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Paul Merrell

Asia Times Online :: US neo-cons despair over Iran diplomacy - 0 views

www.atimes.com/...MID-02-091013.html

war & peace U.S. foreign policy Iran Iranian nukes myth neocons

shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Last week began with a blistering denunciation by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Iranian duplicity and ended with diminished prospects for Israel to take direct action to address Iran's nuclear capabilities ."The Israelis find themselves in a far worse position now than they have been for several years," concluded Elliott Abrams, a leading neo-conservative who served as George W Bush's main Middle East adviser, in Foreign Affairs. While Israel could still attack Iran's nuclear sites on its own, "[i]ts ability to do so is already being narrowed considerably by the diplomatic thaw" between Iran and the United States, Abrams wrote. "It is one thing to bomb Iran when it appears hopelessly <a href='http://asianmedia.com/GAAN/www/delivery/ck.php?n=a9473bc7&cb=%n' target='_blank'><img src='http://asianmedia.com/GAAN/www/delivery/avw.php?zoneid=36&cb=%n&n=a9473bc7&ct0=%c' border='0' alt='' ></a> recalcitrant and isolated and quite another to bomb it when much of the world - especially the United States - is optimistic about the prospects of talks." Abrams' assessment was widely shared among his ideological comrades who believe Israel will be the big loser if hopes for detente between Washington and Tehran gather steam after next week's meeting in Geneva between Iran and the P5+1 (the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China plus Germany).
  • Gary Sick, an Iran expert who served on the National Security Council under presidents Ford, Carter and Reagan, told IPS that neo-conservatives' recent outpouring of defiance and despair constituted "the most convincing evidence I have seen to date that the die-hard supporters of sabotaging an agreement between the US and Iran are in full defensive mode".
  • A week before Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif is expected to sit down with his P5+1 interlocutors in Geneva, Netanyahu and supporters in Washington face a diplomatic and political environment distinctly different from that of just five weeks ago. That environment is defined above all by a pervasive war-weariness among the US electorate, clearly indicated by strong public support for Obama's choice of diplomacy over missile strikes to dismantle Syria's chemical weapons arsenal.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • According to Ignatius, Washington's engagement with Russia over Syria and Iran over its nuclear program presents a "great strategic opportunity" which critics are wrong to see as "signs of American weakness or even capitulation". "The United States will be stronger if it can create a new framework for security in the Middle East that involves Iran and defuses the Sunni-Shiite sectarian conflict threatening the region," and that "accommodates the security needs of Iranians, Saudis, Israelis, Russians and Americans." But such accommodation is anathema to Netanyahu and his neo-conservative supporters, who insist on Israeli primacy in the Middle East and depict its competition with Iran as a zero-sum proposition that cannot be compromised.
  • Paul Merrell on 10 Oct 13
     
    Nice to see the NeoCons and Zionists on the defensive for a change. 
Paul Merrell

Tomgram: Engelhardt, A Record of Unparalleled Failure | TomDispatch - 0 views

www.tomdispatch.com/...record_of_unparalleled_failure

war & peace U.S.-foreign-policy military-failure

shared by Paul Merrell on 11 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • The United States has been at war -- major boots-on-the-ground conflicts and minor interventions, firefights, air strikes, drone assassination campaigns, occupations, special ops raids, proxy conflicts, and covert actions -- nearly nonstop since the Vietnam War began.  That’s more than half a century of experience with war, American-style, and yet few in our world bother to draw the obvious conclusions. Given the historical record, those conclusions should be staring us in the face.  They are, however, the words that can’t be said in a country committed to a military-first approach to the world, a continual build-up of its forces, an emphasis on pioneering work in the development and deployment of the latest destructive technology, and a repetitious cycling through styles of war from full-scale invasions and occupations to counterinsurgency, proxy wars, and back again. So here are five straightforward lessons -- none acceptable in what passes for discussion and debate in this country -- that could be drawn from that last half century of every kind of American warfare:
  • 1. No matter how you define American-style war or its goals, it doesn’t work. Ever. 2. No matter how you pose the problems of our world, it doesn’t solve them. Never. 3. No matter how often you cite the use of military force to “stabilize” or “protect” or “liberate” countries or regions, it is a destabilizing force. 4. No matter how regularly you praise the American way of war and its “warriors,” the U.S. military is incapable of winning its wars. 5. No matter how often American presidents claim that the U.S. military is “the finest fighting force in history,” the evidence is in: it isn’t.
  • And here’s a bonus lesson: if as a polity we were to take these five no-brainers to heart and stop fighting endless wars, which drain us of national treasure, we would also have a long-term solution to the Veterans Administration health-care crisis.  It’s not the sort of thing said in our world, but the VA is in a crisis of financing and caregiving that, in the present context, cannot be solved, no matter whom you hire or fire.  The only long-term solution would be to stop fighting losing wars that the American people will pay for decades into the future, as the cost in broken bodies and broken lives is translated into medical care and dumped on the VA.
Paul Merrell

The 28 Pages and the War on Terror: Is Congress in a State of Willful Ignorance? | 28 Pages.org - 0 views

28pages.org/...n-a-state-of-willful-ignorance

war & peace 9-11 28-pages ISIL Syria Iraq

shared by Paul Merrell on 15 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • Today more than ever, Americans are struggling to unravel the Gordian knot of overt and covert alliances that comprise the Middle East’s geostrategic landscape. As they do, politicians and pundits constantly remind them that reaching the correct conclusions about the region is imperative if we are to thwart the menace of terrorism and prevent the next 9/11.
  • On January 8th of this year, by way of a “Dear Colleague” letter, Jones and Massachusetts Congressman Stephen Lynch urged every one of their fellow House representatives to read the 28 pages for themselves. Among those who heeded their call was Rep. Massie. At a March 11 press conference in which he joined Jones and Lynch in imploring peers to examine the redacted finding, Massie offered a striking description of his reaction to the revelations within the 28 pages, saying: “It was a really disturbing event for me to read those. I had to stop every two or three pages and rearrange my perception of history. And it’s that fundamental…it certainly changes your view of the Middle East.”
  • For everyday Americans, ignorance about what lies within the 28 pages is imposed; for apparently far too many in Congress, that ignorance is willful. You see—unlike the citizens they represent—when it comes to reading or not reading the 28 pages, legislators enjoy the luxury of a choice: After securing permission through their respective intelligence committee, representatives and senators can venture into a guarded, soundproof room at the Capitol and read the classified findings on foreign government assistance to the 9/11 hijackers in their entirety. Astonishingly—given what’s at stake for the country and for the lives of servicemembers and civilians alike—there are indications only a slim minority have bothered to do so. Rep. Walter Jones North Carolina’s Walter Jones is one congressman who did take the initiative to learn what lies in the 28 pages. Later, he said, “I was absolutely shocked by what I read. What was so surprising was that those whom we thought we could trust really disappointed me.” He added, “The information is critical to our foreign policy moving forward and should thus be available to the American people.”
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • As if a thicket of misinformation, hit-and-miss journalism and competing propaganda didn’t make the challenge daunting enough, the American people face an even more formidable barrier in their attempts to reach informed and rational conclusions about U.S. policy in the Middle East: the classification of a 28-page finding on foreign government support of the 9/11 hijackers—classification that continues over the objections of the chairman and vice-chairman of the 9/11 Commission and the former senator who co-chaired the inquiry that produced the 28 pages. Preventing a hypothetical “next 9/11″ starts with a clear understanding of what enabled the actual one—yet, even as the U.S. military prepares for the next chapter in the seemingly perpetual War on Terror, Americans continue to be denied critical knowledge about how the September 11 attacks were planned and funded. Reflecting on that disconnect, Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie recently told Slate, “Until we know what enabled or caused 9/11, we shouldn’t be talking about starting a third war to prevent another 9/11.”
  • in what could well emerge as a national security scandal that engulfs much of Congress, there are indications that, when it comes to acquiring essential knowledge to shape policies that safeguard the country, a majority of legislators have thus far made a conscious decision to remain ignorant: As of this writing, 13 of the House’s 432 representatives have joined as cosponsors of a Jones-authored resolution urging the president to declassify the 28 pages. A source on the Hill who is familiar with the declassification effort is personally unaware of any representative who has read the 28 pages over the last several months who didn’t emerge from the experience as a supporter of declassification. When you overlay one of those observations on the other, the result points to a woefully low level of interest among the nation’s legislators in learning what “shocking,” “surprising” and “history-rearranging” facts are contained in the classified passage.
  • Those indications paint a bleak—albeit, tentative—portrait of Congressional diligence in overseeing national security policy. What’s needed now is a precise, name-by-name accounting of which representatives and senators have read the 28 pages and which have not. To that end, 28Pages.org urges constituents, journalists and transparency advocacy organizations to help bring accountability to this essential issue of national security job performance by contacting legislators and asking them two simple, yes-or-no questions: Have you read the 28 pages? If not, have you asked permission from your intelligence committee to do so? Shortly, 28Pages.org will announce its own contribution to this national exercise in Congressional accountability. However, a thorough accounting will only be achieved with the participation of citizens, journalists and transparency advocates. And with every House and 36 Senate seats up for election on Nov. 4, the faster the country collectively assembles a name-by-name roster of 28-pages readership on the Hill, the better position voters will be in to evaluate incumbents using this potent indicator of their attentiveness to matters of national security.
  • We provide a wealth of resources to help citizens do their part, and journalists are encouraged to contact us for insights on this issue.
Paul Merrell

Anonymous Fearmongering About the Patriot Act from the White House and NYT - The Intercept - 0 views

firstlook.org/...r-mongering-patriot-act-nyt-wh

surveillance state politics-of-fear Patriot-Act white-house

shared by Paul Merrell on 31 May 15 - No Cached
  • Several of the most extremist provisions of the 2001 Patriot Act are going to expire on June 1 unless Congress reauthorizes them in some form. Obama officials such as Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and new Attorney General Loretta Lynch have been engaged in rank fear-mongering to coerce renewal, warning that we’ll all be “less safe” if these provisions are allowed to “sunset” as originally intended, while invoking classic Cheneyite rhetoric by saying Patriot Act opponents will bear the blame for the next attack. In an interview yesterday with the Intercept, ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer explained why those scare tactics are outright frivolous. Enter the New York Times. An article this morning by Julie Hirschfeld Davis, in the first paragraph, cites anonymous Obama officials warning that “failing to [strike a deal by the deadline] would suspend crucial domestic surveillance authority at a time of mounting terrorism threats.” Behold the next two paragraphs:
  • “What you’re doing, essentially, is you’re playing national security Russian roulette,” one senior administration official said of allowing the powers to lapse. That prospect appears increasingly likely with the measure, the USA Freedom Act, stalled and lawmakers in their home states and districts during a congressional recess. “We’re in uncharted waters,” another senior member of the administration said at a briefing organized by the White House, where three officials spoke with reporters about the consequences of inaction by Congress. “We have not had to confront addressing the terrorist threat without these authorities, and it’s going to be fraught with unnecessary risk.”
  • Those two paragraphs, courtesy of the Obama White House and the Paper of Record, have it all: the principal weapons that have poisoned post-9/11 political discourse in the U.S.
  • Paul Merrell on 31 May 15
     
    Greenwald takes on the politics of fear.
Paul Merrell

M of A - Obama and Putin Agreed To Screw Erdogan? - 0 views

www.moonofalabama.org/...n-agreed-to-screw-erdogan.html

war & peace Syria Turkey Kurds safe-zones U.S.-foreign-policy

shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • It's official! The New York Times finally admits that the "CIA rebels" in Syria who received tons of TOW anti-tank missiles are working under the field command of al-Qaeda/Jabhat al Nusra: Rebel commanders scoffed when asked about reports of the delivery of 500 TOWs from Saudi Arabia, saying it was an insignificant number compared with what is available. Saudi Arabia in 2013 ordered more than 13,000 of them. Given that American weapons contracts require disclosure of the “end user,” insurgents said they were being delivered with Washington’s approval. But, be assured, because these "CIA rebels" feel bad about it, they are still "moderate" or somewhat "relative moderate". Advancing alongside the Islamist groups, and sometimes aiding them, have been several of the relatively secular groups, like the Free Syrian Army, which have gained new prominence and status because of their access to the TOWs. ... It is a tactical alliance that Free Syrian Army commanders describe as an uncomfortable marriage of necessity, because they cannot operate without the consent of the larger and stronger Nusra Front. But Mr. Assad and his allies cite the arrangement as proof that there is little difference between insurgent groups, calling them all terrorists that are legitimate targets.
  • That these "relative secular" al-Qaeda auxiliaries are threatening suicide attacks against Russians only confirms their secularism. Judging from the reader comments to that NYT piece the U.S. people are pretty aghast about this now openly admitted cooperation. They, and a realist op-ed in the NYT, call for cooperation with Russia and the Syrian government. There may already be more cooperation between Russia and the U.S. than we can see. At least that is what the Turkish President Erdogan perceives. Yesterday the U.S. dropped 50 tons of small weapons and munition to Kurdish fighters in north east Syria. According the U.S. justification for this those Kurds along with some Arab Syrian tribals are supposed to attack the Islamic State in Raqqa. (Those Arab tribals are by the way just a bunch of worthless thieves. This according to the Voice of America(!).) But the Kurds do not seem to know about those Raqqa plans anyway. They have different aims:
  • U.S. officials hope the YPG will now turn its attention to Raqqa, the Syrian city that is the defacto capital of the Islamic State, which lies just 60 miles south of Tal Abyad, a border town the YPG seized from the Islamic State in June, with U.S. help. But PYD spokesman Can said the Kurdish group’s first priority is to link the Kurdish enclave of Afrin, northwest of the Syrian city of Aleppo, with Kobani, the Kurdish enclave northeast of Aleppo. That would mean clearing the Islamic State from villages along 60 miles of the Turkey-Syria border, in particular the border town of Jarablus. “Our prime and most important goal is to liberate Jarablus and to connect Kobani with Afrin,” Can told McClatchy. Capturing Raqqa, a mostly Arab city, is “not really” a PYD objective, he said. “Not for now,” he said. That is just as I suspected the Kurds to react. But why did the U.S. officials claim that these Kurds and the collection of thieves would attack Raqqa? Did they not coordinate with them or was that Raqqa story a ruse? The Turks seem to assume such and they accuse the U.S. as well as Russia of coordinating with the Kurds to seal the border with Turkey: Turkey warns U.S., Russia against backing Kurdish militia in Syria
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Turkey has warned the United States and Russia it will not tolerate Kurdish territorial gains by Kurdish militia close to its frontiers in north-western Syria, two senior officials said. "This is clear cut for us and there is no joking about it," one official said of the possibility of Syrian Kurdish militia crossing the Euphrates to extend control along Turkish borders from Iraq's Kurdistan region towards the Mediterranean coast. ... "The PYD has been getting closer with both the United States and Russia of late. We view the PYD as a terrorist group and we want all countries to consider the consequences of their cooperation," one of the Turkish officials said. Turkey suspects Russia, which launched air strikes in Syria two weeks ago, has also been lending support to the YPG and PYD. "With support from Russia, the PYD is trying to capture land between Jarablus and Azaz, going west of the Euphrates. We will never accept this," the official said.
  • Is there now really coordination between Russia and the U.S. to seal the Syrian-Turkish border witch would cut off the Islamic State but also the al-Qaeda "CIA rebels" from their supplies? This would destroy all Turkish plans for Syria: a "safe zone" in Syria under Turkman control, a Sunni ruled pipeline corridor from Qatar to Europe, the Turkish-Ottoman annexation of Aleppo. Turkey would be pushed back into a secondary role. Do Russia and the U.S. now really make common cause and decided to screw Erdogan? This would make sense if the destruction of the Islamic State and all other terrorists in Syria is the common aim. That would be a change in the Obama administration's policy. Up to now it only helped the "salafist principality" to grow and never seriously attacked it. And if there is such cooperation why does the U.S still deliver thousands of TOWs to al-Qaeda which only kill more Syrians and prolong the fighting?
  • Paul Merrell on 13 Oct 15
     
    Cutting off the ISIL and al-Nusrah supply lines from Turkey would indeed create problems for Turkish (and U.S. neocon) plans. 
Paul Merrell

Transcript: Comey Says Authors of Encryption Letter Are Uninformed or Not Fair-Minded | Just Security - 0 views

justsecurity.org/...-letter-uninformed-fair-minded

surveillance state FBI Comey encryption backdoors

shared by Paul Merrell on 21 May 15 - No Cached
  • Earlier today, FBI Director James Comey implied that a broad coalition of technology companies, trade associations, civil society groups, and security experts were either uninformed or were not “fair-minded” in a letter they sent to the President yesterday urging him to reject any legislative proposals that would undermine the adoption of strong encryption by US companies. The letter was signed by dozens of organizations and companies in the latest part of the debate over whether the government should be given built-in access to encrypted data (see, for example, here, here, here, and here for previous iterations). The comments were made at the Third Annual Cybersecurity Law Institute held at Georgetown University Law Center. The transcript of his encryption-related discussion is below (emphasis added).
  • Increasingly, communications at rest sitting on a device or in motion are encrypted. The device is encrypted or the communication is encrypted and therefore unavailable to us even with a court order. So I make a showing of probable cause to a judge in a criminal case or in an intelligence case to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge that the content of a particular defense or a particular communication stream should be collected to our statutory authority, and the judge approves, increasingly we are finding ourselves unable to read what we find or we’re unable to open a device. And that is a serious concern. I am actually — I think encryption is a good thing. I think there are tremendous societal benefits to encryption. That’s one of the reasons the FBI tells people not only lock your cars, but you should encrypt things that are important to you to make it harder for thieves to take them.
  • A group of tech companies and some prominent folks wrote a letter to the President yesterday that I frankly found depressing. Because their letter contains no acknowledgment that there are societal costs to universal encryption. Look, I recognize the challenges facing our tech companies. Competitive challenges, regulatory challenges overseas, all kinds of challenges. I recognize the benefits of encryption, but I think fair-minded people also have to recognize the costs associated with that. And I read this letter and I think, “Either these folks don’t see what I see or they’re not fair-minded.” And either one of those things is depressing to me. So I’ve just got to continue to have the conversation. I don’t know the answer, but I don’t think a democracy should drift to a place where suddenly law enforcement people say, “Well, actually we — the Fourth Amendment is an awesome thing, but we actually can’t access any information.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • But we have a collision going on in this country that’s getting closer and closer to an actual head-on, which is our important interest in privacy — which I am passionate about — and our important interest in public safety. The logic of universal encryption is inexorable that our authority under the Fourth Amendment — an amendment that I think is critical to ordered liberty — with the right predication and the right oversight to obtain information is going to become increasingly irrelevant. As all of our lives become digital, the logic of encryption is that all of our lives will be covered by strong encryption, therefore all of our lives — I know there are no criminals here, but including the lives of criminals and terrorists and spies — will be in a place that is utterly unavailable to court ordered process. And that, I think, to a democracy should be very, very concerning. I think we need to have a conversation about it. Again, how do we strike the right balance? Privacy matters tremendously. Public safety, I think, matters tremendously to everybody. I think fair-minded people have to recognize that there are tremendous benefits to a society from encryption. There are tremendous costs to a society from universal strong encryption. And how do we think about that?
  • We’ve got to have a conversation long before the logic of strong encryption takes us to that place. And smart people, reasonable people will disagree mightily. Technical people will say it’s too hard. My reaction to that is: Really? Too hard? Too hard for the people we have in this country to figure something out? I’m not that pessimistic. I think we ought to have a conversation.
  • Paul Merrell on 21 May 15
     
    Considering that I'm over 10 times as likely to die from a police shoooting as I am from a terrorist attack, how about we begin this conversation, Mr. Comey, by you providing formal notice to everyone who's had the telephone metadata gathered or searched all dates on which such gatherings and searches were conducted so citizens can file suit for violation of their privacy rights? Note that the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held last week that the FBI exceeded statutory authority in gathering and searching that information. Because the gathering and searching was not authorized, that would bring the gathering and searching under the protections of the Privacy Act, including the FBI duty to account for the disclosures  and to pay at least the statutory minimum $1,500 in damges per incident.  Then I would like to have an itemization of all of the commercial software and hardware products that your agency and or your buddies at NSA built backdoors into.  Then your resignation for millions of violations of the Privacy Act would be deeply appreciated. Please feel free to delegate the above mentioned tasks to your successor. 
Paul Merrell

Protocols of the Hackers of Zion? « LobeLog - 0 views

www.lobelog.com/otocols-of-the-hackers-of-zion

surveillance state Israel cyber-spying Iran-negotiations

shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Google chairman Eric Schmidt on Tuesday afternoon, he boasted about Israel’s “robust hi-tech and cyber industries.” According to The Jerusalem Post, “Netanyahu also noted that ‘Israel was making great efforts to diversify the markets with which it is trading in the technological field.'” Just how diversified and developed Israeli hi-tech innovation has become was revealed the very next morning, when the Russian cyber-security firm Kaspersky Labs, which claims more than 400 million users internationally, announced that sophisticated spyware with the hallmarks of Israeli origin (although no country was explicitly identified) had targeted three European hotels that had been venues for negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program.
  • Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, one of the first news sources to break the story, reported that Kaspersky itself had been hacked by malware whose code was remarkably similar to that of a virus attributed to Israel. Code-named “Duqu” because it used the letters DQ in the names of the files it created, the malware had first been detected in 2011. On Thursday, Symantec, another cyber-security firm, announced it too had discovered Duqu 2 on its global network, striking undisclosed telecommunication sites in Europe, North Africa, Hong Kong, and  Southeast Asia. It said that Duqu 2 is much more difficult to detect that its predecessor because it lives exclusively in the memory of the computers it infects, rather than writing files to a drive or disk. The original Duqu shared coding with — and was written on the same platform as — Stuxnet, the computer worm  that partially disabled enrichment centrifuges in Iranian nuclear power plants, according to a 2012 report in The New York Times. Intelligence and military experts said that Stuxnet was first tested at Dimona, a nuclear-reactor complex in the Negev desert that houses Israel’s own clandestine nuclear weapons program. While Stuxnet is widely believed to have been a joint Israeli-U.S. operation, Israel seems to have developed and implemented Duqu on its own.
  • Coding of the spyware that targeted two Swiss hotels and one in Vienna—both sites where talks were held between the P5+1 and Iran—so closely resembled that of Duqu that Kaspersky has dubbed it “Duqu 2.” A Kaspersky report contends that the new and improved Duqu would have been almost impossible to create without access to the original Duqu code. Duqu 2’s one hundred “modules” enabled the cyber attackers to commandeer infected computers, compress video feeds  (including those from hotel surveillance cameras), monitor and disrupt telephone service and Wi-Fi, and steal electronic files. The hackers’ penetration of computers used by the front desk would have allowed them to determine the room numbers of negotiators and delegation members. Duqu 2 also gave the hackers the ability to operate two-way microphones in the hotels’ elevators and control their alarm systems.
Paul Merrell

Israel opened up to ridicule over leaked Iran tapes | The National - 0 views

www.thenational.ae/...idicule-over-leaked-iran-tapes

war & peace Auction 2016 Iranian-nukes-myth Netanyahu Israel-lobby

shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Last week, when it became clear he could not muster enough votes in the Senate to block a presidential veto, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu let fly a final punch. He observed that “the overwhelming majority of the American public sees eye-to-eye with Israel”, not their president.But many of those ordinary Americans may be surprised to learn that Mr Netanyahu’s policy on Iran has long been viewed as implausible and counter-productive by his own security officials. That verdict was underscored by the latest disclosures from Ehud Barak, who was defence minister through the critical years of Israel’s lobbying for an attack on Iran. Leaked audio tapes of Mr Barak speaking to biographers suggest that he and Mr Netanyahu pressed unsuccessfully on three occasions, between 2010 and 2012, for the Israeli military to launch a strike. Each time, he says, they were foiled either by the military’s failure to come up with a workable plan or by the reticence of fellow ministers as they heard of the likely fallout.
  • The truth is that Mr Netanyahu does not approve of any agreement. He would prefer an intensification of sanctions, forcing Iran to break free of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and conceal its nuclear research from all scrutiny.Then his warnings would sound more compelling, as would his demands that the US lead an attack on Iran.Above all, Mr Netanyahu wishes to prevent a rapprochement between the US and Tehran, one that might weaken Israel’s hold on Washington’s Middle East policy and increase the pressure for a real peace process with the Palestinians. Mr Barak’s leaked comments, meanwhile, have damaged everyone involved. The former defence minister has been publicly rebuked as a blabbermouth, and Mr Netanyahu derided for being so ineffectual his cabinet spurned him at what he claimed to be the most fateful moment in Israel’s history.
  • But the tapes’ enduring significance – whatever embellishments Mr Barak made in the telling – is that they confirm years of intimations from Israel’s security establishment that it stood firm against Mr Netanyahu’s reckless approach on Iran.From Meir Dagan, the former Mossad spy chief, to Gabi Ashkenazi, the former military chief of staff, Israel’s security elite has hinted loudly that it was blocking Mr Netanyahu’s efforts to provoke regional conflagration. Such was the opposition, one may suspect that even Messrs Netanyahu and Barak began to have doubts. Had they truly believed Israel could be saved only by bombing Iran, would they not have moved mountains to win over the cabinet and defence establishment?More likely, Mr Netanyahu concluded some time ago that Israel had no military option against Iran. So why fight a doomed battle on Iran to the bitter end, further damaging Israel’s frayed ties with Washington?
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Last week Israeli media quoted sources close to Mr Netanyahu saying he knew he would lose from the outset but carried on regardless. The goal was to convince the American public, not Democratic legislators.Mr Netanyahu’s current bluster starts to look like it is aimed less at the nuclear deal than at President Obama himself. Is Mr Netanyahu hoping to turn the Iran issue into a doomsday electoral weapon against the Democrats, helping to clear the path into the White House next year for a Republican?That way, Mr Netanyahu may believe he can still emerge the victor, with a new president prepared to push Iran back into the US line of fire.
  • Paul Merrell on 10 Sep 15
     
    The Iranian Nukes Myth as an Israel Lobby effort to elect a Republican President in the U.S.?
Paul Merrell

As Colombian Oil Money Flowed To Clintons, State Department Took No Action To Prevent Labor Violations - 0 views

www.ibtimes.com/o-action-prevent-labor-1874464

Auction 2016 Hillary Colombia human rights Rubiales bribery

shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • For union organizers in Colombia, the dangers of their trade were intensifying. When workers at the country’s largest independent oil company staged a strike in 2011, the Colombian military rounded them up at gunpoint and threatened violence if they failed to disband, according to human rights organizations. Similar intimidation tactics against the workers, say labor leaders, amounted to an everyday feature of life. For the United States, these were precisely the sorts of discomfiting accounts that were supposed to be prevented in Colombia under a labor agreement that accompanied a recently signed free trade pact liberalizing the exchange of goods between the countries. From Washington to Bogota, leaders had promoted the pact as a win for all -- a deal that would at once boost trade while strengthening the rights of embattled Colombian labor organizers. That formulation had previously drawn skepticism from many prominent Democrats, among them Hillary Clinton. Yet as union leaders and human rights activists conveyed these harrowing reports of violence to then-Secretary of State Clinton in late 2011, urging her to pressure the Colombian government to protect labor organizers, she responded first with silence, these organizers say. The State Department publicly praised Colombia’s progress on human rights, thereby permitting hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. aid to flow to the same Colombian military that labor activists say helped intimidate workers.
  • At the same time that Clinton's State Department was lauding Colombia’s human rights record, her family was forging a financial relationship with Pacific Rubiales, the sprawling Canadian petroleum company at the center of Colombia’s labor strife. The Clintons were also developing commercial ties with the oil giant’s founder, Canadian financier Frank Giustra, who now occupies a seat on the board of the Clinton Foundation, the family’s global philanthropic empire. The details of these financial dealings remain murky, but this much is clear: After millions of dollars were pledged by the oil company to the Clinton Foundation -- supplemented by millions more from Giustra himself -- Secretary Clinton abruptly changed her position on the controversial U.S.-Colombia trade pact. Having opposed the deal as a bad one for labor rights back when she was a presidential candidate in 2008, she now promoted it, calling it “strongly in the interests of both Colombia and the United States.” The change of heart by Clinton and other Democratic leaders enabled congressional passage of a Colombia trade deal that experts say delivered big benefits to foreign investors like Giustra.
  • The Clinton Foundation, Giustra and the State Department did not respond to International Business Times' requests for comment. Pacific Rubiales has denied that it has engaged in any violence toward union organizers. As Hillary Clinton readies a national apparatus for her likely presidential campaign -- one that will surely depend upon the support of American labor unions -- her family’s relationship with Giustra and Pacific Rubiales, her reversal on the Colombia trade pact and her subsequent move to bless Colombia’s human rights record complicate her efforts to present herself as a champion of worker rights.  These issues were amplified this week when the AFL-CIO cited persistent violence against Colombian union organizers in its push to block a new 12-nation trade deal that Clinton has championed.
  • Paul Merrell on 10 Apr 15
     
    Bribery? We ain't talking about campaign donations here.
Paul Merrell

Guantánamo Inmate's Case Reignites Fight Over Detentions - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-feed-guantanamo-detainee.html

war & peace Gitmo-detainees force-feeding

shared by Paul Merrell on 26 May 14 - No Cached
  • The seemingly unending struggle over Guantánamo Bay — the prison President Obama vowed to close shortly after he was sworn in — is again reverberating over an “anguishing” case of force-feeding a Syrian detainee.The case involves Jihad Ahmed Mujstafa Diyab, a Syrian who has been held for 12 years without a trial, and who has gone on prolonged hunger strikes. Late Thursday, a Federal District Court judge lifted an order barring his force-feeding, even as she rebuked the military for using procedures that she said caused “agony.”
  • Mr. Diyab was recommended for transfer more than four years ago, but officials fear repatriating him because of the chaos in Syria and the apparent death sentence.In February, the president of Uruguay offered to allow him to be released there, but Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, who has the final say under restrictions imposed by Congress, has not signed off on the transfer.
  • Mr. Diyab’s defense team recently learned that some videotapes of forcible cell extractions and force-feeding of Mr. Diyab and other detainees exist, and on Wednesday, Judge Kessler ordered the military to turn 34 such tapes over to his lawyers.
Paul Merrell

US forced to acknowledge secret tapes of Guantánamo force-feedings | World news | theguardian.com - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...edge-guantanamo-force-feedings

war & peace torture Gitmo-detainees

shared by Paul Merrell on 22 May 14 - No Cached
  • A federal court has forced the US government to reveal that it has secretly recorded dozens of force-feedings of just one Guantánamo Bay detainee, raising the prospect that the military possesses a vast video library of a practice criticised as abusive.On Wednesday, a federal judge decreed that lawyers for that detainee can view hours of his videotaped force feedings, the first time a non-government official will be permitted to view the secret recordings.Before last week, the Defense Department did not even acknowledge that videotapes of its enteral feedings of hunger striking detainees – conducted by inserting a tube into the stomach through the nose – even existed.
Paul Merrell

LEAKED: Secret Negotiations to Let Big Brother Go Global | Wolf Street - 0 views

wolfstreet.com/...s-to-let-big-brother-go-global

trade agreements TISA privatization data privacy globalization

shared by Paul Merrell on 29 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Much has been written, at least in the alternative media, about the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), two multilateral trade treaties being negotiated between the representatives of dozens of national governments and armies of corporate lawyers and lobbyists (on which you can read more here, here and here). However, much less is known about the decidedly more secretive Trade in Services Act (TiSA), which involves more countries than either of the other two. At least until now, that is. Thanks to a leaked document jointly published by the Associated Whistleblowing Press and Filtrala, the potential ramifications of the treaty being hashed out behind hermetically sealed doors in Geneva are finally seeping out into the public arena.
  • If signed, the treaty would affect all services ranging from electronic transactions and data flow, to veterinary and architecture services. It would almost certainly open the floodgates to the final wave of privatization of public services, including the provision of healthcare, education and water. Meanwhile, already privatized companies would be prevented from a re-transfer to the public sector by a so-called barring “ratchet clause” – even if the privatization failed. More worrisome still, the proposal stipulates that no participating state can stop the use, storage and exchange of personal data relating to their territorial base. Here’s more from Rosa Pavanelli, general secretary of Public Services International (PSI):
  • The leaked documents confirm our worst fears that TiSA is being used to further the interests of some of the largest corporations on earth (…) Negotiation of unrestricted data movement, internet neutrality and how electronic signatures can be used strike at the heart of individuals’ rights. Governments must come clean about what they are negotiating in these secret trade deals. Fat chance of that, especially in light of the fact that the text is designed to be almost impossible to repeal, and is to be “considered confidential” for five years after being signed. What that effectively means is that the U.S. approach to data protection (read: virtually non-existent) could very soon become the norm across 50 countries spanning the breadth and depth of the industrial world.
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  • The main players in the top-secret negotiations are the United States and all 28 members of the European Union. However, the broad scope of the treaty also includes Australia, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Hong Kong, Iceland, Israel, Japan, Liechtenstein, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Pakistan, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, South Korea, Switzerland, Taiwan and Turkey. Combined they represent almost 70 percent of all trade in services worldwide. An explicit goal of the TiSA negotiations is to overcome the exceptions in GATS that protect certain non-tariff trade barriers, such as data protection. For example, the draft Financial Services Annex of TiSA, published by Wikileaks in June 2014, would allow financial institutions, such as banks, the free transfer of data, including personal data, from one country to another. As Ralf Bendrath, a senior policy advisor to the MEP Jan Philipp Albrecht, writes in State Watch, this would constitute a radical carve-out from current European data protection rules:
Paul Merrell

Israel used fabricated images to justify bombing al-Wafa hospital | The Electronic Intifada - 0 views

electronicintifada.net/...stify-bombing-al-wafa-hospital

war & peace Gaza Israel

shared by Paul Merrell on 25 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • The Israeli military on Wednesday completely destroyed the al-Wafa rehabilitation and geriatric hospital in the eastern Gaza City neighborhood of Shujaiya after weeks of missile strikes on the hospital and the forced evacuation of the patients, caregivers and hospital staff last week. The Israeli daily Haaretz reported that the Israeli military claimed the hospital buildings were “being used as a Hamas command center and rocket-launching site.” However, the hospital director, Dr. Basman Alashi, says that Israel has targeted the hospital based on false and misleading claims.
  • Paul Merrell on 25 Jul 14
     
    Nice side-by-side photos, one the aerial photo of the "hospital" released by the Israeli government with a red dot indicating where a purported rocket firing base was located nearby (but some distance from the building. The other is an aerial shot of the actual hospital taken before the Israeli Army destroyed it. Embarrassing. Clearly not the same buildings.  
Paul Merrell

Perfect Timing? ISIS Re-Tweets Threats Against Police | nsnbc international - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...-isis-re-tweets-threats-police

war & peace ISIL politics of fear war-propaganda

shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • The New York City Police Department (NYPD) has reportedly put their officers on high alert after a video attributed to the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq (ISIS) was tweeted on social media threatening law enforcement in the US, France, Australia, and Canada. This video posted by an alleged ISIS spokesperson, was followed by the message: “Strike their police, security, and intelligence members, as well as their treacherous agents.” Interestingly, the video tweeted was a “re-release [of] a September 2014 message”.
  • One mainstream media outlet claims to have “obtained” an instructional email from an unidentified member of the Sergeants Benevolent Association (SBA) stating: “If you are assigned to a fixed post, do not sit together in the RMP [police car]. At least one officer must stand outside the vehicle at all times. Pay attention to your surroundings. Officers must pay close attention to approaching vehicles . . . Pay close attention to people as they approach. Look for their hands.” At the time, the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) published similar warnings to police departments in the US, warning that the message “is consistent with previous threats that ISIS and others, including al Qaeda, have issued.” In October of last year, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton commented speaking at the Economic Club reiterating the US intelligence community’s cries about the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
  • Clinton said: “It’s a serious threat because this is the best-funded, most professional, expansionist jihadist military force that we have ever seen. This is far more advanced and far richer than al-Qaeda ever was.”
  • Paul Merrell on 13 Jan 15
     
    A caution that the article's author, Susanne Posel, is not into fact-checking and frequently dispenses incorrect information.
Paul Merrell

FBI Flouts Obama Directive to Limit Gag Orders on National Security Letters - The Intercept - 0 views

firstlook.org/...ders-national-security-letters

surveillance state FBI NSLs litigation 1st Amendment civil-liberties

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Despite the post-Snowden spotlight on mass surveillance, the intelligence community’s easiest end-run around the Fourth Amendment since 2001 has been something called a National Security Letter. FBI agents can demand that an Internet service provider, telephone company or financial institution turn over its records on any number of people — without any judicial review whatsoever — simply by writing a letter that says the information is needed for national security purposes. The FBI at one point was cranking out over 50,000 such letters a year; by the latest count, it still issues about 60 a day. The letters look like this:
  • Recipients are legally required to comply — but it doesn’t stop there. They also aren’t allowed to mention the order to anyone, least of all the person whose data is being searched. Ever. That’s because National Security Letters almost always come with eternal gag orders. Here’s that part:
  • That means the NSL process utterly disregards the First Amendment as well. More than a year ago, President Obama announced that he was ordering the Justice Department to terminate gag orders “within a fixed time unless the government demonstrates a real need for further secrecy.” And on Feb. 3, when the Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced a handful of baby steps resulting from its “comprehensive effort to examine and enhance [its] privacy and civil liberty protections” one of the most concrete was — finally — to cap the gag orders: In response to the President’s new direction, the FBI will now presumptively terminate National Security Letter nondisclosure orders at the earlier of three years after the opening of a fully predicated investigation or the investigation’s close. Continued nondisclosures orders beyond this period are permitted only if a Special Agent in Charge or a Deputy Assistant Director determines that the statutory standards for nondisclosure continue to be satisfied and that the case agent has justified, in writing, why continued nondisclosure is appropriate.
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  • Despite the use of the word “now” in that first sentence, however, the FBI has yet to do any such thing. It has not announced any such change, nor explained how it will implement it, or when. Media inquiries were greeted with stalling and, finally, a no comment — ostensibly on advice of legal counsel. “There is pending litigation that deals with a lot of the same questions you’re asking, out of the Ninth Circuit,” FBI spokesman Chris Allen told me. “So for now, we’ll just have to decline to comment.” FBI lawyers are working on a court filing for that case, and “it will address” the new policy, he said. He would not say when to expect it.
  • There is indeed a significant case currently before the federal appeals court in San Francisco. Oral arguments were in October. A decision could come any time. But in that case, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which is representing two unnamed communications companies that received NSLs, is calling for the entire NSL statute to be thrown out as unconstitutional — not for a tweak to the gag. And it has a March 2013 district court ruling in its favor. “The gag is a prior restraint under the First Amendment, and prior restraints have to meet an extremely high burden,” said Andrew Crocker, a legal fellow at EFF. That means going to court and meeting the burden of proof — not just signing a letter. Or as the Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez put it, “To have such a low bar for denying persons or companies the right to speak about government orders they have been served with is anathema. And it is not very good for accountability.”
  • In a separate case, a wide range of media companies (including First Look Media, the non-profit digital media venture that produces The Intercept) are supporting a lawsuit filed by Twitter, demanding the right to say specifically how many NSLs it has received. But simply releasing companies from a gag doesn’t assure the kind of accountability that privacy advocates are saying is required by the Constitution. “What the public has to remember is a NSL is asking for your information, but it’s not asking it from you,” said Michael German, a former FBI agent who is now a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice. “The vast majority of these things go to the very large telecommunications and financial companies who have a large stake in maintaining a good relationship with the government because they’re heavily regulated entities.”
  • So, German said, “the number of NSLs that would be exposed as a result of the release of the gag order is probably very few. The person whose records are being obtained is the one who should receive some notification.” A time limit on gags going forward also raises the question of whether past gag orders will now be withdrawn. “Obviously there are at this point literally hundreds of thousands of National Security Letters that are more than three years old,” said Sanchez. Individual review is therefore unlikely, but there ought to be some recourse, he said. And the further back you go, “it becomes increasingly implausible that a significant percentage of those are going to entail some dire national security risk.” The NSL program has a troubled history. The absolute secrecy of the program and resulting lack of accountability led to systemic abuse as documented by repeated inspector-general investigations, including improperly authorized NSLs, factual misstatements in the NSLs, improper requests under NSL statutes, requests for information based on First Amendment protected activity, “after-the-fact” blanket NSLs to “cover” illegal requests, and hundreds of NSLs for “community of interest” or “calling circle” information without any determination that the telephone numbers were relevant to authorized national security investigations.
  • Obama’s own hand-selected “Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies” recommended in December 2013 that NSLs should only be issued after judicial review — just like warrants — and that any gag should end within 180 days barring judicial re-approval. But FBI director James Comey objected to the idea, calling NSLs “a very important tool that is essential to the work we do.” His argument evidently prevailed with Obama.
  • NSLs have managed to stay largely under the American public’s radar. But, Crocker says, “pretty much every time I bring it up and give the thumbnail, people are shocked. Then you go into how many are issued every year, and they go crazy.” Want to send me your old NSL and see if we can set a new precedent? Here’s how to reach me. And here’s how to leak to me.
Paul Merrell

NSA Surveillance Chilling Effects: HRW and ACLU Gather More Evidence | Electronic Frontier Foundation - 0 views

www.eff.org/...-surveillance-chilling-effects

surveillance state NSA ACLU HRW report 1st-Amendment-chill

shared by Paul Merrell on 31 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • Human Rights Watch and the ACLU today published a terrific report documenting the chilling effect on journalists and lawyers from the NSA's surveillance programs entitled: "With Liberty to Monitor All: How Large-Scale US Surveillance is Harming Journalism, Law and American Democracy." The report, which is chock full of evidence about the very real harms caused by the NSA's surveillance programs, is the result of interviews of 92 lawyers and journalists, plus several senior government officials.  This report adds to the growing body of evidence that the NSA's surveillance programs are causing real harm.  It also links these harms to key parts of both U.S. constitutional and international law, including the right to counsel, the right of access to information, the right of association and the free press. It is a welcome addition to the PEN report detailing the effects on authors, called Chilling Effects: How NSA Surveillance Drives US Writers to Self-Censor and the declarations of 22 of EFF's clients in our First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles v. NSA case. 
  • The HRW and ACLU report documents the increasing treatment of journalists and lawyers as legitimate surveillance targets and surveys how they are responding. Brian Ross of ABC says: There’s something about using elaborate evasion and security techniques that’s offensive to me—that I should have to operate as like a criminal, like a spy. The report also notes that the government increasingly likens journalists to criminals. As Scott Shane of the New York Times explains: To compare the exchange of information about sensitive programs between officials and the media, which has gone on for decades, to burglary seems to miss the point. Burglary is not part of a larger set of activities protected by the Constitution, and at the heart of our democracy. Unfortunately, that mindset is sort of the problem. Especially striking in the report is the disconnect between the real stories of chilling effects from reporters and lawyers and the skeptical, but undocumented, rejections from senior government officials.  The reporters explain difficulties in building trust with their sources and the attorneys echo that with stories about the difficulties building client trust.  The senior government officials, in contrast, just say that they don't believe the journalists and appear to have thought little, if at all about the issues facing lawyers.  
Paul Merrell

Tomgram: Peter Van Buren, Iraq and the Battle of the Potomac | TomDispatch - 0 views

www.tomdispatch.com/..._and_the_battle_of_the_potomac

war & peace Iraq Syria ISIL Obama mission-failure

shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • What Could Possibly Go Right? Four Months into Iraq War 3.0, the Cracks Are Showing -- on the Battlefield and at the Pentagon By Peter Van Buren Karl von Clausewitz, the famed Prussian military thinker, is best known for his aphorism “War is the continuation of state policy by other means.” But what happens to a war in the absence of coherent state policy? Actually, we now know. Washington’s Iraq War 3.0, Operation Inherent Resolve, is what happens. In its early stages, I asked sarcastically, “What could possibly go wrong?” As the mission enters its fourth month, the answer to that question is already grimly clear: just about everything. It may be time to ask, in all seriousness: What could possibly go right?
  • The U.S. Department of State lists 60 participants in the coalition of nations behind the U.S. efforts against the Islamic State. Many of those countries (Somalia, Iceland, Croatia, and Taiwan, among them) have never been heard from again outside the halls of Foggy Bottom. There is no evidence that America’s Arab “allies” like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, whose funding had long-helped extreme Syrian rebel groups, including IS, and whose early participation in a handful of air strikes was trumpeted as a triumph, are still flying. Absent the few nations that often make an appearance at America's geopolitical parties (Canada, the Brits, the Aussies, and increasingly these days, the French), this international mess has quickly morphed into Washington's mess. Worse yet, nations like Turkey that might actually have taken on an important role in defeating the Islamic State seem to be largely sitting this one out. Despite the way it’s being reported in the U.S., the new war in the Middle East looks, to most of the world, like another case of American unilateralism, which plays right into the radical Islamic narrative.
  • While American strategy may be lacking on the battlefield, it’s alive and well at the Pentagon. A report in the Daily Beast, quoting a generous spurt of leaks, has recently made it all too clear that the Pentagon brass “are getting fed up with the short leash the White House put them on.” Senior leaders criticize the war’s decision-making process, overseen by National Security Adviser Susan Rice, as “manic and obsessed.” Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel wrote a quickly leaked memo to Rice warning that the president’s Syria strategy was already unraveling thanks to its fogginess about the nature of its opposition to Assad and because it has no “endgame.” Meanwhile, the military's “intellectual” supporters are already beginning to talk -- shades of Vietnam -- about “Obama's quagmire.”
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  • The U.S. military came out of the Vietnam War vowing one thing: when Washington went looking for someone to blame, it would never again be left holding the bag.
  • Taken as a whole, the military's near-mutinous posture is eerily reminiscent of MacArthur's refusal to submit to President Harry Truman's political will during the Korean War. But don’t hold your breath for a Trumanesque dismissal of Dempsey any time soon. In the meantime, the Pentagon’s sights seem set on a fall guy, likely Susan Rice, who is particularly close to the president. The Pentagon has laid down its cards and they are clear enough: the White House is mismanaging the war. And its message is even clearer: given the refusal to consider sending in those ground-touching boots, Operation Inherent Resolve will fail. And when that happens, don't blame us; we warned you.
  • Joint Chiefs Chairman General Martin Dempsey has twice made public statements revealing his dissatisfaction with White House policy. In September, he said it would take 12,000 to 15,000 ground troops to effectively go after the Islamic State. Last month, he suggested that American ground troops might, in the future, be necessary to fight IS. Those statements contrast sharply with Obama's insistence that there will never be U.S. combat troops in this war. In another direct challenge, this time to the plan to create those Sunni National Guard units, Dempsey laid down his own conditions: no training and advising the tribes will begin until the Iraqi government agrees to arm the units themselves -- an unlikely outcome. Meanwhile, despite the White House's priority on training a new Syrian moderate force of 5,000 fighters, senior military leaders have yet to even select an officer to head up the vetting process that’s supposed to weed out less than moderate insurgents.
  • In or out, boots or not, whatever its own mistakes and follies, those who run the Pentagon and the U.S. military are already campaigning strategically to win at least one battle: when Iraq 3.0 collapses, as it most surely will, they will not be the ones hung out to dry. Of the very short list of what could go right, the smart money is on the Pentagon emerging victorious -- but only in Washington, not the Middle East.
Paul Merrell

Amid International Outcry, Venezuelan Officials Allege Blackwater, U.S. and Canadian Links to Thwarted Coup | venezuelanalysis.com - 0 views

venezuelanalysis.com/11212

war & peace U.S.-foreign-policy Venezuela coup-attempts Blackwater UK Canada

shared by Paul Merrell on 18 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • New revelations  in Venezuela have linked U.S. private security firm Blackwater, now known as Academi, to the aircraft that was to be used as part of Thursday's thwarted "Blue Coup" attempt. The four-stage plan included economic war, an international media offensive against the Venezuelan government, political destabilization fomenting ungovernability, and finally the use of a Super Tucano aircraft to strike "tactical targets" in the capital, such as the Presidential Palace, teleSur, and military intelligence The coup was planned for the one-year anniversary of violent opposition protests known as the Guarimba and was to come one day after a public statement by leading opposition leaders calling for a "transition". 
  • According to U.S. aviation records, the EMB-314B1 or "Super Tucano" aircraft in question was acquired  from Brazilian manufacturer Embraer by the firm Blackwater Worldwide in 2008 allegedly for the purpose of pilot training. Registered under the serial number N314TG, the aircraft is, moreover, the only one of its kind sold by the Brazilian firm to a private company.  The Super Tucano is a light, highly agile Brazilian aircraft designed principally for pilot training and counterinsurgency operations. The aircraft has an operational range that extends from the U.S. to any point in Colombia, and has been widely used in Colombian counterinsurgency operations, including in the 2008 assassination of FARC second-in-command Raul Reyes in violation of Ecuadorian sovereignty.  While Venezuela does have its own fleet of 12 Super Tucanos, all aircraft are currently grounded and undergoing major repairs, stated President Nicolas Maduro, whilst offering further evidence regarding the foreign origin of the aircraft. 
  • Blackwater has a checkered human rights record. Several of its contractors have been indicted in U.S. courts for their role in the 2007 massacre of Iraqi civilians, and Jeremy Scahill, national security correspondent for the Nation, has documented the firm's role in the CIA's global assassination program.
  • Paul Merrell on 18 Feb 15
     
    Blackwater, Canada, and the UK too. Oh me, oh my ... 
Paul Merrell

U.S. Airstrikes on ISIS in Tikrit Prompt Boycott by Shiite Fighters - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-raids-islamic-state-isis.html

war & peace Iraq U.S.-foreign-policy bombing Shia-militias yankee-go-home

shared by Paul Merrell on 28 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • By Day 2 of the American airstrike campaign against militants holed up in Tikrit, the mission appeared beleaguered on several fronts on Thursday: Thousands of Shiite militiamen boycotted the fight, others threatened to attack any Americans they found, and Iraqi officials said nine of their fighters had been accidentally killed in an airstrike.In Washington, American military leaders insisted that things were going according to plan. They said that they were stepping into the Tikrit fight only after the Iranian- and militia-led advance on the city had stalled after three weeks, and that they welcomed working solely with Iraqi government forces.Gen. Lloyd Austin, the head of the United States Central Command, told a Senate hearing on Thursday that no Shiite militias remained in Tikrit.
  • While the withdrawal of Iranian-led Shiite militias was one of the preconditions for the Americans to join the fight against the Islamic State in Tikrit, the sudden departure of three of the major groups risked leaving the Iraqi ground forces short-handed, especially if other Shiite militiamen also abandoned the fight.
  • The three militia groups, some of which had Iranian advisers with them until recently, pulled out of the Tikrit fight to protest the American airstrikes, which began late Wednesday night, insisting that the Americans were not needed to defeat the extremists in Tikrit.Too great or abrupt a withdrawal by militia forces, analysts said, could complicate the entire Iraqi counteroffensive. Even with the militias involved, officials said the current pro-government force would not be large enough to eventually help take Mosul back from the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.Top officials at the Pentagon appeared to think that it would not be easy to retake even Tikrit without Iranian help. “It’s going to require the kind of hammer-and-anvil approach of ground forces forcing ISIL to respond in ways that they’re targetable by air power,” one Defense Department official said. “But we’re less than 24 hours into it.”
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  • Another official, asked if he was worried that the United States now owned the Tikrit operation, said, “Yes. This was a calculated risk, but it’s one that had to be taken.” Both officials spoke on grounds of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the issue.Together, the four Shiite groups that objected to the American air role already represent more than a third of the 30,000 fighters on the government side in the offensive against the Islamic State, analysts said.
  • One of the leaders of the biggest militias in the fight, the Badr Organization, also criticized the American role and said his group, too, might pull out.Continue reading the main story “We don’t need the American-led coalition to participate in Tikrit. Tikrit is an easy battle, we can win it ourselves,” said Mueen al-Kadhumi, who is one of the Shiite militia group’s top commanders.
  • The Badr Organization fields the largest cohesive ground force in the conflict, and its withdrawal from Tikrit would be potentially catastrophic, according to Wafiq al-Hashimi, the head of the Iraqi Group for Strategic Studies. “Dr. Abadi rushed into this decision to liberate Tikrit with the Americans without taking time to work out a compromise among all these groups and the Americans, most of whom have a lot of disputes with the Americans,” Mr. Hashimi said.Another Iranian-aligned Shiite militia group reacted with defiance and threats against the Americans.
  • “We are staying in Tikrit, we are not leaving and we are going to target the American-led coalition in Tikrit and their creation, ISIS,” said Akram al-Kabi, the leader of the Nujabaa Brigade, a powerful militia that has previously sent fighters to Syria on behalf of the Bashir al-Assad government there.His remarks raised the possibility that the group would use antiaircraft fire against coalition warplanes, using Iraqi fighting positions.On Thursday night, an airstrike on the village of Alvu Ajeel, on the edge of Tikrit, killed six Shiite militiamen, as well as three federal policemen, one of them a colonel, according to a spokesman for the Iraqi military’s Salahuddin Operations Command. The strike was thought to have been carried out by the United States.
  • The other groups that announced they would boycott the Tikrit operation were Qatab Hizbullah, which like Asaib Ahl al-Haq is closely aligned and supported by Iran, and the Peace Brigade, the latest name for a militia made of up followers of the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, previously known as the Mahdi Army.Mr. Sadr, whose troops fought bitter battles against the Americans during much of the Iraq war, said his group was pulling out because, “The participation of the so-called international alliance is to protect ISIS on the one hand, and to confiscate the achievements of the Iraqis on the other hand.”
  • Paul Merrell on 28 Mar 15
     
    Big "Yankee, go home" message from the Shia militias. They don't trust the U.S. for some strange reason. Not. The U.S. well earned their distrust.
Paul Merrell

Running for Cover: A Sham Air Force Summit Can't Fix the Close Air Support Gap Created by Dumping the A-10 - 0 views

www.pogo.org/...eated-by-Dumping-the-A-10.html

war & peace DoD-procurement F35 A10 scandal

shared by Paul Merrell on 29 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • “I can’t wait to be relieved of the burdens of close air support,” Major General James Post, the vice commander of Air Combat Command (ACC), allegedly told a collection of officers at a training session in August 2014. As with his now notorious warning that service members would be committing treason if they communicated with Congress about the successes of the A-10, Major General Post seems to speak for the id of Air Force headquarters’ true hostility towards the close air support (CAS) mission. Air Force four-stars are working hard to deny this hostility to the public and Congress, but their abhorrence of the mission has been demonstrated through 70 years of Air Force headquarters’ budget decisions and combat actions that have consistently short-changed close air support. For the third year in a row (many have already forgotten the attempt to retire 102 jets in the Air Force’s FY 2013 proposal), the Air Force has proposed retiring some or all of the A-10s, ostensibly to save money in order to pay for “modernization.” After failing to convince Congress to implement their plan last year (except for a last minute partial capitulation by retiring Senate and House Armed Services Committee chairmen Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) and Representative Buck McKeon (R-CA)) and encountering uncompromising pushback this year, Air Force headquarters has renewed its campaign with more dirty tricks.
  • First, Air Force headquarters tried to fight back against congressional skepticism by releasing cherry-picked data purporting to show that the A-10 kills more friendlies and civilians than any other U.S. Air Force plane, even though it actually has one of the lowest fratricide and civilian casualty rates. With those cooked statistics debunked and rejected by Senate Armed Services Chairman Senator John McCain (R-AZ), Air Force headquarters hastily assembled a joint CAS “Summit” to try to justify dumping the A-10. Notes and documents from the Summit meetings, now widely available throughout the Air Force and shared with the Project On Government Oversight’s Center for Defense Information (CDI), reveal that the recommendations of the Summit working groups were altered by senior Air Force leaders to quash any joint service or congressional concerns about the coming gaps in CAS capabilities. Air Force headquarters needed this whitewash to pursue, yet again, its anti-A-10 crusade without congressional or internal-Pentagon opposition.
  • The current A-10 divestment campaign, led by Air Force Chief of Staff Mark Welsh, is only one in a long chain of Air Force headquarters’ attempts by bomber-minded Air Force generals to get rid of the A-10 and the CAS mission. The efforts goes as far back as when the A-10 concept was being designed in the Pentagon, following the unfortunate, bloody lessons learned from the Vietnam War. For example, there was a failed attempt in late-1980s to kill off the A-10 by proposing to replace it with a supposedly CAS-capable version of the F-16 (the A-16). Air Force headquarters tried to keep the A-10s out of the first Gulf War in 1990, except for contingencies. A token number was eventually brought in at the insistence of the theater commander, and the A-10 so vastly outperformed the A-16s that the entire A-16 effort was dismantled. As a reward for these A-10 combat successes, Air Force headquarters tried to starve the program by refusing to give the A-10 any funds for major modifications or programmed depot maintenance during the 1990s. After additional combat successes in the Iraq War, the Air Force then attempted to unload the A-10 fleet in 2004.
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  • To ground troops and the pilots who perform the mission, the A-10 and the CAS mission are essential and crucial components of American airpower. The A-10 saves so many troop lives because it is the only platform with the unique capabilities necessary for effective CAS: highly maneuverable at low speeds, unmatched survivability under ground fire, a longer loiter time, able to fly more sorties per day that last longer, and more lethal cannon passes than any other fighter. These capabilities make the A-10 particularly superior in getting in close enough to support our troops fighting in narrow valleys, under bad weather, toe-to-toe with close-in enemies, and/or facing fast-moving targets. For these reasons, Army Chief of Staff General Ray Odierno has called the A-10 “the best close air support aircraft.” Other Air Force platforms can perform parts of the mission, though not as well; and none can do all of it. Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) echoed the troops’ combat experience in a recent Senate Armed Services committee hearing: “It's ugly, it's loud, but when it comes in…it just makes a difference.”
  • In 2014, Congress was well on the way to roundly rejecting the Air Force headquarters’ efforts to retire the entire fleet of 350 A-10s. It was a strong, bipartisan demonstration of support for the CAS platform in all four of Congress’s annual defense bills. But in the final days of the 113th Congress, a “compromise” heavily pushed by the Air Force was tucked into the National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2015. The “compromise” allowed the Air Force to move A-10s into virtually retired “backup status” as long as the Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE) office in DoD certified that the measure was the only option available to protect readiness. CAPE, now led by former Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Financial Management and Comptroller Jamie Morin, duly issued that assessment—though in classified form, thus making it unavailable to the public. In one of his final acts as Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel then approved moving 18 A-10s to backup status.
  • The Air Force intends to replace the A-10 with the F-35. But despite spending nearly $100 billion and 14 years in development, the plane is still a minimum of six years away from being certified ready for any real—but still extremely limited—form of CAS combat. The A-10, on the other hand, is continuing to perform daily with striking effectiveness in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria—at the insistence of the CENTCOM commander and despite previous false claims from the Air Force that A-10s can’t be sent to Syria. A-10s have also recently been sent to Europe to be available for contingencies in Ukraine—at the insistence of the EUCOM Commander. These demands from active theaters are embarrassing and compelling counterarguments to the Air Force’s plea that the Warthog is no longer relevant or capable and needs to be unloaded to help pay for the new, expensive, more high-tech planes that Air Force headquarters vastly prefers even though the planes are underperforming.
  • So far, Congress has not been any more sympathetic to this year’s continuation of General Welsh’s campaign to retire the A-10. Chairman McCain rejected the Air Force’s contention that the F-35 was ready enough to be a real replacement for the A-10 and vowed to reverse the A-10 retirement process already underway. Senator Ayotte led a letter to Defense Secretary Ashton Carter with Senators Tom Cotton (R-AR), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Thom Tillis (R-NC), Roger Wicker (R-MS), Mike Crapo (R-ID), Johnny Isakson (R-GA), and Richard Burr (R-NC) rebuking Hagel’s decision to place 18 A-10s in backup inventory. Specifically, the Senators called the decision a “back-door” divestment approved by a “disappointing rubber stamp” that guts “the readiness of our nation’s best close air support aircraft.” In the House, Representative Martha McSally (R-AZ) wrote to Secretary Carter stating that she knew from her own experience as a former A-10 pilot and 354th Fighter Squadron commander that the A-10 is uniquely capable for combat search and rescue missions, in addition to CAS, and that the retirement of the A-10 through a classified assessment violated the intent of Congress’s compromise with the Air Force:
  • Some in the press have been similarly skeptical of the Air Force’s intentions, saying that the plan “doesn’t add up,” and more colorfully, calling it “total bullshit and both the American taxpayer and those who bravely fight our wars on the ground should be furious.” Those reports similarly cite the Air Force’s longstanding antagonism to the CAS mission as the chief motive for the A-10’s retirement.
  • By announcing that pilots who spoke to Congress about the A-10 were “committing treason,” ACC Vice Commander Major General James Post sparked an Inspector General investigation and calls for his resignation from POGO and other whistleblower and taxpayer groups. That public relations debacle made it clear that the Air Force needed a new campaign strategy to support its faltering A-10 divestment campaign. On the orders of Air Force Chief of Staff General Mark Welsh, General Herbert “Hawk” Carlisle—the head of Air Combat Command—promptly announced a joint CAS Summit, allegedly to determine the future of CAS. It was not the first CAS Summit to be held (the most recent previous Summit was held in 2009), but it was the first to receive so much fanfare. As advertised, the purpose of the Summit was to determine and then mitigate any upcoming risks and gaps in CAS mission capabilities. But notes, documents, and annotated briefing slides reviewed by CDI reveal that what the Air Force publicly released from the Summit is nothing more than a white-washed assessment of the true and substantial operational risks of retiring the A-10.
  • Just prior to the Summit, a working group of approximately 40 people, including CAS-experienced Air Force service members, met for three days at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base to identify potential risks and shortfalls in CAS capabilities. But Air Force headquarters gave them two highly restrictive ground rules: first, assume the A-10s are completely divested, with no partial divestments to be considered; and second, assume the F-35 is fully CAS capable by 2021 (an ambitious assumption at best). The working groups included A-10 pilots, F-16 pilots, and Joint Terminal Attack Controllers (JTACs), all with combat-based knowledge of the CAS platforms and their shortfalls and risks. They summarized their findings with slides stating that the divestment would “cause significant CAS capability and capacity gaps for 10 to 12 years,” create training shortfalls, increase costs per flying hour, and sideline over 200 CAS-experienced pilots due to lack of cockpits for them. Additionally, they found that after the retirement of the A-10 there would be “very limited” CAS capability at low altitudes and in poor weather, “very limited” armor killing capability, and “very limited” ability to operate in the GPS-denied environment that most experts expect when fighting technically competent enemies with jamming technology, an environment that deprives the non-A-10 platforms of their most important CAS-guided munition. They also concluded that even the best mitigation plans they were recommending would not be sufficient to overcome these problems and that significant life-threatening shortfalls would remain.
  • General Carlisle was briefed at Davis-Monthan on these incurable risks and gaps that A-10 divestment would cause. Workshop attendees noted that he understood gaps in capability created by retiring the A-10 could not be solved with the options currently in place. General Carlisle was also briefed on the results of the second task to develop a list of requirements and capabilities for a new A-X CAS aircraft that could succeed the A-10. “These requirements look a lot like the A-10, what are we doing here?” he asked. The slides describing the new A-X requirements disappeared from subsequent Pentagon Summit presentations and were never mentioned in any of the press releases describing the summit.
  • At the four-day Pentagon Summit the next week, the Commander of the 355th Fighter Wing, Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Col. James P. Meger, briefed lower level joint representatives from the Army and the Marine Corps about the risks identified by the group at Davis-Monthan. Included in the briefing was the prediction that divestment of the A-10 would result in “significant capability and capacity gaps for the next ten to twelve years” that would require maintaining legacy aircraft until the F-35A was fully operational. After the presentation, an Army civilian representative became concerned. The slides, he told Col. Meger, suggested that the operational dangers of divestment of the A-10 were much greater than had been previously portrayed by the Air Force. Col. Meger attempted to reassure the civilian that the mitigation plan would eliminate the risks. Following the briefing, Col. Meger met with Lt. Gen. Tod D. Wolters, the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations for Air Force Headquarters. Notably, the Summit Slide presentation for general officers the next day stripped away any mention of A-10 divestment creating significant capability gaps. Any mention of the need to maintain legacy aircraft, including the A-10, until the F-35A reached full operating capability (FOC) was also removed from the presentation.
  • The next day, Col. Meger delivered the new, sanitized presentation to the Air Force Chief of Staff. There was only muted mention of the risks presented by divestment. There was no mention of the 10- to 12-year estimated capability gap, nor was there any mention whatsoever of the need to maintain legacy aircraft—such as the A-10 or less capable alternatives like the F-16 or F-15E—until the F-35A reached FOC. Other important areas of concern to working group members, but impossible to adequately address within the three days at Davis-Monthan, were the additional costs to convert squadrons from the A-10 to another platform, inevitable training shortfalls that would be created, and how the deployment tempos of ongoing operations would further exacerbate near-term gaps in CAS capability. To our knowledge, none of these concerns surfaced during any part of the Pentagon summit.
  • Inevitably, the Air Force generals leading the ongoing CAS Summit media blitz will point congressional Armed Services and Appropriations committees to the whitewashed results of their sham summit. When they do, Senators and Representatives who care about the lives of American troops in combat need to ask the generals the following questions: Why wasn’t this summit held before the Air Force decided to get rid of A-10s? Why doesn’t the Air Force’s joint CAS summit include any statement of needs from soldiers or Marines who have actually required close air support in combat? What is the Air Force’s contingency plan for minimizing casualties among our troops in combat in the years after 2019, if the F-35 is several years late in achieving its full CAS capabilities? When and how does the Air Force propose to test whether the F-35 can deliver close support at least as combat-effective as the A-10’s present capability? How can that test take place without A-10s? Congress cannot and should not endorse Air Force leadership’s Summit by divesting the A-10s. Instead, the Senate and House Armed Services Committees need to hold hearings that consider the real and looming problems of inadequate close support, the very problems that Air Force headquarters prevented their Summit from addressing. These hearings need to include a close analysis of CAPE’s assessment and whether the decision to classify its report was necessary and appropriate. Most importantly, those hearings must include combat-experienced receivers and providers of close support who have seen the best and worst of that support, not witnesses cherry-picked by Air Force leadership—and the witnesses invited must be free to tell it the way they saw it.
  • If Congress is persuaded by the significant CAS capability risks and gaps originally identified by the Summit’s working groups, they should write and enforce legislation to constrain the Air Force from further eroding the nation’s close air support forces. Finally, if Congress believes that officers have purposely misled them about the true nature of these risks, or attempted to constrain service members’ communications with Congress about those risks, they should hold the officers accountable and remove them from positions of leadership. Congress owes nothing less to the troops they send to fight our wars.
  • Paul Merrell on 29 Mar 15
     
     Though not touched on in the article, the real problem is that the A10 has no proponents at the higher ranks of the Air Force because it is already bought and paid for; there's nothing in the A10 for the big Air Force aircraft manufacturing defense contractors. The F35, on the other hand is, is a defense contractor wet dream. It's all pie in the sky and big contracts just to get the first one in the air, let alone outfit it with the gear and programming needed to use it to inflict harm. It's been one cost-overrun after another and delay after delay. It's a national disgrace that has grown to become the most expensive military purchase in history. And it will never match the A10 for the close air support role. It's minimum airspeed is too high and its close-in maneuverability will be horrible. The generals, of course, don't want to poison the well for their post-military careers working for the defense contractors by putting a halt to the boondobble. Their answer: eliminate the close air support mission for at least 10-12 years and then attempt it with the F35.   As a former ground troop, that's grounds for the Air Force generals' court-martial and dishonorable discharge. I would not be alive today were it not for close air support. And there are tens of thousands of veterans who can say that in all truth. The A10 wasn't available back in my day, but by all reports its the best close air support weapons platform ever developed. It's a tank killer and is heavily armored, with redundant systems for pilot and aircraft survivability. The A10 is literally built around a 30 mm rotary cannon that fires at 3,900 rounds per minute. It also carries air to ground rockets and is the only close air support aircraft still in the U.S. arsenal. Fortunately, John McCain "get it" on the close air support mission and has managed to mostly protect the A10 from the generals. If you want to learn  more about the F35 scandal, try this Wikipedia article section; although it's enoug
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