President Obama to override 9/11 legislation

Obama to veto 9/11 victims bill

Washington (CNN)President Barack Obama will veto a bill that would allow terror victims of the attacks on September 11, 2001, to sue Saudi Arabia, the White House said Monday.

"That's still the plan," White House press secretary Josh Earnest said when asked if the President planned to veto the bill.

The White House had previously suggested Obama would not sign the bill when it first passed the Senate in May saying it would complicate diplomatic relations. 

Earnest defended the administration's stance against the bill saying it is not "an effective, forceful way for us to respond to terrorism."

Lawmakers are expected to attempt to override the veto, and if successful, would mark the first time in Obama's presidency. 

Earnest said the bill -- which passed the House unanimously on Friday -- has not yet been presented to the President.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/12/politics/obama-9-11-victims-bill/index.html

Monsanto Exec Heads FDA, and the Obama Administration’s Revolving Door Politics

Despite their animus history, Barack Obama seems to be warming to the K Street corporate lobbyists he once adamantly denounced.

In 2009, in a classic revolving-door move, President Barack Obama appointed former Monsanto VP and head lobbyist Michael Taylor as Deputy Commissioner for the FDA — the board tasked with regulating Taylor’s own industry.

Taylor joins the growing list of public officials formerly employed by Monsanto, a worldwide food giant oft-criticized for its poor environmental record and repeated aggressive legal action against small farmers over copyright issues.

“I don’t take a dime of their [lobbyist] money, and when I am president, they won’t find a job in my White House,” Obama said in a 2008 campaign speech. A little research, however, shows that claim to be a questionable one.

While the FDA’s headquarters are technically located in Maryland and not the White House, this appointment took place just seven months into the Obama presidency, with few noticing until this online petition gained popularity this weekend.

Also worth noting: how many dimes Obama has already accepted from Washington lobbyists for his 2012 campaign — more than 14,000 dimes, to be exact...

https://petovera.com/monsanto-exec-heads-fda-and-the-obama-administrations-revolving-door-politics/

Obama’s Invasion Plan of Syria Was Drawn Up by Kim Roosevelt in 1957

The same person, Teddy Roosevelt’s grandson, who planned and headed the CIA coup to overthrow Iran’s progressive secular democratic anti-communist President Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953, and to replace him with the brutal dictator Shah Reza Pahlevi, so as to continue Western oil companies’ control over Iran’s oil and gas, went on to plan four years later, in 1957, the invasion of Syria by the U.S., along with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey; and it’s virtually exactly the plan that U.S. President Barack Obama has been placing into action ever since Obama first stepped into the White House: Obama’s plan, like Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt’s plan, entailed what in the intelligence trade is referred to as “false flag” events, which are intended to deceive the public into thinking that the actual victims of the overthrow-operation were instead to be blamed for it. (That’s like Obama’s 2013 sarin gas attack in Syria that he wanted to use as an excuse to invade Syria to remove Assad.)

Back in 1957, there was no Assad dynasty in Syria, but only the Ba’ath Party, which was, and is, the only effective non-sectarian, or non-theocratic, political force in Arabic countries; so, America’s oil companies used instead the Islamic forces, in order to grab Middle Eastern oil, and to be able to use Syria as the vital pipeline-route for it into Europe (the world’s largest energy-market). The Ba’athists refused to cooperate with any such plan for foreign control over their national resources. This was the basis for America’s determination to overthrow the Ba’athists, and replace them with their enemies, the Islamists. (This was likewise a reason for America’s wars against the Ba’athist Saddam Hussein.)

Whereas U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower was ultimately forced to cancel Kim’s plan because only Turkey was willing to participate in it, Obama was able to get the royals of Saudi Arabia and Qatar to perform as Kim had planned for them: getting U.S. weapons to Syria’s jihadists, and supporting the main jihadist organization, Sunni Islam’s fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, to be the chief Syrian participants in overthrowing the Ba’athists.

Kim’s plan, just like his earlier and successful plan to take over Iran, enjoyed the full backing of both of the Dulles brothers — Allen Dulles who ran Eisenhower’s CIA, and John Foster Dulles who ran Eisenhower’s State Department. Both Dulleses headed the U.S. operation to bring top Nazis to America and give them fake backgrounds. Here’s a good documentary about specifically their still-ongoing European “Operation Gladio” to conquer Russia, but which until 1990 fronted as being instead (and was widely thought to have been) anti-communist. It actually was anti-communist, in the very narrow sense that any pro-fascist operation is, but it was anything but ‘democratic’ or pro-democratic. The CIA was set up by Eisenhower as a fascist entity, after President Truman had dithered with its predecessor the OSS, not knowing what to do with the post-WW-II incipient emerging U.S. intelligence bureaucracy. Eisenhower as President was no longer answering to FDR as he had been doing in WW II; he was on his own after the war, and became more and more fascist, so that, when he put together his Presidential Administration, the switch of the U.S. toward fascism began in earnest, and it has never really stopped...

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2016/01/obamas-invasion-plan-syria-drawn-kim-roosevelt-1957.html

The Obama Administration Has Embraced Legal Theories Even Broader Than John Yoo’s

The Justice Department recently released another of the now-notorious Office of Legal Counsel memos written by John Yoo — memos that authorized torture, warrantless wiretapping, and indefinite detention. The new memo, written as a “letter” to then-presiding FISC Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly in May 2002, addresses the legal basis for the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping of Americans’ communications under the “Stellar Wind” program.

Unsurprisingly, Yoo’s memo is extremely broad and poorly reasoned — but we knew that much already, thanks to Jack Goldsmith and Jim Comey. Still, it would be a mistake to think of Yoo’s memo as just an historical artifact, full of long-repudiated legal arguments. In fact, many of the arguments Yoo made behind closed doors in 2002 continue to appear in the Obama administration’s briefs defending warrantless surveillance under Section 702 of FISA today. And, in at least one key respect, the Obama administration’s arguments are even broader than the ones that Yoo felt he could justify.

Like Yoo, the Obama administration has argued that Americans have a “greatly reduced” expectation of privacy in their international communications — so diminished, in fact, that no warrant is necessary for the government to intercept and search those communications. That might come as a surprise to the millions of Americans who regularly engage in personal or confidential communications with family, friends, business associates, and others overseas. When you pick up the phone to call a family member abroad, there is no reason to believe that your communication is any less private than calling a friend across town. The Supreme Court has certainly never said any such thing. Indeed, Yoo eventually admitted in his memo that the case law did not support the suspicionless interception of “the contents of telephone or other electronic communication[s]” — though he then proceeded to ignore his own conclusion.

But that has not stopped the government from making the same claims in the Section 702 cases now moving through the courts. The government has embraced Yoo’s position, arguing that the privacy interests of US persons in international communications are “significantly diminished, if not completely eliminated,” when those communications are sent to or from foreigners abroad...

https://www.justsecurity.org/30460/obama-administration-embraced-legal-theories-broader-john-yoos/

Is Obama serious about declassifying 'dirty war' docs?

(CNN) Leading up to President Barack Obama's historic trip to Argentina this week, his administration dropped a mini-bombshell: The U.S. government would begin declassifying documents related to Argentina's "dirty war," the period between 1976 and 1983 when more than 20,000 citizens—known as "the missing" ("desaparecidos" in Spanish)—were secretly detained and tortured and murdered, their bodies never recovered.

Visiting Argentina on the 40th anniversary of the March 24, 1976, military coup that marked the beginning of that period was a political gamble—much less perhaps than his journey to the Castros' Havana—but a gamble nonetheless.

It was a watershed moment in a relationship that has been fraught for decades, in part because of a disturbing narrative of collusion between U.S. intelligence agencies and the Argentine military establishment which carried out the killings. Whether the narrative is true or not is almost incidental to its overwhelming power in Argentine society.

As so often happens in diplomacy, Obama was forced to strike a delicate balance on this trip.

For example, accusations of the involvement of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger loom large in the dirty-war narrative, though Kissinger has denied them.

And yet, in public speeches Obama steered clear of mentioning Kissinger or addressing his alleged role. His silence on the subject was deafening.

But Obama also extolled certain Americans who took huge risks to expose the atrocities of the dirty war. Obama praised Patt Derian, the assistant secretary of state for human rights under President Jimmy Carter -- who raised the alarm inside the State Department -- and Tex Harris, the courageous U.S. Embassy officer who documented human rights abuses and identified the missing. The President should be commended for recognizing these heroes.

As a whole, the trip was exactly what Obama does best: From dancing the tango and drinking mate tea to giving a moving tribute to the victims of the dirty war, Obama basked in applause from an Argentine public often critical of American policy, and a new pro-free market, pro-U.S. government...

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/26/opinions/obama-argentina-dirty-war-andersen/index.html

Hillary must answer for Honduras: Another assassination raises more questions about her involvement in coup

This article originally appeared on AlterNet.
The early March assassination of Honduran social movement leader Berta Cáceres provoked international outcry, and calls for 2016 presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton to discuss her support of the country’s 2009 coup, which ousted democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya and escalated the violent repression of human rights defenders.

Now, just days after the Clinton campaign dismissed these demands for accountability as “simply nonsense,” Nelson Garcia, a member of the same indigenous justice organization Cáceres was part of, has been shot to death. An outspoken activist with the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous organizations of Honduras (COPINH), Garcia, 30, was killed by “unknown assailants” this week following the violent eviction of families in the community of Rio Chiquito in Rio Lindo, according to a COPINH statement emailed to AlterNet.

The organization reports that “approximately 100 police, 20 members of the militarized police, 10 soldiers, and several members of the DGIC (investigative police)” participated in the eviction by invading “the territory that had been recuperated by 150 families.” Such testimony points to direct government culpability in the eviction and raises questions about who was behind the assassination.

“Comrade Nelson García was an active militant of COPINH, defending the right to habitation,” said the organization. “We remember him for his active participation in the process of recuperating the land and founding the community of Río Chiquito. We lament this new death, thirteen days after the vile assassination of our General Coordinator Berta Cáceres.”

Cindy Wiesner, national coordinator for the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, told AlterNet that the U.S. should step up and come clean. “Both former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama must take responsibility for the financial and political support to the 2009 military coup and to the current Honduran government that is fueling abuses by military personnel and the use of death squads against organizers, journalists, and students—especially those at the forefront of defending land, territory and natural resources,” said Wiesner...

http://www.salon.com/2016/03/18/hillary_must_answer_for_honduras_partner/

Obama, Pentagon clear way to send US aid to Ukraine neo-Nazis

Despite the unanimous support of US lawmakers for amendments banning aid to the openly neo-Nazi paramilitaries operating in Ukraine, the provisions were removed from the final versions of the Pentagon funding bill and the 2016 omnibus budget.

After the $1.8 trillion budget deal was struck between President Barack Obama and the Republican majority in Congress, the White House praised the removal of numerous “ideological riders,” while Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) trumpeted the $64 million aid for European countries “facing Russian aggression.”

It now appears that one of those riders was the amendment passed unanimously by the House of Representatives last June that would have banned US aid to the notorious neo-Nazi ‘Azov’ battalion. The controversial unit is just one of many employed by the Kiev government against the residents of two eastern regions that have refused to accept the legitimacy of the government installed in the US-backed, February 2014 coup...

https://www.rt.com/usa/329010-ukraine-neo-nazis-aid/

President Barack Obama Denies Knowledge of Aliens

The 10 biggest lies you’ve been told about the Trans-Pacific Partnership

Today, the Senate makes a critical test vote on the Obama Administration’s trade agenda, kicking off a process that the White House hopes to end with the signing of an agreement between 12 nations called the Trans-Pacific Partnership. In preparation for this vote, President Obama has been deliberately antagonizing his critics, mostly liberal Democrats. Senator Elizabeth Warren is “a politician, like everybody else,” Obama said Friday to Yahoo News, who has “got a voice that she wants to get out there,” framing her concerns as insincere self-aggrandizement. Those concerns, Obama added, are “absolutely wrong.”

This is not the first time that Obama and his aides have depicted opposition on trade as deliberate misinformation designed to stir up a left-leaning political base, or generate campaign contributions; my favorite is the claim that Warren is merely trying to energize a non-existent Presidential campaign.

It’s beneath the dignity of the Presidency to so aggressively paint opponents as not just wrong on the facts, but hiding the truth on purpose. Warren has responded without using the same indecorous tactics. Unfortunately, I don’t have the same self-control. So by way of response, here are ten moments where the President or his subordinates have lied – call it “misled” or “offered half-truths” or whatever; but I’m in an ornery mood so let’s just say lied – about his trade agenda:

1. 40 PERCENT: The President and his team have repeatedly described TPP as a deal involving nearly 40 percent of global GDP. This tells only part of the story. First of all, the U.S. by itself represents 22 percent of global GDP; a bill naming a post office would involve that much. Second, we already have free trade agreements with six TPP partners – Canada, Mexico, Australia, Singapore, Chile and Peru – and between them and us, that’s 80 percent of the total GDP in this deal. The vast majority of the rest is represented by Japan, where the average applied tariff is a skinny 1.2 percent, per the World Bank.

You can see this paragraph in graphic form here. The point is that saying TPP is about “40 percent of GDP” intimates that it would massively change the ability to export without tariffs. In reality it would have virtually no significance in opening new markets. To the extent that there’s a barrier in global trade today, it comes from currency manipulation by countries wanting to keep their exports cheap. The TPP has no currency provisions...

http://www.salon.com/2015/05/12/the_10_biggest_lies_youve_been_told_about_the_trans_pacific_partnership/

Special report: America's perpetual state of emergency

WASHINGTON — The United States is in a perpetual state of national emergency.

Thirty separate emergencies, in fact.

An emergency declared by President Jimmy Carter on the 10th day of the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979 remains in effect almost 35 years later.

A post-9/11 state of national emergency declared by President George W. Bush — and renewed six times by President Obama — forms the legal basis for much of the war on terror.

Tuesday, President Obama informed Congress he was extending another Bush-era emergency for another year, saying "widespread violence and atrocities" in the Democratic Republic of Congo "pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the foreign policy of the United States."

Those emergencies, declared by the president by proclamation or executive order, give the president extraordinary powers — to seize property, call up the National Guard and hire and fire military officers at will...

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2014/10/22/president-obama-states-of-emergency/16851775/

An Examination of Obama’s Use of Hidden Hypnosis Techniques in His Speeches

Obama Use of Hidden Hypnosis Techniques in His Speeches

Uh...I said look, when you become president you have to kill people.

"I remember the first conversation I ever had with him, during the campaign. Uh...I said look, when you become president you have to kill people. And are you willing to pull the trigger? Are you willing to do that side of the job? And then he got very silent and looked at me in a very steely kind of way and said, 'I know that. And I can do that."

--Richard Clarke, on talking to Obama prior to his election.

POTUS Loves and Kills Kids

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/kids-killed-drones-us-pushes-back/story?id=19759808

American officials are disputing the findings of a secret Pakistani government report, the first known internal Pakistani assessment of America's lethal drone program, that says U.S. drones killed scores of civilians in a three-year span and that nearly 100 of those were children.

The Pakistani report, obtained and published this week by the Bureau for Investigative Journalism, details 75 drone strikes and their alleged collateral damage between 2006 and 2009. Of 746 people killed by drones in that period, the BIJ report says, at least 147 "are clearly stated to be civilian victims, 94 of those are said to be children."...

http://cryptome.org/2014-info/potus-kids/potus-loves-kills-kids.htm

Survey: U.S. press freedom plunges under Obama to 46th in world, after Romania

The Obama administration’s handling of whistleblower Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency leaks and the investigation of a string of leaks produced a plunge in the country’s rating on press freedoms and government openness, according to a global survey released Tuesday.

The U.S. under President Obama, who once promised to run the “most transparent” administration in the country’s history, fell from 32nd to 46th in the 2014 World Press Freedom Index, a drop of 13 slots. The index, compiled by the press advocacy group Reporters Without Borders, analyzes 180 countries on criteria such as official abuse, media independence and infrastructure to determine how free journalists are to report.

Officials of the group said press freedoms were under attack around the world as governments grow increasingly sophisticated in collecting sensitive data and in tracking down those who leak it.

“Journalists are being caught up in what is, I think, fairly characterized as a rapidly growing surveillance apparatus, and this is happening all over the world,” said Geoffrey King, Internet advocacy coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists...

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/feb/11/press-freedom-suffers-under-obama-global-survey-fi/

Wiki: Barack Obama - Early Life

Obama was born on August 4, 1961,[1] at Kapiʻolani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital (now Kapiʻolani Medical Center for Women and Children) in Honolulu, Hawaii,[2][3][4] and is the first President to have been born in Hawaii.[5] His mother,Stanley Ann Dunham, was born in Wichita, Kansas, and was of mostly English ancestry.[6] His father, Barack Obama, Sr., was a Luo from Nyang’oma Kogelo, Kenya. Obama's parents met in 1960 in a Russian class at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where his father was a foreign student on scholarship.[7][8] The couple married in Wailuku on Maui on February 2, 1961,[9][10] and separated when Obama's mother moved with their newborn son to Seattle, Washington, in late August 1961, to attend the University of Washington for one year. In the meantime, Obama, Sr. completed his undergraduate economics degree in Hawaii in June 1962, then left to attend graduate school at Harvard University on a scholarship. Obama's parents divorced in March 1964.[11] Obama Sr. returned to Kenya in 1964 where he remarried; he visited Barack in Hawaii only once, in 1971.[12] He died in an automobile accident in 1982 when his son was 21 years old.[13]

In 1963, Dunham met Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian East–West Center graduate student in geography at the University of Hawaii, and the couple were married on Molokai on March 15, 1965.[14] After two one-year extensions of his J-1 visa, Lolo returned to Indonesia in 1966, followed sixteen months later by his wife and stepson in 1967, with the family initially living in a Menteng Dalam neighborhood in the Tebet subdistrict of south Jakarta, then from 1970 in a wealthier neighborhood in the Menteng subdistrict of central Jakarta.[15] From ages six to ten, Obama attended local Indonesian-language schools: St. Francis of Assisi Catholic School for two years and Besuki Public School for one and a half years, supplemented by English-language Calvert School homeschooling by his mother.[16]

In 1971, Obama returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents,Madelyn and Stanley Dunham, and with the aid of a scholarship attendedPunahou School, a private college preparatory school, from fifth grade until his graduation from high school in 1979.[17] Obama lived with his mother and sister in Hawaii for three years from 1972 to 1975 while his mother was a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Hawaii.[18] Obama chose to stay in Hawaii with his grandparents for high school at Punahou when his mother and sister returned to Indonesia in 1975 to begin anthropology field work.[19] His mother spent most of the next two decades in Indonesia, divorcing Lolo in 1980 and earning a PhD in 1992, before dying in 1995 in Hawaii following treatment for ovarian cancer and uterine cancer.[20]..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obama#Early_life_and_career

In Obama’s war on leaks, reporters fight back

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Goldman Sachs exec is 20th elite Obama fundraiser nominated for diplomatic post this term

A veteran Goldman Sachs & Co. executive and major fundraiser for President Barack Obama has been nominated as the next ambassador to Canada — the latest in a parade of big-dollar campaign backers slated to represent U.S. interests abroad.

Chicago-based Bruce Heyman raised more than $750,000 for Obama’s committees since 2007, along with his wife, according to a Center for Public Integrity review of records.

Heyman’s nomination is a sort of milestone for the White House: During his second term, Obama has now tapped 20 campaign bundlers for ambassadorships.

Together, these moneymen and women raised at least $13.8 million — and likely much more — for Obama’s political committees since 2007, according to the Center for Public Integrity’s research...

http://www.browardbulldog.org/2013/09/goldman-sachs-exec-is-20th-elite-obama-fundraiser-nominated-for-diplomatic-post-this-term/

Obama Promise To 'Protect Whistleblowers' Just Disappeared From Change.gov

The folks from the Sunlight Foundation have noticed that the Change.gov website, which was set up by the Obama transition team after the election in 2008 has suddenly been scrubbed of all of its original content. They noted that the front page had pointed to the White House website for a while, but you could still access a variety of old material and agendas. They were wondering why the administration would suddenly pull all that interesting archival information... and hit upon a clue. A little bit from the "ethics agenda":

Protect Whistleblowers: Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled. We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance. Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government. Obama will ensure that federal agencies expedite the process for reviewing whistleblower claims and whistleblowers have full access to courts and due process...

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130726/01200123954/obama-promise-to-protect-whistleblowers-just-disappeared-changegov.shtml

Obama's Campaign Pledge To Whistleblowers

"Protect Whistleblowers: Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled. We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance. Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government. Obama will ensure that federal agencies expedite the process for reviewing whistleblower claims and whistleblowers have full access to courts and due process."

http://change.gov/agenda/ethics_agenda/