Cartoons - Uprising
Cam Cardow, The Ottawa Citizen
posted by Hanan Elbadry at 9:14 PM
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Saturday, February 19, 2011
Diplomatic duplicity
FOREIGN POLICY
By C. Christine Fair, February 18, 2011 
Friday, February 18, 2011 - 1:55 PM
The U.S. government maintains a simple account: he was an employee of the U.S. consulate in Lahore who shot two men in self defense. Since he has "diplomatic immunity," he should be released under the Vienna Convention immediately. President Obama has himself argued that he should be released for these reasons. Concurrent with Obama's appeals for the man's diplomatic immunity, U.S. Senator John Kerry travelled to Pakistan this week to resolve the ever more complicated row. With such high-level demands, the very credibility of the U.S. presidency is at stake. This is not lost upon Pakistan or its citizens.
Pakistan has its own stylized, yet starkly divergent, account from that heard in the United States. Whereas Raymond Davis is a niche topic of the chattering classes in Washington D.C. in the United States, he is the mainstay of conversation across all stratum of Pakistani society and has become a national obsession in Pakistan's print and television media. Pakistanis have called for the hanging of Davis in public rallies.
From the Pakistani viewpoint, the "facts" are far less clear. Davis was first described in peculiar, ambiguous terms as a "U.S. consulate employee." He was driving his own unarmored vehicle and carrying a gun. Most diplomats in Pakistan -- American or otherwise -- now travel in armored cars. They certainly do not drive their own cars, and they generally don't carry guns.
Despite Pakistanis' assertions that he is a spy, he does not have the profile of a bona fide operative of the Central Intelligence Agency. CIA case managers are well-trained and are unlikely to conduct themselves as Davis did. However, some U.S. officials concede that he is likely a security contractor with ties to the American intelligence apparatus. This is consistent with his resume.
Speculation is rife in both countries that this dispute over Davis may come down to a showdown between Pakistan's intelligence agency, the ISI, and American intelligence agencies. Both Pakistani and American analysts have told me that the two men shot likely were Davis's Pakistani intelligence detail or perhaps informants or operatives gone sour.
The view from Pakistan: "Raymond Davis kaun hai?" Who are you?
The Pakistani press raises different issues that generally are not raised in the United States and reflect the conspiracy theories that grip many Pakistanis. First, Pakistani officials doubt that Raymond Davis is the true name of the man in question. A Pakistani barrister, Iqbal Jafree, suggested that Davis came to Pakistan using a fake name. If this is the case, he has argued that another legal case may also be registered against him. He further asserted that "...the U.S. authorities also have acknowledged Davis is not his real name." My examination of the U.S. press has not revealed that this possibility has been suggested.
Second, while some diplomats may be authorized to carry legal firearms, Pakistani observers claim that Davis's possession and use of a firearm was illegal under Pakistani laws. This reinforces Pakistan's vexation with what they perceive as U.S. impunity and further outrages Pakistanis who embrace various conspiracy theories about Blackwater/Xe Services and its ilk running around Pakistan, whose activities are shrouded in complete opacity. These conspiracy theories are given ballast by the actual presence of people like Raymond Davis: an ostensible "security contractor" of some variety adds "ghee" to this fire.
Third, the Pakistani media -- as well as some international media -- dilate upon the reports that he got out of his vehicle and shot his victims in the back. U.S. courts would likely reject claims of self defense if an alleged victim shot his purported assailants in the back. However, U.S. officials privately note that the individuals fled after the first shot was fired from a frontal position, thus negating the claims that Davis first fired into their backs.
Fourth, further fuelling Pakistan's deepest suspicions are the reports in the Pakistani media that a camera was recovered from Davis upon his arrest. His camera reportedly contained "photos of the strategic Balahisar Fort, the headquarters of the paramilitary Frontier Corps in Peshawar and of Pakistan army bunkers on the eastern border with India were found in the camera." Pakistani media outlets have made these photos available to the public. It remains to be confirmed that these videos and photos were actually recovered from Davis's camera, much less what his intentions were in taking these images if he actually did so. However, many Pakistanis accept the authenticity of the footage and its worrisome implications as a matter of fact.
Fifth, the U.S.'s central claim that Mr. Davis has diplomatic immunity is fundamentally contested in Pakistan. Some of my contacts here in Lahore claim that he was not issued a visa on a diplomatic passport and thus the ex post facto claims to diplomatic immunity is a legal, not diplomatic affair.
However, these interpretations are flawed even if they are widely believed. As one thoughtful Pakistani commentator, Raza Rumi, recently explained
If the sending state declares someone a diplomat and the receiving state accepts him, that's the end of the matter. Those who rant that Davis' visa mentions ‘Official Business' and he's a mere contractor need to get their facts right. Pakistan's diplomatic visa does not carry the words ‘Diplomatic Visa' imprinted on it. When Pakistani authorities endorse a visa saying ‘Official Business' on a diplomatic passport, they recognize that the person is travelling to our country under diplomatic immunity. If he stays here on assignment, he gets a diplomatic ID card with his immunity status printed on its back.Rumi rightly asks how it is possible that Davis could be in Pakistan for three years if his status were ambiguous. He could have been declared "persona non grata" for his suspicious activities long before the current encounter. These questions have a simple answer: this is an orchestrated media frenzy galvanized by an inflammatory ambiguity deliberately fostered by the Pakistani government.
Finally, if the media spectacle were not provocative enough, the suicide of the widow of one of the slain, Mohammad Faheem, has further inflamed Pakistani sentiments about the case and strengthened their resolve to try Davis as a cold-blooded murderer.
The end game
The Raymond Davis issue is iconic of the challenges of U.S.-Pakistani relations.
In some sense, the Pakistani public has made Davis a public catharsis. He is not the first individual to push the envelope of transparency, much less the legal status of diplomatic immunity. Last summer while I was in Pakistan, a U.S. embassy employee crushed a Pakistani citizen to death in his vehicle. It was reportedly the third such incident over week. In 2009, an allegedly drunk U.S. diplomat, ignored a red light and careened his Prado jeep (LG-1) into a fire-brigade vehicle, causing Rs 2.5 million loss (some $29,000) in damages.
Pakistani anger over Davis is also layered upon simmering anger over the inaccurately maligned U.S. drone program. Pakistanis prefer to characterize the program as trampling Pakistani sovereignty and are loathe to acknowledge that the program operates with precision, with the Pakistani government's permission, from Pakistani soil and with Pakistani intelligence input.
Davis also outrages Pakistanis because he is not the first "defense" contractor to vex Pakistanis and raise suspicions about their varied activities in the country. The U.S. use of Blackwater/Xe Services to protect Dyncorp's construction of a Frontier Corps training facility near Peshawar discomfited residents of the frontier city. Absurdly, the Pakistani Taliban have been able to exploit these suspicions to blame the firm for terrorist attacks in Peshawar.
Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari's party, the PPP, has had internal rifts about how best to deal with the imbroglio. Given Zardari's weak government, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz Sharif (Zardari's Punjab-based political opponents) is taking maximal advantage of his predicament. It can do so safely as the party has no responsibility for actually contending with the explosive bilateral fiasco. The Zardari government, for now, appears to have outsourced resolution of the awkward situation to Pakistan's activist courts despite the fact that this is a Foreign Office issue -- not that of the courts.
However, Pakistan's activist courts are increasingly making policy rather than merely interpreting Pakistan's laws. More troubling is the potential likelihood that underneath the justice's cloaks is the color of the army's khakis. Indeed, Pakistani observers note that Pakistan's judiciary may have expanded its influence under the protective umbrella of the army's support.
Pakistani author and analyst, Ahmed Rashid, recently noted the "extraordinary cooperation" between the army and justices in recent years. Rashid also observed that the courts are less inclined to pursue the army's alleged human-rights violations. In contrast, cases that undermine and weaken the government occupy prime time at the bench. If the army has some influence behind the courts, the fate of Raymond Davis is ambiguous at best given the Pakistani Army's fraught views towards Washington and its intelligence agencies.
Given the legal clarity of the matter, a bothersome question persists: what elements of the Pakistani government are stoking these dangerous, populist sentiments and to what end? Is this yet another signal that Islamabad does not want to the strategic relationship that Washington continues to peddle with naïve optimism?
In the end, despite the questionable positioning of Pakistan's judiciary on Pakistan's democratic fabric and the likelihood that Davis' diplomatic status is not a judicial matter, there may be some marginal benefit from this absurd drama.
It is unprecedented that the U.S. government has been compelled to present evidence about the activities of its mission and personnel in Pakistan. The U.S. government will have to present evidence about the nature of the position of Raymond Davis in Pakistan's courts. While this is a tedious and gratuitous predicament, it may be a long overdue occasion to cast much-needed transparency upon the activities of the U.S. government in Pakistan and the nature of its ties to various Pakistani agencies, which may have some complicity in this tragic affair. This may be good for Americans and Pakistanis alike, even if it threatens to further undermine the U.S.-Pakistan relationship.
C. Christine Fair is an assistant professor at Georgetown University, Center for Peace and Security Studies and the author of the political cookbook, Cuisines of the Axis of Evil and Other Irritating States and Pakistan's Madrassah Challenge: Militancy and Religious Education in Pakistan.
posted by Hanan Elbadry at 9:08 PM
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Why Pakistan Cannot Release the Man Who Calls Himself Raymond Davis
By Shaukat Qadir
February 19, 2011 "ThisCantBeHappening" -- Islamabad--By now journalists everywhere (except in the US) have come to the conclusion that there is far, far more to Raymond Davis than is being revealed by the US or by Pakistani officials. That he was engaged in anti-state activities in Pakistan and that the two young men he killed were intelligence agents tailing him is virtually an accepted fact.
The US, never famous for its diplomacy (The Ugly American, which made that point more than half a century ago, became a best seller and a very successful movie, starring Marlon Brando), seems to have discovered fresh depths to its strong-arm, coercive diplomacy. The mere fact that no less a personage than the US President has asked that this low-ranked person be granted absolute immunity, is indicative of the US desperation to get him him out of Pakistan and its court system.
One Western journalist has referred to this incident as the "biggest intelligence fiasco since the downing of a U-2 by the erstwhile USSR in 1962." Obviously, the apprehension is that were he to be tried and convicted in Pakistan and handed a lengthy prison, or even a death sentence, Davis might "spill the beans" and that, were he to do so, those Wikileaks cables could pale into insignificance!
That, in itself, is more than sufficient reason for Pakistan to refuse to hand him over; but there is far more to Pakistan’s problems regarding this issue than just that. However, before we get to those, some comically farcical blunders committed by the US Embassy in Pakistan merit narration, since I am fairly certain these are not being reported by the US media. They illustrate clearly the extent of the desperation American officials are feeling!
On January 25th 2011, just two days before Davis shot and killed the two young Pakistanis, the US Embassy submitted a list of its diplomatic and non-diplomatic staff in Pakistan to the Pakistani Foreign Office (FO), as all foreign nations are required to do annually. The list included 48 names. Raymond Davis was not on the list. The day after Davis shot and killed the two Pakistanis, the US Embassy suddenly submitted a “revised” list to the Foreign Office which added Davis’ name!
When Pakistani police took Davis into custody on January 27th, he had on his person an ordinary American passport with a valid ordinary Pakistan visa, issued by the Pakistan Embassy in Washington. On January 28th, a member of the US Consulate wanted the Pakistani police to exchange that passport in Davis’ possession with another one. The fresh passport being offered was a diplomatic passport with a valid diplomatic visa dated sometime in 2009. This visa was stamped in Islamabad by the FO!
It gets ridiculously funnier. The prosecutor representing the Punjab government has presented two letters from the US Embassy as evidence before the Lahore High Court, forwarded to the Punjab government through the FO. The first letter, dated January 27, reads: “Davis is an employee of the US Consulate General Lahore and holder of a diplomatic passport." The second, dated February 3rd, states that Davis is a member of the “administrative and technical staff of the US Embassy Islamabad!” Just how gullible do the Americans take Pakistanis to be!
Before moving on to the political implications for Pakistan, were Davis to be granted immunity, it is important to review some domestic impediments, without which, he would never have been taken into custody.
Asif Ali Zardari might be a politically empowered president domestically, but if the US asked him to jump, he would ask "how high?" If they asked him to bend over, he would ask, "how low?" Had Davis committed the murders in Islamabad, under federal jurisdiction, he would have been flown out of the country within hours of his crime before any furor could have time to develop. But he slaughtered his victims in Lahore, in the jurisdiction of the Punjab state government, manned by the PML(N), which is Zardari’s party’s main opposition.
Despite repeated and numerous requests from the US Embassy and the Federal government, the Punjab government has stood firm and has even denied Davis the comforts normally afforded a political prisoner. Instead, Davis has the same facilities that any common Pakistani criminal has, in the rather notorious Kot Lakpat jail in Lahore (though he is being separated from the general prison population for his own safety).
Then there is the superior judiciary; the Supreme Court (SC), which awaits Davis with sleeves rolled up, more than ready to ensure justice in defiance of Zardari’s wishes. Meanwhile, Davis has already been indicted before the Lahore High Court (LHC), which has extended his judicial remand in police custody to allow time for more interrogation. Therefore, even if the LHC could be intimidated, an appeal before the SC is inevitable.
Finally there is the Pakistani Pentagon, the General Headquarters, commonly known as GHQ. Now that it is a fairly accepted fact in Pakistan that Davis is guilty of anti-Pakistan activities and has killed two members of an intelligence agency, probably the well-known Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), GHQ will have a say in his disposal. Consequently, despite Zardari’s desire to please the US, he may find himself hamstrung.
Under Pakistani law, there is provision for "Blood Money," i.e. that the next of kin can accept monetary remuneration and then pardon the killer before the court. Despite pressure brought to bear on the families of Zeeshan and Faheem, the ill-fated pair that was murdered, both families have unanimously refused to accept Blood Money. In fact, tempers are running so high that local wealthy businessmen have publicly urged them to refuse, with the promise that they would match any sum offered to them by the US!
When rumors were floating that the US might cut a deal, offering Aafiya Siddique--the Pakistani scientist convicted in the US of attempting to murder two US interrogators and now serving a controversial 86-year sentence-- in exchange for Davis, Siddique’s own family refused to accept her back on these terms and spoke to local dailies urging the Punjab government not to release Davis for any reason.
Based on all of the above, I personally doubt that Davis’ immunity plea will be accepted. However, if despite everything, his claim were accepted, what would be the political repercussions?
That’s the million-dollar question!
The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), known in the US media as the Pakistan Taliban, has issued a warning to the government of dire consequences if Davis is released. That would mean suicide attacks, murder and mayhem would immediately follow his release. Targets might well include any judges involved in the decision.
The youth of Pakistan--who rose to a pedestal in my eyes during last year’s floods, when young boys and girls defied our social taboos (sometimes even parental edicts) in the hundreds of thousands, spending many nights away from home so as to assist those affected by the floods and demonstrating courage, determination, warmth, and patriotism of a level I had not expected--have again joined hands over this case.
They can be found in droves on the web; exhorting the Pakistan government to refuse US aid, promising to raise donations from their resources and the public if the US cuts it off, and urging the government to withstand US pressure and refuse Davis immunity. They are also vowing that if immunity is granted, a youth movement of unprecedented proportions will start and, that like the historic Long March for the restoration of the judiciary in March 2009, which could have toppled the PPP government, this youth movement will succeed in toppling the government, where the Long March let it off the hook when its demands were met.
It’s not just the youth either. Every shopkeeper, cab driver, vendor and ordinary laborer that I have spoken with is unanimous in expressing the view that they will rise to demonstrate and overthrow this government, if Davis is granted immunity.
When the Egyptian People Power revolution started, I explained to a number of friends, local and foreign, why it was unlikely to spread to Pakistan. If Davis is granted immunity, though, I am more than likely to be proven wrong. Here too, as in Egypt, it is more than likely that GHQ will refuse to turn their guns on the demonstrators. But the fall of the PPP government might be the least of our concerns.
Despite the numerical increase in what used to be an infinitesimally small number of Islamic extremists, I have argued forcefully that there is, for the immediate future, no fear of Islamic forces becoming dominant in Pakistan. I have frequently cited the unanimous support for the military in the use of force against TTP--support which persists to date, despite suicide attacks. In fact, each suicide attack increases the determination of the people to fight terrorists.
Davis, however, could change that. Granting him immunity, in my opinion, could be the sole act that could provide an excuse for militant Islam to become dominant in Pakistan.
So, tread carefully, Mr Obama. You have already made one blunder by stoking unrest in Pakistan, using Raymond Davis, or whatever his name is, and his ilk, and have been caught with both hands in the cookie jar. But in trying to avoid the repercussions of this blunder, you could commit another of even more disastrous proportions--one that would reverberate around the world. You could create the realization of your own worst nightmare: a nuclear Pakistan dominated by religious extremist forces.
It might still not happen this way, but the path you are treading certainly is one that leads in the direction of converting that nightmare into reality.
See also - Probe finds connection between Davis, drone attacks: Sources have revealed that a GPS chip recovered from Davis was being used in identifying targets for drone attacks in the tribal region.
Was Davis Running Drone Programme in Pakistan?
SHAUKAT QADIR retired as a Brigadier from the Pakistan infantry in 1999. He was the founder, vice president and, briefly, president of a think tank. He now divides is time between teaching, studying many subjects, including journalism, and baby-sitting his grandchildren. He was a regular writer for the late Far East
February 19, 2011 "ThisCantBeHappening" -- Islamabad--By now journalists everywhere (except in the US) have come to the conclusion that there is far, far more to Raymond Davis than is being revealed by the US or by Pakistani officials. That he was engaged in anti-state activities in Pakistan and that the two young men he killed were intelligence agents tailing him is virtually an accepted fact.
The US, never famous for its diplomacy (The Ugly American, which made that point more than half a century ago, became a best seller and a very successful movie, starring Marlon Brando), seems to have discovered fresh depths to its strong-arm, coercive diplomacy. The mere fact that no less a personage than the US President has asked that this low-ranked person be granted absolute immunity, is indicative of the US desperation to get him him out of Pakistan and its court system.
One Western journalist has referred to this incident as the "biggest intelligence fiasco since the downing of a U-2 by the erstwhile USSR in 1962." Obviously, the apprehension is that were he to be tried and convicted in Pakistan and handed a lengthy prison, or even a death sentence, Davis might "spill the beans" and that, were he to do so, those Wikileaks cables could pale into insignificance!
That, in itself, is more than sufficient reason for Pakistan to refuse to hand him over; but there is far more to Pakistan’s problems regarding this issue than just that. However, before we get to those, some comically farcical blunders committed by the US Embassy in Pakistan merit narration, since I am fairly certain these are not being reported by the US media. They illustrate clearly the extent of the desperation American officials are feeling!
On January 25th 2011, just two days before Davis shot and killed the two young Pakistanis, the US Embassy submitted a list of its diplomatic and non-diplomatic staff in Pakistan to the Pakistani Foreign Office (FO), as all foreign nations are required to do annually. The list included 48 names. Raymond Davis was not on the list. The day after Davis shot and killed the two Pakistanis, the US Embassy suddenly submitted a “revised” list to the Foreign Office which added Davis’ name!
When Pakistani police took Davis into custody on January 27th, he had on his person an ordinary American passport with a valid ordinary Pakistan visa, issued by the Pakistan Embassy in Washington. On January 28th, a member of the US Consulate wanted the Pakistani police to exchange that passport in Davis’ possession with another one. The fresh passport being offered was a diplomatic passport with a valid diplomatic visa dated sometime in 2009. This visa was stamped in Islamabad by the FO!
It gets ridiculously funnier. The prosecutor representing the Punjab government has presented two letters from the US Embassy as evidence before the Lahore High Court, forwarded to the Punjab government through the FO. The first letter, dated January 27, reads: “Davis is an employee of the US Consulate General Lahore and holder of a diplomatic passport." The second, dated February 3rd, states that Davis is a member of the “administrative and technical staff of the US Embassy Islamabad!” Just how gullible do the Americans take Pakistanis to be!
Before moving on to the political implications for Pakistan, were Davis to be granted immunity, it is important to review some domestic impediments, without which, he would never have been taken into custody.
Asif Ali Zardari might be a politically empowered president domestically, but if the US asked him to jump, he would ask "how high?" If they asked him to bend over, he would ask, "how low?" Had Davis committed the murders in Islamabad, under federal jurisdiction, he would have been flown out of the country within hours of his crime before any furor could have time to develop. But he slaughtered his victims in Lahore, in the jurisdiction of the Punjab state government, manned by the PML(N), which is Zardari’s party’s main opposition.
Despite repeated and numerous requests from the US Embassy and the Federal government, the Punjab government has stood firm and has even denied Davis the comforts normally afforded a political prisoner. Instead, Davis has the same facilities that any common Pakistani criminal has, in the rather notorious Kot Lakpat jail in Lahore (though he is being separated from the general prison population for his own safety).
Then there is the superior judiciary; the Supreme Court (SC), which awaits Davis with sleeves rolled up, more than ready to ensure justice in defiance of Zardari’s wishes. Meanwhile, Davis has already been indicted before the Lahore High Court (LHC), which has extended his judicial remand in police custody to allow time for more interrogation. Therefore, even if the LHC could be intimidated, an appeal before the SC is inevitable.
Finally there is the Pakistani Pentagon, the General Headquarters, commonly known as GHQ. Now that it is a fairly accepted fact in Pakistan that Davis is guilty of anti-Pakistan activities and has killed two members of an intelligence agency, probably the well-known Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), GHQ will have a say in his disposal. Consequently, despite Zardari’s desire to please the US, he may find himself hamstrung.
Under Pakistani law, there is provision for "Blood Money," i.e. that the next of kin can accept monetary remuneration and then pardon the killer before the court. Despite pressure brought to bear on the families of Zeeshan and Faheem, the ill-fated pair that was murdered, both families have unanimously refused to accept Blood Money. In fact, tempers are running so high that local wealthy businessmen have publicly urged them to refuse, with the promise that they would match any sum offered to them by the US!
When rumors were floating that the US might cut a deal, offering Aafiya Siddique--the Pakistani scientist convicted in the US of attempting to murder two US interrogators and now serving a controversial 86-year sentence-- in exchange for Davis, Siddique’s own family refused to accept her back on these terms and spoke to local dailies urging the Punjab government not to release Davis for any reason.
Based on all of the above, I personally doubt that Davis’ immunity plea will be accepted. However, if despite everything, his claim were accepted, what would be the political repercussions?
That’s the million-dollar question!
The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), known in the US media as the Pakistan Taliban, has issued a warning to the government of dire consequences if Davis is released. That would mean suicide attacks, murder and mayhem would immediately follow his release. Targets might well include any judges involved in the decision.
The youth of Pakistan--who rose to a pedestal in my eyes during last year’s floods, when young boys and girls defied our social taboos (sometimes even parental edicts) in the hundreds of thousands, spending many nights away from home so as to assist those affected by the floods and demonstrating courage, determination, warmth, and patriotism of a level I had not expected--have again joined hands over this case.
They can be found in droves on the web; exhorting the Pakistan government to refuse US aid, promising to raise donations from their resources and the public if the US cuts it off, and urging the government to withstand US pressure and refuse Davis immunity. They are also vowing that if immunity is granted, a youth movement of unprecedented proportions will start and, that like the historic Long March for the restoration of the judiciary in March 2009, which could have toppled the PPP government, this youth movement will succeed in toppling the government, where the Long March let it off the hook when its demands were met.
It’s not just the youth either. Every shopkeeper, cab driver, vendor and ordinary laborer that I have spoken with is unanimous in expressing the view that they will rise to demonstrate and overthrow this government, if Davis is granted immunity.
When the Egyptian People Power revolution started, I explained to a number of friends, local and foreign, why it was unlikely to spread to Pakistan. If Davis is granted immunity, though, I am more than likely to be proven wrong. Here too, as in Egypt, it is more than likely that GHQ will refuse to turn their guns on the demonstrators. But the fall of the PPP government might be the least of our concerns.
Despite the numerical increase in what used to be an infinitesimally small number of Islamic extremists, I have argued forcefully that there is, for the immediate future, no fear of Islamic forces becoming dominant in Pakistan. I have frequently cited the unanimous support for the military in the use of force against TTP--support which persists to date, despite suicide attacks. In fact, each suicide attack increases the determination of the people to fight terrorists.
Davis, however, could change that. Granting him immunity, in my opinion, could be the sole act that could provide an excuse for militant Islam to become dominant in Pakistan.
So, tread carefully, Mr Obama. You have already made one blunder by stoking unrest in Pakistan, using Raymond Davis, or whatever his name is, and his ilk, and have been caught with both hands in the cookie jar. But in trying to avoid the repercussions of this blunder, you could commit another of even more disastrous proportions--one that would reverberate around the world. You could create the realization of your own worst nightmare: a nuclear Pakistan dominated by religious extremist forces.
It might still not happen this way, but the path you are treading certainly is one that leads in the direction of converting that nightmare into reality.
See also - Probe finds connection between Davis, drone attacks: Sources have revealed that a GPS chip recovered from Davis was being used in identifying targets for drone attacks in the tribal region.
Was Davis Running Drone Programme in Pakistan?
SHAUKAT QADIR retired as a Brigadier from the Pakistan infantry in 1999. He was the founder, vice president and, briefly, president of a think tank. He now divides is time between teaching, studying many subjects, including journalism, and baby-sitting his grandchildren. He was a regular writer for the late Far East
posted by Hanan Elbadry at 9:05 PM
0 comments
U.S. Justice v. the World
By Glenn Greenwald
February 19, 2011 "Salon" -- - In March, 2002, American citizen Jose Padilla was arrested in Chicago and publicly accused by then-Attorney-General John Ashcroft of being "The Dirty Bomber." Shortly thereafter, he was transferred to a military brig in South Carolina, where he was held for almost two years completely incommunicado (charged with no crime and denied all access to the outside world, including even a lawyer) and was brutally tortured, both physically and psychologically. All of this -- including the torture -- was carried out pursuant to orders from President Bush, Secretary Rumsfeld and other high-ranking officials. Just as the Supreme Court was about to hear Padilla's plea to be charged or released -- and thus finally decide if the President has the power to imprison American citizens on U.S. soil with no charges of any kind -- the Government indicted him in a federal court on charges far less serious than Ashcroft had touted years earlier, causing the Supreme Court to dismiss Padilla's arguments as "moot"; Padilla was then convicted and sentenced to 17 years in prison.
Padilla -- like so many other War on Terror detainees -- has spent years in American courts trying unsuccessfully to hold accountable the high-level government officials responsible for his abuse and lawless imprisonment (which occurred for years prior to his indictment). Not only has Padilla (and all other detainees) failed to obtain redress for what was done to them, but worse, they have been entirely denied even the right to have their cases heard in court. That's because the U.S. Government has invented -- and federal courts have dutifully accepted -- a whole slew of legal doctrines which have only one purpose: to insulate the country's most powerful political officials from legal accountability even when they commit the most egregious crimes, such as imprisoning incommunicado and torturing an American citizen arrested and detained on U.S. soil.
Yesterday, in South Carolina, an Obama-appointed federal judge dismissed a lawsuit brought by Padilla against former Bush officials Donald Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft, Paul Wolfowitz and others. That suit alleges that those officials knowingly violated Padilla's Constitutional rights by ordering his due-process-free detention and torture. In dismissing Padilla's lawsuit, the court's opinion relied on the same now-depressingly-familiar weapons routinely used by our political class to immunize itself from judicial scrutiny: national security would be undermined by allowing Padilla to sue; "government officials could be distracted from their vital duties to attend depositions or respond to other discovery requests"; "a trial on the merits would be an international spectacle with Padilla, a convicted terrorist, summoning America's present and former leaders to a federal courthouse to answer his charges"; the litigation would risk disclosure of vital state secrets; and "discovery procedures could be used by our enemies to obtain valuable intelligence."
In other words, our political officials are Too Important, and engaged in far Too Weighty Matters in Keeping Us Safe, to subject them to the annoyance of the rule of law. It's much more important to allow them to Fight The Terrorists without restraints than to bother them with claims that they broke the law and violated the rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. That's the mentality that has resulted in full-scale immunity for both political and now private-sector elites in a whole slew of lawbreaking scandals -- from Obama's refusal to investigate Bush-era crimes or high-level Wall Street criminality to retroactive immunity for lawbreaking telecoms and legal protection for defrauding mortgage banks. With very few exceptions -- yesterday's ruling, for instance, brushed aside a contrary decision from a Bush-43-appointed federal judge in California last year that refused to dismiss Padilla's lawsuit against John Yoo for having authorized his torture (that decision is on appeal) -- Executive Branch officials and the federal judiciary have conspired to ensure that the former are shielded from judicial scrutiny even for the most blatant and horrifying crimes.
There are legalistic questions involved in cases such as the one brought by Padilla -- i.e., whether courts should allow monetary damages to be sought against government officials for Constitutional violations in the absence of a Congressional statute (a "Bivens" claim) and whether such officials should enjoy "qualified immunity" for their illegal acts where the illegality is unclear (as Rumsfeld absurdly alleged the torture of Padilla was) -- but one key fact is not complex. Not a single War on Terror detainee has been accorded any redress in American courts for the severe abuses to which they were subjected (including innocent people being detained for years, rendered and even tortured), and worse, no detainee has been allowed by courts even to have their claims heard. After the U.S. Government implemented a worldwide regime of torture, lawless detention, and other abuses, the doors of the American justice system have been slammed shut in the face of any and all victims seeking to have their rights vindicated or even their claims heard. If an American citizen can't even sue political officials who lawlessly imprison and torture him in his own country -- if political leaders are vested with immunity from a claim of this type -- what rational person can argue that the rule of law or the Constitution binds our government officials?
In one sense, this is hardly surprising. As I've written about before -- and as my forthcoming (September) book documents -- we now have a multi-tiered justice system in the United States where citizens have their legal rights, obligations and punishments determined exclusively by their status and class. Thus, someone like Jose Padilla, in the lowest class of literal non-person (accused Terrorist), has virtually no chance regardless of the merits of his claims against someone like Donald Rumsfeld, who resides in the highest and most privileged class (high-level political official). As Padilla's counsel, Ben Wizner, said, the court yesterday ruled "that Donald Rumsfeld is above the law and Jose Padilla is beneath it." That's just what the American justice system is.
But compare the posture of the American justice system to those in other countries with regard to how victims of illegal War on Terror policies have been treated. Maher Arar -- a Canadian citizen who was abducted by the U.S. in 2002 at JFK Airport and sent to Syria to be tortured for ten months despite being innocent -- had his case dismissed by American courts before it was even heard on the ground (raised by both the Bush and Obama DOJ) that vital state secrets would be jeopardized by allowing him his day in court; by stark contrast, the Canadian government published a comprehensive public report detailing its own culpable role (and that of the U.S.) in his wrongful abduction, while the Canadian Prime Minister publicly apologized to Arar and announced that he would be paid $8.9 million in compensation for Canada's role in what happened to him.
Binyam Mohamed -- the British resident who was rendered to Morocco and then brutally tortured at Guantanamo -- suffered the same treatment in American courts as Arar thanks to the Obama DOJ's insistence that what was done to him was a "state secret": his case was dismissed at the initial stage; by contrast, British courts repeatedly ruled in favor of his right to be heard in court, and in November, 2010, it was announced that the British government would pay him, along with 15 other Guantanamo detainees, several million dollars in damages. In January, 2011, an Egyptian-born Australian citizen, Mamdouh Habib, reached a monetary settlement with the Australian government after winning the right to sue Australian officials in that nation's court system for their collusion in his torture at Guantanamo and other locations. Similarly, numerous countries in both Eastern and Western Europe and elsewhere have probed and publicly accounted for their governments' role in colluding with the U.S. in abusing human rights over the last decade.
The U.S. Government stands virtually alone in steadfastly blocking all such investigations even though it was the U.S. in the lead in creating this torture and detention system. Indeed, the American political class barely bothers any longer with even the pretense of legal accountability. Each political party shields the other from any accountability in a ritual of lawlessness, while the courts concoct ever-new doctrines for shielding our political class from any legal scrutiny
Simultaneously, official Washington's propagandists manufacture new terms to justify this elite immunity. The American Right has long referred to efforts to compel compliance by American political leaders with the law and Constitution as "lawfare," which they define to mean thusly: "when enemies of the United States attempt to use U.S. courts and legal protections to take action against those entrusted with defending the United States from national-security threats." Of course, whether someone is an actual "enemy" (as opposed to a wrongly accused one) can only be determined using "law." Moreover, adopting this mindset by definition means vesting American leaders with the power to break the law. But those logical quandaries have never undermined this thinking. This mentality now extends far beyond the American Right (those Reasonable Conservatives and Sober Centrists -- Jack Goldsmith, Benjamin Wittes, and Robert Chesney -- have even christened their War-on-Terror-venerating blog with that term, while it is this same mindset underlying Obama's Look Forward, Not Backward decrees). In essence, the very idea that political leaders should be constrained by the Constitution and other law is derided as dangerous, leftist, divisive radicalism.
The contrast between how America's War on Terror victims and abuses have been treated in the American justice system versus much of the rest of the world is instructive indeed. In those other places, at least some vestiges of the rule of law prevails. In the U.S., the rule of men does.
February 19, 2011 "Salon" -- - In March, 2002, American citizen Jose Padilla was arrested in Chicago and publicly accused by then-Attorney-General John Ashcroft of being "The Dirty Bomber." Shortly thereafter, he was transferred to a military brig in South Carolina, where he was held for almost two years completely incommunicado (charged with no crime and denied all access to the outside world, including even a lawyer) and was brutally tortured, both physically and psychologically. All of this -- including the torture -- was carried out pursuant to orders from President Bush, Secretary Rumsfeld and other high-ranking officials. Just as the Supreme Court was about to hear Padilla's plea to be charged or released -- and thus finally decide if the President has the power to imprison American citizens on U.S. soil with no charges of any kind -- the Government indicted him in a federal court on charges far less serious than Ashcroft had touted years earlier, causing the Supreme Court to dismiss Padilla's arguments as "moot"; Padilla was then convicted and sentenced to 17 years in prison.
Padilla -- like so many other War on Terror detainees -- has spent years in American courts trying unsuccessfully to hold accountable the high-level government officials responsible for his abuse and lawless imprisonment (which occurred for years prior to his indictment). Not only has Padilla (and all other detainees) failed to obtain redress for what was done to them, but worse, they have been entirely denied even the right to have their cases heard in court. That's because the U.S. Government has invented -- and federal courts have dutifully accepted -- a whole slew of legal doctrines which have only one purpose: to insulate the country's most powerful political officials from legal accountability even when they commit the most egregious crimes, such as imprisoning incommunicado and torturing an American citizen arrested and detained on U.S. soil.
Yesterday, in South Carolina, an Obama-appointed federal judge dismissed a lawsuit brought by Padilla against former Bush officials Donald Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft, Paul Wolfowitz and others. That suit alleges that those officials knowingly violated Padilla's Constitutional rights by ordering his due-process-free detention and torture. In dismissing Padilla's lawsuit, the court's opinion relied on the same now-depressingly-familiar weapons routinely used by our political class to immunize itself from judicial scrutiny: national security would be undermined by allowing Padilla to sue; "government officials could be distracted from their vital duties to attend depositions or respond to other discovery requests"; "a trial on the merits would be an international spectacle with Padilla, a convicted terrorist, summoning America's present and former leaders to a federal courthouse to answer his charges"; the litigation would risk disclosure of vital state secrets; and "discovery procedures could be used by our enemies to obtain valuable intelligence."
In other words, our political officials are Too Important, and engaged in far Too Weighty Matters in Keeping Us Safe, to subject them to the annoyance of the rule of law. It's much more important to allow them to Fight The Terrorists without restraints than to bother them with claims that they broke the law and violated the rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. That's the mentality that has resulted in full-scale immunity for both political and now private-sector elites in a whole slew of lawbreaking scandals -- from Obama's refusal to investigate Bush-era crimes or high-level Wall Street criminality to retroactive immunity for lawbreaking telecoms and legal protection for defrauding mortgage banks. With very few exceptions -- yesterday's ruling, for instance, brushed aside a contrary decision from a Bush-43-appointed federal judge in California last year that refused to dismiss Padilla's lawsuit against John Yoo for having authorized his torture (that decision is on appeal) -- Executive Branch officials and the federal judiciary have conspired to ensure that the former are shielded from judicial scrutiny even for the most blatant and horrifying crimes.
There are legalistic questions involved in cases such as the one brought by Padilla -- i.e., whether courts should allow monetary damages to be sought against government officials for Constitutional violations in the absence of a Congressional statute (a "Bivens" claim) and whether such officials should enjoy "qualified immunity" for their illegal acts where the illegality is unclear (as Rumsfeld absurdly alleged the torture of Padilla was) -- but one key fact is not complex. Not a single War on Terror detainee has been accorded any redress in American courts for the severe abuses to which they were subjected (including innocent people being detained for years, rendered and even tortured), and worse, no detainee has been allowed by courts even to have their claims heard. After the U.S. Government implemented a worldwide regime of torture, lawless detention, and other abuses, the doors of the American justice system have been slammed shut in the face of any and all victims seeking to have their rights vindicated or even their claims heard. If an American citizen can't even sue political officials who lawlessly imprison and torture him in his own country -- if political leaders are vested with immunity from a claim of this type -- what rational person can argue that the rule of law or the Constitution binds our government officials?
In one sense, this is hardly surprising. As I've written about before -- and as my forthcoming (September) book documents -- we now have a multi-tiered justice system in the United States where citizens have their legal rights, obligations and punishments determined exclusively by their status and class. Thus, someone like Jose Padilla, in the lowest class of literal non-person (accused Terrorist), has virtually no chance regardless of the merits of his claims against someone like Donald Rumsfeld, who resides in the highest and most privileged class (high-level political official). As Padilla's counsel, Ben Wizner, said, the court yesterday ruled "that Donald Rumsfeld is above the law and Jose Padilla is beneath it." That's just what the American justice system is.
But compare the posture of the American justice system to those in other countries with regard to how victims of illegal War on Terror policies have been treated. Maher Arar -- a Canadian citizen who was abducted by the U.S. in 2002 at JFK Airport and sent to Syria to be tortured for ten months despite being innocent -- had his case dismissed by American courts before it was even heard on the ground (raised by both the Bush and Obama DOJ) that vital state secrets would be jeopardized by allowing him his day in court; by stark contrast, the Canadian government published a comprehensive public report detailing its own culpable role (and that of the U.S.) in his wrongful abduction, while the Canadian Prime Minister publicly apologized to Arar and announced that he would be paid $8.9 million in compensation for Canada's role in what happened to him.
Binyam Mohamed -- the British resident who was rendered to Morocco and then brutally tortured at Guantanamo -- suffered the same treatment in American courts as Arar thanks to the Obama DOJ's insistence that what was done to him was a "state secret": his case was dismissed at the initial stage; by contrast, British courts repeatedly ruled in favor of his right to be heard in court, and in November, 2010, it was announced that the British government would pay him, along with 15 other Guantanamo detainees, several million dollars in damages. In January, 2011, an Egyptian-born Australian citizen, Mamdouh Habib, reached a monetary settlement with the Australian government after winning the right to sue Australian officials in that nation's court system for their collusion in his torture at Guantanamo and other locations. Similarly, numerous countries in both Eastern and Western Europe and elsewhere have probed and publicly accounted for their governments' role in colluding with the U.S. in abusing human rights over the last decade.
The U.S. Government stands virtually alone in steadfastly blocking all such investigations even though it was the U.S. in the lead in creating this torture and detention system. Indeed, the American political class barely bothers any longer with even the pretense of legal accountability. Each political party shields the other from any accountability in a ritual of lawlessness, while the courts concoct ever-new doctrines for shielding our political class from any legal scrutiny
Simultaneously, official Washington's propagandists manufacture new terms to justify this elite immunity. The American Right has long referred to efforts to compel compliance by American political leaders with the law and Constitution as "lawfare," which they define to mean thusly: "when enemies of the United States attempt to use U.S. courts and legal protections to take action against those entrusted with defending the United States from national-security threats." Of course, whether someone is an actual "enemy" (as opposed to a wrongly accused one) can only be determined using "law." Moreover, adopting this mindset by definition means vesting American leaders with the power to break the law. But those logical quandaries have never undermined this thinking. This mentality now extends far beyond the American Right (those Reasonable Conservatives and Sober Centrists -- Jack Goldsmith, Benjamin Wittes, and Robert Chesney -- have even christened their War-on-Terror-venerating blog with that term, while it is this same mindset underlying Obama's Look Forward, Not Backward decrees). In essence, the very idea that political leaders should be constrained by the Constitution and other law is derided as dangerous, leftist, divisive radicalism.
The contrast between how America's War on Terror victims and abuses have been treated in the American justice system versus much of the rest of the world is instructive indeed. In those other places, at least some vestiges of the rule of law prevails. In the U.S., the rule of men does.
posted by Hanan Elbadry at 9:03 PM
0 comments
"kids for cash" scheme ranks among the biggest courtroom frauds in U.S. history
Pa. judge guilty of racketeering in kickback case
(AP) – 17 hours ago
SCRANTON, Pa. (AP) — A former juvenile court judge defiantly insisted he never accepted money for sending large numbers of children to detention centers even after he was convicted of racketeering for taking a $1 million kickback from the builder of the for-profit lockups.
Former Luzerne County Judge Mark Ciavarella was allowed to remain free pending sentencing following his conviction Friday in what prosecutors said was a "kids for cash" scheme that ranks among the biggest courtroom frauds in U.S. history.
Ciavarella, 61, left the bench in disgrace two years ago after he and a second judge, Michael Conahan, were accused of using juvenile delinquents as pawns in a plot to get rich. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has dismissed 4,000 juvenile convictions issued by Ciavarella, saying he sentenced young offenders without regard for their constitutional rights.
Ciavarella maintained the payments were legal and denied that he incarcerated youths for money.
"Never took a dime to send a kid anywhere. ... Never happened. Never, ever happened. This case was about extortions and kickbacks, not about 'kids for cash,'" said Ciavarella, who plans to appeal.
Federal prosecutors accused Ciavarella and Conahan of taking more than $2 million in bribes from the builder of the PA Child Care and Western PA Child Care detention centers and extorting hundreds of thousands of dollars from the facilities' co-owner.
A federal jury in Scranton convicted Ciavarella of 12 counts, including racketeering, money laundering and conspiracy, but acquitted him of 27 counts, including extortion. He is likely to get a prison sentence of more than 12 years, according to prosecutors — who revealed after the verdicts that a reputed mob boss turned informant helped them make their case.
Parents of juveniles who appeared before Ciavarella were outraged that he was released after the verdicts. Ciavarella often ordered youths he had found delinquent to be immediately shackled, handcuffed and taken away without giving them a chance to say goodbye to their families. Some of the children he ordered locked up were as young as 10.
Sandy Fonzo, whose son was jailed by Ciavarella — and committed suicide last year at age 23 — screamed obscenities at the judge and even poked him as he and his attorneys held a news conference on the courthouse steps.
"My kid's not here anymore!" yelled Fonzo. "He's dead! Because of him! He ruined my ... life! I'd like him to go to hell and rot there forever!"
Ciavarella glanced at Fonzo, then turned his back.
Fonzo's son, Edward Kenzakowski, was a 17-year-old all-star wrestler with no prior record when he landed in Ciavarella's courtroom for possession of drug paraphernalia. She said her son never recovered from the months he served at the detention centers and a wilderness camp.
Tears streaming down her face, Fonzo said she couldn't believe Ciavarella was allowed to walk out of the courthouse.
"There's no justice, there's not. He's never going to get what he deserves," she said. "I just wanted to see him handcuffed and taken out. But when I saw him just being released with that stupid smirk on his face ..."
The jury found Ciavarella guilty of taking a $997,600 kickback from Robert Mericle, the builder of the juvenile facilities — money he was ordered to forfeit to the federal government after the verdicts were announced. He was also convicted of failing to report the payments on his state-mandated financial disclosure forms and failing to pay taxes on the income. Jurors acquitted him of extorting Robert Powell, the facilities' developer and co-owner.
The defense declared victory. "We're amazed. The jury rejected 95 percent of the government's case," said attorney Al Flora.
"I find it interesting," U.S. Attorney Peter Smith said in response, "that a man just convicted of racketeering is claiming any sort of a victory out there today. I wonder what he would consider a defeat."
Prosecutors alleged that Conahan, who pleaded guilty to racketeering last year, and Ciavarella plotted to shut down the dilapidated county-run juvenile detention center in 2002 and arrange for the construction of the PA Child Care facility outside Wilkes-Barre.
Ciavarella, who presided over juvenile court, sent youths to the center and later to its sister facility in western Pennsylvania while he was taking payments from Mericle, a prominent builder and close friend of Ciavarella, and Powell, a high-powered attorney.
Luzerne County paid Powell's company more than $30 million between 2003 and 2007 to house juveniles at PA Child Care and Western PA Child Care. The county could have built its own juvenile center for about $9 million, according to testimony.
In dismissing thousands of Ciavarella's convictions, the state high court said he ran his courtroom with "complete disregard for the constitutional rights of the juveniles," including the right to legal counsel and the right to intelligently enter a plea.
Hundreds of youths and their families are suing Ciavarella and Conahan in federal court, but Smith said the judges' handling of juvenile cases did not figure into the federal prosecution for legal and evidentiary reasons.
"We're very sympathetic to the pain to the community that was caused here ... and we're fully aware of the deep anguish that many parents and many juveniles feel. But the federal criminal courts are not the appropriate venue to resolve that issue fully," he said.
Ciavarella, who took the stand in his own defense, acknowledged to jurors that he failed to report the payments on his tax returns and hid them from the public, but he denied any plot to take kickbacks or extort money.
Ciavarella told jurors that he thought he was legally entitled to Mericle's money, calling it a "finder's fee" for introducing Mericle to Powell.
Ciavarella also denied that he extorted Powell, who had testified for the prosecution that he was forced to pay the judges nearly $600,000 after they agreed to send juvenile delinquents to his new lockup. The payments were disguised as rent on a Florida condominium owned by the judges' wives.
It was Conahan who made the arrangements with Powell, Ciavarella insisted. He said Conahan told him that Powell had agreed to pay them $15,000 a month for 60 months to lease the waterfront Florida property. Prosecutors scoffed at that explanation, questioning why Powell would pay nearly $1 million in rent on a condo he could have purchased outright for less than $800,000.
Officials disclosed for the first time Friday that they were led to the judges by the reputed boss of a northeastern Pennsylvania Mafia family. William D'Elia — who regularly met for breakfast with Conahan — became a government informant after his 2006 arrest on charges of witness tampering and conspiracy to launder drug money.
"D'Elia led us to Judge Conahan," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Gordon Zubrod. "From there we began to focus on them, the financial dealings between Judge Conahan, Judge Ciavarella, Mericle, Powell."
D'Elia won a sentence reduction last year based on his cooperation in another criminal case and could be released as early as next year.
Ciavarella and Conahan initially pleaded guilty in February 2009 to honest services fraud and tax evasion in a deal that called for a sentence of more than seven years in prison. But their plea deals were rejected by Senior U.S. District Judge Edward M. Kosik, who ruled they had failed to accept responsibility for their actions.
A federal grand jury in Harrisburg subsequently indicted the judges on charges of racketeering, fraud, money laundering, bribery, extortion and tax offenses. Conahan pleaded guilty to a single racketeering charge last year and awaits sentencing. Mericle and Powell pleaded guilty to lesser offenses and testified against Ciavarella; both await sentencing.
Ciavarella faces a maximum of 157 years in prison at sentencing, but will more likely receive 12½ years to about 15½ years under federal sentencing guidelines, prosecutors said.
PA Child Care and Western PA Child Care remain open and continue to accept juveniles from many Pennsylvania counties, though Luzerne County no longer sends delinquents to them.
(AP) – 17 hours ago
SCRANTON, Pa. (AP) — A former juvenile court judge defiantly insisted he never accepted money for sending large numbers of children to detention centers even after he was convicted of racketeering for taking a $1 million kickback from the builder of the for-profit lockups.
Former Luzerne County Judge Mark Ciavarella was allowed to remain free pending sentencing following his conviction Friday in what prosecutors said was a "kids for cash" scheme that ranks among the biggest courtroom frauds in U.S. history.
Ciavarella, 61, left the bench in disgrace two years ago after he and a second judge, Michael Conahan, were accused of using juvenile delinquents as pawns in a plot to get rich. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has dismissed 4,000 juvenile convictions issued by Ciavarella, saying he sentenced young offenders without regard for their constitutional rights.
Ciavarella maintained the payments were legal and denied that he incarcerated youths for money.
"Never took a dime to send a kid anywhere. ... Never happened. Never, ever happened. This case was about extortions and kickbacks, not about 'kids for cash,'" said Ciavarella, who plans to appeal.
Federal prosecutors accused Ciavarella and Conahan of taking more than $2 million in bribes from the builder of the PA Child Care and Western PA Child Care detention centers and extorting hundreds of thousands of dollars from the facilities' co-owner.
A federal jury in Scranton convicted Ciavarella of 12 counts, including racketeering, money laundering and conspiracy, but acquitted him of 27 counts, including extortion. He is likely to get a prison sentence of more than 12 years, according to prosecutors — who revealed after the verdicts that a reputed mob boss turned informant helped them make their case.
Parents of juveniles who appeared before Ciavarella were outraged that he was released after the verdicts. Ciavarella often ordered youths he had found delinquent to be immediately shackled, handcuffed and taken away without giving them a chance to say goodbye to their families. Some of the children he ordered locked up were as young as 10.
Sandy Fonzo, whose son was jailed by Ciavarella — and committed suicide last year at age 23 — screamed obscenities at the judge and even poked him as he and his attorneys held a news conference on the courthouse steps.
"My kid's not here anymore!" yelled Fonzo. "He's dead! Because of him! He ruined my ... life! I'd like him to go to hell and rot there forever!"
Ciavarella glanced at Fonzo, then turned his back.
Fonzo's son, Edward Kenzakowski, was a 17-year-old all-star wrestler with no prior record when he landed in Ciavarella's courtroom for possession of drug paraphernalia. She said her son never recovered from the months he served at the detention centers and a wilderness camp.
Tears streaming down her face, Fonzo said she couldn't believe Ciavarella was allowed to walk out of the courthouse.
"There's no justice, there's not. He's never going to get what he deserves," she said. "I just wanted to see him handcuffed and taken out. But when I saw him just being released with that stupid smirk on his face ..."
The jury found Ciavarella guilty of taking a $997,600 kickback from Robert Mericle, the builder of the juvenile facilities — money he was ordered to forfeit to the federal government after the verdicts were announced. He was also convicted of failing to report the payments on his state-mandated financial disclosure forms and failing to pay taxes on the income. Jurors acquitted him of extorting Robert Powell, the facilities' developer and co-owner.
The defense declared victory. "We're amazed. The jury rejected 95 percent of the government's case," said attorney Al Flora.
"I find it interesting," U.S. Attorney Peter Smith said in response, "that a man just convicted of racketeering is claiming any sort of a victory out there today. I wonder what he would consider a defeat."
Prosecutors alleged that Conahan, who pleaded guilty to racketeering last year, and Ciavarella plotted to shut down the dilapidated county-run juvenile detention center in 2002 and arrange for the construction of the PA Child Care facility outside Wilkes-Barre.
Ciavarella, who presided over juvenile court, sent youths to the center and later to its sister facility in western Pennsylvania while he was taking payments from Mericle, a prominent builder and close friend of Ciavarella, and Powell, a high-powered attorney.
Luzerne County paid Powell's company more than $30 million between 2003 and 2007 to house juveniles at PA Child Care and Western PA Child Care. The county could have built its own juvenile center for about $9 million, according to testimony.
In dismissing thousands of Ciavarella's convictions, the state high court said he ran his courtroom with "complete disregard for the constitutional rights of the juveniles," including the right to legal counsel and the right to intelligently enter a plea.
Hundreds of youths and their families are suing Ciavarella and Conahan in federal court, but Smith said the judges' handling of juvenile cases did not figure into the federal prosecution for legal and evidentiary reasons.
"We're very sympathetic to the pain to the community that was caused here ... and we're fully aware of the deep anguish that many parents and many juveniles feel. But the federal criminal courts are not the appropriate venue to resolve that issue fully," he said.
Ciavarella, who took the stand in his own defense, acknowledged to jurors that he failed to report the payments on his tax returns and hid them from the public, but he denied any plot to take kickbacks or extort money.
Ciavarella told jurors that he thought he was legally entitled to Mericle's money, calling it a "finder's fee" for introducing Mericle to Powell.
Ciavarella also denied that he extorted Powell, who had testified for the prosecution that he was forced to pay the judges nearly $600,000 after they agreed to send juvenile delinquents to his new lockup. The payments were disguised as rent on a Florida condominium owned by the judges' wives.
It was Conahan who made the arrangements with Powell, Ciavarella insisted. He said Conahan told him that Powell had agreed to pay them $15,000 a month for 60 months to lease the waterfront Florida property. Prosecutors scoffed at that explanation, questioning why Powell would pay nearly $1 million in rent on a condo he could have purchased outright for less than $800,000.
Officials disclosed for the first time Friday that they were led to the judges by the reputed boss of a northeastern Pennsylvania Mafia family. William D'Elia — who regularly met for breakfast with Conahan — became a government informant after his 2006 arrest on charges of witness tampering and conspiracy to launder drug money.
"D'Elia led us to Judge Conahan," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Gordon Zubrod. "From there we began to focus on them, the financial dealings between Judge Conahan, Judge Ciavarella, Mericle, Powell."
D'Elia won a sentence reduction last year based on his cooperation in another criminal case and could be released as early as next year.
Ciavarella and Conahan initially pleaded guilty in February 2009 to honest services fraud and tax evasion in a deal that called for a sentence of more than seven years in prison. But their plea deals were rejected by Senior U.S. District Judge Edward M. Kosik, who ruled they had failed to accept responsibility for their actions.
A federal grand jury in Harrisburg subsequently indicted the judges on charges of racketeering, fraud, money laundering, bribery, extortion and tax offenses. Conahan pleaded guilty to a single racketeering charge last year and awaits sentencing. Mericle and Powell pleaded guilty to lesser offenses and testified against Ciavarella; both await sentencing.
Ciavarella faces a maximum of 157 years in prison at sentencing, but will more likely receive 12½ years to about 15½ years under federal sentencing guidelines, prosecutors said.
PA Child Care and Western PA Child Care remain open and continue to accept juveniles from many Pennsylvania counties, though Luzerne County no longer sends delinquents to them.
posted by Hanan Elbadry at 8:07 PM
0 comments
84 Dead In Libya Protests In 3 Days: Human Rights Watch
First Posted: 02/18/11 10:31 PM Updated: 02/18/11 11:09 PM
huffingtonpost.com
Disturbing new details are coming out of the Libya protests. Government security forces have killed at least 84 people in three days, Human Rights Watch said in a news release Friday night.
Even though people were protesting peacefully, according to HRW, security forces killed 20 people in Benghazi, 23 in Baida, three in Ajdabiya, and three in Derna in a matter of days. In addition, 35 people were killed in Benghazi on Friday, nearly all with live ammunition.
HRW said that telephone interviews with hospital staffers and witnesses led to the estimates. It added in a statement: "The Libyan authorities should immediately end attacks on peaceful protesters and protect them from assault by pro-government armed groups."
The regime of Muammar Gaddafi is said to be behind the massacres, according to The Guardian, which reported that it also imposed a news blackout, similar to Iran's crackdown on journalists in 2009.
The last few days have represented an unprecedented challenge to the 41-year rule of Gaddafi, the New York Times reported, in part inspired by the Egypt revolution.
Libya is a relatively small nation in North Africa of approximately 6 million people.
huffingtonpost.com
Disturbing new details are coming out of the Libya protests. Government security forces have killed at least 84 people in three days, Human Rights Watch said in a news release Friday night.
Even though people were protesting peacefully, according to HRW, security forces killed 20 people in Benghazi, 23 in Baida, three in Ajdabiya, and three in Derna in a matter of days. In addition, 35 people were killed in Benghazi on Friday, nearly all with live ammunition.
HRW said that telephone interviews with hospital staffers and witnesses led to the estimates. It added in a statement: "The Libyan authorities should immediately end attacks on peaceful protesters and protect them from assault by pro-government armed groups."
The regime of Muammar Gaddafi is said to be behind the massacres, according to The Guardian, which reported that it also imposed a news blackout, similar to Iran's crackdown on journalists in 2009.
The last few days have represented an unprecedented challenge to the 41-year rule of Gaddafi, the New York Times reported, in part inspired by the Egypt revolution.
Libya is a relatively small nation in North Africa of approximately 6 million people.
posted by Hanan Elbadry at 7:13 PM
0 comments
Army wants rapid-fire rubber bullets for crowd control
17 February 2011 by David Hambling
New Scientist
THE US army is planning to field "rubber bullets" for machine guns. Military officials claim the ammunition will allow them to more effectively quell violent protests without loss of life, but human rights campaigners are alarmed by the new weapon.
The final design for the XM1044 round has not been selected, according to an order placed on the Federal Business Opportunities website last month, but the army's Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate has been working on a ring aerofoil projectile for some years. The round is a hollow plastic cylinder 40 millimetres across, looking something like a short toilet-paper roll. In flight its shape generates lift, giving it a longer range.
The army's existing crowd-control rounds are single shots fired from handheld grenade launchers with a range of about 50 metres - the XM1044 would double this range. It would be supplied in belts for the Mk19 grenade launcher, a truck-mounted weapon that can fire almost six rounds per second. The Mk19 has been exported to some 30 countries, including Egypt.
"The US army has a requirement for a rapid-fire non-lethal capability," says Ken Schulters, project manager for close combat systems at Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey. "All currently fielded non-lethal ammunition is single shot."
Firing rapidly at long range is likely to be dangerously inaccurate, says Angela Wright of Amnesty International. "Such a weapon system would allow for a burst of non-accurate fire at a crowd, with high risk of hitting bystanders, ricochets and of hitting vulnerable areas of the body," she says.
Despite being hollow and plastic, if a round were to strike someone in the head, it could severely injure or kill them, she adds.
New Scientist
THE US army is planning to field "rubber bullets" for machine guns. Military officials claim the ammunition will allow them to more effectively quell violent protests without loss of life, but human rights campaigners are alarmed by the new weapon.
The final design for the XM1044 round has not been selected, according to an order placed on the Federal Business Opportunities website last month, but the army's Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate has been working on a ring aerofoil projectile for some years. The round is a hollow plastic cylinder 40 millimetres across, looking something like a short toilet-paper roll. In flight its shape generates lift, giving it a longer range.
The army's existing crowd-control rounds are single shots fired from handheld grenade launchers with a range of about 50 metres - the XM1044 would double this range. It would be supplied in belts for the Mk19 grenade launcher, a truck-mounted weapon that can fire almost six rounds per second. The Mk19 has been exported to some 30 countries, including Egypt.
"The US army has a requirement for a rapid-fire non-lethal capability," says Ken Schulters, project manager for close combat systems at Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey. "All currently fielded non-lethal ammunition is single shot."
Firing rapidly at long range is likely to be dangerously inaccurate, says Angela Wright of Amnesty International. "Such a weapon system would allow for a burst of non-accurate fire at a crowd, with high risk of hitting bystanders, ricochets and of hitting vulnerable areas of the body," she says.
Despite being hollow and plastic, if a round were to strike someone in the head, it could severely injure or kill them, she adds.
posted by Hanan Elbadry at 7:09 PM
0 comments
Did Jews commit genocide in 1948?
The question is provocative, and the answer for most people is an unequivocal no. But a debate over this idea has formed the crux of a heated argument among the most eminent genocide scholars in the world, and led recently to the censure of an Israeli professor by the field’s leading academic association.
It’s also one more reminder of the growing divide between European scholars and their American and Israeli counterparts when it comes to how they view Israel, both historically and in the present moment.
Webmaster's Commentary:
1. "There is a huge gap between us (Jews) and our enemies �not just in ability but in morality, culture, sanctity of life, and conscience. They are our neighbors here, but it seems as if at a distance of a few hundred meters away, there are people who do not belong to our continent, to our world, but actually belong to a different galaxy." Israeli president Moshe Katsav. The Jerusalem Post, May 10, 2001
2. "The Palestinians are like crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more".... Ehud Barak, Prime Minister of Israel at the time - August 28, 2000. Reported in the Jerusalem Post August 30, 2000
3. " [The Palestinians are] beasts walking on two legs." Menahim Begin, speech to the Knesset, quoted in Amnon Kapeliouk, "Begin and the Beasts". New Statesman, 25 June 1982.
4. "The Palestinians" would be crushed like grasshoppers ... heads smashed against the boulders and walls." " Isreali Prime Minister (at the time) in a speech to Jewish settlers New York Times April 1, 1988
5. "When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle." Raphael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence Forces, New York Times, 14 April 1983.
6. "How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to." Golda Maier, March 8, 1969.
7. "There was no such thing as Palestinians, they never existed." Golda Maier Israeli Prime Minister June 15, 1969
8. "The thesis that the danger of genocide was hanging over us in June 1967 and that Israel was fighting for its physical existence is only bluff, which was born and developed after the war." Israeli General Matityahu Peled, Ha'aretz, 19 March 1972.
9. David Ben Gurion (the first Israeli Prime Minister): "If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti - Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault ? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?" Quoted by Nahum Goldmann in Le Paraddoxe Juif (The Jewish Paradox), pp121.
10. Ben Gurion also warned in 1948 : "We must do everything to insure they ( the Palestinians) never do return." Assuring his fellow Zionists that Palestinians will never come back to their homes. "The old will die and the young will forget."
11. "We have to kill all the Palestinians unless they are resigned to live here as slaves." Chairman Heilbrun of the Committee for the Re-election of General Shlomo Lahat, the mayor of Tel Aviv, October 1983.
12. "Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and will do that . . . I want to tell you something very clear: Don't worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it." - Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, October 3, 2001, to Shimon Peres, as reported on Kol Yisrael radio. (Certainly the FBI's cover-up of the Israeli spy ring/phone tap scandal suggests that Mr. Sharon may not have been joking.)
13. "We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel... Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours." Rafael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces - Gad Becker, Yediot Ahronot 13 April 1983, New York Times 14 April 1983.
14. "We must do everything to ensure they [the Palestinian refugees] never do return" David Ben-Gurion, in his diary, 18 July 1948, quoted in Michael Bar Zohar's Ben-Gurion: the Armed Prophet, Prentice-Hall, 1967, p. 157.
15. " ... we should prepare to go over to the offensive with the aim of smashing Lebanon, Trans-jordan and Syria... The weak point in the Arab coalition is Lebanon [for] the Moslem regime is artificial and easy to undermine. A Christian state should be established... When we smash the [Arab] Legions strength and bomb Amman, we will eliminate Transjordan, too, and then Syria will fall. If Egypt still dares to fight on, we shall bomb Port Said, Alexandria, and Cairo." " David Ben-Gurion, May 1948, to the General Staff. From Ben-Gurion, A Biography, by Michael Ben-Zohar, Delacorte, New York 1978.
16. "We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population." Israel Koenig, "The Koenig Memorandum"
17. "Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population." Moshe Dayan, address to the Technion, Haifa, reported in Haaretz, April 4, 1969.
18. "We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, What is to be done with the Palestinian population?' Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said 'Drive them out!'" Yitzhak Rabin, leaked censored version of Rabin memoirs, published in the New York Times, 23 October 1979.
19. Rabin's description of the conquest of Lydda, after the completion of Plan Dalet. "We shall reduce the Arab population to a community of woodcutters and waiters" Uri Lubrani, PM Ben-Gurion's special adviser on Arab Affairs, 1960. From "The Arabs in Israel" by Sabri Jiryas.
20. "There are some who believe that the non-Jewish population, even in a high percentage, within our borders will be more effectively under our surveillance; and there are some who believe the contrary, i.e., that it is easier to carry out surveillance over the activities of a neighbor than over those of a tenant. [I] tend to support the latter view and have an additional argument:...the need to sustain the character of the state which will henceforth be Jewish...with a non-Jewish minority limited to 15 percent. I had already reached this fundamental position as early as 1940 [and] it is entered in my diary." Joseph Weitz, head of the Jewish Agency's Colonization Department. From Israel: an Apartheid State by Uri Davis, p.5.
21. "Everybody has to move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements because everything we take now will stay ours... Everything we don't grab will go to them." Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of militants from the extreme right-wing Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, November 15, 1998.
22. "It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism,colonialization or Jewish State without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands." Yoram Bar Porath, Yediot Aahronot, of 14 July 1972.
23. "Spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment... Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly." Theodore Herzl, founder of the World Zionist Organization, speaking of the Arabs of Palestine,Complete Diaries, June 12, 1895 entry.
24. "One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail." -- Rabbi Yaacov Perrin, Feb. 27, 1994 [Source: N.Y. Times, Feb. 28, 1994, p. 1]
25. "We Jews, we are the destroyers and will remain the destroyers. Nothing you can do will meet our demands and needs. We will forever destroy because we want a world of our own." (You Gentiles, by Jewish Author Maurice Samuels, p. 155).
26. "We will have a world government whether you like it or not. The only question is whether that government will be achieved by conquest or consent." (Jewish Banker Paul Warburg, February 17, 1950, as he testified before the U.S. Senate).
27. "We will establish ourselves in Palestine whether you like it or not...You can hasten our arrival or you can equally retard it. It is however better for you to help us so as to avoid our constructive powers being turned into a destructive power which will overthrow the world." (Chaim Weizmann, Published in "Judische Rundschau," No. 4, 1920)
28. "Our race is the Master Race. We are divine gods on this planet. We are as different from the inferior races as they are from insects. In fact, compared to our race, other races are beasts and animals, cattle at best. Other races are considered as human excrement. Our destiny is to rule over the inferior races. Our earthly kingdom will be ruled by our leader with a rod of iron. The masses will lick our feet and serve us as our slaves." - Israeli prime Minister Menachem Begin in a speech to the Knesset [Israeli Parliament] quoted by Amnon Kapeliouk, "Begin and the Beasts," New Statesman, June 25, 1982
29. "Tell me, do the evil men of this world have a bad time? They hunt and catch whatever they feel like eating. They don't suffer from indigestion and are not punished by Heaven. I want Israel to join that club. Maybe the world will then at last begin to fear us instead of feeling sorry. Maybe they will start to tremble, to fear our madness instead of admiring our nobility. Let them tremble; let them call us a mad state. Let them understand that we are a savage country, dangerous to our surroundings, not normal, that we might go wild, that we might start World War Three just like that, or that we might one day go crazy and burn all the oil fields in the Middle East. Even if you'll prove to me that the present war is a dirty immoral war, I don't care. We shall start another war, kill and destroy more and more. And do you know why it is all worth it? Because it seems that this war has made us more unpopular among the civilized world.We'll hear no more of that nonsense about the unique Jewish morality. No more talk about a unique people being a light upon the nations. No more uniqueness and no more sweetness and light. Good riddance." --Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon
30. "The Modern Age is the Jewish Age, and the twentieth century, in particular, is the Jewish Century." -Yuri Slezkine, Professor of History at University of California, Berkeley, "The Jewish Century"; Princeton University Press
31. "What shocks and worries me is the narrow-mindedness and the shortsightedness of our military leaders. They seem to presume that the State of Israel may or even must-behave in the realm of international relations according to the laws of the jungle- -the long chain of false incidents and hostilities we have invented, and so many clashes we have provoked;" - From Diary of Moshe Sharett, former Primer Minister of Israel in Livia Rokach, Israel's Sacred Terrorism published 980
It’s also one more reminder of the growing divide between European scholars and their American and Israeli counterparts when it comes to how they view Israel, both historically and in the present moment.
Webmaster's Commentary:
1. "There is a huge gap between us (Jews) and our enemies �not just in ability but in morality, culture, sanctity of life, and conscience. They are our neighbors here, but it seems as if at a distance of a few hundred meters away, there are people who do not belong to our continent, to our world, but actually belong to a different galaxy." Israeli president Moshe Katsav. The Jerusalem Post, May 10, 2001
2. "The Palestinians are like crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more".... Ehud Barak, Prime Minister of Israel at the time - August 28, 2000. Reported in the Jerusalem Post August 30, 2000
3. " [The Palestinians are] beasts walking on two legs." Menahim Begin, speech to the Knesset, quoted in Amnon Kapeliouk, "Begin and the Beasts". New Statesman, 25 June 1982.
4. "The Palestinians" would be crushed like grasshoppers ... heads smashed against the boulders and walls." " Isreali Prime Minister (at the time) in a speech to Jewish settlers New York Times April 1, 1988
5. "When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle." Raphael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence Forces, New York Times, 14 April 1983.
6. "How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to." Golda Maier, March 8, 1969.
7. "There was no such thing as Palestinians, they never existed." Golda Maier Israeli Prime Minister June 15, 1969
8. "The thesis that the danger of genocide was hanging over us in June 1967 and that Israel was fighting for its physical existence is only bluff, which was born and developed after the war." Israeli General Matityahu Peled, Ha'aretz, 19 March 1972.
9. David Ben Gurion (the first Israeli Prime Minister): "If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti - Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault ? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?" Quoted by Nahum Goldmann in Le Paraddoxe Juif (The Jewish Paradox), pp121.
10. Ben Gurion also warned in 1948 : "We must do everything to insure they ( the Palestinians) never do return." Assuring his fellow Zionists that Palestinians will never come back to their homes. "The old will die and the young will forget."
11. "We have to kill all the Palestinians unless they are resigned to live here as slaves." Chairman Heilbrun of the Committee for the Re-election of General Shlomo Lahat, the mayor of Tel Aviv, October 1983.
12. "Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and will do that . . . I want to tell you something very clear: Don't worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it." - Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, October 3, 2001, to Shimon Peres, as reported on Kol Yisrael radio. (Certainly the FBI's cover-up of the Israeli spy ring/phone tap scandal suggests that Mr. Sharon may not have been joking.)
13. "We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel... Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours." Rafael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces - Gad Becker, Yediot Ahronot 13 April 1983, New York Times 14 April 1983.
14. "We must do everything to ensure they [the Palestinian refugees] never do return" David Ben-Gurion, in his diary, 18 July 1948, quoted in Michael Bar Zohar's Ben-Gurion: the Armed Prophet, Prentice-Hall, 1967, p. 157.
15. " ... we should prepare to go over to the offensive with the aim of smashing Lebanon, Trans-jordan and Syria... The weak point in the Arab coalition is Lebanon [for] the Moslem regime is artificial and easy to undermine. A Christian state should be established... When we smash the [Arab] Legions strength and bomb Amman, we will eliminate Transjordan, too, and then Syria will fall. If Egypt still dares to fight on, we shall bomb Port Said, Alexandria, and Cairo." " David Ben-Gurion, May 1948, to the General Staff. From Ben-Gurion, A Biography, by Michael Ben-Zohar, Delacorte, New York 1978.
16. "We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population." Israel Koenig, "The Koenig Memorandum"
17. "Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population." Moshe Dayan, address to the Technion, Haifa, reported in Haaretz, April 4, 1969.
18. "We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, What is to be done with the Palestinian population?' Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said 'Drive them out!'" Yitzhak Rabin, leaked censored version of Rabin memoirs, published in the New York Times, 23 October 1979.
19. Rabin's description of the conquest of Lydda, after the completion of Plan Dalet. "We shall reduce the Arab population to a community of woodcutters and waiters" Uri Lubrani, PM Ben-Gurion's special adviser on Arab Affairs, 1960. From "The Arabs in Israel" by Sabri Jiryas.
20. "There are some who believe that the non-Jewish population, even in a high percentage, within our borders will be more effectively under our surveillance; and there are some who believe the contrary, i.e., that it is easier to carry out surveillance over the activities of a neighbor than over those of a tenant. [I] tend to support the latter view and have an additional argument:...the need to sustain the character of the state which will henceforth be Jewish...with a non-Jewish minority limited to 15 percent. I had already reached this fundamental position as early as 1940 [and] it is entered in my diary." Joseph Weitz, head of the Jewish Agency's Colonization Department. From Israel: an Apartheid State by Uri Davis, p.5.
21. "Everybody has to move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements because everything we take now will stay ours... Everything we don't grab will go to them." Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of militants from the extreme right-wing Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, November 15, 1998.
22. "It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism,colonialization or Jewish State without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands." Yoram Bar Porath, Yediot Aahronot, of 14 July 1972.
23. "Spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment... Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly." Theodore Herzl, founder of the World Zionist Organization, speaking of the Arabs of Palestine,Complete Diaries, June 12, 1895 entry.
24. "One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail." -- Rabbi Yaacov Perrin, Feb. 27, 1994 [Source: N.Y. Times, Feb. 28, 1994, p. 1]
25. "We Jews, we are the destroyers and will remain the destroyers. Nothing you can do will meet our demands and needs. We will forever destroy because we want a world of our own." (You Gentiles, by Jewish Author Maurice Samuels, p. 155).
26. "We will have a world government whether you like it or not. The only question is whether that government will be achieved by conquest or consent." (Jewish Banker Paul Warburg, February 17, 1950, as he testified before the U.S. Senate).
27. "We will establish ourselves in Palestine whether you like it or not...You can hasten our arrival or you can equally retard it. It is however better for you to help us so as to avoid our constructive powers being turned into a destructive power which will overthrow the world." (Chaim Weizmann, Published in "Judische Rundschau," No. 4, 1920)
28. "Our race is the Master Race. We are divine gods on this planet. We are as different from the inferior races as they are from insects. In fact, compared to our race, other races are beasts and animals, cattle at best. Other races are considered as human excrement. Our destiny is to rule over the inferior races. Our earthly kingdom will be ruled by our leader with a rod of iron. The masses will lick our feet and serve us as our slaves." - Israeli prime Minister Menachem Begin in a speech to the Knesset [Israeli Parliament] quoted by Amnon Kapeliouk, "Begin and the Beasts," New Statesman, June 25, 1982
29. "Tell me, do the evil men of this world have a bad time? They hunt and catch whatever they feel like eating. They don't suffer from indigestion and are not punished by Heaven. I want Israel to join that club. Maybe the world will then at last begin to fear us instead of feeling sorry. Maybe they will start to tremble, to fear our madness instead of admiring our nobility. Let them tremble; let them call us a mad state. Let them understand that we are a savage country, dangerous to our surroundings, not normal, that we might go wild, that we might start World War Three just like that, or that we might one day go crazy and burn all the oil fields in the Middle East. Even if you'll prove to me that the present war is a dirty immoral war, I don't care. We shall start another war, kill and destroy more and more. And do you know why it is all worth it? Because it seems that this war has made us more unpopular among the civilized world.We'll hear no more of that nonsense about the unique Jewish morality. No more talk about a unique people being a light upon the nations. No more uniqueness and no more sweetness and light. Good riddance." --Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon
30. "The Modern Age is the Jewish Age, and the twentieth century, in particular, is the Jewish Century." -Yuri Slezkine, Professor of History at University of California, Berkeley, "The Jewish Century"; Princeton University Press
31. "What shocks and worries me is the narrow-mindedness and the shortsightedness of our military leaders. They seem to presume that the State of Israel may or even must-behave in the realm of international relations according to the laws of the jungle- -the long chain of false incidents and hostilities we have invented, and so many clashes we have provoked;" - From Diary of Moshe Sharett, former Primer Minister of Israel in Livia Rokach, Israel's Sacred Terrorism published 980
posted by Hanan Elbadry at 6:52 PM
0 comments
US delays visa for BDS leader Barghouti on eve of tour
February 19, 2011 at 07:56
Barghouti tour sponsors are calling on supporters to contact the US Consulate in Jerusalem and the Department of State to ask them to fulfill the promise from the Obama Administration of “promoting the global marketplace of ideas” and grant Barghouti’s visa immediately.
Action Alert:
Sponsors of a US speaking tour featuring boycott, divestment and sanctions movement leader Omar Barghouti call on supporters to contact the US Consulate in Jerusalem and the Department of State to fulfill US promise of “Promoting the Global Marketplace of Ideas” and grant Barghouti’s visa:
Effectively canceling a planned speaking tour, the US consulate in Jerusalem has inexplicably delayed the granting of a visa for
Omar Barghouti, founding member of the Palestinian Civil Society Boycott, Divestment, Sanction (BDS) campaign, due to tour the United States this April for the release of his new book, Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights.
Nobel Peace Laureate, Archbishop Desmond Tutu called the book “lucid and morally compelling … perfectly timed to make a major contribution to this urgently needed global campaign for justice, freedom and peace.
Former President of the UN General Assembly, Father Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann called it “timely and responsibly written by a man who understands that creative nonviolence is the only way out of the dire situation in Palestine.”
In recent years, numerous foreign scholars and experts have been subject to visa delays and denials that have prohibited them from speaking and teaching in the US — a process the American Civil Liberties Union describes as “ideological Exclusion,” which they say violates Americans’ First Amendment right to hear constitutionally protected speech by denying foreign scholars, artists, politicians and others entry to the United States (“
Obama Administration Will Take Steps To Facilitate The Free Exchange Of Ideas Across Borders, State Department Says,” 13 January 2011).
Foreign nationals who have recently been denied visas include Fulbright scholar Marixa Lasso; Iraqi doctor Riyadh Lafta, who disputed the official Iraqi civilian death numbers in the respected British medical journal The Lancet; respected South African scholar and vocal Iraq War critic Dr. Adam Habib, and Oxford’s Tariq Ramadan, who have both recently received visas to speak in the United States after many years of delays and denials.
For the release of Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions, Barghouti has standing invitations for events in New York City, at Harvard, Yale, Brown, Brandeis University, and in Washington DC, and Philadelphia. Barghouti studied, lived and worked in the United States for 11 years before permanently relocating to Jerusalem. He attended Columbia University, receiving both Bachelors and Masters degrees from the school. His US-born child, whom he needs a visa to visit, currently attends college in Indiana. Between 2005-2010, Barghouti visited the US extensively without incident, on a five-year visa, which only recently expired.
Barghouti’s publisher, Anthony Arnove of Haymarket Books, stated that “It’s essential authors be able to travel to promote their books and ideas, and as publishers we believe the free exchange of ideas is vital to a democratic culture. We find it frustrating that Omar’s visa is being delayed and potentially denied for political reasons.”
Barghouti tour sponsors are calling on supporters to contact the US Consulate in Jerusalem and the Department of State to ask them to fulfill the
promise from the Obama Administration of “promoting the global marketplace of ideas” and grant Barghouti’s visa immediately.
US Consulate:
Consul General Daniel Rubinstein
US Consulate General, Jerusalem
18 Agron Road, Jerusalem 94190
Tel.: +972 2 622 7230, Fax: +972 2 625 9270
Email:
jerusalemvisa@state.gov and UsConGenJerusalem@state.gov
Department of State:
Visa Services
Public Inquiries Division
202-663-1225
usvisa@state.gov
On Facebook: Join the group “Let Omar Barghouti Be Heard” and invite your friends.
The above is from a Press Release issued by Haymarket Books
Barghouti tour sponsors are calling on supporters to contact the US Consulate in Jerusalem and the Department of State to ask them to fulfill the promise from the Obama Administration of “promoting the global marketplace of ideas” and grant Barghouti’s visa immediately.
Action Alert:
Sponsors of a US speaking tour featuring boycott, divestment and sanctions movement leader Omar Barghouti call on supporters to contact the US Consulate in Jerusalem and the Department of State to fulfill US promise of “Promoting the Global Marketplace of Ideas” and grant Barghouti’s visa:
Effectively canceling a planned speaking tour, the US consulate in Jerusalem has inexplicably delayed the granting of a visa for
Omar Barghouti, founding member of the Palestinian Civil Society Boycott, Divestment, Sanction (BDS) campaign, due to tour the United States this April for the release of his new book, Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights.
Nobel Peace Laureate, Archbishop Desmond Tutu called the book “lucid and morally compelling … perfectly timed to make a major contribution to this urgently needed global campaign for justice, freedom and peace.
Former President of the UN General Assembly, Father Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann called it “timely and responsibly written by a man who understands that creative nonviolence is the only way out of the dire situation in Palestine.”
In recent years, numerous foreign scholars and experts have been subject to visa delays and denials that have prohibited them from speaking and teaching in the US — a process the American Civil Liberties Union describes as “ideological Exclusion,” which they say violates Americans’ First Amendment right to hear constitutionally protected speech by denying foreign scholars, artists, politicians and others entry to the United States (“
Obama Administration Will Take Steps To Facilitate The Free Exchange Of Ideas Across Borders, State Department Says,” 13 January 2011).
Foreign nationals who have recently been denied visas include Fulbright scholar Marixa Lasso; Iraqi doctor Riyadh Lafta, who disputed the official Iraqi civilian death numbers in the respected British medical journal The Lancet; respected South African scholar and vocal Iraq War critic Dr. Adam Habib, and Oxford’s Tariq Ramadan, who have both recently received visas to speak in the United States after many years of delays and denials.
For the release of Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions, Barghouti has standing invitations for events in New York City, at Harvard, Yale, Brown, Brandeis University, and in Washington DC, and Philadelphia. Barghouti studied, lived and worked in the United States for 11 years before permanently relocating to Jerusalem. He attended Columbia University, receiving both Bachelors and Masters degrees from the school. His US-born child, whom he needs a visa to visit, currently attends college in Indiana. Between 2005-2010, Barghouti visited the US extensively without incident, on a five-year visa, which only recently expired.
Barghouti’s publisher, Anthony Arnove of Haymarket Books, stated that “It’s essential authors be able to travel to promote their books and ideas, and as publishers we believe the free exchange of ideas is vital to a democratic culture. We find it frustrating that Omar’s visa is being delayed and potentially denied for political reasons.”
Barghouti tour sponsors are calling on supporters to contact the US Consulate in Jerusalem and the Department of State to ask them to fulfill the
promise from the Obama Administration of “promoting the global marketplace of ideas” and grant Barghouti’s visa immediately.
US Consulate:
Consul General Daniel Rubinstein
US Consulate General, Jerusalem
18 Agron Road, Jerusalem 94190
Tel.: +972 2 622 7230, Fax: +972 2 625 9270
Email:
jerusalemvisa@state.gov and UsConGenJerusalem@state.gov
Department of State:
Visa Services
Public Inquiries Division
202-663-1225
usvisa@state.gov
On Facebook: Join the group “Let Omar Barghouti Be Heard” and invite your friends.
The above is from a Press Release issued by Haymarket Books
posted by Hanan Elbadry at 6:47 PM
0 comments
U.S. slower than Swiss on Mubarak funds
Published: Feb. 19, 2011 at 6:34 AM
BERN, Switzerland, Feb. 19 (UPI) -- Egyptian rights activists say the United States and European Union should have moved more quickly to freeze former President Hosni Mubarak's assets.
Switzerland took action as soon as Mubarak stepped down last week, invoking a recent law aimed at preventing Swiss banks from becoming a holding place for stolen cash. Banks were ordered to find accounts held by Mubarak, his family and close associates and freeze them.
Adrian Sollberger, a spokesman for the Swiss Foreign Ministry, reported Friday that accounts holding "several dozen millions of Swiss francs" had been identified and blocked, The New York Times reported.
The U.S. Treasury Department only acted Thursday, advising banks to identify any accounts belonging to Mubarak and his family and to freeze the funds. European foreign ministers are scheduled to discuss the issue at a meeting Sunday and Monday.
Omnia Hussein of Transparency International said the delay gives officials time to move money to offshore banks.
"It will give a chance to these officials involved in the corruption to hide their money even further," Hussein said. "Action should be taken immediately."
BERN, Switzerland, Feb. 19 (UPI) -- Egyptian rights activists say the United States and European Union should have moved more quickly to freeze former President Hosni Mubarak's assets.
Switzerland took action as soon as Mubarak stepped down last week, invoking a recent law aimed at preventing Swiss banks from becoming a holding place for stolen cash. Banks were ordered to find accounts held by Mubarak, his family and close associates and freeze them.
Adrian Sollberger, a spokesman for the Swiss Foreign Ministry, reported Friday that accounts holding "several dozen millions of Swiss francs" had been identified and blocked, The New York Times reported.
The U.S. Treasury Department only acted Thursday, advising banks to identify any accounts belonging to Mubarak and his family and to freeze the funds. European foreign ministers are scheduled to discuss the issue at a meeting Sunday and Monday.
Omnia Hussein of Transparency International said the delay gives officials time to move money to offshore banks.
"It will give a chance to these officials involved in the corruption to hide their money even further," Hussein said. "Action should be taken immediately."
posted by Hanan Elbadry at 6:40 PM
0 comments
How Goldman Killed A.I.G.
February 16, 2011, 9:00 pm
By WILLIAM D. COHAN
The New York Times
William D. Cohan on Wall Street and Main Street.
Tags:
A.I.G., Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, goldman sachs, Wall Street
The conventional wisdom has it that the final report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission was a low-budget flop, hopelessly riven by internal political disputes and dissension among the commission’s 10 members. As usual, the conventional wisdom is completely wrong. Actually, the report — and the online archive of testimony, interviews and documents that are now available — is a treasure trove of invaluable information about the causes and consequences of the Great Recession.
For instance, on the exceptionally important but little understood role played by the increasingly lower prices Goldman Sachs placed on the complex mortgage securities on its balance sheet — which helped determine the fate of many of its shakier Wall Street brethren — the commission report, on page 237, is crystalline:
As the crisis unfolded Goldman marked mortgage-related securities at prices that were significantly lower than those of other companies. Goldman knew that those lower marks might hurt those other companies — including some clients — because they could require marking down those assets and similar assets. In addition, Goldman’s marks would get picked up by competitors in dealer surveys. As a result, Goldman’s marks could contribute to other companies recording “mark-to-market” losses: that is, the reported value of their assets could fall and their earnings would decline.
The first victims of Goldman’s decision in May 2007 to begin communicating its lower marks to the rest of the marketplace were the two Bear Stearns hedge funds that were heavily invested in complex and squirrelly mortgage securities. Although Goldman disputes the charge, the lower marks caused the two hedge funds to recalculate the funds’ net asset value, known in the business as N.A.V., and to re-issue to investors in June 2007 a far lower N.A.V. — down 19 percent, rather than down 6 percent. All hell broke loose. Soon enough, the funds’ investors were blocked from withdrawing their money, and by July the funds filed for bankruptcy and were soon liquidated. Investors lost much of the $1.5 billion they had invested. The liquidation of the two hedge funds led to the collapse of Bear Stearns nine months later.
The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission report, buried by critics, is actually a must-read for those who want to understand the collapse.
In late July 2007, Goldman started a nearly 17-month dispute with A.I.G. Financial Products, a subsidiary of American International Group, the giant insurer, about the value of $23 billion of complex mortgage securities that Goldman had insured through the subsidiary by paying some $100 million in premiums. Goldman’s agreement with the A.I.G. Financial Products allowed Goldman to demand collateral payments from the firm under two conditions. First, if A.I.G., the parent company, lost its AAA credit rating, which it did in March 2005. And, second, if Goldman believed the value of the underlying securities being insured had fallen, which by mid-2007 Goldman thought — correctly — had occurred. But the consequences of Goldman’s collateral disputes with the financial products subsidiary were profound for A.I.G., and contributed mightily to the government takeover of the insurer after pumping some $180 billion into it.
The crisis commission report is chock-full of the details of how the dispute developed and progressed. On July 27, 2007, Goldman sent a $1.81 billion collateral call to A.I.G. Financial Products to make up for what Goldman — pretty much alone at that point — thought represented the decline in the value of the securities. “The $2bn margin call is driven by a massive remarking by Goldman Sachs of the underlying [mortgage] securities (down from – 6 pts to – 20-25 pts in some cases), ahead of all other dealers in the street,” Goldman’s Nicholas Friedman wrote in an internal e-mail the day before the collateral call.
When Joseph Cassano, the chief executive of A.I.G. Financial Products, first heard about Goldman’s collateral call, he was blown away and thought that it came “out of the blue,” he said in a five-hour, June 2010 interview released late last week by the crisis commission. “What in the world had changed between yesterday and today?” he wondered, to prompt the “whopper” of a collateral call from Goldman. Goldman’s marks were consistently lower than those of other Wall Street dealers — as Goldman itself admitted — and Cassano was incredulous about their accuracy. “I didn’t believe the numbers,” he said. “These aren’t real numbers. The markets had seized up.”
For the next two weeks, Cassano’s firm disputed Goldman’s valuations and its collateral call. It “was unusual to have disputes” with Goldman, Cassano told the commission. “Goldman Sachs is a business partner of ours and an important relationship.” During that time, Goldman reduced the collateral call to $1.6 billion, then to $1.2 billion and then to $600 million. “That told me something was up with their numbers,” Cassano said. “This market is so difficult, the markets are roiling to say the least. Even Goldman Sachs — a pretty good outfit — was having a hard time getting the numbers themselves.”
Before Cassano left for a late August cycling vacation in Germany and Austria, he suggested paying Goldman a “good faith” $300 million deposit. Goldman countered with a demand for a $450 million deposit, which Cassano agreed to provide on Aug. 10. In a side letter that same day, A.I.G. Financial Products and Goldman further stipulated that the $450 million did not resolve the collateral dispute between the two firms. The payment was a way for everyone to “chill out,” an A.I.G. executive wrote.
After Labor Day, Cassano said, he initiated a meeting with Michael Sherwood, co-chief executive of Goldman Sachs International — whom he described as being “a very practical guy” — to discuss how to resolve the ongoing collateral dispute. Cassano pointed out to Sherwood that something must have been amiss because Goldman’s original collateral call of $1.8 billion got reduced in two weeks time to $450 million. Cassano says that Sherwood admitted to him that Goldman’s bankers “didn’t cover ourselves in glory during this period.”
Things quieted between Goldman and A.I.G. Financial Products until Sept. 11, when Goldman asked for another $1.5 billion in collateral based on its marks. This was the beginning of the end. On Nov. 2, Cassano said, Sherwood gave him a “heads up” that Goldman was increasing its collateral call to $2.8 billion, in addition to the $450 million it already had. “We’re not going to pay that amount,” Cassano said he told Sherwood, and that the latter replied, “Yea, I didn’t think you would.” And, according to the crisis commission report, Cassano soon faced other problems: by Nov. 14, both Société Générale, a large French bank, and Merrill Lynch had asked the A.I.G. subsidiary to post collateral to them as well, in the amounts of $1.7 billion and $610 million, respectively, based largely on the Goldman precedent.
On Nov. 23, A.I.G. Financial Products agreed to give Goldman another $1.55 billion in collateral, bringing its total posted to $2 billion. Cassano told the crisis commission that his supervisor decided to make the payment “to avoid airing dirty laundry” in the market about the disputes. A week later, based on his firm’s calculations and other market input, Cassano phoned Sherwood and demanded the money back from Goldman. Cassano recalls that Sherwood said he would think about it — but the money was never returned.
The dispute continued into January. Cassano eventually spoke with David Viniar, Goldman’s chief financial officer, to try again to get the money back. “We may have been ahead of the market,” Cassano said Viniar told him, “but the market is coming our way.” Cassano was again incredulous, and wondered if Goldman was “driving the market” down to benefit the short position it had started taking in December 2006 against the mortgage market. “There is nothing trading,” Cassano said. “You can’t even trade by appointment.”
That was Cassano’s last conversation with Goldman. By March, he had been relieved of his executive duties and became a $1 million a month consultant until the government takeover of A.I.G. Over the years, A.I.G. Financial Products had paid him more than $300 million in compensation. The Goldman collateral calls continued until the bitter end, by which time it had been paid $12.9 billion and the government had poured some $40 billion into the financial products subsidiary as part of the overall rescue of A.I.G. Cassano told the commission that if he had not been relieved of his duties, he would have continued to dispute the collateral calls with Goldman rather than agree to pay them.
As the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission report makes convincingly clear, Goldman has to finally admit publicly the important role its marks played in exacerbating the financial woes of its competitors. The other lesson is that these kinds of complex securities, and the derivatives tied to them, should in the future be traded on public exchanges, where prices can be far more easily agreed upon between buyers and sellers. The 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law calls for the latter, but it hasn’t happened yet. Contrary to the critics, the commission report is the strongest argument we have to get those regulators moving.
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 18, 2011
An earlier version of this column incorrectly described the context of a quotation. Joseph Cassano told the Financial Crisis Inquiry Committee that his supervisor had decided to make a payment to Goldman Sachs "to avoid airing dirty laundry"; he did not say that he himself had made the decision.
By WILLIAM D. COHAN
The New York Times
William D. Cohan on Wall Street and Main Street.
Tags:
A.I.G., Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, goldman sachs, Wall Street
The conventional wisdom has it that the final report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission was a low-budget flop, hopelessly riven by internal political disputes and dissension among the commission’s 10 members. As usual, the conventional wisdom is completely wrong. Actually, the report — and the online archive of testimony, interviews and documents that are now available — is a treasure trove of invaluable information about the causes and consequences of the Great Recession.
For instance, on the exceptionally important but little understood role played by the increasingly lower prices Goldman Sachs placed on the complex mortgage securities on its balance sheet — which helped determine the fate of many of its shakier Wall Street brethren — the commission report, on page 237, is crystalline:
As the crisis unfolded Goldman marked mortgage-related securities at prices that were significantly lower than those of other companies. Goldman knew that those lower marks might hurt those other companies — including some clients — because they could require marking down those assets and similar assets. In addition, Goldman’s marks would get picked up by competitors in dealer surveys. As a result, Goldman’s marks could contribute to other companies recording “mark-to-market” losses: that is, the reported value of their assets could fall and their earnings would decline.
The first victims of Goldman’s decision in May 2007 to begin communicating its lower marks to the rest of the marketplace were the two Bear Stearns hedge funds that were heavily invested in complex and squirrelly mortgage securities. Although Goldman disputes the charge, the lower marks caused the two hedge funds to recalculate the funds’ net asset value, known in the business as N.A.V., and to re-issue to investors in June 2007 a far lower N.A.V. — down 19 percent, rather than down 6 percent. All hell broke loose. Soon enough, the funds’ investors were blocked from withdrawing their money, and by July the funds filed for bankruptcy and were soon liquidated. Investors lost much of the $1.5 billion they had invested. The liquidation of the two hedge funds led to the collapse of Bear Stearns nine months later.
The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission report, buried by critics, is actually a must-read for those who want to understand the collapse.
In late July 2007, Goldman started a nearly 17-month dispute with A.I.G. Financial Products, a subsidiary of American International Group, the giant insurer, about the value of $23 billion of complex mortgage securities that Goldman had insured through the subsidiary by paying some $100 million in premiums. Goldman’s agreement with the A.I.G. Financial Products allowed Goldman to demand collateral payments from the firm under two conditions. First, if A.I.G., the parent company, lost its AAA credit rating, which it did in March 2005. And, second, if Goldman believed the value of the underlying securities being insured had fallen, which by mid-2007 Goldman thought — correctly — had occurred. But the consequences of Goldman’s collateral disputes with the financial products subsidiary were profound for A.I.G., and contributed mightily to the government takeover of the insurer after pumping some $180 billion into it.
The crisis commission report is chock-full of the details of how the dispute developed and progressed. On July 27, 2007, Goldman sent a $1.81 billion collateral call to A.I.G. Financial Products to make up for what Goldman — pretty much alone at that point — thought represented the decline in the value of the securities. “The $2bn margin call is driven by a massive remarking by Goldman Sachs of the underlying [mortgage] securities (down from – 6 pts to – 20-25 pts in some cases), ahead of all other dealers in the street,” Goldman’s Nicholas Friedman wrote in an internal e-mail the day before the collateral call.
When Joseph Cassano, the chief executive of A.I.G. Financial Products, first heard about Goldman’s collateral call, he was blown away and thought that it came “out of the blue,” he said in a five-hour, June 2010 interview released late last week by the crisis commission. “What in the world had changed between yesterday and today?” he wondered, to prompt the “whopper” of a collateral call from Goldman. Goldman’s marks were consistently lower than those of other Wall Street dealers — as Goldman itself admitted — and Cassano was incredulous about their accuracy. “I didn’t believe the numbers,” he said. “These aren’t real numbers. The markets had seized up.”
For the next two weeks, Cassano’s firm disputed Goldman’s valuations and its collateral call. It “was unusual to have disputes” with Goldman, Cassano told the commission. “Goldman Sachs is a business partner of ours and an important relationship.” During that time, Goldman reduced the collateral call to $1.6 billion, then to $1.2 billion and then to $600 million. “That told me something was up with their numbers,” Cassano said. “This market is so difficult, the markets are roiling to say the least. Even Goldman Sachs — a pretty good outfit — was having a hard time getting the numbers themselves.”
Before Cassano left for a late August cycling vacation in Germany and Austria, he suggested paying Goldman a “good faith” $300 million deposit. Goldman countered with a demand for a $450 million deposit, which Cassano agreed to provide on Aug. 10. In a side letter that same day, A.I.G. Financial Products and Goldman further stipulated that the $450 million did not resolve the collateral dispute between the two firms. The payment was a way for everyone to “chill out,” an A.I.G. executive wrote.
After Labor Day, Cassano said, he initiated a meeting with Michael Sherwood, co-chief executive of Goldman Sachs International — whom he described as being “a very practical guy” — to discuss how to resolve the ongoing collateral dispute. Cassano pointed out to Sherwood that something must have been amiss because Goldman’s original collateral call of $1.8 billion got reduced in two weeks time to $450 million. Cassano says that Sherwood admitted to him that Goldman’s bankers “didn’t cover ourselves in glory during this period.”
Things quieted between Goldman and A.I.G. Financial Products until Sept. 11, when Goldman asked for another $1.5 billion in collateral based on its marks. This was the beginning of the end. On Nov. 2, Cassano said, Sherwood gave him a “heads up” that Goldman was increasing its collateral call to $2.8 billion, in addition to the $450 million it already had. “We’re not going to pay that amount,” Cassano said he told Sherwood, and that the latter replied, “Yea, I didn’t think you would.” And, according to the crisis commission report, Cassano soon faced other problems: by Nov. 14, both Société Générale, a large French bank, and Merrill Lynch had asked the A.I.G. subsidiary to post collateral to them as well, in the amounts of $1.7 billion and $610 million, respectively, based largely on the Goldman precedent.
On Nov. 23, A.I.G. Financial Products agreed to give Goldman another $1.55 billion in collateral, bringing its total posted to $2 billion. Cassano told the crisis commission that his supervisor decided to make the payment “to avoid airing dirty laundry” in the market about the disputes. A week later, based on his firm’s calculations and other market input, Cassano phoned Sherwood and demanded the money back from Goldman. Cassano recalls that Sherwood said he would think about it — but the money was never returned.
The dispute continued into January. Cassano eventually spoke with David Viniar, Goldman’s chief financial officer, to try again to get the money back. “We may have been ahead of the market,” Cassano said Viniar told him, “but the market is coming our way.” Cassano was again incredulous, and wondered if Goldman was “driving the market” down to benefit the short position it had started taking in December 2006 against the mortgage market. “There is nothing trading,” Cassano said. “You can’t even trade by appointment.”
That was Cassano’s last conversation with Goldman. By March, he had been relieved of his executive duties and became a $1 million a month consultant until the government takeover of A.I.G. Over the years, A.I.G. Financial Products had paid him more than $300 million in compensation. The Goldman collateral calls continued until the bitter end, by which time it had been paid $12.9 billion and the government had poured some $40 billion into the financial products subsidiary as part of the overall rescue of A.I.G. Cassano told the commission that if he had not been relieved of his duties, he would have continued to dispute the collateral calls with Goldman rather than agree to pay them.
As the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission report makes convincingly clear, Goldman has to finally admit publicly the important role its marks played in exacerbating the financial woes of its competitors. The other lesson is that these kinds of complex securities, and the derivatives tied to them, should in the future be traded on public exchanges, where prices can be far more easily agreed upon between buyers and sellers. The 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law calls for the latter, but it hasn’t happened yet. Contrary to the critics, the commission report is the strongest argument we have to get those regulators moving.
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 18, 2011
An earlier version of this column incorrectly described the context of a quotation. Joseph Cassano told the Financial Crisis Inquiry Committee that his supervisor had decided to make a payment to Goldman Sachs "to avoid airing dirty laundry"; he did not say that he himself had made the decision.
posted by Hanan Elbadry at 6:33 PM
0 comments
Why Is the US Military Creating an Army of Fake People on the Internet?
Adrian Chen — Why Is the Military Creating an Army of Fake People on the Internet?Here's a slight glimpse into the Air Force's cyber warfare efforts: a request for bids from last summer for "Persona Management Software," which would allow one person to command an army of fake online people.
From the request, posted on the Federal Business Opportunities website:
Software will allow 10 personas per user, replete with background , history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographacilly consistent. Individual applications will enable an operator to exercise a number of different online persons from the same workstation and without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries. Personas must be able to appear to originate in nearly any part of the world and can interact through conventional online services and social media platforms.
The request was for 50 licenses, which means the Air Force hoped to create up to 500 fake Internet people. The request was filled in June, which means these fake people could be roaming the 'net right now.
According to the request, the software was to be deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Why? To secretly gather embarrassing party pics from Taliban solders' Facebook profiles? To swing Iraq newspaper polls about whether the U.S. is evil? May they'll help us beat out North Korea in eBay auctions for rogue nukes.
Freedom of Information Act Support
Solicitation Number: RTB220610
Agency: Department of the Air Force
Office: Air Mobility Command
Location: 6th Contracting Squadron
Added: Jun 22, 2010 1:42 pm
0001- Online Persona Management Service. 50 User Licenses, 10 Personas per user.
Software will allow 10 personas per user, replete with background , history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographacilly consistent. Individual applications will enable an operator to exercise a number of different online persons from the same workstation and without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries. Personas must be able to appear to originate in nearly any part of the world and can interact through conventional online services and social media platforms. The service includes a user friendly application environment to maximize the user's situational awareness by displaying real-time local information.
0002- Secure Virtual Private Network (VPN). 1 each
VPN provides the ability for users to daily and automatically obtain randomly selected
IP addresses through which they can access the internet. The daily rotation of
the user s IP address prevents compromise during observation of likely or
targeted web sites or services, while hiding the existence of the operation. In
addition, may provide traffic mixing, blending the user s traffic with traffic from
multitudes of users from outside the organization. This traffic blending provides
excellent cover and powerful deniability. Anonymizer Enterprise Chameleon or equal
0003- Static IP Address Management. 50 each
Licence protects the identity of government agencies and enterprise
organizations. Enables organizations to manage their persistent online personas
by assigning static IP addresses to each persona. Individuals can perform
static impersonations, which allow them to look like the same person over time.
Also allows organizations that frequent same site/service often to easily switch IP
addresses to look like ordinary users as opposed to one organization. Anonymizer IP Mapper License or equal
0004- Virtual Private Servers, CONUS. 1 each
Provides CONUS or OCONUS points of presence locations that are setup for
each customer based on the geographic area of operations the customer is
operating within and which allow a customer?s online persona(s) to appear to
originate from. Ability to provide virtual private servers that are procured using
commercial hosting centers around the world and which are established
anonymously. Once procured, the geosite is incorporated into the network and
integrated within the customers environment and ready for use by the customer.
Unless specifically designated as shared, locations are dedicated for use by
each customer and never shared among other customers. Anonymizer Annual Dedicated CONUS Light Geosite or equal
0005- Virtual Private Servers, OCONUS. 8 Each
Provides CONUS or OCONUS points of presence locations that are setup for
each customer based on the geographic area of operations the customer is
operating within and which allow a customer?s online persona(s) to appear to
originate from. Ability to provide virtual private servers that are procured using
commercial hosting centers around the world and which are established
anonymously. Once procured, the geosite is incorporated into the network and
integrated within the customers environment and ready for use by the customer.
Unless specifically designated as shared, locations are dedicated for use by
each customer and never shared among other customers. Anonymizer Annual Dedicated OCONUS Light Geosite or equal
0006- Remote Access Secure Virtual Private Network. 1 each
Secure Operating Environment provides a reliable and protected computing
environment from which to stage and conduct operations. Every session uses a
clean Virtual Machine (VM) image. The solution is accessed through sets of
Virtual Private Network (VPN) devices located at each Customer facility. The
fully-managed VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) is an environment that allows
users remote access from their desktop into a VM. Upon session termination,
the VM is deleted and any virus, worm, or malicious software that the user inadvertently downloaded is destroyed. Anonymizer Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Solution or equal.
Contracting Office Address:
2606 Brown Pelican Ave.
MacDill AFB, Florida 33621-5000
United States
Place of Performance:
Performance will be at MacDIll AFB, Kabul, Afghanistan and Baghdad, Iraq.
MacDill AFB , Florida 33679
United States
Primary Point of Contact.:
Russell Beasley,
Contracting Officer
russell.beasley-02@macdill.af.mil
Phone: (813) 828-4729
Fax: (813) 828-5111
Wed Feb 16, 2011 at 10:56 PM EST
Daily Kos
UPDATED: The HB Gary Email That Should Concern Us All
As I wrote yesterday , there is a leaked email that has gotten surprisingly little attention around here. It's the one where Aaron Barr discusses his intention to post at Daily Kos - presumably something negative about Anonymous, the hacking group. But that's not the email I'm talking about here.
As I also mentioned yesterday, in some of the emails, HB Gary people are talking about creating "personas", what we would call sockpuppets. This is not new. PR firms have been using fake "people" to promote products and other things for a while now, both online and even in bars and coffee houses.
But for a defense contractor with ties to the federal government, Hunton & Williams, DOD, NSA, and the CIA - whose enemies are labor unions, progressive organizations, journalists, and progressive bloggers, a persona apparently goes far beyond creating a mere sockpuppet.
According to an embedded MS Word document found in one of the HB Gary emails, it involves creating an army of sockpuppets, with sophisticated "persona management" software that allows a small team of only a few people to appear to be many, while keeping the personas from accidentally cross-contaminating each other. Then, to top it off, the team can actually automate some functions so one persona can appear to be an entire Brooks Brothers riot online.
Persona management entails not just the deconfliction of persona artifacts such as names, email addresses, landing pages, and associated content. It also requires providing the human actors technology that takes the decision process out of the loop when using a specific persona. For this purpose we custom developed either virtual machines or thumb drives for each persona. This allowed the human actor to open a virtual machine or thumb drive with an associated persona and have all the appropriate email accounts, associations, web pages, social media accounts, etc. pre-established and configured with visual cues to remind the actor which persona he/she is using so as not to accidentally cross-contaminate personas during use.
And all of this is for the purposes of infiltration, data mining, and (here's the one that really worries me) ganging up on bloggers, commenters and otherwise "real" people to smear enemies and distort the truth.
This is an excerpt from one of the Word Documents, which was sent as an attachment by Aaron Barr, CEO of HB Gary's Federal subsidiary, to several of his colleagues to present to clients:
To build this capability we will create a set of personas on twitter, blogs, forums, buzz, and myspace under created names that fit the profile (satellitejockey, hack3rman, etc). These accounts are maintained and updated automatically through RSS feeds, retweets, and linking together social media commenting between platforms. With a pool of these accounts to choose from, once you have a real name persona you create a Facebook and LinkedIn account using the given name, lock those accounts down and link these accounts to a selected # of previously created social media accounts, automatically pre-aging the real accounts.
Yes!!! That's how democracy and the first amendment are supposed to work.
In another Word document, one of the team spells out how automation can work so one person can be many personas:
Using the assigned social media accounts we can automate the posting of content that is relevant to the persona. In this case there are specific social media strategy website RSS feeds we can subscribe to and then repost content on twitter with the appropriate hashtags. In fact using hashtags and gaming some location based check-in services we can make it appear as if a persona was actually at a conference and introduce himself/herself to key individuals as part of the exercise, as one example. There are a variety of social media tricks we can use to add a level of realness to all fictitious personas
I don't know about you, but this concerns me greatly. It goes far beyond the mere ability for a government stooge, corporation or PR firm to hire people to post on sites like this one. They are talking about creating the illusion of consensus. And consensus is a powerful persuader. What has more effect, one guy saying BP is not at fault? Or 20 people saying it? For the weak minded, the number can make all the difference.
And another thing, this is just one little company of assholes. I can't believe there aren't others doing this already. From oil companies, political campaigns, PR firms, you name it. Public opinion means big bucks. And let's face it, what these guys are talking about is easy.
Just today I was listening to Stand Up with Pete Dominic on XM's POTUS channel. He was talking about the Wisconsin labor attack and how he had seen a lot of people email and contact the show in support of the Teachers there. Then he added a "but": "I've also seen a lot of anti-labor people on Twitter..."
Really? I thought. How do we know if those are real people? Twitter has to be the easiest thing to fake and to automate with retweets and 180 characrer max sentences. To the extent that the propaganda technique known as "Bandwagon" is an effective form of persuasion, which it definitely is, the ability for a few people to infiltrate a blog or social media site and appear to be many people, all taking one position in a debate, all agreeing, for example, that so and so is not credible, or a crook, is an incredibly powerful weapon.
How many times have you seen a diary get posted that reports some revelatory yet unfavorable tidbit about someone only to see a swarm of commenters arrive who hijack the thread, distract with a bunch of irrelevant nonsense, start throwing unsubstantiated accusations and ad hominem attacks to where before you know it, everyone's pretty much forgotten what the diary said in the first place.
Some times diaries deserve to be swarmed. But what if a diary is swarmed and it's really just one asshole working for a law firm that represents the oil company your diary was attacking?
I don't know about you, but it matters to me what fellow progressives think. I consider all views. And if there appears to be a consensus that some reporter isn't credible, for example, or some candidate for congress in another state can't be trusted, I won't base my entire judgment on it, but it carries some weight.
That's me. I believe there are many people though who will base their judgment on rumors and mob attacks. And for those people, a fake mob can be really effective.
I have no idea what to do about this problem, except just make sure everyone knows its possible, and so watches out for it.
-------------------------------------
Lastly, some here are falling for the meme that HB Gary personel, and especially Aaron Barr himself, are incompetent buffoons. This is a mistake. While Mr Barr may be a fool, he was not the one who fell for a spear fishing attack that allow an, apparently, 16 year old girl to gain access to their servers.
I have rummaged through the leaked email, some of which contain resumes for employees there. These guys are recruiting people with incredibly advanced skills from many different agencies and top universities like MIT.
HB Gary and its subsidiary, HB Gary Federal, as well as Berinco and Palantir, employed a lot of extremely qualified people with backgrounds in the NSA and ATT and other major organizations/corporations. These guys are pros.
Aaron Barr may be a mockery to Anonymous for running his mouth off. As he should be. But he's not an idiot and he wasn't the one who gave out the company's keys to a 16 yo girl.
I wanted to make this clear because it is in the interests of government and propagandists, and anyone else who wants this story to go away to try and blow all this off as one little company who wrote a proposal no one even read and who isn't even competent enough to protect its own servers so no one should pay any attention at all to what they were up to.
That is the narrative being spun, even here on this site, and it is entirely fictitious.
We are under attack. And the attackers are damn good at what they do. Pretending they're not, or that this isn't happening isn't going to make it better.
I do believe there are limitation to the effectiveness of such an attack on this site and others like it. This isn't twitter, and bullshit only goes so far, no matter how many personas are spreading it.
But everyone needs to be aware that not only are sites like this a target of attack, but that Daily Kos has been mentioned specifically as a target of attack.
Maybe this whole thing will be liberating. Maybe people will develop stronger spines and not be so easily swayed by raving mobs.
UPDATE: From another email, I found a government solicitation for this "Persona Management Software".
This confirms that in fact, the US Gov. is attempting to use this kind of technology. But it appears from the solicitation it is contracted for use in foreign theaters like Afghanistan and Iraq. I can't imagine why this is posted on an open site. And whenthis was discovered by a couple of HB Gary staffers, they weren't too happy about it either:
The first email just had the title, "WTF Dude?"
The response email said, "This is posted on open source. Are you fucking serious?"
From the request, posted on the Federal Business Opportunities website:
Software will allow 10 personas per user, replete with background , history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographacilly consistent. Individual applications will enable an operator to exercise a number of different online persons from the same workstation and without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries. Personas must be able to appear to originate in nearly any part of the world and can interact through conventional online services and social media platforms.
The request was for 50 licenses, which means the Air Force hoped to create up to 500 fake Internet people. The request was filled in June, which means these fake people could be roaming the 'net right now.
According to the request, the software was to be deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Why? To secretly gather embarrassing party pics from Taliban solders' Facebook profiles? To swing Iraq newspaper polls about whether the U.S. is evil? May they'll help us beat out North Korea in eBay auctions for rogue nukes.
Freedom of Information Act Support
Solicitation Number: RTB220610
Agency: Department of the Air Force
Office: Air Mobility Command
Location: 6th Contracting Squadron
Added: Jun 22, 2010 1:42 pm
0001- Online Persona Management Service. 50 User Licenses, 10 Personas per user.
Software will allow 10 personas per user, replete with background , history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographacilly consistent. Individual applications will enable an operator to exercise a number of different online persons from the same workstation and without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries. Personas must be able to appear to originate in nearly any part of the world and can interact through conventional online services and social media platforms. The service includes a user friendly application environment to maximize the user's situational awareness by displaying real-time local information.
0002- Secure Virtual Private Network (VPN). 1 each
VPN provides the ability for users to daily and automatically obtain randomly selected
IP addresses through which they can access the internet. The daily rotation of
the user s IP address prevents compromise during observation of likely or
targeted web sites or services, while hiding the existence of the operation. In
addition, may provide traffic mixing, blending the user s traffic with traffic from
multitudes of users from outside the organization. This traffic blending provides
excellent cover and powerful deniability. Anonymizer Enterprise Chameleon or equal
0003- Static IP Address Management. 50 each
Licence protects the identity of government agencies and enterprise
organizations. Enables organizations to manage their persistent online personas
by assigning static IP addresses to each persona. Individuals can perform
static impersonations, which allow them to look like the same person over time.
Also allows organizations that frequent same site/service often to easily switch IP
addresses to look like ordinary users as opposed to one organization. Anonymizer IP Mapper License or equal
0004- Virtual Private Servers, CONUS. 1 each
Provides CONUS or OCONUS points of presence locations that are setup for
each customer based on the geographic area of operations the customer is
operating within and which allow a customer?s online persona(s) to appear to
originate from. Ability to provide virtual private servers that are procured using
commercial hosting centers around the world and which are established
anonymously. Once procured, the geosite is incorporated into the network and
integrated within the customers environment and ready for use by the customer.
Unless specifically designated as shared, locations are dedicated for use by
each customer and never shared among other customers. Anonymizer Annual Dedicated CONUS Light Geosite or equal
0005- Virtual Private Servers, OCONUS. 8 Each
Provides CONUS or OCONUS points of presence locations that are setup for
each customer based on the geographic area of operations the customer is
operating within and which allow a customer?s online persona(s) to appear to
originate from. Ability to provide virtual private servers that are procured using
commercial hosting centers around the world and which are established
anonymously. Once procured, the geosite is incorporated into the network and
integrated within the customers environment and ready for use by the customer.
Unless specifically designated as shared, locations are dedicated for use by
each customer and never shared among other customers. Anonymizer Annual Dedicated OCONUS Light Geosite or equal
0006- Remote Access Secure Virtual Private Network. 1 each
Secure Operating Environment provides a reliable and protected computing
environment from which to stage and conduct operations. Every session uses a
clean Virtual Machine (VM) image. The solution is accessed through sets of
Virtual Private Network (VPN) devices located at each Customer facility. The
fully-managed VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) is an environment that allows
users remote access from their desktop into a VM. Upon session termination,
the VM is deleted and any virus, worm, or malicious software that the user inadvertently downloaded is destroyed. Anonymizer Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Solution or equal.
Contracting Office Address:
2606 Brown Pelican Ave.
MacDill AFB, Florida 33621-5000
United States
Place of Performance:
Performance will be at MacDIll AFB, Kabul, Afghanistan and Baghdad, Iraq.
MacDill AFB , Florida 33679
United States
Primary Point of Contact.:
Russell Beasley,
Contracting Officer
russell.beasley-02@macdill.af.mil
Phone: (813) 828-4729
Fax: (813) 828-5111
Wed Feb 16, 2011 at 10:56 PM EST
Daily Kos
UPDATED: The HB Gary Email That Should Concern Us All
As I wrote yesterday , there is a leaked email that has gotten surprisingly little attention around here. It's the one where Aaron Barr discusses his intention to post at Daily Kos - presumably something negative about Anonymous, the hacking group. But that's not the email I'm talking about here.
As I also mentioned yesterday, in some of the emails, HB Gary people are talking about creating "personas", what we would call sockpuppets. This is not new. PR firms have been using fake "people" to promote products and other things for a while now, both online and even in bars and coffee houses.
But for a defense contractor with ties to the federal government, Hunton & Williams, DOD, NSA, and the CIA - whose enemies are labor unions, progressive organizations, journalists, and progressive bloggers, a persona apparently goes far beyond creating a mere sockpuppet.
According to an embedded MS Word document found in one of the HB Gary emails, it involves creating an army of sockpuppets, with sophisticated "persona management" software that allows a small team of only a few people to appear to be many, while keeping the personas from accidentally cross-contaminating each other. Then, to top it off, the team can actually automate some functions so one persona can appear to be an entire Brooks Brothers riot online.
Persona management entails not just the deconfliction of persona artifacts such as names, email addresses, landing pages, and associated content. It also requires providing the human actors technology that takes the decision process out of the loop when using a specific persona. For this purpose we custom developed either virtual machines or thumb drives for each persona. This allowed the human actor to open a virtual machine or thumb drive with an associated persona and have all the appropriate email accounts, associations, web pages, social media accounts, etc. pre-established and configured with visual cues to remind the actor which persona he/she is using so as not to accidentally cross-contaminate personas during use.
And all of this is for the purposes of infiltration, data mining, and (here's the one that really worries me) ganging up on bloggers, commenters and otherwise "real" people to smear enemies and distort the truth.
This is an excerpt from one of the Word Documents, which was sent as an attachment by Aaron Barr, CEO of HB Gary's Federal subsidiary, to several of his colleagues to present to clients:
To build this capability we will create a set of personas on twitter, blogs, forums, buzz, and myspace under created names that fit the profile (satellitejockey, hack3rman, etc). These accounts are maintained and updated automatically through RSS feeds, retweets, and linking together social media commenting between platforms. With a pool of these accounts to choose from, once you have a real name persona you create a Facebook and LinkedIn account using the given name, lock those accounts down and link these accounts to a selected # of previously created social media accounts, automatically pre-aging the real accounts.
Yes!!! That's how democracy and the first amendment are supposed to work.
In another Word document, one of the team spells out how automation can work so one person can be many personas:
Using the assigned social media accounts we can automate the posting of content that is relevant to the persona. In this case there are specific social media strategy website RSS feeds we can subscribe to and then repost content on twitter with the appropriate hashtags. In fact using hashtags and gaming some location based check-in services we can make it appear as if a persona was actually at a conference and introduce himself/herself to key individuals as part of the exercise, as one example. There are a variety of social media tricks we can use to add a level of realness to all fictitious personas
I don't know about you, but this concerns me greatly. It goes far beyond the mere ability for a government stooge, corporation or PR firm to hire people to post on sites like this one. They are talking about creating the illusion of consensus. And consensus is a powerful persuader. What has more effect, one guy saying BP is not at fault? Or 20 people saying it? For the weak minded, the number can make all the difference.
And another thing, this is just one little company of assholes. I can't believe there aren't others doing this already. From oil companies, political campaigns, PR firms, you name it. Public opinion means big bucks. And let's face it, what these guys are talking about is easy.
Just today I was listening to Stand Up with Pete Dominic on XM's POTUS channel. He was talking about the Wisconsin labor attack and how he had seen a lot of people email and contact the show in support of the Teachers there. Then he added a "but": "I've also seen a lot of anti-labor people on Twitter..."
Really? I thought. How do we know if those are real people? Twitter has to be the easiest thing to fake and to automate with retweets and 180 characrer max sentences. To the extent that the propaganda technique known as "Bandwagon" is an effective form of persuasion, which it definitely is, the ability for a few people to infiltrate a blog or social media site and appear to be many people, all taking one position in a debate, all agreeing, for example, that so and so is not credible, or a crook, is an incredibly powerful weapon.
How many times have you seen a diary get posted that reports some revelatory yet unfavorable tidbit about someone only to see a swarm of commenters arrive who hijack the thread, distract with a bunch of irrelevant nonsense, start throwing unsubstantiated accusations and ad hominem attacks to where before you know it, everyone's pretty much forgotten what the diary said in the first place.
Some times diaries deserve to be swarmed. But what if a diary is swarmed and it's really just one asshole working for a law firm that represents the oil company your diary was attacking?
I don't know about you, but it matters to me what fellow progressives think. I consider all views. And if there appears to be a consensus that some reporter isn't credible, for example, or some candidate for congress in another state can't be trusted, I won't base my entire judgment on it, but it carries some weight.
That's me. I believe there are many people though who will base their judgment on rumors and mob attacks. And for those people, a fake mob can be really effective.
I have no idea what to do about this problem, except just make sure everyone knows its possible, and so watches out for it.
-------------------------------------
Lastly, some here are falling for the meme that HB Gary personel, and especially Aaron Barr himself, are incompetent buffoons. This is a mistake. While Mr Barr may be a fool, he was not the one who fell for a spear fishing attack that allow an, apparently, 16 year old girl to gain access to their servers.
I have rummaged through the leaked email, some of which contain resumes for employees there. These guys are recruiting people with incredibly advanced skills from many different agencies and top universities like MIT.
HB Gary and its subsidiary, HB Gary Federal, as well as Berinco and Palantir, employed a lot of extremely qualified people with backgrounds in the NSA and ATT and other major organizations/corporations. These guys are pros.
Aaron Barr may be a mockery to Anonymous for running his mouth off. As he should be. But he's not an idiot and he wasn't the one who gave out the company's keys to a 16 yo girl.
I wanted to make this clear because it is in the interests of government and propagandists, and anyone else who wants this story to go away to try and blow all this off as one little company who wrote a proposal no one even read and who isn't even competent enough to protect its own servers so no one should pay any attention at all to what they were up to.
That is the narrative being spun, even here on this site, and it is entirely fictitious.
We are under attack. And the attackers are damn good at what they do. Pretending they're not, or that this isn't happening isn't going to make it better.
I do believe there are limitation to the effectiveness of such an attack on this site and others like it. This isn't twitter, and bullshit only goes so far, no matter how many personas are spreading it.
But everyone needs to be aware that not only are sites like this a target of attack, but that Daily Kos has been mentioned specifically as a target of attack.
Maybe this whole thing will be liberating. Maybe people will develop stronger spines and not be so easily swayed by raving mobs.
UPDATE: From another email, I found a government solicitation for this "Persona Management Software".
This confirms that in fact, the US Gov. is attempting to use this kind of technology. But it appears from the solicitation it is contracted for use in foreign theaters like Afghanistan and Iraq. I can't imagine why this is posted on an open site. And whenthis was discovered by a couple of HB Gary staffers, they weren't too happy about it either:
The first email just had the title, "WTF Dude?"
The response email said, "This is posted on open source. Are you fucking serious?"
posted by Hanan Elbadry at 5:51 PM
0 comments
Cancer causing chemicals found in cola coloring ingredient
February 17, 2011
www.naturalnews.com
(NaturalNews) The "caramel coloring" used to color all the top cola brands isn't natural caramel coloring at all. Instead, it's made by reacting sugars with ammonia and sulfites at high temperatures. This reaction results in the formation of 2-methylimidazole and 4-methylimidazole, both of which are chemicals documented by the U.S. government to cause cancer in mammals.
This is all coming to light thanks to an effort by the CSPI, which has now filed a regulatory petition to ban these chemicals from colas (http://www.cspinet.org/new/20110216...).
The National Toxicology Program has conducted animal studies on these toxic chemicals found in colas, concluding there is "clear evidence" that 2-MI and 4-MI are animal carcinogens.
The call to ban these chemicals from use in foods was joined by five carcinogenesis experts who said, "The American public should not be exposed to any cancer risk whatsoever as a result of consuming such chemicals, especially when they serve a non-essential, cosmetic purpose." (http://cspinet.org/new/pdf/experts-...)
That letter explains:
4-methylimidazole (4-MI) causes lung tumors in male and female mice and mononuclear cell leukemia in female rats. Other NTP studies found that 2-methylimidazole caused liver tumors in male and female mice, thyroid tumors in male mice, and precancerous thyroid changes in female mice. In rats, 4-MI caused an increased rate of tumors in thyroid follicular cells in females and an increased rate of hyperplasia in thyroid follicular cells in males.
Even the term "caramel coloring" is extremely misleading to consumers, because most people think it's related to caramel candy, which is made by browning sugar under heat. But the "caramel coloring" used in colas is made by exposing sugars to industrial chemicals (ammonia and sulfites), resulting in a cocktail of cancer-causing chemicals.
Coke and Pepsi products may soon bear cancer warnings in California
California's Proposition 65 law limits the consumption of 4-MI to no more than 16 micrograms per day from a single product. Yet colas contain roughly 200 micrograms of 4-MI in a 20-ounce bottle.
That's over 12 times the allowable limit under Proposition 65, and that's in every bottle! Many people drink several bottles a day, further multiplying their exposure to this potential carcinogen.
If cola companies are going to continue to sell their products in California, then, they must now carry cancer warning labels in order to be in compliance with Prop 65. You can bet that a desperate effort is now under way by the cola industry to lobby California regulators and make sure 4-MI gets removed from any enforcement of Prop 65.
The cola industry wants everybody to think its products are wholesome and natural while forgetting about the health effects of phosphoric acid, aspartame and high-fructose corn syrup. Now, with 2-methylimidazole and 4-methylimidazole in the picture, there's yet another potentially cancer-causing chemical to worry about in colas.
Obviously, 2-MI and 4-MI can be avoided by drinking non-colored soft drinks, but those still contain phosphoric acid, high-fructose corn syrup, caffeine and even aspartame in diet sodas.
It turns out, there's no such thing as a perfectly safe soda. All sodas and soft drinks carry health risks related to their ingredients. I have no doubt that this era of diabetes, obesity and cancer we're living through right now is due in large part to the widespread consumption of sodas and soft drinks.
www.naturalnews.com
(NaturalNews) The "caramel coloring" used to color all the top cola brands isn't natural caramel coloring at all. Instead, it's made by reacting sugars with ammonia and sulfites at high temperatures. This reaction results in the formation of 2-methylimidazole and 4-methylimidazole, both of which are chemicals documented by the U.S. government to cause cancer in mammals.
This is all coming to light thanks to an effort by the CSPI, which has now filed a regulatory petition to ban these chemicals from colas (http://www.cspinet.org/new/20110216...).
The National Toxicology Program has conducted animal studies on these toxic chemicals found in colas, concluding there is "clear evidence" that 2-MI and 4-MI are animal carcinogens.
The call to ban these chemicals from use in foods was joined by five carcinogenesis experts who said, "The American public should not be exposed to any cancer risk whatsoever as a result of consuming such chemicals, especially when they serve a non-essential, cosmetic purpose." (http://cspinet.org/new/pdf/experts-...)
That letter explains:
4-methylimidazole (4-MI) causes lung tumors in male and female mice and mononuclear cell leukemia in female rats. Other NTP studies found that 2-methylimidazole caused liver tumors in male and female mice, thyroid tumors in male mice, and precancerous thyroid changes in female mice. In rats, 4-MI caused an increased rate of tumors in thyroid follicular cells in females and an increased rate of hyperplasia in thyroid follicular cells in males.
Even the term "caramel coloring" is extremely misleading to consumers, because most people think it's related to caramel candy, which is made by browning sugar under heat. But the "caramel coloring" used in colas is made by exposing sugars to industrial chemicals (ammonia and sulfites), resulting in a cocktail of cancer-causing chemicals.
Coke and Pepsi products may soon bear cancer warnings in California
California's Proposition 65 law limits the consumption of 4-MI to no more than 16 micrograms per day from a single product. Yet colas contain roughly 200 micrograms of 4-MI in a 20-ounce bottle.
That's over 12 times the allowable limit under Proposition 65, and that's in every bottle! Many people drink several bottles a day, further multiplying their exposure to this potential carcinogen.
If cola companies are going to continue to sell their products in California, then, they must now carry cancer warning labels in order to be in compliance with Prop 65. You can bet that a desperate effort is now under way by the cola industry to lobby California regulators and make sure 4-MI gets removed from any enforcement of Prop 65.
The cola industry wants everybody to think its products are wholesome and natural while forgetting about the health effects of phosphoric acid, aspartame and high-fructose corn syrup. Now, with 2-methylimidazole and 4-methylimidazole in the picture, there's yet another potentially cancer-causing chemical to worry about in colas.
Obviously, 2-MI and 4-MI can be avoided by drinking non-colored soft drinks, but those still contain phosphoric acid, high-fructose corn syrup, caffeine and even aspartame in diet sodas.
It turns out, there's no such thing as a perfectly safe soda. All sodas and soft drinks carry health risks related to their ingredients. I have no doubt that this era of diabetes, obesity and cancer we're living through right now is due in large part to the widespread consumption of sodas and soft drinks.
posted by Hanan Elbadry at 5:45 PM
0 comments
US carrier transits Suez Canal: navy
(AFP)
2/17/2011
WASHINGTON — The aircraft carrier USS Enterprise has transited the Suez Canal on its way to the Gulf, the US Navy said Wednesday, raising the US military presence in a region buffeted by political unrest.
Rear Admiral Terry Craft, commander of the naval strike group, said the carrier's passage through the canal Tuesday was routine and "demonstrates the ongoing stability of this important waterway."
It came less than a week after Egypt's president Hosni Mubarak was swept from power in a wave of mass protests that continues to rock other autocratic states in the region, including Bahrain, headquarters of the US Fifth Fleet.
Thousands of protesters turned out in the pro-western kingdom of Bahrain on Wednesday chanting for regime change.
Traveling with the Enterprise were the guided missile cruiser USS Leyte Gulf and the USNS Arctic, a combat support ship.
The navy said the Enterprise would conduct "maritime security operations" and support US-led operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
A carrier group led by the USS Carl Vinson also was in Fifth Fleet's area of operations on Wednesday, in the Arabian Sea, according to the Vinson's website.
2/17/2011
WASHINGTON — The aircraft carrier USS Enterprise has transited the Suez Canal on its way to the Gulf, the US Navy said Wednesday, raising the US military presence in a region buffeted by political unrest.
Rear Admiral Terry Craft, commander of the naval strike group, said the carrier's passage through the canal Tuesday was routine and "demonstrates the ongoing stability of this important waterway."
It came less than a week after Egypt's president Hosni Mubarak was swept from power in a wave of mass protests that continues to rock other autocratic states in the region, including Bahrain, headquarters of the US Fifth Fleet.
Thousands of protesters turned out in the pro-western kingdom of Bahrain on Wednesday chanting for regime change.
Traveling with the Enterprise were the guided missile cruiser USS Leyte Gulf and the USNS Arctic, a combat support ship.
The navy said the Enterprise would conduct "maritime security operations" and support US-led operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
A carrier group led by the USS Carl Vinson also was in Fifth Fleet's area of operations on Wednesday, in the Arabian Sea, according to the Vinson's website.
posted by Hanan Elbadry at 4:43 PM
0 comments
Internet 'kill switch' bill gets a makeover
February 18, 2011 6:27 PM PST
by Declan McCullagh
news.cnet.com
A Senate proposal that has become known as the Internet "kill switch" bill was reintroduced this week, with a tweak its backers say eliminates the possibility of an Egypt-style disconnection happening in the United States.
As CNET reported last month, the 221-page bill hands Homeland Security the power to issue decrees to certain privately owned computer systems after the president declares a "national cyberemergency." A section in the new bill notes that does not include "the authority to shut down the Internet," and the name of the bill has been changed to include the phrase "Internet freedom."
"The emergency measures in our bill apply in a precise and targeted way only to our most critical infrastructure," Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said yesterday about the legislation she is sponsoring with Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn). "We cannot afford to wait for a cyber 9/11 before our government finally realizes the importance of protecting our digital resources."
But the revised wording (PDF) continues to alarm civil liberties groups and other critics of the bill, who say the language would allow the government to shut down portions of the Internet or restrict access to certain Web sites or types of content. Even former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak didn't actually "shut down" the Internet: at least at first, a trickle of connections continued.
"It still gives the president incredible authority to interfere with Internet communications," ACLU legislative counsel Michelle Richardson said today. If the Department of Homeland Security wants to pull the plug on Web sites or networks, she said, "the government needs to go to court and get a court order."
That concern was punctuated by a report yesterday that Homeland Security erroneously seized 84,000 Web domains and took them offline. Former congressman Bob Barr, now an NRA board member and newspaper columnist, wrote that the mistake shows that "no government--no matter how benign or well-meaning--should be empowered to control the Internet."
The Electronic Frontier Foundation said today that it continues to have concerns about the Lieberman-Collins bill. "The president would have essentially unchecked power to determine what services can be connected to the Internet or even what content can pass over the Internet in a cybersecurity emergency," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. "Our concerns have not changed."
Some of the companies and industry groups listed as supporting last June's version of the bill, before the protests in Egypt, the FBI's push on Internet wiretapping, and the Justice Department's campaign for Internet data retention, stopped short of endorsing the revised version.
Larry Clinton, president of the Internet Security Alliance, pointed to his letter to the Senate committee last year saying the legislation "is in need of additional refinement." Clinton said in an e-mail today that "much more needed to be done before we could support enactment."
Microsoft said it did not have a position on the legislation. "The bill language just came out, and so we really need to review it before we can provide further comment," a representative said today.
From "Protecting Cyberspace" to "Internet Freedom"
Many portions of the revised bill, also sponsored by Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), are generally uncontroversial, dealing with topics such as boosting the federal government's information security, recruiting federal "cybersecurity personnel," and funding research into secure versions of Internet protocols. (The bill previously was called the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act; as part of its makeover it's been renamed the "Cybersecurity and Internet Freedom Act.")
But all of the recent attention has been focused on the sections handing the president emergency powers. The new version follows the same process as the old one: President Obama would be given the power to "issue a declaration of a national cyberemergency." Once that happens, Homeland Security would receive sweeping new authorities, including the power to require that so-called critical companies "shall immediately comply with any emergency measure or action" decreed.
No "notice" needs to be given "before mandating any emergency measure or actions." That means a company could be added to the "critical" infrastructure list one moment, and ordered by Homeland Security to "immediately comply" with its directives the next.
The U.S. Senate's Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which Lieberman chairs, appears to believe that it's not necessary to include explicit judicial review of the president's emergency authority once exercised, believing it's implicit. Any such lawsuit filed by a targeted company would likely focus on language saying the emergency decrees should be "the least disruptive means feasible."
The president may declare a "cyberemergency" for 30 days, and extend it for one 30-day period, unless Congress votes to approve further extensions.
Homeland Security will "establish and maintain a list of systems or assets that constitute covered critical infrastructure" and that will be subject to those emergency decrees.
Homeland Security is only supposed to place a computer system (which could include a server, Web site, router, and so on) on the list if certain requirements are met. First, the disruption of the system could cause "severe economic consequences" or worse. Second, the system is "a component of the national information infrastructure," such as the Internet, or relies on that infrastructure. Third, it can't be placed on the list "based solely" on any First Amendment-protected activities.
A committee report from December says that senators hope that Homeland Security will interpret that language to include a "combination" of factors, including mass casualties or evacuations, over $25 billion in damages, or "severe degradation" of national security. The suggestion, however, appears to be nonbinding and doesn't actually appear in the legislation.
One big change: Earlier versions of the bill barred companies from filing a lawsuit objecting to being placed on that list. The revised version explicitly permits judicial review as long as the lawsuit is filed in the District of Columbia.
"A state of public peril"
A 1934 law (PDF) creating the Federal Communications Commission says that in wartime, or if a "state of public peril or disaster or other national emergency" exists, the president may "authorize the use or control of any...station or device." That could sweep in the Internet, but it's not entirely clear it does. (The revised bill says that existing authority may not be used to "shut down the Internet," but does not otherwise limit it.)
In congressional testimony (PDF) last year, the Obama administration stopped short of endorsing the Lieberman-Collins bill. The 1934 law already addresses "presidential emergency authorities, and Congress and the administration should work together to identify any needed adjustments to the act," DHS Deputy Undersecretary Philip Reitinger said, "as opposed to developing overlapping legislation."
A draft Senate proposal that CNET obtained in August 2009 authorized the White House to "declare a cybersecurity emergency," and another from Sens. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) would have explicitly given the government the power to "order the disconnection" of certain networks or Web sites. House Democrats have taken a similar approach.
In a statement, Lieberman said there's no "kill switch" in this bill.
"It is impossible to turn off the Internet in this country," he said. "This legislation applies to the most critical infrastructures that Americans rely on in their daily lives--energy transmission, water supply, financial services, for example--to ensure that those assets are protected in case of a potentially crippling cyberattack."
The ACLU's Richardson believes the problem was never a "kill switch." She said: "The question is bigger than that. It's generally, can the government interfere with communications...The question is: Are there significant protections in there?"
Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the free-market Cato Institute and a member of a Homeland Security advisory panel, says that supporters of the bill have yet to make the argument that such governmental emergency powers will do more good than harm.
"They recognize that a total Internet kill switch is totally unacceptable," Harper said today. "A smaller Internet kill switch, or a series of kill switches, is also unacceptable...How does this make cybersecurity better? They have no answer."
by Declan McCullagh
news.cnet.com
A Senate proposal that has become known as the Internet "kill switch" bill was reintroduced this week, with a tweak its backers say eliminates the possibility of an Egypt-style disconnection happening in the United States.
As CNET reported last month, the 221-page bill hands Homeland Security the power to issue decrees to certain privately owned computer systems after the president declares a "national cyberemergency." A section in the new bill notes that does not include "the authority to shut down the Internet," and the name of the bill has been changed to include the phrase "Internet freedom."
"The emergency measures in our bill apply in a precise and targeted way only to our most critical infrastructure," Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said yesterday about the legislation she is sponsoring with Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn). "We cannot afford to wait for a cyber 9/11 before our government finally realizes the importance of protecting our digital resources."
But the revised wording (PDF) continues to alarm civil liberties groups and other critics of the bill, who say the language would allow the government to shut down portions of the Internet or restrict access to certain Web sites or types of content. Even former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak didn't actually "shut down" the Internet: at least at first, a trickle of connections continued.
"It still gives the president incredible authority to interfere with Internet communications," ACLU legislative counsel Michelle Richardson said today. If the Department of Homeland Security wants to pull the plug on Web sites or networks, she said, "the government needs to go to court and get a court order."
That concern was punctuated by a report yesterday that Homeland Security erroneously seized 84,000 Web domains and took them offline. Former congressman Bob Barr, now an NRA board member and newspaper columnist, wrote that the mistake shows that "no government--no matter how benign or well-meaning--should be empowered to control the Internet."
The Electronic Frontier Foundation said today that it continues to have concerns about the Lieberman-Collins bill. "The president would have essentially unchecked power to determine what services can be connected to the Internet or even what content can pass over the Internet in a cybersecurity emergency," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. "Our concerns have not changed."
Some of the companies and industry groups listed as supporting last June's version of the bill, before the protests in Egypt, the FBI's push on Internet wiretapping, and the Justice Department's campaign for Internet data retention, stopped short of endorsing the revised version.
Larry Clinton, president of the Internet Security Alliance, pointed to his letter to the Senate committee last year saying the legislation "is in need of additional refinement." Clinton said in an e-mail today that "much more needed to be done before we could support enactment."
Microsoft said it did not have a position on the legislation. "The bill language just came out, and so we really need to review it before we can provide further comment," a representative said today.
From "Protecting Cyberspace" to "Internet Freedom"
Many portions of the revised bill, also sponsored by Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), are generally uncontroversial, dealing with topics such as boosting the federal government's information security, recruiting federal "cybersecurity personnel," and funding research into secure versions of Internet protocols. (The bill previously was called the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act; as part of its makeover it's been renamed the "Cybersecurity and Internet Freedom Act.")
But all of the recent attention has been focused on the sections handing the president emergency powers. The new version follows the same process as the old one: President Obama would be given the power to "issue a declaration of a national cyberemergency." Once that happens, Homeland Security would receive sweeping new authorities, including the power to require that so-called critical companies "shall immediately comply with any emergency measure or action" decreed.
No "notice" needs to be given "before mandating any emergency measure or actions." That means a company could be added to the "critical" infrastructure list one moment, and ordered by Homeland Security to "immediately comply" with its directives the next.
The U.S. Senate's Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which Lieberman chairs, appears to believe that it's not necessary to include explicit judicial review of the president's emergency authority once exercised, believing it's implicit. Any such lawsuit filed by a targeted company would likely focus on language saying the emergency decrees should be "the least disruptive means feasible."
The president may declare a "cyberemergency" for 30 days, and extend it for one 30-day period, unless Congress votes to approve further extensions.
Homeland Security will "establish and maintain a list of systems or assets that constitute covered critical infrastructure" and that will be subject to those emergency decrees.
Homeland Security is only supposed to place a computer system (which could include a server, Web site, router, and so on) on the list if certain requirements are met. First, the disruption of the system could cause "severe economic consequences" or worse. Second, the system is "a component of the national information infrastructure," such as the Internet, or relies on that infrastructure. Third, it can't be placed on the list "based solely" on any First Amendment-protected activities.
A committee report from December says that senators hope that Homeland Security will interpret that language to include a "combination" of factors, including mass casualties or evacuations, over $25 billion in damages, or "severe degradation" of national security. The suggestion, however, appears to be nonbinding and doesn't actually appear in the legislation.
One big change: Earlier versions of the bill barred companies from filing a lawsuit objecting to being placed on that list. The revised version explicitly permits judicial review as long as the lawsuit is filed in the District of Columbia.
"A state of public peril"
A 1934 law (PDF) creating the Federal Communications Commission says that in wartime, or if a "state of public peril or disaster or other national emergency" exists, the president may "authorize the use or control of any...station or device." That could sweep in the Internet, but it's not entirely clear it does. (The revised bill says that existing authority may not be used to "shut down the Internet," but does not otherwise limit it.)
In congressional testimony (PDF) last year, the Obama administration stopped short of endorsing the Lieberman-Collins bill. The 1934 law already addresses "presidential emergency authorities, and Congress and the administration should work together to identify any needed adjustments to the act," DHS Deputy Undersecretary Philip Reitinger said, "as opposed to developing overlapping legislation."
A draft Senate proposal that CNET obtained in August 2009 authorized the White House to "declare a cybersecurity emergency," and another from Sens. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) would have explicitly given the government the power to "order the disconnection" of certain networks or Web sites. House Democrats have taken a similar approach.
In a statement, Lieberman said there's no "kill switch" in this bill.
"It is impossible to turn off the Internet in this country," he said. "This legislation applies to the most critical infrastructures that Americans rely on in their daily lives--energy transmission, water supply, financial services, for example--to ensure that those assets are protected in case of a potentially crippling cyberattack."
The ACLU's Richardson believes the problem was never a "kill switch." She said: "The question is bigger than that. It's generally, can the government interfere with communications...The question is: Are there significant protections in there?"
Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the free-market Cato Institute and a member of a Homeland Security advisory panel, says that supporters of the bill have yet to make the argument that such governmental emergency powers will do more good than harm.
"They recognize that a total Internet kill switch is totally unacceptable," Harper said today. "A smaller Internet kill switch, or a series of kill switches, is also unacceptable...How does this make cybersecurity better? They have no answer."
posted by Hanan Elbadry at 3:03 PM
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