Friday, March 09, 2012

Breitbart Video Vetting Obama Fails Meanwhile Obama's Attacks on Whistle Blowers Worse Than Bush & Gautemalan Genocide

Todays Issues:

*Obama and Whistle Blowers
*Update Bradley manning Glenn Greenwald
*Gautemala Genocide Supported By Pat Robertson
*Breitbart secret video vetting Obama FAILs
*While the Right envisions a smoking gun

On Vetting Obama Video:

"...Does it matter? At the political level, no. This isn’t a scandal. Who cares if a young law student went racially along to get along? Besides, Obama was just demonstrating for “diversity,” an anodyne goal that has now received a quasi-official societal imprimatur as well as an explicit legal one..."

and :
...The entire episode is vintage Obama. It shows off his strengths: ability to conciliate, open-mindedness, tactfulness, pragmatism. But it also shows off his weaknesses: weakness, indecisiveness, wishful thinking, pragmatism.
Quotes by Gary Kamiya at Salon.com

To the title of the video we should to be fair add a question mark

Obama just sounds like an ambitious politically astute law student.

Barack Obama Protesting At Harvard In 1991 (Radical Association)



And now let's indulge the Crazy:

Watch as Michelle Malkin goes off the rails claiming that the media was and is too Obama friendly.
Give us a break Michelle if anything Fox News attack dogs were after Obama the moment he began even thinking about throwing his hat in the ring for the presidency.
To some extent heaven help me I agree with Sean hannity that this video is not a smoking gun-this is the same old crap and mudslinging Fox News and the GOP threw at Obama during the 2007-2008 presidential campaign .
The reason supporters of Obama might be concerned about not what is contained in the video but rather how Fox News and its allies distort such information to suit their agenda.

Michelle Malkin Skewers Juan Williams Over Obama College Tapes
"Amazing supernatural Force that is (Saint) Andrew Breitbart"
"vet the prez" and her new company "Twitchy.com"





The use of a video of Barack Obama speaking at a protest at Harvard as an attack appears to be a rather lame excuse for an attack on president Obama. In the video Obama focuses on his first meeting with professor Derrick Bell and that Bell did not lecture the students but engaged them in a conversation. This has been an ongoing theme for Obama of having a civil conversation and discussion about issues rather than encouraging what he considers to be unproductive confrontations. If anything Obama at that time was trying to steer a path between the hardliners on either side.and we are told that even conservatives on the Harvard campus did not see Obama as taking a side.


"In the words of Bradford Berenson, a conservative student who would later work in the second Bush administration, “Even though he was clearly a liberal, he didn’t appear to the conservatives in the review to be taking sides in the tribal warfare.”


as Gary Kamiya argues at Salon .com
" ...The entire episode is vintage Obama. It shows off his strengths: ability to conciliate, open-mindedness, tactfulness, pragmatism. But it also shows off his weaknesses: weakness, indecisiveness, wishful thinking, pragmatism.

But it may matter at another level. Obama has shown time and again that he will not get tough until he absolutely has to – and sometimes not even then. He’s conflict-averse. He prefers making beautiful speeches to taking on enemies, or committing himself to one position. He seems to always be slipping away from the fight, thinking he can have it both ways. It is a trait that got him elected, but it is his greatest weakness. The big question, if he is elected for a second term, is whether he is capable of unifying the opposite strands of his character, forging a single identity. That would mean letting the chips fall where they may, and living up to his promise to transform America by finding within himself the only attribute he has so far lacked: courage.


Martin luther King was also in favor of dialogue over confrontation but he also knew that when one side digs in and refuses to give any ground at all then confrontation is inevitable . So Martin Luther King engaged in peaceful non-violent non-cooperation to illustrate that the white Sotherners were unwilling to conduct meaningful discussions and negotiations. The segregationists defended their position and were insitent that they would fight to the death to protect the status quo . They were unwilling to give in to those who believed that blacks were entitled to the same rights as whites were.

One wonders if King had been like Obama that he probably would not have achieved what he eventually did by making the Civil Rights movement and segregation news night after night on the mainstream media`s newscasts and getting civil rights legislation passed by the Johnson administration.

No matter what Obama says or does in the video it is being used by the conservative media as an example of Obama's secret agenda of inciting racial divisiveness of Obama's radicalism even though in the video Obama 's speech is far from radical or incendiary nor does he dress like some sort of stereotypical radical he looks like a typical university prepy.

. Sean hannity and others refuse to accept that in the situation at Harvard Obama was trying to infuse the issue with civility and not conflict or confrontation.



The use of this video to criticize Obama tells us more about his unrepentant critics who deliberately misrepresent anything and everything Obama says or does. For insance Fox News made a big deal of the fact that Obma smoked at one time and may occassionally indulge in smoking. They even made a big deal about Obama in a swimming suit.


Young Obama on display The “smoking gun” video confirms Obama’s strength and weakness: He always tries to have it both ways by Gary Kamiya at Salon.com, March 9, 2012

Just before he died on March 1, the right-wing attack dog and disinformation specialist Andrew Breitbart promised to reveal explosive videos of a racially charged speech made by the young Barack Obama that would “change this election.”

Breitbart’s death at age 43 led wingnuts on the right to mutter darkly that he was taken out by nameless forces, presumably working for a Satanic Commie Muslim with the initials B.O. Now the video has been released, and it is safe to say that if the Obama administration did dispatch a hit team to silence Breitbart, it was a serious miscalculation. If Breitbart really believed that this feeble artifact would change the election, it would have been much better for the White House if he remained a key member of the right-wing brain trust charged with reclaiming the White House.

The brief video, shot in 1990, shows a young, skinny Barack Obama, at the time a second-year student at Harvard Law School, delivering a speech at a rally on behalf of a tenured law professor at the school named Derrick Bell.

...Before he died, Breitbart claimed that this video would show “why racial division and class warfare are central to what hope and change was sold in 2008.” Sure enough, right-wingers have seized upon it to portray Obama as a race-card player and friend of white-hating academic extremists. It’s this year’s version of the Bill Ayers, Rashid Khalidi and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright “scandals,” in which Obama was accused of playing footsie with, respectively, a radical Weatherman, a Palestinian academic and an incendiary black clergyman.

...Anyone who has read Obama’s “Dreams From My Father,” in which Obama grapples with the long-standing tension in the black community between colorblind universalism and Black Power-tinged separatism, will realize that the Bell case put Obama in a difficult situation. As a member of the Black Law Students Association, for him to have sat this dispute out would have been extremely difficult. It was a mom and apple pie issue. He would have come across as a race traitor.


And once again Obama has betrayed his 2008 supporters with his beligerent attitude towards Whistleblowers . Whereas part of his campaign promises was better laws to protect Whistleblowers. You would think if Obama was as radical as Beitbart made him out to be Obama would be protecting Whistle blowers and using their testimony to clean up some of the federal governments departments.

NSA whistle-blower: Obama “worse than Bush” Salon.com March 7,2012

Thomas Drake on life inside the National Security Agency and the price of truth telling

Thomas Drake, the whistle-blower whom the Obama administration tried and failed to prosecute for leaking information about waste, fraud and abuse at the National Security Agency, now works at an Apple store in Maryland. In an interview with Salon, Drake laughed about the time he confronted Attorney General Eric Holder at his store while Holder perused the gadgetry on display with his security detail around him. When Drake started asking Holder questions about his case, America’s chief law enforcement officer turned and fled the store.

... While Drake never disclosed classified information, he did pass on unclassified information to Gorman revealing that the NSA had wasted billions of taxpayers’ dollars on Trailblazer, a contractor-heavy intelligence software program that failed to find terrorist threats in the tsunami of digital data the agency was sucking up globally — and sometimes unconstitutionally. While Trailblazer burned through cash, in the process enriching many NSA employees turned contractors, Drake found that another software program named ThinThread had already met the core requirements of a federal acquisition regulation that governed the proposed system at a sliver of the cost, all while protecting American civil liberties at the code level. The NSA leadership, however, had already bet their careers on Trailblazer. So Drake blew the whistle, first to Congress, then to the Department of Defense Inspector General’s Office, and finally, and fatefully, to Gorman

Meanwhile Glenn Greenwald updates the case of Obama versus whitleblower Bradley Manning. The UN once again chastises President Obama for bein undcooperative and continuing with improper treatment of Bradley Manning.

UN top torture official denounces Bradley Manning’s detention by Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com, March 7, 2012


Over the past year, the U.N. torture investigator repeatedly complained – including in official reprimands – that his investigation was being obstructed by the Obama administration, which refused to provide unmonitored access to interview Manning. About this refusal to allow an unmonitored interview with Manning, the U.N. official said: “Such a condition violates long-standing rules that the UN applies for prison visits and for interviews with inmates everywhere in the world.” In reporting on this U.N. grievance, The Guardian wrote: “It is the kind of censure the UN normally reserves for authoritarian regimes around the world”; indeed, “the vast majority of states allowed for visits to detainees without conditions.” Just to underscore how unusual was this obstruction: the Bush administration allowed investigators with the International Committee of the Red Cross private interviews even with the most “high-value” detainees at Guantanamo: that is, once they emerged from the CIA “black sites” where they were kept for almost three years beyond the reach of the ICRC

Despite this obstruction of his investigation, the U.N. torture rapporteur, speaking at a U.N. Human Rights Council meeting in Geneva, condemned Manning’s treatment as “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment,” specifically citing “the excessive and prolonged isolation he was put in during the eight months he was in Quantico.” He also rejected the defenses offered by Obama officials for what was done to Manning: “the explanation I was given for those eight months was not convincing for me.”

Another case of American Imperialism's high crimes coming back to haunt America but the Mainstream Media fails to report on it.
US intervention and support of dictators and mass murderers is once again in the news of course long after the fact. But that'sthe American way to hide downplay the crimes of those America supports and later to allow such admissions only after the crimes have become ancient history according to the American media and the American people's and governments mindset.
Americans do not want to hear about or think about anything that might question their nations actions and motivations. So as we saw in Egypt the US government tried to defend Mubarack while millions of Egyptians protested against him or the US gave unconditional support to Saddam til he had out lived his usefulness for America's agenda.

In the same way the US supported the brutal anti-democracy regime of General Pinochet of Chile or Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines or the former Apartheid Regime in South Africa or the Saudi Royal Family or the monarchs in Bahrain or the brutal and corrupt Fulgencio Batista of Cuba or Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Jean-Claude Duvalier of Haiti or Francisco Franco of Spain or Georgios Papadopoulos of Greece or Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan and on and on. Americans may support a limited form of democracy in their own country but not in other nations depending on America's interests that is.

The US media and people seem to idolize these sorts of strong men as opposed to those who fight for the rights of their own people such as Chile's President Allende, Honduras' President Zelaya and so on. American administrations demonized Nelson Mandella as a pro-Communist, radical, brutal, terrorist for decades til even the USA had to bow to world pressure and count Mandella as a freedom fighter . But these days few Americans would admit that America like Israel supported the South African Apartheid Regime and as did John Mccain, Pat Buchanan Pat Robertson and most of the political and religious right even after relations were no longer so friendly .

So anyway in Guatemala the people the government and the courts have decided to go after brutal dictator Rios Montt thirty years after he was replaced. Does this mean that maybe 20 or 30 years from now that George W. Bush and his his cabal might face justice or is even that too much to hope for. Meanwhile Obama is committing more crimes against humanity wars of aggression, targeted assassinations, torture, indefinite imprisonment and so on.

Guatemala's Former Leader Charged with Genocide. Pat Robertson Enabled It. Buzzflash, March 1, 2012

BILL BERKOWITZ FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

Nearly thirty years ago, Guatemala's ruthless dictator, José Efraín Ríos Montt and televangelist Pat Robertson were practically tied at the hip. Now, Guatemala's judicial system is debating how to handle charges of genocide against the former military dictator, while Robertson, who had praised Ríos Montt for his ‘enlightened leadership,' appears to have turned his back on his old friend.

In the early 1980s, José Efraín Ríos Montt, a military general was a favorite of the Reagan Administration and U.S. Christian conservative evangelical leaders - particularly televangelist Pat Robertson -- and organizations. Ríos Montt was one of a series of military dictators that masterminded the murders of perhaps as many as 200,000 Guatemalans -- including tens of thousands of Mayan people -- as well as the destruction of a numerous Mayan villages.

Now, some thirty years later, Ríos Montt, whose rule as de-facto president lasted for seventeen months in 1982 and 1983 -- taking over in a military coup before being ousted by a subsequent military coup - has been ordered "to stand trial on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity," the New York Time recently reported.

Ríos Montt is accused of being responsible for at least 1,770 deaths, 1,400 human rights violations, and the displacement of nearly 30,000 indigenous Guatemalans.

This is the first time a Latin American court has charged a former president with genocide.

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