Monday, September 25, 2017

Obama Would Have Assassinated North Korea's Rulers, If He Could Have

Did you know that Obama fully intended to "take out" the entire rulership of North Korea? Neither did I, until I came across this tidbit hidden in a New York Times article from March, moaning about the North Korean "threat" to the U.S.

Get a load of this paragraph, buried way down in a lengthy article, the 39th paragraph of a 47 paragraph long story, interspersed with charts, photos, and captions:

"With only a few months left in office, he [Obama] pushed aides for new approaches [to cripple North Korea's nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs]. At one meeting, he declared that he would have targeted the North Korean leadership and weapons sites if he thought it would work. But it was, as Mr. Obama and his assembled aides knew, an empty threat: Getting timely intelligence on the location of North Korea’s leaders or their weapons at any moment would be almost impossible, and the risks of missing were tremendous, including renewed war on the Korean Peninsula." [My emphasis.] [1]

Incredibly, yet not surprisingly, the U.S. media ignored this. Apparently it was too insignificant to them to spread the news around.

Nor is it surprising, even if it's shocking, that Obama had such a determined intent to assassinate the rulers of a foreign nation. Obama proved himself a cold-blooded, ruthless killer, personally reviewing a "kill list" of people to be assassinated, every week. He murdered teenagers, children, old women. He gave the Saudi regime the weapons and intelligence it needed (and the assistance of the aerial refueling tanker planes of the U.S. Air Force to enable the jets the Saudis purchased from the U.S. to fly their missions) to reduce Yemen to a state of starvation, with a raging cholera epidemic. Unless Putin can add to Russia's body count in Syria, Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama will go down in history as bloodier than the Russian autocrat that American media and the blaterariat elite like to call a "murderer." Certainly in terms of specific individuals targeted for assassination, Obama is leagues above Putin.

But what's more significant is the fact that North Korea really IS at risk from the U.S. It is NOT paranoid for the North Korean regime to feel great danger from the U.S. The U.S. is constantly practicing nuclear war attacks on North Korea. It just did it again, flying B-1 strategic bombers from Guam (a weapon originally designed to attack the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons) right up to North Korea's coast, escorted by U.S. fighter jets from Japan. So why isn't it defensive for North Korea to develop the means to strike those U.S. bases in japan and Guam? In fact, it was after an earlier U.S. "exercise" practicing nuking North Korea from Guan that NK "threatened" to fire a test missile in the vicinity of Guam, which it backed down from after Trump expectorated yet another of his blood-curdling threats to annihilate NK.

I'm no sympathizer of the North Korean regime, as should be clear to regular readers of this site. It is a hellish place to live, a nightmare of totalitarian regimentation, a hereditary oppressive cult system. But that doesn't mean it doesn't have the right of self-defense. It is obvious that the North Korean rulers are not suicidal. Vicious and malign, certainly. But not insane. They would never out of the blue initiate a nuclear attack on the U.S. or its allies, and it is completely dishonest of the U.S. government and media to pretend otherwise, which is the assumption underlying all the propaganda about the NK nuclear "threat."

Hereditary NK dictator Kim Jon-un just stated that the goal of their nuclear and missile programs is "equilibrium" with the U.S., that is, having enough of a balance in terms of destructive potential that the U.S. could no longer attack NK and not suffer unacceptable damage in return. In other words, deterrence. But that is unacceptable to the U.S. And the U.S. has gotten the UN Security Council to go along with that. Of the five permanent members of that body, the UK and France would follow U.S. wishes. Russia and China have no interest in a nuclear-armed North Korea, especially since it could prompt other nations in the region to acquire nuclear weapons (especially Japan and South Korea). Those with nuclear arms like their privilege, and the leverage it gives them. They all share an interest in keeping the nuclear "club" small.

So the U.S. has gotten the UN to impose 9 sets of sanctions on NK in 11 years. And it has sabotaged the North's missile and nuclear programs through various covert means, some of which is reported in the aforementioned NY Times article. With Trump, the U.S. stance has become openly belligerent and threatening. (And Secretary of State Rex Tillerson's recent assertion that the U.S. has no desire for "regime change" in NK was a smarmy lie.) But the fact of the matter is, North Korea has shown over the years that it cannot be intimidated. Which means that ratcheting up threats to annihilate it (Trump just did it again) will only escalate tensions and create a more dangerous situation. Kim Jon-un's regime has just stated that it will launch an attack if the U.S. is preparing to attack it!

There are two lines the U.S. government and media put out on negotiations, First is that the North Koreans are unreasonably refusing "to come to the negotiating table," All they have to do is show a "willingness" to negotiate. How? By completely halting their weapons development programs in advance of any negotiations! Well no wonder they aren't "willing to negotiate"! Surrender in advance, then we'll talk to you. I know what I would say to that, and it would involve salty language!

The other line is that past negotiations "didn't work" because the North Koreans never honored the deals. That is false, as Tim Shorrock of The Nation magazine has documented in a series of articles. The agreement the Clinton regime negotiated held for almost a decade. It broke down after the U.S. reneged on its part of the bargain, not delivering the agree amounts of fuel oil and failing to come through with the construction of two light-water nuclear reactors in NK. So the North Koreans restarted work on nuclear weapons development. [2]

What NK wants, as it has repeatedly stated, is a cessation of hostilities with the U.S. (a formal end to the Korean War, which has never been legally ended), an end to threatening U.S. military maneuvers, and more normal relations. Russia and China some months back proposed that the North freeze its weapons testing and the U.S. stop its practice attacks on North Korea to start negotiations. The U.S. brushed them off with contempt. Trump's hand-picked UN ambassador, Nikki Haley, the former GOP governor of the Confederate state of South Caroline, spat on the proposal as "insulting."  This after the U.S. ignored the Chinese-Russian repeated suggestion for 6 months. (By the way, South Carolina started the American Civil War. It was the first state to secede to form the Confederate States of America, and it initiated hostilities by laying siege to Fort Sumter, a U.S. military base in South Carolina. Haley is a hard-rightwing GOP politician from one of the most racist and reactionary states in the U.S.)

The U.S. hates to compromise just on principle- namely the principle that the strong shouldn't have to make any concessions to the weak. And its elites equate that principle with morality. Thus their genuine outrage when any weaker nation defies them. (Although when it comes to China, a nation almost as strong as the U.S. and on which much U.S. corporate profit depends as a source of cheaply-manufactured good, the U.S. isn't so brave.)

1]  "Trump Inherits a Secret Cyberwar Against North Korean Missiles," New York Times, March 4, 2017.

2]  See Shorrock's articles at The Nation.

Yeah, so I killed some folks. Wanna make something out of it?


 

Sunday, September 24, 2017

Evidence Anthony Weiner May Have Been Targeted To Sabotage Clinton's Election Campaign

Smack in the middle of a Wall Street Journal article about Anthony Weiner's sentencing hearing for his conviction on the Federal charge of "transferring obscene material to a minor" (a 15-year-old teenager) were these startling paragraphs:

Mr. Weiner's attorneys, Arlo Devlin-Brown and Erin Monju, have said the teenager targeted Mr. Weiner for personal profit and "to influence the U.S. presidential election." On Wednesday, Mr. Devlin-Brown declined to comment on the prosecutors' filing. [The prosecutors' filing that called for a prison sentence of 21 to 27 months for Weiner.]

The public exposure in September 2016 of Mr. Weiner's conduct with the teenager triggered a re-examination, days before the U.S. presidential election, of the federal probe concerning the private email server used by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. [Translation: Provided the FBI with a pretext for reigniting the Clinton secret email server scandal.] FBI agents seized a laptop from Mr. Weiner that had been used by both him and his wife, Mrs. Clinton's longtime aide Huma Abedin.

But prosecutors wrote in their filing that the teenager's motivation should be irrelevant to his sentence.
[That's convenient. Sweep it under the rug.] ("Prison proposed for Weiner," Wall Street Journal, September 21, 2017, page A12A.)

So those who comb through media with a fine-tooth comb may have come across this tantalizing hint of a plot to sabotage the Clinton campaign.

It was just ten days before the November 7, 2016 presidential election when then-FBI secret police chief James Comey hurled a grenade into the Clinton campaign, announcing a "reinvestigation" of "new" (actually just copies of previously-obtained and scrutinized ) emails from Clinton's computer server. Clinton had been ahead of Trump by a comfortable 14% in polls, in the wake of the revelation of a video of Trump boasting of sexually assaulting women by grabbing their genitals and forcibly kissing them. Strangely, the churning up of the previously-closed investigation into Clinton's circumvention of Federal record-keeping rules by using a private computer server in her home to conduct her State Department business, caused her lead over Trump to evaporate, illustrating the fickleness and irrationality of a segment of the public.

When Comey had previously announced the conclusion of the lengthy investigation, he pronounced that no crime had been committed, but also publicly excoriated Clinton for her action, which allegedly jeopardized "classified" information. Clinton of course has been thoroughly dishonest throughout the scandal.

The New York City field office of the FBI was furious with Comey's decision not to recommend criminal charges to the Department of "Justice," which brings Federal prosecutions of crimes. Their anger at the decision to let Clinton off the hook has been reported by various bourgeois media sources. This office is staffed and run by rightwing extremists, reactionary political fanatics.

The FBI New York City field office is the largest in the U.S. it has long indulged in nefarious conspiracies against both politicians and against any and all people and groups considered "leftwing." They are a lawless gang that wiretaps, bugs, burglarizes and steals routinely without any warrants, targeting people they don't like. Mail is monitored and sometimes stolen, including certified mail. (I have suffered all of this personally, to my detriment.) This FBI office has long been tasked with carrying out political skulduggery, including espionage and counterespionage. It is tasked with spying on the UN, and the UN missions of various nations, including Cuba, an object of malign assault by the U.S. since 1959, including all manner of terrorism, sabotage, murder, economic warfare and espionage.

Rudolph Giuliani, formerly NYC mayor, and previous to that the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York (i.e. chief Federal prosecutor for much of New York State, including Manhattan, the key borough of New York City where high finance and media are centered) has maintained close connections, dating to his days as U.S. attorney, with the reactionary elements of the FBI field office. He has frequently been an conduit for unattributed "information" from those FBI agents, manipulating public opinion and trying to cause certain political outcomes.

Giuliani was and is a Trump ally, before and after Trump's "election" by the Electoral College. (Trump lost the "popular" vote to Clinton by 2.9 million votes, which Trump claimed were all illegal aliens voting unlawfully.) After Trump assumed the presidency, Giuliani went on television to boast about how he crafted Trump's order banning Muslims from 7 countries entry to the U.S. to better withstand legal challenge. Giuliani's name has repeatedly been publicly bruited about as a possible Trump choice for high government office in the Trump regime.

So IF Weiner was set up, the primary suspects have to be Giuliani and his political hit squad inside the FBI's New York City field office. (Weiner lives in NYC.) Weiner's sexual compulsion, and his vulnerability, was well known. It would have been simple to recruit a malleable teenager to be their pawn in a plot aimed at Clinton, using Weiner as a patsy and collateral victim of their scheme. Others have commented that Comey's hand was forced by the NYC FBI office to go public with the "new" emails taken off the shared laptop of Weiner and Abedin. FBI agents in New York could have "leaked" (planted) the news of finding Clinton State department emails on the Weiner/Abedin laptop, along with derogatory comments about Comey, had Comey not acted. Or they could have fed the information to Giuliani, who could have gone on television (as he often does) and reveal it.
Now, where is the story on what information Weiner's attorneys have to substantiate their claim? (Hel-lo, corporate propaganda system!)



 

















  


Trashy NYC Tabloids Had Great Fun Mocking Weiner
With Juvenile Headlines




Background: Anthony Weiner was a U.S. Congressman representing part of Brooklyn (one of five boroughs of New York City in New York State) when he was publicly exposed as having a habit of sending images of his penis to strange women via the Internet. Driven from office, he attempted a political comeback by running for Mayor of New York City in 2013.

But the establishment media and the shadowy power structure weren't through with Weiner yet.
He actually wasn't doing badly in the polls when he was outed as continuing the behavior that cost him his previous office. This ended his chances of being elected Mayor.

Then came Abedin divorcing him, and the criminal case around the 15-year-old.

The UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter was another victim of a sex trap. A cop pretended online to be a teenage girl, and exchanged sexual messages with Ritter. That was enough to arrest and convict him. In his case also his sexual proclivities were already known. Ritter's crime was contradicting the Bush II and media propaganda campaign that falsely asserted that Iraq still had "weapons of mass destruction." Ritter begged to differ, and could speak with authority.

Expecting men not to be sexually attracted to teenage girls is fighting biology. Before "civilization," life expectancy might be 25 years. People mated at puberty. Even today, in many societies girls are married off in their teens. I think that is not good, and people should evolve out of such practices- and best not to trade sex talk with teenagers, even imaginary ones. In the U.S., the thought itself is a crime, since "attempted" crime is criminal. And the Supreme Court, in an infamous case, affirmed that possession of a video of pre-pubescent girls in swimsuits dancing "suggestively" is a felony- namely possession of "child pornography." The Clinton regime took that one all the way to the high court to enforce that Saudi-style conviction, and set a precedent for extreme repression that comes in handy as yet another weapon against people who run afoul of the government.

The Wall Street Journal is, as its title makes clear, a newspaper for financiers and businessmen. Its editorials and opinion pieces are consistently hard-core reactionary, but the reporting sections are more or less normal for a U.S. establishment newspaper. Rupert Murdoch bought its parent company, Dow Jones, from the Bancroft family and promptly put its website behind a paywall.









Oh You KRAAAZY Ex-Congressman, You!
(Anthony Weiner, he of the uncontrollable sexual compulsion. "SAD!" as a certain President of the U.S. would say.)