"Intelligence sources told The Telegraph that both Mr Spicer and General McMaster, the US National Security Adviser, have apologised over the claims. "The apology came direct from them," a source said.
General McMaster contacted Sir Mark Lyall Grant, the Prime Minister's National Security adviser, to apologise for the comments. Mr Spicer conveyed his apology through Sir Kim Darroch, Britain's US ambassador."
Intelligence sources told The Telegraph that both Mr Spicer and General McMaster, the US National Security Adviser, have apologised over the claims. "The apology came direct from them," a source said.
It's based on an anonymous source.
Here's another quote from that same article:
"Three intelligence sources have informed Fox News that President Obama went outside the chain of command - he didn't use the NSA, he didn't use the CIA, he didn't use the FBI and he didn't use the Department of Justice - he used GCHQ."
So we're going to discard what several anonymous sources said, but we will believe what some other anonymous source said?
Valid point. I guess we can wait and see if the Trump administration continues to point the finger at GCHQ. If not, I'd say that's pretty good evidence that it report is true, given how infrequently Trump and his people walk back or drop a claim.
Right, it goes both ways. Trump based his tweet on Fox News reporting from an anonymous source. The Telegraph is reporting from an anonymous source. Do you believe both of them?
GCHQ has now made a public statement, so the Telegraph was correct. It isn't in the habit of publishing made-up bullshit (aka fake news). Fox, on the other hand...
Apparently a FISA request was made to wiretap Trump or people from his campaign. It was denied the first time, but a second one which narrowed the scope of surveillance got accepted.
Bombing predominately Muslim countries, overthrowing governments and covert black sites where Muslims get tortured. These are things that are acceptable, but a 90-day ban on immigrants coming from war-torn countries, that's a step too far? Has everyone seriously lost their mind?
Imagine you're a person who was strongly against "[b]ombing predominately Muslim countries, overthrowing governments[,] and covert black sites where Muslims get tortured". Now imagine that the US has just elected a president far more conservative (and volatile!) than his predecessor, and a result there is a widespread movement for progressive political change, in line with your beliefs, from people who are normally not engaged in the political process. Do you:
a) bitch and moan at the johnny-come-latelys climbing onto your bandwagon; or
b) accept that society reacts in a non-linear way and use the opportunity to actually achieve something meaningful.
What you call "bitch and moan" can be a useful reminder of how people tent do overestimate what happens in proximity and overlook what happens in a remote location.
c) bitch and moan at the candidate at your side that isn't listening to your ideals?
There's a deep level on hypocrisy here, and that people (against both bombing and closing) are really not trying to fix this, otherwise they would have started sooner.
This is the third time in a row that the US public votes against the candidate supported by the Pentagon. Yet, the non-warmonger is a complete asshole...
(By the way, I'm watching from a safe distance, not participating on this stuff.)
What is the outcome of accepting that point? "You didn't complain when the government did worse things, so now you can't complain ever about anything?" The implication of accepting that logic would seem to be that we just give up. How does that help?
It is possible that this situation would add frustration for on lookers who notice that a large group of people accepted (or did not SEEM to care) about the killing and torturing of people, but all of a sudden are taking the high ground against a 90 day ban on immigration.
For SOME people it would be hard to accept the opinion of such people?
I find myself falling into this sometime... Is it a cognitive bias?
edit: Its hard for me to think about these issues with large fear based reactions from both sides and the hysteria the media is putting out.
> The implication of accepting that logic would seem to be that we just give up. How does that help
Not necessarily it could be also "pay attention harder from now on not to make the same mistake", "this is jumping on the outrage bandwagon more than actual outrage", "let's see what happened before so we don't make the same mistakes", "let's hear what others think about this" (as this is a public discussion forum).
Note that, due to the two-party system, complaining about bad Democrat policy on these issues was always somewhat muted at elections because the likely alternative wasn't some better Democrat but a Republican with a far worse policy. Which is pretty much exactly what's happened.
(The same applies to British politics: yes, the Labour party were wrong over the Iraq war, but does anyone think the Conservative party were in the right, or would have been less keen to support the US in that situation? Especially given the May-Trump summit.)
Your example is a poor one, and the British electorate have very different motivations when it comes to voting for very different parties with very different backgrounds, in very different elections with a very different governmental structure.
I've seen people arguing that, since Clinton was the "pro-war" candidate (due to her work at the State Department), one should vote for Trump.
It's true that the governmental structure is different; the ability of an incoming administration to sweep away the civil service and security services is much less in the UK. However, the recent R (Miller) -v- Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union case has a useful parallel: to what extent is the executive able to deprive people of rights by simple order?
It's hard to say and would depend on the rights in question. Parliamentary sovereignty would mandate consulting parliament, but our parliament is representative, not direct. It would also be necessary to consult devolved kingdoms, but the extent to which required is not clear.
We don't really have the same segregation of powers. Primary legislation can come from various sources and apply in various ways to various parts of the UK. The judiciary is independent and is generally relied on to determine how those laws are to be interpreted.
In order for laws to come into force nationally, they need royal assent from the Queen. If memory serves correct this relies on the Queen literally saying the word "Approved" at a certain point in the reading of a law. It might've changed, but might still be in effect. As such we don't really have the same concept of Executive Orders. We do have written guidance on laws, but this can be overridden through the courts.
Yet people seemed to be awfully calm when Obama was droning weddings. I'm not saying we should've put so much hate towards Obama as well, I'm saying we should put things into perspective.
No, the sad part is that this is getting so much more attention because it's visible here and it's the result of a new party in charge.
Obama's administration was quietly murdering people without trials in a country we aren't at war with from drones. I fail to see how a temporary immigration ban is "worse" other than the "out of sight, out of mind" effect that applies to those exterminated by drones.
The administration before Obama started a needless war with a country that was no threat to them, that resulted in the deaths of literally hundreds of thousands of people, the destruction of two sovereign countries, and set in motion a sequence of events that has Europe tearing itself apart. All to get an electoral boost for the 2004 election...
No, but it's an improvement on the previous state of affairs.
You're making a false equivalence in the first place, suggesting that all Trump is doing is these bans. He's already greenlit a military raid, and children and other noncombatants died in it.
Not a lot of people listen to Democracy Now, or read The Nation, or whatever. Unlike the right, the left critiques of (even their own people in) power don't often make it to mainstream news commentary, or interview targets of the mainstream news, so it'd be easy to think there is none if one doesn't consume left news and opinion sources directly.
You're trying to generalize 350 Million individuals, it doesn't work that way. Outrage is rarely about the events, but about how much coverage those events get.
The question then becomes why were the bombings not getting as much or more coverage than a temporary visa ban?
5 of the 7 countries on the visa list are currently being bombed by the US [0].
It's no surprise then that these countries made it on to the Obama administration's list of countries that are sources of terror, which was used as the basis for Trump's visa ban.
From a security perspective it's difficult to argue that countries you are currently bombing won't have people trying to enter the U.S. looking for payback.
Maybe because the bombings were in faraway countries and had scant information about them? In a large enough city, people generally don't hear about murders that don't happen in their neighborhood nor receive outsized public coverage.
People are angry at Trump for the visa ban, but it would never have come to that if not for the destabilizing actions of previous U.S. administrations.
I chuckled pretty hard at this one, imagining a DJI Phantom filming a wedding. Why not call it what it is, "bombing weddings" - the focus is on what the aircraft was doing, whether it was piloted remotely or locally shouldn't matter in the slightest.
The platform used for bombings is not irrelevant. It's not as if the increase in drone bombings was because the U.S. Military got caught up in the popular consumer drone fad. The very design of drones make it easy to do these operations and to do them in quantity without angering people back home.
> Yet people seemed to be awfully calm when Obama was droning weddings.
No, no they weren't. However it was always pretty apparent that the administration took death of civilians seriously and did all it could to minimise it. That doesn't mean that there weren't screw-ups.
Did all they could to minimize them by classifying all males age 18-49 as militants automatically.
And what about Operation Haymaker [1], showing that the intended target consisted of only about ~10% of the total deaths from drone bombings? How can there be any certainty at all about civilian death tolls in massively war-torn, chaotic environments? I personally don't trust the Obama administration's numbers, which are not all that good in the first place.
Not even close. How many of the tech CEOs who wrote blogs about the ban lobbied previous administration to end the war and arming of rebels in that part of the world?
> Yet people seemed to be awfully calm when Obama was droning weddings. I'm not saying we should've put so much hate towards Obama as well, I'm saying we should put things into perspective.
There were in fact people and organisations who spoke up when Obama was droning schools, hospitals, wedings and funerals.
Yoy're right. Democracy Now reported We've bombed hospitals, weddings, even an American citizen. It also looks like we've been at least indirectly arming ISIS in the region. I watching to see if there will be more revelations about that.
Where's 8 year long trail of posts shaming and blaming previous administration and personally pres. Obama for those actions ? I see hypocrisy reigning supreme since Jan 20, from both sides.
I do however think that Trump is an extreme problem, but also a foreseeable one. I think it's revisionist history to say that Obama's terrible presidency got due attention on HN or anywhere else. Democracy Now! was one of the few outlets that did though, so kudos for posting them.
The level of outrage doesn't seem to make sense. If they are ready to donate to ACLU, drive to a protest at an airport, subscribe for more media, over a botched travel ban surely they protesting 10x harder when actual killing was talking place.
I even got an email from Lyft about it. A driving app on my phone is now telling about this travel ban too and how much they are donating to the ACLU.
Not parallel universe. That was more than a decade ago. Why go back in 2003. We just dropped more than 26k bombs just in 2016. Where were these CEOs and tech leaders then? Were they blocking the entrance to the Pentagon, or WH? With the resources of Brin and others, surely there is a track of heavy lobbying against such things if they indeed seem to deeply care about the fate of refugees
You realize that you are now shifting the context from original "protesting wars, black sites and torture" - which are Iraq war theme - to a tiny subset of military activity that was protested least, precisely because they were protested least?
Of course you do, and you are using it as rhetorical device only, you couldn't care less about people bombed. If I go and find protests and statements against droning, you'd switch to Delta raids, TOW shipments or whatelse. The purpose of exercise is to show that people opposing Muslim bans are not any better and are simply hypocrites, hence the scrupulous fact-combing.
> Bombing predominately Muslim countries, overthrowing governments and covert black sites where Muslims get tortured.
Who is saying that this is acceptable?
> 90-day ban on immigrants coming from war-torn countries
I think the key issue here is that this ban includes valid Green Card holders and people who have Visas. This means that they have already spent up to two years being vetted. This policy makes no sense.
If the order was just "stop issuing visas", I don't think that there would have been such an uproar.
I believe he is referring to the global hate train (media hype?) being run on Trump, magnitudes higher than any directed at the previous administrations responsible for those actions.
edit: Are military actions against these countries targeting Muslim communities worse than removing immigration privileges of Muslim communities? I dunno how to approach this question...
The media was waiting for anything to crucify Trump. He has done nothing but stoke them. He already has been demonized as a white supremisist. The narrative "Trump will ban all Muslims and turn the US into a fascist state" was already on the press, they just needed an excuse to print it.
And there are many who not only disagree with Trump, but are appalled at his persona. There was that big march and that whole "Not my president" thing. They are already primed to believe that Trump will attempt to turn the US into a fascist state. In that light they say this as Step 1 of the "US turns fascist" and they are reacting as though he is suggesting Step 10 Imprisoning political opponents. Because they "see" the path and are doing everything they can to stop it.
> The media was waiting for anything to crucify Trump. He has done nothing but stoke them. He already has been demonized as a white supremisist. The narrative "Trump will ban all Muslims and turn the US into a fascist state" was already on the press, they just needed an excuse to print it.
Of course it helps that "a muslim ban" is quite literally what Trump asked for according to Rudy Giuliani:
> So when he first announced it he said “Muslim ban.” He called me up, he said, “Put a commission together. Show me the right way to do it legally.” I put a commission together with judge Mukasey [Michael Mukasey, a former federal judge], with congressman McCaul [Texas Rep. Michael McCaul], Pete King [New York Rep. Peter King], a whole group of other very expert lawyers on this, and what we did is we focused on, instead of religion, danger—areas of the world that create danger for us. Which is a factual basis, not a religious basis. Perfectly legal, perfectly sensible. And that’s what the ban is based on. It’s not based on religion, it’s based on places where there are substantial evidence that people are sending terrorists into our country.
Yeah it is interesting, to me it seems like trump and the protesters are both coming from a place of fear and are trying to prevent something from happening, whether that is terrorist attack on US soil, or Trump turning the US into a fascist state.
Obama got somewhat of a free pass for simply not being quite as bad as Bush. With Trump we're seeing indications of things getting substantially worse than Bush. That is why.
People outside the US are used to the US being far to our right, and it being relatively futile to do more than complain about these things. But Trump is seriously scaring people.
The people he's targeting now are Americans, which for better or worse people are much less willing to tolerate. Green card and visa holders are Americans.
This map doesn't say anything about visa holders and green card holders. It is only relevant for persons born in the country, which I'm assuming most visa/green card holders aren't.
I got that, but the attitudes about the relevant 'jus' may well be different. It may be as you say it is, but I'm not sure if that's not just a subjective opinion - at least from this graph.
Visa holders are not necessarily "Americans". For example holders of G-{1-4} Visas from the proscribed countries are not affected by the ban and remain foreign nationals.
A few, but this is irrelevant to the parent's point.
Which is that whether people say it is acceptable or not, much fewer numbers complained about it when other administrations where doing it, and much less visibly than people do today .
Which gives one the impression that if in 2 or 4 years some democrat or another republican gets into office and does the same or worse, things will be silent again (except for few consistent protestors), and hence that it's all about ousting Trump rather than justice in general.
Case in point: Obama halted people coming in from Iran in 2011 (for 6 months) and nobody said much of anything. Or how about this: Trump said he'll get rid of 3 million illegal immigrants and all went crazy. Well, Obama has the record thus far with 2.5 million deportations, but nobody seemed to care back then.
Stopping issuing visas in itself would be bad for US reputation. I know many Iranians who really work hard to get a visa for the USA to visit the country they long for at least once in their life. As there is no US embassy in Iran (for good reasons, by the way), they usually have to travel to Turkey at least twice. One couple I know came to Germany for two weeks just to get their visa from the American consulate here. They were so freaking happy to visit the USA for two weeks (they just got home a week before inauguration).
>“Immigration authorities soon began rechecking all Iraqi refugees in America, reportedly comparing fingerprints and other records with military and intelligence documents in dusty archives. About 1,000 soon-to-be immigrants in Iraq were told that they would not be allowed to board flights already booked. Some were removed from planes. Thousands more Iraqi applicants had to restart the immigration process, because their security clearances expired when the program stalled. Men must now pass five separate checks, women four, and children three.”
Sounds pretty similar to me, including a 60% drop in incoming immigrants from Iraq the year that took place compared to the previous and next year.
Let's see how WP differentiates the two cases:
First, they say that Obama "responded to an actual threat" whereas Trump "issued his executive order without any known triggering threat".
So being pro-active in this case is bad? Isn't that the whole idea behind threat prevention? It's not like Trump invented a threat in a new domain where there is known to be none -- we called for potential threats in the same domain (immigration from certain regions) where actual threats have been discovered previously, including under Obama. And ISIS wasn't even a thing back then, nor several big attacks have happened yet in France and Germany.
2) Second, they say that "Obama did not announce a ban on visa applications". And then they excuse that the effective result was similar anyway: "There was certainly a lot of news reporting that visa applications had slowed to a trickle. But the Obama administration never said it had a policy to halt all applications".
3) Third, they say that "Obama’s policy did not prevent all citizens of that country, including green-card holders, from traveling to the United States".
Which is probably the main point they get that can stand on its legs -- though government spokespersons deny that this is the case (even if that was the intention or unintended consequence of the command as issued).
That said, the people accepted as immigrants into the US, either under Obama (and even less now with Trump's order) the last 3 years from Iraq and Syria are an insignificant amount. And that from a region where millions fled to escape, and have been asking for asylum all over Europe etc.
It's not just "a 90-day ban on immigrants coming from war-torn countries" - the fact that Christians from those countries are exempt makes it explicitly a "muslim ban".
No, 'explicitly a Muslim ban' would say 'this is a ban on Muslims'.
Do consider that the list of proscribed countries is compiled between the Departments of Homeland Security and State, not by the President, and is published in the Federal Register. The fact that the majority on that list currently coincide with dominant Muslim populations might have been useful for Mr Trump's intent but is not guaranteed to persist.
As I see it, I did not ignore everything GP said. I read all of their original statements, over half of the evidence, and their 2 additional comments. I admitted that I did not have 30 minutes to watch the videos at first. I explained why my reading of the rest of their comments made me less inclined to spend 30 minutes watching videos. GP seemed confused about HN's reaction, so I attempted to explain my thought process.
Which part of my comment is in bad faith? If I did not disregard all of GP, why should all of my comment be disregarded?
P.S. I did end up watching most of the videos when I had time. I'm still not totally convinced, and since they are entirely about D's, it doesn't help GP seem less partisan.
There's a lot of editing, and I tend to be skeptical of what was edited out (like when ACORN was 'exposed'). Were these people led in a certain direction? Are some of the comments made by someone other than who they're attributed to? A lot of the time you can't see the person speaking.
But, a lot of the commentary in the videos is quite troubling, infuriating even. Given that there appears to be admission of crimes across multiple jurisdictions, why has there not been further prosecution? Especially since some of the allegations occur in majority R states, I'd think they'd jump at the chance to prove D's are cheats.
Both parties are cheats. I think GP agrees, it just didn't come across that way at first.
Would the CIA willingly do so much damage to the US? Surely there are other ways to sabotage the NSA instead of doing something as high profile as leaking NSA documents to the public. Besides, I think leaking classified documents of other intelligence agencies is something no agency does, because an escalation of this sort would be disastrous for both agencies involved.
Turkey’s recent-to-the-job prime minister, Binali Yildirim, announced: “I am sure that we will return ties with Syria to normal, we need it. We normalized our relations with Israel and Russia. I’m sure we will go back to normal relations with Syria as well.”
The prime minister said this a couple of days ago. A huge shift in policy and now suddenly a coup. I'm guessing Erdogan saw the writing on the wall and tried to shift gears, but it seems the military went ahead with the coup anyway.
Literally all your comments are about how China's bad and how it's in deep trouble. These comments span back more than 100 days. I'm not sure you should be the one calling other people trolls.
We'd have to imagine what is being counted behind the former and the later. Behind the former ("Anti-China trolls", that is) at the moment we have just one specific example brought to our attention. Behind the later ("Russian trolls") is anything anybody understands as such. It appears that the journalist who wrote the article we discuss here considers every author of some pro-Russian opinion as a troll (according to the article kaitai linked to http://kioski.yle.fi/omat/this-is-what-pro-russia-internet-p... ). So there you have a lot of ordinary people who could actually be Russians living in Finland. Or if we extend that to other languages, we also get the people who aren't necessary native speakers.
Then we have the people supposedly working at some "government site which pays people to write comments" (as linked by zorf, http://kioski.yle.fi/omat/at-the-origins-of-russian-propagan... ) being paid some 600 EUR a month, who again are almost certainly not the native speakers and probably aren't motivated too much to care ("we'll lower your salary because you screwed up the grammar on some of your posts").
So we can't expect grammar(Russian trolls) to have a high value, and the grammar(Anti-China trolls) is based on a very small sample. That "proves" the current state of the given inequality.
I also hope that this "derivation" also illustrates that naming names ("Anti-China trolls" "Russian trolls") is actually a wrong approach to learn anything about anything. See:
Who is "they?" Tavis Ormandy is a respected security researcher who often makes the news. Hell, not too long ago he found exploits in Sophos and Symantec products. He likes to target AV. Sophos, a UK product, was embarrassed internationally by the exploits he found. He is not playing any favors here. We need more people like him. AV has gotten a free pass for far too long.
If you're attacking Ormandy's character, I'd appreciate some proof over the usual conspirtard stuff that often gets upvoted uncritically on sites like reddit and HN. As far as I can tell, he is certainly one of the good guys and we are lucky to have him in such a high profile position at Google.
>Kaspersky released information about state-sponsored malware.
Kaspersky acutally is the dirtiest of the bunch with ties to Russian KGB/FSB. I suggest you rethink who your heroes are.
This is my concern with any software from an obviously corrupt and autocratic state that attacks its citizens with impunity. How can I trust anyone there when they certainly, and rightfully, value their lives over my rights? No Russian is going to say no to the FSB torture machine. No one is going to become any sort of whistleblower. I would see any Russian software as being dangerous to run at this point and things only getting worse considering Putin's brazen anti-West attitude.
Maybe Kaspersky was safe to run once, but that's just not true anymore.
Plus, if I'm not confusing him, Tavis used to make some kick ass FVWM configurations. The kind of window manager stuff that you see in SF movie computers.
I'm suggesting a higher-up or someone else suggested Tavis target Kaspersky. I'm not suggesting Google execs all sat together and decided to destroy Kaspersky.
Is it that hard to believe that there are certain people that would like to dissuade Kaspersky from revealing further information about state-sponsored malware? I'm not even sure where this incredulity is coming from? Let's see you target an intelligence agency and see what happens.
Are you trying to imply Kaspersky are somehow a victim...? Installing their security product actively decreases your security in this case. That destroys their entire reason for even existing.
Kaspersky is no victim here. They've been so negligent in their own product's security that it is actively harmful to have it installed. That's literally the end of their product being useful for me and it applies to any other security company as well. I hope the rest of them get 'suggested' too, and soon! I'll be clear - this vulnerability is the one thing Kaspersky should have been spending their engineering resources on and they have failed utterly. Pack it up and close shop.
Do you have a source for this?