Category: Hypocrisy

The New York Times Calls Out Erdogan on ISIS

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Not only do they criticize his inaction, the editorial board specifically calls out Turkey’s actions to support Jihadists and Islamic extremists which eventually led to the formation of ISIS:

This is an indictment of Mr. Erdogan and his cynical political calculations. By keeping his forces on the sidelines and refusing to help in other ways — like allowing Kurdish fighters to pass through Turkey — he seeks not only to weaken the Kurds, but also, in a test of will with President Obama, to force the United States to help him oust President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, whom he detests.

 ………

 But all sides — the Americans, Mr. Erdogan and the Kurds — agree that ground forces are necessary to capitalize on the air power. No dice, says Mr. Erdogan, unless the United States provides more support to rebels trying to overthrow Mr. Assad and creates a no-fly zone to deter the Syrian Air Force as well as a buffer zone along the Turkish border to shelter thousands of Syrian refugees who have fled the fighting.

 ………

 Mr. Erdogan’s behavior is hardly worthy of a NATO ally. He was so eager to oust Mr. Assad that he enabled ISIS and other militants by allowing fighters, weapons and revenues to flow through Turkey. If Mr. Erdogan refuses to defend Kobani and seriously join the fight against the Islamic State, he will further enable a savage terrorist group and ensure a poisonous long-term instability on his border.

(emphasis mine)

This is not the sort of truth telling that I expect from the “Paper of Record,” and I hope that they extend it to the House of Saud (specifically Prince Bandar, who was aggressively supporting ISIS until they were well into invading Iraq).

That won’t happen though.

As an aside, Erdogan actions in the matter have set back Turkey’s bid to join the EU by many years, because the Europeans already looked at intervening in Syria, and wanted no part of the Erdogan and the Gulf princes’ efforts to replace yet another secular Arab regime with a Sunni government.

Not not even the French, who still think of Syria as a colony in some ways, were unwilling to go on that adventure.

Given that there is no meaningful opposition to Erdogan and his AKP party for the foreseeable future, I’m pretty sure that any number of EU functionaries, as well as many governments, are now feeling a sense of relief that they have been slow walking Turkey’s application.

They Don’t Want the Truth to Come Out, That’s Why

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More Escalation, and More Turkish Machinations

Turkey has the 2nd biggest army in NATO, and much of it is stationed a few miles from ISIS, but, much to the disappointment of the Obama administration they are refusing to take any actions at all:

As fighters with the Islamic State bore down Tuesday on the Syrian town of Kobani on the Turkish border, President Obama’s plan to fight the militant group without being drawn deeper into the Syrian civil war was coming under acute strain.

 While Turkish troops watched the fighting in Kobani through a chicken-wire fence, Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said that the town was about to fall and Kurdish fighters warned of an impending blood bath if they were not reinforced — fears the United States shares.

 But Mr. Erdogan said Tuesday that Turkey would not get more deeply involved in the conflict with the Islamic State unless the United States agreed to give greater support to rebels trying to unseat the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad. That has deepened tensions with President Obama, who would like Turkey to take stronger action against the Islamic State and to leave the fight against Mr. Assad out of it.

It gets better.

While refusing to take any action, Istanbul is demanding that the US put boots on the ground (see vid).

It’s pretty clear that Erdogan has been aggressively supporting the rebels in Syria, including some of the most extreme Jihadis.  (The so-called moderates could not fight their way out of a wet paper bag)

Turkey is reticent about taking action for a number of reasons:

  • They want the Kurds in Iraq and Syria to be neutralized as a military force that might ally with their own Kurds.
  • Erdogan is obsessed with replacing the secular regime in Syria with a Sunni one.
  • The Turks fear that if they go in on any operations against ISIS, their complicity in its formation will be revealed. 

I think that the last point is most of their concern wight now.

It’s why they went ape sh%$ over Biden’s comments regarding the Turkish role in the Syrian civil war.

Before ISIS was ISIS, Turkey and the House of Saud were the biggest backers of al Qaeda linked militants in Syria, and now that their little monster has become a potential threat, they are looking for plausible deniability.

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.

Joe Biden Speaks the Truth

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So of course, he had to apologize for it:

A diplomatic rift between Turkey and the United States was patched over late Saturday after the American vice president, Joseph R. Biden Jr., officially apologized to Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for remarks suggesting that Turkey helped facilitate the rise of the Islamic State terrorist group.

In remarks at Harvard University on Thursday, Mr. Biden said Mr. Erdogan had admitted erring in allowing foreign fighters to cross Turkey’s border into Syria, eventually leading to the formation of the group, also known as ISIS and ISIL.

Mr. Biden’s spokeswoman, Kendra Barkoff, said in an emailed statement that the two leaders spoke by phone on Saturday. “The vice president apologized for any implication that Turkey or other allies and partners in the region had intentionally supplied or facilitated the growth of ISIL or other violent extremists in Syria,” Ms. Barkoff said. “The United States greatly values the commitments and sacrifices made by our allies and partners from around the world to combat the scourge of ISIL, including Turkey.”

………

Mr. Erdogan, despite widespread evidence to the contrary, denied that Turkey’s long, porous border had enabled thousands of militants to cross onto the Syrian and Iraqi battlefields since the Syrian civil war began in 2011. “Foreign fighters never crossed into Syria from our country,” Mr. Erdogan said. “They would cross into Syria from Turkey on tourist passports, but nobody can claim that they have crossed with arms.”

Seriously? How f%$#ing stupid do we think we are?

BTW, this is what Biden said:

Speaking at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Mr. Biden said allies including Turkey, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates had extended unconditional financial and logistical support to Sunni fighters trying to oust the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad.

“President Erdogan told me,” he said, according to the Turkish newspaper Hurriyet, “ ‘You were right. We let too many people through. Now we are trying to seal the border.’

“Our allies poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against al-Assad,” he said, including jihadists planning to join the Nusra Front and Al Qaeda.

I think that the appropriate response to Erdogan’s hissy fit is to tell him to go pound sand, which is why I would make a lousy diplomat.

He, and rest of the Sunni hegemonists were hip deep in supporting Al Qaedal linked militants, and Saudi Arabia directly supported what would become ISIS in their bid to overthrow the Assad regime.

The fact that this is not a part of the dialog about the US intervention in Iraq and Syria is a sign of just how completely the House of Saud owns our foreign policy apparatus.

Your Daily Schadenfreude

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The draconian voting restrictions in Arkansas have resulted in the Republican Attorney General being dropped from the voter roles:

UC Irvine law professor Rick Hasen says this development, which he describes as coming from the “Irony Dept”, is just “too delicious”.

Leslie Rutledge, the Republican candidate for Attorney General in Arkansas, has been discovered to have been registered to vote in multiple states in addition to Arkansas, and even voted by absentee ballot in Arkansas’ general election in November of 2008 — after she had registered to vote in Washington D.C. [PDF] in July of the same year.

According to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Rutledge has now been removed from Arkansas’ voting rolls by the Pulaski County Clerk, after he confirmed that she was registered to vote in D.C., and possibly Virginia. The removal from the rolls may also lead to her ineligibility to be elected to office.

“For the AG candidate of the party who likes to scream about voter fraud to be registered in two (or three) places at once is ironic and amusing on its own,” writes Matt Campbell of Arkansas’ “Blue Hog Report”, which was on this story from the jump.

“However, the bigger implication is Article 19, section 3, of the Arkansas Constitution,” he adds, which states: “No persons shall be elected to, or appointed to fill a vacancy in, any office who does not possess the qualifications of an elector.” If Rutledge is not registered in Arkansas, she no longer “possess[es] the qualifications of an elector.”

I don’t expect her to be prevented from voting, nor do I expect her to be dropped from the ballot, because, after all, “Silly rabbit, voter suppression is for Democratic voters.”

I am sure that the courts will rule that way.

Still, I will enjoy a few minutes of pleasure at Ms. Rutledge’s discomfiture.

I Guess that the word “Khorasan” is Arabic for “Gulf of Tonkin”

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Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain make a rather compelling case for The Khorasan Group being a construct of the Obama Administration to provide a legal fig leaf for dropping bombs on Syria:

As the Obama administration prepared to bomb Syria without Congressional or U.N. authorization, it faced two problems. The first was the difficulty of sustaining public support for a new years-long war against ISIS, a group that clearly posed no imminent threat to the “homeland.” A second was the lack of legal justification for launching a new bombing campaign with no viable claim of self-defense or U.N. approval.

 The solution to both problems was found in the wholesale concoction of a brand new terror threat that was branded “The Khorasan Group.” After spending weeks depicting ISIS as an unprecedented threat – too radical even for Al Qaeda! – administration officials suddenly began spoon-feeding their favorite media organizations and national security journalists tales of a secret group that was even scarier and more threatening than ISIS, one that posed a direct and immediate threat to the American Homeland. Seemingly out of nowhere, a new terror group was created in media lore.

 ………

 AP warned Americans that “the fear is that the Khorasan militants will provide these sophisticated explosives to their Western recruits who could sneak them onto U.S.-bound flights.” It explained that although ISIS has received most of the attention, the Khorasan Group “is considered the more immediate threat.”
………

 The genesis of the name was itself scary: “Khorasan refers to a province under the Islamic caliphate, or religious empire, of old that included parts of Afghanistan.” AP depicted the U.S. officials who were feeding them the narrative as engaging in some sort of act of brave, unauthorized truth-telling: “many U.S. officials interviewed for this story would not be quoted by name talking about what they said was highly classified intelligence.”

 ………

 Orr then announced that while ISIS is “dominating headlines and terrorist propaganda,” Orr’s “sources” warn of “a more immediate threat to the U.S. Homeland.” As Orr spoke, CBS flashed alternating video showing scary Muslims in Syria and innocent westerners waiting in line at airports, as he intoned that U.S. officials have ordered “enhanced screening” for “hidden explosives.” This is all coming, Orr explained, from ”an emerging threat in Syria” where “hardened terrorists” are building “hard to detect bombs.”
………

 On September 25, the New York Times – just days after hyping the Khorasan threat to the homeland – wrote that “the group’s evolution from obscurity to infamy has been sudden.” And the Paper of Record began, for the first time, to note how little evidence actually existed for all those claims about the imminent threats posed to the homeland:

American officials have given differing accounts about just how close the group was to mounting an attack, and about what chance any plot had of success. One senior American official on Wednesday described the Khorasan plotting as “aspirational” and said that there did not yet seem to be a concrete plan in the works.

Literally within a matter of days, we went from “perhaps in its final stages of planning its attack” (CNN) to “plotting as ‘aspirational’” and “there did not yet seem to be a concrete plan in the works” (NYT).

(emphasis mine)

What’s more, the folks at The Intercept also noted that no one ever heard of the group before it was a justification for the airstrikes:

Even more remarkable, it turns out the very existence of an actual “Khorasan Group” was to some degree an invention of the American government. NBC’s Engel, the day after he reported on the U.S. Government’s claims about the group for Nightly News, seemed to have serious second thoughts about the group’s existence, tweeting:


Syrian activists telling us theyve never heard of Khorasan or its leader
— Richard Engel (@RichardEngel) September 24, 2014

Indeed, a NEXIS search for the group found almost no mentions of its name prior to the September 13 AP article based on anonymous officials. There was one oblique reference to it in a July 31 CNN op-ed by Peter Bergen. The other mention was an article in the LA Times from two weeks earlier about Pakistan which mentioned the group’s name as something quite different than how it’s being used now: as “the intelligence wing of the powerful Pakistani Taliban faction led by Hafiz Gul Bahadur.” Tim Shorrock noted that the name appears in a 2011 hacked Stratfor email published by WikiLeaks, referencing a Dawn article that depicts them as a Pakistan-based group which was fighting against and “expelled by” (not “led by”) Bahadur.

There are serious questions about whether the Khorasan Group even exists in any meaningful or identifiable manner. Aki Peritz, a CIA counterterrorism official until 2009, told Time: “I’d certainly never heard of this group while working at the agency,” while Obama’s former U.S. ambassador to Syria Robert Ford said: ”We used the term [Khorasan] inside the government, we don’t know where it came from….All I know is that they don’t call themselves that.” As the Intercept was finalizing this article, former terrorism federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy wrote in National Review that the group was a scam: “You haven’t heard of the Khorosan Group because there isn’t one. It is a name the administration came up with, calculating that Khorosan … had sufficient connection to jihadist lore that no one would call the president on it.”

What happened here is all-too-familiar. The Obama administration needed propagandistic and legal rationale for bombing yet another predominantly Muslim country. While emotions over the ISIS beheading videos were high, they were not enough to sustain a lengthy new war.

So after spending weeks promoting ISIS as Worse Than Al Qaeda™, they unveiled a new, never-before-heard-of group that was Worse Than ISIS™. Overnight, as the first bombs on Syria fell, the endlessly helpful U.S. media mindlessly circulated the script they were given: this new group was composed of “hardened terrorists,” posed an “imminent” threat to the U.S. homeland, was in the “final stages” of plots to take down U.S. civilian aircraft, and could “launch more-coordinated and larger attacks on the West in the style of the 9/11 attacks from 2001.””

As usual, anonymity was granted to U.S. officials to make these claims. As usual, there was almost no evidence for any of this. Nonetheless, American media outlets – eager, as always, to justify American wars – spewed all of this with very little skepticism. Worse, they did it by pretending that the U.S. Government was trying not to talk about all of this – too secret! – but they, as intrepid, digging journalists, managed to unearth it from their courageous “sources.” Once the damage was done, the evidence quickly emerged about what a sham this all was. But, as always with these government/media propaganda campaigns, the truth emerged only when it’s impotent.

This sounds an awful lot like George W. Bush saying, “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

This is the product of the imperial consensus that emerged following the fall of the USSR, with a dash of venality and mendacity from the House of Saud.

I cannot help but think that we are close to seeing the end of the American imperium, and that it’s fall will be not be pretty.

Bullsh%$

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Eric holder is now saying that the DoJ will finally start prosecuting bankers:

The Justice Department has launched criminal fraud investigations of individuals at Wall Street firms, with the hopes of filing formal charges in the coming months, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said Wednesday.

“We are making good progress in these cases, which involve conduct that has undermined the integrity of our markets,” Holder said at New York University Law School.

The nation’s top prosecutor did not go into detail about the inquiries, but people familiar with the cases say the probes involve the possible manipulation of the $5.3 trillion global foreign-exchange markets.

At least seven banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Barclays, disclosed in regulatory filings last year that “various government authorities” had requested information about their trading activities. Bank employees have turned over information to U.S. authorities about the trading scheme, according to people who were not authorized to speak publicly about the ongoing investigations.

If any person is criminally prosecuted, it will be the little fish, and any settlement will be small enough to be dismissed as a cost of doing business, and any admission will be minor enough that no bank will lose their dollar clearing privileges.

This is theater.

Lucy will pull away the football, again.

If Eric “Place” Holder or Barack Obama were interested in prosecuting law breakers on Wall Street, they would already have done it.

There is no interest in this administration in prosecuting the general criminality that is the US financial industry.

H/t CT at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

Charlie Pierce Makes Chuck Norris his Bitch

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It appears that Mr. Norris, aficionado of martial arts, coarse acting, and promulgating historical myths, accuses President Jimmy Carter of appeasing the Ayatollahs in Iran.

Charlie pierce is having none of it:

You know what appeasing the ayatollahs looks like?

 Promising them if they hold the hostages, they’ll get a better deal from another president. Unfreezing the assets almost as soon as you take the oath. Secretly selling them advanced weaponry because you had use for the profits of this illegal arms sale to fund an illegal war.

 That’s what appeasement looks like.

 And that wasn’t Carter.

 That was the next guy.

That is an epic take-down.

Needless to say, I am adding Mr. Pierce to the serene order of People I Do Not Want to Piss Off.

Lamest Man in Massachusetts New Hampshire

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Scott Brown, of course, who, after losing to Elizabeth Warren, went to work for a law and lobbying firm, got his tits in a bundle with Lawrence Lessig who put out a flyer that criticized Brown as a lobbyist.

The Scott Brown campaign sent a cease and desist letter to Lessig’s campaign finance reform PAC:

Former Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown has attempted to revive his political career by running for Senate in New Hampshire. But in the final days before his September 9 primary, he’s squaring off against another opponent — Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig, who advocates against money in politics. Lessig’s Mayday PAC endorsed Brown’s GOP primary challenger Jim Rubens, and is now sending out a mailer calling Brown a “Washington lobbyist.”

The mailer led to an angry response from the Brown campaign. “This is a flat-out lie. Scott Brown is not nor has he ever been a lobbyist. Ever,” campaign manager Colin Reed wrote, calling on Lessig to “immediately cease and desist with the mailer in question.”

In response, Lessig posted the letter on his blog, and linked to an article from The Hill about Brown joining the Boston office of “Nixon Peabody, a law and lobby firm.” The firm itself said Brown would work on “business and governmental affairs,” including those related to “the financial services industry.” Lessig writes:

Yes, according to the Senate, Scott Brown isn’t a “lobbyist.” But I submit to anyone else in the world, a former Senator joining a “law and lobbying firm” to help with Wall St’s “business and governmental affairs” is to make him a lobbyist. Because to anyone else in the world, when you sell your influence to affect “business and governmental affairs,” you are a lobbyist.

You would think that a man who is a lawyer who has spent much of his life as a public figure would understand just what it means to be a public figure after New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, which required actual malice or a reckless disregard for the truth for libel and defamation suits.

Of course, in the process of making this demand, the hapless former Cosmo centerfold has served to generate publicity for the flyer.

See, “Streisand Effect, The”.  (Heh)

Yet Another Reason to Hate Andrew Cuomo

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It turns out that the Republican coup in the New York State Senatewas sided by hizzoner the Governor:

Andrew Cuomo has always been careful to maintain a plausible-looking deniability when it comes to his role in keeping his own party out of power in the State Senate.

Whenever he’s been asked about his involvement in the creation of the controlling Republican-Independent Democratic coalition, Cuomo has shrugged and suggested that it’s not the governor’s place to get involved in that sort of thing.

“This is an internal legislative matter,” he has said.

It’s on this basis that Cuomo has been able to put distance between himself and the coalition at opportune times—such as, say, when the Working Families Party threatened to endorse someone else for governor earlier this year. And it’s this distance that has allowed him (presumably) to keep a straight face as his running mate, Kathy Hochul, attempts to bolster her own Democratic credentials ahead of the Sept. 9 primary by complaining that the Senate coalition didn’t achieve enough for progressives.

But now, multiple sources with deep knowledge of the IDC and Republican conferences’ dealings confirm that in fact the governor was not a passive observer during the formation of the coalition. He was “deeply involved,” they say, and “absolutely” encouraged the marriage that allowed the Republicans to remain in leadership even after the election of a Democratic majority. Furthermore, they say, the governor was a key player after the coalition launched, privately offering advice about tactics and messaging.

………

But while the governor did not originate the idea of an actual coalition, sources say he and his staff were active in “nudging” it along behind the scenes.

The governor’s interest, say knowledgeable sources, was ensuring that Republicans had control over the agenda in the Senate, so that he wouldn’t be handing over power to New York City Democrats.

“The governor and [top aide] Larry [Schwartz] made it very clear they wanted the IDC to work with the Republicans to run the Senate,” one source explained.

Another recalled that there were “many, many conversations” between Schwartz, Cuomo and Republican leaders. The governor frequently expressed frustration with Democratic Senate leaders, and complained that he couldn’t work with them.

Before the coalition was announced, Cuomo privately made the IDC feel more comfortable working with Republicans and assured them they “wouldn’t get crucified,” or be “left out to dry” if they made the move.

This is not a surprise.

Cuomo was implicitly supportive of the renegade Democrats in the state senate, and now we see evidence of direct collusion.

He so deserves to lose his primary race.

Governor Ultrasound is Completely Fornicated

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After just 17 hours deliberation, despite having an epic set of instructions from the judge, the jury found former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell  and his wife Maureen of every major charge:

A federal jury on Thursday found former Virginia governor Robert F. McDonnell and his wife, Maureen, guilty of public corruption — sending an emphatic message that they believed the couple sold the office once occupied by Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson to a free-spending Richmond businessman for golf outings, lavish vacations and $120,000 in sweetheart loans.

After three days of deliberations, the seven men and five women who heard weeks of gripping testimony about the ­McDonnells’ alleged misdeeds unanimously found that the couple conspired to lend the prestige of the governor’s office to Jonnie R. Williams Sr. in a nefarious exchange for his largesse.

The verdict means that Robert McDonnell, the first governor in Virginia history to be charged with a crime, now holds an even more unwanted distinction — the first to be convicted of one.

He and his wife face decades in federal prison, although their actual sentences are likely to fall well short of that. U.S. District Judge James R. Spencer set a sentencing hearing for Jan. 6.

The former governor, a onetime Republican rising star considered for the 2012 vice-presidential nomination, was convicted of all 11 corruption-related counts brought against him. In a small victory, he was acquitted of lying on loan documents.

………

It was a stunning outcome for the couple, all the more so because in December, McDonnell declined to accept a plea agreement in which he would have been found guilty of just one felony count of lying on a loan document, according to people familiar with the case. Maureen McDonnell would have faced no charges.

He was unbelievably guilty, and he somehow figured that he would get out of it, so he now faces many more years in jail, and he sold the mother of his  children down the river.

I’m not surprised. 

He thought that he was on the proverbial “Mission from God” only, unlike the Blues Brothers movie, he wasn’t joking.

It’s the same cycle as one sees in ancient Greek tragedies: Koros to Hubris to Ate to Nemesis.  (Success to arrogance to madness to comeuppance)

This is Rich

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King Abdullah, the ruler of Saudi Arabia, is warning that ISIS/ISIL/IS will go after the west nest, so they should engage in aggressive military action:

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has warned that the West will be the next target of the jihadists sweeping through Syria and Iraq, unless there is “rapid” action.

“If we ignore them, I am sure they will reach Europe in a month and America in another month,” he said in remarks quoted on Saturday by Asharq al-Awsat daily and Saudi-backed Al-Arabiya television station.

“Terrorism knows no border and its danger could affect several countries outside the Middle East,” said the king who was speaking at a welcoming ceremony on Friday for new ambassadors, including a new envoy from Saudi ally the United States.

While I am sure that some of the members of ISIS might eventually turn their attentions to the west, but they will be turning their eyes to toward Mecca, Medina, and Riyadh.

They are looking at establishing a Caliphate, and driving out apostasy and corruption as their first order of business, and the House of Saud is a good place to start.

Considering the fact that, until recently, the House of Saud was ISIS’s most important patron, I’m thinking that taking the Saudi’s advice is not in our best interest.

The US State Security Apparatus has Dropped Even the Pretense of Cooperating with the Senate Intelligence Committee on Their Torture Report

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Because they have put a defense attorney who represented some of the CIA torturers in charge of making the CIA’s redactions in the torture report:

The background of a key negotiator in the battle over a Senate report on the CIA’s use of interrogation techniques widely denounced as torture has sparked concerns about the Obama administration’s objectivity in handling the study’s public release.

Robert Litt, the general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, is a former defense lawyer who represented several CIA officials in matters relating to the agency’s detention and interrogation program. Now he’s in a key position to determine what parts of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s 6,300-page report will be made public.

Litt’s involvement doesn’t appear to be an ethics issue, at least by the legal definition. But experts say that while it may be acceptable on paper, his involvement in the review should have been a red flag.

Seeing as how Obama has seriously drunk the CIA’s Koolaid, the only way that the torture report will see the light of day in any meaningful way is if the Senate votes to declassify it on their own, which they are authorized to do by statute.

New York Times Declines to Endorse Andrew Cuomo

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I still think that Zephyr Teachout and Tim Wu are unbelievably long shots, and that the putative Republican nominee is pretty much the only in ‘Phant in New York willing to be that embarrassed in a state wide campaign, but the fact that the New York Times has refused to endorse him for reelection is a pretty big deal:

More than four years ago, while announcing his campaign for governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo stood in front of the Tweed Courthouse in downtown Manhattan and said Albany’s antics “could make Boss Tweed blush.”

 New York had had enough corruption, he said, and he was going to put a stop to it. “Job 1 is going to be to clean up Albany,” he said, “and make the government work for the people.”

 Mr. Cuomo became governor on that platform and recorded several impressive achievements, but he failed to perform Job 1. The state government remains as subservient to big money as ever, and Mr. Cuomo resisted and even shut down opportunities to fix it. Because he broke his most important promise, we have decided not to make an endorsement for the Democratic primary on Sept. 9.

 His opponent in the primary is Zephyr Teachout, a professor at Fordham Law School who is a national expert on political corruption and an advocate of precisely the kind of transparency and political reform that Albany needs. Her description of Mr. Cuomo as part of a broken system “where public servants just end up serving the wealthy” is exactly on point, but we decline to endorse her because she has not shown the breadth of interests and experience needed to govern a big and diverse state.

 Why endorse no candidate in a major state primary? Here’s how we see it: Realistically, Governor Cuomo is likely to win the primary, thanks to vastly greater resources and name recognition. And he’ll probably win a second term in November against a conservative Republican opponent. In part, that’s because issues like campaign finance rarely have been a strong motivator for most voters. Nonetheless, those who want to register their disappointment with Mr. Cuomo’s record on changing the culture of Albany may well decide that the best way to do that is to vote for Ms. Teachout. Despite our reservations about her, that impulse could send a powerful message to the governor and the many other entrenched incumbents in Albany that a shake-up is overdue.

So basically, the Times is disgusted by Andrew Cuomo, and they wanted to endorse Ms. Teachout, but she’s too much of a long shot for them.

The primary is in 2 weeks, September 9, and I am with Ryan Cooper when he says, “It’s time for Democrats and progressives to get rid of this toad.”

The bottom line is that Andrew Cuomo is the worst kind of backstabbing, triangulating “centrist” in the wretched No Labels mold. Better for liberals to beat now, or at least make his victory as unimpressive as possible, before we have to beat him in a presidential primary down the line.

Needless to say, the Zephyr/Wu ticket is on my Act Blue Page. 

The Twinkie Defense, The Chewbacca Defense, and now the Bitches be Crazy Defense

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Dan White got away with murdering George Moscone and Harvey Milk through the Twinkie Defense, Chef got put sentenced to jail, and sprung from jail with the Chewbacca defense, and in the Bob McDonnell bribery case, the defense has become even more ludicrous with the “Bitches be Crazy” defense.

That’s right, the former governor of Virginia’s defense team has become even more absurd than the minds of Tray Parker and Matt Stone.

His defense is that he didn’t take any bribes, it was all his wife, a technically private citizen is unbalanced, and had a crush on the man who bribed the governor, and that he had nothing to do with it. I guess the loan of a Ferrari, and the golf outing worth something in excess of $10,000.00, and thousands of dollars of loans from tobacco based “medicine” mogul Jonnie Williams, were just ……… “stuff”

As Eugene Robinson notes, the technical term for this is “throwing his his wife under the bus.”

How far would you go to stay out of jail? Would you publicly humiliate your wife of 38 years, portraying her as some kind of shrieking harridan? Would you put the innermost secrets of your marriage on display, inviting voyeurs to rummage at will?

 For Robert McDonnell, the former Virginia governor on trial for alleged corruption, the answers appear to be: “As far as necessary,” “Hey, why not?” and “Sounds like a plan.”

 McDonnell’s testimony this week in a federal courtroom in Richmond about his wife’s psychological turmoil has been both cringe-worthy and compelling. It has been clear for some time that McDonnell’s strategy for winning acquittal amounted to what could be called the “crazy wife” defense. But only when he took the stand did it become apparent how thoroughly he intended to humiliate the “soul mate” he still claims to love.

 McDonnell disclosed Thursday that he moved out of the family’s home shortly before the trial began. “I knew there was no way I could go home after a day in court and have to rehash the day’s events with my wife,” he testified.

 I guess not. Anyone who said such things in public about his or her spouse would be advised to clear out.

 McDonnell testified that Maureen McDonnell was so volatile that the entire staff at the governor’s mansion signed a petition threatening to quit if her behavior didn’t improve. “She would yell at me,” he told the court. “She would tell me I was taking staff’s side, that I didn’t know what was really going on over there.”

 He said he believed his wife needed professional counseling, though it was unclear whether he tried very hard to convince her to seek it. He spoke of the family’s severe financial problems, which included large credit card bills, and said that “it just seemed like there was too much stuff that she was buying.” Prior testimony has indicated, however, that unwise real estate investments caused most of the problem — and that Robert McDonnell, not Maureen, ran the family finances.

There are also tens of thousands of dollars of loans from the snake oil salesman, but hizonner the governor thought that nothing war wrong with that:

Testifying for the third day in his public corruption trial, former Gov. Bob McDonnell said today he saw nothing inappropriate about $70,000 in loans he negotiated with businessman Jonnie Williams in 2012.

The loans were extended by the diet supplement maker to a real estate company the governor operated with his sister to manage rental properties they owned in the Sandbridge area of Virginia Beach. Rents on the properties were falling short of covering expenses, and the McDonnells needed to make up the deficit.

 McDonnell said he saw nothing wrong with the loans because Williams hadn’t asked him to do anything on his behalf and his administration hadn’t done the businessman any favors.

 Williams testified earlier that he and the governor agreed the loans would be granted on a handshake and kept just between the two of them.

 McDonnell today denied that claim. “There was no such discussion with Mr. Williams,” he said.

 He said he tried to get the terms of the loans in writing, but that never occurred.

 He said he did not disclose the Williams loans on his annual financial disclosure statement because they were corporate loans for which he had no personal liability.

Yeah. Nothing shady here.

Seriously, I half expect the jury to take a page from the original version of the Mel Brooks film The Producers, and announce that, “We find the defendants incredibly guilty.”

Dude, you are going to jail.  The decision that you made is to go without a shred of dignity.

New York Times Calls out Cuomo on Campaign Challenges

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The Editorial Board are unamused by the Cuomo campaign’s efforts to keep Zephyr Teachout off the ballot:

New York State voters rarely have enough real choice on their ballots, and Gov. Andrew Cuomo seems determined to keep it that way. Ever since another Democratic candidate for governor, Zephyr Teachout, arose on his left, Mr. Cuomo has tried to throw her off the primary ballot on the shaky grounds that she hasn’t met the state’s five-year residency requirement.

On Monday, a Brooklyn judge tossed that argument out of court, ruling that Ms. Teachout is perfectly qualified to be on the Democratic primary ballot on Sept. 9. But Mr. Cuomo, true to form, won’t back down. His aides immediately promised an appeal of the ruling. That is political bullying, and the governor should back off and engage with Ms. Teachout as a serious candidate. Doing otherwise suggests he is more nervous about winning a second term than he would like to appear.

………

Although Mr. Cuomo is leagues ahead in the polls and has a $32.5 million bankroll, he should not dismiss Ms. Teachout and her growing number of followers as irritants. Her criticisms are mostly legitimate, and he should defend his first term in a series of robust debates with her in the weeks before the primary, rather than through the timidity of litigation.

Before the ruling from Judge Edgar Walker of the State Supreme Court, the governor’s campaign lawyers tried briefly to challenge Ms. Teachout’s nominating petitions, which required 15,000 voters to support placing her name on the ballot. After she turned in 45,000 names, they turned to the state’s absurdly rigid residency requirements to challenge her. (State law requires that candidates for governor be a legal resident of New York for five years before the election. By comparison, candidates for the United States Senate only have to be residents on Election Day.)

I still don’t think that she has the proverbial snowball’s chance in hell, but the fact that that the Times editorial board is calling out Cuomo’s politico cowardice is amusing.

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.

Why I Don’t Give to NPR on Pledge Week, Part Infinity

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The first reason is their Jihad against community owned low power radio stations, and now they quote a consulting firm that is bought and paid for by the CIA to condemn Snowden’s NSA Leaks:

On August 1, NPR’s Morning Edition broadcast a story by NPR national security reporter Dina Temple-Raston touting explosive claims from what she called “a tech firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.” That firm, Recorded Future, worked together with “a cyber expert, Mario Vuksan, the CEO of ReversingLabs,” to produce a new report that purported to vindicate the repeated accusation from U.S. officials that “revelations from former NSA contract worker Edward Snowden harmed national security and allowed terrorists to develop their own countermeasures.”

The “big data firm,” reported NPR, says that it now “has tangible evidence” proving the government’s accusations. Temple-Raston’s four-minute, 12-second story devoted the first 3 minutes and 20 seconds to uncritically repeating the report’s key conclusion that ”just months after the Snowden documents were released, al-Qaeda dramatically changed the way its operatives interacted online” and, post-Snowden, “al-Qaeda didn’t just tinker at the edges of its seven-year-old encryption software; it overhauled it.” The only skepticism in the NPR report was relegated to 44 seconds at the end when she quoted security expert Bruce Schneier, who questioned the causal relationship between the Snowden disclosures and the new terrorist encryption programs, as well as the efficacy of the new encryption.

With this report, Temple-Raston seriously misled NPR’s millions of listeners. To begin with, Recorded Future, the outfit that produced the government-affirming report, is anything but independent. To the contrary, it is funded by the CIA and U.S. intelligence community with millions of dollars. Back in 2010, it also filed forms to become a vendor for the NSA. (In response to questions from The Intercept, the company’s vice president Jason Hines refused to say whether it works for the NSA, telling us that we should go FOIA that information if we want to know. But according to public reports, Recorded Future “earns most of its revenue from selling to Wall Street quants and intelligence agencies.”)

The connection between Recorded Future and the U.S. intelligence community is long known. Back in July, 2010, Wired‘s Noah Shachtman revealed that the company is backed by both “the investment arms of the CIA and Google.”

Indeed, In-Q-Tel—the deep-pocket investment arm of both the CIA and other intelligence agencies (including the NSA)—has seats on Recorded Future’s board of directors and, on its website, lists Recorded Future as one of the companies in its “portfolio.” In stark contrast to NPR, The New York Times noted these connections when reporting on the firm in 2011: “Recorded Future is financed with $8 million from the likes of Google’s venture arm and In-Q-Tel, which makes investments to benefit the United States intelligence community, and its clients have included government agencies and banks.”

Worse, Temple-Raston knows all of this. Back in 2012, NPR’s Morning Edition broadcast her profile of Recorded Future and its claimed ability to predict the future by gathering internet data. At the end of her report, she noted that the firm has “at least two very important financial backers: the CIA’s investment arm, called In-Q-Tel, and Google Ventures. They have reportedly poured millions into the company.”

Also, she ignores the fact that the changes to encryption, as reported by the New York Times, have been an ongoing process for at least 7 years, predating the Snowden whistle-blowing.

Why would I want to pledge money for the care and feeding mindless hack journalists acting as stenographers for the American state security apparatus?