The IAEA’s Big Challenge of Iran’s Nuclear Program

Posted on February 24, 2016February 24, 2016 by Denise Simon

$150 billion or $50 billion, should take care of the financial shortfall. What say you?

Will IAEA be able to verify Iran’s nuclear program

alMonitor: The UN nuclear agency will face “challenges” verifying Iran’s compliance with last year’s nuclear agreement, the US government watchdog said Feb. 23 in a new report that was immediately used as ammunition by critics of the deal.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) faces a budget and staffing shortfall that will require an extra $10 million per year for the next 15 years to monitor the deal, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO). The report goes on to detail the agency’s dependence on Iranian cooperation to access nuclear sites and the intrinsic difficulty in detecting undeclared activities such as weapons development and centrifuge manufacturing that do not leave a nuclear trace.

Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., said the report raises concerns about “the entity that we are putting all our marbles in.” He commissioned the report with Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., a fellow critic of the deal who also voted against it last year.

“Some of the preliminary findings cause concern for me about what the IAEA is capable of,” Menendez told Secretary of State John Kerry at a hearing on the department’s FY 2017 budget request. “The GAO [report] point[s] directly to future problems with monitoring, verifying and meeting requirements of the [Iran deal].”

Kirk used the report to call on Congress to prepare sanctions that can be imposed if Iran starts to cheat on its nuclear obligations. He and Menendez are pushing for the reauthorization of the Iran Sanctions Act, a decade-old law that expires at the end of the year.

“My biggest takeaway is lawmakers must come together in a bipartisan manner now to create an insurance policy for imposing crippling pressure if and when Iran once again cheats on nuclear inspections as it has so many times in the past,” Kirk said in a statement. “International inspectors, according to the GAO’s interim report, still face an ‘inherent challenge’ in detecting undeclared nuclear activities, including weapons development activities and centrifuge manufacturing. The report also cites concerns the IAEA’s decision to end investigations into Iran’s past nuclear weapons activities ‘could reduce the indicators at the IAEA’s disposal to detect undeclared activity.’ Indeed, GAO also warns the nuclear deal’s mechanism for IAEA inspectors to gain access to Iranian sites suspected of having undeclared nuclear activities remains ‘untested’ and cautions ‘it is too soon to tell whether it will improve access.’”

Among the concerns raised by the GAO report is the sheer amount of manpower the Iran deal will consume. The agency is expected to have to transfer 18 “experienced inspectors” and “nearly twice that number of other staff” to its Iran Task Force, the GAO concludes, raising concerns about proliferation in other countries.

The State Department is proposing a $191 million US contribution to the agency in its FY 2017 budget request, a $5 million increase over the current year, to help the agency meet its new obligations.

***

In part by Rubin at WaPo:

Last week the administration warned that a sale of Russian advanced jets to Iran would violate the United Nations ban on such equipment. Sanctions guru Mark Dubowitz tells me, “Congress should draw up a list of Russian and Iranian entities to be sanctioned, give the administration 30 days to impose sanctions on these entities, and, if there’s no action, move ahead with statutory designations of these entities.”

That thinking needs to be applied across the board, taking into account all aspects of Iran’s behavior. Iran acts with impunity because it is convinced (rightly) the administration will do nothing. If the White House won’t, then Congress must act. Full article here.

Judiciary Cmte; Muslim Brotherhood, Terror Organization

Posted on February 24, 2016February 24, 2016 by Denise Simon

Yes!!!

Feb 24 2016

Judiciary Committee Calls on Administration to List Muslim Brotherhood as a Terrorist Organization

Washington, D.C. – The House Judiciary Committee today approved by a vote of 17-10 the Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act of 2015 (H.R. 3892), which calls on the State Department to recognize the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organization in order to better protect national security.

The Muslim Brotherhood, which was founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna, remains headquartered in Egypt but operates throughout the world. The Muslim Brotherhood’s strategic goal “in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.” It has supported Islamist terrorism directly through fundraising and extortion, and has been designated as a terrorist organization by several U.S. allies in the Middle East.

H.R. 3892 would have a threefold effect: the Administration would actually have to deny admittance to aliens tied to the Muslim Brotherhood; persons who provide material support to the Muslim Brotherhood would be subject to federal criminal penalties; and the Treasury Department would be able to require U.S. financial institutions possessing or controlling any assets of the Muslim Brotherhood to block all financial transactions involving those assets.

Below is a statement from House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and Representative Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.), the author of this legislation, on today’s Committee vote.

Chairman Goodlatte: “The Muslim Brotherhood’s embrace of terrorism and the very real threat it poses to American lives and the national security of the United States make it long overdue for designation. The bill passed by the House Judiciary Committee today calls the State Department to do the right thing and designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organization. This will make it less likely that members of the Muslim Brotherhood will be able to enter the United States. I thank Congressman Diaz-Balart for introducing this bill and urge the House of Representatives to consider it immediately.”

Rep. Diaz-Balart: “The Muslim Brotherhood continues to pose a global threat. The jihadist movement actively supports and finances terrorist networks around the world, including al-Qaeda and Hamas. The United States must recognize and sanction the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization as part of our national security strategy. I thank Chairman Goodlatte for his leadership and assistance in getting this bill through committee, and I look forward to working with him when it is brought to the floor.”

brotherhood

*** In part from JPost: Just a few years ago, the conventional wisdom in Washington, DC, was that the Muslim Brotherhood would be a moderating force in the Middle East and bring democracy to the region. But not three years after the beginning of the “Arab Spring,” the people of countries like Egypt and Tunisia removed their Muslim Brotherhood- led governments. Other Middle Eastern nations have taken measures to designate the organization as a terrorist group and banned their activity entirely. Even our British allies have opened an official investigation into the group’s activities and connection to violent extremism. More here.

*** Gatestone:

“[T]he organization of the Muslim Brotherhood is a terrorist organization, and anyone who asks either to reconcile with them, to join them or to ally with them is himself a terrorist.” — Refaat Saïd, leader of Egypt’s Socialist party, al-Tagammu’, and previously close friend of former Muslim Brotherhood Supreme Guide, Mahdi Akef.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the motto of Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis is also the verse singled out by Hassan al Banna: “Fight them until there is no fitnah [discord], and [until] the religion, all of it, is for Allah.” [Qur’an, Sura VIII, verse 39]

The link between the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas is clear, and confirmed by Article 2 of the Charter of Hamas, which reads: “The Islamic Resistance movement is one of the wings of the Muslim Brothers in Palestine”. Complete details here.

Nightmare for Taxpayers According to an IRS Bulletin

Posted on February 24, 2016February 24, 2016 by Denise Simon

IRS is warning taxpayers of a new surge in tax-related incidents

It is a nightmare for taxpayers according to an IRS bulletin there is a 400 percent surge in tax-related phishing and malware incidents.

This year the IRS already reported 1,026 malware and phishing incidents, compared to 254 this time last year.

SecurityAffairs: The IRS is warning taxpayers of newer forms of attacks aiming victims into disclosing credentials to third-party tax preparation service accounts.

“The Internal Revenue Service renewed a consumer alert for e-mail schemes after seeing an approximate 400 percent surge in phishing and malware incidents so far this tax season.” states the bulletin. “The emails are designed to trick taxpayers into thinking these are official communications from the IRS or others in the tax industry, including tax software companies. The phishing schemes can ask taxpayers about a wide range of topics. E-mails can seek information related to refunds, filing status, confirming personal information, ordering transcripts and verifying PIN information.”

The IRS Commissioner John Koskinen used the adjective “dramatic” to describe this surge in tax-related incidents inviting taxpayers to watch out for scammers.

“This dramatic jump in these scams comes at the busiest time of tax season,” said Koskinen. “Watch out for fraudsters slipping these official-looking emails into inboxes, trying to confuse people at the very time they work on their taxes. We urge people not to click on these emails.”

Threat actors are very interested in using the tax season as a lure, in a common attack scenario victims receive an email containing links to the domain used to serve malware. In other cases, the attackers used emails with attachments that include documents embedding malicious macros. Once the victims open the document, the macro drops a malware on the victim’s machine, including dreaded ransomware like CryptoLocker, TeslaCrypt and Locky.

These are the alarming statistics provided by the IRS:

There were 1,026 incidents reported in January, up from 254 from a year earlier.

The trend continued in February, nearly doubling the reported number of incidents compared to a year ago. In all, 363 incidents were reported from Feb. 1-16, compared to the 201 incidents reported for the entire month of February 2015.

This year’s 1,389 incidents have already topped the 2014 yearly total of 1,361, and they are halfway to matching the 2015 total of 2,748.

Recently IRS services were abused by crooks to target taxpayers, in May 2015 the Internal Revenue Service was breached by hackers that “used an online service provided by the agency” to access data for more than 100,000 taxpayers. The IRS issued an official statement on the incident and specified that the compromised system was “Get Transcript.” The Transcript service could be used by taxpayers to get a transcript online or by mail to view their tax account transactions.

In August 2015, the Internal Revenue Service disclosed a new review of its system, revealing that 334,000 taxpayers (more than three times it initially estimated) may be affected by the hack it announced in May.

A couple of weeks ago the IRS detected roughly unauthorized attempts using 464,000 unique SSNs, and 101,000 attempts allowed crooks in generating PINs.

The U.S. Internal Revenue Service confirmed that cyber criminals abused the Electronic Filing PIN application running on irs.gov that allows taxpayers to generate a PIN that they can use to file tax returns online.

Pierluigi Paganini

Obama Placing Legacy Above Truth in Cuba

Posted on February 24, 2016February 24, 2016 by Denise Simon

First of 8,000 stranded Cuban migrants cross into US

MEXICO CITY (AP)— The first of 8,000 Cuban migrants recently stranded in Central America have crossed the Mexican border into the United States.

Some 180 migrants flew from Costa Rica to El Salvador, and have been making their way to the U.S., with the first reaching Laredo, Texas, on Thursday night.

“I’m a Cuban who has just acquired the American Dream,” said Daniel Caballero, one of the first to cross into Laredo, according to a Facebook posting of the sponsoring non-profit group, Cubans in Liberty.

***

In Part from Panama City (AFP): The first flight left from Panama’s international airport. The foreign ministry said in a statement it would land in Juarez, a Mexican city on the US border. Other flights would follow this week.

It emphasized that the flights were a “limited” and “exceptional” measure.

They mirrored flights Costa Rica has been carrying out since January, for some 8,000 Cubans who had been stuck on its territory.

The Cubans aim to get to the United States where a Cold War-era law allows them easy entry and a fast-track to residency.

But their journey, to South America, up through Central America and then Mexico and the US border, was frustrated in November last year when Nicaragua — a Cuban ally — closed its borders to them, and Costa Rica dismantled a people-smuggling ring they had been relying on.

Costa Rica in December closed its own border to any more Cuban arrivals as it struggled to clear the migrants from its territory.

Cuban State Media: Obama Visit ‘Disproves Human Rights Violations’ by Communists

Cuba’s communist propaganda newspaper Granma has published an article claiming that President Barack Obama’s scheduled visit to Havana in March “disproves” decades of evidence that the Cuban government violates the human rights of its citizens, on a weekend in which Cuban state police arrested almost 200 dissidents for peaceful marches against communism.

Breitbart: In a column titled “Four Myths Obama’s Trip to Cuba Disproves,” the newspaper cites “Cuba violates human rights” as the top “myth” that President Obama is helping to eradicate by visiting the island. The article calls the fact of Cuba’s rampant human rights violations “the mantra of those who want to justify as a philanthropic crusade the politics of aggression begun in 1959 before the advance of a socialist Revolution in their own backyard.” The fact that Cuba violates international human rights law on a routine basis, the article continues, “permeated realpolitik previous to the December 17, 2014 announcement,” referring to the day President Obama announced a number of concessions to the Raúl Castro regime in exchange for, in Castro’s words, “nothing in return.”

Granma also claims that President Obama’s decision to endorse the legitimacy of the Castro regime with his presence dismantles the allegation that “the ultra-right in Miami, especially legislators of Cuban origin, had totally held hostage the United States’ politics towards Cuba.” Cuban state propaganda often insults ethnic Cuban voters in Miami as “ultra-right” extremists, using terms like “the Miami Mafia” in an attempt to alienate Republican-leaning voters in the region. Cuban-American voters in Miami have also been consistently mocked and derided in American left-wing media, particularly the cable news pundits associated with NBC.

While Granma is open to using President Obama’s visit to promote the lie that the Cuban government does not oppress its dissidents, it continues to condemn the United States for defending human rights internationally. In a separate column published Saturday, the propaganda outlet condemns President Obama for not using executive orders to lift trade bans on Cuba, accusing his inaction of “keeping alive politics of aggression.”

President Obama is expected to meet with dictator Raúl Castro and “other Cuban people” during his visit, though it remains unclear whether he will be present in meetings with Cuban civil society or pro-democracy activists.

Whether any of Cuba’s most prominent dissidents will be out of jail during President Obama’s visit remains to be seen. If this weekend is any indication, there is little hope that the leaders of dissident groups will be allowed to attend events involving the President. Various dissident groups, including the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU) and the Ladies in White, staged multiple events across the island this weekend. More than 170 dissidents were arrested, including dozens of Ladies in White arrested for attending Sunday Catholic Mass. An estimated 40 Ladies in White are still in custody after their prayer march in Havana.

The silent marches against the Castro regime this week were dedicated to Orlando Zapata Tamayo, a prisoner of conscience who died during a hunger strike in 2010, and the four men killed in 1996 when the Cuban government shot down a plane belonging to the pro-democracy group Brothers to the Rescue, which included one U.S. citizen.

Cuban dissidents have called President Obama’s decision to visit the island “an error” and warn that “these sorts of visits bring a lot of collateral damage” with them. They note that more than 250 pro-democracy activists were arrested in September during Pope Francis’s visit to Havana, including one man who was beaten and arrested in front of Pope Francis for saying the word “freedom” too loudly near the Pontiff. (The Pope denied having seen the event occurring before him.)

According to the NGO People in Need, President Obama’s efforts to warm up to the Castro regime have significantly deteriorated conditions for dissidents on the island. “There has been no substantial improvement in regard to human rights and individual freedoms on the island. … [The Cuban government] has adapted its repressive methods in order to make them invisible to the scrutinizing, judgmental eyes of the international community, but it has not reduced the level of pressure or control over the opposition,” the group said in a report in December.

Timing: The Clinton’s and Whitewater

Posted on February 24, 2016February 24, 2016 by Denise Simon

Judicial Watch Releases New Document in Criminal Corruption Case against Hillary Clinton in Whitewater Affair

Highly Detailed ‘Order of Proof’ Names Over 100 Witnesses, Outlines Evidence To Be Used At Trial

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today released an unprecedented accounting of the evidence that would have been used at a criminal trial against Hillary Clinton in the Whitewater case. The April 1998 memo by the Office of Independent Counsel, titled “HRC Order of Proof,” includes the names of 121 witnesses, discussions of evidence, and aspects of grand jury testimony to be used at trial, forming a virtual road map to the sweeping criminal case against the Whitewater conspirators.

Prosecutors ultimately decided not to indict Mrs. Clinton, calculating that they could not win the complicated, largely circumstantial case against such a high-profile figure. But while the general outline of the case is known, the “Order of Proof” is definitive and highly detailed, nailing down a number of disputed issues. Among them:

The cover-up of Clinton financial misdeeds in Arkansas began in earnest on a specific date: March 7, 1992.

Documents from the Rose Law Firm—Mrs. Clinton’s former employer at the center of the growing scandal—were passed to a campaign aide in the firm’s “parking lot that night,” demonstrating that Mrs. Clinton and her Rose Law Firm Partners—Webster Hubbell and Vincent Foster—were early participants in the cover-up.

There was a furious Clinton effort to locate documents and shut down witnesses.

Media coverage of the Clintons led to renewed interest by the Resolution Trust Corp. in the corrupt bank at the center of the story, Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan. Madison was “already on the list of S&Ls to be revisited,” having been the subject of earlier probes and a prior criminal case.

Tulsa-based senior Resolution Trust Corp. investigator Jean Lewis—later the subject of a vituperative campaign of personal destruction by the Clinton side—was dispatched “by her local supervisor and someone in Washington to go to Little Rock to determine if Whitewater had caused [Madison] a loss.”

Lewis visited Little Rock in April 1992, and drew up Criminal Referral C-0004, which was sent “directly to the Little Rock U.S. Attorney and Little Rock FBI on 9/1/92.”

U.S. Attorney Paula Casey—a Clinton associate—and the Little Rock FBI office agreed to hold the criminal referral “in abeyance until after the election.” Meanwhile, the FBI and RTC investigations moved forward. Nine more RTC criminal referrals involving Madison-related schemes were drawn up.

A Justice Department probe was underway on July 20, 1993, when search warrants were obtained in Little Rock for Whitewater-related investigations. That night in Washington, Vincent Foster, the former Rose Law Firm partner serving as both the Clintons’ personal lawyer and White House deputy counsel, committed suicide.

Two senior Justice Department officials—David Margolis and Philip Heymann—are on the “Order of Proof” witness list. In the immediate aftermath of Foster’s death, Margolis and Heymann received White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum’s consent to search Foster’s office. Then Nussbaum “reneged.”

Heymann—the Deputy Attorney General of the United States—was “[v]ery upset over the matter” and “[a]sked Bernie what he was trying to hide.”

Numerous witnesses would testify they saw documents being removed from Foster’s office, including papers that resembled the Rose Law Firm billing records—under subpoena at that time and nowhere to be found.

Judicial Watch Chief Investigative Reporter Micah Morrison reported on the new document today at the Daily Caller.