Category Archives: China

Abbas Araqchi, Man Behind the IAEA Side Deals with Iran

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Araqchi is the top hidden negotiator for Iran’s Supreme leader when it comes to inspections, the IAEA and missiles.

From the Deputy Minister of Iran’s Foreign Affairs: Araqchi underscored that Iran attaches great importance to implementation of the nuclear agreement and the commitment of the other party to the deal.

Touching upon Iran`s relations with its neighboring countries, Azerbaijan in particular, in the post-sanctions era, Araqchi underscored that Iran wants to expand its economic cooperation with the international community.

Iran attaches due attention to expansion of relations with its neighboring countries, Azerbaijan, in particular, he said.

Araqchi said in Tehran on Wednesday that the S-300 air defense system is not subject to Security Council resolution.

Speaking in a press conference, he reiterated that the weapons that their sales to Iran would be subject to the restrictions are seven items and this would not include S-300.

Purchasing the S-300 air defense system is out of the jurisdiction of the Security Council`s recent resolution, he added.

Touching upon the wave of European officials trips to Iran, he said European Union Foreign Policy Chief Federica Mogherini and French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius are set to visit Iran next week.

Araqchi reiterated that the Vienna agreement has paved the way for economic cooperation of Iran with several countries that were deprived of fostering ties with Islamic Republic due to imposed sanctions.

Pointing to the continuation of trilateral relations between Iran, Russia and China, he stressed that Iran enjoys cordial, positive and constructive ties with Russia and China.

Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister said Wednesday that Iran`s policy on global hegemony has not changed.

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From the Iran Project: Speaking to Al-Alam News Network, Araqchi said that access to Iran’s military sites has been divided into two areas – one area is about the issues related to the country’s past military activities, wrongly referred to Possible Military Dimensions (PMD), and the other is about Tehran’s future activities.

On Iran’s past military activities, Iran and the agency reached an agreement or roadmap on the day Iran deal was clinched in Vienna by Tehran and the six world powers, Araqchi said.

Araqchi said that there is no need for concern about solving the issues related to Tehran’s past nuclear activities. He said that Iran and the IAEA have agreed upon solving the issues.

To ensure the agency of the future of its nuclear activities, Iran has agreed to implement the Additional Protocol, Araqchi said.

He noted that the Additional Protocol is nothing beyond the international regulations and there is no need for concern in this regard.

The leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah received his guarantee of financial support due to the Iran JPOA deal and is spiking the football.

Beirut:

“Did Iran sell its allies down the river during the nuclear talks? No, there was no bargaining” between Iran and the United States, he said in a speech broadcast on a large screen to supporters in Beirut’s southern suburbs, a party stronghold.

Supreme leader “Ayatollah Ali Khamenei reiterated Iran’s position on the resistance movements and its allies, and Hezbollah occupies a special place among them,” Nasrallah added.

“The United States remains the ‘Great Satan’, both before and after the nuclear accord” reached last week after tough negotiations between Iran and permanent UN Security Council members Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States, plus Germany.

On July 18, Khamenei warned that, despite the deal, Iran would continue its policy towards the “arrogant” United States and also its support for its friends in the region.

Founded in the 1980s by Iran’s Guardians of the Revolution and financed and armed by Tehran, Hezbollah has become a powerful armed party advocating armed struggle against Israel.

The party, which the United States classifies as a terrorist organisation, is also fighting alongside President Bashar al-Assad’s forces against rebels in Syria, itself an ally of Iran.

On Friday, Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem also said the nuclear deal would not affect Iranian support for the Damascus government.

 

 

Iran Deal, Deviled Details White House is Avoiding

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Iran Inspections in 24 Days? Not Even Close

Hillel Fradkin & Lewis Libby

The Obama administration assures Americans that the Iran deal grants access within 24 days to undeclared but suspected Iranian nuclear sites. But that’s hardly how a recalcitrant Iran is likely to interpret the deal. A close examination of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action released by the Obama administration reveals that its terms permit Iran to hold inspectors at bay for months, likely three or more.

Paragraphs 74 to 78 govern the International Atomic Energy Agency’s access to suspect sites. First, the IAEA tells Iran “the basis” of its concerns about a particular location, requesting clarification. At this point Iran will know where the IAEA is headed. Iran then provides the IAEA with “explanations” to resolve IAEA concerns. This stage has no time limit.

Opportunities for delay abound. Iran will presumably want to know what prompted the IAEA’s concern. The suspect site identified by the IAEA is likely to be remote, and Iran will no doubt say that it must gather skilled people and equipment to responsibly allay IAEA concerns. Iran may offer explanations in stages, seeking IAEA clarifications before “completing” its response. That could take a while.

Only if Iran’s “explanations do not resolve the IAEA’s concerns” may the IAEA then “request access” to the suspect site. Oddly, the agreement doesn’t specify who judges whether the explanations resolve concerns. If Iran claims that it has a say in the matter, the process may stall here. Assuming Iran grants that the IAEA can be the judge, might Iran claim that the “great Satan” improperly influenced IAEA conclusions? Let’s assume that Tehran won’t do that.

Now the IAEA must provide written reasons for the request and “make available relevant information.” Let’s assume that even though the IAEA may resist revealing the secret sources or technical means that prompted its suspicions, Iran acknowledges that a proper request has been supplied.

Only then do the supposed 24 days begin to run. First, Iran may propose, and the IAEA must consider, alternative means of resolving concerns. This may take 14 days. Absent satisfactory “arrangements,” a new period begins.

During this period Iran, “in consultation with” the Joint Commission, will “resolve” the IAEA concerns “through necessary means agreed between Iran and the IAEA.” The Joint Commission includes China, France, Germany, Russia, the U.K, the U.S., the European Union and, of course, Iran. Not exactly a wieldy bunch.

The Iranians will likely claim that “consultation” with the Joint Commission doesn’t bind Tehran, just as the U.S. president isn’t bound by consultations with Congress. The agreement says the consultation process will not exceed seven days, but Iran can point out that the nuclear deal doesn’t specify when Iran and the IAEA must reach agreement and “resolve” IAEA concerns.

In the absence of Iran-IAEA agreement, a majority of the Joint Commission has seven days to “advise” on the “necessary means” to resolve the matter. Iran may fairly argue that the commission’s right to “advise” is not the same as a right to “determine” the “necessary means.” Lastly, the agreement provides that “Iran would implement the necessary means within 3 additional days.” But what “necessary means” are these? As noted, the agreement refers to “necessary means agreed between Iran and the IAEA.” So these additional three days don’t even begin until an agreement is reached.

Now what? Well, the U.S. may take a “Dispute” to the Joint Commission, on which Iran sits, which has 15 days to resolve the issue. Parties may or may not invoke a similar 15 days for foreign ministers to act. Parties may also request a nonbinding opinion within 15 days from an advisory board consisting of three members, one appointed by Iran, one by the complaining country and “a third independent member.”

But Iran may argue that nothing in the nuclear deal specifies how quickly a country must appoint its advisory-board member or even how the “independent member” is selected. In short, this stage may take at least 30 days and possibly 45 of consideration at the different levels, but Iran may argue that the last 15 days don’t start until an advisory board has been duly formed. Then we get another five days of Joint Commission deliberation, before a disappointed U.S. or other commission member seeking IAEA inspections can hobble off to the United Nations seeking resolutions reimposing sanctions.

In short, as Iran is free to interpret the agreement, 63 or even 78 days may pass, plus three potentially lengthy periods that Iran can stretch out: One of “explanations” before the clock starts, one to agree on necessary means and “resolve concerns,” and one for advisory-board selection near the end.

So from the moment the IAEA first tips its hand about what it wants to inspect, likely three or more months may pass. All along, the Joint Commission is required to act in “good faith,” and to make only “minimum necessary” requests limited to verification, not “interference.” Tehran could also cite these terms to challenge particular requests.

The description of this process is based on the English-language text of the nuclear agreement. The text lacks a provision that it is the entire agreement, so Iran may claim support in supposed side agreements or statements during negotiations.

Announcing this “comprehensive, long-term” deal, President Obama quoted President Kennedy’s 1961 call for negotiations with the Soviets. Kennedy reached two notable nuclear agreements. Mr. Obama didn’t mention that within a decade of Kennedy’s 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, Soviet nuclear forces—once a fraction of America’s—were at parity or had surpassed ours.

During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy reached secret agreements—undisclosed to Americans for decades—not to invade Cuba and to withdraw U.S. weapons from Turkey. By invoking Kennedy was President Obama signaling there is more to this “long-term” deal than we know?

He is a subtle man.

WH: Census to Home Surveys to HUD to Massive Database

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In 2013, Congresswoman Maxine Waters appeared on television and spilled the secret.

Did you ever wonder exactly why the White House took control of the U.S. Census in 2010 from the Commerce Secretary? It was a multi-tracked mission that not only included future Gerrymandering efforts, but it was for data-mining housing, and to all patterns of personal life across the country.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Chinese have hacked databases and has personal data.

It was just a few weeks ago that Housing and Urban Development announced a scheme to racially diversify neighborhoods across the country. Zipcodes appear to be racist and the White House with HUD is working to change that.

So understand these efforts, in 2013 the profiles of cities began where fact sheets have been created.

A sample of what they are tracking is found here.

Screen shot 2015-07-18 at 6.07.54 PM

 

 

 

So, when the NY Post publishes this by Paul Sperry, one must take real notice. We have a pattern here.

Obama collecting personal data for a secret race database

A key part of President Obama’s legacy will be the fed’s unprecedented collection of sensitive data on Americans by race. The government is prying into our most personal information at the most local levels, all for the purpose of “racial and economic justice.”

Unbeknown to most Americans, Obama’s racial bean counters are furiously mining data on their health, home loans, credit cards, places of work, neighborhoods, even how their kids are disciplined in school — all to document “inequalities” between minorities and whites.

This Orwellian-style stockpile of statistics includes a vast and permanent network of discrimination databases, which Obama already is using to make “disparate impact” cases against: banks that don’t make enough prime loans to minorities; schools that suspend too many blacks; cities that don’t offer enough Section 8 and other low-income housing for minorities; and employers who turn down African-Americans for jobs due to criminal backgrounds.

Big Brother Barack wants the databases operational before he leaves office, and much of the data in them will be posted online.

So civil-rights attorneys and urban activist groups will be able to exploit them to show patterns of “racial disparities” and “segregation,” even if no other evidence of discrimination exists.

Obama is presiding over the largest consolidation of personal data in US history.

Housing database

The granddaddy of them all is the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing database, which the Department of Housing and Urban Development rolled out earlier this month to racially balance the nation, ZIP code by ZIP code. It will map every US neighborhood by four racial groups — white, Asian, black or African-American, and Hispanic/Latino — and publish “geospatial data” pinpointing racial imbalances.

The agency proposes using nonwhite populations of 50% or higher as the threshold for classifying segregated areas.

Federally funded cities deemed overly segregated will be pressured to change their zoning laws to allow construction of more subsidized housing in affluent areas in the suburbs, and relocate inner-city minorities to those predominantly white areas. HUD’s maps, which use dots to show the racial distribution or density in residential areas, will be used to select affordable-housing sites.

HUD plans to drill down to an even more granular level, detailing the proximity of black residents to transportation sites, good schools, parks and even supermarkets. If the agency’s social engineers rule the distance between blacks and these suburban “amenities” is too far, municipalities must find ways to close the gap or forfeit federal grant money and face possible lawsuits for housing discrimination.

Civil-rights groups will have access to the agency’s sophisticated mapping software, and will participate in city plans to re-engineer neighborhoods under new community outreach requirements.

“By opening this data to everybody, everyone in a community can weigh in,” Obama said. “If you want affordable housing nearby, now you’ll have the data you need to make your case.”

Mortgage database

Meanwhile, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, headed by former Congressional Black Caucus leader Mel Watt, is building its own database for racially balancing home loans. The so-called National Mortgage Database Project will compile 16 years of lending data, broken down by race, and hold everything from individual credit scores and employment records.

Mortgage contracts won’t be the only financial records vacuumed up by the database. According to federal documents, the repository will include “all credit lines,” from credit cards to student loans to car loans — anything reported to credit bureaus. This is even more information than the IRS collects.

The FHFA will also pry into your personal assets and debts and whether you have any bankruptcies. The agency even wants to know the square footage and lot size of your home, as well as your interest rate.

FHFA will share the info with Obama’s brainchild, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which acts more like a civil-rights agency, aggressively investigating lenders for racial bias.

The FHFA has offered no clear explanation as to why the government wants to sweep up so much sensitive information on Americans, other than stating it’s for “research” and “policymaking.”

However, CFPB Director Richard Cordray was more forthcoming, explaining in a recent talk to the radical California-based Greenlining Institute: “We will be better able to identify possible discriminatory lending patterns.”

Credit database

CFPB is separately amassing a database to monitor ordinary citizens’ credit-card transactions. It hopes to vacuum up some 900 million credit-card accounts — all sorted by race — representing roughly 85% of the US credit-card market. Why? To sniff out “disparities” in interest rates, charge-offs and collections.

Employment database

CFPB also just finalized a rule requiring all regulated banks to report data on minority hiring to an Office of Minority and Women Inclusion. It will collect reams of employment data, broken down by race, to police diversity on Wall Street as part of yet another fishing expedition.

School database

Through its mandatory Civil Rights Data Collection project, the Education Department is gathering information on student suspensions and expulsions, by race, from every public school district in the country. Districts that show disparities in discipline will be targeted for reform.

Those that don’t comply will be punished. Several already have been forced to revise their discipline policies, which has led to violent disruptions in classrooms.

Obama’s educrats want to know how many blacks versus whites are enrolled in gifted-and-talented and advanced placement classes.

Schools that show blacks and Latinos under-enrolled in such curricula, to an undefined “statistically significant degree,” could open themselves up to investigation and lawsuits by the department’s Civil Rights Office.

Count on a flood of private lawsuits to piggyback federal discrimination claims, as civil-rights lawyers use the new federal discipline data in their legal strategies against the supposedly racist US school system.

Even if no one has complained about discrimination, even if there is no other evidence of racism, the numbers themselves will “prove” that things are unfair.

Such databases have never before existed. Obama is presiding over the largest consolidation of personal data in US history. He is creating a diversity police state where government race cops and civil-rights lawyers will micromanage demographic outcomes in virtually every aspect of society.

The first black president, quite brilliantly, has built a quasi-reparations infrastructure perpetually fed by racial data that will outlast his administration.

Paul Sperry is a Hoover Institution media fellow and author of “The Great American Bank Robbery,” which exposes the racial politics behind the mortgage bust.

 

Guzman’s Sinaloa, Global Narcotics Power and Violence

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El Chapo Guzman, the wealthiest narcotics trafficker in the world and maintaining an empire where is personal war chest is valued into the billions, remains at large after escaping from a Mexican prison.

Factoid:

Between 1987 and 1989, Gúzman used both airplanes and ships to smuggle 20 to 24 tons of cocaine to the United States every month. Authorities believe Gúzman operated no less than ten aircraft at one time. For an interesting read on the genesis of the cartels in Mexico, the names and the inner sanctum within the Mexican government, click here.

In Mexico and beyond, what is most misunderstood is the government and law enforcement corruption that colludes the cartels. Fundamentally, the cartels runs the Mexican government through covert payroll, bribes and extortion. This is a model used throughout Latin America, the Middle East and Asia. Narco dollars worldwide is an industry well in competition for ranking with the petro-dollar.

The estimated related deaths in Mexico attributed to the cartels is difficult to estimate mostly due to lack of reporting by law enforcement and government officials yet in one year the numbers hover around 200,000. Journalist are on the hit lists for just investigating, so reporting on the ground conditions has become fleeting at best.

In Mexico, Crime Is Bigger Than a Crime Boss

From Stratfor

Summary

The July 11 escape of the notorious Sinaloa crime boss, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera, from a maximum-security prison in Mexico has drawn considerable Mexican and international media attention. While the brazen and elaborate nature of the escape will add to the lore already surrounding Guzman, the escape itself carries little significance for organized crime in Mexico — though it will place a momentary strain on coordination between U.S. and Mexican law enforcement. The forces that drive the evolution of organized crime and their impact on society in Mexico are simply greater than any single crime boss.

Analysis

Mexico’s geography enabled drug traffickers like Guzman to operate on a global scale. As international law enforcement effectively dismantled the powerful Colombian cartels and stymied their maritime trafficking routes through the Caribbean in the 1980s and 1990s, Mexico became the lynchpin of new smuggling routes into the United States. This evolution took place just as the Mexican criminal networks that trafficked drugs broke down into smaller groups. Though crime bosses like Guzman rose in stature relative to others, all organized crime groups in Mexico are the result of a systematic decentralization in cartel structure that continues today.

In fact, by the time Guzman was arrested in February 2014, the Sinaloa Cartel was already fragmenting. Groups that operated in areas such as Chihuahua, Sonora, Sinaloa and Baja California states — areas that were once part of El Chapo’s criminal network — were already acting autonomously. Some of them were even fighting one another. The arrest of Guzman and the subsequent capture of some of his lieutenants only accelerated this trend. Now, geographic domains that were controlled by Sinaloa-based crime bosses for decades are now controlled by other groups, including the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion, which expanded from the Tierra Caliente region, and La Linea, which was once the enforcement group for the Juarez cartel.

Among the myths surrounding El Chapo were tales pertaining to his purported role as an arbiter of organized crime in Mexico. According to some of those myths, his organization preferred to expand its business operations through negotiation, rather than through violent conflict. But Guzman, in fact, was party to some of the most violent turf wars in Mexico, introducing rampant insecurity in places such as Tijuana, Nuevo Laredo and Ciudad Juarez. These conflicts had subsided by the time he was arrested but not before nationwide turf wars devolved into more localized conflicts. Guzman may attempt to re-consolidate the control he once had over Mexico’s organized crime activities, but his previous efforts to do so failed, and the task would be even tougher now that his network has become even thinner.

Since 2012, Mexican organized crime has become increasingly balkanized amid government efforts to revamp public security institutions, and nationwide levels of organized crime-related violence have gradually diminished. Though having more crime groups means there are more bosses, these leaders have not been able to sustain violent offensives against their rivals and fend off the state as well as their predecessors did. And while waves of extreme violence can still emerge in places like Tamaulipas, they typically weaken as soon as security forces move in — in contrast to past conflicts in places like Juarez, where violence continued to climb despite repeated deployments of federal troops.

For additional information on the cartels two summaries can be found in the links below.

http://web.wm.edu/so/monitor/issues/14-2/4-vinson.pdf

http://fas.org/sgp/crs/row/R41576.pdf

Cyberwar, Deeper Truth on China’s Unit 61398

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The NSA has been hacking China for years, so it is a cyberwar. What the United States cyber experts have known at least since 2009 spells out that there has been no strategy to combat cyber intrusions much less a declaration that these hacks are an act of war.

The NSA Has A Secret Group Called ‘TAO’ That’s Been Hacking China For 15 Years

China hacking charges: the Chinese army’s Unit 61398
Operating out of a tower block in Shanghai, Unit 61398 allegedly hacks Western companies in support of the Chinese government’s political and economic aims.

From DarkReading:

According to the DOJ indictment, Huang Zhenyu was hired between 2006 and 2009 or later to do programming work for one of the companies (referred to as “SOE-2” in the indictment). Huang was allegedly tasked with constructing a “secret” database to store intelligence about the iron and steel industry, as well as information about US companies.

“Chinese firms hired the same PLA Unit where the defendants worked to provide information technology services,” according to the indictment, which the US Department of Justice unsealed Monday. “For example, one SOE involved in trade litigation against some of the American victims herein hired the Unit, and one of the co-conspirators charged herein, to hold a ‘secret’ database to hold corporate ‘intelligence.'”

The for-hire database project sheds some light on the operations of China’s most prolific hacking unit, Unit 61398 of the Third Department of China’s People’s Liberation Army (also known as APT1), where the alleged hackers work. US Attorney General Eric Holder announced an unprecedented move Monday: The Justice Department had indicted the five men with the military unit for allegedly hacking and stealing trade secrets of major American steel, solar energy, and other manufacturing companies, including Alcoa, Allegheny Technologies Inc., SolarWorld AG, Westinghouse Electric, and US Steel, as well as the United Steel Workers Union.

It has never been a secret, it has only been a topic debated with no resolutions behind closed doors. China has a database on Americans and is filling it with higher details, growing their intelligence on everything America.

China has launched a strategic plan when one examines the order of hacks of American companies, the timing and the data. A full report was published on Unit 61398.

New York Times report

Hacked in the U.S.A.: China’s Not-So-Hidden Infiltration Op

From Bloomberg: The vast cyber-attack in Washington began with, of all things, travel reservations.

More than two years ago, troves of personal data were stolen from U.S. travel companies. Hackers subsequently made off with health records at big insurance companies and infiltrated federal computers where they stole personnel records on 21.5 million people — in what apparently is the largest such theft of U.S. government records in history.

Those individual attacks, once believed to be unconnected, now appear to be part of a coordinated campaign by Chinese hackers to collect sensitive details on key people that went on far longer — and burrowed far deeper — than initially thought.

 

But time and again, U.S. authorities missed clues connecting one incident to the next. Interviews with federal investigators and cybersecurity experts paint a troubling portrait of what many are calling a serious failure of U.S. intelligence agencies to spot the pattern or warn potential victims. Moreover, the problems in Washington add new urgency to calls for vigilance in the private sector.

In revealing the scope of stolen government data on Thursday, Obama administration officials declined to identify a perpetrator. Investigators say the Chinese government was almost certainly behind the effort, an allegation China has vehemently denied.

‘Facebook of Intelligence’

Some investigators suspect the attacks were part of a sweeping campaign to create a database on Americans that could be used to obtain commercial and government secrets.

“China is building the Facebook of human intelligence capabilities,” said Adam Meyers, vice president of intelligence for cybersecurity company CrowdStrike Inc. “This appears to be a real maturity in the way they are using cyber to enable broader intelligence goals.”

The most serious breach of records occurred at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, where records for every person given a government background check for the past 15 years may have been compromised. The head of the government personnel office, Katherine Archuleta, resigned Friday as lawmakers demanded to know what went wrong.

The campaign began in early 2013 with the travel records, said Laura Galante, manager of threat intelligence for FireEye Inc., a private security company that has been investigating the cyber-attacks.

Stockpiling Records

By mid-2014, it became clear that the hackers were stockpiling health records, Social Security numbers and other personal information on Americans -– a departure from the country’s traditional espionage operations focusing on the theft of military and civilian technology.

“There was a clear and apparent shift,” said Jordan Berry, an analyst at FireEye.

Recognition came too late for many of the victims. Vendors of security devices say health-care companies are spending tens of millions of dollars this year to upgrade their computer systems but much of the data is already gone.

U.S. intelligence agencies were collecting information on the theft of personal data but failed to understand the scope and potential damage from the aggressive Chinese operation, according to one person familiar with the government assessment of what went wrong.

In the last two years, much of the attention of U.S. national security agencies was focused on defending against cyber-attacks aimed at disrupting critical infrastructure like power grids.