An FBI special agent says he’s
turned in his badge so he can publicly voice his concerns over the
politicization of the bureau by Republicans in Congress and the Trump
administration.
“FBI agents are dogged people
who do not care about the direction of political winds,” former FBI
special agent Josh Campbell, who was announced Monday as a CNN law
enforcement analyst,
wrote in a New York Times op-ed.
“But to succeed in their work, they need public backing.
Scorched-earth attacks from politicians with partisan goals now
threaten that support, raising corrosive doubts about the integrity of
the FBI that could last for generations.”
Oh, poor baby.
I have no sympathy for him.
The F.B.I. has long been politicized.
I do not see President Donald Trump as a great danger to the F.B.I. but
if Mr. Campbell does, maybe he should not be quitting – maybe he should
stay and fight.
I guess babies just do not care.
I also believe that President Trump is criticizing leadership not rank and file.
If Mr. Campbell is so upset, maybe he
should have been upset when the then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch met
with Bill Clinton while then-candidate Hillary was under investigation –
criminal investigation.
I prefer President Trump’s attitude towards the F.B.I. to President Barack Obama who was always excusing them.
Larry O’Conner (WASHINGTON TIMES) offers this analysis:
One
of the most offensive aspects of the FISA memo release Friday was the
realization that despite dire warnings from Democrats and
activist pundits in the media, there appeared to be no overriding
national security concern with the information President Trump
declassified allowing for the public release of the memo.
In other words: Democrats and their pals in the media lied about why they didn’t want the memo released.
And
it was a pretty awful lie at that. Their lie framed the discussion of
the FISA memo in the starkest terms: If you favor transparency
and a public airing of the events that triggered the Mueller/Russia
probe, you are reckless and irresponsible with regard to the national
security of our country.
The
way Democrats told it, the Republicans and the president were more
interested in their own political narrative than they were in
protecting our country. And, as it turns out, this was nonsense.
Yes, they did lie. And U.S. House
Representative Nancy Pelosi, Minority Leader in the House, was ranting
that this would be a Constitutional crisis.
They really overplayed their hand.
Please read “The memo makes clear why we don't trust corporate
...” that we wrote for THIRD. When you speak to people,
you learn quickly that if they have read the memo they are bothered by
it. This is true even if they have seen commentary dismissing the
memo’s importance.
Now the memo may not be accurate, I
will offer that qualifier. But it is amazing to read all the dismissals
of what it says and see a so-what attitude among the press.
That really angers me.
I am no fan of Mr. Trump but what the memo outlines is political targeting, lying to the court, and countermanding democracy.
This is C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"
Monday, February 5, 2018. Another drawdown but still no withdrawal, IPS
ignores reality to pin the blame on the toxic nature of Iraq's
environment on ISIS (IPS will apparently always provide cover for the US
government) and much more.
Here are 3 things you should know this morning:
- Some U.S. forces are reportedly being redeployed from Iraq to Afghanistan
- Wall Street begins trading after the worst week in 2 years
- "Super Sick Monday?" Researchers predict 14 million Americans will call in sick today
Susannah George and Qassim Abdul-Zahra (AP) report the drawdown has been observed by western contractors and they get some confirmation from unnamed Iraqis. This is a drawdown -- not a withdrawal.
How big is the drawdown? No one knows for sure at this point.
And don't forget that Fort Drum is readying a deployment to Iraq.
Oh, wait. They're there as reported Saturday by THE WATERTOWN DAILY TIMES:
Soldiers from the 925th Contracting Battalion formally marked the beginning of their deployment to Iraq during a ceremony on Friday.
The soldiers will be the Regional Contracting Center and provide contracting support to enhance and sustain building partner capacity operations that enable efforts to counter ISIS and increase regional stability.
[. . .]
This is in addition to the approximately 500 soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division headquarters who will also deploy to Iraq this year.
A drawdown, not a withdrawal, is currently taking place.
There's not been a withdrawal since this phase of the Iraq War started in March of 2003 (Ted Koppel warned at the end of 2011 but so few wanted to listen).
For a year, I sent Marines to Iraq and Afghanistan sometimes I was the last stateside Marine they saw before leaving for a warzone. I remember people I knew from CLC-21 and I was the first person they saw, and they hugged me. Why the F**K are we still there?
Iraq to Afghanistan
A very good question.
Will Higginbotham (IPS) has a story -- story being the operative term -- about Iraq:
In Iraq, thirty years of armed conflict has killed hundreds of thousands of people, wounded countless more, displaced millions and laid cities and towns to waste.
Amongst all of this death and destruction, there is an often-overlooked victim whose harm has far reaching consequences: The environment.
Whilst Iraq’s environment has suffered from degradation due to conflict for decades, in recent years it has been exacerbated due to the so-called Islamic State (ISIS).
“Wherever ISIS has been there has been huge environmental destruction and with that have come potentially major health threats to the public,” says Wim Zwijnenburg, a lead researcher at the dutch not-for profit, PAX.
Over the past two years, PAX has used public satellite images, social media and first-hand field research to track the environmental damage and the subsequent risk to public health in the northern parts of Iraq.
It was that burning of oil, for example, that caused the environmental destruction -- not the bombs dropped on, say Mosul, right?
"Right" as Nipsey Russell says in WILDCATS.
It has nothing to do with oil and the US 'experts' who've decided that no damage to the local ecology is too great, right?
In 2007, Luke Mitchell reported for HARPER'S about how the smell of oil was all over Rumaila nd making observations like the following:
I was making that same journey from well to terminal, and yet in all my time in Iraq I would see the oil itself only once. This was in a particularly empty patch of desert, beyond even the lonely cinder-block houses and the rock-throwing kids. We had sped past dry concrete canals and abandoned oil drums and rocket-charred tanks, past mile upon mile of flat dirt and rust, and then we found ourselves driving between a series of mirror-black ponds. These pools crept along both sides of the highway, and through the scratchy ballistic glass of our SUV it was hard to tell at first if the liquid within was oil or water. There were no ripples, though—the pools were thick—and the hot asphalt smell was strong enough that it had become a taste. Sam said the oil came from leaky pipes, that there is no EPA watching over Rumaila. “You have to give the devil his due here,” he said, meaning Iraq. “On a good day, they export 60,000 to 70,000 barrels an hour. If 500 barrels of crude spill on the ground here, what is that? Not more than a half minute of export.”
[. . .]
We wandered further into the maze of pipes, and Sam paused in front of another tank. This was a desalting unit. Sam said the groundwater in Rumaila is so salty and alkaline that if you put it in your mouth you would gag and probably throw up.
But the problem is the actions of ISIS?
Seven months since Mosul was recaptured from IS, the stench of death still wafts from nearly every rubble-filled corner in the Old City, amid a government tussle over how to collect the bodies of militants and civilians still rotting in the streets:
Civilians left rotting in the streets all these weeks later but it's ISIS?
When it comes to Iraq, IPS broke with reality during the years Barack Obama was in the White House. Even reaching with both hands now, it can't seem to find its way back.
The problem remains that no one cared about anything but getting their hands on Iraq's oil. When the looting took place in the early days of the war, what was Donald Rumsfeld's henny penny crack?
They never cared.
And they didn't care enough about the population to protect them.
ISIS is a terrorist group.
But it wasn't ISIS using White Phosphorus in Iraq -- it was the United States government.
Depleted uranium? That wasn't ISIS either.
Iraq became a toxic place and that's why the rate of birth defects increased so significantly -- as did the rates of cancer.
But here's IPS distorting reality yet again.
Fiona Apple's "Oh Well" (first appears on EXTRAORDINARY MACHINE.
New content at THIRD:
- Truest statement of the week
- Truest statement of the week II
- A note to our readers
- Editorial: YaYa's full of crap
- TV: Look who's naked and look who isn't
- The memo makes clear why we don't trust corporate ...
- Ty's Corner: Justin, you're White
- Mailbag
- 10 worst films of the last 12 months
- This edition's playlist
