Author: Spencer

Former Sec. of State Hillary Clinton testified before the House Select Committee on Benghazi yesterday. Aside from the partisan nature of many of the Representatives’ remarks (of both parties), today’s questioning in the morning session was handicapped by a limited scope — events in Benghazi and the State Department in the months leading up to the attack. But despite the narrow focus, a few useful things were brought out in the questioning, if not in the answers.

Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) tried to get to the big picture: why the U.S. was involved in Libya in the first place? Why the regime-change policy there?  But even here, the question was too narrow, allowing Clinton to get away with her now-standard story line about Qaddafi’s threats to exterminate those opposing him, then Europeans and Arab leaders imploring the U.S. to stop him, and President Obama’s decision to support “our European allies.” The proper starting point is not Libya, but at least President Obama’s 2010 speeches in Cairo and elsewhere about authoritarian Muslim leaders being out of step with history, and the Obama Administration’s support for “civil society” organizations which drove “Arab Spring.” Thus Clinton could start her story with Qaddafi’s threats against the opposition, without the prior chapter telling how the “civil society” cannon fodder was set to take the casualties against dictators, yielding a “bloody shirt” to wave at the bad guys.

Roskam persisted, to his credit. After Clinton’s description of the Administration’s heroic effort, he asked Clinton about the significant opposition to a Libya intervention from people within the State Department, citing in particular Steven Mull, Executive Secretary of the Department of State, having said that even with the best of intentions, such military interventions rarely work out favorably for U.S. interests. Roskam continued that line of questioning, painting Clinton as having successively overcome such opposition at State, the White House (citing Biden, Gates, and the NSC), the U.N. (preventing a Russian veto), and the Arab League (with her recruiting the head of the League to her cause).

Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) pointed what is actually Obama’s criminal responsibility for the Benghazi killings, by showing that a person, Wissam bin Hamid, described in a 9/11/12 cable from Amb. Stevens as having met with State’s representatives in Benghazi within 48 hours of the attack to discuss their security, had been described in a U.S. government report a month before as having fought in Iraq for al Qaeda.

Not stated was that this al Qaeda leader was the had of the Obama-supported group (Ansar al-Sharia) purportedly providing security to the US Embassy.

Also of note was the questioning of Clinton by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), beginning with his assertions that in the early hours of the attack, there were no references in U.S. government documents to a video, no mention of a protest demonstration in Benghazi. Jordan asked rhetorically, where did the fake narrative start? He noted that Sec. Clinton had made a statement at 10:08 pm on the night of the attack, about a video. Clinton’s explanation was, that the demonstrations and attacks at the Cairo and Tunis embassies that day were explicitly about the blasphemous video, and her statement was intended to put government leaders across the region on notice that they should not allow the video to be used as an excuse for further attacks on U.S. embassies.

Not satisfied this was the whole story, Jordan displayed and read some of Clinton’s emails from the night of 9/11/12, to her family, to the President of Libya, and the Prime Minister of Egypt, which variously said that these were planned terrorist attacks and/or citing al Qaeda involvement. Five days later, Susan Rice went on the Sunday talk shows asserting that it all grew out of a demonstration in Benghazi against the video. Clinton gave a “fog of war” answer, about different information having been received and investigated by the intelligence community, without explaining her apparent certainty in the emails about what had happened in Benghazi. Rep. Jordan gave his hypothesis that what was going on with the public statements was driven by the importance to the Obama Administration, in the middle of a re-election campaign, of its supposed success in Libya.

The climax of this line of question was later, when a Congresswoman asked Hillary whether she had spoken to Obama that evening.  “Yes,” she responded.  She refused to answer the next question: “What did he say to you?”

The topic of this year’s annual conference of the Valdai Discussion Club in Sochi, Russia, keynoted by President Vladimir Putin, is “Societies Between War and Peace: Overcoming the Logic of Conflict in Tomorrow’s World.”

On the podium with Putin were Reagan’s Ambassador to Moscow, Jack Matlock, former Czech President Vaclav Klaus, and Speaker of the Iranian Majlis Ali Larijani.  Each of them also addressed the session, although their remarks are not yet available.

Their presence links the Valdai event with today’s Vienna meeting of the US, Russian, Turkish, and Saudi Foreign Ministers on Syria.  EIR’s sources say that Kerry and Lavrov inclined towards inviting Iran to that meeting, but decided against doing so until certain internal disputes are first settled within Iran. They also discussed inviting Jordan and Egypt, which are leading Sunni powers,— like Turkey in that respect,— but which support the Russian mission against terrorism in Syria.  Egypt’s support for the Russian mission has been open and explicit from the first moment.  Jordan’s support is tacit, but well-known.

Putin’s opening address has only been partly published in English.  In the opening segments, he warned against the “concept of the so-called disarming first strike,” and said that some probably have the “illusion that victory of one party in a world conflict was again possible,— without irreversible, unacceptable, as experts say, consequences for the winner, if there ever is one….  The threshold for the use of force has gone down noticeably.”

Later, he asked,

Oct. 20—U.S. Senator Mike Gravel of Alaska (1969-1981) denounced the Obama Administration’s policy of killing civilians and bystanders through “Drone Strikes planned by meetings of a very precise and elaborate command structure” involving CIA Director John Brennan and others, but which ultimately rests on President Obama personally.

In June 1971, Senator Gravel alone had the courage to read “The Pentagon Papers,” Daniel Ellsberg’s revelation of the lies told to the American public to hide the failure of the Vietnam War, into Congressional proceedings. At the time of Sen. Gravel’s exposure of the Vietnam War lies, both The New York Times and Washington Post had been enjoined by courts from publishing the papers, and Ellsberg threatened with criminal prosecution and prison. Today, there is no legal bar to publication of the “Drone Papers,” but the major press have refused to cover the story.

The following press release was made available to LaRouche PAC by U.S. Senator Mike Gravel (1969-1981)

The Intercept website’s “The Drone Papers” details the inner workings of the U.S. military assassination program in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia in murderous detail. “The Drone Papers,” provided by a second ‘Edward Snowden,’ are now getting traction inside the United States, despite the major media’s cover-up, with coverage picked up in Mother Jones, WIRED magazine, Small Wars Journal, and Lawfare, plus  British coverage in The Guardian and newspapers in Ireland.

Mother Jones headlined its coverage “A Massive National Security Leak Just Blew the Lid Off Obama’s Drone War.” It quotes The Intercept’s unnamed whistleblower, “This outrageous explosion of watchlisting—of monitoring people and racking and stacking them on lists, assigning them numbers, assigning them `baseball cards,’ assigning them death sentences without notice, on a worldwide battlefield—it was, from the very first instance, wrong.”

The story noted that Amnesty International has called for an immediate Congressional investigation into the entire drone program, arguing that the newly leaked documents “raise serious concerns about whether the USA has systematically violated International law, including by classifying unidentified people as ‘combatants’ to justify their killing.” There are now official U.S. military documents, the article noted, detailing the extent of the mass kill program (between Jan. 2012 and Feb. 2013, for example, 200 people were killed in drone strikes in northeastern Afghanistan, while only 35 people were named on the kill list). The Mother Jones story also  highlighted the fact that, in some instances, President Obama signed off on kill orders that did not even identify specific targets, but authorized drone attacks based on patterns of observed behavior by groups of people.

The Guardian highlighted the fact that President Obama has been lying in his claims that his drone program requires “near certainty” that there will be no civilian casualties. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, nearly 1,000 civilians have been killed in 421 drone strikes in Pakistan since 2004, and an estimated 200 children. Yet the drone program lists all unidentified civilians killed in combat as terrorists to cover up the fact that, in many areas where the drone program is operating, 90 percent of the people killed are not the approved targets.

At my first encounter with Barack Obama, at the first debate for the 2008 Democratic Presidential candidates in South Carolina in 2007, I questioned Obama’s commitment to using lethal force to take out terrorists, after Barack Obama stated that ‘There is no contradiction between us using our military and in some cases, lethal forms, to take out terrorists and building on alliances around the world…’ referring to Iran and the possibility of supporting Israel if it were threatened. Obama was somewhat embarrassed that he had made that connection. As he passed behind me after the debate’s conclusion, he angrily addressed me, ‘Who are you, Gravel, to question my morality in using nuclear missiles in a First Strike?’ Then, I did question his morality. Today, I point to Obama’s obvious immorality in using Drone strikes on innocent bystanders in drone missile attacks.

As is reported by some media, relatives of persons killed by U.S. drones are taking the responsible authorities and individuals to court, not only in the United States, but also in Germany, where German assistance in the drone warfare through the command and intelligence-gathering center at Rammstein is in the spotlight. For instance, the son of a Somali citizen killed by a drone in 2012 has filed a legal case in the court of Cologne; relatives of Yemeni drone victims have also filed cases in Germany. The government of Germany is charged with not only witting negligence in this practice of targetted killings, but also with violation of the European Human Rights Convention.

The case of Yemeni plaintiffs was turned down by the court in Cologne, which nonetheless ruled that in principle, Yemenis do have the right to life and deserve to have that respected outside of Germany, if German institutions are involved. The ruling, criticized by numerous legal experts, shows the court ducking the issue, but it implies nevertheless that Germany could be held responsible—however, only if the German role can be documented in concrete detail (which is extremely difficult as long as both the U.S. and German authorities continue stonewalling on the Ramstein issue). At least, the debate about the issue is on.

Besides former U.S. drone pilot Brandon Bryant, who testified just a week ago before the investigation committee of the Bundestag, another former U.S. drone pilot, Mark McCurley, has testified on the intense cooperation among the “Five Eyes” network of Western agencies and the phone- and wire-tapping operations. The data gathered by them provide the basis for composing the blacklists for targetted drone killings. The German government has known all that, but is covering up the role of German agencies, such as its foreign intelligence, BND, in assisting the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and other foreign agencies, in trying to suppress any public debate on the fact that Germany is not only a party that knows, but also one that is complicit in the drone warfare. Since the German Defense Ministry wants to invest in development of European drones, the question is posed, such that even the otherwise government-friendly Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung daily asked in a commentary on Oct. 19, whether that would lead to the German Chancellor one day giving her okay to targetted killings, as Barack Obama has done already today.

Lyndon LaRouche yesterday continued the two vital themes of the week: Obama, who is now thoroughly exposed as a mass killer, as the result of the Drone Papers, must be immediately removed from office; and Wall Street, which is hopelessly bankrupt, must be shut down altogether—without any compensation.

In a 2013 book-length account of the 2012 presidential campaign, authors Mark Halperin and John Heilemann quoted President Obama from a conversation with White House aides boasting, “Turns out I’m really good at killing people. Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine.” Obama made the remarks after a US drone strike killed a US citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. At no point has the White House attempted to refute the accuracy of the quote.

Had Congress and the American people listened to Lyndon LaRouche back in April 2009, when he first warned in a now-famous international webcast from Washington, that Obama was a dangerous narcissist in the tradition of Emperor Nero, much of the horror of the past seven years might have been averted, by immediate application of the 25th Amendment. More recently, LaRouche has underscored that Obama was turned into a cold killer early in his life, courtesy of his abusive step-father in Indonesia, who was part of the Suharto coup apparatus and death squads. “The step-father, who raised Obama during a formative period of his life, was a stone-cold killer, and it shows today in Obama’s fervor for killing,” LaRouche commented.

The challenge today is not to produce the evidence of Obama’s mass murderous crimes. The evidence is now on the public record, through the release of the Drone Papers and much more. The challenge, as LaRouche observed to his Policy Committee on Wednesday, is to ignite the American people, leading with the leading circles in Alexander Hamilton’s Manhattan, to force Congress to act before the United States is lost altogether. It is the bankruptcy of Congress, with very few exceptions, that is why Obama is still in office.

The other immediate task for a remoralized citizenry, is to shut down Wall Street. Wall Street is irreversibly bankrupt, and should be put out of its misery now. Through the reinstating of Glass-Steagall, the wiping out of Wall Street can be conducted in an orderly fashion, that avoids the chaos that will engulf the country if it is not re-enacted. With the quadrillions of dollars in derivatives and other unpayable gambling debts out of the way, the Hamiltonian solution, last expressed systematically in Franklin Roosevelt’s recovery program and build-up of the American Arsenal of Democracy, can be immediately implemented. The scale of the current collapse of the productive powers of the American people is much greater than the breakdown of the early Great Depression years, but the same Hamiltonian principles are as necessary today as they were at the time of Hamilton, John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, and FDR.

LaRouche emphasized that the United States has not had an effective presidency since Ronald Reagan. Bill Clinton attempted to be effective, but was stymied at every turn directly by the British. Under George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the real economy of the United States has been destroyed, at an accelerating rate. It is not too late to reverse that, but it must start with Obama’s removal and the wiping out of Wall Street.

As LaRouche reported on Tuesday in his policy statement on the 2016 presidential elections, the American people are desperate but showing signs of waking up to the need to act now.

The overwhelming majority of sane Americans reacted with horror and anger at the clown show of a Democratic Party presidential debate staged by CNN and Facebook on Tuesday, Oct. 13.  The disrespect for the institution of the presidency that was demonstrated by the manner in which the debate was engineered came close to matching the obscenity that has characterized the several Republican Party debates so far.
 
In response to an outpouring of support that I have received, by merely speaking the truth about these abominations, I must issue the following brief statement on the nature of our current national crisis and the proper framework for approaching this vital presidential election.
 
First, the defining issue for today is the fact that Wall Street is hopelessly, irreversibly bankrupt, and there can be no serious improvement in the conditions of life for the vast majority of Americans until Wall Street is shut down altogether.  The first and most immediate remedy for the bankruptcy of Wall Street is the reinstating of Glass Steagall.
 
The simple truth is that an honest appraisal of the disastrous collapse of real productivity in the US economy is that a large and growing majority of our fellow citizens are facing job loss, starvation, collapse of genuine health care services, the destruction of the educational system and an overall disintegration of basic infrastructure.  This has accelerated under the Barack Obama presidency, but it began before that, particularly during the George W. Bush terms in office.
 
Any attempt to dodge this fundamental truth during the now ongoing presidential campaigns, by appealing to “issues” or populist slogans, dooms the United States to total destruction in the very short term period ahead.
 
Wall Street must be shut down totally.  The entire Wall Street system is bankrupt.  It must be ended.  Then, we must do what Franklin Roosevelt did to overcome the Great Depression.  Today, we face an even greater challenge, due, in part, to the decades of collapse of the productive powers of labor in this nation.  Shut down Wall Street now, reinstate Glass Steagall as a means of reconstituting viable commercial banking, and then begin a program of Federal credit to revive the productive economy, through capital investment in infrastructure and other vital programs.  We must begin to reverse the collapse of our industrial economy, and we must train a new generation of young people to develop the skills to function in a modern, technology-intensive growing economy.
 
This is what the 2016 presidential candidates must address.  Any attempt to divert from this essential agenda is tantamount to surrendering to Wall Street and those who would see the United States disintegrate altogether. 
 
A segment of the American people, horrified by the clown show of last week, is demanding nothing less.  Any candidate who fails to meet this standard does not belong in the race.  This is not a popularity contest or a test of who can best pander to the worst pragmatic impulses of a beaten-down and terrified public.  This is an election that will determine whether or not the United States still has the moral fitness to survive.   
 
I hear the American people crying out for a future minus the scourge of Wall Street.  They deserve nothing less.

I want to help.

The Intercept website’s Drone Papers are now getting traction inside the United States, despite the fact that major media have so far covered up the story to protect Obama from impeachment and criminal prosecution.  Based on the evidence contained in the leaked documents and the investigation by The Intercept, President Obama, as Lyndon LaRouche has demanded, must be immediately removed from office and subjected to criminal prosecution for mass murder.  The International Court of Justice will undoubtedly, at some point, take up the issue of war crimes and crimes against humanity by Obama, based on the documentation in the leaked papers, showing he was at the head of an international assassination cabal, run out of the White House Situation Room, where he signed the kill orders.

The coverage of the Drone Papers has been picked up in Mother Jones, Wired Magazine, Small Wars Journal, and Lawfare, with British coverage in The Guardian and newspapers in Ireland.

Mother Jones headlined its coverage “A Massive National Security Leak Just Blew the Lid Off Obama’s Drone War.” It quotes The Intercept’s unnamed whistleblower, “This outrageous explosion of watchlisting—of monitoring people and racking and stacking them on lists, assigning them numbers, assigning them ‘baseball cards,’ assigning them death sentences without notice, on a worldwide battlefield—it was, from the very first instance, wrong.”

The story noted that Amnesty International has called for an immediate congressional investigation into the entire drone program, arguing that the newly leaked documents “raise serious concerns about whether the USA has systematically violated international law, including by classifying unidentified people as ‘combatants’ to justify their killing.”

There are now official U.S. military documents, the article noted, detailing the extent of the mass kill program (between Jan. 2012 and Feb. 2013, for example, 200 people were killed in drone strikes in northeastern Afghanistan, while only 35 people were on the kill list).

The Mother Jones story highlighted the fact that, in some instances, President Obama signed off on kill orders that did not even identify specific targets, but authorized drone attacks based on patterns of observed behavior by groups of people.

Wired Magazine headlined, “A Second Snowden Has Leaked a Mother Lode of Drone Docs,” noting that the second whistleblower had surfaced in the autumn of 2014, and had provided the wire diagram of the drone kill program, leading directly up to Obama.

The Guardian highlighted the fact that President Obama has been lying in his claims that the drone program requires “near certainty” that there will be no civilian casualties.  According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, nearly 1,000 civilians have been killed in 421 drone strikes in Pakistan since 2004, and an estimated 200 have been children.  Yet the drone program lists all unidentified civilians killed in combat as terrorists to cover-up the fact that, in many areas where the drone program is operating, 90 percent of the people killed are not the approved targets.

Gen. Charles Dunlap, a retired U.S. Air Force deputy judge advocate general of the U.S. Air Force and now a law professor at Duke University Law School, published in Small Wars Journal a review of the legal rationale for the program under the Obama’s War Powers claims; it is also excerpted in Lawfare.  Dunlap noted that the drone program has won significant domestic and international support, despite instances proving abuse.  He warned,

  That caveat has now been fulfilled in the Drone Papers. 

We’re taking a step closer to war…The Sunday Times

The genocidal British Empire has leapt into the breach, inside the U.S. and internationally, to try to rescue its puppet Barack Obama, who has been totally outflanked and outwitted by Russian President Vladimir Putin, thus putting the very existence of the British system on the chopping block.

Most dramatically, Democratic Presidential pre-candidate Bernie Sanders, who has been played by the media as the “leading opposition figure” to the current Washington administration, came out with a full-throated endorsement of Obama on national television on Sunday — on the eve of next Tuesday’s nationally televised debate of Democratic candidates. Sanders, proving himself a total British asset, pronounced that he has “enormous respect for Barack Obama… He helped me get elected and I work with him on many, many issues…. only very partisan people refuse to acknowledge reality, [that] our economy today is a heck of a lot better than it was when George W. Bush left office.” This, when the burning issue facing the country is returning to Glass-Steagall and wiping out Wall Street, and everything that the Bush and Obama administrations represent. It should not be surprising that, according to well-placed Washington sources and some media accounts, much of Sanders’s fundraising apparatus was seconded to him by Barack Obama.

Lyndon LaRouche yesterday described the Sanders development as “real ugly, bad news,” that reflects a shift underway by the British globally. He warned that we should expect further, “devilish” actions by Obama and his British sponsors, including assassinations of leading figures of countries that are working with Russian President Putin. “The British have nothing left, except actions such as that,” LaRouche emphasized. The British Empire is about to lose its very existence, so look for every imaginable kind of dirty business coming from those quarters, which have otherwise not been visibly active for a while.

When Obama gets in trouble he turns to the British, LaRouche stated, so expect dirty actions, including direct British deployments into the U.S. to try to reinforce the unstable Obama psychologically.

Also, notable in that regard is the weekend report in the Sunday Times of London that the British government has issued instructions to its pilots flying missions in Syria that authorize them to shoot down Russian planes under certain conditions: “If a pilot is fired on or believes he is about to be fired on, he can defend himself” [emphasis added]. The Russian Defense Ministry considered the press report to be serious enough to warrant summoning the British Defense Attache in Moscow to explain the matter.

“Don’t forget who Obama is,” LaRouche warned. He is a lying, murderous, Satanic figure. His record is known. “Obama has to be crushed,” LaRouche stated today. The only way to remove the danger of World War III is by removing Obama from the White House.

I’m in, let’s get him out.

Syrian ground forces, in coordination with the Russian air contingent based in Latakia, have launched an offensive against Islamist militant groups in Aleppo, Latakia, and Hama provinces.  News reports indicate that the offensive began Wednesday, following the cruise missile strikes launched from Russian ships in the Caspian Sea.  The Chief of Staff of the Syrian Army, Gen. Ali Abdullah Ayoub, went on Syrian TV yesterday to report that the army has “taken the reins of military operations,” to form the 4th Assault Corps, in the aftermath of Syrian and Russian air strikes that have killed hundreds of terrorists in the three aforementioned provinces.  According to the official SANA news agency, Ayoub announced that the Syrian armed forces started a large-scale assault today, aimed at uprooting the gatherings of terrorists and expelling them from the areas and towns which have been suffering the woes and crimes of terrorism.

According to the Wall Street Journal, citing a rebel commander in the area, the Syrian ground assault began at daybreak yesterday, on multiple fronts, with airstrikes and a barrage of rocket and artillery fire.

The Russian Defense Ministry reported today that its jets in Syria had hit 27 targets in 22 sorties overnight.  “The [russian] bombers targeted eight militant strongholds in the province of Homs.  The militants’ fortifications were completely destroyed by the strikes,” said Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov.