And we're congratulating ourselves for keeping IS out of Baghdad.Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno said Monday he is "somewhat" confident that the Iraqi army can defend Baghdad from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
"I believe the capability is there to defend Baghdad. ... But we'll have to see what plays out over the coming days," he told reporters at the Association of the United States Army on Monday.
The Hill
We don’t need no steenkeen context.A soon-to-be released Senate report on the CIA doesn’t assess the responsibility of former President George W. Bush or his top aides for any of the abuses of the agency’s detention and interrogation program, avoiding a full public accounting of one of the darkest chapters of the war on terror.
[...]
The Senate Intelligence Committee report also didn’t examine the responsibility of top Bush administration lawyers in crafting the legal framework .
“This report is not about the White House. It’s not about the president. It’s not about criminal liability. It’s about the CIA’s actions or inactions,” said a person familiar with the document, who asked not to be further identified because the executive summary – the only part to that will be made public – still is in the final stages of declassification.
Mclatchy
So Obama’s “much more aggressive way” to deal with Ebola is to call out the guards to bring the hammer down on you panicking, rioting mobs. Will they be guarding hospitals?President Barack Obama has authorized the Pentagon to call up reserve and National Guard troops if they are needed to assist in the U.S. response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
[...]
In announcing the executive order permitting the deployment of National Guard troops, the White House said the additional personnel would not be providing direct health care aid in the countries.
alJazeera
That’s encouraging, isn’t it?Also on Thursday, federal health officials in the U.S. said they still don't know how two Dallas nurses caught Ebola from a patient.
Confidence is good. Unmerited confidence can be downright deadly.Nevertheless, Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said "despite these latest incidents, we remain confident that our public health and health care systems can prevent an Ebola outbreak here," in prepared testimony for the hearing on Capitol Hill.
So you say. (The New York Post called it a "cursory" exam.) Even if he truly did not have the virus, at this date, his symptoms should have triggered more caution.A male passenger who died after vomiting on a trans-Atlantic flight from Nigeria to New York sparked panic he could be carrying the Ebola virus. However, initial tests on the 63-year-old man show that he tested negative to the virus.
RT
And all the passengers were just let go?[O]nce airborne, the man complained of vomiting during the flight and was sick in his seat. He died sometime before the plane landed at JFK.
[...]
Upon the plane's arrival at the terminal at around 6am local time, the door was left open connecting the plane to the airport building, “which a lot of the first responders found alarming.”
Now THAT’s what you should do when you realize you may have had some chance of being exposed. Not call the CDC with a slight fever and then fly to another city to rummage through bridal shops.A Dallas healthcare worker who handled a lab specimen from an Ebola-infected man has self-quarantined on a Caribbean cruise ship, according to a report by the Associated Press.
The Hill
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.It’s not clear whether the worker has contracted Ebola, but State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki in a statement said the woman had shown no signs of the disease and has been asymptomatic for nearly three weeks.
Public affairs officer on cocaine. What would some of his PR slogans for the Navy be?Hunter Biden, the youngest son of the vice president, was discharged from the Navy Reserve in February after he tested positive for cocaine, the Navy said.
[...]
The service did not give a reason earlier this year when it discharged the 44-year-old Biden barely a year after he was selected for the part-time position as a public affairs officer in the Navy Reserve.
He needed one waiver to join the Navy because of his age. He also received a second Navy waiver because of a drug-related incident when he was a young man, according to The Wall Street Journal.
[...]
“It was the honor of my life to serve in the US Navy, and I deeply regret and am embarrassed that my actions led to my administrative discharge,” [Biden] said.
NYPost
So now we can say we only gave them tanks and small arms, while the EVIL RUSSIANS gave them planes.Islamic State militants in Syria are training Iraqi pilots who joined the group to fly in three captured fighter jets, Reuters reported citing witnesses.
"They have trainers, Iraqi officers who were pilots before for [former Iraqi President] Saddam Hussein," said Rami Abdulrahman, who runs the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR). "People saw the flights. They went up many times from the airport."
The “same resources” have told SOHR activists that the Islamist fighters seized three aircrafts after taking control over the military airports in Aleppo and al Raqqa provinces.
[...]
The jets "flying at a low altitude over the area", which witnesses said defined as MiG 21 or MiG 23 models, were captured from the Syrian military. It was not clear whether or not they were equipped with weaponry.
RT
No, you can’t. We have, as a nation, become blatant and overt about our perceived right to rule the world in any fashion and by any means we choose.(Eleven years [after the US sponsored coup on the Venezuelan democratically elected president Hugo Chávez], upon Chávez’s death, the Times editors admitted that “the Bush administration badly damaged Washington’s reputation throughout Latin America when it unwisely blessed a failed 2002 military coup attempt against Mr. Chávez” [the paper forgot to mention that it, too, blessed (and misled its readers about) that coup]. The editors then also acknowledged the rather significant facts that Chávez’s “redistributionist policies brought better living conditions to millions of poor Venezuelans” and “there is no denying his popularity among Venezuela’s impoverished majority.”
If you think The New York Times editorial page has learned any lessons from that debacle, you’d be mistaken. Today they published an editorial expressing grave concern about the state of democracy in Latin America generally and Bolivia specifically. The proximate cause of this concern? The overwhelming election victory of Bolivian President Evo Morales.[...][D]espite how popular [socialist leaders] are with their own citizens and how much they’ve improved the lives of millions of their nations’ long-oppressed and impoverished minorities, they are depicted as grave threats to “democracy.”[...]Even as [the Times editors] admit that “it is easy to see why many Bolivians would want to see Mr. Morales, the country’s first president with indigenous roots, remain at the helm” – because “during his tenure, the economy of the country, one of the least developed in the hemisphere, grew at a healthy rate, the level of inequality shrank and the number of people living in poverty dropped significantly” - they nonetheless chide Bolivia’s neighbors for endorsing his ongoing rule: “it is troubling that the stronger democracies in Latin America seem happy to condone it.”[...]But the real reason the NYT so vehemently dislikes these elected leaders and ironically views them as threats to “democracy” becomes crystal clear toward the end of the editorial (emphasis added):This regional dynamic has been dismal for Washington’s influence in the region. In Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, the new generation of caudillos [sic] have staked out anti-American policies and limited the scope of engagement on development, military cooperation and drug enforcement efforts. This has damaged the prospects for trade and security cooperation.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.It is, for instance, democratically elected U.S. leaders who imprison people without charges for years, build secret domestic spying systems, and even assert the power to assassinate their own citizens without due process.
[...]
But the very idea that the U.S. government and its media allies are motivated by those flaws is nothing short of laughable. Many of the U.S. government’s closest allies are the world’s worst regimes, beginning with the uniquely oppressive Saudi kingdom (which just yesterday sentenced a popular Shiite dissident to death) and the brutal military coup regime in Egypt [...] And, of course, the U.S. supports Israel in every way imaginable even as its Secretary of State expressly recognizes the “apartheid” nature of its policy path.
[...]
That’s because “democracy” in U.S. discourse means: “serving U.S. interests” and “obeying U.S. dictates,” regardless how how the leaders gain and maintain power.
Cancer IS a big business, after all.WikiLeaks on Thursday published an updated version of the negotiating texts of a controversial and highly secretive trade agreement [Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)] between the United States and 11 other member nations.
[...]
Foreseeable delays in the distribution of lifesaving medications is among the chief concerns raised by TPP’s critics. According to Public Citizen, a non-profit group that examined the texts in collaboration with WikiLeaks, “Access to affordable cancer treatments in the U.S and 11 other countries would be delayed for years if terms revealed today in the leaked [TPP draft] were to go into effect.”
Daily Dot
Good God, Madge!Nearly all of the changes proposed by the U.S. advantage corporate entities by expanding monopolies on knowledge goods, such as drug patents, and impose restrictive copyright policies worldwide. If it came into force, TPP would even allow pharmaceutical companies to sue the U.S. whenever changes to regulatory standards or judicial decisions affected their profits.
And for that, we thank you.“Proposed language makes it easier to get successive, secondary patents on minor changes to or new uses of existing medicines and patent term extensions that increase pricing discretion and monopoly profits on vital medicines, but at the cost of reduced access to poor and uninsured patients,” said [Professor Brook] Baker, a senior policy analyst for Health GAP (Global Access Project).
[...]
“The selective secrecy surrounding the TPP negotiations, which has let in a few cashed-up megacorps but excluded everyone else, reveals a telling fear of public scrutiny,” Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder and editor-in-chief, said on Thursday. “By publishing this text we allow the public to engage in issues that will have such a fundamental impact on their lives.”
And that is supposed to make people feel safe? Really. He’s expected to be safe. He’s superman. The rest of us are mortals. Or did he just think we would be worried about him?Mr. Obama directed his aides to monitor the spread of Ebola in the United States “in a much more aggressive way,” but said Americans should remain confident of the government’s ability to prevent a widespread outbreak. He promised that a review of the Ebola cases in Dallas would discover what allowed the two hospital workers to be infected, but he said that he himself had come into close contact with the nurses who treated Ebola patients at the Emory University hospital, and that he had felt safe doing so.
NYT
Oh, you’re so brave, dear leader."I want to use myself as an example just so people have a sense of the science here. I shook hands with, hugged, and kissed, not the doctors, but a couple of the nurses at Emory because of the valiant work that they did in treating one of the patients," Obama said. "They followed the protocols, they knew what they were doing, and I felt perfectly safe doing so.
Bretibart
“I want people to understand that the dangers of you contracting Ebola, the dangers of a serious outbreak, are extraordinarily low, but we are taking this very seriously at the highest levels of government,” Mr. Obama said.
NYT
Imagine that.Still, there was widespread unease.
Let’s see…how many passengers were there in five more flights?The Frontier jet that carried Ms. Vinson on Monday made five flights the next day, according to Flightaware.com. Frontier, which is based in Denver, said it grounded the plane as soon as it was notified, about 1 a.m. Wednesday, about the Ebola patient.
Four. Only four. How soon can those units fill up?Ms. Vinson was ill but stable as she was transferred Wednesday to Emory, one of four hospitals in the United States that have special containment units for isolating patients with dangerous infectious diseases.
Awww. That’s great.Tara Mosley-Samples, a longtime friend of Ms. Vinson’s mother and a city councilwoman in Akron, Ohio, said Ms. Vinson studied nursing at Kent State and moved to Texas about a year ago. “They’re just good people,” Ms. Mosley-Samples said. “Her daughter, Amber, is the sweetest little girl in the world.”
Heads up bridal shops! Perhaps a list of the stores they were in would be a public service to Cleveland.[Vinson] had recently become engaged. She flew home to plan for her wedding with her mother, said Toinette Parrilla, director of the Cleveland Department of Public Health. “They were doing their bridal shopping and going to the bridal stores,” she said.
Nicky Hager is an independent journalist. He does not have a corporation or any company defense help available. If you can, donate here: https://freedom.press/bundle/nicky-hager-legal-defenseAgents from New Zealand’s national police force ransacked the home of a prominent independent journalist earlier this month who was collaborating with The Intercept on stories from the NSA archive furnished by Edward Snowden. The stated purpose of the 10-hour police raid was to identify the source for allegations that the reporter, Nicky Hager, recently published in a book that caused a major political firestorm and led to the resignation of a top government minister.
[...]
Once they entered the property, detectives spent ten hours sifting through Hager and his family’s personal effects, making copies of any USB storage devices they found and seizing Hager’s computer, personal documents, a camera, a dictaphone, CDs, and dozens of other items—not to mention his daughter’s laptop, cellphones, and iPod. [Hager was out of town. His 22-year-old daughter was alone when the police raided the home.]
[...]
Whether or not Hager’s work with The Intercept may have partially motivated the raid, the situation underscores the dangers of using invasive law enforcement tactics against reporters—they impede the reporting process, render source relationships very difficult to protect, and offer the very authorities that reporters are attempting to hold accountable a window into their ongoing reporting. (The Intercept‘s collaboration with Hager will proceed.)
[...]
Press freedoms are under increasing assault in the English-speaking world—there have been similar controversies in the other Five Eyes alliance nations of the U.S., the U.K., Australia, and Canada—and the ability of New Zealand police officers to cavalierly raid the home of a reporter who has criticized the government in power threatens to establish a dangerous precedent everywhere reporters operate.
[...]
Hager is challenging the legality of the warrant in court, and the property that was seized remains sealed and unavailable to the police for the time being.
Although he is being represented by pro bono counsel, Hager has already incurred legal expenses reaching into the thousands of dollars, and New Zealand’s “loser pays” provision could subject him to a very large monetary judgment if he loses. The Freedom of the Press Foundation campaign to raise money for Hager is intended to help him fight for the return of his property, challenge the legality of the raid, and defend himself against any potential future threats stemming from his work as a journalist.
Glenn Greenwald
