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While magnetic north has always wandered, its routine plod has shifted into high gear, sending it galloping across the Northern Hemisphere—and no one can entirely explain why.
Magnetic north has never sat still. In the last hundred years or so, the direction in which our compasses steadfastly point has lumbered ever northward, driven by Earth‘s churning liquid outer core some 1,800 milesbeneath the surface. Yet in recent years, scientists noticed something unusual: Magnetic north’s routine plod has shifted into high gear, sending it galloping across the Northern Hemisphere—and no one can entirely explain why.
The changes have been so large that scientists began working on an emergency update for the World Magnetic Model, the mathematical system that lays the foundations for navigation, from cell phones and ships to commercial airlines. But then the U.S. government shut down, placing the model’s official release on hold, as Nature News first reported earlier this year.
Questions still likely abound: Why is magnetic north changing so fast? What were the impacts of the update’s delay? Was there really a geologic reason Google maps sent me off course? We’ve got you covered.
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EARTH 101Earth is the only planet known to maintain life. Find out the origins of our home planet and some of the key ingredients that help make this blue speck in space a unique global ecosystem.
What is magnetic north?
Magnetic north is one of three “north poles” on our globe. First, there’s true north, which is the northern end of the axis on which our planet turns.
But our planet’s protective magnetic bubble, or magnetosphere, isn’t perfectly aligned with this spin. Instead, the dynamo of Earth’s core creates a magnetic field that is slightly tilted from the planet’s rotational axis. The northern end of this planet-size bar magnet is what’s known as geomagnetic north—a point sitting off the northwest coast of Greenland that’s changed position little over the last century.
Then there’s magnetic north, what your compass locates, which is defined as the point at which magnetic field lines point vertically down. Unlike geomagnetic north, this position is more susceptible to the surges and flows in the swirl of liquid iron in the core. These currents tug on the magnetic field, sending magnetic north hopping across the globe.
“The north magnetic pole is quite a sensitive place,” says Phil Livermore, a geophysicist at the University of Leeds.
What is the World Magnetic Model?
James Clark Ross first located magnetic north in 1831 in the scattered islands of Canada’s Nunavut territory. Since then, the pole has largely marched north, traversing hundreds of miles over the last several decades. (Curiously, its polar opposite, magnetic south, has moved little during this time.)
Meet the new dinosaur known as the “destroyer of shins”
To keep up with all these changes, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the British Geological Survey developed what eventually became known as the World Magnetic Model, “so they would all be on the same map, essentially,” says Ciaran Beggan, a geophysicist with the BGS.
The model is updated every five years, with the last update in 2015. Between each update, scientists check the model’s accuracy against data from ground magnetic observatories and the European Space Agency’s Swarm mission—a trio of magnetic-field mapping satellites that zip around Earth 15 to 16 times each day. Until now, this seemed sufficient to keep up with magnetic north’s march toward Siberia.
In the mid 1900s, the north magnetic pole was lumbering along at less than a hundred feet each day, adding up to less than seven miles of difference each year. But in the ’90s, this started to change. By the early aughts, magnetic north was chugging along at some 34 miles each year.
“Things are acting very strangely at high latitude,” says Livermore, who notes that this increase seemed to coincide with a strengthening jet in the planet’s liquid outer core. Though the events could be linked, it’s not yet possible to say for sure.
By early 2018, scientists realized that the model would soon exceed the acceptable limits for magnetic-based navigation. Something had to be done before the model’s next regular update, slated for 2020.
Did the government shutdown upset navigation?
To correct the model, NOAA and BGS scientists tweaked it using three years’ worth of recent data. This updated version was pre-released online in October 2018. As Beggan explains, these include the model’s primary users in defense and military—the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.K. Ministry of Defense, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
“Things are acting very strangely at high latitude.”
PHIL LIVERMORE , UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS
The government shutdown delayed the comprehensive public release of the information, which includes online calculators, software, and a technical note describing the changes. In principal, everyone who uses magnetic navigation could benefit from this update, says Arnaud Chulliat, a geomagnetist at the University of Colorado in Boulder and a NOAA affiliate who worked on the update.
The model has found its way into many of our modern mapping systems, including Google and Apple, Beggan adds. But the difference is minor for most civilian purposes, and the changes are mainly limited to latitudes above 55 degrees.
“The average user is not going to be overly affected by this unless they happened to be trekking around the high Arctic,” Beggan says.
What caused all this weirdness?
Interest in these unexpected jolts is about more than mapping. The dance of Earth’s magnetic field lines presents one of the few windows scientists have to processes that happen thousands of miles below your feet.
At the 2018 American Geophysical Union fall meeting, Livermore presented what he calls a magnetic field “tug-of-war” that may offer an explanation for the recent odd behavior. The north magnetic pole seems to be controlled by two patches of magnetic field, he explains, one under northern Canada and one under Siberia. Historically, the one under northern Canada seems to have been stronger, keeping the magnetic pole in its clutches. But recently, that seems to have changed.
“The Siberian patch looks like it’s winning the battle,” he says. “It’s sort of pulling the magnetic field all the way across to its side of the geographic pole.”
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THE ARCTIC: AN OCEAN ON TOP OF THE WORLDIce, wildlife, and adventure—that is what draws us to the icy waters sweeping down from the Arctic Ocean. Join the crew of the National Geographic Fleet to explore the northernmost part of the Earth.
This may be a result of a jet within the core smearing and thus weakening the magnetic field under Canada, he says. The jet’s increase in speed seems to have coincided with the last few decades of the magnetic pole zipping north. But he cautions about jumping to any definite conclusions.
“There may well be a link there,” he says. “It’s not certain, but it could be.”
What’s next for magnetic north?
It’s tough to predict what will happen to the magnetic north pole—or whether it’s even going to maintain its speed as it staggers toward Siberia, notes Robyn Fiori, a research scientist with Natural Resources Canada. The only thing that seems certain about magnetic north is its unpredictability.
Rocks hold geologic maps of even weirder movements of the magnetic poles, suggesting that in the last 20 million years, magnetic north and south have flipped places multiple times. This seems to happen roughly every 200,000 to 300,000 years. The exact causes behind these reversals remains uncertain. But the latest movement shouldn’t have you in knots about an imminent flip.
Models of magnetic north suggest that this latest leap isn’t even the strangest thing the pole has done in more recent history, Fiori adds. Before 1900, its wanderings likely once had a lot more wiggle and may include several hairpin turns in northern Canada that could have sent the pole on a brief southward stint.
“It all has to do with changes in the fluid motion of that outer core,” she says. It’s therefore hard to say if magnetic north’s newfound speed is the new normal.
“We know that the pole now is moving faster than it has for decades, but how often does that happen in the long historical record?” inquires Geoff Reeves, a space scientist at Los Alamos National Lab.
“We don’t have any idea. What we know is what it’s doing now is different, and that’s always exciting scientifically.”
Editor’s Note: This article originally included a misstated quote from Robyn Fiori that has been updated.The types of navigation that can benefit from the new model have also been updated, and the spelling of Arnaud Chulliat’s name has been corrected.
https://clayandiron.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/logo-1.jpg00DrBillhttps://clayandiron.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/logo-1.jpgDrBill2019-02-17 14:01:532019-02-17 14:01:53Magnetic north just changed. Here's what that means.
Hillary Clinton has all of our encryption keys, including the FBI’s. “Encryption keys” is a general reference to several encryption functions hijacked by Hillary and her surrogate ENTRUST. They include hash functions (used to indicate whether the contents have been altered in transit), PKI public/private key infrastructure, SSL (secure socket layer), TLS (transport layer security), the Dual_EC_DRBG NSA algorithm and certificate authorities.
The convoluted structure managed by the “Federal Common Policy” group has ceded to companies like ENTRUST INC the ability to sublicense their authority to third parties who in turn manage entire other networks in a Gordian knot of relationships clearly designed to fool the public to hide their devilish criminality. All roads lead back to Hillary and the Rose Law Firm.
Click here to read a list of just some of the “more than 2000 organizations in 60 different countries” that Hillary can control. Source: ENTRUST 10-K Annual Reports (1998-2009). SEC Edgar. Return in a few days for links to each of the ENTRUST annual reports from 1998 to 2009.
AFI (Nov. 06, 2015). Complicit encryption geeks enable the American spy state. Americans for Innovation.
AFI (Nov. 25, 2015). Dell and Lenovo (IBM) ship computers with spy state backdoors. Americans for Innovation.
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DECIPHERING HILLARY’S ENCRYPTION KEYS THAT HAVE KEPT HER ONE STEP AHEAD OF THE SHERIFF
SPECIAL NOTICE: This post is a work in progress. You are encouraged to return to pick up additional evidence as it is added. Indictable evidence continues to pour in for use by prosecutors, independent media, Treasury, U.S. Marshalls and military tribunals. These criminals have relied on the fact that encryption, cryptography and cryptanalysis is a field of esoteric mathematics for which the average person has little interest. Hopefully, that will now change.
Cryptography—the use of codes and ciphers to protect secrets—began thousands of years ago. Until recent decades, it has been the story of what might be called classic cryptography — that is, of methods of encryption that use pen and paper, or perhaps simple mechanical aids. In the early 20th century, the invention of complex mechanical and electromechanical machines, such as the Enigma rotor machine, provided more sophisticated and efficient means of encryption; and the subsequent introduction of electronics and computing has allowed elaborate schemes of still greater complexity, most of which are entirely unsuited to pen and paper.
In a simple form, simply scrambling the letters in a word is a basic form of cryptography. HELLO might become OLHEL or LEHLO. In more sophisticated approaches, look up tables contain readable words in the first column and a replacement word in the second. The resulting message looks like jibberish until the look up table is used by the recipient. The public key infrastructure and certificate authorities discussed in this post are simply more scrambled forms of encryption.
The earliest example known was from an Egyptian scribe about 1900 BC. Assyrian merchants used a form of encryption called intaglio in 1500 BC. Hebrew scribes wrote a copy of the Book of Jeremiah in a substitution cipher in 605 BC. In 487 BC the Greeks used a “skytale” to encrypt important messages. Julius Caesar (100-44 BC) encrypted government communications. Abu ‘ Abd al-Rahman al-Khalil ibn Ahmad ibn Amr ibn Tammam al Farahidi al-Zadi al Yahmadi wrote a book on cryptography in 725-790 AD. Thomas Jefferson invented a wheel cipher. Tellingly, a design in 1976 by IBM based on “the Lucifer cipher” is now used and called “triple-DES” (the Triple Data Encryption Algorithm).
When the German Enigma Machine was cracked in World War II, the Allies could read ALL German communications from that point forward. In the same way, Hillary’s access to the PKI, Dual_EC_DRBG algorithm and Certificate Authorities gives her access to The Internet of Things’ version of the Enigma Machine break, which was considered by western Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower to have been “decisive” to the Allied victory. SeeHistory of Encryption.
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IMAGINE THAT YOUR IDENTITY IS STOLEN SUDDENLY.
Your healthcare, education, police, employment and bank records are all altered overnight to make you look like an embezzler. Imagine you are jolted awake the following morning by the police bashing in your door to arrest you. Imagine that the local TV is already carrying news of your arrest using a drunken party photo of you off your phone.
Imagine further that you are Hillary Clinton. You need for 55,000 Clinton Foundation emails on FBI director James Comey computer to disappear. Poof. They’re wiped without a trace.
Imagine still further that you are Lord Mark Malloch-Brown from the Queen’s Privy Council. You need to erase the U.S. Department of Treasury’s new evidence of foreign meddling embedded in your Smartmatic voting machines. Your bunk buddy George Soros makes a call to Hillary. Poof. This evidence is digitally wiped, without a trace.
This cannot happen in America you say? Think again.
Since these people have full backdoor access to any computer or phone on the Internet, can they ever be caught? Yes, once we realize how they do it. That method has just been discovered.
Truth is, Hillary Clinton literally has access to every computer on the Internet through a company named ENTRUST. Her 19-year Rose Law Firm partner Jerry C. Jones directs the company (now ostensibly run by a Silicon Valley dude named Orlando Bravo and his private equity firm Thoma Bravo, LLC), and has done since Dec. 2003. Entrust issues the encryption keys for most major governments and companies in the world.
WHAT IS AN ENCRYPTION KEY AND WHY IS THIS DISCOVERY SO DEVASTATING TO THE DEEP STATE SHADOW GOVERNMENT?
Put simply, encryption keys are used on both the sender’s and receiver’s computers to send data. It takes two keys to make a connection to send or receive data. The Clinton Administration created “trusted Certificate Authorities (CA)” to check with to make sure that the two keys are the real sender and receiver. If your keys are not approved by the CA, your connection will be blocked. In the hands of tyrannical globalists like Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, George Soros, Eric Schmidt and Robert Mueller, this will be the new censorship on the Internet.
These CA’s make a big deal in their propaganda that you can “trust” them not to use or spoof your identity to get access to data that you and they are not authorized to have. That is a boldface lie. No wonder these people have the countenances of criminals. They are, and they know it.
Suppose you are the CA who issues keys to the FBI. Suppose you want to see the evidence being gathered against you in an investigation.
All you have to do is “borrow” the FBI key from Hillary or ENTRUST. Then you can connect to the target FBI computer using a bogus key created for you by ENTRUST, and voile! You then have two “trusted” keys so the FBI computers let you in. There are technical nuances to this description, but basically, you can do what you want with these keys. Don’t let trollers try to baffle you with techno-jargon to throw your dogs off the scent. Lucifer (literally, IBM Triple-DES) is in these encryption details.
Hillary Clinton has this level of access to practically all data on the planet, including the FBI, NSA, Departments of State, Commerce, Energy, Treasury, GSA, Patent Office, Post Office, NIST, as well as numerous foreign government and commercial entities. SeeENTRUST 10-K Annual Reports (1998-2009). SEC Edgar.
Now that we finally know how the Clinton’s stay one step ahead of the sheriff, we can now stop them.
MORE HARD PROOF THAT HILLARY CLINTON IS A DIGITAL MONSTER
In this post, we will prove without a doubt how Hillary Clinton cleverly wormed her way into full access and control for 50,000 FBI encryption keys.
They are likely managing this empire from Obama’s Google-constructed U.S. Digital Service bunker three blocks from the White House manned by Valerie Jarrett and Eric Holder.
We admit that these findings sound more like Grisham fiction. But the evidence is a pesky thing. The evidence is now pouring out.
THE EVIDENCE PROVIDED IS “JUDICIALLY RECOGNIZABLE” AND INDICTABLE, WE BELIEVE
“Notoriously public” information, like the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission filings that we cite, is evidence that requires no further verification to be used in litigation, hence the adjective “notoriously.” This means that the information is so publicly noteworthy that further proof of validity is unnecessary. For example, John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. That is a notoriously public fact and no proof is needed.
Notoriously public facts, like SEC filings, are “judicially recognizable” and can be accepted as truthful since the submitter attests to the SEC that they are true. It is criminal fraud to lie intentionally in SEC filings.
TIMELINE: BILL AND HILLARY CLINTON BEGAN ORCHESTRATING UNFETTERED ACCESS TO THE FBI’S ENCRYPTION KEYS IN 1993
On Jun. 07, 1993, the new Clinton Administration convened the “Third CPSR Cryptography and Privacy Conference (CPSR – Computer Professionals For Social Responsibility).”
The conference was held two days before an important Jun. 09, 1993 House hearing on “encryption and telecommunications network security.” The conference gathered over 106 attendees representing government, politics, commerce, manufacturing, industry, media, technology, telecommunications, healthcare, banking, education, faith and accounting. That’s plenty of arm-twisting, even for Washington, D.C.
The meeting sponsor was globalist advocate Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
The hosts included:
(1) James P. Chandler, III, George Washington University intellectual property and national security law professor, and later patent attorney for social networking inventor Leader Technologies, Inc. (Jan. 2000);
2) John D. Podesta, chief of staff and campaign manager to Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton;
(3) Stephen D. Crocker, founding member of the illegal public-private conspiracy group Highland’s Forum/Group (Feb. 1995), then Barack Obama’s director of ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) who ceded control to the UN on Oct. 01, 2016—one month before Donald J. Trump was elected president.
HILLARY HID THE 1993 ENCRYPTION MEETING ATTENDEE LIST
The information about this meeting was hidden on Hillary’s private email server. It was unearthed by corruption watchdog Judicial Watch after they pressed the State Department in court to release the document. See meeting agenda here.
IN 1993-1994, MORE THAN 20 PEOPLE CLOSE TO OR INVESTIGATING CLINTON CORRUPTION DIED UNDER SUSPICIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES.
THEFT AND WEAPONIZATION OF U. S. INVENTIONS
In Feb. 1995, the Highlands Forum/Group was formed. It was and is a highly illegal private “public-private” meeting sponsored by the Department of Defense Net Assessment group run by Senior Executive Service (SES) members Richard P. O’Neill and Andrew W. Marshall. See also AFI. (Nov. 22, 2017). The Weaponization of Social Media Should Concern Us All. Americans for Innovation.
The no-notes meetings involve no-bid crony insiders from the military, intelligence, banking, technology, telecom, transportation, defense, venture capital, media an academia to discuss the weaponization of new inventions stolen by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency).
On Apr. 17, 1995, Clinton signed Executive Order 12958 titled “Classified National Security.”
This order consolidated control of classification procedures to just seven people: (1) Secretary of State, (2) Secretary of Defense, (3) Attorney General, (4) C.I.A. Director, (5) U.S. Archivist, (6) National Security Director and (7) the President.
A most dubious provision said that any U.S. security classification that contradicted another country’s laws or treaty rendered it of no effect. In other words, if Obama wanted to release a classified document, all he had to do was call up Justin Trudeau in Canada and ask him to pass a law saying America’s XYZ classified information was harmful to beavers on the northern slopes. That would nullify the U.S. classification and give Obama the excuse to release it. Clearly, it was a precursor to Obama’s foreign trade entanglements in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) that President Trump killed, thankfully.
On Apr. 19, 1995, the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City, was bombed by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols—just two days after Bill Clinton formed a secret White House intelligence operation via Executive Order 12958 cited above.
This bombing created more excuses for mass surveillance against Americans. Notably, Clinton body guard Alan G. Whicher was killed in this weapons grade-energy blast that could not have been caused by a fertilizer bomb, as were led to believe by MSM. Retired FBI superstar Theodore L. Gunderson, a short-list candidate to be FBI director, revealed that psychiatrist Dr. Jolly West, one of the founders of the C.I.A. MKUltra mind control program, paid a visit to McVeigh before the trial. Gunderson said he believed that McVeigh was a brainwashed MKUltra drone.
On Jul. 12, 1995, IBM and Lotus merged. Lotus Notes became the Deep State’s groupware platform of choice for establishing a global mass surveillance spy grid. PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) encryption standards were selected to build into IBM/Lotus/Microsoft/Novell/Red Hat software, hardware and firmware.
LAWS CHANGED TO PREPARE FOR THE PATRIOT ACT ABOLISHMENT OF THE BILL OF RIGHTS
Between 1995-1999, a series of national security laws, executive orders (EOs) and presidential policy directives (PPDs) were written for Clinton by James P. Chandler, III, his national security and intellectual property advisor.
Magically, the laws that Chandler drafted passed nearly unanimously. (Note: Whenever that occurs, all of Congress has been bought off or fooled en masse before the vote. Remember: Clinton had likely already had access to the FBI encryption keys by this time. Therefore, he had amassed plenty of blackmail and extortion information on every influential member of Congress.)
On Feb. 28, 1996, FBI Director Louis Freeh self-consciously deferred to James P. Chandler, III in his testimony on economic espionage, revealing that Chandler controlled FBI security policy for Clinton. Freeh was clearly the puppet and Chandler the puppet master.
S. Hrg. 104-499 (Feb. 28, 1998). Economic Espionage Act Hearing, testimony of FBI Director Louis Freeh acknowledging James P. Chandler. U.S. Senate. Professor James P. Chandler biography, National Intellectual Property, p. 6; Chandler admission and notorious Washington, D.C. knowledge among Chandler associates in the National Intellectual Property Law Institute. Citation: U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee.
On Oct. 11, 1996, Congress passed three Clinton-Chandler laws that were used to further gut Congressional oversight over security and privacy. It enabled the FBI to increase mass surveillance, then lie about it.
The False Statements Accountability Act of 1996, 18 U.S.C. § 1001.
Hindsight shows that the names for these laws were a cruel, unlawful, immoral, devilish deceit and had the opposite of the intentions of the rogue C.I.A., Clinton’s, Chandler, Mueller, Comey, etc. to fuel economic espionage, theft of trade secrets and lying to Congress, courts, the President and We the People.
On Feb. 12, 1997, Chandler incorporated Eurotech, Ltd. to hire former Soviet scientists and engineers to build embedded encryption spy backdoors inside all computer hardware, firmware and software in Italy. The key Eurotech players were/are Microsoft, IBM, Intel, Cisco, Oracle and Wind River, among others. JPMorgan Chase’s John McNeil Wilkie helped expand the company, as did Fenwick & West LLP (another Leader Technologies patent attorney and Silicon Valley C.I.A. co-conspirator).
Mar. 5, 1998—Jul. 11, 1999, Clinton and Gen. Wesley Clark prosecuted the Kosovo fraud based on a so-called “Račak genocide massacre” false flag. French journalists have proved that Račak was completely staged. However, it did succeed in cajoling Congress to approve U.N. intervention (led by Gen. Wesley K. Clark), and it succeeded in disabling Orthodox Christian resistance to the planned jihadi migration wave now occurring.
On Aug. 06, 1998, Robert S. Mueller, III’s law firm Hale & Dorr (now Wilmer Hale) helped file “The Internet of Things” patents for Hewlett-Packard’s Richard C. Walker that described a global surveillance grid that even monitors and controls individual body functions and describes human beings as “wet-ware.” The invention also contains an accounting and taxing capability to manage “certificate authorities” to control Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) encryption, tax the Internet and control “wet-ware” access.
On Aug. 18, 1998, Entrust Technologies, Inc. went public after being started as a spin-off of Nortel Networks (Canada) to manage and distribute Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) Certificate Authorities—the encryption keys for the Internet. Their customers include important military, banking, healthcare and government entities in the U.S., U.K., Australia, Canada, Sweden, Denmark, France, Italy, Spain and China.
On Aug. 18, 1998, Entrust Technologies, Inc. went public after being started as a spin-off of Nortel Networks (Canada) to manage and distribute Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) Certificate Authorities—the encryption keys for the Internet. Their customers include important military, banking, healthcare and government entities in the U.S., U.K., Australia, Canada, Sweden, Denmark, France, Italy, Spain and China.
On Dec. 20, 1998, globalist psychopath George Soros admitted to having been a Hungarian Jewish Nazi collaborator without remorse for betraying his own Jewish brothers and sisters.
On Mar. 09, 1999, Clinton’s Vice President Al Gore took credit for founding the Internet, laughably.
On Jul. 01, 1999, Clinton Attorney General Janet Reno created a new “Office of Special Counsel” inside the Department of Justice after the Special Counsel law was not re-authorized by Congress. This dubious Department of Justice policy (not a law) is now being used to justify the Mueller witch hunt.
On Jul. 02, 1999, Clinton appointed Larry H. Summers Treasury Secretary. The next day, on Jul. 03, 1999, Summers appointed Sheryl K. Sandberg as chief of staff. Sandberg later started Gmail in Jan. 20, 2001, and then became Facebook chief operating officer on Mar. 14, 2008.
Summers’ former Treasury staffer (1993-2001), Marne L. Levine (Deutch) became Summers’ chief of staff starting at Harvard on Jul. 02, 2001 where she oversaw the C.I.A.’s MKUltra establishment of the 19-year old Mark Zuckerberg as their Facebook cardboard cut out. Then, she became product vice president at AOL on Apr. 06, 2009. Then, she became Summers’ chief of staff for the National Economic Council on Jan. 21, 2009. Then, she became Obama’s Special Assistant to the President for Economic Policy on Jun. 24, 2010. Then, she attended an exclusive dinner with Hillary and Sandberg on Mar. 27, 2012. Then, she became chief operating officer of Instagram on Oct. 07, 2014. Truly magical.
WHITE HOUSE ROGUE INTELLIGENCE NOC (NETWORK OPERATING CENTER): NATIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE ASSURANCE COUNCIL
On Jul. 14, 1999, the Clinton White House set up a spy skunk works that has run rogue intelligence operations called the “National Infrastructure Assurance Council (NIAC)” On Jan. 18, 2001, Clinton appointed James P. Chandler, III and Bill Gates, Microsoft, as directors on NIAC the day before he left office and the same day he pardoned his former CIA director John M. Deutch (Marne L. Levin-Deutch’s father in law) and fraudster Marc Rich.
On Sep. 16, 1999, Clinton announced “relaxed” encryption rules in a flurry of press releases and letters to Congress, which were most assuredly drafted by national security advisor James P. Chandler, III. This action effectively gutted normal engineering security practices. It had the effect of enabling unfettered foreign and domestic access to U.S. classified data.
On Sep. 29, 1999, Bill Clinton established In-Q-Tel Silicon Valley cardboard cutouts for the C.I.A. to be able to raise private venture capital funds to build its rogue operations. It is illegal for a government agencies to invest in private companies.
On Sep. 29, 1999, Clinton C.I.A. institutionalized crony capitalism and the digital take over of America by a Shadow Government, on this day.
On Nov. 12, 1999, Bill Clinton and Larry Summers abolished Glass-Steagall banking controls, enabling the banks to fund In-Q-Tel “private” companies.
On Nov. 17, 1999, Agilent Technologies went public using Robert S. Mueller’s III’s law firm Hale and Dorr (renamed Wilmer Hale). Agilent Technologies was tasked with building the digital infrastructure for “The Internet of Things” global mass surveillance of everything using the Richard C. Walker HP/Agilent patents for monitoring all human beings called “wet-ware” in the patents.
On Jun. 08, 2000, Clinton espionage attorney James P. Chandler, III, participated in seminal Leader invention design meetings as Leader’s newly-appointed patent attorney. He was fully briefed on Leader’s social networking innovations at this meeting (see photo below) without disclosing his Deep State shadow government conflicts of interest and treachery.
JAMES P. CHANDLER, IIII, BILL CLINTON SPY MASTER first learned about Leader/McKibben’s social networking designs in early 2000. By this meeting on Jun. 8, 2000 he was studying every detail. Chandler is pictured here seated in the white shirt against the wall on the right side of this photo with his legal assistant Kelley E. Clements to the viewer’s right. Co-inventor Michael McKibben and Jeffrey Lamb are picture standing in the back left of the photo. Photo: Leader Technologies, Inc.
On Jun. 20, 2000, Sir Geoffrey E. Pattie was awarded the ISSA Silver Star Award in Washington, D.C. Pattie is the primary spy director for the Queen’s Privy Council and founder of SCL Ltd. and Cambridge Analytica—two C.I.A. MKUltra mind control and brain washing operations in the UK.
On Aug. 25, 2000, F. Gary Davis, Acting Director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, issued a tortured 13-page “advisory” that dramatically muddied the waters on mutual fund investing disclosure. Davis left government service soon thereafter. This opinion opened the door to massive nondisclosure fraud by politicians, SES and federal bureaucrats.
In 2001, NSA Director Michael V. Hayden recommended expansion of the NSA’s Senior Executive Service (SES) programs.
On Apr. 15, 2001, C.I.A. whistleblower Susan Lindauer warned American senior intelligence leadership that “I first learned of the 9/11 Conspiracy from my CIA handler, Dr. Richard Fuisz, in mid-April, 2001.” She was imprisoned for a year without due process to shut her up as the first casualty of The Patriot Act.
In Jul. 2001, Department of Justice John C. Yoo was hired into the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) and gave legal opinion cover for a proposed NSA project “Stellar Wind” for mass surveillance of American citizens.
On Sep. 04, 2001, Robert S. Mueller, III was sworn in as FBI Director by President George W. Bush, just 10 days before 9/11.
On Sep. 11, 2001, World Trade Center, Pentagon and Shanksville “terror” attacks were timed simultaneously with DoD NORAD war games and a stand down order.
On Oct. 04, 2001, President Bush approves operation “Stellar Wind” mass surveillance on American citizens.
On Oct. 16, 2001, President Bush signed Executive Order 13231 “Critical Infrastructure Protection in the Information Age” forming the “National Infrastructure Advisory Council (NIAC).” The order used the same NIAC acronym used by Clinton as the excuse for setting up a mass surveillance networking operating center run out of the White House.
On Oct. 26, 2001, President Bush signed The Patriot Act that has essentially destroyed the Bill of Rights. Just look at the flies that gathered to watch the signing.
On Oct 31, 2001, NSA whistleblower and former chief architect William E. Binney resigned the NSA saying the agency had “gone rogue.”
On Nov. 29, 2001, IBM intellectual property attorneys James P. Chandler, III and David J. Kappos used a $40 million IBM “donation” to start the IBM Eclipse Foundation which has been the exclusive distributor of Leader Technologies’ social networking innovations.
On Aug. 29, 2002, IBM Eclipse Foundation distributed Version 2.0.1 that included all of Leader Technologies’ social networking innovations.
On Sep. 18, 2002, career IBMer Thomas E. Noonan (Internet Security Systems, Inc.) was appointed to the National Infrastructure Assurance Council (NIAC) by George W. Bush, surely recommended by James P. Chandler, and he remains a member of the Council to this day. In 2003, Noonan became a partner to ENTRUST INC. Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) controlled by Hillary Clinton.
On Oct. 29, 2003, ENTRUST INC was awarded the contract to supply all 50,000 encryption keys for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
ENTRUST INC, ENTU, Form 8-K. (Oct. 29, 2003). Entrust Announces Third Quarter-Financial Results and Targets Breakeven for Year-end 2003. Accessed Sep. 08, 2018. SEC Edgar. (Despite losses, highlights new contracts with Northrup Grumman, FBI, UK Customs & Excise, Research in Motion Blackberry, Thomas Noonan, Acxiom Corp., California State Senate Counsel, KPMG).
On Dec. 04, 2003, ENTRUST INC elected Jerry C. Jones as a “Class I” director to replace retiring Gen. Wesley K. Clark. Jones is a 19-year Hillary Clinton partner at the Rose Law Firm, Little Rock, Arkansas. With the appointment of Jones, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller, III had an ethical duty to disclose to the public that his approval of ENTRUST INC to manage 50,000 FBI encryption keys enabled his political mentor Hillary Clinton to have full access to the entire FBI operation.
ENTRUST, INC., 10-K. (Dec. 23, 2003). Annual Report, first appearance of new director Jerry C. Jones, PDF page 33. SEC Edgar.ENTRUST, INC., 10-K. (Mar. 15, 2004). Annual Report, first appearance of Jerry C. Jones biography disclosing 19-year partner of Hillary Clinton in the Rose Law Firm, Little Rock, AR. SEC Edgar.
On Mar. 11, 2009, ENTRUST INC. issued its last 10-K annual report before selling its operation to Orlando Bravo, LLC and his Thoma Bravo private equity firm in San Francisco, CA. They disclosed that they had “more than 2,000 customers in 60 different countries.”
On Jul. 16, 2009, ENTRUST, INC. proposed to shareholders to sell to Orlando Bravo and his Thoma Bravo, LLC private equity firm in San Francisco, CA., which occurred on Aug. 07, 2009.
CONCLUSIONS:
Conclusion #1: Robert S. Mueller, III had an affirmative duty to disclose his approval of the contract for ENTRUST to manage the FBI’s 50,000 encryption keys in late 2003. The FBI itself has been scandalously compromised to Hillary Clinton and the Rose Law Firm ever since.
Conclusion #2: ENTRUST’s planetary control of the encryption keys for “over 2000 customers in 60 different countries” means that any matter handled by their customers at the FBI, Department of State, NSA, Treasury, etc. is the fruit of a poisonous tree—tainted by Clinton corruption.
Conclusion #3: President Trump has enough evidence here to seize and prosecute the leaders of every government agency that has involved that agency, or induced other agencies to work with ENTRUST, without disclosing their total compromise to Hillary Clinton and her crime syndicate.
Clearly, Hillary Clinton’s director surrogate at ENTRUST, INC., Jerry C. Jones (2003-2009), steered the development of the company’s control over encryption keys for the maximum benefit of his Clinton overlords.
At a bare minimum, Mueller and the FBI leadership has had an ethical duty ever since Jerry C. Jones became an ENTRUST director to disclose his direct conflict of interest and compromise of FBI operations by Hillary Clinton, his mentor.
A Bible prophecy has been realised as the first ‘red heifer in 2,000 years’ was born in Israel.
The Temple Institute announced the birth on their YouTube channel and said the calf and its mother would undergo “extensive examination” to determine if it’s “blemish free”.
In the announcement, the Institute said the red female calf “brings the promise of reinstating Biblical purity to the world”.
In both Christianity and Judaism, red heifers feature in tales about the “end of times”.
The birth of the ‘first red heifer in 2,000 years’ could signal the ‘end of times’
The birth and sacrifice of the red cow is said to precede the construction of the Third Temple in Jerusalem.
In mainstream Orthodox Judaism, the rebuilding of the Temple will happen before the coming of the Jewish Messiah.
The two previous temples have been destroyed.
However, The Temple Institute and other organisations have been established with the goal of building the Third Temple on Mount Moriah or the Temple Mount.
But some theologians believe the construction of the Third Temple is linked to ‘Judgement Day’ or the ‘end of times’.
The birth of a ‘blemish free red heifer’ precedes the building of the Third Temple
The Temple Institute have been trying to breed their own perfect red heifer
Director of The Temple Institute, Rabbi Chain Richman, believes it’s now time to build the Third Temple following the birth of the red heifer.
The video on the Institutes’s YouTube channel shows the calf with its mother and proclaims: “a perfectly red heifer was born in the land of Israel”.
The calf has since undergone “extensive examination by rabbinical experts” who confirmed she is a “viable candidate for the Biblical red heifer”.
However, the cow could be disqualified due to “natural causes”.
Bosses at the Temple Institute founded a Raise a Red Heifer in Israel program three years ago.
The building of the Third Temple will happen ‘before the coming of the Messiah’
https://clayandiron.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/logo-1.jpg00DrBillhttps://clayandiron.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/logo-1.jpgDrBill2018-09-08 13:23:032018-09-08 13:23:03Birth of 'first red heifer in 2000 years' fulfils Bible prophecy and signals 'end of days' The Temple Institute announced the birth of the red heifer in Israel on their YouTube channel and said the calf underwent 'extensive examination by rabbinical experts'
I was interviewed some time ago by the North Carolina Museum of History concerning the writing of this trilogy.
“The Confederate Secret Services, a conversation with W. Patrick Lang, novelist, retired U.S. Army colonel, and military intelligence consultant
Patrick Lang discusses his two novels, The Butcher’s Cleaver and Death Piled Hard, both of which focus on Claude Devereux, a Virginia banker who is recruited by the Confederate secret service and placed in the office of Union secretary of war Edwin Stanton. Approximate run time: 24 minutes. Podcast ”
“Science currently holds that time travel is an impossibility, but readers of Down the Sky, thefinal volume of Colonel Pat Lang’s Strike the Tent trilogy will question that assertion. Code-named “Hannibal,” Confederate penetration agent Claude Devereux is firmly lodged in the upper echelons of the Federal war machine. Now a Brigadier General of the Union forces with the new Congressional Medal of Honor on his chest, Major Devereux of the Confederate Secret Service knows time is running out. His minders in Richmond may no longer trust him, his personal life is a shambles, and Union spy-catcher Lafayette Baker is determined to bring him down. Only his peculiar, personal friendship with President Lincoln holds his enemies at bay.
Claude’s missions for the Federal War Department take him to major battles, and the reader will experience Cedar Creek, and Fort Fisher as if in person. The vision of Lincoln standing in full view of the Confederate sharpshooters at Fort Stephens is indelible, as is the vignette of a severely wounded Union officer on the grounds of the Belle Grove Plantation after Cedar Creek. Such a view of battle could only have come from the author’s personal experiences.
The book stands alone, but it is a worthy successor to its two predecessors, The Butcher’s Cleaver, and Death Piled Hard. The great Shelby Foote said:
‘The Civil War brings everything into a sharper focus with heightened color. Anytime you want to study human behavior, it is well to study the Civil War, because in that you study human behavior under terrific pressure and heat. So that men show what they are for good or bad more readily than in ordinary times.’
Readers of the trilogy, and of Down the Sky in particular will find this unerringly demonstrated by the historical rigor and deep creativity of Patrick Lang.
James Peak
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The third novel in the “Strike The Tent” trilogy is now available for purchase at; iUniverse, Barnes and Noble and Amazon. The cover painting, “Lincoln, 1863” is by Keith Rocco.
The first and second volumes, “The Butcher’s Cleaver” and “Death Piled Hard” are available from the same booksellers.
These books are available in electronic formats to include “Kindle’ from major vendors. pl
I’m afraid the recent “defensive attack” by US attack helicopters and artillery on Syrian tribesmen loyal to Damascus is not just a one-off fluke. It is a feature of the current US policy in Syria that will most likely result in another full blown war in the region… one that will put the US on a track to war with Russia.
First, here’s an account of the fighting southeast of Deir Ezzor on the eastern side of the Euphrates taken from the twitter feed of Maxim A. Suchkov, Russian editor for Al-Monitor. I’ve put it into prose form and corrected some spelling/grammar for easier reading.
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“Russia’s Defense Ministry on US-coalition killing of 100+ pro-Assad forces: “The incident once again exposed true American intentions in Syria which is not the fight against terrorism but seizure & control of economic assets.” Russia’s MoD version of the incident:”On Feb.7, a Syrian pro-Assad militia was making an incursion to destroy a terrorist group which had been sporadically shelling pro-gov positions.The SYR militia was near El Isba, former oil refinery, 17 km south-east of Salkhiyakh. Suddenly, the Syrian pro-Assad militia came under mortar and multiple artillery rocket system fire, shortly followed by US helicopter strikes. 25 militiamen were wounded (no mention of how many killed). Russia’s MoD suggests the US attack on pro-Assad militia were made possible because “the militia movements hadn’t been coordinated with the Russian military there.” Following the attack Russia hosted reps of US coalition forces in Khmeymim airbase for talks during which according to Moscow, US told the oil refinery was under SDF and US control (which probably was meant to say “stay out” and what prompted Russian response on US trying to seize Syrian economic assets). Finally, Russian MoD claims attacks on Syrian pro-gov positions are getting more frequent over recent days from settlements of Mazlum, Al-Tabiya, and Ksh Sham. Moscow references its military radio intercepts saying it’s done by one of ISIS “sleeper cells.” (@MSuchkov_ALM)
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Maxim A. Suchov continues with the Russian reaction to the attack.
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Follow-up on Moscow’s reaction to US strike on Syrian pro-gov forces:
1. Russia’s UN Ambassador Nebenzya will raise the issue at the upcoming UN Security Council closed-door briefing on the humanitarian situation in Syria. 2. Moscow is now conducting a thorough investigation of the incident, Russia’s MFA asks “How could a decision to open a massive fire to defeat the Syrian militiamen be made in such a short period of time [between SDF attacks and time US aviation came to the field]?” 3. Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Zakharova: “US military presence in Syria presents a serious challenge to the peace process and thwarts the protection of the country’s territorial integrity.” 4. Russia’s MFA spox Zakharova: “A 55-kilometer zone unilaterally created by US around mil base near al-Tanf used by scattered units of Daesh terrorists [who] have opportunity to hide from gov forces in area as well as regroup and prepare for new raids in the Syrian deserts” (@MSuchkov_ALM)
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An editorial in the pro-Turkish government paper “The Daily Sabah” lays the blame squarely on the shoulders of an out of control Pentagon and rogue CENTCOM generals. In so many words, they call on Trump to grow a pair and correct the situation. The full editorial is well worth reading.
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“During his 2016 election campaign, U.S. President Donald Trump kept asking: “Why are we in Syria and Afghanistan?” He called for an end to entanglements abroad and a focus on domestic problems. President Barack Obama’s Syria policy was based on little more than indifference and, the Trump administration just automatically adopted it.
After all these years, the U.S. still does not have a good grasp on what its policies on Syria are. What does it want to achieve? What is its endgame? What kind of timeframe has it settled on to achieve its objectives? American politicians seem clueless about what they have gotten themselves into.
No one knows who is in charge of the U.S.’s Syria policy. Chaos reigns. Who do we call to ask what the U.S. is doing in Syria?
It seems that with no lead from the top, United States Central Command (CENTCOM) has decided it is the boss. While operationally, it is good that soldiers are in charge, it seems soldiers have also taken over the decision making that should be under the purview of elected officials. CENTCOM and its officers now make statements, formulate strategies and even conduct diplomacy. Turkey has a history of power-hungry generals seeing themselves as guardians of the country and the U.S. is well-advised not to repeat it.” (Daily Sabah)
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Maxim Suchkov holds out a similar hope that Trump, himself, will step in and right the ship. He retweeted Trump and provided a comment to that tweet.
“I will be meeting with Henry Kissinger at 1:45pm. Will be discussing North Korea, China and the Middle East.” (@realDonaldTrump)
“Very interesting given Kissinger has now long been Putin’s go-to on messaging of Russia’s own position on same issues. Putin also holds Kissinger in high regard, seeking his wisdom, experience and balanced analysis of US-related matters.” (@MSuchkov_ALM)
I certainly hope Suchkov and the editors at The Daily Sabah are correct and that our current course in Syria is a temporary result of Trump’s inattention. The thought that a simple rage-filled outburst, accompanied by a few firings, can correct our course is oddly reassuring. However, I also have my doubts. Are the generals deflecting Trump by mentioning we control the Syrian oilfields when the President brings up the issue? Are the generals filling the President’s head with fears of Hezbollah and IRGC hordes running rampant across Syria?
Al-Monitor has an article out today extensively quoting Secretary of Defense Mattis. He downplays the role of Russia in Syria and Russian influence over Assad. He seems to be downplaying the risks that our aggressive talk and actions in Syria could lead to a confrontation with Russia. Well I think this jarhead is full of crap this time. To reinforce this man’s fullness of crap, a story appears this morning in Al Masdar News about attacks by the US controlled Deir Ezzor Military Council on SAA and NDF forces in Khashim and Tabiyyah on the Eastern shore of the Euphrates. Unlike the YPG/SDF, the Deir Ezzor Military Council is on the direct payroll of the State Department. This is a dangerous game we are playing.
“And finally, there’s the BFR: the ship Musk wants to use to colonize Mars.
On paper, SpaceX’s Big Falcon Rocket looks like the megarocket to end all megarockets. It’s a completely reusable launch system and features a massive spaceship on top of an equally massive booster powered by 31 SpaceX Raptor engines. (The Falcon Heavy uses 27 of the company’s Merlin engines.) [The BFR: SpaceX’s Mars-Colonization Architecture in Images]
The combined rocket and spaceship will stand 348 feet (106 meters) and will be able to launch 150 tons (136 metric tons) to low Earth orbit (LEO), making the BFR more powerful than NASA’s Saturn V moon rocket, which could launch 135 tons (122 metric tons) to LEO. (The Falcon Heavy may be the most powerful rocket in operation today, but it would take more than one to match the Saturn V, Musk said.)” Space.com
On February 7, the Syrian Arab Army (SAA), backed up by the Russian Aerospace Forces, repelled a Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) attack on its positions in the southeastern Idlib countryside, according to Syrian pro-government sources. The SAA reportedly killed and injured several fighters of HTS and its allies during the clashes.
Additionally, Russian warplanes destroyed several headquarters and ammo depots of the so-called Free Idlib Army in the city of Maarrat al-Nu’man in the southern Idlib countryside, according to Syrian activists.
Syrian opposition sources revealed that thirteen Free Idlib Army fighters, including their general commander “Mohammad Abu Najib”, were killed in the Russian airstrikes on Maarrat al-Nu’man. Russian warplanes also destroyed more than four vehicles armed with anti-aircraft guns belonging to the group. SF
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The SAA is rapidly eliminating jihadist forces in the East Hama pocket. Bereft of a source of re-supply through encirclement the jihadis are being rapidly overrun and destroyed. By the time of this writing that pocket may be altogether eliminated. This will free up the forces involved to return to the attritional grinding process underway NW of Abu Duhur around the town of Tel Sultan. The SAA made a decision to eliminate the East Hama pocket before continuing to the west into Idlib Province. At their positions around Tel Sultan they had clearly gone past the culminating point of their drive to Abu Duhur and although they could have continued immediately, the risk of a sudden reversal brought on by exactly the kind of jihadi counter-attack now underway would have been great. Wisely they decided to improve the odds in their favor and have reduced the East Hama pocket to their operational rear and are bringing up more logistical support before continuing into Idlib. The wealth of air support available to them has been a great help in this. When they re-commence forward movement I hope they share my view that a right hook to Al-Eis to roll up the jihadi flank south of the Aleppo City is the best course of action. pl
“A local militia was conducting reconnaissance actions in the area to detect and eliminate the ISIS cell when it was surprisingly shelled by mortars, rocket launched and then the US-led coalition’s attack helicopters. 25 militiamen were injured as a result of the attack.” SF
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It appears to me thus far that the “troops” attacked were NDF militia from the area. They are likely to be Arab tribesmen, heavily trained and advised by IRGC Quds force people and supported by SAA artillery and and armor. These Arab tribesman are undoubtedly very hostile to the presence of the Kurdish SDF this far south of traditional Kurdish haunts. The US is pursuing an enduring role in Syria and had previously warned the Russians and through them the SAG that intrusions east of the Euphrates in Deir al-Zor Province would be met by force. This does not bode well for future US/SAG relations. US and Iranian hegemonic ambitions are nose to nose in Eastern Syria. pl
“Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has rejected the recent statement by the head of Turkey’s Republican People’s Party (CHP), Kemal Kilicdaroglu, regarding a potential meeting between Ankara and Damascus.
“What would we talk about with a murderer who has killed a million of his citizens,” Erdogan said in his address to mukhtars— heads of Turkish villages and neighbourhoods—at the presidential complex in Turkey’s capital, Ankara, as quoted by TRT World.” AMN
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The sultan is pretending to be motivated by concern for the Syrian peoples. Nonsense. He sees the opportunity to weaken Syria in pursuit of some future de facto annexations in northern Syria. Unfortunately for him the TSK is not doing well in establishing “facts on the ground” to support such ambitions. At the same time, the Turks are positioning small bodies of troops at Al-Eis, Idlib City and Saraqib supposedly to implement the Russian/Iranian/Turkish de-escalation agreement on Idlib Province but IMO their real purpose is to obstruct SAG recovery of the province. pl
Last night’s release of the memo by Senator’s Grassley and Graham asking the Department of Justice to open a criminal investigation of Christopher Steele for possible violations of 18 U.S.C. § 1001 provides critical confirmation of charges presented in the HPSCI memo prepared under the leadership of Devin Nunes, but it also confirms that Christopher Steele was not just some random guy offering good gossip to the FBI. He was an official intelligence asset. He was, in John LeCarre’s parlance, our “Joe.” At least we thought so. But, there is growing circumstantial evidence that Steele was acting on behalf of Britain’s version of the CIA–aka MI-6. If true, we are now faced with actual evidence of a foreign country trying to meddle in a direct and significant way in our national election. Only it was not the Russians. It was our British cousins.
The FBI has since provided the Committee access to classified documents relevant to the FBI’s relationship with Mr. Steele and whether the FBI relied on his dossier work. . . .it appears that either Mr. Steele lied to the FBI or the British court, or that the classified documents reviewed by the Committee contain materially false statements.
October 21, 2016, the FBI filed its first warrant application under FISA for Carter Page. . .The bulk of the application consists of allegations against Page that were disclosed to the FBI by Mr. Steele and are also outlined in the Steele dossier. The application appears to contain no additional information corroborating the dossier allegations against Mr. Page, although it does cite to a news article that appears to be sourced to Mr. Steele’s dossier as well.
March 17, 2017–the Chairman and Ranking Member were provided copies of the two relevant FISA applications, which requested authority to conduct surveillance of Carter Page. Both relied heavily on Mr. Steele’s dossier claims, and both applications were granted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC).
December of 2017, the Chairman, Ranking Member, and Subcommittee Chairman Graham were allowed to review a total of four FISA applications relying on the dossier to seek surveillance of Mr. Carter Page, as well as numerous other FBI documents relating to Mr. Steele.
When asked at the March 2017 briefing why the FBI relied on the dossier in the FISA applications absent meaningful corroboration–and in light of the highly political motives surrounding its creation–then Director Corney stated that the FBI included the dossier allegations about Carter Page in the FISA applications because Mr. Steele himself was considered reliable due to his past work with the Bureau.
In short, it appears the FBI relied on admittedly uncorroborated information, funded by and obtained for Secretary Clinton’s presidential campaign, in order to conduct surveillance of an associate of the opposing presidential candidate. It did so based on Mr. Steele’s personal credibility and presumably having faith in his process of obtaining the information.
. . . the FBI continued to cite to Mr. Steele’s past work as evidence of his reliability, and stated that ”the incident that led to the FBI suspending its relationship with [Mr. Steele] occurred after [Mr. Steele] provided” the FBI with the dossier infonnation described in the application. The FBI further asserted in footnote 19 that it did not ,believe that Steele directly gave information to Yahoo News that “published the September 23 News Article.”
The Grassley/Graham memo is devastating for Jim Comey. We can entertain only two possibilities–Jim Comey is a monumental dunce or he is a liar. One need only read the Michael Isikoff piece from 23 September 2016 to realize that Christopher Steele was a primary source for Isikoff. We are asked to believe that Comey is a naive, trusting soul bereft of curiosity, who refused to entertain the possibility that Steele was double dealing intel.
One of the most surprising revelations from the Grassley/Graham memo is in footnote 7. I’m surprised this was not redacted because it is drawn from a redacted/blacked out paragraph. Here is a critical bit of intel:
Attack Pilot Major Roman Filipov (RuAF) has been posthumously awarded the “Hero of the Russian Federation” decoration. Filipov was shot down near Saraqib while flying a ground attack mission against jihadi fighters massing to counter-attack SAA spearheads west of Abu Duhur town. Filipov ejected from his aircraft and then fought it out with the jihadis on the ground until they gotthe better of him. IMO opinion he richly deserved the aw ard.
The Russian expeditionary force needs to improve its Search and Rescue service so that more Russian air crew are not left to die alone in enemy hands. US practice is such that a rescue package would have been standing by in the air with gunships and extraction birds waiting, waiting.
Saraqib is not in Turkish Armed Forces hands, but they clearly have men on the ground in the area and in liaison with the jihadis. In that context, the GRU (Russian military intelligence) or lower level Russian MI were able to obtain the cooperation of the Turks in recovering Major Filipov’s body. People who exist outside the world of soldiering and its military intelligence function do not generally understand the level of collegiality that exists in that world. That collegiality often extends across political boundaries and the momentary whims of politicians. was Erdogan consulted? Certainly, but the retrieval of Filipov’s body speaks of more than that. pl
1. Nikki Haley is either completely gullible or is in thrall to some collection of Borgists at State. Someone remarked of a previous US Secretary of State that “if only he were still alive this would not happen.” Unfortunately he was still alive and in office. Much the same could be said of Rex Tillerson. Haley is now tub thumping for US air attacks on Syria. This a reprise of several previous US assertions of Syrian Arab Government (SAG) use of chemical weapons including the East Ghouta and Khan Sheikhoun fiascos. After Khan Sheikhoun the SAG invited US and UN investigations of the air base but somehow this was not accepted. Now James Mattis is asserting that the SAG is manufacturing chemical munitions although the US has no evidence of this as yet. I believe this is called “confirmation bias?”
2. As shown above , the SAA is committed to elimination of the East Idlib pocket. The jihadis are without re-supply and will progressively be running out of the means of resistance. This should not take too long and is actually a good idea before proceeding further into Idlib Province to the west. I believe I expressed an opinion as to the wisdom of such a move.
3. The SAA has begun shelling the Turkish strong point (observation post) at Al-Eis. The Turks have been attempting tricky cleverness by claiming that they are occupying the hill at Al–Eis un accord with a Russian/Iranian/Turkish de-escalation igreement. In fact IMO they are seeking to position themselves so as to impede SAG liberation of Idlib Province. pl
Do you want to know why the FBI continued to insist that the Nunes’ memo not be declassified and released to the public? The answer is right there on page 2, (see 1b) in the discussion about what was excluded from the application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court:
The application does not mention Steele was ultimately working on behalf of-and paid by-the DNC and Clinton campaign, or that the FBI had separately authorized payment to Steele for the same information.
I believe that the part in bold is what the FBI wanted out of the memo because it exposes the uncomfortable fact that Christopher Steele was (and had been for some time) a paid asset of the FBI. That is huge news. In other words, Steele was not a mere consultant or sub-contractor for the FBI. He was being paid to provide information/intelligence to the FBI. There are two classes of FBI “informants.” One is serving as a “criminal informant” and the other is as an “intelligence asset.” Information from “criminal informants” can be used in a U.S. judicial proceeding and the informant called as a witness. Getting money under that circumstance can be problematic because the source’s credibility can be impeached by defense counsel, who can argue that the testimony is purloined.
You do not have to worry about that with an “intelligence asset.” In that case the priority is protecting the identity of the source. The fact that Steele had been on the FBI payroll for a while sheds new light on Glen Simpson’s testimony (which was leaked by Senator Feinstein) to the U.S. Senate. Simpson testified that Steele told him in late September 2016 that the FBI wanted to meet him in Rome to discuss the dossier. That struck me initially as quite odd. If Steele was just acting as an average “foreign” citizen who was trying to help the FBI then he could easily have met with the Bureau in London. That city hosts the largest number of FBI agents in the world outside of the U.S. But Steele was asked to go meet in Rome. That’s what you do when you are meeting an intelligence asset that the Brits do not know about.
“When SpaceX was competing to fly cargo to the International Space Station, Musk mocked his rival’s rockets. Vying to launch spy satellites, SpaceX sued the US Air Force for a chance to bid on classified launches. Plotting a satellite internet constellation, he promised a network “an order of magnitude” more sophisticated than his competitors. Tomorrow (Feb. 6), his space company will attempt to launch the largest rocket in the world, the Falcon Heavy—and if successful, the rocket entrepreneur could find himself set for collision with a gigantic rocket NASA been building for more than a decade.
SpaceX’s goal since 2002 has been to develop the technology to make humanity a multi-planetary species. The Falcon Heavy is the first vehicle built by Musk’s company with the capability of taking a usefully large scientific robot—or even, in stages, a human exploration mission—beyond earth orbit, and to another astronomical body.” Qurtz
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Tomorrow, Musk will try to put his red roadster into Mars orbit. “Up, up and away!” “Fly me to the moon!” Pick your tune. I had just arrived in Frankfurt in 1969 when the first moon landing occurred. I remember that the local newspaper had a headline the next day that read “Jetzt der mann in der mond ist ein Ami,” or something like that. pl
Steele, Shvets, Levinson, Litvinenko and the ‘Billion Dollar Don.’
In the light of the suggestion in the Nunes memo that Steele was ‘a longtime FBI source’ it seems worth sketching out some background, which may also make it easier to see some possible reasons why he ‘was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.’
There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this.
This agenda has involved hopes for ‘régime change’ in Russia, whether as the result of an oligarchic coup, a popular revolt, or some combination of both. Also central have been hopes for a further ‘rollback’ of Russia influence in the post-Soviet space, both in areas now independent, such as Ukraine, and also ones still part of the Russian Federation, notably Chechnya.
And, crucially, it involved exploiting the retreat of Russian power from the Middle East for ‘régime change’ projects which it was hoped would provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area.
Important support for these strategies was provided by the ‘StratCom’ network centred around the late Boris Berezovsky, which clearly collaborated closely with MI6. As was apparent from the witness list at Sir Robert Owen’s Inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko, which produced a report based essentially on a recycling of claims made by the network’s members, key players were on your side of the Atlantic – notably Alex Goldfarb, Yuri Shvets, and Yuri Felshtinsky.
The question of what links these had, or did not have, with elements in U.S. intelligence agencies is thus a critical one.
In making some sense of it, the fact that one key figure we know to have been involved in this network was missing at the Inquiry – the former FBI agent Robert Levinson, who disappeared on the Iranian island of Kish in March 2007 – is important.
Unfortunately, I only recently came across a book on Levinson published in 2016 by the ‘New York Times’ journalist Barry Meier, which is now hopefully winging its way across the Atlantic. From the accounts of the book I have seen, such as one by Jeff Stein in ‘Newsweek’, it seems likely that its author did not look at any of the evidence presented at Owen’s Inquiry.
“Amid ongoing offensive operations by the Syrian Arab Army and allied paramilitary groups against Islamist militias in the southern countryside of Aleppo province, elite troops have taken control of yet another town as they eye-out a possible advance towards the rebel stronghold of Al-Eis.
Military-affiliated sources report that forces of the Syrian Army’s Republican Guard have seized from armed rebel groups the town of Tal Mamu in the last hour after kicking-off another day off offensive operations in southern Idlib.” AMN
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IMO the correct move by the Syrians just now is to turn right with their main forces and roll up the jihadis who are now facing east south of Aleppo City. This should collapse the whole jihadi force west of Khanassar and south of Aleppo City and lead to a rapid liberation of the province. Screening forces should be left to “cover” Saraqib and the left flank SE of Saraqib. I have looked at the hill at Al-Eis just north of the town of the same name and it does not seem to be a great obstacle. It can be heavily bombarded with preparatory aerial fires and then attacked from several directions by mobile forces.
The Turks are there? This would be a good opportunity to force them to back away. pl
Now that the Devin Nunes memo is out in the public—with no redactions—and a counter-memo by Adam Schiff is expected to be released within days, it is a good moment to step back and look at the bigger picture of what has gone wrong with our system and where we are headed as a country.
First, it has been clear, long before the Nunes memo flap, that a network operating within the U.S. law enforcement and intelligence community had it out for Donald Trump for reasons that had little or nothing to do with alleged Russian ties. Hardcore Obama-Clinton loyalists at the top of the FBI, the CIA, the ODNI and the DOJ abused their positions in a flagrant partisan effort to prevent Donald Trump’s election. After he won the presidency, they continued in their efforts to deny him the job, deluding themselves that they could forestall the inauguration by claiming that Trump’s victory was solely the result of Russian interference, and by extension, that Trump was a blackmailed dupe of Moscow and Putin.
Post-Nunes memo claims by the Borg media that it was the George Papadopoulos comments to an Australian diplomat that led to the FISA Court surveillance request—not the Steele MI6 memos—are flagrantly phony. The Steele memos were passed to the FBI, as well as to Fusion GPS from the outset. The references to Carter Page appeared in Steele memos months before the FISA Court applications, and before the alleged Peter Strzok probe of Page began in late July 2016 (Page’s name came up in the July 19, 2016 Steele memo and the allegations of Russian possession of damaging material on Hillary Clinton were in the first Steele memo, dated June 20, 2016).
It is one thing for people in government service to have political views and biases, it is another thing for those biases to infect the workings of our law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Likewise for the House Select Committee on Intelligence, which had been one of the last bastions of non-partisan work on Capitol Hill (the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence appears to have preserved some semblance of bipartisan collaboration). That above-politics commitment has been trashed and it may never be restored. And it began with Adam Schiff, who seems to have spent half his time on CNN and MSNBC since the Trump election.
While the entire Mueller probe may have been the result of the fruit of a poison tree (the salacious Steele allegations, which even the FBI admitted were never corroborated), I doubt that the Mueller probe will be shut down before completion. Mueller moved quickly to dismiss Strzok and Page once the amorous emails were turned over to him in July 2017 and somewhat insulated himself from their bile.
If there was credible evidence of Russian attempts to interfere in the 2016 elections—outside of the toxic claims in the Steele dossier—that is a fair subject for counterintelligence investigation. But it is becoming more and more clear that the inclusion of President Trump in the Mueller probe derived almost 100 percent from the Steele product. FBI Director James Comey read the documents and was reportedly so horrified that he threw himself fully into the scheme—along with Obama partisans John Brennan and James Clapper—to stop Donald Trump from taking office.
That, IMHO, is criminal. Comey, Brennan and Clapper are legitimate targets for Federal investigation. Only by getting to the bottom of the abuse of the awesome powers of the Federal law enforcement and intelligence services can we hope to ever restore credibility and non-partisanship, two hallmarks of a genuine republic.
My first reaction to reading the much ballyhooed Nunes memo was to wonder why the DOJ and FBI fought so vociferously to prevent its release. It didn’t give a lot of what I would consider worthy of a TOP SECRET classification nor did it reveal any FBI transgressions a hundred times worse than Watergate as promised. What it did reveal is the fact that a FISA warrant was granted on 21 October 2016 targeting Carter Page and that it was subsequently renewed three times.
Typically the DOJ and FBI offer only a Glomar response (neither confirm nor deny) to any inquiry about FISA warrants. I believe this is why they fought the release of this memo. It sets the precedent that the Government acknowledges the issuance of a specific FISA warrant. This will have consequences beyond the Mueller investigation.
One consequence has already happened. Washington DC national security attorney Mark Zaid and his James Madison Project have had a long standing FOIA lawsuit in Federal Court seeking disclosure of any FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign. The consistent Government position has been a Glomar response. Earlier today Zaid put in a filing in this case taking into account the President’s unprecedented action to declassify the existence of this FISA warrant. The Court’s response was pretty damned quick. This was just tweeted. “Judge Mehta has just ordered DOJ to notify the court by February 14th whether the Nunes Memo requires the reversal of its Glomar Response. If DOJ says it does not, Judge Mehta wants an explanation from DOJ.”
So, we might all get to see the full, albeit redacted, FISA warrants including the Carter Page one. However, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for those FISA warrants to appear anytime soon. Mark Zaid also got word today that his FOIA lawsuit to get the Comey memos was denied because releasing those memos could effect an open investigation… the Mueller investigation. Perhaps we’ll see all the warrants and memos once the investigation concludes… or is stopped in its tracks.
Unless Trump uses this Nunes memo in a “go for broke” effort to fire all the top DOJ and FBI folks and replace them with new folks who have pledged their personal loyalty to Trump, I don’t see this memo having a tremendous effect on the Mueller investigation. By the memo’s own admission the FBI investigation began in July 2016 with information surrounding Papadopoulis, probably from Australia.
Prior to this FBI investigation, an interagency working group was established in April 2016 from the FBI, CIA, NSA, DOJ, the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and representatives of the DNI to begin an inquiry into the movement of Russian money into the US to pay hackers and influence the election. This action was taken based on info received from the Estonian IS concerning Trump associates meeting RIS operatives in Europe and a recording indicating the Russian government was planning to funnel funds aimed at influencing the US election. GCHQ became aware in late 2015 of suspicious “interactions” between figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russia. This intelligence was passed to the US as part of a routine exchange of information. Germany, Poland and possibly the French DGSE also passed on SIGINT.
The existence of neither of these investigations was leaked to the press before the 2016 election. I would think the vast Borg conspiracy would have done this as a vital part of their soft coup. It would have been effective. Instead, they publicly announced the reopening of the Clinton email investigation a week before the election. Is that any way to run a secret society?
The Mueller investigation is not a Borg conspiracy or a leftist conspiracy or a witch hunt. It is a federal counterintelligence and criminal investigation. I have no doubt there have been and will be instances of investigatorial and prosecutorial arrogance, overreach and even errors when this is all over. Whether there will be serious indictments that will permanently hobble or even destroy the Trump presidency is unknown. He may come out of this exonerated and stronger than ever. Only a thorough investigation, with proper oversight, will tell.
Based on the memo released today by the House Intelligence Committee (read it here), current and former members of the FBI and the Department of Justice who signed off on applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court will likely face contempt of court charges. Who? James Comey, Andy McCabe, Sally Yates, Dana Boente and Rob Rosenstein. The effectively lied to a Federal judge. That is not only stupid but illegal.
Here are the critical points from the Nunes memo that you should commit to memory.:
The Steele Dossier played a critical role in obtaining approval from the FISA court to carry out surveillance of Carter Page according to former FBI Deputy Director Andy McCabe.
Christopher Steele was getting paid by the DNC and the FBI for the same information.
No one at either the FBI nor the DOJ disclosed to the court that the Steele dossier was paid for by an opposition political campaign.
The first FISA warrant was obtained on 21 October 2016 based on a story written by Michael Isikoff for Yahoo News based on information he received directly from Christopher Steele–THE FBI DID NOT DISCLOSE IN THE FISA APPLICATION THAT STEELE WAS THE ORIGINAL SOURCE OF THE INFORMATION.
Christopher Steele was a long standing FBI “source” but was terminated as a source after telling Mother Jones reporter David Corn that he had a relationship with the FBI.
The FBI signers of the FISA applications/renewals were James Comey and Andy McCabe.
The DOJ signers of the FISA applications/renewals were Sally Yates, Dana Boente and Rod Rosenstein
Even after Steele was terminated by the FBI, he remained in contact with Deputy Attorney General Bruce Our, whose wife worked for FUSION GPS and was involved with the Steele dossier.
If you go back and read carefully what Isikoff reported in September 2016 it appears that the CIA and the DNI (as well as the FBI) are implicated in spreading the disinformation about Trump and Russia. Isikoff wrote:
Here are the White House letter about the memorandum of 18 January 2018 from the U.S. House Intelligence Committee and the memo itself that were released today.
White House Counsel Donald McGahn II dances around the delicate and not entirely clear issue of exactly what the legal grounds are for making information classified and unclassified and who in the federal government can do it. He opts for a common idea in favor of the executive branch and mentions executive order 13526, which I noted in a comment the other day.
He and President Trump have made it easy for everyone by saying, “… the President has authorized the declassification of the Memorandum”.
The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) was established to promote greater accountability of the taxpayer’s dollars being spent in Afghanistan. That they are saying the military is keeping information from the public that would illustrate the resurgence of Taliban (and other) insurgent elements deserves attention. Afghanistan’s fate will not be determined by the US / West.
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A new report released on Monday states the US military is keeping information from the public that gauges the war in Afghanistan and gains made by insurgents.
The US Defense Department has restricted data on population figures and on what areas are held by either government or insurgents, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) said in a report released on Tuesday.
“The number of districts controlled or influenced by the Afghan government had been one of the last remaining publicly available indicators for members of Congress … and for the American public of how the 16-year-long US effort to secure Afghanistan is faring,” John Sopko, the special inspector general, said in the report.
This however is the first time that SIGAR has been instructed not to release unclassified information in one of its quarterly reports, Sopko said, adding that the information will instead be included in an annex unavailable to the public.
The report stated that SIGAR was not given any justification for the new restrictions.
The SIGAR report stated that the “worrisome development” follows an increase of insurgent control or influence in Afghanistan.
As such, the non-disclosure of information was of particular concern, SIGAR reported.
It also comes after several other measures for gauging the development and strength of Afghanistan’s security forces were blocked or restricted in the fall. Among them were casualty and attrition rates.
A super-moon for a super speech by the new leader of a great country that doesn’t have a tin-pot dictator and an out of control secret police running the place. Here in this storied land when electing our new leaders we citizens know we’re Stronger Together. And our true leaders look stunning in white.
Yes, stronger together. Like when we have record employment for our most downtrodden citizens. That joyous news will make every politician stand and cheer.
Well, you must understand that sometimes our politicians have worked so hard to help their fellow citizens that the best they can do is Stand Sit to honor their fellow citizens because they know whose lives really matter.
Now some foreign readers might have heard that there is some kind of a scandal involving the most recent election of our great leader. Rest assured that here in this fabeled land of milk and honey and truth and justice there’s only one way to discover the truth. A fair and impartial investigation. Like we have here:
“FBI investigators in the Anthony Weiner sexting probe knew for weeks about the existence of newly discovered emails potentially related to the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private email…”
IMO the SAA and friends are well past the culminating point of their drive into Idlib Province and vulnerable to a major reverse if things do not continue to go well, but fortune often favors the brave … A reverse could take the form of a counter-attack against the now very long “roots” (supply lines) of the spearheads fighting NW of Abu Duhur especially in the context of protracted fighting at rapidly stiffening defenses around the crossroads at Saraqib when SAA reaches that location.
But, pilgrims, fortune DOES favor the brave and a crushing defeat of HTS and collapse of jihadi resistance in the province could be accomplished if:
1. The SAA advances to Saraqib and then engages just sufficiently to fix the defending jihadi forces in position.
2. The SAA does not immediately divert scarce forces to the relief of the two besieged Shia villages just north of Idlib City. These places will be uncovered and will fall to government forces of their own weight if the major effort in Idlib Province is successful.
3. The main effort should now be made by a Tiger Force led column that wheels to the right to roll up jihadi forces from south to the north as they currently face government forces to the south of Aleppo City. This movement would turn jihadi forces out of their positions and enable a general government advance into Idlib Province from existing positions in Aleppo Province south of Aleppo City. pl
Why is Donald Trump winning? It is not because he has some a warm, charming personality. Nope. He understands the 21st Century media reality. That also explains why the Democrats and so many pundits who opine on politics are getting things wrong. The Dems and their pundit lackeys are living with a 1970s view of the media. They do not understand that ship has sailed.
Look first at the numbers of viewers for last night’s State of the Union speech. This tells part of the story:
FOXNEWS 11,500,000
NBC 7,100,000
CBS 7,000,000
ABC 5,400,000
FOX 3,600,000
CNN 3,100,000
MSNBC 2,700,000
That’s a total of 40,300,000 viewers. Sounds like a lot. But when you consider the fact that the population in America is approaching 330 million, that’s only 12 percent of the population.
Let’s take this to the level of who watches news. There is the assumption among those who turn on FOX or CNN or MSNBC that these outlets are influential in helping set policy and inform political opinion. That may have been true 30 years ago, but it is no longer the case.
On Monday, 29 January 2018, the U.S. House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence met for a business meeting and voted on five agenda items or motions concerning classified executive session memoranda. This is the tantalizing matter of conduct by one or more executive branch agencies of surveillance, perhaps of president-elect Donald Trump, campaign members, and others. Also said to possibly be involved is the secret federal court created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), and maybe even the bawdy paper pushed during the presidential campaign by “former” (or current?) British MI6 agent Christopher Steele about Donald Trump and Russia. Here are the agenda items and the votes on each one by committee members–
The big one was item number four, which passed, and authorized the disclosure of one classified executive session memo.
Of equal interest is the fact that the U.S. Congress can declassify and make public a document or item that was deemed secret and not to be disclosed. Buried in the 45 pages of fine print in the Rules of the House of Representatives is the language that is claimed to authorize the disclosure. Rule 10 governs the organization of committees. Section or clause 11 of Rule 10 deals with the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The good stuff describing the authority and procedure is on pdf pages 19 and 20 (document pages 15 and 16) of the rules, in parts 11(f) and 11(g). You start near the bottom of the middle column with part “f” on pdf page 19 and go through part/clause 11(g)(2)(G) in the first column on pdf page 20–
That Congress can decide what is classified secret and what is not, and can authorize disclosure, is self-evident from Article 1, section 1 of the U.S. Constitution: “All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives”. However, the House rules are not legislation. I have not yet tried to find a law passed by Congress that creates this unilateral power to declassify material, but I assume that it does exist, or it certainly should.
The members of the House intelligence committee are listed here–
One little item of interest is that committee member Will Hurd (Repub. Texas, 23rd District) is a former CIA officer. His Congressional district includes part of the San Antonio area. According to the committee document cited above with the motions that were voted on, he participated in all of the votes except number four, the one that starts the process to try to disclose the memo to the public. He did not vote “present”, so he may have ducked out of the room for that one. If he has a philosophical objection to disclosing material previously designated as classified, he may not be put on the spot as the deciding vote to disclose if the whole House has to vote on that question. If the Republicans have a surplus in their majority in the House, he might either not vote at all or make a symbolic “no” vote.
If the underlying material for the memo was submitted by the “executive branch” and the executive branch requests that it be kept secret, the committee notifies the president that the vote to disclose was made.
“The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.” 16th Amendment to the US Constitution
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The Democrat governors of; Connecticut, New York and New Jersey have sued the federal government in an attempt to block application of the new federal tax law. Their specific complaint is that the new law abolishes the federal income tax deduction for state income taxes. These three states and a few more including California have very high state income tax rates. They also have a disproportionate number of people whose incomes place them in the 1% percentile of highest US individual incomes across the country. It was reported this AM on Fox Business News that the average state income tax in New York for 1%ers is $500,000. Under the old federal tax law this state tax was deductible from gross income before net income for federal taxation was determined. To say that this is a massive loss for such folk is completely true. Deplorable Trump voters typically either live in states with much lower income tax rates or don’t make anything like that much money. So for them the loss is much less especially considering lower tax rates in the new law and a doubled standard deduction. In fact a great many of them will pay no federal income tax at all. Quite a few paid no federal income tax under the old law and now that number will be larger.
In any circumstance the 16th Amendment is clear in that the federal government is not required to “balance” taxation among the states. pl
https://clayandiron.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/logo-1.jpg00DrBillhttps://clayandiron.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/logo-1.jpgDrBill2018-02-09 15:17:552018-02-09 15:18:20Colonel Pat Lang's Outpost - "A Committee of Correspondence"
China has unveiled ambitious plans to become the next major superpower. Picture: Greg Baker/AFPSource:AFP
BEIJING has outlined plans to become the world’s biggest superpower within the next 30 years.
Opening a five-yearly national congress, Chinese President Xi Jinping set out his time frame for the country to become a “global leader” with international influence.
In his 3 ½ hour speech, Mr Xi urged a reinvigorated Communist Party to take a stronger role in society and economic development to better address the nation’s “grim” challenges.
Speaking in the massive Great Hall of the People near Tiananmen Square, Mr Xi laid out his vision of a ruling party that served as the vanguard for everything from defending national security to providing moral guidance.
He also called for the party not only to safeguard China’s sovereignty but also to revitalise Chinese culture, oppose “erroneous” ideology and promote religion that is “Chinese in orientation”.
China’s President Xi Jinping gives his speech at the opening session of the Chinese Communist Party’s national congress at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. Picture: Wang Zhao/AFPSource:AFP
He said “it was time for his nation to transform itself into a mighty force” that could lead the entire world on political, economic, military and environmental issues, The Guardian reported.
“The Chinese nation … has stood up, grown rich, and become strong — and it now embraces the brilliant prospects of rejuvenation … It will be an era that sees China moving closer to centre stage and making greater contributions to mankind,” Mr Xi said.
Hailing the start of a “new era”, Mr Xi outlined a vision in which the party would lead China on the road to becoming a “great modern socialist country” by the mid-century.
“The great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation is no walk in the park or mere drum-beating and gong-clanging. The whole party must be prepared to make ever more difficult and harder efforts,” Mr Xi told hundreds of delegates.
“To achieve great dreams there must be a great struggle.”
In a rare acknowledgment of the country’s economic issues, Mr Xi said China’s “prospects are bright but the challenges are grim”.
Critics argue China’s plans are ambitious given it has massive demographic issues and slowed economic growth.
A Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) officer practices conducting a military band before the opening session of the Chinese Communist Party’s five-yearly Congress. Picture: Wang Zhao/AFPSource:AFP
CHINA’S BIG PLAN
Senior analyst in defence strategy and capability at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Dr Malcolm Davis, told news.com.au Mr Xi’s message was loud and clear.
“China just doesn’t want to be a just regional superpower, it wants to be the superpower,” he said.
Dr Davis said Beijing wanted to challenge US supremacy and reshape the region according to China’s interests and economic development.
However, he acknowledged China faced several domestic challenges which stood in the way of its long-term goal, including suppression of democracy and freedom of speech.
Dr Davis also said Beijing faced a huge demographic problem with an increasing ageing population and declining birthrate.
This, in turn, would further impact on economic growth.
US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping during a meeting on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Germany last July. Picture: Saul Loeb/APSource:AP
“Like all authoritarian governments, Beijing sees anything which challenges it as a problem and will crack down hard on that,” Dr Davis said.
“After the Tiananmen Square massacre, Beijing said to its people: ‘If you forgo democracy, we will give you prosperity.’”
He questioned what would happen once China’s prosperity ran out and the disparity between rural and city and the elite and the common man was more obvious. Dr Davis pointed out Beijing was a major maritime power which the US was aware of and one which was determined to assert its dominance, particularly in the South China Sea.
He said China was also trying to make other countries sign up to its One Belt, One Road infrastructure investment project.
By doing this Beijing was extending its influence over other countries which would align themselves more with China than the US.
Dr Davis said China’s plans had a direct impact on Australia.
A solder in a raincoat stands watch outside the Great Hall of the People during the opening ceremony of the 19th Party Congress in Beijing. Picture: Andy Wong/APSource:AP
“Australia was just a backwater when Cold War was taking place, now we are right in the frontline” he said.
“The South China Sea is not far away and China is extending its reach into the Indian Ocean as well.
“We are an ally of the US and a vital partner in any potential conflict. We are front and centre of anything to do with China.”
‘MUSCULAR WORLD VIEW’
Mr Xi may have extolled China’s many great assets, but according to New York-based Asian specialist Sean King, the Chinese President made his keynote speech all about himself.
Mr Xi was “clearly positioning himself” for a possible third term.
“People need to stop calling this event a congress as if it’s some kind of legitimate political event,” Mr King said.
“It’s one man (Xi) controlling the only party in a one-party state. How is that political theatre?”
Mr King said the President may be seeking to modernise his country in regards to infrastructure and technology, but his speech showed cause for concern.
Former Chinese President Jiang Zemin closes his eyes during the President’s long speech. Picture: Mark Schiefelbein/APSource:AP
Indications showed the country was also going backwards when it came to internet freedom, free speech and the right to worship, he said.
“Xi’s muscular world view can mean trouble for the PRC’s (People’s Republic of China) immediate neighbours who typically look to America for security but who now almost openly question our commitment to the region,” Mr King said.
“In particular, our South China Sea friends and allies, as well as Japan’s concerns over its Senkaku Islands.”
Mr King said Australia, Japan, India and other like-minded democracies might conclude they have to take things into their own hands, co-operating more among each other, in the event that the US wasn’t there.
“Our (US) quitting the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which didn’t start out as such but evolved into an economic power play against Beijing, only furthers these fears,” he said.
Mr Xi made many nationalistic references during the speech. Picture: Lintao Zhang/Getty Images/APSource:Getty Images
MAN BEHIND THE POWER
Mr Xi opened the congress which is expected to enhance his already formidable power.
In his speech, Mr Xi hailed China’s island-building efforts in the disputed South China Sea as well as his signature foreign-policy initiative, the One Belt, One Road infrastructure investment project aimed at improving connections between China, Europe and Africa.
Mr Xi wields undisputed power and is expected to get a second five-year term as party leader at the gathering.
However, critics claim he has consolidated his power by sidelining his competitors in other intra-party cliques, including those surrounding his immediate predecessor Hu Jintao and former leader Jiang Zemin.
https://clayandiron.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/TRUMP-XI-CHINA-USA-MEETING.jpg488650DrBillhttps://clayandiron.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/logo-1.jpgDrBill2017-11-23 17:16:242017-11-23 17:35:03China’s 30-year deadline to rule the world
BRUSSELS, Belgium – In forceful remarks before the Baden-Württemberg State Parliament and nearly three hours of wide-ranging debate and dialogue with members of the European Parliament in Brussels, Belgium, Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. today forged closer ties with European leaders committed to climate action and blasted the “denialists” who continue to reject the scientific consensus on global warming.
“We have to wake up – wake up Europe, wake up America, wake up the whole world to realize we have a common destiny and we are all human beings on this one planet,” said Governor Brown in his address to the state parliament of Baden-Württemberg, co-founder of the Under2 Coalition. “This is daunting but it’s also an opportunity to pull people together.”
From Stuttgart, Germany, the Governor traveled to Brussels, Belgium, where he joined dozens of members of the European Parliament’s top climate and environmental committee and the leaders of the Parliament’s political parties for more than three hours of debate and discussion on climate change, its impacts, and opportunities for further collaboration. During the final hour of the exchange, the Governor confronted several members that used their remarks to openly question the science of climate change.
“The truth is that any kind of catalogue of the scientific community indicates that climate change is real, it’s having impacts. Even the Trump administration couldn’t, with a straight face, curb a report that underscores the very opposite of what you denialists have expressed here,” said Governor Brown during the discussion with the European Parliament Conference of Presidents. “With the denialists getting more attention, the people, instead of growing in their skepticism, are growing in their conviction that climate change and global warming are real matters – and we have to deal with them.”
Tomorrow, the Governor will conclude his visit to Brussels with a moderated conversation hosted by the German Marshall Fund. Later this week, the Governor will travel to Oslo, Norway, where he will meet with the country’s Prime Minister and Environment Minister and convene scientists from the world’s top national science academies before arriving in Bonn, Germany, where he will serve as Special Advisor for States and Regions at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP23).
Yesterday, Governor Brown met with Baden- Württemberg Minister-President Winfried Kretschmann in Stuttgart, Germany after delivering opening remarks at a high-level conference on clean energy organized by the European Parliament and European Commission and meeting with European Parliament President Antonio Tajani and the European Union’s top representatives at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP23) – Commissioner for Climate Action and Energy Miguel Arias Caüete and European Commission Vice-President for Energy Union Marosh Shefčovič. Over the weekend, the Governor delivered keynote remarks at a symposium on climate change hosted by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences at the Vatican, where he called on global faith leaders to help awaken the world to the threat of toxic carbon pollution.
Governor Brown was named Special Advisor for States and Regions in June by Fiji’s Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama – president of COP23. The Governor continues to build strong coalitions of partners committed to curbing carbon pollution in both the United States through the U.S. Climate Alliance and around the globe with the Under2 Coalition, which has grown to include 188 jurisdictions collectively representing more than 1.2 billion people and $28.9 trillion GDP – equivalent to over 16 percent of the global population and 39 percent of the global economy.
The Governor also joined United Nations Special Envoy for Cities and Climate Change Michael Bloomberg to launch America’s Pledge on climate change to help compile and quantify the actions of states, cities and businesses to drive down their greenhouse gas emissions consistent with the goals of the Paris Agreement. In September 2018, the State of California will convene the world’s climate leaders in San Francisco for the Global Climate Action Summit, where representatives from subnational governments, businesses, investors and civil society will gather with the direct goal of supporting the Paris Agreement.
This year, Governor Brown traveled to China to build closer climate ties with President Xi Jinping, Russia to call for deeper trans-pacific collaboration on climate change at the Eastern Economic Forum, Canada to officially link California’s carbon market with Quebec and Ontario and New York to discuss subnational climate action with the UN Secretary-General and open Climate Week NYC 2017.
Photo captions: 1.) Governor Brown delivers remarks at European Parliament climate dialogue. 2.) Governor Brown at European Parliament climate dialogue. 3.) Governor Brown addresses Baden-Württemberg State Parliament. 4.) Governor Brown at Baden-Württemberg State Parliament. 5.) Governor Brown at European Parliament climate dialogue.
For high-resolution copies of these photos, contact Danella Debel at Danella.Debel@gov.ca.gov.
Anti-Trump US coalition tells UN climate talks: ‘we’re still in’
ENVIRONMENT CORRESPONDENT ALISTER DOYLE Nov 9th 2017 11:30AM
BONN, Nov 9 (Reuters) – A coalition of U.S. cities, companies and other groups said on Thursday that many in the United States remained committed to the 2015 Paris climate agreement despite plans by U.S. President Donald Trump to pull out. The “we are still in” coalition opened a 2,500-square meter (27,000-square foot) tent pavilion outside a venue in Bonn, Germany, where delegates from almost 200 nations are working on details of the pact aimed at ending the fossil fuel era by 2100. By contrast, the U.S. government delegation office at the talks covers only 100 square meters. “There is a tradition of non-partisanship for protecting our planet,” said James Brainard, Republican mayor of the town of Carmel, Indiana, at an opening event. SEE ALSO: Syria plans to join Paris climate agreement, leaving US in isolation “It is unfortunate we have moved away from it.” Trump, who doubts mainstream scientific findings that global warming is primarily caused by man-made greenhouse gases, said in June he would pull out of the Paris Agreement and promote the U.S. coal and oil industries. The “we are still in” coalition of states, cities, universities, faith groups and environmental activists, aims to show delegates from other nations at the Nov. 6-17 U.N. talks that many Americans are working to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
It says its signatories represent more than 130 million Americans and $6.2 trillion of annual economic output. Fiji, which is presiding at the U.N. talks, welcomed the coalition as a “perfect example” of how the Paris accord aims to widen action beyond national governments. RELATED: What President Trump has said about climate change
The “we are still in” pavilion is funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies, The Hewlett Foundation and NextGen America. California Governor Jerry Brown also urged more action on climate change. “Relative to the threat, the urgency is not there … and nobody is in charge. That’s the biggest problem,” he told a news conference in Brussels. Brown travels to Bonn on Saturday. (Additional reporting by Robert-Jan Bartunek in Brussels; editing by Andrew Roche)
The Cities for Climate Protection Campaign (CCPC) and the framing of Local Climate Policy
ICLEI (1993b) Cities for Climate Protection. An International Campaign to Reduce Urban Emissions of Greenhouse Gases Written by Jeb Brugmann, Secretary General of ICLEI and Phillip Jessup, Director for the Urban CO2 Reduction Project, 15 February 1993 (Toronto, ICLEI)
Urban reactions to the global warming issue: Agenda setting in Toronto and Chicago
Jessup, Philip: ICLEI, interview March 11, 1992.
These two cities illuminate the policy-making process for global warming at the urban level and the role ‘{at policy entrepreneurs}’ can play at this level. In comparing the two cities, a common model of policy development is utilized.
While pursuing his Ph.D., and for a good time thereafter (1925–1946), Jessup served as a lecturer and professor in international law at Columbia Law School. In 1946, he was named the Hamilton Fish Professor of International Law and Diplomacy at Columbia Law, a post he held until 1961.[2][3] Jessup served as assistant secretary-general of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) conference in 1943 and the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference (the “Bretton Woods” conference) in 1944. He was a technical advisor to the American delegation to the San FranciscoUnited Nations charter conference in 1945. Jessup became a primary target of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who charged in the 1950 Tydings Committeehearings that Jessup was a security risk who had “an unusual affinity… for Communist causes.” McCarthy wasn’t allowed by the Tydings Committee to outline his case regarding Jessup but the committee did allow Jessup to fly in from Pakistan and give his defense. Jessup was subsequently cleared of all charges by the Loyalty Board of the State Department and the Tydings Committee, and McCarthy was rebuked by many fellow senators and other statesmen. However, in two speeches on the floor of the Senate, McCarthy gave his evidence regarding Jessup’s “unusual affinity for Communist causes”: 1.That Jessup had been affiliated with five Communist front groups; 2.That Jessup had been a leading light in the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR) at a time that organization was reflecting the Communist Party line; 3.And that he had “pioneered the smear campaign against Nationalist China and Chiang Kai-shek” and propagated the “myth of the ‘democratic Chinese Communist'” through the IPR magazine, Far Eastern Survey, over which he had “absolute control”; 4.That Jessup had associated with known Communists in the IPR; 5.That the IPR’s American Council under Jessup’s guidance had received more than $7,000 of Communist funds from Frederick Vanderbilt Field; 6.That Jessup had “expressed vigorous opposition” to attempts to investigate Communist penetration of the IPR; 7.That Jessup had urged that United States atom bomb production be brought to a halt in 1946, and that essential atomic ingredients be “dumped into the ocean”; 8.That Jessup had appeared as a character witness for Alger Hiss, and that later, after Alger Hiss’s conviction, Jessup had found “no reason whatever to change his opinion about Hiss’s veracity, loyalty and integrity.” McCarthy’s allegations severely damaged Jessup’s reputation and career . Nonetheless, President Harry S. Truman appointed Jessup as United States delegate to the United Nations in 1951. However, when the appointment came before the Senate it was not approved, largely because of McCarthy’s influence. Truman circumvented the Senate by assigning Jessup to the United Nations on an “interim appointment.” Shortly after John F. Kennedy took office as president, the State Department approved the appointment of Jessup as U.S. candidate for the International Court of Justice, a post that did not need Senate confirmation. He served from 1961 until 1970.
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LOIS KELLOGG JESSUP, CLASS OF 1920
Lewis Greenleaf Adams, AIA, (1897–1977), was an American architect based in New York City Adams attended the Groton School,[2] graduation in 1916.[3] earned his Bachelor of Architecture from the Yale University[2] in 1920.[1][3]
There, Lewis Adams was a member of the secret society, Skull and Bones.In a double-marriage ceremony on July 24, 1921, Adams married Emiline Kellogg, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Kellogg of Utica, New York, and younger sister of Lois Kellogg who was married that same day to Philip C. Jessup, son of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Wynans Jessup, of 20 Fifth Avenue.
Charles Seymour (1908), President of Yale (1937–1951), founding member of The Council on Foreign Relations All of the Lindsay children attended the best schools. John went to Buckley in Manhattan before prepping at St. Paul’s, in Concord, New Hampshire. He then became a member of the class of 1944 at Yale, where he rowed crew and was elected to Scroll and Key. (David Lindsay also attended Yale; he was selected for the more prestigious Skull and Bones, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.) David A. Lindsay
David L. Boren (1963), Governor of Oklahoma, U.S. Senator, President of the University of Oklahoma
Michael Gates Gill (1963), advertising executive, author
William Dawbney Nordhaus (1963), Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University
Orde Musgrave Coombs (1965), author, editor, first black member of Skull and Bones
John Shattuck (1965), US diplomat and ambassador, university administrator
John Forbes Kerry (1966), U.S. Senator (D-Massachusetts 1985–2013); Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts 1983–1985; 2004 Democratic Presidential nominee; 68th United States Secretary of State 2013-present
David Rumsey (1966), founder of the David Rumsey Map Collection and president of Cartography Associates
Frederick Wallace Smith (1966), founder of FedEx
David Thorne (1966), United States Ambassador to Italy
Victor Ashe (1967), Tennessee State Senator and Representative, Mayor of Knoxville, Tennessee, US Ambassador to Poland
Roy Leslie Austin (1968), appointed ambassador to Trinidad and Tobago by George W. Bush
George W. Bush (1968), grandson of Prescott Bush; son of George H. W. Bush; 46th Governor of Texas; 43rd President of the United States. His nickname was “Temporary” since he failed to choose a name Paul Giamatti (1989), Academy Award-nominated American actor
Jessup was Chairman of the Institute for Pacific Relations (IPR) American council from 1939 to 1940 and chairman of its Pacific council from 1939 to 1942. Both councils were high-level policy-making bodies. The Senate Internal Security Subcommittee found in 1954 that: “ The IPR has been considered by the American Communists and by Soviet officials as an instrument of Communist policy, propaganda andmilitary intelligence. . . . A small core of officials and staff members carried the main burden of IPR activities and directed its administration and policies. Members of the small core of officials and staff members who controlled the IPR were either Communists or pro-Communists. ” Through the IPR Jessup was closely associated with Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, Frederick Vanderbilt Field and Lauchlin Currie. Jessup served as assistant secretary-general of the United Nations Refugee and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) conference in 1943 and the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944. He was a member of the American delegation to the San Francisco United Nations charter conference in 1945. He was also the United States representative on the fifteen-man United Nations committee of jurists that had drafted the World Court statute. Continuing as a technical expert and advisor to various important UN commissions, Jessup prepared the State Department’s “White Paper” on China. Written at the time when the Chinese Communist Party were overrunning the mainland, this report praised the CCP and condemned the Kuomintang forces. Jessup later became one of the early advocates for the admission of Peoples Republic of China to the United Nations. President Truman appointed Jessup as United States delegate to the United Nations in 1951. When the appointment came before the Senate, however, it was not approved because of Jessup’s openly pro-Communist record. President Truman circumvented the Senate action by assigning Jessup to the United Nations on an “interim appointment.” [1] Institute for Pacific Relations Senator McCarthy’s first comments regarding Jessup were made during the Tydings Committee hearings where McCarthy stated that Jessup had an unusual affinity for Communist causes. McCarthy was never allowed by the Tydings Committee to outline his case regarding Jessup but the committee did allow Jessup to fly in from Pakistan and give his defense against charges that McCarthy had not yet even made. Needless to say, the Tydings Committee cleared Jessup as they did with everyone that appeared before them. However, in two speeches on the floor of the Senate, McCarthy gave his evidence regarding Jessup’s “unusual affinity for Communist causes”. They are as follows: That Jessup had been affiliated with five Communist front groups; That Jessup had been a leading light in the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR) at a time that organization was reflecting the Communist Party line; And that he had “pioneered the smear campaign against Nationalist China and Chiang Kai-shek” and propagated the “myth of the ‘democratic Chinese Communist'” through the IPR magazine, Far Eastern Survey, over which he had “absolute control”; That Jessup had associated with known Communists in the IPR; That the IPR’s American Council under Jessup’s guidance had received more than $7,000 of Communist funds from Frederick Vanderbilt Field; That Jessup had “expressed vigorous opposition” to attempts to investigate Communist penetration of the IPR; That Jessup had urged that United States atom bomb production be brought to a halt in 1946, and that essential atomic ingredients be “dumped into the ocean”; That Jessup had appeared as a character witness for Alger Hiss, and that later, after Alger Hiss’s conviction, Jessup had found “no reason whatever to change his opinion about Hiss’s veracity, loyalty and integrity.” While it may be questionable that Jessup pioneered the smear campaign against Chiang Kai-Shek, it’s clear that he aided in it. There’s no doubt that every single one of these allegations was essentially correct. Solid evidence shows that Jessup was associated with four Communist front organizations. They are as follows: the American Russian Institute, the National Emergency Conference (and its successor, the National Emergency Conference for Democratic Rights), theAmerican Law Students Association, and the American Council of the Institute of Pacific Relations. According to the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) each of these organizations was cited as Communist front groups at the time of Jessup’s association with them. Although the Tydings Committee did not allow McCarthy to present his evidence against Jessup, the Tydings Committee did refer to some of McCarthy’s evidence that were made on the floor of the Senate. Of course, as usual, the Tydings Committee either ignored the significance of the evidence or downplayed it. It was up to the McCarran Committee a year later to do the real investigating and in discussing the IPR, it stated, “The IPR was a vehicle used by Communists to orientate American Far Eastern policy toward Communist objectives.” The McCarran Committee Hearings clearly indicate that the IPR was more than just a Communist front organization in that there was an active Communist “cell” that put the services of the IPR at the disposal of “Communist imperialism”. And that this was achieved by “manipulating” the IPR’s policy-making officials. The McCarran Committee reported that ten of the thirty-three individuals whom Jessup recommended as delegates to the IPR Hot Springs Convention in January 1945 have been named as members of the Communist Party. Jessup was well aware that Frederick Vanderbilt Field was a member of the Communist Party, and especially so when Field resigned from the IPR to devote full-time to the Communist front organization, American Peace Mobilization. Jessup also presided over the State Department Policy Conference of October 1949 that was not only stocked with Jessup’s pro-Communist associates but also, in the words of the McCarran Committee, which stated, “…the prevailing [majority] view at the conference advocated (a) the recognition of Communist China; (b) normal trade relations between the United States and Communist China; (c) encouragement of trade between Japan and Communist China; (d) economic assistance to Communist China; (e) recognition that Communist conquest in Asia was a natural and inevitable consequence of revolutionary ferment in Asia with its Communist nature being incidental.”
Harold Stassen and General Joseph Fortier have respectively testified that Jessup not only ignored advice to disregard the pro-Communist direction of the conference and that Jessup was in favor of recognizing Communist China. The above evidence clearly demonstrates that Jessup was at least a security risk and that the State Department Loyalty program failed to identify him as such. [2] World Court Shortly after John F. Kennedy took office as president, the State Department approved the appointment of Jessup as U.S. candidate for the International Court of Justice, a post that did not need Senate confirmation. He served from 1961 until 1970.
Six years after he was first elected President of the United States, Barack Obama remains something of an enigma to the public he presides over.
Ironically, this isn’t due to the President being particularly reticent about himself. After all, judging from his two books, the subject Obama finds most enthralling is Obama. For example, Obama’s 2012 eulogy for Senator Daniel Inouye (D-HI), the Japanese-American war hero, used 48 first person pronouns or adjectives (such as “I,” “me,” or “my”) to recount how the young Obama had noticed Inouye on TV.
Understandably, Obama hasn’t been in any hurry to answer his political opponents’ questions, toying with them for years over his birth certificate. Meanwhile, few of his supporters have felt much urge to ask him the detailed questions about his background that he’d probably love to expound upon at length. As Obama has explained, being a “blank screen” upon which voters can project their political fantasies has its advantages.
One reason for this obscurity is that aspects of Obama’s personal background are genuinely exotic to almost all Americans, which limits the quality of questions. For example, Obama’s Indonesian connections—as a child he lived in Jakarta from 1967-1971, shortly after the notorious massacre of Communists and Chinese; then in the 1980s Obama came fairly close to marrying a wealthy Australian woman with striking family ties to the highest circles of power in Indonesia—are perplexing to even the best-informed Americans.
Indonesia is an immense country (current population: a quarter of a billion), but it’s culturally remote from America. For instance, there are almost no prominent Indonesian-Americans (the Van Halen brothers, who are one-quarter Indonesian, may come closest). Movies about Indonesian history well-known in the West are limited to two curious ones about the downfall of the leftist ruler Sukarno in 1965 and the subsequent slaughter of Communists: The Year of Living Dangerously and last year’s documentary The Act of Killing.
Democrats, even Obama, don’t find Indonesians terribly interesting. It’s impossible to imagine Obama achieving anything in Democratic politics if he had not suddenly switched in the mid-1980s from what his friends called an “international” or “multicultural” identity to being Our First Black President.
“It’s impossible to imagine Obama achieving anything in Democratic politics if he had not suddenly switched in the mid-1980s from what his friends called an “international” or “multicultural” identity to being Our First Black President.”
And Republicans have generally found Indonesia a frustrating dead end in tying Obama to Islam or Communism. For example, the President’s stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, child of a wealthy Indonesian family, eventually died of liver failure at age 52, which doesn’t suggest he was terribly devout about abstaining from alcohol.
Lolo worked for an American oil company because his brother-in-law was a high official in General Suharto’s regime that had marched to power in 1965-66 over the dead bodies of hundreds of thousands of its leftwing opponents.
Likewise, Obama’s mother’s first job in Indonesia was at the American embassy.
The CIA/Ford Foundation policy tended to be to try to attract everybody in the Third World even slightly to the left of Che Guevara. (I wouldn’t be surprised if Obama’s maternal grand-uncle, a Ph.D. named Ralph Waldo Emerson Dunham, who worked for the Naval Personnel Research agency on the ultra-confidential Polaris submarine missile project, had vouched for his niece her being a good Jayhawk Unitarian liberal.)
For example, in Indonesia, where ‘anti-American’ popular and government feelings ran high in the 1950s and 1960s, the Ford Foundation played a vital role in building key educations institution with an underlying pro-western philosophy favoring capitalistic modernization and development strategies.
And that sounds like the President’s mom’s career, which eventually focused upon promoting microfinance for women entrepreneurs.
A major American nerve center for waging the Cold War in Asia was the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii. Janny Scott writes in her bestselling biography of the President’s late mom, A Singular Woman:
The summer Ann arrived in Hawaii [1960], Congress appropriated $10 million to set up the East-West Center, an institution that more than any would go on, over the next twenty-five years, to influence the direction of her life.
Lolo, an Indonesian Army officer, had arrived in Hawaii on an East-West Center grant in 1962.
Similarly, Barack Obama Sr. had gotten to the U. of Hawaii on another Cold War ploy, the Tom Mboya Airlift of promising African students to American universities. When Barack Sr. got back to Kenya, he too worked awhile for an American oil company. Although his ideological sympathies tended to be with the pro-Soviet Luo tribal leader Oginga Odinga, his all-important personal connections were with the pro-American Luo labor leader Tom Mboya.
Patrick J. Buchanan’s new book The Greatest Comeback recounts accompanying Richard Nixon to a 1967 meeting in Kenya with Mboya. Nixon and Buchanan were impressed by Mboya, but also picked up the impression that Mboya was perceived as too pro-Washington to make it all the way to the top in the rough world of Kenyan politics.
“And Tom Mboya never did,” Pat writes. After Mboya was assassinated by a Kikuyu hired gun in 1969, thefinal witnesscalled by the prosecution in the hit man’s trial was the dead man’s protégé: Barack Obama Sr.
One of the more intriguing ties the President’s mother had in Indonesia was to Subud. Scott’s A Singular Woman recounts that Ann Dunham Obama Soetoro went to work for a Ford Foundation-financed English-language school at the end of the Sixties:
The school … had been started several years earlier … with the intention of helping build an Indonesian elite. … In 1970, the Ford Foundation made the first in a series of grants to the institute … She was looking for teachers. A half-dozen of them accepted her invitation, many of them members of an international spiritual organization, Subud, with a residential compound in a suburb of Jakarta.
Obama’s mom became particularly close to a Portuguese-American convert to Subud. Scott writes:
Mohammad Mansur Medeiros, a reclusive and scholarly Subud member from Fall River, Massachusetts, and Harvard, whom Ann hired as a teacher, had immersed himself so deeply in Javanese culture, language, and religion that friends nicknamed him Mansur Java. Samardal Manan … used to listen awestruck and in silence, to Ann’s freewheeling conversations with Medeiros. “You would think they were in love, but they were not,” Manan said.
Founded by a Javanese aristocrat known as Bapak, Subud’s theology was a sort of “Coexist” bumper sticker avant la lettre. You could believe in whatever religion you wanted as long as you practiced the addictive group exercise called latihan, a sort of Javanese equivalent of an est encounter session.
And did whatever you were told.
While Subud’s lack of overt dogmas sounded low-key and appealing to educated Westerners, in practice it was a classic charismatic cult with all power over the communes in the hands of the anointed leaders. The cult accumulated enough wealth to build a skyscraper in Jakarta and today seems most active in running amining company in Indonesian Borneo.
I only became aware of Subud recently, from a friend who had the misfortune of growing up in a totalitarian Subud commune in England.
While Subud’s most ardent followers lived in communes, its political connections tended to be anti-Communist. Indonesia’s new dictator, General Suharto, publicly backed Subud.
It had been introduced to the English-speaking world in the 1950s by John G. Bennett, who had been a British intelligence agent in Istanbul and then a mining engineer. Subud was also a natural fit at the East-West Center at the U. of Hawaii.
Subud seems to have been especially influential among Australian elites posted to Jakarta. For example, novelist / adventuress Blanche D’Alpuget, the second wife of former Aussie prime minister Bob Hawke, was married to an Australian diplomat in Jakarta when she began her affair with the rising politician.
Murray Clapham, a legend among Australian foreign correspondents for his hard man’s role in the 1965 Indonesian countercoup, was another Subud follower. His 2011 obituary in the Sydney Morning Herald read:
Clapham appears to have been the model for at least one fictional Australian secret intelligence service officer in the Jakarta of the 1960s, when he was posted there as a diplomat in the Australian embassy. Clapham certainly looked the part and could have walked off the pages of the Christopher Koch novel The Year of Living Dangerously. It was a dangerous time and Clapham went well beyond the normal role of a diplomat in contacting and encouraging the anti-communist student groups known as KAMI and KAPPI. …
Like various other Western diplomats, Clapham was drawn to the spiritual group Subud, founded by the Javanese teacher Muhammad Subuh Sumohadiwidjojo.
During the later 1960s, Subud became popular among Southern California rock stars, most famously Jim McGuinn, the frontman of The Byrds, who changed his name to Roger at Bapak’s command.
There exists an elaborate conspiracy theory that the SoCal rock scene of the 1960s was a front for the CIA to exercise cultural control over the new generation: the denizens of Laurel Canyon often came from old money (fellow Byrd David Crosby was both a Van Cortlandtand a Van Rensselaer) or military-industrial complex families. For instance, Jim Morrison’s father was the admiral who commanded the fleet during the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, which you must admit couldn’t possibly be a coincidence (assuming you are as high as the Lizard King).
But all that’s unnecessary: California in the 1960s was full of people who wanted to be hippies without being Communists. Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test argued that California hippies were drawn in two polar directions: toward Ken Kesey’s superhero-inspired “flag-flying neon Day-Glo America” or toward Timothy Leary’s Eastern-leaning Oriental quietism. (By the way, it’s not implausible that the Yale American Studies program where Wolfe earned his Ph.D. in 1957 was something of aCIA front.)
For those “seekers” attracted to the Wisdom of the East, Subud offered a syncretic Asian religion without any worries that you were coming under Chi-Com influence.
The marriage of Lolo and Stanley Ann was on the rocks by the time she enrolled in 1972 as a grad student at the East-West Center under anthropologist Alice Greeley Dewey (a descendant of two of the WASPiest figures in American history: philosopher John Dewey and newspaper editor Horace Greeley hired Leon Trotsky ). But Obama’s mother kept returning to Indonesia (with the exception of a spell in Pakistan.)
An odd passage in the President’s life was his love affair in New York in 1983-1985 with Genevieve Cook, the daughter of the future Australian ambassador to the United States. She kept quiet about this until cooperating with Washington Post reporter David Maraniss for his exhaustive 2012 biography of Barack Obama. Maraniss describes their meeting at a Manhattan party from Miss Cook’s point of view, emphasizing how pleasantly surprised she was by how both had so many Indonesian connections. But Maraniss pointedly doesn’t mention the names of the people who must have carefully set up the meeting of the two Indophiles, Barack and Genevieve.
Genevieve Cook‘s father, Michael J. Cook, had been the number two man in the Australian embassy in Jakarta (and now served as Prime Minister Hawke’s chief guru of intelligence).
Genevieve Cook’s her mother’s second husband,Philip C. Jessup Jr., was the son of a famous Truman Administration official, who himself was head lawyer for the International Nickel Company. The Washington Post reported in Jessup’s obituary:
In the late 1960s and 1970s, the company, known as Inco, entrusted him to help create a billion-dollar mining and smelting operation on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.
Was getting Obama and Cook together a Subud operation?
That doesn’t sound impossible, but I haven’t found any evidence to support it.
A more straightforward explanation is that Genevieve’s stepbrother Tim Jessup is an anthropologist in Indonesia who knew the President’s mom.
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He talked quite a lot about discontent in a quiet sort of way—balancing the tendency to be always the observer, how to effect change, wanting to get past his antipathy to working at B.I.
“A SUPERHERO LIFE”
The initials “B.I.” in that journal entry stood for Obama’s employer, Business International, located at 1 Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza, on Second Avenue between 47th and 48th Streets. Business International had been operating for nearly 30 years by the time Obama went to work there. Established in 1954, its stated goal was “to advance profitable corporate and economic growth in socially desirable ways.” What that entailed, for the most part, was compiling and constantly updating newsletters and reference materials for corporations that did business around the world. Obama was a very junior employee, doing research and writing reports.
By early 1984, Obama was absorbed with Genevieve and with figuring out his place in the world. Whatever and wherever that would be, it would certainly not involve Business International or anything like it. He had turned away from the rhetoric of the left, dubious of its practicality and turned off by radical remnants of the 1960s, but was also leery of succumbing to the allure of the business world. Genevieve knew that he harbored faintly articulated notions of future greatness, of gaining power in order to change things. Once, when they were in Prospect Park, in Brooklyn, they saw a young boy in costume, playing out a superhero role. They started to talk about superheroes, the comics he enjoyed as an adolescent in Honolulu, and intimations of “playing out a superhero life.” She considered it “a very strong archetype in his personality.” But he was not to be drawn out—he shut down “and didn’t want to talk about it further.”
Wednesday, May 9, 1984
But he is so wary, wary. Has visions of his life, but in a hiatus as to their implementation—wants to fly, and hasn’t yet started to take off, so resents extra weight.
Saturday, May 26
Dreamt last night for what I’m sure was an hour of waiting to meet him at midnight, with a ticket in my hand. Told me the other night of having pushed his mother away over past 2 years in an effort to extract himself from the role of supporting man in her life—she feels rejected and has withdrawn somewhat. Made me see that he may fear his own dependency on me, but also mine on him, whereas I only fear mine on him He wants to preserve our relationship but either felt or wanted it to be well protected from some sense of immediate involvement.
Genevieve was out of her mother’s Upper East Side apartment by then. Earlier that spring she had moved and was sharing the top floor of a brownstone at 640 Second Street in Park Slope. The routine with Barack was now back and forth, mostly his place, sometimes hers. When she told him that she loved him, his response was not “I love you, too” but “thank you”—as though he appreciated that someone loved him. The relationship still existed in its own little private world. They spent time cooking. Barack loved to make a ginger beef dish that he had picked up from his friend Sohale Siddiqi. He was also big on tuna-fish sandwiches made the way his grandfather had taught him, with finely chopped dill pickles. For a present, Genevieve bought him an early edition ofThe Joy of Cooking. They read books together and talked about what they had read. For a time they concentrated on black literature, the writers Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, and Ntozake Shange.
If Barack and Genevieve were in social occasions as a couple, it was almost always with the Pakistanis. Hasan Chandoo had moved back from London and taken a place in a converted warehouse on the waterfront below Brooklyn Heights. Wahid Hamid, starting a rise up the corporate ladder that would take him to the top of PepsiCo, lived on Long Island with his wife. Sohale Siddiqi was part of the crowd, along with Beenu Mahmood. It was a movable feast, and invariably a matter of bounty and excess, friends losing themselves in food and conversation. Barack for the most part declined alcohol and drugs. “He was quite abstemious,” Genevieve said. She enjoyed the warmth of the gatherings, but was usually ready to go home before him. He was pushing away from the Pakistanis, too, politely, for a different reason, she thought. He wanted something more.
Beenu Mahmood saw a shift in Obama that corresponded to Genevieve’s perceptions. He could see Obama slowly but carefully distancing himself as a necessary step in establishing his political identity as an American. For years when Barack was around them, he seemed to share their attitudes as sophisticated outsiders who looked at politics from an international perspective. He was one of them, in that sense. But to get to where he wanted to go he had to change.
Mahmood remembered that “for a period of two or three months” Obama “carried and at every opportunity read and reread a fraying copy of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. It was a period during which Barack was struggling deeply within himself to attain his own racial identity, and Invisible Manbecame a prism for his self-reflection.” There was a riff in that book that Mahmood thought struck close to the bone with Obama. The narrator, an intelligent black man whose skills were invisible to white society, wrote: “America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain. It’s ‘winner take nothing’ that is the great truth of our country or of any country. Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of certain defeat.” His friend Barack, Mahmood thought, “was the most deliberate person I ever met in terms of constructing his own identity, and his achievement was really an achievement of identity in the modern world. [That] was an important period for him, first the shift from not international but American, number one, and then not white, but black.”
Obama disciplined himself in two activities—writing and running. When he was on the Upper West Side, he would run in Riverside Park. When he was in Brooklyn, he would run in Prospect Park. He was what Genevieve called “a virtuous daily jogger,” and that was one of the differences between them. For weeks that summer, Genevieve challenged Barack to a footrace. Not long-distance but a sprint. If they sprinted, she insisted, she would beat him. Barack kept putting it off. “His response was merry disbelief,” Genevieve recalled. “By merry I don’t mean he laughed at me, though he was amused. He had this way … where he inhabits a mocking space—it’s sort of a loving mocking—as if to imply ‘Ah, the frailties and tendencies we all have to be delusional, self-deceiving, preposterous even, but you are cute, and I like you better for it.’ ” Finally, he relented. They picked a day, went to the park, and chose a walkway lined by lampposts for the dash. Her journal entry:
On Sunday Barack and I raced, and I won. I ran so fast my body transformed itself onto another plane. We ran, he started off behind me and I just said to myself stay ahead, stay ahead and my body became a flat thin box w/ my arms and legs coming each precisely from a corner. And I didn’t know how long I could keep it up, but I was going to try—my whole sight concentrated on the lamp post when I felt him slow and yell you beat me, at first I thought he was giving up, but then I realized he’d meant the lamp post on the left and I’d really won! The feel of the race was exhilarating, but I didn’t feel very victorious. Barack couldn’t really believe it and continued to feel a bit unsettled by it all weekend, I think. He was more startled to discover that I had expected to win than anything else. Anyway, later in the shower (before leaving to see The Bostonians) I told him I didn’t feel that good about winning, and he promptly replied probably cos of feelings of guilt about beating a man. In which case, no doubt, he’d already discovered the obverse feelings about being beaten by a woman. Nevertheless, it was a good metaphor for me, despite, as I confessed to Barack, that in some ways it would have appeased some aspect of my self-image to have tried and lost. But I didn’t; I won.
THE DREAM
Kenya had been weighing on Obama’s mind since the death of his father, and he talked to Genevieve about wanting to visit his family in Kenya. On one occasion he had a vivid dream about his father. It was a dream of a distant place and the lost figure brought back to life, a vision that later inspired his memoir’s title. In this dream, as he recounted it in Dreams from My Father, Barack rode a bus across a landscape of “deep fields of grass and hills that bucked against an orange sky” until he reached a jail cell and found his father before him “cloth wrapped around his waist.” The father, slender, with hairless arms, saw his son and said, “Look at you, so tall—and so thin. Gray hairs, even,” and Obama approached him and hugged him and wept as Barack Hussein Obama Sr. said the words Barack Hussein Obama II would never hear in real life—“Barack, I always wanted to tell you how much I love you.”
Genevieve recalled the morning he awoke from that dream. “I remember him being just so overwhelmed, and I so badly wanted to fix him, help him fix that pain. He woke up from that dream and started talking about it. I think he was haunted.”
Genevieve and Barack talked about race quite often, as part of his inner need to find a sense of belonging. She sympathized and encouraged his search for identity. If she felt like an outsider, he was a double outsider, racial and cross-cultural. He looked black, but was he? He confessed to her that at times “he felt like an imposter. Because he was so white. There was hardly a black bone in his body.” At some point that summer she realized that, “in his own quest to resolve his ambivalence about black and white, it became very, very clear to me that he needed to go black.”
Early in Barack’s relationship with Genevieve, he had told her about “his adolescent image of the perfect ideal woman” and how he had searched for her “at the expense of hooking up with available girls.” Who was this ideal woman? Genevieve conjured her in her mind, and it was someone other than herself. She wrote, “I can’t help thinking that what he would really want, be powerfully drawn to, was a woman, very strong, very upright, a fighter, a laugher, well-experienced—a black woman I keep seeing her as.”
In Dreams from My Father, Obama chose to emphasize a racial chasm that unavoidably separated him from the woman he described as his New York girlfriend.
One night I took her to see a new play by a black playwright. It was a very angry play, but very funny. Typical black American humor. The audience was mostly black, and everybody was laughing and clapping and hollering like they were in church. After the play was over, my friend started talking about why black people were so angry all the time. I said it was a matter of remembering—nobody asks why Jews remember the Holocaust, I think I said—and she said that’s different, and I said it wasn’t, and she said that anger was just a dead end. We had a big fight, right in front of the theater. When we got back to the car she started crying. She couldn’t be black, she said. She would if she could, but she couldn’t. She could only be herself, and wasn’t that enough.
None of this happened with Genevieve. She remembered going to the theater only once with Barack, and it was not to see a work by a black playwright. When asked about this decades later, during a White House interview, Obama acknowledged that the scene did not happen with Genevieve. “It is an incident that happened,” he said. But not with her. He would not be more specific, but the likelihood is that it happened later, when he lived in Chicago. “That was not her,” he said. “That was an example of compression I was very sensitive in my book not to write about my girlfriends, partly out of respect for them. So that was a consideration. I thought that [the anecdote involving the reaction of a white girlfriend to the angry black play] was a useful theme to make about sort of the interactions that I had in the relationships with white girlfriends. And so, that occupies, what, two paragraphs in the book? My attitude was it would be dishonest for me not to touch on that at all … so that was an example of sort of editorially how do I figure that out?”
Obama wrote another scene into his memoir to serve a dual purpose, exposing what he saw as a cultural gap with Genevieve. He described how his New York girlfriend finally persuaded him to go with her to the family’s country estate in Norfolk, in northwestern Connecticut, for a weekend.
The parents were there, and they were very nice, very gracious. It was autumn, beautiful, with woods all around us, and we paddled a canoe across this round, icy lake full of small gold leaves that collected along the shore. The family knew every inch of the land. They knew how the hills had formed, how the glacial drifts had created the lake, the names of the earliest white settlers—their ancestors—and before that, the names of the Indians who’d once hunted the land. The house was very old, her grandfather’s house. He had inherited it from his grandfather. The library was filled with old books and pictures of the grandfather with famous people he had known—presidents, diplomats, industrialists. There was this tremendous gravity to the room. Standing in that room, I realized that our two worlds, my friend’s and mine, were as distant from each other as Kenya is from Germany. And I knew that if we stayed together I’d eventually live in hers. After all, I’d been doing it most of my life. Between the two of us, I was the one who knew how to live as an outsider.
The differences in this case between Barack’s portrayal and Genevieve’s recollections are understandable matters of perspective. It was her stepfather’s place. They rode the Bonanza bus up from New York and got off at the drugstore in Norfolk. It was indeed a beautiful autumn weekend, though colder than expected, and Obama complained about it. He did not bring warm enough clothes, so he had to borrow a woolen shirt from Genevieve. The Jessup property was 14 acres, with woods, brook, and pond. The library was exactly as he described it, cluttered with photographs and memorabilia of the grandfather’s distinguished career. The family mostly watched the evening news in there, and played charades.
From the distance of decades, in reading the memoir, what struck Genevieve most was Obama’s description of the gravity of that library, and the vast distance between their worlds, and his conviction that he alone was the one who knew how to live as an outsider. She felt as estranged from that milieu as he did, and he knew it, and over the ensuing decades it was Barack, not Genevieve, who would move closer to presidents, diplomats, and industrialists, the world of an insider. “The ironic thing,” she noted, “is he moved through the corridors of power in a far more comfortable way than I ever would have.”
“I PUSHED HER AWAY”
Genevieve had started teaching at P.S. 133, on Butler Street in Park Slope, that fall of 1984. She had fretted about it all of the previous summer, and now that she was in the classroom it proved even more difficult than she had anticipated. She confided to Barack one day that she had mentioned the idea of leaving to a colleague, who told her that if she stayed she would end up with a nice pension. “That was the only time he raised his voice and got really, really upset with me,” she recalled. “He went berserk about the trade-offs he saw his grandparents make for some supposed safety net at the expense of something He meant at the expense of their souls.”
That was something Obama, in his own self-assessment, deeply wanted to avoid. He said he would never keep a job just for security. In early December, after one year at Business International, he quit. He also left the apartment on 114th Street and moved in with Genevieve. It was to be a temporary arrangement until he left for Hawaii over the Christmas holidays. When he returned, he would find another place of his own, he said. Their time living together did not go well.
Monday, December 10
After a week of Barack and I adjusting to each others constant presence and his displacement, I expect that this week will make it hard to be alone again when he has gone [to Hawaii for Christmas]. We got very irritated w/ each other Fri. night and Saturday, talked about it.
Thursday, December 13
Induced a flare-up yesterday between Barack and me over a suddenly felt irritation at doing the breakfast dishes. Then I was less than honest when I broached my irritation w/ Barack in the vein of, I’m going to tell you I’m irritated, but only because I don’t want to be, and expected him to just let it roll off his back … living w/ someone, you inevitably turn your private frustrations out on that person, because that kind of projection is such a basic and pervasively influencing ego defense mechanism. And too, as one is so unaware of the other person’s living reality, I had not taken into account Barack’s feeling of being displaced and in the way. In the end he said I know it’s irritating to have me here, and I wanted to say and mean, no of course it isn’t, but I couldn’t. That has been the biggest surprise, that rather than enjoying his extended presence like a very long weekend, as I think I thought I would, and reveling in the comfort of reliably having someone to eat dinner with, and talk to and go to sleep with, I’ve been …resentful I suppose—no—as he said, impatient and domineering How beneath the surface things are after all.
Before Obama left for Hawaii, she bought him an expensive Aran-wool cable-knit white sweater at Saks Fifth Avenue to replace an old one he had inherited, likely from his grandfather, that had holes in it and that Genevieve liked to wear. He was embarrassed that she had spent so much money on it.
When he returned from his western travels in mid-January, he was still without a place of his own and back in her apartment in Park Slope. He had landed his first organizing job for the New York Public Interest Research Group, a nonprofit founded in the state in 1973 and inspired by the national organization created by citizen activist Ralph Nader. Obama had focused his ambitions on organizing since his last year at Columbia, while acknowledging that he was not entirely certain what it meant. He was hired at a salary that was barely more than half what he had earned at B.I., and his job was to organize students up on the Harlem campus of the City University of New York, focusing on environmental and student-aid issues.
He succeeded at the job, by most standards, bringing more students into the organization and rejuvenating the chapter. But the issues seemed secondary to him, and he went to work every day with that same sense of remove and distance that he had carried with him at Columbia. Looking back on it decades later, he said that that first organizing job “had always felt sort of like a tryout of organizing as opposed to plunging into it in a serious way.” When he talked about the job with Genevieve, he mostly just said that it was depressing, which captured his mood much of that winter and early spring of 1985.
In his memoir, explaining his relationship with Genevieve to his Kenyan sister, Auma, he wrote: “I pushed her away. We started to fight. We started thinking about the future, and it pressed in on our warm little world.” All in the perspective, again. From Genevieve: “My take on it had always been that I pushed him away, found him not to be ‘enough,’ had chafed at his withheld-ness, his lack of spontaneity, which, eventually, I imagined might be assuaged, or certain elements of it might be, by living together. Because it felt so intrinsically to be part of his character, though, this careful consideration of everything he does, I saw it, then, as a sort of wound, one which ultimately I decided I was not the person he would ‘fix’ it with.”
At the end of March, Genevieve moved from Second Street to another apartment, on Warren Street, in Brooklyn. Barack helped her move, then found a place for himself in the 30s, off Eighth Avenue, in Hell’s Kitchen. He and Genevieve continued their earlier routine of seeing each other on weekends, but things had changed. By the middle of May, their relationship was over.
Thursday, May 23, 1985
Barack leaving my life—at least as far as being lovers goes. In the same way that the relationship was founded on calculated boundaries and carefully, rationally considered developments, it seems to be ending along coolly considered lines. I read back over the past year in my journals, and see and feel several themes in it all … how from the beginning what I have been most concerned with has been my sense of Barack’s withholding the kind of emotional involvement I was seeking. I guess I hoped time would change things and he’d let go and “fall in love” with me. Now, at this point, I’m left wondering if Barack’s reserve, etc. is not just the time in his life, but, after all, emotional scarring that will make it difficult for him to get involved even after he’s sorted his life through with age and experience.
Hard to say, as obviously I was not the person that brought infatuation. (That lithe, bubbly, strong black lady is waiting somewhere!)
A DIRECTION
Obama had been thinking about Chicago since April 29, 1983, when Harold Washington made history, sworn in as the city’s first black mayor. Obama’s hope initially had been that he could land a job in the Washington administration after he graduated, which only showed how unschooled and naïve he was. Not until a decade later, when he was fully immersed in the give-and-take world of Illinois politics, would he learn how crucial it was to have a patron, or “Chinaman,” as it was called in that inimitable legislative milieu. In the spring of 1985—from the remove of New York City, having visited Chicago only once in his life, on a summer tour of the mainland with his family when he was 12 years old—Obama had no Chinaman, but he did have something. He had a telephone call from Jerry Kellman.
The connection began when Obama was at the New York Public Library and came across the latest copy of Community Jobs, a publication of six to eight pages that listed employment opportunities in the social-justice and social-services fields. One listing was for a group called the Developing Communities Project, which needed a community organizer to work in the Roseland neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. Right city. Right line of work. Obama sent in his résumé and cover letter, something he had done many times before with no luck. Two matters left unstated in the ad were that Kellman, who oversaw the project, specifically wanted an African-American for the job, and that he was getting desperate.
Obama’s application seemed intriguing, though it gave no indication of his race. The résumé noted his Hawaiian childhood. The surname sounded Japanese. Kellman’s wife was Japanese. He knew that Obama could be a Japanese name and that Japanese-Americans were common in Hawaii. It would take a conversation to find out more, so he reached Obama in New York and they talked on the phone for about an hour. At some point, without asking directly, Kellman came to the realization that Obama was black. It was even more apparent to him that this applicant was smart and engaging and interested in social issues. Definitely worth a deeper look. Kellman told Obama that he would be in Manhattan soon to visit his father, a theatrical-copyright attorney who lived at 92nd and Broadway, and suggested they get together then. The meeting took place across town and down in Midtown, at a coffee shop on Lexington Avenue.
Kellman challenged Obama, throwing questions in his path as obstacles, one after another. Why did he want this line of work, with its low pay, long hours, and endless frustration? How did he feel about living and working in the black community for the first time in his life? “I asked him, ‘Why do you want to do this? Why do you want to organize? You graduated from Columbia. You are an African-American when corporations are looking for people like you. Why don’t you do something else?’ But first, Why? Where does this come from? What place and how deep does it come from? And what I got from him was that the people in the civil-rights movement were his heroes. And I also got from him that his mom was a social activist, an academic social activist, but a social activist.”
As the coffee-shop conversation progressed, Obama turned the tables and started interviewing Kellman. He wanted to make sure that the Developing Communities Project was legitimate and serious. This wasn’t some far-left enterprise, was it? He had moved beyond that, he said. Obama turned his questioning to Chicago and what this disheveled white man could teach him. Kellman wondered what Obama knew about Chicago. Not much. Hog butcher for the world, Obama said, reciting the famous Carl Sandburg line. Not anymore—the stockyards had closed, Kellman responded. Obama mentioned the Cubs, perennial losers, and Harold Washington, the town’s new winner. He pressed Kellman for more observations about the city and the South Side neighborhoods, what was happening with the steel mills, the decline of factory work, the fraying of families and communities. The more they talked, the more it became obvious to Kellman that Obama was his man.
Before leaving New York, Barack spent $2,000 on a blue Honda Civic that he would drive into the heartland to start his new life. He also took along the white cable-knit sweater that Genevieve had given him for Christmas. It would comfort him in the cold Chicago winter.
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RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) — Presidential adviser Jared Kushner met with Israeli and Palestinian leaders on Thursday to try to jumpstart moribund peace talks, but after months without progress the Mideast envoy faces growing skepticism on the Palestinian side.
With no clear vision for peace outlined by the administration and domestic issues distracting President Donald Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, expectations for the new peace push are low.
The Palestinians initially welcomed Trump’s election, but they have since grown impatient with what they say is a failure by the U.S. president to present a roadmap for peace. Specifically, they are seeking a halt to Israeli settlement construction on occupied lands, and an American commitment to the establishment of an independent Palestinian state as part of a peace deal with Israel.
“If the U.S. team doesn’t bring answers to our questions this time, we are going to look into our options because the status quo is not working for our interests,” said Ahmad Majdalani, an aide to Abbas.
It was not clear whether Kushner offered any clarity during his three-hour meeting with Abbas. Nabil Abu Rdeneh, Abbas’ spokesman, called the meeting “positive,” without discussing details, and said the Palestinian leader had reiterated his desire for an American commitment to a Palestinian state.
The White House later said both sides agreed the U.S.-talks were the best step forward. “The Palestinian Authority and the U.S. delegation had a productive meeting focused on how to begin substantive Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. Both sides agreed to continue with the U.S.-led conversations as the best way to reach a comprehensive peace deal,” the statement said.
Abbas said ahead of the meeting the Palestinian side appreciated Trump’s efforts. “We know things are difficult and complicated, but nothing is impossible with good intentions,” he said.
Trump took office with hopes of striking what he calls the “ultimate deal” between Israelis and Palestinians — a goal that has eluded administrations before his dogged by the same intractable issues. But he has since given few details of his vision for peace, managing to frustrate both sides.
Kushner, Trump’s chief Middle East adviser and his son-in-law, met Netanyahu in Tel Aviv earlier Thursday before traveling to Ramallah later in the day to meet with Abbas. Kushner is expected to return to the U.S. on Friday.
Before his meeting with Kushner, Netanyahu spoke optimistically of the road ahead.
“We have a lot of things to talk about, how to advance peace, stability and security in our region, prosperity too,” Netanyahu said, standing alongside Kushner. “I think that all of them are within our reach.”
A statement from Netanyahu’s office after the meeting said the talks were “substantive” but gave no details on progress or further steps.
On the campaign trail, Trump took a staunchly pro-Israel line, energizing Netanyahu and hard-liners in his coalition. He promised to relocate the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem — a move welcomed by Israel and opposed by the Palestinians — and refused to endorse the Palestinian goal of independence. His platform played down the significance of Israeli settlements and he surrounded himself with advisers with deep ties to the settlement movement, including Kushner and the U.S. ambassador to Israel, David Friedman.
But since taking office, Trump decided not to move the embassy and has urged Israel to restrain settlement construction.
He has not come out in support of the two-state solution, a position backed by most of the international community and also his Republican and Democratic predecessors, indicating vaguely that he supports whichever solution the sides agree to.
Disappointed Palestinian officials privately gripe that Trump’s team has begun to support Israeli positions and ignore their concerns.
Further complicating any hope for progress are internal troubles for all three leaders. Trump’s administration has become preoccupied with a series of domestic crises, most recently the fallout from the deadly racially charged violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, earlier this month.
Netanyahu, meanwhile, is facing a growing corruption investigation that could soon lead to an indictment against him. These legal troubles, along with Israeli concerns about a possible long-term Iranian presence in neighboring Syria, make it unlikely that he will agree to any major diplomatic initiative.
After years of on-and-off peace efforts that have yielded no progress, Abbas is deeply unpopular at home. He also is stuck in a bitter rivalry with the Islamic militant group Hamas, which seized the Gaza Strip from his forces a decade ago and is now pursuing a reconciliation deal with Mohammed Dahlan, a former Abbas ally who has turned into his political nemesis.
Since the collapse of U.S.-mediated peace talks three years ago, the sides have grown further apart and have been plagued by repeated rounds of violence, including a war between Israel and Hamas and recurring low-level violence sparked by tensions over a contested Jerusalem site holy to both Jews and Muslims.
Israel, meanwhile, has increasingly shifted its sights toward a regional deal with certain Arab countries, rather than one focusing solely on the Palestinians, an approach Trump has expressed support for.
“The time has come for a regional approach,” Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely told Israel Radio. “That is the thinking guiding President Trump and the prime minister of Israel, and so our message to the Palestinians is that time is working against them.”
___
Associated Press writer Fares Akram in Gaza City, Gaza Strip, contributed to this report.
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The military’s record of hitting intermediate-range missiles is less than perfect. That makes the decision to attempt an intercept much harder.
This story has been updated to reflect recent developments overnight.
North Korea launched another medium-range missile on Monday, this one right over Japan. Despite Defense Secretary Jim Mattis’ threats to shoot down missiles aimed at Guam and President Donald Trump’s Pyongyang-aimed bluster, the United States and Japan let it fly. Why?
After the test, Trump on Tuesday said that “all options are on the table,” as every president has said for decades. But the Pentagon is still reluctant to use some of the most obvious options, such as shooting down a missile above the earth’s atmosphere with another missile fired from a ship.
The United States has 33 Aegis warships (three more are slated to arrive next year) that can launch an interceptor to hit a mid- or intermediate-range missile like the Hwasong-12 that North Korea sent over Hokkaido. Sixteen of those warships are currently in the Pacific.
Pacific Command, in Honolulu did not respond to questions about why they didn’t attempt to down Monday’s missile. The command did issue a statement: “North American Aerospace Defense Command, NORAD, determined the missile launch from North Korea did not pose a threat to North America,”
Mattis said earlier this month that any North Korean missile headed toward U.S. land, including Guam and other territories, would be shot down and considered war against the United States. But, he added, if the missile were tracking to land in the sea, it would be the president’s call what to do about it.
Tom Karako, senior fellow and missile defense expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that if the missile launched Monday were really a threat to the United States or even Japan “then presumably we may well have attempted to engage it.”
But what are the costs and what are the benefits in attempting such an intercept? Anti-missile interceptors like the ones on U.S. warships are designed to hit enemy missiles as they reach peak altitude — in the case of the Hwasong-12, that’s above 3,500 kilometers. The United States has demonstrated that it can intercept mid-range and slightly higher intermediate-range missile. But the test record includes embarrassing and recent failures.
Between January 2002 and August 14 of this year, the Defense Department attempted 37 interceptsof a mid-range missile and hit the target 29 times with an SM-3. There are many reasons for this, but the biggest, according to the Pentagon’s Office of the Director of Operational Testing and Engineering, is that realistic testing of interceptors is very expensive and requires a lot of lead time and support.
Update: On Wednesday morning, MDA conducted another successful intercept test using an SM-6 aboard a warship against a medium-range ballistic missile target. “The USS John Paul Jones detected and tracked a target missile launched from the Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai, Hawaii with its onboard AN/SPY-1 radar,” the agency said in a press statement.
In February, MDA showed that their newest version of the standard missile, the SM-3 IIA, could hit a mid-range missile. But a second test in June was a failure. The Navy later attributed that to human error. But 50 percent is not a good record for the most advanced intermediate-range interceptor in the U.S. arsenal.
The Obama administration pushed hard for a ship-based defense against mid-range North Korean missiles aimed at Japan or Guam but found that the military has much better chance of hitting missiles that don’t fly so high.
Shooting down an enemy missile aimed at U.S.territory may be good defense, but shooting down a missile test aimed at the sea would be an act of war. Or so argued North Korea.
“Taking a shot at a North Korean missile is not something the U.S. military would do lightly or without a directive to do so,” said Karako. “if we are going to shoot at something, we will do it like we mean it. But there has to be a good reason to do it. That reason might be if there is an actual threat to the U.S., its forces, or our allies. Or it might be if the U.S. or Japan adopts a policy to intercept certain types of missiles or those on certain kinds of trajectory. But that would have to be a deliberate policy choice.”
The highest probability of success would be to hit the enemy missile closer to the ground, during the so-called boost phase. That’s what MDA is aiming for in the future with laser-armed drones. In July, the agency put out a request for information for a high-altitude long endurance aircraft. Read that to mean a drone that can fly above 63,000 feet for a long time. According to the request, the drone should have enough power for a 140-kw laser. But that program won’t even begin testing until 2023. Until then, and likely even after, every time a missile heads toward Japan, Guam, or anywhere else, military leaders will have to decide whether attempting to shoot down North Korean missiles is worth the costs of possibly missing — or starting a war.
Patrick Tucker is technology editor for Defense One. He’s also the author of The Naked Future: What Happens in a World That Anticipates Your Every Move? (Current, 2014). Previously, Tucker was deputy editor for The Futurist for nine years. Tucker has written about emerging technology in Slate, … FULL BIO
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U.S. general: North Korea ICBM threat advancing faster than expected
U.S. Army General Mark Milley testifies at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on his nomination to become the Army’s chief of staff, on Capitol Hill in Washington July 21, 2015.Jonathan Ernst
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. General Mark Milley, the chief of staff of the Army, said on Thursday that North Korea’s July 4 test of an intercontinental ballistic missile showed its capabilities were advancing significantly and faster than many had expected.
Milley, in remarks to the National Press Club in Washington, said there was still time for a non-military solution to the crisis caused by North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs, but cautioned that “time is running out.”
“North Korea is extremely dangerous and more dangerous as the weeks go by,” he said.
U.S. media reported this week that the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Pentagon spy agency, had assessed that North Korea would be able to field a nuclear-capable ICBM by next year, earlier than previously thought.
However, two U.S. officials said some other analysts who study North Korea’s missile program did not agree with the assessment, although there was no question that Pyongyang had moved further and faster in its efforts.
U.S. officials said on Tuesday they had seen increased North Korean activity that could be preparations for another missile test within days.
After its July 4 test, North Korea said it had mastered the technology needed to deploy a nuclear warhead via the missile. It also said the test verified the atmospheric re-entry of the warhead, which experts say may be able to reach the U.S. state of Alaska.
North Korea has made no secret of its plans to develop a nuclear-tipped missile capable of striking the United States and has ignored international calls to halt its weapons programs.
The vice chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Paul Selva, said last week that North Korea did not have the ability to strike the United States with “any degree of accuracy” and that while its missiles had the range, they lacked the necessary guidance capability.
Reporting by Phil Stewart, Idrees Ali and David Brunnstrom; Editing by Cynthia Osterman and Grant McCool
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Report: North Korea successfully produced a nuclear warhead
A confidential assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency says that North Korea has already developed a miniaturized nuclear weapon that can fit on top of an ICBM. (The Washington Post)
North Korea has successfully produced a miniaturized nuclear warhead that can fit inside its missiles, crossing a key threshold on the path to becoming a full-fledged nuclear power, U.S. intelligence officials have concluded in a confidential assessment.
The analysis, completed last month by the Defense Intelligence Agency, comes on the heels of another intelligence assessment that sharply raises the official estimate for the total number of bombs in the communist country’s atomic arsenal. The United States calculated last month that up to 60 nuclear weapons are now controlled by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Some independent experts think the number is much smaller.
The findings are likely to deepen concerns about an evolving North Korean military threat that appears to be advancing far more rapidly than many experts had predicted. U.S. officials concluded last month that Pyongyang is also outpacing expectations in its effort to build an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of striking the American mainland.
President Trump, speaking Tuesday at an event at his golf course in Bedminster, N.J., said North Korea will face a devastating response if its threats continue. “They will be met with fire and fury and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before,” he said.
Earlier Tuesday, North Korea described a new round of U.N. sanctions as an attempt “to strangle a nation” and warned that in response, “physical action will be taken mercilessly with the mobilization of all its national strength.”
Although more than a decade has passed since North Korea’s first nuclear detonation, many analysts thought it would be years before the country’s weapons scientists could design a compact warhead that could be delivered by missile to distant targets. But the new assessment, a summary document dated July 28, concludes that this critical milestone has been reached.
“The IC [intelligence community] assesses North Korea has produced nuclear weapons for ballistic missile delivery, to include delivery by ICBM-class missiles,” the assessment states, in an excerpt read to The Washington Post. Two U.S. officials familiar with the assessment verified its broad conclusions. It is not known whether the reclusive regime has successfully tested the smaller design, although North Korea officially claimed last year that it had done so.
The DIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment.
An assessment this week by the Japanese Ministry of Defense also concludes that there is evidence to suggest that North Korea has achieved miniaturization.
Kim is becoming increasingly confident in the reliability of his nuclear arsenal, analysts have concluded, explaining perhaps the dictator’s willingness to engage in defiant behavior, including missile tests that have drawn criticism even from North Korea’s closest ally, China. On Saturday, China and Russia joined other members of the U.N. Security Council in approving punishing new economic sanctions, including a ban on exports that supply up to a third of North Korea’s annual $3 billion in earnings.
The nuclear progress further raises the stakes for Trump, who has vowed that North Korea will never be allowed to threaten the United States with nuclear weapons. In an interview broadcast Saturday on MSNBC’s “Hugh Hewitt Show,” national security adviser H.R. McMaster said the prospect of a North Korea armed with nuclear-tipped ICBMs would be “intolerable, from the president’s perspective.”
“We have to provide all options . . . and that includes a military option,” he said. But McMaster said the administration would do everything short of war to “pressure Kim Jong Un and those around him, such that they conclude it is in their interest, to denuclearize.” The options said to be under discussion range from new multilateral negotiations to reintroducing U.S. battlefield nuclear weapons to the Korean Peninsula, officials familiar with internal discussions said.
At the same time, the administration has been attempting to push North Korea toward talks, but Pyongyang has shown no interest in dialogue.
Determining the precise makeup of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal has long been a difficult challenge for intelligence officials because of the regime’s culture of extreme secrecy and insularity. The country’s weapons scientists have conducted five nuclear tests since 2006, the latest being a 20- to 30-kiloton detonation on Sept. 9, 2016, that produced a blast estimated to be up to twice that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945.
But producing a compact nuclear warhead that can fit inside a missile is a technically demanding feat, one that many analysts thought was still beyond North Korea’s grasp. Last year, state-run media in Pyongyang displayed a spherical device that government spokesmen described as a miniaturized nuclear warhead, but whether it was a real bomb remained unclear. North Korean officials described the September detonation as a successful test of a small warhead designed to fit on a missile, although many experts were skeptical of the claim.
Kim has repeatedly proclaimed his intention to field a fleet of nuclear-tipped ICBMs as a guarantor of his regime’s survival. His regime took a major step toward that goal last month with the first successful tests of a missile with intercontinental range. Video analysis of the latest test led some analysts to conclude that the missile caught fire and disintegrated as it plunged back toward Earth’s surface, suggesting that North Korea’s engineers might not be capable yet of building a reentry vehicle that can carry the warhead safely through the upper atmosphere. But U.S. analysts and many independent experts think this hurdle will be overcome by late next year.
“What initially looked like a slow-motion Cuban missile crisis is now looking more like the Manhattan Project, just barreling along,” said Robert Litwak, a nonproliferation expert at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the author of “Preventing North Korea’s Nuclear Breakout,” published by the center this year. “There’s a sense of urgency behind the program that is new to the Kim Jong Un era.”
Although few discount North Korea’s progress, some prominent U.S. experts warned against the danger of overestimating the threat. Siegfried Hecker, director emeritus of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the last known U.S. official to inspect North Korea’s nuclear facilities, has calculated the size of North Korea’s arsenal at no more than 20 to 25 bombs. He warned of potential risks that can come from making Kim into a bigger menace than he actually is.
“Overselling is particularly dangerous,” said Hecker, who visited North Korea seven times between 2004 and 2010, and met with key leaders of the country’s weapons programs. “Some like to depict Kim as being crazy — a madman — and that makes the public believe that the guy is undeterrable. He’s not crazy and he’s not suicidal. And he’s not even unpredictable.”
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“The real threat,” Hecker said, “is we’re going to stumble into a nuclear war on the Korean Peninsula.”
In the past, U.S. intelligence agencies have occasionally overestimated the North Korean threat. In the early 2000s, the George W. Bush administration assessed that Pyongyang was close to developing an ICBM that could strike the U.S. mainland — a prediction that missed the mark by more than a decade. More recently, however, analysts and policymakers have been surprised repeatedly as North Korea achieved key milestones months or years ahead of schedule, said Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies. There was similar skepticism about China’s capabilities in the early 1960s, said Lewis, who has studied that country’s pathway to a successful nuclear test in 1964.
“There is no reason to think that the North Koreans aren’t making the same progress after so many successful nuclear explosions,” Lewis said. “The big question is: Why do we hold the North Koreans to a different standard than we held [Joseph] Stalin’s Soviet Union or Mao Zedong’s China? North Korea is testing underground, so we’re always going to lack a lot of details. But it seems to me a lot of people are insisting on impossible levels of proof because they simply don’t want to accept what should be pretty obvious.”
https://clayandiron.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/ESTIMATED-NUCLEAR-WARHEADS-WORLDWIDE-2017.png6271200DrBillhttps://clayandiron.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/logo-1.jpgDrBill2017-08-19 15:00:092017-08-19 15:00:09North Korea now making missile-ready nuclear weapons, U.S. analysts say
(1) James P. Chandler, III, George Washington University intellectual property and national security law professor, and later patent attorney for social networking inventor Leader Technologies, Inc. (
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