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Thursday, July 27, 2017

Shut 'Em Down!

In these days of false news  and the growing focus on mobilizing 'the grass roots'  to do your revolutions, or demand 'justis', or lock somebody up,  is it much of a surprise when some governments that really can't stand much heat, or dissident viewpoints,  enlist the help of the grassroots to shut down 'propaganda'?  Rather than trying to cope with it?

In Canada the former government - through its self-defined 'grass roots' mandate - took it into mind to have a good look at registered charities. As a result of which a number of charities that had objectives 'at odds' with government policies,  found themselves un-registered or investigated by the tax department or both.  It had a chilling effect on donations and doing much to help, except for 'big charity', or - even better - political parties.

So it's not much of a surprise to see this to-day

BBC News lambastes 'war via charity'.

Of course the BBC has less to do with this than Sam Bright, another freelance journalist who thinks he's found something that Kyiv already knows, and through him,  the 'revolutionary government of dignity' that unseated the last lot. Not only have they been running a fruitless little ATO (anti-terror Operation) in Lugansk and Donetsk regions, they have also been somewhat peeved by a couple  of westerners who simply will not be shut up. Until now, perhaps,  if they can get themselves banned on fund-raising sites.

Britain came out early on the side of the Maidan 'angels', buying into the myth of 'democracy' and the need for Euro-closeness (who would have thought Britain would have reversed its own need of 'Eurocloseness' before the revolution of dignity was completed)?  The Brits are still 'hyper-Euro' for EUkrainia, however. Just last week they sentenced a Brit (assisting terror) , who had foolishly been subject of a BBC piece on Brits fighting against the Kyiv government, to 7 years in the slammer. A simlar piece on a Brit fighting FOR the Kyiv government, got him some public recognition and no penalty at all.

The problem this time is with an American fighter and two newsies who have been known to do some charitable work in the Donbass,  as well as write about the 'war' there.  The subjects of this piece are Americans: anti-fascist 'warrior' Russell Bentley and videographer/helper Patrick Lancaster and British videographer/reporter  Graham Phillips.  All three have little good to say about the technocrats in Kyiv or the army of louts they have unleashed on the 'Russians'.

I don't know how much real fighting Russell Bentley  has actually done - he talks a good game - but his videography is wide-ranging and depicts many facets of life in the 'novorussian' regions,.  He often depicts himself, armed and in military gear,  but is not very often depicted in combat operations. He does give some valuable insights into a lot of things we do not see on 'mainstream' media and,  if the camera lens doesn't lie, it adds to our understanding of the situation,   a dimension we certainly won't get from the 'what war'/ 'Putin Invades' department in Kyiv.



Graham Phillips has been documenting his time in Ukraine since well before the polyankiy went up. He was there for a large amount of the Maidan 'celebrations' and on both sides of the line as a 'good thing' went sour.  Since the actual fighting has started,  his 'slant' has been increasingly anti-Maidan,  to the extent that, now,  he is a marked man,with a price on his head for illegal entry into Ukraine ( all  three have done that) as well as 'inciting violence'.  He is the subject of a couple of attempted government intimidations in Great Britain.   Phillips has done his anti-Ukrainian 'reportage'  in a number of places outside Ukraine. He is a fluent Russian-speaker and often has  an infuriating effect on Ukrainians he interviews, or depicts. Phillips was  wounded during the first year of the fighting and has documented the horrors of war.

Patrick Lancaster is truly a 'oner' with a gut feel for the people affected by this trouble and a willingness to do what he can to help. He not only documents the home front and the little things that give the impression that the people of the dissident regions are truly 'soldiering on', he also reports on,  and has been exposed to,  the fighting itself. At Christmas time last year,  he was visiting the trenches in the Delbaltsevo area - on the occasion of another  failed government 'tooth-breaking' attempted territorial integration.  His reports showed actual artillery and mortar barrages striking within meters of his position -  front line reporting at its best.  Lancaster is one of the three who claims to be running a one-man charitable operation,  as well as reporting. He has done stories on delivering relief supplies  that  he has purchased for civilians with donations of money he has received.




While the initial problem is what these men do, the BBC is carping about how they raise the money to do it.

For all three are 'free lancer' journalists,  who wouldn't be employed (any longer - for at least one was) by western media .  The BBC claims they are using "crowd funding" and 'charitable donations ' to fund their 'war activities'. The BBC claims that "Go Fund Me" or "Indigogo" being two  that Bentley's supposedly recommending. The BBC claims that Bentley  has raised over $2 000,  while pointing out that a similar 'charity' raised $2.5 million for victims of the Manchester bombing (huh?). Last time I looked,  Indiegogo wasn't a charity fundraiser and,  while Gofundme might be used for that purpose, one would have to be able to 'sell' the case for giving. The BBC fails to mention that all of three of them use 'Patreon',  another 'pay site' dedicated to supporting independent writers and artists, a category into which these three definitely fit. At least two of them have been banned by common payment sources like Paypal  but can receive money directly through email addresses and credit card companies.

Just Add Klinger: This IS America - David Sockman

I found this piece which for me pretty-well summs up America to-day, or what might pass for cogent discussion around the complex pool.  Minus the transgendered community - not that you see many of them around the complex pool - at least any obvious (or really, REALLY good) ones.

Quote:

Home Alone – Trump Is the Kevin McCallister of American Politics

It’s as if on election night the shocked and exasperated rulers of the Imperial City ordered Donald Trump to sleep in the White House attic. Unlike Kevin McCallister’s family in the movie, however, the establishment never stopped obsessing about his bratty insolence and never intended for him to rejoin the family the next morning – or ever.

Instead, the Washington political establishment and its collaborators in the main stream media are engaged in an unabashed and unconcealed campaign to remove the Donald from even the figurative White House attic where he now dwells with his Twitter account.

The evidence for that lies right in the threadbare and preposterous pretext for this de facto coup. Namely, the alleged Russian meddling and collusion campaign, which took another body-slam this morning in the form of son-in-law Jared Kushner’s written congressional testimony about the Trump campaign’s now endlessly ballyhooed June 2016 meeting with the "Russians".

That this meeting was a giant nothingburger should have been evident enough from the politically illiterate email of the meeting’s arranger, Rob Goldstone. The latter was a former British tabloid journalist and Vodka-chugging music world pimp, who happened to be under contract with Emin Agalarov, the Russian pop star.

"Emin", as he is known Madonna-style, also happens to be the son of a Moscow real estate billionaire who had provided the venue for Trump’s 2013 Miss Universe contest, and has since become a pal of sorts of Donald Jr. But as it happened, the promised dirt on Hillary was only the come-on for the meeting.

The real reason is plain as day. The elder Agalarov’s company, the Crocus Group, was having trouble with the Magnitsky Act and wanted its hired attorney-advocate, one Natalia Veselnitskaya, to make a pitch on the matter to the Trumps.

So what! Actually, the shady part of this episode is the Magnitsky Act itself. The latter is just another of the Imperial City’s arrogant "sanctions" against what it deems – in its plenary moral superiority – to be the misbehavior of foreign people in their own counties.

In this case, the act was single-handedly lobbied into law based on the cock-and-bull story of an American swindler and scoundrel, Bill Browder. He happens to be the grandson of a former Communist Party candidate for Vice-President of the U.S., but his billions were made, ironically, in Russia’s post-Soviet wild west during the 1990s.

At length, Browder was invited to leave the country forthwith by Putin during his campaign to stop the plundering of Russia’s economy by foreign speculators. Whether Vlad wanted the loot for himself is beside the point. The fact is, Browder was no investment genius, and like the other western gunslingers who pillaged Russia during the Boris Yeltsin era, he essentially stole his fortune.

In any event, Rob Goldstone’s knowledge of Russia was apparently limited to Vodka brands since Ms. Veselnitskaya, was definitely not, as Goldstone’s email averred, the "Crown prosecutor of Russia". The last to hold that esteemed office was assassinated by the Bolsheviks at the time Czar Nicholas and his family were shot dead by the same in July 1918.

Nor was Ms. Veselnitskaya a "Russian government attorney" as Goldstone averred in a subsequent email, nor did she possess "very high level and sensitive information" that would "incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia".

And plainly she was not a Kremlin agent sent to America to ensnare the Donald in Putin’s lair. She didn’t even speak English and was in the US on a special visa waiver granted by the Obama Justice Department to permit her to represent a Russian national charged under the Magnitsky Act.
In short, the Trump campaign took the meeting because Goldstone had contacted them on behalf of the one major Russian family that the Donald & Sons apparently knew – and on the basis of a promise of dirty laundry about Hillary that was a complete ruse.

So today comes the smoking gun evidence. It seems that Jared Kushner sought to end the meeting within 10 minutes when it became clear Natalia was there to lobby against the Magnitsky Act, not to dump the dirt on Hillary; and Kushner has a record to prove it – a contemporaneous email he sent during the middle of the meeting:

"[I]n looking for a polite way to leave and get back to my work," he says in the statement, "I actually emailed an assistant from the meeting after I had been there for ten or so minutes and wrote ‘Can u pls call me on my cell? Need excuse to get out of meeting.’ I had not met the attorney before the meeting nor spoken with her since. I thought nothing more of this short meeting until it came to my attention recently."

Another highlight: "With respect to my contacts with Russia or Russian representatives during the campaign, there were hardly any. … [T]he day after the election, I could not even remember the name of the Russian Ambassador. … I sent an email asking [Dmitri Simes of the Center for the National Interest, which hosted a Trump foreign policy speech], ‘What is the name of the Russian ambassador?’"

This not only drowns the "Donnie Jr. did it" meme in gallons of cold water, but also puts the spotlight on the barrenness of the entire RussiaGate defamation campaign against Trump.
To wit, just as Jarred scurried-up his old emails for the Congressional investigators, there is absolutely no reason why the Donald should not do the same with respect to all of the NSA intercepts that bear on the alleged Russian hacking, meddling and collusion campaign.

As President, he has the authority to declassify them and indeed the obligation to do so. And not only to save himself, but to clarify to the American public that the Kremlin did not attack our sacred democratic process; and that rather than more idiotic "sanctions" to "punish" Russia, what needs to happen is the arrest and prosecution of the Deep State operatives and Obama Administration political hacks – Brennan, Rice, and Power, at least – who concocted, leaked and fomented among the main stream media the RussiaGate scam in the first place.

And such a Jarred-like disclosure should most especially include the single intelligence tidbit that CIA director Brennan apparently got from the Latvian security service last summer alleging Putin’s personal involvement in these activities. If the Latvians actually had a mole in Moscow who gussied-up and exaggerated what he/she knew in order to stay on the Latvian payroll, the Donald could readily offer said operative a lifetime sanctuary at one of the Trump Golf Resorts.

Yes, that’s just how ludicrous the whole story has become. As we documented last week, the global grand champion of hacking, meddling and depositing disinformation and malware in the communications systems of foreign governments is Imperial Washington itself. It should not be surprising, therefore, if some of the subjects of such constant cyber-attacks by the $75 billion U.S. intelligence community (IC) do not attempt to return the favor in kind.

But the whole thing is a giant and pointless waste of resources on all sides. The $7 billion spent by registered campaign committees in the 2016 US elections and the tens of billions more of pro-Hillary coverage generated by the main stream media – CNN, NBC, ABC, The New York Times, Politico, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and countless more – self-evidently drowned-out whatever putative disinformation was being spread by Russia Today, Sputnik, and RT television (daily audience 200k) or even by purported "useful idiots" like Contra Corner.

Unfortunately, the Donald seems content to root around the White House attic banging his Twitter account from time to time rather than attempting to govern. A better term for what he is actually doing is brawling with his media and political enemies – a foolish course of action that can have no other end game than his eventual removal from office.

But the real tragedy is that in the interim, Donald Trump is home alone. He does not even have the rudiments of a government committed to his agenda – as vague, inchoate and shape-shifting as it mainly was.

For instance, he ran his campaign under a slogan of "America First" with respect to foreign policy. If that term had any meaning it was the opposite of the Empire First policy on which the beltway’s self-importance and ungodly prosperity depends.

But he has loaded his national security team with a gaggle of Empire Firsters – including H.R. McMasters, Mad Dog Mattis, Mike Pompeo, and Nikki Haley, among countless others. All of them give obeisance to the obviously obsolete and destructive institution of Greater NATO, which now threatens the peace as it stands unnecessarily and provocatively cheek-by-jowl on Russia’s borders.

Likewise, they have advised Trump to escalate American intervention in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan – despite decades of failure and terrorist blowback; and have induced him to humiliate himself by snuggling up to the despicable Saudi royals as part of a long discredited Washington policy of tilting to the Sunnis against Shiite Iran, and of attempting to price global oil via Fifth Fleet maneuvers in the Persian Gulf rather than the far more efficacious and benign pricing mechanisms of the free market.

Now they have even got him sending lethal weapons to the Washington-installed usurpers who control Ukraine’s government in Kiev, and who are carrying on a brutal war against the autonomy-seeking Russian populations of the Donbas. In other words, even our Kevin McCallister in the White House attic is now implementing the opposite policy that he demanded in Cleveland when his operatives removed this stupid idea from the GOP’s platform.

Worse still, while he was home alone tweeting, the Washington establishment, including his own GOP leadership, was busy passing a measure to absolutely hog-tie the Donald on the urgent matter of lifting Obama’s ridiculous sanctions on Russia. And with the main stream media driving home the RussiaGate hysteria on a 24/7 basis, our Kevin McCallister won’t even be able to give it fight with a veto, as did the original Kevin when he booby-trapped the basement and foiled the burglar attacks of Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern.

On the domestic front, it’s even worse. Trump got elected by Flyover America where a large share of America’s 160 million payroll taxpaying workers are struggling to make ends meet.
While Trump cannot immediately reverse 30 years of jobs being off-shored or easily nullify the global competitive pressures that have kept US real wage growth in the subbasement of modern history, he could have gone hammer and tong after the 15.5% combined employer/employee payroll tax.

The latter extracts $1.1 trillion per year from the business economy, where it functions as the nation’s number 1 jobs killer by unnecessarily bloating employer compensation costs; and it also extracts upwards of $4,000 per yearfrom the average paycheck.

Instead, the beltway corporate lobbies and recidivist GOP tax cutters have saddled Trump with a corporate rate cut that can’t be even remotely financed with offsetting loophole closings, and individual tax cuts which will provide 75% of their benefits to the 20 million most affluent/wealthy households in America.

But the most egregious case of the Donald being home alone is on the overwhelming source of America’s economic decline. To wit, the Keynesian monetary central planners at the Fed and the destructive regime of Bubble Finance that they have imposed on American capitalism over the last three decades.
The Donald was surely right when he referred to the fruits of this baleful regime as "one, fat ugly bubble" during the campaign.

The fact is, these policies are savaging savers, shrinking real wages and fostering the off-shoring of millions of good jobs – even as they encourage the C-suites of corporate America to plunder their own cash flows and balance sheets with trillions of financial engineering extractions – stock buybacks, M&A deals and LBOs and leveraged recaps. The latter drastically diminish investment in productive assets and future growth, jobs and wages – even as they shower Wall Street gamblers and the 1% with unspeakable windfalls and ill-gotten gains.

Yet on that score, the Donald is home alone with the very Vampire Squid at who’s behest Bubble Finance has become the overwhelming economic force in the land. That is, his two chief economic advisors – Gary Cohn and Steve Mnuchin – are the latest plenipotentiaries seconded to Washington by Goldman Sachs and its Wall Street fellow travelers to insure that the stock averages are pumped ever higher – and at all hazards.

Yet now even the Keynesian posse in the Eccles Building realizes that three-decades of Bubble Finance have come to a dead end, and that it must begin to "normalize" (viz. shrink) its drastically bloated balance sheet – if for no other reason than to have "dry powder" to combat the next recession or other (inexorable) economic crisis.

Consider the implications of the graph below, however. During the long span of 50 years between 1959 and 2008, the balance sheet of the Fed crept upward about 6% per year – and even that resulted in the commodity and consumer inflation of the 1970’s, the stock market bubble of the dotcom era, and the housing and mortgage catastrophe of the Greenspan reflation after 2001.
But in the next six years, the Fed’s balance sheet grew at a 25% annual rate, thereby injecting a monetary inflation and fraud into the financial system of biblical proportions. And now our clueless monetary central planners propose to pump the air out of the giant bubble they have created without any collateral damage at all.

In fact, the collateral damage will be earthshaking and it will soon fall on the head of the nation’s Tweeter-in-chief, trundling around alone in the residence portion of the White House.
The Donald foolishly and insensibly embraced the Bubble, which was reflated in the wee hours of election night by a shocked Wall Street in order to effect one last shearing the retail sheep. And he has added insult to injury by failing to exploit what amounts to five empty seats on the Fed (including Yellen and Fischer whose chairs expire in six months).

In fact, he has turned that file over to the Vampire Squid’s men on the job. That is, to lifetime bubble riders who think Janet Yellen has done a swell job – along with Bernanke and Greenspan before – and should be considered for reappointment. Then again, if they don’t nominate themselves or another Wall Street operative.


Needless to say, at 25X profits on the S&P 500, 87X earnings on the Russell 2000 and 190X and 217X on the meager profits of Amazon and Netflix, respectively, Wall Street is sitting on the precipice of an imminent implosion.

Ironically, the Donald could have punctured the bubble and launched a top-to-bottom house-cleaning at the Fed on Jan. 20, while blaming the Fed’s incumbents and Obama. Now it is way too late – the Bubble will implode, but the Donald will get all the blame.

At some time soon thereafter, they will come for him with helicopter engines running. Unlike Kevin McCallister’s excellent adventure, however, the Donald’s exercise in being Home Alone won’t end in reunification with the rulers who originally sent him to the attic.

Publkish in AntiWar.com  27/07/17

Friday, July 21, 2017

Another Never-ending Story

The Norks - gosh darn em!

Inscrutable Silence.

Just when we thought that we were starting to get 'on top of things' again - no more arms to the FSA (unless they're pointing them at ISIS),  a modus vivaldi with Putin, the fall of more things ISIS, vic'try in sight of the Philippines. Africa - pax americus, Europe enjoying maneuvre season aand military open houses, the Chinese - quiet, the press no longer demanding any more evidence of Russian Hacking and only yesterday the Vice President announcing that there were larger catfish to fry than North Korea, we awaken, this morning, to a blizzrd of stories about item number one - 'the threat to everything!!" that is North Korea and the need to do something about that,  NOW!

Just two days ago the government of the Republic of South Korea had issued an invite to talks that had our media plastered with images of weeping Korean families reuniting in the DMZ. All was hopeful and waiting, like at Christmastime.

A new advent


And then the Norks failed to respond.

The initial stories ran the gamut from 'the tyrant was taken out by the Seals'  to 'they're all starving and can no longer communicate'.   Then the media  developed some sense and changed our focus to the threat of nuckuler annihilation, the need to practise 'best defences' in Hawaii and how concerned we all are.

The Threat

Drought

The Un News

Executions

Better late than Never


And there is good news too:  about their economy growing more than South Korea's last year, The Economy 'rockets' up?  or the fact that we could drop a dickie bird over the Yalu,  if there remain any of those uneaten - our anti-ICBM (Chaaads or Braaaaads)  'defenses' are that good.



Perhaps what's needed is a new 'fandango'.




Wednesday, July 19, 2017

The Trooth? We Can't Handle the Trooth.

Trump's latest foible - foreign governments and 'enemies'.







Twitterganda

The fifth man at that meeting: Chris Steele? Nope! It was a former KGB agent, top-secret and now resident in America, known only to NBC - and not the fabled 'Jimmy Bond' and Clinton classmate, ex MI 6 secret operative,  DNC-contractee and finder of  Trump's 'wet Russian hookers. If Trump Jr. was smart he would have had somebody 'Russian' present to translate, if nothing else, and to perhaps determine if the 'dirt' he was about to receive was plausible - maybe that's why Manafort was there. When 'the Russian lawyer' announced she was really there to get Trump's help with beautiful Russian babies, Kushner and Manafort left the meeting. There was nothing they were interested in. Trump Jr. gave her a listen - which is more than Podesta would have done.

 Meanwhile when it came to Trump's peeing hookers, it took months -  while 'Washington insiders' circulated the Steele report - possibly because they knew it as bullshit - until it developed the email 'legs of truthiness' and could be passed along to the NATSEC supersluths for 'investigation'. That took the form (apparently for this this all hush-hush, too)  of Big John (no horseshit) Brennan asking Trump 'if Putin had him by the balls', with the outgoing Supreme Adjudicator standing watch.

We're still waiting for somebody to actually table Steele's 'report' - which has him hiding from a 'speznaz hit squad' and editing out the parts that have already been debunked.


Talki about debunking.   Enemy Hacking Identification 101

But what dumped Dolly Clinton's run for the Rose Garden was the niggling fear that Trump, or somebody like Putin, had the goods, or video  of Willie Jeff taking part in what Willie Jeff likes to do more than anything else - BJ's.  It was contended that he had done more than merely  'get away' the 11 times he adnmitted  guesting at Jeffrey Epstein's 'pleasure island'  complex. A line-up of overdeveloped 'dollies' had helped convict Epstein and caused a Royal Highness a few troubled moments in regard to the sexual predation of tweenagers that seems to have been what it was all about. Rumor had it that Jeffrey was doing for Israel twhat the KGB was doing for Putin - helping get the goods on somebody worth negotiating with. Had not Hilary let herself down towards the end of the campaign,  somebody else was going to.   Needless to say since that stuff never came out it doesn't need to be investigated,  like the true stulff that did come out doesn't either.   Huh?

Donald speaking in front of a silent panel of Willuie accusers while the big fella sat in the audience and watched his wife flounder didn't need any Putin.  That was the night that drove old Dicksie down.

It's OK for good guys to jack an election

Ukraine is an ally dontcha no?  It's not an enemy like Russia.   They vote with us as all the important UN sanctions votes and they deployed troopps to Afghanistan and Iraq even theiough they didn't have to and couldn't afford it. And even if they did try changing our regime it's only because  they're entitled after all we recently changed theirs.

Thursday, July 13, 2017

Putin's Hacking takes Back Burner



Another 'Morphus Americanus' is underway.  In the grand style of Claghorn Leghorn, or any number of other cartoon characters, the US media has stopped following  the stale spoor of the unproveable,  to hie-off on the scent of a 'wascally wabbit' who knew all about that other story and still 'colluded' with foreign potentates to bring a perrfectly good Democratic presidential candidate down.

17 Security Agencies

DNC hack

While to-day its starting to look like all the 'hoopla' about Putin or his goons 'hacking' that election - the tale that brought on an on-going spate of Congressional 'herrings', may have neen a trifle 'overblown', or perhaps created out of 'whole cloth' by the guardians of our 'security' and whatever libderties 'they' think we should have, it is no less apparent that somebody in America has a large 'penetrating device' lubricated for TrumpInc.



 The 'Russians'  are beginning to take a back seat to the new 'facts' that Trump, or members of his team , or family still knew all about whatever it was the Russians were doing and he, or they, teracherously colluded to spoil the ballot of democrazy.  Some Pol introduced a motion of impeachement,  against  Trump,  yesterday.


While it's fairly certain that nobody in a position to do so, actually knows much at all about Russia's role in all this - that they can tell, or show, or leak - without compromising 'the security of the USA' - by,  I imagine, risking having  the Russians find out HOW we 'know' what they did, or didn't do.  I'm making an assumption that the Russians might not need to be tiold if they 'did' or  'didn't do' something, but I'm a hundred percent positive that thay aren't ready to admit we're right or 'own up to anything'.

 I saw an interesting story about how Trump broached that hacking topic "repeatedly" with Putin at their 'face-to-face' last week. I imagine the notion went throught Trump's mind that, if Putin 'caved' and admitting hacking him into the hotseat, a  Writ of Impeachement would be waiting when he next stepped off Marine One.  Yet the Sec State insisted that Donald definitely DID NOT accept Putin's protestations that he didn't torpedo the dike.  To-day Donald is valiantly defending his 17 security agencies 'evidence' that Russia hacked Clinton of of a victory -  but he 'discovered' a 13 agency discrepancy. The remaining four agencies are right - chapter and verse  hacking 'evidence' from Crowdstrike. Did he really say that??!!!

Not 17 only 4 .... actually 1 and they're guessing

Family Ties

And this we week step right along to another chapter of the saga: the 'attempt' to enlist the support of a foreign plenipotentiary to  'do in' a legitimate candidate.  Don Trump Jr,  is accused of meeting with a Russian 'governmrnt lawyer', Manafort (the 'Russian agent' in charge of his campaign)  and Jared the electoral Whiz-kid,  at the behest of a fat english 'slob' who indicated she had poop to share about crooked Hillary and  her Russian 'B'ackers.  Turns out she only wanted to talk about her 'adoption' business but Junior had 'sinned in his heart' by wanting her to have actionable intel. Strsange that nobody is remembering an 'ultra private' meeting of Trump,  Obama and the 'big' John Brennan to do the big reveal on the Russian plot to 'blackmail' the new President with an NKVD video of him, russian hookers and peeing on a 'presidential bed?  That story was 'generated' by a 'James Bondian' Englishman.  hired for the purpose by somebody American.  You'd think that, psrticularly,  after the past 20 years, anything 'British intelligence' has for America should be taken with a dose of castor oil. They've had a stinky finger in every one of America mis-steps and boo-boos, for along time.

Sinning in his hart

As George Harrison once sang'All things Must Pass",  this 'hot potato' will too. Hopfully it won't require another war of distraction.




Friday, July 07, 2017

Khadr's Back

Khadr, Canada's boy jihadi  and innernational good-guy-killer, is back in Canadian news after a recent government decision to mke a settlement on a lawsuit brought against the Canadian government on his behalf claiming $60 million in damages for depriving him of his civil rights under Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms.




 This is the last in a number of lawsuits raised in Khadr's behalf in Canadian courts and dating back at least 12 years. All of the lawsuits - two of which were taken to ajudication at the Supreme Court of Canada have been successful in citing the Government of Canada for failing to attend to Khadr's protection (as a Canadian citizen) and in carrying-out a program of harassment and oppression against him.  Khadr is receiving about $8 million dollars (US) for the 12 years the Canadian government - calling him a 'terrorist' -   refused to support him.

You may recall from earlier posts on the subject, earlier post that Omar Khadr's was one of the first stories to come out of Operation Afghan Freedom - the cautionary tale of a 'radical kid' killer,  wounded and captured , treated by IS medics and doctors and one of the first inmates at Guantanamo.  Khadr,  we are told,  had been taken to Afghanistan to meet all the bad guys,  by his Egyptian-born father who, again we are told,  acted as 'the chief financial officer' for AQ's  training operations there. The Father was later killed in an US/Pakistani 'security operation'. Khadr had a brother who was crippled in that opeation and subsequently repatriated to join his family in Canada.


Khadr was tortured while being held by US forces at their base at Bagram. After he arrived at Guantanmo he was treated as a 'hard core terrorist', accused of killing a US "medic" and subjected to disciplinary detention and interrogations.  At at least two points in his detention Canadian government "representatives" were present at and participated in the intererogation process - leaving Khadr to believe that Canada was prepared to do nothing to help him,  unless he confessed and provided information.  After 13 years of detention,  a deal was struck whereby Khadr would plead guilty to a number of charges,  be sentenced, released and repatriated to Canada. That court action was executed.

 The US authorities, however, chose to differentiate between Khadr and a number of other detaineees who had opted for the same 'plea deal' - conviction-release  process. It was decided that, because he was now a 'self-confessed killer',  an extended period of detention at Guantanmo was required. The Canadian government did not object to this breech of the plea-deal agreement. After two years a court ruling, in Canada, directed the Canadian government to act to secure  his release. After a further year spent appealing, and losing,  the court ruling was put into action.

When Khadr arrived back in Canada the government, at that time, (in a distinct break with common procedure in every one of the similar plea-bargain cases)  stated that it was prepared to carry out the sentence of the Guantanamo Tribunal and detained  the 'self-confessed murderer and terrorist' in a Canadian prison.   A second lawsuit to force his release, again going all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, saw Khadr released, on bail, about 18 moths later,  while the government continued to file objections to and appeals of the SC ruling. That process was still pending when the Tory government of Steven Harper lost the election in 2016.

The incoming Liberal government eventually abandoned the appeals  and a lawsuit for costs and damages against the government was initiated. After study,  the Federal Justice Department declined to contest the suit and a settlement process was intiated.  This was concluded yesterday when Khadr and his lawyers,  recieved their money.




It was also noted that the widow of the dead special forces soldier and a comrade, partially blinded in that incident, had filed an application in a Canadian court to have the court enforce a ruling made by a Utah court,  granting them damages of $174 million dollars (US) from Khadr. There were also lawsuits launched against the Khadr family claiming damages from the incident.  Some news sources are now saying that, since the government has already paid Khadr, the widow won't be getting money from them, or Khadr,  without signifiant actions in Canadian Courts.


Khadr Hears Victim Impact Statement
A Court in Toronto dismissed the claim against Khadr by the American claimants.


Khadr is curently training to be a nurse.

According to the pulp press this 'issue' has "polarized" Canadians. Actually the split is the same one as appears now on political grounds, or with those Canadians who believe in the rule of law, and those who believe that laws should be different depending on circumstances. That the courts are supreme in law (as indicated in the Constitution)  or that the Government can and should change, or in Khadr's case ignore, the law,  to do as it pleases.


                                               
                                                      Khadr - for the specially educated