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Paul Merrell

OPERATION CONDOR: National Security Archive Presents Trove of Declassified Documentatio... - 0 views

nsarchive.gwu.edu/...NSAEBB514

war & peace Operation-Condor U.S.-foreign-policy

shared by Paul Merrell on 06 May 15 - No Cached
  • Argentine Newspaper, Pagina 12, Highlights Evidence Presented by Archive Southern Cone Project Director Carlos Osorio Documents given to Court Reveal Condor Precedents; Secret Summary of Inaugural Condor Meeting Introduced into Court for First Time National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 514
  • The National Security Archive today posted key documents on Operation Condor, presented by its Southern Cone analyst, Carlos Osorio, at a historic trial in Buenos Aires of former military officers. During 10 hours on the witness stand recently, Osorio introduced one hundred documents into evidence for the court proceedings. His testimony was profiled on May 3 in a major feature article published in the Buenos Aires daily, Pagina 12. Operation Condor was an infamous secret alliance between South American dictatorships in the mid and late 1970s - a Southern Cone rendition and repression program - formed to track down and eliminate enemies of their military regimes. The Condor trial charges 25 high-ranking officers, originally including former Argentine presidents Jorge Videla (deceased) and Reynaldo Bignone (aged 87), with conspiracy to "kidnap, disappear, torture and kill" 171 opponents of the regimes that dominated the Southern Cone in the 1970s and 1980s. Among the victims were approximately 80 Uruguayans, 50 Argentines, 20 Chileans and a dozen others from Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador who were targeted by Condor operatives.
  • The tribunal requested Osorio’s testimony, which took place over two days on March 6 and 7, 2015, and included presentation of an Excel data base of 900 documents drawn mostly from U.S. government sources and from the Archive of Terror in Paraguay. Of these, Osorio focused on 100 declassified records selected for the tribunal, which was presided over by Judge Oscar Amirante, president of Federal Tribunal N° 1. The National Security Archive obtained the U.S. documents through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), primarily from the Central Intelligence Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency and the State Department. Other notable records originated from the Chilean former secret police, DINA. "We have been working on Operation Condor for years," Osorio said, "sifting through archives in many continents and building a body of knowledge and a trove of documents." The Pagina 12 feature entitled "The Evolution of Condor," described Osorio’s presentation of "dozens" of documents to the tribunal, and the contribution the documents made in educating the judges on the genesis and evolution of coordinated repression in the Southern Cone. Osorio’s testimony covered a range of topics including the breadth of Condor operations, U.S. knowledge of those operations and the authenticity of the records being introduced into evidence.
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  • The article highlighted one document Osorio presented that revealed the bilateral precedent for what would become a multilateral system of regional repression: a secret accord between the Argentine and Paraguayan military intelligence services to "Collaborate in the struggle against subversion…" and the "… internment [of dissenters]…" " The agreement was dated September 12,1972, and signed by Paraguayan intelligence officer Col. Benito Guanes Serrano. Three years later, Guanes would also be one of the five original signatories of the secret Condor accords. Osorio discovered the document in the Archive of Terror in Paraguay. In September 1975, an assessment by a State Department intelligence analyst concluded that "The national security forces of the southern cone surpass the terrorists in cooperation at the international level…" Six weeks later, in Santiago, Chile, intelligence chiefs from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay signed an "Acta" officially establishing Operation Condor. Osorio introduced that pivotal document - provided to the Archive by a source in Chile - into evidence as well.
  • Two declassified U.S. documents presented to the tribunal underscored the contradictory response of high U.S. officials as they became aware of Condor operations in the summer of 1976. One well-known 13-page memorandum of conversation between Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Argentine Foreign Minister Admiral Cesar Guzzetti dated June 10, 1976, revealed Kissinger’s endorsement of the regional collaboration to repress the left. After Guzzetti informed Kissinger that the Southern Cone regimes were engaged in "joint efforts" to fight "the terrorist problem," Kissinger essentially supported this approach: "If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly. But you should get back quickly to normal procedures," according to the declassified transcript Osorio provided to the court. "We want you to succeed. We do not want to harrass [sic] you," Kissinger concluded. "I will do what I can … "
  • After a CIA briefing to Kissinger’s top aides in late July 1976 on the Condor countries’ plans to send assassination teams around the world to eliminate opponents, the Secretary of State authorized a démarche to General Augusto Pinochet in Chile, General Jorge Videla in Argentina, and other military leaders in the region calling on them to cease and desist. "Government planned and directed assassinations within and outside the territory of Condor members has most serious implication which we must face squarely and rapidly," stated the secret August 13, 1976, cable to U.S. ambassadors in those nations. But the démarche was never delivered to any of the Condor regimes. After the U.S. ambassadors raised objections about presenting the démarche to the generals, on September 16, 1976, Kissinger rescinded it, and ordered "that no further action be taken on this matter." In addition to Osorio, the National Security Archive’s Chile Documentation Project director, Peter Kornbluh, testified in the Operation Condor trial for five hours in December 2014. Archive Advisory Board member, professor of journalism and author John Dinges presented evidence in April 2015. Read the Documents
Paul Merrell

SANTIAGO, Chile: Chilean accused of murder, torture taught 13 years for Pentagon | Nati... - 0 views

www.mcclatchydc.com/...accused-of-murder-torture.html

war & peace National-Defense-Univ human rights Chile Colombia Operation-Condor

shared by Paul Merrell on 15 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • A member of the late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s brutal secret police who’s been accused of murder taught for more than a decade at the Pentagon’s premier university, despite repeated complaints by his colleagues about his past. Jaime Garcia Covarrubias is charged in criminal court in Santiago with being the mastermind in the execution-style slayings of seven people in 1973, according to court documents. McClatchy also interviewed an accuser who identified Garcia Covarrubias as the person who sexually tortured him.Despite knowing of the allegations, State and Defense department officials allowed Garcia Covarrubias to retain his visa and continue working at a school affiliated with the National Defense University until last year .Human rights groups also question the school’s selection of a second professor, Colombia’s former top military commander.
  • Some Latin America experts said the hirings by the William J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies reflected a continuing inclination by the U.S government to overlook human rights violations in Latin America, especially in countries where it funded efforts to quash leftists. But those experts were especially troubled by Garcia Covarrubias’ long tenure at one of the nation’s most renowned defense institutions. “His hiring undermines our moral authority on both human rights and in the war on terror,” said Chris Simmons, a former Defense Intelligence Agency and Army intelligence officer from 1982 to 2010 who specializes in Latin America. “If he is in fact guilty of what he is accused of, he is a terrorist. Then who are we to tell other countries how they should be fighting terrorism?” To his supporters, Garcia Covarrubias is a brilliant thinker with a Ph.D. and purveyor of leadership skills. To his alleged victims, he’s a sadistic torturer with a penchant for horsewhips and perversity.
  • A 2008 Chilean military document reviewed by McClatchy identified Garcia Covarrubias as a member of the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional, the feared spy agency known by its acronym DINA.“DINA was simply the most sinister agency in Latin America,” said Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst with the National Security Archive, which secured the release of U.S. government classified documents underscoring the complicit relationship between the U.S. and Pinochet. “Anyone associated with that agency should never have been allowed into this country, let alone given this job.”Officials with the Pentagon, the State Department and the school refused to comment. Garcia Covarrubias is now back in Chile, ordered by an investigative judge in January 2014 to remain in the country while an inquiry continues into his alleged role in the deaths of seven people in Temuco weeks after the U.S.-backed Pinochet coup on Sept. 11, 1973. His case is one of 108 involving tortured, disappeared or murdered supporters of the deposed elected president, Salvador Allende. More than 3,000 people died at the hands of the regime, and in 2003, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell offered regrets for U.S. involvement in the coup, calling it “not a part of American history that we're proud of.”
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  • The center’s officials who hired and renewed Garcia Covarrubias’ contracts say he was a highly qualified professor and minimize the allegations against him. “We made inquiries with people in the region, in Chile and so forth, and were never given anything negative about Jaime,” said Margaret Daly Hayes, the center’s first director. “He was vetted by the U.S. government, by the (U.S.) Embassy. They obviously didn’t have anything either or he wouldn’t have been hired.”McClatchy, however, located one of his alleged victims, who described being brutalized by him. “They submitted us to torture, twice a day. We were submerged in feces,” Herman Carrasco, who’s now a real estate agent, told McClatchy in Chile. “They stuck rifle barrels in our anuses.”According to Carrasco, the torture unfolded in October and November 1973 – lorded over by the horsewhip-wielding Garcia Covarrubias – and included electric shock administered to eyelids, genitals and other sensitive areas of the body.“He was the person who tortured us, with his face shown,” said Carrasco, who added that he’d known Garcia Covarrubias from social events before the coup. “He forced us into sexual acts, which shows that besides ferocious cruelty there was a level of psychopathic behavior.”
  • Despite very graphic torture accusations against Garcia Covarrubias, U.S. officials are rallying behind him.
  • As the center supported Garcia Covarrubias, it pushed out Andersen in retaliation, the former communications chief said.Last September, Andersen filed a complaint with the Pentagon’s inspector general, with the support of then-Sen. Carl Levin. D-Mich. An inspector general spokeswoman declined to comment. “It’s shameful that at a time the U.S. prestige as a democracy is under attack, that the National Defense University could be playing footsie with a former state terrorism agent,” Andersen said. The details uncovered about Garcia Covarrubias have prompted demands from several members of Congress for a Pentagon accounting of how he was hired and retained his job.“The American people deserve to know that adequate vetting of such individuals would be routine,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., author of the “ Leahy Law,” which restricts U.S. assistance to foreign security forces that violate human rights.
  • While most of the concerns focused on Garcia Covarrubias, the center also took heat in 2006 for hiring Colombian Gen. Carlos Ospina Ovalle. As army commander, he turned the tables in a decades-old guerrilla war while simultaneously crushing drug cartels. Ospina Ovalle left the center last year and took a post at another National Defense University school.He was hired at the request of the Colombian government and was popular with U.S. military leaders, recalls Downie, the center’s director at the time. “The Colombians wanted, for his own safety, to get him out of Colombia,” said Downie. “This is a guy we certainly wanted to have as a professor.”Human rights groups, however, criticized the general’s hiring and continued employment at the National Defense University. They point to his earlier command in Antioquia province, where right-wing paramilitaries ran roughshod and were linked to the military.“Antioquia in the late 1990s . . . is less than one degree of separation from working with the paramilitaries,” said Adam Isacson, a senior associate specializing in military matters for the Washington Office on Latin America. “If he has not, it’s some miracle that he managed to be the one clean officer.”“Having officers like that, the implicit message is that human rights takes a backseat,” said Isacson.
Gary Edwards

Daniel Henninger: Capitalism Saved the Miners - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...3673604575550322091167574.html

capitalism obammunism chile daniel-henninger

shared by Gary Edwards on 17 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 17 Oct 10
     
    If those miners had been trapped a half-mile down like this 25 years ago anywhere on earth, they would be dead. What happened over the past 25 years that meant the difference between life and death for those men? Short answer: the Center Rock drill bit. This is the miracle bit that drilled down to the trapped miners. Center Rock Inc. is a private company in Berlin, Pa. It has 74 employees. The drill's rig came from Schramm Inc. in West Chester, Pa. Seeing the disaster, Center Rock's president, Brandon Fisher, called the Chileans to offer his drill. Chile accepted. The miners are alive. Longer answer: The Center Rock drill, heretofore not featured on websites like Engadget or Gizmodo, is in fact a piece of tough technology developed by a small company in it for the money, for profit. That's why they innovated down-the-hole hammer drilling. If they make money, they can do more innovation. This profit = innovation dynamic was everywhere at that Chilean mine. The high-strength cable winding around the big wheel atop that simple rig is from Germany. Japan supplied the super-flexible, fiber-optic communications cable that linked the miners to the world above.
Paul Merrell

What is Israël's project in Argentina?, by Thierry Meyssan - 0 views

www.voltairenet.org/article198968.html

Israel Argentina Patagonia

shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Dec 17 - No Cached
  • The Argentinian authorities are wondering about the massive purchase of land in Patagonia by a British billionaire, and the « holidays » that tens of thousands of Israëli soldiers are enjoying on his property.
  • In the 21st century, benefitting from the advantages offered them by the Falklands War Treaty, the United Kingdom and Israël are now setting up a new project Patagonia. British billionaire Joe Lewis has acquired immense territories in the South of Argentina and even neighbouring Chile. His properties cover areas several times larger than the State of Israël. They are situated in Tierra del Fuego, at the extreme Southern point of the continent. In particular, they surround the Lago Escondido, which effectively denies access to the entire region, despite a legal injunction. The billionaire has built a private airport with a two kilometre landing strip, in order to be able to receive civil and military aircraft. Since the Falklands War, the Israëli army has been organising « holiday camps » (sic) in Patagonia for its soldiers. Between 8,000 and 10,000 of them now come every year to spend two weeks on Joe Lewis’ land. While in the 1970’s, the Argentinian army noted the construction of 25,000 empty houses, which gave rise to the myth of the Andinia Plan, hundreds of thousands have been built today.
  • It is impossible for the moment to determine if Israël is engaged in a programme for the exploitation of Antarctica, or if it is building a rear base in case of defeat in Palestine.
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  • It is impossible to verify the state of the construction work, since these are private lands, and Google Earth has neutralised the satellite photographs of the area, just as it does with NATO’s military installations. Neighbouring Chile has handed over a submarine base to Israël. Tunnels have been dug in order to survive the polar winter.
  • In the 21st century, benefitting from the advantages offered them by the Falklands War Treaty, the United Kingdom and Israël are now setting up a new project Patagonia. British billionaire Joe Lewis has acquired immense territories in the South of Argentina and even neighbouring Chile. His properties cover areas several times larger than the State of Israël. They are situated in Tierra del Fuego, at the extreme Southern point of the continent. In particular, they surround the Lago Escondido, which effectively denies access to the entire region, despite a legal injunction. The billionaire has built a private airport with a two kilometre landing strip, in order to be able to receive civil and military aircraft. Since the Falklands War, the Israëli army has been organising « holiday camps » (sic) in Patagonia for its soldiers. Between 8,000 and 10,000 of them now come every year to spend two weeks on Joe Lewis’ land. While in the 1970’s, the Argentinian army noted the construction of 25,000 empty houses, which gave rise to the myth of the Andinia Plan, hundreds of thousands have been built today.
Paul Merrell

Americans on Wrong Side of Income Gap Run Out of Means to Cope - 0 views

www.moneynews.com/...544365

financial-collapse income inequality statistics Obama Boehner

shared by Paul Merrell on 02 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • “We’ve exhausted our coping mechanisms,” said Alan Krueger, an economics professor at Princeton University in New Jersey and former chairman of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. “They weren’t sustainable.” The result has been a downsizing of expectations. By almost two to one — 64 percent to 33 percent — Americans say the U.S. no longer offers everyone an equal chance to get ahead, according to the latest Bloomberg National Poll. The lack of faith is especially pronounced among those making less than $50,000 a year, with close to three-quarters in the Dec. 6-9 survey saying the economy is unfair.
  • The diminished expectations have implications for the economy. Workers are clinging to their jobs as prospects fade for higher-paying employment. Households are socking away more money and charging less on credit cards. And young adults are living with their parents longer rather than venturing out on their own. In the meantime, record-high stock prices are enriching wealthier Americans, exacerbating polarization and bringing income inequality to the political forefront. Even independent government agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Reserve have been dragged into the debate.
  • “The basic bargain at the heart of our economy has frayed,” Obama said in a Dec. 4 speech in Washington. “This is the defining challenge of our time: Making sure our economy works for every working American.” Democratic lawmakers also intend to press next year for a higher minimum wage to tackle the yawning gap between rich and poor, Durbin said. Republicans aren’t ceding the issue. “The American dream is certainly more in doubt than in decades,” House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio said in response to Obama’s speech. “But after more than five years in office, the president has no one to blame but himself.”
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  • Income inequality has been rising more or less steadily since the mid-1970s. The Gini coefficient, a broad-based measure of inequality, stood at a record high last year, according to Census Bureau data dating back 46 years.
  • Women who became unemployed during the recession and its aftermath have been slower to find new positions. Among women losing jobs they’d held for at least three years between January 2009 and the end of 2011, 50 percent were re-employed by the start of 2012, while the share for men was 61 percent, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report released in February. Households turned to stepped-up borrowing to help make ends meet, until that avenue was shut off by the collapse of house prices. About 10.8 million homeowners still owed more money on their mortgages than their properties were worth in the third quarter, according to Seattle-based Zillow Inc. The fallout has made many Americans less inclined to take risks. The quits rate — the proportion of Americans in the workforce who voluntarily left their jobs — stood at 1.7 percent in October. While that’s up from 1.5 percent a year earlier, it’s below the 2.2 percent average for 2006, the year house prices started falling, government data show.
  • “The middle has really collapsed,” said Lawrence Katz, an economics professor at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a former chief economist at the Labor Department in Washington. Even those with college degrees are having trouble keeping up, he said. While they earn more than those with less schooling, they’ve seen no real wage growth in recent years. The median income of men 25 years of age and older with a bachelor’s degree was $56,656 last year, 10 percent less than in 2007 after taking account of inflation, according to Census data.
  • It’s the richest of the rich who are reaping the most benefit as an increasingly interconnected and technologically sophisticated world puts a premium on those perceived to have the highest skills — a phenomenon dubbed “winner take all” by Cornell University Professor Robert Frank. Government policies also play a role. The Treasury Department, for instance, taxes capital gains racked up by the wealthy on the sale of shares, bonds and other assets at about half the rate of ordinary income. The top 1 percent captured 95 percent of the gains in incomes in the first three years of the recovery, based on analysis of tax returns by Saez. Those less well-off, meanwhile, are running out of ways to cope. The percentage of working-age women who are in the labor force steadily climbed from a post-World War II low of 32 percent to a peak of 60.3 percent in April 2000, fueling a jump in dual-income households and helping Americans deal with slow wage growth for a while. Since the recession ended, the workforce participation rate for women has been in decline, echoing a longer-running trend among men. November data showed 57 percent of women in the labor force and 69.4 percent of men.
  • The disparity has widened since the recovery began in mid-2009. The richest 10 percent of Americans earned a larger share of income last year than at any time since 1917, according to Emmanuel Saez, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley. Those in the top one-tenth of income distribution made at least $146,000 in 2012, almost 12 times what those in the bottom tenth made, Census Bureau data show. Economists have posited a variety of explanations for the growing differences in incomes. Manufacturing companies moved once high-paying jobs abroad, to China and elsewhere. Technological advances led to the loss of clerical and office work, especially relating to routine tasks. The decline of unions — 11.3 percent of workers were represented in 2012 compared with 20.1 percent in 1983 — has advantaged bosses at the expense of their employees.
  • Millennials — adults aged 18 to 32 — are still slow to set out on their own more than four years after the recession ended, according to an Oct. 18 report by the Pew Research Center in Washington. Just over one in three head their own households, close to a 38-year low set in 2010. Obama has proposed a raft of policies to attack the widening wage gap — from simplifying the tax code and increasing exports to enhancing worker training and boosting pre-kindergarten education. Yet in a divided Washington he hasn’t made much progress pushing them through. The president’s renewed focus on income inequality has more to do with politics than policy, said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, a self-described center- right institute in Washington.
  • “It’s great politics to demagogue income distribution and complain about the rich getting ahead and the poor falling behind,” said Holtz-Eakin, a former Congressional Budget Office director. “The substance of what he’s actually done doesn’t match the enormity of the problem as he’s portrayed it.”
  • The wage-gap debate has reverberated to other parts of Washington, as the SEC published a rule Sept. 18 that would compel public companies to reveal pay ratios between chief executives and their employees. While businesses have decried the requirement as overreach, some investors welcome the data as a way to help assess a company’s health.
  • Across companies in the S&P 500, the average multiple of CEO compensation to that of rank-and-file workers is 204, up 20 percent since 2009, according to data compiled by Bloomberg in April. The Fed also has been caught up in the debate over growing income disparities. Lawmakers from both parties have questioned whether its bond-buying policy, called quantitative easing, has benefited the rich at the expense of those less well-off by boosting prices of stocks and other assets.
  • The S&P 500 stock index has risen 29 percent in 2013. The richest third of U.S. households account for 89 percent of all equities ownership, according to the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.
  • Janet Yellen, nominated to take over as Fed chairman next year, defended the central bank’s actions at a Senate Banking Committee hearing on Nov. 14. “The policies we’ve undertaken have been meant to generate a robust recovery,” Yellen told the committee. The growing calls for action to reduce income inequality have translated into a national push for a higher minimum wage. Fast-food workers in 100 cities took to the streets Dec. 5 to demand a $15 hourly salary.
  • Paul Merrell on 02 Jan 14
     
    Monetary policy of, by, and for banksters continues in the U.S. One irony is that banksters press for transition to an all digital currency so that savers can be penalized, a blatant "trickle-up"economic policy, whilst also pressing for more bank bailouts, wielding the thoroughly-discredited "trickle down" economic theory. But "trickle down" theory, in the context of bank bailouts, has not successfully trickled down and the only beneficiaries have been the few Americans who can still invest in the stock market, paying the highest dividends to the wealthiest among us. Has their ever been a time when the stock market's behavior has been so divorced from the well-being of the middle and lower economic classes? I doubt there has been at least in the last 50 years. Where would we be if the bank bail-out trillions had instead been mailed as checks to the middle and lower economic classes? "Trickle up" works and that is what built the American economy to its peak in inflation-adjusted dollars -- an affluent middle class. But do not expect leadership from Washington, D.C. in correcting income inquequality; only political rhetoric and a fight over extension of unemployment benefits, now lapsed. "According to the World Bank, the GINI coefficient "measures the extent to which the distribution of income or consumption expenditure among individuals households within an economy deviates from a perfectly equal distribution." Therefore it is used as an indication of income inequality within countries. ... In the late 2000s, Chile had the highest GINI coefficient, after taxes and transfers, among OECD member countries. The United States, Turkey and Mexico came right before it. At the other end of the scale, Slovenia, Denmark and Norway led the ranking with the lowest levels of income inequality." http://www.gfmag.com/tools/global-database/economic-data/11944-wealth-distribution-income-inequality.html#ixzz2pGpv4xGZ Higher minimum wages? How about instead abolishing the Feder
Paul Merrell

Torture Report Revives Rogue Image the CIA Has Sought to Erase - Bloomberg - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...e-cia-has-sought-to-erase.html

war & peace torture CIA Senate-Intelligence_Committee-Report

shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • This week’s Senate report on the CIA’s use of harsh interrogation methods is neither the first nor the worst time the agency has run afoul of its congressional overseers. Four decades ago, a series of hearings on Capitol Hill helped reveal that the CIA-run Phoenix Program in South Vietnam, working in concert with the U.S. and South Vietnamese militaries, had “neutralized” -- killed, detained or recruited -- as many as 80,000 people suspected of being members of the Communist Vietcong and used gang rape, beatings and electric shock as well as waterboarding to interrogate prisoners. Then in 1975 and 1976, a Senate panel took a broader look into the dark side of the Central Intelligence Agency and found that the nation’s spies seemed to have few limits, with covert activities that included plotting to assassinate foreign leaders, domestic spying and LSD experiments on unwitting subjects.
  • The Church committee, the investigative panel named for Democratic chairman Frank Church of Idaho, published 14 reports on CIA activities, including efforts to kill leaders in Cuba, Chile, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Dominican Republic and Vietnam; a secret program to open Americans’ mail; and a mind-control program called MKULTRA
  • It led to creation of the current congressional intelligence committees to guard against CIA abuses and resulted in an executive order by Republican President Gerald Ford banning assassinations of foreign leaders.
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  • Obama has defended CIA Director John Brennan, who this week said that the agency’s methods produced “intelligence that helped thwart attack plans, capture terrorists and save lives.” Brennan said the report was wrong to suggest the CIA “systematically and intentionally misled” Congress and the White House.
  • Nevertheless, the new findings are a blow to the agency Brennan leads. “The Senate intel report is right up there with the Church committee in the scathing criticism of the agency,” said Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University in Washington.
  • This image of the CIA supposedly having run amok and having done all this torture stuff on its own will stick with a large part of the American public,” said Paul Pillar, a former senior CIA analyst who had a 28-year career in the intelligence community. “The idea that the CIA has been lying to the president, lying to the Justice Department, lying to the Congress, and even lying to itself about how effective these programs were -- that’s the real show-stopper in the Senate intel report,” Blanton said. “That’s really the most remarkable piece of it.” The Church committee, despite the breadth of its review, “did not produce this kind of damning indictment using the CIA’s own words and own evidence,” Blanton said.
  • Pillar said the reaction to the CIA’s interrogation methods reflects a public mood change from the “fears and emotions” immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks. Similarly, Americans at first accepted the internment of Japanese-Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor, a policy since considered a black mark in American history, he said. “The CIA is where the people who are on the bottom end of the political process happen to work, but this was a much bigger process where the bigger story was how the American mood, as expressed by the public and our political leaders, has changed significantly since the first year or two after 9/11, when there was much more willingness to compromise long-held values in the name of American security,” Pillar said.
  • In 1984, Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Barry Goldwater, an Arizona Republican, wrote an angry “Dear Bill” letter to CIA Director William Casey amid reports that the CIA was covertly involved in mining Nicaraguan harbors. “I’m pissed off,” Goldwater wrote, complaining that Casey had misled the committee on an action that amounted to an act of war. The panel’s Democratic vice chairman, Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, quit the committee as the “most emphatic way to protest” the Reagan administration’s failure to inform lawmakers.
Paul Merrell

Ukraine Massacre has CIA Fingerprints Says Oliver Stone | News | teleSUR - 0 views

www.telesurtv.net/...liver-Stone-20141231-0005.html

war & peace Ukraine-coup CIA Stone

shared by Paul Merrell on 02 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Revered film maker Oliver Stone revealed that the overthrow of the Ukrainian president in February 2014, in which more than 50 people were killed, has the hallmarks of the techniques used by the CIA to remove undesirable leaders in Venezuela, Chile and Iran. After a four-hour interview with the ousted, legitimately elected president Viktor Yanukovych, Stone concluded that a “third party” played a part in the massacre, and that the resulting shooting had “CIA fingerprints on it.” “It seems clear that the so-called ‘shooters’ who killed 14 police men, wounded some 85, and killed 45 protesting civilians, were outside third party agitators. Many witnesses, including Yanukovych and police officials, believe these foreign elements were introduced by pro-Western factions -- with CIA fingerprints on it,” the director wrote on his Facebook page.
  • Stone went on to point out the “similar technique” used against former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's elected government in 2002, when he was briefly driven out, which also used “mysterious shooters in office buildings.” Just like in the Maiden Massacre, the mainstream media portrayed the latter event as the work of a brutal, authoritarian government. “Create enough chaos, as the CIA did in Iran ‘53, Chile ‘73, and countless other coups, and the legitimate government can be toppled. It’s America’s soft power technique called ‘Regime Change 101,'” Stone said. The documentary-maker, who spoke to Yanukovych for a new film, said that the United States would not be able to hide its crimes for much longer. “The truth is not being aired in the West. It’s a surreal perversion of history that’s going on once again, as in Bush pre-Iraq ‘WMD’ campaign. But I believe the truth will finally come out in the West, I hope, in time to stop further insanity,” Stone concluded.
Paul Merrell

Argentina Prosecutor Who Accused Kirchner Had Steady Contact With US Embassy, Leaked Ca... - 0 views

news.vice.com/...-us-embassy-leaked-cables-show

war & peace U.S.-foreign-policy Argentina interference-in-foreign-governments

shared by Paul Merrell on 02 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Alberto Nisman, the prosecutor who accused Argentina's president of a cover-up plot over the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center before being found shot to death, met repeatedly with the US embassy in Buenos Aires during his investigation, leaked diplomatic cables show.Nisman gave US officials advanced notice on his procedural moves and was apparently coached by the embassy in "improving" his requests for arrest warrants for Iranians that Nisman suspected of carrying out the deadly attack against the Argentine Israeli Mutual Association, or AIMA, according to cables published by Wikileaks."Embassy can now more logically approach the [government of Argentina] about [its] anticipated next steps and ways we might be able to coordinate outreach to other governments [...] to bring attention to the warrants and pressure to bear on Iran and Hezbollah," says one US cable dated November 1, 2006, after a meeting with Nisman.The revelations are adding fodder to the entangled scandal over the AIMA center bombing, Nisman's mysterious death, and the reactions of President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner and her government loyalists.The president and her supporters have piled doubt on Nisman's investigation, suggesting he didn't himself write the inquiry accusing Kirchner of a cover-up deal with Iran, and that he was influenced by foreign agents in his claims. Kirchner said this week that Nisman was manipulated and double-crossed by government spies plotting against her.
  • Nisman on January 16 told VICE News he had proof that Kirchner sought a back-channel deal with Iran — swapping Iranian oil for Argentine grain — in exchange for abandoning efforts to prosecute former Iranian diplomats in connection to the Jewish center bombing.Eight-five people were killed in the terror attack, which remains unsolved. Survivors and opposition forces are now blaming Kirchner's government for Nisman's death.
  • The prosecutor, who was found dead the night before making his blockbuster claim against Kirchner and her foreign minister in Argentina's Congress, is mentioned in 46 leaked US cables.In the cable from November 2006, Nisman informed US officials of the likelihood that a judge would follow his recommendations to seek charges against Iranian suspects for the bombing. American embassy officials discussed plans to inform "other governments" ahead of time, in an apparent push to make the case against the Iranians an international matter.Another cable, dated January 19, 2007, suggests the US embassy had a hand in shaping Nisman's warrant requests with Interpol, the international diplomatic police force. The cable shows US officials thought Nisman's work was shoddy and needed help.Before the Justice Department's Office of International Affairs intervened in the warrant applications, the cable says, Nisman's paperwork contained "statements that were presumptuous conclusions of guilt."Nisman took on the case of the AIMA center bombing in 2004, at the request of the then-President Nestor Kirchner, Cristina Fernandez's late husband. In his interview with VICE News — perhaps his last with a foreign news organization — Nisman denied connections with any foreign spy agencies.
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  • "You won't find reports from the CIA, Mossad, or the MI5 in my files. I have no doubt that there is a link between them and the Argentine intelligence agency, but I never dealt with any foreign intelligence agencies," Nisman said, two days before he was found dead.The US embassy in Buenos Aires declined to discuss its officers' interactions with Nisman. "We will not comment on the contents of these alleged cables that purport to include classified information," an embassy spokesman told VICE News.
  • The relationship was apparently so involved that Nisman apologized for not letting then-ambassador Earl Anthony Wayne know that he would call for the arrest of former president Carlos Menem in relation to the case."AMIA Special Prosecutor Alberto Nisman called the Ambassador on May 23 to apologize for not giving the Embassy advance notice of his request for the arrest of former President Menem and other [government of Argentina] officials for their alleged roles in the cover up of the 'local connection' in the 1994 terrorist bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center," says a cable from May 2008.The prosecutor also apologized that the judicial order coincided with a visit to Argentina from the former deputy director of the FBI, John Pistole, adding it was "completely unintentional," the cable shows."He noted that he was very sorry and that he sincerely appreciates all of the [US government's] help and support and in no way meant to undermine that," the cable continues.
  • The cable also notes that US officials "have for the past two years recommended to Nisman that he focus on the perpetrators of the terrorist attack and not on the possible mishandling of the first investigation."Santiago O'Donnell, author of two books based on the cables released by Julian Assange, said in an interview that the leaked cables show the US influenced Nisman throughout his work on the AIMA bombing investigation."The embassy gave instructions to the prosecutor Nisman for him to follow the Iranian lead, and not follow other leads, like the Syrian lead, or the local connection, because that would detract from the terrorist image that the US was trying to impose on Iran," O'Donnell said.President Kirchner this week proposed in a nationally televised address to disband and reform the government's intelligence agency. In doing so, she said rogue government spies were responsible for Nisman's death. Opposition voices, meanwhile, said the reform plan for the Secretaría de Inteligencia, or SI, would further politicize the work of the embattled spy agency and make it more responsive to the president's political whims.
  • Alberto Nisman, the prosecutor who accused Argentina's president of a cover-up plot over the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center before being found shot to death, met repeatedly with the US embassy in Buenos Aires during his investigation, leaked diplomatic cables show.Nisman gave US officials advanced notice on his procedural moves and was apparently coached by the embassy in "improving" his requests for arrest warrants for Iranians that Nisman suspected of carrying out the deadly attack against the Argentine Israeli Mutual Association, or AIMA, according to cables published by Wikileaks."Embassy can now more logically approach the [government of Argentina] about [its] anticipated next steps and ways we might be able to coordinate outreach to other governments [...] to bring attention to the warrants and pressure to bear on Iran and Hezbollah," says one US cable dated November 1, 2006, after a meeting with Nisman.
  • Paul Merrell on 02 Feb 15
     
    Well this is interesting. The U.S. was covertly working through an Argentinian prosecutor to topple Argentina's head of state. On the plan to reform the Argentine intelligence service, that service's subordination to the CIA was the prototype operation than led to Operation Condor, in which the CIA subverted most intelligence services in Latin America, leading to coups and the deaths and disappearnaces of hundreds of thousands Latin American citizens suspected of being left-leaning. The overthrow of the Allende government in Chile is perhaps the best known in the U.S. 
Paul Merrell

First to Fall? Panama Papers Bring Down Iceland PM, Portending Future Fallout | Common ... - 0 views

www.commondreams.org/...d-pm-portending-future-fallout

Auction 2016 Hillary Panama-Papers Iceland Ukraine British-Virgin-Isles Chile

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • In the first instance of a prominent politician taken down by the 11.5 million documents leaked in the Panama Papers, Iceland Prime Minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson resigned on Tuesday after fully 10 percent of Iceland's population rallied in protest of his wife's secret, offshore shell company holding millions. Gunnlaugsson was asked about the account on the day the leak was announced in a television interview, and he walked out rather than answer the question:
  • The next day, "an estimated 22,000 Icelanders slung eggs and protested outside the Parliament building" demanding his resignation, as Common Dreams reported. Gunnlaugsson initially refused to bow to the public pressure, but eventually announced his resignation on Tuesday evening.
  • News editor of the Reykjavík Grapevine Paul Fontaine said Tuesday, "While the Prime Minister's particular role in the Panama Papers leak is huge, and I don't want to downplay it, I also don't want to downplay the involvement other Icelanders—and the countless others around the world—also had in this." "This extends beyond the prime minister; it reaches parliament, it reaches Reykjavík City Hall, and it reportedly reaches hundreds of as yet unnamed Icelandic businesspeople," Fontaine pointed out. "The greater crime, which the Panama Papers illustrate comprehensively, is that we have a secret economy connected to and even supporting some of the worst aspects of the global capitalist system."
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  • Meanwhile, Ukraine's president faces possible impeachment proceedings for his offshore holdings in the British Virgin Islands, and the Chilean head of anti-corruption group Transparency International resigned Tuesday after the Panama Papers revealed his own use of secret shell companies.
  • Relatively few Americans have been named in the leak thus far, perhaps pointing to the country's status as one of the foremost locales for creating shell corporations like those documented in the Panama Papers. "Americans can form shell companies right in Wyoming, Delaware or Nevada," said Shima Baradaran Baughman, a law professor at the University of Utah, in an interview with Fusion. "They have no need to go to Panama to form a shell company to use for illicit activities."
  • David Dayen explored in depth the paltry U.S. regulations around onshore shell companies in Salon: "While we force foreign financial institutions to give up information on accounts held by U.S. taxpayers through the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act of 2010, we don’t reciprocate by complying with international disclosure requirements standardized by the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) and agreed to by 97 other nations. As a result, the U.S. is becoming one of the world’s foremost tax havens."
  • President Barack Obama addressed the Panama Papers leak for the first time on Tuesday, condemning the laws that make offshore tax havens legal. But those words rang hollow to many observers who recalled that the Obama Administration was behind the very trade deal, Panama TPA, that enshrined the rights of firms such as Mossack Fonseca to funnel millions into untraceable offshore shell companies. As Common Dreams noted, "Much of [Mossack Fonseca's] activities were not necessarily illegal—thanks to agreements such as the Panama TPA." It is worth noting that Bernie Sanders advocated against the deal.
  • Reform also seems unlikely should Hillary Clinton become the Democratic party's nominee, considering that she and her husband own a shell corporation such as the ones documented in the Panama Papers, as the Associated Press reported last year. Unnamed officials told the AP that "the entity was a 'pass-through' company designed to channel payments to the former president." Thanks to the nature of the laws surrounding such corporations, Clinton is not required to disclose the company's existence or earnings in her campaign finance reports. Still, observers are hopeful that this record-shattering leak will drum up enough public pressure to not only topple prominent politicians, but to also propel the efforts of groups seeking real legislative reform. "The Panama Papers are a boost to the global movement to stop tax-haven abuse and recapture trillions of the hidden wealth of nations," wrote author Chuck Collins in The Nation. "This story isn’t going away anytime soon."
Gary Edwards

The Real Reason for the Iraq War | VICE United Kingdom - 1 views

www.vice.com/...asnt-waged-for-oil-greg-palast

Oil Iraq neocons Saudi Banksters Oilsters

shared by Gary Edwards on 29 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Like most lefty journalists, I assumed that George Bush and Tony Blair invaded Iraq to buy up its oil fields, cheap and at gun-point, and cart off the oil. We thought we knew the neo-cons true casus belli: Blood for oil. But the truth in the Options for Iraqi Oil Industry was worse than "Blood for Oil". Much, much worse.
  • Within days, our chief of investigations, Ms Badpenny, delivered to my shack in the woods outside New York a 323-page, three-volume programme for Iraq's oil crafted by George Bush's State Department and petroleum insiders meeting secretly in Houston, Texas. I cracked open the pile of paper – and I was blown away.
  • I'd already had in my hands a 101-page document, another State Department secret scheme, first uncovered by Wall Street Journal reporter Neil King, that called for the privatisation, the complete sell-off of every single government-owned asset and industry. And in case anyone missed the point, the sales would include every derrick, pipe and barrel of oil, or, as the document put it, "especially the oil". That plan was created by a gaggle of corporate lobbyists and neo-cons working for the Heritage Foundation. In 2004, the plan's authenticity was confirmed by Washington power player Grover Norquist. (It's hard to erase the ill memory of Grover excitedly waving around his soft little hands as he boasted about turning Iraq into a free-market Disneyland, recreating Chile in Mesopotamia, complete with the Pinochet-style dictatorship necessary to lock up the assets – while behind Norquist, Richard Nixon snarled at me from a gargantuan portrait.) The neo-con idea was to break up and sell off Iraq's oil fields, ramp up production, flood the world oil market – and thereby smash OPEC and with it, the political dominance of Saudi Arabia.
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  • General Jay Garner also confirmed the plan to grab the oil. Indeed, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld fired Garner, when the General, who had lived in Iraq, complained the neo-con grab would set off a civil war. It did. Nevertheless, Rumsfeld replaced Garner with a new American viceroy, Paul Bremer, a partner in Henry Kissinger's firm, to complete the corporate takeover of Iraq's assets – "especially the oil".
  • But that was not to be. While Bremer oversaw the wall-to-wall transfer of Iraqi industries to foreign corporations, he was stopped cold at the edge of the oil fields. How? I knew there was only one man who could swat away the entire neo-con army: James Baker, former Secretary of State, Bush family consiglieri and most important, counsel to Exxon-Mobil Corporation and the House of Saud.
  • There was no way in hell that Baker's clients, from Exxon to Abdullah, were going to let a gaggle of neo-con freaks smash up Iraq's oil industry, break OPEC production quotas, flood the market with six million bbd of Iraqi oil and thereby knock the price of oil back down to $13 a barrel where it was in 1998.
  • Big Oil could not allow Iraq's oil fields to be privatised and taken from state control. That would make it impossible to keep Iraq within OPEC (an avowed goal of the neo-cons) as the state could no longer limit production in accordance with the cartel's quota system. The US oil industry was using its full political mojo to prevent their being handed ownership of Iraq's oil fields. That's right: The oil companies didn't want to own the oil fields – and they sure as hell didn't want the oil. Just the opposite. They wanted to make sure there would be a limit on the amount of oil that would come out of Iraq. Saddam wasn't trying to stop the flow of oil – he was trying to sell more. The price of oil had been boosted 300 percent by sanctions and an embargo cutting Iraq's sales to two million barrels a day from four. With Saddam gone, the only way to keep the damn oil in the ground was to leave it locked up inside the busted state oil company which would remain under OPEC (i.e. Saudi) quotas. The James Baker Institute quickly and secretly started in on drafting the 323-page plan for the State Department. With authority granted from the top (i.e. Dick Cheney), ex-Shell Oil USA CEO Phil Carroll was rushed to Baghdad in May 2003 to take charge of Iraq's oil. He told Bremer, "There will be no privatisation of oil – END OF STATEMENT." Carroll then passed off control of Iraq's oil to Bob McKee of Halliburton, Cheney's old oil-services company, who implemented the Baker "enhance OPEC" option anchored in state ownership.
  • This week, VICE readers can download, for free, Greg Palast's investigation of the war in Iraq in the BBC film, Bush Family Fortunes, at www.GregPalast.com – as well as the illustrated poster of "The Secret History of War over Oil in Iraq" from Palast's international bestseller, Armed Madhouse, also at www.GregPalast.com
  • Some oil could be released, mainly to China, through limited, but lucrative, "production sharing agreements". And that's how George Bush won the war in Iraq. The invasion was not about "blood for oil", but something far more sinister: blood for no oil. War to keep supply tight and send prices skyward. Oil men, whether James Baker or George Bush or Dick Cheney, are not in the business of producing oil. They are in the business of producing profits. And they've succeeded. Iraq, capable of producing six to 12 million barrels of oil a day, still exports well under its old OPEC quota of three million barrels. The result: As we mark the tenth anniversary of the invasion this month, we also mark the fifth year of crude at $100 a barrel. As George Bush could proudly say to James Baker: Mission Accomplished!
  • Paul Merrell on 29 Mar 13
     
    The Sherman Act forbids conspiracies in restraint of trade and is at its zenith in price-fixing cases. This looks to be the mother of all price-fixing cases, to say the least.   
  • Gary Edwards on 30 Mar 13
     
    Wow, Marbux has it right.  This report from the legendary Greg Palast of the BBC News Network is a stunning reversal of what everyone believed to be the truth.  To wit, the militarist and global strategist - resource control hungry neocon contingent of the Repubican party was always thought to be behind the Iraqi war.  For control of cheap, plentiful oil and, the protection / destruction of Israel's enemies.   Funny, but it turns out America was fighting for higher oil prices and limited supplies.  Just as in the first Gulf War, Americans were fighting to protect Saudi and big oil profits. excerpt: Big Oil could not allow Iraq's oil fields to be privatised and taken from state control. That would make it impossible to keep Iraq within OPEC (an avowed goal of the neo-cons) as the state could no longer limit production in accordance with the cartel's quota system. The US oil industry was using its full political mojo to prevent their being handed ownership of Iraq's oil fields. That's right: The oil companies didn't want to own the oil fields - and they sure as hell didn't want the oil. Just the opposite. They wanted to make sure there would be a limit on the amount of oil that would come out of Iraq. Saddam wasn't trying to stop the flow of oil - he was trying to sell more. The price of oil had been boosted 300 percent by sanctions and an embargo cutting Iraq's sales to two million barrels a day from four. With Saddam gone, the only way to keep the damn oil in the ground was to leave it locked up inside the busted state oil company which would remain under OPEC (i.e. Saudi) quotas. The James Baker Institute quickly and secretly started in on drafting the 323-page plan for the State Department. With authority granted from the top (i.e. Dick Cheney), ex-Shell Oil USA CEO Phil Carroll was rushed to Baghdad in May 2003 to take charge of Iraq's oil. He told Bremer, "There will be no privatisation of oil - END OF STATEMENT." Carroll then passed off control
Paul Merrell

Colombian government and Farc rebels announce ceasefire deal to end war | World news | ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ent-farc-rebels-ceasefire-deal

war & peace Columbia FARC Peace U.S.-foreign-policy

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • The Colombian government and leftist Farc rebels have announced that they have reached a deal on a bilateral ceasefire that would be the last major step toward ending one of the world’s longest wars. “We have arrived with success at an agreement on the bilateral and definitive ceasefire and end to hostilities,” both sides said in a statement read to media in Havana. The accord will be signed on Thursday in Havana by President Juan Manuel Santos and Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, rebel leader Rodrigo Londono, better known by his nom de guerre Timochenko. President Juan Manuel Santos will travel to Cuba on Thursday for the announcement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or Farc. The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, announced he would also be present to witness the signing of the deal. The presidents of Cuba, Venezuela and Chile, the three countries sponsoring the almost four-year-old peace talks in Havana, were also expected, and the Obama administration will send its special envoy to the talks, former diplomat Bernard Aronson.
  • Colombia’s conflict has killed more than 220,000 people and displaced millions since 1964. But a 15-year, US-backed military offensive thinned the rebels’ ranks and forced its ageing leaders to the negotiating table in 2012.
  • In addition to announcing a framework for the ceasefire, both sides said they agreed on how the Farc’s estimated 7,000 fighters will demobilise and hand over their weapons, as well as the security guarantees that will be provided to leftist activists after the conflict ends. Negotiators in January tasked the UN with monitoring adherence to an eventual ceasefire and resolving disputes emerging from the demobilisation.
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  • With the latest advances, only a few minor pending items remain, the biggest being how the final deal will be ratified and given legal force so that it will not unravel should a more conservative government succeed Santos, who leaves office in 2018. Santos has vowed to put the deal to a referendum so Colombians can express their opinion. Opinion polls show the Farc are widely despised among conservative Colombians and frustration with the rebels has grown as the talks have dragged on, making reconciliation seem more distant. The peace talks have been bumpy and extended much longer than Santos or anyone else anticipated. But if a final deal is reached it would bring an end to Latin America’s last major insurgency, one accused of being a major supplier of cocaine to the US, though the much-smaller and more recalcitrant National Liberation Army has a toehold in some areas and could fill the void left by the Farc.
  • The group of about 8,000 combatants, down from 17,000 in its heyday, is considered a terrorist group by the United States and European Union. The Farc grew out of a 1960s peasant movement demanding land reform, and has been fighting successive governments ever since.
  • Paul Merrell on 24 Jun 16
     
    That should let land reforming rebels not to go into competition with the CIA's cocaiine smuggling racket. 
Paul Merrell

Are We On The Verge Of A Massive Emerging Markets Currency Collapse? - 0 views

theeconomiccollapseblog.com/...ging-markets-currency-collapse

banksters financial-collapse emerging-nations quantitative-easing

shared by Paul Merrell on 27 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • This time, the Federal Reserve has created a truly global problem.  A big chunk of the trillions of dollars that it pumped into the financial system over the past several years has flowed into emerging markets.  But now that the Fed has decided to begin "the taper", investors see it as a sign to pull the "hot money" out of emerging markets as rapidly as possible.  This is causing currencies to collapse and interest rates to soar all over the planet.  Argentina, Turkey, South Africa, Ukraine, Chile, Indonesia, Venezuela, India, Brazil, Taiwan and Malaysia are just some of the emerging markets that have been hit hard so far.  In fact, last week emerging market currencies experienced the biggest decline that we have seen since the financial crisis of 2008.  And all of this chaos in emerging markets is seriously spooking Wall Street as well.  The Dow has fallen nearly 500 points over the last two trading sessions alone.  If the Federal Reserve opts to taper even more in the coming days, this currency crisis could rapidly turn into a complete and total currency collapse.
Paul Merrell

America's Staggering Hypocrisy | Consortiumnews - 0 views

consortiumnews.com/...americas-staggering-hypocrisy

war & peace foreign policy Ukraine MSM WaPo neocons

shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Since World War II – and extending well into the Twenty-first Century – the United States has invaded or otherwise intervened in so many countries that it would be challenging to compile a complete list. Just last decade, there were full-scale U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, plus American bombing operations from Pakistan to Yemen to Libya. So, what is one to make of Secretary of State John Kerry’s pronouncement that Russia’s military intervention in the Crimea section of Ukraine – at the behest of the country’s deposed president – is a violation of international law that the United States would never countenance?
  • Kerry decried the Russian intervention as “a Nineteenth Century act in the Twenty-first Century.” However, if memory serves, Sen. Kerry in 2002 voted along with most other members of the U.S. Congress to authorize President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, which was also part of the Twenty-first Century. And, Kerry is a member of the Obama administration, which like its Bush predecessor, has been sending drones into the national territory of other nations to blow up various “enemy combatants.” Are Kerry and pretty much everyone else in Official Washington so lacking in self-awareness that they don’t realize that they are condemning actions by Russian President Vladimir Putin that are far less egregious than what they themselves have done?
  • And, what do Hiatt and other neocons at the Washington Post say about confronting the Russians over the Ukraine crisis, which was stoked by neocon holdovers in the U.S. State Department, such as Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland,  and the U.S.-funded National Endowment for Democracy, which was founded in 1983 to replace the CIA in the business of destabilizing targeted governments? [See Consortiumnews.com’s “What Neocons Want from Ukraine Crisis.”] The Post is demanding a new Cold War with Russia in retaliation for its relatively non-violent interventions to protect pro-Russian provinces of two countries that were carved out of the old Soviet Union: Georgia where Russian troops have protected South Ossetia and Abkhazia since 2008 and in Ukraine where Russian soldiers have taken control of Crimea. In both cases, the pro-Russian areas felt threatened from their central governments and sought Moscow’s assistance. In the case of Ukraine, a neo-Nazi-led putsch – representing the interests of the western part of the country – overthrew the democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, who came from the eastern region. Then, under the watchful eye of the neo-Nazi storm troopers in Kiev, a rump parliament voted unanimously or near unanimously to enact a series of draconian laws offensive to the ethnic Russian areas in the east and south.
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  • If Putin is violating international law by sending Russian troops into the Crimea after a violent coup spearheaded by neo-Nazi militias ousted Ukraine’s democratically elected president – and after he requested protection for the ethnic Russians living in the country’s south and east – then why hasn’t the U.S. government turned over George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and indeed John Kerry to the International Criminal Court for their far more criminal invasion of Iraq? In 2003, when the Bush-Cheney administration dispatched troops halfway around the world to invade Iraq under the false pretense of seizing its non-existent weapons of mass destruction, the U.S. touched off a devastating war that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and left their country a bitterly divided mess. But there has been virtually no accountability. And, why haven’t many of the leading Washington journalists who pimped for those false WMD claims at least been fired from their prestigious jobs, if not also trundled off to The Hague for prosecution as propagandists for aggressive war? Remarkably, many of these same “journalists” are propagandizing for more U.S. wars today, such as attacks on Syria and Iran, even as they demand harsh penalties for Russia over its intervention in the Crimea, which incidentally was an historic part of Russia dating back centuries.
  • Though the Russian case for intervention in both Georgia and Ukraine is much stronger than the excuses often used by the United States to intervene in other countries, the Washington Post was apoplectic about Russia’s “violation” of suddenly sacred international law. The Post wrote, “as long as some leaders play by what Mr. Kerry dismisses as 19th-century rules, the United States can’t pretend that the only game is in another arena altogether. Military strength, trustworthiness as an ally, staying power in difficult corners of the world such as Afghanistan — these still matter, much as we might wish they did not.” The Post also laments what it sees as a “receding” tide of democracy around the world, but it is worth noting that the U.S. government has a long and sorry record of overthrowing democratic governments. Just a partial list since World War II would include: Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, Allende in Chile in 1973, Aristide in Haiti twice, Chavez in Venezuela briefly in 2002, Zelaya in Honduras in 2009, Morsi in Egypt in 2013, and now Yanukovych in Ukraine in 2014. The next target of a U.S.-embraced “democratic” coup looks to be Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela. Perhaps the closest U.S. parallel to the Russian intervention in Ukraine was President Bill Clinton’s decision to invade Haiti in 1994 to reinstall Haiti’s elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide to office, though Russia has not gone nearly that far regarding Yanukovych in Ukraine. Russia has only intervened to prevent the fascist-spearheaded coup regime in Kiev from imposing its will on the country’s ethnic Russian provinces.
  • Thus, the overriding hypocrisy of the Washington Post, Secretary Kerry and indeed nearly all of Official Washington is their insistence that the United States actually promotes the principle of democracy or, for that matter, the rule of international law. Those are at best situational ethics when it comes to advancing U.S. interests around the world.
Paul Merrell

Putin's quiet Latin America play | TheHill - 0 views

thehill.com/...s-quiet-play-for-latin-america

war & peace Russia China Iran Latin-America BRICS bases

shared by Paul Merrell on 22 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Away from the conflict in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin is quietly seeking a foothold in Latin America, military officials warn.To the alarm of lawmakers and Pentagon officials, Putin has begun sending navy ships and long-range bombers to the region for the first time in years.ADVERTISEMENTRussia’s defense minister says the country is planning bases in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, and just last week, Putin’s national security team met to discuss increasing military ties in the region.“They’re on the march,” Sen. Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.) said at a Senate hearing earlier this month. “They’re working the scenes where we can’t work. And they’re doing a pretty good job.”
  • Gen. James Kelly, commander of U.S. Southern Command said there has been a “noticeable uptick in Russian power projection and security force personnel” in Latin America.“It has been over three decades since we last saw this type of high-profile Russian military presence,” Kelly said at the March 13 hearing. The U.S. military says it has been forced to cut back on its engagement with military and government officials in Latin America due to budget cuts. Kelly said the U.S. military had to cancel more than 200 effective engagement activities and multi-lateral exercises in Latin America last year.With the American presence waning, officials say rivals such as Russia, China and Iran are quickly filling the void.
  • Iran has opened up 11 additional embassies and 33 cultural centers in Latin America while supporting the "operational presence" of militant group Lebanese Hezbollah in the region.“On the military side, I believe they're establishing, if you will, lily pads for future use if they needed to use them,” Kelly said. China is making a play for Latin America a well, and is now the fastest growing investor in the region, according to experts. Although their activity is mostly economic, they are also increasing military activity through educational exchanges. The Chinese Navy conducted a goodwill visit in Brazil, Chile and Argentina last year and conducted its first-ever naval exercise with the Argentine Navy.
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  • “Our relationships, our leadership, and our influence in the Western Hemisphere are paying the price,” Kelly said.Some experts warn against being too alarmist, and say Russia, China and Iran do not have the ability or desire to project military power beyond their borders. Army War College adjunct professor Gabriel Marcella said Russia's maneuvering is more about posturing than a real threat. "Latin America is seen as an opportunity to challenge the United States in terms of global presence," he said. "They want to show the flag to assert their presence and say they need to be counted on the world stage." Other experts said the encroachment of rivals has huge economic implications for the U.S., which has more trade partners in Latin America than in any other region in the world. 
  • “[Russia’s presence] serves to destabilize what has become a more stabilized, middle class continent with an increasing respect for the rule of law. ... Any type of unsettling of that environment will scare off investors,” said Jason Marczak, deputy director at the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center.“Market economies and democracies are fundamental for trade, for jobs, and for stable investment environments," he said. Marczak noted the instability in Venezuela, which is facing civil unrest from anti-government protestors.“In Venezuela, a lot of the money that’s been able to prop up President Chavez and now Maduro has been Chinese money,” Kelly said. 
  • And while Chinese investment in Latin America could have positive aspects for the region, it could also make it more difficult for U.S. official to push labor and environmental safeguards that it argues are building blocks for democracy, Marczak said.  Angel Rabasa, a senior political scientist at RAND, said cuts to the defense budget are going to accelerate a long trend of U.S. neglect and disengagement with Latin America. According to Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), there are 10 countries in Latin America that currently have no U.S. ambassador because they either haven’t been nominated yet or confirmed, a sign that the region is seen as a low priority.“We will be losing the ability to influence developments in a region that is very important to us because of proximity,” Rabasa said. 
  • Paul Merrell on 22 Mar 14
     
    While Obama shifts to the East and tries to encircle Russia with NATO missile batteries, Putin shifts to the Southwest, surrounding the U.S. with missile batteries. One gets the sniff that the BRICS nations are setting up a military defense.   
Paul Merrell

John Pilger - The Forgotten Coup - How the Godfather Rules from Canberra to Kiev - 0 views

www.informationclearinghouse.info/article37970.htm

war & peace Ukraine Australia U.S. foreign policy

shared by Paul Merrell on 17 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Washington's role in the fascist putsch against an elected government in Ukraine will surprise only those who watch the news and ignore the historical record. Since 1945, dozens of governments, many of them democracies, have met a similar fate, usually with bloodshed. Nicaragua is one of the poorest countries on earth with fewer people than Wales, yet under the reformist Sandinistas in the 1980s it was regarded in Washington as a "strategic threat". The logic was simple; if the weakest slipped the leash, setting an example, who else would try their luck? The great game of dominance offers no immunity for even the most loyal US "ally". This is demonstrated by perhaps the least known of Washington's coups - in Australia. The story of this forgotten coup is a salutary lesson for those governments that believe a "Ukraine" or a "Chile" could never happen to them.
Paul Merrell

U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence - 0 views

www.intelligence.senate.gov/churchcommittee.html

surveillance state Church-Committee-docs NSA FBI COINTELPRO

shared by Paul Merrell on 28 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations withRespect to Intelligence Activities ("Church Committee") Rules and Authorizing Resolution Rules of Procedure and S. Res. 21, 94th Congress
  • Interim and Staff Reports (1975) Interim Report, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, S. Rep. No. 94-465 Staff Report, Covert Action in Chile, 1963-1973 Final Report, S. Rep. No. 94-755 (1976) Book I, Foreign and Military Intelligence Book II, Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans Book III, Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans Book IV, Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Foreign and Military Intelligence Book V, The Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy: Performance of the Intelligence Agencies Book VI, Supplementary Reports on Intelligence Activities
  • Hearings Volume 1, Unauthorized Storage of Toxic Agents (September 16, 17, and 18, 1975) Volume 2, Huston Plan (September 23, 24, and 25, 1975) Volume 3, Internal Revenue Service (October 2, 1975) Volume 4, Mail Opening (October 21, 22, and 24, 1975 Volume 5, The National Security Agency and Fourth Amendment Rights (October 29 and November 6, 1975) Volume 6, Federal Bureau of Investigation (November 18, 19, December 2, 3, 9, 10, and 11, 1975) Volume 7, Covert Action (December 4 and 5, 1975) Additional Link Collection of Church Committee Reports and Hearings
  • Paul Merrell on 28 Nov 13
     
    The records of the mid-1970s Church Committee investigation into covert government surveillance and illegal repression of political rights are now online. The revelations of this investigation led directly to passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and other legislation aimed at confining the U.S. military to surveillance of foreign targets and to dismantling of J. Edgar. Hoover's COINTEL program of political repression in the U.S., including blackmailing of elected officials and assassination of dissident political activists. The more recent NSA revelations should be viewed with knowledge that the NSA was already told decades earlier by Congress to butt out of domestic surveillance in no uncertain terms. Yet here we have the NSA gathering the entire "haystack" of U.S. citizens' domestic communications. In any event, this is a historical treasure trove of  prior misbehavior by the U.S. clandestine services, an overpowering  testimony that government officials cannot  be trusted with secret surveillance powers. 
Paul Merrell

Twitter / conradhackett: People in jail per 100k people US ... - 0 views

twitter.com/...1

civil liberties incarceration-rates land of the free

shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • People in jail per 100k people US 710 Chile 266 Mexico 210 Turkey 179 UK 147 Canada 118 Sweden 67 Japan 51 Iceland 47
Paul Merrell

How the David Petraeus Prosecution Backfired - The Daily Beast - 0 views

www.thedailybeast.com/...andard-for-david-petraeus.html

Dark-State CIA DoD Patraeus sentencing litigation leaks

shared by Paul Merrell on 23 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • The sordid tale of marital infidelity, cyber-stalking, and spilled secrets surrounding former CIA director David Petraeus is scheduled to come to a close Thursday, when the former four-star general is sentenced for his crimes. But Petraeus’s punishment will likely have lasting ramifications on future leak cases, national security lawyers said. They argue the government is cutting its own throat by offering him a more lenient sentence in the wake of harsher penalties to other leakers and creating a double standard that can be exploited by defense attorneys in future cases.“This is a horrible choice by the government,” said Mark Zaid, a national security lawyer for more than two decades. “I think it is going to have a negative impact. The judges who are going to be truly objective are going to look at the Petraeus case. Going forward, it is going to hurt the government’s cases.”
  • The hearing Thursday to sentence Petraeus for giving his former girlfriend and biographer highly classified information will happen only a few miles from her home in North Carolina. Petraeus will enter his plea on one misdemeanor count of unauthorized removal and retention of classified material before U.S. Magistrate Judge David Keesler in Charlotte. Petraeus is the second director of the CIA to be convicted for actions while leading the agency. President Nixon’s director, Richard Helms, was convicted in 1978 of lying to Congress about the CIA’s role in overthrowing President Salvador Allende of Chile. He received a two-year suspended sentence and a $2,000 fine.
  • And after John M. Deutsch, who served under President Clinton, left office, he was accused of mishandling classified information on his laptop. He lost his security clearance, but he was never prosecuted. Clinton pardoned him on his last day as president. Petraeus has the distinction, however, of being the only director forced to resign because of misdeeds while serving,
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • In October 2012, Petraeus, then director of the CIA, praised the Kiriakou conviction.“Oaths do matter, and there are indeed consequences for those who believe they are above the laws that protect our fellow officers and enable American intelligence agencies to operate with the requisite degree of secrecy,” he said in a statement.Petraeus isn’t facing any jail time, however. His misdemeanor charge carries with it a one-year prison sentence, but prosecutors have suggested a sentence of two years’ probation and a $40,000 fine in return for a guilty plea. Judge Keesler is free to reject the prosecutors’ recommendation, but it rarely happens.
  • Petraeus can easily make $40,000 in one speaking engagement and likely makes seven figures as a partner at KKR, an equity firm, Zaid said. Indeed, Petraeus’s star hasn’t fallen far despite the charges, a very public affair, and his resignation from the CIA. He is advising the National Security Council on the self-proclaimed Islamic State, according to the White House. He is also a visiting professor at two universities.
Paul Merrell

Spy Tech Company 'Hacking Team' Gets Hacked | Motherboard - 0 views

motherboard.vice.com/...mpany-hacking-team-gets-hacked

surveillance-state Hacking-Team hacking-the-spies

shared by Paul Merrell on 06 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • Sometimes even the cops get robbed. The controversial Italian surveillance company Hacking Team, which sells spyware to governments all around the world, including agencies in Ethiopia, Morocco, the United Arab Emirates, as well as the US Drug Enforcement Administration, appears to have been seriously hacked. Hackers have made 500 GB of client files, contracts, financial documents, and internal emails, some as recent as 2015, publicly available for download. Hacking Team’s spokesperson Eric Rabe did not immediately respond to Motherboard’s calls and email asking for verification that the hacked information is legitimate. Without confirmation from the company itself, it’s difficult to know what percentage of the files are real—however, based on the sheer size of the breach and the information in the files, the hack appears to be authentic. What’s more, the unknown hackers announced their feat through Hacking Team’s own Twitter account.
  • he hackers composed the tweets as if they were written by Hacking Team. “Since we have nothing to hide, we're publishing all our e-mails, files, and source code,” the hackers wrote in a tweet, which included the link to around 500 Gb of files. The hackers also started tweeting a few samples of internal emails from the company. One of the screenshots shows an email dated 2014 from Hacking Team’s founder and CEO David Vincenzetti to another employee. In the email, titled “Yet another Citizen Lab attack,” Vincenzetti links to a report from the online digital rights research center Citizen Lab, at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, which has exposed numerous cases of abuse from Hacking Team’s clients. Hacking Team has never revealed a list of its clients, and has always and repeatedly denied selling to sketchy governments, arguing that it has an internal procedure to address human rights concerns about prospective customers.
  • It’s unclear exactly how much the hackers got their hands on, but judging from the size of the files, it’s certainly a large collection of internal files. A source who asked to speak anonymously due to the sensitivity of the issue, told me that based on the file names and folders in the leak, the hackers who hit Hacking Team "got everything." A few hours after the initial hack, a list of alleged Hacking Team customers was posted on Pastebin. The list includes past and current customers. Among the most notable, there are a few that were previously unknown, such as the FBI, Chile, Australia, Spain, and Iraq, among others.
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  • The breach on Hacking Team comes almost a year after another surveillance tech company, the competing FinFisher, was hacked in a similar way, with a hacker leaking 40 Gb of internal files. FinFisher, like Hacking Team, sells surveillance software to law enforcement agencies across the world. Their software, once surreptitiously installed on a target’s cell phone or computer, can be used to monitor the target’s communications, such as phone calls, text messages, Skype calls, or emails. Operators can also turn on the target’s webcam and exfiltrate files from the infected device.
Paul Merrell

New Data Reveals U.S. Far From Freest Country in the World - 0 views

theantimedia.org/om-freest-country-in-the-world

U.S. economy economic-freedom ranking stats

shared by Paul Merrell on 27 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • According to the annual Economic Freedom of the World report, the United States has dropped to #16 in an index of economic freedom. The list, released by the Fraser Institute, ranks countries around the world by a number of different factors that include the size and scope of government: expenditures, taxes, enterprises, legal structure and security of property rights, access to sound money, freedom to trade internationally, and regulation of credit, labor, and business were all evaluated. The study also considered income levels and poverty rates. As the introduction of the study details:“The cornerstones of economic freedom are (1) personal choice, (2) voluntary exchange coordinated by markets, (3) freedom to enter and compete in markets, and (4) protection of persons and their property from aggression by others. Economic freedom is present when individuals are permitted to choose for themselves and engage in voluntary transactions as long as they do not harm the person or property of others.”At the top of the list was Hong Kong, followed by Singapore, New Zealand, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, Mauritius, Jordan, Ireland, and Canada. The United Kingdom and Chile tied at #10. The United States followed behind at #16, continuing a downward trend that has grown for several years.
  • The report also noted that “Nowhere has the reversal of the rising trend in the economic freedom been more evident than in the United States. Throughout the period from 1970 to 2000, the United States ranked as the world’s freest OECD nation (generally the third freest economy overall behind only Hong Kong and Singapore). The chain-linked summary rating of the United States in 2000 was 8.65. By 2005, the US rating had slipped to 8.22. The slide has continued. The 7.73 chain-linked rating of the United States in 2013 was more than 0.9 of a unit lower than the 2000 rating. Thus, the decline in economic freedom in the United States has been more than three times greater than the average decline found in the OECD [emphasis added].”While the U.S. has never had a truly free economy, the new study makes it evident that Americans have far less economic freedom and opportunity than they did in the year 2000. Now that economic conditions are even worse in the U.S. than they were before, a culture of extreme economic control has taken over and exacerbated the growing recession — one that history may end up redesignating a depression.
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