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Colin Powell's Private Email Account Has Been Hacked (theverge.com)
According to The New York Times, Former Secretary of State Colin Powell has been hacked and a password-protected archive of his personal emails has been published by DC Leaks. The Verge reports: DC Leaks is the same site that first published emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee, which many took as an explicit effort to influence the U.S. election process. Many experts in the U.S. intelligence apparatus have attributed that attack to the Russian government, although no public attribution has been made. Thus far, there's no evidence tying Powell's hack to Russia, and similar hacks have been carried out by mischievous teens without government affiliation. The immediate result of the hack has been political fallout for Powell himself. Last night, BuzzFeed News reported on an email in which Powell called Republican nominee Donald Trump a "national disgrace," and another in which he said the candidate was "in the process of destroying himself."
Even though he was an enthusiastic supporter of Obama.
This does not bode well.
That's more than just tabloid material. It's indicative of the type of characters making decisions and taking actions on behalf of you and me. Guess who gets to pay the bill and clean up the mess when these types are done feeding their egos and wallets?
When the king heard the words of the Book of the Law he tore his robes.2Kings22:11
I'm voting for Johnson.
His campaign has basically become: Not Trump *or* Clinton
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A lot of countries opposed toppling Saddam - Russia, France, Saudi Arabia, et al. Why didn't they produce evidence that Iraq did not have WMDs? Truth is that Iraq wanted to put out the impression that it had WMDs as a deterrence to Iran, w/o having them. Instead, the US took those hints and took out their regime.
FWIW, my only opposition to Saddam Hussein was his support to Hamas against Israel, and his $25k reward for each suicide bomber in Israel. I had nothing against his having WMDs or even using them (except against the Kurds). I had nothing against his annexing Kuwait, a completely useless country whose citizens have forgotten and who now commit Jihad acts against Americans, like the guy in Chattanooga. He was a useful deterrence to Iran, which is today a quasi superpower of the region. Now, the only obstacle to Iran's domination there is ISIS!!!
I have seen no indication that independents are leaning Trumpward.
None are so blind as those who will not see.
Latest Quinnipiac poll has Independents going for Trump 45-40.
Latest Reuters poll has Independents going for Trump 30-22.
As a reminder, Romney won the independent vote in 2012 50-45. Boring, milquetoast Mitt. Independents were 29% of the electorate that year. Do you really think that the number of independents will go DOWN this year? After Trump won more primary votes than any other Republican in history? After the kind of excitement and craziness we've seen on both sides of the aisle? Get the fuck out.
Yeah, there's going to be a landslide, alright. But its going to be completely opposite what you think.
To be fair, what evidence we do have suggests that intelligence services genuinely believed that at the time. They were wrong, but it was an honest mistake on their part.
Saddam himself went far out of his way to make it look as if he had the weapons. It was his way of discouraging conflict - not only from the US, but also from the Kurds, the Iranians, and every other local faction that hated his guts (which was most of them). In the end it backfired spectacularly, but it might still have been his best chance for hanging on to power.
The reason nation building worked post WWII was that the countries involved already had democratic traditions, and self criticism, while somewhat new, was something those countries were capable of. The US didn't sit down to write constitutions from scratch - as far as West Germany went, they sat down and put together the list of things that Germans could not do. Things like putting together a constitution was something that the West Germans did, and it was nothing similar to the Third Reich. Same w/ Italy - no semblance to the Mussolini regime that had been overthrown.
That's a totally different situation from Afghanistan and Iraq. Like the mission of Operation Enduring Freedom was to topple the Taliban. What followed? The creation of a constitution in Afghanistan that states that no law shall contravene the rules of Sharia. So the same issues that one had in Afghanistan w/ the Taliban are just bound to return, and the only thing there is that the regime is not anti-US as the Taliban was. Spending billions on the reconstruction of Afghanistan to win 'hearts & minds' has bombed. How do you win the hearts & minds of people who have neither?
In Iraq, Saddam was toppled, w/ the naïve assumption that the replacement regime would be a Jeffersonian democracy, w/ Shi'ites and Sunnites singing Kumbaya. It never happened, and the reason it can't happen is that those 2 have a historical rivalry dating back to after the death of Mohammed. Like the fable of the 4 geniuses who put together a lion w/o stopping to think that the revived lion would eat them (or Trump's narration of Al Wilson's song 'The Snake' at his rallies), none of the geniuses in either the State Department or outside it stopped to consider that if the Shi'ites came to power in Baghdad, you'd have a Shi'ite Crescent of Teheran, Baghdad, Damascus and partially Beirut (w/ Hizbullah).
Allying w/ either side in this conflict - Shi'ite or Sunnite - is idiotic. None of them are our allies. While Obama deserves to be faulted for the Iran deal and a restrained policy towards Iranian boats taunting US Navy vessels in the Gulf, Bush too deserves to be faulted for regarding Saudi Arabia and Qatar as allies. The issue w/ Bush/Powell/Rice was that he saw them as 'people of faith', even though the faith in question is a barbaric one. Obama/Clinton/Kerry's problem is that when the Arab Spring started, they continued the Bush doctrine policies of 'promoting democracy' by supporting the Arab Spring, w/ disastrous results.
What was worse was letting Qatar and Saudi Arabia guide their policy on Syria. Granted - Bashar al Assad was no saint, but he wasn't running a genocide in his country when it all started. If anything, he was trying to reform things so that opposition to his regime from the Sunnis would decrease. However, the Saudis and Qataris wanted to replace his regime w/ a Sunni one in Damascus, and tried to first get the US to agree, and then used the Arab Spring as a pretext to support it. It's not like they were clean either - Bahrein too wanted democracy, and Saudi troops marched in to prop up the Hanafas. Anyway, they all started supporting their own favorite factions - be it the Free Syrian Army, Khorasan, and so on, and plunged that country into civil war.
The point I was making was that everyone who supported nation building, as well as getting rid of dictators and replacing them w/ whoever the people wanted, turned out to be wrong. The intervention in Libya, which was supported not just by Hilary & Obama but also by McCain and a whole bunch of Republicans across the board: they only turned on that policy once it turned south. This despite the fact that one of the few benefits of the Iraq war was Gadaffi voluntarily ending his WMD program, and doing what he could to restore relations w/ the West. Yeah, he was evil, but there was no reason to support his ouster when he was on a reformation trajectory. Now, Cyrenaica is completely under the control of ISIS, and Tripoli has a regim