COLLECTIVE MADNESS
“Soft despotism is a term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by "a network of small complicated rules" might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people."
None of them were classified At. The. Time.
ReplyDeleteI did not know that.
ReplyDeleteThe State Department released 7,000 emails from Hillary Clinton’s private server on Monday night, including 150 containing information now deemed to be classified.
The email dump, the third since Clinton handed over the work-related emails on her private server to the State Department, is the largest batch released so far.
None of the emails were classified at the time they were sent, a State Department spokesman told reporters.
HOWEVER, just hitting the wires - Hillary staffer who set up the server, subpoened by the Benghazi Committee, Taking the Fifth.
DeleteHoly Shit.
Wow
ReplyDelete.
ReplyDeleteClinton is louche.
If not guilty criminally, she should still be disqualified as being to stupid to be president.
Hey, you might be able to understand that she isn't that tech savvy and didn't fully understand the security implications of what she was doing. You can believe her when she said she thought it was within the rules. You might even be willing to believe her when she said she only did it for convenience sake. You can argue that many of them were not classified At. The. Time. However...
While I am one who contends the US overclassifies every innocuous document they possibly can, I am in agreement with those who argue there are some documents 'born classified'. And example of these are the various e-mails Clinton received from or sent to foreign governments or officials of those governments. As we've seen from the Wikileaks leaks, some of these can be embarrassing to the US and arm relations with foreign governments. Not having other evidence to go on it is only prudent to assume there were a number of these included in the Clinton cache of e-mails. We see evidence of this as e-mails of this type that have been released have been almost totally redacted.
Since the released documents have been redacted, we can argue about just how sensitive they really are but we can't argue that Clinton shouldn't have known the rules on classified information. She was a US senator from 2001 until 2003 and then served as Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013. If after over a decade in prominent government jobs Clinton doesn't know what qualifies as a classified document then she is likely incompetent to be in any sensitive government position, not senator of SOS, much less POTUS.
.
Good argument, but I would not exclude the RHIP syndrome (rank has its privilege). Hillary has lived in a bubble of privilege. THEY are not us. They are our rulers and masters. They live it and breathe it. They make the rules and do as they please because that is what they do. That is corruption. That is Washington.
Delete.
DeleteI agree. I believe she just couldn't be bothered by such petty considerations. However, I tried to restrict the argument to something that to me is pretty self-evident and not open to debate.
.
A former State Department staffer who worked on Hillary Clinton’s email server is planning to invoke his Fifth Amendment right to avoid testifying before Congress about it, according to a memo obtained by ThinkProgress.
ReplyDeleteBryan Pagliano, who also worked as the IT director on Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, will not testify in order to avoid unsubstantiated attacks from Republicans, who have been frequently accusing Clinton of criminality for using a personal email server while serving as Secretary of State.
Considering there has so far been no evidence of criminal conduct, the memo asserted, it made sense for Pagliano to avoid risking erroneous coverage of his testimony.
“It is understandable that attorneys for Mr. Pagliano have advised him to assert his constitutional right not to testify given the onslaught of reckless accusations of criminal conduct that continue to be made by many Republicans — including several running for President — without evidence to support their claims,” read the letter, sent on Wednesday to the House committee investigating the 2012 Benghazi attack. The memo, sent from the House Benghazi Committee Democrats, cited a letter received on Monday from Pagliano’s attorneys.
According to the Washington Post, that letter also cited the current FBI investigation into Clinton’s email as a reason for Pagliano to plead the Fifth. The FBI is investigating Clinton’s use of a personal email server while serving as Secretary of State, specifically whether the use of that server jeopardized national security information.
The FBI investigation is not criminal and does not accuse Clinton of wrongdoing. No accusations of criminality have been made from the Justice Department, State Department, or FBI.
Despite this, the political environment has indeed been fraught with questionable attacks. The memo itself pointed to several “reckless accusations” by Republican candidates for president, including Donald Trump (“The fact is, what she’s done is criminal”), Mike Huckabee (“This is about her violation of the law”), and Scott Walker (“A complete and thorough criminal investigation is the only way to get to the bottom of this serious matter”).
Accusations of criminality have not been limited to Republicans. Last month, the New York Times reported that Clinton may be the subject of a criminal investigation by the Department of Justice because of her personal email account, but later had to walk that back. A Times editor said the error was due to “sloppiness on deadline.“
http://thinkprogress.org/election/2015/09/02/3698234/clinton-server-fbi-bryan-pagliano/
Holy Shit !
ReplyDeleteA topic on which we can all agree !
Miracles do happen....
I guess I just became a Sanders supporter, for real. :)
ReplyDeleteDon't rule out Drinkin' Joe Biden so quickly.
DeleteHe may be an option for you too....
There's Jim Webb.....
DeleteIt is very early in the campaign. I doubt her base will be much moved by any of it. She certainly has not helped herself and all in all, I see nothing in her that qualifies her to be president. Of course there is George W. Bush, The Catastrophe, who so dumbed down the standard anyone could qualify.
ReplyDeleteCoke head, drunk, serial lout, enabled by privilege and so far the worst of the worst.
DeleteATLANTIC
ReplyDeleteAs Hillary Clinton loses ground to Bernie Sanders in Iowa, where her lead shrinks by the day, it’s worth noticing that she has never made particular sense as the Democratic Party’s nominee. She may be more electable than her social-democratic rival from Vermont, but plenty of Democrats are better positioned to represent the center-left coalition. Why have they let the former secretary of state keep them out of the race? If Clinton makes it to the general election, I understand why most Democrats will support her. She shares their views on issues as varied as preserving Obamacare, abortion rights, extending legal status to undocumented workers, strengthening labor unions, and imposing a carbon tax to slow climate change.
But most Democrats hold similar positions on those issues. So why are Democrats supporting her in a primary bid? She’s awful on other issues they’ve deemed hugely important.
Most Democrats regard the Iraq War as a historic disaster. Clinton voted for that conflict. That hawkishness wasn’t a fluke. She pushed for U.S. intervention in Libya without Congressional approval and without anticipating all that has gone wrong in that country. She favored U.S. intervention in the Syrian civil war as well. Why haven’t Democrats concluded that she has dangerously bad judgment on foreign policy? She certainly hasn’t done anything to distinguish herself in that realm.
Along with the Iraq War, Democrats disdained George W. Bush for the Patriot Act, his expansive views on executive power, and his awful record on transparency. Clinton voted for the Patriot Act. She shows every sign of embracing a similarly expansive view of executive power. And she took extraordinary steps to shield her emails from federal public-records and freedom of information laws.
Then there are her financial backers.
Many Democrats are sympathetic to Occupy Wall Street and to the notion that wealthy special interests on Wall Street are rigging the system by buying off politicians. Who is more bought off than Clinton? It isn’t just her campaign coffers and her family’s foundation that benefit from Wall Street money. Her family’s private accounts are flush with funds from big banks, including at least one that benefitted from her tenure at State and paid her husband seven figures for a speaking gig. It is naive to think that she won’t look out for the interests of Big Finance in Washington.
.
ReplyDeleteRegarding the Khobar Towers post on the last page, I have seen a lot written arguing the same thing, that it was an al Queda operation but blamed on Hezbollah for political reasons.
Saudi Arabia has never accused Iran of the attack.
All of the trials in SA have been conducted in secret.
Iran has denied any participation of any kind in the attack.
The Saudi Hezbollah group was established in Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province in 1987 in retaliation to the killing of more than 400 Iranians who died in clashes that same year with Saudi riot police in Mecca during the annual hajj pilgrimage.
They were never a mainstream Hezbollah group and never had more than a couple hundred members at their peak and disbanded after Khobar. They were guilty of attacks on some low level Saudi officials and some oil installations, acts for which they took responsibility. However, they have continued to deny the attack on the Towers.
The US charged Iranian participation in the attack but there were no court rulings stating Iran was in fact partially responsible for the attack until Judge Lamberth's ruling in 2006 which reversed reversed a lower magistrate judge who said evidence linking the Iranian government to the bombing was not convincing. Lamberth based his decision primarily on the testimony of Louis Freeh.
Who is Lamberth?
He was elected to the Federal bench by Reagan in 1987. He also served as Presiding Judge of the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. He also managed federal court responsibility over the Gitmo detainees. He was the Judge who ruled that Beirut during the Lebanon Civil War was not a war zone so the US marines were not a military target.
.
.
ReplyDeleteThe biggest purveyor of terrorism in the world? Gotta be Saudi Arabia.
But if you think Iran is the only source of trouble in the Middle East, you must have slept through 9/11, when 15 of the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia. Nothing has been more corrosive to the stability and modernization of the Arab world, and the Muslim world at large, than the billions and billions of dollars the Saudis have invested since the 1970s into wiping out the pluralism of Islam — the Sufi, moderate Sunni and Shiite versions — and imposing in its place the puritanical, anti-modern, anti-women, anti-Western, anti-pluralistic Wahhabi Salafist brand of Islam promoted by the Saudi religious establishment.
It is not an accident that several thousand Saudis have joined the Islamic State or that Arab Gulf charities have sent ISIS donations. It is because all these Sunni jihadist groups — ISIS, Al Qaeda, the Nusra Front — are the ideological offspring of the Wahhabism injected by Saudi Arabia into mosques and madrasas from Morocco to Pakistan to Indonesia.
And we, America, have never called them on that — because we’re addicted to their oil and addicts never tell the truth to their pushers.
“Let’s avoid hyperbole when describing one enemy or potential enemy as the greatest source of instability,” said Husain Haqqani, the former Pakistani ambassador to Washington, who is an expert on Islam at the Hudson Institute...
{...}
.
.
Delete{...}
“It is an oversimplification,” he said. “While Iran has been a source of terrorism in supporting groups like Hezbollah, many American allies have been a source of terrorism by supporting Wahhabi ideology, which basically destroyed the pluralism that emerged in Islam since the 14th century, ranging from Bektashi Islam in Albania, which believes in living with other religions, to Sufi and Shiite Islam.
“The last few decades have seen this attempt to homogenize Islam,” claiming “there is only one legitimate path to God,” Haqqani said. And when there is only one legitimate path, “all others are open to being killed. That has been the single most dangerous idea that has emerged in the Muslim world, and it came out of Saudi Arabia and has been embraced by others, including the government in Pakistan.”
Consider this July 16, 2014, story in The Times from Beirut: “For decades, Saudi Arabia has poured billions of its oil dollars into sympathetic Islamic organizations around the world, quietly practicing checkbook diplomacy to advance its agenda. But a trove of thousands of Saudi documents recently released by WikiLeaks reveals in surprising detail how the government’s goal in recent years was not just to spread its strict version of Sunni Islam — though that was a priority — but also to undermine its primary adversary: Shiite Iran.”
Or consider this Dec 5, 2010, report on BBC.com: “U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned last year in a leaked classified memo that donors in Saudi Arabia were the ‘most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.’ She said it was ‘an ongoing challenge’ to persuade Saudi officials to treat such activity as a strategic priority. The groups funded include al-Qaeda, the Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba, she added.”
.
.
Deletehttp://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/02/opinion/thomas-friedman-our-radical-islamic-bff-saudi-arabia.html?ref=opinion&_r=1
.
DeleteDeuce ☂Tue Sep 01, 11:22:00 PM EDT
In short, Netanyahu is a deranged scumbag.
ReplyDelete
Replies
What is "Occupation"Tue Sep 01, 11:25:00 PM EDT
Your opinion on the matter is without substance or merit.
Netanyahu is the Prime Minister of Jewish State of Israel. You have a deranged Israel bashing, Jew trashing, Zionism hating blog...
Like it or not? He's a leader you are a nothing.
Delete
Deuce ☂Thu Sep 03, 01:50:00 AM EDT
If you want to argue that Netanyahu’s values are the values of Israel, Jews and you, you are welcome to that ground.I’ll stick with my team.
Delete
“Netanyahu is the Prime Minister of Jewish State of Israel.”
DeleteI just know the cost of US support for as you say the ”Jewish State of Israel”:
911, the Afghan and Iraq war, the destabilization of Syria, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, ISIS, the destabilization of Libya, the current refugee crisis t, etc , all fruits of the Neocon dream to expand the Zionist dream of ”Jewish State of Israel”.
The staggering cost to the US of support for Israel and the tolerance for the Saudis in hard to calculate. We did get cheap oil from the Saudis. Nothing from Israel.
The next post is a view of how the Islamic World sees Israel and the treatment of Palestinians and by proxy the US. I’ll call it “The Israeli Warrior”.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the inspiration.
ReplyDelete