11/18/15

Terrorism, not Climate Change, Kills People

On November 13, the same day as the terrorist attacks in Paris, USA Today ran a full-page ad from billionaire Tom Steyer’s group NextGen Climate highlighting the alleged global threat from climate change. As hundreds of people were being injured or killed in Paris, the ad featured these quotes about the “climate crisis:”

Hillary Clinton: “An existential threat”
Bernie Sanders: “The greatest threat facing the planet”
Martin O’Malley: “Critical threat to our economy”

In a new development, we have just learned from Judicial Watch that Hillary Clinton was characterized by her Muslim-connected aide, Huma Abedin, as being “very confused” about the world leaders she was supposed to be communicating with as secretary of state. The confusion may also be reflected in Mrs. Clinton’s bizarre utterance that so-called climate change is an “existential threat” that is somehow comparable to Russian nuclear weapons, which could reduce America to a burned-out cinder.

Mrs. Clinton is not alone, however. All of the Democrats running for president, plus former Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore, want to treat changes in the weather as something to be addressed through new treaties, international agreements and global tax schemes. This campaign has taken precedence over defeating international terrorism.

At the Democratic Party debate this past weekend, Sanders claimed that “Climate change is directly related to the growth of terrorism and if we do not get our act together and listen to what the scientists say, you’re going to see countries all over the world—this is what the CIA says—they’re going to be struggling over limited amounts of water, limited amounts of land to grow their crops and you’re going to see all kinds of international conflict…”

So from one disputed claim about people causing climate change, they have reached another disputed claim that climate change is causing people to commit terrorism.

On the same day as the Paris attacks, former Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore was staging his 24-hour climate change telethon from the foot of the Eiffel Tower to focus attention on this month’s United Nations climate summit in Paris. The attacks forced him to pull the plug on the event after five hours.

In advance of his ill-fated climate change telethon, People magazine asked Gore which Democrat he was endorsing for president. “It’s still too early, in my opinion, to endorse a candidate or pick a candidate,” he said.

But why is his endorsement worth anything? Al Gore has become a very rich man, a one percenter. He and his partners sold Current TV (Gore personally netted an estimated $100 million of the $500 million sale price) to the terrorist-supporting Middle Eastern oil and gas dictatorship of Qatar.

A member of Apple, Inc.’s board of directors, Gore is today worth as much as $170 million. Even the New York Times has wondered if his climate change campaign is designed to make himself rich, while preserving his lifestyle as an elite member of the one percent.

His telethon carried the official title of “Live Earth: 24 Hours of Reality.” The reality of terrorism got in the way of the broadcast, featuring various rock stars and co-sponsored by Arianna Huffington’s television channel, HuffPost Live.

Gore and his partners sold Current TV to Qatar so another Al Jazeera spin-off could be piped into American homes. The Al Jazeera America channel was the result, and it is now publishing nonsense like the piece by Rami G. Khourientitled, “Military responses alone will not defeat ISIL.”

Khouri acknowledges that “Religion is critical for shaping the theological concept of the Islamic State and the wider Caliphate…” But, he says, “it may not be the most important reason why individuals go there to live, work and do battle.” He lists “eight reasons why people across Islamic societies join or support ISIL.”

But none of the “reasons” for the rise of the Islamic State, in his analysis, consists of the hate-filled passages from the Koran which guide their beliefs and actions.

Instead, we are told, in reason number four, that their motivations include “To live among like-minded people in a society defined by camaraderie, peace, justice and wholesome family life.” Reason number six is “To find meaning, direction and purpose to one’s personal life, or to escape family or personal problems, loneliness or alienation.”

We are supposed to believe this may be why terrorists opened fire on people in Paris. This is why the Islamic State beheads people or burns them alive?

It is easy to forget that the website publishing this material is financed by a Middle Eastern dictatorship that promotes Islamic terrorism. Like the notion of the “existential threat” allegedly posed by climate change, Al Jazeera America constitutes a diversion from what really threatens America, our way of life, and our people. Perhaps that was the intention all along.

As serious as this is, the problem of foreign propaganda in the U.S. media market could get far worse. Television producer Jerry Kenney notes that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is planning to remove the barriers to broadcast station ownership by foreigners, a move that would enable American broadcasters to sell out to foreign interests, just like Gore did. The FCC could allow the sale of local broadcast stations and other media properties to the Chinese, Russian and Mexican governments, or to the Muslim Brotherhood.

The public must respond to what the FCC is planning to do by December 21.

05/22/15

How the Media Got Into Bed with the Clintons

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

Republican operative Karl Rove writes in The Wall Street Journal that “few demonstrate as much contempt for journalists as do Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.” That may be true for Obama, but Mrs. Clinton has taken a different approach. Her platforms, the Clinton Foundation and its project, the Clinton Global Initiative, have given the appearance of humanitarian work, drawing many big names from the media into her network of influence. No wonder they treat her with deference and respect. The media have been compromised.

“Until late Tuesday afternoon,” reports USA Today, “the Clinton Foundation website listed CNN anchor Jake Tapper as a ‘speaker’ at a Clinton Global Initiative event scheduled for June 8-10 in Denver. After USA TODAY asked CNN about the event, Tapper’s name was swiftly removed from the Clinton Foundation website.”

It appears that Tapper will still participate in the meeting, but not as a speaker.

This Tapper controversy should put an end to the pretense that George Stephanopoulos of ABC News is the only member of the journalism business who was compromised through his involvement in the Clinton Foundation. A list of media members of the Clinton Global Initiative in 2011 included Stephanopoulos and many others:

Christiane Amanpour, Chief International Correspondent, CNN
Thomas Friedman, Columnist, The New York Times
Lionel Barber, U.S. Managing Director, The Financial Times
Nicholas Kristof, Columnist, The New York Times
Maria Bartiromo, Anchor, CNBC (now with Fox Business Network)
Matt Lauer, Host, The Today Show, NBC
Matthew Bishop, New York Bureau Chief and American Business Editor, The Economist
Tom Brokaw, Special Correspondent and Moderator of Meet the Press, NBC News
Greta Van Susteren, Anchor and Host, Fox News Channel
Anderson Cooper, Anchor, CNN
Judy Woodruff, Senior Correspondent, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, PBS
Katie Couric, Anchor, CBS News (now with Yahoo)
Fareed Zakaria, Editor, Newsweek International

The pro-Clinton group Media Matters has been having a field day with the news that Fox News personalities were on the list. The group points out that Van Susteren and Bartiromo have both lavished praise on the Clinton Global Initiative for its good work.

For our part, we have been drawing attention to media links to the Clintons for at least 10 years. It wasn’t considered controversial by the media, on the left or right, until the release of Peter Schweizer’s new book, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich. Schweizer has attempted to link some of the contributions made to the Clintons to actions taken by the Obama administration when Mrs. Clinton was Secretary of State.

We noted back in 2005 that Rupert Murdoch, chairman and CEO of the Fox News parent company, was a participant in the Clinton Global Initiative meeting held in New York in mid-September of that year. As we also pointed out, Clinton himself had appeared on Greta Van Susteren’s Fox News Channel show to promote the event.

That same year we reported that the Fox News Channel, in addition to giving Clinton a platform to talk about his Global Initiative, had done then-Senator Hillary Clinton a big favor by canceling some interviews with Ed Klein, the author of a book critical of Hillary.

Back in 2007 we noted that Murdoch had personally made a $500,000 gift to the Clinton Global Initiative.

“In terms of the Clinton Global Initiative,” Van Susteren told former President Clinton in a 2010 interview, “I’ve seen so many of the good works in terms of the money that goes around the world, whether it’s clean water in different areas. If there is one particular mission for you to describe the Clinton Global Initiative, what is it?”

Clinton’s lengthy reply to this softball question included praise for Frank Giustra, the Canadian business executive, for giving $20 million. Giustra’s donations have subsequently been linked to a plan to win U.S. approval to sell a uranium company to Russia.

Rather than look into the contributions of Giustra and others, Van Susteren encouraged others to contribute to the Clintons. She said to the former president, “A lot of people look at the program, a lot of big names, big contributors and very generous, what about somebody who says I don’t have any big money to contribute. I might have some ideas, or I’m willing to do some leg work to help. How can I participate?”

Isn’t that nice? Even Fox News was in bed with the Clintons.

In a September 27, 2012 column, we pointed out that members of the media scheduled to speak at that year’s Clinton Global Initiative meeting were:

Nicholas D. Kristof, Columnist, The New York Times
Piers Morgan, Host, CNN’s Piers Morgan Tonight
Charlie Rose, Executive Editor and Anchor, “Charlie Rose”
Fareed Zakaria, Host, CNN-GPS

It turns out that 2012 GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney even attended and addressed that year’s Clinton Global Initiative meeting. Perhaps he had been told by Republican advisers like Rove that it was a humanitarian event with a bipartisan flavor.

“Since serving as President here in America,” Romney declared, “President Clinton has devoted himself to lifting the downtrodden around the world. One of the best things that can happen to any cause, to any people, is to have Bill Clinton as its advocate. That is how needy and neglected causes have become global initiatives.”

The comment goes to show how Clinton, who disgraced himself by having sex with a White House intern and was impeached, has had his reputation rehabilitated. A Republican who got caught doing such things would be forced to slink away and beg for forgiveness from the media.

Romney may have gotten bad advice about going to that event, but it was Romney himself who told Jan Crawford of CBS News during the campaign that the major media were not in the tank for President Obama and that he had no plans to challenge liberal media bias.

No wonder the Democrats are so confident about their ability to manipulate the press. They have the Republicans eating out of their hands.

03/11/15

Hillary’s Emailgate Explained

By: Bethany Stotts
Accuracy in Media

Exclusive to Accuracy in Media.

Clinton’s 2016 presidential chances undoubtedly have been harmed by the revelation that she exclusively used a private email address while serving as Secretary of State. But while the media remain mired in calculations about whether Mrs. Clinton can survive this latest crisis, and who the villains are in this unfolding story, additional questions call out for answers.

Mrs. Clinton made many claims at her press conference on Tuesday. The media shouldn’t simply regurgitate them wholesale, as the AP has done, but rather they should approach them with due skepticism.

“Well, the system we used was set up for President Clinton’s office, and it had numerous safeguards,” said Mrs. Clinton. “It was on property guarded by the Secret Service and there were no security breaches. So, I think that the use of that server, which started with my husband, certainly proved to be effective and secure.”

In contrast, Philip Bump reports for The Washington Post that the domain, clintonemail.com, was established “the same day that Clinton’s confirmation hearings began before the Senate.” That is suspicious timing for a system allegedly set up to support her husband’s office.

The professional assessment by security experts quoted in the media seems to be that Mrs. Clinton’s private email was vulnerable to hacking. “The system could have previously been hardened against attack, and left to get weedy and vulnerable after she left government,” writes Sam Biddle for Gawker. “We don’t know. … With Clinton’s off-the-books scheme, there are only questions.”

“We can only go by what Clinton says,” reports USA Today.

Mrs. Clinton told the press that she had set up the account for both private and work-related emails to avoid the inconvenience of having to set up two phones and two separate accounts, but that, in retrospect, she should have thought better about it. She offered few answers about the actual details of her server, and avoided questions about whether she would subject it to independent analysis, asserting that she had done her full duty by turning over 30,490 vetted emails to the State Department.

There were about 60,000 emails in total, she said—but after the private vetting process, controlled by her and her advisors, she has since deleted the private ones. “At the end I chose not to keep my private personal emails—emails about planning Chelsea’s wedding, or my mother’s funeral arrangements, condolence notes to friends, as well as yoga routines, family vacations—the other things you typically find in inboxes,” she said. Yet the Select Committee on Benghazi’s Chair Trey Gowdy indicated that no emails have been turned over to Congress covering the duration of her 2011 trip to Libya.

Mrs. Clinton apparently expects the media to swallow whole the argument that all her emails on that trip regarded personal affairs.

What can be established at this juncture is depressingly disturbing for national security.

“…security experts consulted by Gawker have laid out a litany of potential threats that may have exposed [Mrs. Clinton’s] email conversations to potential interception by hackers and foreign intelligence agencies,” writes Biddle. This, despite Mrs. Clinton’s assertion that there were no breaches.

Problems identified by Biddle’s sources include that the URL log-in was accessible by anyone in the world, and could have been linked to an “administrative console interface to the Windows machine or a backup,” allowing the possibility that Mrs. Clinton’s emails could have been copied in their entirety by hackers. And, as of March, reports Biddle, “the server at sslvpn has an invalid SSL certificate.” Without a valid SSL certificate there is no third-party indicating that the key is still good, and not hacked.

“An exact physical address could not be determined” for the server, but Internet records indicate that it’s in Chappaqua, New York, reported Bloomberg News.

The server, as of March 4, was on “factory default for the security appliance” when it could have been “replaced by a unique certificate purchased for a few hundred dollars,” making it vulnerable to hacking, it reports.

But, the paper hedges, “While Clinton didn’t have a classified e-mail system, she had multiple ways of communicating in a classified manner, including assistants printing documents for her, secure phone calls and secure video conferences.”

Similarly, Mrs. Clinton asserted at the press conference that she never sent classified information through her private email.

It is not necessary to reveal classified information directly to jeopardize national security or the international diplomatic process. As Thomas Patrick Carroll, formerly of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of Operations, explained in 2001 for the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, “classification usually has relatively little to do with the information itself, but a lot to do with the protection of sources and methods.” His given example was how a foreign minister’s personal assistant might have a private conversation with that minister and obtain “the minister’s private observations on the matter,” later relaying this to U.S. intelligence for their exploitation. These types of inside observations prove invaluable for all foreign intelligence services.

If Mrs. Clinton’s email was hacked, then foreign governments such as Iran, China, Russia, and others, might have gained access to her private internal musings about diplomatic talks as she worked out the details with her staff—an intelligence treasure trove.

One must also ask, if Mrs. Clinton refused to set up a government email, how high was that refusal relayed? If it wasn’t relayed to the very top by security specialists, then why not?

Mrs. Clinton was sworn in on January 21, 2009. A couple months after she took office, in March of 2009, the University of Toronto and TheSecDevGroup issued their report on Ghostnet, a cyberespionage network established by an unknown party to mine data from the Tibetans. They found “real-time evidence of malware that had penetrated Tibetan computer systems” which was connected to a large network of 1,295 infected computers in 103 countries—almost 30 percent of which were high-value targets such as ministries of foreign affairs.

The authors of the report found “that GhostNet is capable of taking full control of infected computers, including searching and downloading specific files, and covertly operating attached devices, including microphones and web cameras,” and was sent through “contextually relevant emails” that look like real emails.

Granted, the mechanism of action for Ghostnet would not have been the same as that which could have compromised the server that Mrs. Clinton was using. But few can claim ignorance about the degree of threat posed by the use of insecure systems at the time.

The Ghostnet network compromised computers at the “ministries of foreign affairs of Iran, Bangladesh, Latvia, Indonesia, Philippines, Brunei, Barbados and Bhutan; embassies of India, South Korea, Indonesia, Romania, Cyprus, Malta, Thailand, Taiwan, Portugal, Germany and Pakistan.”

Even if the Obama administration’s appointees lacked the know-how to anticipate cyber threats when they took office, they were undoubtedly immediately educated about the dangers by the government’s more knowledgeable members. Bob Gates, the former Director of Central Intelligence, and later Defense Secretary under Obama, commented in his 2014 book, Duty, that “A number of the new appointees, both senior and junior, seemed to lack an awareness of the world they had just entered.” He noticed that “fully half” of those in the Situation Room had their “cell phones turned on during the meeting, potentially broadcasting everything that was said to foreign intelligence electronic eavesdroppers” and he ensured that such behavior stopped.

The Ghostnet story made page A1 of the New York Times in March 2009. Can this administration really claim innocence about the security threats posed by an insecure, private email server when Clinton served as Secretary of State? How much did President Obama know, and when?

It now appears that the Obama administration received questions from Gawker’s John Cook about the ramifications of Clinton’s private email use back in 2013. The Obama administration has likely spent at least those two years—if not much longer—covering for Mrs. Clinton. Her press conference to explain her exclusive use of private email fails to satisfy, and the press should continue demanding answers until this presidential hopeful provides some real ones.