Amerika, zemlja velika

[Eraserhead]

Lopta je u Kastrovoj polovini.  On mora da odigra sledeci potez jer je Obama odigrao nekoliko.  Ukoliko Kastro nastavi da se pravi Tosa i mlako prima ili odbija pruzenu ruku, sve dalje inicijative mogu da se stopiraju i ostanu zamrznute onoliko dugo koliko su i diplomatski odnosi bili u raskidu.  Mislim da ce tek sledeci kubanski lider, koji je manje opterecen nasledjem revolucije i koji nije bio rodjen u vreme americke intervencije u Zalivu svinja i u vreme Raketne krize, napraviti pozitivne korake prema SAD.

 

Dosta je Raul vec napravio. Posebno ako se uzme u obzir to da je on bio ova rigidnija sovjetska struja u vreme revolucije. Najveci trgovinski partner (Venecuela) im je u raspadu. Uglavnom uvoze hranu a izvoze sirovine. Karaktyerise ih dosta niska produktivnost. Kuba iz ovog aranzmana ima da dobije vise nego USA, a ako pametno odigra moze da kapitalizuje na egzoticnoj reputaciji koju ima u Americi. Ostaje da vidimo da li je Raul pametan da to izvede ili kao sto ti rece mora neko mladji i manje opterecen. 

[Dimitrije]

Bojim se da Raul Kastro nece nista mnogo dalje da cini da ne bude optuzen za "izdaju revolucije".  Ne znam da li je u kubanskom politbirou jos uvek revolucionarni kadar, ali ako jeste nema tu mrdanjca osim ako mogu da ucare od davnja dozvola za gradnju turistickih kampova/hotela za Gringose kao sto ih imaju za Kanadjene.  Post-revolucionarne vodje (birokrate i tehnokrate) koje ce da dodju posle odlaska Kastovih i njihovih kompanjersoa na onaj svet ce poceti da daju ustupke SAD i zeleno svetlo americkom kapitalu za novu invaziju ostrva.  Naravno da medju tim novim moze da bude neki Ugo Cavez ali nadam se da su SAD politicari naucili do sada kako treba da se odnose sa ljudima kao sto je Cavez.

[Gandalf]

Pa sto nije otisao onda 2012 da bustuje svoje izborne sanse nego 2016?

ne bih rekao da bi mu ovakvo sto popravilo sanse na izborima '12-e. oni koji bi pozdravili su svakako glasali za njega. pride sto je oprezan covek, igra siguricu.

[Budja]

ne bih rekao da bi mu ovakvo sto popravilo sanse na izborima '12-e. oni koji bi pozdravili su svakako glasali za njega. pride sto je oprezan covek, igra siguricu.

 

Dakle, ipak nije bilo low hanging fruit?

Bio neki rizik.

 

Mislim, nije mi ideja da se preganjam, i svakako long overdue otvaranje prema Kubi nema istu tezinu i rizik kao otvaranje prema Iranu, ali je tesko braniti tezu da je poseta Kubi jednako nerizicna kao susret sa prehajpovanim manekenom Trudoom.

[Gandalf]

Dakle, ipak nije bilo low hanging fruit?

Bio neki rizik.

low hanging fruit ne iskljucuje rizik. za Obamu pre 4-5 godina mali, sada mozda i nikakav.

Edited March 25, 2016 by Gandalf

[Weenie Pooh]

Ako se sećate one priče iz decembra, gde pandur prilazi slupanom automobilu i mrtav hladan upucava čoveka koji se izvlači iz istog - ovo je nastavak snimka gde traži od upucanog da izađe iz auta i ubeđuje ga da nije upucan Posle njegov kolega pita žrtvu ko ju je upucao, on kaže onaj tamo, ovaj kaže "that cop did not shoot you". Neverovatni su ljudi.

 

 

Kažu da je jedanaest minuta tvrdio da ga nije upucao. Kao ono kad malo dete razbije nešto pred tobom, a onda te pogleda u oči i kaže "nisam ja!"

[WTF]

Ne brini ti o tome, sad ce Donald Trump da kaze da je to 1 divna stvar i sve ce da bude OK.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[ObiW]

Dosta je Raul vec napravio. Posebno ako se uzme u obzir to da je on bio ova rigidnija sovjetska struja u vreme revolucije. 

Da li je on bio rigidnija struja ili je to bio Kastro?

 

 

 

 

In a full page column titled "Brother Obama," published in the Cuban communist-party newspaper Granma, the former Cuban president rejected Obama's visit and words of reconciliation.

"We don't need the empire to give us anything," Castro wrote, referring to the United States, in his acidly critical and rambling column.

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/28/politics/cuba-fidel-castro-blasts-obama-trip/index.html

[Takeshi]

to je prava iskrena drzavna uprava.  :D

 

 

 

Earlier today, the official twitter account for the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs offered a bit of advice to ugly Americans looking for sex overseas: There’s a reason all the locals keep buying you drinks—and it’s not because they find you attractive. (You’re not.)

Apparently, the (now deleted) was all part of a (poorly conceived) “#springbreakingbadly” campaign.

[Hella]

možda je ovo štokantno za one koji već nisu uočili radnu šemu saudijskih pudli posle svakog alahuekberaškog raskomadavanja civila kada se četvoronošci promptno upinju ko gladan belolistićarit da nas nabede kako je ono religija mira te kako ovo nema veze s onim te da su najveće žrtve jadni muhamedanci a najveća pretnja čovečanstvu islamofobija

 

uzrok te jel fobije nije pristojno spominjat jer bi se onda svašta moglo izbunarit

 

How Many American Politicians Do the Saudis Own?
By Michael Walsh March 31, 2016

 

A nonprofit with ties to Senator John McCain received a $1 million donation from the government of Saudi Arabia in 2014, according to documents filed with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service.

 

The Arizona Republican has strictly honorary roles with the McCain Institute for International Leadership, a program at Arizona State University, and its fundraising arm, the McCain Institute Foundation, according to his office. But McCain has appeared at fundraising events for the institute and his Senate campaign’s fundraiser is listed in its tax returns as the contact person for the foundation.

 

Though federal law strictly bans foreign contributions to electoral campaigns, the restriction doesn’t apply to nonprofits engaged in policy, even those connected to a sitting lawmaker.

 

Groups critical of the current ethics laws say that McCain’s nonprofit effectively gives Saudi Arabia -- or any other well-heeled interests -- a means of making large donations to politicians it hopes to influence. “Foreign governments are prohibited from financing candidate campaigns and political parties,” Craig Holman, the government affairs lobbyist for ethics watchdog Public Citizen, said. “Funding the lawmakers’ nonprofit organizations is the next best thing.”

 

Read more: https://pjmedia.com/trending/2016/03/31/how-many-american-politicians-do-the-saudis-own/

Edited April 1, 2016 by Hella

[iDemo]

 

A nonprofit with ties to Senator John McCain received a $1 million donation from the government of Saudi Arabia in 2014, according to documents filed with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service.

 

...

 

Though federal law strictly bans foreign contributions to electoral campaigns, the restriction doesn’t apply to nonprofits engaged in policy, even those connected to a sitting lawmaker.

...

“Funding the lawmakers’ nonprofit organizations is the next best thing.”

 

Sve legalno™, legitmno™ i registrovano i gde treba i kako treba, ne? 

[Gojko & Stojko]

Par izvoda iz NYB prikaza knjige Čarlija Sevidža "Power Wars: Inside Obama's Post-9/11 Presidency":

 

...

 

Savage delves deeply into the administration’s legal debates about the War Powers Act during the Libya intervention in 2011, as the campaign approached the sixty-day deadline after which the act requires presidents to get approval from Congress. But he never touches on the decisions to launch the intervention in the first place and then escalate it into a de facto (even if unacknowledged) war to bring about regime change. This was surely one of the biggest blunders of Obama’s foreign policy: the campaign left Libya a fractured and chaotic haven for terrorists, and the escalation probably doomed any future UN-backed humanitarian interventions. Here, focusing on the lawyers rather than the planners seems mistaken.

 

Even in the Libya case, though, the legal story matters. Savage depicts lawyers scrambling for a legal theory to avoid bringing Libya before a skeptical Congress at a moment when France and the UK were counting on US military help. Tellingly, the lawyers didn’t think the solution they eventually came up with was the best reading of the law, merely that it was “legally available”—a dubious category that apparently means little more than “not laughably off the wall.” It was the closest they ever came to acting as Dr. Yes. Readers might well wonder why legal arguments that are not right but merely “available” deserve any of the respect we accord to law. And one can’t help wondering whether some congressional skepticism was exactly what was needed.

 

On other issues the legal story clearly deserves emphasis, because the contours of the law critically shaped the policy. This is most notable in decisions about who can or cannot be targeted for drone strikes. Lethal drones are weapons of war, not of law enforcement, so the questions of where and with whom the United States is at war are decisive. Obama’s lawyers interpreted Congress’s 2001 authorization to use military force to apply not only to al-Qaeda but also to “associated forces”; but not every jihadist group is associated with al-Qaeda. In 2010, Jeh Johnson, then general counsel of the Defense Department, concluded that al-Shabaab in Somalia was not an associated force. He “stunned his Pentagon colleagues” by countermanding a strike that Special Operations Forces wished to launch against Shabaab militants. This was an example where the law made a real difference.

 

...

 

Barack Obama took office promising to end the perceived lawlessness of the Bush administration, manifested most vividly in the torture of detainees at CIA black sites. True to his promise, on his third day in office Obama issued an executive order ending torture and revoking all the Bush administration legal opinions that authorized it. His supporters were elated.

 

Three weeks later, though, Obama’s lawyers entered a California courtroom and, to the surprise of the judges, defended one of the Bush administration’s most aggressive tactics, the invocation of state secrets, in order to dismiss a lawsuit that might expose ugly facts about CIA cooperation with other nations in the program of rendition and torture. Much of the cheering stopped. As it happened, Savage tells us, nobody had informed the president about the Justice Department’s decision to maintain the Bush legal position, and Obama was furious. But evidently he got over his fury, for the Justice Department continued to assert the state secrets defense in that case and all other pending cases where the Bush administration had invoked it.

 

Gradually, other points of continuity between the national security policies of Bush’s second term and the Obama administration became evident. Obama revived the military commissions charged with conducting trials of detainees. He continued to classify the struggle against al-Qaeda as a war to be fought under military rules. He also increased drone strikes, maintained the NSA’s secret surveillance programs, and prosecuted whistleblowers with greater zeal than any administration in history. What happened?

 

Savage offers an explanation. Obama’s supporters on the left thought he was a civil libertarian, but they were wrong. What Obama cares about, Savage argues, is not civil liberties, but the rule of law. Confusing the two is understandable, for both are central to American constitutionalism. But they are fundamentally different. Civil liberties are substantive rights; the rule of law is about legal legitimacy. What Obama’s team aimed to do was provide a firm legal foundation for his policies, including those that civil libertarians oppose—policies like preventive detention, targeted killings, and extensive surveillance.

 

Savage’s diagnosis rings true in many ways. Again and again, we read about the Obama lawyers agonizing over legal arguments and sweating to get them right. That’s the rule of law at work. Obama and his team wanted, as a matter of principle, to avoid Bush’s swashbuckling use of the commander in chief’s authority, and they sometimes bent over backward to find well-grounded alternatives.

 

Mostly they found them. Savage quotes CIA Director (and former Deputy Homeland Security Adviser) John Brennan: “I have never found a case that our legal authorities, or legal interpretations that came out from that lawyers group, prevented us from doing something that we thought was in the best interest of the United States to do.” Savage raises a very good question, though:

 

If the end result was often the same—the president can do something specific he wants to do—does it make a difference if his lawyers got there by tossing off a five-page memo or by agonizing through a hundred-page memo?

The answer to this seemingly rhetorical question is yes. Taking careful account of legal process in making decisions rules out the most extreme and patently illegal options long before officials ever get to the stage of formally asking for a legal memo. Meeting legal standards disciplines and shapes official debates over what actually is in the national interest. That makes it less surprising that the option ultimately chosen usually gets the approval of legal advisers. The more cynical answer that the legal process makes only a fig leaf’s difference is largely untrue.

 

 

...

 

In a 2013 congressional hearing, a representative asked Robert Litt, the top lawyer for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, whether he really thought the NSA’s program of bulk surveillance of telephone calls in the US “could be indefinitely kept secret from the American people.” Litt responded, “Well, we tried.”

 

Obama promised to run the most transparent administration in history, and in one way he kept his promise. In 2014 the government classified only one fourth the number of secrets as the yearly average under the Bush administration. But in other important respects, Obama perpetuated the Bush administration’s desire for secrecy. Notably, the bulk collection of metadata by the NSA was approved under secret legal interpretations that were reluctantly made public following the Snowden revelations. These interpretations were not merely secret; they were flatly contrary to what many people supposed the law meant.

 

Secret law undermines the rule of law, as legal theorists beginning with Kant have insisted: citizens must be able to know the law under which they are being governed. This is a hard lesson for officials to accept. When journalists won a Freedom of Information Act case to gain the release of secret white papers about the law governing targeted killings, Obama’s White House Counsel Neil Eggleston “swiftly issued instructions to the Obama legal team:…no more white papers.”

 

Furthermore, the Obama Justice Department prosecuted, in Savage’s words, “three times as many leak-related cases as all previous presidents combined.” Some, such as the cases of Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning and Edward Snowden, involved major leaks. Others, however, did not. Former NSA official Thomas Drake was prosecuted because he was a source for news exposés of waste and mismanagement. After years, the government acknowledged that it had no case against Drake; but before admitting that, prosecutors wishing to save face unethically got Drake to accept a last-minute plea bargain for a misdemeanor. At the sentencing hearing, the judge ripped into the prosecutors:

 

I think the average American citizen would take great caution to say, okay, let me get this straight, my home is searched, and three years later I’m finally indicted, and then a year after that the government drops the whole case. That’s four years of hell that a citizen goes through…. I find that unconscionable.

Eric Holder defended the leak indictments by arguing that each was justified on the merits, which was plainly untrue in Drake’s case. But Holder’s defense also ducks the larger question. Previous administrations had refrained from cracking down on leakers, even when the government might have won on the merits; why not the Obama administration as well? Savage reports that there was no conscious policy driving the prosecutions for leaking, merely a set of unconnected decisions. I find this is a bit hard to credit, because the early prosecutions were well publicized and controversial; not to back off in later ones would have been a policy decision. A 2012 Defense Department document made it clear that, for at least some in government, the point was harsh deterrence: “Hammer this fact home,” the document said. “Leaking is tantamount to aiding the enemies of the United States.” That is a chilling mind-set: anyone who reveals a government secret is a traitor. It bespeaks a sense of entitlement to operate in absolute secrecy that is as foreign to the rule of law as it is to civil liberties.

 

At the same time, high-level officials who leaked information were not investigated. That includes CIA and Pentagon officials who cooperated in the film Zero Dark Thirty and were criticized by the Pentagon’s inspector general for unauthorized disclosures, and a former vice-chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who “became a prime suspect as a source for…reporting about the cyberattack on Iranian nuclear equipment.” It need hardly be said that such double standards are antithetical to the rule of law.

 

 

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[189-]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings/

[Anduril]

Super text, Gojko. Postuj cesce - nedostajes.

[Gojko & Stojko]

  9/11 court row reveals Saudis and Americans trapped in a most unhappy marriage

 

April 22, 2016 - 3:04PM

Paul McGeough Chief foreign correspondent

 

Washington: So that's what the Saudis are banging on about. Almost out of the blue and inferring a need to inflict great pain on Washington, they threaten to pull hundreds of billions of dollars from the American economy – and it fell to the US Supreme Court to reveal precisely why the royals of Riyadh are in such a lather.

 

On Wednesday, the court ruled that the families of hundreds of American victims of terrorist attacks, including the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut and the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in eastern Saudi Arabia, were entitled to collect about $2.6 billion of Iranian funds snap-frozen by economic sanctions – on the grounds that Tehran supports terrorism.

 

Tough exchanges: US President Barack Obama with Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir in Riyadh this week. Photo: AP

Chief Justice John Roberts dissented, declaring: "Hereafter, with this court's seal of approval, Congress can unabashedly pick winners and losers in particular pending cases."

 

The Saudis might have good reason to believe they are on their way to becoming one of Roberts' congressionally-designated "losers".

 

Saudi Arabia has always seemed to be utterly protected from allegations about its role in the 9/11 attacks, as much by a 1976 US law that granted foreign governments immunity as by the historical coziness of Riyadh's relationship with Washington.

 

But there are signs that the White House might soon succumb to pressure to release a highly classified 28-page excerpt of the 858-page Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 2001, which has been suppressed, to save Riyadh – and Washington – from embarrassment over possible Saudi ties to the attacks that go beyond the fact that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens.

 

These developments come on the back of a sizeable body of law, dubbed "lawfare", that has evolved in the US since about 2000, by which parties that have helped designated terror groups, no matter how tangentially - banks, auditors, charities and the like - can be held to be liable for the actions of the group.

 

At work in all this was the agile mind of lawyer Nathan Lewin, who in reading a little-used 1992 law which allowed actions against terrorists who had attacked Americans abroad, concluded that it had not been fully understood – rather than being confined to suing the actual gunman or bomber in an attack, Lewin argued that any individual or group that had aided in any way a terror group that had killed an American abroad could be held responsible.

 

Such is the congressional support, both senior and bipartisan, for the bid to make Saudi interests accountable for 9/11, that the White House has unleashed a ferocious lobbying effort to thwart it - issuing the thinly veiled threat of a presidential veto should the bill land on Barack Obama's desk. Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir swooped into Washington in March to warn individual members of Congress of Riyadh's proposed economic assault on the US should the bill become law.

 

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, a government victims' compensation fund paid about $US6 billion to 2880 families of the dead and more than $US1 billion to the injured. But the families of more than 40 victims opted to take legal action against various parties, including Saudi Arabia, instead of accepting the government's payouts.

 

Almost half of the Senate - 46 members - signed a letter of demand to then president George W. Bush for the release of the suppressed 28 pages on the Saudi links to the 9/11 attacks.

 

Barack Obama arrives on Air Force One at King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh. King Salman was not on hand to greet him. Photo: AP

 

At the time, New York Democratic senator Charles Schumer said: "Keeping this material classified only strengthens the theory that some in the US government are hell bent on covering up for the Saudis." 

 

The 9/11 Commission report said of the Saudis and 9/11: "We have found no evidence that the Saudi Government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded the [al-Qaeda] organisation."

 

As one commentator observed this week, that's a narrowly tailored sentence.

 

 

Awkward: Barack Obama with Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz and Bahrain's King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa (far right) and Oman's deputy prime minister in Riyadh. Photo: AP

 

According to people who have read them, the 28 pages set out links between the hijackers and a Saudi network that helped some of them when they arrived in California. In particular, it has been alleged that two senior Saudi princes had been making payments to Osama bin Laden since a 1995 bombing in Riyadh, in which five American military advisers died.

 

In a 2002 piece in The Wall Street Journal, Simon Henderson - an analyst for pro-Israel think tank the Washington Institute for Near East Policy - wrote: "US and British officials [told] me the names of the two senior princes. They were using Saudi official money - not their own - to pay off Bin Laden to cause trouble elsewhere but not in the kingdom. The amounts involved were 'hundreds of millions of dollars' and it continued after September 11."

 

When I interviewed former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal in Riyadh in 2002, he denied that bin Laden was in the service of Saudi intelligence, but pressed on who did deal with al-Qaeda's leader, he told me: "Our intelligence and other departments had nothing to do with him - he had access to [high] officials because of his family's standing in the kingdom."

 

This week, The Atlantic reported that the 28 pages were said to shed light on Saudi involvement – possibly "by lower-level Saudi officials, or by elements of the government, but not the government 'as an institution'.''

 

And alluding to the 28 pages this week, Obama's senior adviser Ben Rhodes told CNN's David Axelrod that "there were a number of very wealthy individuals in Saudi Arabia who would contribute, sometimes directly, to extremist groups, sometimes to charities that kind of, ended up being ways to launder money to these groups. So a lot of the funding … the seed money if you will, for what became al-Qaeda, came out of Saudi Arabia."

 

Realpolitik still underpins the US-Saudi relationship, but a particular problem has been Obama's inability to abide by the sage advice of Riyadh's legendary ambassador to Washington, Prince Bandar bin Sultan: "Make your words soft and sweet – you never know when you have to eat them."

 

As Obama reportedly said of the Saudi relationship in conversation with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, "it's complicated". Even before Obama was elected, at a rally in 2002, he referred to the Saudis as "our so- called allies". In recent weeks, he dismissed the Saudis and other Arab Gulf monarchies as "free riders" with no "skin in the game". He complains that Saudi policies fuel anti-US terror and contribute to chaos in the region.

 

Obama has doubly infuriated Riyadh – one, by concluding the nuclear deal with Iran; and, two, by acknowledging Iran as a legitimate regional broker, in arguing that Tehran and Riyadh should "share" the region. As Saudis see things, Obama betrayed them by pulling the mat from under Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak in 2011; and again, by allowing Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad to survive – if only for the time being.

 

On the other hand, as much as the Saudis offend democratic and human rights sensibilities and despite the soaring rhetoric of Obama's 2009 speech in Cairo, the President subscribes to the realist school of foreign policy that says Washington and Riyadh need each other.

 

Under Obama, the US has sold Riyadh weapons worth almost $US100 billion, more than any of his predecessors; and despite increasing US energy self-sufficiency, he knows that dozens of allied economies depend on Riyadh's control of world oil prices.

 

Importantly too, Riyadh still depends on Washington for security. As the Saudis are demonstrating in the Yemen war, they couldn't fight their way out of a wet paper bag; they're apparently useful in sharing intelligence, but skittish and self-serving in their handling of conflict and tension in the Middle East; and they are not giving Obama what the US wants in the war on the so-called Islamic State.

 

The bid for a special law to end Saudi immunity in US courts burst into the news in the last days of the New York presidential primaries – and the competing candidates fell over themselves to endorse it. In Congress, the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act has the backing of 12 Republicans and 10 Democrats - almost double the support it had last year.

 

On arriving in Riyadh on Wednesday, Obama was snubbed. The 80-year-old King Salman had been happy to travel to the airport earlier that day to welcome Gulf leaders, but he was pointedly absent as Obama alighted from Air Force One.

 

As Obama runs out the clock on his presidency, the Saudis are talking tough – whether or not they can continue to do so remains to be seen.

 

Regional experts resorted to marriage as a metaphor. "Despite all the differences, Saudi Arabia and America are not getting divorced – we need each other," former White House adviser and CIA analyst Bruce Riedel said.  It was an "estrangement", not a rupture, according to Fawaz Gerges of the London School of Economics; and a report in Foreign Policy was headlined "The Long Divorce".

 

Economists say a Saudi retreat from the US would hurt the kingdom significantly more than it would the republic. But it's possible too that the threat is a bid for cover for a strategy already in place - according to the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority, there has been a sharp falling-off in Riyadh's foreign security holdings, from $US533 billion at the end of 2014, to $US395 billion in February 2016.

 

The Saudi star is waning in the US - despite the princes' retention of what The Washington Post describes as a "vast" network of PR and lobbying firms in the US. But in America there are few hot-button issues like 9/11 and there are few lobbies with more power than the families bereaved in that atrocity.

 

Former US senator Bob Graham put it bluntly: "They are so fearful of what would emerge if there was to be a full trial … the Saudis know what they did; we know what they did."

 

 

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