Monday, October 3, 2016
Clinton on Assange: "Can't we just drone this guy?"
Warning, I have not had the chance to vet this info or source.
The honeymoon for the whistle-blower web site, once a darling of the Democratic Party, was now over. Even more alarming, Assange’s personal safety and organization were increasingly at risk from U.S. concerns.
By November 2010, Assange was a household name globally, but especially on Capitol Hill. And in the State Department alone his prowess of releasing otherwise secret, damning military documents and emails were filling conference rooms at Foggy Bottom and the White House with policy wonks and bureaucrats desperately seeking to squelch the upstart Wikileaks. At the State Department, meeting after meeting was conducted about how Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her inner circle were going to squash Assange and Wikileaks latest planned document dump on the United States. Deemed “CableGate,” Assange planned to release confidential cables, or communications, unveiling damaging internal conversations between State Department personnel and its foreign assets and allies.
Prodded by the looming CableGate, Clinton met with staff on Tuesday November 23, 2010 shortly after 8 a.m. on Mahogany Row at the State Department to attempt to formulate a strategy to avert Assange’s plans to release an enormous batch of 250,000 secret cables, dating from 1966 to 2010. Assange had professed for months to rain the internal cables down on Clinton and President Obama. The collective fear was the context of the secret cables would hamper U.S. intelligence gathering and compromise private correspondences and intelligence shared with foreign governments and opposition leaders. Splashing such juicy details on television news shows and the front pages of major newspapers in the country was great for the media but lousy for intelligence and foreign policy. Many, including Clinton and her elected boss, expressed fear these revelations would embarrass and expose intelligence allies of the United States and set America’s already fragile foreign policy back decades.
“By its very nature, field reporting to Washington is candid and often incomplete information,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said in a statement responding to Wikileaks’ anticipated tidal wave release of intelligence. “It is not an expression of policy, nor does it always shape final policy decisions.”
Clinton’s State Department was getting pressure from President Obama and his White House inner circle, as well as heads of state internationally, to try and cutoff Assange’s delivery of the cables and if that effort failed, then to forge a strategy to minimize the administration’s public embarrassment over the contents of the cables. Hence, Clinton’s early morning November meeting of State’s top brass who floated various proposals to stop, slow or spin the Wikileaks contamination. That is when a frustrated Clinton, sources said, at some point blurted out a controversial query.
“Can’t we just drone this guy?” Clinton openly inquired, offering a simple remedy to silence Assange and smother Wikileaks via a planned military drone strike, according to State Department sources. The statement drew laughter from the room which quickly died off when the Secretary kept talking in a terse manner, sources said. Clinton said Assange, after all, was a relatively soft target, “walking around” freely and thumbing his nose without any fear of reprisals from the United States. Clinton was upset about Assange’s previous 2010 records releases, divulging secret U.S. documents about the war in Afghanistan in July and the war in Iraq just a month earlier in October, sources said. At that time in 2010, Assange was relatively free and not living cloistered in in the embassy of Ecuador in London. Prior to 2010, Assange focused Wikileaks’ efforts on countries outside the United States but now under Clinton and Obama, Assange was hammering America with an unparalleled third sweeping Wikileaks document dump in five months. Clinton was fuming, sources said, as each State Department cable dispatched during the Obama administration was signed by her.
Clinton and other top administration officials knew the compromising materials warehoused in the CableGate stash would provide critics and foreign enemies with a treasure trove of counterintelligence. Bureaucratic fears about the CableGate release ultimately proved to be well founded by Clinton, her inner circle and her boss in the White House.
Assange better come through this time.
Well, Halloween's coming this month, better get ready now.
Bloody handprint stickers
PS, a reader in Denmark suggests that these could have a political use. I see that now! Perhaps put one next to every Hillary! sign (don't vandalize!) as a trenchant protest.
Pumpkin lights
Sunday, October 2, 2016
Greenland's Elephant's Foot Glacier, from space.
Pour batter onto a griddle and watch the mixture spread out into a round-shaped pancake. The movement is similar to the flow of piedmont glaciers, which form when ice spills from a steep valley onto a relatively flat plain. These glaciers are known for their nearly symmetric, fan-shaped lobes.
The shape of Greenland’s Elephant Foot Glacier, for example, is so distinct that it stands out dramatically from its surroundings when viewed from space. The Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 acquired this image of the glacier on June 21, 2014.
“Elephant Foot is an excellent example of a piedmont glacier,” said NASA scientist Tom Neumann. “In fact, it is often used as the example of a piedmont glacier because it is so symmetric.”
Located in northeastern Greenland on the Kronprins Christian Land peninsula, the glacier is not connected to Greenland’s main ice sheet. Rather, it’s part of a network of glaciers and ice caps that pepper the periphery of the island. Research has shown that as a whole, these outlying glaciers and ice caps account for 5 to 7 percent of Greenland’s total ice coverage, but they are responsible for 20 percent of its contribution to sea level rise.
Elephant Foot Glacier is just one of the beautiful scenes contained within an image swath acquired from across the Arctic by Landsat 8. To interactively explore the entire swath and to view more image highlights, read the full story here.
Yesterday and today
The wife and I drove over Carson Pass and visited a yarn store my wife found out about. Like Viking raiders, we looted the little store and came back with this stash. Let the knitting begin!
Today, home alone, so I'm enjoying a pipe of the Country Squire's hobbit blend Second Breakfast, in Randy Wiley's nicely bent and rusticated Galleon.
At the same time, I'm finishing off an old bottle of Oban in memory of my old pal Lou, and of Scratch and Spit get togethers of yore, now irretrievably but fine memories. Bitter, bitter sweet.
Skol!
Three at once.
On September 29, 2016, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this false-color image (MODIS bands 7-2-1) showing volcanic activity in the South Sandwich Islands.
Located in the South Atlantic Ocean, the uninhabited South Sandwich Islands include several active stratovolcanoes. Due to their remote location, these volcanoes are some of the least studied in the world, though satellites often catch them erupting.
The combination of clouds and ice can make it difficult to see plumes of volcanic ash in natural color imagery. Using portions of the electromagnetic spectrum that are typically invisible to the naked eye—such as infrared—enables satellites to distinguish ice from ash and clouds, or even reveal hot spots underneath a smoky wildfire.
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