Author: Peter Van Buren

Is there a better way to ensure no troublesome violations of John Kerry’s signature ceasefire in Syria get reported than by staffing the hotline where violations are to be reported by Syrians with non-Arabic speakers?

Gotta love those clever gals and guys over at the State Department. The Department is all a twitter, high-fiving each other and sending congratulatory emails to Secretary of State John Kerry over his negotiating a ceasefire in Syria. And, in order to monitor compliance with the terms of the ceasefire, State set up a hotline. Ordinary Syrians, out there on the ground, could call in to report violations.

Now remember, violations by anyone other than the naughty Russkies might make the State Department look bad, as if the ceasefire was only smoke, mirrors and a PR stunt, violated in part by forces to include the U.S.-supported militias.

Continue reading “State Dept Staffs Syria Ceasefire Violations Hotline – With Non-Arabic Speakers”

You remember Bryan Pagliano, pictured above, the guy who ran Hillary’s IT during her 2008 presidential campaign. After Obama tossed Hillary the job of secretary of state, Hillary had Pagliano hired by the State Department. She also had him continue to administer her private server, supposedly paying him on the side for the help.

Taking the Fifth

In addition to everything else swirling in the cesspool of that email server, there are also questions about whether or not whether the State Department spent taxpayer money to manage Hillary’s email server. See, Pagliano was working for both State as a government employee and Hillary as a private employee at the same time. One wonders if he always kept the two tasks fully separate, and of course what a government employee was doing working privately for the Clintons at the same time.

Continue reading “Justice Dept Grants Immunity to Staffer Who Set Up Clinton’s Email Server”

Apparently a new feature of the modern war of terror is the shameless, blameless, overt targeting of hospitals, doctors and bedridden patients, all without the means of even modest self-defense.

Following the American destruction of a Doctors Without Borders facility in Afghanistan, the Saudi targeting, using American weapons, of hospitals in Yemen, the Israeli destruction, using American weapons, of Palestinian hospitals in Gaza, and the Russia/Syrian destruction of a Doctors Without Borders facility in Syria, we now have another case, perpetrated against the rules of war, international treaties and simple humanity.

Afghan security forces, possibly accompanied by NATO advisers, raided a hospital south of Kabul and abducted and then killed at least three men suspected of being insurgents.

The raid began in Wardak Province, 100 miles from Kabul, at a hospital run by the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan, an international aid agency. Initial reports differed about whether the units involved in the four-hour raid, whose members descended from helicopters, belonged to the Afghan Army or the police. The number of casualties was also not clear, with different accounts suggesting that between three and five people had been killed.

Continue reading “Brave Afghan Forces Kill Inside Hospital, for Freedom”

America’s mercenaries smell the blood (and the money) and are returning to Iraq.

Mercs are a great thing for the U.S. government, in that they aren’t counted as “troops,” or as “boots on the ground,” even while they are both. The Defense Department can disavow any mischief the contractors get up like, such as murdering civilians, and keep the headcount low and the body count low when things are going well, or bad. It only costs money, and that America has a bottomless pool of, as long as it being spent on something violent abroad instead of helping Americans at home (which is socialism, sonny.)

So let’s look at some numbers.

The number of private contractors working for the U.S. Defense Department in Iraq grew eight-fold over the past year, a rate that far outpaces the growing number of American troops training and advising Iraqi soldiers battling Islamic State militants.

Continue reading “US Military Contractors Return In Droves to Iraq”

Clinton supporters, erroneously, make much out of the idea that of the many, many emails that passed through her private server, none were “marked” classified. They claim that, when in fact thousands of those same emails are indeed now marked classified, that is just after-the-fact Washington squabbling.

So this new information – that America’s intelligence agencies now say the contents of some of those unmarked emails match the contents of their own classified documents – is a big deal. It also suggests just how Clinton’s unclassified server came to be loaded up with classified material.

Several agencies have told Congress that Hillary Clinton’s home server contained some emails that should have been treated as TOP SECRET because their wording matched sections of some of the government’s most highly classified documents. These reports are the first formal declarations by intel agencies detailing how they believe Clinton violated government rules when highly classified information in at least 22 email messages passed through her unsecured home server.

So how this all work?

Continue reading “Intel Agencies: Clinton Emails Match Top Secret Documents”

So, those American airstrikes recently in Libya, the ones for freedom and to defeat ISIS and banish Ant Man to hell?

Yeah, darn it, they also killed two Serbian diplomats. But don’t worry, America’s own secretary of state John Kerry personally called the Serbian prime minister to say “Sorry, our bad, dude.”

So that’s OK now. The U.S. may resume bombing nations of its choosing around the globe.

Even as the Pentagon said it had “no information” indicating that the American attack had led to the deaths of two Serbians and that the circumstances of their deaths “remained unclear,” Kerry offered his condolences to Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic over the Serbian diplomats killed in the U.S. airstrike.

Continue reading “Kerry Phones Serbian PM Over Diplomats Killed in US Libya Strike”