Trump: Illusion, Mist and Bought?

[Aianawa]

Spygate will = 8 more years, ta Obama.

Lol ok 4.

[Emil El Zapato]

I'm betting some one like this...Challenge for today? Who will be the 1st to get to the bottom of this story and provide corroboration, falsification, or context?

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/obama...b0860924770747

I started to dig in and ended up at some weird site and started hearing voices out of thin air...but I won't give up...

The story is from November of 2013...interesting.

[Aragorn]

I'm betting some one like this...Challenge for today? Who will be the 1st to get to the bottom of this story and provide corroboration, falsification, or context?

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/obama...b0860924770747

I started to dig in and ended up at some weird site and started hearing voices out of thin air...but I won't give up...

Abby Martin already reported that three or four years ago, when she still had her "Breaking The Set" show on RT. It's not exactly news.

[Emil El Zapato]

Is this the rest of the story?

When President Obama took office in 2009, he put in place an executive order designed to prevent the abuses that took place during the Bush administration, which used waterboarding, extended sleep deprivation, standing in painful “stress positions” on broken feet or legs, and the forced “rectal feeding” of detainees carrying out hunger strikes over their conditions.

The executive order barred any “officer, employee, or other agent” of the US government (whether military, CIA, FBI, or any other agency) from using any interrogation method that is not among those methods listed in US Army Field Manual, which contains detailed rules and guidelines for a wide range of procedures important to soldiers serving in the field. Since waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” favored by the Bush administration are not part of the Army Field Manual, they could no longer be used.

The problem is that those restrictions were part of an executive order, not an actual law passed by Congress, which means they could easily be overturned by the next president with an executive order of his own.

To prevent that from happening, the Obama administration worked with the Republican-controlled Congress in 2015 on legislation to make the rule about following the Army Field Manual part of actual US law. The legislation had strong bipartisan support, passing the Senate in an overwhelming vote of 91-3. It was meant to ensure that future presidents couldn’t change the rules without going through Congress — but it contained a major loophole.

Robert Chesney, professor and associate dean at the University of Texas School of Law, explains on the Lawfare blog that there’s nothing explicitly stopping the secretary of defense, who is appointed by the president, from changing what’s in the Army Field Manual. Indeed, the law actually requires the Defense Department to "complete a thorough review" of the field manual every three years.

This means that the new secretary of defense could potentially push the Army to alter the Field Manual to include things like waterboarding in its list of approved interrogation techniques, thereby making all the safeguards President Obama put in place essentially meaningless.

Now, to be clear, this doesn’t mean the US military or the CIA would actually be willing to use waterboarding, even if ordered to do so. Former top military brass and national security officials rejected Trump’s comments during the campaign about potentially ordering the military to torture people and kill the families of suspected terrorists. (Trump later backed away from the latter idea, which would be a war crime.)

Current senior officers have been careful not to comment about Trump specifically to avoid wading into US domestic politics. But they've made clear that they're just as opposed to waterboarding or targeting the families of terrorists.

Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford, while explicitly refraining from discussing Trump directly, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March that “Those kinds of activities that you described are inconsistent with the values of our nation.” Former CIA director Michael Hayden, who also led the National Security Agency from 1999 to 2005, told HBO’s Bill Maher in February that if Trump were to order such actions once in office, “the American armed forces would refuse to act.”

Current CIA director John Brennan, speaking at an event at the Brookings Institution think tank back in April, stated, “If a president were to order the agency to carry out waterboarding or something else, it’ll be up to the director of CIA and others within CIA to decide whether or not that direction and order is something that they can carry out in good conscience,” he said.

“As long as I’m director of CIA, irrespective of what the president says, I’m not going to be the director of CIA who gives that order. They’ll have to find another director,” he added.

Trump also said on the campaign trail that he would keep open the US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — one of the places where detainees tortured by the CIA were held — and “load it up with bad guys.” That's a stark reversal from the positions of both George W. Bush, who several times toward the end of his tenure said he’d like to see the prison closed, and Obama, who on his second day in office issued an executive order directing that the controversial prison be shut down within a year.

Obama's efforts have been stymied by fierce Congressional opposition, and the prison contained 60 detainees as of October 21, 2016, according to Human Rights First. The advocacy group says 56 of the detainees have been imprisoned there for more than 10 years. Their fate, as well as that of the prison itself, will soon be in the hands of President-elect Trump.

Drone strikes/targeted killing
Although the US “drone program” — that is, the covert CIA program involving the targeted killing of “suspected terrorists” by unmanned aerial vehicles often far outside of immediate war zones — began under President George W. Bush, it was dramatically expanded under President Obama.

According to the Obama administration’s official numbers, the US has killed 2,436 people in 473 counterterrorism strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya between January 2009 and the end of 2015. Of those, between 64 and 116 were “non-combatants” (that is, civilians).

The independent, nonprofit Bureau of Investigative Journalism puts the total number of people killed at roughly the same number, 2,753, but its estimate of how many of them were civilians six times higher than the Obama administration’s estimate.

Even more chilling from a constitutional perspective is that the Obama administration has — with little to no complaint from the American people or the other two branches of government — deliberately targeted and killed US citizens in drone strikes, without those individuals ever having been given their constitutional right to due process of law.

The Obama administration justifies this by arguing that “when an American has made the decision to affiliate himself with al-Qaeda and target fellow Americans, that there is a legal justification for us to try and stop them from carrying out plots.”

Though Obama acknowledges that US citizens are subject to due process under the Constitution, his attorney general, Eric Holder, has argued that “‘Due process’ and ‘judicial process’ are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security.” Apparently, the administration believes that its own internal processes for determining if a US citizen can be killed in a drone strike are sufficient enough to count as giving someone “due process.”

All of that is what President-elect Trump will inherit when he takes office.

But what, exactly, are people so worried that Trump will do with this power that Obama hasn’t already done?

The concern seems to stem from the perception — much of which seems to come from the Obama administration’s own efforts to push this narrative — of President Obama as a deeply moral man who engages in serious, conscientious deliberations on each individual case before deciding to target someone, and especially a US citizen, in a drone strike.

Indeed, the Obama administration, after years of refusing to disclose any information about the internal deliberation process involved in targeted killings, finally in August decided to release a (heavily redacted) memo detailing that process, in part to further the perception that the administration wasn’t just killing Americans willy-nilly.

The worry, then, seems to be that Trump lacks Obama’s strong moral compass and penchant for cautious deliberation, and thus will be much more frivolous about who we do and don’t target with drone strikes. And since the Obama administration’s internal guidelines for determining who can be killed in a drone strike are just that — the administration’s own internal guidelines — and not actual law, Trump could absolutely throw them out and do basically whatever he wants.

But the real question is this: Will anyone really care if Trump expands the drone war even further, and kills other US civilians along the way?

Despite its memos and statements about its super-careful deliberative process, the Obama administration still regularly kills people without even being completely sure who it is they’re actually killing.

Yet no one really cares. There has been no real outcry from Congress, no moves by the judicial branch to curb the president’s power or declare his actions unconstitutional, and no massive, nationwide demonstrations by concerned Americans. Will anyone really care if Trump were to kill 6,000 people in drone strikes instead of 2,000?

The families of the people killed will certainly care, the governments of the countries where we carry out strikes may occasionally protest, and international human rights organizations will probably make a fuss — but all of those things already happen now.

Yet it hasn’t made a single bit of difference when it comes to stopping or even curbing the targeting killing program. Americans — even those Americans whose job is to make sure the executive branch doesn’t exceed its powers or violate the Constitution — just don’t seem to mind if the president kills people, even US citizens, as long as they’re told the people being killed are terrorists.

“Americans are very pragmatic as to how a President exercises his War Powers,” writes Charles Dunlap, executive director of Duke University’s Center on Law, Ethics and National Security. “[T]hey are less concerned about the technical legal basis as they are about success against authentic threats. Moreover, Americans are largely unmoved by foreign disapproval — even from allies — where they perceive the Nation’s security to be threatened.”

NSA surveillance
During his campaign, Trump “jokingly” encouraged Russia to hack Hillary Clinton and publish her deleted emails; said he’d consider allowing the surveillance of “certain mosques” in the US, as New York City did after the 9/11 attacks; and stated he would be open to restoring the NSA’s program of collecting Americans’ phone records in bulk from telephone companies.

Denying any involvement with the email hack of the Democratic National Committee, Trump lamented to a crowd of supporters, “I wish I had that power. Man, that would be power.” Now he’s going to have that power — and far, far more. When Trump takes office in January, he will have access to the massive, awesome spying and data collection capabilities of the NSA.


That terrifies many civil libertarians who worry that he will expand controversial NSA surveillance programs in the name of law and order.

But it’s not just a few privacy-obsessed civil libertarian types who are afraid of what President Trump could do. NSA insiders are worried, too. Former NSA lawyer Susan Hennessey told Wired that the NSA’s regulations don’t entirely protect it from a president who wants to abuse its capabilities. “No one should kid themselves about the idea that in the wrong hands, it couldn’t do quite a bit that’s very scary,” she said.

So what, specifically, could Trump do?

First, Trump could rescind various executive actions and directives issued by President Obama aimed at reforming the NSA in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations about the agency’s mass surveillance programs. Take, for instance, Presidential Policy Directive 28, which Obama issued in 2014.

PPD 28 laid out guidelines for what the government could and couldn’t use the NSA’s powerful spying capabilities for. It said the government could use intelligence gathered by the NSA overseas for legitimate “national security” purposes, but it couldn’t use it to give US companies a competitive advantage over their foreign competitors, for example, or to suppress political dissent abroad.

But Trump could rescind that directive easily, just by issuing his own executive order, and he would essentially be able to use the intelligence gathered by the NSA overseas for whatever he and his administration wanted.

Trump also said back in December that he would be “fine” with restoring provisions of the USA Patriot Act to allow the NSA to once again collect data on millions of Americans’ phone calls. Under the Patriot Act, which was enacted in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the NSA was allowed to collect information from Americans’ phone records such as who called whom, the time the call was placed, and how long the conversation lasted (so-called “metadata”).

This practice was banned with the passage of the USA Freedom Act in 2015. But Trump says he’d be okay with bringing that program back. “As far as I'm concerned, that would be fine,” Trump said. “When you have the world looking at us and would like to destroy us as quickly as possible, I err on the side of security.”

Again, President Trump couldn’t just change the law on his own — he’d need Congress to repeal the USA Freedom Act. But unlike with the torture question, getting a GOP-held Congress to do that probably wouldn’t be too difficult.

A September 2016 Pew survey found that 58 percent of Republicans believe terrorists today are better able to launch a major strike on America than they were on 9/11, and 68 percent of Republicans say they are more concerned that government policies have done too little to protect the country against terrorism rather than that those policies have infringed on civil liberties.

Thus, a GOP-dominated Congress would likely feel comfortable passing a law to allow more invasive NSA surveillance in the name of preventing terrorism, knowing Republican constituents would overwhelmingly support it.

The NSA’s surveillance of Americans is theoretically constrained by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and congressional oversight. But in practice, the FISC has often acted more as a rubber stamp for NSA surveillance requests than a robust check on overreach or abuse.

Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties at Stanford Law’s Center for Internet and Society, writes on Just Security that “History tells us that up against a determined adversary from within the most powerful office in the world, America’s surveillance safeguards are anemic, barely bumps in the road.”

And if his various statements on the campaign trail are an accurate indication of how Trump plans to govern, he is almost certainly going to be “a determined adversary.”

In an interview with Yahoo News in November 2015, Trump was asked whether his push for increased surveillance of American Muslims could include warrantless searches: “We’re going to have to do things that we never did before,” Trump responded. “And some people are going to be upset about it, but I think that now everybody is feeling that security is going to rule.”

[Aragorn]

It was because of the drone strikes, if I recall correctly.

[Emil El Zapato]

yes, that was it...

[Wind]

Obama didn't earn the nickname Obomber for no reason.

That guy won the Nobel peace price, just think about that for a moment.

[Aragorn]

Obama didn't earn the nickname Obomber for no reason.

That guy won the Nobel peace price, just think about that for a moment.

Yeah, that boggles the mind. And what's more, it clearly reveals that the Nobel Peace Prize nominations are just as fake and as politically loaded as the Eurovision Song Contest.

[Emil El Zapato]

Obama was the representative of the United States that accepted the Nobel Peace Prize...it wasn't misguided but premature in the sense that the U.S. didn't deserve it.

Obomber huh... That's a good one...ok, I stepped into it, now let's see if i can scrape it off.

For starters did you read the above article.

I knew the U.S. was drone bombing it seems before most of America did. It was obvious to me (In the Bush administration). And Obama followed: Death in war is a very simple formula. The idea is to kill more of them than they kill of us. Terrorism is real and a constant threat. In a true sense, Drone bombing is the most humane of war tactics. But it still fails and it is never hard to find fault in war...ever. I guess a cheap analogy is to compare the number of deaths in drone bombings against the deaths at the Twin Towers. Drone bombers are akin to the military sniper gone techno.

Remember, Americans want safety, want dead Muslims, want them all gone. The fact that Obama didn't nuke them is a point for his side...He tried reaching out to the middle east looking for rapprochement. Americans couldn't have it. If one major attack had occurred in the U.S under his watch, he would have been lynched at the nearest tree.

[Wind]

When collateral damage becomes collateral murder... With the authorization of POTUS.

They all have blood on their hands and they will be held accountable for their actions.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V03mHlhXHHg

[Emil El Zapato]

The Jury's Out on Obama's Terror Fight

If you said on Sept. 12, 2001, that there wouldn’t be another major terror attack on U.S. soil over the next 15 years, most Americans wouldn’t have believed you. Yet, that’s just what has happened. Following the deaths of 2,996 people on 9/11, there has been a flurry of terror attacks—the biggest one killing 49 at an Orlando nightclub in June—but nothing like the horror visited on New York City, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field.

Politicians like to take credit for pretty much anything, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that President Obama defended his counter-terrorism record in a speech Tuesday. It is likely to be the last major speech on national security of his presidency.

President Obama Delivers Last Major National Security Speech
President Barack Obama gave his last major national security speech as Commander-in-Chief on Tuesday. He summed up his administration’s counter-terrorism efforts over the past eight years.

“No foreign terrorist organization has planned and executed an attack on our homeland in the last eight years,” he said at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla. “And it is not because they didn’t try.” The base is the central hub of the U.S. war on terror: U.S. Central Command, which is running the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and U.S. Special Operations Command, which killed Osama bin Laden, are both headquartered there. The summing-up speech has been in the works for months, and is unrelated to Donald Trump’s election last month, White House officials said.

Al-Qaeda Bomb Maker Killed Two Years Ago: White House
But, after 9/11, there also were no major terror attacks inside the U.S. during the remaining seven years of President George W. Bush’s Administration.

Bush launched two wars to defeat terrorism, while Obama pushed to wind them down. Does their mutual success signal wise U.S. military decisions? Or does it indicate that the 9/11 attack—the al Qaeda hijackers used American weapons against American targets—was a one-off event that has become far more difficult to duplicate as the U.S. tightened its defenses?

The answer, of course, is that the nation’s success in combating terrorism since 9/11 is due to a bit of both. In Afghanistan, Bush pounded al Qaeda and the Taliban government that gave it sanctuary. Then he invaded Iraq, juggling two wars and winning neither. It was on Obama’s watch that the war on terror—a phrase Obama dislikes—downshifted into a worldwide, but quieter, campaign. It has consisted largely of drones strikes and clandestine military attacks that can be sustained, perhaps indefinitely. He got the supreme satisfaction of telling the nation on the night of May 2, 2011, that “the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden.” But the rise of ISIS in Iraq and Syria has forced Obama to backpedal, and redeploy 5,000 troops to the region to “destroy” the self-declared Islamic caliphate.

When it comes to the war on terror, the question that will outlive the Obama presidency is: did he do enough? Most of the smaller terrorist attacks on U.S. soil since 9/11 are so-called “lone wolf” attacks, generally carried out by radicalized Americans and very hard to stop. As President, Obama has rarely stepped up into the bully pulpit traditionally used by wartime commanders-in-chief to rally public support. But these aren’t traditional wars, Obama has noted. He has taken the long view—that the fight against Islamic extremism is going to be more marathon than sprint—and that a steady, persistent campaign will eventually crush such terrorists.

Obama and Terrorism
Like It or Not, the War Goes On
By Jessica Stern September/October 2015

Capture the flag: Shiite fighters with an Islamic State banner in Iraq, November 2014.

U.S. President Barack Obama came into office determined to end a seemingly endless war on terrorism. Obama pledged to make his counterterrorism policies more nimble, more transparent, and more ethical than the ones pursued by the George W. Bush administration. Obama wanted to get away from the overreliance on force that characterized the Bush era, which led to the disastrous U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. That war, in turn, compromised the U.S. campaign against al Qaeda. During the past six-plus years, Obama has overseen an approach that relies on a combination of targeted killing, security assistance to military and intelligence forces in partner and allied countries, and intensive electronic surveillance. He has also initiated, although in a tentative way, a crucial effort to identify and address the underlying causes of terrorism. Overall, these steps amount to an improvement over the Bush years. But in many important ways, the relationship between Bush’s and Obama’s counterterrorism programs is marked by continuity as much as 
by change.

One important difference, however, is that whereas Bush’s approach was sometimes marred by an overly aggressive posture, Obama has sometimes erred too far in the other direction, seeming prone to idealism and wishful thinking. This has hampered his administration’s efforts to combat the terrorist threat: despite Obama’s laudable attempts to calibrate Washington’s response, the American people find themselves living in a world plagued with more terrorism than before Obama took office, not less. Civil war, sectarian tensions, and state failure in the Middle East and Africa ensure that Islamist terrorism will continue its spread in those regions—and most likely in the rest of the world as well. Most worrisome is the emergence in Iraq and Syria of the self-proclaimed Islamic State (also known as ISIS), a protean Salafi jihadist organization whose brutal violence, ability to capture and hold territory, significant financial resources, and impressive strategic acumen make it a threat unlike any other the United States has

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When collateral damage becomes collateral murder... With the authorization of POTUS.

statistically, I think it was about 100-300 collateral deaths...yes, not good, but not really in the arena of the 40 million killed in WW2. Most every one that is ever involved in war suffers from PTSD. It is unfair to say they have blood on their hands...even if they do...some enjoy it...most develop PTSD. hell, Watching it is enough to cause PTSD. that is documented as well.

[Aianawa]

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4eKNJhH6Ww

[Fred Steeves]

Why are people on both sides of this thing losing all sense of logic and proportion, to the point of it having "fallen sloppy dead" over this stuff?

Maybe Alice knows:

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WANNqr-vcx0

[Emil El Zapato]

[QUOTE=Aianawa[/QUOTE]

nice bazoombas.

[Emil El Zapato]

Trump Derangement Syndrome realizes its worst fears, it is contagious:

Germans think Trump is bigger threat to world peace than Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin
Forty-one percent of Germans say Trump is the greatest threat, followed by Kim at 17 percent and Putin at 8 percent

Germans believe that President Donald Trump is a bigger threat to global peace than several world leaders accused of regularly violating the human rights of those within their own borders, according to the results of a new poll.

The survey, conducted by YouGov, reveals that Germans believe Trump poses a significantly bigger threat to world peace than North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Some 41 percent of Germans think Trump is the most dangerous, followed by Kim at 17 percent, Khamenei and Putin at 8 percent and Xi at 7 percent.

The latest results are similar to those reported in past polls. In a similar YouGov survey conducted last year, 48 percent of Germans surveyed said Trump presented the greatest hurdle to global peace, followed by Kim and Putin. That poll, notably, did not include Xi or Khamenei as options.

Earlier this year, YouGov posed a similar question to Americans of all ages: Who do you think is more dangerous — Trump, Kim, Putin, Xi or Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro? Though voters ages 18 to 91, including Gen Z, millennials, Gen X, baby boomers and the Silent Generation, tend to vote differently, the poll found that voters across every generation considered Trump to be the biggest threat to world peace over Kim, Putin, Xi or Maduro.

The most recent poll surveyed 2,000 people between Dec. 16-18. It comes three weeks after Trump found himself as the laughing stock of his peers. A widely-circulated video showed several world leaders — including Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson — mocking him at the NATO summit in London.