous to minorities and whole foreign nations; 4) killed hundreds of innocents in drone strikes; 5) waged war illegally and killed an American citizen without due process (while suppressing the legal reasoning used to do so); 6) let high-ranking national-security officials break the law with impunity; and 7) persecuted whistleblowers—confronted with all of those transgressions, more than four in 10 Americans still approve of the job Obama is doing. And most of them are loyal Democrats. Partisanship and tribalism are overriding the moral compass of too many liberals, who ought to be furious with Obama. National-security policies he unilaterally pursued will be harming the U.S., its moral standing, and its most vulnerable citizens for years if not decades to come, especially since Democrats are poised to make civil illibertarian Hillary Clinton their party’s next leader.

To see it all with open eyes is to disapprove.

But for the fact that he leaves off the bit about his relentless protection of the corrupt ratf%$#s on Wall Street who destroyed our economy, he lays it out pretty well.

Read the rest.

Chickensh%$s on the World Stage

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As you are no doubt aware, anonymous sources at the White House called Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu a Chickensh%$.

There was a minor sh%$ storm over this, but reaction was, and is, “But he IS a complete chickensh%$?”

He’s a guy with no morals or vision who cannot look past the next election.

Then again, in the least surprising news of so far this week, email have leaked revealing that, despite their contemporaneous denials, the Obama administration was intimately involved in the firing of Shirley Sherrod:(Background here)

A 2010 e-mail from Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack says his department was “waiting for the go-ahead” from the White House before accepting the resignation of Shirley Sherrod, according to newly released documents, despite Obama administration assertions that her ouster was Vilsack’s decision alone.

The e-mail, which was made public Friday in an ongoing federal court case over the matter, shed more light on the evening of July 19, 2010, when the USDA hastily asked Sherrod to resign after a video showing her making supposed racist remarks surfaced on a conservative Web site. Her dismissal turned into a racial firestorm after it became clear that the video had been edited and her remarks were meant to tell a story of reconciliation.

Both the White House and Vilsack have repeatedly said that the agriculture secretary made the decision to ask for Sherrod’s resignation without White House input. The e-mails, along with earlier e-mails obtained by the Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act in 2010 and 2012, make it apparent that Vilsack wanted Sherrod to leave the department and ordered her resignation. But a newly released e-mail sent by Vilsack himself suggests that he was awaiting a decision from White House officials on how to proceed.

“She has offered her resignation which is appropriate,” reads an e-mail from the initials “TJV” to Dallas Tonsager, then the USDA undersecretary of rural development and Sherrod’s boss. Vilsack’s middle name is James. “The WH is involved and we are waiting for the go-ahead to accept her resignation. I suspect some direction from WH soon.”

Israel has a chickensh%$ Prime Minister, and the US has a chickensh%$ president.

Anyone who is surprised by either of these facts has been living under a rock.

The Banality of Evil at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

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The New York Times is reporting that Obama asked for a report from the CIA on the effectiveness of covert to rebels, and it revealed that it was an almost unbroken string of failure:

The Central Intelligence Agency has run guns to insurgencies across the world during its 67-year history — from Angola to Nicaragua to Cuba. The continuing C.I.A. effort to train Syrian rebels is just the latest example of an American president becoming enticed by the prospect of using the spy agency to covertly arm and train rebel groups.

 An internal C.I.A. study has found that it rarely works.

 The still-classified review, one of several C.I.A. studies commissioned in 2012 and 2013 in the midst of the Obama administration’s protracted debate about whether to wade into the Syrian civil war, concluded that many past attempts by the agency to arm foreign forces covertly had a minimal impact on the long-term outcome of a conflict. They were even less effective, the report found, when the militias fought without any direct American support on the ground.

 ………

 But in April 2013, President Obama authorized the C.I.A. to begin a program to arm the rebels at a base in Jordan, and more recently the administration decided to expand the training mission with a larger parallel Pentagon program in Saudi Arabia to train “vetted” rebels to battle fighters of the Islamic State, with the aim of training approximately 5,000 rebel troops per year.

George W. Bush was drooling idiot, and Richard Bruce Cheney is, well, Dick Cheney.  They don’t know any any better.

Barack Obama had doubts, and got research done, found out that it was a fool’s errand, and then he went ahead and did it anyway.

Barack Obama is in a very much a hostage of the inside the Beltway/Council on Foreign Relations bellicose consensus, which has led us to nothing but ruin since at least our little adventure in Indochina.

What’s more he is an enthusiastically willing hostage of this whole bomb/drone/invade everything and let God sort them out consensus, but he knows better.

If he didn’t he would not have called for the CIA study on backing insurgents.

But he let loose the dogs of war, even though he knew better:

What’s worse: Launching a disastrous military campaign under false pretenses to achieve goals you wrongly believe are attainable? Or launching a disastrous military campaign you know is doomed in order to help your party win an election?

I ask in light of today’s New York Times story about how President Obama asked the CIA a while back whether arming rebel forces – pretty much the agency’s signature strategy — had ever worked in the past.

He was told that it almost never has.

But then in June, once the political pressure for intervention in Syria got too great, he did just that — sending weapons to rebels fighting the Syrian military.

Yes: He knew better, but he did it anyway.

………

As it happens, Syria is hardly the first or most significant place Obama has used his power as Commander-in-Chief in ways that get people slaughtered, even though he knew better, primarily for political purposes.

Obama’s biggest such decision killed a lot of American servicemembers who he sent to fight and die in Afghanistan.
 During his 2008 presidential campaign, which was marked by his opposition to the war in Iraq, then-Senator Obama’s vow to re-engage in Afghanistan was seen by many as a ploy to avoid being cast as a dove, first by Hillary Clinton and then by John McCain.

What’s not clear to this day is precisely when Obama knew better; when he realized that the war in Afghanistan was hopeless.

By inauguration time, that conclusion seemed fairly obvious to many foreign-policy watchers. So why not him?

But one month into his presidency, Obama announced he was sending more troops there – 30,000, as it would turn out. Despite the obvious lack of what he himself had frequently described as a must — an exit strategy – he increased the number of troops in Afghanistan by 50 percent. And the monthly death tolls shot up.

Over 1,600 American servicemembers  have died in Afghanistan since the summer of 2009 — well over half of all the dead during the entire war – along with countless Afghans.

There were public signs in November 2009 that Obama was “rethinking” his plan. David Sanger, in his book Confront and Conceal, wrote that Obama actually began a “reassessment of whether the war was as necessary as he first believed” even earlier, in the summer of 2009. (At an off-the-record June 2009 dinner with historians the “main point” his guests tried to make was “that pursuit of war in Afghanistan would be for him what Vietnam was to Lyndon Johnson,” Garry Wills wrote  later.)

Unlike Dan Froomkin’s analysis above, I am slightly more charitable.  I do not think that politics was the primary motivation.

This is cowardice and hypocrisy, not the stupidity of Bush, or the violent delusions of Cheney.

On a moral level, this is worse than Bush, because he has the tools to do the right thing, and he chooses not to use them.

So Not Feeling the Hope and Change Here

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The US Government leaned on James Risen’s publisher to spike his latest book on the US intelligence services:

James Risen’s new book on war-on-terror abuses comes out tomorrow, and if you want to find a copy it shouldn’t be hard to obtain. As natural as that seems, it almost wasn’t the case with the Risen’s last book, “State of War,” published in 2006. Not only did U.S. government officials object to the publication of the book on national security grounds, it turns out they pressured Les Moonves, the CEO of CBS, to have it killed.

The campaign to stifle Risen’s national security reporting at the Times is already well-documented, but a 60 Minutes story last night provided a glimpse into how deeply these efforts extended into the publishing world, as well. After being blocked from reporting on the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program for the paper of record, Risen looked into getting these revelations out through a book he was already under contract to write for Simon & Schuster, a book that would look at a wide range of intelligence missteps in the war on terror.

In response, it seems, the government once again went straight to the top in order to thwart him. As 60 Minutes reports:

The administration [reached] out to Leslie Moonves, head of CBS, whose Simon & Schuster division was the publisher of Risen’s book, in an unsuccessful attempt to stop its publication.”

In an interview with The Intercept, Risen said he had been told the same story by Simon & Schuster a day or two before his book was published. He added he remembers feeling “very happy” that Moonves stood up for him.

Yes, this is the right time to invoke Eric Arthur Blair (George Orwell).

Not also that the Obama administration is looking to jail Mr. Risen for not revealing his sources.

You I think that this whole, “Most transparent administration in history,” promise is, in the words of Ron Ziegler, “Inoperative.”

I miss the openness and transparency of Richard Nixon.

Well, This Explains a Lot

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Former CIA Director Leon Panetta has now revealed that Rahm Emanuel attempted to cut him a new one for his cooperation with the Senate investigation of torture:

Former CIA Director Leon Panetta, in his new book, describes being summoned to a White House meeting and cussed out by President Obama’s chief of staff after he agreed to give the Senate intelligence committee access to documents chronicling the agency’s use of torture during the Bush administration.

“The president wants to know who the f%$# authorized this release to the committees,” Rahm Emanuel, who served as Obama’s chief of staff and enforcer in 2009 and 2010, is quoted as saying while slamming the table for emphasis.

Panetta’s book, Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace, is a blunt account of his time as Obama’s CIA director and, later, Secretary of Defense.

He describes being micromanaged and second-guessed by White House aides who seemed focused on political appearance over substance. White House pushback on the Senate torture inquiry, which came despite Obama’s pledge to run the most transparent administration ever, is in that way typical – as is Emanuel’s profane tirade. (Emanuel, as I’ve written before, saw even the most deeply moral and legal decisions in purely political terms.)

………

Panetta describes then-director of national intelligence Dennis Blair as coming to his rescue, asking Emanuel:

“If the president’s hair is on fire,” he retorted, “I want to know who the f%$# set his hair on fire.”

Blair was fired in May 2010 and replaced by James Clapper, with sources citing as a main reason “the mutual distrust between the White House and members of Mr. Blair’s staff.” John Brennan, who was then Obama’s counter-terrorism adviser and is now CIA director, was one of the people Panetta implied had set the president’s hair on fire.

I do not know whether Obama never had any intention to create openness, or if folks like James Clapper and John Brennan managed to get him to swallow their sky is falling bullsh%$.

It really doesn’t matter.

Hope and change, my flabby white ass.

Yes, James Risen Has a Legitimate Beef with Barack Obama

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What has been done to him is so egregious that Maureen Dowd actually wrote a decent column, albeit it one that still contains gratuitous fashion references and a junior high school sensibility:

Over lunch near the White House on Friday, Risen, dressed in his Men’s Wearhouse shirt and khakis and his brown Ecco walking shoes, talked about having the sword of Damocles over his head, as the reluctant star of a searing media-government showdown that could end with him behind bars.

(See what I mean about the fashion bullsh%$?)

Risen said he’s not afraid that F.B.I. agents will show up one day at the suburban Maryland home he shares with his wife, Penny. (His three sons are grown, and one is a reporter.) But he has exhausted all his legal challenges, including at the Supreme Court, against the Obama administration.

 “I was nervous for a long time, but they’ve been after me for six years so now I try to ignore it,” he said, musing that he’s already decided what he’ll take to prison: Civil War books and World War II histories.

 The Justice Department is trying to scuttle the reporters’ privilege — ignoring the chilling effect that is having on truth emerging in a jittery post-9/11 world prone to egregious government excesses.

 Attorney General Eric Holder wants to force Risen to testify and reveal the identity of his confidential source on a story he had in his 2006 book concerning a bungled C.I.A. operation during the Clinton administration in which agents might have inadvertently helped Iran develop its nuclear weapon program. The tale made the C.I.A. look silly, which may have been more of a sore point than a threat to national security.

But Bush officials, no doubt still smarting from Risen’s revelation of their illegal wiretapping, zeroed in on a disillusioned former C.I.A. agent named Jeffrey Sterling as the source of the Iran story.

 The subpoena forcing Risen’s testimony expired in 2009, and to the surprise of just about everybody, the constitutional law professor’s administration renewed it — kicking off its strange and awful aggression against reporters and whistle-blowers.

 Holder said in May that “no reporter who is doing his job is going to go to jail,” trying to show some leg and signal that his intention is benign, merely to put pressure on Sterling so that he will plead guilty before his trial.

I can think of no more contemptible reason to go after a reporter then to save a bit of effort by prosecutors.

This is the sort of crap that killed Aaron Swartz.

How can he use the Espionage Act to throw reporters and whistle-blowers in jail even as he defends the intelligence operatives who “tortured some folks,” and coddles his C.I.A. chief, John Brennan, who spied on the Senate and then lied to the senators he spied on about it?

 “It’s hypocritical,” Risen said. “A lot of people still think this is some kind of game or signal or spin. They don’t want to believe that Obama wants to crack down on the press and whistle-blowers. But he does. He’s the greatest enemy to press freedom in a generation.”

I tend to agree.

The Obama administration has been implacably hostile to reporting on the US state security apparatus, to a degree that would make Richard Nixon go, “What the f%$#?”

Our security apparatus runs Barack Obama, not the other way around.

And We are Back in the Iraq War

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I just heard the Obama press conference, and while I expected him to make an announcement about air dropping aid to the Yazidis who have been driven to the slopes of Mount Sinjar by ISUIS, he also put the camels under then tent and threatened, “limited air strikes,” and he dropped the “G-word” with regard to the behavior of ISIS/ISIL/IS/whatever they called today. (Genocide)

We were back in Iraq, and the distinction between Bush and Obama become even more blurred.

Of course, if we really want to preempt ISIS’ ability to make war, we need to disrupt their war making ability at the source, and bomb Riyadh.

I Think that Obama Just Called al-Maliki’s Bluff

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Kerry just announced that there will be no airstrikes without a national unity government in Iraq:

US Secretary of State John Kerry has ruled out airstrikes against the rapidly advancing Islamist State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) unless Baghdad forms a more inclusive government, upping the political pressure on Nouri al-Maliki to work with the Sunnis and Kurds, or step aside as prime minister.

“It would be a complete and total act of irresponsibility for the president to just order a few strikes,” Kerry told CBS News on Tuesday. “But there’s no government, there’s no backup, there’s no military – there’s nothing there that provides the capacity for success.”

“The president reserves the right to use force as he does anywhere in the world, if it is necessary,” Kerry said. “But he wants to do so … with knowledge that there’s a government in place that can actually follow through and guarantee that what the United States is working toward can actually be achieved.”

But Prime Minister al-Maliki, a Shiite, rejected calls on Wednesday for a national unity government with Sunnis and Kurds, saying such a step would amount to a coup. Maliki’s State of Law alliance won the most seats in parliamentary elections last April, but fell short of the majority needed to form a government without help from rival parties.

I’m not sure if this is good news, or bad news.

It’s clear that Nouri al-Maliki is the source of most of the problems in Iraq, but our meddling in Iraqi affairs implies that we are getting back in.

It looks like when Obama is desperately trying to get back into the war that he called “stupid” in 2003.

Who says that Irony is dead?

Barack Obama is Not a Member of the the Reality-Based Community

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The “reality-based” bon mot is, of course from Run Suskind’s description of the hubris and delusions of the Bush administration:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Well, it increasingly appears that Barack Obama comes from a very similar place:

Am I misjudging our time, or have we entered some accelerated cycle of American subversions, and then another cycle of coverups and disinformation that do not quite come off? In less than a year, the Obama administration has mounted four covert coup operations, all variants of the classic Cold War model, all costly of human life, all assuring us the contempt and animosity of many people for years to come.

In chronological order:

* The American-authorized coup in Egypt last July. In the disinformation universe, Washington watched at a distance. Since the coup, dead silence in the face of a blood bath, except for Secretary of State Kerry’s applause for the Egyptian army’s “restoration of democracy.”

• In the war to depose Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, the linchpin event is the chemical-weapons attack last Aug. 21. We are invited — required, actually — to believe Assad allowed U.N. inspectors in to determine responsibility for previous gas attacks and then launched another attack near Damascus while the inspectors were settled in their hotel rooms.

* The role of the U.S. and its European allies in financing, fomenting and steering the direction of the Ukraine coup requires little discussion at this point. Rather bizarrely in the face of all we have on record, the Obama people continue to insist Ukraine is nothing more than a case of Russian overreach. As order unravels in the eastern sections of the country, it is important to bear in mind the chronology of events — and from the beginning, not somewhere in the middle.

* In Venezuela, the foreign minister recently read aloud portions of intercepted cable traffic documenting American subterfuge. No, no, no: Nicolás Maduro, successor to the late Hugo Chávez, is just as paranoid as his mentor, and both were merely trying to distract Venezuelans from their economic problems. (Vigilance is always essential when Washington and the hacks marshal the “distraction” thesis.)

Cuba could go on this list, given news of Washington’s operation of a social-media network on Cuban soil via the customary collection of front companies, except that intruding covertly in Cuba is so routine as to be (appallingly) unremarkable.

And Seymour Hersh is all over how Barack Obama attempted to lie us into a Libya-type war:

In 2011 Barack Obama led an allied military intervention in Libya without consulting the US Congress. Last August, after the sarin attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, he was ready to launch an allied air strike, this time to punish the Syrian government for allegedly crossing the ‘red line’ he had set in 2012 on the use of chemical weapons. Then with less than two days to go before the planned strike, he announced that he would seek congressional approval for the intervention. The strike was postponed as Congress prepared for hearings, and subsequently cancelled when Obama accepted Assad’s offer to relinquish his chemical arsenal in a deal brokered by Russia. Why did Obama delay and then relent on Syria when he was not shy about rushing into Libya? The answer lies in a clash between those in the administration who were committed to enforcing the red line, and military leaders who thought that going to war was both unjustified and potentially disastrous.

Obama’s change of mind had its origins at Porton Down, the defence laboratory in Wiltshire. British intelligence had obtained a sample of the sarin used in the 21 August attack and analysis demonstrated that the gas used didn’t match the batches known to exist in the Syrian army’s chemical weapons arsenal. The message that the case against Syria wouldn’t hold up was quickly relayed to the US joint chiefs of staff. The British report heightened doubts inside the Pentagon; the joint chiefs were already preparing to warn Obama that his plans for a far-reaching bomb and missile attack on Syria’s infrastructure could lead to a wider war in the Middle East. As a consequence the American officers delivered a last-minute caution to the president, which, in their view, eventually led to his cancelling the attack.

For months there had been acute concern among senior military leaders and the intelligence community about the role in the war of Syria’s neighbours, especially Turkey. Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan was known to be supporting the al-Nusra Front, a jihadist faction among the rebel opposition, as well as other Islamist rebel groups. ‘We knew there were some in the Turkish government,’ a former senior US intelligence official, who has access to current intelligence, told me, ‘who believed they could get Assad’s nuts in a vice by dabbling with a sarin attack inside Syria – and forcing Obama to make good on his red line threat.’

………

A series of chemical weapon attacks in March and April 2013 was investigated over the next few months by a special UN mission to Syria. A person with close knowledge of the UN’s activity in Syria told me that there was evidence linking the Syrian opposition to the first gas attack, on 19 March in Khan Al-Assal, a village near Aleppo. In its final report in December, the mission said that at least 19 civilians and one Syrian soldier were among the fatalities, along with scores of injured. It had no mandate to assign responsibility for the attack, but the person with knowledge of the UN’s activities said: ‘Investigators interviewed the people who were there, including the doctors who treated the victims. It was clear that the rebels used the gas. It did not come out in public because no one wanted to know.’

In the months before the attacks began, a former senior Defense Department official told me, the DIA was circulating a daily classified report known as SYRUP on all intelligence related to the Syrian conflict, including material on chemical weapons. But in the spring, distribution of the part of the report concerning chemical weapons was severely curtailed on the orders of Denis McDonough, the White House chief of staff. ‘Something was in there that triggered a shit fit by McDonough,’ the former Defense Department official said. ‘One day it was a huge deal, and then, after the March and April sarin attacks’ – he snapped his fingers – ‘it’s no longer there.’ The decision to restrict distribution was made as the joint chiefs ordered intensive contingency planning for a possible ground invasion of Syria whose primary objective would be the elimination of chemical weapons.

………

In the aftermath of the 21 August attack Obama ordered the Pentagon to draw up targets for bombing. Early in the process, the former intelligence official said, ‘the White House rejected 35 target sets provided by the joint chiefs of staff as being insufficiently “painful” to the Assad regime.’ The original targets included only military sites and nothing by way of civilian infrastructure. Under White House pressure, the US attack plan evolved into ‘a monster strike’: two wings of B-52 bombers were shifted to airbases close to Syria, and navy submarines and ships equipped with Tomahawk missiles were deployed. ‘Every day the target list was getting longer,’ the former intelligence official told me. ‘The Pentagon planners said we can’t use only Tomahawks to strike at Syria’s missile sites because their warheads are buried too far below ground, so the two B-52 air wings with two-thousand pound bombs were assigned to the mission. Then we’ll need standby search-and-rescue teams to recover downed pilots and drones for target selection. It became huge.’ The new target list was meant to ‘completely eradicate any military capabilities Assad had’, the former intelligence official said. The core targets included electric power grids, oil and gas depots, all known logistic and weapons depots, all known command and control facilities, and all known military and intelligence buildings.

(emphasis mine)

Once again, what was sold as a strike for a specific purpose is actually being run as a flat out attempt at regime change.

I am not arguing that Barack Obama is simply George W. Bush with a prettier (and smarter) wife. (At least not today)

Rather, I am suggesting that, notwithstanding protestations of “Hope” and “Change”, Barack Obama is a creature of the political and bureaucratic institutions in Washington, and he lacks the inclination, and perhaps the power to challenge them.

This is far more worrying, because it means that it is not the elected officials, who periodically must submit themselves to the will of the voters, but rather the internal bureaucracies of our foreign policy/war making apparatus who are approaching our interests from a viewpoint detached from reality.

This makes our foreign policy missteps over the past decade or so an artifact of an ineluctably dysfunctional culture.

When one looks at history, this is a place occupied by empires just before their death throes.

This will not be pretty.