Newsweek reports that the George W. Bush administration “lost” 22 million emails covering a time of crucial decisions about the war in Iraq.
“For 18 months, Republican strategists, political pundits, reporters and Americans who follow them have been pursuing Hillary Clinton’s personal email habits, and no evidence of a crime has been found. But now they at least have the skills and interest to focus on a much larger and deeper email conspiracy, one involving war, lies, a private server run by the Republican Party and contempt of Congress citations—all of it still unsolved and unpunished.Clinton’s email habits look positively transparent when compared with the subpoena-dodging, email-hiding, private-server-using George W. Bush administration.
“Between 2003 and 2009, the Bush White House “lost” 22 million emails. This correspondence included millions of emails written during the darkest period in America’s recent history, when the Bush administration was ginning up support for what turned out to be a disastrous war in Iraq with false claims that the country possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and, later, when it was firing U.S. attorneys for political reasons. Try Newsweek for only $1.25 per week Like Clinton, the Bush White House used a private email server—its was owned by the Republican National Committee. And the Bush administration failed to store its emails, as required by law, and then refused to comply with a congressional subpoena seeking some of those emails. “It’s about as amazing a double standard as you can get,” says Eric Boehlert, who works with the pro-Clinton group Media Matters. “If you look at the Bush emails, he was a sitting president, and 95 percent of his chief advisers’ emails were on a private email system set up by the RNC. Imagine if for the last year and a half we had been talking about Hillary Clinton’s emails set up on a private DNC server?”
Double standard, anyone?
What will Donald J.Trump say? Will he start ranting about the “crooked Bush administration”? Will he threaten to throw the ex-President in jail? Will the FBI launch an investigation of the 22 million missing emails?
Yes, we knew the Bush administration had trouble keeping track of emails. And Democrats were having massive collective apoplexy about it at the time. That’s exactly why it’s so hypocritical that they’re now collectively shrugging their shoulders like it’s no big deal now that it’s “our guy” with the same issues. Some of us have the intellectual honesty – not to mention the decency – to admit that it’s wrong no matter who does it. My mother taught me two wrongs don’t make a right. Maybe not all mothers teach that these days.
Like!
Very old news of course but I guess it’s “news” that it finally got attention in the newsweak media.
From The Hill just now….
“The Clinton campaign gathered its top national security advisers for a blistering conference call with reporters on Friday, framing the email dump as a provocative cyber-attack by foreign adversaries with ties to terror groups.
The advisers described the (Assange/Putin implied, says ellen) hacks as unprecedented interference in the U.S. election that threatens the nation’s sovereignty, and warned there would be “consequences” for the hackers and potentially the “Russian state actors” supporting them.
The campaign lashed out at Trump, arguing he is encouraging the behavior (which the world heard him say early in his campaign, says ellen). They questioned whether he and his advisers, driven by their own foreign business interests, have conspired to aid the Russians.
And Clinton’s allies fumed at the media’s coverage of the leaked emails, saying the focus has been on trivial political minutia rather than the national security implications.”
Does Assange have some kind of vendetta against Hillary?
Same vendetta (and for the same reasons) he had against Bush apparently. Or have you forgotten that several of his first major document archives focused on the Bush administration’s mishandling of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars? The vendetta Assange has is the way the people in power (regardless of political party) are destroying the planet, economically, militarily and environmentally. I have the same vendetta myself.
So what happened to his “vendetta” against Trump?
It astounds me that people who are otherwise intelligent can’t figure this out. Trump is obviously a joke, a fool, a baboon (apologies to jokes, fools and baboons). His flaws are obvious for the world to see – there is nothing more to be revealed – certainly nothing more than he himself brags about. No one is going to change their mind about Trump based on further revelations of how bad he is. His followers know it and that’s why they like him. Those who are going to be disgusted are already disgusted. It serves no purpose to further reveal his ridiculousness/appallingness because it only further glorifies him to his followers. As any good teacher knows, there comes a time to stop giving the class clown the attention he seeks.
Also, the reality is, he has practically zero chance of becoming president and, more to the point, he has never previously held elected office. Hillary, on the other hand, has held prior office and is likely to be our next president. She has managed to engineer this image of herself as competent, experienced and progressive. It is necessary to reveal that her experience puts the lie to her claims of being a “progressive”. Since it appears that we’re going to be stuck with her, people should know up front what it is we’re getting stuck with.
True, Hillary is no progressive. I’m just wondering why Assange doesn’t go after Trump, too, even with all the press revelations. It’s not as if there isn’t already a lot of anti-Hillary stuff out there and for many decades. The anti-Hillaryism is a cottage industry. Why does Assange have to go after Hillary when there is already enough negative stuff against HRC, to use your logic. Hillary is very unpopular as it is. However, the leaks do raise questions and concerns. Now it looks like Trump is toast but why didn’t Assange do releases about him a year ago or 8 months (when Trump was riding a wave)?
Good question, Joe. Why doesn’t Assange leak Trump’s emails or hack into the Apprentice videos that are so closely guarded?
Joe, there is no point in “digging deeper” into Trump, because what you see – narcissism, bluster, bigotry, ignorance, predation – is what you get. There’s no point in going deeper, because there’s nothing deeper there. It’s all puked up for public consumption and every news cycle
Hillary, on the other hand, is a more complicated and slippery case…
Joe…..Assange does not go after tRump because Assange may soon become a Russian citizen and he is working with Putin to get the American vituperous DUNCE elected. tRump has a decades long history of borrowing cash from the Russian billionaire oligarchs, with Putin’s approbation, for building projects in Russia. This is all old news, but is not being the focus of our news cycles these days. They prefer sex stories.
Why do you think he saved this current drip drip drip of leaked DNC and Hillary/Podesta emails for just before our election?
Anyone who uses twitter and email and facebook and other social media with abandon, thinking it is private, is STUPID.
This isn’t exactly new news.
Reblogged this on Lloyd Lofthouse and commented:
Who was more crooked when using a private server for their e-mail: Hillary with 30k e-mails deleted by accident more than a year before the FBI asked to see them, or the G. W. Bush White House and the leadership of the GOP that defied Congress by deleting more than 22 million? We already know what Trump will say, “Crooked Hillary!” Because she’s a woman he won’t grope, and Bush was a man that Trump thinks understands “Locker Room talk”.
We already know what Trump will do. He will ignore what the Bush White House and the Republican Party did just like he ignored the fact that Pence, his VP running mate, not only voted for the Iraq War but sponsored the Bill.
To Trump, Hillary will always be guilty of the same things men do, because she is a woman, and he only likes women he wants to grope until they reveal his perversion to the media and public.
And let’s not forget Trump’s lie that he was never supported the Iraq War. His words can be heard at about 1:40 in the following video.
This point about double standards would have a little more traction if Hillary had voted against the war. or learned from her mistake. However, she is more bellicose that ever, and her quip about Kadaffi (“We came. We Saw. He Died”) is as morally repulsive as anything Trump has said (which is saying a lot), and more so when considering the predictably catastrophic results of her actions there.
I do not agree with your opinion.
I think Hillary didn’t go far enough when she said, “We came. We Saw. He died.” She should have said. “We came. We Saw. He died. Too bad we couldn’t make him suffer more first.”
But then what I think doesn’t count as a member of one of the smallest minorities in the US, a military vet who actually fought for his country.
That’s beneath you, Lloyd. Be the better person. Another thing my mother taught me.
Sorry, the effort to guilt me into backing off of my words won’t work. That’s who I am, and, at my age, I am comfortable with that. I’m not like most Americans who have no clue how brutal the world really is. I’m a former U.S. Marine who fought in Vietnam and came far too close to death too many times. I also refuse to give in to any politically correct faction that exists on both the left and right.
When I was fighting in Vietnam, the politically correct mob in fashion at the time made sure we, the troops in uniform that volunteered and swore an oath to defend our country. had so-called humanitarian rules of engagement forced on us that denied us the right to defend ourselves unless we could visually identify who was actually shooting at us. Something that is almost impossible in combat.
Just like Donald Trump, Gaddafi was a monster but far worse unless Trump is elected president, and Gaddafi deserved to be treated like the monster he was. I refuse to retract my words.
William Tecumseh Sherman was right when he said, “You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.”
The only place that I’m with people who understand what I think and say is when I’m at the VA vet center with other combat vets crowded around a table. We are there to support each other in dealing with our combat related PTSD, and when we say things like I did about Gaddafi, they understand. The VA also assures us our words are confidential and will not spill out to the no-clue, politically-correct mob or mobs since there are more than one and each one has its own pontifically correct dictionary.
Most combat vets will keep their mouths shut around no-clue civilians, because they know someone will try to guilt them with currently popular politically correct thinking.
Wartime vets make up about 5 percent of the U.S. population. We are a minority that most do not understand. But for those of us who survive and get older, we start speaking our minds around others and don’t care what they think because we carry our anger like it’s a medal of honor.
Thank you, Lloyd.
I honor your service.
I shed no tears for Gaddafi. He ordered the bombing of an American civilian airliner over Scotland that contained many students from Syracuse University, coming home for Christmas vacation. One of them was the daughter of a friend.
Lloyd, we could grant everything you might say about Khadaffi, and it would still not refute the fact that recklessly bringing down his government has been a disaster for the Libyan people, Africa and Europe.
Please inform us as to how his overthrow and death has improved things in that part of the world.
Go back to the source before you place the blame at the feet of Hillary Clinton. Where did this all start, this Arab Spring? Where did the first domino fall?
The mess we have today in the Middle East is complicated, and it all started with the colonial era with the British Empire. When the Brits pulled out of the Middle East, the left a mess behind that still festers today.
And when G. W. Bush came along after 9/11 and lied about WMDs so he could start a war in Iraq, that was the second domino falling that led to all the rest.
Hillary Clinton is not responsible for what happened to Gaddafi. even if she gave the order. She wasn’t the president of the United States, who is the Commander in Chief where that so-called buck stops.
I don’t blame her. She should have been tougher, but I’m sure the White House has a leash on its subordinates to make sure they do what the Presidents wants just like Bush did when he lied about WMDs and started the war in Iraq that eventually led to what happened in Libya, Syria, and with ISIS.
Lloyd,
Thanks for the reminder that the President is the Decider.
Lloyd and Diane, you can hide behind the legalistic point that Hillary was not directly responsible for Khadaffi’s death, and that President Obama was ultimately responsible for the decision to have NATO do our dirty work in LIbya, but that has little bearing on the fact that Hillary is directly responsible for what happened to Libya, since it has been widely reported that it was she, her viziers, the military-industrial-national security state and a compliant media which pressured a skeptical and reluctant President Obama to move forward, with predictably disastrous results.
It also does not detract from the fact that her quip that, “We came. We saw. He died” is as repugnant as anything Trump has ever said (and that’s really, really saying something), and reveals the moral rot at the heart of Clintonismo.
She may not have killed Khadaffi, but she more than anyone else is responsible for killing Libya – previously the wealthiest country in Africa, with the most equitable income distribution and developed social welfare system, whatever Khadaffi’s personal criminality – as a functioning country, leaving behind a failed state of warlord fiefdoms, a platform for ISIS and uncontrolled immigration that is swamping the political systems of Europe.
President Obama, to his credit, has publicly spoken of his regrets about what the US has done in Libya, and that seems to have affected his actions in Syria, where he is attempting to be comparatively cautious, unlike the rhetoric emanating from the Clinton campaign.
MF,
BS
You have your opinion and I reject it.
Let’s step back in time to World War II. How did we win that war?
We napalmed cities and killed tens of thousands of civilians in nightly raids from infants to the elderly. Napalm and bombs dropped on civilian targets do not discriminate. They roast babies as well as great grandparents. It was horrible but war is hell.
If the U.S. had the mindset of the politically correct mob of today during WWII, would we have won that war? I don’t think so.
And how did the North win the Civil War? Scorched earth policy with Sherman’s march through the South burning everything in his army’s path.
How many wars has the U.S., won since the ascendancy of the humanitarian politically correct mob? Not one. Yet millions have died, millions more displaced and the U.S. has piled up a national debt of trillions thanks to the endless wars fought with rules that Sun Tzu who wrote the “Art of War” would mock.
I don’t care of Hillary is a Hawk, because I think the U.S. needs a Hawk who won’t bend to that politically correct mob, but she hasn’t said in public she wants to use nuclear weapons and Trump has. What is the biggest danger when it comes to nuclear weapons – the radioactive ash that gets carried in the upper atmosphere around the world and returns to the U.S.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/apr/28/donald-trump-wont-rule-out-using-nuclear-weapons-a/
Lloyd, your history of WWII is bogus: “we” did not defeat Hitler and win WWII, the European war was essentially won by the Red Army, with material help from the US, which was racing toward Germany before US troops even stepped foot in Europe.
Do you really think the Red Army defeated Hitler all by itself? If you do, let me sell you some real estate on Mars.
Do you know who armed Russia? Who shipped and assembled whole factories to Russia to manufacturer weapons from tanks to fighter aircraft?
http://www.historynet.com/russias-life-saver-lend-lease-aid-to-the-ussr-in-world-war-ii-book-review.htm
In addition, the Western Front, after the invasion on D-Day with US, British and French troops had more than 5 million troops in Europe by the end of the war. To fight those allied troops that landed on D-Day, the Germans had 3.35 million troops and lost 2 million of them in combat by 1944-45. What would have happened to Russia, if those troops had been available to fight in the East instead of in France.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Front_(World_War_II)
The Russian Military did not defeat Germany’s army. The Russian winter did that just like it did to Napoleon.
I suggest you educate yourself and read this piece:
How an educator wishes to re-write history is beyond me. If it had not been for certain political agreements re. “Areas of influence,” as agreed on between Stalin, Churchill and FDR, the Russians would not have been as far west as they had come. Allied forces were ordered to stop at certain times and places, so the Russians could be seen as the “liberators” of Berlin.
I would like to agree with Lloyd even as an avowed pacifist and the descendant of the occupied South. We cannot prevail in battle unless we fight. Nor can we achieve in diplomacy without skill. Unfortunately, all wars must end in a peace that holds. So let us review some wars mentioned here and add a few.
The American Civil War ended in a peace that gave the defeated South self government so soon that Jim Crow emerged as a new governing paradigm. This gave the believers I the lost cause amo to convince each other that it really was about states rights.
World War II ended with a very lengthy peace enforced by a Cold War that must have felt very hot for the likes of Lloyd, who was in one of its vignettes. The enforcement of this peace has been very costly as the US has been asked to be actively engaged in international policy, a stance eschewed for a long time.
The end of the Cold War has not really rolled back the presence of the US as a power. She must answer her international obligations or risk allowing those who detest our system to insert themselves forcibly into international politics. A cruel reality this is.
The Arab Spring has now been followed by a long, hot summer. It seems so long ago that neoconservative writers saw Iraq as the opportunity to test the theory that we could bring a revolutionary democracy to that region.
We should have known. The birth pangs of representative government covered Europe with paroxysms of violence for over a century. In France the heads rolled, and hen the barricades went up again and again. German unification was hardly a Sunday School Picnic.
I must confess that I do not like to gloat over the death of even a tyrant, but I would lie if I said I cried a great deal over the demise of Kadaffi or Bin Laden.
My father, an avowed Christian and a person interested in Ghandi’s pacificism, did not go to fight Hitler. People in the community who did not know him well looked down on him for that stance. But when integration came at last, he was one of the community leaders who was called on to make peace. And peace we had. Not hostile screaming and picket lines like so many experienced.
My hat is off to you Lloyd. You answered twice. You served in war, and then for years in peace. Thanks for both.
You’re welcome.
From wikipedia: Mummer Gaddafi, the deposed leader of Libya, died on 20 October 2011 during the Battle of Sirte, aged c. 69. Gaddafi was found hiding in a culvert west of Sirte and captured by National Transitional Council forces. He was killed shortly afterwards. The NTC initially claimed he died from injuries sustained in a firefight when loyalist forces attempted to free him, although videos of his last moments show rebel fighters beating him and one of them sodomizing him with a bayonet[2] before he was shot several times as he shouted for his life.[3]
This brutal dictator was killed by his own people in the style of Mussolini. Did we invade and occupy Libya?
No. we didn’t occupy it: we wrecked it and left it behind as a failed state, something we seem intent on doing in that part of the world.
It doesn’t matter who did this, it is wrong. Both are responsible for actions that are irresponsible and indicate very poor judgement.
The bar has to be higher for a person running for the highest office in the land.
It was NOT just the Bush administration that “lost” their e mails. Colin Powell destroyed all his e mails if what I read is true.
I liked what Bernie said about Clinton’s e mails and that he added let us focus on the real issues.
This has no relevance now, does it? I wish the candidates, both horrible candidates, would start discussing the issues, rather than digging up the dead.
This is not news, and in no way does this make what Clinton did any less criminal. Much of the Bush administration should be up on War Crimes, but that doesn’t excuse either Hillary or Obama for similar criminal acts.
Wired magazine had an interesting story explaining Assange’s motivation: https://www.wired.com/2016/10/want-know-julian-assanges-endgame-told-decade-ago/?mbid=nl_101516_p1&CNDID=36095693 based on what Assange wrote several years ago.
No Trump e-mails because the Donald does not use e-mail. Maybe his young son Barron does, since he is good with the cyber.
Assange is posting Hillary stuff because that is the stuff he is getting from hackers. Is anyone targeting RNC leadership? Team Trump? Congressional leaders? Even if they are, they aren’t releasing it to Assange.
surely his campaign managers use email.
That sounds phony
Trump only tweets? Anything more than 140 characters must be too challenging.
Bush/Cheney/Halliburton’s emails would have had impact on war crimes investigations..Find it very odd that Wikileaks can’t find their way to RNC docs & emails..
I posted this Newsweek link on my Facebook page last week. I commented that it doesn’t exonerate Hillary’s actions but politics can be a dirty business on both sides of the aisle and GW’s actions are a perfect example.
A very Republican friend of mine commented that the Dem controlled Congress saw fit to drop the matter and that the erased emails were eventually decided to be “insignificant”.
I replied that there’s nothing “insignificant” about erasing tens of millions of emails which chronicle a hugely controversial war which was declared under false pretenses.
Then I asked him who, exactly, had deemed these emails to be “insignificant”.
No reply, as of yet.
Oh Lord. With a tremendous amount of respect (and gratitude) for Diane, can’t this blog not jump on the tit for tat bandwagon? Enough is enough.
The point of the post was not “tit for tat,” but surprise that I had no idea that the 22 million emails that documented the decision making process that brought the nation into a disastrous war had disappeared. Apparently others knew this and said it was “old news.” I am a news junkie and did not know it.
As a historian, I’m appalled. As a citizen, I’m appalled.
Bill Clinton’s sex scandals are also old news. Why aren’t they being dismissed too? Why are they being used to attack Hillary?
I think part of the problem at the time of those erasures was that we, as a nation, weren’t as tech savvy as we are now and, so, it was easier to sweep those nasty little facts under the permanently gone rug without as much fanfare as we’d see nowadays.
I was heavily involved in tech at our sites at that point and was completely blown away by the lack of attack on the part of Congress. They made some noise and then it was over without much more than a whimper.
Btw (just to set the record straight, regardless of anyones’ leanings):
Hillary expressed trepidation when she voted in favor of the invasion. She was our NY State rep in Congress and I was keeping an eye on that one. She said that the only reason she voted in favor was the supposed finding of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. She expressed skepticism about the administrations’ claims, but said they the stakes were too high if the findings were correct.