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Paul Merrell

NSA Drops Christmas Eve Surprise - The Intercept - 0 views

  • The National Security Agency on Christmas Eve day released twelve years of internal oversight reports documenting abusive and improper practices by agency employees. The heavily redacted reports to the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board found that NSA employees repeatedly engaged in unauthorized surveillance of communications by American citizens, failed to follow legal guidelines regarding the retention of private information, and shared data with unauthorized recipients. While the NSA has come under public pressure for openness since high-profile revelations by whistleblower Edward Snowden, the release of the heavily redacted internal reports at 1:30PM on Christmas Eve demonstrates limits to the agency’s attempts to demonstrate transparency. Releasing bad news right before a holiday weekend, often called a “Christmas Eve surprise,”  is a common tactic for trying to minimize press coverage.
  • The reports, released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by the American Civil Liberties Union, offer few revelations, but contain accounts of internal behavior embarrassing to the agency. In one instance an NSA employee “searched her spouse’s personal telephone directory without his knowledge to obtain names and telephone numbers for targeting”, a practice which previous reports have indicated was common enough to warrant the name “LOVEINT”. Many of the reports appear to deal with instances of human error rather than malicious misuse of agency resources. Nonetheless, many of these errors are potentially serious, including entries suggesting that unminimized U.S. telephone numbers were mistakenly disseminated to unauthorized parties and that military personnel were given unauthorized access to raw traffic databases collected under the Foreign Intelligence Services Act.
  • There are also accounts of simple bumbling by NSA employees, including the apparently common mistake of targeting their own communications for surveillance. In one unintentionally amusing passage, an NSA analyst is said to have “targeted his personal cellphone,” because he “mistakenly thought it would be acceptable to [redacted].” Another common example is the practice of NSA analysts accidentally designating their own communications as being those of a foreign intelligence target.
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  • Even in their redacted form the reports give insight into the level of power individual agency employees have in ordering surveillance, and the intentional and unintentional abuses that can take place in an environment of minimal oversight. Though NSA officials have repeatedly suggested that the agency has rigorous safeguards in place to prevent individual employees from abusing their powers of surveillance, the agency’s own confidential internal reporting appears to contradict this. “The government conducts sweeping surveillance under this authority -— surveillance that increasingly puts Americans’ data in the hands of the NSA”, Patrick Toomey of the ACLU’s National Security Project said in comments to Bloomberg News. “Despite that fact, this spying is conducted almost entirely in secret and without legislative or judicial oversight.”
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    NSA: not so squeaky clean and careful as it claimed. Surprise, surprise.
Paul Merrell

Netanyahu to be probed over public cash abuses | Middle East Eye - 0 views

  • A damning report by the State Comptroller said that Netanyahu spent up to $230,000 on cleaning fees in 2011 alone
  • Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is to be probed over allegations of fiscal misconduct at his private and official residence. Israeli Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein on Thursday ordered a preliminary investigation, which will determine whether or not a criminal investigation will eventually be launched to deal with the misdemeanours. However, the attorney general has stressed that at this stage the investigations are not focusing in on the prime minister personally and noted that the probe will not begin before the election on 17 March where Netanyahu is vying for re-election.  
  • The announcement follows a scathing report by the State Comptroller, which queried huge sums spent on cleaning, makeup and clothing between 2009 and 2013. The long-awaited report by Yosef Shapira, who reviews how the Israeli government operates, unearthed that at their highest point in 2011, cleaning expenses for one of Netanyahu’s homes cost the Israeli taxpayer almost $285,000. Netanyahu and the First Lady only spend the occasional weekend there, but monthly cleaning costs for the house averaged more than $2,100 over the four-year period, the report found. The document also queried a large amount of electrical work carried out at the private residence by a personal friend of the Netanyahu's. “In light of the large cleaning costs, the [Prime Minister’s Office] should examine...their prudence and act to avoid unnecessary expenditures," Shapiro wrote in the report.
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  • Netanyahu, his wife Sara, and their allegedly lavish lifestyles have taken centre stage in the elections so far with the opposition Zionist Union camp largely taking aim at the couple and their various misdemeanours. Claims that Sara pocket profits from a bottle recycling scheme, nicknamed bottlegate, and old allegations that she abuses her staff have all been making the rounds in the press. However, Netanyahu’s upcoming speech to US Congress has attracted growing furore.
Paul Merrell

NSA Spied on Israel and US Lawmakers over Iran Deal | News | teleSUR English - 0 views

  • Friendly relations between US and Israel could turn sour over revelations that the NSA tapped Netanyahu, revealing efforts to block the Iran nuclear deal. The U.S. National Security Agency spied on close ally Israel, exposing how Israelis lobbied U.S. authorities to undermine the Iranian nuclear deal, RT reports.   The monitoring came in spite of a U.S. pledge to tone down surveillance of friendly states, while the latest snooping even included some Congress members private conversations. Former Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Pete Hoekstra called the interceptions an “abuse of power” and called for an investigation into the allegations. “WSJ (Wall Street Journal) report that NSA spied on Congress and Israel communications very disturbing. Actually outrageous. Maybe unprecedented abuse of power,” Hoekstra wrote on his official Twitter account. “NSA and Obama officials need to be investigated and prosecuted if any truth to WSJ reports. NSA loses all credibility. Scary,” he added.
  • Friendly relations between US and Israel could turn sour over revelations that the NSA tapped Netanyahu, revealing efforts to block the Iran nuclear deal. The U.S. National Security Agency spied on close ally Israel, exposing how Israelis lobbied U.S. authorities to undermine the Iranian nuclear deal, RT reports.   The monitoring came in spite of a U.S. pledge to tone down surveillance of friendly states, while the latest snooping even included some Congress members private conversations. Former Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Pete Hoekstra called the interceptions an “abuse of power” and called for an investigation into the allegations. “WSJ (Wall Street Journal) report that NSA spied on Congress and Israel communications very disturbing. Actually outrageous. Maybe unprecedented abuse of power,” Hoekstra wrote on his official Twitter account. “NSA and Obama officials need to be investigated and prosecuted if any truth to WSJ reports. NSA loses all credibility. Scary,” he added.
  • Massive surveillance has continued under President Barack Obama’s two terms, and the revelations of Edward Snowden in 2013 over the extent of the data harvested from civilians did little to dent the spy agency’s activities, according to the Wall Street Journal. A “protected list” rapidly pulled together by the Obama administration in the wake of the scandal to safeguard its closest allies from monitoring included countries including Germany and France. Israel, however, was not on this list, and was instead placed as NSA’s top monitoring priority, as was Turkey. A senior US official said told the Wall Street Journal, “Going dark on Bibi? Of course we wouldn’t do that,” using Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s nickname.
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  • As Obama’s administration painstakingly worked toward reaching a nuclear deal with Iran, the NSA tapped communications between Israeli and U.S. lawmakers, revealing the lengths Netanyahu’s government was going to prevent the negotiations from concluding successfully.
  • Yet the White House was unable to use much of the information gleaned from surveillance as it would have been “politically risky:” exposing a “paper trail stemming out from a request.” But, the Wall Street Journal reports that when the NSA was tasked with deciding which information could be shared and which withheld, the agency recognized the conversations they had swept up included U.S. lawmakers, creating an “Oh-s— moment,” an official said, that the NSA was also spying on its own Congress members. The NSA dealt with the sticking point by removing the lawmakers’ names from intelligence reports and any trace of personal information.
  • Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz said the revelation is “indicative of the Obama Clinton foreign policy and their inability to distinguish their friends from their enemies” and attacked Obama’s stance on Israel.
  • “The Obama administration has been the most hostile and antagonistic to the nation of Israel in our country’s history … it’s not surprising at all that the focus of the Obama administration would be on trying to intercept the communications of our very close friend and ally, Prime Minister Netanyahu,” CBS journalist Alan He reported Cruz as saying on Wednesday. But U.S. commentators have pointed out the irony of NSA “defenders” being scandalized by spying, when they happen to be the subject. “As usual, NSA defenders in Congress only get outraged about spying on Americans when the Americans happen to be them,” said U.S. journalist Trevor Timm.
Paul Merrell

The Latest European Court of Human Rights Ruling on Accountability for Torture | Just S... - 0 views

  • In another important decision on European participation in the US war on terrorism, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) issued a judgment late last month against Italy for its role in the extraordinary rendition of Egyptian cleric Osama Mustafa Hassan Nasr, better known as Abu Omar. (An English-language summary of ruling is here; the full decision, presently available only in French, is here.) The ruling not only represents a further contribution to the Strasbourg Court’s growing accountability jurisprudence, but also highlights the United States’ own failure to provide any redress to victims of the torture program that it primarily created and operated. The ECtHR’s decision in Nasr v. Italy concerns one of the most notorious instances of extraordinary rendition (i.e., the extrajudicial transfer of an individual to another country for purposes of abusive interrogation). In 2003, Nasr, who had been granted political asylum in Italy, was abducted in broad daylight from a street in Milan and taken to Aviano air base, which is operated by the US Air Force. Nasr was subsequently taken, by way of the US’s Ramstein air base in Germany, to Cairo where he was interrogated by Egyptian intelligence services. Egyptian authorities held Nasr in secret for more than a year and subjected him to repeated torture before releasing him in April 2004. Approximately 20 days after his release — and after submitting a statement to Milan’s public prosecutor describing his abuse — Nasr was rearrested and detained without charges. He was released in 2007, but prohibited from leaving Egypt.
  • The ECtHR ruling centers on Italy’s role in Nasr’s abduction in Milan, his rendition to Egypt where he faced a real risk of abuse, and its subsequent failure to conduct an effective domestic investigation or to provide any redress. The ECtHR found Italy liable for multiple violations of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), including article 3 (the prohibition on inhuman or degrading treatment), article 5 (the right to liberty and security), and article 13 (the right to an adequate remedy). It ordered Italy to pay €70,000 to Nasr and €15,000 to his wife, Nabila Ghali, for the suffering and anguish caused by her husband’s enforced disappearance. The Milan public prosecutor had previously investigated and prosecuted 25 CIA officers, including the agency’s Milan station chief, Robert Seldon Lady, and seven Italian military intelligence officers, for aiding and abetting in Nasr’s abduction and rendition. The United States strenuously opposed the prosecution, warning that it would harm US-Italian relations, and the Italian government successfully challenged much of the evidence on the grounds it could jeopardize national security. The trial court convicted 22 CIA agents in absentia and gave them prison sentences of between six to nine years; a Milan appeals court upheld the convictions and overturned the acquittals of the other three US defendants. Italy’s highest court, however, overturned the conviction of five of the Italian military intelligence agents based on state secrecy grounds. The Italian government has refused to seek the extradition of the convicted US nationals. (For more details, Human Rights Watch has an excellent summary of the proceedings in Italy here.)
  • The ECtHR’s ruling in Nasr strengthens accountability by reinforcing state responsibility for participation in abuses committed during the war on terrorism. It builds on the Strasbourg Court’s prior decisions in El-Masri v. Macedonia and Al-Nashiri v. Poland/Husayn (Abu Zubaydah) v. Poland, which held Macedonia and Poland, respectively, liable for their role in CIA torture and rendition, including (in the case of Poland) for hosting a CIA black site. Nasr, together with El-Masri and al-Nashiri/Husayn, should help discourage a state’s future participation in cross-border counterterrorism operations conducted in flagrant violation of human rights guarantees. While the deterrent value of legal judgments may be uncertain, the recent line of Strasbourg Court decisions raises the costs of aiding and abetting illegal operations, even in the national security context.
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  • Nasr also advances the jurisprudence surrounding a state’s duty to conduct an effective domestic investigation into torture. The Strasbourg Court noted that Italian courts had conducted a detailed investigation and that the evidence disregarded by Italy’s highest court on grounds of state secrecy had been sufficient to convict the five Italian military intelligence defendants. It further observed that because the evidence inculpating those defendants had been widely available in the press and on the Internet, the court’s invocation of state secrecy doctrine was not only unpersuasive, but designed to grant impunity to the defendants. Further, the Strasbourg Court noted that the Italian government had never sought the extradition of the convicted CIA agents. As result, the court ruled that despite the efforts of Italian investigators and judges, which had identified the responsible individuals and secured their convictions, the domestic proceedings failed to satisfy the procedural requirements of article 3 of the European Convention (prohibiting torture and other ill-treatment), due to the actions of the executive. This ruling is important because it imposes liability not only where a state takes no steps towards a genuine domestic investigation and prosecution (as in El-Masri and Al-Nashiri/Husayn), but also where efforts by a state’s judges and prosecutors are thwarted in the name of state secrecy.
  • The ECtHR’s rulings on the CIA torture program also highlight the continued absence of accountability in the United States. The US has failed both to conduct an effective criminal investigation of those most responsible for CIA torture and to provide any remedies to victims. In fact, the Obama administration has vigorously opposed the latter at every turn, invoking the same sweeping state secrecy doctrines the ECtHR rejected in El-Masri and Nasr. These rulings will likely catalyze future litigation before the Strasbourg Court and in European domestic courts as well. (Recent actions filed against Germany for its participation in US targeted killings through use of the Ramstein Air Base provide one example of such litigation.) While the ECtHR’s rulings may not spur further efforts in the United States, they reinforce the perception of the United States as an outlier on the important question of accountability for human rights violations.
Gary Edwards

A Battering Ram Becomes a Stonewall - WSJ.com - 0 views

  • "I don't know." "I don't remember." "I'm not familiar with that detail." "It's not my precise area." "I'm not familiar with that letter." These are quotes from the Internal Revenue Service officials who testified this week before the House and Senate. That is the authentic sound of stonewalling, and from the kind of people who run Washington in the modern age—smooth, highly credentialed and unaccountable. They're surrounded by legal and employment protections, they know how to parse a careful response, they know how to blur the essential point of a question in a blizzard of unconnected factoids. They came across as people arrogant enough to target Americans for abuse and harassment and think they'd get away with it. So what did we learn the past week, and what are the essentials to keep in mind?
  • We learned the people who ran and run the IRS are not going to help Congress find out what happened in the IRS. We know we haven't gotten near the bottom of the political corruption of that agency. We do not know who ordered the targeting of conservative groups and individuals, or why, or exactly when it began. We don't know who executed the orders or directives. We do not know the full scope or extent of the scandal. We don't know, for instance, how many applicants for tax-exempt status were abused.
  • With all the talk and the hearings and the news reports, it is important to keep the essentials of this story in mind.
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  • First, only conservative groups were targeted in this scandal by the IRS. Liberal or progressive groups were not targeted. The IRS leaked conservative groups' confidential applications and donor lists to liberal groups, never the other way around.
  • This was a political operation. If it had not been, then the statistics tell us left-wing groups would have been harassed and abused, and seen their applications leaked to the press.
  • And all of this apparently took place in the years leading up to the 2012 election. Meaning that before that election, groups that were anti-Obamacare, or pro-life, or pro-Second Amendment or constitutionalist, or had words like "tea party" or "patriot" in their name—groups that is that would support Republicans, not Democrats—were suppressed, thwarted, kept from raising money and therefore kept from fully operating.
  • if what happened at the IRS is not stopped now—if the internal corruption within it is not broken—it will never stop, and never be broken. The American people will never again be able to have the slightest confidence in the revenue-gathering arm of their government. And that, actually, would be tragic.
Paul Merrell

MoD pays out millions to Iraqi torture victims | Law | The Guardian - 0 views

  • The Ministry of Defence has paid out £14m in compensation and costs to hundreds of Iraqis who complained that they were illegally detained and tortured by British forces during the five-year occupation of the south-east of the country.Hundreds more claims are in the pipeline as Iraqis become aware that they are able to bring proceedings against the UK authorities in the London courts.
  • Lawyers representing former prisoners of the British military say that more than 700 further individuals are likely to make claims next year.Most of those compensated were male civilians who said they had been beaten, deprived of sleep and threatened before being interrogated by British servicemen and women who had detained them on suspicion of involvement in the violent insurgency against the occupation. Others said that they suffered sexual humiliation and were forced into stress positions for prolonged periods.
  • Many of the complaints arise out of the actions of a shadowy military intelligence unit called the Joint Forward Interrogation Team (Jfit) which operated an interrogation centre throughout the five-year occupation. Officials of the International Committee of the Red Cross complained about the mistreatment of detainees at Jfit not long after it was first established.Despite this, the interrogators shot hundreds of video films in which they captured themselves threatening and abusing men who can be seen to be bruised, disoriented, complaining of starvation and sleep deprivation and, in some cases, too exhausted to stand unaided.
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  • During proceedings brought before the high court in London, lawyers representing the former Jfit prisoners suggested the interrogation centre could be regarded as "Britain's Abu Ghraib".
  • Next month, the high court will hear a judicial review of the MoD's refusal to hold a public inquiry into the abuses. Human rights groups and lawyers for the former prisoners say the UK government is obliged to hold an inquiry to meet its obligations under the European convention on human rights – and particularly under article three of the convention, which protects individuals from torture.After a hearing, the high court highlighted matters supporting the allegations of systemic abuse. These included:• The same techniques being used at the same places for the same purpose: to assist interrogation.• The facilities being under the command of an officer.• Military doctors examining each prisoner at various stages in their detention.• Investigations by the Royal Military police that were concluded without anyone being held to account.
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    The Brits at least have the decency to attempt to make amends for its soldiers who tortured prisoners. Not so in the U.S. *Every* "war on terror" detainee who has filed a case for damages in the U.S. has been thrown out of court at the government's request, usually on grounds of the State Secrets privilege. It is a sad situation that our courts allow government secrecy about unlawful conduct to trump individual rights to redress for injury. 
Paul Merrell

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article35403.htm - 0 views

  • Many who shout the loudest that we must “support the troops” urge sending them off to unwinnable and undeclared wars in which there is no legitimate US interest. The US military has been abused by those who see military force as a first resort rather than the last resort and only in self-defense. This abuse has resulted in a generation of American veterans facing a life sentence in the prison of tortured and deeply damaged minds as well as broken bodies. The numbers sadly tell the story: more military suicides than combat deaths in 2012, some 22 military veterans take their lives every day, nearly 30 percent of veterans treated by the VA have PTSD.
  • We should be saddened but not shocked when we see the broken men and women return from battles overseas. We should be angry with those who send them to suffer and die in unnecessary wars. We should be angry with those who send them to kill so many people overseas for no purpose whatsoever. We should be afraid of the consequences of such a foolish and dangerous foreign policy. We should demand an end to the abuse of military members and a return to a foreign policy that promotes peace and prosperity instead of war and poverty.
Paul Merrell

Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition | Open Society Fo... - 0 views

  • Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Central Intelligence Agency embarked on a highly classified program of secret detention and extraordinary rendition of terrorist suspects. The program was designed to place detainee interrogations beyond the reach of law. Suspected terrorists were seized and secretly flown across national borders to be interrogated by foreign governments that used torture, or by the CIA itself in clandestine “black sites” using torture techniques.
  • Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition Download the 216-page report. 1.08 MB pdf
  • Globalizing Torture is the most comprehensive account yet assembled of the human rights abuses associated with CIA secret detention and extraordinary rendition operations. It details for the first time what was done to the 136 known victims, and lists the 54 foreign governments that participated in these operations. It shows that responsibility for the abuses lies not only with the United States but with dozens of foreign governments that were complicit. More than 10 years after the 2001 attacks, Globalizing Torture makes it unequivocally clear that the time has come for the United States and its partners to definitively repudiate these illegal practices and secure accountability for the associated human rights abuses.
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    Thorough and comprehensive review of what is known about more than 130 cases of CIA "extraordinary renditions" and torture. Report makes it clear that these practices continue under Obama. For the first time, identifies all of the 54 foreign governments that collaborated. Heavily referenced, written by experienced human rights lawyers.  This report comes as the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is fighting CIA and Obama Administration efforts to delay publication of the Senate committee's multi-volume report on the same topic. 
Paul Merrell

gulftoday.ae | Pressure mounts over UK's Iraq 'war crimes' - 0 views

  • Legal experts from around the world are to join calls for an investigation into whether British politicians and senior military figures should be prosecuted for alleged war crimes in Iraq.An open letter from about a dozen heavyweight figures will increase the pressure on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to launch a formal inquiry into allegations that more than 400 Iraqis were victims of  thousands of incidents of mistreatment amounting to “torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”The Independent on Sunday revealed that a 250-page dossier has been submitted to the ICC  in The Hague by Public Interest Lawyers and the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights. It will be published in London on Tuesday.Ministers dismissed the need for an investigation, pointing out that the ICC had rejected such a call in 2006.  However, the letter from international experts will argue that fewer than 20 cases were known about then and that hundreds of new cases have emerged since.
  • William Schabas, professor of law at Middlesex University, who is co-ordinating the letter, said: “There is fresh evidence that was not there in 2006.  A lot more has come to light since then. We think the 2006 decision was wrong and we want the [ICC] Prosecutor to look at it through a different lens.”  He believed there was enough evidence to pass the tests for an ICC inquiry to be launched – that there was systematic rather isolated abuse; the scale of the complaints cleared the “gravity” threshold and that the claims had not been properly investigated by the UK.  However, the government will argue that these criteria have not been met.The dossier names General Sir Peter Wall, the head of the British Army; Geoff Hoon, the former Defence Secretary and Adam Ingram, the former Armed Forces Minister, who did not respond for requests to comment. The complainants decided to name those responsible for the UK’s strategy in Iraq following the US-led invasion in 2003. But political and defence figures said the ICC was unlikely to hold them responsible for actions “on the ground.”William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, said there was no “systematic” torture by troops and individual cases had either already been dealt with by the British authorities or were the subject of inquiries.He told Sky News: “There have been some cases of abuse that have been acknowledged and apologies and compensation have been paid appropriately.  But the government has always been clear and the armed forces have been clear that they absolutely reject allegations of systematic abuses by the British armed forces.
Paul Merrell

NSA Critics, Right All Along | National Review Online - 1 views

  • Barton Gellman’s explosive story in last Thursday’s Washington Post revealed an unnerving audit of the National Security Agency that showed, among other things, that the federal government “broke privacy rules thousands of times per year” in conducting extensive and “unauthorized surveillance of Americans or foreign intelligence targets in the United States, both of which are restricted by statute and executive order.” Thus was put convincingly to bed the now-obselete notion that the NSA’s claim on the privacy of the righteous was merely declaratory.
  • Contrary to the self-satisfied insistence of America’s national-security apologists, none of the excuses made on behalf of the NSA are reassuring. To both their credit and discredit, people in the United States continue to exhibit a definite fear of accusing public servants of mendacity. It is therefore apparently beyond the pale to suggest that President Obama was “lying” when he promised that the “transparent” NSA has not been “actually abusing” its power and that “we don’t have a domestic spying program.” For the sake of this column, I shall defer to the tradition.
  • Nevertheless, if Obama was in fact not lying, then there remain only two reasonable options as to why his explanations and the truth are so far removed from one another: Either the president of the United States is so genuinely and worryingly out of touch with his own NSA that he has no idea what is going on, or his conception of what constitutes “abuse” is appreciably different enough from everyone else’s that he is unsuited to the high office he holds. As The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf helpfully clarifies: “The 2,776 incidents of illegal surveillance” that the audit revealed “don’t mean that just 2,766 people had their rights violated — in just a single one of those 2,776 incidents, 3,000 people had their rights violated,” sometimes because operators inadvertently started tracking all calls into Washington, D.C. If this is not “abuse,” what is?
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    Let's always keep in mind that the NSA audits are only spot checks and that far more database queries are never audited. 
Paul Merrell

When the CIA's Empire Struck Back | Global Research - 0 views

  • In the mid-1970s, Rep. Otis Pike led a brave inquiry to rein in the excesses of the national security state. But the CIA and its defenders accused Pike of recklessness and vowed retaliation, assigning him to a political obscurity that continued to his recent death. Otis Pike, who headed the House of Representatives’ only wide-ranging and in-depth investigation into intelligence agency abuses in the 1970s, died on Jan. 20. A man who should have received a hero’s farewell passed with barely a mention. To explain the significance of what he did, however, requires a solid bit of back story.
  • Rep. Otis Pike, D-New York, took over what became known as the “Pike Committee.” Under Pike, the committee put some real teeth into the investigation, so much so that Ford’s White House and the CIA went on a public-relations counterattack, accusing the panel and its staff of recklessness. The CIA’s own historical review acknowledged as much:
  • “The final draft report of the Pike Committee reflected its sense of frustration with the Agency and the executive branch. Devoting an entire section of the report to describing its experience, the committee characterized Agency and White House cooperation as ‘virtually nonexistent.’ The report asserted that the executive branch practiced ‘footdragging, stonewalling, and deception’ in response to committee requests for information. It told the committee only what it wanted the committee to know. It restricted the dissemination of the information and ducked penetrating questions.”
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  • Essentially, the CIA and the White House forbade the Pike report’s release by leaning on friendly members of Congress to suppress the report, which a majority agreed to do. But someone leaked a copy to CBS News reporter Daniel Schorr, who took it to the Village Voice, which published it on Feb. 16, 1976. Mitchell Rogovin, the CIA’s Special Counsel for Legal Affairs, threatened Pike’s staff director, saying, “Pike will pay for this, you wait and see … We [the CIA] will destroy him for this. … There will be political retaliation. Any political ambitions in New York that Pike had are through. We will destroy him for this.” And, indeed, Pike’s political career never recovered. Embittered and disillusioned by the failure of Congress to stand up to the White House and the CIA, Pike did not seek reelection in 1978 and retired into relative obscurity.
  • But what did Pike’s report say that was so important to generate such hostility? The answer can be summed up with the opening line from the report: “If this Committee’s recent experience is any test, intelligence agencies that are to be controlled by Congressional lawmaking are, today, beyond the lawmaker’s scrutiny.” In other words, Otis Pike was our canary in the coal mine, warning us that the national security state was literally out of control, and that lawmakers were powerless against it. Pike’s prophetic statement was soon ratified by the fact that although former CIA Director Richard Helms was charged with perjury for lying to Congress about the CIA’s cooperation with ITT in the overthrow of Chilean President Salvador Allende, Helms managed to escape with a suspended sentence and a  $2,000 fine.
  • As Pike’s committee report stated: “These secret agencies have interests that inherently conflict with the open accountability of a political body, and there are many tools and tactics to block and deceive conventional Congressional checks. Added to this are the unique attributes of intelligence — notably, ‘national security,’ in its cloak of secrecy and mystery — to intimidate Congress and erode fragile support for sensitive inquiries. “Wise and effective legislation cannot proceed in the absence of information respecting conditions to be affected or changed. Nevertheless, under present circumstances, inquiry into intelligence activities faces serious and fundamental shortcomings. “Even limited success in exercising future oversight requires a rethinking of the powers, procedures, and duties of the overseers. This Committee’s path and policies, its plus and minuses, may at least indicate where to begin.” The Pike report revealed the tactics that the intelligence agencies had used to prevent oversight, noting the language was “always the language of cooperation” but the result was too often “non-production.” In other words, the agencies assured Congress of cooperation, while stalling, moving slowly, and literally letting the clock run out on the investigation. The Pike Committee, alone among the other investigations, refused to sign secrecy agreements with the CIA, charging that as the representatives of the people they had authority over the CIA, not the other way around.
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    The Senate's Church Committee gets all the publicity but the House Pike Committee did much of the heavy lifting in the mid-1970s investigation of spy agency abuse. This is a good solid overview of that committee's work in historical context and a troubling reminder that the NSA's current confrontational tactics with Congress are nothing new.
Paul Merrell

Obama concedes NSA bulk collection of phone data may be unnecessary | World news | theg... - 0 views

  • President Barack Obama has conceded that mass collection of private data by the US government may be unnecessary and said there were different ways of “skinning the cat”, which could allow intelligence agencies to keep the country safe without compromising privacy. In an apparent endorsement of a recommendation by a review panel to shift responsibility for the bulk collection of telephone records away from the National Security Agency and on to the phone companies, the president said change was necessary to restore public confidence. “In light of the disclosures, it is clear that whatever benefits the configuration of this particular programme may have, may be outweighed by the concerns that people have on its potential abuse,” Obama told an end-of-year White House press conference. “If it that’s the case, there may be a better way of skinning the cat.”
  • Though insisting he will not make a final decision until January, this is the furthest the president has gone in backing calls to dismantle the programme to collect telephone data, a practice the NSA claims has legal foundation under section 215 of the Patriot Act. This week, a federal judge said the program “very likely” violates the US constitution. “There are ways we can do this potentially that give people greater assurance that there are checks and balances, sufficient oversight and transparency,” Obama added. “Programmes like 215 could be redesigned in ways that give you the same information when you need it without creating these potentials for abuse. That’s exactly what we should be doing: to evaluate things in a very clear specific way and moving forward on changes. And that’s what I intend to do.”
  • The president would not comment on a suggestion last weekend by Richard Ledgett, the NSA official investigating the Snowden leaks, that an amnesty might be appropriate in exchange for the return of the data Snowden took from the agency. Obama said he could not comment specifically because Snowden was “under indictment”, something not previously disclosed. While the Justice Department filed a criminal complaint against Snowden on espionage-related charges in June, there has been no public subsequent indictment, although it is possible one exists under gag order. The Justice Department referred comment on a Snowden indictment to the White House. Caitlin Hayden, the chief spokeswoman for the White House National Security Council, clarified that Obama was referring to the criminal complaint against Snowden. It remains unclear if there is an indictment under seal. 
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  • The president also went further than his review panel in suggesting the US needed to rein in its overseas surveillance activities. “We have got to provide more confidence to the international community. In a virtual world, some of these boundaries don’t matter any more,” he said. “The values that we have got as Americans are ones that we have to be willing to apply beyond our borders, perhaps more systematically than we have done in the past.”
  • Conspicuously, Obama declined to rebut one assessment from his surveillance review group – that the bulk collection of US call data was not essential to stopping a terrorist attack. Instead, he contended that there had been “no abuse” of the bulk phone data collection. But in 2009, a judge on the secret surveillance court prevented the NSA from searching through its databases of US phone information after discovering “daily violations” resulting from NSA searches of Americans’ phone records without reasonable suspicion of connections to terrorism. That data was inaccessible to the NSA for almost all of 2009, before the Fisa court was convinced the NSA had sufficient safeguards in place for preventing similar violations
  • In another indication of the shifting landscape on surveillance, the telecoms giant AT&T announced on Friday that it will begin publishing a semi-annual report about its complicity with government surveillance requests. AT&T followed its competitor Verizon, which announced a similar move on Thursday.
  • The first such report is expected for early 2014, Watts said. While technology firms like Yahoo and Google have pushed for greater transparency about providing their customer data to the government, the telecommunications firms – which have cooperated with the NSA since the agency’s 1952 inception – did not join them before the events of the past week.
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    Movement on the NSA. Obama hints that the NSA's section 215 metadata collection will end, fesses up that Snowden has been criminally indicted, but declines to discuss whether Snowden might be pardoned in exchange for turning over his NSA document collection, notably not ruling it out. And finally, two of the giant telcos, AT&T and Verizon, have announced intent to do semi-annual public reports on their collaboration with government spy agencies. Amazing what a federal court decision can do, particularly when immediately followed by the president's own blue-ribbon panel report, both holding that the section 215 program has resulted in no terrorist attacks being prevented and that the program in unconstitutional. Obama finally reaches his tipping point. A good week for civil libertarians.   
Paul Merrell

Bigger than Libor? Forex probe hangs over banks - Nov. 20, 2013 - 0 views

  • Yet another dark cloud is looming over global banks as officials examine their behavior in the massive foreign exchange market, threatening to deal a new blow to earnings and reputations. Regulators in the U.S., Europe and Asia are in the early stages of investigating whether traders at the world's top banks manipulated foreign exchange benchmarks to profit at the expense of their clients. Goldman Sachs (GS, Fortune 500), Citigroup (C, Fortune 500), JP Morgan (JPM, Fortune 500), Deutsche Bank (DB), Barclays (BCS), Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), UBS (UBS) and HSBC (HBCYF)are among the firms in their sights. Financial lawyers say the probe could have steep and uncertain consequences as the impact of currency market abuse would reverberate far beyond Wall Street.
  • It's unwelcome timing for an industry already fighting a raft of legal battles over foreclosure abuses, misleading investors over mortgages and payment protection insurance. And then there's the Libor scandal. A global investigation into the setting of the London interbank lending rate, and related global benchmarks, has so far yielded about $3.6 billion in fines. Penalties for some of the biggest players are still to come. Traders have also faced criminal charges. As the extent of damage caused by Libor-rigging is revealed, lawyers say the probe into fixing currency rates could unfold in a similar way, and rival its impact. London is the center of the loosely regulated foreign exchange market, the biggest in the world's financial system with average daily turnover of $5.3 trillion. Proven abuse in this market would have a significant ripple effect, exposing offending firms to a host of legal action.
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    For more detail see http://money.cnn.com/2013/10/30/news/companies/global-forex-probe/ I'll get excited if and when major bankster executives face prison time. Until then, the "fines" against corporations are just a cost of doing business usually dwarfed by the unjust riches that one group of human beings fraudulently acquires from others. Reality check: corporations are an entirely imaginary legal fiction; it's actually people that are committing the misbehavior. Fines for corporations are as fictional as the corporations themselves; you must prosecute the people and send them to prison to deter bankster misbehavior.  And it is human beings working for another legal fiction, government, who are making the decisions to prosecute corporations rather than misbehaving people. 
Paul Merrell

CIA misled on interrogation program, Senate report says - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • A report by the Senate Intelligence Committee concludes that the CIA misled the government and the public about aspects of its brutal interrogation program for years — concealing details about the severity of its methods, overstating the significance of plots and prisoners, and taking credit for critical pieces of intelligence that detainees had in fact surrendered before they were subjected to harsh techniques. The report, built around detailed chronologies of dozens of CIA detainees, documents a long-standing pattern of unsubstantiated claims as agency officials sought permission to use — and later tried to defend — excruciating interrogation methods that yielded little, if any, significant intelligence, according to U.S. officials who have reviewed the document.
  • “The CIA described [its program] repeatedly both to the Department of Justice and eventually to Congress as getting unique, otherwise unobtainable intelligence that helped disrupt terrorist plots and save thousands of lives,” said one U.S. official briefed on the report. “Was that actually true? The answer is no.”
  • Several officials who have read the document said some of its most troubling sections deal not with detainee abuse but with discrepancies between the statements of senior CIA officials in Washington and the details revealed in the written communications of lower-level employees directly involved.Officials said millions of records make clear that the CIA’s ability to obtain the most valuable intelligence against al-Qaeda — including tips that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011 — had little, if anything, to do with “enhanced interrogation techniques.”The report is divided into three volumes — one that traces the chronology of interrogation operations, another that assesses intelligence officials’ claims and a third that contains case studies on virtually every prisoner held in CIA custody since the program began in 2001. Officials said the report was stripped of certain details, including the locations of CIA prisons and the names of agency employees who did not hold ­supervisor-level positions.One official said that almost all of the critical threat-related information from Abu Zubaida was obtained during the period when he was questioned by Soufan at a hospital in Pakistan, well before he was interrogated by the CIA and waterboarded 83 times.Information obtained by Soufan, however, was passed up through the ranks of the U.S. intelligence community, the Justice Department and Congress as though it were part of what CIA interrogators had obtained, according to the committee report.
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  • The Senate Intelligence Committee is expected to vote Thursday to send an executive summary of the report to Obama for declassification. U.S. officials said it could be months before that section, which contains roughly 20 conclusions and spans about 400 pages, is released to the public. The report’s release also could resurrect a long-standing feud between the CIA and the FBI, where many officials were dismayed by the agency’s use of methods that Obama and others later labeled torture. CIA veterans have expressed concern that the report reflects FBI biases. One of its principal authors is a former FBI analyst,
  • “The CIA conflated what was gotten when, which led them to misrepresent the effectiveness of the program,” said a second U.S. official who has reviewed the report. The official described the persistence of such misstatements as among “the most damaging” of the committee’s conclusions.Detainees’ credentials also were exaggerated, officials said. Agency officials described Abu Zubaida as a senior al-Qaeda operative — and, therefore, someone who warranted coercive techniques — although experts later determined that he was essentially a facilitator who helped guide recruits to al-Qaeda training camps.The CIA also oversold the role of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri in the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, which killed 17 U.S. sailors. CIA officials claimed he was the “mastermind.” The committee described a similar sequence in the interrogation of Hassan Ghul, an al-Qaeda operative who provided a critical lead in the search for bin Laden: the fact that the al-Qaeda leader’s most trusted courier used the moniker “al-Kuwaiti.” But Ghul disclosed that detail while being interrogated by Kurdish authorities in northern Iraq who posed questions scripted by CIA analysts. The information from that period was subsequently conflated with lesser intelligence gathered from Ghul at a secret CIA prison in Romania, officials said. Ghul was later turned over to authorities in Pakistan, where he was subsequently released. He was killed by a CIA drone strike in 2012.
  • Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has previously indicated that harsh CIA interrogation measures were of little value in the bin Laden hunt. “The CIA detainee who provided the most significant information about the courier provided the information prior to being subjected to coercive interrogation techniques,” Feinstein said in a 2013 statement, responding in part to scenes in the movie “Zero Dark Thirty” that depict a detainee’s slip under duress as a breakthrough moment.
  • As with Abu Zubaida and even Nashiri, officials said, CIA interrogators continued the harsh treatment even after it appeared that Baluchi was cooperating. On Sept. 22, 2003, he was flown from Kabul to a CIA black site in Romania. In 2006, he was taken to the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. His attorneys contend that he suffered head trauma while in CIA custody. Last year, the Senate Intelligence Committee asked Baluchi’s attorneys for information about his medical condition, but military prosecutors opposed the request. A U.S. official said the request was not based solely on the committee’s investigation of the CIA program.
  • Officials said a former CIA interrogator named Charlie Wise was forced to retire in 2003 after being suspected of abusing Abu Zubaida using a broomstick as a ballast while he was forced to kneel in a stress position. Wise was also implicated in the abuse at Salt Pit. He died of a heart attack shortly after retiring from the CIA, former U.S. intelligence officials said.
Paul Merrell

Report: Massive Increase In Local Governments Spying on Citizens - 0 views

  • A report from Al Jazeera America has revealed that the private data of everyday citizens is being spied upon much more than previously thought.
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    12-1/2 min. report from Al Jazeera on abuse of state databases by government officials and the growing problem of surveillance by automated license plate readers.
Paul Merrell

Polish Outrage to Paying Victims of CIA Black Sites-and What the Eur Court Said | Just ... - 0 views

  • Poland will be paying a quarter of a million dollars to two Guantánamo detainees, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. The payment arises in the context of the torture of the terror suspects at a CIA “black site” operating on Polish territory. Last July, the European Court of Human Rights handed down its much-awaited judgments in the cases of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri v. Poland and Husayn (Abu Zubaydah) v. Poland in relation to Poland’s involvement in the CIA rendition, detention and interrogation program. The Court ruled that Poland violated the substantive and procedural aspects of the detainees’ right to be free from torture or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment (Article 3, European Convention on Human Rights). The Court also found violations of, among other rights, Articles 5 (liberty and security), 8 (private and family life), and 13 (effective remedy) of the ECHR. The Court ordered the Polish government to pay €130,000 to Zubaydah and €100,000 to al-Nashiri, within three months from when the judgments become final. Poland appealed the ruling, but the request was rejected by a Grand Chamber panel on February 16, making last weekend the deadline for the payments. The Polish Foreign Ministry said on Friday that it was processing the payments, AP’s Vanessa Gera reported.
  • Poland will be paying a quarter of a million dollars to two Guantánamo detainees, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. The payment arises in the context of the torture of the terror suspects at a CIA “black site” operating on Polish territory. Last July, the European Court of Human Rights handed down its much-awaited judgments in the cases of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri v. Poland and Husayn (Abu Zubaydah) v. Poland in relation to Poland’s involvement in the CIA rendition, detention and interrogation program. The Court ruled that Poland violated the substantive and procedural aspects of the detainees’ right to be free from torture or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment (Article 3, European Convention on Human Rights). The Court also found violations of, among other rights, Articles 5 (liberty and security), 8 (private and family life), and 13 (effective remedy) of the ECHR. The Court ordered the Polish government to pay €130,000 to Zubaydah and €100,000 to al-Nashiri, within three months from when the judgments become final. Poland appealed the ruling, but the request was rejected by a Grand Chamber panel on February 16, making last weekend the deadline for the payments. The Polish Foreign Ministry said on Friday that it was processing the payments, AP’s Vanessa Gera reported.
  • But the Court took a different, more robust view and found significant responsibility on part of the Polish government. The Court held (my emphasis added): “517. … Notwithstanding the [Article 3] Convention obligation, Poland, for all practical purposes, facilitated the whole process, created the conditions for it to happen and made no attempt to prevent it from occurring. As the Court has already held above, on the basis of their own knowledge of the CIA activities deriving from Poland’s complicity in the [High-Value Detainees Program] Programme and from publicly accessible information on treatment applied in the context of the “war on terror” to terrorist suspects in US custody the authorities – even if they did not witness or participate in the specific acts of ill-treatment and abuse endured by the applicant – must have been aware of the serious risk of treatment contrary to Article 3 occurring on Polish territory.”
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  • The ruling, which predated the publication of the redacted version of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA program, brought important judicial scrutiny to the agency’s post-9/11 practices, including the controversial role played by U.S. allies. The Senate report has since provided some further details about Poland’s involvement, although the country is not identified by name. The AP report notes the frustration of those in Poland who view the ruling as unjustifiably punishing the country for CIA actions. An opposition Polish lawmaker has recorded his discontent, stating that the terror suspects remained in the sole custody of U.S. officials throughout their detention. Former Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski has similarly been quoted by the LA Times’ Carol Williams as saying:  “We might have to pay compensation even though our personnel did nothing wrong. You can imagine how Polish people feel about it … We just wish that intelligence matters were kept confidential.”
  • While some in Poland are expressing their exasperation with the Court’s ruling, the issue of compensation has sparked equal outrage among some in the United States who do not believe that suspects of terrorist attacks should receive payments, as noted by the AP. The controversy over compensation comes just as the U.S. faces renewed calls from some European and other countries to compensate victims of CIA torture. At the UN Human Rights Council last week, the Universal Periodic Review report on the United States documented other UN member states’ objections to U.S. practices.
  • Meanwhile, in Europe, more judgments are pending on this subject, including two involving the same detainees (see: Abu Zubaydah v. Lithuania and Al Nashiri v. Romania). While accountability within the U.S. still seems like a pipe dream, the European Court of Human Right’s more robust approach perhaps offers the only means of securing reparation for human rights abuses committed as part of the “war on terror.” The Court’s approach may also help to educate European citizens on the nature of complicity in grave human rights abuses. By calling for compensation, the Court has also served to weaken the forms of international cooperation that foster such violations in the first place.
Paul Merrell

Hackers Stole Secrets of U.S. Government Workers' Sex Lives - The Daily Beast - 0 views

  • It was already being described as the worst hack of the U.S. government in history. And it just got much worse.A senior U.S. official has confirmed that foreign hackers compromised the intimate personal details of an untold number of government workers. Likely included in the hackers’ haul: information about workers’ sexual partners, drug and alcohol abuse, debts, gambling compulsions, marital troubles, and any criminal activity.Those details, which are now presumed to be in the hands of Chinese spies, are found in the so-called “adjudication information” that U.S. investigators compile on government employees and contractors who are applying for security clearances. The exposure suggests that the massive computer breach at the Office of Personnel Management is more significant and potentially damaging to national security than officials have previously said.
  • Three former U.S. intelligence officials told The Daily Beast that the adjudication information would effectively provide dossiers on current and former government employees, as well as contractors. It gives foreign intelligence agencies a roadmap for finding people with access to the government’s most highly classified secrets.Obama administration officials had previously acknowledged the breach of information that applicants voluntarily disclose on a routine questionnaire, called Standard Form 86, but the theft of the more detailed and wide-ranging adjudication information appears to have gone overlooked.
  • “Whoever compromised the adjudication information is going to have clear knowledge, beyond what’s in the SF86, about who the best targets for espionage are in the United States,” Michael Adams, a computer security expert who served more than two decades in the U.S. Special Operations Command, told The Daily Beast. “This is the most successful cyber attack in the history of the United States,” owing to the amount and quality of the information that was stolen, Adams said. U.S. intelligence officers spend years trying to recruit foreign spies to gather the kinds of details and insights that are contained in adjudication information, one former senior U.S. official said. This official, who requested anonymity, added that adjudication information would give foreign intelligence services “enormous leverage” over U.S. personnel whom they might forcibly interrogate for information or try to recruit.
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  • The adjudication process had a broad scope, taking into account the SF86 questionnaire, reports from background investigations, interviews with the applicant's family members and associates, his or her employment history, and for people seeking high-level clearances, the results of polygraph investigations.Seymour said such records “span an employee’s career” and could stretch back as far as 30 years. Officials have said that as many as 18 million people may have been affected by the breach. Asked specifically what information the hackers had obtained, Seymour told lawmakers that she preferred to answer later in a “classified session.” Seymour didn’t specify how many people’s information was stolen. But the OPM oversees background investigations, which comprise a key part of the adjudication process, for more than 90 percent of security clearance applicants, according to the Congressional Research Service. An OPM spokesman didn’t respond to a request for comment in time for publication.
  • A former senior U.S. intelligence official, who asked to remain anonymous, said the OPM breach would cause more damage to national security operations and personnel than the leaks by Edward Snowden about classified surveillance by the National Security Agency.“This is worse than Snowden, because at least programs that were running before the leaks could be replaced or rebuilt,” the former official said. “But OPM, that’s the gift that keeps on giving. You can’t rebuild people.”Adjudicators are in a powerful position because in deciding whether to recommend granting a security clearance, they have access to the entire scope of an applicant’s file and are told to make a subjective analysis.“The adjudication process is the careful weighing of a number of variables known as the whole-person concept,” according to official guidelines. “Available, reliable information about the person, past and present, favorable and unfavorable, should be considered in reaching a determination.”
  • By design, adjudication is an invasive process, meant to unearth risk factors including drug and alcohol abuse, extramarital affairs, a history of violence, and other events that speak to a person’s “trustworthiness” and their susceptibility to blackmail or being recruited to spy for a foreign government.For instance, “compulsive gambling is a concern, as it may lead to financial crimes including espionage,” the guidelines say. Adjudicators are told to note “a pattern of compulsive, self-destructive, or high risk sexual behavior,” “relapse after diagnosis of alcohol abuse,” and “emotionally unstable, irresponsible, dysfunctional, violent, paranoid, or bizarre behavior,” among other warning signs in 13 categories. Some of the embarrassing personal details found in some adjudications have been made public. That’s what happens after an applicant who was denied a security clearance launched an appeal.
  • Armed with such intimate details of a person’s worst moments, foreign spies would have unprecedented advantage against their U.S. adversaries. And the news is especially bad for people who hold the highest levels of clearance, which require more rigorous background checks, noted Adams, the computer security expert. “The higher up you go in your sensitivity levels, the more data that’s in your adjudication file,” he said.
Paul Merrell

US to UN Human Rights Committee: Move Along, Nothing to See Here | American Civil Liber... - 0 views

  • Yesterday the United States gave the U.N. Human Rights Committee its one year follow-up report on progress made to implement four priority recommendations made by the committee a year ago. The independent human rights experts had reviewed the United States' compliance with a major human rights treaty, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). They found the U.S. coming up short in many areas, including accountability for torture, privacy and surveillance, Guantánamo, and gun violence. Yesterday’s disappointing 15-page submission does provide some information on Justice Department investigations regarding police misconduct, including the recent Ferguson report. But, there was nothing on accountability measures taken in the aftermath of the release of the Senate report on the CIA torture program. The need for Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a special prosecutor remains as glaring as ever.
  • The submission notes that the Senate report’s 500-page executive summary was “declassified with minimal redactions to protect national security,” but it failed to commit to release the entire report (which the ACLU is currently fighting for in a FOIA lawsuit). And while the submission states that the U.S. “supports transparency and has taken steps to ensure that it never resorts to the use of those [harsh interrogation] techniques again,” there is no mention of any concrete actions taken to criminally investigate CIA torture, especially in light of the new information made public in the report about the brutality of the CIA’s methods, and its lies to Congress, the media, and the public about its torture program. Under the ICCPR and the Convention Against Torture, the U.S. has an obligation to effectively, independently, and impartially investigate all cases of unlawful killing or torture, as well as arbitrary detention or enforced disappearance. The U.S. also has an international legal obligation to appropriately prosecute perpetrators – including high-level policymakers.
  • The U.S. submission mentions the investigation by Justice Department prosecutor John Durham, which he closed in 2012 without any charges being filed. But, the submission fails to provide detailed information on the precise scope of Durham’s mandate. We remain concerned that the investigation may have focused on instances in which interrogators overstepped limits set by senior officials, rather than on the culpability of senior officials themselves. It also remains unclear whether investigators interviewed any prisoners who were subjected to the CIA torture program. During the November 2014 review of the United States before the U.N. Committee Against Torture in Geneva, the committee raised concerns, based on letters and accounts from torture victims or their attorneys, indicating that Durham had never interviewed any detainees. The U.S. delegation responded that it had interviewed 96 persons as part of the investigation, but it did not indicate whether any of the prisoners who were subjected to abuse and torture were amongst those interviewed.
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  • A comprehensive criminal investigation by the U.S. government would dissuade future government officials from ordering or using torture and abuse. Failure to conduct an independent criminal investigation not only flouts international law but it also undermines America’s ability to advocate for human rights abroad and compromises Americans’ faith in the rule of law at home. The ACLU and other human rights groups have until May 1st to submit “shadow reports” to the Human Rights Committee, which will subsequently assess and grade U.S. implementation of the key priority recommendations.  The Obama administration can still avoid a low grade by responding to domestic and international calls to appoint a special prosecutor to conduct a comprehensive criminal investigation of the tactics described in the Senate torture report, including all acts authorizing or ordering acts of torture and other abuses and provide redress to victims of torture.  
Gary Edwards

Revealed - the capitalist network that runs the world - physics-math - 19 October 2011 ... - 0 views

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    The secret 1% revealed at last. Using advanced "complex systems heuristics", a group of mathematicians and scientist studying the stability of complex systems has applied their techniques to study the interlocking relationships driving the global economy. They claim to have identified the inner architecture of global economic power, and hope to make it more stable. Incredible stuff! A list of the top 50 of the 147 superconnected companies cross references nicely with the question, "Who Owns the Federal Reserve Bankster Cartel?" The focus is on global "Transnational Corporations" (TNCs) and how the interlocking ownership/cross-director-relationships has affected the global economy. The study discovers a "super-entity" comprised of a core 147 companies that control over 40% of the world's wealth and productivity capacity. Most of these are global banking and financial operations. Yes, Wall Street Banksters! "In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network," says James Glattfelder, head of the Zurich research team. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group. Collectively this 1% control a further 60% of global revenues. excerpt: AS OWS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

    The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.

    The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global econo
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    Important work but perhaps too immature to base decisions on with confidence. I was struck by this statement: "Glattfelder says we may need global anti-trust rules, which now exist only at national level, to limit over-connection among TNCs. Sugihara says the analysis suggests one possible solution: firms should be taxed for excess interconnectivity to discourage this risk." My relevant question is, who would be the recipients of the postulated tax? Anytime you create a revenue stream, the recipients acquire a vested interest in maintaining and expanding that revenue stream and the folks who pay the revenue acquire a vested interest in minimizing or eliminating the expense. While the payers incentives are consistent with the article's statement, the identities of the recipients and their incentives to tweak the tax to produce more revenue needs more thought and discussion with a strong focus on: [i] who makes that decision; [ii] who has the the power to decide whether that authority is abused; and [iii] who has standing to initiate actions to correct abuse. On the latter, the U.S. Constitution would seem to require that those who pay the taxes are entitled to Due Process. But at the same time, the individual consumer can also be injured by abuse. However, a hallmark trait of most trade agreements is that only government and regulated corporations are granted standing to challenge regulatory decisions, which has skewed their interpretation heavily to the corporate side. Universal standing is the cure.
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