[Wash Times] Hillary Clinton’s sit-down with the FBI snapped the political world to attention over the sleepy July Fourth holiday weekend, with Democrats saying charges are outside "the realm of possibility" and Republicans signaling the same, yet only because they think the Justice Department will not hurt President Obama’s handpicked successor.
Mrs. Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, submitted to an interview with the FBI on Saturday as the Obama administration was nearing completion of its investigation into her exclusive use of a secret email server while she was secretary of state.
The Clinton campaign confirmed the "voluntary" interview, which took place at FBI headquarters in Washington and lasted more than three hours.
"It was something I had offered to do since last August. I’ve been eager to do it and I was pleased to have the opportunity to assist the department in bringing its review to a conclusion," Mrs. Clinton told MSNBC after her sit-down with authorities.
Her campaign said she doesn’t plan to comment further "out of respect for the investigative process."
Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, cited unidentified sources and professed to have inside knowledge of the investigation’s outcome: no charges.
He appeared to be angling for a political boost no matter what the FBI recommends. If Mrs. Clinton is indicted, she might be nudged out of the race. If she isn’t, he can cry malfeasance.
"Like I said, the system is totally rigged!" he said on Twitter.
#1
Trump senior adviser Paul Manafort has undoubtedly advised him not to count on a Hildebeest indictment. With all that we have seen over the past 12 months, I would consider this very prudent guidance.
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.
We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
[DAWN] A slaughter of foreign hostages has put Bangladesh firmly on the frontline of the global war on terror despite government efforts to portray a campaign of attacks as the work of domestic opponents, according to analysts.
Several dozen people have been killed by bully boyz in Bangladesh in the last two years, the victims including mainly local atheist bloggers, Hindus, gay activists and liberal academics.
But while those attacks generated few column inches beyond Bangladesh,
...we've been following events, but Rantburg is a very small market...
We're not small, we're selective...
this weekend's hostage siege in a Dhaka cafe led news bulletins around the world, attracting the kind of attention its perpetrators had long been craving.
Analysts said the choice of venue, target, timing and method of killing were all designed to maximise publicity for bully boyz who were well aware of the outrage that greeted recent massacres in Orlando and Gay Paree.
Eighteen of the 20 civilians who were killed in the Holey Artisan Bakery were foreigners. Nearly all were hacked to death with machetes, even though the hostage-takers had plenty of firearms.
The attack was even more shocking as it came on the final weekend of Ramazan, with survivors describing how the hostage-takers made clear their targets were non-Moslems, separating locals from the foreigners.
Around 90 per cent of Bangladesh's 160 million people are Moslems but the state is officially secular.
"By hacking people to death... they wanted to show the world that they can go to any extent for jihad," said K G Suresh, a senior fellow at New Delhi's Vivekananda International Foundation think-tank.
"Once they attack a restaurant popular with foreigners on a Friday night their message is clear who they want to go after. By sparing Moslems, they wanted to send out the message that they are only against Westerners."
According to the monitoring group SITE, the bully boyIslamic State ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not really Moslems.... organization grabbed credit for the attack which it said had targeted "citizens of crusader states".
Posted by: Fred ||
07/04/2016 00:00 ||
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Top|| File under: Islamic State
#1
We're not small, we're selective...
Way off topic, but you know, Groucho would have been a hell of a MOD
BLUF: [NYT] In the late 1970s, the F.C.C. put into place a minority ownership policy that used credits and deferrals on capital gains taxes to help make minority businesses more competitive in the bidding process and promote the sale of existing stations to minorities.
The policy, while not without critics, was largely considered a success among advocates of minority ownership. But in 1995, after a Supreme Court ruling that established new standards for race-based government policies, the F.C.C. began to disassemble the program. A year later, Congress ended the tax-deferral policy that had helped drive sales to minorities. It also did away with most restrictions on the number of radio stations a single company could own. The market for Chinese chamber pots continues to slip as well.
The resulting wave of consolidation in the broadcast industry has made it more difficult for black entrepreneurs to enter the industry, said Alfred C. Liggins III, the president and chief executive of Radio One, which while publicly traded is the country’s largest black-controlled multimedia company.
"That means that the likelihood that minority owners are going to own a TV station in New York or Los Angeles gets lower and lower," said Mr. Liggins, whose mother founded the company with a single radio station in 1980.
For Johnson Publishing, which also owns the Fashion Fair cosmetics line, pressures on the business proved too difficult to overcome. In the last several years, it sold its historic building on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, brought on JPMorgan Chase as a minority investor and reduced its staff.
"We did not feel that we had adequate capital and resources," said Cheryl Mayberry McKissack, who was chief operating officer of Johnson Publishing and is now chief executive of Ebony Media Operations.
Yet as stories like Johnson Publishing’s have become more common across the industry, those who see their companies as following in its footsteps say the notion of black ownership continues to resonate.
Mr. Williams, who referred to Ebony as "a staple" of his upbringing, said that young African-Americans regularly expressed awe that he, a black man, really owned television stations.
"It does change the dynamic," he said, "of what they believe they can become."
TAKEAWAY: Without government subsidy and intervention, free-market forces eventually prevail.
In the three years since Edward Snowden landed in Moscow, his relationship with his hosts has been a source of much speculation and controversy. The American IT contractor, who worked for the CIA and NSA until he fled Hawaii with more than a million purloined secret files, has not left Russia since he arrived at Sheremetyevo airport on 23 June 2013, on a flight from Hong Kong. On the run from prosecution in the USA, Snowden received asylum from Vladimir Putin. Although Snowden recently indicated he would like a pardon from President Barack Obama before he leaves office in January, there’s no indication that will happen. The White House only a month ago explained that it considers Snowden to be a criminal, so any pardon seems like a fantasy.
Then there is the messy question of Snowden’s ties with the Kremlin. To anybody acquainted with the world of espionage, particularly when it involves Russians, Snowden is a defector and his collaboration with Moscow’s security agencies is a sure thing – as I explained recently. Experts on the Kremlin’s powerful intelligence apparatus, what Russians call the “special services,” have no doubt that collaboration is a matter of simple quid pro quo. Any Western intelligence official who receives sanctuary in Russia will share what he knows with his hosts: there is no choice in the matter.
Snowden and his representatives have insisted that he is no collaborator. The official story is that Snowden arrived in Moscow with none of the classified documents he stole from NSA, and he refused to share secrets with Russian intelligence. According to Wikileaks, which told Snowden to flee to Moscow, the defector was approached by Russian spies after his arrival in their country, but refused to spill secrets. Since Wikileaks itself is now more or less openly a front for the Kremlin, with its head Julian Assange mouthing pro-Putin propaganda with increasing frequency, there’s no reason to take its claims about Snowden seriously – particularly given Assange’s admitted role in getting the American to Moscow in the first place.
Continued on Page 49
[DAWN] DECIPHERING the foreign policy and national security statements of the PML-N government is becoming an increasingly odd affair. There is the known, but unacknowledged, gap between the priorities and preferences of the political government and the military leadership.
There is also the pressure that the civilian foreign policy advisers of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif ... served two non-consecutive terms as prime minister, heads the Pakistain Moslem League (Nawaz). Noted for his spectacular corruption, the 1998 Pak nuclear test, border war with India, and for being tossed by General Musharraf... appear to be under from the military to publicly articulate and defend policies that are crafted in GHQ.
But vastly experienced civilians, like foreign affairs adviser Sartaj PrunefaceAziz ...Adviser to Pak Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on National Security and Foreign Affairs, who believes in good jihadis and bad jihadis as a matter of national policy... , appear to be adding to the confusion rather than trying to find a consistent and defendable line on vital issues.
Consider Mr Aziz’s latest pronouncement: citing fears about so-called blowback from turban groups, the foreign affairs adviser appeared to defend the state’s lack of action against sanctuaries of the Haqqani network and the Afghan Taliban on Pak soil.
While Mr Aziz made familiar reference to the state’s decision that action against turban groups should follow some kind of sequence, he appeared to suggest that decisions have yet to be made regarding "how far" and on "what scale" the state will eventually act against some groups.
Has Mr Aziz backtracked on the state’s explicit commitment that there will no longer be a policy of differentiating between so-called good and bad Taliban?
That would be an alarming and astonishing reversal made all the worse by the casual -- almost careless -- manner in which the remarks were given. Perhaps Mr Aziz was hoping to pre-empt pressure from a delegation of US senators visiting Pakistain.
But the foreign adviser’s remarks to a wire agency require immediate and emphatic clarification -- does the state of Pakistain adhere to a policy of not differentiating between so-called good and bad Taliban?
And, if so, what is the strategy to progressively act against all turban groups that have found sanctuary on or are operating from Pak soil?
Surely, the remarks of a bigwig such as Mr Aziz cannot simply be dismissed as a misstatement or a bungled attempt at explaining existing policy.
The existing policy -- reinforced time and again since the start of Operation Zarb-e-Azb ..the Pak offensive against Qaeda in Pakistain and the Pak Taliban in North Wazoo. The name refers to the sword of the Prophet (PTUI!)... and enshrined in the National Action Plan -- is to treat all turban groups as a problem that must be solved by eventual elimination.
That policy clarity matters, even if operational and strategic choices so far do not immediately reflect that.
To reiterate, the security of Pakistain and the region lies in an unambiguous policy against militancy and terrorism in all their manifestations by all countries.
Pakistain’s pledge to try and deliver the Afghan Taliban to the negotiating table should not be allowed to become a reason to differentiate between turban groups over the long term.
What threatens the stability of Afghanistan inevitably threatens the stability of Pakistain -- the security establishment and politicianship here cannot lapse into old, damaging habits of denial and obfuscation.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/04/2016 00:00 ||
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Top|| File under: Govt of Pakistan
[RUDAW.NET] As we are getting closer to the djinn-infested Mosul ... the home of a particularly ferocious and hairy djinn... operation there is a continued traffic of international, regional and local delegations to Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan Region. Erbil has become a hub for meetings and discussions on the future of Mosul. This is telling us that Erbil is a neutral and reliable actor in the saga of Mosul and its possible liberation. Although Mosul is an Iraqi city because of its biased position Baghdad does not seem to be the preferred choice of planning.
In a meeting hosted by the Erbil-based Middle East Research Institute (MERI) last month representatives of the US, UK, EU, UN, KRG and Mosul provincial council discussed and exchanged views on the final operation and what the future Mosul should be like. All participants agreed that such gatherings were crucial especially on the issue of the future administration of Mosul.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Fred ||
07/04/2016 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
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Top|| File under: Islamic State
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.
[Wash Times] Hillary Clinton’s sit-down with the FBI snapped the political world to attention over the sleepy July Fourth holiday weekend, with Democrats saying charges are outside "the realm of possibility" and Republicans signaling the same, yet only because they think the Justice Department will not hurt President Obama’s handpicked successor.
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
In the three years since Edward Snowden landed in Moscow, his relationship with his hosts has been a source of much speculation and controversy. The American IT contractor, who worked for the CIA and NSA until he fled Hawaii with more than a million purloined secret files, has not left Russia since he arrived at Sheremetyevo airport on 23 June 2013, on a flight from Hong Kong. On the run from prosecution in the USA, Snowden received asylum from Vladimir Putin. Although Snowden recently indicated he would like a pardon from President Barack Obama before he leaves office in January, there’s no indication that will happen. The White House only a month ago explained that it considers Snowden to be a criminal, so any pardon seems like a fantasy.
There is also the pressure that the civilian foreign policy advisers of Prime Minister 
