Friday, October 14, 2016

The disgraced Comey

James Comey is the F.B.I. Director.  He was supposed to investigate Hillary Clinton's e-mail scandal.  Instead, he ran a white wash.

And he is not going to live that down.

Paul Sperry (NEW YORK POST) reports that F.B.I. agents are up in arms over the white wash and details how Director Comey ensured that no real investigation would take place:

 Instead of going to prosecutors and insisting on using grand jury leverage to compel testimony and seize evidence, Comey allowed immunity for several key witnesses, including potential targets.
The immunity agreements came with outrageous side deals, including preventing agents from searching for any documents on a Dell laptop owned by former Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills generated after Jan. 31, 2015, when she communicated with the server administrator who destroyed subpoenaed emails.
Comey also agreed to have Mills’ laptop destroyed after the restricted search, denying Congress the chance to look at it and making the FBI an accomplice to the destruction of evidence.

Comey’s immunized witnesses nonetheless suffered chronic lapses in memory, made unsubstantiated claims of attorney-client privilege upon tougher questioning and at least two gave demonstrably false statements. And yet Comey indulged it all.


He will not live this down.

Not tomorrow, not next week, not ever.


He did not do his job.

He did not act appropriately.

He did not conduct himself professionally.


This is C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot" for today:


Friday, October 14, 2016.  Chaos and violence continue, Haider al-Abadi is said to survive an assassination attempt, the refugees and displacements that Mosul liberation or 'liberation' will create is a given and should be addressed now, and much more.



US President Barack Obama is hoping to both bolster his legacy and deliver the election to War Hawk Hillary Clinton via a 'victory' in Mosul.

Mosul was seized by the Islamic State in June of 2014.  Over two years later, it's suddenly time, a month before the US presidential election, to liberate or 'liberate' it.

And you get US government spokespersons trying to gin up US public interest with press releases like "Liberating Mosul Will Be Iraq's Biggest Fight, OIR Spokesman Says."


So -- get this -- the US government is preparing.

Preparing for propaganda, preparing for using Iraq, preparing for lying . . .

Preparing for everything, apparently, except helping Iraqis.

Reminder:

 Oct 8
Shahad, 3, in a tent in a camp south of , is one of 4.7 million children in who currently requires humanitarian assistance.

28 retweets18 likes





Iraq's already got a displacement crisis.



 Oct 8
Shahad, 3, in a tent in a camp south of , is one of 4.7 million children in who currently requires humanitarian assistance.

28 retweets18 likes






Liberating or 'liberating' Mosul will result in more displacement.


This is a known.  Where is the preparation by Barack to deal with that?


 8 hours ago
We call for genuinely safe routes for civilians to escape fighting & get to the shelter/help they need:

2 replies23 retweets23 likes







 Oct 8
An assault on Mosul risks 600,000 children's lives. Children will be in the line of fire - unless we act now

43 retweets32 likes






Many are warning what's coming.  There's no excuse for Barack's failure to prepare for this.  The White House better get on it and if they fail in this task the news outlets might want to try to remember there's supposed to be a difference between journalism and hagiography.

And Ken Roth better ask himself if pimping for Hillary Clinton is worth short changing human lives? I'm talking about the failure of Human Rights Watch to warn of this impending disaster while Roth sends his 'coded' Tweets of support to Hillary (which include pimping the lie that WikiLeak's revelations are due to Russian hackers).  Roth would do better to focus on humanity and stop cheapening his reputation with election politics.


The timing of Mosul faces complications due to the ongoing animosity between the governments of Iraq and Turkey.  Turkey has troops in Iraq.  The government of Iraq wants them out.  Turkey is refusing to remove the troops.

Birce Bora (ALJAZEERA) observes, "Only weeks before Iraqi troops and their local and international partners start their push to retake the city of Mosul from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS), the leaders of Turkey and Iraq have been caught in a war of words that could derail the Mosul liberation efforts."


In other news out of Iraq today, there's this:

 5 minutes ago
Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi survived an assassination attempt today.








THE BAGHDAD POST apparently has the exclusive, if the attempt took place.

What is known and established by others right now is that Haider al-Abadi was in Kirkuk earlier today.




 11 minutes ago
PM walking around in Al Basheer district southwest and now back in Kirkuk govt complex.

1 like







Mohammed Jabaal (BAGHDAD POST) reports that there was a shelling on a post where al-Abadi had been ten minutes prior.  No one was injured in the shelling.



Haider was put in check on Tuesday by Iraq's federal courts who overturned his decision (unconstitutional decision) to do away with the post of vice president.  This means that Osama al-Nujaifi, Ayad Allawi and Nouri al-Maliki remain vice presidents.

Nouri is the former prime minister and thug of Iraq whose actions -- persecuting the Sunni people, among his many actions -- nearly destroyed Iraq.

So it's no surprise that this is one response to the news:

 2 hours ago
Iraqi Shia cleric calls for demonstrations against Maliki’s return to a vice presidential position. |
7 retweets5 likes






Moqtada and Nouri have long been foes and rivals for control of the Shia population.



And the US Defense Dept announced Thursday:


 Strikes in Iraq
Attack, fighter and remotely piloted aircraft conducted 10 strikes in Iraq, coordinated with and in support of Iraq’s government:
-- Near Huwayjah, a strike destroyed an ISIL boat and a vehicle bomb.
-- Near Rutbah, a strike engaged an ISIL tactical unit and destroyed three vehicles.
-- Near Bashir, a strike engaged an ISIL staging area and destroyed two ISIL-held buildings, two fighting positions, two tunnels, a storage cache and an ammunition cache.
-- Near Beiji, a strike destroyed two ISIL ammunition caches, two vehicles, a mortar system and a tunnel entrance.
-- Near Kisik, two strikes destroyed three ISIL tunnel entrances and damaged another tunnel.
-- Near Mosul, a strike engaged an ISIL tactical unit and destroyed a vehicle.
-- Near Qayyarah, two strikes engaged two ISIL tactical units and destroyed three supply caches, two vehicles, two mortar systems, two rocket systems and a heavy machine gun.
-- Near Sultan Abdallah, a strike destroyed five ISIL homemade explosive caches, two vehicles and an artillery system and suppressed a mortar position.

Task force officials define a strike as one or more kinetic events that occur in roughly the same geographic location to produce a single, sometimes cumulative, effect. Therefore, officials explained, a single aircraft delivering a single weapon against a lone ISIL vehicle is one strike, but so is multiple aircraft delivering dozens of weapons against buildings, vehicles and weapon systems in a compound, for example, having the cumulative effect of making those targets harder or impossible for ISIL to use. Accordingly, officials said, they do not report the number or type of aircraft employed in a strike, the number of munitions dropped in each strike, or the number of individual munition impact points against a target. Ground-based artillery fired in counterfire or in fire support to maneuver roles is not classified as a strike.



I know a few people are posting this morning.

I'll add the following community sites posted when they go up:











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