Clinton’s New Book and A Blast from the Past: Why Hillary Clinton Should Never Be President

Hillary Clinton’s new book, What Happened, will be released in a few days, so it’s time to remind people of why she would have been a lousy president — not as bad as Trump (a lobotomized Chihuahua could hardly be worse) — but lousy nonetheless.

The excerpts I’ve read have been notable for Clinton’s attempt to blame Bernie Sanders for her loss. Let’s be clear about one thing: Clinton lost because she was a wooden, status-quo, visionless candidate, who openly ridiculed Sanders’ calls for change, and whose only apparent reason for wanting to be president was personal ambition. She was a candidate who inspired no one beyond her identity-politics worshipers. (Her campaign slogan, “I’m with her,” exemplified this. What a call to arms.)

Seth Myers called her out on some of her b.s. tonight, but he didn’t go far enough: 1) Bernie Sanders didn’t force her to give three $5,000-a-minute speeches to Goldman Sachs; 2) Bernie Sanders didn’t force her to vote for G.W. Bush’s disastrous invasion of Iraq; 3) Bernie Sanders didn’t force her to oppose single-payer healthcare (favored by about 60% of the American public); 4) Bernie Sanders didn’t force her campaign and Super PAC to rely on big-money and corporate donors rather than small donors; 5) Bernie Sanders didn’t force her to take advantage of her allies’ at the DNC rigging of the primary system; 6) Bernie Sanders didn’t force her (as secretary of state) to engineer the disastrous intervention in Libya; 7) Bernie Sanders didn’t force her, during a debate, to brag about her friendship with war criminal and mass murderer Henry Kissinger. (Yes, a minor point, but one that’s particularly revealing.)

The list goes on; these are just some of the highlights.

To reiterate what I’ve written elsewhere, we’re in some ways fortunate that Trump won. If Clinton had won, we’d have had four years of gridlock, the corporate Democrats would have retained an iron grip on the Democratic Party, the Republicans would have blamed her for everything that went wrong while being held responsible for nothing, and they’d almost certainly have retained control of both houses of Congress in 2018 and won the presidency in 2020. And with a more competent, less overtly loathsome theofascist than Trump, who is stirring up massive popular resistance.

So, here’s a blast from the past from 2013. Enjoy!, if that’s the right word.

Why Hillary Clinton Should Never Be President

by Chaz Bufe, See Sharp Press publisher

There are plenty of reasons that no one should ever be president, but for now let’s focus on why Hillary Clinton shouldn’t be president.

She should never be president because of one single vote, the vote that authorized the illegal war of aggression against Iraq in 2003. No one in their right mind would accuse  Hillary Clinton of being stupid. It’s beyond dispute that she’s one of the sharpest political operatives in recent decades. So, it’s almost certain that she knew exactly what she was doing when she cast that vote. It’s almost certain that she knew it was wrong, that the “evidence” supporting the invasion had been cooked, and that the invasion would result in disaster–in untold death and misery. But she cast the vote anyway.

This is no small thing.

When the chickenhawks in the Bush Administration (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al.) began ginning up the case for invading Iraq, it was obvious from the start that they were doing exactly that–manufacturing evidence and support for an unnecessary, illegal war. The very concept that former U.S. ally Saddam Hussein was in league with Al Qaeda was mind boggling, absurd on the surface. Al Qaeda was and is a virulently fundamentalist religious organization. Saddam Hussein, for all his many and terrible sins, was a secularist. Al Qaeda considered Saddam a very bad Muslim.

Then there was the problem that the 9/11 hijackers were Saudis, the head of Al Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, was a Saudi, his number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was an Egyptian, and that Al Qaeda was based in Afghanistan. From all this, Bush and company concluded–more accurately, attempted to sell the idea–that Al Qaeda’s secularist enemy, Saddam Hussein, was responsible for the 9/11 attacks and, to make matters worse, had weapons of mass destruction (WMD’s).

And most Americans bought it. Not all of us, but most of us. How did Bush and company pull off this incredible con job? They grossly manipulated intelligence, ignored evidence that pointed away from their predetermined conclusions, relied on weak and even demonstrably false evidence supporting those conclusions, smeared those who pointed out false evidence (Joe Wilson, Valerie Plame), and even set up their own intelligence operation in the Pentagon to produce the “evidence” they wanted.

Even so, they’d never have gotten away with it if the press had done its job. With very few exceptions (notably some reporters at Knight-Ridder), the press rolled over and served as the propaganda arm of the Bush Administration. It did essentially no investigation of Bush et al.’s claims, let alone expose their falsity. Rather, the press served as Bush’s megaphone. In the run-up to the war, the networks (notably CNN) hired dozens of former high-ranking military officers as “expert” commentators, and fired anti-war reporters and pundits (among them, Phil Donohue, who had the top-rated show on MSNBC). So, not only were the TV news operations not doing their job of investigating and reporting, they were actively supporting the launch of an illegal war. A study of ABC, NBC, CBS, and PBS in January and February 2003 by FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) found that only 17% of guests on those networks’ news programs were opposed to or skeptical of invasion, while 83% favored it.

As well, a New York Times “reporter,” Judith Miller (now, appropriately, employed by Fox “News”), served as the Bush Administration’s stenographer. She reported as fact what they told her about supposed Iraqi WMD’s, and the Times ran Miller’s reports as front-page “news.” In one particularly egregious example, Miller’s September 13, 2002 article in the Times, “White House Lists Iraq Steps To Build Banned Weapons,” repeated White House-supplied disinformation about the “threat” of Iraqi WMD’s — and the next day Dick Cheney cited Miller’s article as “evidence” of the WMD “threat,” using the Times, the national “paper of record,” to lend credibility to his and Bush’s self-manufactured “evidence.” Of course, Miller and the Times didn’t call Cheney on his dishonesty.

Almost all of this (sans some details of the media manipulation) was obvious at the time–at least to those who were paying attention. And rest assured, Hilary Clinton was paying attention. Yet she cast a vote in favor of death and destruction on an industrial scale. Approximately 4,500 American troops died needlessly in that war, with tens of thousands more wounded, many of them maimed for life. Iraqi casualties were far higher. All of the widely cited estimates of the number of deaths caused by the war exceed 100,000, with some being much higher. The Lancet estimate, for instance, is 601,000. Then there are the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi wounded and the estimated 1.5 to 4 million Iraqis who lost their homes and became refugees as a direct result of the war.

Hillary Clinton couldn’t have known how destructive the Iraq War would be. No one could have known that. But she had to have known that it would cause death and destruction, and that it was unjustified, simply wrong. At the time, public opinion was heavily in favor of invading Iraq, with most polls showing support by roughly a 2-to-1 margin. So, Hillary Clinton made a cold political calculation and voted in favor of the war. She certainly wasn’t stupid enough to believe Dick Cheney’s b.s. that U.S. troops would be “greeted as liberators,” but she bet that public opinion would remain in favor of the war and that voting for it would be to her political advantage. Never mind the unnecessary death and destruction.

That alone is enough to forever disqualify her from being president.

Related articles

• Hillary the Hawk
• Hillary Clinton Likes to Bomb People and That Could Be a Problem for Democrats in 2016

• Ten years after Saddam Hussein’s capture, Iraq struggles with violent legacy (metro.co.uk)
• Al-Qaeda Raises Its Black Flag In Iraq (patdollard.com)
• Are Syria’s chemical weapons the Iraqi WMDs that didn’t exist? (bokertov.typepad.com)
• Torture Doesn’t Work. Law Does Work. Why Keep That Secret?! (huffingtonpost.com)
• PressTV: Congress cites 9/11 Bush cover-up, demands Obama act (jhaines6.wordpress.com)
• Iraq: ‘Christians are finished here’ (atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com)
• Down Memory Lane (brainiac-conspiracy.typepad.com)

Russian “hacking” of the presidential election

A group of former intelligence operatives, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), whose steering group (see below) is composed primarily of ex-CIA and ex-NSA officers, has just released a statement (“Memorandum”) on why Russia could not have hacked the U.S. presidential election (i.e., the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign) without the NSA being aware of it, and why instead the revelations of the DNC’s/Clinton’s dirty tricks were the result of untraceable leaks. (There’s a crucial difference, which they explain in some detail in their memorandum, reproduced below in its entirety, which originally appeared on the Consortium News site.)

They make a good case.

Before you write them off as tools for Trump, please realize that VIPS was formed in 2003 to counter the Bush Administration’s disinformation campaign about Iraq, and that those members of their steering committee I’m familiar with, via their work, Mike Gravel and Ray McGovern, are left-leaning, anti-war activists. (warisacrime.org has an archive of all of the VIPS previous memorandums.)

All this brings up the question of why the Russian “hacking” allegations are being promoted by Democratic insiders and treated as fact in the corporate media. One theory is that by focusing on the “hacking,” Clinton partisans are attempting to divert attention from their very flawed, very unpopular, business-as-usual candidate, their very flawed, very unethical campaign, and their responsibility for foisting that candidate upon the public, and instead blame an outside force for the disaster they engineered.

If people buy this, and blame the Russians for Clinton’s loss, it follows that there was nothing fundamentally wrong with Clinton or her campaign, and thus no reason for the Democrats not to nominate another business-as-usual candidate (or, god help us, Clinton again) in 2020.

This seems plausible.

But why would CIA insiders leak the Russian hacking assertions to the press, when they have no hard evidence? Two things come to mind: 1) they’re Clinton partisans; or 2) they’re so alarmed by Trump’s gross incompetence and erratic, volatile nature — the huge and obvious danger that he represents to all of us — that they’re doing their best to kneecap him before he takes office.

If so, they might succeed. It would be highly ironic if false hacking allegations brought down Donald Trump (Mussolini without the charm)  a demagogue who built his entire campaign on lies. There would be some perverse justice in that.

In the end, we don’t know who was responsible for the DNC/Clinton campaign leaks, nor do we know why the CIA leaked the allegations about those leaks. We might never know.

Here’s the VIPS’ memorandum, in its entirety.

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Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

MEMORANDUM

Allegations of Hacking Election Are Baseless

A New York Times report on Monday alluding to “overwhelming circumstantial evidence” leading the CIA to believe that Russian President Vladimir Putin “deployed computer hackers with the goal of tipping the election to Donald J. Trump” is, sadly, evidence-free. This is no surprise, because harder evidence of a technical nature points to an inside leak, not hacking – by Russians or anyone else.

Seal of the National Security Agency

Monday’s Washington Post reports that Sen. James Lankford, R-Oklahoma, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has joined other senators in calling for a bipartisan investigation of suspected cyber-intrusion by Russia. Reading our short memo could save the Senate from endemic partisanship, expense and unnecessary delay.

In what follows, we draw on decades of senior-level experience – with emphasis on cyber-intelligence and security – to cut through uninformed, largely partisan fog. Far from hiding behind anonymity, we are proud to speak out with the hope of gaining an audience appropriate to what we merit – given our long labors in government and other areas of technology. And corny though it may sound these days, our ethos as intelligence professionals remains, simply, to tell it like it is – without fear or favor.

We have gone through the various claims about hacking. For us, it is child’s play to dismiss them. The email disclosures in question are the result of a leak, not a hack. Here’s the difference between leaking and hacking:

Leak: When someone physically takes data out of an organization and gives it to some other person or organization, as Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning did.

Hack: When someone in a remote location electronically penetrates operating systems, firewalls or any other cyber-protection system and then extracts data.

All signs point to leaking, not hacking. If hacking were involved, the National Security Agency would know it – and know both sender and recipient.

In short, since leaking requires physically removing data – on a thumb drive, for example – the only way such data can be copied and removed, with no electronic trace of what has left the server, is via a physical storage device.

Awesome Technical Capabilities

Again, NSA is able to identify both the sender and recipient when hacking is involved. Thanks largely to the material released by Edward Snowden, we can provide a full picture of NSA’s extensive domestic data-collection network including Upstream programs like Fairview, Stormbrew and Blarney. These include at least 30 companies in the U.S. operating the fiber networks that carry the Public Switched Telephone Network as well as the World Wide Web. This gives NSA unparalleled access to data flowing within the U.S. and data going out to the rest of the world, as well as data transiting the U.S.

Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. (Photo credit: The Guardian)

In other words, any data that is passed from the servers of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) or of Hillary Rodham Clinton (HRC) – or any other server in the U.S. – is collected by the NSA.  These data transfers carry destination addresses in what are called packets, which enable the transfer to be traced and followed through the network.

Packets: Emails being passed across the World Wide Web are broken down into smaller segments called packets. These packets are passed into the network to be delivered to a recipient. This means the packets need to be reassembled at the receiving end.

To accomplish this, all the packets that form a message are assigned an identifying number that enables the receiving end to collect them for reassembly. Moreover, each packet carries the originator and ultimate receiver Internet protocol number (either IPV4 or IPV6) that enables the network to route data.

When email packets leave the U.S., the other “Five Eyes” countries (the U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) and the seven or eight additional countries participating with the U.S. in bulk-collection of everything on the planet would also have a record of where those email packets went after leaving the U.S.

These collection resources are extensive [see attached NSA slides 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]; they include hundreds of trace route programs that trace the path of packets going across the network and tens of thousands of hardware and software implants in switches and servers that manage the network. Any emails being extracted from one server going to another would be, at least in part, recognizable and traceable by all these resources.

The bottom line is that the NSA would know where and how any “hacked” emails from the DNC, HRC or any other servers were routed through the network. This process can sometimes require a closer look into the routing to sort out intermediate clients, but in the end sender and recipient can be traced across the network.

The various ways in which usually anonymous spokespeople for U.S. intelligence agencies are equivocating – saying things like “our best guess” or “our opinion” or “our estimate” etc. – shows that the emails alleged to have been “hacked” cannot be traced across the network. Given NSA’s extensive trace capability, we conclude that DNC and HRC servers alleged to have been hacked were, in fact, not hacked.

The evidence that should be there is absent; otherwise, it would surely be brought forward, since this could be done without any danger to sources and methods. Thus, we conclude that the emails were leaked by an insider – as was the case with Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. Such an insider could be anyone in a government department or agency with access to NSA databases, or perhaps someone within the DNC.

As for the comments to the media as to what the CIA believes, the reality is that CIA is almost totally dependent on NSA for ground truth in the communications arena. Thus, it remains something of a mystery why the media is being fed strange stories about hacking that have no basis in fact. In sum, given what we know of NSA’s existing capabilities, it beggars belief that NSA would be unable to identify anyone – Russian or not – attempting to interfere in a U.S. election by hacking.

For the Steering Group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)

William Binney, former Technical Director, World Geopolitical & Military Analysis, NSA; co-founder, SIGINT Automation Research Center (ret.)

Mike Gravel, former Adjutant, top secret control officer, Communications Intelligence Service; special agent of the Counter Intelligence Corps and former United States Senator

Larry Johnson, former CIA Intelligence Officer & former State Department Counter-Terrorism Official

Ray McGovern, former US Army infantry/intelligence officer & CIA analyst (ret.)

Elizabeth Murray, Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Middle East, CIA (ret.)

Kirk Wiebe, former Senior Analyst, SIGINT Automation Research Center, NSA (ret.)

American Democracy

Laugh about it, shout about it
When you’ve got to choose
Every way you look at it, you lose

–Simon & Garfunkle, “Mrs. Robinson”

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On the one hand you have a lying, war-mongering, win-at-any-price, hypocritical, hubristic  narcissist who’s a servant of the 1%.

And on the other hand you have a lying, war-mongering, win-at-any-price, hypocritical, hubristic narcissist who’s a member of the 1%, and is also a racist bully, a would-be Mussolini, and a sexual predator.

This is what, 240 years on, passes for American democracy: this dog’s breakfast of a “choice.”

There is no good outcome to this election. Every way you look at it, we lose.

 

Clinton or Trump — what will you be voting FOR?

Most Americans dislike or detest Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. So, most voters in this presidential cycle will be voting against the candidate they find more odious.

Unfortunately, there is no “none of the above” or “hell no!” option, so those who vote against Trump by voting for Clinton will be voting for something, and vice versa. What will they be voting in favor of? Let’s take the candidates in alphabetical order.

CLINTON

• Continued government secrecy
• Continued mass surveillance of American citizens
• Continued persecution of whistleblowers
• Continued domination of government by big-money interests
• Continued massive U.S. military spending, accounting for nearly half the world’s total
• Continued U.S. support for authoritarian, brutal Islamist regimes in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Turkey, and other Middle East states
• Continued U.S. support for the murderous oppression of the Palestinians by the Israelis
• Continued gross disparities in the distribution of wealth and income in the U.S.; no meaningful measures to address them
• Continued (after the election) support for corporate friendly “free trade” treaties
• Continuation of the “war on drugs” and mass incarceration of its victims
• Continuation of mass deportation; no meaningful immigration reform (even if Clinton wants it)
• Selection of conventional center-right Supreme Court nominees
• Plenty of rhetoric, but inadequate action on climate change
• Continuation of corporate profiteering in, and domination of, the healthcare field–at best, a few bandaid measures
• Support for reproductive rights
• Support for LGBT rights
• Continued stockpiling of enough nuclear weapons to end human civilization
• Placing the presidency in the hands of a member of the top 1%
• Placing the nuclear button in the hands of a proven warmonger
• Continuation of politics as usual

TRUMP

• Continued government secrecy
• Continued mass surveillance of American citizens
• Continued persecution of whistleblowers
• Continued domination of government by big-money interests
• Continued massive U.S. military spending, accounting for nearly half the world’s total
• Continued U.S. support for authoritarian, brutal Islamist regimes in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Turkey, and other Middle East states (probably)
• Continued U.S. support for the murderous oppression of the Palestinians by the Israelis
• Continued gross disparities in the distribution of wealth and income in the U.S.; no meaningful measures to address them; probably measures to aggravate them
• Continued (after the election) support for corporate-friendly “free trade” treaties
• Continuation of the “war on drugs” and mass incarceration of its victims
• Continuation of mass deportation; possible measures to make the situation much worse
• Selection of batshit crazy, goose-stepping Supreme Court nominees
• No action on climate change–nothing to threaten oil industry profits
• Continuation of corporate profiteering in, and domination of, the healthcare field–possible actions to make the situation even worse
• Attacks on reproductive rights (by Trump, maybe; by his supporters, yes)
• Attacks on LGBT rights (by Trump, maybe; by his supporters, yes)
• Continued stockpiling of enough nuclear weapons to end human civilization
• Placing the presidency in the hands of a member of the top 1%
• Placing the nuclear button in the hands of a narcissistic demagogue and possible mad man
• Continuation of politics as even worse than usual

Vote for either of these candidates, and this is what you’re voting for.

On November 8th ya pays yer money and ya takes yer chances. The quadrennial “lesser of two evils” game of extortion is on. Ballots and barf bags to the right at your friendly neighborhood polling place.

The Horror of the 2016 Election — Some Definitions

The 2016 presidential election is fast approaching, and to provide a few moments of respite from the nauseating spectacle — election workers would be well advised to hand out barf bags along with ballots — here are a few definitions you might find humorous.

The first definition is from Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism, and all of the others, plus the graphics, are from our new American Heretic’s Dictionary. We hope you enjoy them.

Democracy, n. 1) The bludgeoning of the people, by the people, for the people.

Democratic Party, n. 1) The “good cop” in the biennial good cop/bad cop mugging of the American public; 2) A political party which has persevered and prospered for over two centuries without, curiously, ever having had any principles to betray.

Hell, n. A place of everlasting torment, much like the United States during an election year.

Lesser of Two Evils, phr. The perennial and inspiring reason to vote for the Democratic Party’s courageous, incorruptible candidates.

Majority Rule, phr. The governing principle of the United States. The revered concept that it is every bit as right and just that two million individuals impose their will upon one million, under threat of force, as it is that two individuals impose their will upon one, under similar threat.

Municipal Election, n. A refreshing dip in an open sewer.

President of the United States, n. 1) A pathological liar suffering delusions of grandeur; 2) An office which confers upon its holder vast coercive power as well as the means to commit mass murder—an opportunity of which all recent U.S. presidents have taken advantage. Because of this, some observers have concluded that only the worst type of individuals seek the office of president. This unkind assessment is, however, incorrect. It is more realistic to conclude that only the worst type of individuals are elected to the office.

Republican, adj. Having an affinity for gold, in both bullion and shower form.

Republican Party, n. Once described as “America’s largest hate group,” the Republican Party is often scurrilously portrayed as consisting entirely of racists, but this is not so. Many Republican leaders are not racists themselves, but are merely content to pander to them.

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