[Breitbart] Former CIA operations officer Scott Uehlinger, co-host of The Station Chief podcast, talked about the Susan Rice "unmasking" story with SiriusXM host Raheem Kassam on Tuesday’s Breitbart News Daily.
"I think it’s an issue which deeply concerns people like myself and other people, working-level officers in the intel community," Uehlinger said. "Even though at this point, there seems to be no evidence of breaking the law, this ’unmasking’ of people was ill-advised at best. I think it really shows that abuse of power and the fact that many people in the Obama administration were willing to violate the spirit of the laws designed to protect Americans, perhaps rather than the law itself." Emphasis added.
#1
Uehlinger said. "Even though at this point, there seems to be no evidence of breaking the law, this ’unmasking’ of people was ill-advised at best.
I would encourge Mr. Uehlinger to reacquaint himself with the applicable Director Central Intelligence Directive (DCID), it's supporting legal authorities and federal laws.
#2
Ex-CIA Officer: Surveillance ‘intent was to allow for further leakage to hurt Trump administration'…
Thinking outside the box a bit. Could this same logic trail apply to former Klingon contractor Erik Snowden and his short-lived career at sometimes uncooperative community partner NSA ?
#3
I agree that the 'unmasking' was ill-advised, but probably not illegal.
The leaking of that unmasking to other agencies seems also to have not been illegal, thanks to last-minute Obama rule changes.
The leaking outside of government intelligence organizations was clearly illegal - but who can prove where the leak came from, since thousands of government officials had access.
#4
The whole thing was designed as a 'legal' series of independent actions that resulted in the leakage to the media. I wouldn't doubt a hundred lawyers looked it all over before hand, and that a hundred lawyers are currently sleeping in landfill.
[Politico] It’s still too soon to say who is responsible for the bombing on Monday of the subway in St. Petersburg, Russia--but it wouldn’t be surprising if international terrorists were responsible. Russia is fast replacing the United States as the No. 1 enemy of Al Qaeda, the Islamic State and other Sunni jihadist groups motivated by violent and puritanical Salafist ideology.
This shift is rooted in recent Russian actions in the Middle East--including its escalating intervention in Syria and its moves toward intervention in Libya with the recent deployment of special forces to an air base in Egypt--that have drawn the ire of militant Sunnis worldwide and elevated Russia as the jihadists’ top target. And if the Islamic State’s "caliphate" in Syria collapses and foreign fighters, an estimated 2,400 of whom are from Russia, attempt to return home and fix their sights on the Kremlin, the situation could dramatically worsen for Moscow.
Terrorist groups have made their changing priorities clear. In an ISIS video titled "Soon Very Soon Blood Will Spill Like an Ocean," an ISIS fighter threatens Russian leader Vladimir Putin directly, citing the country’s intervention in Syria and its growing alliance with Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, Iran and the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah as proof that Moscow is the chief proponent of a growing Shiite axis throughout the Middle East. Forty other Syrian rebel groups have concurred, pointedly saying that "any occupation force to our beloved country is a legitimate target."
[The Hill] McCain, a longtime advocate of arming Syrian rebels and removing Assad from power, also barbed Tillerson, who recently said whether Assad will stay in power "will be decided by the Syrian people." McCain called that remark "one of the more incredible statements I’ve ever heard," echoing a fiery statement he released previously.
"Syrian people cannot decide the fate of Assad or the future of their country when they are being slaughtered by Assad’s barrel bombs, Putin’s aircraft and Iran’s terrorist proxies," McCain said Thursday. "U.S. policy must reflect such basic facts."
Calling Assad "one of the great brutal dictators in history," McCain emphasized that leaving the Syrian president in power would contradict the United States’ duty to spread democracy throughout the world.
"These are war crimes on the scale ... almost unmatched since Nazi Germany or Pol Pot."
Although McCain expressed "confidence" in the Trump administration’s national security team, he lamented what he said was a lack of conviction in America’s policy toward the Syrian civil war.
#2
It was non-involvement till the last POTUS stuck his nose into it. McPain above all should know what it is to abandon (boat) loads of people to their fate. That happens when you're not interested in really winning a war.
#3
OK Johnny McShame. Exactly what should we do about it? Load up the bombers with glass making appliances and turn Syria into a really big reflector telescope?
Light up the missles and turn Russia into a really big parking lot?
#5
Trump should mistakenly call McCain a Democrat one or two times. Give some good sound bites to whomever goes up against McCain the next election McCain is up.
[Powerline] This past Sunday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell vowed that Judge Gorsuch would be confirmed to the Supreme Court this week. If put to a straight up or down vote, as he will be, Judge Gorsuch would win a majority for his confirmation. If Democrats rally 41 votes to support a filibuster -- Senator McConnell didn’t expressly say, but it was implicit in his vow -- Republicans would be put to the trouble of invoking the Reid Rule to proceed with the confirmation vote.
Yesterday the Democrats reached 41 votes to support a filibuster blocking a vote on Judge Gorsuch. Politico reported the story here.
Mitch McConnell is no fool. I take him at his word. I infer that he has the votes to extend the Reid Rule to Supreme Court confirmations and will do so with the support of Senate Republicans on Friday.
The Democrats have no case against Judge Gorsuch. The pretext that the Democrats have to die on Mount Gorsuch is ludicrous. No serious observer buys it. It’s a joke. See, e.g., the statement Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar gave to the Duluth News Tribune. No conceivable Republican nominee could pass muster under the "I say it’s spinach" test that she articulates.
It also departs from Senate tradition. No Supreme Court nominee has ever been blocked by a partisan filibuster. The filibuster of Gorsuch for no particular reason invites a united Republican response to invoke the Reid rule.
The Democrats’ filibuster is irrational from the perspective of the left. It belies their interests so long as a Republican administration remains in power by making it easier for Republicans to confirm the next justice, whose confirmation might alter the balance on the Court to the right.
Republicans have never used the filibuster to block the confirmation of the likes of Ruth Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor. If not them, who? By filibustering Judge Gorsuch, Democrats have made it easy for Republicans to do what is necessary to confirm him and prospective nominees who may move the Court in a direction congenial to conservatives.
In his excellent Washington Post column reviewing relevant history in some detail, Marc Thiessen derives some pathos, but I’m not feeling it. I don’t see a reason for conservative observers to feel any ambivalence about the extension of the Reid Rule to Supreme Court nominees.
Like Senator McConnell, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is no fool. He is a calculating man. He is now a calculating man performing an irrational act. He knows it and he doesn’t like it. Yet Senator Schumer and his crowd -- including, let it be noted, Minnesota’s own Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken -- have become the willing instrument of a deranged base.
#1
Looks like "nuclear option showdown." Watch for self-righteous indignation, whining, squealing and a worsening, if possible, of Trump Derangement Syndrome. It's O.K. for the Donks to change the rules and invoke the nuclear option but not the Pubs--hypocrits.
#3
Doing us a favor. The next empty seat is when the real fight happens. If the filibuster is already gone, that leaves the Dems with no other option than looking for RINO defectors.
[LI] I appeared earlier today on America Talks Live, with Steve Malzberg.
The discussion centered on two big developments today, the reports that Susan Rice "unmasked" Trump campaign and transition officials names from intelligence reports, and the Neil Gorsuch nomination and the threat of a filibuster.
On Rice, Steve used my post earlier today, Susan Rice unmasked? Previously said "I know nothing about" Nunes allegations.
Here are some of my comments:
What this suggests, is that while there may not necessarily have been anything illegal about Susan Rice making those requests, given her background, given how she was put out as the point person to spread the lie about the Benghazi video, that it was an attack based on a video, given her tattered history, I think that it’s very, very suspicious, and it certainly warrants additional information, additional investigation.
So I think what this all but guarantees is that there will be a dual track investigation in Congress.
On the one hand, any alleged collusion by the Trump campaign with Russia, of which there’s been no proof thus far, but also the action of the Obama administration.
I don’t see how the Obama administration does not now become a target of congressional investigation after this revelation."
As to Gorsuch, and Democrats leaving Republicans no choice but to go nuclear:
The filibuster has a moderating effect. A president understands that there’s some necessity of nominating someone in the mainstream.
And certainly, any argument you could have even used multiple times over with regard to Elena Kagan, or with regard to Sotomayor, or with regard to a lot of different people. But there’s been that moderating effect of a threat of a filibuster.
That’s not going to be there anymore if Chuck Schumer gets his way. So Gorsuch is going to be approved. But what it means is that it’s wide open for Trump to nominate almost anyone he wants the next go round.
And that might be to replace Justice Ginsburg, or Justice Breyer, or Justice Kennedy.
So I think the Democrats are going to come to regret this much as they now regret what Harry Reid did with regard to the lower courts.
[Washington Times] Radio host Rush Limbaugh told millions of listeners on Monday that surveillance "unmasking" by former national security adviser Susan Rice demonstrates how "the Obama administration weaponized politically our intelligence services against the Republicans and against Trump."
Author Mike Cernovich broke news on Sunday that Ms. Rice was identified by the White House Counsel’s office as the one who "unmasked" associates of President Donald Trump who were randomly netted in electronic surveillance. The story went viral on Monday with additional reporting by Bloomberg and Fox News, but Mr. Limbaugh said the real story is being muddled by political analysts.
"The Obama administration weaponized everything else to use against the GOP, from the IRS to NOAA to any of these agencies, EPA, involving climate change," Mr. Limbaugh said. "The Drive-By Media reported all of this. We know that there had to be unmasking. We know that there had to be leaking. The media proudly told us that sources who could not be identified [...] fed them data. We know now that the media was complicit."
The conservative then said media outlets that reported on possible collusion between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia are now slow to say how the Obama administration may have legally but unethically spied on Mr. Trump’s campaign.
"I want to repeat a possibility that I mentioned," Mr. Limbaugh said. "While [the Obama administration] couldn’t get a FISA warrant to target Americans, they purposely targeted for surveillance foreign actors that they knew Trump transition people would be talking to and learned what they were saying that way. And that’s why Rice was requesting that these people be unmasked so that she and Obama and whoever else in this operation would understand who was being talked about and who was saying what. ..."
"The scandal is not Trump and the Russians," he continued. "The scandal is the Obama administration and these embeds in the deep state surveilling targets with the express purpose of hoping to capture Americans as part of the surveillance."
#1
Rush is right. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (raided Gibson Guitar), IRS, BLM (Bundy standoff and land grabs), EPA, BATF (F&F), intelligence agencies and the DOJ are only a few that come to mind. There's probably a list somewhere that expands on this. The lame stream media provided support wherever they could by hyping false narratives or blocking stories that needed to be honestly reported. There ought to be impeachments, mass firings, and prosecutions for many offenses of the previous admin.
[DAWN] TWENTY people killed in order to ’cleanse’ them of their worldly afflictions. It is difficult to recall when the country, brimming as it does with people pursuing spiritual purity or combating all kinds of guilt via various routes, last experienced a similar incident of this magnitude. The mass murder that took place on Friday in Sargodha -- though discovered by police on Sunday -- at the hands of a shrine custodian and his accomplices, brings a number of ugly aspects to the fore: superstition, isolation from society, patronage of influentials. One may well include intelligence failure in the list, for most ignorant is a law-enforcement set-up that is unaware of what is happening for such long hours at a place potentially as heady as a shrine.
It is never too difficult for a clever individual anywhere to convince a few of those around of the need to clean up their souls but Pakistain’s social system facilitates such extreme steps by not doing enough to expose its citizens to the help they so desperately need in terms of their physical and mental well-being. Poverty is an issue in many cases, although this latest instance reconfirms that when it comes to matters of belief, even the supposedly educated can easily fall prey to overwhelming madness. The spiritual side to this story might never be known fully -- 20-odd people offering themselves up slave-like, in total submission, in such a manner is a riddle unlikely to be satisfactorily resolved. For the time being, a theory has been tentatively put forward which hints at some succession row at the Ali Mohammad Qalandar shrine where the incident took place, and which may have played a role -- given that the spiritual and material often go hand in hand in this business. That said, it is shocking to realise that the man who confessed, did so with an apparent sense of security that he will not or cannot be held accountable for his blood-curdling act. This sense of safety could only come from a real or imaginary immunity from punishment. Although that is an indictment of everyone around, practicality demands that the follow-up also include asking questions of those responsible under the system. How could the police not get a whiff of what was happening at the shrine? And where were the other routine minders, like the local government representatives, while the shrine was being bathed in human blood?
Posted by: Fred ||
04/04/2017 00:00 ||
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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.
[The Hill] McCain, a longtime advocate of arming Syrian rebels and removing Assad from power, also barbed Tillerson, who recently said whether Assad will stay in power "will be decided by the Syrian people." McCain called that remark "one of the more incredible statements I’ve ever heard," echoing a fiery statement he released previously.
