TBR News March 7, 2016
The Voice of the White House
Washington, D.C., March 7 2016: “The focus shifts now to Asia where the lunatic North Koreans are threatening nuclular war against the United States, South Korea and Antarctica. Are they capable of this? Highly doubtful but if the North Koreans keep up such noise, they are more than liable to be pounced upon and flattened. If this happens, like so many others in different areas, they have more than brought it on themselves.
China, no great friend of the United States, has warned North Korea to stop its trouble-making but to no avail. Another Korean War in the offing? If so, it would be nasty, brutish and short.”
North Korea threatens US and S Korea with nuclear strikes
March 7, 2016
BBC
North Korea has threatened “indiscriminate” nuclear strikes on the US and South Korea as the two begin their largest ever military drills.
The exercises, Key Resolve and Foal Eagle, are an annual event and always generate tension.
The order for a “pre-emptive nuclear strike of justice” was made in a statement put out by Pyongyang.
Such rhetoric is not uncommon, and experts doubt the North’s ability to put nuclear warheads on its missiles.
North Korea says it sees the annual US-South Korean war games as a rehearsal for invasion. Last year, it threatened to turn Washington into a “sea of fire”.
“We will launch an all-out offensive to decisively counter the US and its followers’ hysteric[al} nuclear war moves,” a newsreader on the state-run North Korean KRT news channel said of the latest exercises.
Can South Korea defend itself?Dealing with the North: Carrots or sticks?
How advanced is North Korea’s nuclear programme?
Approximately 17,000 US forces are participating in the exercises, alongside around 300,000 South Korean troops – both significant increases on 2015’s numbers.
Despite starting on the same day, Key Resolve is more computer simulation-driven and ends on 18 March, while Foal Eagle is more focussed on field exercises and runs until 30 April.
The South’s defence ministry has warned Pyongyang against any “rash act that brings destruction upon itself”.
“If North Korea ignores our warning and makes provocations, our military will firmly and mercilessly respond to it,” said spokesman Moon Sang-gyun.
Japan’s foreign minister also demanded that North Korea show restraint.
“North Korea’s nuclear, and nuclear missile development is absolutely unacceptable. We will coordinate with the international community to demand that North Korea show restraint, and abide by the various resolutions including that of the six party talks,” said Fumio Kishida.
Though unconfirmed, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency, citing military sources, has reported that the exercises will include training for precision attacks on North Korean leadership and its nuclear and missile facilities.
These latest exercises come just days after the UN passed new sanctions against North Korea following its recent nuclear test and rocket launch.
On Saturday, the Philippines impounded a North Korean cargo vessel under the toughened measures. A presidential spokesman said the crew would be deported and the ship subject to a UN-mandated inspection.
The North responded to the sanctions by saying it was readying nuclear weapons for “pre-emptive” use, and by firing short-range missiles into the sea.
Seoul is expected to announce more sanctions of its own on Tuesday, which is likely to draw another angry response from Pyongyang.
The US and South Korea on Friday also began formal talks on the deployment of a US missile defence system to the peninsula, a move strongly opposed by North Korea, Russia and China.
Beijing says the Thaad anti-missile system compromises its security and would undermine its nuclear deterrent.
What is the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense System (Thaad)?
◾Shoots down short and medium-range ballistic missiles in the terminal phase of their flight
◾Uses hit-to-kill technology – where kinetic energy destroys the incoming warhead
◾Has a range of 200km and can reach an altitude of 150km
◾US has previously deployed it in Guam and Hawaii as a measure against potential attacks from North Korea
In drills, U.S., South Korea practice striking North’s nuclear plants
March 7, 2016
by Anna Fifield
The Washington Post
Tokyo-The United States and South Korea started huge military exercises Monday, kicking off drills that will include rehearsing surgical strikes on North Korea’s main nuclear and missile facilities and sending in special forces to carry out “decapitation raids” on the North Korean leadership.
The exercises always elicit an angry response from Pyongyang but Monday’s statement was particularly ferocious, accusing the United States and South Korea of planning a “beheading operation” aimed at removing Kim Jong Un’s regime. The North Korean army and people “will take military counteraction for preemptive attack so that they may deal merciless deadly blows at the enemies,” the North’s powerful National Defense Commission said in a statement.
The drills come amid a particularly tense time, with the international community — and the United States and South Korea especially — trying to punish Pyongyang for its recent nuclear test and missile launch. The U.N. sanctions passed last week are the toughest yet, and South Korean president Park Geun-hye is expected to unveil further, unilateral sanctions against the North on Tuesday.
About 17,000 American forces and 300,000 South Korean personnel — a third more from both militaries than last spring’s exercises — will take part in 11 days of computer-simulated training and eight weeks of field exercises, which will involve ground, air, naval and Special Operations services.
The exercises will revolve around a wartime plan adopted by South Korea and the United States last year, called OPLAN 5015. The plan has not been made public but, according to numerous reports in the South Korean media, includes a contingency for surgical strikes against North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missile facilities, as well as having special forces practice “decapitation” raids to take out the North Korean leadership. The JoongAng Ilbo newspaper reported that Kim Jong Un would be among them.
The joint forces will also run through their new “4D” operational plan, which details the allies’ pre-emptive military operations to detect, disrupt, destroy and defend against North Korea’s nuclear and missile arsenal, the Yonhap News Agency reported. “The focus of the exercises will be on hitting North Korea’s key facilities precisely,” a military official told the wire service.
Christopher Bush, a spokesman for United States Forces Korea, declined to comment on the reports. “Alliance operational plans are classified and we aren’t authorized to discuss them for operations security reasons,” he said.
USFK said in a statement that it had informed the North’s Korean People’s Army — through the United Nations Command, which controls the Demilitarized Zone between the two Koreas — about the exercise dates and “the non-provocative nature of this training.”
But North Korea did not see it this way.
“We have a military operation plan of our style to liberate south Korea and strike the U.S. mainland ratified by our dignified supreme headquarters,” the North’s National Defense Commission said its statement, carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.
It said it already had deployed “offensive means” to strike South Korea and also “U.S. imperialist aggressor forces bases in the Asia-Pacific region and the U.S. mainland.”
“If we push the buttons to annihilate the enemies even right now, all bases of provocations will be reduced to seas in flames and ashes in a moment,” the commission said.
North Korea is particularly sensitive to suggestions of attacks on Kim — as the case of the 2014 Hollywood film The Interview showed — and it also has a habit of making threats on which it cannot follow through.
Last week, Kim ordered his military to be ready to use its nuclear weapons at any time, saying they were needed, given the “ferocious hostility” of new “gangster-like” sanctions leveled against Pyongyang
Monday’s threats were “absolutely not credible,” said Daniel Pinkston, a former Korean linguist with the United States Air Force who now teaches at Troy University’s campus in Seoul.
“They would trigger everything North Korea wants to avoid, which is their absolute destruction in retaliatory attacks,” Pinkston said. “Second, if you are going to launch an attack against a much stronger adversary, why would you telegraph that? You’d want the element of surprise.”
Much of North Korea’s rhetoric is for domestic consumption, as Kim tries to burnish his leadership credentials ahead of a much-anticipated Workers’ Party congress in May, the first in 36 years.
Kim, however, has shown himself willing to use the means available to him to express his anger. Last year, during a period of tensions with South Korea, he ordered his military onto a war footing, sending army units to the DMZ and submarines out of port.
South Korea and the United States will increase monitoring of North Korea during the exercises.
“We will carry out these exercises while keeping tabs on signs of North Korean provocations,” a South Korean official told reporters. “If the North provokes us during this exercise, the U.S. and our troops will retaliate with an attack ten-fold stronger.”
About 28,500 American troops are still on the Korean peninsula, the result of the security alliance formed during the Korean War.
2,000 U.S. Marines arrive in S. Korea for drills as North threatens war
March 5, 2016
by Jeff Schogol
Marine Corps Times
The U.S. military is holding exercises in South Korea amid increased tensions with North Korea, whose leader Kim Jong Un has ordered his country’s nuclear weapons to be at the ready.
About 2,100 Marines and sailors along with the amphibious assault ship Bonhomme Richard and the amphibious dock landing ships Ashland and Germantown recently arrived in South Korea for exercise Ssang Yong 16, which began on March 2 and lasts until March 20, Marine Corps officials said.
Held every two years, the exercise involves U.S. and South Korean troops conducting amphibious operations for possible disaster relief or wartime missions, said 2nd Lt. Joshua Hays, a Marine Corps spokesman .
Meanwhile, North Korea has recently tested a nuclear weapon and fired six projectiles into the sea, just as it did in 2013, said Bruce Klingner, a Korea expert at the Heritage Foundation think tank in Washington, D.C.
“Things could get dicey in the next couple months,” Klingner said in an interview. “We’re already seeing North Korea starting to issue threats: If the U.S. doesn’t stop these exercises or doesn’t cancel these exercises, North Korea may take appropriate action. They also highlight that there are a number of strategic assets that will be part of it: nuclear-capable submarines, B-52s, F-22s, etc., special forces Marines — all of which, in North Korean eyes, or the North Korean depiction, is a prelude to an attack on North Korea.”
It is unclear whether North Korea actually believes that the exercise is camouflage for an invasion by the U.S. and South Korea or it is trying to frighten South Korea into canceling the exercise, but with the militaries from both sides operating so closely to each other, the chances of something going wrong increases, Klingner said.
“In their statements, they certainly declare that they see the potential for a U.S. attack,” he said. “They will point to U.S. attacks on Libya and Iraq and Serbia as indicative of what the U.S. and its allies might do to them.”
The North Koreans are particularly wary at seeing Marines on the Korean peninsula, Klingner said. In September 1950, Marines and soldiers launched an amphibious landing at Inchon that stopped the North Korean advance south and led to UN forces crossing the 38th parallel into North Korea.
“Gen. B.B. Bell, the former commander in chief of U.S. Forces Korea, said that the Marines on Okinawa were his maneuver unit,” Klingner said. “They were the ones that would carry out operations behind the front lines, behind the DMZ [demilitarized zone].
“The North Koreans know that. They know the history of the Marine Corps, so they would see a large presence of Marines on the peninsula as possibly a prelude to an attack or an invasion — especially when it’s coupled with the presence of B-52s and nuke-capable submarines.”
The current exercise, however, was scheduled long before the most recent tensions on the Korean peninsula, said retired Army Special Forces Col. David Maxwell, associate director at the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University. For decades, the U.S. has held combined military exercises with South Korea during this time of year to send a message to North Korea.
The North Korean military is about to finish its winter training cycle, when it will be at its highest state of readiness, Maxwell said in an interview.
“That’s important because this month and next month are the optimal times for the invasion of the South, where the ground is still hard and the rice paddies have not been flooded,” he said. “That makes the best time for maneuver on the peninsula.”
By bringing U.S. and South Korean forces to a high state of readiness, the alliance is letting North Korea know that it would be unwise to attack, Maxwell said.
“I believe the North Korean leadership, the military leaders in particular, are smart enough to know that you don’t attack into strength,” Maxwell said.
While Marines have conducted past amphibious exercises in South Korea, they need to keep those skills fresh in case the U.S. Forces Korea commander needs to call upon Marines to land on either of North Korea’s coasts, he said.
“It’s a critical capability that will give the commander many different options in actual war,” Maxwell said. “It is also important as well from a humanitarian assistance. If the regime collapses; if we have the mother of all humanitarian operations that needs to take place in the North … the ROK [South Korean] and the U.S. Marines will have a capability to get humanitarian assistance to either the east coast or west coast.”
While the U.S. believes these military exercises work to deter North Korean aggression, “we don’t know what goes on in the mind of Kim Jong Un,” Maxwell said.
His father Kim Jong Il had 21 years during which he was the designated successor in which to kill any possible rivals, Maxwell said. The younger Kim only had two years to prepare to take his father’s place. Since then, he has eliminated several senior North Korean leaders, and that could indicate that he is still consolidating his power.
“Given his leadership style and his inexperience and the fact that he has had so many violent purges of senior leaders, I do worry that military leadership may not be able to tell the emperor he wears no clothes,” Maxwell said. “They may only be telling him things they think he wants to hear.”
If North Korean military leaders are not giving Kim accurate information about U.S. and South Korean military strength, Kim may decide to invade, especially during times of instability or if Kim feels he is facing internal opposition, Maxwell said.
“His rational option may be to execute his campaign plan to try to unify the peninsula to try to ensure his survival,” Maxwell said. “To us, that seems irrational. But if he believes that this is his only option and he has a military that can defeat the South or defeat the alliance, then he of course might do that.”
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 conversatins 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. 1
Date: Saturday, January 27, 1996
Commenced: 11: 02 AM (CST)
Concluded: 11:25AM (CST)
EC: Hello?
GD: Mrs. Crowley. This is Gregory. Is Robert available?
EC: I think he’s upstairs. Greg was supposed to come over….let me call him for you.
GD: Thanks
(Pause)
RTC: Gregory! How are you?
GD: Emily says you’re expecting your son…
RTC: He’s probably not coming. Never mind. If he comes, I’ll tell you and we can talk later…in the afternoon.
GD: I talked to Corson about a foreword for the next Mueller book. I know we mentioned this but are you willing to contribute?
RTC: Certainly. Have it out in a few days or I can work it up and fax it to you. OK?
GD: Fine. Thanks a lot for this.
RTC: It’ll just make me more popular, that’s all. How are you coming with the next one?
GD: About halfway through. I’ve decided to put in the counterfeiting business and probably do a hit on the Gehlen mob…
RTC: That ought to frost Critchfield’s worthless balls!
GD: And I was there, don’t forget, and I know where the bum hid the money. I was thinking about doing a number about Willi (Krichbaum). He was Critchfield’s top recruiter. Wait until they find out good old Willi was a Gestapo colonel and Müller’s top deputy in the Gestapo!
RTC: More fun and games. You really do like to twist the nuts, don’t you?
GD: Only if they don’t come off in my hands.
RTC: Lois would never miss them. What else goes in?
GD: Well, I owe Corson the thing on Kronthal. He goes in for sure. Maybe Wisner too.
RTC: Remind me to tell you about the time Frank got caught in Rock Creek giving a blow job to a black exchange student. Fine thing for a southern gentleman to get caught at.
GD: Mississippi or something.
RTC: Originally one of the New York Gardiners. Gardiner’s Island. Old family. They had holdings in Montana, if memory serves me…of course names elude me…but holdings in Mississippi too. Poor Frank was a first class nut case. You know about blowing his brains out all over the garage roof? Yes, I told you that, didn’t I. Couldn’t follow through on his promises to the Hungarians of our military intervention if they rose up against Stalin….
GD: But Stalin died in 1953 and that business was in 1956…
RTC: Yes, yes, of course but I meant the Stalin empire.
GD: Understood. Theory and practice.
RTC: What else new and exciting to drive them bats?
GD:Wallenberg…
RTC: Who cares about that hebe?
GD: Well, the gits started the story that the Russians got him…
RTC: We made that one up…
GD: But Müller said the Gestapo bagged him and offed him in some farmyard..
RTC: Had it coming. Listen, Gregory, what do you want to do about the Kennedy business? I guess there’s still interest in it. God…fifty thousand books and all of them fuller of shit than a Christmas turkey.
GD: How many did your people write, sponsor and publish? I mean to deliberately drag carmine herrings across the path?
RTC: Lost track. Hundreds. One thing Wisner did was to build up a very cooperative media and that includes book publishers.
GD: I could consider that.
RTC: Maybe after I’m dead and gone. It would be better.
GD: Fine. Question here?
RTC: Shoot.
GD: Was Oswald a patsy?
RTC: Sure. He worked for us once in Japan… at Atsugi…and also for ONI. Not high level but he was a soldier after all.
GD: How would I handle that?
RTC: Let’s claim he worked for Hoover!1 Why not?
GD: I mean, did he actually?
RTC: Christ no. Poor idiot. Jesus, what a wife! First class bitch. Thought Lee was a millionaire and when she came here, she would strike it rich. Turned out she lived in a slum and she had to put up with a loudmouth husband and then got stuck with a kid. No wonder she did what we told her.
GD: Women are not easy to deal with. They are either at your feet or your throat…
RTC: Oh, the truth of it all! Emily is a lovely person but I tell her nothing. And let me ask you that when you talk with her, for God’s sake, don’t talk shop with her. It would just stir her up. Most Company wives are a pack of nuts. Did I mention Cord’s wife?
GD: I don’t think so. I…no, I don’t remember. Cord Meyer?2
RTC: Right, the Great Cyclops. Or the One-Eyed Reilley.
GD: In the center of his forehead?
RTC: Lost it in the Pacific. Glass.
GD: The wife?
RTC: What?
GD: You mentioned his wife…
RTC: Ah yes. He married the daughter of Pinchot just after the war…
GD: Gifford?
RTC: Correct. The governor. Very attractive woman but her sister was even better. She married Bradlee who is one of the Companies’ men. He’s on the ‘Post’ now. Cord’s wife was what they call a free spirit…liked modern art, runs around naked in people’s gardens and so on. Pretty but strange and unstable. She and Cord got along for a time but time changes everything….they do say that, don’t they?…They broke up and Cord was so angry at being dumped, he hated her from then on. She took up with Kennedy. Did you know that?
GD: No.
RTC: Oh yes indeed. Kennedy had huge orgies out at 1600 with nude women in the pools and all that. Even had a professional photographer come in and take pictures of him in action. Old Jack loved threesomes, the occasional dyke and God knows what else. It was Joe’s money that shut people up, including his nasty wife…
GD: I thought she was a saint. Old family…
RTC: Bullshit! Family is Irish, bog trotters, like Kennedy. Not French at all. A greedy, lying and completely nutty woman. Never liked her. One generation here and they give up washing clothes and put up the lace curtains in the family parlor. What was I saying?
GD: About Cord’s wife…
RTC: Oh yes. After Mary…that was her name…Mary. You haven’t heard about her?
GD: No.
RTC: After Kennedy bought the farm, ex-Mrs Meyer was annoyed. She became the steady girlfriend and he was very serious about her. Jackie was brittle, uptight and very greedy. Poor people usually are. Mary had money and far more class and she knew how to get along with Jack. Trouble was, she got along too well. She didn’t approve of the mass orgies and introduced him to pot and other things. Not a good idea. Increased chances for blackmail or some erratic public behavior. But after Dallas, she began to brood and then started to talk. Of course she had no proof but when people like that start to run their mouths, there can be real trouble.
GD: What was the outcome?
RTC: We terminated her, of course.
GD: That I didn’t know. How?
RTC: Had one of our cleaning men nail her down by the towpath while she was out for her daily jog.
GD: Wasn’t that a bit drastic?
RTC: Why? If you knew the damage she could cause us…
GD: Were you the man?
RTC: No, Jim Angleton was. And Bradlee, her brother-in-law, was in the know. After she assumed room temperature, he and Jim went over to Mary’s art studio to see if she had any compromising papers and ran off with her diary. I have a copy of it…
GD: Could I see it?
RTC: Now, Gregory, don’t ask too many questions. Maybe later.
GD: Did anyone get nailed?
RTC: Some spaced out nigger was down there but he had nothing to do with it. Our people came down on that place in busloads to help out the locals but they were searching for the gun. Our man was supposed to have tossed it into the water but it never made it in and one of our boys found it in some bushes, half in and half out of the water. Beat the locals to it by about ten seconds. Very close. See, it was one of our hit weapons that never had serial numbers. Not made that way.
GD: Ruger made a silenced .22 during the war for the OSS. No numbers, parkerized finish.
RTC: Same thing.
GD: Couldn’t they have talked sense into her?
RTC: What did Shakespeare say about angry women?
GD: ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.’
RTC: Exactly.
GD: She had children?
RTC: Some. One was killed by a drunk driver. Caused all kinds of friction in the family as I remember.
GD: Meyer. He was tied up with Alan Cranston?
RTC: Yes. The one-world crap.
GD: I knew Cranston and his family. United World Federalists. He married into the Fowle family and I was a friend of one of the members. Ultra left-wing. Was at his house by the golf course one time and the bedroom bookshelf was jammed with Commie books…Debray, Mao, Lenin, Marx, Engels, Kautsky and on and on.
RTC: Cord was under investigation by Phoebie for that.
GD: Phoebie?
RTC: Slang for FBI. We’ll have to talk about Cranston…he left the Senate..
GD: I know. I nailed him. The savings and loan business. I got inside skinny on this and tipped off the media. ABC people. It went on from there.
RTC: Good for you. Cord was tied up.
GD: You didn’t like him.
RTC: Nasty, opinionated, loud and a general asshole.
GD: What did he think about doing his wife?
RTC: Ex-wife. Let’s be accurate now. Ex-wife. When Jim talked to Cord about this, Cord didn’t let him finish his fishing expedition. He was in complete agreement about shutting her up. Gregory, you can’t reason with people like her. She hated Cord, loved Kennedy and saw things in the Dallas business that were obvious to insiders or former insiders but she made the mistake of running her mouth. One of the wives had a talk with her about being quiet but Mary was on a tear and that was that.
GD: Yes, I think there’s something there.
RTC: But not while I’m breathing, Gregory. Not until later. And it wasn’t my decision. I was there but Jim and the others made the final decision. You know how it goes.
GD: Oh yeah, I know that one. But to get back to the foreword. No problem?
RTC: None at all.
GD: I don’t think Tom Kimmel will like that.
RTC: I’ve heard from him on that. He doesn’t like the idea that Bill and I approve of you. I wouldn’t tell him too much if I were you. You can tell me things and sometimes you can tell Bill but Kimmel has a mouth problem.
GD: I helped him with the Pearl Harbor matter…
RTC: Don’t bother. What else is going to be in the next book?
GD: Something on the Duke of Windsor.
RTC: Gregory, I think my son is about to come up here so perhaps we can get together later today. Call me after 6 tonight if you wish. Sorry but weekends can be busy here.
GD: Understood.
(Concluded at 11:25AM CST)
Israel and American Politics: The Big Breakthrough
And guess who’s responsible?
March 7, 2016
by Justin Raimondo
AntiWar
Let’s do a little experiment. Now I realize that what people most remember about the recent Republican presidential debates is the vulgarity, the inanity, and the name-calling, but there have been a few moments of lucidity when history has been made, precedents have been set, and – yes – even reasons for optimism have been highlighted, although these may have been lost amid all the brouhaha.
So on to our experiment. Which candidate said the following?
“As president … there’s nothing that I would rather do to bring peace to Israel and its neighbors generally. And I think it serves no purpose to say that you have a good guy and a bad guy.
“Now, I may not be successful in doing it. It’s probably the toughest negotiation anywhere in the world of any kind. OK? But it doesn’t help if I start saying, “I am very pro-Israel, very pro, more than anybody on this stage.” But it doesn’t do any good to start demeaning the neighbors, because I would love to do something with regard to negotiating peace, finally, for Israel and for their neighbors.
“And I can’t do that as well – as a negotiator, I cannot do that as well if I’m taking … sides.”
Okay, I’m going to give you a few moments to contemplate the answer. I mean, here is a rare example of a Republican candidate speaking reasonably, rationally, in a statesman-like manner about one of the most controversial issues in American politics. Here is someone who is defying the bipartisan consensus on Israeli-American relations, which is that we must always give unstinting and unconditional support to the Jewish state. Here is an outright abrogation of the conditions of the so-called “special relationship,” that one-sided love affair that dictates Washington must kowtow to Tel Aviv and ignore the horrific conditions under which Palestinians have been condemned live.
Okay, you’ve had enough time. So what’s the answer? Who would dare to step on the third rail of American politics and defy the Israel lobby?
The answer has to be Donald Trump – doesn’t it? And indeed it is.
He said it in Houston. He said it in Detroit. And the two other main contenders attacked him for it, both Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. Of course they didn’t have any substantial or terribly convincing criticism – there can’t be any. How can one argue against evenhandedness? Cruz merely repeated his pledge to give Israel everything it wants, and more, while Rubio simply repeated the Israeli embassy’s talking points: Hamas, Hezbollah, terrorism, and of course “moral equivalence,” in short the usual nonsense – as if the Palestinians and their allies have no right to resist the occupation.
Yet Trump stood his ground. He’s repeated his position in at least two debates, and – wonder of wonders! – has suffered not at all for it at the ballot box. He is the frontrunner by a country mile, and the only flack he’s gotten over it has been from the usual suspects – the neoconservatives, who hated him anyway and are among his loudest detractors.
Bill Kristol’s so-called “Emergency Committee for Israel” ran an ad attacking him, but not, interestingly enough, over his support for evenhandedness: they didn’t want to go there. That’s because Trump has single-handedly changed the terms of the debate, with hardly anyone noticing: Israel is no longer the sacred cow of American politics, which no candidate dares lay a hand on for fear of his or her political future.
How did he do it? By simply and fearlessly telling the truth.
Of course some people did notice, the Israel lobby first of all. And in Israel itself, panic has set in. An interesting piece by Chemi Shalev, usually one of the more reasonable Zionists, notes that
“In their Super Tuesday speeches, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio tried to use an Israel hammer to bash Donald Trump. Cruz sneeringly lambasted him for saying he would remain “neutral” while Rubio trounced Trump for trying to stay “impartial”, as his audience booed accordingly. And Trump? Trump was racking up victories, amassing delegates and laughing all the way to the top of the Republican presidential field.
“In this way, the New York billionaire is decimating the conventional wisdom, one of many, that in 2016, total and unconditional support for Israel is a prerequisite for any aspiring GOP candidate wishing to run for president.”
Remember when the support of evangelical Christians was contingent on a candidate’s willingness to grovel before Benjamin Netanyahu? Poor Rand Paul, the alleged anti-interventionist/”isolationist,” had to travel all the way to Israel, cuddle up to the Israeli right-wing, and pointedly ignore the Palestinians, whom he didn’t even deign to visit – and where did it get him? Just amused disdain from the Jewish Republican Coalition and a series of televised ads from a dark money pro-Israel group attacking him for his trouble. Appeasement, it seems, doesn’t work when it comes to dealing with the Israel lobby, but one tactic does work: undermining them with a direct and honest assault.
As Shalev notes, southern evangelicals voted for Trump anyway, and in droves: they handed him victories in Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Virginia, and elsewhere. As Shalev puts it:
“The notion that the Republican Party is a monolithic bastion of support that will withstand the test of time is evaporating. The belief that any Republican president who will follow Obama will be better for Israel is eroding with each passing day. Faced with the Trump phenomenon, Netanyahu’s Fortress GOP strategy is collapsing like a house of cards.”
The supposed invincibility of the Israel lobby has been a long time unraveling: the process began a couple of years ago with their first big defeat over the nomination of Chuck Hagel as Defense Secretary. Senator Cruz, in particular, took center stage during this seminal battle, doing his imitation of Joe McCarthy in impugning Hagel’s integrity and accusing his supporters of being “Friends of Hamas.” It didn’t work, and the Obama administration grew bolder, taking the initiative in defying the Lobby and becoming more vocal in its criticism of Israeli settlement-building and other depredations aimed at the Palestinians.
But it took a Republican – it took Donald Trump – to deal the Israel lobby a death blow, breaking its stranglehold on the GOP and defying the interdict against evenhandedness in dealing with the occupation. The Israel lobby, for all its legendary wealth and influence, was always a paper tiger, and while it may have been nearly inevitable that this would happen it took someone with the requisite boldness to demonstrate this to the world.
And, as Shalev points out, there is no going back:
“Every time Cruz and Rubio try to hit Trump over the head with an Israel club and nothing happens, it is Israel’s weakness that is exposed. Every time Trump wins a party primary without challenge from his supporters, another nail is driven into the coffin of the unshakeable alliance between Israel and America’s deep right.”
That alliance is now being shaken to its very foundations. And the panic extends to the Democratic party, where Haim Saban, the billionaire whose great achievement has been the creation of “Mighty Morphin Rangers,” is denouncing Trump as “unreliable” when it comes to supporting Israel. Calling the Republican frontrunner “a clown,” and “dangerous,” he ranted in an interview with Israel’s Channel 2 that Trump “dangerous for the world and since Israel is part of the world therefore he’s dangerous for Israel.” And especially dangerous, it seems, for those who consider Israel to be the moral equivalent of the world. Says Saban:“It’s hard to know what he is thinking. One day he’ll give an interview to an Israeli newspaper and say ‘you’ve never had such a friend in the White House as you will when I become president.’ The next day they ask him about the Middle East and he says, ‘I’m neutral. I’m the U.N. I won’t involve myself. You just don’t know with him, every day it’s something else.”
Nothing less than complete and total support satisfies people like Saban: anything else is “dangerous for Israel.”
Saban, by the way, is one of Hillary Clinton’s longtime supporters: he has given her millions, and is the single biggest donor to the Democratic congressional campaign. He has a net worth of $3.6 billion.
What’s really significant about Trump’s stance is that, if, as President, he tries to make a deal in an evenhanded way, and it all falls through, Israel will be blamed, as Shalev rightly points out. That’s because, for domestic political reasons, the Israeli leadership cannot and will not make any significant concessions, which is why they view Trump’s evenhandedness with horror.
And that will show the world what Israel is really all about, deepening the rift between Washington and Tel Aviv, and perhaps even calling US financial support to the Jewish state into question. After all, if Trump is doesn’t want to pay for the defense of Japan, Korea, and our European allies, without getting much of anything in return, what’s to stop him from taking the same dim view of our yearly tribute of $3.5 billion to Israel – and getting bupkis for our generosity?
The dam is broken, the great breakthrough is upon us – and the great irony is that it came about because of a politician widely reviled by liberals and especially by Muslims, for his undisguised hostility to people of the Muslim faith. Who would’ve thought this man, of all men, would sound a reasonable note on the issue of US-Israeli relations? Yet history is full of such ironies, and I would advise my readers not to let the rather counterintuitive notion of a reasonable Donald Trump blind them to the unfolding political reality.
“Internet of Things” security is hilariously broken and getting worse
Shodan search engine is only the latest reminder of why we need to fix IoT security
January 23, 2016
by J.M. Porup (UK) –
Shodan, a search engine for the Internet of Things (IoT), recently launched a new section that lets users easily browse vulnerable webcams.
The feed includes images of marijuana plantations, back rooms of banks, children, kitchens, living rooms, garages, front gardens, back gardens, ski slopes, swimming pools, colleges and schools, laboratories, and cash register cameras in retail stores, according to Dan Tentler, a security researcher who has spent several years investigating webcam security.
“It’s all over the place,” he told Ars Technica UK. “Practically everything you can think of.”
We did a quick search and turned up some alarming results,
The cameras are vulnerable because they use the Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP, port 554) to share video but have no password authentication in place. The image feed is available to paid Shodan members at images.shodan.io. Free Shodan accounts can also search using the filter port:554 has_screenshot:true.
Shodan crawls the Internet at random looking for IP addresses with open ports. If an open port lacks authentication and streams a video feed, the new script takes a snap and moves on.
While the privacy implications here are obvious, Shodan’s new image feed also highlights the pathetic state of IoT security, and raises questions about what we are going to do to fix the problem.
Of course insecure webcams are not exactly a new thing. The last several years have seen report after report after report hammer home the point. In 2013, the FTC sanctioned webcam manufacturer TRENDnet for exposing “the private lives of hundreds of consumers to public viewing on the Internet.” Tentler told Ars he estimates there are now millions of such insecure webcams connected and easily discoverable with Shodan. That number will only continue to grow.
So why are things getting worse and not better?
The curse of the minimum viable product
Tentler told Ars that webcam manufacturers are in a race to bottom. Consumers do not perceive value in security and privacy. As a rule, many have not shown a willingness to pay for such things. As a result, webcam manufacturers slash costs to maximize their profit, often on narrow margins. Many webcams now sell for as little as £15 or $20.
“The consumers are saying ‘we’re not supposed to know anything about this stuff [cybersecurity],” he said. “The vendors don’t want to lift a finger to help users because it costs them money.”
Police body cams found pre-installed with notorious Conficker worm
One of the world’s most prolific pieces of malware is found in cams from Martel.
If consumers were making an informed decision and that informed decision affected no one but themselves, perhaps we could let the matter rest. But neither of those conditions are true. Most consumers fail to appreciate the consequences of purchasing insecure IoT devices. Worse, such a quantity of insecure devices makes the Internet less secure for everyone. What botnet will use vulnerable webcams to launch DDoS attacks? What malware will use insecure webcams to infect smart homes? When 2008-era malware like Conficker.B affects police body cams in 2015, it threatens not just the reliability of recorded police activity but also serves as a transmission vector to attack other devices.
“The bigger picture here is not just personal privacy, but the security of IoT devices,” security researcher Scott Erven told Ars Technica UK. “As we expand that connectivity, when we get into systems that affect public safety and human life—medical devices, the automotive space, critical infrastructure—the consequences of failure are higher than something as shocking as a Shodan webcam peering into the baby’s crib.”
Admiring the problem is easy. Finding solutions is harder. For his part, Tentler is sceptical that raising consumer awareness will be enough to solve the problem. Despite tons of press harping on about the privacy implications of webcams, it’s pretty clear, according to Tentler, that just telling people to care more about security isn’t going to make a difference.
Instead, he argues it’s time to start arm-twisting vendors to release more secure products.
Apple users fall victim to first ransomware attack to ever penetrate Mac security
March 7, 2016
RT
Apple users have fallen prey to ransomware for the first time ever. The ‘KeRanger’ malware appeared hidden in the popular BitTorrent application, Transmission. Users’ Macs were infected upon downloading the latest copy.
A ransomware is malicious code, like any other type of malware. The way it works is usually by hiding inside a program one may hastily download, irrespective of the risks. A message then appears, telling the user all or part of their files have been encrypted, and the only way to decrypt them is by paying a ransom – usually in digital currency, which is difficult to trace.
An attack of this sort struck computers in a US hospital in Hollywood recently, forcing it to pay a $17,000 ransom to regain control of its systems. The hackers had originally demanded $3.7 million.
On Friday, a similar fate befell Apple users as they downloaded Transmission 2.90, researchers at the company’s Palo Alto headquarters said on Sunday in their blog.
The company’s Threat Intelligence Director Ryan Olson confirmed to Reuters over the phone that the ‘KeRanger’ malware was “the first one in the wild that is definitely functional, encrypts your files and seeks a ransom.“Attackers infected two installers of Transmission version 2.90 with KeRanger on the morning of March 4. When we identified the issue, the infected DMG files were still available for downloading from the Transmission site,” Apple continued on its Palo Alto blog.
“The KeRanger application was signed with a valid Mac app development certificate; therefore, it was able to bypass Apple’s Gatekeeper protection,” they explained.
“If a user installs the infected apps, an embedded executable file is run on the system. KeRanger then waits for three days before connecting with command and control (C2) servers over the Tor anonymizer network. The malware then begins encrypting certain types of document and data files on the system.”
After this is complete, the malware demands $400 from every infected user, equivalent to one bitcoin.
An Apple representative told the agency the company has been implementing various contingency measures over the weekend.
The company says anyone who hasn’t paid up could start losing data on Monday.
China angered by planned U.S. export restrictions on ZTE
March 7, 2016
by Jess Macy Yu
Reuters
Beijing-China’s Foreign Ministry expressed anger on Monday at the U.S. Commerce Department’s plans to place export restrictions on Chinese telecoms equipment-maker ZTE Corp (000063.SZ) for allegedly violating U.S. export controls on Iran.
The restrictions will take effect Tuesday, Reuters has learned, and apply to any company worldwide that wants to ship American-made products to ZTE Corp in China. Those companies are not the target of the export curbs on ZTE.
“China is opposed to the U.S. citing domestic laws to place sanctions on Chinese enterprises,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei told a daily news briefing.
“We hope the U.S. stops this erroneous action and avoids damaging Sino-U.S. trade cooperation and bilateral relations,” he said, without elaborating.
China and Iran have close diplomatic, economic, trade and energy ties, and China was active in pushing both the United States and Iran to reach agreement on Iran’s controversial nuclear program.The U.S. restrictions will require ZTE’s suppliers to apply for an export license before shipping any American-made equipment or parts to ZTE, potentially complicating the Chinese firm’s ability to acquire U.S. products.
Trade in shares of ZTE, which also sells consumer devices such as smartphones in the United States, was suspended in Hong Kong and Shenzhen on Monday.
ZTE said in a statement issued over the weekend that it was “high concerned” at media reports of the U.S. plan.
The Commerce Department investigated ZTE for alleged export-control violations following Reuters reports in 2012 that the company had signed contracts to ship millions of dollars worth of hardware and software to Iran’s largest telecoms carrier, Telecommunication Co of Iran (TCI), as well as a unit of the consortium that controls it.
The United States has long banned the sale of U.S.-made technology products to Iran, and the Commerce Department’s investigation focused on whether ZTE had acquired American products through front companies and then shipped them to Iran in violation of U.S. sanctions.
As one of the world’s largest telecoms equipment makers, ZTE has operations in 160 countries, according to its website. It is also a major manufacturer of mobile handsets.
Besides ZTE, the export curbs will also apply to two of its Chinese affiliates, ZTE Kangxun Telecommunications Ltd and Beijing 8-Star, as well as ZTE Parsian, which is an Iranian company.
(This story corrects word “Sino-U.S.” in paragraph 4)
(Reporting by Jess Macy Yu; Editing by Ben Blanchard and Alex Richardson)
Strange but True: The Oddballs on Parade
from The Encyclopedia of American Loons
OJ Simpson case: how knife discovery puts burden of proof on LAPD again
Infamous trial had all the elements for a sensational story except a murder weapon, and retired officer’s ‘odd’ reveal years later extends saga that won’t end
March 7, 2016
by Maria I. LaGanga
Reuters
The OJ Simpson case had it all – questions of race and class, the sheen of celebrity, grisly details, snappy lines, the smudge of police misconduct, television cameras, more television cameras. Everything, that is, except a murder weapon.
All that may have changed on Friday morning, when Los Angeles police captain Andy Neiman stood before yet another bank of cameras and confirmed that the department was examining a knife allegedly discovered on the grounds of the former football player’s former estate in the wealthy Los Angeles neighborhood of Brentwood.
The weapon had been held for years by a retired police officer who, fittingly, was moonlighting on a movie set in the 1990s when a construction worker handed the knife to him. The worker said he had found it on the athlete’s property, two miles from where Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman were stabbed to death in 1994.
Whether or not the knife is connected to the case, Simpson was acquitted of the brutal killings in 1995. Legal experts posit that he cannot be prosecuted for the crime again because the US constitution prohibits so-called double jeopardy, even if the knife really was used in the crime. That itself is a big question.
And, just like that June day in 1994 when Brown Simpson’s body was found, nearly decapitated, sprawled on the walkway steps of her condominium, audiences tuned in for news of a crime that riveted the nation and drew interest from around the world.
The LAPD news conference was televised live on Friday morning by stations that set up cameras in downtown Los Angeles long before Neiman even appeared. In between weather, traffic and headlines came the occasional peek at an empty lectern bristling with microphones.
“More people watched the OJ preliminary hearing than watched the Gulf war coverage,” said Laurie Levenson, a professor at Loyola Law School who served as legal analyst for CBS during the gavel-to-gavel televised trial.
“It was unprecedented,” Levenson added. “It contributed to the growth of cable’s 24-hour news cycle. It was celebrity. The characters were fascinating. It was a whodunnit. It was the beginning of DNA. There were other high-profile cases. But this one had a life of its own.”
People still remember where they were when Simpson led police on a nearly two-hour, low-speed chase in a white Ford Bronco through the rush hour-clogged streets of Los Angeles. When the verdict in his murder trial was announced, an estimated 150 million people tuned in, making it the most-watched event in TV history at the time. Bill Clinton watched from the White House.
“Nothing else approaches it in media magnitude since,” said Franklin E Zimring, Simon professor of law at UC Berkeley. “This was an outlier in terms of the whole of the criminal process being a media event. I think it was probably much more important for that reason than any impact it might have had on substance.”
The case spurred discussion of domestic violence – of what traps women in dangerous relationships, of when and why partners can turn deadly – but did not result in legal reform. Brown Simpson regularly called police to report abuse that she suffered at the hands of the athlete, although little came of that either. According to the Los Angeles Times, Simpson beat Brown Simpson badly enough in 1989 that she required treatment at a hospital.
It offered a window into a racially polarized America. Levenson was at the courthouse every day of the trial and recalls the crowd’s response when Simpson was acquitted.
“Literally the streets divide in half,” she said. “You see blacks on one side, whites on the other, blacks cheering, whites looking like they got hit by a meteor.”
At the end of a broadcast that day she was asked: “So, Professor Levenson, in the 10 seconds remaining, what does this tell us about justice?”
“I said, ‘That will be debated for years to come.’ OJ is just going to continue to be a fascination for people.”
It also brought into wide usage an accepted euphemism for a reviled racial epithet – “the N-word”. The actual slur rang through the courtroom during the months-long trial, with witnesses testifying that detective Mark Fuhrman used the term on a regular basis.
But recordings were played during trial of the disgraced former detective – who had been investigated before the case went trial over allegations he had picked up a bloody glove near Brown Simpson’s and Goldman’s bodies and had taken a bloody glove to Simpson’s home – spewing racist rants, boasting of police brutality and using the N-word over and over.
“‘The N-word’ [as a phrase] comes out of this trial,” recounted Jim Newton, who covered the Simpson case from crime to verdict and now teaches and edits the magazine Blueprint at UCLA. Prosecutor “Chris Darden, he recounted, made a motion that no one should be able to use the racial slur in court. “ Johnnie [Cochran, a Simpson defense attorney] argued the opposite,” said Newton. “He said it was condescending to African Americans. Johnnie prevailed.”Although it was a showcase of deeply flawed police practices, the Simpson case was only “a minor disaster” for the LAPD, said Berkeley’s Zimring, noting that the police beating of Rodney King two years earlier was far worse. The officers were acquitted and rioting ensued.
“In the annals of homicide investigation, [the Simpson case] was problematic in the extreme,” Zimring said. “But in terms of police-community relations, this was a minor disaster given some of the major disasters that preceded it.”
In fact, the LAPD press conference about the knife discovery came 25 years and one day after the Rodney King beating. It also occurred midway through a cable mini-series on the Simpson case called The People v OJ Simpson, and a few months before ESPN plans to release a five-part Simpson documentary, which will further extend the lifespan of a tale that seems to never end.
Loyola’s Levenson, who still is amazed about the more than 1,000 credentialed journalists who descended on Los Angeles for the Simpson trial, calls the timing of the knife’s appearance “just very odd”.
“You wonder whether somebody wants his 15 minutes of fame,” she said, noting that Simpson languishes in a Nevada prison, convicted of an entirely unrelated crime. “The cop holds on to this as a souvenir?”
So much of the Simpson case “was the LAPD on trial”, Levenson said. “This latest find is a continuation of this saga.”
New Film Delves Into FBI Arrests of Youths for Terrorism Crimes They Might Commit
March. 6 2016,
by Murtaza Hussain
The Intercept
In an early scene from the HBO documentary Homegrown, an FBI agent describes his angst while tracking a teenager’s engagement in the online jihadi world. “You almost want to pick up the phone and say, ‘Son, don’t do this,’” the agent reflects. The teenager in question was Shifa Sadequee, a 19-year-old who was arrested on terrorism charges in 2006. Following a 2009 trial in which Sadequee represented himself, he was sentenced to 17 years in prison plus an additional 30 years of supervision.
The ethical issues involved in preventive counterterrorism cases like Sadequee’s are the theme behind much of Homegrown. Following 9/11, law enforcement agencies were given a mandate to halt terrorist acts before they occurred, rather than investigate crimes after the fact. This directive inevitably gave rise to some disturbing ethical questions. When is it acceptable to arrest someone for a crime they haven’t actually committed, but you think they might commit in the future? At what point do a teenager’s online postings turn into a terrorism offense?
Born in Virginia to parents from Bangladesh, Sadequee was raised largely in suburban Georgia. In the years leading up to his arrest, during his early and mid-teens, he was the subject of intense online surveillance by law enforcement. Around the age of 16, Sadequee became involved online with a group of young men who had been translating jihadi material into English. The men were generally not in direct contact, and were scattered in different countries around the English-speaking world. Online, some of them expressed support for terrorist groups and made threats of future violence.
In real life, Sadequee was a socially awkward teenager growing up in a broken home. But in the virtual world, he used his language skills and scholarly demeanor to become something of a respected figure, making friends and contacts throughout North America and Europe. As time went on, Sadequee began immersing himself more deeply in this new community.
In 2005, he and another young man, Syed Haris Ahmed, made a trip to Toronto to meet with a group of men they had befriended online, several of whom were later arrested in a separate terrorism sting. Roughly a month after that visit, Sadequee and Ahmed traveled to Washington, D.C., where they made a “casing video” of major landmarks in the city. While providing limited strategic value, the videos were deeply provocative. In footage shown on Homegrown, Sadequee and Ahmed pan a camera across the Pentagon and White House while making threatening comments. The video they made was later alleged by the government to have been created for online propaganda, rather than as preparation for a specific attack. The footage was played at trial as evidence of their intent to support terrorism.
After this trip, while Sadequee’s online persona grew more fearsome, his real life continued along the path his family had expected of him. At 19, Sadequee traveled to Bangladesh to get married. But just days after his wedding, he was abducted by plainclothes Bengali police officers off the streets of Dhaka and extradited to the United States. For the next several years, he was held in pre-trial solitary confinement, an experience that had an emotionally traumatic effect on him. His lawyers and family also say that Sadequee suffered repeated assaults and psychological abuse while awaiting trial.
In 2009, Sadequee was tried, convicted, and sentenced to a 17-year federal sentence. But even after receiving that harsh sentence, the irksome fact remained that Sadequee had never actually committed an act of terrorism. The allegations against him amounted to statements and translations he had made online as a teenager. At his trial, Sadequee said that these online activities were “just talk,” and were never intended to manifest in an act of violence.
“Shifa was never accused of making any specific threat or plot. The government didn’t even have to prove that he did anything, just that he had the intent, which they did using his online chats and translation activities,” says Khurrum Wahid, who served as Sadequee’s stand-by counsel during the trial and who also appears in Homegrown. “It goes down to the issue of what you do when you come across a teenager making provocative statements online. As a society, is it our responsibility to string them along and send them to jail?”
Wahid is outraged about the government’s handling of Sadequee’s case and those of other young people that involve preventive policing. “In no other context would we accept that we arrest and jail people for further actions that haven’t happened,” he says. “The right solution in cases of teenagers like Shifa might be to call the families and do an intervention, which is what would happen in any other case. But for some reason, we decide that terrorism is different.”
Sadequee was not arrested until the age of 19, but it appears that the government had been surveilling him closely for many years before that. Among the accusations against him were that he had sought to join the Taliban in December 2001. At that time, Sadequee would have been 15 years old.Mubin Shaikh, a specialist on counterterrorism and former undercover agent, infiltrated Sadequee’s group of Toronto friends a few months after his 2005 visit to Canada. Although torn about sending young men in terror cases to prison for extended terms, Shaikh says that law enforcement often has little choice. “The dilemma is, What happens when you’re watching someone and you blow the undercover part and confront them with their family in their homes? A suspect might remain committed to a plot, and then go alert his co-conspirators to derail a broader investigation,” he says. Shaikh further notes that were an individual to go on and commit a criminal act after a failed intervention, public criticism would inevitably fall upoin law enforcement for failing to stop someone who was “known to authorities.”
“Perhaps a third option could be to provide counseling in prison to help reduce their sentence once incarcerated,” he says. “But it’s not clear if Western institutions are even prepared for such programs yet.”
Over roughly 90 minutes, Homegrown discusses the case of Sadequee, as well as others like Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan Malik, from the perspective of law enforcement, local communities, and the families of the accused. As a film, it succeeds in offering a more nuanced take on the subject of radicalization than many other mainstream productions. Over generic footage of Muslim Americans going about their lives, the film airs voiceovers from counterterrorism officials describing the threat of terrorism as wildly overblown in the public imagination. Left unspoken, however, is the somewhat underwhelming nature of even those “terrorists” who do end up being identified and apprehended in the United States today.Since the rise of the Islamic State, a steadily increasing number of young men similar in profile to Sadequee have been arrested due to statements and postings they’ve made online. A report issued this week by George Washington University’s Program on Extremism found that since March 2014, 84 individuals, mostly young men, have been arrested in the United States for allegedly supporting ISIS. Some, like Khalil Abu Rayyan, 21, were seemingly disturbed young men who thought they were interacting online with friends or potential love interests. Others, like John T. Booker, had well-documented histories of mental illness before their postings brought them to the attention of authorities. In many of the cases, it seems highly questionable whether the individuals involved had the capacity to commit a crime without the assistance of law enforcement.
In the film, Sadequee’s older sister Sharmin emerges as a powerful advocate on his behalf. Since his arrest and incarceration, she and her sister have devoted themselves to his case, as well as to the cases of other young men whom they say have been railroaded by law enforcement agencies.
“We are a family who learned firsthand how the counterterrorism industry actively seeks to destroy innocent people with manufactured terrorism cases,” Sharmin Sadequee told The Intercept. “The government conceded at his trial that there was no plot or plan of a plot to harm anyone or anything. So why is Shifa in prison for 10 years? These types of cases are used to assault us with fear and hysteria and silence us from protesting our government’s wars abroad.”
Causes of Blindness Vary for Older Adults
March 5, 2016
by C. Claiborne Ray
New York Times
Q. What’s the No. 1 cause of blindness in older adults in the United States?
A. “It sounds like a simple question, but there’s no perfect answer,” said Dr. Susan Vitale, a research epidemiologist at the National Eye Institute of the National Institutes of Health. “It depends on age, how blindness is measured and how statistics are collected.” For example, some studies have relied on the self-reported answer to the vague question: “Do you have vision problems?”
The best available estimates, she said, come from a 2004 paper aggregating many other studies, some in the United States and some in other countries, updated by applying later census data
This paper and others have found striking differences by age and by racial and socioeconomic groups, Dr. Vitale said. In white people, she said, the major cause of blindness at older ages is usually age-related macular degeneration, progressive damage to the central portion of the retina. In older black people, the major causes are likely to be glaucoma or cataracts. In older people of working age, from their 40s to their 60s, the major cause, regardless of race, is diabetic retinopathy, damage to the retina as a result of diabetes.
Many studies have shown that white people are more likely to have age-related macular degeneration, Dr. Vitale said, but as for cataracts, for which blindness is preventable by surgery, there are questions about access to health care and whether those affected can get the needed surgery. It is not known why black people are at higher risk of glaucoma. There are also some gender differences, she said, with white women more likely than white men to become blind. Studies have not found the same difference by gender in black and Hispanic people.
Because many of the causes of blindness at all ages are preventable, Dr. Vitale said, it is essential to have regular eye checkups, even if there are no obvious symptoms.