[National Review] The more Mueller searches for hypothetical lawbreaking, the more he ignores the actual lawbreakers. The country is about to witness an investigatory train wreck.
In one direction, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation train is looking for any conceivable thing that President Donald Trump’s campaign team might have done wrong in 2016.
The oncoming train is slower but also larger. It involves congressional investigations, Department of Justice referrals, and inspector general’s reports ‐ mostly focused on improper or illegal FBI and DOJ behavior during the 2016 election.
Why are the two now about to collide?
By charging former national-security adviser Michael Flynn for lying to the FBI, Mueller emphasized that even the appearance of false testimony is felonious behavior.
If that is so, then the DOJ will probably have to charge former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe with perjury or related offenses. A report from the Office of the Inspector General indicates that McCabe lied at least four times to federal investigators.
Former FBI director James Comey may also have lied to Congress when he testified that he had not written his report on the Hillary Clinton email scandal before interviewing Clinton. Former director of national intelligence James Clapper and former CIA director John Brennan lied under oath to Congress on matters related to surveillance.
h/t Instapundit
...China ‐ without firing a shot, committing troops to active military intervention in the Middle East’s myriad proxy conflicts, and doing little more in international diplomacy than raising their hands against the occasional contentious resolution at the United Nations Security Council ‐ became the world’s largest investor in the Arab Middle East two years ago, with commitments of almost $30 billion and a close to 32 percent share of all foreign direct investment. Beijing seeks to integrate the Middle East’s largest economies into its One Belt One Road development initiative while avoiding imperial overstretch, recognizing the crucial role of economic development, human capital, and strategic investment to future global power.
In line with its cynically independent foreign policy ‐ which seeks little to no input from secondary powers about its interests ‐ China has methodically reaped the rewards of America’s mistakes.
The U.S. spent anywhere from $1.7 to $2.2 trillion, and suffered almost 4,500 dead and over 32,000 wounded, to remove Saddam Hussein and his Ba’athist regime from power in Iraq, run a provisional government, fight a Shia and Sunni insurgency, and try to impose western institutions and norms on a country simmering with tribal and sectarian conflicts.
China stood to the side, pocketed the American expenditures and elimination of the sanctions imposed prior to the 2003 invasion, and emerged as Iraq’s biggest import partner. For context, petroleum products account for anywhere between 93 and 99 percent of Iraq’s exports. China has committed billions to Iraqi infrastructure development and reconstruction, pledged to build an oil refinery near the Gulf port of Fao, and in recent years poured over $2 billion and hundreds of workers annually to develop Iraqi oil deposits.
These dynamics led former U.S. Defense Department official Michael Makovsky to note, "The Chinese had nothing to do with the war, but from an economic standpoint they are benefiting from it, and our Fifth Fleet and air forces are helping to assure their [oil] supply."
...Across the border in Iran ‐ empowered by America’s removal of an obstacle to its regional influence in the form of Saddam Hussein, and a close partner of the Iraqi government that the U.S. spent years building and propping up ‐ it is the same story.
...As the U.S. operates a disjointed regional paradigm and spends considerably in search of elusive gains ‐ limiting who it can do business with and sometimes attaching conditions removed from the Middle East’s realities ‐ the Chinese begin and end their regional policy with what is in China’s narrow national interest. This has allowed them to deal with everyone without making political commitments, assurances, or promises. As American policy unwittingly upends the Middle East’s balance of power, China adjusts to the situation, recalibrates, and fills the vacuum to generate geopolitical and/or economic returns.
#1
This guy's observations are so trivial they're a waste of time, in composition as well as in perusal by whatever audience unfortunate enough to read it to its conclusion. It's a given that friendlies, neutrals and hostiles not actually fighting will all benefit from US actions that help stabilize a given region. Removing Saddam from the equation meant no more Kuwait-style invasions and no nukes for Iraq. For a while.
It's the nature of these wars. People are innumerate about wartime expenditures. $2.2 trillion sounds like a lot of money. But it's under 15% of an $19T economy. By the end of the Vietnam War in 1973 (for US forces), the US had spent roughly the same %, relative to US GDP at the time. And lost about 60K men.
Note that there was a lot that was unstated*, but Muslim countries got the (9/11-related) message anyway. Screw with US and you will pay the price. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow. But one day, when you're teetering on the edge of a cliff, we'll give you a nudge.
* Bush said "Islam is a religion of peace" because we needed the help of local Muslim allies and collaborators. But he sure did tighten scrutiny of Muslim crazies domestically.
[SCMP] The collapse after five nuclear blasts may be why North Korean leader Kim Jong-un declared on Friday that he would freeze the hermit state's nuclear and missile tests and shut down the site, one researcher said.
The last five of Pyongyang's six nuclear tests have all been carried out under Mount Mantap at the Punggye-ri nuclear test site in North Korea's northwest.
One group of researchers found that the most recent blast tore open a hole in the mountain, which then collapsed upon itself. A second group concluded that the breakdown created a "chimney" that could allow radioactive fallout from the blast zone below to rise into the air.
A research team led by Wen Lianxing, a geologist with the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, concluded that the collapse occurred following the detonation last autumn of North Korea's most powerful thermal nuclear warhead in a tunnel about 700 metres (2,296 feet) below the mountain's peak.
The test turned the mountain into fragile fragments, the researchers found
Posted by: Frank G ||
04/26/2018 00:00 ||
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Link ||
[8 views]
Top|| File under: Commies
#2
...This makes sense. At least in theory, the Norks could test in downtown Pyongyang if they wanted, but it costs big bucks - really big bucks - to prepare a site. Excavation of that magnitude, even in a command economy, ain't cheap. The instrumentation is even more expensive, and a good chunk of that has to be replaced every time you hit that little red button.
At the end of the day, they might have just finally run out of available funds and gear. The Norks know the bombs work - they get a yield from a device, even if it's not one they can put on a warhead or aircraft yet. Add to that they fact that in DJT they finally have a US leader who is not going to simply roll over and let himself be blackmailed, and this might, at the end of the day, be simply a matter of Kimmie making a virtue out of necessity.
Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
04/26/2018 6:02 Comments ||
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#3
OR, perhaps, the Chinese putting their foot down with the risk of radioactive leaks. Mountain collapse's, a lot of dust in the air, right next to the border...
Wouldn't surprise me if the slave-gangs were throwing everything, including themselves, into the mountain to seal it up.
Posted by: Charles ||
04/26/2018 7:57 Comments ||
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[The Cipher Brief] Just weeks after the attacks of 9/11, a flatbed truck was parked unceremoniously in the tree-lined fire lane next to the CIA’s New Headquarters Building, surrounded by furious activity.
The team was packing gear on shipping pallets for a mission of uncertain duration: bandages, trauma packs and children’s kites. The ballistic body amour was on back order ‐ added to the growing list that would have to be air-dropped to wherever the team ended up.
In the melee, a white-bearded paramilitary officer collected "other paper work"‐ a euphemism for final letters to loved ones.
Military members of the team were unaccustomed to the improvisational nature of agency planning. Bare bones staffing, just enough provisions to get by, and constantly shifting priorities ‐ like the World War-II era "Glorious Amateurs" of the Office of Special Services or OSS. Special operators and CIA officers were deploying together again, as they’d once fought side-by-side in the fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants OSS, with a new shared mission: stop the next al-Qaida attack on the homeland. We were at war.
More than a decade and a half later, we are still a nation at war. If anything, the threats have multiplied.
That’s why we need a seasoned and experienced field officer like Gina Haspel at the helm of the CIA, who served through those fraught times. We need the insights and leadership of a senior officer who took on some of the hardest collection missions to keep our nation safe to lead the organization into the future.
Her upcoming senate confirmation hearing is an opportunity to define how we as a nation collect intelligence and how we respond to threats to our country in an era of perpetual conflict.
The agency is designed to work in the murky grey world of perpetual ambiguity. The primary goal of agency operations (paramilitary, technical and human) is to obtain intelligence of value to the U.S. decision-makers. The more valuable the intelligence, the more risk to the collection and the collector.
Among the many paradoxes of intelligence collection is the notion of plausible deniability. The ability to deny that an operation is conducted on behalf of the government is a fundamental tenet of espionage, one designed to protect reputational and political risk, and thwart and misdirect possible retaliation by our enemies. The reality that a clandestine intelligence operation can be disavowed and denied by the very government it is a part of is a foundational component of "diplomacy by other means."
This paradox is difficult for a spy organization in a free an open society, and is particularly vexing for lawmakers outside the oversight committees to grasp and distill for their constituents in the era of sound bites and tweets. Plausible deniability codifies the popular ethos that intelligence operations are rogue, unapproved and out of control. Continues.
#1
Because the Dems do not care what kind of damage they do to our intelligence services, I worry about what kind of drilling they will do into Ms. Haspel's career for the sake of political capital and embarrassment of DJT.
There are lots of things we have done over the years that have and should remained out of the public record because of potential diplomatic fallout.
[Ynet] Analysis: If thousands of Gazooks leap to their feet undauntedly from the new tent line and start running towards the fence, the corpse count from Israeli fire will grow to hundreds. Those who cross the fence will run amok into Israel to evade the fire. And that’s the exact outcome Hamas, a contraction of the Arabic words for "frothing at the mouth", is hoping for.
They call it "The March of Return." We refer to the military activity on the Gazoo border fence as "the gatekeepers." These are two sides of the same coin. They march, we guard. They initiate, and Israel responds.
In the past week, Israeli officials have been trying to create the impression that "the gatekeepers" have overpowered the "March of Return." Fewer people are flocking to the the fence protests; Hamas has failed. That’s a dangerous delusion.
Continued on Page 49
[Task & Purpose] Do you remember when the defense industry could actually build airplanes? Not just build airplanes, but mass produce them in large numbers?
Of course you don’t.
Over time, military aircraft have become so complicated and defense industry has become so impervious to outside forces that you probably weren’t born when the United States could actually build tough, reliable and relatively low cost airplanes.
Look no further than the B-52, also known as the "BUFF" for "Big, Ugly, Fat F*cker." Boeing built more than 700 of the bombes between 1952 and 1962 and the Air Force expects to keep flying the BUFF until the 2050s. That means that a bomber first built during the Truman administration will still be putting warheads on foreheads about the time the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan reach their halfway mark.
In comparison, the B-1 Lancer and B-2 Spirit, which first flew in the 1980s, are both expected to be retired in the early 2030s ‐ more than a decade earlier than planned, according to Air Force Magazine. NASA’s Space Shuttle retired in 2011 after 30 years of service. The SR-71 Blackbird bowed out in 1990 after flying for 24 years.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[National Review] The more Mueller searches for hypothetical lawbreaking, the more he ignores the actual lawbreakers. The country is about to witness an investigatory train wreck.
[SCMP] The collapse after five nuclear blasts may be why North Korean leader Kim Jong-un declared on Friday that he would freeze the hermit state's nuclear and missile tests and shut down the site, one researcher said. 
[Ynet] Analysis: If thousands of Gazooks leap to their feet undauntedly from the new tent line and start running towards the fence, the 
[Task & Purpose] Do you remember when the defense industry could actually build airplanes? Not just build airplanes, but mass produce them in large numbers?
