Our Role in the Clinton E-mails

Well, we have deep ties to the Hillary Clinton e-mail scandal. Oh, yessiree!

Well, maybe not deep, but perhaps a shallow connection,  and rather remote.

But here it is:

1) Xiaolin Cheng, here was a postdoc with Andy McCammon at UCSD, as is presently our ex-postdoc, Yinglong Miao. Tongye Shen also worked with Andy. Andy himself was a postdoc with Martin Karplus, as was I. And we have a paper in press together. So we have several connections with the McCammon group.

2) In the seventies Andy was  a grad student of John Deutch, a chemistry professor at MIT.

3) Deutch became Director of the CIA in May 1995 but stored and processed hundreds of files of highly classified material on unprotected home computers that he and family members also used to connect to the Internet, according to an internal CIA investigation. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for this, and was only few hours away from signing a plea bargain when Bill Clinton pardoned him on his last day in office!

4) As a result of that presidential pardon  the FBI today could find no precedent for indicting Hillary for storing secret information on her personal computer. So they didn't recommend indictment, thus paving the way for her presumed victory in November.

Ta-da!  Cool, huh? Not.

True to our Values

OK, who do we back in the Middle East conflicts? I mean, we’ve got to back SOMEONE, haven’t we? We have to remain true to our values, don't we? 

This year is the 50th anniversary of little-discussed, but classic example of these values, when the US backed the genocide of about a million “Communist” villagers by the Indonesian military, with the CIA supplying lists of names to the perpetrators. The genocide was celebrated by many over here, and by Time Magazine as “the West’s best news for years in Asia.” 10 years later we went one better, supplying not only political backing but also 90% of the military equipment Suharto needed to massacre another 100-200,000, this time in East Timor.  And it wasn’t just a Cold War anomaly, because Western support for that regime continued well after 1990, into the Clinton years.

Don’t expect our choice of who to back in the Middle East to be influenced by such petty considerations as the potential genocide of those who live there.