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Speaking to Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine in July 2015, Assange suggested that institutions within the international relations discipline have failed to understand the intersection between current geopolitical and technological developments. Specifically, Assange charged that the US journal International Studies Quarterly (ISQ), published by the prestigious International Studies Association (ISA), would not accept manuscripts based on WikiLeaks’ material. Professor of international politics Daniel W. Drezner hit back on July 30 in The Washington Post, arguing that there were other explanations for why the journal was not publishing WikiLeaks’ material. However, he did concede that it is possible that the “structural forces” opposing WikiLeaks were so powerful that a scholar would eschew WikiLeaks’ publications for “fear of being blackballed”. For the thousands of undergraduate to PhD students, fellows and academic researchers facing a precarious employment market, self-censorship for fear of freezing one’s career is not unlikely. One publicised incident from November 2010 concerning the office of career services at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), which according to The New York Times “grooms future diplomats”, provides the perfect illustration. That year the office sent an email to students warning them against commenting on or posting WikiLeaks’ documents on social media because “engaging in these activities would call into question your ability to deal with confidential information, which is part of most positions with the federal government”. The warning came to the office through a SIPA alumnus working at the State Department.

Years later, the tone of the warning continued to reverberate through the halls of one of the most reputable universities in the world. In documenting human rights abuses in June 2013 a Columbia University graduate class produced the anonymous academic paper “WikiLeaks and Iraq Body Count: the sum of parts may not add up to the whole — a comparison of two tallies of Iraqi civilian deaths”. The acknowledgements section of their report refers to the 2010 warning email and states that in light of that email it would be “unwise and perhaps unethical to acknowledge all the participating students by name”. Others participating in a peer-review process have cited additional factors curtailing their use of comprehensive and illuminating WikiLeaks publications. Former US presidential candidate for the Green Party Cynthia McKinney, for example, says that she was forced to scrub her PhD dissertation from any reference of WikiLeaks material. However Drezner, who is an ISA member and on the ISQ’s web advisory board, claims that WikiLeaks’ published diplomatic cables “are not nearly as significant as Assange believes” and that the “academic universe is indifferent to WikiLeaks”. A surprising claim, given that international human rights courts have not been indifferent to evidence derived from WikiLeaks’ published cables, including cables that show the insidious ways in which European officials attempt to conceal CIA torture in secret prisons.

To help address the gap in scholarly analysis of the more than 2 million US diplomatic cables and State Department records published by WikiLeaks since 2010, WikiLeaks has produced a new book, The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to US Empire, published September 7, 2015. The book brings together journalists, researchers and experts on international law and foreign policy to examine the current cables and records. The documents are extensive. They expose US efforts —  across Bush and Obama administrations — to use bribes and threats to keep the US protected from facing war crimes allegations, conveying the fading effervescence of concepts such as “international justice” or “rule of law” in the face of a superpower that clearly believes that “might makes right”. Analysts review the efforts US diplomats take to maintain ties with dictators. They examine the meaning of human rights in the context of a global “War on Terror”. Like the cables they seek to illuminate, the 18 chapters of the book touch upon most major regions of the world. Experts on US foreign policy such as Robert Naiman, Stephen Zunes and Gareth Porter examine cables that reveal US meddling in Syria, US acceptance of Israeli violations of international law, and how the US dealt with the International Atomic Energy Agency in relation to Iranian nuclear development. The book offers a user guide written by WikiLeaks’ investigations editor Sarah Harrison on how to research WikiLeaks’ cables including meta data and content.

Following the attempt on Venezuelan Nicolas Maduro’s life with two explosive-laden drones on Saturday, the President promised to get to the bottom of the failed plot. Last night he showed that his government has learned some things at least, and Maduro says there is still more evidence to come. Prior to releasing the evidence, Maduro announced that he would be showing off what Venezuelan security had found late Monday night. According to Maduro at the time the evidence backed up the initial claims he had made right after the assassination attempt that “there is sufficient evidence of the participation of the outgoing Colombian government of President Juan Manuel Santos.” On Tuesday night Maduro presented the evidence to the people of Venezuela in a televised address. Much of what Maduro presented seems to confirm his conclusions and exposes a wider network of the forces plotting to end his life, and the Bolivarian revolution.

Late Tuesday night Maduro took to Twitter to announce that he would “be presenting strong evidence of the links that the Colombian oligarchy has with the events on Avenida Bolivar” in a few hours. In this post, Maduro promised that during his presentation that he would show that Venezuela’s security services “have the location, the names of the place in Chinacota Norte de Santander where they trained, the assassins, the terrorists,” and have also captured all those directly involved with the terrorist attack. Maduro’s final presentation late Tuesday shined even more light on the events of Saturday, including where the drone was controlled from. The Venezuelan Military also confirmed that the drones were stopped by signal jammers near the stage and that’s what caused them to crash and explode before reaching Maduro. According to Venezuelan intelligence, this attack was no one-off either, as the attackers had trained for months in the Colombian town of Chinacota, in the northern border province of Santander. According to Maduro, the assassination was originally planned for Venezuela’s Independence Day on July 5th but was delayed due to a lack of preparation. The military arrested two of the drone pilots minutes after the attack as well as four other conspirators in the days following the attempt on Maduro’s life. Two names of terrorists involved with the plot have been released so far, they are Rayder Russo, a resident of Colombia, and Osman Delgado, a resident of the United States. Earlier today, Venezuelan Attorney General, Tarek William Saab, said this list of suspectshas also grown since the attack to include another 19 individuals. According to the AG, many of these newly identified plotters are not actually in Venezuela so “The Public Ministry will send requests to the United States and Colombia for their cooperation to extradite those involved in this act.”

A contractor working for the National Security Agency (NSA) was arrested by the FBI following his alleged theft of “state secrets.” More specifically, the contractor, Harold Thomas Martin, is charged with stealing highly classified source codes developed to covertly hack the networks of foreign governments, according to several senior law enforcement and intelligence officials. The Justice Department has said that these stolen materials were “critical to national security.” Martin was employed by Booz Allen Hamilton, the company responsible for most of the NSA’s most sensitive cyber-operations. Edward Snowden, the most well-known NSA whistleblower, also worked for Booz Allen Hamilton until he fled to Hong Kong in 2013 where he revealed a trove of documents exposing the massive scope of the NSA dragnet surveillance. That surveillance system was shown to have targeted untold numbers of innocent Americans. According to the New York Times, the theft “raises the embarrassing prospect” that an NSA insider managed to steal highly damaging secret information from the NSA for the second time in three years, not to mention the “Shadow Broker” hack this past August, which made classified NSA hacking tools available to the public.

Snowden himself took to Twitter to comment on the arrest. In a tweet, he said the news of Martin’s arrest “is huge” and asked, “Did the FBI secretly arrest the person behind the reports [that the] NSA sat on huge flaws in US products?” It is currently unknown if Martin was connected to those reports as well.

It also remains to be seen what Martin’s motivations were in removing classified data from the NSA. Though many suspect that he planned to follow in Snowden’s footsteps, the government will more likely argue that he had planned to commit espionage by selling state secrets to “adversaries.” According to the New York Times article on the arrest, Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea are named as examples of the “adversaries” who would have been targeted by the NSA codes that Martin is accused of stealing. However, Snowden revealed widespread US spying on foreign governments including several US allies such as France and Germany. This suggests that the stolen “source codes” were likely utilized on a much broader scale.

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is a controversial character. But there’s no denying the emails he has picked up from inside the Democrat Party are real, and he’s willing to expose Hillary Clinton. Now, he’s announcing that Hillary Clinton and her State Department were actively arming Islamic jihadists, which includes the Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria. Clinton has repeatedly denied these claims, including during multiple statements while under oath in front of the United States Senate.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Julian, I want to mention something else. In March, you launched a searchable archive for over 30,000 emails and email attachments sent to and from Hillary Clinton’s private email server while she was secretary of state. The 50,547 pages of documents span the time from June 2010 to August 2014; 7,500 of the documents were sent by Hillary Clinton herself. The emails were made available in the form of thousands of PDFs by the U.S. State Department as the result of a Freedom of Information Act request. Why did you do this, and what’s the importance, from your perspective, of being able to create a searchable base? JULIAN ASSANGE:

So, those Hillary Clinton emails, they connect together with the cables that we have published of Hillary Clinton, creating a rich picture of how Hillary Clinton performs in office, but, more broadly, how the U.S. Department of State operates. So, for example, the disastrous, absolutely disastrous intervention in Libya, the destruction of the Gaddafi government, which led to the occupation of ISIS of large segments of that country, weapons flows going over to Syria, being pushed by Hillary Clinton, into jihadists within Syria, including ISIS, that’s there in those emails. There’s more than 1,700 emails in Hillary Clinton’s collection, that we have released, just about Libya alone.

This week the Center for Media Justice, ColorOfChange.org, and New America’s Open Technology Institute filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission alleging the Baltimore police are violating the federal Communications Act by using cell site simulators, also known as Stingrays, that disrupt cellphone calls and interfere with the cellular network—and are doing so in a way that has a disproportionate impact on communities of color. Stingrays operate by mimicking a cell tower and directing all cellphones in a given area to route communications through the Stingray instead of the nearby tower. They are especially pernicious surveillance tools because they collect information on every single phone in a given area—not just the suspect’s phone—this means they allow the police to conduct indiscriminate, dragnet searches. They are also able to locate people inside traditionally-protected private spaces like homes, doctors’ offices, or places of worship. Stingrays can also be configured to capture the content of communications. Because Stingrays operate on the same spectrum as cellular networks but are not actually transmitting communications the way a cell tower would, they interfere with cell phone communications within as much as a 500 meter radius of the device (Baltimore’s devices may be limited to 200 meters). This means that any important phone call placed or text message sent within that radius may not get through. As the complaint notes, “[d]epending on the nature of an emergency, it may be urgently necessary for a caller to reach, for example, a parent or child, doctor, psychiatrist, school, hospital, poison control center, or suicide prevention hotline.” But these and even 911 calls could be blocked.

The Baltimore Police Department could be among the most prolific users of cell site simulator technology in the country. A Baltimore detective testified last year that the BPD used Stingrays 4,300 times between 2007 and 2015. Like other law enforcement agencies, Baltimore has used its devices for major and minor crimes—everything from trying to locate a man who had kidnapped two small children to trying to find another man who took his wife’s cellphone during an argument (and later returned it). According to logs obtained by USA Today, the Baltimore PD also used its Stingrays to locate witnesses, to investigate unarmed robberies, and for mysterious “other” purposes. And like other law enforcement agencies, the Baltimore PD has regularly withheld information about Stingrays from defense attorneys, judges, and the public. Moreover, according to the FCC complaint, the Baltimore PD’s use of Stingrays disproportionately impacts African American communities. Coming on the heels of a scathing Department of Justice report finding “BPD engages in a pattern or practice of conduct that violates the Constitution or federal law,” this may not be surprising, but it still should be shocking. The DOJ’s investigation found that BPD not only regularly makes unconstitutional stops and arrests and uses excessive force within African-American communities but also retaliates against people for constitutionally protected expression, and uses enforcement strategies that produce “severe and unjustified disparities in the rates of stops, searches and arrests of African Americans.”

Adding Stingrays to this mix means that these same communities are subject to more surveillance that chills speech and are less able to make 911 and other emergency calls than communities where the police aren’t regularly using Stingrays. A map included in the FCC complaint shows exactly how this is impacting Baltimore’s African-American communities. It plots hundreds of addresses where USA Today discovered BPD was using Stingrays over a map of Baltimore’s black population based on 2010 Census data included in the DOJ’s recent report:

Though last month’s unilateral bombing of Syria by the U.S., U.K. and France came and went, the threat of foreign military intervention targeting the Syrian government remains, particularly given Syria’s success in defeating the foreign-funded terrorist proxies that have prolonged the Syrian conflict for seven long years. While Israel seems to have taken it upon itself to militarily intervene in Syria to prevent the Syrian government from continuing to reclaim its lost territory, the other major powers that have long sought the end of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad have seemed to step back from intervening in Syria, unless another chemical weapons attack were to take place and be blamed on Assad. For that reason, a recent article, published in early May by Russian news agency RIA Novosti, should raise concern, as it exposes alleged plans for another gas-attack provocation in Syria. According to the report, preparations for a staged chemical weapons attack began late last month as civilians were relocated to a territory near Jafra oil field in Eastern Syria, where they will participate in a staged filming of a chemical-weapons attack scene. According to South Front, a U.S. military garrison was recently established in this area. The report, based on the testimony of an anonymous member of the Syrian security services, claimed that an attack was being planned by U.S. security services and would employ “prohibited substances” against a group of civilians. The source also noted that the operation itself was being led by a former Daesh (ISIS) militant, Mishan Idris Hamash. Though this may seem unusual, the U.S. and its proxy force in Eastern Syria, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), have been known to collaborate with former Daesh forces, including militias composed of former Daesh fighters under the SDF banner. If this report is true, it would not be the first time that such warnings were made public prior to chemical weapons attacks in Syria that were ultimately blamed on the Syrian government. For instance, in late March, the Russian Ministry of Defense had warned that a chemical weapons “provocation” was being planned in Eastern Ghouta by rebel groups in the area as part of a last-ditch attempt to prevent being run out of the Damascus suburb by the Syrian Arab Army. Just a few weeks later, a chemical weapons attack in Douma – widely believed to have been staged – took place and, prior to any investigation, prompted the U.S., U.K. and France to bomb the Syrian government, which they blamed for the attack.

In addition, once Eastern Ghouta had returned to Syrian government control, several chemical weapon laboratories under rebel control were uncovered, revealing that the Syrian rebels are in possession of chemical weapons while chemical weapons stockpiles of the Syrian government were destroyed under international supervision in 2013.

According to sources in oil industry, Iran and India have agreed to bolster bilateral trade using national currencies instead of US dollar which is exposed to Washington's economic pressures. Oil Industry sources have told the media that both countries are in consonance over the barter-like system, wherein Iran would allow India to make a portion of oil payments in Rupee through the state-run UCO Bank, which has no US exposure, reported Sputnik. Expediting the formation of a mechanism to withstand US sanctions, India and Iran have discussed various options, including rupee-rial trade, so that bilateral trade between the two countries continues without a blip.

Donald Trump’s $1 trillion infrastructure plan is not an infrastructure plan and it won’t put $1 trillion of fiscal stimulus into the economy. It’s basically a scheme for handing over public assets to private corporations that will extract maximum profits via user fees and tolls. Because the plan is essentially a boondoggle, it will not lift the economy out of the doldrums, increase activity or boost growth.  Quite the contrary. When the details of how the program is going to be implemented are announced,  public confidence in the Trump administration is going to wither and stock prices are going to plunge.   This scenario cannot be avoided because the penny-pinching conservatives in the House and Senate have already said that they won’t support any plan that is not “revenue neutral” which means that any real $1 trillion spending package is a dead letter.  Thus, it’s only a matter of time before the Trump’s plan is exposed as a fraud and the sh** hits the fan.

Here are more of the details from an article at Slate: “Under Trump’s plan…the federal government would offer tax credits to private investors interested in funding large infrastructure projects, who would put down some of their own money up front, then borrow the rest on the private bond markets. They would eventually earn their profits on the back end from usage fees, such as highway and bridge tolls (if they built a highway or bridge) or higher water rates (if they fixed up some water mains). So instead of paying for their new roads at tax time, Americans would pay for them during their daily commute. And of course, all these private developers would earn a nice return at the end of the day.” (“Donald Trump’s Plan to Privatize America’s Roads and Bridges”, Slate) Normally, fiscal stimulus is financed by increasing the budget deficits, but Maestro Trump has something else up his sleeve.  He wants the big construction companies and private equity firms to stump up the seed money and start the work with the understanding that they’ll be able to impose user fees and tolls on roads and bridges when the work is completed.  For every dollar that corporations spend on rebuilding US infrastructure, they’ll get a dollar back via tax credits, which means that they’ll end up controlling valuable, revenue-generating assets for nothing. The whole thing is a flagrant ripoff that stinks to high heaven.   The corporations rake in hefty profits on sweetheart deals, while the American people get bupkis. Welcome to Trumpworld.  Here’s more background from Trump’s campaign website:

“American Energy and  Infrastructure Act Leverages public-private partnerships, and private investments through tax incentives, to spur $1 trillion in infrastructure investment over ten years. It is revenue neutral.” (Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter”) In practical terms, ‘revenue neutral’ means that every dollar of new spending has to be matched by cuts to other government programs.  So, if there are hidden costs to Trump’s plan, then they’ll have to be paid for by slashing funds for Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, food stamps etc. But, keep in mind, these other programs are much more effective sources of stimulus since the money goes directly to the people who spend it immediately and help grow the economy. Trump’s infrastructure plan doesn’t work like that. A lot of the money will go towards management fees and operational costs leaving fewer dollars to trickle down to low-paid construction workers whose personal consumption drives the economy. Less money for workers means less spending, less activity and weaker growth.

The first “false flag” operation conducted by the CIA’s UMBRAGE program - exposed by Wikileaks’ release of the “Vault 7” documents - may have involved planting “proof” that led to the approval of a request to wiretap Trump Tower last October.

Though Assad has refrained from attacking foreign forces hostile to his regime that are operating within Syria’s borders, this recent escalation has prompted him to step up his rhetoric. In a recent interview with Phoenix TV, Assad stated that “any foreign troops coming to Syria without our invitation or consultation or permission, they are invaders, whether they are American, Turkish or any other one.” Though Assad didn’t specifically single out U.S. troops, he did state the following: “What are they [foreign troops] going to do? To fight ISIS [Islamic State, formerly ISIL]? The Americans lost nearly every war. They lost in Iraq, they had to withdraw at the end. Even in Somalia, let alone Vietnam in the past and Afghanistan.” Assad then added that the U.S. “didn’t succeed anywhere they sent troops, they only create a mess; they are very good in creating problems and destroying, but they are very bad in finding solutions.” “The complexity of this war is the foreign intervention. This is the problem,” he continued.

However, foreign intervention is increasingly seeming more likely than not. According to the head of U.S. Central Command Army General Joseph Votel, once Raqqa is liberated from Islamic State elements, U.S. forces will be “required” to stabilize the region as U.S. officials anticipate that “America’s allies,” i.e. anti-Assad rebels, will need assistance from the U.S. military to establish “Syrian-led peacekeeping efforts” in the area. This is a frank admission that U.S. troops will not be going anywhere even after the Islamic State is removed, despite the fact that the presence of the Islamic State is the only justification the U.S. military has offered for its technically illegal presence within Syria. If this comes to pass, the U.S. will once again be an occupying force in yet another Middle Eastern nation. It seems likely that the U.S. will return to its former mantra “Assad must go” and refocus its efforts on removing Assad from power once and for all.

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.

Russia and Iran have warned the US they will “respond with force” if their own “red lines” are crossed in Syria. Following Friday’s cruise missile strike on a Syrian airbase, in retaliation for the chemical attack on Khan Sheikhoun earlier in the week, the alliance supporting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad made a joint statement threatening action in response to “any breach of red lines from whoever it is”. “What America waged in an aggression on Syria is a crossing of red lines. From now on we will respond with force to any aggressor or any breach of red lines from whoever it is and America knows our ability to respond well,” the group’s joint command centre said.

President Donald Trump is being blocked from knowing he can pardon WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in exchange for information vindicating Russia of hacking allegations, according to Republican California Rep. Dana Rohrabacher. Trump told reporters Sunday that he has “never heard” of a potential deal with Assange. “I think the president’s answer indicates that there is a wall around him that is being created by people who do not want to expose this fraud that there was collusion between our intelligence community and the leaders of the Democratic Party,” Rohrabacher told The Daily Caller Tuesday in a phone interview.

While Trump's Twitter activity from yesterday continues to drive media and political outrage, especially in the UK, and with the focus of the frenzied coverage being that the president retweeted a far-right U.K. leader's "anti-Muslim videos", there is actually something much more interesting concerning the context to the “Muslim Destroys A Statue Of Virgin Mary” video. That particular video shared by the president is from 2013 and shows a Free Syrian Army (FSA) commander named Omar Gharba destroying a Virgin Mary statue as the group invaded a Syrian Christian town. In a geopolitical and deeply ironic twist demonstrating the absurdity and contradictions of US foreign policy, the radical Islamist commander was actually supported by the United States at the time as part of the FSA, which the media and US government deemed "moderate".  So a sitting US president shared a video which reveals a Syrian "rebel" fighter committing war crimes who was part of one of the very groups backed by the CIA as official US policy under the Obama administration. Of course it is likely that Trump himself is not fully aware of this, yet the astounding geopolitical irony in this should not be missed, even as public outrage is reduced to merely discussing "anti-Muslim bigotry" and whether or not Trump is being "presidential".

nd while multiple media outlets, for example NPR, continue to claim the videos are "unverified" and "have no context" or are of "murky origins" (as the Washington Post wrongly claims), this particular video especially was widely shared and discussed among the world's top Syria analysts and Middle East scholars at the time. The video was taken in 2013 and shows the Wahhabi cleric and FSA commander smashing the Christian statue in connection with the US-backed group's prior attack on Yakubiya in Idlib province. The book, The Islamic State: Combating The Caliphate Without Borders, authored by counter-terrorism experts Yonah and Dean Alexander, gives his full name as Omar Gharba al-Khojji and like vast numbers of FSA fighters he eventually jointed ISIS (some online sources alternately list his name as Omar Raghba).

akubiyah was a mostly Christian village principally comprised of Armenian Orthodox and Catholic churches which after being taken over by the FSA was subsequently held by ISIS. The local Christians saw no distinction between the invading FSA and ISIS fighters as it was primarily the US-backed FSA which began massacring Christians and looting churches. Even the US government funded Voice of America news had this to say based on an interview with a Christian survivor: Christian refugees described to VOA the execution of a half dozen of their co-religionists in the northwestern village of al-Yakubiye, in Idlib province, by Sunni Muslims aligned with the Western-backed Free Syrian Army. Rahel, a 45-year-old former teacher, said, “Al Nusra didn’t come to our village; the people who came were from villages close by, and they were Free Syrian Army.”   ...Nearly a third of Syria’s Christians, an estimated 600,000, have fled the country. Before the war, Christians accounted for about 10 percent of Syria’s population of 22 million. And The Daily Beast also confirmed at the time that "nearly all Christians have fled [Yakubiyah] after half a dozen were executed with their heads chopped off and about 20 more were kidnapped" by the US sponsored FSA. Furthermore, an October 2013 report in Arabic media confirmed that, Terrorists belonging to al-Nusra front broke into homes in Yakubiyah in Syria's Idlib province, killed a Chrisitan man and destroyed a Virgin Mary statue. Upon arrival at a house that had the statue of virgin Mary, Wahhabi cleric, Omar Gharba' carried the statue of the Virgin Mary after it was taken over by militants from the "Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant" (ISIL) and broke it by throwing it on the ground. He stated that he and his fellow Wahhabis won't tolerate any form of worship except strict Wahhabism of Saudi Arabia.   "God willing, Only God will be worshipped in the land of the Levant," the terrorist who destroyed the statue said, noting that "no other idol will be worshiped after these days . We won't accept but the religion of Allah and the Sunnah of our Prophet Mohammed bin Abdullah." In 2012 and 2013 Omar Gharba's name appeared somewhat frequently in Western news reports as he was interviewed on a few occasions and presented as a "moderate" rebel, for example by BBC Arabic in 2012. The below video is one such example of Omar Gharba insisting that he and his fellow FSA militants would be tolerant and respectful of Christians and other religious minorities should they inherit power by toppling the Assad government  - though he was subsequently outed as the destroyer of the Virgin Mary statue, as the edit of the video interview makes clear.

US Defense Secretary James Mattis says there is no need to resort to military option against Iran over allegations that Tehran supplies missiles to Yemen. Mattis said he does not see the need for a stepped-up military posture against Iran, the day after Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the United Nations, displayed what she called “concert evidence” that a missile fired last month from Yemen at an airport in the Saudi capital Riyadh had been made in Iran. She called on the international community to join "a united front in resisting this global threat." When asked if he thought such “evidence” warranted an emboldened or expanded military action against Iran, Mattis told reporters at the Pentagon, "Not militarily, no."

US Defense Secretary James Mattis says there is no need to resort to military option against Iran over allegations that Tehran supplies missiles to Yemen. Mattis said he does not see the need for a stepped-up military posture against Iran, the day after Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the United Nations, displayed what she called “concert evidence” that a missile fired last month from Yemen at an airport in the Saudi capital Riyadh had been made in Iran. She called on the international community to join "a united front in resisting this global threat." When asked if he thought such “evidence” warranted an emboldened or expanded military action against Iran, Mattis told reporters at the Pentagon, "Not militarily, no."

“It's the reason Ambassador Haley was there and not one of our generals," he said. "This is a diplomatically-led effort to expose to the world what Iran is up to."

A changing-places moment brought about by Russia-gate is that liberals who are usually more skeptical of U.S. intelligence agencies, especially their evidence-free claims, now question the patriotism of Americans who insist that the intelligence community supply proof to support the dangerous claims about Russian ‘hacking” of Democratic emails especially when some  veteran U.S. government experts say the data would be easily available if the Russians indeed were guilty. One of those experts is William Binney, a former high-level National Security Agency intelligence official who, after his 2001 retirement, blew the whistle on the extraordinary breadth of NSA surveillance programs. His outspoken criticism of the NSA during the George W. Bush administration made him the subject of FBI investigations that included a raid on his home in 2007. Even before Edward Snowden’s NSA whistleblowing, Binney publicly revealed that NSA had access to telecommunications companies’ domestic and international billing records, and that since 9/11 the agency has intercepted some 15 trillion to 20 trillion communications. Snowden has said: “I have tremendous respect for Binney, who did everything he could according to the rules.”

I spoke to Binney on Dec. 28 about Russia-gate and a host of topics having to do with spying and America’s expanding national security state.

Bernstein: Your expertise was in the Soviet Union and so you must know a lot about bugging.  Do you believe that Russia hacked and undermined our last election?  Can Trump thank Russia for the result? Binney:  We at Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) published an article on this in July.  First of all, if any of the data went anywhere across the fiber optic world, the NSA would know.  Just inside the United States, the NSA has over a hundred tap points on the fiber lines, taking in everything.    Mark Klein exposed some of this at the AT&T facility in San Francisco. This is not for foreigners, by the way, this is for targeting US citizens.  If they wanted only foreigners, all they would have to do was look at the transatlantic cables where they surface on the coast of the United States.  But they are not there, they are distributed among the US population. Bernstein: So if, in fact, the Russians were tapping into DNC headquarters, the NSA would absolutely know about it. Binney: Yes, and they would also have trace routes on where they went specifically, in Russia or anywhere else.  If you remember, about three or four years ago, the Chinese hacked into somewhere in the United States and our government came out and confirmed that it was the Chinese who did it, and it came from a specific military facility in Shanghai.  The NSA had these trace route programs embedded by the hundreds across the US and all around the world.

Prominent U.S. senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have joined watchdog groups and banking regulators in calling for a crackdown on dirty money and banks that profit from it in the wake of the FinCEN Files investigation. Sanders and Warren, former candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination who both inspired strong support on the left, called for tougher consequences for banks and their executives who move money linked to crime and corruption.

Sanders’ messages came less than a day after the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ release of FinCEN Files, a global investigation revealing how leading banks allowed trillions of dollars in tainted money to flow freely through the financial system. Based on more than 2,100 secret reports filed by banks to the U.S. Department of Treasury and obtained by BuzzFeed News, the investigation included more than 400 journalists in 88 countries around the world. Warren also called for a crackdown on banks that are complicit in the spread of dirty money, highlighting policy proposals that would strengthen the ability of law enforcement to combat white collar crime. Warren called for the creation of a new unit in the U.S. Treasury Department to investigate financial crimes linked to the flow of dirty money. She also pushed for the passage of the Ending Too Big to Jail Act, a law she proposed in 2018 that would make it easier to hold Wall Street executives criminally accountable when the banks they lead engage in illegal activity.

Elizabeth Rosenberg, a former sanctions official for the U.S. Treasury Department, said the revelations exposed the national security threats posed by banks’ laxity. “The FinCEN Files illustrate the alarming truth that an enormous amount of illicit money is sloshing around our financial system, and that U.S. banks play host and facilitator to rogues and criminals that represent some of America’s most insidious national security threats,” Rosenberg told the Wall Street Journal. Rosenberg urged the passage of stronger transparency laws that crack down on the use of anonymous companies, which are often used for money laundering.