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Ellen H. Brown (WoD) : On December 11, 2014, the US House passed a bill repealing the Dodd-Frank requirement that risky derivatives be pushed into big-bank subsidiaries, leaving our deposits and pensions exposed to massive derivatives losses. The bill was vigorously challenged by Senator Elizabeth Warren; but the tide turned when Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorganChase, stepped into the ring. Perhaps what prompted his intervention was the unanticipated $40 drop in the price of oil. As financial blogger Michael Snyder points out, that drop could trigger a derivatives payout that could bankrupt the biggest banks. And if the G20’s new “bail-in” rules are formalized, depositors and pensioners could be on the hook. The new bail-in rules were discussed in my last last article entitled “New G20 Rules: Cyprus-style Bail-ins to Hit Depositors AND Pensioners.” They are edicts of the Financial Stability Board (FSB), an unelected body of central bankers and finance ministers headquartered in the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland. Where did the FSB get these sweeping powers, and is its mandate legally enforceable?

Those questions were addressed in an article I wrote in June 2009, two months after the FSB was formed, titled “Big Brother in Basel: BIS Financial Stability Board Undermines National Sovereignty.” It linked the strange boot shape of the BIS to a line from Orwell’s 1984: “a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” The concerns raised there seem to be materializing, so I’m republishing the bulk of that article here. We need to be paying attention, lest the bail-in juggernaut steamroll over us unchallenged. The Shadowy Financial Stability Board Alarm bells went off in April 2009, when the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) was linked to the new Financial Stability Board (FSB) signed onto by the G20 leaders in London. The FSB was an expansion of the older Financial Stability Forum (FSF) set up in 1999 to serve in a merely advisory capacity by the G7 (a group of finance ministers formed from the seven major industrialized nations). The chair of the FSF was the General Manager of the BIS. The new FSB was expanded to include all G20 members (19 nations plus the EU).

Formally called the “Group of Twenty Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors,” the G20 was, like the G7, originally set up as a forum merely for cooperation and consultation on matters pertaining to the international financial system. What set off alarms was that the new Financial Stability Board had real teeth, imposing “obligations” and “commitments” on its members; and this feat was pulled off without legislative formalities, skirting the usual exacting requirements for treaties. It was all done in hasty response to an “emergency.” Problem-reaction-solution was the slippery slope of coups. Buried on page 83 of an 89-page Report on Financial Regulatory Reform issued by the US Obama administration was a recommendation that the FSB strengthen and institutionalize its mandate to promote global financial stability. It sounded like a worthy goal, but there was a disturbing lack of detail. What was the FSB’s mandate, what were its expanded powers, and who was in charge? An article in The London Guardian addressed those issues in question and answer format:

Suddenly there was a chilling scream. “Allah,” someone wailed. “Allah! Allah!” As I wrote at the time, this wasn’t a cry of religious ecstasy. It was the sound of deep pain, coming from elsewhere in the town library, which had been turned into a detention center by Iraqi security forces who were advised by American soldiers and contractors. I was embedded with the Americans for a week, and I had already heard two of them, from the Wisconsin National Guard, talk about seeing their Iraqi partners trussing up prisoners like animals at a slaughter. During raids, I had seen these Iraqis beat their detainees — muggings as a form of questioning — while their American advisers watched.

The CIA’s violations of its detainees are the tip of the torture iceberg. We run the risk, in the necessary debate sparked by the Senate’s release of 500 pages on CIA interrogation abuses, of focusing too narrowly on what happened to 119 detainees held at the agency’s black sites from 2002-2006. The problem of American torture — how much occurred, what impact it had, who bears responsibility — is much larger. Across Iraq and Afghanistan, American soldiers and the indigenous forces they fought alongside committed a large number of abuses against a considerable number of people. It didn’t begin at Abu Ghraib and it didn’t end there. The evidence, which has emerged in a drip-drip way over the years, is abundant though less dramatic than the aforementioned 500-page executive summary of the Senate’s still-classified report on the CIA.

Just as the CIA opposed release of the Senate torture report, the Pentagon and White House continue to do their best to suppress the evidence. The Daily Beast noted the other day that the Obama Administration, responding to pressure from the Pentagon, continues to fight in court to prevent the publication of thousands of photos of detainee abuse. The argument against release is nearly identical to the argument used by the CIA to repress the Senate’s report—it could put American lives in danger. To her credit, Sen. Dianne Feinstein pushed back and published an executive summary of her committee’s 6,000-page report (which has caused practically no protest or violence overseas). Repression is the gut instinct of institutions that have something to hide, and I came across that in Samarra, too. Shortly after I witnessed the threatened execution of a detainee (an Iraqi soldier pointed his AK-47 at a prisoner who was against a wall with his hands up), an order came down from the American command to get me out of Samarra. I was told to pack my backpack for the next convoy out of town. After I made a flurry of calls on my satellite phone, the order was rescinded. Someone wanted the truth to come out.

Late on Wednesday the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill to introduce sanctions against Venezuela. The bill was also passed by the Senate on Monday, and White House officials have indicated that President Barack Obama will sign the bill into law, although it was not specified when. The Venezuelan Defense of Human Rights and Civil Society Act seeks to sanction high ranking Venezuelan officials accused of being responsible for human rights abuses during the opposition unrest movement earlier this year. Primarily, it will sanction such officials with a visa ban and a freeze on any U.S. assets they possess. Democrat senator Robert Menendez, the Act’s main sponsor, said of the bill’s passage that, “The absence of justice and the denial of human rights in Venezuela must end, and the U.S. Congress is playing a powerful part in righting this wrong”. The Act also calls for a U.S. government strategy to increase funding for and availability of anti-government media in Venezuela, including utilizing the Voice of America for this end. The bill states that U.S. foreign policy should aim to “continue to support the development of democratic political processes and independent civil society in Venezuela”.

Investigative journalist Eva Golinger has documented how over the last twelve years U.S. government agencies have provided well over $100 million to opposition groups in Venezuela for their activities. The Venezuelan government rejects the Act’s narrative of the opposition’s unrest movement from February to May this year, which led to 43 deaths, including members of security forces and supporters of both sides. It states that the opposition was responsible for violence against civilians and public infrastructure, and that the unrest was aimed at provoking a state coup. Officials also argue that members of security forces accused of abuses against opposition activists were investigated and detained.

The Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), which counts Venezuela, Cuba, Ecuador and Nicaragua among its members, issued a statement on Thursday opposing the proposed U.S. sanctions. “The countries of the ALBA wish to emphasise that they won’t allow the utilisation of old practices already applied in the region which are directed at fomenting a change in political regime. In this sense, we express our deepest support and solidarity with the people and government of Venezuela,” read the strongly worded statement. The Venezuelan officials who would be sanctioned by the bill have not been named, however Republican senator Marco Rubio recently issued a list of 27 names he suggested should be included.

The Central Bank of Russia (CBR), on Friday, admitted domestic banks to the Russian alternative to the international SWIFT banking system. Domestic banks can access the system after signing agreements with the Central Bank. The Russian alternative to the SWIFT system is expected to be fully developed and operational by May 2015.

The Central Bank of Russia issued a statement saying that the new service would allow credit institutions to transmit SWIFT-format messages through the Bank of Russia in all regions within the Russian Federation without restrictions. The CBR added that the new service had been established to ensure continuous and secure transmissions of financial messages inside the country. The decision to create the domestic alternative to the SWIFT system was made against the backdrop of EU proposals in September, to disconnect Russia from the international SWIFT system as part of the sanctions against Russia over the situation in and about Ukraine. Several U.S. Senators lobbied in support of the measure. Moscow responded by drafting an alternative to the Brussels-based SWIFT system by creating a Russian alternative non-governmental inter-bank communication system.

The Russian Tass news agency reported that the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) transmits 1.8 billion transactions per year, remitting payment orders worth $6 trillion a day. Disconnecting Russia from the SWIFT system, as proposed by certain EU members in September, would not only harm the Russian economy. Disconnecting Russia from the SWIFT system before an alternative is operational would also create substantial problems for Russia’s main trading partners within the EU, which include Germany, Italy and France.

Putin announced that Russia has cancelled the South Stream project on December 1, 2014. Instead the South Stream pipeline project has been replaced by a natural gas pipeline that goes across the Black Sea to Turkey from the Russian Federation’s South Federal District. This alternative pipeline has been popularly billed the «Turk Stream» and partners Russian energy giant Gazprom with Turkey’s Botas. Moreover, Gazprom will start giving Turkey discounts in the purchase of Russian natural gas that will increase with the intensification of Russo-Turkish cooperation. The natural gas deal between Ankara and Moscow creates a win-win situation for both the Turkish and Russian sides. Not only will Ankara get a discount on energy supplies, but Turk Stream gives the Turkish government what it has wanted and desired for years. The Turk Stream pipeline will make Turkey an important energy corridor and transit point, complete with transit revenues. In this case Turkey becomes the corridor between energy supplier Russia and European Union and non-EU energy customers in southeastern Europe. Ankara will gain some leverage over the European Union and have an extra negotiating card with the EU too, because the EU will have to deal with it as an energy broker.

For its part, Russia has reduced the risks that it faced in building the South Stream by cancelling the project. Moscow could have wasted resources and time building the South Stream to see the project sanctioned or obstructed in the Balkans by Washington and Brussels. If the European Union really wants Russian natural gas then the Turk Stream pipeline can be expanded from Turkey to Greece, the former Yugoslav Republic (FYR) of Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary, Slovenia, Italy, Austria, and other European countries that want to be integrated into the energy project. The cancellation of South Stream also means that there will be one less alternative energy corridor from Russia to the European Union for some time. This has positive implications for a settlement in Ukraine, which is an important transit route for Russian natural gas to the European Union. As a means of securing the flow of natural gas across Ukrainian territory from Russia, the European Union will be more prone to push the authorities in Kiev to end the conflict in East Ukraine.

From the perspective of Russian Presidential Advisor Sergey Glazyev, the US is waging its multi-spectrum war against Russia to ultimately challenge Moscow’s Chinese partners. In an insightful interview, Glazyev explained the following points to the Ukrainian journalist Alyona Berezovskaya — working for a Rossiya Segodnya subsidiary focusing on information involving Ukraine — about the basis for US hostility towards Russia: the bankruptcy of the US, its decline in competitiveness on global markets, and Washington’s inability to ultimately save its financial system by servicing its foreign debt or getting enough investments to establish some sort of innovative economic breakthrough are the reasons why Washington has been going after the Russian Federation. [13] In Glazyev’s own words, the US wants «a new world war». [14] The US needs conflict and confrontation, in other words. This is what the crisis in Ukraine is nurturing in Europe. Sergey Glazyev reiterates the same points months down the road on September 23, 2014 in an article he authors for the magazine Russia in Global Affairs, which is sponsored by the Russian International Affairs Council — a think-tank founded by the Russian Foreign Ministry and Russian Ministry of Education 2010 — and the US journal Foreign Affairs — which is the magazine published by the Council on Foreign Relation in the US. In his article, Glazyev adds that the war Washington is inciting against Russia in Europe may ultimately benefit the Chinese, because the struggle being waged will weaken the US, Russia, and the European Union to the advantage of China. [15] The point of explaining all this is to explain that Russia wants a balanced strategic partnership with China. Glazyev himself even told Berezovskaya in their interview that Russia wants a mutually beneficial relationship with China that does reduce it to becoming a subordinate to Beijing. [16]

Lindsey Graham, who is not a stupid person, can be so embarrassing. Speaking at a press conference alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem Saturday, Graham said the following in response to Bibi’s call for “more sanctions, and stronger sanctions” against Iran. But you, above all others, have said that sanctions are what got Iran to the table, and it will be the only thing that brings them to a deal that we can all live with. I’m here to tell you, Mr. Prime Minister, that the Congress will follow your lead. [Emphasis added.]

But that’s not all he said. He implied that people in the US intelligence community, which has insisted for more than seven years now that Iran has not made a decision to build a nuclear weapon, should have their driver’s licenses revoked whenever they return from overseas assignments, meetings or vacations. To those who believe the Iranians have not been trying to develop a nuclear weapon, if you come to America, you should not be allowed to drive on our highways. Clearly, this regime for years has been deceiving the international community, has been trying to pursuit [sic], in my view, a nuclear weapon.

And then there’s this little gem offered to a leader who, as prime minister or the leader of the opposition, has steadfastly opposed the peace-making efforts of three US presidents, including George W. Bush, and who enthusiastically encouraged the United States to invade and occupy Iraq, among other incredibly stupid moves. And what brings me here so many times, is common and shared values and common and shared enemies. The fate of one country determines the fate of the other. God bless the people of Israel, and you can count on the United States Congress, Republican and Democrat, to be there for you when you need us the most. [Emphasis added.]

The National Security Agency used the holiday lull to “minimise the impact” of a tranche of documents by releasing them on Christmas Eve, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said on Friday. The documents, which were released in response to a legal challenge by the ACLU under the Freedom of Information Act, are heavily – in some places totally –redacted versions of reports by the NSA to the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board dating back to 2007. A court ordered the documents released this past summer, and a 22 December deadline for that release was agreed upon, according to Patrick Toomey, a staff attorney at the ACLU’s national security project, because the NSA said it needed “six or seven months” to complete its review and redaction process. A spokesperson for the NSA said that the 22 December deadline, “which was agreed to by all parties,” was met.

But according to Toomey, the ACLU didn’t receive the documents until “late in the day on the 23rd” – the NSA sent them by FedEx late on the 22nd – and the NSA didn’t publicly release them until Christmas Eve. “I certainly think the NSA would prefer to have the documents released right ahead of the holidays in order to have less public attention on what they contain,” Toomey said. The redactions on the document are extreme, and their omissions tantalising. One entry, from the 4th quarter of 2008, reads: “On [redacted] [redacted] used the US SIGINT System (USSS) to locate [redacted] believed to be kidnapped [redacted] The selectors were tasked before authorization was obtained from NSA. After the NSA Office of General Counsel (OGC) denied the authorization request, [redacted] was found. He had not been kidnapped.” Another reads: “On [redacted] during an experimental collection and processing effort, NSA analysts collected [several lines of text redacted.] The messages were deleted [redacted] when the error was identified.”

Many entries are erased entirely, which means the documents reveal very little about how individuals who misuse the data were disciplined by the NSA, or how quickly errors were resolved. But, according to Toomey, they speak to a total picture of a “large number of different compliance violations. We don’t know how many.” He said the documents deepen the picture of the nature and extent of compliance violations by analysts working for the NSA.

Thousands of recently highly paid workers have been laid off after the oil price plummeted 50 percent in 2014. At least four American oil-producing states are already facing budget problems due to decreasing oil revenues. The price plunge has affected petroleum production in all oil-extracting countries, including the US.

For Texas, which has a far larger and more diversified economy than Louisiana, the oil price downturn is no good either. In just October and November Texas lost 2,300 oil and gas jobs, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics reported last week. Through the last half a year the state has been losing $83 million in potential revenue every day, the Greater Houston Partnership recently reported. They blamed this on crashing price of its West Texas Intermediate crude oil, which has depreciated to $54.73 per barrel this week, from more than $100 six months ago.

This doesn’t apply to the state of Alaska. According to the NYT, approximately 90 percent of state’s budget is formed from oil revenues. Alaska’s government is considering a 50 percent capital-spending cut for bridges and roads in the face of the oil price drop, with Moody’s, the credit rating service, lowering Alaska’s credit outlook from stable to negative. The state of Louisiana’s 2015-16 budget is going to be $1.4 billion short, with 162 state government positions already eliminated and more to be discontinued starting from January. Contracts and projects are being either reduced or frozen in state agencies. According to the state’s chief economist Greg Albrecht, for every $1 fall in price of an annual average barrel of oil, Louisiana loses $12 million.

Let's review. Ukraine produces 45% of its electricity from nuclear power. Fuel for its reactors comes from Russia.It produces 40% of its electricity from thermal power. Since the war in East Ukraie coal for its plants comes from Russia.It produces 10% of its electricity from natural gas that also comes from Russia.Since Ukraine is still unable to produce enough electricity domestically Russia also supplies it with ready-made electricity.It's safe to say the only thing preventing a total Ukraine energy collapse is Russia.

Moscow and Kiev have signed an agreement on the supply of 9 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity to Ukraine, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak said.He added that Russia has already started the delivery, despite the fact that the terms of the agreement have not been fulfilled yet, and hopes for the subsequent payment."In order to reduce the blackouts and other existing problems we [Moscow and Kiev] have held negotiations on the supply of 9 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity to Ukraine.We have signed an agreement, but the terms of the contract are not currently fulfilled…

Nevertheless, under the instructions of the Russian president, the decision has been made to carry out such a delivery.Hopefully, the payments will be made in future," Russia 24 TV channel has quoted Kozak on its website as saying.In 2013, electricity consumption in Ukraine amounted to nearly 147 billion kilowatt-hours.Russian deputy prime minister also stated that the electricity will be delivered to Ukraine on favorable terms.

US and British intelligence agencies undertake every effort imaginable to crack all types of encrypted Internet communication. The cloud, it seems, is full of holes. The good news: New Snowden documents show that some forms of encryption still cause problems for the NSA.

Jordan late Wednesday submitted a draft United Nations Security Council resolution calling for an end to the Israeli occupation by 2017, on behalf of the Palestinian leadership. After a day of closed-door negotiations among Arab members of the United Nations, Jordan, which represents Arab countries on the Security Council, put the draft resolution "in blue," meaning the text of the draft has been finalized and could be put to a vote 24 hours later.

Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Malki said that the resolution submitted by Jordan was a French-sponsored version of the draft, not the one originally phrased by the Palestinians and the Arab League. The resolution sets a two-year deadline to reach a solution to the Palestinian issue, Al-Malki told Voice of Palestine Radio. "France said it wants to go to the Security Council with us because the proposal will deal with all the problems that existed over the past 20 years of negotiations," al-Malki said. "It believes a ceiling to end negotiations and end the occupation is the best process now, because direct negotiations have proven to be futile." Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said Thursday that the submission of the draft amounted to an act of aggression.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is trying to censure Israel, Lieberman said, a process he added would have no benefit for the Palestinians but rather worsen the regional council. Such a measure will not advance steps toward a permanent agreement, Lieberman added, as without Israel's consent, nothing will change.

The Obama administration has been tightlipped about its controversial naming of the North Korean government as the definitive source of the hack that eviscerated Sony Pictures Entertainment late last year. But FBI director James Comey is standing by the bureau’s conclusion, and has offered up a few tiny breadcrumbs of the evidence that led to it. Those crumbs include the claim that Sony hackers sometimes failed to use the proxy servers that masked the origin of their attack, revealing IP addresses that the FBI says were used exclusively by North Korea. Speaking at a Fordham Law School cybersecurity conference Wednesday, Comey said that he has “very high confidence” in the FBI’s attribution of the attack to North Korea. And he named several of the sources of his evidence, including a “behavioral analysis unit” of FBI experts trained to psychologically analyze foes based on their writings and actions. He also said that the FBI compared the Sony attack with their own “red team” simulations to determine how the attack could have occurred. And perhaps most importantly, Comey now says that the hackers in the attack failed on multiple occasions to use the proxy servers that bounce their Internet connection through an obfuscating computer somewhere else in the world, revealing IP addresses that tied them to North Koreans.

“In nearly every case, [the Sony hackers known as the Guardians of Peace] used proxy servers to disguise where they were coming from in sending these emails and posting these statements. But several times they got sloppy,” Comey said. “Several times, either because they forgot or because of a technical problem, they connected directly and we could see that the IPs they were using…were exclusively used by the North Koreans.” “They shut it off very quickly once they saw the mistake,” he added. “But not before we saw where it was coming from.” Comey’s brief and cryptic remarks—with no opportunity for followup questions from reporters—respond to skepticism and calls for more evidence from cybersecurity experts unsatisfied with the FBI’s vague statements tying the hack to North Korean government. In a previous public announcement the FBI had said only that it found “similarities in specific lines of code, encryption algorithms, data deletion methods, and compromised networks,” as well as IP addresses that matched prior attacks it knows to have originated in North Korea. At that time, the FBI also said it had further evidence matching the tools used in the attack to a North Korean hacking attack that hit South Korean banks and media outlets.

Following those elliptical statements, the cybersecurity community demanded more information be released to prove North Korea’s involvement. Some have even signed a petition on the White House website calling for more transparency in the investigation. Well-known security blogger and author Bruce Schneier has compared the FBI’s “trust us” mentality to the claims of the Bush administration about Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the Iraq War. Without more information, security experts themselves have remained deeply divided in their conclusions about who hacked Sony.

The euro has plunged to a nine-year low against the dollar on worries that a victory in Greece by the far-left Syriza party in the January 25 election will result in the country's departure from the European Union. The EU currency's value, which dived on Monday to $1.1864, a level last reached back in 2006. was also dented by growing expectations of quantitative easing, or economic stimulus, from the European Central Bank. "Greek problems may spell trouble for the eurozone (and) may impact energy demand out of Western Europe -- especially with press suggesting German politicians are talking about Grexit," said analyst Anthony Cheung.

As local law enforcement has deployed martial tactics against those protesting the police killing of an 18-year-old in Ferguson, Missouri, a debate is suddenly raging over how municipal police forces came to resemble military units. A new report suggests the trend may, in part, have to do with campaign contributions to congressional lawmakers. At issue is the federal government’s so-called 1033 Program, which permits the Pentagon to give military hardware to local police departments. 

The group’s new report looked at a June congressional vote on legislation, offered by U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Fla., that would have blocked the Pentagon from spending resources on transferring military hardware to local police agencies. The bill was defeated 62-355.  According to data compiled by Maplight, the lawmakers “voting to continue funding the 1033 Program have received, on average, 73 percent more money from the defense industry than representatives voting to defund it.” In all, the average lawmaker voting against the bill received more than $50,000 in campaign donations from the defense industry in the last two years. The report also found that of the 59 lawmakers who received more than $100,000  from defense contractors in the last two years, only four voted for Grayson’s legislation. Though thought of as a political force primarily in federal policymaking, the defense industry also spends on state politics, which influences law enforcement procurement decisions. According to data compiled by the National Institute for Money in State Politics, more than $8 million of campaign contributions has been dumped into state elections in the last decade by military contractors and their employees.

Police officials say the equipment helps them better secure local communities. By contrast groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union have recently launched a national campaign to demilitarize local police departments. That campaign got a boost this week when Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, a prospective 2016 presidential candidate, published an editorial in Time magazine echoing the ACLU’s message in the wake of the Ferguson shooting.  “When you couple this militarization of law enforcement with an erosion of civil liberties and due process that allows the police to become judge and jury — national security letters, no-knock searches, broad general warrants, pre-conviction forfeiture — we begin to have a very serious problem on our hands,” he wrote.

Exactly one year ago Obama proposed to take Bashar Al Assad to the woodshed because he had allegedly unleashed a vicious chemical attack on his own citizens. That was all pretext, of course, because even the CIA refused to sign-off on the flimsy case for Assad’s culpability at the time—-a reluctance corroborated since then by the considerable evidence that hundreds of Syrian civilians were murdered during a false flag operation staged by the rebels with help from Turkey. The aim of the rebels, of course, was to activate American tomahawk missiles and bombers in behalf of “regime change”, which was also the stated goal of the Obama Administration. Now the White House is threatening to bomb Syria again, but this time its “regime change” objective has been expanded to include both sides! In 12 short months what had been the allegedly heroic Sunni opposition to the “brutal rule” of the Assad/Alawite minority has transmuted into the “greatest terrorist threat ever”, according to the Secretary of Defense.

Adding to this blinding farce is the warning of Syria’s Foreign Affairs minister that Obama should please to request permission before he rains destruction from the sky on the Opposition—-that is, the opposition to the very same Damascus regime which the White House has vowed to eradicate. Needless to say,  the Washington apparatus is having nothing to do with aiding the enemy of its new enemy:

In fact, there is apparently an option emerging from the bowels of the war machine that calls for an odd/even day plan to bomb both sides, thereby making clear that Washington is an equal opportunity spanker. Apparently, whether you use a 12th century sword or 20th century attack helicopter as a means of rule, you will be bombed by the “indispensable nation”, as Obama put it, adding that “no other nation can do what we do”. Well, that involves some “doing”. According to AP, it appears that Syrian airstrikes are imminent, but could be carried out under the odd/even day plan: “In an effort to avoid unintentionally strengthening the Syrian government, the White House could seek to balance strikes against the Islamic State with attacks on Assad regime targets.” Is any more evidence needed that Washington has gone stark raving mad than even the possibility that such an absurd option could  be under consideration? Has not the imperial city on the Potomac become so inured to its pretensions of global hegemony and to instant resort to deployment of its war machine that any semblance of rationality and coherence has been dissolved?

All across the country, heavily armed SWAT teams are raiding people’s homes in the middle of the night, often just to search for drugs. It should enrage us that people have needlessly died during these raids, that pets have been shot, and that homes have been ravaged. Our neighborhoods are not warzones, and police officers should not be treating us like wartime enemies. Any yet, every year, billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment flows from the federal government to state and local police departments. Departments use these wartime weapons in everyday policing, especially to fight the wasteful and failed drug war, which has unfairly targeted people of color. As our new report makes clear, it’s time for American police to remember that they are supposed to protect and serve our communities, not wage war on the people who live in them.

t is widely known that policing tactics across the country often unfairly target communities of color. According to our investigation, the use of paramilitary weapons and tactics appears to be no different. These maps show the distribution of SWAT raids by racial composition of neighborhoods in two cities, but this trend is echoed nationwide. Read the complete report for more.

It’s not uncommon for SWAT teams to brutalize bystanders in their search for a suspect. One family in Atlanta was woken up in the middle of the night when officers burst into their home and threw a flashbang grenade into the playpen where a toddler was sleeping. This is their story.  

Security experts call it a “drive-by download”: a hacker infiltrates a high-traffic website and then subverts it to deliver malware to every single visitor. It’s one of the most powerful tools in the black hat arsenal, capable of delivering thousands of fresh victims into a hackers’ clutches within minutes. Now the technique is being adopted by a different kind of a hacker—the kind with a badge. For the last two years, the FBI has been quietly experimenting with drive-by hacks as a solution to one of law enforcement’s knottiest Internet problems: how to identify and prosecute users of criminal websites hiding behind the powerful Tor anonymity system. The approach has borne fruit—over a dozen alleged users of Tor-based child porn sites are now headed for trial as a result. But it’s also engendering controversy, with charges that the Justice Department has glossed over the bulk-hacking technique when describing it to judges, while concealing its use from defendants. Critics also worry about mission creep, the weakening of a technology relied on by human rights workers and activists, and the potential for innocent parties to wind up infected with government malware because they visited the wrong website. “This is such a big leap, there should have been congressional hearings about this,” says ACLU technologist Chris Soghoian, an expert on law enforcement’s use of hacking tools. “If Congress decides this is a technique that’s perfectly appropriate, maybe that’s OK. But let’s have an informed debate about it.”

The FBI’s use of malware is not new. The bureau calls the method an NIT, for “network investigative technique,” and the FBI has been using it since at least 2002 in cases ranging from computer hacking to bomb threats, child porn to extortion. Depending on the deployment, an NIT can be a bulky full-featured backdoor program that gives the government access to your files, location, web history and webcam for a month at a time, or a slim, fleeting wisp of code that sends the FBI your computer’s name and address, and then evaporates. What’s changed is the way the FBI uses its malware capability, deploying it as a driftnet instead of a fishing line. And the shift is a direct response to Tor, the powerful anonymity system endorsed by Edward Snowden and the State Department alike.

When Israel completes its damage assessment from its latest war with Hamas, it may conclude that one of the biggest casualties was its all-important relationship with the United States. A recent American decision to hold back on the delivery of advanced Hellfire missiles offered dramatic manifestation of a relationship that appears to be deteriorating in large part due to strained ties between President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Since both came into power in early 2009, they have been unable to see eye-to-eye on a host of issues — most notably on how to handle Iran’s nuclear program and on peace talks with the Palestinians. There also seems to be little personal chemistry. Topping things off are mutual accusations of political meddling in each other’s countries.

“The problem is that Netanyahu has become a domestic political enemy of the president and his party,” leading Israeli commentator Nahum Barnea wrote Monday in Yediot Ahronot. “That is a blunder of historic proportions.”

U.S.-Israeli relations have seen their ups and downs, but what makes this time remarkable is the wide gap between how each leader sees the world, said Shmuel Rosner, an Israeli columnist who focuses on the relationship. “Six years of mutual suspicions have left deep scars and I don’t see it improving over the next two,” he said.

As I sit in a room filled with scores of high-ranking military officers resplendent in their dress uniforms -- Kenyans in their khakis, Burundians and Ugandans clad in olive, Tanzanians in deep forest green sporting like-colored berets and red epaulets with crossed rifles on their shoulders -- chances are that the U.S. military is carrying out some mission somewhere on this vast continent.  It might be a kidnapping raid or a training exercise.  It could be an airstrike or the construction of a drone base.  Or, as I wait for the next speaker to approach the lectern at the “Land Forces East Africa” conference in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, it could be a humanitarian operation run not by civilians in the aid business, but by military troops with ulterior motives -- part of a near-continent-wide campaign utilizing the core tenets of counterinsurgency strategy. The U.S. is trying to win a war for the hearts and minds of Africa.  But a Pentagon investigation suggests that those mystery projects somewhere out there in Djibouti or Ethiopia or Kenya or here in Tanzania may well be orphaned, ill-planned, and undocumented failures-in-the-making.  According to the Department of Defense’s watchdog agency, U.S. military officials in Africa “did not adequately plan or execute” missions designed to win over Africans deemed vulnerable to the lures of violent extremism. 

This evidence of failure in the earliest stages of the U.S. military’s hearts-and-minds campaign should have an eerie resonance for anyone who has followed its previous efforts to use humanitarian aid and infrastructure projects to sway local populations in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan.  In each case, the operations failed in spectacular ways, but were only fully acknowledged after years of futility and billions of dollars in waste.  In Africa, a war zone about which most Americans are completely unaware, the writing is already on the wall.  Or at least it should be.  While Pentagon investigators identified a plethora of problems, their report has, in fact, been kept under wraps for almost a year, while the command responsible for the failures has ignored all questions about it from TomDispatch.

The US military and humanitarian mission in Iraq continues to suffer from what is known as "mission creep," which is defined as "a gradual shift in objectives during the course of a military campaign, often resulting in an unplanned long-term commitment." When the Obama administration ordered limited military intervention against the Islamic State beginning on Aug. 7, the objectives were twofold: to halt the Islamic State's advance on Irbil to protect US personnel based there, and provide humanitarian relief to the Yazidi minority who fled Sinjar and other towns and were trapped on Mount Sinjar. Within a week, the objectives were modified, and the US military was now tasked with serving as the air force to Kurdish and Iraqi forces "to protect critical infrastructure" and "support Iraqi security forces and Kurdish defense forces, who are working together to combat ISIL [the Islamic State]." Yesterday, the US began launching airstrikes against Islamic State fighters who are besieging the ethnic Turkmen town of Amerli. Note that Amerli is in Salahaddin province and doesn't constitute a critical threat to US personnel in Irbil, nor does it host critical infrastructure. Below is the full press release that was issued yesterday by US Central Command:

It has been clear from the beginning that the Obama administration does not have a strategy to deal with the Islamic State. President Obama admitted as much in a press conference last week. But what is clear is that the Obama administration is doing exactly what it said it wouldn't do: get sucked into Iraq's civil war and serve as Iraq's air force. If President Obama wants to defeat the Islamic State, a group that he described as a "cancer," he needs to quickly develop a comprehensive strategy and articulate it to the American public. Otherwise, the administration is employing tactical solutions to the strategic problem that is the Islamic State, and adjusting these tactics on the fly.