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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.
He refers to Hillary as "unbridled ambition, greedy, not transformational, with a husband still dicking bimbos at home." That didn't bore me at all!
The summary totally ignores Powell's extremely critical remarks about Hillary, her lies, manipulation, and the public exploitation of his name against his wishes.
A lie of omission is still a lie, and that you choose to ignore these facts makes them all the more critical to examine.
The immediate result of the hack has been political fallout for Powell himself.
The guy who has no political aspirations? Nah, he's untouchable politically because he has no ambition. He is like the Buddha of US politics: having no desires, he feels no pain at loss.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I would be comfortable with Powell in charge. He always preferred diplomacy over a military solution, and he was not in favor of any military action that didn't serve the interests of the US. We could do a lot worse than that.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
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
No, it was wrong intelligence. Or else, why did UK, run by a Left wing government run by Tony Blair, back that? They could easily have told the US that Iraq had nothing, and that would have worked, but everybody's intelligence agencies seemed to suggest that Saddam had chemical and/or biological weapons
Did you watch it? His best evidence was a satellite picture of trucks leaving a building. He had no evidence, and he presented no evidence. To his credit, he at least didn't try to show any fake evidence. To his everlasting shame, he did make it sound like the evidence was damning. Your horse shit is just more on the pile.
Play Command HQ online
They did produce evidence. The UN inspectors had free run of the country for several months prior to the war. In their own words, the US evidence was "shit". Of course they found no evidence of an ongoing weapons program, because there was none.
In any case, the US never has produced any real evidence, before or after for their WMD claims.
They had cryptic radio intercepts.
They had satellite pictures of trucks leaving buildings.
They had unknown chemical processing trucks (turned out to be hydrogen production. The design was known, but not by Powell.).
They had aluminum tubes.
For hard evidence, that's all they had.
Play Command HQ online
You asked "why?"
why did UK, run by a Left wing government run by Tony Blair, back that?
1. Because warhawks are warhawks, and allies are allies, regardless of party affiliation. After 9/11, Europe sympathized with the US.
everybody's intelligence agencies seemed to suggest that Saddam had chemical and/or biological weapons
2. Actually, the intelligence agencies didn't suggest this. The politicians claimed that the intelligence agencies said this, but they really didn't. The agencies don't really speak publicly, they speak through the elected officials that they report to. We now know that what they told the president and prime minister isn't the same as what the president and prime minister said publicly.
For example: We now know that for example, at the time that George W. Bush gave a speech about the supposed "yellow cake uranium," that he knew it was falsified evidence but proceeded with the speech anyway. The UK did the same thing, leading up to the invasion, asking BBC reporters to basically make-up phony facts.
If you look back at the evidence, it was clear that the evidence was being used to justify an already decided-upon conclusion. For example: The UK and US cited a shipment of aluminum tubes as evidence that Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons. It turns out that the tubes were used for the much more mundane purpose of rockets. If you saw an aluminum tube that could be used for rockets or nuclear weapons, and you knew the country was developing rockets, why would you assert that these tubes are evidence of nuclear weapons? Certainly, it is possible. But they didn't present it as "well, it was probably used for rockets, but maybe it is for nukes (shrug)." It was presented as "OMG This is proof that they are developing nukes!" A lie of omission is still a lie.
You asked "Why?" It is important to understand why. It is because well-intentioned people can sometimes lie to support what they believe is right. The populus and the media in particular, must be vigilant against such things. The New York times, has since, apologized for being the white house's mouthpiece.
No, it was wrong intelligence. Or else, why did UK, run by a Left wing government run by Tony Blair, back that? They could easily have told the US that Iraq had nothing, and that would have worked, but everybody's intelligence agencies seemed to suggest that Saddam had chemical and/or biological weapons
Read the damned Downing Street Memos
The policy is to invade, and the intel is being fixed around the policy
That's 2002. Seriously, brownnosing Bush won't help change the war crimes committed in our name.
I haven't found many people that really like Hilliary although I have heard from a lot of people that say they will vote for her. I've heard more people that like Trump but there are still more that don't but say they will vote for him. So far it seems to me the one thing going for Trump is that he's not Hilliary. The number one thing going for Hilliary is that she's a Democrat. I know tons of people that would vote for Satan himself if he ran on the Democratic ticket.
Many did.
One from Australia quit his intelligence job (preparing reports on Iraq) and ran for the Senate with the argument that Iraq did not have WMDs and the war was based on a lie. He was not just some Snowden but had served for twenty years reached the rank of lieutenant colonel and had also worked for Raytheon.
He was in the Australian Senate for a few years and is in now Member of the Australian Parliament for Denison and his name is Andrew Wilkie.
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
Well he's not wrong, about a month and a half ago Reuters changed their polling method because it was showing 3rd party candidates taking more from Hillary than Trump.
The problem with polling in general is it is often used to influence the way people think rather than report on how they think. Many of the polling firms are marketing groups, not political scientists.
The problem with polling this election is that every poll I've seen relies on the assumption that the turnout demographics in 2016 will be the same as they were in 2012 or 2008, but no one justifies this assumption. I find it hard to believe that blacks will come out for Hillary the way they came out for Obama. On the other hand the white working class hasn't had anyone speak to them about trade and immigration like Trump has in pretty much forever.
I don't know what the turnout will be in November, so I can't "unskew" the polls. But since the pollsters never justify the fundamental premise of the polls, I can't trust them either. I would just take any poll numbers you see with a massive grain of salt.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.