TBR News April 5, 2018

Apr 05 2018

The Voice of the White House 

Washington, D.C. April 5, 2018:” 1. Only in America……can a pizza get to your house faster than an ambulance.

  1. Only in America……are there handicap parking places in front of a skating rink.
  2. Only in America……do drugstores make the sick walk all the way to the back of the store to get their prescriptions while healthy people can buy cigarettes at the front.
  3. Only in America……do people order double cheeseburgers, large fries, and a diet coke.
  4. Only in America……do banks leave both doors open and then chain the pens to the counters.
  5. Only in America……do we leave cars worth thousands of dollars in the driveway and put our useless junk in the garage.
  6. Only in America……do we use answering machines to screen calls and then have call waiting so we won’t miss a call from someone we didn’t want to talk to in the first place.
  7. Only in America……do we buy hot dogs in packages of ten and buns in packages of eight.
  8. Only in America……do we use the word ‘politics’ to describe the process so well: ‘Poli’ in Latin meaning ‘many’ and ‘tics’ meaning ‘bloodsucking creatures’.
  9. Only in America……do they have drive-up ATM machines with Braille lettering.”

 

Table of Contents

  • How U.S. Foreign Intervention Created Our Domestic Surveillance State
  • Trump vs. the Permanent Government
  • For Mueller, a Feared Weakness Becomes a Strength
  • What Is Robert Mueller Looking For?
  • Muslims Accused of Plotting Violence Get Seven Times More Media Attention and Four Times Longer Sentences
  • ‘Is Putin a CIA agent?’ NYT’s ‘dumbest paragraphs ever printed’ ridiculed online
  • Facebook says Cambridge Analytica may have gained 37m more users’ data
  • Trump activates plan to deploy National Guard to Mexico border
  • TOP SECRET SPECIAL HANDLING -NOFORN

             PRETEXTS TO JUSTIFY US MILITARY INTERVENTION IN CUBA

  • Ruling means Puigdemont cannot face rebellion charges: German court spokeswoman

 

How U.S. Foreign Intervention Created Our Domestic Surveillance State

A militaristic foreign policy has real effects on domestic institutions and poses a genuine threat to domestic liberties.

March 30, 2018

by Christopher Coyne and Abigail Hall

The Federalist

The Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal continues to be front-page news. According to current reports, Cambridge Analytica obtained private Facebook data, which it used to send pro-Trump material to targeted Facebook users. These reports have met outrage in Washington DC. The Federal Trade Commission has opened an investigation, and U.S. senators have called for Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook CEO, to testify in front of Congress.

Calls by Congress for increased oversight to prevent private companies from surveilling people are extremely ironic given that they recently renewed a section of the 2008 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows for the warrantless surveillance of Americans. Issues regarding the appropriate use of government surveillance are also at the center of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump administration.

These headlines provide an excellent opportunity to consider the history of the U.S. government’s surveillance state, which matters for people across the world whose liberties are at stake as government power expands.

Surveillance Origins: To Squash Dissent

The origins of the present-day surveillance state can be traced back to the U.S. government’s military occupation of the Philippines in the late 1890s. Under the leadership of Ralph Van Deman, who would earn the informal honorific of “father of U.S. military intelligence,” the U.S. occupiers established a state-of-the-art surveillance apparatus to squash dissent by those who resisted U.S. efforts.

After his time abroad, Van Deman returned home and, drawing upon his experiences abroad, worked tirelessly to establish similar surveillance infrastructure at home. In May 1917, the Military Intelligence Sec­tion (MIS) was formed, with Van Deman at the helm.

Over the following decades, the U.S. surveillance state continued to expand and reorganize, resulting in the founding of the National Security Agency (NSA) in 1952. This coincided with an unprecedented expansion in the scope of government surveillance of the daily lives and activities of American persons. The prevalence of unconstrained government surveil­lance is evident in the four main concurrent operations undertaken at that time: Project SHAMROCK and Project MINARET, both operated by the NSA; COINTELPRO, implemented by the Federal Bureau of Investiga­tion; and Operation CHAOS, which fell under the purview of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

These programs monitored all foreign telegraphs passing through the United States and surveilled individuals the FBI deemed “subversive,” which included civil rights leaders and anti-war protestors, among many others. This included not just indirect monitoring, but also infiltrating private organizations and illegal burglary in the name of protecting against “domestic dissent.”

Attempts at Restraint Turn Into License for More

The success of Van Deman’s vision and influence emerged in the 1970s, when the scale and scope of the national surveillance state, and the American government’s abuse of the power derived from controlling that machinery, were publicly revealed due to the reporting of Seymour Hersh. The subsequent investigation by the Church Committee revealed the extent of the abuses by U.S. intelligence operations, noting that “virtually every element of our society has been subjected to excessive government-ordered intelligence inquiries.” The committee’s findings made clear that the unchecked surveillance apparatus had unleashed an unconstrained leviathan that undermined the liberty of the American people.

In response to the committee’s findings, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978, which was intended to oversee and place judicial constraints on the government’s surveillance activities. The act created the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). However, as the revelations by Edward Snowden in 2013 made clear, these reforms were ineffective, with the members of the security state acting with few if any real constraints on their behavior.

It is crucial to understand the origins of the U.S. surveillance state both as an important historical episode, but also because it highlights a broader point: a militaristic foreign policy has real effects on domestic institutions and poses a genuine threat to domestic liberties. Many Americans believe overseas interventions by the U.S. government protect domestic liberties and promote freedom.

In our book, “Tyranny Comes Home,” we argue that this view is incomplete, if not entirely mistaken. When a society adopts the values of an aggres­sive empire, it runs the risk of adopting imperial characteristics at home.

Let’s Discuss the Boomerang Effect

To explain why, we develop a theory of the “boomerang effect” to un­derstand the process through which intervention abroad increases the scope of government power at home and erodes citizens’ liberties. Preparing for and engaging in foreign intervention provides a test­ing ground for intervening governments to experiment with new forms of social control over distant populations. Under certain conditions, these innovations in social control are then imported back to the intervening country, expanding the scope of domestic gov­ernment activities.

The result is that the intervening government becomes more effective at controlling not only foreign populations but the domes­tic population as well. Under this scenario, preparing and executing foreign intervention changes domestic political institutions and the re­lationship between citizen and government. Domestic freedom from others’ in­terference and coercion is eroded or lost altogether as the state gains power over citizens.

The thriving U.S. surveillance state clearly illustrates the logic of the boo­merang effect. The centralized apparatus of social control that the U.S. government first developed in the Philippines in the late nineteenth cen­tury has boomeranged to the United States, where it is flourishing more than a century later. As we discuss in “Tyranny Comes Home,” the boomerang effect also offers important insights into other cases, including the militarization of police, the domestic use of drones, and torture in U.S. prisons. Ongoing foreign military interventions with no end in sight will certainly lead to increased government power at home in the future.

Members of the U.S. government often use the rhetoric of freedom and virtue to legitimize intervention. This supposed commitment to higher ide­als is indicated by the names assigned to the government’s actions, such as “Operation Just Cause,” “Operation Enduring Freedom,” “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” “Operation Valiant Guardian,” and “Operation Falcon Freedom.” Despite this lofty rhetoric, the pernicious boomerang effect continues to operate: preparing for and carrying out intervention abroad undermines freedom at home.

It is crucial for Americans to realize this unseen and overlooked cost of a militarist foreign policy before it is too late and their liberties are forever lost.

 

Trump vs. the Permanent Government

The battle to put America first isn’t easy

April 5, 2018

by Justin Raimondo

AntiWar

The other day President Trump told his audience at a rally in Ohio that US troops are leaving Syria “very soon.” “Let others take care of it,” he said, “it’s time to build up our own country. It’s time to bring them home.”

The foreign policy Establishment, the military, and the pro-jihadist “humanitarian interventionists” of the liberal-left (e.g., Nicholas Kristof), went ballistic. Oh noes! You can’t do that! What about Bashar al-Assad, the Very Bad Dictator who’s been protecting religious minorities from US-funded head-choppers? He’ll be left in power, and we can’t have that! The Democrats on Twitter reacted by denouncing Trump – because wars are bad only if Republicans start them.

While the counterintuitive moral posturing of the Nicholas Kristofs of this world probably has a minimal impact on the decision-making process in the White House, the US military does indeed have a say – and they, along with their civilian allies in the sprawling national security bureaucracy, aren’t afraid to contradict a sitting president. As the Washington Post gleefully reports:

“President Trump on Tuesday repeated his desire to quickly ‘get out’ of Syria, even as his top commander for the Middle East outlined the need for an ongoing military presence there.

“‘A lot of very good military progress has been made over the last couple of years, but the hard part, I think, is in front of us,’ said Gen. Joseph L. Votel, head of U.S. Central Command. Upcoming efforts, he said, include the military’s role in ‘stabilizing [Syria], consolidating gains’ and ‘addressing long-term issues of reconstruction’ after the defeat of the Islamic State.

“The two spoke simultaneously in Washington. Votel, joined in remarks at the US Institute of Peace by the administration’s top diplomatic envoy to the U.S.-led coalition against the militants and by the head of the US Agency for International Development, discussed the need to align military operations with those of diplomatic and aid activities on the ground.

“Barely a mile away, Trump told a White House news conference that ‘I want to get out. I want to bring our troops back home.’”

The issue was addressed at a meeting with the President and various national security officials, and it ended with Trump instructing the military to prepare to leave. However, he did not set a date, and news reports have it that he was persuaded – against his better instincts – to allow the troops to stay “a little longer.”

Yes, it’s always “a little longer,” isn’t it? Victory is right around the corner. Except when it isn’t.

The President is surrounded by his enemies – the permanent albeit unelected government that really runs the country. He ran on an “isolationist” (i.e., traditional American) platform: “America first.” The Iraq war was a preventable disaster, he said, promising no more regime change. Once he got into office, however, it’s not that he forgot his promises – it’s that he began to realize that the ship of state is not easily turned. The vast apparatus that is the American Empire has been set on its course since the end of World War II and the beginning of the cold war with the Soviet Union: no one person can succeed in turning it completely around. A president can announce policies, but as far as getting them implemented by underlings – well, in this case, good luck with that.

Trump is at war with his own government on the foreign policy front as well as many other fronts. That’s what the Mueller “investigation” is all about. With the entire political class, the government bureaucracy, and the media against him – and determined to oust him – Trump is isolated in the Oval Office and unable to actually implement many of the policies he prefers. This is not to say he’s perfect – far from it! – but he’s subject to extraordinary political pressure. Add to this the inertia imposed by the imperial traditions of a city – Washington, D.C. – that have shaped US foreign policy for the last seventy-five years or so.

Yes, Trump has a way of upsetting the Powers That Be which is fun to watch: his Korean peace initiative and the announcement of an upcoming meeting with North Korean despot Kim Jong-un has the foreign policy Establishment in a tizzy. Even the alleged “non-interventionists” denounced it as potentially “dangerous” – which just goes to show how subjective emotionalism (i.e. Trump Derangement Syndrome) can distort one’s thinking in ways that aren’t pretty.

The smoke had barely cleared after that explosion when Trump unveiled yet another foreign policy bunker-buster: a summit meeting with Vladimir Putin. At the White House.

This was enough to send the Louise Mensch crowd – which now consists of the entire Democratic party base – into a frenzy: here, at last, was the “proof” that Trump is “Putin’s puppet.” The smirk on Rachel Maddow’s face got even smirkier. And Trump’s outgoing National Security Advisor, having just been fired, launched an attack from the dais of the Atlantic Council:

“Mr. Putin may believe that he is winning in this new form of warfare,” he said. “He may believe that his aggressive actions in the parks of Salisbury, in cyberspace, in the air, and on the high seas can undermine our confidence, our institutions, and our values. Perhaps he believes that our free nations are weak and will not respond. He. Is. Wrong.”

The clear implication here – understood by all the many cretins in that audience – is that Putin believes this because he has Trump in the palm of his hand. The President, they believe, is a traitor to the Empire – and, in an important sense, he is.

The Empire is the creation of the political class, which resides on the coasts and is centered in Washington. It is the creature of the City: middle America has no role in it, except in a negative sense – to serve as cannon fodder in their wars. The Country party is “isolationist” and always has been. Kept from the centers of power since the run-up to World War II, with Trump’s election the Country party has found its champion – but he’s too beleaguered to carry out the kind of fundamental change that his followers and well-wishers expect. And he has no real philosophy – only some good instincts (and plenty of bad ones) that come to the surface often but not consistently.

As I’ve said until I’m blue in the face: we won’t rid ourselves of the burden of empire overnight. It took decades for the political class to create this monstrous excrescence, and it will take at least that long for an organized effort to free us from the burden it imposes. And this is the key: an organized effort. A lobby for America First to counteract the militarist lobby is absolutely essential: that’s the factor that’s been missing since 1940. Trump can’t do it alone: he needs a grassroots campaign to back up his anti-interventionist instincts. The Country party must rise to meet the task – or lose out to those City slickers with blood on their hands and larceny in their hearts.

The War Party will do everything in its power to stop the Trump-Putin summit, because it’s the most hopeful sign yet that the tide is turning against them. The threat of nuclear war hasn’t gone away: indeed, it’s greater than ever. Think about it: an accident – a misreading of instruments, a rogue commander, a misunderstanding of some kind could launch a nuclear exchange between the United States and Russia, with the potential to end all life – all life! – on earth.

The stakes could not be higher.

 

For Mueller, a Feared Weakness Becomes a Strength

April 5, 2018

by Charlie Savage

The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, transformed this week what has appeared to be a weakness — his relative lack of independence — into a strength.

Since he was appointed in May by Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, the scope of Mr. Mueller’s power has been intensely debated. President Trump’s allies have portrayed the special counsel as running amok as his focus expanded to the business dealings of Mr. Trump’s associates. The president’s critics have worried that Mr. Mueller is too vulnerable to potential Trump administration interference.

The tension is familiar when the president comes under scrutiny by law enforcement, as the vast powers of the executive branch are at stake. Similar tensions cropped up during the Watergate, Iran-contra, Whitewater and Valerie Plame leak investigations. Now they have spurred the first significant legal fight arising from Mr. Mueller’s work, as Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s onetime campaign chairman, battles charges related to payments he received from a pro-Russia government in Ukraine.

“Manafort’s fight over Mueller’s authority goes to a central question in our republic, going all the way back to Plato’s question, ‘Who guards the guardians?’” said Neal Katyal, a former Justice Department official who drafted its special counsel regulations in 1999. “The central debate is how much independence do you want, versus how much accountability for the prosecution. There needs to be a balance between these two competing goals.”

Last month, Mr. Manafort asked Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia to dismiss his indictment. Portraying Mr. Mueller as out of control, Mr. Manafort’s defense lawyers contended that criminal allegations arising from their client’s Ukraine dealings either exceeded the limits of the special counsel’s assigned jurisdiction or that Mr. Rosenstein had improperly given Mr. Mueller a “blank check” to prosecute anything. Mr. Manafort has also filed a  lawsuit making similar arguments.

Mr. Mueller’s original assignment from Mr. Rosenstein was to look into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and any links to Trump campaign officials, with the ambiguous addition of “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation.”

In a response this week, Mr. Mueller’s team insisted that Mr. Manafort’s Ukraine dealings, in light of his campaign role were relevant to investigating links between Russia and the Trump campaign. The team also argued that Mr. Manafort had no right to challenge Mr. Mueller’s jurisdiction. (It did not, however, invoke the widespread belief that Mr. Mueller is using the Ukraine charges to pressure Mr. Manafort to divulge what he knows about 2016 events as part of a plea bargain.)

But members of Mr. Mueller’s team also backed up those arguments with a striking move: They emphatically pointed to their subordination to Mr. Rosenstein — the acting attorney general for the Russia investigation because Attorney General Jeff Sessions is recused from it.

While Mr. Rosenstein has testified that he knows about and approves of what Mr. Mueller is doing, the filing went into significant new detail, including disclosing that Mr. Rosenstein wrote a memo on Aug. 2 blessing the idea that Mr. Mueller’s jurisdiction extends to Mr. Manafort’s Ukraine-linked dealings.

“The acting attorney general appointed the special counsel, defined his jurisdiction, understands the scope of his investigation and has specifically confirmed that the allegations that form the basis” of Mr. Manafort’s prosecution are within Mr. Mueller’s purview, the filing said. “In these circumstances, no serious question of political accountability can be raised.”

Mr. Mueller’s assertive use of a Trump appointee’s control over his investigation as a shield against Mr. Manafort’s attack was a remarkable moment in the history of recurring tensions over the independence of investigations touching on high-level executive branch officials.

After the Watergate scandal, in which President Richard M. Nixon forced the Justice Department to fire the prosecutor investigating him, Congress enacted a law permitting the appointment of an “independent” counsel who would report to a panel of judges rather than to a presidential appointee.

Although the Supreme Court upheld Congress’s constitutional power to make that arrangement in a 1988 case, both political parties came to see it as a bad idea. In 1999, when the independent counsel statute expired, lawmakers did not renew it.

As a replacement, the Justice Department created a regulation to permit the appointment, from outside the government, of a special counsel who would exercise day-to-day independence but remain subject to control by the attorney general, who could veto decisions like whether to file charges or expand jurisdiction. At the same time, it limited the attorney general’s power to fire a special counsel to cases of misconduct.

But that regulation has rarely been used. The most high-profile case arising during George W. Bush’s administration — the appointment in 2003 of Patrick J. Fitzgerald to investigate who leaked the identity of Valerie Plame Wilson, a C.I.A. official — bypassed its envisioned arrangement.

Mr. Fitzgerald, then a United States attorney in Chicago, was appointed as a special counsel by James B. Comey, then the deputy attorney general, after Attorney General John Ashcroft recused himself from the investigation. Mr. Comey also delegated his supervisory powers as the acting attorney general to Mr. Fitzgerald, permitting the prosecutor to take major investigative steps “independent of the supervision or control of any officer of the department.”

By contrast, after Mr. Trump fired Mr. Comey in May from his subsequent job as F.B.I. director and Mr. Rosenstein appointed Mr. Mueller as special counsel, Mr. Rosenstein invoked the regulation — meaning he retained supervisory control.

At the time, some Democrats greeted that arrangement with suspicion. They worried that Mr. Rosenstein — a Trump appointee who had helped with Mr. Trump’s firing of Mr. Comey by writing a memo criticizing Mr. Comey’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation — would keep Mr. Mueller on a short leash.

During a June hearing, for example, Senator Kamala Harris, Democrat of California, pressed Mr. Rosenstein to instead create a more independent special counsel who could oversee himself, like Mr. Fitzgerald.

“Are you willing to do as has been done before?” she demanded.

Mr. Rosenstein demurred. While noting that Mr. Bush could have fired Mr. Fitzgerald for any reason — so working under the regulation gave Mr. Mueller greater protection — he also said there were other complicated legal issues that led him to his decision. (One of the complexities may have been that Mr. Mueller was not a current Justice Department employee at the time of his appointment, unlike Mr. Fitzgerald in 2003, so Mr. Mueller most likely could not have been delegated attorney general supervisory powers, Mr. Katyal said.)

The anxieties of that period make it all the more striking that, 10 months later, Mr. Mueller’s team is stressing his subordination to Mr. Rosenstein to repel Mr. Manafort’s attack.

Still, several specialists cautioned that Mr. Mueller’s subordination could revert to a weakness if Mr. Trump were to fire Mr. Sessions or Mr. Rosenstein, putting someone else in charge of the special counsel.

Against that backdrop, Julie O’Sullivan, a Georgetown University law professor and a former federal prosecutor, worried about the lengths the filing went to in detailing Mr. Rosenstein’s approval for Mr. Mueller’s actions.

“Mueller’s lack of independence was viewed as a real problem, but now it’s a response to any attack on the indictment,” she said. “I do wonder, though, if he hasn’t put Rosenstein in additional jeopardy.”

 

What Is Robert Mueller Looking For?

April 5, 2018

by Andrew P. Napolitano

AntiWar

Robert Mueller is the special counsel appointed by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in May 2017 to probe the nature and extent of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign. The investigation began in October 2016 under President Barack Obama when the FBI took seriously the boast of Carter Page, one of candidate Donald Trump’s foreign policy advisers, that he had worked for the Kremlin.

The FBI also had transcripts of telephone conversations and copies of emails and text messages of Trump campaign personnel that had been supplied to it by British intelligence. Connecting the dots, the FBI persuaded a judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to issue a search warrant for the surveillance of Page, an American.

Page never registered as a foreign agent, and working for the Kremlin and not registering as a foreign agent is a crime for which the FBI should have investigated Page. Such an investigation would have included surveillance, but not from the FISA court. Surveillance in a criminal case requires a search warrant from a U.S. District Court based upon the constitutional requirement of probable cause of crime – meaning that it is more likely than not that the thing to be searched (internet and telephone communications) will produce evidence of criminal behavior.

But the FBI didn’t seek that. Instead, it sought a warrant to surveil Page’s communications based on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act standard, which is probable cause of communicating with a foreign power. This lower, easier-to-demonstrate and unconstitutional standard is the tool of choice these days for FBI agents because it requires less effort and is used in a court that grants 99.9 percent of search warrant applications.

The temptation to use the FISA court and its easy standard instead of a U.S. District Court and its privacy-recognizing constitutional standard to get a search warrant is often too much for the FBI to resist. This is a form of corruption because it presents a path for criminal investigators to invade the privacy of Americans that the Constitution protects.

Yet the FBI used whatever it learned from the surveillance of Page to get that surveillance extended. Even the Trump Department of Justice went to the FISA court to spy on Page. Lost in all this is the purpose of FISA – to prevent government surveillance of Americans and limit it to agents of foreign powers.

When Jeff Sessions became attorney general, he recognized that he himself would most likely be a witness in the Mueller investigation because of his involvement in the Trump campaign, so he removed himself from all matters pertaining to Russia, and his deputy, Rosenstein, appointed Mueller to run the investigation.

What is Mueller looking for?

When the feds are examining a potential crime committed by a group, their treasure-trove of evidence can often be a member of the group who reveals the criminal behavior of his former colleagues. That’s why the feds often indict people for crimes that appear to be irrelevant to the ones they are investigating – in this case, lying to the FBI and bank fraud allegedly committed before the 2016 election.

When such an indicted person can then be persuaded to turn on his former colleagues in return for a lesser charge or a lighter sentence, prosecutors can have a field day. This is a form of bribery – you tell us on the witness stand what we want to hear and we’ll go easy on you – that is permitted only to prosecutors; and the courts condone it. If defense counsel gave as much as a lollipop to a witness to shade his testimony, both would be indicted.

From the backgrounds of those whom Mueller’s grand juries have indicted and from the deals they have cut with him, it appears that Mueller is looking at three areas of potential criminal behavior. Mueller has already established as a base line the saturation of the 2016 presidential campaign by Russian intelligence agents. If his indictments of these Russians are accurate, they were here virtually and physically and they spent millions to help Trump. But the indicted Russians are not coming back to the U.S. for their trials.

Mueller is examining their potential American confederates for the crime of conspiracy – or, as my colleagues in the media call it, collusion. This would be an agreement by campaign officials to accept something of value from a foreign person, entity or government, even if the thing of value – for example, Hillary Clinton emails – was never actually delivered. The crime is the agreement, and it is prosecutable after at least one of those who agreed takes a material step in furtherance of the agreement.

Mueller’s second area of examination is possible obstruction of justice by President Trump himself. Obstruction is the interference with a judicial proceeding for a corrupt purpose. Was FBI Director James Comey fired because Trump couldn’t work with him or because he was hot on the president’s trail and Trump wanted to impede that? If it was the former, it would have been licit. If it was the latter, it could have been criminal.

The third of Mueller’s areas is financial dealings by the pre-presidential Trump. These bear little surface relationship to Russian involvement in the campaign, yet evidence of wrongdoing must have come to Mueller from his FBI agents or his cooperating witnesses, and he is following the money as prosecutors do.

Where will all this go? The president cannot seem to find an experienced criminal defense lawyer. Mueller has 16 experienced federal prosecutors and a few dozen FBI agents passionately at work. And he also has witnesses he legally bribed and a few hundred thousand documents from the White House and from Trump’s financial affairs that the president has not personally reviewed.

And now Mueller wants to interview the president. Who will have the upper hand if that happens?

Muslims Accused of Plotting Violence Get Seven Times More Media Attention and Four Times Longer Sentences

April 5 2018

by Murtaza Hussain

The Intercept

American courts treat Muslims differently, a new study says. Among perpetrators of ideologically motivated violent plots, those who were perceived to be Muslim received sentences that were four times longer than non-Muslims involved in similar cases. The disproportionality carried over into the court of public opinion, too: Cases of attempted violence by Muslims received 7 1/2 times more coverage from major media outlets, while successful plots were covered twice as much.

These findings are contained in a new report, titled “Equal Treatment? Measuring the Legal and Media Responses to Ideologically Motivated Violence in the United States,” released on Thursday by the Washington-based Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, or ISPU. Built on years of research on cases of planned or successfully executed acts of ideological violence in the U.S., the report highlights glaring discrepancies in the way the judicial system and media treat such acts, depending on the background of the suspected perpetrator.

“The findings of this report build and expand on existing research, and provides quantitative backing to many people’s instinctual perceptions of what has been going on in the media and in our legal system,” said Kumar Rao, a fellow at ISPU and one of the co-authors of the report. “As it relates to acts of ideological violence, there is, frankly, a double standard in how perpetrators are described in the media, as well as how they are treated in the courts.”

The report draws on public databases that compile information on acts of ideological violence attempted or carried out in the U.S. between 2002 and 2015, including The Intercept’s Trial and Terror database, which tracks prosecutions of cases involving international terrorism. Among these cases were numerous bomb plots, plots to attack government buildings, attempts to stockpile assault rifles for the purpose of carrying out attacks against civilians, and completed attacks that led to two or more fatalities. (The researchers did a media analysis of completed attacks, but could not do a legal analysis, as those incidents often led to the death of the perpetrator.)

The researchers used seven different variables to control for the severity of the crime in cases comparing perceived Muslim and non-Muslim perpetrators, including whether the plots resulted in fatalities, utilized deadly weapons, or involved co-perpetrators. For purposes of analysis, the report refers to individuals “perceived” to be Muslim by the description of their motives in law enforcement statements and the media.

When comparing highly similar cases in terms of intended harm, the researchers found staggering disparities in the way cases were treated in the courts. In cases involving Muslim defendants, the study found that prosecutors sought three times longer sentences than they did in comparable cases involving non-Muslim defendants, seeking an average of 230 months in prison, compared to 76 months. Upon conviction, the sentences that Muslim defendants received were, on average, 211 months long, four times longer than the average 53-month sentences of non-Muslim defendants.

Law enforcement also used very different tactics in cases involving Muslim and non-Muslim perpetrators. In two-thirds of convicted plots involving Muslims, the means to actually commit the crime, such as explosives or weaponry, were in fact provided by undercover informants acting on behalf of the government. But only roughly 16 percent of investigations involving non-Muslim perpetrators utilized this controversial tactic, which critics have blamed for effectively manufacturing criminal conspiracies in many cases.

“What was really interesting is that in the majority of cases involving people perceived to be Muslim, the perpetrators were not acquiring weapons on their own, but were instead being provided with them by government agents — yet they were being charged more heavily,” said Carey Shenkman, also a fellow at ISPU and co-author of the report. “Meanwhile, in cases involving non-Muslim perpetrators, you very often had people actually making explosives and stockpiling firearms. They didn’t need the FBI to go over and hand them weapons, because they already had them.”

In 2014, Mohamed Osman Mohamud, a 21-year-old Muslim man in Oregon, was sentenced to 30 years in prison after being convicted of plotting a bombing. Government informants had encouraged Mohamud and provided the actual materials for the attack. Last fall, a North Carolina man named Michael Christopher Estes, who wanted to “fight a war on U.S. soil,” attempted to bomb an airport in North Carolina. In January, he pleaded guilty to unlawful possession of an explosive device, a charge that carries a maximum penalty of up to five years in prison. A sentencing date for his case has not yet been set.

Estes’s case barely registered in the national media. Nor was it promoted by political leaders who often enthusiastically use acts of violence committed by Muslims or Latinos to rally their bases around issues of immigration and national security.

The disparity in sentencing in these similar cases is attributable, in part, to the charges they faced. The ISPU study found that the government is more likely to prosecute Muslim defendants for possessing “weapons of mass destruction,” a far more serious charge than simple possession of explosives.

Media scrutiny of cases involving Muslim defendants has been similarly unbalanced over the years, according to the report. The ISPU researchers analyzed coverage by the New York Times and the Washington Post from 2002 to 2015, finding that foiled cases of ideologically motivated violence involving Muslim perpetrators received, on average, 770 percent more coverage than similar cases involving non-Muslims, while completed violent acts were covered twice as much. Last year, researchers at Georgia State University found that violent attacks involving Muslims received, on average, 4 1/2 times more coverage than those committed by non-Muslims.

This increased media attention also appeared to be helped along by government efforts to promote awareness of some cases rather than others. The ISPU study found that the Justice Department was, on average, six times more likely to issue press releases about foiled plots of violence involving Muslims than non-Muslims. Reporters often use these releases in their news stories following such incidents, using a summary of the government’s allegations and taking note of the harm that foiled plots could potentially have caused.

This disparity in media and legal attention to cases of ideologically motivated violence has grown more troubling with the increase of violence carried out by sympathizers of the “alt-right” movement over the past several years. More than 100 people have been killed or wounded in the U.S. since 2014 by people believed to have been supporters of the “alt-right,” according to a February report from the Southern Poverty Law Center. Supporters of a neo-Nazi group called Atomwaffen Division are alleged to have been responsible for recent murders, including the January killing of a young, gay, Jewish college student in California. Despite these acts of violence, however, the Department of Homeland Security under President Donald Trump has been working to strip funding from groups that work to mitigate far-right violence, while redirecting counter-extremism programming to focus exclusively on Muslim terrorism.

The disparities documented in the report help quantify a level of institutional bias in the legal system and media that many have argued exists in cases involving Muslim perpetrators. The glaring differences in response to very similar acts of violence suggest that systemic biases have warped the way in which these institutions are functioning, leading to vastly unequal treatment of individuals based on their personal background, as well as inappropriate or excessive policy responses to perceived threats.

“At heart, there is a question here of what we as a society deem threatening, and what we as a society are afraid of. What you often find is that when a crime is committed by a member of the dominant, privileged group in any society, it’s excused as an aberration, while crimes committed by members of an out-group are pathologized toward that group as a whole,” said Dalia Mogahed, the director of research at ISPU. “This implicit bias finds its way into all our institutions, including courtrooms and the media.”

“It’s a self-perpetuating problem, and until we address it and stop making excuses, it’s not going to change.”

 

‘Is Putin a CIA agent?’ NYT’s ‘dumbest paragraphs ever printed’ ridiculed online

April 5, 2018

RT

From the newspaper that brought you headlines like “Mother Russia crashes the Oscars,” and “What homoerotic videos can teach us about modern Russia,” comes another smash hit: “Is Putin a CIA agent?”

In the lauded journalist’s latest column, Thomas Friedman poses his ridiculous question, before unloading on the Russian leader in fourteen paragraphs of unfounded allegations, personal grievances, and impotent rage.

When he’s not trashing Putin for his “shirtless bravado” and apparent insecurity, Friedman rejoices in the expulsion of Russian diplomats from the West following the poisoning of Sergei and Julia Skripal. The fact that no evidence that Russia was involved in the poisoning was publically presented does not bother Friedman, nor does the fact that the nerve agent used may not have even originated in Russia.

Facts would only get in the way of his righteous outrage.

Likewise, Friedman describes Russia’s intervention in Syria as “another short-term sugar high for his base.” In reality, Russian intervention in Syria between 2015 and 2017 helped crush Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS), to the point where the terrorist group holds only two percent of the territory it held in 2015. Russian firms are now moving into Syria to rebuild the nation’s energy grid.

Naturally, Friedman’s fellow journalists took to Twitter to savage his column. They described it as “breathtakingly stupid,” “insufferable,” and “perhaps the dumbest 8 to 10 paragraphs ever printed in the New York Times.”

Current Affairs magazine held Friedman’s column up high as an example to young writers, saying:  “once again, aspiring writers: if you’re worried that you won’t have a successful writing career because you don’t think your writing is good enough, there’s no better way of gaining confidence in your relative abilities than by reading thomas friedman’s columns.”

Putin is not Friedman’s only target. He regularly uses his column to blast President Donald Trump, American gun owners, and whoever else opposes his sanctimonious brand of New York Neoliberalism.

And while it must be noted that Friedman’s opinion column does not necessarily reflect the views of the Times as a whole, it’s right at home in a newspaper that devotes column inch after column inch to bashing Russia every day.

 

 

Facebook says Cambridge Analytica may have gained 37m more users’ data

Company reveals up to 87m people may have been affected as Mark Zuckerberg takes responsibility for ‘a huge mistake’

April 4, 2018

by Olivia Solon in San Francisco

The Guardian

The Facebook data of up to 87 million people – 37 million more than previously reported – may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica, the company has revealed.

This larger figure, which included over a million UK users, was buried in the penultimate paragraph of a blogpost by the company’s chief technology officer, Mike Schroepfer, published on Wednesday, which also provided updates on the changes Facebook was making to better protect user information.

Mark Zuckerberg, during a conference call shortly after the post was published, said: “We didn’t take a broad enough view on what our responsibility was and that was a huge mistake. That was my mistake.”

When asked if anyone had been fired over the data scandal, the CEO replied: “I started this place, I run it, I’m responsible for what happens here. I’m going to do the best job I can going forward. I’m not looking to throw anyone under the bus for mistakes I’ve made.”

Zuckerberg’s latest mea culpa comes one week before he is due to face questioning from members of Congress over the data scandal. He will appear before the House energy and commerce committee on Wednesday 11 April.

Schroepfer, in his blogpost, outlined sweeping changes to the way third-party developers can interact with Facebook via APIs, the digital interfaces through which third parties can interact with and extract data from the platform.

The company will no longer allow developers to access the guest list or wall posts of an event scheduled on Facebook, while developers seeking to access the data of Facebook group members will first need to get the permission from a group administrator to ensure “they benefit the group”.

Facebook is also tightening its review process for apps that request access to information such as check-ins, likes, photos and posts, making developers agree to strict requirements. Apps will no longer be allowed access to personal information such as religious or political views, relationship status, education, work history, fitness activity, news habits and activity related to news, video and games consumption.

The company is also removing a tool that allows people to search for someone on Facebook using their phone number or email address because, Schroepfer said, “malicious actors have also abused these features to scrape public profile information”.

Zuckerberg also pointed out that privacy controls being introduced to ensure Facebook complied with Europe’s general data protection regulation would be available to users globally, contrary to earlier news reports.

“We will make all the same controls and settings available everywhere not just Europe,” he said.

The updates come two weeks after the Observer revealed that the data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the Brexit campaign acquired millions of profiles of US citizens and used it to build a software program to predict and influence voters. Facebook discovered the information had been harvested by a third party in late 2015, but failed to alert users at the time.

The data was collected through an app called thisisyourdigitallife, built by Cambridge University academic Aleksandr Kogan through his company Global Science Research in collaboration with Cambridge Analytica. Hundreds of thousands of users were paid a small fee to take a personality test and they consented to have their data collected.

However, the app also harvested the information of the participants’ friends, which allowed for the accumulation of data from tens of millions of Americans.

Following Facebook’s announcement of the 87m figure, Cambridge Analytica published a blog post stating that it had licensed data for “no more than 30m people from GSR” and “did not receive more data than this”.

Facebook first discovered that Kogan had improperly shared the information with Cambridge Analytica when a Guardian journalist contacted the company about it at the end of 2015. At the time Facebook asked Cambridge Analytica to delete the data and revoked Kogan’s access to the Facebook API, the interface through which third parties interact with the social network.

After the Observer contacted Facebook three weeks ago with testimony from a whistleblower stating that Cambridge Analytica had not deleted the data, Facebook has announced a series of measures to prevent future data leaks.

Zuckerberg said the company would investigate apps that had access to “large amounts of information” and audit any apps that show “suspicious activity”. The company said it would also inform those whose data was “misused”.

Last week the company announced plans to shut down a feature allowing “data brokers” such as Experian and Oracle to use their own reams of consumer information to target social network users.

 

Trump activates plan to deploy National Guard to Mexico border

April 4, 2017

by Cristiano Lima

Politico

President Donald Trump has directed officials to deploy the National Guard to the southern U.S. border as part of a push to curb illegal immigration, Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen said Wednesday.

Nielsen told reporters during a White House press briefing that Trump “will be signing a proclamation to that effect today.”

“The president has directed that the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security work together with our governors to deploy our National Guard to our southwest border to assist the border patrol,” Nielsen said.

Nielsen added that plans were still “being finalized” but that officials were “working with all haste” to implement the measure. “We do hope that the deployment begins immediately,” she said. Nielsen said that personnel could be deployed as early as Wednesday night, but that the rollout would be made in conjunction with state officials.

The DHS secretary did not specify how many troops would be deployed, but she said they would serve functions similar to those they performed when they were dispatched to the border by past administrations, including assisting in aerial surveillance and providing support functions to current patrol officials.

Nielsen declined to comment on the cost of the deployment but said “past numbers should be indicative.”

Pressed on whether the troops would be tasked with enforcement measures, such as arresting undocumented immigrants, Nielsen said they would not, “as of now.”

The announcement came a day after Trump said he intended to deploy military personnel to the U.S.-Mexico border until his administration was able to deliver on his campaign promise to build a wall to bolster security. The president did not elaborate on the timing for the decision.

Nielsen said she had discussed the measure with Mexican officials. “They understand and respect national sovereignty,” she said.

Trump said Tuesday during a session at the White House with Baltic leaders: “We are going to be guarding our border with our military. That’s a big step. We cannot have people flowing into our country illegally, disappearing and, by the way, never showing up for court.”

His decision to send troops to the southern border is not without precedent. President George W. Bush deployed roughly 6,000 members of the National Guard from 2006 to 2008 to assist Customs and Border Protection officials. The troops were armed but did not have the authority to carry out law enforcement functions, like detaining suspects.

President Barack Obama sent about 1,200 National Guard members to the border in 2010, primarily to perform surveillance functions.

Homeland Security recorded the lowest number of border arrests on record in fiscal year 2017, but administration officials maintained on Wednesday that a surge of migrants could be on the horizon — something they depicted as a threat underscoring the need to deploy military personnel.

Border Patrol recorded 37,393 arrests on the southwest border in March, according to data released Wednesday evening by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The tally represents a more than 200 percent increase over the same period a year earlier — when border arrests plummeted after Trump took office.

The number of family units and unaccompanied minors picked up at the border also continued to rise in March. Border Patrol agents nabbed 8,882 families and 4,171 unaccompanied minors, according to CBP.

A senior official told reporters on Wednesday that the numbers “clearly emphasize the need for additional action.”

Nielsen has spoken with all border state governors, and the conversations were productive, the official said, adding that the administration remained “optimistic” about a cooperation plan — a less-likely prospect in immigrant-friendly California, which is led by Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown.

The specifics, including whether National Guard troops will be armed during deployment, remain under discussion, according to the official.

In addition to the president’s directive, the White House is drafting legislation that would address what it calls immigration “loopholes” — laws that prevent federal immigration officers from swiftly deporting children, families and asylum seekers.

Administration officials cautioned on Wednesday that troop deployment alone would be insufficient if Congress does not address issues in the immigration system at the legislative level.

“This will not be enough if Congress does not act to pass clear, fair and effective legislation that ends the illegality and creates a system that serves the national interest,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement. “It is essential for Congress to act.”

In his remarks, Sessions directly cited recent media reports about a “so-called ‘migrant caravan’” in emphasizing the need for dispatching the National Guard. Earlier this week, the president launched a Twitter spree on immigration shortly after Fox News aired a report on a large group of Central American immigrants making its way through Mexico. The sequence raised questions of whether Trump was influenced by Fox in opting to deploy troops.

Nielsen and White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders declined to comment at Wednesday’s briefing on whether the Fox News report had affected Trump’s thinking on the matter.

The president’s proposal was met by skepticism from some former military officials and Democratic lawmakers, with Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) calling it a “waste” of taxpayer money on Tuesday.

Sanders fired back at the criticism on Wednesday.

“If that congressman’s so concerned, maybe he ought to show up and actually support legislation that would fix these problems instead of blaming the president that’s actually doing something about it,” she said.

Trump has made securing the southern border a focal point of his presidency, with plans to beef up border security and create a wall as key components.

Last month, Customs and Border Protection officials revealed that the administration would put 2018 congressional appropriations — about $1.6 billion — toward creating or replacing roughly 100 miles of wall structures along the southern border.

Ted Hesson contributed to this report.

 

TOP SECRET SPECIAL HANDLING -NOFORN

PRETEXTS TO JUSTIFY US MILITARY INTERVENTION IN CUBA

(Note: The courses of action which follow are a preliminary submission suitable only for planning purposes. They are arranged neither chronologically nor in ascending order. Together with similar inputs from other agencies, they are intended to provide a point of departure for the development of a single, integrated, time-phased plan. Such a plan would permit the evaluation of individual projects within the context of cumulative, correlated actions designed to lead inexorably to the objective of adequate justification for US military intervention in Cuba).

  1. Since it would seem desirable to use legitimate provocation as the basis for US military intervention in Cuba a cover and deception plan, to include requisite preliminary actions such as has been developed in response to Task 33 c, could be executed as an initial effort to provoke Cuban reactions. Harassment plus deceptive actions to convince the Cubans of imminent invasion would be emphasized. Our military posture throughout execution of the plan will allow a rapid change from exercise to intervention if Cuban response justifies.
  2. A series of well coordinated incidents will be planned to take place in and around Guantanamo to give genuine appearance of being done by hostile Cuban forces.
  3. Incidents to establish a credible attack (not in chronological order):

(1) Start rumors (many). Use clandestine radio stations

(2) Land friendly Cubans in uniform “over-the-fence” to stage attack on base.

(3) Capture Cuban (friendly) saboteurs inside the base.

(4) Start riots near the base main gate (friendly Cubans).

(5) Blow up ammunition inside the base; start fires.

(6) Burn aircraft on air base (sabotage).

(7) Lob mortar shells from outside of base into base. Some damage to installations.

(8) Capture assault teams approaching from the sea or vicinity of Guantanamo City.

(9) Capture militia group which storms the base

(10) Sabotage ship in harbor; large fires — napthalene.

(11) Sink ship near harbor entrance. Conduct funerals for mock-victims (may be lieu of (10)).

  1. United States would respond by executing offensive operations to secure water and power supplies, destroying artillery and mortar emplacements which threaten the base.
  2. Commence large scale United States military operations.
  3. A “Remember the Maine” incident could be arranged in several forms:
  4. We could blow up a US ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba.
  5. We could blow up a drone (unmanned) vessel anywhere in the Cuban waters. We could arrange to cause such incident in the vicinity of Havana or Santiago as a spectacular result of Cuban attack from the air or sea, or both. The presence of Cuban planes or ships merely investigating the intent of the vessel could be fairly compelling evidence that the ship was under attack. The nearness to Havana or Santiago would add credibility especially to those people that might have heard the blast or have seen the fire. The US could follow up with an air/sea rescue operation covered by US fighters to “evacuate” remaining members of the non-existent crew. Casualty lists in US newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.
  6. We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington.

The terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States. We could sink a boatload of Cubans enroute to Florida (real or simulated). We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized. Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots, the arrest of Cuban agents and the release of prepared documents substantiating Cuban involvement also would be helpful in projecting the idea of an irresponsible government.

  1. A “Cuban-based, Castro-supported” filibuster could be simulated against a neighboring Caribbean nation (in the vein of the 14th of June invasion of the Dominican Republic). We know that Castro is backing subversive efforts clandestinely against Haiti, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, and Nicaragua at present and possible others. These efforts can be magnified and additional ones contrived for exposure. For example, advantage can be taken of the sensitivity of the Dominican Air Force to intrusions within their national air space. “Cuban” B-26 or C-46 type aircraft could make cane-burning raids at night. Soviet Bloc incendiaries could be found. This could be coupled with “Cuban” messages to the Communist underground in the Dominican Republic and “Cuban” shipments of arms which could be found, or intercepted, on the beach.
  2. Use of MIG type aircraft by US pilots could provide additional provocation. Harassment of civil air, attacks on surface shipping and destruction of US military drone aircraft by MIG type planes would be useful as complementary actions. An F-86 properly painted would convince air passengers that they saw a Cuban MIG, especially if the pilot of the transport were to announce such fact. The primary drawback to this suggestion appears to be the security risk inherent in obtaining or modifying an aircraft. However, reasonable copies of the MIG could be produced from US resources in about three months.
  3. Hijacking attempts against civil air and surface craft should appear to continue as harassing measures condoned by the government of Cuba. Concurrently, genuine defections of Cuban civil and military air and surface craft should be encouraged.
  4. It is possible to create an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner enroute from the United States to Jamaica, Guatemala, Panama or Venezuela. The destination would be chosen only to cause the flight plan route to cross Cuba. The passengers could be a group of college students off on a holiday or any grouping of persons with a common interest to support chartering a non-scheduled flight.
  5. An aircraft at Eglin AFB would be painted and numbered as an exact duplicate for a civil registered aircraft belonging to a CIA proprietary organization in the Miami area. At a designated time the duplicate would be substituted for the actual aircraft and would be loaded with the selected passengers, all boarded under carefully prepared aliases. The actual registered aircraft would be converted to a drone.
  6. Take off times of the drone aircraft and the actual aircraft will be scheduled to allow a rendezvous south of Florida. From the rendezvous point the passenger-carrying aircraft will descend to minimum altitude and go directly into an auxiliary field at Eglin AFB where arrangements will have been made to evacuate the passengers and return the aircraft to its original status. The drone aircraft meanwhile will continue to fly the filed flight plan. When over Cuba the drone will being transmitting on the international distress frequency a “MAY DAY” message stating he is under attack by Cuban MIG aircraft. The transmission will be interrupted by destruction of the aircraft which will be triggered by radio signal. This will allow ICAO radio stations in the Western Hemisphere to tell the US what has happened to the aircraft instead of the US trying to “sell” the incident.
  7. It is possible to create an incident which will make it appear that Communist Cuban MIGs have destroyed a USAF aircraft over international waters in an unprovoked attack.
  8. Approximately 4 or 5 F-101 aircraft will be dispatched in trail from Homestead AFB, Florida, to the vicinity of Cuba. Their mission will be to reverse course and simulate fakir aircraft for an air defense exercise in southern Florida. These aircraft would conduct variations of these flights at frequent intervals. Crews would be briefed to remain at least 12 miles off the Cuban coast; however, they would be required to carry live ammunition in the event that hostile actions were taken by the Cuban MIGs.
  9. On one such flight, a pre-briefed pilot would fly tail-end Charley at considerable interval between aircraft. While near the Cuban Island this pilot would broadcast that he had been jumped by MIGs and was going down. No other calls would be made. The pilot would then fly directly west at extremely low altitude and land at a secure base, an Eglin auxiliary. The aircraft would be met by the proper people, quickly stored and given a new tail number. The pilot who had performed the mission under an alias, would resume his proper identity and return to his normal place of business. The pilot and aircraft would then have disappeared.
  10. At precisely the same time that the aircraft was presumably shot down a submarine or small surface craft would disburse F-101 parts, parachute, etc., at approximately 15 to 20 miles off the Cuban coast and depart. The pilots returning to Homestead would have a true story as far as they knew. Search ships and aircraft could be dispatched and parts of aircraft found.

 

Ruling means Puigdemont cannot face rebellion charges: German court spokeswoman

April 5, 2018

Reuters

BERLIN (Reuters) – Former Catalan President Carles Puigdemont is free to leave prison as soon as he posts bail of 75,000 euros, but must remain in Germany, reporting weekly to police, while extradition proceedings continue, a German court spokeswoman said on Thursday.

The higher regional court of Schleswig-Holstein ruled earlier that Puigdemont could be extradited only on corruption charges, not charges of rebellion as Madrid had also requested.

Reporting by Thomas Escritt; editing by Andrew Roche

 

 

 

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