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The development came as defense lawyers for the alleged USS Cole bombing mastermind, Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, a Saudi, were questioning the war court overseer, Ary, on what he meant when he proposed the rule change Dec. 9, saying “the status quo does not support the pace of litigation necessary to bring these cases to their just conclusion.”Ary, testifying from his Pentagon headquarters, said that he believed the order to move the war court judges to Guantánamo and strip them of their court martial duties was “influence neutral.”He said he didn’t anticipate the order sidelining progress in the hearings. “Knowing what I knew then, I didn’t believe that it would have this effect, no,” he said, adding, “I stand by that recommendation.”

The facility, a nondescript warehouse on Chicago’s west side known as Homan Square, has long been the scene of secretive work by special police units. Interviews with local attorneys and one protester who spent the better part of a day shackled in Homan Square describe operations that deny access to basic constitutional rights. Alleged police practices at Homan Square, according to those familiar with the facility who spoke out to the Guardian after its investigation into Chicago police abuse, include: Keeping arrestees out of official booking databases. Beating by police, resulting in head wounds. Shackling for prolonged periods. Denying attorneys access to the “secure” facility. Holding people without legal counsel for between 12 and 24 hours, including people as young as 15. At least one man was found unresponsive in a Homan Square “interview room” and later pronounced dead.

Brian Jacob Church, a protester known as one of the “Nato Three”, was held and questioned at Homan Square in 2012 following a police raid. Officers restrained Church for the better part of a day, denying him access to an attorney, before sending him to a nearby police station to be booked and charged.

The facility, a nondescript warehouse on Chicago’s west side known as Homan Square, has long been the scene of secretive work by special police units. Interviews with local attorneys and one protester who spent the better part of a day shackled in Homan Square describe operations that deny access to basic constitutional rights. Alleged police practices at Homan Square, according to those familiar with the facility who spoke out to the Guardian after its investigation into Chicago police abuse, include: Keeping arrestees out of official booking databases. Beating by police, resulting in head wounds. Shackling for prolonged periods. Denying attorneys access to the “secure” facility. Holding people without legal counsel for between 12 and 24 hours, including people as young as 15. At least one man was found unresponsive in a Homan Square “interview room” and later pronounced dead.

“Homan Square is definitely an unusual place,” Church told the Guardian on Friday. “It brings to mind the interrogation facilities they use in the Middle East. The CIA calls them black sites. It’s a domestic black site. When you go in, no one knows what’s happened to you.”

The secretive warehouse is the latest example of Chicago police practices that echo the much-criticized detention abuses of the US war on terrorism. While those abuses impacted people overseas, Homan Square – said to house military-style vehicles, interrogation cells and even a cage – trains its focus on Americans, most often poor, black and brown. Unlike a precinct, no one taken to Homan Square is said to be booked. Witnesses, suspects or other Chicagoans who end up inside do not appear to have a public, searchable record entered into a database indicating where they are, as happens when someone is booked at a precinct. Lawyers and relatives insist there is no way of finding their whereabouts. Those lawyers who have attempted to gain access to Homan Square are most often turned away, even as their clients remain in custody inside.

“It’s sort of an open secret among attorneys that regularly make police station visits, this place – if you can’t find a client in the system, odds are they’re there,” said Chicago lawyer Julia Bartmes. Chicago civil-rights attorney Flint Taylor said Homan Square represented a routinization of a notorious practice in local police work that violates the fifth and sixth amendments of the constitution. “This Homan Square revelation seems to me to be an institutionalization of the practice that dates back more than 40 years,” Taylor said, “of violating a suspect or witness’ rights to a lawyer and not to be physically or otherwise coerced into giving a statement.”

“It’s sort of an open secret among attorneys that regularly make police station visits, this place – if you can’t find a client in the system, odds are they’re there,” said Chicago lawyer Julia Bartmes. Chicago civil-rights attorney Flint Taylor said Homan Square represented a routinization of a notorious practice in local police work that violates the fifth and sixth amendments of the constitution.

While Gemalto was indeed another casualty in Western governments’ sweeping effort to gather as much global intelligence advantage as possible, the leaked documents make clear that the company was specifically targeted. According to the materials published Thursday, GCHQ used a specific codename — DAPINO GAMMA — to refer to the operations against Gemalto. The spies also actively penetrated the email and social media accounts of Gemalto employees across the world in an effort to steal the company’s encryption keys. Evidence of the Gemalto breach rattled the digital security community. “Almost everyone in the world carries cell phones and this is an unprecedented mass attack on the privacy of citizens worldwide,” said Greg Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy & Technology, a non-profit that advocates for digital privacy and free online expression. “While there is certainly value in targeted surveillance of cell phone communications, this coordinated subversion of the trusted technical security infrastructure of cell phones means the US and British governments now have easy access to our mobile communications.”

For Gemalto, evidence that their vaunted security systems and the privacy of customers had been compromised by the world’s top spy agencies made an immediate financial impact. The company’s shares took a dive on the Paris bourse Friday, falling $500 million. In the U.S., Gemalto’s shares fell as much 10 percent Friday morning. They had recovered somewhat — down 4 percent — by the close of trading on the Euronext stock exchange. Analysts at Dutch financial services company Rabobank speculated in a research note that Gemalto could be forced to recall “a large number” of SIM cards. The French daily L’Express noted today that Gemalto board member Alex Mandl was a founding trustee of the CIA-funded venture capital firm In-Q-Tel. Mandl resigned from In-Q-Tel’s board in 2002, when he was appointed CEO of Gemplus, which later merged with another company to become Gemalto. But the CIA connection still dogged Mandl, with the French press regularly insinuating that American spies could infiltrate the company. In 2003, a group of French lawmakers tried unsuccessfully to create a commission to investigate Gemplus’s ties to the CIA and its implications for the security of SIM cards. Mandl, an Austrian-American businessman who was once a top executive at AT&T, has denied that he had any relationship with the CIA beyond In-Q-Tel. In 2002, he said he did not even have a security clearance.

AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon could not be reached for comment Friday. Sprint declined to comment. Vodafone, the world’s second largest telecom provider by subscribers and a customer of Gemalto, said in a statement, “[W]e have no further details of these allegations which are industrywide in nature and are not focused on any one mobile operator. We will support industry bodies and Gemalto in their investigations.” Deutsche Telekom AG, a German company, said it has changed encryption algorithms in its Gemalto SIM cards. “We currently have no knowledge that this additional protection mechanism has been compromised,” the company said in a statement. “However, we cannot rule out this completely.”

Update: Asked about the SIM card heist, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said he did not expect the news would hurt relations with the tech industry: “It’s hard for me to imagine that there are a lot of technology executives that are out there that are in a position of saying that they hope that people who wish harm to this country will be able to use their technology to do so. So, I do think in fact that there are opportunities for the private sector and the federal government to coordinate and to cooperate on these efforts, both to keep the country safe, but also to protect our civil liberties.”

Another indicator is, according to several analysts, that France and Germany are increasingly working towards the establishment of a continental European consensus that aims at ending a predominantly US/UK-driven policy of tensions directed against Russia. These trends include closer ties between the European Union and the Eurasian Economic Union as part of a long-term solution for Europe and Ukraine. The question whether the French 3.2 billion euro loan to Egypt is “business as usual” for a major arms exporter as France, or whether it signals a long-awaited U-turn within the French Socialist Party led government of Francois Hollande is not necessarily unjustified. Time will tell whether the warning by the senior French Statesman and former French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas, that France has become “the vanguard dog of NATO” has had a long-anticipated effect within the French Socialist Party and Hollande’s administration.

Monday, Spath bristled at the notion that pretrial hearings could be accelerated.“This is a complicated international terrorism case under a relatively new statutory scheme with an unprecedented amount of classified evidence,” he said.In last week’s hearings, Nashiri’s attorneys uncovered a plan to relieve Spath of his Guantánamo cases and leave him in his full-time duties as chief of the Air Force Judiciary — a behind-the-scenes development that Spath said was particularly troubling.Ary had staff crunch costs of conducting commuter hearings here at remote Camp Justice — flights, translators, etc. — and figured that 34 days of hearings in 2014 cost $2,294,117 million for each day the court was open. That works out to $458,823 an hour on mostly tangential pretrial issues — or $7,647 a minute. Staff also tallied how many hours each judge spent on the bench at Guantánamo.

Three judges are hearing three terror cases: ▪ Army Col. James L. Pohl, presiding in the Sept. 11 capital murder conspiracy trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four alleged accomplices. He ruled without taking testimony last week that there was an appearance of unlawful interference. He had halted proceedings and threatened more action until the Pentagon revoked the move-in order.▪ Judge Spath in the USS Cole case, who said Monday that Work’s revocation of the relocation rule was not a sufficient remedy. He said the attempted effort of unlawful influence appeared to “cast a cloud” over the independence of the judiciary but did not succeed because he would allow no one to rush him. Ary’s role, he ruled, is to resource the judiciary — “most certainly not an entity that sets the pace of litigation.”▪ The non-capital prosecution of Abd al Hadi al Iraqi, who is accused of commanding al-Qaida forces that allegedly committed war crimes while resisting the 2001 U.S. invasion in Afghanistan. Hadi’s judge, Navy Capt. J.K. Waits, has listed the unlawful-influence question, and whether to dismiss the case, as first up on the docket of his next hearing, March 23.

Hadi’s lawyers were watching Spath’s decision to see what, if any, remedy they would seek from their Navy judge who is based in Naples, Italy, and commutes to Cuba to preside in the case.It was disclosed over the weekend that Waits has lifted an order on the prison forbidding female troops from touching Hadi, a development that, like the move-in order, had stirred controversy.Spath’s move rejecting a “convening authority” has precedent in the war court that President George W. Bush built and President Barack Obama reformed.In 2008, before the reforms, a Navy judge in the case of Osama bin Laden’s driver disqualified the then-military commissions legal adviser, Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Hartmann, as not being fair and balanced. The legal adviser in that version of the war court had some of the duties of the current convening authority.

Although they do not flatly state that the Mossad was the source of the documents, they certainly lead the reader to that conclusion. They begin by establishing the fact that the MEK was fronting for the Mossad in its revelation in August 2002 of Iran’s first enrichment facility at Natanz. The CIA, they write, “appeared to believe that the Mossad and the British MI6 were feeding MEK intelligence they had obtained, using the Iranian opposition as a hopefully credible source”.  And they explicitly confirm CIA’s suspicions. “According to Israeli sources,” they write, “It was, in fact, a watchful Mossad officer who had discovered the mammoth centrifuge installation at Natanz.”  Other sources, including Seymour Hersh and Connie Bruck have reported that the MEK got the intelligence on Natanz from the Israelis, but theirs is the first explicit acknowledgement attributed to an Israeli source that the MEK had revealed Natanz on the basis of Mossad intelligence.  What the Israeli co-authors do not say is that the Mossad was simply guessing at the purpose of Natanz, which the MEK mistakenly called a “fuel fabrication” facility, rather than a centrifuge enrichment facility.

Bar-Zohar and Mishal are little concerned with whether the Mossad’s laptop caper involved fraud or not. They obviously view the Israeli intelligence agency’s use of an Iranian exile group to get out documents that had been central to the international sanctions regime against Iran as a great triumph. But whatever their reasons, their book adds another layer to the growing body of evidence showing that the Bush administration and its allies hoodwinked the rest of the world with those documents.

The authors further suggest that the Mossad was behind information later released by the MEK on Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the Iranian physics professor said to be shown in the laptop documents as the man in charge of that purported Iranian nuclear weapons research program. The MEK disclosed such personal details as Fakhrizadeh’s passport number and his home telephone number. But the Mossad chroniclers write: “This abundance of detail and means of transmission leads one to believe that, again, “a certain secret service” ever suspected by the West of pursuing its own agenda, painstakingly collected these facts and figures about the Iranian scientists and passed them to the Iranian resistance.” I asked Bar-Zohar’s research assistant, Nilly Ovnat, whether he had Israeli sources for those statements relating to the MEK and the laptop documents. She responded by          e-mail: “Professor Bar Zohar had other sources for most of the material concerning MEK and Natanz [and the] laptop, yet they could not be mentioned and cannot be discussed.”

Turning to the laptop documents, they make it clear that western intelligence had indeed obtained the documents from the MEK and suggest that the MEK got them from somewhere else. “The dissidents wouldn’t say how they had gotten hold of the laptop,” they write. They again frame the question of the origins of those documents in terms of CIA suspicions. “[T]he skeptical Americans suspected that the documents had been only recently scanned into the computer,” they write. “They accused the Mossad of having slipped in some information obtained from our own sources - and passing it to the MEK leaders for delivery to the West." Bar-Zohar and Mishal steer clear of any suggestion that the Mossad fabricated any documents, but their account leaves little doubt that they are convinced that the Mossad should be credited for the appearance of the documents. Their approach of referring to US suspicions, rather than stating it directly, appears to be a way of avoiding problems with Israeli military censors, who often clamp down on local reporting on sensitive issues while allowing references to foreign reports.

In the United States and Europe, it is unchallenged in political and media circles that intelligence documents purporting to be from a covert Iranian nuclear weapons program for which the IAEA long demanded an Iranian explanation are genuine.   But evidence has continued to accumulate that the documents - sometimes called the “laptop documents” because they were said to have been on a laptop computer belonging to one of the participants in the program - were fabricated by Israel’s foreign intelligence agency (Mossad).  We now know that the documents did not come from an Iranian participant in the alleged project, as the media were led to believe for years; they were turned over to German intelligence by the anti-regime Iranian terrorist organisation, Mujahedeen E Khalq, (MEK). I first reported this in 2008 and have now confirmed from an authoritative German source in my book on the Iran nuclear issue. The MEK was well known to have been a client of the Mossad, serving to launder Israeli intelligence claims that the Israelis did not want attributed to themselves.

The new measures will see the number of staff at the US embassy in Caracas significantly reduced and US representatives obliged to inform Venezuelan authorities of any meetings that they intend to hold. The diplomatic institution currently has over 100 employees, in comparison to just 17 who work at the Venezuelan embassy in Washington. Venezuelan Foreign Minister, Delcy Rodriguez, has explained that the US diplomatic mission will be obliged to reduce its staffing numbers to 17 over the next 2 weeks.

Recently the US embassy in Caracas has become embroiled in a diplomatic altercation with the Maduro administration which has intensified since the discovery of a planned coup against the government in February. The Venezuelan head of state has accused the White House of conspiring against his government and charged embassy personnel with having advanced knowledge of the coup plot, which was allegedly being funded in US dollars from Miami. Prior to the discovery of the coup, the US embassy was reported to have attempted to bribe senior military and government officials to partake in insurrectionist actions against the government. US Vice-president Joe Biden also made a series of statements accusing the Venezuelan government of repression following a meeting with the wife of jailed opposition leader, Liliana Tintori. Current opinion polls suggest significant support amongst the population for government actions against the US. According to a February poll conducted by opposition aligned think tank, Hinerlaces, 92% of Venezuelans oppose any kind of foreign intervention while 62% think that the US should not be allowed to pass judgement on the country’s internal affairs. In 2014, the US government issued 103 statements against Venezuela and another 65 since the start of the year. Just a few weeks ago, the Obama administration also approved increased funding for Venezuelan opposition groups and Non-Governmental Organisations.

The new challenges facing the White House plan come as a growing number of Democrats are breaking with the administration over its handling of a range of international crises. Several Iran hawks in the Senate Democratic Caucus signed onto a bill calling on the White House to send any nuclear deal with Iran for immediate congressional approval. They were working to gather enough Democratic support to override a threatened presidential veto, but the plan has stalled temporarily over a partisan procedural squabble. Influential Democrats like Dick Durbin of Illinois have joined a push calling on the White House to toughen sanctions against Russia while arming Ukraine in the fight against Russian-backed rebels.

And on ISIL, Democrats say the president needs to swallow changes to his proposed draft to win backing from his own party, even if doing so could turn off even more Republicans. “No,” said New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, when asked whether he would support the president’s proposal. “I think we have to do a better job of defining what is ‘no enduring offensive combat troops.’ That is a critical element. I think if we can get past that element of it, other elements could fall into place. But we need to do a better job of that — otherwise, many members feel that is the equivalent of a blank check.”

It’s unclear how aggressive the president will be, but senior administration officials have indicated they would not play a heavy hand in the negotiations on Capitol Hill, at least at the onset of the debate. A White House spokesperson said, “We remain open to reasonable adjustments that are consistent with the president’s policy and that can garner bipartisan support. However, it is ultimately up to Congress to pass a new authorization.”

There is little margin for error on the committee, given that it is split between 10 Republicans and nine Democrats. On the Republican side, two senators who are likely running for president and have opposite foreign policy views — Rand Paul of Kentucky and Marco Rubio of Florida — will be difficult to court no matter how the proposal is structured. And the nine Democrats on the committee each have strong reservations about the president’s proposal, arguing it’s too broad in scope.

“If the Vietnam War taught us anything, and if the president’s interpretation of the 2001 authorization has taught us anything, it’s that Congress better be pretty specific on our authorization,” Cardin said. “The hearings and meetings we’ve had raised as many questions as they have answered,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). “I appreciate the president has done something unprecedented — he’s proposed restrictions on his authority — but it’s likely got to change for me to support it.”

Al-Khadoumi points out that Israel’s Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, in 2013, stated that “Israel and the Golan are part and parcel” and that the “international community” should settle the question about sovereignty over the Golan within the framework of an Israel – Palestinian agreement. Besides open announcements about plans to permanently annex the Syrian Golan, Israel has been supporting Jabhat al-Nusrah and other al-Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood(FSA and co.) brigades via the Golan since 2012. In 2013 Israel’s covert support of the insurgents was leaked to the press by an Austrian UNDOF officer. By February 2014 the administration of Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu launched a PR campaign to sell the support of the Islamist mercenary brigades under “humanitarian cover”. (see video)

By October 2014 Israel’s direct cooperation and State sponsorship of Jabhat al-Nusrah, the so-called Free Syrian Army and other mercenary brigades resulted in the withdrawal of UNDOF troops from a 12 – 16 km wide corridor in the buffer zone. (see UNDOF map above) The withdrawal has since then facilitated the direct interaction between Israeli military and intelligence and the foreign-backed mercenaries, using the Golan Heights as well as the Israeli occupied, Lebanese Sheba Farms area as launching pads for transgressions against Syria and Lebanon. Absent a U-turn in U.S. policy with regard to Israel and Syria, notes Al-Khadoumi, it is highly implausible that the re-drafted Security Council resolution will pass, or that it won’t be vetoed by the United States.

That the New Zealand government engages in precisely the mass surveillance activities Key vehemently denied is now barely in dispute. Indeed, a former director of GCSB under Key, Sir Bruce Ferguson, while denying any abuse of New Zealander’s communications, now admits that the agency engages in mass surveillance.

Meanwhile, Russel Norman, the head of the country’s Green Party, said in response to these stories that New Zealand is “committing crimes” against its neighbors in the Pacific by subjecting them to mass surveillance, and insists that the Key government broke the law because that dragnet necessarily includes the communications of New Zealand citizens when they travel in the region.

So now that it’s proven that New Zealand does exactly that which Prime Minister Key vowed would cause him to resign if it were proven, is he preparing his resignation speech? No: that’s something a political official with a minimal amount of integrity would do. Instead — even as he now refuses to say what he has repeatedly said before: that GCSB does not engage in mass surveillance — he’s simply retracting his pledge as though it were a minor irritant, something to be casually tossed aside:

When asked late last week whether New Zealanders have a right to know what their government is doing in the realm of digital surveillance, the Prime Minister said: “as a general rule, no.” And he expressly refuses to say whether New Zealand is doing that which he swore repeatedly it was not doing, as this excellent interview from Radio New Zealand sets forth: Interviewer: “Nicky Hager’s revelations late last week . . . have stoked fears that New Zealanders’ communications are being indiscriminately caught in that net. . . . The Prime Minister, John Key, has in the past promised to resign if it were found to be mass surveillance of New Zealanders . . . Earlier, Mr. Key was unable to give me an assurance that mass collection of communications from New Zealanders in the Pacific was not taking place.” PM Key: “No, I can’t. I read the transcript [of former GCSB Director Bruce Ferguson’s interview] – I didn’t hear the interview – but I read the transcript, and you know, look, there’s a variety of interpretations – I’m not going to critique–”

Interviewer: “OK, I’m not asking for a critique. Let’s listen to what Bruce Ferguson did tell us on Friday:” Ferguson: “The whole method of surveillance these days, is sort of a mass collection situation – individualized: that is mission impossible.” Interviewer: “And he repeated that several times, using the analogy of a net which scoops up all the information. . . . I’m not asking for a critique with respect to him. Can you confirm whether he is right or wrong?” Key: “Uh, well I’m not going to go and critique the guy. And I’m not going to give a view of whether he’s right or wrong” . . . . Interviewer: “So is there mass collection of personal data of New Zealand citizens in the Pacific or not?” Key: “I’m just not going to comment on where we have particular targets, except to say that where we go and collect particular information, there is always a good reason for that.”

From “I will resign if it’s shown we engage in mass surveillance of New Zealanders” to “I won’t say if we’re doing it” and “I won’t quit either way despite my prior pledges.” Listen to the whole interview: both to see the type of adversarial questioning to which U.S. political leaders are so rarely subjected, but also to see just how obfuscating Key’s answers are. The history of reporting from the Snowden archive has been one of serial dishonesty from numerous governments: such as the way European officials at first pretended to be outraged victims of NSA only for it to be revealed that, in many ways, they are active collaborators in the very system they were denouncing. But, outside of the U.S. and U.K. itself, the Key government has easily been the most dishonest over the last 20 months: one of the most shocking stories I’ve seen during this time was how the Prime Minister simultaneously plotted in secret to exploit the 2013 proposed law to implement mass surveillance at exactly the same time that he persuaded the public to support it by explicitly insisting that it would not allow mass surveillance. But overtly reneging on a public pledge to resign is a new level of political scandal. Key was just re-elected for his third term, and like any political official who stays in power too long, he has the despot’s mentality that he’s beyond all ethical norms and constraints. But by the admission of his own former GCSB chief, he has now been caught red-handed doing exactly that which he swore to the public would cause him to resign if it were proven. If nothing else, the New Zealand media ought to treat that public deception from its highest political official with the level of seriousness it deserves.

The center’s officials who hired and renewed Garcia Covarrubias’ contracts say he was a highly qualified professor and minimize the allegations against him. “We made inquiries with people in the region, in Chile and so forth, and were never given anything negative about Jaime,” said Margaret Daly Hayes, the center’s first director. “He was vetted by the U.S. government, by the (U.S.) Embassy. They obviously didn’t have anything either or he wouldn’t have been hired.”McClatchy, however, located one of his alleged victims, who described being brutalized by him. “They submitted us to torture, twice a day. We were submerged in feces,” Herman Carrasco, who’s now a real estate agent, told McClatchy in Chile. “They stuck rifle barrels in our anuses.”According to Carrasco, the torture unfolded in October and November 1973 – lorded over by the horsewhip-wielding Garcia Covarrubias – and included electric shock administered to eyelids, genitals and other sensitive areas of the body.“He was the person who tortured us, with his face shown,” said Carrasco, who added that he’d known Garcia Covarrubias from social events before the coup. “He forced us into sexual acts, which shows that besides ferocious cruelty there was a level of psychopathic behavior.”

Despite very graphic torture accusations against Garcia Covarrubias, U.S. officials are rallying behind him.

As the center supported Garcia Covarrubias, it pushed out Andersen in retaliation, the former communications chief said.Last September, Andersen filed a complaint with the Pentagon’s inspector general, with the support of then-Sen. Carl Levin. D-Mich. An inspector general spokeswoman declined to comment. “It’s shameful that at a time the U.S. prestige as a democracy is under attack, that the National Defense University could be playing footsie with a former state terrorism agent,” Andersen said. The details uncovered about Garcia Covarrubias have prompted demands from several members of Congress for a Pentagon accounting of how he was hired and retained his job.“The American people deserve to know that adequate vetting of such individuals would be routine,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., author of the “ Leahy Law,” which restricts U.S. assistance to foreign security forces that violate human rights.

While most of the concerns focused on Garcia Covarrubias, the center also took heat in 2006 for hiring Colombian Gen. Carlos Ospina Ovalle. As army commander, he turned the tables in a decades-old guerrilla war while simultaneously crushing drug cartels. Ospina Ovalle left the center last year and took a post at another National Defense University school.He was hired at the request of the Colombian government and was popular with U.S. military leaders, recalls Downie, the center’s director at the time. “The Colombians wanted, for his own safety, to get him out of Colombia,” said Downie. “This is a guy we certainly wanted to have as a professor.”Human rights groups, however, criticized the general’s hiring and continued employment at the National Defense University. They point to his earlier command in Antioquia province, where right-wing paramilitaries ran roughshod and were linked to the military.“Antioquia in the late 1990s . . . is less than one degree of separation from working with the paramilitaries,” said Adam Isacson, a senior associate specializing in military matters for the Washington Office on Latin America. “If he has not, it’s some miracle that he managed to be the one clean officer.”“Having officers like that, the implicit message is that human rights takes a backseat,” said Isacson.

his is the state of affairs NATO bequeathed to Libya, reversing the country’s trajectory as a stable, prosperous pan-African state that was a leading player in the African Union, and a thorn in the side of US and British attempts to re-establish military domination. And it is not only Libya that has suffered; the power vacuum resulting from NATO’s wholesale destruction of the Libyan state apparatus has dragged the whole region into the vortex. As Brendan O Neill has shown in detail, the daily horrors being perpetrated in Mali, Nigeria and now Cameroon are all a direct result of NATO’s bloodletting, as death squads from across the entire Sahel-Sahara region have been given free reign to set up training camps and loot weapons across the giant zone of lawlessness which NATO have sculpted out of Libya.

The result? African states that in 2010 were forging ahead economically, greatly benefitting from Chinese infrastructure and manufacturing investment, moving away from centuries of colonial and neo-colonial dependence on extortionate Western financial institutions, have been confronted with massive new terror threats from groups such as Boko Haram, flush with new weaponry and facilities courtesy of NATO’s humanitarianism. Algeria and Egypt, too, still governed by the same independent-minded movements which overthrew European colonialism, have seen their borders destabilised, setting the stage for ongoing debilitating attacks planned and executed from NATO’s new Libyan militocracy. This is the context in which Egypt is launching the regional fightback against NATO’s destabilisation strategy.

Over the past year in particular, Egyptians have witnessed their Western neighbour rapidly descending down the same path of ISIS takeover as Syria. In Syria, a civil war between a Western-sponsored insurgency and an elected secular government has seen the anti-government forces rapidly fall under the sway of ISIS, as the West’s supposed ‘moderates’ in the Free Syrian Army either join forces with ISIS (impressed by their military prowess, hi-tech weaponry, and massive funding) or find themselves overrun by them. In Libya, the same pattern is quickly developing. The latest phase in the Libyan disaster began last June when the militias who dominated the previous parliament (calling themselves the ‘Libya Dawn’ coalition) lost the election and refused to accept the results, torching the country’s airport and oil storage facilities as opening salvos in an ongoing civil war between them and the newly elected parliament. Both parliaments have the allegiance of various armed factions, and have set up their own rival governments, each controlling different parts of the country. But, starting in Derna last November, areas taken by the Libya Dawn faction have begun falling to ISIS. Last weekend’s capture of Sirte was the third major town to be taken by them, and there is no sign that it will be the last. This is the role that has consistently been played by the West’s proxies across the region – paving the way and laying the ground for ISIS takeover. Egyptian President Sisi’s intervention – airstrikes against ISIS targets in Libya - aims to reverse this trajectory before it reaches Iraqi-Syrian proportions.

The internationally-recognised Libyan government based in Tobruk – the one appointed by the House of Representatives that won the election last summer - has welcomed the Egyptian intervention. Not only, they hope, will it help prevent ISIS takeover, but will also cement Egyptian support for their side in the ongoing civil war with ‘Libya Dawn’. Indeed, Egypt could, with some justification, claim that winning the war against ISIS requires a unified Libyan government committed to this goal, and that the Dawn’s refusal to recognise the elected parliament , not to mention their ‘ambiguous’ attitude towards ISIS, is the major obstacle to achieving such an outcome. Does this mean that the Egyptian intervention will scupper the UN’s ‘Libya dialogue’ peace talks initiative? Not necessarily; in fact it could have the opposite effect. The first two rounds of the talks were boycotted by the General National Congress (GNC) - the Libya Dawn parliament- safe in the knowledge that they would continue to receive weapons and financing from NATO partners Qatar and Turkey whilst the internationally-recognised Tobruk government remained under an international arms embargo. As the UK’s envoy to the Libya Dialogue, Jonathan Powell, noted this week, the “sine qua non for a [peace] settlement” is a “mutually hurting stalemate”. By balancing up the scales in the civil war, Egyptian support military support for the Tobruk government may show the GNC that taking the talks seriously will be more in their interests than continuation of the fight.

Sisi’s call for the military support of the West in his intervention has effectively been rejected, as he very likely expected it to be. A joint statement by the US and Britain and their allies on Tuesday poured cold water on the idea, and no wonder – they did not go to all the bother of turning Libya into the centre of their regional destabilisation strategy only to then try to stabilise it just when it is starting to bear fruit. However, by forcing them to come out with such a statement, Sisi has called the West’s bluff. The US and Britain claim to be committed to the destruction of ISIS, a formation which is the product of the insurgency they have sponsored in Syria for the past four years, and Sisi is asking them to put their money where their mouth is. They have refused to do so. In the end, the Egyptian resolution to the UN Security Council (UNSC) on Wednesday made no mention of calling for military intervention by other powers, and limited itself to calling for an end to the one-sided international arms embargo which prevents the arming of the elected government but does not seem to deter NATO’s regional partners from openly equipping the ‘Libya Dawn’ militias. Sisi has effectively forced the West to show its hand: their rejection of his proposal to support the intervention makes it clear to the world the two-faced nature of their supposed commitment to the destruction of ISIS.

There are, however, deep divisions on this issue in Europe. France is deepening its military presence in the Sahel-Sahara region, with 3000 troops based in Chad, Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali and a massive new base opened on the Libyan border in Niger last October, and would likely welcome a pretext to extend its operations to its historic protectorate in Southern Libya. Italy, likewise, is getting cold feet about the destabilisation it helped to unleash, having not only damaged a valuable trading partner, but increasingly being faced with hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the horror and destitution that NATO has gifted the region. But neither are likely to do anything without UNSC approval, which is likely to continue to be blocked by the US and Britain, who are more than happy to see countries like Russian-allied Egypt and Chinese-funded Nigeria weakened and their development retarded by terror bombings. Sisi’s actions will, it is hoped, not only make abundantly clear the West’s acquiescence in the horrors it has created – but also pave the way for an effective fightback against them.

The founding member countries of the AIIB have agreed the basic parameters that would determine the capital structure of the new bank would be relative gross domestic product. Banking experts have estimated that, if taken at face value, this would give China a 67% shareholding in the new bank. That's significantly different than the Asia Development Bank, which has a similar structure to the World Bank and has been in existence 1966. There, the majority stakes are controlled by Japan and the US.

If, as a result, the International Atomic Energy Agency concludes that U.S. assertions about an alleged Iranian nuclear weapons program lack credibility, top officials in Washington will have themselves to blame.