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Paul Merrell

The coming collapse of Iran sanctions - Opinion - Al Jazeera English - 0 views

www.aljazeera.com/...201322584515426148.html

iran sanctions european union China WTO foreign policy blunders

shared by Paul Merrell on 27 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Western policymakers and commentators wrongly assume that sanctions will force Iranian concessions in nuclear talks that resume this week in Kazakhstan - or perhaps even undermine the Islamic Republic's basic stability in advance of the next Iranian presidential election in June.  Besides exaggerating sanctions' impact on Iranian attitudes and decision-making, this argument ignores potentially fatal flaws in the US-led sanctions regime itself - flaws highlighted by ongoing developments in Europe and Asia, and that are likely to prompt the erosion, if not outright collapse of America's sanctions policy.       Virtually since the 1979 Iranian revolution, US administrations have imposed unilateral sanctions against the Islamic Republic. These measures, though, have not significantly damaged Iran's economy and have certainly not changed Iranian policies Washington doesn't like. 
  • Secondary sanctions are a legal and political house of cards. They almost certainly violate American commitments under the World Trade Organisation, which allows members to cut trade with states they deem national security threats but not to sanction other members over lawful business conducted in third countries. If challenged on the issue in the WTO's Dispute Resolution Mechanism, Washington would surely lose.  
  • Last year, the European Union - which for years had condemned America's prospective "extraterritorial" application of national trade law and warned it would go to the WTO's Dispute Resolution Mechanism if Washington ever sanctioned European firms over Iran-related business - finally subordinated its Iran policy to American preferences, banning Iranian oil and imposing close to a comprehensive economic embargo against the Islamic Republic.   In recent weeks, however, Europe's General Court overturned European sanctions against two of Iran's biggest banks, ruling that the EU never substantiated its claims that the banks provided "financial services for entities procuring on behalf of Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile programmes". 
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  • On the other side of the world, America is on a collision course with China over sanctions. In recent years, Beijing has tried to accommodate US concerns about Iran. It has not developed trade and investment positions there as rapidly as it might have, and has shifted some Iran-related transactional flows into renminbito to help the Obama administration avoid sanctioning Chinese banks (similarly, India now pays for some Iranian oil imports in rupees). Whether Beijing has really lowered its aggregate imports of Iranian oil is unclear - but it clearly reduces them when the administration is deciding about six-month sanctions waivers for countries buying Iranian crude.  
  • However, as Congress enacts additional layers of secondary sanctions, President Obama's room to manoeuver is being progressively reduced. Therein lies the looming policy train wreck.  
  • If, at congressional insistence, the administration later this year demands that China sharply cut Iranian oil imports and that Chinese banks stop virtually any Iran-related transactions, Beijing will say no. If Washington retreats, the deterrent effect of secondary sanctions will erode rapidly. Iran's oil exports are rising again, largely from Chinese demand.
  • Once it becomes evident Washington won't seriously impose secondary sanctions, growth in Iranian oil shipments to China and other non-Western economies (for example, India and South Korea) will accelerate. Likewise, non-Western powers are central to Iran's quest for alternatives to US-dominated mechanisms for conducting and settling international transactions - a project that will also gain momentum after Washington's bluff is called.   Conversely, if Washington sanctions major Chinese banks and energy companies, Beijing will respond - at least by taking America to the WTO's Dispute Resolution Mechanism (where China will win), perhaps by retaliating against US companies in China. 
  • Chinese policymakers are increasingly concerned Washington is reneging on its part of the core bargain that grounded Sino-American rapprochement in the 1970s - to accept China's relative economic and political rise and not try to secure a hegemonic position in Asia.   Beijing is already less willing to work in the Security Council on a new (even watered-down) sanctions resolution and more willing to resist US initiatives that, in its view, challenge Chinese interests (witness China's vetoes of three US-backed resolutions on Syria).  In this context, Chinese leaders will not accept American high-handedness on Iran sanctions. At this point, Beijing has more ways to impose costs on America for violations of international economic law that impinge on Chinese interests than Washington has levers to coerce China's compliance.   As America's sanctions policy unravels, President Obama will have to decide whether to stay on a path of open-ended hostility toward Iran that ultimately leads to another US-initiated war in the Middle East, or develop a very different vision for America's Middle East strategy - a vision emphasising genuine diplomacy with Tehran, rooted in American acceptance of the Islamic Republic as a legitimate political order representing legitimate national interests and aimed at fundamentally realigning US-Iranian relations.  
  • Paul Merrell on 27 Feb 13
     
    Keep in mind that Iran has the military power to close the Straits of Hormuz, thereby sending the West into an economic depression as the world's oil supply  suddenly contracts. 
Paul Merrell

Lawmaker Says There More To NSA Spying - Business Insider - 0 views

www.businessinsider.com/here-more-to-nsa-spying-2013-6

surveillance state NSA future-disclosures

shared by Paul Merrell on 04 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • A House Democrat said information revealed about the National Security Agency's secret surveillance programs are "the tip of the iceberg," Daniel Strauss of The Hill reports. "I think it's just broader than most people even realize, and I think that's, in one way, what astounded most of us, too," Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Calif.) told C-SPAN's "Washington Journal" after a classified briefing with national security officials. Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), who also attended the meeting, said that the NSA "violated the spirit of the law when it started collecting data from everyone in the country just because technology now makes that possible.” Barton added that "in America ... You don’t target everyone and violate their 4th Amendment rights just because of a handful of threats. But that is exactly what is happening at the NSA ... it is wrong and it needs to stop now.” More from Sanchez: "I don't know if there are other leaks, if there's more information somewhere, if somebody else is going to step up, but I will tell you that I believe it's the tip of the iceberg."
  • A House Democrat said information revealed about the National Security Agency's secret surveillance programs are "the tip of the iceberg," Daniel Strauss of The Hill reports. "I think it's just broader than most people even realize, and I think that's, in one way, what astounded most of us, too," Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Calif.) told C-SPAN's "Washington Journal" after a classified briefing with national security officials. Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), who also attended the meeting, said that the NSA "violated the spirit of the law when it started collecting data from everyone in the country just because technology now makes that possible.” Barton added that "in America ... You don’t target everyone and violate their 4th Amendment rights just because of a handful of threats. But that is exactly what is happening at the NSA ... it is wrong and it needs to stop now.”
  • Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian, who has served as a conduit for Snowden's leaks, recently said that there will me many more "significant revelations that have not yet been heard." Greenwald told The New York Times that he received “thousands” of classified documents — “dozens” of which are newsworthy — from the the 29-year-old ex-Booz Allen employee who was contracted by the NSA. Sanchez said that what lawmakers learned "is significantly more than what is out in the media today," which is interesting when considering previous reports by journalists and whistleblowers.
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  • Here's a rundown of the reports and the allegations: In 2006 NSA insiders told Leslie Cauley of USA Today that the NSA has been collecting almost all U.S. phone records since shortly after 9/11. In 2010 Dana Priest and William Arkin of The Washington Post reported that "collection systems at the [NSA] intercept and store 1.7 billion emails, phone calls, and other types of communications" every day. According to a 2007 lawsuit, Verizon built a fiber optic cable to give the "access to all communications flowing through the carrier’s operations center." In April 2012 Wired's James Bamford reported how the U.S. government hired two secretive Israeli companies to wiretap AT&T. AT&T engineer Mark Klein discovered the "secret room" at AT&T central office in San Francisco, through which the NSA actively "vacuumed up Internet and phone-call data from ordinary Americans with the cooperation of AT&T" through the wiretapping rooms, emphasizing that "much of the data sent through AT&T to the NSA was purely domestic." Former NSA executive and whistleblower Thomas Drake testified that the NSA is using Israeli-made hardware to "seize and save all personal electronic communications."
  • A classified program called Prism, leaked by Snowden, appears to acquire information from the servers of nine of the biggest internet companies. The Washington Post reported that the government's orders "serve as one-time blanket approvals for data acquisition and surveillance on selected foreign targets for periods of as long as a year." NSA Whistleblower William Binney that the NSA began using the program he built (i.e. ThinThread) to use communications data for creating, in real time, profiles of nearly all Americans so that the government is "able to monitor what people are doing" and who they are doing it with. In July the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), established to "hear applications for and grant orders approving electronic surveillance," found that the NSA violated the Fourth Amendment's restriction against unreasonable searches and seizures "on at least one occasion." BONUS: In March CIA Chief Technology Officer Ira "Gus" Hunt said: "It is really very nearly within our grasp to be able to compute on all human generated information." If there is "significantly more" to the NSA's domestic snooping, then we're all ears and eyes.
Gary Edwards

Gadfly ONLINE | The Age of Neo-Feudalism: A Government of the Rich, by the Rich, and fo... - 2 views

www.gadflyonline.com/...the-age-of-neo-feudalism

new-fgeudalism ruling-class-elites New-World-Order Banksters Globalist Corporatists fascism

shared by Gary Edwards on 28 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 28 Mar 13
     
    "THE AGE OF NEO-FEUDALISM: A GOVERNMENT OF THE RICH, BY THE RICH, AND FOR THE CORPORATIONS" excerpt: "The shaping of the will of Congress and the choosing of the American president has become a privilege reserved to the country's equestrian classes, a.k.a. the 20% of the population that holds 93% of the wealth, the happy few who run the corporations and the banks, own and operate the news and entertainment media, compose the laws and govern the universities, control the philanthropic foundations, the policy institutes, the casinos, and the sports arenas." - Journalist Lewis Lapham The pomp and circumstance of the presidential inauguration has died down. Members of Congress have taken their seats on Capitol Hill, and Barack Obama has reclaimed his seat in the White House. The circus of the presidential election has become a faint memory. The long months of debates, rallies, and political advertisements have slipped from our consciousness. Now we are left with the feeling that nothing has really changed, nor will it. This is not by accident. The media circus leading up to the elections, the name calling in the halls of Congress, the vitriol and barbs traded back and forth among people who are supposed to be working together to improve the country, are all components of the game set up by those who run the show. The movers and shakers behind these engaging, but ultimately trite, political exercises are the elite, the so-called upper class, who benefit from the status quo. This status quo is marked by an economic crisis with no end in sight, by the slow but steady growth of a police state aimed at the lowest rungs of society, and a political circus which keeps us enraptured long enough that we don't question what's really going on. Meanwhile, this elite, composed of corporations profiting off of our ignorance, avoid being brought to task for their destruction of democratic governance and the economy. These are the corporations who sent our econo
Paul Merrell

Israel Won't Stop Spying on the U.S. - 0 views

www.newsweek.com/ael-wont-stop-spying-us-249757

war & peace espionage Israel visa-waiver

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 May 14 - No Cached
  • Whatever happened to honor among thieves? When the National Security Agency was caught eavesdropping on German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone, it was considered a rude way to treat a friend. Now U.S. intelligence officials are saying—albeit very quietly, behind closed doors on Capitol Hill—that our Israeli “friends” have gone too far with their spying operations here. According to classified briefings on legislation that would lower visa restrictions on Israeli citizens, Jerusalem’s efforts to steal U.S. secrets under the cover of trade missions and joint defense technology contracts have “crossed red lines.”  Israel’s espionage activities in America are unrivaled and unseemly, counterspies have told members of the House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs committees, going far beyond activities by other close allies, such as Germany, France, the U.K. and Japan. A congressional staffer familiar with a briefing last January called the testimony “very sobering…alarming…even terrifying.” Another staffer called it “damaging.”  The Jewish state’s primary target: America’s industrial and technical secrets. 
  • “No other country close to the United States continues to cross the line on espionage like the Israelis do,” said a former congressional staffer who attended another classified briefing in late 2013, one of several in recent months given by officials from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the State Department, the FBI and the National Counterintelligence Directorate. 
  • “I don’t think anyone was surprised by these revelations,” the former aide said. “But when you step back and hear…that there are no other countries taking advantage of our security relationship the way the Israelis are for espionage purposes, it is quite shocking. I mean, it shouldn’t be lost on anyone that after all the hand-wringing over [Jonathan] Pollard, it’s still going on.” Israel and pro-Israel groups in America have long lobbied U.S. administrations to free Pollard, a former U.S. naval intelligence analyst serving a life sentence since 1987 for stealing tens of thousands of secrets for Israel. (U.S. counterintelligence officials suspect that Israel traded some of the Cold War-era information to Moscow in exchange for the emigration of Russian Jews.) After denying for over a decade that Pollard was its paid agent, Israel apologized and promised not to spy on U.S. soil again. Since then, more Israeli spies have been arrested and convicted by U.S. courts. 
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  • I.C. Smith, a former top FBI counterintelligence specialist during the Pollard affair, tells Newsweek, “In the early 1980s, dealing with the Israelis was, for those assigned that area, extremely frustrating. The Israelis were supremely confident that they had the clout, especially on the Hill, to basically get [away] with just about anything. This was the time of the Criteria Country List—later changed to the National Security Threat List—and I found it incredible that Taiwan and Vietnam, for instance, were on [it], when neither country had conducted activities that remotely approached the Pollard case, and neither had a history of, or a comparable capability to conduct, such activities.” While all this was going on, Israel was lobbying hard to be put on the short list of countries (38 today) whose citizens don’t need visas to visit here.  Until recently, the major sticking point was the Jewish state’s discriminatory and sometimes harsh treatment of Arab-Americans and U.S. Palestinians seeking to enter Israel. It has also failed to meet other requirements for the program, such as promptly and regularly reporting lost and stolen passports, officials say—a problem all the more pressing since Iranians were found to have boarded the missing Malaysia Airlines flight with stolen passports. 
  • “But this is the first time congressional aides have indicated that intelligence and national security concerns also are considerations in weighing Israel’s admission into the visa waiver program,” Jonathan Broder, the foreign and defense editor for CQ Roll Call, a Capitol Hill news site, wrote last month. He quoted a senior House aide as saying, “The U.S. intelligence community is concerned that adding Israel to the visa waiver program would make it easier for Israeli spies to enter the country.” The Israelis “thought they could just snap their fingers” and get friends in Congress to legislate visa changes, a Hill aide said, instead of going through the required hoops with DHS.
  • Congressional aides snorted at the announcement. “The Israelis haven’t done s**t to get themselves into the visa waiver program,” the former congressional aide said, echoing the views of two other House staffers working on the issue. “I mean, if the Israelis got themselves into this visa waiver program and if we were able to address this [intelligence community] concern—great, they’re a close ally, there are strong economic and cultural links between the two countries, it would be wonderful if more Israelis could come over here without visas. I’m sure it would spur investment and tourist dollars in our economy and so on and so forth. But what I find really funny is they haven’t done s**t to get into the program. They think that their friends in Congress can get them in, and that’s not the case. Congress can lower one or two of the barriers, but they can’t just legislate the Israelis in.” The path to visa waivers runs through DHS and can take years to navigate.
  • Israel is not even close to meeting those standards, a congressional aide said. “You’ve got to have machine-readable passports in place—the e-passports with a data chip in them. The Israelis have only just started to issue them to diplomats and senior officials and so forth, and that probably won’t be rolled out to the rest of their population for another 10 years.” But U.S. counterspies will get the final word. And since Israel is as likely to stop spying here as it is to give up matzo for Passover, the visa barriers are likely to stay up. As Paul Pillar, the CIA’s former national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, told Newsweek, old habits are hard to break: Zionists were dispatching spies to America before there even was an Israel, to gather money and materials for the cause and later the fledgling state. Key components for Israel’s nuclear bombs were clandestinely obtained here. “They’ve found creative and inventive ways,” Pillar said, to get what they want. “If we give them free rein to send people over here, how are we going to stop that?” the former congressional aide asked. “They’re incredibly aggressive. They’re aggressive in all aspects of their relationship with the United States. Why would their intelligence relationship with us be any different?”
Gary Edwards

The obscure legal system that lets corporations sue countries | Claire Provost and Matt... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...rtations-sue-states-ttip-icsid

ISDS TTIP Banksters World-Banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 10 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • 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.”
  • 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.
  • “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.
  • 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.”
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • “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.”
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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).
  • 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.
  • 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”.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Gary Edwards on 10 Jun 15
     
    "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."
Gary Edwards

GAO Audit: Fed Gave $16 Trillion in Emergency Loans to Bankster Cartel! - 0 views

www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28660.htm

Banksters GAO-Audit Federal-Reserve-Bank-Cartel Federal-debt-ceiling financial-collapse

shared by Gary Edwards on 27 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 27 Jul 11
     
    The U.S. Federal Reserve gave out $16.1 trillion in emergency loans to U.S. and foreign financial institutions between Dec. 1, 2007 and July 21, 2010, according to figures produced by the government's first-ever audit of the central bank. Last year, the gross domestic product of the entire U.S. economy was $14.5 trillion. Of the $16.1 trillion loaned out, $3.08 trillion went to financial institutions in the U.K., Germany, Switzerland, France and Belgium, the Government Accountability Office's (GAO) analysis shows. Additionally, asset swap arrangements were opened with banks in the U.K., Canada, Brazil, Japan, South Korea, Norway, Mexico, Singapore and Switzerland. Twelve of those arrangements are still ongoing, having been extended through August 2012. Out of all borrowers, Citigroup received the most financial assistance from the Fed, at $2.5 trillion. Morgan Stanley came in second with $2.04 trillion, followed by Merill Lynch at $1.9 trillion and Bank of America at $1.3 trillion. The audit also found that the Fed mostly outsourced its lending operations to the very financial institutions which sparked the crisis to begin with, and that they delegated contracts largely on a no-bid basis. The GAO report recommends new policies that would eliminate such conflicts of interest, and suggests that in the future the Fed should keep better records of their emergency decision-making process.
Paul Merrell

What is Khamenei thinking on removing sanctions? - Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middle ... - 0 views

www.al-monitor.com/...-speech-sanctions-nuclear.html

war & peace Iran Iran-negotiations sanctions Khamenei

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • The issue of removing international sanctions on Iran is one of the most important aspects of the nuclear negotiations between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany (P5+1). While the nuclear talks are confidential, there have been conflicting reports about how the sanctions can and should be removed in return for Iran reducing their nuclear program. During his March 21 Iranian New Year's speech, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader who has final say on the nuclear program, discussed his positions on the nuclear talks and sanctions removal.
  • “What the Americans repeat, ‘We’ll sign the contract with Iran, then we’ll see if they act upon the contract, then we’ll remove the sanctions’ — this is wrong and unacceptable," Khamenei said. "The removal of sanctions is part of the negotiations, not the result of negotiations. Those people involved [in the talks] know well the difference between the two. “The removal of sanctions should happen without any distance [delays] when an agreement is made.” Sa’adollah Zaeri, an Iranian analyst whose work is published on the supreme leader’s website and in the hard-line Kayhan newspaper, spoke to Tasnim News Agency about the issue. “One of the important statements of the supreme leader is that the removal of the sanctions be in the text of the negotiations.” Zaeri said, “However, the last few months, the West tried with cleverness to avoid its commitments and introduce the sanctions as an issue of time and connected to Iran’s commitments.” Zaeri said that the West tried to make sanction removal a “marginal issue” and that they had proposed “Iran reduce the nuclear program for 10 years and afterward if the West gives Iran a passing grade, then the sanctions will be removed.” There have also been reports that there could be a multistep removal of sanctions, which Khamenei has rejected in the past. Given that there are numerous UN, US and European Union sanctions against Iran, the nuclear negotiators have to at least to include specific language on the removal of sanctions in a final nuclear agreement.
  • During his Nowruz speech, Khamenei also rejected the possibility of cooperation between Iran and the United States in the Middle East. The idea that both countries have a common interest in fighting the terrorist group the Islamic State and can cooperate on this issues has been floated by some in Washington and even by members of President Hassan Rouhani’s administration. On this, Khamenei said: “The negotiations with America are about the nuclear program and nothing else, everyone should know this. We will not negotiate with America over regional matters. The goals of the Americans on regional matters are exactly the opposite of our goals. We want security and calm in the region … the policy of the US in the region creates instability. “We definitely do not speak or negotiate with the Americans on regional, domestic or weapons matters. The negotiations are merely on nuclear matters and how we can reach a conclusion on the nuclear negotiations through diplomacy.” 
Gary Edwards

Global Financial Meltdown Coming? Clear Signs That The Great Derivatives Crisis Has Now... - 0 views

theeconomiccollapseblog.com/...rivatives-crisis-has-now-begun

Banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 15 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • No one “understands” derivatives. How many times have readers heard that thought expressed (please round-off to the nearest thousand)? Why does no one understand derivatives? For many; the answer to that question is that they have simply been thinking too hard. For others; the answer is that they don’t “think” at all. Derivatives are bets. This is not a metaphor, or analogy, or generalization. Derivatives are bets. Period. That’s all they ever were. That’s all they ever can be.
  • One very large financial institution that appears to be in serious trouble with these financial weapons of mass destruction is Glencore.  At one time Glencore was considered to be the 10th largest company on the entire planet, but now it appears to be coming apart at the seams, and a great deal of their trouble seems to be tied to derivatives.  The following comes from Zero Hedge… Of particular concern, they said, was Glencore’s use of financial instruments such as derivatives to hedge its trading of physical goods against price swings. The company had $9.8 billion in gross derivatives in June 2015, down from $19 billion in such positions at the end of 2014, causing investors to query the company about the swing. Glencore told investors the number went down so drastically because of changes in market volatility this year, according to people briefed by Glencore. When prices vary significantly, it can increase the value of hedging positions. Last year, there were extreme price moves, particularly in the crude-oil market, which slid from about $114 a barrel in June to less than $60 a barrel by the end of December.
  • That response wasn’t satisfying, said Michael Leithead, a bond fund portfolio manager at EFG Asset Management, which managed $12 billion as of the end of March and has invested in Glencore’s debt.
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  • According to Bank of America, the global financial system has about 100 billion dollars of exposure overall to Glencore.  So if Glencore goes bankrupt that is going to be a major event.  At this point, Glencore is probably the most likely candidate to be “the next Lehman Brothers”. And it isn’t just Glencore that is in trouble.  Other financial giants such as Trafigura are in deep distress as well.  Collectively, the global financial system has approximately half a trillion dollars of exposure to these firms… Worse, since it is not just Glencore that the banks are exposed to but very likely the rest of the commodity trading space, their gross exposure blows up to a simply stunning number:
  • For the banks, of course, Glencore may not be their only exposure in the commodity trading space. We consider that other vehicles such as Trafigura, Vitol and Gunvor may feature on bank balance sheets as well ($100 bn x 4?)
  • Call it half a trillion dollars in very highly levered exposure to commodities: an asset class that has been crushed in the past year. The mainstream media is not talking much about any of this yet, and that is probably a good thing.  But behind the scenes, unprecedented moves are already taking place. When I came across the information that I am about to share with you, I was absolutely stunned.  It comes from Investment Research Dynamics, and it shows very clearly that everything is not “okay” in the financial world… Something occurred in the banking system in September that required a massive reverse repo operation in order to force the largest ever Treasury collateral injection into the repo market.   Ordinarily the Fed might engage in routine reverse repos as a means of managing the Fed funds rate.   However, as you can see from the graph below, there have been sudden spikes up in the amount of reverse repos that tend to correspond the some kind of crisis – the obvious one being the de facto collapse of the financial system in 2008:
  • What in the world could possibly cause a spike of that magnitude? Well, that same article that I just quoted links the troubles at Glencore with this unprecedented intervention… What’s even more interesting is that the spike-up in reverse repos occurred at the same time – September 16 – that the stock market embarked on an 8-day cliff dive, with the S&P 500 falling 6% in that time period.  You’ll note that this is around the same time that a crash in Glencore stock and bonds began.   It has been suggested by analysts that a default on Glencore credit derivatives either by Glencore or by financial entities using derivatives to bet against that event would be analogous to the “Lehman moment” that triggered the 2008 collapse. The blame on the general stock market plunge was cast on the Fed’s inability to raise interest rates.  However that seems to be nothing more than a clever cover story for something much more catastrophic which began to develop out sight in the general liquidity functions of the global banking system. Back in 2008, Lehman Brothers was not “perfectly fine” one day and then suddenly collapsed the next.  There were problems brewing under the surface well in advance. Well, the same thing is happening now at banking giants such as Deutsche Bank, and at commodity trading firms such as Glencore, Trafigura and The Noble Group. And of course a lot of smaller fish are starting to implode as well.  I found this example posted on Business Insider earlier today…
  • On September 11, Spruce Alpha, a small hedge fund which is part of a bigger investment group, sent a short report to investors. The letter said that the $80 million fund had lost 48% in a month, according the performance report seen by Business Insider. There was no commentary included in the note. No explanation. Just cold hard numbers.
  • Wow – how do you possibly lose 48 percent in a single month? It would be hard to do that even if you were actually trying to lose money on purpose. Sadly, this kind of scenario is going to be repeated over and over as we get even deeper into this crisis. Meanwhile, our “leaders” continue to tell us that there is nothing to worry about.  For example, just consider what former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke is saying…
  • Former Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke doesn’t see any bubbles forming in global markets right right now. But he doesn’t think you should take his word for it. And even if you did, that isn’t the right question to ask anyway. Speaking at a Wall Street Journal event on Wednesday morning, Bernanke said, “I don’t see any obvious major mispricings. Nothing that looks like the housing bubble before the crisis, for example. But you shouldn’t trust me.”
  • I certainly agree with that last sentence.  Bernanke was the one telling us that there was not going to be a recession back in 2008 even after one had already started.  He was clueless back then and he is clueless today. Most of our “leaders” either don’t understand what is happening or they are not willing to tell us. So that means that we have to try to figure things out for ourselves the best that we can.  And right now there are signs all around us that another 2008-style crisis has begun. Personally, I am hoping that there will be a lot more days like today when the markets were relatively quiet and not much major news happened around the world. Unfortunately for all of us, these days of relative peace and tranquility are about to come to a very abrupt end.
  • Gary Edwards on 15 Oct 15
     
    "Warren Buffett once referred to derivatives as "financial weapons of mass destruction", and it was inevitable that they would begin to wreak havoc on our financial system at some point.  While things may seem somewhat calm on Wall Street at the moment, the truth is that a great deal of trouble is bubbling just under the surface.  As you will see below, something happened in mid-September that required an unprecedented 405 billion dollar surge of Treasury collateral into the repo market.  I know - that sounds very complicated, so I will try to break it down more simply for you.  It appears that some very large institutions have started to get into a significant amount of trouble because of all the reckless betting that they have been doing.  This is something that I have warned would happen over and over again.  In fact, I have written about it so much that my regular readers are probably sick of hearing about it.  But this is what is going to cause the meltdown of our financial system. Many out there get upset when I compare derivatives trading to gambling, and perhaps it would be more accurate to describe most derivatives as a form of insurance.  The big financial institutions assure us that they have passed off most of the risk on these contracts to others and so there is no reason to worry according to them. Well, personally I don't buy their explanations, and a lot of others don't either.  On a very basic, primitive level, derivatives trading is gambling.  This is a point that Jeff Nielson made very eloquently in a piece that he recently published…"
Paul Merrell

Pentagon: 9/11 defense team linguist was CIA asset | The Miami Herald The Miami Herald - 0 views

www.miamiherald.com/...article9705209.html

war & peace 9-11 GITMO litigation CIA torture translator

shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • The military confirmed Tuesday that a linguist tasked to serve on the death-penalty defense of an alleged Sept. 11 plotter had previously worked for the CIA but would not say whether he worked at a black site.The revelation Monday by alleged plot deputy Ramzi bin al Shibh, 42, brought this week’s resumption of the Sept. 11 hearings, the first in six months, to a screeching halt. All but one of the five alleged 9/11 conspirators said they independently recognized the stony-faced translator seated beside bin al Shibh at the war court from their years in the spy agency’s secret overseas prisons.The five men, led by alleged mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed, 49, are accused of orchestrating, financing and training the men who hijacked four aircraft and killed nearly 3,000 people at the World Trade Center, Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field on Sept. 11, 2001.
  • Defense attorneys accuse the CIA of torturing their clients and then seeking to hide the evidence from their death-penalty trials. They also allege U.S. government and military interference is designed to disrupt their work with the accused.The five defendants return to court Wednesday to figure a way forward after the revelation, the latest snag in pretrial hearings for the case that has no trial date. The judge, Army Col. James L. Pohl, gave lawyers Tuesday to conduct research, and trade classified court filings — starting with one by the prosecution Monday night that apparently described the controversial contract linguist’s intelligence background.Tuesday afternoon, a Pentagon spokesman, Army Lt. Col. Myles B. Caggins, said the linguist “has in the past made readily available to prospective supervisors his prior work experience with the United States government, including with the CIA.”
  • Caggins would not say whether the linguist worked at a CIA “black site,” an overseas prison where agents secretly interrogated prisoners and subjected them to brutal techniques — waterboarding, nudity, sleep deprivation, painful shackling and a quasi-medical procedure called rectal rehydration. He did, however, distance the case prosecutor, Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, from the disruption, saying his office “does not have any role in providing linguists to defense teams in military commissions.” He said defense lawyers get to vet their own linguists.“We vetted him. He denied it,” Bin al Shibh’s attorney, Jim Harrington, said Tuesday evening. Harrington said his team pointedly asked the linguist whether he had “participated in any interrogation, questioning or done any work with respect to detainees. Any place. His résumé denies it. It says he worked someplace else — Reston, Va., from 2002 to 2006.”Bin al Shibh was held in a series of secret overseas prison from his capture in Pakistan on Sept. 11, 2002until his arrival at Guantánamo four years later. Even then, according to the so-called Senate Torture Report, he remained in CIA custody.Defense lawyers want more information.
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  • “We will be filing motions for discovery regarding the former CIA interpreter utilized by Mr. Bin al Shibh’s defense team,” said attorney Cheryl Bormann, defending the alleged terror trainer Walid bin Attash, 36, who she said was shaken at seeing someone from a black site.Bormann also said she would be seeking a court order from Judge Pohl similar to the one Pohl styled after disclosure that FBI agents were investigating and questioning members of the 9/11 defense team: Instructing the defense team members to disclose if they worked for the CIA or a CIA contractor, absolving them of any Non Disclosure Order they signed with the CIA.“If people aren’t truthful about their background,” Bormann said, “there’s really no way for us to determine whether or not they are inappropriately assigned to our team.”
  • Paul Merrell on 12 Feb 15
     
    So, it sounds like the CIA was trying to sneak an agent who understands Arabic into the GITMO defendants' defense team. This, after the FBI was caught interrogating a defense team member. Time to dismiss the charges and free the defendants, I think. These men can't get a fair trial. 
Paul Merrell

CIA Documents Expose the Failed Torture Methods Used on Guantanamo's Most Famous Detain... - 0 views

www.alternet.org/...failed-torture-guantanamo

war & peace CIA torture Zubaydah

shared by Paul Merrell on 18 May 17 - No Cached
  • It is early on in Abu Zubaydah’s time at a CIA black site. He insists to his interrogators that he has no additional information on jihadist operations planned against the US, but his captor won’t stop slapping him. Eventually a hood is placed over Zubaydah's head and he is placed into a confinement box by unseen security officers. He is told this is his new home until he’s prepared to provide information on operations against the US.Several physically stressful hours in the confinement box fail to elicit any intelligence, so Zubaydah’s captors place him in an even smaller box. He makes painful groans and is forced to scoot out of the box on his hindquarters when he’s finally allowed out. He is immediately made to stand and backed up against a wall. Two interrogators begin to double-team him with rapid-fire questions. Zubaydah is told that if he does not cooperate, he will only bring more misery on himself. Again he denies having any additional knowledge, but this time, he isn’t slapped. Instead, Zubaydah is hooded and a water board is brought into the cell.Zubaydah is the first post-9/11 detainee to be waterboarded, and this is his first session. He coughs and vomits. The waterboarding lasts for over two hours, but he still insists he does not have any additional information beyond that which he already provided to the FBI. He is then put into the larger confinement box, where he spends the rest of the evening. The interrogation process resumes in the morning: more slapping, zero new information, and more time in the smaller box.This was a summary of CIA documents obtained by AlterNet’s Grayzone Project. The records were originally obtained by Zubaydah’s defense team through the discovery process and were provided to me by a source familiar with the case who considered their publication critical to the public’s understanding of Zubaydah’s treatment. The vast majority of the documents have not been available to the public prior to this story.
  • As clinically detailed as they are gut-wrenching, the documents comprise hundreds of pages on the interrogation of Zubaydah, perhaps Guantanamo Bay’s most famous detainee. The files revealed here have renewed significance as Zubaydah has decided to testify about conditions at Guantanamo Bay despite the likelihood that it will imperil his legal situation. The records also highlight the methods of psychologist James Mitchell, a top architect of the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation program.” Though Mitchell had previously worked as an Air Force psychologist, the Senate “Torture Report” noted that he had no prior experience as an interrogator. Mitchell’s private contracting company had received over $80 million from the CIA by the time their contract was terminated in 2009. The contract was terminated because, as the CIA Inspector General put it, there was no reason to believe Mitchell’s interrogation techniques were effective or even safe.Mitchell and the US government originally believed Zubaydah to be a top leader of Al Qaeda who had knowledge of imminent plots against the US; however, the government would later concede that Zubaydah was never an Al Qaeda leader but still contend that he poses a threat. According to the US government, Zubaydah "possibly" knew in advance about the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000 and attacks on American embassies in Africa in 1998.After his capture in Pakistan in 2002, Zubaydah was held in CIA black sites for four years where he was subjected to extended torture so intense he lost his left eye. Following his first waterboarding, he was subjected to the same form of torture 82 times. It is unclear the brutal methods applied to Zubaydah’s body elicited any valuable intelligence.
  • Paul Merrell on 18 May 17
     
    In our name, they did this ...
Paul Merrell

'Comprehensive' CIA Torture Report Won't Even Name Well-Known Architects of Torture Pro... - 0 views

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war & peace CIA torture Senate-Intelligence_Committee-Report redactions

shared by Paul Merrell on 23 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • Some familiar names will be missing from the Senate Intelligence Committee's long-awaited report on the CIA's torture program, VICE News has learned.Notably, two retired Air Force psychologists, Dr. Bruce Jessen and Dr. James Mitchell, who have been credited with being the architects of the CIA's so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques," have their names redacted in the 480-page executive summary of the report, according to current and former US officials knowledgeable about the contents of the document.
  • Feinstein's concerns about the redactions led Senator Carl Levin to issue a statement condemning the blacked-out passages, in which he noted that much of the redacted information had already been disclosed in a previous report about the treatment of detainees in custody of the US military. That report was released in 2009 by the Senate Armed Services Committee, of which he is chairman.Specifically, Levin is referring to a section that addresses the CIA's interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, whose interrogation and torture also factors prominently in the Senate Intelligence Committee's executive summary, portions of which have been redacted, officials familiar with the document told VICE News.
  • The CIA has argued that the Intelligence Committee's use of pseudonyms in its executive summary does not provide the officers who were involved in the program with enough cover. People familiar with the document also said it leaves an impression that the agency gave the committee its blessing to partially identify its officers.Officials say the agency is concerned that journalists and human rights researchers will be able to unmask the officers, whose identities, in some cases, are still classified, based on the way the pseudonyms are used and the fact that some information about the individuals has already appeared in previously published reports.The report currently says individual CIA officers and contractors, identified by pseudonyms, were present in unnamed European countries with named CIA captives during particular years. In some cases, those officers are identified with the same pseudonyms in other parts of the report as having been promoted to leadership positions in the CIA, which also makes it easier to identify them.
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  • One version of the Senate Intelligence Committee's executive summary had apparently identified Mitchell and Jessen by name, and a copy of the panel's findings and conclusions obtained by McClatchy Newspapers included a bullet point that said: "Two contract psychologists devised the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques and were central figures in the program's operation."But, according to current and former intelligence officials and committee staffers knowledgeable about the report, the CIA has insisted that the executive summary exclude any reference to Mitchell and Jessen by name, despite the fact that their roles in the program have been widely reported. The issue is part of a larger battle that has surfaced in recent weeks between the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee over the intelligence community's redactions in the executive summary that the committee's chairwoman, Senator Dianne Feinstein, said were excessive.
  • The names of countries where the CIA set up so-called black site prisons have also been redacted."Exposing details of past intelligence cooperation with specific foreign governments could jeopardize current relationships with those governments, cause domestic political upheaval in those countries, and undermine the willingness of foreign intelligence services to work with America in the future," the person familiar with the administration's redactions said.
  • The CIA, which has responded to the Senate's report with a 122-page rebuttal, does not wholly disagree with the Intelligence Committee's findings. But there are vehement disagreements the CIA has with the committee over certain assertions the panel has made involving 10 detainees. The rebuttal includes a list of recommendations the agency intends to implement. The CIA response does not defend the use of torture techniques and it adds that there were instances when the value of intelligence was inflated.With that said, several committee staffers say that the CIA's response asserts that all of the intelligence obtained from detainees was valuable and saved lives. It also says there is no way to determine whether interrogators would have been able to obtain intelligence if the detainee were not tortured.
  • Paul Merrell on 23 Aug 14
     
    Let's keep in mind that the CIA agents' names that CIA wants to keep concealed are required to be arrested and prosecuted as war criminals by a treaty the U.S. is party to, the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. E.g., in Article 6: " Upon being satisfied, after an examination of information available to it, that the circumstances so warrant, any State Party in whose territory a person alleged to have committed any offence referred to in article 4 is present shall take him into custody or take other legal measures to ensure his presence. The custody and other legal measures shall be as provided in the law of that State but may be continued only for such time as is necessary to enable any criminal or extradition proceedings to be instituted." But here we are presented with the CIA attempting to conceal the identities of its officials who committed torture and to retain them as active agents, rather than assisting in their arrest and prosecution. From the same treaty's Article 2: "1. Each State Party shall take effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction. "2. No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture. "3. An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture."  
Paul Merrell

Revealed: Inside the Senate report on CIA interrogations | Al Jazeera America - 0 views

america.aljazeera.com/...reportonciainterrogations.html

war & peace torture Senate-Intelligence-Committee cover-up

shared by Paul Merrell on 20 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • A still-classified report on the CIA's interrogation program established in the wake of 9/11 sparked a furious row last week between the agency and Senate Intelligence Committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein. Al Jazeera has learned from sources familiar with its contents that the committee's report alleges that at least one high-value detainee was subjected to torture techniques that went beyond those authorized by George W. Bush's Justice Department. Two Senate staffers and a U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the information they disclosed remains classified, told Al Jazeera that the committee's analysis of 6 million pages of classified records also found that some of the harsh measures authorized by the Department of Justice had been applied to at least one detainee before such legal authorization was received. They said the report suggests that the CIA knowingly misled the White House, Congress and the Justice Department about the intelligence value of detainee Zain Abidin Mohammed Husain Abu Zubaydah when using his case to argue in favor of harsher interrogation techniques.
  • Even before accessing the documents, committee staffers received crucial information in a briefing from former FBI agent Ali Soufan in early 2008, according to Al Jazeera’s sources. Soufan — who now runs a private security and intelligence consultancy — told the staffers that he had kept meticulous notes about the methods used by a psychologist under CIA contract to interrogate Abu Zubaydah at a CIA black site in Thailand after his capture in Pakistan in March of 2002. Soufan's account, the staffers say, shows that torture techniques were used on Abu Zubaydah even before some had been sanctioned as permissible by the Bush administration.
  • Two Senate staffers told Al Jazeera that the Panetta documents question the Bush administration claims about the efficacy of Abu Zubaydah’s torture, and the staffers noted that some of the techniques to which he was subjected early in his captivity had not yet been authorized.
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  • Soufan described his briefing of Intelligence Committee researchers in his memoir, “The Black Banners.” “In early 2008, in a conference room that is referred to as a sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF), I gave a classified briefing on Abu Zubaydah to staffers of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,” Soufan wrote. “The staffers present were shocked. What I told them contradicted everything they had been told by Bush administration and CIA officials. When the discussion turned to whether I could prove everything I was saying, I told them, ‘Remember, an FBI agent always keep his notes.’ ”  The committee tried to gain access to Soufan’s notes — then in possession of the CIA and FBI — after it launched a review of the agency’s detention and interrogation program in 2009. But Senate investigators were told, according to Al Jazeera’s sources, that Soufan’s notes were missing and could not be found in either the FBI’s or CIA’s computer system, where other classified records about the interrogation program were stored. More than a year later, the notes ended up with the Senate Intelligence Committee, although it's not clear whether they were turned over to committee investigators by the CIA or FBI or if they were in the cache of documents taken by investigators from the secure facility in Northern Virginia in 2010, which Senate staffers refer to as the Panetta review.
  • A few weeks before the 2009 announcement of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation, Abu Zubaydah’s attorney Brent Mickum was invited to meet with committee staffers in a secure conference room in the Senate Hart Office Building in Washington. Mickum recalled in an interview with Al Jazeera that committee staffers were interested in Abu Zubaydah’s recollections. “The committee was talking about torture and whether it was effective,” Mickum said. “I was able to relate to them what Abu Zubaydah told me. We talked about where he was tortured. I told them where we thought he was. I told them that the government confirmed he was never a member of Al-Qaeda. The drawings were then passed around the room.” Mickum and his co-counsel, Amy Jacobsen, presented to the committee staffers a set of ink drawings on yellow legal paper marked top secret by the CIA. Abu Zubaydah, they said, made the sketches to depict his torture and the torture of two other high-value detainees. One of the highly detailed drawings, according to knowledgeable intelligence officials, depict Abu Zubaydah being waterboarded. 
  • Senate staffers told Al Jazeera that Abu Zubaydah’s drawings were used in the report’s narrative but that the CIA objected to including copies of the images as exhibits.
  • When Panetta briefed CIA employees on March 16, 2009, about the Senate Intelligence Committee’s review, he said Feinstein and her Republican counterpart, Kit Bond of Missouri, had “assured” him “that their goal is to draw lessons for future policy decisions, not to punish those who followed guidance from the Department of Justice.” But now that some of the report’s conclusions suggest that some of the techniques used on Abu Zubaydah and other captives either went beyond what was authorized by the Justice Department or were applied before they had been authorized, the congressional staffers and U.S. officials who spoke to Al Jazeera said CIA officials are seeking further assurances against any criminal investigation. Thus far, no such assurances have been given, according to Al Jazeera’s sources, nor is there any indication that the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report would prompt a criminal investigation.
  • Chris Anders, senior legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, told Al Jazeera he's not surprised by the CIA's response, because many of those involved in the creation of the interrogation program still work at the agency and may fear being placed in legal jeopardy.  “Whatever is in the report is big enough and significant enough that the CIA has fought tooth and nail to keep it buried,” Anders said. “If what comes out in this report is as bad as some senators have said, it’s going to require a broader and deeper discussion about what took place, and it will be up to the president and Congress to lead the country through it, figure out what it means and how we need to respond to clean it up.”
Gary Edwards

Ever Wonder How All Those RINOs Got Control Of The GOP? What Conservatives Should Know ... - 0 views

archive.redstate.com/...es_should_know_about_the_repub

rino-repubicans establishment-repubicans globalist-repubicans ruling-class-elites

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Oct 11
     
    List of RiNO Repubicans for the infamous 2008 Repubican Mainstreet Project. excerpt: Have you ever wondered where all those RINOs go to scheme and subvert the goals of Conservatives in the Republican Party and how they maintain "Centrist", (read Liberal), control of a center right party? Ever wonder what ever happened to the Gingrich Revolution when the GOP stormed Washington and gained control of the Congress for the first time in 40 years? Have you ever wanted to know why we weren't able to complete the Contract with America or how the losses of 2006 were engineered and who engineered them? Well...look no farther. I stumbled upon The Republican Mainstreet Project while researching information for another article about RINOS who have been or are about to be primaried this year and the losses by Chaffee and other RINOS in 2006 because Conservatives stayed home and refused to vote for them! I've heard of the Republican Main Street Project but never paid any attention to who they were or what they were about over the years since the Republican sweeps in the 1994 elections. Well...Today I got an answer to that and many questions I've asked myself since 1994. From their Web Site:
Paul Merrell

9/11 lawyers trade barbs over CIA 'black site' translator turned Guantánamo d... - 0 views

www.miamiherald.com/...article9765239.html

war & peace 9-11 terrorists™ litigation CIA torture black-sites translator

shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • The Sept. 11 trial judge and prosecutors struggled Wednesday to find a way forward out of the startling discovery that a former CIA linguist tasked to translate for an alleged 9/11 plotter earlier worked at a secret CIA prison.Defense lawyers, who say their clients were tortured in the agency’s secret prison network, asked to take sworn testimony from the man. They also asked the judge to halt the intended two-week pretrial hearing, the first since August, to conduct an inquiry and perhaps new background checks on defense team staff in the complex, five-man death-penalty prosecution. About 130 people, both military and civilian, work at the Office of the Chief Defense Counsel.“This has so decimated any trust on this team,” said defense attorney Cheryl Bormann, her voice cracking, “we can't go forward.”
  • Army Col. James L. Pohl, the judge, said he’d hear from prosecutors Thursday on the request to question the former CIA linguist who had been working temporarily for the team representing accused terrorist Ramzi Bin al Shibh since August. A new translator, who just got his security clearance on Friday, was flown in Tuesday from Miami. Meantime, defense and prosecution attorneys traded accusations over how the contract linguist came to sit beside Bin al Shibh on Monday in a courtroom where four of the five accused 9/11 conspirators said they recognized him from their years of secret detention.
  • War court Arabic language linguists come from a pool of names provided by approved Pentagon contractors. They require special security clearances that allow them to work with secret intelligence. Bin al Shibh’s lead counsel, Jim Harrington, said after court that he and a co-counsel vetted the linguist in August, and he had no idea of the translator’s previous CIA work before the alleged terrorist disclosed it in court Monday.“The problem is I cannot trust him because he was working at the black site with the CIA, and we know him from there,” said Bin al Shibh, a Yemeni accused of functioning as a 9/11 plot deputy.
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  • Bormann wants to investigate “every defense team member” past and present for undisclosed previous work, and told the judge the prosecution filing on the CIA linguist episode was an “out and out falsehood.” Nevin asked the judge to suspend proceedings “until we can get to the bottom of this issue.”The issue is the latest to beleaguer preparation for the trial of the five men accused of conspiring in the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, and, as defense lawyers see it, fodder for an eventual motion to dismiss the case for outrageous government conduct.It had already been sidelined by what defense lawyers called an FBI infiltration of their privilege by agents secretly questioning team members then having them sign non-disclosure agreements.
  • It was the FBI snooping episode that set up this week’s CIA linguist scandal. Little is known about what the FBI was investigating in secret approaches and questioning of defense teams. But as a result, Bin al Shibh’s earlier translator lost his security clearance and his job.They settled on a new permanent linguist, who didn’t arrive on this remote base until Tuesday.In between, the temporary translator who worked at a CIA black site had been filling in since August, off and on, according to Harrington — and had met Bin al Shibh earlier.
  • But Bin al Shibh only disclosed in court Monday that he recognized the linguist from a secret prison where Bin al Shibh had been held captive before his arrival at Guantánamo in 2006. Accused accomplices Ammar al Baluchi and Walid bin Attash recognized him, too, as did Mohammed. The three were apparently seeing the translator for the first time at Guantánamo in court Monday.
  • Paul Merrell on 13 Feb 15
     
    Dismissal for outrageous conduct is what needs to happen. And the officials who ordered the penetration of the defense team in the FBI and CIA need to be dismissed from government and prosecuted criminally. 
Paul Merrell

Big Oil's "Sore Losers" Lead the Drive to War » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts... - 0 views

www.counterpunch.org/...e-losers-lead-the-drive-to-war

war & peace Ukraine Russia U.S.-foreign-policy pipelinestan reserve currrencies

shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Following a 13 year rampage that has reduced large swathes of Central Asia and the Middle East to anarchy and ruin, the US military juggernaut has finally met its match on a small peninsula in southeastern Ukraine that serves as the primary operating base for Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. Crimea is the door through which Washington must pass if it intends to extend its forward-operating bases throughout Eurasia, seize control of vital pipeline corridors and resources, and establish itself as the dominant military/economic power-player in the new century. Unfortunately, for Washington, Moscow has no intention of withdrawing from the Crimea or relinquishing control of its critical military outpost in Sevastopol. That means that the Crimea–which has been invaded by the Cimmerians, Bulgars, Greeks, Scythians, Goths, Huns, Khazars, Ottomans, Turks, Mongols, and Germans–could see another conflagration in the months ahead, perhaps, triggering a Third World War, the collapse of the existing global security structure, and a new world order, albeit quite different from the one imagined by the fantasists at the Council on Foreign Relations and the other far-right think tanks that guide US foreign policy and who are responsible for the present crisis.
  • How Washington conducts itself in this new conflict will tell us whether the authors of the War on Terror–that public relations hoax that concealed the goals of eviscerated civil liberties and one world government–were really serious about actualizing their NWO vision or if it was merely the collective pipedream of corporate CEOs and bored bankers with too much time on their hands. In the Crimea, the empire faces a real adversary, not a disparate group of Kalashinov-waving jihadis in flip-flops. This is the Russian Army; they know how to defend themselves and they are prepared to do so. That puts the ball in Obama’s court. It’s up to him and his crackpot “Grand Chessboard” advisors to decide how far they want to push this. Do they want to intensify the rhetoric and ratchet up the sanctions until blows are exchanged, or pick up their chips and walk away before things get out of hand? Do they want to risk it all on one daredevil roll of the dice or move on to Plan B? That’s the question. Whatever US policymakers decide, one thing is certain, Moscow is not going to budge. Their back is already against the wall. Besides, they know that a lunatic with a knife is on the loose, and they’re ready to do whatever is required to protect their people. If Washington decides to cross that line and provoke a fight, then there’s going to trouble. It’s as simple as that. Perma-hawk, John McCain thinks that Obama should take off the gloves and show Putin who’s boss. In an interview with TIME magazine McCain said “This is a chess match reminiscent of the Cold War and we need to realize that and act accordingly…We need to take certain measures that would convince Putin that there is a very high cost to actions that he is taking now.” “High cost” says McCain, but high cost for who?
  • What McCain fails to realize is that this is not Afghanistan and Obama is not in a spitting match with puppet Karzai. Leveling sanctions against Moscow will have significant consequences, the likes of which could cause real harm to US interests. Did we mention that “ExxonMobil’s biggest non-US oil project is a collaboration with Russia’s Rosneft in the Arctic, where it has billions of dollars of investments at stake.” What if Putin decides that it’s no longer in Moscow’s interest to honor contracts that were made with US corporations? What do you think the reaction of shareholders will be to that news? And that’s just one example. There are many more. Any confrontation with Russia will result in asymmetrical attacks on the dollar, the bond market, and oil supplies. Maybe the US could defeat Russian forces in the Crimea. Maybe they could sink the fleet and rout the troops, but there’ll be a heavy price to pay and no one will be happy with the outcome.
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  • Here’s a clip from an article at Testosterone Pit that sums it up nicely: “Sergei Glazyev, the most hardline of Putin’s advisors, sketched the retaliation strategy: Drop the dollar, sell US Treasuries, encourage Russian companies to default on their dollar-denominated debts, and create an alternative currency system with the BRICS and hydrocarbon producers like Venezuela and Iran… Putin’s ally and trusted friend, Rosneft president Igor Sechin…suggested that it was “advisable to create an international stock-exchange for the participating countries, where transactions could be registered with the use of regional currencies.” (From Now On, No Compromises Are Possible For Russia, Testosterone Pit)
  • As the US continues to abuse its power, these changes become more and more necessary. Foreign governments must form new alliances in order to abandon the present system–the “dollar system”–and establish greater parity between nation-states, the very nation-states that Washington is destroying one-by-one to establish its ghoulish vision of global corporate utopia. The only way to derail that project is by exposing the glaring weakness in the system itself, which is the use of an international currency that is backed by $15 trillion in government debt, $4 trillion in Federal Reserve debt, and trillions more in unpaid and unpayable federal obligations. Whatever steps Moscow takes to abort the current system and replace the world’s reserve currency with money that represents a fair store of value, should be applauded. Washington’s reckless and homicidal behavior around the world make it particularly unsuitable as the de facto steward of the global financial system or to enjoy seigniorage, which allows the US to play banker to the rest of the world. The dollar is the foundation upon which rests the three pillars of imperial strength; political, economic and military. Remove that foundation and the entire edifice comes crashing to earth. Having abused that power, by killing and maiming millions of people across the planet; the world needs to transition to another, more benign way of consummating its business transactions, preferably a currency that is not backed by the blood and misery of innocent victims.
  • Paul Volcker summed up the feelings of many dollar-critics in 2010 when he had this to say: “The growing sense around much of the world is that we have lost both relative economic strength and more important, we have lost a coherent successful governing model to be emulated by the rest of the world. Instead, we’re faced with broken financial markets, underperformance of our economy and a fractious political climate.” America is irreparably broken and Washington is a moral swamp. The world needs regime change; new leaders, new direction and a different system.
  • In our last article, we tried to draw attention to the role of big oil in the present crisis. Author Nafeez Ahmed expands on that theme in a “must read” article in Monday’s Guardian. Check out this brief excerpt from Ahmed’s piece titled “Ukraine crisis is about Great Power oil, gas pipeline rivalry”: “Ukraine is increasingly perceived to be critically situated in the emerging battle to dominate energy transport corridors linking the oil and natural gas reserves of the Caspian basin to European markets… Considerable competition has already emerged over the construction of pipelines. Whether Ukraine will provide alternative routes helping to diversify access, as the West would prefer, or ‘find itself forced to play the role of a Russian subsidiary,’ remains to be seen.” (Guardian) The western oil giants have been playing “catch up” for more than a decade with Putin checkmating them at every turn. As it happens, the wily KGB alum has turned out to be a better businessman than any of his competitors, essentially whooping them at their own game, using the free market to extend his network of pipelines across Central Asia and into Europe. That’s what the current crisis is all about.
Gary Edwards

There Are No Coincidences - 3 views

This commentary is currently making the rounds of the Bay Area Patriots circles: ITS ALL TRUE :: Any one of these 'coincidences' when taken singularly appear to not mean much, but when taken as a ...

Obama-coincidences Marxism Marxist-Muslim

started by Gary Edwards on 02 Jul 13 no follow-up yet
Paul Merrell

US sues 16 banks for rigging Libor rate - Americas - Al Jazeera English - 0 views

www.aljazeera.com/...r-rate-201431544528243637.html

banksters libor fraud litigation

shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • The US Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) has sued 16 big banks that set a key global interest rate, accusing them of fraud and conspiring to keep the rate low to enrich themselves. The banks, which include Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase in the US, are among the world's largest. The FDIC says it is seeking to recover losses suffered from the rate manipulation by 10 US banks that failed during the financial crisis and were taken over by the agency. The civil lawsuit was filed on Friday in federal court in Manhattan, the Associated Press reported. The banks rigged the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, from August 2007 to at least mid-2011, the FDIC alleged. The Libor affects trillions of dollars in contracts around the world, including mortgages, bonds and consumer loans. A British banking trade group sets the Libor every morning after the 16 international banks submit estimates of what it costs them to borrow. The FDIC also sued that trade group, the British Bankers' Association.
  • By submitting false estimates of their borrowing costs used to calculate Libor, the 16 banks "fraudulently and collusively suppressed [the Libor rate], and they did so to their advantage," the FDIC said in the suit.
  • Four of the banks - Britain's Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland, Switzerland's biggest bank UBS and Rabobank of the Netherlands - have previously paid a total of about $3.6bn to settle US and European regulators' charges of rigging the Libor. The banks signed agreements with the US Justice Department that allow them to avoid criminal prosecution if they meet certain conditions. Under a change announced last July, the London-based company that owns the New York Stock Exchange, NYSE Euronext, will take over supervising the setting of Libor from the British Bankers' Association. The changeover is scheduled to be completed by early next year.
Paul Merrell

M of A - Obama and Putin Agreed To Screw Erdogan? - 0 views

www.moonofalabama.org/...n-agreed-to-screw-erdogan.html

war & peace Syria Turkey Kurds safe-zones U.S.-foreign-policy

shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • It's official! The New York Times finally admits that the "CIA rebels" in Syria who received tons of TOW anti-tank missiles are working under the field command of al-Qaeda/Jabhat al Nusra: Rebel commanders scoffed when asked about reports of the delivery of 500 TOWs from Saudi Arabia, saying it was an insignificant number compared with what is available. Saudi Arabia in 2013 ordered more than 13,000 of them. Given that American weapons contracts require disclosure of the “end user,” insurgents said they were being delivered with Washington’s approval. But, be assured, because these "CIA rebels" feel bad about it, they are still "moderate" or somewhat "relative moderate". Advancing alongside the Islamist groups, and sometimes aiding them, have been several of the relatively secular groups, like the Free Syrian Army, which have gained new prominence and status because of their access to the TOWs. ... It is a tactical alliance that Free Syrian Army commanders describe as an uncomfortable marriage of necessity, because they cannot operate without the consent of the larger and stronger Nusra Front. But Mr. Assad and his allies cite the arrangement as proof that there is little difference between insurgent groups, calling them all terrorists that are legitimate targets.
  • That these "relative secular" al-Qaeda auxiliaries are threatening suicide attacks against Russians only confirms their secularism. Judging from the reader comments to that NYT piece the U.S. people are pretty aghast about this now openly admitted cooperation. They, and a realist op-ed in the NYT, call for cooperation with Russia and the Syrian government. There may already be more cooperation between Russia and the U.S. than we can see. At least that is what the Turkish President Erdogan perceives. Yesterday the U.S. dropped 50 tons of small weapons and munition to Kurdish fighters in north east Syria. According the U.S. justification for this those Kurds along with some Arab Syrian tribals are supposed to attack the Islamic State in Raqqa. (Those Arab tribals are by the way just a bunch of worthless thieves. This according to the Voice of America(!).) But the Kurds do not seem to know about those Raqqa plans anyway. They have different aims:
  • U.S. officials hope the YPG will now turn its attention to Raqqa, the Syrian city that is the defacto capital of the Islamic State, which lies just 60 miles south of Tal Abyad, a border town the YPG seized from the Islamic State in June, with U.S. help. But PYD spokesman Can said the Kurdish group’s first priority is to link the Kurdish enclave of Afrin, northwest of the Syrian city of Aleppo, with Kobani, the Kurdish enclave northeast of Aleppo. That would mean clearing the Islamic State from villages along 60 miles of the Turkey-Syria border, in particular the border town of Jarablus. “Our prime and most important goal is to liberate Jarablus and to connect Kobani with Afrin,” Can told McClatchy. Capturing Raqqa, a mostly Arab city, is “not really” a PYD objective, he said. “Not for now,” he said. That is just as I suspected the Kurds to react. But why did the U.S. officials claim that these Kurds and the collection of thieves would attack Raqqa? Did they not coordinate with them or was that Raqqa story a ruse? The Turks seem to assume such and they accuse the U.S. as well as Russia of coordinating with the Kurds to seal the border with Turkey: Turkey warns U.S., Russia against backing Kurdish militia in Syria
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  • Turkey has warned the United States and Russia it will not tolerate Kurdish territorial gains by Kurdish militia close to its frontiers in north-western Syria, two senior officials said. "This is clear cut for us and there is no joking about it," one official said of the possibility of Syrian Kurdish militia crossing the Euphrates to extend control along Turkish borders from Iraq's Kurdistan region towards the Mediterranean coast. ... "The PYD has been getting closer with both the United States and Russia of late. We view the PYD as a terrorist group and we want all countries to consider the consequences of their cooperation," one of the Turkish officials said. Turkey suspects Russia, which launched air strikes in Syria two weeks ago, has also been lending support to the YPG and PYD. "With support from Russia, the PYD is trying to capture land between Jarablus and Azaz, going west of the Euphrates. We will never accept this," the official said.
  • Is there now really coordination between Russia and the U.S. to seal the Syrian-Turkish border witch would cut off the Islamic State but also the al-Qaeda "CIA rebels" from their supplies? This would destroy all Turkish plans for Syria: a "safe zone" in Syria under Turkman control, a Sunni ruled pipeline corridor from Qatar to Europe, the Turkish-Ottoman annexation of Aleppo. Turkey would be pushed back into a secondary role. Do Russia and the U.S. now really make common cause and decided to screw Erdogan? This would make sense if the destruction of the Islamic State and all other terrorists in Syria is the common aim. That would be a change in the Obama administration's policy. Up to now it only helped the "salafist principality" to grow and never seriously attacked it. And if there is such cooperation why does the U.S still deliver thousands of TOWs to al-Qaeda which only kill more Syrians and prolong the fighting?
  • Paul Merrell on 13 Oct 15
     
    Cutting off the ISIL and al-Nusrah supply lines from Turkey would indeed create problems for Turkish (and U.S. neocon) plans. 
Paul Merrell

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

www.informationclearinghouse.info/article41455.htm

incarceration-nation for-profit-prisons boycott

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

US-Saudi Plan: Let 9,000 ISIS Fighters Walk Free from Mosul - to Fight in Syria - 0 views

21stcenturywire.com/...e-from-mosul-to-fight-in-syria

war & peace U.S.-foreign-policy ISIL Mosul Deir-Ezzor U.S. Saudis deal

shared by Paul Merrell on 17 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Judging by both the words, and deeds of the Obama White House and its political ‘diplomatic’ appointees led by perfidious John Kerry and caustic Samantha Power – all evidence to date points to the US wanting to escalate its war on Syria – while happily baiting a military confrontation, and ‘World War‘ scenario with Russia and its allies in the process.  If this latest leak is indeed true – and time will certainly tell whether or not it is, it would constitute one of the most egregious violations of both US and international law – by the United States government and its theocratic dictator partner in Saudi Arabia. Washington’s own anti-terror legislation expressly forbids colluding to provide logistical or material support for terrorist groups, and this US-Saudi venture would be the latest in a long list of violations…
  • Here’s what makes this a potential shocker: the operation allows for safe passage for 9,000 ISIS fighters on the proviso that they are transferred from Iraq to eastern Syria in order to help US plans for “regime change” there.  “At the time of the assault, coalition aircraft would strike only on a pre-agreed detached buildings in the city, which are empty, the source said.” “According to him [the source], the plan of Washington and Riyadh also provides that the rebels move from Mosul to Syria for the attack on the government-controlled town of troops.” Essentially, Washington and Saudi Arabia, will allow 9,000 ISIS (Islamic State) fighter FREE passage into Syria if they agree to join Washington’s “regime change” operations there. This could also include, “… eastern regions of Syria to follow a major offensive operation, which involves the capture of Deir ez-Zor and Palmyra,” the source added. Before you write this story off as some ornate Russian psychological operation, consider the long trend arch. The US along with its generous Gulf sidekicks, have already established a solid track record of aiding and abetting ISIS – not just in Syria, but in Iraq too. The record shows that the US is guilty on a number of counts…
  • If the Mosul leak is true, then it wouldn’t be the first time that the US has provided cover in the military pantomime the world has come to know as “the fight against ISIS.” When large ISIS convoys crossed the Syrian desert to invade and occupy the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra in May 2015, the US ‘Coalition’ airforce did nothing, and allowed ISIS to take and destroy part of the world’s great historic cultural heritage, along with the murder of scores of innocent civilians. Professor Tim Anderson from Sydney University states: “U.S. weapons with Israeli ammunition were used by Islamic State group when taking over Palmyra. The extremists also had U.S. military rations.” “The U.S., which since 2014 claimed to be conducting a war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, and which had air power and sophisticated surveillance of the region, did nothing to stop the huge ISIS advance on Palmyra.” The US isn’t even shy about its laissez-faire policy with ISIS in the field, with the New York Times openly boasting, “Any airstrikes against Islamic State militants in and around Palmyra would probably benefit the forces of President Bashar al-Assad. So far, United States-led airstrikes in Syria have largely focused on areas far outside government control, to avoid the perception of aiding a leader whose ouster President Obama has called for.”
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  • More importantly however, is what kind of message an US statement like that sends to ISIS, as well as Al Nusra and other terrorist brigades inside Syria, which is basically, “we do not need to worry about US air strikes, only Syrian Army and Russian strikes.” This situation really sums up the utter fraud and contempt of the US deception in Syria, and it’s no surprise that the Russian Foreign Ministry are reticent to extend themselves any more where the US is concerned. Then, in March 2016, when ISIS fled Palmyra, back across the desert towards Deir ez-Zor and Raqqa – the great and powerful US ‘Coalition’ airforce actually helped ISIS in a number of ways, including allowing them free passage once more. In late August, we were told that the Turkish Army, alongside “allied Syrian rebels” (terrorist group Faylaq al-Sham) backed by the US air cover, invaded Syria in order to capture the “ISIS-held” town of Jarabulus, Syria, this supposedly to cut off ISIS’s last open route into Turkey. But what happened to ISIS? The NYT even admitted that, “… it appeared that most of the militants had fled without a fight.” Here, ISIS appears to have been given advanced warning – by either US or Turkish intelligence, as they left the contested town of Jarabulus quietly, but in droves. In reality, Turkey twisted this operation in order to attack and degrade Kurdish militias including the US-backed artificial construct called the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), and pro-Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) and Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), the Syrian affiliate of the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Iraq and Turkey – all of whom are meant to be fighting ISIS. Instead, they are now busy dodging Turkish artillery rounds. Confusing, yes, but true nonetheless.
  • It’s also common knowledge now, that top of the line US weaponry is being used by ISIS, both in Iraq, in Afghanistan and in Syria as well. In fact, if not for US weapons and supplies (along with US air intervention, or noninterventions), ISIS would have struggled to maintain many of the strategic positions it enjoys today. For the last 3 years, US officials have been dodging this issue, and when they do admit this is true, their patronizing party line is that, “this must be a mistake, if they do have US weapons, we didn’t mean it.” As if the world was born yesterday. Perhaps the most flagrant violation by the US-led forces in aiding and abetting ISIS took place on Sept 17, 2016, when the US-led Coalition bombed Syrian Army positions outside of Deir ez-Zor near al-Tharda Mountain, killing some 80 soldiers and injuring 100 more.  As if by design, an ISIS offensive began immediately following the US massacre of Syrian soldiers. Clearly, this bold move by the Pentagon paved the way for a major ISIS advance. To any normal observer, the US attack was a belligerent act of war that effective destroyed an already fragile bilateral ceasefire agreement, and yet the US response was to somehow blame Russia for calling an emergency UNSC meeting to discuss the incident. Judging by this response, it’s pretty clear that US wants to see the Syrian Conflict carry on for a while, and it will need groups like ISIS to make that happen.
  • The other problem with Washington’s hollow righteousness in the Middle East is that there are key members of the US-led “Coalition” who are financing ISIS, Al Nusra Front, Nour al Din Zinki, and Arar al Sham (all ‘moderate’ terrorists we’re told) militants in Syria, Iraq and beyond. This fact was recently admitted by former US Secretary of State and Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, as revealed in this week’s batch of Wikileaks emails. Clinton writes: “While this military/para-military operation is moving forward, we need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region.”  Add to that the multiple exposures over the last 3 years of the US CIA illegally trafficking lethal arms to Al Nusra and other terrorists through covert operations like Timber Sycamore. Still, US and NATO member state officials and their media gatekeepers continue to deny it and play dumb, rather than come clean that the United States and its ‘partners’ in the region are helping, not hindering ISIS terrorism. Some might ask: why would they do a thing like that? By now, the answer should be simple, but threefold:
  • ISIS is still one of Washington’s best hope for continuing instability, and “regime change” in Syria. The existence of ISIS in Syria and Iraq guarantees that Washington can invite itself to the party.  The ISIS brand has been a boon for the global military industrial complex and all of its bottom-feeder businesses and ‘security’ contract firms. What’s so comical yet even more tragic, is how prominent the topic of “ISIS” factors into all of the vapid ‘national security’ debates and media panels in this year’s US Presidential election, and in the dumbed-down ‘coverage’ of the delusional US mainstream media, led by Pentagon surrogate CNN, and hopeless FOX News. Judging by their prosaic ‘coverage’, neither the networks, nor Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump have the slightest clue of what the reality on the ground is. Instead we here, “My ISIS plan is better than yours!” The US political conversation has gone beyond ridiculousness. The corps of US military and CIA media spokesman aren’t much better. The sad part is some of them do know what is really happening, but would rather lie to the American public. With so much double dealing, who can you trust? Certainly not anyone in Washington. More on the White House’s latest dangerous proposition….
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