Obama Denies Role in Government
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—President Obama used his weekly radio address on Saturday to reassure the American people that he has “played no role whatsoever” in the U.S. government over the past four years.
“Right now, many of you are angry at the government, and no one is angrier than I am,” he said. “Quite frankly, I am glad that I have had no involvement in such an organization.”
The President’s outrage only increased, he said, when he “recently became aware of a part of that government called the Department of Justice.”
“The more I learn about the activities of these individuals, the more certain I am that I would not want to be associated with them,” he said. “They sound like bad news.”
Mr. Obama closed his address by indicating that beginning next week he would enforce what he called a “zero tolerance policy on governing.”
“If I find that any members of my Administration have had any intimate knowledge of, or involvement in, the workings of the United States government, they will be dealt with accordingly,” he said.
Source: http://www.newyorker.com
Oh Look, It’s Nixon!
President Barack Obama will not cooperate in a “partisan fishing expedition” over who knew what and when about revelations that groups seeking tax-exempt status were subject to extra Internal Revenue Service scrutiny.
“We are going to work with Congress, as the president said, in legitimate oversight,” Dan Pfeiffer, a senior adviser to Obama, said today on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” program. “What we’re not going to participate in is a partisan fishing expedition designed to distract from the real issues at hand.”
With all due respect Mr. President (and that would be “none” as far as this goes, if you care) this isn’t under your control and never was.
That’s why we have a government with checks and balances, and three distinct branches. You only head up one of them. The others are equals to you, not your subordinates.
Congress has every right to subpoena whatever it wants. You can try to fight that but there is no valid “executive privilege” claim available when it comes to abuses by the IRS.
Finally, I will remind you of this:
Article 2
Using the powers of the office of President of the United States, Richard M. Nixon, in violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in disregard of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has repeatedly engaged in conduct violating the constitutional rights of citizens, impairing the due and proper administration of justice and the conduct of lawful inquiries, or contravening the laws governing agencies of the executive branch and the purposed of these agencies.
This conduct has included one or more of the following:
- He has, acting personally and through his subordinates and agents, endeavoured to obtain from the Internal Revenue Service, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, confidential information contained in income tax returns for purposed not authorized by law, and to cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigations to be intitiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner.
- He misused the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Secret Service, and other executive personnel, in violation or disregard of the constitutional rights of citizens, by directing or authorizing such agencies or personnel to conduct or continue electronic surveillance or other investigations for purposes unrelated to national security, the enforcement of laws, or any other lawful function of his office; he did direct, authorize, or permit the use of information obtained thereby for purposes unrelated to national security, the enforcement of laws, or any other lawful function of his office; and he did direct the concealment of certain records made by the Federal Bureau of Investigation of electronic surveillance.
- He has, acting personally and through his subordinates and agents, in violation or disregard of the constitutional rights of citizens, authorized and permitted to be maintained a secret investigative unit within the office of the President, financed in part with money derived from campaign contributions, which unlawfully utilized the resources of the Central Intelligence Agency, engaged in covert and unlawful activities, and attempted to prejudice the constitutional right of an accused to a fair trial.
- He has failed to take care that the laws were faithfully executed by failing to act when he knew or had reason to know that his close subordinates endeavoured to impede and frustrate lawful inquiries by duly constituted executive, judicial and legislative entities concerning the unlawful entry into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, and the cover-up thereof, and concerning other unlawful activities including those relating to the confirmation of Richard Kleindienst as Attorney General of the United States, the electronic surveillance of private citizens, the break-in into the offices of Dr. Lewis Fielding, and the campaign financing practices of the Committee to Re-elect the President.
- In disregard of the rule of law, he knowingly misused the executive power by interfering with agencies of the executive branch, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Criminal Division, and the Office of Watergate Special Prosecution Force, of the Department of Justice, and the Central Intelligence Agency, in violation of his duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.
In all of this, Richard M. Nixon has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and subversive of constitutional government, to the great prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States.
Wherefore Richard M. Nixon, by such conduct, warrants impeachment and trial, and removal from office.
Care to do it again Mr. President?
I’ll remind you, Mr. Obama, that this is not under your control either.
Lawyer who drafted White House drone policy says US would rather kill suspects than send them to Guantanamo Bay
The lawyer who first drew up White House policy on lethal drone strikes has accused the Obama administration of overusing them because of its reluctance to capture prisoners that would otherwise have to be sent to Guantánamo Bay.John Bellinger, who was responsible for drafting the legal framework for targeted drone killings while working for George W Bush after 9/11, said he believed their use had increased since because President Obama was unwilling to deal with the consequences of jailing suspected al-Qaida members.”This government has decided that instead of detaining members of al-Qaida [at Guantánamo] they are going to kill them,” he told a conference at the Bipartisan Policy Center.Obama this week pledged to renew efforts to shut down the jail but has previously struggled to overcome congressional opposition, in part due to US disagreements over how to handle suspected terrorists and insurgents captured abroad.An estimated 4,700 people have now been killed by some 300 US drone attacks in four countries, and the question of the programme’s status under international and domestic law remains highly controversial.
Bellinger, a former legal adviser to the State Department and the National Security Council, insisted that the current administration was justified under international law in pursuing its targeted killing strategy in countries such as Pakistan and Yemen because the US remained at war.
“We are about the only country in the world that thinks we are in an armed conflict with al-Qaida,” Bellinger said. “We really need to get on top of this and explain to our allies why it is legal and why it is permissible under international law,” he added.
“These drone strikes are causing us great damage in the world, but on the other hand if you are the president and you do nothing to stop another 9/11 then you also have a problem,” Bellinger said.
Nevertheless, the legal justification for drone strikes has become so stretched that critics fear it could now encourage other countries to claim they were acting within international law if they deployed similar technology.
A senior lawyer now advising Barack Obama on the use of drone strikes conceded that the administration’s definition of legality could even apply in the hypothetical case of an al-Qaida drone attack against military targets on US soil.
Philip Zelikow, a member of the White House Intelligence Advisory Board, said the government was relying on two arguments to justify its drone policy under international law: that the US remained in a state of war with al-Qaida and its affiliates, or that those individuals targeted in countries such as Pakistan were planning imminent attacks against US interests.
When asked by the Guardian whether such arguments would apply in reverse in the unlikely event that al-Qaida deployed drone technology against military targets in the US, Zelikow accepted they would.
“Yes. But it would be an act of war, and they would suffer the consequences,” he said during the debate at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington. “Countries under attack are the ones that get to decide whether they are at war or not,” added Zelikow.
Hina Shamsi, a director at the American Civil Liberties Union, warned that the issue of legal reciprocity was not just a hypothetical concern: “The use of this technology is spreading and we have to think about what we would say if other countries used drones for targeted killing programmes.”
“Few thing are more likely to undermine our legitimacy than the perception that we are not abiding by the rule of law or are indifferent to civilian casualties,” she added.
Zelikow, a former diplomat who also works as a professor of history at the University of Virginia, said he believed the US was in a stronger position when it focused on using drones only against those directly in the process of planning or carrying out attacks.
“Bush badly mangled the definition of enemy combatant to expand to anyone who might be giving support, which was very pernicious,” he said.
Zelikow – stressing he was speaking in a personal capacity, not on behalf of the administration – added that he felt the US should be clearer in explaining that its targeted killing programme was responding to specific threats against national security.
• This article was corrected on 2 May to attribute to Philip Zelikow, not John Bellinger, the assertion that “countries under attack get to decide whether they are at war”. Bellinger said the US needs to “explain to our allies” why drone strikes are legal.
Boston bombers’ uncle married daughter of top CIA official
The uncle of the two suspected Boston bombers in last week’s attack, Ruslan Tsarni, was married to the daughter of former top CIA official Graham Fuller
The discovery that Uncle Ruslan Tsarni had spy connections that go far deeper than had been previously known is ironic, especially since the mainstrean media’s focus yesterday was on a feverish search to find who might have recruited the Tsarnaev brothers.
The chief suspect was a red-haired Armenian exorcist. They were fingering a suspect who may not, in fact, even exist.
It was like blaming one-armed hippies on acid for killing your wife.
Ruslan Tsarni married the daughter of former top CIA official Graham Fuller, who spent 20 years as operations officer in Turkey, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Hong Kong. In 1982 Fuller was appointed the National Intelligence Officer for Near East and South Asia at the CIA, and in 1986, under Ronald Reagan, he became the Vice-Chairman of the National Intelligence Council, with overall responsibility for national level strategic forecasting.
At the time of their marriage, Ruslan Tsarni was known as Ruslan Tsarnaev, the same last name as his nephews Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the alleged bombers.
It is unknown when he changed his last name to Tsarni.
What is known is that sometime in the early 1990’s, while she was a graduate student in North Carolina, and he was in law school at Duke, Ruslan Tsarnaev met and married Samantha Ankara Fuller, the daughter of Graham and Prudence Fuller of Rockville Maryland. Her middle name suggests a reference to one of her father’s CIA postings.
The couple divorced sometime before 2004.
Today Ms. Fuller lives abroad, and is a director of several companies pursuing strategies to increase energy production from clean-burning and renewable resources.
On a more ominous note, Graham Fuller was listed as one of the American Deep State rogues on Sibel Edmonds’ State Secrets Privilege Gallery,. Edmonds explained it featured subjects of FBI investigations she became aware of during her time as an FBI translator.
Criminal activities were being protected by claims of State Secrets, she asserted. After Attorney General John Ashcroft went all the way to the Supreme Court to muzzle her under a little-used doctrine of State Secrets, she put up twenty-one photos, with no names.
One of them was Graham Fuller.
“Congress of Chechen International” c/o Graham Fuller
A story about a 
Chechen oik exec/uncle pairing up with a top CIA official who once served as CIA Station Chief in Kabul sounds like a pitch for a bad movie.
But the two men may have been in business together.
In 1995, Tsarnaev incorporated the Congress of Chechen International Organizations in Maryland, using as the address listed on incorporation documents 11114 Whisperwood Ln, in Rockville Maryland, the home address of his then-father-in-law.
It is just eight miles up the Washington National Pike from the Montgomery Village home where “Uncle Ruslan” met—and apparently wowed, the press after the attack in Boston.
The Washington Post yesterday called him a “media maven,” while nationally syndicated Washington Post columnist Ester Cepeda , in a piece with the headline “The Wise Words of Uncle Ruslan” opined that he was her choice for “an award for bravery in the face of adversity.”
Success through indirection, mis-direction, redirection, and protection
Uncle Ruslan’s spy connections go far deeper than was already known, which was that he spent two years working in Kazakhstan for USAID.
But the mainstream media was lookng the other way.
Under the headline “Did ‘Misha’ influence Tsarnaevs? In Watertown, doubts,” USA Today reported: “Misha. A new name has emerged in the Boston Marathon bombing case—one familiar to the family of the two young men accused of the atrocity and apparently of interest to the Russian and American security services as well.”
Ruslan Tsarni was the first to bring up the supposed man’s supposed name. Or rather, he brought up a first name: Misha. But it was enough. We were off to the races…
Attention all cars: Be on lookout for chubby Armenian exorcist
Tsarni described Misha to CNN as being “chubby, a big guy, big 
mouth presenting himself with some kind of abilities as exorcist . . . having some part-time job in one of the stores, not married. All of the qualifications of a loser, just another big mouth.”
According to Uncle Ruslan, Misha was the man who over a considerable period of time had radicalized Tamerlan.
It seemed strange, then, that in contrast to his “you are there” verbal picture of the man, even with all his supposed concerns, and given his high level of education and abundant resources (Big Sky Energy was paying him in excess of $200,00 a year, according to documents filed with the SEC) Ruslan had somehow never found out just who the bad guy was.
He never got a name, something that in spook-dom is considered something of a faux pas. Then again, no one else had either.
Worse, Tsarni’s vivid description seemed to be taken from personal observation, from, in other words…real life. But that isn’t possible. Tsarni had stated he hadn’t been physically in the presence of his Boston relatives since December 2005. And Misha, if he existed, didn’t show up on the scene until 2008 at the earliest.
Still, just a few days later, the entire family began chiming in. Misha anecdotes were flying fast & furious, and the nation’s scribblers were busy uncritically scribbling down their every word.
Maybe their Twitter account got hacked again?
No performance was nearly as masterful, however, as that of the Associated Press.
“Bomb suspect influenced by mysterious radical,” reported the Associated Press.
“Tamerlan’s relationship with Misha could be a clue in understanding the motives behind his religious transformation and, ultimately, the attack itself,” reported the Associate Press. Only to take it all back in the very next line.
“Two U.S. officials say he had no tie to terrorist groups.”
The AP’s “story” about the mysterious “Misha” was 1145 words, long enough for an editor to squeeze in a caveat.
“It was not immediately clear whether the FBI has spoken to Misha or was attempting to,” the national wire service reported. “Efforts over several days by The Associated Press to identify and interview Misha have been unsuccessful.”
The big difference: when you do it, its conspiracy theory. When we do it, its informed speculation.
In any other context, this might be seen as the rankest kind of “conspiracy theory.” But, apparently, when the Associated Press does it, its news.
Then Uncle Ruslan made a clear mis-step.
“An uncle of the alleged bombers claims that Misha, an Armenian convert to Islam, had a huge influence on the elder brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Describing him as an “Armenia exorcist, Tsarni said, “Somehow he just took his brain.”
Armenians are a deeply-rooted Christian community, which is proud of the fact that their country was the first in the world to adopt Christianity as state religion in 301 AD.
Moreover this is the week every year when they remember the Armenian Holocaust, when as many as 1,000,000 Armenians were slaughtered by Turkish Muslims.
In the large and close-knit Boston Armenian community, a red-bearded Armenian named Misha becoming a radicalized Muslim would stand out.
“I’ve never heard of him, nor has anyone that I know,” Hilda Avedissian, executive director at the Armenian Cultural & Educational Centre.
So what if the guy was involved with biggest bank fraud in history?
“For an Armenian to convert to Islam is like finding a unicorn in a field,” Nerses Zurabyan, 32, an information technology director who lives in nearby Cambridge told USA Today.
The report reveals that the bomber’s Uncle, made famous for his outspoken condemnation of his nephew’s which aired repeatedly on international news networks, is a well-connected oil executive who at one point worked for a Halliburton shell company used as a front to obtain oil contracts from the Kazakh State.
Ruslon Tsarni was implicated in an investigation involving the laundering and theft of $6 billion. But everybody loves Uncle Ruslon. At least most of America’s mainstream media does.
There has, to date, been no speculation at all about whether an uncle of the men suspected of the bombing who had been involved in international intrigue at the hightest levels, and who married the daughter of a top CIA official, might warrant a closer look.
It’s enough, isn’t it, to turn even reasonably rational adults into—gasp!—conspiracy theorists.
“News,” someone once wrote, “is selection. And selection is always based on an ideology and agenda, which is something to remember next time you watch, listen or read the ‘news.’”
Too true.
“The government will take care of you” – Pro-gun billboard causing a stir
I think billboards like this cause a stir with people because they reflect the cold hard truth, a truth that can be very troubling but one that shouldn’t be ignored. And that’s why this new billboard in Colorado is fantastic:
FOX 8 – A pro-gun billboard that features images of Native Americans is drawing both contempt and support in Colorado.
“Turn in your arms. The government will take care of you,” the sign says.
While the sarcasm is evident, the group behind the message is not.
Lamar Advertising, the company that owns the billboard, told CNN affiliate KUSA that the group who paid for the message wants to remain anonymous.
Regardless, the billboard has outraged some residents in Greeley, about 50 miles north of Denver.
“I think it is insensitive, because even though it is what may have happened in the past, people are still living that. Relatives are still living that,” Kerri Salazar, a Greeley resident and Native American, told KUSA.
“I personally do not own a gun. I don’t feel the need to, but for those that do, that is their right,” Salazar said.
“My hope would be is that they can just take the picture down, leave the saying. … Believe me, I get it.”
But Dudley Brown, executive director of Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, told CNN he supported the billboard.
“Where can we send a check to support more?” he asked.
Blogroll
Enhancement for Bodies and Minds
LifeLink
Nutraceuticals and nootropics for anti-aging
Reinventing the Fountain of Youth
When You're Not Looking For The Exit