Big Oil to the World: FU

Monday saw the release of the latest climate report from the planet’s scientists. Predictions of famine, flood, and so on – mostly what we already knew, in even more striking language.

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[T]he report [...] demonstrated that if Exxon Mobil and its ilk [continue] to dig up their reserves and burn them, then the planet will no longer function effectively. br />
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On [the same day,] [Exxon Mobil] issued two reports, in formal response to a shareholder resolution that demanded they disclose their carbon risk and talk about how they planned to deal with the fact that they and other oil giants have many times more carbon in their collective reserves than scientists say we can safely burn. The company said that government restrictions that would force it to keep its reserves in the ground were “highly unlikely,” and that they would not only dig them all up and burn them, but would continue to search for more gas and oil — a search that currently consumes about $100 million of its investors’ money every single day.

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Exxon’s statements are easy to translate: “We plan on overheating the planet, we think we have the political muscle to keep doing it, and we dare you to stop it.”

  Guardian

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Kerry Is Tired

US secretary of state John Kerry, who has made it a personal mission to breathe life into the long-stalled peace talks between Palestine and Israel, hinted on Friday that the negotiations are on the brink of collapse and said the Obama administration would reasses its participation in the process.

[...]

On Thursday, Israel scrapped the scheduled release of a group of Palestinian prisoners and called for the entire US-sponsored negotiations to be reviewed.

Kerry appeared to express frustration with the failure of both sides to make progress. “They say they want to continue,” he said of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas. “But we are not going to sit there indefinitely. This is not an open-ended effort. It's reality-check time.”

  Guardian

Reality check. Give that man a mirror on US participation in the problem.

We can back out now, because, hey, we’ve got drones. Who needs peace talks when you’ve got drones?

Extended Empire

This week, the Associated Press exposed a secret program run by the U.S. Agency for International Development to create “a Twitter-like Cuban communications network” run through “secret shell companies” in order to create the false appearance of being a privately owned operation. Unbeknownst to the service’s Cuban users was the fact that “American contractors were gathering their private data in the hope that it might be used for political purposes”–specifically, to manipulate those users in order to foment dissent in Cuba and subvert its government.

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Documents prepared by NSA and its British counterpart GCHQ–and previously published by The Intercept as well as some by NBC News–detailed several of those programs, including a unit devoted in part to “discrediting” the agency’s enemies with false information spread online.

  Glenn Greenwald (additional reference links are in the article)

And, there’s a great scramble to get distance from the program.

The Obama administration defended its creation of a Twitter-like Cuban communications network to undermine the communist government, declaring the secret program was "invested and debated" by Congress and wasn't a covert operation that required White House approval.

But two senior Democrats on congressional intelligence and judiciary committees said Thursday they had known nothing about the effort, which one of them described as "dumb, dumb, dumb." [That was Patrick Leahy.] A showdown with that senator's panel is expected next week.

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"We also offered to brief our appropriators and our authorizers," said State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf. She added that she was hearing on Capitol Hill that many people support these kinds of democracy promotion programs. And some lawmakers did speak up on that subject. But by late Thursday no members of Congress had acknowledged being aware of the Cuban Twitter program earlier than this week.

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White House spokesman Jay Carney said he was not aware of individuals in the White House who had known about the program.

  Yahoo

Well, apparently, one individual was aware of it…one very high up individual…and “defended its creation.”

USAID and its contractors went to extensive lengths to conceal Washington's ties to the project, according to interviews and documents obtained by the AP. They set up front companies in Spain and the Cayman Islands to hide the money trail, and recruited CEOs without telling them they would be working on a U.S. taxpayer-funded project.

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Similarly, subscribers' messages were funneled through two other countries — and never through American-based computer servers.

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"That is not what USAID should be doing," said Rep. Jason Chaffetz, the Republican chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform National Security Subcommittee. "USAID is flying the American flag and should be recognized around the globe as an honest broker of doing good. If they start participating in covert, subversive activities, the credibility of the United States is diminished."

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At minimum, details uncovered by the AP appear to muddy the USAID's longstanding claims that it does not conduct covert actions, and the details could undermine the agency's mission to deliver aid to the world's poor and vulnerable — an effort that requires the trust and cooperation of foreign governments.

Let me put that in “truth speak.” The citizens of every other nation in the world know that USAID is an arm of the US government which funds and supports destabilization in enemy – i.e. politically opposed – countries. (Bolivia's president expelled USAID from that country in 2013.) The “trust and cooperation of foreign governments” has nothing to do with the actuality of non-political aid to their citizens. Other governments are allowing USAID to operate in their countries – the revelation will affect whether they continue to, but it will have nothing to do with trust. Cooperation, yes. Trust, no.

"I know they said we were notified," Leahy told AP. "We were notified in the most oblique way, that nobody could understand it. I'm going to ask two basic questions: Why weren't we specifically told about this if you're asking us for money? And secondly, whose bright idea was this anyway?"

I’M going to ask ONE basic question: If you didn’t understand something, if you were notified only “in the most oblique way,” why were you funding it?

The estimated $1.6 million spent on ZunZuneo was publicly earmarked for an unspecified project in Pakistan.

I see.

ZunZuneo vanished abruptly in 2012, and the Communist Party remains in power

The story is that the grant period ran out. Sure. (I thought it was money diverted from Pakistan?) I suppose what actually happened is that’s when the Cuban government got too close.

The annual SIGDEV conference, according to one NSA document published today by The Intercept, “enables unprecedented visibility of SIGINT Development activities from across the Extended Enterprise, Second Party and US Intelligence communities.”

“The Extended Empire?”

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Venezuelan Riots - Maduro's Response to US Press

Today, the Obama administration spends at least $5 million annually to support opposition movements in Venezuela. A bill calling for an additional $15 million for these anti-government organizations is now in Congress. Congress is also deciding whether to impose sanctions on Venezuela. I hope that the American people, knowing the truth, will decide that Venezuela and its people do not deserve such punishment, and will call upon their representatives not to enact sanctions.

   Nicolás Maduro, President of Venezuela, in the NYT

If you read the article, you will see President Maduro's version of the truth. It differs widely from the American (US) press, as you might imagine.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The Logical Follow-Up to Citizens United

A 5-4 split decision handed down Wednesday morning by the Supreme Court of the United States has invalidated a long-standing law that limited the overall amount of money US citizens can contribute to political campaigns each election cycle.

The landmark ruling in the case of McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission will not directly impact a law that currently keeps Americans from legally being able to contribute more than $2,600 apiece to individual candidates running for federal office each two-year period. It does, however, erase a so-called “aggregate cap” of $123,200 that up until now prevented people from contributing a combined total of more than $48,600 to the candidates of their choice and $74,000 on parties and Political Action Committees, or PACS, each cycle.

Plaintiff Shaun McCutcheon, a conservative electrical engineer from Alabama, insisted that the limits in place hindered his freedom of speech because it prohibited his ability to donate freely to the politicians he favored. During the last cycle, McCutcheon contributed the symbolically significant amount of $1,776 apiece to a total of 15 right-leaning candidates running for Congress, but FEC restrictions prohibited him from spending much more because signing checks to other candidates would have quickly put him over the aggregate cap.

  RT

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) denounced the ruling saying it would fundamentally undermine American democracy. “The Supreme Court is paving the way toward an oligarchic form of society in which a handful of billionaires like the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson will control our political process,” he said in a statement.

  Bill Moyers

Oh, hell, I think they already do.

Casualties of War

An Iraq War veteran being treated for mental health issues opened fire at Fort Hood military base on Wednesday, killing three people and wounding 16 others before committing suicide. The attack took place on the same Texas site where more than a dozen people were slain in 2009, authorities said.

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Wednesday's shooting was the third rampage at U.S. military base in just over six months, with memories still fresh from shootings at the Washington Navy Yard in September and late last month at Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia.

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Lopez had served for four months in Iraq in 2011. He was not physically wounded in action, but self-reported a traumatic brain injury before returning to the U.S., the Associated Press reported.

  

A traumatic brain injury is not a physical wound?  Or did he just report one when he didn't have one?

Lopez arrived at Fort Hood in February from another base in Texas. He was taking medication and receiving psychiatric help for deprrssion and anxiety, officials said.

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[He] had been undergoing an assessment before the attack to determine if he had post-traumatic stress disorder, Milley said.

Case closed.

40 Days and 40 Nights

No, not the Noah movie, again. A rainy day treat, in case you missed it the several years you've had the chance:



And I'm willing to bet you haven't seen this:



And this guy....brilliant.

Congratulations, Glenn

[Glenn Greenwald, the] journalist most associated with the coverage of Edward Snowden's leak of phone and Internet surveillance by the National Security Agency will be this year's recipient of the University of Georgia's McGill Medal for Journalistic Courage.

  Fox

I'm going to assume he will at least verbally share the award with Laura Poitras and Barton Gellman, who traveled with him to Hong Kong and met with Snowden. In fact, had it not been for Laura Poitras, Greenwald may have missed the opportunity entirely, as Snowden was about to give up trying to get a response from him.

The Torture Report

A report by the Senate Intelligence Committee concludes that the CIA misled the government and the public about aspects of its brutal interrogation program for years — concealing details about the severity of its methods, overstating the significance of plots and prisoners, and taking credit for critical pieces of intelligence that detainees had in fact surrendered before they were subjected to harsh techniques.

  WaPo

The surprise here is that the Intel Committee admits it

“The CIA described [its program] repeatedly both to the Department of Justice and eventually to Congress as getting unique, otherwise unobtainable intelligence that helped disrupt terrorist plots and save thousands of lives,” said one U.S. official briefed on the report. “Was that actually true? The answer is no.”

Current and former U.S. officials who described the report spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue and because the document remains classified.

Don’t hold your breath for it to be released. We are many months away from even the executive summary to be sent to the big O and eventually released to the public – heavily redacted, perhaps.

Classified files [...] reveal internal divisions over the interrogation program, [...] including one case in which CIA employees left the agency’s secret prison in Thailand after becoming disturbed by the brutal measures being employed there [and other] cases in which officials at CIA headquarters demanded the continued use of harsh interrogation techniques even after analysts were convinced that prisoners had no more information to give.

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The report [...] does not recommend new administrative punishment or further criminal inquiry into a program that the Justice Department has investigated repeatedly.

Of course it doesn’t.

Current and former [CIA] officials, however, have privately described the study as marred by factual errors and misguided conclusions.

Of course they have.

Officials said a former CIA interrogator named Charlie Wise was forced to retire in 2003 after being suspected of abusing Abu Zubaida [...] . Wise was also implicated in the abuse at Salt Pit. He died of a heart attack shortly after retiring from the CIA, former U.S. intelligence officials said.

A heart attack courtesy of the CIA, would be my guess.

Details surrounding the CIA’s activities have been one of the most contentious issues concerning the commissions at Guantánamo, where the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and his co-defendants are on trial. Their alleged treatment while in CIA custody has been a key stumbling block in the hearings’ progress. The same goes for the man alleged to be behind the USS Cole bombing, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, another former CIA captive.

In both cases, there have been dozens of delays — mainly due to the fact that the attorneys have been battling military prosecutors over access to classified information about the CIA interrogation program that the attorneys want to use as evidence. Both cases have been dragging on for two years and are still in the pretrial evidentiary phase.

But now that the Senate Intelligence Committee appears set to vote on releasing its long-awaited 6,300-page, $50 million study — or at least some portion of it — the defense attorneys will finally get the opportunity to talk openly at the military commissions about torture. That could prove disastrous for military prosecutors. According to defense attorneys and human rights observers who have been monitoring the proceedings, it might also derail the government’s attempts to convince a jury that the detainees, if convicted, deserve to be executed.

  alJazeera

My guess is the USG and military are currently hunkered down figuring how they are going to come out best. They still have time.

The Second Fall of Rome?

Crimean dominoes?

First Venice, now Sicily.

Independence activists marched through the center of the Sicilian capital city of Palermo on Sunday, demanding a referendum of the island's population on the question of leaving the Italian republic. Activists, inspired by the example of the recent informal referendum of Venetians, say that Sicily is being 'robbed' by the Italian state and the European Union.

  RT

Which is no doubt true.