Lawsuit Advances on Trump Dossier Case, McCain Testimony

Posted on July 11, 2017July 11, 2017 by Denise Simon

Okay, this cat Aleksej Gubarev who owns a few internet tech companies has launched the lawsuit(s). Seems too that Gubarev is a Russian venture capitalist based out of Cyprus has an operational location in Dallas. His company boasts 75,000 servers across the globe. McCain was sent the 35 Trump dossier and had official conversations about the dossier with officials and passed the dossier to the FBI.

***

Former British ambassador to Moscow admits warning John McCain about Trump dossier

WASHINGTON

Sen. John McCain faces questions in a defamation lawsuit about leaks leading to publication of the now-infamous dossier that alleged Donald Trump’s campaign had connections to Russian operatives, McClatchy has learned.

The dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele and his London firm, Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd., amounted to a collection of uncorroborated reports of collusion gathered as political research for sale to Trump’s opponents. It proved explosive when published by online news site BuzzFeed on Jan. 10.

Now, two lawsuits — one in the United States and a second in the U.K. — are being brought by lawyers for Aleksej Gubarev, a Cyprus-based Internet entrepreneur whom Steele’s Russian sources accused of cyber spying against the Democratic Party leadership.

According to a new court document in the British lawsuit, counsel for defendants Steele and Orbis repeatedly point to McCain, R-Ariz., a vocal Trump critic, and a former State Department official as two in a handful of people known to have had copies of the full document before it circulated among journalists and was published by BuzzFeed.

The court document obtained by McClatchy confirms that Sir Andrew Wood, a former British ambassador to Moscow and a Russia adviser to former Prime Minister Tony Blair, discussed the 35-page dossier with McCain.

“The Defendants considered that the issues were self-evidently relevant to the national security of the US, UK and their allies,” the document says, explaining why Steele and his partner, Christopher Burrows, felt it necessary to share the dossier’s findings.

*** The lawsuit document is here.

Wood had told Britain’s The Guardian in January that McCain had reached out to him about the dossier, and had obtained it through other means. The court document confirms that Wood, Steele and former State Department official David Kramer decided together that new information gathered after the election should be shared with authorities in Britain and the United States.

A McCain spokesperson declined to comment Monday on the new court document, pointing instead to a Jan. 11 statement from the veteran senator about the dossier. “Upon examination of the contents, and unable to make a judgment about their accuracy, I delivered the information to the director of the FBI,” McCain had said then. “That has been the extent of my contact with the FBI or any other government agency regarding this issue.”

In recent congressional testimony, ex-FBI Director James Comey, fired by Trump amid a widening probe, acknowledged receiving the dossier from McCain on Jan. 6. Kramer, a former State Department official who until recently served as a senior director at Arizona State University’s McCain Institute for International Leadership, declined comment.

The British court documents are legal responses in the British suit and do not reflect the entire docket. The British suit is related to a similar lawsuit in the United States against online news site BuzzFeed.

At least a dozen national media organizations had a copy of the Steele dossier before it became public but hadn’t published details because much of the information had not been corroborated.

McClatchy was among them and subsequently published numerous reports on people named in the dossier, including a Russian diplomat and a supposed hacker who apparently is an imprisoned pedophile.

The dossier, without substantiation, said Gubarev’s U.S.-based global web-hosting companies, XBT and Webzilla, planted digital bugs, transmitted viruses and conducted altering operations against the Democratic Party leadership.

While one key name in the dossier was blackened out by BuzzFeed, Gubarev’s was not. He alleges that he was never contacted for comment, suffering reputational harm in the process.

In the court document, Steele’s barrister, Nicola Cain, argued that the portion of the dossier dealing with Gubarev, which came in weeks after Trump’s election and after Steele was no longer paid by his client for research, amounted to raw intelligence and was advertised as such. She did not return a call or email requests for comment.

Capturing Terrorists Again and Going to Gitmo?

Posted on July 10, 2017July 10, 2017 by Denise Simon

Notice that for years, no terrorist has been captured on the battlefield, they have simply been killed per the edict of the Obama administration. It has made intelligence collection and cultivation almost impossible and in some cases under the previous administration has led to the deaths of innocent civilians due to collateral damage or bad ground control.

The most recent capture was in 2014 of Abu Khattalah of Benghazi, the only terrorist detained and he is presently being held in the Washington DC area.

Meanwhile: The case of United States v. Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al Qosi proceedings at Fort Belvoir, Va., scheduled for July 12. He was released by Obama from Gitmo to his home country Sudan and made his way to Yemen working for AQAP.

The charge sheet for Ahmed Abu Khattalah is here.

The Trump administration appears to be making its first moves toward fulfilling a campaign promise to fill the Guantanamo Bay prison camp with “bad dudes.”

Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein visited the prison on Friday to get an update on current operations, the first concrete action the administration has taken on the facility since taking office.

Up until now, Guantanamo has been running on autopilot; the executive order from former President Obama calling for the facility to be shut down is still technically the law of the land. More here from The Hill.

ABC

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba — In the highest-ranking known visit by a Trump administration official, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, were visiting this remote outpost Friday to get “an up-to-date understanding” of current war-on-terror operations.

Rod Rosenstein, Sessions’ deputy, was also on the tour. Its first stop was the war court compound, Camp Justice, where the Pentagon holds pretrial hearings in the death penalty case against five alleged plotters of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, and others accused of terrorism and war crimes.

They also toured the Detention Center Zone where, after an extensive Obama administration downsizing effort, the Pentagon holds 41 war prisoners, 10 charged with crimes and five cleared for release through Obama or Bush administration review boards.

“Keeping this country safe from terrorists is the highest priority of the Trump administration,” Justice Department spokesman Ian D. Prior said in a statement issued before the VIP party landed at the base and took a special boat rather than the large ferry across Guantanamo Bay.

A court hearing was postponed until afternoon to accommodate the visit. It comes as the chief war court judge, Army Col. James L. Pohl, has been openly complaining about insufficient resources to mount a robust schedule of 2018 hearings in the 9/11 and USS Cole cases.

Other attorneys general have visited the site, including Michael Mukasey for the Bush administration in 2008 and Eric Holder for the Obama administration in 2009. This visit — coming more than five months into the Trump administration, even as the White House has yet to officially rescind Barack Obama’s 2009 closure order — may be seen as a signal of support for the detention operation and the war court where six men are in pretrial, death penalty proceedings for the Sept. 11 and USS Cole attacks.

The one-day visit was announced hours before a Saudi man was due at the war court for a pre-sentencing hearing. Ahmed al-Darbi pleaded guilty to war crimes in February 2014, in exchange for a commitment to let him serve out his sentence of up to 15 years in his homeland starting next year.

“Recent attacks in Europe and elsewhere confirm that the threat to our nation is immediate and real,” Prior said in his statement, “and it remains essential that we use every lawful tool available to prevent as many attacks as possible.”

He said the goal of the visit was for the officials to meet with “the people on the ground who are leading our government-wide efforts at GTMO,” using the Navy acronym from for the 45-square-mile base in southeast Cuba. “In addition to the Department of Justice’s role in handling detainee-related litigation,” he added, “it is important for the Department of Justice to have an up-to-date understanding of current operations.”

Coats’ spokesman, Timothy L. Barrett, issued an identical statement to the Department of Justice’s on the trip’s purpose: “To gain an understanding of current operations by meeting with the people on the ground who are leading our government-wide efforts at GTMO.”

Others on the tour included Adm. Kurt Tidd, the commander of the U.S. Southern Command, which has oversight of the prison; Navy Rear Adm. Edward Cashman, the detention center commander; and Col. Steve Gabavics, the head of the guard force, said Pentagon spokesman Air Force Maj. Ben Sakrisson.

He declined to say whether they visited the prison’s clandestine Camp 7, where former CIA captives are kept in military custody, in what he called a “standard tour of the camps.” The group had lunch in the Detention Center Zone at the Seaside Galley mess hall where guards and other prison staff eat.

Sessions first visited in late January 2002 as a U.S. senator and has long been one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the prison and military commissions system, whose rules are a hybrid of U.S. military and federal legal systems.

The visit comes as the U.S. Southern Command, not so long ago run by Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, is proposing an up to $100 million construction project to house 13,000 temporary migrants and 5,000 support staff on the base near the airstrip. The Navy, in announcing the proposal, called it a “contingency mass migration complex.”

The war court and Detention Center Zone staffed by 1,500 troops and civilians are on the opposite side of the base, requiring a ferry ride across Guantanamo Bay.

No such mass exodus is foreseen. First, the Obama administration canceled a decades-old “wet foot, dry foot” policy that let Cubans who reach U.S. shores gain legal entry. Now the Trump administration is pursuing deportations of undocumented immigrants, a program championed by Sessions.

“There are no detention facilities involved in this project,” Southcom spokesman Army Maj. Vance Trenkel said by email on Thursday. “This project is to assist with mass migration operations … caused by things such as a natural disaster.”

In the 1990s the base was used to shelter more than 50,000 Cubans and Haitians who were stopped at sea from reaching the United States.

Trump in that Miss Universe Music Video and Agalarov

Posted on July 10, 2017July 10, 2017 by Denise Simon

Primer: Russian ‘Gun-For-Hire’ Lurks In Shadows Of Washington’s Lobbying World

Rinat Akhmetshin, the man at the back of the room who for nearly 20 years has worked the shadowy corners of the Washington lobbying scene on behalf of businessman and politicians from around the former Soviet Union. In an e-mail response to RFE/RL, Akhmetshin denied that he ever worked for Soviet military intelligence, something he would have had to declare when he applied for U.S. citizenship.

Akhmetshin has paid at least one visit to Congress in connection with new human rights legislation that builds on the earlier Magnitsky Act. Along with Ron Dellums, a former U.S. congressman from California and longtime Washington lobbyist, Akhmetshin visited House member offices on May 17 to meet with Dana Rohrabacher, another California congressman viewed as one of the most sympathetic U.S. officials to Russian causes. Read the full story here for context and timeline.

According to The Daily Beast, the two told congressional officials said they were lobbying on behalf of Prevezon. But Dellums told RFE/RL that his involvement focused on resuming Russian adoptions by U.S. parents.

Senator Grassley was advised in 2016 on the moving parts of foreign agents, the mission to lift sanctions or scale back the Magnitsky Act and other connections.

Aras Agalarov

Real Time Net Worth — as of 7/10/17

$1.92 B

Forbes: Billionaire developer Aras Agalarov and his pop star son, Emin, have close ties to US president Donald Trump. In 2013, the Agalarovs brought Trump’s Miss Universe pageant to Moscow, and, they say, later planned to construct a Trump Tower in Russia. Those ambitions fell apart when The Donald ran for office. Aras began his career in the technology industry, but saw greater business potential in trade fairs. In 1989 he established development firm Crocus, which became one of the country’s largest trade-fair operators. His holdings have since expanded into an array of luxe buildings and shopping malls, including the expansive Crocus City Mall in Moscow. Emin, who once featured Trump in a music video, was previously married to the daughter of Azerbaijan president Ilkham Aliyev. He retains close ties to the Trump family and brand. More here on Aras Agalarov and real estate.

Trump with Agalarov at the Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow, on Nov. 9, 2013.

Photographer: Victor Boyko/Getty Images

The last time Donald Trump made an appearance in Moscow was November 2013 for the Miss Universe contest he famously owned. It was a glittering event filled with carefully choreographed photographs and parties. Then another, more private, invitation arrived: Come to Nobu to meet more than a dozen of Russia’s top businessmen, including Herman Gref, the chief executive officer of state-controlled Sberbank PJSC, Russia’s biggest bank.

Gref, who was President Vladimir Putin’s economy minister from 2000 to 2007, organized the meeting together with Aras Agalarov, the founder of Crocus Group, one of the country’s largest real-estate companies, which was hosting the beauty pageant at one of its concert halls.

“There was a good feeling from the meeting,” Gref said in an interview. “He’s a sensible person, very lively in his responses, with a positive energy and a good attitude toward Russia.”

Trump’s two-hour gathering at Nobu, a 15-minute walk from the Kremlin, suggests that the president-elect’s circle of contacts in Russia is wider than previously reported and includes a close confidant of Putin’s. More here from Bloomberg.

Facebook check-ins can be damming.

Rob Goldstone, the man who says he connected Donald Trump Jr. with a Russian lawyer who claimed to have damaging information about Hillary Clinton, is a British-born music producer with ties to a Russian billionaire through his pop star son.Trump Jr. confirmed in a statement that he and other Trump campaign officials met with Natalia Veselnitskaya in June 2016. The person who asked Trump Jr. to attend the meeting was Goldstone, a music producer with ties to a Russian pop star named Emin Agalarov, according to The Washington Post.

The New York Times broke the story that Trump Jr., Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort had attended the meeting, although Trump Jr. says Veselnitskaya never produced information negative to Clinton.

A special prosecutor is investigating whether members of the Trump campaign colluded with Russian interference into the 2016 presidential election. Goldstone is a colorful addition to the cast of characters in the Trump/Russia controversies. More here from Heavy.

US President Donald Trump was “not aware of and did not attend” a 2016 meeting between his son Donald Trump Jr and a Kremlin-connected lawyer who was offering damaging information on then Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, his lawyers say.

Mr Trump’s then-campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and his son-in-law Jared Kushner also attended the meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower on June 9 last year, two weeks after Mr Trump won the Republican nomination, the New York Times reported, citing three advisers to the White House.

Donald Trump Jr acknowledged the meeting, but said Ms Veselnitskaya had “no meaningful information”.

*** So who is Natalia Veselnitskaya?

By her own account, the Russian lawyer that managed to slide her way into Trump Tower last year and meet with President Donald Trump’s eldest son, his campaign manager and son-in-law is a former Moscow prosecutor who had been denied a visa to enter the United States.

Natalia Veselnitskaya filed an affidavit in a federal case in New York describing how she managed to get special permission to enter the United States after the visa denial to help represent a Russian company called Prevezon Holdings owned by the Russian businessman Denis Katsyv in a case brought against it by U.S. prosecutors.

“I represent victims in many criminal cases involving economic crimes. I have been retained by Denis Katsyv and the defendants in this action to assist their attorneys in the United States, Baker & Hostetler LLP to prepare their defense,” she wrote in the January 2016 affidavit filed in court in New York City.

“As counsel to Defendants, it is important that I be able to participate in the defense of this action by traveling to the United States. For that reason, I applied for a visa to enter the United States, but was denied,” she added. “I also applied for entry visas for my children, so that they could be together with me over the Christmas holiday while I was working in New York on this lawsuit, but this was also denied. However, the United States did issue a parole letter for me to enter the United States in order to help defend this lawsuit.”

It was apparently during the time she was in the United States on that parole entry that she arranged to meet with Donald Trump Jr., Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and former campaign manager Paul Manafort on June 9, 2016 at Trump Tower.

During the meeting Veselnitskaya raised the issue of restoring U.S. adoptions inside Russia if the United States would repeal the Magnitsky Act, a law passed in 2012 punishing Moscow for human rights violations in connection with the death of a lawyer who had discovered a massive money laundering scheme inside the country. More here from Circa.

The Dark-World with U-47700 and Bitcoin

Posted on July 8, 2017July 8, 2017 by Denise Simon

Congress should sanction China operations due to synthetic opioid production and should also list all variants of synthetic opioids as weapons of mass destruction under the chemical and biological weapons convention. DEA now has offices in China to work with officials there and investigation trafficking patterns.

Insight

The United States consumes 85% of all the world’s natural and synthetic opiates, which in 2015 factored in 33,091 U.S. deaths, up more than 4000 from the previous year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Opioid overdoses have quadrupled since 1999. When average U.S. life expectancies for men and women edged downward last year, for the first time in decades, many health professionals blamed opiate abuse.

The opium poppy is no longer the starting point for many of the opiates on the street. The new compounds, often sold mixed with heroin, originate in illicit labs in China. “For the cartels, why wait for a field of poppies to grow and harvest if you can get your hands on the precursor chemicals and cook a batch of fentanyl in a lab?” says Tim Reagan, resident agent in charge of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA’s) Cincinnati office.

In late 2015, the drug agency persuaded its Chinese counterpart to add 116 synthetic drugs to its list of controlled substances; fentanyl and several analogs were included. In response, underground Chinese labs began tweaking the fentanyl molecule, which is easy to alter for anyone with basic knowledge of chemistry and lab tools. By adding chemical groups, unscrupulous chemists have created new, unregulated variants, some of them even more potent than the original.

Hoping to stem the tide of synthetic opiates, DEA has taken the fight to China, as prolific a maker of illicit drugs as it is of legitimate chemicals. According to a U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission report last month, “China is a global source of illicit fentanyl and other [new psychoactive substances] because the country’s vast chemical and pharmaceutical industries are weakly regulated and poorly monitored.” In response to U.S. pressure, China has scheduled fentanyl and several other derivatives. More here.

U-47700

COMMON NAMES

U-47700

EFFECTS CLASSIFICATIONS

Opioid

CHEMICAL NAME

3,4-dichloro-N-[2-(dimethylamino)cyclohexyl]-N-methylbenzamide

DESCRIPTION

U-47700 is a short-acting synthetic opioid analgesic that first became available via online vendors in late 2014. It has only a short history of human use. U-47700 has been detected in counterfeit pharmaceutical opioids and associated with deaths.

Mar-Apr 2016 – Fake oxycodone tablets containing U-47700 are seized by law enforcement in Ohio and fake Norco tablets containing U-47700 and fentanyl appear in the Sacramento, CA area.

An 18-Year-Old Girl Died From a Synthetic Opioid She Bought Online. Here’s How Portland Police Cracked the Case.

A fatal overdose in East Portland leads detectives into the Dark Web, where lab-created opioids are bought with Bitcoin.

Courtesy of Jessica Collins

Even by Portland standards, the weather was dreary on the day Aisha Zughbieh-Collins died.

It was late morning Feb. 16 when Jessica Collins drove through a 40-degree drizzle to the pink and yellow townhouse on Southeast 84th Avenue, where Aisha, her 18-year-old daughter, lived.

Collins drove gingerly down the rutted, dead-end gravel street. It’s the kind of street that’s often lined with abandoned shopping carts.

She got out of her truck, walked into Aisha’s townhouse and climbed the stairs with a sense of dread. For the past 12 hours, Collins had been unable to reach her daughter.

Just two weeks earlier, Aisha had overdosed, her life saved when a roommate called paramedics.

As Collins entered her daughter’s bedroom, Aisha was sitting lotus-style on her bed.

“Each step closer I could tell something was really wrong,” Collins recalls.

Aisha had a syringe in her right arm, and a shoelace tourniquet tied around her biceps. She wasn’t breathing. Her skin was cold.

“I know it sounds strange,” Collins says, “but a sense of peace came over me—that she’s OK now—even though she was dead in front of me.”

Drug overdoses now kill more people than firearms or automobile crashes in Oregon, according to state figures, and are the largest cause of accidental death in the U.S. As the country’s overdose death total continues to soar, Oregon officials have responded far more effectively than officials in most states (see chart below).

While opioid overdose deaths nationally rose 57 percent from 2010 to 2015, they actually dropped slightly in Oregon over the same period. Source: Oregon Health Authority

But even in Portland, which has slowed overdose deaths resulting from heroin and prescription opioids such as oxycodone, Aisha’s death is part of a new and dangerous development.

The drug that killed her was a potent “synthetic” opioid manufactured in China—a drug so new that narcotics investigators and Portland’s public health officials had never encountered it before.

“What we don’t have a lot of here yet is the synthetics,” says Dr. Paul Lewis, the Multnomah County health officer. “That could change.”

When Portland Police Bureau detectives arrived at Aisha’s townhouse, they were initially stymied. Their investigation would eventually lead them across the country and into the deepest recesses of the internet: places where the common currency is Bitcoin, and where buyers and sellers are anonymous and far removed from each other. Bitcoin is used for a lot of other purposes though, as people find it a lot easier to buy bitcoin. It just depends on the circumstances though obviously.

The trail would take them to a condo in South Carolina, and to one of the Dark Web’s most prolific synthetic opioid sellers.

“We’d never done a case like this,” says the Police Bureau detective who led the investigation. “We weren’t familiar with the substance. And we had no idea where it came from.”

Aisha Zughbieh-Collins traveled a long way in a short life that started on the Gulf Coast of Florida.

She was petite—barely 5 feet 4 inches tall, with a quick smile. She loved animals: She used to have a cat named Bebe and a Burmese python named Applejack. She liked sushi and Thai food, root beer and cream soda. She listened to Bright Eyes and Nirvana.

In November 2015, Aisha ran away from a foster-care facility in Baltimore, where her mother says she’d been assaulted. Aisha reconnected with her mother, who was also living in Maryland but who had lost custody of Aisha three years earlier.

Rather than return Aisha to foster care, the pair decided to head west to begin new lives. They left shortly before Thanksgiving. “We didn’t know where to go, but we wanted warm weather,” Collins says.

They drove west in a sunflower-colored Nissan Xterra, using throwaway phones and paying cash at cheap motels. They feared authorities might be looking for Aisha, who was 17 years old and still a ward of the state.

They arrived in Oregon in February 2016, and Collins found work as a host in a remote campground in Mount Hood National Forest.

They liked the woods, but for Aisha, there was little in the way of entertainment—nobody her age, nowhere to eat, and no WiFi. “It was hard for Aisha to be without the internet,” Collins says.

In May of that year, Aisha found a place to live on Craigslist and moved to the Brentwood-Darlington neighborhood just east of 82nd Avenue, sharing with several housemates the townhouse where she would eventually die.

Collins says her daughter had been using hard drugs in Maryland, and had started using again when Collins moved to Portland, living near Aisha.
She told her mother she was using a drug called U-47700.

U-47700, known sometimes as U4 or “pink,” was developed by the pharmaceutical company Upjohn in 1976 as an alternative to morphine but never received U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval. As a result, it was never placed on the FDA’s schedule of illicit drugs, so for decades there was no prohibition on its manufacture or distribution. It existed in a gray zone—neither approved for use nor specifically illegal.

And while Upjohn never manufactured the drug, laboratories in China—where law enforcement officials say many synthetic opioids are made—figured out how to do so.

U-47700 is also lethal—nearly eight times more potent than heroin. Records show the feds first became aware that people were using U4 to get high in October 2015, although they weren’t sure where the drug was coming from.

In the next year, they recorded 46 overdose deaths, most on the Eastern Seaboard. In November 2016, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, “responding to the imminent threat to public health and safety,” made U-47700 a schedule I substance, classifying it among the most dangerous street drugs.

“I told Aisha U4 was suicide,” Collins recalls. “You can’t choose whether you live or die. It’s like Russian roulette.”

**Rising Synthetic Tide: Overdose deaths from synthetic opioids rose much faster last year than overdose deaths from heroin or prescription pain pills.**

Source: Centers for Disease Control

The day Aisha died, Portland narcotics detectives arrived at her townhouse. The lead detective is a stocky cop, with salt-and-pepper hair and, considering his job, a cheery demeanor.

The detective later spoke to WW but insisted on anonymity because he works undercover. He sees a lot of dead bodies: There are about two fatal overdoses a week in Portland, most opioid-related.

But this one stood out, the detective says, not only because he’d never heard of the drug that killed Aisha, but also because she was a woman, and so young—the average overdose victim in Oregon is a man over 35.

The house where Aisha Zughbieh-Collins died. (Hilary Sanders)

Portland’s approach to overdose deaths changed in 2007, when Kraig Crow, a Lincoln High School graduate, fatally overdosed.

“Our policy here is different from other jurisdictions’,” the detective says. “Before, we just walked away and let the medical examiner handle it.

“After the Lincoln case,” he continues, “we started asking, ‘What can we find at the scene that can allow us to investigate further?'”

When Portland detectives respond to an overdose death now, they are looking for witnesses, phones and the packaging in which drugs are delivered.

In the Crow case, prosecutors won convictions of six defendants, including what’s called a “Len Bias conviction” for the top dealer.

That law, named after University of Maryland basketball star Len Bias, who died of a cocaine overdose in 1986 after being picked second overall in the NBA draft, became a potent tool for prosecutors because it replaced lighter sentences with a 20-year prison term for those who deal drugs leading to a death.

Federal prosecutors in Oregon are recognized as national leaders in bringing Len Bias cases.

Investigators try to determine how the fatal dose moved from the original source to the consumer, establishing a chain of custody. “Every person in the chain is potentially liable for the overdose death,” says Steve Mygrant, an assistant U.S. attorney who has prosecuted several dealers in fatal overdose cases. (Local and federal officials often cooperate on Len Bias cases.)

Aisha’s mother told detectives she thought her daughter bought U4 online, and she provided them with Aisha’s email address.

The detectives also found unusual materials in Aisha’s bedroom—distinctive packaging suggested someone had carefully disguised the U-47700 to send it through the mail.

The drug Aisha bought had been hidden in a VeriQuick brand pregnancy test kit—sold only at Dollar Tree stores—and appeared to have arrived from an unknown seller in a U.S. Postal Service shipping envelope from South Carolina.
Those were clues. But the detectives couldn’t work their way up the usual chain of delivery as they do in heroin cases.

“Our calls usually come from people complaining about a neighborhood drug house,” the detective says. “This online stuff is at a completely different level.”

The next day, the detectives asked for help from federal experts who knew how to navigate the deepest recesses of the internet.

In 2013, federal agents busted Silk Road, a vast online bazaar for drugs, child pornography, illegal weapons, stolen credit cards, valuable personal information, hacking services and even contract killers.

Silk Road operated on what’s called the Dark Web. That’s the term used to describe the vast array of websites that operate out of reach of the average web surfer.

The internet is like an iceberg: Experts say less than 5 percent of websites are visible using typical browsers such as Safari, Firefox or Chrome.

Some of what’s under the surface is benign material that is simply password-protected: legitimate financial and medical records, for instance, that are shielded for privacy reasons. But it is also used by dissidents in countries where free speech isn’t allowed—and by criminals of all kinds.

Dark Web users need a couple of things to access such sites: a specialized (and easily downloadable) browser called Tor and, if they want to remain anonymous, a tool that encrypts their communications and preserves their anonymity. Aisha used what’s called a PGP (“pretty good privacy”) key to hide her activity.

And for people who wish to buy or sell goods or services on the Dark Web, using Bitcoin or another virtual currency adds another layer of anonymity. Bitcoin, which Aisha used, allowed her to purchase drugs without creating the kind of easily traceable trail that credit or debit cards leave behind.

“But once you clear the smoke,” says George Chamberlin, chief of the FBI’s Oregon Cyber Task Force, “it’s not that different from the visible internet.”
When Silk Road disappeared because of the indictment and conviction of its creator, other Dark Web marketplaces took its place. One, called AlphaBay, offers a staggering array of illicit drugs.

Sellers hawk their wares aggressively and encourage buyers to rate their experiences just as customers do on conventional sites such as Amazon, Yelp or Trip Advisor. But instead of rating tacos or hotel rooms, buyers are rating heroin, meth or the newest kind of illicit narcotic, synthetic opioids.

“The game is changing,” the FBI’s Chamberlin says, “especially because of synthetics. They are different because of their potency and because they are trafficked on the Dark Web.”

Detectives found that Aisha had written an alphanumeric code on a pad in her bedroom. That code identified her PGP key.

They determined that Aisha’s PGP key had been used to buy drugs on AlphaBay.
The detective learned that, using her PGP, Aisha had purchased U-47700 on Feb. 11, five days before her death, from a vendor who called himself “Peter the Great”—like the Russian emperor.

A U.S. postal inspector determined the envelope found in Aisha’s bedroom had a fictitious return address but was purchased at a post office in Greenville, S.C.

In April, the Portland detective bought U4 over the Dark Web from Peter the Great. The drugs arrived, wrapped in material from Dollar Tree.

The person who purchased the shipping labels—presumably Peter the Great—used secure email addresses. The investigators then filed a subpoena for all records related to those addresses.

They turned up a name: Ted Khleborod, a resident of Greenville.

Peter the Great—who detectives now believed was Khleborod—was a prolific salesman: Figures on AlphaBay showed he’d done 9,553 transactions.

The Portland detective contacted federal officials in South Carolina. “We scared the crap out the assistant U.S. attorney back there when we told him about the substance and volume of sales,” the detective says. “This guy was sending out the equivalent of bombs.”

Ted Khleborod (Spartanburg County Sheriff’s Office)

Khleborod, now 28, was born in Moldova, part of the former Soviet Union. When he was in high school, records show he spent time on bodybuilder chat boards, discussing the benefits of steroid use and posting as “Arnoldismyhero,” a tribute to former California governor and champion body builder Arnold Schwarzenegger.

He later studied at the University of South Carolina, where, according to his Facebook page, he was pre-med. He graduated in 2016.

Khleborod lived well for a college student, records show, driving a BMW—with a vanity plate that read “TEDALICUS”—and a Ducati motorcycle.

In late April, Portland detectives flew to Greenville to coordinate with local police.

For three days, they staked out Khleborod at his condo. They saw his girlfriend, Ana Barrero, leave his place twice to mail dozens of parcels, with labels matching those they’d found earlier in Aisha’s room and identical to those matching labels from the drugs that investigators bought over the Dark Web from Peter the Great.

They also obtained video of Barrero buying 71 VeriQuick pregnancy test kits at a Dollar Tree in Greenville.

On April 26, officers arrested Khleborod as he left work at an urgent care clinic. “He was a quiet guy, contemplative,” says the Portland detective. “I don’t think he used his own product, and based on his numbers, he could have made a million bucks in the past couple years.”

Khleborod, who is now in custody, faces federal charges in South Carolina. (His attorney did not respond to a request for comment.)

When officers served a search warrant on Khleborod’s condo, they wore hazmat suits to guard against the toxicity of U-47700. They hauled away 9 kilos of the drug, worth $270,000.

They also found a book, written for prospective doctors, called *Kill as Few Patients as Possible.*

The Portland detective says Aisha’s case revealed to him a new world of synthetic opioids and the Dark Web. He says he also realized that despite all the technically sophisticated tools dealers like Peter the Great employ, they are subject to human mistakes.

“Internet privacy—even with encryption—is not as great as you think,” the detective says. “People on the Dark Web still leave breadcrumbs we can follow.”
Jessica Collins says she’s happy police arrested Khleborod. But she remains heartbroken over her daughter’s death.

“I feel like she’s with me every day,” Collins says, “and I worry about how many other families this might happen to.”

Cam Strahm, the DEA chief for Oregon, applauds the police work that led to Khleborod’s capture. But he says after 26 years of chasing drug dealers, he’s come to understand the limits of that work.

“Addiction is a treatable disease,” he says, “and we’re facing an epidemic. We can’t arrest our way out of it.”

Aisha Collins (Courtesy of Jessica Collins)

**The Wages of Synthetics**

The new challenge from synthetic opioids marketed over the Dark Web comes at a time when the trend in overdose deaths in Oregon is relatively positive.

Opioid deaths here have declined in recent years, while the trend in the rest of the country is still sharply upward. (The New York Times recently reported deaths jumped nearly 20 percent nationally in 2016.)

“When you look at the rest of the country, flat is good,”says Multnomah County Health Officer Dr. Paul Lewis.

There are two reasons for the good news. The first is naloxone, marketed under the brand name Narcan, a nasal spray that reverses overdoses. Under the leadership of former Multnomah County Health Officer Dr. Gary Oxman, the Portland area was a national pioneer in making naloxone widely available (“Who Wants to Save a Junkie?” WW, March 13, 2013).

And Oxman’s successor, Lewis, pushed large metro-area medical systems to decrease the number of opioid pain pills prescribed to patients. That number has decreased each of the past five quarters.

Together, those two developments have caused the number of overdose deaths in Oregon to decline, a result most states would envy.

But deaths such as Aisha Zughbieh-Collins’ highlight a new danger: synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, carfentanil and U-47700 that are not prescribed by physicians but instead manufactured and sold illegally.

Lewis says there have been just two confirmed deaths in the metro area in the past 18 months in which U-47700 was the primary cause. But synthetic opioids are now the nation’s fastest-growing cause of overdose deaths. The death toll in some states is extraordinary: Last year, for instance, there were 34 deaths from synthetics in Oregon in 2015—and 949 in Massachusetts.

“The synthetic thing is new to everybody,” Lewis says. “We thought heroin was the foe, but now these synthetics come along. It’s a new chapter, and we don’t know how it ends.”

Cam Strahm of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration notes that synthetics such as fentanyl and carfentanil are dozens or even hundreds of times stronger than heroin.

Strahm says synthetics are also less predictable than heroin, which is now fairly standard in quality and potency. The dealers who sell synthetics often mix them in nonstandard “cocktails” and also frequently misrepresent what they are selling.

“When you are making illicit purchases from anonymous sources, you can’t depend on purity or that what you think you are buying is what you actually get,” Strahm says. “You really don’t know what you are purchasing. It’s like going on a vacation without knowing your destination.”

But even in Portland, which has slowed overdose deaths resulting from heroin and prescription opioids such as oxycodone, Aisha’s death is part of a new and dangerous development.

The drug that killed her was a potent “synthetic” opioid manufactured in China—a drug so new that narcotics investigators and Portland’s public health officials had never encountered it before.

“What we don’t have a lot of here yet is the synthetics,” says Dr. Paul Lewis, the Multnomah County health officer. “That could change.”

When Portland Police Bureau detectives arrived at Aisha’s townhouse, they were initially stymied. Their investigation would eventually lead them across the country and into the deepest recesses of the internet: places where the common currency is Bitcoin, and where buyers and sellers are anonymous and far removed from each other. Bitcoin is used for a lot of other purposes though, as people find it a lot easier to buy bitcoin. It just depends on the circumstances though obviously.

The trail would take them to a condo in South Carolina, and to one of the Dark Web’s most prolific synthetic opioid sellers.

“We’d never done a case like this,” says the Police Bureau detective who led the investigation. “We weren’t familiar with the substance. And we had no idea where it came from.”

Aisha Zughbieh-Collins traveled a long way in a short life that started on the Gulf Coast of Florida.

She was petite—barely 5 feet 4 inches tall, with a quick smile. She loved animals: She used to have a cat named Bebe and a Burmese python named Applejack. She liked sushi and Thai food, root beer and cream soda. She listened to Bright Eyes and Nirvana.

In November 2015, Aisha ran away from a foster-care facility in Baltimore, where her mother says she’d been assaulted. Aisha reconnected with her mother, who was also living in Maryland but who had lost custody of Aisha three years earlier.

Rather than return Aisha to foster care, the pair decided to head west to begin new lives. They left shortly before Thanksgiving. “We didn’t know where to go, but we wanted warm weather,” Collins says.

They drove west in a sunflower-colored Nissan Xterra, using throwaway phones and paying cash at cheap motels. They feared authorities might be looking for Aisha, who was 17 years old and still a ward of the state.

They arrived in Oregon in February 2016, and Collins found work as a host in a remote campground in Mount Hood National Forest.

They liked the woods, but for Aisha, there was little in the way of entertainment—nobody her age, nowhere to eat, and no WiFi. “It was hard for Aisha to be without the internet,” Collins says.

In May of that year, Aisha found a place to live on Craigslist and moved to the Brentwood-Darlington neighborhood just east of 82nd Avenue, sharing with several housemates the townhouse where she would eventually die.

Collins says her daughter had been using hard drugs in Maryland, and had started using again when Collins moved to Portland, living near Aisha.
She told her mother she was using a drug called U-47700.

U-47700, known sometimes as U4 or “pink,” was developed by the pharmaceutical company Upjohn in 1976 as an alternative to morphine but never received U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval. As a result, it was never placed on the FDA’s schedule of illicit drugs, so for decades there was no prohibition on its manufacture or distribution. It existed in a gray zone—neither approved for use nor specifically illegal.

And while Upjohn never manufactured the drug, laboratories in China—where law enforcement officials say many synthetic opioids are made—figured out how to do so.

U-47700 is also lethal—nearly eight times more potent than heroin. Records show the feds first became aware that people were using U4 to get high in October 2015, although they weren’t sure where the drug was coming from.

In the next year, they recorded 46 overdose deaths, most on the Eastern Seaboard. In November 2016, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, “responding to the imminent threat to public health and safety,” made U-47700 a schedule I substance, classifying it among the most dangerous street drugs.

“I told Aisha U4 was suicide,” Collins recalls. “You can’t choose whether you live or die. It’s like Russian roulette.”

**Rising Synthetic Tide: Overdose deaths from synthetic opioids rose much faster last year than overdose deaths from heroin or prescription pain pills.**

Source: Centers for Disease Control

The day Aisha died, Portland narcotics detectives arrived at her townhouse. The lead detective is a stocky cop, with salt-and-pepper hair and, considering his job, a cheery demeanor.

The detective later spoke to WW but insisted on anonymity because he works undercover. He sees a lot of dead bodies: There are about two fatal overdoses a week in Portland, most opioid-related.

But this one stood out, the detective says, not only because he’d never heard of the drug that killed Aisha, but also because she was a woman, and so young—the average overdose victim in Oregon is a man over 35.

The house where Aisha Zughbieh-Collins died. (Hilary Sanders)

Portland’s approach to overdose deaths changed in 2007, when Kraig Crow, a Lincoln High School graduate, fatally overdosed.

“Our policy here is different from other jurisdictions’,” the detective says. “Before, we just walked away and let the medical examiner handle it.

“After the Lincoln case,” he continues, “we started asking, ‘What can we find at the scene that can allow us to investigate further?'”

When Portland detectives respond to an overdose death now, they are looking for witnesses, phones and the packaging in which drugs are delivered.

In the Crow case, prosecutors won convictions of six defendants, including what’s called a “Len Bias conviction” for the top dealer.

That law, named after University of Maryland basketball star Len Bias, who died of a cocaine overdose in 1986 after being picked second overall in the NBA draft, became a potent tool for prosecutors because it replaced lighter sentences with a 20-year prison term for those who deal drugs leading to a death.

Federal prosecutors in Oregon are recognized as national leaders in bringing Len Bias cases.

Investigators try to determine how the fatal dose moved from the original source to the consumer, establishing a chain of custody. “Every person in the chain is potentially liable for the overdose death,” says Steve Mygrant, an assistant U.S. attorney who has prosecuted several dealers in fatal overdose cases. (Local and federal officials often cooperate on Len Bias cases.)

Aisha’s mother told detectives she thought her daughter bought U4 online, and she provided them with Aisha’s email address.

The detectives also found unusual materials in Aisha’s bedroom—distinctive packaging suggested someone had carefully disguised the U-47700 to send it through the mail.

The drug Aisha bought had been hidden in a VeriQuick brand pregnancy test kit—sold only at Dollar Tree stores—and appeared to have arrived from an unknown seller in a U.S. Postal Service shipping envelope from South Carolina.
Those were clues. But the detectives couldn’t work their way up the usual chain of delivery as they do in heroin cases.

“Our calls usually come from people complaining about a neighborhood drug house,” the detective says. “This online stuff is at a completely different level.”

The next day, the detectives asked for help from federal experts who knew how to navigate the deepest recesses of the internet.

In 2013, federal agents busted Silk Road, a vast online bazaar for drugs, child pornography, illegal weapons, stolen credit cards, valuable personal information, hacking services and even contract killers.

Silk Road operated on what’s called the Dark Web. That’s the term used to describe the vast array of websites that operate out of reach of the average web surfer.

The internet is like an iceberg: Experts say less than 5 percent of websites are visible using typical browsers such as Safari, Firefox or Chrome.

Some of what’s under the surface is benign material that is simply password-protected: legitimate financial and medical records, for instance, that are shielded for privacy reasons. But it is also used by dissidents in countries where free speech isn’t allowed—and by criminals of all kinds.

Dark Web users need a couple of things to access such sites: a specialized (and easily downloadable) browser called Tor and, if they want to remain anonymous, a tool that encrypts their communications and preserves their anonymity. Aisha used what’s called a PGP (“pretty good privacy”) key to hide her activity.

And for people who wish to buy or sell goods or services on the Dark Web, using Bitcoin or another virtual currency adds another layer of anonymity. Bitcoin, which Aisha used, allowed her to purchase drugs without creating the kind of easily traceable trail that credit or debit cards leave behind.

“But once you clear the smoke,” says George Chamberlin, chief of the FBI’s Oregon Cyber Task Force, “it’s not that different from the visible internet.”
When Silk Road disappeared because of the indictment and conviction of its creator, other Dark Web marketplaces took its place. One, called AlphaBay, offers a staggering array of illicit drugs.

Sellers hawk their wares aggressively and encourage buyers to rate their experiences just as customers do on conventional sites such as Amazon, Yelp or Trip Advisor. But instead of rating tacos or hotel rooms, buyers are rating heroin, meth or the newest kind of illicit narcotic, synthetic opioids.

“The game is changing,” the FBI’s Chamberlin says, “especially because of synthetics. They are different because of their potency and because they are trafficked on the Dark Web.”

Detectives found that Aisha had written an alphanumeric code on a pad in her bedroom. That code identified her PGP key.

They determined that Aisha’s PGP key had been used to buy drugs on AlphaBay.
The detective learned that, using her PGP, Aisha had purchased U-47700 on Feb. 11, five days before her death, from a vendor who called himself “Peter the Great”—like the Russian emperor.

A U.S. postal inspector determined the envelope found in Aisha’s bedroom had a fictitious return address but was purchased at a post office in Greenville, S.C.

In April, the Portland detective bought U4 over the Dark Web from Peter the Great. The drugs arrived, wrapped in material from Dollar Tree.

The person who purchased the shipping labels—presumably Peter the Great—used secure email addresses. The investigators then filed a subpoena for all records related to those addresses.

They turned up a name: Ted Khleborod, a resident of Greenville.

Peter the Great—who detectives now believed was Khleborod—was a prolific salesman: Figures on AlphaBay showed he’d done 9,553 transactions.

The Portland detective contacted federal officials in South Carolina. “We scared the crap out the assistant U.S. attorney back there when we told him about the substance and volume of sales,” the detective says. “This guy was sending out the equivalent of bombs.”

Ted Khleborod (Spartanburg County Sheriff’s Office)

Khleborod, now 28, was born in Moldova, part of the former Soviet Union. When he was in high school, records show he spent time on bodybuilder chat boards, discussing the benefits of steroid use and posting as “Arnoldismyhero,” a tribute to former California governor and champion body builder Arnold Schwarzenegger.

He later studied at the University of South Carolina, where, according to his Facebook page, he was pre-med. He graduated in 2016.

Khleborod lived well for a college student, records show, driving a BMW—with a vanity plate that read “TEDALICUS”—and a Ducati motorcycle.

In late April, Portland detectives flew to Greenville to coordinate with local police.

For three days, they staked out Khleborod at his condo. They saw his girlfriend, Ana Barrero, leave his place twice to mail dozens of parcels, with labels matching those they’d found earlier in Aisha’s room and identical to those matching labels from the drugs that investigators bought over the Dark Web from Peter the Great.

They also obtained video of Barrero buying 71 VeriQuick pregnancy test kits at a Dollar Tree in Greenville.

On April 26, officers arrested Khleborod as he left work at an urgent care clinic. “He was a quiet guy, contemplative,” says the Portland detective. “I don’t think he used his own product, and based on his numbers, he could have made a million bucks in the past couple years.”

Khleborod, who is now in custody, faces federal charges in South Carolina. (His attorney did not respond to a request for comment.)

When officers served a search warrant on Khleborod’s condo, they wore hazmat suits to guard against the toxicity of U-47700. They hauled away 9 kilos of the drug, worth $270,000.

They also found a book, written for prospective doctors, called *Kill as Few Patients as Possible.*

The Portland detective says Aisha’s case revealed to him a new world of synthetic opioids and the Dark Web. He says he also realized that despite all the technically sophisticated tools dealers like Peter the Great employ, they are subject to human mistakes.

“Internet privacy—even with encryption—is not as great as you think,” the detective says. “People on the Dark Web still leave breadcrumbs we can follow.”
Jessica Collins says she’s happy police arrested Khleborod. But she remains heartbroken over her daughter’s death.

“I feel like she’s with me every day,” Collins says, “and I worry about how many other families this might happen to.”

Cam Strahm, the DEA chief for Oregon, applauds the police work that led to Khleborod’s capture. But he says after 26 years of chasing drug dealers, he’s come to understand the limits of that work.

“Addiction is a treatable disease,” he says, “and we’re facing an epidemic. We can’t arrest our way out of it.”

Aisha Collins (Courtesy of Jessica Collins)

**The Wages of Synthetics**

The new challenge from synthetic opioids marketed over the Dark Web comes at a time when the trend in overdose deaths in Oregon is relatively positive.

Opioid deaths here have declined in recent years, while the trend in the rest of the country is still sharply upward. (The New York Times recently reported deaths jumped nearly 20 percent nationally in 2016.)

“When you look at the rest of the country, flat is good,”says Multnomah County Health Officer Dr. Paul Lewis.

There are two reasons for the good news. The first is naloxone, marketed under the brand name Narcan, a nasal spray that reverses overdoses. Under the leadership of former Multnomah County Health Officer Dr. Gary Oxman, the Portland area was a national pioneer in making naloxone widely available (“Who Wants to Save a Junkie?” WW, March 13, 2013).

And Oxman’s successor, Lewis, pushed large metro-area medical systems to decrease the number of opioid pain pills prescribed to patients. That number has decreased each of the past five quarters.

Together, those two developments have caused the number of overdose deaths in Oregon to decline, a result most states would envy.

But deaths such as Aisha Zughbieh-Collins’ highlight a new danger: synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, carfentanil and U-47700 that are not prescribed by physicians but instead manufactured and sold illegally.

Lewis says there have been just two confirmed deaths in the metro area in the past 18 months in which U-47700 was the primary cause. But synthetic opioids are now the nation’s fastest-growing cause of overdose deaths. The death toll in some states is extraordinary: Last year, for instance, there were 34 deaths from synthetics in Oregon in 2015—and 949 in Massachusetts.

“The synthetic thing is new to everybody,” Lewis says. “We thought heroin was the foe, but now these synthetics come along. It’s a new chapter, and we don’t know how it ends.”

Cam Strahm of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration notes that synthetics such as fentanyl and carfentanil are dozens or even hundreds of times stronger than heroin.

Strahm says synthetics are also less predictable than heroin, which is now fairly standard in quality and potency. The dealers who sell synthetics often mix them in nonstandard “cocktails” and also frequently misrepresent what they are selling.

“When you are making illicit purchases from anonymous sources, you can’t depend on purity or that what you think you are buying is what you actually get,” Strahm says. “You really don’t know what you are purchasing. It’s like going on a vacation without knowing your destination.”

***

Synthetic opioid nicknamed ‘pink’ blamed for deaths of two 13-year-old Utah boys – Nov 4 2016, WashingtonPost

2 Park City 13 year olds dead; police warn against possible overdose… – Gephardt Daily (Utah), Sep 13 2016

Fresno doctor warns new fake Norco drug can be deadly – Fresno Bee, July 27 2016

Another Powerful Painkiller Found in Prince’s System: U-47700 – ABC News, Jul 18 2016

Meet U-47700, the Potent, Newish Painkiller Sending People to Parkland – Dallas Observer, Mar 10, 2016

Synthetic opiate makers stay step ahead of US drug laws as overdose cases rise – Guardian, Apr 11, 2016

UNESCO declares Hebron shrine Palestinian

Posted on July 8, 2017July 8, 2017 by Denise Simon

Israeli soldier guards at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron

You would think by virtue of a UN heritage committee known as United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, they would get history right. Israel has provided proof and historical evidence, where is that from the Palestinians?

The Tomb and the city of Hebron is the second holiest site in Judaism, after the Temple Mount and its Western Wall, he noted. The Bible clearly records its purchase by Abraham. The committee of T21 members are: Angola, Azerbaijan, Burkina Faso, Croatia, Cuba, Finland, Indonesia, Jamaica, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Republic of Korea, Tunisia, Turkey, United Republic of Tnzania, Vietnam and Zimbabwe. Anymore questions on the countries that refuse history and remain Anti-Semitic?

Now is the time for the United States to defund UNESCO and the UNRWA.

Following the resolution passed by the UNESCO World Heritage Committee regarding the Tomb of the Patriarchs, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, today (Friday, 7 July 2017), decided to cut an additional $1 million from the membership funds that Israel pays to the UN and to transfer it to the establishment of “The Museum of the Heritage of the Jewish People in Kiryat Arba and Hebron” and to additional heritage projects related to Hebron.

Against UNESCO’s denial of the past, Prime Minister Netanyahu is determined to present to the entire world the historic truth and the Jewish People’s deep connection – of thousands of years – to Hebron.

***

Tomb of Sarah, wife a Patriarch Abraham

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – The U.N. cultural organisation declared an ancient shrine in the occupied West Bank a Palestinian heritage site on Friday, prompting Israel to further cut its funding to the United Nations.

UNESCO designated Hebron and the two adjoined shrines at its heart – the Jewish Tomb of the Patriarchs and the Muslim Ibrahimi Mosque – a “Palestinian World Heritage Site in Danger”.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called that “another delusional UNESCO decision” and ordered that $1 million be diverted from Israel’s U.N. funding to establish a museum and other projects covering Jewish heritage in Hebron.

The funding cut is Israel’s fourth in the past year, taking its U.N. contribution from $11 million to just $1.7 million, an Israeli official said. Each cut has come after various U.N. bodies voted to adopt decisions which Israel said discriminated against it.

Palestinian Foreign Minister, Reyad Al-Maliki, said the UNESCO vote, at a meeting in Krakow, Poland, was proof of the “successful diplomatic battle Palestine has launched on all fronts in the face of Israeli and American pressure on (UNESCO) member countries.”

Hebron is the largest Palestinian city in the occupied West Bank with a population of some 200,000. About 1,000 Israeli settlers live in the heart of the city and for years it has been a place of religious friction between Muslims and Jews.

Jews believe that the Cave of the Patriarchs is where Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and their wives, are buried. Muslims, who, like Christians, also revere Abraham, built the Ibrahimi mosque, also known as the Sanctuary of Abraham, in the 14th century.

The religious significance of the city has made it a focal point for settlers, who are determined to expand the Jewish presence there. Living in the heart of the city, they require intense security, with some 800 Israeli troops protecting them.

Even before Netanyahu’s budget announcement, Internal Security Minister Gilad Erdan signalled Israel would seek to further make its mark at the Hebron shrine, tweeting: “UNESCO will continue to adopt delusional decisions but history cannot be erased … we must continue to manifest our right by building immediately in the Cave of the Patriarchs.”

(Additional reporting by Ali Sawafta in Ramallah and Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)