ISIS Tactics Include Taxes and Treasures

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With a multi-country coalition, air strikes, ground intelligence gathering, surveillance drones and up to 1000 more troops being deployed to Iraq, the White House has no strategy and blames the Pentagon.

The Pentagon has a division that is assigned to war-gaming and planning in all conditions across the globe that is based on human intelligence, information gathered from diplomatic staff in all embassies, use of software, estimations, locations of military assets, threats from the enemy, money, transportation, secret deals, ordnance positioning and more. The Pentagon always has several strategies that are current and nimble that require dynamic alterations as even minor conditions change. For Obama to blame the Pentagon is childish and misguided.

Despite nine months and $2.44 billion in U.S. airstrikes against the fighters and their oil facilities and smuggling networks, the self-proclaimed Islamic State has proven to be as resilient financially as it’s been militarily.

The group that President Barack Obama dismissed in January 2014 as a junior varsity team last year seized an estimated $675 million from banks, plus $145 million in oil sales and ransom payments and tens of millions more from other commercial enterprises, looting and extortion, according to U.S. Treasury and United Nations figures.

“This isn’t your average terrorist group operating from your average safe haven,” said Juan Zarate, a former assistant secretary of Treasury for terrorist financing and financial crimes who spent years targeting al-Qaeda funding. “They have access to oil in Iraq and Syria; access to major population centers; access to banks, antiquities and smuggling groups — all of that allows them to be more agile and have access to more capital and resources than your average terrorist group.”

“The truth is nobody really knows how much they’re making now,” said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “The U.S. government is getting closer to pegging the group’s finances because of things like last month’s raid in eastern Syria. But no one knows how much they’re getting versus their spending.”

Islamic State “is in some ways a proto-state, in some ways a terrorist organization, in some ways an insurgency and in some ways a transnational criminal group,” he said. Like drug cartels in Colombia and Mexico and al-Qaeda offshoots in Somalia, northern Mali and Yemen, the group is extorting taxes, plundering local resources and taking a cut of commercial enterprises, he said. Read much more detail here.

ISIS has published their objectives on the internet for the world to see and yet operates with unhindered. ISIS is fully functional in an estimated 12 countries while the Obama administration is in neutral to lead the coalition in both offensive and defensive measures. The impact of the coalition is inert.

Egypt, a country working to recover from a power revolution is at particular risk.

From Oren Kessler in part: Egypt’s once-foundering economy is slowly rising from the abyss. President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi has cut costly fuel and food subsidies, cut red tape on investments, instructed the Central Bank to tackle the black market in foreign currencies and vowed to bring unemployment under 10 percent.

His efforts are beginning to bear fruit. In May, the ratings agency Standard & Poor’s revised Egypt’s country outlook from stable to positive, predicting real GDP growth over the next three years of 4.3 percent – double the average of the four years since the revolution. Meanwhile, the government’s suspension of the capital gains tax sent stocks soaring 6.5 percent in a single day.

Still, no economic turnaround will be complete without a recovery in tourism. The U.S. State Department currently urges citizens to exercise caution in traveling to the country, and advises against any non-essential travel in Sinai, where an insurgency by Islamic State-linked militants has raged since the military ouster of Muslim Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi in July 2013. At the same time, shadowy pro-Brotherhood groups calling themselves Ajnad Misr (“Soldiers of Egypt”) and the “Popular Resistance Movement” are increasingly targeting the populous mainland, including Cairo, Alexandria and the cities of the Nile Delta. The government accuses the now-banned Brotherhood of responsibility for virtually every attack, but the extent to which the group is actually orchestrating the violence remains unclear.

What is clear is that continued terrorism, particularly against tourists, has the capacity to set back the fragile gains Cairo has made in restoring stability and reviving its economy. For Egypt, persuading visitors to come soak up the country’s sights and sun will require convincing them beyond a reasonable doubt that traveling to the land of the Pharaohs will not be a one-way ticket. More detail here.

Explaining Relations with Cuba, Prisoners and Debt

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Repaying $15 billion in debt default:

The Cuban government has agreed that it owes $15 billion to the exclusive group of nations known as the Paris Club, after Cuba declared itself in default in 1986, according to a report from Reuters quoting diplomatic sources.

The figure agreed to includes principal, service charges, interest and fines that Cuba owes 16 Paris Club nations from its 1986 default, Reuters reported on Monday. However, it does not include compensation fees levied by the United States for private properties confiscated by the Cuban government since 1959.

The Paris Club is an informal group of creditor governments and institutions composed of 20 permanent member countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom and the United States.

The agreement reached with the Paris Club advances negotiations on the terms of payment, the first since negotiations failed in 2001, in part due to a $35 billion debt owed to the former Soviet Union, Cuba’s primary benefactor before its collapse in 1991. In July, President Vladimir Putin agreed to forgive nearly all of that debt and pledged to reinvest payments made by the Cuban government toward development projects on the island.

“This agreement is another sign of the political will of the Cuban government to rejoin a reasonable credit system at the normal level of the world economy, in accordance with the norms of international financial standards,” said José Oro, director of research division of Cuba at Thomas J. Herzfeld Advisors Inc. investment firm in Miami Beach.  Read more here.

Criminal illegals that Cuba wont take back:

Havana won’t take them back

Hundreds with ‘Zadvydas cases’ refused by their home countries

Hundreds of Cuban criminals are released onto the streets of the U.S. every year because that nation won’t take them back — even though the Obama administration is trying to broker a more open relationship with the communist island nation.

It’s a quirk of immigration law known as “Zadvydas cases,” after a 2001 Supreme Court ruling that said the government cannot detain immigrants indefinitely if their home countries won’t take them back.

Cuba, China and Vietnam regularly top the list, but even some countries that are supposed to be closer partners, such as Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, are refusing to quickly accept some of their citizens whom the U.S. is trying to deport.

Cuba refused to take back 878 criminals last year and rejected nearly 400 through the first eight months of the current fiscal year, according to statistics that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement provided to the House Judiciary Committee. Vietnam is second, having refused 331 criminals in 2014, though it has rejected the return of only 44 criminals so far this year.

All told, the government released 2,457 criminals and 461 non-criminal illegal immigrants onto the streets last year because of the Zadvydas strictures, ICE said. This year, the totals through May 9 were 1,107 criminals and 344 noncriminals.

“The Zadvydas problem is an urgent one, considering that a large percentage of the most serious criminal alien releases are Zadvydas,” said Jessica Vaughan, policy studies director at the Center for Immigration Studies. “Given the obvious public safety risks, the administration should be more aggressive in seeking a solution or in using the tools available to them.”

In the Zadvydas ruling, the Supreme Court said immigration detention cannot extend beyond six months unless there is a compelling national security or public safety interest. If home countries won’t cooperate in taking back their citizens, the U.S. government must release them.

Republicans in Congress have proposed a number of fixes and have pushed for tools such as withholding visas from countries that refuse to accept their scofflaws, but the George W. Bush and Obama administrations have been reluctant to take those steps.

The issue is even more acute given that Cuba is the biggest offender and President Obama is trying to normalize relations with that nation. Analysts said it would be the perfect time to raise the issue of Zadvydas refusals.

The State Department didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment, but there is no indication that it has raised the issue as part of the talks.

Ms. Vaughan said that is a missed opportunity.

“It’s the best chance in decades to push Cuba to be more cooperative,” she said.

Beyond Cuba, the government faces problems returning citizens to a number of countries. Twelve nations refused the return of at least 70 of their citizens in 2014, including a number of countries that received generous U.S. aid.

One of those, Liberia, refused 85 criminals’ return, even as the U.S. was providing extensive help to combat an Ebola outbreak.

Three other Central American countries are poised to receive hundreds of millions of dollars in aid among them to try to stem a surge of their citizens entering the U.S. illegally for life in the shadows.  Read more here.

Among them, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador refused 127 criminals and 145 noncriminals in 2014.

The Guatemalan and Honduran embassies didn’t respond to repeated messages requesting comment, but El Salvador’s embassy in Washington said it does what it can while guaranteeing that its citizens go through legal due process.

“We want to make clear that there’s no policy that allows refusing deportations. On the contrary, our consulates give assistance to all Salvadoran prisoners in the United States seeking to facilitate their return to the country, where many of them won’t be in prison,” said Ana Virginia Guardado, an embassy spokeswoman.

She said her country refused return in cases in which the individuals rejected El Salvador’s consular help. She said El Salvador is still working on those cases and that individuals will be given travel documents allowing their deportation once they have exhausted all of their legal avenues in the U.S.

She said El Salvador has worked to accept nearly 8,000 deportees so far this year.

ICE said the Central American countries provide good cooperation and that the relationships have grown stronger with the surge of illegal immigrant children in the U.S. that peaked last summer.

“Through relationship-building, consular pilot programs and regular engagement, timely issuance of travel documents has risen, as has the host governments’ willingness and capacity to accept an increased amount of ICE air charter flights,” spokeswoman Sarah Rodriguez said.

Ms. Rodriguez said the number of refusals from the Central American countries is low compared with the total number of deportations. El Salvador’s 2014 refusal rate was less than half of a percent of the total number who were accepted back.

She said the cases that are refused often have special circumstances that make them tougher to complete. Even after they are released, however, the Zadvydas cases are still in the system and ICE is still working to deport them as soon as possible.

 

Meet Bernard Aronson and Venezuela Blackouts

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Bernard Aronson, a Goldman Sachs insider with assignments in Latin America. It is especially cool that Barack Obama calls on Aronson to end the rebel fighting in Latin America. Or how about using Bernard to normalize Cuba with Hillary Clinton’s approval? John Kerry uses Aronson to handle matters with Columbia.

The intrigue begins. This is rather convoluted, so be patient as you read on.

Aronson has deep ties to Thomas Pritzker of Hyatt hotels fame same as Penny Pritzker who is Barack Obama’s Secretary of Commerce.

The Pritzker dynasty looks like this:

Family tree: Pritzker is the son of Jay Pritzker, founder of Hyatt Hotels Corporation.
Areas of interest:
nonprofits

College: Pritzker received a B.A. from Claremont Men’s College, and an MBA and J.D. from the University of Chicago.

Report: billionaires collect farm subsidies
Fifty billionaires were direct or indirect recipients of farm subsidies, according to a report by the nonprofit Environmental Working Group.
November 7, 2013
The Pritzker fortune and the Obama campaign
Tonight, President Obama will speak at a ceremony honoring this year’s winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, named for the family that built a fortune with the Hyatt Hotels chain.
Back to the intrigue and Bernard Aronson….

Bernard W. Aronson past relationships:

Jimmy Carter – speechwriter
Freedom House – trustee
Global Hyatt Corporation – director
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. – international adviser
Hyatt Hotels Corporation – director
Mariner Energy Inc. – director
Walter F. Mondale – speechwriter
U.S. Department of State – assistant secretary
Now Venezuela:
There were power black-outs in Venezuela? But why? Answer here.
Derwick Associates:
Defendants are U.S. residents who have amassed enormous fortunes through an illicit scheme to secure energy-industry contracts in Venezuela for their various U.S.-based companies, Derwick Associates USA LLC and Derwick Associates Corporation (together with these

companies’  predecessors, successors, assigns and affiliates, “Derwick  
Associates” ). Known in the press as the “ChavezKids, ” “BoliBoys,”
 and “the  mafiosi of the Fifth Republic ,”  Defendants Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt Lopez (“Betancourt”),  Pedro Jose Trebbau Lopez (“Trebbau”),  and Francisco D’Agostino  Casado (“D’Agostino)
 have profited wildly from their ongoing illegal bribery scheme designed to exploit for their personal financial gain the corrupt and anti-democratic Chavez regime.
+++ 
By: Dan Rosenau
Venezuela/U.S. energy sector scandal involving J.P. Morgan, ProEnergy Services (partially-owned by Obama appointee), Derwick AssociatesThe U.S. Department of the Treasury’s FINCEN recently announced that Banco Privada d’Andorra was favored by criminal enterprises from Russia, China, and Venezuela. In the case of Venezuela, government officials reportedly deposited more than $4Bn into personal accounts—most of it siphoned off from PDVSA, the state-owned oil company of Venezuela.

I’m painfully aware of the embezzlement and overbilling involving Venezuela’s energy sector given that, until recently, I was employed at Sedalia, Missouri-based ProEnergy Services. ProEnergy was the contractor responsible for the construction of one dozen power plants in deals involving gross overbilling, multiple offshore transactions, and a murky association with Derwick Associates, a Venezuelan start-up with zero experience in power plant construction. I’m making available here more than 10GB of material directly from the company hard drive. The metadata on each document can be traced directly to Pro-Energy’s computers. My hope is that “crowdsourcing” the enclosed data will allow interested parties to assist in exposing a multi-billion dollar fraud.

From 2009-2012 ProEnergy billed to the tune of $2Bn almost all of it flowing from a single client: Derwick Associates. Our company sold more than $1Bn in turbines (most of them used or refurbished–but sold as new) to Derwick which then resold them hours later at a significant mark-up to the government of Venezuela through entities such as their electricity ministry, their Guyanese state enterprise CVG, their state-owned oil company PDVSA, and the SIDOR iron-ore producer.  In addition to turbine sales to Derwick, ProEnergy built the power plants that Derwick marketed as their own and for which both companies overbilled the Venezuelan government in the hundreds of millions of dollars.  According to the Wall Street Journal, Derwick is now under criminal investigation by federal authorities and by local authorities in New York. (This prompted Derwick to immediately hire Adam Kauffmann, former head of the Manhattan DA investigation division. Kauffmann is already representing several Venezuelan government officials who embezzled hundreds of millions).

Working in ProEnergy’s sales department, I learned our company had hit paydirt when a group of connected Venezuelans chose to ignore Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) such as Rolls Royce, Pratt & Whitney, and General Electric and instead used ProEnergy as a middleman. In other words, a middleman used a middleman.

Inexplicably, the IT department at ProEnergy had blocked access to internet sites when I googled  “Derwick” and “corruption.” This stirred my curiosity and so I explored the company’s shared computer drive for the term “Derwick.”  What I found there shocked me: dozens of proposals to Derwick for generators, for power plants, for upgrades to those power plants. It was odd given that ProEnergy has never built a power plant in the United States (ProEnergy fails to meet American standards and so has offices in places like Angola, Argentina, Pakistan, and Venezuela).  Shockingly, ProEnergy’s proposals reflected a mark-up ranging from 20-74%.  In my industry, profit margin usually hovers between 2 and 5%. At these prices someone was being ripped off.  ProEnergy was overbilling Derwick.

My sense of disbelief only grew the more I read. I discovered document drafts on Derwick letterhead. ProEnergy was writing the proposals and preparing the invoices that Derwick sent Venezuelan clients for the exact same equipment described in the proposals to Derwick from ProEnergy. This included actual invoices from Derwick to Venezuela’s state-owned enterprises like PDVSA. These invoices, the Microsoft Word documents indicated, were created on ProEnergy computers in Sedalia. On some of the Derwick invoices, the bank wiring instructions went to bank accounts belonging to ProEnergy. Some to offshore bank Davos International and others to JP Morgan in New York.

When I learned that the owners of Derwick were barely out of college and friendly with the son of the Electricity Minister of Venezuela I realized why ProEnergy had prepared the Derwick invoices: because our 20-something Venezuelan clients lacked the technical know-how. After all, how does a person draft an invoice for a product with no knowledge about the item in question?

Remarkably, these invoices prepared by ProEnergy and purportedly from Derwick also revealed mammoth markups over and above the prices that ProEnergy charged Derwick.  So, an item like a set of three FT8 Swift Pac turbines bought by ProEnergy from Pratt and Whitney for $67.5M were sold one day later for $78M to Derwick who then sold it two days after that to Venezuela for $97.5 million.  And so in four days an item with a retail cost of $67.5M had $30M added by ProEnergy and by Derwick Associates. In another instance three Rolls Royce Trent 60 turbines originally sourced for $66M from Rolls Royce were sold to Derwick for $79.3M, which in turn resold them hours later for $97.5M, adding another $31M profit to the bottom line of both Derwick and ProEnergy. Like these transactions there are scores of instances on every item imaginable—from spare parts to construction costs, from turbines to generators, from transformers to transportation costs and employee training.  I stopped counting the total on the invoices after two billion dollars.

One colleague told me that the FBI had visited ProEnergy on several occasions. I was tortured, week after week, knowing that ProEnergy was robbing a nation where poverty and crime are rampant.  I spent sleepless nights agonizing about what to do.  Company-wide layoffs solved my immediate dilemma. The truth is that with no more Venezuelan cash flow, ProEnergy suffered a long-standing cash crunch. So much so that Washington, D.C.’s Acon Investments, made a capital injection into ProEnergy.  Acon is run by Obama appointee to Latin America Bernard Aronson.

Months went by and I could not shake the disgust of what transpired.  I blew the whistle by sharing the information with celebrated Venezuelan investigative reporter Cesar Batiz who verified the material and allowed a blogger to post some of it on Scribd.

The sensational revelations about money-laundering activities of Venezuelan energy officials at the Andorran bank would explain why Venezuelan state officials agreed to overpay Derwick and ProEnergy. The men addressed in the letters (written by ProEnergy and) and sent by Derwick are accountholders exposed to criminal charges in Spain for amassing illegal fortunes in “consulting fees.”

It is disheartening that American energy executives would display such appalling greed and be so quick to partake in the looting of Venezuela.  My hope is that by going public with the 10GB of information more of my former colleagues will come forward and blow the whistle on one of the most troubling international scandals in Venezuelan (and Missouri) history. I’ve learned that Derwick Associates has persecuted numerous bloggers in Venezuela and abroad as well as mainstream journalists including having stories about their misdeeds “spiked” at the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, the Economist, Huffington Post, and the Miami Herald.

Then there is Davos and JP Morgan. Sheesh…ties that bind in covert actions.

Make a New Friend in Tehran or Havana

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There are no country borders, the world is transnational and a simple phone call will create a wider address book for new friends, just step inside.

What about stable internet connections or a translator? Is there a Taliban fighter, a Shiite militia fighter, a Soviet loyalist or a Castro brother on the other end?

The concept was created by  Amar Bakshi, Special Assistant to U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice. Mr. Bakshi, spoke from Washington, shared his insights on how Muslim youth can use the tools of new media, from the internet and Facebook to text messaging, to enhance dialogue among diverse populations around the world.

Golden shipping container transports Americans to parts unknown

Washington (AFP) – Step inside a gold-painted shipping container in downtown Washington, midway between the White House and the Capitol, and, for 20 minutes, you can make a new friend in Afghanistan, Cuba or Iran.

“What would make today a good day for you?” is the ice-breaking question that visitors to the Portals project are invited to use to strike up a transnational conversation via a sometimes shaky Internet video link.

Situated in the Ronald Reagan Building’s Woodrow Wilson Plaza off Pennsylvania Avenue, Portals encourages one-on-one contact between typical Americans and folks in Herat, Havana and Tehran.

“Now I have a friend in Cuba and he has a friend in the United States,” said Niloofar Jebelli, 23, as she emerged Friday from her virtual meet-up with a counterpart in Havana.

“This was amazing because I don’t know anyone from Cuba who is in Cuba now,” the graduate student and Portals volunteer from Maryland told AFP. “I’m so happy this is happening.”

Portals creator Amar Bakshi launched the project last year with an impressive $60,000 raised through a Kickstarter crowdfunding appeal.

An man emerges from the Golden Shipping Container after …

His goal is to have gilded 20-foot shipping containers everywhere, harnessing real-time Internet video technology to help strangers in two distant places to become acquaintances.

“When you enter one, you feel as though you are in the same room as someone in another container,” said Bakshi, whose diverse CV includes stints in journalism, law school and the Obama administration.

 

“The goal is to place these all over the world and sort of build the community center of the 21st century,” he told AFP.

The Washington container debuted at George Washington University in April, with its counterpart set up at Hariwa University in Afghanistan’s third-largest city.

In lieu of containers, participants in Havana and Tehran currently step into video chat boxes in a hotel and an art gallery respectively.

Setting up in Havana was particularly challenging because of Cuba’s sore lack of video-capable bandwidth, said Michelle Moghtader, another member of the Portals team.

“It’s just hard to find reliable Internet” on the Communist-ruled Caribbean island that the United States is only now starting to re-establish diplomatic relations with, she told AFP.

And in security-obsessed Washington, Bakshi said the container had to be screened for explosives before it could open its doors in a courtyard surrounded by federal government offices and a farmers’ market.

Over the ether from Tehran, 24-year-old photographer Mahsa Biglow said Friday that Portals has made her see how the US media has shaped Americans’ frequently negative image of her country.

“I found that American people …. don’t know anything about Iran,” she told AFP after concluding a live-stream chat. “It opens their eyes, I guess.”

Portals remains open at its current Washington location until June 21. Would-be participants can reserve a time slot at www.sharedstudios.com, which also has instructions for building your own Portal.

“The Portal will continue in (Washington) D.C. after June 22,” states the website. “We’re just not sure where yet!”