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Paul Merrell

Here Are All the Sketchy Government Agencies Buying Hacking Team's Spy Tech | Motherboard - 0 views

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surveillance state Hacking-Team hacked

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • They say what goes around comes around, and there's perhaps nowhere that rings more true than in the world of government surveillance. Such was the case on Monday morning when Hacking Team, the Italian company known for selling electronic intrusion tools to police and federal agencies around the world, awoke to find that it had been hacked itself—big time—apparently exposing its complete client list, email spools, invoices, contracts, source code, and more. Those documents show that not only has the company been selling hacking tools to a long list of foreign governments with dubious human rights records, but it’s also establishing a nice customer base right here in the good old US of A. The cache, which sources told Motherboard is legitimate, contains more than 400 gigabytes of files, many of which confirm previous reports that the company has been selling industrial-grade surveillance software to authoritarian governments. Hacking Team is known in the surveillance world for its flagship hacking suite, Remote Control System (RCS) or Galileo, which allows its government and law enforcement clients to secretly install “implants” on remote machines that can steal private emails, record Skype calls, and even monitor targets through their computer's webcam. Hacking Team in North America
  • According to leaked contracts, invoices and an up-to-date list of customer subscriptions, Hacking Team’s clients—which the company has consistently refused to name—also include Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, Bahrain, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Sudan and many others. The list of names matches the findings of Citizen Lab, a research lab at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs that previously found traces of Hacking Team on the computers of journalists and activists around the world. Last year, the Lab's researchers mapped out the worldwide collection infrastructure used by Hacking Team's customers to covertly transport stolen data, unveiling a massive network comprised of servers based in 21 countries. Reporters Without Borders later named the company one of the “Enemies of the Internet” in its annual report on government surveillance and censorship.
  • we’ve only scratched the surface of this massive leak, and it’s unclear how Hacking Team will recover from having its secrets spilling across the internet for all to see. In the meantime, the company is asking all customers to stop using its spyware—and likely preparing for the worst.
Gary Edwards

Goggle Hires Obama's Campaign E-Team - America Conservative 2 Conservative - 0 views

americac2c.com/...-hires-obama-s-campaign-e-team

Federalis-Bankster-Corporatist-Media_elites Google NSA-Patriot-Act-NDAA

shared by Gary Edwards on 13 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 13 Jun 13
     
    Looks like Florian was right after all.  Google is a front for the big Media-Federalis-Bankster-Corporatist elites. excerpt: "The hand-in-hand nature of this White House and some of the nation's biggest corporations is seen in yet another incident as Barack Obama's 2012 campaign data team is now moving from team Obama to team Google. This week, Bloomberg reported that Obama's data mining team, used to such great effect during his 2012 re-election for president, has been hired nearly wholesale to go work for Google. This may not come as such a great surprise, however, as Google's Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt, helped organize and run Obama's re-election e-team. Schmidt "helped recruit talent, choose technology, and coach the campaign manager, Jim Messina, on the finer points of leading a large organization," Bloomberg reports. Since he came onto the national political scene, Barack Obama has campaigned like a veritable David vs Goliath with evil corporations standing in for Goliath while Obama presents himself as David loading his sling shot to do battle. But the reality is not quite that cut and dried and Google has been a big recipient of Obama's largesse. The Washington Examiner's Tim Carney points out that the administration is filled with Googleites and that President Obama and Google have a long standing love affair. Remember Obama's No. 2 tech staffer at the White House was Google's former top lobbyist-who improperly worked with active Google lobbyists on pushing polic.... Obama appointed non-registered Google lobbyist and max-Obama donor Vint Cerf to a science advisory board. Then there was the time when Google chief Schmidt is reported to have told a Google staffer to make sure that the search engine did not connect his entries to his own political donations so that it was a bit harder to find out to whom he donated campaign cash."
Paul Merrell

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

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

war & peace 9-11 GITMO litigation CIA torture translator

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

Guantánamo hearing halted by supposed CIA 'black site' worker serving as war ... - 0 views

www.miamiherald.com/...article9600110.html

war & peace 9-11-trial GITMO military-tribunal translator CIA torture

shared by Paul Merrell on 11 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • The 9/11 trial judge abruptly recessed the first hearing in the case since August on Monday after some of the alleged Sept. 11 plotters said they recognized a war court linguist as a former secret CIA prison worker.Alleged plot deputy Ramzi bin al Shibh, 42, made the revelation just moments into the hearing by informing the judge he had a problem with his courtroom translator. The interpreter, Bin al Shibh claimed, worked for the CIA during his 2002 through 2006 detention at a so-called “Black Site.”“The problem is I cannot trust him because he was working at the black site with the CIA, and we know him from there,” he said.This week’s is the first hearing for the five men accused of conspiring in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks — that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, the Pentagon and Pennsylvania — since the public release of portions of a sweeping Senate Intelligence Committee study of the agency’s secret prisons known as “The Torture Report.”
  • Instead the issue became, apparently, a stony-faced translator who was sitting alongside Bin al Shibh in court when the hearing started. Lawyers for the alleged mastermind, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, 49, and his nephew, Ammar al Baluchi, 37, said they learned about the recognition just as court began. The judge ordered a quick recess, excused Campoamor-Sanchez and summoned the chief prosecutor, Army Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, for questioning.Court resumed briefly with the linguist missing. Martins sought, and got, a continuing recess until 9 a.m. Wednesday, to look into the issue and file a written pleading with the court. Pleadings are sealed for at least 15 days for intelligence agencies’ scrub of secret information.Mohammed’s attorney, David Nevin, asked Pohl to order the suspected CIA worker to not leave this remote base in southeast Cuba and to submit to defense questioning.
  • Cheryl Bormann, attorney for another alleged plotter, Walid bin Attash, 36, told the judge, Army Col. James L. Pohl, that her client “was visibly shaken” at recognizing a man in the maximum-security war court.“My client relayed to me this morning that there is somebody in this courtroom who was participating in his illegal torture,” she said.Bormann said it was either “the biggest coincidence ever” or “part of the pattern of the infiltration of defense teams.” Monday’s hearing was supposed to start with a presentation by a Justice Department lawyer, Fernando Campoamor-Sanchez, on FBI agents secretly questioning members of the Bin al Shibh defense team. The Sept. 11 legal defense teams have called the FBI’s action spying on privileged attorney-client conversations.
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  • War court translators are provided by one of two Defense Department contractors paid by the Pentagon unit that runs the war court, called the Office of the Convening Authority for Military Commissions. It’s run by retired Marine Maj. Gen. Vaughn Ary, a former military lawyer. The contractors are Leidos and All World.Ary’s office provides a list of qualified translators to the Office of Military Commissions Defense unit, and, in the capital cases, each one gets a dedicated translator assigned to the team. Teams can object to the choice, and have done so in the past, as unsuitable, according to earlier war court sessions.The war court’s Chief Defense Counsel, Air Force Col. Karen Mayberry, said after the court session Monday that the translator sitting with Bin al Shibh in court was not permanently assigned to his team, or the 9/11 case. The Bin al Shibh team had lost its translator after an FBI investigation secretly questioned Sept. 11 defense team members. Monday’s translator, the one that Bin al Shibh said he recognized from a CIA prison, had worked for years on war court defense teams, but none with the Sept. 11 death-penalty case, according to Mayberry. Monday’s translator was filling in for this session because, although the Bin al Shibh team had chosen a new team translator, the new permanent translator had not yet gotten a security clearance, which can be a lengthy process.
  • Bin al Shibh and the other four men are accused of helping to orchestrate, train, and arrange travel for the 19 men who hijacked four U.S. passenger aircraft on Sept. 11, 2001. The prosecutor is seeking their execution, if they are convicted. The CIA held and interrogated them for three to four years in secret overseas prisons before they were brought to Guantánamo in September 2006. But even once they got here, they continued to be in CIA custody, according to the Senate report. Jay Connell, attorney for Baluchi, 37, said Sunday it is still not known when the agency relinquished control of the men, who are held in a secret prison called Camp 7.
Gary Edwards

Startup turns carbon dioxide into fuels - 0 views

phys.org/...rtup-carbon-dioxide-fuels.html

syngas synfuels energy Clean-Energy carbon dioxide

shared by Gary Edwards on 23 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • The research has received funding from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFSOR), the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy (DOE). The collaboration between Liquid Light and the University was supported by the DOE Small Business Innovation Research program and the AFOSR Small Business Technology Transfer program. Princeton's agreement with Liquid Light allowed the company to continue to collaborate with Bocarsly and his research team. Before long, new discoveries were emerging. "They started noticing interesting chemistry that we wouldn't have predicted," said Bocarsly.
  • The Princeton scientists did some additional studies, and made a surprising discovery: They could turn CO2, which contains only one carbon, into a compound with a carbon-carbon bond, which vastly increases the possibilities for creating commercial applications. This was radical because although the reaction is certainly possible, it is highly unlikely to happen because so many other competing reactions are occurring. "Everyone who electrochemically reduces CO2 today makes compounds with only one carbon," said Bocarsly. "Nobody makes things with carbon-carbon bonds." He paused. "But we can." "That was a very 'wow' moment," recalled Cole, "because we thought that our process could only make methanol. But now we were finding that we could make a variety of products, and that is what makes this technology commercially interesting." She said Liquid Light scientists can now make more than 20 different products from CO2.
  • One of the chemicals Liquid Light can make is isopropanol, commonly known as rubbing alcohol and an important industrial chemical. Another is butanol, which could be commercially important as a fuel. Liquid Light's technology offers the potential to make these chemicals at lower cost than today's methods, which involve starting with fossil fuels such as petroleum and natural gas.
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  • Why does pyridinium work so well as a catalyst for the reaction? Based on its structure, the ring-shaped molecule is an unlikely catalyst for this reaction because it shuttles just one electron at a time. But to convert CO2 to methanol requires six electrons, and to make higher-carbon molecules takes even more electrons. Bocarsly and his team — in collaboration with Steven Bernasek, professor of chemistry — are doing studies to understand the steps in the chemical reaction, and they are making rapid progress. "There are clearly some intermediate products formed during the reaction that do not sit around for a long time and are not there in very high concentrations," said Bocarsly.
  • The Princeton team also is studying the factors that determine which products can be made from CO2. The researchers have found that very subtle changes in the electrode surface can lead to production of different chemicals. For example, CO2 plus a pyridinium catalyst and a platinum electrode make methanol. However, the same catalyst and a different electrode give a different product. The team published its findings on how the reaction is affected by catalyst concentration, temperature and pressure in the journal ChemSusChem last year.
  • Citing government statistics that the United States generates about 5.5 billion metric tons of CO2 per year, Teamey said it will not be hard to obtain the starting materials for this new industry. However, the CO2 needs to be relatively pure, a requirement that rules out gasoline tailpipes and coal-fired power plants. Instead, said Teamey, the CO2 could come from manufacturing facilities, such as fertilizer manufacturers and cement plants, which according to Teamey emit some 100 million tons of high-purity CO2 each year.
  • Gary Edwards on 23 Feb 14
     
    "Today, carbon dioxide (CO2) is a hot topic. Scientists around the globe are searching for ways to store, dispose of, or prevent the formation of the greenhouse gas, which is a major driver of global climate change. Liquid Light hopes to take this concept one step further and harness waste CO2 as a source of carbon to make industrial chemicals and fuels. The technology behind the process is simple: Take CO2 and mix it in a water-filled chamber with an electrode and a catalyst. The ensuing chemical reaction converts CO2 into a new molecule, methanol, which can be used as a fuel, an industrial solvent or a starting material for the manufacture of other chemicals. Liquid Light's founders include Bocarsly and his former graduate student Emily Cole, who earned her Ph.D. from Princeton in 2009. Cole helped revive efforts in Bocarsly's lab to study the conversion of CO2 into usable fuels, which led to the launch of Liquid Light and an ongoing collaboration that Bocarsly said has been extremely positive for his research team at the University. "We've made some discoveries that wouldn't have been made in a university setting, and this has really accelerated the research," Bocarsly said. "It is a very productive relationship." Back in the 1990s, a former Ph.D. student of Bocarsly's named Chao Lin conducted some of the earliest experiments on turning CO2 into methanol. He used palladium metal as the electrode and pyridinium, an inexpensive ring-shaped molecule, as the catalyst. By plugging the electrode into an electrical outlet, he could drive an electrochemical reaction that converted CO2 into methanol. As Bocarsly recalled, Lin was quite excited about his success. However, said Bocarsly, "We published that finding in 1994 and there was approximately zero interest in it." The work languished until 2005 when Cole, then a new graduate student, told Bocarsly she wanted to work on a clean-energy project. She took up the challenge of reproducing Lin's results, but this time
Paul Merrell

Spy Tech Company 'Hacking Team' Gets Hacked | Motherboard - 0 views

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surveillance-state Hacking-Team hacking-the-spies

shared by Paul Merrell on 06 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • Sometimes even the cops get robbed. The controversial Italian surveillance company Hacking Team, which sells spyware to governments all around the world, including agencies in Ethiopia, Morocco, the United Arab Emirates, as well as the US Drug Enforcement Administration, appears to have been seriously hacked. Hackers have made 500 GB of client files, contracts, financial documents, and internal emails, some as recent as 2015, publicly available for download. Hacking Team’s spokesperson Eric Rabe did not immediately respond to Motherboard’s calls and email asking for verification that the hacked information is legitimate. Without confirmation from the company itself, it’s difficult to know what percentage of the files are real—however, based on the sheer size of the breach and the information in the files, the hack appears to be authentic. What’s more, the unknown hackers announced their feat through Hacking Team’s own Twitter account.
  • he hackers composed the tweets as if they were written by Hacking Team. “Since we have nothing to hide, we're publishing all our e-mails, files, and source code,” the hackers wrote in a tweet, which included the link to around 500 Gb of files. The hackers also started tweeting a few samples of internal emails from the company. One of the screenshots shows an email dated 2014 from Hacking Team’s founder and CEO David Vincenzetti to another employee. In the email, titled “Yet another Citizen Lab attack,” Vincenzetti links to a report from the online digital rights research center Citizen Lab, at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, which has exposed numerous cases of abuse from Hacking Team’s clients. Hacking Team has never revealed a list of its clients, and has always and repeatedly denied selling to sketchy governments, arguing that it has an internal procedure to address human rights concerns about prospective customers.
  • It’s unclear exactly how much the hackers got their hands on, but judging from the size of the files, it’s certainly a large collection of internal files. A source who asked to speak anonymously due to the sensitivity of the issue, told me that based on the file names and folders in the leak, the hackers who hit Hacking Team "got everything." A few hours after the initial hack, a list of alleged Hacking Team customers was posted on Pastebin. The list includes past and current customers. Among the most notable, there are a few that were previously unknown, such as the FBI, Chile, Australia, Spain, and Iraq, among others.
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  • The breach on Hacking Team comes almost a year after another surveillance tech company, the competing FinFisher, was hacked in a similar way, with a hacker leaking 40 Gb of internal files. FinFisher, like Hacking Team, sells surveillance software to law enforcement agencies across the world. Their software, once surreptitiously installed on a target’s cell phone or computer, can be used to monitor the target’s communications, such as phone calls, text messages, Skype calls, or emails. Operators can also turn on the target’s webcam and exfiltrate files from the infected device.
Paul Merrell

Hacking Team Asks Customers to Stop Using Its Software After Hack | Motherboard - 0 views

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surveillance state Hacking-Team hacked

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • But the hack hasn’t just ruined the day for Hacking Team’s employees. The company, which sells surveillance software to government customers all over the world, from Morocco and Ethiopia to the US Drug Enforcement Agency and the FBI, has told all its customers to shut down all operations and suspend all use of the company’s spyware, Motherboard has learned. “They’re in full on emergency mode,” a source who has inside knowledge of Hacking Team’s operations told Motherboard.
  • Hacking Team notified all its customers on Monday morning with a “blast email,” requesting them to shut down all deployments of its Remote Control System software, also known as Galileo, according to multiple sources. The company also doesn’t have access to its email system as of Monday afternoon, a source said. On Sunday night, an unnamed hacker, who claimed to be the same person who breached Hacking Team’s competitor FinFisher last year, hijacked its Twitter account and posted links to 400GB of internal data. Hacking Team woke up to a massive breach of its systems.
  • A source told Motherboard that the hackers appears to have gotten “everything,” likely more than what the hacker has posted online, perhaps more than one terabyte of data. “The hacker seems to have downloaded everything that there was in the company’s servers,” the source, who could only speak on condition of anonymity, told Motherboard. “There’s pretty much everything here.” It’s unclear how the hackers got their hands on the stash, but judging from the leaked files, they broke into the computers of Hacking Team’s two systems administrators, Christian Pozzi and Mauro Romeo, who had access to all the company’s files, according to the source. “I did not expect a breach to be this big, but I’m not surprised they got hacked because they don’t take security seriously,” the source told me. “You can see in the files how much they royally fucked up.”
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  • For example, the source noted, none of the sensitive files in the data dump, from employees passports to list of customers, appear to be encrypted. “How can you give all the keys to your infrastructure to a 20-something who just joined the company?” he added, referring to Pozzi, whose LinkedIn shows he’s been at Hacking Team for just over a year. “Nobody noticed that someone stole a terabyte of data? You gotta be a fuckwad,” the source said. “It means nobody was taking care of security.”
  • The future of the company, at this point, it’s uncertain. Employees fear this might be the beginning of the end, according to sources. One current employee, for example, started working on his resume, a source told Motherboard. It’s also unclear how customers will react to this, but a source said that it’s likely that customers from countries such as the US will pull the plug on their contracts. Hacking Team asked its customers to shut down operations, but according to one of the leaked files, as part of Hacking Team’s “crisis procedure,” it could have killed their operations remotely. The company, in fact, has “a backdoor” into every customer’s software, giving it ability to suspend it or shut it down—something that even customers aren’t told about. To make matters worse, every copy of Hacking Team’s Galileo software is watermarked, according to the source, which means Hacking Team, and now everyone with access to this data dump, can find out who operates it and who they’re targeting with it.
Paul Merrell

Hacking Team: the Hack on Us Was Not Done by 'Some Random Guy' | Motherboard - 0 views

motherboard.vice.com/...as-not-done-by-some-random-guy

surveillance state Hacking-Team breach admissions

shared by Paul Merrell on 08 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • Almost 48 hours after an unnamed hacker announced the breach of Hacking Team, exposing more than 400GB of secrets, the Italian surveillance tech company is investigating what happened, and coming out of its radio silence. The cyberintrusion, which was “quite sophisticated,” was likely the work of people “with a lot of expertise,” according to the company spokesperson Eric Rabe, who spoke with Motherboard on the phone from Milan, where he flew after finding out about the attack.
  • Paul Merrell on 08 Jul 15
     
    Hacking Team admits that the hack occurred and that the documents are genuine.
Paul Merrell

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

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

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

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

Ted Cruz's Team of Islamophobes « LobeLog - 0 views

lobelog.com/ted-cruzs-team-of-islamophobes

war & peace Auction 2016 Cruz foreign-policy-advisors Islamaphobia

shared by Paul Merrell on 17 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), one of the three remaining candidates for the Republican presidential nomination, is unveiling his national security team today, and Bloomberg View columnist Eli Lake was able to preview some of its members for his readers this morning. Calling the group “an unlikely team of foreign-policy rivals,” Lake argued that Cruz has chosen a wide array of advisors who hold divergent views with respect to at least one key foreign policy issue: In a year when the Republican Party is breaking apart because of Donald Trump, the only man left with a chance to beat him is trying to build a big tent—by GOP standards—when it comes to foreign affairs. On Thursday, Senator Ted Cruz is set to announce his campaign’s national security advisory team, and it includes many foreign-policy insurgents and a few more establishment types. The list includes conservatives who disagree on one of the most pressing issues facing the next president: defining and confronting radical Islam.
  • This is one way to describe Cruz’s team. Another way would be to say that Cruz has assembled a collection of some of the most prominent Islamophobes in American right-wing circles and balanced them with a group of neoconservatives who only want to go to war against part of the Islamic world, not all of it.
Gary Edwards

The Qatari Deal To Hold The Taliban - The Qataris Have Been Used Before By President Ob... - 1 views

theconservativetreehouse.com/...ama-with-horrific-consequences

Benghazi-coverup Qatar Gitmo-5 Obammunism

shared by Gary Edwards on 09 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Three months, a naval fleet, 3,000 marines, one Billion dollars, and 450 cruise missiles later, it’s May 2011 and Obama had yet to ask for permission to engage in his offensive war from anyone but himself and the previously noted ‘club of the traveling pantsuits’. Despite the Office of Legal Council (the golfers own legal team) telling him approval is needed, he chose to violate the War Powers Act and more importantly the Constitution. It is critical to remember the political battle being waged at the time over whether President Obama had the authority to take “offensive military action”, without congressional approval,  when the threat was not against the United States. It’s critical because from that initial impetus you find the reason why arming the Libyan rebels had to be done by another method – because President Obama never consulted congress, nor sought permission.
  • Normally, in order to send arms to the rebels lawfully, President Obama would have to request approval from Congress. He did not want to do that.   Partly because he was arrogant, and partly because he did not want the politically charged fight that such a request would engage.  It would hamper his ability to take unilateral action in Libya.
  • So an alternate method of arming the rebels needed to be structured.    Enter the State Department, Hillary Clinton, and CIA David Petraeus. Weapons, specifically MANPADS or shoulder fired missiles, would be funneled to the Benghazi rebels by the State Dept, through the CIA under the auspices of ongoing NATO operations.   May, June, July, August, Sept, 2011 this covert process was taking place. It was this covert missile delivery process which later became an issue after Gaddafi was killed.    It was during the recovery of these missiles , and the redeployment/transfer to the now uprising “Syrian Rebels” when Ambassador Chris Stevens was killed on Sept. 11th 2012.
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  • [O]n July 25, 2012, Taliban fighters in Kunar province successfully targeted a US Army CH-47 helicopter with a new generation Stinger missile. They thought they had a surefire kill. But instead of bursting into flames, the Chinook just disappeared into the darkness as the American pilot recovered control of the aircraft and brought it to the ground in a hard landing. The assault team jumped out the open doors and ran clear in case it exploded. Less than 30 seconds later, the Taliban gunner and his comrade erupted into flames as an American gunship overhead locked onto their position and opened fire. The next day, an explosive ordnance disposal team arrived to pick through the wreckage and found unexploded pieces of a missile casing that could only belong to a Stinger missile. Lodged in the right nacelle, they found one fragment that contained an entire serial number. The investigation took time. Arms were twisted, noses put out of joint. But when the results came back, they were stunning: The Stinger tracked back to a lot that had been signed out by the CIA recently, not during the anti-Soviet ­jihad. Reports of the Stinger reached the highest echelons of the US command in Afghanistan and became a source of intense speculation, but no action. Everyone knew the war was winding down. Revealing that the Taliban had US-made Stingers risked demoralizing coalition troops. Because there were no coalition casualties, government officials made no public announcement of the attack. My sources in the US Special Operations community believe the Stinger fired against the Chinook was part of the same lot the CIA turned over to the ­Qataris in early 2011, weapons Hillary Rodham Clinton’s State Department intended for anti-Khadafy forces in Libya. They believe the Qataris delivered between 50 and 60 of those same Stingers to the Taliban in early 2012, and an additional 200 SA-24 Igla-S surface-to-air missiles.  (link)
  • Gary Edwards on 09 Jun 14
     
    The pieces of the puzzle are slowly coming together, and it isn't pretty. This article connects Qatar, Afghanistan and hero of Benghazi, to the fabulous five terrorist dream team Obama let out of the gitmo prison. Incredible story. excerpt: "How Our Stinger Missiles Wound Up In Afghanistan Being Used Against Our Own Troops: On February 15th 2011 a civil war erupted inside Libya.   Egyptian Islamists previously  freed from jail by the Muslim Brotherhood flooded into Eastern Libya and joined with their ideological counterparts.  al-Qaeda operatives hell bent on using the cover of the Arab Spring to finally rid themselves of their nemesis, Muammar Gaddafi. President Obama chose to ignore an outbreak of violence in Libya for 19 days.  Perhaps Obama was tentative from the criticism he and Hillary received over the mixed messaging in Egypt.  Regardless, eventually Obama was begged to engage himself by leaders from France, The United Kingdom, and Italy. The White House advisors (Emanuel, McDonough, Donolin, Jarrett, Axelrod, Plouffe) were more cautious this time.  Initially Obama ignored the EU requests and later chose to dispatch the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, to Europe to address their concerns. "Look, enough with the jokes shorty; you got us into this mess, now the turban heads are laughing at us"… "ah, bot of course, zeah av bullets, no? Vee ave to shoot" For the following 11 days American citizens, including State Dept. embassy officials, were trying to evacuate the country as vast swathes of the country erupted in bloodshed and violence, they became trapped in Tripoli.   A bloody national revolution was underway. The United Nations Security Council held urgent immediate emergency meetings to try to determine what to do.    However, the United States Ambassador to those meetings, Susan Rice, was not present.    She was attending a global warming summit in Africa. Without the U.S. present the United  Natio
Gary Edwards

The Black Banners : Six Questions for Ali Soufan-By Scott Horton (Harper's Magazine) - 0 views

harpers.org/...hbc-90008292

Ali-Soufan FBI 911-Conspiracy-facts

shared by Gary Edwards on 09 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 09 Jan 12
     
    3. The major still-unanswered question from 9/11 may be this: Why did the CIA keep information about Khalid Al-Mihdhar - the 9/11 team member who was identified before the attacks as having a U.S. visa and tracked into the United States - secret from the FBI and other law enforcement agencies? Clearly this information could have been used to stop the 9/11 plot, yet CIA officials lied about it repeatedly, and have never been held to account either for their failure to inform or their lies. Do you have an answer? My hands started shaking. I didn't know what to think. "They just sent these reports," the [CIA chief of station*] said, seeing my reaction. I walked out of the room, sprinted down the corridor to the bathroom, and fell to the floor next to a stall. There I threw up. I sat on the floor for a few minutes, although it felt like hours. What I had just seen went through my mind again and again. The same thought kept looping back: "If they had all this information since January 2000, why the hell didn't they pass it on?" My whole body was shaking… I got myself to the sink, washed out my mouth, and splashed some water on my face. I covered my face with a paper towel for a few moments. I was still trying to process the fact that the information I had requested about major al-Qaeda operatives, information the CIA had claimed they knew nothing about, had been in the agency's hands since January 2000. The SWAT agent asked, "What's wrong, bud? What the hell did he tell you?" "They knew, they knew." -From The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda. (*Redacted in original - text restored by Harper's). Reprinted by permission of W.W. Norton & Co., © 2011 Ali Soufan. Sadly no. To date we've never been told why the information wasn't passed to the team investigating the USS Cole attack, the State Department, or the Immigration and Naturalization Service, nor why he wasn't put on a no-fly list, al
Gary Edwards

Revealed: Obama's Immense Shadow Army & Its Shocking Takeover Plan - 1 views

www.libertynews.com/...rmy-its-shocking-takeover-plan

shared by Gary Edwards on 26 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 26 Oct 13
     
    Is the ObamaCare train wreck a wreck by design? Another notch in the Bankster belt marking another step in the bankrupting of America? Revealed: Obama's Immense Shadow Army & Its Shocking Takeover Plan October 26, 2013  //  By: Eric Odom  //   The ObamaCare train wreck - it's awful, possibly purposeful, certainly useful for team Obama and its growing army of community activists and organizers. In a previous report, we explored the question, "What if the ObamaCare debacle is really a diversion, using a military term a "feint" - a tactical distraction to draw our attention, our focus and our fire away from the real point of attack on liberty?" Remember that horrible train wreck in Spain not long ago, captured on video? As tragic as it was, watching the crash and its gruesome aftermath was almost irresistible, wasn't it? Well, what if the disastrous rollout of the President's signature legislative achievement - what if this spectacular slow motion ObamaCare train wreck has been and is being allowed to happen so that what's going on around the bend from the fiery crash site gets little attention, from the public, from the media or from Congressional investigators? Think about it, friends. How could Barack Obama and his celebrated team of incredibly proficient, plugged in techies - the team that twice got him elected - be behind the utterly disastrous launch of the ObamaCare online storefront, healthcare.gov - arguably the biggest website failure in history? How could so much money have been spent to produce such a problem-plagued site that apparently was doomed in its developmental confusion? And how to fix this monumental mess, well, there doesn't seem to be any clear plan…other than hope. And now we learn that many, if not most, of the people actually signing up for ObamaCare through the website are enrolling in Medicaid, not signing up for private insurance policies they pay for, but adding their names onto government roll
  • Gary Edwards on 26 Oct 13
     
    There is no doubt in my mind that corporations (and their Chamber of Commerce boot licking lackys) believe that employer provided healthcare benefits was a HUGE MISTAKE. The key feature of ObamaCare is that of ENDING the HMO-Employee Healthcare profit draining quagmire these corporations somehow stumbled into. (Hint: they traded healthcare benefits for wide open government assisted Globalization - the new world order Merchantilism). IMHO, the insurance companies know full well that the entire HMO-Employee Healthcare bandwagon is going to end. Not because of socialism; because of profit hungry out of control mercantilism. So they are trying to cut the best deal possible with the government. The merchantilist doesn't care that their employees are going to suffer. They only care that this cost and the blame for losing the benefit is moved from their books to the government. Nor does the merchantilist care about protecting our borders. They want cheap labor. Even if the social cost of that cheap labor lands on the government and destroys the nation. That's why the merchantilist and his Bankster financiers support Open Borders. The merchantilist could care less about the trade deficit and the massive transfer of American manufacturing jobs overseas. As long as they can sell their junk back into the USA market without a 33% import tax these bastardos are happy to destroy their country. I wonder whose army and navy will secure their investments when the USA no longer can? Are their private armies enough? Just wondering.
Paul Merrell

Judicial Watch Played Into The Government's Hands -- Americans Are Blinded By Agendas -... - 0 views

www.paulcraigroberts.org/...ands-americans-blinded-agendas

Roberts 9-11 bin-Laden-assassination

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Disinformation succeeds because so many people and interest groups across the political spectrum find that it serves their agendas as well as the agenda of the government. Consider for example the explanation of 9/11 that blamed Muslim terrorists for the attack. This served the interests of the neoconservatives, the private armaments companies, the US military, the private security companies, government security agencies such as the CIA, the left-wing, the right-wing, the Israel Lobby, and the print and TV media. The official explanation gave the neoconservatives the “new Pearl Harbor” that they needed for their program of invasions of Middle Eastern countries. The private armaments companies could look forward to decades of high profits. Wars always bring the military rapid promotions and higher retirement benefits. Private manufacturers of security equipment and spyware enjoy a rising demand for their products and have grown fat from the products sold to the TSA and NSA. Homeland Security has vastly expanded the federal workforce and administrative positions. The left-wing has proof of “blowback” caused by US interference in the internal affairs of other countries. The right-wing has proof that America has enemies against whom defense at all costs is necessary. The Israel Lobby has the US to overthrow the regimes in the way of Israel’s territorial expansion. The media has the story of the century with which to boost ratings and curry the favor of government.
  • In other words, the government’s story cannot stand the light cast by the facts and independent experts, and the government’s false story must be protected by shutting down the truth-telling experts. The government, Sunstein argued, needs to either gain control over these experts or to shut them down. Just as many different collections of interest groups and people have stakes in the Obama regime’s story of the killing of Osama bin Laden by US Navy SEALS in Abbottabad, Pakistan. This story and its selling by an enthusiastic media guaranteed Obama’s reelection. It served the emotions of super patriots desperate for revenge who wear their gullibility on their sleeves. It served the myth of CIA and NSA prowess. It served the reputation of the killing power of US Special Forces teams. It proved that America won even though it lost the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. All the trillions of dollars spent were worth it. We got revenge on the guy who did 9/11. No one remembered that the US government, unable to find bin Laden for 10 years, had settled on a different “9/11 mastermind,” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and had him water-boarded 183 times until he confessed to being responsible for 9/11. If Khalid Sheikh Mohammed “was responsible for the 9/11 operation from A to Z,” why were SEALS sent, illegally, into Pakistan to murder bin Laden? As the FBI says, there is no evidence that bin Laden is responsible for 9/11. That is why bin Laden was not wanted on that charge by the FBI, as the FBI publicly stated.
  • Judicial Watch has been trying to pry the (nonexistent) photos of a dead bin Laden from the government’s hands. For “national security reasons” the US government does not want anyone to see evidence that supports its far-fetched tale of bin Laden’s murder. The photographic evidence of a successful raid are off limits. They are like the alleged videos of the airliner hitting the Pentagon that we are not permitted to see for “national security reasons.” In other words, the photos and videos do not exist and never did. No government, not even the American one, would be so totally stupid as to withhold the evidence for its claims. The government, seeing its unbelievable stories lose believability at home and abroad used Judicial Watch’s lawsuit to boost the credibility of its story. Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for the photos that the Obama regime alleged to have of the murdered bin Laden but refused to release. Obviously, the government has no such photos and never had any such photos. But the government does not need evidence when it can rely on the gullibility of the American people.
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  • How was bin Laden, who was known in 2001 to be suffering from terminal illnesses, including renal failure, and whose death was widely reported in 2001 still alive ten years later to be murdered by SEALs? What sense does it make that the greatest terrorist leader of our time only had two unarmed women to protect him. What sense does it make that the US would murder the terrorist mastermind with all the plots in his head instead of capturing and questioning him? How can anyone be so gullible as to believe such a nonsense tale as told to them by Obama and the presstitute media? Is America really a nation of utter fools? Like the 9/11 story, the story of bin Laden’s murder is losing credibility with the US population. Pakistani National TV shot Obama’s story down with an eyewitness interview that reported that not one single person, dead body, or any piece of evidence left Abbottadad, because the only helicopter that landed blew up when it attempted to leave and there were no survivors. No other helicopters landed. So there was no dead bin Laden to be buried at sea (there are no known witnesses to the alleged burial) and no photographs of a dead bin Laden.
  • As the government had no photos to release, the US government decided to use the opportunity presented by Judicial Watch to bolster its story that photos of bin Laden murdered and dead were once in its possession. The government released to Judicial Watch a document under the Freedom of Information Act that is an order from Special Operations Commander Admiral William McRaven to “destroy immediately” the photos of the dead bin Laden. Judicial Watch took the bait. Instead of realizing that there was no reason whatsoever for the government to destroy the only evidence that might support its claim to have murdered bin Laden, Judicial Watch focused on the illegality of destroying the evidence. Judicial Watch says that “Federal law contains broad prohibitions against the ‘concealment, removal, or mutilation generally’ of government records.” http://www.globalresearch.ca/top-pentagon-leader-ordered-destruction-of-bin-laden-death-photos/5368389 Judicial Watch played into the government’s hands. Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton was maneuvered by the government into defining the scandal as the destruction of evidence, “revealing both contempt for the rule of law and the American people’s right to know.” To the contrary, the real scandal is the massive lie that bin Laden was killed by a SEAL raid and the acceptance of this lie by the American people and Judicial Watch.
  • By damning the government for destroying evidence, Judicial Watch has given credibility to the government’s claim that SEALs murdered Osama bin Laden. The SEAL team credited with bin Laden’s murder was quickly eliminated when the team was loaded onto a 1960s vintage helicopter in Afghanistan. Apparently the team members were asking one another, “Were you on that mission that killed bin Laden?” Of course, no one was, and this information was too dangerous for the Obama regime.
  • Paul Merrell on 07 Apr 14
     
    Paul Craig Roberts goes on record as a 9-11 Truther and as a deep sceptic of Obama's claim that Seal Team 6 killed Osama bin Laden in 2011. 
Paul Merrell

The Pentagon's slush fund is arming a War Zone on Main Street. Let's end the local-cop ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...rica-militarized-police-forces

police-militarization

shared by Paul Merrell on 01 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • What many other communities across America have learned since is that we're living in what the writer Radley Balko calls the age of the "warrior cop". And when warrior cops want a straight-outta-Baghdad toy, it's increasingly and unnecessarily simple for them to use a federally enabled slush-fund to wreak havoc – particularly against minorities, and even at a pumpkin festival. It's also pretty simple to start accounting for all the high-tech violence."Before another small town's police force gets a $700,000 gift from the Defense Department that it can't maintain or manage," Rep Hank Johnson of Georgia told me this week, "we need to press pause and revisit the merits of a militarized America."
  • The ACLU released a devastating report this week examining more than 800 incidents of Swat team deployments conducted by 20 law enforcement agencies between 2010 and 2013. It's a small sample of the estimated 45,000 deployments that occur in the US each year (up from 1,400% from the '80s), but the report reveals a picture of law enforcement as flash-bang assault unit, with hardly an actual suspect in harm's way: pandemonium in a baby's crib; a grandfather of 12 killed by a discharged gun; Swat officers gunning down a mother as she died, child in her arms. According to the ACLU study, 79% of the incidents surveyed involved a Swat team searching a person's home, and more than 62% of the cases involved searches for drugs. That's not what Swat teams were made for.America is winding down wars abroad – depending on what the hell happens in Iraq, of course – but we are fueling an addiction to armed conflict here at home.As Balko notes in his book, The Rise of the Warrior Cop, "America's cops have increasingly come to resemble ground troops."
  • But the federal government has been enabling even more localized branches of law enforcement to get its hands on heavy-duty artillery for the last 20 years, when the Reagan administration formalized the Pentagon's so-called 1033 Program. It sends "excess" military equipment to local police departments, and combined with the Homeland Security operation that provides grants to purchase such equipment, we've got a veritable firearms sale funnelling from Washington on down to the local station house. And when local law enforcement is making hundreds of thousands of dollars off seized drug money – sometimes illegally – you've got the makings of a War Zone on Main Street.Rep Johnson has plans to introduce a bill that would reform the 1033 Program, which donated at least $500bn per year in military gear to virtually every police department in the country. "We not only lack serious oversight and accountability," Johnson wrote me in an email on Tuesday, "but we need some parameters put in place for what is appropriate." His legislation would put limitations on the transfer of certain kinds of military-grade equipment, and require the Pentagon to account for transfers of all such equipment in an annual report to Congress.
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  • The ACLU also made several recommendations in its report – state laws to restrain Swat teams, plus transparency and strict oversight – that all make sense, as do training sessions for more of our trigger-happy "rescue" officers. But this was perhaps the most endemic part of that report:Overall, 42% of people impacted by a Swat deployment to execute a search warrant were black and 12% were Latino. This means that of the people impacted by deployments for warrants, at least 54% were minorities.Whether this is by accident or design, the racial reality of America's militarized law enforcement offers yet another compelling reason why the dangerous trend of warrior-style policing needs to be re-examined – and then reversed.When the first Swat team was deployed in the late '60s, its target was a single remaining cell of the Black Panthers. Nearly half a century later, all the nation's a theater, and we are merely the pumpkin eaters – with half a million bucks worth of smashing, exploding, high-artillery gear for the taking.
Paul Merrell

Putin signs "undesirable NGOs" Bill into Law | nsnbc international - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...desirable-ngos-bill-into-law-2

war & peace Russia legislation NGOs U.S.-foreign-policy color-revolutions Dark-State

shared by Paul Merrell on 25 May 15 - No Cached
  • Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a bill, enabling the designation of foreign and foreign-funded NGOs as undesirables after the bill passed both the Lower and Upper House of Parliament.
  • The bill authorizes the designation of foreign and foreign funded non-profit as well as for profit NGOs as “undesirables” on grounds of “national security. The bill passed the second reading in Russia’s Lower House of Parliament (State Duma), last week and was approved by the Upper House of Parliament, the Federation Council. The bill had been proposed by legislators of the governing United Russia party of President Vladimir Putin, The passing of the bill in both houses of parliament and the signing of the bill by Putin was no surprise since United Russia has a majority in both chambers. The bill has been heavily criticized by foreign, particularly western media, western politicians and primarily western-based or funded NGOs, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, among many others. One of the NGOs that is certain to fall under the provisions of the bill is USAID.
  • he new law follows up on a law that was adopted in 2012 that obliged foreign-funded non-governmental organizations to register as “foreign agents”. The law provides for declaring foreigners and foreign-funded NGOs as“undesirable”. Persons who are violating the newly adopted law could face a fine up to 10,000 dollar to be paid in local currency and up to six years imprisonment. Supporters of the bill are referring to the risk that foreign-funded NGOs could pose to the Russian Federation’s national security while critics maintain that the wording of the legislation and especially the term “undesirable” is ambiguous and opens the floodgates for the abuse of the law to crack down on legal and legitimate dissent.
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  • While the wording and the use of “undesirable” is ambiguous and does pose legal problems as much as it opens the floodgates for the abuse of the legislation, there may be a good reason for keeping the wording ambiguous. Internationally acting NGOs have increasingly become “weaponized”; That is, that they have increasingly been utilized as tool for everything from supporting legitimate dissent to the organization of political violence and coup d’état. Another disturbing fact is that this pattern includes UN organizations such as the UN Interagency Framework Team for Preventive Action (Framework Team). Examples? Doctors Without Borders (MSF) played a key role in accusing the Syrian government for the use of chemical weapons, stating MSF sources. Later on the NGO had to admit that it had no staff in Damascus and exclusively relied on statements by “partners” in “rebel-held territories”.
  • Amnesty International for its part issued a report about alleged war crimes committed during NATO’s bombing of Libya in 2011. A 2012 report by Amnesty International claimed that Operation Unified Protector, authorized by UNSC Resolution 1973 has resulted in 55 documented cases of named civilian casualties, including 16 children and 14 women that were killed in air strikes in the capital Tripoli and the towns of Zliten, Majer, Sirte, and Brega. The low figure is utterly inconsistent with casualty figures provided by local NGOs as well as documented eyewitness reports. Two things are worth considering with regard to the Amnesty report. During the first night of the operation NATO forces launched over 100 cruise missiles into Tripoli alone.
  • The Director of Amnesty International at that time was Suzanne Nozzel, who also worked as adviser on U.S. government – NGO relations for the then U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
  • While Human Right Watch does, indeed, engage in justified human rights advocacy, it has also been engaged in issuing strongly biased reports, in politicizing that “representatives are denied entry to e.g. Egypt”, while failing to mention that proper visa procedures had not been followed, and so forth. The most disturbing NGO may, however, be the UN Interagency Framework Team for Preventive Action. The Framework Team is largely privately funded with George Soros as one of the primary sponsors. The NGO under UN cover is “coordinating UN, governmental and non-governmental initiatives”.
  • The UN organization could undoubtedly be useful but it has also been sharply criticized for “fanning the flames” of the inter-communal violence in Myanmar’s Rakhine State, and for its active role in creating rather than preventing ethnic and sectarian disputes and violence in Nepal. In both the case of Myanmar and in the case of Nepal it is easy to establish ties between the Framework Team and Western or Western allied intelligence services. Criticism of the ambiguous wording of the new Russian legislation is, in other words, as justified as criticism of NGOs who prostitute themselves and the best intentions of the members at their base as pawns in geopolitical chess-games.
  • Paul Merrell on 25 May 15
     
    More than understandable given the long history of the U.S. weaponizing NGOs in aid of its "color revolutions" strategy to overthrow governments in secular states and left-leaning democracies. The most recent examples are the successful U.S. coup in Ukraine and the thrice-failed coup attempts in Venezuela.  U.S. NGOs have been attempting to provoke such a coup in Russia for some time but have failed thus far because of Putin's immense popularity and a perhaps better-informed Russian public. The Russian people know they are under attack and have wisely closed ranks rather than falling for a divide-and-conquer strategy. Venezuela recently enacted similar legislation.  
Paul Merrell

Secret Manuals Show the Spyware Sold to Despots and Cops Worldwide - The Intercept - 0 views

firstlook.org/...hacking-team

surveillance state Hacking-Team Remote-Control-System FinFisher

shared by Paul Merrell on 31 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • When Apple and Google unveiled new encryption schemes last month, law enforcement officials complained that they wouldn’t be able to unlock evidence on criminals’ digital devices. What they didn’t say is that there are already methods to bypass encryption, thanks to off-the-shelf digital implants readily available to the smallest national agencies and the largest city police forces — easy-to-use software that takes over and monitors digital devices in real time, according to documents obtained by The Intercept. We’re publishing in full, for the first time, manuals explaining the prominent commercial implant software “Remote Control System,” manufactured by the Italian company Hacking Team. Despite FBI director James Comey’s dire warnings about the impact of widespread data scrambling — “criminals and terrorists would like nothing more,” he declared — Hacking Team explicitly promises on its website that its software can “defeat encryption.”
  • The manuals describe Hacking Team’s software for government technicians and analysts, showing how it can activate cameras, exfiltrate emails, record Skype calls, log typing, and collect passwords on targeted devices. They also catalog a range of pre-bottled techniques for infecting those devices using wifi networks, USB sticks, streaming video, and email attachments to deliver viral installers. With a few clicks of a mouse, even a lightly trained technician can build a software agent that can infect and monitor a device, then upload captured data at unobtrusive times using a stealthy network of proxy servers, all without leaving a trace. That, at least, is what Hacking Team’s manuals claim as the company tries to distinguish its offerings in the global marketplace for government hacking software. Hacking Team’s efforts include a visible push into the U.S. Though Remote Control System is sold around the world — suspected clients include small governments in dozens of countries, from Ethiopia to Kazakhstan to Saudi Arabia to Mexico to Oman — the company keeps one of its three listed worldwide offices in Annapolis, Maryland, on the edge of the federal intelligence and law-enforcement cluster around the nation’s capital; has sent representatives to American homeland security trade shows and conferences, where it has led training seminars like “Cyber Intelligence Solutions to Data Encryption” for police; and has even taken an investment from a firm headed by America’s former ambassador to Italy. The United States is also, according to two separate research teams, far and away Hacking Team’s top nexus for servers, hosting upwards of 100 such systems, roughly a fifth of all its servers globally.
Gary Edwards

Tomgram: William Astore, Groundhog Day in the War on Terror | TomDispatch - 0 views

www.tomdispatch.com/...ndhog_day_in_the_war_on_terror

Banksters Military-Industrial-Security-And-War-Complex

shared by Gary Edwards on 02 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 02 Feb 15
     
    "It was August 2, 1990, and Saddam Hussein, formerly Washington's man in Baghdad and its ally against fundamentalist Iran, had just sent his troops across the border into oil-rich Kuwait.  It would prove a turning point in American Middle East policy. Six days later, a brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division was dispatched to Saudi Arabia as the vanguard of what the U.S. Army termed "the largest deployment of American troops since Vietnam." The rest of the division would soon follow as part of Operation Desert Storm, which was supposed to drive Saddam's troops from Kuwait and fell the Iraqi autocrat.  The division's battle cry: "The road home... is through Baghdad!" In fact, while paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne penetrated deep into Iraq in the 100-day campaign that followed, no American soldier would make it to the Iraqi capital -- not that time around, anyway.  After the quick triumph of the Gulf War, the Airborne's paratroops instead returned to Ft. Bragg, North Carolina.  And that, it seemed, was the end of the matter, victory parades and all.  Naturally, the soldiers using that battle cry did not have the advantage of history.  They had no way of knowing that it would have been more accurate to chant something like: "The road home always leads back to Baghdad!"  After all, when the First Gulf War ended in the crushing defeat of Saddam's forces and he nonetheless remained in power, the stage was set for the invasion that began Iraq War 2.0 a dozen years later.  Perhaps you still remember that particular "mission accomplished" moment. In the course of that invasion, the 82nd Airborne would conduct "sustained combat operations throughout Iraq."  Once the occupation of the country began, paratroopers from the division would return to Iraq in August 2003 to, as an Army website puts it, "continue command and control over combat operations in and around Baghdad."  In other words, they were tasked with repressing the insurgen
Paul Merrell

American Greed: Trump's Economic Team Is A Who's Who Of What's Wrong - 0 views

www.mintpressnews.com/...219341

Auction 2016 Trump economic-team

shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • Hedge funds are represented. So is fracking. And tobacco. And guns. And banking. And steel. And there’s the guy who mismanaged Chrysler before it was rescued by a government intervention.
  • Paul Merrell on 12 Aug 16
     
    A who's who piece on the Trump economic team. Mad Max: Fury Road as a presidential platform?
Paul Merrell

Sarin used in two Syria chemical attacks point to military stockpiles - UN - RT News - 0 views

rt.com/...-syria-military-stockpiles-038

war & peace Syria WMD sarin whodunnit

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Two incidents where chemical weapons were used in Syria last year appear to have come from Syrian army stockpiles, United Nations investigators said on Wednesday in a new report that goes beyond previous conclusions. The team of experts led by Paulo Pinheiro concluded that sarin – a deadly nerve agent – was used in total in three incidents: in the Damascus suburb of Al-Ghouta on August 21, in Khan al-Assal near Aleppo on March 19, and in Saraqeb near the northern town of Idlib in April 2013, Reuters reported. "The evidence available concerning the nature, quality and quantity of the agents used on 21 August indicated that the perpetrators likely had access to the chemical weapons stockpile of the Syrian military, as well as the expertise and equipment necessary to manipulate safely large amount of chemical agents," the UN investigators said in the report. They also concluded that the attack in Khan al-Assal in March used the same chemical agents and bore exactly the same hallmarks as the Al-Ghouta attack in August.
  • But Pinheiro’s report did not give any reliable casualty figures from the attacks and was only able to determine “that at least several hundred people were affected.” Ake Sellstrom, who was in charge of the inspection team that was on the ground in Syria, concluded in an earlier report in December that while chemical weapons had most likely been used in five out of seven alleged attacks, the team did not assign any blame. Both the Syrian government and the opposition have blamed each other for the attacks, which they have also both denied. The Al-Ghouta attack was the world’s deadliest in 25 years and provoked threats of retaliatory military attacks by the US. Under a diplomatic initiative suggested and largely brokered by the Russians, Syrian President Bashar Assad agreed to help the international community to destroy his chemical weapons arsenal. On Tuesday, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) – the global chemical weapons watchdog – said that Syria has so far managed to ship out about one-third of its stockpile, including mustard gas, for destruction abroad or on vessels in international waters.
  • The Pinheiro team has been investigating up to 20 incidents where chemical weapons have allegedly been used. He said they were building on Sellstrom’s findings while also trying to dig deeper. Pinheiro told a news conference on Thursday that his team had interviewed a wide group of people, including doctors, victims, defectors, and journalists. “We made other investigations [to Sellstrom] in terms of interviews of experts, interviews with functionaries involved. We conducted our own investigation including specialized expertise and of course we have been in close contact with the members of this Sellstrom mission,” he said. Selltsrom’s December report visited only seven sites and cited poor security conditions as the primary reason.
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