Copyright © 2016 - 2021, The Troy Press
Copyright © 2016 - 2021, The Troy Press
Copyright © 2016 - 2021, The Troy Press
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"Dems grapple with lessons from Clinton disaster"
Hillary Clinton's loss to Donald Trump is an unmitigated disaster for Democrats, who want to ensure nothing like it happens again. But Clinton's popular-vote lead over Trump is so large that it complicates the question of how to recalibrate for future elections.
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And if there were ever a situation in which it was crucial to lean in the direction of more rather than less disclosure, it's now. Obama should make that clear to the intelligence agencies, and that if forced to he is willing to wield his power as president to declassify anything he deems appropriate.
The current discourse on this issue is plagued by partisan gibberish - there is a disturbing trend emerging that dictates that if you don't believe Russia hacked the election or if you simply demand evidence for this tremendously significant allegation, you must be a Trump apologist or a Soviet agent.
The reality, however, is that Trump's reference to the Iraq War and the debacle over weapons of mass destruction is both utterly cynical and a perfectly valid point. U.S. intelligence agencies have repeatedly demonstrated that they regularly both lie and get things horribly wrong. In this case they may well be correct, but they cannot expect Americans to simply take their word for it.
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For centuries, the US has committed war crimes around the world and rarely suffered negative consequences as a result. Some of the US most notable war criminals, such as Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama, have received numerous accolades, including the Nobel Peace Prize, despite their dark legacies. However, things may soon change as former President George W. Bush may be forced to stand trial over the war crimes his administration committed in Iraq. The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in California recently confirmed that Judges Susan Graber and Andrew Hurwitz will hear oral arguments in the case of Saleh v. Bush, beginning tomorrow December 12th. Other members of Bush's administration, such as Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz, are also named as defendants in the case.
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The administration of Barack Obama released Monday a CIA report on Operation Condor, the 1970s covert efforts to rid U.S.-backed dictatorships of progressive opponents or to topple progressive governments outright in South America.
According to a press release announcing the documents, the National Security Archive - an independent non-governmental research institute and library in Washington, D.C. - said the CIA disclosures are among 500 pages on repression in Argentina during the military dictatorship in that country beginning in 1976.
According to the archive, "Another proposal under study included the collection of material on the membership, location, and political activities of human rights groups in order to identify and expose their socialist and Marxist connections. Similar data reportedly are to be collected on church and third-world groups," the documents state. Amnesty International was one of the groups named in the documents.
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If you don't like refugees coming to your country, then stop voting for
politicians who love to bomb the shit out of other countries.
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Low morale at the National Security Agency is causing some of the agency's most talented people to leave in favor of private sector jobs, former NSA Director Keith Alexander told a room full of journalism students, professors and cybersecurity executives Tuesday. The retired general and other insiders say a combination of economic and social factors - including negative press coverage - have played a part.
"I do hear that people are increasingly leaving in large numbers and it is a combination of things that start with [morale] and there's now much more money on the outside," Alexander said. "I am honestly surprised that some of these people in cyber companies make up to seven figures. That's five times what the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff makes. Right? And these are people that are 32 years old."
"Do the math. [The NSA] has great competition," he said.
The rate at which these cyber-tacticians are exiting public service has increased over the last several years and has gotten considerably worse over the last 12 months, multiple former NSA officials and D.C. area-based cybersecurity employers have told CyberScoop in recent weeks.
"Morale has always been an issue at NSA, with roughly 20 percent of the workforce doing 80 percent of the actual work," a former official told CyberScoop on the condition of anonymity. "NSA is a place where people retire in place. At some point watching this behavior even for motivated people becomes highly demotivating."
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As President Barack Obama's administration comes closer to an end, the number of civilians killed by United States drone strikes in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen is at least 500, according to data compiled by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
Nearly all of the drone strikes were a part of the Obama administration's institutionalization of a targeted assassination policy, where alleged terrorism suspects or individuals with ties to terrorism organizations were placed on kill lists for execution without charge or trial.
The Obama administration put out a report [PDF] on December 5 summarizing the "legal and policy frameworks" it relied upon in pursuing war. The second half of the report particularly focused on "targeting efforts" or targeted assassinations, which "comply with all applicable international obligations, domestic laws, and policies."
Under the guise of transparency, the Obama administration's report presents policies as constrained and restrained in order to guard against any concerns that it will leave behind an assassination complex that President Donald Trump will take advantage of and abuse. But the reality is the administration redefined a number of concepts and definitions so that extrajudicial killings can be justified. The administration also refuses to acknowledge and compensate civilians impacted by drone strikes.
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The overseers of the U.S. intelligence community have not embraced a CIA assessment that Russian cyber attacks were aimed at helping Republican President-elect Donald Trump win the 2016 election, three American officials said on Monday.
While the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) does not dispute the CIA's analysis of Russian hacking operations, it has not endorsed their assessment because of a lack of conclusive evidence that Moscow intended to boost Trump over Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton, said the officials, who declined to be named.
The position of the ODNI, which oversees the 17 agency-strong U.S. intelligence community, could give Trump fresh ammunition to dispute the CIA assessment, which he rejected as "ridiculous" in weekend remarks, and press his assertion that no evidence implicates Russia in the cyber attacks.
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