RSN: Half the Foreign Policy Experts Signing Clinton's Anti-Sanders Letter Have Ties to Military Contractors, Armed Ships Embark on Secretive Plutonium Mission From Japan to the US

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Frank Rich | It's Time to Get Serious About Bernie Sanders

Frank Rich, New York Magazine
Rich writes: "Let's face it: This is going to be remembered as the election where almost no one in either party's Establishment or the political news media saw anything coming. So why should the Bernie Sanders surge be any different?"
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Half the Foreign Policy Experts Signing Clinton's Anti-Sanders Letter Have Ties to Military Contractors
Lee Fang, The Intercept
Fang writes: "Hillary Clinton's campaign released a letter this week in which 10 foreign policy experts criticized her opponent Bernie Sanders' call for closer engagement with Iran and said Sanders had 'not thought through these crucial national security issues that can have profound consequences for our security.'"
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Hillary Clinton. (photo: Jewel Samad/Getty Images)

illary Clinton’s campaign released a letter this week in which 10 foreign policy experts criticized her opponent Bernie Sanders’ call for closer engagement with Iran and said Sanders had “not thought through these crucial national security issues that can have profound consequences for our security.”

The missive from the Clinton campaign was covered widely in the press, but what wasn’t disclosed in the coverage is that fully half of the former State Department officials and ambassadors who signed the letter, and who are now backing Clinton, are now enmeshed in the military contracting establishment, which has benefited tremendously from escalating violence around the world, particularly in the Middle East.

Here are some of the letter signatories’ current employment positions that were not disclosed in the reporting of the letter:

• Former Assistant Defense Secretary Derek Chollet, former Pentagon and CIA Chief of Staff Jeremy Bash, and former Deputy National Security Adviser Julianne Smith are now employed by the consulting firm Beacon Global Strategies, a firm we profiled last year. Beacon Global Strategies’ staff advises both Clinton and Republican candidates for president, including Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. The firm makes money by providing advice to a clientele that is primarily military contractors. Beacon Global Strategies, however, has refused to disclose the identity of its clients.


• Former Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns is a senior counselor at the Cohen Group, a consulting firm founded by former Defense Secretary William Cohen. The firm “assists aerospace and defense firms on policy, business development, and transactions,” including deals in the U.S., Turkey, Israel, and the Middle East.


• Former Undersecretary of Defense Jim Miller is an advisory board member to Endgame Systems, a start-up that has been called the “Blackwater of Hacking.” Miller is also on the board of BEI Precision Systems & Space, a military contractor.

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/34769-half-the-foreign-policy-experts-signing-clintons-anti-sanders-letter-have-ties-to-military-contractors

Donald Trump Retweets Nazi-Sympathizing White Supremacist
Emily Atkin, ThinkProgress
Atkin writes: "We're only one week away from the start of the presidential primaries, and the Republican frontrunner is promoting the commentary of a white supremacist."
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e’re only one week away from the start of the presidential primaries, and the Republican frontrunner is promoting the commentary of a white supremacist.

On Friday, Donald Trump took to Twitter to insult one of his Republican opponents, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. After lambasting Bush for being a “low energy guy,” Trump retweeted another user’s photoshopped picture of a disheveled Bush holding a “Vote Trump” sign outside of the Trump tower.

The problem, however, is that the account he retweeted appears to be operated by a Nazi sympathizing white nationalist.

The account, @WhiteGenocideTM, tweets obsessively about white women allegedly raped by various minority groups. “Africans and Muslims rape more than anyone else,” reads one of the user’s retweets. “Don’t let them in.” Many of the tweets are accompanied by the hashtag “#rapefugees,” apparently a combination of the words “rape” and “refugees.”

The account also dabbles in support for Nazi Germany. “Hitler SAVED Europe,” reads another tweet.

This is not the first time Trump’s twitter account has interacted positively with white nationalists. In November, the leading Republican candidate retweeted a graphic falsely stating that 81% of whites who are murdered are murdered by blacks. In reality, the actual data shows that 14% of white murder victims are murdered by a black person.

Later, when confronted with the fact that the data was false, Trump said he shouldn’t be held accountable for his retweets beause they don’t come directly from him. “I retweeted somebody that was supposedly an expert,” he said. “Am I gonna check every statistic?”

Trump also has the support of prominent white nationalist groups. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, two prominent white nationalist groups have been making robocalls in support of Trump. In addition, the SPLC writes, “Former KKK grand wizard David Duke has endorsed Trump, as has Andrew Anglin’s Daily Stormer. Kyle Rogers, the former webmaster for the white nationalist group Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) is selling Trump t-shirts online and Brad Griffin, the CCC’s current webmaster, regularly praises Trump in his writings.”

IMAGES ON LINK: 

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/34768-donald-trump-retweets-nazi-sympathizing-white-supremacist

Cleveland's Vile, Embarrassing Scheme to Avoid Paying Victims of Police Abuse 

Radley Balko, The Washington Post 

Balko writes: "Kyle Swenson draws attention to the case of Kenny Smith, whose family won a rare jury award of $5.5 million. Smith was killed by an off-duty Cleveland police officer outside of a bar. But thanks to some crafty moves from the city's law department, Smith's moment of justice might never come." 

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Two police officers at their vehicle. (photo: Guardian Liberty Voice)


ere at The Watch, we’ve frequently noted how difficult it can be for victims of police brutality and misconduct to recover any sort of compensation. Given the opaqueness with which police agencies are allowed to operate, the various “police officer bill of rights” laws, the qualified immunity afforded to police and the sovereign immunity enjoyed by states, cities and counties, it’s rare that police abuse lawsuits ever get in front of a jury. When a case does get that far, juries tend to be reluctant to rule against law enforcement officers. Only the more egregious cases tend to result in compensation, and even then, it’s usually due to political pressure on the city or county to offer a settlement before trial.

All of which makes what’s going on in Cleveland all the more reprehensible. Writing in the Cleveland Scene, Kyle Swenson draws attention to the case of Kenny Smith, whose family won a rare jury award of $5.5 million. Smith was killed by an off-duty police officer outside of a bar.

But thanks to some crafty moves from the city’s law department, Smith’s moment of justice might never come.

Across the country, piggy bank-busting civil judgments have become the best way to keep police and municipalities honest in cases of officer misconduct. From 2004 to 2014, for instance, Cleveland shelled out $10.5 million in settlement money to victims of badly behaving cops. Under state law and the terms of the union contract, chronically cash-strapped Cleveland indemnifies officers in the cases where they’ve been personally found liable, meaning ultimately, taxpayers foot the bill for an officer’s misconduct.

But now, in the two largest civil judgments currently sitting on the books — one being Kenny Smith’s death; the other a sloppy and malicious murder investigation that railroaded an innocent man — the city has pulled a move that one veteran civil rights lawyer calls “wrong, immoral, disingenuous and unethical.”

In both cases, the Cleveland law department used city funds to pay for cops saddled with judgments to move into personal bankruptcy. It’s a calculated effort, according to the attorneys fighting the move, for the city to skip out on their responsibilities to pay the judgments.

… Just as mayor Frank Jackson, clutching the Department of Justice’s 2014 consent decree, promised citywide soul-searching on police reform, Cleveland’s law department is messing with civil matters that have already been decided by a jury.

And the implications aren’t only local.

“This provides a road map for any municipality that wants to evade their obligations,” says Ruth Brown, a Chicago attorney currently locked in legal judo with Cleveland over the issue. “We fully expect that if Cleveland is allowed to get away with this, they will try this again.”

Normally in such cases, the city indemnifies police officers — since the officers are employees of the city, the city covers the award. In rare cases, a city will ask a court to release them from indemnification, but that’s generally limited to misconduct so egregious that the officers are found to have been acting outside the scope of their official duties. (An example might be a cop who, say, blackmails a suspect, or rapes someone while on duty.) Swenson cites a 2014 study that found cops were indemnified in 99.98 percent of cases the researcher surveyed.

Cleveland appears to refusing to indemnify these officers, then paying for their legal and filing fees so that they can declare bankruptcy. The city apparently hopes that this will take the awards off the books. It’s a crafty bit of legal maneuvering. It’s also a betrayal of both the public trust and a second betrayal of the victims in these cases. A man’s life was wrongly taken from him. Another man lost a decade of his life due to a wrongful conviction caused by the illegal actions of a Cleveland police officer. And all of this comes aftera jaw-dropping report from the Justice Department finding pervasive and systematic abuse, widespread civil rights violations, routine use of force that violates the Constitution and virtually no accountability. The Justice Department report found the city’s police department to be lacking in almost every area it investigated. And that report, published a little over a year ago, follows a similar report from a decade ago. And of course, this is all happening as the shooting death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice has made the city a focal point of the national debate over police reform.

In theory, civil rights lawsuits serve two purposes: They make victims whole, and they deter similar violations from occurring in the future. The hope is that substantial awards in these cases will spur political pressure on public officials to change the policies that allowed the rights violations to happen. The deterrent doesn’t seem to be particularly effective, except in a few cases in which large settlements have prompted a city’s municipal insurer to demand changes under the threat of terminating coverage. There are a lot of reasons for that, but I suspect it’s mostly because elected officials calculate that the pushback from police unions and police agencies against any proposed reforms is a far worse political headache than earmarking a few million dollars in each annual budget to pay off the victims of police abuse.

That’s what happens in most places, and it’s disturbing. But what Cleveland is doing is far more sinister. There’s also an argument to be made that indemnification insulates individual actors from any real accountability. There’s certainly a lot of evidence for that argument. Over the past few years, we’ve seen lots of reports about cities that pay out millions of dollars each year to compensate victims of police abuse, while almost never holding cops accountable for misconduct, even in cases of egregious abuse or repeat offenders. One idea I’ve seen suggested is to end both indemnification and qualified immunity but make police officers purchase personal liability insurance. In theory, this would eliminate a lot of the political barriers to police reform and impose real consequences for misconduct. In practice, it isn’t difficult to envision the problems that might accompany a system that would essentially hand policing policy over to the insurance industry.

For now, we have the system we have. It’s certainly flawed, but what’s happening in Cleveland isn’t just unfair; if it’s allowed to happen, it means that the system no longer even aspires to fairness or justice. The city is not only shirking responsibility for the policies and lack of oversight that allowed these abuses to happen, but it’s also actively seeking to deny the victims the compensation that the justice system has determined they deserve. It’s just outrageous.

At least with the current system, a victim with a case strong enough to merit a settlement or judgment is made whole. The city pays. That provides at least a little bit of an incentive to fix the problem. Eventually, a city will either have to deal with rogue cops and implement better policies or continue to pay out millions. Cops who are found guilty of abuse or misconduct are less effective witnesses. The incentives aren’t strong enough, but they at least exist.

As Swenson points out, the same lawyers representing the city of Cleveland are representing the individual officers in their bankruptcy cases. The decision of whether to indemnify an officer can spur — and has spurred — litigation between officers and the governments that employ them. It seems like some awfully shady ethics for the same attorneys to be representing the city and the officers after the decision not to indemnify. It certainly gives the appearance of some sort of arrangement. And it isn’t difficult to see how other city officials adopting this policy could, say, promise to not press criminal charges, to let an officer keep his or her job, or to not stand in the way of an officer working elsewhere in exchange for an agreement to declare bankruptcy and release the city from indemnification. The result: Even the relatively weak incentive for change that these payouts provide is removed. The individual cops responsible even for misconduct severe enough to merit a judgment escape serious punishment. And the victims are never made whole. It’s the worst of all possible outcomes.

I’m not a lawyer, but this also feels like bankruptcy fraud. Or if it isn’t, it ought to be. At best, it’s a second violation of people whose lives have already been ruined by government abuse and an utter abandonment of the idea that public officials serve the public.

If I lived, voted and paid taxes in Cleveland, I don’t know if I’d be more angry or embarrassed.

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/34767-clevelands-vile-embarrassing-scheme-to-avoid-paying-victims-of-police-abuse


How the West Creates Terrorism
Andre Vltchek, CounterPunch
Vltchek writes: "The West linked terrorism with Islam, which is one of the greatest cultures on earth, with 1.6 billion followers. Islam is big and mighty enough, to scare the shit out of the middle class housewives in some Western suburb! And on top of that, it had to be contained anyway, as it was essentially too socialist and too peaceful."
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Haiti Cancels Elections Indefinitely
teleSUR
Excerpt: "The Provisional Electoral Council of Haiti has once again canceled the presidential runoff elections that were scheduled for Sunday, EFE reported."
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Armed Ships Embark on Secretive Plutonium Mission From Japan to the US
Paul Brown, Climate News Network
Brown writes: "Two armed ships set off from the northwest of England this week to sail round the world to Japan on a secretive and controversial mission to collect a consignment of plutonium and transport it to the U.S."
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