After months of battlefield stalemate in Syria, a flurry of reports from Washington, Jerusalem, Amman and the Gulf suggests a major new clandestine effort is under way to open up a "southern front" against the regime of Bashar al-Assad.Central to the mooted plan is a renewed push to provide Syria's badly divided and often ineffectual moderate, secular rebel groups with additional funding, upgraded weapons and intelligence support.What use they may make of such support, if indeed it fully materialises, remains to be seen.The initiative, as reported in the region, is set against a backdrop of secret talks in the US last month between Susan Rice, Barack Obama's national security adviser, and Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, the Saudi interior minister in charge of covert action programmes in Syria.According to the usually well informed Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, spy chiefs from Jordan, Turkey, Qatar and other regional countries also attended the discussions, focused on making a "stronger effort" to help the rebels.
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Syria war: new push against Assad being planned, reports suggest | World news | theguar... - 0 views
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After months of battlefield stalemate in Syria, a flurry of reports from Washington, Jerusalem, Amman and the Gulf suggests a major new clandestine effort is under way to open up a "southern front" against the regime of Bashar al-Assad.Central to the mooted plan is a renewed push to provide Syria's badly divided and often ineffectual moderate, secular rebel groups with additional funding, upgraded weapons and intelligence support.What use they may make of such support, if indeed it fully materialises, remains to be seen.The initiative, as reported in the region, is set against a backdrop of secret talks in the US last month between Susan Rice, Barack Obama's national security adviser, and Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, the Saudi interior minister in charge of covert action programmes in Syria.
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According to the usually well informed Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, spy chiefs from Jordan, Turkey, Qatar and other regional countries also attended the discussions, focused on making a "stronger effort" to help the rebels.This meeting has been linked in turn to last month's launching by the Free Syrian Army (FSA) of what they termed a spring offensive in the south of Syria. The offensive began days after they received new US weapons funding that may eventually total $31.4m (£18.9m), rebel commanders said.After holding back for months owing to fears that new arms might fall into the hands of al-Qaida affiliates, unidentified American officials said Congress had given closed-door approval in January for renewed cash for light weapons intended for the moderate, secular opposition in the south.The new US funding supposedly augments a fresh push by Gulf states to finance rebel operations in the southern region of Syria, which are ultimately aimed at Damascus. More than $1bn has been disbursed since last summer, much of it for weapons purchases in eastern Europe, according to Gulf government sources quoted by regional media.
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Detailed media reports claim the operational plans, supply routes and tactics for the new push are being overseen by a secret international operations command centre in Amman staffed by military officials from 14 countries, including the US, Britain, Israel and Arab states opposed to the Assad regime."Rebel fighters and opposition members say the command centre, based in an intelligence headquarters building in Amman, channels vehicles, sniper rifles, mortars, heavy machine guns, small arms and ammunition to Free Syrian Army units," the Abu Dhabi-based National newspaper reported.Jordan denies the existence of the centre and of reportedly CIA-run rebel training facilities in northern Jordan.
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shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Oct 14
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ECHELON: NSA's Global Electronic Interception - 0 views
web.archive.org/...echelon-dc.htm
surveillance state NSA ECHELON Five-Eyes Duncan-Campbell NSA-history
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12 August 1988 Cover, pages 10-12 Somebody's listening . . . and they don't give a damn about personal privacy or commercial confidence. Project 415 is a top-secret new global surveillance system. It can tap into a billion calls a year in the UK alone. Inside Duncan Campbell on how spying entered the 21st century . . . They've got it taped In the booming surveillance industry they spy on whom they wish, when they wish, protected by barriers of secrecy, fortified by billions of pounds worth of high, high technology. Duncan Campbell reports from the United States on the secret Anglo-American plan for a global electronic spy system for the 21st century capable of listening in to most of us most of the time American, British and Allied intelligence agencies are soon to embark on a massive, billion-dollar expansion of their global electronic surveillance system. According to information given recently in secret to the US Congress, the surveillance system will enable the agencies to monitor and analyse civilian communications into the 21st century. Identified for the moment as Project P415, the system will be run by the US National Security Agency (NSA). But the intelligence agencies of many other countries will be closely involved with the new network, including those from Britain, Australia, Germany and Japan--and, surprisingly, the People's Republic of China. New satellite stations and monitoring centres are to be built around the world, and a chain of new satellites launched, so that NSA and its British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) at Cheltenham, may keep abreast of the burgeoning international telecommunications traffic.
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Both the new and existing surveillance systems are highly computerised. They rely on near total interception of international commercial and satellite communications in order to locate the telephone or other messages of target individuals. Last month, a US newspaper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, revealed that the system had been used to target the telephone calls of a US Senator, Strom Thurmond. The fact that Thurmond, a southern Republican and usually a staunch supporter of the Reagan administration, is said to have been a target has raised fears that the NSA has restored domestic, electronic, surveillance programmes. These were originally exposed and criticised during the Watergate investigations, and their closure ordered by President Carter. After talking to the NSA, Thurmond later told the Plain Dealer that he did not believe the allegation. But Thurmond, a right-wing Republican, may have been unwilling to rock the boat. Staff members of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence said that staff were "digging into it" despite the "stratospheric security classification" of all the systems involved. The Congressional officials were first told of the Thurmond interception by a former employee of the Lockheed Space and Missiles Corporation, Margaret Newsham, who now lives in Sunnyvale, California. Newsham had originally given separate testimony and filed a lawsuit concerning corruption and mis-spending on other US government "black" projects. She has worked in the US and Britain for two corporations which manufacture signal intelligence computers, satellites and interception equipment for NSA, Ford Aerospace and Lockheed. Citing a special Executive Order signed by President Reagan. she told me last month that she could not and would not discuss classified information with journalists. But according to Washington sources (and the report in the Plain Dealer, she informed a US Congressman that the Thurmond interception took place at Menwith Hill, and that she p
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A secret listening agreement, called UKUSA (UK-USA), assigns parts of the globe to each participating agency. GCHQ at Cheltenham is the co-ordinating centre for Europe, Africa and the Soviet Union (west of the Ural Mountains). The NSA covers the rest of the Soviet Union and most of the Americas. Australia--where another station in the NSA listening network is located in the outback--co-ordinates the electronic monitoring of the South Pacific, and South East Asia.
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During the Watergate affair. it was revealed that NSA, in collaboration with GCHQ, had routinely intercepted the international communications of prominent anti-Vietnam war leaders such as Jane Fonda and Dr Benjamin Spock. Another target was former Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver. Then in the late 1970s, it was revealed that President Carter had ordered NSA to stop obtaining "back door" intelligence about US political figures through swapping intelligence data with GCHQ Cheltenham.
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ince then, investigators have subpoenaed other witnesses and asked them to provide the complete plans and manuals of the ECHELON system and related projects. The plans and blueprints are said to show that targeting of US political figures would not occur by accident. but was designed into the system from the start. While working at Menwith Hill, Newsham is reported to have said that she was able to listen through earphones to telephone calls being monitored at the base. Other conversations that she heard were in Russian. After leaving Menwith Hill, she continued to have access to full details of Menwith Hill operations from a position as software manager for more than a dozen VAX computers at Menwith which operate the ECHELON system. Newsham refused last month to discuss classified details of her career, except with cleared Congressional officials. But it has been publicly acknowledged that she worked on a large range of so-called "black" US intelligence programmes, whose funds are concealed inside the costs of other defence projects. She was fired from Lockheed four years ago after complaining about the corruption, and sexual harassment.
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he largest overseas station in the Project P415 network is the US satellite and communications base at Menwith Hill. near Harrogate in Yorkshire. It is run undercover by the NSA and taps into all Britain's main national and international communications networks (New Statesman, 7 August 1980). Although high technology stations such as Menwith Hill are primarily intended to monitor international communications, according to US experts their capability can be, and has been, turned inwards on domestic traffic. Menwith Hill, in particular, has been accused by a former employee of gross corruption and the monitoring of domestic calls. The vast international global eavesdropping network has existed since shortly after the second world war, when the US, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand signed a secret agreement on signals intelligence, or "sigint". It was anticipated, correctly, that electronic monitoring of communications signals would continue to be the largest and most important form of post-war secret intelligence, as it had been through the war. Although it is impossible for analysts to listen to all but a small fraction of the billions of telephone calls, and other signals which might contain "significant" information, a network of monitoring stations in Britain and elsewhere is able to tap all international and some domestic communications circuits, and sift out messages which sound interesting. Computers automatically analyse every telex message or data signal, and can also identify calls to, say, a target telephone number in London, no matter from which country they originate.
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If Margaret Newsham's testimony is confirmed by the ongoing Congressional investigation, then the NSA has been behaving illegally under US law--unless it can prove either that Thurmond's call was intercepted completely accidentally, or that the highly patriotic Senator is actually a foreign spy or terrorist. Moreover NSA's international phone tapping operations from Menwith Hill and at Morwenstow, Cornwall, can only be legal in Britain if special warrants have been issued by the Secretary of State to specify that American intelligence agents are persons to whom information from intercepts must or should be given. This can not be established, since the government has always refused to publish any details of the targets or recipients of specific interception warrants.
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Both British and American domestic communications are also being targeted and intercepted by the ECHELON network, the US investigators have been told. The agencies are alleged to have collaborated not only on targeting and interception, but also on the monitoring of domestic UK communications. Special teams from GCHQ Cheltenham have been flown in secretly in the last few years to a computer centre in Silicon Valley near San Francisco for training on the special computer systems that carry out both domestic and international interception.
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The centre near San Francisco has also been used to train staff from the "Technical Department" of the People's Liberation Army General Staff, which is the Chinese version of GCHQ. The Department operates two ultra-secret joint US-Chinese listening stations in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, close to the Soviet Siberian border. Allegedly, such surveillance systems are only used to target Soviet or Warsaw Pact communications signals, and those suspected of involvement in espionage and terrorism. But those involved in ECHELON have stressed to Congress that there are no formal controls over who may be targeted. And I have been told that junior intelligence staff can feed target names into the system at all levels, without any check on their authority to do so. Witnesses giving evidence to the Congressional inquiry have discussed whether the Democratic presidential contender Jesse Jackson was targeted; one source implied that he had been. Even test engineers from manufacturing companies are able to listen in on private citizens' communications, the inquiry was told. But because of the special Executive Order signed by President Reagan, US intelligence operatives who know about such politically sensitive operations face jail sentences if they speak out--despite the constitutional American protection of freedom of speech and of the press. And in Britain, as we know, the government is in the process of tightening the Official Secrets Act to make the publication of any information from intelligence officials automatically a crime, even if the information had already been published, or had appeared overseas first.
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From the original series of ariticles * in 1988 * that first brought the Five Eyes' nation's ECHELON surveillance project to light. But note the paragarph about the disclosure during the Watergate scandal (early 1970s) about domestic digital surveillance of antiwar leaders and Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver.
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REVEALED: GCHQ's BEYOND TOP SECRET Middle Eastern INTERNET SPY BASE * The Register - 0 views
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Exclusive Above-top-secret details of Britain’s covert surveillance programme - including the location of a clandestine British base tapping undersea cables in the Middle East - have so far remained secret, despite being leaked by fugitive NSA sysadmin Edward Snowden. Government pressure has meant that some media organisations, despite being in possession of these facts, have declined to reveal them. Today, however, the Register publishes them in full.The secret British spy base is part of a programme codenamed “CIRCUIT” and also referred to as Overseas Processing Centre 1 (OPC-1). It is located at Seeb, on the northern coast of Oman, where it taps in to various undersea cables passing through the Strait of Hormuz into the Persian/Arabian Gulf. Seeb is one of a three site GCHQ network in Oman, at locations codenamed “TIMPANI”, “GUITAR” and “CLARINET”. TIMPANI, near the Strait of Hormuz, can monitor Iraqi communications. CLARINET, in the south of Oman, is strategically close to Yemen. British national telco BT, referred to within GCHQ and the American NSA under the ultra-classified codename “REMEDY”, and Vodafone Cable (which owns the former Cable & Wireless company, aka “GERONTIC”) are the two top earners of secret GCHQ payments running into tens of millions of pounds annually.
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The actual locations of such codenamed “access points” into the worldwide cable backbone are classified 3 levels above Top Secret and labelled “Strap 3”. The true identities of the companies hidden behind codenames such as “REMEDY”, “GERONTIC”, “STREETCAR” or “PINNAGE” are classified one level below this, at “Strap 2”.After these details were withheld, the government opted not to move against the Guardian newspaper last year for publishing above-top-secret information at the lower level designated “Strap 1”. This included details of the billion-pound interception storage system, Project TEMPORA, which were revealed in 2013 and which have triggered Parliamentary enquiries in Britain and Europe, and cases at the European Court of Human Rights. The Guardian was forced to destroy hard drives of leaked information to prevent political embarrassment over extensive commercial arrangements with these and other telecommunications companies who have secretly agreed to tap their own and their customers’ or partners’ overseas cables for the intelligence agency GCHQ. Intelligence chiefs also wished to conceal the identities of countries helping GCHQ and its US partner the NSA by sharing information or providing facilities
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According to documents revealed by Edward Snowden to journalists including Glenn Greenwald among others, the intelligence agency annually pays selected companies tens of millions of pounds to run secret teams which install hidden connections which copy customers' data and messages to the spooks’ processing centres. The GCHQ-contracted companies also install optical fibre taps or “probes” into equipment belonging to other companies without their knowledge or consent. Within GCHQ, each company has a special section called a “Sensitive Relationship Team” or SRT.BT and Vodafone/C&W also operate extensive long distance optical fibre communications networks throughout the UK, installed and paid for by GCHQ, NSA, or by a third and little known UK intelligence support organization called the National Technical Assistance Centre (NTAC).
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BBC News - Ukraine crisis: Putin hopes for peace deal by Friday - 0 views
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Russia's president has said he is hoping for a peace deal between Ukraine and pro-Russian rebels by Friday. Vladimir Putin urged both sides to stop military action in eastern Ukraine, adding that his views and those of his Ukrainian counterpart were very close. Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko said they had agreed a "ceasefire process" but PM Arseny Yatsenyuk said no plan from Mr Putin should be trusted.
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Insisting that Russia is in no way a negotiating party in the Ukrainian conflict, Vladimir Putin is nevertheless certain that it is Moscow's proposals that are going to advance both sides to peace. Mr Putin's plan is short and leaves a lot of room for interpretation. Take, for example, a point on moving Ukrainian troops away from positions from which towns and cities can be shelled. Taken to an extreme, this could mean rewinding the situation on the ground to a point several weeks ago before Ukrainian advances. Just two weeks ago the discussions centred around when, and not if, the rebels would have to move out of Donetsk and Luhansk. But Moscow's plan will allow them to strengthen their control over the two regional centres and other areas.
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Mr Putin has often seemed unwilling to negotiate from a position of weakness and the reversals of the past few days illustrate this perfectly. Now it's Petro Poroshenko who has to choose whether to accept something which clearly protects Kiev's enemies in eastern Ukraine.
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Speaking to journalists in the Mongolia capital Ulan Bator, Mr Putin said the two sides should reach agreement when they resumed talks in Minsk on Friday. "Our views on the way to resolve the conflict, as it seemed to me, are very close," he said, referring to a phone conversation with Mr Poroshenko.
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He said he was proposing a seven-point peace plan: The Ukrainian army and eastern rebels should stop "active offensive operations" Ukrainian troops must pull back to a distance where they would be unable to shell population centres International monitoring of the ceasefire No use of military jets against civilians "All-for-all" prisoner exchange without preconditions Humanitarian corridor for refugees and to deliver aid Restoration of destroyed infrastructure. In its statement (in Russian), the Kremlin said a phone conversation had taken place on Wednesday between the two presidents in which their points of view had "coincided significantly" on possible ways to end the crisis.
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Mr Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, clarified for Russian news agency Ria-Novosti: "Putin and Poroshenko did not agree a ceasefire in Ukraine because Russia is not party to the conflict, they only discussed how to settle the conflict." Mr Poroshenko said he also hoped for a ceasefire. "The people of Ukraine want peace while some politicos want to play a game of war. I will not allow this to happen. We must pull together in fighting for peace," he said. But Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseny Yatsenyuk rejected the proposal. "The real plan of Putin is to destroy Ukraine and to restore the Soviet Union," he said.
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Pro-Russian rebels said they supported Mr Putin's proposals but that they did not trust Mr Poroshenko to observe a ceasefire. Meanwhile a Ukrainian official in Zaporizhzhya region, west of the combat zone, said the bodies of 87 soldiers and pro-government volunteers killed in a controversial incident near the town of Ilovaysk several days ago had been brought to a local morgue. The Ukrainian military says troops were fired on by rebels on Sunday after they had apparently been given safe passage out of an encirclement during rapid rebel advances. No-one has been able to confirm the circumstances of the killings or the total number of dead. More than 2,600 civilians and combatants have been killed and more than a million people have fled their homes since fighting erupted in eastern Ukraine in April, when pro-Russian separatists there declared independence.
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shared by Paul Merrell on 11 Jul 14
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The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control | Antony Loewenstein | Comment... - 0 views
www.theguardian.com/...sa-is-total-population-control
surveillance state NSA NSA-targets phone-audio Binney
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William Binney is one of the highest-level whistleblowers to ever emerge from the NSA. He was a leading code-breaker against the Soviet Union during the Cold War but resigned soon after September 11, disgusted by Washington’s move towards mass surveillance.On 5 July he spoke at a conference in London organised by the Centre for Investigative Journalism and revealed the extent of the surveillance programs unleashed by the Bush and Obama administrations.
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“At least 80% of fibre-optic cables globally go via the US”, Binney said. “This is no accident and allows the US to view all communication coming in. At least 80% of all audio calls, not just metadata, are recorded and stored in the US. The NSA lies about what it stores.”The NSA will soon be able to collect 966 exabytes a year, the total of internet traffic annually. Former Google head Eric Schmidt once argued that the entire amount of knowledge from the beginning of humankind until 2003 amount to only five exabytes.Binney, who featured in a 2012 short film by Oscar-nominated US film-maker Laura Poitras, described a future where surveillance is ubiquitous and government intrusion unlimited.“The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control”, Binney said, “but I’m a little optimistic with some recent Supreme Court decisions, such as law enforcement mostly now needing a warrant before searching a smartphone.”
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It shows that the NSA is not just pursuing terrorism, as it claims, but ordinary citizens going about their daily communications. “The NSA is mass-collecting on everyone”, Binney said, “and it’s said to be about terrorism but inside the US it has stopped zero attacks.”The lack of official oversight is one of Binney’s key concerns, particularly of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa), which is held out by NSA defenders as a sign of the surveillance scheme's constitutionality.“The Fisa court has only the government’s point of view”, he argued. “There are no other views for the judges to consider. There have been at least 15-20 trillion constitutional violations for US domestic audiences and you can double that globally.”
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He praised the revelations and bravery of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and told me that he had indirect contact with a number of other NSA employees who felt disgusted with the agency’s work. They’re keen to speak out but fear retribution and exile, not unlike Snowden himself, who is likely to remain there for some time.
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Binney recently told the German NSA inquiry committee that his former employer had a “totalitarian mentality” that was the "greatest threat" to US society since that country’s US Civil War in the 19th century. Despite this remarkable power, Binney still mocked the NSA’s failures, including missing this year’s Russian intervention in Ukraine and the Islamic State’s take-over of Iraq.The era of mass surveillance has gone from the fringes of public debate to the mainstream, where it belongs. The Pew Research Centre released a report this month, Digital Life in 2025, that predicted worsening state control and censorship, reduced public trust, and increased commercialisation of every aspect of web culture.It’s not just internet experts warning about the internet’s colonisation by state and corporate power. One of Europe’s leading web creators, Lena Thiele, presented her stunning series Netwars in London on the threat of cyber warfare. She showed how easy it is for governments and corporations to capture our personal information without us even realising.Thiele said that the US budget for cyber security was US$67 billion in 2013 and will double by 2016. Much of this money is wasted and doesn't protect online infrastructure. This fact doesn’t worry the multinationals making a killing from the gross exaggeration of fear that permeates the public domain.
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Wikileaks understands this reality better than most. Founder Julian Assange and investigative editor Sarah Harrison both remain in legal limbo. I spent time with Assange in his current home at the Ecuadorian embassy in London last week, where he continues to work, release leaks, and fight various legal battles. He hopes to resolve his predicament soon.At the Centre for Investigative Journalism conference, Harrison stressed the importance of journalists who work with technologists to best report the NSA stories. “It’s no accident”, she said, “that some of the best stories on the NSA are in Germany, where there’s technical assistance from people like Jacob Appelbaum.” A core Wikileaks belief, she stressed, is releasing all documents in their entirety, something the group criticised the news site The Intercept for not doing on a recent story. “The full archive should always be published”, Harrison said.
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With 8m documents on its website after years of leaking, the importance of publishing and maintaining source documents for the media, general public and court cases can’t be under-estimated. “I see Wikileaks as a library”, Assange said. “We’re the librarians who can’t say no.”With evidence that there could be a second NSA leaker, the time for more aggressive reporting is now. As Binney said: “I call people who are covering up NSA crimes traitors”.
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MoD pays out millions to Iraqi torture victims | Law | The Guardian - 0 views
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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.
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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.
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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".
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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.
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Netanyahu scandals reflect corruption at the heart of Israeli society - Mondoweiss - 0 views
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Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in danger of being brought down, possibly soon, over what initially appears to be little more than an imprudent taste for Cuban cigars and pink champagne. In truth, however, the allegations ensnaring Netanyahu reveal far more than his personal flaws or an infatuation with the high life. They shine a rare light on the corrupt nexus between Israel’s business, political and media worlds, compounded by the perverse influence of overseas Jewish money. Of the two police investigations Netanyahu faces (there are more in the wings), the one known as Case 1000, concerning gifts from businessmen worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, is most likely to lead to his downfall. But it is the second investigation, Case 2000, and the still-murky relationship between the two cases, that more fully exposes the rot at the heart of Israel’s political system. This latter case hinges on a tape recording in which Netanyahu plots with an Israeli newspaper tycoon to rig media coverage in his favor. Leads from both cases suggest that Netanyahu may have been further meddling, together with his billionaire friends, in the shadowy world of international espionage.
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Netanyahu’s appetite for a free lunch has been common knowledge in Israel since his first term as prime minister in the late 1990s. Then, he was twice investigated for fraud, though controversially charges were not brought in either case. Police discovered along the way that he and his wife, Sara, had horded many of the gifts he received during state visits. More than 100 were never recovered. The clarifications that were issued more than 15 years ago, as a result of those investigations, make it hard for Netanyahu to claim now that he did not understand the rules. According to justice ministry advice in 2001, government and state officials cannot keep gifts worth more than $100 without risking violating Israeli law. The gifts Netanyahu received from one of the Israeli businessmen involved in Case 1000, Hollywood film producer Arnon Milchan, amounted to as much as $180,000. Netanyahu has argued that these presents, ranging from cigars to jewelry, were expressions of a close friendship rather than bribes to him in his capacity as prime minister. The problem, however, is that Netanyahu appears to have reciprocated by using his position as head of the Israeli government to lobby John Kerry, the then U.S. secretary of state, to gain Milchan a 10-year U.S. residency visa. He may have done more.
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Also being investigated are his family’s ties to a friend of Milchan’s, Australian billionaire James Packer, who made his fortune in the media and gambling industries. Packer has similarly lavished gifts on the Netanyahu family, especially Yair, Netanyahu’s eldest son. At the same time, Packer, now a neighbor of the Netanyahus in the coastal town of Caesarea, has been seeking permanent residency and the enormous benefits that would accrue with tax status in Israel. As a non-Jew, Packer should have no hope of being awarded residency. There are suspicions that Netanyahu may have been trying to pull strings on the Australian’s behalf. Many of these gifts were apparently not given freely. The Netanyahus asked for them. Indicating that Netanyahu knew there might be legal concerns, he used code words – “leaves” for cigars and “pinks” for champagne – to disguise his orders to Milchan. Police are reported to be confident, after questioning Netanyahu three times, that they have enough evidence to indict him. If they do, Netanyahu will be under heavy pressure to resign.
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Yossi Cohen was appointed head of the Mossad a year ago, after a government vetting committee accepted that he had no personal ties to Netanyahu. But Cohen forgot to mention that he is extremely close to Netanyahu’s high-flying friends – connections that are now under investigation. Milchan set up a global security firm in 2008 called Blue Sky International, stuffed with Israeli security veterans. Packer soon became a partner. They developed close ties to Cohen, first while he was a senior official at the Mossad and later when he headed Israel’s national security council. Before Cohen was appointed head of Mossad in December 2015, the pair had hoped to recruit him to their cyber-security operations. Cohen received several gifts from Packer, in violation of Israeli government rules, including a stay at one of his luxury hotels. A source speaking to Haaretz said Blue Sky had “more than [a] direct line” to Netanyahu. They “would pull him out from anywhere, at any time, on any occasion.” According to Haaretz’s military analyst, Amir Oren, the new disclosures raise serious questions about whether Milchan and Packer twisted Netanyahu’s arm to parachute Cohen into the post over the favored candidate. In return, Packer may have been hoping that Cohen would authorise exceptional Israeli residency for him, classifying him as a security asset.
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From Hollywood to Mossad Cases 1000 and 2000 share at least one figure in common. Milchan gave Netanyahu extravagant gifts over many years, but he is also reported to have acted as go-between, bringing arch-enemies Netanyahu and Mozes together. Milchan has his own financial stake in the media, in his case a holding in the Channel 10 TV station. In addition, Milchan introduced Netanyahu to sympathetic businessmen, including his friend Packer, to discuss taking the ailing Yedioth media group off Mozes’ hands. Only last October he arranged for media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s son, Lachlan, to fly to Israel for one night for a secret meeting with Netanyahu. Milchan is undoubtedly at the centre of the shadowy world of power and finance that corrupts public life in Israel. Not only is Milchan a highly influential Hollywood figure, having produced more than 100 films, but he has admitted that he is a former Mossad agent. He used his Hollywood connections to help make arms deals and secure parts for Israel’s nuclear weapons program. One can only wonder whether Milchan was not effectively set up in his Hollywood career as a cover for his Mossad activities. But Milchan, it seems, is still wielding influence in Israel’s twilight world of security.
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eyond this, one one can only speculate about how Cohen’s indebtedness to Milchan, Packer and Netanyahu might have influenced his decisions as head of the Mossad. It was only a few years ago that the former Mossad chief, Meir Dagan, was reported to have wrestled furiously with Netanyahu to stop him launching a military strike on Iran. Prosecution drags feet It is unclear for the time being whether the revelations are drawing to a close or will lead deeper into Israel’s twin netherworlds of financial corruption and security. But what has emerged so far should be enough to finish off Netanyahu as prime minister. Whether it does so may depend on the extent of Israel’s compromised legal system. Attorney general Avichai Mendelblit was appointed by Netanyahu and is a political ally. He appears to have been dragging his feet as much as possible to slow down the police investigation, if not sabotage it. But the weight of evidence is looking like it may prove too overwhelming. As political analyst Yossi Verter observed: “There’s no way that a police commissioner … appointed [by Netanyahu] and a cautious attorney general, who in the past was part of his close circle and one of his loyalists, would be putting him through the seven circles of hell if they weren’t convinced that there’s a solid basis for indictment and conviction.” The next question for Netanyahu is whether he will step down if indicted. He should, if Olmert’s example is followed. But his officials are citing a 1993 high court ruling that allows a cabinet minister under indictment to remain in office. Certainly if Netanyahu chooses to stay on, his decision would be appealed to the court again. However, the judges may be reluctant to oust a sitting prime minister. The court of public opinion is likely to be decisive in that regard. A recent poll shows few Israelis believe Netanyahu is innocent of the allegations. Some 54 per cent think he broke the law, while only 28 believe him. Opinion, however, is split evenly on whether he should resign.
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If past experience is any measure, Netanyahu will try to turn public opinion his way by increasing friction with the Palestinians and exploiting the international arena, especially his relations with the Trump administration. He may be expected to encourage Trump at the very least to posture more stridently against Iran. Nonetheless, most observers assume Netanyahu is doomed – it is simply a matter of when. The odds are on an indictment in late spring, followed by elections in the fall, say Israeli analysts. At this stage, none of his political rivals wants to be seen stabbing Netanyahu in the back. Most are keeping quiet. But behind the scenes, political leaders are hurrying to forge new alliances and extract political concessions while Netanyahu is wounded.
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Who might succeed Netanyahu? Yair Lapid, of the centre-right Yesh Atid, is heading the polls, but that may in part reflect the disarray in Netanyahu’s Likud party. In a sign of where the deeper currents in Israeli society are leading, a Maariv poll last week showed that settler leader Naftali Bennett would win an election if he were to head the Likud. Netanyahu now needs the help of all the powerful friends he can muster. His biggest ally, U.S. casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, may not be among them. After the revelations that Netanyahu was conspiring against him with Mozes, Adelson has cut back on Israel Hayom’s circulation and is reported to be offering less favorable coverage of the Netanyahus. That could prove the final straw, sealing Netanyahu’s fate.
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shared by Gary Edwards on 13 Jan 12
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A New Reserve Currency to Challenge the Dollar | Veterans Today - 0 views
www.veteranstoday.com/...ng-on-in-the-straits-of-hormuz
Banksters GOLD David-Malone Oil Islamic-Wars
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Author David Malone digs into world events, suggesting that all the saber rattling over Iran and nuclear weapons is really about GOLD! He argues that the dollar is rapidly being replaced as the world's "settlement" currency. As a function, "settlement" is different than "reserve", but since WWII and the Basel Conference, the USA Dollar has been both the currency of "reserve" and settlement". That is now changing, and fast! David further suggests that the Iraqi wars with Saddam Hussein were also about his use of the Euro to "settle" oil purchases. It could also be argued that Muamma Gaddafi in Lybia was removed because he was organizing all of Africa to "settle" oil and other commodity purchases in GOLD, and not the USA Dollar. Are the Islamic wars really about oil? Or are they about how oil purchases are "settled"? David further argues that Russia, India, China and Japan are actively pursuing a GOLD based settlement currency agreement series where the Chinese Yuan plays a central role. Interestingly, all of these countries have cut agreements with Iran. Which seems to have triggered the December 2011 Obama response banning any banks, both private and government controlled, from dealings with Iran. It's increasingly looking like it's not the Iranian nuclear weapons program that is upsetting to Obama and his Bankster buddies. It's the rapid replacement of the worthless paper USA dollar as a settlement currency. One of the interesting points the venerable "Veterans Today" news sight is making is that our military is being used to forcefully prop up an inflationary Bankster Dollar, and force oil producing countries into accepting that inflated Bankster Dollar as payment. The one thing the International Bankster Cartel doesn't want is for the trade of important commodities, especially energy, to be paid for in GOLD instead of the worthless paper they control. excerpt: I think the stand-off with Iran in the Straits of Hormuz over sanctions is a
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shared by Paul Merrell on 18 Oct 13
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Testosterone Pit - Home - NSA Revelations Kill IBM Hardware Sales in China - 0 views
www.testosteronepit.com/...m-hardware-sales-in-china.html
surveillance state NSA IBM NSA-blowback NSA-targets hardware hardware-backdoors
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The first shot was fired on Monday. Teradata, which sells analytics tools for Big Data, warned that quarterly revenues plunged 21% in Asia and 19% in the Middle East and Africa. Wednesday evening, it was IBM’s turn to confess that its hardware sales in China had simply collapsed. Every word was colored by Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA’s hand-in-glove collaboration with American tech companies, from startups to mastodons like IBM.
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The explanation is more obvious. In mid-August, an anonymous source told the Shanghai Securities News, a branch of the state-owned Xinhua News Agency, which reports directly to the Propaganda and Public Information Departments of the Communist Party, that IBM, along with Oracle and EMC, have become targets of the Ministry of Public Security and the cabinet-level Development Research Centre due to the Snowden revelations. “At present, thanks to their technological superiority, many of our core information technology systems are basically dominated by foreign hardware and software firms, but the Prism scandal implies security problems,” the source said, according to Reuters. So the government would launch an investigation into these security problems, the source said. Absolute stonewalling ensued. IBM told Reuters that it was unable to comment. Oracle and EMC weren’t available for comment. The Ministry of Public Security refused to comment. The Development Research Centre knew nothing of any such investigation. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology “could not confirm anything because of the matter’s sensitivity.”
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I’d warned about its impact at the time [read.... US Tech Companies Raked Over The Coals In China]. Snowden’s revelations started hitting in May. Not much later, the Chinese security apparatus must have alerted IT buyers in government agencies, state-owned enterprises, and major independent corporations to turn off the order pipeline for sensitive products until this is sorted out. As Mr. Loughridge’s efforts have shown, it’s hard to explain any other way that hardware sales suddenly collapsed by “40%, 50%” in China, where they’d boomed until then. This is the first quantitative indication of the price Corporate America has to pay for gorging at the big trough of the US Intelligence Community, and particularly the NSA with its endlessly ballooning budget. For once, there is a price to be paid, if only temporarily, for helping build a perfect, seamless, borderless surveillance society. The companies will deny it. At the same time, they’ll be looking for solutions. China, Russia, and Brazil are too important to just get kicked out of – and other countries might follow suit. In September, IBM announced that it would throw another billion at Linux, the open-source operating system, to run its Power System servers – the same that China had stopped buying. It seems IBM was trying to make hay of the NSA revelations that had tangled up American operating system makers. Linux, free of NSA influence, would be a huge competitive advantage for IBM. Or so it would seem. Read.... The Other Reason Why IBM Throws A Billion At Linux (With NSA- Designed Backdoor)
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The first shot was fired on Monday. Teradata, which sells analytics tools for Big Data, warned that quarterly revenues plunged 21% in Asia and 19% in the Middle East and Africa. Wednesday evening, it was IBM’s turn to confess that its hardware sales in China had simply collapsed. Every word was colored by Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA’s hand-in-glove collaboration with American tech companies, from startups to mastodons like IBM.
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The obscure legal system that lets corporations sue countries | Claire Provost and Matt... - 0 views
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Every year on 15 September, thousands of Salvadorans celebrate the date when much of Central America gained independence from Spain. Fireworks are set off and marching bands parade through villages across the country. But, last year, in the town of San Isidro, in Cabañas, the festivities had a markedly different tone. Hundreds had gathered to protest against the mine. Gold mines often use cyanide to separate gold from ore, and widespread concern over already severe water contamination in El Salvador has helped fuel a powerful movement determined to keep the country’s minerals in the ground. In the central square, colourful banners were strung up, calling on OceanaGold to drop its case against the country and leave the area. Many were adorned with the slogan, “No a la mineria, Si a la vida” (No to mining, Yes to life). On the same day, in Washington DC, Parada gathered his notes and shuffled into a suite of nondescript meeting rooms in the World Bank’s J building, across the street from its main headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue. This is the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID): the primary institution for handling the cases that companies file against sovereign states. (The ICSID is not the sole venue for such cases; there are similar forums in London, Paris, Hong Kong and the Hague, among others.) The date of the hearing was not a coincidence, Parada said. The case has been framed in El Salvador as a test of the country’s sovereignty in the 21st century, and he suggested that it should be heard on Independence Day. “The ultimate question in this case,” he said, “is whether a foreign investor can force a government to change its laws to please the investor as opposed to the investor complying with the laws they find in the country.”
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Most international investment treaties and free-trade deals grant foreign investors the right to activate this system, known as investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), if they want to challenge government decisions affecting their investments. In Europe, this system has become a sticking point in negotiations over the controversial Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) deal proposed between the European Union and the US, which would massively extend its scope and power and make it harder to challenge in the future. Both France and Germany have said that they want access to investor-state dispute settlement removed from the TTIP treaty currently under discussion. Investors have used this system not only to sue for compensation for alleged expropriation of land and factories, but also over a huge range of government measures, including environmental and social regulations, which they say infringe on their rights. Multinationals have sued to recover money they have already invested, but also for alleged lost profits and “expected future profits”. The number of suits filed against countries at the ICSID is now around 500 – and that figure is growing at an average rate of one case a week. The sums awarded in damages are so vast that investment funds have taken notice: corporations’ claims against states are now seen as assets that can be invested in or used as leverage to secure multimillion-dollar loans. Increasingly, companies are using the threat of a lawsuit at the ICSID to exert pressure on governments not to challenge investors’ actions.
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“I had absolutely no idea this was coming,” Parada said. Sitting in a glass-walled meeting room in his offices, at the law firm Foley Hoag, he paused, searching for the right word to describe what has happened in his field. “Rogue,” he decided, finally. “I think the investor-state arbitration system was created with good intentions, but in practice it has gone completely rogue.”
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The quiet village of Moorburg in Germany lies just across the river from Hamburg. Past the 16th-century church and meadows rich with wildflowers, two huge chimneys spew a steady stream of thick, grey smoke into the sky. This is Kraftwerk Moorburg, a new coal-fired power plant – the village’s controversial next-door neighbour. In 2009, it was the subject of a €1.4bn investor-state case filed by Vattenfall, the Swedish energy giant, against the Federal Republic of Germany. It is a prime example of how this powerful international legal system, built to protect foreign investors in developing countries, is now being used to challenge the actions of European governments as well. Since the 1980s, German investors have sued dozens of countries, including Ghana, Ukraine and the Philippines, at the World Bank’s Centre in Washington DC. But with the Vattenfall case, Germany found itself in the dock for the first time. The irony was not lost on those who considered Germany to be the grandfather of investor-state arbitration: it was a group of German businessmen, in the late 1950s, who first conceived of a way to protect their overseas investments as a wave of developing countries gained independence from European colonial powers. Led by Deutsche Bank chairman Hermann Abs, they called their proposal an “international magna carta” for private investors.
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In the 1960s, the idea was taken up by the World Bank, which said that such a system could help the world’s poorer countries attract foreign capital. “I am convinced,” the World Bank president George Woods said at the time, “that those … who adopt as their national policy a welcome [environment] for international investment – and that means, to mince no words about it, giving foreign investors a fair opportunity to make attractive profits – will achieve their development objectives more rapidly than those who do not.” At the World Bank’s 1964 annual meeting in Tokyo, it approved a resolution to set up a mechanism for handling investor-state cases. The first line of the ICSID Convention’s preamble sets out its goal as “international cooperation for economic development”. There was sharp opposition to this system from its inception, with a bloc of developing countries warning that it would undermine their sovereignty. A group of 21 countries – almost every Latin American country, plus Iraq and the Philippines – voted against the proposal in Tokyo. But the World Bank moved ahead regardless. Andreas Lowenfeld, an American legal academic who was involved in some of these early discussions, later remarked: “I believe this was the first time that a major resolution of the World Bank had been pressed forward with so much opposition.”
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now governments are discovering, too late, the true price of that confidence. The Kraftwerk Moorburg plant was controversial long before the case was filed. For years, local residents and environmental groups objected to its construction, amid growing concern over climate change and the impact the project would have on the Elbe river. In 2008, Vattenfall was granted a water permit for its Moorburg project, but, in response to local pressure, local authorities imposed strict environmental conditions to limit the utility’s water usage and its impact on fish. Vattenfall sued Hamburg in the local courts. But, as a foreign investor, it was also able to file a case at the ICSID. These environmental measures, it said, were so strict that they constituted a violation of its rights as guaranteed by the Energy Charter Treaty, a multilateral investment agreement signed by more than 50 countries, including Sweden and Germany. It claimed that the environmental conditions placed on its permit were so severe that they made the plant uneconomical and constituted acts of indirect expropriation.
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With the rapid growth in these treaties – today there are more than 3,000 in force – a specialist industry has developed in advising companies how best to exploit treaties that give investors access to the dispute resolution system, and how to structure their businesses to benefit from the different protections on offer. It is a lucrative sector: legal fees alone average $8m per case, but they have exceeded $30m in some disputes; arbitrators’ fees at start at $3,000 per day, plus expenses.
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Vattenfall v Germany ended in a settlement in 2011, after the company won its case in the local court and received a new water permit for its Moorburg plant – which significantly lowered the environmental standards that had originally been imposed, according to legal experts, allowing the plant to use more water from the river and weakening measures to protect fish. The European Commission has now stepped in, taking Germany to the EU Court of Justice, saying its authorisation of the Moorburg coal plant violated EU environmental law by not doing more to reduce the risk to protected fish species, including salmon, which pass near the plant while migrating from the North Sea. A year after the Moorburg case closed, Vattenfall filed another claim against Germany, this time over the federal government’s decision to phase out nuclear power. This second suit – for which very little information is available in the public domain, despite reports that the company is seeking €4.7bn from German taxpayers – is still ongoing. Roughly one third of all concluded cases filed at the ICSID are recorded as ending in “settlements”, which – as the Moorburg dispute shows – can be very profitable for investors, though their terms are rarely fully disclosed.
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“It was a total surprise for us,” the local Green party leader Jens Kerstan laughed, in a meeting at his sunny office in Hamburg last year. “As far as I knew, there were some [treaties] to protect German companies in the [developing] world or in dictatorships, but that a European company can sue Germany, that was totally a surprise to me.”
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While a tribunal cannot force a country to change its laws, or give a company a permit, the risk of massive damages may in some cases be enough to persuade a government to reconsider its actions. The possibility of arbitration proceedings can be used to encourage states to enter into meaningful settlement negotiations.
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A small number of countries are now attempting to extricate themselves from the bonds of the investor-state dispute system. One of these is Bolivia, where thousands of people took to the streets of the country’s third-largest city, Cochabamba, in 2000, to protest against a dramatic hike in water rates by a private company owned by Bechtel, the US civil engineering firm. During the demonstrations, the Bolivian government stepped in and terminated the company’s concession. The company then filed a $50m suit against Bolivia at the ICSID. In 2006, following a campaign calling for the case to be thrown out, the company agreed to accept a token payment of less than $1. After this expensive case, Bolivia cancelled the international agreements it had signed with other states giving their investors access to these tribunals. But getting out of this system is not easily done. Most of these international agreements have sunset clauses, under which their provisions remain in force for a further 10 or even 20 years, even if the treaties themselves are cancelled.
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There are now thousands of international investment agreements and free-trade acts, signed by states, which give foreign companies access to the investor-state dispute system, if they decide to challenge government decisions. Disputes are typically heard by panels of three arbitrators; one selected by each side, and the third agreed upon by both parties. Rulings are made by majority vote, and decisions are final and binding. There is no appeals process – only an annulment option that can be used on very limited grounds. If states do not pay up after the decision, their assets are subject to seizure in almost every country in the world (the company can apply to local courts for an enforcement order).
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While there is no equivalent of legal aid for states trying to defend themselves against these suits, corporations have access to a growing group of third-party financiers who are willing to fund their cases against states, usually in exchange for a cut of any eventual award.
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Increasingly, these suits are becoming valuable even before claims are settled. After Rurelec filed suit against Bolivia, it took its case to the market and secured a multimillion-dollar corporate loan, using its dispute with Bolivia as collateral, so that it could expand its business. Over the last 10 years, and particularly since the global financial crisis, a growing number of specialised investment funds have moved to raise money through these cases, treating companies’ multimillion-dollar claims against states as a new “asset class”.
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El Salvador has already spent more than $12m defending itself against Pacific Rim, but even if it succeeds in beating the company’s $284m claim, it may never recover these costs. For years Salvadoran protest groups have been calling on the World Bank to initiate an open and public review of ICSID. To date, no such study has been carried out. In recent years, a number of ideas have been mooted to reform the international investor-state dispute system – to adopt a “loser pays” approach to costs, for example, or to increase transparency. The solution may lie in creating an appeals system, so that controversial judgments can be revisited.
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Brazil has never signed up to this system – it has not entered into a single treaty with these investor-state dispute provisions – and yet it has had no trouble attracting foreign investment.
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"Luis Parada's office is just four blocks from the White House, in the heart of K Street, Washington's lobbying row - a stretch of steel and glass buildings once dubbed the "road to riches", when influence-peddling became an American growth industry. Parada, a soft-spoken 55-year-old from El Salvador, is one of a handful of lawyers in the world who specialise in defending sovereign states against lawsuits lodged by multinational corporations. He is the lawyer for the defence in an obscure but increasingly powerful field of international law - where foreign investors can sue governments in a network of tribunals for billions of dollars. Fifteen years ago, Parada's work was a minor niche even within the legal business. But since 2000, hundreds of foreign investors have sued more than half of the world's countries, claiming damages for a wide range of government actions that they say have threatened their profits. In 2006, Ecuador cancelled an oil-exploration contract with Houston-based Occidental Petroleum; in 2012, after Occidental filed a suit before an international investment tribunal, Ecuador was ordered to pay a record $1.8bn - roughly equal to the country's health budget for a year. (Ecuador has logged a request for the decision to be annulled.) Parada's first case was defending Argentina in the late 1990s against the French conglomerate Vivendi, which sued after the Argentine province of Tucuman stepped in to limit the price it charged people for water and wastewater services. Argentina eventually lost, and was ordered to pay the company more than $100m. Now, in his most high-profile case yet, Parada is part of the team defending El Salvador as it tries to fend off a multimillion-dollar suit lodged by a multinational mining company after the tiny Central American country refused to allow it to dig for gold."
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GCHQ spied on Amnesty International, tribunal tells group in email | UK news | The Guar... - 0 views
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The government’s electronic eavesdropping agency GCHQ spied illegally on Amnesty International, according to the tribunal responsible for handling complaints against the intelligence services. Confirmation that surveillance took place emerged late on Wednesday, when the human rights group revealed that the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) sent it an email correcting an earlier judgment. The extraordinary revision of a key detail in the ruling given on 22 June may alarm many supporters of Amnesty, who will want to know why it has been targeted.
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In the original judgment, the IPT said that communications by the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights and the South African non-profit Legal Resources Centre had been illegally retained and examined. In the email sent on Wednesday, the tribunal made it clear that it was Amnesty and not the Egyptian organisation that had been spied on – as well as the Legal Resources Centre in South Africa. The breach of surveillance powers, under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, related to retaining databases for longer than was permitted. Amnesty had been one of the claimants in the case, but in the original judgment the IPT made “no determination” on the organisation’s complaint – implying that either their emails and phone calls were not intercepted or that they were intercepted but by legal means.
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shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Oct 15
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Doctors Without Borders airstrike: MSF says 33 people still missing | World news | The ... - 0 views
www.theguardian.com/...g-us-airstrike-afghan-hospital
war & peace Afghanistan Kunduz U.S.-foreign-policy war-crimes
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Death toll of 22 could rise, with 24 staff and nine patients still unaccounted for five days after US strike on Médecins sans Frontières trauma centre in Kunduz
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Thirty-three people are still missing five days after a US air strike on an Afghan hospital, Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) warned on Thursday, sparking fears the death toll could rise significantly. Saturday’s bombing in the disputed town of Kunduz killed 12 staff and 10 patients, prompting the medical aid agency to close the trauma centre.
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President Barack Obama has apologised to MSF but three investigations – by the US military, by Nato and by Afghan officials – are underway and the general would not be drawn on their progress.
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MSF, which has condemned the attack as a war crime, is stressing the need for an international investigation, saying the raid contravened the Geneva Conventions.
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The Obamas Administration has rejected calls for an investigation by a duly-constituted international body, saying that it has three investigations under way and an unblemished record of investigating and prosecuting misconduct by U.S. forces. This, from the President who refused to investigate and prosecute officials of the Bush2 administration for war crimes in invading Iraq and Afghanistan and refused to prosecute CIA torturers, insisting on legislation to retroactively immunize them.
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Secret documents shine light on GCSB spying in Bangladesh - National - NZ Herald News - 0 views
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Secret documents reveal New Zealand has shared intelligence collected through covert surveillance with Bangladesh despite that country's security forces being implicated in extrajudicial killings, torture and other human rights abuses. The documents shine light on the major role played by the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) in electronic spying operations conducted in the small South Asian nation. The surveillance has been used to aid the United States as part of its global counter-terrorism campaign, launched after the September 11 attacks in 2001. The New Zealand Herald analysed the documents in collaboration with US news website The Intercept, which obtained them from the NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden.
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Green Party co-leader Russel Norman said the spy agency was "dragging" New Zealand into human rights abuses, and the Government should stop providing intelligence assistance to Bangladesh. "All three key anti-terrorism government agencies in Bangladesh have been implicated in horrendous human rights abuses, so it is impossible to guarantee that the information passed on did not lead to innocent people being killed or tortured," Dr Norman said. "John Key has always justified the GCSB on the basis that it is there to protect the good guys, but these documents reveal that it is helping the bad guys.
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The intelligence gathered by the GCSB staff was also being forwarded to foreign intelligence agencies, including Bangladesh's state intelligence agency. In recent years, human rights groups have issued several reports documenting Bangladeshi intelligence and security agencies' disregard for international prohibitions on torture and alleged involvement in politically motivated killings. In 2014, a case was filed in the International Criminal Court accusing the Bangladesh Government of committing crimes against humanity. The GCSB's surveillance operations in Bangladesh are among the most surprising and obscure yet revealed. Bangladesh barely registers in New Zealand foreign policy. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade website says: "Relations between New Zealand and Bangladesh remain friendly, although interaction is limited." Nonetheless, a New Zealand government source told the Herald that Bangladesh is the main focus of one of the GCSB's four analysis sections, called ICT, and has been for over a decade. ICT, the Transnational Issues section, was set up in April 2002 in the wake of the September 11 attacks to focus on terrorism threats.
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The 2009 document reveals that there is a special collection site in the Bangladesh capital, Dhaka, for eavesdropping on local communications. New Zealand does not have a high commission or any other official building in Bangladesh in which to hide a covert listening post. The Snowden documents suggest the Dhaka unit may be located inside a US-controlled building with operations overseen by the NSA and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
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The Bangladesh spying is revealed in an April 2013 US National Security Agency (NSA) report about its relationship with New Zealand. In a section called "What Partner Provides to NSA", it says "GCSB has been the lead for the intelligence community on the Bangladesh CT [Counter-Terrorism] target since 2004." The GCSB provides "one of the key SIGINT [signals intelligence] sources of [Bangladesh counter-terrorism] reporting to the US intelligence community."
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The intelligence gathered by the GCSB staff was being forwarded to foreign intelligence agencies. The April 2013 NSA report said the "GCSB's Bangladesh CT [counter terrorism] reporting provided unique intelligence leads that have enabled successful CT operations by Bangladesh State Intelligence Service, CIA and India over the past year". The specific Bangladesh "State Intelligence Service" referred to is not named in the document. Bangladesh has several agencies that focus on gathering intelligence, primarily including the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI), the National Security Intelligence agency (NSI), and the police Special Branch. The lead agency that executes the country's counter-terrorism operations is the Rapid Action Battalion, or RAB. Each of these agencies has been accused of involvement in severe human rights abuses over a sustained number of years. In 2008, for instance, Human Rights Watch alleged that the Special Branch headquarters in Dhaka's Maghbazar neighbourhood was used to torture detainees.
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In 2010, a trade union activist accused the NSI of arresting, torturing, and threatening to kill him. The same activist was found dead in unexplained circumstances two years later, his toes and feet broken, legs and body battered and bruised, and his legs apparently pierced with a sharp object. Bangladesh's intelligence agencies and main police and security forces co-operate closely. Most notably, they work together as part of a notorious centre called the Taskforce for Interrogation Cell, located inside a compound in northern Dhaka that is controlled by the RAB unit. In 2011, Britain's Guardian newspaper reported the interrogation cell was used as a place to extract information and confessions from "enemies of the state". It was described as a "torture centre" used for "deliberate and systematic" mistreatment of detainees. One British man detained there in 2009 on terrorism-related charges was allegedly hooded and strapped to a chair while a drill was driven into his right shoulder and hip.
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Other torture methods used by Bangladeshi authorities, according to Human Rights Watch, have included "burning with acid, hammering of nails into toes ... electric shocks, beatings on legs with iron rods, beating with batons on backs after sprinkling sand on them, ice torture, finger piercing, and mock executions". In February last year, the US Government suspended its own support for the RAB, citing "gross violation of human rights" committed by the force's members. The same month, a case against the Bangladesh Government was lodged in the International Criminal Court, accusing the country's officials of waging a brutal campaign of "widespread or systematic" torture, killings, and other human rights abuses that amounted to crimes against humanity.
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The concurrent article by The Intercept is at https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/04/15/new-zealand-bangladesh-gcsb-surveillance-human-rights/
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shared by Paul Merrell on 04 Sep 14
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Hamas popularity 'surges after Gaza war' - Middle East - Al Jazeera English - 0 views
www.aljazeera.com/...aza-war-20149215723979443.html
war & peace Palestine Hamas Fatah popularity polls
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Hamas's support has surged after its war with Israel and would win Palestinian elections if they were held today, an opinion poll suggests. The Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research's poll, released on Tuesday, suggested Hamas leader Ismail Haniya would win almost twice as many votes as Fatah's Mahmoud Abbas, in a two-way presidential election.
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More than half of respondents said armed resistance - a pillar of Hamas's ideology - would help gain a Palestinian state, as opposed to 20 percent who said they supported non-violent means. And 79 percent of respondents said they believed that Hamas won the Gaza war, three percent backed Israel and 17 percent said both sides were losers. There have been no national elections since Hamas won polls in 2007 and took control of Gaza. Hamas has fought three wars against Israel while Fatah has pursued on-off talks, mediated by the United States, which have so far failed to secure an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. Meanwhile, a rare rally by thousands of Hamas supporters in Ramallah on Saturday passed without incident under the watchful eyes of plain-clothes Fatah forces, although Hamas complained that several of its backers were arrested afterwards. The Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research describes itself as a Ramallah-based independent non-profit institution and think tank. The survey was conducted with more than 1,000 Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
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Explainer: why the Greek election is so important - 0 views
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The Greek election on January 25 will be the most important in recent memory. If the pollsters are proven correct, Syriza is poised to win by a large margin and this victory will end four decades of two-party rule in Greece. Since 2010 – and as a result of austerity measures – the country has seen its GDP shrink by nearly a quarter, its unemployment reach a third of the labour force and nearly half of its population fall below the poverty line. With the slogan “hope is coming” Syriza, a party that prior to 2012 polled around 4.5% of the vote, seems to have achieved the impossible: creating a broad coalition that, at least rhetorically, rejects the TINA argument (There Is No Alternative) that previous Greek administrations have accepted. In its place, Syriza advocates a post-austerity vision, both for Greece and Europe, with re-structuring of sovereign debt at its centre. How significant is this victory for Europe and the rest of the world? Comments range from grave concerns about the impact on the euro and the global economy to jubilant support for the renewal of the European left. For sure, Syriza is at the centre of political attention in Europe.
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Economic havoc looks to be about to break Greece's two-party political system as a third party, Syriza rises to take control of government. Might a similar event happen in the U.S. if the economy gets much worse, as seems about to happen because of the collapse of the petro-dollar? If so, what might the new coalition look like in the U.S.? This article points out that in Greece, Syriza is uniting demographic elements viewed as leftist. But the what is regarded as the left in the U.S., progressives, liberals, socialists, and communists, historically has been incapable of organizing in a way to assert political power for decades because they invariably fall for the choice of two evils argument and vote Democratic in general elections. It seems to be much the same story on the right in the U.S. For example, the Tea Party was co-opted by the Republican Party in general elections from the Tea Party's inception. What has been particularly troubling to me is that the American left and right actually agree on very many issues, but the divide-and-conquer strategy of the corporate/globalist/war machine of the oligarchy has so instilled hatred between the right and the left that it's been impossible to form a third-party that pushes an agenda driven by majority public opinion. To me, a new party that focuses on areas of broad agreement and avoids areas of disagreement seems to be the most likely candidate to break the the rule of our present usurpers of democracy. But if we are to create a new Majority Party (I like that name) based on majority opinion, how do we get past the hatred, particularly given that the usurpers will do their level best to fan the fire of hatred even more as the Majority Party gains numbers? And what to do about majority opinions that are formed by false usurper propaganda, e.g., the current propaganda campaigns that drive the pro-war agenda? They've been able to create majorities, e.g., for renentry of the U.S. military into Iraq to fight ISIL,
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shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Nov 15
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Microsoft to host data in Germany to evade US spying | Naked Security - 0 views
nakedsecurity.sophos.com/...-in-germany-to-evade-us-spying
surveillance state NSA FBI EU data-centers privacy
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Microsoft's new plan to keep the US government's hands off its customers' data: Germany will be a safe harbor in the digital privacy storm. Microsoft on Wednesday announced that beginning in the second half of 2016, it will give foreign customers the option of keeping data in new European facilities that, at least in theory, should shield customers from US government surveillance. It will cost more, according to the Financial Times, though pricing details weren't forthcoming. Microsoft Cloud - including Azure, Office 365 and Dynamics CRM Online - will be hosted from new datacenters in the German regions of Magdeburg and Frankfurt am Main. Access to data will be controlled by what the company called a German data trustee: T-Systems, a subsidiary of the independent German company Deutsche Telekom. Without the permission of Deutsche Telekom or customers, Microsoft won't be able to get its hands on the data. If it does get permission, the trustee will still control and oversee Microsoft's access.
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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella dropped the word "trust" into the company's statement: Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every individual on the planet to achieve more. Our new datacenter regions in Germany, operated in partnership with Deutsche Telekom, will not only spur local innovation and growth, but offer customers choice and trust in how their data is handled and where it is stored.
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On Tuesday, at the Future Decoded conference in London, Nadella also announced that Microsoft would, for the first time, be opening two UK datacenters next year. The company's also expanding its existing operations in Ireland and the Netherlands. Officially, none of this has anything to do with the long-drawn-out squabbling over the transatlantic Safe Harbor agreement, which the EU's highest court struck down last month, calling the agreement "invalid" because it didn't protect data from US surveillance. No, Nadella said, the new datacenters and expansions are all about giving local businesses and organizations "transformative technology they need to seize new global growth." But as Diginomica reports, Microsoft EVP of Cloud and Enterprise Scott Guthrie followed up his boss’s comments by saying that yes, the driver behind the new datacenters is to let customers keep data close: We can guarantee customers that their data will always stay in the UK. Being able to very concretely tell that story is something that I think will accelerate cloud adoption further in the UK.
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Microsoft and T-Systems' lawyers may well think that storing customer data in a German trustee data center will protect it from the reach of US law, but for all we know, that could be wishful thinking. Forrester cloud computing analyst Paul Miller: To be sure, we must wait for the first legal challenge. And the appeal. And the counter-appeal. As with all new legal approaches, we don’t know it is watertight until it is challenged in court. Microsoft and T-Systems’ lawyers are very good and say it's watertight. But we can be sure opposition lawyers will look for all the holes. By keeping data offshore - particularly in Germany, which has strong data privacy laws - Microsoft could avoid the situation it's now facing with the US demanding access to customer emails stored on a Microsoft server in Dublin. The US has argued that Microsoft, as a US company, comes under US jurisdiction, regardless of where it keeps its data.
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Running away to Germany isn't a groundbreaking move; other US cloud services providers have already pledged expansion of their EU presences, including Amazon's plan to open a UK datacenter in late 2016 that will offer what CTO Werner Vogels calls "strong data sovereignty to local users." Other big data operators that have followed suit: Salesforce, which has already opened datacenters in the UK and Germany and plans to open one in France next year, as well as new EU operations pledged for the new year by NetSuite and Box. Can Germany keep the US out of its datacenters? Can Ireland? Time, and court cases, will tell.
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The European Community's Court of Justice decision in the Safe Harbor case --- and Edward Snowden --- are now officially downgrading the U.S. as a cloud data center location. NSA is good business for Europeans looking to displace American cloud service providers, as evidenced by Microsoft's decision. The legal test is whether Microsoft has "possession, custody, or control" of the data. From the info given in the article, it seems that Microsoft has done its best to dodge that bullet by moving data centers to Germany and placing their data under the control of a European company. Do ownership of the hardware and profits from their rent mean that Microsoft still has "possession, custody, or control" of the data? The fine print of the agreement with Deutsche Telekom and the customer EULAs will get a thorough going over by the Dept. of Justice for evidence of Microsoft "control" of the data. That will be the crucial legal issue. The data centers in Germany may pass the test. But the notion that data centers in the UK can offer privacy is laughable; the UK's legal authority for GCHQ makes it even easier to get the data than the NSA can in the U.S. It doesn't even require a court order.
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With US Backing, France Launches Bombing Campaign in Syria | Global Research - Centre f... - 0 views
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The G-20 summit of world political leaders being held in Turkey to discuss the economic issues impacting on the world economy has been turned into a council of war. The major imperialist powers are moving rapidly to escalate their military intervention in Syria in the wake of Friday night’s terror attack in Paris. Yesterday evening French fighter jets carried out their biggest raid on Syria. It was launched simultaneously from the United Arab Emirates and Jordan, dropping 20 bombs on the Syrian city of Raqqa, reportedly targeting an Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) command centre, a munitions depot and a training camp. The operation was carried out in coordination with US forces. Earlier, Ben Rhodes, the US deputy national security adviser, said he was confident that in the “coming days and weeks” the US and France would “intensify our strikes against [ISIS] … to make clear there is no safe haven for these terrorists.” Speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Rhodes said there would be an “intensification” of US military efforts and “what we are doing here at the G-20 is seeking to gain additional contributions from some of our partners so we can bring more force to bear on that effort.”
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The subsequent discussions between Obama and Putin at the G-20 were held as part of the US objective of sidelining, if not completely removing, Russian support for the Syrian regime of president Bashar al-Assad. Under the agreement, following a ceasefire, a process would be set in motion to establish “inclusive and non-sectarian” governance, the drafting of a new constitution and the holding of elections under UN supervision within 18 months. However, the crucial sticking point remains the future of Assad. In an interview on the eve of the G-20 summit, Putin said other nations had no right to demand that Assad leave office and that “only those who believe in their exceptionality [a thinly-veiled reference to the US] allow themselves to act in such a manner and impose their will on others.” The US has been waging a campaign since 2011 for the overturn of the Assad government as part of its regime-change operations in the Middle East, in order to bring the region under its control. Russia has backed Assad in order to protect its strategic interests in the region, including a naval facility in Syria. The US has made clear that as far as it is concerned there can be no resolution without Assad’s ouster—a position repeated by Obama’s National Security Adviser Susan Rice. She said a “transition regime” had to come to power “and it’s very hard to envision how that could be accomplished with Assad still in power.”
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Demands are being brought forward from within the American military and political establishment for a major escalation in US action, regardless of the consequences. Texas Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican candidate for president, said that ISIS would “not be deterred by targeted air strikes with zero tolerance for civilian casualties, when the terrorists have such utter disregard for innocent life.” His call for vastly stepped-up US military action, without any regard for the consequences for the civilian population already devastated by the US-inspired civil war, were echoed by California Democrat, Dianne Feinstein, who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee. “It has become clear,” Feinstein said, “that limited air strikes and support for Iraqi forces and the Syrian opposition are not sufficient to protect our country and our allies.” Retired Navy admiral John Stavridis, who served as NATO’s top commander in Europe from 2009 to 2013, called for direct NATO intervention in Syria and Iraq. “Soft power and playing the long game matter in the Middle East, but there is a time for the ruthless application of hard power. This is that time, and NATO should respond militarily against the Islamic State with vigor,” Stavridis said.
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These remarks make clear that while the stepped up military offensive is being conducted under the banner of a “war” against ISIS, the real target is the Assad regime, which both the US and France want to see overturned. Other imperialist powers are also preparing to intervene. British Prime Minister David Cameron indicated his intention to seek parliamentary backing for the US of British forces. The UK refused to back the US in August–September 2013 over plans to attack Syria, causing Obama to pull back and accept a Russian intervention to destroy Syrian chemical weapons. “It’s becoming even more clear that our safety and security depends on degrading and ultimately destroying Isil [ISIS] whether it’s in Iraq or Syria,” Cameron said. Following the talks with Obama at the G-20, a spokesman for Putin said that, while it was too early to speak of a rapprochement, there was need for “unity” in the fight against terror. This was met with what the Financial Times described as “thinly disguised scorn” on the part of EU Council President Donald Tusk. “We need not only more co-operation but also more goodwill, especially from Russian action on the ground in Syria. It must be focused more on Islamic state and not … against the moderate Syrian opposition,” he said.
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The “moderate Syrian opposition” is a mythical being created by imperialist politicians and a compliant media. The forces opposed to the Assad regime are dominated by groups such as Al Nusra, spawned by Al Qaeda, from which ISIS also developed. The fictional character of the so-called “moderates” was exposed earlier this year when it was revealed that, despite an expenditure of millions of dollars for the purpose of military training, the US was only able to find four or five people who could fall into that category. The Paris terror attack is a terrible blow-back consequence of US operations in the Middle East. The statements emanating from imperialist world leaders and the discussions at the G-20 make clear that terror attacks resulting from yesterday’s crimes are rapidly being employed for the commission of new ones.
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shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Jan 16
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Afghan Holocaust, Afghan Genocide - 0 views
sites.google.com/...afghanholocaustafghangenocide
war & peace Afghanistan csualties stats genocide holocaust Iraq Palestine
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This site is dedicated to informing people about the ongoing, US Alliance-imposed Afghan Holocaust and Afghan Genocide that as of 2012 is associated with post-2001 violent and non-violent avoidable deaths totalling 7.2 million and Afghan and Pashtun refugees totalling 5-6 million – an Afghan Holocaust ( a huge number of deaths) and an Afghan Genocide as defined by Article 2 of the UN Geneva Convention (see: http://www.edwebproject.org/sideshow/genocide/convention.html ) which states: “In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: a) Killing members of the group; b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”Also utterly ignored by Neocon American and Zionist Imperialist (NAZI)-perverted and subverted Western Mainstream media are the 1.2 million people who have died world-wide since 9-11 due to US Alliance restoration of the Taliban-destroyed Afghan opium industry from 6% of world market share in 2001 to 93% in 2007, the breakdown (as of 2015) including 280,000 Americans, 256,000 Indonesians, 68,000 Iranians, 25,000 British, 14,000 Canadians, 10,000 Germans, 5,000 Australians and 500 French.
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As of January 2014 deaths from the Afghanistan War include approximately 7 million violent and non-violent excess deaths of Indigenous Afghans since 2001 and 3,417 US Alliance deaths (see: http://icasualties.org/oif/ ).As of January 2014 it is estimated from the latest UN Population Division data that in Occupied Afghanistan post-invasion non-violent excess deaths total 5.5 million. Assuming expert US-Australian advice that the level of violence has been 4 times lower in the Afghan War than in the Iraq War where the ratio of violent deaths to non-violent avoidable deaths was 1.5 million/1.2million = 1.25, then post-invasion violent deaths in Afghanistan can be estimated at 1.25 x 5.5 million/4 = 1.7 million. Post-invasion violent and non-violent avoidable deaths total 5.5 million plus 1.7 million = 7.2 million; and post-invasion under-5 infant deaths total 3.0 million (90% avoidable and due to US Alliance war crimes in gross violence of the Geneva Convention – Articles 55 and 56 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War demand that an Occupier must supply life-sustaining food and medical requisites “to the fullest extent of the means available to it” (see: http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/instree/y4gcpcp.htm ) but according to the WHO (see: http://www.who.int/countries/en/ ) the “total annual expenditure on health per capita” permitted in Occupied Afghanistan is $50 as compared to $8,608 in Occupier US, $3,322 in Occupier UK, $4.086 in Occupier France, $4,371 in Occupier Germany and $3,692 in Occupier racist, white Apartheid Australia).
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There are 3-4 million Afghan refugees plus a further 2.5 million Pashtun refugees generated in NW Pakistan by the obscene war policies of war criminal Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Obama – this carnage involving 4.5 million post-invasion violent and non-violent excess Afghan deaths constitutes an Afghan Holocaust and an Afghan Genocide as defined by Article 2 of the UN Genocide Convention (see: http://www.edwebproject.org/sideshow/genocide/convention.html ).
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As of January 2014 2009 it was estimated from the latest UN Population Division data that in Occupied Afghanistan post-invasion non-violent excess deaths totalled 5.5 million and post-invasion violent deaths totalled 1.7 million (this based on assuming expert US-Australian advice that the level of violence has been 4 times lower in the Afghan War than in the Iraq War).
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The US Alliance restored the Taliban-destroyed Afghan opium industry from about 6% of world market share in 2001 to 93% in 2007 (see UNODC World Drug Report 2007: http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/WDR-2007.html and World Drug Report 2009: http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/WDR-2009.html and World Drug Report , Opium/heroin market, 2009: http://www.unodc.org/documents/wdr/WDR_2009/WDR2009_Opium_Heroin_Market.pdf ).
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About 0.1 million people die from opiate drug-related causes each year (see Australian National Drug Research Centre: http://db.ndri.curtin.edu.au/media.asp?mediarelid=40 ; UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), “Addiction, crime and insurgency. The transnational threat of Afghan opium”, 2009: http://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/Afghanistan/Afghan_Opium_Trade_2009_web.pdf ) and hence about 0.8 million have died since the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, of whom about 90%, i.e. 0.9 x 0.8 million = 0.7 million people, have died as a result of the huge expansion of the Afghan opium industry under US Alliance occupation. In 2005 in the US, of 18,347 deaths due to narcotics and psychodysleptics, 12, 262 were due to heroin (2,011), other opioids (5,789) or methadone (4,462) (see Health E-stat, “Increases in poisoning and methadone-related deaths: United States,1999-2005 “: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/poisoning/poisoning.pdf ) . Given the over 90% contribution of the US restoration of the Taliban-destroyed opium industry to world illicit heroin production, and the interconnectedness and effective indistinguishability of "Afghan-derived heroin" from the "pool" of other abusively-used opiates, one can accordingly crudely estimate 0.9 x 12,262 persons/year x 8 years = 88,286 US opiate drug-related deaths (0.9 x 2,011 deaths/year x 8 years = 14,479 heroin-related deaths) connected with the aftermath of the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.
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Global deaths from violent priorities and ignoring Developing World poverty. Professor John Holdren (Professor of Environmental Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University; Director of the Woods Hole Research Center; recent Chairman of the American Association for the Advancement of Science) identified nuclear weapons, poverty and global warming as the three biggest threats facing Humanity (see: http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2007/0216am_holdren_address.shtml ). The US military budget is now about $1 trillion per annum (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States ) and 2001 Economics Nobel Laureate and former World Bank Chief Economist, Professor Joseph Stiglitz (Columbia University) has estimated that the accrual cost (long-term committed cost as opposed to the shirt-term budgeted cost) of the Iraq War is about $3 trillion (see: http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2007/s2236161.htm and “The Three Trillion Dollar War” by Joseph Stiglitz). In 2009, funds for war had been equally distributed between Iraq and Afghanistan, which each received $700 million. But in 2010, the bulk of the funds - $1.2 billion dollars will go to Afghanistan (see: http://www.defencetalk.com/afghan-war-costs-to-overtake-iraq-in-2010-pentagon-18679/ ). The budgeted cost from Congress of the Afghan War is estimated to have been $38 billion (see: http://www.asianews.it/index.php?l=en&art=16570
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Poverty results in the deaths of 16 million people annually (including 9.5 million under-5 year old infants) from deprivation and deprivation exacerbated disease (2003 data; see Gideon Polya, “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950”, G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 2007). yet high female literacy, good governance, good primary health care and a modest increase in economic security could abolish this global avoidable mortality holocaust. It is estimated that the simple expedient of increasing the per capita of all countries to about $1000 would cost only $1.4 trillion, roughly the annual global “defence” budget and about 2.65 of global GNP (2003) ( p169, Gideon Polya, “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950”). Global deaths from worsening climate genocide. Both Dr James Lovelock FRS (Gaia hypothesis) and Professor Kevin Anderson ( Director, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Manchester, UK) have recently estimated that fewer than 1 billion people will survive this century due to unaddressed, man-made global warming – noting that the world population is expected to reach 9.5 billion by 2050, these estimates translate to a climate genocide involving deaths of 10 billion people this century, this including 6 billion under-5 year old infants, 3 billion Muslims, 2 billion Indians, 0.5 billion Bengalis, 0.3 billion Pakistanis and 0.3 billion Bangladeshis (see “Climate Genocide”: http://sites.google.com/site/climategenocide/ ).
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US Alliance war policies in a swathe of countries from Occupied Haiti to Occupied Afghanistan and NW Pakistan, coupled with similarly greedy and racist US Alliance global warming policies, oppose and prevent global equity and will ultimately kill 10 billion non-Europeans this century.
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MoD admits campaign in Afghanistan is 'an unwinnable war' - UK Politics - UK - The Inde... - 0 views
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British soldiers fighting in Afghanistan are part of a campaign that attempted to “impose an ideology foreign to the Afghan people” and was “unwinnable in military terms”, according to a damning report by the Ministry of Defence. The internal study says that Nato forces have been unable to “establish control over the insurgents’ safe havens” or “protect the rural population”, and warns the “conditions do not exist” to guarantee the survival of the Afghan government after combat troops withdraw next year.
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The report, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, says that when troops leave, Afghanistan “will be left with a severely damaged and very weak economic base”, which means that the West will have to continue to fund “large-scale support programmes” for many years to come.
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The report, Lessons from the Soviet Transition in Afghanistan, is an internal research project produced in November last year by the MoD’s think-tank, the Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre (DCDC). Based in Shrivenham, Wiltshire, the DCDC’s reports “help inform decisions in defence strategy, capability development and operations” across all three branches of the armed forces.The study examines the “extraordinary number of similar factors that surround both the Soviet and Nato campaigns in Afghanistan” and highlights lessons that military commanders could learn.
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The UK military finally figures out that there will be no victory in Afghanistan. They've got back as far as looking for parallels between the NATO and Soviet invasions of Afghanistan; maybe someday they'll look as far back as Alexander the Great, who said of Afghanistan that it "is easy to march into but hard to march out of."