Carly Fiorina = Clueless, RSN: Big US Firms Hold $2.1 Trillion Overseas to Avoid Taxes: Study, Saudi Arabia and the Crime of Royal Impunity, Even Appalachia Is Walking Away From Coal

Carly Fiorina has proven herself to be uninformed, an unqualified candidate whose background is questionable at best, has never held public office. 

Little space will be dedicated to this, among the worst candidates on the Republican Clown Car.  

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John Kiriakou | Carly Fiorina Just Doesn't "Get It" on Torture

John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News
Kiriakou writes: "Carly Fiorina has to be the most completely clueless Republican running for president, at least when it comes to intelligence policy."
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arly Fiorina has to be the most completely clueless Republican running for president, at least when it comes to intelligence policy. Fiorina disingenuously told Yahoo News last week that waterboarding and other CIA torture techniques “kept our country safe” in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.

She went on to justify these violations of U.S. and international law by saying, “I believe that all of the evidence is very clear – that waterboarding was used in a very small handful of cases and was supervised by medical personnel … and I also believe that waterboarding was used when there was no other way to get information that was necessary.”

There are so many things wrong with this asinine statement that I don’t know where to begin. Perhaps the best place is the beginning.

Fiorina ignores the Senate Torture Report, which found that waterboarding and other torture techniques did not result in the collection of any actionable intelligence and did not save any American lives. Maybe Fiorina didn’t believe the report because Senate Intelligence Committee Democrats were the only ones who voted to approve it (despite the fact that Committee investigators used primary-source CIA documents to write it.)

In that case, she could have looked at the CIA Inspector General’s Report on torture, which was released in 2009 and which found not only that torture didn’t work, and that no lives were saved by using it, but that the CIA had lied even to its own officers when it said that waterboarding was used sparingly. In fact, Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times, and Khalid Shaikh Muhammad was waterboarded 147 times. That’s a lot of torture for no information.

Fiorina also could have read reports from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the International Committee of the Red Cross, all of which said that between 2005 and 2007 the CIA was torturing its prisoners and that there was no information to indicate that torture worked.

Maybe Fiorina was too busy trying to convince people that she had been a successful CEO at Hewlett-Packard to have read the news that the American Psychological Association recently voted to prohibit its 80,000 members from participating in any national security interrogations, even indirectly. Why? Because the CIA’s entire detention, rendition, and interrogation program was immoral, unethical, and illegal.

Maybe Fiorina was too busy running Hewlett-Packard into the ground to have read the United Nations Convention Against Torture, to which the U.S. is a signatory and for which it was a driving force. It says very clearly that torture is “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of committing, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person.” It doesn’t get much clearer than that.

Maybe Fiorina was too busy selling printers to Iran in violation of U.S. and international sanctions, and then lying about it when she said first that she was “unaware” that the company she headed was illegally supplying an “enemy” country with computer peripherals, and then that she had been exonerated by the Securities and Exchange Commission. (There was no such exoneration.)

Regardless of the reasons for Fiorina’s ill-informed and poorly-conceived position on torture, the fact that she doesn’t seem to know or care about the very basics – that torture is illegal, that it didn’t work, and that it didn’t save lives – makes her unfit to lead the country and to set the policy on this abomination.

I like to think that most Americans understand and appreciate the immorality that was the torture program, and that they now realize that the George W. Bush Justice Department’s bastardization of the laws prohibiting torture was wrong, and that we should never go back to those dark days. Indeed, thanks to theMcCain-Feinstein Amendment, passed last summer, torture is finally illegal in this country.

But Carly Fiorina just doesn’t get it. And she thinks she’s too smart to take advice from anybody else. That makes her unfit to be president.

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John Kiriakou is an Associate Fellow with the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington DC. He is a former CIA counterterrorism operations officer and former senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

Big US Firms Hold $2.1 Trillion Overseas to Avoid Taxes: Study
David Alexander and Eric Beech, Reuters
Excerpt: "The 500 largest American companies hold more than $2.1 trillion in accumulated profits offshore to avoid U.S. taxes and would collectively owe an estimated $620 billion in U.S. taxes if they repatriated the funds, according to a study released on Tuesday.'
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he 500 largest American companies hold more than $2.1 trillion in accumulated profits offshore to avoid U.S. taxes and would collectively owe an estimated $620 billion in U.S. taxes if they repatriated the funds, according to a study released on Tuesday.

The study, by two left-leaning non-profit groups, found that nearly three-quarters of the firms on the Fortune 500 list of biggest American companies by gross revenue operate tax haven subsidiaries in countries like Bermuda, Ireland, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.

The Citizens for Tax Justice and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group Education Fund used the companies' own financial filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission to reach their conclusions.

Technology firm Apple (AAPL.O) was holding $181.1 billion offshore, more than any other U.S. company, and would owe an estimated $59.2 billion in U.S. taxes if it tried to bring the money back to the United States from its three overseas tax havens, the study said.

The conglomerate General Electric (GE.N) has booked $119 billion offshore in 18 tax havens, software firm Microsoft (MSFT.O) is holding $108.3 billion in five tax haven subsidiaries and drug company Pfizer (PFE.N) is holding $74 billion in 151 subsidiaries, the study said.

"At least 358 companies, nearly 72 percent of the Fortune 500, operate subsidiaries in tax haven jurisdictions as of the end of 2014," the study said. "All told these 358 companies maintain at least 7,622 tax haven subsidiaries."

Fortune 500 companies hold more than $2.1 trillion in accumulated profits offshore to avoid taxes, with just 30 of the firms accounting for $1.4 trillion of that amount, or 65 percent, the study found.

Fifty-seven of the companies disclosed that they would expect to pay a combined $184.4 billion in additional U.S. taxes if their profits were not held offshore. Their filings indicated they were paying about 6 percent in taxes overseas, compared to a 35 percent U.S. corporate tax rate, it said.

"Congress can and should take strong action to prevent corporations from using offshore tax havens, which in turn would restore basic fairness to the tax system, reduce the deficit and improve the functioning of markets," the study concluded.

Richard Falk | Saudi Arabia and the Crime of Royal Impunity
Richard Falk, Middle East Eye
Falk writes: "Saudi impunity makes us appreciate the value of normal relationships that do not require promises of impunity in relation to international crimes and human rights violations."
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Snowden: US, UK Spies 'Want to Own Your Phone'
Cory Bennett, The Hill
Bennett writes: "American and British spy agencies have been aggressively developing tools to hack smartphones, government leaker Edward Snowden told BBC's 'Panorama' in an interview aired Monday night."
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California to Become Fifth State to Legalize Assisted Dying
Associated Press
Excerpt: "California will become the fifth state to allow terminally ill patients to legally end their lives using doctor-prescribed drugs after Governor Jerry Brown announced Monday he signed one of the most emotionally charged bills of the year."
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The EPA Closed the Lab That Might Have Caught VW Years Ago
Peter Whoriskey, The Washington Post
Whoriskey writes: "More than 20 years ago, an engineer at the Environmental Protection Agency invented a device that allows technicians to measure the emissions of a car as it is traveling in the real world."
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Even Appalachia Is Walking Away From Coal
Daniel Gross, Slate
Gross writes: "The coal industry has entered a rough patch. Its largest customers - electricity producers - are systematically shutting down plants that use the material."
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