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Friday, January 29, 2016
Navy commander pleads guilty in bribery case, faces up to 20 years in prison
So if this guy is going to do 20 tell me...
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SAN DIEGO – A Navy commander accused of diverting ships to Asian ports for a Malaysian contractor offering prostitution services and other gifts pleaded guilty to bribery charges Thursday, marking the eighth conviction in the massive scandal.
Michael Misiewicz is one of the highest ranking Naval officers charged in the case, which is centered on businessman Leonard Francis, nicknamed "Fat Leonard" because of his wide girth. Misiewicz pleaded guilty to one count each of conspiracy to commit bribery and bribery of a public official at a hearing in federal court in San Diego.
He faces up to 20 years in prison if sentenced to the maximum amount for both charges.
His defense lawyers said in a statement that Misiewicz regrets his actions from 2011 to 2012. They went on to say that they plan to show at his sentencing hearing this was an "extreme departure from his otherwise distinguished and honorable 30 plus year career."
Only one defendant of the nine named in the case is still fighting the charges. Prosecutors say the investigation is ongoing and there could be more arrests.
Francis has admitted to providing an exhaustive list of gifts in exchange for classified information that helped his Singapore-based company, Glenn Defense Marine Asia Ltd., or GDMA, overbill the Navy by at least $20 million. He is awaiting sentencing.
Misiewicz accepted theater tickets, prostitution services and other items, according to the criminal complaint. He provided ship routes to Francis and then they moved ships like chess pieces, diverting them to Pacific ports with lax oversight where GDMA submitted fake tariffs and other fees, prosecutors said.
In 2010, Misiewicz caught the world's attention when he made an emotional return as a U.S. Naval commander to his native Cambodia, where he had been rescued as a child from the violence of the Khmer Rouge and adopted by an American woman. His homecoming was widely covered by international media.
A sentencing hearing was set for April 29.
Lt. Commander Todd Malaki, who has pleaded guilty in the same case, and is scheduled to be sentenced Friday. He faces a maximum of five years in prison.
Still remember exactly where I was that fateful day
Engineer who warned of 1986 Challenger disaster still racked with guilt, three decades on
BRIGHAM CITY, Utah, Jan. 28 (UPI) -- The entire nation was stunned into silence watching the Space Shuttle Challenger abruptly blow apart 73 seconds after launch, but one man wasn't. In fact, he blew the whistle as loud as he could in the days leading up to the worst disaster in the history of the American space program exactly 30 years ago Thursday.
The problem was, no one with any authority listened to Bob Eberling.
An engineer at Morton Thiokol, the rocket propulsion firm that supplied the space shuttle's two solid rocket boosters, Eberling repeatedly warned NASA that the launch conditions that day could be catastrophic.
It was a lesson learned too late.
The Challenger was doomed by a failed rubber seal, called an O-ring, in the field joints of each section of the boosters. The O-rings are designed to flex during movement and prevent fuel from escaping from the boosters. In the chilly Florida temperatures that day, one of the seals on the lower right booster didn't flex because it was too cold. Additionally, it was partly burned away by the combustion of fuel during liftoff -- producing small black puffs of smoke that can be seen in footage of the launch.
Eberling, 89, says he was fully aware of the ring's limitations and tried to get NASA on board with his thinking, but was ultimately overruled by managers at Thiokol and the space administration.
"I was one of the few that was really close to the situation," Ebeling told National Public Radio. "Had they listened to me and wait[ed] for a weather change, it might have been a completely different outcome."
Although Eberling can't be accused of neglect or failing to act, he says he still feels responsible for the deaths of six American astronauts and a civilian teacher aboard the flight -- even now, 30 years later.
By the time the Challenger finally launched on the morning of Jan. 28, 1986, it had already been delayed six times between Jan. 22 and Jan. 28. The reasons for the delays varied from mechanical to meteorological, but the postponements may have made NASA more eager to get the late shuttle into orbit.
"NASA ruled the launch," Eberling told NPR. "They had their mind set on going up and proving to the world they were right and they knew what they were doing. But they didn't."
Eberling, and four others at Thiokol, actually believed that if an O-ring failed, Challenger would blow up on the launch pad. By an incredible stroke of luck, it didn't, and the spacecraft lifted off and cleared the tower.
Watching the launch on television from their firm's Utah headquarters, a relieved Eberling and other concerned engineers at Morton Thiokol thought they, NASA and the astronauts had dodged a major bullet -- until mission controller Richard Covey relayed a command to shuttle pilots Dick Scobee and Michael Smith to increase power.
"Challenger, go at throttle-up."
In the crew's final communication to the ground, Scobee acknowledged the instruction.
"Roger, go at throttle-up."
About a second later, the engineers at Thiokol agonizingly realized their solace had been premature.
Further, Eberling and the others had been right. Challenger never should have gotten into the air. But a buildup of metallic material in the rocket fuel, called slag, inadvertently plugged the leak caused by the failed seal.
Engineers speculated in the years following that if the slag had continued to stem the leak for just a few more moments, the shuttle and its crew almost certainly would have have survived. The vehicle exploded less than a minute before the boosters would've been jettisoned.
A subsequent government investigation confirmed what Eberling already knew -- that the chilly weather precluded an O-ring from expanding properly during launch. When the escaping fuel came into contact with the flames trailing the shuttle, it ignited and instantaneously blew the shuttle to smithereens.
The disaster caused NASA to shutter the program until 1988, but Challenger would not be the last shuttle to meet with catastrophe.
Seven more astronauts were killed aboard Columbia at the end of mission STS-107 in 2003. In that case, though, the problem wasn't a rocket booster -- but a piece of foam that fell from the main center tank during launch and punched a hole in the leading edge of the left wing.
It was critical mishap. Beneath the wing and the entire shuttle are thermal tiles that resist the inferno of penetrating Earth's atmosphere during re-entry. The gaping hole in Columbia's wing was present for the entire two-week mission, but went unnoticed by the astronauts and mission controllers.
NASA finally shut down its space shuttle program in 2011, but that's something Eberling says he'll never be able to do with his feelings of sorrow and guilt
"I could have done more. I should have done more," Eberling said in 1986. Today, he feels no different.
"I think that was one of the mistakes that God made," he said. "He shouldn't have picked me for the job. But next time I talk to him, I'm gonna ask him, 'Why me? You picked a loser.'"
Thursday, January 28, 2016
Susan Sarandon backs Bernie Sanders for president
(Click)
Actress and progressive activist Susan Sarandon lent her star power to Bernie Sanders at an Iowa rally this evening, passing over Hillary Clinton a second time for the nation's top job.
A decider for Sarandon, who has known Sanders for more than two decades, was Clinton's 2002 vote for the Iraq War as a New York senator, a military conflict that Sanders did not support.
'That's where Hillary Clinton lost me,' she told DailyMail.com in an exclusive interview, 'because there was plenty of information that even I had that said there was a real problem with the logic involved.'
Clinton went on to be secretary of state and has more experience in the foreign policy realm than Sanders, who has has focused his legislative career on fighting for economic justice.
'But what is experience without judgement,' Sarandon said tonight after a Sanders rally in northern Iowa. 'She's had a job but what has she done that we're bragging about. How has she led?'
Continuing the actress said of Clinton, once the nation's top diplomat, 'She's had that job, and he's had a job, too, and she went overseas, but what I'm saying is the biggest foreign decision that had to be made in terms of foreign policy was whether or not to go into Iraq and go into war, and she failed that test.'
'I'm sorry, but for me, you can't get a bigger decision than that and we've been paying the price ever since. And I think she has to be held accountable for that.'
In 2008 Sarandon got behind Barack Obama at a critical time in the primary. Now, she's hitting the trail for Sanders a week before Iowans cast their ballots - the start of the 2016 election.
'I've come here because for me gender is not what's important. Issues are what's important,' she said as she introduced the U.S. senator at tonight's event in Music Man Square in Mason City Iowa.
'I want a candidate who has the courage to stand and do the right thing when it was not popular,' she said ahead of his speech.
During the rally she also made a not-so-thinly veiled jab at Clinton over gay marriage.
'It's one thing to be for gay rights and gay marriage once everybody else is for it. That's not difficult,' Sarandon stated.
Clinton is a johnny-come-lately on a gay marriage, she suggested.
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If I remember rightly so was her hero Barry.
Didn't he evolve?
Another torpedo to the bow
Hat tip to Ed Kilbane
Clinton Chief Of Staff Lost Her Personal Blackberry, Which Contained Classified Emails
My iPhone holds no classified information and I take better care of it than they do! Let's see... how many people under her have been found with classified information on their cell phone? Cheryl Mills, Bryan Pagliano, Huma Abedin, Sidney Blumenthal, how many more are out there?
Knowing they'll try to save Killary, with this latest derailment to her campaign, I just don't see how the DOJ is going to wave its magic wand and make this go away. What plausible excuse could they possibly come up with not to indict? But I'm sure they'll think of something.
Socialist Sanders made an unannounced visit to the WH the other day. Think Barry told him he's now the standard-bearer for the party?
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The truth be told
While working as Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff at the State Department, Cheryl Mills lost her personal Blackberry, on which she sent emails that the State Department has determined contain classified information.
Records obtained by The Daily Caller through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit show Mills revealed that she lost her Blackberry in a March 20, 2010 email she sent to Bryan Pagliano, the State Department IT staffer who managed Clinton’s private email server.
“Somewhere b/w my house and the plane to NYC yesterday my personal bb got misplaced; no on [sic] is answering it thought [sic] I have called,” Mills wrote from her personal email account to the address Pagliano used when he worked on Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign.
Other State Department records indicate that Mills’ personal Blackberry appears to have been synced with her Gmail account. Many of the emails she sent from the personal account include footers which show they were sent from a Blackberry powered by AT&T.
Some of the emails Mills sent and received on the account contain information that the State Department has retroactively determined to have classified information.
In one such email, from Dec. 24, 2009, Clinton forwarded Mills a message she had received from Johnnie Carson, then the Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, who provided details from a conversation he had with French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner about a situation in Guinea.
“Pls review so we can discuss,” Clinton wrote to Mills and Jake Sullivan, her foreign policy aide.
In a Jan. 14, 2010 email, Rajiv Shah, who was in charge of U.S. Agency for International Development, emailed Clinton and Mills about Haiti. The email is heavily redacted because it contains now-classified information. The State Department has retroactively classified more than 1,300 emails housed on Clinton’s private server, though Clinton and the State Department maintain that the information was not considered classified when it was originated.
It is unclear if Mills recovered her Blackberry after first losing it. Her attorney did not return a request for comment. It is also unclear what other sensitive, government-related information Mills sent on her Blackberry and personal email account to other federal officials.
Blackberry usage by Clinton and her inner circle has been a growing area of focus in the ongoing scandal involving the Democratic presidential candidate’s use of a personal email account and a private server.
The Daily Caller reported earlier this month that in Aug. 2011, a top State Department official offered to provide Clinton with a government-issued Blackberry equipped with a state.gov email account after her personal Blackberry went on the blink. But Clinton aide Huma Abedin rejected the offer, claiming that the idea “doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
And on Monday, Fox News reported a video from 2013 in which Wendy Sherman, who served as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs under Clinton, admitted that Clinton and other State Department officials frequently used their Blackberries to send information that “would never be on an unclassified system.”
Clinton used only a personal Blackberry throughout her tenure at the State Department. Mills and Abedin used both personal and government-issued Blackberries.
There is some evidence that the State Department was concerned with the use of personal Blackberries separate and apart from the risk posed by losing them.
“I cannot stress too strongly… that any unclassified BlackBerry is highly vulnerable in any setting to remotely and covertly monitoring conversations, retrieving emails, and exploring calendars,” wrote Eric Boswell, then the head of State’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, in a March 2009 memo.
Boswell also warned that the bureau had intelligence concerning “vulnerability” to Clinton’s Blackberry during her Feb. 9, 2009 trip to China. He also issued a warning about using Blackberries on “Mahogany Row,” the floor that houses the offices of top State Department officials at headquarters in Foggy Bottom.
In Feb. 2014, well before the Clinton email scandal broke, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki spoke to the issue using personal digital assistants (PDA) — such as Blackberries — that were not government issued.
“Classified processing and classified conversation on a personal digital assisted device is prohibited,” she told reporters.
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