[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
The private-intelligence firm Black Cube compiled profiles on Ben Rhodes and Colin Kahl, Obama Administration advisers who were proponents of the Iran nuclear deal.
The New Yorker, “Israeli Operatives Who Aided Harvey Weinstein Collected Information on Former Obama Administration Officials”, 6 May 2018:
In June, 2017, Ann Norris, a former State Department official, received an e-mail containing an unusual proposal. Norris is married to Ben Rhodes, a former foreign-policy adviser to President Barack Obama and a prominent advocate of the Iran nuclear deal. In the e-mail, a woman who introduced herself as Eva Novak and claimed to work for a London-based film company called Shell Productions asked Norris to consult on a movie that she described as “ ‘All the President’s Men’ meets ‘The West Wing’ ”: it would follow the personal lives of “government officials in the positions that determine war and Peace” during times of geopolitical crisis, including “nuclear negotiations with a hostile nation.” Recalling the exchange, Ann Norris said that she found Eva Novak’s request “bizarre,” and that she “never responded.”
The e-mail appears to be part of an undercover campaign by an Israeli private-intelligence firm to discredit Obama officials who had been leading proponents of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. The campaign was first reported, on Saturday, by the British newspaper the Observer. However, sources familiar with the effort and pages of documents obtained by The New Yorker reveal that there is more to understand. Two of those sources told me on Sunday that the operation was carried out by Black Cube—a firm that was also employed by Harvey Weinstein and that offers its clients access to operatives from “Israel’s élite military and governmental intelligence units,” including the Mossad.
A month before Norris received her e-mail, Rebecca Kahl, a former program officer at the National Democratic Institute and the wife of the former Obama Administration foreign-policy adviser Colin Kahl, had also received a puzzling e-mail. A woman named Adriana Gavrilo claimed to be the head of corporate social responsibility at Reuben Capital Partners, a London-based wealth-management firm. Gavrilo told Kahl that her firm was launching an initiative on education and that she wanted to meet to discuss the school that Kahl’s daughter attended, at which Kahl volunteered. Kahl referred Gavrilo to school staff members, but Gavrilo repeatedly refused to speak to anyone but her. Gavrilo’s firm would “not be able to make the necessary due diligence” on the school employees, she wrote. Rebecca Kahl, who said she “worried I’m strangely a target of some sort,” eventually stopped responding to Gavrilo.
Adriana Gavrilo and Eva Novak appear to be aliases. LinkedIn pages for both Gavrilo and Novak at one point showed a slim blond woman advertised as fluent in Serbian. Shortly after The New Yorker contacted Black Cube about this story, Novak’s LinkedIn page was deleted. The e-mail addresses listed by both women do not work. Calls to the phone number Novak listed went unanswered. The Web sites for Reuben Capital Partners and Shell Productions have been taken down, but both were bare-bones pages constructed through the free site-building tool Wix. The addresses for both companies led to shared office spaces; there is no evidence that Shell Productions or Reuben Capital Partners had ever operated there.
The documents show that Black Cube compiled detailed background profiles of several individuals, including Rhodes and Kahl, that featured their addresses, information on their family members, and even the makes of their cars. Black Cube agents were instructed to try to find damaging information about them, including unsubstantiated claims that Rhodes and Kahl had worked closely with Iran lobbyists and were personally enriched through their policy work on Iran (they denied those claims); rumors that Rhodes was one of the Obama staffers responsible for “unmasking” Trump transition officials who were named in intelligence documents (Rhodes denied the claim); and an allegation that one of the individuals targeted by the campaign had an affair.
The campaign is strikingly similar to an operation that Black Cube ran on behalf of Harvey Weinstein, which was reported in The New Yorker last fall. One of Weinstein’s attorneys, David Boies, hired Black Cube to halt the publication of sexual-misconduct allegations against Weinstein. Black Cube operatives used false identities to track women with allegations, and also reporters seeking to expose the story. In May, 2017, a former Israel Defense Forces officer, who had emigrated to Israel from the former Yugoslavia, was working as an undercover agent for Black Cube. The woman contacted the actress Rose McGowan, claiming to work for Reuben Capital Partners but using the identity of a Diana Filip. Filip’s e-mails to McGowan displayed the same tactics as those in the e-mails sent to Norris and Kahl, and in some cases used almost identical language. (Filip also wrote to me from Reuben Capital Partners, and again used similar language.)
In a statement, Black Cube said, “It is Black Cube’s policy to never discuss its clients with any third party, and to never confirm or deny any speculation made with regard to the company’s work.” The statement also read, “Black Cube has no relation whatsoever to the Trump administration, to Trump aides, to anyone close to the administration, or to the Iran Nuclear deal.” The firm also said that it “always operates in full compliance of the law in every jurisdiction in which it conducts its work, following legal advice from the world’s leading law firms.”
In the Iran operation, as in its operation for Weinstein, Black Cube focussed much of its work on reporters and other media figures, sometimes using agents who posed as journalists. The company compiled a list of more than thirty reporters who it believed were in touch with Obama Administration officials, annotated with instructions about how to seek negative information. Transcripts produced by Black Cube reveal that the firm secretly recorded a conversation between one of its agents and Trita Parsi, a Swedish-Iranian author. The conversation, which began as a general discussion of Iran policy, quickly devolved into questions about Rhodes, Kahl, and whether they had personally profited off of the Iran policy. “I’ve had the first part of the conversation five hundred times,” Parsi recalled, of his conversation with the agent, who claimed to be a reporter. “But then he started asking about personal financial interests, and that was more unusual. He was pushing very, very hard.”
The Observer reported that aides of President Trump had hired Black Cube to run the operation in order to undermine the Iran deal, allegations that Black Cube denies. “The idea was that people acting for Trump would discredit those who were pivotal in selling the deal, making it easier to pull out of it,” a source told the Observer. One of the sources familiar with the effort told me that it was, in fact, part of Black Cube’s work for a private-sector client pursuing commercial interests related to sanctions on Iran. (A Trump Administration spokesperson declined to comment to the Observer on the allegations.)
Kahl, who worked as an adviser to Vice-President Joe Biden, said that he believed Trump associates may have been involved because of unsubstantiated reports in conservative media outlets accusing Rhodes and Kahl of damaging leaks about the Trump Administration. “Why Ben and I? Why conjoin Ben and me?” Kahl asked. “Of all the other senior people in the White House, I’m least senior.”
Black Cube is known for its close ties to current and former power players in Israeli politics and intelligence. The late Meir Dagan, a former Mossad director, once served as the company’s president. Ehud Barak, the former Israeli Prime Minister, has publicly acknowledged that he introduced Weinstein to Black Cube’s leadership. (Barak said he did not know the nature of Weinstein’s concerns at the time.) The Observer reported that officials linked to Trump’s team had made contact with Black Cube days after Trump visited Tel Aviv in May, 2017, during his first foreign tour as President. Standing next to Netanyahu during that trip, Trump promised, “Iran will never have nuclear weapons, that I can tell you.”
Rhodes said that the campaign represented a troubling situation in which public servants were being targeted for their work in government. “This just eviscerates any norm of how governments should operate or treat their predecessors and their families,” he said. “It crosses a dangerous line.”
Trump with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein
“Trump Treason: Mossad Run Contractor Paid to Falsify US Intel on Iran Nukes, Ordered by Donald Trump Personally”, Greek News On Demand, 6 May 2018:
Trump aides hired Israeli private spy agency in attempt to flesh out incriminating info on Obama Officials
It has been learned that Trump aides hired an Israeli private spy agency in an attempt to flesh out any potential incriminating information on officials from the Obama administration who assisted with the 2015 Iran nuclear deal negotiations.
Aides to US President Donald Trump hired an Israeli private intelligence agency to find incriminating information on Obama administration employees who participated in Iran deal negotiations, The Guardian has reported.
The outlet reported that Trump’s team hired an Israeli spy agency the previous year in May to find derogatory information about former US President Barack Obama’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communications Ben Rhodes and former Vice-President Joe Biden’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communications Colin Kahl in an attempt to compromise the Iran nuclear accord.
The idea behind the move was to discredit those pivotal in selling the agreement, which — if any dirt had been located — would make it easier to pull out, The Guardian reported, citing a source familiar with details of the investigation.
The private investigators were tasked with looking into Rhodes and Kahl’s political careers and personal lives, checking to see if they might have benefited from the Nuclear Deal, according to documents the outlet claims to have seen.There is no information on how deep the hired spies were able to dig, or what became of any possible information unearthed, according to the outlet’s sources.
The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) commonly known as Iran Nuclear Deal, which stipulated a gradual lifting of sanctions against Iran in exchange for Tehran curbing its nuclear program, was reached by the so-called P5+1 group — Russia, the United States, China, France, the United Kingdom, Germany — and the European Union on July 14.
The International Atomic Energy Association has verified that Iran is upholding its commitments under the accord. However, Trump has repeatedly criticized the deal during his 2016 election campaign, saying the European Union needed to fix major flaws in it. He now faces the May 12 deadline to waive sanctions on Iran under the agreement.
Netanyahu brings his case for war against Iran to the public which the Alt-Lite/Right has prepared.
On national television, Netanyahu drops ‘bombshell revelation’ about Iran’s ‘non-compliance’ with nuclear deal in order to overwhelm talks by those heads of state (notably Macron to Trump) trying to save the deal. In this public address, Netanyahu is trying to bypass discussion with signatories to the agreement and instead affect a groundswell from the already prepared ground of American public opinion.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has revealed what he says are “secret nuclear files” proving Iran once covertly pursued nuclear weapons.
He said thousands of pages of material obtained by Israel showed Iran had deceived the world by denying it had ever sought nuclear weapons.
Iran agreed in 2015 to curb its nuclear energy programme in return for the lifting of sanctions.
It maintained that it had only been pursuing nuclear energy.
But Mr Netanyahu accused Iran of conducting a secret weapons programme until 2003 codenamed “Project Amad”. He claimed Iran continued to pursue nuclear weapons knowledge after Project Amad was shuttered.
Iran pushed back against the claims. Foreign Minister Javad Zarif tweeted to say the evidence was a “rehash of old allegations” which had already been dealt with by the United Nations nuclear watchdog.
Iran’s foreign minister accused Mr Netanyahu of a “childish” stunt to influence President Donald Trump’s decision on whether to remain in a nuclear deal with Iran.
The US along with five other international powers struck a deal with Iran in 2015 to curb the country’s nuclear programme.
Mr Trump, who has long threatened to scrap the Obama-era deal, said he had viewed part of Mr Netanyahu’s presentation and said the situation was “not acceptable”.
He said he would make a decision on whether to retain the deal on or before 12 May.
A White House statement said there were “new and compelling details” in Mr Netanyahu’s material.
“These facts are consistent with what the United States has long known: Iran has a robust, clandestine nuclear weapons programme that it has tried and failed to hide from the world and from its own people,” the statement went on.
However, European powers have said they are committed to upholding the accord.
“We have never been naive about Iran and its nuclear intentions,” said a UK government spokesperson late on Monday.
Until he was sold on the Alt-Right quid pro quo, David Duke’s major point against any candidate concerned their being a hawk against Iran on behalf of Israel.
“That is why the IAEA inspection regime agreed as part of the Iran nuclear deal is one of the most extensive and robust in the history of international nuclear accords.”
Mr Netanyahu said he had spoken to the leaders of France and Germany about Israel’s intelligence and planned to send representatives to the two countries to discuss it.
A German government spokesman said the country would carry out a detailed analysis of Israel’s intelligence, Reuters reported.
John Hughes, a former deputy director for sanctions at the US State Department who worked on the Iran deal, said he had not seen anything in the Israeli presentation that would change the deal.
“I think, frankly, this was a political statement meant to try to influence President Trump’s decision on whether to pull out of the deal,” Mr Hughes said. “I think it’s mostly recycled material.”
Guess which group of people the Americans got played by this time? The usual. Israel. Yet again!
Buzzfeed, “Here’s How Breitbart And Milo Smuggled Nazi and White Nationalist Ideas Into The Mainstream”, 5 Oct 2017: Milo Yiannopoulos at the One Nostalgia Tavern in Dallas, belting out a karaoke rendition of “America the Beautiful” in front of a crowd of “sieg heil”-ing admirers, including Richard Spencer.
A cache of documents obtained by BuzzFeed News reveals the truth about Steve Bannon’s alt-right “killing machine.”
In August, after a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville ended in murder, Steve Bannon insisted that “there’s no room in American society” for neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, and the KKK.
But an explosive cache of documents obtained by BuzzFeed News proves that there was plenty of room for those voices on his website.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, under Bannon’s leadership, Breitbart courted the alt-right — the insurgent, racist right-wing movement that helped sweep Donald Trump to power. The former White House chief strategist famously remarked that he wanted Breitbart to be “the platform for the alt-right.”
Ibid: Like all the new media success stories, Breitbart’s alt-right platform depends on the participation of its audience. It combusts the often secret fury of those who reject liberal norms into news, and it doesn’t burn clean.
Now Bannon is back at the controls of the machine, which he has said he is “revving up.” The Mercers have funded Yiannopoulos’s post-Breitbart venture. And these documents present the clearest look at what these people may have in store for America.
A year and a half ago, Milo Yiannopoulos set himself a difficult task: to define the alt-right. It was five months before Hillary Clinton named the alt-right in a campaign speech, 10 months before the alt-right’s great hope became president, and 17 months before Charlottesville clinched the alt-right as a stalking horse for violent white nationalism. The movement had just begun its explosive emergence into the country’s politics and culture.
At the time, Yiannopoulos, who would later describe himself as a “fellow traveler” of the alt-right, was the tech editor of Breitbart. In summer 2015, after spending a year gathering momentum through GamerGate — the opening salvo of the new culture wars — he convinced Breitbart upper management to give him his own section. And for four months, he helped Bannon wage what the Breitbart boss called in emails to staff “#war.” It was a war, fought story by story, against the perceived forces of liberal activism on every conceivable battleground in American life.
Yiannopoulos was a useful soldier whose very public identity as a gay man (one who has now married a black man) helped defend him, his anti-political correctness crusade, and his employer from charges of bigotry.
But now Yiannopoulos had a more complicated fight on his hands. The left — and worse, some on the right — had started to condemn the new conservative energy as reactionary and racist. Yiannopoulos had to take back “alt-right,” to redefine for Breitbart’s audience a poorly understood, leaderless movement, parts of which had already started to resist the term itself.
So he reached out to key constituents, who included a neo-Nazi and a white nationalist.
“Finally doing my big feature on the alt right,” Yiannopoulos wrote in a March 9, 2016, email to Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer, a hacker who is the system administrator of the neo-Nazi hub the Daily Stormer, and who would later ask his followers to disrupt the funeral of Charlottesville victim Heather Heyer. “Fancy braindumping some thoughts for me.”
“It’s time for me to do my big definitive guide to the alt right,” Yiannopoulos wrote four hours later to Curtis Yarvin, a software engineer who under the nom de plume Mencius Moldbug helped create the “neoreactionary” movement, which holds that Enlightenment democracy has failed and that a return to feudalism and authoritarian rule is in order. “Which is my whorish way of asking if you have anything you’d like to make sure I include.”
“Alt r feature, figured you’d have some thoughts,” Yiannopoulos wrote the same day to Devin Saucier, who helps edit the online white nationalist magazine American Renaissance under the pseudonym Henry Wolff, and who wrote a story in June 2017 called “Why I Am (Among Other Things) a White Nationalist.”
The three responded at length: Weev about the Daily Stormer and a podcast called The Daily Shoah, Yarvin in characteristically sweeping world-historical assertions (“It’s no secret that North America contains many distinct cultural/ethnic communities. This is not optimal, but with a competent king it’s not a huge problem either”), and Saucier with a list of thinkers, politicians, journalists, films (Dune, Mad Max, The Dark Knight), and musical genres (folk metal, martial industrial, ’80s synthpop) important to the movement. Yiannopoulos forwarded it all, along with the Wikipedia entries for “Alternative Right” and the esoteric far-right Italian philosopher Julius Evola — a major influence on 20th-century Italian fascists and Richard Spencer alike — to Allum Bokhari, his deputy and frequent ghostwriter, whom he had met during GamerGate. “Include a bit of everything,” he instructed Bokhari.
“Bannon, as you probably know, is sympathetic to much of it.”
“I think you’ll like what I’m cooking up,” Yiannopoulos wrote to Saucier, the American Renaissance editor.
“I look forward to it,” Saucier replied. “Bannon, as you probably know, is sympathetic to much of it.”
Five days later Bokhari returned a 3,000-word draft, a taxonomy of the movement titled “ALT-RIGHT BEHEMOTH.” It included a little bit of everything: the brains and their influences (Yarvin and Evola, etc.), the “natural conservatives” (people who think different ethnic groups should stay separate for scientific reasons), the “Meme team” (4chan and 8chan), and the actual hatemongers. Of the last group, Bokhari wrote: “There’s just not very many of them, no-one really likes them, and they’re unlikely to achieve anything significant in the alt-right.”
With cheerful taken-for-grantedness of the ‘unassailable’ virtue of their motives, this panel at CFR discusses the prospect of “democratization” of “illiberal democracies” by having them accept non-White migrants and integration; i.e., cheerful acceptance of the destruction of our European genome. Primarily with the targeted “problem” of Eastern European countries Not accepting immigrants.
Published on Apr 23, 2018 by Council on Foreign Relations -
Speakers discuss the growing trend toward populism around the world and the current global state of democracy.
Speakers
Michael Abramowitz
President, Freedom House; Former White House Correspondent, Washington Post
Nicole M. Bibbins Sedaca
Chair, Global Politics and Security Concentration and Professor in the Practice of International Affairs, Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown U; Former Senior Advisor to the Undersecretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs, US Department of State
Timothy Snyder
Richard C. Levin Professor of History, Yale University; Author, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America
Presider
Kati I. Marton
Author and Human Rights Activist
Kati I. Marton (15:56): We haven’t yet mentioned one of the most powerful motives for the rise of populism, which is the fear of refugees - migrants. Most graphically on display in Hungary where you can’t go a block without seeing a billboard showing George Soros’s smiling face, and the headline over that face is, ‘don’t let him have the last laugh.’
Six months ago George Soros was known to a very small handful of Budapest literati. Now he is probably the second best known person in Hungary after Victor Orban. And this manipulation of the fear of migrants, of which by the way, there are virtually none in Hungary and very few in Poland, as opposed to over a million in Germany, where this problem doesn’t exist…is something that uh, that we haven’t really dealt with sufficiently.
We seem to step-by-step, accept that his is the way of the world now. I frequently ask myself what didn’t my Hungarian grandparents, whose lives didn’t end well, what didn’t they do in the 30’s? that we should be doing today? Rather than sleepwalking thought this rather dangerous passage.
So, the migration problem and how it relates to the rise of populism - AdF (eg) is entirely about fear of outsiders.
When an audience member suggest the problem of Eastern European countries having a bad track record with regard to democracy, Snyder draws comparisons -
Snyder: (36:00): When the Supreme Court decides in 2013 that racism is no longer a problem, twenty two states then pass voter suppression laws - that’s not democratization, whatever you think of the legality of it.
...its been very hard for the West European countries to extend democracy over second class citizens (empire/subject relation)...asking about the things that make democracy possible….which for me precisely have to do with integration - the European Union, whatever its chances are, is the hope for democracy.
Kati I. Marton (38:00) ...these countries are not destined to be undemocratic, there are a whole bunch of other factors and one of them, frankly, is the luck of leaders (Merkel!)
Posted by DanielS on Saturday, 21 April 2018 12:40.
Scooter Libby with Paul Wolfowitz in 2008
- Observes Majorityrights correspondent, Kumiko.
It waves a giant red flag as to how much Trump is down with the Zionist agenda.
Who even needed 9-11 when you had Scooter Libby!
When you have insiders like that to manipulate the evidence to create false warrant on behalf of Zionist Operation Clean Break, you don’t need massive false flag events.
In fact, if you look at the PBS piece titled “A Secret History of ISIS”, they actually reveal the precise moment at which Israel injected itself into the decision-making process in the lead up to the Iraq War in 2003, and thus shaped the outcome to their advantage.
From 11min 40sec onward in that video, the transcript:
COLIN POWELL: The speech, supposedly, had been prepared in the White House and in the NSC. But when we were given what had been prepared, it was totally inadequate and we couldn’t track anything in it. And when I asked Condi Rice, the National Security Advisor, “Where did this come from?”, it turns out the Vice-President’s office had written it.
NARRATOR: Powell would turn to the CIA to vet the speech.
NADA BAKOS: We [the CIA] had a copy of the speech that was sent over from the White House that Powell was preparing, and one of our senior analysts was working on it, editing, working on the language to ensure that it reflected our analysis.
NARRATOR: Just days later, Powell arrived at the United Nations.
POWELL: Walking into that room is always a daunting experience, but I had been there before. And we had projectors and all sorts of technology to help us make the case.
KAREN DEYOUNG: Powell was very nervous. Powell doesn’t like to read speeches; he likes to have a few note cards and then do his Powell thing. But this one he read from the text, every word.
NARRATOR: At the Counterterrorism Centre, Bakos was watching carefully to see what Powell would say about Zarqawi, bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein.
BAKOS: We’re sitting in our room at CTC watching the television with a copy of the speech in our hand. When he got to our portion, it went off our script fairly quickly. And we were looking around at each other saying, “Where’s he at, where’s he at?” We’re flipping through pages. And so, you know, right away, we could tell that this wasn’t reflecting the language that we had used.
NARRATOR: Powell used Zarqawi to make the connection between bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.
BAKOS: It drew conclusions in language that we would not use. So we were very, very, very careful about describing the relationship as we saw it, and it seemed to overinflate and not reflect our analysis.
INTERVIEWER: How did that happen, Nada?
BAKOS: Within the process of how it went, you know, where it went back to the White House and who worked on it after that, I don’t know how it was changed, or by who.
If anyone should want to know what happened at that crucial point, and how, the place to look would be at the office of the Chief of the Staff to the Vice President of the United States, who at the time was Scooter Libby.
If you understand that Scooter Libby was to Dick Cheney as Dick Cheney was to George W. Bush, then suddenly you become capable of seeing how it could be possible for the changes that Bakos is referring to, to have been made in the Vice-President’s office by Scooter Libby and his network of very Zionist associates.
In summary
There is no need for any kind of 9/11 conspiracy theory to explain what happened in Iraq.
The explanation has been right in front of everyone’s face from day one. The office of the Chief of the Staff to the Vice President of the United States was compromised by Israel, and as such, all decision-making processes that flowed through there were subject to having Israeli policy preferences injected into them.
It is not the only node that was compromised, but it is the most pivotal and significant one in this situation. I hope that clears up all possible questions and that everyone can draw a line under that issue and call it a closed case now.
Now for the BBC article:
BBC, “Scooter Libby: Trump pardons Cheney aide who leaked”, 13 April 2018:
US President Donald Trump has pardoned former Vice-President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, who was convicted of lying about leaks to the media.
Lewis Libby, known as Scooter, was found guilty in 2007 following an investigation into the unauthorised disclosure of a CIA agent’s identity.
The White House said Libby was “fully worthy of this pardon”.
“I don’t know Mr Libby,” said Mr Trump, “but for years I have heard that he has been treated unfairly.
“Hopefully, this full pardon will help rectify a very sad portion of his life.”
What’s the background to the case?
Libby was found guilty of perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements following an investigation into a leak that revealed the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame.
His trial heard that Bush administration officials wanted to get back at Ms Plame’s husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.
Mr Wilson had written a 2003 New York Times op-ed accusing Mr Cheney of doctoring pre-war intelligence on Iraq.
Libby was charged with lying to investigators about his contacts with reporters, but he maintained he simply misremembered the sequence of events.
He was sentenced to 30 months in prison and fined $250,000 (£175,000).
But his sentence was commuted by then-President George W Bush.
What’s the reaction?
In an interview on Friday with MSNBC, Ms Plame condemned Mr Trump’s decision to pardon Libby.
“My personal sense is that I didn’t think my contempt for Donald Trump could go lower, but he surprises me each and every day,” she said.
“It’s very clear that this is a message he is sending, that you can commit crimes against national security and you will be pardoned,” she added.
Ms Plame has previously said her career as a CIA agent was finished “in an instant” once her identity was leaked.
She told the BBC in 2007 that “treason” had been committed in pursuit of political retribution.
Mr Cheney told the New York Times Mr Libby is “one of the most capable, principled and honourable men I have ever known.
“He is innocent and he and his family have suffered for years because of his wrongful conviction. I am gratedful that President Trump righted this wrong…”
On Friday, Democrats charged Mr Trump with hypocrisy for pardoning a man who leaked to the media, despite the president’s condemnation of such disclosures in his White House.
Mr Trump’s decision came on the same day that he savaged former FBI Director James Comey as a “proven LEAKER & LIAR”.
Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff tweeted: “This is the President’s way of sending a message to those implicated in the Russia investigation: You have my back and I’ll have yours.”
What was Libby case’s political fallout?
Mr Cheney had pressured Mr Bush to pardon Libby in the final days of his presidency.
But Mr Cheney’s badgering reached the point where Mr Bush reportedly told his aides his vice-president was beginning to annoy him.
After consulting White House lawyers, Mr Bush decided it was best not to issue a pardon.
When he finally told Mr Cheney about his decision, Mr Cheney snapped at him, saying: “You are leaving a good man wounded on the field of battle.”
“The comment stung,” Mr Bush would write in his memoirs.
“In eight years, I had never seen Dick like this, or even close to this.
“I worried that the friendship we had built was about to be severely strained, at best.”
Key players in the 2007 CIA leak probe
What is a presidential pardon?
Libby’s pardon amounts to official forgiveness for his crime, but does not equate to exoneration or finding that he was innocent.
Presidential pardons can overturn consequences of a conviction such as being denied the right to carry out jury service, vote or run for political office.
Since the conviction, Libby has already had his law license reinstated.
And former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell restored his voting rights in 2013.
This is the third time Mr Trump has issued a pardon.
In August last year, he did so for former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was convicted of criminal contempt over his crackdown on undocumented immigrants.
Last month he pardoned Kristian Saucier, a Navy sailor who took photos of classified areas inside a US submarine and served a year in federal prison.
Kumiko adds: Last night’s strike was not what they wanted.
John Bolton and some middle eastern leaders are laying the metapolitical backdrop for that - they wanted a broad and longer engagement. .
Instead, they got a limited strike because the US Defence Dept prevented anything bigger.
New Observer, “Jews Force 11,000 Pro-Israel Changes to US School Textbooks”, 16 April 2018:
The Jewish lobby in America has forced through more than 11,000 changes to US school textbooks issued by National Geographic, Prentice Hall, Five Ponds Press, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and McGraw-Hill over the past several years, it has emerged.
According to a press release issued by the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep) and posted at the Israel Lobby Archive, the latest changes were revealed in a set of changes demanded by the Jews in textbooks and teaching guides used in the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Requested changes include:
– Deletion of references to Israel “occupying” territories captured during the 1967 Six-Day War and substituting “controlled.” International conventions clearly outline the responsibility of occupying powers and the illegality of collective punishment and population transfers.
– Changes to maps to recognize Israel’s declared “annexation” of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. The U.S. and most other countries do not officially recognize Israeli annexation of either territory.
– Substitution of references to “occupied territories” to “captured areas.”
– Substitution of references to “Jewish settlers” and “settlements” with “building of homes and communities.”
– Deletion of a lesson reviewing a video documentary by Iranian-American religious studies scholar, author, producer and television host Reza Aslan.
– Deletion of an activity based on reading the biography and work of Palestinian legislator Hanan Ashrawi.
– Substitution of an editorial cartoon titled “The Mideast Peace Game Rules” with a cartoon of an Arab suicide terrorist holding a “Road Map to Peace” game hostage.
California-based Institute for Curriculum Services (ICS) proposed changes were submitted to the Virginia Department of Education on February 28 on behalf of the Jewish Community Federation of Richmond, the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington, the Jewish Community Relations Committee (JCRC) of Richmond, and the JCRC of Tidewater.
In a January webcast on YouTube, ICS chief Aliza Craimer Elias claimed that “working behind the scenes” through state advocacy organizations ICS had successfully made more than 11,000 changes to U.S. textbooks.
Publishers of the textbooks targeted for changes include National Geographic, Prentice Hall, Five Ponds Press, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and McGraw-Hill.
Common themes in ICS requests to make changes to Virginia textbooks.
1. Qualify claims of Islam as “expressing Muslim religious belief” while referencing those of Judaism as “God’s covenant.”
2. Replace Christian versions of key texts (such as the Ten Commandments) with Judaic versions.
3. Emphasize the “Jewish ethnicity”“ of major American historical figures.
4. Eliminate terms such as “settlers,” “occupation,” “land theft” and “wall” or replace with more neutral terms such as “disputed,” “captured areas,” “security fence” and “controlled.”
5. Emphasize Arab culpability for crisis initiation (Israel’s 1948 War of Independence) leading to military action, but not Israeli culpability (e.g. surprise Israeli airstrikes on Egypt commencing the 1967 Six-Day War).
6. Discourage students from conducting open internet research on current events lest they run into controversial content. Instead recommend approved websites such as the ADL and the JewishVirtualLibrary.org
7. Eliminate or replace historical artwork created for predominately Christian audiences.
8. Add content that augments Israeli claims to occupied territory in the Middle East, such as changing maps of the Golan Heights as belonging to Israel rather than Syria.
9. Reference Israeli claims such as “Israel annexed East Jerusalem” as settled fact, without referencing lack of official recognition by other nation states.
10. Delete all references to “Palestinian Territories.”
11.Where ICS has already successfully lobbied for changes in national editions of textbooks, it demands that these changes also be made to State of Virginia editions.
Posted by DanielS on Saturday, 14 April 2018 18:16.
Trump took over Republican party on behalf of the Jewish Right in tandem with disingenuous, deracinating, oligarchic, objectivist, propositional Right…through its kosher, paleocon safety net/valve, false opposition, (((the Alt-Right))).
After Trump committed what was to Republican insiders the great sin of saying “there were good and bad on all sides” at the Unite the Right rally…
(((Corey Lewandowski))): “He has to fight back. So when you accuse him of being a racist he doesn’t want to back up, he wants to double down to prove to you that that’s not true, and that’s what the President is.”
Trump: “What about the ‘Alt-Left?” Not to be confused with what we define as White Left, nor the Jewy, fraud “Alt-Left” that also goes by that name; Trump was certainly not addressing that anyway, but rather a trendy way of addressing the motley “left” as it is commonly known - the pivotal move - to redirect attention and blame to “the Left” - in orchestration of the White Right through the “Unite the Right” rally.
In addition to Mnuchin using “Unite The Right” to offend Gary Cohn through it and Trump’s neutral response, to get Cohn out of the way, there were key Republican insiders that needed ingratiation for the Jewish Right to be able to take-over and join forces with the (deracinating) American right through front man Trump.
Following Trump’s first political victory on their behalf, the passing of the tax-cut bill:
Paul Ryan heaps saccharine, about face praise of Trump for making the rich, richer…
As Mitch McConnell has been kissing black ass since the days of “civil rights” when he marched with M.L. King, Trump had to be sure to burnish his pro-black credentials for him (note Uncle Tom/ Satchmo Step n’ Fetch-it type to Trump’s right).
Mitch McConnell: “You’ve made the case for the tax-bill (so that the rich could get richer and the poor, poorer - typical Repugs). We’ve cemented the Supreme Court to the right of center for a generation (pro-black women having babies). You’ve ended the over regulation of the American economy (pro-pollution). Thank you Mr. President, for all you’re doing.”
(((Corey Lewandowski))): “In essence this became Trump’s Republican party.
The testimony that people gave there is hard to take back”
- Oren Hatch, for example: “You’re one heck of a leader…and we’re going to make this the greatest Presidency that we’ve seen, not only in generations, but maybe ever.”
(((Corey Lewandowski))): “What the Republican establishment now know, is that Donald Trump is unequivocally the leader of the Republican party” (The Jewish Right-wing has taken over from Jewish liberals).
“He’ is the one who sets the tone of what takes place in Washington. He is the leader of our country - both politically and from a legislative side of things. I think they’ve learned that over the last year.”
Special Counsel Robert Mueller has evidence that Donald Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen made a late-summer trip to Prague during the 2016 presidential campaign, around the time a British spy says Cohen met with a Kremlin official there to discuss Russian interference in the U.S. election, sources have told McClatchy. Cohen, pictured on April 11, 2018, has vehemently denied ever visiting Prague. Mary Altaffer AP
“Sources: Mueller has evidence Cohen was in Prague in 2016, confirming part of dossier.”
WASHINGTON
The Justice Department special counsel has evidence that Donald Trump’s personal lawyer and confidant, Michael Cohen, secretly made a late-summer trip to Prague during the 2016 presidential campaign, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
Confirmation of the trip would lend credence to a retired British spy’s report that Cohen strategized there with a powerful Kremlin figure about Russian meddling in the U.S. election.
It would also be one of the most significant developments thus far in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of whether the Trump campaign and the Kremlin worked together to help Trump win the White House. Undercutting Trump’s repeated pronouncements that “there is no evidence of collusion,” it also could ratchet up the stakes if the president tries, as he has intimated he might for months, to order Mueller’s firing.
Trump’s threats to fire Mueller or the deputy attorney general overseeing the investigation, Rod Rosenstein, grew louder this week when the FBI raided Cohen’s home, hotel room and office on Monday. The raid was unrelated to the Trump-Russia collusion probe, but instead focused on payments made to women who have said they had sexual relationships with Trump.
Cohen has vehemently denied for months that he ever has been in Prague or colluded with Russia during the campaign. Neither he nor his lawyer responded to requests for comment for this story.
It’s unclear whether Mueller’s investigators also have evidence that Cohen actually met with a prominent Russian – purportedly Konstantin Kosachev, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin — in the Czech capital. Kosachev, who chairs the Foreign Affairs Committee of a body of the Russian legislature, the Federation Council, also has denied visiting Prague during 2016. Earlier this month, Kosachev was among 24 high-profile Russians hit with stiff U.S. sanctions in retaliation for Russia’s meddling.
But investigators have traced evidence that Cohen entered the Czech Republic through Germany, apparently during August or early September of 2016 as the ex-spy reported, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is confidential. He wouldn’t have needed a passport for such a trip, because both countries are in the so-called Schengen Area in which 26 nations operate with open borders. The disclosure still left a puzzle: The sources did not say whether Cohen took a commercial flight or private jet to Europe, and gave no explanation as to why no record of such a trip has surfaced.
Peter Carr, a spokesman for Mueller’s office, declined comment.
Unconfirmed reports of a clandestine Prague meeting came to public attention in January 2017, with the publication of a dossier purporting to detail the Trump campaign’s interactions with Russia – a series of reports that former British MI6 officer Christopher Steele gathered from Kremlin sources for Trump’s political opponents, including Democrat Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Cohen’s alleged communications with the Russians were mentioned multiple times in Steele’s reports, which he ultimately shared with the FBI.
When the news site Buzzfeed published the entire dossier on Jan. 11, Trump denounced the news organization as “a failing pile of garbage” and said the document was “false and fake.” Cohen tweeted, “I have never been to Prague in my life. #fakenews.”
In the ensuing months, he allowed Buzzfeed to inspect his passport and tweeted: “The #Russian dossier is WRONG!”
Last August, an attorney for Cohen, Stephen Ryan, delivered to Congress a point-by-point rebuttal of the dossier’s allegations, stating: “Mr. Cohen is not aware of any ‘secret TRUMP campaign/Kremlin relationship.’”
However, Democratic investigators for the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, which are conducting parallel inquiries into Russia’s election interference, also are skeptical about whether Cohen was truthful about his 2016 travels to Europe when he was interviewed by the panels last October, two people familiar with those probes told McClatchy this week. Cohen has publicly acknowledged making three trips to Europe that year – to Italy in July, England in early October and a third after Trump’s November election. The investigators intend to press Cohen for more information, said the sources, who lacked authorization to speak for the record.
One of the sources said congressional investigators have “a high level of interest” in Cohen’s European travel, with their doubts fueled by what they deem to be weak documentation Cohen has provided about his whereabouts around the time the Prague meeting was supposed to have occurred.
Cohen has said he was only in New York and briefly in Los Angeles during August, when the meeting may have occurred, though the sources said it also could have been held in early September.
Evidence that Cohen was in Prague “certainly helps undermine his credibility,” said Jill Wine-Banks, a former Watergate prosecutor who lives in Chicago. “It doesn’t matter who he met with. His denial was that I was never in Prague. Having proof that he was is, for most people, going to be more than enough to say I don’t believe anything else he says.”
“I think that, given the relationship between Michael Cohen and the president,” Wine-Banks said, “it’s not believable that Michael Cohen did not tell him about his trip to Prague.”
Posted by DanielS on Wednesday, 11 April 2018 06:07.
Zuckerberg “concedes” by increasing ZOG’s global influence - viz. in Asia - by cracking down on use of social media - viz. Facebook - by opponents of its Abrahamic footsoldiers (Islam) in Myanmar
Reuters, “Facebook’s Zuckerberg vows to work harder to block hate speech in Myanmar”, 11 April 2018:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said on Tuesday his company would step up efforts to block hate messages in Myanmar as he faced questioning by the U.S. Congress about electoral interference and hate speech on the platform.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before a joint Senate Judiciary and Commerce Committees hearing regarding the company’s use and protection of user data, on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., April 10, 2018. REUTERS/Aaron P. Bernstein
Facebook has been accused by human rights advocates of not doing enough to weed out hate messages on its social-media network in Myanmar, where it is a dominant communications system.
“What’s happening in Myanmar is a terrible tragedy, and we need to do more,” Zuckerberg said during a 5-hour joint hearing of the Senate Commerce Committee and Senate Judiciary Committee.
More than 650,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled Myanmar’s Rakhine state into Bangladesh since insurgent attacks sparked a security crackdown last August.
United Nations officials investigating a possible genocide in Myanmar said last month that Facebook had been a source of anti-Rohingya propaganda.
Marzuki Darusman, chairman of the U.N. Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, said in March that social media had played a “determining role” in Myanmar.
“It has ... substantively contributed to the level of acrimony and dissension and conflict ... within the public. Hate speech is certainly of course a part of that. As far as the Myanmar situation is concerned, social media is Facebook, and Facebook is social media,” he said.
Zuckerberg said Facebook was hiring dozens more Burmese-language speakers to remove threatening content.
“It’s hard to do it without people who speak the local language, and we need to ramp up our effort there dramatically,” he said, adding that Facebook was also asking civil society groups to help it identify figures who should be banned from the network.
He said a Facebook team would also make undisclosed product changes in Myanmar and other countries where ethnic violence was a problem.
Until he was sold on the Alt-Right quid pro quo, David Duke’s major point against any candidate concerned their being a hawk against Iran on behalf of Israel.
Scooter Libby with Paul Wolfowitz in 2008
The private-intelligence firm Black Cube compiled profiles on Ben Rhodes and Colin Kahl, Obama Administration advisers who were proponents of the Iran nuclear deal.
Trump with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein
“Fancy braindumping some thoughts for me.”
Special Counsel Robert Mueller has evidence that Donald Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen made a late-summer trip to Prague during the 2016 presidential campaign, around the time a British spy says Cohen met with a Kremlin official there to discuss Russian interference in the U.S. election, sources have told McClatchy. Cohen, pictured on April 11, 2018, has vehemently denied ever visiting Prague. Mary Altaffer AP
