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Gary Edwards

Tomgram: Michael Klare, Superpower in Distress | TomDispatch - 0 views

www.tomdispatch.com/...lare%2C_superpower_in_distress

Iraq ISIS

shared by Gary Edwards on 01 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • In response, the Obama administration dispatched thousands of new advisers and trainers and began shipping in piles of new weaponry to re-equip the Iraqi army.  It also filled Iraqi skies with U.S. planes armed with their own munitions to destroy, among other things, some of that captured U.S. weaponry.  Then it set to work standing up a smaller version of the Iraqi army.  Now, skip nearly a year ahead and on a somewhat lesser scale the whole process has just happened again.  Less than two weeks ago, Islamic State militants took Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province.  Iraqi army units, including the elite American-trained Golden Division, broke and fled, leaving behind -- you’ll undoubtedly be shocked to hear -- yet another huge cache of weaponry and equipment, including tanks, more than 100 Humvees and other vehicles, artillery, and so on. The Obama administration reacted in a thoroughly novel way: it immediately began shipping in new stocks of weaponry, starting with 1,000 antitank weapons, so that the reconstituted Iraqi military could take out future “massive suicide vehicle bombs” (some of which, assumedly, will be those captured vehicles from Ramadi).  Meanwhile, American planes began roaming the skies over that city, trying to destroy some of the equipment IS militants had captured.
  • Notice anything repetitive in all this -- other than another a bonanza for U.S. weapons makers?  Logically, it would prove less expensive for the Obama administration to simply arm the Islamic State directly before sending in the air strikes
  • In any case, what a microcosm of U.S. imperial hubris and folly in the twenty-first century all this training and equipping of the Iraqi military has proved to be.  Start with the post-invasion decision of the Bush administration to totally disband Saddam’s army and instantly eject hundreds of thousands of unemployed Sunni military men and a full officer corps into the chaos of the “new” Iraq and you have an instant formula for creating a Sunni resistance movement.  Then, add in a little extra “training” at Camp Bucca, a U.S. military prison in Iraq, for key unemployed officers, and -- Voilà! -- you’ve helped set up the petri dish in which the leadership of the Islamic State movement will grow.  Multiply such stunning tactical finesse many times over globally and, as TomDispatch regular Michael Klare makes clear today, you have what might be called the folly of the “sole superpower” writ large. Tom
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  • Delusionary Thinking in Washington The Desperate Plight of a Declining Superpower By Michael T. Klare
  • Take a look around the world and it’s hard not to conclude that the United States is a superpower in decline. Whether in Europe, Asia, or the Middle East, aspiring powers are flexing their muscles, ignoring Washington’s dictates, or actively combating them. Russia refuses to curtail its support for armed separatists in Ukraine; China refuses to abandon its base-building endeavors in the South China Sea; Saudi Arabia refuses to endorse the U.S.-brokered nuclear deal with Iran; the Islamic State movement (ISIS) refuses to capitulate in the face of U.S. airpower. What is a declining superpower supposed to do in the face of such defiance? This is no small matter. For decades, being a superpower has been the defining characteristic of American identity. The embrace of global supremacy began after World War II when the United States assumed responsibility for resisting Soviet expansionism around the world; it persisted through the Cold War era and only grew after the implosion of the Soviet Union, when the U.S. assumed sole responsibility for combating a whole new array of international threats. As General Colin Powell famously exclaimed in the final days of the Soviet era, “We have to put a shingle outside our door saying, ‘Superpower Lives Here,’ no matter what the Soviets do, even if they evacuate from Eastern Europe.”
  • The problem, as many mainstream observers now acknowledge, is that such a strategy aimed at perpetuating U.S. global supremacy at all costs was always destined to result in what Yale historian Paul Kennedy, in his classic book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, unforgettably termed “imperial overstretch.” As he presciently wrote in that 1987 study, it would arise from a situation in which “the sum total of the United States’ global interests and obligations is… far larger than the country’s power to defend all of them simultaneously.”
  • The first of two approaches to this conundrum in Washington might be thought of as a high-wire circus act.  It involves the constant juggling of America’s capabilities and commitments, with its limited resources (largely of a military nature) being rushed relatively fruitlessly from one place to another in response to unfolding crises, even as attempts are made to avoid yet more and deeper entanglements. This, in practice, has been the strategy pursued by the current administration.  Call it the Obama Doctrine.
  • In other words, whoever enters the Oval Office in January 2017 will be expected to wield a far bigger stick on a significantly less stable planet. As a result, despite the last decade and a half of interventionary disasters, we’re likely to see an even more interventionist foreign policy with an even greater impulse to use military force.
  • The first step in any 12-step imperial-overstretch recovery program would involve accepting the fact that American power is limited and global rule an impossible fantasy.
  • Accepted as well would have to be this obvious reality: like it or not, the U.S. shares the planet with a coterie of other major powers -- none as strong as we are, but none so weak as to be intimidated by the threat of U.S. military intervention.
  • Having absorbed a more realistic assessment of American power, Washington would then have to focus on how exactly to cohabit with such powers -- Russia, China, and Iran among them -- and manage its differences with them without igniting yet more disastrous regional firestorms. 
  • fewer military entanglements abroad, a diminishing urge to garrison the planet, reduced military spending, greater reliance on allies, more funds to use at home in rebuilding the crumbling infrastructure of a divided society, and a diminished military footprint in the Middle East.
  • Gary Edwards on 01 Jun 15
     
    Thanks Marbux! "Think of this as a little imperial folly update -- and here's the backstory.  In the years after invading Iraq and disbanding Saddam Hussein's military, the U.S. sunk about $25 billion into "standing up" a new Iraqi army.  By June 2014, however, that army, filled with at least 50,000 "ghost soldiers," was only standing in the imaginations of its generals and perhaps Washington.  When relatively small numbers of Islamic State (IS) militants swept into northern Iraq, it collapsed, abandoning four cities -- including Mosul, the country's second largest -- and leaving behind enormous stores of U.S. weaponry, ranging from tanks and Humvees to artillery and rifles.  In essence, the U.S. was now standing up its future enemy in a style to which it was unaccustomed and, unlike the imploded Iraqi military, the forces of the Islamic State proved quite capable of using that weaponry without a foreign trainer or adviser in sight."
Paul Merrell

The Latest US and World News - USATODAY.com - 0 views

www.usatoday.com/...70808616

surveillance state DEA phone-surveillance

shared by Paul Merrell on 08 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • The U.S. government started keeping secret records of Americans' international telephone calls nearly a decade before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, harvesting billions of calls in a program that provided a blueprint for the far broader National Security Agency surveillance that followed.For more than two decades, the Justice Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed logs of virtually all telephone calls from the USA to as many as 116 countries linked to drug trafficking, current and former officials involved with the operation said. The targeted countries changed over time but included Canada, Mexico and most of Central and South America.Federal investigators used the call records to track drug cartels' distribution networks in the USA, allowing agents to detect previously unknown trafficking rings and money handlers. They also used the records to help rule out foreign ties to the bombing in 1995 of a federal building in Oklahoma City and to identify U.S. suspects in a wide range of other investigations.The Justice Department revealed in January that the DEA had collected data about calls to "designated foreign countries." But the history and vast scale of that operation have not been disclosed until now.
  • The now-discontinued operation, carried out by the DEA's intelligence arm, was the government's first known effort to gather data on Americans in bulk, sweeping up records of telephone calls made by millions of U.S. citizens regardless of whether they were suspected of a crime. It was a model for the massive phone surveillance system the NSA launched to identify terrorists after the Sept. 11 attacks. That dragnet drew sharp criticism that the government had intruded too deeply into Americans' privacy after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked it to the news media two years ago.More than a dozen current and former law enforcement and intelligence officials described the details of the Justice Department operation to USA TODAY. Most did so on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the intelligence program, part of which remains classified.The DEA program did not intercept the content of Americans' calls, but the records — which numbers were dialed and when — allowed agents to map suspects' communications and link them to troves of other police and intelligence data. At first, the drug agency did so with help from military computers and intelligence analysts
  • The extent of that surveillance alarmed privacy advocates, who questioned its legality. "This was aimed squarely at Americans," said Mark Rumold, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "That's very significant from a constitutional perspective."Holder halted the data collection in September 2013 amid the fallout from Snowden's revelations about other surveillance programs. In its place, current and former officials said the drug agency sends telecom companies daily subpoenas for international calling records involving only phone numbers that agents suspect are linked to the drug trade or other crimes — sometimes a thousand or more numbers a day.Tuesday, Justice Department spokesman Patrick Rodenbush said the DEA "is no longer collecting bulk telephony metadata from U.S. service providers." A DEA spokesman declined to comment.
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  • The system they built ultimately allowed the drug agency to stitch together huge collections of data to map trafficking and money laundering networks both overseas and within the USA. It allowed agents to link the call records its agents gathered domestically with calling data the DEA and intelligence agencies had acquired outside the USA. (In some cases, officials said the DEA paid employees of foreign telecom firms for copies of call logs and subscriber lists.) And it eventually allowed agents to cross-reference all of that against investigative reports from the DEA, FBI and Customs Service.
  • The result "produced major international investigations that allowed us to take some big people," Constantine said, though he said he could not identify particular cases.
  • In 1992, in the last months of Bush's administration, Attorney General William Barr and his chief criminal prosecutor, Robert Mueller, gave the DEA permission to collect a much larger set of phone data to feed into that intelligence operation.Instead of simply asking phone companies for records about calls made by people suspected of drug crimes, the Justice Department began ordering telephone companies to turn over lists of all phone calls from the USA to countries where the government determined drug traffickers operated, current and former officials said
  • The DEA obtained those records using administrative subpoenas that allow the agency to collect records "relevant or material to" federal drug investigations. Officials acknowledged it was an expansive interpretation of that authority but one that was not likely to be challenged because unlike search warrants, DEA subpoenas do not require a judge's approval. "We knew we were stretching the definition," a former official involved in the process said.Officials said a few telephone companies were reluctant to provide so much information, but none challenged the subpoenas in court. Those that hesitated received letters from the Justice Department urging them to comply.
  • A spokesman for AT&T declined to comment. Sprint spokeswoman Stephanie Vinge Walsh said only that "we do comply with all state and federal laws regarding law enforcement subpoenas."Agents said that when the data collection began, they sought to limit its use mainly to drug investigations and turned away requests for access from the FBI and the NSA. They allowed searches of the data in terrorism cases, including the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people in 1995, helping to rule out theories linking the attack to foreign terrorists. They allowed even broader use after Sept. 11, 2001. The DEA's public disclosure of its program in January came in the case of a man charged with violating U.S. export restrictions by trying to send electrical equipment to Iran.At first, officials said the DEA gathered records only of calls to a handful of countries, focusing on Colombian drug cartels and their supply lines. Its reach grew quickly, and by the late 1990s, the DEA was logging "a massive number of calls," said a former intelligence official who supervised the program.
  • At its peak, the operation gathered data on calls to 116 countries, an official involved in reviewing the list said. Two other officials said they did not recall the precise number of countries, but it was more than 100. That gave the collection a considerable sweep; the U.S. government recognizes a total of 195 countries.
Paul Merrell

Illicit Snowden statue put New York City officials in ironic dilemma - 0 views

wagingnonviolence.org/...-city-officials-ironic-dilemma

surveillance state Snowden bust

shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Runners and dog-walkers in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park were greeted with an unusual sight yesterday morning: a 4-foot tall bust of National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. The pair of anonymous artists responsible tapped arts and culture blog ANIMAL New York to film the guerrilla installation, which was covered and eventually taken down by the city parks officials by mid-day Monday. The artists’ developed a contingency plan that involved 3-D printing “an army of mini-Snowden heads.” Although, to-date, no such back-up forces have arrived, a group of locally-based political artists known collectively as The Illuminator projected a holographic image of Snowden in the place where the bust had briefly stood last night.
  • Before dawn, the small crew donning construction attire hauled the 100-pound statue, made by a sympathetic sculptor on the West Coast, into the Prison Ship Martyr’s monument, built to commemorate the 11,000 American soldiers who died on British ships during the Revolutionary War. Snowden’s likeness was placed atop an empty column. Rather than bronze, the statue was constructed out of hydrocal, a substance often used in Las Vegas casinos to replicate castles and Romanesque statues in gaudy displays. They spared no detail, ensuring that the color of the bust and Snowden’s last name, spelled out at the column’s base, fit perfectly into the rest of the monument. The placement was not incidental. In a statement entitled “Prison Ship Martyrs 2.0,” the New York-based artists write, “We have updated this monument to highlight those who sacrifice their safety in the fight against modern tyrannies.” “All too often,” they added,” “figures who strive to uphold these ideals have been cast as criminals rather than in bronze.”
  • Paul Merrell on 09 Apr 15
     
    Nice bust. Snowden for President in 2016! 
Paul Merrell

Boycott, Divest and Sanction Corporations That Feed on Prisons  :    Informat... - 0 views

www.informationclearinghouse.info/article41455.htm

incarceration-nation for-profit-prisons boycott

shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • All attempts to reform mass incarceration through the traditional mechanisms of electoral politics, the courts and state and federal legislatures are useless. Corporations, which have turned mass incarceration into a huge revenue stream and which have unchecked political and economic power, have no intention of diminishing their profits. And in a system where money has replaced the vote, where corporate lobbyists write legislation and the laws, where chronic unemployment and underemployment, along with inadequate public transportation, sever people in marginal communities from jobs, and where the courts are a wholly owned subsidiary of the corporate state, this demands a sustained, nationwide revolt. “Organizing boycotts, work stoppages inside prisons and the refusal by prisoners and their families to pay into the accounts of phone companies and commissary companies is the only weapon we have left,” said Amos Caley, who runs the Interfaith Prison Coalition, a group formed by prisoners, the formerly incarcerated, their families and religious leaders.
  • These boycotts, they said, will be directed against the private phone, money transfer and commissary companies, and against the dozens of corporations that exploit prison labor. The boycotts will target food and merchandise vendors, construction companies, laundry services, uniforms companies, prison equipment vendors, cafeteria services, manufacturers of pepper spray, body armor and the array of medieval instruments used for the physical control of prisoners, and a host of other contractors that profit from mass incarceration. The movement will also call on institutions, especially churches and universities, to divest from corporations that use prison labor. The campaign, led by the Interfaith Prison Coalition, will include a call to pay all prisoners at least the prevailing minimum wage of the state in which they are held. (New Jersey’s minimum wage is $8.38 an hour.) Wages inside prisons have remained stagnant and in real terms have declined over the past three decades. A prisoner in New Jersey makes, on average, $1.20 for eight hours of work, or about $28 a month. Those incarcerated in for-profit prisons earn as little as 17 cents an hour. Over a similar period, phone and commissary corporations have increased fees and charges often by more than 100 percent. There are nearly 40 states that allow private corporations to exploit prison labor. And prison administrators throughout the country are lobbying corporations that have sweatshops overseas, trying to lure them into the prisons with guarantees of even cheaper labor and a total absence of organizing or coordinated protest.
  • Corporations currently exploiting prison labor include Abbott Laboratories, AT&T, AutoZone, Bank of America, Bayer, Berkshire Hathaway, Cargill, Caterpillar, Chevron, the former Chrysler Group, Costco Wholesale, John Deere, Eddie Bauer, Eli Lilly, ExxonMobil, Fruit of the Loom, GEICO, GlaxoSmithKline, Glaxo Wellcome, Hoffmann-La Roche, International Paper, JanSport, Johnson & Johnson, Kmart, Koch Industries, Mary Kay, McDonald’s, Merck, Microsoft, Motorola, Nintendo, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, Quaker Oats, Sarah Lee, Sears, Shell, Sprint, Starbucks, State Farm Insurance, United Airlines, UPS, Verizon, Victoria’s Secret, Wal-Mart and Wendy’s.
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  • “Prisoner telephone rates in New Jersey are some of the highest in the country,” Caley said. “Global Tel Link charges prisoners and their families $4.95 for a 15-minute phone call, which is about two and a half times the national average for local inmate calling services.”
  • Prison phone services are a $1.2-billion-a-year industry. Prisoners outside New Jersey are charged by Global Tel Link, which makes about $500 million a year, as much as $17 for a 15-minute phone call. A call of that duration outside a prison would cost about $2. If a customer deposits $25 into a Global Tel Link phone account, he or she must pay an additional service charge of $6.95. And Global Tel Link is only one of several large corporations that exploit prisoners and their families. JPay is a corporation that deals in privatized money transfers to prisoners. It controls money transfers for about 70 percent of the prison population. The company charges families that put money into prisoners’ accounts additional service fees of as much as 45 percent. JPay generates more than $50 million a year in revenue. The Keefer Group, which controls prison commissaries in more than 800 public and private prisons, and which often charges prisoners double what items cost outside prison walls, makes $41 million a year in profit.
  • Prisons, to swell corporate profits, force prisoners to pay for basic items including shoes. Prisoners in New Jersey pay $45 for a pair of basic Reebok shoes—almost twice the average monthly wage. If a prisoner needs an insulated undergarment or an extra blanket to ward off the cold at night he must buy it. Packages from home, once permitted, have been banned to force prisoners to buy grossly overpriced items at the commissary or company-run store. Some states have begun to charge prisoners rent. This gouging is burying many prisoners and their families in crippling debt, debt that prisoners carry when they are released from prison. The United States has 2.3 million people in prison, 25 percent of the world’s prison population, although we are only 5 percent of the world’s population. We have increased our prison population by about 700 percent since 1970. Corporations control about 18 percent of federal prisoners and 6.7 percent of all state prisoners. And corporate prisons account for nearly all newly built prisons. Nearly half of all immigrants detained by the federal government are shipped to corporate-run prisons. And slavery is legal in prisons under the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. It reads: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.”
  • Vast sums are at stake. The for-profit prison industry is worth $70 billion. Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest owner of for-profit prisons and immigration detention facilities in the country, had revenues of $1.7 billion in 2013 and profits of $300 million. CCA holds an average of 81,384 inmates in its facilities on any one day. Aramark Holdings Corp., a Philadelphia-based company that contracts through Aramark Correctional Services to provide food to 600 correctional institutions across the United States, was acquired in 2007 for $8.3 billion by investors that included Goldman Sachs. And, as in the wider society, while members of a tiny, oligarchic corporate elite each are paid tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars annually, the workers who generate these profits live in misery.  “It is an abomination that prisoners are paid 22 cents an hour, $1.20 cents a day,” Larry Hamm told the Newark meeting. “Every prisoner should get the minimum wage of New Jersey, $8.38 per hour.”
  • Paul Merrell on 09 Apr 15
     
    Why pay a liveable wage to American workers if you can get prison labor for less than market prices in Bangla Desh? The prison telephone racket has bothered me for many years. The FCC authorized no-limit telephone charges for prisoners and their families on the simplistic grounds of, "well, they prisoners who have reduced civil rights anyway. But it ignored that most prison phone calls are collect calls to families on the outside, who are not prisoners and still have their full civil rights. The for-profit prison industry is a prime example of not thinking things through before privatizing a formerly government function. Privatization creates a lobby for the industry, as Americans have learned all to well with the privatization of most Dept. of Defense work other than actual combat.   Already, for profit prison industries are showing up in state legislatures to demand longer prison sentences. They were the prime movers behind the "mandatory minimum sentence" movement, which has stuffed prisons to overflowing. 
Paul Merrell

Iran calls for a timetable for global nuclear disarmament - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...4-b6d7-b9bc8acf16f7_story.html

war & peace nuclear-disarmament U.N.

shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Iran accused the five nuclear powers Wednesday of failing to take concrete action to eliminate their stockpiles and called for negotiations on a convention to achieve nuclear disarmament by a target date. Iran’s deputy U.N. ambassador Gholam Hossein Dehghani told the U.N. Disarmament Commission that “a comprehensive, binding, irreversible, verifiable” treaty is the most effective and practical way to eliminate nuclear weapons. He accused the nuclear powers — the U.S., Russia, China, Britain and France — of promising nuclear disarmament but making no significant progress. Dehghani’s speech came days after the announcement of a framework agreement between Iran and the five nuclear powers and Germany aimed at keeping Tehran from being able to develop a nuclear weapon. It has to be finalized by June 30.
  • The commission, which includes all 193 member states, is supposed to make recommendations in the field of disarmament but has failed to make substantive proposals in the past decade. Its three-week meeting is taking place ahead of the five-year review of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), the world’s single most important pact on nuclear arms, which begins on April 27. The NPT is credited with preventing the spread of nuclear weapons to dozens of nations since entering into force in 1970. It has done that via a grand global bargain: Nations without nuclear weapons committed not to acquire them; those with them committed to move toward their elimination; and all endorsed everyone’s right to develop peaceful nuclear energy.
  • Dehghani said that as a non-nuclear weapon state and NPT member, Iran believes it’s time to end the incremental approach toward disarmament and to start negotiations with all nuclear and non-nuclear weapon states on a convention that would set a deadline for ridding the world of nuclear weapons. He noted that a proposal in 2013 by the Nonaligned Movement, which represents over 100 developing countries, to start negotiations on a comprehensive nuclear weapons convention in the Conference on Disarmament gained wide support. Russia said President Vladimir Putin has confirmed that Moscow is ready for a serious and substantive dialogue on nuclear disarmament. But Olga Kuznetsova, a counselor in Russia’s Foreign Ministry, warned in a speech Tuesday that the U.S. deployment of a global missile defense system could lead to the resumption of a nuclear arms race.
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  • The only way to change the situation, she said, is for states that pursue anti-missile capabilities follow the “universal principle” of not trying to strengthen their security at the expense of the security of other states. Kuznetsova also warned that development of high-precision non-nuclear weapons threatened “strategic parity” between the two nuclear powers and could lead to “global destabilization of (the) international situation in general.” Chinese counselor Sun Lei urged countries to “abandon Cold War mentality” and said those with the largest nuclear arsenals should be the first to make “drastic and substantive” cuts in their nuclear weapons. Ukraine’s representative called for the urgent development of a binding agreement that would give assurances to countries without nuclear weapons that they will not be threatened by nuclear weapons. Pakistani Ambassador Maleeha Lodhi echoed that call.
  • The United States said the negotiation of a treaty that would cap available fissile material “is the next logical step on the multilateral nuclear disarmament agenda.” John Bravaco said the U.S. has not produced fissile material for nuclear weapons since 1989. North Korea’s deputy U.N. ambassador, An Myong Hun, declared that “our nuclear forces are the life and soul of our nation” and will not be given up as long as nuclear threats remain in the world.
Paul Merrell

Activists send the Senate 6 million faxes to oppose cyber bill - CBS News - 0 views

www.cbsnews.com/...ion-faxes-to-oppose-cyber-bill

surveillance state CISA legislation faxes Obama

shared by Paul Merrell on 06 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • Activists worried about online privacy are sending Congress a message with some old-school technology: They're sending faxes -- more than 6.2 million, they claim -- to express opposition to the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA).Why faxes? "Congress is stuck in 1984 and doesn't understand modern technology," according to the campaign Fax Big Brother. The week-long campaign was organized by the nonpartisan Electronic Frontier Foundation, the group Access and Fight for the Future, the activist group behind the major Internet protests that helped derail a pair of anti-piracy bills in 2012. It also has the backing of a dozen groups like the ACLU, the American Library Association, National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and others.
  • CISA aims to facilitate information sharing regarding cyberthreats between the government and the private sector. The bill gained more attention following the massive hack in which the records of nearly 22 million people were stolen from government computers."The ability to easily and quickly share cyber attack information, along with ways to counter attacks, is a key method to stop them from happening in the first place," Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, who helped introduce CISA, said in a statement after the hack. Senate leadership had planned to vote on CISA this week before leaving for its August recess. However, the bill may be sidelined for the time being as the Republican-led Senate puts precedent on a legislative effort to defund Planned Parenthood.Even as the bill was put on the backburner, the grassroots campaign to stop it gained steam. Fight for the Future started sending faxes to all 100 Senate offices on Monday, but the campaign really took off after it garnered attention on the website Reddit and on social media. The faxed messages are generated by Internet users who visit faxbigbrother.com or stopcyberspying.com -- or who simply send a message via Twitter with the hashtag #faxbigbrother. To send all those faxes, Fight for the Future set up a dedicated server and a dozen phone lines and modems they say are capable of sending tens of thousands of faxes a day.
  • Fight for the Future told CBS News that it has so many faxes queued up at this point, that it may take months for Senate offices to receive them all, though the group is working on scaling up its capability to send them faster. They're also limited by the speed at which Senate offices can receive them.
  • Paul Merrell on 06 Aug 15
     
    From an Fight For the Future mailing: "Here's the deal: yesterday the Senate delayed its expected vote on CISA, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act that would let companies share your private information--like emails and medical records--with the government. "The delay is good news; but it's a delay, not a victory. "We just bought some precious extra time to fight CISA, but we need to use it to go big like we did with SOPA or this bill will still pass. Even if we stop it in September, they'll try again after that. "The truth is that right now, things are looking pretty grim. Democrats and Republicans have been holding closed-door meetings to work out a deal to pass CISA quickly when they return from recess. "Right before the expected Senate vote on CISA, the Obama Administration endorsed the bill, which means if Congress passes it, the White House will definitely sign it.  "We've stalled and delayed CISA and bills like it nearly half a dozen times, but this month could be our last chance to stop it for good." See also http://tumblr.fightforthefuture.org/post/125953876003/senate-fails-to-advance-cisa-before-recess-amid (;) http://www.cbsnews.com/news/activists-send-the-senate-6-million-faxes-to-oppose-cyber-bill/ (;) http://www.npr.org/2015/08/04/429386027/privacy-advocates-to-senate-cyber-security-bill (.)
Gary Edwards

ACTA Open Must Read Analysis: Why Markets Are Still Falling . . . The Shadow Financial ... - 0 views

www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/...analysis_why_ma.php

acta foremski cds credit-default-swaps finacial-crisis politics economy

shared by Gary Edwards on 24 Nov 08 - Cached
  • evidence suggests more credit default swaps are traded in London than in the United States according to the US Federal Reserve, so US action alone cannot address perceived problems.
  • As corporations, home owners and credit card holders go into default -- stop making payments -- many financial institutions are being hit twice on their balance sheet -- once by the bad loan and then by the associated CDS default or obligation.
  • CDS trading has expanded 100-fold since 2001 as financial institutions including insurance companies and hedge funds as well as investors have used the contracts to protect against bond losses and speculate on companies' ability to repay debt.
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  • Chicago Mercantile Exchange
  • Lawmakers are also considering the introduction of new regulations to curb CDS abuse as engines of speculation, but many financial experts are also encouraging the creation of public exchanges for these shadow markets. An exchange would establish an arms length price. As that price was transparent and moved, the market would see that a credit was deteriorating. A centralised clearing market would help shine a clear light on these transactions and since every trade would be backed up by the members of the clearing house, chances of default would greatly be reduced.
  • Unlike most financial markets, credit default swaps are unregulated and at USD 54.6 trillion, they are one of the largest unregulated markets in the world.
  • In response to the coming derivatives and deleveraging Tsunami, which has already begun, the world GDP may have to shrink drastically -- some estimates suggest between 30% and 50% -- over the coming years of The Great Unwind. This is the severe recession the markets fear as they go into free fall.
  • Gary Edwards on 24 Nov 08
     
    Why are Markets still Falling? The Tsunami caused by Derivatives and Deleveraging The invisible elephant in the room causing continuous falls in global financial markets is the link to the privately traded Credit Default Swaps (CDS) and the financial uncertainty they have created whilst synchronised deleveraging takes place across the world. ... Credit default swaps are unregulated financial derivatives which act as debt insurance on risky assets like mortgages, corporate and government bonds. But unlike a normal insurance policy, financial institutions that sell credit default swaps are not required to have enough funds in reserve should those risky loans turn bad. Since the US Congress in 2000 declined to regulate these contracts as it does insurance, the companies that guarantee the assets are not required by law to keep enough capital on hand to pay them off in the event of a default.
Gary Edwards

How Can the US Get Back its AAA Rating? | NewsyStocks.com - 0 views

www.newsystocks.com/...the-us-get-back-its-aaa-rating

Banksters S&P-downgrade USA-downgrade financial-collapse Obammunism

shared by Gary Edwards on 09 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • First among the recommendations of S&P 500, it expects the US government to get the federal debt down to around 60 percent or 65 percent of GDP, which has been historically around 40 percent.
  • . Its concerns were divided into two categories. First, the Americans are growing old and the cons
  • Currently, t
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  • S&P had made it clear that budget cuts alone are not sufficient but taxes must be increased.
  • S&P wants the US to generate enough savings from its debt deal to stabilize the national debt so that it will no longer
  • w faster than t
  • The government requires at least $4 trillion to $5 trillion in savings over the next 10 years to achieve the debt target.
  • tinue to gro
  • ncreases in entitlement costs cannot be sustained alone by the current tax collections for programs like Social S
  • ecurity.
  • budget cuts alone are not enough to reduce deficits. So taxes have to be increased to add revenue to the Treasury.
  • A cap on spending would act as sort of a stopgap preventing lawmakers from letting party politics put a blockade in the way on necessary steps towards the economic recovery of the US.
  • Gary Edwards on 09 Aug 11
     
    S&P wants the US to generate enough savings from its debt deal to stabilize the national debt so that it will no longer continue to grow faster than the economy. Its concerns were divided into two categories. First, the Americans are growing old and the consequent increases in entitlement costs cannot be sustained alone by the current tax collections for programs like Social Security. So, the government needs to create a framework to address the costs of an aging American population. This could require an increase in the age limit at which Social Security and Medicare Benefits could be accessed and to exclude those people who have savings or jobs from both of these programs.   The other crucial area of concerns highlighted by S&P is that budget cuts alone are not enough to reduce deficits. So taxes have to be increased to add revenue to the Treasury. While increasing revenue and cutting spending will help in reducing the deficit and help in balancing the budget. A cap on spending would act as sort of a stopgap preventing lawmakers from letting party politics put a blockade in the way on necessary steps towards the economic recovery of the US.   Analysts believe that the US needs to compromise on its defence budget also, which still supports large deployments of armed forces and material overseas. The US has commitments to NATO in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the federal government believes that it needs to support strategic initiatives in place like Japan. The government has to take strong steps in its policy towards these obligations to put the country's economy back on track.   The US owes maximum of its debt to China. So the Congress needs to put pressure on the Chinese government to alter the value of its currency to make the trade between the two countries fair. Furthermore, cheap goods exported by China have caused a loss of manufacturing jobs in the US, so the latter should place tariffs on more Chinese goods as a way to raise money and prevent dumping of pro
Gary Edwards

Cow Economics & Politics - 1 views

docs.google.com/...pub

Banksters Cows S&P-downgrade

shared by Gary Edwards on 09 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 09 Aug 11
     
    Update on that classic economic-political use case; "You have two cows". Hard to joke when the stock market has lost over $2 Trill in one week, and neither the government or the Federal Banksters Reserve show any concern.  Obama's golf game, fund raising and vacation schedule will not miss a beat.  Cape Cod calls and Obama is there.  Bernake and the Banksters met today, with a stock market begging for him to print up some more free fuel.  Bernake decides to stick with the plan and go with the collapse of the USA and the Dollar as scheduled. GOLD today is over $1780 /oz.  It's value in dollars has risen over $120 /oz since the raising of the debt limit to near $17 Trillion. The stock market melted down yesterday, crashing through key support barriers … shattering the confidence of millions of individual investors … and prompting most - who had been trying to turn a blind eye to the carnage - to start heading for the hills. Yesterday, Aug 9 2011 was the worst trading day since December of 2008. Just since the market began falling on July 26th, more than $7.8 trillion in equity has now been erased! Even though the Banksters are flush with $16.1 Trill in Federal Bankster Reserve coupons (GAO Audit of 2009-2010 Bankster books), the market can't seem to sort things out. And Banks stocks got hit hardest of all in yesterdays crash: US Bancorp and Wells Fargo were both down 9%. Huntington Bancshares and JP Morgan Chase declined 8.5% and 9.4% respectively. Fifth Third Bankcorp fell 11.4% and Capital One fell 12.08%. Regions Bank dropped 13.5% and SunTrust lost 13.9% of its value. Saw a National Media special on S&P last night.  These clowns gave Enron, Worldcom, Lehman Brothers, Ireland, Greece and Iceland their highest ratings right up until the eve of their collapse.  And then there's those trillions in garbage mortgage securities and derivatives rated triple A right through the collapse of the World economy
Gary Edwards

Who Gave Warren Buffett The Authority To Discuss Billionaire Guilt? - 1 views

www.businessinsider.com/scuss-billionaire-guilt-2011-8

Banksters Buffett-phony

shared by Gary Edwards on 16 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Stop coddling the super-rich he says.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 16 Aug 11
       
      Disclosure here:  I actually met Buffett back in the 70's while workign at the Millyard Restaurant in Manchester NH.  Buffett purchased the old Amoskeag Mills "Berkshire Hathaway" shirt manufacturing building just across the Merrimack River.  Nice guy, very friendly, polite and considerate.  Of course, that was years before he made it big investing in the worldwide, McDonald's led USA franchise explosion of the late 80"s.  For sure he made a great call predicting that President Reagan would succeed in ending the Cold War, collapsing the walls, and unleashing the capitalist forces of both free and merchantilist trade.  And that the USA Franchise system was extremely well prepared to launch worldwide as soon as the barriers fell.  He made billions off this call.  Knowing Paul Volker does pay off.
  • Gary Edwards on 16 Aug 11
     
    What is it with billionaires these days? Buffett suggesting we need to tax him more? Stop coddling the super-rich he says.  In other words, he's saying "I've done such a fine job with my money, now I want to give more to a government that hasn't."  Mr. Buffett, has someone changed your suppositions? It seems counter intuitive to your "invest in great management" philosophy.  Shouldn't you really be telling the government to cut costs? Just like you demanded of your Netjets, Clayton Homes, and Helzberg Diamond Shops executives.
K.R.F.C. 76

YouTube - 100 Days of "Fair & Balanced" - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

shared by K.R.F.C. 76 on 30 Apr 09 - Cached
  • K.R.F.C. 76 on 30 Apr 09
     
    A bias piece by MediaMatters.
Paul Merrell

Amy Goodman: U.S. sailors and Marines allege Fukushima radiation sickness : Ct - 0 views

host.madison.com/...9f-5ec5-8275-ac3f6997fee0.html

environment Fukushima litigation Navy class action

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Three years have passed since the earthquake and tsunami that caused the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan. The tsunami's immediate death toll was more than 15,000, with close to 3,000 still missing. Casualties are still mounting, though, both in Japan and much farther away. The impact of the Fukushima nuclear meltdown on health and the environment is severe, compounded daily as radioactive pollution continues to pour from the site, owned by the Tokyo Electric Power Company, TEPCO.In an unusual development, more than 100 U.S. Marines and Navy sailors have joined a class action suit, charging TEPCO with lying about the severity of the disaster as they were rushing to the scene to provide humanitarian assistance. They were aboard the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan and other vessels traveling with the Reagan, engaged in humanitarian response to the disaster. The response was dubbed "Operation Tomodachi," meaning "Operation Friendship."
  • This is the second attempt to sue TEPCO on behalf of these sailors and Marines. The first lawsuit had eight plaintiffs and was dismissed for technical reasons based on the court's lack of jurisdiction. "By June of 2013, we had 51 sailors and Marines who had contacted us with various illnesses," lead attorney Charles Bonner explained, "including thyroid cancers, testicular cancers, brain cancers, unusual uterine problems, excessive uterine bleeding, all kinds of gynecological problems, problems that you do not see in a population of 20-year-olds, 22-year-olds, 23-year-olds, even 35-year-olds. ... So, now we have filed a class action for approximately a hundred sailors." As news of the lawsuit spreads, many more will likely join in. The USS Reagan had at least 5,500 people on board when off the coast of Japan.
  • The ongoing nuclear disaster at Fukushima should serve as a warning to the world. Instead of following the wisdom of Naoto Kan, President Barack Obama is committing public funds to build the first new nuclear power plants in the United States in more than 30 years. In the wake of Fukushima, Obama's Nuclear Regulatory Commission put out talking points designed to diminish growing public concern with the safety of nuclear power plants in the U.S. NBC News obtained the NRC's internal emails instructing staff to downplay safety risks. U.S. nuclear plants are not safe. The U.S. sailors and Marines of Operation Tomodachi deserve their day in court. The U.S. public deserves an honest assessment of the grave risks of nuclear power.
Paul Merrell

BBC News - Farage: UKIP has 'momentum' and is targeting more victories - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...uk-politics-27567744

Auction-2014 UK UKIP EU

shared by Paul Merrell on 27 May 14 - No Cached
  • The UK Independence Party is a truly national force and has "momentum" behind it, Nigel Farage has said after its victory in the European elections. Hailing a "breakthrough" in Scotland and a strong showing in Wales, he said UKIP would target its first Westminster seat in next week's Newark by-election. Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg has said he will not resign after his party lost all but one of its 12 MEPs. He said he was not going to "walk away" from the job despite the poor results. Mr Farage has been celebrating his party's triumph in the European polls, the first time a party other than the Conservatives or Labour has won a national election for 100 years.
  • The UK Independence Party is a truly national force and has "momentum" behind it, Nigel Farage has said after its victory in the European elections. Hailing a "breakthrough" in Scotland and a strong showing in Wales, he said UKIP would target its first Westminster seat in next week's Newark by-election. Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg has said he will not resign after his party lost all but one of its 12 MEPs.
  • The UK Independence Party is a truly national force and has "momentum" behind it, Nigel Farage has said after its victory in the European elections. Hailing a "breakthrough" in Scotland and a strong showing in Wales, he said UKIP would target its first Westminster seat in next week's Newark by-election. Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg has said he will not resign after his party lost all but one of its 12 MEPs. He said he was not going to "walk away" from the job despite the poor results.
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  • UKIP won 27.5% of the vote and had 24 MEPs elected. Labour, on 25.4%, has narrowly beaten the Tories into third place while the Lib Dems lost all but one of their seats and came sixth behind the Greens. With Northern Ireland yet to declare its results, the election highlights so far have been: Far-right, anti-EU parties, including the Front National in France, made gains across Europe, as did anti-austerity groups from the left Labour has 20 MEPs so far, an increase of seven on 2009, which was a record low point for the party It topped the poll in Wales by a narrow margin from UKIP. The SNP won two seats in Scotland, where UKIP also won its first MEP
  • The Conservatives have so far secured 24% of the vote nationally and lost seven seats The Lib Dems slumped to fifth place The Green Party came fourth and has got three MEPs - one more than it achieved in 2009. BNP leader Nick Griffin lost his seat as the party was wiped out, the English Democrats also saw their vote share fall
  • Mr Farage has said his party intends to build on what he has described as "the most extraordinary result" in British politics in the past century.
  • Speaking in London at an election rally, he said his party now appealed to all social classes and had made significant inroads in Wales and Scotland as well as winning the most votes in England.
  • He said the party was aiming to win the Newark by-election next week, to try and "turn the heat" up on David Cameron. They would target a dozen or more seats in next year's general election, he added. "Our game is to get this right, to find the right candidates, and focus our resources on getting a good number of seats in Westminster next year. "If UKIP do hold the balance of power, then indeed there will be a (EU) referendum."
  • Mr Farage said Labour would come under "enormous pressure" to offer the voters a referendum on Europe, and he said he did not believe Nick Clegg would still be Lib Dem leader at the general election. "The three party leaders are like goldfish that have been tipped out of their bowl onto the floor and are gasping for air," he said.
  • Mr Clegg is facing calls to stand down after Sunday night's results, with MP John Pugh saying the "abysmal" performance meant the Lib Dem leader should make way for Vince Cable. But Mr Clegg said he had no intention of stepping down despite the "gut-wrenching" loss of most of the party's representatives in Brussels. "Of course it's right to have searching questions after such a bad set of results," he said. "But the easiest thing in politics when the going gets really really tough is to wash your hands of it and walk away, but I'm not going to do that and neither is my party."
  • Lib Dem Business Secretary Vince Cable added: "These were exceptionally disappointing results for the party. Many hard-working Liberal Democrats, who gave this fight everything they had and then lost their seats, are feeling frustrated and disheartened and we all understand that." Mr Clegg "deserves tremendous credit" for having been bold enough to stand up to "the Eurosceptic wave which has engulfed much of continental Europe", he said. The party had taken a "kicking for being in government with the Conservatives", but must now "hold its nerve", he said.
  • Reacting to his third place, David Cameron said the public was "disillusioned" with the EU and their message had been "received and understood", but he rejected calls to bring forward his proposed in/out EU referendum to 2016.
  • After UKIP's success, the Tory leadership is facing renewed calls for an electoral pact with their rivals to avoid a split in the right of British politics at next year's general election. Daniel Hannan, who was returned as a Tory MEP in the South East region, said it would be "sad" if the two parties "were not able to find some way, at least in marginal seats, of reaching an accommodation so that anti-referendum candidates don't get in with a minority of votes". But Mr Cameron said it was a "myth" that the two parties had a shared agenda. Labour was looking at one stage as if it might be beaten into third place by the Tories - a potentially disastrous result for Ed Miliband as he seeks to show he can win next year's general election. But the party was rescued by another strong showing in London - and it took heart from local election results in battleground seats, which party spokesmen suggested were a better guide to general election performance.
  • Mr Miliband said the party was "making progress" but had "further to go" if it was to prevail in next year's general election. He said the outcome of the elections was about more than Europe and his party must respond to a "desire for change" over a wide range of issues. BNP leader Nick Griffin lost his seat and saw his party's vote collapse by 6% in the North West of England. Anti-EU parties from the left and right have gained significant numbers of MEPs across all 28 member states in the wake of the eurozone crisis and severe financial squeeze. However, pro-EU parties will still hold the majority in parliament. Turnout across the EU is up slightly at 43.1%, according to estimates. Turnout in the UK was 33.8%, down slightly on last time.
  • In the European elections five years ago, the Conservatives got 27.7% of the total vote, ahead of UKIP on 16.5%, Labour on 15.7%, the Lib Dems on 13.7%, the Green Party on 8.6% and the BNP on 6.2%.
  • Eurosceptic 'earthquake' rocks EU Under pressure Clegg: I won't quit Miliband: Labour 'making progress' Cameron: We can still win in 2015 BNP wiped out in Euro elections UKIP looks to Westminster after win Calls for Clegg to quit 'ridiculous' Immigration target
  • Paul Merrell on 27 May 14
     
    UKIP sets the wheels to rocking on apple carts in the UK and EU, winning 24 of UK's 73 seats in the European Parliament and hundreds of seats in UK community governments, all at the expense of the front-running three parties in the UK's 2009 election.   Wikipedia: The UK Independence Party (UKIP) is a [hard] Eurosceptic, right-wing populist political party in the United Kingdom, founded in 1993. The party describes itself in its constitution as a "democratic, libertarian party." Now if we could just begin to see a NATO-sceptic party emerging across Europe ...  
Paul Merrell

Data Pirates of the Caribbean: The NSA Is Recording Every Cell Phone Call in the Bahama... - 0 views

firstlook.org/...-every-cell-phone-call-bahamas

surveillance state NSA DEA cell-phone-dragnet-recording

shared by Paul Merrell on 20 May 14 - No Cached
  • The National Security Agency is secretly intercepting, recording, and archiving the audio of virtually every cell phone conversation on the island nation of the Bahamas. According to documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the surveillance is part of a top-secret system – code-named SOMALGET – that was implemented without the knowledge or consent of the Bahamian government. Instead, the agency appears to have used access legally obtained in cooperation with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to open a backdoor to the country’s cellular telephone network, enabling it to covertly record and store the “full-take audio” of every mobile call made to, from and within the Bahamas – and to replay those calls for up to a month. SOMALGET is part of a broader NSA program called MYSTIC, which The Intercept has learned is being used to secretly monitor the telecommunications systems of the Bahamas and several other countries, including Mexico, the Philippines, and Kenya. But while MYSTIC scrapes mobile networks for so-called “metadata” – information that reveals the time, source, and destination of calls – SOMALGET is a cutting-edge tool that enables the NSA to vacuum up and store the actual content of every conversation in an entire country.
  • All told, the NSA is using MYSTIC to gather personal data on mobile calls placed in countries with a combined population of more than 250 million people. And according to classified documents, the agency is seeking funding to export the sweeping surveillance capability elsewhere. The program raises profound questions about the nature and extent of American surveillance abroad. The U.S. intelligence community routinely justifies its massive spying efforts by citing the threats to national security posed by global terrorism and unpredictable rival nations like Russia and Iran. But the NSA documents indicate that SOMALGET has been deployed in the Bahamas to locate “international narcotics traffickers and special-interest alien smugglers” – traditional law-enforcement concerns, but a far cry from derailing terror plots or intercepting weapons of mass destruction.
  • By targeting the Bahamas’ entire mobile network, the NSA is intentionally collecting and retaining intelligence on millions of people who have not been accused of any crime or terrorist activity. Nearly five million Americans visit the country each year, and many prominent U.S. citizens keep homes there, including Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), Bill Gates, and Oprah Winfrey.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • The Intercept has confirmed that as of 2013, the NSA was actively using MYSTIC to gather cell-phone metadata in five countries, and was intercepting voice data in two of them. Documents show that the NSA has been generating intelligence reports from MYSTIC surveillance in the Bahamas, Mexico, Kenya, the Philippines, and one other country, which The Intercept is not naming in response to specific, credible concerns that doing so could lead to increased violence. The more expansive full-take recording capability has been deployed in both the Bahamas and the unnamed country. MYSTIC was established in 2009 by the NSA’s Special Source Operations division, which works with corporate partners to conduct surveillance. Documents in the Snowden archive describe it as a “program for embedded collection systems overtly installed on target networks, predominantly for the collection and processing of wireless/mobile communications networks.”
  • If an entire nation’s cell-phone calls were a menu of TV shows, MYSTIC would be a cable programming guide showing which channels offer which shows, and when. SOMALGET would be the DVR that automatically records every show on every channel and stores them for a month. MYSTIC provides the access; SOMALGET provides the massive amounts of storage needed to archive all those calls so that analysts can listen to them at will after the fact. According to one NSA document, SOMALGET is “deployed against entire networks” in the Bahamas and the second country, and processes “over 100 million call events per day.”
  • When U.S. drug agents need to tap a phone of a suspected drug kingpin in another country, they call up their counterparts and ask them set up an intercept. To facilitate those taps, many nations – including the Bahamas – have hired contractors who install and maintain so-called lawful intercept equipment on their telecommunications. With SOMALGET, it appears that the NSA has used the access those contractors developed to secretly mine the country’s entire phone system for “signals intelligence” –recording every mobile call in the country. “Host countries,” the document notes, “are not aware of NSA’s SIGINT collection.” “Lawful intercept systems engineer communications vulnerabilities into networks, forcing the carriers to weaken,” says Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union. “Host governments really should be thinking twice before they accept one of these Trojan horses.”
  • The DEA has long been in a unique position to help the NSA gain backdoor access to foreign phone networks. “DEA has close relationships with foreign government counterparts and vetted foreign partners,” the manager of the NSA’s drug-war efforts reported in a 2004 memo. Indeed, with more than 80 international offices, the DEA is one of the most widely deployed U.S. agencies around the globe. But what many foreign governments fail to realize is that U.S. drug agents don’t confine themselves to simply fighting narcotics traffickers. “DEA is actually one of the biggest spy operations there is,” says Finn Selander, a former DEA special agent who works with the drug-reform advocacy group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. “Our mandate is not just drugs. We collect intelligence.” What’s more, Selander adds, the NSA has aided the DEA for years on surveillance operations. “On our reports, there’s drug information and then there’s non-drug information,” he says. “So countries let us in because they don’t view us, really, as a spy organization.”
  • “I seriously don’t think that would be your run-of-the-mill legal interception equipment,” says the former engineer, who worked with hardware and software that typically maxed out at 1,000 intercepts. The NSA, by contrast, is recording and storing tens of millions of calls – “mass surveillance,” he observes, that goes far beyond the standard practices for lawful interception recognized around the world. The Bahamas Telecommunications Company did not respond to repeated phone calls and emails.
  • The proliferation of private contractors has apparently provided the NSA with direct access to foreign phone networks. According to the documents, MYSTIC draws its data from “collection systems” that were overtly installed on the telecommunications systems of targeted countries, apparently by corporate “partners” cooperating with the NSA. One NSA document spells out that “the overt purpose” given for accessing foreign telecommunications systems is “for legitimate commercial service for the Telco’s themselves.” But the same document adds: “Our covert mission is the provision of SIGINT,” or signals intelligence.
  • According to the NSA documents, MYSTIC targets calls and other data transmitted on  Global System for Mobile Communications networks – the primary framework used for cell phone calls worldwide. In the Philippines, MYSTIC collects “GSM, Short Message Service (SMS) and Call Detail Records” via access provided by a “DSD asset in a Philippine provider site.” (The DSD refers to the Defence Signals Directorate, an arm of Australian intelligence. The Australian consulate in New York declined to comment.) The operation in Kenya is “sponsored” by the CIA, according to the documents, and collects “GSM metadata with the potential for content at a later date.” The Mexican operation is likewise sponsored by the CIA. The documents don’t say how or under what pretenses the agency is gathering call data in those countries. In the Bahamas, the documents say, the NSA intercepts GSM data that is transmitted over what is known as the “A link”–or “A interface”–a core component of many mobile networks. The A link transfers data between two crucial parts of GSM networks – the base station subsystem, where phones in the field communicate with cell towers, and the network subsystem, which routes calls and text messages to the appropriate destination. “It’s where all of the telephone traffic goes,” says the former engineer.
  • When U.S. drug agents wiretap a country’s phone networks, they must comply with the host country’s laws and work alongside their law enforcement counterparts. “The way DEA works with our allies – it could be Bahamas or Jamaica or anywhere – the host country has to invite us,” says Margolis. “We come in and provide the support, but they do the intercept themselves.” The Bahamas’ Listening Devices Act requires all wiretaps to be authorized in writing either by the minister of national security or the police commissioner in consultation with the attorney general. The individuals to be targeted must be named. Under the nation’s Data Protection Act, personal data may only be “collected by means which are both lawful and fair in the circumstances of the case.” The office of the Bahamian data protection commissioner, which administers the act, said in a statement that it “was not aware of the matter you raise.” Countries like the Bahamas don’t install lawful intercepts on their own. With the adoption of international standards, a thriving market has emerged for private firms that are contracted by foreign governments to install and maintain lawful intercept equipment. Currently valued at more than $128 million, the global market for private interception services is expected to skyrocket to more than $970 million within the next four years, according to a 2013 report from the research firm Markets and Markets.
  • If the U.S. government wanted to make a case for surveillance in the Bahamas, it could point to the country’s status as a leading haven for tax cheats, corporate shell games, and a wide array of black-market traffickers. The State Department considers the Bahamas both a “major drug-transit country” and a “major money laundering country” (a designation it shares with more than 60 other nations, including the U.S.). According to the International Monetary Fund, as of 2011 the Bahamas was home to 271 banks and trust companies with active licenses. At the time, the Bahamian banks held $595 billion in U.S. assets. But the NSA documents don’t reflect a concerted focus on the money launderers and powerful financial institutions – including numerous Western banks – that underpin the black market for narcotics in the Bahamas. Instead, an internal NSA presentation from 2013 recounts with pride how analysts used SOMALGET to locate an individual who “arranged Mexico-to-United States marijuana shipments” through the U.S. Postal Service.
  • The presentation doesn’t say whether the NSA shared the information with the DEA. But the drug agency’s Special Operations Divison has come under fire for improperly using classified information obtained by the NSA to launch criminal investigations – and then creating false narratives to mislead courts about how the investigations began. The tactic – known as parallel construction – was first reported by Reuters last year, and is now under investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general. So: Beyond a desire to bust island pot dealers, why would the NSA choose to apply a powerful collection tool such as SOMALGET against the Bahamas, which poses virtually no threat to the United States? The answer may lie in a document that characterizes the Bahamas operation as a “test bed for system deployments, capabilities, and improvements” to SOMALGET. The country’s small population – fewer than 400,000 residents – provides a manageable sample to try out the surveillance system’s features. Since SOMALGET is also operational in one other country, the Bahamas may be used as a sort of guinea pig to beta-test improvements and alterations without impacting the system’s operations elsewhere. “From an engineering point of view it makes perfect sense,” says the former engineer. “Absolutely.”
  • SOMALGET operates under Executive Order 12333, a Reagan-era rule establishing wide latitude for the NSA and other intelligence agencies to spy on other countries, as long as the attorney general is convinced the efforts are aimed at gathering foreign intelligence. In 2000, the NSA assured Congress that all electronic surveillance performed under 12333 “must be conducted in a manner that minimizes the acquisition, retention, and dissemination of information about unconsenting U.S. persons.” In reality, many legal experts point out, the lack of judicial oversight or criminal penalties for violating the order render the guidelines meaningless. “I think it would be open, whether it was legal or not,” says German, the former FBI agent. “Because we don’t have all the facts about how they’re doing it. For a long time, the NSA has been interpreting their authority in the broadest possible way, even beyond what an objective observer would say was reasonable.” “An American citizen has Fourth Amendment rights wherever they are,” adds Kurt Opsahl, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Nevertheless, there have certainly been a number of things published over the last year which suggest that there are broad, sweeping programs that the NSA and other government agencies are doing abroad that sweep up the communications of Americans.”
  • Legal or not, the NSA’s covert surveillance of an entire nation suggests that it will take more than the president’s tepid “limits” to rein in the ambitions of the intelligence community. “It’s almost like they have this mentality – if we can, we will,” says German. “There’s no analysis of the long-term risks of doing it, no analysis of whether it’s actually worth the effort, no analysis of whether we couldn’t take those resources and actually put them on real threats and do more good.” It’s not surprising, German adds, that the government’s covert program in the Bahamas didn’t remain covert. “The undermining of international law and international cooperation is such a long-term negative result of these programs that they had to know would eventually be exposed, whether through a leak, whether through a spy, whether through an accident,” he says. “Nothing stays secret forever. It really shows the arrogance of these agencies – they were just going to do what they were going to do, and they weren’t really going to consider any other important aspects of how our long-term security needs to be addressed.”
  • Paul Merrell on 20 May 14
     
    Words fail me.
Paul Merrell

U.S. Strategy to Fight Terrorism Increasingly Uses Proxies - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...increasingly-uses-proxies.html

war & peace war by proxy Africa U.S.-foreign-policy

shared by Paul Merrell on 02 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • During the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States military often carried out dozens of daily operations against Al Qaeda and other extremist targets with heavily armed commandos and helicopter gunships.But even before President Obama’s speech on Wednesday sought to underscore a shift in counterterrorism strategy — away from the Qaeda strongholds in and near those countries — American forces had changed their tactics in combating Al Qaeda and its affiliates, relying more on allied or indigenous troops with a limited American combat role.
  • Navy SEAL or Army Delta Force commandos will still carry out raids against the most prized targets, such as the seizure last fall of a Libyan militant wanted in the 1998 bombings of two United States Embassies in East Africa. But more often than not, the Pentagon is providing intelligence and logistics assistance to proxies, including African troops and French commandos fighting Islamist extremists in Somalia and Mali. And it is increasingly training foreign troops — from Niger to Yemen to Afghanistan — to battle insurgents on their own territory so that American armies will not have to.
  • To confront several crises in Africa, the United States has turned to helping proxies. In Somalia, for instance, the Pentagon and the State Department support a 22,000-member African force that has driven the Shabab from their former strongholds in Mogadishu, the capital, and other urban centers, and continues to battle the extremists in their mountain and desert redoubts.
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  • In the Central African Republic, American transport planes ferried 1,700 peacekeepers from Burundi and Rwanda to the strife-torn nation earlier this year, but refrained from putting American boots on the ground.The United States flies unarmed reconnaissance drones from a base in Niger to support French and African troops in Mali, but it has conspicuously stayed out of that war, even after the conflict helped spur a terrorist attack in Algeria in which Americans were taken hostage.In addition to proxies, the Pentagon is training and equipping foreign armies to tackle their own security challenges. In the past two years, the Defense Department has gradually increased its presence in Yemen, sending about 50 Special Operations troops to train Yemeni counterterrorism and security forces, and a like number of commandos to help identify and target Qaeda suspects for drone strikes, according to American officials.
  • Across Africa this year, soldiers from a 3,500-member brigade in the Army’s First Infantry Division are conducting more than 100 missions, ranging from a two-man sniper team in Burundi to humanitarian exercises in South Africa.
  • Last October, for instance, American troops assisted by F.B.I. and C.I.A. agents seized a suspected Qaeda leader on the streets of Tripoli, Libya, while on the same day a Navy SEAL team raided the seaside villa of a militant leader in a firefight on the coast of Somalia. The Navy commandos exchanged gunfire with militants at the home of a senior leader of the Shabab but were ultimately forced to withdraw.The Libyan militant captured in Tripoli was indicted in 2000 for his role in the 1998 bombings of the United States Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The militant, born Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai and known by his nom de guerre, Abu Anas al-Libi, had a $5 million bounty on his head; his capture at dawn ended a 15-year manhunt.
  • Mr. Ruqai was taken to Manhattan for trial after being held for a week in military custody aboard a Navy vessel in the Mediterranean, where he was reportedly interrogated for intelligence purposes. He has pleaded not guilty and is scheduled to go to trial in November.
Paul Merrell

Secret Manuals Show the Spyware Sold to Despots and Cops Worldwide - The Intercept - 0 views

firstlook.org/...hacking-team

surveillance state Hacking-Team Remote-Control-System FinFisher

shared by Paul Merrell on 31 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • When Apple and Google unveiled new encryption schemes last month, law enforcement officials complained that they wouldn’t be able to unlock evidence on criminals’ digital devices. What they didn’t say is that there are already methods to bypass encryption, thanks to off-the-shelf digital implants readily available to the smallest national agencies and the largest city police forces — easy-to-use software that takes over and monitors digital devices in real time, according to documents obtained by The Intercept. We’re publishing in full, for the first time, manuals explaining the prominent commercial implant software “Remote Control System,” manufactured by the Italian company Hacking Team. Despite FBI director James Comey’s dire warnings about the impact of widespread data scrambling — “criminals and terrorists would like nothing more,” he declared — Hacking Team explicitly promises on its website that its software can “defeat encryption.”
  • The manuals describe Hacking Team’s software for government technicians and analysts, showing how it can activate cameras, exfiltrate emails, record Skype calls, log typing, and collect passwords on targeted devices. They also catalog a range of pre-bottled techniques for infecting those devices using wifi networks, USB sticks, streaming video, and email attachments to deliver viral installers. With a few clicks of a mouse, even a lightly trained technician can build a software agent that can infect and monitor a device, then upload captured data at unobtrusive times using a stealthy network of proxy servers, all without leaving a trace. That, at least, is what Hacking Team’s manuals claim as the company tries to distinguish its offerings in the global marketplace for government hacking software. Hacking Team’s efforts include a visible push into the U.S. Though Remote Control System is sold around the world — suspected clients include small governments in dozens of countries, from Ethiopia to Kazakhstan to Saudi Arabia to Mexico to Oman — the company keeps one of its three listed worldwide offices in Annapolis, Maryland, on the edge of the federal intelligence and law-enforcement cluster around the nation’s capital; has sent representatives to American homeland security trade shows and conferences, where it has led training seminars like “Cyber Intelligence Solutions to Data Encryption” for police; and has even taken an investment from a firm headed by America’s former ambassador to Italy. The United States is also, according to two separate research teams, far and away Hacking Team’s top nexus for servers, hosting upwards of 100 such systems, roughly a fifth of all its servers globally.
Paul Merrell

UN's Ban: Being born in Gaza is not a crime - 0 views

www.jpost.com/...uilding-supplies-let-in-378849

war & peace Israel Gaza Ban-Ki-moon investigations

shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • N Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon lashed out at Israel for striking his organization’s facilities in Gaza during the conflict this summer as he visited the Strip on Tuesday, and said he was considering launching his own investigation into the matter.He also called on Israel to end its “occupation” of land over the pre-1967 lines and to lift all its restrictions on the Gaza borders.“This is one of the fundamental underlying issues, ending the occupation and lifting the blockade, that I have been urging the parties, the Palestinians and Israelis, to address,” Ban said.Several times during his visit, Ban remarked that he was surprised and unprepared for the level of devastation wrought by the conflict between Israel and Hamas, which controls Gaza.
  • But when he spoke about specific investigations, he mentioned Israel’s internal one into IDF activity in Gaza as well as the UN Human Rights Council’s probe into Israeli activity.In addition to those, he said, “I, as secretary-general of the United Nations, am considering establishing my own Board of Inquiry to investigate the shelling of the UN facilities and killing of UN staff.” He did not mention an investigation into Hamas activity.Its estimated that some 100 UN buildings were damaged in the war.The UN has also charged the IDF with attacking three of its UNRWA schools where civilians sought shelter, including the one that Ban visited in Jabalya.
Paul Merrell

UN Report Finds Mass Surveillance Violates International Treaties and Privacy Rights - ... - 0 views

firstlook.org/...ort-condemns-mass-surveillance

surveillance state UN-report digital-privacy

shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • The United Nations’ top official for counter-terrorism and human rights (known as the “Special Rapporteur”) issued a formal report to the U.N. General Assembly today that condemns mass electronic surveillance as a clear violation of core privacy rights guaranteed by multiple treaties and conventions. “The hard truth is that the use of mass surveillance technology effectively does away with the right to privacy of communications on the Internet altogether,” the report concluded. Central to the Rapporteur’s findings is the distinction between “targeted surveillance” — which “depend[s] upon the existence of prior suspicion of the targeted individual or organization” — and “mass surveillance,” whereby “states with high levels of Internet penetration can [] gain access to the telephone and e-mail content of an effectively unlimited number of users and maintain an overview of Internet activity associated with particular websites.” In a system of “mass surveillance,” the report explained, “all of this is possible without any prior suspicion related to a specific individual or organization. The communications of literally every Internet user are potentially open for inspection by intelligence and law enforcement agencies in the States concerned.”
  • Mass surveillance thus “amounts to a systematic interference with the right to respect for the privacy of communications,” it declared. As a result, “it is incompatible with existing concepts of privacy for States to collect all communications or metadata all the time indiscriminately.” In concluding that mass surveillance impinges core privacy rights, the report was primarily focused on the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, a treaty enacted by the General Assembly in 1966, to which all of the members of the “Five Eyes” alliance are signatories. The U.S. ratified the treaty in 1992, albeit with various reservations that allowed for the continuation of the death penalty and which rendered its domestic law supreme. With the exception of the U.S.’s Persian Gulf allies (Saudi Arabia, UAE and Qatar), virtually every major country has signed the treaty. Article 17 of the Covenant guarantees the right of privacy, the defining protection of which, the report explained, is “that individuals have the right to share information and ideas with one another without interference by the State, secure in the knowledge that their communication will reach and be read by the intended recipients alone.”
  • The report’s key conclusion is that this core right is impinged by mass surveillance programs: “Bulk access technology is indiscriminately corrosive of online privacy and impinges on the very essence of the right guaranteed by article 17. In the absence of a formal derogation from States’ obligations under the Covenant, these programs pose a direct and ongoing challenge to an established norm of international law.” The report recognized that protecting citizens from terrorism attacks is a vital duty of every state, and that the right of privacy is not absolute, as it can be compromised when doing so is “necessary” to serve “compelling” purposes. It noted: “There may be a compelling counter-terrorism justification for the radical re-evaluation of Internet privacy rights that these practices necessitate. ” But the report was adamant that no such justifications have ever been demonstrated by any member state using mass surveillance: “The States engaging in mass surveillance have so far failed to provide a detailed and evidence-based public justification for its necessity, and almost no States have enacted explicit domestic legislation to authorize its use.”
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  • Instead, explained the Rapporteur, states have relied on vague claims whose validity cannot be assessed because of the secrecy behind which these programs are hidden: “The arguments in favor of a complete abrogation of the right to privacy on the Internet have not been made publicly by the States concerned or subjected to informed scrutiny and debate.” About the ongoing secrecy surrounding the programs, the report explained that “states deploying this technology retain a monopoly of information about its impact,” which is “a form of conceptual censorship … that precludes informed debate.” A June report from the High Commissioner for Human Rights similarly noted “the disturbing lack of governmental transparency associated with surveillance policies, laws and practices, which hinders any effort to assess their coherence with international human rights law and to ensure accountability.” The rejection of the “terrorism” justification for mass surveillance as devoid of evidence echoes virtually every other formal investigation into these programs. A federal judge last December found that the U.S. Government was unable to “cite a single case in which analysis of the NSA’s bulk metadata collection actually stopped an imminent terrorist attack.” Later that month, President Obama’s own Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies concluded that mass surveillance “was not essential to preventing attacks” and information used to detect plots “could readily have been obtained in a timely manner using conventional [court] orders.”
  • Three Democratic Senators on the Senate Intelligence Committee wrote in The New York Times that “the usefulness of the bulk collection program has been greatly exaggerated” and “we have yet to see any proof that it provides real, unique value in protecting national security.” A study by the centrist New America Foundation found that mass metadata collection “has had no discernible impact on preventing acts of terrorism” and, where plots were disrupted, “traditional law enforcement and investigative methods provided the tip or evidence to initiate the case.” It labeled the NSA’s claims to the contrary as “overblown and even misleading.” While worthless in counter-terrorism policies, the UN report warned that allowing mass surveillance to persist with no transparency creates “an ever present danger of ‘purpose creep,’ by which measures justified on counter-terrorism grounds are made available for use by public authorities for much less weighty public interest purposes.” Citing the UK as one example, the report warned that, already, “a wide range of public bodies have access to communications data, for a wide variety of purposes, often without judicial authorization or meaningful independent oversight.”
  • The report was most scathing in its rejection of a key argument often made by American defenders of the NSA: that mass surveillance is justified because Americans are given special protections (the requirement of a FISA court order for targeted surveillance) which non-Americans (95% of the world) do not enjoy. Not only does this scheme fail to render mass surveillance legal, but it itself constitutes a separate violation of international treaties (emphasis added): The Special Rapporteur concurs with the High Commissioner for Human Rights that where States penetrate infrastructure located outside their territorial jurisdiction, they remain bound by their obligations under the Covenant. Moreover, article 26 of the Covenant prohibits discrimination on grounds of, inter alia, nationality and citizenship. The Special Rapporteur thus considers that States are legally obliged to afford the same privacy protection for nationals and non-nationals and for those within and outside their jurisdiction. Asymmetrical privacy protection regimes are a clear violation of the requirements of the Covenant.
  • That principle — that the right of internet privacy belongs to all individuals, not just Americans — was invoked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden when he explained in a June, 2013 interview at The Guardian why he disclosed documents showing global surveillance rather than just the surveillance of Americans: “More fundamentally, the ‘US Persons’ protection in general is a distraction from the power and danger of this system. Suspicionless surveillance does not become okay simply because it’s only victimizing 95% of the world instead of 100%.” The U.N. Rapporteur was clear that these systematic privacy violations are the result of a union between governments and tech corporations: “States increasingly rely on the private sector to facilitate digital surveillance. This is not confined to the enactment of mandatory data retention legislation. Corporates [sic] have also been directly complicit in operationalizing bulk access technology through the design of communications infrastructure that facilitates mass surveillance. ”
  • The latest finding adds to the growing number of international formal rulings that the mass surveillance programs of the U.S. and its partners are illegal. In January, the European parliament’s civil liberties committee condemned such programs in “the strongest possible terms.” In April, the European Court of Justice ruled that European legislation on data retention contravened EU privacy rights. A top secret memo from the GCHQ, published last year by The Guardian, explicitly stated that one key reason for concealing these programs was fear of a “damaging public debate” and specifically “legal challenges against the current regime.” The report ended with a call for far greater transparency along with new protections for privacy in the digital age. Continuation of the status quo, it warned, imposes “a risk that systematic interference with the security of digital communications will continue to proliferate without any serious consideration being given to the implications of the wholesale abandonment of the right to online privacy.” The urgency of these reforms is underscored, explained the Rapporteur, by a conclusion of the United States Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board that “permitting the government to routinely collect the calling records of the entire nation fundamentally shifts the balance of power between the state and its citizens.”
Paul Merrell

Western Sponsors Liable for Kiev Basket Case | nsnbc international - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...onsors-liable-kiev-basket-case

war & peace Ukraine-creditworthiness Russia natural-gas

shared by Paul Merrell on 23 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • The Kiev ultra rightwing regime that Washington and Brussels railroaded into power in February this year, in an illegal coup d’état, has compounded fiscal bankruptcy with a seventh-month criminal war on the ethnic Russian population of the eastern Donbass regions, prompting up to a million refugees to stream across the border with Russia. Earlier this month, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) warned that Ukraine will need to find an additional $19 billion to avoid bankruptcy if the Kiev regime continues with its military operations in the east of the country. That is on top of the $17 billion that the IMF has already committed to Kiev following the CIA-backed coup against the elected government of President Victor Yanukovych. The legality and delivery of those IMF funds are questionable given the Washington-based institute’s own prohibition on funding states that are engaged in war.
  • This is the context for why Russia was obliged to put Ukraine on a prepayment basis over gas purchases back in June. At a trilateral negotiation in Brussels on September 26, the parties appeared to reach an agreement on a winter package of gas supply to Ukraine from Russia to cover the months of October to March inclusively, which would be based on a prepayment scheme. The payment rate agreed to was $385 per 1,000 cubic metres of natural gas. Granted, that payment rate is a lot more than what Moscow was previously supplying the Yanukovych government. But that was on a preferential basis to an ally. Given that the Kiev regime ousted this ally of Moscow and has shown unprecedented hostility towards Russia ever since the coup in February it is not unreasonable that Russian state-owned Gazprom has raised the price of its gas to $385, and especially because that figure is the average price paid by all European countries for Russian gas.
  • The fact is that Ukraine owes Russia $5.3 billion in unpaid gas bills going back several years. As Western consumer societies might just appreciate, if a customer does not make good on outstanding credit for a service or goods, then the supplier of that service is entitled by law to with-hold further delivery.
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  • «We are ready to pay in advance but the advance payment mechanism has not yet been squared,» the Kiev energy minister told media. Hmmm, payment mechanism has not yet been squared? That hardly sounds like an ironclad commitment to honour contracts with Russia and to make long overdue amends to outstanding debt. It sounds rather like more of the same shenanigans that typifies this warmongering junta. Russia’s energy minister Alexandr Novak is therefore not only entitled, but is merely exercising a modicum of sanity, to insist that Kiev presents a definitive source of funds by the next trilateral meeting scheduled to take place on October 29. To any reasonable person, Russia’s insistence on Kiev providing proof of ability and willingness to pay for the next delivery of natural gas is not an act of «intimidation» but rather is a basic and wholly justified reservation on the part of Moscow to make sure that it is indeed paid for a strategically vital export. One can only imagine how the US or EU would react if they were being dictated to by a hostile jumped-up regime.
  • The depth of Kiev’s insolvency is probably even worse than the IMF’s own dire forecast. Sergei Glazyev, an economic advisor to Russian President Vladimir Putin, earlier this month reckoned that Ukraine will need at least $100 billion to stabilise its economy. He says that the Kiev regime won’t be able to meet its international obligations even if all the promised financial aid from the US and the European Union is delivered, which is doubtful. «Default is inevitable,» Glazyev concludes. In this context of extreme credit unworthiness, it is not surprising therefore that Russia is insisting that the Kiev regime make prepayments for the further purchase of natural gas. Ukraine will require some 18 billion cubic metres of the fuel to see it through the bitter winter months – and all of it from Russia.
  • The September 26 agreement also stipulated that Kiev would pay off its $5.3 billion debt to Russia in roughly two equal tranches amounting to a total of $3.1 billion by the end of this year, with the first payment at the end of this month. However, on October 13, the Kiev-appointed energy minister Yuriy Prodan announced an about-turn by declaring that the regime would not be making any prepayment, and that money would be forthcoming only after delivery of Russian gas. Such a truculent attitude is by no means the first time that Kiev has vacillated on commitments, not just over gas, but also in the realm of political negotiations to find a peaceful solution to the violence in the eastern regions. In a word, the Western-backed regime in Kiev has shown itself to be unreliable to say the least, if not downright unscrupulous. That conclusion is not based on random delinquent behaviour but rather on a systematic pattern since the regime seized power. Then this week at the latest trilateral talks in Brussels, Kiev’s Prodan once again swivelled position and is now appearing to say that the regime will make good on the arrangement of prepayments.
  • What’s more, Russia’s adamant stance on gas prepayments is all the more warranted because the Western sponsors of the Kiev regime have so far shown little inclination to help it deal with its looming energy crisis.
  • Last week, Kiev put a request to the European Commission for a loan of $2.6 billion. But all that the EC would say is that it is considering the request. Yet, on the basis of no money, the EU’s energy commissioner Guenther Oettinger this week says that he expects a gas deal to be signed on October 29 between Russia and Ukraine under the auspices of Brussels. Washington is even more circumspect than Brussels on the matter of providing hard cash to Kiev, as opposed to lots of hot-air promises of nebulous aid. One gets the feeling that the Western sponsors know full well that this regime is a basket case. Nevertheless, these Western sponsors are liable for the basket case that they created. Russia is thus dead right to be sceptical and to insist: show us the colour of your money. If not, then the Western-aspiring regime should be ready to abide by its Western consumer-market principles. No money, no delivery – unless your Western daddy bails you out, which is not looking likely so far. If Ukraine comes off the rails with an energy crisis this winter, the responsibility lies with the reckless regime-hijackers in Washington and Brussels. They created this wreck, they should pay for it – not the government of Russia, which has shown incredible forbearance in spite of gratuitous insults, provocation and insolence.
Paul Merrell

Venezuela to Reevaluate U.S. Relations Due to "Interventionism" | nsnbc international - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...lations-due-to-interventionism

war & peace U.S.-foreign-policy Venezuela destabilization-activities

shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro has warned of “interventionist” activity emanating from the U.S. Embassy in Caracas, and says he is reevaluating relations with his country’s northern neighbour. In an interview with Telesur on Saturday Maduro claimed that actions being taken by the U.S. embassy were aimed at undermining Venezuela’s stability and were “beginning to become intolerable” despite Venezuelan efforts to “normalise diplomatic relations”.
  • “It’s lamentable that [U.S. president Barack] Obama allows his own U.S. embassy in Venezuela to act in a dangerous way…I have a lot of information about the interventionism of the U.S. embassy,” he said. The Venezuelan head of state explained that as a result his administration was “reevaluating” relations with the U.S. “At the right moment I will pertinently explain to our nation the actions that I have to take,” he added. Maduro also gave his opinion that racism had worsened in the U.S. under Obama. He said that the U.S. president had become “tired” of struggling for a progressive agenda and had “joined the worst causes, in the United States and the world”. The comments are the latest indicator of the poor state of U.S. – Venezuelan relations, which have remained frosty since the early years of the administration of former Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez.
  • Venezuela accuses the U.S. of having supported the short-lived coup against Chavez in 2002 and of plotting to destabilise and overthrow the Bolivarian government. U.S. government agencies have funneled over $100 million to pro-opposition groups since 2002. The U.S. meanwhile has expressed worry over some of Venezuela’s international alliances and has claimed the Bolivarian government displays authoritarian practices and tendencies domestically. In July the United States introduced a visa and travel ban against a handful of top Venezuelan officials for what it says were “human rights abuses” committed during an opposition-led wave of unrest in the country earlier this year which caused 43 deaths. Venezuelan officials counter that the opposition was responsible for the violence, and that any member of security forces suspected of using excessive force has been arrested or investigated.
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  • In November an Obama administration spokesperson revealed the president’s willingness to support further sanctions against Venezuela which would freeze the financial assets of 27 Venezuelan government officials and increase funding for opposition groups. The proposed legislation is sponsored by Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio Last month the U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) amended the Export Administration Regulations to restrict exports to Venezuela of items intended for “a military end use or end user.” The term “military end user” is broad and refers to non military bodies such as the coast guard, police and government intelligence.
  • Paul Merrell on 09 Dec 14
     
    Non-intervention in foreign government's internal affairs is one of the major cornerstones of international law that flows directly from the human right of self-determination in government via democratic principles. The U.S. intervention in Venezuela, as In Syria, Ukraine, and elsewhere, is thus profoundly anti-democratic. Several governments around the world are well along the path of shutting down U.S. (e.g., USAID, National Endowment for Democracy, Soros Open Society Foundation, Einstein Institute, etc/)  funding for rabble-rousers. Venezuela is among them, but now appears moving toward ejecting "diplomatic" officials who participate, if not the entire U.S. Embassy.
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