International, Liberty, Socialism/Communism, Socialist Opinion Shapers »
Edward Snowden Labeled a Modern-day Alger Hiss By: Cliff KincaidAccuracy in Media
In remarks prepared for delivery on Thursday night to the “Pumpkin Papers Irregulars” dinner in Washington, D.C., Kyl said, “As with Hiss, many in the public seem to be confused about whether Snowden is a ‘hero’ or a ‘traitor,’ with many, especially young people, more worried about the National Security Agency than Edward Snowden. Much of this confusion is the fault of the same media that is reaping large financial windfalls from publishing highly damaging news articles and stories.”
Rejecting claims by some conservatives and libertarians that Snowden is a hero or whistleblower for stealing and releasing classified information, Kyl, who retired from the Senate after the 2012 election, said, “Heroes and whistleblowers don’t admittedly steal thousands of classified documents about some of NSA’s most sensitive collection activities, give copies of them to the media, flee to that bastion of personal and political freedom, the People’s Republic of China, and, in an irony to end all ironies, seek political asylum in Russia.”
Snowden gave much of the stolen material to Glenn Greenwald, who has now left the British Guardian newspaper to work for billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. Greenwald had been a regular participant in communist conferences, featuring Marxist enemies of the United States, and this month will speak to a conference of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Muslim Brotherhood front.
In comments that could be seen as directed toward some of his fellow Republicans, such as Senator Rand Paul (KY) or Rep. Justin Amash (MI), the former senator from Arizona said, “I don’t know whether I’m more dismayed by our failure to protect national secrets, the despicable actions of Snowden and Greenwald, or the naivety of many Americans and even leaders in their reaction to the disclosures.”
Amash, who has partnered with far-left Democratic Rep. John Conyers (MI) in a legislative effort to undermine the surveillance programs of the NSA, was a featured speaker at an anti-NSA rally on October 26 in Washington, D.C., in support of Snowden. The event was organized by the George Soros-funded Free Press group.
Senator Rand Paul jumped to Snowden’s defense as the disclosures were being made, even as the former NSA contractor was making his way to Moscow. Snowden has since been indicted for espionage and theft of government secrets.
The term “pumpkin papers” carries special significance for anti-communists and national security experts and analysts. It is a reference to microfilm copies of secret and stolen State Department documents given to Whittaker Chambers by State Department official Alger Hiss for transmission to the Soviet Union. They constituted absolute proof of Hiss’s guilt and role as a Soviet spy. Chambers broke with the Communist Party and wrote the classic book, Witness, about his conversion to the cause of freedom.
The “Pumpkin Papers Irregulars” dinner is held every year to pay tribute to Chambers and those who follow in his footsteps. One of those honored this year was Diana West, author of American Betrayal, about communist penetration of the U.S. government during and after World War II. She described the depth of the communist penetration, comparing it to the modern-day Muslim Brotherhood infiltration of the Obama administration, and the purging from intelligence and training materials of any negative comments about Islam.
Other speakers included author and veteran journalist M. Stanton Evans; Professor Paul Kengor, who wrote The Communist, about Barack Obama’s communist mentor; and Alfred S. Regnery, a former publisher of The American Spectator. Kengor paid tribute to William P. Clark, also known as “Bill Clark” or “Judge Clark,” a former top adviser to Ronald Reagan who passed away recently.
A highlight of the evening was Kenneth deGraffenreid announcing the nominees for the shameful “Victor Navasky Award,” named after the publisher emeritus of The Nation and representing indifference or blindness to the evils of totalitarianism. Navasky had famously asked the question, in regard to the Alger Hiss case, “Espionage, is it really so wrong?”
Among his various positions, deGraffenreid served as Senior Director of Intelligence Programs at the National Security Council from 1981-1987. While he introduced his remarks about the award and the nominees by saying, “this is all done in good humor,” his speech was a combination of jokes and serious warnings about national security problems and the people who had caused them.
For example, taking a cue from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who deflected questions about her responsibility for the deaths of four Americans at Benghazi, deGraffenreid listed other nominees for the Navasky Award and their anti-American activities, and jokingly posed the question, “What difference at this point does it make?”
For this audience, it makes all the difference in the world.
One of the runners up was “Sandinista and Cuba worshipper” Bill de Blasio, the Obama-backed Democratic “progressive” candidate for mayor of New York City. DeGraffenreid said de Blasio “…also has a soft spot for Islamic terrorists, vowing to dismantle the New York PD’s outstanding counter-terrorism program…”
But deGraffenreid saved a lot of invective for NSA leaker Edward Snowden, another nominee, calling him a “vain and impudent product of the moral nihilism produced by the American left’s 50 year assault on America, its values, its achievements, and its strengths.” He said Snowden is “as damaging a spy as any we have seen in the long history of betrayal.”
While it is possible the Obama administration could use the NSA for corrupt purposes against the American people, he said, “we must be crystal clear: Snowden is a premeditated calculating spy who defected to Russia and shared the secrets of America’s necessary intelligence capabilities—and by the way some of the crown jewels of our intelligence capabilities—with our enemies.”
He said Snowden’s “leak a week stories” are designed to inflict “maximum damage to U.S. national security,” which is why he has become “a hero and rallying symbol of the international and home grown anti-American left.”
DeGraffenreid predicted Snowden would one day meet with a terrible accident, perhaps by falling down a back stairway, “when he is no longer of use to the FSB,” the successor to the old Soviet KGB.
Still, Snowden didn’t win the Navasky award. Instead, it went to Saul Alinsky, author of Rules for Radicals, who has inspired such figures as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Obama himself had gotten the award two other years.
Kyl, who for personal reasons could not appear in person to deliver his speech, served in a series of top leadership posts in the Senate. He explained in his remarks that the classified programs that Snowden has willfully disclosed “are legal and have been subjected to some of the closest legislative, executive, and judicial branch scrutiny of any intelligence program in our nation’s history.”
He added, “If some of these programs had been in existence before 9/11, the attacks of that day may well have never happened. The foreign intelligence information from these programs has been used to disrupt terrorist plots against the United States and our allies.”
“My hope is that we will be blessed with leaders with the uncommon courage of Whittaker Chambers; leaders who can help us bring Edward Snowden, our modern-day Alger Hiss, to justice,” Kyl said. “For as much harm as Hiss did to our country and to patriots like Chambers, we are just beginning to understand the breadth and depth of damage Snowden and his cohorts have done and are doing to our country. Our work is to testify that this is wrong and it must not be made worse by taking the easier political course” of making changes to the NSA in response to the media’s sensational but misleading coverage of the agency.
The former senator said he is aware of legislative maneuvers to gut the NSA’ s surveillance programs by repealing or prohibiting Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which permits the bulk collection of phone call data in the possession of third party telecommunications carriers.
One of those maneuvers, supported by Rep. Amash, is the so-called USA Freedom Act, also known as H.R. 3361.
If that section is modified so that it can no longer be used to collect bulk data, Kyl said, “That would deprive the Intelligence Community of an important tool necessary to help identify terrorist networks or corroborate information about those networks from other intelligence sources.”
He said that “while there are a lot of emotional and purely hypothetical concerns about this bulk data collection, the fact is, there is no infringement of my privacy or the privacy of anybody else arising out of this program.”
He found it ironic that content collection is done by companies in the private sector which advise Internet users of products they may find interesting, based on previous buying patterns. “That is content collection by the private sector being acted upon, yet no one seems to be getting too upset about it,” he noted.
Kyl also warned against other proposed changes to NSA programs that would “make it harder for our intelligence professionals to gather or share information than it would for an ordinary criminal investigator” solving crimes. He also said our enemies should not be given “better insight into our intelligence sources and method” so they can take countermeasures against us.
Asia-Pacific, Barack Obama, Socialism/Communism, Socialist Opinion Shapers »
Cold War Redux: China’s Nuclear Counterbalance NoisyRoom.netBy: Terresa Monroe-Hamilton
Cross-Posted at Right Wing News
Image for Yu column Inside China Source: Global TimesIn the 50′s and 60′s, this threat by China would have put the U.S. on war footing. Now, we hear crickets not only from our military leaders, but the media and our political leadership. From The Washington Times:
On Monday, leading media outlets including China Central TV, the People’s Daily, the Global Times, the PLA Daily, the China Youth Daily and the Guangmin Daily ran identical, top-headlined reports about the “awesomeness” of the People’s Liberation Army navy’s strategic submarine force.
“This is the first time in 42 years since the establishment of our navy’s strategic submarine force that we reveal on such a large scale the secrets of our first-generation underwater nuclear force,” the Global Times said in a lengthy article titled “China for the First Time Possesses Effective Underwater Nuclear Deterrence against the United States.”
The article features 30 photos and graphics detailing, among other things, damage projections for Seattle and Los Angeles after being hit by Chinese nuclear warheads and the deadly radiation that would spread all the way to Chicago.
In this photo taken on Oct. 26, 2010, and released by the
Chinese Navy on Sunday, Oct. 27, 2013, a Chinese navy nuclear submarine
takes part in a nuclear safety drill at the Qingdao submarine base in
east China’s Shandong province. In a sign of growing confidence, China’s
navy gave Chinese media on Sunday unprecedented publicity on its first
nuclear submarine fleet, one of its most secretive military programs.
China is devoting increasing resources to its naval forces to safeguard
its maritime interests and assert its territorial claims. (AP Photo)If I have not sufficiently chilled you to the bone, I apologize. The Chinese are not bluffing:
Chinese calculations for nuclear attacks on the U.S. are chillingly macabre.Now, I want you to throw into the mix, the threat of EMPs. If it were me, I would launch those first and take out as much as I could that way to clear the path so to speak. Consider the fact that most of our electronics are manufactured by China. They claim to have embedded in our electronics ‘kill switches’ that can be triggered to cause failures and chaos. They also claim that they have back doors into our utility, communications, financial, military and Internet systems. You begin to see the trouble we are in and how negligent our military and leaders have also been.
“Because the Midwest states of the U.S. are sparsely populated, in order to increase the lethality, [our] nuclear attacks should mainly target the key cities on the West Coast of the United States, such as Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego,” the Global Times said.
“The 12 JL-2 nuclear warheads carried by one single Type 094 SSBN can kill and wound 5 million to 12 million Americans,” the Global Times reported.
China also has developed land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles — notably the DF-31A, which has a range of 7,000 to 7,500 miles.
“If we launch our DF 31A ICBMs over the North Pole, we can easily destroy a whole list of metropolises on the East Coast and the New England region of the U.S., including Annapolis, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Portland, Baltimore and Norfolk, whose population accounts for about one-eighth of America’s total residents,” the Global Times said.
All the state-run press reports stressed the point that the PLA’s missile submarines are now on routine strategic patrol, “which means that China for the first time has acquired the strategic deterrence and second strike capability against the United States.”
“Our JL-2 SLBMs have become the fourth type of Chinese nuclear missiles that threaten the continental United States, after our DF-31A, DF-5A and DF-5B ICBMs,” said the Global Times.
But wait… there’s more. A surveillance ship from China was spotted in Hawaiian waters for the first time. It is being described as an unprecedented move and as a provocative retaliation to the U.S. naval presence in the East China Sea. The ship is a 4,000 ton People’s Liberation Army electronic reconnaissance ship and was recently spotted near Hawaii within the U.S. 200-nautical mile EEZ (Exclusive Economic Zone). It is a spy ship and it got within 2400 miles of San Francisco.
Why all this, you might ask. Well, it is a message to the U.S. to let China do as she pleases or she will crush us. And Russia is right there with China. This is what you get when you gut your military and have a weak kneed President. From InfoWars:
China’s increasing aggressiveness in the East China Sea and its challenge to Japanese control of the Senkaku Islands has sparked tensions, with Japan repeatedly scrambling fighter jets earlier this week in response to Chinese military aircraft flying near Okinawa.Did anyone really believe that our enemies wouldn’t seize an opportunity to put America in her place? We have entered a Cold War Redux and China’s nuclear counterbalance is a terrifying warning shot off our bow. World War III is bearing down on America and our President is sacrificing us on a global Marxist altar. America needs to wake up and not be a lamb to the slaughter. If we fall, the rest of the free world will fall and a horrific darkness will descend on the U.S. Somebody better wake up the military and let them know we are being threatened by enemies who do not make idle threats and always, always keep their promises.
Back in September, China also reportedly sent warships to the coast of Syria to “observe” the actions of US and Russian vessels in the region.
“The recent deployment of a PLAN surveillance ship into Hawaiian waters is seen as Beijing’s message to the US and the rest of the world that China can now contest the waters of the western Pacific and that the US Navy no longer has a free pass in the region. It is also seen as a form of retaliation for what Beijing considers the provocative naval exercises the US recently conducted in the Yellow Sea jointly with the navies of South Korea and Japan’s Self-Defense Force,” states the report.
Barack Obama, Liberty, Socialism/Communism, Socialist Opinion Shapers »
Sat, Nov 2nd The Chattanooga TEA Party Welcomes Author Trevor Loudon and ‘The Enemies Within’ Pacific Freedom FoundationThe Chattanooga (TN) TEA Party welcomes a modern-day Paul Revere, Trevor Loudon! Bring your friends. This is too important to miss!
The book profiles fourteen Senators and more than fifty Representatives and their ties to the Communist Party USA, Democratic Socialists of America, Workers World Party and the Institute for Policy Studies, Council for a Livable World and other radical anti-American organizations. Trevor has done the hard work to connect the dots of why the U.S. Congress has moved further and further left over our lifetime and you won’t want to miss him.
We look forward to seeing you! Bring friends and family!
Chattanooga TEA Party
Saturday, Nov 2nd, 2013 | 6:30 pm — 8:30 pm
Western Sizzlin Steak and More
6021 Relocation Way
Ooltewah,Tennessee 37363
Barack Obama, Middle East, Radical Islam, Socialism/Communism, Socialist Opinion Shapers »
“60 Minutes” Reveals Little New in Benghazi Exposé By: Roger AronoffAccuracy in Media
The segment, which can be viewed online, interviews one “Morgan Jones,” a self-identified Blue Mountain security chief who was at an apartment 15 minutes away when the attack started at the Benghazi Special Mission Compound in Benghazi on September 11, 2012.
Jones raced to the compound, scaled the 12-foot wall, and attempted to enter the compound to assist those inside, but they had already been rescued by a CIA rapid-response team that included the now-deceased Tyrone Woods.
“[The attackers] said, ‘We’re here to kill Americans, not Libyans,’” recounts Jones in an emotional moment. “So they’d give them a good beating, pistol whip them, beat them with their rifle, and let them go.”
Other than Fox News, it appears that the major networks are largely ignoring the “60 Minutes” piece. Fox’s Adam Housley noted on air that he was in contact with Jones as late as last December, until Jones began asking for money to continue talking. Jones apparently was training the unarmed guards inside the compound, and he told Housley, “…the men were supposed to go away when this attack started because they didn’t have any guns or any weapons. They were there basically to keep the riffraff out.”
The “60 Minutes” story highlighted Morgan’s new book on his experience in Benghazi, The Embassy House: The Explosive Eyewitness Account of the Libyan Embassy Siege by the Soldier Who Was There, but they failed to acknowledge that the book was published by Simon & Schuster, which is a division of the CBS Corporation. Was that CBS’s way of compensating Morgan?
“This colors in some of the story, but it doesn’t advance the scandal,” comments Dave Weigel for Slate Magazine about Morgan’s account of the events that evening (emphasis in original). Why doesn’t the “60 Minutes” piece advance the scandal, you might ask? “But the report tells us more about what we’ve known for a year, and known in detail since the spring of 2013,” writes Weigel. He might have missed the part where Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Wood, who headed a Special Forces Site Security Team (SST) in Libya, told CBS’s Lara Logan that al Qaeda had posted online three threats: that they would attack the Red Cross, the British, and then the Americans in Benghazi. “They made good on two out of the three promises. It was a matter of time until they captured the third one,” said Wood. The Red Cross pulled out, as did the British after their ambassador survived an assassination attempt. Why didn’t the Americans pull out? Logan asks whether Washington was notified of these threats. “They [Washington] knew we monitored it. We included that in our reports to both State Department and DoD,” said Wood.
These reports were likely not just lost in the ether. Consider, for example, the State Department classified cable that said the Special Mission Compound could not defend against a “coordinated attack.” When asked about this cable, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin Dempsey testified that although he didn’t read the cable himself, he heard about it and it “bothered” him a “great deal.” Did Wood’s report likewise go up the chain of command? If not, why not?
Wood tells Logan in the interview that before he left Libya he told Ambassador Christopher Stevens in a meeting that he felt al Qaeda was in its final planning stages of an attack.
However, the “60 Minutes” report does not mention Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama once—failing to hold them culpable for the poor security, poor planning, and an unwillingness to recognize the deteriorating situation in Benghazi and pull their people out. “We had to make sure we weren’t used by anyone on the Left or the Right who had a political agenda,” said Logan for CBS. “So, we left about 98 percent of what we learned on the floor—didn’t even report it—because unless we could substantiate it with primary sources that we truly trusted and whose motivations we trusted, then we didn’t even go there.”
Speaking of leaving most of what they learned on the floor, astonishingly, CBS has recently again found new documents on the floor in the compound in Benghazi, that appear to have been classified material.
However, the “60 Minutes” segment does note that the White House was still arguing that the attack was prompted by the Innocence of Muslims film long after the evidence indicated a coordinated attack by al Qaeda. “Conservatives are apoplectic about Clinton’s public statements after the attack, which continued to mention the ‘Innocence of Muslims’ video, and did not lead with how terrorists had actually planned and executed an attack,” asserts Weigel.
The report also notes that that the CIA quick reaction force “ignored orders to wait” and went to assist the security guards at the Special Mission compound, and states that “the lingering question is why no larger military response ever crossed the border into Libya.”
It now turns out, according to a report in The Washington Times, that there were at least eight special operators on the ground in Tripoli, two of whom volunteered and flew the 400 miles from Tripoli to Benghazi to help rescue the people under attack at the CIA annex in Benghazi.
“The two special operations forces [Army Delta forces] arrived in time to engage in the final, ferocious firefight between the terrorists and Americans holed up in the CIA annex near the ill-fated diplomatic mission in Benghazi,” wrote Rowan Scarborough for the Times. Scarborough said his story shows that the military could have done more if they wanted to, since they arrived in Benghazi by plane.
Where are the questions about who knew what, at what time? The lack of a military response may be a “lingering question,” but CBS does not educate the viewer as to what forces were or were not available, glossing over this vital question. CBS calls this good journalism, for a report that was a year in the making. “CBS News, it should be noted, has been far more aggressive in pursuing the Benghazi story than its competitors…” writes John Hayward for Human Events.
As a result of the report, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) “tweeted Monday that he will block every one of President Obama’s nominees on the Senate floor until the administration discloses information about the survivors of last year’s attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya,” reported The Washington Post.
We hear that “60 Minutes” is planning additional stories on the Benghazi scandal in the near future. Hopefully, they will advance the story further, and attempt to hold senior people accountable.
Roger Aronoff is the Editor of Accuracy in Media, and can be contacted at roger.aronoff@aim.org. View the complete archives from Roger Aronoff.
No comments:
Post a Comment