U.S. Politics

[OutByEaster?]

13 minutes ago, blandy said:

Another way of looking at it would be "Guns". The Police need all that stuff in large part because of whoppers with freely available assault weapons, perhaps? 

Absolutely - but when you're selling to the whoppers and to the police and making a tidy sum out of both - you'll continue your "investment" in the political system to make sure nothing changes. 

We see a problem in US policing and US crime because people get killed. US democracy isn't about people - while there's a profit there isn't a problem.

 

[villakram]

12 hours ago, OutByEaster? said:

Absolutely - but when you're selling to the whoppers and to the police and making a tidy sum out of both - you'll continue your "investment" in the political system to make sure nothing changes. 

We see a problem in US policing and US crime because people get killed. US democracy isn't about people - while there's a profit there isn't a problem.

 

It'll be room101 for you if you continue on with this! 

[villakram]

Trump 2020 campaign underway as of last night... just the ~18 months to go.

[peterms]

Thread on the US and concentration camps.

 

[A'Villan]

On 17/06/2019 at 09:16, villakram said:

It'll be room101 for you if you continue on with this! 

As long as it doesn't actually threaten the investments and power structure, then we can continue on because we're 'free' otherwise.

[peterms]

Interesting: even US conservatives now recognise that the tales we have been told about Syrian chemical weapons are lies.

Bias, Lies & Videotape: Doubts Dog ‘Confirmed’ Syria Chemical Attacks Disturbing new evidence suggests 2018 incident might've been staged, putting everything else, including U.S. retaliation, into question.

Quote

Thanks to an explosive internal memo, there is no reason to believe the claims put forward by the Syrian opposition that President Bashar al-Assad’s government used chemical weapons against innocent civilians in Douma back in April. This is a scenario I have questioned from the beginning.

It also calls into question all the other conclusions and reports by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which was assigned in 2014 “to establish facts surrounding allegations of the use of toxic chemicals, reportedly chlorine, for hostile purposes in the Syrian Arab Republic.”...

...The role of the OPCW in sustaining the claims made by the obviously biased Syrian opposition sources cannot be understated—by confirming the allegations of chemical weapons use in Douma, the OPCW lent credibility to claims that otherwise should not—and indeed would not—have been granted, and in doing so violated the very operating procedures that had been put in place by the OPCW to protect the credibility of the organization and its findings.

There is an old prosecutorial rule—one lie, all lies—that comes into play in this case. With the leaked internal report out there, suggesting that the sources in the Douma investigation were agenda-driven and dishonest, all information ever provided to the OPCW by the White Helmets, SAMS, and other Syrian opposition groups must now, in my mind, be viewed as tainted and therefore unusable.

Scott Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD.

 

[peterms]

My thoughts and prayers are with the drone at this sad time.  I hope yours are, too.

[A'Villan]

5 hours ago, peterms said:

Interesting: even US conservatives now recognise that the tales we have been told about Syrian chemical weapons are lies.

Bias, Lies & Videotape: Doubts Dog ‘Confirmed’ Syria Chemical Attacks Disturbing new evidence suggests 2018 incident might've been staged, putting everything else, including U.S. retaliation, into question.

 

Sorry to nitpick, but what kind of crap is that..

"One lie, all lies.." My mother was a prosecutor for a government organisation and thankfully I was not brought up with such utter nonsense.

Sure, any deliberately falsified information taints the credibility of the source, and therefore raises questions over their authenticity regarding other matters too.

But that's all it does, raises questions, calls for more intense scrutiny to ascertain what degree the source can be trusted on any given subject.

Prosecutors have a role which needs to be taken seriously with the utmost sincerity. Not creating rules based on phrases which are ridiculously unreliable and untrue.

Baffling.

[peterms]

4 hours ago, A'Villan said:

Sorry to nitpick, but what kind of crap is that..

"One lie, all lies.." My mother was a prosecutor for a government organisation and thankfully I was not brought up with such utter nonsense.

Sure, any deliberately falsified information taints the credibility of the source, and therefore raises questions over their authenticity regarding other matters too.

But that's all it does, raises questions, calls for more intense scrutiny to ascertain what degree the source can be trusted on any given subject.

Prosecutors have a role which needs to be taken seriously with the utmost sincerity. Not creating rules based on phrases which are ridiculously unreliable and untrue.

Baffling.

I'm not sure if you're seeing the reference to a "rule" too literally.  I think it's simply referring to the idea of the credibility of a witness, ie if they are found to be not credible on one issue, their credibility on other issues is also in doubt.  Surely that's uncontroversial?  I don't think Ritter is saying that a lie on one issue must always and everywhere mean that every other statement is thereby proven false, or that there is some rule to that effect in place.

[A'Villan]

17 minutes ago, peterms said:

I'm not sure if you're seeing the reference to a "rule" too literally.  I think it's simply referring to the idea of the credibility of a witness, ie if they are found to be not credible on one issue, their credibility on other issues is also in doubt.  Surely that's uncontroversial?  I don't think Ritter is saying that a lie on one issue must always and everywhere mean that every other statement is thereby proven false, or that there is some rule to that effect in place.

Simply going off the reference that all information provided must now be considered tainted and unusable because a certain source was found to be dishonest and agenda driven.

It's there in black and white as far as I can see. It just pisses me off that I'm supposed to swallow and stomach the notion that the U.S is some benevolent and honest institution.

 

[peterms]

51 minutes ago, A'Villan said:

Simply going off the reference that all information provided must now be considered tainted and unusable because a certain source was found to be dishonest and agenda driven.

It's there in black and white as far as I can see. It just pisses me off that I'm supposed to swallow and stomach the notion that the U.S is some benevolent and honest institution.

 

Well, he's saying that the OPCW should not base their findings on information supplied by the Syrian opposition, because they have been found to supply false information. 

I don't get the reference to being supposed to accept that the US is a benevolent and honest institution - I don't see him suggesting that. 

[Xann]

Feck - He had planes in the air to retaliate for the downing of the drone, then called them back.

Hopefully he's having second thoughts about Bolton's words of poison?

Perhaps this had some bearing?

Quote

Trump is giving up on regime change in Venezuela because it’s complicated and he got bored, report says

Business Insider

[bickster]

55 minutes ago, Xann said:

Feck - He had planes in the air to retaliate for the downing of the drone, then called them back.

The drone they had every right to shoot down too

[A'Villan]

3 hours ago, peterms said:

Well, he's saying that the OPCW should not base their findings on information supplied by the Syrian opposition, because they have been found to supply false information. 

I don't get the reference to being supposed to accept that the US is a benevolent and honest institution - I don't see him suggesting that. 

What place does it have involving itself in Syria then? U.S involvement is not agenda driven to begin with?

This is the same institution that proposed Project Northwood and went ahead with the likes of mk-ultra.

The same institution that got Cheney's Halliburton billion dollar contracts in the Middle East.

So I was more referring to the indirect insinuation that America goes in purely on account of Syrian civilians.

 

[blandy]

34 minutes ago, A'Villan said:

So I was more referring to the indirect insinuation that America goes in purely on account of Syrian civilians.

Not really in response to the quoted bit, but for the past month or so, Syrian and Russian forces have been bombing the heck out of Hospitals and other civilian locations, full of people and barely a word of outrage has been heard - from America, from critics of America, from anyone. It barely even makes the news. So as you say America seems not to give a heck about the civilians (though obviously it's Russia and Assad's forces actually bombing the hospitals etc). 

[A'Villan]

44 minutes ago, blandy said:

Not really in response to the quoted bit, but for the past month or so, Syrian and Russian forces have been bombing the heck out of Hospitals and other civilian locations, full of people and barely a word of outrage has been heard - from America, from critics of America, from anyone. It barely even makes the news. So as you say America seems not to give a heck about the civilians (though obviously it's Russia and Assad's forces actually bombing the hospitals etc). 

I don't really watch the news but this is also the first I'm reading about that. It's so tragic. That's all I can fathom on the subject at this point.

[Straggler]

If Trump prevents his administration from going to war it will be the best thing he has ever done.

[HanoiVillan]

1 hour ago, Straggler said:

If Trump prevents his administration from going to war it will be the best thing he has ever done.

I don't recognise this vision of a President desperately trying to restrain the worst impulses of his own administration, and nobody is declaring war without his say-so. 

[villakram]

Pay attention.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-iran-iraq-oil-exclusive/exclusive-exxons-53-billion-iraq-deal-hit-by-contract-snags-iran-tensions-sources-idUSKCN1TM0IZ

"Just weeks ago, U.S. energy giant ExxonMobil looked poised to move ahead with a $53 billion project to boost Iraq’s oil output at its southern fields, a milestone in the company’s ambitions to expand in the country. But now a combination of contractual wrangling and security concerns, heightened by escalating tensions between Iraq’s bigger neighbor Iran and the United States, has conspired to hold back a deal, according to Iraqi government officials."

[snowychap]

From the Grauniad's US live page:

Quote

ICE raids targeting migrant families to begin on Sunday

The Washington Post is reporting that Trump has directed US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers to “conduct a mass roundup of migrant families that have received deportation orders, an operation that is likely to begin with predawn raids in major US cities on Sunday.”

The report, based on interviews with three US officials with knowledge of the plans, said the raids are intended to target as many as 2,000 families in Houston, Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles and among other cities with a large migrant population.

Trump revealed the operation in a tweet on Monday night that said US immigration agents were planning to make mass arrests starting “next week”.

According to the Post, Acting DHS Secretary Kevin McAleenan had pushed for a narrower operation that targeted a smaller number of families who had dropped out of the legal process.

...more on link