"Biden tries to rally G-7 nations to counter China’s influence" by David E. Sanger and Mark Landler New York Times, June 12, 2021
PLYMOUTH, England — President Biden urged European nations and Japan on Saturday to counter China’s growing economic and security influence by offering developing nations hundreds of billions in financing as an alternative to relying on Beijing for new roads, railways, ports and communications networks.
As their own citizens infrastructure is literally falling apart and needs to be to be converted to some warped Great Re$et pre-industrial scale world save for the psychopathic globalist overlords who have paid for it all after looting us blind.
It was the first time the world’s richest nations had discussed organizing a direct alternative to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, President Xi Jinping’s overseas lending and investment push, which has now spread across Africa, Latin America and, haltingly, into Europe itself, but the White House cited no financial commitments, and there is sharp disagreement among the United States and its allies about how to respond to China’s rising power.
Biden has made challenging a rising China and a disruptive Russia the centerpiece of a foreign policy designed to build up democracies around the world as a bulwark against spreading authoritarianism. Beijing, for its part, has pointed to the poor U.S. response to the pandemic and divisive American politics — particularly the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol — as signs that democracy is failing.
The lauded "democracy" has been an illusion from the beginning, and a buzzword to cover the constitutional republic under which we are supposed to be governed, and this Wilsonesque flogging of democracy from a nation that has interfered and led countless color coups across the planet the last 75 years is offensively laughable -- especially from a regime that stole an election in a coup.
I used to call these Sunday Globe Specials, but the truth is it is all garbage these days.
In size and ambition, the Chinese development effort far surpasses the Marshall Plan, the U.S.’ program to rebuild Europe after World War II. At the Group of 7 summit meeting, discussions Saturday about how to counter it reflected the debate within the West about whether to regard China as a partner, competitor, adversary or outright security threat.
It is far from clear that the wealthy democracies will be able to muster a comprehensive response.
The plan described by the White House appeared to stitch together existing projects in the United States, Europe and Japan, along with an encouragement of private financing. A fact sheet distributed to reporters gave it a name, “Build Back Better for the World,” with roots in Biden’s campaign theme — shortened to B3W, a play on China’s BRI.
Straight out of the World Economic Forum's manife$to, and the pre$$ does a good job of putting a muzzle on that.
Given the choice between the two, were I the leader of a developing country, I would probably rather go through the Chinese than the damn bankers.
It emphasizes the environment, anti-corruption efforts, the free flow of information and financing terms that would allow developing countries to avoid taking on excessive debt. One of the criticisms of Belt and Road is that it leaves the nations that sign on dependent on China, giving Beijing too much leverage over them.
It was a sign of the growing concern about pervasive Chinese surveillance that the British hosts of this year’s G-7 gathering cut off all internet and Wi-Fi links around the room where the leaders were meeting, leaving them disconnected from the outside world.
Okay, look, they ALREADY WERE! That band of eliti$t $cum couldn't be more out-of-touch with the wider world.
Beyond that, they want to surveil us all forever and turn themselves off so they can be in secret and carry out their $ick perver$ions, whatever they be.
The leaders largely agree that China is using its investment strategy both to bolster its state-owned enterprises and to build a network of commercial ports and, through Huawei, communications systems over which it would exercise significant control, but officials emerging from the meeting said Germany, Italy and the European Union were clearly concerned about risking their huge trade and investment deals with Beijing or accelerating what has increasingly taken on the tones of a new Cold War.
Ah, ONCE AGAIN we have New York Times stoking a Cold War.
Keep this in mind for the self-adulatory piece of crap regarding another Asian war that follows below and was located on the front-page.
Biden used the meeting to advance his argument that the fundamental struggle in the post-pandemic era will be democracies versus autocracies.
There isn't going to be a post-pandemic era, so they can f**k off with this war-mongering garbage. I am so goddamn sick of it. It's been 15 years already. Enough is enough!
The first test may be whether he can persuade the allies to reject participation in any projects that rely on forced labor. It is unclear, American officials said, what kind of language about rejecting goods or investments in such projects would be included in the meeting’s final communiqué, which will be issued Sunday, but the meeting comes just a day after Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who is traveling with Biden, told his Chinese counterpart in a phone call that the United States would actively oppose “ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing” against Muslims in Xinjiang, in China’s far western territory, and “the deterioration of democratic norms” in Hong Kong. European leaders have largely avoided that terminology.
Unless Israel (or themselves through the genocidal vaccination program) is doing it, of course, and the Chinese just blinked.
I mean honestly, folks, the hypocritical criticism coming from that $cum is beyond the pale at this point. He must have made his Chinese counterpart furious with such a comment.
Look, I'm not saying the Chinese and Xi are great guys. They have a horrible history does the CCP, what with its Cultural Revolution that has come to AmeriKa. I don't want to be like them, but our government should really offer people in faraway lands better ideas and mechani$ms rather than the brute force of sanction and bombing when they don't comply. That's on our leaders, not us, for they are illegitimate and do not represent our will.
The divisions on how to regard China help explain why the West has until now failed to muster a coordinated response to Belt and Road. A recent study by the Council on Foreign Relations described Washington’s own reactions as “scattershot,” a mix of modest Congressional adjustments to rules governing the Export-Import Bank to compete with Chinese loans in high technology, and efforts to ban Huawei, China’s telecommunications champion.
Do I even have to type it?
The risk for the American strategy is that dealing with a patchwork of separate programs — and a Western insistence on good environmental and human rights practices — may seem less appealing to developing nations than Beijing’s all-in-one package of financing and new technology.
The best way to do that is show them that “democracy delivers.”
“Many BRI countries appreciate the speed at which China can move from planning to construction,” said the council report, which was written by a bipartisan group of China experts and former U.S. officials.
Those countries, it added, also appreciate China’s “willingness to build what host countries want rather than telling them what they should do, and the ease of dealing with a single group of builders, financiers and government officials.”
Still, Biden senses an opening, as European nations have begun to understand the risks of dependency on Chinese supply chains and have watched China’s reach extend into their own backyards.
Britain, which once pursued arguably the most China-friendly policy in Europe, has swung firmly behind the American hard line, particularly on Huawei, which the U.S. sees as a security threat. After trying to accommodate Huawei, it announced, under Prime Minister Boris Johnson, that it was ripping out older Huawei equipment from its networks.
The real threat is the CIA and MI6.
Germany, for which China has become the No. 1 market for Volkswagens and BMWs, remains committed to engagement and is deeply resistant to a new Cold War. It has kicked decisions about using Huawei and other Chinese-made networking equipment down the road, after threats from Chinese officials to retaliate with a ban on the sale of German luxury cars in China.
Damn Nazis and fascists!
Italy became the first member of the G-7 to sign up to Belt and Road in 2019. It then had to back away, in part, under pressure from NATO allies who feared that Italian infrastructure, including the telecommunications network, would be dependent on Chinese technology.
Didn't they face some sort of crisis after they tilted toward Russia and signed off on this?
Government dissolved and then the central banker Draghi took over, right?
“America would be well served if the European Union got its act together and defined a coherent China strategy,” said Wolfgang Ischinger, a former German ambassador to the United States. “Its interests are not well served if there is a German-China strategy, a French-China strategy and a British-China strategy.”
Need to close ranks as World War III looms, and it should be a lot of fun!
That is easier said than done. Britain shifted closer to the United States under pressure from former President Donald Trump — less because it changed its view about the strategy or security risks posed by China than because, in the aftermath of Brexit, it feared being isolated from its most important ally.
Chancellor Angela Merkel, a steadfast believer in engagement with China, will leave office in a few months, but Germany’s policy may not change much, particularly if her successor as the leader of the Christian Democratic Party, Armin Laschet, replaces her in the chancellery. He is viewed as being in lockstep with Merkel.
The insults never stop when it comes to the trigger terminology like the Rockefeller's lockstep and the fact that policy doesn't change even though leaders come and go. Hmmmm.
France is a different story. Macron faces a formidable challenge from the populist right in elections next year. The right-wing leader, Marine LePen, has vowed to stand up to China’s ambitions in the Indo-Pacific region.
“Whenever you have one of these meetings, you’re going to see fluidity in one country or the other,” said Simon Fraser, a former top civil servant in Britain’s Foreign Office, but, he added, “there’s a lack of cohesion on the European side that needs to be addressed.”
Italy is a good test case of how China has tried to build influence in Europe. Since joining Belt and Road, Rome has signed nearly two dozen deals with Beijing ranging from tax regulations to sanitary requirements on pork exports, but Italy also vetoed a 5G deal between Huawei and one of its telecommunications companies.
The centerpiece of China’s investment in Europe is a rail network that would connect its factories on the Pacific to London — a project that China’s premier, Li Keqiang, once described as an express lane to Europe. Italy, which has a terminus on the route, welcomes the investment as a tonic for its struggling economy, but Britain’s relations with China have gone into a deep freeze. The government imposed sanctions over China’s treatment of its Uyghur population and offered residency and a path to citizenship to more than 300,000 holders of British overseas passports in Hong Kong after China imposed a draconian national security law on the former British colony.
It's a win-win, right?
China’s human rights record, analysts say, is hardening European attitudes across the board. The European Parliament declined to ratify a landmark investment treaty, championed by Germany, because of China’s heavy-handed reaction to sanctions over its treatment of the Uyghurs. China sanctioned 10 EU politicians.
There is also evidence that Biden recognizes that his aggressive language about China — as the great adversary in a fateful struggle between democracies and autocracies — is discomfiting to many Europeans. He has largely shunned that framing in the days leading up to his European tour, speaking more generally about the need to promote democracies in a competitive world.
It's all hypocritical boiler plate.
What a waste of a tree, ink, time, and money.
For some analysts, that opens the door to a hopeful scenario in which the United States and Europe move toward one other, moderating the most extreme aspects of confrontation versus conciliation in each others’ approaches.
“America is becoming more realistic on China from the hard line, while Europe is becoming more realistic from the soft line,” said Robin Niblett, director of Chatham House, a think tank in London.
Chatham is some sort of neo-con war-mongering outfit. That's the kind of expert anal-y$i$ I am treated to when reading this slop.
When China shipped face masks and ventilators to a desperate Italy during its COVID outbreak, an Italian official pointedly told his fellow Europeans that the country would remember who its friends were after the pandemic.
France did not join Belt and Road, though it has welcomed Chinese investment in the country and stopped short of banning Huawei from its wireless network. Relations with China cooled after President Emmanuel Macron criticized Beijing for its lack of transparency on the origins of the coronavirus.
They also discussed Iran, and this next article was located immediately below the above piece:
"Did Biden give Boris Johnson a $6,000 bike and get a Wikipedia printout in return? Not exactly" by Antonia Noori Farzan The Washington Post, June 12, 2021
There are few things more awkward than an uneven gift exchange.
So when reports began circulating that President Joe Biden had given British Prime Minister Boris Johnson a $6,000 custom-made bicycle at the Group of Seven summit - only to receive a photo of Frederick Douglass that had been printed out from Wikipedia in exchange - it seemed like a particularly cringeworthy moment in international diplomacy.
"The total lack of respect for Biden captured in one gift exchange," Donald Trump Jr., the former president's son, tweeted.
The reality, however, is more complicated.
Yeah, but here is the thing: it isn't!
Reality is only complicated for liars or agenda-pu$hing $cumbags -- in this case, both.
Truthfully, I am not only astonished but aghast that this absolute fluff is considered serious news by the Globe or anyone else. There was no hyperbole when I call this garbage. It is.
For starters, the State Department paid $1,800 for the bicycle, Bilenky Cycle Works told The Washington Post. The small Philadelphia-based business typically charges $6,000 for a similar lightweight model, and the custom Union Jack graphics, matching helmet, bronze and silver badge displaying crisscrossed British and American flags on the head tube, and rush fees would have brought the total cost to $10,000 under normal circumstances.
The State Department initially proposed a budget of $1,500, said Stephen Bilenky, the company's owner. On his website, he recalled initially thinking that he had been targeted by a scam when he received the "cryptic" email asking if he could produce a handmade bike for an unnamed foreign dignitary in less than two weeks, a feat that required working 14-hour days. He received a few hints - the foreign leader was 5′8″ and from a country with a red, white and blue flag - but didn't learn that the gift would be for Johnson until he'd already agreed to build the bicycle at a heavily discounted price.
"When your country calls, you answer!" Bilenky wrote.
The gift was intended to commemorate Biden and Johnson's shared enthusiasm for cycling, the White House said, but if Johnson wants to use the bike, he'll likely have to pay up. Britain's ministerial code allows government ministers to accept gifts that are valued at less than 140 pounds, the equivalent of about $200. If they want to keep a more expensive gift, they have to pay the difference - meaning that Johnson could either end up paying roughly $1,600 for a bike he didn't choose himself, or forfeiting it.
British taxpayers are on the hook after Americans were fleeced for this wheel-$pinning, penny-ante corruption the Wa$hington Compo$t has $niffed out with this turd-shining piece of PR crap?
Never mind the call to shut down the genocidal vaccine program that BoJo the Clown is pushing.
As for the idea that Johnson handed Biden a framed printout from Wikipedia? That's also not the full story.
Officials in Britain's Foreign Office did stumble upon a photo that appears on the Wikipedia page for Frederick Douglass, showing a mural of the famed abolitionist that was painted on an Edinburgh street. Melissa Highton, who took the photo, told The Post that the Foreign Office contacted her and asked permission to use it as a gift for Biden, who has invoked Douglass in his speeches.
"I agreed and I gave them a higher resolution version of the image so that it would be a better quality print," Highton wrote in an email. "I don't know how they printed it, but, yes, I assume they got a high quality print on quality paper and a nice frame. I haven't seen the finished item."
I am so impressed with the investigative reporting on display here, aren't you?
Downing Street didn't immediately respond to an inquiry about how much the gift cost, but a professional printing and framing job could be in the hundreds of dollars. U.S. presidents are barred from accepting personal gifts from world leaders that are valued at more than $415, and items that exceed that limit are typically sent directly to the National Archives.
Though some in the United States have interpreted the less-costly gift as a slight, there's no indication that the Bidens are feeling snubbed. First lady Jill Biden was also given a first edition of a novel by British author Daphne du Maurier, whose work is often set in Cornwall, while Johnson's wife, Carrie, reportedly received a silk scarf and a leather tote bag made by military spouses, and, if nothing else, the exchange marks a reversal of the awkwardness that ensued in 2009 when British Prime Minister Gordon Brown gave President Barack Obama a penholder made from the timbers of the same ship whose wood was used to build the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. Obama gave Brown a set of DVDs.....
Related:
The 95-year-old monarch sat on a dais to watch the ceremony that despite ongoing social distancing restrictions did not disappoint on the pomp and pageantry front. If she was tired after meeting G-7 leaders, including U.S. President Biden, on Friday evening, it didn’t show, and the ceremony is a gift from the Household Division of army regiments, which has a close affinity with the monarch. It featured soldiers who have played an integral role in the COVID-19 response, as well as those who have been serving on military operations. She was seen beaming from ear to ear as the nine planes of the Royal Air Force’s Red Arrows flew past in formation and let loose their red, white and blue smoke.
So what was the carbon footprint on that gratuitous waste of fuel during a national reckoning over male violence against women?
"British Prime Minister Boris Johnson gave a strong hint Saturday that the next planned relaxation of coronavirus restrictions in England this month will be delayed as a result of the spread of the delta variant first identified in India. In a series of interviews on the sidelines of the Group of Seven leaders’ summit in southwest England, Johnson conceded that he has grown more pessimistic about sanctioning the next easing scheduled for June 21 as the number of infections across the U.K. has struck levels not seen since February. Johnson is set to make an announcement Monday about the June 21 timetable. Government figures reported Saturday showed 7,738 new daily cases, slightly down from the previous day’s 8,125, which was the highest one-day figure since Feb. 26. The government has said it wants every adult to have received at least one dose by the end of July. Around 62% of the British population has had one shot so far, while about 44% has had two. The U.K. has recorded nearly 128,000 coronavirus-related deaths, more than any other nation in Europe....."
Then lockdowns have utterly failed and that tyrant needs to be given the King Charles treatment, pronto, as the the fourth stage in his government’s four-step unlocking plan for England is dependent on daily infection levels have increased threefold over the past few weeks; however, the recent rise in new confirmed cases has led many scientists to call for a delay on what has been dubbed by sections of the British media as “Freedom Day”, potentially of up to four weeks, so more people can get vaccinated before the restrictions are lifted, and supporters of a pause, which includes the British Medical Association, say it would make the vaccine rollout more effective by allowing more younger people to get their first shot and older people to receive their second, which evidence shows helps contain the delta variant because “there is a huge risk that prematurely relaxing all restrictions will undo the excellent work” of the country’s vaccination program and further fuel infections and it’s not just about the number of hospitalizations, but also the risk to the health of large numbers of younger people, who can suffer long-term symptoms affecting their lives and ability to work.”
Of course, the tyrant appeared to indicate that he was ready to sanction a pause in the lockdown-easing as he sought to downplay any concerns that restrictions would be re-imposed, stressing that every scheduled easing would be driven by “data, not dates” and that each stage would be irreversible and “just to cheer you up a little bit, I would like to tell you that the scientists are agreed about one thing: They do not think there is any case for going into reverse.”
My only question is how much he had to drink at dinner.
What a f**king liar!
He's got good company, too:
"Jean-Luc Melenchon, a far-left political leader in France and a likely high-profile candidate in next year's presidential election, was pelted with flour at a protest Saturday, days after President Emmanuel Macron was slapped in the face as he sought to shake hands with voters. It is not uncommon for French political figures to be pelted with food: Former presidents Nicolas Sarkozy and Francois Hollande have been showered with flour, and Macron was pelted with eggs at least twice before he was elected president in 2017, but the Paris assault that targeted Melenchon, the leader of the France Unbowed party, took place against the backdrop of renewed political tensions before regional elections next week, and broader concerns about violence before the presidential election, scheduled for May. Melenchon was speaking with journalists at a demonstration against the far-right in Paris on Saturday when a person threw flour at him. No one was taken into custody. On Tuesday, a far-right sympathizer slapped Macron as the French leader was greeting a small crowd during a visit to southeastern France....."
The slap prompted swift political condemnation as a video of the incident spread rapidly on social media, and he's lucky he hasn't gotten this kind of treatment for which the French are known:
You have to admit, it is a lot more timely and cost-effective than controlled courts.
Nostradamus actually predicted the demise of Macron:
"The husband of Brigitte, 25 years her junior, shall be driven from the city. He shall take a devious route, through Alps and forests. He shall be driven off the path to an untimely death before he arrives in the kingdom of Alexander."
He should have went by motorbike instead:
"Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro led thousands of motorcyclist supporters through the streets of Sao Paulo on Saturday — and got hit with a fine for failure to wear a mask. Sao Paulo’s state government press office said a fine — equivalent to about $110 — would be imposed for violation of a rule that has required masks in public places since May 2020.Bolsonaro’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The conservative president waved to the crowd from his motorcycle and later from atop a sound truck, where helmeted but largely maskless backers cheered and chanted as he insisted that masks were useless for those already vaccinated — an assertion disputed by most public health experts. Vaccines are designed chiefly to protect recipients from getting sick, not necessarily from being infected. While studies show many vaccines reduce viral load, and likely spread, not all varieties have been fully studied. Less than 12% of Brazil’s population so far has received both doses of a COVID-19 vaccine, according to the Ministry of Health....."
Which is why Brazil is in the midst of an alleged outbreak, and it was nice to see Cristina Melo, 47, a businesswoman in the computer industry, say she and her husband were at the motorcycle rally “because we are patriots, and of course we defend our president Bolsonaro,” for he is one of the handful of world leaders who are profiles in courage for standing against the CVD madness (Lukashenko and the martyr Magufuli come to mind).
{@@##$$%%^^&&}
Now for the page one self-serving self-adulation that is actually sad:
"Fifty years later, Pentagon Papers still speak loudly about war and government untruths" by David M. Shribman Globe Correspondent, June 12, 2021
In the middle of a controversial war, in the middle of generational conflict, in the middle of a contentious presidential administration, a single finger depressing a starter button in a manufacturing plant in Manhattan 50 years ago rocked the nation.
As the last strains of dance music from a 15-piece orchestra faded at the White House wedding of Richard Nixon’s daughter Tricia, the editors of The New York Times were bracing themselves 225 miles away for an assault from the bride’s father. The presses that the starter button set in motion themselves set in motion one of the great political controversies and legal battles of the 20th century.
The newspapers rolling off those presses were carrying excerpts from a study that would be known in history — history that the study, its interpretations, and misinterpretations would spawn — as the Pentagon Papers.
Like the “Odyssey” and “Paradise Lost,” the Pentagon Papers would be more cited than actually read. Indeed, no academic monograph with the possible exception of Charles Darwin’s 1859 “Origin of Species” would have the impact of this work of 36 scholars toiling down the hall from the Pentagon office of Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara. They eventually produced 2.5 million words that filled 47 volumes weighing 60 pounds and gave a bracing account of American involvement in Vietnam from the end of World War II to 1967.
More important than its size was its scathing honesty. It was a minutely documented account of how unimaginably and disastrously misguided that involvement was: begun on unfounded Cold War convictions about the importance of Vietnam’s security to our own, pursued with escalating brutality but never a coherent strategy, and cynically perpetuated for more than a decade — and more than 38,000 lost American lives — after top advisers to President Lyndon Johnson told him repeatedly they deemed it unwinnable.
It was, that is, a vast catalog of inconvenient truths — truths that begged the great questions that lingered, loud and haunting, into the Nixon years: Why are we still in Vietnam? Why are young men still being sent to die there?
No president of the war era was ready to answer them, for fear of “losing” the war and losing face, and so the report’s existence had to be kept secret, and was, until the day those presses rolled — at the Times and, soon after, at The Washington Post and The Boston Globe.
A half-century later, the publication of the Pentagon Papers has both less and greater significance than it did on June 13, 1971, and yet their release speaks as loudly to our time as it did in the long-ago month in which the first Hard Rock Cafe was opened and when Carole King performed for the first time.
The American wars still to come would have their own bodyguards of lies.
“The Pentagon Papers foreshadowed Iraq and Afghanistan in that they showed presidents’ ability to keep secrets — the exact thing we saw in Vietnam,” Daniel Ellsberg, the Defense Department scholar who released the papers, said in an interview for this retrospective. “There are no big Afghanistan Papers and no Iraq Papers but they would show the same kind of thing: Progress in those wars was a lie, and there was no progress that was going to happen, and the leaders told themselves that but didn’t tell it to the public.”
Actually, there are the 21st-Century Pentagon Papers regarding Afghanistan, but those have been completely ignored.
How pathetic is it that Globe scum, 'er, scribe has to reach back 50 years for a war they told the truth about -- even though they didn't tell the truth before the infamous leak by Ellsberg(!)?
The release of the Pentagon Papers — at that point the largest-ever disclosure of classified documents — didn’t bring American involvement in Vietnam to a close; the last Americans were not evacuated from Saigon for nearly five more years. The legal battles that followed, as the Nixon Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to halt the publication and was firmly rebuffed, did not leave the American press unfettered; reporters feared imprisonment for leaks of national security information as recently as the Barack Obama years, and Donald Trump waged psychological war against the press, but there is no minimizing the drama that began to unfold when Ellsberg began seeking an outlet for the documents and found one in Times reporter Neil Sheehan. Sheehan immediately launched a frantic but furtive effort to copy them — against the wishes and without the knowledge, we now know, of Ellsberg, who was looking for another impactful outlet, preferably on Capitol Hill. That drama gave rise to the popular 2017 film “The Post,” about publisher Katharine Graham’s decision for The Washington Post to follow the Times in publishing the papers, handed to her newspaper by Ellsberg in two cardboard boxes.
Oh, the poor, shit-shoveling liars are such victims -- and heroes, according to the self-serving crap troweled out by Hollywood and Speilberg.
“The story was worthy of an entire film,” director and producer Steven Spielberg said in a recent telephone conversation. “I never bought the idea that the Pentagon Papers were a threat to national security. We — Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep — were all drawn to this. The chief executive in the Oval Office — Richard Nixon — was basically trying to shut down the free press. It had ironic parallels to the [Trump] threats we have all just lived.”
He didn't jail reporters like the Obama/Biden regime, and where is Julian Assange these days anyway?
In his introduction to a book edition that grew out of the publication of the Pentagon Papers, Sheehan said that to “read the Pentagon Papers in their vast detail is to step through the looking glass into a new and different world,” and those in that world with eyes to see were stunned.
Oh, the NYT reporter got a book out of it!
John F. Kerry was back from Southeast Asia, leading the Vietnam Veterans against the War. Less than two months earlier he posed his haunting question to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”
“The papers were a stunning confirmation of my remarks, and it had enormous impact on me,” Kerry recalled this spring. “I remember being furious at the fact that our government was officially lying. It was a double lie — a lie about the realities of the war and a lie about whether there was a strategy. It wasn’t just about dying for a mistake. It was about dying for a lie.’'
Thirty-four years later he voted for the invasion of Iraq based on lies, he was quoted as saying propping up the Afghan government and cleaning up its corruption was a reason for staying, and now he is jetting around the world to save the planet.
What a shameless piece of hypocritical excrement!
The impact was powerful, too, in shaping America’s sense of its place in the world — and of the honor, or want of it, of its political leaders.
Nearly three decades since the Herring interpretation, scholars have come to believe the Pentagon Papers had little influence on the course of the war, though their release stirred fears in Nixon and Henry Kissinger of further disclosures that could be damaging to them. Nor do contemporary scholars believe the papers substantially turned public opinion against the war; the trends in public opinion already had turned, “but the papers provided confirmation for a lot of things that the critics of the war had been saying,” said Edward Miller, a Dartmouth College historian and adviser on Ken Burns’s television history of the war, which aired on PBS in 2017. “The ‘credibility gap’ had been talked about for years before 1971, but the evidence in the papers demonstrated it in spades.”
It took the racist PBS's Ken Burns to finally confirm that we were lied to?
That evidence reinforced not only the viewpoints of antiwar protesters but also the perceptions of veterans of the war.
“The papers showed me how a lot of the people involved in policy-making actually knew they were building on a house of cards,” said former senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, a onetime Navy SEAL who lost part of his right leg in combat two years before the release of the documents.
He later served on the 9/11 cover-up commission.
Whatever the impact in politics, the Pentagon Papers had enormous influence in military circles.
It led to co-opted reporters who became embedded cheerleaders and propaganda mouthpieces -- a far cry from the days of Vietnam!
“The papers revealed the degree to which we went to war without a strategy,” said Trump-era national security adviser H.R. McMaster, who served in the Gulf War, the Iraq War, and Afghanistan and who wrote his PhD thesis on the Vietnam War. “Americans were already loosing faith in the war and this showed gross incompetence by our leaders.”
Then it was back to Vietnam as those wars based on lies that were pushed by the pre$$ garner no reflection at all.
In fact, was there ANY WAR the PRE$$ has NOT PROMOTED in the 50 years since the Pentagon Papers?
Can you name ONE WAR they STOPPED?
I CAN'T!
The papers were a time bomb whose ticking Ellsberg, another RAND thinker, could not expel from his mind. His first inclination was to get them exposed in Congress. He met disappointment and resistance. The ultimate destiny of the Pentagon Papers — their appearance in 19 newspapers — began innocently enough in the Joyce Chen Small Eating Place between Harvard and MIT in Central Square, Cambridge. There, the MIT linguist and social critic Noam Chomsky suggested to the Globe’s Thomas N. Oliphant that perhaps he ought to track down someone named Daniel Ellsberg.
Oliphant did, and after two lunches with Ellsberg wrote a story on March 7, 1971, about a “secret Indochina report.” That set in motion panic in the White House, an FBI manhunt to find the leaker and the cache of documents, and a journalistic race to get the Pentagon Papers into print.
Sheehan, who had covered the war from 1962 to 1966, was quickly in touch with Ellsberg, beginning a tortuous series of negotiations marked by trust (the shared conviction that these documents were significant) and deception (Sheehan and his wife, the New Yorker writer Susan Sheehan, quietly photocopied the documents, portions of which Sheehan had quietly acquired separately).
Before long the documents were secreted along with a Times team in the New York Hilton.
As the excerpts from the papers started rolling off the Times presses and as the Justice Department was seeking an injunction, Ellsberg offered the papers to The Washington Post, which began printing them as well. Third came the Globe, in part because Ellsberg had admired the newspaper’s antiwar editorial and stance and had warmed to editor Tom Winship when they encountered each other on a Caribbean vacation.
Winship — whose successors as editor John S. Driscoll and Matthew V. Storin also would be principals in the undertaking — made it clear that he would be willing to disobey a court order to print the Pentagon Papers. If necessary, he remarked, he would dispatch Oliphant with a pile of the papers and the instructions to read them aloud on Boston Common.
So 1,700 pages of documents in a plastic bag were given in a Newton telephone booth to Tom Ryan, the Globe’s national news editor, who soon thereafter marched into the Morrissey Boulevard newsroom with a red plaid zippered suitcase stuffed with the documents. The papers later were locked in the back of a car in the newspaper’s parking lot. Winship told Attorney General John Mitchell the paper would continue printing the material, which by that time had been moved to a locker at Logan Airport before ending up in a First National Bank of Boston vault.
The legal struggle over the Pentagon Papers — and over the First Amendment-rattling notion of prior restraint of speech — was one of the landmark Supreme Court battles of the 20th century. It also marked the beginning of what persists to this day, the controversy about the merits of the Vietnam War, issues about government openness, and debates about the prerogatives of a free press. For a superpower with global influence, an armada of nuclear weapons, and a civic culture rooted in the First Amendment, the “dirty questions” at the center of the Pentagon Papers never end, nor are they ever fully answered.....
Certainly not by a War Pre$$ that carries their water!
Oh for the days of real antiwar protesters, huh?
See here for a real one.
The only thing that tops the above outrage, is the whining and crying of victimhood by the propaganda-pushing liars of the pre$$:
"News Analysis: Garland confronts long-building crisis over leak inquiries and journalism" by Charlie Savage New York Times, June 12, 2021
It's a called anal-y$i$ because that is where it comes from.
WASHINGTON — Government leak hunters have been ratcheting up pressure on the ability of journalists to do their jobs for a generation — a push fueled by changing technology and fraught national security issues that arose after the Sept. 11 attacks. Now those tensions have reached an inflection point.
See what happens when you collaborate with lies?
Recent disclosures about aggressive steps that the Justice Department secretly took under former president Donald Trump while hunting for the confidential sources of reporters — at The New York Times, CNN and The Washington Post — prompted a backlash from the top. President Biden ordered prosecutors to stop seizing reporters’ phone and email data, but Biden’s sweeping vow to ban a practice he called “simply, simply wrong” left crucial questions unanswered. Among them: How broadly will prosecutors define the journalistic activities that the new protections apply to, and will the changes be easy or difficult for a future administration to roll back?
They didn't care when the Obama/Biden regime jailed them, and now they are a fawning servant of their oppressors.
Cry me a river, assholes!
“The question of how this will be institutionalized or codified is crucial,” said Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “These kinds of protections shouldn’t be a matter of executive grace.”
Enshrined in the First Amendment, the role of the free press in bringing to light information beyond what those in power approve for release is a foundational principle of the U.S. system of self-government. In Senate testimony this past week, Attorney General Merrick Garland said the transparency that comes from investigative journalism about “wrongdoing and error in the government” gives people faith in democracy.
Hey, thanks, I needed a laugh!
An essential task for journalists who report such material is to talk with officials who are not authorized to publicly speak about government matters and to protect their confidentiality. Leak prosecutions and seizures of journalists’ communications data not only jeopardize particular sources but can also frighten others with newsworthy information into staying silent, but the confluence of recent events — which also include the Trump-era targeting of Democratic lawmakers and aides suspected of being reporters’ sources, and extraordinary gag orders imposed on Times and CNN executives in fights over data that spilled into the Biden era, all of which an inspector general is investigating — has brought into focus how fragile the protections for journalism are in the 21st century.
They aren't getting pulled down like blogs and YouTube videos, so fuck off!!!
Wah-wah-wah!
Maybe if you were not incorrigible liars and slaves to power pushing evil agendas, maybe things would be different but rather than repent they double down on pure evil.
Biden has vowed a major course correction. Garland, who as a federal appeals court judge in 2005 stressed “the public interest in protecting” reporters’ sources to avoid chilling the disclosure of information with “importance to the public,” has signed onto that effort while acknowledging this past week that “there are some definitional questions, but I think they are quite resolvable.”
Especially since the administration and Democrats are the sources!
The unresolved details are expected to be a focus of a meeting Monday between Garland and leaders of the Times, the Post and CNN.
One issue is whether Garland will replace a Justice Department regulation that permits seizures of reporters’ information that can reveal their sources in leak investigations under certain conditions — or leave it intact and simply ban that technique for the time being.
Garland has discussed only issuing “some kind of memorandum, obviously, from me.” If he pursues that route, the Biden administration’s changes may prove fleeting. With or without telling the public, he or a successor could later revoke his memo or make an exception.
A regulatory change would be an intermediate step. It would take greater bureaucratic effort to reverse, and the public would be more likely to learn if it were undone. Garland could change the department regulation on his own.
Who f**king really cares?
By contrast, he would need help from Congress for an even more robust change: enacting the ban as a new law.
There is precedent. In 1980, after the Supreme Court upheld a police search of a newsroom to hunt for unpublished photographs of a protest that turned violent, Congress barred law enforcement from seizing journalists’ work product materials, except if a journalist was suspected of a crime.
They are all criminals for pushing agendas based on lies, sorry. The pre$$ is primally evil and $atanic. It's the only explanation for why they are the way they are.
Key details about the scope and limits of any new restrictions on prosecutors also remain unresolved.
It is clear that whether a reporter’s information is protected from investigators will turn on the circumstances. For example, investigators will still be able to seize the communications records of criminal suspects who happen to be reporters, but other issues are murkier. Among them is what counts as reporters “doing their jobs” under the new protections. Defining journalism in the internet era — when it is no longer necessary to have a printing press or television studio to disseminate information — is notoriously difficult.
They only care about this when it is personal; otherwise, they wouldn't give a damn!
Bloggers and self-proclaimed citizen journalists are not the only categories that arguably blur the lines. It is unclear, for example, whether the Biden administration intends to extend the shield to entities like RT, the Kremlin-funded news service that is generally considered an outlet for Russian propaganda.
Given the ambiguity of what counts as a leak investigation, Jaffer said, “it’s possible the new rules would allow them to get a reporter’s records even if they think the reporter is a real reporter just doing his job.”
Sorry, but I'm a real reporter, not them. They are propagandists, and I report on it.
The recent events that prompted Biden’s vow were the culmination of a major shift in how the government treats unauthorized disclosures of official secrets that has been unfolding for nearly two decades.
Few argue that it is unjustified for the government, like any organization, to try to deter excessive unauthorized disclosures, but for most of American history, it did so through administrative action, like the threat of losing one’s security clearance or job, rather than treating it as a crime.
Prosecutors first convicted an official of violating the Espionage Act for leaking to the news media — as opposed to spying — in 1985, and that case then stood alone for another generation, but starting midway through the George W. Bush administration and extending through the Obama and Trump presidencies, it became routine to send leakers to prison.
Not a peep was raised until Trump came along.
What disingenuous assholes!
That change partly stemmed from the legally and politically charged issues that arose in the post-Sept. 11 period, like the Iraq War, torture and warrantless surveillance. The Bush Justice Department formed a task force dedicated to going after high-level national security leaks, helping alter the bureaucracy’s culture.
The change also stemmed from 21st-century communications, whose deluge of electronic trails — “metadata” showing who contacted whom and when, to who looked at or printed out a classified computer file — made it easier for the FBI to identify suspects. (Encryption, of course, has separately made it harder for agents to eavesdrop on the content of communications.)
Several cracks in protections for journalism have formed under the resulting pressure. One is that investigators have increasingly tried to seize data about reporters’ phone calls and emails.
Now they are concerned about e-mails!
Prosecutors sometimes notified news organizations about their intentions in advance, which has led to negotiations and court fights, including a 2006 appeals court ruling upholding a subpoena for a Times reporter’s phone data; however, the statute of limitations passed, and the investigation ended.
Prosecutors have also avoided such lengthy fights by arguing that advance notification would damage an investigation and secretly seized reporters’ data from communications companies without it. Examples include an Obama-era seizure of Associated Press phone data disclosed in 2013 — and at least four Trump-era leak investigations.
They should have been proud to have Obama spy on them!
The QUESTION NOW is WHO DIDN'T OBAMA SPY ON?
Prosecutors have also subpoenaed reporters to testify about their sources.
In 2005, a Times reporter was jailed for 85 days because she refused to comply with a subpoena demanding that she talk about a confidential source. In a 2013 case involving another Times reporter, the Justice Department won an appeals court ruling that established that there is no “reporter’s privilege” that empowers federal judges to quash such subpoenas.
That would be Judith Miller, the main purveyor of Iraq lies on the front page of the New York Times.
The Biden administration’s description of its new policy — that prosecutors “will not seek compulsory legal process in leak investigations to obtain source information from members of the news media doing their jobs” — appears to ban such subpoenas to reporters.
It is less clear whether Garland intends to address a growing threat of prosecuting reporters themselves for writing about government secrets.
Only the ones they are allowed to write about.
In theory, several laws could be used to prosecute reporters for publishing national security secrets, but First Amendment concerns have deterred prosecutors from testing that idea. Cracks, however, have been forming in that barrier, too. After the Times exposed secret post-9/11 surveillance under the Bush administration, some conservatives called for prosecuting the paper and its reporters.
What is omitted there is the Times sat on the story for a year until after the 2004 election before they released it, but don't call that interfering in an election or anything.
In 2013, it came to light that the Obama Justice Department portrayed a Fox News reporter as a criminal conspirator in his source’s leak as part of a search warrant application. That time, conservatives joined in expressing outrage.
There was no liberal outrage, and Obama sure liked to phony up the warrant applications, didn't he?
What a f**king crook!
The Justice Department said prosecutors never intended to charge the reporter but portrayed him as a criminal to bypass the 1980 law that bans search warrants for reporters’ work materials; it makes an exception if the reporter is suspected of a crime. Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. banned the loophole, but the specter of prosecuting reporters returned in 2019 when the department under Attorney General William Barr expanded a hacking conspiracy indictment of Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, to treat his journalistic-style acts of soliciting and publishing classified information as crimes.
That's where the pre$$ proves they are a fraud, for they will not defend Assange.
Obama-era officials had weighed charging Assange for publishing leaked military and diplomatic files but worried about establishing a precedent that could damage mainstream news outlets that sometimes publish government secrets, like the Times. The Trump administration, however, was undeterred by that prospect.
Yeah, Obama was so good to them!
For now, the First Amendment issues are on hold as Assange fights extradition from Britain. Soon after the Biden administration took office, the Justice Department pressed forward with that extradition effort in British court, leaving the charges in place, but that was before Garland was sworn in — and before the latest uproar about the escalating aggression of the Justice Department’s leak investigation tactics prompted him to focus on drafting a new approach that, he testified, will be “the most protective of journalists’ ability to do their jobs in history.”
What are they getting all worried about then?
Here are some reading glasses for you:
"While shopping for eyeglasses in Des Moines last year, Shane Wayne Michael was approached by a patron and asked what’s become a familiar question during the coronavirus pandemic: Can you pull your mask over your nose, but Michael, whose nose was exposed inside Vision 4 Less, did not take kindly to the question in November, according to a criminal complaint. What happened next, police say, was a parking-lot fight in which Michael attacked Mark Dinning’s eyes and genitals. Dinning told authorities that Michael then pulled down his mask and began to cough and spit in his face. “If I have it, you have it!” said Michael, referring to covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, according to the complaint. Weeks after the Iowa man was convicted of willful injury causing serious injury, Michael, 42, was sentenced Wednesday to 10 years in prison for the violent attack stemming from the mask dispute. Michael’s sentence is among the sternest yet nationwide related to an argument over face coverings since the start of the pandemic. The sentencing comes amid a continuing flurry of incidents and arrests at places like banks and polling places over masks. There’s been an unprecedented rise in unruly passenger behavior on planes, with the Federal Aviation Administration saying that a large majority of its incident reports this year have involved people who would not comply with the federal mandate to wear a face covering. A maskless Florida woman was recently sentenced to 30 days in jail for purposely coughing on a customer at a Pier 1 store last year. A Family Dollar security guard in Flint, Mich., was fatally shot last year, authorities said, after telling a customer that her child had to wear a face covering to enter the store. Neither Michael’s attorneys nor Iowa Assistant Attorney General Kevin Cmelik, who represented the prosecution in the trial, immediately returned requests for comment Saturday. Efforts to reach Dinning, 60, were unsuccessful...."
The guy is getting 10 years for what is essentially a bar fight, and the mask Stasi are what we used to call busybodies. They will be met with profanity by me as I tell them the masks a) don't work, and b) are actually harmful because trees should breathing in CO2, not people.
If they persist, I will see my way clear to knocking them flat on their ass.
I am literally sick of this shit and not going to take it anymore!
