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top of the heap to third world status in one generation

Gry

Well-known member
Veteran
CIA Plot to Kill Julian Assange: Will Perpetrators Ever Face Legal Accountability for Criminal Behavior?

https://covertactionmagazine.com/author/johnkiriakou/

Chances are Slim as Political Cowardice Reigns Supreme in America’s Second Gilded Age


Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) last week asked the CIA for information related to a Yahoo News report that the Agency in 2017 had planned to kidnap or kill Wikileaks cofounder Julian Assange outside the Ecuadorean Embassy in London. Knowing the CIA, I’m sure the Agency’s Office of Congressional Affairs had a good laugh over the request, but we can talk about that a little later.

The journalists who wrote the Yahoo News report say they had more than 30 independent sources in the CIA and the Trump White House with whom they spoke and all of whom told the same story: Then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo was so incensed that Wikileaks had published what came to be known as the Vault 7 Cache that Assange had to die.
Assange has, of course, long been on the CIA’s radar. But publication of the Vault 7 documents, the greatest data loss in the CIA’s history, was too much. One Trump counterterrorism official said that Pompeo and other senior CIA officers “were seeing blood.” They discussed plans to kidnap Assange from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he had been holed up since 2012. Alternatively, they talked about killing him (with the British Intelligence Service MI-6 doing the actual shooting.)
Yet another idea was, if Assange could somehow make his way to a Russian diplomatic plane, a CIA/MI6 partnership would shoot the tires of the plane before it could lift off. Assange could then be snatched off the plane, even if it constituted a violation of international law and a major diplomatic incident.
These were not just idle musings. There was real planning involved. Because the CIA is a big, lumbering bureaucracy, there’s a process that it must go through, even for a plot as cockamamie as this one.
When a person comes up with an idea like, “Let’s kill Assange,” it goes to a specific office that deals with proposed covert operations.Functionaries in that office put the idea on paper in the proper format and send it to the CIA’s Office of the General Counsel to get their input. Once the General Counsel signs off on the idea, it goes to the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC.)

Technically, OLC’s job is to determine whether a CIA idea is legal or not. But you’ll recall that it was OLC attorneys John Yoo and Jay Bybee who figuratively stood on their heads in 2002 to find that the CIA’s torture program was legal, despite the fact that the torture techniques the CIA was advocating had been specifically outlawed by statute decades earlier. According to the Yahoo News report, OLC apparently found that the plot to kidnap or kill Assange was indeed “legal.”
Once OLC had determined that there was no legal impediment to killing Assange, the memo was sent to the National Security Council’s legal team for their comment and approval.

It is my experience that the NSC legal staff is a rubber stamp for OLC. If the CIA wants it and OLC says it’s legal, there’s no reason for NSC lawyers to stand in the way.

The last step in the system is for the National Security Advisor to sign the plan and to send it to the President for his signature on what is called a “Presidential Finding.” The signed Finding is then sent back to the CIA, where it is kept in a locked safe, with other signed copies going to the NSC and to the Justice Department. The CIA is then free to implement its plan.

But that’s not what happened. No Finding was ever signed. Although the Yahoo News article doesn’t specifically say so, it seems that the plan died on the desk of then-National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster.

McMaster was a professional soldier before taking the job as National Security Advisor. He was not a confidant of Donald Trump, nor was he particularly close to Mike Pompeo. It seems that McMaster read the plan, thought it was insane (or risked too much blowback), and killed it. It never made its way to Trump.
There’s another element to this story that is deeply worrying to me. The plan to kidnap or kill Assange never made its way to the Congressional oversight committees—the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence—either. Why? Because there’s a loophole in the system. If the CIA deems something to be a “counterintelligence operation,” it doesn’t have to inform the committees. The idea is that counterintelligence is so incredibly sensitive—it normally deals with moles inside the intelligence community or hostile powers spying on the U.S.—that the Agency can’t risk somebody on Capitol Hill leaking the information.
That’s nonsense, of course. The CIA knew that oversight committee members would have gone crazy at the prospect of the CIA kidnapping or killing an Australian national who had never been convicted of a crime in the U.S. The CIA didn’t dare inform the committees.
So here we are, four years after the operation was effectively canceled, and Adam Schiff wants details. I can guess what the CIA’s response will be. They’ll say that the plan was just an idea, that they went through the proper administrative channels, that teams of attorneys deemed it to be legal, that the committees weren’t informed because the operation was of a counterintelligence nature, and that, in the end, nothing happened anyway. Schiff will likely accept that and the story will fade away. (It’s already begun fading away because almost no mainstream media outlets bothered to report on it in the first place.) That’ll be the end of it.It’s not the end of it for Julian Assange, however. Last week a British appeals court heard arguments about whether he should be extradited to the United States, where he would almost certainly face solitary confinement in a maximum-security penitentiary.It’s not the end of it for Julian Assange, however. Last week a British appeals court heard arguments about whether he should be extradited to the United States, where he would almost certainly face solitary confinement in a maximum-security penitentiary.

Julian’s supporters were heartened that the appellate judges had read the Yahoo News article, mentioned it unprompted, and demanded that the Justice Department explain itself. In the meantime, the would-be kidnappers and murderers and their bosses at the CIA will go home to their families as if nothing happened. It’s the American way.

https://covertactionmagazine.com/20...e-legal-accountability-for-criminal-behavior/
 

Gry

Well-known member
Veteran
This tribe helped the Pilgrims survive for their first Thanksgiving. They still regret it 400 years later.

Long marginalized and misrepresented in U.S. history, the Wampanoags are bracing for the 400th anniversary of the first Pilgrim Thanksgiving in 1621 <---This has audio available - 13 min run time

https://www.washingtonpost.com/histo...=pocket-newtab
 

Gry

Well-known member
Veteran
Something approaching perpetual free energy.
Recall hearing people argue over what genius is. This gentleman fits the description well for me. In reading about the man, it is quite the story,
he was spoken of poorly by his peers. He lacked the education or social standing to be taken seriously. The project he is best known for was
expensive as hell. Was a miracle that someone with more money did not take his concept and run with it for themselves.

A unique source of compressed air, and it's inventor. Charles Havelock Taylor. 1859-1953

Today, the power of observation. The University of Houston presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.

In 1895, while working on the construction of a dam in Quebec, Charles Havelock Taylor noticed something. In winter, water flowing over the spillway created air bubbles that became trapped under ice sheets at the bottom of the dam. The trapped air was compressed in the same way as air in a bicycle tire, causing the ice to bulge upward. And as an engineer, Taylor immediately realized the compressed air had the potential to be used as a power source.

But how? Consider the competition. In Taylor’s time the most common source of power was the burning of cheap fossil fuels. Electric power was on the horizon. Further, compressed air is a perfectly good source of power, but it’s better for some uses than others. It’s not especially efficient for, say, heating a stove.

One area where compressed air excels is in the running of power tools. Nail guns. Paint sprayers. Those noisy jackhammers used to break up city pavement. Air powered tools are both powerful and cheaper to manufacture than their electrical counterparts since they don’t need motors. Compressed air is also ideal for ventilation – far more efficient than running fans. Taylor concluded that the best places for testing his ideas were remote mines situated near waterfalls or dams.

Taylor’s approach was ingeniously simple. Instead of ice, he began by excavating a cavern well below a river’s surface. At the Victoria mine in Michigan’s upper peninsula, for example, the cavern was 18 feet wide, 20 feet high, and the length of a football field. By properly channeling water in from above a nearby dam, and out below it, air became trapped in the cavern and rose in pressure. All that was needed were sealed pipes taking compressed air to the mining equipment. A safety valve led from the cavern to the surface that spewed like a geyser if pressure grew too high.

One of the beauties of Taylor’s design is that it has no moving parts. Electricity generation requires spinning turbines and other equipment needing regular maintenance. Not so with Taylor’s hydraulic air compression system. Set it up, let the river run through, and the system provides a perpetual source of air power.

Taylor’s system doesn’t remain widely used – a casualty of the evolving economic landscape. But Taylor’s design still captures the imagination for its combination of functionality and simplicity. And variations on Taylor’s theme are now being resurrected. A consortium of Canadian agencies is undertaking a Taylor-like project aimed at ultra-deep mining operations – operations more than one-and-a-half miles underground. The work may even lead to new methods for keeping greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. I imagine Charles Taylor would be excited by the possibility.

I’m Andy Boyd at the University of Houston, where we’re interested in the way inventive minds work.
https://www.uh.edu/engines/epi3082.htm
He also wrote a book on what he built, it can be read for free with google books:
https://archive.org/details/Illustra...p?view=theater

1905 - 1910 The building of Ragged Chutes

http://charleshtaylor.blogspot.com/2...ed-chutes.html

Ragged Chute Air Plant: Now You're Digging With Gas! <---- the device in operation


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvgNqIuz2GM

https://archimerged.wordpress.com/20...trompe-trombe/

https://archive.org/details/Illustra...p?view=theater
 

Gry

Well-known member
Veteran
Was a debate last Monday that took place between Scott Horton of antiwar radio, and William "Bill" Krystal
Bill Kristol and Scott Horton Debate U.S. Interventionism

https://libertarianinstitute.org/blo...he-soho-forum
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxdXqAkgOVs&t=116s

Caught about 30 minutes worth of it on the Scott Horton radio show Pacfica runs.
Left me wanting to hear the balance. Here it is.
Hope that someone else will find it as disturbing/ troublesome as I do.
Am no libertarian, but share perspective with this cause.
 

Gry

Well-known member
Veteran
Recently had an opportunity to hear Us and Them several times. Had forgotten how absolutely epic it was.


Us (us, us, us, us) and them (them, them, them, them)
And after all we're only ordinary men
Me
And you (you, you, you)
God only knows
It's not what we would choose (choose, choose) to do (to do, to do)
Forward he cried from the rear
And the front rank died
And the general sat
And the lines on the map
Moved from side to side
Black (black, black, black)
And blue (blue, blue)
And who knows which is which and who is who
Up (up, up, up, up)
And down (down, down, down, down)
And in the end it's only round 'n round (round, round, round)
Haven't you heard it's a battle of words
The poster bearer cried
"Listen son", said the man with the gun
There's room for you inside
"I mean, they're not gonna kill ya
So if you give 'em a quick short, sharp, shock
They won't do it again. Dig it?
I mean he get off lightly, 'cause I would've given him a thrashing
I only hit him once! It was only a difference of opinion, but really
I mean good manners don't cost nothing do they, eh?"
Down (down, down, down, down)
And out (out, out, out, out)
It can't be helped that there's a lot of it about
With (with, with, with), without
And who'll deny it's what the fighting's all about?
Out of the way
It's a busy day
I've got things on my mind
For the want of the price
Of tea and a slice
The old man died

Songwriters: Richard William Wright / George Roger Waters
 
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