Foreign powers influencing the outcome of US elections? Nothing new here to see, has been occurring for decades and includes spying on allies.
[Some links are adjusted due to cached version of original article and some are added – Oui]
Why I Published US Intelligence Secrets About Israel’s Anti-Iran Campaign | Tikun Olam | by Richard Silverstein
The material published included references to Israeli diplomats briefing President-elect Obama on Operation Cast Lead while the war was being prosecuted, presumably in an effort to persuade him of the importance of continuing it, despite the pressure the incoming president was under to speak out against it. They revealed private, late-night meetings between the Israeli ambassador and a key Obama operative at which they presumably discussed how and whether the war would end in relation to the president-elect’s upcoming inauguration. Note that the war ended on January 18, and Obama was inaugurated on January 20. I’m certain this was no accident, but rather a carefully choreographed deal between the two sides. Obama never criticized the war publicly. Now we know why.
I noted that an Israeli diplomat ghost wrote some or all of a Boston Herald op-ed attacking Iran, to which a prominent Jewish attorney and community leader signed his name. In Minneapolis, the local Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) briefed the Chicago Israeli Consulate on the travel schedule and a meeting it held with Rep. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim-American elected to Congress. Ellison, according to the tapes, was viewed as hostile to Israeli interests. In fact, the JCRC official told the Israeli diplomat that Ellison had just led a local trade delegation to Saudi Arabia (a big no-no) and was planning to join Rep. Brian Baird (D-Washington) in a fact-finding mission to Gaza in the aftermath of the war. This trip, too. was viewed with alarm by both parties in the transcripts.
“The JCRC director conceded implicitly in The American Jewish World that he monitored Ellison and reported to the consulate:
‘As part of our work fostering a strong U.S.-Israel relationship, the JCRC communicates from time to time with the Consul General’s office in Chicago … Accordingly, the JCRC’s conversations with the Consul General’s office have included discussions about members of Minnesota’s Congressional delegation, including Representative Ellison.'”
In Texas, a member of Congress held a meeting with a prominent Jewish campaign donor and consular official to discuss ways of advancing Israel’s legislative campaign against Iran, including punitive sanctions and alarming the US public with the dangers posed by that country and its supposed effort to produce a nuclear weapon.
Another article on how the Obama administration has treated whistleblowers:
WikiLeaks and private Manning – the Apachi helicopter attack on a group of journalist in the Iraq War …
○ Iceland: Minister Who Refused FBI Operation to Frame Assange
Below the fold my post in a fp aticle by BooMan, added here before it gets downrated by the vigilantes roaming the pond.
Those were the days …
Yeltsin, Clinton, Major, Russian clan, oligarchs, raw capitalism …
No need to prove politicians in world’s capitals from Moscow, via Kiev, Berlin, Paris, London and Washington DC are corrupted by greed of capitalism.
○ Bill Clinton, Boris Yeltsin, and U.S.-Russian Relations (1993-2000)
○ The Evolution of NATO, 1988-2001
○ Revisiting the Prophetic Memoir of Clinton’s Top Russia Adviser
Similar to the oligarchy in the Ukraine: corruption on a massive scale, just different people in power that profit.
The Man-made “Disaster Capitalism” in Russia: Clintons Forgotten the 1990s?
While only 6% of the Russian public approved of Yeltsin’s “reforms,” the Clinton administration directed and sponsored the Yeltsin administration’s efforts in Russia.
With the approval of Washington, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank, Yeltsin privatized state owned industries, lifted price controls, and in the process left millions of Russians in desperate conditions.
US economist Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University was dispatched to Russia in order to oversee the process. The result was not the establishment of a free market paradise, but rather a huge catastrophe.
US Senator Bill Bradley explained it this way: “30% unemployment, rampant inflation, pensions gone, savings gone, 30 or 40 years… it’s all gone. No jobs. A few people doing very well, who bought all assets from the state, but the average person, no.”According to Naomi Klein’s 2007 book “The Shock Doctrine” between 1991 and 1998 “more than 80 percent of Russian farms had gone bankrupt and roughly seventy thousand state factories had closed creating an epidemic of unemployment.”
As a result, 74 million Russians were living below the poverty line. Klein goes on to say that “25 percent of Russians – almost 37 million people – lived in poverty described as ‘desperate.'”
During the 1990s, when Yeltsin was dramatically changing the country under the direction of the Clinton administration, the rate of drug addiction in Russia increased by 900 percent.
○ The Yeltsin years and the oligarchs