Infighting on Obama team squandered chance for peace in Afghanistan

In late March 2010, President Obama’s national security adviser, James L. Jones, summoned Richard C. Holbrooke to the White House for a late-afternoon conversation. The two men rarely had one-on-one meetings, even though Holbrooke, the State Department’s point man for Afghanistan, was a key member of Obama’s war cabinet.

As Holbrooke entered Jones’s West Wing office, he sensed that the discussion was not going to be about policy, but about him. Holbrooke believed his principal mission was to accomplish what he thought Obama wanted: a peace deal with the Taliban. The challenge energized Holbrooke, who had more experience with ending wars than anyone in the administration. In 1968, he served on the U.S. delegation to the Paris peace talks with North Vietnam. And in 1995, he forged a deal in the former Yugoslavia to end three years of bloody sectarian fighting.

The discussion quickly wound to Jones’s main point: He told Holbrooke that he should start considering his “exit strategy” from the administration.

As he left the meeting, Holbrooke pulled out his trump card — a call to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who was traveling in Saudi Arabia. The following week, Clinton went to see Obama armed with a list of Holbrooke’s accomplishments. “Mr. President,” she said, “you can fire Richard Holbrooke — over the objection of your secretary of state.” But Jim Jones, Clinton said, could not.

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Dreams from My Real Father: A Story of Reds and Deception

At age 18, Barack Obama admittedly arrived at Occidental College a committed revolutionary Marxist.

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QE3 to the Rescue in a Slowing Economy; Special Report by Leading Financial Web Site Investment Contrarians

Houston Chronicle

In a recent Investment Contrarians article, editor Danny Esposito argues that there will be a third round of quantitative easing (QE3) because the Fed needs to have some kind of GDP growth. Esposito believes not only will there be a QE3, but also a QE4, QE5 and so on.

New York, NY (PRWEB) June 23, 2012

In a recent Investment Contrarians article, editor Danny Esposito argues that there will be a third round of quantitative easing (QE3) because the Fed needs to have some kind of GDP growth. Esposito believes not only will there be a QE3, but also a QE4, QE5 and so on.

“The first of four main components of GDP growth is consumer spending,” explains Esposito, “which is 70% of the economy here in the U.S. and has been the main driver of growth worldwide before the economy collapsed in 2008.”

It is safe to say that consumer spending levels will not reach pre-2008 levels until debt is paid down and incomes rise, comments Esposito.

The second of the four components of GDP growth is business investment, according to the editor. There frequently have been stories in the press about how corporations are holding onto a record amount of money on their balance sheets.

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A Sober New Reality in Credit Downgrades for Banks

NY Times

When a consumer’s creditscore drops, it is hard to recover financially. Wall Street firms could face the same fate.

Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup all suffered credit ratings cuts on Thursday. The rating agency Moody’s Investors Service said that, even though these banks had moved to strengthen their operations, their core trading businesses contained structural weaknesses.

In other words, the downgrades reflect the new sober era for Wall Street.

Since Moody’s put the banks on warning in February, the firms have had time to brace themselves and the immediate impact of the cuts is not likely to be drastic. But banking industry analysts say they think Moody’s actions will cause lasting pain.

“It will make life more difficult for the banks over the long run,” said Andrew Ang, a professor of business at Columbia Business School. “The effect of ratings is pervasive.”

Ratings at Bank of America, which owns Merrill Lynch, and Citigroup, which has a large investment bank, were cut to Baa2. At that level, their creditworthiness is at the lower end of the investment grade, just two levels above junk. Morgan Stanley was downgraded to Baa1, three notches above junk, and Goldman was reduced to A3, four notches above junk.

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What 'conspiracy' lies behind Eric Holder and 'Fast and Furious'?

Rep. Darrel Issa, chair of the House Oversight Committee, has led the now 16-month old investigation into who knew what, and when, about an ill-advised gun interdiction scheme on the border called Fast and Furious.

The effort, says Mr. Issa, is to get answers for the family of Brian Terry, the Border Patrol agent shot and killed in a high desert shootout where guns belonging to the Fast and Furious gun-walking program were found.

But as Congress moves now to cite the attorney general of the United States, Eric Holder, for contempt, the situation has quickly become more intense, fueling a central and long-running conspiracy theory about Fast and Furious. 

How much do you know about the US Constitution? A quiz.

Along with conservative commentators like Rush Limbaugh, Issa suggested as late as April that Fast and Furious may have been part of a policy by the White House to flood the Mexican market with guns to foment violence, which would then put political pressure back on the US to curb its wide-open border gun bazaar and weaken Second Amendment rights.

That contention, liberals say, is on its face absurd. Comedy Central satirist Stephen Colbert summed up the extent of the alleged conspiracy on Friday, concluding Fast and Furious-spawned border violence was intended “to panic Americans in order to gin up support for a Draconian gun control measure Obama has never introduced. Complicated?

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Radioactive Tuna Migrated Into Californian Waters From Japan

MNT

Pacific bluefin tuna which have migrated from Japan to California have been found to be contaminated with radioactive cesium from the Fukushima nuclear accident, researchers from Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific have reported in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences). Despite radiation contamination, levels so far detected are well below those considered hazardous for human health, the authors emphasized.

The researchers have no doubt that the fish caught of the San Diego coast in 2011 were contaminated with radiation that originated from the nuclear disaster.

Seafood distributors have been assuring the American public that their bluefin tuna should not be affected by radiation because they are fished thousands of miles from Japanese waters.

Bluefin tuna migrate, and on this occasion were caught by sports fishermen off the Californian coast. Daniel J. Madigan, a marine ecologist, senior author in this study, added that the affected tuna had not been headed for the consumer market in the USA.

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Obama administration’s drone death figures don’t add up

Last month, a “senior administration official” said the number of civilians killed in drone strikes in Pakistan under President Obama is in the “single digits.” But last year “U.S. officials” said drones in Pakistan killed about 30 civilians in just a yearlong stretch under Obama.

Both claims can’t be true.

A centerpiece of President Obama’s national security strategy, drones strikes in Pakistan are credited by the administration with crippling Al Qaeda but criticized by human rights groups and others for being conducted in secret and killing civilians. The underlying facts are often in dispute and claims about how many people died and who they were vary widely.

So we decided to narrow it down to just one issue: have the administration’s own claims been consistent?

We collected claims by the administration about deaths from drone strikes in Pakistan and compared each one not to local reports but rather to other administration claims. The numbers sometimes do not add up. (Check out our interactive graphic to explore the claims.)

Even setting aside the discrepancy between official and outside estimates of civilian deaths, our analysis shows that the administration’s own figures quoted over the years raise questions about their credibility.

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From renovation to revolution: Was the Pentagon attacked from within?

“I have no desire to attack the Pentagon; I want to liberate it. We need to save it from itself.”  Donald Rumsfeld, September 10, 2001

The official account of what happened at the Pentagon on 9/11 leaves many questions unanswered.[1]  The work of independent investigators has also failed to address those questions. In an attempt to find answers, an alternative account of the Pentagon attack is considered.

An alternative account would be more compelling than the official account if it explained more of the evidence without adding unnecessary complications.  Considering means, motive and opportunity might allow us to propose a possible “insider conspiracy” while maintaining much of the official account as well.

A few of the more compelling unanswered questions are as follows.

1. How could American Airlines Flight 77 have hit the building as it did, considering that the evidence shows the alleged hijacker pilot, Hani Hanjour, was a very poor pilot?[2]
2. Why did the aircraft make a 330-degree turn just minutes before hitting the building?
3. Why did the aircraft hit the least occupied one-fifth of the building that was the focus of a renovation plan and how was it that the construction in that exact spot just happened to be for the purpose of minimizing the damage from a terrorist explosion?[3]

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What Will New World Order Look Like?

WSJ

Los Cabos in Mexico is by all accounts a delightful place: Chic hotels, excellent beaches and fine weather at this time of year. World leaders descending on the resort for this week's Group of 20 summit should make the most of what it has to offer. Nothing they discuss is likely to make any difference to the crisis raging in the global economy.

The world is now a different place to 2009 when, at summits in London and Pittsburgh, the leaders of the world's largest economies believed they had "saved the world"—as then-U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown put it—with a massive fiscal and monetary stimulus and a comprehensive agenda to reform the financial system. At the time, the G-20's response was hailed as the start of a new world order. It may turn out to have been the last gasp of an old world order.

That old world order began in 1944 at Bretton Woods in response to the Great Depression and the horrors that followed. One of its main architects was John Maynard Keynes, and his ideas have guided much of the current crisis response.

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Holder agrees to give Issa internal emails on Fast and Furious, offers to meet

Attorney General Eric Holder on Thursday agreed to make what he called "an extraordinary accommodation" to Republicans investigating the botched "Operation Fast and Furious" by turning over department emails he has long insisted deal with internal deliberations and should be protected.

Holder is trying to head off a push by House Republicans to hold him in contempt of Congress for allegedly "stonewalling" their investigation. And he offered to personally brief the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., in the next few days.

"We believe that this briefing, and the documents we are prepared to provide ... will fully address the remaining concerns identified in the recent letters to me from you and House leadership," Holder said in a letter to Issa. "The department's willingness to provide these materials is a serious, good faith effort to bring this matter to an amicable resolution."

Issa's office said in an early response that Holder's letter "only seems to indicate a willingness to offer a selective telling" of key events and that the chairman is still asking the Justice Department to explain "how it is prepared to alter its opposition to producing subpoenaed documents"

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/06/14/house-dems-mount-holder-defense-as-republicans-pursue-contempt-vote/#ixzz1xonUiqVk

Young Americans get the shaft

WASHINGTON POST

Hear me, Americans under 35!

There’s plenty that divides the parties in this pivotal election — from taxes to drones, from public workers to private equity. But there’s one uber-policy that brings Democrats and Republicans together that doesn’t get the attention it deserves.

That policy involves you, younger Americans. You’re in big trouble. You don’t even know it. You’re busy trying to get a degree, land a job, start a family, save for a home. You don’t follow the news. But trust me — you’ve been taken for a ride by your elders.

The question isn’t whether such talk will stir up generational war. That’s already being waged — and you’re losing. The question is whether you’ll wake up and engage in a little generational self-defense. Let me see if I can motivate you.

How are you being swindled today? Let me count just some of the ways:

As many as 100 million Americans live in households today that are earning less than their parents did at a similar age. And this is happening well before we feel the full impact of global economic integration with rising economies like India and China.

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NATO’s lost lessons from Libya

Marc Garlasco headed the United Nations Protection of Civilians office in Afghanistan in 2011 and was the U.N. senior military adviser for the Human Rights Council’s Independent Commission of Inquiry on Libya where he led the investigation into NATO’s actions during the war in Libya.

As the international community assesses the situation in Syria, it’s important to keep in mind what might be expected of NATO.

I investigated the organization’s actions in Libya last year while at the same time working with the United Nations’ civilian protection office in Afghanistan. The difference in how NATO interacted with me in each place was striking. I had a collegial, open relationship with officials in Afghanistan — and an adversarial and frosty one with those in Libya.

In August 2011 laser-guided bombs dropped by NATO forces reduced three homes in Majer, Libya, to rubble. The strike killed 34, the largest loss of civilian lives from a NATO attack; 38 others were wounded. As the head of the U.N. investigating team for all NATO activity in Libya, I sifted through the debris and makeshift memorials in the small rural village near Misrata while interviewing survivors, trying to piece together what had happened. It didn’t make sense — NATO hit the homes and returned for a follow-up strike, killing the rescuers who were frantically digging for survivors minutes after the first bombs struck. A pilot using laser-guided bombs would have been able to see the rescuers at work.

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Pentagon to soon deploy pint-sized but lethal Switchblade drones

LA TIMES

Seeking to reduce civilian casualties and collateral damage, the Pentagon will soon deploy a new generation of drones the size of model planes, packing tiny explosive warheads that can be delivered with pinpoint accuracy.

Errant drone strikes have been blamed for killing and injuring scores of civilians throughout Pakistan and Afghanistan, giving the U.S. government a black eye as it targets elusive terrorist groups. The Predator and Reaper drones deployed in these regions typically carry 100-pound laser-guided Hellfire missiles or 500-pound GPS-guided smart bombs that can reduce buildings to smoldering rubble.

The new Switchblade drone, by comparison, weighs less than 6 pounds and can take out a sniper on a rooftop without blasting the building to bits. It also enables soldiers in the field to identify and destroy targets much more quickly by eliminating the need to call in a strike from large drones that may be hundreds of miles away.

"This is a precision strike weapon that causes as minimal collateral damage as possible," said William I. Nichols, who led the Army's testing effort of the Switchblades at Redstone Arsenal near Huntsville, Ala.

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Obama’s ‘kill list’ is unchecked presidential power

WASHINGTON POST

A stunning report in the New York Times depicted President Obama poring over the equivalent of terrorist baseball cards, deciding who on a “kill list” would be targeted for elimination by drone attack. The revelations — as well as those in Daniel Klaidman’s recent book — sparked public outrage and calls for congressional inquiry.

Yet bizarrely, the fury is targeted at the messengers, not the message. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) expressed dismay that presidential aides were leaking national security information to bolster the president’s foreign policy credentials. (Shocking? Think gambling, Casablanca). Republican and Democratic senators joined in condemning the leaks. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. — AWOL in the prosecution of rampant bank fraud — roused himself to name two prosecutors to track down the leakers.

Please. Al-Qaeda knows that U.S. drones are hunting them. The Pakistanis, Yemenis, Somalis, Afghanis and others know the U.S. is behind the drones that strike suddenly from above. The only people aided by these revelations are the American people who have an overriding right and need to know.

The problem isn’t the leaks, it’s the policy. It’s the assertion of a presidential prerogative that the administration can target for death people it decides are terrorists — even American citizens — anywhere in the world, at any time, on secret evidence with no review.

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Issa plans Holder contempt vote for June 20

House Republicans sounded like they were ready to go to war with the Obama administration Monday over the Fast and Furious program as they announced a committee vote to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress.

But behind the scenes, House Republican leaders want nothing more than for the White House and Justice Department to fork over thousands of pages of documents related to the ill-fated gun-running program and avoid a dramatic — and potentially distracting — House floor showdown.

Even as Speaker John Boehner said Monday that the DOJ is “out of excuses,” his staff and the Justice Department are continuing informal discussions. Those talks haven’t yielded any progress, and Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa is planning his contempt vote for June 20 in committee.

But the unavoidable reality is this: Republican leadership sees this issue as a political loser.

“This isn’t the message leadership wants,” one veteran House Republican lawmaker said. “They just want a boring, quiet summer of us not saying anything to screw up [and] get in the way of Obama’s economic news.”

A House GOP aide added, “Not a fight we are looking for. It doesn’t look good for anybody.”

The Department of Justice and Issa’s staff are still talking, and the Justice Department says that “as recently as a few days ago, the department staff and committee staff were discussing a way toward a resolution of this matter.”

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Next Six Months Could Determine Fate of the Internet, FCC Commissioner Warns

CNS

Actions taken – or not taken – by proponents of online freedom within the next six months will decide the fate of the Internet, according to Federal Communica-tions Commission commissioner Robert McDowell.

“Six months separate us from the renegotiation of the 1988 treaty that led to insulating the Internet from economic and technical regulation,” McDowell, a Republican, told lawmakers during a hearing on Capitol Hill last week.

“What proponents of Internet freedom do or don’t do between now and then will determine the fate of the Net and effect global economic growth as well as determine whether political liberty can proliferate,” he said.

On December 4, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a Geneva-based U.N. specialized agency, will convene in Dubai to discuss its ongoing review of international telecommunications regulations (ITRs).

The Internet does not currently fall within the scope of the ITRs, but some ITU members, including Russia, India, China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, have long been promoting U.N. oversight of the Internet, and are expected to push for it at the Dubai conference.

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Federal Judge Reaffirms Her Order Blocking Indefinite Detention by Obama Administration

The New American

Lest there was any lingering doubt, the federal judge who enjoined enforcement of the indefinite detention provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) told the Obama Administration that it may not legally detain an American indefinitely based on a suspicion of support of terrorism unless the government can demonstrate a connection to the attacks of September 11, 2001.

In a memorandum clarifying her ruling from May 16, Judge Katherine B. Forrest (pictured) of the Southern District of New York reaffirmed her earlier opinion stating plainly that her earlier order stands and that the objections raised by the government in its request for a reconsideration were not valid.

In its Motion for Reconsideration of the judge’s injunction, the White House argued that, in its opinion, the judge’s prohibition on the application of Section 1021 of the NDAA applied only to the plaintiffs named in the original lawsuit.

Judge Forrest, while agreeing that her ruling concerned only Section 1021, informed the lawyers for the government that the injunction applied to anyone who might reasonably fear that his constitutionally protected freedom of expression would be affected by the specter of criminal punishment.

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Afghan government warns US over 'one-sided' airstrike that killed 18

The Afghan government has hit out at the US for failing to consult with local forces ahead of an airstrike that killed 18 civilians, suggesting future such raids would be viewed as a breach of its pact with Washington.

An investigation into Wednesday's night-time raid found that it was the result of "a one-sided decision, and not co-ordinated with Afghan security forces", President Hamid Karzai's spokesman Aimal Faiz said.

He went on to suggest that a repeat of the unilateral strike would be seen as a violation of a pact between the two countries over who takes the lead in "special operations" in the country.

Signed in April, the agreement puts the Afghan government in charge of such manoeuvres – a move designed to resolve some of the longstanding tensions between the two countries.

The fallout from the deadly strike – alongside news Saturday that four French soldiers in Afghanistan were killed by a suicide bomber wearing a burqa – have reaffirmed fears that Nato's exit strategy will be far from orderly.

As part of the transition of power, more agreements are expected to be signed handing responsibility for security matters to Afghan forces.

But investigators looking into the circumstances surrounding the latest loss of civilian life in an airborne attack concluded that the call was made by US authorities alone.

Wednesday's raid took place at a village in the Logar province in which militants were believed to be hiding.

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ATF Seizes 25 Guns From Collector & Won't Return Them!

It’s been nearly seven years since 58-year-old auto mechanic and gun collector David Bord made a purchase that has caused him no end of grief: a Hatton Industries machine gun, which he got at the Armory, a gun store near Annapolis, in exchange for 10 pistols and $10,000. What Bord didn’t learn until almost three years later—in spring 2008, when agents of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) visited him—was that the gun was suspected of being part of an allegedly fraudulent gun-registration ring based in Arizona.

In December 2009, as a result of an ATF tip involving Bord’s purchase at the Armory, Baltimore County police raided Bord’s home and business and seized a large part of his gun collection. Bord says they took 25 firearms worth $250,000, nearly all of them 35 to 50 years old, based on a faulty warrant, and that the guns are now in ATF’s possession.

“They said the guns weren’t registered with Maryland or the [United States],” Bord says of the Baltimore County police who took his guns, “but every single one of the guns is—I showed them the paperwork. They know everything is legal, and they still refuse to return them. Every single one of them is legal and registered, but the idiots still won’t back down.”

Bord’s ongoing efforts to have the guns returned to him include a lawsuit against Baltimore County, which is scheduled for trial in September, having survived the county’s attempt last year to have it dismissed.

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Collapse At Hand

Paul Craig Roberts

Ever since the beginning of the financial crisis and Quantitative Easing, the question has been before us:  How can the Federal Reserve maintain zero interest rates for banks and negative real interest rates for savers and bond holders when the US government is adding $1.5 trillion to the national debt every year via its budget deficits? 

Not long ago, the Fed announced that it was going to continue this policy for another 2 or 3 years. Indeed, the Fed is locked into the policy. Without the artificially low interest rates, the debt service on the national debt would be so large that it would raise questions about the US Treasury’s credit rating and the viability of the dollar, and the trillions of dollars in Interest Rate Swaps and other derivatives would come unglued.

In other words, financial deregulation leading to Wall Street’s gambles, the US government’s decision to bail out the banks and to keep them afloat, and the Federal Reserve’s zero interest rate policy have put the economic future of the US and its currency in an untenable and dangerous position.  It will not be possible to continue to flood the bond markets with $1.5 trillion in new issues each year when the interest rate on the bonds is less than the rate of inflation. Everyone who purchases a Treasury bond is purchasing a depreciating asset. Moreover, the capital risk of investing in Treasuries is very high. The low interest rate means that the price paid for the bond is very high. A rise in interest rates, which must come sooner or later, will collapse the price of the bonds and inflict capital losses on bond holders, both domestic and foreign.

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