Cornel West: Obama Is A 'War Criminal' Like Nixon And Bush

[SA210]

.
.
Dr. Cornel West with the backbone. :tu


Obama is, like his Republican predecessors Richard Nixon and George W. Bush, a war criminal, West said.

"Your thoughts on this so-called license to kill?" Smiley asked West.

"The chickens are coming home to roost," West replied. "We've been talking about this for a good while, the immorality of drones, dropping bombs on innocent people, it's been over 200 children so far. These are war crimes."

"I think we have to be very honest, let us not be deceived — Nixon, Bush, Obama, they're war criminals," West continued. "They have killed innocent people in the name of the struggle for freedom, but they're suspending the law, very much like Wall Street criminals. The law is suspended for them, but the law applies for the rest of us."

West highlighted a double standard in conclusion by saying that, if he or Smiley were to conduct themselves as Obama has, they would be sent to prison.




Cornel West: Obama Is A 'War Criminal' Like Nixon And Bush



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Z9QE5PY8Jg




NY Daily News: Cornel West: President Obama a ‘war criminal’

The Princeton professor has taken sharp issue with the White House’s covert drone program. The drones have killed ‘over 200 children so far,' West says. 'These are war crimes.’


http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopoly_fs/1.1265162.1360946233%21/img/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_635/west16n-1-web.jpg

Cornel West says, "Let us not be deceived: Nixon, Bush, Obama, they're war criminals."


Princeton professor Cornel West (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Cornel+West) says President Obama (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Barack+Obama) is a "war criminal."
West, the prominent black academic and activist who has consistently been a harsh Obama critic, took issue with the White House's covert drone program, saying that "the chickens are coming home to roost."


"We've been talking about this for a good while, the immorality of drones, dropping bombs on innocent people," West said on his "Smiley & West" radio show with Tavis Smiley.


"It's been over 200 children so far," West said. "These are war crimes."
West, who has previously said that "brother Barack was just completely mesmerized by the acceptance of the establishment," compared Obama to former Presidents George W. Bush and Richard Nixon.


"Let us not be deceived: Nixon, Bush, Obama, they're war criminals," West said. "They have killed innocent people in the name of the struggle for freedom, but they're suspending the law, very much like Wall Street criminals. The law is suspended for them, but the law applies for the rest of us."

[email protected]



Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/cornel-west-president-obama-war-criminal-article-1.1265163#ixzz2L0ZoZkPT

[Blake]

West appears in both The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions and also provides the voice for his character in the video game Enter the Matrix. [23].......

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornel_West

lol

[Latarian Milton]

its a hard call between bush and obama imho. obama might be slightly better than bush, but it doesn't say much

[Winehole23]

Obama is the caretaker of power. He normalized/institutionalized all the -- truly radical -- Bush outrages.

Even took it further, tbh.

[Nbadan]

wrong thread....

[boutons_deux]

NSA/CIA are beyond the reach of civilians

Delays in Effort to Refocus C.I.A. From Drone War

In the skies above Yemen, the Pentagon’s armed drones have stopped flying, a result of the ban on American military drone strikes imposed by the government there after a number of botched operations in recent years killed Yemeni civilians. But the Central Intelligence Agency’s drone war in Yemen continues.

In Pakistan, the C.I.A. remains in charge of drone operations, and may continue to be long after American troops have left Afghanistan.

And in Jordan, it is the C.I.A. rather than the Pentagon that is running a program to arm and train Syrian rebels — a concession to the Jordanian government, which will not allow an overt military presence in the country.

Just over a year ago John O. Brennan, the C.I.A.’s newly nominated director, said at his confirmation hearing that it was time to refocus an agency that had become largely a paramilitary organization after the Sept. 11 attacks toward more traditional roles carrying out espionage, intelligence collection and analysis. And in a speech last May in which he sought to redefine American policy toward terrorism, President Obama expanded on that theme, announcing new procedures for drone operations, which White House officials said would gradually become the responsibility of the Pentagon.

But change has come slowly to the C.I.A.

“Some might want to get the C.I.A. out of the killing business, but that’s not happening anytime soon,” said Michael A. Sheehan, who until last year was the senior Pentagon official in charge of special operations and now holds the distinguished chair at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center (http://www.ctc.usma.edu/).

A number of factors — including bureaucratic turf fights, congressional pressure and the demands of foreign governments — have contributed to this delay. At the same time, Mr. Brennan is facing a reckoning for other aspects of the C.I.A.’s role at the forefront of the secret wars the United States has waged since 2001.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/world/delays-in-effort-to-refocus-cia-from-drone-war.html

[boutons_deux]

NSA Blows Its Own Top Secret Program in Order to Propagandize

Over the last 40 years, the U.S. government has relied on extreme fear-mongering to demonize transparency. In sum, every time an unwanted whistleblower steps forward, we are treated to the same messaging: You’re all going to die because of these leakers and the journalists who publish their disclosures! Lest you think that’s hyperbole, consider this headline from last week (http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/03/25/nsa-director-to-jimmy-carter-agency-not-spying-on-your-emails/) based on an interview with outgoing NSA chief Keith Alexander:

This demonstrates how brazenly the NSA manipulates and exploits the consultation process in which media outlets are forced (mostly by legal considerations) to engage prior to publication of Top Secret documents: They’ll claim with no evidence that a story they don’t want published will “endanger lives,” but then go and disclose something even more sensitive if they think doing so scores them a propaganda coup. It also highlights how cynical and frivolous are their claims that whistleblowers and journalists Endanger National Security™ by reporting incriminating information about their activities which they have hidden, given how casually (http://www.salon.com/2012/03/26/obama_takes_bushs_secrecy_games_one_step_further/)and frequently they disclose Top Secret information (http://www.salon.com/2012/06/07/probing_obamas_secrecy_games/) for no reason other than to advance their own PR interests. It’s the dynamic whereby the same administration that has prosecuted more leakers than all prior administrations combined freely leaks classified information to make Obama look tough (http://www.whistleblower.org/blog/42-2012/1700-obama-administration-leaks-are-ok-when-its-obama-defending-controversial-drone-program) or to help produce a pre-election hagiography film (http://www.politico.com/story/2013/06/leon-panetta-seal-leak-92263.html).

Thus, writes the L.A. Times:

Thanks to Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor, the world came to know many of the agency’s most carefully guarded secrets.


Actually, in this case, the NSA’s “most carefully guarded secrets” were spilled thanks to Chris Inglis and the paper’s own Ken Dilanian. But because the purpose was to serve the NSA’s interests and to propagandize the public, none of the people who pretend to object to leaks–when they shine light on the bad acts of the most powerful officials–will utter a peep of protest. That’s because, as always, secrecy designations and condemnations of leaks are about shielding those officials from scrutiny and embarrassment, not any legitimate considerations of national security or any of the other ostensible purposes.

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/03/31/nsa-worlds-blows-top-secret-program/

Cornel West blaming Obama as personally responsible for foreign murders betrays West's naivete about the out-of-control power of CIA/NSA

[Nbadan]

Obama is the caretaker of power. He normalized/institutionalized all the -- truly radical -- Bush outrages.

Even took it further, tbh.

Well....no...I can see your case in wiretapping and illegal surveillance.and those issues maybe important to you..but did he take torture further? International kidnapping? Invasion of sovereign countries?

[boutons_deux]

The Deep State doesn't care who is in nominal power.

[Winehole23]

Well....no...I can see your case in wiretapping and illegal surveillance.and those issues maybe important to you..but did he take torture further? International kidnapping? Invasion of sovereign countries?If you think we still don't bundle over bad guys to less scrupulous allies (see: Baghram) who do the torturing, or that that is any less depraved than actually torturing them ourselves, you are very naive.

The CIA black sites are still in operation, we still torture indefinitely detained hunger strikers at Gitmo, the drone war continues apace in several countries, and we just commenced hostilities in Iraq and Syria.

So yeah, more of the same on all counts, and more of it in some.

[Winehole23]

Bruce Bartlett, not without very good reasons, calls Obama a Republican:


According to exit polls (http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/results/polls/#USP00p1) in 2008, Obama ended up with 20 percent of the conservative vote. Even in 2012 (http://elections.nbcnews.com/ns/politics/2012/all/president/#exitPoll), after four years of relentless conservative attacks, he still got 17 percent of the conservative vote, with 11 percent of Tea Party supporters saying they cast their ballots for Obama.


They were not wrong. In my opinion, Obama has governed as a moderate conservative—essentially as what used to be called a liberal Republican before all such people disappeared from the GOP. He has been conservative to exactly the same degree that Richard Nixon basically governed as a moderate liberal, something no conservative would deny today. (Ultra-leftist Noam Chomsky recently called Nixon (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/21/noam-chomsky-richard-nixon_n_4832847.html) “the last liberal president.”)

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/obama-is-a-republican/

[Nbadan]

If you think we still don't bundle over bad guys to less scrupulous allies (see: Baghram) who do the torturing, or that that is any less depraved than actually torturing them ourselves, you are very naive.

Please...anywhere you send these guys in the middle east they are going to be interrogated....you want to bring these guys to the US?

[Nbadan]

The CIA black sites are still in operation, we still torture indefinitely detained hunger strikers at Gitmo, the drone war continues apace in several countries, and we just commenced hostilities in Iraq and Syria.

Detention does not equal torture WH...

[Winehole23]

force feeding the way we're doing it at Gitmo sure does.

[Winehole23]

Detention does not equal torture WH...actually, I'd be hard pressed to think of any torture worse than indefinite detention without a fair legal process.

[dbestpro]

This supports the point that the far right and the far left have more in common with one another than they do with the rest of the country. They both want to control people, and they both want their finger on the button.

[boutons_deux]

They both want to control people

bullshit, politicians run for office to get (more) wealthy, since EVERYTHING they do, vote for is purchased by the wealthy, corporations.

[Slutter McGee]

Cornel West blaming Obama as personally responsible for foreign murders betrays West's naivete about the out-of-control power of CIA/NSA


Because as President, Obama has no control over the NSA or CIA. haha. Face it, your messiah is just as bad as the rest of em.

Slutter McGee

[boutons_deux]

Because as President, Obama has no control over the NSA or CIA. haha. Face it, your messiah is just as bad as the rest of em.

Slutter McGee

Slut, you haven't been paying tenhut to my brilliant posting. CIA/NSA are beyond civilian control, "Deep State" rules all.

[Slutter McGee]

President Barack Obama further defended the National Security Agency's collection of phone and other electronic records to PBS' Charlie Rose, calling the program "transparent."
In a pretaped interview set to air (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/17/charlie-rose-obama-primetime-interview-pbs_n_3454585.html) Monday evening, Obama gave a forceful defense of the program, saying that the NSA had not unlawfully targeted Americans.

Oh, and just to make you understand how obvious it is that Obama supports this, this was taken from Huff, not Redstate, TH or any other Republican news source.

Slutter McGee

[Nbadan]

force feeding the way we're doing it at Gitmo sure does.

..any other war these guys would have bought a bullet...this is not a Obama problem...this is a international global war on terror problem...

[Nbadan]

This supports the point that the far right and the far left have more in common with one another than they do with the rest of the country. They both want to control people, and they both want their finger on the button.

Actually, the far right and the far left want nothing to do with controlling people....you think the tea party and the Occupy crowd want to control people?

:lol

[Slutter McGee]

All I know is that Bou masterbates to Obama every night.

Slutter McGee

[Nbadan]

http://0.tqn.com/y/politicalhumor/1/S/Y/W/2/bush-flying-shoe.gif

[Winehole23]

..any other war these guys would have bought a bullet...this is not a Obama problem...this is a international global war on terror problem...our prison, our problem.

btw, some of the hunger strikers have been cleared for release but we're keeping them because they might face mistreatment in their home countries.

[dbestpro]

Actually, the far right and the far left want nothing to do with controlling people....you think the tea party and the Occupy crowd want to control people?

:lol

Every minute, and every second of the day.