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DOHA: The UAE knew in advance of Israel’s plans for an offensive in Gaza and even offered to fund the operation provided the militant Palestinian outfit Hamas was eliminated in the process, Israel’s Channel 2 claimed in a recent report, according to local Arabic daily Al Sharq. The daily says in a report published today that Israel’s leading national TV station (Channel 2 in Hebrew) disclosed details of secret parleys between the UAE’s foreign minister, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, and his Israeli counterpart, Avigdor Lieberman, in Paris at the end of last month. Both leaders met on the sly in Paris on the sidelines of a meeting of a meeting of foreign ministers from the GCC states and Jordan with US Secretary of State John Kerry. Israel’s foreign minister was also in the city.  The meeting was to discuss the situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian issue.

Al Sharq said the UAE was aware of Israeli’s planned military action in Gaza beforehand and Al Nahyan, at his meeting with Lieberman, expressed his country’s keenness to fund Israeli’s Gaza offensive provided the Hamas movement was annihilated since it had close links to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is reportedly urging U.S. lawmakers to protect his country from Palestinian claims that Israel engaged in “war crimes” during recent Gaza fighting that left nearly 1,900 Palestinians dead. A top Israeli lawmaker told The New York Post that Netanyahu is urging U.S. lawmakers to “help Israel avoid war crimes charges.” The Israeli leader is reportedly appealing to American legislators to resist a seemingly global backlash against the Gaza fighting, saying that Israel took “extraordinary measures” to avoid civilian deaths in the recent month-long conflict.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is reportedly urging U.S. lawmakers to protect his country from Palestinian claims that Israel engaged in “war crimes” during recent Gaza fighting that left nearly 1,900 Palestinians dead. A top Israeli lawmaker told The New York Post that Netanyahu is urging U.S. lawmakers to “help Israel avoid war crimes charges.” The Israeli leader is reportedly appealing to American legislators to resist a seemingly global backlash against the Gaza fighting, saying that Israel took “extraordinary measures” to avoid civilian deaths in the recent month-long conflict.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is reportedly urging U.S. lawmakers to protect his country from Palestinian claims that Israel engaged in “war crimes” during recent Gaza fighting that left nearly 1,900 Palestinians dead. A top Israeli lawmaker told The New York Post that Netanyahu is urging U.S. lawmakers to “help Israel avoid war crimes charges.” The Israeli leader is reportedly appealing to American legislators to resist a seemingly global backlash against the Gaza fighting, saying that Israel took “extraordinary measures” to avoid civilian deaths in the recent month-long conflict. According to Gaza officials, three-quarters of the 1,900 Palestinians killed in the fighting were civilians, although Israeli Defense Forces have stressed that Hamas has intentionally used civilians as human shields. Three Israeli civilians and 64 Israeli soldiers have also been killed in the Gaza conflict. Netanyahu said that “90percent of the fatalities could have been avoided had Hamas not rejected the ceasefire it accepts now,” according to The Post.

Bank of America has agreed to a legal settlement with the Department of Justice (DOJ) to avoid prosecution for the hundreds of billions of dollars in bad mortgage loans that it and its subsidiaries sold to unwitting investors in the run-up to the financial crisis, according to multiple new reports. The total on-paper cost of the deal is reportedly at least $16 billion and perhaps as high as $17 billion, which makes it the largest corporate legal settlement with the government in U.S. history. But that record price tag is deceptive. The deal is unlikely to cost Bank of America anywhere close to that amount.

“If you let a thief buy his way out of jail, you should really make sure the check doesn’t bounce,” HDL national campaign director Kevin Whelan said in an email. “Even a record $17 billion settlement is a small fraction of the damage done by B of A and Countrywide. But it could do real good for a lot of families,” Whelan said. “The fact that the JP Morgan Chase settlement has not delivered any noticeable relief to families makes us skeptical.”

the government’s decision to pursue civil settlements rather than criminal cases against banks that inflated the toxic mortgage bubble means that shareholders pay the price while executives who oversaw the misconduct earn large bonuses.

Editor's note: This article was originally published on August 13, 2013; it was updated on August 29, 2014 to reflect the latest information. Syria’s civil war is the worst humanitarian disaster of our time. The number of innocent civilians suffering — more than nine million people are displaced, thus far — and the increasingly dire impact on neighboring countries can seem to overwhelming to understand.

Three years after it began, the full-blown civil war has killed over 190,000 people, half of whom are believed to be civilians. Bombings are destroying crowded cities and horrific human rights violations are widespread. Basic necessities like food and medical care are sparse. The U.N. estimates that over 6.5 million people are internally displaced — an increase of more than two million in just six months. When you also consider refugees, over half of the country’s pre-war population of 23 million is need urgent humanitarian assistance, whether they still remain in the country or have escaped across the borders.

Three million Syrians have registered with the United Nations High Commission of Refugees, who is leading the regional emergency response. But hundreds of thousands more await registration.

The sponsors of the latest Kirk-Menendez Iran sanctions bill appear determined to move the legislation as quickly as possible, although it has yet to be formally introduced. Of course, both Obama and visiting British Prime Minister David Cameron came out strongly against any sanctions legislation during their joint press appearance at the White House Friday, warning that approval risked sabotaging not only the ongoing negotiations, but also unity among the P5+1 (U.S., U.K, France, Russia, China plus Germany) themselves. In olden times one would have expected most Republicans to take seriously what a British prime minister–especially one from Winston Churchill’s Conservative Party–has to say about a foreign policy issue of mutual interest. But the combination of their real hatred for Obama and purported love for Israel (and especially for the campaign funds from wealthy Republican Jewish Coalition donors like Sheldon Adelson) is likely to supersede the historic “special relationship” extolled by Churchill himself. In any event, the best and most up-to-date summary of where things stand was provided in the weekly Legislative Round-Up by Lara Friedman of Americans for Peace Now (APN), lengthy excerpts of which are reproduced below with permission. (APN legislative round-ups are an excellent source for tracking what’s happening on Capitol Hill on Middle East policy.) Note that there are two parts to her account: the first is regarding an AIPAC draft that circulated earlier this week (and Lara’s analysis of that legislation); the second, an updated version circulated at week’s end apparently in the hope of securing more Democratic support, as well as Lara’s analysis of that draft.

Updated analysis of Kirk-Menendez text (as of 3pm, 1/16) In some annoying corollary to Murphy’s Law, shortly after posting analysis of the draft text of the new Kirk-Menendez sanctions bill (in which it was noted that the text should not be considered final or authoritative), a newer draft of the bill began circulating (underscoring the oddness of AIPAC circulating a “summary” of the bill while it was/is apparently still being tweaked).  Bearing in mind that this new text should still not be considered final or authoritative, the following are some observations about this newer text:

Existing sanctions don’t snap back, but additional sanctions relief remains elusive: This newer text repeats language in the earlier draft to the effect that while following an agreement (and required notification to Congress) the President may not waive any sanctions on Iran until Congress has had time to review the deal and the Administration’s plans to verify Iranian compliance. The newer version includes language – completely absent in the earlier draft – stipulating that this ban on waiving sanctions does not apply to sanctions previously waived under the JPOA. Notably, the updated version of the bill still stipulates that the Congressional review period during which the President is barred from waiving any new sanctions must last “30 days of continuous session of Congress,” and defines “continuous session” as not including periods where Congress is in recess for more than 3 days.  What does this mean? Looking at the House Calendar for 2105 and counting the days, it means that if the President sends the details of a deal and the required “verification assessment” to Congress on July 5, no new sanctions may be waived until at least November 13.

U.S. President Barack Obama issued an executive order this Monday slapping Venezuela with new sanctions and declaring the Bolivarian nation an "unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security".  The sanctions target seven individuals accused by the White House of alleged human rights violations and "public corruption", freezing their assets and barring entry into the U.S. The figures include Justo Jose Noguera Pietri, President of the state entity, the Venezuelan Corporation of Guayana (CVG) and Katherine Nayarith Haringhton Padron, a national level prosecutor currently taking the lead in the trials of several Venezuelan political opposition leaders, including Leopoldo Lopez.  The executive order is the latest in a series of U.S. sanctions imposed on Venezuela over the past few months. On February 3, the Obama administration expanded the list of Venezuelan officials barred from entering the U.S., which now includes the Chief Prosecutor Luis Ortega Diaz. 

The Venezuelan government, for its part, maintains that all of those arrested are in the process of facing trial for criminal offences linked to violent destabilization efforts spearheaded by the opposition. Former Caracas Metropolitan Mayor Antonio Ledezma was arrested last month on charges of conspiracy and sedition related to the February 12 thwarted "Blue Coup" attempt. A Venezuelan judge found sufficient evidence linking the opposition figure to air force officials involved in the coup as well as to rightwing terrorist leaders such as Lorent Saleh, who was extradited by Colombian authorities to face charges last year. The other high profile Venezuelan opposition leader currently facing trial is Leopoldo López, who was indicted for his role in leading several months of violent opposition protests last year with the aim of effecting the "exit", or ouster, of the constitutional government. Known as the "guarimbas", these violent protests and street barricades caused the death of 43 people, the majority of whom were security personnel or Chavistas.

"Venezuelan officials past and present who violate the human rights of Venezuelan citizens and engage in acts of public corruption will not be welcome here, and we now have the tools to block their assets and their use of U.S. financial systems," announced White House spokesman Josh Earnest. The U.S. has failed thus far to disclose evidence that might bolster its claims of human rights violations, leading Venezuelan and other regional leaders to condemn what they regard as the arbitrary and political character of U.S. sanctions.  While regional bodies such as the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) have called for dialogue, Washington has so far refused to support negotiations or to recognise the organisation's stance.

Over the weekend, the U.S. military carried out further airstrikes in Iraq, targeting Islamic State militants near the Mosul Dam, involving “a mix of fighter, bomber, attack and remotely piloted aircraft.” The nine strikes on Saturday and 14 strikes on Sunday were carried out under authority “to support humanitarian efforts in Iraq,” to protect U.S. personnel and facilities, and to support Iraqi and Kurdish defense forces [U.S. Central Command]. President Obama notified Congress of the latest American involvement yesterday, stating that “[t]he failure of the Mosul Dam could threaten the lives of large numbers of civilians, endanger U.S. personnel and facilities, including the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.” Obama said the operations will be “limited in their scope and duration.” The significantly expanded air campaign, including the first reported use of U.S. bombers, has strengthened the Kurdish forces’ ground offensive to reclaim the strategic dam from Islamic State control [Wall Street Journal’s Matt Bradley et al.; Washington Post’s Liz Sly et al.]. Iraqi state television reported early today that Iraqi and Kurdish forces are now in control of the dam [Reuters], although there are reports of continued heavy fighting around the Mosul Dam [Al Jazeera]. Joe Parkinson [Wall Street Journal] covers how the U.S. has gained a “controversial new ally” in the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), as a number of PKK fighters joined the U.S.-backed Kurdish battle in northern Iraq over the weekend.

Israel-Palestine With the five-day truce between Israel and Hamas set to expire tonight, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators are continuing discussions in Cairo, although significant gaps remain between the two sides. While Israel is pushing for tougher security measures, Palestine is demanding an end to the Gaza blockade without preconditions [Associated Press; Reuters’ Nidal Al-Mughrabi and Jeffrey Heller]. Israeli troops have demolished the homes of two Palestinians suspected to have been behind the abduction and killing of the three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank in June [Haaretz’s Gili Cohen]. An IDF spokesperson said that the demolition “conveys a clear message to terrorists and their accomplices that there is a personal price to pay when engaging in terror and carrying out attacks against Israelis” [Al Jazeera]. Haaretz’s editorial board notes how the Israeli offensive in Gaza has generated “a very public crisis in relations between Israel and the United States” and warns that “Netanyahu must ease the tension with Washington and act to repair the rift with Obama.” The Wall Street Journal (Joshua Mitnick) explores how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “containment strategy” in the ongoing conflict is “a contrast from the tough talk against terrorism that fueled his political ascent.”

ulian Borger [The Guardian] notes how the potential International Criminal Court investigation into alleged war crimes in Gaza by both Israeli and Hamas forces has become a “fraught political battlefield.” Marwan Bishara [Al Jazeera] explains how and why the UN has been “sidelined” in the Middle East conflict. Meanwhile, the British government is facing a legal challenge over its decision to not suspend existing licenses for the sale of military hardware to Israel following the launch of Operation Protective Edge in Gaza last month [The Guardian’s Jamie Doward].

Perhaps you already assume that there's some kind of twisted marriage between Wall Street megabanks and the US global surveillance regime. Why wouldn't there be? But not even a total cynic could have anticipated spymaster Keith Alexander cashing in this hard, this fast. As Bloomberg recently reported, the former National Security Agency chief, who resigned in March at the age of 62, quickly offered his cyber-security expertise at the eye-popping price of $1 million per month to an assortment of shady business lobbies. And now at least one member of Congress is probing this most delightfully dystopian of arrangements, raising the possibility that Alexander will be shamed out of the practice, if nothing else. “Disclosing or misusing classified information for profit is, as Mr. Alexander well knows, a felony. I question how Mr. Alexander can provide any of the services he is offering unless he discloses or misuses classified information, including extremely sensitive sources and methods,” Florida Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson wrote one of the business groups, the Security Industries and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), which holds it down for Wall Street in Washington. “Without the classified information that he acquired in his former position, he literally would have nothing to offer to you.”

In an interview Monday, Grayson was even more strident in his criticism. "Frankly, what the general is doing is beginning to resemble an extortion racket," he told me. "This is a man who basically lied for a living, and he continues to do that." To be clear, what's uniquely outrageous about Alexander, who has apparently lowered his asking price to $600,000, is not that he is a former US official dangling his alleged expertise and the allure of privileged access to government officials before Wall Street. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who served under Barack Obama and is the odds-on favorite to succeed him, does this all the time, usually at a rate of about $250,000 a pop. (Indeed, one might argue that the very fact she has managed to do so while enjoying a stellar national reputation is what signaled to Alexander he might as well dive headlong through the revolving door.) But the former NSA head presumably knows things about sophisticated intelligence-gathering practices that very, very few people on Earth have been privy to—information that could be useful in the private sector, which has a tendency to collude with the military in ways that made former President and World War II General Dwight Eisenhower very sad.

"What could he possibly have that's worth $1 million a month other than classified information?" wonders Melanie Sloan, founder of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a good government group. "That's more than former presidents make." Indeed, even former President Bill Clinton, whose corruption since leaving office is by now the stuff of legend, doesn't have the gall to ask for that much per gig. There's a sort of "fuck it!" attitude to what Alexander is doing, seemingly kicking sand in the face of everyone angry at his surveillance regime by getting paid to reflect on the experience of assembling it. More ominously, there's the prospect that Alexander, whether deliberately or otherwise, may have left behind vulnerabilities while running the NSA so as to put himself in prime position to effectively hold the banks hostage now. Certainly, there have been reports suggesting the agency was aware of some vulnerabilities it either could or did not address.   "What is especially troubling is he might actually be worth it," says former North Carolina Democratic Congressman Brad Miller, who worked extensively on financial regulation and Wall Street reform in Congress. "He's obviously not a computer geek. Some of the things that might have seemed paranoid a few years ago now seem more than plausible given what we've already learned the NSA has been doing."

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel resigned under pressure on Monday after President Obama determined that he had to shake up his national security team in the face of escalating conflicts overseas and hawkish Republicans reasserting themselves on Capitol Hill.

Aides said Mr. Obama made the decision to remove his defense secretary on Friday after weeks of rising tension over a variety of issues, including what administration officials said were Mr. Hagel’s delays in transferring detainees from the military prison in Guantánamo Bay and a dispute with Susan E. Rice, the national security adviser, over Syria policy.

In reality, Mr. Hagel was never able to penetrate the president’s tight national security team of West Wing loyalists, officials at the White House and the Pentagon said. And faced with the calls for a shake-up of his national security staff to better deal with an onslaught of global crises, Mr. Obama balked at the idea of replacing Ms. Rice, Secretary of State John Kerry or the powerful White House chief of staff, Denis R. McDonough.

What Could Possibly Go Right? Four Months into Iraq War 3.0, the Cracks Are Showing -- on the Battlefield and at the Pentagon By Peter Van Buren Karl von Clausewitz, the famed Prussian military thinker, is best known for his aphorism “War is the continuation of state policy by other means.” But what happens to a war in the absence of coherent state policy? Actually, we now know. Washington’s Iraq War 3.0, Operation Inherent Resolve, is what happens. In its early stages, I asked sarcastically, “What could possibly go wrong?” As the mission enters its fourth month, the answer to that question is already grimly clear: just about everything. It may be time to ask, in all seriousness: What could possibly go right?

The U.S. Department of State lists 60 participants in the coalition of nations behind the U.S. efforts against the Islamic State. Many of those countries (Somalia, Iceland, Croatia, and Taiwan, among them) have never been heard from again outside the halls of Foggy Bottom. There is no evidence that America’s Arab “allies” like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, whose funding had long-helped extreme Syrian rebel groups, including IS, and whose early participation in a handful of air strikes was trumpeted as a triumph, are still flying. Absent the few nations that often make an appearance at America's geopolitical parties (Canada, the Brits, the Aussies, and increasingly these days, the French), this international mess has quickly morphed into Washington's mess. Worse yet, nations like Turkey that might actually have taken on an important role in defeating the Islamic State seem to be largely sitting this one out. Despite the way it’s being reported in the U.S., the new war in the Middle East looks, to most of the world, like another case of American unilateralism, which plays right into the radical Islamic narrative.

While American strategy may be lacking on the battlefield, it’s alive and well at the Pentagon. A report in the Daily Beast, quoting a generous spurt of leaks, has recently made it all too clear that the Pentagon brass “are getting fed up with the short leash the White House put them on.” Senior leaders criticize the war’s decision-making process, overseen by National Security Adviser Susan Rice, as “manic and obsessed.” Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel wrote a quickly leaked memo to Rice warning that the president’s Syria strategy was already unraveling thanks to its fogginess about the nature of its opposition to Assad and because it has no “endgame.” Meanwhile, the military's “intellectual” supporters are already beginning to talk -- shades of Vietnam -- about “Obama's quagmire.”

Palestinian boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) activists have welcomed the news that SodaStream has announced it is to close its factory in the illegal Israeli settlement of Mishor Adumim following a high profile boycott campaign against the company. “SodaStream’s announcement today shows that the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement is increasingly capable of holding corporate criminals to account for their participation in Israeli apartheid and colonialism,” said Rafeef Ziadah, a spokesperson for the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee (BNC), the broad coalition of Palestinian civil society organisations that leads and supports the BDS movement. “BDS campaign pressure has forced retailers across Europe and North America to drop SodaStream, and the company’s share price has tumbled in recent months as our movement has caused increasing reputational damage to the SodaStream brand,” she added. The news of this major success against a company famed for its role in illegal Israeli settlements broke amidst intensifying demonstrations against Israel’s policies of colonisation in Jerusalem. Grassroots boycott activism saw SodaStream dropped by major retailers across North America and Europe including Macy’s in the US and John Lewis in the UK.

SodaStream’s participation in Israel’s forced displacement of Palestinians gained international notoriety when A-list celebrity Scarlett Johansson signed up to be a brand ambassador for the company. Following an international campaign urging Oxfam end its relationship with Johansson for endorsing SodaStream, the actor decided to quit Oxfam. SodaStream has also come under fire for its treatment of Palestinian workers in its West Bank factory, as Ziadah explains: “Any suggestion that SodaStream is employing Palestinians in an illegal Israeli settlement on stolen Palestinian land out of the kindness of its heart is ludicrous.” “Palestinian workers are paid far less than their Israeli counterparts and SodaStream recently fired 60 Palestinians following a dispute over food for the breaking of the Ramadan fast. Workers have previously said they are treated ‘like slaves’”. “Palestinians are forced to work inside settlements in sub-standard conditions because of Israel’s deliberate destruction of the Palestinian economy. There’s an urgent need for the creation of decent and dignified jobs within the Palestinian economy.”

SodaStream was forced to close its flagship store in Brighton in the UK as a result of regular pickets of the store. Soros Fund Management, the family office of the billionaire investor George Soros, sold its stake in SodaStream following BDS pressure. SodaStream’s share price fell dramatically in recent months as sales dried up, particularly in North America. After reaching a high of $64 per share in October 2013, the stock fell to around $20 per share this month. SodaStream has estimated its third quarter revenue will be $125 million, down almost 14 percent from the same period last year. But Ziadah warned that SodaStream will still remain actively complicit in the displacement of Palestinians in the Naqab and will remain a focus of boycott campaigning. “Even if this announced closure goes ahead, SodaStream will remain implicated in the displacement of Palestinians. Its new Lehavim factory is close to Rahat, a planned township in the Naqab (Negev) desert, where Palestinian Bedouins are being forcefully transferred against their will. Sodastream, as a beneficiary of this plan, is complicit with this violation of human rights,” she said.

Russia raised its gold reserves for a ninth straight month in December as the country continued its multi month gold buying spree, adding to the fifth-biggest gold holdings in the world, data from the IMF showed yesterday.  Russia continues to dollar cost average into gold and increased its bullion holdings by another hefty 20.73 tonnes to 1,208.23 tonnes in December. The December figure for Russia, who have the fifth largest reserves in the world, brings their officially stated reserves to 1208.23 tonnes. If this trend were to continue their officially stated reserves would increase 20.6% this year.

Given that Russia perceives itself to be under financial and economic attack from the West, there is the possibility that they are accumulating more gold than they are declaring officially to the IMF. This is what the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) has been doing in recent years and there is little reason why Russia may not adopt the Chinese practice of not being transparent in this regard. The Chinese government have been surreptitiously accumulating vast quantities of the metal in recent years and there is no reason to believe this buying will end in the coming months as geopolitical and monetary risks intensify. Western central banks seem to be balking at what will be seen as the disastrous policy of dumping the gold owned by their populations onto the market. The Gold Anti Trust Action Committee (GATA) have documented how this was done in order to suppress gold prices, in a bid to support and maintain faith in the dollar as reserve currency. Already there are strong movements across Europe to have sovereign gold stored domestically. The German and Dutch central banks have recently reported the repatriation of large volumes of their gold being held by central banks of foreign nations.

Dizzy, vomiting and struggling to breathe, 11 Iraqi police officers were rushed to a government hospital 50 miles north of the capital last month. The diagnosis: poisoning by chlorine gas. The perpetrators, according to the officers: Islamic State extremists. The chlorine attack appears to be the first confirmed use of chemical weapons by the Islamic State on the battlefield. An Iraqi Defense Ministry official corroborated the events, and doctors said survivors’ symptoms were consistent with chlorine poisoning. Iraqi forces say two other crude chlorine attacks have occurred since the extremists seized vast tracts of Iraqi territory this summer, but details on those incidents remain sketchy. The reported assaults all raise concerns that the militants are attempting to hone their chemical weapons capabilities as they push to control more ground

Chlorine, a common component in industry, is sold legally, but its use as a weapon violates the Chemical Weapons Convention. It was widely employed in trench warfare during World War I, including infamously at Ypres in Belgium, where German forces dispersed more than 160 tons of chlorine into the breeze, killing thousands of French and Allied soldiers.

One physician on the team, Hassanain Mohammed, had treated similar cases­ before. In 2006 and 2007, al-Qaeda in Iraq, a group that later morphed into the Islamic State, carried out a string of chlorine bombings in the country.

12 August 1988  Cover, pages 10-12   Somebody's  listening  . . . and they don't give a damn about personal privacy or commercial confidence. Project 415 is a top-secret new global surveillance system. It can tap into a billion calls a year in the UK alone. Inside Duncan Campbell on how spying entered the 21st century . . .  They've got it taped In the booming surveillance industry they spy on whom they wish, when they wish, protected by barriers of secrecy, fortified by billions of pounds worth of high, high technology. Duncan Campbell reports from the United States on the secret Anglo-American plan for a global electronic spy system for the 21st century capable of listening in to most of us most of the time   American, British and Allied intelligence agencies are soon to embark on a massive, billion-dollar expansion of their global electronic surveillance system. According to information given recently in secret to the US Congress, the surveillance system will enable the agencies to monitor and analyse civilian communications into the 21st century. Identified for the moment as Project P415, the system will be run by the US National Security Agency (NSA). But the intelligence agencies of many other countries will be closely involved with the new network, including those from Britain, Australia, Germany and Japan--and, surprisingly, the People's Republic of China. New satellite stations and monitoring centres are to be built around the world, and a chain of new satellites launched, so that NSA and its British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) at Cheltenham, may keep abreast of the burgeoning international telecommunications traffic.

Both the new and existing surveillance systems are highly computerised. They rely on near total interception of international commercial and satellite communications in order to locate the telephone or other messages of target individuals. Last month, a US newspaper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, revealed that the system had been used to target the telephone calls of a US Senator, Strom Thurmond. The fact that Thurmond, a southern Republican and usually a staunch supporter of the Reagan administration, is said to have been a target has raised fears that the NSA has restored domestic, electronic, surveillance programmes. These were originally exposed and criticised during the Watergate investigations, and their closure ordered by President Carter. After talking to the NSA, Thurmond later told the Plain Dealer that he did not believe the allegation. But Thurmond, a right-wing Republican, may have been unwilling to rock the boat. Staff members of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence said that staff were "digging into it" despite the "stratospheric security classification" of all the systems involved. The Congressional officials were first told of the Thurmond interception by a former employee of the Lockheed Space and Missiles Corporation, Margaret Newsham, who now lives in Sunnyvale, California. Newsham had originally given separate testimony and filed a lawsuit concerning corruption and mis-spending on other US government "black" projects. She has worked in the US and Britain for two corporations which manufacture signal intelligence computers, satellites and interception equipment for NSA, Ford Aerospace and Lockheed. Citing a special Executive Order signed by President Reagan. she told me last month that she could not and would not discuss classified information with journalists. But according to Washington sources (and the report in the Plain Dealer, she informed a US Congressman that the Thurmond interception took place at Menwith Hill, and that she p

A secret listening agreement, called UKUSA (UK-USA), assigns parts of the globe to each participating agency. GCHQ at Cheltenham is the co-ordinating centre for Europe, Africa and the Soviet Union (west of the Ural Mountains). The NSA covers the rest of the Soviet Union and most of the Americas. Australia--where another station in the NSA listening network is located in the outback--co-ordinates the electronic monitoring of the South Pacific, and South East Asia.

After seizing her from her home in the middle of the night last week, Israeli occupation forces have ordered that a Palestinian lawmaker be held without charge or trial for six months. Palestinian Legislative Council member Khalida Jarrar was given a so-called “administrative detention” order on Sunday, the Palestinian prisoners’ rights group Addameer said in a statement.

Jarrar is one of 15 Palestinian legislators and 23 female political prisoners currently detained by Israeli occupation forces, Addameer states. Jarrar, a prominent member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, is closely involved in prisoner issues. Last August, Israeli occupation forces issued Jarrar with an order banishing her to Jericho. She defied the order, remaining in her home in the occupied West Bank town of al-Bireh from where she was arrested by dozens of armed soldiers.

There are currently six thousand Palestinian political detainees in Israeli prisons, including almost 500 administrative detainees, according to Addameer’s most recent statistics. Human rights defenders have consistently condemned Israel’s practice of prolonged detention of Palestinians without charge or trial. In a 2012 report, Amnesty International called on Israel to stop using administrative detention – a relic of British colonial rule in Palestine – and urged “the immediate and unconditional release [of] prisoners of conscience held just for peacefully exercising their rights to freedom of expression and assembly.” Amnesty says that administrative detainees, like many other Palestinian prisoners, “have been subjected to violations such as the use of torture and other ill-treatment during interrogation, as well as cruel and degrading treatment during their detention, sometimes as punishment for hunger strikes or other protests.”

Eight months after Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies began an aerial campaign against the Houthi rebels, the civilian death toll continues to mount. More than 5,600 people, including 2,615 civilians and 500 children, have been killed since March. The vast majority of civilian deaths are attributable to coalition airstrikes.  Human rights groups have warned about war crimes and the continued humanitarian calamity in Yemen. “Yemen in five months is like Syria after five years,” Peter Maurer, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said in August. “The humanitarian situation is nothing short of catastrophic. Every family in Yemen has been affected by this conflict.” Complicit in the growing humanitarian disaster is the United States and its unchecked arms sales to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf allies. The Barack Obama administration agreed to transfer more than $64 billion in weapons and services to members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) during its first five years. On Oct. 20, the U.S. government approved an $11.25 billion deal to sell warships to Saudi Arabia, ignoring calls from human rights activists to refrain from selling certain military equipment in light of the civilian toll it is inflicting. In continuing to provide weapons, intelligence and logistical support to Riyadh, including precision rockets and internationally banned cluster munitions, the U.S. is contributing to Yemen’s suffering.

Take the Sept. 28 coalition airstrike that hit a wedding party, killing dozens and wounding many more. Among the dead were women and children. The White House expressed concern about the incident, but its words ring hollow, given that the U.S supplied the planes used in the attack. In a report on Oct. 6, London-based advocacy group Amnesty International investigated 13 coalition airstrikes from May to July that killed an estimated 100 people, including 59 children. The group found that some of the strikes hit civilian objects such as “homes, public buildings, schools, markets, shops, factories, bridges, roads and other civilian infrastructure,” as well as civilians fleeing in vehicles and those delivering humanitarian assistance. Amnesty said the strikes violate international law and found “damning evidence of war crimes,” which warrant an international investigation and the suspension of certain arms transfers. A United Nations panel has accused all sides of human rights abuses, but singled out coalition forces for committing “grave violations.” But international condemnation has done little to ease the devastation wrought by the strikes.

A federal appeals court Tuesday eliminated a possible roadblock for the National Security Agency (NSA), delaying a judge’s order to halt the agency's controversial data collection.The order from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit sets the NSA on a path to wind down its bulk gathering of Americans’ phone records later this month.ADVERTISEMENTOn Monday, Judge Richard Leon of the U.S. District Court for D.C. had sought to end the program immediately, before a Nov. 29 deadline. Leon’s order would have ended the NSA’s collection of records about one California lawyer, though doing that might have required taking the entire system offline, he acknowledged.Late Tuesday afternoon, however, the appeals court stepped in and issued a stay on that order, preventing it from taking effect. The move from the appeals court was widely expected, given that Leon's order would merely kill the program three weeks early.“The purpose of this administrative stay is to give the court sufficient opportunity to consider the merits of the motion for a stay,” it said in a brief order, “and should not be construed in any way as a ruling on the merits of that motion.”

Plaintiffs suing the Obama administration, led by conservative legal activist Larry Klayman, will have until noon Friday to submit arguments on whether the program should be shut down immediately. The government has until the following Monday. Few watchers expect the court to interfere with the NSA’s own schedule, which will take the phone records program offline Nov. 29.Under the current program, the spy agency collects metadata records about millions of Americans’ phone calls, which include the numbers involved in a call, when the call occurred and how long it lasted. The records do not include content about people’s conversations.This summer, Congress passed legislation ending the current system and forcing the NSA to move to a new process in which it requests a narrow set of records from individual phone companies.

On Monday, the agency told lawmakers on Capitol Hill that it has “successfully developed a technical architecture to support the new program” and that testing is “underway.”In his Monday order, Leon said that the NSA should not wait until the new system was up and running, since “even one day” of the current program poses a threat to the Constitution. 

Iraqi forces appear better positioned than ever to launch an offensive against Islamic State militants controlling Ramadi, now that months-long efforts to cut off supply lines to the city are having an effect, but plenty of risks remain.The fall of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, to the group in May was the biggest defeat for Iraq's weak central government in nearly a year, dampening its hopes of routing the Sunni militants from the country's north and west.Retaking the city of 450,000 would provide a major psychological boost to Iraqi security forces, who have mostly collapsed in the face of advances by Islamic State, which last year seized a third of Iraq, a major OPEC oil producer and U.S ally.The ultimate goal for Iraqi forces is to break Islamic State's grip over its main stronghold Mosul, the biggest city in the north. Critical momentum is needed in order to achieve that.The Ramadi offensive has been impeded by heavy use of improvised explosive devices, inadequate troops and equipment due to government cash shortages, and stringent rules of engagement for U.S.-led air strikes, Iraqi army and federal police officers involved in the battle told Reuters.

Recent gains, however, have raised expectations that the military is set to strike, six months after vowing to quickly seize the city, 100 miles (60 km) west of Baghdad.Iraq's elite U.S.-trained counter-terrorism forces have led the campaign to put a cordon around the city. Backed by armored divisions of the federal police, they cut off the southern and western approaches to prevent reinforcements arriving from cities near the Syrian border.The forces have taken control of towns, villages and roads in those areas, including Anbar University and sprawling desert areas along the highway to Syria, the officers said.They also seized eastern outskirts such as Husaiba al-Sharqiya and Matheeq, significantly reducing Islamic State's ability to resupply from Falluja, a nearby city it controls.Earlier this month, counter-terrorism forces seized a large military camp on Ramadi's western outskirts and a handful of districts further north, reaching the western approach to the Palestine Bridge over the Euphrates.Two army divisions on the opposite side of the river, which runs north to south through Ramadi, are pushing slowly along a northern highway. Last week they reached the al-Jarayshi overpass, less than 2 km (1.25 miles) from the river.

Colonel Steve Warren, the spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition which has been bombing targets in Iraq and Syria for more than a year, said the insurgents were using the Euphrates as "a water-borne highway" to resupply the center of Ramadi.Taking the stretch of highway to the bridge would complete the cordon around Ramadi and enable the forces to begin clearing the city one neighborhood at a time.

Washington continues making an international fool of herself by her inability to effectively counter the impression around the world that Russia, spending less than 10% of the Pentagon annually on defense, has managed to do more against ISIS in Syria in six weeks than the mighty US Air Force bombing campaign has done in almost a year and half. One aspect that bears attention is the demonstration by the Russian military of new technologies that belie the widely-held Western notion that Russia is little more than a backward oil and raw material commodity exporter. Recent reorganization of the Russian state military industrial complex as well as reorganization of the Soviet-era armed forces under Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu’s term are visible in the success so far of Russia’s ISIS and other terror strikes across Syria. Clearly Russian military capabilities have undergone a sea-change since the Soviet Cold War era. In war there are never winners. Yet Russia has been in an unwanted war with Washington de facto since the George W. Bush Administration announced its lunatic plan to place what they euphemistically term “Ballistic Missile Defense” missiles and advanced radar in Poland, Czech Republic, Romania and Turkey after 2007. Without going into detail, BMD technologies are the opposite of defensive. They instead make a pre-emptive war highly likely. Of course the radioactive ash heap in such an exchange would be first and foremost the EU countries foolish enough to invite US BMD to their soil.

What the Russian General Staff has managed, since the precision air campaign began September 30, has stunned western defense planners with Russian technological feats not expected. Two specific technologies are worth looking at more closely: The Russian Sukoi SU-34 fighter-bomber and what is called the Bumblebee hyperbaric mortar weapon.

The plane responsible for some of the most damaging strikes on ISIS and other terror enclaves in Syria is manufactured by the Russian state aircraft industry under the name Sukhoi SU-34. As the Russian news agency RIA Novosti described the aircraft, “The Su-34 is meant to deliver a sufficiently large ordnance load to a predetermined area, hit the target accurately and take evasive action against pursuing enemy planes.” The plane is also designed to deal with enemy fighters in aerial combat such as the US F-16. The SU-34 made a first test flight in 1990 as the collapse of the Soviet Union and the chaos of the Yeltsin years caused many delays. Finally in 2010 the plane was in full production. According to a report in US Defense Industry Daily, among the SU-34 features are: • 8 ton ordnance load which can accommodate precision-guided weapons, as well as R-73/AA-11 Archer and R-77/AA-12 ‘AMRAAMSKI’ missiles and an internal 30mm GSh-301 gun. • Maximum speed of Mach 1.8 at altitude.

Photo: Alex Brandon/APFormer President Bill Clinton on Monday met in secret (no press allowed) with roughly 100 leaders of South Florida’s Jewish community, and, as the Times of Israel reports, “He vowed that, if elected, Hillary Clinton would make it one of her top priorities to strengthen the U.S.-Israel alliance.” He also “stressed the close bond that he and his wife have with the State of Israel.” It may be tempting to dismiss this as standard, vapid Clintonian politicking: adeptly telling everyone what they want to hear and making them believe it. After all, is it even physically possible to “strengthen the U.S.-Israel alliance” beyond what it already entails: billions of dollars in American taxpayer money transferred every year, sophisticated weapons fed to Israel as it bombs its defenseless neighbors, blindly loyal diplomatic support and protection for everything it does? But Bill Clinton’s vow of even greater support for Israel is completely consistent with what Hillary Clinton herself has been telling American Jewish audiences for months. In November, she published an op-ed in The Forward in which she vowed to strengthen relations not only with Israel, but also with its extremist prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Her comments on Israel have similarly contained implicit criticisms of Obama’s foreign policy: namely, that he has created or at least allowed too much animosity with Netanyahu. In her Forward op-ed, she wrote that the Israeli prime minister’s “upcoming visit to Washington is an opportunity to reaffirm the unbreakable bonds of friendship and unity between the people and governments of the United States and Israel.” She pointedly added: “The alliance between our two nations transcends politics. It is and should always be a commitment that unites us, not a wedge that divides us.” And in case her message is unclear, she added this campaign promise: “I would also invite the Israeli prime minister to the White House in my first month in office.” Last month, Clinton wrote an even more extreme op-ed in the Jewish Journal, one that made even clearer that she intends to change Obama’s policy to make it even more “pro-Israel.” It begins: “In this time of terrorism and turmoil, the alliance between the United States and Israel is more important than ever. To meet the many challenges we face, we have to take our relationship to the next level.”

“With every passing year, we must tie the bonds tighter,” she wrote. Tie those bonds tighter. Thus: As part of this effort, we need to ensure that Israel continues to maintain its qualitative military edge. The United States should further bolster Israeli air defenses and help develop better tunnel detection technology to prevent arms smuggling and kidnapping. We should also expand high-level U.S.-Israel strategic consultations. As always, there is not a word about the oppression and brutality imposed on Palestinians as part of Israel’s decadeslong occupation. She does not even acknowledge, let alone express opposition to, Israel’s repeated, civilian-slaughtering bombing of the open-air prison in Gaza. That’s because for Clinton — like the progressive establishment that supports her — the suffering and violence imposed on Palestinians literally do not exist. None of this is mentioned, even in passing, in the endless parade of pro-Clinton articles pouring forth from progressive media outlets.