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Violence in Israel and the Palestinian territories - the Guardian briefing | News | The... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-territories-guardian-briefing war & peace Israel Palestine escalating-violence
shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories have been convulsed by a wave of escalating violence in recent days. The lethal tensions ratcheted up sharply last Thursday when a married couple, Jewish settlers from Neria in the northern West Bank, were shot and killed in a car in front of their four children near Beit Furik, allegedly by members of a five-man Hamas cell who were subsequently arrested. Two more Israelis were stabbed and killed in Jerusalem’s Old City on Saturday by a Palestinian youth, who was shot dead at the scene. On Sunday, an 18-year-old Palestinian was shot dead by Israeli forces in clashes near the West Bank town of Tulkarem. The mounting friction has seen attacks by settlers on Palestinians, clashes between Palestinians and Israeli security forces and attempted attacks continue. On Wednesday. there were incidents in Jerusalem, where a Palestinian woman stabbed an Israeli man who then shot and seriously wounded her in the Old City, the southern Israeli city of Kiryat Gat, where a Palestinian was killed after reportedly trying to seize a gun from a soldier and stabbing him, and when a female Israeli settler’s car was stoned near Beit Sahour, which adjoins Bethlehem, in an incident in which it appears other settlers fired on Palestinians, seriously injuring a youth.
  • On the Palestinian side, anger escalated earlier this week after a 13-year-old boy in Bethlehem’s Aida refugee camp was shot and killed by an Israeli sniper in an incident the Israeli military has claimed was “unintentional” as soldiers were aiming at another individual.
  • Jerusalem has remained tense now for almost a year. Most analysts blame the recent heightened tension on several factors. Key among them has been the issue of the religious site in Jerusalem known to Muslims as al-Haram al-Sharif, or the Noble Sanctuary, and Jews as the Temple Mount. A long-running campaign by some fundamentalist Jews and their supporters for expanding their rights to worship in the Al-Aqsa mosque compound on the Temple Mount, supported by rightwing members of Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s own cabinet, has raised the suspicion – despite repeated Israeli denials – that Israel intends to change the precarious status quo for the site, which has been governed under the auspices of the Jordanian monarchy since 1967.
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  • Recent Israeli police actions at the site scandalised the Muslim world and raised tensions. Israel has also banned two volunteer Islamic watch groups – male and female – accusing them of harassing Jews during the hours they are allowed to visit. That has combined with the lack of a peace process and growing resentment and frustration in Palestinian society aimed at both Israel and the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and the Palestinian Authority. Israel has complained in recent weeks of an increase in stone throwing and molotov cocktail attacks on West Bank roads and in areas adjoining mainly Palestinian areas of Jerusalem, where an elderly motorist died after crashing his car during an alleged stoning attack. In response, Netanyahu and his cabinet have loosened live-fire regulations over the use of .22 calibre bullets on Palestinian demonstrators. Although described by Israel as “less lethal”, it is this type of ammunition that killed 13-year-old Abdul Rahman Shadi on Monday.
  • Part of the problem is the leadership on both sides. Netanyahu leads a rightwing/far-right coalition with the smallest of majorities. Several cabinet ministers support the settler movement and have publicly criticised him for not cracking down harder on Palestinian protest. Netanyahu’s weakness is reflected on the Palestinian side, where the ageing Abbas is seen as isolated, frustrated and increasingly out of step with other members of the Palestinian leadership, who would like a tougher line against Israel over continued settlement building and the absence of any peace process.
  • In his recent speech to the UN general assembly, Abbas went further than he had ever done before in threatening to end what he claims is Palestine’s unilateral adherence to the Oslo accords, which he said Israel refuses to honour. “We cannot continue to be bound by these signed agreements with Israel and Israel must assume fully its responsibilities of an occupying power,” he said. Abbas, however, stopped short of ending security cooperation between Israel and Palestinian security forces – mainly aimed at Hamas on the West Bank – and asked the UN for international protection. His speech at the United Nations has been seen as a move to placate growing discontents in Palestinian society. Both Abbas and Netanyahu are now both engaged in a delicate balancing act, trying to avoid further escalation that would be detrimental to both while trying not to lose the support of key constituencies. On Abbas’s side, that has meant ordering Palestinian factions and security forces to desist from joining the conflict, while on Netanyahu’s side it has seen numerous warnings of harsh measures – many of which have been repeatedly announced.
  • Nentanyahu does not want to risk a position where Abbas ends security cooperation and in the local jargon “hands back the keys” – in other words revokes the Oslo accords and insists on Israel once again taking full responsibility for administering the occupied territories. For his part, Abbas is said to see a limited popular uprising as useful because of the message it delivers to both Israel and the international community of the mounting risks of a moribund peace process and how serious things could become if security cooperation were to end.
  • At the end of the last round of the peace process last year, US diplomats warned about this potential outcome and Washington has largely withdrawn from a guiding role, exhausted by the lack of progress and frustrated with Netanyahu. Despite the Palestinian desire for a new multilateral international approach, it has failed to materialise as have any US guarantees to Abbas that they intend to advance the peace process. While Syria, migration and Russia are preoccupying western governments, Israel and Palestine have been largely left to their own devices.
  • Flare-ups of violence have a habit of coming and going but hopes that this one is coming to an end appear premature for now. However, the likelihood of the current violence fading away still remains the strongest bet. The biggest risk is a miscalculation by either side, which is out of the hands of either leader, that would alter the dynamics. Individuals on both sides have led some of the worst attacks: Jewish extremists in the summer burning three members of a Palestinian family to death, and “lone wolf attacks” launched by Palestinians angry about al-Aqsa and other issues. With neither side having a clear exit strategy, there is a risk is that Netanyahu and Abbas are being led by events rather than leading.
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CURIA - Documents - 0 views

curia.europa.eu/...document.jsf surveillance state EU Court-of-Justice data-retention data privacy
shared by Paul Merrell on 19 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • 37      It must be stated that the interference caused by Directive 2006/24 with the fundamental rights laid down in Articles 7 and 8 of the Charter is, as the Advocate General has also pointed out, in particular, in paragraphs 77 and 80 of his Opinion, wide-ranging, and it must be considered to be particularly serious. Furthermore, as the Advocate General has pointed out in paragraphs 52 and 72 of his Opinion, the fact that data are retained and subsequently used without the subscriber or registered user being informed is likely to generate in the minds of the persons concerned the feeling that their private lives are the subject of constant surveillance.
  • 43      In this respect, it is apparent from recital 7 in the preamble to Directive 2006/24 that, because of the significant growth in the possibilities afforded by electronic communications, the Justice and Home Affairs Council of 19 December 2002 concluded that data relating to the use of electronic communications are particularly important and therefore a valuable tool in the prevention of offences and the fight against crime, in particular organised crime. 44      It must therefore be held that the retention of data for the purpose of allowing the competent national authorities to have possible access to those data, as required by Directive 2006/24, genuinely satisfies an objective of general interest.45      In those circumstances, it is necessary to verify the proportionality of the interference found to exist.46      In that regard, according to the settled case-law of the Court, the principle of proportionality requires that acts of the EU institutions be appropriate for attaining the legitimate objectives pursued by the legislation at issue and do not exceed the limits of what is appropriate and necessary in order to achieve those objectives (see, to that effect, Case C‑343/09 Afton Chemical EU:C:2010:419, paragraph 45; Volker und Markus Schecke and Eifert EU:C:2010:662, paragraph 74; Cases C‑581/10 and C‑629/10 Nelson and Others EU:C:2012:657, paragraph 71; Case C‑283/11 Sky Österreich EU:C:2013:28, paragraph 50; and Case C‑101/12 Schaible EU:C:2013:661, paragraph 29).
  • 67      Article 7 of Directive 2006/24, read in conjunction with Article 4(1) of Directive 2002/58 and the second subparagraph of Article 17(1) of Directive 95/46, does not ensure that a particularly high level of protection and security is applied by those providers by means of technical and organisational measures, but permits those providers in particular to have regard to economic considerations when determining the level of security which they apply, as regards the costs of implementing security measures. In particular, Directive 2006/24 does not ensure the irreversible destruction of the data at the end of the data retention period.68      In the second place, it should be added that that directive does not require the data in question to be retained within the European Union, with the result that it cannot be held that the control, explicitly required by Article 8(3) of the Charter, by an independent authority of compliance with the requirements of protection and security, as referred to in the two previous paragraphs, is fully ensured. Such a control, carried out on the basis of EU law, is an essential component of the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data (see, to that effect, Case C‑614/10 Commission v Austria EU:C:2012:631, paragraph 37).69      Having regard to all the foregoing considerations, it must be held that, by adopting Directive 2006/24, the EU legislature has exceeded the limits imposed by compliance with the principle of proportionality in the light of Articles 7, 8 and 52(1) of the Charter.
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  • 58      Directive 2006/24 affects, in a comprehensive manner, all persons using electronic communications services, but without the persons whose data are retained being, even indirectly, in a situation which is liable to give rise to criminal prosecutions. It therefore applies even to persons for whom there is no evidence capable of suggesting that their conduct might have a link, even an indirect or remote one, with serious crime. Furthermore, it does not provide for any exception, with the result that it applies even to persons whose communications are subject, according to rules of national law, to the obligation of professional secrecy. 59      Moreover, whilst seeking to contribute to the fight against serious crime, Directive 2006/24 does not require any relationship between the data whose retention is provided for and a threat to public security and, in particular, it is not restricted to a retention in relation (i) to data pertaining to a particular time period and/or a particular geographical zone and/or to a circle of particular persons likely to be involved, in one way or another, in a serious crime, or (ii) to persons who could, for other reasons, contribute, by the retention of their data, to the prevention, detection or prosecution of serious offences.
  • 1        These requests for a preliminary ruling concern the validity of Directive 2006/24/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 15 March 2006 on the retention of data generated or processed in connection with the provision of publicly available electronic communications services or of public communications networks and amending Directive 2002/58/EC (OJ 2006 L 105, p. 54).
  • Digital Rights Ireland Ltd (C‑293/12)vMinister for Communications, Marine and Natural Resources,Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform,Commissioner of the Garda Síochána,Ireland,The Attorney General,intervener:Irish Human Rights Commission, andKärntner Landesregierung (C‑594/12),Michael Seitlinger,Christof Tschohl and others,
  • JUDGMENT OF THE COURT (Grand Chamber)8 April 2014 (*)(Electronic communications — Directive 2006/24/EC — Publicly available electronic communications services or public communications networks services — Retention of data generated or processed in connection with the provision of such services — Validity — Articles 7, 8 and 11 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union)In Joined Cases C‑293/12 and C‑594/12,
  • 34      As a result, the obligation imposed by Articles 3 and 6 of Directive 2006/24 on providers of publicly available electronic communications services or of public communications networks to retain, for a certain period, data relating to a person’s private life and to his communications, such as those referred to in Article 5 of the directive, constitutes in itself an interference with the rights guaranteed by Article 7 of the Charter. 35      Furthermore, the access of the competent national authorities to the data constitutes a further interference with that fundamental right (see, as regards Article 8 of the ECHR, Eur. Court H.R., Leander v. Sweden, 26 March 1987, § 48, Series A no 116; Rotaru v. Romania [GC], no. 28341/95, § 46, ECHR 2000-V; and Weber and Saravia v. Germany (dec.), no. 54934/00, § 79, ECHR 2006-XI). Accordingly, Articles 4 and 8 of Directive 2006/24 laying down rules relating to the access of the competent national authorities to the data also constitute an interference with the rights guaranteed by Article 7 of the Charter. 36      Likewise, Directive 2006/24 constitutes an interference with the fundamental right to the protection of personal data guaranteed by Article 8 of the Charter because it provides for the processing of personal data.
  • 65      It follows from the above that Directive 2006/24 does not lay down clear and precise rules governing the extent of the interference with the fundamental rights enshrined in Articles 7 and 8 of the Charter. It must therefore be held that Directive 2006/24 entails a wide-ranging and particularly serious interference with those fundamental rights in the legal order of the EU, without such an interference being precisely circumscribed by provisions to ensure that it is actually limited to what is strictly necessary.66      Moreover, as far as concerns the rules relating to the security and protection of data retained by providers of publicly available electronic communications services or of public communications networks, it must be held that Directive 2006/24 does not provide for sufficient safeguards, as required by Article 8 of the Charter, to ensure effective protection of the data retained against the risk of abuse and against any unlawful access and use of that data. In the first place, Article 7 of Directive 2006/24 does not lay down rules which are specific and adapted to (i) the vast quantity of data whose retention is required by that directive, (ii) the sensitive nature of that data and (iii) the risk of unlawful access to that data, rules which would serve, in particular, to govern the protection and security of the data in question in a clear and strict manner in order to ensure their full integrity and confidentiality. Furthermore, a specific obligation on Member States to establish such rules has also not been laid down.
  • 60      Secondly, not only is there a general absence of limits in Directive 2006/24 but Directive 2006/24 also fails to lay down any objective criterion by which to determine the limits of the access of the competent national authorities to the data and their subsequent use for the purposes of prevention, detection or criminal prosecutions concerning offences that, in view of the extent and seriousness of the interference with the fundamental rights enshrined in Articles 7 and 8 of the Charter, may be considered to be sufficiently serious to justify such an interference. On the contrary, Directive 2006/24 simply refers, in Article 1(1), in a general manner to serious crime, as defined by each Member State in its national law.61      Furthermore, Directive 2006/24 does not contain substantive and procedural conditions relating to the access of the competent national authorities to the data and to their subsequent use. Article 4 of the directive, which governs the access of those authorities to the data retained, does not expressly provide that that access and the subsequent use of the data in question must be strictly restricted to the purpose of preventing and detecting precisely defined serious offences or of conducting criminal prosecutions relating thereto; it merely provides that each Member State is to define the procedures to be followed and the conditions to be fulfilled in order to gain access to the retained data in accordance with necessity and proportionality requirements.
  • 55      The need for such safeguards is all the greater where, as laid down in Directive 2006/24, personal data are subjected to automatic processing and where there is a significant risk of unlawful access to those data (see, by analogy, as regards Article 8 of the ECHR, S. and Marper v. the United Kingdom, § 103, and M. K. v. France, 18 April 2013, no. 19522/09, § 35).56      As for the question of whether the interference caused by Directive 2006/24 is limited to what is strictly necessary, it should be observed that, in accordance with Article 3 read in conjunction with Article 5(1) of that directive, the directive requires the retention of all traffic data concerning fixed telephony, mobile telephony, Internet access, Internet e-mail and Internet telephony. It therefore applies to all means of electronic communication, the use of which is very widespread and of growing importance in people’s everyday lives. Furthermore, in accordance with Article 3 of Directive 2006/24, the directive covers all subscribers and registered users. It therefore entails an interference with the fundamental rights of practically the entire European population. 57      In this respect, it must be noted, first, that Directive 2006/24 covers, in a generalised manner, all persons and all means of electronic communication as well as all traffic data without any differentiation, limitation or exception being made in the light of the objective of fighting against serious crime.
  • 62      In particular, Directive 2006/24 does not lay down any objective criterion by which the number of persons authorised to access and subsequently use the data retained is limited to what is strictly necessary in the light of the objective pursued. Above all, the access by the competent national authorities to the data retained is not made dependent on a prior review carried out by a court or by an independent administrative body whose decision seeks to limit access to the data and their use to what is strictly necessary for the purpose of attaining the objective pursued and which intervenes following a reasoned request of those authorities submitted within the framework of procedures of prevention, detection or criminal prosecutions. Nor does it lay down a specific obligation on Member States designed to establish such limits. 63      Thirdly, so far as concerns the data retention period, Article 6 of Directive 2006/24 requires that those data be retained for a period of at least six months, without any distinction being made between the categories of data set out in Article 5 of that directive on the basis of their possible usefulness for the purposes of the objective pursued or according to the persons concerned.64      Furthermore, that period is set at between a minimum of 6 months and a maximum of 24 months, but it is not stated that the determination of the period of retention must be based on objective criteria in order to ensure that it is limited to what is strictly necessary.
  • 52      So far as concerns the right to respect for private life, the protection of that fundamental right requires, according to the Court’s settled case-law, in any event, that derogations and limitations in relation to the protection of personal data must apply only in so far as is strictly necessary (Case C‑473/12 IPI EU:C:2013:715, paragraph 39 and the case-law cited).53      In that regard, it should be noted that the protection of personal data resulting from the explicit obligation laid down in Article 8(1) of the Charter is especially important for the right to respect for private life enshrined in Article 7 of the Charter.54      Consequently, the EU legislation in question must lay down clear and precise rules governing the scope and application of the measure in question and imposing minimum safeguards so that the persons whose data have been retained have sufficient guarantees to effectively protect their personal data against the risk of abuse and against any unlawful access and use of that data (see, by analogy, as regards Article 8 of the ECHR, Eur. Court H.R., Liberty and Others v. the United Kingdom, 1 July 2008, no. 58243/00, § 62 and 63; Rotaru v. Romania, § 57 to 59, and S. and Marper v. the United Kingdom, § 99).
  • 26      In that regard, it should be observed that the data which providers of publicly available electronic communications services or of public communications networks must retain, pursuant to Articles 3 and 5 of Directive 2006/24, include data necessary to trace and identify the source of a communication and its destination, to identify the date, time, duration and type of a communication, to identify users’ communication equipment, and to identify the location of mobile communication equipment, data which consist, inter alia, of the name and address of the subscriber or registered user, the calling telephone number, the number called and an IP address for Internet services. Those data make it possible, in particular, to know the identity of the person with whom a subscriber or registered user has communicated and by what means, and to identify the time of the communication as well as the place from which that communication took place. They also make it possible to know the frequency of the communications of the subscriber or registered user with certain persons during a given period. 27      Those data, taken as a whole, may allow very precise conclusions to be drawn concerning the private lives of the persons whose data has been retained, such as the habits of everyday life, permanent or temporary places of residence, daily or other movements, the activities carried out, the social relationships of those persons and the social environments frequented by them.
  • 32      By requiring the retention of the data listed in Article 5(1) of Directive 2006/24 and by allowing the competent national authorities to access those data, Directive 2006/24, as the Advocate General has pointed out, in particular, in paragraphs 39 and 40 of his Opinion, derogates from the system of protection of the right to privacy established by Directives 95/46 and 2002/58 with regard to the processing of personal data in the electronic communications sector, directives which provided for the confidentiality of communications and of traffic data as well as the obligation to erase or make those data anonymous where they are no longer needed for the purpose of the transmission of a communication, unless they are necessary for billing purposes and only for as long as so necessary.
  • On those grounds, the Court (Grand Chamber) hereby rules:Directive 2006/24/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 15 March 2006 on the retention of data generated or processed in connection with the provision of publicly available electronic communications services or of public communications networks and amending Directive 2002/58/EC is invalid.
  • Paul Merrell on 19 Jul 14
     
    EU Court of Justice decision in regard to a Directive that required communications data retention by telcos/ISPs, finding the Directive invalid as a violation of the right of privacy in communications. Fairly read, paragraph 59 outlaws bulk collection of such records, i.e., it requires the equivalent of a judge-issued search warrant in the U.S. based on probable cause to believe that the particular individual's communications are a legitimate object of a search.  Note also that paragraph 67 effectively forbids transfer of any retained data outside the E.U. So a barrier for NSA sharing of data with GCHQ derived from communications NSA collects from EU communications traffic. Bye-bye, Big Data for GCHQ in the E.U. 
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How anti-Muslim are Americans? Data points to extent of Islamophobia | US news | The Gu... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-islam-islamophobia-data-polls Auction 2016 Trump Muslim-ban polls
shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Who exactly was Donald Trump appealing to when he called on Monday for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”? Quite a few people, according to a YouGov poll conducted earlier this year which found that 55% of surveyed Americans had an “unfavorable” opinion of Islam. Looking more closely at those respondents, Islamophobic sentiments are more common among Americans who are 45 and older, those who are Republican and those who are white.
  • Attitudes toward Islam and attitudes toward Muslims should be considered separately – however, studies suggests that the two overlap considerably, as many people fail to distinguish between the two. In 2014, Pew Research Center published a large study about American attitudes towards individuals of different faiths. Over 3,000 US respondents were asked to rate members of religious groups using a “feeling thermometer” that ranged from 0 to 100: 0 indicated the coldest, most negative possible rating and 100 the warmest, most positive rating. Muslims scored just 40. That score excludes Muslim respondents’ views about other Muslims. The only other group to fare similarly badly were atheists as rated by religious respondents – they too scored 40. There is however an important difference between those two scores: there are far more atheists in America than there are Muslims. Since the Census Bureau is prohibited by law from asking about religious affiliation, Pew surveys are the main source on America’s religious makeup. Their 2015 data shows that 3% of Americans identify as atheist (as well as 4% who say they’re agnostic and 16% who say they’re nothing in particular). By contrast, just under 1% of Americans identify as Muslim – although estimates vary widely and are partly dependent on Muslims’ willingness to identify with the label to interviewers.
  • Those two percentages – the number of Americans who dislike Muslims and the number of Americans who are Muslim – suggest that Trump would not have had the same receptive audience had he singled out members of any other religious group. So far, much of Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric has focused on security. That’s smart. When Brits were asked this year what words they think of when they hear the word Muslim, their most common responses were “terror”, “terrorism” and “terrorist”. It’s also relevant that when individuals (again often white, often Republican) were trying to undermine Barack Obama’s credibility in 2004 and claim that he could not be trusted, they said he was a secret Muslim. What sounded like an accusation only increased in frequency once Obama became a presidential candidate. As of September this year, 29% of Americans (and 43% of Republicans) still believe that Obama is a Muslim, according to a poll by CNN and the Opinion Research Corporation.
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Spies and internet giants are in the same business: surveillance. But we can stop them ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-harbour-ruling-edward-snowden surveillance state NSA EU data privacy litigation
shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • On Tuesday, the European court of justice, Europe’s supreme court, lobbed a grenade into the cosy, quasi-monopolistic world of the giant American internet companies. It did so by declaring invalid a decision made by the European commission in 2000 that US companies complying with its “safe harbour privacy principles” would be allowed to transfer personal data from the EU to the US. This judgment may not strike you as a big deal. You may also think that it has nothing to do with you. Wrong on both counts, but to see why, some background might be useful. The key thing to understand is that European and American views about the protection of personal data are radically different. We Europeans are very hot on it, whereas our American friends are – how shall I put it? – more relaxed.
  • Given that personal data constitutes the fuel on which internet companies such as Google and Facebook run, this meant that their exponential growth in the US market was greatly facilitated by that country’s tolerant data-protection laws. Once these companies embarked on global expansion, however, things got stickier. It was clear that the exploitation of personal data that is the core business of these outfits would be more difficult in Europe, especially given that their cloud-computing architectures involved constantly shuttling their users’ data between server farms in different parts of the world. Since Europe is a big market and millions of its citizens wished to use Facebook et al, the European commission obligingly came up with the “safe harbour” idea, which allowed companies complying with its seven principles to process the personal data of European citizens. The circle having been thus neatly squared, Facebook and friends continued merrily on their progress towards world domination. But then in the summer of 2013, Edward Snowden broke cover and revealed what really goes on in the mysterious world of cloud computing. At which point, an Austrian Facebook user, one Maximilian Schrems, realising that some or all of the data he had entrusted to Facebook was being transferred from its Irish subsidiary to servers in the United States, lodged a complaint with the Irish data protection commissioner. Schrems argued that, in the light of the Snowden revelations, the law and practice of the United States did not offer sufficient protection against surveillance of the data transferred to that country by the government.
  • The Irish data commissioner rejected the complaint on the grounds that the European commission’s safe harbour decision meant that the US ensured an adequate level of protection of Schrems’s personal data. Schrems disagreed, the case went to the Irish high court and thence to the European court of justice. On Tuesday, the court decided that the safe harbour agreement was invalid. At which point the balloon went up. “This is,” writes Professor Lorna Woods, an expert on these matters, “a judgment with very far-reaching implications, not just for governments but for companies the business model of which is based on data flows. It reiterates the significance of data protection as a human right and underlines that protection must be at a high level.”
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  • This is classic lawyerly understatement. My hunch is that if you were to visit the legal departments of many internet companies today you would find people changing their underpants at regular intervals. For the big names of the search and social media worlds this is a nightmare scenario. For those of us who take a more detached view of their activities, however, it is an encouraging development. For one thing, it provides yet another confirmation of the sterling service that Snowden has rendered to civil society. His revelations have prompted a wide-ranging reassessment of where our dependence on networking technology has taken us and stimulated some long-overdue thinking about how we might reassert some measure of democratic control over that technology. Snowden has forced us into having conversations that we needed to have. Although his revelations are primarily about government surveillance, they also indirectly highlight the symbiotic relationship between the US National Security Agency and Britain’s GCHQ on the one hand and the giant internet companies on the other. For, in the end, both the intelligence agencies and the tech companies are in the same business, namely surveillance.
  • And both groups, oddly enough, provide the same kind of justification for what they do: that their surveillance is both necessary (for national security in the case of governments, for economic viability in the case of the companies) and conducted within the law. We need to test both justifications and the great thing about the European court of justice judgment is that it starts us off on that conversation.
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America's new, more 'usable', nuclear bomb in Europe | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-usable-nuclear-bomb-in-europe war & peace U.S.-foreign-policy nukes B-61
shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • The $8 billion upgrade to the US B61 nuclear bomb has been widely condemned as an awful lot of money to spend on an obsolete weapon. As an old fashioned ‘dumb’ bomb it has no role in US or NATO nuclear doctrine, but the upgrade has gone ahead anyway, in large part as a result of lobbying by the nuclear weapons laboratories. In non-proliferation terms however the only thing worse than a useless bomb is a ‘usable’ bomb. Apart from the stratospheric price, the most controversial element of the B61 upgrade is the replacement of the existing rigid tail with one that has moving fins that will make the bomb smarter and allow it to be guided more accurately to a target. Furthermore, the yield can be adjusted before launch, according to the target. The modifications are at the centre of a row between anti-proliferation advocates and the government over whether the new improved B61-12 bomb is in fact a new weapon, and therefore a violation of President Obama’s undertaking not to make new nuclear weapons. His administration’s 2010 Nuclear Posture Review said life extension upgrades to the US arsenal would “not support new military missions or provide for new military capabilities.”
  • The issue has a particular significance for Europe where a stockpile of 180 B61’s is held in six bases in five countries. If there is no change in that deployment by the time the upgraded B61-12’s enter the stockpile in 2024, many of them will be flown out to the bases in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and Turkey. The row has had a semantic tone, revolving on what the definition of ‘new’ is, but arguably the only definition that counts is whether the generals and officials responsible for dropping bombs, view its role in a different light as a result of its refurbishment. Referring to the B61-12’s enhanced accuracy on a recent PBS Newshour television programme, the former head of US Strategic Command, General James Cartwright, made this striking remark: If I can drive down the yield, drive down, therefore, the likelihood of fallout, etc, does that make it more usable in the eyes of some — some president or national security decision-making process? And the answer is, it likely could be more usable.
  • In general, it is not a good thing to see the words ‘nuclear bomb’ and ‘usable’ anywhere near each other. Yet they seem to share space in the minds of some of America’s military leaders, as Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists, points out. Cartwright’s confirmation follows General Norton Schwartz, the former U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff, who in 2014 assessed that the increased accuracy would have implications for how the military thinks about using the B61. “Without a doubt. Improved accuracy and lower yield is a desired military capability. Without a question,” he said. The great thing about nuclear weapons was that their use was supposed to be unthinkable and they were therefore a deterrent to contemplation of a new world war. Once they become ‘thinkable’ we are in a different, and much more dangerous, universe.
  • Paul Merrell on 16 Nov 15
     
    Oh, Lord, please save this planet from idiocy in high places. 
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Homan Square revealed: how Chicago police 'disappeared' 7,000 people | US news | The Gu... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...o-police-disappeared-thousands police Chicago-PD Homan stats
shared by Paul Merrell on 20 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Police “disappeared” more than 7,000 people at an off-the-books interrogation warehouse in Chicago, nearly twice as many detentions as previously disclosed, the Guardian can now reveal.
  • From August 2004 to June 2015, nearly 6,000 of those held at the facility were black, which represents more than twice the proportion of the city’s population. But only 68 of those held were allowed access to attorneys or a public notice of their whereabouts, internal police records show. The new disclosures, the result of an ongoing Guardian transparency lawsuit and investigation, provide the most detailed, full-scale portrait yet of the truth about Homan Square, a secretive facility that Chicago police have described as little more than a low-level narcotics crime outpost where the mayor has said police “follow all the rules”. The police portrayals contrast sharply with those of Homan Square detainees and their lawyers, who insist that “if this could happen to someone, it could happen to anyone”. A 30-year-old man named Jose, for example, was one of the few detainees with an attorney present when he surrendered to police. He said officers at the warehouse questioned him even after his lawyer specifically told them he would not speak.
  • “The Fillmore and Homan boys,” Jose said, referring to police and the facility’s cross streets, “don’t play by the rules.” According to an analysis of data disclosed to the Guardian in late September, police allowed lawyers access to Homan Square for only 0.94% of the 7,185 arrests logged over nearly 11 years. That percentage aligns with Chicago police’s broader practice of providing minimal access to attorneys during the crucial early interrogation stage, when an arrestee’s constitutional rights against self-incrimination are most vulnerable. But Homan Square is unlike Chicago police precinct houses, according to lawyers who described a “find-your-client game” and experts who reviewed data from the latest tranche of arrestee records obtained by the Guardian.
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  • The narcotics, vice and anti-gang units operating out of Homan Square, on Chicago’s west side, take arrestees to the nondescript warehouse from all over the city: police data obtained by the Guardian and mapped against the city grid show that 53% of disclosed arrestees come from more than 2.5 miles away from the warehouse. No contemporaneous public record of someone’s presence at Homan Square is known to exist. Nor are any booking records generated at Homan Square, as confirmed by a sworn deposition of a police researcher in late September, further preventing relatives or attorneys from finding someone taken there.
  • But those documents do not tell the entire story of Homan Square. Chicago police have not disclosed any figures at all on people who were detained at Homan Square but never ultimately charged. Nor has it released any information about detentions or arrests before September 2004, claiming that information is burdensome to produce because it is not digital. (Chicago purchased the warehouse in 1995.) “It’s hard to believe that 7,185 arrests is an accurate number of arrestees at Homan Square,” said the University of Chicago’s Futterman. “Even if it were true that less than 1% of Homan arrestees were given access to counsel, that would be abhorrent in and of itself.”
  • 11.8% of detainees in the Homan Square logs were Hispanic, compared with 28.9% of the population. 5.5% of the detainees were white, compared with 31.7% of the population. Of the 68 people who Chicago police claim had access to counsel at Homan Square, however, 45% were black, 26% were Hispanic and another 26% were white.
  • Twenty-two people have told the Guardian that Chicago police kept them at Homan Square for hours and even days. They describe pressure from officers to become informants, and all but two – both white – have said the police denied them phone calls to alert relatives or attorneys of their whereabouts. Their accounts point to violations of police directives, which say police must “complete the booking process” regardless of their interest in interrogating a suspect and must also “allow the arrestee to make a reasonable number of telephone calls to an attorney, family member or friend”, usually within “the first hour” of detention. The most recent disclosure of Homan Square data provides the scale behind those accounts: the demographic trends within the 7,185 disclosed arrests at the warehouse are now far more vast than what the Guardian reported in August after launching the transparency lawsuit – but are consistently disproportionate in terms of race and constitutional access to legal counsel. 82.2% of people detained at Homan Square were black, compared with 32.9% of the Chicago population.
  • Despite the lack of booking and minimal attorney access at Homan Square, it is not a facility for detaining and interrogating the most violent of Chicago’s criminals. Drug possession charges were eventually levied in 5,386 of the disclosed Homan Square arrests, or 74.9%; heroin accounted for 35.4% of those, with marijuana next at 22.3%. The facility’s use by police has intensified in recent years. Nearly 65% of documented Homan Square arrests since August 2004 took place in the five years since Rahm Emanuel, formerly Barack Obama’s top aide, became mayor. (The Guardian has filed a Foia request with Emanuel’s office to disclose the extent of its involvement in Homan Square.) The 68 documented attorney visits are actually slightly higher, statistically speaking, than the extremely minimal legal access Chicago police provide suspects in custody during the initial stages of their arrest. The 2014 citywide total at declared police stations, according to First Defense Legal Aid, was 0.3%. On face value, the lawyer visit rate at Homan Square, according to the newly disclosed documents, was 0.9% over nearly 11 years.
  • Chicago attorneys say they are not routinely turned away from police precinct houses, as they are at Homan Square. The warehouse is also unique in not generating public records of someone’s detention there, permitting police to effectively hide detainees from their attorneys. “Try finding a phone number for Homan to see if anyone’s there. You can’t, ever,” said Gaeger. “If you’re laboring under the assumption that your client’s at Homan, there really isn’t much you can do as a lawyer. You’re shut out. It’s guarded like a military installation.”
  • “Often,” Futterman continued, “prisoners aren’t entered into the central booking system until they’re being processed – which doesn’t occur at Homan Square. They’re supposed to begin that processing right away, under CPD procedures, and at Homan Square the reality is, that isn’t happening or is happening sporadically and inconsistently, which leads to the whole find-your-client game.”
  • According to police, when they took a woman the Guardian will identify as Chevoughn to Homan Square in May 2007 regarding a theft, they allowed her attorney to see her. Chevoughn says that never happened. “I was there a very long time, maybe eight to 10 hours,” said Chevoughn, who remembered being “petrified”, particularly as police questioned her in what she calls a “cage”. “I went to Harrison and Kedzie,” Chevoughn said, referring to the cross streets of central booking. “That’s where I slept. It’s where they did fingerprinting, all that crap. That’s when my attorney came.”
  • Police arrested another man, whom the Guardian will call Anthony, in 2006 on charges of starting a garbage fire, and moved him to Homan Square. Police identified him as receiving an attorney there. But Anthony told the Guardian: “That’s not true.”
  • Paul Merrell on 20 Oct 15
     
    It's good to see The Guardian following through on this story.
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Blair and Bush went to war in Iraq despite South Africa's WMD assurances, book states |... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...e-south-africas-wmd-assurances war & peace Iraq Blair Bush43 South-Africa WMD
shared by Paul Merrell on 02 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Tony Blair went to war in Iraq despite a report by South African experts with unique knowledge of the country that showed it did not possess weapons of mass destruction, according to a book published on Sunday.
  • God, Spies and Lies, by South African journalist John Matisonn, describes how then president Thabo Mbeki tried in vain to convince both Blair and President George W Bush that toppling Saddam Hussein in 2003 would be a terrible mistake. Mbeki’s predecessor, Nelson Mandela, also tried to convince the American leader, but was left fuming that “President Bush doesn’t know how to think”. The claim was this week supported by Mbeki’s office, which confirmed that he pleaded with both leaders to heed the WMD experts and even offered to become their intermediary with Saddam in a bid to maintain peace. South Africa had a special insight into Iraq’s potential for WMD because the apartheid government’s own biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programme in the 1980s led the countries to collaborate. The programme was abandoned after the end of white minority rule in 1994 but the expert team, known as Project Coast, was put back together by Mbeki to investigate the US and UK assertion that Saddam had WMD – the central premise for mounting an invasion.
  • Mbeki, who enjoyed positive relations with both Blair and Saddam, asked for the team to be granted access. “Saddam agreed, and gave the South African team the freedom to roam unfettered throughout Iraq,” writes Matisonn, who says he drew on sources in Whitehall and the South African cabinet. “They had access to UN intelligence on possible WMD sites. The US, UK and UN were kept informed of the mission and its progress.” The experts put their prior knowledge of the facilities to good use, Matisonn writes. “They already knew the terrain, because they had travelled there as welcome guests of Saddam when both countries were building WMD.” On their return, they reported that there were no WMDs in Iraq. “They knew where the sites in Iraq had been, and what they needed to look like. But there were now none in Iraq.”
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  • In January 2003, Mbeki, who succeeded Mandela as president, sent a team to Washington to explain the findings, but with little success. Mbeki himself then met Blair for three hours at Chequers on 1 February, the book relates. He warned that the wholesale removal of Saddam’s Ba’ath party could lead to a national resistance to the occupying coalition forces. But with huge military deployments already under way, Blair’s mind was clearly made up. When Frank Chikane, director-general in the president’s office, realised that the South Africans would be ignored, it was “one of the greatest shocks of my life”, he later wrote in a memoir. Matisonn adds: “Mandela, now retired, had tried as well. On Iraq, if not other issues, Mandela and Mbeki were on the same page. Mandela phoned the White House and asked for Bush. Bush fobbed him off to [Condoleezza] Rice. Undeterred, Mandela called former President Bush Sr, and Bush Sr called his son the president to advise him to take Mandela’s call. Mandela had no impact. He was so incensed he gave an uncomfortable comment to the cameras: ‘President Bush doesn’t know how to think,’ he said with visible anger.”
  • Paul Merrell on 02 Dec 15
     
    'President Bush doesn't know how to think,' 
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Jim Crow returns | Al Jazeera America - 0 views

projects.aljazeera.com/...index.html voting-rights Interstate-Cross-Check voter-fraud-fraud civil-liberties
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  • Election officials in 27 states, most of them Republicans, have launched a program that threatens a massive purge of voters from the rolls. Millions, especially black, Hispanic and Asian-American voters, are at risk. Already, tens of thousands have been removed in at least one battleground state, and the numbers are expected to climb, according to a six-month-long, nationwide investigation by Al Jazeera America. At the heart of this voter-roll scrub is the Interstate Crosscheck program, which has generated a master list of nearly 7 million names. Officials say that these names represent legions of fraudsters who are not only registered but have actually voted in two or more states in the same election — a felony punishable by 2 to 10 years in prison. Until now, state elections officials have refused to turn over their Crosscheck lists, some on grounds that these voters are subject to criminal investigation. Now, for the first time, three states — Georgia, Virginia and Washington — have released their lists to Al Jazeera America, providing a total of just over 2 million names.
  • The Crosscheck list of suspected double voters has been compiled by matching names from roughly 110 million voter records from participating states. Interstate Crosscheck is the pet project of Kansas’ controversial Republican secretary of state, Kris Kobach, known for his crusade against voter fraud. The three states’ lists are heavily weighted with names such as Jackson, Garcia, Patel and Kim — ones common among minorities, who vote overwhelmingly Democratic. Indeed, fully 1 in 7 African-Americans in those 27 states, plus the state of Washington (which enrolled in Crosscheck but has decided not to utilize the results), are listed as under suspicion of having voted twice. This also applies to 1 in 8 Asian-Americans and 1 in 8 Hispanic voters. White voters too — 1 in 11 — are at risk of having their names scrubbed from the voter rolls, though not as vulnerable as minorities.If even a fraction of those names are blocked from voting or purged from voter rolls, it could alter the outcome of next week’s electoral battle for control of the U.S. Senate — and perhaps prove decisive in the 2016 presidential vote count.
  • Based on the Crosscheck lists, officials have begun the process of removing names from the rolls — beginning with 41,637 in Virginia alone. Yet the criteria used for matching these double voters are disturbingly inadequate.
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  • In practice, all it takes to become a suspect is sharing a first and last name with a voter in another state. Typical “matches” identifying those who may have voted in both Georgia and Virginia include:Kevin Antonio Hayes of Durham, North Carolina, is a match for a man who voted in Alexandria, Virginia, as Kevin Thomas Hayes.John Paul Williams of Alexandria is supposedly the same man as John R. Williams of Atlanta, Georgia.Robert Dewey Cox of Marietta, Georgia is matched with Robert Glen Cox of Springfield, Virginia.
  • That was the sales pitch. But the actual lists show that not only are middle names commonly mismatched and suffix discrepancies ignored, even birthdates don’t seem to have been taken into account. Moreover, Crosscheck deliberately ignores Social Security mismatches, in the few instances when the numbers are even collected. The Crosscheck instructions for county election officers state, “Social Security numbers are included for verification; the numbers might or might not match.”
  • There are 6,951,484 names on the target list of the 28 states in the Crosscheck group; each of them represents a suspected double voter whose registration has now become subject to challenge and removal. According to a 2013 presentation by Kobach to the National Association of State Election Directors, the program is a highly sophisticated voter-fraud-detection system. The sample matches he showed his audience included the following criteria: first, last and middle name or initial; date of birth; suffixes; and Social Security number, or at least its last four digits.
  • Al Jazeera America visited these and several other potential double voters. John Paul Williams of Alexandria insists he has never used the alias “John R. Williams.” “I’ve never lived in Georgia,” he says.Jo Cox, wife of suspected double voter Robert Glen Cox of Virginia, says she has a solid alibi for him. Cox “is 85 years old and handicapped. He wasn’t in Georgia. Never voted there,” she says. He has also never used the middle name “Dewey.” Twenty-three percent of the names — nearly 1.6 million of them — lack matching middle names. “Jr.” and “Sr.” are ignored, potentially disenfranchising two generations in the same family. And, notably, of those who may have voted twice in the 2012 presidential election, 27 percent were listed as “inactive” voters, meaning that almost 1.9 million may not even have voted once in that race, according to Crosscheck’s own records.
  • Mark Swedlund is a specialist in list analytics whose clients have included eBay, AT&T and Nike. At Al Jazeera America’s request, he conducted a statistical review of Crosscheck’s three lists of suspected double voters. According to Swedlund, “It appears that Crosscheck does have inherent bias to over-selecting for potential scrutiny and purging voters from Asian, Hispanic and Black ethnic groups. In fact, the matching methodology, which presumes people in other states with the same name are matches, will always over-select from groups of people with common surnames.” Swedlund sums up the method for finding two-state voters — simply matching first and last name — as “ludicrous, just crazy.”
  • elen Butler is the executive director of Georgia’s Coalition for the Peoples’ Agenda, which conducts voter drives in minority communities. Any purge list that relies on name matches will contain a built-in racial bias against African-Americans, she says, because “We [African-Americans] took our slave owners’ names.” The search website PeopleSmart notes that 86,020 people in the United States have the name John Jackson. And according to the 2000 U.S. Census, which is the most recent data set, 53 percent of Jacksons are African-American.
  • In North Carolina, state officials have hired former FBI agent Charles W. “Chuck” Stuber, who played a major role in the campaign finance fraud case brought against former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, to, in the words of their press release, “investigate cases of possible voter fraud identified by an interstate cross-check comparing election records from 28 states.”
  • But despite knowing the names and addresses of 192,207 supposed double voters in the state, Stuber has not nabbed a single one in his five months on the job. Josh Lawson, a spokesman for the board of elections, says, “This agency has made no determination as to which portion of these [lists] represent data error or voter fraud.” In fact, to date, Lawson admits that Stuber has found only errors and not one verified fraudulent voter.
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Turkey could cut off Islamic State's supply lines. So why doesn't it? | David Graeber |... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...tate-supply-lines-erdogan-isis war & peace Turkey ISIL PKK YPG
shared by Paul Merrell on 20 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • n the wake of the murderous attacks in Paris, we can expect western heads of state to do what they always do in such circumstances: declare total and unremitting war on those who brought it about. They don’t actually mean it. They’ve had the means to uproot and destroy Islamic State within their hands for over a year now. They’ve simply refused to make use of it. In fact, as the world watched leaders making statements of implacable resolve at the G20 summit in Antalaya, these same leaders are hobnobbing with Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a man whose tacit political, economic, and even military support contributed to Isis’s ability to perpetrate the atrocities in Paris, not to mention an endless stream of atrocities inside the Middle East.
  • How could Isis be eliminated? In the region, everyone knows. All it would really take would be to unleash the largely Kurdish forces of the YPG (Democratic Union party) in Syria, and PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ party) guerillas in Iraq and Turkey. These are, currently, the main forces actually fighting Isis on the ground. They have proved extraordinarily militarily effective and oppose every aspect of Isis’s reactionary ideology. But instead, YPG-controlled territory in Syria finds itself placed under a total embargo by Turkey, and PKK forces are under continual bombardment by the Turkish air force. Not only has Erdoğan done almost everything he can to cripple the forces actually fighting Isis; there is considerable evidence that his government has been at least tacitly aiding Isis itself. It might seem outrageous to suggest that a Nato member like Turkey would in any way support an organisation that murders western civilians in cold blood. That would be like a Nato member supporting al-Qaida. But in fact there is reason to believe that Erdoğan’s government does support the Syrian branch of al-Qaida (Jabhat al-Nusra) too, along with any number of other rebel groups that share its conservative Islamist ideology. The Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University has compiled a long list of evidence of Turkish support for Isis in Syria.
  • And then there are Erdoğan’s actual, stated positions. Back in August, the YPG, fresh from their victories in Kobani and Gire Spi, were poised to seize Jarablus, the last Isis-held town on the Turkish border that the terror organisation had been using to resupply its capital in Raqqa with weapons, materials, and recruits – Isis supply lines pass directly through Turkey. Commentators predicted that with Jarablus gone, Raqqa would soon follow. Erdoğan reacted by declaring Jarablus a “red line”: if the Kurds attacked, his forces would intervene militarily – against the YPG. So Jarablus remains in terrorist hands to this day, under de facto Turkish military protection.
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  • How has Erdoğan got away with this? Mainly by claiming those fighting Isis are “terrorists” themselves. It is true that the PKK did fight a sometimes ugly guerilla war with Turkey in the 1990s, which resulted in it being placed on the international terror list. For the last 10 years, however, it has completely shifted strategy, renouncing separatism and adopting a strict policy of never harming civilians. The PKK was responsible for rescuing thousands of Yazidi civilians threatened with genocide by Isis in 2014, and its sister organisation, the YPG, of protecting Christian communities in Syria as well. Their strategy focuses on pursuing peace talks with the government, while encouraging local democratic autonomy in Kurdish areas under the aegis of the HDP, originally a nationalist political party, which has reinvented itself as a voice of a pan-Turkish democratic left.
  • They have proved extraordinarily militarily effective and with their embrace of grassroots democracy and women’s rights, oppose every aspect of Isis’ reactionary ideology. In June, HDP success at the polls denied Erdoğan his parliamentary majority. Erdoğan’s response was ingenious. He called for new elections, declared he was “going to war” with Isis, made one token symbolic attack on them and then proceeded to unleash the full force of his military against PKK forces in Turkey and Iraq, while denouncing the HDP as “terrorist supporters” for their association with them. There followed a series of increasingly bloody terrorist bombings inside Turkey – in the cities of Diyarbakir, Suruc, and, finally, Ankara – attacks attributed to Isis but which, for some mysterious reason, only ever seemed to target civilian activists associated with the HDP. Victims have repeatedly reported police preventing ambulances evacuating the wounded, or even opening fire on survivors with tear gas.
  • As a result, the HDP gave up even holding political rallies in the weeks leading up to new elections in November for fear of mass murder, and enough HDP voters failed to show up at the polls that Erdoğan’s party secured a majority in parliament. The exact relationship between Erdoğan’s government and Isis may be subject to debate; but of some things we can be relatively certain. Had Turkey placed the same kind of absolute blockade on Isis territories as they did on Kurdish-held parts of Syria, let alone shown the same sort of “benign neglect” towards the PKK and YPG that they have been offering to Isis, that blood-stained “caliphate” would long since have collapsed – and arguably, the Paris attacks may never have happened. And if Turkey were to do the same today, Isis would probably collapse in a matter of months. Yet, has a single western leader called on Erdoğan to do this? The next time you hear one of those politicians declaring the need to crack down on civil liberties or immigrant rights because of the need for absolute “war” against terrorism bear all this in mind. Their resolve is exactly as “absolute” as it is politically convenient. Turkey, after all, is a “strategic ally”. So after their declaration, they are likely to head off to share a friendly cup of tea with the very man who makes it possible for Isis to continue to exist.
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WikiLeaks Cables Portray Saudi Arabia As A Cash Machine For Terrorists - 0 views

www.mintpressnews.com/...210038 Auction 2016 Hillary war & peace mercenary funding Saudis UAE Qatar Kuwait Pakistan
shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Saudi Arabia is the world’s largest source of funds for Islamist militant groups such as the Afghan Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba – but the Saudi government is reluctant to stem the flow of money, according to Hillary Clinton. “More needs to be done since Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qaida, the Taliban, LeT and other terrorist groups,” says a secret December 2009 paper signed by the US secretary of state. Her memo urged US diplomats to redouble their efforts to stop Gulf money reaching extremists in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
  • “Donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide,” she said. Three other Arab countries are listed as sources of militant money: Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. The cables highlight an often ignored factor in the Pakistani and Afghan conflicts: that the violence is partly bankrolled by rich, conservative donors across the Arabian Sea whose governments do little to stop them. The problem is particularly acute in Saudi Arabia, where militants soliciting funds slip into the country disguised as holy pilgrims, set up front companies to launder funds and receive money from government-sanctioned charities. One cable details how the Pakistani militant outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba, which carried out the 2008 Mumbai attacks, used a Saudi-based front company to fund its activities in 2005. Meanwhile officials with the LeT’s charity wing, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, travelled to Saudi Arabia seeking donations for new schools at vastly inflated costs – then siphoned off the excess money to fund militant operations. Militants seeking donations often come during the hajj pilgrimage – “a major security loophole since pilgrims often travel with large amounts of cash and the Saudis cannot refuse them entry into Saudi Arabia”. Even a small donation can go far: LeT operates on a budget of just $5.25m (£3.25m) a year, according to American estimates.
  • Saudi officials are often painted as reluctant partners. Clinton complained of the “ongoing challenge to persuade Saudi officials to treat terrorist funds emanating from Saudi Arabia as a strategic priority”. Washington is critical of the Saudi refusal to ban three charities classified as terrorist entities in the US. “Intelligence suggests that these groups continue to send money overseas and, at times, fund extremism overseas,” she said. There has been some progress. This year US officials reported that al-Qaida’s fundraising ability had “deteriorated substantially” since a government crackdown. As a result Bin Laden’s group was “in its weakest state since 9/11” in Saudi Arabia. Any criticisms are generally offered in private. The cables show that when it comes to powerful oil-rich allies US diplomats save their concerns for closed-door talks, in stark contrast to the often pointed criticism meted out to allies inPakistan and Afghanistan. Instead, officials at the Riyadh embassy worry about protecting Saudi oilfields from al-Qaida attacks. The other major headache for the US in the Gulf region is the United Arab Emirates. The Afghan Taliban and their militant partners the Haqqani network earn “significant funds” through UAE-based businesses, according to one report. The Taliban extort money from the large Pashtun community in the UAE, which is home to 1 million Pakistanis and 150,000 Afghans. They also fundraise by kidnapping Pashtun businessmen based in Dubai or their relatives.
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  • “Some Afghan businessmen in the UAE have resorted to purchasing tickets on the day of travel to limit the chance of being kidnapped themselves upon arrival in either Afghanistan or Pakistan,” the report says. Last January US intelligence sources said two senior Taliban fundraisers hadregularly travelled to the UAE, where the Taliban and Haqqani networkslaundered money through local front companies. One report singled out a Kabul-based “Haqqani facilitator”, Haji Khalil Zadran, as a key figure. But, Clinton complained, it was hard to be sure: the UAE’s weak financial regulation and porous borders left US investigators with “limited information” on the identity of Taliban and LeT facilitators. The lack of border controls was “exploited by Taliban couriers and Afghan drug lords camouflaged among traders, businessmen and migrant workers”, she said. In an effort to stem the flow of funds American and UAE officials are increasinglyco-operating to catch the “cash couriers” – smugglers who fly giant sums of money into Pakistan and Afghanistan.
  • In common with its neighbours Kuwait is described as a “source of funds and a key transit point” for al-Qaida and other militant groups. While the government has acted against attacks on its own soil, it is “less inclined to take action against Kuwait-based financiers and facilitators plotting attacks outside of Kuwait”. Kuwait has refused to ban the Revival of Islamic Heritage Society, a charity the US designated a terrorist entity in June 2008 for providing aid to al-Qaida and affiliated groups, including LeT. There is little information about militant fundraising in the fourth Gulf country singled out, Qatar, other than to say its “overall level of CT co-operation with the US is considered the worst in the region”. The funding quagmire extends to Pakistan itself, where the US cables detail sharp criticism of the government’s ambivalence towards funding of militant groups that enjoy covert military support. The cables show how before the Mumbai attacks in 2008, Pakistani and Chinese diplomats manoeuvred hard to block UN sanctions against Jamaat-ud-Dawa. But in August 2009, nine months after sanctions were finally imposed, US diplomats wrote: “We continue to see reporting indicating that JUD is still operating in multiple locations in Pakistan and that the group continues to openly raise funds”. JUD denies it is the charity wing of LeT.
  • Paul Merrell on 24 Dec 15
     
    Question for Hillary: Since you have known at least since December, 2009 that these Arab nations are funding al Qaida and its offshoot organizations, if elected will you impose strong sanctions on them to halt their funding of terrorism?
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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."
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Inside the Battle Over the CIA Torture Report - Bloomberg View - 0 views

www.bloombergview.com/...le-over-the-cia-torture-report war & peace CIA torture Senate-Intelligence_Committee-Report redactions
shared by Paul Merrell on 06 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • After months of internal wrangling, the Senate Intelligence Committee is finally set to release its report on President George W. Bush-era CIA practices, which among other details will contain information about foreign countries that aided in the secret detention and interrogation of suspected terrorists. Several U.S. officials told us that the negotiations are nearly complete between the Central Intelligence Agency and the committee's Democratic staff, which prepared the classified 6,300-page report and its 600-page, soon-to-be-released declassified executive summary. Dianne Feinstein, the committee's chairman, is set to release the summary early next week. Her staff members had objected vigorously to hundreds of redactions the CIA had proposed in the executive summary. After an often-contentious process to resolve the disputes, managed by top White House officials, Feinstein was able to roll back the majority of the disputed CIA redactions.
  • Among the most significant of Feinstein’s victories, the report will retain information on countries that aided the CIA program by hosting black sites or otherwise participating in the secret rendition of suspected terrorists. The countries will not be identified by name, but in other ways, such as code names like “Country A.” This falls short of Feinstein’s original desire, which was to name the countries explicitly, but represents a big victory for the committee nonetheless. In a victory for the CIA, Feinstein reluctantly agreed to allow the redactions of the pseudonyms of agency personnel mentioned in the report. The CIA maintained that any reference to individuals working under cover that offered clues to their identities could place them in harm’s way. “We need to understand the role that particular countries played across time. Even having pseudonyms for countries in the report is important for a full accounting,” said Raha Wala, senior counsel at Human Rights First, which advocated on behalf of the report’s declassification.
  • The CIA and some Republican senators had argued that even such masked identifications could be deciphered, leading to compromised relationships with those countries’ governments. In June 2013, the top intelligence official at the State Department, Philip Goldberg, wrote a classified letter to Congress warning against the disclosure of the names of countries who had participated in the program.
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  • John Rizzo, who served as the CIA's acting general counsel during the black-site program and later wrote a memoir, "Company Man," said the agency has long fought against declassifying any information on the locations of the secret prisons overseas. "That was something we had fought for years and years," Rizzo told us. "Up to now one of the only remaining classified facts about the program was the names of countries where there were black sites." Rizzo said the concern about even referencing the locations of the black sites is that one could piece together the locations with other information that is likely to be in the final public report. One Republican Senate staffer familiar with the negotiations over the report said Feinstein's office relented on some concerns about redacting information that could identify countries hosting the black sites. "Do you scrub enough information to prevent that information from being released?" the staffer said. "It ended up as a half-step in-between, some of the stuff she wanted released and some of the information identifying the countries has been redacted."
  • There is also a risk that any information about foreign countries that aided the CIA programs, even using code names,  could be matched against public reporting that already exists to make them more identifiable. There have been news reports about cooperation by the governments of Poland,  Lithuania, Romania, Thailand and others. "Just because something is leaked doesn’t mean it’s still not secret," Rizzo said. "A national security secret is still a national security secret until the government says otherwise."
  • Originally there had been bipartisan support for the majority staff’s investigation, and the committee’s Republican staff was initially part of the investigation -- but it withdrew early in the process. Even after the Republican staff disowned the investigation, some Republican senators continued to support declassification, including John McCain and Lindsey Graham.
  • The release will not include internal CIA documents that the agency accused Feinstein’s staff of improperly removing from a CIA facility that had been set up for the investigators to work at. Feinstein said that her staff had removed the documents, including a review by Panetta, only after CIA officials tried to surreptitiously remove them from computers being used by the committee’s staff. “What was unique and interesting about the internal documents was not their classification level, but rather their analysis and acknowledgement of significant CIA wrongdoing,” Feinstein said on the Senate floor in July. “The interrogations and the conditions of confinement at the CIA detention sites were far different and far more harsh than the way the CIA had described them to us.”
  • Paul Merrell on 06 Dec 14
     
    Nations that knowingly hosted the CIA "black sites" won't be named, as though their own citizens should be deprived of that information. I still maintain that there would be no need for redacting CIA agents' names who participated in the torture if they were named in criminal complaints as they are required to be by the Convention Against Torture, which -- through the Constitution's Treaty Clause, is "the law of this land." 
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Never trust a corporation to do a library's job - The Message - Medium - 0 views

medium.com/...do-a-librarys-job-f58db4673351 Internet archives Google librarians
shared by Paul Merrell on 01 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Google wrote its mission statement in 1999, a year after launch, setting the course for the company’s next decade:“Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”For years, Google’s mission included the preservation of the past.
  • In the last five years, starting around 2010, the shifting priorities of Google’s management left these archival projects in limbo, or abandoned entirely.After a series of redesigns, Google Groups is effectively dead for research purposes. The archives, while still online, have no means of searching by date.Google News Archives are dead, killed off in 2011, now directing searchers to just use Google.Google Books is still online, but curtailed their scanning efforts in recent years, likely discouraged by a decade of legal wrangling still in appeal. The official blog stopped updating in 2012 and the Twitter account’s been dormant since February 2013.
  • Even Google Search, their flagship product, stopped focusing on the history of the web. In 2011, Google removed the Timeline view letting users filter search results by date, while a series of major changes to their search ranking algorithm increasingly favored freshness over older pages from established sources. (To the detriment of some.)
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  • Two months ago, Larry Page said the company’s outgrown its 14-year-old mission statement. Its ambitions have grown, and its priorities have shifted.Google in 2015 is focused on the present and future. Its social and mobile efforts, experiments with robotics and artificial intelligence, self-driving vehicles and fiberoptics.As it turns out, organizing the world’s information isn’t always profitable. Projects that preserve the past for the public good aren’t really a big profit center. Old Google knew that, but didn’t seem to care.
  • The desire to preserve the past died along with 20% time, Google Labs, and the spirit of haphazard experimentation.Google may have dropped the ball on the past, but fortunately, someone was there to pick it up.
  • Paul Merrell on 01 Feb 15
     
    So here's my plan. In the same legislation that abolishes the NSA, grant its funding and deed the NSA's enormous data center in Utah to the Internet Archives.  Require that the NSA's internet archives be turned over to Internet Archive in good working order. Put thousands of librarians and digital archaeologists to work preserving and making the history of the online global populattion accessible to all. Also require that the remainder of the NSA be used as combustibles for the first annual NSA Bonfire Ball. BYOB. 
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U.S. deserter needs Iraq war crimes evidence to be refugee: EU court | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...dier-usa-idUSKBN0LU16A20150226 war & peace U.S.-foreign-policy Iraq Army-deserter litigation Europe-Court-of-Justice
shared by Paul Merrell on 27 Feb 15 - No Cached

  • (Reuters) - A U.S. soldier who deserted because he thought the Iraq war was illegal could have grounds for seeking asylum in Germany but only if he can show he would have been involved in war crimes, Europe's highest court said on Thursday.

    The European Court of Justice added that even if Andre Shepherd could prove war crimes were very likely to have been committed, he would still have to show he had no alternative to desertion, such as becoming a conscientious objector.

    The Luxembourg-based court was asked for guidance by a German court after Shepherd took legal action when German authorities rejected his asylum application.

     
     
     
     
     
     

    The final decision will be taken by the German court in accordance with the European court's ruling.

  • Shepherd, who served in Iraq between September 2004 and February 2005 as an Apache helicopter mechanic in the 412th Aviation Support Battalion, deserted in 2007 after being ordered to return to Iraq. He applied for asylum in Germany, where he was based. He remains in Germany."When I read and heard about people being ripped to shreds from machine guns or being blown to bits by the Hellfire missiles I began to feel ashamed about what I was doing," Shepherd told a news conference in Frankfurt in 2008."I could not in good conscience continue to serve," the army specialist from Cleveland, Ohio, said.Shepherd believed he should no longer participate in a war he considered unlawful and in war crimes he believed were committed in Iraq. He said he risked criminal prosecution in the United States because of his desertion.
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US manoeuvre in South China Sea leaves little wiggle room with China | World news | The... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-little-wiggle-room-with-china war & peace China U.S.-foreign-policy Navy South-China-Sea confrontation Obama
shared by Paul Merrell on 28 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Barack Obama’s decision to send a US guided missile destroyer into disputed waters off the Spratly islands in the South China Sea on Tuesday has provoked predictable outpourings of rage and veiled threats from Beijing – but nothing, yet, in the way of a military response. The worry now is that the confrontation will catch fire, escalate and spread. Both China, which claims the Spratlys as its own, and the US, which does not recognise Beijing’s sovereignty, have boxed themselves into a rhetorical and tactical corner. With the Pentagon insisting it will repeat and extend such naval patrols at will, and with the People’s Liberation Army Navy determined to stop them, it is feared a head-on collision cannot be far away. China’s heated response to Tuesday’s manoeuvre by the USS Lassen off the Spratlys’ Mischief and Subi reefs, where Beijing is controversially building military airstrips and lighthouses on reclaimed land, left it little wiggle room. The American warship had been tracked and warned off, officials said, adding that what it termed an illegal incursion was a “threat to national sovereignty” and a deliberate provocation that could backfire.
  • Anticipating the US move earlier this month, foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said: “China will never allow any country to violate China’s territorial waters and airspace in the South China Sea.” If ever a government has publicly laid down a red line, this is it. And Obama just crossed it. Having personally failed to find a compromise in White House talks with Xi Jinping, China’s president, last month, Obama has upped the ante. As is also the case with Xi, it is now all but impossible to envisage an American climbdown without enormous loss of face and prestige. By deploying a powerful warship, by declining to inform China in advance, and by insisting the US is upholding the universal principle of free navigation in international waters and will do so again whenever and wherever it wishes, Obama has deliberately challenged Beijing to do its worst.
  • China is in dispute over other South China Sea islands and reefs with several countries that are all more or less at one with the US on the issue, including the Philippines, Vietnam and Malaysia. Renewed trouble could flare up in any of these places. One possibility is the Scarborough Shoal, claimed by Manila, where clashes have continued on and off since 2012. Another obvious pressure point is the Senkaku islands (Diaoyu in Chinese) in the East China Sea, claimed by both Japan and China. In 2013 Beijing upped the ante, unilaterally declaring an air exclusion, or identification, zone in the area, which the US promptly breached with B52 bombers. This dispute forms part of the background to the military buildup ordered by Japan’s hawkish prime minister, Shinzo Abe, who set a record £27bn defence budget this year. (China’s military budget is roughly £90bn; that of the US is about £378bn).
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  • Chinese retaliation, when it comes, and it surely must, may not centre specifically on the Spratlys. There are plenty of other potential troublespots and flashpoints where Beijing might seek to give the Americans pause. In prospect is a sort of geopolitical chain reaction. A spokesman, Lu Kang, hinted at this on Tuesday: “China hopes to use peaceful means to resolve all the disputes, but if China has to make a response then the timing, method and tempo of the response will be made in accordance with China’s wishes and needs.”
  • Reacting to the perceived China threat, Abe is extending Okinawa’s defences and getting involved in South China Sea patrols in support of Washington. Japan also strengthened defence and security ties with Britain – a development that now makes David Cameron’s courtship of Beijing seem all the more incongruous. Taiwan is another powder keg that could be ignited by widening US-China confrontation. While Beijing regards Taiwan as a renegade province and seeks its return, the present-day status quo is underwritten by US military might.
  • US-China naval and aerial rivalry could expand even further afield. China is busy building a blue water fleet (a maritime force capable of operating across the deep waters of open oceans) including aircraft carriers, with the aim of challenging US dominance in the eastern Pacific. Chinese naval ships recently showed up off the Aleutian islands during an Obama visit to Alaska, the mineral-rich Arctic being another possible theatre. Meanwhile, regional western allies such as Australia have serious cause for concern that escalating superpower friction could draw them in.
  • Paul Merrell on 28 Oct 15
     
    The latest Obama idiocy.
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EU issues guidelines on labelling products from Israeli settlements | World news | The ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ducts-from-israeli-settlements war & peace Israel settlements products labeling EU
shared by Paul Merrell on 11 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • The European Union has issued new guidelines for the labelling of products from illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, after years of deliberation and in the teeth of fierce Israeli opposition. Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, made a personal appeal to a number of key European figures in the runup to the decision, in which he said the plan was discriminatory, indicative of double standards, and would embolden those who seek to “eliminate” Israel. The measures will primarily cover fruit and vegetables and should affect less than 1% of all trade from Israel to the EU, which is worth about €30bn. EU officials said existing measures for produce brought into Britain have had no negative economic effect.
  • On some products, like fruit and vegetables, the labelling referring to settlements will be mandatory, while on others it will be voluntary. Israel sees the move as a political stigma that rewards Palestinian violence and will push consumers away. It immediately summoned the EU ambassador to Israel, Lars Faaborg-Andersen, in protest. The Israeli foreign ministry said the EU has chosen “for political motives, to take an unusual and discriminatory step” at a time when Israel is facing a wave of terror. In a statement, the ministry said it was “surprised and even angered by the fact that the EU chooses to implement a double standard against Israel, while ignoring 200 territorial disputes taking place today around the world, including within [the EU] or right on [Israel’s] doorstep”. The EU’s claim that the decision was a “technical step” was baseless and cynical, the statement added.
  • Despite insisting in public that the new guidelines provide clarity to consumers, European diplomats have privately made it clear the move is designed to put pressure on Israel over its continued settlement building in the occupied territories and the absence of a peace dialogue; a sharp rise in violence between Israelis and Palestinians has claimed 90 lives in the last month. Announcing the new guidelines, a European commission official said it had “adopted this morning the Interpretative Notice on indication of origin of goods from the territories occupied by Israel since June 1967”. Although the new guidelines are expected to have little real economic impact, they do carry a political significance for Israel, not least because of the widespread agreement among European governments over their implementation. The decision to push ahead with issuing the guidelines also marks the second major defeat in a year for Netanyahu on an international stage, following his defeat over the Iran nuclear accord, amid mounting evidence of Israel’s growing international isolation.
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  • Senior European officials insist that European consumers are entitled to know the source of goods previously labelled as Israeli. Israeli politicians – including Netanyahu – have made comparisons between labelling and the Nazi era, with some suggesting the move is immoral and antisemitic.
  • On Tuesday, a letter leaked to the Guardian showed that Netanyahu had written or spoken to a number of senior European figures, including European parliament president Martin Schulz, asking for their help to block the move. In a letter to Schulz, the Israeli prime minister said the move was politicised, adding that it could “lead to an actual boycott [of Israel], emboldening those who are not interested in Israeli-Palestinian peace but eliminating Israel altogether”. Since 2003, the EU has placed a numerical code on Israeli imports to allow customs to distinguish between products made within the Green Line and those that are produced beyond it. The UK adopted labelling guidelines for settlement products three years ago.
  • Paul Merrell on 11 Nov 15
     
    Too mild. Under international law, the EU should do a total ban on importing all products from the Occupied Territories. 
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'Comprehensive' CIA Torture Report Won't Even Name Well-Known Architects of Torture Pro... - 0 views

news.vice.com/...-architects-of-torture-program 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."  
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Redaction error reveals FBI did target Lavabit to spy on Edward Snowden | Technology | ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...dar-lavabit-spy-edward-snowden surveillance state NSA Lavabit Snowden litigation
shared by Paul Merrell on 21 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • A redaction oversight by the US government has finally confirmed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s targeting of secure email service Lavabit was used specifically to spy on Edward Snowden. Ladar Levison, creator of the email service, which was founded on a basis of private communications secured by encryption and had 410,000 users, was served a sealed order in 2013 forcing him to aid the FBI in its surveillance of Snowden. Levison was ordered to install a surveillance package on his company’s servers and later to turn over Lavabit’s encryption keys so that it would give the FBI the ability to read the most secure messages that the company offered. He was also ordered not to disclose the fact to third-parties. After 38 days of legal fighting, a court appearance, subpoena, appeals and being found in contempt of court, Levison abruptly shuttered Lavabit citing government interference and stating that he would not become “complicit in crimes against the American people”.
  • We now know that reports of Snowden’s use of Lavabit for his secure communications were true and that, as most presumed, the reason the FBI drove Lavabit into closure was to surveil the leaker of the NSA files. Documents obtained from the federal court were published by transparency organisation Cryptome, as noted by Wired’s Kim Zetter, revealing that “Ed_Snowden@lavabit.com” was the intended target of the action against Lavabit. The documents were released after legal action from Levison, who has been fighting in an attempt to lift himself from his order of silence and reveal what really happened. A motion filed in December prompted the court to order the release of files within the case, specifically with the identity of the subscriber redacted. As the documents show, that didn’t happen. Snowden’s email address was left unredacted, and while Levison is still under order not to reveal who the FBI was after, the redaction error has confirmed Snowden as the target.
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Researchers Connect 91% of Numbers With Names In Metadata Probe - Slashdot - 0 views

yro.slashdot.org/...s-with-names-in-metadata-probe NSA NSA-targets metadata names lies
shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • "One of the key tenets of the argument that the National Security Agency and some lawmakers have constructed to justify the agency's collection of phone metadata is that the information it's collecting, such as phone numbers and length of call, can't be tied to the callers' names. However, some quick investigation by some researchers at Stanford University who have been collecting information voluntarily from Android users found that they could correlate numbers to names with very little effort. The Stanford researchers recently started a program called Metaphone that gathers data from volunteers with Android phones. They collect data such as recent phone calls and text messages and social network information. The goal of the project, which is the work of the Stanford Security Lab, is to draw some lines connecting metadata and surveillance. As part of the project, the researchers decided to select a random set of 5,000 numbers from their data and see whether they could connect any of them to subscriber names using just freely available Web tools. The result: They found names for 27 percent of the numbers using just Google, Yelp, Facebook and Google Places. Using some other online tools, they connected 91 of 100 numbers with names."
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Larry Summers and the Secret "Bankster End Game" Memo : http://goo.gl/wDhDhL - 1 views

news.google.com/?ar=1379450048 banksters Larry-Summers Federal-Reserve-Bankster-Cartel financial-collapse
shared by Gary Edwards on 17 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 17 Sep 13
     
    Diigo is screwing up the URL AGAIN!!!!! WTF!!! The correct title is "Larry Summers and the Secret "End-Game" Memo :: http://goo.gl/wDhDhL From the marbux treasure trove of truth we have financial expert Greg Palast describing how the Banksters engineered the 2008 World Financial Collapse. Greg names names, sighting an important 1997 memo signed by then Deputy Treasury Secretary, Larry Summers. The memo describes the Banksters "end game", and authorizes pulling the trigger on a process of forcing the world's financial institutions to accept the game of derivative roulette where high risk financial schemes and casino bets had to be accepted as "financial assets". Good story and as from everything I know, the absolute truth. Read it carefully because these same Banksters control the Obama Administration and seek to continue the great shakedown. One item of note is the recent resignation of Larry Summers as Obama nominee to head the Federal Reserve Bankster Cartel. Summers is one of the architects of the 2008 financial collapse, but is seen be Wall Street as hesitant to continue with the current Bernake flooding of the money markets with $85 Billion per month in freshly minted paper. Even the hint of rolling back the Bankster bailout a bit is enough to do in Summers. alternative Fed Banster Czar Janette Yellin promises to up the $85 Billion monthly bailout, and Wall Street celebrated with a near doubling of trades. We're so screwed! We started the "Socialism and the End of the American Dream" Diigo group in September of 2008 as an effort to understand the financial collapse. In this short article, Greg Palast summarizes the story and places the important facts on the table for all to see. Pray with me for his health and safety. excerpt: "The year was 1997.  US Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin was pushing hard to de-regulate banks.  That required, first, repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act to dismantle the barrier between commercial ba
  • Paul Merrell on 18 Sep 13
     
    Related link: Summers Withdraws From Consideration for Fed Chairmanship, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-15/obama-said-he-accepted-summers-decision-to-withdraw-his-name.html
  • Gary Edwards on 19 Sep 13
     
    From the marbux treasure trove of truth we have financial expert Greg Palast describing how the Banksters engineered the 2008 World Financial Collapse. Greg names names, sighting an important 1997 memo signed by then Deputy Treasury Secretary, Larry Summers. The memo describes the Banksters "end game", and authorizes pulling the trigger on a process of forcing the world's financial institutions to accept the game of derivative roulette where high risk financial schemes and casino bets had to be accepted as "financial assets". Good story and as from everything I know, the absolute truth. Read it carefully because these same Banksters control the Obama Administration and seek to continue the great shakedown. One item of note is the recent resignation of Larry Summers as Obama nominee to head the Federal Reserve Bankster Cartel. Summers is one of the architects of the 2008 financial collapse, but is seen be Wall Street as hesitant to continue with the current Bernake flooding of the money markets with $85 Billion per month in freshly minted paper. Even the hint of rolling back the Bankster bailout a bit is enough to do in Summers. alternative Fed Banster Czar Janette Yellin promises to up the $85 Billion monthly bailout, and Wall Street celebrated with a near doubling of trades. We're so screwed! We started the "Socialism and the End of the American Dream" Diigo group in September of 2008 as an effort to understand the financial collapse. In this short article, Greg Palast summarizes the story and places the important facts on the table for all to see. Pray with me for his health and safety. excerpt: "The year was 1997.  US Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin was pushing hard to de-regulate banks.  That required, first, repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act to dismantle the barrier between commercial banks and investment banks.  It was like replacing bank vaults with roulette wheels. Second, the banks wanted the right to play a new high-risk game:  "d
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