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Paul Merrell

Mark H. Gaffney   :9/11: The FBI Report and the Dancing Israelis:   Informati... - 0 views

www.informationclearinghouse.info/article44477.htm

war & peace 9-11 dancing-Israelis

shared by Paul Merrell on 23 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • As she watched, she noticed three men in the parking lot below who were behaving strangely. They were sitting or kneeling on the roof of a white panel truck and, like her, were watching the stricken World Trade Center. Oddly, however, the three men were celebrating. They were smiling and laughing, giving high-fives, taking photos, and one looked to be filming the World Trade Center as it burned. Their inappropriate behavior made Maria suspicious and, a few minutes later, when the men drove off in the van, she copied down their license plate number. When her husband returned home from jury duty, she discussed the matter with him, then, called the police and reported what she had seen.
  • Paul Merrell on 23 Mar 16
     
    The dancing Israelis. Excellent research with citations.
Paul Merrell

The NSA Is Building the Country's Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say) | Threat Leve... - 0 views

www.wired.com/...1

Big Brother NSA Stellar Wind cryptography supercomputers surveillance

shared by Paul Merrell on 23 May 12 - No Cached
    • Paul Merrell
      Paul Merrell on 23 May 12
       
      There goes the neighborhood; the Feds are moving in. 
  • In the process—and for the first time since Watergate and the other scandals of the Nixon administration—the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens. It has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas. It has created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns and unscramble codes. Finally, the agency has begun building a place to store all the trillions of words and thoughts and whispers captured in its electronic net. And, of course, it’s all being done in secret.
  • According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.
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  • as a 2007 Department of Defense report puts it, the Pentagon is attempting to expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes (1024 bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a septillion bytes—so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.) It needs that capacity because, according to a recent report by Cisco, global Internet traffic will quadruple from 2010 to 2015, reaching 966 exabytes per year. (A million exabytes equal a yottabyte.
  • The data stored in Bluffdale will naturally go far beyond the world’s billions of public web pages. The NSA is more interested in the so-called invisible web, also known as the deep web or deepnet—data beyond the reach of the public. This includes password-protected data, US and foreign government communications, and noncommercial file-sharing between trusted peers.
  • The broad outlines of the so-called warrantless-wiretapping program have long been exposed—how the NSA secretly and illegally bypassed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which was supposed to oversee and authorize highly targeted domestic eavesdropping; how the program allowed wholesale monitoring of millions of American phone calls and email. In the wake of the program’s exposure, Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which largely made the practices legal. Telecoms that had agreed to participate in the illegal activity were granted immunity from prosecution and lawsuits. What wasn’t revealed until now, however, was the enormity of this ongoing domestic spying program. For the first time, a former NSA official has gone on the record to describe the program, codenamed Stellar Wind, in detail.
  • one of the deepest secrets of the Stellar Wind program—again, never confirmed until now—was that the NSA gained warrantless access to AT&T’s vast trove of domestic and international billing records, detailed information about who called whom in the US and around the world. As of 2007, AT&T had more than 2.8 trillion records housed in a database at its Florham Park, New Jersey, complex. Verizon was also part of the program
  • the NSA succeeded in building an even faster supercomputer. “They made a big breakthrough,” says another former senior intelligence official, who helped oversee the program. The NSA’s machine was likely similar to the unclassified Jaguar, but it was much faster out of the gate, modified specifically for cryptanalysis and targeted against one or more specific algorithms, like the AES.
  • The breakthrough was enormous, says the former official, and soon afterward the agency pulled the shade down tight on the project, even within the intelligence community and Congress. “Only the chairman and vice chairman and the two staff directors of each intelligence committee were told about it,” he says. The reason? “They were thinking that this computing breakthrough was going to give them the ability to crack current public encryption.”
  • But the real competition will take place in the classified realm. To secretly develop the new exaflop (or higher) machine by 2018, the NSA has proposed constructing two connecting buildings, totaling 260,000 square feet, near its current facility on the East Campus of Oak Ridge. Called the Multiprogram Computational Data Center,
  • n the meantime Cray is working on the next step for the NSA, funded in part by a $250 million contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It’s a massively parallel supercomputer called Cascade, a prototype of which is due at the end of 2012. Its development will run largely in parallel with the unclassified effort for the DOE and other partner agencies. That project, due in 2013, will upgrade the Jaguar XT5 into an XK6, codenamed Titan, upping its speed to 10 to 20 petaflops.
Paul Merrell

Evaluating Drug Decriminalization in Portugal 12 Years Later - SPIEGEL ONLINE - 0 views

www.spiegel.de/...l-12-years-later-a-891060.html

war-on-drugs prohibition legalization Portugal

shared by Paul Merrell on 21 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Twelve years ago, Portugal eliminated criminal penalties for drug users. Since then, those caught with small amounts of marijuana, cocaine or heroin go unindicted and possession is a misdemeanor on par with illegal parking. Experts are pleased with the results.
Paul Merrell

The Daily Dot - How a major bank and the U.S. government joined forces to spy on Anonymous - 0 views

www.dailydot.com/...ca-monitoring-activists-online

surveillance state banksters corporate-state-consolidation

shared by Paul Merrell on 08 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • New details have surfaced regarding the surveillance protocols used by Bank of America to keep tabs on social activists. Last year, Anonymous hacktivists published 14 gigabytes of private emails and spreadsheets which revealed that Bank of America was monitoring social media and other online services used by activists for basic communication. This time however, information about the bank’s recent surveillance activities were obtained legally through a public records request by a single petitioner. The newly published documents reveal a coordinated effort by Bank of America, the Washington State Patrol (WSP), and federal counterterrorism agencies, to monitor activists as they prepared for a public demonstration in Olympia, Wash. Over 230 people originally signed up to attend the “Million Mask March” event, which was organized by the Anonymous movement and took place on November 5, 2013. Although an official report by the WSP described the event as a “peaceful protest” being organized by activists who had made “no threats of violence,” those involved were still monitored by the department before the event took place. Information gathered about the potential protesters was then shared with Bank of America. Furthermore, Bank of America solicited information about activists from various federal agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
  • According to Andrew Charles Hendricks, an activist who originally acquired the documents, the emails included the home address of a demonstration organizer. Hendricks claims he redacted the address before publishing the documents online. The relationship between Bank of America and the WSP, as well as their long-term investment in surveillance, is highlighted by an email sent on September 23, 2013. Kim Triplett-Kolerich, an intelligence analyst for Bank of America requested that WSP share any intelligence gathered on activists taking part in the Million Mask March with the bank. She began the email by identifying herself as a former officer and provided her former rank. “From time to time I will see items that I believe will be of use to my friends at WSP—especially during session,” she told the officer. “May Day I will pick your brain for intel and I will give you a lot also,” she wrote.
  • The next week, Triplett-Kolerich emailed the same WSP sergeant again about the march. “Sorry for not getting back to you sooner—hectic weeks lately with foreclosures and this MMM,” Triplett-Kolerich wrote. She then notified the sergeant that Bank of America has been in contact with “the Fusion Center and JTTF” regarding the Anonymous march. JTTF refers to the Joint Terrorism Task Force, which is a group comprised of local law enforcement agencies, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (with whom it shares a website) and the Homeland Security department. The Fusion Center is a state-level counterterrorism agency, which coordinates “national intelligence” between various local law enforcement and public safety departments. In addition, the Fusion Center provides for “the effective communication of locally generated threat-related information to the federal government.”
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  • Triplett-Kolerich concluded her email by boasting that the surveillance tactics used by Bank of America to monitor activists online was superior to that of the WSP. “I will most likely find it first as social media trolling is not what WSP does best. Bank of America has a team of 20 people and that’s all they do all day and then pass it to us around the country!!!” On October 24, an email was sent by a sergeant at the WSP’s Special Operations Division to an executive aide at the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office. The sergeant notified the office that a large number of arrests may take place during the Million Mask March, which could impact the jail. Attached to the letter was a message written by an Anonymous activist, and a link to its Facebook event page where the names of those planning to attend the march could be seen.
  • Unbeknownst to the crowd, the supervisor of a local transit company had dropped off an Olympia city bus nearby at the request of the WSP. According to recently published emails, it was parked on the west side of an administration building close to the demonstration, just in case they needed to move in and haul a large group of disorderly protesters off to jail—but they didn’t. The Daily Dot reached out to Triplett-Kolerich and three Bank of America media relations contacts requesting a comment for this article, but received no response. 
  • Paul Merrell on 08 Jan 14
     
    More evidence of the cozy relationship between the banksters and the "anti-terrorism" folk in the U.S. Of particular interest BofA has a 20-person unit that spends their days trolling social media for intelligence.
Gary Edwards

Jim Douglass: A Letter to the American People (and Myself in Particular) On the Unspeak... - 0 views

www.ratical.org/...letterToAP.html

Kennedy-Assassination Military-Industrial-Complex

shared by Gary Edwards on 30 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • “But if they’re not [authentic], then you have something of a magnitude beyond common experience that would reflect so devastatingly on our society as a whole and its corruptibility that you don’t know how to deal with it.”[4]
  • Since I began researching the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and John and Robert Kennedy, I have been shocked by the obvious signature that is written across all four of them. It is the signature of what President Eisenhower identified as the military-industrial complex of our government.[6] We can read that signature at once in Dallas in the identity of the scapegoat Lee Harvey Oswald.
  • When Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested in Dallas after the assassination, he was carrying a Department of Defense ID card that is routinely issued to U.S. intelligence agents abroad. The FBI later obliterated the card by “testing” it but writer Mary La Fontaine discovered a copy of it in l992 in a Dallas Police Department photo. Oswald had been a radar operator for the CIA’s U-2 spy plane while he was a Marine stationed at Atsugi Naval Air Station in Japan. The Atsugi base served as the CIA’s center for its Far East operations. His fellow Marines David Bucknell and James Botelho said that when Oswald “defected” to the Soviet Union, he did so under the direction of U.S. intelligence.[8] The professed traitor Oswald was given a U.S.-government loan to assist his return from the USSR. When he settled in Dallas, his closest friend and mentor was longtime U.S. intelligence operative George DeMohrenschildt.
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  • Fidel Castro recognized “CIA” written all over Lee Harvey Oswald and the press releases on him that were being sent around the world within minutes of the assassination. The whole Dallas set-up was obvious to someone as familiar with CIA assassination plots as Fidel Castro was.
  • The more one investigates the assassination of John Kennedy, the more one becomes immersed in the depths of U.S. intelligence. The American intelligence community was the sea around Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, and the host of anti-Castro Cuban exiles and gun runners with whom Oswald and Ruby worked closely.
  • By the Fall of l963 John Kennedy had also decided to withdraw from Vietnam.[14] Robert McNamara in his memoir In Retrospect[15] has described the contentious October 2, l963, National Security Council meeting at which Kennedy decided, against the arguments of most of his advisors: to withdraw all U.S. forces from Vietnam by the end of l965; to withdraw l,000 U.S. troops by the end of l963; to announce this policy publicly “to set it in concrete,” which Press Secretary Pierre Salinger did at a press conference when the meeting was over.[16]
  • After JFK’s assassination, his withdrawal policy was quietly voided.[18] In light of the future consequences of Dallas, it was not only John Kennedy who was crucified on November 22, l963, but 58,000 other Americans and over three million Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians.
  • Clifton Baird was a Louisville, Kentucky, police officer in l965 when he was asked to help kill Martin Luther King. On September l8, l965, Baird gave a ride home in his car to fellow Louisville officer Arlie Blair after their 3-ll pm shift. Baird parked his car in Blair’s driveway, and the two men talked. Alarmed at what Blair was saying, Clifton Baird secretly turned on a microphone hidden under his seat that was connected to a recorder in a rear speaker. What Baird taped was an offer to engage in a conspiracy to kill Dr. King. He later shared the information with author William F. Pepper who included it in his book on the King assassination Orders to Kill.[32] Blair told Baird that an organization he belonged to was willing to pay $500,000 for the death of King. Would Baird be willing to participate? Baird said he definitely would not. He urged Blair to stay away from it, too.
  • The next day at a Louisville police station, Clifton Baird saw Arlie Blair conferring with a group of police officers and FBI agents. The FBI agents had, over a period of sixteen years or more, developed a close relationship with members of the Louisville police force.
  • On September 20, l965, Baird taped a second car conversation with Blair. Blair again brought up the $500,000 bounty for King, which Baird had now connected with the FBI.
  • Myron Billett was another witness to the truth. By undergoing a conversion in his own life, Myron Billett was able to reveal that in January l968 FBI and CIA agents offered a New York Mafia leader a $l million contract to kill Martin Luther King.
  • After Dr. King was assassinated on April 4, Sam Giancana gave Myron Billett $30,000 and told him to start running: They both knew too much and were going to be killed. Giancana was in fact murdered in his Chicago home in June l975, just before he was scheduled to testify before the Church Committee concerning assassination plots. His killing took the form of a symbolic warning to other possible assassination witnesses. Giancana was shot seven times in a circle around his mouth.
  • In his Canadian Broadcasting Corporation lectures at the end of l967 (later published as The Trumpet of Conscience[39]), King’s vision went beyond even these overwhelming concerns. He saw the next step as a global nonviolent movement using escalating acts of massive civil disobedience to disrupt the entire international order and block economic and political exploitation across borders.
Paul Merrell

Tomgram: Laura Gottesdiener, Security vs. Securities | TomDispatch - 0 views

www.tomdispatch.com/...ner%2C_security_vs._securities

banksters housing-market foreclosures equity-firms Blackstone Progress-Residential

shared by Paul Merrell on 23 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • I live in Washington, D.C.'s Capitol Hill neighborhood. I can more or less roll out of bed into the House of Representatives or the Senate; the majestic Library of Congress doubles as my local branch. (If you visit, spend a sunset on the steps of the library's Jefferson Building. Trust me.) You can't miss my place, three stories of brick painted Big Bird yellow. It's a charming little corner of the city. Each fall, the trees outside my window shake their leaves and carpet the street in gold. Nora Ephron, if she were alive, might've shot a scene for her latest movie in one of the lush green parks that bookend my block. The neighborhood wasn't always so nice. A few years back, during a reporting trip to China, I met an American consultant who had known Capitol Hill in a darker era. "I was driving up the street one time," he told me, "and walking in the opposite direction was this huge guy carrying an assault rifle. Broad daylight, no one even noticed. That's what kind of neighborhood it was." Nowadays, row houses around me sell for $1 million or more. I rent.
  • Washington's a fun place to live if you're young and employed. But as a recent Washington Post story pointed out, the nation's capital is slowly pricing out even its yuppies who, in their late-twenties and early-thirties, want to start families but can't afford it. "I hate to say it, but the facts show that the D.C. market is for people who are single and relatively affluent," a real estate researcher told the Post. The District's housing boom just won't stop; off go those new and expecting parents to the suburbs. And we're talking about the lucky ones. Elsewhere in the country, vulnerability in the housing market isn't a trend story; it's the norm. The Cedillo family, as Laura Gottesdiener writes today, went looking for their version of the American housing dream and thought they found it in Chandler, Arizona. They didn't know that the house they chose to rent rested on a shaky foundation -- not physically but financially. It had been one of thousands snapped up and rented out by massive investment firms making a killing in the wake of the housing collapse. As Gottesdiener -- who has put the new rental empires of private equity firms on the map for TomDispatch -- shows, the goal of such companies is to squeeze every dime of profit from their properties, from homes like the Cedillos', and that can lead to tragedy.
  • Drowning in Profits A Private Equity Firm, a Missing Pool Fence, and the Price of a Child’s Death By Laura Gottesdiener
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  • Security is a slippery idea these days -- especially when it comes to homes and neighborhoods. Perhaps the most controversial development in America’s housing “recovery” is the role played by large private equity firms. In recent years, they have bought up more than 200,000 mostly foreclosed houses nationwide and turned them into rental empires. In the finance and real estate worlds, this development has won praise for helping to raise home values and creating a new financial product known as a “rental-backed security.” Many economists and housing advocates, however, have blasted this new model as a way for Wall Street to capitalize on an economic crisis by essentially pushing families out of their homes, then turning around and renting those houses back to them. Caught in the crosshairs are tens of thousands of families now living in these private equity-owned homes.
  • The same month that the family rented the house at 1471 West Camino Court, Progress Residential purchased more homes in Maricopa Country than any other institutional buyer. Nationally, Blackstone, a private equity giant, has been the leading purchaser of single-family homes, spending upwards of $8 billion between 2012 and 2014 to purchase 43,000 homes in about a dozen cities. However, in May 2013, according to Michael Orr, director of the Center for Real Estate Theory and Practice at the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, Progress Residential bought nearly 200 houses, surpassing Blackstone's buying rate that month in the Phoenix area. The condition and code compliance of these houses varies and is rarely known at the time of the purchase. Mike Anderson, who works for a bidding service contracted by Progress Residential and other private equity giants to buy houses at auctions, was sometimes asked to go out and look at the homes. But with the staggering buying rate -- up to 15 houses a day at the peak -- he couldn’t keep up. “There’d be too many, you couldn’t go out and look at them,” he said. “It’s just a gamble. You never know what you’ve got into.”
  • Global private equity firms have not been, historically, in the business of dealing with pool fences and the other hassles of maintaining single-family houses. But following the housing market collapse, the idea of buying a ton of these foreclosed properties suddenly made sense, at least to investors. Such private-equity purchases were to make money in three ways: buying cheap and waiting for the houses to gain value as the market bounced back; renting them out and collecting monthly rental payments; and promoting a financial product known as “rental-backed securities,” similar to the infamous mortgage-backed securities that triggered the housing meltdown of 2007-2008. Even though the buying of the private equity firms has finally slowed, economists (including those at the Federal Reserve) have expressed concern about the possibility that someday those rental-backed securities could even destabilize -- translation: crash -- the broader market.
  • ince Wall Street was overwhelmingly responsible for the original collapse of the housing market, many have characterized these new purchases as a land grab. In many ways, Progress CEO Donald Mullen is the poster-child for this argument. An investment banker who enjoyed a brief flurry of fame after losing a bidding war to Alec Baldwin at an art auction, he was the leader of a team at Goldman Sachs that orchestrated an infamous bet against the housing market. Known as “the big short,” it allowed that company to make “some serious money“ when the economy melted down, according to Mullen’s own emails. (They were released by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in 2010.) As Kevin Roose of New York magazine has written, “A guy whose most famous trade was a successful bet on the full-scale implosion of the housing market is now swooping in to pick up the pieces on the other end.”
Paul Merrell

FOIA Reform Bill on Senate Judiciary Agenda, State Secrets, and Much More: FRINFORMSUM ... - 0 views

nsarchive.wordpress.com/...-much-more-frinformsum-9182014

surveillance state CIA acoustic-kitty

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Finally, this week’s #tbt document pick – and recently picked up by Reddit’s TIL feed – is a March 1967 CIA report entitled “Views on Trained Cats [Redacted] for [Redacted] Use,” more popularly known as the CIA’s “acoustic kitty” project. In what the CIA described as a “remarkable scientific achievement,” though later conceding it was not a “practical eavesdropping device,” the CIA stuffed a live cat with electronic spying equipment and attempted to train it to become a Cold War spy. After the cat had batteries and wires placed inside of it and an antenna inserted into its tail, several CIA agents took it outside to a park to see if it would, well, work. The cat was promptly hit by a taxi instead. The project cost 15$ million.
Paul Merrell

Will Aleppo become the capital of a new Caliphate? | Middle East Eye - 0 views

www.middleeasteye.net/...pital-new-caliphate-1251918375

war & peace Syria U.S.-foreign-policy Turkey Saudis Qatar Al-Nusrah Aleppo

shared by Paul Merrell on 28 May 15 - No Cached
  • The “mother of all battles” is what a looming showdown in Aleppo is being called, as revitalised Islamist rebel forces fresh from victories in nearby Idlib are preparing to mount an all-out offensive in the next few weeks to seize the remaining part of the city under government control. The stakes couldn’t be any higher - no less than the fate of the Syrian nation hangs in the balance - and the final lines of division might be drawn here.The plan, drawn up by the insurgency’s three most powerful regional backers - Turkey, Saudi and Qatar - is to overrun the entire northwest of Syria and create a rebel controlled “safe zone,” and through direct military intervention prevent the Syrian regime’s aircraft and missiles from targeting it, thereby essentially setting up a de facto mini state.To that end, there has been unprecedented cooperation and coordination between those powers who have put aside their rivalries and differences after King Salman of Saudi assumed the throne. This effort has seen them pour enormous financial, logistical and military resources into setting up what is called the “Fatih Army” or the Army of Conquest, and controlling the flow of its battles directly through an operations room in Turkey as well as intelligence officers on the ground. This was given the go ahead by the US, which under pressure from those allies again seems to have flipped its priority in Syria from battling the Islamic State (IS) to regime change.
  • The “mother of all battles” is what a looming showdown in Aleppo is being called, as revitalised Islamist rebel forces fresh from victories in nearby Idlib are preparing to mount an all-out offensive in the next few weeks to seize the remaining part of the city under government control. The stakes couldn’t be any higher - no less than the fate of the Syrian nation hangs in the balance - and the final lines of division might be drawn here.The plan, drawn up by the insurgency’s three most powerful regional backers - Turkey, Saudi and Qatar - is to overrun the entire northwest of Syria and create a rebel controlled “safe zone,” and through direct military intervention prevent the Syrian regime’s aircraft and missiles from targeting it, thereby essentially setting up a de facto mini state.To that end, there has been unprecedented cooperation and coordination between those powers who have put aside their rivalries and differences after King Salman of Saudi assumed the throne. This effort has seen them pour enormous financial, logistical and military resources into setting up what is called the “Fatih Army” or the Army of Conquest, and controlling the flow of its battles directly through an operations room in Turkey as well as intelligence officers on the ground. This was given the go ahead by the US, which under pressure from those allies again seems to have flipped its priority in Syria from battling the Islamic State (IS) to regime change.
  • It is worth mentioning that after almost a year of US-led coalition bombing, IS has continued to expand and grow, and now controls half of Syria and a third of Iraq. US policy here, as many had foreseen, is a confused and muddled disaster.If the name of the Fatih Army sounds ominous, then its composition is even more disturbing, being made up primarily of al-Qaeda’s affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra, as well as other hardline Salafi jihadist groups like Ahrar el-Sham. This army has already “conquered” most of Idlib province, and is looking to go for Aleppo next.
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  • This once tolerant, secular, multicultural and multi-confessional nation with a diverse society and rich heritage will soon become home to two of the world’s most noxious, extremist and violently fanatical statelets. In their wake, all of Syria’s non-Sunni Muslim inhabitants are being ethnically cleansed and displaced. Predictably, this is what happened in Idlib after it fell to the Fatih Army, which saw all of its Christians abandon their homes and flee to government-controlled areas, to little media attention. This will undoubtedly happen in Aleppo too, which has a very large Christian population comprised of various denominations, including ethnic Armenians.Leaders of the Christian community here have sounded the alarm, and warned that after surviving for countless centuries in one of the first lands inhabited by ancient Christians, their presence here might be coming to a final end. Again, the absence of any media concern about this impending calamity is very telling.The backers of the insurgency have now dropped any pretence of “moderate” rebel groups fighting the Syrian regime, and have almost completely ditched and sidelined the umbrella opposition in exile which they for so long touted as the “legitimate representatives” of the Syrian people. In their stead, we now have an al-Qaeda army preparing to “liberate” north Syria.
  • Gone are all those grand slogans along with the “moderate” rebel groups we have heard so much about in the news, who after all these years proved to be little more than incompetent and corrupt profiteers. Those groups disintegrated, many of their former fighters joining the extremist jihadist groups who also seized their sophisticated US supplied weapons.This rebel farce of course was well known to us Syrians, but was never a newsworthy item. We’ve always known that the only effective insurgents on the ground were the Islamists and the jihadists, and that the others were there for show, for the camera crews and media consumption. Maintaining this image no longer seems to be a concern however. After failing to convince Nusra to “rebrand” and ditch its ties with al-Qaeda, The Fatih Army was formed as a more palatable and purely cosmetic media-friendly cover name.
  • Partitioning SyriaThis is what the nations who claim to back the Syrian people’s aspirations for freedom and a democratic inclusive state have deemed fit to unleash upon us. After failing to topple the Syrian regime for four years and realising there would never be any political compromise that would fit their goals, they have now decided to partition Syria and facilitate its partial takeover by jihadists.It doesn’t seem that previous lessons have been learned, with Afghanistan being the prime precedent. You simply cannot deal with and hope to control the jihadi proxies that you are using to fulfil your military ambitions. Quite simply those groups don’t play by the rules, and will turn on you the first chance they get and follow their own ideologically motivated agendas. The repercussions of doing so have always been, and will continue to be, extremely dangerous and profound.
  • Needless to say, the majority of Syrians refuse the partitioning of their nation and its takeover by extremists under any pretexts. But that this pretext should be “freeing them from tyranny and oppression” is yet another sad little irony in the black comedy that is Syria’s conflict.This is felt especially acutely in Aleppo, whose helpless people have endured years of a deadly stalemated war that has killed many of them and destroyed all they held precious. It now seems they must again dread the day they will be “conquered” and “liberated” as it would likely mean the loss of what little they still have left of their city, and what little hope they still hold for the future.
  • In all likelihood, Aleppo becoming the capital of yet another caliphate would see the majority of its inhabitants abandoning it in droves, and the complete loss of its religious minorities, hence its unique character and identity.The people here are bracing themselves for the worst, for a momentous battle ahead. The outcome of this battle is by no means a foregone conclusion though, as Syria’s ambassador to the UN has warned in no uncertain terms that Aleppo is a red line, which once crossed would see the escalation of the conflict to other nations. Whether these words are empty and mere rhetoric remains to be seen and depends largely on what the regime’s prime backer, Iran, decides to do.
  • This month is a very sensitive time for Iran, as it prepares to sign a historic nuclear agreement while regional tensions are soaring. While the ball is now squarely in its park with regards to Syria, it may choose to delay its move until the picture becomes clearer.Speculation is rife that along with the nuclear deal, regional issues are being hammered out too. Could it be that Iran would accept the partitioning of Syria as long as it gets to keep a majority Shia and Alawi “protectorate” along the coast? Or is it sticking to its guns and thwarting the planned “mother of all battles” in Aleppo by demanding it be stopped, or threatening a serious escalation if it isn’t? How will the flow of war and proxy showdown in Yemen affect Syria?The coming weeks will tell, and they will be some of the most difficult the people of Syria and Aleppo have seen yet. 
  • Paul Merrell on 28 May 15
     
    The Aleppo region is well to the north of Tartus, where the Russians have there only  naval base in the Mediterranean, but Russia has a vested interest in Syria surviving intact. Look for a Russian move soon to blunt the planned attack on Aleppo. You can bet that the Russian, Iranian, and Syrian governments are working together on a strategy.  
Paul Merrell

Newest Remote Car Hacking Raises More Questions About Reporter's Death - WhoWhatWhy - 0 views

whowhatwhy.org/...uestions-about-reporters-death

Dark-State car-hacking Hastings

shared by Paul Merrell on 25 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • As readers of WhoWhatWhy know, our site has been one of the very few continuing to explore the fiery death two years ago of investigative journalist Michael Hastings, whose car left a straight segment of a Los Angeles street at a high speed, jumped the median, hit a tree, and blew up.Our original report described anomalies of the crash and surrounding events that suggest cutting-edge foul play—that an external hacker could have taken control of Hastings’s car in order to kill him. If this sounds too futuristic, a series of recent technical revelations has proven that “car hacking” is entirely possible. The latest just appeared this week.
  • Hackers, seeking to demonstrate the vulnerability of automobiles to remote attacks, were able to largely take over the Jeep Cherokee driven by a writer for the tech magazine Wired:Their code is an automaker’s nightmare: software that lets hackers send commands through the Jeep’s entertainment system to its dashboard functions, steering, brakes, and transmission, all from a laptop that may be across the country.They were able to make his car decelerate suddenly, causing the writer to “narrowly avert death” at the hands of a semi-trailer coming up behind him.In an earlier demonstration, they had been able to do similar things with other vehicles:In the summer of 2013, I drove a Ford Escape and a Toyota Prius around a South Bend, Indiana, parking lot while they sat in the backseat with their laptops, cackling as they disabled my brakes, honked the horn, jerked the seat belt, and commandeered the steering wheel.
  • All of this is increasingly drawing the attention—and action— of the authorities. U.S. Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Edward J. Markey (D-MA), members of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, introduced legislation Tuesday seeking to establish federal standards for security and privacy of drivers in today’s computer-laden cars.What we do not hear is any discussion about whether the risk has gone beyond the realm of possibility…to a reality.
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  • Back when Michael Hastings died, former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke—by all accounts a sober, no-nonsense man—said that the Hastings’s crash was “consistent with a car cyber attack” and that it was likely that intelligence agencies knew “how to remotely seize control of a car.”It is worth noting, too, that the day before his death, Hastings had “urgently” requested to borrow his neighbor’s car—he wanted to get out of town, but he feared his own car was being tampered with.How is it then that “mainstream” publications, including even Wired, do not talk about the very odd circumstances surrounding the death of a journalist who had made powerful enemies? Did the fact that he had caused a famed general to be fired, that he was investigating the CIA chief, that he told colleagues he himself was being investigated by the FBI—did none of this at least raise the slightest suspicion on the part of our journalistic community? How about the fiery explosion when his car hit a palm tree—which automotive experts say should not normally take place; what about the fact that the engine flew out of the vehicle and landed a considerable distance away–which, again, we are told, is highly unusual?
  • As with so many of these things, the authorities raced to conclude that it was all an unfortunate accident and that there was no more to the story. And virtually the entirety of journalism—Left, Right and Center, Mainstream and “Alternative”—accepted this conclusion without so much as a hint of skepticism.So, now that it has been dramatically demonstrated that accidents can be caused remotely by those targeting a driver, will we see other media stepping up to take a good hard look at the key question: What really happened to Michael Hastings? We hope so, but we aren’t taking any bets.
Paul Merrell

Putin's Lightning War in Syria - 0 views

www.counterpunch.org/...putins-lightning-war-in-syria

war & peace Russia Syria ISIL Quds-force Hezbollah

shared by Paul Merrell on 05 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • For more than a year, the United States has been playing patty-cake with an army of homicidal maniacs who call themselves ISIS. On Monday, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that he’d had enough of Washington’s song-and-dance and was planning to bring a little Russian justice to the terrorist militias that had killed 225,000 Syrians and ripped the country to shreds. In language that could not be more explicit, Putin said to the General Assembly: “We can no longer tolerate the currents state of affairs in the world”.  Less than 48 hours later, Russian bombers were raining down precision-guided munitions on terrorist strongholds across western Syria sending the jihadi vermin scrambling for cover. That’s how you fight terrorism if you’re serious about it.   Bravo, Putin.
  • Putin’s blitz caught the entire western political establishment flat-footed. Even now, three days into the air campaign, neither the administration nor the policy wonks at the many far-right think tanks in Washington have even settled on an approach, much less a strategy, to developments on the ground. What’s clear, is that Putin’s action has surprised everyone including the media which to-this-day hasn’t even settled on it’s talking points. This is extraordinary. Ask yourself this, dear reader: How can our political and military leaders watch Moscow deploy its troops, warplanes and military hardware to a theater where the US is carrying out major operations and have absolutely no plan of how deal with those forces if they are sent into battle? If you are convinced, as I am, that we are governed by numbskulls, you will certainly find confirmation of that fact in recent events.
  • But while the Obama administration is frantically searching for a strategy, Putin’s air-squadrons are unleashing holy hell on the sociopaths, the head-choppers and the other assorted vipers that comprise the Islamic State.  And Mr. Putin is getting plenty of help too, particularly from the crack-troops in the Iranian Quds forces and from the ferocious militia that defeated the IDF in two separate conflicts, Hezbollah, the Army of God. Check this out from Reuters: “Hundreds of Iranian troops have arrived in Syria in the last 10 days and will soon join government forces and their Lebanese Hezbollah allies in a major ground offensive backed by Russian air strikes, two Lebanese sources told Reuters…. “The (Russian) air strikes will in the near future be accompanied by ground advances by the Syrian army and its allies,” said one of the sources familiar with political and military developments in the conflict…. “The vanguard of Iranian ground forces began arriving in Syria: soldiers and officers specifically to participate in this battle. They are not advisors … we mean hundreds with equipment and weapons. They will be followed by more,” the second source said. Iraqis would also take part in the operation, the source said.”
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  • (“Assad allies, including Iranians, prepare ground attack in Syria: sources“, Reuters) A military alliance between Moscow, Tehran and Hezbollah? You’re darn tootin’, and you can thank Barack Obama and his lunatic regime change plan for that development. Many critics of Putin’s action have said that “He doesn’t know what he’s doing” or “He’ll get bogged down” or “It’ll be another Vietnam”. Wrong. The fact is, Putin is more a devotee of the Powell Doctrine than any of the morons at the Pentagon. And he is particularly mindful of Rule Number 5 which states: “Is there a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement?” Has Putin thought about that or has he merely blundered ahead impulsively like US leaders are so apt to do?  Here’s what he said on September 30:
  • “We naturally have no intention of getting deeply entangled in this conflict. We will act strictly in accordance with our set mission. First, we will support the Syrian army only in its lawful fight against terrorist groups. Second, our support will be limited to airstrikes and will not involve ground operations. Third, our support will have a limited timeframe and will continue only while the Syrian army conducts its anti-terrorist offensive.” Bingo. In other words, he’s going to bomb these jokers into oblivion and let Quds brigade and Hezbollah mop up afterwards. There will be no Russian boots-on-the-ground. The Russian airforce will get precise intelligence on ISIS locations from Syrian agents on the battlefield which will minimize civilian casualties and limit damage to critical infrastructure. It will also make mincemeat out of anyone on the receiving end of the bombardment. Does anyone seriously believe that  ISIS and the disparate rabble of “moderate” throat-slitters that receive CIA funding are going to be able to withstand this impending onslaught?
  • No way. Putin’s going to cut through these guys like a tornado through a trailer park.  Yes, ISIS has had some success against the bedraggled Iraqi and Syrian armies. But now they’re up-against the A Team where they are clearly out of their league.  Rolling up these cutthroats is going to take a lot less time than anyone figured. Russian bombers are already destroying ammo dumps, fuel depots, heavy military hardware, command posts, anything that enhances ISIS’s ability to wage war.  The new anti-terror coalition is going to cut supply lines and hang the jihadis out to dry. And the whole operation is going to be wrapped up before Uncle Sam even get’s his boots laced.  This is from Iran’s Press TV: “A senior member of Russia’s parliament says an ongoing air campaign by Moscow against militants operating in Syria is going to intensify. Alexei Pushkov, who serves as the chairman of the Committee for International Affairs at the Russian State Duma, said Friday that Moscow will be intensifying its attacks against the militants in Syria while studying the risks associated with an extensive operation.
  • “There is always a risk of being bogged down, but in Moscow, we are talking about an operation of three to four months,” Alexei Pushkov said, Reuters reported. Russia started to launch coordinated airstrikes on the positions of militants in Syria on Wednesday. The move came shortly after members of the Russian upper house of the parliament, the Federation Council, authorized the operations in Syria.” (Press TV) There’s not going to be any pussyfooting around. Putin’s going to go straight for the jugular and then head for the exits.
  • Do you think they’ve figured this out at the White House yet?  Do you think they understand that Iranian troops and Hezbollah are not going to distinguish between the “moderate” terrorists and the “extreme” terrorists; that they’re simply going to “kill them all and let God sort it out”.  Do you think they realize that Washington’s Middle East policy just collapsed and that the funding of jihadis and dreams of regime change just ended for good?  Do you think they grasp that Washington’s role as guarantor of global security has just been transferred to Vladimir Putin who has put himself and his country at risk to defend the fundamental principles of international law, national sovereignty and self determination? Here’s Putin again:  “We are supporting the government of Syria in the fight against a terrorist aggression. We are offering and will continue to offer it necessary military-technical assistance. We must continue a dialogue for the sake of reaching consensus. But it’s impossible to achieve real success as long as bloodshed continues and people don’t feel secure. We won’t achieve anything until we defeat terrorism in Syria.” Putin is leading a coalition in the fight against terror. We should all be grateful for that.
  • Paul Merrell on 05 Oct 15
     
    The inimitable Mike Whitney.
Gary Edwards

911: Lloyds of London Insurance brokers have sued Citigroup-AMEC et al. in respect of t... - 1 views

www.godlikeproductions.com/...pg1

9_11 911-Conspiracy-facts Lloyd's-of-London 911-Insurance-Fraud

shared by Gary Edwards on 22 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • We allege the Citigroup-AMEC partners sabotaged the diesel generators to feed fires lit by arsonists on the 11th, 12th or 13th floors of WTC7 where the Securities & Exchange Commission lost between 3,000 to 4,000 files. The SEC files contained evidence of insider trading by Citigroup-AMEC investment bank partners in the shares of initial public offerings during the high-tech boom. The House Financial Services Committee was seeking information about the treatment Citigroup's Salmon Smith Barney investing banking division may have given WorldCom executives. Salomon had offices in 7 World Trade Center and Citigroup says back-up tapes of corporate emails from September 1998 through December 2000 were stored at the building and destroyed in 9/11. Citigroup subsequently paid $2.65 billion to the settlement class which purchased WorldCom securities during the period from April 1999 through June 2002. www.thestreet.com/markets...36925.html www.citigroup.com/citigro...40510a.htm
  • At 5:20 p.m. on 9/11, 7 World Trade Center collapsed in its own footprint at a speed slightly slower than free fall under gravity in a manner consistent with a controlled demolition. Molten steel and partially evaporated steel members were found in the debris pile of WTC #1, 2 and 7. The thermal signature of 32 hot spots, 5 days and 10 days after the collapse, is consistent with all the buildings being rigged for demolition with an incendiary such as thermite.
  • We allege that the Citigroup-AMEC partnership now conspired to remove and destroy evidence of arson before filing bogus property insurance claims in an arrangement with Larry Silverstein and Silverstein Properties, including a claim for a double payment for the destruction of the Twin Towers. "Griffin quotes court documents to the effect that Silverstein had only $14 million invested in the insurance deal for the Twin Towers (compared to 50 times as much by his [off-book] lenders) through limited liability investment vehicles."
  • Gary Edwards on 22 Sep 11
     
    Incredible.  In 2006 Lloyd's of London sued a group comprised of Citigroup, AMEC and GMAC for a "concealed demolition" conspiracy resulting in insurance fraud.  This is complicated, but the key assertion is that World Trade Center building #1, #2, and #7 were rigged for demolition prior to the 9/11/01 attack.  The claim also alleges the involvement of Larry Silverstein, who had purchased these buildings a few months prior to the 9/11 attack, and made the subsequent and fraudulent insurance claim. Based on the Lloyd's of London report: "9/11 - A Citigroup-AMEC insurance fraud on Lloyd's of London?" .. by David Hawkins, Foundation Scholar, Cambridge University, Founder of the Citizen's Association of Forensic Economists at Hawks' CAFE .
Paul Merrell

WASHINGTON: Not just torture: Senator says CIA stalling over bogus intelligence that le... - 0 views

www.mcclatchydc.com/...just-torture-senator-says.html

war & peace Iraq al-Qaeda false-intelligence Brennan CIA Levin

shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • CIA Director John Brennan, under fire over the Senate report on the CIA’s use of torture, is facing new heat over his role in what a senior lawmaker calls an apparent coverup involving bogus intelligence used by the George W. Bush administration to help justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq.Carl Levin, D-Mich., who’s ending 36 years in the Senate, plans to press Brennan one last time to fulfill a pledge to support the full declassification of a CIA cable debunking the claim that the leader of the 9/11 hijackers met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in the Czech capital of Prague just months before the attacks.“Director Brennan’s apparent refusal to do what he has committed to do – to ask the Czech government if it objects to release of the cable – now takes on the character of a continuing coverup,” Levin plans to tell the Senate on Thursday, according to a draft of his speech obtained by McClatchy.
  • At a Christian Science Monitor breakfast with reporters on Wednesday, Levin said he’s been told by Czech officials that “they have no objection” to the release of the cable.Levin also pointed out that the former chief of the Czech counterintelligence service, who was in the post at the time of the alleged meeting, published a memoir this year in which he asserted that the CIA pressured him to confirm the encounter and that U.S. officials pressured the Czech government when he couldn’t do so.“Without any regard to us, they used our intelligence information for propaganda press leaks. They wanted to mine certainty from unconfirmed suspicion and use it as an excuse for military action,” wrote Jiri Ruzek. “We were to play the role of useful idiot.”The CIA declined to comment. But a U.S. intelligence official said that Levin had been told that releasing the full cable couldn’t be done without damaging intelligence sources.
  • The March 13, 2003, cable was sent by CIA field officers in response to a request for more information on a single-source intelligence report of a meeting in a Prague park between Atta and al Ani. The cable warned that U.S. government officials shouldn’t cite the unverified report.Even so, Cheney continued to give the report credibility in media interviews, telling CNN in June 2004 that the truth of the report hadn’t been resolved.“Those statements were simply not true,” Levin said in the draft. “The vice president was recklessly disregarding the truth, and he did so in a way calculated to maintain support for the administration’s decision to go to war in Iraq.”During his February 2013 hearing to be confirmed as CIA director, Brennan was urged by Levin to ask the Czech government if it would object to the release of the cable. “Absolutely, Senator, I will,” Brennan replied.
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  • The alleged meeting between Mohammad Atta and Ahmad Samir al Ani was repeatedly cited by former Vice President Dick Cheney before and after the invasion to bolster the Bush administration’s assertion that Saddam was in cahoots with al Qaida and could pass Iraqi weapons of mass destruction – which didn’t exist – to the terrorist group.“The notion of such a meeting was a centerpiece of the administration’s campaign to create an impression in the public mind that Saddam was in league with the al Qaida terrorists who attacked us on 9/11,” Levin planned to tell the Senate, according to the speech draft.“Now why am I bringing up a CIA cable from more than a decade ago?” the draft said. “This is about giving the American people a full account of the march to war as new information becomes available. It is about trying to hold leaders who misled the public accountable.”
  • After receiving no response from Brennan, Levin earlier this year blocked the nomination of Caroline Krass to be the CIA general counsel. He agreed to lift his hold on Krass after receiving a March 13 letter from Brennan that summarized the cable, saying that it cast “serious doubt” that the alleged meeting occurred.Brennan added, “Investigative records subsequently placed Atta in the United States just before and after the date on which the single-source report said the meeting was to have occurred,” according to a copy of the letter obtained by McClatchy.Brennan declassified a single line from the cable that said, “There is not one USG (U.S. government counterterrorism) or FBI expert that . . . has said they have evidence or ‘know’ that (Atta) was indeed (in Prague). In fact, the analysis has been quite the opposite.”
  • In the draft of his remarks, Levin asserted that there was other “critically relevant information” in the cable that had been “denied to the public in order to protect those in the Bush White House who are responsible” for “playing games with intelligence.”“I believe decision-makers should have to face the full, unadulterated, unredacted truth about their decisions,” said Levin. “The American people should know the full story . . . as a warning to future leaders against the misuse of intelligence and the abuse of power.”
Paul Merrell

America's Monetary Crisis: Even the Council on Foreign Relations Is Saying It: Time to ... - 0 views

www.globalresearch.ca/...5398884

banksters economic-collapse trickle-down

shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • The Fed, it seems, has finally run out of other ammo. It has to taper its quantitative easing program, which is eating up the Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities needed as collateral for the repo market that is the engine of the bankers’ shell game. The Fed’s Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) has also done serious collateral damage. The banks that get the money just put it in interest-bearing Federal Reserve accounts or buy foreign debt or speculate with it; and the profits go back to the 1%, who park it offshore to avoid taxes. Worse, any increase in the money supply from increased borrowing increases the overall debt burden and compounding finance costs, which are already a major constraint on economic growth. Meanwhile, the economy continues to teeter on the edge of deflation. The Fed needs to pump up the money supply and stimulate demand in some other way. All else having failed, it is reduced to trying what money reformers have been advocating for decades — get money into the pockets of the people who actually spend it on goods and services.
  • Blyth and Lonergan write: [L]ow inflation . . . occurs when people and businesses are too hesitant to spend their money, which keeps unemployment high and wage growth low. In the eurozone, inflation has recently dropped perilously close to zero. . . . At best, the current policies are not working; at worst, they will lead to further instability and prolonged stagnation. Governments must do better. Rather than trying to spur private-sector spending through asset purchases or interest-rate changes, central banks, such as the Fed, should hand consumers cash directly. In practice, this policy could take the form of giving central banks the ability to hand their countries’ tax-paying households a certain amount of money. The government could distribute cash equally to all households or, even better, aim for the bottom 80 percent of households in terms of income. Targeting those who earn the least would have two primary benefits. For one thing, lower-income households are more prone to consume, so they would provide a greater boost to spending. For another, the policy would offset rising income inequality. [Emphasis added.]
  • A money drop directly on consumers is not a new idea for the Fed. Ben Bernanke recommended it in his notorious 2002 helicopter speech to the Japanese who were caught in a similar deflation trap.
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  • Assume a $1 trillion dividend issued in the form of debit cards that could be used only for goods and services. A back-of-the-envelope estimate is that if $1 trillion were shared by all US adults making under $35,000 annually, they could each get about $600 per month.  If the total dividend were $2 trillion, they could get $1,200 per month. And in either case it could, at least in theory, all come back in taxes to the government without any net increase in the money supply.
  • Paul Merrell on 09 Sep 14
     
    Have the banksters finally accepted that trickle-down economics does not work, that only a money-drop on the lower classes can get the economy growing again? 
Paul Merrell

Asia Times Online :: NATO attacks! - 0 views

www.atimes.com/...WOR-02-030914.html

war & peace Ukraine NATO-summit Escobar

shared by Paul Merrell on 05 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • You don't need to be a neo-Foucault hooked on Orwellian/Panopticon practices to admire the hyper-democratic "ring of steel" crossing average roads, parks and even ringing castle walls to "protect" dozens of NATO heads of state and ministers, 10,000 supporting characters and 2,000 journalists from the real world in Newport, Wales - and beyond. NATO's summit in Wales also provides outgoing secretary-general Anders "Fogh of War" Rasmussen the chance to display his full <a href='http://asianmedia.com/GAAN/www/delivery/ck.php?n=a9473bc7&cb=%n' target='_blank'><img src='http://asianmedia.com/GAAN/www/delivery/avw.php?zoneid=36&cb=%n&n=a9473bc7&ct0=%c' border='0' alt='' ></a> attack dog repertoire. It's as if he's auditioning for a starring role in a remake of Tim Burton's epic Mars Attacks!
  • Fogh of War is all over the place, talking "pre-positioning of supplies, equipment" - euphemism for weapons; boosting bases and headquarters in host countries; and touting a 10,000-strong, rapid reaction "spearhead" force to respond to Russian "aggression" and deployable in a maximum of five days. Meanwhile, in a bad cop-bad cop routine, outgoing president of the European Commission, outstanding mediocrity Jose Manuel Barroso, leaked that Russian President Vladimir Putin told him over the phone later last week he could take Kiev in a fortnight if he wanted. Well, Putin could. If he wanted. But he doesn't want it. What matters is what he told Rossiya state TV; that Kiev should promote inclusive talks about the future statute of Eastern Ukraine. Once again, the Western spin was that he was advocating the birth of a Novorossiya state. Here, The Saker analyzes in detail the implications of what Russia really wants, and what the Novorossiya forces really want.
  • NATO somehow is already in Ukraine. A NATO cyber center group has been in Kiev since March, operating in the building of the Council of National Security and Defense. So it is a bunch of NATO bureaucrats who actually determine the news agenda in Ukraine - and the non-stop demonization of all things Russia. Ukraine is all about Germany now. Berlin wants a political solution. Fast. Berlin wants Russian gas flowing via Ukraine again. Fast. Berlin does not want US missile defense in Eastern Europe - no matter what the Baltic states scream. That's why Poroshenko's latest "Invasion! Invasion! Invasion!" craze is nothing but pure desperation by a lowly, bankrupt vassal of the Empire of Chaos. Of course that does not prevent Fogh of War - who got the NATO job because he was an enthusiastic cheerleader of the rape of Iraq - to keep crying "Invasion!" till all Danish retrievers come home.
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  • And then there's NATO's recent record. An ignominious defeat in Afghanistan. A "humanitarian" bombing that reduced once-stable Libya to a miserable failed state immersed in total anarchy and ravaged by rabid militias. Not exactly fabulous PR for NATO's future as a coalition assembly line with global "vocation", capable of pulling off expeditionary wars all around the world by creating the appearance of a military and political consensus unified by - what else - an Empire of Chaos doctrine: NATO's "strategic concept" approved at the 2010 Lisbon summit. (See US a kid in a NATO candy store, Asia Times Online, November 25, 2010.) Since those go-go "Bubba" Clinton years; through the "pre-emptive" Dubya era; and now under the R2P dementia of Obama's warring Medusas (Rice, Power, Hillary), the Pentagon dreams of NATO as global Robocop, dominating all the roles embodied by the UN and the EU in terms of security. This has absolutely nothing to do with the original collective defense of NATO signatories against possible territorial attacks. Oh, sorry; we forgot the attacks by those (non-existent) nuclear missiles deployed by evil Iran.
  • The Ukraine battleground at least has the merit of showing the alliance is naked. For the Full Spectrum Dominance Pentagon, what really matters above all is something that's been actually happening since the fall of the Soviet Union; unlimited NATO expansion to the westernmost borders of Russia. The real deal this September is not NATO. It's the SCO's summit. Expect the proverbial tectonic shifts of geopolitical plaques in the upcoming meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization - a shift as far-reaching as when the Ottoman empire failed at the gates of Vienna in 1683. On the initiative of Russia and China, at the SCO summit, India, Pakistan, Iran and Mongolia will be invited to become permanent members. Once again, the battle lines are drawn. NATO vs SCO. NATO vs BRICS. NATO vs Global South. Therefore, NATO attacks!
Paul Merrell

U.S. Companies Are Stashing $2.1 Trillion Overseas to Avoid Taxes - Bloomberg Business - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...illion-overseas-to-avoid-taxes

U.S. tax-evasion

shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Eight of the biggest U.S. technology companies added a combined $69 billion to their stockpiled offshore profits over the past year, even as some corporations in other industries felt pressure to bring cash back home. Microsoft Corp., Apple Inc., Google Inc. and five other tech firms now account for more than a fifth of the $2.10 trillion in profits that U.S. companies are holding overseas, according to a Bloomberg News review of the securities filings of 304 corporations. The total amount held outside the U.S. by the companies was up 8 percent from the previous year, though 58 companies reported smaller stockpiles. The money pileup, reflecting companies’ incentives to park profits in low-tax countries, has drawn the attention of President Barack Obama and U.S. lawmakers, who see a chance to tap the funds for spending programs and to revamp the tax code. That effort is stalled in Washington, and there are few signs that tech companies will bring the profits back to the U.S. until Congress gives them an incentive or a mandate.
Paul Merrell

Nemtsov's Killers Also Planned to Kill Putin - 0 views

fortruss.blogspot.com/...er-was-hired-by-commander.html

war & peace Russia Ukraine Nemtsov-asassination false-flag SBU CIA U.S.-foreign-policy

shared by Paul Merrell on 17 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • FSB source to "Komsomolskaya Pravda": "the customer of Nemtsov's murder was preparing an assassination of Vladimir Putin" The main suspect in the organization of the high-profile crime - is a commander of the Ukrainian battalion in the name of Dzhokhar Dudayev, Adam Osmayev. The correspondent of "Komsomolskaya Pravda" met with the FSB agent, who is part of the team investigating the murder of Boris Nemtsov. In an exclusive interview he spoke about the new details of the crime and named the most likely customer of the murder.
  • Today the investigators have irrefutable proof that all persons detained on suspicion of murder of the politician are the perpetrators, - said our source in the FSB. First of all, billing (data about calls and movements of the subscriber. - Ed.) from their mobile phones showed that they conducted surveillance of Nemtsov before the murder, following him closely. The suspects were tracked with their phones at the location where Nemtsov was present with his phone. During the murder all the detainees "were in the area": some under the bridge, some in a car, some nearby. Zaur Dadaev pulled the trigger. He first made a confession, and then, on the advice of his lawyers, took it back. But it changes nothing, the investigation has already collected compelling evidence of his guilt. I will not give details of how this was done. The pistol was thrown into the river after the crime, it was later recovered by divers. That Zaur Dadaev immediately said to the TV cameras: "I love prophet Muhammad" - is just a cover. There was no religious motive for the killings. They cynically carried out an order. They are far from devout Muslims. In fact, just real gangsters. And the most important thing. The executor of the murder was in close contact with Adam Osmaev, who recently became the commander of the Ukrainian battalion in the name of Dzhokhar Dudayev. They met, talked a lot on the phone. Zaur Dadaev and his cronies worked with Osmaev on Ukrainian affairs. And also with Chechens, who fought on the territory of Ukraine for the new regime. Zaur Dadaev was listed in the battalion "North" ("Sever") of the Chechen Interior Ministry, but while serving in it, in fact, was engaged in activities against Russia. He was associated with Osmaev by a certain relationship and mutual obligations.
  • The evidence is still being gathered. But I can say that today the main suspected customer of Nemtsov's murder is Adam Osmayev.
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  • - The perpetrators were told to execute the order in the place where it was committed, - continues our source. - Another words not just to kill him in the alley, but do it in the heart of Moscow across from the Kremlin - deliberately to cause outrage around the world. Before the crime they received the advance payment, it was agreed that the remainder of the money for the "job" will be transferred to their bank account. - Why did they have to kill Nemtsov, who spoke out against Putin's policies? It turns out, they had killed their ideological ally! - [Ultra-] Nationalists and criminals will not stop at anything. To kill their ally for them is not a question of morality. Nemtsov became a bargaining chip. The goal was - to slander Russia, to show it in a bad light, to prevent peace in Donbass (especially after talks with Merkel and Hollande). To show the President of Russia in the eyes of the world community as the "ultimate evil" - to show: look, how he strangled the opposition. The world just began to warm up to Putin's politics, which he is following in relation to Ukraine. And this cynical murder of Nemtsov has caused a wave of discontent, fueled by the world media. The American and European press immediately began to show this murder in their own light, placing the responsibility on the President of Russia.
  • Adam Osmayev was previously suspected in the attempt to organize the 2012 assassination of Vladimir Putin, at that time a Prime Minister and presidential candidate. Osmayev  planned to blow up Putin's motorcade, which was confirmed by a video, found in his laptop, of Prime Minister's motorcade travelling through Moscow. Then Osmaev cooperated with the investigation - admitted he came to Odessa from the United Arab Emirates with instructions from field commander Doku Umarov. But in court Osmayev refused to testify, claiming he gave his testimony after a beating. His lawyers wrote a complaint to the Prosecutor's office and the European Court of Human Rights. - Osmaev failed to get to Putin himself, but it seems that he did not calm down, - says our source in the FSB. - And later the most accessible target to attack the President was selected - Boris Nemtsov. Nemtsov lately was not seen as an active member of the opposition, was no competition to Putin, but his name was known. The choice of a sacrificial lamb was quite successful. The gangsters do not stop at anything. And gangsters involved in politics is a devilish blend.
  • - Will Osmaev be charged? - Now everything is in the stage of investigation and evidence collection. Some of the evidence we already gathered, but I don't want to tell everything in order not to hinder the investigation.
  • What was Adam Osmayev "famous" for... In 2007 in Moscow on the eve of Victory Day a terrorist attack was averted - explosives were found in a parked car. A native of Grozny, Adam Osmayev, a suspect in the case, was arrested in absentia by the Lefortovsky district court of Moscow and declared for international search. The investigation found that Osmayev with a group of Chechens and Ingush was also preparing an assassination on May 9 of the head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov. According to the press, after that Osmayev was hiding in the UK, where he was contacted by associates of Doku Umarov and was offered to organize a new terrorist attack. Adam agreed and went to Ukraine with a fake passport. In 2012, he was arrested after an explosion in a rented apartment - the terrorist was preparing homemade bombs. Osman and his "right hand", a Kazakh citizen, Ilya Pyanzin, admitted: they were preparing an assassination of the head of the government of Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin. The suspects also reported that they recruited fighters for future terrorist attacks in Russia. But later they took back their testimony.
  • Russia demanded to extradite Adam Osmayev, however, the European Court of Human Rights had blocked it, declaring: "In Russia the detainee may be subjected to torture". Pyanzin eventually was extradited to Russia, and in September 2013 he was sentenced to ten years in a colony with a strict regime. On November 18, 2014, the court of Odessa declared a sentence for Osmaev: 2 years and 9 months imprisonment. He was released in the courtroom "for lack of evidence of preparation of assassination" - he was credited the time he already spent in jail. The court room reacted to the sentence of Osmaev with applause, and he, in turn, encouraged them to "protect Ukraine". In February of this year Osmayev headed the Ukrainian battalion  in the name of Dzhokhar Dudayev, succeeding the general, deceased under Debaltsevo, Isa Munaev. 
  • OFFICIAL COMMENT Dmitry Peskov: In the coming days, the prosecutors will announce the motives for the murder "We hope that in the coming days all legal formalities will be completed and prosecutors will announce their versions of the murder, will name those who are behind this," said the President's press secretary Dmitry Peskov to the journalists of "AP", answering the question about the prospects of completing the investigation of the murder of Boris Nemtsov.
  • Paul Merrell on 17 Mar 15
     
    According to this translated-from-Russian Pravda report, the investigation of the Boris Nemtsov assassination in Russia is closing in on the commander of a Ukrainian battalion, Adam Osmayev, as the person who set in motion the assassination by a professional hit team that had also been tasked to assassinate Vladimir Putin. In other words, a false flag attack on Nemtsov to make Russia look bad, to be followed up by killing the Russian Prime Minister.  The pseudonym reportedly used by Osmayev in Ukraine is Dzhokar Dudayev. That is the name of the first President of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, a breakaway state in the North Caucasus. Wikpedia says, "Dudayev was killed on 21 April 1996, by two laser-guided missiles when he was using a satellite phone, after his location was detected by a Russian reconnaissance aircraft, which intercepted his phone call." http://goo.gl/67qPVR  In comments by the translator that I did not highlight, she speculates that the trail may lead further to the CIA and SBU, which is roughly the Ukrainian equivalent of the CIA. See also this 2014 article, http://www.interfax.com/newsinf.asp?id=488090 (.) That article reports, inter alia, that the CIA had personnel working within the SBU between 2006-10 and that CIA had been provided with the personnel files of Ukraine "special services" officers. If true, that would mean that CIA had penetrated SBU long before the coup and may in fact have been in control of SBU. Approximately the first paragraph of this article was reported by the Kyev Post, without mention of the CIA officials working within SBU. http://goo.gl/9HX1n
  • Paul Merrell on 17 Mar 15
     
    Correction: I misunderstood the translation. The plot to kill Putin happened in 2012 and Adam Osmayev was allegedly tied to it. I have no information that the other defendants in the present incident were involved with that. Also, Dzhokar Dudayev is not a pseudonym used by Osmayev but instead the name of his militia battalion in Ukraine. It's composed of "international" volunteers, one might suspect largely of Chechnyans. I'll be bookmarking another article soon that makes more sense of all this. Osmayev is himself Chechnyan.
Paul Merrell

California Tells Court It Can't Release Inmates Early Because It Would Lose Cheap Priso... - 0 views

thinkprogress.org/...-be-keeping-people-behind-bars

shared by Paul Merrell on 20 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • Out of California’s years-long litigation over reducing the population of prisons deemed unconstitutionally overcrowded by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2010, another obstacle to addressing the U.S. epidemic of mass incarceration has emerged: The utility of cheap prison labor. In recent filings, lawyers for the state have resisted court orders that they expand parole programs, reasoning not that releasing inmates early is logistically impossible or would threaten public safety, but instead that prisons won’t have enough minimum security inmates left to perform inmate jobs. The dispute culminated Friday, when a three-judge federal panel ordered California to expand an early parole program. California now has no choice but to broaden a program known as 2-for-1 credits that gives inmates who meet certain milestones the opportunity to have their sentences reduced. But California’s objections raise troubling questions about whether prison labor creates perverse incentives to keep inmates in prison even when they don’t need to be there.
  • The debate centers around an expansive state program to have inmates fight wildfires. California is one of several states that employs prison labor to fight wildfires. And it has the largest such program, as the state’s wildfire problem rapidly expands arguably because of climate change. By employing prison inmates who are paid less than $2 per day, the state saves some $1 billion, according to a recent BuzzFeed feature of the practice. California relies upon that labor source, and only certain classes of nonviolent inmates charged with lower level offenses are eligible for the selective program. They must then meet physical and other criteria. In exchange, they get the opportunity for early release, by earning twice as many credits toward early release as inmates in other programs would otherwise earn, known as 2-for-1 credits. In February, the federal court overseeing California’s prison litigation ordered the state to expand this 2-for-1 program to some other rehabilitation programs so that other inmates who exhibit good behavior and perform certain work successfully would also be eligible for even earlier release.
  • As has been California’s practice in this litigation, California didn’t initially take the order that seriously. It continued to work toward reducing its prison population. In fact, the ballot initiative passed by voters in November to reclassify several nonviolent felonies as misdemeanors will go a long way toward achieving that goal. But it insisted that it didn’t have to do it the way the court wanted it to, because doing so could deplete the state’s source of inmate firefighters. The incentives of this wildfire and other labor programs are seemingly in conflict with the goal of reducing U.S. reliance on mass incarceration. But the federal judges overseeing this litigation were nonetheless sensitive to the state’s need for inmate firefighters. That’s why they ordered the state to offer 2-for-1 credits only to those many inmates who weren’t eligible for the wildfire program. This way, inmates who were eligible would still be incentivized to choose fighting wildfires, while those that weren’t could choose other rehabilitative work programs to reduce their sentence.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The Department of Corrections didn’t like this idea, either. It argued that offering 2-for-1 credits to any inmates who perform other prison labor would mean more minimum security inmates would be released earlier, and they wouldn’t have as large of a labor pool. They would still need to fill those jobs by drawing candidates who could otherwise work fighting wildfires, and would be “forced to draw down its fire camp population to fill these vital MSF [Minimum Support Facility] positions.” In other words, they didn’t want to have to hire full-time employees to perform any of the work that inmates are now performing. The plaintiffs had this to say in response: “Defendants baldly assert that if the labor pool for their garage, garbage, and city park crews is reduced, then ‘CDCR would be forced to draw-down its fire camp population to fill these vital MSF positions.’ That is a red herring; Defendants would not be ‘forced’ to do anything. They could hire public employees to perform tasks like garbage collection, garage work and recycling … ”
  • California Attorney General Kamala Harris told BuzzFeed News she was “shocked” to learn that the lawyers in her department had argued against parole credits because they wanted to retain their labor force. “I will be very candid with you, because I saw that article this morning, and I was shocked, and I’m looking into it to see if the way it was characterized in the paper is actually how it occurred in court,” Harris said in an interview with BuzzFeed published late Tuesday. “I was very troubled by what I read. I just need to find out what did we actually say in court.” Harris was referring to the Los Angeles Times’ report on the three-judge panel’s ruling, which included a line referencing that argument. While ThinkProgress does not know what lawyers for the state said in court, the written motions submitted in the litigation make very clear that the state did indeed argue against expanding the early release program on the basis that it would deplete the labor force.
  • Paul Merrell on 20 Nov 14
     
    In the land of the free and the home of the brave ...j California has been in deep judicial doo-doo because of massive prison overcrowding and years of ignoring federal court orders to drastically reduce its prison population, leading to a Supreme Court decision that basically said, "no more stalling." 
Paul Merrell

IGs form front line of war on waste and fraud, but weak links remain | WashingtonExamin... - 0 views

www.washingtonexaminer.com/...2556319

Auction 2016 Hillary State-Dept. cover-up

shared by Paul Merrell on 03 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • The ambassador to Belgium, a big campaign bundler for President Obama, was accused of soliciting sex in a park near the U.S. Embassy in Brussels. Members of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s security detail were accused of hiring prostitutes, and a State Department security official in Beirut “engaged in sexual assaults” on foreign nationals, according to the complaints. The Diplomatic Security Service, a law enforcement branch of the State Department, tried to investigate the underlying charges but was blocked by top agency managers including Kennedy and Cheryl Mills, chief of staff to Hillary Clinton, according to whistleblower allegations that surfaced later.
  • DSS agents reported the interference to the inspector general’s office, which confirmed the pressure from the top. A draft IG report written in November 2012 described the underlying cases of misconduct and the strong-arm tactics used by top managers to block the DSS investigations. But that draft report was not made public. Instead, it was shown to top State Department officials who wanted it scrubbed of damaging information. “This is going to kill us,” one top agency official reportedly said upon seeing the draft report, according to CBS News. When the final IG report was issued in February 2013, it made no mention of the individual cases or of management pressure to kill the DSS probes. Instead, the IG report blandly stated that DSS “lacks a firewall” to prevent management interference with DSS investigations.
  • The more candid draft report was leaked by an investigator inside the IG’s office to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and to CBS News. Rep. Ed Royce, the California Republican who is chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, demanded copies of the draft report and details about the specific cases of misconduct. The IG’s office refused to provide the information. “There is every indication that critical information was missing from the IG report submitted to Congress,” Royce told the Washington Examiner in a recent interview. “And whether it was State’s pressure to remove it or Geisel’s unwillingness to include it, the result is the same. We are not, as required by law, kept fully and currently informed. The bottom line is when federal agencies lack a Senate-confirmed, independent inspector general, the potential for malfeasance really abounds,” he said.
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  • Under pressure from Congress, and in the wake of revelations that agency management influenced the IG’s final report, Obama appointed Linick as the State Department’s permanent IG in June 2013, less than a month after CBS broke the news about the IG cover-up. Congress confirmed him three months later. Linick launched a new investigation, and in October 2014 the IG confirmed that at least three DSS investigations were blocked by top State Department officials, including the probe involving the ambassador. While the new IG’s report was critical of management’s efforts to block the DSS investigations, it was silent on whether its own office bowed to the pressure.
Paul Merrell

Running for Cover: A Sham Air Force Summit Can't Fix the Close Air Support Gap Created ... - 0 views

www.pogo.org/...eated-by-Dumping-the-A-10.html

war & peace DoD-procurement F35 A10 scandal

shared by Paul Merrell on 29 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • “I can’t wait to be relieved of the burdens of close air support,” Major General James Post, the vice commander of Air Combat Command (ACC), allegedly told a collection of officers at a training session in August 2014. As with his now notorious warning that service members would be committing treason if they communicated with Congress about the successes of the A-10, Major General Post seems to speak for the id of Air Force headquarters’ true hostility towards the close air support (CAS) mission. Air Force four-stars are working hard to deny this hostility to the public and Congress, but their abhorrence of the mission has been demonstrated through 70 years of Air Force headquarters’ budget decisions and combat actions that have consistently short-changed close air support. For the third year in a row (many have already forgotten the attempt to retire 102 jets in the Air Force’s FY 2013 proposal), the Air Force has proposed retiring some or all of the A-10s, ostensibly to save money in order to pay for “modernization.” After failing to convince Congress to implement their plan last year (except for a last minute partial capitulation by retiring Senate and House Armed Services Committee chairmen Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) and Representative Buck McKeon (R-CA)) and encountering uncompromising pushback this year, Air Force headquarters has renewed its campaign with more dirty tricks.
  • First, Air Force headquarters tried to fight back against congressional skepticism by releasing cherry-picked data purporting to show that the A-10 kills more friendlies and civilians than any other U.S. Air Force plane, even though it actually has one of the lowest fratricide and civilian casualty rates. With those cooked statistics debunked and rejected by Senate Armed Services Chairman Senator John McCain (R-AZ), Air Force headquarters hastily assembled a joint CAS “Summit” to try to justify dumping the A-10. Notes and documents from the Summit meetings, now widely available throughout the Air Force and shared with the Project On Government Oversight’s Center for Defense Information (CDI), reveal that the recommendations of the Summit working groups were altered by senior Air Force leaders to quash any joint service or congressional concerns about the coming gaps in CAS capabilities. Air Force headquarters needed this whitewash to pursue, yet again, its anti-A-10 crusade without congressional or internal-Pentagon opposition.
  • The current A-10 divestment campaign, led by Air Force Chief of Staff Mark Welsh, is only one in a long chain of Air Force headquarters’ attempts by bomber-minded Air Force generals to get rid of the A-10 and the CAS mission. The efforts goes as far back as when the A-10 concept was being designed in the Pentagon, following the unfortunate, bloody lessons learned from the Vietnam War. For example, there was a failed attempt in late-1980s to kill off the A-10 by proposing to replace it with a supposedly CAS-capable version of the F-16 (the A-16). Air Force headquarters tried to keep the A-10s out of the first Gulf War in 1990, except for contingencies. A token number was eventually brought in at the insistence of the theater commander, and the A-10 so vastly outperformed the A-16s that the entire A-16 effort was dismantled. As a reward for these A-10 combat successes, Air Force headquarters tried to starve the program by refusing to give the A-10 any funds for major modifications or programmed depot maintenance during the 1990s. After additional combat successes in the Iraq War, the Air Force then attempted to unload the A-10 fleet in 2004.
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  • To ground troops and the pilots who perform the mission, the A-10 and the CAS mission are essential and crucial components of American airpower. The A-10 saves so many troop lives because it is the only platform with the unique capabilities necessary for effective CAS: highly maneuverable at low speeds, unmatched survivability under ground fire, a longer loiter time, able to fly more sorties per day that last longer, and more lethal cannon passes than any other fighter. These capabilities make the A-10 particularly superior in getting in close enough to support our troops fighting in narrow valleys, under bad weather, toe-to-toe with close-in enemies, and/or facing fast-moving targets. For these reasons, Army Chief of Staff General Ray Odierno has called the A-10 “the best close air support aircraft.” Other Air Force platforms can perform parts of the mission, though not as well; and none can do all of it. Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) echoed the troops’ combat experience in a recent Senate Armed Services committee hearing: “It's ugly, it's loud, but when it comes in…it just makes a difference.”
  • In 2014, Congress was well on the way to roundly rejecting the Air Force headquarters’ efforts to retire the entire fleet of 350 A-10s. It was a strong, bipartisan demonstration of support for the CAS platform in all four of Congress’s annual defense bills. But in the final days of the 113th Congress, a “compromise” heavily pushed by the Air Force was tucked into the National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2015. The “compromise” allowed the Air Force to move A-10s into virtually retired “backup status” as long as the Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE) office in DoD certified that the measure was the only option available to protect readiness. CAPE, now led by former Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Financial Management and Comptroller Jamie Morin, duly issued that assessment—though in classified form, thus making it unavailable to the public. In one of his final acts as Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel then approved moving 18 A-10s to backup status.
  • The Air Force intends to replace the A-10 with the F-35. But despite spending nearly $100 billion and 14 years in development, the plane is still a minimum of six years away from being certified ready for any real—but still extremely limited—form of CAS combat. The A-10, on the other hand, is continuing to perform daily with striking effectiveness in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria—at the insistence of the CENTCOM commander and despite previous false claims from the Air Force that A-10s can’t be sent to Syria. A-10s have also recently been sent to Europe to be available for contingencies in Ukraine—at the insistence of the EUCOM Commander. These demands from active theaters are embarrassing and compelling counterarguments to the Air Force’s plea that the Warthog is no longer relevant or capable and needs to be unloaded to help pay for the new, expensive, more high-tech planes that Air Force headquarters vastly prefers even though the planes are underperforming.
  • So far, Congress has not been any more sympathetic to this year’s continuation of General Welsh’s campaign to retire the A-10. Chairman McCain rejected the Air Force’s contention that the F-35 was ready enough to be a real replacement for the A-10 and vowed to reverse the A-10 retirement process already underway. Senator Ayotte led a letter to Defense Secretary Ashton Carter with Senators Tom Cotton (R-AR), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Thom Tillis (R-NC), Roger Wicker (R-MS), Mike Crapo (R-ID), Johnny Isakson (R-GA), and Richard Burr (R-NC) rebuking Hagel’s decision to place 18 A-10s in backup inventory. Specifically, the Senators called the decision a “back-door” divestment approved by a “disappointing rubber stamp” that guts “the readiness of our nation’s best close air support aircraft.” In the House, Representative Martha McSally (R-AZ) wrote to Secretary Carter stating that she knew from her own experience as a former A-10 pilot and 354th Fighter Squadron commander that the A-10 is uniquely capable for combat search and rescue missions, in addition to CAS, and that the retirement of the A-10 through a classified assessment violated the intent of Congress’s compromise with the Air Force:
  • Some in the press have been similarly skeptical of the Air Force’s intentions, saying that the plan “doesn’t add up,” and more colorfully, calling it “total bullshit and both the American taxpayer and those who bravely fight our wars on the ground should be furious.” Those reports similarly cite the Air Force’s longstanding antagonism to the CAS mission as the chief motive for the A-10’s retirement.
  • By announcing that pilots who spoke to Congress about the A-10 were “committing treason,” ACC Vice Commander Major General James Post sparked an Inspector General investigation and calls for his resignation from POGO and other whistleblower and taxpayer groups. That public relations debacle made it clear that the Air Force needed a new campaign strategy to support its faltering A-10 divestment campaign. On the orders of Air Force Chief of Staff General Mark Welsh, General Herbert “Hawk” Carlisle—the head of Air Combat Command—promptly announced a joint CAS Summit, allegedly to determine the future of CAS. It was not the first CAS Summit to be held (the most recent previous Summit was held in 2009), but it was the first to receive so much fanfare. As advertised, the purpose of the Summit was to determine and then mitigate any upcoming risks and gaps in CAS mission capabilities. But notes, documents, and annotated briefing slides reviewed by CDI reveal that what the Air Force publicly released from the Summit is nothing more than a white-washed assessment of the true and substantial operational risks of retiring the A-10.
  • Just prior to the Summit, a working group of approximately 40 people, including CAS-experienced Air Force service members, met for three days at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base to identify potential risks and shortfalls in CAS capabilities. But Air Force headquarters gave them two highly restrictive ground rules: first, assume the A-10s are completely divested, with no partial divestments to be considered; and second, assume the F-35 is fully CAS capable by 2021 (an ambitious assumption at best). The working groups included A-10 pilots, F-16 pilots, and Joint Terminal Attack Controllers (JTACs), all with combat-based knowledge of the CAS platforms and their shortfalls and risks. They summarized their findings with slides stating that the divestment would “cause significant CAS capability and capacity gaps for 10 to 12 years,” create training shortfalls, increase costs per flying hour, and sideline over 200 CAS-experienced pilots due to lack of cockpits for them. Additionally, they found that after the retirement of the A-10 there would be “very limited” CAS capability at low altitudes and in poor weather, “very limited” armor killing capability, and “very limited” ability to operate in the GPS-denied environment that most experts expect when fighting technically competent enemies with jamming technology, an environment that deprives the non-A-10 platforms of their most important CAS-guided munition. They also concluded that even the best mitigation plans they were recommending would not be sufficient to overcome these problems and that significant life-threatening shortfalls would remain.
  • General Carlisle was briefed at Davis-Monthan on these incurable risks and gaps that A-10 divestment would cause. Workshop attendees noted that he understood gaps in capability created by retiring the A-10 could not be solved with the options currently in place. General Carlisle was also briefed on the results of the second task to develop a list of requirements and capabilities for a new A-X CAS aircraft that could succeed the A-10. “These requirements look a lot like the A-10, what are we doing here?” he asked. The slides describing the new A-X requirements disappeared from subsequent Pentagon Summit presentations and were never mentioned in any of the press releases describing the summit.
  • At the four-day Pentagon Summit the next week, the Commander of the 355th Fighter Wing, Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Col. James P. Meger, briefed lower level joint representatives from the Army and the Marine Corps about the risks identified by the group at Davis-Monthan. Included in the briefing was the prediction that divestment of the A-10 would result in “significant capability and capacity gaps for the next ten to twelve years” that would require maintaining legacy aircraft until the F-35A was fully operational. After the presentation, an Army civilian representative became concerned. The slides, he told Col. Meger, suggested that the operational dangers of divestment of the A-10 were much greater than had been previously portrayed by the Air Force. Col. Meger attempted to reassure the civilian that the mitigation plan would eliminate the risks. Following the briefing, Col. Meger met with Lt. Gen. Tod D. Wolters, the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations for Air Force Headquarters. Notably, the Summit Slide presentation for general officers the next day stripped away any mention of A-10 divestment creating significant capability gaps. Any mention of the need to maintain legacy aircraft, including the A-10, until the F-35A reached full operating capability (FOC) was also removed from the presentation.
  • The next day, Col. Meger delivered the new, sanitized presentation to the Air Force Chief of Staff. There was only muted mention of the risks presented by divestment. There was no mention of the 10- to 12-year estimated capability gap, nor was there any mention whatsoever of the need to maintain legacy aircraft—such as the A-10 or less capable alternatives like the F-16 or F-15E—until the F-35A reached FOC. Other important areas of concern to working group members, but impossible to adequately address within the three days at Davis-Monthan, were the additional costs to convert squadrons from the A-10 to another platform, inevitable training shortfalls that would be created, and how the deployment tempos of ongoing operations would further exacerbate near-term gaps in CAS capability. To our knowledge, none of these concerns surfaced during any part of the Pentagon summit.
  • Inevitably, the Air Force generals leading the ongoing CAS Summit media blitz will point congressional Armed Services and Appropriations committees to the whitewashed results of their sham summit. When they do, Senators and Representatives who care about the lives of American troops in combat need to ask the generals the following questions: Why wasn’t this summit held before the Air Force decided to get rid of A-10s? Why doesn’t the Air Force’s joint CAS summit include any statement of needs from soldiers or Marines who have actually required close air support in combat? What is the Air Force’s contingency plan for minimizing casualties among our troops in combat in the years after 2019, if the F-35 is several years late in achieving its full CAS capabilities? When and how does the Air Force propose to test whether the F-35 can deliver close support at least as combat-effective as the A-10’s present capability? How can that test take place without A-10s? Congress cannot and should not endorse Air Force leadership’s Summit by divesting the A-10s. Instead, the Senate and House Armed Services Committees need to hold hearings that consider the real and looming problems of inadequate close support, the very problems that Air Force headquarters prevented their Summit from addressing. These hearings need to include a close analysis of CAPE’s assessment and whether the decision to classify its report was necessary and appropriate. Most importantly, those hearings must include combat-experienced receivers and providers of close support who have seen the best and worst of that support, not witnesses cherry-picked by Air Force leadership—and the witnesses invited must be free to tell it the way they saw it.
  • If Congress is persuaded by the significant CAS capability risks and gaps originally identified by the Summit’s working groups, they should write and enforce legislation to constrain the Air Force from further eroding the nation’s close air support forces. Finally, if Congress believes that officers have purposely misled them about the true nature of these risks, or attempted to constrain service members’ communications with Congress about those risks, they should hold the officers accountable and remove them from positions of leadership. Congress owes nothing less to the troops they send to fight our wars.
  • Paul Merrell on 29 Mar 15
     
     Though not touched on in the article, the real problem is that the A10 has no proponents at the higher ranks of the Air Force because it is already bought and paid for; there's nothing in the A10 for the big Air Force aircraft manufacturing defense contractors. The F35, on the other hand is, is a defense contractor wet dream. It's all pie in the sky and big contracts just to get the first one in the air, let alone outfit it with the gear and programming needed to use it to inflict harm. It's been one cost-overrun after another and delay after delay. It's a national disgrace that has grown to become the most expensive military purchase in history. And it will never match the A10 for the close air support role. It's minimum airspeed is too high and its close-in maneuverability will be horrible. The generals, of course, don't want to poison the well for their post-military careers working for the defense contractors by putting a halt to the boondobble. Their answer: eliminate the close air support mission for at least 10-12 years and then attempt it with the F35.   As a former ground troop, that's grounds for the Air Force generals' court-martial and dishonorable discharge. I would not be alive today were it not for close air support. And there are tens of thousands of veterans who can say that in all truth. The A10 wasn't available back in my day, but by all reports its the best close air support weapons platform ever developed. It's a tank killer and is heavily armored, with redundant systems for pilot and aircraft survivability. The A10 is literally built around a 30 mm rotary cannon that fires at 3,900 rounds per minute. It also carries air to ground rockets and is the only close air support aircraft still in the U.S. arsenal. Fortunately, John McCain "get it" on the close air support mission and has managed to mostly protect the A10 from the generals. If you want to learn  more about the F35 scandal, try this Wikipedia article section; although it's enoug
Paul Merrell

Ford White House Altered Rockefeller Commission Report - 0 views

nsarchive.gwu.edu/...-Rockefeller-Commission-Report

Dark-State CIA assassinations cover-up

shared by Paul Merrell on 29 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Gerald Ford White House Altered Rockefeller Commission Report in 1975; Removed Section on CIA Assassination Plots White House Aide Dick Cheney Spearheaded Editing of Report to Dampen Impact New Documents Cast Further Doubt on Commission’s Investigation, Independence
  • The Gerald Ford White House significantly altered the final report of the supposedly independent 1975 Rockefeller Commission investigating CIA domestic activities, over the objections of senior Commission staff, according to internal White House and Commission documents posted today by the National Security Archive at The George Washington University (www.nsarchive.org). The changes included removal of an entire 86-page section on CIA assassination plots and numerous edits to the report by then-deputy White House Chief of Staff Richard Cheney.  Today’s posting includes the entire suppressed section on assassination attempts, Cheney’s handwritten marginal notes, staff memos warning of the fallout of deleting the controversial section, and White House strategies for presenting the edited report to the public. The documents show that the leadership of the presidentially-appointed commission deliberately curtailed the investigation and ceded its independence to White House political operatives. This evidence has been lying ignored in government vaults for decades. Much of the work of securing release of the records was done by the John F. Kennedy Assassinations Records Board in the 1990s, and the documents were located at the National Archives and Records Administration at College Park, Maryland; or at the Gerald R. Ford Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Additional mandatory declassification review requests filed by Archive fellow John Prados returned identical versions of documents, indicating the CIA is not willing to permit the public to see any more of the assassinations story than we show here. The documents in this set have yet to be incorporated into standard accounts of the events of this period.
  • Among the highlights of today’s posting: White House officials of the Ford administration attempted to keep a presidential review panel—the Rockefeller Commission—from investigating reports of CIA planning for assassinations abroad. Ford administration officials suppressed the Rockefeller Commission’s actual report on CIA assassination plots. Richard Cheney, then the deputy assistant to the president, edited the report of the Rockefeller Commission from inside the Ford White House, stripping the report of its independent character. The Rockefeller Commission remained silent on this manipulation. Rockefeller Commission lawyers and public relations officials warned of the damage that would be done to the credibility of the entire investigation by avoiding the subject of assassinations. President Ford passed investigative materials concerning assassinations along to the Church Committee of the United States Senate and then attempted—but failed—to suppress the Church Committee’s report as well. The White House markup of the Rockefeller Commission report used the secrecy of the CIA budget as an example of excesses and recommended Congress consider making agency spending public to some degree.
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