Tag Archives: Barack Obama

Watch: Ben Swann on Media, Politics, and ISE Media on The Ripple Effect Podcast

In my recent interview with Ricky Varandas on The Ripple Effect podcast, I enjoyed a great discussion on current and past events impacting the world and talked about the launch of my new platform, ISE Media. In this interview I was able to share some of my background in my 20 years of journalism and explained how 2012 in particular was an awakening to the way that mainstream media operates.

As we covered a number of topics ranging from issues stemming from the pandemic to widespread corruption in the media, I appreciated the opportunity to talk about the censorship sweeping across every tech platform and how ISE is poised to allow a space where facts and ideas can be freely discussed.

Ricky and I also talked about the equity crowdfund for ISE Media going on now. With the support of investors in this crowdfund our goal is to expand the platform; we launched this crowdfund to not only help our team continue development and building out the platform, but to allow our investors to actually own a part of ISE Media.

Our announcement video explains the platform launch and how crowdfund investors can own part of ISE Media. Click to watch here.

You can also register your ISE Media account right now by clicking here.

Learn more and invest in ISE Media by clicking here.

Content creators like Ricky, myself and many others are publishing and sharing important, quality content. While big tech platforms are determined to stamp out these voices that challenge mainstream narratives, we are fighting back with the ISE Media platform.

Thank you to Ricky and The Ripple Effect Podcast for hosting this in-depth discussion.

 

Truth In Media with Ben Swann, Episode 32- Trump Administration: Syria’s Assad “Does Not” Have To Go

The Trump Administration’s stance on Syria and Bashar al-Assad goes against President Obama’s and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s policy since 2011. In this episode, Ben takes a look at how this new policy is contrary to the media narrative about Syria over the past decade.

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US Court Allows 9/11 Lawsuits Against Saudi Arabia to Proceed

Manhattan, NY –On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge George Daniels rejected a request by Saudi Arabia to dismiss lawsuits accusing the nation of assisting in the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001, and asserted jurisdiction based on the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA), a federal law passed in 2016. Previously, Saudi Arabia had broad based immunity from 9/11 lawsuits in the United States.

JASTA provides a legal exemption to the principle of sovereign immunity, thus allowing foreign governments to be held liable in U.S. courts. Daniels said the plaintiffs’ allegations “narrowly articulate a reasonable basis” for him to assert jurisdiction under JASTA. However, Daniels dismissed claims against a Saudi construction company and two Saudi banks for allegedly providing material support to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda to carry out the attacks, claiming he lacked jurisdiction.

According to a report by Reuters:

Daniels said the plaintiffs could try to prove that Saudi Arabia was liable for the alleged activities of Fahad al Thumairy, an imam at the King Fahad Mosque in Culver City, California, and Omar al Bayoumi, said to be an intelligence officer.

They were accused of helping two hijackers acclimate themselves to the United States, and begin preparing for the attacks.

Victims’ families, in court documents, highlighted that nearly all of the hijackers were Saudi citizens, and claimed that Saudi officials and institutions “aided and abetted” the attackers in the years leading up to the 9/11 attacks. Reuters reported that “Daniels’ decision covers claims by the families of those killed, roughly 25,000 people who suffered injuries, and many businesses and insurers.”

The government of Saudi Arabia has steadfastly denied involvement in the 9/11 attacks against the World Trade Center and Pentagon, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed. Jim Kreindler, an attorney for roughly 850 victims’ families in the case against the Saudi government, told Reuters on Wednesday he is “delighted” that the judge dismissed Saudi Arabia’s motion.

“We have been pressing to proceed with the case and conduct discovery from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, so that the full story can come to light, and expose the Saudi role in the 9/11 attacks,” he added.

[RELATED: Massie on the 28 Pages: Documents Will Challenge Americans to Rethink 9/11]

JASTA was vetoed by then-President Barack Obama, who claimed that the bill “could expose U.S. companies, troops and officials to lawsuits in other countries,” but the Senate overrode the veto by an overwhelming margin to adopt the legislation.

Despite the judge’s ruling, there is still a possibility that the federal government could intervene on behalf of the Saudi government. As previously reported by the author for The Free Thought Project in September 2016, a last-minute amendment was inserted into the JASTA legislation called the “Stay of Actions Pending State Negotiations,” which allows the U.S. attorney general or secretary of state to simply “certify” that the U.S. is “engaged in good-faith discussions with the foreign-state defendant concerning the resolution of claims against the foreign state.”

 

After the amendment was added to the JASTA bill, victims’ families said they felt betrayed by Congress.

How do I feel about the Justice Department being given this power? Not good,” 9/11 widow Kristen Breitweiser told the NY Post. “Their failure to bring their own Saudi indictment reveals how little they care about holding the Saudis accountable for either their funding or operational support of the 9/11 hijackers.‎

The Middle East Eye reported that “Wednesday’s ruling comes during Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s visit to the US. President Donald Trump heaped praise on the Saudi royal during a meeting at the White House last week.”

Reality Check: Obama/Clinton to Blame for Slave Markets in Libya?

It’s been three months since the media outcry over the open market slave trading in Libya and yet, the problem persists.

And the root cause of how these slave markets were created, thanks to U.S. foreign policy, has been ignored.

Do you want to end the slave trade in Libya?

We’ll tell you the biggest step toward making that happen… in a Reality Check you won’t get anywhere else.

The video shocked the world. CNN posted the images: men who appeared to be sold at auction in Libya for $400. The grainy undercover video appears to show smugglers selling off a dozen men outside of the capital city Tripoli.

So how did we get here? Most media will tell you that Libya is the main transit point for refugees and migrants trying to reach Europe by sea.

According to Time, “In each of the last three years, 150,000 people have made the dangerous crossing across the Mediterranean Sea from Libya. For four years in a row, 3,000 refugees have died while attempting the journey, according to figures from the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the U.N.’s migration agency.”

What’s more, according to a September report by the United Nations Human Rights Agency, there are estimates that “400,000 to almost one million people” are now bottled up Libya. “Detention centers are overrun and there are mounting reports of robbery, rape, and murder among migrants.”

Read just about any mainstream report on what is happening in Libya, and what you will not hear is who is responsible for the utter failure of Libya.

The policies that have created some of the most horrific conditions in the world fall squarely on the shoulders of former President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Keep in mind, in 2003, under the Bush administration, the long time leader of Libya, Muammar Gaddafi, had entered into an agreement where Gaddafi would give up any weapons of mass destruction and the U.S. would leave Gaddafi and Libya alone.

But under Obama and Clinton, the U.S. broke that agreement. In 2012 the U.S. insisted that there was an “Arab Spring” uprising taking place in Libya. There was not. As I reported at the time, the fighters attempting to overthrow Gaddafi were al Qaeda fighters.

Under Obama and Clinton, on March 21st of that year, a no fly zone was imposed over Libya. And then, seven months later, with the U.S. tracking a Gaddafi convoy, the Libyan leader was caught and killed in the streets.

Was Muammar Gaddafi a dictator? Yes. No question.

But was Libya under Gaddafi a relatively peaceful place? Yes.

Gaddafi actually promoted a Pan-Africanism, spoke out against anti-black Arab racism and was pushing for unified African currency.

Bragging about her so-called accomplishments after the fact, Hillary Clinton famously said… “We came, we saw, he died.” The problem is, so many others are dying now as a result.

In an interview after the leaving the White House, former President Obama called the overthrow of Gaddafi his greatest single mistake in office. While that is difficult to argue, what is truly stunning about that statement? The policy to overthrow Gaddafi was attempted again for the next four years by the Obama administration as they attempted to overthrow the Assad regime, even as Libya continued to slip deeper into chaos.

And that’s what you need to know. Because Obama is no longer president, Clinton is no longer secretary of state and Gaddafi is no longer alive.

The answer to how Libyans should fix what is happening in Libya is beyond me. But the answer as to what the U.S. should do about Libya is not.

If we want to prevent these chaotic failed states around the world, the U.S. must stop intervening and thereby creating them through the toppling of governments in the Middle East and Africa.

That’s Reality Check. Let’s talk about that, right now, on Twitter and Facebook.

Reality Check: No Sarin Gas Used by Assad in Syria?

It was a stunning announcement, stunning because of what was said and maybe equally as stunning because it was honest.

Secretary of Defense James Mattis says there is no evidence that the Syrian government used sarin gas on the its own people.

It is a narrative we have been pushing back on for years. So what does this mean for U.S. policy in Syria? And will President Trump continue to push for war in Syria, or will he return to the positions of candidate Trump who said the U.S. should stay out of it?

Let’s give it a Reality Check you won’t get anywhere else.

The statement is getting very little media coverage but it is a very big deal.

According to Defense Secretary James Mattis, there is no evidence that the Syrian government has used sarin gas on its own people.

Here is exactly what Mattis told reporters at the Pentagon:

“We have other reports from the battlefield from people who claim it’s been used.”

“We do not have evidence of it.”

“We’re looking for evidence of it, since clearly we are dealing with the Assad regime that has used denial and deceit to hide their outlaw actions.”

Mattis insists that he wasn’t refuting the claims. But in a sense, he did.

According to Newsweek, in 2017 a White House memorandum was quickly produced and then declassified to justify an American Tomahawk missile strike against the Shayrat airbase in Syria.

The justification used was that Assad had used chemical weapons on his own people. Then President Trump himself insisted that there was no doubt that Syrian President Assad had killed his own people with banned chemical weapons.

But Mattis also didn’t qualify the statement to just the Syrian airbase strike. That means that the 2013 gas attack in Ghouta also was not proven to be Assad.

At that time, President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry were demanding congress approve use of force against Assad. Obama said this from the rose garden as he said American destroyers armed with Tomahawk missiles were on standby in the Mediterranean Sea.

“I’m prepared to give that order, but having made my decision as commander in chief based on what I am convinced is our national security interests, I’m also mindful that I’m the president of the world’s oldest constitutional democracy.”

Congress did not approve that use of force, but then applauded Trump for his use.

For his part, in this latest statement, Mattis says that “aid groups and others” had provided evidence of the Syrian government using sarin.

But as I have extensively reported over the past few years, there is much evidence that the so called Syrian freedom fighters are actually ISIS and Al Qaeda fighters. And there is evidence that they have used chemical weapons.

Other problems with the claims of Assad using sarin: in the 2013 Ghouta event, the sarin came from home-made rockets, which were favored by insurgents.

Also, according to Newsweek:

“In the 2013 event, the White House memorandum seemed to rely heavily on testimony from the Syrian white helmets who were filmed at the scene having contact with supposed sarin-tainted casualties and not suffering any ill effects.

“Carla del Ponte was unable to fulfill her U.N. joint investigative mechanism mandate in Syria and withdrew in protest over the United States refusing to fully investigate allegations of chemical weapons use by ‘rebels’ who are actually jihadis, allied with the American effort to oust President Assad (including the use of sarin by anti-Assad rebels).”

According to the Times of London:

“Carla del Ponte, head of the independent UN commission investigating reports of chemical weapons use in Syria, told a Swiss-Italian television station that UN investigators gleaned testimony from victims of Syria’s civil war and medical staff which indicated that rebel forces used sarin gas – a deadly nerve agent.

“‘Our investigators have been in neighboring countries interviewing victims, doctors and field hospitals and, according to their report of last week which I have seen, there are strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof of the use of sarin gas, from the way the victims were treated,’ del Ponte said in the interview, translated by Reuters.

‘This was use on the part of the opposition, the rebels, not by the government authorities,’ she added.”

It was the involvement of those jihadis posing as Syrian rebels that made then-candidate Trump state emphatically that he wouldn’t intervene and help oust Assad as Hillary Clinton wanted to do.

Candidate Trump pushed back heavily against intervention. He warned that ISIS was likely to take over Syria if Assad were ousted, just as they have in Iraq and Libya.

And yet the U.S. is only escalating fighting.

Four Russian nationals, and perhaps dozens more, were killed in fighting between pro-government forces in eastern Syria and members of the United States-led coalition fighting the Islamic State, according to Russian and Syrian officials—that according to the New York Times.

Russia says that no members of the Russian armed forces were killed and that any Russians fighting alongside the Syrians were mercenaries.

So what you need to know is that candidate Trump was clear when he pointed to the bush policy in Iraq and the Obama/Clinton policies in Libya and Syria that have only strengthened the creation and spread of ISIS and jihadism.

Candidate Trump rightly pointed out that these policies had failed and that it was insanity to keep pursuing those policies and expecting a different outcome.

So why is President Trump now embracing those insane policies that if continued will undoubtedly leave another power vacuum in the Middle East which will be filled with jihadis?

That’s Reality Check, let’s talk about it tonight on Twitter and Facebook.

Newly Released FBI ‘Lovers’ Text Message Implies Obama Oversight in Clinton Email Investigation

Washington, D.C. — Despite claims of maintaining a hands-off policy regarding pending investigations, newly revealed text messages between alleged lovers— FBI agent Peter Strzok (of “insurance policy” text infamy) and FBI attorney Lisa Page— contain a message from Page denoting the preparation of talking points for then-FBI Director James Comey to brief President Barack Obama.

The newly released text from Page specifically notes that “potus wants to know everything we’re doing,” and comes on the heels of newly released Senate report that raises questions about Obama’s involvement in the Clinton email investigation.

This message from Page, if accurate, seemingly obscures a public statement made by then-President Obama, who on April 10, 2016, said:

“I do not talk to the Attorney General about pending investigations. I do not talk to the FBI directors about pending investigations.”

An interim report titled “The Clinton Email Scandal and the FBI’s Investigation of It” from the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee stated:

“Although sometimes cryptic and disjointed due to their nature, these text messages raise several questions about the FBI and its investigation of classified information on Secretary Clinton’s private email server. Strzok and Page discussed serving to ‘protect the country from the menace’ of Trump ‘enablers,’ and the possibility of an ‘insurance policy’ against the ‘risk’ of a Trump presidency.

The two discussed then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch knowing that Secretary Clinton would not face charges—before the FBI had interviewed Secretary Clinton and before her announcement that she would accept Director Comey’s prosecution decision.

They wrote about drafting talking points for then-Director Comey because President Obama ‘wants to know everything we’re doing.’

Strzok and Page also exchanged views about the investigation on possible Russian collusion with the Trump campaign—calling it ‘unfinished business’ and ‘an investigation leading to impeachment,’ drawing parallels to Watergate, and expressing Strzok’s ‘gut sense and concern there’s no big there there.’

The text messages raise several important questions that deserve further examination:

• Whether, and the extent to which, any personal animus and/or political bias influenced the FBI’s investigation;
• Whether, and the extent to which, the Obama Department of Justice or White House influenced the FBI’s investigation; and
• Whether, and the extent to which, any personal animus and/or political bias influenced the FBI’s actions with respect to President Trump.”

The newly released texts call into question the timeline of events surrounding the discovery of “hundreds of thousands” of emails on the computer of disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner’s laptop. Weiner is the husband Hillary Clinton aide, Huma Abedin, who was vice-chair of Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Of specific note, on Sept. 28, 2016, Strzok texted Page:

“Got called up to Andy’s [McCabe] earlier.. hundreds of thousands of emails turned over by Weiner’s atty to sdny [Southern District of New York], includes a ton of material from spouse [Huma Abedin]. Sending team up tomorrow to review… this will never end.”

A month later, Comey told Congress that it was reopening the Clinton email investigation “due to recent developments.”

“In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation. I am writing to inform you that the investigative team briefed me on this yesterday…” Comey told members of Congress on Oct. 28, 2016.

The aforementioned text raises questions about when Comey became aware that emails relevant to the Clinton email investigation had been found on the laptop of Anthony Weiner, according to the Senate memo.

Wednesday, during an appearance on “Fox and Friends,” Rep. Louis Gohmert questioned the recently released text message implying Obama’s involvement in the Clinton email investigation, and noted the need for an investigation to determine Obama’s involvement.

“It is extraordinary. Clearly the FBI [and Justice Department] covered for Hillary Clinton,” Gohmert told Fox.

Gohmert said that he believes transcripts of the FISA application, used to attain a warrant to surveille Trump advisor Carter Page, should be released, noting that the FISA court was presented “lies” in the FBI’s warrant application, as alleged in the House Intelligence Committee memo.

“Either the judge was duped with false information into signing a warrant or the judge is so worthless and was part of all this and didn’t care if he didn’t have the facts,” said Gohmert.

“If a fraud is presented to the court, you don’t have to have a hearing, you can just order them in contempt for six months in jail. These people should be in jail for what they did.”

GOP Rep. Calls for Prosecution of FBI, DOJ Officials; Calls Actions in FISA Memo “Treason”

Washington, D.C. — In the wake of the release of the declassified FISA memo, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) published a letter Friday, announcing that he will pursue a criminal prosecution of officials in both the Justice Department and FBI for “treason.”

The highly charged allegation of treason follows the contentious FISA memo released Friday by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which alleged misconduct through the abuse of FISA warrants to target political adversaries.

The FISA memo was composed by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes and other Republican lawmakers, and alleged that FBI and DOJ officials utilized unverified opposition research from a dossier, compiled by self-professed anti-Trump former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, which was then used to initially acquire and subsequently renew a warrant to place a former Trump campaign official under surveillance— without informing the FISA court that the dossier was funded by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign.

“House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Memorandum on the FBI abuse of FISA warrants wasn’t just evidence of incompetence but clear and convincing evidence of treason,” wrote Gosar.

[RELATED: WATCH: Senator Rand Paul Calls Out Government Surveillance Power on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert]

“The FBI knowingly took false information from the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign and then used it to smear Donald Trump in order to hurt his campaign,” Gosar continued.

“The full-throated adoption of this illegal misconduct and abuse of FISA by James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Sally Yates and Rod Rosenstein is not just criminal but constitutes treason,” Gosar explained.

The Congressman labeled the behavior by FBI and Justice Department officials as “third word politics where official government agencies are used as campaign attack dogs.”

Here is Rep. Gosar’s full statement on the declassified memo:

Gosar went on to write that he will be spearheading a “letter to the Attorney General seeking criminal prosecution against these traitors to our nation.”

Under the United States Constitution, if convicted of treason, FBI or Justice Department officials could be potentially be sentenced to death.

US Marines Enter Ground Combat in Iraq to Defend Oil Fields

by Jason Ditz

Even as Pentagon officials have sought to emphasize their claims of ISIS being “on the run,” ever more US ground troops are being deployed into Iraq to try to cope with ISIS offensives, with the battle of Makhmur leading to the introduction of US Marines in front-line combat roles.

Officials are trying to downplay the operation as “force protection” for Iraqi ground troops, who have been massing in the area in an effort to ultimately launch an attack on the ISIS-held city of Mosul, not far away.

The explanation is unsatisfying for several reasons, but primarily because this “tactical assembly area” already includes thousands of Iraqi troops and Kurdish Peshmerga, and these are the same troops who are supposed to attack Mosul. Yet these troops are apparently unable to even hold Makhmur, let alone advance toward Mosul.

The Makhmur District is also a key to holding oil fields around Kirkuk, and the ISIS offensive is seen by many analysts as part of an effort to ultimately regain control over those lucrative oil fields, and have been “outgunning” the thousands of Iraqi troops in the area.

Whether they’re trying to save Iraqi ground troops who still can’t stand up to ISIS, or save oil fields, however, the latest escalation puts US troops even further in harm’s way, and has put the war even further afield from the “no boots on the ground” affair initially promised by the Obama Administration.

 

Obama Defends US Involvement in Libya, Blames Europe for Aftermath

by Jason Ditz

A new round of wide-ranging comments on his assorted wars in The Atlantic saw President Obama defending America’s involvement in the 2011 NATO-imposed regime change in Libya, saying he had a UN mandate and it only cost $1 billion, which “is very cheap.”

And while Obama conceded that Libya turned into a “mess” in the aftermath, he sought to shift blame for that onto Europe, particularly Britain and France, saying he had “more faith in the Europeans, given Libya’s proximity, being invested in the follow-up.”

He was particularly open about France’s involvement, saying then-President Nicholas Sarkozy wanted to brag about all the flights France was launching, dispute waiting until the US wiped out all air defenses in the country. Obama said allowing France to take credit for more than they actually did was a way to “purchase France’s involvement” in the war.

He also took shots at British Prime Minister David Cameron, who he said “stopped paying attention” in Libya after the war, and ended up “distracted by a range of other things,” as well as other unnamed nations who were pushing the US to act but didn’t “have any skin in the game.”

Iraq PM: Foreign Troop Deployments Would Be ‘Act of Aggression’

by Jason Ditz

Despite the Pentagon announcing their latest deployment of combat troops into Iraq in the context of an “invitation” by the Iraqi government, and insisting they had consultations, Iraqi PM Haider al-Abadi continues to insist the US deployment was neither discussed with the government nor welcome.

In his latest statement, made through his official Facebook page, Abadi reiterated that no foreign ground troops from any country had been requested by Iraq, and that any new deployment would be viewed as an “act of aggression.”

The US has been steadily increasing troop levels in Iraq and Syria, with Defense Secretary Ash Carter bragging the US now has “tens of thousands of personnel” in the region. The deployments have fueled growing objections from Shi’ite militias the government is depending on in the war.

The most recent announcement had several major militias threatening to shift their focus from fighting ISIS to fighting the growing US presence in Iraq, and this likely obliged Abadi to change his own talking points to keep on their good side.

Federal Reserve Oversight Bill Passes House, Obama Veto Threat Looms

The Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives passed the Fed Oversight Reform and Modernization Act (FORM) on Thursday.

The bill would require the Federal Reserve to establish and publicize a mathematical rule by which it adjusts monetary policy, limit the private bank’s emergency lending powers, and expand the Government Accountability Office’s authority to audit the Fed’s monetary policy decision-making.

According to Zero Hedge, the proposal passed by a vote of 241-185.

[RELATED: World Bank Warns Developing Nations On Federal Reserve Interest Rates]

Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan said in a statement lauding the bill’s passage, “If the Federal Reserve explained to the public how it made its decisions, the American people would have greater confidence in them. Families could better plan for the future, invest their money wisely, and create opportunity for all of us. I thank Chairman Hensarling and the Financial Services Committee for offering this commonsense legislation.

A Tuesday letter from Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen to House Speaker Paul Ryan and House Democratic majority leader Nancy Pelosi read, “The bill would severely impair the Federal Reserve’s ability to carry out its congressional mandate and would be a grave mistake, detrimental to the economy and the American people.

There is no consensus among economists or policymakers about a simple policy rule that is best suited to cover a wide range of scenarios,” she added.

[RELATED: Texas to Repatriate $1 Billion in Gold from Federal Reserve to New State Depository]

A statement by FORM supporter and House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling read, “Since the financial crisis, the Fed’s historically unconventional monetary policy and vastly expanded powers granted by Dodd-Frank would make the Fed unrecognizable to members of Congress who created it 100 years ago… While the Fed’s unusual monetary activities and power have increased, there has regrettably been no corresponding increase in its transparency and accountability. The FORM Act will correct that.

The White House has reportedly threatened to veto the bill. “If the President were presented with (the legislation), his senior advisors would recommend that he veto the bill,” read an Obama administration statement.

Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton Support Keeping U.S. Troops in Afghanistan

Democratic Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have both indicated support for President Obama’s decision to keep U.S. troops in Afghanistan through 2016.

During Obama’s re-election campaign, he promised that he would end the war that was started by former President George W. Bush in 2001.

Obama announced his plan to leave the current 9,800 troops in Afghanistan on Thursday.

“While America’s combat mission in Afghanistan may be over, our commitment to Afghanistan and its people endures,” Obama said. “I will not allow Afghanistan to be used as safe haven for terrorists to attack our nation again.”

[RELATED: President Obama Cancels Plan to Withdraw from Afghanistan]

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lent support for Obama’s decision during an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Friday.

[pull_quote_center]I think what you’re seeing with President Obama is a perfect example of a leader who has strong convictions about what he would like to see happen, but also pays attention to what’s going on in the real world. And his decision is one that I agree with.[/pull_quote_center]

Clinton said she wouldn’t specify what she would do if she were President, but that she believes the U.S. should “continue to work with the government of Afghanistan to try to help strengthen security for them.

“I will not sit here today and say what I would do upon taking office because, again, we want to bring our troops home,” Clinton said. “We certainly don’t want them engaged in on the ground combat. We want them to help support and train the Afghan army.”

Clinton concluded, “So, I can’t predict where things will be in January of 2017. But I support the president’s decision.”

[RELATED: U.S. Turns Blind Eye To Afghan Allies Abusing Children]

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) also showed support for Obama’s decision on ABC’s “This Week” when he was asked by host George Stephanopoulos if he would keep troops in Afghanistan.

Stephanopoulos said that Obama is “keeping 10,000 troops in Afghanistan through next year. More than five thousand after that. You just heard Ben Carson saying he supports that decision. So does Hillary Clinton. Do you?”

“Well, yeah- I won’t give you the exact number,” Sanders replied. “Clearly, what the president has been trying to do and I say this as somebody who voted against the war in Iraq, a war which destabilized the entire region.”

“Clearly, we do not want to see the Taliban gain more power, and I think we need a certain nucleus of American troops present in Afghanistan to try to provide the training and support the Afghan army needs.”

Sanders said he would not “get into hypotheticals” when pressed by Stephanopoulos to explain which circumstances might push Sanders to authorize unilateral action to use force.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0W4qwqsRn0

 

For more election coverage, click here.

Jeb Bush: Hillary Clinton Shares The Blame For The Rise Of ISIS

GOP presidential candidate and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has begun attacking Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in several areas, including her involvement in the United States’ relations with Iraq during her tenure as Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013.

During a speech on Tuesday at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif., Bush blamed both Clinton and President Obama, claiming that they let the U.S. retreat from Iraq which gave way to  the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

“ISIS grew while the United States disengaged from the Middle East and ignored the threat and where was Secretary of State Clinton in all of this?” Bush said. “Like the President himself, she had opposed the surge, then joined in claiming credit for its success, then stood by as that hard-won victory by American and Ally forces was thrown away.”

While many would point towards Bush’s father, former President George Bush, who ordered the nation’s first invasion of Iraq in 1990, or to his brother, former President George W. Bush, who began the Iraq war in 2003 and called for additional forces in 2006, Jeb Bush insisted that Obama’s “minimalist approach of incremental escalation,” along with Clinton standing by, was to blame for the rise of ISIS.

[RELATED: College Student Tells Jeb Bush ‘Your Brother Created ISIS’]

“Right now, we have around 3,500 soldiers and marines in Iraq, and more may well be needed,” said Bush, who went on to explain that he would also send U.S. forces to Iraq as “spotters” looking for enemy targets and that he would provide more support to Iraqi Kurds fighting ISIS.

In response, Jake Sullivan, Clinton’s senior policy advisor and former aide at the State Department, told the New York Times that he sees Bush’s comments as “a pretty bold attempt to rewrite history and reassign responsibility.”

Bush claimed that “in all of her record-setting travels” as Secretary of State, Clinton “stopped by Iraq only once.”

Sullivan insisted that the key issue was not “how many times does the plane touch down at the airport,” rather it was “how intensive and effective is the engagement that leads to progress.”

ISIS was also the topic of one of the questions at last week’s GOP debate. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul was asked about the United States’ involvement with ISIS, and he noted that while the U.S. did not create ISIS directly, it is responsible for the group obtaining at least a billion dollars in Humvees deserted by the United States.

[RELATED: GOP Debate: Rand Paul Notes U.S. Involvement In Arming ISIS]

Investigative journalist Ben Swann reported on the origin of ISIS in March, and he noted that the group grew drastically after it seized Humvees, tanks and weaponry left behind by the U.S. and that even when the U.S. government “became aware that ISIS fighters were capturing U.S. equipment, it did nothing.” 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6kdi1UXxhY

For more election coverage click here.

NSA Whistle-blower, William Binney, Says Agency’s Methods Make Us Less Safe

In a very powerful exclusive interview, I recently had the privilege of speaking to an American hero, William Binney, NSA whistleblower.

We discussed how NSA mass data collection makes us LESS safe; how the intentions behind it are not misguided but positively nefarious; how the lies that have been told about it are snowballing, and how Rand Paul presidential candidacy may uniquely represent an opportunity for change.

Click below for the audio – or read the astonishing transcript that follows.

ROBIN KOERNER: Welcome to a very important edition of Blue Republican Radio with Robin Koerner. This is all a more appropriate edition considering we have just had the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta. We are going to be talking today to a man who, to me, is a hero. I imagine he is a hero to many of my listeners. We’ve all heard of Edward Snowden; maybe not so many of us have heard of Bill Binney – we should have – but Bill Binney is the NSA whistleblower of 2002, whom I will be speaking to today, and who performed a great service to our nation when he saw that the NSA was implementing a bastardized version of the technology that he created to protect to security and liberty of Americans – and he saw that that bastardized version was to be used en masse to violate the liberties and privacy of Americans.

Bill Binney – welcome to the show. Thank you so much; this is a privilege. Have I fairly characterized the trigger of your leaving the NSA of which you were a veteran for between 30 and 40 years?

BILL BINNEY: Yes, you pretty much captured it. I mean, when they started spying basically on everybody, first in the United States and then around the world on the entire planet, I mean, that’s something that violated everybody’s privacy and that’s something I couldn’t be associated with, so … I had to get out of there as fast as I could when that happened.

ROBIN: Now, your most senior title – if I can put it that way – at the NSA, and correct me if I am wrong, was Director of World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group. Did I get that right?

BILL: Yes, that’s right. Yeah. About 6000 analysts doing all the reporting and analysis around the world.

ROBIN: And so that’s why when I say that it was really your technology, it was technology that you personally, directly managed the development of that is now being deployed – I would say – against United States’ citizens, would that be fair? As I say, a bastardized version with the protections removed.

BILL: Yes, that’s right.

ROBIN: Now, I know, Bill, that you have been asked in countless interviews (many of which can be found online and many of which are excellent) about the details, the factual details, of the violations; what it was that you saw; what you blew the whistle on; what’s happened to you since and I can urge all my listeners to go and check out those interviews and get those facts. It’s shocking and it’s important. As I say, this is important information that is out there in the public domain, thanks entirely in many instances to you. So I don’t want to cover the ground that I know you must’ve covered time and time again – with all these news stations. I am going to try and ask you something a little different. Maybe I’ll fail, maybe I’ll succeed, but I’d like to start off with this simple question because I am guessing you must have thought about this a lot. Why is it that agents…that the security agents on the one hand and our politicians on the other – so consistently want to violate our rights? What do they believe they’re doing? Are they badly informed good guys or are they just bad guys?

BILL: I don’t think it’s quite black and white like that, but if you stop and think about what they’re doing now: it’s like hiding what the government is doing. It’s like trying to keep what the federal government is doing secret from the people when, in fact, our founding principles were that people were supposed to know what the government’s doing not the reverse, and we’ve got exactly the opposite situation now.

ROBIN: Yes.

BILL: What it really boils down to, if you look down through history, this is nothing new. This is since Caesar Augustus. This kind of activity has gone on with central governments around the world with dictatorships and so on. Its whole objective is population control and also control of political enemies, who are people who are doing things that you don’t want to happen. So it’s a way of controlling the environment inside your country and also way of manipulating people. So, I mean, if you have information on everybody on the planet that means you might have material to blackmail them or influence them, one way or the other, to make a decision that you want them to make.

ROBIN: Do you actually think that kind of reasoning was going on in the heads of, let’s say, George W. Bush or Obama? Are they actually consciously thinking that?

BILL: Well, I think it started with Dick Cheney, yes.

ROBIN: Okay.

BILL: Yeah, I think it was because that’s exactly… I mean, Dick Cheney learned under Richard Nixon, and that was Richard Nixon’s policy and what Richard Nixon was doing with the programs, MINARETTE at NSA, COINTELPRO at FBI and CHAOS at CIA, is exactly what the three agencies are doing now under Bush and Obama. They’re doing exactly the same thing except orders of magnitude, more, more, more and in fact if you read the impeachment proceedings, or the articles of impeachment of Richard Nixon, you could apply them directly to what’s going on today.

ROBIN: Absolutely. Now, at least though on the surface, the likes of Cheney were telling us that he was doing it for our own good, obviously… Are you going so far as to say that you think that we are compromising liberty for security? We don’t agree with that, we don’t believe that is necessary, but is that even a cover? Was Cheney politically motivated for his own political ends rather than for a misguided notion of securing his country? Are you going that far?

BILL: I would. I mean, that’s the standard procedure that these dictatorships and despots down through history have always done. They’ve disguised everything in terms of “I’m protecting you, and I’m doing this in your interest” and when in fact they’re not, so, I mean, the Nazis used this. You know, down through history, lots of people have used this kind of attack.

ROBIN: So do you think…?

BILL: This is nothing new really.

ROBIN: Oh no, it’s absolutely not new. That’s clear. As you say, we see it throughout history. I was watching a clip of Obama on his podium a while ago saying different folks can make different decisions, and can argue about where we draw the line and how much we could compromise for liberty, for security. That’s very different from thinking that this guy is trying to collect something that he has a nefarious intention to use against political enemies. I mean, is it…? It just seems astonishing that there are so many evil people in one place, if indeed that’s true.

BILL: Well, I mean, look what the IRS did with the Tea Party or the Occupy group, what they did with them with the FBI and so on. All these organizations have direct access to this data in NSA databases. The IRS has direct access through the SOD and the DEA to get into the database of the NSA, showing the entire social network of everybody in the country, in fact, everybody in the world. Now, they’re supposed to be looking at it to find tax fraud or tax evasion or, you know, money laundering, things like that…but that’s not what they’re doing. They’re doing many other things with it… And the FBI is also doing things with it like they have direct access too, and none of this is being monitored or overseen by the congress or the courts or anybody. This is all done… You don’t hear anybody talking about what FBI is doing with the NSA collected data. That’s because they’re doing it in secret. I mean, they’re also using it to convict people of crimes, and that’s what they’re doing – they’re looking at it for criminal activity.

ROBIN: Okay.

BILL: But I also say that… It’s my personal opinion that they used this data to get rid of Elliot Spitzer when he was going after the bankers on Wall Street for defrauding people in the 2008 financial crisis. And so the probable cause to go after him was “he’s after the bankers, we have to stop him;” that’s the probable cause, so the FBI went into the NSA databases (emails, phone calls, you know, financial transactions – all of that) and found something to embarrass him and get rid of him.

ROBIN: Now, who…?

BILL: And that protected their bankers.

ROBIN: So what would be in it for the people who authorized that? Are you saying that they’re being paid off to abuse this information in this way? Is there financial gain?

BILL: Let’s put it this way: when Mueller of the FBI and Alexander of the NSA retired, they formed a cyber-security consulting group, and they were asking, if you remember, a million dollars a month for their consulting fees. After there was such a reaction to that kind of thing, they reduced it down to $600,000/month for their consulting fee. Well, I think I read somewhere in Washington Post – I believe – that their first customers were the bankers on Wall Street.

ROBIN: I see..

BILL: It does set a very bad image doing that. You see that gives the appearance of things. If you’re in government, that’s one of the one things you have to do is to always avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest.

ROBIN: Yes indeed. Now, that would be for personal financial gain. In what ways, if any that you know about, has this massive body of information about all Americans that the NSA has collected, how has that been deployed for political purposes? I mean, do you know of any examples? I mean, it’s a big claim we’re making here.

BILL: Yeah, well, I mean, the direct use of it is the IRS gets the Tea Party.

ROBIN: And so who would have authorized that?

BILL: Well, the connection, at least from what’s come out so far from the investigation in congress, is that woman in the IRS (I can’t remember her name) had communications back to the White House.

ROBIN: Yes.

BILL: Don’t know who in the White House but somebody.

ROBIN: Wow. We’re going into break. We’re going into the break. Bill, we’ll come back and discuss this after.

[MUSIC]

ROBIN: This is Robin Koerner with Blue Republican Radio talking to an American hero, William Binney. William, we’ve talked a little bit about the political and personal gain that seems to drive, perhaps, the collection and abuse of data by the NSA. What about you…? I mean, you are a veteran of the agency. You were a very senior employee of America’s secret service. What motivates the folks who turn up to work every day, who aren’t maybe in the White House or in the IRS with decision-making power? They’re doing their jobs. They’ve got to know that they are engaged en masse in a violation of the basic principles of our nation. Are they just “jobsworths”? Do they just think the ideas of the Constitution are quaint and just not something to be bothered with – that they just don’t apply? Is there a certain personality type, is there a cultural issue that is enabling this, by inertia, to continue?

BILL: Actually, they’ve done some studies over the years in NSA the type of employees they have … If you’re familiar with the Myers & Briggs personal character traits.

ROBIN: Indeed.

BILL: And the testing that goes into that.

ROBIN: Yes.

BILL: I believe it came out at one point when they ran the test across the entire agency, they had 85% of the people in NSA working there were characterized as ISTJ. That means introverted, sensing, technical and judgmental.

ROBIN: Yes. Thinking and judgmental.

BILL: Yeah, these are the kind of people who focus on a job right in front of them. They like to isolate themselves, they’re not interactive with others that much, and so these are the kind of people that are easily threatened, which is what’s going on. Internally in NSA, they’re threatening them. In fact, the government’s threatening them, you know, across the board; that’s why Obama’s prosecuting so many people for whistleblowing.

ROBIN: Yes.

BILL: Because he wants to keep a secret government, keep everything secret and no transparency whatsoever, so to speak. You only become transparent when you’re exposed by a whistleblower and that’s what he doesn’t like, so you have to stop that and so that’s what he’s doing. Internally in NSA, they’re also threatening by saying (this is a Stasi tactic) ‘see something, say something’ of your coworkers, and you’re also responsible now to report your coworkers to internal security for any potential…another potential Snowden is what they’re after. But by doing that, they they’re making it totally… they’re totally destroying the work environment internally.

ROBIN: Yes.

BILL: I mean, how can you work with somebody who’s going to be watching you for everything you’re doing, and if you do something that they don’t like, they report you for it. So, I mean, it’s like the Stasi all over again.

ROBIN: Does this give you any – I know this is going to sound like a strange question, Bill – but does that fact give you any cause for optimism? In the sense that this is not a tenable situation in the long run. It doesn’t seem like it can go on indefinitely. Something has to break. Or is that just a naïve thought?

BILL: No, no, no. I think it is fundamentally destroying the work environment, and … you know, we’re paying over a hundred billion dollars a year to the intelligence community inside this country alone. Just ask yourselves, how many times have they warned us in advance of any of these attacks that we’ve been having. The answer is they haven’t, right?

ROBIN: But, but would we know? I remember Clinton, when he left office, saying that the secret services between them stopped some large number of attacks during his presidency. (I can’t remember what the number was.) And he actually did put a number out and it was quite significant. So would folks within the NSA, the CIA, the FBI – I mean, the people who are using these data – would they agree with you or would they just say that Bill’s factually wrong; that we’ve stopped 15 attacks in the last 3 years because, you know, of this information? Would they say that?

BILL: I mean, if you recall Senator Leahy’s investigation into that. Originally, they started claiming there were 54 attacks they stopped, and when the judiciary committee looked into it a little further, they found out, well, the number dropped down to 30-something and then 13-something, and then down to 1.

ROBIN: Right.

BILL: And the 1 they gave was the guy from in the West Coast or somewhere over there in the West Coast who sent $8500 to Al-Shabaab. Well, look at it this way: when you transfer that money, one end is in Africa, so it is not a domestic issue. So zero attacks domestically have ever been prevented. That is the whole point of it. When they came under real scrutiny, they claim any number of things, but as long as you don’t put them under the sunlight and examine what they’re saying, they’re lying to you. I mean, they have a track record of lying to you. Clearly, look what Clapper said, look what Alexander said in front of congress. I mean, they lied to congress, don’t you think they lie to us?

ROBIN: Sure.

BILL: Then congress lies to themselves; that’s what’s going on. That’s why the Amash-Conyers group coalition – that wasn’t even a committee – of Democrats and Republicans got together to try to unfund the NSA activity a year ago. And the reason they did that was because they finally realized that they were being lied to by the committees and by the agencies and by the administration.

ROBIN: So, do we have to…?

BILL: Well, I mean, the whole point was all of this activity was done in secret with a secret court behind closed doors and they were trying to keep an uninformed public and an uninformed congress, so they could manipulate them and pull their strings and say “do this and do that and if you don’t,” you know, “thousands of people are gonna die and this….” And that’s the threat they generally throw out.

ROBIN: So what do you think is the end of all of this? I mean, are there any systemic or systematic ways that We The People or maybe good politicians – if there are such things – can undo this? Or do we actually have to wait for it to eat itself because some of our political class are using this abusively derived information against others in the political class, and they tear themselves apart such that, like you say, eventually the higher-ups even get hurt by this. Is that what happens or is there something that we can do to accelerate the end of this nefarious setup?

BILL: Yeah, well, I think there is. It requires that people stand up. I mean, most people think they are powerless, but they’re not, they have all the power. I mean, they have the power of the vote that fires everybody, and they also have the power of the purse of not giving money to them and also you can influence corporations by saying if you contribute to them, I’m not going to buy your products anymore. Or you can call up your candidates or people running for office and say: ‘if you don’t do this, I’m not going to contribute to you, in fact, I’m going to work against you and contribute to the other side and try to find somebody who’d actually try to terminate this activity.’ The only one so far in congress that seems really willing to stop it all is Rand Paul.

ROBIN: Yes.

BILL: The rest of them seem to be going along with it, and they’re being duped too because they don’t know what they’re talking about. They’re just misinformed or ill-informed about what going on. They don’t really realize that you don’t have to sacrifice any privacy to get security.

ROBIN: And that’s the point that you’ve been making. Soon after you blew the whistle, I know you went to quite some lengths to get people with decision-making power and even the judiciary to understand this fact: that it’s just a myth that we need to trade our liberty/privacy to get our security, right?

BILL: That’s right. The difference is that the path they’ve taken is, like Alexander said, ‘we’re gonna to collect it all.’ Well, that path means it’s an ever-increasing amount of data that you have to collect year after year. That means you’ve committed yourself and congress and the people of the United States to committing more and more money every year to keep up with that ever-increasing amount of data. And so, you have to invest more, the budget grows, you know, you get a bigger budget. And as that grows also, you have to find places to store it so you now have to build more storage facilities like on Fort Meade they’re planning a 2.8 million sq. ft. facility coming up here. We know this because they submitted an environmental impact statement talking about it. So we know they’re putting this huge facility that is 3 times the size of Bluffdale.

ROBIN: That’s the facility in Utah, right? The data storage facility in Utah?

BILL: Yes, the Bluffdale, UT, facility. Yeah, that’s a million sq. ft. facility – this one is 2.8, so that is close to 3 times the size and it’s going on in Fort Meade. Well, you figure it’s going to take 5 or maybe a little more than 5 years to build that and $4bn or $5bn so that’s more to the budget. So once you do that, then you have to capture all the data, needs more communications are transported into the storage and then you have to have more contractors to manage the data and to manipulate it for the analysts, and you need more analysts and so on. So you see this is how you build a big empire, but in the process you sacrifice the ability to do the mission.

BILL: When you lose the professional focus and discipline of finding the targets and finding the bad guys…

ROBIN: Bill, we’re going into the break, so we’ll carry on when we come back…

[COMMERCIAL BREAK]

ROBIN: This is Robin Koerner with Blue Republican Radio, talking to William Binney, NSA whistleblower back in 2002, and he’s been working hard since to get the word out about just how horrendously the government through its secret agencies are violating the rights of Americans. And Bill, I’m sorry. At the end of the last segment, the bumper music there cut you off, and you were in the process of making a critical point about how the more we take in, the worse becomes our ability to actually use the information that we do take in for the benefit of our security.

BILL: Yes. See the point is: the more data you take in, the more you have to look at or sort through or have programs going through to find information. And they don’t have automated analysis programs, so what they do is they do sort routines or selection routines that will pull data out and will give it to much like a Google search, and then they will return that to the analyst to look at, to try to figure things out. Well, I mean, when you take in the entire world and all the contents and metadata of everybody on the planet, you end up with massive amounts of data like a standard Google query, except probably worse than that because they’ve got more data than Google does. See, they have all the transactional data, which Google doesn’t have, so… Google only has a limited amount. In the Google returns, you can get 100,000 to 1 million or 2 returns, and if you get that every day, your analysts could never get through it, so they never really find necessarily what is important to look at.

ROBIN: Yes.

BILL: And another way to look at it is: if you require your analysts to look at everybody in the planet, which is about 4 billion people using electronic devices. Then, assume if you had all these countries —the “Five Eyes,” and the other 8 countries that are participating with the NSA in this kind of data (acquisition and analysis) – then perhaps you could assemble 20,000 analysts among all of them. Once you have that, then you have to divide the 20,000 into 4 billion that means each analyst, if you could uniquely divide it up, would have to monitor 200,000 people. That’s like a, you know, fairly good-sized city.

ROBIN: Yes.

BILL: So it’s kind of hard to imagine how any analyst could possibly do that, so by taking this approach instead of using a disciplined, professional attack, they have made their analysts totally dysfunctional and they can’t succeed. Case in point: the shooting in Texas. Two days before those two gunmen tried to get in to kill people and that cartoon contest down in Texas, a member of Anonymous tipped off the local police that this attack was going to happen two days in advance of it. Now that’s what our intelligence community is supposed to do, but our intelligence community said absolutely nothing. Why? Because they’re looking at massive amounts of people. They don’t have the focused look that Anonymous did.

ROBIN: Yeah.

BILL: If they took that approach, they would succeed virtually every time. I don’t know how they could miss it.

ROBIN: Now, does this tie into what you were saying earlier then, Bill? I mean, you would think that the NSA, out of some form of self-interest, would want to improve their methods so that they could be more successful. Is the reason that they don’t do that – they would rather use this catchall that is failing – because the catchall-that’s-failing method is actually better for the political blackmail, etc., etc., and the self-interest of the higher parties that you mentioned earlier? Is it that they actually don’t really care about the success of their methods in terms of American security, but they have a different agenda altogether? Is that why they stick with it?

BILL: Yes, yes. That’s exactly what, from what I’ve seen, is what they’ve done.

ROBIN: Wow!

BILL: They traded the security of the people of the United States and the free world and our allies around the world for money… The whole idea is that to do a focused, disciplined approach doesn’t cost anywhere near the amount of money, nor would you need any of the storage. They wouldn’t have to build that facility; they wouldn’t have had to build that facility in Bluffdale. There is a money interest to get a bigger budget and a bigger operation so that you can manage more. That’s what their focus is, and they basically assume that if they collect it all, eventually down the road somebody’ll figure out how to get through it and work out things that are smart. And they’ll have algorithms go through it and figure it out for us. So eventually they’re planning somewhere down the road, but in the meantime we’re all vulnerable and much more vulnerable than we’ve ever been.

ROBIN: That makes a lot of sense, Bill. Would you say, again based on your experience with the internal culture of American secret services and of the people that you worked with, that the culture morally corrupts folks? I imagine a lot of people go in to, as I think you did, this work because they’re patriots: they care about their fellow Americans; they care about their country, their people; and they want to do the best they can – they want to apply their skills for the good of their nation. Now, they get in to that culture and they see that the driving intentions aren’t what they thought they were. That there are other interests being pursued. Do many folks get corrupted within the organization?

BILL: Yes. As a matter of fact, I refer to that process as the “cloning process.”

ROBIN: Okay.

BILL: Once you get into management, say it’s a GS-15 starting, maybe 14 – but 15 you really get into. Then at super grades, you’re really being cloned into corporate thinking. I refer to it as “corporate über alles.” It’s like when they had so many programs running that we call “legacy programs,” things that existed. Then, they need get any new ideas to be dependent on the things that they’ve got running already, so they could keep those things funded.

ROBIN: Right. Okay.

BILL: That’s the whole thinking, the whole process of how you build your empire and require more and more money to sustain it.

ROBIN: Yeah.

BILL: That’s really what they’ve been doing, and instead of taking new, fresh approaches, they’ve resorted to trying to sustain everything they’ve got and that they developed over time – even some of the analog systems. It’s just a, you know, a whole way of thinking from a corporate perspective…

ROBIN: That’s fascinating.

BILL: … that doesn’t necessarily have any influence on mission outcomes. In fact, it’s contrary to it. In fact, when I joined the agency, the values of the agency were mission first, then your people, then your organization, and then yourself. And when I left, they were exactly the reverse.

ROBIN: Hmm…okay. That makes sense.

BILL: The mission is last in line for values.

ROBIN: Yeah. Okay, I understand. Interestingly, earlier in the interview –you mentioned Rand Paul, and I want to just ask you a little bit about that because I know for a lot of folks who identify with the liberty movement, there’s a certain hopelessness about the electoral process. They believe that any application of people-power to the electoral process is basically hopeless because that process is hopelessly corrupt. Now, is it fair to say that – given that you offered the name of Rand Paul – that you believe, that you apply effort to supporting candidates like him, to shining the light on candidates like him, and that you think it is worth turning out to support folks like Rand Paul – and that it is possible, at least in theory, that a Rand Paul presidency would not become corrupted in the same way that a George W. or a Barack Obama presidency did? Do you believe that?

BILL: Yes, I do because…actually I’m trying to help as much as I can. I mean, if he gets the right advisors and doesn’t fall for the bamboozling of the intelligence community, then, he would have it right, and I believe that he will not fall for that. At least, so far, he’s evidenced the fact that he wouldn’t. He’s made it pretty clear that all the existing laws that we had would function well as long as we abided by the constitution.

ROBIN: Yes.

BILL: He’s advocating for more intrusive investigation of people who are suspect or in a zone of suspicion around bad guys.

ROBIN: Yeah.

BILL: That’s the disciplined, professional approach that really we need to succeed, and he’s got that focus and he said that on the floor of the Senate in his filibuster basically for 11 hours down there.

ROBIN: Yes.

BILL: He said that, and that’s really pretty clear. I mean, that’s really the way they have to do it. That’s the way Anonymous did it; that’s why they succeeded.

ROBIN: Yeah.

BILL: Our intelligence community is consistently failing on that. I mean, the FBI is really good at entrapping people, but, you know, those aren’t the real threats. I mean the real threats that were coming – fundamentally, most of them succeeded. The ones that failed failed because their devices failed, you know, or some local policeman saw them and stopped them.

ROBIN: Yeah, that makes sense.

BILL: So that should be clear evidence that they’re doing something wrong. I mean, after all, if you’re running an organization that’s not succeeding, you’re doing something wrong. You’ve got to change. That’s really pretty simple.

ROBIN: Now, the beginning of that answer, Bill, just to make sure that I was clear. Did I hear you say that you were advising Rand Paul or talking to him about these matters?

BILL: Yeah, we’re passing advice to people who are working with him…

ROBIN: Okay.

BILL: … so that we can try to contribute to him that way.

ROBIN: I see. That makes a lot of sense. And I should say — full disclosure — I’m the communications director for Ready for Rand PAC at www.readyforrand.com . So I’m actually delighted to hear that you, one of my heroes, is helping Rand. And, actually more importantly to me, I haven’t sat down across the table with Rand Paul and looked the man in the whites of his eyes, and I think it’s always important to do that. So I do feel a little better that you feel that he is a man of integrity and that you could even see him, in your mind’s eye in office, maintaining that integrity and his belief in the constitution. I certainly hope you’re right about that. Now, what about other political engagement? It amazes me and I’m British – as you can tell from my accent, Bill – but it kind of amazes me just how much we now know in the United States about the abuses of individual liberties and, yet, nobody seems to be marching in the street. Nobody is handcuffing themselves to the diggers in Utah building – this massive institution for violation of American rights. Are Americans apathetic? Are we antipathetic? Are we … should we be out in the streets, let’s say, exerting our Second Amendment rights at this point? What’s wrong with us, Bill. What’s wrong with us?

BILL: Okay, I think there are several things, and I said some of this in different meetings and talks and interviews.

ROBIN: Sure.

BILL: We are, we are… We’ve been for the last about 240 years very accustomed to having a country, a government that does the right thing. We wear the white hats; they try to do the right thing by us, and they try at least to be, for the most part, honest with us. And so, we have built up this internal trust in our central government to do the right thing or to try to do the right thing. That’s because we haven’t had a dictator here since George III, I might add. And so what we ended up doing, as I keep saying over and over again, what we ended up doing was trading George III for George the W. And so from there on, it went worse.

ROBIN: And you know I’ve said often, Bill, that George III never signed an executive order in his life. And to find the last English king that signed an executive order, you actually have to go back an entire century before the George III and to get to James, who was actually kicked out for his one executive order. So, I think I’ve got to say: I think our President is more of a monarch, and maybe even in the terms we’re discussing a dictator, than ever George III was.

BILL: I’m basically referring to it now as an imperial presidency.

ROBIN: Indeed.

BILL: For that reason, I mean, because everything is so secret and they don’t want it out in the open and they can’t, you know… they say the right words in public: ‘yes, we wanna have a… it’s not time to have an open discussion about this,’ but they’re not open at all about it. I mean the biggest thing they’ve not talked about is that all of the contents of the communications (emails and phone calls) that they’re doing now. Recently in The Intercept, they published some articles about using automated translations to do some rough translations of voice calls. Well, that means they’re doing it on the orders of millions of calls every day. They’re doing rough translations just to get words out to see if there is some word that might hit their list that they might want to look at that conversation a little more closely. Then they’ll use people to do a full transcription.

ROBIN: Yeah.

BILL: This is basically what I think Adrienne Kinne and David Murphy-Fawkes were doing at Fort Gordon, GA. They were transcribers doing transcriptions of US communications with other US people without a warrant, and according to FISA, those were federal felonies. That was also true when Tom Tamm — Thomas Tamm who was a DOJ lawyer — who was charged to write up request for warrants to the FISA court. And he saw all these warrantless wiretaps and warrantless reading of emails coming through as justification for probable cause. They should have gone through the FISA court, and here they were using the data that they already collected to go through as justification for probable cause to get a warrant from the FISA court. So you know, this is the collection of content that’s been going on all along – even the latest 5IG report came out at the bottom of page 8, the top of page, it says in there where Addington told General Hayden of NSA that (this was in the first 45 days of the authorization of 4 October, 2001, of the President).. he was telling Hayden that the President’s authorization authorized him to collect content of US citizens as well as metadata.

ROBIN: Wow.

BILL: So, I mean, this is the whole point that this has been going on all along and they keep claiming they’re not doing content and that’s just an outright lie.

ROBIN: Presumably, though, there’s also just a very simple motivation about this, which is nobody wants to be caught with their pants down, right? Nobody wants to have been caught in the lie, so we’re now in this kind of rut of having to build lies on lies on lies.

BILL: Right. And then everybody is involved so they all have to support it like McConnell in the Senate, all the leadership in the house and senate, the FISA Court, and the intelligence committees, and the Attorney General. They’re all a part of it, so they have to support it.

ROBIN: Now we’ve only got about a minute left in this segment, Bill, but do you think there is a change in zeitgeist now either among the People or the political class or both? Back towards individual rights? Rand Paul did do his filibuster. We got the USA Freedom Act –not ideal—but is it a step in the right direction? Or is it a whitewash? And again, we’ve only got about 45 seconds left, but what do you think about that?

BILL: It is basically a step in the right direction, but by no means anywhere near something that really, I mean… they’re only doing the surface stuff. They already have separate programs already acquiring most of that data any way. In the upstream acquisition of data, that’s where they’re tapping directly into the fiber lines and taking everything in bulk (content and metadata). For metadata, they probably get about 80% of it with the upstream program, and the Section 215 stuff was illegally acquired but it was the extra 20% that they were missing from the upstream, so it really doesn’t do that much. We need to do a lot more.

ROBIN: Thanks, Bill. We’re going into the final break. This is Robin Koerner with Bill Binney on Blue Republican Radio.

[BREAK]

ROBIN: In the final segment, I just want to ask you, Bill – and thanks again for being here with me on Blue Republican Radio — is it worse in America than everywhere else or is everywhere else catching up? Is this an American anti-civil liberties disease or is it a global one?

BILL: Well, it started all here within the US and it focused on US citizens. Then it spread around the world for the US to do it, but also at the same time the Five Eyes group (Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, and the US) went together on this and then other countries were joining it. So that you see that they’re all adopting the same procedures of bulk acquisition of data and information and using it to share…and they’re sharing it back and forth. Just recently the Bundesamt found out that the B&D, the equivalent of the NSA and CIA over in Germany, was also sharing data with NSA, and collecting data on their own citizens. So it’s really a worldwide process that started here but is infecting entire governments, democracies around the world as well. And so it’s really destroying the entire fabric of democracy everywhere on the planet. I mean, Ronald Reagan used to say that “we’re a country with a government,” well, now we’re a government with a country and we’re making everybody else that way too.

ROBIN: My god. That seems to be such a depressing note to end on. I would just say… I mentioned at the beginning of this show that we’ve just marked the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta. In history, some things keep repeating themselves, and my little contribution to this was to set up at www.magnacarta.us — and I invite any of the listeners to go to magnacarta.us. I have rewritten the Magna Carta for our time in which I’ve listed to a set of grievances and made a set of demands, of those who would rule us, to undo some of the extreme violations of the basic individual liberties that we’ve been fighting for 800 years but are now undergoing in this country, and – if you have been listening to Bill, are affecting citizens around the world. Also, if you care about these issues, please go to www.bluerepublican.org , stick your name in the box, and join the mailing list. Check out the archives: we have some fantastic guests; we discuss issues like this a lot. We had Coleen Rowley, the 2002 Time Magazine Person of the Year, discussing similar issues recently – check that out in the archives. Bill, thank you very much for being with me on Blue Republican Radio.

(With thanks to Hema Gorzinnski for transcribing.)

Obama: Only Alternative to Iran Deal Is War

British Foreign Secretary: Israel Just Wanted Permanent Standoff

by Jason Ditz, July 15, 2015

When the P5+1 nuclear deal with Iran was announced early Tuesday, everyone knew what was coming next. After spending decades railing against Iran’s nuclear program and months claiming the negotiations were a threat to Israel, there was no calming Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu down.

A day later, world leaders are starting to fire back with surprising openness, lashing Netanyahu for his insincerity. British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond insisted no deal would’ve been good enough for Netanyahu, and that what he really wanted was a “permanent standoff” with Iran.

President Obama seemed a little less interested in placating Netanyahu today as well, giving his usual lip service on Israeli security concerns but insisting Netanyahu never provided a valid alternative to the deal, and said the deal was a fair sight better than war.

The criticisms are all fairly obvious, and the real news is how publicly they’re being made by high profile officials, and how quickly. This underscores a growing problem faced by Netanyahu internationally, compounding domestic criticism over his botched lobbying against the deal.

Israelis must see Netanyahu’s effort one of two ways. Either he was correct that the deal means the end of Israel, and failed despite his promises to stop it, or he was incorrect about the deal and is alienating the international community by continuing to complain. Neither puts him in a particularly favorable light.

White House: Congress Is Playing ‘Russian Roulette’ With The Patriot Act

In preparation for the possible expiration of certain provisions of the Patriot Act, the Obama administration is urging the Senate to act, and warning of repercussions that might occur if the Act expires altogether.

The Washington Post reported that at a press briefing on Wednesday, a senior administration official likened the fact that the Senate has not passed either an outright extension of the Patriot Act, or the USA Freedom Act, to it playing a game of “national security Russian roulette.”

“What you’re doing essentially is you’re just playing national security Russian roulette,” the official said. “That’s a game that you can play. But we urge Congress not to play that game with these uncontroversial authorities.”

The USA Freedom Act was presented by lawmakers as a way to curb Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which is used by the NSA to justify its bulk collection of Americans’ data. While advocates for the USA Freedom Act claim that it will end the NSA’s bulk data collection, those in opposition to the bill, such as Rep. Justin Amash  (R-Mich.) say that it wouldn’t end the collection; it would only change the channels the government went through to collect Americans’ records.

While the USA Freedom Act was passed in the House of Representatives by an overwhelming vote of 338-88, it failed to reach the 60-vote threshold needed in the Senate, with a 57-42 vote on Friday.

Congress adjourned for a week-long recess early Saturday, leaving the final decision on the future of Section 215 up to a last minute vote when they return on May 31, one day before the section is set to expire.

GOP Presidential candidate Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has been the face of the campaign to abolish the NSA’s surveillance program altogether. Paul took to the floor of the Senate for 10 hours and 30 minutes on Wednesday to filibuster the renewal of Section 215, and he was a prominent voice against the act’s extension, when it came to a vote on Friday, fighting back against Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the Senate majority leader, who pushed for an “clean” extension of the bill.

On Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said that if the Patriot Act expires altogether, the White House has no “Plan B.”

“The fact is I’m not aware of any ‘Plan B’ that exists or that is currently being contemplated,” Earnest said. “There are significant consequences for the Senate’s failure to act. It would certainly put at great risk these programs and could risk a lapse in some of these important national security capabilities.”

During the recess, the New York Times reported that senior lawmakers are “scrambling this week in rare recess negotiations to agree on a face-saving change to legislation” that would save a form of the NSA’s massive surveillance program.

The Obama administration joined in the campaign to support the USA Freedom Act, with President Obama urging the Senate to pass the Act, just as the House did.

“The House of Representatives did its work and came up with what they called the USA Freedom Act, which strikes an appropriate balance,” Obama said. “Our intelligence communities are confident that they can work with the authorities that are provided in that act passed on a bipartisan basis.”

In addition to the USA Freedom Act being passed on a bipartisan basis, Paul’s stance against it has also been a bipartisan effort. During his time on the Senate Floor speaking out against the Patriot Act, Paul was joined by seven Democrats and three Republicans.

Obama called out the Senate for not passing the USA Freedom Act, and said that the powers that are lost if the Patriot Act expires are ones that could hurt the security of the American people.

“The Senate did not act, and the problem we have now is that those authorities run out at midnight on Sunday,” Obama said. “So, I strongly urge the Senate to work through this recess and make sure that they identify a way to get this done.

While Obama put emphasis on urging the Senate to act, Paul noted that the NSA’s bulk data collection was recently ruled illegal, and called the President disingenuous, because even though he said wanted to protect civil liberties, he has yet to stop the program.

Investigative journalist Ben Swann explained how section 215 of the Patriot Act is collecting the data of innocent Americans in an episode of Truth in Media:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrY_bmdi-N4

Jeb Bush: Enhanced NSA Spying Is The Best Part Of The Obama Administration

On Tuesday, former Florida governor and rumored 2016 GOP Presidential candidate Jeb Bush was on the Michael Medved Show with conservative talk radio host Michael Medved.

In addition to discussing current opposition to President Obama, how Bush will handle rivals in his own party, where Bush stands on education and poverty, and whether or not Bush can connect with “everyday people,” Medved also asked Bush what he thinks has been the “best part of the Obama administration.

I would say the best part of the Obama administration would be his continuance of the protections of the homeland using the big metadata programs, the NSA being enhanced,” Bush said. “Advancing this — even though he never defends it, even though he never openly admits it, there has been a continuation of a very important service, which is the first obligation, I think of our national government is to keep us safe. And the technologies that now can be applied to make that so, while protecting civil liberties are there.”

Bush shared a similar sentiment during a speech at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs on Feb. 18. He defended the NSA’s massive surveillance program, calling it “hugely important” in the United States’ long-term battle against terrorism, and saying that it was necessary to “protect our civil liberties,” and to “keep us safe.

Writing for The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald noted that the notion of bipartisanship being impossible to achieve is “one of the most glaring myths propagated by Washington,” and that in reality, “from trade deals to Wall Street bailouts to a massive National Security and Penal State, the two parties are in full agreement on the bulk of the most significant D.C. policies.

While Bush agrees with Obama’s enhancement of the NSA’s spying program, his views differ drastically from his GOP rival, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), who announced that he was running for President on April 7.

During a speech in New Hampshire on April 8, Paul condemned the NSA’s massive data collection, and vowed that if elected as President in 2016, he would end the program “on day one.”

“Warrantless searches of Americans phone records and computer records, are un-American and a threat to our civil liberties,” Paul said. “I say that your phone records are yours. I say the phone records of law-abiding citizens are none of their damn business. The president created this vast dragnet by executive order. As President, on day one I will immediately end this unconstitutional program.”

Obama Takes Netanyahu ‘at his word’ In His Promise To Prevent Palestinian Statehood

On Friday, President Obama addressed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s promise to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian State in his attempt to garner support for a fourth term as Prime Minister.

In an interview with the Huffington Post, Obama said he took Netanyahu “at his word” when he said that a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine would not be reached under his watch.

We’re going to make sure, regardless of disagreements we have on policy, that our military and intelligence cooperation to keep the Israeli people safe continues and that cooperation also helps the American people stay safe,” Obama said. “But we are going to continue to insist that, from our point of view, the status quo is unsustainable. And that while taking into complete account Israel’s security, we can’t just in perpetuity maintain the status quo, expand settlements. That’s not a recipe for stability in the region.”

Reuters reported that despite the “the urgency of renewed, structured and substantial efforts towards peace” expressed by the European Union, the United States will not speak at the annual United Nations debate on Israeli violations in Palestinian territories on Monday.

During an interview with Israeli news website NRG last week, Netanyahu promised that if re-elected as Israeli Prime Minister he would prevent the establishment of a Palestinian State in the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza.

“I think anyone who is going to establish a Palestinian state and to evacuate territory is giving radical Islam a staging ground against the State of Israel,” Netanyahu said.

With opinion polls prior to the election showing Netanyahu’s Likud falling behind Isaac Herzog’s Zionist Union, he urged citizens to vote, claiming that the right-wing government is in danger, due to the fact that “Arab voters are coming out in droves to the polls,” and “Left-wing organizations are busing them out.”

Netanyahu won in a narrow victory on Wednesday with his Likud party winning 30 seats and surpassing Herzog’s Zionist Union, which won 24 seats.

Obama told the Huffington Post that when he called Netanyahu on Thursday to congratulate him on the Likud party’s victory, he said that given Netanyahu’s statement prior to the election, “it is going to be hard to find a path where people are seriously believing that negotiations are possible.”

We indicated that that kind of rhetoric was contrary to what is the best of Israel’s traditions,” Obama said. “That although Israel was founded based on the historic Jewish homeland and the need to have a Jewish homeland, Israeli democracy has been premised on everybody in the country being treated equally and fairly.

White House Exempts Office of Administration from FOIA Requests

On Tuesday, the White House published a notice in the Federal Register, deleting the regulation that required the Office of Administration to be subject to public information requests, which would have required a response under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

The Office of Administration is made up of seven offices that are in charge of overseeing the general administration of the entire Executive Office.

The notice published in the Federal Register said that the White House is “removing regulations from the Code of Federal Regulations related to the status of records created and maintained by the Executive Office of the President.”

This action is being taken in order to align Office of Administration policy with well-settled legal interpretations of the Office of Administration’s status under Federal law and Executive Orders, including the Freedom of Information Act, the Privacy Act of 1974, and Executive Order 13526,” stated the notice.

At a press conference on Tuesday, Press Secretary Josh Earnest claimed that even with the change in rules, the Obama administration is the “most transparent administration in history.” He referred to the repeal as an “administrative change,” and said that it has “no impact on our compliance with the Freedom of Information Act.

This change in the regulations is merely an effort to comply with a court ruling that was issued almost six years ago,” said Earnest, referencing an appeals court ruling from 2009 that made the Office of Administration exempt from FOIA. The ruling was the result of a lawsuit filed against the Bush administration by the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).

Anne Weismann, a member of CREW, told USA Today that the repeal is “completely out of step with the president’s supposed commitment to transparency.

You have a president who comes in and says, ‘I’m committed to transparency and agencies should make discretionary disclosures whenever possible,’ but he’s not applying that to his own White House,” Weismann said.

According to The Hill, the Obama administration has “censored or denied access to records more frequently than ever in 2013” and has “cited more legal reasons than ever for exempting them.”

USA Today noted that the timing of the repeal has “raised eyebrows among transparency advocates,” due to the fact that it was made on National Freedom of Information Day, in the midst of a debate over the preservation of Obama administration records, and during Sunshine Week, which is devoted to news organizations and watchdog groups highlighting issues of government transparency.

 

Benghazi Chairman: There are “Huge Gaps” in Hillary Clinton’s Email Records

Last week, it was revealed that rumored 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton used her private email for government business during her four years as Secretary of State. The House Committee investigating the September 11, 2012, terrorist attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, issued subpoenas on Wednesday for all of Clinton’s emails related to Libya.

On Sunday, the chairman of the Benghazi Committee, Republican Representative Trey Gowdy, said that although Clinton provided 50,000 pages of emails, documentation from her trip to Libya following the terrorist attacks was not included.

Gowdy appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer on Sunday, and he confirmed that there were “huge gaps” in the email records that were given to the Benghazi Committee.

Gowdy said that while Clinton’s emails are still under investigation, there would be no “selective releases” of the messages. “If she wants to release all of them, with the emphasis being on the word all, she’s welcome to do that. I can’t stop her from doing it,” Gowdy said. “But serious investigations don’t make selective releases.”

When asked about any significant gaps in the emails Clinton turned over to the Committee, Gowdy said that there were several “huge gaps” that raise questions about Clinton’s credibility.

There are gaps of months and months and months,” Gowdy said. “And if you think to that iconic picture of her on a C-17 flying to Libya, she has sunglasses on and she has her handheld device in her hand, we have no e-mails from that day. In fact, we have no e-mails from that trip.”

Gowdy said that it shouldn’t be up to Clinton to decide “what is a public record and what’s not.” He explained that he ultimately blames the State Department for allowing the arrangement, and for not doing anything about it until they received a request from the House Committee on Benghazi.

In an interview with CBS News on Saturday, President Obama said he learned of Clinton’s use of private email at “the same time everybody else learned it through news reports.”

On Monday, the Associated Press reported that while Obama was aware that Clinton conducted business using a private email account, he was not aware that she was using a private server to send those emails.

Josh Earnest, a spokesman for the White House, confirmed that Obama exchanged emails with Clinton using her private email address. “The president — as I think many people expected — did over the course of his first several years in office trade emails with the secretary of state,” Earnest said.

March 12, 2015: UPDATE: Fact Check: Holes in Hillary’s Email Story