Ruth's Report: The out of control F.B.I.

The F.B.I. needs to be reigned in. It is out of control and has become a menace. I am referring to its leadership which does not respect the Constitution, the rule of law, or the basic elements of a democracy.

It is becoming very clear that not only did leadership -- James Comey, Sally Yates, Andrew McCabe, etc. -- favor Hillary Clinton for president, they plotted and conspired on how to destroy Donald Trump should he become president.

The country has suffered as a result. Gary Abernathy (N.Y. POST) explains:

Comey destroyed that image, first through his admission that he orchestrated a leak to The New York Times in hopes that it would lead to the appointment of a special counsel — a signal to the FBI rank and file he once led that if you can’t achieve a result you want through aboveboard means, consider subterfuge. Such actions are expected of politicians. Americans expect the FBI to be better, especially at the top.

Comey later couldn’t resist a Trump-like tweet calling unnamed people “weasels and liars,” revealing more about himself than his intended targets. Now comes the revelation that not only has he apparently written a quickie book, but he’s also planning a media tour next month to promote it — in the midst of an ongoing special counsel investigation in which he is a key witness. We’re still awaiting the across-the-board media outrage.

Comey has abandoned his carefully cultivated public demeanor as a straight-arrow FBI official in exchange for a self-demotion to the ranks of just another partisan political operative. The real James Comey has emerged.

McCabe’s alleged misdeeds and self-pitying response to his firing lend credence to notions that a DC swamp indeed exists, in immediate need of draining. Despite what so many in the media implied over the weekend, McCabe wasn’t fired by the president. He was fired by the attorney general based on a recommendation from the FBI’s own Office of Professional Responsibility, following an investigation by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz — an appointee of President Barack Obama.

That alone is outrageous enough. But Mike Levine (ABC NEWS) reports that Andrew McCabe, all on his own, decided to spy on Attorney General Pete Sessions:

Nearly a year before Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired senior FBI official Andrew McCabe for what Sessions called a "lack of candor," McCabe oversaw a federal criminal investigation into whether Sessions lacked candor when testifying before Congress about contacts with Russian operatives, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.

Democratic lawmakers have repeatedly accused Sessions of misleading them in congressional testimony and called on federal authorities to investigate, but McCabe's previously-unreported decision to actually put the attorney general in the crosshairs of an FBI probe was an exceptional move.

One source told ABC News that Sessions was not aware of the investigation when he decided to fire McCabe last Friday less than 48 hours before McCabe, a former FBI deputy director, was due to retire from government and obtain a full pension, but an attorney representing Sessions declined to confirm that.

Judge Andrew Napolitano (FOX NEWS) observes:

Here is the back story.

After the unlawful use of the FBI and CIA by the Nixon administration to spy on President Nixon’s domestic political opponents, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978. This statute outlawed all domestic surveillance except that which is authorized by the Constitution or by the new Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

That court, the statute declared, could authorize surveillance of foreigners physically located in the United States on a legal standard lesser than that which the Constitution requires. Even though this meant Congress could avoid the Constitution -- an event that every high school social studies student knows is unconstitutional -- the FISC enthusiastically embraced its protocol.

That protocol was a recipe for the constitutional crisis that is now approaching. The recipe consists of a secret court whose records and rulings are not available to the public. It's a court where only the government’s lawyers appear; hence there is no challenge to the government’s submissions. And it's a court that applies a legal standard profoundly at odds with the Constitution. The Constitution requires the presentation of evidence of probable cause of a crime as the trigger for a search warrant, yet FISA requires only probable cause of a relationship to a foreign power.

In the years in which the FISC authorized spying only on foreigners, few Americans complained. Some of us warned at FISA’s inception that this system violates the Constitution and is ripe for abuse, yet we did not know then how corrupt the system would become. The corruption was subtle, as it consisted of government lawyers, in secret and without opposition, persuading the FISC to permit spying on Americans.

The logic was laughable, but it went like this: We need to spy on all foreigners, whether they're working for a foreign government or not; we need to spy on anyone who communicates with a foreigner; and we need to spy on anyone who has communicated with anyone else who has ever communicated with a foreigner.

These absurd extrapolations, pressed on the FISC and accepted by it in secret, turned FISA -- a statute written to prevent spying on Americans -- into a tool that facilitates it. Now, back to McCabe.

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

Wednesday, March 21, 2018. "I want my money back."

I never meant to be the needle that broke your back
You were here, you were here, and you were here
Don't look back

He war he war
He will kill for you
He war he war
He will kill for you
From who you can
You know you can

-- "He War," by Cat Power, first appears on her YOU ARE FREE

However you count it, the Iraq War is now 15 years old. (Or the latest wave of it.) The Bastard War? No, The War Of The Bastards. It's a long, long list of bastards -- Bully Boy Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Tony Blair, John Howard, Dianne Feinstein, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, John McCain, Mitch McConnell, Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, Olympia Snowe . . .

The War Of The Bastards. How appropriate that it's birth is so clouded. It began at the same moment around the world but, due to the time zone differences, it started on March 20th in Iraq and the late night of March 19th in the US.

The War Of The Bastards ignored international and domestic law, used pysops on the American people, was willfully sold by the media whores and left the US forever in debt. US President Donald Trump's slammed for saying three trillion dollars. Slam him when you want but when he's actually right and you slam him, you make it look like your problem isn't with his actions, it's just with him and that's not going to build a resistance though it may bring one or two more over for your circle jerk. Play safe, kiddies.

Three trillion is the estimated cost. That's when the medical needs of the veterans of today's wars are factored in.

Three trillion dollars. And it wasn't Bush or Barack or Donald's money. It was We The People's money.

And we suffer, across the country as a result.

I want my money back
I'm down here drowning in your fat
You got me on my knees
Praying for everything you lack
I ain't afraid of you
I'm just a victim of your fears
You cower in your tower
Praying that I'll disappear
I got another plan
One that requires me to stand
On the stage or in the street
Don't need no microphone or beat
And when you hear this song
If you ain't dead sing along
Bang and strum to these here drums
Till you get where you belong

I got a list of demands
Written on the palm of my hands
I ball my fist, you're gonna
Know where I stand
I'm living hand to mouth
You wanna be somebody? See somebody?
Try and free somebody?
"List of Demands (Reparations)" -- the new single from The Kills

"I want my money back!" should be the cry of the American people.

Mike rightly called out Bernie Sander's latest for show action. But grasp that if Bernie wants to focus on the economy, on jobs (the lack of), on the crumbling infrastructure, you can't do that without talking about where the money went. It went to the colonize Iraq. Three trillion dollars and counting. And counting.

I want my money back.

If the senator wants to run for president again, he's going to have to explain where the money went and how, as president, he'd avoid the same thing. Because we've now had three occupants of the Oval Office conducting the war on Iraq: Bully Boy Bush, President Barack Obama and President Donald Trump. The money continues to flow to Iraq.

Not to help the Iraqi people, understand, but to prop up the US-created government. The occupation and the colonization of Iraq continues as surely as the war itself does -- they are all intertwined.

I want my money back.

Gordon Block (WATERTOWN DAILY TIMES) reports:

Soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division formally took the lead of the international ground forces helping Iraqi troops defeat ISIS in the country.

The ceremony took place 15 years to the day from when American forces first entered the country to take on Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, after President George W. Bush and his cabinet built the case that the country was developing weapons of mass destruction.

The Combined Joint Forces Land Component Command — Operation Inherent Resolve, previously managed by the 1st Armored Division, represents 75 nations and international organizations supporting training, advising and equipping Iraq’s security forces.

The Iraq War has not ended. It's amazing that those who supported the war grasp that while those of us who opposed it have a large number who self-deceive that the war is over. Tara Copp (MILITARY TIMES) spoke with one service member who supports the ongoing and never-ending war:

Fifteen years after the U.S. launched Operation Iraqi Freedom, the remaining U.S. troops deployed there are still needed, the spokesman for U.S. operations in western Iraq said Tuesday.
Marine Corps Col. Seth W.B. Folsom was one of the 150,000 U.S. and coalition troops who initially crossed into Iraq 2003 and is now the commander of Task Force Lion, the continued U.S. effort in Anbar province.
"My Marines and I came to Iraq in 2003 because we thought it was the right thing to do and we served honorably," Folsom said Tuesday at press briefing with reporters at the Pentagon.
"Unlike a lot of people out there right now, I'm not really interested in engaging in the same sort of self-loathing a lot of people are doing today on the anniversary. The simple fact is this: the war has changed out here. It's not the same war anymore.

Well then that would mean -- if it's not the same war anymore -- that it would need something other than the 2002 Congressional authorization to go forward. The war continues. Many Americans live blissfully unaware of that. Who knew we were a nation of Barbara Bushes (the old one, not the young pretty one).

"Why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?"

Take a look in the mirror, America, we've become Barbara Bush.

We're saggy and flabby -- and that's just our minds.

How does this happen? Well you can't pay Rachel Maddow over a million a year and still do news, apparently. Of television outlets, all but CNN pulled out of Iraq at the end of 2008. The only real American withdraw has been the US media's 2008 withdraw. The print outlets? THE WASHINGTON POST has journalists in the region -- often in Iraq itself. MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS? None. Because MCCLATCHY never did s**t. Bill Moyers started that lie. KNIGHT RIDDER was the newspaper chain questioning the war and the claims made to support it. KNIGHT RIDDER was purchased by MCCLATCHY (it ceased publication in July of 2006). Now MCCLATCHY was around in the lead up to the war. It did nothing but whore. Don't give MCCLATCHY credit for what KNIGHT RIDDER did. It had papers but it chose to whore like THE NEW YORK TIMES did. THE NEW YORK TIMES? They do have reporters in Iraq.

Now under Barack, coverage fell there -- despite the money the paper was spending. Why? Jill Abrasmon -- who has attacked Judith Miller on the record and on background in a catty manner that can only be described as bitchy (well, there's the c-word but I'm still not comfortable using that). She supported the war. She tries to pretend otherwise but she did. And when she was made editor of the paper, it was all about bury Iraq. Tim Arango, remember, had the exclusive news in September 2012 that Barack was sending US troops back into Iraq and he had an on the record US military brass source. Jill wouldn't let that be a story. Tim finally managed to squeeze it into a report on Syria -- two paragraphs buried in there.

Jill was trash and so is her son. Poor Jill, disgraced. And her son's once promising career no more. Yes, I had a hand in the departure of Jill -- a hand (Elaine actually documented my role at her site, my part -- in the lead up to Jill being fired) -- from the paper. But when it came to take down her son, that was pretty much 72% me. You're welcome, Jill. The Iraqi people pay for your sins, it's the least I can do to make sure that you and your son are miserable.

Jill's gone (and exposed as a racist at the paper).

If Jill were still at the paper, we wouldn't get this announcement:

On the 15th anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq, we are relaunching At War, which began as a blog for our journalists and contributors in Baghdad years ago. You can read more about that here.

One contributor, Matt Ufford, writes about rolling into Iraq on a tank, as a Marine. Above, U.S. troops keeping watch as the Iraqi Ministry of Transportation burned in April 2003.

In our Op-Ed section, the Iraqi-born novelist Sinan Antoon writes about how he opposed the invasion, and he mourns what has happened since.

“The invasion of Iraq is often spoken of in the United States as a ‘blunder,’ or even a colossal mistake,’” he writes. “It was a crime.”

We wouldn't get that if Jill were still at the paper. But she's gone. Scribbling a weekly column for THE GUARDIAN -- a foreign newspaper -- and trying to pretend like that qualifies as disgrace when it's shame, she's bathed in shame and embarrassment.

Those objecting to Judith Miller? Miller's reports were wrong. Miller didn't make up things, she just trusted her sources and trusted them way too much. After the fact, Jill tried to whisper to the press to make herself look better. Reality, Jill had the power to stop Miller's reporting but she supported it. A lot of people want to pretend that Judith Miller is responsible for everything. She's responsible for what she wrote. Others above her are responsible for it making it into print and for it making it into print the way it did.

People sometimes say no lessons were learned from this ongoing war.

How could lessons be learned?

There was no accountability.

MOTHER JONES, to name but one outlet, rewarded pro-War Cheerleaders like Kevin Drum.

The people who were right, to this day, are not applauded.

The people who lied are still in positions of power -- even in the press.

How can lessons be learned when that happens?

Also true, we didn't demand accountability as a people. When Ed Needham did his "trend" story about bug chasers (AIDS), outraged readers called that junk nonsense out and demanded that ROLLING STONE extend their subscriptions by one issue. Imagine if NYT subscribers had done that with regards to all the editions of the paper with lies published as fact?

The following community sites updated: