Interestingly Chinese MSM which reflects the government's thinking called Trump a small kid and who knows nothing......
Beijing isn't kidding here. This isn't a game or a reality TV show -- this is playing chicken with a nuclear power.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-38313839#
And we have today a US Admiral stating he is ready to defend US rights in the South China Sea........is he channeling Trump as he knows what Trump has stated about China?????
REMEMBER both Trump and his selected natsec advisor shouting...."lock her up....lock her up......WELL maybe the Trump natsec advisor and Trump should not throw stones at a glass house.......
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world....2638cb2c605c#
A secret U.S. military investigation in 2010 determined that Michael T. Flynn, the retired Army general tapped to serve as national security adviser in the Trump White House, “inappropriately shared” classified information with foreign military officers in Afghanistan, newly released documents show.
Although Flynn lacked authorization to share the classified material, he was not disciplined or reprimanded after the investigation concluded that he did not act “knowingly” and that “there was no actual or potential damage to national security as a result,” according to Army records obtained by The Washington Post under the Freedom of Information Act.
Flynn has previously acknowledged that he was investigated while serving as the U.S. military intelligence chief in Afghanistan for sharing secrets with British and Australian allies there. But he has dismissed the case as insignificant and has given few details.
The Army documents provide the first official account of the case, but they are limited in scope because the investigation itself remains classified. Former U.S. officials familiar with the matter said that Flynn was accused of telling allies about the activities of other agencies in Afghanistan, including the CIA.
The Army files call into question Flynn’s prior assertion that he had permission to share the sensitive information.
During the presidential race, Flynn campaigned vigorously for Republican nominee Donald Trump and drew attention for his scalding attacks against Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton for mishandling classified material. Clinton was investigated by the FBI for allowing classified information to be transmitted on her private email server when she ran the State Department.
No charges were filed against the former secretary of state, but the issue dogged her for more than a year.
At the Republican National Convention in July, Flynn called on Clinton to drop out of the race for putting “our nation’s security at extremely high risk with her careless use of a private email server.” He egged on the partisan crowd in chants of “lock her up,” adding: “If I, a guy who knows this business, if I did a tenth, a tenth of what she did, I would be in jail today.”
Flynn did not respond to requests for comment.
The office of the Army’s Judge Advocate General released a four-page summary of the investigation into Flynn in response to The Post’s Freedom of Information Act request for records of any misconduct allegations involving the retired three-star general.
The U.S. military opened the investigation into Flynn in 2010 after receiving a complaint from an unnamed Navy intelligence specialist, according to the documents. The intelligence officer charged that Flynn violated rules by “inappropriately” sharing secrets with “various foreign military officers and/or officials in Afghanistan.”
The documents do not reveal the nature of the information. But former U.S. officials familiar with the case said it centered on slides and other materials containing classified information about CIA operations in Afghanistan.
“It was a general intelligence briefing that included stuff that shouldn’t have been on those slides,” said a former senior U.S. intelligence official, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the subject. The disclosures revealed “stuff the intelligence community was doing that had a much higher level of classification.”
The agency has had an extensive presence in the Afghanistan since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Beyond gathering intelligence on al-Qaeda and the Taliban, the CIA has also assembled its own paramilitary networks in the country, paying warlords for cooperation and funding armed groups known as Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams.
A second former U.S. official said Flynn failed to secure permission to reveal those secrets. “This was a question of whether or not information was put through proper channels before it was shared,” the second official said.
The episode marked the second time in a year that Flynn had drawn official complaints for his handling of classified material.
Former U.S. officials said that Flynn had disclosed sensitive information to Pakistan in late 2009 or early 2010 about secret U.S. intelligence capabilities being used to monitor the Haqqani network, an insurgent group accused of repeated attacks on U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
Flynn exposed the capabilities during meetings with Pakistani officials in Islamabad. The former U.S. intelligence official said a CIA officer who accompanied Flynn reported the disclosures to CIA headquarters, which then relayed the complaint to the Defense Department. Flynn was verbally reprimanded by the Pentagon’s top intelligence official at the time, James R. Clapper Jr.
Clapper subsequently became director of national intelligence and endorsed Flynn to become his successor as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. In 2014, however, Clapper forced Flynn out of that job over concerns with his temperament and management.
The newly disclosed Army documents state that the 2010 investigation was ordered by the head of U.S. Central Command, which oversees military operations in the Middle East and Afghanistan. Although the records do not say exactly when the case was opened, the commander at the time would have been Marine Gen. James Mattis.
Mattis took charge at Central Command’s headquarters in Tampa, Fla., in August 2010. One month later, Flynn was ordered back to Washington from Afghanistan. He was assigned to a temporary job at the Pentagon as the special assistant to the Army’s chief of intelligence while the investigation unfolded, records show.
Mattis was nominated this month by Trump to serve as secretary of defense. In that role, Mattis will work closely with Flynn; the retired generals are expected to be the most influential voices on national security in the Trump administration.
The Army documents that summarize the investigation into Flynn do not specify which countries he was accused of improperly sharing secrets with. In an interview with The Post in August, Flynn said he was scrutinized for giving classified information to British and Australian officials serving in Afghanistan alongside U.S. forces.
In that interview, Flynn defended his actions and said he did nothing wrong. “That was substantiated because I actually did it. But I did it with the right permissions when you dig into that investigation. I’m proud of that one. Accuse me of sharing intelligence in combat with our closest allies, please.”
The Army documents, however, state explicitly that the Central Command investigation determined that Flynn did not have permission to share the particular secrets he divulged. The Defense Department’s inspector general, which conducted an independent review of the investigation, came to the same conclusion, the documents show.
It is routine for the U.S. military to share intelligence in Afghanistan with NATO allies such as Britain, as well as other members of the broader international coalition fighting the Taliban and al-Qaeda, including Australia.
But there are established mechanisms and guidelines that must be followed.
Flynn was highly regarded within the Army for the key role he played in shaping U.S. counterterrorism strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pentagon officials had intended to promote Flynn in 2010 to the rank of lieutenant general and to make him assistant director of national intelligence, a job that would place him in charge of improving ties with foreign intelligence agencies.
The Central Command investigation delayed his career advancement for a full year. He received his promotion and new assignment in September 2011.
After being forced to retire from the military in 2014, Flynn became a vocal opponent of the Obama administration’s policies regarding Iran and al-Qaeda.
At the same time, he gained a reputation for floating conspiracy theories on Twitter.
Some Democratic lawmakers have criticized his selection as Trump’s national security adviser. The position is not subject to Senate confirmation.
Last edited by OUTLAW 09; 12-14-2016 at 04:08 PM.
Says Someone Who Should Know | Trump Is Using Our Old Putin TV Propaganda Playbook
http://thebea.st/2gBulpV
Last edited by OUTLAW 09; 12-14-2016 at 04:08 PM.
China, target of Trump tweets, could in turn target Ford or GM.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-ch...idUSKBN143014#
The Hill
✔
@thehill
McMullin: "I know for a fact" GOP knew about Russian election meddling and ignored it
http://hill.cm/7D5YUng
The perception of being legitimate is an interesting one...notice I place the emphasis on the single word.....perception.......
Winning the Electoral College by 100K votes but losing the popular vote by 2.8M and still climbing when 46% of the electorate did not even vote does not bestow either a mandate to govern nor "make major changes" that impacts those 2.8M more general votes.....and those 46% that did not vote...
In some aspects Trump is what some in Europe would call a minority President....and needs to fully understand that....
If the indications of the Office for Government Ethnics is correct all those business types and Generals have to submit an extensive amount of documentation that many of them will find intrusive....to say the least and even though nominated just getting that information to the Office before they can go in front of Congress for approval can in fact take literally months.....if that is they get past any conflicts of interest the OGE finds .........
The NYTs had a great Editorial on this today....
Last edited by OUTLAW 09; 12-14-2016 at 08:09 PM.
To Outlaw 09 RE: Various
*Please, less ellipsis!
Oh really? Then who is the “real” inheritor of the Soviet Union?Originally Posted by OUTLAW 09
Most UNGA members are not fully free or full democracies (54%), and 56 are members of the OIC (29%). Only 32 or 17% of the UNGA’s members are Western liberal democracies. I am not sure that a non-democratic and non-Western bloc of the UN should be able to impose its will upon the West or compel Western military activity.
History is replete with pronouncements by American presidents that are meaningless because of opposition in Congress, particularly the Senate (e.g. Wilson and collective security). Bill Clinton had the freest hand in the developing world of any president, and did nothing in Rwanda, Sudan, Congo, North Korea or Pakistan. I suggest you take it up with Bubba…
As for the Budapest Agreement, its text only provided for consultation in the event of violation, and referral to the UNSC if that violation involved the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons. Did you think that Yeltsin was going to handicap himself? Did you think that Bubba would commit to military action in defense of Ukraine? Did you think that Ukraine signed because of ironclad guarantees, or because Russia threatened invasion?
Budapest was the best agreement that Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan were going to get at the time; securing nuclear warheads in the 1990s and averting a violent dissolution of the USSR (ongoing) were the main priorities for NATO and Russia.
The world is shades of gray. Americans prefer that every conflict suit the mythology of the Civil War and World War II, when they fought for a “higher object”, but until the next one occurs, there are plenty of dirty, gray and selfish ones to fight.
Had Obama been painting in grays, he would have done the following:
- Supported the Arab Spring in Tunisia
- Supported Mubarak in Egypt (against the Muslim Brotherhood)
- Refused to help the Libyan rebels (nuclear non-proliferation)
- Supported the Arab Spring in Syria (against Iran)
- Signed the JCPOA with Iran (at least there is a verification mechanism)
- Supported Saudi efforts in Yemen (against Iran)
- Not confronted China (to prevent a Sino-Russian condominium)
- Confronted Russia in Ukraine (lethal aid)
- Encouraged Chinese penetration of Central Asia (against Russia)
- Deployed peacekeepers to South Sudan (against Sudan)
- Partnered with China to effect regime change and unification in Korea
- Allowed China to bully the Philippines and Vietnam, but not Taiwan and Japan
Prior to the Financial Crisis and Great Recession, many American Neo-Conservatives were referring to Germany as the “sick man” of Europe. How ironic…
Yet Schroeder did not erode Germany's manufacturing sector as a share of GDP, the current account went from -$5 billion to +$12 billion during his tenure, and economic growth had begun to slow during Kohl's tenure.
Yet if Germany had retained the DM, it would be far more expensive vis-à-vis the USD than the Euro. What you described is the free market acting against arbitrage, which was far easier with a single currency.
You do realize that Obama used Breedlove as he uses Harris: to talk tough on Russia and China, respectively, while the White House takes a more conciliatory tone?
Yawn. Hillary deliberately put classified materials at risk for her personal convenience, whereas Flynn unknowingly shared classified materials with US allies that did not cause any real or potential damage. It is unknown if Hillary’s violation caused damage.
Azor....ABSOLUTELY no US military intelligence officer ACCIDENTLY and or UNKNOWINGLY shares any level of classified materials outside his or her intel chain of command ....simply does not happen.....you saw what happen to Pateraus and nothing happened to Flynn?????
Costing him a promotion to the next General level for a year depicts the quality of the damage done....and the penalty he received....and it caused him in the end to be fired for cause from the DIA....
Revealing a TS/SCI special ops HUMINT program to Pakistan is not what you want in a so called natsec advisor....
You do notice you distract from Trump who is the focal point in this thread.....
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump 36m
36 minutes ago
If Russia, or some other entity, was hacking, why did the White House waite so long to act? Why did they only complain after Hillary lost?
BUT WAIT....the MSM did carry articles on top of countless social media accounts before the election...Trump did dismiss the Russian hacking as it could have been a 400lb person on his bed doing it was his comment DURING the second first debate......
The WH and the IC did in fact allude to it before the election..........
MATTER OF FACT the WH issued a rare public warning to Russia and Putin to not get involved in the election BEFORE the election and the Putin response is no we will not....
BUT WAIT we now have a President elect claiming what exactly in the face of the above.....
SO who is now lying again Trump with this tweet or the entire 17 IC agencies who have all agreed Russian hacking did in fact occur NOT the Trump 400lb excuse.....
OR is Trump simply deflecting again and lying again??????
Actually, all 17 US intelligence agencies said Russia was behind the hacks back in October
https://www.dhs.gov/news/2016/10/07/...ctor-national#
Last edited by OUTLAW 09; 12-15-2016 at 02:54 PM.
Trump Disciples Suddenly Showing Up In #Russia
(seriously, it can't really be considered "sudden" anymore)
http://www.npr.org/2016/12/14/505581...campaign=news#
Carter Page is currently being investigated by the FBI for his Russian contact shortly before the election as a "foreign agent" which he never registered as.....
Cater Page made the announcement concerning Tillerson as SoS BEFORE Trump did in Moscow of all places and Moscow media kept calling his a close advisor to Trump when Trump stated he no longer worked for the campaign....just as Manafort and the Trump campaign stated he was no longer working for them when his Russian and Ukrainian connections came out ONLY to find out later he was still being paid the entire time....
The Trump cabinet wants to stop Iran. So what do they propose to do about Aleppo, which Iran just conquered?
http://thebea.st/2h2XQx5
Azor...you ask what the Russians benefit from being in Syria in combat conditions just as in eastern Ukraine.....
Ukraine – a proving ground for modern and application of prohibited russian weapons
http://bit.ly/2hz9gJH
Donald Trump's "entire career was built on breaking the law," Gingrich says on a regulatory panel
http://at.law.com/r9etmp
Business Insider
✔
@businessinsider
Trump keeps falsely claiming allegations of Russian hacking only came after he won election
http://read.bi/2h4eNal
Michael McFaul
✔
@McFaul
Explosion of Russia trolling mockery on my twitter feed today suggest that people in Moscow might be getting worried about hacking stories
McFaul was the former US Ambassador to Russia and speaks fluent Russian.....
Last edited by OUTLAW 09; 12-15-2016 at 03:18 PM.
Azor.......
http://observer.com/2016/11/the-krem...ary-obama-did/
The Kremlin Didn’t Sink Hillary—Obama Did
Democratic panic about Russian disinformation neglects to mention that it was the White House that refused to stop it
By John R. Schindler • 11/26/16 11:07am
“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing." - Trump, July 27, 2016.The liberal conniption about alleged Russian “hacking” of our election has reached a boiling point. A politically dangerous Democratic narrative is emerging which posits that it was aggressive Kremlin propaganda that undermined Hillary Clinton’s presidential run—not that she ran a terrible campaign which alienated the white working class to Donald Trump’s benefit.
Like so many half-truths, this narrative contains its fair share of accurate claims. I know, because I was warning the public about Kremlin espionage and disinformation long before Democrats suddenly became passionately interested in the subject because it was hurting their candidate. After Vladimir Putin seized Crimea in early 2014 and began a war of aggression against Ukraine, Russian propaganda efforts aimed at the West went into overdrive.
To anybody acquainted with well-honed Moscow agitprop techniques, this was no more than old-style KGB Active Measures sped up for the Internet age. That said, the threat posed by this online disinformation offensive is real, as I and other experts counseled years ago (in my case, beginning with the defection of Edward Snowden to Moscow in June 2013).
However, it was frankly difficult to get the mainstream media interested in this rising problem—at least until the Kremlin’s disinformation machine went after Hillary, as it did in 2016 with gusto.
The Washington Post reported this week that Kremlin-backed websites pushed “fake news” regularly portraying Hillary and the Democrats in a negative light.
There’s really nothing new here for anybody who’s followed Russian propaganda for any length of time. Kremlin agitprop aimed at the West—properly termed disinformation—contains an amalgam of fact and fiction, plus lots of gray information somewhere in between which can be difficult and time-consuming to refute.
Back in the 1980s, when the KGB was pumping all kinds of outlandish conspiracy theories into Western media outlets to smear the Reagan administration, Washington got proficient at countering this sort of nasty deception (the Pentagon created AIDS, for instance).
The Active Measures Working Group, an interagency entity stood up expressly to debunk Kremlin lies, became effective at its job, drawing on expertise from various government departments and agencies. With Cold War victory, however, it folded along with the Soviet Union.
By mid-2014, it was apparent that Moscow was up to its old disinformation tricks again, and it was obvious to anybody acquainted with the Kremlin that Washington needed to react to the torrents of lies filtering into Western media thanks to Russian intelligence and its friends in the West. Putin, that wily KGB veteran, is familiar with Active Measures, and his Kremlin has become more aggressive about employing it abroad than the Politburo ever was.
There were hardly any veterans of the Active Measures Working Group still on active service by 2014, however, so Washington quietly cobbled together a shoestring effort—no more than handful of experts—to start debunking Kremlin disinformation. Its mission was clear: track Russian lies aimed at the West, particularly falsehoods designed to harm the United States and its allies, then show how they are false.
However, that worthy effort never got off the ground and its website was shut before it went live. The counterpropaganda baby was strangled in the crib—by the White House. As I explained in a column titled “Obama Failed to Fight Putin’s Propaganda Machine,” which appeared almost exactly one year before our election:
Nearly a year ago, the State Department created a Counter-Disinformation Team, inside its Bureau of International Information Programs, as a small, start-up effort to resist Russian disinformation. Consisting of only a handful of staffers, it was supposed to expose the most laughable Moscow lies about America and the West that are disseminated regularly via RT and other outlets. They created a beta website and prepared to wage the struggle for truth online.
Alas, their website never went live. Recently the State Department shut down the tiny Counter-Disinformation Team and any efforts by the Obama administration to resist Putin’s propaganda can now be considered dead before birth. Intelligence Community sources tell me that it was closed out of a deep desire inside the White House “not to upset the Russians.”
Yet again, President Obama’s unwillingness to confront Putin and his regime about anything—Syria, Ukraine, deploying nuclear missiles next to Poland—only encouraged the honey badger in the Kremlin to grow more adventurous and aggressive. By refusing to debunk noxious Russian lies, Obama encouraged Putin to tell more of them—including about Hillary Clinton.
This culminated in the Russian intelligence operation which employed Wikileaks as a front to disseminate Democratic emails which had been intercepted by Moscow—as I told you months ago, and which the National Security Agency has recently admitted.
A year ago, knowing that killing our counterpropaganda effort in Washington was certain to beget more Kremlin lies aimed at our country and its institutions, I asked several pertinent questions about why the White House acted as it did:
Who killed the Counter-Disinformation Team and why? What did the team produce during the time it existed? What has become of this product? How many people were on it? Does the State Department not consider countering Kremlin disinformation to be in its remit? Does the White House agree? What about the National Security Council? Is anybody in the U.S. government authorized to debunk Putin’s lies—if so, who? If not, why not?
To this day, nobody has answered any of those questions. Democrats are clamoring for a Congressional investigation of clandestine Russian operations which influenced our election this year, and that’s a great idea. At the outset, they should demand that the White House answer the questions I asked a year ago—they are the logical place to start any inquiry into what went wrong in Washington, and why.
It’s past time to ditch wishful thinking and embrace clarity, what spies term “ground truth.” Russian intelligence interfered with American democracy this year. The extent of its impact on our election is debatable, and may not be fully understood for years.
However, the blame for Russian disinformation damaging Hillary Clinton and her party—in particular, the lack of any pushback from Washington, which allowed the Kremlin’s deception machine to go into overdrive—lies not with Donald Trump or the Republicans, but with Barack Obama himself.
CBS Poll:
60% say necessary for Trump to release tax returns
59% say Trump biz a conflict
70% say putting family in charge still a conflict
Democratic House Candidates Were Also Targets of Russian Hacking
http://nyti.ms/2hCOgEY
Last edited by OUTLAW 09; 12-15-2016 at 06:46 PM.
Posting Permissions
Bookmarks