Biden Going Agency by Agency and Undoing Trump’s Rescission Orders

First, Charles Payne announced that President Biden has rerouted $30 billion in the Farmers Fund under President Trump to climate change. The fund that President Trump established was to be used on agricultural trade issues if needed to protect farmers. Biden has designated it for climate change.

The Biden administration wants to use the Agriculture Department money to tackle climate change, support restaurants and kickstart other programs without waiting for Congress. Go here for the report.

Long hidden in obscurity as a Depression-era financial institution, the Commodity Credit Corp. is shaping up as one of the first focal points for how the Biden administration is quickly revamping flexible programs left behind by former President Donald Trump.

Before the Trump era, the CCC was used in narrow ways to support farm income and prices, like helping cotton growers with ginning costs and purchasing cheese to boost dairy farmers. It’s also used to fund certain conservation programs, foreign market development, export credit and commodity purchases.

It became a signature tool in the last administration, which used it to dole out billions in aid to farmers suffering from Trump’s trade wars and tariffs. It was also dipped into to provide financial relief to farmers hit by the pandemic.The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) will use funds being made available from the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) Charter Act and CARES Act to support row crops, livestock, specialty crops, dairy, aquaculture and many additional commodities. USDA has incorporated improvements in CFAP 2 based from stakeholder engagement and public feedback to better meet the needs of impacted farmers and ranchers.Farm Subsidies In America with Pros, Cons, and Impact

The Biden Executive Order is here. 

As for the other agencies:

President Biden on Sunday formally revoked his predecessor’s effort to rescind $27 billion in funding spread across two-dozen federal agencies, unfreezing the money for immediate expenditure.

Just days before he left office, President Trump issued a rescission request under the 1974 Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act. Trump had warned he would issue such a proposal when he signed the fiscal 2021 omnibus spending package in December, which narrowly averted a shutdown. His request triggered a 45-day freeze on the funds, which Biden lifted in his Sunday action.

The previous White House, which noted the rescission package was the largest ever proposed, identified the funds as “wasteful and unnecessary spending” and amounts “no longer needed for the purposes for which they were appropriated.” It focused largely on international aid efforts through the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development, but the 73 targeted programs also included those related to climate research, federal student aid and renewable energy.

The 1974 rescission law allows the president to propose to rescind funding previously approved by Congress. Lawmakers have 45 days to consider the request and if they do not act to support the rescissions during that window, the request is denied. The Office of Management and Budget can direct agencies not to spend the funding proposed for rescission for the entire 45-day period, regardless of when Congress acts. The Trump White House briefly floated a rescission in 2019 less than 45 days before the end of the fiscal year, which critics derided as illegal as it would have enabled the administration to freeze out funds from ever being spent. That followed a 2018 effort to rescind $15 billion in largely foreign aid funding, which the House approved but was narrowly rejected by the Senate.

The most recent rescission package, where funds are now unfrozen, included accounts within the following departments and agencies:

  • Agriculture
  • Commerce
  • Education
  • Energy
  • Health and Human Services
  • Homeland Security
  • Interior
  • Justice
  • Labor
  • State
  • Treasury
  • African Development Foundation
  • Commission of Fine Arts
  • Corporation for National and Community Service
  • District of Columbia
  • Environmental Protection Agency
  • Inter-American Foundation
  • Millennium Challenge Corporation
  • National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities
  • National Gallery of Art
  • Peace Corps
  • Presidio Trust
  • U.S. Agency for International Development
  • Army Corps of Engineers
  • Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
  • Legislative Branch

Twitter Being Sued for Refusing to Remove Child Pornography

In short, child pornography does not violate their terms of use policies. While you’re at it…check out Facebook Messenger or any of the other platforms that are encrypted.

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The 70 page lawsuit is found here.

Twittergate: Massive child porn rings revealed on Twitter ...

source and TwitterGate

 

NYP:

Twitter refused to take down widely shared pornographic images and videos of a teenage sex trafficking victim because an investigation “didn’t find a violation” of the company’s “policies,” a scathing lawsuit alleges.

The federal suit, filed Wednesday by the victim and his mother in the Northern District of California, alleges Twitter made money off the clips, which showed a 13-year-old engaged in sex acts and are a form of child sexual abuse material, or child porn, the suit states.

The teen — who is now 17 and lives in Florida — is identified only as John Doe and was between 13 and 14 years old when sex traffickers, posing as a 16-year-old female classmate, started chatting with him on Snapchat, the suit alleges.

Doe and the traffickers allegedly exchanged nude photos before the conversation turned to blackmail: If the teen didn’t share more sexually graphic photos and videos, the explicit material he’d already sent would be shared with his “parents, coach, pastor” and others, the suit states.

Doe, acting under duress, initially complied and sent videos of himself performing sex acts and was also told to include another child in his videos, which he did, the suit claims.

Eventually, Doe blocked the traffickers and they stopped harassing him, but at some point in 2019, the videos surfaced on Twitter under two accounts that were known to share child sexual abuse material, court papers allege.

Over the next month, the videos would be reported to Twitter at least three times — first on Dec. 25, 2019 — but the tech giant failed to do anything about it until a federal law enforcement officer got involved, the suit states.

Doe became aware of the tweets in January 2020 because they’d been viewed widely by his classmates, which subjected him to “teasing, harassment, vicious bullying” and led him to become “suicidal,” court records show.

While Doe’s parents contacted the school and made police reports, he filed a complaint with Twitter, saying there were two tweets depicting child pornography of himself and they needed to be removed because they were illegal, harmful and were in violation of the site’s policies.

A support agent followed up and asked for a copy of Doe’s ID so they could prove it was him and after the teen complied, there was no response for a week, the family claims.

Around the same time, Doe’s mother filed two complaints to Twitter reporting the same material and for a week, she also received no response, the suit states.

Finally on Jan. 28, Twitter replied to Doe and said they wouldn’t be taking down the material, which had already racked up over 167,000 views and 2,223 retweets, the suit states.

“Thanks for reaching out. We’ve reviewed the content, and didn’t find a violation of our policies, so no action will be taken at this time,” the response reads, according to the lawsuit.

“If you believe there’s a potential copyright infringement, please start a new report. If the content is hosted on a third-party website, you’ll need to contact that website’s support team to report it. Your safety is the most important thing, and if you believe you are in danger, we encourage you to contact your local authorities.”

In his response, published in the complaint, Doe appeared shocked.

“What do you mean you don’t see a problem? We both are minors right now and were minors at the time these videos were taken. We both were 13 years of age. We were baited, harassed, and threatened to take these videos that are now being posted without our permission. We did not authorize these videos AT ALL and they need to be taken down,” the teen wrote back to Twitter.

He even included his case number from a local law enforcement agency, but still the tech giant allegedly ignored him and refused to do anything about the illegal child sexual abuse material — as it continued to rack up more and more views.

Two days later, Doe’s mom was connected with an agent from the Department of Homeland Security through a mutual contact who successfully had the videos removed on Jan. 30, the suit states.

“Only after this take-down demand from a federal agent did Twitter suspend the user accounts that were distributing the CSAM and report the CSAM to the National Center on Missing and Exploited Children,” states the suit, filed by the National Center on Sexual Exploitation and two law firms.

“This is directly in contrast to what their automated reply message and User Agreement state they will do to protect children.”

The disturbing lawsuit goes on to allege Twitter knowingly hosts creeps who use the platform to exchange child porn material and profits from it by including ads interspersed between tweets advertising or requesting the material.

Early Thursday, Twitter declined comment to The Post but later in the day, reversed course and sent a statement by email.

“Twitter has zero-tolerance for any material that features or promotes child sexual exploitation. We aggressively fight online child sexual abuse and have heavily invested in technology and tools to enforce our policy, a Twitter spokesperson wrote.

“Our dedicated teams work to stay ahead of bad-faith actors and to ensure we’re doing everything we can to remove content, facilitate investigations, and protect minors from harm — both on and offline.”

Biden Leaving Troops in Afghanistan Past the May Deadline

For many many months, the Trump administration was negotiating a peace deal with the Taliban. Frankly, all that the Taliban has agreed to, they have violated. Trump also issued a schedule to lower troop levels in Afghanistan to only a small tight residual number in May of 2021 along with contractors. With the new possible threat(s) of the Taliban and their growing connection to al Qaeda, Biden has decided to leave troop levels in the region at the present level with an increase in Syria and possibly Iraq. All the while, Iran just hosted a Taliban leader for talks where the topic(s) are unknown. Further, Taliban officials have been meeting in Moscow with Russian officials. Those details are found here. 

President Biden also has another immediate issue before him and that is the release of a U.S. contractor that went missing in Afghanistan about a year ago. Mark Frerichs, a navy veteran went missing about a year ago while he was working as a contractor on an engineering project. It is thought he is in the custody of the Haqqani network. The U.S. State Department is offering a $5 million reward that leads to Frerichs’ return. 

So, it is rather fitting that just this week, a very old FOIA request for former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld documents have been released. Frankly, the questions which were referred to at the Pentagon as ‘snowflakes’ reflects his frustration of the layers of bureaucracy  within the Department of Defense and his anger at getting real answers and challenging the quality of intelligence reports. Sound familiar? It is clearly a problem that after 20+ years has not found a quality solution. Just read a few of his snowflakes and judge for your self.

***Donald H. Rumsfeld - U.S. PRESIDENTIAL HISTORY

35 of the most notable items from the new collection is below from the National Archives. 

A follow-on DNSA publication covering the rest of Rumsfeld’s tenure as secretary will appear through ProQuest later in 2021.

One such snowflake was written on March 3, 2003. At 8:16 AM, Rumsfeld wrote to Senior Military Assistant LTG Bantz J. Craddock and Department of Defense General Counsel William Haynes with the subject “KSM”. He wanted to know, “Do we know where the information to find Khalid Sheikh Mohammed came from? Was it from GTMO detainees?” There is no response from either Craddock or Haynes in the DOD release to the Archive, though Rumsfeld’s question is likely a push back to the false claims made by CIA Director George Tenet that the Agency’s resort to torture of Abu Zubaydah led to the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence torture report would later reveal that key intelligence on KSM as the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks came from the FBI’s non-coercive, rapport-building interrogation of Abu Zubaydah.[1] This success was prior to the CIA’s contract psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, taking over the interrogation at the CIA “Detention Site Green” in Thailand, which was created to house Zubaydah in 2002.  Their approach to Zubaydah would include 83 water board sessions yet fail to produce any valuable intelligence.  CIA clandestine services chief Jose Rodriguez (and perhaps Gina Haspel, who would later become DCI, though CIA redactions of documents continue to obscure her role) ordered the destruction of the torture videotapes, commenting that “the heat from destoying [sic] is nothing compared to what it would be if the tapes ever got into public domain.”

Later on March 3, under the subject “Contingencies”, Rumsfeld wrote to Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith, stating, “We need to plan what we will do if Saddam Hussein is captured. We need to plan what we will do if we catch an imposter.” There is no record of Feith’s answer in the DOD release to the Archive.

Throughout Rumsfeld’s tenure, his snowflakes circulated daily through the highest levels of the Pentagon. With scant limitations on their subject matter, the all-encompassing documents are sometimes an hourly paper trail inside the Office of the Secretary of Defense during six years of tremendous consequence for U.S. foreign policy. The declassified documents also provide an account that at times contradicts DOD public statements.  For example, The Washington Post published a selection of the memos in the six part series “The Afghanistan Papers” in September 2019 revealing that officials misled the American public about the war in Afghanistan.

The entire corpus of snowflakes also details many aspects of the day-to-day operations of the Pentagon, the modernization of the U.S. armed forces, and Rumsfeld’s personal agenda against bureaucracy. “Bureaucracy is driving people nuts,” he wrote in an April 8, 2002, memo at 7:41AM. “If we can take two or three layers out of this place, we will be a lot better off.” In a separate April 8 letter, the secretary suggested cutting all major Pentagon programs by at least 20 percent. (The DOD budget increased by 37.54 percent between FY2001 and FY2006.) On March 11, 2002, Rumsfeld wrote to colleagues, “I am getting tired of seeing the word ‘joint’ everywhere.”

Rumsfeld, Snowflake by Snowflake - Open Source with ...

Other topics in the collection include:

  • the military budgeting process and efforts to rein in defense spending;
  • military planning, procurement, and expenditures;
  • nuclear issues – weapons, proliferation, safety;
  • decision making on military wages, benefits, tours of duty, and veterans issues;
  • military intelligence;
  • Defense Department relations with the CIA and Homeland Security;
  • Rumsfeld’s relations with the State Department and National Security Council;
  • U.S. relations with NATO;
  • U.S. military relations with Russia, former Soviet republics, and other countries;
  • Rumsfeld’s interactions with the news media, Congress, and the public;
  • Guantanamo detainees, interrogation, and torture;
  • concerns about the International Criminal Court and U.S. liability for war crimes;
  • the hunt for Osama bin Laden and other terrorists;
  • the Joint Strike Fighter program; and
  • the emergency landing of a U.S. EP-3 at Hainan Island in 2001

Donald Rumsfeld’s Snowflakes, Part 1: The Pentagon and U.S. Foreign Policy, 2001-2003 will be a critical research tool for historians and will be available through many college and research libraries. Part II, which covers the last three years of Rumsfeld’s tenure as secretary of defense from 2004 to 2006, will be published in 2021. Learn more about accessing the Digital National Security Archive through your library online and how to request a free trial here.

 

March 11, 2002
April 8, 2002
September 12, 2003
October 23, 2003

A few more:

October 10, 2001
Rumsfeld requests a daily report on the location of Osama bin Laden.

 

November 8, 2001
Rumsfeld inquires: “Why doesn’t Pakistan sever its relationship with [sic] Taliban?”

 

November 29, 2001
Rumsfeld accuses career employees in the OSD of undermining his decisions and working too slowly.

 

January 5, 2002
Rumsfeld complains to George Tenet about the CIA.

 

February 15, 2002
Rumsfeld directs his staff to develop a white paper on detainees and the Geneva Conventions.

 

March 11, 2002
Rumsfeld suggests further classification review of the already pre-reviewed Annual Report to the President and the Congress.

 

March 11, 2002
Rumsfeld says the DOD annual report is not conclusive or upbeat enough.

 

March 12, 2002
Rumsfeld recounts his conversation with Russian MoD Sergei Ivanov at a Washington Wizards basketball game.

 

March 14, 2002
Rumsfeld asks how to fix the requirements process.

 

March 16, 2002
Rumsfeld inquiries into U.S. nuclear policy.

 

March 26, 2002
Under the subject “Business As Usual”, Rumsfeld questions whether the Department should cut educational programs while at war.

 

March 28, 2002
Rumsfeld pushes to lift restrictions on contractors providing force protection.

 

March 28, 2002
Rumsfeld proposes a weekly meeting on Afghanistan, stating that it is “drifting”.

April 3, 2002
Rumsfeld’s thoughts on the Middle East.

 

April 8, 2002
Rumsfeld instructs his staff to create a list of all the major “processes” at the Pentagon and shorten them by atleast 20 percent.

 

April 9, 2002
Rumsfeld expresses concern about a “zero defect mentality” in promotion process.

 

 

April 12, 2002
Rumsfeld ruminates on the creation of a new Homeland Security Department.

 

April 15, 2002
Rumsfeld details a conversation with Henry Kissinger about the ICC.

 

April 15, 2002
Rumsfeld contacts Tenet about the ICC.

 

April 23, 2002
Rumsfeld considers possibly renegotiating a Russia-NATO arrangement.

 

April 23, 2002
Rumsfeld proposes using contractors to train the Afghan army.

 

April 23, 2002
Rumsfeld asks if a DOD chart of the PPB system is a joke, or whether it should be.

 

May 5, 2002
Rumsfeld tells Hank Crumpton to “speak up”.

 

May 22, 2002
Rumsfeld circulates a letter comparing interrogation techniques in Afghanistan to Guantanamo.

 

August 8, 2002
Rumsfeld questions whether it is right for pilots to use amphetamines.

 

August 17, 2002
Rumsfeld ruminates on the U.S. and Western Europe “stopping proliferation, reducing weapons of mass destruction and contrubitng to peace and stability” around the world.

 

August 19, 2002
Rumsfeld addresses the President, Vice President, CIA Director, and National Security Advisor on U.S. policy towards Iran and North Korea.

 

October 1, 2002
Rumsfeld sends handwritten notes from an interview with a detainee to Fieth.

 

March 3, 2003
Rumsfeld requests a contingency plan for the possibility of capturing an imposter of Saddam Hussein.

 

March 3, 2003
Rumsfeld contacts Tenet about the intelligence that led to capturing KSM.

 

March 26, 2003
Rumsfeld requests material to brief the President privately on a post-Saddam Iraq.