Category Archives: foreign policy

Investigate After All?

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After acknowledging last week that several minutes of video from a 2013 briefing on the Iran nuclear deal had been intentionally cut, the State Department announced Wednesday that Secretary of State John Kerry has ordered an investigation into who ordered the edit.

This comes on the heels of ABC News having caught the White House altering the transcript of President Barack Obama’s (D) press agent, Josh Earnest’s, briefing about another Iran-related matter.

Given State’s (and this administration’s generally) mendacity regarding this sort of thing from the jump, why should we take any investigation State might now undertake seriously?  Why should we believe its outcome to be anything other than a once-over-lightly square filler, or any “miscreant” who might be identified as anyone other than a scapegoat?

Hillary Clinton’s Insecurity

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With her emails, that is.  Only more so.  It seems she exchanged, and was in the middle of exchanges, that were real-time discussions of drone strike permissions in Pakistan.

The 2011 and 2012 emails were sent via the “low side”—government slang for a computer system for unclassified matters—as part of a secret arrangement that gave the State Department more of a voice in whether a Central Intelligence Agency drone strike went ahead, according to congressional and law-enforcement officials briefed on the Federal Bureau of Investigation probe.

Unfortunately, the only thing secret about these discussions was the arrangement between State and the CIA.  They knew their discussions were in the clear because they used weasel-words (instead of encryption).

The vaguely worded messages didn’t mention the “CIA,” “drones” or details about the militant targets, officials said.

But they talked around the subjects.

State Department officials told FBI investigators they communicated via the less-secure system on a few instances, according to congressional and law-enforcement officials.  It happened when decisions about imminent strikes had to be relayed fast, and the US diplomats in Pakistan or Washington didn’t have ready access to a more-secure system, either because it was night or they were traveling.

Because secure communications systems cease operations when the sun goes down.  Sure.  Traveling?  Folks important enough to be in on discussions of this nature have mobile satellite phones on them all the time.

These guys carefully ignore COMSEC considerations when they make idiotic excuses like this.  Which makes the excuses dishonest rather than idiotic.

Some of the emails were then forwarded by Mrs Clinton’s aides to her personal email account, which routed them to a server she kept at her home in suburban New York when she was secretary of state, the officials said.

And one of these guys wants to be President of the United States.  What secrets will she give up from that office, with this knowledge of security?  This knowledge of right and wrong?  What damage will she do to our nation with this level of understanding of the difference at this time that it makes?

Elections have consequences.

Hillary Clinton’s Foreign Policy

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This is what Democrat Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy has been like and what President Barack Obama’s (D) foreign policy is like.

  • Compromised national security with her cavalier treatment of our most classified information—and lying about it
  • Failed to protect or rescue Americans in Benghazi—and lying about it afterwards
  • Enthusiastically pushed for the Libya war—and then failing to support efforts to control its aftermath
  • Supported the premature Iraq withdrawal—which threw away our hard-won victory and left Iraq in shambles
  • Failed to deal with the spread of Islamic terrorism
  • Failed to reset relations with Russia—not even bothering to use the correct Russian word on her “reset” button
  • Lost all of our then-ongoing wars: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya. Counting Syria, and her BFF’s badly faded and washed out pink line, four
  • Facilitated Iran’s drive to obtain nuclear weapons
  • Failed to deal with the Veterans Administration’s apparent abandonment of our veterans—many of them the very same ones whose battlefield victories her foreign affairs policies have abandoned
  • Ongoing, slow-motion surrenders of the South China Sea to an expansionist People’s Republic of China and of provinces of Georgia and Ukraine to an expansionist Russia

Clinton is loud and proud about wanting more of the same.

Elections have consequences.

False Premises

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Here’s one.

The differences between China and the US over the South China Sea issue have become a matter of concern and even anxiety.  But some of the perceptions in the US and elsewhere about China’s policy and intentions in the area are misplaced.  A pressing task is to understand the facts and China’s intentions correctly so as to avoid real danger and consequences as a result of misinterpretation and miscalculation.

No, this is false.  The pressing task is to make clear to the People’s Republic of China, and to the nations rimming the South China Sea, the facts and intentions of the US.

One problem with false premises is that they contribute to timidity, in outcome if not directly.

The issues in the South China Sea revolve around territorial and maritime jurisdiction.  China believes it is doing nothing more than maintaining and defending legitimate territorial claims and maritime rights.

And they’re getting away with those illegitimate claims, their Nine-Dash Line-based seizure and occupation of the South China Sea, at the direct expense of those littoral nations, our friends and allies, potential friends and allies, and our credibility and very operational capability in that Sea.  That Sea that hosts shipping lanes that carry, annually, world trade worth trillions of dollars in goods and basic resources, including trillions of dollars that underlie the economies of Japan and the Philippines, as well as our own.

Lies of the Democrats

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Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s Campaign Chairman John Podesta:

What she thought would be a convenient way to communicate with family, friends and colleagues—by using one email account for both her work related and personal emails….

Which we know to be a lie, and that was confirmed in testimony by Clinton’s senior aid Cheryl Mills was compelled to provide (compelled because she didn’t have the integrity to testify voluntarily, as Clinton’s “promise” of full disclosure and transparency pressed her to do) to Judicial Watch:

Mills also testified under oath that the server existed before Clinton became secretary of state in 2009.

“President Clinton had established a server for the purposes of his own staff office, and…her email was subsequently put on that,” Mills said….

Podesta also had this on behalf of Clinton:

She believed she was following the practices of other Secretaries and senior officials.

That was another lie:

The IG report released last week found Clinton did not seek permission to use her personal account for official business as secretary of state—and would not have been approved to do so had she asked.

And

[T]he report stated that Condoleezza Rice did not use personal email for government business.  It said Colin Powell used personal email to connect with people outside the department—but he did not have a private server.

And here’s another lie:

Had Secretary Clinton known of any concerns about her email setup at the time, she would have taken steps to address them[.]

However,

The IG report also found that repeated warnings about cybersecurity were ignored and that staffers who expressed their concerns were told “never to speak of the Secretary’s personal email system again.”

And this [emphasis added]:

Clinton consistently has claimed nothing she sent or received was marked classified at the time. While technically correct, this distinction also appears misleading.  A January 2009 non-disclosure agreement signed by Clinton confirms her understanding that “classified information is marked or unmarked.”

Rather, it is the content and source that determine classification.

Elections have consequences.