TBR News June 2, 2017

Jun 02 2017

The Voice of the White House  

Washington, D.C. June 2, 2017:”We have a most interesting situation that has developed.

WikiLeaks has been releasing to the public, great troves of highly embarrassing intercepted emails.

No one has said they were faked.

WikiLeaks is always stated to be controlled by Julian Assange, an Australian who once worked for the US DARPA intelligence program.

Assange is in the Bolivian Embassy in London and is quite incapable of sending the WikiLeaks messages.

It did not take any kind of trouble to have a computer specialist check on the actual location of WikiLeaks and they at once came up with the Moscow address.

But officialdom and their captive media have never, ever, mentioned this fact although there has been loud and incoherent screaming about this.

And a list of the entities whom WikiLeaks has plundered the computers of is as long as a telephone book.

Our first article today shows only some of the more prominent ones.

More will follow.

And the Russian computer offensive is a reaction to long harassment of that country by the United States and its trained poodles.”

Table of Contents

  • Who Owns WikiLeaks?
  • Spying on You, Spying on Me, Spying on the President
  • James O’Keefe Hit by Group He Stung With Million-Dollar Lawsuit
  • Top Defense Contractor Left Sensitive Pentagon Files on Amazon Server With No Password
  • Trump delays moving U.S. embassy to Jerusalem despite campaign pledge
  • What Did John Brennan and Anonymous Sources Really Say?
  • Shadowy Chinese Conglomerate Cultivated Ties to the Most Powerful U.S. Politicians
  • How China Rolled Up a CIA Network
  • Haven’t We Had Enough of Afghanistan?
  • Kill them All!
  • The awful David Clarke and the homeland security behemoth
  • Giant iceberg close to separating from Antarctic ice shelf
  • Gunman torches Philippine casino, killing at least 36 people

 

Who Owns WikiLeaks?

June 2, 2017

by Gaylord E. Wessock

The WikiLeaks site is hosted on servers based in Russia — the actual owner of the site is a man by the name of Peter Chayanov.

IP addresses

IP Address of WikiLeaks is: 141.105.65.113

Host: wikileaks.org

Location: Ru- Russian Federation

City: Moscow 48, 101-1194

It is known in European intelligence circles that computer experts, working for WikiLeaks, have managed to penetrate the highest level of secret computer-originated messaging for the following entities in the United States:

  • Democratic National Committee (DNC)
  • Republican National Committee (RNC)
  • Bank of America (BoA)
  • Goldman Sachs
  • The World Bank
  • The International Monetary Fund (IMF)
  • Bloomberg
  • Google
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • The Wall Street Journal (WSJ)
  • The New York Times (NYT)
  • The Washington Post (WP)
  • The White House
  • The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
  • The National Security Agency (NSA)
  • The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
  • The Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
  • The Naval Security Group (NSG)
  • The 902nd Military Intelligence Group
  • The United States Army Intelligence CI Special Agents (USAI)
  • The Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM)
  • The Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI)
  • The DIA’s Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center (DCHC)
  • The Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS)
  • Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence
  • National Reconnaissance Office
  • Other specific American, and foreign, agencies and/or business, financial and political entities
  • Bureau of Intelligence and Research

Spying on You, Spying on Me, Spying on the President

June 1, 2017

by Andrew P. Napolitano

AntiWar

“The makers of our Constitution … conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone – the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.” ~ Justice Louis D. Brandeis, 1928

After the Watergate era had ended and Jimmy Carter was in the White House and the Senate’s Church Committee had attempted to grasp the full extent of lawless government surveillance in America during the LBJ and Nixon years, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. FISA declared that it provided the sole source for federal surveillance in America for intelligence purposes.

FISA required that all domestic intelligence surveillance be authorized by a newly created court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Since 1978, FISC has met in secret. Its records are unavailable to the public unless it determines otherwise, and it hears only from Department of Justice lawyers and National Security Agency personnel. There are no lawyers or witnesses to challenge the DOJ or the NSA.

Notwithstanding this handy constitutional novelty, the NSA quickly grew impatient with its monitors and began crafting novel arguments that were met with no resistance. Those arguments did away with the kind of particularized probable cause about targets of surveillance that the Constitution requires in favor of warrants based on the probability that someone somewhere in a given group could provide intelligence data helpful to national security, and because the FISC bought these arguments, the entire group could be spied upon. The FISC unleashed the NSA to spy on tens of millions of Americans.

That was still not enough for the nation’s spies. So beginning in 2005, then-President George W. Bush permitted the NSA to interpret President Ronald Reagan’s executive order 12333 so as to allow all spying on everyone in the U.S., all the time. The NSA and Bush took the position that because the president is constitutionally the commander in chief of the military and because the NSA is in the military, both the president and the NSA are lawfully independent of FISA.

The NSA does not acknowledge any of this, but we know from the Edward Snowden revelations and from the testimony of a former high-ranking NSA official who devised many of the NSA programs that this is so.

The NSA’s use of FISC-issued warrants is only one of a half-dozen tools that the NSA uses, but it is the only tool that the NSA publicly acknowledges. FISC-issued warrants do not name a person as a suspect; they name a category. For example, it could be customers of Verizon, which includes 115 million people. It could be telephones and computers located at 721-725 Fifth Ave. in New York; that’s Trump Tower. It could be all electronic devices in the 10036 ZIP code; that’s midtown Manhattan.

When the NSA obtains a FISA warrant and captures a communication, the participants often mention a third person. The federal “minimization” statute requires the NSA to get a warrant before surveilling that third person. Last week, we learned that last month, the FISC rebuked the NSA for failing to minimize by continuing to surveil third parties to the sixth degree without warrants.

Here is an example of warrantless surveillance to the sixth degree. The NSA surveils A and B pursuant to a FISC-issued warrant; A and B discuss C; the NSA, without a warrant, surveils C talking to D; C mentions E, and D mentions F; the NSA surveils E and F without warrants, etc. This continues going out to six stops from the A-and-B conversation, even though this is prohibited by federal law. The final stop, which involves huge numbers of people, has been proved to have no connection whatsoever to the warrant issued for A and B, yet the NSA continues to spy there.

But it doesn’t stop there. The Bush interpretation of EO 12333 is still followed by the NSA. Its logic – “I am the commander in chief, and I’ll do what I need to do to keep us safe, and the NSA can do what I permit” – permits universal surveillance in flagrant violation of FISA and the Constitution. It was used to justify the surveillance of Donald Trump before he was inaugurated. It no doubt still is.

The availability of the information acquired by this massive spying is a serious threat to democracy. We know from the Susan Rice admissions that folks in the government can acquire intelligence-generated data – emails, text messages, recordings of telephone conversations – and use that data for political purposes. Just ask former Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. And we know from recent tragedies in San Bernardino and Orlando, even Manchester, that the NSA is suffering from information overload. It has too much data to sift through because it does not focus on the bad guys until after the tragedies. Before the tragedies, it has no focus.

The now public rebuke of the NSA by the FISC is extraordinary, but it is also a farce. The FISC is virtually owned by the NSA. That court has granted 99.9 percent of requests made by the NSA since the court was created. Despite all the public revelations, the FISC looks the other way at non-FISC-authorized NSA spying. The judges of the FISC have become virtual clerks for the NSA. And the FISC has become an unconstitutional joke.

Where does all this leave us? It leaves us with a public recognition that we are the most spied-upon people in world history and that the president himself has been a victim. This fall, the NSA will ask Congress to reauthorize certain spying authorities that are due to expire at the end of the year. Congress needs to know just how unconstitutional, intrusive and fruitless all this spying has become.

Perhaps then Congress will write laws that are faithful to the Constitution – and if so, maybe the folks empowered by those laws will follow them.

James O’Keefe Hit by Group He Stung With Million-Dollar Lawsuit

June 1, 2017

by Ryan Grim

The Intercept

Conservative provocateur James O’Keefe III will be hit with a million-dollar lawsuit on Thursday, sources behind the filing tell The Intercept.

The lawsuit accuses O’Keefe and his organization, Project Veritas, with breaking local and federal wiretap laws and running afoul of other statutes, dubbing him and two colleagues “modern-day Watergate burglars.”

O’Keefe operative Allison Maass posed as a progressive activist, using an elaborate cover story and falsified documents to win an internship with the Democratic campaign consultants Democracy Partners.

“Basically O’Keefe and Maass were modern-day Watergate burglars. They used fraud to get Maass a position as an intern at Democracy Partners so they could steal documents and secretly videotape conversations,” said Joe Sandler, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs. “There is no question that, in doing so, they violated federal and D.C. law and should be held liable for the damages suffered by our clients as a result.”

O’Keefe’s scheme involved having a man claiming to be a potential donor to the Democratic group Americans United for Change ask Robert Creamer, a principal at Democracy Partners, if his niece, going by the name Angela Brandt, could do volunteer work. Brandt was in fact Maass.

Maass, much like the burglars who broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters ahead of the 1972 campaign, pilfered a large cache of documents. Maass also secretly filmed interactions with Democracy Partners staff.

O’Keefe worked closely with the right-wing local news chain Sinclair Broadcast Group in rolling out the videos produced from the sting. President Trump’s top adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner had struck a deal during the campaign with Sinclair that exchanged access for favorable coverage. Sinclair is deeply influential at the local level, having the trust of local television networks.

Project Veritas also distributed the videos through the conservative outlet Breitbart, which was a veritable arm of the Trump campaign during the election; its former honcho, Steve Bannon, took a leave to officially run Trump’s campaign, though he stayed in close touch with reporters there, according to sources familiar with the relationship. The Trump Foundation previously gave Project Veritas $10,000 and, after the election, Trump called O’Keefe to thank him and invite him to the inauguration.

O’Keefe told The Intercept he plans to aggressively challenge the suit and would be offering a lengthier statement shortly. (We’ll update this post when he does.)

Creamer, a plaintiff in the Thursday suit and a central figure in the O’Keefe videos, announced he was “stepping back” from his work on behalf of the Clinton campaign in the wake of the video release. Operative Scott Foval left his job with AUC. The videos alleged a voter-fraud scheme and came after Trump had made unfounded accusations of widespread fraud. He used the videos to claim vindication.

Wisconsin’s attorney general looked into charging Foval, and his office announced in April it was closing the case. Days later, under pressure, he reversed himself, and said the investigation remains open.

Georgetown University Law Center’s Institute of Public Representation agreed to take on the lawsuit, suggesting that it may have legal merit.

Institute of Public Representation staff attorney Yael Bromberg said her center got behind the case “because the fraud that O’Keefe and Project Veritas perpetrate debase our politics and has no place in our democracy.”

“When we heard about the manner and method which it took place, it occurred to us this is an issue about democracy, not partisanship,” she added. “This is not about journalism, it’s about political espionage.”

It is legal in Washington to record a conversation with another person without their consent, but Bromberg argued that O’Keefe and Maass are not shielded by that law because of the civil conspiracy, fraud, and duplicity behind the project.

Top Defense Contractor Left Sensitive Pentagon Files on Amazon Server With No Password

May 31, 2017

by Dell Cameron

gizmodo

Sensitive files tied to a US military project were leaked by a multi-billion dollar firm once described as the world’s most profitable spy operation, Gizmodo has confirmed.

A cache of more than 60,000 files was discovered last week on a publicly accessible Amazon server, including passwords to a US government system containing sensitive information, and the security credentials of a lead senior engineer at Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the nation’s top intelligence and defense contractors. What’s more, the roughly 28GB of data contained at least a half dozen unencrypted passwords belonging to government contractors with Top Secret Facility Clearance.

The exposed credentials could potentially grant their holders further access to repositories housing similarly sensitive government da

Countless references are made in the leaked files to the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), which in March awarded Booz Allen an $86 million defense contract. Often referred to as the Pentagon’s “mapmakers,” the combat support agency works alongside the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, and the Defense Intelligence Agency to collect and analyze geospatial data gathered by spy satellites and aerial drones.

The NGA on Tuesday confirmed the leak to Gizmodo while stressing that no classified information had been disclosed. “NGA takes the potential disclosure of sensitive but unclassified information seriously and immediately revoked the affected credentials,” an agency spokesperson said. The Amazon server from which the data was leaked was “not directly connected to classified networks,” the spokesperson noted.

UpGuard cyber risk analyst Chris Vickery discovered the Booz Allen server last week while at his Santa Rosa home running a scan for publicly accessible s3 buckets (what Amazon calls its cloud storage devices). At first there was no reason to suspect it contained sensitive military data. Typically, US government servers hosted by Amazon are segregated into what’s called the GovCloud—a “gated community” protected by advanced cryptography and physical security. Instead, the Booz Allen bucket was found in region “US-East-1,” chiefly comprised of public and commercial data.

Yet the files bore some hallmarks of a government project. First, Vickery spotted the public and private SSH keys of a Booz Allen employee, identified by his LinkedIn page as a lead senior engineer in Virginia—also home to the NGA’s Fort Belvoir campus. “Exposing a private key belonging to a Booz Allen IT engineer is potentially catastrophic for malicious intrusion possibilities,”he said.

SSH keys employ what’s called public-key cryptography and challenge-response authentication. Essentially, Booz Allen stores sensitive data in the cloud, and before the engineer can access it, his private key must pair successfully with a public key on Booz Allen’s server. This protocol only really works, however, so long as the employee’s private key remains a secret.

“Booz Allen takes any allegation of a data breach very seriously, and promptly began an investigation into the accessibility of certain security keys in a cloud environment,” a Booz Allen spokesman told Gizmodo on Tuesday. “We secured those keys, and are continuing with a detailed forensic investigation. As of now, we have found no evidence that any classified information has been compromised as a result of this matter.”

Mark Zaid, a Washington lawyer who specializes in national security cases, said the incident is likely to dredge up bad memories of the company. “The first thing that jumps to mind,” he said, is “Oh, no. It’s Booz Allen again.”

Zaid was referring to Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who worked for Booz Allen when he fled to Hong Kong in 2013 with a trove of classified material. Another of the firm’s employees, Harold Martin III, was arrested last year and charged under the Espionage Act after federal agents discovered over 50 terabytes of classified data in his residence, the trunk of his car and in an unlocked outdoor shed

“Obviously, Booz Allen is a large company and a well-respected defense contractor,” Zaid added. “And none of these cases are necessarily related to one another. But it still raises some real serious concerns about what’s going on with Booz Allen’s security protocols.”

Trump delays moving U.S. embassy to Jerusalem despite campaign pledge

June 1, 2017

by Matt Spetalnick

Reuters

WASHINGTON-President Donald Trump signed a temporary order on Thursday to keep the U.S. embassy in Israel in Tel Aviv instead of relocating it to Jerusalem, despite his campaign pledge to go ahead with the controversial move.

After months of fierce debate within his administration, Trump chose to continue his predecessors’ policy of signing a six-month waiver overriding a 1995 law requiring that the embassy be transferred to Jerusalem, an action that would have complicated his efforts to restart Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

The White House insisted, however, that the decision, which is sure to disappoint Israel’s U.S. supporters, did not mean Trump was abandoning the goal of eventually shifting the embassy to Jerusalem. But a U.S. official said no timetable has been set.

“The question is not if that move happens, but only when,” the White House said in a statement.

With a deadline looming, Trump made the decision to defer action on the embassy “to maximize the chances of successfully negotiating a deal between Israel and the Palestinians, fulfilling his solemn obligation to defend America’s national security interests,” the White House said.

Palestinian leaders, Arab governments and Western allies had urged Trump not to proceed with the embassy relocation, which would have upended decades of U.S. policy by granting what would have been seen as de facto U.S. recognition of Israel’s claim to all of Jerusalem as its capital.

“Though Israel is disappointed that the embassy will not move at this time, we appreciate today’s expression of President Trump’s friendship to Israel and his commitment to moving the embassy in the future,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement.

Taking a harder stance, Israeli Education Minister Naftali Bennett, a far-right member of Netanyahu’s coalition, said delaying the move would “damage the prospect of a lasting peace by nurturing false expectations among the Palestinians regarding the division of Jerusalem, which will never happen.”

Nabil Abu Rdainah, a close aide to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, said Trump’s decision “reaffirms the seriousness of the United States in its efforts to achieve peace.”

NO MENTION OF EMBASSY

Trump avoided any public mention of a potential embassy move during his visit to Israel and the West Bank in May. Despite that, most experts are skeptical of Trump’s chances for achieving a peace deal that had eluded other U.S. presidents.

The status of Jerusalem is one of the major stumbling blocks. Israel captured Arab East Jerusalem during the 1967 Middle East war and later annexed it, a move not recognized internationally. Israel considers all of the city its indivisible capital.

The Palestinians want East Jerusalem as the capital of their future state. Jerusalem is home to sites considered holy by the Jewish, Muslim and Christian religions.

Successive U.S. administrations have insisted that Jerusalem’s status must be decided in negotiations.

On the campaign trail, Trump’s pro-Israel rhetoric raised expectations that he would act quickly to move the embassy. But after he took office in January, the issue lost momentum as he met Arab leaders who warned it would be hard to rejuvenate long-stalled peace efforts unless he acted as a fair mediator.

Some of Trump’s top aides pushed for him to keep his campaign promise to satisfy the pro-Israel, right-wing base that helped him win the presidency. The State Department, however recommended against an embassy move, one U.S. official said.

“No one should consider this step to be in any way a retreat from the president’s strong support for Israel,” according to the White House statement on the signing of the waiver.

(Additional reporting by Ori Lewis in Jerusalem; Writing by Matt Spetalnick; Editing by Bernadette Baum and James Dalgleish)

 What Did John Brennan and Anonymous Sources Really Say?

Speaking to a Russian becomes treasonous

May 30, 2017

by Philip Giraldi

The Unz Review

The Washington Post and a number of other mainstream media outlets are sensing blood in the water in the wake of former CIA Director John Brennan’s public testimony before the House Intelligence Committee. The Post headlined a front page featured article with Brennan’s explosive testimony just made it harder for the GOP to protect Trump. The article states that Brennan during the 2016 campaign “reviewed intelligence that showed ‘contacts and interaction’ between Russian actors and people associated with the Trump campaign.” Politico was also in on the chase in an article entitled Brennan: Russia may have successfully recruited Trump campaign aides.

The precise money quote by Brennan that the two articles chiefly rely on is “I encountered and am aware of information and intelligence that revealed contacts and interactions between Russian officials and US persons involved in the Trump campaign that I was concerned about because of known Russian efforts to suborn such individuals. It raised questions in my mind whether or not Russia was able to gain the co-operation of those individuals.”

Now first of all, the CIA is not supposed to keep tabs on American citizens and tracking the activities of known associates of a presidential candidate should have sent warning bells off, yet Brennan clearly persisted in following the trail. What Brennan did not describe, because it was “classified,” was how he came upon the information in the first place. We know from the New York Times and other sources that it came from foreign intelligence services, including the British, Dutch and Estonians, and there has to be a strong suspicion that the forwarding of at least some of that information might have been sought or possibly inspired by Brennan unofficially in the first place. But whatever the provenance of the intelligence, it is clear that Brennan then used that information to request an FBI investigation into a possible Russian operation directed against potential key advisers if Trump were to somehow get nominated and elected, which admittedly was a longshot at the time.

That is how Russiagate began.

But where the information ultimately came from as well as its reliability is just speculation as the source documents have not been made public. What is not speculative is what Brennan actually said in his testimony. He said that Americans associated with Trump and his campaign had met with Russians. He was “concerned” because of known Russian efforts to “suborn such individuals.” Note that Brennan, presumably deliberately, did not say “suborn those individuals.” Sure, Russian intelligence (and CIA, MI-6, and Mossad as well as a host of others) seek to recruit people with access to politically useful information. That is what they do for a living, but Brennan is not saying that he has or saw any evidence that that was the case with the Trump associates. He is speaking generically of “such individuals” because he knows that spies, inter alia, recruit politicians and the Russians presumably, like the Americans and British, do so aggressively.

At a later point in his testimony Brennan also said that “I had unresolved questions in my mind about whether or not the Russians had been successful in getting U.S. persons, involved in the campaign or not, to work on their behalf, again, either in a witting or unwitting fashion,” clearly meant to imply that some friends of Trump might have become Russian agents voluntarily but others might have cooperated without knowing it. It is a line that has surfaced elsewhere previously, most notably in the demented meanderings of former acting Director of Central Intelligence Michael Morell. As the purpose of recruiting an intelligence agent is to have a resource that can be directed to do things for you, the statement is an absurdity and Brennan and Morell, as a former Director and acting Director of the CIA, should know better. That they don’t explains a lot of things about today’s CIA.

Brennan confirms his lack of any hard evidence when he also poses the question “whether or not Russia was able to gain the co-operation of those individuals.” He doesn’t know whether the Americans were approached and asked to cooperate by Russian intelligence officers and, even if they were, he does not know whether they agreed to do so. That means that the Americans in question were guilty only of meeting and talking to Russians, which was presumably enough to open an FBI investigation. One might well consider that at the time and even to this day Russia was not and is not a declared enemy of the United States and meeting Russians is not a criminal offense.

In his testimony, Brennan also hit the main theme that appears to be accepted by nearly everyone inside the beltway, namely that Russian sought to influence and even pervert the outcome of the 2016 election. Interpreting his testimony, the Post article asserts that “Russia was engaged in an ‘aggressive’ and ‘multifaceted ‘effort to interfere in our election.” As has been noted frequently before, even though this assertion has apparently been endorsed by nearly everyone in the power structure AKA (also known as) “those who matter,” it is singularly lacking in any actual evidence.

Nor has any evidence been produced to support the claim that it was Russia that hacked the Democratic National Committee (DNC) server, which now is accepted as Gospel, but that is just one side to the story being promoted. Last Wednesday, the New York Times led off its front page with a piece entitled Top Russian Officials Discussed How to Influence Trump Aides Last Summer. Based, as always, on anonymous sources citing “highly classified” intelligence, the article claimed that “American spies collected information last summer revealing that senior Russian intelligence and political officials were discussing how to exert influence over Donald J. Trump through his advisers…” The “discussions,” which are presumably NSA intercepts of phone calls, reportedly focused on two aides in particular, Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn, both of whom had established relationships with Russian businessmen and government officials.

The article goes on to concede that “It is unclear, however, whether Russian officials actually tried to directly influence Mr. Manafort and Mr. Flynn…,” and that’s about all there is to the tale, though the Times wanders on for another three pages, recapping Brennan and the Flynn saga lest anyone has forgotten. So what do we have? Russians were talking on the phone about the possibility of influencing an American’s presidential candidate’s advisers, an observation alluded to by Brennan and also revealed in somewhat more detail by anonymous sources. Pretty thin gruel, isn’t it? Isn’t that what diplomats and intelligence officers do?

It would appear that the New York Times’ editors are unaware that the United States routinely interferes in elections worldwide and that the action taken in various places including Ukraine goes far beyond phone conversations. In some other places like Libya, Syria, Iraq, Somalia and Afghanistan the interference is particularly robust taking place at the point of a bayonet, but the Times and Washington Post don’t appear to have any problem when the regime change is being accomplished ostensibly to make the world more democratic, even if it almost never has that result.

How one regards all of the dreck coming out of the Fourth Estate and poseurs like John Brennan pretty much depends on the extent one is willing to trust that what the government, its highly-politicized bureaucrats and the media tell the public is true. For me, that would be not a lot. The desire to bring down the buffoonish Donald Trump is understandable, but buying into government and media lies will only lead to more lies that have real consequences, up to and including the impending wars against North Korea and Iran. It is imperative that every American should question everything he or she reads in a newspaper, sees on television “news” or hears coming out of the mouths of former and current government employees.

Shadowy Chinese Conglomerate Cultivated Ties to the Most Powerful U.S. Politicians

June 2 2017

by Lee Fang

The Intercept

A few years ago, Guo Wengui, a pugnacious Chinese billionaire known for his hardball business tactics, left his native China to live in self-imposed exile in Manhattan. He recently began unleashing a torrent of purported insider information on how China’s political power brokers have enriched themselves.

Among the dizzying array of allegations, Guo claimed that a mysterious Chinese conglomerate has illicitly enriched the family of one of the most senior members of the Communist Party. The conglomerate, HNA Group, has attracted attention with a multibillion-dollar spending spree, acquiring stakes in over 20 multinational firms from across the globe.

Those allegations remain far from proven — Guo has yet to substantiate many of them — but the attention on HNA Group may raise eyebrows over attempts by the conglomerate to court American political elites. Over the years, the firm has built relationships with everyone from Obama to Trump administration officials, as well as members of the Bush and Clinton dynasties.

Guo’s purported revelations have already rocked China. Using YouTube and interviews with U.S.-based news outlets to broadcast his claims, Guo alleged that family members of a powerful official named Wang Qishan secretly own shares in HNA Group, which has skyrocketed in value. The charges are particularly scandalous because Wang, who serves as President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption czar, has remade the Chinese political landscape by cracking down on graft and imprisoning officials, many of whom are perceived as adversaries of factions loyal to Xi.

Although Guo did not provide evidence that Wang’s relatives own shares of HNA Group, the explosive allegations have generated sustained controversy. The New York Times’s Michael Forsythe was able to partially corroborate at least one of Guo’s other claims about another senior party official using a shell company to enrich his family.

It’s not clear if Guo’s allegations will end up tainting Xi’s anti-corruption campaign, but the claims have already brought attention to HNA Group, where the firm and its executives have recently been seeking to build business and other relationships with powerful figures in the U.S.

Earlier this year, Anthony Scaramucci, a prominent supporter of President Trump’s campaign, sought to divest from his hedge fund, SkyBridge Capital, and join the White House as a staffer. HNA Group came forward to buy a stake in Scaramucci’s company. The move, reported by the New York Times, was widely perceived as an effort to influence the new administration.

HNA Group also developed financial ties to a prominent Democrat who served in the Obama administration. Before he was appointed by President Obama to serve as the U.S. ambassador to China, Gary Locke, the former governor of Washington state, provided legal assistance to Hainan Airlines, HNA Group’s flagship subsidiary. The revelation is buried in Locke’s personal finance disclosure, which was filed with the Office of Government Ethics. Hainan Airlines, notably, established a Beijing-Seattle direct flight in 2008.

And before HNA Group courted Trump, the company courted Jeb Bush and Bill Clinton. In February 2013, Bush met with HNA Group President Tan Xiangdong to discuss “cooperation in the broad market between China and the United States,” according to the HNA Group website. Soon after, HNA Group was among a pool of investors to finance a company set up by Bush called BH Logistics, which used $26 million in investor money to buy shares in a liquid petroleum shipping company.

Also in 2013, Clinton traveled to Beijing to speak at the China Philanthropy Forum, an event that hosted HNA Group chairman Chen Feng as a speaker. After the forum, Clinton met with Chen.

Chen Guoqing, the brother of HNA Group Chair Chen Feng, serves as chair of HNA Group North America and has become increasingly involved in American think tanks. Chen Guoqing serves on the board of trustees to the China Institute and the Asia Society and is a member of the Committee of 100, an influential organization that represents prominent Chinese-American business leaders.

HNA Group has attracted attention in the business world for its seemingly limitless appetite for international expansion.

Over the last few years, the firm has purchased major stakes in microchip manufacturer Ingram Micro, Brazilian airline Azul SA, aircraft leasing firm CIT Group, cargo handler Swissport, Virgin Australia, and Carlson Hotels, as well as making major investments in multinational firms Hilton Hotels and Deutsch Bank. The expansion has made HNA Group, which began as a small regional airline company, into a behemoth with a $145 billion portfolio.

The shopping spree, which also includes luxury real estate, has been financed by a $60 billion line of credit from Chinese state-owned banks, a usually large amount of debt financing typically reserved for state-owned companies involved in advancing official government policy.

In recent months, Chinese censors have blocked coverage of Guo. And in April, Chinese authorities issued a “red notice” seeking Guo’s arrest over corruption charges. Guo called the corruption charges “pure fabrication,” claiming officials were merely pursuing him because they were fearful of further revelations.

How China Rolled Up a CIA Network

Washington might be sending too many spies, making them more vulnerable.

May 31, 2017

by Philip Giraldi

The American Conservative

The Central Intelligence Agency, established through the National Security Act of 1947, was primarily intended to be a centralized clearinghouse for information to prevent another Pearl Harbor-style attack on the United States. Be that as it may, the initiation of what would eventually be termed the Cold War soon after led to the rapid expansion of the Agency’s role, to include running actual spies and engaging in classic covert actions. The CIA took the lead in the U.S. pushback against Moscow and developed tactically into the principal offensive weapon in America’s conduct of the Cold War. Russia and its allies responded in kind. Indeed, the Cold War against the Soviet Union and its allies might well be termed the war of the spies.

Espionage employing human agents, as opposed to technical intrusions, is a high-risk and morally questionable business. It was justified after World War II because the United States was confronted by a cluster of enemies who were militarily powerful and fully capable of hitting the American homeland with nuclear weapon-tipped ballistic missiles. Given that level of confrontation, the most important secrets were those relating to the intentions of the leadership of countries like Russia and China—and it is only possible to obtain that kind of information from an actual spy who penetrates the inner councils of the hostile regimes. That is precisely why so much time and effort has been put into recruiting, training, and supporting spies overseas.

On May 20, the New York Times reported that “Killing CIA Informants, China Crippled U.S. Spying Operations”.  The article described how an entire network of American spies in China had been identified by the counterintelligence services of that country and rolled up between 2010 and 2012, “crippl[ing] U.S. spying operations…for years afterwards.” Some of the “eighteen to twenty” sources, including high level government officials, were executed while others were imprisoned. It is to be presumed that all who were not shot outright were tortured. The Times report stated that a thorough damage assessment has been conducted but it had proven impossible to identify the actual cause of the disaster, so it remains unknown whether there was a mole or some tradecraft or communications failure that had brought about the death and imprisonment of so many American agents.

In reality, the rolling up of entire American espionage networks is not exactly that unusual because of the way intelligence agencies operate even when their actions have not been betrayed from within. Sweeping arrests of American spies have occurred not only in Russia and China, but also in Cuba, Iran, India and France. In theory, every single high-level spy in what is referred to as a “denied area” with a hostile and capable counterintelligence service is compartmented off from any other spies operating in that country, but the reality is that agents are often recruited and handled in such a way that the exposure of one individual puts all the others at risk.

To be sure, the mole explanation is attractive because it is more convenient to blame an individual than it is to critique an entire system. But as the presumed mole has not been discovered, it also leads to the presumption that he or she might still be active. CIA and FBI moles have been devastating. Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen, and Edward Howard provided the Soviet Union with information that led to the betrayal of numerous agents and the virtual destruction of espionage networks that took years to develop. In this case, investigators identified several possible moles, one of whom had quit the Agency and moved to an unnamed Asian country, but a solid case to proceed with an arrest could not be developed.

And then there is the tradecraft angle. Tradecraft is the term used to describe how an American case officer identifies, develops, recruits and then runs a spy. The Times account reveals that highly-sensitive Chinese agents were routinely met by their handlers in Beijing. There were encounters in restaurants where the local counterintelligence service employed the waiters and had microphones implanted on all of the tables. I must admit that I find it unimaginable that even a Chinese-American case officer would risk meeting a Chinese official in the high-security environment that Beijing represents, but that is apparently what the FBI investigation determined. It would be a piece of cake for local surveillance to pick up the agent, interrogate him, and develop a clear picture of the CIA modus operandi in the city. Once you have one spy you have the key to identifying all of them.

The other two notable vulnerabilities are how and where foreign spies are recruited and what they use to communicate. How would you recruit a Chinese official or scientist who would have information that Washington wanted? You would approach him when he is outside China on business, vacation, or studying. But the problem is that those places where American intelligence can operate freely are relatively easily identifiable and are also well known to the counterintelligence service in Beijing. So a Chinese physicist recruited by U.S. intelligence while doing postgraduate studies at an American university would intensify interest in others who also attended that university, some of whom might also be spies.

Back in my time in the Agency, a number of hostile intelligence services identified vacation and business destinations in the Middle East where their officials were being spotted by CIA, approached, and sometimes recruited. Knowing this, they could focus on recent travelers to those areas and were able to turn several of the agents while also identifying a number of others. The Chinese counterintelligence service could certainly have done the same in assessing its travelers that it considered sensitive from either a political or occupational point of view.

Knowing how the opponent is approaching and recruiting spies from among your countrymen also provides an opportunity to run a dangle operation, which can be used to enter, identify, and disrupt an intelligence network. A dangle is essentially a double agent who will pretend to work for the Americans while really working for his own country. U.S. intelligence polygraphs new agents but “swirl” examiners confess that lie detectors work best on Americans, who find it hard to lie when confronted by a machine that they believe can tell what is the truth. Asians and Arabs are regarded as particularly difficult to examine effectively because their cultures make it possible to mentally compartmentalize their responses. Guilt-ridden Catholics are easy.

And then there are the communications, seen by many as the most vulnerable element in agent handling. No one writes letters anymore, so secret or invisible writing is passé, but electronic communication using satellites is very much in. Messages from spies are encrypted, but anything encrypted can be unencrypted if enough time and effort are committed to the project. One should assume that the counterintelligence services in Moscow and Beijing are very good at what they do and quite willing to work hard. American intelligence services probably used the same technical system to stay in touch with all their spies in China, so when you catch one of them and analyze his procedures and equipment you are probably well on your way to catching all of them. And when you uncover a “nest of spies” you inflict serious collateral damage on whoever recruited them. In this case, prospective Chinese agents willing to trade secrets for money will come to the logical conclusion that the United States government is unable to protect them.

The best way to avoid the pain and embarrassment of having one’s human sources exposed is to cut back on spying in most places most of the time because running agents will inevitably mean occasionally getting caught. It is perhaps more important to consider why one spies in the first place. Unique information that protects a vital national interest is certainly desirable, but unleashing thousands of numbers-driven case officers worldwide to collect information that is either of passing interest or no interest at all is both a waste of resources and an invitation for international humiliation when something goes wrong. With that in mind, one has to wonder how many of the Chinese who paid the ultimate price were actually providing information that was essential to policymakers in Washington. Perhaps none of them were.

Haven’t We Had Enough of Afghanistan?

The forever war continues

June 2, 2017

by Justin Raimondo

AntiWar

Will there ever be an end to the war in Afghanistan? Apparently not if our generals have anything to say about it – and they do. President Trump has turned over the prosecution of our perpetual “war on terrorism” to the Pentagon, claiming that they’ve been held back by previous administrations. The new policy is to turn them loose.

We saw what this means when the so-called “Mother of All Bombs” was dropped in a remote location where ISIS was said to be hiding: 92 “militants” were said to have been killed. Contrary to the triumphalist reports in US media, the biggest non-nuclear bomb ever deployed in combat had a minimal effect. And the cost, at $16 million for a single MOAB, came to around $174,000 per “militant.”

With anywhere from 1,000 to 3,000 ISIS fighters in Afghanistan, let’s take the median number of 2,000 and estimate that getting rid of all of them will cost around $348 million, give or take $10 million or so.

And you’ll note that we’re just talking about ISIS here. The Taliban is not only still in the mix, they’re actually in a better position than ever. In March, the Taliban claimed that 211 administrative districts of the country were either under their control or else contested: this isn’t far off the report of the Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, which put the number at 171. The Taliban control more of Afghanistan than at any time since the war started, and they continue to make major gains, such as in Helmland province. The pace and severity of Taliban/ISIS attacks has recently escalated, with a suicide bombing in Kabul that killed 100 people, the culmination of 8 major attacks just in the month of May.

After 16 years of fighting, the US is no closer to defeating the radical Islamist insurgency than it was at the very beginning. The original rationale for the invasion – the presence of Osama bin Laden – is long since gone.

The justification for continuing the Afghan war, you’ll recall, was that we couldn’t allow any “safe havens” where the terrorists could plan and carry out attacks on the US and Western Europe. The logic of this is difficult to follow, however, since a “safe haven” can be defined as anywhere terrorists gather – which can occur just as easily in Hamburg, Germany, than in some mountain cave in Afghanistan. Furthermore, we are now told that the primary locus of terrorist activities is in territory controlled by ISIS, which has few strongholds and little support in Afghanistan.

The reality is that terrorist plots are more likely to be hatched in Western Europe and right here in the United States than in the Afghan wilds.

Yet that hasn’t stopped our generals from requesting thousands more US troops to be sent to fight the longest war in our history: news reports tell us they want “a few thousand” more, but it’s hard to imagine this will make much difference. It’s also hard to imagine that the American people support this: while no recent polls have been taken — for some mysterious reason they stopped measuring support for the war in 2015 – the last time anyone looked opposition was over fifty percent.

Naturally, given the current atmosphere in Washington, there’s an anti-Russian angle to all this: General John Nicholson recently testified before Congress that Moscow is pushing a “false narrative” that the Taliban is fighting ISIS while the Afghan government army is sitting on its haunches, collecting bribes and managing the drug harvest. Russia’s goal, he said, is to “undermine the United States and NATO.”

Yet the Taliban is not the same as ISIS, and the latter has largely alienated Afghan civilians, just as al-Qaeda did in Iraq: foreign fighters, no matter their religion, are not popular in Afghanistan. The Taliban, for all its theological pretensions, is essentially a nationalist movement fighting a foreign invader: ISIS, however, is quite a different story.

The Trump campaign told us that all foreign commitments were going to be judged by new criteria: how does this serve American interests? And the question of how continuing to fight this war serves our interests has yet to be answered by the Trump administration. They have simply taken the war as a given.

In a 2009 speech at Tennessee State University, I asked my audience to “remember the fate of the previous would-be conquerors of the proud Afghan people: the Russians, the British, the Golden Horde, and even Alexander the Great. They all failed, and the bones of their centurions are dust beneath the feet of a warrior people. In that kind of terrain, against that kind of enemy, there is no such thing as victory – there is only a question of how long it will take for them to drive us out – or whether we go bankrupt before that happens.”

Even earlier, in 2001, I predicted that the Afghan war would be a quagmire, a mistake we would eventually come to regret – an opinion for which David Frum, then National Review’s neocon enforcer of ideological correctness, saw cause to label me “anti-American.”

When the truth is considered “anti-American,” then we know we’re in trouble. Indeed, we’ve been in some pretty serious trouble for the past 16 years. Now is the time to reverse course and make it right.

It’s time to acknowledge that truth. It’s time to get the hell out of Afghanistan – now

Kill them All!

June 2, 2017

by Harry von Johnston, PhD

It has been very accurately said that one man’s freedom fighter is another’s terrorist. It all depends on one’s point of view. In a historical context, Germany, Soviet Russia, Great Britain and the United States have been occupying powers and all have suffered the ravages of guerrilla warfare: Germany in Europe and Russia, Britain in half of the world, the Soviets in their own country and Eastern Europe, and the United States in Southeast Asia. All of these powers dealt with their dissidents in the same way: extensive use of force and terror. Concentration camps have been called “detention” or “relocation centers” but in the final analysis, they are prisons where the politically dangerous are caged, often tortured, and left to the ravages of disease, hunger and neglect.

The Regional Interrogation Centers of the CIA in Vietnam differed little from their counterparts of the Gestapo or the NKVD. The aims of these entities was to elicit information and destroy the will to resist in the occupied countries. Extensive exposure of these methods have done absolutely nothing at all to eradicate them—witness the barbarity of the Serbs against their neighbors in Bosnia and Croatia.

A low-key controversy has been bubbling for a number of years concerning the deaths of a large number of German prisoners of war in the months following the end of the Second World War. Revisionists claim that after the collapse of Germany, huge numbers of prisoners were left in exposed, outdoor camps with only meager rations—certainly not enough for all of them—and the death tolls were tremendously high. Apologists for the captors claim that while there were a few deaths, due to natural causes, a pattern of deliberate starvation and neglect did not occur.

Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, has been singled out for blame in this matter. Although blame is difficult to place, it should be noted that Eisenhower despised the Germans, not just the defeated military but all Germans. Some apologists have credited Eisenhower’s loathing of Germans to his discovery of the horrors in the concentration camp system.

A recently-surfaced thick dossier on Eisenhower that may offer a different reason for his attitudes and actions. According to what appears to be a thoroughly researched study, one of many kept on Allied leaders both political and military, the Eisenhower family was Jewish and emigrated to the United States in the 19th century from the Saxon city of Pirna.

If this is true, it would explain Eisenhower’s hatred of Germans.

The awful David Clarke and the homeland security behemoth

May 19, 2017

by Anthony L. Fisher

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke is bad. Very, very bad. And he probably wouldn’t mind you thinking so.

Prisoners have died in his jails, including a newborn and a man who died of profound dehydration after begging his captors over several days for water. One of his deputies t-boned another driver, breaking her neck. The deputy then framed her for drunk driving, which the department under Clarke’s leadership allegedly helped try to cover up.

Clarke has proposed using the Department of Homeland Security – where he claims to have been offered a job as an assistant secretary – to round up “hundreds of thousands … or maybe a million” and “detain them indefinitely at Gitmo,” suspending habeas corpus, to protect the homeland from the supposedly existential threat of those “spewing jihadi rhetoric online.”

In case you were thinking this was just the opinion of a passionate patriot who believes the threat of Islamist terrorism justifies the destruction of basic constitutional rights, Clarke has also conflated the Black Lives Matter movement with ISIS and believes in treating unruly protests with “force,” telling Fox News’ Tucker Carlson in March 2016 that he believes “if the fight is inevitable, hit first, and hit hard.”

That a law enforcement official who doesn’t believe in the rule of law could potentially be placed in a such a powerful senior leadership position at Homeland Security is chilling.

But his (still-unconfirmed by DHS) nomination presents an opportunity for discussion: DHS should be abolished.

Created in the wake (or panic) of post-9/11 America, DHS took the problem of entangled domestic security apparatuses — of which some blame for the intelligence failures leading up to 9/11 had been laid — and made it far worse.

Calls to “Do Something, Anything!” led to the birth of a bureaucratic behemoth that combined 22 federal agencies – including those with such disparate missions as the Secret Service, Coast Guard, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Transportation Security Agency and three separate agencies dealing with immigration — under the command of a single cabinet official.

While enormous agencies like this are hardly ever reformed, much less disposed of, after more than a decade and a half, it’s well past time for a progress report.

The case for building one DHS out of many agencies was in large part to streamline unwieldy departments that didn’t talk to one another.

In real life, that hasn’t happened. The Department of Homeland Security’s annual budget has increased since its debut in 2002 from $20 billion to approximately $60 billion this year, and a 2011 report from John Mueller of Ohio State University found – surprise! – that DHS senior officials had failed to apply standard cost-benefit analysis and “have engaged in various forms of probability neglect by focusing on worst case scenarios; adding, rather than multiplying, the probabilities.”

Essentially, like any bureaucracy, DHS is not in the business of an honest self-assessment, because anything short of presenting a constant apocalyptic threat would hinder its efforts at securing an always exponentially increasing budget.

Lax oversight has led to an investigation of the Customs and Border Protection Agency over allegations that new officers at Newark airport had been hazed for years by their colleagues on a “rape table.” Barely a week goes by without a story of a TSA employee assaulting airline passengers in some way, and much like Sheriff Clarke’s jails in Milwaukee county, ICE has a problem with detainees dying in its custody.

These are issues that a serious and self-reflective DHS should be prioritizing. Instead, those concerned about civil liberties abuses by those responsible for “homeland security” are told by DHS Secretary John Kelly that we are a nation “under attack” and we “should shut up and support the men and women on the front lines.”

That’s the core problem with the Department of Homeland Security: Since so many government functions are now placed under the all-consuming umbrella of domestic security, every mission, no matter how distinct, must be subsumed to that one.

Clarke’s elevation to a senior position in DHS should serve as a warning of the kinds of civil liberties abuses that would likely take place in the event of the next inevitable terror attack on U.S. soil. This is a man who believes in using state power in deliberate shows of force against political dissent, rounding people up without trial indefinitely, and who sneers at the idea that any law enforcement agency could be in need of reform or restraint.

Total security is not possible, but a man like Clarke is likely to see any violation of our national security as an excuse to expand DHS’ already overreaching authority. And if a few people get hurt along the way, that’s just how Clarke does business.

Giant iceberg close to separating from Antarctic ice shelf

A piece of ice the size of the US state of Delaware is close to breaking off from one of Antarctica’s largest ice shelves. The break could destabilize the Larsen C ice shelf.

June 2, 2017

DW

A crack in the Larson C ice shelf reached within 8 miles (13 kilometers) of the ocean after expanding 11 miles (17 kilometers) in just the last week,  scientists with Project MIDAS at the University of Swansea in Britain said on Thursday.

Scientist studying the region expect the 1,900-square-mile (5,000-square-kilometer) chunk of ice to separate from the Larson C ice shelf within weeks. An ice shelf is a sheet of ice floating over the ocean.

If and when it does, the Larcon C ice shelf would be 10 percent smaller, reducing it to the smallest size ever recorded.

“The rift in Larsen C is likely to lead to one of the largest icebergs ever recorded,” said Swansea University in Wales

Scientists say the iceberg itself would not raise global sea levels, but it could cause the Larsen C ice shelf, Antartica’s fourth largest, to become unstable and collapse.

Two smaller, more northern shelves have already collapsed.

The Larsen A disappeared in 1995, and seven years later the Larsen B collapsed.

“We have previously shown that the new configuration will be less stable than it was prior to the rift, and that Larsen C may eventually follow the example of its neighbour Larsen B, which disintegrated in 2002 following a similar rift-induced calving event,” the scientists with Project MIDAS said.

The role of global warming

While icebergs are normal, scientists attribute the collapse or retreat of several ice shelves in recent decades to global warming.

“It is widely accepted that warming ocean and atmospheric temperatures have been a factor in earlier disintegrations of ice shelves elsewhere on the Antarctic Peninsula,” Swansea scientists said.

The collapse of the Larsen C ice shelf would take possibly decades and contribute to a several centimeter rise in ocean levels.

“If Larsen C were to collapse, it would be concerning for its own reasons, but the contribution to global sea level rise would be very small, something in the centimeters,” Dan McGrath, a scientist with the US Geological Survey, told Reuters.

More worrisome is that the collapse of ice shelves could destabilize glaciers in Western Antarctica.

The West Antarctic ice sheet holds enough frozen water to raise sea levels by about six meters (20 feet).

Gunman torches Philippine casino, killing at least 36 people

June 2, 2017

by Manolo Serapio Jr and Neil Jerome Morales

Reuters

MANILA-A gunman burst into a casino in the Philippine capital on Friday, setting gaming tables alight and killing at least 36 people who suffocated in thick smoke, in an attack claimed by Islamic State but which officials believe was a botched robbery.

The gunman killed himself in a hotel room after being shot and wounded by security officers at the Resorts World Manila entertainment complex, police said. A second “person of interest” who was in the casino at the time was cooperating with the investigation, police said.

Most of the dead suffocated in the chaos. Many guests and staff had tried to hide from the gunfire rather than get out of the building when attack began shortly after midnight (1600 GMT) and fell victim to the smoke, the fire bureau said.

“Islamic State fighters carried out the Manila attack in the Philippines,” the militant group’s Amaq news agency said.

But that was quickly rejected by National Security Adviser Hermogenes Esperon, who said all the evidence pointed to an attempt to steal casino chips. Police said they were not looking at other motives.

“This is plain and simple propaganda,” Esperon told Reuters.

“If the lone gunman was really an IS terrorist, why did he not shot and kill people in the casino? He only went for the casino chips.”

The IS claim, which came nearly 24 hours after the attack, also contradicted a statement from Ernesto Abella, a spokesman for President Rodrigo Duterte, who said there was no evidence linking it to fighting between government troops and Islamist militants in the country’s south.

“All indications point to a criminal act by an apparently emotionally disturbed individual,” Abella told a news conference. “Although the perpetrator gave warning shots, there apparently was no indication that he wanted to do harm or shoot anyone.”

Oscar Albayalde, chief of the capital’s police office, said those who died were in the casino’s main gaming area.

“What caused their deaths is the thick smoke,” he told reporters. “The room was carpeted and of course the tables, highly combustible.”

A Resorts World official said the dead included 22 guests.

DEATH IN ROOM 510

At dawn, the body of the suspected gunman was found in a hotel room in the smoldering complex, which is close to Manila’s airport and an air force base, police said.

“He burned himself inside the hotel room 510,” national police chief Ronald dela Rosa told a news conference. “He lay down on the bed, covered himself in a thick blanket and apparently doused himself in gasoline.”

Resorts World Chief Operating Officer Stephen Reilly said casino guards had shot and wounded the gunman – armed with what authorities described as a “baby armalite” – during the attack.

“Severe loss of blood from the gunshot wound significantly slowed down the assailant and resulted to his holing up in the room where he took his own life,” Reilly said.

Officials said at least 54 people were hurt, some seriously, as they rushed to escape what was at first was believed to have been a militant attack.

Survivor Magdalena Ramos, who was a guest at the hotel, said people began shouting “ISIS! ISIS!” when the gunfire began. The 57-year-old said she hid in a kitchen and then fled when the smoke became too thick.

But police quickly said they did not believe the attacker had any militant connections.

“We cannot attribute this to terrorism,” national police chief dela Rosa told DZMM radio.

“We are looking into a robbery angle because he did not hurt any people and went straight to the casino chips storage room. He parked at the second floor and barged into the casino, shooting large TV screens and poured gasoline on a table setting it on fire,” he said.

Earlier reports said the gunman may have been white, but police later said he appeared to be Filipino, although they were still establishing his nationality.

Kimberly Molitas, a spokeswoman for the capital’s police office, said 113 million pesos ($2.27 million) worth of casino chips stolen during the raid had been recovered.

GUNSHOTS, PANIC

Videos posted on social media showed people fleeing as several loud bangs went off.

“Even the security personnel panicked,” casino guest Jeff Santos told a radio station. “Definitely us patrons we did not expect that, everyone ran away.”

Jeri Ann Santiago, who works in the emergency room at the San Juan de Dios hospital, said patients were suffering from smoke inhalation and some had fractures. None had gunshot wounds, she said.

The Philippines has been on heightened alert amid a crisis in the south of the country, where troops have been battling Islamist rebels since May 23.

Duterte declared martial law on the southern island of Mindanao last week and has warned it could become a haven for Islamic State supporters fleeing Iraq and Syria.

Security was tightened around the presidential palace on Friday, with armored personal carriers stationed on approach roads and river ferries barred from passing close by.

Taiwan’s foreign ministry said four people from Taiwan were among those killed and South Korea said one of its citizens had died, apparently after a heart attack.

Shares in resort owner Travellers International Hotel Group Inc, a joint venture of the Philippines’ Alliance Global Group Inc and Genting Hong Kong Ltd, fell 7 percent.

(Additional reporting by Peter Blaza, Clare Baldwin, Karen Lema, Manuel Mogato, Enrico Dela Cruz and Martin Petty in MANILA and Ju-min Park in SEOUL; Writing by Alex Richardson and Lincoln Feast; Editing by Robert Birsel and Nick Macfie)

 

 

 

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