Defense secretary: 'No plan' to give Gitmo back to Cuba

Two words...My Ass!

Step back a minute and review Barry's negotiating skills and the underlining motivation for his actions. The 5 for 1 swap had nothing to do with 'no soldier left behind'. He could care less about Bergdahl. It was all about depleting the population at Gitmo to help bring to fruition his wet dream of closing it down for good. He took a lot of heat for an endeavor which can only be described as a dumb ass deal. Yet, on the other hand, it was to bothersome to place a phone call to the Mexican president to get Tamarossi released. Why? There was no payoff. 

We have all witnessed Barry's negotiating skills firsthand with releasing terrorists and talking to their counterparts in Iran. Deadlines come and go like puffs of smoke.  "They won't get a nuke on my watch" insures the next president gets it on their's. Were holding all the cards yet Obama and Kerry have bent over backwards so far an orthopedic spinal surgeon couldn't straighten them out. So now what are they going to do? Take this set of finely honed negotiating  skills ...give everything, get nothing in return... to Cuba.

Check Cuba's list of demands in the article below.

What do we get? Barry's legacy preserved in history as the president who restored relations with Cuba. 

But with legacy comes consequences. 

Here's what we should be talking about.

http://nypost.com/2015/03/13/cuomo-in-cuba/

Cuba harbors some 70 American fugitives from justice, but we have three particular ones in mind. Because each committed heinous crimes in this area — and none has been held to account.

 Joanne Chesimard, aka Assata Shakur, a Black Liberation Army terrorist convicted of the 1973 execution-style murder of a New Jersey state trooper. In 1979, she fled to Cuba after escaping from prison.

 Guillermo Morales, chief bomb maker for the Puerto Rican terrorist group FALN, responsible for scores of deadly New York attacks — including the infamous 1975 bombing of Fraunces Tavern.

(A Columbia alumni no less)

 Cheri Dalton, aka Nehanda Isoke Abiodun, wanted for a string of “revolutionary” armored-car robberies. She allegedly drove the getaway car in the 1981 Brinks robbery in Nyack, in which two police officers and a guard were murdered.

Any overtures to get these criminals back? Of course not.

And they want us to compensate them for sanctions?  

What about all the Americans who owned homes, hotels, and other various businesses to the tune of $6 billion taken over by Castro? Who compensates them? BTW... what does the demand U.S. broadcasts over Cuba cease tell you about control? 

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/01/26/cuba-6b-debt-to-americans-for-seized-properties-hangs-over-us-talks/

 The bottom line? This sudden epiphany concerning Cuba didn't happen in a vacuum. Barry instigated the talks. Why? Because he knows the Castro's brothers will insist on reclaiming Gitmo effectively closing it down. The climax to his wet dream.

I can hear him now...

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There is "no plan" to return the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay to Cuba despite Wednesday's announcement of renewed diplomatic relations between the two former foes, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter said Thursday.

"No anticipation and no plan with respect to the Guantanamo Bay Naval Station," Carter said at a press conference Wednesday.

The facility would be just one of the issues that would keep the the U.S. and Cuba from establishing full diplomatic ties. On Tuesday, as President Obama was lauding the new relationship, the Cuban government said that to reach full relations with the U.S., it would be "indispensable that the territory illegally occupied by the Guantanamo Naval Base is returned." The Cuban government's statement had other demands, including that U.S. broadcasts over Cuba cease and that the island nation would be compensated for years of sanctions. 

Of the almost 800 detainees once held at the detention facility, 115 remain locked up there. Fifty-one of those detainees are approved for transfer, but escalating violence and instability in Middle Eastern countries where the detainees could go and Congress' opposition to the transfers limit the administration's options.

Last month, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain, R-Ariz., said he is willing to work with the Obama administration to advance a plan to close the center. The 2016 defense bill, which still needs to be approved by Congress, includes a provision to allow the administration to move forward with closure if it submits a plan that Congress approves.

Defense secretary: 'No plan' to give Gitmo back to Cuba

In-your-face provocative

Iwo Jima then and now

The world we live in.

On the other hand, to be fair,

 I can see why some people may want the Confederate flag to come down. 

In-your-face provocative

Blumenthal gave diplomatic advice to Hillary Clinton as early as 2009, emails show

5o shades of grey
That will never see the light of day

Interesting to see what Barry may do
When it comes to the election of you

The NYT's no less first broke this story in March 2015.  I'm no computer expert but did it occur to the Republicans who owned the House and Senate to immediately but a 'freeze' on her email account the minute it was made known? After all, you're dealing with a Clinton. To draw a parallel... is a person  charged with murder allowed access to the DNA evidence so they can destroy it before going to trial?

1o-29-14 email

Controversial adviser Sidney Blumenthal was sending then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton guidance on sensitive diplomatic matters much earlier than previously known, even as the White House was blocking him from becoming a part of her staff, according to emails released late Tuesday by the State Department.

The emails, part of a series of document dumps from Clinton's private email server from which she controversially conducted official State Department business, also show that Clinton paid special interest to the attempt to hire Blumenthal.

Blumenthal served as a senior adviser to former President Bill Clinton between 1997 and 2001, but was prohibited by the Obama administration from taking a job with Clinton's State Department team.

Another brain dead Barry moment. 

The Clintons don't live by rules.

However, in an email dated November 5, 2009, Blumenthal sent Clinton an email titled "Agenda with Merkel," encouraging Clinton to develop the Transatlantic Economic Council, which he said "now languishes." Noting that it was German Chancellor Angela Merkel's major initiative when Germany held the EU presidency in 2007, Blumenthal advised that "raising Merkel's project and reinvigorating it would undoubtedly be well received."

Emails previously released by the State Department and the House committee investigating the 2012 Benghazi attack showed that Blumenthal forwarded intelligence information to then-Secretary Clinton about Libya around the time of the attack that killed four Americans. Clinton then asked that his insight be circulated amongst the staff.

The above 2009 email is one of several that year showing that Clinton was receiving advice from the controversial confidant much earlier than had been previously known.

Additionally, a conversation between Clinton and her Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills on June 22, 2009 shows Clinton's interest in getting Blumenthal hired. In response to an unrelated matter, Clinton writes to Mills: "Good. What is latest re: Sid Blumenthal."

Mills writes, "Will see – he is doing the paperwork."

The confidant's role with Clinton became clearer in a June 2009 email. Blumenthal passed an email along to Clinton from then-U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown and spoke of her helping him with "Adams" in a meeting with Martin McGuiness of Northern Island. Adams is apparently referring to Gerry Adams.

"Shaun briefed me that Gordon will be meeting with Martin McGuiness together on Wednesday and may want your help with Adams. I said that he and Gordon should let me know before Wednesday and may want your help with Adams. I said that he and Gordon should let me know before Wednesday whether your involvement is essential and what they request."

Blumenthal gave more of his input before Clinton's 2009 speech to the Council of Foreign Relations in New York. Blumenthal told Clinton her speech must have "a distinctive and authoritative voice."

"The speech must be crafted with a sense of real time and cannot be delivered out of sync with it," he wrote. "Slogans can become shopworm, especially those that lack analytical, historical and descriptive power."

Blumenthal also gave tips for policy on Afghanistan.

"Hillary: FYI," the message read. "I found this one of the most sensible and informed brief articles on Afghanistan. Patrick Cockburn, of the London Independent, is one of the best informed on-the-ground journalists. He was almost always correct on Iraq."

In a statement late Tuesday night, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus called the latest email findings "troubling."

"Administration officials knew more than previously disclosed, Sidney Blumenthal was involved with more than just providing Libya off-the-books intelligence, and State Department officials were possibly fundraising on government accounts," the statement said. "These emails however are just the tip of the iceberg and we will never get full disclosure until Hillary Clinton releases her secret server for an independent investigation."

The revelations come at an awkward time for Clinton, now a presidential candidate, who had repeatedly sought to distance herself from Blumenthal, saying his advice on Libya and other issues was "unsolicited."

The emails, covering March through December 2009, were posted online Tuesday evening, as part of a court mandate that the agency release batches of Clinton's private correspondence from her time as secretary of state every 30 days starting June 30.

Clinton's emails have become a major issue in her early presidential campaign, as Republicans accuse her of using a private account rather than the standard government address to avoid public scrutiny of her correspondence. As the controversy has continued, Clinton has seen ratings of her character and trustworthiness drop in polling.

The monthly releases all but guarantee a slow drip of revelations from the emails throughout Clinton's primary campaign, complicating her efforts to put the issue to rest. The goal is for the department to publicly unveil 55,000 pages of her emails by Jan. 29, 2016 -- just three days before Iowa caucus-goers will cast the first votes in the Democratic primary contest. Clinton has said she wants the department to release the emails as soon as possible.

"There's been nothing but nearly nonstop work on this" since the last group of emails was released, State Department spokesman John Kirby told reporters Tuesday at briefing in which he acknowledged the inconvenient timing. "You have to understand the enormity of the task here. It is a lot of stuff to go through."

Clinton turned her emails over to the State Department last year, nearly two years after leaving the Obama administration. She has said she got rid of about 30,000 emails she deemed exclusively personal. Only she and perhaps a small circle of advisers know the content of the discarded communications.

Though Clinton has said her home system included "numerous safeguards," it's not clear if it used encryption software to communicate securely with government email services. That would have protected her communications from the prying eyes of foreign spies or hackers.

Separately, the State Department on Tuesday provided more than 3,600 pages of documents to the Republican-led House committee investigating the deadly 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, including emails of Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations at the time, and former Clinton aides Mills and Jake Sullivan.

In a letter to the committee, the department said "to the extent the materials produced relate to your inquiry, we do not believe they change the fundamental facts of the attacks on Benghazi."

Four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, were killed in the assaults on the diplomatic facility in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012. Several investigations have faulted security at the facility, but found that the CIA and military acted properly in responding. One Republican-led House probe asserted no wrongdoing by Obama administration officials in its report last year.

The House committee will hold a public business meeting next week to vote on whether to release the transcript of Blumenthal's deposition. Blumenthal testified behind closed doors for more than eight hours earlier this month, and Democrats have been pressing the panel to release the full transcript. 



This whole fiasco is probably moot. The left would vote for her even if she personally shot Chris Stevens.

Blumenthal gave diplomatic advice to Hillary Clinton as early as 2009, emails show

Prosecuting 31,000 deleted emails in one gif

Cast of characters:

The Cats...  Republicans

The Frozen Lake...  The MSM

The Big Fish...  If you don't know by now you never will

Prosecuting 31,000 deleted emails in one gif

Chelsea Clinton Demands $65,000 for 10-Minute Speech

A chip off the old block.

I'm sure after she gave this illuminating 10 minute speech those present were richly rewarded and because of her living far better lives. Or they just got taken again by another Clinton.

Listen baby...for $6,500 bucks a minute you better be able to tell me who's going to win the World series, in how many games, and the final score!

The money goes to the 'Clinton Foundation' alright.

http://realestate.aol.com/blog/on/chelsea-clinton-marc-mezvinsky-nyc-apartment/

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(Washington Post) – When the University of Missouri at Kansas City was looking for a celebrity speaker to headline its gala luncheon marking the opening of a women's hall of fame, one name came to mind: Hillary Rodham Clinton.

But when the former secretary of state's representatives quoted a fee of $275,000, officials at the public university balked. "Yikes!" one e-mailed another.

So the school turned to the next best option: her daughter, Chelsea.

The university paid $65,000 for Chelsea Clinton's brief appearance Feb. 24, 2014, a demonstration of the celebrity appeal and marketability that the former and possibly second-time first daughter employs on behalf of her mother's presidential campaign and family's global charitable empire.

More than 500 pages of e-mails, contracts and other internal documents obtained by The Washington Post from the university under Missouri public record laws detail the school's long courtship of the Clintons.

They also show the meticulous efforts by Chelsea Clinton's image-makers to exert tight control over the visit, ranging from close editing of marketing materials and the introductory remarks of a high school student to limits on the amount of time she spent on campus.

The schedule she negotiated called for her to speak for 10 minutes, participate in a 20-minute, moderated question-and-answer session and spend a half-hour posing for pictures with VIPs offstage.

As with Hillary Clinton's paid speeches at universities, Chelsea Clinton made no personal income from the appearance, her spokesman said, and directed her fee to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

"Chelsea is grateful to have the opportunity to speak at events like this while also supporting the work of the Clinton Foundation," said the spokesman, Kamyl Bazbaz. He said she was happy to "celebrate the legacy of women in their community."

Chelsea Clinton, who at the time was just shy of her 34th birthday, commanded a higher fee than other prominent women speakers the university considered booking when Hillary Clinton proved too expensive, including feminist icon Gloria Steinem ($30,000) and journalists Cokie Roberts ($40,000), Tina Brown ($50,000) and Lesley Stahl ($50,000), the records show.

Officials with the school appeared to believe Clinton was worth her fee, which university spokesman John Martellaro said was paid using private donations. They exulted to Clinton's representatives that the luncheon sold out quickly, with 1,100 tickets selling for $35 each — which would equal $38,500. University officials say the event was intended to boost attention for the new hall of fame, not raise money.

"Chelsea was the perfect fit," Amy Loughman, an alumni relations official who managed the event, wrote in an e-mail a few days later. "It created fantastic buzz in the community."

Chelsea Clinton has become an increasingly public figure in her own right.

With her parents stepping back from the foundation, started by former president Bill Clinton in 2002, Chelsea Clinton has assumed a prominent management role there and as an advocate for its work on global health, childhood obesity and other issues. Until last summer, she worked as a special correspondent for NBC News, where Politico first reported she earned an annual salary of $600,000.

Clinton is stepping out as an early key surrogate for her mother's campaign, appearing this spring on the cover of Elle magazine and walking at the head of the campaign's marchers at last weekend's gay pride parade in New York City. Last week, an all-male a capella group released a playful music video called"Chelsea's Mom," which Clinton praised on Twitter.

Clinton has delivered nine paid speeches on behalf of the Clinton Foundation in recent years, raising between $370,000 and $800,000 for the nonprofit organization. Overall, the foundation has taken in between $12 million and $26 million in speaking fees, the lion's share of that money from 73 speeches delivered by Bill Clinton.

In dozens of e-mails exchanged between University of Missouri officials and Clinton's representatives at the Harry Walker Agency, which arranges appearances by all three Clintons, there was no reference to her $65,000 fee going to charity. Nor was there any reference in the five-page contract.

The university paid the fee — which also covered Clinton's travel expenses — in two disbursements to the Walker Agency. But Martellaro said, "We have no knowledge of how funds were disbursed from that point."

Bazbaz said all of Clinton's paid speeches through the Walker Agency are delivered on behalf of the foundation "to support implementing its life saving work" and that this was "always the intention" with the University of Missouri. He added that neither she nor her hosts receive charitable tax deductions.

The contract stipulated that Clinton would have final approval of everything, such as the selection of her introducer (celebrities, journalists and elected officials were prohibited from consideration), the onstage setup (there must be "room-temperature water" next to her podium along with "two comfortable armed-and-backed chairs" for the question-and-answer session) and the type of microphone provided for her use (both lavaliere and handheld).

In e-mails with university officials, Clinton's aides closely edited the texts of press releases, marketing materials and introductory remarks. Clinton's representatives instructed that a line about her being the daughter of Bill and Hillary Clinton be deleted from one news release and that her title of vice chair of the Clinton Foundation be added beneath her name on an electronic flier. Other materials mentioned her parents, however.

When reviewing the script that a student would read introducing her, a Clinton Foundation aide asked university officials to remove the list of Clinton's degrees. A Clinton adviser, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about the event, said "this was by no means an intention to script a high school student's introduction of Chelsea," but rather to avoid what otherwise would have been a recitation of all of Clinton's achievements.

Clinton's representatives also instructed university officials to cut a reference to her mother-in-law, former congresswoman Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky, from a news release being drafted about the event. Margolies-Mezvinsky was an acquaintance of Martha Jane Phillips Starr, a Kansas City philanthropist and namesake of the hall of fame that Clinton was unveiling. However, a Clinton adviser noted that Margolies-Mezvinsky was mentioned during the event itself.

Clinton's representatives also closely managed her time on campus. They asked whether she would be free to depart from the event once she finished her remarks, rather than waiting until the luncheon concluded. Martellaro said she stayed until the end.

Clinton agreed to pose for photographs backstage with 100 VIPs prior to the speech. But her representatives requested that only 20 to 30 minutes be budgeted for the photo line, rather than 45 minutes the university initially sought.

The contract required that the university submit a final list of attendees (including their occupations, titles and affiliations) two weeks prior to the event "for vetting" and stipulated that guests must be lined up prior to Clinton's arrival and then "proceed to their seats" after their photos were taken. The contract also gave Clinton's team "final approval" of which media outlets were authorized to cover the speech.

Some of these requirements are standard for prominent speakers.

The documents show that university officials were persistent in pursuing Clinton as a speaker. When they first inquired about her availability, a Walker Agency staffer informed them that Clinton had never before accepted a speaking invitation.

Later, a speaking agency staffer told the university that Clinton had decided to "consider a very select few invitations" and that the mission of their project made it something she might agree to do.

During her remarks, Clinton praised both her parents and highlighted the work of their foundation, talking at length about its efforts to lower drug prices.

"As my mother has observed, equal rights for women and girls remains the unfinished business of the 21st century," she said, according to a university account of her remarks. "We will only complete this business if we are equally committed and we highlight the role models we are already blessed to have."

Chelsea Clinton Demands $65,000 for 10-Minute Speech