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Paul Merrell

F.B.I. and Justice Dept. Said to Seek Charges for Petraeus - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...former-gen-david-petraeus.html

Patraeus criminal-investigation DoJ Holder leaks

shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • The F.B.I. and Justice Department prosecutors have recommended bringing felony charges against David H. Petraeus, contending that he provided classified information to a lover while he was director of the C.I.A., officials said, and leaving Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to decide whether to seek an indictment that could send the pre-eminent military officer of his generation to prison.The Justice Department investigation stems from an affair Mr. Petraeus had with Paula Broadwell, an Army Reserve officer who was writing his biography, and focuses on whether he gave her access to his C.I.A. email account and other highly classified information.F.B.I. agents discovered classified documents on her computer after Mr. Petraeus resigned from the C.I.A. in 2012 when the affair became public.
  • Mr. Petraeus, a retired four-star general who served as commander of American forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan, has said he never provided classified information to Ms. Broadwell, and has indicated to the Justice Department that he has no interest in a plea deal that would spare him an embarrassing trial. A lawyer for Mr. Petraeus, Robert B. Barnett, said Friday he had no comment.
  • Mr. Holder was expected to decide by the end of last year whether to bring charges against Mr. Petraeus, but he has not indicated how he plans to proceed. The delay has frustrated some Justice Department and F.B.I. officials and investigators who have questioned whether Mr. Petraeus has received special treatment at a time Mr. Holder has led a crackdown on government officials who reveal secrets to journalists.The protracted process has also frustrated Mr. Petraeus’s friends and political allies, who say it is unfair to keep the matter hanging over his head. Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, wrote to Mr. Holder last month that the investigation had deprived the nation of wisdom from one of its most experienced leaders.“At this critical moment in our nation’s security,” he wrote, “Congress and the American people cannot afford to have his voice silenced or curtailed by the shadow of a long-running, unresolved investigation marked by leaks from anonymous sources.”
Paul Merrell

Did Al Qaeda Cash in on the 9/11 Attacks? | 911Blogger.com - 0 views

911blogger.com/...did-al-qaeda-cash-911-attacks

war & peace 9-11 insider-trading CIA

shared by Paul Merrell on 31 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • In chapter one Rickards’ otherwise clear vision fails him. The author is absolutely correct that pre-9/11 insider trading did occur. Rickards also correctly notes that “every transaction has two parties,” meaning that every put and call option leaves a paper trail. But Rickards insults our intelligence when he tells us that associates of Osama bin Laden were responsible for the insider trading. Rickards would have us believe, for example, that the terrorists were behind the 600% spike in call options for the military contractor Raytheon, whose stock surged 37% in the weeks after 9/11. Other big winners were L-3 Communications, Northrop Grumman, and Allied Techsystems. According to Paul Zarembka, professor of econometrics at SUNY Buffalo, the put/call options were exercised, meaning that whoever purchased them later collected the profits, blood money. But is it believable that the very same terrorists who sought to destroy America got away with profiting from the subsequent vast expansion of the US war machine? Catching those responsible certainly was the intent of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which led the probe into allegations of insider trading in the weeks after 9/11. At the time, SEC chairman Harvey Pitt told the press “We will do everything in our power to track those [guilty] people down and bring them to justice.” Everyone took it for granted that the paper trail would lead to al Qaeda.
  • Yet, weeks later, the SEC quietly and inexplicably tabled its investigation. Why? Instead of issuing indictments, the SEC took the unprecedented step of deputizing everyone associated with its probe. This totaled hundreds, possibly thousands, of people. Why did the SEC do this? The answer was transparently obvious to former LAPD narcotics investigator Mike Ruppert, who pointed out that the SEC deputized its investigators to effectively gag them, no doubt, to prevent leakage of its actual findings. And what were those findings? Well, probably the inconvenient truth that the paper trail led not to bin Laden but back to Wall Street. As we know, there was leakage despite the SEC’s best efforts to keep a lid on things. The Independent (UK) reported that “to the embarrassment of investigators, it has emerged that the firm used to buy the put options on United Airlines was headed until 1998 by Alvin “Buzzy” Krongard, now executive director of the CIA.” George Tenet had personally recruited Krongard, probably to serve as his liaison with Wall Street.
  • The firm in question was America’s oldest investment bank, A.B. Brown, which merged with Bankers Trust in 1997. In 1999, when B.T. - Alex Brown pled guilty to criminal conspiracy charges, after it was revealed that top-level executives had created a $20 million slush fund out of unclaimed funds, B.T. - Alex Brown was on the verge of being closed down when Deutsche Bank scooped it up. Krongard’s former associate at Alex Brown, Mayo Shattuck III, who helped engineer the merger with Bankers Trust, went on to assume Krongard’s former duties as private banker to the firm’s wealthiest clients, personally arranging confidential transactions and transfers. According to the New York Times, in January 2001, Shattuck was named “co-head of investment banking….overseeing Deutsche Bank’s 400 brokers who cater to wealthy clients.” Shattuck’s sudden resignation on September 12, 2001 must therefor be viewed as highly suspicious. Shattuck retired without a word of explanation even though he reportedly had three years remaining on his contract.
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  • All of the above is conspicuously absent from Rickards’ discussion about insider trading. One may draw his/her own conclusions -- I have drawn mine. Even as we teeter on the brink of a financial meltdown of historic proportions, the insider-writer who would explain all of this cannot bring himself to acknowledge the true extent of Wall Street corruption and criminality, especially regarding 9/11, the fulcrum event that produced the world as we know it.
  • Paul Merrell on 31 Jul 14
     
    The mentioned article by The Independent is no longer on that newspaper's web site. But it survives on the Wayback Machine. http://goo.gl/j4nJVX
Paul Merrell

Redactions in U.S. Memo Leave Doubts on Data Surveillance Program - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...data-surveillance-program.html

surveillance-state NSA DoJ Stellar-Wind email Bush2 illegal

shared by Paul Merrell on 08 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • The Justice Department has released a newly declassified version of a May 2004 legal memo approving the National Security Agency’s Stellarwind program, a set of warrantless surveillance and data collection activities that President George W. Bush secretly authorized after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But questions about the program remain.A more heavily redacted version of the memo had been released in 2011 as part of Freedom of Information Act lawsuits by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Privacy Information Center. The new version includes previously censored references to the existence of the data collection related to Americans’ phone calls and emails.
  • The Obama administration voluntarily reprocessed the memo from Jack Goldsmith, the head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, in light of the fact that it had declassified the existence of the bulk phone and email data programs last year after leaks by Edward J. Snowden, a former N.S.A. contractor.The fuller release adds to the public record of an important historical episode. However, the government continued to redact crucial portions of the memo that would answer a primary remaining question about the history of Stellarwind: What prompted the Justice Department to conclude in early 2004 that one aspect of the program, which collected records about Americans’ emails in bulk, was illegal — even though it permitted other aspects, like warrantless wiretapping and the bulk collection of Americans’ phone records, to continue?“They have continued to keep redacted something very significant,” said Jameel Jaffer, a lawyer with the A.C.L.U.
  • The Justice Department’s conclusion that the email metadata program was illegal led to a March 2004 confrontation between White House and department officials in the hospital room of Attorney General John Ashcroft, after which nearly the entire top leadership of the department threatened to resign, prompting President Bush to agree to changes.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • parts of what had happened began to become public, starting with a December 2005 article in The New York Times that revealed the warrantless wiretapping portion of the program. The bulk phone and email metadata programs, however, remained secret until 2013, when they came to light in leaks by Mr. Snowden.While the basic existence of the March 2004 crisis has been known, it was not until Mr. Snowden’s leaks that it became clear that it pertained only to the Internet metadata program. However, it has remained murky what Mr. Goldsmith objected to in light of his willingness to bless the rest of Stellarwind based on a sweeping theory of presidential wartime powers.Those portions of the memo remain redacted in the newly released version.
Paul Merrell

US Troops 'May' Be Needed in Iraq, Says Hagel | News | teleSUR - 0 views

www.telesurtv.net/...-Says-Hagel-20150131-0002.html

war & peace Iraq ISIL U.S.-foreign-policy boots-on-the-ground mission-creep Hagel Carter

shared by Paul Merrell on 02 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • The United States already has 4500 troops in Iraq, but outgoing defense secretary Chuck Hagel says more may be needed.
  • U.S. ground forces may again be deployed to Iraq, outgoing Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel hinted on Friday. “I think it may require a forward deployment of some of our troops,” he told CNN. Hagel stated troops wouldn't operate as frontline fighters, but instead support Iraqi government forces in spotting Islamic State group targets and gathering intelligence. He also stated he is unsure whether such a deployment is yet needed. “I would say we're not there yet. Whether we get there or not, I don't know,” he said. Despite a pledge by President Barack Obama that there would be “no boots on the ground” in the fight against the Islamic State group, around 4500 U.S. troops are already in Iraq. The administration says the troops are primarily providing training to Iraqi government forces, and will not directly face the Islamic State group.
  • However, Hagel himself has acknowledged las year, “This is a long-term effort.” “It’s difficult. There will be setbacks. There will be victories,” he said ahead of a visit to Baghdad in December. The surprise visit was the first time Hagel has been to Iraq since he became defense secretary in February, 2013.
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  • It also followed the announcement of Hagel's sudden resignation in November. Obama has tapped Ashton Carter as the next defense secretary. “Carter has been through the revolving door between industry, the military and academia — advising Goldman Sachs and other investment firms on military technology along the way,” nuclear disarmament campaigner Alice Slater said when Carter's nomination was announced. Slater warned that Carter has advocated for an expanded U.S. military presence in Asia, and was “instrumental in establishing the policy that led to the new demonization of Russia which we see today.” “Carter also advised Obama on expanding the U.S. empire to Asia in the so-called Asia pivot, which resulted in new bases in the Pacific, expanded missile shields with Japan and South Korea, and actually stationing troops in Australia,” she stated.
  • Paul Merrell on 02 Feb 15
     
    I wonder why Obama doesn't simply move the Pentagon and all military bases located in the U.S. to Iraq? 
Paul Merrell

As Yemen Crumbled, a Disappeared US Detainee Called Home in Fear for His Life | VICE News - 0 views

news.vice.com/...lled-home-in-fear-for-his-life

war & peace Yemen Obama-renditions Sharif-Mobley cover-up

shared by Paul Merrell on 02 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • On January 20, as Houthi fighters battled the guards watching the compound of Yemen's president and further expanded their grip on the capital, a US citizen who has been detained in Sana'a since 2010 and hasn't been seen in almost a year called home to say that the Shia rebels had taken over the prison where he is held and that they planned to "kill everyone," according to his wife who resides in the US."Yemen is in complete turmoil as of yesterday," she wrote on a Facebook page advocating for his release. "He was able to make a call and asked for his country, America, to save his life by rescuing him from a sectarian battle between two groups [with] which he has no involvement."Sharif Mobley, a 31-year-old father of three from New Jersey, was snatched by Yemeni security officers 5 years ago and is suspected by the US of having ties to terrorist groups after he made contract with US-born Islamist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed in a US drone attack in Yemen in 2011. His wife, who lived with him at the time of his capture, said they had traveled to Yemen to study Arabic and the teachings of Islam.
  • On January 20, as Houthi fighters battled the guards watching the compound of Yemen's president and further expanded their grip on the capital, a US citizen who has been detained in Sana'a since 2010 and hasn't been seen in almost a year called home to say that the Shia rebels had taken over the prison where he is held and that they planned to "kill everyone," according to his wife who resides in the US.
  • On January 20, as Houthi fighters battled the guards watching the compound of Yemen's president and further expanded their grip on the capital, a US citizen who has been detained in Sana'a since 2010 and hasn't been seen in almost a year called home to say that the Shia rebels had taken over the prison where he is held and that they planned to "kill everyone," according to his wife who resides in the US."Yemen is in complete turmoil as of yesterday," she wrote on a Facebook page advocating for his release. "He was able to make a call and asked for his country, America, to save his life by rescuing him from a sectarian battle between two groups [with] which he has no involvement."Sharif Mobley, a 31-year-old father of three from New Jersey, was snatched by Yemeni security officers 5 years ago and is suspected by the US of having ties to terrorist groups after he made contract with US-born Islamist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed in a US drone attack in Yemen in 2011. His wife, who lived with him at the time of his capture, said they had traveled to Yemen to study Arabic and the teachings of Islam.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Mobley was shot in the leg during his abduction, and interrogated by FBI agents and representatives of the US Department of Defense while in hospital on January 30, 2010 — but never charged with terrorism. Instead, Yemeni authorities later charged him with the murder of a guard during a failed escape attempt, for which he now faces the death penalty. His lawyer was never formally notified of the charges against him.While his trial is ongoing, Mobley hasn't been seen in court since February 2014. In sporadic, frantic calls made from the cell phone of the occasional sympathetic guard, he has reportedly told his wife that he is being tortured and threatened. On his last call, two days before Yemen's president resigned, plunging the country into political chaos, Mobley once again told his wife that he fears for his life.
  • Mobley's lawyer, Cori Crider — the legal director of Reprieve, a UK-based legal aid group — told us that Islam is "really, really scared right now." "There is no trial process anymore, it hasn't happened for ages," said Crider, who hasn't been told where her client is and hasn't been able to speak with him in nearly a year. "[The US] really needs to renegotiate with what remains of the Yemeni state to get this guy deported and back to where he's gonna be safe, because he's really at risk right now."Crider and Islam said that US officials know where Mobley is — but that they won't tell them.
  • A State Department official told VICE News that there are no current plans for the US to directly evacuate Americans and that the US does not evacuate prisoners in a crisis situation, but declined to discuss Mobley's case, citing privacy laws. That's the same reasoning US officials have given to Crider — who has been fighting for months to find her client."I was like, guys, I'm this person's attorney," she said. "He has a right to see his legal representative — that is basic under Yemeni law just like it would be under US law. So you know where he is, you know he has a right to an attorney, what are you doing? Where is he?"
  • "They won't tell me and they won't tell his family," she added. "Even though they know, they refuse to tell us where their citizen is held at a time when the country is going into total chaos."Under America's Privacy Act, the state department cannot reveal any information related to a US citizen's "location, welfare, intentions, or problems" to anyone without that person's permission — this includes relatives and members of Congress.But Crider believes the US government may not only know where Sharif is, but she says they may also have had something to do with his disappearance.
  • US agents backed Mobley's initial arrest, Crider said, but they may have also been behind his subsequent disappearance. An unnamed Yemeni security source told NBC News that Mobley had been transferred in coordination with the US and that American officials have participated in his interrogation."We are very disturbed by recent reports that suggest that they are in some way implicated in the second disappearance," Crider said, adding that she has been fighting the government to disclose more information, including through government records requests. "If that's right, that's a problem of a totally different magnitude."
  • Mobley's whereabouts over the last year have not been confirmed — including by US officials who claimed to have visited him and found him "in good health and with  no major complaints," as reported by the Guardian. Mobley was believed to be in the hands of Yemen's Specialized Criminal Court — a secretive national security court known for its record of human rights abuse and targeting of political opponents and journalists.At some point last year, Mobley was believed to be detained at a Sana'a military base. A number of Sana'a's official facilities have recently passed under the control of Houthi rebels — including one seized Thursday, where US officials had previously trained Yemeni security forces on counter-terrorism tactics.
  • In previous calls to his wife, Mobley said that his captors had forced him to drink from bottles that had previously contained urine, and sprayed him with mace when he asked to speak with embassy officials. Lawyers with Reprieve said that during his detention he was beaten, chained to a bed, and dragged down the stairs.
  • Paul Merrell on 02 Feb 15
     
    The State Department's Privacy Act excuse for withholding the location of Sharif Mobley is a load of bull puckey intended for media consumption, not as a serious legal argument. The Privacy Act has an exception for just such situations: "(b) Conditions of Disclosure.- No agency shall disclose any record which is contained in a system of records by any means of communication to any person, or to another agency, except pursuant to a written request by, or with the prior written consent of, the individual to whom the record pertains, *unless disclosure of the record would be-* ... (8) to a person pursuant to a showing of compelling circumstances affecting the health or safety of an individual if upon such disclosure notification is transmitted to the last known address of such individual;" 5 U.S.C. 552a(b), http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/552a. This is an outrageous cover-up!
Paul Merrell

European Lawmakers Demand Answers on Phone Key Theft - The Intercept - 0 views

firstlook.org/...gemalto-heist-shocks-europe

surveillance state Gemalto SIM-card-keys

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • European officials are demanding answers and investigations into a joint U.S. and U.K. hack of the world’s largest manufacturer of mobile SIM cards, following a report published by The Intercept Thursday. The report, based on leaked documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, revealed the U.S. spy agency and its British counterpart Government Communications Headquarters, GCHQ, hacked the Franco-Dutch digital security giant Gemalto in a sophisticated heist of encrypted cell-phone keys. The European Parliament’s chief negotiator on the European Union’s data protection law, Jan Philipp Albrecht, said the hack was “obviously based on some illegal activities.” “Member states like the U.K. are frankly not respecting the [law of the] Netherlands and partner states,” Albrecht told the Wall Street Journal. Sophie in ’t Veld, an EU parliamentarian with D66, the Netherlands’ largest opposition party, added, “Year after year we have heard about cowboy practices of secret services, but governments did nothing and kept quiet […] In fact, those very same governments push for ever-more surveillance capabilities, while it remains unclear how effective these practices are.”
  • “If the average IT whizzkid breaks into a company system, he’ll end up behind bars,” In ’t Veld added in a tweet Friday. The EU itself is barred from undertaking such investigations, leaving individual countries responsible for looking into cases that impact their national security matters. “We even get letters from the U.K. government saying we shouldn’t deal with these issues because it’s their own issue of national security,” Albrecht said. Still, lawmakers in the Netherlands are seeking investigations. Gerard Schouw, a Dutch member of parliament, also with the D66 party, has called on Ronald Plasterk, the Dutch minister of the interior, to answer questions before parliament. On Tuesday, the Dutch parliament will debate Schouw’s request. Additionally, European legal experts tell The Intercept, public prosecutors in EU member states that are both party to the Cybercrime Convention, which prohibits computer hacking, and home to Gemalto subsidiaries could pursue investigations into the breach of the company’s systems.
  • According to secret documents from 2010 and 2011, a joint NSA-GCHQ unit penetrated Gemalto’s internal networks and infiltrated the private communications of its employees in order to steal encryption keys, embedded on tiny SIM cards, which are used to protect the privacy of cellphone communications across the world. Gemalto produces some 2 billion SIM cards a year. The company’s clients include AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, Sprint and some 450 wireless network providers. “[We] believe we have their entire network,” GCHQ boasted in a leaked slide, referring to the Gemalto heist.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • 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.”
  • Paul Merrell on 24 Feb 15
     
    Watch for massive class action product defect litigation to be filed against the phone companies.and mobile device manufacturers.  In most U.S. jurisdictions, proof that the vendors/manufacturers  knew of the product defect is not required, only proof of the defect. Also, this is a golden opportunity for anyone who wants to get out of a pricey cellphone contract, since providing a compromised cellphone is a material breach of warranty, whether explicit or implied..   
Paul Merrell

Confession of Former Russian Officer in Nemtsov Slaying could prompt Mole-Hunt | nsnbc international - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...slaying-could-prompt-mole-hunt

war & peace Russia Nemtsov-asassination U.S.-foreign-policy NED Soros

shared by Paul Merrell on 11 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • The Moscow Basmanny Court, on Sunday, sanctioned the detention of three additional suspects in the case of the murder of Russian politician Boris Nemtsov. Meanwhile, Daur Dadayev , a former Chechen officer pleaded guilty for his involvement. The developments prompt the President of the Russian Federation’s Republic of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, to launch a probe into the republics security services and a probe to identify what may have motivated Dadayev, whom he knew as a loyal officer, to get involved in the crime. The three additional suspects whose arrest was sanctioned by Moscow’s Basmanny Court are Khamzad Bakhayev, Tamerlan Eskerkhanov and Shagid Gubashev, reported the Russian Tass news agency.
  • The Court stated that it reached the conclusion to support the investigators’ request after having reviewed the materials presented to the court. Gubachev was arrested on March 7 while Eskerkhanov and Bakhayev were arrested on March 8. The three were charged under Articles 105 and 222 of the Russian Federation’s Criminal Code, involving the murder committed by a group of persons, in collusion, and for reasons of money, as well as with robbery, extortion and banditry and the illegal possession or transfer of weapons. The Court justifies their detention on the grounds that the suspects could flee and possibly attempt to destroy evidence.
  • Judge Natalya Mushnikova was quoted by Tass as saying that “Zaur Dadayev’s involvement has been confirmed by his confession”. The Court would not provide details about Dadayev’s alleged or confessed role in the murder of RPR-Psarnas party Co-Chair Boris Nemtsov during the night from February 27 to 28. Dadayev’s arrest and confession prompted the President of the Russian Federation’s Republic of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, to order an investigation into the Dadayev’s past. President Kadyrov stressed that he remembered Dadayev as a true Russian patriot. The Tass news agency quoted the Chechen Republic’s President as stating: “I have known Zaur as a true patriot of Russia. … Zaur was one of the bravest men in the regiment. … He displayed particular courage in an operation against a large group of terrorists near Benoi. He was awarded the Order of Courage, and medals For Bravery and For Services to the Chechen Republic. I am certain that he was sincerely dedicated to Russia and prepared to give his life for the Motherland. The real reasons and motives behind Dadayev’s dismissal from the Russian Interior Ministry troops are unclear to me.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • … I have instructed Chechnya’s Security Council Secretary Vakhit Usmayev to conduct a thorough investigation of Zaur Dadayev’s resignation and to scrutinize his behavior and morale on the eve of leaving the service. … In any case, if Dadayev’s guilt is established in court, it will have to be admitted that by taking a human life he committed a grave crime. But I must say once again that he would have never taken a single step against Russia, for the sake of which he had risked his own life for many years. Beslan Shavanov, the man killed during an attempt to detain him, was a brave soldier, too. We hope that a thorough investigation will follow to show if Dadayev is really guilty, and if yes, what was the real reason behind his actions.”.
  • A shortlist of the civil society organizations which have been implicated in supporting Russian terrorist organizations includes the Jamestown Foundation, the United States-Chechen Republic Alliance Inc., the American Committee for Peace in the Caucasus (ACPC), Freedom House, the Open Society Foundation, funded by George Soros, among many others.
  • Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov, for his part, has previously accused U.S. intelligence officials, including David Petraeus, for involvement in “flipping” detainees at Camp Bucca and at black CIA sites, including Caliph Ibrahim of the self-proclaimed Islamic State (ISIS / ISIL) Al-Baghdadi, a.k.a. Al-Badri or Caliph Ibrahim. In Helsinki, the capital of Finland the Kavkaz Center is maintaining a “pro-Caucasus Emirate” website. The Center provided PR support to the now deceased terrorist leader Doku Umarov and his terrorist network. Umarov would threaten to disrupt the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympic Games before he was killed in an explosion. U.S. Civil Society organizations as well as CIA and JSOC fronts like USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) are known for their support of “Caucasian Rebels or Freedom Fighters”.
  • Western and Arab Support of Terrorists could justify a Mole-Hunt in the Russian Federation’s Security Services. Chechen and Ingushetian Islamist terrorist organizations are known for their close ties to foreign intelligence services. In 2013 the then Chief of Saudi Arabia’s Intelligence, Prince Bandar admitted that Saudi Arabia uses and controls Chechen and other Caucasian terrorists promising President Putin “a safe Winter Olympic Games in Sochi” in exchange for Russian willingness to have a Saudi-friendly regime installed in Syria. The released minutes of the meeting between Putin and Bandar quote Bandar as saying: “I can give you a guarantee to protect the Winter Olympics in the city of Sochi on the Black Sea next year. The Chechen groups that threaten the security of the games are controlled by us, and they will not move in the direction of the Syrian territory without coordinating with us. These groups don´t scare us. We use them in the face of the Syrian regime but they will have no role or influence in Syria´s political future”.
  • he former U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniev Brzezinski is generally known as one of the main enablers and sponsors of the “Chechen Representation in the United States” led by Alisher Usmanov. Brzezinsky, for his part, is strongly supported by Rockefeller Foundation money. Brzezinski is according to several analysts pathologically obsessed with dividing Russia into at least six separate States” to reign in Moscow under the umbrella of a U.S. hegemony. It is noteworthy that Boris Nemtsov and the RPR-Psarnas party had close ties to the National Endowment of Democracy (NED). In 2012, Russian President Vladimir Putin would state that “he knows as a meter of fact” that especially foreign-backed organizations, over the last ten years, have used the strategy to sacrifice one of their own to create a martyr”. (see video)
  • The alleged involvement of Chechen and Ingushetian nationals in the murder of Boris Nemtsov and the confession of the former Interior Ministry officer Dadayev is not unlikely to prompt in-depth “mole-hunt” operations in the federal and national Russian, Chechen, Ingushetian and other security forces as well as mole-hunts in foreign-backed NGO’s.
Paul Merrell

Netanyahu Promises More Settler Homes in Jerusalem If Elected | nsnbc international - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...-homes-in-jerusalem-if-elected

war & peace Israel Palestine Jerusalem Netanyahu

shared by Paul Merrell on 17 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed Monday that, if reelected, he will build thousands of settler homes in occupied East Jerusalem to prevent future concessions to Palestinians. Speaking ahead of Tuesday’s general election on a whistle-stop tour of Har Homa, a contentious settlement neighborhood of annexed East Jerusalem, the PM vowed that he would never allow Palestinians to establish a capital in the city’s eastern sector.
  • “I won’t let that happen. My friends and I in Likud will preserve the unity of Jerusalem,” he said of his ruling right-wing party, according to AFP, vowing to prevent any future division of the city by building thousands of new settler homes. “We will continue to build in Jerusalem, we will add thousands of housing units, and in the face of all the (international) pressure, we will persist and continue to develop our eternal capital,” he added. During the 2013 negotiations, Israeli officials announced, and, eventually, carried out in full force, plans to build thousands of additional homes in illegal settlements across the occupied West Bank, while continuing to further seize lands, demolish homes and agricultural resources and, thus, leaving scores of Palestinian families severely disenfranchised and without so much as a roof over their heads to shelter them from inclement weather. Gazans were already surviving on a mere 8 hours per day of electricity when the Palestinian negotiating team finally resigned in protest, in mid-November. Israel, soon after, made quite clear its position on securing peace with Palestinians when Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, during a meeting with young Likud Party supporters, boasted: “I was threatened in Washington: ‘not one brick’ [of settlement construction] … after five years, we built a little more than one brick…”
  • Asked about “peace talks with the Palestinians”, the PM reportedly replied, according to +972 online Israeli magazine: “about the – what?” to which his audience responded with a round of chuckling. Critics of Israel’s aggressively right-wing regime assert that such peace negotiations are simply used as a front for continued settlement expansion and military occupation, noting that settlement activity clearly increases during negotiations, while daily acts of violence against Palestinians, by both Israeli civilians and soldiers alike, remains as of yet unchallenged by the powers that be. Israel seized East Jerusalem in the 1967 Six-Day War and later annexed it in a move never recognized by the international community. Israel refers to both halves of the city as its “united, undivided capital” and does not see construction in the eastern sector as settlement building. Successive Israeli leaders have vowed that Jerusalem will never again be divided — in war or peace.
  • Paul Merrell on 17 Mar 15
     
    Israel's election is in the morning, although it will take a bit longer to learn who will become the Prime Minister. (Much depends on which party gets the nod from the Israeli President to try to form a ruling coalition; then it takes time tio form one.)  But this campaign promise deserves more credibility than most campaign promises in the U.S.: It's a promiose to do more of what Netanyahu has been doing since he came to power.  Multiple U.N. Security Council regulations have demanded that Israel return to its pre-1967 borders. And the U.N. General Council Resolution that is Israel's claim to legitimacy (although further action that never happened was required to become effective never happened) specifically provided that its allocation of territory to the Israeli government was conditioned on the existing rights of Palestinian within that territory be preserved. Moreover, Israel took Jerusalem (and other lands) during its 1967 Six-Day War. Under the 4th Geneva Convention, Israel was required to withdraw from all occupied territories and to permit all refugees to return to their homes "immediately upon cessation of hostilities." So Obama's campaign promise is a promise to commit a war crime and crime against humanity.  The truly disgusting parts are that: [i] the majority of Israeli Jews support that position; and [ii] the U.S. government even though it routinely calls the eviction of Palestinians in Jerusalem and the West Bank to construct Israeli homes and settlements "illegal", routinely vetoes U.N. Security Council resolutions to bring Israel into compliance with the older S.C. resolutions and international law.   
Paul Merrell

The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control | Antony Loewenstein | Comment is free | theguardian.com - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...sa-is-total-population-control

surveillance state NSA NSA-targets phone-audio Binney

shared by Paul Merrell on 11 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • William Binney is one of the highest-level whistleblowers to ever emerge from the NSA. He was a leading code-breaker against the Soviet Union during the Cold War but resigned soon after September 11, disgusted by Washington’s move towards mass surveillance.On 5 July he spoke at a conference in London organised by the Centre for Investigative Journalism and revealed the extent of the surveillance programs unleashed by the Bush and Obama administrations.
  • “At least 80% of fibre-optic cables globally go via the US”, Binney said. “This is no accident and allows the US to view all communication coming in. At least 80% of all audio calls, not just metadata, are recorded and stored in the US. The NSA lies about what it stores.”The NSA will soon be able to collect 966 exabytes a year, the total of internet traffic annually. Former Google head Eric Schmidt once argued that the entire amount of knowledge from the beginning of humankind until 2003 amount to only five exabytes.Binney, who featured in a 2012 short film by Oscar-nominated US film-maker Laura Poitras, described a future where surveillance is ubiquitous and government intrusion unlimited.“The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control”, Binney said, “but I’m a little optimistic with some recent Supreme Court decisions, such as law enforcement mostly now needing a warrant before searching a smartphone.”
  • It shows that the NSA is not just pursuing terrorism, as it claims, but ordinary citizens going about their daily communications. “The NSA is mass-collecting on everyone”, Binney said, “and it’s said to be about terrorism but inside the US it has stopped zero attacks.”The lack of official oversight is one of Binney’s key concerns, particularly of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa), which is held out by NSA defenders as a sign of the surveillance scheme's constitutionality.“The Fisa court has only the government’s point of view”, he argued. “There are no other views for the judges to consider. There have been at least 15-20 trillion constitutional violations for US domestic audiences and you can double that globally.”
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  • He praised the revelations and bravery of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and told me that he had indirect contact with a number of other NSA employees who felt disgusted with the agency’s work. They’re keen to speak out but fear retribution and exile, not unlike Snowden himself, who is likely to remain there for some time.
  • Binney recently told the German NSA inquiry committee that his former employer had a “totalitarian mentality” that was the "greatest threat" to US society since that country’s US Civil War in the 19th century. Despite this remarkable power, Binney still mocked the NSA’s failures, including missing this year’s Russian intervention in Ukraine and the Islamic State’s take-over of Iraq.The era of mass surveillance has gone from the fringes of public debate to the mainstream, where it belongs. The Pew Research Centre released a report this month, Digital Life in 2025, that predicted worsening state control and censorship, reduced public trust, and increased commercialisation of every aspect of web culture.It’s not just internet experts warning about the internet’s colonisation by state and corporate power. One of Europe’s leading web creators, Lena Thiele, presented her stunning series Netwars in London on the threat of cyber warfare. She showed how easy it is for governments and corporations to capture our personal information without us even realising.Thiele said that the US budget for cyber security was US$67 billion in 2013 and will double by 2016. Much of this money is wasted and doesn't protect online infrastructure. This fact doesn’t worry the multinationals making a killing from the gross exaggeration of fear that permeates the public domain.
  • Wikileaks understands this reality better than most. Founder Julian Assange and investigative editor Sarah Harrison both remain in legal limbo. I spent time with Assange in his current home at the Ecuadorian embassy in London last week, where he continues to work, release leaks, and fight various legal battles. He hopes to resolve his predicament soon.At the Centre for Investigative Journalism conference, Harrison stressed the importance of journalists who work with technologists to best report the NSA stories. “It’s no accident”, she said, “that some of the best stories on the NSA are in Germany, where there’s technical assistance from people like Jacob Appelbaum.” A core Wikileaks belief, she stressed, is releasing all documents in their entirety, something the group criticised the news site The Intercept for not doing on a recent story. “The full archive should always be published”, Harrison said.
  • With 8m documents on its website after years of leaking, the importance of publishing and maintaining source documents for the media, general public and court cases can’t be under-estimated. “I see Wikileaks as a library”, Assange said. “We’re the librarians who can’t say no.”With evidence that there could be a second NSA leaker, the time for more aggressive reporting is now. As Binney said: “I call people who are covering up NSA crimes traitors”.
Paul Merrell

CIA admits to spying on Senate staffers | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-admits-spying-senate-staffers

surveillance state CIA torture Senate-Intelligence_Committee-Report Brennan

shared by Paul Merrell on 01 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • The director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Brennan, issued an extraordinary apology to leaders of the US Senate intelligence committee on Thursday, conceding that the agency employees spied on committee staff and reversing months of furious and public denials. Brennan acknowledged that an internal investigation had found agency security personnel transgressed a firewall set up on a CIA network, which allowed Senate committee investigators to review agency documents for their landmark inquiry into CIA torture. Among other things, it was revealed that agency officials conducted keyword searches and email searches on committee staff while they used the network.The admission brings Brennan’s already rocky tenure at the head of the CIA under renewed question. One senator on the panel said he had lost confidence in the director, although the White House indicated its support for a man who has been one of Barack Obama’s most trusted security aides.
  • CIA spokesman Dean Boyd acknowledged that agency staff had improperly monitored the computers of committee staff members, who were using a network the agency had set up, called RDINet. “Some CIA employees acted in a manner inconsistent with the common understanding reached between [the committee] and the CIA in 2009 regarding access to the RDINet,” he said.Asked if Brennan had or would offer his resignation, a different CIA spokesman, Ryan Trapani, replied: “No.”
  • McClatchy first reported the apology on Thursday.
  • Paul Merrell on 01 Aug 14
     
    A bit more detail on what CIA admits to doing. 
Paul Merrell

BBC News - David Cameron faces fresh Gaza pressure - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...uk-politics-28670421

war & peace Israel Palestine Gaza sanctions weapons-export

shared by Paul Merrell on 06 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • The Liberal Democrats are calling for the suspension of arms export licences to Israel, adding to the pressure David Cameron is facing over Gaza. It comes after Baroness Warsi resigned as a Foreign Office minister, arguing Downing Street's stance on Israel's actions was "morally indefensible". She said the government was not doing enough to shape events, but the PM said he had been clear in calling for peace. No 10 said a review of arms export licences was already under way.
  • Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg said the Israeli military operation in Gaza had "overstepped the mark" and called for the suspension of arms export licences to Israel. He said he had been working with his Lib Dem colleague and business secretary Vince Cable to get the suspension finalised, saying an announcement would be made "very shortly".
  • Speaking about the potential suspension of licences, Mr Cable said senior Lib Dems had been "making this case inside government", but said they had "not yet been able to get agreement" with Tory coalition partners. "I hope and expect that to change shortly," he said. Conservative MP and former Chief Whip Andrew Mitchell also said an embargo "should be considered", telling BBC Radio 4's World at One there was "a strong case for trying to ensure that weapons getting into this conflict are minimised as much as possible". A Downing Street spokesman said a review of export licences to Israel was under way, and no new military licences had been issued since the Israeli operation was launched. "Suspending export licences is not a decision we take lightly and it is right that we examine the facts fully. This is the approach being taken by the vast majority of countries," the spokesman said.
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  • Sir Hugh Robertson, who was a Foreign Office minister alongside Lady Warsi until he left in last month's reshuffle by Mr Cameron, said he was "sad" she had stepped down and understood why she felt "very strongly" about the situation in Gaza. But he said he was "not sure that British policy towards the Middle East has changed markedly in the last fortnight", and he suggested "shouting" from London was not the best way to influence Israeli policy. This view was contradicted by Lib Dem Energy Secretary Ed Davey, who said he shared Lady Warsi's views, but added: "I think she didn't need to go because we are winning the argument."
  • Paul Merrell on 06 Aug 14
     
    British sale of armaments to Israel contributes 8 billion pounds annually to the British economy. If the UK imposes an armaments export embargo on Israel, will other weapon manufacturing nations follow? 
Paul Merrell

Ex-Chief of C.I.A. Shapes Response to Detention Report - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-on-interrogation-program.html

war & peace CIA torture Tenet Brennan Obama Senate-Intelligence_Committee-Report cover-up must-read

shared by Paul Merrell on 05 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • Just after the Senate Intelligence Committee voted in April to declassify hundreds of pages of a withering report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s detention and interrogation program, C.I.A. Director John O. Brennan convened a meeting of the men who had played a role overseeing the program in its seven-year history.The spies, past and present, faced each other around the long wooden conference table on the seventh floor of the C.I.A.’s headquarters in Northern Virginia: J. Cofer Black, head of the agency’s counterterrorism center at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks; the undercover officer who now holds that job; and a number of other former officials from the C.I.A.’s clandestine service. Over the speakerphone came the distinctive, Queens-accented voice of George J. Tenet.
  • Over the past several months, Mr. Tenet has quietly engineered a counterattack against the Senate committee’s voluminous report, which could become public next month. The effort to discredit the report has set up a three-way showdown among former C.I.A. officials who believe history has been distorted, a White House carefully managing the process and politics of declassifying the document, and Senate Democrats convinced that the Obama administration is trying to protect the C.I.A. at all costs.The report is expected to accuse a number of former C.I.A. officials of misleading Congress and the White House about the program and its effectiveness, but it is Mr. Tenet who might have the most at stake.
  • Mr. Tenet, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has arranged a number of conference calls with former C.I.A. officials to discuss the impending report. After private conversations with Mr. Brennan, he and two other former C.I.A. directors — Porter J. Goss and Michael V. Hayden — drafted a letter to Mr. Brennan asking that, as a matter of fairness, they be allowed to see the report before it was made public. Describing the letter, one former C.I.A. officer who spoke on condition of anonymity said that the former directors “think that those people who were heavily involved in the operations have a right to see what’s being said about them.”Mr. Brennan then passed the letter to Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who is chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
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  • Ms. Feinstein agreed to let a group of former senior C.I.A. officials read a draft of the report, although she initially insisted they be allowed to review it only at the committee’s office. Officials said President Obama’s chief of staff, Denis McDonough, intervened and brokered an arrangement in which the officials could read an unredacted version of the report inside a secure room at the office of the Director of National Intelligence. Ms. Feinstein declined to comment.
  • “While former C.I.A. officials may be working to hide their own past wrongs, there’s no reason Brennan or any other current C.I.A. official should help facilitate the defense of the indefensible,” said Christopher Anders, senior legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union.Spokesmen for the C.I.A. and the White House declined to comment.
  • The April meeting at C.I.A. headquarters highlighted how much of the agency is still seeded with officers who participated in the detention and interrogation program, which Mr. Obama officially ended during his first week in office in 2009.At one point during the meeting, the current head of the counterterrorism center, an officer with the first name Mike, told Mr. Brennan that roughly 200 people under his leadership had at some point participated in the interrogation program. They wanted to know, he said, how Mr. Brennan planned to defend them in public against accusations that the C.I.A. engaged in systematic torture and lied about its efficacy.
  • Mr. Tenet resigned a decade ago amid the wash of recriminations over the C.I.A.’s botched Iraq assessments, and he has given few interviews since his book tour.
  • Paul Merrell on 05 Aug 14
     
    Major Obama scandal brewing here. The current head of the CIA, John Brennan, has been caught conspiring with former CIA heads and others to counter the Senate Intelligence Committee's pending report on CIA torture and extraordinary rendition, even as Brennan works to delay the report summary's publication by censoring it, resulting in delay while the Committee argues with the CIA over the deletions. All of which sharply contrasts with Obama's publicly expressed desire to have the report published promptly.    The article also makes a very strong case that those CIA officials who participated in the torture and rendition program have been enabled, on Obama's watch, to act as the censors of the Senate Report.  A must-read
Paul Merrell

Is NSA Surveillance Mastermind Keith Alexander Selling US Secrets to Wall Street? | VICE United States - 0 views

www.vice.com/...-us-secrets-to-wall-street-630

surveillance state NSA Alexander revolving-door

shared by Paul Merrell on 02 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • Perhaps you already assume that there's some kind of twisted marriage between Wall Street megabanks and the US global surveillance regime. Why wouldn't there be? But not even a total cynic could have anticipated spymaster Keith Alexander cashing in this hard, this fast. As Bloomberg recently reported, the former National Security Agency chief, who resigned in March at the age of 62, quickly offered his cyber-security expertise at the eye-popping price of $1 million per month to an assortment of shady business lobbies. And now at least one member of Congress is probing this most delightfully dystopian of arrangements, raising the possibility that Alexander will be shamed out of the practice, if nothing else. “Disclosing or misusing classified information for profit is, as Mr. Alexander well knows, a felony. I question how Mr. Alexander can provide any of the services he is offering unless he discloses or misuses classified information, including extremely sensitive sources and methods,” Florida Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson wrote one of the business groups, the Security Industries and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), which holds it down for Wall Street in Washington. “Without the classified information that he acquired in his former position, he literally would have nothing to offer to you.”
  • In an interview Monday, Grayson was even more strident in his criticism. "Frankly, what the general is doing is beginning to resemble an extortion racket," he told me. "This is a man who basically lied for a living, and he continues to do that." To be clear, what's uniquely outrageous about Alexander, who has apparently lowered his asking price to $600,000, is not that he is a former US official dangling his alleged expertise and the allure of privileged access to government officials before Wall Street. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who served under Barack Obama and is the odds-on favorite to succeed him, does this all the time, usually at a rate of about $250,000 a pop. (Indeed, one might argue that the very fact she has managed to do so while enjoying a stellar national reputation is what signaled to Alexander he might as well dive headlong through the revolving door.) But the former NSA head presumably knows things about sophisticated intelligence-gathering practices that very, very few people on Earth have been privy to—information that could be useful in the private sector, which has a tendency to collude with the military in ways that made former President and World War II General Dwight Eisenhower very sad.
  • "What could he possibly have that's worth $1 million a month other than classified information?" wonders Melanie Sloan, founder of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a good government group. "That's more than former presidents make." Indeed, even former President Bill Clinton, whose corruption since leaving office is by now the stuff of legend, doesn't have the gall to ask for that much per gig. There's a sort of "fuck it!" attitude to what Alexander is doing, seemingly kicking sand in the face of everyone angry at his surveillance regime by getting paid to reflect on the experience of assembling it. More ominously, there's the prospect that Alexander, whether deliberately or otherwise, may have left behind vulnerabilities while running the NSA so as to put himself in prime position to effectively hold the banks hostage now. Certainly, there have been reports suggesting the agency was aware of some vulnerabilities it either could or did not address.   "What is especially troubling is he might actually be worth it," says former North Carolina Democratic Congressman Brad Miller, who worked extensively on financial regulation and Wall Street reform in Congress. "He's obviously not a computer geek. Some of the things that might have seemed paranoid a few years ago now seem more than plausible given what we've already learned the NSA has been doing."
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  • In an email, former New York Times reporter and Goldman Sachs regulatory guru Stephen Labaton—who is currently president of communications and influence powerhouse RLM Finsbury and apparently fielding the General's media inquiries—dismissed Grayson's critique and Miller's concerns. "The letter is ludicrous," he wrote me, before adding about Miller, "The congressman’s kidding, right? Will he [Alexander] next be tied to the Kennedy assassination?" But as Marcy Wheeler points out, given that the former NSA boss has spent the last year hyping the incredible risk of catastrophic cyber-attack, as well as the alleged damage done by Edward Snowden (an assessment his successor does not seem to share), it's fair to ask if his consultancy is essentially a scam. That the victims are, for now, Wall Street bankers—some of the least sympathetic human beings around—is a sweet bit of irony. But it doesn't change the bigger picture: In this age of total surveillance and unchecked financial power, the frontiers of corruption never seem to stop expanding.
Paul Merrell

Public Offers Support for Obama's Iraq Intervention « LobeLog.com - 0 views

www.lobelog.com/t-for-obamas-iraq-intervention

war & peace Iraq U.S.-reinvasion polls

shared by Paul Merrell on 19 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • Despite rising criticism of his foreign policy — even from his former secretary of state — President Barack Obama’s decision last week to carry out airstrikes against Islamic State militants in northern Iraq enjoys relatively strong public support, at least so far. Over half (54 percent) of respondents in a poll released here Monday by the Pew Research Center and USA Today said they approved of the airstrikes, which appear to have helped reverse some of the gains made by Islamic State fighters against Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga forces earlier this month.
  • Thirty-one percent said they disapproved of the strikes, while 15 percent of the 1,000 randomly selected respondents who took part in the survey, which was carried out between Thursday and Sunday, declined to give an opinion. The poll found major partisan differences, with self-described Republicans markedly more hawkish than Democrats or independents, although a majority of Democratic respondents said they also supported the airstrikes. However, a majority (57 percent) of Republicans said they were concerned that Obama was not prepared to go “far enough to stop” the Islamic State, while majorities of Democrats (62 percent) and independents (56 percent) said they worried that he may go too far in re-inserting the military into Iraq three years after the last US combat troops were withdrawn. Overall, 51 percent of respondents expressed the latter fear. That concern was felt particularly strongly by younger respondents, members of the so-called “millennial” generation, whose foreign policy views have tended to be far more skeptical of the effectiveness of military force than those of other generational groups, according to a number of polls that have been released over the past two years.
  • The initial success of the US air campaign — 68 airstrikes have been carried out to date, according to Washington’s Central Command (CentCom) — follows Thursday’s resignation of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a critical step, in the administration’s view, toward establishing a less-sectarian government capable of reaching out to disaffected Sunnis who have joined or cooperated with the Islamic State without necessarily sharing the group’s extreme and violent ideology.
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  • Thus, while respondents over the age of 65 were roughly equally split between those who expressed concern about Obama doing too little or going too far, more than two-thirds of millennials said they were worried about the US becoming too involved in Iraq, while only 21 percent voiced the opposing view.
  • Even some in his own party, including, most recently, his former secretary of state and the presumptive 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, have complained that he should have provided more support to “moderate” factions in Syria’s insurgency earlier in that country’s civil war and that he was too passive for too long in responding to the Islamic State’s advances in al-Anbar province earlier this year. But the latest survey, as most others released over the past year, suggest that Obama’s caution reflects the public mood, and especially the sentiments of younger voters, as well as the Democratic Party’s core constituencies.
  • In addition to asking whether they feared Obama would either do too much or too little in countering the Islamic State in Iraq, the pollsters asked respondents whether they thought the “U.S. has a responsibility to do something about the violence in Iraq.” Overall, 44 percent answered affirmatively, while 41 percent said no, and 15 percent said they didn’t know. Those results marked a major change from when the same question was posed in July. At that time 39 percent said yes, but a 55-percent majority answered in the negative, and six percent said they didn’t know. While the change may be attributed to the sense of increased threat posed by the Islamic State to the US itself, much of the news media coverage since the beginning of August focused on the plight of minority communities, especially Christians and Yazidis, threatened by the Islamic State’s latest campaign. The percentage of respondents who believe the US has a responsibility to take action in Iraq is significantly higher than the percentages that took the same position when the US intervened in Libya and when Obama said he was prepared to conduct military action against Syria after the chemical attacks. Detailed surveys about foreign policy attitudes conducted over the past decade have suggested that US respondents are most likely to favor unilateral military action in cases where it could prevent genocide or mass killings.
Paul Merrell

EFDD Block at EU Parliament Collapsed - The real Danger of Fascism comes from Where? | nsnbc international - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...psed-real-danger-fascism-comes

EU EU-skeptics

shared by Paul Merrell on 17 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • The Europe for Freedom and Direct Democracy (EFDD) group at the European Parliament, which is known for being the most outspoken Euro skeptic alliance has collapsed. The breakup came after the withdrawal of Latvian MEP Iveta Grigule and was allegedly brought about by lobbying against the block with participation of EU Parliament President Martin Schulz.
  • To officially form a block at the EU Parliament and to be privied to EU funding, extra talking time and committee seats, requires that a block represents members from at least seven EU member states. On June 4, 2014, the Danish People’s Party and the Finns Party left the block and were admitted to the European Conservatives and Reformists. EFDD was reduced to represent only six member states when Latvian MEP Iveta Grigule left the block. The withdrawal of Grigule is a severe blow for the remaining EFDD members, including the UK Independence Party UKIP and the Italian right-wing populist movement of Beppe Grillo, the Five Star Movement. The withdrawal of Grigule’s support for the EFDD came, allegedly, after intense lobbying against the Euro-skeptic alliance. Among the lobbyists was allegedly the President of the EU Parliament, Martin Schulz.
  • The EFDD accused Schulz of having caused Grigule’s withdrawal and the collapse of the block. The EFDD alleged that Schulz asked Grigule to resign from the group in return for adopting a role of president in a special EU delegation to Kazakhstan. The collapse deals a severe financial blow to the blocks constituent parties. UKIP could lose up to €14 million, equivalent to US$17.8 million of EU funding, reported the Financial Times.
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  • The allegation that the collapse was willingly brought about by an anti-EU-skeptic alliance is substantiated by the fact that EU officials are notoriously known for anti-democratic practices, and especially for targeting EU-skeptics. In March 2013, a leaked, secret EU report revealed that the European Commission planned to use millions of euro on a massive manipulation campaign up to the 2014 elections. Morten Messerschmidt, an MEP for the Danish People’s Party which left the EFDD in June 2014, denounced the pre-election pro-EU campaign as undemocratic and dangerous.
  • Likewise, the Euro-skeptic block was targeted with a unified scare campaign when UKIP and other Euro-skeptics won more seats during the last EU Parliamentary elections than expected. Corporate and state-funded media throughout Europe, almost unanimously, warned that Europe was on a “slippery slope towards fascism”, while it was neglected that most of the establishment pro-EU parties supported the Nazi and Ultra-Nationalist coup d’État in Ukraine.
Paul Merrell

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

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

war & peace DoD-procurement F35 A10 scandal

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

Steven Salaita settles lawsuit with Univ. of Illinois | The Electronic Intifada - 0 views

electronicintifada.net/...-settles-lawsuit-univ-illinois

war & peace Israel Palestine Salatia litigation settlement BDS

shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Steven Salaita will not be reinstated under the terms of an out of court settlement with the University of Illinois. The deal will pay Salaita $875,000 – about ten times the annual salary he would have received as a tenured professor in the American Indian Studies program at the university’s flagship Urbana-Champaign campus. “This settlement is a vindication for me, but more importantly, it is a victory for academic freedom and the First Amendment,” Salaita said in a release from his legal counsel, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the law firm Loevy & Loevy. The settlement brings an end to Salaita’s breach of contract lawsuit against university trustees and administrators over his August 2014 firing because of his tweets excoriating Israel’s attack on Gaza. Salaita had sought reinstatement as well as financial damages.
  • The university statement said Salaita would receive a lump sum of $600,000, while the remaining amount would cover his legal fees.
  • Salaita’s case became a cause celebre for academic freedom, highlighting the role of pro-Israel donors in pressuring university administrators. Thousands of academics pledged to boycott the university until he was reinstated. The Salaita affair devastated and demoralized the university’s celebrated American Indian Studies program, leading to the departure of several faculty. His firing also earned the University of Illinois a formal censure from the American Association of University Professors for violating academic freedom, a rare rebuke and severe blow to its reputation.
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  • Salaita had scored successes in the early phases of his federal lawsuit. In August, US District Judge Harry Leinenweber backed Salaita’s contention that he had a binding contract with the university. Yet there was never a guarantee that even if he won at trial that the court would order his reinstatement. In September, the judge found that university officials had destroyed emails that may have contained key evidence Salaita needed to prove his case. This came after sensational revelations that top officials, including then Chancellor Phyllis Wise, had been using private email accounts to discuss the case and evade disclosure laws. Wise and another official, Provost Ilesanmi Adesida, resigned in disgrace, adding to the disarray at the frequently scandal-plagued state university.
  • In August, Salaita took up a year-long post as Edward W. Said Chair of American Studies at the American University of Beirut.
Paul Merrell

Judge bars release of 2013 videos of fatal shooting by Chicago cops -- for now - Chicago Tribune - 0 views

www.chicagotribune.com/...ting-video-20151209-story.html

police-militarization Chicago Emanuel suppressed-videos

shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • s Mayor Rahm Emanuel was apologizing Wednesday for the broken system of police accountability exposed by the Laquan McDonald case, city attorneys argued before a federal judge that footage of an officer fatally shooting a 17-year-old carjacking suspect nearly three years ago should be kept from public view.Lawyers for Cedrick Chatman's family allege the videos of his January 2013 killing contradict statements from police that Chatman had turned and pointed a dark object at police as he ran, prompting Officer Kevin Fry to fire in fear of his life. City attorneys argue releasing the footage — which they described as low-quality and incomplete — could inflame the public and jeopardize a fair trial.At a brief hearing Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Robert Gettleman said the records should stay sealed for the time being. But the judge said he would likely lift the protective order next month if he was going to be asked to consider the videos in any pretrial rulings, a move that would automatically make them part of the public record.
  • "If it's likely going to come out through pretrial motions, then there really is no reason to wait," said Gettleman, who set a hearing on the issue for Jan. 14.Gettleman's ruling came three weeks after police dash-cam video of 17-year-old McDonald being shot 16 times by Officer Jason Van Dyke went viral, sparking protests and leading to the resignations of both police Superintendent Garry McCarthy and Scott Ando, who headed the Independent Police Review Authority, which has drawn criticism for its lax enforcement on excessive-force complaints.
  • Earlier this year, Lorenzo Davis, the IPRA supervisor who headed up the Chatman probe, filed a federal lawsuit alleging he was fired by Ando for concluding that officers in several shootings — including Chatman's — were not justified in using lethal force.Davis, who viewed the surveillance video as part of the IPRA inquiry, told the Tribune last month he did not see Chatman aim at or turn toward the officers."Cedrick was just running as the shots were fired," Davis said. "You're taught that deadly force is a last resort and that you should do everything in your power to apprehend the person before you use deadly force. I did not see where deadly force was called for at that time."An investigator on Davis' team alleged that Fry violated the department's deadly force policy, but that claim was ruled "unfounded" in the final IPRA report.
  • Paul Merrell on 12 Dec 15
     
    If the videos "could inflame the public and jeopardize a fair trial," then they must show a different story than the police have been telling, yes? 
Paul Merrell

News from The Associated Press - 0 views

hosted.ap.org/...EU_RUSSIA_US

war & peace Syria Assad U.S.-foreign-policy

shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday accepted Russia's long-standing demand that President Bashar Assad's future be determined by his own people, as Washington and Moscow edged toward putting aside years of disagreement over how to end Syria's civil war. "The United States and our partners are not seeking so-called regime change," Kerry told reporters in the Russian capital after meeting President Vladimir Putin. A major international conference on Syria would take place later this week in New York, Kerry announced. Kerry reiterated the U.S. position that Assad, accused by the West of massive human rights violations and chemical weapons attacks, won't be able to steer Syria out of more than four years of conflict. But after a day of discussions with Assad's key international backer, Kerry said the focus now is "not on our differences about what can or cannot be done immediately about Assad." Rather, it is on facilitating a peace process in which "Syrians will be making decisions for the future of Syria." Kerry's declarations crystallized the evolution in U.S. policy on Assad over the last several months, as the Islamic State group's growing influence in the Middle East has taken priority.
  • President Barack Obama first called on Assad to leave power in the summer of 2011, with "Assad must go" being a consistent rallying cry. Later, American officials allowed that he wouldn't have to resign on "Day One" of a transition. Now, no one can say when Assad might step down. Russia, by contrast, has remained consistent in its view that no foreign government could demand Assad's departure and that Syrians would have to negotiate matters of leadership among themselves. Since late September, it has been bombing terrorist and rebel targets in Syria as part of what the West says is an effort to prop up Assad's government. "No one should be forced to choose between a dictator and being plagued by terrorists," Kerry said. However, he described the Syrian opposition's demand that Assad must leave as soon as peace talks begin as a "nonstarting position, obviously."
  • Earlier Tuesday in the Kremlin, Putin noted several "outstanding issues" between Russia and its former Cold War foe. Beyond Assad, these include which rebel groups in Syria should be allowed to participate in the transition process and which should be deemed terrorists, and like the Islamic State group and al-Qaida, combatted by all. Jordan is working on finalizing the list of terrorist vs. legitimate opposition forces. Representatives of Syria's opposition themselves hope this week to finalize their negotiating team for talks with Assad's government. The U.S., Russia and others hope those talks will begin early next year. Appearing beside Kerry, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov hailed what he described as a "big negotiating day," saying the sides advanced efforts to define what a Syrian transition process might look like.
  • Paul Merrell on 16 Dec 15
     
    A very big U.S. blink, given Assad's popularity in public polling and the likelihood that he would be reelected in any election mandated by a peace accord (which is why the U.S. and allies have been insisting that Assad step down as a negotiation pre-condition.  
Paul Merrell

One of the World's Safest Places for Banking Is Rocked by Scandals - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...lm-banking-industry-1528092559

banksters Australia criminal-prosecution

shared by Paul Merrell on 05 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • Commonwealth Bank of Australia ’s oversight of money transfers from that account to Lebanon last year was among many failures cited by the Australian federal government’s financial intelligence agency in its nearly US$530 million fine of the bank on Monday. If approved, the fine—meant to settle a lawsuit brought by the agency and founded on breaches of the country’s Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Act—would be the largest corporate civil penalty ever paid in Australia. Australia’s banks have long held a reputation for being among the world’s safest for investors. But a series of scandals over the past year has rocked the country’s top financial institutions. Commonwealth Bank has seen separate penalties for conduct in alleged interest-rate rigging and bad governance. On Friday, Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd. said it would defend against criminal prosecution for alleged cartel conduct in a 2015 capital raising. A public inquiry into the sector, launched last autumn by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, has heard accusations against Australia’s leading financial firms of inappropriate lending, collecting fees from dead customers for financial advice and lying to regulators. The tribunal has already claimed several big scalps. Beginning in late April, the chief executive, chairman and several board members at Australia’s largest wealth management company, AMP Ltd. , resigned after the company admitted it had misled regulators and been slow to compensate customers for fees charged for financial advice it didn’t deliver.
  • Disoriented investors now fear tighter regulation of a sector that has reliably returned a run of record annual underlying profits and solid dividends. The government has already beefed up penalties for corporate wrongdoing, including prison time, and strengthened the corporate regulator’s investigative powers. Commonwealth Bank shares recently tumbled to 5-year lows.
  • Those mistakes included not assessing the inherent risk of so-called intelligent deposit machines before mid-2015. Commonwealth Bank also didn’t limit the number of times that customers could deposit money each day, or create reports on thousands of deposits of A$10,000 (US$7,569) or more at the machines. These flaws created an architecture that money launderers could exploit, the financial-intelligence agency said.
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  • ANZ last month said it would scrap sales-based bonuses for financial planners while paying compensation in about 9,000 cases where it had provided inappropriate advice. And the banking industry has agreed to binding changes around conduct, including tightened background checks for employees and improved transparency around fees.
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