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Paul Merrell

Operation Socialist: How GCHQ Spies Hacked Belgium's Largest Telco - 0 views

firstlook.org/...elgacom-hack-gchq-inside-story

surveillance state GCHQ NSA Regin-malware Belgacom

shared by Paul Merrell on 15 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • When the incoming emails stopped arriving, it seemed innocuous at first. But it would eventually become clear that this was no routine technical problem. Inside a row of gray office buildings in Brussels, a major hacking attack was in progress. And the perpetrators were British government spies. It was in the summer of 2012 that the anomalies were initially detected by employees at Belgium’s largest telecommunications provider, Belgacom. But it wasn’t until a year later, in June 2013, that the company’s security experts were able to figure out what was going on. The computer systems of Belgacom had been infected with a highly sophisticated malware, and it was disguising itself as legitimate Microsoft software while quietly stealing data. Last year, documents from National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden confirmed that British surveillance agency Government Communications Headquarters was behind the attack, codenamed Operation Socialist. And in November, The Intercept revealed that the malware found on Belgacom’s systems was one of the most advanced spy tools ever identified by security researchers, who named it “Regin.”
  • The full story about GCHQ’s infiltration of Belgacom, however, has never been told. Key details about the attack have remained shrouded in mystery—and the scope of the attack unclear. Now, in partnership with Dutch and Belgian newspapers NRC Handelsblad and De Standaard, The Intercept has pieced together the first full reconstruction of events that took place before, during, and after the secret GCHQ hacking operation. Based on new documents from the Snowden archive and interviews with sources familiar with the malware investigation at Belgacom, The Intercept and its partners have established that the attack on Belgacom was more aggressive and far-reaching than previously thought. It occurred in stages between 2010 and 2011, each time penetrating deeper into Belgacom’s systems, eventually compromising the very core of the company’s networks.
  • When the incoming emails stopped arriving, it seemed innocuous at first. But it would eventually become clear that this was no routine technical problem. Inside a row of gray office buildings in Brussels, a major hacking attack was in progress. And the perpetrators were British government spies. It was in the summer of 2012 that the anomalies were initially detected by employees at Belgium’s largest telecommunications provider, Belgacom. But it wasn’t until a year later, in June 2013, that the company’s security experts were able to figure out what was going on. The computer systems of Belgacom had been infected with a highly sophisticated malware, and it was disguising itself as legitimate Microsoft software while quietly stealing data. Last year, documents from National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden confirmed that British surveillance agency Government Communications Headquarters was behind the attack, codenamed Operation Socialist. And in November, The Intercept revealed that the malware found on Belgacom’s systems was one of the most advanced spy tools ever identified by security researchers, who named it “Regin.”
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  • Snowden told The Intercept that the latest revelations amounted to unprecedented “smoking-gun attribution for a governmental cyber attack against critical infrastructure.” The Belgacom hack, he said, is the “first documented example to show one EU member state mounting a cyber attack on another…a breathtaking example of the scale of the state-sponsored hacking problem.”
  • Publicly, Belgacom has played down the extent of the compromise, insisting that only its internal systems were breached and that customers’ data was never found to have been at risk. But secret GCHQ documents show the agency gained access far beyond Belgacom’s internal employee computers and was able to grab encrypted and unencrypted streams of private communications handled by the company. Belgacom invested several million dollars in its efforts to clean-up its systems and beef-up its security after the attack. However, The Intercept has learned that sources familiar with the malware investigation at the company are uncomfortable with how the clean-up operation was handled—and they believe parts of the GCHQ malware were never fully removed.
  • The revelations about the scope of the hacking operation will likely alarm Belgacom’s customers across the world. The company operates a large number of data links internationally (see interactive map below), and it serves millions of people across Europe as well as officials from top institutions including the European Commission, the European Parliament, and the European Council. The new details will also be closely scrutinized by a federal prosecutor in Belgium, who is currently carrying out a criminal investigation into the attack on the company. Sophia in ’t Veld, a Dutch politician who chaired the European Parliament’s recent inquiry into mass surveillance exposed by Snowden, told The Intercept that she believes the British government should face sanctions if the latest disclosures are proven.
  • What sets the secret British infiltration of Belgacom apart is that it was perpetrated against a close ally—and is backed up by a series of top-secret documents, which The Intercept is now publishing.
  • Between 2009 and 2011, GCHQ worked with its allies to develop sophisticated new tools and technologies it could use to scan global networks for weaknesses and then penetrate them. According to top-secret GCHQ documents, the agency wanted to adopt the aggressive new methods in part to counter the use of privacy-protecting encryption—what it described as the “encryption problem.” When communications are sent across networks in encrypted format, it makes it much harder for the spies to intercept and make sense of emails, phone calls, text messages, internet chats, and browsing sessions. For GCHQ, there was a simple solution. The agency decided that, where possible, it would find ways to hack into communication networks to grab traffic before it’s encrypted.
  • The Snowden documents show that GCHQ wanted to gain access to Belgacom so that it could spy on phones used by surveillance targets travelling in Europe. But the agency also had an ulterior motive. Once it had hacked into Belgacom’s systems, GCHQ planned to break into data links connecting Belgacom and its international partners, monitoring communications transmitted between Europe and the rest of the world. A map in the GCHQ documents, named “Belgacom_connections,” highlights the company’s reach across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, illustrating why British spies deemed it of such high value.
  • Documents published with this article: Automated NOC detection Mobile Networks in My NOC World Making network sense of the encryption problem Stargate CNE requirements NAC review – October to December 2011 GCHQ NAC review – January to March 2011 GCHQ NAC review – April to June 2011 GCHQ NAC review – July to September 2011 GCHQ NAC review – January to March 2012 GCHQ Hopscotch Belgacom connections
Paul Merrell

State Department Delays Release of Iran History « LobeLog - 0 views

www.lobelog.com/delays-release-of-iran-history

war & peace Iranian-nukes-myth U.S.-foreign-policy negotiations CIA 1953-coup

shared by Paul Merrell on 19 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • The U.S. Department of State has blocked the publication of a long-awaited documentary history of U.S. covert action in Iran in the 1950s out of concern that its release could adversely affect ongoing negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program. The controversial Iran history volume, part of the official Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series, had been slated for release last summer. (“History of 1953 CIA Covert Action in Iran to be Published,” Secrecy News, April 16, 2014). But senior State Department officials “decided to delay publication because of ongoing negotiations with Iran,” according to the minutes of a September 8, 2014 meeting of the Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation that were posted on the Department of State website this week. Dr. Stephen P. Randolph, the Historian of the State Department, confirmed yesterday that the status of the Iran volume “remains as it was in September” and that no new publication date has been set. The subject was also discussed at an Advisory Committee meeting this week.
  • The suppression of this history has been a source of frustration for decades, at least since the Department published a notorious 1989 volume on U.S. policy towards Iran that made no mention of CIA covert action. But the latest move is also an indirect affirmation of the enduring significance of the withheld records, which date back even further than the U.S. rupture with Cuba that is now on the mend. It seems that the remaining U.S. records of the 1953 coup in Iran are not only of historical interest but they evidently hold the power to move whole countries and to alter the course of events today. Or so the State Department believes. “The logic, as I understand it, is that the release of the volume could aggravate anti-U.S. sentiment in Iran and thereby diminish the prospects of the nuclear negotiations reaching a settlement,” said Prof. Richard H. Immerman, a historian at Temple University and the chair of the State Department Historical Advisory Committee. “I understand the State Department’s caution, but I don’t agree with the position,” he said. “Not only is the 1953 covert action in Iran an open secret, but it was also a motive for taking hostages in 1979. The longer the U.S. withholds the volume, the longer the issue will fester.”
Paul Merrell

CIA Torture Report: Oversight, But No Remedies Yet - 0 views

fas.org/...torture-remedies

war & peace CIA torture Senate-Intelligence_Committee-Report

shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • The release of the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation program is, among other things, an epic act of record preservation. Numerous CIA records that might not have been disclosed for decades, or ever, were rescued from oblivion by the Senate report and are now indelibly cited and quoted, even if many of them are not yet released in full. That’s not a small thing, since the history of the CIA interrogation program was not a story that the Agency was motivated or equipped to tell. “The CIA informed the Committee that due to CIA record retention policies, the CIA could not produce all CIA email communications requested by the Committee,” the report noted, explaining that the desired information was sometimes recovered from a reply message when the original email was missing. Agency emails turned out to be a critical source of information, a fact that illuminates the Committee’s sharp response recently to the (now suspended) CIA proposal to the National Archives (NARA) to destroy most Agency emails of non-senior officials.
  • Thus, the gruesome record of the waterboarding of al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah “was referenced in emails, but was not documented or otherwise noted in CIA cables.” (This is at odds with NARA’s initial view that “It is unlikely that permanent records will be found in these email accounts that is not filed in other appropriate files.”) The Committee report is also a remarkable demonstration of the congressional oversight function that is all the more impressive because it was performed in adverse, unfavorable conditions. It is striking to see how the CIA sometimes treated the Senate Intelligence Committee, its leadership and its staff with the same disdain and evasiveness that is often perceived by FOIA requesters and other members of the public. Committee questions were ignored, inaccurate information was provided, and the oversight process was gamed.
  • “Internal CIA emails include discussion of how the CIA could ‘get… off the hook on the cheap’ regarding [then-Committee] Chairman [Bob] Graham’s requests for additional information…. In the end, CIA officials simply did not respond to Graham’s requests prior to his departure from the Committee in January 2003,” the report said. “I am deeply disturbed by the implications of the study for the committee’s ability to discharge its oversight responsibility,” wrote Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) in his additional remarks. “Because it appears from the study that the committee was continuously misled as to virtually all aspects of this program, it naturally raises the extremely troubling question as to whether we can trust the representations of the agency in connection with difficult or sensitive issues in the future.” But minority members of the Committee disputed this characterization: “In reality, the overall pattern of engagement with the Congress shows that the CIA attempted to keep the Congress informed of its activities,” they wrote in their extensive dissenting views. Perhaps the most important achievement of the Committee report was to document and memorialize the fact that agents of the US Government practiced torture. Not “harsh measures” or “enhanced techniques,” but torture.
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  • Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine), who criticized what she said were methodological flaws in the Committee report, said in her additional views that “Despite these significant flaws, the report’s findings lead me to conclude that some detainees were subject to techniques that constituted torture. This inhumane and brutal treatment never should have occurred.” By the same token, the most important omission from the report is the absence of any discussion of remedies. Now that it is firmly established that “we tortured some folks,” as President Obama awkwardly put it, the question is what to do about it. Confession without atonement is incomplete. Prosecution seems problematic for a number of reasons, including the difficulty of localizing responsibility, when it is entire institutions and not just particular officials that failed. A different approach to the problem would start by considering the individuals who suffered abuse at the hands of the U.S. government, including a number of persons who were detained in error. Congress could now ask how some of them (i.e. those who are still alive) could be compensated in some measure for what was wrongly done to them.
  • Several previous efforts to seek remedies for torture were deflected by use of the state secrets privilege. In light of the detailed findings of the Senate Intelligence Committee report, that sort of evasion should be harder to sustain. Congress could accelerate a resolution of the problem with a focused investigation of what potential remedies are now feasible and appropriate.
Paul Merrell

FBI Director: Sony's 'Sloppy' North Korean Hackers Revealed Their IP Addresses | WIRED - 0 views

www.wired.com/...s-failed-use-proxies-sony-hack

war & peace cyberwar North-Korea Sony-hack FBI Comey

shared by Paul Merrell on 08 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • The Obama administration has been tightlipped about its controversial naming of the North Korean government as the definitive source of the hack that eviscerated Sony Pictures Entertainment late last year. But FBI director James Comey is standing by the bureau’s conclusion, and has offered up a few tiny breadcrumbs of the evidence that led to it. Those crumbs include the claim that Sony hackers sometimes failed to use the proxy servers that masked the origin of their attack, revealing IP addresses that the FBI says were used exclusively by North Korea. Speaking at a Fordham Law School cybersecurity conference Wednesday, Comey said that he has “very high confidence” in the FBI’s attribution of the attack to North Korea. And he named several of the sources of his evidence, including a “behavioral analysis unit” of FBI experts trained to psychologically analyze foes based on their writings and actions. He also said that the FBI compared the Sony attack with their own “red team” simulations to determine how the attack could have occurred. And perhaps most importantly, Comey now says that the hackers in the attack failed on multiple occasions to use the proxy servers that bounce their Internet connection through an obfuscating computer somewhere else in the world, revealing IP addresses that tied them to North Koreans.
  • “In nearly every case, [the Sony hackers known as the Guardians of Peace] used proxy servers to disguise where they were coming from in sending these emails and posting these statements. But several times they got sloppy,” Comey said. “Several times, either because they forgot or because of a technical problem, they connected directly and we could see that the IPs they were using…were exclusively used by the North Koreans.” “They shut it off very quickly once they saw the mistake,” he added. “But not before we saw where it was coming from.” Comey’s brief and cryptic remarks—with no opportunity for followup questions from reporters—respond to skepticism and calls for more evidence from cybersecurity experts unsatisfied with the FBI’s vague statements tying the hack to North Korean government. In a previous public announcement the FBI had said only that it found “similarities in specific lines of code, encryption algorithms, data deletion methods, and compromised networks,” as well as IP addresses that matched prior attacks it knows to have originated in North Korea. At that time, the FBI also said it had further evidence matching the tools used in the attack to a North Korean hacking attack that hit South Korean banks and media outlets.
  • Following those elliptical statements, the cybersecurity community demanded more information be released to prove North Korea’s involvement. Some have even signed a petition on the White House website calling for more transparency in the investigation. Well-known security blogger and author Bruce Schneier has compared the FBI’s “trust us” mentality to the claims of the Bush administration about Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the Iraq War. Without more information, security experts themselves have remained deeply divided in their conclusions about who hacked Sony.
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  • That pseudo-explanation will likely do little to quell the security community’s doubts. Even if the hackers appeared to fail to use proxies on some occasions, it could still be very difficult to be sure those “real” IP addresses weren’t proxies themselves designed to serve as further misdirection. And a nagging loose thread remains that the Guardians of Peace hackers in their initial statements to Sony tried to extort money from the company before making any political demands. Sony’s Kim Jong-un assassination comedy “The Interview,” the suppression of which is believed by many to be the North Korean government’s motive in the hack, wasn’t even mentioned by the hackers until long after the intrusion was underway. Comey didn’t address that plot hole in the North Korean explanation in his speech.
Paul Merrell

Will France Repeat US Mistakes after 9/11? | Consortiumnews - 0 views

consortiumnews.com/...e-repeat-us-mistakes-after-911

war & peace terrorists™ motives McGovern must-read

shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • As three suspects in the Charlie Hebdo massacre die in a shootout with French police, the cycle of violence that has engulfed the Mideast again reaches into the West, but the challenge is to learn from U.S. mistakes after 9/11 and address root causes, not react with another round of mindless violence, says ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.
  • Paul Merrell on 10 Jan 15
     
    I'd like to see a law that requires all candidates for Congress to pass a comprehension test after reading this essay. Comprehension, not agreement. But they should not be allowed to plead ignorance on this message. A must-read.
Paul Merrell

Hamas backs Palestinian push for ICC Gaza war crimes probe | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...gaza-icc-idUSKBN0GN09320140823

war & peace Israel Palestine Gaza ICC war-crimes

shared by Paul Merrell on 25 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • (Reuters) - Hamas leaders said on Saturday they had given their consent for the Palestinians to join the International Criminal Court (ICC), a move that could open up both Israel and the militant group to war crime probes over the fighting in Gaza. Moussa Abu Marzouk, a Hamas leader based in Cairo, said he had signed a document Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas says all factions must endorse before he proceeds with the ICC push.If the Palestinians were to sign the ICC's founding treaty, the Rome Statute, the court would have jurisdiction over crimes committed in the Palestinian territories.An investigation could then examine events as far back as mid-2002, when the ICC opened with a mandate to try individuals for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.Explaining the Islamist group's decision to sign, Hamas official Mushir al-Masri told Reuters: "There is nothing to fear, the Palestinian factions are leading legitimate resistance in keeping with all international laws and standards.""We are in a state of self-defence," he added.
  • At a news conference in Cairo earlier on Saturday, Abbas said he had asked all factions to join the ICC bid, adding: "There will be results for them joining." There was no immediate comment from Israel, which is also not an ICC member. It says Hamas has committed war crimes by both firing thousands of rockets indiscriminately at Israeli towns and cities and by using Gazans as human shields.A statement from the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not directly address the Hamas move, but it quoted the Israeli leader as telling U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon Hamas was guilty of such crimes.
  • Palestinian health officials say 2,078 people, most of them civilians, have been killed by Israel since it launched its offensive, which is intended to end the militants' rocket fire.The United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF) said on Saturday at least 480 Palestinian children had been reported killed.
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  • Malki says the Palestinian Authority's current U.N. status, upgraded to "non-member state" from "entity" by a vote of the General Assembly in 2012, qualified it to become an ICC member and a decision on whether to apply could happen very soon.As neither Israel nor the Palestinians are ICC members, the court currently lacks jurisdiction over Gaza. This could be granted by a U.N. Security Council resolution, but Israel's main ally, the United States, would probably veto any such proposal.Membership of the ICC opens countries to investigations both on their behalf and against them. Several powers, including the United States, have declined to ratify the ICC founding treaty, citing the possibility of politically motivated prosecutions.The ICC is a court of last resort, meaning that it will only intervene when a country is found to be unwilling or unable to carry out its own investigation.
  • Paul Merrell on 25 Aug 14
     
    Not a decision to go to the ICC, but the latest in a consistent dribble of information indicating that the Palestinian state is working toward doing so.  The slow pace of the public indications hint that they are intended to increase Palestinian leverage in negotiations. To me the questions of whether Abbas would actually make such a complaint and if he did so whether ICC would proceed with a prosecution are far from settled.  Almost certainly, such a complaint would end negotiations and U.S. subsidy of the Palestinian government's expenses. Abbas has previously shown no sign of being more than a U.S.-Israeli puppet. And the U.S. and Israel are applying stiff pressure on the ICC not to take the case if it arrives there, including a U.S. threat to cease its funding contributions to the ICC. On the other hand, if Abbas wishes to preserve his unity government with Hamas and thus have standing to speak for the entirety of the Palestinian population, he *must* be perceived  in Gaza as either delivering or fighting hard for very substantial easing of Israel's blockade of Gaza. A complaint to the ICC would be perceived as fighting hard, as having abandoned his commitment to resolution purely via negotiation.   So there is a lot of pressure on Abbas to do something more than negotiate unsuccessfully. And the U.S. and Israel leadership surely realize that.
Paul Merrell

Did Israeli army deliberately kill its own captured soldier and destroy Gaza ceasefire? | The Electronic Intifada - 0 views

electronicintifada.net/...tured-soldier-and-destroy-gaza

war & peace Israel Gaza Rafah-Massacre Hannibal-Directive war crimes

shared by Paul Merrell on 28 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • On Saturday evening, the Israeli army stated that Hadar Goldin, the soldier it claimed Hamas had captured on Friday morning, is dead: on Twitter A special IDF committee has concluded that Lt. Hadar Goldin was killed in combat in Gaza on Friday. May his memory be a blessing.— IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) August 2, 2014 It was on the pretext of searching for the missing soldier that Israel slaughtered at least 110 of people in the southern Gaza town of Rafah since Friday morning, destroying what was supposed to be a 72-hour humanitarian ceasefire. But the toll is rising as more bodies are found. “Such was the savagery of Israel’s bombardment in Rafah, such was the quantity of dead bodies, that there was simply no other option but to use vegetable refrigerators as makeshift morgues,” journalist Mohammed Omer, who hails from Rafah, reports.
  • One wonders whether US President Barack Obama will now retract his hasty statement – no doubt based on misinformation from Israel – blaming Hamas for capturing the soldier and demanding that he be “unconditionally” released. Now that Israel has, like Hamas, concluded that Goldin is dead, the question remains whether someone in the Israeli army gave the order to shell Rafah to kill him and prevent Hamas taking a live prisoner.
  • Friday turned into yet another day of horror for Palestinians in Gaza, as Israel committed massacres and atrocities claiming the lives of at least 100 people. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. Friday was meant to be the first day of a three-day “humanitarian ceasefire” announced on Thursday evening by the United Nations and the United States.
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  • Israel has long had a murky procedure called the Hannibal Directive that some interpret as an order to do whatever it takes to prevent a soldier’s capture, even if it means killing him in the process.
  • Here’s Israel’s version, as reported in Ynet: According to an announcement by the IDF [Israeli army], at 9:30 am Friday, terrorists opened fire at IDF forces in southern Gaza. Initial information from the scene indicated that there is a chance that an IDF soldiers [sic] was kidnapped [sic] during the incident. Israel claims that the soldiers were working to destroy a resistance tunnel and that such “defensive” activities were permitted by the ceasefire agreement. What Israel does not dispute is that its occupation forces were carrying out operations in the Gaza Strip.
  • But an interesting observation comes from this tweet: on Twitter Just returned from Southern gaza - got to border with Israel multiple artillery barrages whilst there an hour after supposed ceasefire— Rageh Omaar (@ragehomaar) August 1, 2014 If Omaar is right, this would mean that Israel was already heavily shelling in the Rafah area by around 9am, since the ceasefire was supposed to begin at 8am. And if the artillery barrages followed the killing and alleged capture of Israeli soldiers by Qassam it would also mean that the incident could have occurred before 9:30am.
  • Around 10am many more reports started to come in of mass casualties from “indiscriminate shelling” on George Street, east of Rafah. If the shelling indeed began between 9 and 10am, it would mean that Israel launched a massive and indiscriminate barrage at just about the time it says its soldier was captured. This makes no sense if Israeli forces wanted to ensure the captured soldier’s safety. After all, he could be killed along with his captors.
  • Qassam did not comment for the whole of Friday on Israel’s assertion that one of its soldiers was captured. Early on Saturday it issued a new military communiqué condemning the “ongoing horrifying massacre of civilians in Rafah” and reaffirming its earlier version and timeline of events. But it has these important additions: We lost contact with the group of fighters that were stationed at that location and we believe that all members of the unit were martyred and the soldier the enemy says went missing was killed in the Zionist shelling, assuming that the fighters did capture him during the confrontation. We in Qassam have no knowledge up to this moment about the missing soldier, nor his whereabouts nor the circumstances of his disappearance. It is reasonable to assume that Qassam has no motive to be deceptive about this; a captured Israeli soldier is a valuable asset. If they had him they would either boast about it or keep quiet and perhaps seek to trade information about him for concessions from Israel.
  • If the Israeli soldier was killed, it is possible that it was unintentional “friendly fire.” But again, forces that were intent on protecting and rescuing a missing soldier would be foolhardy to launch massive air raids or barrages of artillery fire in the area where he was captured. This leaves open the question of whether Israeli forces intended to kill the missing soldier. The Hannibal Directive The “Hannibal Directive” captured the Israeli imagination in the mid-1980s, when ongoing incursions and occupation in Lebanon, following the 1982 invasion, confronted the Israeli army with opportunities to experience capture. Popular understanding of this directive is phrased as “a dead soldier is better than a kidnapped [sic] one” – which was taken to mean that it would be better to kill a captured prisoner of war than have him remain alive.
  • There was much discussion on Twitter about this being the reason for the shelling of Rafah on Friday morning, including in reports from Ynet’s military reporter Attila Somfalvi, that the words “Hannibal! Hannibal!” were shouted over military communication systems.
  • Journalist Haim Har-Zahav reminisced that it took 50 minutes before the directive was put into practice on the Lebanon border, in 2006 and almost an hour in 1991, but that his own brigade took only a few minutes. Sports commentator Ouriel Daskal stated outright: “what I deduce from what’s happening in Rafah is that there’s an implementation of the Hannibal Directive. Let’s hope not.” Moreover, blogger Richard Silverstein reported a few days ago that another soldier was killed in Gaza under the directive. Israeli investigative journalist Ronen Bergman confirmed in a radio interview, with respect to an earlier incident, that in Gaza the procedure “was tested in practice and apparently the soldiers acted in accordance with that directive.”
  • But these indications, combined with the fact that Israel bombed Rafah so viciously make it a reasonable hypothesis that someone giving orders on Friday morning wanted the soldier dead rather than captured. If that is the case, then it is Israel that destroyed the humanitarian ceasefire, in the process murdering dozens more innocent people and pushing the death toll from the ongoing massacre in Gaza to more than 1,600 people.
  • Paul Merrell on 28 Aug 14
     
    Ali Abunimah pieces together rather compelling evidence that the Israel Defense Force's utter devastation of Rafah, Gaza by artillery fire was an attack intended to kill one of its own soldiers they believed had been captured, and broke a cease-fire agreement to do so then lied about it, pursuant to the IDF's unwritten Hannibal Directive, that it is better to kill one of their own than to allow him to be kept captive. A serious war crime slaughtering over 100 civilians even without that.    
Paul Merrell

Tomgram: Nick Turse, American Monuments to Failure in Africa? | TomDispatch - 0 views

www.tomdispatch.com/...monuments_to_failure_in_africa

war & peace U.S. AFRICOM mission-failure

shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • As I sit in a room filled with scores of high-ranking military officers resplendent in their dress uniforms -- Kenyans in their khakis, Burundians and Ugandans clad in olive, Tanzanians in deep forest green sporting like-colored berets and red epaulets with crossed rifles on their shoulders -- chances are that the U.S. military is carrying out some mission somewhere on this vast continent.  It might be a kidnapping raid or a training exercise.  It could be an airstrike or the construction of a drone base.  Or, as I wait for the next speaker to approach the lectern at the “Land Forces East Africa” conference in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, it could be a humanitarian operation run not by civilians in the aid business, but by military troops with ulterior motives -- part of a near-continent-wide campaign utilizing the core tenets of counterinsurgency strategy. The U.S. is trying to win a war for the hearts and minds of Africa.  But a Pentagon investigation suggests that those mystery projects somewhere out there in Djibouti or Ethiopia or Kenya or here in Tanzania may well be orphaned, ill-planned, and undocumented failures-in-the-making.  According to the Department of Defense’s watchdog agency, U.S. military officials in Africa “did not adequately plan or execute” missions designed to win over Africans deemed vulnerable to the lures of violent extremism. 
  • This evidence of failure in the earliest stages of the U.S. military’s hearts-and-minds campaign should have an eerie resonance for anyone who has followed its previous efforts to use humanitarian aid and infrastructure projects to sway local populations in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan.  In each case, the operations failed in spectacular ways, but were only fully acknowledged after years of futility and billions of dollars in waste.  In Africa, a war zone about which most Americans are completely unaware, the writing is already on the wall.  Or at least it should be.  While Pentagon investigators identified a plethora of problems, their report has, in fact, been kept under wraps for almost a year, while the command responsible for the failures has ignored all questions about it from TomDispatch.
Paul Merrell

Americans Now Fear ISIS Sleeper Cells Are Living in the U.S., Overwhelmingly Support Military Action - The Intercept - 0 views

firstlook.org/...son-americans-refuse-learn-war

war & peace ISIL war-propaganda war-fever

shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • Gallup, 2000: “A new Gallup poll conducted November 13-15, 2000 finds that nearly seven out of 10 Americans (69%) believe that sending troops to Vietnam was a mistake.” Gallup, 2013: “Ten years have passed since the United States and its allies invaded Iraq, and it appears the majority of Americans consider this a regrettable anniversary. Fifty-three percent of Americans believe their country ‘made a mistake sending troops to fight in Iraq’ and 42% say it was not a mistake.” Gallup, 2014: “For the first time since the U.S. initially became involved in Afghanistan in 2001, Americans are as likely to say U.S. military involvement there was a mistake as to say it was not.” New York Times, today: “The Obama administration is preparing to carry out a campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria that may take three years to complete, requiring a sustained effort that could last until after President Obama has left office, according to senior administration officials.”
  • CNN, today: “Americans are increasingly concerned that ISIS represents a direct terror threat, fearful that ISIS agents are living in the United States, according to a new CNN/ORC International poll. Most now support military action against the terrorist group.” A few points: (1) I’ve long considered this September, 2003 Washington Post poll to be one the most extraordinary facts about the post-9/11 era. It found that – almost 2 years after 9/11, and six months after the invasion of Iraq – “nearly seven in 10 Americans believe it is likely that ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the Sept. 11 attacks . . . .  A majority of Democrats, Republicans and independents believe it’s likely Saddam was involved.”
  • Is it even possible to imagine more potent evidence of systemic media failure than that (or systemic success, depending on what you think the media’s goal is)? But in terms of crazed irrationality, how far away from that false belief is the current fear on the part of Americans that there are ISIS sleeper cells “living in the United States”? (2) If the goal of terrorist groups is to sow irrational terror, has anything since the 9/11 attack been more successful than those two journalist beheading videos? It’s almost certainly the case that as recently as six months ago, only a minute percentage of the American public (and probably the U.S. media) had even heard of ISIS. Now, two brutal beheadings later, they are convinced that they are lurking in their neighborhoods, that they are a Grave and Unprecedented Threat (worse than al Qaeda!), and that military action against them is needed.
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  • It’s as though ISIS and the U.S. media and political class worked in perfect unison to achieve the same goal here when it comes to American public opinion: fully terrorize them. (3) Although Americans favor military action against ISIS, today’s above-cited CNN poll finds that – at least of now – most do not want ground troops in Iraq or Syria (“61%-38%, oppose placing U.S. soldiers on the ground in Iraq and Syria to combat the terrorist group”). But almost every credible expert has said that airstrikes, without troops, is woefully inadequate to achieve any of the stated goals. Other than further inflaming anti-American sentiment in the region and strengthening ISIS, what possible purpose can such airstrikes have? The answer given by much of the U.S. media, as FAIR documented, seems clear: to “flex muscles” and show “toughness”:
  • What kind of country goes around bombing people with no strategic purpose and with little motive other than to “flex muscles” and “show toughness”? This answer also seems clear: one that is deeply insecure about its ongoing ability to project strength (and one whose elites benefit in terms of power and profit from endless war). (4) For those who favor air strikes: if, as most regional and military experts predict, it turns out that airstrikes are insufficient to seriously degrade ISIS, would you then favor a ground invasion? If you really believe that ISIS is a serious threat to the “homeland” and other weighty interests, how could you justify opposing anything needed to defeat them up to and including ground troops? And if you wouldn’t support that, isn’t that a compelling sign that you don’t really see them as the profound threat that one should have to see them as before advocating military action against them?
  • (5) For those who keep running around beating their chests talking about the imperative to “destroy ISIS”: will that take more or less time than it’s taken to “destroy the Taliban”? Does it ever occur to such flamboyant warriors to ask why those sorts of groups enjoy so much support, and whether yet more bombing of predominantly Muslim countries – and/or flooding the region with more weapons – will bolster rather than subvert their strength? Just consider how a one-day attack in the U.S., 13 years ago, united most of the American population around the country’s most extreme militarists and unleashed an orgy of collective violence that is still not close to ending. Why does anyone think that constantly bringing violence to that part of the world will have a different effect there?
  • 6) When I began writing about politics in 2005, it was very common to hear the “chickenhawk” slur cast about: all as a means of arguing that able-bodied people who advocate war have the obligation to fight in those wars rather than risking other people’s lives to do so. Since January, 2009, I’ve almost never heard that phrase. How come? Does the obligation-to-fight apply now to those wishing to deploy military force to “destroy ISIS”? (7) It’s easy to understand why beheading videos provoke such intense emotion: they’re savage and horrific to watch, by design. But are they more brutal than the constant, ongoing killing of civilians, including children, that the U.S. and its closest allies have been continuously perpetrating? In 2012, for instance, Pakistani teenager Tariq Kahn attended an anti-drone meeting, and then days later, was “decapitated” by a U.S. missile - the high-tech version of beheading – and his 12-year-old cousin was also killed by that drone. Whether “intent” is one difference is quite debatable (see point 3), but the brutality is no less. It’s true that we usually don’t see that carnage, but the fact that it’s kept from the U.S. population doesn’t mean it disappears or becomes more palatable or less savage.
  • (8) Here’s how you know you live in an empire devoted to endless militarism: when a new 3-year war is announced and very few people seem to think the president needs anyone’s permission to start it (including Congress) and, more so, when the announcement - of a new multiple-year war - seems quite run-of-the-mill and normal. (9) How long will we have to wait for the poll finding that most Americans “regret” having supported this new war in Iraq and Syria and view it as a “mistake”, as they prepare, in a frenzy of manufactured fear, to support the next proposed war?   UPDATE [Tues.]: In case you’re wondering how so many Americans have been led to embrace such fear-mongering tripe, consider the statement last week of Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida:
  • “This is a terrorist group the likes of which we haven’t seen before, and we better stop them now. It ought to be pretty clear when they start cutting off the heads of journalists and say they’re going to fly the black flag of ISIS over the White House that ISIS is a clear and present danger.” They’re a “clear and present danger” because they threatened to “fly the black flag of ISIS over the White House.” It’s hard to believe the fear-mongering is anything but deliberate.
  • Paul Merrell on 10 Sep 14
     
    Amen, Brother Greenwald. Amen!
Paul Merrell

Obama's "Catastrophic Defeat" in Ukraine » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names - 0 views

www.counterpunch.org/...catastrophic-defeat-in-ukraine

war & peace Ukraine Novorussia Obama propaganda lies

shared by Paul Merrell on 30 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • “We are currently witnessing an epic and historic event. The Ukrainian regular army and the punitive battalions are suffering a catastrophic defeat to the south of Donetsk…..It still is not quite clear how the Junta intends to avoid a complete defeat here…. By squandering the most combat-capable brigades in systematic offensive operations, the Junta sustained enormous losses and at the same time suffered a crushing, purely military defeat. The southern front has collapsed.” – The Southern Front Catastrophe – August 27, 2014″, Colonel Cassad, Military Briefing, Novorossiya, Ukraine “The reports out of Novorussia (New Russia) are nothing short of incredible… sources are reporting that Novorussian forces have bypassed Mariupol from the north and have entered the Zaporozhie region!” – News from the Front, Vineyard of the Saker Barack Obama has pushed Ukraine to the brink of political, economic and social collapse. Now he wants to blame Russia for the damage he’s done. It’s absurd. Moscow is in no way responsible for Ukraine’s descent into anarchy. That’s all Washington’s doing, just as Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and now Syria were Washington’s doing. If you want to blame someone, blame Obama.
  • “We are currently witnessing an epic and historic event. The Ukrainian regular army and the punitive battalions are suffering a catastrophic defeat to the south of Donetsk…..It still is not quite clear how the Junta intends to avoid a complete defeat here…. By squandering the most combat-capable brigades in systematic offensive operations, the Junta sustained enormous losses and at the same time suffered a crushing, purely military defeat. The southern front has collapsed.” – The Southern Front Catastrophe – August 27, 2014″, Colonel Cassad, Military Briefing, Novorossiya, Ukraine “The reports out of Novorussia (New Russia) are nothing short of incredible… sources are reporting that Novorussian forces have bypassed Mariupol from the north and have entered the Zaporozhie region!” – News from the Front, Vineyard of the Saker Barack Obama has pushed Ukraine to the brink of political, economic and social collapse. Now he wants to blame Russia for the damage he’s done. It’s absurd. Moscow is in no way responsible for Ukraine’s descent into anarchy. That’s all Washington’s doing, just as Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and now Syria were Washington’s doing. If you want to blame someone, blame Obama.
  • Ukraine’s troubles began when the US State Department toppled the elected president in February and replaced him with a compliant stooge who agreed to follow Washington’s directives. The new “junta” government quickly launched a full-blown war against Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the east which split the civilian population and drove the country to ruin. The plan “pacify” the East was concocted in Washington, not Kiev and certainly not Moscow.
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  • Donetsk and Lugansk have formed militias and taken the war to the enemy. They’ve engaged Obama’s proxy-army on the battlefield and pounded it into mincemeat. That’s why Obama deployed his propagandists to lie about the fictitious “Russian invasion”. The administration needs a diversion because the Novorussia forces (aka-the “pro Russia separatists”) are kicking the holy crap out of Obama’s legions. That’s why Washington and Kiev are in full panic-mode, because none of this was supposed to happen. Obama figured the army would put down the insurrection, crush the resistance, and move him one step closer to his goal of establishing NATO bases and missile defense systems on Russia’s western flank. Well, guess what? It’s not playing out that way and it probably never will. The Novorussia fighters are too tough, too smart and too motivated to be one-upped by Obama’s feckless troopers. (Check out this short video and you’ll see why the rebels are winning: Vineyard of the Saker)
  • Putin hasn’t sent tanks and artillery into Ukraine. He doesn’t need to. The militias are loaded with battle-hardened veterans who know how to fight and who are quite good at it. Just ask Poroshenko whose army has been taking it in the shorts for the last couple of weeks. Check out this blurb in Thursday’s Itar Tass: “Over the week of August 16-23, the self-defense fighters of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics seized 14 T-64 tanks, 25 infantry fighting vehicles, 18 armored personnel carriers, one armored reconnaissance and patrol vehicle, one Uragan multiple launch rocket system, two Gvozdika self-propelled artillery guns, four D-30 howitzers, four mortars, one ZU-23-2 air defense system and 33 vehicles.” (East Ukraine militias seize large amount of Ukrainian armor, Itar Tass) Get the picture? The Ukrainian army is getting beaten to a pulp, which means that Obama’s glorious “pivot strategy” just slammed into a brick wall.
  • Bottom line: Russia has not invaded Ukraine. The propagandists in the media are just trying to hide the fact that the Novorussia Army Forces (NAF; aka-the pro Russia separatists) are kicking ass and taking names. That’s what’s really going on. That’s why Obama and his gaggle of miscreant neocons are in a furor. It’s because they don’t know what to do next, so they’ve returned to their default position on every issue; lie like hell until they settle on a plan.
  • So, who do you believe; Kerry or the facts? And who are you going to believe this time; “Aluminum tubes” Gordie or Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) monitor Andrey Kelin who said yesterday: “We have said that no Russian involvement has been spotted, there are no soldiers or equipment present.” “Accusations relating to convoys of armored personnel carriers have been heard during the past week and the week before that. All of them were proven false back then, and are being proven false again now.” (RT) Repeat: “No Russian involvement”. All the accusations “were proven false.” “False” as in fake, phony, propaganda, bunkum, lies which, by the way, appears to be Gordon’s area of expertise.
  • Paul Merrell on 30 Aug 14
     
    Don't miss the video at http://vineyardsaker.blogspot.com/2014/08/watershed-press-conference-by-top.html It's a press conference by Alexander V. Zakharchenko, Chairman of The Council of Ministers of The Donetsk National Republic, describing the rout of coup government forces and the reconstitution of the Novorussia militias into a national army. Russian with English subtitle translation.  According to him the DNR army has killed thousands of Ukrainian soldiers, but the coup government is notifying family members that they are "missing in action," even when the DNR transfers the bodies to Ukraine. He also describes encountering coup government soldiers wearing the insignia of the Galacia SS Division, a Ukraine collaborators' division of the Nazi World War II Waffen SS. (The coup government includes in its leadership neo-Nazis, and neo-Nazi militias are fighting on the side of the coup government.)  
Paul Merrell

Billionaires Make War on Iran - The Unz Review - 0 views

www.unz.com/...billionaires-make-war-on-iran

Israel-lobby Iranian-nukes-myth UANI Restis Kaplan litigation DoJ secrets

shared by Paul Merrell on 30 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • All the pro-Israel anti-Iran groups engage in pressure tactics on Capitol Hill and have been effective in dominating the political debate. Of thirty-six outside witnesses brought in to testify at seven Senate hearings on Iran since 2012 only one might be characterized as sensitive to Iranian concerns. The enormous lobbying effort enables the anti-Iran groups to define the actual policies, move their drafts of legislation through congress, and eventually see their bills pass with overwhelming majorities in both the House and Senate. It is democracy in action if one accepts that popular rule ought to be guided by money and pressure groups rather than by national interests. Less well known is United Against Nuclear Iran, which has a budget just shy of $2 million. UANI is involved in the New York lawsuit. The group, which has somehow obtained a 501[c]3 “educational” tax status that inter alia allows it to conceal its donors, has offices in Rockefeller Center in New York City. It is active on Capitol Hill providing “expert testimony” on Iran for congressional committees, to include “help” in drafting legislation. At a July Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Iran all three outside witnesses were from UANI. It is also active in the media but is perhaps best known for its “name and shame” initiatives in which it exposes companies that it claims are doing business with Tehran in violation of US sanctions.
  • UANI is being sued by a Greek billionaire Victor Restis whom it had outed in 2013. Restis, claiming the exposure was fraudulent and carried out to damage his business, has filed suit demanding that UANI and billionaire Thomas Kaplan turn over documents and details of relationships regarding UANI donors who it is claimed are linked to the case. Kaplan, a New York City resident, made his initial fortune on energy exploration and development. More recently he has been involved in commodities trading in precious metals. His wife Daphne is Israeli and his involvement in various Jewish philanthropies both in the US and in Israel have invited comparison with controversial deceased commodities trader Marc Rich, who reportedly worked closely with the Israeli government on a number of projects. The Justice department would like to the see the UANI lawsuit go away as it is aware that what is being described as “law enforcement” documents would include both privileged and classified Treasury Department work product relating to individuals and companies that it has investigated for sanctions busting. Passing either intelligence related or law enforcement documents to a private organization is illegal but the Justice Department’s only apparent concern is that the activity might be exposed. There is no indication that it would go after UANI for having acquired the information and it perhaps should be presumed that the source of the leak is the Treasury Department itself.
  • Who or what provided the documents to a private advocacy group that is also a tax exempt foundation supported by prominent businessmen with interests in the Middle East is consequently not completely clear but Restis is assuming that the truth will out if he can get hold of the evidence. The lawsuit claims that UANI intimidates its targets by defaming their business practices as well as by demanding both examination of their books and an audit carried out by one of its own accountants followed by review from an “independent counsel.” Kaplan is named in the suit as he appears to be the gray eminence behind UANI. He once boasted “we’ve (UANI) done more to bring Iran to heel than any other private sector initiative.” Kaplan also employs as a director or officer in six of his companies the Executive Director of UANI Mark Wallace and reportedly arranged the awarding of the Executive Director position at Harvard’s Belfer Center to its President Gary Samore. Kaplan is a business competitor to Restis, whose lawyers are apparently seeking to demonstrate two things: first, that the US government has been feeding sometimes only partially vetted information to UANI to help in its “name and shame” program and second, that UANI is itself supported by partisan business interests like Kaplan as well as by foreign sources, which apparently is meant to imply Israel. Or even the Israeli intelligence service Mossad. Meir Dagan, former head of Mossad, is on the UANI advisory board, which also includes ex-Senator Joseph Lieberman and former Senior Diplomat Dennis Ross, both of whom have frequently been accused of favoring Israeli interests and both of whom might well have easy access to US government generated information.
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  • And then there is the Muhadedin-e-Khalq, the Iranian terrorist group that has assassinated at least six Americans and is now assisting the Israeli government in killing Iranian scientists, a prima facie definition of what constitutes terrorism. The group was on the State Department terrorist list from 1997 until 2012, when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton de-listed it in response to demands coming from friends of Israel in Congress as well as from a large group of ex government officials, many of whom were paid large honoraria by the group to serve as advocates. The paid American shills included former CIA Directors James Woolsey and Porter Goss, New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, former Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Louis Freeh and former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton. The promoters of MEK in congress and elsewhere claimed to be primarily motivated by MEK’s being an enemy of the current regime in Tehran, though its virulent anti-Americanism and terrorist history make it a somewhat unlikely poster child for the “Iranian resistance.”
  • Supporters of MEK also ignore the fact that the group is run like a cult, routinely executes internal dissidents, and has virtually no political support within Iran. But such are the ways of the corrupt Washington punditocracy, lionizing an organization that it should be shunning. MEK’s political arm is located in Paris and it has long been assumed that it is funded by the Israeli government and by at least some of the same gaggle of billionaires, possibly including their Israeli counterparts, who support the anti-Iranian agenda in the United States.
  • Paul Merrell on 30 Aug 14
     
    More detail about the extraordinary action of the Dept. of Justice to negotiate a settlement because discovery requested from the United Against Nuclear Iran private organization would include privileged and classified "law enforcement" records.
Gary Edwards

Civil Unrest Ahead - LewRockwell.com - 0 views

www.lewrockwell.com/...civil-unrest-ahead

Ron-Paul Libertarian

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • The Victimized Inner Cities
  • This social disruption has motivated the enthusiastic growth and militarization of our local police departments. The law and order crowd thrives on excessive laws and regulations that no US citizen can escape. The out-of-control war on drugs is the worst part, and it generates the greatest danger in poverty-ridden areas via out-of-control police. It is estimated that these conditions have generated up to 80,000 SWAT raids per year in the United States. Most are in poor neighborhoods and involve black homes and businesses being hit disproportionately. This involves a high percentage of no-knock attacks. As can be expected many totally innocent people are killed in the process. Property damage is routine and compensation is rare. The routine use of civil forfeiture of property has become an abomination, totally out of control, which significantly contributes to the chaos. It should not be a surprise to see resentment building up against the police under these conditions. The violent reaction against local merchants in retaliation for police actions further aggravates the situation —hardly a recipe for a safe neighborhood.
  • Civil liberties are ignored by the police, and the private property of innocent bystanders is disregarded by those resenting police violence.
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  • The entitlement mentality is a source of much anger and misunderstanding. It leads people who see themselves as victims to one conclusion: they are entitled to be taken care of.
  • If one trillion dollars per year doesn’t do the job, then make it $2 trillion. If the war on poverty’s $16 trillion hasn’t worked, make it $32 trillion.
  • The wealthy special interests, such as banks, the military-industrial complex, the medical industry, the drug industry, and many other corporatists, quickly gain control of the system.
  • Honest profits of successful entrepreneurs are quite different than profits of the corporate elite who gain control of the government and, as a consequence, accumulate obscene wealth by “robbing” the middle class.
  • To blame and destroy those who make an honest living by satisfying consumers without the use of special benefits from the government is destructive to liberty and wealth.
  • Crumbs may be thrown to the poor, but the principle of wealth transfer is hijacked and used for corporate and foreign welfare instead of wealth transfers to the poor.
  • True satisfaction comes from productive effort and self-reliance and not from a government transferring wealth in an effort to bring about an egalitarian society.
  • The people have too little confidence that most problems can be solved in a voluntary manner in a society that cherishes civil liberties. There’s never an admission that government problem-solving doesn’t work. Government-created problems are a road to poverty and resentment. Too many people believe that “free stuff” from the government can solve our problems. They mistakenly believe that deficits don’t matter and that wealth can come from a printing press.
  • The high profile episodes of police violence and overreaction are a consequence of conditions that in many ways were generated by government policy.
  • equal justice requires the end of welfare redistribution
  • Retraining the police won’t touch the complex problems that pit the police against the victims of complex social conditions generated by hate, violence and bad economic policies.
  • Redistribution is a process that is always destined to help a small minority, whether in an economy like ours that endorses central economic planning or in one run by radical fascists or communists.
  • Under an authoritarian regime, those in power take care of themselves. This always leads to poverty and discrepancy in wealth distribution.
  • Eventually the social strife that is predictable leads to an overthrow of the government.
  • The strife that we are witnessing is a reflection of a growing number of people who are recognizing the discrepancy between rich and poor, the weak and the powerful, Wall Street and Main Street.
  • Both political parties are financed by Wall Street, the big banks, and the military-industrial complex. Getting rich by being part of the government class is the problem.
  • Indeed the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer. The extreme current inequality is not a consequence of free markets and true liberty. Rather it results from the welfare state that, as always, morphs into a system that provides excesses for the powerful few.
  • The economic interventionist system under which we live today rewards those who benefit from government economic planning by the Federal Reserve, access to government contracts, and targeted special regulations to help one group over the other
  • There are two problems. First is conceding the principle that government has the moral authority to redistribute wealth. Second is believing the redistribution will be managed wisely and without corruption.
  • Police brutality and militarization may well induce a violent event far beyond what we have seen in Ferguson. It also can serve as an excuse. But it is not the root cause of turmoil. The real cause is poverty, the entitlement mentality, and the breakdown of the rule of law. Moral decay and the national police state are the real culprits.
  • We must limit the government’s role to protecting equal justice in defense of life, liberty, and property.
  • We have too many police, too many laws, and too much exemption of government officials from the crimes they commit.
  • There has to be an understanding that productive effort and self-reliance on the part of everyone is required for a free society to thrive.
  • The loss of our liberty has sharply accelerated since the 9/11 attacks. We have done to ourselves what no foreign enemy could have possibly accomplished.
  • Welfare, for the rich or poor, cannot exist without the sacrifice of the principal of property ownership.
  • The national police are made up of over 100,000 bureaucrats and police officials who carry guns to enforce federal law on the American citizens.
  • Today every American is a suspect. Our president has established a policy that an American citizen can be assassinated without even being charged with a crime.
  • The Founders and our Constitution intended that policing powers would be the responsibility of the individual states. That was forgotten a long time ago
  • the Feds are there taking charge over all local officials and property owners,
  • The Founders did not even want a standing army. They wanted only a militia.
  • Old-fashioned colonialism was deemed necessary by various European powers to secure natural resources along with control over sea lanes and markets for selling manufactured goods.
  • European-style colonialism — supporting a mercantilistic economy — came to be seen as politically unrealistic and unnecessary.
  • We are now subject to an out-of-control domestic police force while the US military maintains our Empire overseas.
  • When free-trade principles were utilized, colonialism did not die; it only changed form. Mercantilism in various forms and degrees drove trade policies of nations with strong economies and militaries.
  • The United States military presence around the world provides a “private” police force to protect US and other international companies against any local resistance or leaders that turn unfriendly. Our military presence overseas has nothing to do with protecting our freedoms and defending our Constitution.
  • The international monetary system is a powerful tool for the select few.
  • In fact, the real heroes are the ones who expose the truth and refuse to fight foreign wars for the international corporations.
  • The “one percenters,” generally speaking, are internationalists who are not champions of individual liberty and free trade. They are supporters of managed trade and international institutions like the WTO where the interests of the one percent can influence the rulings that frequently have little to do with advancing advertised goals of low tariffs and free trade.
  • Disengaging our troops from around the world and refusing to defend American neocolonialism is pursuing a course compatible with the qualities that Americans claim to stand for.
  • The obsession with continuing all the same policies has increased our poverty, increased violence between the classes, and lowered the standard of living for all except the elite one percent. And worst of all, the sacrifice of liberty was for naught.
  • Losing both liberty and the right to truly own property undermines the ability to create wealth.
  • When this process gets out-of-control the economy goes into a death spiral, in the beginning of which we currently find ourselves. Without a correction to the basic understanding of the proper role of government, the downward spiral will continue.
  • Tax revenues will continue to rise, aiding the policy of the government spending the people’s money rather than those who earned it.
  • Wall Street will be protected, and the trillions of dollars of big banks derivatives will be absorbed by the Fed, the FDIC, and ultimately by the American taxpayers in the next financial crisis.
  • There’s no doubt the poor will get poorer and the rich richer until the spirit of revolution in the people calls a halt to the systematic destruction of freedom in America.
  • Authoritarianism has overtaken our economic system as the welfare mentality takes over at every level of government.
  • Once the initiation of force by government is accepted by the people, even minimally, it escalates and involves every aspect of society. The only question that remains is just who gets to wield the power to distribute the largess to their friends and chosen beneficiaries.
  • It’s a recipe for steady growth of the government at the expense of liberties, even if official documents and laws written to limit government power are in place.
  • Restraining the few who thrive on the use of force to rule over us is the challenge. Fortunately they are outnumbered by those who would choose liberty yet lack the will to challenge the humanitarian monsters who gain support from naive and apathetic citizens.
  • The sentiments supporting secession, jury nullification, nullification of federal laws by state legislatures, and a drive for more independence from larger governments will continue.
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Jan 15
     
    "If Americans were honest with themselves they would acknowledge that the Republic is no more. We now live in a police state. If we do not recognize and resist this development, freedom and prosperity for all Americans will continue to deteriorate. All liberties in America today are under siege. It didn't happen overnight. It took many years of neglect for our liberties to be given away so casually for a promise of security from the politicians. The tragic part is that the more security was promised - physical and economic - the less liberty was protected. With cradle-to-grave welfare protecting all citizens from any mistakes and a perpetual global war on terrorism, which a majority of Americans were convinced was absolutely necessary for our survival, our security and prosperity has been sacrificed. It was all based on lies and ignorance. Many came to believe that their best interests were served by giving up a little freedom now and then to gain a better life. The trap was set. At the beginning of a cycle that systematically undermines liberty with delusions of easy prosperity, the change may actually seem to be beneficial to a few. But to me that's like excusing embezzlement as a road to leisure and wealth - eventually payment and punishment always come due. One cannot escape the fact that a society's wealth cannot be sustained or increased without work and productive effort. Yes, some criminal elements can benefit for a while, but reality always sets in. Reality is now setting in for America and for that matter for most of the world. The piper will get his due even if "the children" have to suffer. The deception of promising "success" has lasted for quite a while. It was accomplished by ever-increasing taxes, deficits, borrowing, and printing press money. In the meantime the policing powers of the federal government were systematically and significantly expanded. No one cared much, as there seemed to be enough "gravy" for the rich, th
Paul Merrell

Israeli Government Watchdog Investigates Military's Conduct in Gaza War - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...a-strip-war-investigation.html

war & peace Israel war-crimes Palestine Gaza self-investigtion ICC

shared by Paul Merrell on 22 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Israel’s government watchdog, the state comptroller, said on Tuesday that he had opened an investigation into decisions made by military and political leaders during last summer’s 50-day war with the Hamas militant group in Gaza.The announcement was Israel’s latest effort to head off an International Criminal Court inquiry into its conduct during the war, and came days after prosecutors at the court opened a preliminary examination of possible war crimes committed in the Palestinian territories, the first formal step that could lead to charges against Israelis.
  • A United Nations Human Rights Council commission of inquiry into Israel’s military operations in the Gaza Strip is underway. The state comptroller’s announcement also came as Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, which opposes Israeli occupation of the territories captured in 1967, published a report criticizing what it said were failures of the Israeli military’s system for warning Gaza’s citizens of impending strikes during the fighting last summer. It also faulted the military for a lack of safe evacuation routes and for strikes against rescue teams.
  • The International Criminal Court generally takes on only cases concerning countries that are unwilling or unable to investigate their own actions. In a statement, the Israeli state comptroller, Joseph Haim Shapira, highlighted this point as what was apparently a motivating factor in beginning his inquiry.
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  • “According to principles of international law,” the statement said, “when a state exercises its authority to objectively investigate accusations regarding violations of the laws of armed conflict, this will preclude examination of said accusations by external international tribunals (such as the International Criminal Court in The Hague).”
  • Paul Merrell on 22 Jan 15
     
    The claim that self-investigation serves as an absolute bar to investigation and prosecution by the ICC drastically overstates the actual principle, which makes exceptions for situations in which the investigating state is unable or unwilling to conduct a thorough investigation and actually prosecute those most responsible for the crime, and for situations in which the state investigation is intended to shield those most responsible from criminal prosecution. An investigation by the Israeli Comptroller won't cut it. The Comptroller has no power to initiate prosecutions; he can only make recommendations to the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, He has no power to initiate criminal prosectuions. This announcement is pure and false propaganda, 
Paul Merrell

Latest FBI Claim of Disrupted Terror Plot Deserves Much Scrutiny and Skepticism - The Intercept - 0 views

firstlook.org/...t-deserves-scrutiny-skepticism

war & peace terrorists™ FBI budget entrapment false-flag politics-of-fear

shared by Paul Merrell on 17 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • The Justice Department on Wednesday issued a press release trumpeting its latest success in disrupting a domestic terrorism plot, announcing that “the Joint Terrorism Task Force has arrested a Cincinnati-area man for a plot to attack the U.S. Capitol and kill government officials.” The alleged would-be terrorist is 20-year-old Christopher Cornell (above), who is unemployed, lives at home, spends most of his time playing video games in his bedroom, still addresses his mother as “Mommy” and regards his cat as his best friend; he was described as “a typical student” and “quiet but not overly reserved” by the principal of the local high school he graduated in 2012.
  • The DOJ’s press release predictably generated an avalanche of scary media headlines hailing the FBI. CNN: “FBI says plot to attack U.S. Capitol was ready to go.” MSNBC: “US terror plot foiled by FBI arrest of Ohio man.” Wall St. Journal: “Ohio Man Charged With Plotting ISIS-Inspired Attack on U.S. Capitol.”
  • Just as predictably, political officials instantly exploited the news to justify their powers of domestic surveillance. House Speaker John Boehner claimed yesterday that “the National Security Agency’s snooping powers helped stop a plot to attack the Capitol and that his colleagues need to keep that in mind as they debate whether to renew the law that allows the government to collect bulk information from its citizens.” He warned: “We live in a dangerous country, and we get reminded every week of the dangers that are out there.”  The known facts from this latest case seem to fit well within a now-familiar FBI pattern whereby the agency does not disrupt planned domestic terror attacks but rather creates them, then publicly praises itself for stopping its own plots.
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  • First, they target a Muslim: not due to any evidence of intent or capability to engage in terrorism, but rather for the “radical” political views he expresses. In most cases, the Muslim targeted by the FBI is a very young (late teens, early 20s), adrift, unemployed loner who has shown no signs of mastering basic life functions, let alone carrying out a serious terror attack, and has no known involvement with actual terrorist groups. They then find another Muslim who is highly motivated to help disrupt a “terror plot”: either because they’re being paid substantial sums of money by the FBI or because (as appears to be the case here) they are charged with some unrelated crime and are desperate to please the FBI in exchange for leniency (or both). The FBI then gives the informant a detailed attack plan, and sometimes even the money and other instruments to carry it out, and the informant then shares all of that with the target. Typically, the informant also induces, lures, cajoles, and persuades the target to agree to carry out the FBI-designed plot. In some instances where the target refuses to go along, they have their informant offer huge cash inducements to the impoverished target. Once they finally get the target to agree, the FBI swoops in at the last minute, arrests the target, issues a press release praising themselves for disrupting a dangerous attack (which it conceived of, funded, and recruited the operatives for), and the DOJ and federal judges send their target to prison for years or even decades (where they are kept in special GITMO-like units). Subservient U.S. courts uphold the charges by applying such a broad and permissive interpretation of “entrapment” that it could almost never be successfully invoked. As AP noted last night, “defense arguments have repeatedly failed with judges, and the stings have led to many convictions.”
  • There are countless similar cases where the FBI triumphantly disrupts its own plots, causing people to be imprisoned as terrorists who would not and could not have acted on their own. Trevor Aaronson has comprehensively covered what amounts to the FBI’s own domestic terror network, and has reported that “nearly half [of all DOJ terrorism] prosecutions involved the use of informants, many of them incentivized by money (operatives can be paid as much as $100,000 per assignment) or the need to work off criminal or immigration violation.” He documents “49 [terrorism] defendants [who] participated in plots led by an agent provocateur—an FBI operative instigating terrorist action.” In 2012, Petra Bartosiewicz in The Nation reviewed the post-9/11 body of terrorism cases and concluded: Nearly every major post-9/11 terrorism-related prosecution has involved a sting operation, at the center of which is a government informant. In these cases, the informants — who work for money or are seeking leniency on criminal charges of their own — have crossed the line from merely observing potential criminal behavior to encouraging and assisting people to participate in plots that are largely scripted by the FBI itself. Under the FBI’s guiding hand, the informants provide the weapons, suggest the targets and even initiate the inflammatory political rhetoric that later elevates the charges to the level of terrorism.
Paul Merrell

Russia may accept Chinese control of oil and gas fields | Economy | Worldbulletin News - 0 views

www.worldbulletin.net/...-control-of-oil-and-gas-fields

economy Russia China oil-field-investments

shared by Paul Merrell on 28 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • ussia may consider allowing Chinese investors more than 50 percent stakes in its strategic oil and gas fields, an official said on Friday, an about-face by Moscow that underlines its need for foreign help to develop energy reserves. While closely guarding control of the oil and gas fields that supply the lifeblood of its economy, Russia has forged alliances with some Western companies to obtain the know-how it needs to tap hard-to-reach deposits. But now that Western sanctions over Moscow's role in Ukraine have all but halted that cooperation, Russia has overcome a "psychological barrier" and is ready to deepen its economic ties with China, Deputy Prime MinisterArkady Dvorkovich said. "We have a strategic partnership with China and now decisions are made much faster than before. In particular, we have a gas contract, a second one will be signed soon. Now we know China better: their motives and intentions are understood," he told a conference in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk. "There used to be a psychological barrier. Now it doesn't exist any more. We are interested in maximum investments in new industries. China is an obvious investor for us."
Paul Merrell

United Airlines Tries Scapegoating Pilots for Safety Problems | nsnbc international - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...ing-pilots-for-safety-problems

United-Airlines criminal-investigation bribery Christie Samson

shared by Paul Merrell on 11 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • A memo United Airlines leaked to the February 25 Wall Street Journal was presented as a “brutally honest” rebuke of its pilots, blaming their “lack of attention” to rules and regulations for the airline’s recent safety lapses. But the public lashing looks like a diversionary move by United to head off criticism after a federal probe of the company has received much recent attention.
  • The carrier is accused of scheduling special flights for David Samson, former chair of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, himself under investigation for his role in the “Bridgegate” scandal (where New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and others allegedly engineered traffic jams to punish political enemies.) If United realized it was offering flights “to curry favor with a public official, then United’s in the soup—it’s a bribe,” former federal prosecutor and Department of Transportation Inspector General Mary Schiavo told Bloomberg Business. Whatever United’s motives, union officers from Chicago-based Council 12 of the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) were shocked, calling the letter “duplicitous” and even “offensive.” They fired back with a “brutally honest” safety examination of their own. Council 12 officers see a pattern of “threats, intimidation, and outright bullying” against those who raise safety considerations that conflict with on-time performance or the flight schedule.
Paul Merrell

Bibi Using Congressional Address In New Campaign Ad, Just As Critics Warned - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...ibi-campaign-ad_n_6856826.html

war & peace Netanyahu Congress speech Israel election-2015 campaign-ad

shared by Paul Merrell on 15 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • When House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) announced he had invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress just a few weeks ahead of an Israeli election, he was criticized for giving Netanyahu a platform to boost his campaign.The United States has a policy of not meeting with foreign leaders in advance of elections, so as not to appear to be tilting the electoral balance. But Netanyahu insisted that his motivations had nothing to do with the election, and that the timing of the speech was demanded by the urgency of the Iran nuclear negotiations. There was simply no time to waste.Already, however, Netanyahu is using his speech as a prop in a campaign commercial back in Israel, where the prime minister is shown basking in the applause of members of Congress who did not boycott his speech.
  • With five days left until the Israeli elections, Netanyahu launched the 80-second campaign ad above, featuring his controversial address along with footage of rockets being launched.
Paul Merrell

Responding to Failure: Reorganizing U.S. Policies in the Middle East | Middle East Policy Council - 0 views

mepc.org/...nizing-us-policies-middle-east

war & peace Mideast Israel Arabs Shia-nations U.S.-foreign-policy recommendations

shared by Paul Merrell on 17 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • I want to speak with you today about the Middle East. This is the region where Africa, Asia, and Europe come together. It is also the part of the world where we have been most compellingly reminded that some struggles cannot be won, but there are no struggles that cannot be lost. It is often said that human beings learn little useful from success but can learn a great deal from defeat. If so, the Middle East now offers a remarkably rich menu of foreign-policy failures for Americans to study. • Our four-decade-long diplomatic effort to bring peace to the Holy Land sputtered to an ignominious conclusion a year ago. • Our unconditional political, economic, and military backing of Israel has earned us the enmity of Israel’s enemies even as it has enabled egregiously contemptuous expressions of ingratitude and disrespect for us from Israel itself.
  • • Our attempts to contain the Iranian revolution have instead empowered it. • Our military campaigns to pacify the region have destabilized it, dismantled its states, and ignited ferocious wars of religion among its peoples. • Our efforts to democratize Arab societies have helped to produce anarchy, terrorism, dictatorship, or an indecisive juxtaposition of all three. • In Iraq, Libya, and Syria we have shown that war does not decide who’s right so much as determine who’s left. • Our campaign against terrorism with global reach has multiplied our enemies and continuously expanded their areas of operation. • Our opposition to nuclear proliferation did not prevent Israel from clandestinely developing nuclear weapons and related delivery systems and may not preclude Iran and others from following suit.
  • • At the global level, our policies in the Middle East have damaged our prestige, weakened our alliances, and gained us a reputation for militaristic fecklessness in the conduct of our foreign affairs. They have also distracted us from challenges elsewhere of equal or greater importance to our national interests. That’s quite a record.
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  • One can only measure success or failure by reference to what one is trying achieve. So, in practice, what have U.S. objectives been? Are these objectives still valid? If we’ve failed to advance them, what went wrong? What must we do now to have a better chance of success? Our objectives in the Middle East have not changed much over the course of the past half century or more. We have sought to 1. Gain acceptance and security for a Jewish homeland from the other states and peoples of the region; 2. Ensure the uninterrupted availability of the region’s energy supplies to sustain global and U.S. security and prosperity; 3. Preserve our ability to transit the region so as to be able to project power around the world; 4. Prevent the rise of a regional hegemon or the deployment of weapons of mass destruction that might threaten any or all of these first three objectives; 5. Maximize profitable commerce; and 6. Promote stability while enhancing respect for human rights and progress toward constitutional democracy. Let’s briefly review what’s happened with respect to each of these objectives. I will not mince words.
  • Israel has come to enjoy military supremacy but it remains excluded from most participation in its region’s political, economic, and cultural life. In the 67 years since the Jewish state was proclaimed, Israel has not made a single friend in the Middle East, where it continues to be regarded as an illegitimate legacy of Western imperialism engaged in racist removal of the indigenous population. International support for Israel is down to the United States and a few of the former colonial powers that originally imposed the Zionist project on the Arabs under Sykes-Picot and the related Balfour Declaration. The two-state solution has expired as a physical or political possibility. There is no longer any peace process to distract global attention from Israel’s maltreatment of its captive Arab populations. After years of deference to American diplomacy, the Palestinians are about to challenge the legality of Israel’s cruelties to them in the International Criminal Court and other venues in which Americans have no veto, are not present, or cannot protect the Jewish state from the consequences of its own behavior as we have always been able to do in the past. Israel’s ongoing occupation of the West Bank and siege of Gaza are fueling a drive to boycott its products, disinvest in its companies, and sanction its political and cultural elite. These trends are the very opposite of what the United States has attempted to achieve for Israel.
  • In a stunning demonstration of his country’s most famous renewable resource — chutzpah — Israel’s Prime Minister chose this very moment to make America the main issue in his reelection campaign while simultaneously transforming Israel into a partisan issue in the United States. This is the very opposite of a sound survival strategy for Israel. Uncertainties about their country’s future are leading many Israelis to emigrate, not just to America but to Europe. This should disturb not just Israelis but Americans, if only because of the enormous investment we have made in attempts to gain a secure place for Israel in its region and the world. The Palestinians have been silent about Mr. Netanyahu’s recent political maneuvers. Evidently, they recall Napoleon’s adage that one should never interrupt an enemy when he is making a mistake. This brings me to an awkward but transcendently important issue. Israel was established as a haven from anti-Semitism — Jew hatred — in Europe, a disease of nationalism and Christian culture that culminated in the Holocaust. Israel’s creation was a relief for European Jews but a disaster for the Arabs of Palestine, who were either ethnically cleansed by European Jewish settlers or subjugated, or both.  But the birth of Israel also proved tragic for Jews throughout the Middle East — the Mizrahim. In a nasty irony, the implementation of Zionism in the Holy Land led to the introduction of European-style anti-Semitism — including its classic Christian libels on Jews — to the region, dividing Arab Jews from their Muslim neighbors as never before and compelling them to join European Jews in taking refuge in Israel amidst outrage over the dispossession of Palestinians from their homeland. Now, in a further irony, Israel’s pogroms and other injustices to the Muslim and Christian Arabs over whom it rules are leading not just to a rebirth of anti-Semitism in Europe but to its globalization.
  • The late King `Abdullah of Saudi Arabia engineered a reversal of decades of Arab rejectionism at Beirut in 2002. He brought all Arab countries and later all 57 Muslim countries to agree to normalize relations with Israel if it did a deal — any deal — with the Palestinians that the latter could accept. Israel spurned the offer. Its working assumption seems to be that it does not need peace with its neighbors as long as it can bomb and strafe them. Proceeding on this basis is not just a bad bet, it is one that is dividing Israel from the world, including Jews outside Israel. This does not look like a story with a happy ending. It’s hard to avoid the thought that Zionism is turning out to be bad for the Jews. If so, given the American investment in it, it will also have turned out to be bad for America. The political costs to America of support for Israel are steadily rising. We must find a way to divert Israel from the largely self-engineered isolation into which it is driving itself, while repairing our own increasing international ostracism on issues related to Israel.  
  • Despite Mr. Netanyahu’s recent public hysteria about Iran and his efforts to demonize it, Israel has traditionally seen Iran’s rivalry with the Arabs as a strategic asset. It had a very cooperative relationship with the Shah. Neither Israelis nor Arabs have forgotten the strategic logic that produced Israel's entente with Iran. Israel is very much on Daesh’s list of targets, as is Iran. For now, however, Israel’s main concern is the possible loss of its nuclear monopoly in the Middle East. Many years ago, Israel actually did what it now accuses Iran of planning to do. It clandestinely developed nuclear weapons while denying to us and others that it was doing so. Unlike Iran, Israel has not adhered to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty or subjected its nuclear facilities to international inspection. It has expressed no interest in proposals for a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East. It sees its ability to bring on nuclear Armageddon as the ultimate guarantee of its existence.
  • To many, Israel now seems to have acquired the obnoxious habit of biting the American hand that has fed it for so long. The Palestinians have despaired of American support for their self-determination. They are reaching out to the international community in ways that deliberately bypass the United States. Random acts of violence herald mayhem in the Holy Land. Daesh has proclaimed the objective of erasing the Sykes-Picot borders and the states within them. It has already expunged the border between Iraq and Syria. It is at work in Lebanon and has set its sights on Jordan, Palestine, and Israel. Lebanon, under Saudi influence, has turned to France rather than America for support. Hezbollah has intervened militarily in Iraq and Syria, both of whose governments are close to Iran. Egypt and Turkey have distanced themselves from the United States as well as from each other. Russia is back as a regional actor and arms supplier. The Gulf Arabs, Egypt, and Turkey now separately intervene in Libya, Syria, and Iraq without reference to American policy or views. Iran is the dominant influence in Iraq, Syria, parts of Lebanon, and now Yemen. It has boots on the ground in Iraq. And now Saudi Arabia seems to be organizing a coalition that will manage its own nuclear deterrence and military balancing of Ir
  • To describe this as out of control is hardly adequate. What are we to do about it? Perhaps we should start by recalling the first law of holes — “when stuck in one, stop digging.” It appears that “don’t just sit there, bomb something” isn’t much of a strategy. When he was asked last summer what our strategy for dealing with Daesh was, President Obama replied, “We don’t yet have one.” He was widely derided for that. He should have been praised for making the novel suggestion that before Washington acts, it should first think through what it hopes to accomplish and how best to do it. Sunzi once observed that “tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat." America’s noisy but strategy-free approach to the Middle East has proven him right. Again the starting point must be what we are trying to accomplish. Strategy is "the discipline of achieving desired ends through the most efficient use of available means" [John Lewis Gaddis].Our desired ends with respect to the Middle East are not in doubt. They have been and remain to gain an accepted and therefore secure place for Israel there; to keep the region's oil and gas coming at reasonable prices; to be able to pass through the area at will; to head off challenges to these interests; to do profitable business in the markets of the Middle East; and to promote stability amidst the expansion of liberty in its countries. Judging by results, we have been doing a lot wrong. Two related problems in our overall approach need correction. They are “enablement” and the creation of “moral hazard.” Both are fall-out from  relationships of codependency.
  • Enablement occurs when one party to a relationship indulges or supports and thereby enables another party’s dysfunctional behavior. A familiar example from ordinary life is giving money to a drunk or a drug addict or ignoring, explaining away, or defending their subsequent self-destructive behavior.  Moral hazard is the condition that obtains when one party is emboldened to take risks it would not otherwise take because it knows another party will shoulder the consequences and bear the costs of failure. The U.S.-Israel relationship has evolved to exemplify codependency. It now embodies both enablement and moral hazard. U.S. support for Israel is unconditional.  Israel has therefore had no need to cultivate relations with others in the Middle East, to declare its borders, or to choose peace over continued expansion into formerly Arab lands. Confidence in U.S. backing enables Israel to do whatever it likes to the Palestinians and its neighbors without having to worry about the consequences. Israel is now a rich country, but the United States continues to subsidize it with cash transfers and other fiscal privileges. The Jewish state is the most powerful country in the Middle East. It can launch attacks on its neighbors, confident that it will be resupplied by the United States. Its use of U.S. weapons in ways that violate both U.S. and international law goes unrebuked. 41 American vetoes in the United Nations Security Council have exempted Israel from censure and international law. We enable it to defy the expressed will of the international community, including, ironically, our own.
  • We Americans are facilitating Israel's indulgence in denial and avoidance of the choices it must make if it is not to jeopardize its long-term existence as a state in the Middle East. The biggest contribution we could now make to Israel's longevity would be to ration our support for it, so as to cause it to rethink and reform its often self-destructive behavior. Such peace as Israel now enjoys with Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinians is the direct result of tough love of this kind by earlier American administrations. We Americans cannot save Israel from itself, but we can avoid killing it with uncritical kindness. We should support Israel when it makes sense to do so and it needs our support on specific issues, but not otherwise. Israel is placing itself and American interests in jeopardy. We need to discuss how to reverse this dynamic.
  • Moral hazard has also been a major problem in our relationship with our Arab partners. Why should they play an active role in countering the threat to them they perceive from Iran, if they can get America to do this for them? Similarly, why should any Muslim country rearrange its priorities to deal with Muslim renegades like Daesh when it can count on America to act for it? If America thinks it must lead, why not let it do so? But responsible foreign and defense policies begin with self-help, not outsourcing of military risks. The United States has the power-projection and war-fighting capabilities to back a Saudi-led coalition effort against Daesh. The Saudis have the religious and political credibility, leadership credentials, and diplomatic connections to organize such an effort. We do not. Since this century began, America has administered multiple disappointments to its allies and friends in the Middle East, while empowering their and our adversaries. Unlike the Gulf Arabs, Egypt, and Turkey, Washington does not have diplomatic relations with Tehran. Given our non-Muslim identity, solidarity with Israel, and recent history in the Fertile Crescent, the United States cannot hope to unite the region’s Muslims against Daesh.  Daesh is an insurgency that claims to exemplify Islam as well as a governing structure and an armed force. A coalition led by inhibited foreign forces, built on papered-over differences, and embodying hedged commitments will not defeat such an insurgency with or without boots on the ground.
  • When elections have yielded governments whose policies we oppose, we have not hesitated to conspire with their opponents to overthrow them. But the results of our efforts to coerce political change in the Middle East are not just failures but catastrophic failures. Our policies have nowhere produced democracy. They have instead contrived the destabilization of societies, the kindling of religious warfare, and the installation of dictatorships contemptuous of the rights of religious and ethnic minorities. Frankly, we have done a lot better at selling things, including armaments, to the region than we have at transplanting the ideals of the Atlantic Enlightenment there. The region’s autocrats cooperate with us to secure our protection, and they get it. When they are nonetheless overthrown, the result is not democracy or the rule of law but socio-political collapse and the emergence of  a Hobbesian state of nature in which religious and ethnic communities, families, and individuals are able to feel safe only when they are armed and have the drop on each other. Where we have engineered or attempted to engineer regime change, violent politics, partition, and ethno-religious cleansing have everywhere succeeded unjust but tranquil order. One result of our bungled interventions in Iraq and Syria is the rise of Daesh. This is yet another illustration that, in our efforts to do good in the Middle East, we have violated the principle that one should first do no harm.
  • Americans used to believe that we could best lead by example. We and those in the Middle East seeking nonviolent change would all be better off if America returned to that tradition and forswore ideologically motivated hectoring and intervention. No one willingly follows a wagging finger. Despite our unparalleled ability to use force against foreigners, the best way to inspire them to emulate us remains showing them that we have our act together. At the moment, we do not. In the end, to cure the dysfunction in our policies toward the Middle East, it comes down to this. We must cure the dysfunction and venality of our politics. If we cannot, we have no business trying to use an 8,000-mile-long screwdriver to fix things one-third of the way around the world. That doesn’t work well under the best of circumstances. But when the country wielding the screwdriver has very little idea what it’s doing, it really screws things up.
  • Paul Merrell on 17 Mar 15
     
    Chas Freeman served as US ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the war to liberate Kuwait and as Assistant Secretary of Defense from 1993-94. He was the editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on "diplomacy" and is the author of five books, including "America's Misadventures in the Middle East" and "Interesting Times: China, America, and the Shifting Balance of Prestige."  I have largely omitted highlighting portions of the speech dealing with Muslim nations because Freeman has apparently lost touch with the actual U.S., Saudi, UAE, Kuwait, and Turish roles in creating and expanding ISIL. But his analysis of Israel's situation and recommendations for curing it seem quite valid, as well as his overall Mideast recommendation to heed the First Law of Holes: "when stuck in one, stop digging."   I recommend reading the entire speech notwithstanding his misunderstanding of ISIL. There is a lot of very important history there ably summarized.
Paul Merrell

Federal Chief Information Officers (CIO) Council Wins Rosemary Award - 0 views

www2.gwu.edu/...20150318

Hillary Auction 2016 email-scandal State-Dept. gov't.-CIOs

shared by Paul Merrell on 19 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Hillary Clinton E-Mail Controversy Illuminates Government-Wide Failure National Security Archive Lawsuit Established E-Mails as Records in 1993 CIO Council Repeats as Rosemary "Winner" for Doubling Down On "Lifetime Failure" Only White House Saves Its E-Mail Electronically, Agencies No Deadline Until 2016
  • The Federal Chief Information Officers (CIO) Council has won the infamous Rosemary Award for worst open government performance of 2014, according to the citation published today by the National Security Archive at www.nsarchive.org. The National Security Archive had hoped that awarding the 2010 Rosemary Award to the Federal Chief Information Officers Council for never addressing the government's "lifetime failure" of saving its e-mail electronically would serve as a government-wide wakeup call that saving e-mails was a priority. Fallout from the Hillary Clinton e-mail debacle shows, however, that rather than "waking up," the top officials have opted to hit the "snooze" button. The Archive established the not-so-coveted Rosemary Award in 2005, named after President Nixon's secretary, Rose Mary Woods, who testified she had erased 18-and-a-half minutes of a crucial Watergate tape — stretching, as she showed photographers, to answer the phone with her foot still on the transcription pedal. Bestowed annually to highlight the lowlights of government secrecy, the Rosemary Award has recognized a rogue's gallery of open government scofflaws, including the CIA, the Treasury Department, the Air Force, the FBI, the Justice Department, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.
  • Chief Information Officer of the United States Tony Scott was appointed to lead the Federal CIO Council on February 5, 2015, and his brief tenure has already seen more references in the news media to the importance of maintaining electronic government records, including e-mail, and the requirements of the Federal Records Act, than the past five years. Hopefully Mr. Scott, along with Office of Management & Budget Deputy Director for Management Ms. Beth Cobert will embrace the challenge of their Council being named a repeat Rosemary Award winner and use it as a baton to spur change rather than a cross to bear.
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  • Many on the Federal CIO Council could use some motivation, including the beleaguered State Department CIO, Steven Taylor. In office since April 3, 2013, Mr. Taylor is in charge of the Department's information resources and IT initiatives and services. He "is directly responsible for the Information Resource Management (IRM) Bureau's budget of $750 million, and oversees State's total IT/ knowledge management budget of approximately one billion dollars." Prior to his current position, Taylor served as Acting CIO from August 1, 2012, as the Department's Deputy Chief Information Officer (DCIO) and Chief Technology Officer of Operations from June 2011, and was the Program Director for the State Messaging and Archival Retrieval Toolset (SMART). While Hillary Clinton repeatedly claimed that because she sent her official e-mail to "government officials on their State or other .gov accounts ... the emails were immediately captured and preserved," a recent State Department Office of Inspector General report contradicts claims that DOS' e-mail archiving system, ironically named SMART, did so.
  • The report found that State Department "employees have not received adequate training or guidance on their responsibilities for using those systems to preserve 'record emails.'" In 2011, while Taylor was State's Chief Technology Officer of Operations, State Department employees only created 61,156 record e-mails out of more than a billion e-mails sent. In other words, roughly .006% of DOS e-mails were captured electronically. And in 2013, while Taylor was State's CIO, a paltry seven e-mails were preserved from the Office of the Secretary, compared to the 4,922 preserved by the Lagos Consulate in Nigeria. Even though the report notes that its assessments "do not apply to the system used by the Department's high-level principals, the Secretary, the Deputy Secretaries, the Under Secretaries, and their immediate staffs, which maintain separate systems," the State Department has not provided any estimation of the number of Clinton's e-mails that were preserved by recipients through the Department's anachronistic "print and file" system, or any other procedure.
  • The unfortunate silver lining of Hillary Clinton inappropriately appropriating public records as her own is that she likely preserved her records much more comprehensively than her State Department colleagues, most of whose e-mails have probably been lost under Taylor's IT leadership. 2008 reports by CREW, right, and the GAO, left, highlighted problems preserving e-mails. Click to enlarge. The bigger issue is that Federal IT gurus have known about this problem for years, and the State Department is not alone in not having done anything to fix it. A 2008 survey by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and OpenTheGovernment.org did not find a single federal agency policy that mandates an electronic record keeping system agency-wide. Congressional testimony in 2008 by the Government Accountability Office indicted the standard "print and file" approach by pointing out:
  • 2011- the Justice Department (for doing more than any other agency to eviscerate President Obama's Day One transparency pledge through pit-bull whistleblower prosecutions, recycled secrecy arguments in court cases, retrograde FOIA regulations, and mixed FOIA responsiveness) 2010 - the Federal Chief Information Officers' Council (for "lifetime failure" to address the crisis in government e-mail preservation) 2009 - the FBI (for having a record-setting rate of "no records" responses to FOIA requests) 2008 - the Treasury Department (for shredding FOIA requests and delaying responses for decades) 2007 - the Air Force (for disappearing its FOIA requests and having "failed miserably" to meet its FOIA obligations, according to a federal court ruling) 2006 - the Central Intelligence Agency (for the biggest one-year drop-off in responsiveness to FOIA requests yet recorded).
  • Troublingly, current Office of Management and Budget guidance does not require federal agencies to manage "all email records in an electronic format" until December 31, 2016. The only part of the federal government that seems to be facing up to the e-mail preservation challenge with any kind of "best practice" is the White House, where the Obama administration installed on day one an e-mail archiving system that preserves and manages even the President's own Blackberry messages. The National Security Archive brought the original White House e-mail lawsuit against President Reagan in early 1989, and continued the litigation against Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, until court orders compelled the White House to install the "ARMS" system to archive e-mail. The Archive sued the George W. Bush administration in 2007 after discovering that the Bush White House had junked the Clinton system without replacing its systematic archiving functions. CREW subsequently joined this suit and with the Archive negotiated a settlement with the Obama administration that included the recovery of as many as 22 million e-mails that were previously missing or misfiled.
  • s a result of two decades of the Archive's White House e-mail litigation, several hundred thousand e-mails survive from the Reagan White House, nearly a half million from the George H.W. Bush White House, 32 million from the Clinton White House, and an estimated 220 million from the George W. Bush White House. Previous recipients of the Rosemary Award include: 2013 - Director of National Intelligence James Clapper (for his "No, sir" lie to Senator Ron Wyden's question: "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?") 2012 - the Justice Department (in a repeat performance, for failing to update FOIA regulations to comply with the law, undermining congressional intent, and hyping its open government statistics)
  • Rogue Band of Federal E-mail Users and Abusers Compounds Systemic Problems Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other federal officials who skirt or even violate federal laws designed to preserve electronic federal records compound e-mail management problems. Top government officials who use personal e-mail for official business include: Clinton; former U.S. Ambassador to Kenya Scott Gration; chairman of the U.S. Chemical Safety Board Rafael Moure-Eraso; and former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who told ABC's This Week "I don't have any to turn over. I did not keep a cache of them. I did not print them off. I do not have thousands of pages somewhere in my personal files." Others who did not properly save electronic federal records include Environmental Protection Agency former administrator Lisa Jackson who used the pseudonym Richard Windsor to receive email; current EPA administrator Gina McCarthy, who improperly deleted thousands of text messages (which also are federal records) from her official agency cell phone; and former Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner, whose emails regarding Obama's political opponents "went missing or became destroyed."
  • "agencies recognize that devoting significant resources to creating paper records from electronic sources is not a viable long-term strategy;" yet GAO concluded even the "print and file" system was failing to capture historic records "for about half of the senior officials."
  • The destruction of other federal records was even more blatant. Jose Rodriguez, the former CIA official in charge of the agency's defunct torture program ordered the destruction of key videos documenting it in 2005, claiming that "the heat from destroying [the torture videos] is nothing compared to what it would be if the tapes ever got into the public domain;" Admiral William McRaven, ordered the immediate destruction of any emails about Operation Neptune Spear, including any photos of the death of Osama bin Laden ("destroy them immediately"), telling subordinates that any photos should have already been turned over to the CIA — presumably so they could be placed in operational files out of reach of the FOIA. These rogues make it harder — if not impossible — for agencies to streamline their records management, and for FOIA requesters and others to obtain official records, especially those not exchanged with other government employees. The US National Archives currently trusts agencies to determine and preserve e-mails which agencies have "deemed appropriate for preservation" on their own, often by employing a "print and file" physical archiving process for digital records. Any future reforms to e-mail management must address the problems of outdated preservation technology, Federal Records Act violators, and the scary fact that only one per cent of government e-mail addresses are saved digitally by the National Archive's recently-initiated "Capstone" program.
  • Paul Merrell on 19 Mar 15
     
    Complete with photos, names, titles, of the 41 federal department and independent agency CIOs. The March 2015 Insopector General report linked from the article belies Hillary Clinton's claim that all emails she sent to State Department staff had been preserved by the Department.   
Paul Merrell

Why Does Israel Keep Changing Its Story On Gaza? - YouTube - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

war & peace Israel Palestine Gaza motives

shared by Paul Merrell on 05 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • srael's continued military offensive in Gaza has many around the world questioning its objectives. Israel has put forth different reasons over time, but the question remains: what is its endgame in Gaza?
  • Paul Merrell on 05 Aug 14
     
    Nice presentation by Al Jazeera Labs.
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