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shane wistley

background criminal record check - 0 views

backgroundcriminalrecord.org

criminal record check

shared by shane wistley on 03 Oct 11 - Cached
  • shane wistley on 03 Oct 11
     
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shane wistley

background criminal record check - 0 views

Literally millions of individuals are victimized by a heinous crime each year. Many of these crimes are violent ones. Due to this reason, the popularity of performing criminal record background ch...

criminal record check

started by shane wistley on 03 Oct 11 no follow-up yet
Argos Media

U.N. Official, D'Escoto, Faults U.S. and West on Iran and Sudan - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...18nations.html

UN Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann Iran Sudan

shared by Argos Media on 18 Mar 09 - Cached
  • Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, the president of the General Assembly, lashed out at the West in general and the United States in particular on Tuesday, saying that Iran’s president had been maligned and that the indictment of Sudan’s president was racist.
  • His comments drew a rebuke from several Security Council ambassadors and even from the 33-member Latin American bloc that had nominated him. “He confuses his personal opinions sometimes with those of the General Assembly,” said Heraldo Muñoz, the ambassador from Chile.
  • Mr. d’Escoto was speaking at a news conference to mark the end of a world tour. He said that he had been struck by the “great respect” shown to Iran by its neighbors and that its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had been unfairly “demonized” in the West.
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  • He said the International Criminal Court’s indictment of Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, on war crimes charges was lamentable because it would undermine Darfur peace talks. A request by the African Union and the Arab League for the Security Council to suspend the indictment for a year should be respected, he said. The indictment “helps to deepen a perception that international justice is racist” because the case is the third to be brought against Africans, Mr. d’Escoto said.
  • Ruhakana Rugunda, the Ugandan ambassador and a Security Council member, said, “I do not consider that decision racist.”
  • Mr. d’Escoto supported Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s criticism of the United States for falling about $1 billion behind in its United Nations dues. Describing the United States’ attitude toward the Council, Mr. d’Escoto said, “ ‘You either give me the green light to commit the aggression that I want to commit, or I shall declare you irrelevant.’ ” Mark Kornblau, the spokesman for the United States Mission, said, “It’s hard to make sense of Mr. d’Escoto’s increasingly bizarre statements.”
  • Mr. d’Escoto tends to draw support from countries at odds with Washington, while Western nations accuse him of being stuck in a leftist, Sandinista mind-set. Mr. d’Escoto, a Roman Catholic priest, was Nicaragua’s foreign minister from 1979 to 1990.
Argos Media

Opinion: Torturing for America - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International - 0 views

www.spiegel.de/...0,1518,622382-2,00.html

Torture US Germany Baltasar Garzón

shared by Argos Media on 02 May 09 - Cached
  • Germany's Code of Crimes against International Law is equally strict in its treatment of torture. Under the statute, as under similar statutes in other European countries, torture is considered an international crime which can be prosecuted even if it is committed in another country. Citing this so-called principle of "universal jurisdiction," Spanish prosecutor Baltasar Garzón has now sought the prosecution on criminal charges of six former US officials who are allegedly behind the torture scandal
  • The notion that international treaties, and European positions on human rights, could impose limits on national sovereignty, or that a foreign power or non-American values exist that could question what happens in the United States does not fit into this system. "We don't have the same moral and legal framework as the rest of the world, and never have. If you told the framers of the Constitution that what we're after is to, you know, do something that will be just like Europe, they would have been appalled." These are the words of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who was involved in the decision on whether to close the torture facility at Guantanamo.
  • This is both a benefit and a drawback of any democratic country: Elected officials change, but the state remains the same. Unlike a change of power in a dictatorship, when the injustices committed by a previous dictator can be dealt with at one go, in a democracy a newly elected leader has to tread carefully when it comes to the legal opinions of his predecessor.
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  • This is why Obama, a Democrat, is promising the people at the CIA that they will not be prosecuted, because when they tortured people, they did so strictly within the framework of the then-administration's interpretation of the law. This is a concept that is not entirely foreign to European legal thought. Under German criminal law, for instance, the actions committed by a person who could have assumed his behavior was permissible, are considered excusable, albeit not justified.
  • Nevertheless, the idea that "what was lawful then cannot be unlawful today" -- as the late Baden-Württemberg Governor Hans Filbinger, who had been a judge during the Third Reich, famously told SPIEGEL in a 1978 interview -- does not always apply.
Argos Media

Bush-era interrogation may have worked, Obama official says - CNN.com - 0 views

edition.cnn.com/...index.html

CIA Torture US Jay Bybee Obama Dennis Blair

shared by Argos Media on 22 Apr 09 - Cached
  • The Bush-era interrogation techniques that many view as torture may have yielded important information about terrorists, President Obama's national intelligence director said in an internal memo.
  • A Gallup poll in early February showed that 38 percent of respondents favored a Justice Department criminal investigation of torture claims, 24 percent favored a noncriminal investigation by an independent panel, and 34 percent opposed either. A Washington Post poll about a week earlier showed a narrow percentage of Americans in favor of investigations.
  • The memo, obtained by CNN late Tuesday, was sent around the time the administration released several memos from the previous administration detailing the use of terror interrogation techniques such as waterboarding, which simulates drowning.
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  • Obama left open the possibility of criminal prosecution Tuesday for former Bush administration officials who drew up the legal basis for aggressive interrogation techniques many view as torture. Obama said it will be up to Attorney General Eric Holder to decide whether or not to prosecute the former officials. "With respect to those who formulated those legal decisions, I would say that is going to be more a decision for the attorney general within the parameter of various laws, and I don't want to prejudge that," Obama said during a meeting with Jordan's King Abdullah II at the White House.
  • "High-value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qaeda organization that was attacking this country," Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair said in a memo to personnel.
  • The author of one of the memos that authorized those techniques, then-Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, is now a federal appeals court judge in California. U.S. Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-New York, a senior member of the House Judiciary Committee, has called for Bybee's impeachment, while Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, chair of the Senate Judiciary committee, called for his resignation. "If the White House and Mr. Bybee told the truth at the time of his nomination, he never would have been confirmed," Leahy said. "So actually, the honorable and decent thing for him to do now would be to resign. If he's an honorable and decent man, he will."
  • Obama reiterated his belief that he did not think it is appropriate to prosecute those CIA officials and others who carried out the interrogations in question. "This has been a difficult chapter in our history and one of [my] tougher decisions," he added. The techniques listed in memos "reflected ... us losing our moral bearings."
  • The president's apparent willingness to leave the door open to a prosecution of Bush officials seemed to contradict White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who indicated Sunday that the administration was opposed to such an action. Obama believes "that's not the place that we [should] go," Emanuel said on ABC's "This Week."
Argos Media

Hearsay: IDF Releases Findings of Investigation Regarding Remarks Made at Rabin Center - 0 views

dover.idf.il/...3001.htm

Israel War Crimes

shared by Argos Media on 01 Apr 09 - Cached
  • The Military Advocate General, Brig. Gen. Avichai Mendelblit, made the decision to close the case in which the Criminal Investigation Department of the Military Police investigated statements made by soldiers at the Rabin Military Preparation Center in reference to Operation Cast Lead.
  • he Military Advocate General, Brig. Gen. Avichai Mendelblit, made the decision to close the case in which the Criminal Investigation Department of the Military Police investigated statements made by soldiers at the Rabin Military Preparation Center in reference to Operation Cast Lead.
  • This decision was made after the Military Police investigation found that the crucial components of their descriptions were based on hearsay and not supported by facts. In particular, the investigation addressed two alleged incidents that raised suspicion of acts in which uninvolved non-combatants were fired upon.
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  • The investigation was initiated by the Military Advocate General after reviewing claims made during a conference at the Rabin Military Preparation Center at which soldiers who participated in Operation Cast Lead were present.
  • The investigation concluded, based on evidence from the soldiers that participated in the conference, that the stories told were purposely exaggerated and hyperbolic in order to reinforce a point amongst the conference participants.
  • For example, one story made the claim that a soldier was allegedly given orders to fire at an elderly woman. However, upon investigation, it was found that the soldier witnessed no such thing, and was only repeating a rumor that he had heard from an unknown source.
  • In an unrelated investigation, it was found that in a similar incident, a woman, suspected of being a suicide bomber, approached IDF forces. After trying to convince her to cease all movement and to stop advancing toward the forces, they then opened fire.
  • This same soldier admitted that he had not witnessed the additional disrespectful and immoral incidents he had described during the conference and that they were based on rumors.
  • A claim made by a different soldier who had supposedly been ordered to open fire at a woman and two children was also determined to be an incident that he had not witnessed. After checking the claim, it was found that during this incident, a force had opened fire in a different direction—specifically, towards two suspicious men who were unrelated to the civilians in question.
  • During the aforementioned investigations, the participants at the Rabin Center explicitly stated that they had based their claims relating to the use of phosphorous munitions on what they had heard in the media and not on their own personal knowledge.
  • No evidence to justify further legal procedures was discovered in this context. When the case did not offer sufficient evidence, it was decided that the case should be closed.”
  • The Military Advocate General, Brig. Gen. Avichai Mendelblit, concluded the findings of the Military Police investigation: "It is unfortunate that none of the speakers at the conference was careful to be accurate in the depiction of his claims, and even more so that they chose to present various incidents of a severe nature, despite not personally witnessing and knowing much about them. It seems that it will be difficult to evaluate the damage done to the image and morals of the IDF and its soldiers, who had participated in Operation Cast Lead, in Israel and the world."
Argos Media

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Gaddafi storms out of Arab League - 0 views

news.bbc.co.uk/...7971624.stm

Lybia Muammar Gaddafi Arab League

shared by Argos Media on 30 Mar 09 - Cached
  • Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has stormed out of the Arab League summit in Qatar having denounced the Saudi king for his ties with the West. He disrupted the opening session by criticising King Abdullah, calling him a British product and an American ally.
  • Col Gaddafi's grudge against King Abdullah goes back to an Arab meeting shortly before the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, when they exchanged harsh words. "Now after six years, it has [been] proved that you were the liar," said the Libyan leader. He added that he now considered their "problem" over and was ready to reconcile.
  • Splits among the Arab League nations have become glaring, says the BBC's Katya Adler who is in Doha, over Arab nations' differing attitudes to internal Palestinian divisions between the Fatah movement of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and the Islamist militant group Hamas. Our correspondent says Western-backed Sunni nations fear the spread of Iranian influence - in Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq and among marginalised Shia communities in the Gulf States - and are suspicious of those they regard as Iran's Arab friends, such as Syria and Qatar.
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  • But when the emir of Qatar switched off his microphone, Col Gaddafi insisted that he could not be denied the right to address the summit as - he called himself - the dean of the Arab rulers, the king of kings of Africa and the imam of Muslims.
  • Arab leaders have concluded their annual summit by showing their support for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir who is wanted for war crimes. The Arab League said it rejected the International Criminal Court's decision to issue a warrant for his arrest. President Bashir had earlier spoken at the summit in Qatar, and won strong support from his Syrian counterpart Bashar al-Assad.
  • earlier reports that Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi had stormed out of the Arab League summit were incorrect. But, our correspondent says, Mr Gaddafi used the floor to settle old scores, criticising Saudi King Abdullah and appearing to reignite a public spat he had at the 2003 Arab summit. At Monday's opening session he called the king a British product and an American ally. But he added that he now considered their "problem" over and was ready to reconcile, drawing applause from the other delegates. The two leaders appeared to bury the hatchet with a 30 minute face-to-face meeting on the sidelines of the summit, reports said.
  • At the end of the summit a joint statement by the Arab League said: "We stress our solidarity with Sudan and our rejection of the ICC (International Criminal Court) decision." Earlier in the day, Syrian President Assad said those who had "committed massacres and atrocities in Palestine, Iraq and Lebanon" should be arrested first.
  • In his opening remarks, Syria's President Assad also spoke about Israel - saying the Arab world had no "real partner in the peace process".
Pedro Gonçalves

US heading for point when 'military pursuit of al-Qaida should end' | World news | The ... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...us-war-against-al-qaida

Al-Qaeda

shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 01 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • Jeh Johnson suggested the group would become so degraded that a time would come when the legal authority given to the White House by Congress should no longer be used to justify waging the war that has been fought since 2001.Johnson said that when this happened, America had to "be able to say ... that our efforts should no longer be considered an armed conflict against al-Qaida and its affiliates".Instead, the responsibility for tackling al-Qaida should pass to the police and other law enforcement agencies.
  • Congress had authorised the president to use "all necessary and appropriate force" against the nations, organisations and individuals responsible for the 9/11 attacks; the US supreme court had endorsed this in 2006 by ruling "our efforts against al-Qaida may be properly viewed as armed conflict".
  • A fortnight ago the US defence secretary, Leon Panetta, claimed America had "decimated core al-Qaida" and that the group was "widely distributed, loosely knit and geographically dispersed".
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  • Johnson insisted the US was applying conventional law to an unconventional enemy, and justified detaining prisoners indefinitely and using "targeted lethal force" – such as drones – to kill suspects. He conceded these techniques would be questionable "viewed in the context of law enforcement or criminal justice, where no person is sentenced to death or prison without an indictment, an arraignment, and a trial before an impartial judge and jury".
Pedro Gonçalves

GCHQ intercepted foreign politicians' communications at G20 summits | UK news | The Gua... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...ted-communications-g20-summits

Spying UK G20 GCHQ

shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 17 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Foreign politicians and officials who took part in two G20 summit meetings in London in 2009 had their computers monitored and their phone calls intercepted on the instructions of their British government hosts, according to documents seen by the Guardian. Some delegates were tricked into using internet cafes which had been set up by British intelligence agencies to read their email traffic.
  • The G20 spying appears to have been organised for the more mundane purpose of securing an advantage in meetings. Named targets include long-standing allies such as South Africa and Turkey.
  • According to the material seen by the Guardian, GCHQ generated this product by attacking both the computers and the telephones of delegates.
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  • The documents suggest that the operation was sanctioned in principle at a senior level in the government of the then prime minister, Gordon Brown, and that intelligence, including briefings for visiting delegates, was passed to British ministers.
  • A detailed report records the efforts of the NSA's intercept specialists at Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire to target and decode encrypted phone calls from London to Moscow which were made by the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, and other Russian delegates.
  • Another document records that when G20 finance ministers met in London in September, GCHQ again took advantage of the occasion to spy on delegates, identifying the Turkish finance minister, Mehmet Simsek, as a target and listing 15 other junior ministers and officials in his delegation as "possible targets". As with the other G20 spying, there is no suggestion that Simsek and his party were involved in any kind of criminal offence. The document explicitly records a political objective – "to establish Turkey's position on agreements from the April London summit" and their "willingness (or not) to co-operate with the rest of the G20 nations".
  • A second review implies that the analysts' findings were being relayed rapidly to British representatives in the G20 meetings, a negotiating advantage of which their allies and opposite numbers may not have been aware: "In a live situation such as this, intelligence received may be used to influence events on the ground taking place just minutes or hours later. This means that it is not sufficient to mine call records afterwards – real-time tip-off is essential."
Pedro Gonçalves

Libyan attack: it should have been clear deposing Gaddafi was the easy bit | Simon Tisd... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...-attack-fire-cannot-extinguish

Lybia

shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 14 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • Any number of other Libyan armed groups might have had a hand in the killings. But in truth, responsibility may also be traced back, directly or indirectly, to those in London, Paris, Brussels and Washington who launched last year's Nato intervention in Libya with insouciant disregard for the consequences. It was clear then, or should have been, that toppling Muammar Gaddafi was the easy bit. Preventing an Iraq-style implosion, or some form of Afghan anarchy, would be much harder.
  • Once again, the western powers have started a fire they cannot extinguish. A year after David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy jointly travelled to Libya to lay claim to a liberator's bogus laurels, the Libyan revolution they fanned and fuelled is in danger of degenerating into a chaotic, violent free-for-all.
  • Do not be misled by the fig leaf of this summer's national assembly polls. Post-Gaddafi Libya lacks viable national political leadership, a constitution, functioning institutions, and most importantly, security. Nationwide parliamentary elections are still a year away. The east-west divide is as problematic as ever. Political factions fight over the bones of the former regime, symbolised by the forthcoming trials of Gaddafi's son, Saif, and his intelligence chief, Abdullah al-Senussi.
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  • Effective central control, meanwhile, is largely absent. And into this vacuum have stepped armed groups – whether politically, religiously or financially inspired matters little – all claiming sectional suzerainty over the multitude of fractured fiefdoms that was, until Nato barged in, a unified state.
  • Research published in June by the Small Arms Survey suggested that the emergence and influence of armed groups challenging national government and army was accelerating rapidly. The survey identified four distinct types including experienced revolutionary brigades accounting for up to 85% of all weapons not controlled by the state and myriad militias – loosely defined as armed gangs, criminal networks and religious extremists bent on exploiting post-revolution weakness.
  • In Misrata, for example, in addition to about 30,000 small arms, revolutionary brigades "control more than 820 tanks, dozens of heavy artillery pieces, and more than 2,300 vehicles equipped with machine-guns and anti-aircraft weapons." Misrata, scene of some of the worst fighting last year, has become a state within a state.
  • the Salafists who besieged the Benghazi consulate have also been involved in a wave of attacks on historic Sufi mosques and libraries and attempts to intimidate female university students who eschew the hijab.
  • western politicians who, just as in Iraq, jumped feet first into a complex situation without sufficient care or thought for the future.
Pedro Gonçalves

Trouble Down South | Foreign Policy - 0 views

www.foreignpolicy.com/...trouble_down_south

Kyrgyzstan Central Asia

shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 15 Jun 10 - Cached
  • Local officials say the unrest broke out as news spread of a fight between young patrons at a casino in Osh. The groups of young Kyrgyz patrolling the streets of Osh and Jalalabad blame Uzbeks for starting the fighting as part of a plot by neighboring Uzbekistan to wrest control of the region.
  • the Kyrgyz provisional government has accused deposed President Kurmanbek Bakiyev -- who draws much of his support from the Southern Kyrgyz --  of instigating the unrest through proxies as a way to disrupt a planned constitutional referendum on June 27. The referendum would have given the country's new leaders a foundation for establishing legitimacy.
  • Kyrgyz military officials say that agents of Bakiyev dispatched well-trained mercenary snipers to Osh and Jalalabad who shot indiscriminately at locals to spread chaos. While it's not surprising that the new government would seek to pin the blame on its predecessor, there is compelling evidence to suggest that the unrest may have been carefully orchestrated. These include attempts by unidentified armed groups to seize control of TV channels, universities, and local government buildings during the fighting, unlikely targets for a mob driven purely by ethnic animosity.
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  • Uzbeks are the largest ethnic minority in Kyrgyzstan after Russians, making up over 13 percent of the population. In Osh and Jalalabad, however, Uzbeks constitute the majority of the population. The Uzbek minority is largely excluded from Kyrgyzstan's political system, though they dominate the country's merchant class. Disputes over water and land use between the Uzbeks and Kyrgyz are common in the south.
  • in 1990, when the Soviet military was unable to put a stop to a three-month-long inter-ethnic battle between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz in Osh that resulted in hundreds of deaths, it was taken as a sign of Moscow's diminished power over its regions.
  • But the early years of Kyrgyz independence, the two groups were generally able to settle disputes without resorting to violence, much of which was due to former leader Askar Akayev's policies of rapprochement. He made the advancement of ethnic minorities a priority, granting land to the Uzbek community and building Uzbek language universities under a policy known as "Kyrgyzstan - Our Common Home." Uzbeks were overwhelmingly supportive of Akayev, but their fortunes turned for the worse when Bakiyev overthrew him in 2005. While he never directly suppressed the Uzbek community, Bakiyev mostly ignored their grievances and allowed the ethnic situation to return to its normal state of animosity. Under his leadership, drug traffickers and organized criminal groups found a safe haven in Kyrgyzstan's south, further frustrating local residents. All the same, the president's firm hand kept ethnic violence to a minimum.
  • Since Bakiyev's downfall earlier this year, however, ethnic tensions in Kyrgyzstan have spiralled out of control. In April, a group of Meshketian Turks, a small Muslim minority group, were attacked by provocateurs in the outskirts of Bishkek. In May, ethnic Kyrgyz and Uzbeks clashed in much small riots in Jalalabad in a preview of this weekend's violence.
  • The heavy deployment of troops to Osh has left other parts of the country vulnerable and fears are running high that the unrest could spread to other areas.
  • the Kyrgyz military, predominantly made up of ethnic Kyrgyz, may itself be part of the problem. Many of its leaders share the suspicion that Uzbekistan plans to invade Kyrgyzstan to protect water resources and expand its territory. They are thus inclined to look upon local Uzbek residents as a fifth column; for their part, many Uzbek residents fear that they will be specifically targeted and are disinclined to trust the military to fairly resolve the dispute.
  • t is still the only state in Central Asia with viable and active political opposition, professional NGOs, and independent journalists. The upcoming referendum and the parliamentary elections that would follow could set a powerful example for the region. However, if Kyrgyzstan is left alone in solving its deep-rooted ethnic strife, the escalating violence threatens the very future of democracy in Central Asia.
Argos Media

BBC NEWS | Africa | Sudan Islamist leader 'released' - 0 views

news.bbc.co.uk/...7931769.stm

Sudan Hassan al-Turabi Omar al-Bashir

shared by Argos Media on 09 Mar 09 - Cached
  • Sudanese Islamist leader Hassan al-Turabi has been released from prison, his family say.
  • Mr Turabi was imprisoned two months ago after calling on Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir to surrender to the International Criminal Court.
  • As leader of the National Islamic Front and speaker of the Sudanese parliament, Hassan al-Turabi was a key ally of President Bashir until they split in a power struggle 10 years ago.
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  • He is the leader of the Islamist Popular Congress Party and has been frequently arrested in the past.
Argos Media

'Merchant of Death', Viktor Bout, denies arming terror | World news | The Observer - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...viktor-bout-merchant-of-death

Arms Trade Igor Sechin Russia US Viktor Bout

shared by Argos Media on 15 Mar 09 - Cached
  • The UN has accused him of arming the alleged war criminal Charles Taylor in Liberia, as well as rebels in Sierra Leone and the Congo. He was arrested in a five-star hotel last March while allegedly discussing the sale of shoulder-launched missiles with US agents masquerading as Colombian rebels from FARC. The request to Thai authorities to arrest Bout says the US feared he was travelling on a British passport, number K163077. UK officials have declined to comment.
  • Bout's supposed client list reads like a Who's Who of the world's nastiest warlords but also includes Americans, Britons, Frenchmen and Russians. A former US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, has admitted that planes connected to his department did fly supplies into Iraq to aid the US occupation. Bout said it was possible that these deliveries were made by a company run by his brother, Sergei. He denied earlier reports that he shipped armoured cars into Iraq for Britain. He said the French government did hire him to fly its troops into the Congo in 1994 for Operation Turquoise, a relief mission after the Rwanda genocide.
  • Some analysts suspect that Bout's activities were linked to Russian intelligence. He denies this, but, asked if he worked for the Russian state, he said: "Sometimes, yeah. We did the flights." His battle against extradition has now become intensely political. Some observers have speculated that he is of high value to the US because of his alleged links to Igor Sechin, a deputy to Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin and one of the Kremlin's most powerful figures. He denied any such links or ever meeting Sechin, saying that the two men did not – as is claimed – serve as intelligence officers in Mozambique at the same time.
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  • one estimate had his wealth at $6 billion
Argos Media

Haass: Why Obama Should Lift the Cuba Embargo | Newsweek International | Newsweek.com - 0 views

www.newsweek.com/...188147

Cuba US Richard Haas Cuban Embargo

shared by Argos Media on 12 Mar 09 - Cached
  • There are signs that change may finally be coming to Cuba, 50 years after the revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power. In a major shakeup, Raúl Castro, Fidel's brother, fired several high-level officials last week
  • Some American conservatives maintain that all this is reason enough for the United States to persist in its policy of ignoring Cuba diplomatically and sanctioning it economically. At least in principle, one could argue that the revolution is running out of steam and that regime change from within may finally be at hand. The problem is that this argument ignores Cuban reality. The country is not near the precipice of collapse. To the contrary, the intertwined party, government and military have matters well in hand. The population, ensured basic necessities along with access to education and health care, is neither inclined to radical change nor in a position to bring it about.
  • The American policy of isolating Cuba has failed. Officials boast that Havana now hosts more diplomatic missions than any other country in the region save Brazil. Nor is the economic embargo working. Or worse: it is working, but for countries like Canada, South Korea and dozens of others that are only too happy to help supply Cuba with food, generators and building materials.
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  • The policy of trying to isolate Cuba also works—perversely enough—to bolster the Cuban regime. The U.S. embargo provides Cuba's leaders a convenient excuse—the country's economic travails are due to U.S. sanctions, they can claim, not their own failed policies. The lack of American visitors and investment also helps the government maintain political control.
  • There is one more reason to doubt the wisdom of continuing to isolate Cuba. However slowly, the country is changing. The question is whether the United States will be in a position to influence the direction and pace of this change. We do not want to see a Cuba that fails, in which the existing regime gives way to a repressive regime of a different stripe or to disorder marked by drugs, criminality, terror or a humanitarian crisis that prompts hundreds of thousands of Cubans to flee their country for the United States.
Pedro Gonçalves

2 Chinese Schools Said to Be Linked to Online Attacks - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...19china.html

China US Cyber Warfare

shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 20 Feb 10 - Cached
  • A series of online attacks on Google and dozens of other American corporations have been traced to computers at two educational institutions in China, including one with close ties to the Chinese military, say people involved in the investigation.
  • the attacks, aimed at stealing trade secrets and computer codes and capturing e-mail of Chinese human rights activists, may have begun as early as April, months earlier than previously believed.
  • Computer security experts, including investigators from the National Security Agency, have been working since then to pinpoint the source of the attacks. Until recently, the trail had led only to servers in Taiwan.
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  • The Chinese schools involved are Shanghai Jiaotong University and the Lanxiang Vocational School
  • Lanxiang, in east China’s Shandong Province, is a huge vocational school that was established with military support and trains some computer scientists for the military. The school’s computer network is operated by a company with close ties to Baidu, the dominant search engine in China and a competitor of Google.
  • Within the computer security industry and the Obama administration, analysts differ over how to interpret the finding that the intrusions appear to come from schools instead of Chinese military installations or government agencies. Some analysts have privately circulated a document asserting that the vocational school is being used as camouflage for government operations. But other computer industry executives and former government officials said it was possible that the schools were cover for a “false flag” intelligence operation being run by a third country. Some have also speculated that the hacking could be a giant example of criminal industrial espionage, aimed at stealing intellectual property from American technology firms.
  • Independent researchers who monitor Chinese information warfare caution that the Chinese have adopted a highly distributed approach to online espionage, making it almost impossible to prove where an attack originated. “We have to understand that they have a different model for computer network exploit operations,” said James C. Mulvenon, a Chinese military specialist and a director at the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis in Washington. Rather than tightly compartmentalizing online espionage within agencies as the United States does, he said, the Chinese government often involves volunteer “patriotic hackers” to support its policies.
  • Google’s decision to step forward and challenge China over the intrusions has created a highly sensitive issue for the United States government. Shortly after the company went public with its accusations, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton challenged the Chinese in a speech on Internet censors, suggesting that the country’s efforts to control open access to the Internet were in effect an information-age Berlin Wall.
  • A report on Chinese online warfare prepared for the U.S.-China Economic Security Review Commission in October 2009 by Northrop Grumman identified six regions in China with military efforts to engage in such attacks. Jinan, site of the vocational school, was one of the regions.
Pedro Gonçalves

The truth about the Mossad | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...ian-black-mossad-dubai

israel mossad dubai hamas

shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 19 Feb 10 - Cached
  • two years ago this week, when a bomb in a Pajero jeep in Damascus decapitated a man named Imad Mughniyeh. Mughniyeh was the military leader of Lebanon's Shia movement Hizbullah, an ally of Iran, and was wanted by the US, France and half a dozen other countries. Israel never went beyond cryptic nodding and winking about that killing in the heart of the Syrian capital, but it is widely believed to have been one of its most daring and sophisticated clandestine operations
  • The Mossad's most celebrated exploits included the abduction of the fugitive Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, who was later tried and hanged in Israel. Others were organising the defection of an Iraqi pilot who flew his MiG-21 to Israel, and support for Iraqi Kurdish rebels against Baghdad. Military secrets acquired by Elie Cohen, the infamous spy who penetrated the Syrian leadership, helped Israel conquer the Golan Heights in the 1967 Middle East war.
  • Over the years, the Mossad's image has been badly tarnished at home as well as abroad. It was blamed in part for failing to get wind of Egyptian-Syrian plans for the devastating attack that launched the 1973 Yom Kippur war. Critics wondered whether the spies had got their priorities right by focusing on hunting down Palestinian gunmen in the back alleys of European cities, when they should have been stealing secrets in Cairo and Damascus. The Mossad also played a significant, though still little-known, role in the covert supply of arms to Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran to help fight Saddam Hussein's Iraq, as part of the Iran-Contra scandal during Ronald Reagan's presidency.
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  • In 1990, a Canadian-born former officer called Victor Ostrovsky blew the whistle on its internal organisation, training and methods, revealing codenames including "Kidon" (bayonet), the unit in charge of assassinations. An official smear campaign failed to stop Ostrovsky's book, so the agency kept quiet when another ostensibly inside account came out in 2007. It described the use of shortwave radios for sending encoded transmissions, operations in Iran for collecting soil samples, and joint operations with the CIA against Hezbollah.
  • the worst own goal came in 1997, during Binyamin Netanyahu's first term as prime minister. Mossad agents tried but failed to assassinate Khaled Mash'al – the same Hamas leader who is now warning of retaliation for Mabhouh's murder – by injecting poison into his ear in Amman, Jordan. Using forged Canadian passports, they fled to the Israeli embassy, triggering outrage and a huge diplomatic crisis with Jordan. Danny Yatom, the then Mossad chief, was forced to quit. Ephraim Halevy, a quietly spoken former Londoner, was brought back from retirement to clear up the mess.
  • It would be surprising if a key part of this extraordinary story did not turn out to be the role played by Palestinians. It is still Mossad practice to recruit double agents, just as it was with the PLO back in the 1970s. News of the arrest in Damascus of another senior Hamas operative – though denied by Mash'al – seems to point in this direction. Two other Palestinians extradited from Jordan to Dubai are members of the Hamas armed wing, the Izzedine al-Qassam brigades, suggesting treachery may indeed have been involved. Previous assassinations have involved a Palestinian agent identifying the target.
  • Yossi Melman, the expert on intelligence for Israel's Haaretz newspaper, worries that, as before the 1973 war, the Israeli government may be getting it wrong by focusing on the wrong enemy – the Palestinians – instead of prioritising Iran and Hizbullah.
Pedro Gonçalves

Al Eisele: Why Kazakhstan Is Front and Center at the Global Nuclear Security Summit - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...hstan-is-front-a_b_533531.html

Kazakhstan Nuclear Weapons

shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 13 Apr 10 - Cached
  • even though Kazakhstan is hardly a shining example of democracy - Kazakhstan's parliament made Nazarbayev de facto president for life in 2007 with veto powers over any legislation and immunity from criminal prosecution - he was the first foreign leader to renounce the possession and use of nuclear weapons.
  • On August 29, 1991, four months before the Soviet Union collapsed and 38 years after Mrs. Koloskova witnessed the Soviets' first thermonuclear explosion, Nazarbayev shut down the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site.
  • And in 1995, after his country inherited the world's fourth largest nuclear arsenal, he declared that Kazakhstan was a nuclear free country and returned 40 heavy bombers and more than 1,400 nuclear warheads for intercontinental and intermediate range missiles to Russia for destruction. He later destroyed 148 ICBM silos across Kazakhstan and underground test tunnels at Semipalatinsk, as part of the Nunn-Lugar Program.
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  • At the same time, he approved a secret joint operation with the U.S. code named Project Sapphire, which removed 1,278 pounds of highly enriched uranium to the U.S..
  • Kazakhstan also has the Caspian Sea region's largest recoverable oil and gas reserves as well as the world's second largest deposits of uranium.
  • And it is flexing its diplomatic muscles as it became in January the first predominantly Muslim nation and the first former Soviet Union state to assume the chairmanship of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
Pedro Gonçalves

Academic claims Israeli school textbooks contain bias | World news | The Observer - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...israeli-school-racism-claim

Israel Palestine Education

shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 07 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • The Arab with a camel, in an Ali Baba dress. They describe them as vile and deviant and criminal, people who don't pay taxes, people who live off the state, people who don't want to develop," she says. "The only representation is as refugees, primitive farmers and terrorists. You never see a Palestinian child or doctor or teacher or engineer or modern farmer."
  • Peled-Elhanan, a professor of language and education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has studied the content of Israeli school books for the past five years, and her account, Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education, is to be published in the UK this month. She describes what she found as racism– but, more than that, a racism that prepares young Israelis for their compulsory military service.
  • "One question that bothers many people is how do you explain the cruel behaviour of Israeli soldiers towards Palestinians, an indifference to human suffering, the inflicting of suffering. People ask how can these nice Jewish boys and girls become monsters once they put on a uniform. I think the major reason for that is education. So I wanted to see how school books represent Palestinians."
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  • The killing of Palestinians is depicted as something that was necessary for the survival of the nascent Jewish state, she claims. "It's not that the massacres are denied, they are represented in Israeli school books as something that in the long run was good for the Jewish state. For example, Deir Yassin [a pre-1948 Palestinian village close to Jerusalem] was a terrible slaughter by Israeli soldiers. In school books they tell you that this massacre initiated the massive flight of Arabs from Israel and enabled the establishment of a Jewish state with a Jewish majority. So it was for the best. Maybe it was unfortunate, but in the long run the consequences for us were good."
  • Children, she says, grow up to serve in the army and internalise the message that Palestinians are "people whose life is dispensable with impunity. And not only that, but people whose number has to be diminished."
  • The family produced a poster, calling for a peaceful settlement to the conflict, featuring Peled-Elhanan's only daughter, Smadar. It's message was that all children deserve a better future.Then, in 1997, Smadar was killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber while shopping in Jerusalem. She was 13. Peled-Elhanan declines to talk about her daughter's death apart from once or twice referring to "the tragedy".At the time, she said that it would strengthen her belief that, without a settlement to the conflict and peaceful coexistence with Palestinians, more children would die. "Terrorist attacks like this are the direct consequence of the oppression, slavery, humiliation and state of siege imposed on the Palestinians," she told TV reporters in the aftermath of Smadar's death.
  • "University professors stopped inviting me to conferences. And when I do speak, the most common reaction is, 'you are anti-Zionist'." Anybody who challenges the dominant narrative in today's Israel, she says, is similarly accused.
  • Asked if Palestinian school books also reflect a certain dogma, Peled-Elhanan claims that they distinguish between Zionists and Jews. "They make this distinction all the time. They are against Zionists, not against Jews."But she concedes that teaching about the Holocaust in Palestinian schools is "a problem, an issue". "Some [Palestinian] teachers refuse to teach the Holocaust as long as Israelis don't teach the Nakba [the Palestinian "catastrophe" of 1948]."
Argos Media

Bush Officials Try to Alter Ethics Report - washingtonpost.com - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...AR2009050502219.html

US CIA Torture John Yoo Jay Bybee

shared by Argos Media on 06 May 09 - Cached
  • Former Bush administration officials have launched a behind-the-scenes campaign to urge Justice Department leaders to soften an ethics report criticizing lawyers who blessed harsh detainee interrogation tactics, according to two sources familiar with the efforts.
  • Bybee, now a federal appeals court judge, and Yoo, now a law professor in California
  • A draft report of more than 200 pages, prepared in January before Bush's departure, recommends disciplinary action, rather than criminal prosecution, by state bar associations against Yoo and Bybee, former attorneys in the department's Office of Legal Counsel, for their work in preparing and signing the interrogation memos. State bar associations have the power to suspend a lawyer's license to practice or impose other penalties.
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  • Representatives for John C. Yoo and Jay S. Bybee, subjects of the ethics probe, have encouraged former Justice Department and White House officials to contact new officials at the department to point out the troubling precedent of imposing sanctions on legal advisers, said the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the process is not complete.
  • The legal analysis on interrogation prepared by a third former chief of the Office of Legal Counsel, Steven G. Bradbury, also was a subject of the ethics probe. But in an early draft, investigators did not make disciplinary recommendations about Bradbury.
  • Among other things, the draft report cited passages from a 2004 CIA inspector general's investigation and cast doubt on the effectiveness of the questioning techniques, which sources characterized as far afield from the narrow legal questions surrounding the lawyers' activities.
Argos Media

Afghan president Hamid Karzai criticised for selecting former warlord as election runni... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...resident-hamid-karzai-election

Afghanistan Hamid Karzai Mohammad Qasim Fahim

shared by Argos Media on 05 May 09 - Cached
  • Senior diplomats and human rights workers lashed out at Hamid Karzai's decision today to select a powerful warlord accused by western officials of involvement in criminal gangs and arms smuggling as a running mate in Afghanistan's presidential election.Karzai's decision to defy international pressure and appoint Mohammad Qasim Fahim as one of his two vice-presidential candidates for the 20 August poll showed the world and the Afghan people that the president was "moving the country backwards", said a western diplomat in Kabul, who is close to the UN chief in the country, Kai Eide.
  • The former militia leader, who goes by the honorary title of Marshal Fahim, is disliked by many Afghans suspicious of the wealth he has acquired since 2001 and disliked by the west for his opposition to the disbandment of the private armies of Afghanistan's warlords. An official with an international mission in Kabul said Mr Fahim had been linked to kidnap gangs operating in the capital. He is also accused of murdering prisoners of war during the mujahideen government in the 1990s.
  • For many of his critics, Karzai's biggest mistake was to bring many of the warlords into government after the US-led toppling of the Taliban regime. However, his defenders say he had no other choice after the international community deprived him of the resources he needed in the years immediately after 2001.
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  • Fahim is also regarded as a hate figure by the Taliban and could possibly hinder efforts to kickstart a peace process between the Afghan government and members of the hardline movement.
  • In selecting Fahim the president made amends with a man who earned his spurs as a leader in the anti-Soviet jihad, serving the guerrilla commander Ahmed Shah Massoud. Fahim served as Karzai's vice president and defence minister in the transitional government after 2001. He was stopped from running as vice-president in Afghanistan's first democratic elections in 2004 by lobbying from the international community.
  • General Mohammad Qasim Fahim is a member of the Tajik community, Afghanistan's second-largest ethnic group.
  • He took over as military chief of the Northern Alliance two days before the World Trade Centre attacks, following the death of Ahmad Shah Massoud.
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