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Israeli military exports this year could decline to just 53% of their level in 2012 and “less desire for Israeli-made products” is a key factor, according to a letter from Israel’s four largest military companies. Industry leaders are warning that military exports have steadily fallen since they reached $7.5bn in 2012. Sales in 2014 decline to $5.5bn and could drop to as low as $4bn this year, according to media reports about the letter. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement has been running highly visible campaigns against military trade with Israel that have seen 12 banks and pension funds exclude Israeli arms company Elbit Systems from their investment portfolio. Israeli owned arms factories have been blockaded, and a growing number of political parties and trade unions have called for an end to military ties with Israel. The governments of Norway and Turkey have both announced military embargo policies against Israel in recent years.

During Israel’s 2014 Gaza massacre, the Spanish government announced a temporary freeze on arms exports to Israel, the USA temporarily withheld arms shipments, and the UK government came close to taking similar steps as calls for a military embargo on Israel took centre stage in the debate over Israel’s crimes.

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

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

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

When Edward Snowden disclosed details of America’s huge surveillance program two years ago, many in Europe thought that the response would be increased transparency and stronger oversight of security services. European countries, however, are moving in the opposite direction. Instead of more public scrutiny, we are getting more snooping. Pushed to respond to the atrocious attacks in Paris and Copenhagen and by the threats posed by the Islamic State to Europe’s internal security, several countries are amending their counterterrorism legislation to grant more intrusive powers to security services, especially in terms of mass electronic surveillance.

Governments now argue that to guarantee our security we have to sacrifice some rights. This is a specious argument. By shifting from targeted to mass surveillance, governments risk undermining democracy while pretending to protect it.They are also betraying a long political and judicial tradition affording broad protection to privacy in Europe, where democratic legal systems have evolved to protect individuals from arbitrary interference by the state in their private and family life. The European Court of Human Rights has long upheld the principle that surveillance interferes with the right to privacy. Although the court accepts that the use of confidential information is essential in combating terrorist threats, it has held that the collection, use and storage of such information should be authorized only under exceptional and precise conditions, and must be accompanied by adequate legal safeguards and independent supervision. The court has consistently applied this principle for decades when it was called to judge the conduct of several European countries, which were combating domestic terrorist groups.

More recently, as new technologies have offered more avenues to increase surveillance and data collection, the court has reiterated its position in a number of leading cases against several countries, including France, Romania, Russia and Britain, condemned for having infringed the right to private and family life that in the interpretation of the court covers also “the physical and psychological integrity of a person.”

We all know justice is blind. But that is supposed to mean that everyone before it is treated equally, not that the justice system must close its eyes and refuse to look at important legal issues facing Americans.  Yet the government continues to convince courts that they cannot consider the constitutionality of its behavior in national security cases and, last week, in an important case for anyone who has ever used Wikipedia, another judge agreed with that position.  A federal district judge in Maryland dismissed Wikimedia v. NSA, a case challenging the legality of the NSA’s “upstream” surveillance—mass surveillance of Internet communications as they flow through the Internet backbone. The case was brought by our friends at the ACLU on behalf of nine plaintiffs, including human rights organizations, members of the media, and the Wikimedia Foundation.1 We filed a brief in the case, too, in support of Wikimedia and the other plaintiffs. The judge dismissed the case based on a legal principle called standing. Standing is supposed to ensure, among other things, that the party bringing the lawsuit has suffered a concrete harm, caused by the party being sued, and that the court can resolve the harm with a favorable ruling.

But the U.S. government has taken this doctrine, which was intended to limit the cases federal courts hear to actual live controversies, and turned it into a perverse shell game in surveillance cases—essentially arguing that because aspects of the surveillance program are secret, plaintiffs cannot prove that their communications were actually, in fact, intercepted and surveilled. And without that proof, the government argues, there’s no standing, because plaintiffs can’t show that they’ve suffered harm. Sadly, like several other courts before it, the judge agreed to this shell game and decided that it couldn’t decide whether the constitutional rights of Wikimedia and the other plaintiffs were violated.  This game is mighty familiar to us at EFF, but that doesn’t make it any less troubling. In our system, the courts have a fundamental obligation to conclusively determine the legality of government action that affects individuals’ constitutional rights. For years now, plaintiffs have tried to get the courts to simply issue a ruling on the merits of NSA surveillance programs. And for years, the government has successfully persuaded the courts to rely on standing and related doctrines to avoid doing so. That is essentially what happened here. The court labeled as “speculative” Wikimedia’s claim that, at a minimum, even one of its approximately one trillion Internet communications had been swept up in the NSA’s upstream surveillance program. Remember, this is a program that, by the government’s own admission, involves the searching and scanning of vast amounts of Internet traffic at key Internet junctures on the Internet’s backbone. Yet in court’s view, Wikimedia’s allegations describing upstream—based on concrete facts, taken from government documents— coupled with a plaintiff that engages in a large volume of internet communications were not enough to state a “plausible” claim that Wikimedia had been surveilled.

On the way to reaching that conclusion, and putting on its blindfold, the court made a number of mistakes. The Government’s Automated Eyes Are Still Government Eyes First, it appears the court fundamentally misunderstood Wikimedia’s claim about upstream surveillance and, in particular, “about surveillance.” As Wikimedia alleged, “about surveillance” (a specific aspect of upstream surveillance that searches the content of communications for references to particular email addresses or other identifiers) amounts to “the digital analogue of having a government agent open every piece of mail that comes through the post to determine whether it mentions a particular word or phrase.” The court held, however, that this type of “about” surveillance was “targeted insofar as it makes use of only those communications that contain information matching the tasked selectors,” like email addresses. But what the government "makes use of" is entirely beside the point—it is the scanning of the communications for the tasked selectors in the first place that is the problem.  To put it into a different context, the government conducts a search when it enters into your house and starts rifling through your files—not just when it finds something it wants to keep. The government's ultimate decision to “make use of” the communications it finds interesting is irrelevant. It is the search of the communications that matters.

Amidst the wilderness of mirrors surrounding the Syrian tragedy, a diamond-shaped fact persists: Despite so many degrees of separation, the Saudis are still talking to the Russians. Why? A key reason is because a perennially paranoid House of Saud feels betrayed by their American protectors who, under the Obama administration, seem to have given up on isolating Iran.

From the House of Saud’s point of view, three factors are paramount. 1) A general sense of ‘red alert’ as they have been deprived from an exclusive relationship with Washington, thus becoming incapable of shaping US foreign policy in the Middle East; 2) They have been mightily impressed by Moscow’s swift counter-terrorism operation in Syria; 3) They fear like the plague the current Russia-Iran alliance if they have no means of influencing it.

That explains why King Salman’s advisers have pressed the point that the House of Saud has a much better chance of checking Iran on all matters - from “Syraq” to Yemen - if it forges a closer relationship with Moscow. In fact, King Salman may be visiting Putin before the end of the year.

The figures are staggering. In what looks like a vast population transfer from a disintegrating Greater Middle East, nearly 200,000 refugees passed through Austria in September alone. About half a million desperate refugees from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere have arrived in Greece since 2015 began (those, that is, who don’t die at sea), and the numbers are only expected to rise. Seven hundred children a day have been claiming asylum somewhere in Europe (190,000 between January and September 2015). And at least three million refugees and migrants from the planet’s war and desperation zones are expected to head for Europe in 2016. Under the circumstances, I’m sure it won’t surprise you that, once the first upbeat stories about welcoming European crowds had died down, the truncheons and water cannons came out in some parts of the continent and the walls began to go up. Nor, I’m sure, will you be shocked to learn that an anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim fervor is now gripping parts of Europe, while far-right parties are, not coincidentally, on the rise.  This is true in France, where Marine Le Pen’s virulently anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-European-Union National Front is expected to make significant gains in local elections this winter (and Le Pen herself is leading early opinion polls in the race for the presidency), while in “tolerant” Sweden a far-right party with neo-Nazi ties is garnering more than 25% of the prospective vote in opinion polls. In Poland, an extreme party wielding anti-refugee rhetoric just swept into power. And so it goes across much of Europe these days.

All of this (and more) represents a stunning development that could, sooner or later, reverse the increasingly integrated nature of Europe, raise walls and barriers across the continent, and irreversibly fracture the European Union, while increasing nationalistic fervor and god knows what else. In the United States, in a somewhat more muted way, you can see similar developments in what’s being talked about here as an “outsider” election, but is, in fact, significantly focused on keeping outsiders separated from insiders. (Just Google Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and immigrants, and you'll see what I mean.) Isn’t it strange how we always speak of the “tribal” when it comes to Africa or the backlands of Pakistan and Afghanistan, but never when it comes to our world? And yet, if these aren’t, broadly speaking, “tribal” responses, what are?

A federal appeals court Tuesday eliminated a possible roadblock for the National Security Agency (NSA), delaying a judge’s order to halt the agency's controversial data collection.The order from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit sets the NSA on a path to wind down its bulk gathering of Americans’ phone records later this month.ADVERTISEMENTOn Monday, Judge Richard Leon of the U.S. District Court for D.C. had sought to end the program immediately, before a Nov. 29 deadline. Leon’s order would have ended the NSA’s collection of records about one California lawyer, though doing that might have required taking the entire system offline, he acknowledged.Late Tuesday afternoon, however, the appeals court stepped in and issued a stay on that order, preventing it from taking effect. The move from the appeals court was widely expected, given that Leon's order would merely kill the program three weeks early.“The purpose of this administrative stay is to give the court sufficient opportunity to consider the merits of the motion for a stay,” it said in a brief order, “and should not be construed in any way as a ruling on the merits of that motion.”

Plaintiffs suing the Obama administration, led by conservative legal activist Larry Klayman, will have until noon Friday to submit arguments on whether the program should be shut down immediately. The government has until the following Monday. Few watchers expect the court to interfere with the NSA’s own schedule, which will take the phone records program offline Nov. 29.Under the current program, the spy agency collects metadata records about millions of Americans’ phone calls, which include the numbers involved in a call, when the call occurred and how long it lasted. The records do not include content about people’s conversations.This summer, Congress passed legislation ending the current system and forcing the NSA to move to a new process in which it requests a narrow set of records from individual phone companies.

On Monday, the agency told lawmakers on Capitol Hill that it has “successfully developed a technical architecture to support the new program” and that testing is “underway.”In his Monday order, Leon said that the NSA should not wait until the new system was up and running, since “even one day” of the current program poses a threat to the Constitution. 

For the first time in the four-year Syrian civil war, President Obama is beginning to execute a combined diplomatic and military approach to force President Bashar al-Assad to leave office and end the carnage. As 50 Special Operations troops arrive in Syria to bolster the most effective opposition groups, the administration is gambling that Secretary of State John Kerry will have more leverage to push Russia, Iran and other players toward two objectives: a cease-fire to limit the cycle of killing and the establishment of a timeline for a transition of power.But the task is enormous, given the number of nations and rebel groups operating at cross-purposes and the tiny size of the American force. Even senior members of the administration express doubts in private about whether the effort is sufficient.

Mr. Kerry will travel to Vienna this weekend, summoning many of Syria’s neighbors and European powers to turn a vague declaration of principles, settled on two weeks ago, into a plan for a political agreement. The talks, at least so far, have not included representatives of Mr. Assad’s government or the fractured rebel groups seeking to depose him, and Mr. Kerry is struggling to bring them to the negotiating room.But after years in which the Obama administration has been accused of largely sitting on the sidelines while a quarter-million Syrians died and millions more were displaced, Mr. Kerry seems buoyed by being at the center of the only diplomatic effort underway.

Several African nations, first and foremost South Africa, have signaled that AU member States have no advantage from being bound by the Rome Statutes and the International Criminal Court (ICC). The development comes in response to what a growing number of African policy makers denounce as the ICC’s selective prosecution and the ICC being an impediment to conflict resolution.

South Africa’s governing African National Congress is trailblazing a development that could result in South Africa’s and eventually African Union (AU) member States’ withdrawal from the Rome Statute and the International Criminal Court (ICC). This month, former South African President Thabo Mbeki gave a lecture at the 2015 Tmali Alumni Forum that reflects a growing consensus among African nations. That is, that the ICC is notorious for selective prosecution, and especially for the prosecution of African and other political leaders and nationals from States with a policy that opposes the western neo-colonialist discourse.

Mbeki would also stress that the ICC is an impediment to conflict resolution on the African continent. Mbeki stressed the example of the ousted Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo. Gbagbo was ousted by a clearly French-backed coup d’état in 2010. Gbagbo has since been extradited to The Hague.

Edward Snowden says he is “overwhelmed” by the public reaction to his disclosures about the government's mass surveillance programs.“I was really worried ... that this would be a two day story, then everybody would forget about it and we’d move on.” he said during a video question and answer session hosted by the PEN American Center on Tuesday.Snowden spoke to the event from Moscow, where he has been since fleeing the U.S. in 2013 after leaking classified information about the National Security Agency (NSA) collecting information on millions of Americans' phone calls.ADVERTISEMENTHis disclosures led to a public outcry, which Snowden hailed, and Congress passing broad reforms to the NSA.But he said that there was still need for vigilance and further reforms. He also warned against secrecy in national security programs, noting that the surveillance programs "were passed without meaningful debate at all."The NSA program collected data on the phone numbers involved in calls and their duration but not the actual content of conversations. It is set to expire at the end of the month.Under the reforms, the government must now obtain a warrant to access phone data that will be stored by private companies.

Critics say that Snowden endangered national security, but his supporters say he acted as a whistleblower and drew appropriate scrutiny to the government's programs.Activists such as Snowden and PEN America Center have championed reforms and sought to increase protections for whistleblowers.The event took place on the same day the group released a report outlining the risks that government contractors face when leaking classified information.

A Senate security officer stepped out of the December chill last year and delivered envelopes marked “Top Secret” to the Pentagon, the C.I.A., the State Department and the Justice Department. Inside each packet was a disc containing a 6,700-page classified report on the C.I.A.’s secret prison program and a letter from Senator Dianne Feinstein, urging officials to read the report to ensure that the lessons were not lost to time. Today, those discs sit untouched in vaults across Washington, still in their original envelopes. The F.B.I. has not retrieved a copy held for it in the Justice Department’s safe. State Department officials, who locked up their copy and marked it “Congressional Record — Do Not Open, Do Not Access” as soon as it arrived, have not read it either. Continue reading the main story Related Coverage document The Senate Committee’s Report on the C.I.A.’s Use of TortureDEC. 9, 2014 Panel Faults C.I.A. Over Brutality and Deceit in Terrorism InterrogationsDEC. 9, 2014 Senate Votes to Turn Presidential Ban on Torture Into LawJUNE 16, 2015 Outside Psychologists Shielded U.S. Torture Program, Report FindsJULY 10, 2015 Nearly a year after the Senate released a declassified 500-page summary of the report, the fate of the entire document remains in limbo, the subject of battles in the courts and in Congress. Until those disputes are resolved, the Justice Department has prohibited officials from the government agencies that possess it from even opening the report, effectively keeping the people in charge of America’s counterterrorism future from reading about its past. There is also the possibility that the documents could remain locked in a Senate vault for good.

In a letter to Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch last week, Ms. Feinstein, a California Democrat, said the Justice Department was preventing the government from “learning from the mistakes of the past to ensure that they are not repeated.”Although Ms. Feinstein is eager to see the document circulated, the Senate is now under Republican control. Her successor as head of the Intelligence Committee, Senator Richard M. Burr of North Carolina, has demanded that the Obama administration return every copy of the report. Mr. Burr has declared the report to be nothing more than “a footnote in history.”It was always clear that the full report would remain shielded from public view for years, if not decades. But Mr. Burr’s demand, which means that even officials with top security clearances might never read it, has reminded some officials of the final scene of “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” when the Ark of the Covenant is put into a wooden crate alongside thousands of others in a government warehouse of secrets.

The full report is not expected to offer evidence of previously undisclosed interrogation techniques, but the interrogation sessions are said to be described in great detail. The report explains the origins of the program and names the officials involved. The full report also offers details on the role of each agency in the secret prison program.The Justice Department, which played a central role in approving the interrogation methods, has even prohibited its own officials from reading the full report.“The Department of Justice was among those parts of the executive branch that were misled about the program, and D.O.J. officials’ understanding of this history is critical to its institutional role going forward,” Ms. Feinstein wrote to the Justice Department last week in a letter she signed with Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee.In court, Justice Department lawyers have agreed with Mr. Burr’s contention that the document belongs to Congress. As evidence, they point to an agreement between the C.I.A. and the Senate as the Intelligence Committee began its lengthy investigation. The Senate was under Democratic control at the time.

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

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

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

Following in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris on Friday, November 13 and Moscow’s conclusion that the Russian Airbus 321 that crashed in Egypt’s North Sinai province on October 31; and following recent talks on Syria in Vienna and talks on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Antalya, Turkey, the military dynamics pertaining Syria and the international fight against the self-proclaimed Islamic State has changed, significantly. 

French President Francois Hollande and his administration responded to the attacks in Paris by declaring a three months state of emergency while deploying the French aircraft carrier Charles De Gaulle to the Mediterranean to upscale French participation in the fight against the self-proclaimed Islamic State, a.k.a. Daesh, ISIS or ISIL. Hollande announced that the carrier would leave port on September 19., adding that: “This is going to triple our military power [as part of the operation against the Islamic State]. I am not talking about deterring the IS but about eliminating it totally.” On Tuesday the Chief of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), Alexander Bortnikov, announced that the crash of the Russian Kogalmavia (Metrojet) Airbus 321 in Egypt’s North Sinai on October 31 had been caused by a bomb on board the plane.

The of Flight KGL9268 claimed the lives of all 224 passengers and crew on board. The plane was brought down about one month after Russia launched its airstrikes against Daesh, Jabhat al-Nusrah and other insurgencies in Syria. President Putin has briefed the Russian military command on the deployment of the French aircraft carrier and instructed the Russian naval forces in the Mediterranean and the Russian air forces in Syria to cooperate with the French military and to coordinate their military operations.

It seems that Saudi Arabia has started to undergo the transformation various experts predicted. Those became obvious when the sitting king Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud replaced his deceased elder brother Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud in January 2015, and made a number of quite unusual arrangements within the ruling elite, appointing the head of the Ministry of Interior Muhammad bin Nayef from Abdullah’s clan the Crown Prince, while his 33-year-old son Mohammad bin Salman Al Saudfrom the Sudairy clan received the appointment of Deputy Crown Prince.

Now it seems that the wheels of the political machine are moving again. Last week reports from Riyadh indicated that his disease is taking a toll on the king and he wants to renounce his reign in favor of the Crown Prince. But then neighboring states, especially Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, started hinting that the members of the Saudi royal family along with the sheikhs of the strongest tribes, which are the foundation of Al Saud’s rule, are extremely dissatisfied with the sharp deterioration of the economic and social situation in the country, leading to a major drop in their personal incomes. It is no secret that Riyadh increased the volume of oil production to weaken the positions of its main competitors – Russia, Iran and Venezuela. But the kingdom had to take a punch as well, it was forced to unseal its reserve fund and cut the funding of numerous social programs.

Now the highly respected Institute for Gulf Affairs is stating that the king of Saudi Arabia Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud is preparing to renounce the throne in favor of his son Mohammad bin Salman Al Saud, and has since brought his country to the brink of a disaster. It means that the 80-year-old Salman is trying desperately hard to persuade his brothers on the succession board to allow him to change the principle of succession of the Saudi throne, since he’s ready to leave, but not so ready for his nephew Mohammad bin Salman Al Saud to rule the country. What the king has been doing is allegedly done “only for the sake of the stability of the kingdom.” Although the reality of the situation is clear – should Salman retain his position, the disintegration of the kingdom is imminent, with certain Shia areas breaking away, while the regions on the border with Yemen which are mostly populated by Yemeni tribes, more than happy to return home. Moreover, the Minister of Interior used to be a habitual cocaine user, so he was only able to “produce” two daughters, and now he’s somewhat incapable of producing more children. Should the king manage to carry out the above described scheme, he will become the first Saudi monarch to leave the throne to his son.

Stunned by falling poll numbers, Hillary Clinton is hoping that Democrats will rally to her neocon-oriented foreign policy and break with Bernie Sanders as insufficiently devoted to Israel. But will that hawkish strategy work this time, asks Robert Parry.

Even with a number of U.S. sanctions against Iran coming to an end, the Iranian government has recently made a very important decision in regards to its oil payment system and it could spell bad news for the United States. This is because Iran has apparently decided to no longer accept U.S. dollars for payment on both its new and outstanding oil sales. Instead it will receive its payment in euros. Reuters has cited an official from the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) as stating that the new plan will apply to “newly signed deals” with France’s Total, Russia’s Lukoil, and Spain’s Cepsa. Reuters quotes the official as saying that “In our invoices we mention a clause that buyers of our oil will have to pay in euros, considering the exchange rate versus the dollar around the time of delivery.”   In addition, Iran is also informing its trading partners, including India, that owe billions of dollars that it now prefers to be paid in euros instead of dollars. “Iran shifted to the euro and cancelled trade in dollars because of political reasons,” the official source said, pointing out that this policy was concocted during the time of the sanctions.

The NYPD has used cell-site simulators, commonly known as Stingrays, more than 1,000 times since 2008, according to documents turned over to the New York Civil Liberties Union. The documents represent the first time the department has acknowledged using the devices. The NYPD also disclosed that it does not get a warrant before using a Stingray, which sweeps up massive amounts of data. Instead, the police obtain a “pen register order” from a court, more typically used to collect call data for a specific phone. Those orders do not require the police to establish probable cause. Additionally, the NYPD has no written policy guidelines on the use of Stingrays. Stingrays work by imitating cellphone towers. They force all nearby phones to connect to them, revealing the owners’ locations. That means they collect data on potentially hundreds of people. They are small enough to fit in a suitcase, or be mounted on a plane.

When they were originally developed in 2003, Stingrays were designed for military use. But in the past decade, they have increasingly been purchased by law enforcement agencies. According to the ACLU, Stingrays are used by at least 59 police departments in 23 states, and at least 13 federal agencies, including the DEA, FBI, and the IRS. Because most departments withhold information about Stingrays, these numbers likely underrepresent the total.

Stingrays have long been a topic of concern for privacy activists. “Cell-site simulators are powerful surveillance devices that can track people, including in their homes, and collect information on innocent bystanders,” said Mariko Hirose, a senior staff attorney at the NYCLU.  “If they are going to be used in communities the police should at minimum obtain a warrant and follow written policies.” Instead, law enforcement agencies have fought to keep Stingrays secret, even dropping criminal cases to avoid disclosing anything about them. The FBI has forced local police agencies to sign Stingray-related non-disclosure agreements, claiming that criminals and terrorists who know about Stingrays could take countermeasures against them. The increasing use of Stingrays, coupled with the lack of transparency, has alarmed civil liberties groups. “I think it’s critical to have transparency about the use of technology like Stingrays,” said Faiza Patel, an attorney with the Brennan Center for Justice. “That’s what allows courts, the public, and our elected officials to weigh in on the proper rules.”

Donald Trump has doubled down on his statement at a town hall last week that he aims to be neutral in his comments on the Israel/Palestine conflict so as not to injure his ability as president to negotiate a deal between the parties. On Meet the Press yesterday he pointedly did not buy into the Republican “orthodoxy” on Israel, saying he’s very pro-Israel but peace there is the “ultimate deal” and he wasn’t going to prejudice matters.

Trump surely senses that he can gain by exhibiting independence of the Israel lobby. Here are some other straws in the wind: –A new poll shows that the number of Americans holding a favorable view of Israel has declined 16 percent in the last year, to 59 percent. And in the same interval those holding a favorable view of the Palestinians has surged 42 percent, to 25 percent, and even Iran has had an image-makeover, with 16 percent of Americans regarding the country favorably, up considerably. Grant Smith of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy says the data reveal “a stunning turn in U.S. public opinion.” –The MSM are reflecting the thaw. Last week Newsweek ran a defiant piece by Hanin Zoabi, the Palestinian Israeli legislator who has been suspended from the Knesset as a troublemaker, explaining Palestinian violence as a response to occupation and discrimination. Boldly titled, “Why Israel Is Fighting the Indigenous Palestinians,” it included these lines: “The occupier does not have the right to self-defense. We, the occupied, have the full and only right to fight it, by all means recognized within the framework of international law.”

I throw in these stray facts to say that American public opinion is changing (as is Jewish opinion) and there is political hay to be made of the changes. Donald Trump surely senses this, in his populist campaign. And so he is preparing to run against Marco Rubio by saying that Rubio is Sheldon Adelson’s “perfect little puppet”, and preparing to set up a general election campaign against Hillary Clinton in which he can call out her beholdenness to the billionaire Haim Saban. In his reissued autobiography of last fall, Bernie Sanders refers with disdain to Sheldon Adelson and the “Adelson primary” on the very first page. But that’s the last we hear of it: Adelson, who is in bed with Hillary Clinton’s good friend Haim Saban. Sanders is ignoring a populist political opportunity that Donald Trump has seized upon. Go figure

While bankers can probably get their highs any number of ways, the Mexican drug cartels need financial institutions to clean their dirty money. And, it seems, there is no better bank for that than London-based HSBC, which is one of the world’s largest. In the first six months of last year, it reported a pre-tax profit of $13.6 billion.According to a lawsuit filed against HSBC earlier this month, it earned some of those profits by allowing the drug cartels to cycle billions of dollars through it.“From 2004 through at least 2008, HSBC Mexico accepted over $16.1 billion in cash deposits from customers throughout Mexico. This amount eclipsed the amount of USD cash deposits at financial institutions with market shares multiple times greater than HSBC Mexico’s,” the lawsuit alleges.

HSBC is no stranger to accusations of helping the cartels. In 2012, the bank paid $1.9 billion as part of an agreement with the United States and admitted that it had failed to establish an effective anti-money laundering (AML) program. In spite of having to pay such a massive penalty, no HSBC employees went to jail.

Even though the new lawsuit addresses an old problem, the legal action is unique for several reasons. It was brought on behalf of the families of several Americans killed by the Mexican cartels. The action seeks redress under a 1996 law (amended following the 9/11 attacks) that allows victims of terrorism to seek compensation from any organization that supported the perpetrators of such crimes.

In addition to withdrawing from districts in Helmand province in mid-February, the Afghan Army has begun to leave areas in Uruzgan. On March 1, troops abandoned areas of the district of Shahidi Hassas in the neighboring Uruzgan province. A provincial spokesman indicated that troops will likely leave other districts in order to create a “a reserve battalion.” From Reuters: Provincial government spokesman Dost Mohammad Nayab said about 100 troops and police had been pulled from checkpoints in two areas in Shahidi Hassas district and sent to the neighbouring district of Deh Rawud. The Afghan Taliban, seeking to topple the Western-backed government in Kabul and reimpose Islamic rule 15 years after they were ousted from power, said the move, which came after heavy fighting late Monday, had left the area around the village of Yakhdan under their control. The decision to leave the posts follows months of heavy fighting with the Taliban, who have put government forces under heavy pressure across southern Afghanistan. “We want to create a reserve battalion in Deh Rawud, and we may ask our soldiers and policemen from other districts also to leave their checkpoints,” Nayab said. Nayab said the withdrawal was prompted by a shortage of troops and police, worn down by combat losses and desertions. He said troop numbers in the province were about 1,000 short of their assigned strength while police were hundreds short.