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October 2016

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

WikiLeaks Stirs Up Trouble for Hillary Clinton Email correspondence is said to show excerpts of paid speeches before her presidential bid By Rebecca Ballhaus

By on October 8th, 2016

The organization WikiLeaks on Friday released what it claimed to be Clinton campaign email correspondence revealing excerpts from paid speeches that Hillary Clinton gave in recent years, before her presidential bid.

A Clinton campaign spokesman declined to verify whether the documents are authentic.

The emails appear to show Mrs. Clinton taking a tone in private that is more favorable to free trade and to banks than she has often taken on the campaign trail. The emails also suggest she was aware of security concerns regarding electronic devices, which could feed into criticism that Mrs. Clinton was careless with national secrets when she was secretary of state.

The release marks the latest time WikiLeaks has inserted itself into this year’s presidential campaign, and it came the same day the U.S. intelligence community accused the Russian government of trying to interfere in the U.S. elections by purposefully leaking emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee and other entities. The intelligence agencies alleged the hacks were directed by the most senior officials in the Russian government, with WikiLeaks one of the entities whose methods are consistent with those of a Russia-directed effort.

“Earlier today the U.S. government removed any reasonable doubt that the Kremlin has weaponized WikiLeaks to meddle in our election and benefit Donald Trump’s candidacy,” said Clinton spokesman Glen Caplin in a statement. “We are not going to confirm the authenticity of stolen documents released by [WikiLeaks founder] Julian Assange who has made no secret of his desire to damage Hillary Clinton.”

Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, whose emails were WikiLeaks’s primary target, sent several tweets on the subject late Friday.

“I’m not happy about being hacked by the Russians in their quest to throw the election to Donald Trump,” he wrote. “Don’t have time to figure out which docs are real and which are faked.” He added that the organization’s claim on its website that he owns the Podesta Group, a lobbying firm headed by his brother, Tony, was “completely false.”

Some of the documents in the most recent WikiLeaks release are similar in their design to documents released in recent days by DCLeaks.com, another entity that the U.S. intelligence community says has published documents stolen by the Russian government. The documents have proven difficult to authenticate.

In the two years between her time at the State Department and her presidential campaign, Mrs. Clinton earned millions on the paid speech circuit, including $4.1 million from financial institutions, according to financial disclosures. This became an issue during Mrs. Clinton’s Democratic primary campaign when Sen. Bernie Sanders called for her to release the speech transcripts, particularly for speeches she gave to major financial firms. At the time, Mrs. Clinton said she would “look into” releasing the transcripts but hasn’t provided them.

This past January, the WikiLeaks documents suggest, Clinton campaign research director Tony Carrk emailed excerpts of Mrs. Clinton’s speeches to senior campaign officials, including Mr. Podesta and communications director Jennifer Palmieri, calling them the “flags from HRC’s paid speeches.”

Mr. Carrk said he had obtained the transcripts from “HWA,” an apparent reference to the Harry Walker Agency, which arranged Mrs. Clinton’s paid speeches after she left the State Department in 2013.

“I put some highlights below,” Mr. Carrk wrote. “There is a lot of policy positions that we should give an extra scrub with Policy.”

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BOOKS Comments turned off

The Roots of America’s Mideast Delusion Our history of failure in the Middle East goes all the way back to Eisenhower. James Traub on “Ike’s Gamble” by Michael Doran.

By on October 8th, 2016

From the moment he took office in 2009, President Barack Obama tried to repair America’s standing in the Middle East by demonstrating his sincere concern for the grievances and aspirations of Arab peoples. He gave interviews to Arab news outlets. He issued New Year’s greetings to the people of Iran. He delivered a speech in Cairo in which he acknowledged America’s past wrongs, and he called on Israel to accept the legitimacy of Palestinian demands for a state. Mr. Obama did almost everything liberal critics of the policies of George W. Bush wished him to do. And he failed. Or rather, he found that the Arab world was afflicted with pathologies that placed it beyond the reach of his words and deeds.

Had Mr. Obama had the chance to read “Ike’s Gamble,” Michael Doran’s account of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s statecraft before, during and after the Suez Crisis of 1956, he might have saved his breath. Mr. Doran, a scholar and former State and Defense Department official in the George W. Bush administration, describes a seasoned, wily and prudent president who aligned the United States with what he understood to be the legitimate hopes of Arab peoples, even at the cost of damaging relations with America’s closest allies—and made a hash of things.
Ike’s Gamble

By Michael Doran

Free Press, 292 pages, $28

Mr. Doran illuminates a narrative with which very few non-specialists will be familiar. His tale begins at the moment in the early 1950s when America was reaching its zenith. The United Kingdom was reluctantly acknowledging the end of empire, and the United States was filling the vacuum in the Middle East. Neither Eisenhower nor his fervently anti-communist secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, understood this transition in strictly geopolitical terms; both believed that the liberating American faith in national self-determination and consent of the governed would supplant Britain’s self-aggrandizing colonialism. Both morality and national interest dictated such a course. As Dulles said in a prime-time televised address in 1953: “We cannot afford to be distrusted by millions who could be sturdy friends of freedom.”

The familiar story—and it is all too true—is that Cold War competition led the United States to side with friendly but despised dictators in the region like Iran’s Reza Shah Pahlavi. Yet at the same moment that the U.S. was plotting to overthrow Iran’s democratically elected leader in favor of the shah, leading policy makers were infatuated with Egypt’s immensely popular revolutionary leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser. Eisenhower and Dulles saw in Nasser the kind of nationalist leader whom America needed to recruit to its side in order to demonstrate that postcolonial nations were better off in the democratic than in the communist camp.

The problem was that in order to do so, they had to sell out their closest ally. To British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Britain’s 80,000-man garrison in Suez was irrefutable proof that his nation remained an imperial force. But Eisenhower and Dulles took Nasser’s side in 1953-4 as he whittled away at British influence and demanded that Britain withdraw its forces. Unintimidated by his former wartime ally, Eisenhower brusquely advised Churchill to defer to “the very strong nationalist sentiments of the Egyptian Government and people” by agreeing to hand over control of the base. Churchill had loudly declared that he had not been elected prime minister to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire; having no choice, he now agreed to do just that.

Britain was one impediment to America’s grand bargain with Nasser; Israel was the other. Eisenhower, Dulles and State Department officials feared that the United States would never win Arab hearts and minds if it was seen as the ally of a nation that almost all Arabs reviled. The problem has hardly gone away over the past six decades. But while the American response today is to gently prod Israel to rein in the growth of illegal settlements, the answer in 1955 was to push Israel to make unilateral territorial concessions—and, remarkably, to present the plan to Nasser for his approval before disclosing it to the Israelis. Mr. Doran makes it clear that the anti-Semitism of the Washington elite converged with what seemed at the time to be perfectly sound strategic calculations.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Kerry Says Russia and Syria Should Be Investigated for War Crimes Aleppo bombardment ‘hitting hospitals and medical facilities and children and women,’ he says By Felicia Schwartzsee note please

By on October 8th, 2016

Cretin Kerry once accused the American soldiers of commuting war crimes in Vietnam- a “deplorable” lie ….so his words are hollow and hypocritical…..rsk

WASHINGTON—Secretary of State John Kerry said Russia and Syria should be investigated for war crimes because of their continued attacks on hospitals and civilians in Aleppo.

Mr. Kerry, speaking to reporters at the State Department on Friday ahead of a meeting with French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, said such attacks were not accidental and part of a strategy to terrorize civilians.

“Russia and the regime owe the world more than an explanation about why they keep hitting hospitals and medical facilities and children and women,” Mr. Kerry said. “These are acts that beg for an appropriate investigation of war crimes.”

Mr. Kerry did not specify how the investigation should occur and did not formally request one. War crimes prosecutions typically go through the International Criminal Court, which functions under an international treaty. The U.S. has not ratified the treaty, though the Obama administration generally supports the court’s prosecutions and has provided assistance t o it.

Mr. Ayrault, appearing with Mr. Kerry, said France had prepared a draft United Nations Security Council resolution calling for an end to bombing in Aleppo and a ban on military aircraft flying over the city.

“We’re not giving up and we cannot accept that Aleppo will be totally destroyed by Christmas,” Mr. Ayrault said.

Russia’s ambassador to the U.N., Vitaly Churkin, on Friday threatened to veto the measure. The council met Friday, but announced no action. Russian and Syrian officials did not immediately respond to Mr. Kerry’s war crimes comments. CONTINUE AT SITE

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Obama’s Russia Epiphany The U.S. blames the Kremlin for attacks on U.S. elections. And then?

By on October 8th, 2016

It took seven and a half years, but the Obama Administration is finally awakening to the nature of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. On Friday John Kerry said the Syrian and Russian governments should face a war-crimes probe for bombing civilians in Syria, while the U.S. intelligence community announced its belief that the Russian government is behind the cyberattacks on the Democratic Party.

Many readers will recall how President Obama mocked Mitt Romney in 2012 for saying in a presidential debate that Russia is America’s main adversary. And don’t forget Mr. Obama’s private whispers to then Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, caught unaware on a microphone, that he’d be ready to wheel and deal with Russia again after his 2012 re-election.

The wheeling has all been done by Mr. Putin, who returned as Russian President and proceeded to roll over Mr. Obama as if he were the president of Azerbaijan. The Russian’s affronts include his conquest of Crimea and invasion of Ukraine, his military intervention in the Middle East, and now his attempts to influence the U.S. presidential election.

Secretary of State Kerry’s moral dudgeon about Syria reflects his frustration at being gulled by the Kremlin’s fake diplomacy one more time. But it won’t amount to much because Mr. Obama’s abdication in Syria has left the U.S. with little leverage on the ground. If Mr. Kerry took the war-crime issue to the United Nations, Russia and probably China would veto in the Security Council.

The meddling in U.S. elections is another matter. In an unusual joint statement Friday, the Department of Homeland Security and Director of National Intelligence said that “the U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations.”

The U.S. spooks added that “the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia,” and that given the “scope and sensitivity” of these efforts “only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.” Senior-most is a euphemism for Mr. Putin.

One question is why the Obama Administration has gone public with this hacking news now. One reason might be to warn Russia against dumping more of the U.S. documents it almost certainly has before Election Day. But then Russia’s hacking habits are hardly new, and Mr. Putin is still harboring the national-security thief Edward Snowden. The timing suggests the White House may also be trying to help Hillary Clinton given her campaign’s portrayal of Donald Trump as a Putin apologist. Sure enough, her campaign issued a statement linking Mr. Trump to the news almost on cue Friday. CONTINUE AT SITE

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel’s Resilient Decency Despite Extreme Terrorism by Noah Beck

By on October 8th, 2016

U.S. citizens got a small taste of the Islamist terror threat that hounds Israelis on Sept. 17, with four bombings or bombing attempts in the New York metropolitan area and a Minnesota stabbing attack.

Israel, a country about the size of New Jersey, endured eight terrorist attacks in a four-day period overlapping the American incidents. Even that frightening frequency does not represent “the scale of the attacks during the previous wave” of terror, according to the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, an Israeli think tank.

Israel’s experience shows that the war against Islamist terror is a long and difficult one, but it can be managed while maintaining a democracy’s core values.

Whereas the U.S. experienced about a dozen attacks during the 21 months from the start of 2015 through last month, an Israeli government list of terror attacks covering 12 months from 2015-16 totaled 407 attacks, including 165 stabbings, 87 attempted stabbings, 107 shootings, 47 vehicular (ramming) attacks, and one bus bombing. Those attacks killed 40 people and injured 558 others.

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