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America's 14-year project to defeat the Taliban and build a stable Afghanistan is teetering on the brink of failure, according to a sobering report Friday by a government watchdog. The Taliban controls more of the country than at any time since U.S. troops invaded in 2001, notes the quarterly report to Congress by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. The fragile economy is worsening. One of the few bright spots of the troubled reconstruction effort — getting more girls in school — has been tainted by allegations of fraud. "The lack of security has made it almost impossible for many U.S. and even some Afghan officials to get out to manage and inspect U.S.-funded reconstruction projects," wrote John Sopko, the inspector general. The U.S. has spent more than $113 billion on Afghan reconstruction, more in constant dollars than it spend rebuilding Western Europe after World War II under the Marshall Plan. It is on track to spend billions more, but many critics view the Afghan civilian aid effort as a wasteful failure. Sopko has examined a fraction of the spending, but his audits have uncovered $17 billion in questioned costs in just three years, according to a tally by ProPublica, the investigative group.

Canada’s CBC network reported Thursday that the country is slamming on the brakes when it comes to sharing some communications intelligence with key allies — including the U.S. — out of fear that Canadian personal information is not properly protected. “Defense Minister Harjit Sajjan says the sharing won’t resume until he is satisfied that the proper protections are in place,” CBC reported. Earlier on Thursday, the watchdog tasked with keeping tabs on the Ottawa-based Communications Security Establishment (CSE), Jean-Pierre Plouffe, called out the electronic spying agency for risking Canadian privacy in his annual report. Plouffe wrote that the surveillance agency broke privacy laws when it shared Canadian data with its allies without properly protecting it first. Consequently, he concluded, it should precisely explain how Canadian citizens’ metadata — information about who a communication is to and from, the subject line of an email, and so on — can and can’t be used.

Canada’s decision to temporarily stop sharing information comes at a time when the U.S. is scrambling to come up with a new data-sharing arrangement with the European Union before a January 31 deadline. Europe’s top court decided in October that European privacy isn’t sufficiently respected by the American government or its spying agencies.

European privacy regulators are putting U.S. surveillance practices under the microscope, this time with a crucial transatlantic data deal hanging in the balance.Legal and privacy advocates say European nations are poised to strike down the deal if they decide the U.S. hasn't done enough to reform its spying programs.The new test comes after the European Commission and the Commerce Department — after months of tense negotiations — reached a deal this week permitting Facebook, Google and thousands of other companies to continue legally handling Europeans’ personal data.ADVERTISEMENTCritics though have long warned that unless the U.S. overhauls its privacy and national security laws, there is no legal framework that can stand up in European court, where privacy is considered a fundamental right under the EU Charter.A working group of 28 EU nations’ data protection authorities — domestic entities separate from the Commission that will be in charge of enforcing the new agreement — may now cast the deciding vote.The group is spending the next few months picking through the so-called Privacy Shield agreement to determine if it adequately protects the personal data of European citizens.

“The Commission has said, ‘We’re satisfied. We believe them. We believe the U.S. has substantially changed its practices,’ and they are no longer going off the [Edward] Snowden revelations in the media,” said Susan Foster, a privacy attorney at Mintz Levin who works in both the EU and the U.S.“Whether the working group will go along with it is another question.”The privacy advocate whose complaint against Facebook brought down the Privacy Shield’s 15-year-old predecessor agreement is already questioning the new deal’s validity.“With all due respect ... a couple of letters by the outgoing Obama administration is by no means a legal basis to guarantee the fundamental rights of 500 million European users in the long run, when there is explicit U.S. law allowing mass surveillance,” Max Schrems of Austria said in a statement Tuesday.The United States has been fighting against the perception that it tramples on civil liberties after ex-National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed the breadth of the agency’s snooping.One sticking point in the Privacy Shield negotiations was over the scope of an exception allowing surveillance for national security purposes.

In announcing the deal, Commission officials insisted that the U.S. had provided “detailed written assurances” that surveillance of Europeans’ data by intelligence agencies would be subject to appropriate limitations.“The U.S. has clarified that they do not carry out indiscriminate surveillance of Europeans,” Andrus Ansip, Vice President for the Digital Single Market on the European Commission, said Tuesday.The U.S. has also agreed to create an office in the State Department, to address complaints from EU citizens who feel their data has been inappropriately accessed by intelligence authorities.Complicating the working group’s approval of the deal is the hodgepodge of competing regulators in Europe. Each nation has an agency in charge of its own country’s regulation. Some countries — such as Germany — are seen as tougher on privacy than others, like France or the U.K.While some countries consider U.S. privacy protections to be satisfactory, in others they are seen as woefully inadequate.

A federal judge on Tuesday ruled that State Department officials and top aides to Hillary Clinton should be questioned under oath about whether they intentionally thwarted federal open records laws by using or allowing the use of a private email server throughout Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state from 2009 to 2013. The decision by U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of Washington came in a lawsuit over public records brought by Judicial Watch, a conservative legal watchdog group, regarding its May 2013 request for information about the employment arrangement of Huma Abedin, a longtime Clinton aide.

Sullivan set an April 12 deadline for parties to litigate a detailed investigative plan--subject to court approval--that would reach well beyond the limited and carefully worded explanations of the use of the private server that department and Clinton officials have given. Sullivan also suggested from the bench that he might at some point order the department to subpoena Clinton and Abedin to return all emails related to Clinton’s private account, not just records their camps previously deemed work-related and returned.

In granting Judicial Watch’s request, Sullivan said that months of piecemeal revelations about Clinton and the State Department’s handling of the email controversy created “at least a ‘reasonable suspicion’ ” that public access to official government records under the federal Freedom of Information Act was undermined. Sullivan noted that there was no dispute that senior State Department officials were aware of the email set-up from time Clinton took office, citing a January 2009 email exchange including Undersecretary for Management Patrick F. Kennedy, Clinton chief of staff Cheryl D. Mills and Abedin about establishing a “stand-alone network” email system. Sullivan said the State Department’s inspector general last month faulted the department and Clinton’s office for overseeing processes that repeatedly allowed “inaccurate and incomplete” FOIA responses, including a May 2013 reply that found “no records” concerning email accounts Clinton used, even though dozens of senior officials had corresponded with her private account.

Senior Whitehall figures are drawing up controversial plans to ensure that Britain’s armed forces will no longer be subject to legal claims by their enemies over human rights violations.Guaranteed to have Brits in Middle England choking on their morning croissants, Saturday’s claims from right-wing mouthpiece, The Telegraph, insisted that taxpayers are facing a bill of £150 million to defend British soldiers being sued by “enemy fighters” for breaching their human rights. The Telegraph claimed that over 2,000 compensation claims and judicial reviews are being prepared by lawyers in the aftermath of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as part of a growing litigation culture that is encroaching on the ability of the armed forces to do their jobs.So far, 500 judicial review applications have been lodged, with 1,200 claims for compensation against the Ministry of Defense for alleged abuse, unlawful detention, and unlawful killing in Iraq.Further, an estimated 800 compensation cases from Afghanistan could follow.

Defence secretary Michael Fallon is so dismayed at what he calls the “increasing encroachment of human rights law into the battlefield,” that he is determined to take steps to stem the tide of legal action.Some of the planned fightback by ministers should concern everyone:Pulling out of the European Convention: Ministers could declare a temporary withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) before sending British forces into action in future.Taking legal action against law firms that have brought “bogus” cases against the Armed Forces: This includes referring lawyers to legal watchdogs and bringing fraud prosecutions against firms found to have made false allegations.A time limit on legal action to stop compensation claims being made years after incidents occur: Further reforms would end legal aid for claimants who are living outside the U.K.Planned new laws would also allow the government to recover the costs of “bogus judicial reviews,”  but one proposal is the most worrying of all:

A new Bill of Rights: Michael Gove is working on a British Bill of Rights to replace the Human Rights Act, according to ministers. It will reportedly include safeguards for the Armed Forces to protect them from being sued.In contrast to Michael Fallon’s indignation, a report by Stop The War claims “The long history of British abuse and torture in Kenya, Malaya, Aden, Cyprus, Northern Ireland and Afghanistan cannot be explained as the work of a few ‘bad apples.’”.BottomResponsiveBanner{width:300px;height:250px}@media (min-width:420px){.BottomResponsiveBanner{width:336px;height:280px}}@media (min-width:1300px){.BottomResponsiveBanner{width:728px;height:90px}} The report lists abuses committed by British forces and also references the “loss of the moral compass evident in the behaviour of British forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.”Some might say that by scrapping the Human Rights Act, the government fears being challenged and wants to take away the public’s ability to contest decisions and policies. One thing is for sure: without it, the British government will be allowed to act with almost complete impunity.

A second federal judge has taken the rare step of allowing a group suing for records from Hillary Clinton's time as U.S. secretary of state to seek sworn testimony from officials, saying there was "evidence of government wrong-doing and bad faith."The language in Judge Royce Lamberth's order undercut the Democratic presidential contender's assertion she was allowed to set up a private email server in her home for her work as the country's top diplomat and that the arrangement was not particularly unusual.He described Clinton's email arrangement as "extraordinary" in his order filed on Tuesday in federal district court in Washington.Referring to the State Department, Clinton and Clinton's aides, he said there had been "constantly shifting admissions by the Government and the former government officials."Spokesmen for Clinton did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The case is a civil matter, but the order adds to the legal uncertainty that has overshadowed Clinton's campaign to be the Democratic nominee in the Nov. 8 presidential election. The FBI is also conducting a criminal inquiry into the arrangement after it emerged that classified government secrets ended up in Clinton's unsecured email account. Clinton has said she does not think she will be charged with a crime. Lamberth's order granted the request by Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group suing the department under open records laws, to gather evidence, including sworn testimony. The group has filed several lawsuits, including one seeking records about the 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans."Where there is evidence of government wrong-doing and bad faith, as here, limited discovery is appropriate, even though it is exceedingly rare in FOIA (freedom-of-information) cases," Lamberth noted in his order.The government is normally given the benefit of the doubt that it properly searched and produced records.

Since the email arrangement came to public knowledge a year ago, the State Department has found itself defending Clinton in scores of lawsuits from groups, individuals and news outlets who say they were wrongly denied access to Clinton's federal records. Clinton left the department in 2013, but did not return her email records to the government until nearly two years later. Last month, Judge Emmet Sullivan, who is overseeing a separate Judicial Watch lawsuit over other Clinton-related records, allowed a similar motion for discovery.

Last year, a Reuters article brought renewed scrutiny to the budgeting practices of the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), specifically the U.S. Army, after it was revealed that the department  had “lost” $6.5 trillion in 2015 due to “wrongful budget adjustments.” Nearly half of that massive sum, $2.8 trillion, was lost in just one quarter. Reuters noted that the Army “lacked the receipts and invoices to support those numbers [the adjustments] or simply made them up” in order to “create an illusion that its books are balanced.” Officially, the DOD has acknowledged that its financial statements for 2015 were “materially misstated.” However, this was hardly the first time the department had been caught falsifying its accounting or the first time the department had mishandled massive sums of taxpayer money.

The report, which examined in great detail the budgets of both the DOD and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), found that between 1998 and 2015 these two departments alone lost over $21 trillion in taxpayer funds. The funds lost were a direct result of “unsupported journal voucher adjustments” made to the departments’ budgets. According to the Office of the Comptroller, “unsupported journal voucher adjustments” are defined as “summary-level accounting adjustments made when balances between systems cannot be reconciled. Often these journal vouchers are unsupported, meaning they lack supporting documentation to justify the adjustment [receipts, etc.] or are not tied to specific accounting transactions.” The report notes that, in both the private and public sectors, the presence of such adjustments is considered “a red flag” for potential fraud. The amount of money lost is truly staggering. As co-author Fitts noted in an interview with USA Watchdog, the amount unaccounted for over this 17 year period amounts to “$65,000 for every man, woman and child resident in America.” By comparison, the cost per taxpayer of all U.S. wars waged since 9/11 has been $7,500 per taxpayer. The sum is also enough to cover the entire U.S. national debt, which broke $20 trillion less than a month ago, and still have funds left over. What’s more, the actual amount of funds lost — measured at $21 trillion – is likely to be much higher, as the researchers were unable to recover data for every year over the period, meaning the assessment is incomplete.

What is really behind the deep-state infighting over the U.S. elections and the "wire tapping" of the Trump campaign? Why was the CIA-Neocon axis vehemently lobbying against Trump? What foreign interests and what money is involved in this? Answers to these questions are now emerging. The former director of the CIA under Clinton, James Woolsey, went to the Wall Street Journal and offered some information (likely some true and some false) on the retired General Flynn and the lobbying businesses he was involved in. Woolsey is an arch-neoconservative. He had worked on the transition team of Trump but got fired over "growing tensions over Trump’s vision for intelligence agencies." Flynn is the former National Security Advisor of Trump who later also got fired. Woolsey was a board member of Flynn's former lobbying company FIG. Woolsey claims: In September 2016 he took part in a meeting between Flynn and high level Turkish officials, including the Turkish foreign minister and the energy minister who is the son-in-law of the Turkish president Erdogan. During the meeting, Woolsey claims, a brainstorming took place over how the Turkish cult leader Fethullah Gülen could -probably by illegal means- be removed from the U.S. and handed over to Turkey. Gülen is accused by the Erdogan mafia of initiating a coup attempt against it. The U.S. claims officially that there is no evidence for such an accusation and that Gülen can therefore not be rendered to Turkey. Gülen is an old CIA asset that helped the U.S. deep state to control Turkey.  Erdogan divorced from the Gülen organization after it became useless for his neo-Ottoman project. Here is the WSJ report on the Woolsey claims and a video clip with parts of his WSJ interview. Woolsey also went on CNN where he repeated his WSJ story. Flynn was accused by the anti-Trump campaign to have worked for Russia. He had taken several $10,000 for speeches he gave in Moscow. He also, at times, had argued for better U.S. relations with Russia. But Flynn's pro-Russia stand was probably honest. (Or the bribes involved were just smaller than the ones paid by others.) The money he got on the speaker circus was rather small for a man in his position. Flynn's real corruption was on another issue. After having been fired from the Trump administration, Flynn retroactively filed under the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA). His lobbying firm had a contract over $530,000 to work for a company near to the Turkish president Erdogan: In its filing, Mr. Flynn’s firm said its work from August to November “could be construed to have principally benefited the Republic of Turkey.” The filing said his firm’s fee, $530,000, wasn’t paid by the government but by Inovo BV, a Dutch firm owned by a Turkish businessman, Ekim Alptekin.

This lobbying, not the alleged Flynn-Putin relation, is the real scandal and part of the Trump/CIA/Clinton deep-state in-fighting. The meeting Woolsey described was under the "Turkish" Flynn contract. The Turkish business man, and owner of Inovo, Ekim Alptekin is a member of the Erdogan gang. But hidden at the very end of the WSJ story is the real key to understand the shady network: Inovo hired Mr. Flynn on behalf of an Israeli company seeking to export natural gas to Turkey, the filing said, and Mr. Alptekin wanted information on the U.S.-Turkey political climate to advise the gas company about its Turkish investments. It was the Israeli gas company, not the Alptekin outlet, that drove the issue. The Leviatan (and Tamar) gas fields in the Mediterranean along the Israeli coast are a huge energy and profit resource IF the gas from them can be exported to Europe. Several companies are involved in the exploration and all are looking for ways to connect the fields to the European gas network. There are (likely true) rumors that huge bribes have been payed in Israel, Jordan and elsewhere to win exploration contracts and to sell the gas. Negotiations between Israel and Turkey over the pipeline have been on and off. They depend on a positive climate towards Israel in the Turkish government which again depends on the often changing political position of the Erdogan gang.

The picture evolving here (lots of sleuthing and sources) is this: An Israeli company (or whoever is behind it) wants a gas pipeline to Turkey. It hires Flynn and Alptekin to arrange a positive climate for the Leviathan pipeline within the Turkish government. It offers Flynn more than half a million for a little (4-month long) influence work. His job is to create a "friendly atmosphere" for the deal by using his influence in the U.S. to accommodate Erdogan. A major point that is expected from Flynn is to arrange the handover of Gülen, by whatever means, from the U.S. to Erdogan. After accepting the (lobbying) bribe Flynn-the-whore suddenly changes his former anti-Turkish, pro-Russian, pro-Kurdish political position into a pro-Turkish, neutral-Russian and anti-Kurdish one. (His lobbying firm also makes some smaller payments related to the Clinton email-server scandal. This may be related to links between the Clinton family and the Gülen school empire.) He has a meeting with the Turkish government/Erdogan officials part of which is a discussion of a removal of Gülen to Turkey. He pens a pro Erdogan anti-Gülen op-ed which is published on the day of the election and he denigrates the Pentagon plan to work with the Kurds in Syria. The NSA, CIA and the FBI are listening to Flynn's conversations with Turkish and Israeli interests. (For the old and long history of such "wiretapping" of Turkish and Israeli connections and various dirty and criminal deals they revealed read and ask Sibel Edmonds.) The projects which Flynn is involved in, especially removing Gülen, are against the long term interests of the (neoconservative-driven) CIA. Selected tapes of his talks are transcribed and distributed within the anti-Trump campaign. This is the origin of the "wiretapping" of the Trump Tower the U.S. president lamented about. The stuff the CIA dug up about Flynn's dealing was and is used against Trump. Woolsey is caught up in this as he also worked for Flynn's lobbying firm. (His neocon-pro-Zionist history suggests that he is the senior Israeli watchdog over Flynn in all this.) He is now engaged in damage control and is "coming clean" and selectively leaking his anti-Flynn stuff to exculpate himself. (There is probably also some new, better deal involved that will pay off from him.) The Israeli-Turkish pipeline and the related deep-state fight are not the only issue involved in the campaign against Trump. There are also British interests and British intelligence involvement especially with the accusations against Russia of "hacking" of the DNC. If and how these fit in with above has not yet been revealed.

The CIA inspector general’s office has said it “mistakenly” destroyed its only copy of a comprehensive Senate torture report, despite lawyers for the Justice Department assuring a federal judge that copies of the documents were being preserved. The erasure of the document by the spy agency’s internal watchdog was deemed an “inadvertent” foul-up by the inspector general, according to Yahoo News. One intelligence community source told Yahoo News, which first reported the development, that last summer CIA inspector general officials deleted an uploaded computer file with the report and then accidentally destroyed a disk that also contained the document.

The 6,700-page report contains thousands of secret files about the CIA’s use of “enhanced” interrogation methods, including waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other aggressive interrogation techniques at “black site” prisons overseas. The full version of the report remains classified, but a 500-page executive summary was released to the public in 2014. Christoper R. Sharpley, the CIA’s acting inspector general (CIA IG), alerted the Senate intelligence panel that his office’s copy of the report had vanished in August. And Senator Dianne Feinstein, the driving force behind the 2014 report, sent letters to the CIA and Justice Department confirming the spy agency’s inspector general “has misplaced and/or accidentally destroyed” its copy of the report. Douglas Cox, a City University of New York School of Law professor who specialises in tracking the preservation of federal records told Yahoo News: “It’s breathtaking that this could have happened, especially in the inspector general’s office – they’re the ones that are supposed to be providing accountability within the agency itself.”

Another copy of the report exists elsewhere within the CIA, which is waiting for the conclusion of a years-long legal battle over the document.