Putin’s Suspected Election Meddling - a Disturbing First

Thankfully, the media seems to be waking up to the reality that we have a foreign dictator in the form of Russian despot Vladimir Putin seeking to influence an American presidential election in order to see Donald Trump elected in November.  In many posts I have looked at the many foul and dangerous things that Putin has done and how in his own way he has mimicked some of Adolph Hitler's tactics and shown himself to care nothing about the Russian people and only about his own enrichment and power. Putin views himself as a new tsar, but in all the worse respects. Now Putin has found an kindred spirit in Donald Trump and Trump has signaled to Putin the gifts that Trump would bring to Russia if elected.  Never in my lifetime have I ever seen an American presidential candidate basically promise to aid a foreign enemy.  The Washington Post takes on the situation in a main editorial.  Here are highlights:

CREDIT FOR the internecine furor that disrupted the Democratic Party on the eve of its convention should go to Vladimir Putin. As The Post has reported, cybersecurity experts say Russian intelligence operatives were likely responsible for the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s computer network, as well as for leaking to the Moscow-friendly WikiLeaks website some 20,000 emails. The trove appeared online Friday, just in time to create discord between supporters of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders as they headed to Philadelphia.

Mr. Putin’s regime has tried to intervene in the internal politics of numerous European countries, from Ukraine and Moldova to Italy and France. But the evident attempt to meddle in a U.S. presidential election is a first. That may reflect the reckless aggressiveness Mr. Putin has embraced in foreign affairs since returning to the presidency in 2012. It likely also reveals Moscow’s judgment that it stands to reap a geopolitical windfall if Donald Trump is elected president.

The potential benefits Mr. Trump offers to Mr. Putin have been clearly and repeatedly spelled out by the candidate himself. Russia’s most cherished goal is to weaken or destroy NATO; Mr. Trump has called the alliance obsolete. Mr. Putin dreams of reestablishing dominion over the pieces of the Soviet Union; Mr. Trump has said that he might not defend former Soviet republicsLatvia, Estonia and Lithuania if Russia invaded, despite their NATO membership. Mr. Putin wants the United States to treat Russia as an equal superpower with its own acknowledged sphere of influence; Mr. Trump has repeatedly praised Mr. Putin and promised to work with him.

This pro-Kremlin tilt is unprecedented in the Republican Party and would represent a radical and dangerous shift in U.S. policy. Whether there are non-political reasons for it is a fair question. Mr. Trump is known to have sought business repeatedly in Russia, and his son Donald Jr. has said that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.” Because Mr. Trump will not release his tax returns or business records, the full extent of his financial interests in Russia remains unclear.

One of the few changes in the GOP platform pushed by the Trump campaignwas the weakening of language calling for support for Ukraine’s current democratic government, which replaced the man Mr. Manafort represented — and which Mr. Putin is attempting to destroy. The DNC emails appeared on WikiLeaks the next week.

Some political analysts doubt that KGB-style tricks will ultimately sway votes in a wide-open U.S. election — especially as Moscow has barely bothered to disguise its authorship. Yet the fact that Mr. Putin is trying is remarkable and disturbing — as is the motivation Mr. Trump has given him to meddle.

 Is Trump trying to make America great again or is he really out to make Russia great again?  It's a question that supposed GOP super patriots need to be asking themselves. 

National Security Officers Are Worried About Trump's Ties to Russia

The 1959 novel, The Manchurian Candidate is a political thriller about the son of a prominent U.S. political family who is brainwashed into being an unwitting assassin for a Communist conspiracy, the goal being the overthrow of the United States' constitutional government.  Now, we find ourselves face with a presidential candidate with strong financial ties to Russian oligarchs and Russian dictator, Vladimir Putin who voluntarily may be willing to sabotage our government for personal enrichment and satisfaction of his insatiable ego.   As more news outlets fortunately are picking up on the Russian hacking of the DNC and Trump's dependence on Russian financing since he has been cutoff by American banks, some in the national intelligence community are fearful of Trump gaining access to intelligence materials, especially those relating to Russia and Putin's never ending machinations and intrigue.   Both Huffington Post and The Daily Beast looks at the issue and the FBI's view that Wikileaks effort was facilitated by Russia and may have been aimed at electing Donald Trump in November.  First these highlights from The Daily Beast:

The FBI suspects that Russian government hackers breached the networks of the Democratic National Committee and stole emails that were posted to the anti-secrecy site WikiLeaks on Friday. It’s an operation that several U.S. officials now suspect was a deliberate attempt to influence the presidential election in favor of Donald Trump, according to five individuals familiar with the investigation of the breach.

The theory that Moscow orchestrated the leaks to help Trump, who has repeatedly praised Russian President Vladimir Putin and practically called for the end of NATO, is fast gaining currency within the Obama administration because of the timing of the leaks and Trump’s own connections to the Russian government, the sources said on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing and developing quickly.

Current and former U.S. officials drew analogies to so-called “active measures campaigns,” or state-sponsored operations designed for political effects.

“The release of emails just as the Democratic National Convention is getting underway this week has the hallmarks of a Russian active measures campaign,” David Shedd, a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told The Daily Beast. Shedd said that additional leaks were likely, echoing an opinion expressed by U.S. officials and experts who said that the release of emails on Friday may just be an opening salvo.

Officials also noted Trump’s own connections to the Russian government. . . . One of Trump’s top national security advisers, retired Army Gen. Michael Flynn, sat with Putin at a dinner celebrating the 10th anniversary of Kremlin-backed media network RT and was paid to give a speech at the event; Flynn later re-tweeted an anti-Semitic message that called into question any Kremlin-Trump link. Another Trump adviser, Carter Page, recently denounced America’s “often-hypocritical focus on democratization” while in Moscow. And last week, Trump said that he might not come to the aid of U.S. NATO allies in the face of Russian aggression unless they paid what he thinks they owe for Europe’s common defense.

Officials also thought it was telling that the emails were given to WikiLeaks, which is perceived as being hostile to the U.S. government. “This wasn’t surprising to us,” said one U.S. official familiar with the investigation. 

"If the hack is linked to Russian actors, it would not be the first time cyber intrusions linked to the Kremlin and its supporters have sought to influence the political process in other countries,” Rep. Adam Schiff said in a statement. “Given Donald Trump’s well known admiration for Putin and his belittling of NATO, the Russians have both the means and the motive to engage in a hack of the DNC and the dump of its emails prior to the Democratic Convention. That foreign actors may be trying to influence our election—let alone a powerful adversary like Russia—should concern all Americans of any party." 

If the worse suspicions prove true, the irony will be that Trump is playing right wing nutcases' xenophobia even as he may be preparing to sell out America and European allies.  Never forget that with Trump the ONLY thing that matters is himself and his ego and self-enrichment.  

Huffington Post has these additional highlights:

Members of the intelligence community are worried that Donald Trump ― who has deep ties to Russia and is apparently the preferred presidential candidate of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin ― could have access to highly classified national security briefings as early as Friday.

Trump and presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton will begin receiving the briefings after the Democratic National Convention ends on Thursday, ABC News reported Monday. As the Republican nominee for president, Trump is now among a handful of people who do not hold a security clearance but have the potential to get these briefings. But he also has closer ties to a foreign government than perhaps any presidential candidate in recent history.

Trump has called for following Moscow’s lead on various global issues and questioned whether it’s necessary for the U.S. to always defend other members of NATO, the alliance created during the Cold War to protect American partners from an expansionist Soviet Union. His rhetoric about foreign policy neatly matches the message coming out of Moscow: that America has little need for its long-time partners in Europe ― particularly in NATO ― or elsewhere, and that the U.S. should have less influence internationally. Trump has extensive business and financial ties to Russia.

“Never have we had a candidate so tied to a foreign power, especially one that is so hostile to the U.S. in many ways, and one that is actively messing with our election,” said one former senior intelligence official. “Many [in the intelligence community] don’t care about U.S. politics and pride themselves on being nonpartisan, but the ties to Russia are deeply disturbing.”

“The notion that the Trump team could request intel briefings on Russia when they clearly have close ties is horrifying, especially after the DNC leak,” said the former intelligence official.

Be very, very afraid.

Bradley Manning Makes His Statement on Why He Exposed War Crimes

As the title of this post indicates, I believe some of the information released by Bradley Manning exposed war crimes committed by American military personnel. And it is because of some of the horrific American wrongdoing exposed in my opinion that the military has been so Hell bent to persecute Manning.  Watch the video above from the Press Freedom Foundation which has some on Manning's statement superimposed underneath and I would argue any moral, decent person would have felt the need to expose these murders and hopefully prevent further atrocities.  A full audio of Manning's over 1 hour statement is here.  Here is a portion of the statement made by the Press Freedom Foundation:

The information provided by Manning has uncovered stories of wrongdoing by the United States, as well as by leaders and politicians around the world. The cables were reportedly one of the catalysts that led to the Arab Spring and sped up the end of the Iraq War. To this day, more than two years after their release, the information provided by Manning is used every day by journalists and historians in major publications are the world to enlighten and inform the public, both in the United States and around the world. In a time when the extent and reach of U.S. government secrecy is unprecedented, and there are credible reports that the government has abused its secrecy and classification systems to cover up numerous illegal and unconstitutional activities, Manning’s actions should be seen as an overdue sliver of sunlight into an overly secret system rather than as a basis for a prosecution seeking decades of imprisonment.

By releasing this audio recording, we wish to make sure that the voice of this generation's most prolific whistleblower can be heard—literally—by the world.

Regardless of whether one believes that Manning’s acts were right or wrong or a mix of both, he has taken responsibility for them by pleading guilty to ten charges, for which he faces up to twenty years in prison. The government however, is continuing to pursue all of the charges against him, including charges under the Espionage Act and "aiding the enemy" —which could have huge consequences for press freedom and the First Amendment. The ACLU has expressed concern that this "aiding the enemy" charge could criminalize speech for all sorts of active military members, noting that "In its zeal to throw the book at Manning, the government has so overreached that its ‘success’ would turn thousands of loyal soldiers into criminals."

And Harvard Law professor Yochai Benkler has argued that this prosecution could decimate national security journalism by outlawing whole categories of journalist-source relationships in the future: "[T]he prosecutors seem bent on using this case to push a novel and aggressive interpretation of the law that would arm the government with a much bigger stick to prosecute vaguely-defined national security leaks, a big stick that could threaten not just members of the military, but civilians too."

 Here is a portion of Manning's statement in connection with the video clip above (I find the mindset exhibited by the weapons team deeply disturbing): 

"At first I did not consider the video very special, as I have viewed countless other war porn type videos depicting combat. However, the recording of audio comments by the aerial weapons team crew and the second engagement in the video of an unarmed bongo truck troubled me ...

It was clear to me that the event happened because the aerial weapons team mistakenly identified Reuters employees as a potential threat and that the people in the bongo truck were merely attempting to assist the wounded. The people in the van were not a threat but merely "good samaritans." The most alarming aspect of the video to me, however, was the seemly delightful bloodlust they appeared to have."

Is Manning a criminal and traitor or is  he a patriot who wanted to prevent heinous crimes.  Readers will have to decide for themselves.   For my part, those prosecuting Manning do not seem to care about morality and decency whatsoever otherwise they would be prosecuting the members of the weapons team.
 

Bradley Manning: Traitor or Hero?

As the prosecution of Bradley Manning continues to unfold for his alleged crime of aiding the enemy, one thing is becoming increasingly clear: George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and other high ranking officials of the Bush/Cheney regime should be on trial for war crimes.  Among the things that the documents traced to Manning indicate that torture and repeated violations of the Geneva Conventions occurred - i.e., the same things that led to imprisonment and execution for some of the leaders of the Nazi and Japanese governments after World War II.  And as Andrew Sullivan notes the credit for the exposure of these crimes is because of Manning.  Indeed, Andrew notes:

How did we find all this out? Bradley Manning’s leaks. Sometimes a whistleblower is not only a traitor. He can also be a patriot, uncovering war crimes. 

I for one view Manning as a patriot.  And the fact that the military and the Obama administration are so hot to crucify Manning shows that Manning's real offense was to document just how morally bankrupt the Bush/Cheney regime really was.  If Obama had any guts, he'd open the door for criminal prosecutions of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and others who committed nothing short of war crimes.  Naturally, much of the investigative work on these crimes is being done by the foreign media.  Here's more from Andrew's post:

The Guardian, in a 15-month investigation, has unearthed the fact that Donald Rumsfeld brought veterans from the dirty wars in Latin America, Colonel James Steele and Colonel James H Coffman, to empower sectarian warfare against the Sunni insurgency in Iraq. He set up detention centers for Sunni insurgents that were run by Iraqis but monitored and checked on by two men, one of whom reported to Rumsfeld, the other to Petraeus. So we have the first solid evidence that Petraeus, the golden mediocrity of Washington, was also an abetter of the worst forms of torture imaginable:

“Every single detention centre would have its own interrogation committee,” claimed [Iraqi General Muntadher] al-Samari, who worked with Petraeus’ and Rumsfeld’s designated men on the ground] … “Each one was made up of an intelligence officer and eight interrogators. This committee will use all means of torture to make the detainee confess like using electricity or hanging him upside down, pulling out their nails, and beating them on sensitive parts.” There is no evidence that Steele or Coffman tortured prisoners themselves, only that they were sometimes present in the detention centres where torture took place, and were involved in the processing of thousands of detainees.

But reporters witnessed horrifying war crimes in US-occupied Iraq, under the authority of those reporting directly to Rumsfeld and Petraeus:

Samari claimed that torture was routine in the commando-controlled detention centres. “I remember a 14-year-old who was tied to one of the library’s columns. And he was tied up, with his legs above his head. Tied up. His whole body was blue because of the impact of the cables with which he had been beaten.”

Gilles Peress, a photographer, came across Steele when he was on assignment for the New York Times, visiting one of the commando centres in the same library, in Samarra. “We were in a room in the library interviewing Steele and I’m looking around I see blood everywhere.”

The reporter Peter Maass was also there, working on the story with Peress. “And while this interview was going on with a Saudi jihadi with Jim Steele also in the room, there were these terrible screams, somebody shouting ‘Allah, Allah, Allah!’. But it wasn’t kind of religious ecstasy or something like that, these were screams of pain and terror.”

And we wonder why America's image has fallen abroad.   I would argue that those who authorized these crimes deserve to be on trial far more than Bradley Manning.  Oh yes, the Republicans would scream and shriek.  But as the evidence was rolled out, I suspect that the American public would be repulsed by what the GOP rubber stamped during the Bush/Cheney years.  It's truly ugly, but Americans need to know what was done allegedly in their name.