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Gary Edwards

BENGHAZI - THE BIGGEST COVER-UP SCANDAL IN U.S. HISTORY? - WAS BENGHAZI A CIA GUN-RUNNI... - 0 views

www.libertynews.com/...r-insurgents-fighting-in-syria

Benghazi Benghazigate Benghazi-coverup

shared by Gary Edwards on 09 May 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 09 May 13
     
    "LibertyNEWS.com - Editorial Team Special Report It's never fun to admit you've been lied to and duped. There is no comfort in realizing a high-level group in government has conned you. The wound created from such a realization would be deep and painful when paired with extraordinary insult when you realize the cons are people you not only trusted, but people who are tasked with protecting your rights, your liberty, your life. When these people betray you, you're in trouble - big trouble. Unfortunately, we believe America is being betrayed by powerful individuals tasked with our protection. These people are found in the White House, the Congress, the CIA and other government entities - and they're lying to you. Then they're covering it up on an epic scale, in a never-before-seen manner. Here are the basics of what the schemers in government and the complicit media would like for us all to focus on and buy into: Why wasn't there better security at the consulate (keep this misleading word in mind) in Benghazi? Why didn't authorization come to move special forces in for protection and rescue? Why was an obscure video blamed when everyone knew the video had nothing to do with it? Did Obama's administration cover-up the true nature of the attacks to win an election? Truth is, as we're starting to believe, the above questions are convenient, tactical distractions. And truth is, answers to these questions, if they ever come, will never lead to revelations of the REAL TRUTH and meaningful punishment of anyone found responsible. Rep. Darrell Issa knows this, members of the House Committee investigating the Benghazi attacks know this, the White House knows this, and much of the big corporate media infrastructure knows it, too. How do they know it? Because they know the truth. They know the truth, but cannot and/or will not discuss it in public. Here are the basics that we (America, in general) should be focusing on, but aren't: Why do media
Gary Edwards

Impeach Judge James Robart for violating sovereignty and Constitution - 0 views

www.conservativereview.com/...g-sovereignty-and-constitution

Byron-York Trump-Immigration-Order

shared by Gary Edwards on 08 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 08 Feb 17
     
    "It's still hard to believe we now live in a country where a district judge can demand that we bring in refugees from state sponsors of terror and failed states saturated with terrorists and no data systems during a time of war. It's almost unfathomable that a district judge, an institution created by Congress, can overturn long-standing refugee law and bar the federal government from prioritizing persecuted religious minorities for refugee resettlement. All in contravention to statute, numerous clauses of the Constitution, the social contract, the social compact, popular sovereignty, jurisdictional sovereignty, and 200 years of case law. If Obergefell redefined the building block of all civilization, Judge James Robart's ruling redefined the building block of a sovereign nation. It's hard to comprehend a judicial opinion more divorced from our Constitution, sovereignty, fundamental laws, founding values, history, and tradition. It's also hard to imagine an opinion that is of greater consequence - unless it is ignored. In the long run, Congress must strip the federal judiciary of their power grab and restore Congress' plenary power over immigration, as it was since our founding. However, in the meantime, it's time to make impeachment great again. Impeachment was a critical check on abuse of power   Before the growth of political parties killed the separation of powers, the tool of impeachment was regarded by our founders as one of the most effective ways of checking the executive and judicial branches of government. By my count, impeachment is referenced 58 times in the Federalist Papers and countless times during the Constitutional Convention. Impeachment [U.S.CONST. art. II, §4] was not only reserved for those who engage in criminal behavior. It was clearly designed to check abuse of power. As the Congressional Research Service observes, Congress has identified "improperly exceeding or abusing the powers of the office" as a criterion for
Paul Merrell

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.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • 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. 
Gary Edwards

Chinese agency bans online mention of Panama Papers - CNET - 0 views

www.cnet.com/...rs-will-be-dealt-with-severely

Panama-papers

shared by Gary Edwards on 06 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 06 Apr 16
     
    "China is flexing its censorship muscles yet again, banning any online mention of the widely publicized Panama Papers. A government agency sent an order to media groups to "find and delete reprinted reports of the Panama Papers. Do not follow up on related content, no exceptions," according to the China Digital Times. "If material from foreign media attacking China is found on any website, it will be dealt with severely." The Panama Papers refer to 2.6 terabytes of information published online Sunday after a yearlong investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a German newspaper and other news groups. The more than 11 million legal and financial records were stolen from Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca's servers. They focus on 140 politicians and public officials worldwide with previously undisclosed involvement in or ownership of offshore financial havens. Relatives of eight current or former members of China's ruling party were implicated. MORE ON THE PANAMA PAPERS Panama Papers show no one's secrets safe Panama Papers leak claims its first victim The most significant findings among the Chinese officials were secret offshore activities linked to the family of Xi Jinping, the country's president. His brother-in-law, Deng Jiagui, was named. Xi assumed office in 2013 and has led a public charge against corruption in China. Also named were Li Xiaolin, daughter of former premier Li Peng, and Jasmine Li, granddaughter of former Standing Committee member Jia Qinglin. The Chinese agency also ordered that references be removed relating to money laundering of people associated with Russian President Vladamir Putin. The Global Times, a publication run by the Chinese government, posted an op-ed shortly after the leaks that implied the Panama Papers' information had been distorted to make countries like China and Russia look bad. The leaks have already made an impact, with Iceland Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson resigni
Gary Edwards

Jim Kunstler's 2014 Forecast - Burning Down The House | Zero Hedge - 0 views

www.zerohedge.com/...14-forecast-burning-down-house

Banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 08 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 08 Jan 14
     
    Incredible must read analysis. Take away: the world is going to go "medevil". It's the only way out of this mess. Since the zero hedge layout is so bad, i'm going to post as much of the article as Diigo will allow: Jim Kunstler's 2014 Forecast - Burning Down The House Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/06/2014 19:36 -0500 Submitted by James H. Kunstler of Kunstler.com , Many of us in the Long Emergency crowd and like-minded brother-and-sisterhoods remain perplexed by the amazing stasis in our national life, despite the gathering tsunami of forces arrayed to rock our economy, our culture, and our politics. Nothing has yielded to these forces already in motion, so far. Nothing changes, nothing gives, yet. It's like being buried alive in Jell-O. It's embarrassing to appear so out-of-tune with the consensus, but we persevere like good soldiers in a just war. Paper and digital markets levitate, central banks pull out all the stops of their magical reality-tweaking machine to manipulate everything, accounting fraud pervades public and private enterprise, everything is mis-priced, all official statistics are lies of one kind or another, the regulating authorities sit on their hands, lost in raptures of online pornography (or dreams of future employment at Goldman Sachs), the news media sprinkles wishful-thinking propaganda about a mythical "recovery" and the "shale gas miracle" on a credulous public desperate to believe, the routine swindles of medicine get more cruel and blatant each month, a tiny cohort of financial vampire squids suck in all the nominal wealth of society, and everybody else is left whirling down the drain of posterity in a vortex of diminishing returns and scuttled expectations. Life in the USA is like living in a broken-down, cob-jobbed, vermin-infested house that needs to be gutted, disinfected, and rebuilt - with the hope that it might come out of the restoration process retaining the better qualities of our heritage.
Paul Merrell

FBI says search warrants not needed to use "stingrays" in public places | Ars Technica - 0 views

arstechnica.com/...se-stringrays-in-public-places

surveillance state stingrays DoJ privacy 4th Amendment

shared by Paul Merrell on 08 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • The Federal Bureau of Investigation is taking the position that court warrants are not required when deploying cell-site simulators in public places. Nicknamed "stingrays," the devices are decoy cell towers that capture locations and identities of mobile phone users and can intercept calls and texts. The FBI made its position known during private briefings with staff members of Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). In response, the two lawmakers wrote Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security chief Jeh Johnson, maintaining they were "concerned about whether the FBI and other law enforcement agencies have adequately considered the privacy interests" of Americans. According to the letter, which was released last week: For example, we understand that the FBI’s new policy requires FBI agents to obtain a search warrant whenever a cell-site simulator is used as part of a FBI investigation or operation, unless one of several exceptions apply, including (among others): (1) cases that pose an imminent danger to public safety, (2) cases that involve a fugitive, or (3) cases in which the technology is used in public places or other locations at which the FBI deems there is no reasonable expectation of privacy.
  • The letter was prompted in part by a Wall Street Journal report in November that said the Justice Department was deploying small airplanes equipped with cell-site simulators that enabled "investigators to scoop data from tens of thousands of cellphones in a single flight, collecting their identifying information and general location." The bureau's position on Americans' privacy isn't surprising. The Obama Administration has repeatedly maintained that the public has no privacy in public places. It began making that argument as early as 2010, when it told a federal appeals court that the authorities should be allowed to affix GPS devices on vehicles and track a suspect's every move without court authorization. The Supreme Court, however, eventually ruled that warrants are required. What's more, the administration has argued that placing a webcam with pan-and-zoom capabilities on a utility pole to spy on a suspect at his or her residence was no different from a police officer's observation from the public right-of-way. A federal judge last month disagreed with the government's position, tossing evidence gathered by the webcam that was operated from afar.
  • In their letter, Leahy and Grassley complained that little is known about how stingrays, also known as ISMI catchers, are used by law enforcement agencies. The Harris Corp., a maker of the devices from Florida, includes non-disclosure clauses with buyers. Baltimore authorities cited a non-disclosure agreement to a judge in November as their grounds for refusing to say how they tracked a suspect's mobile phone. They eventually dropped charges rather than disclose their techniques. Further, sometimes the authorities simply lie to judges about their use or undertake other underhanded methods to prevent the public from knowing that the cell-site simulators are being used.
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  • Hanni Fakhoury, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said some states and judges are pushing back against stingrays. "In Tacoma, judges now require police (to) specifically note they plan to use an IMSI catcher and promise not to store data collected from people who are not investigation targets," he said. "The Florida and Massachusetts state supreme courts ruled warrants were necessary for real-time cell phone tracking. Nine states—Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Minnesota, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, and Wisconsin—passed laws specifically requiring police to use a warrant to track a cell phone in real time."
  • Paul Merrell on 08 Jan 15
     
    Is there any problem here that couldn't be cured by discharge and public flogging for any government official caught using information derived from a stingray?
Paul Merrell

Fresno Police Roll Out Dystopian 'Threat Ranking' System - 0 views

www.mintpressnews.com/...212684

surveillance state Fresno citizen-threat-ranking Intrado Beware trade-secrets

shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • “On 57 monitors that cover the walls of the center, operators zoomed and panned an array of roughly 200 police cameras perched across the city. They could dial up 800 more feeds from the city’s schools and traffic cameras, and they soon hope to add 400 more streams from cameras worn on officers’ bodies and from thousands from local businesses that have surveillance systems.” Though the intricate surveillance apparatus described above seems straight from a dystopic novel, it is actually the Washington Post’s recent description of the the visual data collection system employed by a local California police department. The police department in Fresno, California, has taken extreme measures to combat high rates of crime in the city. As the Post reports, Fresno’s Real Time Crime Center, buried deep in the police station’s headquarters, has developed as a response to what many police call increasing threats. The system, according to police officials, can “provide critical information that can help uncover terrorists or thwart mass shootings, ensure the safety of officers and the public, find suspects, and crack open cases” — a feature they say is increasingly important in the wake of events like the November terror attack in Paris and the San Bernardino shooting last month.
  • “Our officers are expected to know the unknown and see the unseen,” Fresno Chief of Police Jerry Dyer said. “They are making split-second decisions based on limited facts. The more you can provide in terms of intelligence and video, the more safely you can respond to calls.” Programs similar to the Real Time Crime Center have launched in New York, Houston, and Seattle over the course of the last decade. Nationwide, the use of Stingrays, data fusion centers, and aerial drone surveillance have broadened the access local police have to private information. In another example, the FBI is continually developing a comprehensive biometric database that local police access every day. “This is something that’s been building since September 11,” says Jennifer Lynch, a senior attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Like the problem of police militarization, Lynch traces the trend back to the Pentagon: “First funding went to the military to develop this technology, and now it has come back to domestic law enforcement. It’s the perfect storm of cheaper and easier-to-use technologies and money from state and federal governments to purchase it.”
  • While many of these programs may fail to shock Americans, one new software program takes police scrutiny of private citizens to a new level. Beware, a software tool produced by tech firm Intrado, not only surveils the data of the citizens of Fresno, the first city to test it — it calculates threat levels based on what it discovers. The software scours arrest records, property records, Deep Web searches, commercial databases, and social media postings. By this method, it was able to designate a man with a firearm and gang convictions involved in a real-time domestic violence dispute as the highest of three threat levels: a bright red ranking. Fresno police say the intelligence from Beware aided them, as the man eventually surrendered and officers found he was armed with a gun. Beware scours billions of data points to develop rankings for citizens, and though few recoil at the thought of catching criminals and miscreants, the program provides particular cause for concern because of both its invasiveness and its fallibility.
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  • These shortcomings have sparked concern among Fresno’s city council members, who discussed the issue at a meeting in November. At that meeting, one council member cited an incident where a girl who posted on social media about a card game called “Rage” was consequently given an elevated threat ranking — all because “rage” could be a triggering keyword for Beware. At that same meeting, libertarian-leaning Republican councilman Clinton J. Olivier asked Chief Dyer to use the technology to calculate his threat level. In real-time, Olivier was given a green, or non-threatening ranking, but his home received a yellow, or medium, threat ranking. It was likely due to the record of his home’s prior occupant. “Even though it’s not me that’s the yellow guy, your officers are going to treat whoever comes out of that house in his boxer shorts as the yellow guy,” Olivier told Dyer. “That may not be fair to me.” He added later, “[Beware] has failed right here with a council member as the example.” “It’s a very unrefined, gross technique,” Fresno civil rights attorney, Rob Nabarro, has said of Beware’s color-coded levels. “A police call is something that can be very dangerous for a citizen,” he noted, echoing Olivier’s worries.
  • Further, though Fresno police use Beware, they are left in the dark about how it determines rankings. Intrado designates the method a “trade secret,” and as such, will not share it with the officers who use it. This element of the software’s implementation has concerned civil rights advocates like Nabarro. He believes the secrecy surrounding the technology may result in unfair, unchecked threat rankings. Nabarro cautioned that between the software’s secrecy and room for error, Beware could accidentally rank a citizen as dangerous based on, for example, posts on social media criticizing police. This potential carries with it the ability for citizens to be punished not for actual crimes, but for exercising basic constitutional rights. Further, it compromises the rights of individuals who have been previously convicted of crimes, potentially using past behavior to assume guilt in unrelated future incidents. Chief Dyer insists concerns are exaggerated and that a particular score does not guarantee a particular police response. Police maintain the tools are necessary to fight crime. Nevertheless, following the heated November meeting, Dyer suggested he would work to turn off the color-coded threat ranking due to citizens’ concerns. “It’s a balancing act,” he admitted.
  • It remains to be seen if Fresno police and residents will move forward with the technology or shut it down over privacy concerns. City officials in Oakland, California, for example, recently scaled back plans to establish a Real Time Crime Center after outraged citizens protested. At the very least, as Northern California ACLU attorney Matt Cagle said, “[W]henever these surveillance technologies are on the table, there needs to be a meaningful debate. There needs to be safeguards and oversight.”
  • Paul Merrell on 12 Jan 16
     
    Claiming trade secrecy for the software's selection criteria for threat ranking actually constitutes policy policy, the trade secrecy claim would probably not survive judical review. It's at least arguably an unconstitutional delegation of a government function (ranking citizens as threats) to a private company. Police departments in Florida were sued to produce records of how a related surveillance device, the Stingray IMSI device that intercepts cell phone calls by mimicking a cell-phone tower, and only averted court-ordered disclosure of its trade secret workings by the FBI swooping in just before decision to remove all the software documentation from local police possession, custody, and control.    There is a long chain of case law holding that information that is legitimately trade secret and proprietary loses that protection if adopted by local or federal government as law. With a software program that classifies citizens as threats for governmental purposes if they meet the program's selection criteria, the software is performing a strictly governmental function that is in reality law. 
Paul Merrell

Obama confidant's spine-chilling proposal - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/...sunstein_2

surveillance state psywar Sunstein Obama

shared by Paul Merrell on 06 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Cass Sunstein has long been one of Barack Obama’s closest confidants.  Often mentioned as a likely Obama nominee to the Supreme Court, Sunstein is currently Obama’s head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs where, among other things, he is responsible for “overseeing policies relating to privacy, information quality, and statistical programs.”  In 2008, while at Harvard Law School, Sunstein co-wrote a truly pernicious paper proposing that the U.S. Government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-”independent” advocates to “cognitively infiltrate” online groups and websites — as well as other activist groups — which advocate views that Sunstein deems “false conspiracy theories” about the Government.  This would be designed to increase citizens’ faith in government officials and undermine the credibility of conspiracists.  The paper’s abstract can be read, and the full paper downloaded, here. Sunstein advocates that the Government’s stealth infiltration should be accomplished by sending covert agents into “chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups.”  He also proposes that the Government make secret payments to so-called “independent” credible voices to bolster the Government’s messaging (on the ground that those who don’t believe government sources will be more inclined to listen to those who appear independent while secretly acting on behalf of the Government).   This program would target those advocating false “conspiracy theories,” which they define to mean: “an attempt to explain an event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who have also managed to conceal their role.”  Sunstein’s 2008 paper was flagged by this blogger, and then amplified in an excellent report by Raw Story‘s Daniel Tencer.
  • There’s no evidence that the Obama administration has actually implemented a program exactly of the type advocated by Sunstein, though in light of this paper and the fact that Sunstein’s position would include exactly such policies, that question certainly ought to be asked.  Regardless, Sunstein’s closeness to the President, as well as the highly influential position he occupies, merits an examination of the mentality behind what he wrote.  This isn’t an instance where some government official wrote a bizarre paper in college 30 years ago about matters unrelated to his official powers; this was written 18 months ago, at a time when the ascendancy of Sunstein’s close friend to the Presidency looked likely, in exactly the area he now oversees.  Additionally, the government-controlled messaging that Sunstein desires has been a prominent feature of U.S. Government actions over the last decade, including in some recently revealed practices of the current administration, and the mindset in which it is grounded explains a great deal about our political class.  All of that makes Sunstein’s paper worth examining in greater detail.
  • Initially, note how similar Sunstein’s proposal is to multiple, controversial stealth efforts by the Bush administration to secretly influence and shape our political debates.  The Bush Pentagon employed teams of former Generals to pose as “independent analysts” in the media while secretly coordinating their talking points and messaging about wars and detention policies with the Pentagon.  Bush officials secretly paid supposedly “independent” voices, such as Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher, to advocate pro-Bush policies while failing to disclose their contracts.  In Iraq, the Bush Pentagon hired a company, Lincoln Park, which paid newspapers to plant pro-U.S. articles while pretending it came from Iraqi citizens.  In response to all of this, Democrats typically accused the Bush administration of engaging in government-sponsored propaganda — and when it was done domestically, suggested this was illegal propaganda.  Indeed, there is a very strong case to make that what Sunstein is advocating is itself illegal under long-standing statutes prohibiting government ”propaganda” within the U.S., aimed at American citizens: As explained in a March 21, 2005 report by the Congressional Research Service, “publicity or propaganda” is defined by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) to mean either (1) self-aggrandizement by public officials, (2) purely partisan activity, or (3) “covert propaganda.”  By covert propaganda, GAO means information which originates from the government but is unattributed and made to appear as though it came from a third party.
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  • Covert government propaganda is exactly what Sunstein craves.  His mentality is indistinguishable from the Bush mindset that led to these abuses, and he hardly tries to claim otherwise.  Indeed, he favorably cites both the covert Lincoln Park program as well as Paul Bremer’s closing of Iraqi newspapers which published stories the U.S. Government disliked, and justifies them as arguably necessary to combat “false conspiracy theories” in Iraq — the same goal Sunstein has for the U.S.Sunstein’s response to these criticisms is easy to find in what he writes, and is as telling as the proposal itself.  He acknowledges that some “conspiracy theories” previously dismissed as insane and fringe have turned out to be entirely true (his examples:  the CIA really did secretly administer LSD in “mind control” experiments; the DOD really did plot the commission of terrorist acts inside the U.S. with the intent to blame Castro; the Nixon White House really did bug the DNC headquarters).  Given that history, how could it possibly be justified for the U.S. Government to institute covert programs designed to undermine anti-government “conspiracy theories,” discredit government critics, and increase faith and trust in government pronouncements?  Because, says Sunstein, such powers are warranted only when wielded by truly well-intentioned government officials who want to spread The Truth and Do Good — i.e., when used by people like Cass Sunstein and Barack Obama
  • Throughout, we assume a well-motivated government that aims to eliminate conspiracy theories, or draw their poison, if and only if social welfare is improved by doing so. But it’s precisely because the Government is so often not “well-motivated” that such powers are so dangerous.  Advocating them on the ground that “we will use them well” is every authoritarian’s claim.  More than anything else, this is the toxic mentality that consumes our political culture:  when our side does X, X is Good, because we’re Good and are working for Good outcomes.  That was what led hordes of Bush followers to endorse the same large-government surveillance programs they long claimed to oppose, and what leads so many Obama supporters now to justify actions that they spent the last eight years opposing.
  • Consider the recent revelation that the Obama administration has been making very large, undisclosed payments to MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber to provide consultation on the President’s health care plan.  With this lucrative arrangement in place, Gruber spent the entire year offering public justifications for Obama’s health care plan, typically without disclosing these payments, and far worse, was repeatedly held out by the White House — falsely — as an “independent” or “objective” authority.  Obama allies in the media constantly cited Gruber’s analysis to support their defenses of the President’s plan, and the White House, in turn, then cited those media reports as proof that their plan would succeed.  This created an infinite “feedback loop” in favor of Obama’s health care plan which — unbeknownst to the public — was all being generated by someone who was receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in secret from the administration (read this to see exactly how it worked).In other words, this arrangement was quite similar to the Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher scandals which Democrats, in virtual lockstep, condemned.  Paul Krugman, for instance, in 2005 angrily lambasted right-wing pundits and policy analysts who received secret, undisclosed payments, and said they lack “intellectual integrity”; he specifically cited the Armstrong Williams case.  Yet the very same Paul Krugman last week attacked Marcy Wheeler for helping to uncover the Gruber payments by accusing her of being “just like the right-wingers with their endless supply of fake scandals.”  What is one key difference?  Unlike Williams and Gallagher, Jonathan Gruber is a Good, Well-Intentioned Person with Good Views — he favors health care — and so massive, undisclosed payments from the same administration he’s defending are dismissed as a “fake scandal.”
  • Sunstein himself — as part of his 2008 paper — explicitly advocates that the Government should pay what he calls “credible independent experts” to advocate on the Government’s behalf, a policy he says would be more effective because people don’t trust the Government itself and would only listen to people they believe are “independent.”  In so arguing, Sunstein cites the Armstrong Williams scandal not as something that is wrong in itself, but as a potential risk of this tactic (i.e., that it might leak out), and thus suggests that “government can supply these independent experts with information and perhaps prod them into action from behind the scenes,” but warns that “too close a connection will be self-defeating if it is exposed.”  In other words, Sunstein wants the Government to replicate the Armstrong Williams arrangement as a means of more credibly disseminating propaganda — i.e., pretending that someone is an “independent” expert when they’re actually being “prodded” and even paid “behind the scenes” by the Government — but he wants to be more careful about how the arrangement is described (don’t make the control explicit) so that embarrassment can be avoided if it ends up being exposed.  
  • In this 2008 paper, then, Sunstein advocated, in essence, exactly what the Obama administration has been doing all year with Gruber:  covertly paying people who can be falsely held up as “independent” analysts in order to more credibly promote the Government line.  Most Democrats agreed this was a deceitful and dangerous act when Bush did it, but with Obama and some of his supporters, undisclosed arrangements of this sort seem to be different.  Why?  Because, as Sunstein puts it:  we have “a well-motivated government” doing this so that “social welfare is improved.”  Thus, just like state secrets, indefinite detention, military commissions and covert, unauthorized wars, what was once deemed so pernicious during the Bush years — coordinated government/media propaganda — is instantaneously transformed into something Good.* * * * *What is most odious and revealing about Sunstein’s worldview is his condescending, self-loving belief that “false conspiracy theories” are largely the province of fringe, ignorant Internet masses and the Muslim world.  That, he claims, is where these conspiracy theories thrive most vibrantly, and he focuses on various 9/11 theories — both domestically and in Muslim countries — as his prime example.
  • It’s certainly true that one can easily find irrational conspiracy theories in those venues, but some of the most destructive “false conspiracy theories” have emanated from the very entity Sunstein wants to endow with covert propaganda power:  namely, the U.S. Government itself, along with its elite media defenders. Moreover, “crazy conspiracy theorist” has long been the favorite epithet of those same parties to discredit people trying to expose elite wrongdoing and corruption. Who is it who relentlessly spread “false conspiracy theories” of Saddam-engineered anthrax attacks and Iraq-created mushroom clouds and a Ba’athist/Al-Qaeda alliance — the most destructive conspiracy theories of the last generation?  And who is it who demonized as “conspiracy-mongers” people who warned that the U.S. Government was illegally spying on its citizens, systematically torturing people, attempting to establish permanent bases in the Middle East, or engineering massive bailout plans to transfer extreme wealth to the industries which own the Government?  The most chronic and dangerous purveyors of “conspiracy theory” games are the very people Sunstein thinks should be empowered to control our political debates through deceit and government resources:  namely, the Government itself and the Enlightened Elite like him.
  • It is this history of government deceit and wrongdoing that renders Sunstein’s desire to use covert propaganda to “undermine” anti-government speech so repugnant.  The reason conspiracy theories resonate so much is precisely that people have learned — rationally — to distrust government actions and statements.  Sunstein’s proposed covert propaganda scheme is a perfect illustration of why that is.  In other words, people don’t trust the Government and “conspiracy theories” are so pervasive precisely because government is typically filled with people like Cass Sunstein, who think that systematic deceit and government-sponsored manipulation are justified by their own Goodness and Superior Wisdom.
  • The point is that there are severe dangers to the Government covertly using its resources to “infiltrate” discussions and to shape political debates using undisclosed and manipulative means.  It’s called “covert propaganda” and it should be opposed regardless of who is in control of it or what its policy aims are. UPDATE II:  Ironically, this is the same administration that recently announced a new regulation dictating that “bloggers who review products must disclose any connection with advertisers, including, in most cases, the receipt of free products and whether or not they were paid in any way by advertisers, as occurs frequently.”  Without such disclosure, the administration reasoned, the public may not be aware of important hidden incentives (h/t pasquin).  Yet the same administration pays an MIT analyst hundreds of thousands of dollars to advocate their most controversial proposed program while they hold him out as “objective,” and selects as their Chief Regulator someone who wants government agents to covertly mold political discussions “anonymously or even with false identities.”
  • UPDATE III:  Just to get a sense for what an extremist Cass Sunstein is (which itself is ironic, given that his paper calls for ”cognitive infiltration of extremist groups,” as the Abstract puts it), marvel at this paragraph:
  • So Sunstein isn’t calling right now for proposals (1) and (2) — having Government ”ban conspiracy theorizing” or “impose some kind of tax on those who” do it — but he says “each will have a place under imaginable conditions.”  I’d love to know the “conditions” under which the government-enforced banning of conspiracy theories or the imposition of taxes on those who advocate them will “have a place.”  That would require, at a bare minumum, a repeal of the First Amendment.  Anyone who believes this should, for that reason alone, be barred from any meaningful government position.
  • Paul Merrell on 06 Apr 14
     
    This is a January 2010 article by Glenn Greenwald. The Sunstein paper referred to was published in 2008 and is at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1084585  Sunstein left the Obama Administration in 2012 and now teaches law at Harvard. He is the husband of U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice,a notorious neocon.  His paper is scholarly only in format. His major premises have no citations and in at least two cases are straw man logical fallacies that misportray the position of the groups he criticizes. This is "academic" work that a first-year-law student heading for a 1.0 grade point average could make mincemeat of. This paper alone would seem to disqualify him from a Supreme Court nomination and from teaching law. Has he never heard of the First Amendment and why didn't he bother to check whether it is legal to inflict propaganda on the American public? But strange things happen when you're a buddy of an American president. Most noteworthy, however, is that the paper unquestionably puts an advocate of waging psychological warfare against the foreign populations *and* the American public as the head of the White House White House OMB Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs from 2008 through 2012 and on Obama's short list for the Supreme Court. Given the long history of U.S. destabilization of foreign nations via propaganda, of foreign wars waged under false pretenses, of the ongoing barrage of false information disseminated by our federal government, can there be any reasonable doubt that the American public is not being manipulated by false propaganda disseminated by their own government?  An inquiring mind wants to know ...   
Gary Edwards

Does Trump Trump? Angelo Codevilla on Our Present Moment | Power Line - 1 views

www.powerlineblog.com/...illa-on-our-present-moment.php

Angelo-Codevilla Trump ruling-class-elites

shared by Gary Edwards on 29 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • Angelo Codevilla is a former staff member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, professor emeritus of international relations at Boston University, and the author of more than a dozen fine books on politics, arms control, and intelligence (if I had to pick a favorite it might be The Character of Nations), including a fine translation of Machiavelli’s Prince published by Yale University Press. Most recently his essay-turned-book The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It caught the attention of Rush Limbaugh and many others. It argues that our fundamental political problem is not “big government,” but the creation of a ruling class, inhabiting both parties, that is steadily increasing its authoritarian control over the nation. In a conversation a few months ago Angelo remarked, “The 2016 election is simple; the person who runs on the platform ‘Who do they think they are?’ will win.”
  • Donald Trump leapt atop other contenders for the Republican presidential nomination when he acted on the primordial fact in American public life today, from which most of the others hide their eyes, namely: most Americans distrust, fear, are sick and tired of, the elected, appointed, and bureaucratic officials who rule over us, as well as their cronies in the corporate, media, and academic world.
  • Trump’s attraction lies less in his words’ grace or even precision than in the extent to which Americans are searching for someone, anyone, to lead against this ruling class, that is making America less prosperous, less free, and more dangerous.
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  • three fifths of Democratic voters approve the conduct of their officials, only about one fifth of Republican voters approve what theirs do.
  • Moreover, Americans are becoming increasingly skeptical about their celebrities’ integrity. With good reason. McCain is just a minor example of a phenomenon that characterizes our ruling class: reputations built on lies and cover-ups, lives of myth protected by mutual forbearance, by complicitous journalists, or by records deep-sixed, including in in government archives.
  • As they lord it over us, they live lives that cannot stand scrutiny.
  • The point here is simple: our ruling class has succeeded in ruling not by reason or persuasion, never mind integrity, but by occupying society’s commanding heights, by imposing itself and its ever-changing appetites on the rest of us. It has coopted or intimidated potential opponents by denying the legitimacy of opposition. Donald Trump, haplessness and clownishness notwithstanding, has shown how easily this regime may be threatened just by refusing to be intimidated.
  • At increasing speed, our ruling class has created “protected classes” of Americans defined by race, sex, age, disability, origin, religion, and now homosexuality, whose members have privileges that outsider do not. By so doing, they have shattered the principle of equality – the bedrock of the rule of law. Ruling class insiders use these officious classifications to harass their socio-political opponents. An unintimidated statesman would ask: Why should not all “classes” be equally protected? Does the rule of law even admit of “classes”? Does not the 14th amendment promise “the equal protection of the laws” to all alike? He would note that when the government sets aside written law in favor of what the powerful want, it thereby absolves citizens any obligation to obey government.
  • Gary Edwards on 29 Jul 15
     
    "Does Trump trump? By Angelo M. Codevilla "In the land of the blind," so goes the saying, "the one-eyed man is king." Donald Trump leapt atop other contenders for the Republican presidential nomination when he acted on the primordial fact in American public life today, from which most of the others hide their eyes, namely: most Americans distrust, fear, are sick and tired of, the elected, appointed, and bureaucratic officials who rule over us, as well as their cronies in the corporate, media, and academic world. Trump's attraction lies less in his words' grace or even precision than in the extent to which Americans are searching for someone, anyone, to lead against this ruling class, that is making America less prosperous, less free, and more dangerous. Trump's rise reminds this class's members that they sit atop a rumbling volcano of rejection. Republicans and Democrats hope to exorcise its explosion by telling the public that Trump's remarks on immigration and on the character of fellow member John McCain (without bothering to try showing that he errs on substance), place him outside the boundaries of their polite society. Thus do they throw Br'er Rabbit into the proverbial briar patch. Now what? The continued rise in Trump's poll numbers reminds all that Ross Perot - in an era that was far more tolerant of the Establishment than is ours - outdistanced both Bush 41 and Bill Clinton before self-destructing, just by speaking ill of both parties before he self destructed. Republicans brahmins have the greater reason to fear. Whereas some three fifths of Democratic voters approve the conduct of their officials, only about one fifth of Republican voters approve what theirs do. If Americans in general are primed for revolt, Republican (and independent) voters fairly thirst for it. Trump's barest hints about what he opposes (never mind proposes) regarding just a few items on the public agenda have had such effect because they accord with
Paul Merrell

US pushing local cops to stay mum on surveillance - Yahoo News - 0 views

news.yahoo.com/;_ylt=AwrBJR4e65lTwmEAb7zQtDMD

surveillance state location-data public-records-acts litigation stingrays

shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Obama administration has been quietly advising local police not to disclose details about surveillance technology they are using to sweep up basic cellphone data from entire neighborhoods, The Associated Press has learned. Citing security reasons, the U.S. has intervened in routine state public records cases and criminal trials regarding use of the technology. This has resulted in police departments withholding materials or heavily censoring documents in rare instances when they disclose any about the purchase and use of such powerful surveillance equipment. Federal involvement in local open records proceedings is unusual. It comes at a time when President Barack Obama has said he welcomes a debate on government surveillance and called for more transparency about spying in the wake of disclosures about classified federal surveillance programs.
  • One well-known type of this surveillance equipment is known as a Stingray, an innovative way for law enforcement to track cellphones used by suspects and gather evidence. The equipment tricks cellphones into identifying some of their owners' account information, like a unique subscriber number, and transmitting data to police as if it were a phone company's tower. That allows police to obtain cellphone information without having to ask for help from service providers, such as Verizon or AT&T, and can locate a phone without the user even making a call or sending a text message. But without more details about how the technology works and under what circumstances it's used, it's unclear whether the technology might violate a person's constitutional rights or whether it's a good investment of taxpayer dollars. Interviews, court records and public-records requests show the Obama administration is asking agencies to withhold common information about the equipment, such as how the technology is used and how to turn it on. That pushback has come in the form of FBI affidavits and consultation in local criminal cases.
  • "These extreme secrecy efforts are in relation to very controversial, local government surveillance practices using highly invasive technology," said Nathan Freed Wessler, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, which has fought for the release of these types of records. "If public participation means anything, people should have the facts about what the government is doing to them." Harris Corp., a key manufacturer of this equipment, built a secrecy element into its authorization agreement with the Federal Communications Commission in 2011. That authorization has an unusual requirement: that local law enforcement "coordinate with the FBI the acquisition and use of the equipment." Companies like Harris need FCC authorization in order to sell wireless equipment that could interfere with radio frequencies. A spokesman from Harris Corp. said the company will not discuss its products for the Defense Department and law enforcement agencies, although public filings showed government sales of communications systems such as the Stingray accounted for nearly one-third of its $5 billion in revenue. "As a government contractor, our solutions are regulated and their use is restricted," spokesman Jim Burke said.
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  • Local police agencies have been denying access to records about this surveillance equipment under state public records laws. Agencies in San Diego, Chicago and Oakland County, Michigan, for instance, declined to tell the AP what devices they purchased, how much they cost and with whom they shared information. San Diego police released a heavily censored purchasing document. Oakland officials said police-secrecy exemptions and attorney-client privilege keep their hands tied. It was unclear whether the Obama administration interfered in the AP requests. "It's troubling to think the FBI can just trump the state's open records law," said Ginger McCall, director of the open government project at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. McCall suspects the surveillance would not pass constitutional muster. "The vast amount of information it sweeps in is totally irrelevant to the investigation," she said.
  • A court case challenging the public release of information from the Tucson Police Department includes an affidavit from an FBI special agent, Bradley Morrison, who said the disclosure would "result in the FBI's inability to protect the public from terrorism and other criminal activity because through public disclosures, this technology has been rendered essentially useless for future investigations." Morrison said revealing any information about the technology would violate a federal homeland security law about information-sharing and arms-control laws — legal arguments that that outside lawyers and transparency experts said are specious and don't comport with court cases on the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. The FBI did not answer questions about its role in states' open records proceedings.
  • But a former Justice Department official said the federal government should be making this argument in federal court, not a state level where different public records laws apply. "The federal government appears to be attempting to assert a federal interest in the information being sought, but it's going about it the wrong way," said Dan Metcalfe, the former director of the Justice Department's office of information and privacy. Currently Metcalfe is the executive director of American University's law school Collaboration on Government Secrecy project. A criminal case in Tallahassee cites the same homeland security laws in Morrison's affidavit, court records show, and prosecutors told the court they consulted with the FBI to keep portions of a transcript sealed. That transcript, released earlier this month, revealed that Stingrays "force" cellphones to register their location and identifying information with the police device and enables officers to track calls whenever the phone is on.
  • One law enforcement official familiar with the Tucson lawsuit, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to speak about internal discussions, said federal lawyers told Tucson police they couldn't hand over a PowerPoint presentation made by local officers about how to operate the Stingray device. Federal officials forwarded Morrison's affidavit for use in the Tucson police department's reply to the lawsuit, rather than requesting the case be moved to federal court. In Sarasota, Florida, the U.S. Marshals Service confiscated local records on the use of the surveillance equipment, removing the documents from the reach of Florida's expansive open-records law after the ACLU asked under Florida law to see the documents. The ACLU has asked a judge to intervene. The Marshals Service said it deputized the officer as a federal agent and therefore the records weren't accessible under Florida law.
  • Paul Merrell on 13 Jun 14
     
    The Florida case is particularly interesting because Florida is within the jurisdiction of the U.S. Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, which has just ruled that law enforcement must obtain a search warrant from a court before using equipment to determine a cell phone's location.  
Paul Merrell

U.S. Military Bans The Intercept - The Intercept - 0 views

firstlook.org/...-s-military-bans-the-intercept

surveillance state military-censorship leaked-docs

shared by Paul Merrell on 29 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • A portion of an email (redacted and slightly altered to protect the source) sent to staff last week at a U.S. Marine Corps installation directing employees not to read this web site. The U.S. military is banning and blocking employees from visiting The Intercept in an apparent effort to censor news reports that contain leaked government secrets. According to multiple military sources, a notice has been circulated to units within the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps warning staff that they are prohibited from reading stories published by The Intercept on the grounds that they may contain classified information. The ban appears to apply to all employees—including those with top-secret security clearance—and is aimed at preventing classified information from being viewed on unclassified computer networks, even if it is freely available on the internet. Similar military-wide bans have been directed against news outlets in the past after leaks of classified information.
  • A directive issued to military staff at one location last week, obtained by The Intercept, threatens that any employees caught viewing classified material in the public domain will face “long term security issues.” It suggests that the call to prohibit employees from viewing the website was made by senior officials over concerns about a “potential new leaker” of secret documents. The directive states: We have received information from our higher headquarters regarding a potential new leaker of classified information.  Although no formal validation has occurred, we thought it prudent to warn all employees and subordinate commands.  Please do not go to any website entitled “The Intercept” for it may very well contain classified material. As a reminder to all personnel who have ever signed a non-disclosure agreement, we have an ongoing responsibility to protect classified material in all of its various forms.  Viewing potentially classified material (even material already wrongfully released in the public domain) from unclassified equipment will cause you long term security issues.  This is considered a security violation.
  • A military insider subject to the ban said that several employees expressed concerns after being told by commanders that it was “illegal and a violation of national security” to read publicly available news reports on The Intercept. “Even though I have a top secret security clearance, I am still forbidden to read anything on the website,” said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the subject.  “I find this very disturbing that they are threatening us and telling us what websites and news publishers we are allowed to read or not.”
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  • In an emailed statement, Defense Department spokeswoman Lt. Col. Valerie Henderson said that she had not been able to establish whether the DoD had been the source of “any guidance related to your website.” Henderson added, however, that “DoD personnel have an obligation to safeguard classified information. Classified information, whether made public by unauthorized disclosure, remains classified until declassified by an appropriate government authority. DoD is committed to preventing classified information from being introduced onto DoD’s unclassified networks.” Earlier this month, after the publication of two Intercept stories revealing classified details about the vast scope of the government’s watchlisting program, Reuters reported that “intelligence officials were preparing a criminal referral” over the leaks.
  • The ban on The Intercept appears to have come in the aftermath of those stories, representing the latest in a string of U.S. military crackdowns on news websites that have published classified material. Last year, the Army admitted that it was blocking parts of The Guardian’s website after it published secret documents from former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. In 2010, WikiLeaks and several major news organizations were subject to similar measures after the publication of leaked State Department diplomatic files. Flanagan, the Marine Corps spokesman, told The Intercept that The Washington Post was also blocked by some military agencies last year after it published documents from Snowden revealing covert NSA surveillance operations. “Just because classified information is published on a public website, that doesn’t mean military people with security clearance have the ability to download it,” Flanagan said.
  • Paul Merrell on 29 Aug 14
     
    Enforced ignorance of the U.S. military. The official reason is a bucket that doesn't hold water. Despite official "classified" status, public is public. Any enemy can read it, so why should our military be barred from doing so. The real reason, I suspect, is protecting morale. 
Paul Merrell

Investigation Finds World's Largest Coal Company Misled Public On Climate Change | Thin... - 0 views

thinkprogress.org/...ttlement-new-york-schneiderman

shared by Paul Merrell on 11 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • The world’s largest private coal company misled its investors and the public about the financial risks of climate change, New York state’s attorney general announced on Monday. In a press release, Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said Peabody Energy violated New York laws prohibiting “false and misleading conduct” in public statements about its business. Specifically, Schneiderman found that Peabody failed to tell its investors about how regulations to fight climate change could hurt the coal industry. Instead, Peabody insisted it had no idea how climate regulations would affect its business, and provided its investors with “incomplete and one-sided discussions” of the future of coal in a climate-concerned world, Schneiderman said.
  • “As a publicly traded company whose core business generates massive amounts of carbon emissions, Peabody Energy has a responsibility to be honest with its investors and the public about the risks posed by climate change, now and in the future,” Schneiderman said in a statement. “I believe that full and fair disclosures by Peabody and other fossil fuel companies will lead investors to think long and hard about the damage these companies are doing to our planet.” The state laws Peabody was found to have violated are the Martin Act and Executive Law, both of which “prohibit false and misleading conduct in connection with securities transactions,” the attorney general said. Peabody did not admit or deny those findings, but signed a document on Sunday agreeing to revise its shareholder disclosures with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Per that document, Peabody will have to correct its financial statements to be honest about how a global climate deal or other carbon regulation could hurt its business. The document can be found in full here.
  • Peabody’s violations will not result in financial punishment, as both laws only allow monetary penalties if shareholders need to be reimbursed for financial losses. It’s difficult to know what, if any, financial harm was passed on to shareholders due to Peabody’s misleading statements, since this particular situation was about the future risks of climate change. If in the future, however, investors find that Peabody’s misleading statements cost them money, they would likely have the option to sue. The settlement comes just a few days after the two-year investigation became public. On Friday, Scheiderman announced that his office had issued subpoenas to both Peabody and oil company ExxonMobil, both related to the fossil fuel giants’ public statements on climate change.
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  • Environmentalists and Democratic politicians have accused ExxonMobil of engaging in a cover-up to mislead the public about the risks of human-caused climate change in order to sell more of its carbon-intensive product. Exxon has vehemently denied the accusation. Either way, Schneiderman’s two investigations are sparking serious legal discussion about how honest fossil fuel companies must be when it comes to the carbon emissions they create — especially if honesty might mean knowingly lowering profits. Should coal companies be forced to admit that their coal is creating a climate risk? If so, should they be allowed to fund politicians who advocate against climate action? Are these corporate activities protected free speech? Bloomberg View columnist Matt Levine offered a nuanced discussion of those questions on Friday. And ultimately, he said, it may just come down to whether these companies lied to their own investors — even if the lie was in their investors’ financial interest. “If you lie to the public about the risks that fossil fuel use poses to life on earth, you are just exercising your right as a citizen,” Levine wrote. “But if you lie to your investors about the risks that fossil fuel regulation poses to your stock price, you are committing fraud and will get in bad trouble.”
  • Paul Merrell on 11 Nov 15
     
    "If you lie to the public about the risks that fossil fuel use poses to life on earth, you are just exercising your right as a citizen," Levine wrote. Correction. Corporations are not citizens; only human beings can achieve that status.  
Gary Edwards

The List: Unnecessarily Shut Down by Obama to Inflict Public Pain - 0 views

www.breitbart.com/...st-obama-closures-for-shutdown

government-shutdown Obammunism financial-crisis

shared by Gary Edwards on 08 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 08 Oct 13
     
    "The media may or may not report on these individual occurrences, but what they will never do is provide the American people with the full context and scope of Obama's shrill pettiness. Below is a list of illogical, unnecessary, and shockingly spiteful moves our government is making in the name of essential and non-essential. This list will be regularly updated, and if you have something you feel should be added, please email me at jnolte@breitbart.com or tweet me @NolteNC.Please include a link to the news source. -- 1. Treatments for Children Suffering From Cancer - The GOP have agreed to a compromise by funding part of the government, including the National Institutes of Health, which offers children with cancer last-chance experimental treatment. Obama has threatened to veto this funding. 2. The World War II Memorial - The WWII memorial on the DC Mall is a 24/7 open-air memorial that is not regularly staffed. Although the White House must have known that WWII veterans in their eighties and nineties had already booked flights to visit this memorial, the White House still found the resources to spitefully barricade the attraction.  The Republican National Committee has offered to cover any costs required to keep the memorial open. The White House refused. Moreover, like the NIH, the GOP will pass a compromise bill that would fund America's national parks. Obama has threatened to veto that bill. 3. Furloughed Military Chaplains Not Allowed to Work for Free - Furloughed military chaplains willing to celebrate Mass and baptisms for free have been told they will be punished for doing so. 4. Business Stops In Florida Keys - Although the GOP have agreed to compromise in the ongoing budget stalemate and fund the parks, Obama has threatened to veto that funding. As a result, small businesses, hunters, and commercial fisherman can't practice their trade. While the feds have deemed the personnel necessary to keep this area open "non-essential," the "enforcement office
Gary Edwards

Thoughts from the Frontline: The Center Cannot Hold by John Mauldin - 0 views

www.2000wave.com/article.asp

john-mauldin frontline economic-rules government-debt

shared by Gary Edwards on 05 Jun 10 - Cached
  • The Minsky Journey is where investment goes from what Minsky called a hedge unit, where the investment is its own source of repayment; to a speculative unit, where the investment only pays the interest; to a Ponzi unit, where the only way to repay the debt is for the value of the investment to rise.
  • Gary Edwards on 05 Jun 10
     
    "Our examination of the future of public debt leads us to several important conclusions. First, fiscal problems confronting industrial economies are bigger than suggested by official debt figures that show the implications of the financial crisis and recession for fiscal balances. As frightening as it is to consider public debt increasing to more than 100% of GDP, an even greater danger arises from a rapidly ageing population. The related unfunded liabilities are large and growing, and should be a central part of today's long-term fiscal planning. "It is essential that governments not be lulled into complacency by the ease with which they have financed their deficits thus far. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, the path of future output is likely to be permanently below where we thought it would be just several years ago. As a result, government revenues will be lower and expenditures higher, making consolidation even more difficult. But, unless action is taken to place fiscal policy on a sustainable footing, these costs could easily rise sharply and suddenly. "Second, large public debts have significant financial and real consequences. The recent sharp rise in risk premia on long-term bonds issued by several industrial countries suggests that markets no longer consider sovereign debt low-risk. The limited evidence we have suggests default risk premia move up with debt levels and down with the revenue share of GDP as well as the availability of private saving. Countries with a relatively weak fiscal system and a high degree of dependence on foreign investors to finance their deficits generally face larger spreads on their debts. This market differentiation is a positive feature of the financial system, but it could force governments with weak fiscal systems to return to fiscal rectitude sooner than they might like or hope. "Third, we note the risk that persistently high levels of public debt will drive down capital accumulation, productivity growth and lon
Paul Merrell

Smoking gun emails reveal 'deal in blood' George Bush and Tony Blair made as they secre... - 0 views

www.dailymail.co.uk/...ors-YEAR-invasion-started.html

war & peace Blair Bush2 Powell Iraq Hillary-emails

shared by Paul Merrell on 19 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • A bombshell White House memo has revealed for the first time details of the ‘deal in blood’ forged by George Bush and Tony Blair over the Iraq War.The damning memo, from secretary of state Colin Powell to president George Bush, was written on March 28, 2002, a week before Bush’s famous summit with Blair at his Crawford ranch in Texas.The Powell document, headed ‘Secret... Memorandum for the President’, lifts the lid on how Blair and Bush secretly plotted the war behind closed doors at Crawford. In it, Powell tells Bush that Blair ‘will be with us’ on military action. Powell assures the president: ‘The UK will follow our lead’.The classified document also discloses that Blair agreed to act as a glorified spin doctor for the president by presenting ‘public affairs lines’ to convince a skeptical public that Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction - when none existed.In return, the president would flatter Blair’s ego and give the impression that Britain was not America’s poodle but an equal partner in the ‘special relationship’. 
  • The sensational leak shows that Blair had given an unqualified pledge to sign up to the conflict a year before the invasion started.It flies in the face of the UK Prime Minister’s public claims at the time that he was seeking a diplomatic solution to the crisis.He told voters: ‘We’re not proposing military action’ - in direct contrast to what the secret email now reveals. 
  • The disclosure is certain to lead for calls for Sir John Chilcot to reopen his inquiry into the Iraq War if, as is believed, he has not seen the Powell memo.A second explosive memo from the same cache also reveals how Bush used ‘spies’ in the Labour Party to help him to manipulate British public opinion in favor of the war.The documents, obtained by The Mail on Sunday, are part of a batch of secret emails held on the private server of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton which U.S. courts have forced her to reveal.Former UK Conservative shadow home secretary David Davis said: ‘The memos prove in explicit terms what many of us have believed all along: Tony Blair effectively agreed to act as a frontman for American foreign policy in advance of any decision by the House of Commons or the British Cabinet.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • ‘He was happy to launder George Bush’s policy on Iraq and sub-contract British foreign policy to another country without having the remotest ability to have any real influence over it. And in return for what?'For George Bush pretending Blair was a player on the world stage to impress voters in the UK when the Americans didn’t even believe it themselves’.Davis was backed by a senior diplomat with close knowledge of Blair-Bush relations who said: ‘This memo shows beyond doubt for the first time Blair was committed to the Iraq War before he even set foot in Crawford.'And it shows how the Americans planned to make Blair look an equal partner in the special relationship to bolster his position in the UK.’Blair’s spokesman insisted last night that Powell’s memo was ‘consistent with what he was saying publicly at the time’.The former Prime Minister has always hotly denied the claim that the two men signed a deal ‘in blood’ at Crawford to embark on the war, which started on March 20, 2003. Powell says to Bush: ‘He will present to you the strategic, tactical and public affairs lines that he believes will strengthen global support for our common cause,’ adding that Blair has the presentational skills to ‘make a credible public case on current Iraqi threats to international peace’.Five months after the summit, Downing Street produced the notorious ‘45 minutes from doom’ dossier on Saddam Hussein’s supposed Weapons of Mass Destruction. After Saddam was toppled, the dossier’s claims were exposed as bogus.Nowhere in the memo is a diplomatic route suggested as the preferred option.
  • Instead, Powell says that Blair will also advise on how to ‘handle calls’ for the ‘blessing’ of the United Nations Security Council, and to ‘demonstrate that we have thought through “the day after” ’ – in other words, made adequate provision for a post-Saddam Iraq.Critics of the war say that the lack of post-conflict planning has contributed to the loss of more than 100,000 lives since the invasion – and a power vacuum which has contributed to the rise of Islamic State terrorism.Significantly, Powell warns Bush that Blair has hit ‘domestic turbulence’ for being ‘too pro-U.S. in foreign and security policy, too arrogant and “presidential” ’, which Powell points out is ‘not a compliment in the British context’.Powell also reveals that the splits in Blair’s Cabinet were deeper than was realized: he says that apart from Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon, ‘Blair’s Cabinet shows signs of division, and the British public are unconvinced that military action is warranted now’.Powell says that although Blair will ‘stick with us on the big issues’, he wants to minimisze the ‘political price’ he would have to pay: ‘His voters will look for signs that Britain and America are truly equity partners in the special relationship.’The president certainly did his best to flatter Blair’s ego during the Crawford summit, where he was the first world leader to be invited into Bush’s sanctuary for two nights.
  • Mystery has long surrounded what was discussed at Crawford as advisers were kept out of a key meeting between the two men.Sir Christopher Meyer, who was present in Crawford as Britain’s ambassador to the U.S., told Chilcot that his exclusion meant he was ‘not entirely clear to this day... what degree of convergence was, if you like, signed in blood at the Crawford ranch’.But in public comments during his time at Crawford, Blair denied that Britain was on an unstoppable path to war.‘This is a matter for considering all the options’, he said. ‘We’re not proposing military action at this point in time’.
  • During his appearance before the Chilcot inquiry in January 2010, Blair denied that he had struck a secret deal with Bush at Crawford to overthrow Saddam. Blair said the two men had agreed on the need to confront the Iraqi dictator, but insisted they did not get into ‘specifics’.‘The one thing I was not doing was dissembling in that position,’ he told Chilcot.‘The position was not a covert position, it was an open position. This isn’t about a lie or a conspiracy or a deceit or a deception. It’s a decision. What I was saying... was “We are going to be with you in confronting and dealing with this threat.” ’Pressed on what he thought Bush took from their meeting, he said the president had realized Britain would support military action if the diplomatic route had been exhausted.In his memoirs, Blair again said it was ‘a myth’ he had signed a promise ‘in blood’ to go to war, insisting: ‘I made no such commitment’.Critics who claimed that Blair acted as the ‘poodle’ of the US will point to a reference in Mr Powell’s memo to the fact Mr Blair ‘readily committed to deploy 1,700 commandos’ to Afghanistan ‘even though his experts warn that British forces are overstretched’.The decision made the previous October in the wake of the September 11 attacks led to widespread concern that the UK was entering an open-ended commitment to a bloody conflict in Afghanistan – a concern many critics now say was well-founded.
  • Mr Powell’s memo goes on to say that a recent move by the U.S. to protect its steel industry with tariffs, which had damaged UK exports, was a ‘bitter blow’ for Blair, but he was prepared to ‘insulate our broader relationship from this and other trade disputes’.The memo was included in a batch of 30,000 emails which were received by Mrs Clinton on her private server when she was US Secretary of State between 2009 and 2013.Another document included in the email batch is a confidential briefing for Powell prepared by the U.S. Embassy in London, shortly before the Crawford summit.The memo, dated ‘April 02’, includes a detailed assessment of the effect on Blair’s domestic position if he backs US military action.The document says: ‘A sizeable number of his [Blair’s] MPs remain at present opposed to military action against Iraq... some would favor shifting from a policy of containment of Iraq if they had recent (and publicly usable) proof that Iraq is developing WMD/missiles... most seem to want some sort of UN endorsement for military action.‘Blair’s challenge now is to judge the timing and evolution of America’s Iraq policy and to bring his party and the British people on board.'There have been a few speculative pieces in the more feverish press about Labor [sic] unease re Iraq policy… which have gone on to identify the beginnings of a challenge to Blair’s leadership of the party.
  • 'Former Cabinet member Peter Mandelson, still an insider, called it all "froth". Nonetheless, this is the first time since the 1997 election that such a story is even being printed’.The paper draws on information given to it by Labour ‘spies’, whose identities have been hidden.It states: ‘[name redacted] told us the intention of those feeding the story is not to bring down Blair but to influence him on the Iraq issue’.‘Some MPs would endorse action if they had proof that Iraq has continued to develop WMD since UN inspectors left.‘More would follow if convinced that Iraq has succeeded in developing significant WMD capability and the missiles to deliver it.'Many more would follow if they see compelling evidence that Iraq intends and plans to use such weapons. A clear majority would support military action if Saddam is implicated in the 9/11 attacks or other egregious acts of terrorism’.‘Blair has proved an excellent judge of political timing, and he will need to be especially careful about when to launch a ramped-up campaign to build support for action against Iraq.'He will want neither to be too far in front or behind US policy... if he waits too long, then the keystone of any coalition we wish to build may not be firmly in place. No doubt these are the calculations that Blair hopes to firm up when he meets the President’.A spokesperson for Blair said: ‘This is consistent with what Blair was saying publicly at the time and with Blair’s evidence given to the Chilcot Inquiry’.
  • Stunning memo proves Blair signed up for Iraq even before Americans - comment by former shadow home secretary David DavisThis is one of the most astonishing documents I have ever read.It proves in explicit terms what many of us have believed all along: Tony Blair effectively agreed to act as a front man for American foreign policy in advance of any decision by the House of Commons or the British Cabinet.He was happy to launder George Bush’s policy on Iraq and sub-contract British foreign policy to another country without having the remotest ability to have any real influence over it.And in return for what? For George Bush pretending Blair was a player on the world stage to impress voters in the UK when the Americans didn’t even believe it themselves.Blair was content to cynically use Britain’s international reputation for honest dealing in diplomacy, built up over many years, as a shield against worldwide opprobrium for Bush’s ill-considered policy.Judging from this memorandum, Blair signed up for the Iraq War even before the Americans themselves did. It beggars belief.
  • Blair was telling MPs and voters back home that he was still pursuing a diplomatic solution while Colin Powell was telling President Bush: ‘Don’t worry, George, Tony is signed up for the war come what may – he’ll handle the PR for you, just make him look big in return.’It should never be forgotten that a minimum of 120,000 people died as a direct result of the Iraq War.What is truly shocking is the casualness of it all, such as the reference in the memo to ‘the day after’ – meaning the day after Saddam would be toppled.The offhand tone gives the game away: it is patently obvious nobody thought about ‘the day after’ when Bush and Blair met in Crawford.And they gave it no more thought right through to the moment ‘the day after’ came about a year later when Saddam’s statue fell to the ground.We saw the catastrophic so-called ‘de-Baathification’ of Iraq, with the country’s entire civil and military structure dismantled, leading to years of bloodshed and chaos. It has infected surrounding countries to this day and created the vacuum into which Islamic State has stepped.This may well be the Iraq ‘smoking gun’ we have all been looking for.
Paul Merrell

Quitting Over Syria | The American Conservative - 0 views

www.theamericanconservative.com/...quitting-over-syria

war & peace Syria WMD Obama lies

shared by Paul Merrell on 15 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • The release of the White House “Government Assessment” on August 30, providing the purported evidence to support a bombing attack on Syria, defused a conflict with the intelligence community that had threatened to become public through the mass resignation of a significant number of analysts. The intelligence community’s consensus view on the status of the Syrian chemical-weapons program was derived from a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) completed late last year and hurriedly updated this past summer to reflect the suspected use of chemical weapons against rebels and civilians. The report maintained that there were some indications that the regime was using chemicals, while conceding that there was no conclusive proof. There was considerable dissent from even that equivocation, including by many analysts who felt that the evidence for a Syrian government role was subject to interpretation and possibly even fabricated. Some believed the complete absence of U.S. satellite intelligence on the extensive preparations that the government would have needed to make in order to mix its binary chemical system and deliver it on target was particularly disturbing. These concerns were reinforced by subsequent UN reports suggesting that the rebels might have access to their own chemical weapons. The White House, meanwhile, considered the somewhat ambiguous conclusion of the NIE to be unsatisfactory, resulting in considerable pushback against the senior analysts who had authored the report.
  • In a scenario unfortunately reminiscent of the lead up to Iraq, the National Security Council tasked the various intelligence agencies to beat the bushes and come up with more corroborative information. Israel obligingly provided what was reported to be interceptions of telephone conversations implicating the Syrian army in the attack, but it was widely believed that the information might have been fabricated by Tel Aviv, meaning that bad intelligence was being used to confirm other suspect information, a phenomenon known to analysts as “circular reporting.” Other intelligence cited in passing by the White House on the trajectories and telemetry of rockets that may have been used in the attack was also somewhat conjectural and involved weapons that were not, in fact, in the Syrian arsenal, suggesting that they were actually fired by the rebels. Also, traces of Sarin were not found in most of the areas being investigated, nor on one of the two rockets identified. Whether the victims of the attack suffered symptoms of Sarin was also disputed, and no autopsies were performed to confirm the presence of the chemical. 
  • With all evidence considered, the intelligence community found itself with numerous skeptics in the ranks, leading to sharp exchanges with the Director of Central Intelligence John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. A number of analysts threatened to resign as a group if their strong dissent was not noted in any report released to the public, forcing both Brennan and Clapper to back down. This led to the White House issuing its own assessment, completely divorcing the process from any direct connection to the intelligence community. The spectacle of CIA Director George Tenet sitting behind Secretary of State Colin Powell in the United Nations, providing him with credibility as Powell told a series of half-truths, would not be repeated. Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, is executive director of the Council for the National Interest.
  • Paul Merrell on 15 Nov 13
     
    More detail about backing up previous reports that the information supplied in the White House "Government Assessment of the Syrian Government's Use of Chemical Weapons on August 21, 2013" cooking of intelligence to justify missile strikes on Syria. Note that the same day the Assessment was published by the White House Offiice of the Press Secretary, active duty intelligence officials passed a message to Obama through veteran intelligence officers that the intelligence in the report was unreliable and that there was strong evidence that it was the "rebels" rather than Syrian government that had used sarin gas. http://www.globalresearch.ca/u-s-military-and-intelligence-officials-to-obama-assad-not-responsible-for-chemical-attack/5348576 Next came a report three days later citing and quoting an anonymous former intelligence official who said the format used and its publication by the White House rather than by the Chief of Intelligence were both strong indications that the document was not the product of the intelligence community. http://www.ipsnews.net/2013/09/obamas-case-for-syria-didnt-reflect-intel-consensus/ Now we learn the reason the White House had to cook its own "public summary of intelligence,"  because many top intelligence threatened to resign if the cherry-picked version of events without reservations explaining the likelihood that it was the rebels who did it. So the Obama Administration, like the Bush II Administration, deliberately lied to the public in an attempt to stampede the nation into another foreign war in the Mideast. The only relevant difference is that Obama didn't get away with launching his own "shock and awe" campaign. Impeachable offense? Yes. Likely to happen? No. Too many hawks in Congress who want war against both Syria and Iran.
Paul Merrell

Loopholes, Filing Failures, and Lax Enforcement: How the Foreign Agents Registration Ac... - 0 views

www.pogo.org/...istration-act-falls-short.html

Congress corruption foreign-agents-registration

shared by Paul Merrell on 20 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Why This Matters The Foreign Agents Registration Act requires American lobbyists working on behalf of foreign clients to disclose significantly more information about their activities than what is required of domestic lobbyists. This includes the actual documents used to influence policy makers, called informational materials. These materials include draft legislation, speeches, press releases and more, all created to influence U.S. policy. But the lobbyists do not always follow the letter of the law and enforcement by the Justice Department has been lax in recent years. Furthermore, the law itself seems to have loopholes that make enforcement difficult if not impossible. The Foreign Agents Registration Act is intended to bring transparency into the world of foreign lobbying. But when American lobbyists working on behalf of foreign interests fail to follow the law, or the Justice Department fails to enforce it, the American people are left in the dark.
  • Why This Matters The Foreign Agents Registration Act requires American lobbyists working on behalf of foreign clients to disclose significantly more information about their activities than what is required of domestic lobbyists. This includes the actual documents used to influence policy makers, called informational materials. These materials include draft legislation, speeches, press releases and more, all created to influence U.S. policy. But the lobbyists do not always follow the letter of the law and enforcement by the Justice Department has been lax in recent years. Furthermore, the law itself seems to have loopholes that make enforcement difficult if not impossible. The Foreign Agents Registration Act is intended to bring transparency into the world of foreign lobbying. But when American lobbyists working on behalf of foreign interests fail to follow the law, or the Justice Department fails to enforce it, the American people are left in the dark.
  • Executive Summary The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) requires that all American citizens working to influence U.S. policy on behalf of foreign governments register with the Department of Justice and to disclose information on any and all political activity in which they engaged for foreign clients. This includes filing, within 48 hours, any informational materials disseminated to two or more people.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Table of Contents Executive SummaryIntroductionBackgroundWhat the Foreign Influence Database ShowsEgypt: A Case Study Of Foreign InfluenceSame-Day ContributionsSystemic Foreign InfluenceQuid Pro Quo or Coincidence?Foreign Money and the LawLax Compliance with and Enforcement of FARAEnforcementConclusionRecommendationsEndnotes
  • The law requires lobbyists for foreign interests to plainly and conspicuously identify themselves as such in any materials distributed in the course of their lobbying—for example, emails, other correspondence, or publications. We found that many documents filed with the Justice Department lack this identification statement; furthermore, many lobbyists admitted that they did not comply with this requirement. More than half (51 percent) of the registrants we examined in a sample from 2010 checked a box on a the semi-annual Justice Department questionnaire saying they had filed informational materials, and checked another box saying they had not met the legal requirement that they identify themselves in those materials as working on behalf of foreign interests. Toby Moffett, a former Member of Congress from Connecticut who is now Chairman of the Moffett Group and one of its registered lobbyists, told POGO that “Around the edges there’s a lot of loosey-goosey stuff going on. People representing foreign interests and not reporting.”[4] But even when lobbyists do report to the Justice Department, the information they provide is not easily accessible to the public. Astonishingly, informational materials are not available online, despite the fact that the Justice Department has an electronic filing system. Instead, these documents are kept in an office at the Justice Department that is only open for four hours each weekday. Hard copies of the documents are kept in folders that are often disorganized and susceptible to misfiling. This archaic system undermines the intended transparency of the law.
  • The Project On Government Oversight examined thousands of these materials spanning four years, as well as additional public records related to the Justice Department’s oversight of lobbyists for foreign interests. We found that lobbyists for foreign interests have routinely failed to comply with the law—a failure that prevents journalists and watchdogs from scrutinizing the lobbying activities while foreign interests are trying to influence U.S. policy. We found a pattern of lax enforcement of FARA requirements by the Justice Department. We found that the Justice Department office responsible for administering the law is a record-keeping mess. And we found loopholes in the law that often makes it difficult if not impossible for the government to police compliance or to discipline lobbyists who fail to comply. Here are some highlights of our investigation:
  • Though federal law bars foreign money from U.S. political campaigns, there appears to be a gray area in the law that can let in such money indirectly. POGO found many instances in which members of lobbying firms made political contributions to Members of Congress on the same day that those firms were lobbying the Members of Congress or their legislative staffs on behalf of foreign clients.[1] Lobbyists who fail to comply with certain FARA requirements may have little to fear from the Justice Department. “The cornerstone of the Registration Unit’s enforcement efforts is encouraging voluntary compliance,” a Justice Department website says.[2] When lobbyists do not voluntarily comply, the Justice Department rarely uses one of the key tools at its disposal to enforce the law—seeking a court injunction. A representative of the Department’s FARA unit told POGO: “While the FARA statute and regulations authorize the pursuit of formal legal proceedings, such as injunctive remedy options, the FARA Unit [has] not pursued injunctive remedy options recently and has instead utilized other mechanisms to achieve compliance.”[3] It appears that some registered foreign agents have been distributing materials but not filing them with the Justice Department. It’s unclear the extent to which that illustrates a lack of compliance with the law or loopholes in the law. In the process of researching this report, POGO noticed that many more lobbyists were registering as foreign agents than had filed informational materials that we could locate at the FARA office. To determine what was happening, we looked at a sampling of questionnaires that the Justice Department requires registered agents to complete every six months. Some checked one box indicating they had distributed materials and another box stating they did not file them with the FARA office.
  • We set out to determine the extent to which lobbyists for foreign interests were filing lobbying materials at the Justice Department within the required time frame. Based on a review of filings made in 2012, in those instances where it was possible to answer the question, POGO estimates that almost half—46 percent—were filed late. Fifteen percent were filed more than 30 business days after they were distributed, and 12 percent were filed more than 100 business days after they were distributed. In many instances, the Justice Department would be hard pressed to enforce the filing deadline. Based on the records the Department maintains to enforce the law, we found that in more than a quarter (26 percent) of the 2012 filings, it was impossible to determine whether the lobbyists complied. For example, in many cases, the records did not show when the lobbyists disseminated the materials to the targets of their lobbying. In a glaring omission, the law does not require lobbyists to provide that information. Without it, there may be no way for the government or the public to know whether lobbying materials were filed on time.
  • When lobbyists for foreign interests do not follow the law, when the U.S. government fails to enforce it, and when the Justice Department makes it difficult for the American people to access records to which they are legally entitled, the public is left in the dark. To bring more transparency to this opaque realm, POGO has made four years of informational materials available for the first time online with our Foreign Influence Database, allowing the public to see how lobbyists attempt to influence American policies on behalf of their foreign clients.
  • With the release of the Foreign Influence Database, the Project On Government Oversight (POGO) is making years of documents from this key set of FARA filings electronically available for the first time. The materials were previously only available in hard copy at the FARA Registration Unit in Washington, DC, which is only open to the public from 11am to 3pm on weekdays.[12] In this digital age it is surprising that these materials could not be read online and are instead stored in file folders, where they are disorganized and susceptible to misfiling. Even those that were electronically filed by the registrants are not available to the public in an electronic format. POGO’s database includes informational materials filed in 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012.[13]
  • Paul Merrell on 20 Dec 14
     
    POGO does thorough work and doesn't let up until it gets results. Forcing DoJ to puts its foreign agents registration materials online should be a fairly trivial battle. The real war, though, will be forcing better enforcement. The new database is at http://www.pogo.org/tools-and-data/foreign-influence-database/ I punched up the word "Israel" and came up with 113 documents in the search results. Each search hit lists the name of the nation involved that the lobbying was done for. Of those 113 document hits, only two were for the nation of Israel, both for its Ministry of Tourism. The rest were by other nations who had mentioned Israel in their lobbying materials.  Now that is fairly incredible, given that Israel outright controls Congress when it comes to Middle East policy.  The last administration to attempt to do something about Israeli lobbyists not registering was the the Kennedy Administration. The result was that the major Israeli lobbying group disbanded and was promptly reformed under a new corporate charter and name. That was the very last attempt at enforcing the Foreign Agents Registration Act against Israel's lobbyists in the U.S., despite the fact that the reformed group, AIPAC, has even been caught more than once being passed highly classified U.S. documents by double agents working inside the U.S. military establishment. The leakers went to prison but the AIPACers were never prosecuted. AIPAC rules.  
Paul Merrell

Spy Chief James Clapper Wins Rosemary Award - 0 views

www2.gwu.edu/...20140324

surveillance state NSA Rosemary-Award Obama Clapper Alexander

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has won the infamous Rosemary Award for worst open government performance in 2013, according to the citation published today by the National Security Archive at www.nsarchive.org. Despite heavy competition, Clapper's "No, sir" lie to Senator Ron Wyden's question: "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" sealed his receipt of the dubious achievement award, which cites the vastly excessive secrecy of the entire U.S. surveillance establishment. The Rosemary Award citation leads with what Clapper later called the "least untruthful" answer possible to congressional questions about the secret bulk collection of Americans' phone call data. It further cites other Clapper claims later proved false, such as his 2012 statement that "we don't hold data on U.S. citizens." But the Award also recognizes Clapper's fellow secrecy fetishists and enablers, including:
  • Gen. Keith Alexander, director of the NSA, for multiple Rose Mary Woods-type stretches, such as (1) claiming that the secret bulk collection prevented 54 terrorist plots against the U.S. when the actual number, according to the congressionally-established Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) investigation (pp. 145-153), is zero; (2) his 2009 declaration to the wiretap court that multiple NSA violations of the court's orders arose from differences over "terminology," an explanation which the chief judge said "strains credulity;" and (3) public statements by the NSA about its programs that had to be taken down from its website for inaccuracies (see Documents 78, 85, 87 in The Snowden Affair), along with public statements by other top NSA officials now known to be untrue (see "Remarks of Rajesh De," NSA General Counsel, Document 53 in The Snowden Affair).
  • Robert Mueller, former FBI director, for suggesting (as have Gen. Alexander and many others) that the secret bulk collection program might have been able to prevent the 9/11 attacks, when the 9/11 Commission found explicitly the problem was not lack of data points, but failing to connect the many dots the intelligence community already had about the would-be hijackers living in San Diego. The National Security Division lawyers at the Justice Department, for misleading their own Solicitor General (Donald Verrilli) who then misled (inadvertently) the U.S. Supreme Court over whether Justice let defendants know that bulk collection had contributed to their prosecutions. The same National Security Division lawyers who swore under oath in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for a key wiretap court opinion that the entire text of the opinion was appropriately classified Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (release of which would cause "exceptionally grave damage" to U.S. national security). Only after the Edward Snowden leaks and the embarrassed governmental declassification of the opinion did we find that one key part of the opinion's text simply reproduced the actual language of the 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and the only "grave damage" was to the government's false claims.
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  • President Obama for his repeated misrepresentations about the bulk collection program (calling the wiretap court "transparent" and saying "all of Congress" knew "exactly how this program works") while in effect acknowledging the public value of the Edward Snowden leaks by ordering the long-overdue declassification of key documents about the NSA's activities, and investigations both by a special panel and by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. The PCLOB directly contradicted the President, pointing out that "when the only means through which legislators can try to understand a prior interpretation of the law is to read a short description of an operational program, prepared by executive branch officials, made available only at certain times and locations, which cannot be discussed with others except in classified briefings conducted by those same executive branch officials, legislators are denied a meaningful opportunity to gauge the legitimacy and implications of the legal interpretation in question. Under such circumstances, it is not a legitimate method of statutory construction to presume that these legislators, when reenacting the statute, intended to adopt a prior interpretation that they had no fair means of evaluating." (p. 101)
  • Even an author of the Patriot Act, Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI), was broadsided by the revelation of the telephone metadata dragnet. After learning of the extent of spying on Americans that his Act unleashed, he wrote that the National Security Agency "ignored restrictions painstakingly crafted by lawmakers and assumed plenary authority never imagined by Congress" by cloaking its actions behind the "thick cloud of secrecy" that even our elected representatives could not breech. Clapper recently conceded to the Daily Beast, "I probably shouldn't say this, but I will. Had we been transparent about this [phone metadata collection] from the outset … we wouldn't have had the problem we had." The NSA's former deputy director, John "Chris" Inglis, said the same when NPR asked him if he thought the metadata dragnet should have been disclosed before Snowden. "In hindsight, yes. In hindsight, yes." Speaking about potential (relatively minimal) changes to the National Security Agency even the president acknowledged, "And all too often new authorities were instituted without adequate public debate," and "Given the unique power of the state, it is not enough for leaders to say: Trust us. We won't abuse the data we collect. For history has too many examples when that trust has been breached." (Exhibit A, of course, is the NSA "watchlist" in the 1960's and 1970's that targeted not only antiwar and civil rights activists, but also journalists and even members of Congress.)
  • The Archive established the not-so-coveted Rosemary Award in 2005, named after President Nixon's secretary, Rose Mary Woods, who testified she had erased 18-and-a-half minutes of a crucial Watergate tape — stretching, as she showed photographers, to answer the phone with her foot still on the transcription pedal. Bestowed annually to highlight the lowlights of government secrecy, the Rosemary Award has recognized a rogue's gallery of open government scofflaws, including the CIA, the Treasury Department, the Air Force, the FBI, the Federal Chief Information Officers' Council, and the career Rosemary leader — the Justice Department — for the last two years. Rosemary-winner James Clapper has offered several explanations for his untruthful disavowal of the National Security Agency's phone metadata dragnet. After his lie was exposed by the Edward Snowden revelations, Clapper first complained to NBC's Andrea Mitchell that the question about the NSA's surveillance of Americans was unfair, a — in his words — "When are you going to stop beating your wife kind of question." So, he responded "in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful, manner by saying 'no.'"
  • The Emmy and George Polk Award-winning National Security Archive, based at the George Washington University, has carried out thirteen government-wide audits of FOIA performance, filed more than 50,000 Freedom of Information Act requests over the past 28 years, opened historic government secrets ranging from the CIA's "Family Jewels" to documents about the testing of stealth aircraft at Area 51, and won a series of historic lawsuits that saved hundreds of millions of White House e-mails from the Reagan through Obama presidencies, among many other achievements.
  • After continuing criticism for his lie, Clapper wrote a letter to Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Dianne Feinstein, now explaining that he misunderstood Wyden's question and thought it was about the PRISM program (under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) rather than the telephone metadata collection program (under Section 215 of the Patriot Act). Clapper wrote that his staff "acknowledged the error" to Senator Wyden soon after — yet he chose to reject Wyden's offer to amend his answer. Former NSA senior counsel Joel Brenner blamed Congress for even asking the question, claiming that Wyden "sandbagged" Clapper by the "vicious tactic" of asking "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" Meanwhile, Steve Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists countered that "it is of course wrong for officials to make false statements, as DNI Clapper did," and that in fact the Senate Intelligence Committee "became complicit in public deception" for failing to rebut or correct Clapper's statement, which they knew to be untruthful. Clapper described his unclassified testimony as a game of "stump the chump." But when it came to oversight of the National Security Agency, it appears that senators and representatives were the chumps being stumped. According to Representative Justin Amash (R-Mich), the House Intelligence Committee "decided it wasn't worthwhile to share this information" about telephone metadata surveillance with other members of Congress. Classified briefings open to the whole House were a "farce," Amash contended, often consisting of information found in newspapers and public statutes.
  • Director Clapper joins an undistinguished list of previous Rosemary Award winners: 2012 - the Justice Department (in a repeat performance, for failure to update FOIA regulations for compliance with the law, undermining congressional intent, and hyping its open government statistics) 2011- the Justice Department (for doing more than any other agency to eviscerate President Obama's Day One transparency pledge, through pit-bull whistleblower prosecutions, recycled secrecy arguments in court cases, retrograde FOIA regulations, and mixed FOIA responsiveness) 2010 - the Federal Chief Information Officers' Council (for "lifetime failure" to address the crisis in government e-mail preservation) 2009 - the FBI (for having a record-setting rate of "no records" responses to FOIA requests) 2008 - the Treasury Department (for shredding FOIA requests and delaying responses for decades) 2007 - the Air Force (for disappearing its FOIA requests and having "failed miserably" to meet its FOIA obligations, according to a federal court ruling) 2006 - the Central Intelligence Agency (for the biggest one-year drop-off in responsiveness to FOIA requests yet recorded).   ALSO-RANS The Rosemary Award competition in 2013 was fierce, with a host of government contenders threatening to surpass the Clapper "least untruthful" standard. These secrecy over-achievers included the following FOI delinquents:
  • Admiral William McRaven, head of the Special Operations Command for the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden, who purged his command's computers and file cabinets of all records on the raid, sent any remaining copies over to CIA where they would be effectively immune from the FOIA, and then masterminded a "no records" response to the Associated Press when the AP reporters filed FOIA requests for raid-related materials and photos. If not for a one-sentence mention in a leaked draft inspector general report — which the IG deleted for the final version — no one would have been the wiser about McRaven's shell game. Subsequently, a FOIA lawsuit by Judicial Watch uncovered the sole remaining e-mail from McRaven ordering the evidence destruction, in apparent violation of federal records laws, a felony for which the Admiral seems to have paid no price. Department of Defense classification reviewers who censored from a 1962 document on the Cuban Missile Crisis direct quotes from public statements by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. The quotes referred to the U.S. Jupiter missiles in Turkey that would ultimately (and secretly) be pulled out in exchange for Soviet withdrawal of its missiles in Cuba. The denials even occurred after an appeal by the National Security Archive, which provided as supporting material the text of the Khrushchev statements and multiple other officially declassified documents (and photographs!) describing the Jupiters in Turkey. Such absurd classification decisions call into question all of the standards used by the Pentagon and the National Declassification Center to review historical documents.
  • Admiral William McRaven memo from May 13, 2011, ordering the destruction of evidence relating to the Osama bin Laden raid. (From Judicial Watch)
  • The Department of Justice Office of Information Policy, which continues to misrepresent to Congress the government's FOIA performance, while enabling dramatic increases in the number of times government agencies invoke the purely discretionary "deliberative process" exemption. Five years after President Obama declared a "presumption of openness" for FOIA requests, Justice lawyers still cannot show a single case of FOIA litigation in which the purported new standards (including orders from their own boss, Attorney General Eric Holder) have caused the Department to change its position in favor of disclosure.
Paul Merrell

Netanyahu-Mossad Split Divides U.S. Congress on Iran Sanctions - Bloomberg View - 0 views

www.bloombergview.com/...u-s-congress-on-iran-sanctions

war & peace Iranian-nukes-myth sanctions legislation

shared by Paul Merrell on 22 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • The Israeli intelligence agency Mossad has broken ranks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, telling U.S. officials and lawmakers that a new Iran sanctions bill in the U.S. Congress would tank the Iran nuclear negotiations. Already, the Barack Obama administration and some leading Republican senators are using the Israeli internal disagreement to undermine support for the bill, authored by Republican Mark Kirk and Democrat Robert Menendez, which would enact new sanctions if current negotiations falter. Bob Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee  -- supported by Republican Senators Lindsay Graham and John McCain -- is pushing for his own legislation on the Iran nuclear deal, which doesn't contain sanctions but would require that the Senate vote on any pact that is agreed upon in Geneva. The White House is opposed to both the Kirk-Menendez bill and the Corker bill; it doesn't want Congress to meddle at all in the delicate multilateral diplomacy with Iran.
  • Israeli intelligence officials have been briefing both Obama administration officials and visiting U.S. senators about their concerns on the Kirk-Menendez bill, which would increase sanctions on Iran only if the Iranian government can't strike a deal with the so-called P5+1 countries by a June 30 deadline or fails to live up to its commitments. Meanwhile, the Israeli prime minister’s office has been supporting the Kirk-Menendez bill, as does the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, ahead of what will be a major foreign policy confrontation between the executive and legislative branches of the U.S. government in coming weeks. Evidence of the Israeli rift surfaced Wednesday when Secretary of State John Kerry said that an unnamed Israeli intelligence official had said the new sanctions bill would be “like throwing a grenade into the process.” But an initial warning from Israeli Mossad leaders was also delivered last week in Israel to a Congressional delegation -- including Corker, Graham, McCain and fellow Republican John Barrasso; Democratic Senators Joe Donnelly and Tim Kaine; and independent Angus King -- according to lawmakers who were present and staff members who were briefed on the exchange. When Menendez (who was not on the trip) heard about the briefing, he quickly phoned Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Ron Dermer to seek clarification. Barrasso told us Tuesday that different parts of the Israeli government told the delegation different things. “We met with a number of government officials from many different parts of the government. There’s not a uniform view there,” he said.
  • Menendez is so livid at the administration, he decried its efforts to avert Congressional action on Iran at the hearing, telling Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken: “You know, I have to be honest with you, the more I hear from the administration in its quotes, the more it sounds like talking points that come straight out of Tehran.” Tuesday night, Obama threatened to veto the Kirk-Menendez bill if it passes Congress. Wednesday morning, House Speaker John Boehner responded by announcing that Netanyahu has accepted his invitation to address a joint session of Congress on Feb. 11, just as Congress is likely to be embroiled in a legislative fight over both bills. Boehner told fellow Republicans that he was specifically inviting Netanyahu to address the threat posed by radical Islam and Iran. Netanyahu is expected to deliver full-throated support for sanctions. The administration is upset that Netanyahu accepted Boehner’s invitation without notifying them, the latest indication of the poor relationship between the Israeli government and the White House. Two senior U.S. officials tell us that the Mossad has also shared its view with the administration that if legislation that imposed a trigger leading to future sanctions on Iran was signed into law, it would cause the talks to collapse.
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  • The Israeli view shared with Corker and other senators also mirrors the assessment from the U.S. intelligence community. “We’ve had a standing assessment on this,” one senior administration official told us. “We haven’t run the new Kirk-Menendez bill through the process, but the point is that any bill that triggers sanctions would collapse the talks. That’s what the assessment is.” Another intelligence official said that the Israelis had come to the same conclusion.  This is not the first time Israel’s Mossad has been at odds with Netanyahu on Iran. In December 2010, former Mossad chief Meir Dagan told Israeli reporters that he had openly opposed an order from Netanyahu to prepare a military attack on Iran. At the time, Obama was also working to persuade the Israeli prime minister to hold off on attacking Iran. Iranian diplomats have also routinely threatened to leave the talks if new sanctions were imposed. Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, at the end of December said new sanctions would “violate the spirit” of the negotiations that have been going on for more than a year now. Despite the intelligence analyses, however, predicting Iranian behavior is no exact science. There is still much about Iran’s program that U.S. spies do not know. In November, former CIA director Michael Hayden told Congress that U.S. intelligence assessments do not have a “complete picture” of the extent of Iran’s nuclear program.
  • On Capitol Hill, the fight over how to proceed against the administration is far from over. The Senate Banking Committee was supposed to mark up the Kirk-Menendez bill on Thursday, but the session was delayed by one week. Some Senate staffers told us that Democrats asked for the delay because Menendez wants to get more Democrats to commit to his bill before he goes public. A main pitch of the Kirk-Menendez bill is that is could garner bipartisan -- even perhaps veto-proof -- support in the face of Obama's disapproval. So far, most Democrats have stayed on the sidelines, especially after Obama and Menendez got into a heated argument over the bill at last week’s private Democratic retreat. Kirk and Menendez softened their proposal to make it more palatable to Democrats, by giving the president more flexibility than the previous version and providing the administration waivers after the fact. Corker, Graham and McCain are trying to woo Democrats to their side by arguing that avoiding sanctions language altogether and simply mandating that the Senate get a vote is a more bipartisan approach. There are only a handful of Democrats that will support any Iran bill, so competition for these votes is heated.
  • Update, 12 p.m. Jan. 22:  The Israeli prime minister's office released a statement Thursday about Mossad chairman Tamir Pardo’s meeting with the U.S. Senate delegation last weekend. The statement said Pardo didn’t oppose new sanctions on Iran but acknowledged that Pardo used the term “hand grenade” to describe the effect new sanctions would have on the nuclear negotiations with Iran. “He used this term to describe the possibility of creating a temporary breakdown in the talks, at the end of which the negotiations will be restarted under better conditions,” the statement said. “The Mossad chairman explicitly pointed out that the agreement that is being reached with Iran is bad, and may lead to a regional arms race.”
  • Paul Merrell on 22 Jan 15
     
    My advice to Obama: tell John Kerry  to change Netanyahu's visa to impose travel restrictions, allowing him to travel only  to New York City  (where the U.N. is located). within the U.S. The U.S. did that routinely with Soviet Union officials during the Cold War days. That will teach Netanyahu a lesson he will remember, that  in the U.S. the Executive Branch has control of diplomatic relations. Netanyahu has already faced heavy criticism in Israel for straining relations with Obama. He's currently facing heavy criticism for forcing his way  into the Charlie Hebdo march in Paris after President Hollande had specifically requested that he not take part and for having the idocy to tell French Jews that they could never have a home if they did not emigrate to Israel. If  the Obama Administration makes a public issue out of Netanyahu's latest affront, it might well cost Netanyahu re-eloection as Prime Minister next month. That decision lies in the hands of a single Israeli official who will choose which party is to try to form a new ruling coalition of parties. Mr. Netanyahu's Likud Party has no guarantee of getting that nod.  
Paul Merrell

Saudi Arabia warns of shift away from U.S. over Syria, Iran | Reuters - 1 views

www.reuters.com/...audi-usa-idUSBRE99L0K120131022

shared by Paul Merrell on 23 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • (Reuters) - Upset at President Barack Obama's policies on Iran and Syria, members of Saudi Arabia's ruling family are threatening a rift with the United States that could take the alliance between Washington and the kingdom to its lowest point in years. Saudi Arabia's intelligence chief is vowing that the kingdom will make a "major shift" in relations with the United States to protest perceived American inaction over Syria's civil war as well as recent U.S. overtures to Iran, a source close to Saudi policy said on Tuesday.Prince Bandar bin Sultan told European diplomats that the United States had failed to act effectively against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, was growing closer to Tehran, and had failed to back Saudi support for Bahrain when it crushed an anti-government revolt in 2011, the source said."The shift away from the U.S. is a major one," the source close to Saudi policy said. "Saudi doesn't want to find itself any longer in a situation where it is dependent."It was not immediately clear whether the reported statements by Prince Bandar, who was the Saudi ambassador to Washington for 22 years, had the full backing of King Abdullah.
  • Saudi Arabia's intelligence chief is vowing that the kingdom will make a "major shift" in relations with the United States to protest perceived American inaction over Syria's civil war as well as recent U.S. overtures to Iran, a source close to Saudi policy said on Tuesday.Prince Bandar bin Sultan told European diplomats that the United States had failed to act effectively against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, was growing closer to Tehran, and had failed to back Saudi support for Bahrain when it crushed an anti-government revolt in 2011, the source said."The shift away from the U.S. is a major one," the source close to Saudi policy said. "Saudi doesn't want to find itself any longer in a situation where it is dependent."It was not immediately clear whether the reported statements by Prince Bandar, who was the Saudi ambassador to Washington for 22 years, had the full backing of King Abdullah.The growing breach between the United States and Saudi Arabia was also on display in Washington, where another senior Saudi prince criticized Obama's Middle East policies, accusing him of "dithering" on Syria and Israeli-Palestinian peace.
  • In unusually blunt public remarks, Prince Turki al-Faisal called Obama's policies in Syria "lamentable" and ridiculed a U.S.-Russian deal to eliminate Assad's chemical weapons. He suggested it was a ruse to let Obama avoid military action in Syria."The current charade of international control over Bashar's chemical arsenal would be funny if it were not so blatantly perfidious. And designed not only to give Mr. Obama an opportunity to back down (from military strikes), but also to help Assad to butcher his people," said Prince Turki, a member of the Saudi royal family and former director of Saudi intelligence.The United States and Saudi Arabia have been allies since the kingdom was declared in 1932, giving Riyadh a powerful military protector and Washington secure oil supplies.The Saudi criticism came days after the 40th anniversary of the October 1973 Arab oil embargo imposed to punish the West for supporting Israel in the Yom Kippur war.That was one of the low points in U.S.-Saudi ties, which were also badly shaken by the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. Most of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi nationals.
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  • Saudi Arabia gave a clear sign of its displeasure over Obama's foreign policy last week when it rejected a coveted two-year term on the U.N. Security Council in a display of anger over the failure of the international community to end the war in Syria and act on other Middle East issues.Prince Turki indicated that Saudi Arabia will not reverse that decision, which he said was a result of the Security Council's failure to stop Assad and implement its own decision on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."There is nothing whimsical about the decision to forego membership of the Security Council. It is based on the ineffectual experience of that body," he said in a speech to the Washington-based National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations.
  • Prince Bandar is seen as a foreign policy hawk, especially on Iran. The Sunni Muslim kingdom's rivalry with Shi'ite Iran, an ally of Syria, has amplified sectarian tensions across the Middle East.A son of the late defense minister and crown prince, Prince Sultan, and a protégé of the late King Fahd, he fell from favor with King Abdullah after clashing on foreign policy in 2005.But he was called in from the cold last year with a mandate to bring down Assad, diplomats in the Gulf say. Over the past year, he has led Saudi efforts to bring arms and other aid to Syrian rebels."Prince Bandar told diplomats that he plans to limit interaction with the U.S.," the source close to Saudi policy said."This happens after the U.S. failed to take any effective action on Syria and Palestine. Relations with the U.S. have been deteriorating for a while, as Saudi feels that the U.S. is growing closer with Iran and the U.S. also failed to support Saudi during the Bahrain uprising," the source said.The source declined to provide more details of Bandar's talks with the diplomats, which took place in the past few days.
  • But he suggested that the planned change in ties between the energy superpower and the United States would have wide-ranging consequences, including on arms purchases and oil sales.Saudi Arabia, the world's biggest oil exporter, ploughs much of its earnings back into U.S. assets. Most of the Saudi central bank's net foreign assets of $690 billion are thought to be denominated in dollars, much of them in U.S. Treasury bonds."All options are on the table now, and for sure there will be some impact," the Saudi source said.He said there would be no further coordination with the United States over the war in Syria, where the Saudis have armed and financed rebel groups fighting Assad.The kingdom has informed the United States of its actions in Syria, and diplomats say it has respected U.S. requests not to supply the groups with advanced weaponry that the West fears could fall into the hands of al Qaeda-aligned groups.Saudi anger boiled over after Washington refrained from military strikes in response to a poison gas attack in Damascus in August when Assad agreed to give up his chemical weapons arsenal.
  • Paul Merrell on 23 Oct 13
     
    This lengthy article from Reuters deserves attention. The peace initiatives by Russia/Syria and by Iran are forcing realignment of foreign policies throughout the Mideast. The U.S. is no longer perceived as being on the side of only Sunni Muslim states. One of the most visible changes (after cancellation of the U.S. military strike on Syria) is a go-it-alone declaration by the House of Saud that parallels the stance taken by Israel's ruling right-wing coalition. Both Israel and the Saudis had very successfully isolated the U.S. from the non-Sunni Arab nations, fueling and deepening a religious divide within the Arab nations. It remains to be seen whether the declarations by the House of Saud and Bibi Netanyahu will translate into effective military action against Iran and Syria, although Saudi money and weapons will continue to flow into Syria for the foreseeable future. Both nations will continue attempts to undo the looming Iran-U.S. thaw in relations. Predictably, the Zionist/Neocon hawks in Congress are pushing legislation to put a big freeze back on the Iran-U.S. thaw in relations, including a bill to stiffen economic sanctions on Iran and authorize military strikes against Syria. But that legislation seems to be going nowhere; the mood of the U.S. population (and thus of those up for election next year) has shifted to profoundly anti-war, at least as applied to Syria and Iran. It would be ironic if Russia/Syria and Iran's peace initiatives actually resulted in a lasting U.S. shift away from the Zionist/Neocon strategy to destabilize all of Israel's neighboring states except Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan (those three have already been destabilized and swept into Israel's influence). If so, Obama might yet leave a positive legacy.
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