Dont tell anyone, but American conservatives will soon be embracing single-payer healthcare, or some other form of socialized healthcare.

Yes, thats a bold claim given that a GOP-controlled Congress and Presidentare poised to un-socialize a great deal of healthcare, and may even pull it off. But within five years, plenty of Republicans will be loudly supporting or quietly assenting to universal Medicare.

And thats a good thing, because socializing healthcare is the only demonstrably effective way to control costs and cover everyone. It results in a healthier country and it saves a ton of money.

That may seem offensively counterintuitive. Its generally assumed that universal healthcare will by definition cost more.

In fact, in every first-world nation that has socialized medicinewhether it be a heavily regulated multi-insurer system like Germany, single-payer like Canada, or a purely socialized system like the United Kingdom-it costs less. A lot, lot less, in fact: While healthcare eats up nearly 18 percent of U.S. GDP, for other nations, from Australia and Canada to Germany and Japan, the figure hovers around 11 percent. (Its no wonder that smarter capitalists like Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaway are bemoaning the drag on U.S. firm competitiveness from high healthcare costs.) Nor are healthcare results in America anything to brag about: lower life expectancy, higher infant mortality and poor scores on a wide range of important public health indicators.

Why does socialized healthcare cost less? Getting rid of private insurers, which suck up a lot money without adding any value, would result in a huge savings, as much as 15percent by one academic estimate published in the American Journal of Public Health. When the government flexing its monopsony muscle as the overwhelmingly largest buyer of medical services, drugs and technology, it would also lower prices-thats what happens in nearly every other country.

So while its a commonly progressive meme to contrast the national expenditure of one F-35 with our inability to afford single-payer healthcareand I hesitate to say this lest word get out to our neocon friendsthere is no need for a tradeoff. If we switched to single payer or another form of socialized medicine, we would actuallyhave more money to spend on even more useless military hardware.

The barrier to universal healthcare is not economic but political. Is profligate spending on health care really a conservative value? And what kind of market incentives are working anywayits an odd kind of market transaction in which the buyer is stopped from negotiating the price, but that is exactly what Medicare Part D statutorily requires: The government is not allowed to haggle the prices of prescription drugs with major pharmaceutical companies, unlike in nearly every other rich country. (Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump pledged to end this masochism, but the 45th president has so far done nothing, and U.S. prescription drug prices remain the highest in the world.) Does anyone seriously think medical savings accounts with their obnoxious complexity and added paperwork are the right answer, and not some neoliberal joke?

The objections to socialized healthcare crumble upon impact with the reality. One beloved piece of folklore is that once people are given free healthcare theyll abuse it by going on weird medical joyrides, just because they can, or simply let themselves go because theyll have free doctor visits. I hate to ruin this gloating fantasy of lumpenproletariat irresponsibility,but people need take an honest look at the various health crises in the United States compared to other OECD(Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries. If readily available healthcare turns people hedonistic yahoos, why does Germany have less lethal drug overdoses than the U.S. Why does Canada have less obesity and type II diabetes? Why does the Netherlands have less teen pregnancy and less HIV? The evidence is appallingly clear: Among first-world countries, the U.S. is a public health disaster zone. We have reached the point where the rationalist santera of economistic incentives in our healthcare policies have nothing to do with people as they actually are.

If socialized medicine couldbe in conformity with conservative principles, what about Republican principles? This may seem a nonstarter given the pious market Calvinism of Paul Ryan and Congressmen like Reps. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) and Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), who seem opposed to the very idea of health insurance of any kind at all. But their fanaticism is surprisingly unpopular in the U.S. According to recent polling, less than 25 percent of Americans approve of the recent GOP healthcare bills. Other polls show even lower numbers. These Republicans arealso profoundly out of step with conservative parties in the rest of the world.

Strange as it may seem to American Right, $600 EpiPens are not the sought-after goal of conservatives in other countries. In Canada, the single-payer healthcare system is such a part of national identity that even hard-right insurgents like Stockwell Day have enthusiastically pledged to maintain it. None of these systems are perfect, and all are subject to constant adjustment, but they do offer a better set of problemsthe most any mature nation can ask forthan what we have in the U.S.

Andvirtually no one looks at our expensive American mess as a model.

I recently spoke with one German policy intellectual, Nico Lange, who runs the New York outpost of the German Christian Democrats main think tank, the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, to get his thoughts on both American and German healthcare. Is socialized medicine the entering wedge of fascism and/or Stalinism? Are Germans less free than Americans because they all have healthcare (through a heavily regulated multi-payer system), and pay a hell of a lot less (11.3 percent of GDP) for it?

Mr. Lange paused, and took an audible breath; I felt like I had put him in the awkward spot of inviting him over and asking for his honest opinion of the drapes and upholstery. Yes, he said, we are less free but security versus freedom is a classic balance! National healthcare makes for a more stable society, its a basic service that needs to be provided to secure an equal chance for living standards all over the country. Even as Mr. Lange delineated the conservative pedigree of socialized medicine in GermanyYou can certainly argue that Bismarck was a conservative in founding this systemI had a hard time imagining many Democrats, let alone any Republican, making such arguments.

Indeed, the official GOP stance is perhaps best described as Shkrelism than conservatism, after the weasel-faced pharma entrepreneur Martin Shkreli, who infamously jacked up the price of one lifesaving drug and is now being prosecuted for fraud. (Though in fairness, this type of bloodsucking awfulness is quite bipartisan: Heather Bresch, CEO of Mylan corporation, which jacked up the price of EpiPens from $100 to $600, is the daughter of Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), who defended his daughters choice.)

But GOP healthcare politics are at the moment spectacularly incoherent. Many GOP voters have told opinion polls that they hate Obamacare, but like the Affordable Care Act. And as the GOP healthcare bill continues to be massively unpopular, Donald Trump has lavished praise on Australias healthcare system (socialized, and eating up only 9.4 percent of the GDP there). Even in the GOP, this is where the votes are: Trumps move to the center on questions of social insuranceMedicare, Medicaid, Social Securitywas a big part of his appeal in the primaries. The rising alt-Right, not to hold them up as any moral authority, dont seem to have any problem with universal Medicare either.

It will fall on reform conservatives to convince themselves and others that single-payer or some kind of universal care is perfectly keeping with conservative principles, and, for the reasons outlined above, its really not much of a stretch. Lest this sound outlandish, consider how fully liberals have convinced themselves that the Affordable Care Acta plan hatched at the Heritage Foundation for heavens sake, and first implemented by a Republican governoris the every essence of liberal progressivism.

Trumps candidly favorable view of Australian-style socialized healthcare is less likely a blip than the future of the GOP. Republican governors who actually have to govern, like Brian Sandoval and John Kasich, and media personalities like Joe Scarborough, and the Rock, will be soon talking up single-payer out of both fiscal probity, communitarian decency, and the in-your-face evidence that, ideology aside, this is what works. Even the Harvard Business Review is now giving single-payer favorable coverage. Sean Hannity and his angry brigade may be foaming at the mouth this week about the GOP failure to disembowel Obamacare, but Seans a sufficiently prehensile fellow to grasp at single-payer if it seems opportunejust look at his about-face on WikiLeaks. And though that opportunity has not arisen yet, check again in two years.

The real obstacle may be the Democrats. As Max Fine, last surviving member of John F. Kennedys Medicare task force, recently toldthe Intercept, Single payer is the only real answer and some day I believe the Republicans will leap ahead of the Democrats and lead in its enactment, he speculated, just as did Bismarck in Germany and David Lloyd George and Churchill in the UK. For now, an invigorating civil war is raging within the Democrats with the National Nurses Union, the savvy practitioner-wonks of the Physicians for a National Health Program, and thousands of everyday Americans shouting at their congressional reps at town hall meetings are clamoring for single-payer against the partys donor base of horrified Big Pharma executives and affluent doctors. In a few years there might even be a left-right pincers movement against the neolib/neocon middle, whose unlovable professional-class technocrats are the main source of resistance to single payer.

I dont want to oversell the friction-free smoothness of the GOPs conversion to socialized healthcare. Our funny country will always have a cohort of InfoWars ooga-boogas, embittered anesthesiologists and Hayekian fundies for whom universal healthcare is a totalitarian jackboot. (But, and not to be a jerk, its worth remembering that Hayek himself supported the socialized healthcare of Western Europe in one of his most reasonable passages from the Road to Serfdom.)

So even if there is some banshee GOP resistance at first, universal Medicare will swiftly become about as controversial as our government-run fire departments. Such, after all, was the trajectory of Medicare half a century ago. You read it here first, people: Within five years, the American Right will happily embrace socialized medicine.

Chase Madar is an attorney in New York and the author of The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story Behind the Wikileaks Whistleblower.

Read more:
The Conservative Case for Universal Healthcare - The American Conservative

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.

This article was produced in partnership with AlterNet andInsurge Intelligence. Learn more aboutNafeez Ahmedand how to support his work.

An extraordinarynew Pentagon studyhas concluded that the US-backed framework of international order established after World War II is fraying and may even be collapsing, leading the United States to lose its position of primacy in world affairs.

The solution proposed to protect US power in this new post-primacy environment is, however, more of the same: more surveillance, more propaganda (strategic manipulation of perceptions) and more military expansionism.

The document concludes that the world has entered a fundamentally new phase of transformation in which US power is in decline, international order is unravelling, and the authority of governments everywhere is crumbling.

Having lost its past status of pre-eminence, the US now inhabits a dangerous, unpredictable post-primacy world, whose defining feature is resistance to authority.

Danger comes not just from great power rivals like Russia and China, both portrayed as rapidly growing threats to American interests, but also from the increasing risk of Arab Spring-style events. These will erupt not just in the Middle East, but all over the world, potentially undermining trust in incumbent governments for the foreseeable future.

The report, based on a year-long intensive research process involving consultation with key agencies across the Department of Defense and US Army, calls for the US government to invest in more surveillance, better propaganda through strategic manipulation of public opinion, and a wider and more flexible US military.

The report was published in June by the US Army War Colleges Strategic Studies Institute to evaluate the DoDs approach to risk assessment at all levels of Pentagon policy planning. The study was supported and sponsored by the US Armys Strategic Plans and Policy Directorate; the Joint Staff, J5 (Strategy and Policy Branch); the Office of the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Force Development; and the Army Study Program Management Office.

Collapse

While the United States remains a global political, economic, and military giant, it no longer enjoys an unassailable position versus state competitors, the report laments.

In brief, the status quo that was hatched and nurtured by U.S. strategists after World War II and has for decades been the principal beat for DoD is not merely fraying but may, in fact, be collapsing.

The studys description of this order subtly recognizes its imperial nature as one underpinned by American dominance, in which the US and its allies literally dictate the terms of how the system operates, to further their own interests:

The order and its constituent parts, first emerged from World War II, were transformed to a unipolar system with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and have by-and-large been dominated by the United States and its major Western and Asian allies since. Status quo forces collectively are comfortable with their dominant role in dictating the terms of international security outcomes and resist the emergence of rival centers of power and authority.

But this era when the US and its allies could simply get their way is over. Observing that US officials naturally feel an obligation to preserve the U.S. global position within a favorable international order, the report concludes that this rules-based global order that the United States built and sustained for 7 decades is under enormous stress.

The report provides a detailed breakdown of how the DoD perceives this order to be rapidly unravelling, with the Pentagon being increasingly outpaced by world events. Warning that global events will happen faster than DoD is currently equipped to handle, the study concludes that the US can no longer count on the unassailable position of dominance, supremacy, or pre-eminence it enjoyed for the 20-plus years after the fall of the Soviet Union.

So weakened is US power, that it can no longer even automatically generate consistent and sustained local military superiority at range.

Its not just US power that is in decline. The US Army War College study concludes that:

[A]ll states and traditional political authority structures are under increasing pressure from endogenous and exogenous forces The fracturing of the post-Cold War global system is accompanied by the internal fraying in the political, social, and economic fabric of practically all states.

But, the document says, this should not be seen as defeatism, but rather a wakeup call. If nothing is done to adapt to this post-primacy environment, the complexity and speed of world events will increasingly defy [DoDs] current strategy, planning, and risk assessment conventions and biases.

Defending the Status Quo

Top on the list of forces that have knocked the US off its position of global pre-eminence, says the report, are the role of competing powersmajor rivals like Russia and China, as well as smaller players like Iran and North Korea.

The document is particularly candid in setting out why the US sees these countries as threatsnot so much because of tangible military or security issues, but mainly because their pursuit of their own legitimate national interests is, in itself, seen as undermining American dominance.

Russia and China are described as revisionist forces who benefit from the US-dominated international order, but who dare to seek a new distribution of power and authority commensurate with their emergence as legitimate rivals to U.S. dominance. Russia and China, the analysts say, are engaged in a deliberate program to demonstrate the limits of U.S. authority, will, reach, influence, and impact.

The premise of this conclusion is that the US-backed status quo international order is fundamentally favorable for the interests of the US and its allies. Any effort to make global order also work favorably for anyone else is automatically seen as a threat to US power and interests.

Thus, Russia and China seek to reorder their position in the existing status quo in ways thatat a minimumcreate more favorable circumstances for pursuit of their core objectives. At first glance there seems nothing particularly wrong about this. So the analysts emphasize that a more maximalist perspective sees them pursuing advantage at the direct expense of the United States and its principal Western and Asian allies.

Most conspicuous of all, there is little substantiation in the document at all of how Russia and China pose a meaningful threat to American national security.

The chief challenge is that they are bent on revising the contemporary status quo through the use of gray zone techniques, involving means and methods falling far short of unambiguous or open provocation and conflict.

Such murkier, less obvious forms of state-based aggression, despite falling short of actual violence, are condemnedbut then, losing any sense of moral high-ground, the Pentagon study advocates that the US itself should go gray or go home to ensure US influence.

The document also sets out the real reasons that the US is hostile to revolutionary forces like Iran and North Korea: they pose fundamental obstacles to US imperial influence in those regions. They are:

neither the products of, nor are they satisfied with, the contemporary order At a minimum, they intend to destroy the reach of the U.S.-led order into what they perceive to be their legitimate sphere of influence. They are also resolved to replace that order locally with a new rule set dictated by them.

Far from insisting, as the US government does officially, that Iran and North Korea are threats mainly due to nuclear weapons, the document makes clear that actually they are considered threatening to the expansion of the U.S.-led order.

Losing the Propaganda War

Amidst the challenge posed by these competing powers, the Pentagon study emphasizes the threat from non-state forces which are undermining the U.S.-led order in different ways, primarily through information.

The hyper-connectivity and weaponization of information, disinformation, and disaffection, the study team observes, is leading to the uncontrolled spread of information. The upshot is that the Pentagon faces the inevitable elimination of secrecy and operational security.

Wide uncontrolled access to technology that most now take for granted is rapidly undermining prior advantages of discrete, secret, or covert intentions, actions, or operations In the end, senior defense leaders should assume that all defense-related activity from minor tactical movements to major military operations would occur completely in the open from this point forward.

This information revolution, in turn, is leading to the generalized disintegration of traditional authority structures fueled, and/or accelerated by hyperconnectivity and the obvious decay and potential failure of the post-Cold War status quo.

Civil Unrest

Highlighting the threat posed by groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda, the study also points to leaderless instability (e.g., Arab Spring) as a major driver of a generalized erosion or dissolution of traditional authority structures. The document hints that such populist civil unrest is likely to become prominent in Western homelands, including inside the United States.

To date, U.S. strategists have been fixated on this trend in the greater Middle East. However, the same forces at work there are similarly eroding the reach and authority of governments worldwide it would be unwise not to recognize that they will mutate, metastasize, and manifest differently over time.

The US homeland is flagged-up as being especially vulnerable to the breakdown of traditional authority structures:

The United States and its population are increasingly exposed to substantial harm and an erosion of security from individuals and small groups of motivated actors, leveraging the confluence of hyperconnectivity, fear, and increased vulnerability to sow disorder and uncertainty. This intensely disorienting and dislocating form of resistance to authority arrives via physical, virtual, and psychological violence and can create effects that appear substantially out of proportion to the origin and physical size or scale of the proximate hazard or threat.

There is little reflection, however, on the role of the US government itself in fomenting such endemic distrust, through its own policies.

Bad Facts

Among the most dangerous drivers of this risk of civil unrest and mass destabilization, the document asserts, are different categories of fact. Apart from the obvious fact-free, which is defined as information that undermines objective truth, the other categories include actual truths that, however, are damaging to Americas global reputation.

Fact-inconvenient information consists of the exposure of details that, by implication, undermine legitimate authority and erode the relationships between governments and the governedin other words, facts that reveal how government policy is corrupt, incompetent or undemocratic.

Fact-perilous information refers to basically to national security leaks from whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden or Bradley Manning, exposing highly classified, sensitive, or proprietary information that can be used to accelerate a real loss of tactical, operational, or strategic advantage.

Fact-toxic information pertains to actual truths which, the document complains, are exposed in the absence of context, and therefore poison important political discourse. Such information is seen as being most potent in triggering outbreaks of civil unrest, because it:

fatally weakens foundational security at an international, regional, national, or personal level. Indeed,fact-toxicexposures are those likeliest to trigger viral or contagious insecurity across or within borders and between or among peoples.

Mass Surveillance and Psychological Warfare

The Pentagon study comes up with two solutions to the information threat.

The first is to make better use of US mass surveillance capabilities, which describes as the largest and most sophisticated and integrated intelligence complex in world. The US can generate insight faster and more reliably than its competitors can, if it chooses to do so. Combined with its military forward presence and power projection, the US is an enviable position of strength.

Supposedly, though, the problem is that the US does not make full use of this potential strength:

That strength, however, is only as durable as the United States willingness to see and employ it to its advantage. To the extent that the United States and its defense enterprise are seen to lead, others will follow

The document also criticizes US strategies for focusing too much on trying to defend against foreign efforts to penetrate or disrupt US intelligence, at the expense of the purposeful exploitation of the same architecture for the strategic manipulation of perceptions and its attendant influence on political and security outcomes.

Pentagon officials need to simply accept, therefore, that:

the U.S. homeland, individual American citizens, and U.S. public opinion and perceptions will increasingly become battlefields.

Military Supremacy

Having mourned the loss of US primacy, the Pentagon report sees expanding the US military as the only option. The bipartisan consensus on military supremacism, however, is not enough. The document demands a military force so powerful it can preserve maximum freedom of action, and allow the US to dictate or hold significant sway over outcomes in international disputes.

One would be hard-pressed to find a clearer statement of imperial intent in any US Army document:

While as a rule, U.S. leaders of both political parties have consistently committed to the maintenance of U.S. military superiority over all potential state rivals, the post-primacy reality demands a wider and more flexible military force that can generate advantage and options across the broadest possible range of military demands. To U.S. political leadership, maintenance of military advantage preserves maximum freedom of action Finally, it allows U.S. decision-makers the opportunity to dictate or hold significant sway over outcomes in international disputes in the shadow of significant U.S. military capability and the implied promise of unacceptable consequences in the event that capability is unleashed.

Once again, military power is essentially depicted as a tool for the US to force, threaten and cajole other countries into submission to US demands. The very concept of defense is thus re-framed as the capacity to use overwhelming military might to get ones wayanything which undermines this capacity ends up automatically appearing as a threat that deserves to be attacked.

Empire of Capital

Accordingly, a core goal of this military expansionism is ensuring that the United States and its international partners have unimpeded access to air, sea, space, cyberspace, and the electromagnetic spectrum in order to underwrite their security and prosperity.

This also means that the US must retain the ability to physically access any region it wants, whenever it wants:

Failure of or limitations on the ability of the United States to enter and operate within key regions of the world, for example, undermine both U.S. and partner security.

The US thus must try to minimize any purposeful, malevolent, or incidental interruption of access to the commons, as well as critical regions, resources, and markets.

Without ever referring directly to capitalism, the document eliminates any ambiguity about how the Pentagon sees this new era of Persistent Conflict 2.0: some are fighting globalization and globalization is also actively fighting back. Combined, all of these forces are rending at the fabric of security and stable governance that all states aspire to and rely on for survival.

This is a war, then, between US-led capitalist globalization, and anyone who resists it. And to win it, the document puts forward a combination of strategies: consolidating the US intelligence complex and using it more ruthlessly; intensifying mass surveillance and propaganda to manipulate US and global popular opinion; expanding US military power and reach to ensure access to strategic regions, markets, and resources.

Even so, the overarching goal is somewhat more modest: to prevent the US-led order from collapsing further:

. while the favorable U.S.-dominated status quo is under significant internal and external pressure, adapted American power can help to forestall or even reverse outright failure in the most critical regions.

The hope is that the US will be able to fashion a remodeled but nonetheless still favorable post-primacy international order.

Narcissism

Like all US Army War College publications, the document states that it does not necessarily represent the official position of the US Army or DoD. While this caveat means that its findings cannot be taken to formally represent the US government, the document does also admit that it represents the collective wisdom of the numerous officials consulted.

In that sense, the document is a uniquely insightful window into the mind of the Pentagon, and how embarrassingly limited its cognitive scope really is.

Launched in June 2016 and completed in April 2017, the US Army War College research project involved extensive consultation with officials across the Pentagon, including representatives of the joint and service staffs, the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), U.S. Central Command (USCENTCOM), U.S. Pacific Command (USPACOM), U.S. Northern Command (USNORTHCOM), U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM); U.S. Forces, Japan (USFJ), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the National Intelligence Council, U.S. Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM), and U.S. Army Pacific [USARPAC] and Pacific Fleet [PACFLT]).

The study team also consulted with a handful of American think-tanks of a somewhat neoconservative persuasion: the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the RAND Corporation, and the Institute for the Study of War.

No wonder, then, that its findings and conclusions are so myopic. The research methodology manages to systematically ignore the most critical evidence surrounding the drivers that are behind the myriad forces the study pinpoints as undermining US primacy: such as, for instance, thebiophysical processes of climate, energy and food disruptionbehind the Arab Spring; theconfluence of military violence, fossil fuel interests and geopolitical alliancesbehind the rise of ISIS; or the fundamental grievances that have driven a breakdown in trust with governments since the 2008 financial collapse and theensuing ongoing period of neoliberal economic failure.

In this context, the studys conclusions are less a reflection of the actual state of the world, than of the way the Pentagon sees itself and the world. Indeed, most telling of all is the documents utter inability to recognize the role of the Pentagon itself in systematically pursuing a wide range of policies over the last several decades which have contributed directly to the very instability it now wants to defend against.

The Pentagon frames itself as existing outside the Hobbesian turmoil that it conveniently projects onto the worldthe result is a monumental and convenient rejection of any sense of responsibility for what happens in the world.

It is no surprise then that even the Pentagons apparent conviction in the inexorable decline of US power could well be overblown.

According to Dr. Sean Starrs of MITs Center for International Studies, a true picture of US power cannot be determined solely from national accounts. We have to look at the accounts of transnational corporations.

Starrsshowsthat American transnational corporations are vastly more powerful than their competitors. His data suggests that American economic supremacism remains at an all-time high, and still unchallenged even by an economic powerhouse like China.

This does not necessarily discredit the Pentagons emerging recognition that US imperial power now faces a new era of decline and unprecedented volatility.

But it does suggest that the Pentagons sense of US global pre-eminence is very much bound up with its capacity to project American capitalism globally.

As geopolitical rivals agitate against US economic reach, and as new movements emerge hoping to undermine American unimpeded access to global resources and markets, whats clear is that DoD officials see anything which competes with or undermines American capitalism as a clear and present danger.

This article was produced in partnership with AlterNet andInsurge Intelligence. Learn more aboutNafeez Ahmedand how to support his work.

Nafeez Ahmedis an investigative journalist and international security scholar. He is the winner of a 2015 Project Censored Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism for his former work at the Guardian.He is the author ofA Users Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It(2010), and the scifi thriller novelZero Point, among other books.

This article was made possible by the readers and supporters of AlterNet.

Read more:
Pentagon Study Declares American Empire Is 'Collapsing' - The National Memo (blog)

Once upon a time one applied for a government position that required a clearance with the expectation that in three or four months the process would be completed and the authorization would or would not be issued. I experienced the drill on three occasions for top-secret clearances, once for the Department of Defense (DOD) and twice for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Each government agency then managed its own security, and largely does today, in spite of last years creation of the National Background Investigation Board. A subsidiary of the federal governments Office of Personnel Management, the board was intended to coordinate and resolve a massive backlog of clearances. Currently the processing delay in issuing more than 70,000 pending top-secret clearances is approaching one year and there is also a large backlog of existing clearances that are up for reauthorization and under review.

Back in my time there were major differences in how the various national-security components ran their background investigations. The DOD clearance was largely document driven, relying on police reports and public records from the various jurisdictions that I had lived in supplemented by a brief personal interview with the chief of police in the town in New Jersey where I had spent the most time. That pretty much was it and the check did not even include confirmation of the university degree that I claimed to have, as no one asked for my approval to obtain that information. The investigator clearly was looking for illegal activity and did not appear to be particularly interested in confirming that I was who I said I was.

One particular sticking point with the military was the concern over my father rather than me. He was a naturalized citizen and the investigation absolutely required production of the original document confirming that fact, which we were eventually able to produce. It struck me as odd that one part of the government could not have asked another part to confirm the information, but that was the case back then and apparently is still the case now. There is little reciprocity between agencies and information is not routinely shared.

One of the reasons why is that each agency has a different perspective on what is important and what isnt. CIA clearances were quite different than those carried out by the Army. They required a polygraph examination at an early stage and the background checks were very thorough, including interviews with bosses from summer jobs while I was in college as well as of people I knew while I was at school. There were a number of questions about possible homosexuality both directed at friends and as part of the poly, which, of course, would not be allowed today. Public records were, of course, reviewed, as were credit reports. FBI clearances went through a similar vetting, though the polygraph exam was not mandatory in all cases. For CIA there were also follow-up reviews every five years or thereabouts, though they generally consisted of another polygraph exam with particular attention paid to concealed foreign contacts and relationships, both amorous and espionage related.

A big difference between background checks back then and now was that the investigations were initially conducted by the office of security of the actual component that one was intending to work for. Today the investigations are nearly all conducted by contractors, who are themselves hungry for a piece of what has become a multi-billion dollar business. These companies are developing highly sophisticated security software to constantly update government files on its employees.

There are nearly five million United States government employees with clearances. Since Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, there has been considerable demand from Congress to reduce that number. But the national security industry is, if anything, slated to grow under President Donald Trump. The White House has added its own concerns over politically motivated leakers of classified information and would like to see mechanisms in place that continuously monitor activity by clearance holders to reveal who might have engaged in unauthorized exposure of the sensitive information that has wound up in the Washington Post and New York Times.

But instead of limiting the access to classified information, there has been instead a push for increased and even continuous monitoring of those who have clearances to avoid what are described as insider threats. Software fixes are already in place at some agencies to scour public records and also in some cases redline users who have repeated access to certain types of files that are not directly germane to their work. As we have seen in the recent case of claimed whistleblower Reality Winner, printers connected to classified computers have features that enable identification of the actual user when there is a leak.

Using computers to continuously monitor cleared employees generally employs a variation on software that has already been developed for commercial users, including air carriers, where there is high risk and major liability if an employee is responsible for a violent incident. The special software constantly reviews criminal and civil files, such as divorce filings, bankruptcies, traffic violations, unreported foreign travel, and credit reports, to identify red flags that might result in unacceptable or even aberrant behavior on the part of the employee or prospective employee. Spies are notoriously motivated by money (Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen) and careful review of their credit reports might have revealed that they were financially stressed before they took the step of selling secrets to the Soviet Union. Washington Navy Yard shooter Aaron Alexis, who killed 12 people in September 2013, reportedly was the subject of a Rhode Island police report that revealed that he had been hearing voices shortly before he went on his rampage.

Monitoring ones civil and criminal record is not particularly easy to do, as much of the information is only available at state or even county and local levels and not all of it is online. Even though most of the information that is being screened by the government computers is public record and therefore fair game, there is concern that while something like a bankruptcy or a foreign trip is verifiable fact, other information might be either uninterpretable or completely lacking context. Even public databases frequently contain inaccurate information, including what is referred to as false negatives and false positivesand yet if they appear to cross an employer red line, they become part of the personnel file. Some of it is certainly information that once upon a time would have been regarded as both private and sensitive, such as a credit report, even though applicants for security clearances customarily waive any right to privacy when they are being background investigated.

And there is also increasing pressure coming from government managers to begin screening social media to determine if individuals are becoming disgruntled or otherwise developing hostile attitudes towards their employer. To complain about ones job or express unpopular opinions would not exactly be criminalized but it would inevitably become an element in consideration of ones ability to move upward in the organization, even if that is not the intention.

The bottom line is that no one has yet made the case that the continuous monitoring of five million security clearance holders would actually reduce espionage and insider threats. It is clear, however, that it would be enormously expensive and is therefore being pushed hardboth by prospective contractors offering their services and also hardliners in government who seek to have such a weapon in their arsenal to catch spies, leakers, and malcontents. Critics observe that while aggressive monitoring quite possibly might discover an individual instance where someone could appear to be in one of those at risk categories, most individuals who are moving in that direction do not necessarily allow their inner thoughts or hidden activities to become either part of the public record or an entry on Facebook.

And the greatest danger of all is over the horizon. Once the government discovers a new technology to intrude on the lives of ordinary citizens, a pretext will no doubt be developed after the next terrorist incident or insider attack to use it in ever widening circles as new threats are allegedly discovered. When that happens, we can confidently expect Patriot Act III, with a provision allowing continuous surveillance of any and all possible suspects. And there is actually a precedent. Back in 2003, the Pentagon under George W. Bush was already tinkering with what if referred to as Total Information Awareness to examine predictive behavior, described at the time as the biggest surveillance program in the history of the United States.

Total Information Awareness was briefly implemented before being abandoned 14 years ago. Today the technical resources available are much more impressive, with the ability to have a fully automated process that can monitor, store, and recover billions of pieces of data in real time. It means that achieving continuous monitoring for everyone who resides in or travels to the United States is now a reality. Every American will become a potential victim and part of an Orwellian nightmare as a substantially mythical national security narrative trumps privacy concerns and constitutional rights. And the government, to quell any concerns, will continue to insist that what it is doing is only done to make you safer.

Philip Giraldi, a former CIA offier, is executive director of the Council for the National Interest.

Read more here:
How Not to Catch the Next Reality Winner - The American Conservative

A pro-family activist is publicly calling out two dozen Republican lawmakers who failed to support an amendment introduced by a congresswoman.

Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-Missouri) introduced the amendment that would have barred taxpayers' dollars from funding gender transition surgeries in the U.S. armed forces.

"It makes no sense," Hartzler said during floor debate, "to create soldiers who are unable to fight and win our nation's wars."

It was claimed by supporters of the amendment that the financial bill for transgenders could exceed $3 billion over the next decade.

Democrats, meanwhile, claimed that Republicans were attempting to "rip away" health care needs from military personnel.

The most infamous transgender case to date involved U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning (pictured above).Originally sentenced to 35 years for disseminating 700,000 classified military reports, the largest in U.S. history, Manning's sentence was commuted by Obama. The homosexual former soldier has since become a folk hero to LGBT activists for announcing he is transgender.

All totaled, 24 Republicans in Congress joined with Democrats to defeat the amendment 209-214, which means a controversial Obama-era policy remains in place thanks to GOP efforts.

The amendment was defeated by a "faction" of moderate and liberal Republicans, says American Family Association spokesman Rob Chambers.

Many of those congressmen, he points out, have a formal name on Capitol Hill: the Tuesday Group, a caucus of approximately 50 Republican lawmakers who are considered moderates in the GOP.

"We have a strong faction of moderate to liberal Republicans," says Chambers, "that are basically seeking to undermine the basic values and principles that this country was founded on."

All of them, he adds, deserve to be challenged in their next GOP primary, especially after many of them helped defeat the Hartzler amendment.

The moderate Tuesday Group made news in May when its members grew angry after caucus leader Rep. Tom MacArthur introduced an amendment to the American Health Care Act that pleased conservatives in the House Freedom Caucus.

MacArthur, who was forced to step down as Tuesday Group co-chairman due to his actions, was among the 24 Republicans who voted "no" last week.

The 209-214 roll call can be viewed on the House of Representatives website here.

The bigger problem in the U.S. armed forces, meanwhile, remains a commitment to homosexual activism within the Pentagon, warns conservative activist Peter LaBarbera.

LaBarbera's organization, Americans for Truth, serves as a watchdog that documents homosexual activism, including in the U.S. armed forces.

He blames Obama-era holdovers for pushing those policies during the Trump administration, but he also blames Secretary of Defense James Mattis for refusing to end the transgender policy. The policy has been delayed for six months but deserves to be ended, says LaBarbera.

"We're talking about using taxpayer funds to perform these disgusting, gross body mutilations in the name of changing your gender," says LaBarbera. "I don't think the American people support it. I don't think Donald Trump should support it."

American Family Association is the parent organization of American Family News and news website OneNewsNow.

The staff at Onenewsnow.com strives daily to bring you news from a biblical perspective. If you benefit from this platform and want others to know about it please consider a generous gift today.

We moderate all reader comments, usually within 24 hours of posting (longer on weekends). Please limit your comment to 300 words or less and ensure it addresses the article - NOT another reader's comments. Comments that contain a link (URL), an inordinate number of words in ALL CAPS, rude remarks directed at other readers, or profanity/vulgarity will not be approved.

More here:
AFA: This is on you, Republicans - OneNewsNow

Remember when Rosie O'Donnell was going to be the end of President Trump? Then, it was John McCain. And then Khizr Khan and the Access Hollywood tape and the Russian dossier and the Mika/Joe tweetstorm.

All of that should have brought down President Trump, at least in the eyes of the Left. None of it has. But hope sprang anew earlier this week when it was discovered Donald Trump Jr. had met with a Russian lawyer who offered dirt on Hillary Clinton.

Trump Jr. promptly turned over the entire email chain he had on the affair, and the press has since had a field day finding people to make ever more ludicrous claims about his possible legal exposure.

It's clearly collusion, some said although collusion is not exactly a crime. It's an illegal campaign contribution, said others although nothing of value was given.

It's a Logan Act violation, said others, referring to the 1799 law that makes it a crime for citizens to intervene in disputes with foreign governments and has never been used to prosecute anyone.

It could even be conspiracy to defraud, said one Vermont law professor, Jennifer Taub, because Trump Jr. went to a meeting to hear evidence that someone else may have committed a crime against the United States.

To all of which Tim Kaine, perhaps the worst vice presidential candidate in modern times, accused Trump Jr. of treason of working against the interests of the U.S. and for the interests of a foreign power.

That's right a 20-minute meeting, ultimately about nothing, with a Russian lawyer who promised dirt on the opponent in a charged political atmosphere is supposedly not just a technical violation of some obscure campaign regulation. It is treason, with punishments ranging up to the death penalty.

There have been some rough moments as President Trump and his team have grown into their jobs, and even Trump Jr. admits he would have done some things differently. But treason? Collusion? Conspiracy to defraud?

Many in the media want these to be crimes so badly, according to Rush Limbaugh, they are losing their minds in trying to find some way to force the president from office.

This is not it. Not only did Trump Jr. not commit treason by taking the meeting with the Russian lawyer, but he probably committed no crime at all. And that would hold even if the Russian lawyer had provided useful information, which she didn't.

Jonathan Turley, a liberal professor of constitutional law at George Washington University, said so. "Does any of this constitute a clear crime or even a vague inkblot image of a crime?" Turley asked in an op-ed in The Hill. "No, at least not on these facts."

Alan Dershowitz, another liberal lawyer, agreed. "I don't see a crime at this point in time," he told Newsmax. And that's true even if the information was obtained illegally, he said.

That's how the Washington Post and New York Times were able to publish the Pentagon Papers, as well as information from Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning, he said.

Turley and law professor Eugene Volokh, author of the well-respected Volokh Conspiracy law blog, pointed to the obvious problem with prosecuting anyone for what Trump Jr. did. None of the laws detractors want to use against Trump Jr. could be enforced without serious First Amendment implications.

It's illegal for foreign governments to provide a "thing of value" to a federal campaign, but can information be considered a thing of value? That's the key question for both Volokh and Turley. And both say no or no foreign government or individual could provide any damaging evidence on any federal candidate.

Under this reading, if a foreign person or government offered damaging information on Trump to The New York Times, the paper would be bound by law to either decline or pay for the information checkbook journalism has its own substantial set of problems.

And if some aggrieved business across the globe wanted to share the dirt on its unhappy dealings with Trump's companies, it would be illegal for us to hear about this.

In other words, the statute is so "unconstitutionally over-broad" that it "ought to be read as not covering such distribution or solicitation of damaging information about a candidate."

There are clearly double standards at work here. How did the Hillary Clinton campaign find out about the foreign beauty contest winner Trump had supposedly "fat-shamed"? How did it find out Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign manager, had Russia ties? What about the information the Russian lawyer offered it was about Hillary's ties to the Russian government? Is that not worth looking into? And how did she get in the country for this meeting in the first place?

Trump continues to be blessed with overreaching, overzealous, and imprudent political enemies. Every blip is The One. Every act is high treason with articles of impeachment to follow.

People can see what's going on here. They have tuned out the Russia allegations this entire Trump Jr. episode never even trended on Twitter. And until Democrats get serious or at least a bit more measured in their treatment of the president, they're not going to make a dent.

Ford O'Connell (@Ford Connell) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog. He is an adjunct professor at The George Washington University Graduate School of Political Management, worked on John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign, and authored the book "Hail Mary: The 10-Step Playbook for Republican Recovery."

If you would like to write an op-ed for the Washington Examiner, please read our guidelines on submissions here.

Read this article:
Donald Trump Jr.'s emails are not treason - Washington Examiner

The amendment to the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act was offered by Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R, Mo.). It would have prohibited the use of taxpayer dollars to pay for the non-military medical task of converting healthy soldiers into transgender soldiers who face lifelong dependence on hormones and surgery.

The July 13 vote saw Democrats vote in lockstep to defeat the amendment, despite the national unpopularity of the transgender ideology. They were joined by 24 Republicans who broke with their party to assist the Democrats to defeat the amendment, without any visible objections by the GOPs business-focused leadership.

The offer of free medical care to gender-confused soldiers is part of the broader effort by Obama to have the Pentagon affirm and implement the transgender ideology, which says that people can have a gender different from their biological sex. The ideology also says that a persons legal sex is defined by their self-assessed gender not by their biology and that other Americans must agree with people who say they are a member of the opposite sex.

Many Republicans praised the Hartzler amendment and criticized the Obama transgender policy. It makes no sense to create soldiers who are unable to fight and win our nations wars, Hartzler said during debate on the bill, according to the Associated Press.

Figure out whether youre man or a woman before you join, Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter of California said. U.S. taxpayers shouldnt have to foot the bill.

Amendment supporters say the Pentagons financial bill for accepting transgender claims could reach$3.7 billion over the next ten years.

So far, the militarys most famous transsexual soldier is Private Bradley Manning, who copied and released 90,000 military reports from Iraq and Afghanistan. He was released from jail in early 2017 after Obama reduced his jail sentence. Manning has since changed his name to Chelsea Manning.

Democrats embrace the transgenderideology and called the GOP amendment bigoted for not saying men can be women.

Rep. Jared Polis (D, CO) insisted the amendment would hurt the military. It would have a negative impact on morale, a negative impact on retention and move us away from the merit-based system which we now have, where we have one set of rules applied to everybody, he said.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) slammed Republicans for attempting to rip away health care for soldiers. Republicans should be ashamed: instead of protecting the men and women who risk their lives to defend our freedoms, they are fighting to rip away the health care of thousands of brave service members, Pelosi said in hyperbolically. This cowardly Republican amendment targeting transgender men and women in uniform effectively bans these patriotic Americans from serving their country.

But the Center for Military Readiness, a policy group located in Michigan, criticized the current transgender policy, calling it absurd and sometimes bizarre plans incorporated in Obama Administration transgender mandates.

In a statement, the group also said that the policies are dangerous. Social experiments with the lives of people who deserve better will create many problems that detract from impacts on morale and readiness.

The Republicans who support the transgender ideology are mostly social liberals (click See More to view the list):

Obamas Secretary of Defense, Ash Carter, created the problem of having to pay for the medical needs of transsexual soldiers by repealing the ban on transgenders serving openly in the military in 2016.

However, the plan is apparently very unpopular among top leaders and the rank-and-file, partly because it would female soldiers to share rooms and showers with biological men who have been classified by the military as women.

If the military agrees to establish the transgender ideology, the pro-transgender campaign will be boosted in the nations courtrooms, capitols, and classrooms, said Austen Ruse, president of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute. Every transgender activist can point to the military to say, Theyvedone, it, so weshould do it in gradeschools, high schools, colleges,everywhere, he added.

The progressive push to bend Americans attitudes and their male-and-female civic society around the idea of gender has already attacked and cracked popular social rules for how Americans handle the useful differences between complementary and equal men and women.

These pro-gender claims have an impact on different-sex bathrooms,shelters for battered women,sports leagues for girls,hiking groups for boys,K-12 curricula,university speech codes,religious freedoms,free speech, thesocial status of women,parents rightsin childrearing, practices tohelp teenagers, womensexpectations of beauty,culture and civic society,scientific research,prison safety,civic ceremonies,school rules, menssense of masculinity,law enforcement, and childrenssexual privacy.

A study of the 2010 census showed that roughly 1-in-2,400 adults had changed their name from one sex to the other sex.

Polls showthat strong majority of ordinary Americans oppose the transgender claims, they want sexual privacy in bathrooms and shower rooms especially in K-12 schools. Even as Americans want to keep their sexual privacy, most are also willing to bepolite and friendlyto the very few transgender people who wish to live as members of the other sex.

UPDATE: An earlier version of this story included anembeddedtweet with an inaccurate list of GOP members who voted against this amendment. Weve replaced that tweet with the accurate list of members via a Facebook post from Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-SC). We regret the error.

Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.

P.S. DO YOU WANT MORE ARTICLES LIKE THIS ONE DELIVERED RIGHT TO YOUR INBOX?SIGN UP FOR THE DAILY BREITBART NEWSLETTER.

See the article here:
24 Republicans Vote To Preserve Transgender Ideology in Military - Breitbart News

National Security Desk Jul. 14, 2017

On Thursday, the House voted down an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would have prevented any of the militarys budget from being used to pay for sex reassignment surgeries, as 24 Republicans crossed the aisle to vote with Democrats. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi had caterwauled about the proposed amendment being appalling, disgusting and mean spirited and warned that it would undermine our national security. She further stated, This cowardly Republican amendment targeting transgender men and women in uniform effectively bans these patriotic Americans from serving their country.

Who knew that the number of transgenders in the military was so significant that it would undermine our national security if taxpayers were not forced to foot the bill to entertain the twisted notions of gender dysphoria via sex-reassignment surgery. Last we checked the military does not cover the medical costs of elective cosmetic surgery. Only surgeries deemed to be medically necessary are covered.

Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-MO), the representative who filed the amendment, defended her position in June, stating, Military service is a privilege, not a right. It is predicated on winning wars and defeating the enemy. All decisions on personnel and funding should be made with this in mind. But now evidently having ones sex-change surgery covered is a right.

And speaking of undermining national security, recall one Bradley Manning, the transgender poster, er, boy of the Rainbow Mafia, who was found guilty of mishandling classified information as in deliberately distributing it to Americas foes. How much security has that cost Americans? Not only that, Barack Obama chose to placate the Rainbow Mafias demands when he commuted Mannings sentence. Americans are paying for his transition to female. How again does this make the American military more prepared for warfare? It doesnt.

Continued here:
House Votes to Cover Cost of Military Sex-Change Surgeries - Patriot Post

The 2007 airstrikes were a series ofair-to-ground attacks conducted inAl-Amin al-Thaniyah, New Baghdad.

In the first, the Apaches fired ona group often Iraqis, including journalist Namir Noor-Eldeen and his driver and assistant Saeed Chmagh (both employed byReuters) seven were killed, and one injured.

The second strike was directed ata van driven bySaleh Matasher Tomal. Both Chmagh and Tomal were killed, and two ofTomal's children badly wounded.

In the third, pilots fired ona building intowhich the group fled, witha volley ofHellfire missiles.

On the day ofthe attack, the US military acknowledged the two journalists were killed, alongwith nine "insurgents" the engagement was claimed tohave a combat operation againsta "hostile force" inwhich "great pains" were taken toprevent the loss ofinnocent lives. Moreover, it was claimed it was unclear whether the journalists were slain byUS fire or fromIraqi insurgents.

The event was consequently investigated bythe US military, an inquiry which concluded the soldiers had acted entirely inaccordance withthe law ofarmed conflict, and the military's own rules ofengagement.

For almost three years, despiteattempts byReuters tohave footage ofthe incident released undertheFreedom ofInformation Act, the deadly strikes remained largely unacknowledged, and entirely unexamined.

A mainstream media journalist, embedded withthe US military atthe time, mentioned the assault inhis 2009 autobiography although his account was subsequently shown tobe fabricated.

The conspiracy ofsilence onthe matter was shattered inApril 2010, when WikiLeaks released footage recorded bythe gunsightof one ofthe attacking helicopters. Dubbed "Collateral Murder" bythe leak site, the video depicted the incident infull, replete withdisturbingly callous radio chatter betweenthe aircrews and ground units involved.

The exposure provoked international condemnation and widespread media coverage. Many outlets hailed WikiLeaks, and the video's (then unknown) leaker, asheroes, and the Iraq war bythen inits seventh year became increasingly impossible forpoliticians, journalists and civilians toseriously defend.

While the footage shocked and appalled the world over, Josh Stieber, a member ofthe US military company that carried outthe attack, starkly underlined just how mundane the incident was inthe context ofthe conflict.

"When I started tosee the discussion flowing from [the video], I was surprised athow extreme it was made outto be. What was shown inthe video was not outof the ordinary inIraq. One policy we had that was even more extreme was if a roadside bomb went off, we were supposed toshoot anyone standing inthat area. We were told that we needed tomake the local population more afraid ofus," he said.

However, the revelation did not precipitate a termination ofhostilities inIraq, or prosecutions ofany ofthe personnel involved. Instead, inMay 2010, 22-year-old American Army intelligence analyst Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning was arrested afterit was revealed she was the source ofthe leaked video, alongwith roughly 260,000 diplomatic cables, toWikiLeaks.

Army Pfc. Bradley Manning (now Chelsea Manning) is escorted to a security vehicle outside a courthouse in Fort Meade, Md., after a hearing in his court martial.

Manning proceeded tospend overthree years insolitary confinement, a period which David House, founder ofthe Private Manning Support Network, dubbed "no-touch torture" Manning was subjected toextended periods ofisolation, harassment and sleep-deprivation.

The experience caused Manning to "physically, mentally, and emotionally" degrade overtime, House said. In August 2013, she was sentenced to35 years' imprisonment. Mercifully, inMay 2017, Manning was released, followinga commutation ofher sentence byformer President Barack Obama.

It was subsequently acknowledged Manning's disclosures did not infact damage US interests.

Moreover, WikiLeaks, and site founder Julian Assange, quickly found themselves the subject ofUS prosecutorial ire too.

REUTERS/ Axel Schmidt

Julian Assange, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of WikiLeaks speaks via video link during a press conference on the occasion of the ten year anniversary celebration of WikiLeaks in Berlin, Germany, October 4, 2016.

In November 2010, US Attorney-General Eric Holder announced there was "an active, ongoing criminal investigation" intoWikiLeaks that same month, Sweden launched a sexual assault investigation intoAssange, and issued a Europe-wide warrant forhis arrest.

Residing inthe UK, Assange feared extradition tothe US, should Swedish or British authorities take him into custody. He applied forpolitical asylum inEcuador, and was granted sanctuary inthe country's London embassy June 19, 2012. For five years, he remained undereffective house arrest, forbidden fromleaving a 2,153 square foot room inthe embassy's bowels, untilprosecutors dumped the baseless case.

REUTERS/ Peter Nicholls

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is seen on the balcony of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, Britain, May 19, 2017

However,Assange's problemsremain far fromover.

London's Metropolitan Police which stood watch outsidethe Embassy's door 24 hours a day, seven days a week fromthe momenthe entered it, atan estimated cost toUK taxpayers ofUS$16.8 million (13 million) between2012 and 2015 alone remain "obliged" toexecute an arrest warrant issued in2012 byWestminster Magistrate's Court.

The charges relate toAssange's failure tosurrender toauthorities. He still faces arrest if he leaves the embassy. Discussions betweenAssange's legal team and UK authorities onthe potential cessation ofbail violation charges remain ongoing.

All along, hostilities inIraq have continued, withfluctuating levels ofintensity.

Sputnik/ Iliya Pitalev

"The scale and gravity ofthe loss ofcivilian lives duringthe military operation toretake Mosul must be publicly acknowledged. The horrors people have witnessed and the disregard forhuman life byall parties tothis conflict must not go unpunished. Entire families have been wiped out, many ofwhom are still buried underthe rubble today. The people ofMosul deserve toknow, fromtheir government, that there will be justice and reparation so that the harrowing impact ofthis operation is duly addressed," said Lynn Maalouf, Amnesty International's Middle East Research Director.

Continue reading here:
Murder, Imprisonment, Isolation, War Crimes: 'Collateral Murder' Ten Years On - Sputnik International

Between attacking President Trump's important and robust (if somewhat hypocritical) defense of Western civilization in Warsaw, and defending Linda Sarsour's call for 'jihad' against the Trump administration (coupled with a dangerously wrong-headed anti-assimilation jeremiad), many on the hard Left continue to showcase seriously misaligned moral compasses. The degree to which elements of the Democratic base have embraced and celebrated Chelsea Manning is further evidence of this phenomenon. Yesterday, Manning tweeted a stupefyingly ignorant pronouncement that generated thousands of likes and shares on social media:

Where to begin? Let's go point by point:

(1) Taxation is a sharing of responsibility in a number of ways, though it's quite difficult to swallow a lecture on shared civic responsibility from someone who was convicted and sentenced to a lengthy prison sentence for violating his oath and breaking the law when he leaked (Manning identified as a man at the time of his treacherous acts) a massive trove of national security secrets in a profoundly irresponsible manner. A refresher from David French:

Bradley Manning was no ordinary leaker. When he dumped hundreds of thousands of military and diplomatic secrets into the public domain, he violated every single tenet of the warrior ethos. He abandoned the mission. He accepted defeat and, through his data dumps, worked to facilitate it. He quit on his comrades, acting with utter, callous disregard for their lives. His message to his unit and to his nation was clear: He would disobey lawful orders and risk killing his comrades to, in his words, stimulate worldwide discussions, debates, and reforms...In such a case, commanders have a sacred obligation to protect their soldiers. Its a matter of maintaining a bond with the men and women they lead. There can be no tolerance of true betrayal, and the military to its credit sought a severe sentence for Manning, attempting to make the punishment fit his crime. It fought for life imprisonment, and ultimately obtained a 35-year sentence that itself was an act of unreasonable mercy.

Incidentally, how many of the liberals who have been in high dudgeon for months over Wikileaks' role in helping Russia interfere in the US election were unperturbed by Manning's partnership with Julian Assange to expose American secrets? It's almost as if reflexive partisans on both sides of the ideological divide determine their views on Wikileaks based upon the immediate political implications of the material it releases.

(2) Taxation is also a form of legal theft, wherein -- despite Harry Reid's bizarre spin -- the government coercively confiscates a portion of its citizens' income. This view is not held "only" by the wealthy. Some of the most fanatical libertarians and objectivists in America are by no means well-to-do, and some of the richest people on the planet are enthusiastically pro-taxation statists. Google a group of insufferably self-righteous left-wingers who call themselves the "patriotic millionaires," if you're so inclined.

(3) "They don't pay taxes" is just a much dumber version of the standard "fair share" argument liberals make in support of imposing an ever-heavier tax burden upon high income earners and businesses. It's risibly false to assert that the wealthy don't pay taxes, and therefore need to be "made" to do so. The rich not only pay taxes, they pay more than their fair share of them. From my myth-busting post on this subject, published this past spring:

The top one percent of US wage-earners make less than one-fifth of the total income in the United States, yet pay close to 40 percent of all federal income taxes, and more than one-quarter of all federal taxes...The top 20 percent of US wage-earners ("the rich," broadly defined), make just over half of total US income, yet pay close to 90 percent of all federal income taxes, and approximately 70 percent of the total federal tax bill. It is flat-out wrong to say that the wealthy aren't paying their fair share; they're statistically paying a disproportionately high percentage of federal taxes.

To frame this in terms that Chelsea Manning might understand, because "the wealthy" pay roughly 70 percent of the overall federal tax bill, this group proportionally provided about $35,000 of the estimated $50,000 gender-reassignment treatment and surgery (nearly the median household income in America) she received courtesy of taxpayers while incarcerated for betraying her country. As an expression of her gratitude, Manning now demands that the government -- whose laws she flagrantly, willfully and unapologetically broke, only to be released by President Obama -- forcibly extract more money from law-abiding taxpayers, as lefties cheer her on. It's enough to rouse an exasperated writer to devote an entire essay to refuting a stupid tweet from a minor, ignominious celebrity. Sometimes, Donald Trump's victory in middle America isn't a mystery that's especially difficult to untangle.

Military Plane Crashes in Mississippi; At Least 12 Dead

Officer Who Killed Castile Gets $48,500 in Agreement

The rest is here:
Chelsea Manning: 'The Wealthy' Don't Pay Taxes, So We Must Force Them To, or Something - Townhall

After over three years of solitary confinement, the US judicial system has proven its bias against the right to freedom of speech and information granted to the people of the US in the First Amendment. Manning, who in February of this year said he had a clear conscience I wanted the American public to know that not everyone in Iraq and Afghanistan was a target that needed to be engaged and neutralised but people struggling to live in the pressure cooker of asymmetric warfare

The prosecution rested its case, on 21th August, in the court martial of Bradley Manning, the Army private who had admitted to leaking 700,000 documents exposing US military atrocities and other crimes to the WikiLeaks website in April of 2010.

The prosecutor, Major Ashden Fein, dropped one of the 22 charges against Manning. That charge alleged Manning had leaked intelligence to an enemy whose name is classified.

In charging Manning with aiding the enemy under Article 104 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the US government is equating the publication of classified information about its secret and illegal activities with espionage, treason and aiding terrorists. It is doing so on the spurious grounds that such information can end up in the hands of forces considered by the government to be hostile.

In fact, as the Obama administration and the military well know, Manning released the information to inform the American people of war crimes being carried out by the US government in Iraq and Afghanistan and diplomatic intrigues targeting many other countries.

The Baghdad helicopter attack video especially made impact on the American conscience. Manning initially faced up to 90 years in prison for leaking more than 700,000 Iraq and Afghanistan battlefield reports and State Department diplomatic cables in 2010 while working as an intelligence analyst in Iraq. He also leaked video of an U.S. helicopter attack in Baghdad in which at least nine people were killed, including a Reuters news photographer and his driver.

He didnt kill anyone as far as I know, former Fort Meade medic Ken Howland says of U.S. soldier Bradley Manning.

But the Pentagon has come up with perhaps a more excruciating punishment for him. After 3 years of trial Manning has suddenly come up with a confession of being Chelsea instead of Bradley; its a wonder what solitary confinements and torture can bring out of a person!

Inside a tiny cell in the bases prison block languishes the object of their mission a slightly-built, fresh-faced young man called Bradley Manning, held in conditions that have been compared to those at the notorious detention camps Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. His cell does not have a window and on the rare occasions he is allowed out, the clanking of the chains that shackle his hands and feet tend to drown out other sounds.

The US military has a history of getting out of torture allegations on technicalities. Its spokespeople would doubtless claim that keeping Manning in solitary confinement under strip lighting for 23 hours a day, forcing him to sleep naked and depriving him of all rights, strained at the definition of torture but did not snap it. Yet it was within the US militarys power to treat Manning as a human being. It chose instead to torment him in a tiny cell and seemed remarkably relaxed about who knew it. The message to everybody else is clear.

And they are tracing his mentally disturbed life right from his mothers fetus.

Pte First Class Bradley Manning, 25, showed signs of foetal alcohol syndrome, said Capt David Moulton, a clinical psychiatrist, who testified in court that day. Moulton described Mannings facial features that characterised the syndrome, such as his smooth, thin upper lip, and looked over at him in the courtroom.

Recently Mannings gender-identity struggle a sense of being a woman in a mans body was brought up by the defense at the court-martial.

George Wright, an Army spokesman at the Pentagon, said the Army does not provide such treatment or sex-reassignment surgery. He said soldiers behind bars are given access to psychiatrists and other mental health professionals.

Mannings case appeared to be the first time the therapy had come up for a military prisoner, It can be also argued that Manning might be gaining sympathy in front of court after such brutal torture.

Bradley Manning is no doubt being made an example for aspiring whistleblowers to think before they come up with the idea of saving the humanity again..

Link:
Making an Example Out of Manning - PKKH