Where is Jeff Sessions and the GOP on the Ethically Altered Comey/Mueller FBI Scandal?

by VICTOR DAVIS HANSON September 7, 2017 12:00 AM @VDHANSON

Read more at: National Review

Beware of Narratives and Misinformation

September 7, 2017 12:00 AM

U.S. intelligence agencies said Russia was responsible for hacking Democratic National Committee e-mail accounts, leading to the publication of about 20,000 stolen e-mails on WikiLeaks.

But that finding was reportedly based largely on the DNC’s strange outsourcing of the investigation to a private cybersecurity firm. Rarely does the victim of a crime first hire a private investigator whose findings later form the basis of government conclusions.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is many things. But so far he has not been caught lying about the origin of the leaked documents that came into his hands. He has insisted for well over a year that the Russians did not provide him with the DNC e-mails.

When it was discovered that the e-mails had been compromised, then–DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz weirdly refused to allow forensic detectives from the FBI to examine the DNC server to probe the evidence of the theft. Why did the FBI accept that refusal?

That strange behavior was not as bizarre as Wasserman Schultz’s later frenzied efforts to protect her information-technology specialist, Imran Awan, from Capitol Police and FBI investigations. Both agencies were hot on Awan’s trail for unlawfully transferring secure data from government computers, and also for bank and federal-procurement fraud.

So far, the story of the DNC hack is not fully known, but it may eventually be revealed that it involves other actors beyond just the Russians.

There is not much left to the media myth of James Comey as dutiful FBI director, unjustly fired by a partisan and vindictive President Donald Trump. A closer look suggests that Comey may have been the most politicized, duplicitous, and out-of-control FBI director since J. Edgar Hoover.

There is not much left to the media myth of James Comey as dutiful FBI director, unjustly fired by a partisan and vindictive President Donald Trump.

---

During the 2016 election, Comey, quite improperly, was put into the role of prosecutor, judge, and jury in the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server while she was secretary of state. That proved a disaster. Comey has admitted under oath to deliberately leaking his own notes — which were likely government property — to the media to prompt the appointment of a special counsel. That ploy worked like clockwork, and by a strange coincidence it soon resulted in the selection of his friend, former FBI director Robert Mueller.

Comey earlier had assured the public that his investigation of Clinton had shown no prosecutable wrongdoing (a judgment that in normal times would not be the FBI’s to make). It has since been disclosed that Comey offered that conclusion before he had even interviewed Clinton.

That inversion suggests that Comey had assumed that whatever he found out about Clinton would not change the reality that the Obama administration would probably drop the inquiry anyway — so Comey made the necessary ethical adjustments.

Comey was also less than truthful when he testified that there had been no internal FBI communications concerning the infamous meeting between Clinton’s husband, former president Bill Clinton, and then–attorney general Loretta Lynch on an airport tarmac. In fact, there was a trail of FBI discussion about that supposedly secret rendezvous.

Before he fired Comey, Trump drafted a letter outlining the source of his anger. But it seemed to have little to do with the obstruction of justice.

Instead, Trump’s anguished letter complained about Comey’s private assurances that the president was not under FBI investigation, which were offered at about the same time a winking-and-nodding Comey would not confirm that reality to the press, thus leaving the apparently deliberate impression that a compromised president was in legal jeopardy.

There is also a media fantasy about the Antifa street protesters. Few have criticized their systematic use of violence. But when in history have youths running through the streets decked out in black with masks, clubs, and shields acted nonviolently?

Antifa rioters in Charlottesville were praised by progressives for violently confronting a few dozen creepy white supremacists, Klansmen, and neo-Nazis. The supremacists were pathetic losers without any public or political support for their odious views, and they were condemned by both political parties. Yet Antifa’s use of violence was compared perversely by some progressives to American soldiers storming the beaches on D-Day.

Later, Antifa thuggery in Boston and Berkeley against free speech and against conservative groups without ties to white supremacists confirmed that the movement was fascistic in nature.

It was recently disclosed that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security had warned the Obama administration in 2016 that Antifa was a domestic terrorist organization that aimed to incite violence during street protests. That stark assessment and Antifa’s subsequent violence make the recent nonchalance of local police departments with regard to Antifa thuggery seem like an abject dereliction of duty.

Doubts about official narratives of the DNC leaks and the errant behavior of James Comey, and misinformation about the violent extremists of Antifa, illustrate media bias — not to mention entrenched government bureaucracies that are either incompetent, ethically compromised, or completely politicized.

– Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, to appear in October from Basic Books. You can reach him by e-mailing authorvdh@gmail.com. © 2017 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

H. A. Goodman Report: Awan Turning On Debbie Wasserman Schultz

Wasserman Schultz Aide Who Fled US Strikes A Deal To Return, Facing Charges

A former staffer for Florida Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz who fled to Pakistan while under criminal investigation has struck a deal with federal officials to return to the U.S. to appear at an arraignment.

Two former Democratic staffers, Imran Awan and his wife Hina Alvi, both face charges of conspiracy and bank fraud. Alvi who has a warrant for her arrest, struck a deal with prosecutors that would allow her to return to the U.S. for a mandatory court date in October, according to new court documents.

“Because the Court has already scheduled defendant Awan’s continued status hearing for October 6, 2017, at 9:15 am, the government respectfully requests that the Court also summon defendant Alvi to appear for her arraignment on that date and time, or at the earliest available date for the Court thereafter,” the document reads.

The FBI arrested Awan after he wired nearly $300,000 to Pakistan and misrepresented the purpose. He had previously wired money to the country and was frantically liquidating multiple real estate properties on the day he was arrested, The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group discovered in July.

Alvi moved to Pakistan after learning the family was the subject of a criminal investigation into their work as IT administrators for House Democrats. On the day of Imran’s arrest, the couple accepted a buyer for one house owned by Hina with an asking price of $618,000 (Hawkshead Dr.) and listed another property for sale at $200,000 (Pembrook Village), according to real estate records.

The FBI arrested Awan at Dulles International Airport July 24 as he was preparing to board a flight to Pakistan. When his wife Alvi left the U.S. for Pakistan in March. Federal authorities found more than $12,000 in cash hidden in a suitcase she took to the airport. She withdrew the couple’s three children from their schools and did not intend to return to the U.S., according to the FBI. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: FBI Seized Smashed Hard Drives From Wasserman Schultz IT Aide’s Home)

“Defendants AWAN and ALVI did unlawfully, willfully, and knowingly conspire, combine, confederate, and agree with each other to commit offenses against the United States,” including bank fraud, false statements, and unlawful monetary transactions, the court document alleges.

Awan and Alvi are set to see a judge on Oct. 6 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

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Time to Dust Off Import Replacement 101

North Korean Crisis Reveals America’s Dangerous Economic Dependence on China

John Carney4 Sep 2017 BREITBART

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

When President Trump said on Sunday that America would consider stopping all trading with countries doing business with North Korea, critics responded by saying this would mean economic ruin for the United States.

This is a shocking admission that the cost of economic globalism has been the compromise of American independence.

And it should rally Americans to the cause championed by Donald Trump as he campaigned for the presidency, the cause of economic nationalism.

Consider that after decades of indoctrination about the blessings of global trade, Americans are now told that our economic prosperity is dependent on trade with foreign nations, particularly China. Free trade has shackled us from taking serious action to thwart North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.

The numbers are startling. China is North Korea’s largest trading partner–and Trump’s talk of cutting off trade was clearly aimed at China. But China is also the largest trading partner with the U.S., with nearly $650 billion in goods and services traded between the two nations. Countless more products in America contain parts assembled by Chinese workers. You may even be reading this on one of them.

“If bilateral trade between the U.S. and China goes away, American stores shelves are empty,” former Bush administration Treasury spokesman Taylor Griffin told NBC News recently. You’re not going to have anything to sell in Walmart…There’ll be no iPhone 8 for you.”

According to Griffin, if the U.S. cuts off trade with China, the consequences would be “apocalyptic.”

Trade dependency is not usually thought of as a feature of a free, independent nation. It is the property common to colonies dominated by empires. It is the condition that we rejected as a people in 1776.

Alexander Hamilton knew first hand the dangers of economic dependency. The Caribbean islands where he grew up manufactured nothing and were forced to import all of their supplies. As a result, they were easily dominated by far-off colonial powers. Even as the U.S. fought for its independence, our country depended on France and the Netherlands for manufactured goods. Our political independence won, Hamilton set out to establish our economic independence as well.

In an incredibly short period of time, that independence has been forsaken. We have become so dependent on trade with China, according to the president’s critics, that we face economic disaster if we try to break free from it. The country that defeated Hitler’s Germany, Imperial Japan, and Soviet Communism is not strong enough to cut off trade with China, they say.

Whatever the benefits of globalism may be, they have come at the cost of economic fragility and constrained American sovereignty.

Just as the weakness of subprime mortgage lenders and Bear Stearns illuminated the weakness at the heart of the American financial system, the crisis brought on by North Korea’s nuclear test has revealed an even deeper crisis for America. And just as we responded to our financial crisis by strengthening our banks and our financial safeguards to avoid ever again facing such peril, we should respond to this crisis by rebuilding America’s economic independence.

Otherwise, we might as well take down the statue of Hamilton that stands outside of the U.S. Treasury. Or at least drape it in a shroud to mourn the death of American independence.

Is North Korea a Rational Actor?

What the Media isn’t Telling You About North Korea’s Missile Tests

Mike Whitney

COUNTERPUNCH

Photo by Stefan Krasowski | CC BY 2.0

Here’s what the media isn’t telling you about North Korea’s recent missile tests.

Last Monday, the DPRK fired a Hwasong-12 intermediate-range ballistic missile over Japan’s Hokkaido Island. The missile landed in the waters beyond the island harming neither people nor property.

The media immediately condemned the test as a “bold and provocative act”  that showed the North’s defiance of UN resolutions and “contempt for its neighbors.” President Trump sharply criticized the missile test saying:

“Threatening and destabilizing actions only increase the North Korean regime’s isolation in the region and among all nations of the world. All options are on the table.”

What the media failed to mention was that,  for the last three weeks, Japan, South Korea and the US have been engaged in large-scale joint-military drills on Hokkaido Island and in South Korea. These needlessly provocative war games are designed to simulate an invasion of North Korea and a “decapitation” operation to remove (Re: Kill)  the regime. North Korea’s supreme leader, Kim Jong-un has asked the US repeatedly to end these military exercises, but the US has stubbornly refused. The US reserves the right to threaten anyone, anytime and anywhere even right on their doorstep. It’s part of what makes the US exceptional. Check out this excerpt from an article at Fox News:

“More than 3,500 American and Japanese troops kicked off a weeks-long joint military exercise Thursday against the backdrop of an increasingly belligerent North Korean regime. The exercise, known as Northern Viper 17, will take place on Hokkaido — Japan’s northern-most main island — and will last until Aug. 28…. 

“We are improving our readiness not only in the air, but as a logistical support team,” Col. R. Scott Jobe, the 35th Fighter Wing commander, said in a statement. “We are in a prime location for contingency purposes and this exercise will only build upon our readiness in the case a real-world scenario occurs.” (US, Japanese troops begin joint military exercise amid North Korea threat”, Fox News)

Monday’s missile test (which flew over Hokkaido Island) was conducted just hours after the war games ended. The message was clear: The North is not going to be publicly humiliated and slapped around without responding. Rather than show weakness, the North demonstrated that it was prepared to defend itself against foreign aggression. In other words, the test was NOT a  “bold and provocative act” (as the media stated) but a modest and well thought-out  response by a country that has experienced 64 years of relentless hectoring, sanctions, demonization and saber rattling by Washington. The North responded because the Washington’s incitements required a response. End of story.

And the same is true of the three short-range ballistic missiles  the North tested last week. (two of which apparently fizzled out shortly after launching.)  These tests were a response to the 3 week-long joint-military drills in South Korea which involved  75,000 combat troops  accompanied by hundreds of tanks, armored vehicles, landing craft, heavy artillery, a full naval flotilla and flyovers by squadrons of state of the art fighters and strategic bombers.  Was the North supposed to sit on its hands while this menacing display of brute military force took place right under its nose???

Of course not. Imagine if Russia engaged in a similar operation over the border in Mexico while the Russian fleet conducted “live fire” drills three miles outside of San Francisco Bay. What do you think Trump’s reaction would be?

He’d blow those boats out of the water faster than you could say “Jackie Robinson”, right?

So why the double standard when it comes to North Korea? Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

North Korea should be applauded for showing that it won’t be intimidated by the schoolyard bully. Kim knows that any confrontation with the US will end badly for the North, even so, he hasn’t caved in or allowed himself to be pushed around by the blustering, browbeating thugs in the White House. Booyah, Kim.

By the way, Trump’s response to Monday’s missile test was barely covered in the mainstream media, and for good reason. Here’s what happened two days later:

On Wednesday,  a US-led flight-group of  F-35B fighters, F-15 fighters and B-1B bombers conducted military operations over a training range east of Seoul. The B-1B’s, which are low-altitude nuclear bombers, dropped their dummy-bombs on the site and then returned to their home base. The show of force was intended to send a message to Pyongyang that Washington is unhappy with the North’s ballistic missile testing project and is prepared to use nuclear weapons against the North if it fails to heed Washington’s diktats.

So Washington is prepared to nuke the North if they don’t straighten up and do as they are told?

It sure looks that way, but who really knows?  In any event, Kim has no choice but to stand firm. If he shows any sign of weakness, he knows he’s going to end up like Saddam and Gaddafi. And that, of course, is what’s driving the hyperbolic rhetoric; the North wants to avoid the Gaddafi scenario at all cost. (BTW, the reason Kim has threatened to fire missiles at the waters surrounding Guam is because Guam is the home of Anderson Airforce Base which is the point-of-origin for the B-1B nuclear-capable bombers that have been making threatening flyovers on the Korean Peninsula for some time now. The North feels like it has to respond to that existential threat.

Wouldn’t it help if the media mentioned that fact or does it better serve their agenda to make it look like Kim is barking mad by lashing out against the ‘totally innocent’ United States, a country that only seeks to preserve the peace wherever it goes?

Give me a break!

It is so hard to find anything in the media that doesn’t reflect Washington’s bias and hostility. Surprisingly, there was  pretty decent article at CBS News last week written by a former Western intelligence officer with decades of experience in Asia. It’s the only article I’ve found that accurately explains what’s  really going on beyond the propaganda. Check it out:

“Prior to President Trump’s inauguration, North Korea made it clear it was prepared to give the new U.S. administration time to review the policy and come up with something better than President Obama’s.  The only wrinkle was that if the U.S. went full-steam ahead with its annual joint exercises with South Korea (especially if that were accompanied by more talk of “decapitation” and more flights of strategic bombers over the Korean peninsula), the North would react strongly.

In short, the U.S. did, and the North reacted. 

Behind-the-scenes contacts went up and down, but couldn’t get traction.  In April, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un paraded new missiles as a warning, to no effect.  The regime launched the new systems, one after another.  Still, Washington’s approach didn’t change.” (Analysis: Pyongyang’s view of the North Korea-U.S. crisis”, CBS News)

Okay, so now we know the truth: The North gave it their best shot and came up snakeeyes, mainly because Washington doesn’t want to negotiate, they’d rather twist arms (Russia and China), tighten the embargo and threaten war. That’s Trump’s solution. Here’s more from the same piece:

“On July 4, after North Korea’s first successful intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) launch, Kim sent a public signal that the North could put the nuclear and missile programs “on the table” if the U.S. changed its approach.

The U.S. did not, so the North launched another ICBM, very deliberately deeming it a warning to the U.S. that they were to be taken seriously. Still, more B-1 bombers flew over the Peninsula, and the U.N. Security Council passed new sanctions.” (CBS News)

So, the North was ready to do some serious horse-trading, but the US balked. Kim probably heard what a wheeler dealer Trump was and figured they could work something out. But it hasn’t happen.  Trump has turned out to be a bigger bust than Obama, which is pretty bad.  He not only refuses to negotiate but he also delivers bellicose threats almost every day. This isn’t what the North was expecting. They were expecting a   “non interventionist” leader who might be receptive to a trade-off.

The current situation has left Kim with no good options. He can either cave in and terminate his missile program altogether or increase the frequency of the tests and hope that they pave the way for negotiations.   Kim chose the latter.

Did he make a bad choice?

Maybe.

Is it a rational choice?

Yes.

The North is betting that its nuclear weapons programs will be valuable bargaining chits in future negotiations with the United States. The North has no plan to nuke the west coast of the United States.  That’s ridiculous! That doesn’t accomplish anything. What they want is to preserve their regime,  procure security guarantees from Washington,  lift the embargo,  normalize relations with the South,  extricate the US from the political affairs of the peninsula, and (hopefully) end the irritating and endlessly provocative 64 year US occupation. Yankee go home. Please.

Bottom line: The North is ready to deal. They want negotiations. They want to end the war. They want to put this whole nightmare behind them and get on with their lives. But Washington won’t let them because Washington likes the status quo. Washington wants to be a permanent feature in South Korea so it can encircle Russia and China with lethal missile systems and expand its geopolitical grip bringing the world closer to nuclear Armageddon.

That’s what Washington wants, and that’s why the crisis on the peninsula will continue to boil.

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Mike Whitney contributed to:

Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion

"Those who feel that like lemmings they are being led over a cliff would be well-advised not to read this book. They may discover that they are right."—Noam Chomsky

“Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank have skillfully smoked out the real Barack Obama . . . the technofascist military strategist disguised as a Nobel Peace Laureate, but owned, operated, and controlled by Wall Street, Corporate America, and the Pentagon.”—Thomas H. Naylor, co-author of Affluenza, Downsizing the USA

“The writers assembled here hit hard, with accuracy, and do not pull punches."—Marcus Rediker, author of The Slave Ship: A Human History

The Barack Obama revolution was over before it started, guttered by the politician’s overweening desire to prove himself to the grandees of the establishment. From there on, other promises proved ever easier to break. Here's the book that dares not let Obama off the hook. It's all here: the compromises, the backstabbing, the same old imperial ambitions. Covering all major "Obummer" categories since he took office, this fast-paced collection will delight the critical and offer food for thought for those contemplating the 2012 electoral circus—and beyond.

Jeffrey St. Clair is co-editor of CounterPunch, author of Born Under a Bad Sky and Been Brown So Long it Looked Green to Me, and co-author of Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs, and the Press.

Joshua Frank is an environmental journalist and co-editor of Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance in the Heartland. His investigative reports and columns appear in CounterPunch, Chicago Sun-Times, Common Dreams, and AlterNet.

Crooked Comey - Boy Scout From Hell: Comey’s pattern of unethical bias, plus his personal ties to Special Counsel Robert Mueller going back many years, seriously tarnish Mueller’s standing

Comey and Clinton: Rigged from the beginning

By Steve Cortes Published September 02, 2017 

Fox News

Newly disclosed evidence that then-FBI Director James Comey began working on a statement to reject criminal charges against former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton months before she and other key witnesses were interviewed by the FBI shows that President Trump was right to fire Comey.

The evidence proves that Trump and his supporters were correct to say throughout the presidential campaign that Washington operates on a “rigged” crony system that serves the interests of the powerful and rewards corporate globalists to the detriment of the American people.

As evidence of the rigged system, voters sided with Trump during the campaign in often citing Clinton’s apparent immunity from consequences regarding her unsavory acts as secretary of state, especially her hidden emails on a private server, as well as corrupt Clinton Foundation dealings.

Given what we learned in recent days about Comey, the investigation he oversaw of Clinton represented the very worst of the rigged process. Instead of acting as an impartial, honest fact-finder on behalf of the American people, Comey behaved like a partisan hack.

The former FBI director’s reprehensible behavior both during and after his tenure surely validates the judgment of President Trump in firing a man totally unfit to oversee our most revered law enforcement agency in our nation.

The new evidence is revealed in a letter sent Wednesday to FBI Director Christopher Wray from Republican Senators Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. The letter is a bombshell, and didn’t get anywhere near the media attention it deserves.

The evidence disclosed by Grassley and Graham comes from the Office of Special Counsel, a government agency that investigated whether Comey violated the law when he was FBI director. The investigation was closed after Comey was fired. The new evidence shows that Comey drafted a memo exonerating Clinton of wrongdoing as early as April 2016, even though Clinton was not interviewed until July 2016.

As Grassley and Graham correctly stated in their letter:  “conclusion first, fact-gathering second – that’s no way to run an investigation.”

In fact, after Comey wrote his “nothing to see here” draft absolving Clinton of wrongdoing, the FBI still interviewed a total of 17 key officials. In addition to Clinton herself, State Department Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills, who was appointed by Clinton and served under her, was also questioned. Mills received a very unusual immunity agreement from investigators. 

How is it possible that Comey had ascertained, at such an early date, that the evidence would not incriminate Hillary Clinton? Such a prejudicial judgment certainly reveals a shocking level of bias and a dangerous willingness to engage in partisan politics.

Understandably, President Trump reacted to the new evidence with indignation, tweeting Friday: “Comey exonerated Hillary Clinton long before the investigation was over … a rigged system!” 

Many Americans had already concluded that Comey’s investigation of Clinton was a sham. The majority in a July 2016 Washington Post/ABC News poll disagreed with Comey’s decision to not seek an indictment against her.

The American people were poorly served by an FBI director who shirked his duty as a public servant. They thankfully delivered their verdict on Clinton’s suitability for the Oval Office at the ballot box last November.

Adding insult to injury, Comey’s deceptive practices extended beyond his FBI tenure.  Once he was fired by President Trump, he again showed his true colors by leaking confidential information to the media with the expressed intention of triggering a special counsel investigation.

Comey’s pattern of unethical bias, plus his personal ties to Special Counsel Robert Mueller going back many years, seriously tarnish Mueller’s standing.

Donald Trump triumphed in 2016 because he promised to “drain the swamp” in Washington.  Sadly, the swamp has proven resilient, from Capitol Hill to James Comey in obstructing the president’s transformational agenda.

In the end, the will of the people must prevail and smash a rigged system that has stolen the dignity and prosperity of Americans.

Steve Cortes is a Fox News contributor, former Trump campaign operative and spokesman for the Hispanic 100. For two decades, he worked on Wall Street as a trader and strategist. 

Reports of North Korean Nuclear Test

‘Artificial earthquake’ strikes North Korea near known nuclear test site

Published time: 3 Sep, 2017 03:57 Edited time: 3 Sep, 2017 05:22

An earthquake measuring 6.3 magnitude has struck North Korea near a known nuclear test site, Punggye-ri, suggesting that Pyongyang may have conducted its sixth nuclear test, Yonhap reports.

An allegedly artificial quake was detected at 12:36pm in North Hamgyeong Province, according to the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA), Yonhap reports.

"Today, at around 12:36pm, we detected an artificial earthquake measuring 5.6 magnitude... we are analyzing whether a nuclear test was conducted," South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff said, according to Yonhap.

The USGS reported the tremor as a 6.3 magnitude, while China's earthquake administration also said it detected a 6.3 magnitude earthquake in northeastern North Korea, calling it a "suspected explosion," Reuters reported.

The Pentagon and the JCS have urgently called for a crisis countermeasure, assuming that North Korea is most likely to have conducted a sixth nuclear test, the report added. Seoul has placed its military on highest alert and is closely cooperating with the US.

Seoul's presidential office has already accused its neighbor of conducting a nuclear test while president Moon Jae-in has convened a National Security Council meeting.

Earlier in the day, North Korea's official news agency (KCNA) reported that the Nuclear Weapons Institute has created a “more developed nuke,” that can be fitted on an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).

The new alleged hydrogen bomb, the report said, not only features “enormous destructive power” but can also be used to detonate a “super powerful”electromagnetic pulse.

South Korea’s National Intelligence Service warned Monday that its neighbor might be preparing its sixth nuclear weapon test from a nuclear test site in Punggye-ri. North Korea has already conducted five nuclear tests – in 2006, 2009, 2013 and in January and September 2016. During the last test, the North claimed it had successfully detonated a small nuclear warhead.

✧✧✧✧✧

REUTERS - FRANCE 24

A shallow, 6.3 magnitude earthquake shook North Korea on Sunday, suggesting it had detonated a sixth nuclear device, hours after it said it had developed an advanced hydrogen bomb that possesses “great destructive power”.

The earthquake struck 75 km (45 miles) north northwest of Kimchaek. Previous recent tremors in the region have been caused by nuclear tests, which if the case this time round, is bound to increase the tension hours after U.S. President Donald Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe talked by phone about the “escalating” nuclear crisis.

The quake was only 10 km deep, the U.S. Geological Survey said, again suggesting a nuclear device.

Witnesses in the Chinese city of Yanji, on the border with North Korea, said they felt a tremor that lasted roughly 10 seconds, followed by an aftershock.

The hydrogen bomb report by North Korea’s official KCNA news agency comes amid heightened regional tension following Pyongyang’s two tests of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) in July that potentially could fly about 10,000 km (6,200 miles), putting many parts of the mainland United States within range.

Under third-generation leader Kim Jong Un, North Korea has been pursuing a nuclear device small and light enough to fit on a long-range ballistic missile, without affecting its range and making it capable of surviving re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere.

North Korea, which carries out its nuclear and missile programmes in defiance of UN Security Council resolutions and sanctions, “recently succeeded” in making a more advanced hydrogen bomb that will be loaded on to an ICBM, KCNA said.

“The H-bomb, the explosive power of which is adjustable from tens kiloton to hundreds kiloton, is a multi-functional thermonuclear nuke with great destructive power which can be detonated even at high altitudes for super-powerful EMP (electromagnetic pulse) attack according to strategic goals,” KCNA said.

“All components of the H-bomb were homemade and all the processes ... were put on the Juche basis, thus enabling the country to produce powerful nuclear weapons as many as it wants,” KCNA quoted Kim as saying.

Juche is North Korea’s homegrown ideology of self-reliance that is a mix of Marxism and extreme nationalism preached by state founder Kim Il Sung, the current leader’s grandfather. It says its weapons programmes are needed to counter U.S. aggression.

North Korea offered no evidence for its latest claim, and Kim Dong-yub, a military expert at Kyungnam University’s Institute of Far Eastern Studies in Seoul, was sceptical.

“Referring to tens to hundreds of kilotons, it doesn’t appear to be talking about a fully fledged H-bomb. It’s more likely a boosted nuclear device,” Kim said, referring to an atomic bomb which uses some hydrogen isotopes to boost explosive yield.

A hydrogen bomb can achieve thousands of kilotons of explosive yield - massively more powerful than some 10 to 15 kilotons that North Korea’s last nuclear test in September was estimated to have produced, similar to the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945.

Hourglass-shaped device

Kim Jong Un, who visited the country’s nuclear weapons institute, “watched an H-bomb to be loaded into new ICBM” and “set forth tasks to be fulfilled in the research into nukes,” KCNA said.

Pictures released by the agency showed Kim inspecting a silver-coloured, hourglass-shaped warhead in the visit accompanied by nuclear scientists, with a concept diagram of its Hwasong-14 long-range ballistic missile seen hanging on the wall.

The shape shows a marked difference from pictures of the ball-shaped device North Korea released in March last year, and appears to indicate the appearance of a two-stage thermonuclear weapon, or a hydrogen bomb, said Lee Choon-geun, senior research fellow at state-run Science and Technology Policy Institute.

“The pictures show a more complete form of a possible hydrogen bomb, with a primary fission bomb and a secondary fusion stage connected together in an hourglass shape,” Lee said.

Tensions on the Korean peninsula have been high since last month when North Korea threatened to launch missiles into the sea near the strategically located U.S. Pacific territory of Guam after Trump said Pyongyang would face “fire and fury” if it threatened the United States.

North Korea further raised regional tensions on Tuesday by launching an intermediate-range ballistic missile over Japan, drawing international condemnation.

Trump and Abe spoke by phone and said that in face of an “escalating” situation with North Korea that close cooperation between their countries and with South Korea was needed, Abe told reporters.

Trump told Abe that the United States, as an ally, was 100 percent with Japan, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasutoshi Nishimura told reporters.

“The two leaders reaffirmed the importance of close cooperation between the United States, Japan and South Korea in the face of the growing threat from North Korea,” the White House said in a statement. “President Trump noted that he looks forward to continued trilateral coordination on the margins of the United Nations General Assembly.”

The United States has repeatedly urged China, the North’s sole major ally, to do more to rein in its neighbour.

North Korea last year conducted its fourth and fifth nuclear tests, saying the fourth in January 2016 was a successful hydrogen bomb test, although outside experts say the claim has not been proved.

Impoverished North Korea and the rich, democratic South are technically still at war because their 1950-53 conflict ended in a truce, not a peace treaty. The North regularly threatens to destroy the South and its main ally, the United States.

(REUTERS)

Date created : 2017-09-03

We Knew From the Beginning Comey Was a Dirty Cop

UPDATE

What Happens When You Build on a Coastal Swamp & Flood Plain in a Hurricane Zone?

The real villains in Harvey flood: urban sprawl and the politicians who allowed it | Billy Fleming

Billy FlemingThursday 31 August 2017 10.13 EDT Guardian 

‘The swamps and wetlands that once characterized Houston’s hinterland have been replaced with strip malls and suburban tract homes.’ Photograph: Gerald Herbert/AP

Houston’s catastrophic flood will be framed by leaders in Texas as an unforeseeable act of God. It isn’t. Houston’s unfettered sprawl into the marshland of southeast Texas was a conscious choice by policymakers. So was building a global city on a slowly submerging swamp. Both were decisions that led to disaster.

Houston has quietly become our fourth largest and fastest-growing city, due in large part to cheap housing. But the latter has come at an exorbitant cost to its safety. The swamps and wetlands that once characterized Houston’s hinterland have been replaced with strip malls and suburban tract homes.

Those landscapes once served as a natural flood protection system for the city. Research shows that, if they hadn’t been filled and developed, Harvey’s impact would have been lessened. Sam Brody and his colleagues at Texas A&M University in Galveston have been predicting an event like this for nearly a decade. That their work went unheeded by Texas policymakers should not be forgotten. 

Worse, a generation of civic leaders have completely deregulated Houston’s land development market. In that process, they helped build a far-flung network of poor neighborhoods on top of a swamp. In Houston, there is a simple truth: the poorer you are, the closer you live to a petrochemical plant and the likelier your home is to flood.

There will be an impulse to elide past the political choices that led us to this point. We shouldn’t allow our politicians to use the use Harvey’s victims as human shields by pronouncing that now is not the time for criticism or blame. There’s never been a more important time to understand the political machinations that led to Harvey’s destructiveness, and to do everything in our power to dismantle them.

Much has been made about Ted Cruz’s vote against Sandy relief funding in 2013. His hypocrisy is fair game for political journalists. But the greater failure of Cruz and John Cornyn is in not seeking funding for a solution to the world’s most predictable disaster before Harvey made landfall.

Much more should be made of Texas Land Commissioner, George P Bush’s failings. As head of the General Land Office, Bush holds a unique and singular power to plan, engineer, and manage the Texas coastline.

But nearly a decade after Hurricane Ike – which hit the city eight years ago – and nearly three years since his election, there’s scant evidence that Bush has done anything to secure Texas’s coastal cities against the threat posed by climate change.

In fact, he’s yet to fully spend the more than $3bn allocated to the General Land Office after Ike. Given that Bush is likely to lead the Harvey recovery, it’s fair for us to question whether or not he’s up to the task.

The question that he and every Houstonian must ponder now is how their recovery can be better than those that followed Ike and Katrina. 

Erecting a massive barrier system akin to the $14.5bn behemoth rimming New Orleans won’t be enough. But it will be the impulse of every politician eager to project an image of strength and resilience in Harvey’s aftermath – and to expand their political brand by becoming known as Houston’s savior.

Built in 2014 and already suffering a potentially catastrophic pump failure, the New Orleans surge barrier is emblematic of the greater infrastructural challenge facing coastal cities in the US. 

Coastal infrastructure is incredibly expensive to build and nearly impossible to maintain, especially when you realize that the maintenance is borne entirely by local governments – none of which have the financial or technical capacity to do so effectively.

Some have already begun to point to Holland, where the world’s most complex flood control system operates, and to proclaim that if the Dutch do it, so can the United States. This simply isn’t true.

The Netherlands has a much higher tax rate, giving it more resources per person to invest in its infrastructure. Dutch storms are also less intense and bring lower surge heights and less rainfall than their American counterparts.

For a lasting recovery, Houston will need to supplement whatever barrier system it builds with a broader, regional network of wetlands, retention ponds, and green infrastructure to restore the once-robust, natural flood protection lost to a half-century of urban sprawl. 

Designers have been calling for such an approach since Ike made landfall. Houston should look to New York’s landscape architect-led recovery process as a model worthy of consideration.

A half-century of bad design choices and impotent planning led Houston to this crisis. Now, it’s up to a new generation of Houstonians to do what their predecessors could not – prepare the Magnolia City to rise up and meet its wetter future head on. 

Houston deserves the full, fair recovery that never came after Ike. They may not get another chance.

• Billy Fleming is research director for the Ian L McHarg Center at University of Pennsylvania School of Design, where he earned a PhD in City Planning. He is a co-author The Indivisible Guide and a co-creator of Data Refuge