TBR News April 6, 2016
The Voice of the White House
Washington, D.C., April 6, 2016: “With important domestic elections on hand, the outing of offshore tax avoidance entites is causing spastic colon in Washington and in the board rooms of important oligarchs. The obedient American media is either turning a blind eye to the huge revelations or is pointing to people the administration and oligarchs do not like and hoping that the hundreds of those who have all of the information will either keep silent or have the decency to wait until the election period has passed. After all, it is becoming well-known that many American Congressmen and political leaders are involved in hiding bribe monies and the press is compliant in protecting the voting public from unpleasant revelations. After all, the tax payers must not be disturbed. Of course their taxes are automatically deducted and paid by their employers to the coffers of a very corrupt government but an enraged public could create havoc. The American middle class is shrinking rapidly but the poor are growing and the rich as well. The poor have no power, other than revolt, and the rich can always live in Aruba.”
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. 17
SECRECY NEWS
From the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2016, Issue No. 31
April 6, 2016
DNI CLAPPER EMBRACES REVIEW OF SECRECY SYSTEM
Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper threw his weight behind the upcoming Fundamental Classification Guidance Review (FCGR), which requires executive branch agencies to review all of their classification guidance and to eliminate obsolete secrecy requirements every five years. (On the FCGR, see “Secrecy System to Undergo ‘Thoughtful Scrutiny’,” Secrecy News, March 28).
In an extraordinary memorandum sent to directors of five other intelligence agencies (CIA, DIA, NGA, NSA, and NRO), Director Clapper told them to seize the opportunity to overhaul current classification policy.
“This periodic review provides an ideal platform for the Intelligence Community (IC), as stewards of the nation’s most sensitive information, to take a leading role in reducing targeted classification activities that could extend to the larger Federal government,” Clapper wrote in his March 23 memo.
Ordinarily, the nuts and bolts of the classification system would be beneath the concern of senior agency officials. But DNI Clapper’s intervention changes that presumption. In effect, the Clapper memo focuses attention on what would otherwise be a routine mid-level bureaucratic function and elevates it to a senior-level imperative.
“I am requesting your personal involvement,” he wrote, instructing the intelligence agency directors to perform several additional steps above and beyond what the Fundamental Classification Guidance Review already requires.
Clapper asked for feasibility studies on reducing the number of IC Original Classification Authorities, on the utility of an IC-wide classification guide, on the elimination of the Confidential classification in the IC, and on a new initiative to promote discretionary declassification actions.
“Please comment on what would be required to implement a proactive discretionary declassification program distinct from the systematic, automatic, and mandatory declassification review programs” that already exist, the DNI wrote.
The history of secrecy reform in the U.S. government demonstrates that it is most effective — or that it is only effective — when it is driven by senior agency leadership. Not since Secretary of Energy Hazel O’Leary’s “openness initiative” in the 1990s has an agency head endorsed secrecy reform with the specificity and authority expressed by DNI Clapper.
“I believe your efforts will serve as a significant step forward in furthering our shared goals for greater openness and reduced classification activity while protecting legitimate national security interests,” he wrote to the intelligence agency directors.
DOD SECURITY CLEARANCES DOWN BY 900K SINCE 2013
The total number of employees and contractors holding security clearances for access to classified information at the Department of Defense dropped by a hefty 900,000 between 2013 and 2016 — or 20% of the total cleared population at DoD. At the start of the current Fiscal Year, DoD had a remaining 3.7 million cleared personnel.
These data were presented in the latest quarterly report on Insider Threat and Security Clearance Reform, 1st quarter, FY 2016, published last month.
Importantly, this was a policy choice, not simply a budgetary artifact or a statistical fluke. A reduction in security clearances is a wholesome development, since it lowers costs and permits more focused use of security resources. It also increases pressure, at least implicitly, to eliminate unnecessary security classification restrictions.
However, reductions in clearances appeared to be stabilizing over the past year, with the elimination of around 100,000 clearance holders who did not have access to classified information, and an increase of around 100,000 cleared persons who did have such access.
Meanwhile, the Insider Threat program is being slowly implemented across the government. The Department of Defense expanded its “Continuous Evaluation” capability — providing automated notification of financial irregularities or criminal activity, for example — to cover 225,000 employees, up from 100,000 last year. The Department of State also initiated its own Continuous Evaluation pilot program.
Overall, the Insider Threat program faces continuing hurdles. “Many departments and agencies are discovering challenges with issues such as organizational culture, legal questions, and resource identification, to name a few,” the latest quarterly report said.
CORRECTION: U.S. HEU INVENTORY CUT BY 101 MT IN 2004-13
I mistakenly wrote on April 4 that the U.S. inventory of Highly Enriched Uranium in 2004 was 590.5 Metric Tons, and that very little HEU had been eliminated between then and 2013 when, as the White House announced last week, the total HEU inventory was 585.6 Metric Tons.
The 590.5 MT number came from a 2006 Department of Energy report. But I read the report wrong: 590.5 MT was the amount of U-235, not the amount of HEU. The actual inventory of HEU in 2004 was 686.6 Metric Tons.
Therefore, between 2004 and 2013 there was indeed a sizable reduction in the U.S. HEU inventory from 686.6 MT to 585.6 MT, or 101 Metric Tons. Thanks to Prof. Alan Kuperman for pointing out the error.
Zika mystery deepens with evidence of nerve cell infections
April 6, 2016
by Julie Steenhuysen
Reuters
Chicago-Top Zika investigators now believe that the birth defect microcephaly and the paralyzing Guillain-Barre syndrome may be just the most obvious maladies caused by the mosquito-borne virus.
Fueling that suspicion are recent discoveries of serious brain and spinal cord infections – including encephalitis, meningitis and myelitis – in people exposed to Zika.
Evidence that Zika’s damage may be more varied and widespread than initially believed adds pressure on affected countries to control mosquitoes and prepare to provide intensive – and, in some cases, lifelong – care to more patients. The newly suspected disorders can cause paralysis and permanent disability – a clinical outlook that adds urgency to vaccine development efforts.
Scientists are of two minds about why these new maladies have come into view. The first is that, as the virus is spreading through such large populations, it is revealing aspects of Zika that went unnoticed in earlier outbreaks in remote and sparsely populated areas. The second is that the newly detected disorders are more evidence that the virus has evolved.
“What we’re seeing are the consequences of this virus turning from the African strain to a pandemic strain,” said Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine.
The Zika outbreak was first detected in Brazil last year and is spreading through the Americas. It has been linked to thousands of suspected cases of microcephaly, a typically rare birth defect marked by unusually small head size, signaling a problem with brain development. Evidence linking Zika to microcephaly prompted the World Health Organization to declare a global health emergency in February.
The suspicion that Zika acts directly on nerve cells began with autopsies on aborted and stillborn fetuses showing the virus replicating in brain tissues. In addition to microcephaly, researchers reported finding other abnormalities linked with Zika including fetal deaths, placental insufficiency, fetal growth retardation and injury to the central nervous system.
Doctors also are worried that Zika exposure in utero may have hidden effects, such as behavioral problems or learning disabilities, that are not apparent at birth.
“If you have a virus that is toxic enough to produce microcephaly in someone, you could be sure that it will produce a whole series of conditions that we haven’t even begun to understand,” said Dr. Alberto de la Vega, an obstetrician at San Juan’s University Hospital in Puerto Rico.
First discovered in the Zika forest of Uganda in 1947, the virus circulated quietly in Africa and Asia, causing rare infections and producing mild symptoms. A 2013 outbreak in French Polynesia, the largest at that time, led researchers to make the Guillain-Barre link. Other neurological effects were noted but scientists made little of them at the time.
A rare and poorly understood condition, Guillain-Barre can weaken muscles and cause temporary paralysis, often requiring patients to need respirators to breathe.
An estimated 32,000 people in the French Polynesia Zika outbreak were infected, and 42 patients were confirmed to have Guillain-Barre, a 20-fold increase in incidence over the previous four years, the WHO reported. Another 32 patients had other neurological disorders, including encephalitis, meningoencephalitis, myelitis and facial paralysis.
Guillain-Barre is an autoimmune disorder, in which the body attacks itself in the aftermath of an infection. But the newly discovered brain and spinal cord infections are known to be caused by a different mechanism – a direct attack on nerve cells. That has prompted scientists to consider whether the Zika virus also may infect nerves directly in adults, as they already have suspected in fetuses.
In medical journals published last month, doctors described neurological syndromes in two patients that they attributed to Zika. Doctors in Paris diagnosed meningoencephalitis, an infection of both the brain and spinal cord, in an 81-year-old man who was hospitalized after being exposed to Zika on a cruise.
Another French team reported acute myelitis, a paralyzing infection of the spinal cord, in a 15-year-old girl who had been infected with Zika on the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe.
In its latest surveillance report, the WHO said the two cases “highlight the need to better understand the range of neurological disorders associated with Zika-virus infection.”
Other mosquito-borne viruses – including dengue, Japanese encephalitis and West Nile – are known to directly infect nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord. But such viruses are seldom associated with Guillain-Barre, and never with microcephaly, said Baylor’s Hotez.
POSSIBLE EVOLUTION
In a recent paper, WHO researcher Mary Kay Kindhauser wrote that Zika “appears to have changed in character,” noting its transition from a mild infection to one causing “large outbreaks linked with neurological disorders.”
Scientists studying Zika in Brazil now are reporting the same neurological disorders seen in French Polynesia. From April through July 2015, doctors in Brazil identified a spike in Guillain-Barre cases.
In Salvador, there were roughly 50 reported cases of Guillain-Barre in July alone, far more than would typically be expected, Dr. Albert Ko, a tropical disease expert from Yale University who is studying Zika in the coastal city of Salvador, recently told a research symposium.
“Throughout Brazil, doctors have seen strange, atypical, neurological manifestations,” Ko said told the symposium.
Zika exposed patients have had other neurological problems as well, including acute disseminated encephalomyelitis, which causes inflammation of the myelin, the protective sheath covering nerve fibers in the brain and spinal cord. Other patients experienced tingling, prickling or burning sensations, which are often markers of peripheral nerve damage.
In addition to Brazil and French Polynesia, at least 11 more countries and territories have reported hundreds of cases of Guillain-Barre syndrome linked to Zika. In Brazil, Guillain-Barre cases jumped 19 percent to 1,708 last year.
El Salvador, a country that has an annual average of 196 cases of Guillain-Barre, reported 118 cases in six weeks in December and January.
Zika’s arrival in Colombia in October 2015 was associated with another increase in Guillain-Barre cases. The country typically reports 242 cases of the syndrome a year, or about five a week. But in the five weeks starting in mid-December, Colombia reported 86 cases of Guillain-Barre, or about 17 a week.
Dr. Carlos Pardo-Villamizar, a neurologist at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, is studying Zika complications with colleagues in five Colombian research centers. They have seen cases of encephalitis, myelitis and facial paralysis associated with Zika and want to understand what is triggering these complications.
They also want to study whether prior infection with dengue or chikungunya – two related viruses – are contributing to neurological disorders seen in patients with Zika.
Scientists are turning their attention next to Puerto Rico, where Zika is expected to infect hundreds of thousands of residents by year-end.
More cases hold the potential for “a better sense of the full spectrum of disease that Zika is capable of causing,” said Dr. Amesh Adalja of the Center for Health Security at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
(Reporting by Julie Steenhuysen; additional reporting by Anthony Boadle in Brasilia, Brazil; Editing by Michele Gershberg and Lisa Girion)
Panama law firm says data hack was external, files complaint
April 6, 2016
by Elida Moreno and Enrique Pretel
Reuters
Panama City-The Panamanian lawyer at the center of a data leak scandal that has embarrassed a clutch of world leaders said on Tuesday his firm was a victim of a hack from outside the company, and has filed a complaint with state prosecutors.
Founding partner Ramon Fonseca said the firm, Mossack Fonseca, which specializes in setting up offshore companies, had broken no laws and that all its operations were legal. Nor had it ever destroyed any documents or helped anyone evade taxes or launder money, he added in an interview with Reuters.
Company emails, extracts of which were published in an investigation by the U.S.-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and other media organizations, were “taken out of context” and misinterpreted, he added.
“We rule out an inside job. This is not a leak. This is a hack,” Fonseca, 63, said at the company’s headquarters in Panama City’s business district. “We have a theory and we are following it,” he added, without elaborating.
“We have already made the relevant complaints to the Attorney General’s office, and there is a government institution studying the issue,” he added, flanked by two press advisers.
Governments across the world have begun investigating possible financial wrongdoing by the rich and powerful after the leak of more than 11.5 million documents, dubbed the “Panama Papers,” from the law firm that span four decades.
The papers have revealed financial arrangements of prominent figures, including friends of Russian President Vladimir Putin, relatives of the prime ministers of Britain and Pakistan and Chinese President Xi Jinping, and the president of Ukraine.
On Tuesday, Iceland’s prime minister, Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson, resigned, becoming the first casualty of the leak.
“The (emails) were taken out of context,” Fonseca said, denouncing what he called a “witch-hunt”.
He lamented what he called journalistic activism and sensationalism, extolling his own investigative research credentials as a published novelist in Panama. He said he feared that his rivals could muscle in on their business following the leak.
“The only crime that has been proven is the hack,” Fonseca said. “No one is talking about that. That is the story.”
He said his company had a staff of around 500, 300 of which work in Panama, but declined to comment on his law firm’s structure or franchises in other parts of the world.
Setting up a company might cost between about $700 and $1,000, he said, with a significant part of that fee going to the government. Mossack Fonseca has set up around 250,000 businesses over the past 40 years.
He added that it is cheaper to do business in Nevada. He said business rules have tightened and that his company has adhered to them.
“Fifteen years ago, due diligence didn’t exist and they are judging us by other standards,” Fonseca said.
France announced on Tuesday it would put the Central American nation back on its blacklist of uncooperative tax jurisdictions.
Alvaro Aleman, chief of staff to Panamanian President Juan Carlos Varela, told a news conference the government could respond with similar measures against France, or any other country that followed France’s lead.
“This is a tropical storm, like the ones we have here in Panama where once it passes the sun will come out,” Fonseca said. “I guarantee you that we will not be found guilty of anything.”
(Additional reporting by Christine Murray; Writing by Simon Gardner; Editing by Peter Cooney and Sam Holmes)
Forget Panama: it’s easier to hide your money in the US than almost anywhere
The term tax haven may evoke images of exotic locales, but Panama actually ranks as the 13th most attractive spot for hiding assets, while the US lies third
April 6, 2016
by Jana Kasperkevic
Reuters
New York-One of the surprises about the Panama Papers – the largest leak from an offshore tax adviser in history – is how few Americans have so far been exposed. The reason? It may be because creating a shell company in the US is easier than obtaining a library card.
About 200 people with US addresses have so far been revealed as clients of Mossack Fonseca, the firm at the center of the Panama Papers leak. Compared with countries such as China, Switzerland, Russia and the United Kingdom, the number is small.
The anomaly may be because it’s so easy to create a vehicle to hide your money and your identity in the US that there’s no need to mess with Panama, according to Shruti Shah, vice-president of programs and operations at Transparency International, an anti-corruption organization.
“You don’t really have to go to Panama or other tax havens. They are not the only ones making it possible for corrupt officials and other criminals to launder their money. You can do it in every state in the US,” explained Shah.
“In every state in the US, you can incorporate an LLC – [a limited liability company] – or another legal entity and you don’t have to disclose who the beneficiary on it is. In fact, Delaware is so synonymous with anonymous companies and ghost corporations that it was named in Transparency International’s Unmask the Corrupt campaign as one of the most symbolic cases of corruption.”
The term tax haven usually evokes an image of some faraway place like Belize or the Cayman Islands. Yet in 2015, in a ranking of tax havens most attractive for those looking to hide assets, the US came in third – surpassing Cayman and Singapore. The two places that were even better suited as tax havens for the rich were Switzerland and Hong Kong, according to the Tax Justice Network that published the ranking.
What was Panama’s ranking? It was 10 spots behind the US, at 13.
Welcome to Delaware
A while back, Shah sent her husband to return an overdue book she had borrowed from the library. When he returned, he told her her library card was expired and that to renew it she would have to bring her driver’s license showing her current address or a utility bill with her address.
“If I were to open a shell company, I wouldn’t require any of those things. I would actually need less information to open a shell company in the US than I would need to get a driver’s license or a library card,” pointed out Shah.
Is this in every state or just some like Delaware where the majority of US companies are incorporated ? “No state in the US requires beneficial ownership information. So it’s practically everywhere,” explained Shah, who lives in Virginia. “Some states are easier than others. In some states it’s more money than others, because they also have tax-friendly laws. Delaware and Nevada and Wyoming are infamous – or famous, however you look at it – [for their tax laws]. Texas and Florida are equally easy.”
There is nothing illegal about setting up a shell company. US states are proud of their business-friendly policies. Delaware, for example, prides itself on being the incorporation capital of the US. “More than 1,000,000 business entities have made Delaware their legal home,” claimed the state’s Division of Corporations website. “More than 50% of all publicly-traded companies in the US including 64% of the Fortune 500 have chosen Delaware as their legal home.”
In the wake of the Panama Papers, the number of shell companies incorporated in the US could grow. Instead of stashing their cash in Belize, Panama or the Cayman Islands, the companies and individuals could turn to the US.
“They certainly could,” said Heather Lowe, director of government affairs at Global Financial Integrity. “Given the lack of action in the US to address this issue compared to, say, the European Union, it may seem like a safe bet right now.”
Shell companies have their uses; they can be used to buy land anonymously, for example, without tipping off the competition. To create an entity to protect future business rights, or a holding company for various businesses. They can also be used to, legally, make political contributions anonymously.
Just because some people or companies have chosen the state to form shell companies and hide assets does not mean the entire system should be to blame, argued Charles Elson, director of the John L Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware.
“Delaware really is not a tax haven. Delaware is a place where most US companies are incorporated, because of a very intelligent corporate law regime,” he said. “Obviously, some companies that are problematic come here, too, but that’s not the design of the system. That’s a collateral effect … If someone uses the corporation for nefarious purposes, I don’t think that’s the fault of the corporate statute, but of the individual.”
Shell companies, whether created abroad or at home, make it easy for people to hide assets and commit crimes, said Shah. For example, in the mid-2000s, former Louisiana congressman William Jefferson had created eight different shell companies to hide hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes. Viktor Bout, an infamous arms trafficker known as the Merchant of Death, had at least a dozen shell companies incorporated in Delaware, Texas and Florida to cover up his weapons trafficking operation.
There is no reason, said Shah, why creating such shell companies should be easier than obtaining a library card. Her group Transparency International has called on the US Congress to pass the Incorporation Transparency and Law Enforcement Assistance Act introduced by congresswoman Carolyn Maloney and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. If enacted, the bill would require states to collect, maintain and update information about beneficial ownership of all companies created in the US.
“Bipartisan legislation has been introduced in the House since 2008, but it has never seen the light of day. It’s never been enacted into law. Maybe now is the time,” said Shah.
Elson remains skeptical as to whether such a law would actually work.
“I don’t know how fixing the beneficial ownership rule would fix this. If someone is devious enough to game the system in this way, they would work their way around any single regulatory change. These are very clever people,” he said.
In order for any legislation to pass, the US business community would have to come out in support of it, pointed out Lowe.
“The US Chamber of Commerce has long opposed legislation to end anonymous companies, and they must reverse that position and begin to support honest and open business practices,” she said.
EU border vulnerable to terrorist infiltration as majority of migrants undocumented – Frontex
April 6, 2016
RT
The EU border agency’s annual risk analysis warns of terrorists using illegal migrant flows to enter Europe as border guards are often unable to determine the nationality of migrants, let alone check their identity.
“As the vast majority of migrants arrive undocumented, screening activities are essential to properly verify their declaration of nationality,” the document states.
“False declarations of nationality are rife among nationals who are unlikely to obtain asylum in the EU,” Frontex reports, stressing there are “no penalties in place for those making such false declarations.”
“There is a risk that some persons representing a security threat to the EU may be taking advantage of this situation,” the analysis concludes.
Terrorists have already exploited this danger. Frontex points out that two bombers participating in last year’s terror attacks in Paris arrived in the EU on a smuggler boat from Turkey through the Greek island of Leros. They were then registered by the Greek authorities, having presented fraudulent Syrian IDs.
“The Paris attacks in November 2015 clearly demonstrated that irregular migratory flows could be used by terrorists to enter the EU,” Frontex analysts say.
Another means of entering the EU illegally is by joining the crowds of asylum seekers breaking through the cordons of border guards.
“Situations when a large number of people are crossing the border en masse have led to violence requiring public order policing, a task for which border control authorities are neither adequately equipped nor trained,” the document says.
One piece of “good” news from Frontex is that the number of migrants that have already entered the European Union could actually be smaller than the 1.8 million officially declared in 2015.
In a tweet last year Frontex admitted that some migrants could be double-counted in statistics while crossing different European borders.
“People arriving in Greece would again be counted entering Hungary,” the organization said.
“They are not talking about 1.8 million people – they are talking about 1.8 million border detections,” the Guardian quoted Nando Sigona, a migration-focused academic at the University of Birmingham, as saying. “People may have crossed more than one border.”
The unprecedented number of illegal border crossing detections has been accompanied by a surge of violence on EU borders, the reports says, adding that crossings sometimes involve threats to border guards – something that was previously quite rare.
One example is the traffickers – most often Moroccans, Spaniards, Albanians and Syrians – who are smuggling illegal migrants. They are so motivated to keep their lucrative trade going that they could even “threaten border guards to recover boats or escape apprehension.”
Erdogan proposes stripping PKK supporters of Turkish citizenship
In the latest step in Turkey’s crackdown on the PKK, President Erdogan has floated the idea of revoking Kurdish supporters’ Turkish citizenship. Erdogan said Turkey has “nothing to discuss with terrorists.”
April 6, 2016
DW
Members and supporters of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) do not deserve to maintain Turkish citizenship, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said.
“To prevent them from doing harm we must take all measures, including stripping supporters of the terrorist organization of their citizenship,” Erdogan said in a speech to lawyers in Ankara on Tuesday. “These people don’t deserve to be our citizens. We are not obliged to carry anyone engaged in the betrayal of their state and their people.”
Without rejecting the idea, Turkish Prime Minster Ahmet Davutoglu said the government was not currently planning to strip PKK backers of their citizenship.
“This idea is not ready,” Davutoglu told reporters.
The country’s justice minister, Bekir Bozdag, however, said on Wednesday that work would start on a new rule as proposed by the president, Reuters news agency reported.
Nothing to discuss
Erdogan added that the state “has nothing to discuss with terrorists. That business is over.” He also reiterated accusations he leveled in March at academics, journalists and aid workers of supporting terrorism.
“Supporters [of terror] who pose as academics, spies who identify themselves as journalists, an activist disguised as a politician … are no different from the terrorists who throw bombs,” Erdogan said.
Turkey: Defiant journalists
Two journalists at the opposition daily “Cumhuriyet” face life in prison for revealing state secrets concerning alleged Turkish weapon supplies to rebels in Syria, and a court-appointed panel of trustees took control of “Zaman,” another opposition newspaper, in March. Prosecutors in January launched investigations against more than 1,200 academics who denounced the military campaign against Kurdish rebels.
Erdogan also called for stripping pro-Kurdish lawmakers of their parliamentary immunity so they could be charged with “terrorist propaganda.” He has accused members of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) of being an extension of the PKK. HDP members replied that their party is opposed to violence.
Ongoing fighting
Turkey, the United States and the European Union consider the PKK a terrorist organization. Fighting between the Kurdish militia and Turkey has picked up since July when the PKK scrapped a two-year ceasefire in its fight for greater autonomy and rights for Kurds. The conflict has claimed more than 40,000 lives since 1984.
Two attacks conducted by Kurdish rebels in Ankara killed dozens last month leading to an offensive to root rebels out of urban areas. The move comes in addition to a long-running military campaign in southeastern Turkey.
Turkey won’t tolerate insults to Erdogan
April 5, 2016
AP
ANKARA, Turkey: Turkey’s prime minister says his country will not tolerate any insults directed toward President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s “honor,” following German television programs that mocked him.
Ahmet Davutoglu said Tuesday any insults to Erdogan amounted to insulting Turkish people’s honor and would not go without a “response.”
Last month, Turkey summoned Germany’s ambassador to complain about a song aired by a channel that poked fun at Erdogan. A German comedian later read an offensive poem on another German channel as an example of something that wouldn’t be allowed in Germany.
Davutoglu said he discussed the poem with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and welcomed a statement by her spokesman who said Monday that “satire takes place within our country’s press and media freedom, which – as you know – is not unlimited.”
Writing a Blank Check on War for the President
How the United States Became a Prisoner of War and Congress Went MIA
by Andrew J. Bacevich
TomDispatch
Let’s face it: in times of war, the Constitution tends to take a beating. With the safety or survival of the nation said to be at risk, the basic law of the land — otherwise considered sacrosanct — becomes nonbinding, subject to being waived at the whim of government authorities who are impatient, scared, panicky, or just plain pissed off.
The examples are legion. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln arbitrarily suspended the writ of habeas corpus and ignored court orders that took issue with his authority to do so. After U.S. entry into World War I, the administration of Woodrow Wilson mounted a comprehensive effort to crush dissent, shutting down anti-war publications in complete disregard of the First Amendment. Amid the hysteria triggered by Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order consigning to concentration camps more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans, many of them native-born citizens. Asked in 1944 to review this gross violation of due process, the Supreme Court endorsed the government’s action by a 6-3 vote.
More often than not, the passing of the emergency induces second thoughts and even remorse. The further into the past a particular war recedes, the more dubious the wartime arguments for violating the Constitution appear. Americans thereby take comfort in the “lessons learned” that will presumably prohibit any future recurrence of such folly.
Even so, the onset of the next war finds the Constitution once more being ill-treated. We don’t repeat past transgressions, of course. Instead, we devise new ones. So it has been during the ongoing post-9/11 period of protracted war.
During the presidency of George W. Bush, the United States embraced torture as an instrument of policy in clear violation of the Eighth Amendment prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment. Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, ordered the extrajudicial killing of an American citizen, a death by drone that was visibly in disregard of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. Both administrations — Bush’s with gusto, Obama’s with evident regret — imprisoned individuals for years on end without charge and without anything remotely approximating the “speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury” guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment. Should the present state of hostilities ever end, we can no doubt expect Guantánamo to become yet another source of “lessons learned” for future generations of rueful Americans.
Congress on the Sidelines
Yet one particular check-and-balance constitutional proviso now appears exempt from this recurring phenomenon of disregard followed by professions of dismay, embarrassment, and “never again-ism” once the military emergency passes. I mean, of course, Article I, section 8 of the Constitution, which assigns to Congress the authority “to declare war” and still stands as testimony to the genius of those who drafted it. There can be no question that the responsibility for deciding when and whether the United States should fight resides with the legislative branch, not the executive, and that this was manifestly the intent of the Framers.
On parchment at least, the division of labor appears straightforward. The president’s designation as commander-in-chief of the armed forces in no way implies a blanket authorization to employ those forces however he sees fit or anything faintly like it. Quite the contrary: legitimizing presidential command requires explicit congressional sanction.
Actual practice has evolved into something altogether different. The portion of Article I, Section 8, cited above has become a dead letter, about as operative as blue laws still on the books in some American cities and towns that purport to regulate Sabbath day activities. Superseding the written text is an unwritten counterpart that goes something like this: with legislators largely consigned to the status of observers, presidents pretty much wage war whenever, wherever, and however they see fit. Whether the result qualifies as usurpation or forfeiture is one of those chicken-and-egg questions that’s interesting but practically speaking beside the point.
This is by no means a recent development. It has a history. In the summer of 1950, when President Harry Truman decided that a U.N. Security Council resolution provided sufficient warrant for him to order U.S. forces to fight in Korea, congressional war powers took a hit from which they would never recover.
Congress soon thereafter bought into the notion, fashionable during the Cold War, that formal declarations of hostilities had become passé. Waging the “long twilight struggle” ostensibly required deference to the commander-in-chief on all matters related to national security. To sustain the pretense that it still retained some relevance, Congress took to issuing what were essentially permission slips, granting presidents maximum freedom of action to do whatever they might decide needed to be done in response to the latest perceived crisis.
The Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 1964 offers a notable example. With near unanimity, legislators urged President Lyndon Johnson “to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression” across the length and breadth of Southeast Asia. Through the magic of presidential interpretation, a mandate to prevent aggression provided legal cover for an astonishingly brutal and aggressive war in Vietnam, as well as Cambodia and Laos. Under the guise of repelling attacks on U.S. forces, Johnson and his successor, Richard Nixon, thrust millions of American troops into a war they could not win, even if more than 58,000 died trying.To leap almost four decades ahead, think of the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) that was passed by Congress in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 as the grandchild of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. This document required (directed, called upon, requested, invited, urged) President George W. Bush “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations, or persons.” In plain language: here’s a blank check; feel free to fill it in any way you like.
Forever War
As a practical matter, one specific individual — Osama bin Laden — had hatched the 9/11 plot. A single organization — al-Qaeda — had conspired to pull it off. And just one nation — backward, Taliban-controlled Afghanistan — had provided assistance, offering sanctuary to bin Laden and his henchmen. Yet nearly 15 years later, the AUMF remains operative and has become the basis for military actions against innumerable individuals, organizations, and nations with no involvement whatsoever in the murderous events of September 11, 2001.
Consider the following less than comprehensive list of four developments, all of which occurred just within the last month and a half:
*In Yemen, a U.S. airstrike killed at least 50 individuals, said to be members of an Islamist organization that did not exist on 9/11.
*In Somalia, another U.S. airstrike killed a reported 150 militants, reputedly members of al-Shabab, a very nasty outfit, even if one with no real agenda beyond Somalia itself.
*In Syria, pursuant to the campaign of assassination that is the latest spin-off of the Iraq War, U.S. special operations forces bumped off the reputed “finance minister” of the Islamic State, another terror group that didn’t even exist in September 2001.
*In Libya, according to press reports, the Pentagon is again gearing up for “decisive military action” — that is, a new round of air strikes and special operations attacks to quell the disorder resulting from the U.S.-orchestrated air campaign that in 2011 destabilized that country. An airstrike conducted in late February gave a hint of what is to come: it killed approximately 50 Islamic State militants (and possibly two Serbian diplomatic captives).
Yemen, Somalia, Syria, and Libya share at least this in common: none of them, nor any of the groups targeted, had a hand in the 9/11 attacks.
Imagine if, within a matter of weeks, China were to launch raids into Vietnam, Thailand, and Taiwan, with punitive action against the Philippines in the offing. Or if Russia, having given a swift kick to Ukraine, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, leaked its plans to teach Poland a lesson for mismanaging its internal affairs. Were Chinese President Xi Jinping or Russian President Vladimir Putin to order such actions, the halls of Congress would ring with fierce denunciations. Members of both houses would jostle for places in front of the TV cameras to condemn the perpetrators for recklessly violating international law and undermining the prospects for world peace. Having no jurisdiction over the actions of other sovereign states, senators and representatives would break down the doors to seize the opportunity to get in their two cents worth. No one would be able to stop them. Who does Xi think he is! How dare Putin!
Yet when an American president undertakes analogous actions over which the legislative branch does have jurisdiction, members of Congress either yawn or avert their eyes.
In this regard, Republicans are especially egregious offenders. On matters where President Obama is clearly acting in accordance with the Constitution — for example, in nominating someone to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court — they spare no effort to thwart him, concocting bizarre arguments nowhere found in the Constitution to justify their obstructionism. Yet when this same president cites the 2001 AUMF as the basis for initiating hostilities hither and yon, something that is on the face of it not legal but ludicrous, they passively assent.
Indeed, when Obama in 2015 went so far as to ask Congress to pass a new AUMF addressing the specific threat posed by the Islamic State — that is, essentially rubberstamping the war he had already launched on his own in Syria and Iraq — the Republican leadership took no action. Looking forward to the day when Obama departs office, Senator Mitch McConnell with his trademark hypocrisy worried aloud that a new AUMF might constrain his successor. The next president will “have to clean up this mess, created by all of this passivity over the last eight years,” the majority leader remarked. In that regard, “an authorization to use military force that ties the president’s hands behind his back is not something I would want to do.” The proper role of Congress was to get out of the way and give this commander-in-chief carte blanche so that the next one would enjoy comparably unlimited prerogatives.
Collaborating with a president they roundly despise — implicitly concurring in Obama’s questionable claim that “existing statutes [already] provide me with the authority I need” to make war on ISIS — the GOP-controlled Congress thereby transformed the post-9/11 AUMF into what has now become, in effect, a writ of permanent and limitless armed conflict. In Iraq and Syria, for instance, what began as a limited but open-ended campaign of air strikes authorized by President Obama in August 2014 has expanded to include an ever-larger contingent of U.S. trainers and advisers for the Iraqi military, special operations forces conducting raids in both Iraq and Syria, the first new all-U.S. forward fire base in Iraq, and at least 5,000 U.S. military personnel now on the ground, a number that continues to grow incrementally.
Remember Barack Obama campaigning back in 2008 and solemnly pledging to end the Iraq War? What he neglected to mention at the time was that he was retaining the prerogative to plunge the country into another Iraq War on his own ticket. So has he now done, with members of Congress passively assenting and the country essentially a prisoner of war.
By now, through its inaction, the legislative branch has, in fact, surrendered the final remnant of authority it retained on matters relating to whether, when, against whom, and for what purpose the United States should go to war. Nothing now remains but to pay the bills, which Congress routinely does, citing a solemn obligation to “support the troops.” In this way does the performance of lesser duties provide an excuse for shirking far greater ones.
In military circles, there is a term to describe this type of behavior. It’s called cowardice.
Class-Action Suit Targets System That Added a Baby to Terrorist Watchlist
April 6, 2016
by Ryan Devereaux
The Intercept
Baby Doe was seven months old when his troubles with the U.S. government began. His mother was taking him on a flight when security officials stopped them at an airport. He was patted down and subjected to “chemical testing.” His mother’s bag was searched. His diapers were examined. Unbeknownst to the family from California, four letters on the infant’s boarding pass— “SSSS” — had singled him out as a particularly dangerous class of individual: a “known or suspected terrorist.”
Four years later, Baby Doe, as he’s identified in court documents, is part of a class-action lawsuit taking aim at the federal government’s sweeping terrorist watchlisting system. His ordeal is one of 18 included in the suit, filed Tuesday in Alexandria, Virginia, by the Michigan branch of the Council of American-Islamic Relations, CAIR. The rights group claims their plaintiffs’ collective experiences are the consequence of “an injustice of historic proportions.”
“Through extra-judicial and secret means,” the suit alleges, “the federal government is ensnaring individuals into an invisible web of consequences that are imposed indefinitely and without recourse as a result of the shockingly large federal watch list that now include hundreds of thousands of individuals.”
Before September 11, 2001, the U.S. government had a list of 16 people prohibited from boarding flights due to suspected terrorism links. By 2013, that number had swelled to 47,000. Today the watchlisting apparatus includes both the No Fly List and the Selectee List—which triggers the enhanced airport screening Baby Doe’s family allegedly experienced—as well as other lesser known, though much larger, secret government watchlists.
The watchlisting system has come under fire from attorneys across the country, who have blasted the procedures for secretly labeling individuals as “known or suspected terrorists” — “KSTs” in government parlance — as discriminatory against Muslims, arbitrary in execution, and devoid of acceptable means for legal challenge and redress. For years the government would refuse even to acknowledge whether an individual was included on the No Fly List. Following recent rounds of litigation, the Department of Homeland Security last year instituted a policy of providing confirmation to people who believe they have been wrongly watchlisted so long as the disclosure does not endanger “national security and law enforcement interests.”
In addition to compensation for those wrongly watchlisted, the CAIR lawsuit aims to break down obstacles faced by those seeking to challenge their placement on the government’s controversial lists. The government has three weeks to respond to the suit. The FBI said it could not comment on pending litigation.
CAIR’s class action suit takes particular issue with the Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB), the U.S. government’s central terrorism watchlist. Overseen by the F.B.I.’s Terrorist Screening Center, the TSDB both draws from and informs a number of other government lists. In 2014, The Intercept published a set of government documents that lay out how the watchlisting process works as well as its massive scope. Among the materials was the Obama administration’s 2013 “Watchlisting Guidance,” which revealed that U.S. officials require neither “concrete facts” nor “irrefutable evidence” to secretly label an individual a known or suspected terrorist. Another document showed that nearly half the 680,000 people listed on the TSDB were described as having “no recognized terrorist group affiliation.”
The documents also revealed that more than 1 million people were included in the government’s Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment system, an expansive database drawn from intelligence community sources that feeds into the TSDB and other associated lists. Aside from legal and ethical concerns, the sheer size of the government’s multiple overlapping lists has led critics to argue that such an overwhelming amount of data makes it more difficult for law enforcement and national security officials to pinpoint risks and protect the public.
In Tuesday’s court filing, CAIR cited the documents disclosed by The Intercept as evidence of a watchlisting system gone haywire, noting that the consequences of an individual being wrongly labeled a potential threat to national security includes “the unimaginable indignity and real-life danger of having their own government communicate to hundreds of thousands of federal agents, private contractors, businesses, state and local police, the captains of sea-faring vessels, and foreign governments all across the world that they are a violent menace.”
CAIR also observed that inclusion on one of the government’s terrorist watchlists can expose individuals to pressure from federal authorities to become informants in risky counterterrorism investigations. “Defendants have utilized the watch list, not as a tool to enhance aviation and border security, but as a bludgeon to coerce American Muslims into becoming informants or forgoing the exercise of their rights, such as the right to have an attorney present during law enforcement questioning.”
The documents published by The Intercept in 2014 listed the five U.S. cities with the highest concentrations of watchlisted residents. Four of those locations — New York, Houston, San Diego, and Chicago — are cities with millions of residents. The city with the second highest concentration of watchlisted individuals, however, was Dearborn, Michigan, population 96,000, home of the largest percentage of Arab-Americans in the United States. More than half of the plaintiffs in CAIR’s lawsuit, all of whom are Muslim, reside in Michigan.
Although the lawsuit comes at time of heightened anxiety for many Muslim Americans, Dawud Walid, executive director of CAIR’s Michigan Chapter, was quick to point out that pressure on Muslim communities from law enforcement and intelligence agencies has been going on for years, under both Republican and Democratic presidents.
“This type of profiling, which includes the watchlist that started under President Bush, mushroomed under a Democratic president, Mr. Obama,” Walid told The Intercept, before offering a list of grievances that spanned both presidents and ranged from the New York City Police Department’s haphazard mapping of Muslim communities, to the FBI’s use of confidential informants in American mosques, to the NSA’s surveillance of prominent Muslim Americans. “In terms of the policing of Muslim communities, it’s happened already.”
“We’re concerned about the hyperbolic rhetoric that’s coming out of the right in particular, in terms of banning immigration or banning Syrian refugees,” Walid said, “But in terms of the state of the surveillance apparatus that’s taking place right now, it’s already horrendous under President Obama.”
The detectives watching you from space
Modern detectives use a variety of new technologies to help them solve cases. Paul Marks meets the agency harnessing a new tool – satellites.
April 5, 2016
by Paul Marks
BBC
Fans of crime writer Raymond Chandler’s wise-cracking prose would no doubt be pleased that there’s a real-life private detective agency run by two men called Raymond. But Ray Harris and Ray Purdy are not planning to tail unfaithful spouses to seedy motels like Chandler’s pulp detective Philip Marlowe. Rather, the two Rays are cosmic private eyes, running the world’s first outer space detective agency – and they don’t care who knows it.
The pair’s aim is to use satellite photography to help clients argue cases in court – anything from property border disputes, to establishing rights of way, spotting stolen vehicles and illegal landfills – or proving serious environmental harm to vital wetlands and ancient woodlands.
Purdy, a space lawyer, and Harris, a geographer schooled in the use of geospatial imagery and databases, set up their space detective agency, Air & Space Evidence, in October 2014. Both hail from University College London, but Purdy is now working at Oxford University
Their familiarity with imaging satellites, and how the law applies, gives them a distinct advantage. And the technology can be extremely useful. “With resolution as high as 30 centimetres you can see a mailbox or a manhole cover from space now,” says Purdy.
Their arrival on the detective scene certainly stirred public imaginations. While the pair expected some attention when they announced their venture, they were surprised by the response as the media clicked they were planning to offer something new. “The reaction was completely unexpected. It was phone call after phone call for about two months. We had virtually every single British newspaper ring up, plus magazines and TV production companies wanting to make fly-on-the-wall documentaries. We’re still getting the TV calls now,” Purdy says.
Many had, however, firmly grasped the wrong end of the stick. Thanks to TV dramas like Homeland and Spooks, many believed the planet’s surface is being constantly video recorded from space – and at extremely high resolution to boot. A lot of the detectives’ early work has involved putting would-be clients straight over the real capabilities of today’s space imaging systems.
For instance a woman who was being stalked asked the agency to try to identify the suspect from space – sadly, not possible. Another potential customer wanted to see who had hammered nails into her car tyres. Other clients have wanted them to identify vehicles used in a burglary and a bank robbery – including the expectation of seeing licence plates from orbit. “A lot of people assumed there would be video satellites, not just snapshots,” says Purdy. “I can’t blame people. It’s quite exciting and the technology is moving fast. But not as fast as some might think.”
Visual time travel
Although video-recording satellites do exist they don’t have the resolution of the best stills cameras in orbit – and can’t yet offer extended coverage. Google-owned Terra Bella – formerly Skybox Imaging – for instance, is building a fleet of imaging Cubesats in low-Earth orbit. These are capable of providing 90-second-long clips of video over a spot on Earth – before it moves out of range.
Eventually they want to do this over one spot many times each day as the fleet approaches its target of 24 satellites – but that isn’t necessarily at the precise time somebody might want it.
One of the space detectives’ first paid-for cases involved a Californian who had a neighbour claim that an online mapping service showed a right of way existed right through his property – and the neighbour wanted it formally recognised. “By going back to original space imagery over time we could determine that there had never been a track or road there,” says Purdy. That visual time travel trick was possible because space images have been archived by satellite companies since the 1970s – initially in low resolution but gradually improving until, in 1999, images that could resolve down to less than a metre became available outside the military, and now much sharper 50cm and 30 cm images possible today.
Image timelines are crucial to all this – and Purdy’s experience as a space lawyer, knowing what makes for admissible evidential imagery, is key. “We have to be able to show a court they can rely on it as evidence,” he says. That involves proving the image has been properly stored and that no alterations has been made to it.
Space images can form part of a complex web of evidence. Boundary disputes are common cases for A&SE and the imagery often helps determine which side was right. But the agency cannot always help: as clouds, shadows, bushes and brambles can get in the way on some crucial historic images showing, for example, where a fence line was a decade ago.
In one case they were asked to look at the illegal dredging of a lake which is a protected European wetland. They were able to source images revealing the number and size of dredging operations, and provide evidence of how much dredged sand was being stored alongside the lake – and even how the volumes had changed dramatically over the years.
A&SE also use radar-armed satellites in their work. As these bounce microwave radar signals off an area, instead of acquiring reflected sunlight, they can be used for very different tasks, such as where stolen industrial machinery might have been moved to. “But they are also great for quickly telling if a house or building has been extended. The different shape registers straight away on radar,” says Purdy.
GPS satellites help in detection, too – thanks to the tracking services they have made possible like their identification system for ships. The agency was asked if it could spot from space which ship had collided with an offshore wind turbine. While it’s almost impossible to see the moment of impact Purdy says such tracking can help identify which ships were in an area at the time. Forensic evidence – scraped-off hull paint, for instance – from the accident site could then help identify the collider.
Landfill locating
Another strong vein of the space detectives’ work is unfolding: solving environmental crime. In a case in the Republic of Ireland, for instance, the cutting down of an ancient woodland posed questions – was it done so long ago that no-one could be prosecuted for it, or more recently? A&SE’s space imagery timelines were able to show definitively that it had disappeared in a period of a few weeks in 2014.
Illicit landfills have become a growing problem, and space images are expected to be a major source of future evidence against offenders. One recent example was an illegal landfill in Northern Ireland holding some 1.5 million tonnes of rubbish, much of it construction waste. “That could potentially cost hundreds of millions of pounds in lost landfill taxes and clean-up fees,” says Purdy. So, with Interpol and Europol backing, A&SE has been seeking research funding to develop ways to use space images to spot illicit landfills as they are being created. “We want to catch them in the act,” says Purdy.
Another project they are looking for funding for is to spot disturbed earth from orbit, which could help police forces find buried human remains. The big problem is producing data that is of high enough resolution to be useful to investigators.
It’s clear that the possibilities of this type of detective work will mushroom as satellite image resolution improves and video imaging options arrive. And as more imaging satellites are launched, especially by emerging space powers such as China and India, and with constellations of low-cost imaging cubesats from the likes of Terra Bella and PlanetLabs joining those of established imaging firms like Digital Globe and Airbus-owned Spot Satellite Imagery, space-based crime detection will become more and more capable. As an example, PlanetLabs promises a 50-gigapixel snapshot of the whole planet, every day, once it has 100 cubesats in orbit.
But the increasing numbers of Earth imaging satellites could have “profound implications” for privacy in the future says Richard Tynan, technologist at London pressure group Privacy International. “Satellites can focus their capabilities across borders and examine the pattern of life of societies on a large scale or be used to track individuals,” he says – suggesting the industry needs privacy-sensitive regulation.
He’s not alone in that view. “With commercial satellite resolution comfortably down to 30cm, it is now verging on the realm of surveillance and military imaging. So we are hearing more concerns voiced around data protection and human rights related to such imaging,” says Joanne Wheeler, a London-based space lawyer and a UK representative at the UN’s Office of Outer Space Affairs in Vienna.
In particular, she says, the point at which a space image breaches personal data protection law may still need defining. The European Commission has been developing data protection policies for Earth observation – with one measure having anything photographed under 2.5 metre resolution needing careful checks before it can be released. But for the moment, says Wheeler, the EC’s plan has been refused as an “anti-competitive” hindrance to the operators in this new market.
So if, as Raymond Chandler wrote in The Big Sleep, you live in a “nice neighbourhood to have bad habits in”, take care – you never know what’s going to be orbiting overhead. Or how powerful its cameras are.