29-10-2016, 07:41 AM
R.K. Locke Wrote:So what is really going on here? Something of substance or more theatre? Both?
http://washingtonbabylon.com/what-the-fu...-a-theory/
It's an extraordinary decision. God knows what's behind it though.
R.K. Locke Wrote:So what is really going on here? Something of substance or more theatre? Both?
http://washingtonbabylon.com/what-the-fu...-a-theory/
David Guyatt Wrote:R.K. Locke Wrote:So what is really going on here? Something of substance or more theatre? Both?
http://washingtonbabylon.com/what-the-fu...-a-theory/
It's an extraordinary decision. God knows what's behind it though.
David Guyatt Wrote:R.K. Locke Wrote:So what is really going on here? Something of substance or more theatre? Both?
http://washingtonbabylon.com/what-the-fu...-a-theory/
It's an extraordinary decision. God knows what's behind it though.
Quote:Hillary Clinton's Emails: The Real Reason the FBI Is Reviewing More of Them
By Kurt Eichenwald On 10/28/16 at 10:19 PM
Updated | The disclosure by the Federal Bureau of Investigation late on Friday, October 28 that it had discovered potential new evidence in its inquiry into Hillary Clinton's handling of her personal email when she was Secretary of State has virtually nothing to do with any actions taken by the Democratic nominee, according to government records and an official with knowledge of the investigation, who spoke to Newsweek on condition of anonymity.
The revelation that the FBI has discovered additional emails convulsed the political world, and led to widespread (and erroneous) claims and speculation. Many Republicans proclaimed that the discovery suggests Clinton may have broken the law, while Democrats condemned FBI Director James Comey for disclosing this information less than two weeks before the election, claiming he did it for political purposes.
Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, said the development showed his opponent had engaged in corruption "on a scale we have never seen before,'' while Clinton called for the FBI to release all of the information it has, saying the American people have a right to know everything.
Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, said the development showed his opponent had engaged in corruption "on a scale we have never seen before,'' while Clinton called for the FBI to release all of the information it has, saying the American people have a right to know everything.
The truth is much less explosive. There is no indication the emails in question were withheld by Clinton during the investigation, the law enforcement official told Newsweek, nor does the discovery suggest she did anything illegal. Also, none of the emails were to or from Clinton, the official said. Moreover, despite the widespread claims in the media that this development had prompted the FBI to "reopen" of the case, it did not; such investigations are never actually closed, and it is common for law enforcement to discover new information that needs to be examined.
As of Friday night Comey had only said the bureau is seeking to determine whether these newly discovered emails involved classified material.
The FBI found the new evidence during an unrelated inquiry into former Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner regarding an allegation that he sent illicit, sexual text messages to an underage girl in North Carolina. In the course of that investigation, agents seized a laptop computer Weiner shared with his wife, Huma Abedin, a longtime Clinton aide who has already been questioned by the FBI during its investigation. The bureau found the emails now being examined on this shared device, which agents obtained some time ago.
This new evidence relates to how Abedin managed her emails. She maintained four email accountsan unclassified State Department account, another on the clintonemail.com domain and a third on Yahoo. The fourth was linked to her husband's account; she used it to support his activities when he was running for Congress, investigative records show. Abedin, who did not know Clinton used a private server for her emails, told the bureau in an April interview that she used the account on the clintonemail.com domain only for issues related to the Secretary's personal affairs, such as communicating with her friends. For work-related records, Abedin primarily used the email account provided to her by the State Department.
Because Clinton preferred to read documents on paper rather than on a screen, emails and other files were often printed out and provided to her either at her office or home, where they were delivered in a diplomatic pouch by a security agent. Abedin, like many State Department officials, found the government network technology to be cumbersome, and she had great trouble printing documents there, investigative records show. As a result, she sometimes transferred emails from her unclassified State Department account to either her Yahoo account or her account on Clinton's server, and printed the emails from there. It is not clear whether she ever transferred official emails to the account she used for her husband's campaign.
Abedin would use this procedure for printing documents when she received emails she believed Clinton needed to see and when the Secretary forwarded emails to her for printing. Abedin told the FBI she would often print these emails without reading them. Abedin printed a large number of emails this way, in part because, investigative records show, other staff members considered her Clinton's "gatekeeper" and often sent Abedin electronic communications they wanted the Secretary to see.
This procedure for printing documents, the government official says, appears to be how the newly discovered emails ended up on the laptop shared by Abedin and her husband. It is unclear whether any of those documents were downloaded onto the laptop off of her personal email accounts or were saved on an external storage device, such as a flash drive, and then transferred to the shared computer. There is also evidence that the laptop was used to send emails from Abedin to Clinton; however, none of those emails are the ones being examined by the FBI. Moreover, unless she was told by Abedin in every instance, Clinton could not have known what device her aide was using to transmit electronic information to her.
If the FBI determines that any of the documents that ended up on the shared device were classified, Abedin could be deemed to have mishandled them. In order to prove that was a criminal offense, however, investigators would have to establish that Abedin had intended to disclose the contents of those classified documents, or that she knew she was mishandling that information.
If the documents were not classified, no crime was committed. But either way, this discovery has embarrassed Clinton, even though there is no evidence at this point suggesting she has been implicated in any potential wrongdoing.
According to a letter Comey sent to the chairs of several Congressional committee on Friday, he learned of these new emails on Thursday, October 27.
His decision to immediately reveal this discovery was not a partisan act, although it was a horribly mishandled one. Arguably, he had to issue his letter because of previous statements he had made to Congress. In September, he testified that the bureau had completed its review of the evidence in the case and found no crimes had been committed. With the discovery of the information on the laptop shared by Weiner and Abedin, that sworn statement was no longer true, and there was new evidence that needed to be examined. As a result, Comey felt he was obligated to inform the committees as quickly as possible that his previous statement was now incorrect.
However, the letter he sent could well damage the reputation of the FBI as an apolitical organization for years to come. Given that Comey also testified that his agents would examine any new evidence that emerged, Democrats will undoubtedly argue that issuing a letter repeating that point was unnecessary.
In a communication to bureau employees, Comey described his letter to Congress as an attempt to thread a needle amend his testimony while not disclosing details of an ongoing investigation. The combination, however, created a circumstance where politicians are filling in the blanks, creating a storyline of corruption that was not justified by the evidence developed by the bureau. Making it worse, the communication to the bureau employees is far more detailed than what Comey issued to Congress.
"There is a significant risk of being misunderstood," Comey told the bureau employees in the communication, explaining why he was so vague in his letter to Congress. "It would be misleading to the American people were we not to supplement the record. At the same time, however, given that we don't know the significance of this newly discovered collection of emails, I don't want to create a misleading impression."
Unfortunately, by trying to have things both ways revealing the change in circumstances while remaining vague about what the agents know Comey has created that misleading impression that could change the outcome of a presidential election, an act that, if uncorrected, will undoubtedly go down as one of the darkest moments in the bureau's history.
Quote:Reports: Emails Had Nothing to Do With Clinton
The emails that Donald Trump has claimed will bring down Hillary Clinton are not quite the bombshell that he thinks, reports said Saturday. The revelation about new emails related to Hillary Clinton came out Friday, after FBI Director James Comey sent a letter to Congress on the matter, a move that triggered panic and sent stocks plunging. Trump quickly swept up the story and told supporters the scandal would be "bigger than Watergate." Yet an official told the Los Angeles Times late Friday that the emails in question weren't sent to or from Clinton, nor did they contain any new information. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Comey's letter to Congress was more a formality than anything else. NBC's Pete Williams later reiterated that, saying FBI sources had told him that not only were the emails not from Clinton, but they had nothing to do with her. Williams also noted that the investigation had not been "reopened," since the probe had never been closed to begin with "as a purely technical thing." The content of the emails has not been disclosed.
Quote:The governed are ready for a period of retrenchment, consolidation and diplomatic solutions to unwinnable conflicts, as imperfect as the peace might be to hawks.
Are you open to a somewhat unconventional perspective on this election? If so, read on. If you're absolutely confident you know all there is know about this election (good vs evil, Democrat vs. Republican, etc.), well then let's compare notes in five years and see which context provided more insight into the future.
In the context presented here, the personalities of the two candidates matter less than their perceived role in the changing of the Imperial Order. Let's start with a quick overview of the relationships between each political party and the Deep State--the unelected power centers of the central government that continue on regardless of which person or party is in elected office.
Liberal Democrats have always been uneasy bedfellows with the Deep State.Republican President Eisenhower had the political and military gravitas to put limits on the Military-Industrial wing of the Deep State, so much so that Democratic candidate John F. Kennedy claimed the U.S. had fallen behind the U.S.S.R. militarily in the 1960 presidential election (the infamous "missile gap").
Eisenhower was a cautious Cold War leader, wary of hot wars, wars of conquest, and the inevitable burden of conquest, nation-building. The military was best left sheathed in his view, and careful diplomacy was sufficient to pursue America's interests.
Kennedy entered office as a foreign policy hawk who was going to out-hawk the cautious Republicans. A brush with C.I.A. cowboys (the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba) and a taste of Imperial meddling in distant, poorly understood lands (Vietnam) increased his interest in peace and reduced his enthusiasm for foreign adventurism.
Lyndon Johnson, perhaps the most activist liberal Democrat of the era, was not about to be out-hawked by the Republicans, and so he followed an expansive Imperial agenda into the 10-year quagmire of Vietnam.
Since the immense global enterprise known as World War II had taken less than four years to win, Americans had little patience for low-intensity wars that dragged on inconclusively for years while combat deaths mounted into the tens of thousands.
Liberal Democrats could find no easy political ground between the pressure to out-hawk the Republicans and the demands of an expansive Cold War Deep State. Both liberal Democratic presidents between 1965 and 1980, Johnson and Jimmy Carter, were one-term presidents, undermined by military/foreign entanglements.
The Republicans were given a freer hand; Nixon unleashed the B-52s on Hanoi in late 1972 until the North Vietnamese ran out of Soviet-supplied SAMs (surface to air missiles). Given a choice between a brokered peace or a flattened capital, they chose peace, and Nixon was free to declare victory and pull the majority of remaining American forces out of Southeast Asia.
The disastrous defeat in Vietnam of expansive Imperial ambitions (nation-building, etc.) led to an era of retrenchment and consolidation. Other than "splendid little wars" in Grenada and Panama and supporting proxies such as the Contras, the 1980s were years not of Imperial expansion but of Cold war diplomacy.
Republican President Reagan was also given a free hand to be a peacemaker, overseeing the fatal erosion of the U.S.S.R. and the end of the long, costly Cold War. President Bush Senior was a cautious Cold War leader, careful not to alienate the post-U.S.S.R. Russians and wary of over-reach and quagmires even in the new Unipolar world of unrivaled U.S. power.
The era's one hot war, Desert Storm, restored the sovereignty of Kuwait but left Saddam Hussein in control of Iraq. Bush and his inner circle (and the Deep State they represented) were mindful of the lessons of Vietnam: Imperial over-reach led to costly, drawn-out failures of nation-building in the name of exporting democracy.
Though it was poorly understood by the public, Desert Storm played to American military strengths: a high-intensity conflict with concentrated forces, maneuver warfare with heavy armor protected by absolute air superiority, aided by proximity to allied bases and aircraft carrier groups. If you designed a war optimized to American military strengths, it would look much like Desert Storm. No wonder it was one of the most lopsided victories in history, with most American casualties resulting from random Scud missile strikes and accidents.
The end of the Cold War and victory in Iraq left the Republicans without their hawkish agenda and political raison d'etre, and Ross Perot's third-party movement in 1992 effectively delivered the presidency to Democrat Bill Clinton.
Clinton was blessed with a booming domestic economy and a peace dividend from the end of the Cold war. Though Clinton reportedly hankered for a great crisis he could exploit to burnish his place in the history books, alas none arose, and the 20th century ended with a decided absence of existential threats to the U.S. or even U.S. interests.
The incredible success of Desert Storm and the temptations of Unipolar Power birthed an expansionist, activist Imperial doctrine (neoconservatism) and a Deep State enthusiasm for flexing America's unrivaled power. What better place to put these doctrines into practice than Iraq, a thorn in the Imperial side since Desert Storm in 1991.
Alas, Bush Junior and his clique of doctrinaire neoconservatives had little grasp of the limits and trade-offs of military tactics and strategies, and they confused the optimization of Desert Storm with universal superiority in any and all conflicts.
But as veterans of Vietnam knew, low-intensity war with diffused, irregular combatants is quite a different situation. Add in the shifting politics of Sunni and Shia, tribal allegiances, failed states and a post-colonial pot of simmering resentments and rivalries, and you get Iraq and Afghanistan, two quagmires that have already exceeded the cost and duration of the Vietnam quagmire.
A decade after the collapse of the U.S.S.R. and 25 years after Vietnam, the Deep State was once again enamored of expansion, hot wars, conquest and nation-building. Fifteen years on, despite endless neocon PR and saber-rattling, the smarter and more adept elements of the Deep State have given up on expansion, hot wars, conquest and nation-building.
Even empires eventually taste the ashes of defeat when expansion and hubris-soaked ambitions lead to over-reach, over-extended military forces, and enemies who are not just undeterred but much stronger than when the over-confident expansion began.
In my view, the current era of U.S. history shares parallels with the Roman era of A.D. 9 and beyond, when a planned expansionist invasion of the Danube region in central Europe led to military defeats and insurgencies that took years of patient warfighting and diplomacy to quell.
Which brings us to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. President Obama, nominally a liberal Democrat, has pursued an extension of the neocon Bush expansionism, with the key difference being Obama has relied more on proxies and drone strikes than on "boots on the ground." But the quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan have not only persisted, they have expanded under Obama's watch into Syria and Libya.
War by drone and proxy is even more tempting than outright invasion, as American casualties are modest and the responsibilities for failure are (it is fervently hoped) easily sidestepped. Alas, fulfilling Imperial ambitions via proxies has its own set of limits and trade-offs; proxy wars only get the desired results in very specific circumstances.
The Democrats have out-hawked the Republicans for eight years, and the Deep State is in disarray. I have been writing about this for several years now:
Is the Deep State Fracturing into Disunity? (March 14, 2014): http://www.oftwominds.com/blogmar14/disu...e3-14.html
When we speak of the Deep State, this ruling Elite is generally assumed to be monolithic: of one mind, so to speak, unified in worldview, strategy and goals.
In my view, this is an over-simplification of a constantly shifting battleground of paradigms and political power between a number of factions and alliances within the Deep State. Disagreements are not publicized, of course, but they become apparent years after the conflict was resolved, usually by one faction winning the hearts and minds of decision-makers or consolidating the Deep State's group-think around their worldview and strategy.
Even the Deep State only rules with the consent of the governed. The wiser elements of the Deep State recall how the Vietnam War split the nation in two and exacerbated social upheaval. These elements recognize America is tired of Imperial expansion, quagmires, proxy wars and doomed nation-building.
This exhaustion with over-reach shares many parallels with 1968 America.
In this long view of Imperial expansion, defeat and retrenchment, Hillary is holding down the status quo fort of failed expansionism and proxy wars. Her ability to out-hawk the Republicans is unquestioned, and that is one of her problems:
Could the Deep State Be Sabotaging Hillary? (August 8, 2016): http://www.oftwominds.com/blogaug16/deep...y8-16.html
When the governed get tired of Imperial over-reach and expansion, they are willing to take chances just to get rid of the expansionist status quo. In this point in history, Hillary Clinton embodies the status quo. The differences in policy between her and the Obama administration are paper-thin: she is the status quo.
The governed are ready for a period of retrenchment, consolidation and diplomatic solutions to unwinnable conflicts, as imperfect as the peace might be to hawks.
For these reasons, the more adept elements of the Deep State have no choice but to dump Hillary. Empires fall not just from defeat in war with external enemies, but from the abandonment of expansionist Imperial burdens by the domestic populace.
Put another way: drones and proxies don't pay taxes
Quote:The Deep State's most prescient elements must derail Hillary's campaign to clear a path to Trump's executive team.
Back in August, I asked Could the Deep State Be Sabotaging Hillary? I think we now have a definitive answer: "These blast points on Hillary's campaign... too accurate for the Mainstream Media. Only the forces of the Imperial Deep State are so precise."
The Mainstream Media is presenting the FBI investigation as a "lose-lose" situation for embattled FBI Director Comey. If Comey remained quiet until after the election, he would be accused of colluding with the Clinton campaign and its allies in the Department of Justice (sic).
But in going public, he stands accused by Democrats of "intervening in an election," i.e. raising doubts about Hillary's judgement and veracity days before Americans go to the polls.
Another narrative has Comey's hand forced by the threat of disgusted FBI agents leaking information that would show the FBI caved into political pressure from the Democratic Party and Clinton campaign to keep relevant material out of the public eye until after the election.
I submit another much more powerful dynamic is in play: the upper ranks of the Deep State now view Hillary as an unacceptable liability. The word came down to Comey to act whether he wanted to or not, i.e. take one for the good of the nation/Deep State/Imperial Project.
As a refresher: the Deep State is the unelected government (also called the invisible or shadow government) that is not as monolithic as generally assumed.
The neo-conservative globalists who want Hillary to continue pushing their agenda are the more visible camp, but another less visible but highly motivated camp realizes Hillary and her neo-con agenda would severely damage the nation's security and its global influence. It is this camp that is arranging for Hillary to lose.
The consensus view seems to be that the Establishment and the Deep State see Trump as a loose cannon who might upset the neo-con apple cart by refusing to toe the neo-con line.
This view overlooks the reality that significant segments of the Deep State view the neo-con strategy as an irredeemable failure. To these elements of the Deep State, Hillary is a threat precisely because she embraces the failed neo-con strategy and those who cling to it. From this point of view, Hillary as president would be an unmitigated disaster for the Deep State and the nation/Imperial Project it governs.
Whatever else emerges from the emails being leaked or officially released, one conclusion is inescapable: Hillary's judgement is hopelessly flawed. Combine her lack of judgement with her 24 years of accumulated baggage and her potential to push the neo-con agenda to the point of global disaster, and you get a potent need for the Deep State's most prescient elements to derail her campaign and clear a path to Trump's executive team.
Once this path is clear, the management of Trump's executive team can begin in earnest, a management process aimed at disengaging the nation and its global Empire from neo-con overreach.
If you think this scenario is "impossible," let's see how the election plays out before deciding what's "impossible" and what's inevitable.
Cliff Varnell Wrote:David Guyatt Wrote:R.K. Locke Wrote:So what is really going on here? Something of substance or more theatre? Both?
http://washingtonbabylon.com/what-the-fu...-a-theory/
It's an extraordinary decision. God knows what's behind it though.
"God" is behind it.
The Dominionist Oligarchy is making a desperate last stand against demographic destiny.
White supremacist bible-thumpers are losing privilege in the US of A so one of their law enforcement puppets is taking action.
Quote:People tell me that Hillary is acting like a retard' since her head injury. Frankly, considering her normal behavior, I'm surprised anyone noticed! (this is a joke!) Have someone talk to her doctor and see if there's anything he can give her.
Also, I've noticed she's had an odor' lately. It reminds me of a combination of boiled cabbage, urine and farts. I'm guessing it's either connected to her fall or simply the fact that she rarely bathes. Outside of encouraging her to take a shower once in a while, I don't know what to do about this. any suggestions would be appreciated.
sent from my iPad
john.podesta@gmail.com