TiLTNews Network: Earth Watch - Freedom is defined by the ability of citizens to live without government interference, not by safety. It is easy to clamor for government security when terrible things happen; but liberty is given true meaning when we support it without exception, and we will be safer for it ~ Dr. Ron Paul
Wednesday, July 2, 2014
Monday, June 30, 2014
Anti-Homeless Spikes? Heartless. Cementing Over Them? Ingenious. | Common Dreams
Anti-Homeless Spikes? Heartless. Cementing Over Them? Ingenious. | Common Dreams
Published on Friday, June 27, 2014 by YES! Magazine
Anti-Homeless Spikes? Heartless. Cementing Over Them? Ingenious.
Londoners have made their feelings clear about a corporate "solution" to the problem of homelessness—and the company listened.
by Molly Rusk
Published on Friday, June 27, 2014 by YES! Magazine
Anti-Homeless Spikes? Heartless. Cementing Over Them? Ingenious.
Londoners have made their feelings clear about a corporate "solution" to the problem of homelessness—and the company listened.
by Molly Rusk
(Photo by Tom Johnson / Vice News)
Early in the morning on June 12, a few members of a group known as the London Black Revolutionaries showed up in front of a Tesco shopping center on Regent Street in London and covered the store's "anti-homeless spikes" with home-made cement.
If the issue of spikes outside of Tesco hit a nerve, it could be because rates of homelessness in England have been rising.
A few days before the stunt, the spikes generated a firestorm of public criticism of the retail giant. The criticism largely took place online and centered around a series of photos of the spikes taken in October 2013 by
photojournalist Joshua Preston.
The spikes were intended to deter "antisocial behavior," Tesco told The Guardian in response to the criticism. But Londoners were having none of that.
"We want homes not spikes," Preston said in a press release from the People's Assembly Against Austerity, an organization that campaigns against austerity policies—such as cuts to pensions and public spending. "We will show Tesco that its decision to victimize the homeless is shameful."
Interest in the issue grew quickly. When Preston organized a Facebook event to protest the spikes, more than 600 people agreed to demonstrate. The event was planned to coincide with a national anti-austerity protest in London on June 21.
But the Revolutionaries got to Tesco first, and their slap-dash cement-laying did the trick: Less than 24 hours after the stunt, Tesco removed the spikes from the Regent Street store, saying "We will find a different solution."
If the issue of spikes outside of Tesco hit a nerve, it could be because rates of homelessness in England have been steadily rising. And, according to The Guardian, austerity measures are at least partly to blame:
Homelessness has increased for three consecutive years, partly because of housing shortages and cuts to benefits, with an estimated 185,000 people a year now affected in England.
The actual number of people experiencing homelessness may be significantly higher than that. Research from the charity group Crisis suggests that about 62 percent of single homeless people may not show up in official figures.
One anonymous member of the London Black Revolutionaries offered Tesco a few spike-free ways to address homelessness.
"Give money to a local shelter organization, a food kitchen, or a food bank, because that's what's going to help," he told Vice News. "It's not going to solve the problem of homelessness, but it's going to alleviate some of the pain and suffering in these people's lives."
The Revolutionaries also said they will target other businesses in London that decide to install the spikes.
Molly Rusk wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Molly Rusk is a recent graduate of the program in Creative Writing at the University of Washington and an online reporting intern at YES! Magazine
If the issue of spikes outside of Tesco hit a nerve, it could be because rates of homelessness in England have been rising.
A few days before the stunt, the spikes generated a firestorm of public criticism of the retail giant. The criticism largely took place online and centered around a series of photos of the spikes taken in October 2013 by
photojournalist Joshua Preston.
The spikes were intended to deter "antisocial behavior," Tesco told The Guardian in response to the criticism. But Londoners were having none of that.
"We want homes not spikes," Preston said in a press release from the People's Assembly Against Austerity, an organization that campaigns against austerity policies—such as cuts to pensions and public spending. "We will show Tesco that its decision to victimize the homeless is shameful."
Interest in the issue grew quickly. When Preston organized a Facebook event to protest the spikes, more than 600 people agreed to demonstrate. The event was planned to coincide with a national anti-austerity protest in London on June 21.
But the Revolutionaries got to Tesco first, and their slap-dash cement-laying did the trick: Less than 24 hours after the stunt, Tesco removed the spikes from the Regent Street store, saying "We will find a different solution."
If the issue of spikes outside of Tesco hit a nerve, it could be because rates of homelessness in England have been steadily rising. And, according to The Guardian, austerity measures are at least partly to blame:
Homelessness has increased for three consecutive years, partly because of housing shortages and cuts to benefits, with an estimated 185,000 people a year now affected in England.
The actual number of people experiencing homelessness may be significantly higher than that. Research from the charity group Crisis suggests that about 62 percent of single homeless people may not show up in official figures.
One anonymous member of the London Black Revolutionaries offered Tesco a few spike-free ways to address homelessness.
"Give money to a local shelter organization, a food kitchen, or a food bank, because that's what's going to help," he told Vice News. "It's not going to solve the problem of homelessness, but it's going to alleviate some of the pain and suffering in these people's lives."
The Revolutionaries also said they will target other businesses in London that decide to install the spikes.
Molly Rusk wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Molly Rusk is a recent graduate of the program in Creative Writing at the University of Washington and an online reporting intern at YES! Magazine
The First Iraq War Was Also Sold to the Public Based on a Pack of Lies | Common Dreams
There Has Been No Decent POTUS Since JFK And The Man In The Picture Below Was Front And Center on November 23, 1963 in Texas to help assassinate him - WAKE UP AMERICA
The First Iraq War Was Also Sold to the Public Based on a Pack of Lies | Common Dreams
Published on Friday, June 27, 2014 by Moyers & Company
The First Iraq War Was Also Sold to the Public Based on a Pack of Lies
by Joshua Holland
Published on Friday, June 27, 2014 by Moyers & Company
The First Iraq War Was Also Sold to the Public Based on a Pack of Lies
by Joshua Holland
Then Vice President George H.W. Bush and his wife, Barbara, arrive in New Orleans for the 1988 Republican National Convention (Credit: Esther/cc/flickr)Polls suggest that Americans tend to differentiate between our “good war” in Iraq — “Operation Desert Storm,” launched by George HW Bush in 1990 — and the “mistake” his son made in 2003.
Across the ideological spectrum, there’s broad agreement that the first Gulf War was “worth fighting.” The opposite is true of the 2003 invasion, and a big reason for those divergent views was captured in a 2013 CNN poll that found that “a majority of Americans (54%) say that prior to the start of the war the administration of George W. Bush deliberately misled the U.S. public about whether Baghdad had weapons of mass destruction.”
But as the usual suspects come out of the woodwork to urge the US to once again commit troops to Iraq, it’s important to recall that the first Gulf War was sold to the public on a pack of lies that were just as egregious as those told by the second Bush administration 12 years later.
The Lie of an Expansionist Iraq
Most countries condemned Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. But the truth — that it was the culmination of a series of tangled economic and historical conflicts between two Arab oil states — wasn’t likely to sell the US public on the idea of sending our troops halfway around the world to do something about it.
So we were given a variation of the “domino theory.” Saddam Hussein, we were told, had designs on the entire Middle East. If he wasn’t halted in Kuwait, his troops would just keep going into other countries.
As Scott Peterson reported for The Christian Science Monitor in 2002, a key part of the first Bush administration’s case “was that an Iraqi juggernaut was also threatening to roll into Saudi Arabia. Citing top-secret satellite images, Pentagon officials estimated in mid-September [of 1990] that up to 250,000 Iraqi troops and 1,500 tanks stood on the border, threatening the key US oil supplier.”
A quarter of a million troops with heavy armor amassed on the Saudi border certainly seemed like a clear sign of hostile intent. In announcing that he had deployed troops to the Gulf in August 1990, George HW Bush said, “I took this action to assist the Saudi Arabian Government in the defense of its homeland.” He asked the American people for their “support in a decision I’ve made to stand up for what’s right and condemn what’s wrong, all in the cause of peace.”
But one reporter — Jean Heller of the St. Petersburg Times — wasn’t satisfied taking the administration’s claims at face value. She obtained two commercial satellite images of the area taken at the exact same time that American intelligence supposedly had found Saddam’s huge and menacing army and found nothing there but empty desert.
She contacted the office of then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney “for evidence refuting theTimes photos or analysis offering to hold the story if proven wrong.” But “the official response” was: “Trust us.”
Heller later told the Monitor’s Scott Peterson that the Iraqi buildup on the border between Kuwait and Saudi Arabia “was the whole justification for Bush sending troops in there, and it just didn’t exist.”
Dead Babies, Courtesy of a New York PR Firm
Military occupations are always brutal, and Iraq’s six-month occupation of Kuwait was no exception. But because Americans didn’t have an abundance of affection for Kuwait, a case had to be built that the Iraqi army was guilty of nothing less than Nazi-level atrocities.
That’s where a hearing held by the Congressional Human Rights Caucus in October 1990 played a major role in making the case for war.
A young woman who gave only her first name, Nayira, testified that she had been a volunteer at Kuwait’s al-Adan hospital, where she had seen Iraqi troops rip scores of babies out of incubators, leaving them “to die on the cold floor.” Between tears, she described the incident as “horrifying.”
Her account was a bombshell. Portions of her testimony were aired that evening on ABC’s “Nightline” and NBC’s “Nightly News.” Seven US senators cited her testimony in speeches urging Americans to support the war, and George HW Bush repeated the story on 10 separate occasions in the weeks that followed.
In 2002, Tom Regan wrote about his own family’s response to the story for The Christian Science Monitor:
I can still recall my brother Sean’s face. It was bright red. Furious. Not one given to fits of temper, Sean was in an uproar. He was a father, and he had just heard that Iraqi soldiers had taken scores of babies out of incubators in Kuwait City and left them to die. The Iraqis had shipped the incubators back to Baghdad. A pacifist by nature, my brother was not in a peaceful mood that day. “We’ve got to go and get Saddam Hussein. Now,” he said passionately.
Subsequent investigations by Amnesty International, a division of Human Rights Watch and independent journalists would show that the story was entirely bogus — a crucial piece of war propaganda the American media swallowed hook, line and sinker. Iraqi troops had looted Kuwaiti hospitals, but the gruesome image of babies dying on the floor was a fabrication.
In 1992, John MacArthur revealed in The New York Times that Nayirah was in fact the daughter of Saud Nasir al-Sabah, Kuwait’s ambassador to the US. Her testimony had been organized by a group called Citizens for a Free Kuwait, which was a front for the Kuwaiti government.
Tom Regan reported that Citizens for a Free Kuwait hired Hill & Knowlton, a New York-based PR firm that had previously spun for the tobacco industry and a number of governments with ugly human rights records. The company was paid “$10.7 million to devise a campaign to win American support for the war.” It was a natural fit, wrote Regan. “Craig Fuller, the firm’s president and COO, had been then-President George Bush’s chief of staff when the senior Bush had served as vice president under Ronald Reagan.”
According to Robin Andersen’s A Century of Media, a Century of War, Hill & Knowlton had spent $1 million on focus groups to determine how to get the American public behind the war, and found that focusing on “atrocities” was the most effective way to rally support for rescuing Kuwait.
Arthur Rowse reported for the Columbia Journalism Review that Hill & Knowlton sent out a video news release featuring Nayirah’s gripping testimony to 700 American television stations.
As Tom Regan noted, without the atrocities, the idea of committing American blood and treasure to save Kuwait just “wasn’t an easy sell.”
Only a few weeks before the invasion, Amnesty International accused the Kuwaiti government of jailing dozens of dissidents and torturing them without trial. In an effort to spruce up the Kuwait image, the company organized Kuwait Information Day on 20 college campuses, a national day of prayer for Kuwait, distributed thousands of “Free Kuwait” bumper stickers, and other similar traditional PR ventures. But none of it was working very well. American public support remained lukewarm the first two months.
That would change as stories about Saddam’s baby-killing troops were splashed across front pages across the country.
Saddam Was Irrational
Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait was just as illegal as the US invasion that would ultimately oust him 13 years later — it was neither an act of self-defense, nor did the UN Security Council authorize it.
But it can be argued that Iraq had significantly more justification for its attack.
Kuwait had been a close ally of Iraq, and a top financier of the Iraqi invasion of Iran in 1980, which, as The New York Times reported, occurred after “Iran’s revolutionary government tried to assassinate Iraqi officials, conducted repeated border raids and tried to topple Mr. Hussein by fomenting unrest within Iraq.”
Saddam Hussein felt that Kuwait should forgive part of his regime’s war debt because he had halted the “expansionist plans of Iranian interests” not only on behalf of his own country, but in defense of the other Gulf Arab states as well.
After an oil glut knocked out about two-thirds of the value of a barrel of crude oil between 1980 and 1986, Iraq appealed to OPEC to limit crude oil production in order to raise prices — with oil as low as $10 per barrel, the government was struggling to pay its debts. But Kuwait not only resisted those efforts — and asked OPEC to increase its quotas by 50 percent instead — for much of the 1980s it also had maintained its own production well above OPEC’s mandatory quota. According to a study by energy economist Mamdouh Salameh, “between 1985 and 1989, Iraq lost US$14 billion a year due to Kuwait’s oil price strategy,” and “Kuwait’s refusal to decrease its oil production was viewed by Iraq as an act of aggression against it.”
There were additional disputes between the two countries centering on Kuwait’s exploitation of the Rumaila oil fields, which straddled the border between the two countries. Kuwait was accused of using a technique known as “slant-drilling” to siphon off oil from the Iraqi side.
None of this justifies Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. But a longstanding and complex dispute between two undemocratic petrostates wasn’t likely to inspire Americans to accept the loss of their sons and daughters in a distant fight.
So instead, George HW Bush told the public that Iraq’s invasion was “without provocation or warning,” and that “there is no justification whatsoever for this outrageous and brutal act of aggression.” He added: “Given the Iraqi government’s history of aggression against its own citizens as well as its neighbors, to assume Iraq will not attack again would be unwise and unrealistic.”
Ultimately, these longstanding disputes between Iraq and Kuwait got considerably less attention in the American media than did tales of Kuwaiti babies being ripped out of incubators by Saddam’s stormtroopers.
Saddam Was “Unstoppable”
A crucial diplomatic error on the part of the first Bush administration left Saddam Hussein with the impression that the US government had little interest in Iraq’s conflict with Kuwait. But that didn’t fit into the narrative that the Iraqi dictator was an irrational maniac bent on regional domination. So there was a concerted effort to deny that the US government had ever had a chance to deter his aggression through diplomatic means — and even to paint those who said otherwise as conspiracy theorists.
As John Mearsheimer from the University of Chicago and Harvard’s Stephen Walt wrote in 2003, “Saddam reportedly decided on war sometime in July 1990, but before sending his army into Kuwait, he approached the United States to find out how it would react.”
In a now famous interview with the Iraqi leader, U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie told Saddam, “[W]e have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.” The U.S. State Department had earlier told Saddam that Washington had “no special defense or security commitments to Kuwait.” The United States may not have intended to give Iraq a green light, but that is effectively what it did.
Exactly what was said during the meeting has been a source of some controversy. Accounts differ. According to a transcript released by the Iraqi government, Glaspie told Hussein, ” I admire your extraordinary efforts to rebuild your country.”
I know you need funds. We understand that and our opinion is that you should have the opportunity to rebuild your country. But we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.
I was in the American Embassy in Kuwait during the late 60′s. The instruction we had during this period was that we should express no opinion on this issue and that the issue is not associated with America. James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasize this instruction.
Leslie Gelb of The New York Times reported that Glaspie told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the transcript was inaccurate “and insisted she had been tough.” But that account was contradicted when diplomatic cables between Baghdad and Washington were released. As Gelb described it, “The State Department instructed Ms. Glaspie to give the Iraqis a conciliatory message punctuated with a few indirect but significant warnings,” but “Ms. Glaspie apparently omitted the warnings and simply slobbered all over Saddam in their meeting on July 25, while the Iraqi dictator threatened Kuwait anew.”
There is no dispute about one crucially important point: Saddam Hussein consulted with the US before invading, and our ambassador chose not to draw a line in the sand, or even hint that the invasion might be grounds for the US to go to war.
The most generous interpretation is that each side badly misjudged the other. Hussein ordered the attack on Kuwait confident that the US would only issue verbal condemnations. As for Glaspie, she later told The New York Times, ”Obviously, I didn’t think — and nobody else did — that the Iraqis were going to take all of Kuwait.”
Fool Me Once…
The first Gulf War was sold on a mountain of war propaganda. It took a campaign worthy of George Orwell to convince Americans that our erstwhile ally Saddam Hussein — whom the US had aided in his war with Iran as late as 1988 — had become an irrational monster by 1990.
Twelve years later, the second invasion of Iraq was premised on Hussein’s supposed cooperation with al Qaeda, vials of anthrax, Nigerian yellowcake and claims that Iraq hadmissiles poised to strike British territory in little as 45 minutes.
Now, eleven years later, as Bill Moyers put it last week, “the very same armchair warriors in Washington who from the safety of their Beltway bunkers called for invading Baghdad, are demanding once again that America plunge into the sectarian wars of the Middle East.” It’s vital that we keep our history in Iraq in mind, and apply some healthy skepticism to the claims they offer us this time around.
© 2014 Moyers & Company
Joshua Holland is a senior digital producer for BillMoyers.com. He’s the author of The Fifteen Biggest Lies About the Economy (and Everything Else the Right Doesn’t Want You to Know about Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America) (Wiley: 2010), and host of Politics and Reality Radio. Follow him on Twitter or drop him an email at hollandj [at] moyersmedia [dot] com.
Across the ideological spectrum, there’s broad agreement that the first Gulf War was “worth fighting.” The opposite is true of the 2003 invasion, and a big reason for those divergent views was captured in a 2013 CNN poll that found that “a majority of Americans (54%) say that prior to the start of the war the administration of George W. Bush deliberately misled the U.S. public about whether Baghdad had weapons of mass destruction.”
But as the usual suspects come out of the woodwork to urge the US to once again commit troops to Iraq, it’s important to recall that the first Gulf War was sold to the public on a pack of lies that were just as egregious as those told by the second Bush administration 12 years later.
The Lie of an Expansionist Iraq
Most countries condemned Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. But the truth — that it was the culmination of a series of tangled economic and historical conflicts between two Arab oil states — wasn’t likely to sell the US public on the idea of sending our troops halfway around the world to do something about it.
So we were given a variation of the “domino theory.” Saddam Hussein, we were told, had designs on the entire Middle East. If he wasn’t halted in Kuwait, his troops would just keep going into other countries.
As Scott Peterson reported for The Christian Science Monitor in 2002, a key part of the first Bush administration’s case “was that an Iraqi juggernaut was also threatening to roll into Saudi Arabia. Citing top-secret satellite images, Pentagon officials estimated in mid-September [of 1990] that up to 250,000 Iraqi troops and 1,500 tanks stood on the border, threatening the key US oil supplier.”
A quarter of a million troops with heavy armor amassed on the Saudi border certainly seemed like a clear sign of hostile intent. In announcing that he had deployed troops to the Gulf in August 1990, George HW Bush said, “I took this action to assist the Saudi Arabian Government in the defense of its homeland.” He asked the American people for their “support in a decision I’ve made to stand up for what’s right and condemn what’s wrong, all in the cause of peace.”
But one reporter — Jean Heller of the St. Petersburg Times — wasn’t satisfied taking the administration’s claims at face value. She obtained two commercial satellite images of the area taken at the exact same time that American intelligence supposedly had found Saddam’s huge and menacing army and found nothing there but empty desert.
She contacted the office of then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney “for evidence refuting theTimes photos or analysis offering to hold the story if proven wrong.” But “the official response” was: “Trust us.”
Heller later told the Monitor’s Scott Peterson that the Iraqi buildup on the border between Kuwait and Saudi Arabia “was the whole justification for Bush sending troops in there, and it just didn’t exist.”
Dead Babies, Courtesy of a New York PR Firm
Military occupations are always brutal, and Iraq’s six-month occupation of Kuwait was no exception. But because Americans didn’t have an abundance of affection for Kuwait, a case had to be built that the Iraqi army was guilty of nothing less than Nazi-level atrocities.
That’s where a hearing held by the Congressional Human Rights Caucus in October 1990 played a major role in making the case for war.
A young woman who gave only her first name, Nayira, testified that she had been a volunteer at Kuwait’s al-Adan hospital, where she had seen Iraqi troops rip scores of babies out of incubators, leaving them “to die on the cold floor.” Between tears, she described the incident as “horrifying.”
Her account was a bombshell. Portions of her testimony were aired that evening on ABC’s “Nightline” and NBC’s “Nightly News.” Seven US senators cited her testimony in speeches urging Americans to support the war, and George HW Bush repeated the story on 10 separate occasions in the weeks that followed.
In 2002, Tom Regan wrote about his own family’s response to the story for The Christian Science Monitor:
I can still recall my brother Sean’s face. It was bright red. Furious. Not one given to fits of temper, Sean was in an uproar. He was a father, and he had just heard that Iraqi soldiers had taken scores of babies out of incubators in Kuwait City and left them to die. The Iraqis had shipped the incubators back to Baghdad. A pacifist by nature, my brother was not in a peaceful mood that day. “We’ve got to go and get Saddam Hussein. Now,” he said passionately.
Subsequent investigations by Amnesty International, a division of Human Rights Watch and independent journalists would show that the story was entirely bogus — a crucial piece of war propaganda the American media swallowed hook, line and sinker. Iraqi troops had looted Kuwaiti hospitals, but the gruesome image of babies dying on the floor was a fabrication.
In 1992, John MacArthur revealed in The New York Times that Nayirah was in fact the daughter of Saud Nasir al-Sabah, Kuwait’s ambassador to the US. Her testimony had been organized by a group called Citizens for a Free Kuwait, which was a front for the Kuwaiti government.
Tom Regan reported that Citizens for a Free Kuwait hired Hill & Knowlton, a New York-based PR firm that had previously spun for the tobacco industry and a number of governments with ugly human rights records. The company was paid “$10.7 million to devise a campaign to win American support for the war.” It was a natural fit, wrote Regan. “Craig Fuller, the firm’s president and COO, had been then-President George Bush’s chief of staff when the senior Bush had served as vice president under Ronald Reagan.”
According to Robin Andersen’s A Century of Media, a Century of War, Hill & Knowlton had spent $1 million on focus groups to determine how to get the American public behind the war, and found that focusing on “atrocities” was the most effective way to rally support for rescuing Kuwait.
Arthur Rowse reported for the Columbia Journalism Review that Hill & Knowlton sent out a video news release featuring Nayirah’s gripping testimony to 700 American television stations.
As Tom Regan noted, without the atrocities, the idea of committing American blood and treasure to save Kuwait just “wasn’t an easy sell.”
Only a few weeks before the invasion, Amnesty International accused the Kuwaiti government of jailing dozens of dissidents and torturing them without trial. In an effort to spruce up the Kuwait image, the company organized Kuwait Information Day on 20 college campuses, a national day of prayer for Kuwait, distributed thousands of “Free Kuwait” bumper stickers, and other similar traditional PR ventures. But none of it was working very well. American public support remained lukewarm the first two months.
That would change as stories about Saddam’s baby-killing troops were splashed across front pages across the country.
Saddam Was Irrational
Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait was just as illegal as the US invasion that would ultimately oust him 13 years later — it was neither an act of self-defense, nor did the UN Security Council authorize it.
But it can be argued that Iraq had significantly more justification for its attack.
Kuwait had been a close ally of Iraq, and a top financier of the Iraqi invasion of Iran in 1980, which, as The New York Times reported, occurred after “Iran’s revolutionary government tried to assassinate Iraqi officials, conducted repeated border raids and tried to topple Mr. Hussein by fomenting unrest within Iraq.”
Saddam Hussein felt that Kuwait should forgive part of his regime’s war debt because he had halted the “expansionist plans of Iranian interests” not only on behalf of his own country, but in defense of the other Gulf Arab states as well.
After an oil glut knocked out about two-thirds of the value of a barrel of crude oil between 1980 and 1986, Iraq appealed to OPEC to limit crude oil production in order to raise prices — with oil as low as $10 per barrel, the government was struggling to pay its debts. But Kuwait not only resisted those efforts — and asked OPEC to increase its quotas by 50 percent instead — for much of the 1980s it also had maintained its own production well above OPEC’s mandatory quota. According to a study by energy economist Mamdouh Salameh, “between 1985 and 1989, Iraq lost US$14 billion a year due to Kuwait’s oil price strategy,” and “Kuwait’s refusal to decrease its oil production was viewed by Iraq as an act of aggression against it.”
There were additional disputes between the two countries centering on Kuwait’s exploitation of the Rumaila oil fields, which straddled the border between the two countries. Kuwait was accused of using a technique known as “slant-drilling” to siphon off oil from the Iraqi side.
None of this justifies Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. But a longstanding and complex dispute between two undemocratic petrostates wasn’t likely to inspire Americans to accept the loss of their sons and daughters in a distant fight.
So instead, George HW Bush told the public that Iraq’s invasion was “without provocation or warning,” and that “there is no justification whatsoever for this outrageous and brutal act of aggression.” He added: “Given the Iraqi government’s history of aggression against its own citizens as well as its neighbors, to assume Iraq will not attack again would be unwise and unrealistic.”
Ultimately, these longstanding disputes between Iraq and Kuwait got considerably less attention in the American media than did tales of Kuwaiti babies being ripped out of incubators by Saddam’s stormtroopers.
Saddam Was “Unstoppable”
A crucial diplomatic error on the part of the first Bush administration left Saddam Hussein with the impression that the US government had little interest in Iraq’s conflict with Kuwait. But that didn’t fit into the narrative that the Iraqi dictator was an irrational maniac bent on regional domination. So there was a concerted effort to deny that the US government had ever had a chance to deter his aggression through diplomatic means — and even to paint those who said otherwise as conspiracy theorists.
As John Mearsheimer from the University of Chicago and Harvard’s Stephen Walt wrote in 2003, “Saddam reportedly decided on war sometime in July 1990, but before sending his army into Kuwait, he approached the United States to find out how it would react.”
In a now famous interview with the Iraqi leader, U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie told Saddam, “[W]e have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.” The U.S. State Department had earlier told Saddam that Washington had “no special defense or security commitments to Kuwait.” The United States may not have intended to give Iraq a green light, but that is effectively what it did.
Exactly what was said during the meeting has been a source of some controversy. Accounts differ. According to a transcript released by the Iraqi government, Glaspie told Hussein, ” I admire your extraordinary efforts to rebuild your country.”
I know you need funds. We understand that and our opinion is that you should have the opportunity to rebuild your country. But we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.
I was in the American Embassy in Kuwait during the late 60′s. The instruction we had during this period was that we should express no opinion on this issue and that the issue is not associated with America. James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasize this instruction.
Leslie Gelb of The New York Times reported that Glaspie told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the transcript was inaccurate “and insisted she had been tough.” But that account was contradicted when diplomatic cables between Baghdad and Washington were released. As Gelb described it, “The State Department instructed Ms. Glaspie to give the Iraqis a conciliatory message punctuated with a few indirect but significant warnings,” but “Ms. Glaspie apparently omitted the warnings and simply slobbered all over Saddam in their meeting on July 25, while the Iraqi dictator threatened Kuwait anew.”
There is no dispute about one crucially important point: Saddam Hussein consulted with the US before invading, and our ambassador chose not to draw a line in the sand, or even hint that the invasion might be grounds for the US to go to war.
The most generous interpretation is that each side badly misjudged the other. Hussein ordered the attack on Kuwait confident that the US would only issue verbal condemnations. As for Glaspie, she later told The New York Times, ”Obviously, I didn’t think — and nobody else did — that the Iraqis were going to take all of Kuwait.”
Fool Me Once…
The first Gulf War was sold on a mountain of war propaganda. It took a campaign worthy of George Orwell to convince Americans that our erstwhile ally Saddam Hussein — whom the US had aided in his war with Iran as late as 1988 — had become an irrational monster by 1990.
Twelve years later, the second invasion of Iraq was premised on Hussein’s supposed cooperation with al Qaeda, vials of anthrax, Nigerian yellowcake and claims that Iraq hadmissiles poised to strike British territory in little as 45 minutes.
Now, eleven years later, as Bill Moyers put it last week, “the very same armchair warriors in Washington who from the safety of their Beltway bunkers called for invading Baghdad, are demanding once again that America plunge into the sectarian wars of the Middle East.” It’s vital that we keep our history in Iraq in mind, and apply some healthy skepticism to the claims they offer us this time around.
© 2014 Moyers & Company
Joshua Holland is a senior digital producer for BillMoyers.com. He’s the author of The Fifteen Biggest Lies About the Economy (and Everything Else the Right Doesn’t Want You to Know about Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America) (Wiley: 2010), and host of Politics and Reality Radio. Follow him on Twitter or drop him an email at hollandj [at] moyersmedia [dot] com.
Germany Fires Verizon Over NSA Spying | Common Dreams
Germany Fires Verizon Over NSA Spying | Common Dreams
Published on Friday, June 27, 2014 by Common Dreams
Germany Fires Verizon Over NSA Spying
'The German government needs a high level of security for its essential networks'
- Sarah Lazare, staff writer
Verizon Wireless retail store in Saugus, Massachusetts (Photo: Wikimedia Creative Commons / Anthony92931)Germany announced Thursday it is canceling its contract with Verizon Communications over concerns about the role of U.S. telecom corporations in National Security Agency spying.
“The links revealed between foreign intelligence agencies and firms after the N.S.A. affair show that the German government needs a high level of security for its essential networks,” declared Germany's Interior Ministry in a statement released Thursday.
The Ministry said it is engaging in a communications overhaul to strengthen privacy protections as part of the process of severing ties with Verizon.
The announcement follows revelations, made possible by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, that Germany is a prime target of NSA spying. This includes surveillance of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone communications, as well as a vastnetwork of centers that secretly collect information across the country.
Yet, many have accused Germany of being complicit in NSA spying, in addition to being targeted by it.
The German government has refused to grant Snowden political asylum, despite his contribution to the public record about U.S. spying on Germany.
Verizon, which has provided services to many of Germany's governmental agencies since, will be replaced by Deutsche Telekom, which was formerly run by the German state.
Published on Friday, June 27, 2014 by Common Dreams
Germany Fires Verizon Over NSA Spying
'The German government needs a high level of security for its essential networks'
- Sarah Lazare, staff writer
Verizon Wireless retail store in Saugus, Massachusetts (Photo: Wikimedia Creative Commons / Anthony92931)Germany announced Thursday it is canceling its contract with Verizon Communications over concerns about the role of U.S. telecom corporations in National Security Agency spying.“The links revealed between foreign intelligence agencies and firms after the N.S.A. affair show that the German government needs a high level of security for its essential networks,” declared Germany's Interior Ministry in a statement released Thursday.
The Ministry said it is engaging in a communications overhaul to strengthen privacy protections as part of the process of severing ties with Verizon.
The announcement follows revelations, made possible by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, that Germany is a prime target of NSA spying. This includes surveillance of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone communications, as well as a vastnetwork of centers that secretly collect information across the country.
Yet, many have accused Germany of being complicit in NSA spying, in addition to being targeted by it.
The German government has refused to grant Snowden political asylum, despite his contribution to the public record about U.S. spying on Germany.
Verizon, which has provided services to many of Germany's governmental agencies since, will be replaced by Deutsche Telekom, which was formerly run by the German state.
West Africa Ebola Epidemic "Out of Control" | Common Dreams
West Africa Ebola Epidemic "Out of Control" | Common Dreams
Published on Friday, June 27, 2014 by Common Dreams
West Africa Ebola Epidemic "Out of Control"
Deadly virus outbreak is worst on record, say health experts.
- Nadia Prupis, staff writer
(Photo: European Commission DG ECHO/Flickr/Creative Commons)Immediate action is needed to contain the deadly Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa, World Health Organization (WHO) officials warned Wednesday. At least 600 cases and 390 deaths in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea have been reported since the epidemic began in March.
"There is an urgent need to intensify response efforts," Dr. Luis Sambo, WHO regional director for Africa, said this week. WHO and Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) have sent teams of relief workers to affected countries.
But large numbers of new cases are straining emergency services on the ground.
"We have reached our limits," said Dr. Bart Janssens, MSF director of operations. "Despite the human resources equipment deployed... we are no longer able to send teams to the new outbreak sites."
This is the first time Ebola has broken out in the region. Fear and misunderstanding of the disease in local communities have contributed to the speed and scale with which it has spread, while political and religious authorities are failing to promote vital information to fight it, MSF stated. Funerals without safety measures have been a large contributing factor.
Additional support is essential to contain the outbreak, Janssens said.
"The WHO, the affected countries, and neighboring countries must deploy the resources necessary for an epidemic of this scale.... Ebola is no longer a public health issue limited to Guinea. It is affecting the whole of West Africa."
Ebola causes fever, vomiting, and diarrhea and can lead to organ failure and internal and external bleeding. It can kill up to 90 percent of those affected. While there is no cure or vaccine for the disease, it can be maintained if it is treated early.
Published on Friday, June 27, 2014 by Common Dreams
West Africa Ebola Epidemic "Out of Control"
Deadly virus outbreak is worst on record, say health experts.
- Nadia Prupis, staff writer
(Photo: European Commission DG ECHO/Flickr/Creative Commons)Immediate action is needed to contain the deadly Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa, World Health Organization (WHO) officials warned Wednesday. At least 600 cases and 390 deaths in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea have been reported since the epidemic began in March."There is an urgent need to intensify response efforts," Dr. Luis Sambo, WHO regional director for Africa, said this week. WHO and Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) have sent teams of relief workers to affected countries.
But large numbers of new cases are straining emergency services on the ground.
"We have reached our limits," said Dr. Bart Janssens, MSF director of operations. "Despite the human resources equipment deployed... we are no longer able to send teams to the new outbreak sites."
This is the first time Ebola has broken out in the region. Fear and misunderstanding of the disease in local communities have contributed to the speed and scale with which it has spread, while political and religious authorities are failing to promote vital information to fight it, MSF stated. Funerals without safety measures have been a large contributing factor.
Additional support is essential to contain the outbreak, Janssens said.
"The WHO, the affected countries, and neighboring countries must deploy the resources necessary for an epidemic of this scale.... Ebola is no longer a public health issue limited to Guinea. It is affecting the whole of West Africa."
Ebola causes fever, vomiting, and diarrhea and can lead to organ failure and internal and external bleeding. It can kill up to 90 percent of those affected. While there is no cure or vaccine for the disease, it can be maintained if it is treated early.
US Still Won't Commit to Banning Landmines | Common Dreams
US Still Won't Commit to Banning Landmines | Common Dreams
Published on Friday, June 27, 2014 by Common Dreams
US Still Won't Commit to Banning Landmines
US announces steps to stop amassing stockpile of pernicious weapons, but makes no target to join global treaty
- Andrea Germanos, staff writer
A poster from a landmine museum captures the horror of landmines. (Photo: Nathan Nelson/cc/flickr)In a move met with cautious praise, the United States announced Friday that it would not produce or add to its stockpile of antipersonnel landmines (APL), and would work towards becoming party to a treaty described as "the only solution to eliminate the suffering" the weapons cause.
The U.S. "will not produce or otherwise acquire any anti-personnel landmines (APL) in the future, including to replace existing stockpiles as they expire," reads a statement from National Security Council Spokesperson Caitlin Hayden, adding that the country is "diligently pursuing solutions that would be compliant with and ultimately allow the United States to accede to the Ottawa Convention," referring to the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty.
A U.S. delegation made the announcement in Maputo, Mozambique at a conference that convenes parties to the treaty. The U.S. attended as an observer.
The U.S. thus far has failed to join 161 nations that are party to the mine ban treaty.
Though the last known use of landmines by the U.S. was in 1991 in Iraq and Kuwait, according to the Landmine Monitor Report, the U.S. still maintains the right to use self-destructing, self-deactivating antipersonnel mines anywhere. It is believed to hold 9 million self-destructing APLs in its stockpikle.
"With this announcement, the U.S. has changed its mine ban stance and has laid the foundation for accession to the treaty," said Steve Goose, International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) Head of Delegation and arms director at Human Rights Watch. "The message to the international community is clear, the Mine Ban Treaty is the only solution to eliminate the suffering caused by landmines," he said.
Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), who has pressed for years for the U.S. to ban landmines, also welcomed the announcement, calling it "incremental" but "significant."
Yet, with no target date or commitment to accede to the treaty, and potential use by the U.S. of landmines within its stockpiles, the ICBL and US Campaign to Ban Landmines stress that the announcement falls short.
"It makes no sense for the U.S. to acknowledge the weapons should be banned because of the humanitarian harm they cause while retaining the option to use them for years to come," Goose stated.
"An obvious next step is for the Pentagon to destroy its remaining stockpile of mines, which do not belong in the arsenal of civilized nations," Sen. Leahy said.
The anti-landmine coalition is calling on the U.S. to ban the use of APLs, become party to the treaty and begin to eliminate its stockpiles.
Published on Friday, June 27, 2014 by Common Dreams
US Still Won't Commit to Banning Landmines
US announces steps to stop amassing stockpile of pernicious weapons, but makes no target to join global treaty
- Andrea Germanos, staff writer
A poster from a landmine museum captures the horror of landmines. (Photo: Nathan Nelson/cc/flickr)In a move met with cautious praise, the United States announced Friday that it would not produce or add to its stockpile of antipersonnel landmines (APL), and would work towards becoming party to a treaty described as "the only solution to eliminate the suffering" the weapons cause.The U.S. "will not produce or otherwise acquire any anti-personnel landmines (APL) in the future, including to replace existing stockpiles as they expire," reads a statement from National Security Council Spokesperson Caitlin Hayden, adding that the country is "diligently pursuing solutions that would be compliant with and ultimately allow the United States to accede to the Ottawa Convention," referring to the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty.
A U.S. delegation made the announcement in Maputo, Mozambique at a conference that convenes parties to the treaty. The U.S. attended as an observer.
The U.S. thus far has failed to join 161 nations that are party to the mine ban treaty.
Though the last known use of landmines by the U.S. was in 1991 in Iraq and Kuwait, according to the Landmine Monitor Report, the U.S. still maintains the right to use self-destructing, self-deactivating antipersonnel mines anywhere. It is believed to hold 9 million self-destructing APLs in its stockpikle.
"With this announcement, the U.S. has changed its mine ban stance and has laid the foundation for accession to the treaty," said Steve Goose, International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) Head of Delegation and arms director at Human Rights Watch. "The message to the international community is clear, the Mine Ban Treaty is the only solution to eliminate the suffering caused by landmines," he said.
Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), who has pressed for years for the U.S. to ban landmines, also welcomed the announcement, calling it "incremental" but "significant."
Yet, with no target date or commitment to accede to the treaty, and potential use by the U.S. of landmines within its stockpiles, the ICBL and US Campaign to Ban Landmines stress that the announcement falls short.
"It makes no sense for the U.S. to acknowledge the weapons should be banned because of the humanitarian harm they cause while retaining the option to use them for years to come," Goose stated.
"An obvious next step is for the Pentagon to destroy its remaining stockpile of mines, which do not belong in the arsenal of civilized nations," Sen. Leahy said.
The anti-landmine coalition is calling on the U.S. to ban the use of APLs, become party to the treaty and begin to eliminate its stockpiles.
Armed US Drones Flying Over Iraq | Common Dreams
Armed US Drones Flying Over Iraq | Common Dreams
Published on Friday, June 27, 2014 by Common Dreams
Armed US Drones Flying Over Iraq
Pentagon announced Thursday drones equipped with Hellfire missiles will accompany another troop deployment
- Sarah Lazare, staff writer
Predator drone (Photo: Lt Col Leslie Pratt / Wikimedia Creative Commons)U.S. armed drones are now flying over Iraq, a Pentagon official announced Thursday,according to numerous media reports.
Equipped with Hellfire missiles, the predator drones are being deployed from a base in Kuwait to accompany unarmed surveillance flights that include drones as well as manned aircraft. The armed drones will also supplement U.S. military "advisers" on the ground, the official stated.
Meanwhile, the United States has opened a "joint operations center" in Baghdad, boosting the total number of U.S. service members to 500, Pentagon officials revealed in a statementreleased Thursday.
And according to a New York Times article published Wednesday, two Iraqi advisers to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said that the U.S. is planning to send more than 1,000 U.S. private security guards to Iraq to protect U.S. troops. This amounts to "far more Americans than previously acknowledged," the Times notes.
The Pentagon's announcement of drone flights come amid reports that Iran is also sending surveillance drones to Iraq.
Middle East scholar Juan Cole warned earlier this month that the Obama administration's deployment of special forces military "advisers" to Iraq for intelligence-gathering and other purposes suggest that "Obama is likely paving the way to US drone strikes on ISIS in Iraq."
Published on Friday, June 27, 2014 by Common Dreams
Armed US Drones Flying Over Iraq
Pentagon announced Thursday drones equipped with Hellfire missiles will accompany another troop deployment
- Sarah Lazare, staff writer
Predator drone (Photo: Lt Col Leslie Pratt / Wikimedia Creative Commons)U.S. armed drones are now flying over Iraq, a Pentagon official announced Thursday,according to numerous media reports.Equipped with Hellfire missiles, the predator drones are being deployed from a base in Kuwait to accompany unarmed surveillance flights that include drones as well as manned aircraft. The armed drones will also supplement U.S. military "advisers" on the ground, the official stated.
Meanwhile, the United States has opened a "joint operations center" in Baghdad, boosting the total number of U.S. service members to 500, Pentagon officials revealed in a statementreleased Thursday.
And according to a New York Times article published Wednesday, two Iraqi advisers to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said that the U.S. is planning to send more than 1,000 U.S. private security guards to Iraq to protect U.S. troops. This amounts to "far more Americans than previously acknowledged," the Times notes.
The Pentagon's announcement of drone flights come amid reports that Iran is also sending surveillance drones to Iraq.
Middle East scholar Juan Cole warned earlier this month that the Obama administration's deployment of special forces military "advisers" to Iraq for intelligence-gathering and other purposes suggest that "Obama is likely paving the way to US drone strikes on ISIS in Iraq."
Obama Requests Nearly $60 Billion to Continue Endless War | Common Dreams
Obama Requests Nearly $60 Billion to Continue Endless War | Common Dreams
Published on Friday, June 27, 2014 by Common Dreams
Obama Requests Nearly $60 Billion to Continue Endless War
Fund request also marks escalation in aid to "vetted" Syrian opposition forces
- Andrea Germanos, staff writer
An anti-war protest in 2010. (Photo: Fibonacci Blue/cc/flickr)President Obama on Thursday announced he would ask Congress for $58.6 billion in war funding for the 2015 fiscal year.
A White House statement outlining the request for what is formally called the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) notes that it is $20.9 billion less than what had been figured in an earlier budget.
The OCO—re-branded from the Global War on Terror—fund is in addition to the nearly $500 billion base FY2015 budget for the Defense Department.
The OCO fund request amount on its own represents 1.55 percent of the the total budget, but is part of the overall military spending that accounts for over 16 percent of the budget.
The OCO budget "isn’t subject to caps or cuts or any restrictions at all," as Mattea Kramer of the National Priorities Projected has noted, and, as Defense News reported earlier this month, "The administration has never announced a final year for OCO funding."
"While it is good to see the Overseas Contingency Operations account finally begin to come down, the Pentagon's request continues to use OCO as a massive slush fund to avoid fiscal discipline," Stephen Miles, coalition coordinator for Win Without War, stated to Common Dreams. "At nearly $60 billion, the request is $40 billion over what the Administration itself has pegged as the costs of our mission in Afghanistan," he added.
Included within the nearly $60 billion request is "$500 million for a proposed authority to train and equip vetted elements of the Syrian armed opposition to help defend the Syrian people, stabilize areas under opposition control, facilitate the provision of essential services, counter terrorist threats, and promote conditions for a negotiated settlement."
As Democracy Now! reported Friday, "If approved, it would mark the most direct U.S. military role in the [Syrian] conflict to date, following more covert forms of support for the rebels."
In contrast to calls by war hawks for continued military intervention, Miles added that the American public doesn't want continued war funding.
"Americans want our tax dollars to be coming home with our troops," he stated.
_________________________________
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Published on Friday, June 27, 2014 by Common Dreams
Obama Requests Nearly $60 Billion to Continue Endless War
Fund request also marks escalation in aid to "vetted" Syrian opposition forces
- Andrea Germanos, staff writer
An anti-war protest in 2010. (Photo: Fibonacci Blue/cc/flickr)President Obama on Thursday announced he would ask Congress for $58.6 billion in war funding for the 2015 fiscal year.A White House statement outlining the request for what is formally called the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) notes that it is $20.9 billion less than what had been figured in an earlier budget.
The OCO—re-branded from the Global War on Terror—fund is in addition to the nearly $500 billion base FY2015 budget for the Defense Department.
The OCO fund request amount on its own represents 1.55 percent of the the total budget, but is part of the overall military spending that accounts for over 16 percent of the budget.
The OCO budget "isn’t subject to caps or cuts or any restrictions at all," as Mattea Kramer of the National Priorities Projected has noted, and, as Defense News reported earlier this month, "The administration has never announced a final year for OCO funding."
"While it is good to see the Overseas Contingency Operations account finally begin to come down, the Pentagon's request continues to use OCO as a massive slush fund to avoid fiscal discipline," Stephen Miles, coalition coordinator for Win Without War, stated to Common Dreams. "At nearly $60 billion, the request is $40 billion over what the Administration itself has pegged as the costs of our mission in Afghanistan," he added.
Included within the nearly $60 billion request is "$500 million for a proposed authority to train and equip vetted elements of the Syrian armed opposition to help defend the Syrian people, stabilize areas under opposition control, facilitate the provision of essential services, counter terrorist threats, and promote conditions for a negotiated settlement."
As Democracy Now! reported Friday, "If approved, it would mark the most direct U.S. military role in the [Syrian] conflict to date, following more covert forms of support for the rebels."
In contrast to calls by war hawks for continued military intervention, Miles added that the American public doesn't want continued war funding.
"Americans want our tax dollars to be coming home with our troops," he stated.
_________________________________
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
IRS Official Whose Emails Were "Lost" Visited White House More Than 30 Times - Katie Pavlich
IRS Official Whose Emails Were "Lost" Visited White House More Than 30 Times
Katie Pavlich | Jun 20, 2014
Last night on The Kelly File Chief Counsel at the American Center for Law and Justice Jay Sekulo revealed that the former chief of staff to former IRS Commissioner Steven Miller, Nikole Flax, visited the White House 35 times after talking with former head of tax exempt groups Lois Lerner about working to criminally prosecute conservative tea party groups for "lying" about political activity. At the White House, Flax met with a top Obama aid during some of those visits. This entire exchange is worth your time.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHyWUvjf23I&w=560&h=315]
The email discussed in the segment above is detailed in this previously reported story, along with Lerner's contact with Democrat Elijah Cummings and suggestions from former FEC Attorney Larry Noble and Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse that conservative groups should be targeted for criminal prosecution in order to "make an impact and they [conservative groups] wouldn't feel so comfortable doing the stuff."
"I got a call today from Richard Pilger Director Elections Crimes Branch at DOJ ... He wanted to know who at IRS the DOJ folk s [sic] could talk to about Sen. Whitehouse idea at the hearing that DOJ could piece together false statement cases about applicants who "lied" on their 1024s --saying they weren't planning on doing political activity, and then turning around and making large visible political expenditures. DOJ is feeling like it needs to respond, but want to talk to the right folks at IRS to see whether there are impediments from our side and what, if any damage this might do to IRS programs. I told him that sounded like we might need several folks from IRS," Lerner wrote in a May 8, 2013 email to former Nikole C. Flax, who was former-Acting IRS Commissioner Steven T. Miller's chief of staff.
"I think we should do it – also need to include CI [Criminal Investigation Division], which we can help coordinate. Also, we need to reach out to FEC. Does it make sense to consider including them in this or keep it separate?" Flax responded on May 9, 2013.
"As I mentioned yesterday -- there are several groups of folks from the FEC world that are pushing tax fraud prosecution for c4s who report they are not conducting political activity when they are (or these folks think they are). One is my ex-boss Larry Noble (former General Counsel at the FEC), who is now president of Americans for Campaign Reform. This is their latest push to shut these down. One IRS prosecution would make an impact and they wouldn't feel so comfortable doing the stuff," she wrote. "So, don't be fooled about how this is being articulated – it is ALL about 501(c)(4) orgs and political activity."
The White House denied any involvement in the IRS targeting scandal and responded to revelations of "lost" emails as a normal computer crash.
IRS Commissioner John Koskinen will testify today in front of the House Ways and Means Committee about the "lost" emails.
via IRS Official Whose Emails Were "Lost" Visited White House More Than 30 Times - Katie Pavlich.
Katie Pavlich | Jun 20, 2014
Last night on The Kelly File Chief Counsel at the American Center for Law and Justice Jay Sekulo revealed that the former chief of staff to former IRS Commissioner Steven Miller, Nikole Flax, visited the White House 35 times after talking with former head of tax exempt groups Lois Lerner about working to criminally prosecute conservative tea party groups for "lying" about political activity. At the White House, Flax met with a top Obama aid during some of those visits. This entire exchange is worth your time.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHyWUvjf23I&w=560&h=315]
The email discussed in the segment above is detailed in this previously reported story, along with Lerner's contact with Democrat Elijah Cummings and suggestions from former FEC Attorney Larry Noble and Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse that conservative groups should be targeted for criminal prosecution in order to "make an impact and they [conservative groups] wouldn't feel so comfortable doing the stuff."
"I got a call today from Richard Pilger Director Elections Crimes Branch at DOJ ... He wanted to know who at IRS the DOJ folk s [sic] could talk to about Sen. Whitehouse idea at the hearing that DOJ could piece together false statement cases about applicants who "lied" on their 1024s --saying they weren't planning on doing political activity, and then turning around and making large visible political expenditures. DOJ is feeling like it needs to respond, but want to talk to the right folks at IRS to see whether there are impediments from our side and what, if any damage this might do to IRS programs. I told him that sounded like we might need several folks from IRS," Lerner wrote in a May 8, 2013 email to former Nikole C. Flax, who was former-Acting IRS Commissioner Steven T. Miller's chief of staff.
"I think we should do it – also need to include CI [Criminal Investigation Division], which we can help coordinate. Also, we need to reach out to FEC. Does it make sense to consider including them in this or keep it separate?" Flax responded on May 9, 2013.
"As I mentioned yesterday -- there are several groups of folks from the FEC world that are pushing tax fraud prosecution for c4s who report they are not conducting political activity when they are (or these folks think they are). One is my ex-boss Larry Noble (former General Counsel at the FEC), who is now president of Americans for Campaign Reform. This is their latest push to shut these down. One IRS prosecution would make an impact and they wouldn't feel so comfortable doing the stuff," she wrote. "So, don't be fooled about how this is being articulated – it is ALL about 501(c)(4) orgs and political activity."
The White House denied any involvement in the IRS targeting scandal and responded to revelations of "lost" emails as a normal computer crash.
IRS Commissioner John Koskinen will testify today in front of the House Ways and Means Committee about the "lost" emails.
via IRS Official Whose Emails Were "Lost" Visited White House More Than 30 Times - Katie Pavlich.
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