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The FBI was right to withhold records about an alleged murder plot targeting the leaders of Occupy Houston, to protect its informants, a federal judge ruled. Plaintiff Ryan Noah Shapiro is a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research includes “the policing of dissent … especially in the name of national security” and “examining FBI and other intelligence agency efforts to preserve domestic surveillance capabilities while simultaneously subverting the Freedom of Information Act,” according to his MIT profile. Shapiro sent the FBI three Freedom of Information Act requests in early 2013, asking for records about “a potential plan to gather intelligence against the leaders of [Occupy Wall Street-related protests in Houston] and obtain photographs, then formulate a plan to kill the leadership [of the protests] via suppressed sniper rifles.” Shapiro told Courthouse News he learned of the alleged plot from FBI documents obtained by investigative reporter Jason Leopold.

The FBI had refused to give Shapiro any documents until he filed an April 2013 federal complaint in Washington, D.C., after which the agency gave him 17 pages. U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer found last year that the FBI had properly withheld some records, but took issue with its use of Exemption 7 under the FOIA, which protects from disclosure “records or information compiled for law enforcement purposes.” Collyer dismissed the lawsuit this week after reviewing the documents in her chambers. Shapiro challenged the FBI’s withholding of the names of its murder plot sources, claiming there is no privacy expectation for people who could be called to testify as trial witnesses. But Collyer found Monday that the FBI correctly invoked FOIA exemption 7(c), which shields law enforcement records from disclosure if they could constitute an invasion of personal privacy. The judge also agreed with the FBI that exemption 7(d) applied to the case. It allows records to be withheld if they “could reasonably be expected to disclose the identity of a confidential source.”

Citing a declaration from FBI agent David Hardy that said the confidential sources are “individuals who are members of organized violent groups,” Collyer said the likelihood of retaliation justified keeping the sources’ identities under wraps. Shapiro vowed to keep fighting for the records. “I’m of course disappointed in, and disagree with, the judge’s ruling. I’m now conferring with my attorney to determine next steps,” Shapiro said in an email. He said he is concerned that the FBI collected dossiers on Occupy protestors while publicly denying it. “The FBI even flatly asserted in a separate FOIA lawsuit of mine that, ‘(T)he FBI determined that it had never opened an investigation on the Occupy movement,'” Shapiro wrote. “Yet, in the course of my FOIA lawsuit against the FBI for records about the sniper plot against Occupy Houston, the FBI contradicted its own position.” Shapiro said that with recently released FBI documents about Occupy Chicago, “We are coming ever closer to finally forcing the FBI to concede it actually possesses a large volume of documents about this FBI-coordinated nationwide investigation of political protesters as supposed terroristic threats to national security.”

President Obama’s push for a massive new trade deal with Asia is predicated on the idea it will help everyday Americans: that it will “level the playing field for the middle class,” in Obama’s words. But as the debate over the Trans-Pacific Partnership enters its endgame, newly released government data about the US trade deficit shows recent trade deals have done the opposite of what was promised—and have inflicted added damage on American jobs. The Census Bureau’s annual trade data for 2014, released Thursday morning, shows the US trade deficit in 2014 jumped 6 percent to $505 billion in 2013. This increase received a late boost from the December 2014 numbers, which showed at 17.1 percent increase in the trade deficit—resulting in the biggest trade imbalance since December 2012. A country’s trade balance is a crucial economic indicator; a nation that is exporting far more goods than it is importing is generally in good economic health. Conversely, a country that is increasingly importing more than it exports—as is the case with the United States—is watching valuable dollars and jobs flow overseas.

The data shows a small, 1 percent growth in US exports for 2014, though the domestic oil and gas boom accounts for much of that. US manufacturing exports fell by more than $5 billion in 2014, and the US goods trade deficit rose to $736.8 billion. (More on that number in a minute; it doesn’t tell the full story.) There’s a simple explanation for the widening trade deficit: the US dollar is strong, and there’s weak growth overseas, which would naturally depress exports. But congressional critics of the TPP seized on a broader point on Thursday morning—robust promises about the benefits of past trade deals have turned out to be empty. “We signed those trade deals, and the result has been the opposite,” said Representative Rosa DeLauro on a Thursday morning conference call with reporters. “The administration continues to pursue the same failed policies of the past several years.”

Of particular note is the increasing trade deficit with Korea, which increased a whopping 20 percent in 2014, to $25.1 billion. Obama signed a free-trade agreement with Korea during his first term, calling the deal “a major win for American workers and businesses,” and it took effect in early 2012. But the US goods trade deficit with Korea was 81 percent higher in 2014 than in 2011. That translates to a loss of 74,000 jobs, by the administration’s own metrics for measuring job gains from trade. “[The new information] basically confirms a lot of our suspicions, and our positions and votes over the years about how these trade agreements have really been a bad deal for the American worker,” said Representative Tim Ryan.

Geopolitically, China has also tweaked its model, but the West, especially the US, has barely noticed it. Essentially, the Beijing leadership finally got fed up with trying to manage a possible reset of the China-US strategic relationship, and be treated as an equal. Exceptionalists don’t do equality. So Beijing came up with its own response to the Obama administration’s political/military “pivot to Asia” – originally announced, and that’s quite significant, at the Pentagon. Thus, in late November 2014, during the Central Foreign Affairs Work Conference in Beijing, President Xi Jinping made an earth-shattering announcement; from now on China would stop treating the US – and the EU – as its main strategic priority. The new focus is on the fellow BRICS group of emerging powers, especially Russia; Asian neighbors; and top nations of the Global South, referred to as “major developing powers” (kuoda fazhanzhong de guojia). This is not as much a Chinese pivot to Asia as a Chinese pivot to selected nations in the Global South. And based on a “new type of international relations centered on ‘win-win’ cooperation” – not the bully-or-bomb exceptionalist approach.

China’s new foreign policy and strategic configuration is all the more evident in the courting of Asian neighbors, invited to embark on China’s extremely ambitious twin strategy and the greatest trade/commerce story of the young 21st century: the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, in short “Belt and Road initiative,” as it’s known in China, now officially launched with the first $40 billion attributed to a Silk Road Fund. The enormity of the challenge is on a par with Beijing’s ambition: a pan-Eurasia trade/commerce utopia weaved by high-speed rail, fiber optic networks, ports and pipelines, and connecting East Asia, Central Asia, Russia, the Middle East and Europe.

Plenty to be excited about then as the Year of the Sheep (or Goat) starts. What’s certain is that the Chinese caravan, much in contrast with the dogs of war - and austerity – pivoting across the West, has already pivoted towards “win-win” pan-Eurasia integration.

In a rare move, the European Parliament (EP) recently adopted a strongly worded resolution condemning human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia by a vote of 460 to 153. The focus of the resolution was Raif Badawi, a blogger that the Saudi authorities charged with blasphemy and sentenced to 1,000 lashes, 10 years of prison, and a 228,000 euro fine for founding a liberal website. But the resolution took a broader view on the human rights situation in Saudi Arabia. The European MPs didn´t mince words. Although they took note of some cautious reforms undertaken by the late king Abdullah, they charged that the Saudi political and social system “remains profoundly undemocratic, makes women and Shia Muslims second-class citizens, seriously discriminates against the country’s large foreign workforce and severely represses all voices of dissent.” They portrayed the Badawi case “as a symbol of the Kingdom’s characteristic policies of intolerance and extremist interpretation of Islamic law.” In particularly damning paragraphs, the EP took Saudi Arabia to task for playing “a leading role in financing, disseminating and promoting worldwide a particularly extremist interpretation of Islam, which, in its most sectarian vision, has inspired terrorist organisations such as the so-called Islamic State and al‑Qaeda.” In language that is certain to provoke Riyadh´s ire, the MPs noted that the so-called Islamic State (ISIS or IS) and Saudi Arabia prescribe near-identical punishments for a host of crimes, and that Saudi claims to be a partner to the EU in fighting IS and al-Qaeda would have been more credible “if it did not engage in anachronistic and extremist practices, such as public beheadings, stoning and other forms of torture, similar to those committed by IS.”

By way of conclusion, the MPs asked the EU and the Member States “to reconsider their relationship with Saudi Arabia, in a way that allows it to pursue its economic, energy and security interests, whilst not undermining the credibility of its core human rights commitments.” This unprecedented criticism of Saudi Arabia, officially an “ally,” by a EU institution contrasts with the relatively milder treatment accorded to Iran, an official “foe” and Saudi Arabia´s regional antagonist. In its last resolution adopted in May 2014, the EP criticized Iran for its human rights abuses, but the overall tone was much more positive, highlighting an array of possible areas of cooperation.

the EP resolution sends an important political message. In the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris and Copenhagen, it echoes a growing realization among policymakers, diplomats, and the wider security community that Saudi Arabia´s track record of supporting extremist groups may be a root cause of the terrorist threat, while Iran´s opposition to IS and al-Qaeda could help Europe tackle this threat. The prospects for regional cooperation with Iran in countering IS, al-Qaeda, and also the Taliban, are a staple of think-tank conferences in Europe these days. The idea of Iran´s potentially stabilizing role in the region is becoming mainstream.

The United States has found a way to permanently embed surveillance and sabotage tools in computers and networks it has targeted in Iran, Russia, Pakistan, China, Afghanistan and other countries closely watched by American intelligence agencies, according to a Russian cybersecurity firm.In a presentation of its findings at a conference in Mexico on Monday, Kaspersky Lab, the Russian firm, said that the implants had been placed by what it called the “Equation Group,” which appears to be a veiled reference to the National Security Agency and its military counterpart, United States Cyber Command.

It linked the techniques to those used in Stuxnet, the computer worm that disabled about 1,000 centrifuges in Iran’s nuclear enrichment program. It was later revealed that Stuxnet was part of a program code-named Olympic Games and run jointly by Israel and the United States.Kaspersky’s report said that Olympic Games had similarities to a much broader effort to infect computers well beyond those in Iran. It detected particularly high infection rates in computers in Iran, Pakistan and Russia, three countries whose nuclear programs the United States routinely monitors.

Some of the implants burrow so deep into the computer systems, Kaspersky said, that they infect the “firmware,” the embedded software that preps the computer’s hardware before the operating system starts. It is beyond the reach of existing antivirus products and most security controls, Kaspersky reported, making it virtually impossible to wipe out.

As a reaction to the highly unanticipated speech of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Congress, next month, the White House is reportedly planning a series of procedures in reaction to the unwelcome visit.

A source in the White House reported to the Associated Press that one of the possible procedures being considered is a boycott of the pro-Israel lobby, AIPAC, which is holding its annual meeting while Netanyahu is in Washington. The procedures, PNN reports, could also involve a presidential interview with a prominent journalist known for coverage of the rift between Obama and Netanyahu, and multiple Sunday show television appearances by senior national security officials to talk about the US stance on Iran's nuclear program. The White House is also considering stiff strategies, including dispatching Cabinet members out of the country and sending a lower-ranking official to represent the administration at the annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

Netanyahu's plan for a March 3 address to a joint meeting of Congress has further strained already tense ties between the US and Israel. Congressional Republicans orchestrated Netanyahu's visit without consulting the White House or State Department, a move the Obama administration blasted as a break in diplomatic protocol. Some Democratic lawmakers say they will boycott the speech.

Recent talks with the Syrian government and opposition resulted in the first adoption of a joint agreement between the government and the opposition, prompting UN Special Envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura to stress that the international community should pay more attention to Moscow’s efforts.  Speaking to the British The Independent, de Mistura said that it is time for the world to listen more closely to Russia with regard to Moscow’s effort to broker a peaceful resolution to the four-year-long conflict that has cost more than 210,000 lives and caused an unprecedented rise in Islamist terrorism.

De Mistura stressed the long-standing ties between Damascus and Moscow and added that Russia cannot manage to bring about a peaceful resolution without the help of others. Last week Moscow hosted talks between representatives of the Syrian government and the opposition, including the first direct talks. The head of the Syrian government’s delegation and Syrian UN Envoy Dr. Bashar al-Jaafari described the outcome of the talks as positive and confirmed the adoption of a joint document entitled “An Assessment of the Situation in Syria”. The talks were facilitated by Vitaly Naumkin who is the Director of the Institute of Oriental Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences.  Naumkin stressed that it was the first time that the two sides managed to unanimously adopt a document of political character, reports the Russian Tass news agency. The document reportedly contains provisions on resolving the Syrian crisis based on the principles of the June 30, 2012 Geneva Communique and the UN Security Council’s resolution on the fight against terrorism. It envisions the lifting of all restrictive economic measures against Syria and the international community’s assistance in repatriating refugees.

It also stipulates that the inter-Syrian dialog must be conducted without foreign interference, stressing that this would be the only way to resolve the crisis peacefully. Both the Syrian government, Syrian political parties and civil society organizations have repeatedly stressed that everybody who renounces violence and vouches for the territorial integrity of Syria is welcome to participate in Syria’s political discourse, constitutionally, and on equal terms with others. Last week the head of the foreign-based opposition, Qadri Jamil, said that the opposition would apply to the UN to arrange a Geneva III conference to continue the work toward a peaceful settlement. Both the “opposition” as well as the government and Syrian self-defense forces have increasingly been pressed by the advance of ISIS. Meanwhile, the United States is preparing its “train and equip” program in Turkey which will work towards launching more so-called “moderate rebels” into Syria. In 2014 some 5,000 of these “moderate rebels” would join the ranks of the Islamic State.

If Elizabeth Warren ran for president, a key part of her campaign—if not the centerpiece—would likely involve how to restructure the financial sector in a less dangerous and more productive way. Dodd-Frank was by many accounts a good start, but it’s clear the economy is still over-financialized and too-big-to-fail banks continue to pose an existential threat. Warren isn’t running for president, but she unveiled that exact agenda in a sweeping speech Wednesday in a conference at the Levy Institute in Washington. It advocated an array of specific, often ambitious policy proposals, many of which have circulated in Washington for years and that Warren, at various times, has already called for. But tied together in one place, and packaged as a clear call for structural and not just technocratic changes, a blueprint emerged for how Warren thinks Democrats should attack continued financial reform. Whether purposeful or not, the speech was timed exactly to start of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Her ideas fit into four basic categories: first, getting tougher on bad financial actors, particularly big banks, and presenting them with actual legal accountability for malfeasance. Second, Warren outlined how to change the basic structure of the country’s largest financial institutions so their very existence doesn’t threaten the economy nor taxpayer money via inevitable bailouts. Third, she outlined how to change tax policies that incentivize financial risk-taking and instability. And finally, Warren called for tougher regulations on the shadow-banking sector that was a huge contributor to the 2008 crash and which remained largely untouched by Dodd-Frank.

13 June 2009

The city of Yakaterinburg, Russia’s largest east of the Urals, may become known not only as the death place of the tsars but of American hegemony too – and not only where US U-2 pilot Gary Powers was shot down in 1960, but where the US-centered international financial order was brought to ground. Challenging America will be the prime focus of extended meetings in Yekaterinburg, Russia (formerly Sverdlovsk) today and tomorrow (June 15-16) for Chinese President Hu Jintao, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and other top officials of the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). The alliance is comprised of Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrghyzstan and Uzbekistan, with observer status for Iran, India, Pakistan and Mongolia. It will be joined on Tuesday by Brazil for trade discussions among the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India and China).      The attendees have assured American diplomats that dismantling the US financial and military empire is not their aim. They simply want to discuss mutual aid – but in a way that has no role for the United States, NATO or the US dollar as a vehicle for trade. US diplomats may well ask what this really means, if not a move to make US hegemony obsolete. That is what a multipolar world means, after all. For starters, in 2005 the SCO asked Washington to set a timeline to withdraw from its military bases in Central Asia. Two years later the SCO countries formally aligned themselves with the former CIS republics belonging to the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), established in 2002 as a counterweight to NATO. 

Challenging America will be the prime focus of extended meetings in Yekaterinburg, Russia (formerly Sverdlovsk) today and tomorrow (June 15-16) for Chinese President Hu Jintao, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and other top officials of the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). The alliance is comprised of Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrghyzstan and Uzbekistan, with observer status for Iran, India, Pakistan and Mongolia. It will be joined on Tuesday by Brazil for trade discussions among the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India and China).    

White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough made clear in a speech to a left-leaning Israel advocacy group that President Barack Obama isn’t letting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu off the hook for his dismissal of a two-state solution. That stance, as well as Netanyahu’s suggestion also made in the closing days before last week’s Israeli elections that he’d approved settlements in contested territory in Jerusalem for the strategic purpose of changing the borders are “so very troubling,” McDonough told J Street’s annual conference in Washington. He called the pro-Israel group, which opposes some of Netanyahu’s policies, “our partner.” Story Continued Below McDonough added that the White House isn’t impressed by Netanyahu’s efforts since last Tuesday to backtrack on what he meant when he said there wouldn’t be a Palestinian state established so long as he’s prime minister. “We cannot simply pretend that these comments were never made,” McDonough said.

McDonough said the Obama administration is well aware of the regional security problems Netanyahu referenced in explaining why he didn’t see a two-state solution as an imminent possibility. But he said Obama does not believe that is or could be reason to back off talks — and this is not simply matter of personal “pique” about Netanyahu, the chief of staff said. “The United States will never stop working for a two-state solution and a lasting peace that Israelis and Palestinians so richly deserve,” he said. McDonough then described the alternate to a two-state agreement: a one-state solution based on unilateral annexation and abandonment of democratic rights for Palestinians that, he warned, “would only contribute to Israel’s further isolation.” In other words, he said, more divestment, boycotts and efforts to delegitimize Israel in the international community. “An occupation that has lasted more than 50 years must end,” McDonough said, one of several times he brought the crowd to its feet.

PRESIDENT OBAMA:

But I am required to evaluate honestly how we manage Israeli-Palestinian relations over the next several years.  Because up until this point, the premise has been, both under Republican and Democratic administrations, that as different as it was, as challenging as it was, the possibility of two states living side by side in peace and security could marginalize more extreme elements, bring together folks at the center and with some common sense, and we could resolve what has been a vexing issue and one that is ultimately a threat to Israel as well. And that possibility seems very dim.  That may trigger, then, reactions by the Palestinians that, in turn, elicit counter-reactions by the Israelis.  And that could end up leading to a downward spiral of relations that will be dangerous for everybody and bad for everybody. So, bottom line, just to summarize here -- number one, our military and intelligence cooperation with Israel will continue unabated, unaffected, and we are absolutely committed to making sure that the Israeli people are safe, particularly from rocket attacks and terrorist attacks aimed on civilians.

I don't think anybody ever envisioned in any peace agreement, certainly not one that Prime Minister Netanyahu would agree to, or that the Israeli people would agree to, that overnight you suddenly have a Palestinian state right next to Jerusalem and that Israel would not have a whole range of security conditions that had to be met, and that it would be phased in over a long period of time. So the issue has never been, do you create a Palestinian state overnight.  The question is, do you create a process and a framework that gives the Palestinians hope, the possibility, that down the road they have a secure state of their own, standing side-by-side with a secure, fully recognized Jewish state of Israel.  And I think -- it's not just my estimation -- I think it’s hard to envision how that happens based on the Prime Minister’s statements.  And so, when I said that we have to now do an evaluation of where we are, it's not in reference to our commitment to Israel’s military edge in the region, Israel’s security, our intelligence cooperation, our military cooperation.  That continues unabated.  And I will continue to do whatever I need to do to make sure that our friends in Israel are safe.  That's what I've done since I've been President, and that's not going to stop.  And so the Israeli people need to know that.

The “proxy war” model the US has been employing throughout the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and even in parts of Asia appears to have failed yet again, this time in the Persian Gulf state of Yemen. Overcoming the US-Saudi backed regime in Yemen, and a coalition of sectarian extremists including Al Qaeda and its rebrand, the “Islamic State,” pro-Iranian Yemeni Houthi militias have turned the tide against American “soft power” and has necessitated a more direct military intervention. While US military forces themselves are not involved allegedly, Saudi warplanes and a possible ground force are. Though Saudi Arabia claims “10 countries” have joined its coalition to intervene in Yemen, like the US invasion and occupation of Iraq hid behind a “coalition,” it is overwhelmingly a Saudi operation with “coalition partners” added in a vain attempt to generate diplomatic legitimacy. The New York Times, even in the title of its report, “Saudi Arabia Begins Air Assault in Yemen,” seems not to notice these “10” other countries. It reports:

Saudi Arabia announced on Wednesday night that it had launched a military campaign in Yemen, the beginning of what a Saudi official said was an offensive to restore a Yemeni government that had collapsed after rebel forces took control of large swaths of the country.  The air campaign began as the internal conflict in Yemen showed signs of degenerating into a proxy war between regional powers. The Saudi announcement came during a rare news conference in Washington by Adel al-Jubeir, the kingdom’s ambassador to the United States.

Indeed, the conflict in Yemen is a proxy war. Not between Iran and Saudi Arabia per say, but between Iran and the United States, with the United States electing Saudi Arabia as its unfortunate stand-in. Iran’s interest in Yemen serves as a direct result of the US-engineered “Arab Spring” and attempts to overturn the political order of North Africa and the Middle East to create a unified sectarian front against Iran for the purpose of a direct conflict with Tehran. The war raging in Syria is one part of this greater geopolitical conspiracy, aimed at overturning one of Iran’s most important regional allies, cutting the bridge between it and another important ally, Hezbollah in Lebanon. And while Iran’s interest in Yemen is currently portrayed as yet another example of Iranian aggression, indicative of its inability to live in peace with its neighbors, US policymakers themselves have long ago already noted that Iran’s influence throughout the region, including backing armed groups, serves a solely defensive purpose, acknowledging the West and its regional allies’ attempts to encircle, subvert, and overturn Iran’s current political order.

Silicon Valley and a bipartisan group of lawmakers are lining up against the Obama administration, criticizing what they see as a lack of support for total online privacy.The steady rise of sophisticated privacy techniques such as encryption and anonymity software has put the government in a difficult position — trying to support the right to privacy while figuring out how to prevent people from evading law enforcement.ADVERTISEMENT“The technologies are evolving in ways that potentially make this trickier,” President Obama said during a January news conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron.The conundrum has led to a heated debate in Washington: Should law enforcement have guaranteed access to data?

The Obama administration — from officials with FBI and the National Security Agency (NSA) to the president himself — has come out in favor of some form of guaranteed access while still endorsing strong encryption.“If we get into a situation in which the technologies do not allow us at all to track somebody that we're confident is a terrorist,” Obama said, “that's a problem.”What shape that access takes, however, is unclear.“The dialogue that we're engaged in is designed to make sure that all of us feel confident that if there is an actual threat out there, our law enforcement and our intelligence officers can identify that threat and track that threat at the same time that our governments are not going around phishing into whatever text you might be sending on your smartphone,” Obama said. “And I think that's something that can be achieved.”Privacy hawks on Capitol Hill aren’t buying it.

“I don’t think much of that,” Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), co-founder of the Congressional Bipartisan Privacy Caucus, told The Hill. “We have a huge homeland security apparatus with almost unlimited authority to — with some sort of a reasonable suspicion — check almost any type of communication, whether it’s voice, Internet, telephonic, electronic, you name it.”“Those were positions that did not receive rave reviews here in Silicon Valley,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), whose district includes parts of tech-heavy San Jose.Many believe the administration’s stance is inherently at odds with robust digital protection.“In order to fully implement what he's suggesting, you would need one of two things,” Lofgren said.One would be installing so-called “backdoors” in encryption — an access point known only to law enforcement agencies. Security experts find this concept abhorrent, since cyber crooks or foreign intelligence agencies would likely exploit it.

Arab League member states agreed to establish a joint Arab military force within four months, in which participation will be optional, according to the outcome document following the 26th Arab League summit in Sharm al-Sheikh.

The outcome document also announced its official support of the Saudi-lead military operation Resolute Storm in Yemen against Shiite Houthi forces; it also demanded their withdrawal from the capital of Sanaa and to return power to “legitimate authorities.” Shokry added in news conference that the the proposed military force is separate from intervention in Yemen.

The Pentagon’s top two leaders on Tuesday decried as “outrageous” an Army judge’s nine-month-old ban on female guards touching the five alleged 9/11 conspirators as they move them to and from court and legal meetings.Secretary of Defense Ash Carter and Gen. Joseph Dunford Jr., chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, criticized the ban in response to a question from New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in Washington, D.C. Ayotte and two other GOP senators visited the prison Friday, and said they met with female guards upset by the restriction.

“I think it is counter to the way we treat service members, including women service members, and outrage is a very good word for it,” Carter said, incorrectly attributing the ban to a federal judge — not the chief of the war court judiciary, Army Col. James L. Pohl.The five alleged Sept. 11 plotters complained through their lawyers last year that Islamic and traditional doctrine require they have no physical contact with women other than family members. They claimed that, until a year ago, prison commanders had provided the religious accommodation of not being touched by female soldiers.

Pentagon-paid U.S. defense attorneys got Pohl to issue an emergency, temporary restraining order against the use of female guards in January, pending testimony and legal arguments on the subject.As it happens, Pohl has listed the ban on this week’s docket for pretrial hearings in the case of the five men facing a joint death-penalty trial as the alleged plotters of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. Whether it would actually be heard, however, was unclear because the majority of the current session’s 40-item agenda has been sidelined by one alleged plotter’s interest in functioning as his own defense attorney.

The Pentagon says Master Sgt. Joshua Wheeler, the Delta Force soldier who died last week in a hostage rescue mission in Iraq, was the first U.S. service member killed in action in the ISIS war. But Wheeler was not the first combat casualty. Five other service members have been “wounded in action” since the U.S. first sent troops back into Iraq last year, according to statistics from the Pentagon and interviews with officials in Iraq (PDF). But how and when they were injured, the Pentagon refuses to say.As the Obama administration holds to the increasingly dubious claim that U.S. troops are not engaged in combat against the self-proclaimed Islamic State, the Pentagon is withholding details about its wounded that would give key insights into the kind of fight American troops are facing in Iraq. Were any of the five shot by the Iraqi forces they are training? Did a mortar round shot at their base injure a soldier? Has ISIS wounded a U.S. service member?According to U.S. Central Command, which oversees military action in the region, the details of the wounded are not available, despite repeated requests for such basic information. The only specifics available are from a Washington Post story, which reported the first service member was wounded in March, just south of Baghdad, while in a guard tower. He was struck in the face by bullet fragments, according to the report, while coming under enemy fire.

In announcing that the U.S. would fight ISIS, Obama was adamant the U.S. could “degrade and ultimately destroy” ISIS without U.S. combat troops. But the number of troops has slowly increased since that September 2014 pronouncement, from a few hundreds advisers to thousands of troops, at least some of them conducting combat missions. During a June 2014 press conference, Obama stressed that Americans would not be at risk: “I think we always have to guard against mission creep, so let me repeat what I’ve said in the past: American combat troops are not going to be fighting in Iraq again.”

That the administration does not publicly admit that troops are in combat has stung many in uniform who feel such distinctions are insulting. That’s particularly true in the halls of the Pentagon, filled with war veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, where the consensus is: “If I am being shot at by enemy forces, I am in combat.”On paper at least, the U.S. military treats the troops serving in Iraq as if they are in a war zone. American service members in Iraq receive hazardous-duty pay, a gun, and live ammunition—standard fare for troops in combat.

IN A MEETING with President Obama today, Benjamin Netanyahu went through the familiar motions of expressing rhetorical support for a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Stating, “I remain committed to a vision of peace of two states for two peoples,” Netanyahu said that he wanted “make it clear that we have not given up our hope,” for achieving a two-state solution to the conflict. Just a day before this statement, however, the Israeli government took steps to ensure such a vision could never become reality, moving to authorize the construction of an additional 2,200 housing units in the occupied territories in the face of Palestinian opposition. The reason behind this apparent discrepancy between word and deed is that Netanyahu does not, and has essentially never, supported the creation of an actual Palestinian state. Last year, during the Israeli election, Netanyahu briefly acknowledged this fact himself, explicitly stating to voters that there would not be a Palestinian state during his tenure as prime minister if he was reelected. Despite this, the convenient fiction that the Israeli prime minister supports a “two-state solution” continues to linger in the United States. Why?

In 2009, however, that began to change. In June of that year, newly elected President Barack Obama, who had made rebuilding ties with the Muslim world a part of his foreign policy platform, gave a landmark speech in Cairo in which he said the United States “does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements,” going on to describe them as contrary to previous agreements and an impediment to peace in the region. Israeli media would report at the time that Obama’s words “resonated through Jerusalem’s corridors.” In seeming recognition of shifting American sentiments on this issue, 10 days later Netanyahu gave what was billed as a landmark speech at Bar-Ilan University near Tel-Aviv, dealing in part with the subject of Palestinian statehood. In his address, hailed by the White House as an “important step forward,” Netanyahu endorsed for the first time the creation of what he called “a demilitarized Palestinian state” in the occupied territories. But the same speech added stipulations that, in sum, turned this so-called state into a rebranded version of Netanyahu’s 2000 “Palestinian entity,” with only limited autonomy. In private, just three months before the speech, Netanyahu was even more blunt about the limits he required for a more independent Palestinian territory, stipulating he could only support one “without an army or control over air space and borders,” according to diplomatic cables later released by WikiLeaks.

In a speech two years later to Congress, Netanyahu would go into more detail about the ridiculous conception of Palestinian “statehood” he was imagining, one in which the West Bank would be essentially bifurcated by massive Israeli settlement blocs, the prospective Palestinian capital of East Jerusalem would be surrounded by settlements, and the Israeli Defense Forces would continue to have “a long-term military presence” inside the newly independent “state.” Needless to say, such a proposal was unlikely ever to be accepted by the Palestinians, nor did it bear much resemblance to the independent statehood they had actually been seeking. Netanyahu let the mask drop even further in July 2014, when he stated in a press conference that “there cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan,” essentially outlining a position of permanent military occupation of Palestinian territories. In the run-up to the 2015 election, when he publicly disowned the idea of Palestinian statehood, Netanyahu would specifically repudiate his 2009 Bar-Ilan speech, stating that “there will be no withdrawals and no concessions,” and that the speech was “not relevant.” As recently as last week, Netanyahu told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that “we need to control all of the territory for the foreseeable future,” before adding darkly that Israel “will forever live by the sword.”

“Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination,” reads UN General Assembly Resolution 3379. The measure was adopted 40 years ago, on Nov. 10, 1975, and the majority of the international community backed it. 72 countries voted for the resolution, with just 35 opposed (and 32 abstentions). Although little-known in the US today (it is remarkable how effectively the US and its allies have rewritten history in their favor), UN GA Res. 3379, titled “Elimination of all forms of racial discrimination,” made an indelible imprint on history. The geographic distribution of the vote was telling. The countries that voted against the resolution were primarily colonial powers and/or their allies. The countries that voted for it were overwhelmingly formerly colonized and anti-imperialist nations.

The resolution also cited two other little-known measures passed by international organizations in the same year: the Assembly of the Heads of State and Government of the Organization of African Unity’s resolution 77, which ruled “that the racist regime in occupied Palestine and the racist regimes in Zimbabwe and South Africa have a common imperialist origin, forming a whole and having the same racist structure”; and the Political Declaration and Strategy to Strengthen International Peace and Security and to Intensify Solidarity and Mutual Assistance among Non-Aligned Countries, which called Zionism a “racist and imperialist ideology.” When the resolution was passed, Israeli Ambassador to the UN Chaim Herzog — who later became Israel’s sixth president, and the father of Isaac Herzog, the head of Israel’s opposition — famously tore up the text at the podium. Herzog claimed the measure was “based on hatred, falsehood, and arrogance,” insisting it was “devoid of any moral or legal value.” Still today, supporters of Israel argue UN GA Res. 3379 was an anomalous product of anti-Semitism. In reality, however, the resolution was the result of international condemnation of the illegal military occupation to which Palestinians had been subjected since 1967 and the apartheid-like conditions the indigenous Arab population had lived under as second-class citizens of an ethnocratic state since 1948.

In 1991, resolution 3379 was repealed for two primary reasons: One, the Soviet bloc, which helped pass the resolution, had collapsed; and two, Israel and the US demanded that it be revoked or they refused to participate in the Madrid Peace Conference. At the UN on Nov. 11, US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power and Secretary of State John Kerry eulogized the late Herzog and forcefully condemned the resolution on its 40th anniversary. In his 2,500-word statement, Kerry mentioned Palestinians just once, and only then as an extension of Israelis. In her remarks, Power did not mention Palestinians at all.

Microsoft's new plan to keep the US government's hands off its customers' data: Germany will be a safe harbor in the digital privacy storm. Microsoft on Wednesday announced that beginning in the second half of 2016, it will give foreign customers the option of keeping data in new European facilities that, at least in theory, should shield customers from US government surveillance. It will cost more, according to the Financial Times, though pricing details weren't forthcoming. Microsoft Cloud - including Azure, Office 365 and Dynamics CRM Online - will be hosted from new datacenters in the German regions of Magdeburg and Frankfurt am Main. Access to data will be controlled by what the company called a German data trustee: T-Systems, a subsidiary of the independent German company Deutsche Telekom. Without the permission of Deutsche Telekom or customers, Microsoft won't be able to get its hands on the data. If it does get permission, the trustee will still control and oversee Microsoft's access.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella dropped the word "trust" into the company's statement: Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every individual on the planet to achieve more. Our new datacenter regions in Germany, operated in partnership with Deutsche Telekom, will not only spur local innovation and growth, but offer customers choice and trust in how their data is handled and where it is stored.

On Tuesday, at the Future Decoded conference in London, Nadella also announced that Microsoft would, for the first time, be opening two UK datacenters next year. The company's also expanding its existing operations in Ireland and the Netherlands. Officially, none of this has anything to do with the long-drawn-out squabbling over the transatlantic Safe Harbor agreement, which the EU's highest court struck down last month, calling the agreement "invalid" because it didn't protect data from US surveillance. No, Nadella said, the new datacenters and expansions are all about giving local businesses and organizations "transformative technology they need to seize new global growth." But as Diginomica reports, Microsoft EVP of Cloud and Enterprise Scott Guthrie followed up his boss’s comments by saying that yes, the driver behind the new datacenters is to let customers keep data close: We can guarantee customers that their data will always stay in the UK. Being able to very concretely tell that story is something that I think will accelerate cloud adoption further in the UK.

Washington continues making an international fool of herself by her inability to effectively counter the impression around the world that Russia, spending less than 10% of the Pentagon annually on defense, has managed to do more against ISIS in Syria in six weeks than the mighty US Air Force bombing campaign has done in almost a year and half. One aspect that bears attention is the demonstration by the Russian military of new technologies that belie the widely-held Western notion that Russia is little more than a backward oil and raw material commodity exporter. Recent reorganization of the Russian state military industrial complex as well as reorganization of the Soviet-era armed forces under Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu’s term are visible in the success so far of Russia’s ISIS and other terror strikes across Syria. Clearly Russian military capabilities have undergone a sea-change since the Soviet Cold War era. In war there are never winners. Yet Russia has been in an unwanted war with Washington de facto since the George W. Bush Administration announced its lunatic plan to place what they euphemistically term “Ballistic Missile Defense” missiles and advanced radar in Poland, Czech Republic, Romania and Turkey after 2007. Without going into detail, BMD technologies are the opposite of defensive. They instead make a pre-emptive war highly likely. Of course the radioactive ash heap in such an exchange would be first and foremost the EU countries foolish enough to invite US BMD to their soil.

What the Russian General Staff has managed, since the precision air campaign began September 30, has stunned western defense planners with Russian technological feats not expected. Two specific technologies are worth looking at more closely: The Russian Sukoi SU-34 fighter-bomber and what is called the Bumblebee hyperbaric mortar weapon.

The plane responsible for some of the most damaging strikes on ISIS and other terror enclaves in Syria is manufactured by the Russian state aircraft industry under the name Sukhoi SU-34. As the Russian news agency RIA Novosti described the aircraft, “The Su-34 is meant to deliver a sufficiently large ordnance load to a predetermined area, hit the target accurately and take evasive action against pursuing enemy planes.” The plane is also designed to deal with enemy fighters in aerial combat such as the US F-16. The SU-34 made a first test flight in 1990 as the collapse of the Soviet Union and the chaos of the Yeltsin years caused many delays. Finally in 2010 the plane was in full production. According to a report in US Defense Industry Daily, among the SU-34 features are: • 8 ton ordnance load which can accommodate precision-guided weapons, as well as R-73/AA-11 Archer and R-77/AA-12 ‘AMRAAMSKI’ missiles and an internal 30mm GSh-301 gun. • Maximum speed of Mach 1.8 at altitude.