More whistleblowers will emerge shortly in the escalating Benghazi scandal, according to two former U.S. diplomats who spoke with PJ Media Monday afternoon.
These whistleblowers, colleagues of the former diplomats, are currently securing legal counsel because they work in areas not fully protected by the Whistleblower law.
According to the diplomats, what these whistleblowers will say will be at least as explosive as what we have already learned about the scandal, including details about what really transpired in Benghazi that are potentially devastating to both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
The former diplomats inform PJM the new revelations concentrate in two areas — what Ambassador Chris Stevens was actually doing in Benghazi and the pressure put on General Carter Ham, then in command of U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) and therefore responsible for Libya, not to act to protect jeopardized U.S. personnel.
In Is Democracy in Trouble? E.J. Dionne describes major studies suggesting that “Across most of the democratic world, there is an impatience bordering on exhaustion with electoral systems and political classes” because governments don’t follow the will of “the people”.
It would be one thing if governments made wiser decisions than what “the people” want. But they so seldom do. Usually they make decisions that favor special interests regardless of the common good.
It saddens me that this is framed as people losing faith in democracy. I don’t think governments that act this way are good examples of democracy. I’m also not sure that such a system can be fixed within a corrupted democratic process.
There are other ways to do democracy. Most people don’t realize that ancient Athenians – our alleged democratic forebears – were radically in favor of random selection and opposed to voting for representatives. They figured that aristocrats would dominate any electoral system. (Sound familiar?) Aristotle summarized their view, saying “It is accepted as democratic when public offices are allocated by lot [random selection]; and as oligarchic when they are filled by election.”
Although John Adams and James Madison (the first and fourth US Presidents) may not have been aware of the use of random selection in democracy, they did make statements that sound like it. Adams said that a legislature “should be an exact portrait, in miniature, of the people at large, as it should think, feel, reason, and act like them.” And Madison added that “The government ought to possess… the mind or sense of the people at large. The legislature ought to be the most exact transcript of the whole society.”
EU tax: Barroso urges full automatic exchange of data
The head of the European Commission has told the European Parliament he wants EU-wide exchange of income data as part of the fight against tax evasion.
Jose Manuel Barroso said he would urge Wednesday's summit of EU leaders to support automatic exchange of people's earnings data between tax authorities.
MEPs are expected to call for a Europe-wide blacklist of tax havens.
Pressure is likely to be put on Switzerland to relax banking secrecy amid anger over revelations about Greek and French politicians holding secret Swiss bank accounts.
The debate comes a day after UK Prime Minister David Cameron urged British overseas territories which operate low-tax regimes to “get their house in order” and sign up to international treaties on tax.
Mr Barroso said he wanted to see the principle of automatic exchange “become the standard at international level as well”.
In today's issue I want to illustrate several trends, and show how they blend together into a meta-trend. This is our shadow. An amalgam of hysteria, fear, anger, racism, willful ignorance, and a sense of affronted victimization. Each of these stories illustrates an aspect of this meta-trend. By putting them together I wanted to give a sense of how broad this trend is. It is an act of intentioned self-sabotage of historic proportions. For other examples read Jared Diamond's Collapse, or Barbara Tuchman's March of Folly. We are coming to a crisis. I want to be clear here. This is not about partisanship, this is about attitudes and priorities. Finally, I close the edition with a different world, the one that could be, if we would only make national wellness a first priority. [Denmark, not the USA, is the gold standard for secular Western democracy.]
And finally let me close the edition with this… What we could do, what we could be… if socially progressive adults who had national wellness as a first priority made policy.
There's a contradiction built into every campaign promise about transparent government beyond the failure to keep the promises. Our government is, in significant portion, made up of secret operations, operations that include warmaking, kidnapping, torture, assassination, and infiltrating and overthrowing governments. A growing movement is ready to see that end.
The Central Intelligence Agency is central to our foreign policy, but there is nothing intelligent about it, and there is no good news to be found regarding it. Its drone wars are humanitarian and strategic disasters. The piles of cash it keeps delivering to Hamid Karzai fuel corruption, not democracy. Whose idea was it that secret piles of cash could create democracy? (Nobody's, of course, democracy being the furthest thing from U.S. goals.) Lavishing money on potential Russian spies and getting caught helps no one, and not getting caught would have helped no one. Even scandals that avoid mentioning the CIA, like Benghazigate, are CIA blowback and worse than we're being told.
We've moved from the war on Iraq, about which the CIA lied, and its accompanying atrocities serving as the primary recruiting tool for anti-U.S. terrorists, to the drone wars filling that role. We've moved from kidnapping and torture to kidnapping and torture under a president who, we like to fantasize, doesn't really mean it. But the slave-owners who founded this country knew very well what virtually anyone would do if you gave them power, and framed the Constitution so as not to give presidents powers like these.
There are shelves full in your local bookstore of books pointing out the CIA's outrageous incompetence. The brilliant idea to give Iran plans for a nuclear bomb in order to prevent Iran from ever developing a nuclear bomb is one of my favorites.
Watch more from this Senate hearing at http://owl.li/l96qm. A Pentagon official predicted May 16 that the war against al-Qaeda and its affiliates could last up to 20 more years. The comment came during a Senate hearing revisiting the Authorization for Use of Military Force, or AUMF, enacted by Congress days after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. At the hearing, Pentagon officials claimed the AUMF gives the president power to wage endless war anywhere in the world, including in Syria, Yemen and the Congo. “This is the most astounding and most astoundingly disturbing hearing that I've been to since I've been here,” said Independent Sen. Angus King of Maine. “You guys have essentially rewritten the Constitution here today.”
This is what I mean by the Theocratic Right's aggressive program to convert armed services personnel. Lawrence Wilkerson is a retired United States Army colonel, and former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell. Wilkerson is an adjunct professor at the College of William & Mary where he teaches courses on US national security. He also instructs a senior seminar in the Honors Department at the George Washington University entitled “National Security Decision Making.”
WILKERSON: Right. Well, one group in particular–and you can just Google them and you can see what they're about, called the Dominionist. This is a group that believes that its mission is to take over the Armed Forces of the United States and then use them in a crusade against all those who don't believe in Christ in the world. Mikey's clientele now is over 32,000, some 90 percent of whom are Protestant or Catholic. So you've got mostly Christians who were looking to Mikey's organization to protect them against the chain of command in their own military unit.
WILKERSON: They're everything from I've been ordered to go to a prayer breakfast to I'm being proselytized by my commanding officer or by my platoon leader or by my NCOs to be a Christian; or worse, if you will, on the other side of that coin, people being derided and even kept from promotion and from advancement, education, and training, and so forth because they're not the kind of Christian they should be, this sort of Dominionist Christian.
