Is this an offense under the Logan Act? GOP's message to Iran.

a reply to: ~Lucidity

Snow!!! Snow. Can't wait to hear more lameass excuses.

I got to thinking. There certainly is state legislation written by ALEC. The ACA was pretty much written by those with connections to the health/insurance/pharma industries. As is posited here (from one of your prior post links, thank you), it might be that the letter was taken word for word from an AIPAC draft.

If that were true, then the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) may need to be looked into. Did Mr. Cotton's office pretty much cut and paste an AIPAC draft? Did the 47 signatories pass along information from one foreign government to another? Were they "acting as agents of foreign principals in a political or quasi-political capacity"?

FARA may not apply to these signers. AIPAC is not registered as a foreign lobbyist. But certainly the smell is there that the Senators passed along information from one foreign govt to another, making them act as direct agents of a foreign govt.

ETA

The purpose of FARA is to insure that the U.S. Government and the people of the United States are informed of the source of information (propaganda) and the identity of persons attempting to influence U.S. public opinion, policy, and laws. In 1938, FARA was Congress' response to the large number of German propaganda agents in the pre-WWII U.S..

from FARA

So this thread way ahead gets only 22 flags and barely any attention, but a waaay behind thread (both info wise and timewise) gets all the attention.Sometimes ATS baffles me.

originally posted by: ~Lucidity
So this thread way ahead gets only 22 flags and barely any attention, but a waaay behind thread (both info wise and timewise) gets all the attention.Sometimes ATS baffles me.

The weather has a lot to do with things.

originally posted by: ~Lucidity
So this thread way ahead gets only 22 flags and barely any attention, but a waaay behind thread (both info wise and timewise) gets all the attention.Sometimes ATS baffles me.

That's because there are forum gangs at work here.

a reply to: Blackmarketeer
Oh. Got you. Very strange to observe.

Dupe.

Germany lashes US Republicans over Iran letter

Washington (AFP) - Germany's foreign minister hit out at US Republican senators Thursday for sending a letter to Iran over the nuclear talks, fearing it could undermine Tehran's confidence in the negotiations at a critical juncture.

Way to make friends and influence people, GOP

The Message Behind the Senate GOP’s Letter to Iran

For those who might claim that the letter is protected by the First Amendment, it’s interesting to note that when he was serving in the US Army after law school in 2006, Cotton wrote another “open letter” published by the far-right website Power Line calling for the prosecution and imprisonment of three New York Times reporters for allegedly violating the Espionage Act by disclosing how the government was tracking terrorist financing.

I’ll leave the legal analysis to the specialists, but the political implications of this truly remarkable effort to undermine the duly elected president of the United States and sabotage an international negotiation in which our closest NATO allies are also deeply invested need to be digested and understood. This is a clarifying moment and one that Obama himself made abundantly clear when he said that “it’s somewhat ironic to see some members for Congress wanting to make common cause with the hard-liners in Iran. It’s an unusual coalition.”

So, 47 "Poor Decision Making Rob Lowes" were elected to the Senate.

It is almost like there was a competition between GOP Congressional members for most naive House of Congress. House of Representatives start the competition inviting Netanyahu to speak, whereupon they became fodder for his Israeli political election ad. Then the Senate does its stunt of writing to Iran. I would say it's a tie.

This is from a year ago!

On this anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, which Kristol and his friends whole-heartedly championed, he called on Republicans to rally Americans into believing that using military action to solve the country’s problems can be acceptable again. “A war-weary public can be awakened and rallied. Indeed, events are right now doing the awakening. All that’s needed is the rallying. And the turnaround can be fast,” he implored. Exactly one year ago, Kristol published what is essentially the exact same plea he made this week. “The task of GOP political leaders is to educate the public about the dangers of the world and to inspire people to rise above their [war] weariness,” he wrote in a March 18, 2013 Weekly Standard article.

The man for the job? Tom Cotton. “He’s not stale or moss-covered,” Kristol said at the time. “A combat veteran, he understands real war weariness. But he also understands it needs to be resisted and overcome.”

It’s no secret that Kristol prefers the military option in dealing with Iran’s nuclear program. Perhaps that’s why he’s re-launching his war-isn’t-so-bad campaign: the U.S. and its international partners (the P5+1) are closer to resolving the nuclear stand-off with Iran diplomatically than they were a year ago and polling continues to show that Americans prefer diplomacy over war with Iran.

On Iran, Cotton is on Kristol’s page. Last November, when Iran and the P5+1 reached their first step nuclear agreement in Geneva — one the American public, experts and most on Capitol Hill widely praised — Cotton called it a “humiliating defeat” for the U.S. and a “total victory” for Iran. And Cotton called for imposing additional sanctions on Iran even though doing so would violate the terms of the Geneva agreement and push the U.S. closer to war with Iran.

Last May, Cotton even introduced legislation to punish the family members of people who violate Iran sanctions, a measure that was widely panned as unconstitutional. The Arkansas Republican quietly withdrew the measure after discussions with the Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

As much as those 47 signers might want to deny it after the fact, they signed on to a pledge to war. THEY are the ones who in effect signed a declaration of war, their Constitutional right, which they took so lightly. They have now earned the title of warmonger.

a reply to: desert

Maybe these guys went into panic mode because their commander-in-chief Netanyahu might be getting bumped off the throne in a couple days.

Maybe the idea of their beloved warmongerer leader possibly getting replaced with a *gulp* peacemongerer leader has them shaking in their combat boots.

a reply to: intrepid

Basically the 47 should be brought to trial for explicitely violating Logan act. Negotiations with Iran just got tougher because of this gang of morans.

There are still good characters among these 47, so one does not need go hard after them, but sure enough a message needs to be stated for any future moran that there is a limit even in the American scale of stupidity.

Iran got the message