TBR News April 10,2016
The Voice of the White House
Washington, D.C. April 10, 2016: “Now we see, on RT, a story about the reported approach of ‘Planet X.’ It is supposed to crash into Cleveland sometime next year.
I did some research on this subject several years ago when one ‘Sorcha Faal’ wrote a series of postings that excited many.
“Sorcha Faal” (aka William Booth) was hot on the subject but a bit of digging exposed both Booth and Planet X.
No such, never.
‘Planet X’ is like finding the underwater road just off the Bahamas that led down to Atlantis or digging up tons of ‘pirate gold’ ( the Oak Island Treasure) or the story that the Loch Ness Monster was seen in Lake Erie, by ‘scientists’ (or in the Gulf of Mexico just off New Orleans.)
And imagine the thrill of seeing thousands of CIA/Scientologists hurtling through the air experiencing Out of Body trips to the nudist colonies.
And do not forget the Giant Dirigibles seen by thousands in the 1910s, all across American skies.
No doubt they were propelled by a mixture of Bromo Seltzer and cat urine.
In elder times we hoped for the Return of Jesus and joyful bliss.
Now, the disillusioned just smoke pot.
What will it be next year?
The Coming Eruptions at Yellowstone Park?
Giant Lizard Controllers take over Disneyland at Orlando?
No one is ever satisfied with the status quo.
To the small of mind, the possession of secrets is a comforting treasure
Note: Readers with interesting information, questions or comments can contact us at: tbrnews@hotmail.com
Conversations with the Crow
On October 8th, 2000, Robert Trumbull Crowley, once a leader of the CIA’s Clandestine Operations Division, died in a Washington hospital of heart failure and the end effects of Alzheimer’s Disease. Before the late Assistant Director Crowley was cold, Joseph Trento, a writer of light-weight books on the CIA, descended on Crowley’s widow at her town house on Cathedral Hill Drive in Washington and hauled away over fifty boxes of Crowley’s CIA files.
Once Trento had his new find secure in his house in Front Royal , Virginia, he called a well-known Washington fix lawyer with the news of his success in securing what the CIA had always considered to be a potential major embarrassment. Three months before, July 20th of that year, retired Marine Corps colonel William R. Corson, and an associate of Crowley, died of emphysema and lung cancer at a hospital in Bethesda, Md. After Corson’s death, Trento and his Washington lawyer went to Corson’s bank, got into his safe deposit box and removed a manuscript entitled ‘Zipper.’ This manuscript, which dealt with Crowley’s involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, vanished into a CIA burn-bag and the matter was considered to be closed forever
After Crowley’s death and Trento’s raid on the Crowley files, huge gaps were subsequently discovered by horrified CIA officials and when Crowley’s friends mentioned Gregory Douglas, it was discovered that Crowley’s son had shipped two large boxes to Douglas. No one knew their contents but because Douglas was viewed as an uncontrollable loose cannon who had done considerable damage to the CIA’s reputation by his on-going publication of the history of Gestapo-Mueller, they bent every effort both to identify the missing files and make some effort to retrieve them before Douglas made any use of them.
Douglas had been in close contact with Crowley and had long phone conversations with him. He found this so interesting and informative that he taped and later transcribed them.
These conversations have been published in a book: ‘Conversations with the Crow” and this is an excerpt.
Conversation No. 59
Date: Saturday, January 11. 1997
Commenced: 2:23 PM CST
Concluded: 3:11 PM CST
RTC: Gregory, would you believe your nice present arrived here today? You mailed it on the fifteenth and it took almost a month to get here. Unbelievable. Symptomatic of the growing inefficiency in the entire bureaucratic structure. Nice book by the way. Who was Malaparte?
GD: Curzio Malaparte was the pen name of an Austrian journalist named Stuckert. A friend and adherent of Mussolini. The book is a classic study of the coup, as you will note. Dutton put this out in ’32, just while the Depression was getting a full head of steam, and it was decided by those in power that it ought not to be circulated so it was pulled. I got your copy from a Denver dealer and I got mine from my grandfather’s library. Very interesting, especially the business with Trotsky in Petrograd. Have you read any of it?
RTC: Yes, actually I have read the Trotsky section. Very perceptive.
GD: And be sure to read the chapter on Trotsky versus Stalin. The differences between the two are well-covered. Trotsky was brilliant but mercurial and Stalin was equally brilliant but thorough, methodical and far more deadly than Trotsky. In Josef’s case, patience was a real virtue.
RTC: At any rate, thank you for your gift. I can assure you I will read it.
GD: You are the only person I know that might appreciate it. I can just see Tom Kimmel with it. Never read it.
RTC: Corson might.
GD: Yes, that’s true.
RTC: I’m sure they have a copy at Langley.
GD: I don’t doubt that at all. But they remind me of a dog I had once. He loved to chase cars. I wonder what would have happened if he caught one?
RTC: Now, they’re not all that bad.
GD: Perhaps not when you were in harness, but some of the idiots they have working for them now certainly aren’t worth a pinch of sour owl shit.
RTC: I haven’t heard that one for years, Gregory.
GD: I’m not young either, Robert.
RTC: Are you working on anything interesting these days?
GD: Still trying to create a structure for the Kennedy business. I translated some wartime German documents last week dealing with their flying saucer program. Habermohl?
RTC: I know that the Krauts had one or two but the name means nothing.
GD: They made and flew at least one prototype, but the project was just one of many at the time.
RTC: Well, the U.S. built them after the war. Some place in Canada.
GD: AVRO. The Roe Company.
RTC: Doesn’t ring a bell.
GD: But that means we did have some examples.
RTC: Oh, yes, that we did. I told you that the Russians thought these were ours and we thought they were theirs. I did some sit-downs on this one. Russian Intelligence was one of my fields, as you know. And we did have some of these, but we used them for high-altitude reconnaissance and photographing. The U-2 replaced them, so we retired them. The Russians had at one working model, that I know.
GD: So all the sightings were of these planes, or whatever they called them?
RTC: No, not all. Most of the public sightings were basically wishful thinking or mass hysteria. But there certainly were other incidents that were not of ours or Russian construction.
GD: Where did they come from?
RTC: No one had any idea. Of course, Truman had all of that shut up to prevent another Orson Wells panic. The idea was to make the whole thing look like a hoax so that people spotting something would ignore it at the risk of being branded a fool.
GD: Know anything about the Roswell business?
RTC: Oh, indeed. Now that was the real thing, Gregory. And there were space cadets on board that one. They had to clamp down on the story and said it was a weather balloon. As I remember, they retrieved a lot of electronic gadgetry that was highly advanced. They reconstructed the thing, or did you know that?
GD: No, I did not. Did they fly it?
RTC: Too complex. Do you know about Groom Lake in Nevada?
GD: No.
RTC: We used it as a U-2 base. Out in the remote desert. They have several of these things there. One is a reconstruction and another one was fished out of a lake in Montana intact, crew and all. That one they did fly around, as I understand.
GD: Why keep it quiet?
RTC: As I said, panic. The Cold War was in full swing, Korea had happened and everyone was afraid of the Russians, so it was decided to play it all down. We got certified idiots on board and got them to set up Flying Saucer clubs to attract the brainless moths and kept the pot boiling. You understand that once the government decides on a program, they never change it. They never do. Poor Tom keeps thinking they will rehabilitate his grandfather over Pearl Harbor, but they never will. I told him that once, and I thought he’d weep. First off, no one cares these days about Pearl Harbor and secondly, once a policy has been set, no one will change it later. Same with the saucers.
GD: They have no idea where they came from?
RTC: Absolutely none. But there were no attacks from any of them and the best thinking was that they were doing what we were doing, and that is photo recon. They weren’t from us because no human could survive the speeds they could move at. Flatten them out. I hope to God you’re not going to get into that mess, Gregory.
GD: Intellectual curiosity only. What did ours photograph?
RTC: The same things the U-2 did. Military bases like airfields, missile launching areas, naval bases. They took some wonderfully clear pictures. They had a building down on Fifth and K streets where they processed and printed these. It was the Steuart or Seward Building. I was in there a couple of times. And some very interesting buildings out on Wilson Boulevard. Remind me to tell you about them some time. Anyway, I recommend you keep away from the saucer side. As much as they hate you around here that would all that would be needed to label you a certified lunatic.
GD: Oh, I know about the official stories about me. Once the Mueller book came out, they got Gitta Sereny to go after me. Do you know who she is?
RTC: She’s a friend of Wolfe. I looked her up once because he made it a point of shoving some piece of trash on me at the Archives about you she got published. A Communist dyke as I remember. She does not like you.
GD: (Laughing) Oh, I know that, and note that I do not like her. When I uncovered the fact that an SS concentration camp head had been declared dead and then put to work by the Brits and later by us, she came to see me in California, with the assistance of Wolfe, and with the sole intention of getting me to say something she could use to discredit me.
RTC: Well, they didn’t like it made public that this fellow worked for us. The same as your friend Mueller. What did she write?
GD: Long story.
RTC: I have plenty of time and you have the happy knack of making long boring stories interesting. Go on.
GD: She published a book in 1974 entitled Into That Darkness. This work purported to be based on an interview with Franz Stangl, an alleged SS officer who ran a camp in occupied Poland during the war where many prisoners were later stated to have been gassed. Stangl was not an SS man but Sereny never bothered to mention that unimportant fact. The book contains a lengthy section quoting Stangl, who according to Sereny’s version, fully admitted his part in the purported killings and asks for forgiveness from God and his victims. The balance of the work consists of various supplementary testimonies from former associates and family members, all attesting to the evil nature of Stangl’s activities and all clearly acknowledging his willing cooperation in a state-sponsored program of genocide. Of course, Sereny has carved out her niche as a holocaust writer, trashing all the Germans, and she has made a nice living out of it. But this particular book shows with great clarity the pitfalls that occur when a journalist, as opposed to a legitimate academic historian, produces a work which is not only entirely anecdotal in content, but ideological in thrust. There is no documentation, whatsoever, in this work which relies almost entirely on the author’s purported interviews with various people. Stangl died on the day following Sereny’s visit to him in prison where he was appealing his life sentence.
RTC: I agree. That makes no sense. This man was not an SS camp man?
GD: No. He is in none of the official SS personnel lists anywhere at any time.
RTC: Did he exist?
GD: Yes. He was an Austrian policeman. And she must have known it, because she is tied up with Wolfe who has ready access to all the official lists. And herein lies the key to the questionability of the entire book. Stangl had been sentenced to a life term in prison. He, through his attorneys, was appealing this sentence. It is highly doubtful if either Stangl or his attorneys would permit such a damaging interview to take place and to permit Sereny, whose extremist views were well known, free and unfettered access to the prisoner. There would appear to be no question that Sereny and her photographer husband, Don Honeyman, did indeed visit the prison and did see Stangl. Sereny’s husband took several photographs of him, photographs which are extensively reproduced in the book. The published pictures, however, do not support statements alleged to have been made by the former Austrian police officer, but merely prove that he permitted himself to be photographed by his visitors. By making such incriminating statements as Sereny placed, post mortem, in his mouth, Stangl would have irrevocably destroyed any chance he might have had in his pending appeal before the German courts. I think it is beyond reasonable belief that such statements were made under the circumstances indicated. A dead Stangl, however, could comfortably be alleged to have made any statement that the author chose to put into his mouth, and without the possible embarrassment to her or her publisher of an instant denial or possible legal proceedings.
RTC: These fabricators never use logic, do they. Lie like rugs, throw in a few fuzzy pictures of Hitler and, Bingo, a new Holocaust book. Well, they have made quite a business out of it.
GD: Oh, yes, and you dast not dare question them with inconvenient facts. If you have the time and the stomach to read the book, you can clearly see the author’s prejudice towards Stangl and the system he served, but also is entirely devoid of any facts to support her thesis. She notes that a number of witnesses died before the book was published, of course, including her main source, Stangl. Much of the anecdotal material Sereny had put together to support her case is of such a nature as to preclude its ever being introduced in a court of law. Several examples are set forth as illustration. In one, Sereny claims that Stangl’s wife wrote her a letter following an interview Sereny had with the wife in Brazil. In this letter, which is not reproduced, Frau Stangl allegedly states that in 1945 she was interviewed by two members of the U.S. Army’s Counter Intelligence agency, and that they knew of her husband’s whereabouts in an American jail. “I examined their papers,” she is quoted as writing, “I have no doubt whatever that they were genuine.” The flaw in this scenario is obvious. It is simply not believable that the wife of an obscure police officer would have the slightest idea what “genuine” U.S. CIC identification papers looked like. But Sereny states that the woman would have no reason to invent the incident. Perhaps the invention did not originate with Stangl’s wife, but with the author herself. Robert, generations must pass before the fictive is eventually weeded out from the factual, and in the meantime an appellation which has been applied to the Sereny book, Dialogs with the Dead, could well be applied to other mendacious creative writing essays that people like Wolfe, who certainly will never be any kind of a successful writer or Sereny the ideological hack.
RTC: Maybe Sereny…what is that name, by the way?
GD: She’s a Hungarian Jewess, but the name was changed somewhere years ago to become more Aryan. Anyway, she published some libels about me in two major British papers. I got a solicitor in the UK to represent me and not only were the stories pulled but dear old Gitta was sacked. It was either sack her for free, or I would sue the papers for malicious defamation. There wasn’t any contest. One of the paper’s editors told me on the phone that she was a nasty old bitch and he was glad to be rid of her. Actually, she mumbled away about me for a little while more until I had to take certain actions that dissuaded her from future essays into more libels.
RTC: I don’t suppose…
GD: Not on the phone. Did I bore you?
RTC: No, and none of that surprised me. You ought to have heard old Wolfe screeching about how evil you are. He sounds like you have a picture of him humping the neighbor’s cocker spaniel.
GD: (Laughter) I think it was a sheep named Minnie he keeps in his garage. By God, sir, with mesh stockings and lipstick, she drives men mad with passion.
RTC: Why don’t you turn him into the Humane Society?
GD: I’d much rather turn him into a pumpkin. Speaking of that, do you know what happened to Cinderella?
RTC: No, I don’t. She married her prince?
GD: Maybe, but did you know what happened when the clock struck midnight?
RTC: Not offhand.
GD: Her tampon turned into a pumpkin.
RTC: (Laughter) Such an image!
GD: You see the connection in my imagination, at least, between Wolfe and a pumpkin?
RTC: It’ll give me something to think about over dinner, Gregory. Or are you equating Wolfe with a tampon?
GD: Pay your money, Robert, and take your choice.
(Concluded at 3:11 PM CST)
Police brutality and homelessness collide in aftermath of San Francisco killing
The story of Luis Gongora, shot dead by police this week, reflects city’s twin crises and raises alarming questions about the official and witness accounts of the shooting
April 9, 2016
by Julia Carrie Wong
The Guardian
San Francisco-The morning after a homeless man in San Francisco was shot and killed by police, someone else had moved into his tent. “I can’t say nothing,” the new occupant said before moving into the small blue and grey tent on the sidewalk. “It’s done.”
The death of a homeless man on a busy California street is not uncommon. Neither, in a country in which 1,134 people died at the hands of law enforcement last year, are fatal police shootings.
Yet the story of how 45-year-old Luis Gongora was killed this week, pieced together from friends and neighbors – both those who sleep in tents and others who have roofs over their heads – raises alarming questions.
San Francisco police have released few details in a public relations campaign that appears intended to justify, before the completion of any investigation, the decision by two officers to shoot seven bullets from their .40-caliber service pistols.
Many locals in the Mission district of the city knew Gongora merely as a friendly Latino man who was always kicking a soccer ball against a wall.
One person who knew him a little better was the homeless man who, less than 24 hours after Gongora’s shooting, was occupying his tent.
Like Gongora, Javier Chab Dzul, 40, was from Mexico. Previously, he had been sleeping in another tent, on the same block, under the same giant Ficus trees that provide shade to around a dozen residents in tents.
Dzul became homeless about a year ago. He spends much of his time painting the street and sidewalk with cheerful designs and flowers. His hands and clothes are splattered with paint.
“He’s my friend,” he said of Gongora, pointing out how the pair came from the same region of Mexico. “He’s Yucatecan too.”
Dzul knew little else about Gongora’s background, though the two had lived mere yards apart for several months.
The fact Dzul chose to occupy his friend’s tent so soon after he was shot dead by police should not, others said, be mistaken for callousness. “It doesn’t mean we don’t care,” said Stephanie Grant, another resident of the encampment where Gongora lived and died. “That’s basically how the streets go.”
‘He called me “hermano”’
Gongora was shot and killed by two police officers on Thursday, shortly after 10.00am.
Police say they were called to the scene by members of the city’s homeless outreach team who reported a “suspect waving a large kitchen knife”. Two of the responding officers opened fire – first with beanbag rounds and then with live ammunition.
Shortly after the shooting, police chief Greg Suhr told reporters that after the initial volley of beanbag rounds, Gongora “charged” at the officers with the knife. The officers then opened fire with live rounds.
That claim has been disputed by witnesses, including other residents of the encampment such as Grant and her partner John Visor, both witnesses to the incident.
Gongora was transported to a local hospital where he was declared dead around 1pm.
The shooting took place on Shotwell street, the same block as the homeless encampment where Gongora lived.
A few minutes earlier, Gongora had been hanging out in the tent of his best friend, Markale Raybon.
“I can see his face in my head,” Raybon recalled Friday, as he sat in his tent – a bright orange shelter next to the one that used to be Gongora’s and has now been inherited by Dzul.
Inside Raybon’s tent were crammed two collapsible lawn chairs, a child’s circus play tent, a shopping cart, a sleeping pad and bedding. A travel toiletry kit hung from the shopping cart.
“We were just hanging out right here smoking pot, and then he walked up the street kicking the ball. The next thing I knew, I heard the throttle of a car, and then I heard someone shouting, and the shots.”
Raybon sipped on a soda that another member of the encampment brought him from Burger King. Moments later, recalling his friend, he wept.
“He was my brother. He called me ‘hermano’.” The pair would help each other out, sharing whatever food or money they managed to come by. “It was half down the middle with everything.”
Raybon recalled once seeing Gongora standing on the sidewalk seemingly shouting to himself. He thought his friend had gone “crazy” until he approached close enough to realize that Gongora was using an earpiece to talk on the phone.
That was when Raybon learned that Gongora had childrenwith whom he stayed in touch. In the 24 hours since his death, the homeless residents have been trying to join the threads that might help them track down their friend’s surviving relatives, but in the absence of resources they have been clutching at snippets of memory.
Grant remembered Gongora also had two brothers and an ex-wife living in San Francisco. She said she thought his brothers were living in housing somewhere, and that the ex-wife was homeless and “lives over by the freeway”, but she could not be sure.
‘I didn’t even know his name’
Another of Gongora’s neighbors was a 47-year-old documentary filmmaker named S Smith Patrick, who has lived in a second-floor loft on Shotwell street for 14 years. In all that time, the homeless encampment has been “a permanent fixture”, she said, although the number of temporary residents ebbs and flows.
Patrick is heavily pregnant, and lives in the apartment with her partner and six-year-old son.
The presence of a homeless encampment outside their door hasn’t been too much of a bother to the family. Once, she thought someone from the encampment had stolen her bicycle, but when she confronted them, they assured her that they knew her and wouldn’t steal from her. They also offered her some of their bike parts.
“We never had a problem with him,” Smith said of Gongora. She recalled how her young son would sometimes practice the Spanish he learned in class with the homeless man.
But the acquaintance with the man who kicked the soccer ball against the wall only went so far. “I didn’t even know his name,” she said.
Smith’s block of Shotwell street is a cross-section of San Francisco’s contradictions.
In the short stretch of road there are remnants of the Mission district’s old industries – a warehouse, a utility company parking lot, an auto body shop. There are residential lofts inhabited by artists and young families like Smith’s. There are tech company startup offices and construction crews converting former lofts into additional office space. And there are the homeless.
Other occupants of the block’s homes and businesses shared similar stories of the soccer-ball kicking homeless man they saw everyday.
“We had interacted with him,” said a neighbor who lives in the same building as Patrick and asked not to be identified. “He was a really decent fellow, not violent. We never worried about him.”
“My husband kicked a ball back to him the day before it happened,” a woman who works at one of the offices on the street said Friday morning. She had just finished writing a message on the makeshift memorial that has been erected at the site of Gongora’s death. “I had a good cry this morning.”
San Francisco’s mayor Ed Lee, who has struggled to cope with both the claims of police brutality in the city and the issue of homelessness, said on Friday that Shotwell street’s tents would be taken down.
“Once the various investigations have finished collecting evidence and completed their interviews of witnesses, I will be ordering the Shotwell camp to be taken down and for it not to come back,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle. “When it comes to public safety, I’m not going to compromise with these camps.”
By no stretch of the imagination
Earlier Friday, San Francisco police officials convened a press conference to reiterate their claims that Gongora had “charged” at the police officers who killed him with a knife.
Commander Greg McEachern reportedly said that one witness “saw the suspect stand up and lunge at the officers”, and that another said that Gongora “rose up with a knife in hand and ran toward the officers”.
Police also presented reporters with a photograph of the 13-inch butcher knife they said Gongora was carrying.
The San Francisco police department has faced intense criticism since December, when five police officers shot and killed 26-year-old Mario Woods, another man allegedly armed with a knife. Bystander video of that shooting appeared to contradict the police claim that Woods raised the knife toward one of the officers before the group opened fire.
The Woods shooting remains under investigation, and the police commission has initiated a process to update the department’s use-of-force policy.
The police department’s insistence that Gongora “charged” at the officers with a knife has already prompted several witnesses to come forward to challenge that account.
Patrick, the woman who lived opposite Gongora’s tent, and whose six-year-old son occasionally spoke with him in Spanish, is the latest to contradict the police’s version of events.
Her account, one of several provided to the Guardian, all of whom have contradicted the police’s account, could be the most significant to date. Patrick saw the shooting from her apartment window, where she had an unobstructed view of the incident as it unfolded directly across the street.
“He never charged them. There’s no way they were going to get hurt from the knife,” she said, adding that she is “enraged” by the police department’s version of events.
Patrick posted a widely shared account of the incident on social media network Nextdoor.com shortly after the shooting. However, she said she began to doubt herself after reading news reports that quoted police chief Greg Suhr saying that Gongora had moved toward the officers with a knife.
Patrick said she assumed that Gongora had threatened the police further down the street, before she looked out the window. She assumed she must have seen an incomplete segment of the incident.
But she changed her mind Friday after viewing surveillance video obtained by the San Francisco Chronicle. The video shows the police cruisers arriving on the scene and provides audio of the gunfire, which began just 30 seconds after the officers exited their cars.
The footage did not show the shooting itself, but it was enough to convince Patrick that she had witnessed the incident in its entirety.
Patrick said that she was sitting at one of four windows in her apartment when she heard someone shout, “Get on the ground.” She ran to the next window and saw Gongora.
“He was on the ground, crouched with his head between his knees,” she said.
She saw two police officers standing about 15 feet from Gongora, one carrying what looked like a rifle and the other with his hand at his belt. She heard two shots fired from the rifle – a less-lethal weapon that fires beanbag pellets – and then “live ammunition” being fired concurrently with additional beanbag rounds.
Patrick said she could differentiate the different types of ammunition because of her experience working as a film-maker in the West Bank.
“He didn’t get up until they were shooting,” she said. “I would by no stretch of the imagination say that he was charging them. His body was recoiling from bullets.”
Patrick said that the police officers were moving “parallel” to the street, toward Gongora, but that once he stood up, he was moving “perpendicular” – as if to cross the street – until he fell. “It was after he was shot several times that the knife kind of fell from his body. I don’t know if it came from his hand or his pocket, but he was never like this to somebody,” Smith said, miming holding a knife up as if to threaten someone.
She added: “It’s like they came out shooting. It’s complete bullshit what’s happening. There’s no way that somebody deserved to lose their life.”
Patrick’s account of the shooting fills in key details that are missing from the surveillance video, which does not show the police officers while they were shooting or any view of Gongora.
It also corresponds with the account of another neighbor who said that he saw the entire incident from his kitchen window, also across the street.
“I watched the whole thing. It was absolutely fucking terrible,” said the neighbor, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of police retaliation. “I was at the kitchen window and it all started. They shot him with the bean bag, and he turned to block the shots and gestured, like, ‘What the fuck?’ And that’s when they shot him.”
The neighbor added: “He was not really threatening. He wasn’t running at them with a knife or anything like that. They just jumped right out and 20 seconds later he was dead.”
Last rites
On Friday morning, Gongora’s friend, Stephanie Grant, sat in the large blue tent steps from where Luis Gongora’s blood is still visible on the sidewalk.
She was exhausted. She too is pregnant, due to give birth on 1 June, and the events of the previous day – witnessing her friend’s killing, recounting the tale to police and journalists – had been overwhelming.
But Grant is determined to tracked Gongora’s family members so that his body can be released from the morgue.
The rituals we use to mark the end of a life seemed far out of reach for Gongora’s friends. The people who knew him best have no legal right to claim his body. Even if they could, they have no money to pay for his burial.
A priest from the neighborhood has offered to set up a fundraiser, and Grant said she hopes that will make the difference.
“People won’t give money to us because they’ll think we’ll just steal it,” she said. “We’re not like that. It would mean a lot to me if he had a proper memorial.”
FBI’s “Shared Responsibility Committees” to Identify “Radicalized” Muslims Raise Alarms
April 9, 2016
by Murtaza Hussain
The Intercept
The FBI’s plan to enlist community leaders in “Shared Responsibility Committees” all across the country with the goal of identifying “radicalized” individuals is raising alarm among civil rights activists.
The Shared Responsibility Committees, known as SRCs, “are expanding the informant program under the guise of an intervention program, which it is not,” said Abed Ayoub, legal director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC).
The FBI’s ideas is to have social service workers, teachers, mental health professionals, religious figures, and others interdict young people they believe are on a path towards radicalization. The program was first revealed last November, and while details remain scant, it is widely believed to have been developed along the lines of similar “anti-radicalization” programs in the United Kingdom.
The FBI did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Experts acknowledge the need to have options beyond sending young people to jail for making threatening statements. The committees purport to offer such an option, by allowing members to offer non-binding recommendations to law enforcement about whether certain individuals should be arrested or offered rehabilitation for their alleged radicalization.
But critics say that despite the FBI’s benign characterization of the SRCs, the proposal amounts to nothing more than an expansion of already existing FBI informant programs. The committees “would be doing the work of the FBI, gathering information. This initiative failed in the U.K., it’s not like this is a new idea,” said Ayoub.
The U.K. program called “Channel” has been widely blamed for alienating the communities it targeted while inflaming attitudes towards authorities. Arun Kundnani, an adjunct professor at New York University and expert on U.K. counterterrorism policy, said he worries that the U.S. program would “suffer from the same problems, such as drawing non-policing professionals into becoming the eyes and ears of counter-terrorism surveillance, and thereby undermining professional norms and relationships of trust among educators, health workers and others.”
And Faiza Patel co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center, said the U.K. program simply doesn’t work. “The premise of these committees are that school teachers, mental health and social workers and Muslim religious leaders will be able to identify ‘radicalized’ youth. But this is completely contrary to both the experience of the U.K., where about 80 percent of Channel referrals are rejected as unfounded.”
Why did those committees do such a poor job? “All the studies that I have reviewed, including those funded by the government, state quite clearly that there are no predictors or indicators of who is going to become a terrorist,” Patel said. “So on what basis are people going to be hauled before these committees?” she asked. “The idea that ‘alienation’ is an indicator of someone who is going to become a terrorist is so general as to be laughable. There are plenty of alienated people in the world and very, very few terrorists.”
An open letter to the United Nations published last December by the Brennan Center, the ACLU and the British human rights organization Article 19, criticized a number of proposed government programs to fight radicalization, specifically noting the forthcoming Shared Responsibility Committees as an area of concern. A report by the George Washington University Program on Extremism published last month showed that since March 2014 a total of 84 Americans have been arrested on charges of supporting ISIS.
As a recent HBO documentary showed, many of those arrested were young men who came to the FBI’s attention through their online activities and ended up facing lengthy jail sentences. Law enforcement agencies faced with a mandate of preventive policing of terrorism cases say that they are often compelled to err on the side of making arrests rather than giving a pass to individuals who might be just blowing smoke online.
Seamus Hughes, a former official with the National Counterterrorism Center and now deputy director of George Washington’s Program on Extremism, said that if implemented transparently, the Shared Responsibility Committees could offer the promise of an “off-ramp” for people on a road to either radicalization or arrest.
“We haven’t provided families with any tools to help them. Parents are taking passports away, bringing their kids to local imams, but these are ad hoc approaches set up to fail with no support system in place,” Hughes said. “Law enforcement is given very few options besides arrest. There are a lot of attacks on heavy handed counterterrorism approaches, like informants and agent provocateurs, but that’s the status quo now until we have other options.”
But, Hughes said, the responsibilities of the interveners would need to be well defined if SRCs are going to succeed. For instance, there are concerns that the social worker or mental health professional who fails to tell the FBI someone poses a threat before they go out and commit an attack might be held civilly liable by families of the victims.
Abed Ayoub of the ADC says that the FBI has been unreceptive to community concerns. “We had a meeting in October, a couple meetings at local field offices and FBI headquarters,” he said. “But the FBI is not listening to the community advocates, they’re listening to the people receiving grants, who are paid to put programs like this into place.”
Bernie Sanders Did Confuse Numbers of Dead and Wounded in Gaza War, but Israel’s Mass Killing of Civilians Is a Fact
April 9, 2016
by Robert Mackey
The Intercept
Israeli politicians continued to rail against Bernie Sanders on Friday, even after the candidate admitted that, in an interview with the Daily News editorial board, he did momentarily confuse the estimated number of Palestinians wounded in Israel’s bombardment of Gaza in 2014, over 10,000, with the number of civilians killed, at least 1,473, according to a United Nations count.
After Sanders told the editors of the News, “my recollection is over 10,000 innocent people were killed in Gaza,” the most blistering attack came from Michael Oren, a member of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, who recently served as Israel’s Ambassador to the United States. Oren compared the misstatement to “a blood libel,” a term used to refer to the antisemitic myth dating to medieval Europe which held that Jews used the blood of Christian children in their rituals. He also insisted that Sanders had to apologize for spreading a false statistic that could help the Palestinian-led movement to use the economic tools of Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions, or BDS, against Israel.
Zeev Elkin, Israel’s immigration minister, chimed in with the comparatively mild assessment that the error by Sanders was “weird and loony.”
In an opinion piece for the News on Friday, Yair Lapid, who was a member of the governing coalition’s security cabinet at the time of the Gaza offensive, then accused Sanders of helping Hamas by bolstering the Islamist militant group’s “narrative that it is the real victim.” Lapid also asserted, without offering any evidence for the claim, that “the Israeli government found most of those killed in the operation were terrorists.”
Several independent examinations of the casualties in Gaza, however, have concluded just the opposite — that at least 60 percent of the Palestinians killed in Gaza during Israel’s seven-week offensive were civilians.
One week after the conclusion of the fighting, the U.N. reported that 2,131 Palestinians had been killed in the Israeli bombardment, and of the first 1,752 cases to be verified, “1,473 are believed to be civilians, including 501 children and 257 women.” Just 279 were “members of armed groups.” At that time, 379 of the bodies had yet to be identified.
Six months later, The Associated Press reported that its journalists had carried out a painstaking examination of the casualties from 247 Israeli airstrikes that, according to witnesses and site visits, had destroyed residential compounds in Gaza. The review found that of 844 people killed in just those strikes, 508 of the dead, over 60 percent, “were children, women and older men, all presumed to be civilians.” (This method of counting excludes anyone killed in Israel’s other 4,750 airstrikes and credible evidence that at least some of the young men killed by Israeli fire were civilians too.)
Having been attacked by Israelis who supported the Gaza offensive, Sanders was then defended by Israeli critics of the operation.
As Noam Sheizaf, a journalist in Tel Aviv, pointed out on Twitter, the hysteria in Israel seemed to be rooted in more than a dispute about exact figures, given that “we only killed 500 kids” is not great material for righteous indignation.
Hagai El-Ad, the director of B’Tselem, an Israeli rights group that also reported on the killing of civilians during the offensive, argued that Sanders deserved credit for talking about the killing of so many Palestinian civilians, despite having confused the numbers of the dead and wounded. El-Ad responded directly to Oren’s complaints about Sanders on Twitter.
M.J. Rosenberg, a critic of Israel’s ongoing siege of Gaza who once worked for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, suggested that Sanders had infuriated Israelis by raising a broader truth, that the mass killing of civilians during that operation in Gaza and others was a fact.
Indeed, a look at the transcript of his interview with the editors of the News reveals that Sanders brought up the death toll to argue that Israel’s use of force had been “indiscriminate.”
I don’t remember the figures, but my recollection is over 10,000 innocent people were killed in Gaza. Does that sound right?… I think it’s over 10,000. My understanding is that a whole lot of apartment houses were leveled. Hospitals, I think, were bombed. So yeah, I do believe and I don’t think I’m alone in believing that Israel’s force was more indiscriminate than it should have been.
These comments echoed remarks Sanders made last month in a speech laying out his Middle East policy he had intended to deliver via video link to an AIPAC conference. In that address, Sanders said that peace would require “strict adherence by both sides to the tenets of international humanitarian law. This includes Israelis ending disproportionate responses to being attacked – even though any attack on Israel is unacceptable.”
In the same speech, Sanders made it clear that he believed both sides were guilty of the indiscriminate use of force:
Of course, I strongly object to Hamas’ long held position that Israel does not have the right to exist – that is unacceptable. Of course, I strongly condemn indiscriminate rocket fire by Hamas into Israeli territory, and Hamas’ use of civilian neighborhoods to launch those attacks. I condemn the fact that Hamas diverted funds and materials for much-needed construction projects designed to improve the quality of life of the Palestinian people, and instead used those funds to construct a network of tunnels for military purposes.
However, let me also be very clear: I – along with many supporters of Israel – spoke out strongly against the Israeli counter attacks that killed nearly 1,500 civilians and wounded thousands more. I condemned the bombing of hospitals, schools and refugee camps.
In another part of the exchange with the editors of the News, Sanders — who lived on a kibbutz as a young man and has relatives who still live in Israel — criticized another aspect of Israeli policy, the building of Jewish-only settlements in the occupied West Bank, as a violation of international law. Although that has been official United States policy for decades, it is rarely stated so frankly by American politicians.
Asked if he would insist on the evacuation of settlements as president, Sanders replied: “I think if the expansion was illegal, moving into territory that was not their territory, I think withdrawal from those territories is appropriate.”
Pressed to say “who makes the call about illegality,” the candidate said: “I think that’s based on previous treaties and ideas. I happen to think that those expansions were illegal.”
The Senate’s Draft Encryption Bill is ‘Ludicrous, Dangerous, Technically Illiterate’
April 8, 2016
by Andy Greenberg
Wired
As Apple battled the FBI for the last two months over the agency’s demands that Apple help crack its own encryption, both the tech community and law enforcement hoped that Congress would weigh in with some sort of compromise solution. Now Congress has spoken on crypto, and privacy advocates say its “solution” is the most extreme stance on encryption yet.
On Thursday evening, the draft text of a bill called the “Compliance with Court Orders Act of 2016,” authored by offices of Senators Diane Feinstein and Richard Burr, was published online by the Hill.1 It’s a nine-page piece of legislation that would require people to comply with any authorized court order for data—and if that data is “unintelligible,” the legislation would demand that it be rendered “intelligible.” In other words, the bill would make illegal the sort of user-controlled encryption that’s in every modern iPhone, in all billion devices that run Whatsapp’s messaging service, and in dozens of other tech products. “This basically outlaws end-to-end encryption,” says Joseph Lorenzo Hall, chief technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology. “It’s effectively the most anti-crypto bill of all anti-crypto bills.”
Kevin Bankston, the director of the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, goes even further: “I gotta say in my nearly 20 years of work in tech policy this is easily the most ludicrous, dangerous, technically illiterate proposal I’ve ever seen,” he says.
The bill, Hall and Bankston point out, doesn’t specifically suggest any sort of backdoored encryption or other means to even attempt to balance privacy and encryption, and actually claims to not require any particular design limitations on products. Instead, it states only that communications firms must provide unencrypted data to law enforcement or the means for law enforcement to grab that data themselves. “To uphold the rule of law and protect the security and interests of the United States, all persons receiving an authorized judicial order for information or data must provide, in a timely manner, responsive and intelligible information or data, or appropriate technical assistance to obtain such information or data.”
Hall describes that as a “performance standard. You have to provide this stuff, and we’re not going to tell you how to do it,” he says. George Washington Law School professor Orin Kerr points out on Twitter that the text doesn’t even limit tech firms’ obligations to “reasonable assistance” but rather “assistance as is necessary,” a term that means the bill goes beyond current laws that the government has used to try to compel tech firms to help with data access such as the All Writs Act.
Even more extreme, the draft bill also includes the requirement that “license distributors” ensure all “products, services, applications or software” they distribute provide that same easy access for law enforcement. “Apple’s app store, Google’s play store, any platform for software applications somehow has to vet every app to ensure they have backdoored or little enough security to comply,” says Bankston. That means, he says, that this would “seem to also be a massive internet censorship bill.”
Burr and Feinstein’s bill disappoints its privacy critics in part because it seems to entirely ignore the points already made in a debate that’s raged for well over a year, and has its roots in the crytpo wars of the 1990s. Last summer, for instance, more than a dozen of the world’s top cryptographers published a paper warning of the dangers of weakening encryption on behalf of law enforcement. They cautioned that any backdoor created to give law enforcement access to encrypted communications would inevitably be used by sophisticated hackers and foreign cyberspies. And privacy advocates have also pointed out that any attempt to ban strong encryption in American products would only force people seeking law-enforcement-proof data protection to use encryption software created outside the U.S., of which there is plenty to choose from. Apple, in its lengthy, detailed arguments with the FBI in front of Congress and in legal filings, has called that weakening of Americans’ security a “unilateral disarmament” in its endless war with hackers to protect its users’ privacy.
Tom Mentzer, a spokesman for Senator Feinstein, told WIRED in a statement on behalf of both bill sponsors that “we’re still working on finalizing a discussion draft and as a result can’t comment on language in specific versions of the bill. However, the underlying goal is simple: when there’s a court order to render technical assistance to law enforcement or provide decrypted information, that court order is carried out. No individual or company is above the law. We’re still in the process of soliciting input from stakeholders and hope to have final language ready soon.”
The Burr/Feinstein draft text may in fact be so bad for privacy that it’s good for privacy: Privacy advocates point out that it has almost zero likelihood of making it into law in its current form. The White House has already declined to publicly support the bill. And Adam Schiff, the top Democratic congressman on the House of Representatives’ intelligence committee, gave WIRED a similarly ambivalent comment on the upcoming legislation yesterday. “I don’t think Congress is anywhere near a consensus on the issue,” Schiff said, “given how difficult it was to legislate the relatively easy [Cyber Information Sharing Act], and this is comparatively far more difficult and consequential.”
Bankston puts it more simply. “The CCOA is DOA,” he says, coining an acronym for the draft bill. But he warns that privacy activists and tech firms should be careful nonetheless not to underestimate the threat it represents. “We have to take this seriously,” he says. “If this is the level of nuance and understanding with which our policymakers are viewing technical issues we’re in a profoundly worrisome place.”
The Corruption Revealed in the Panama Papers Opened the Door to Isis
April 8, 2016
by Patrick Cockburn
UNZ Review
Who shall doubt ‘the secret hid
Under Cheops‘ pyramid‘
Was that the contractor did
Cheops out of several millions?
The message of Rudyard Kipling’s poem is that corruption is always with us and has not changed much down the ages. There is some truth in this, but degrees of corruption greatly matter, as the Cheops would have found to his cost if he tried to build his pyramid in modern Iraq instead of ancient Egypt. The project would cost him billions rather than millions – and he would be more likely to end up with a hole in the ground than anything resembling a pyramid.
Three years ago I was in Baghdad after it had rained heavily, driving for miles through streets that had disappeared under grey-coloured flood water combined with raw sewage. Later I asked Shirouk Abayachi, an advisor to the Ministry of Water Resources, why this was happening and she said that “since 2003, $7bn has been spent to build a new sewage system for Baghdad, but either the sewers weren’t built or they were built very badly”. She concluded that “corruption is the key to all this”.
Anybody discussing the Panama Papers and the practices of the law firm Mossack Fonseca should think about the ultimate destination of the $7bn not spent on the Baghdad drainage system. There will be many go-betweens and middle men protecting anyone who profited from this huge sum, but the suspicion must be that a proportion of it will have ended up in offshore financial centres where money is hidden and can be turned into legally held assets.
There is no obvious link between the revelations in the Panama Papers, the rise of Islamic State and the wars tearing apart at least nine countries in the Middle East and North Africa. But these three developments are intimately connected as ruling elites, who syphon off wealth into tax havens and foreign property, lose political credibility. No ordinary Afghans, Iraqis and Syrians will fight and die for rulers they detest as swindlers. Crucial to the rise of Isis, al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan is not their own strength and popularity, but the weakness and unpopularity of the governments to which they are opposed.
Kipling was right in believing that there has always been corruption, but since the early 1990s corrupt states have often mutated into kleptocracies. Ruling families and the narrow coteries around them have taken a larger and larger share of the economic cake.
In Syria since the turn of the century, for instance, the rural population and the urban poor no longer enjoyed the limited benefits they had previously received under an equally harsh but more egalitarian regime. By 2011, President Bashar al-Assad’s first cousin Rami Makhlouf was reported to be a dominant player in 60 per cent of the Syrian economy and to have a personal worth of $5 billion.
In Iraq earlier this year, a financial specialist, who wished to remain anonymous, said that the government of prime minister Haider al-Abadi held files on corrupt individuals, including “one politician who has amassed a fortune of $6 billion through corrupt dealings.”
The danger of citing extreme examples of corruption from exotic and war-ravaged countries like Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria is that these may sound like events happening on another planet. But the political and economic systems in Iraq and Afghanistan were devised under the tutelage of the US and allies like Britain. They were proponents of free market economics which in the West may increase inequality and benefit the wealthy, but in Kabul and Baghdad were a license to steal by anybody with power.
Neo-liberal economists have a lot to answer for. A few days after Isis had captured Mosul in June 2014, I was in Baghdad and asked a recently retired four-star Iraqi general why the much larger and better-equipped Iraqi army had been defeated so swiftly and humiliatingly. He replied that the explanation was: “Corruption! Corruption! Corruption!”
He added that this was pervasive and had begun when the US was building a new Iraqi military after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003, when the American commanders had insisted on out-sourcing food and other supplies to private contractors. These businessmen and the army officers soon determined that, if the Iraqi government was paying money to feed and equip a battalion of 600 men, but its real strength was only 150, they could pocket the difference. So profitable was this arrangement that by 2014 all officers’ jobs were for sale and it cost $200,000 to become a colonel and up to $2m a general in charge of a division. Blatant corruption at the top in Kabul and Baghdad has been frequently reported over the years, though nothing much seems to change. But it is a mistake to imagine that this was simply the outcome of a culture of corruption specific to Afghanistan and Iraq. The most corrupt ministers were appointed and the most crooked contracts signed at a time when US officials were the real decision-makers in Baghdad.
For example, the entire military procurement budget of $1.2 billion was effectively stolen in 2004/5 when the Defence Ministry was substantially under US control, raising questions of the competence, or even collusion, of the US authorities.
The situation has got worse, not better. “I feared seven or eight years ago that Iraq would become like Nigeria,” said one former minister in 2013, “but in fact it is far worse.”
He cited as evidence a $1.3bn contract signed by a minister with one foreign company that had only a nominal existence – and a second company that was bankrupt. This took place in a country in which one third of the labour force is unemployed, and, if the underemployed are taken into account, the figure rises to over half.
The use of offshore financial centres by the moneyed elite in the oil states and much of the rest of the world is not always to avoid taxes which they would not pay if they kept the money at home, but in some cases to conceal what they have stolen and later to legally launder it.
Some of this can be done by buying property in places like Baghdad, which explains why property prices in that dangerous city are as high as London. But it is safer and better to buy property in London itself, something that will ultimately require the services of a company like Mossack Fonseca – though these services will be far removed from the original toxic source of the investment.
The Panama Papers give insight into the names and mechanisms through which globalised elites hide their wealth and avoid paying tax on it. Commentators now predict that popular disgust with political establishments will benefit radical leaders like Bernie Sanders in the US and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK.
What they do not see is that the way in which the detachment of interests of elites from the countries they rule has already produced states that have failed or are failing, or are wracked by conflict and war.
Smuggled Afghan boy texts for help inside UK lorry
April 8, 2016
AFP
London (AFP) – A young Afghan boy saved his life and that of 14 adults by texting for help from inside a refrigerated truck in which they were being smuggled to Britain, a charity worker who helped him said Friday.
Ahmed, who is aged six or seven, used a mobile phone given to him by a British aid worker in a French migrant camp to warn her that they were running out of oxygen.
Volunteer Inca Sorrell was attending a conference in New York when she received his texts and contacted a colleague in Britain, Tanya Freedman, who alerted police.
Officers traced the phone and stopped the truck, taking all those inside into the care of immigration authorities.
“It’s an extraordinary story. It’s a global network of people who came together to save lives, led by this young boy,” Freedman, who works at British charity Help Refugees, told AFP.
Sorrell had met Ahmed in a children’s centre in “The Jungle” migrant camp in the French port of Calais, where thousands of refugees and economic migrants live while waiting to travel to Britain, often illegally.
As the camp was being demolished last month, she gave the boy a phone with credit and her number on, with instructions to call her if he found himself in danger.
“He texted me to let me know that he’d made it to England,” Sorrell told delegates at the conference.
“Then he told me that he was stuck in the back of the lorry and the driver wouldn’t stop, that it was a refrigerated lawyer and he had no way of getting out.”
The text read: “I ned halp darivar no stap car no oksijan in the car no sagnal iam in the cantenar. Iam no jokan valla.”
This means: “I need help, driver no stop car, no oxygen in the car, no signal, I am in the container. I am not joking, Wallah (I promise).”
A police spokeswoman confirmed a truck was stopped at a motorway service station in Leicestershire in central England on Thursday, and 14 people were arrested on suspicion of being illegal immigrants.
She said one man was arrested on suspicion of smuggling them into Britain, while “safeguarding measures were put in place for a child who was found in the truck”.
Ahmed was travelling with his older brother, estimated to be aged around 20.
Around 40 migrants a day were detained after crossing the Channel from France to Britain last summer, according to an official report by HM Inspectorate of Prisons.