WH: Ben Rhodes is to Iran Deal ~ Valerie Jarrett is to Gun Control

Ban the AR-15….heh….right Val Gal…. This is a White House full of ahem….experts that think AR stands for Automatic Rifle…sheesh…The Federal ‘Assault’ Weapons ban happened in 1994.

   

Valerie Jarrett’s war on guns

Politico: Valerie Jarrett is increasingly asserting control of the administration’s campaign to curtail gun violence — and she’s not afraid of burning White House bridges with firearm manufacturers as she does it.

Even before the latest massacre in Orlando, it was Jarrett who used her influence with President Barack Obama to resurrect the push for new regulations, gun control advocates say. But since that shooting, she’s employed a more aggressive strategy than did Vice President Joe Biden, whose consensus-building efforts failed to produce new laws three years ago.

Take a recent White House bid to collaborate with weapons manufactures on so-called “smart guns,” which make it impossible for anyone other than an authorized user to fire a weapon — and should be fertile ground for a relatively non-controversial compromise.

But after 30 industry executives refused to show up for a meeting last Friday, Jarrett decided to mobilize nearly 200,000 supporters behind a new assault weapons ban, which industry vehemently opposes and would take a bestseller off the shelves. While it didn’t slam the door on further negotiations, it’s the kind of move that would make any future talks much more difficult.

With Biden dispatched in search of a cure for cancer, and Obama demanding an end to the bloodshed, Jarrett — Obama’s closest friend and conscience in the West Wing — is not just focused on measures like background checks that are much easier to sell to Congress, at least compared to an assault weapons ban. Instead, Jarrett is executing Obama’s call to “politicize” the issue during his last year in office and crank up the pressure on reluctant lawmakers.

“Please keep making your voices heard. Raise them over and over and over and over and over again,” Jarrett said on Monday in an unusual conference call, which was intended for the people who signed a “We the People” petition to ban the AR-15, but was broadcast live on YouTube for anyone to listen.

“I’ve had people say to me, ‘Well I enjoy gong to the firing range and using the assault weapons,’” Jarrett said. “But the pleasure derived from that compared to the horrendous damage that it can do, we believe that the damage warrants banning assault weapons.”

In the wake of the Orlando massacre, which involved a Sig Sauer MCX semiautomatic rifle, both Obama and Biden have made clear that, as Biden put it in his written response to the AR-15 petition, assault weapons “should be banned from civilian ownership.” But Biden focused his message to Congress on passing the background check and terror watch list bills that failed in the Senate on Monday.

Jarrett went further: “There’s no reason why Congress could not reauthorize legislation that would call for that ban.” And stoking support for the assault weapons ban with activists will likely intensify the political fight ahead of the 2016 elections.

Previously, Obama put Biden in charge of crafting the administration’s response to the December 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary shootings, and the vice president still serves a prominent role as sympathizer-in-chief. But since his effort ran aground, gun control advocates say, it’s been Jarrett who’s pushed for action over the last year despite congressional gridlock.

“As the months went by and ideas were discussed and priorities came and went, she was a constant source of influence in the building making sure that the process was moving forward,” said Peter Ambler, director at Americans for Responsible Solutions. When the group’s co-founders, former Rep. Gabby Giffords and Mark Kelly, proposed new executive actions during a January 2015 meeting with Obama and Jarrett in Phoenix, Ambler recalled, the president turned to his senior adviser to make them happen. He announced new directives to expand background checks a year later.

“I don’t think that there is an individual at the White House except for the president who can claim more responsibility for the successes of the executive actions than Valerie Jarrett,” Ambler said.

Biden isn’t completely out of the picture, though he’s increasingly turned his attention to his “Cancer Moonshot.” As the architect of the now-expired 1994 assault weapons ban and original background check bill, he’s got substantial credibility with activists, especially those driven by grief.

“I refuse to give up, we refuse to give up,” Biden said on Wednesday at a Washington fundraiser for Sandy Hook Promise, a gun violence prevention group founded by parents of the first-graders gunned down at the elementary school.

“It took me seven years to get the first ban put in place,” said Biden, who had argued that the administration should prioritize guns even before the Newtown shooting. “We should not stop.”

But as the audience waited for Biden to come to the podium, Jarrett was in the back of the room, deep in conversation, as her top aides — Paulette Aniskoff, Bess Evans and Yohannes Abraham — circulated through the crowd. It was those aides, in Jarrett’s Office of Public Engagement, who have gradually taken on the bulk of the gun portfolio over the past three years, even as they continue to collaborate with Biden’s staff.

The portfolio has been something of an orphan in the Obama administration, with no obvious point person, particularly after the legislation Biden was working on failed in April 2013, and Bruce Reed, who had run an exhaustive series of outreach and strategy sessions with gun control advocates in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, stepped down as Biden’s chief of staff in late 2013.

Jarrett brought it back into the West Wing — and out to the statehouses, advocates said, by making it a priority for the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs. In May, for example, Jarrett presided over a White House strategy session on enacting local laws to expand background checks and promote gun safety technology with elected officials from 48 states.

In his search for progress after Newtown, Biden and his staff famously met with, as he put it, “every possible stakeholder in this debate; 229 separate groups,” in just a few months. They settled on expanding background checks, a measure that’s hovered above 80 percent public approval since 2013. The bill failed in the Senate then, and an updated version failed on Monday, 56 to 44.

Meeting with ‘stakeholders’ is also a raison d’etre of Jarrett’s office.

“Part of the Valerie Jarrett portfolio is working with the many constituencies that have a stake in the issues that matter most, and one of those has become the family members of victims of shootings,” said Arkadi Gerney, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who works on gun policy.

Jarrett herself is in that category: she’s recounted how her grandfather was killed with his own gun when burglars broke into his office.

She was trying the outreach approach before a gunman killed 49 people in Orlando, when her focus was on smart guns. The administration is working to get buy-in from police for the technology, in hopes of creating a new market; earlier this month, the Department of Justice hosted law enforcement officials to talk about how smart guns might work for their departments.

Manufacturers have expressed some openness to smart guns — they could be a whole new sales category, after all — but they fear any sort of government mandate, as well as backlash from gun rights groups.

So weeks before the Orlando shooting, Jarrett and Chief of Staff Denis McDonough invited executives from about 30 gun-makers to the White House. They declined, according to an industry executive, because they perceived the invitation as “disingenuous.”

Jarrett lashed out at the gun lobby in her call.

“The NRA over the past seven and a half years has never been willing to come to the table and work with us,” she said. (Incidentally, both the industry and the NRA met with Biden and his staff in 2013, but there was no detente.)

And there’s some appetite for action on the Democratic side of the campaign trail: Hillary Clinton wants to take “weapons of war” off the streets.

But despite Jarrett’s call to resurrect a bill banning assault weapons, there’s little appetite for it in Congress. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who wrote the White House’s preferred version in 2013, hasn’t even decided to reintroduce it.

 

 

 

 

Exemptions and Waivers Rubber Stamped in DC

Anyone remember Richard Windsor…ooops Lisa Jackson at the EPA? By the way, lil miss Lisa is a Board member of the Clinton Foundation.

New Homeland Security Records Reveal Top Officials Were Exempted from Strict Ban Placed on Web-Based Personal Email Accounts Despite Heightened Security Concerns

Jeh Johnson granted special waiver on first day of official ban.
Practice Continued Even After Clinton Email Revelations.

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today announced it obtained 693 pages of Department of Homeland Security records revealing that Secretary Jeh Johnson and 28 other agency officials used government computers to access personal web-based email accounts despite an agency-wide ban due to heightened security concerns.  The documents also reveal that Homeland Security officials misled Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) when Perry specifically asked whether personal accounts were being used for official government business.

The records were obtained in response to a February 2016 court order by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia following a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit (Judicial Watch v. Department of Homeland Security (No. 1:15-cv-01772)).

The Judicial Watch lawsuit was filed in October 2015 after the Department of Homeland Security failed to comply with a July 2015 FOIA request seeking the following:

  • All requests (in any form) submitted by senior DHS officials for waivers to use personal Web-based email accounts on government-owned computers.
  • Copies of all waivers granted to senior DHS officials to use personal Web-based email accounts on government-owned computers.

Judicial Watch sought the documents following a Bloomberg News report revealing that 29 high-level Homeland Security officials, including Johnson, obtained exemptions from a February 2014 agency-wide ban on the use of web-based email systems due to increased security concerns.  The waivers were granted despite security officials’ warning of the risks of malicious attacks and data exfiltration from webmail use.

Included among the records is a February 19, 2014 memorandum from security officials at the Department of Homeland Security strongly warning: “According to the Office of the Chief Information Officer, access to webmail using DHS networks is responsible for almost half of all attempts to compromise DHS network security.  The memo explains that webmail use resulted in 14 Trojan-Horse attacks in August 2013 and 25 attacks in December 2013 on Homeland Security computer networks.

As a result, in the same memo, Department of Homeland Security officials imposed a total ban on employee use of web-based email systems:

New restrictions are being implemented that will no longer allow employee access to personal webmail sites from government computers [Emphasis added].  This action is being taken to strengthen cybersecurity and enhance protection of the Department’s computer networks.  Effective tonight, access to webmail sites like AOL, Hotmail, Comcast, Gmail, Yahoo, and other email services will be prohibited.

The records reveal that despite this strict prohibition, Johnson was given an exemption from the ban on the first day of its implementation simply because he liked to check his personal email from the office everyday.  In an April 7, 2014 email, DHS Deputy Director for Scheduling and Protocol Mary Ellen Brown wrote to DHS Chief of Staff for the Under Secretary for Management Vincent Micone: “Hi Vince – I wanted to flag that S1 [Secretary Johnson] accesses his [redacted] account every day and I didn’t know if we could add his computer to the waiver list? Let us know at your convenience. Thanks! ME”

Micone responds several minutes later: “ME, This will be done… no problem. Thanks, Vince”

The documents also reveal that on April 29, 2014, Connie LaRossa, then- director of legislative affairs for Homeland Security, was granted a waiver to use her web-based email account for official government business. The justification LaRossa used for requesting access to Yahoo email was that some congressional staffers wanted to send her “political information” that they “do not want to transmit via government mail.”

Despite LaRossa’s waiver, in an April 7, 2014, seems to contradict answers prepared Rep. Scott Perry in response to his query about the use of personal email accounts for official business, Homeland Security explicitly denied it was being done. In one question, Rep. Perry asked: “Are DHS officials permitted to maintain private email accounts that are used to conduct official business? If so, who and under what circumstances?”

Homeland Security officially responded: “To date, no requests have been approved to use a private email account for official business.”

Others Homeland Security officials included among those receiving waivers permitting them to use personal, web-based email on government computers despite the official ban included:

ANMS2 [Alejandro N. Mayorkas, deputy secretary]
Bunnell, Stevan E. [general counsel]
Chavez, Richard [director of the Office of Operations Coordination]
Gottfried, Jordan [Chief of Staff]
JCJ [Jeh Charles Johnson, secretary of Homeland Security]
Kronisch, Matthew [associate general counsel (Intelligence)]
Marrone, Christian [chief of staff]
Meyer, Jonathan [deputy general counsel]
Rosen, Paul [deputy chief of staff]
Shahoulian, David [deputy general counsel]
Silvers, Robert [deputy chief of staff]
Taylor, Francis X [undersecretary for intelligence and analysis]
Veitch, Alenandra [acting deputy assistant secretary]
Waters, Erin [director of strategic communication]

The use of personal email accounts on Homeland Security computers continued for more than a year after the official ban was put in place in April 2014, until July 2015 – over four months after revelations about Hillary Clinton’s controversial email practices.  In a July 20, 2015 email, Luke McCormack, then-Chief Information Officer of the Justice Department, ordered Jeanne Etzel, Executive Director of Homeland Security’s Next Generation Program, to “pull down” the personal “webmail” email accounts of the 29 Department of Homeland Security executives previously approved to use personal email accounts, except for that of Secretary Jeh Johnson [“S1”].

McCormack ordered this at the “DUSM’s direction.” (Deputy Undersecretary for Management, Charles Fulghum.)  This order came the same day a Bloomberg story was published regarding Homeland Security officials’ “bending the rules” on personal email use on government computers.  The next day, Secretary Johnson’s webmail access also was blocked.

“Jeh Johnson and top officials at Homeland Security put the nation’s security at risk by using personal email despite significant security issues,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “And we know now security rules were bent and broken to allow many these top Homeland officials to use ‘personal’ emails to conduct government business.  This new Obama administration email scandal is just getting started.  If the waivers were appropriate, then they wouldn’t have been dropped like a hot potato as soon as they were discovered by the media.”

Loretta Lynch Fully Opposes Obama on Gitmo

Say it isn’t so…pigs flying? Video calls between soccer or basketball games?

The Obama White House has a habit of altering assessments and reports especially noted by the CENTCOM scandal. The Obama regime also did the same with the assessment profiles of those forcibly released to other countries in an effort to close Gitmo. One such country that was betrayed by the Obama administration was Ghana. 

What is mind boggling is whether we should trust our President or the external people who are proving him wrong. According to US pundits, the said description as given by our leaders isn’t true for either of the men. Bin Atef in particular is a cause of concern. Long before his transfer, the intelligence analysts at Joint Task Force Guantanamo assessed him as a ‘high risk’ and ‘likely to pose a threat to the US, its interest and allies’. Atef is actually a fighter in Usama bin Laden’s former 55th Arab Brigade and an admitted member of the Taliban.

This is in sharp contrast to the claim by Mahama, who portrays the deal as an act of humanitarian assistance, likening the Yemeni men to non-threatening refugees who have been cleared of any involvement in terrorist activities. More here.

Those former detainees released to Uruguay were to be managed and controlled by the government under the Memorandum of Understanding and release. Well, at least one has fled, allegedly to Brazil.

Exclusive: Justice Department opposes new Obama proposal on Guantanamo

Reuters: President Barack Obama is again facing dissent from within his administration – this time from Attorney General Loretta Lynch – over his plans to shutter the Guantanamo Bay military prison, according to senior administration officials.

Lynch, a former federal prosecutor whom Obama appointed to head the Justice Department two years ago, is opposing a White House-backed proposal that would allow Guantanamo Bay prisoners to plead guilty to terrorism charges in federal court by videoconference, the officials said.

Over the past three months, Lynch has twice intervened to block administration proposals on the issue, objecting that they would violate longstanding rules of criminal-justice procedure.

In the first case, her last-minute opposition derailed a White House-initiated legislative proposal to allow video guilty pleas after nearly two months of interagency negotiations and law drafting. In the second case, Lynch blocked the administration from publicly supporting a Senate proposal to legalize video guilty pleas.

“It’s been a fierce interagency tussle,” said a senior Obama administration official, who supports the proposal and asked not to be identified.

White House officials confirmed that President Obama supports the proposal. But the president declined to overrule objections from Lynch, the administration’s top law-enforcement official.

“There were some frustrations,” said a White House official who spoke on condition of anonymity. “The top lawyer in the land has weighed in, and that was the DOJ’s purview to do that.”

If enacted into law, the Obama-backed plan would allow detained terrorism suspects who plead guilty to serve their sentences in a third-country prison, without setting foot on U.S. soil. The plan would thus sidestep a Congressional ban on transferring detainees to the United States, which has left dozens of prisoners in long-term judicial limbo in Guantanamo, the American military enclave in Cuba.

Obama has vowed to close the prison on his watch. But while he has overseen the release of some 160 men from the prison, the facility still holds 80 detainees.

The video plea plan has broad backing within the administration, including from senior State Department and Pentagon officials. A Defense Department spokesman declined to comment.

The most enthusiastic backers of the plan have been defense lawyers representing up to a dozen Guantanamo Bay detainees who are eager to extricate their clients from seemingly indefinite detention.

Republicans in Congress have opposed the president’s plans to empty the prison, on the grounds that many of the detainees are highly dangerous. But there is some bipartisan support for the proposal as well, a rarity in the Guantanamo debate.

Kevin Bishop, a spokesman for Senator Lindsey Graham, a leading Republican voice on defense and national security issues, said Graham was “intrigued” by the proposal.

While support from a Republican senator would by no means guarantee the votes needed to pass, it does give the proposal a better chance than schemes that would transfer detainees from the Cuban enclave to the United States.

Obama views the video feed proposal as a meaningful step toward closing the facility and making good on one of his earliest pledges as president, administration officials said.

 

Of the 80 prisoners remaining in Guantanamo, roughly 30 have been approved for transfer to third countries by an interagency review board. Most of those 30 men are expected to be released from Guantanamo in coming weeks, according to administration officials.

The officials said they think that as many as 10 more prisoners could be added to the approved-for-transfer list by the review board. Finally, another 10 detainees are standing trial in military commissions.

That leaves roughly 30 detainees whom the government deems too dangerous to release but unlikely to be successfully prosecuted in court. As a result, those men would likely have to be transferred to detention in the United States if the prison were closed.

Administration officials say that allowing video feeds could reduce that number to somewhere between 10 and 20. The administration believes that with such a small number of prisoners requiring transfer to the United States, it would be easier to win support for closing the facility, which is run by a staff of 2,000 military personnel.

“This is the group that gives the president the most heartburn,” said the senior administration official.

Lynch and her deputies at the Justice Department argued that the laws of criminal procedure do not allow defendants to plead guilty remotely by videoconference.

Even if Congress were to pass the law, Lynch and her aides have told the White House that federal judges may rule that such pleas are in effect involuntary, because Guantanamo detainees would not have the option of standing trial in a U.S. courtroom.

A defendant in federal court usually has the option to plead guilty or face a trial by jury. In the case of Guantanamo detainees, the only option they would likely face is to plead guilty or remain in indefinite detention.

“How would a judge assure himself that the plea is truly voluntary when if the plea is not entered, the alternative is you’re still in Gitmo?” said a person familiar with Lynch’s concerns about the proposal. “That’s the wrinkle.”

Lawyers for Guantanamo detainee Majid Khan, a 36-year-old Pakistani citizen, first proposed allowing Khan to plead guilty by videoconference in a legal memo submitted to the Department of Justice in November. In 2012, Khan confessed in military court to delivering $50,000 to Qaeda operatives who used it to carry out a truck bombing in Indonesia, and to plotting with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, on various planned strikes.

Senate investigators found internal CIA documents confirming that Khan’s CIA interrogators subjected him to forced rectal feedings. Khan’s lawyers say the experience amounted to rape. He was also water-boarded.

That treatment makes it difficult for the Department of Justice to successfully prosecute Khan in federal court, according to administration officials.

When White House officials learned that Khan and other detainees were ready to plead guilty to terrorism charges in federal court, they thought they had found a solution.

Efforts to try detainees, including Mohammed and other Sept. 11 suspects, in military tribunals at Guantanamo have bogged down over legal disputes. Only eight defendants have been fully prosecuted. Three verdicts have been overturned.

“The beauty of a guilty plea is you don’t need a trial,” said the senior administration official who supports the video plea proposal.

In February, senior Obama aides proposed pushing ahead with video guilty pleas at an interagency meeting at the White House on the closure of Guantanamo, according to officials briefed on the meeting.

Justice Department officials said they opposed video guilty pleas. Matthew Axelrod, the chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, said the proposal would violate laws of criminal procedure, according to the officials.

The meeting ended with an agreement to pursue new legislation allowing the guilty pleas, the officials said, which the Department of Justice supported.

One week later, President Obama rolled out his plan to close the prison in a nationally televised announcement from the Roosevelt Room. Obama’s plan included seeking “legislative changes … that might enable detainees who are interested in pleading guilty” in U.S. federal courts.

Administration officials spent much of the next two months drafting the new law. On a Friday afternoon in mid-April, White House staff emailed all the involved agencies with a final draft of the bill, according to the officials. The bill would be submitted to Congress the following Monday, the White House email said.

That weekend, Lynch intervened unexpectedly and said the Justice Department opposed the bill. The eleventh-hour move frustrated White House staff. Deciding again to not overrule Lynch, the White House shelved the bill.

In late May, White House officials found a sympathetic lawmaker who inserted language authorizing video pleas into the annual defense spending bill. The White House drafted a policy memo publicly supporting the proposal, which is known as a Statement of Administration Policy, or SAP.

Lynch opposed the idea, according to administration officials, sparking renewed tensions between the Justice Department and White House.

A SAP is the president’s public declaration on the substance of a bill, according to Samuel Kernell, a political science professor at the University of California at San Diego. Without one, it’s often more difficult to get lawmakers on the fence to vote the way the White House wants.

The White House again bowed to Lynch’s objections and declined to issue the SAP.

Doctors Being Slaughtered in Syria

Not only are good Syrian doctors hiding wounded patients, they are reaching out to other doctors globally for help. So, really, where are all the global human rights activists, where is their outrage?

   

In the past five years, the Syrian government has assassinated, bombed, and tortured to death almost seven hundred medical personnel, according to Physicians for Human Rights, an organization that documents attacks on medical care in war zones. (Non-state actors, including ISIS, have killed twenty-seven.) Recent headlines announced the death of the last pediatrician in Aleppo, the last cardiologist in Hama. A United Nations commission concluded that “government forces deliberately target medical personnel to gain military advantage,” denying treatment to wounded fighters and civilians “as a matter of policy.”

In response, some doctors established secret medical units to treat people injured in the crackdown. One surgeon at Aleppo University Hospital adopted the code name Dr. White. Along with three colleagues, he identified and stocked safe houses where emergency operations could be performed. Dr. White also lectured at the university’s faculty of medicine; he suspected that seven of his most promising students shared his sympathies toward the nascent uprising. Another doctor, named Noor, recruited them to join the mission. In Arabic, noor means “light,” so the group called itself Light of Life.

At night, Noor and Dr. White gave the medical students lessons via Skype, concealing their faces and voices. The goal was to teach them the principles of emergency first aid, with an emphasis on halting the bleeding from gunshot wounds. During demonstrations, the students waited in cars and vans to shuttle injured protesters to the safe houses, then disappeared. “They had to leave the house before my arrival,” Dr. White told me during a recent Skype call from Aleppo. “They could not know who this man is.”

More here.

More than 700 doctors killed in Syria war: UN

Attacks on hospitals since Syria’s war broke out five years ago have left more than 700 doctors and medical workers dead, many of them in air strikes, UN investigators said Tuesday.

The UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria also condemned horrific violations by jihadists and voiced concern that Al-Qaeda-affiliated militants may have recruited hundreds of children into their ranks.

Commission chief Paulo Pinheiro told the UN Human Rights Council that widespread, targeted aerial attacks on hospitals and clinics across Syria “have resulted in scores of civilian deaths, including much-needed medical workers.”

“More than 700 doctors and medical personnel have been killed in attacks on hospitals since the beginning of the conflict,” he said.

Pinheiro, who was presenting the commission’s latest report to the council, said attacks on medical facilities and the deaths of so many medical professionals had made access to health care in the violence-wracked country extremely difficult — and in some areas completely impossible.

– ‘Terrorised survivors’ –

“As civilian casualties mount, the number of medical facilities and staff decreases, limiting even further access to medical care,” he said.

Pinheiro also denounced frequent attacks on other infrastructure essential to civilian life, such as markets, schools and bakeries.

“With each attack, terrorised survivors are left more vulnerable,” he said, adding that “schools, hospitals, mosques, water stations … are all being turned into rubble.”

Since March 2011, Syria’s brutal conflict has left more than 280,000 people dead and forced half the population to flee their homes.

War broke out after President Bashar al-Assad’s regime unleashed a brutal crackdown against protesters demanding political change in Arab Spring-inspired protests.

It has since become a multi-front war between regime forces, jihadists and other groups with the civilian population caught in the crossfire.

Pinheiro said the commission was investigating allegations that the Al-Nusra Front “and other Al-Qaeda-affiliated groups have recruited hundreds of children under 15 in Idlib” in northwestern Syria.

The brutality of Syria’s conflict is preventing millions of children from attending school, and activists have warned this is helping fuel jihadist recruitment drives.

Pinheiro also condemned violations committed by the Islamic State group.

In a report published last week, the commission warned that IS jihadists were continuing to commit genocide against the Yazidi minority in Iraq and Syria.

In 2014, IS jihadists massacred members of the Kurdish-speaking minority mainly based around Sinjar mountain in northern Iraq, forcing tens of thousands to flee, and captured thousands of girls and women.

– ‘Stop the genocide’ –

“As we speak, Yazidi women and girls are still sexually enslaved, subjected to brutal rapes and beatings. They are bought and sold in markets, passed from fighter to fighter like chattel, their dignity being ripped from them with each passing day,” Pinheiro said Tuesday.

“Boys are taken from their mother’s care and forced into ISIS training camps once they reach the age of seven,” he said, using another acronym for IS as he called on the international community to act “to stop the genocide.”

Vian Dakhil, a Yazidi member of the Iraqi parliament, also appealed for action.

“We need the (UN) Security Council to bring this … to the International Criminal Court” in the Hague, she told reporters on the sidelines of the Human Rights Council.

Dakhil said 3,200 Yazidi women and girls are still being held by IS, while around 1,000 boys under the age of 10 are being brainwashed and prepared for battle by the jihadists.

“This is still happening,” she said. “We need help.”

Around 400,000 Yazidis are still living in camps in northern Iraq, Dakhil said, adding that they still feared returning to Sinjar to rebuild their communities, since some of their Sunni Muslim neighbours had helped IS in its attacks.

“We need to rebuild peace … and trust,” she said. More from DailyMail.

 

Russian Hackers Also Hit the Clinton Foundation

So, global adversaries came to understand early that much of the covert and diplomatic work and connections by Hillary Clinton during her term as senator and later as Secretary of State was going on in a dual location, meaning the Clinton Foundation and the U.S. State Department. So….let the hacking begin, and they did.

Now there is a question: Are there more than one servers? Evidence speaks to the answer, YES. See this item from Forbes where there are clues.

 

Records reveal that Hillary Clinton’s private clintonemail.com server shared an IP address with her husband Bill Clinton’s email server, presidentclinton.com, and both servers were housed in New York City, not in the basement of the Clintons’ Chappaqua, New York home.

Web archives show that the Presidentclinton.com Web address was being operated by the Clinton Foundation as of 2009, when Hillary Clinton registered her own clintonemail.com server.

Numerous Clinton Foundation employees used the presidentclinton.com server for their own email addresses, which means that they were using email accounts that, if hacked, would have given any hacker complete access to Hillary Clinton’s State Department emails, as well. More here.

Clinton Foundation Said to Be Breached by Russian Hackers

Bloomberg: The Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation was among the organizations breached by suspected Russian hackers in a dragnet of the U.S. political apparatus ahead of the November election, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The attacks on the foundation’s network, as well as those of the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, compound concerns about her digital security even as the FBI continues to investigate her use of a personal e-mail server while she was secretary of state.

A spokesman for the foundation, Brian Cookstra, said he wasn’t aware of any breach. The compromise of the foundation’s computers was first identified by government investigators as recently as last week, the people familiar with the matter said. Agents monitor servers used by hackers to communicate with their targets, giving them a back channel view of attacks, often even before the victims detect them.

For a primer on recent cyber intrusions, click here.

Before the Democratic National Committee disclosed a major computer breach last week, U.S. officials informed both political parties and the presidential campaigns of Clinton, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders that sophisticated hackers were attempting to penetrate their computers, according to a person familiar with the government investigation into the attacks.

The hackers in fact sought data from at least 4,000 individuals associated with U.S. politics — party aides, advisers, lawyers and foundations — for about seven months through mid-May, according to another person familiar with the investigations.

Thousands of Documents

The thefts set the stage for what could be a Washington remake of the public shaming that shook Sony in 2014, when thousands of inflammatory internal e-mails filled with gossip about world leaders and Hollywood stars were made public. Donor information and opposition research on Trump purportedly stolen from the Democratic Party has surfaced online, and the culprit has threatened to publish thousands more documents.

A hacker or group of hackers calling themselves Guccifer 2.0 posted another trove of documents purportedly from the DNC on Tuesday, including what they said was a list of donors who had made large contributions to the Clinton Foundation.

The Republican Party and the Trump campaign have been mostly silent on the computer attacks. In an earlier statement, Trump said the hack was a political ploy concocted by the Democrats.

Information about the scope of the attacks and the government warnings raises new questions about how long the campaigns have known about the threats and whether they have done enough to protect their systems.

The Clinton campaign was aware as early as April that it had been targeted by hackers with links to the Russian government on at least four recent occasions, according to a person familiar with the campaign’s computer security.

U.S. Inquiries

The U.S. Secret Service, Federal Bureau of Investigation and National Security Agency are all involved in the investigation of the theft of data from the political parties and individuals over the last several months, one of the people familiar with the investigation said. The agencies have made no public statements about their inquiry.

The FBI has been careful to keep that investigation separate from the review of Clinton’s use of private e-mail, using separate investigators, according to the person briefed on the matter. The agencies didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Clinton spokesman Glen Caplin said that he couldn’t comment on government briefings about cyber security and that the campaign had no evidence that its systems were compromised.

“We routinely communicate and cooperate with government agencies on security-related matters,” he said. “What appears evident is that the Russian groups responsible for the DNC hack are intent on attempting to influence the outcome of this election.”

The DNC wouldn’t directly address the attacks but said in a written statement that it believes the leaks are “part of a disinformation campaign by the Russians.”

Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks didn’t respond to e-mails seeking comment about the government warnings. The Republican National Committee didn’t respond to e-mail messages. A Sanders spokesman, Michael Briggs, said he wasn’t aware of the warnings.

IDing the Hackers

The government’s investigation is following a similar path as the DNC’s, including trying to precisely identify the hackers and their possible motives, according to people familiar with the investigations. The hackers’ link to the Russian government was first identified by CrowdStrike Inc., working for the Democratic Party.

A law firm reviewing the DNC’s initial findings, Baker & McKenzie, has begun working with three additional security firms — FireEye Inc., Palo Alto Networks Inc. and Fidelis Cybersecurity — to confirm the link, according to two people familiar with the matter, underscoring Democrats’ concerns that the stolen information could be used to try to influence the outcome of the November election.

A spokesman for Baker & McKenzie didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. DNC spokesman Luis Miranda said the party worked only with CrowdStrike.

If the Democrats can show the hidden hand of Russian intelligence agencies, they believe that voter outrage will probably outweigh any embarrassing revelations, a person familiar with the party’s thinking said.

So far the released documents have revealed little that is new or explosive, but that could change. Guccifer 2.0 has threatened to eventually release thousands of internal memos and other documents.

Line of Attack

Sensitive documents from the Clinton Foundation could have the most damaging potential. The Trump camp has said it plans to make the foundation’s activities a subject of attacks against Clinton; the sort of confidential data contained in e-mails, databases and other digital archives could aid that effort.

An analysis by Fidelis confirmed that groups linked to Russian intelligence agencies were behind the DNC hack, according to a published report.

The government fills a crucial gap in flagging attacks that organizations can’t detect themselves, said Tony Lawrence, a former U.S. Army cyber specialist and now chief executive officer of VOR Technology, a computer security company in Hanover, Maryland.

“These state actors spend billions of dollars on exploits to gather information on candidates, and nine times out of ten [victims] won’t be able to identify or attribute them,” he said.

Google Accounts

Bloomberg News reported Friday that the hackers who hit the DNC and Clinton’s campaign burrowed much further into the U.S. political system than initially thought, sweeping in law firms, lobbyists, consultants, foundations and policy groups in a campaign that targeted thousands of Google e-mail accounts and lasted from October through mid-May.

Data from the attacks have led some security researchers to conclude that the hackers were linked to Russian intelligence services and were broadly successful in stealing reports, policy papers, correspondence and other information. Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for President Vladimir Putin, denied that the Russian government was involved.

Russia uses sophisticated “information operations” to advance foreign policy, and the target audience for this kind of mission wouldn’t be U.S. voters or even U.S. politicians, said Brendan Conlon, who once led a National Security Agency hacking unit.

“Why would Russia go to this trouble? Simple answer — because it met their foreign policy objectives, to weaken the U.S. in the eyes of our allies and adversaries,” said Conlon, now CEO of Vahna Inc., a cyber security firm in Washington. Publishing the DNC report on Trump “weakens both candidates — lists out all the weaknesses of Trump specifically while highlighting weaknesses of Clinton’s security issues. The end result is a weaker president once elected.”

Russia Link

Russia has an expansive cyber force that it has deployed in complex disinformation campaigns throughout Europe, according to intelligence officials.

BfV, the German intelligence agency, has concluded that Russia was responsible for a 2015 hack against the Bundestag that forced shutdown of its computer systems for several days. Germany is under “permanent threat” from Russian hackers, said BfV chief Hans-Georeg Maassen.

Security software maker Trend Micro said in May that Russian hackers had been trying for several weeks to steal data from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union party, and that they also tried to hack the Dutch Safety Board computer systems to obtain an advance copy of a report on the downing of a Malaysian aircraft over Ukraine in July 2014. The report said the plane was brought down by a Russian-made Buk surface-to-air missile.

The cyber attacks are part of a broader pattern of state-sponsored hacking by Russia focused on political targets, with a goal of giving Russia the upper hand in dealing with other governments, said Pasi Eronen, a Helsinki-based cyber warfare researcher who has advised Finland’s Defense Ministry.