1064 Trump tweet repudiating Mid-East wars is blacked out by Jewish-owned MSM which pushed for those wars

Trump tweet repudiating Mid-East wars is blacked out by Jewish-owned MSM
which pushed for those wars

Newsletter published on October 10, 2019

This newsletter is at http://mailstar.net/Trump-admits-War-Crime.doc

(1) Trump tweet repudiating Mid-East wars is blacked out by Jewish-owned
MSM which pushed for those wars
(2) MSM blacks out Trump tweet admitting criminality of Iraq war - wsws
(3) The Hill verifies Trump's tweet condemning US entry into Iraq War
(4) Staged melodrama, media hysteria, progressive demands
(5) Hillary recommends shredding the Constitution
(6) Democrats seek to abolish the Electoral College

(1) Trump tweet repudiating Mid-East wars is blacked out by Jewish-owned
MSM which pushed for those wars
- by Peter Myers, October 10, 2019

Thanks to the Trotskyist wsws website for drawing attention to the MSM
blackout on Trump's tweet admitting the criminality of US entry into the
Iraq War, and repudiating US entry into other Mid-East wars.

Even though the (Jewish-owned) MSM blacked the story out, minor US news
outlets including The Hill did report it - thus validating it, and
making the MSM blackout speak volumes.

Saddam was indicted for killing a small number of Iraqis; why then
should not Bush Jnr, Cheney, John Bolton and other US leaders -
including media bosses - be indicted for killing a million by invading
Iraq on false pretenses? At the behest of the Jewish lobby, it should be
added. Where is the "Jewish Internationalism" we hear so much about?
Where is the "Jewish Intellectual Aristocracy"?

Luckily Trump got rid of Bolton before he could incite any more wars.

Given Trump's admission, all other candidates for the 2020 election
should be judged on whether they, too, repudiate those wars that the
Jewish lobby has dragged us into.

Tulsi Gabbard and Bernie Sanders pass that test.

To test which US media published Trump's tweet, search Google for (NB:
include the quote marks; copy & paste the whole lot into your browser)
"United States has spent EIGHT TRILLION DOLLARS fighting"

If you do it today, you need not specify a time-period. But if you do it
a bit later, specify (e.g.) past week.

The NYT and the Washington Post blacked the tweet out. But don't take my
word - check for yourself.

(2) MSM blacks out Trump tweet admitting criminality of Iraq war - wsws

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/10/10/iraq-o10.html

Trump admits US killed millions in war based on lies

Bill Van Auken

10 October 2019

Amid the storm of denunciations—extending from right-wing Republicans to
the Democratic Party, the New York Times and the pseudo-left Jacobin
magazine—of his decision to pull US troops out of Syria, President
Donald Trump issued an extraordinary tweet on Wednesday in defense of
his policy:

"The United States has spent EIGHT TRILLION DOLLARS fighting and
policing in the Middle East. Thousands of our Great Soldiers have died
or been badly wounded. Millions of people have died on the other side.
GOING INTO THE MIDDLE EAST IS THE WORST DECISION EVER MADE ... IN THE
HISTORY OF OUR COUNTRY! We went to war under a false & now disproven
premise, WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION."

Trump’s Twitter account has dominated the US news cycle ever since he
took office. Tweets have introduced fascistic new policies on
immigration, announced the frequent firings of White House personnel and
cabinet members and signaled shifts in US foreign policy.

Last month, amid the mounting of an impeachment inquiry, which the
Democratic leadership in Congress has focused exclusively on "national
security" concerns stemming from Trump’s July 25 phone call with
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the US president set a new
personal record, tweeting 800 times.

Yet the corporate media has chosen to ignore Trump’s tweet on the
protracted US military intervention in the Middle East.

 From the standpoint of the bitter internecine struggle unfolding within
the US capitalist state, the tweet expresses the sharp divisions over US
global strategy. While those around Trump want to focus entirely on
preparation for confrontation with China, layers within the political
establishment and the military and intelligence apparatus see the
continuation of the US intervention to assert its hegemony over the
Middle East and countering Russia as critical for American imperialism’s
drive to impose its dominance over the Eurasian landmass.

But aside from these disputes over geo-strategic policy, the admission
by a sitting US president that Washington launched a war under a "false"
and "disproven" premise that ended up killing "millions" has direct
political implications, whatever Trump’s intentions.

It amounts to an official admission from the US government that
successive US administrations are responsible for war crimes resulting
in mass murder.

Trump acknowledges that Washington launched the 2003 invasion of Iraq on
the "false premise" of "weapons of mass destruction." In other words,
the administration of George W. Bush lied to the people of the United
States and the entire planet in order to facilitate a war of aggression.

Under international law, this war was a criminal action and a patently
unjustified violation of Iraq’s sovereignty. The Nuremberg Tribunal,
convened in the aftermath of the Second World War, declared the planning
and launching of a war of aggression the supreme crime of the Nazis,
from which all of their horrific atrocities flowed, including the
Holocaust. On the basis of this legal principle, Bush, Vice President
Cheney and other top US officials, as well as their successors in the
Obama and Trump administrations who continued the US intervention in the
Middle East—expanding it into Syria and Libya, while threatening a new
war against Iran—should all face prosecution as war criminals.

The real basis for the war was the long-held predatory conception that
by militarily conquering Iraq Washington could seize control of the vast
energy resources of the Middle East—giving it a stranglehold over the
oil lifeline to its principal rivals in Asia and Europe—and thereby
offset the decline of US imperialism’s global hegemony.

The World Socialist Web Site described the consequences of the US
assault on Iraq and its people as "sociocide," the deliberate
destruction of what had been among the most advanced societies, in terms
of education, health care and infrastructure, in the Middle East (see:
"The US war and occupation of Iraq—the murder of a society").

The casualties inflicted by this war were staggering. According to a
comprehensive 2006 study done by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of
Public Health and published in the prestigious medical journal The
Lancet, the death toll resulting from the US invasion rose to over
655,000 in the first 40 months of the US war alone.

The continued slaughter resulting from the US occupation and the bloody
sectarian civil war provoked by Washington’s divide-and-rule tactics
claimed many more direct victims, while the destruction of basic water,
power, health care and sanitation infrastructure killed even more. The
mass slaughter continued under the Obama administration with the
launching in 2014 of what was billed as a US war against ISIS. This war,
which saw the most intense bombing campaign since Vietnam and reduced
Mosul, Ramadi, Fallujah and other Iraqi cities to rubble, claimed tens
if not hundreds of thousands more lives.

Recent estimates of the death toll resulting from 16 years of US
military intervention in Iraq range as high as 2.4 million people.

The Iraq war has had its own disastrous consequences for US society as
well. In addition to claiming the lives of more than 4,500 US troops and
nearly 4,000 US contractors, the war left tens of thousands of US troops
wounded and hundreds of thousands suffering from post-traumatic stress
disorder and traumatic brain injuries.

What of all the families in the United States who lost children,
siblings or parents in a war that Trump now admits was based upon lies?
Together with the veterans suffering from the wounds of this war, they
should have the right to sue the US government for the results of its
criminal conduct.

The cost of the US wars launched since 2001 has risen to nearly $6
trillion, the bulk of it stemming from Iraq, while interest cost on the
money borrowed to pay for these wars will eventually amount to $8 trillion.

These grievous costs to US society are compounded by the social and
political impact of waging an illegal war, resulting in the shredding of
democratic rights and the wholesale corruption of a political system
that is ever more dominated by the military and intelligence apparatus.

The media’s silence on Trump’s admission of war crimes carried out by US
imperialism in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East is
self-incriminating. It reflects the complicity of the corporate media in
these crimes, with its selling of the lies used to promote the
aggression against Iraq and its attempt to suppress antiwar sentiment.

Nowhere was this war propaganda developed more deliberately than at the
New York Times which inundated the American public with lying reports
about "weapons of mass destruction" by Judith Miller and the noxious
opinion pieces by chief foreign affairs commentator Thomas "I have no
problem with a war for oil" Friedman.

By all rights, the media editors and pundits responsible for promoting a
criminal war of aggression deserve to sit in the dock alongside the war
criminals who launched it.

The corporate media has also ignored Trump’s indictment of the US wars
in the Middle East because it speaks for those sections of the US ruling
establishment that want them to continue.

Trump’s cynical nationalist and populist rhetoric about ending US wars
in the Middle East is aimed at currying support with a US population
that is overwhelmingly hostile to these wars, even as his
administration—backed by the Democrats—has secured a record $738 billion
military budget in preparation for far more catastrophic wars, including
against nuclear-armed China and Russia.

If the fascistic occupant of the White House is able to adopt the
farcical posture of an opponent of imperialist war, it is entirely
thanks to the Democrats, whose opposition to Trump is bound up with the
concerns of the US intelligence agencies and the Pentagon over his
conduct of foreign policy.

While there was mass opposition to the invasion of Iraq, the pseudo-left
in the United States, together with the media, worked might and main to
channel it behind the Democratic Party, which provided uninterrupted
support and funding for the war. Today, it is the most pro-war party,
aligned with the opposition to Trump by the likes of John Bolton,
Lindsey Graham and Bush.

Trump’s admission about the criminality of the Iraq war only confirms
what the World Socialist Web Site stated from its very outset. The
struggle that it has waged for the building of a mass antiwar movement
based upon the working class and armed with a socialist and
internationalist program to unite the workers of the United States, the
Middle East and the entire planet against the capitalist system provides
the only way forward in the struggle against war.

(3) The Hill verifies Trump's tweet condemning US entry into Iraq War

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/464967-trump-says-50-us-troops-removed-from-northern-syria

Trump says 50 US troops removed from northern Syria

BY RACHEL FRAZIN - 10/09/19 08:10 AM EDT

Trump says 50 US troops removed from northern Syria BY RACHEL FRAZIN -
10/09/19 08:10 AM EDT

President Trump said Wednesday that 50 U.S. soldiers had been removed
ahead of an anticipated Turkish offensive in northern Syria. ...

"The United States has spent EIGHT TRILLION DOLLARS fighting and
policing in the Middle East. Thousands of our Great Soldiers have died
or been badly wounded. Millions of people have died on the other side,"
he said in a subsequent post.

"GOING INTO THE MIDDLE EAST IS THE WORST DECISION EVER MADE IN THE
HISTORY OF OUR COUNTRY! We went to war under a false & now disproven
premise, WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION. There were NONE! Now we are slowly
& carefully bringing our great soldiers & military home. Our focus is on
the BIG PICTURE! THE USA IS GREATER THAN EVER BEFORE!" he added. ...

(4) Staged melodrama, media hysteria, progressive demands

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/trump-impeachment-inquiry-anti-trump-psychodrama/

Anti-Trump Psychodrama 10.0?

By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

October 8, 2019 6:30 AM

‘Groundbreaking’ disclosures fall apart, hoaxes are exposed, the media
are discredited, over and over and over again.

What do the Kavanaugh hearings, Jussie Smollett, the Covington kids, the
Mueller investigation, and now the Trump phone call all have in common?

Staged melodrama, media collusion hysteria, progressive demands that
justice be served immediately, promises of walls-are-closing-in
blockbuster revelations from new witnesses, supposed surprise revelatory
documents, fusions between Democratic politicians and Washington
bureaucrats — and then bust, nada, and teeth-gnashing as the truth
catches up to various rumor-mongers.

The disgraced purveyors of lies — a Christine Blasey Ford, Michael
Avenatti, Nathan Phillips, Jussie Smollet, Adam Schiff — for a time go
mute, content with progressives’ praise that they lied for a moral cause
and almost pulled it off.

The particular narrative is not all that important, at least compared
with a general overriding theme: We are in a virtual civil war, and the
Left believes that it can win over the hearts and minds of 20 to 30
percent of the swing voters in the United States with therapeutic tales
of racism, sexism, unearned white privilege, and right-wing greed and
selfishness, and also by destroying the elected president. Particular
events in the news are warped and twisted, to the degree that they can
be, to serve that narrative — on the principle that the superior moral
end of ensuring a radical equality of result more than justifies the
often tawdry and dishonest means to achieve it.

Christine Blasey Ford’s recovered-memory accusations that a teenaged
Brett Kavanaugh, nearly 40 years ago, had assaulted her were not
corroborated by any firsthand witnesses, and Ford provided no reliable
information on the place or date of the alleged assault. The
investigation did turn up plenty of contradictory evidence, including
denials from her closest friends and from people she herself named as
witnesses to the alleged attack.

Just this September, Kavanaugh 2.0 played out, when two New York Times
reporters wished to revise the psychodrama on its first anniversary by
publishing new lurid assault charges that someone had "pushed"
Kavanaugh’s dangling phallus into the hands of an innocent woman. That
macabre tale imploded within hours after we learned that the supposed
victim had no memory of the assault and that the single secondhand
hearsay source was a left-wing politico who chose to remain quiet about
his former charges.

About ten months ago, we witnessed another progressive morality farce,
between stereotypical evil white Christian kids wearing MAGA hats and a
saintly Native American, Vietnam veteran Nathan Phillips, who was
threatened by the punk kids and yet spoke truth to power when he
resisted their slurs by beating a drum.

Phillips, we were told, had served in battle on behalf of spoiled white
kids who repaid with insults and racism befitting their privileged airs.
When it was revealed that the activist Nathan Phillips had never been to
Vietnam, that he was a chronic liar, that he was the one who had first
walked over to the teenagers and initiated the stand-off by banging a
drum in their faces, and that the kids were being mocked by a group of
African-American cult activists, the Left shrugged, went quiet for a
bit, and then assumed that facts were not very important because a
greater truth had been revealed in yet another pushback against the
white male Christian hierarchy.

Shortly after the Covington caper, an apparent opportunist has-been
actor Jussie Smollett, of half African-American ancestry, gave America
his own concocted fable about being attacked by two white supremacists
in MAGA hats, who were apparently (while carrying bleach and rope)
randomly prowling the liberal streets of Chicago — in the early-morning
hours in subfreezing weather — hoping just maybe to lynch any young, gay
African-American actor like Smollett on his way to buy a sandwich at 2 a.m.

In his retelling of the epic battle with the two racist monsters, the
doused and noosed Smollett managed to beat them back, hold on to his
cellphone and sandwich, and make his wounded way home, with the rope
still around his neck. Smollett was crushed that his attackers not only
used the N-word and gay slurs but also went so far as deride his
television show Empire — an African-American cable-television series
that was apparently a big hit with the white-supremacist community.

The Left, of course, went ballistic. Politicians and stars
virtue-signaled their outrage at yet further proof of Trump’s racist
America. When it was revealed that two black Nigerians admitted that
Smollett had hired them to stage the mock assault, and had them dress up
with the suitable masks and red-hat props, the story fell apart.
Nonetheless, the felony charges against Smollett (for disorderly conduct
and filing a false report) were quickly dropped, and embarrassed
leftists have rarely mentioned the caper, despite the cost and harm it
did to the nation.

In May 2017, Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel to investigate
Trump’s alleged "collusion" with the Russians and "obstruction" in
seeking to impede Mueller’s "all-stars" and "dream team" of mostly
progressive lawyers, some who had a history of close association with
Clinton interests and many who had been donors to the Clinton campaign.
For the next 22 months of the $32 million investigation, the media
weekly leaked supposedly sensational disclosures leaked by "unnamed
sources" and "high-ranking officials who prefer to remain anonymous."
Adam Schiff was periodically wheeled out to grimace and say he was
disturbed at the shocking crimes of Donald Trump that he had seen in secret.

When a befuddled Mueller was finished, he had found no collusion and no
grounds to indict Trump for impeding his investigation of the crime that
he had just concluded did not exist. When Mueller rambled before
Congress, he was unable to remember basic facts of his own inquiry and
for the most part appear muddled and confused.

The only salient fact about the collusion investigation was Mueller’s
own embarrassing lack of knowledge of Christopher Steele’s fabricated
dossier, gleaned largely from Russian plants and sources. The fake-news
document had been paid for by candidate Hillary Clinton to undermine the
Trump campaign, and it later became a source for lurid stories about
Trump that were peddled by Obama-era officials in the FBI, DOJ, and CIA
to undermine the Trump transition and presidency.

Not only were there no apologies; there also was no embarrassment that
zealots for 22 months and $32 million of wasted money had lied about
Trump’s imminent indictment and disgrace. If anyone could have found an
iota of wrongdoing on Trump’s part, it was the dream team that hated
Trump’s guts, though in the end, they found no collusion at all.

Now on schedule we are on to yet another progressive psychodrama. This
time we were told that a blockbuster transcript of Trump’s phone call
with the Ukrainian president would prove Trump’s collusion with a
foreign power to hurt his presidential rival Joe Biden.

Then the transcript was released, and it showed no quid pro quo. As with
the projection of the Mueller case, Trump’s domestic foes in the Ukraine
imbroglio were accusing Trump of what they themselves had done. The only
explicit threats to cut off Ukrainian aid were made not by Trump but by
Joe Biden himself, who boasted, on camera at a public event, that he had
forced the firing of a prosecutor — a prosecutor who was looking into
his own son’s profiteering in Ukraine — by threatening to cut $1 billion
in Obama-administration aid to Ukraine.

Over the next few days, in the manner of these earlier concocted tales,
a number of contradictory facts arose that destroyed the narrative.
Three Democratic U.S. senators had earlier written the Ukrainian
government and, in far more explicit language than Trump used, warned
them to investigate in a fashion that the senators preferred.

The Ukrainian government did not, as alleged, substantiate the charges
against Trump but in fact asserted that Trump had not pressured them for
dirt on Biden in exchange for aid — the sort of gambit that Biden
himself had earlier bragged about employing.

Almost daily, pieces of the Ukrainian hoax fell apart. Senator Chris
Murphy — who had charged out to issue a statement that Ukrainians on an
earlier visit had complained directly to him about Trump interference —
now recalibrated his tale, perhaps fearing that Ukraine would release
contradictory evidence.

The complaint file itself hardly seemed the work of a whistleblower.
Instead, in the style of the Steele dossier and the Mueller
investigation, it footnoted liberal media sources as verification, cited
past legal rulings and cases, and seemed the work of progressive
attorneys. Oddly, whistleblower forms had been mysteriously changed
retroactively to legitimize the complainant’s charges on the basis of
hearsay without the need for a single firsthand example of direct
knowledge of wrongdoing.

Adam Schiff, to heighten the drama of the caper, opened a congressional
hearing by reading from the transcript of the Trump call to the
Ukrainian president. Only he didn’t. Instead he ad-libbed and recited a
fantasy version that contradicted the actual transcript in several
places — much as the whistleblower complaint also erred in key ways.
When caught, he pled that he was offering a "parody" for effect.
Schiff’s staff, it may well turn out, hand-in-glove coached the
"whistleblower" well before he went public.

We have learned nothing and forgotten nothing in all these instances.
There is an eerie sameness about all of them. The media go berserk with
rumors of a "groundbreaking" disclosure. Talking points are issued,
which liberal news readers regurgitate ad nauseam. Democratic would-be
presidential candidates rush to social media with the grimmest
predications and loudest condemnations. Sober and judicious — and
terrified — Republican politicians and pundits virtue-signal their own
wide distance from the MAGA operatives and Trump himself. No one waits
for all the evidence. Instead, they endlessly replay the Ox-Bow Incident
over the electronic airwaves.

When it is all over, there are no apologies and no contriteness, just a
shrug. After all, if it wasn’t true, it could have been, or it reflected
a higher moral truth, and lying for noble ends justifies the means. In
fact, those who call out the rumor-mongers, sanctimonious scolds, and
political hacks are usually themselves damned as racists, homophobes,
Stalinists, Trump robots, conspiracy theorists, or any such slur deemed
useful in projectionist fashion to deflect their own culpability.

So here we are, on the eve of impeaching a president on the basis of
disgruntled White House staffers, whose rumors in secondhand and
thirdhand fashion were passed on to a "whistleblower" who worked hand in
hand with partisan lawyers and Adam Schiff to circumvent the normal
whistleblower protocols and smear a president.

And we will all shrug and grow quiet — at least until the next Blasey
Ford, Michael Avenatti, Jussie Smollett, Nathan Philipps, dream-team,
all-star star chamber, James Comey, or "anonymous" crusading
"whistleblower" comes forth to seek notoriety and do his yeoman’s work
to rid the country of Trump and all his odious henchmen.

Meanwhile, they have no idea of the wreckage they have inflicted on the
intelligence agencies, the media, the Democratic party, themselves, and
the country — or much less why a growing number of Americans are sick of
them all.

Editor’s Note: This piece originally misidentified Christine Blasey
Ford. It has been corr

(5) Hillary recommends shredding the Constitution

The Dem-CIA Impeachment. Remove Trump from the Oval Office

Nothing Burger with HRC in the Wings

By Renee Parsons

Global Research, October 07, 2019

It has been more than fascinating if not totally absorbing to watch the
chain of events unfold over recent days with the Democrats in open
cahoots with the CIA.  Their joint goal is to remove the implacable
Donald Trump from the Oval Office as two-time former Dem presidential
candidate Hillary Clinton has suddenly emerged from the Swamp for a few
media appearances.

While the problematic candidacy of former veep Joe Biden plods on
despite evidence of facilitating a family corruption scandal (also known
as influence peddling) and a dementia that confirms he is unable to
fulfill the duties of the presidency.

Image on the right: Joe and Hunter Biden (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

The Democrats latest frenzied attempt to oust Trump was the result of an
assertion by a CIA operative embedded in the White House that the
President ‘pressured’ Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky in a July
25th phone call to investigate allegations of misconduct by former veep
Joe Biden and his son Hunter and their association with Burisma,
Ukraine’s largest energy provider.  The alleged whistleblower alleged
that Trump’s ‘pressure’ was ‘to solicit interference from a foreign
country’ for political gain which would constitute abuse of his office
thereby justifying an impeachment inquiry.

Before the Dems whipped themselves into a froth of anticipation, they
might have checked out the ‘Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters
Agreement" signed by President Bill Clinton with the Ukraine government
in 1999.  Spelling out a ‘broad range of cooperation in criminal
matters," the Agreement is internationally binding, still in force and
indicates that Trump was acting within his Constitutional authority in
his conversation with Zelensky.  You would think that would be the end
of the matter, right?

Trump’s response to the Dem-initiated furor was to release the White
House transcript of the phone call which the CIA operative claimed was
on ‘lock down’ by the White House to prevent its distribution.  Here is
the only portion of that conversation that discussed the Biden Ukraine
connection which is clearly asking the Ukraine President to conduct
their own investigation.  Read the transcript and decide for yourself if
there is political pressure, a quid pro quo or a violation worthy of
impeachment – or is it all a Big Fat Nothing Burger?

"The other thing, there’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden
stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that
so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great.  Biden
went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look
in it…"

Contents of that phone call then became the subject of an extensive
nine-page whistleblower Complaint filed on August 12th, the filing of
which came at about the same time as Intel Inspector General Michael
Atkinson changed the standard to allow for second hand tattling.

What is stunning is that the alleged whistleblower admits in his lengthy
Complaint, that none of the information provided is first hand or
personally obtained knowledge but rather informal via second and
possibly third hand sources.  The speculative, hypothetical nature of
the Complaint "not as a direct witness" therefore makes the entire
document legally indefensible in addition to its factual errors.
Surely, IG Atkinson understood that when he allowed such a flawed,
legally insubstantial document to be filed, a document based on hearsay,
gossip, rumor, innuendo and/or word of mouth, that such a document would
be inadmissible in any court proceeding.  End of Story, right?

And then, voila!, a second whistleblower with first hand knowledge has
just stepped forward and is being interviewed by the same IG who
accepted the first legally flawed document.

The impeachment efforts were further undermined by the inept
manipulations of Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif), Israeli proxy
extraordinaire who appears to have lied about his level of knowledge
and/or involvement, created his own version of Trump statements as well
as what amounts to a Brady violation of withholding of evidence from
Republicans on the Intel Committee in violation of Committee rules.

It is all almost too good a story with a too perfect cast of characters
to be anything less than a great political theatre as a coup generated
by the US intel community throws all legitimacy to the wind in its last
ditch effort to impeach a sitting President for …well, we’re not quite
sure exactly what the "misdemeanor and high crime" (Section 4, Article 2
of the Constitution) charges might be since the Dems are not following
the Constitutional impeachment procedures.

So far, the Democrats have failed to adhere to basic due process rights
with no debate or vote on the Floor of the House of Representatives
regarding potential Articles of  Impeachment.  After which, the House
Judiciary Committee would prepare formalized charges for Committee
consideration and hold a public hearing.

Instead there is a lot of hot air and grandstanding with the
Intelligence Committee holding behind-closed-door-interviews as if there
is some dire national security threat at stake which the American public
should not be privy to.  In addition, the Intelligence Committee has no
legislative role to bring impeachment charges but, alas, all of the
above would require the Dems to provide facts of an impeachable offense.

In other words, it is time for the Democrats to put up or shut up and
get on with the business of running the country – if they have the
ability to do so remains in question.

Enter HRC, not widely regarded as a friend of the rule of law, who
sought to relieve the House of their Constitutional prerogative by
suggesting

"If the impeachment provision in the US Constitution will not reach the
offenses charged here then perhaps that 18th Century Constitution should
be abandoned to a 20th Century paper shredder."

It should be shocking that Clinton finds nothing sacrosanct about
‘abandoning’ the Constitution to a paper shredder. It should make every
American fearful of what a Clinton Administration might look like as she
suggests that if the crime doesn’t fit the law, then change the law to
fit the crime.

While the American public earnestly awaits the next chapter of
Ukraine-gate, Biden warned Trump "you’re not going to destroy my family"
although the former VP and son are doing a pretty good job of that
without help from the often hapless Trump.

In 2012, the 42 year old Hunter Biden, with no prior military
experience, was one of six recruits selected to serve as a Reserve
Officer in the Navy’s Direct Commission Officer Program.  He sought two
waivers; one because of his age and a second because of a previous drug
charge years earlier.  In May, 2013, Biden was commissioned as an Ensign
in the Navy’s Public Affairs Division in Norfolk, Virginia.  By June, he
tested positive for cocaine and was dishonorably discharged in February,
2014.

By May, 2014, Hunter Biden was appointed to a seat on the Board of
Directors for Burisma Holdings Ltd., Ukraine’s largest gas company and
as a graduate of Yale Law School, he was in charge of its legal
department for a cool $50,000 a month.  Biden joined Devon Archer
another American new to the Burisma Board who also serves with Biden at
Rosemont Seneca, a private equity firm.

Meanwhile, Burisma’s owner oligarch was under examination by Ukraine
investigators after which, at Joe’s urging, the lead prosecutor was
fired and the case dropped.  At a January Council on Foreign Relations
meeting, Biden related threatening the government of Ukraine with the
loss of a $1 billion loan guarantee in March, 2016:

"I got the commitment from Poroshenko and Yatsenyk that they would take
action against the state prosecutor and they didn’t. We’re not going to
give you the billion dollars. I’m going to be leaving here in six hours
and if the prosecutor’s not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well,
son of a bitch, he got fired and they put in place someone who was solid."

In addition, "Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides
Corruption and Benefits Family and Friends" revealed that the younger
Biden traveled to China during an official state visit aboard Air Force
Two in December, 2013 with his father, VP Joe Biden.  That trip occurred
several months after Hunter Biden failed the Navy’s drug test but before
he was discharged.  The younger Biden was accompanied by Devon Archer
and James Bulger, nephew of gangster Whitey Bulger when he met with
Chinese State Bank officials.  A week later, Biden secured a $1.5
billion investment for Rosemont Seneca Partners, a hedge fund the
younger Biden partnered with John Kerry’s stepson and Archer. It is not
known if Archer and Bulger traveled aboard Air Force Two as part of the
US delegation.

In 2014, after Hunter Biden joined the Burisma Board, Chris Heinz who
had been a partner at Rosemont Seneca, left the equity firm and ended
his business relationshipwith the younger Biden.   In early 2019, Hunter
Biden left the Burisma Board.

Renee Parsons has been a member of the ACLU’s Florida State Board of
Directors and president of the ACLU Treasure Coast Chapter. She has been
an elected public official in Colorado, an environmental lobbyist with
Friends of the Earth and staff member of the US House of Representatives
in Washington DC. She can be found on Twitter @reneedove31. She is a
frequent contributor to Global Research.

The original source of this article is Global Research

Copyright © Renee Parsons, Global Research, 2019

(6) Democrats seek to abolish the Electoral College

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/10/can-we-keep-our-republic-bruce-thornton/

Can We Keep Our Republic?

If the Dems win, Obama’s "fundamental transformation" of America will be
complete.

Thu Oct 10, 2019

Bruce Thornton

When asked the type of government the Constitutional Convention had
created, Benjamin Franklin famously replied, "A Republic, if you can
keep it." Franklin and the Founders understood that given a flawed human
nature and its passion for power, no form of political order can survive
if it is not continually maintained and defended against attempts to
dismantle it in order to empower one faction at the expense of others,
thus diminishing their freedom.

Since the election of Donald Trump, we have been watching one of the
most serious assaults on the Constitutional Republic in our history.
With the current efforts of the Democrat-controlled House to engineer
public support for impeachment, this three-year attack is intensifying.
[...]

Most important, the means by which this assault on Trump has been
executed represent the most sustained abuse of government power at least
since World War II. The administration of the previous
president––including very likely the president himself––and the powerful
federal agencies overseeing police, justice, and intelligence, like
classic tyrants turned these lethal government powers against a
political rival, blatantly violating the oaths they had sworn to uphold
the Constitution. Abetted by a corrupt media that no longer hide their
political passions, they used state power to engineer the "Russia
collusion" hoax that was so flimsy even two years of investigation by
hostile deep-state operatives and Democrat donors could not find any
evidence to support it.

And along the way, they violated the protocols and legal guard-rails of
formal investigations to achieve their ends: First, to discredit the
Trump campaign, and then to hamstringing his presidency. The examples of
this professional and civic malfeasance are legion and amply documented
by Andy McCarthy, Gregg Jarret, and many others. But there are two that
are particularly egregious.

First was James Comey’s phony investigation of Hillary’s felonious abuse
of rules for handling sensitive government information. Even worse was
the press conference in which he laid out the obvious predicates of an
indictment, then found a nonexistent "intention" proviso in the
penumbras and emanations of the relevant statute, and then usurped the
Attorney General’s authority as to whether or not to indict by making
the decision himself during the press conference.

The second violation has not been as commented on as it should be––the
handling of the "hacked" DNC servers scandal. We know the narrative,
since it is regularly repeated even by conservative commentators:
Several of our intelligence agencies discovered that a Russian operative
named Guccifer 2.0 hacked the DNC servers, and then via Wikileaks
publicized the contents to embarrass Hillary and weaken the Democrats,
the goal being to help Donald Trump in the 2016 election. This has
become a foundational dogma of the whole Russia collusion, foreign
interference, Trump corruption tale that provides the flimsy rationale
for the Trump-haters’ invective and calls for impeachment.

But as George Parry summarizes in an important analysis, this claim is
unsubstantiated by any forensic evidence. On the contrary, an
investigation by the "Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
(VIPS), an organization of former CIA, FBI, National Security Agency,
and military intelligence officers, technical experts, and analysts,"
discovered something quite different. The whole report is worth reading,
but here is the salient conclusion that the files were not hacked, but
downloaded directly from the DNC server:

How was this determined? The time stamps contained in the released
computer files’ metadata establish that, at 6:45 p.m. July 5, 2016,
1,976 megabytes (not megabits) of data were downloaded from the DNC’s
server. This took 87 seconds, which means the transfer rate was 22.7
megabytes per second, a speed, according to VIPS, that "is much faster
than what is physically possible with a hack." Such a speed could be
accomplished only by direct connection of a portable storage device to
the server. Accordingly, VIPS concluded that the DNC data theft was an
inside job by someone with physical access to the server.

VIPS also found that, if there had been a hack, the NSA would have a
record of it that could quickly be retrieved and produced. But no such
evidence has been forthcoming. Can this be because no hack occurred?

Even more remarkable, the experts determined that the files released by
Guccifer 2.0 have been "run, via ordinary cut and paste, through a
template that effectively immersed them in what could plausibly be cast
as Russian fingerprints." In other words, the files were deliberately
altered to give the false impression that they were hacked by Russian
agents.

Some have challenged VIPS’s analysis, but one fact casts a huge cloud of
suspicion on the intelligence agencies’ publicized assertion that
Russians engineered the hack: None of them have analyzed the server
themselves, despite having the resources to do so. The DNC refused to
hand over the server, instead passing along a forensic analysis by a
firm it hired called CrowdStrike, according to VIPS "a cybersecurity
firm of checkered reputation and multiple conflicts of interest,
including very close ties to a number of key anti-Russian organizations."

Again, the FBI and other security agencies came to their conclusion
about the Russian hack based on the word of a dodgy outfit paid by the
DNC. Remind you of a famous fake "dossier" also paid for by Democrats,
and used by government officials to obtain a FISA warrant to spy on
American citizens?

Apart from that hard evidence casting doubt on the narrative, we can
challenge the assumption that Russia would prefer Trump over Hillary.
Hillary had a public record of supporting Obama’s "reset" with Russia,
which featured his infamous hot-mic promise of "flexibility" on granting
Putin’s wish for the US to stop missile-defense installations in Eastern
Europe after Obama’s reelection––an example of actual collusion with a
foreign power in order to affect the outcome of the imminent 2012
presidential election. And Hillary herself, through Russian donations to
her foundation and her help in transferring 20% of our uranium stocks to
a subsidiary of a Russian company, had raked in millions of dollars. Why
wouldn’t Putin prefer this known appeaser and grifter over the volatile
and unknown Donald Trump, who has in fact been much tougher with Putin
than Obama and Clinton ever were?

So the most powerful investigative agencies in the world have relied on
the investigation of foreign hired guns to determine that Russia hacked
the DNC to help Donald Trump. Nor did the FBI or the Mueller
investigation seem interested in getting to the bottom of this blatant
act of foreign interference in an American election, the ostensible
reason for the Special Counsel’s investigation in the first place. A
better explanation is that yet once again, government security and
police agencies were colluding in fabricating the narrative to misdirect
the people from Hillary’s various shady actions, and to tar her rival
with a Russian bogeyman redolent of the McCarthy era "Red scare."

The Mueller investigation having come a cropper, now we have the even
more transparently contrived and dishonest "Ukraine" scandal to provide
the media fuel for impeachment. The media are in a frenzy, and their
Republican NeverTrump allies are contributing to the effort. Mitt Romney
and other Republican preemptive cringers are piling on. The Dems think
that even if the Senate doesn’t vote to convict, they’ll have thrown
enough mud on the president that a critical mass of voters will turn
against him. And if the economy slows down enough, that could turn out
to be a smart strategy.

Nor should we take comfort in the buffoonish slate of Dem primary
candidates to save us, for the stakes are too high. The corruption of
the Constitution and federal agencies of the past three years is exactly
what follows when power is concentrated and citizen autonomy is
surrendered to unaccountable, unelected technocrats. In the end the
primary job of our national government is to defend us from foreign
enemies and protect our freedoms from internal ones, not intrude into
elections for their own political and careerist aggrandizementß.

If the Dems win, and they succeed in abolishing the Electoral College,
making the Senate proportionately representative, eviscerating the First
and Second Amendments, and transforming the United States from the
exceptional Republic and indispensable champion of unalienable rights
and freedom it is, to just another client of a supranational,
technocratic empire like the EU––then Obama’s aim of "fundamentally
transforming" America will have been achieved.

And that will be the moment, after more than two centuries, we failed to
keep our Republic.

(4) Media silent on Trump repudiation of Mid-East wars "We went to war
under a false & now disproven premise"

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/10/10/iraq-o10.html

https://niqnaq.wordpress.com/2019/10/10/madmen-tango/

Trump admits Pindostan killed millions in war based on lies

Bill Van Auken, WSWS, Oct 10 2019

Amid the storm of denunciations, extending from right-wing Thugs to the
Demagog Party, the NYT and the pseudo-left Jacobin magazine, of his
decision to pull Pindo troops out of Syria, Pres Trump issued an
extraordinary tweet on Wednesday in defense of his policy:

Pindostan has spent EIGHT TRILLION DOLLARS fighting and policing in the
Middle East. Thousands of our Great Soldiers have died or been badly
wounded. Millions of people have died on the other side. GOING INTO THE
MIDDLE EAST IS THE WORST DECISION EVER MADE … IN THE HISTORY OF OUR
COUNTRY! We went to war under a false & now disproven premise, WEAPONS
OF MASS DESTRUCTION.

Trump’s Twitter account has dominated the Pindo news cycle ever since he
took office. Tweets have introduced fascistic new policies on
immigration, announced the frequent firings of White House personnel and
cabinet members and signaled shifts in Pindo foreign policy. Last month,
amid the mounting of an impeachment inquiry, which the Demagog
leadership in Congress has focused exclusively on "national security"
concerns stemming from Trump’s Jul 25 phone call with Pres Zelensky, the
POTUS set a new personal record, tweeting 800 times. Yet the corporate
media has chosen to ignore Trump’s tweet on the protracted Pindo
military intervention in the Middle East. From the standpoint of the
bitter internecine struggle unfolding within the Pindo capitalist state,
the tweet expresses the sharp divisions over Pindo global strategy.
While those around Trump want to focus entirely on preparation for
confrontation with China, layers within the political establishment and
the military and intelligence apparatus see the continuation of the
Pindo intervention to assert its hegemony over the Middle East and
countering Russia as critical for Pindo imperialism’s drive to impose
its dominance over the Eurasian landmass. But aside from these disputes
over geostrategic policy, the admission by a sitting POTUS that
Faschingstein launched a war under a "false" and "disproven" premise
that ended up killing "millions" has direct political implications,
whatever Trump’s intentions. It amounts to an official admission from
the Pindo government that successive Pindo administrations are
responsible for war crimes resulting in mass murder. Trump acknowledges
that Faschingstein launched the 2003 invasion of Iraq on the "false
premise" of "weapons of mass destruction." In other words, the Bush 43
administration lied to the creeple of Pindostan and the entire planet in
order to facilitate a war of aggression. Under international law, this
war was a criminal action and a patently unjustified violation of Iraq’s
sovereignty. The Nuremberg Tribunal, convened in the aftermath of WW2,
declared the planning and launching of a war of aggression the supreme
crime of the Nazis, from which all of their horrific atrocities flowed,
including the Holocaust. On the basis of this legal principle, Bush,
Cheney and other top officials, as well as their successors in the Obama
and Trump administrations who continued their intervention in the Middle
East, expanding it into Syria and Libya while threatening a new war
against Iran, should all face prosecution as war criminals.

The real basis for the war was the long-held predatory conception that
by militarily conquering Iraq Faschingstein could seize control of the
vast energy resources of the Middle East, giving it a stranglehold over
the oil lifeline to its principal rivals in Asia and Europe, and thereby
offset the decline of Pindo imperialism’s global hegemony. We described
the consequences of the Pindo assault on Iraq and its people as
"sociocide," the deliberate destruction of what had been among the most
advanced societies, in terms of education, health care and
infrastructure, in the Middle East. The casualties inflicted by this war
were staggering. According to a comprehensive 2006 study done by the
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and published in the
prestigious medical journal The Lancet, the death toll resulting from
the Pindo invasion rose to over 655,000 in the first 40 months of the
Pindo war alone. The continued slaughter resulting from the Pindo
occupation and the bloody sectarian civil war provoked by Washington’s
divide-and-rule tactics claimed many more direct victims, while the
destruction of basic water, power, health care and sanitation
infrastructure killed even more. The mass slaughter continued under the
Obama administration with the launching in 2014 of what was billed as a
Pindo war against Daesh. This war, which saw the most intense bombing
campaign since Vietnam and reduced Mosul, Ramadi, Fallujah and other
Iraqi cities to rubble, claimed tens if not hundreds of thousands more
lives. Recent estimates of the death toll resulting from 16 years of
Pindo military intervention in Iraq range as high as 2.4 million people.

The Iraq war has had its own disastrous consequences for Pindo society
as well. In addition to claiming the lives of more than 4,500 Pindo
troops and nearly 4,000 Pindo contractors, the war left tens of
thousands of Pindo troops wounded and hundreds of thousands suffering
from post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injuries. What
of all the families in Pindostan who lost children, siblings or parents
in a war that Trump now admits was based upon lies? Together with the
veterans suffering from the wounds of this war, they should have the
right to sue the Pindo government for the results of its criminal
conduct. The cost of the Pindo wars launched since 2001 has risen to
nearly $6 trillion, the bulk of it stemming from Iraq, while interest
cost on the money borrowed to pay for these wars will eventually amount
to $8 trillion. These grievous costs to Pindo society are compounded by
the social and political impact of waging an illegal war, resulting in
the shredding of democratic rights and the wholesale corruption of a
political system that is ever more dominated by the military and
intelligence apparatus.

The media’s silence on Trump’s admission of war crimes carried out by
Pindo imperialism in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East is
self-incriminating. It reflects the complicity of the corporate media in
these crimes, with its selling of the lies used to promote the
aggression against Iraq and its attempt to suppress antiwar sentiment.
Nowhere was this war propaganda developed more deliberately than at the
NYT which inundated the Pindo public with lying reports about "weapons
of mass destruction" by Judith Miller and the noxious opinion pieces by
chief foreign affairs commentator Thomas "I have no problem with a war
for oil" Friedman. By all rights, the media editors and pundits
responsible for promoting a criminal war of aggression deserve to sit in
the dock alongside the war criminals who launched it. The corporate
media has also ignored Trump’s indictment of the Pindo wars in the
Middle East because it speaks for those sections of the Pindo ruling
establishment that want them to continue. Trump’s cynical nationalist
and populist rhetoric about ending Pindo wars in the Middle East is
aimed at currying support with a Pindo population that is overwhelmingly
hostile to these wars, even as his administration, backed by the
Demagogs, has secured a record $738b military budget in preparation for
far more catastrophic wars, including against nuclear-armed China and
Russia. If the fascistic occupant of the White House is able to adopt
the farcical posture of an opponent of imperialist war, it is entirely
thanks to the Demagogs, whose opposition to Trump is bound up with the
concerns of the Pindo intelligence agencies and the Pentagon over his
conduct of foreign policy. While there was mass opposition to the
invasion of Iraq, the pseudo-left in the United States, together with
the media, worked might and main to channel it behind the Democratic
Party, which provided uninterrupted support and funding for the war.
Today, it is the most pro-war party, aligned with the opposition to
Trump by the likes of John Bolton, Lindsey Graham and Bush. Trump’s
admission about the criminality of the Iraq war only confirms what we
stated from its very outset.

Trump defends Syria decision by saying Kurds ‘didn’t help us with Normandy’
Maanvi Singh, Groon, Oct 9 2019

Donald Trump defended his decision to withdraw Pindo troops from Syria
and enable a Turkish offensive against Pindo-backed Kurdish fighters in
the region by noting the Kurds didn’t fight alongside Pindostan in WW2.
The POTUS president told reporters that the Kurds "didn’t help us in the
second world war, they didn’t help us with Normandy as an example, they
mention the names of different battles, they weren’t there," in a
staggering comment following the signing of executive orders on the
federal regulation at the White House on Wednesday. The president said:

We have spent a tremendous amount of money helping the Kurds. They’re
fighting for their land. When you say they’re fighting with Pindostan,
yes. But they’re fighting for their land.

Kurdish forces fought alongside Pindostan against Daesh for nearly five
years, losing roughly 11,000 fighters. Trump said he learned that the
Kurds didn’t help in Normandy from a "very, very powerful article,"
apparently referencing a column by conservative opinion writer Kurt
Schlichter. Misrepresenting how NATO works, Trump also told reporters:

Alliances are very easy. But our alliances have taken advantage of us.
If you look at how much money we spend on NATO and how much countries
from Europe who are a much bigger beneficiary than we are.

Turkey on Wednesday launched an offensive into north-eastern Syria,
targeting the SDF. The Turkish offensive came just days after a call
between Trump and Erdo?an, after which Trump tweeted that Pindo troops
would withdraw from the region. Trump’s decision to abandon the Kurdish
groups who have fought alongside Pindostan in Syria has drawn bipartisan
condemnation. Critics argue the move casts doubts about Pindostan’s
commitments to its allies, could enable an Isis resurgence and raises
fears that some of the thousand Isis fighters in Kurdish detention may
escape. At the White House, Trump told reporters that some of the "most
dangerous" Daesh prisoners had been moved, but he did not say how many
or where they had been taken, only:

We’re putting them in different locations where it’s secure.