CIA Haspel Confirmation: Sen. Warner and Harris can GTH

The open session in the Senate for the confirmation of Gina Haspel to be the new Director of CIA quickly became a contest between Democrats in the committee on who maintained the higher moral authority all at the expense of Gina Haspel. Countless questions were asked in various forms on the enhanced interrogation techniques, torture and the destruction by Jose Rodriguez of the video tapes on an interrogation session with one al Qaeda detainee.

Remember, it is the Democrat party that is good with abortion, late term abortion that is when a fetus can live and thrive outside the womb. Death versus waterboarding…humm and by the way, not one Democrat mentioned that the Army Field Manual included waterboarding and that during SERE training, our military personnel are waterboarded.

The CIA does not do interrogations, it is contracted out to professionals. Document below as explained by an interrogator.

 

An Interrogator Breaks His Silence by J. Swift (TWS) on Scribd

At the end of the open confirmation session, Senator Burr asked Gina Haspel to explain who Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abd al Rahim al Nashiri were. She responded in detail.

Un tribunal militar de EEUU ultima el juicio al cerebro ... photo

On the matter of al Nashiri, below is a fact that should tell you the reader just how twisted things get regarding the war on terror. Enter Navy Lt. Alaric Piette and al Nashiri. Everyone deserves a lawyer, but c’mon.

The bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen was concocted by al Nashiri along with Fahd al Quso and Jamal al Badawi.

*** Attorney Navy Lt. Alaric Piette, with his SEAL trident topping his uniform, at the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, on Nov. 3, 2017.Attorney Navy Lt. Alaric Piette, with his SEAL trident topping his uniform, at the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, on Nov. 3, 2017. Carol Rosenberg

2017:

After suicide bombers attacked the USS Cole 17 years ago, this young Navy SEAL from Wisconsin would have gladly risked his life on a mission to snatch someone suspected of plotting the attack that killed 17 U.S. sailors.

Now, the former SEAL sits in the war court with the man accused of orchestrating the bombing that killed his shipmates. And Navy Lt. Alaric Piette, 39, is navigating a different kind of treacherous assignment.

Piette, a lawyer for just five years, is the lone attorney in court representing Saudi captive Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, whose long-serving death-penalty defender and two other civilian lawyers quit the case over a clandestine ethical conflict. So across two weeks of court hearings, Piette has answered the trial judge’s instruction to litigate by arguing that until a new capital defender is found, the case cannot go on.

“When military attorneys are assigned to these cases, people just expect us to go along and roll over. And I’m not going to,” Piette said in an interview at the end of a week in which the judge sentenced the Marine general overseeing the defense teams to 21 days confinement for letting Nashiri’s civilian lawyers quit.

Piette was one of the last military attorneys hired on the team led by Rick Kammen, the 71-year-old capital defense attorney from Indiana who for years led a constantly changing cast of military lawyers with a kangaroo pin on his lapel to express his contempt for the war court system.

Their courtroom style is a study in contrasts.

Where Kammen wore a kangaroo pin, Piette wears the coveted trident of a SEAL, the elite Navy unit whose slogan is “the only easy day was yesterday.”

Where Kammen was confrontational in both words and attire, Piette has been nothing but courteous, even as he has explained again and again that he must sit mute alongside Nashiri, litigate no motions and question no witnesses until a qualified death-penalty defense attorney arrives in court.

Nashiri, 52, is accused of orchestrating al-Qaida’s Oct. 12, 2000, bombing of the Cole while it was on a resupply mission off Aden, Yemen. Two men pulled alongside in an explosives-laden skiff, ostensibly to collect the ship’s garbage, then blew themselves up.

Nashiri was captured in Dubai in 2002 and held for four years in the CIA’s Black Sites, where he was waterboarded, rectally abused and subjected to other torture techniques. He was first charged at Guantánamo in 2011, five years after his arrival. All those circumstances have caused delays in getting him to trial.

After a clearly frustrated lead prosecutor Mark Miller fired off an invective against defense lawyers — accusing the Marine general in charge of “obstruction” and the civilian attorneys of adopting a “scorched-earth strategy,” and calling Piette “a potted plant defense” — the soft-spoken Navy lieutenant responded with this:

“What I am asking — the only reason I’m up here now — is to ask the courts, when they’re looking at this on the record, to look deeply and without the hats of cynicism and understand that everybody here cares about justice and getting to the truth.”

Kammen spent years overtly salting the record with asides for a post-conviction appeal in civilian courts. With that remark, Piette did the same.

The contrast doesn’t end there. Kammen started practicing law seven years before Piette was born in Wisconsin to a family of Belgian ancestry. Kammen says he has defended about 40 capital cases, none ending in a death sentence, and has never voluntarily left one before. Kammen handled his first capital case before Piette was in first grade.

Piette has worked on none.

But on one issue they are in agreement: Something secret has gone on at the prison to make it impossible for any defense attorney to trust in the confidentiality of privileged attorney-client conversations. And because it’s classified, neither Nashiri nor the public can know precisely what it is.

Piette says he has the same ethical conflict as the three lawyers who quit: He can’t carry on confidential conversations with Nashiri, and can’t provide the Saudi with a classified explanation. But he has stayed on the case in part because, as a military attorney, it took him longer to get an ethics opinion through Navy channels. By then, Kammen and fellow civilian defenders Rosa Eliades and Mary Spears had all resigned.

“The only reason I think I can stay on right now is because I view my scope of representation as limited solely to getting him a learned counsel, and making sure that his rights aren’t violated while he doesn’t have learned counsel,” Piette said. “I am not representing him on substantive matters for the trial.”

Now, he said, he has a duty to represent Nashiri — not by arguing motions or filing new pleadings but by helping him find capital counsel.

Only after that person is found, gets top secret clearances, reads the record, and finds out about the classified confidentiality problem, might that attorney decide whether he or she is ethically bound to quit the case as well.

The trial judge, Air Force Col. Vance Spath, meantime has been hearing from witnesses on potential trial evidence — basic litigation, as the judge sees it, that any lawyer with court-martial experience can handle.

“Death is different,” says Piette. Last week he responded to every opportunity to argue or cross-examine witnesses by saying the defense has no position because no learned counsel is in court. Spath, who at one point considered holding Piette in contempt, replied on Friday: “There is a position and a strategic decision from the defense and the defense community.”

Three more military defense attorneys are waiting in the wings — two from the Air Force, the other a Marine. None is death-penalty qualified. But, to Spath’s annoyance, Piette sits there alone.

“I think Colonel Spath, whom I have a lot of respect for, is in a bad position,” Piette said, explaining that the Manual for Military Commissions gives the chief defense counsel authority to hire and fire. That authority exists in “no other court in the United States,” he said.

In other U.S. courts an attorney of record must go before a judge to be released from a case. Spath argues his power is the same.

So much so that, after Marine Brig. Gen. John Baker, the chief defense counsel for military commissions, refused to return Kammen and the other civilian attorneys to the case, the judge found the general in contempt of the war court and ordered him confined to his quarters in a trailer park behind the court for 21 days. A senior Pentagon official suspended that sentence after 48 hours.

Piette got to the case in April and only got a clearance to begin seeing classified material in June.

But he said that even while he was a junior lawyer representing sailors accused of housing allowance fraud, he followed Guantánamo’s USS Cole case. Navy colleagues and mentors had served as defense attorneys at the military commissions.

Tom Clancy novels, Michael Bay movies and a shadowy terrorist named Osama bin Laden drew him to the SEALs from high school, Piette said. By his account, he didn’t really know anything about al-Qaida but from the news, but he was well aware of the “audacious” Feb. 26, 1993, first World Trade Center bombing and enlisted four years later.

After six months of indoctrination and Basic Underwater Demolition SEALS training, he was assigned to SEAL Team Two.

“I had joined the Navy because I thought there was this covert war on terror going on,” he said. “I thought it was clear, if they’re willing to do that, they’re not going to stop. So we must be fighting this war out there, that’s a secret nobody knows about. And I wanted to be part of that; thought that would be cool.”

He felt that even more so after the bombing of the USS Cole. “I thought after the Cole happened that we were going to go to war and start doing the things I came in to do. We didn’t. Not until after September 11th.”

Piette says that he never saw combat as a SEAL and never fired a shot outside training, and his missions were mostly “recons” and the occasional “snatch and grab” in Kosovo, a hot area of commando activity at the time. He didn’t know much about who the targets were, but says he believes they were mostly weapons smugglers who were ultimately let go.

Had his team been ordered to snatch someone suspected of being the USS Cole bomber, Piette “would’ve been happy to do it,” he said. “Whoever did this killed my fellow sailors. I would’ve been eager to do it.

“I actually had to have a friend talk me down about my anger about the issue. He said, ‘Look, it’s upsetting but at the same time that’s why we’re here, that’s why we wear the uniform. So we’re the targets.’ ”

Truth be told, he said, had a target ever been identified for a snatch-and grab, that assignment would have no doubt gone to SEAL Team Six, the best of the best. But none was.

It was only after he left the Navy, got a bachelor’s degree at Old Dominion University and went on to study law at Georgetown that he began to think hard about defendants and due process.

He said he studied law “intending to become rich,” and pay for his degree. But at a Georgetown legal clinic he found his calling in criminal defense. If the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia had accepted his application, he said, he never would have turned to the Navy Judge Advocate General’s Corps.

In his five years as a naval officer, he has tried 15 cases to court martial verdict. Probably the most serious crime he handled was a sailor accused of attempted murder. Piette, who got it reduced to battery, called it classic prosecution overcharging.

But he says he’s learned a lot from his clients — about human struggle and consequences — and to distrust career prosecutors, whom he describes as “often arrogant and smug.”

“Prosecutors tend to be so judgmental and dismissive of these human beings and think that people make out these well thought-out deliberate choices. It’s just people, living.”

Now the lone defense lawyer in court, he said his time as a SEAL is serving him well. “Sometimes I miss parts of it but I’ve found my calling as a criminal defense lawyer.” Being in the teams taught him “the paramount importance of disciplined and thorough preparation.”

It sounds nerdy, perhaps dull — not exactly fodder for an action thriller. But this is a man who points to his favorite part of the SEAL code as this: “Excel as warriors through discipline and innovation.”

 

 

 

Eric Schneiderman/Harvey Weinstein and Sexual Abuse?

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Eric Schneiderman is the current Attorney General of New York. And already Governor Cuomo is calling for his resignation. Schneiderman has joined 8 other AG’s against Scott Pruitt at the EPA over applying limited science on decisions made on public health and the environment. Schneiderman has also made it a personal and professional challenge to take down Donald Trump as the leader of the resistance. Hillary is sitting on the sidelines at the moment.

Schneiderman also worked diligently of the case involving Trump University where it appears a settlement was reached.

Okay so hold on for this story, breaking all over this Monday night.

Eric Schneiderman Is Still Seeking Justice for the ...

The New Yorker: Eric Schneiderman, New York’s attorney general, has long been a liberal Democratic champion of women’s rights, and recently he has become an outspoken figure in the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment. As New York State’s highest-ranking law-enforcement officer, Schneiderman, who is sixty-three, has used his authority to take legal action against the disgraced film mogul Harvey Weinstein, and to demand greater compensation for the victims of Weinstein’s alleged sexual crimes. Last month, when the Times and this magazine were awarded a joint Pulitzer Prize for coverage of sexual harassment, Schneiderman issued a congratulatory tweet, praising “the brave women and men who spoke up about the sexual harassment they had endured at the hands of powerful men.” Without these women, he noted, “there would not be the critical national reckoning under way.”

Now Schneiderman is facing a reckoning of his own. As his prominence as a voice against sexual misconduct has risen, so, too, has the distress of four women with whom he has had romantic relationships or encounters. They accuse Schneiderman of having subjected them to nonconsensual physical violence. All have been reluctant to speak out, fearing reprisal. But two of the women, Michelle Manning Barish and Tanya Selvaratnam, have talked to The New Yorker on the record, because they feel that doing so could protect other women. They allege that he repeatedly hit them, often after drinking, frequently in bed and never with their consent. Manning Barish and Selvaratnam categorize the abuse he inflicted on them as “assault.” They did not report their allegations to the police at the time, but both say that they eventually sought medical attention after having been slapped hard across the ear and face, and also choked. Selvaratnam says that Schneiderman warned her he could have her followed and her phones tapped, and both say that he threatened to kill them if they broke up with him. (Schneiderman’s spokesperson said that he “never made any of these threats.”)

A third former romantic partner of Schneiderman’s told Manning Barish and Selvaratnam that he also repeatedly subjected her to nonconsensual physical violence, but she told them that she is too frightened of him to come forward. (The New Yorker has independently vetted the accounts that they gave of her allegations.) A fourth woman, an attorney who has held prominent positions in the New York legal community, says that Schneiderman made an advance toward her; when she rebuffed him, he slapped her across the face with such force that it left a mark that lingered the next day. She recalls screaming in surprise and pain, and beginning to cry, and says that she felt frightened. She has asked to remain unidentified, but shared a photograph of the injury with The New Yorker.

In a statement, Schneiderman said, “In the privacy of intimate relationships, I have engaged in role-playing and other consensual sexual activity. I have not assaulted anyone. I have never engaged in nonconsensual sex, which is a line I would not cross.”

Manning Barish was romantically involved with Schneiderman from the summer of 2013 until New Year’s Day in 2015. Selvaratnam was with him from the summer of 2016 until the fall of 2017. Both are articulate, progressive Democratic feminists in their forties who live in Manhattan. They work and socialize in different circles, and although they have become aware of each other’s stories, they have only a few overlapping acquaintances; to this day, they have never spoken to each other. Over the past year, both watched with admiration as other women spoke out about sexual misconduct. But, as Schneiderman used the authority of his office to assume a major role in the #MeToo movement, their anguish and anger grew.

In February, four months after the first stories about Weinstein broke, Schneiderman announced that his office was filing a civil-rights suit against him. At a press conference, he denounced Weinstein, saying, “We have never seen anything as despicable as what we’ve seen right here.” On May 2nd, at the direction of Governor Andrew Cuomo, Schneiderman launched an investigation into the past handling of criminal complaints against Weinstein by the Manhattan District Attorney, Cyrus Vance, Jr., and the New York City Police Department. (In 2015, Vance declined to bring criminal charges against Weinstein, saying that he lacked sufficient evidence—a decision criticized by activist groups.) In a speech, Cuomo explained that “sexual-assault complaints must be pursued aggressively, and to the fullest extent of the law.” The expanding investigation of the Weinstein case puts Schneiderman at the center of one of the most significant sexual-misconduct cases in recent history.

Schneiderman’s activism on behalf of feminist causes has increasingly won him praise from women’s groups. On May 1st, the New York-based National Institute for Reproductive Health honored him as one of three “Champions of Choice” at its annual fund-raising luncheon. Accepting the award, Schneiderman said, “If a woman cannot control her body, she is not truly equal.” But, as Manning Barish sees it, “you cannot be a champion of women when you are hitting them and choking them in bed, and saying to them, ‘You’re a fucking whore.’ ” She says of Schneiderman’s involvement in the Weinstein investigation, “How can you put a perpetrator in charge of the country’s most important sexual-assault case?” Selvaratnam describes Schneiderman as “a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” figure, and says that seeing him lauded as a supporter of women has made her “feel sick,” adding, “This is a man who has staked his entire career, his personal narrative, on being a champion for women publicly. But he abuses them privately. He needs to be called out.”

Manning Barish notes that many of her friends attended the N.I.R.H. luncheon. “His hypocrisy is epic,” she says. “He’s fooled so many people.” Manning Barish includes herself among them. She says that she met Schneiderman in July, 2013, through mutual friends. She had become a blogger and political activist after opposing her younger brother’s deployment to Iraq and working with groups such as MoveOn.org. Amicably divorced from Chris Barish, a hospitality-industry executive, she was a single mother with a young daughter and socially prominent friends. Schneiderman, who was rising in Democratic politics after being elected attorney general, in 2010, was also divorced. His ex-wife, Jennifer Cunningham, a lobbyist and political strategist at the firm SKDKnickerbocker, currently serves as one of his political consultants. They have a grown daughter.

Manning Barish says that she fell quickly for Schneiderman and was happy to be involved with someone who seemed to share her progressive idealism and enjoy her feistiness. Page Six chronicled the romance, calling her a “ravishing redhead” and noting that, at a fund-raiser, the television producer Norman Lear had introduced her as Schneiderman’s “bride-to-be.”

But Manning Barish began to see signs of controlling and abusive behavior. Soon after she started dating Schneiderman, he told her to remove a small tattoo from her wrist; it wasn’t appropriate, he said, if she were to become the wife of a politician. The process of having it removed was painful and expensive. In retrospect, she says, it was the first step in trying to control her body. “Taking a strong woman and tearing her to pieces is his jam,” she says.

About four weeks after they became physically involved, she says, Schneiderman grew violent. One night, they were in the bedroom of his Upper West Side apartment, still clothed but getting ready for bed, and lightly baiting each other. As she recalls it, he called her “a whore,” and she talked back. They had both been drinking, and her recollection of their conversation is blurry, but what happened next remains vivid. Schneiderman, she says, backed her up to the edge of his bed. “All of a sudden, he just slapped me, open handed and with great force, across the face, landing the blow directly onto my ear,” Manning Barish says. “It was horrendous. It just came out of nowhere. My ear was ringing. I lost my balance and fell backward onto the bed. I sprang up, but at this point there was very little room between the bed and him. I got up to try to shove him back, or take a swing, and he pushed me back down. He then used his body weight to hold me down, and he began to choke me. The choking was very hard. It was really bad. I kicked. In every fibre, I felt I was being beaten by a man.”

She finally freed herself and got back on her feet. “I was crying and in shock,” she says. She recalls shouting, “Are you crazy?” To her astonishment, Schneiderman accused her of scratching him. At one point—she can’t remember if it was at this moment or in a later conversation—he told her, “You know, hitting an officer of the law is a felony.”

After the incident, Manning Barish left the apartment, telling him that she would never come back. “I want to make it absolutely clear,” she says. “This was under no circumstances a sex game gone wrong. This did not happen while we were having sex. I was fully dressed and remained that way. It was completely unexpected and shocking. I did not consent to physical assault.”

In the following days, Manning Barish confided to three close female friends that Schneiderman had hit her. All of them have confirmed this to The New Yorker. “She was distraught,” one of the friends, a high-profile media figure, says. “She was very, very upset. This wasn’t a gentle smack. He clocked her ear. I was shocked.” She notes, “Michelle had mentioned that he drank a lot, and that he changed under the influence of alcohol, but I’d never anticipated that he would be violent.” The friend describes Manning Barish as having seemed “sad” and “torn,” because “she’d really wanted the relationship to work.”

The novelist Salman Rushdie, who dated Manning Barish before Schneiderman did, and who has been her close friend for nearly fifteen years, says that she confided in him as well. “She called me and told me he had hit her,” Rushdie recalls. “She was obviously very upset. I was horrified.” In his view, Schneiderman’s behavior does not fall into the kind of gray area that should remain private. “It was clear to me that it crossed a line,” he says. Rushdie, who describes Manning Barish as “a very truthful person in my experience,” advised her to stay away from Schneiderman.

But Manning Barish went back to him, a decision that she regrets. After the attack, she says, Schneiderman “called and called” her. A few days later, on a weekday afternoon, his security detail drove him to her apartment, and he showed up at her door with an armload of flowers and a case of wine. She found the wine surprising, given the fact that alcohol had fuelled his violent behavior. She recalls saying over and over, “You hit me! You hurt me! You should never hit a woman!” But he didn’t want to talk about having hit her. “The hitting was not an issue for him,” she says. Before long, they reconciled.

Manning Barish says that her ear bothered her for months. It often felt painful and clogged, and she kept hearing odd gurgling sounds. Once, blood trickled out, reaching her collarbone. Eventually, Manning Barish sought medical help from Dr. Gwen Korovin, an ear, nose, and throat specialist. Manning Barish shared her medical records with The New Yorker. They confirm that, on September 13, 2014, Korovin found and removed “dried bloody crust” from Manning Barish’s ear. Manning Barish thought that the slap might have caused the injury, but when Korovin asked her what had happened she said that she might have injured herself with a Q-tip. “I was protecting Eric,” Manning Barish says. “And I was ashamed. For victims, shame plays a huge role in most of these stories. I want people to know that.” Korovin was asked by The New Yorker if the injury could have been caused by a slap. “Yes, it could be consistent with a slap,” she said. “You could perforate an eardrum in a lot of ways, with a Q-tip or with a slap.”

Manning Barish and Schneiderman were together, off and on, for nearly two years. She says that when they had sex he often slapped her across the face without her consent, and that she felt “emotionally battered” by cruel remarks that he made. She says that he criticized how she looked and dressed, and “controlled what I ate.” Manning Barish, who is five feet seven, lost thirty pounds, falling to a hundred and three. In a photograph from the period, she looks emaciated; her hair, she recalls, started to fall out. Nevertheless, he squeezed her legs and called them “chubby.”

Manning Barish says that Schneiderman pressed her to consume huge amounts of alcohol. She recalls, “I would come over for dinner. An already half-empty bottle of red wine would be on the counter. He had had a head start. ‘Very stressful day,’ he would say.” Sometimes, if she didn’t drink quickly enough, she says, he would “come to me like a baby who wouldn’t eat its food, and hold the glass to my lips while holding my face, and sweetly but forcefully, like a parent, say, ‘Come on, Mimi, drink, drink, drink,’ and essentially force me—at times actually spilling it down my chin and onto my chest.” Schneiderman, she recalls, “would almost always drink two bottles of wine in a night, then bring a bottle of Scotch into the bedroom. He would get absolutely plastered five nights out of seven.” On one occasion, she recalls, “he literally fell on his face in my kitchen, straight down, like a tree falling.” Another evening, he smashed his leg against an open drawer, cutting it so badly that “there was blood all over the place.” She bandaged it, but the next day she went to his office to change the dressing, because the bleeding hadn’t stopped.

Manning Barish says that Schneiderman also took prescription tranquillizers, and often asked her to refill a prescription that she had for Xanax, so that he could reserve “about half” the pills for himself. (Schneiderman’s spokesperson said that he has “never commandeered anyone’s medications.”) Sometimes in bed, she recalls, he would be “shaking me and grabbing my face” while demanding that she repeat such things as “I’m a little whore.” She says that he also told her, “If you ever left me, I’d kill you.”

Evan Stark, a forensic social worker and an emeritus professor at Rutgers, is the author of a landmark book, “Coercive Control,” in which he argues that domestic abuse is just as often psychological as it is physical. Abusive men, he writes, often “terrorize” and “control” their partners by demeaning them, particularly about the traits or accomplishments of which they are proudest. Manning Barish says that Schneiderman often mocked her political activism. When she told him of her plan to attend an anti-gun demonstration with various political figures and a group of parents from Sandy Hook Elementary School, he dismissed the effort, calling the demonstrators “losers.” He added, “Go ahead, if it makes you feel better to do your little political things.” When she was using her computer, he’d sometimes say, “Oh, look at little Mimi. So cute—she’s working!” He told Manning Barish that, because she had childcare, she wasn’t “a real mother.”

Manning Barish broke up with Schneiderman a second time, and then got back together with him. He’d been talking about marrying her, she says, and she somehow convinced herself that the real problem between them was her fear of commitment. In January, 2015, she ended the relationship a third time, feeling degraded. After that, they got together romantically a few more times, but since 2016 she has been in touch with him only sporadically.

Since the #MeToo movement began, Manning Barish has been active on social-media platforms, cheering on women who have spoken out, including those whose accusations prompted the resignation of the Minnesota senator Al Franken, a widely admired Democrat. Once, she made an oblique reference to Schneiderman on social media, in connection with a political issue. He called her and, in a tone that she describes as “nasty,” said, “Don’t ever write about me. You don’t want to do that.” Manning Barish says that she took his remarks as a threat, just as she took seriously a comment that he’d once made after she objected to him “yanking” her across a street. She recalls saying to him, “Jaywalking is against the law,” and him responding, “I am the law.” Manning Barish says, “If there is a sentence that sums him up, it’s that.”

Schneiderman was elected to the New York State Senate in 1998, and served for twelve years. He wrote many laws, including one that created specific penalties for strangulation. He introduced the bill in 2010, after chairing a committee that investigated domestic-violence charges against the former state senator Hiram Monserrate, a Democrat, who was expelled from the legislature after having been convicted of assaulting his girlfriend. During the hearings, the legislators learned that New York State imposed no specific criminal penalty for choking, even though it is a common prelude to domestic-violence homicides. Not only did Schneiderman’s bill make life-threatening strangulation a grave crime; it also criminalized less serious cases involving “an intent to impede breathing” as misdemeanors punishable by up to a year in prison. “I’m just sorry it took us so long in New York State to do this,” Schneiderman declared at the time. “I think this will save a lot of lives.”

Jennifer Friedman, a legal expert on domestic violence, says that she cannot square Schneiderman’s public and private behavior. Anyone knowledgeable about intimate-partner violence, she says, knows that choking is “a known lethality indicator.” She adds, “I cannot fathom that someone who drafted the legislation on strangulation is unfamiliar with such concepts.” She also says, “A slap is not just a slap—it reverberates through the rest of the relationship, making her afraid of setting him off.” She adds, “People aren’t usually prosecuted for it, but, in the state of New York, slapping is assault when it results in pain or physical injury.”

In the summer of 2016, the attorney general may have crossed this line again. He went to a party in the Hamptons, where he drank heavily, and invited another guest—a woman he’d known for some time—to join him at an after-party. An accomplished Ivy League-educated lawyer with government experience, she had worked closely with his office in the past, and supported him politically. She says that she agreed to let a man in Schneiderman’s security detail drive them to the next destination. But, when they arrived at the house, there was no party; it was where Schneiderman was staying. The security officer left the property.

The lawyer and Schneiderman began making out, but he said things that repelled her. He told the woman, a divorced mother, that professional women with big jobs and children had so many decisions to make that, when it came to sex, they secretly wanted men to take charge. She recalls him saying, “Yeah, you act a certain way and look a certain way, but I know that at heart you are a dirty little slut. You want to be my whore.” He became more sexually aggressive, but she was repulsed by his talk, and pulled away from him. She says that “suddenly—at least, in my mind’s eye—he drew back, and there was a moment where I was, like, ‘What’s happening?’ ” Then, she recalls, “He slapped me across the face hard, twice,” adding, “I was stunned.”

Schneiderman hit her so hard, she says, that the blow left a red handprint. “What the fuck did you just do?” she screamed, and started to sob. “I couldn’t believe it,” she recalls. “For a split second, I was scared.” She notes that, in all her years of dating, she has never been in a situation like the one with Schneiderman. “He just really smacked me,” she says.

When she told him that she wanted to leave, she recalls, he started to “freak out,” saying that he’d misjudged her. “You’d really be surprised,” he claimed. “A lot of women like it. They don’t always think they like it, but then they do, and they ask for more.” She again demanded to be taken home. They got into his car, and it quickly became apparent how intoxicated he was. As he drove, weaving along back roads, she was terrified that he’d kill not just her but another driver. She says that Schneiderman “broke the law at least once that night.” (“This is untrue,” Schneiderman’s spokesperson said.)

The next day, she told two friends, and sent them a photograph of the mark on her face. (Both women corroborate this.) Another photograph of the lawyer, taken later that day at a family birthday party, shows faint raised marks splayed on her cheek. One of the friends says of Schneiderman, “He seemed not to know what the word ‘consent’ means.”

Given the woman’s prominence in the legal sphere, Schneiderman’s actions had exposed him to tremendous risk. Yet she took no official action against him. “Now that I know it’s part of a pattern, I think, God, I should have reported it,” she says. “But, back then, I believed that it was a one-time incident. And I thought, He’s a good attorney general, he’s doing good things. I didn’t want to jeopardize that.” She notes that he did not hit her again, after she protested. Nevertheless, she says of the assault, “I knew it was wrong,” adding, “Our top law officer, this guy with a platform for women’s rights, just smacked away so much of what I thought he stood for.”

Tanya Selvaratnam is the author of “The Big Lie: Motherhood, Feminism, and the Reality of the Biological Clock,” which explores infertility issues; she is also an actor and a film producer, as well as a supporter of feminist and progressive social causes. She, too, is divorced. In 2016, she attended the Democratic National Convention, in Philadelphia, where Schneiderman introduced himself to her. She says that their first encounter felt “like kismet.” They had both gone to Harvard: she as an undergraduate and a graduate student, he as a law student. She was impressed when he expressed an interest in meditation and Buddhism. They had both studied Chinese, and, when he asked, in Mandarin, if she spoke the language, she answered, “Wo shuo keshi bu tai liu li”—“Yes, but not fluently.”

They began dating, and appeared to be a happy couple. Selvaratnam all but lived in his apartment, attending political functions and dinners with his friends and donors, and brainstorming with him on speeches and projects. But, as she puts it, “it was a fairy tale that became a nightmare.” Although Schneiderman often doted on her, he demanded that she spend more and more time with him, and he began physically abusing her in bed. “The slaps started after we’d gotten to know each other,” she recalls. “It was at first as if he were testing me. Then it got stronger and harder.” Selvaratnam says, “It wasn’t consensual. This wasn’t sexual playacting. This was abusive, demeaning, threatening behavior.”

When Schneiderman was violent, he often made sexual demands. “He was obsessed with having a threesome, and said it was my job to find a woman,” she says. “He said he’d have nothing to look forward to if I didn’t, and would hit me until I agreed.” (She had no intention of having a threesome.) She recalls, “Sometimes, he’d tell me to call him Master, and he’d slap me until I did.” Selvaratnam, who was born in Sri Lanka, has dark skin, and she recalls that “he started calling me his ‘brown slave’ and demanding that I repeat that I was ‘his property.’ ”

The abuse escalated. Schneiderman not only slapped her across the face, often four or five times, back and forth, with his open hand; he also spat at her and choked her. “He was cutting off my ability to breathe,” she says. Eventually, she says, “we could rarely have sex without him beating me.” In her view, Schneiderman “is a misogynist and a sexual sadist.” She says that she often asked him to stop hurting her, and tried to push him away. At other times, she gave in, rationalizing that she could tolerate the violence if it happened only once a week or so during sex. But “the emotional and verbal abuse started increasing,” she says, and “the belittling and demeaning of me carried over into our nonsexual encounters.” He told her to get plastic surgery to remove scars on her torso that had resulted from an operation to remove cancerous tumors. He criticized her hair and said that she should get breast implants and buy different clothes. He mocked some of her friends as “ditzes,” and, when these women attended a birthday celebration for her, he demanded that she leave just as the cake was arriving. “I began to feel like I was in Hell,” she says.

Like Manning Barish, Selvaratnam says that Schneiderman routinely drank heavily—a bottle and a half of wine, or more. He also took sedatives, she says, and pushed her to drink with him, saying, “Drink your bourbon, Turnip”—his nickname for her. In the middle of the night, he staggered through the apartment, as if in a trance. “I’ve never seen anyone that messed up,” she recalls. “It was like sleeping next to a monster.” The next morning, she says, he’d seem fine, but often berated her for not having kept him away from the alcohol. His emotional state seemed to worsen after the 2016 Presidential election. He had counted on forging an ambitious partnership with a White House led by Hillary Clinton. Instead, the Presidency had gone to Donald Trump. Earlier, Schneiderman’s office had sued Trump University for civil fraud, and Trump had countersued Schneiderman personally.

On the morning of January 19, 2017, the day before Trump’s Inauguration, Schneiderman called Selvaratnam from a hospital emergency room. She recalls, “He told me that he’d been drinking the night before he fell down. He didn’t realize he’d cut himself, and got into bed, and when he woke up he was in a pool of blood.” Selvaratnam rushed to the hospital. Schneiderman had several stitches above his left eye; his face was puffy and bruised. He had her send his press secretary a photograph of the injury, and they agreed to cancel a public appearance. In the image, which was shared with The New Yorker, Schneiderman has a black eye and a bandage across the left side of his forehead. Schneiderman then called Cunningham, his ex-wife and political consultant, and they agreed that he and Selvaratnam should tell anyone who asked about the injury that he had fallen “while running.” (A spokesperson for Schneiderman said, “One morning, Mr. Schneiderman fell in the bathroom while completely sober, hit his head, and had to go the the E.R. for stitches. Because he was embarrassed to tell his staff he fell in the bathroom, he told them he fell while running.” Cunningham did not respond to requests for comment.)

Selvaratnam understands how incomprehensible it may seem that she stayed in such an abusive relationship for more than a year. But, she says, “now I see how independent women get stuck in one.” The physical abuse, she notes, “happens quickly”: “He’s drunk, and you’re naked and at your most vulnerable. It’s so disorienting. You lose a little of who you are.” She kept telling herself that she could help him change, and tried to get him to see a therapist. At times, she blamed herself for his behavior. “I was scared what he might do if I left him,” she says. “He had said he would have to kill me if we broke up, on multiple occasions. He also told me he could have me followed and could tap my phone.”

It’s unclear if Schneiderman was serious when he made such remarks, but Selvaratnam says that she felt intimidated. Jacquelyn Campbell, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing, is the author of a danger-assessment checklist that helps authorities gauge the likelihood of homicide in domestic-violence situations. She says, “It’s often true that women don’t know whether to take threats to kill seriously. But we should always take threats seriously. It’s categorized as a violent act, and you can report someone to the police for it.”

Selvaratnam began to spend more time apart from Schneiderman, and last fall she ended the relationship. She’d been suffering from ringing in her ears, and sometimes had vertigo. After the breakup, she, like Manning Barish, sought medical help from an ear, nose, and throat specialist. The doctor could find no specific cause for her ailments. The writer Danzy Senna, a close friend of Selvaratnam’s, recalls, “She was thin, fragile, and shaky.” Selvaratnam confided to Senna about the abuse, and Senna was so shocked that she wrote down the details and e-mailed the account to her husband, so that there would be a dated copy of it should any harm come to her friend. Senna’s document, which she shared with The New Yorker, is dated September 16, 2017, and says, in part, “She told me that her boyfriend of a year, Eric Schneiderman, the Attorney General of New York, has been choking, beating, and threatening her for the entirety of their relationship, and that several times he threatened to have her killed if she ever tried to leave him. She said he knows that she has a lot of really damning information about him, his alcoholism, sexual deviance, and drug use, and she worries about her safety.”

Senna advised Selvaratnam to retrieve her belongings from his apartment. On November 3, 2017, she did so, with another friend—Jennifer Gonnerman, a staff writer at this magazine. As they carried her things outside, they talked about the fact that Selvaratnam couldn’t possibly be the only woman who had seen this side of Schneiderman. Gonnerman asked her who else he had dated. Selvaratnam knew of one former girlfriend—not Manning Barish—and described where she had worked.

The next day, Gonnerman happened to run into a male friend who had once worked with the former girlfriend. Gonnerman asked him if he’d ever known anyone who had dated Schneiderman. He said yes: a close friend of his had. Without divulging anything, Gonnerman asked, “So how did that work out?” He answered, “He used to spit on her and slap her during sex.”

Gonnerman told Selvaratnam about the other victim. “She was very traumatized,” Gonnerman recalls. “On the one hand, she was relieved to learn it had happened before, but on the other it was, like, ‘Why hasn’t anyone stopped him?’ ”

Selvaratnam says, “I wished someone had warned me. And I wondered, Who’s next?” She notes, “I was not planning to come forward, until I found out there was another woman. The silence of women before me meant that I’d suffered, too. I felt, I will not be able to live with myself if I hear of him doing this to another woman years or months from now.”

Selvaratnam reached out to the former girlfriend, and they agreed to meet. In February, Selvaratnam recalls, they sat outside on a bench for ninety minutes, and their stories came flooding forth. Selvaratnam says that she was astounded to discover how similar their experiences had been.

Selvaratnam kept notes about her exchanges with the former girlfriend, and she described them to The New Yorker. According to these notes, the former girlfriend told Selvaratnam that she had been in love with Schneiderman, but that in bed he had routinely slapped her hard across the ear and the face, as tears rolled down her cheeks. He also choked her and spat at her. Not all the abuse had taken place in a sexual context. She said that Schneiderman had once slapped her during an argument they’d had while getting dressed to go out. The blow left a handprint on her back; the next day, the spot still hurt. When the former girlfriend objected to this mistreatment, he told her that she simply wasn’t “liberated” enough. Just as Schneiderman had done with the other women, he had pushed her to drink with him and to set up a threesome, and he had belittled her work and appearance, saying in her case that she had fat legs and needed Botox.

After the former girlfriend ended the relationship, she told several friends about the abuse. A number of them advised her to keep the story to herself, arguing that Schneiderman was too valuable a politician for the Democrats to lose. She described this response as heartbreaking. And when Schneiderman heard that she had turned against him, she said, he warned her that politics was a tough and personal business, and that she’d better be careful. She told Selvaratnam that she had taken this as a threat.

The former girlfriend told Selvaratnam she found it “shameless” that Schneiderman was casting himself as a leading supporter of the #MeToo movement. She promised to support Selvaratnam if she spoke out, but she wasn’t sure that she could risk joining her. The former girlfriend told Selvaratnam she’d once been so afraid of Schneiderman that she’d written down an extensive account of the abuse, locked the document in a safe-deposit box, and given keys to two friends.

In February, the news broke that Rob Porter, a top aide in the Trump White House, was resigning, amid allegations that he’d abused his two ex-wives. One of the women, Colbie Holderness, released a photograph of herself taken after he’d allegedly given her a black eye. The image resonated deeply among the women who had dated Schneiderman. Manning Barish recalls, “After Rob Porter, I was struggling about whether to come forward. I felt guilt and shame that I was encouraging other women to speak out but wasn’t doing the same. I was a hypocrite. I was in tears.” Her friends told her that she risked becoming known mainly for being Schneiderman’s victim, and she initially agreed to let the matter go. But, after thinking it over, she told them, “If he’s done this to more than one woman, I’m going to say something.”

After Porter’s resignation, Selvaratnam felt more determined than ever to speak out about Schneiderman and the broader issue of intimate-partner violence. As this story was being reported, Manning Barish became aware that there were other victims, and decided that she had three choices: “I can lie. I can be silent, which is being complicit, and a betrayal of the other women. Or I can tell the truth.” She concluded, “I’m choosing No. 3.” Manning Barish is aware of the risks faced by women who take on powerful politicians, and isn’t relishing the prospect of taking on the attorney general. “It’s hard,” she says. “It affects your life, and not in a positive way.”

Selvaratnam says that she considered filing an ethics complaint against Schneiderman, or bringing a civil suit, but the various legal options she considered were always connected to Schneiderman in some way. Meanwhile, at least eight members of Congress had resigned, or announced plans to retire, after being accused of sexual misconduct. In Missouri, the legislature called a special session to take up the impeachment of Governor Eric Greitens, who had been accused of slapping, restraining, and belittling a woman during an affair. Greitens has denied the allegations, but he is facing a felony charge stemming from the woman’s assertion that he took compromising photographs of her, in an effort to stop her from speaking out.

Selvaratnam, by contrast, feels caught up in circumstances that have given her only one real choice: to go public. “It’s torturous for me to do this,” she says. “I like my life.” Of this article, she says, “I wish my name did not have to be in it,” and notes, of Schneiderman, “I know it’s going to be my word against his, because I don’t have photos of bruises, and I don’t have a police report.” Schneiderman’s accusers, she feels, are in an unusually difficult situation. As she puts it, “What do you do if your abuser is the top law-enforcement official in the state?”

  • Jane Mayer has been a New Yorker staff writer since 1995.

China is Buying America with and without CFIUS

Statistics found here.

When China is not buying America, they are busy in other parts of the globe buying places like Europe. That is how China is expanding, including stealing intelligence, espionage and hacking. The parts of Britain not owned by Russia are being gobbled up by China. Russia has a long plan and China has a long plan, not too sure about the United States, Britain or other allies.

There has been many discussions in Congress to reform CFIUS, Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. The most widely noticed scandal with CFIUS was the Uranium One deal.

U.S. watchdog expands scrutiny to more Chinese deals ... photo

Anyway, John Carlin recently spoke with the National Law Journal about bipartisan legislation introduced in November in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives by U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, and U.S. Rep. Robert Pittenger, R-North Carolina, respectively, to overhaul the CFIUS review process. CFIUS reviews, which are voluntary, are meant to protect the nation from business transactions that pose a national security or strategic risk to the United States. The panel has the authority to require the transaction’s parties to undertake risk mitigation, such as carving out a specific location or element of the deal.

The panel can also recommend that the president block a deal entirely. President Donald Trump, for example, in September blocked the sale of Oregon-based Lattice Semiconductor Corp. to a Chinese company. A deal by Anthony Scaramucci, briefly a White House communications director, to sell his stake in SkyBridge Capital to Chinese company HNA Group Co., which is partly government-owned, appears to be in jeopardy after not yet clearing its nearly yearlong CFIUS review, according to reports in financial media including Bloomberg News in mid-December.Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who chairs the panel, has urged toughening CFIUS reviews.

While leading the DOJ’s National Security Division, Carlin oversaw the indictment in 2014 of five Chinese military members for economic espionage for hacks against several big U.S. companies, among them United States Steel, Westinghouse, Alcoa Inc. and SolarWorld from 2006 through 2014. The division also investigated the cyberattack on Sony Pictures Entertainment in late 2014 that the U.S. government determined originated in North Korea; and brought charges with the FBI against seven Iranians working for computer companies under contract to the Iranian government and military that conducted cyberattacks between 2011 and 2013 against 46 financial institutions including Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase & Co. More here.

The CFIUS review process also appears to be affecting efforts by China Oceanwide Holdings Group Co. Ltd. to acquire Genworth Financial Inc.

BusinessInsider: In 2016, General Electric sold its appliances business to Qingdao-based Haier. China’s Zoomlion made an unsolicited bid for heavy-lifting-equipment maker Terex Corporation, and property and investment firm Dalian Wanda announced a deal to buy a majority stake in Hollywood’s Legendary Entertainment.

On Friday, a Chinese-led investor group announced it would buy the Chicago Stock Exchange. And then there’s ChemChina’s record-breaking deal for the Swiss seeds and pesticides group Syngenta, valued at $48 billion according to Dealogic.

There have already been 82 Chinese outbound mergers-and-acquisitions deals announced this year, amounting to $73 billion in value, according to Dealogic. That’s up from 55 deals worth $6.2 billion in the same period last year.

Last year was a record-breaker for Chinese outbound deals, with 607 deals valued at $112.5 billion in total. Just over one month into 2016, and China is more than halfway to breaking that record.

So what’s going on?

One interpretation is that Chinese companies are simply hungry for growth as that country’s economy slows, and they’re feeding themselves by buying other companies.

“With the slowdown of the economy, Chinese corporates are increasingly looking to inorganic avenues to supplement their growth,” Vikas Seth, head of emerging markets in the investment-banking and capital-markets department at Credit Suisse, told Business Insider.

Last year, investment bankers earned $558 million in revenue from Chinese outbound M&A deals, according to Dealogic. This year, that number is at $121 million to date.

But there are, of course, a number of challenge these deals will face — especially in the US.

M&A deals in the US are subject to scrutiny by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS. It recently prevented the $3.3 billion sale of Philips’ lighting business to a group of buyers in Asia.

feb 5 total china m&a deal value
The 82 Chinese outbound deals announced so far in 2016 are worth more than half of 2015’s total Chinese outbound-deal value.
Andy Kiersz/Business Insider

“I would be very surprised if CFIUS did not have an interest in taking a look at this deal,” said Anne Salladin of law firm Stroock & Stroock, referring to the Chicago Stock Exchange deal.

Did the Trump Operation Hire Black Cube for Dirty Ops?

The allegations are that certain former Obama officials were part of discredit operation by Donald Trump. Humm, perhaps but who has been fully discredited that anyone seems to know or care about?

‘Dirty Ops’?

The Observer did not name any Trump officials or the private Israeli intelligence firm said to be involved in the plot, which was allegedly hatched when “Trump’s team contacted investigators days after Trump visited Tel Aviv a year ago,” according to the report. The plan was to “get dirt” on Rhodes and Kahl “as part of an elaborate attempt to discredit the deal,” The Observer said. Trump has suggested he will not recertify that Iran is complying with the pact when it comes up for renewal May 12. (The U.K., Russia, France and Germany also signed the deal.)

Veteran Washington foreign affairs journalist Laura Rozen told Newsweek that Kahl showed her the first email his wife got from the person, who identified herself as “Adriana Gavrilov from Reuben Capital Partners.” Rozen said she recognized Reuben Capital from a New Yorker story by Ronan Farrow that described it as a cover for Black Cube, a private Israeli spy firm reportedly hired by Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein to dig up dirt on the women who accused him of sexual misconduct, harassment, assault or rape.

Farrow reported Sunday on another attempt linked to Black Cube: In 2017, Rhodes’s wife, a former State Department official, received a proposal from a London-based film company called Shell Productions for a movie that would follow the personal lives of “government officials in the positions that determine war and peace” during times of geopolitical crisis, including “nuclear negotiations with a hostile nation.” She said she found the pitch “bizarre” and never responded. Farrow said two sources told him the proposal originated with Black Cube.

*** War News Updates: An Insider's View On White House Policy ...  White House aide Ben Rhodes responds to controversial New ...

A former deputy assistant to president Barack Obama and national security adviser to vice president Joe Biden responded on Twitter Sunday night to reports he was targeted by the private Israeli security firm Black Cube in an attempt to discredit the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.

 

Putin Denies Military Operations Against Ukraine, Proof Emerges

Map of Mariupol in Ukraine - ABC News (Australian ...

photo

The Ambassador predicted liberation of Mariupol in 2014, the plan was in place, was anyone listening? Liberation? That is how Moscow packaged it? And the Active Measures/propaganda continues.

Related reading: Ukraine Fortifies Its Airwaves Against Russian TV Broadcasts

Russian troops attacking Mariupol, Ukrainian militia ... photo

Breaking: Russian Officers and Militants Identified as Perpetrators of the January 2015 Mariupol Artillery Strike

The investigation can be viewed here

На русском языке

The Bellingcat Investigation Team has determined conclusively that the artillery attack on targets in the Ukrainian town of Mariupol on 24 January 2015, which resulted at least 30 civilian deaths and over 100 injuries, came from Russia-controlled territory. Bellingcat has also determined that the shelling operation was instructed, directed and supervised by Russian military commanders in active service with the Russian Ministry of Defense. Bellingcat has identified nine Russian officers, including one general, two colonels, and three lieutenant colonels, involved directly with the military operation.

Furthermore, Bellingcat has determined that two artillery batteries of Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (MLRS) were transported from Russia into Ukraine the day before the Mariupol operation. In the early morning of 24 January 2015, these batteries were deployed near the village of Bezimenne exclusively for the shelling of targets in and around Mariupol, after which they were repatriated back into Russia.

In the course of analyzing the events in the eve of and on 24 January 2015, Bellingcat has also identified two Russian generals involved with the selection and assignment of Russian artillery specialists to commanding roles in eastern Ukraine.

This investigation was made possible due to access to raw video and audio data that is being submitted by the Ukrainian government to the International Court of Justice as part of an ongoing legal case. This data was made available to a small group of international investigative media for the purposes of independent assessment. Bellingcat and its media partners analyzed a large volume of intercepted calls from and to participants in the armed conflict located in the area of Bezimenne at the time of shelling. Bellingcat conducted detailed cross-referencing of events, names and locations, as well as metadata from the calls, to open source data, including satellite photography data, social media posts, and voice samples from public statements of some of the identified persons. A detailed analysis permitted the identification of persons and military units, and the reconstruction of events leading up to the shelling of residential areas in Mariupol.

While previous reports, including the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) to Ukraine report from 24 January 2015, have identified that shelling of Mariupol’s residential areas came from separatist-controlled territory, Bellingcat’s investigation is the first to fully detail and identify the role of active Russian military units, as well as the direct commanding role of active Russian army officers in this military operation.

Our full report identifying the nine Russian officers involved with the military operation that led to the deaths of 30 Ukrainian civilians in Mariupol will be published later this week. Today, we are revealing the names of these individuals, along with a sampling of the telephone conversations that led to their identification.

The Russian officers who were in charge on high and lower levels of the MLRS batteries on the day of the shelling at Mariupol, or provided target instructions from another location in Eastern Ukraine, have been identified by Bellingcat as:

  • Major General Stepan Stepanovich Yaroshchuk
  • Alexander Iozhefovich Tsapliuk, call sign ‘Gorets’
  • Alexander Anatolevich Muratov
  • Maksim Vladimirovich Vlasov, call sign ‘Yugra’
  • Sergey Sergeyevich Yurchenko, call sign ‘Voronezh’
  • Alexander Valeryevich Grunchev, call sign ‘Terek’

The Russian officers who were in charge of selecting and sending artillery commanders and artillery equipment to Eastern Ukraine have been identified by Bellingcat as:

  • Colonel Oleg Leargievich Kuvshinov
  • Major General Dmitry Nikolaevich Klimenko
  • Colonel Sergey Ivanovich Lisai

The two Russian and Ukrainian militants in direct charge of the artillery units that shelled Mariupol have been identified by Bellingcat as:

  • Alexander Mikhailovich Evtody, call sign ‘Pepel’
  • Grayr Manukovich Egiazaryan, call sign ‘Shram’

Our full investigation, with biographical details on each of these men, our research process, and our analysis of the shelling attack itself, will be published later this week.

The investigation can be viewed here