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Paul Merrell

US Terminates Contracts with Private Prison Industry, Stocks Slump - nsnbc internationa... - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...e-prison-industry-stocks-slump

corporatism privatization private-prisons DoJ Bureau-of-Prisons

shared by Paul Merrell on 19 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • The United States’ Department of Justice, on Thursday, announced that it will cut back and ultimately terminate contracts with private prison companies. The announcement caused stock prices  of corporations involved in America’s prison-industrial complex to slump.
  • Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates noted that private prisons don’t provide the same level of correctional services, programs and resources and don’t save substantially on costs. Yates posted a blog, citing that the dwindling federal prison population as one of the drivers of the shift in policy. She added that the population in bureau or private facilities had gone down from about 220,000 in 2013 to 195,000 inmates. The DoD’s announcement about the beginning of the end of the U.S. prison-industrial complex had an immediate impact on the industry leaders’ stocks. At 2:05 p.m. in New York City, Corrections Corporation slumped 37 percent to $17.06 after it earlier plummeted 52 percent. The real estate investment trust’s biggest intraday loss in nearly 16 years. The GEO Group slumped 38 percent to $20.14, after earlier falling 50 percent, its largest drop since the stock began trading in 1994. Corrections Corp.’s report noted 24 government contracts were set to expire in December of this year, as were 10 more that were not eligible for renewal. The contracts were worth $594 million in revenue for the single corporation — 33% of the company’s total revenue. GEO Group currently receives 45% of its total revenue from government agencies.
  • A substantial rise in incarceration rates, and a boom for the prison-industrial complex came as a result of the failed war on drugs. The prison population grew with a whopping 800 percent between 1980 and 2003. It is noteworthy that privately run prisons have not only shown to be substandard, they have also gained notoriety for abuse of prisoners and rights violations. However, Yates noted that prison populations often grew at a far faster rate than the Bureau of Prisons could accommodate in their own facilities. She claimed that the bureau began contracting with privately operated correctional institutions to confine some federal inmates.  By 2013, as both the federal prison population and the proportion of federal prisoners in private facilities reached their peak, the bureau was housing approximately 15 percent of its population, or nearly 30,000 inmates, in privately operated prisons.
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  • Yates added that the memo (published here), reflects important steps that the bureau has already taken to reduce its reliance on private prisons, including a decision three weeks ago, to end private prison contracts for approximately 1,200 beds. Taken together, these steps will reduce the private prison population by more than half from its peak in 2013 and puts the Department of Justice on a path to ensure that all federal inmates are ultimately housed at bureau facilities, she added. Even if this reduction manifests, the USA would still be one of the countries with the highest incarceration rates, globally.
Paul Merrell

Mexican Government to Launch Anti-Trump Strategy | News | teleSUR English - 0 views

www.telesurtv.net/...mp-Strategy-20170127-0009.html

Trump wall Mexico trade-war

shared by Paul Merrell on 31 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • Representatives from the three branches of the Mexican government meet today at the presidential residence of Los Pinos in Mexico City to coordinate a joint plan of action in response to attacks by U.S. President Donald Trump against Mexico. 
  • According to official sources, some businessmen will also attend Friday’s meeting and the president will hold a separate gathering with the governors of Mexico’s 32 states.  The emergency meeting was called by President Enrique Peña Nieto following the cancellation of a planned visit to Washington in which he was going to meet with Trump to discuss bilateral issues of importance to the neighboring countries. 
  • On Thursday, Trump warned Peña Nieto that if he was unwilling to pay for his key election campaign pledge of building a barrier along the U.S. southern border, it was better to cancel the visit. Trump also threatened to impose a 20 percent tax on Mexican imports to force the government to pay for his 2,000-mile planned border wall. 
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  • Meanwhile, social organizations, Indigenous groups, media companies and even the Catholic Church have called on Mexicans to stay united in the face of attacks from the most hostile and aggressive U.S. administration in recent history.  Even Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray, who supposedly was a close friend to Trump's son-in-law and senior advisor Jared Kushner, rejected the actions against Mexico and said such a tax would make Mexican imports more expensive for U.S. consumers, meaning they would end up paying for the wall.
Paul Merrell

New Law Introduced Into California Legislature Would Punish Companies That Boycott Israel - 0 views

www.mintpressnews.com/...212590

war & peace anti-BDS California legislation

shared by Paul Merrell on 01 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • A Republican California assemblyman introduced a bill into the state legislature on Monday that would forbid the state – whose campuses have been a focal point of BDS activity – from doing business with companies boycotting, sanctioning or divesting from Israel. Travis Allen, of Huntington Beach in southern California’s Orange County, introduced the bill – called the California- Israel Protection Act – to “require the State of California to divest from companies that boycott Israel.”
  • Any company that is intentionally inflicting economic harm upon California’s trading partners weaken our ability to conduct business and harm the vital economic interests of our state. Further, boycotts of countries often derive from ethnic, religious, racial, or nationality discrimination, which directly contradicts the values of California citizens.” The bill would also penalize companies boycotting products made in the settlements, east Jerusalem or the Golan Heights, since it would prohibit California from investing in any company that is “engaging in actions that are politically motivated and are intended to penalize, inflict economic harm on, or otherwise limit commercial relations with the State of Israel or companies based in the State of Israel or in territories controlled by the State of Israel.”
  • Paul Merrell on 01 Jun 16
     
    Dear Mr. Allen:  We have this thing called the First Amendment. It protects, among other things, the right of speech including to boycott. Government actions that punish speech are unconstitutional. Get it?
Paul Merrell

The Fed caused 93% of the entire stock market's move since 2008: Analysis - Yahoo Finance - 0 views

finance.yahoo.com/...-2008--analysis-194426366.html

banksters Federal-Reserve-Bankster-Cartel stock-market-manipulation

shared by Paul Merrell on 17 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • The bull market just celebrated its seventh anniversary. But the gains in recent years – as well as its recent sputter – may be explained by just one thing: monetary policy. The factors behind that and previous bubbles can be illuminated using simple visual analysis of a chart. The S&P 500 (^GSPC) doubled in value from November 2008 to October 2014, coinciding with the Federal Reserve Bank’s “quantitative easing” asset purchasing program. After three rounds of “QE,” where the Fed poured billions of dollars into the bond market monthly, the Fed’s balance sheet went from $2.1 trillion to $4.5 trillion. This isn’t just a spurious correlation, according to economist Brian Barnier, principal at ValueBridge Advisors and founder of FedDashboard.com. What’s more, he says previous bull runs in the market lasting several years can also be explained by single factors each time.
  • Barnier first compiled data on the total value of publicly-traded U.S. stocks since 1950. He then divided it by another economic factor, graphing the ratio for each one. If the chart showed horizontal lines stretching over long periods of time, that meant both the numerator (stock values) and the denominator (the other factor) were moving at the same rate. “That's the beauty of the visual analysis,” he said. “All we have to do is find straight, stable lines and we know we've got something good.”
  • Scouring hundreds of different factors, Barnier ultimately whittled it down to just four factors: GDP data five years into the future, household and nonprofit liabilities, open market paper, and the Fed’s assets. At different stretches of time, just one of those was the single biggest driver of the market and was confirmed with regression analyses.
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  • He isolated each factor in a separate chart, calling them “eras” for the stock market. From after World War II until the mid-1970s, future GDP outlook explained 90% of the stock market’s move, according to statistical analysis by Barnier. GDP growth lost its sway on the market in the early 1970s with the rise of credit cards and consumer debt. Household liabilities grew with plastic first, followed by home mortgages, until the real estate crash of the early 1990s. Barnier’s analysis shows debt explained 95% of the entire market’s move during this time. The period between the mid- to late-1990s until 2000 was, of course, marked by the tech bubble. While stocks took much of the headline, that time also saw heightened activity in the commercial paper market. Startups and young companies sought cash beyond their stratospheric share values to fund their operations. Barnier’s regression analysis shows commercial paper increases could explain as much as 97% of the tech bubble. Shortly after the tech bubble burst, a housing bubble began, once more in the form of mortgages and other debt. That drove 94% of the market’s move for the first several years of the current century.
  • As the financial crisis reached a fevered pitch in 2008, the Federal Reserve took to flooding the financial market with dollars by buying up bonds. Simultaneously, interest rates fell dramatically, as bond yields move in the opposite direction of bond prices. Barnier sees the Fed as responsible for over 93% of the market from the start of QE until today. During the first half of 2013, the Fed caused the entire market’s growth, he said. Since the Fed stopped buying bonds in late 2014, the S&P 500 has been batted around in a 16% range and is more or less where it was when the QE came to a close. Investors need to anticipate the next driver, said Barnier. “Quantitative easing has stopped, but now we're into the interest rate world,” he said. “That means for any investor trying to figure out what to do, step one is starting with a macro strategy.”
Paul Merrell

Say Hello to China's ICBMs - 0 views

sputniknews.com/...bm-df-41-heilongjiang-province

China ICBMs U.S.-foreign-policy

shared by Paul Merrell on 31 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • China's alleged deployment of a DF-41 strategic ballistic missile brigade to Heilongjiang province, bordering Russia, triggered a fascinating spectacle; how to spin – or not to spin - what necessarily represents a milestone in Russia-China's strategic partnership.The Global Times stressed Hong Kong and Taiwan media interpreted pictures of the DF-41 were taken in Heilongjiang, admitting there was no official confirmation from Beijing while hoping the "strategic edge" would soon be confirmed.
  • Russian media was way more explicit, with military analyst Konstantin Sivkov stressing that the DF-41, as positioned, would not be able to target Russia's Far East and most of Eastern Siberia; and Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov noting that "if the reports prove correct, the military build-up in China is not perceived as a threat to our country."
  • The timing of the alleged deployment, with Team Trump doubling down on anti-Chinese rhetoric on their war of positioning geared to extract further trade concessions, may indeed betray a very graphic Beijing message.
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  • The DF-41, a three-stage solid-propellant missile, with a range of up to 15,000 km and capable of delivering up to 10 MIRVed nuclear warheads, is one of the most sophisticated – and secret — ICBMS on earth. Virtually everything about it is classified. Positioning in Heilongjiang, near the city of Daqing, close to the Russian border, implies a huge "dead zone" around it. So call it a mix of nuclear deterrence and a "message" to the ultimate target — the West Coast of the United States. This propels the matter to an even more serious sphere than a possible upcoming crisis in the South China Sea, where the Pentagon, under the pretext of "freedom of navigation", is obsessed in maintaining "access", Trump or no Trump. If there ever were an attempted American blockade in the South China Sea, it would be easy to take out the Chinese-developed islands/islets/rocks/shoals. But far from easy to grapple with the Chinese response; submarines with "carrier killer" missiles able to take out anything the US Navy may come up with.
  • It's virtually guaranteed that an official Chinese confirmation of the DF-41 deployment will accelerate a nuclear arms race, involving all players from Russia, China and the US to India and Pakistan and even North Korea.
  • But more than this, it will be yet another lethal blow to the Beltway's master strategy – first deployed by Dr. Zbig "Grand Chessboard" Brzezinski – of trying to prevent the emergence of any peer competitor, or worse, an alliance of peer competitors such as Russia-China. Just at the start of the Trump era, the new reality could not be more striking. Not long ago, it was "say hello to Russia-China". Now it's "say hello to China's ICBMs."
Joe La Fleur

Disgraceful: Obama adds socialist Buffett rule to Reagan's White House bio pa... - 1 views

www.therightscoop.com/o-reagans-white-house-bio-page

obama adds socialist buffett rule reagan white house bio page

shared by Joe La Fleur on 16 May 12 - No Cached
  • Paul Merrell on 16 May 12
     
    Reagan's exact words in pushing his "tax fairness" plan in that speech: "Just a few moments ago, I told some people inside the building here of a letter that I just received the day before yesterday. It's a letter from a man out here in the country, an executive who's earning in six figures -- well above $100,000 a year. He wrote me in support of the tax plan because he said, 'I am legally able to take advantage of the present tax code -- nothing dishonest, doing what the law prescribes -- and wind up paying a smaller salary than my secretary gets -- or I mean, paying a smaller -- I'm sorry, *paying a smaller tax than my secretary pays.'* And he wrote me the letter to tell me he'd like to come to Washington and testify before Congress as to how that's possible for him to do and why it is wrong. So, this is the kind of spirit that is going on throughout the country." http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1985/62885b.htm Read the whole speech. Reagan was pushing the Buffet rule long before Buffet did. What's said on Reagan's bio page is accurate. And Reagan signed the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982, the largest peacetime tax increase in U.S. history. Reagan was no saint, just another big-spending politician willing to bend with the political winds. He did far more talking about supply-side economics than he did even attempting to implement the concept. Just more politician hot air. I'm going to vote for Ron Paul even if I have to write in his name on the ballot. I don't truck with the anti-Obama propaganda. That's just playing into Romney's hands. But Romney is just the flip side of the same coin Obama's on, two corporatist- bankster sycophants eager to run this nation into the ground to keep waging expensive foreign wars for the military-industrial types. Trading Obama for Romney leaves us neither better nor worse off. Two peas in the same pod. Better to send a message than to become a co-conspirator by voting for either Obama or Rom
Paul Merrell

Tomgram: Nick Turse, Special Ops Goes Global | TomDispatch - 0 views

www.tomdispatch.com/...rse%2C_special_ops_goes_global

war & peace empire SOCOM Special-Forces U.S.

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • I started with a blank map that quickly turned into a global pincushion.  It didn’t take long before every continent but Antarctica was bristling with markers indicating special operations forces’ missions, deployments, and interactions with foreign military forces in 2012-2013.  With that, the true size and scope of the U.S. military’s secret military began to come into focus.  It was, to say the least, vast. A review of open source information reveals that in 2012 and 2013, U.S. Special Operations forces (SOF) were likely deployed to -- or training, advising, or operating with the personnel of -- more than 100 foreign countries.   And that’s probably an undercount.  In 2011, then-SOCOM spokesman Colonel Tim Nye told TomDispatch that Special Operations personnel were annually sent to 120 countries around the world. They were in, that is, about 60% of the nations on the planet.  “We’re deployed in a number of locations,” was as specific as Bockholt would ever get when I talked to him in the waning days of 2013. And when SOCOM did finally get back to me with an eleventh hour answer, the number offered made almost no sense. 
  • Despite the lack of official cooperation, an analysis by TomDispatch reveals SOCOM to be a command on the make with an already sprawling reach. As Special Operations Command chief Admiral William McRaven put it in SOCOM 2020, his blueprint for the future, it has ambitious aspirations to create “a Global SOF network of like-minded interagency allies and partners.”  In other words, in that future now only six years off, it wants to be everywhere. 
  • Born of a failed 1980 raid to rescue American hostages in Iran (in which eight U.S. service members died), U.S. Special Operations Command was established in 1987.  Made up of units from all the service branches, SOCOM is tasked with carrying out Washington’s most specialized and secret missions, including assassinations, counterterrorist raids, special reconnaissance, unconventional warfare, psychological operations, foreign troop training, and weapons of mass destruction counter-proliferation operations.
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  • In the post-9/11 era, the command has grown steadily.  With about 33,000 personnel in 2001, it is reportedly on track to reach 72,000 in 2014.  (About half this number are called, in the jargon of the trade, “badged operators” -- SEALs, Rangers, Special Operations Aviators, Green Berets -- while the rest are support personnel.)  Funding for the command has also jumped exponentially as SOCOM’s baseline budget tripled from $2.3 billion to $6.9 billion between 2001 and 2013.  If you add in supplemental funding, it had actually more than quadrupled to $10.4 billion.  Not surprisingly, personnel deployments abroad skyrocketed from 4,900 “man-years” -- as the command puts it -- in 2001 to 11,500 in 2013.  About 11,000 special operators are now working abroad at any one time and on any given day they are in 70 to 80 countries, though the New York Times reported that, according to statistics provided to them by SOCOM, during one week in March 2013 that number reached 92. 
  • Paul Merrell on 07 Jan 14
     
    Nick Turse strikes again. To my knowledge he is the only journalist tracking the aftermath of Obama's decision to deploy U.S. special operations forces globally.
Paul Merrell

N.S.A. Able to Foil Basic Safeguards of Privacy on Web - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...-much-internet-encryption.html

surveillance state NSA GCHQ NSA-capabilities

shared by Paul Merrell on 06 Sep 13 - No Cached
Gary Edwards liked it
  • The National Security Agency is winning its long-running secret war on encryption, using supercomputers, technical trickery, court orders and behind-the-scenes persuasion to undermine the major tools protecting the privacy of everyday communications in the Internet age, according to newly disclosed documents.
  • The agency has circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling, that guards global commerce and banking systems, protects sensitive data like trade secrets and medical records, and automatically secures the e-mails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others around the world, the documents show.
  • The N.S.A. hacked into target computers to snare messages before they were encrypted. In some cases, companies say they were coerced by the government into handing over their master encryption keys or building in a back door. And the agency used its influence as the world’s most experienced code maker to covertly introduce weaknesses into the encryption standards followed by hardware and software developers around the world.
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  • “For the past decade, N.S.A. has led an aggressive, multipronged effort to break widely used Internet encryption technologies,” said a 2010 memo describing a briefing about N.S.A. accomplishments for employees of its British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. “Cryptanalytic capabilities are now coming online. Vast amounts of encrypted Internet data which have up till now been discarded are now exploitable.”
  • Some of the agency’s most intensive efforts have focused on the encryption in universal use in the United States, including Secure Sockets Layer, or SSL; virtual private networks, or VPNs; and the protection used on fourth-generation, or 4G, smartphones. Many Americans, often without realizing it, rely on such protection every time they send an e-mail, buy something online, consult with colleagues via their company’s computer network, or use a phone or a tablet on a 4G network.
  • For at least three years, one document says, GCHQ, almost certainly in collaboration with the N.S.A., has been looking for ways into protected traffic of popular Internet companies: Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Microsoft’s Hotmail. By 2012, GCHQ had developed “new access opportunities” into Google’s systems, according to the document. (Google denied giving any government access and said it had no evidence its systems had been breached).
  • Paul Kocher, a leading cryptographer who helped design the SSL protocol, recalled how the N.S.A. lost the heated national debate in the 1990s about inserting into all encryption a government back door called the Clipper Chip. “And they went and did it anyway, without telling anyone,” Mr. Kocher said. He said he understood the agency’s mission but was concerned about the danger of allowing it unbridled access to private information.
  • The documents are among more than 50,000 shared by The Guardian with The New York Times and ProPublica, the nonprofit news organization. They focus on GCHQ but include thousands from or about the N.S.A. Intelligence officials asked The Times and ProPublica not to publish this article, saying it might prompt foreign targets to switch to new forms of encryption or communications that would be harder to collect or read. The news organizations removed some specific facts but decided to publish the article because of the value of a public debate about government actions that weaken the most powerful privacy tools.
  • The files show that the agency is still stymied by some encryption, as Mr. Snowden suggested in a question-and-answer session on The Guardian’s Web site in June. “Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on,” he said, though cautioning that the N.S.A. often bypasses the encryption altogether by targeting the computers at one end or the other and grabbing text before it is encrypted or after it is decrypted.
  • Because strong encryption can be so effective, classified N.S.A. documents make clear, the agency’s success depends on working with Internet companies — by getting their voluntary collaboration, forcing their cooperation with court orders or surreptitiously stealing their encryption keys or altering their software or hardware.
  • At Microsoft, as The Guardian has reported, the N.S.A. worked with company officials to get pre-encryption access to Microsoft’s most popular services, including Outlook e-mail, Skype Internet phone calls and chats, and SkyDrive, the company’s cloud storage service.
  • Simultaneously, the N.S.A. has been deliberately weakening the international encryption standards adopted by developers. One goal in the agency’s 2013 budget request was to “influence policies, standards and specifications for commercial public key technologies,” the most common encryption method. Cryptographers have long suspected that the agency planted vulnerabilities in a standard adopted in 2006 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and later by the International Organization for Standardization, which has 163 countries as members. Classified N.S.A. memos appear to confirm that the fatal weakness, discovered by two Microsoft cryptographers in 2007, was engineered by the agency. The N.S.A. wrote the standard and aggressively pushed it on the international group, privately calling the effort “a challenge in finesse.” “Eventually, N.S.A. became the sole editor,” the memo says.
  • But the agencies’ goal was to move away from decrypting targets’ tools one by one and instead decode, in real time, all of the information flying over the world’s fiber optic cables and through its Internet hubs, only afterward searching the decrypted material for valuable intelligence. A 2010 document calls for “a new approach for opportunistic decryption, rather than targeted.” By that year, a Bullrun briefing document claims that the agency had developed “groundbreaking capabilities” against encrypted Web chats and phone calls. Its successes against Secure Sockets Layer and virtual private networks were gaining momentum.
  • Ladar Levison, the founder of Lavabit, wrote a public letter to his disappointed customers, offering an ominous warning. “Without Congressional action or a strong judicial precedent,” he wrote, “I would strongly recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States.”
  • Paul Merrell on 06 Sep 13
     
    Lengthy article, lots of new information on NSA decryption capabilities, none of it good for those who value their data privacy.
  • Gary Edwards on 06 Sep 13
     
    Thanks Paul - nice job cutting this monster down to size :)
Paul Merrell

National Defense Authorization Act of 2014 Authorizes Cyber Warfare Against American Ci... - 0 views

www.blacklistednews.com/...M.html

war & peace cyberwar U.S. legislation

shared by Paul Merrell on 15 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • In the midst of the holiday season Congress decided to pass the National Defense Authorization Act of 2014 or NDAA.  The bill was later signed into law by President Obama with little if any fanfare.
  •  The NDAA contains a number of highly questionable sections that run contrary to the principles articulated in the United States Constitution.  Specifically, language contained in the bill appears to authorize cyber warfare operations against the American people.
  • All of this is even more concerning when one considers that the NDAA also has a lot of new cyber warfare initiatives.  Section 931 through Section 942 contains a bunch of crazy stuff dealing with the world of cyber warfare..Section 932 authorizes the creation of a position known as The Principal Cyber Advisor which will be responsible for supervising offensive and defensive cyber warfare activities.  Obviously this position would not be created unless the federal government is intending upon involving itself in both offensive and defensive cyber warfare well into the future.  Section 933 instructs the Secretary of Defense to conduct a broad mission analysis of the government’s cyber warfare capabilities.  The required analysis will focus primarily on how they will manage, increase and enhance their personnel assigned to cyber warfare operations.  It even disallows the reduction of cyber warfare personnel assigned to the Air National Guard.
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  • Section 936 requests the Secretary of Defense to strengthen outreach and threat awareness programs for small businesses.  This is allegedly to assist businesses that are awarded contracts by the Department of Defense to understand cyber threats, develop plans to protect intellectual property and networks of such businesses.  Realistically, this section appears to give the Department of Defense the authority to mandate all sorts of cyber security requirements on small businesses that they do transactions with.  The language of the section makes it sound as if they will be doing these small businesses a favor when the opposite appears to be the case.Section 940 authorizes the President to establish a process and policy to control the proliferation of cyber weapons through law enforcement activities, financial means, diplomatic engagement and pretty much any other means that the President considers appropriate.  This would also include potential private industry participation in the initiative.  The objective of the process is to suppress the trade of so-called cyber tools that could be used for criminal, terrorist or military activities.  The term cyber weapon is not explicitly defined in the section so this could be considered almost anything be it software or hardware that they declare could potentially be used for a nefarious purpose.  Even something like bit torrent and torrent related applications could be considered cyber weapons since copyrighted material is consistently transferred back and forth using these tools.  As a result, the use of these tools could potentially fall under the classification of criminal activity.  Once again we have the President being given expansive powers from Congress with its extremely broad use of language in the bill. 
  • Section 941 directs the president to establish an interagency policy to deter adversaries in cyberspace.  The word adversaries is yet again not specifically defined in the section so this could also mean almost anything.  With many American citizens not trusting the United States government this could mean a policy to deter or stifle anyone from political opponents to protesters who voice their disgust on the Internet.Overall, between the records collection initiative and the immense cyber warfare planning that is outlined in the NDAA it is becoming painfully clear that the United States government is turning the Internet into a battlefield.
Paul Merrell

Leaked conversation about Ukraine fans U.S.-Russian tensions - The Globe and Mail - 0 views

www.theglobeandmail.com/...article16724431

war & peace Ukraine U.S. EU Russia pipelinestan

shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Ukraine’s protest standoff came dangerously close to becoming a direct confrontation between Russia and the United States on Thursday as shockingly unguarded words from Washington and Moscow officials reached public ears, either voluntarily or otherwise.A recording of a phone conversation between two senior U.S. diplomatic officials, in which they discussed their efforts to influence the membership of the Ukrainian government that would be formed to replace the one dismissed under protester pressure by President Viktor Yanukovych, was leaked to the public – almost certainly by an intelligence agency – just as one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s top aides issued a direct threat to the United States over its involvement in Ukrainian affairs.
  • Mr. Yanukovych’s explicitly pro-Russian government has long been accused of being a puppet of Mr. Putin – especially after it abandoned a European Union open-borders treaty in November to instead endorse a trade-and-aid deal with Russia, a move that angered many Ukrainians and provoked the protests that have convulsed the nation for two months.But now, with the leak of the apparently bugged State Department call, the Kremlin and Mr. Yanukovych have new ammunition with which it can accuse the protesters of being puppets of U.S. and European agendas.
  • The call, if it is genuine, was posted on YouTube by an anonymous source on Tuesday under the headline “puppets of Maidan,” a reference to the protests in Kiev’s central square. It was then linked on Twitter by Russian government officials on Thursday – exactly as U.S. and European Union officials were descending on Kiev to try to broker a resignation, a new election and a constitutional change from Mr. Yanukovych.The voices the audio resemble those of Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. They appear to be talking about their preference of political party leaders to form a new Ukrainian government, and about their efforts, including several phone calls to Mr. Yanukovych by Vice President Joe Biden, to influence that outcome. The EU was prepared to begin negotiating government-opposition talks toward a new government on Friday.Much of the call is devoted to efforts to keep Ukrainian liberal parties in government, and to prevent right-wing ultranationalist parties, which have been prominent in the protest movement, from gaining influence.
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  • “I’m just thinking in terms of sort of the process moving ahead, we want to keep the moderate democrats together,” Mr. Pyatt says at one point. Ms. Nulund explicitly endorses moderate opposition party leader Arseniy Yatseniuk and argues that “what he needs” is fellow opposition leaders Vitali Klitschko, a former boxer with a populist style, and Oleh Tiahnybok, a far-right leader whose party is known for intolerance.“I think Yats [Yatseniuk] is the guy who’s got the economic experience, the governing experience … what he needs is Klitsch and Tiahnybok on the outside,” she adds. Mr. Pyatt says: “Let me work on Klitschko, and I think we get a Western personality to come out here and midwife this thing.”And then Ms. Nuland says, a propos of nothing: “And you know, fuck the EU.” This was an apparent reference to the EU’s hesitancy to threaten to impose sanctions on the Yanukovych government, something the U.S. – and Canada – have done. On Thursday, the European Parliament voted to impose limited sanctions, including the stripping of visas, on Ukrainian officials directly responsible for violence.
  • Sergei Glazyev, a top adviser to the Russian president, said that U.S. “interference” contravened a 1994 treaty that granted Ukraine its independence from the Soviet Union and guaranteed that outside nations would not intervene. Russian leaders, he told the paper, “are obliged to intervene when conflict situations of this nature arise.”Asked if violence should be used to remove the protesters, Mr. Glazyev said: “As for starting to use force, in a situation where the authorities face an attempted coup d’état, they simply have no other course of action. Otherwise, the country will be plunged into chaos.”
Paul Merrell

N.S.A. Spied on Allies, Aid Groups and Businesses - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...groups-and-business-elite.html

surveillance state NSA NSA-targets

shared by Paul Merrell on 21 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Secret documents reveal more than 1,000 targets of American and British surveillance in recent years, including the office of an Israeli prime minister, heads of international aid organizations, foreign energy companies and a European Union official involved in antitrust battles with American technology businesses.
  • While the names of some political and diplomatic leaders have previously emerged as targets, the newly disclosed intelligence documents provide a much fuller portrait of the spies’ sweeping interests in more than 60 countries. Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, working closely with the National Security Agency, monitored the communications of senior European Union officials, foreign leaders including African heads of state and sometimes their family members, directors of United Nations and other relief programs, and officials overseeing oil and finance ministries, according to the documents. In addition to Israel, some targets involved close allies like France and Germany, where tensions have already erupted over recent revelations about spying by the N.S.A.
  • Details of the surveillance are described in documents from the N.S.A. and Britain’s eavesdropping agency, known as GCHQ, dating from 2008 to 2011. The target lists appear in a set of GCHQ reports that sometimes identify which agency requested the surveillance, but more often do not. The documents were leaked by the former N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden and shared by The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel. The reports are spare, technical bulletins produced as the spies, typically working out of British intelligence sites, systematically tapped one international communications link after another, focusing especially on satellite transmissions. The value of each link is gauged, in part, by the number of surveillance targets found to be using it for emails, text messages or phone calls. More than 1,000 targets, which also include people suspected of being terrorists or militants, are in the reports. It is unclear what the eavesdroppers gleaned. The documents include a few fragmentary transcripts of conversations and messages, but otherwise contain only hints that further information was available elsewhere, possibly in a larger database.
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  • Ms. Hansen, the spokeswoman for the European Commission, said that it was already engaged in talks with the United States that were “needed to restore trust and confidence in the trans-Atlantic relationship.” She added that “the commission will raise these new allegations with U.S. and U.K. authorities.”
  • Also appearing on the surveillance lists is Joaquín Almunia, vice president of the European Commission, which, among other powers, has oversight of antitrust issues in Europe. The commission has broad authority over local and foreign companies, and it has punished a number of American companies, including Microsoft and Intel, with heavy fines for hampering fair competition. The reports say that spies intercepted Mr. Almunia’s communications in 2008 and 2009. Mr. Almunia, a Spaniard, assumed direct authority over the commission’s antitrust office in 2010. He has been involved in a three-year standoff with Google over how the company runs its search engine. Competitors of the online giant had complained that it was prioritizing its own search results and using content like travel reviews and ratings from other websites without permission. While pushing for a settlement with Google, Mr. Almunia has warned that the company could face large fines if it does not cooperate.
  • Some condemned the surveillance on Friday as unjustified and improper. “This is not the type of behavior that we expect from strategic partners,” Pia Ahrenkilde Hansen, a spokeswoman for the European Commission, said on the latest revelations of American and British spying in Europe. Some of the surveillance relates to issues that are being scrutinized by President Obama and a panel he appointed in Washington that on Wednesday recommended tighter limits on the N.S.A., particularly on spying of foreign leaders, especially allies.
  • “We do not use our foreign intelligence capabilities to steal the trade secrets of foreign companies on behalf of — or give intelligence we collect to — U.S. companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their bottom line,” said Vanee Vines, an N.S.A. spokeswoman. But she added that some economic spying was justified by national security needs. “The intelligence community’s efforts to understand economic systems and policies, and monitor anomalous economic activities, are critical to providing policy makers with the information they need to make informed decisions that are in the best interest of our national security,” Ms. Vines said.
  • The surveillance reports show American and British spies’ deep appetite for information. The French companies Total, the oil and gas giant, and Thales, an electronics, logistics and transportation outfit, appear as targets, as do a French ambassador, an “Estonian Skype security team” and the German Embassy in Rwanda.
  • Multiple United Nations Missions in Geneva are listed as targets, including Unicef and the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research. So is Médecins du Monde, a medical relief organization that goes into war-ravaged areas. Leigh Daynes, an executive director of the organization in Britain, responded to news about the surveillance by saying: “There is absolutely no reason for our operations to be secretly monitored.” More obvious intelligence targets are also listed, though in smaller numbers, including people identified as “Israeli grey arms dealer,” “Taleban ministry of refugee affairs” and “various entities in Beijing.” Some of those included are described as possible members of Al Qaeda, and as suspected extremists or jihadists.
  • While few if any American citizens appear to be named in the documents, they make clear that some of the intercepted communications either began or ended in the United States and that N.S.A. facilities carried out interceptions around the world in collaboration with their British partners. Some of the interceptions appear to have been made at the Sugar Grove, W.Va., listening post run by the N.S.A. and code-named Timberline, and some are explicitly tied to N.S.A. target lists in the reports.
  • Strengthening the likelihood that full transcripts were taken during the intercepts is the case of Mohamed Ibn Chambas, an official of the Economic Community of West African States, known as Ecowas, a regional initiative of 15 countries that promotes economic and industrial activity. Whether intentionally or through some oversight, when Mr. Chambas’s communications were intercepted in August 2009, dozens of his complete text messages were copied into one of the reports.
  • Paul Merrell on 21 Dec 13
     
    No mention of any "terrorist" targets. Could it be that Snowden and Greenwald are right, that the surveillance is not about terrorism at all? Surely our nation's leaders would not lie to us about that. Right. The Politics of Fear.
Paul Merrell

Stand Firm, John Kerry - Zbigniew Brzezinski and Frank Carlucci and Lee Hamilton and Ca... - 0 views

www.politico.com/...rm-john-kerry-105483_full.html

war & peace Palestine Israel negotiations Brzezinski

shared by Paul Merrell on 11 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • By ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI, FRANK CARLUCCI, LEE HAMILTON, CARLA A. HILLS, THOMAS PICKERING and HENRY SIEGMAN
  • e commend Secretary of State John Kerry’s extraordinary efforts to renew Israeli-Palestinian talks and negotiations for a framework for a peace accord, and the strong support his initiative has received from President Barack Obama. We believe these efforts, and the priority Kerry has assigned to them, have been fully justified. However, we also believe that the necessary confidentiality that Secretary Kerry imposed on the resumed negotiations should not preclude a far more forceful and public expression of certain fundamental U.S. positions: Settlements: U.S. disapproval of continued settlement enlargement in the Occupied Territories by Israel’s government as “illegitimate” and “unhelpful” does not begin to define the destructiveness of this activity. Nor does it dispel the impression that we have come to accept it despite our rhetorical objections. Halting the diplomatic process on a date certain until Israel complies with international law and previous agreements would help to stop this activity and clearly place the onus for the interruption where it belongs.
  • Palestinian incitement: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s charge that various Palestinian claims to all of historic Palestine constitute incitement that stands in the way of Israel’s acceptance of Palestinian statehood reflects a double standard. The Likud and many of Israel’s other political parties and their leaders make similar declarations about the legitimacy of Israel’s claims to all of Palestine, designating the West Bank “disputed” rather than occupied territory. Moreover, Israeli governments have acted on those claims by establishing Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem and throughout the West Bank. Surely the “incitement” of Palestinian rhetoric hardly compares to the incitement of Israel’s actual confiscations of Palestinian territory. If the United States is not prepared to say so openly, there is little hope for the success of these talks, which depends far more on the strength of America’s political leverage and its determination to use it than on the good will of the parties.
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  • The Jewishness of the state of Israel: Israel is a Jewish state because its population is overwhelmingly Jewish, Jewish religious and historical holidays are its national holidays, and Hebrew is its national language. But Israeli demands that Palestinians recognize that Israel has been and remains the national homeland of the Jewish people is intended to require the Palestinians to affirm the legitimacy of Israel’s replacement of Palestine’s Arab population with its own. It also raises Arab fears of continuing differential treatment of Israel’s Arab citizens. Israelis are right to demand that Palestinians recognize the fact of the state of Israel and its legitimacy, which Palestinians in fact did in 1988 and again in 1993. They do not have the right to demand that Palestinians abandon their own national narrative, and the United States should not be party to such a demand. That said, Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, provided it grants full and equal rights to its non-Jewish citizens, would not negate the Palestinian national narrative.
  • Israeli security: The United States has allowed the impression that it supports a version of Israel’s security that entails Israeli control of all of Palestine’s borders and part of its territory, including the Jordan Valley. Many former heads of Israel’s top intelligence agencies, surely among the best informed in the country about the country’s security needs, have rejected this version of Israel’s security. Meir Dagan, a former head of the Mossad, dismissed it as “nothing more than manipulation.” Israel’s confiscation of what international law has clearly established as others’ territory diminishes its security. Illegal West Bank land grabs only add to the Palestinian and the larger Arab sense of injustice that Israel’s half-century-long occupation has already generated, and fuels a revanchismthat sooner or later will trigger renewed violence. No Palestinian leader could or would ever agree to a peace accord that entails turning over the Jordan Valley to Israeli control, either permanently or for an extended period of time, thus precluding a peace accord that would end Israel’s occupation. The marginal improvement in Israel’s security provided by these expansive Israeli demands can hardly justify the permanent subjugation and disenfranchisement of a people to which Israel refuses to grant citizenship in the Jewish state.
  • The terms for a peace accord advanced by Netanyahu’s government, whether regarding territory, borders, security, resources, refugees or the location of the Palestinian state’s capital, require compromises of Palestinian territory and sovereignty on the Palestinian side of the June 6, 1967, line. They do not reflect any Israeli compromises, much less the “painful compromises” Netanyahu promised in his May 2011 speech before a joint meeting of Congress. Every one of them is on the Palestinian side of that line. Although Palestinians have conceded fully half of the territory assigned to them in the U.N.’s Partition Plan of 1947, a move Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, has hailed as unprecedented, they are not demanding a single square foot of Israeli territory beyond the June 6, 1967, line. Netanyahu’s unrelenting efforts to establish equivalence between Israeli and Palestinian demands, insisting that the parties split the difference and that Israel be granted much of its expansive territorial agenda beyond the 78 percent of Palestine it already possesses, are politically and morally unacceptable. The United States should not be party to such efforts, not in Crimea nor in the Palestinian territories. We do not know what progress the parties made in the current talks prior to their latest interruption, this time over the issue of the release of Palestinian prisoners. We are nevertheless convinced that no matter how far apart the parties may still be, clarity on America’s part regarding the critical moral and political issues in dispute will have a far better chance of bringing the peace talks to a successful conclusion than continued ambiguity or silence.
  • The co-authors, senior advisers to the U.S./Middle East Project, are, respectively, former national security adviser, former U.S. secretary of defense; former chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee; former U.S. trade representative; former under secretary of state for political affairs, and president, U.S./Middle East Project.
  • Paul Merrell on 11 Apr 14
     
    Brzezinski and other high former foreign relations officials publicly criticizing the Israeli position and calling for a hardened U.S. position that Israel must halt enlargement of settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank before negotiations will resume to "clearly place the onus for the interruption where it belongs," whew! Times are definitely changing. 
Paul Merrell

False Flag in Odessa » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names - 0 views

www.counterpunch.org/...false-flag-in-odessa

war & peace Ukraine Odessa-fire CIA false-flag

shared by Paul Merrell on 09 May 14 - No Cached
  • Photos of the victims of the Odessa fire which have been circulating on the Internet have cast doubt on the official version of events. It’s now clear that many of the anti-junta activists who occupied the Trade Unions House were neither burned to death nor died of smoke inhalation, but were savagely shot at point-blank range by agents and thugs who had infiltrated the building to kill as many of the occupants as possible, burn the corpses, and then slip away without notice. Some of the victims–like a young woman who was eight months pregnant –were strangled with an electrical chord and left slumped backwards over her desk in a room that shows no sign of fire or smoke damage. In another case, a woman was stripped naked from the waste down, raped, killed, and set ablaze. In still other cases, victims with bullet-holes through their skulls, had flammable fluid dumped on their heads and were incinerated, leaving a charred head atop a corpse whose clothes were untouched by fire. The sloppily-executed killing-spree proves that the fire was not the result of a spontaneous clash between pro and anti-Kiev demonstrators, but a carefully planned black-op that likely involved foreign Intel agencies working hand-in-hand with the fascist junta government in Kiev. Did we mention that the CIA has taken up residence in the Ukrainian capital? Here’s the scoop from the AFP:
  • “Dozens of specialists from the US Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation are advising the Ukrainian government … helping Kiev end the rebellion in the east of Ukraine and set up a functioning security structure…” (CIA, FBI agents ‘advising Ukraine government: report, AFP) We all know about the CIA’s energetic efforts to create a “functioning security structure” in nations around the world. The CIA’s presence in Ukraine suggests that the US was either actively involved in the Odessa incident or knows who was. Either way, there should be an independent investigation before the case is referred to the ICC for prosecution.
Paul Merrell

BBC News - Hungary PM Orban condemns EU sanctions on Russia - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-europe-28801353

war & peace Ukraine U.S.-foreign-policy sanctions Russia Hungary Slovakia

shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • Hungary's conservative Prime Minister Viktor Orban says the EU is harming itself by imposing sanctions on Russia, describing the measures as "shooting oneself in the foot". He was speaking after his Slovak counterpart, Robert Fico, had also criticised the EU sanctions. Russia is Hungary's main trading partner outside the EU. Both Hungary and Slovakia depend on Russian gas.
Paul Merrell

Is Rouhani's Iran Tilting East? « LobeLog.com - 0 views

www.lobelog.com/is-rouhanis-iran-tilting-east

war & peace Iran Russia China U.S.-foreign-policy sanctions Iranian-nukes-myth

shared by Paul Merrell on 15 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • Two simultaneous pieces of economic news in Iran inform us of a trend in the Rouhani administration’s foreign policy. Firstly, Iranian and Russian press reported last week that Tehran and Moscow signed a trade agreement amounting to 70 billion euros on Sept. 9. Alexander Novak, Russia’s energy minister, and Bijan Namdar Zanganeh, Iran’s oil minister, signed on behalf of Russia and Iran respectively. The details of the agreement have not been revealed but Russia may also invest in Iranian oil, according to Ali Majedi, Iran’s deputy oil minister for international affairs. If implemented as planned, the reported agreement could strike a blow to the American sanctions regime on Iran. On the same day, Ishaq Jahangiri, President Hassan Rouhani’s first deputy, told reporters that during the upcoming third presidential meeting between Iran and China on the sidelines of the Shanghai Summit, “we will secure billions of dollars from China for private sector projects which top the agenda.” Against the $18 billion that China owes Iran for its imported oil, China will reportedly finance these Iranian projects for up to 2 or 3 times that amount. According to Asadollah Asgaroladi, the chairman of the Iran-China Joint Chamber of Commerce, most of the projects will be industrial or oil-related.
  • With close ties to the centrist, business-friendly cleric, former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, Rouhani was voted into office with the underlying hope that he would pursue good relations with the West. Rouhani’s nomination of Javad Zarif as his top diplomat strengthened this notion. During his career, Zarif, under the presidencies of Hashemi Rafsanjani, Mohammad Khatami, and even Mahmoud Ahmadinejad relentlessly strived to make peace between Iran and the West, especially with the United States. Yet while Iran continues to negotiate for a final deal over its nuclear program, one of the main points of contention in US-Iran relations, Rouhani’s Iran appears to be looking eastward.
  • Paul Merrell on 15 Sep 14
     
    Is BRICS about to become BRIICS? Unfortunately, no mention whether the deals will be dollar-based or de-dollarized, but I strongly suspect the latter.
Paul Merrell

US Government Labeled Al Jazeera Journalist as Al Qaeda - 0 views

firstlook.org/...al-qaeda-member-put-watch-list

surveillance state NSA Al-Jazeera metadata phone-metadata

shared by Paul Merrell on 09 May 15 - No Cached
  • The U.S. government labeled a prominent journalist as a member of Al Qaeda and placed him on a watch list of suspected terrorists, according to a top-secret document that details U.S. intelligence efforts to track Al Qaeda couriers by analyzing metadata. The briefing singles out Ahmad Muaffaq Zaidan, Al Jazeera’s longtime Islamabad bureau chief, as a member of the terrorist group. A Syrian national, Zaidan has focused his reporting throughout his career on the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and has conducted several high-profile interviews with senior Al Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden.
  • The document cites Zaidan as an example to demonstrate the powers of SKYNET, a program that analyzes location and communication data (or “metadata”) from bulk call records in order to detect suspicious patterns. In the Terminator movies, SKYNET is a self-aware military computer system that launches a nuclear war to exterminate the human race, and then systematically kills the survivors. According to the presentation, the NSA uses its version of SKYNET to identify people that it believes move like couriers used by Al Qaeda’s senior leadership. The program assessed Zaidan as a likely match, which raises troubling questions about the U.S. government’s method of identifying terrorist targets based on metadata. It appears, however, that Zaidan had already been identified as an Al Qaeda member before he showed up on SKYNET’s radar. That he was already assigned a watch list number would seem to indicate that the government had a prior intelligence file on him. The Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE, is a U.S. government database of over one million names suspected of a connection to terrorism, which is shared across the U.S. intelligence community.
  • Peter Bergen, CNN’s national security analyst and author of several books on Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, told The Intercept, “I’ve known [Zaidan] for well over a decade, and he’s a first class journalist.” “He has the contacts and the access that of course no Western journalist has,” said Bergen. “But by that standard any journalist who spent time with Al Qaeda would be suspect.” Bergen himself interviewed bin Laden in 1997.
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  • That presentation states that the call data is acquired from major Pakistani telecom providers, though it does not specify the technical means by which the data is obtained. The June 2012 document poses the question: “Given a handful of courier selectors, can we find others that ‘behave similarly’” by analyzing cell phone metadata? “We are looking for different people using phones in similar ways,” the presentation continues, and measuring “pattern of life, social network, and travel behavior.” For the experiment, the analysts fed 55 million cell phone records from Pakistan into the system, the document states. The results identified someone who is “PROB” — which appears to mean probably — Zaidan as the “highest scoring selector” traveling between Peshawar and Lahore.
  • According to another 2012 presentation describing SKYNET, the program looks for terrorist connections based on questions such as “who has traveled from Peshawar to Faisalabad or Lahore (and back) in the past month? Who does the traveler call when he arrives?” and behaviors such as “excessive SIM or handset swapping,” “incoming calls only,” “visits to airports,” and “overnight trips.”
  • The following slide appears to show other top hits, noting that 21 of the top 500 were previously tasked for surveillance, indicating that the program is “on the right track” to finding people of interest. A portion of that list visible on the slide includes individuals supposedly affiliated with Al Qaeda and the Taliban, as well as members of Pakistan’s spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence. But sometimes the descriptions are vague. One selector is identified simply as “Sikh Extremist.” As other documents from Snowden revealed, drone targets are often identified in part based on metadata analysis and cell phone tracking. Former NSA director Michael Hayden famously put it more bluntly in May 2014, when he said, “we kill people based on metadata.” Metadata also played a key role in locating and killing Osama bin Laden. The CIA used cell phone calling patterns to track an Al Qaeda courier and identify bin Laden’s hiding place in Pakistan.
  • A History of Targeting Al Jazeera  The U.S. government’s surveillance of Zaidan is not the first time that it has linked Al Jazeera or its personnel to Al Qaeda. During the invasion of Afghanistan, in November 2001, the United States bombed the network’s Kabul offices. The Pentagon claimed that it was “a known al-Qaeda facility.” That was just the beginning. Sami al-Hajj, an Al Jazeera cameraman, was imprisoned by the U.S. government at Guantanamo for six years before being released in 2008 without ever being charged. He has said he was repeatedly interrogated about Al Jazeera. In 2003, Al Jazeera’s financial reporters were barred from the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange for “security reasons.” Nasdaq soon followed suit.
  • During the invasion of Iraq, U.S. forces bombed Al Jazeera’s Baghdad offices, killing correspondent Tariq Ayoub. The U.S. insisted it was unintentional, though Al Jazeera had given the Pentagon the coordinates of the building. When American forces laid siege to Fallujah, and Al Jazeera was one of the few news organizations broadcasting from within the city, Bush administration officials accused it of airing propaganda and lies. Al Jazeera’s Fallujah correspondent, Ahmed Mansour, reported that his crew had been targeted with tanks, and the house they had stayed in had been bombed by fighter jets. So great was the suspicion of Al Jazeera’s ties to terrorism that Dennis Montgomery, a contractor who had previously tried peddling cheat-detector software to Las Vegas casinos, managed to convince the CIA that he could decode secret Al Qaeda messages from Al Jazeera broadcasts. Those “codes” reportedly caused Bush to ground a number of commercial transatlantic flights in December 2003. But the U.S. government appeared to have somewhat softened its view of the network in the last several years. The Obama administration has criticized Egypt for holding three of Al Jazeera’s journalists on charges of aiding the Muslim Brotherhood. During the height of the 2011 Arab Spring, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praised the network’s coverage, saying, “Viewership of Al Jazeera is going up in the United States because it’s real news.”
  • Zaidan is still Al Jazeera’s Islamabad bureau chief, and has also reported from Syria and Yemen in recent years. Al Jazeera vigorously defended his reporting. “Our commitment to our audiences is to gain access to authentic, raw, unfiltered information from key sources and present it in an honest and responsible way.” They added that, “our journalists continue to be targeted and stigmatized by governments,” even though “Al Jazeera is not the first channel that has met with controversial figures such as bin Laden and others — prominent western media outlets were among the first to do so.”
  • Paul Merrell on 09 May 15
     
    It was crazy. I was at home in Idaho sitting there watching TV and chatting with my internet buddy in Croatia. Then the black helicopters came for me ... 
Paul Merrell

Foreign investment in Israel plummets by half since Gaza massacre | The Electronic Inti... - 0 views

electronicintifada.net/...el-plummets-half-gaza-massacre

war & peace Israel BSD foreign-investment stats

shared by Paul Merrell on 26 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Foreign investment in Israel plummeted almost 50 percent in 2014, a fact attributed to last summer’s assault on Gaza and the growing impact of boycotts. This week the UN’s trade and development agency UNCTAD released its annual World Investment Report on foreign direct investment (FDI) – a measure of money that investors from overseas put into a country to invest in businesses, build factories or start other economic projects. According to the report, FDI into Israel in 2014 plummeted to just $6.4 billion from almost $12 billion in 2013. The 2014 figure appears to be the lowest in more than a decade. Foreign direct investment into Israel averaged around $9 billion per year from 2005 to 2012. “We believe that what led to the drop in investment in Israel are Operation Protective Edge and the boycotts Israel is facing,” Roni Manos, an Israeli economist who co-authored the report, told Israel’s Ynet.
  • “Operation Protective Edge” is the name Israel gave its 51-day assault last summer that devastated much of Gaza and killed more than 2,200 Palestinians, including 551 chidren. In line with global trends, FDI fell in other regional countries, but nowhere near as sharply as in Israel. FDI fell 1.7 percent in Turkey, 6.8 percent in Iraq, 4 percent in the United Arab Emirates and 9.6 percent in Saudi Arabia. But it actually rose by 6.6 percent in Lebanon. Iran, which has been under brutal international sanctions, saw inward investment decline by about a third to just over $2 billion.
  • The news that investors are fleeing is only the latest economic blow to Israel as a result of its attack on Gaza. In May, Ynet revealed a dramatic plunge in visits to the country in an article headlined “Tourists have stopped coming to Israel.” During the Gaza assault, Palestinian resistance organizations considered it a significant strategic achievement that they managed to force a shutdown of Israel’s main international airport for several days, dealing Israel a severe economic and reputational blow. But it appears the damage may have lasted far longer than the airport shutdown. “Despite the hopes for a recovery two or three months after last summer’s operation in Gaza, it seems the crisis is only getting worse,” Ynet reported, “the number of tourists is dropping, the number of hotel stays is declining and the number of organized tours has been significantly cut.”
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  • Ynet cited figures from the Israel Hotel Association for the first quarter of this year pointing to a 28 percent drop in tourist stays, with some areas including the Red Sea resort of Eilat – heavily marketed as a seaside destination for Europeans – seeing a 51 percent decline. The report quoted one tour operator saying he didn’t expect matters to improve next year. “We are only left with the pilgrims and Jewish tourists,” the tour operator complained, adding that Christian religious tourists spent most of their time in the Palestinian city of Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank.
Paul Merrell

Gaza Could Be Uninhabitable In 5 Years, UN Report Warns | nsnbc international - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...ble-in-5-years-un-report-warns

war & peace Gaza habitability

shared by Paul Merrell on 02 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • A new report by the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) found that under current conditions, the Gaza Strip, home to 1.8 million Palestinians, will become uninhabitable within the next five years.
  • The report states that “The social, health and security-related ramifications of the high population density and overcrowding are among the factors that may render Gaza unliveable by 2020″. The UNCTAD report, entitled “Assistance to the Palestinian people: Developments in the economy of the Occupied Palestinian Territory”, was released today. The report examined the current conditions in the coastal strip, and found that Gaza could become uninhabitable by 2020 due to ongoing de-development, eight years of economic blockade and three military operations in the past six years. Last year’s invasion by the Israeli military “ravaged the already debilitated infrastructure of Gaza, shattered its productive base, left no time for meaningful reconstruction or economic recovery and impoverished the Palestinian population in Gaza,” the report said.
  • The report also called for an end to the Israeli siege on Gaza, stating, “Short of ending the blockade, donor aid… will not reverse the ongoing de-development and impoverishment in Gaza.” According to the UN Report, socio-economic conditions in Gaza today are currently “at their lowest point since 1967,” In addition to the 500,000 people who have been displaced in Gaza as a result of the most recent military operation in 2014, the report estimates significant economic losses, including the destruction or severe damage of more than 20,000 Palestinian homes, 148 schools and 15 hospitals and 45 primary health-care centres.
Paul Merrell

Palestinians worse off than ever as settler numbers soar, says UN | The Electronic Inti... - 1 views

electronicintifada.net/...r-settler-numbers-soar-says-un

war & peace Israel Gaza economy stats U.N.-report

shared by Paul Merrell on 03 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Palestinians are economically worse off than ever before as the number of Israeli settlers on their land sets records, a new report by the United Nations trade and development agency UNCTAD reveals. Israel’s longstanding restrictions on the Palestinian economy are to blame. But the situation has been made catastrophically worse by its ongoing blockade and devastating attack on Gaza last summer that killed more than 2,200 people, including 551 children.
  • Three full-scale Israeli military attacks on Gaza in the last six years, on top of eight years of blockade, have ravaged the territory’s infrastructure, destroyed its productive capacity, hindered any meaningful reconstruction and left the people poorer than any time in 20 years, the report states. Unemployment in Gaza has reached 44 percent, the highest level on record, and is at 18 percent in the West Bank. But UNCTAD says “the real depth of unemployment and the attendant waste of human resources” are even worse than the figures suggest. Even before last summer’s Israeli attack on Gaza and the further deterioration in the economy, 3 out of 5 households in Gaza and 1 out of 5 in the West Bank were food insecure – meaning they could not guarantee a reliable and sufficient supply of affordable and nutritious food. In the year 2000, just 72,000 people in Gaza were dependent on UN food rations. In May this year, that figure reached 868,000 – almost half the population.
  • The lastest Israeli assault on Gaza “effectively eliminated what was left of the middle class, sending almost all of the population into destitution and dependence on international humanitarian aid,” the report states. UNCTAD estimates the direct costs of the destruction Israel inflicted on Gaza in its attacks in November 2012 and last year at $2.7 billion. In a much publicized 2012 report, the UN concluded that if nothing changed, Gaza would be “unlivable” by 2020. This latest report notes that things have only gotten worse since then.
Paul Merrell

The Numbers Are In: China Dumps A Record $94 Billion In US Treasurys In One Month | Zer... - 0 views

www.zerohedge.com/...billion-us-treasurys-one-month

war & peace economic-warfare China reserves disinvestment de-dollarization

shared by Paul Merrell on 08 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Shortly after the PBoC’s move to devalue the yuan, we noted with some alarm that it looked as though China may have drawn down its reserves by more than $100 billion in the space of just two weeks. That, we went on the point out, would represent a stunning increase over the previous pace of the country’s reserve draw down, which we began documenting months ahead of the devaluation (see here, for instance). We went on to estimate, based on the projected size of the RMB carry trade unwind, how large the FX reserve liquidation might need to be to offset capital outflows and finally, late last week, we suggested that China’s official FX reserve data was set to become the new risk-on/off trigger for nervous, erratic markets. In short, the pace at which Beijing is burning through its USD assets in defense of the yuan has serious implications not only for investors’ collective perception of market stability, but for yields on core paper, for global liquidity, and for US monetary policy. 
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