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Service Quality and Reputation
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The internet is an interesting tool. It is especially fascinating that some crafty people can go backwards in the internet cache and capture evidence.
What say you Grover this time? To all the Republicans, to the Democrats, to the Conservative Union, to Congress and to the NRA….take notice. To the IRS, to policy makers, to the lobby groups, the terrorists are among us due to you. It should be noted, this was during the Clinton administration.
A PARTICULAR HAT TIP TO GLENN BECK, THANK YOU SIR. Great work to Tom Trento for his stick-t0-it’ned-ness.
A newly discovered document proves that Grover Norquist, top GOP moneyman, sponsored in October 23rd 2000 an anti-Israel pro-HAMAS and pro-Hezbollah rally in front of the White House in Lafayette Park. The rally was run and led by the Muslim Brotherhood terrorist Abdul Rahman al-Amoudi who pleaded guilty to financing terrorism and conspiracy to assassinate then-Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah. Al-Amoudi is currently serving a 23 year sentence in federal prison. Al-Amoudi who is co-founder of the Islamic Institute with Grover Norquist is seen on video in the Oct 23 rally screaming his support for al-Qaeda and Hezbollah both of which are specially designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO).
The newly discovered document found on the Islamic Institutes website in their weekly Friday brief demonstrably proves that Norquist’s organization was the organizational and contact body for the event dubbed: “March and Rally in Washington Against Israeli Aggression,” and states:
On October 23, 2000, there will be a march and rally in front of the White House in Washington, D.C., to protest Israel’s aggression against the Al-Aqsa Mosque and its escalating use of violence toward the Palestinian people. The march and rally are being organized by the National Task Force for the Crisis in Jerusalem (NTFCJ), a coalition of national American Muslim organizations of which the Islamic Institute is a part. The march begins at 11:00am at Freedom Plaza, and will move to Lafayette Park in front of the White House where a rally will begin at 12:00pm.
It is highly important that the Muslim community in the U.S. demonstrates a show of solidarity by attending this event. A strong presence will emphasize the call of American Muslims for peace and justice in Jerusalem and Palestine. Buses are being chartered nationwide to bring supporters to Washington. For further information, contact the Islamic Institute via phone or e-mail, or the American Muslim Council at (202) 789-2262(202) 789-2262. Members of the NTFCJ are: the American Muslim Council, the American Muslim Alliance, American Muslims for Jerusalem, the Council on American Islamic Relations, the Islamic Circle of North America, the Islamic Institute, the Islamic Society of North America, the Muslim American Society, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, and the Muslim Student Association.
When asked by Glenn Beck if he (Grover Norquist) sponsored the event Norquist replied that it was a mistake by and intern and that his organization, the Islamic Institute, had no direct involvement or planning of the rally – a direct contradiction of the Organizations weekly brief.
Clearly the Islamic Institute was the primary sponsor, primary planner, primary organizer and primary leader of the anti-Israel in October of 2000 and in possible violation of 18 U.S. Code § 2339A – Providing material support to terrorists.
Friday’s 4pm Show:
HEY, US CONGRESS – “THROW THE TERRORISTS OUT!”
4.13.15
On Monday April 13 and Tuesday 14 Muslim Terrorists walking around the United States Congress will demand that our elected Representatives change federal law thereby making it harder to investigate Muslim terrorists. I know, crazy stuff, but it is happening right in broad daylight! Thank Allah that we at The United West are experts at investigating Muslim Brotherhood terrorists and exposing their influence operations for all Americans to understand and properly respond. To accomplish this we are launching a five-part investigative series entitled: “Muslim Terrorists Lobby 114th Congress.” Our show today focuses on what the Members of the 114th Congress should do when the terrorists enter their offices. And what is that? THROW THEM OUT THE DOOR! Why in the world should an elected Member of Congress give any time to KNOWN terrorists who have a written agenda that includes destroying the essence of the Capitol building in which they are meeting! Watch this show as it is FULL of critically important information to help all Americans properly, professionally and legally DEFEAT this Muslim Brotherhood political influence operation.
Hillary continues to dig her way out of scandalapalooza with the two most recent issues being her server and the nefarious actions at the more than one Clinton Foundations. Still she has enlisted a hand chosen innercircle to work the media, recrafting herself into a political icon she is not. So it is important to understand who will the Democratic Party embrace if Hillary cannot rebrand herself.
There has been a large push and media chatter to promote Senator Elizabeth Warren, yet she responds with ‘no’ when asked if she is going to run. Watch that carefully as she could wind that back. In the meantime, there is another player that is working the political rooms and streets and media that you need to know about…Martin O’Malley. Here is a tip sheet for your advanced use to know his history. Be warned.
Marylanders fear what a President O’Malley could do to America
Maryland has been called “the Land of Pleasant Living,” but after eight years of the policies of Gov. Martin O’Malley, a lot of Marylanders found it not so pleasant. In a Gallup poll taken in 2014, shortly before the conclusion of Mr. O’Malley’s second term, 47 percent of voters stated that they would move out of Maryland if they could — the third-highest state in the nation from which people wanted to flee.
Taxes, jobs and better opportunity were the main reasons Marylanders gave for wanting to leave. The poll did not count the thousands of people who had already left. In 2010 after just one term with Mr. O’Malley, nearly 31,000 Maryland taxpayers had fled his unabashedly left-wing economic and social policies, with most heading south to relatively tax-friendly states.
Since 2007, 40 tax, fee and toll increases were imposed on Marylanders, taking $3.1 billion annually out of taxpayer pockets to grow a state government that Mr. O’Malley claimed was “severely undercapitalized.” His budgets grew much faster than the taxpayers’ paychecks. During his two terms as governor, spending ballooned from $28.8 billion to more than $39 billion. His budget increases of over $1 billion a year were the highest in the region.
Shamefully, his budgets were only balanced by gimmicks like raiding most dedicated funds, including the state pension fund and the Transportation Trust Fund, and dramatically expanding bonded indebtedness to replace the pilfered money. Irresponsible, deliberate underfunding of the pension fund increased the unfunded pension liability by $10.4 billion.
Mr. O’Malley has bragged that he cut state spending by $9 billion and created thousands of new jobs, but both claims are delusional. By normal math, spending has increased more than $10 billion. Since 2007, Maryland has lost 40,000 jobs, thousands of small businesses and several major corporations.
On Election Day 2014, Mr. O’Malley’s record was soundly repudiated by the voters of liberal Maryland when his lieutenant governor, who promised to carry on his policies, was trounced by Larry Hogan, a Republican businessman promising change.
Liberal Democrats who are becoming intrigued with Martin O’Malley as a potential nominee for president might want to talk to the Democrats from Dundalk. The eastern Baltimore County community includes thousands of union steelworkers who once worked at the Bethlehem Steel plant, which was recently demolished. They have never elected a Republican to any office. But in 2014, fed-up Democrats went to the polls and in a clear repudiation of the O’Malley record, replaced all their state legislators and their councilman with GOP representatives.
Martin O’Malley ran for governor promising no tax increases on families earning less than $250,000 per year. A class warrior, he promised to balance the budget on the backs of the rich. Indeed, he tried soaking the rich by levying a “millionaire tax” on high earners. In creating the new top tax bracket, Mr. O’Malley pronounced that these richest Marylanders were “willing and able to pay their fair share.”
A year later, one-third of the millionaires had disappeared from the tax rolls and it was clear that they were not so willing to pay a combined state and county income tax rate approaching 10 percent. Some of the missing millionaire tax returns could be attributed to the recession, but many wealthy Marylanders just changed their residency to states such as Florida, which has no income tax. Instead of increasing revenues by an estimated $106 million, the following year the tax took in $100 million less than the prior year.
The loss of revenues had to be made up elsewhere. The O’Malley tax burden has weighed very heavily on middle-class Marylanders. They have suffered higher taxes on their paycheck, their beer, their tobacco, their gasoline and for the privilege of flushing their toilets. And they were hit with an increased sales tax, amusement tax, vehicle titling tax, hospital provider tax, fees for birth and death certificates, huge new tolls, and even a new tax on the rain that falls on their roof.
With the help of one of the most liberal legislatures in the nation, Mr. O’Malley was successful in achieving significant and controversial changes to the social fabric of Maryland. Among his “achievements” is a Maryland Dream Act that provides in-state college tuition to illegal immigrants whom the former governor defines as “New Americans.” He signed same-sex marriage into law, successfully fought to eliminate the death penalty, and passed one of the most onerous gun laws in the country. He also burnished his environmental credentials with a government-led scheme to build costly, inefficient wind turbines off the coast of Ocean City.
Fiscal irresponsibility, left-wing social causes and environmental extremism are pillars of Mr. O’Malley’s eight-year reign in Annapolis. Expect the same liberal agenda to appear on the presidential stage as he tries to outflank Hillary Clinton on the left.
As for Marylanders, we’re not ready to have an aspiring President O’Malley do to America what he did to Maryland.
Starting in 1992, the Justice Department amassed logs of virtually all telephone calls from the USA to as many as 116 countries, a model for anti-terror surveillance after Sept. 11, 2001.
WASHINGTON — The U.S. government started keeping secret records of Americans’ international telephone calls nearly a decade before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, harvesting billions of calls in a program that provided a blueprint for the far broader National Security Agency surveillance that followed.
For more than two decades, the Justice Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed logs of virtually all telephone calls from the USA to as many as 116 countries linked to drug trafficking, current and former officials involved with the operation said. The targeted countries changed over time but included Canada, Mexico and most of Central and South America.
Federal investigators used the call records to track drug cartels’ distribution networks in the USA, allowing agents to detect previously unknown trafficking rings and money handlers. They also used the records to help rule out foreign ties to the bombing in 1995 of a federal building in Oklahoma City and to identify U.S. suspects in a wide range of other investigations.
The Justice Department revealed in January that the DEA had collected data about calls to “designated foreign countries.” But the history and vast scale of that operation have not been disclosed until now.
The now-discontinued operation, carried out by the DEA’s intelligence arm, was the government’s first known effort to gather data on Americans in bulk, sweeping up records of telephone calls made by millions of U.S. citizens regardless of whether they were suspected of a crime. It was a model for the massive phone surveillance system the NSA launched to identify terrorists after the Sept. 11 attacks. That dragnet drew sharp criticism that the government had intruded too deeply into Americans’ privacy after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked it to the news media two years ago.
More than a dozen current and former law enforcement and intelligence officials described the details of the Justice Department operation to USA TODAY. Most did so on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the intelligence program, part of which remains classified.
The DEA program did not intercept the content of Americans’ calls, but the records — which numbers were dialed and when — allowed agents to map suspects’ communications and link them to troves of other police and intelligence data. At first, the drug agency did so with help from military computers and intelligence analysts.
That data collection was “one of the most important and effective Federal drug law enforcement initiatives,” the Justice Department said in a 1998 letter to Sprint asking the telecom giant to turn over its call records. The previously undisclosed letter was signed by the head of the department’s Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Section, Mary Lee Warren, who wrote that the operation had “been approved at the highest levels of Federal law enforcement authority,” including then-Attorney General Janet Reno and her deputy, Eric Holder.
The data collection began in 1992 during the administration of President George H.W. Bush, nine years before his son, President George W. Bush, authorized the NSA to gather its own logs of Americans’ phone calls in 2001. It was approved by top Justice Department officials in four presidential administrations and detailed in occasional briefings to members of Congress but otherwise had little independent oversight, according to officials involved with running it.
The DEA used its data collection extensively and in ways that the NSA is now prohibited from doing. Agents gathered the records without court approval, searched them more often in a day than the spy agency does in a year and automatically linked the numbers the agency gathered to large electronic collections of investigative reports, domestic call records accumulated by its agents and intelligence data from overseas, it even use 800 numbers for business too!
The result was “a treasure trove of very important information on trafficking,” former DEA administrator Thomas Constantine said in an interview.
The extent of that surveillance alarmed privacy advocates, who questioned its legality. “This was aimed squarely at Americans,” said Mark Rumold, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “That’s very significant from a constitutional perspective.”
Holder halted the data collection in September 2013 amid the fallout from Snowden’s revelations about other surveillance programs. In its place, current and former officials said the drug agency sends telecom companies daily subpoenas for international calling records involving only phone numbers that agents suspect are linked to the drug trade or other crimes — sometimes a thousand or more numbers a day.
Tuesday, Justice Department spokesman Patrick Rodenbush said the DEA “is no longer collecting bulk telephony metadata from U.S. service providers.” A DEA spokesman declined to comment.
HARVESTING DATA TO BATTLE CARTELS
The DEA began assembling a data-gathering program in the 1980s as the government searched for new ways to battle Colombian drug cartels. Neither informants nor undercover agents had been enough to crack the cartels’ infrastructure. So the agency’s intelligence arm turned its attention to the groups’ communication networks.
Calling records – often called “toll records” – offered one way to do that. Toll records are comparable to what appears on a phone bill – the numbers a person dialed, the date and time of the call, its duration and how it was paid for. By then, DEA agents had decades of experience gathering toll records of people they suspected were linked to drug trafficking, albeit one person at a time. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, officials said the agency had little way to make sense of the data their agents accumulated and almost no ability to use them to ferret out new cartel connections. Some agents used legal pads.
“We were drowning in toll records,” a former intelligence official said.
The DEA asked the Pentagon for help. The military responded with a pair of supercomputers and intelligence analysts who had experience tracking the communication patterns of Soviet military units. “What they discovered was that the incident of a communication was perhaps as important as the content of a communication,” a former Justice Department official said.
The military installed the supercomputers on the fifth floor of the DEA’s headquarters, across from a shopping mall in Arlington, Va.
The system they built ultimately allowed the drug agency to stitch together huge collections of data to map trafficking and money laundering networks both overseas and within the USA. It allowed agents to link the call records its agents gathered domestically with calling data the DEA and intelligence agencies had acquired outside the USA. (In some cases, officials said the DEA paid employees of foreign telecom firms for copies of call logs and subscriber lists.) And it eventually allowed agents to cross-reference all of that against investigative reports from the DEA, FBI and Customs Service.
The result “produced major international investigations that allowed us to take some big people,” Constantine said, though he said he could not identify particular cases.
In 1989, President George H.W. Bush proposed in his first prime-time address using “sophisticated intelligence-gathering and Defense Department technology” to disrupt drug trafficking. Three years later, when violent crime rates were at record highs, the drug agency intensified its intelligence push, launching a “kingpin strategy” to attack drug cartels by going after their finances, leadership and communication.
THE START OF BULK COLLECTION
In 1992, in the last months of Bush’s administration, Attorney General William Barr and his chief criminal prosecutor, Robert Mueller, gave the DEA permission to collect a much larger set of phone data to feed into that intelligence operation.
Instead of simply asking phone companies for records about calls made by people suspected of drug crimes, the Justice Department began ordering telephone companies to turn over lists of all phone calls from the USA to countries where the government determined drug traffickers operated, current and former officials said.
Barr and Mueller declined to comment, as did Barr’s deputy, George Terwilliger III, though Terwilliger said, “It has been apparent for a long time in both the law enforcement and intelligence worlds that there is a tremendous value and need to collect certain metadata to support legitimate investigations.”
The data collection was known within the agency as USTO (a play on the fact that it tracked calls from the U.S. to other countries).
The DEA obtained those records using administrative subpoenas that allow the agency to collect records “relevant or material to” federal drug investigations. Officials acknowledged it was an expansive interpretation of that authority but one that was not likely to be challenged because unlike search warrants, DEA subpoenas do not require a judge’s approval. “We knew we were stretching the definition,” a former official involved in the process said.
Officials said a few telephone companies were reluctant to provide so much information, but none challenged the subpoenas in court. Those that hesitated received letters from the Justice Department urging them to comply.
After Sprint executives expressed reservations in 1998, for example, Warren, the head of the department’s drug section, responded with a letter telling the company that “the initiative has been determined to be legally appropriate” and that turning over the call data was “appropriate and required by law.” The letter said the data would be used by authorities “to focus scarce investigative resources by means of sophisticated pattern and link analysis.”
The letter did not name other telecom firms providing records to the DEA but did tell executives that “the arrangement with Sprint being sought by the DEA is by no means unique to Sprint” and that “major service providers have been eager to support and assist law enforcement within appropriate bounds.” Former officials said the operation included records from AT&T and other telecom companies.
A spokesman for AT&T declined to comment. Sprint spokeswoman Stephanie Vinge Walsh said only that “we do comply with all state and federal laws regarding law enforcement subpoenas.”
Agents said that when the data collection began, they sought to limit its use mainly to drug investigations and turned away requests for access from the FBI and the NSA. They allowed searches of the data in terrorism cases, including the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people in 1995, helping to rule out theories linking the attack to foreign terrorists. They allowed even broader use after Sept. 11, 2001. The DEA’s public disclosure of its program in January came in the case of a man charged with violating U.S. export restrictions by trying to send electrical equipment to Iran.
At first, officials said the DEA gathered records only of calls to a handful of countries, focusing on Colombian drug cartels and their supply lines. Its reach grew quickly, and by the late 1990s, the DEA was logging “a massive number of calls,” said a former intelligence official who supervised the program.
Former officials said they could not recall the complete list of countries included in USTO, and the coverage changed over time. The Justice Department and DEA added countries to the list if officials could establish that they were home to outfits that produced or trafficked drugs or were involved in money laundering or other drug-related crimes.
The Justice Department warned when it disclosed the program in January that the list of countries should remain secret “to protect against any disruption to prospective law enforcement cooperation.”
At its peak, the operation gathered data on calls to 116 countries, an official involved in reviewing the list said. Two other officials said they did not recall the precise number of countries, but it was more than 100. That gave the collection a considerable sweep; the U.S. government recognizes a total of 195 countries.
At one time or another, officials said, the data collection covered most of the countries in Central and South America and the Caribbean, as well as others in western Africa, Europe and Asia. It included Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Italy, Mexico and Canada.
The DEA often — though not always — notified foreign governments it was collecting call records, in part to make sure its agents would not be expelled if the program was discovered. In some cases, the DEA provided some of that information to foreign law enforcement agencies to help them build their own investigations, officials said.
The DEA did not have a real-time connection to phone companies’ data; instead, the companies regularly provided copies of their call logs, first on computer disks and later over a private network. Agents who used the system said the numbers they saw were seldom more than a few days old.
The database did not include callers’ names or other identifying data. Officials said agents often were able to identify individuals associated with telephone numbers flagged by the analysis, either by cross-referencing them against other databases or by sending follow-up requests to the phone companies.
To keep the program secret, the DEA sought not to use the information as evidence in criminal prosecutions or in its justification for warrants or other searches. Instead, its Special Operations Division passed the data to field agents as tips to help them find new targets or focus existing investigations, a process approved by Justice Department lawyers. Many of those tips were classified because the DEA phone searches drew on other intelligence data.
That practice sparked a furor when the Reuters news agency reported in 2013 that the DEA trained agents to conceal the sources of those tips from judges and defense lawyers. Reuters said the tips were based on wiretaps, foreign intelligence and a DEA database of telephone calls gathered through routine subpoenas and search warrants.
As a result, “the government short-circuited any debate about the legality and wisdom of putting the call records of millions of innocent people in the hands of the DEA,” American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Patrick Toomey said.
A BLUEPRINT FOR BROADER SURVEILLANCE
The NSA began collecting its own data on Americans’ phone calls within months of Sept. 11, 2001, as a way to identify potential terrorists within the USA. At first, it did so without court approval. In 2006, after The New York Times and USA TODAY began reporting on the surveillance program, President George W. Bush’s administration brought it under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows the government to use secret court orders to get access to records relevant to national security investigations. Unlike the DEA, the NSA also gathered logs of calls within the USA.
The similarities between the NSA program and the DEA operation established a decade earlier are striking – too much so to have been a coincidence, people familiar with the programs said. Former NSA general counsel Stewart Baker said, “It’s very hard to see (the DEA operation) as anything other than the precursor” to the NSA’s terrorist surveillance.
Both operations relied on an expansive interpretation of the word “relevant,” for example — one that allowed the government to collect vast amounts of information on the premise that some tiny fraction of it would be useful to investigators. Both used similar internal safeguards, requiring analysts to certify that they had “reasonable articulable suspicion” – a comparatively low legal threshold – that a phone number was linked to a drug or intelligence case before they could query the records.
“The foundation of the NSA program was a mirror image of what we were doing,” said a former Justice Department official who helped oversee the surveillance. That official said he and others briefed NSA lawyers several times on the particulars of their surveillance program. Two former DEA officials also said the NSA had been briefed on the operation. The NSA declined to comment.
There were also significant differences.
For one thing, DEA analysts queried their data collection far more often. The NSA said analysts searched its telephone database only about 300 times in 2012; DEA analysts routinely performed that many searches in a day, former officials said. Beyond that, NSA analysts must have approval from a judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court each time they want to search their own collection of phone metadata, and they do not automatically cross-reference it with other intelligence files.
Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., then the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, complained last year to Holder that the DEA had been gathering phone data “in bulk” without judicial oversight. Officials said the DEA’s database was disclosed to judges only occasionally, in classified hearings.
Holder pulled the plug on the phone data collection in September 2013.
That summer, Snowden leaked a remarkable series of classified documents detailing some of the government’s most prized surveillance secrets, including the NSA’s logging of domestic phone calls and Internet traffic. Reuters and The New York Times raised questions about the drug agency’s own access to phone records.
Officials said the Justice Department told the DEA that it had determined it could not continue both surveillance programs, particularly because part of its justification for sweeping NSA surveillance was that it served national security interests, not ordinary policing. Eight months after USTO was halted, for example, department lawyers defended the spy agency’s phone dragnet in court partly on the grounds that it “serves special governmental needs above and beyond normal law enforcement.”
Three months after USTO was shut down, a review panel commissioned by President Obama urged Congress to bar the NSA from gathering telephone data on Americans in bulk. Not long after that, Obama instructed the NSA to get permission from the surveillance court before querying its phone data collection, a step the drug agency never was required to take.
The DEA stopped searching USTO in September 2013. Not long after that, it purged the database.
“It was made abundantly clear that they couldn’t defend both programs,” a former Justice Department official said. Others said Holder’s message was more direct. “He said he didn’t think we should have that information,” a former DEA official said.
By then, agents said USTO was suffering from diminishing returns. More criminals — especially the sophisticated cartel operatives the agency targeted — were communicating on Internet messaging systems that are harder for law enforcement to track.
Still, the shutdown took a toll, officials said. “It has had a major impact on investigations,” one former DEA official said.
The DEA asked the Justice Department to restart the surveillance program in December 2013. It withdrew that request when agents came up with a new solution. Every day, the agency assembles a list of the telephone numbers its agents suspect may be tied to drug trafficking. Each day, it sends electronic subpoenas — sometimes listing more than a thousand numbers — to telephone companies seeking logs of international telephone calls linked to those numbers, two official familiar with the program said.
The data collection that results is more targeted but slower and more expensive. Agents said it takes a day or more to pull together communication profiles that used to take minutes.
The White House proposed a similar approach for the NSA’s telephone surveillance program, which is set to expire June 1. That approach would halt the NSA’s bulk data collection but would give the spy agency the power to force companies to turn over records linked to particular telephone numbers, subject to a court order.
Gigantic global policy decisions are always deferred to the United Nations. Only recently did residents of Detroit appeal to the United Nations in the case of water. Countless residents in Detroit were not paying for water and it was shut-off so an appeal was made to the UNI declaring water is a right and no one needs to pay.
The U.N. has become dangerous. It has failed to disarm terrorist states like Iran, Iraq and the Sudan, and it has failed to halt nuclear proliferation in outlaw nations like North Korea, China and Iran. If the U.N. did not pose a danger to the future of America, we could just be amused by its failures and move on. But what’s amazing is how the U.N. has continued to exist as the defeats accumulate.
This is no small matter. This body is supposed to enforce world order, but it aids and abets mass murderers and genocide. It places some of the most despicable governments you can think of — Libya, Cuba, Sudan, China, Venezuela, Zimbabwe — on its Human Rights Council, which is supposed to uphold the highest standards in human rights protection. Yet the council is controlled by African and Middle Eastern countries, which vote in blocs and protect one another from criticism over their own human rights violations.
So it screams credulity on the causes of why all deference is delivered to the United Nations. Let’s go deeper.
Ban Ki Moon, age 70 is the Secretary General of the United Nations. The short bio on Ban Ki Moon reads as follows:
Ban Ki-moon is the eighth Secretary-General of the United Nations. His priorities have been to mobilize world leaders around a set of new global challenges, from climate change and economic upheaval to pandemics and increasing pressures involving food, energy and water. He has sought to be a bridge-builder, to give voice to the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people, and to strengthen the Organization itself.
“I grew up in war”, the Secretary-General has said, “and saw the United Nations help my country to recover and rebuild. That experience was a big part of what led me to pursue a career in public service. As Secretary-General, I am determined to see this Organization deliver tangible, meaningful results that advance peace, development and human rights.”
Beyond the historic tragedy in human history, the Holocaust, there is yet another tragedy that is all but forgotten in history and Ban Ki Moon was derelict in his duty, the Khmer Rouge.
Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen was preparing to fight a civil war in 1997 when a senior United Nations official stopped by to ask if he’d like help putting the former leaders of the Khmer Rouge on trial. With a figurative wave of the hand, Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge commander himself, said in effect: Sure, go ahead. At that moment, his mind was obviously elsewhere.
Eventually, he and his co–prime minister, Norodom Ranariddh—the opposition in this little internal war—separately signed an agreement asking the UN for help staging a trial. But then, after Hun Sen defeated Ranariddh and became the nation’s sole leader, he probably looked back and realized that agreeing to a trial was one of the greatest mistakes he had ever made. After all, he and most of his colleagues in government were former Khmer Rouge officers themselves.
So, Hun Sen set out to sabotage the idea he had agreed to. And now, ten years after the court opened for business, he has largely succeeded.
Today, the court is saddled with charges of rampant corruption and malign Cambodian government interference in its operations. Several judges and staff members have quit in disgust. Its reputation is now so bad that donors have largely stopped giving money, so the court is broke. And the trials have dragged on for so long that defendants are growing ill and dying.
Theary Seng, who was left an orphan after the Khmer Rouge killed her parents, became the court’s first “civil party” victims’ representative. She withdrew from the proceedings in 2011, saying the trial had become “an irredeemable political farce.”
The problems began cropping up just as soon as the UN and the Cambodian government began negotiating the trial’s terms in the months following that initial agreement in 1997. Hun Sen and his aides threw up one objection after another. They professed concern about national stability. They complained about infringement upon Cambodian sovereignty. They insisted that any trial take place in home courts—even though Hun Sen knew full well that his court system was thoroughly corrupt. In fact, reforming the courts had been on his own campaign agenda during the most recent election. Today, that has still not been done.
“If foreigners have the right to lack confidence in Cambodian courts,” Hun Sen said defiantly, “we have the right to lack confidence in an international court.” But the UN continued to object to the government’s obstructive pronouncements and refused to use judges handpicked by, and utterly beholden to, Hun Sen and his aides.
“It became such a difficult, convoluted, lengthy, very, very difficult process,” said Kent Wiedemann, the US ambassador to Cambodia at that time, largely because “as far as the UN was concerned, there was no Cambodian qualified to participate in the tribunal in any meaningful way. The secretary general wanted to appoint judges with eminent standing in the international community.”
Finally, Kofi Annan, then secretary general of the UN, threw up his hands and said he’d had enough. Hun Sen must “change his position and attitude,” he declared, and “send a clear message that he is interested in a credible court, a credible tribunal which meets international standards.” Until that day came, Annan announced, the United Nations was backing out of the discussions.
Ten months later, however, the UN General Assembly stepped into the debate and rescinded Kofi Annan’s previous order. It passed a resolution directing “the secretary general to resume negotiations without delay, to conclude an agreement with the Government of Cambodia, based on previous negotiations, to try those suspected of being responsible for the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge.”
So it was that the UN and Cambodia commenced negotiations over how the court would be structured, and eventually they agreed to establish a hybrid court with both Cambodian and international judges and prosecutors. They called it the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (widely known as the ECCC) to differentiate it from Cambodia’s debased domestic court system.
David Scheffer, who was the US ambassador at large for war crimes issues, visited Cambodia and came up with the compromise that made the negotiations succeed. Under Scheffer’s plan, a majority of the trial judges could be Cambodian. But no decision could be reached unless at least one international judge agreed as well. That formula settled six years of tortured, acrimonious debate. Finally, the court opened for business in 2003.
Two years later, David Tolbert, a United Nations lawyer working at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, got a call. Could he please go to Cambodia and try to straighten out the war crimes courtroom there? Nothing was moving. The court was stuck.
Tolbert, a tall, garrulous North Carolinian with a world-weary manner, was to bring his experiences in the heart of the world’s worst recent genocidal moments to Cambodia, where a past genocide was being litigated. The problems he found there were altogether different from the ones he had been dealing with. The court had been trying to organize itself for several years, but Tolbert says that when he arrived, “it had no administrative leadership, particularly with respect to court management, including translation and interpretation and the witness-protection program.”
The international side had essentially given over judicial management to the Cambodian side. But, Tolbert says, “there was really very little judicial management in place. The Cambodian staff in charge had virtually no knowledge or experience, as most had no judicial background. And yet there were a large number of them,” hundreds in fact. What’s more, Cambodian human rights groups alleged that each of the Cambodian judges had paid a large bribe to get his seat on the court’s bench, which would not be at all unusual in that state.
Tolbert concluded that there was no way a trial could proceed at that point. He spent a few weeks drawing up a series of recommendations to get the process moving. Then he returned to Yugoslavia.
In 2008, when the new UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, asked Tolbert to step back into the Khmer Rouge trial, he quickly found that five years after the agreement to set up the court, “very little progress had been made. I proposed reducing the budget by 35 percent. The staff was bloated. They had 15 gardeners, which looked like a job-creation program to me.” He also quickly found that Cambodia’s endemic corruption had reared its head in the courthouse, where Cambodian employees were required to turn over a portion of their paychecks to their supervisors.
All during Hun Sen’s battle with the United Nations about the trial, he had been trying to ensure that the UN did not set up an autonomous body inside his country that he could not manipulate to protect himself and his fellow former Khmer Rouge friends. But as he and the rest of the world soon discovered, the Khmer Rouge trial presented a new and different liability. It exposed Cambodia’s way of doing business—incompetent, indolent, rapacious, corrupt—for everyone in the world to see, like a dollhouse with no back wall.
Despite all of that, the court proceeded with the trial of Kaing Guek Eav, widely known as “Duch”—the commander of S-21, the prison and interrogation and torture center in Phnom Penh, where fifteen thousand people died. On July 26, 2010, the court convicted Duch of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to thirty-five years in prison—by almost every reaction, an exceedingly light sentence for a man who oversaw the torture and deaths of so many thousands of innocent civilians. Even with that, he won’t serve the full thirty-five years. After subtracting his time already spent in jail, more for cooperation and good behavior, and still more for a period of illegal detention in a military jail, the court left him with nineteen years to serve. On the day the judge sentenced Duch, he was sixty-seven years old, meaning he could conceivably walk out of prison a free man one day.
After that, the court took up what it called Case 002, four senior Khmer Rouge leaders who were to be tried together. At the same time, more than a dozen legal investigators, foreigners on the UN payroll, were researching new suspects. And in the fall of 2009, the court announced that it intended to charge roughly half a dozen additional suspects. These were labeled cases 003 and 004.
But Hun Sen, implacably opposed, almost instantly went on the offensive. The prime minister was already well known for his “colorful” quips. For example, he had labeled anyone criticizing the trial’s Cambodian judges as “not human; they are animals,” who “even want to seduce their own parents.” Now, referring to the additional defendants, he insisted, “This will not happen on my watch. The UN and the countries that supported Pol Pot to occupy Cambodia’s seat at the UN from 1979 to 1991 should be tried first. They should be sentenced more heavily than Pol Pot.”
Then later that year, undeterred by its illogic, he took up a new line of argument. “If you want a tribunal, but you don’t want to consider peace and reconciliation, and war breaks out again, killing two hundred thousand or three hundred thousand people, who will be responsible?” he asked. “Finally, I have got peace in this country, so I will not let someone destroy it. The people and the nation will not be destroyed by someone trying to lead the country into instability.”
No one bothered to point out that during the Duch trial, there was no unrest, no protest, no sign of any trouble at all. In fact, the vast majority of Cambodians were largely unaware that the trial was under way. Eighty percent of the people live in the countryside, most of them with no modern conveniences such as radio or television. They’re uniformly preoccupied with finding enough food to feed their families each day. The trial was on during the day, when they were at work in the rice paddies. The few who did have car battery–powered televisions, if they had time to watch them, most likely just wanted to be entertained.
Some of the handful who did watch, largely in urban areas, were outraged by the treatment the defendants were getting—three meals a day, hand-delivered; living in air-conditioned cells; sleeping on actual beds with mattresses, a luxury in Cambodia. Bou Meng, a Khmer Rouge survivor, remarked: “I am extremely envious of Duch and the treatment he receives. I don’t understand why the court treats him so well, much better than me.” But most preferred to ignore the trial.
One reason was that many older Cambodians were beset with traumatic mental illnesses, including post-traumatic stress disorder, still lingering after the horrors of the Khmer Rouge years. (In one clinical study of Cambodian refugees who came to the United States in the early 1980s and now live in Long Beach, California, sixty-two percent were diagnosed with PTSD—twenty-five years after their trauma.) The last thing most people in Cambodia wanted to do was watch someone on TV describing their years of horror.
Hun Sen blocked several past and present Cambodian officials from testifying, despite subpoenas from the court. And a Cambodian judge he appointed to the ECCC had a documented history of accepting bribes in exchange for verdicts while he presided over a Cambodian court.
But while Hun Sen’s frontal attacks may have been little noticed by most Cambodians, they had a strong effect in the courtroom. One international judge resigned, blaming government interference in the proceedings, as did half of one defendant’s defense team. A reserve justice, Laurent Kasper-Ansermet, who is Swiss, was promoted to fill the empty judge’s chair, per ECCC protocol. Kasper-Ansermet then tweeted that he looked forward to hearing cases 003 and 004. That was enough to do him in.
On obvious orders from the prime minister’s office, his domestic co-judge refused to work with Kasper-Ansermet. He was denied use of court cars and drivers. He was not given access to the official stamps used to validate affidavits and other court records. And the Cambodian government’s Supreme Council of Magistracy refused to approve his appointment—even though this domestic body answerable to Hun Sen had no authority to involve itself in the appointment of international judges.
After less than six months, Kasper-Ansermet resigned because, as he said, he was unable to work with rampant Cambodian obstructionism. Nearly all of the international investigators quit, too.
For many legal experts today, the ECCC remains an embarrassment to the international legal system. Since its inception in 2003, the court has tried only one individual for the horrific genocide carried out by the Khmer Rouge: Kaing Guek Eav, or Duch, giving him a sentence so light that many Cambodians were appalled. Just one conviction and the court reports that it has already spent $208.7 million over the last ten years. Last year it asked for another $92 million from international donors to fund operations going forward.
But by all accounts donor fatigue has set in alongside disillusionment with Cambodian corruption and obstructionism, and very little money has been raised. In fact, this spring the court’s Cambodian staff went on strike because they had not been paid since last November. Without staff, including court reporters, transcribers, and translators, the court could not function. It shut down. Finally the court management promised to pay them—“sometime soon.” The staff went back to work but vowed to quit for good if the promise was not kept. Still, as international court officials repeatedly pointed out, the Cambodian government was responsible for paying these people. Apparently it was not unhappy to see the court shut down.
That was hardly the only problem. The four former Khmer Rouge leaders in case 002—Ieng Sary, Nuon Chea, Ieng Thirith, and —looked likely to be the final defendants. But all of them were already so old that they were making the case moot.
Last September, Ieng Thirith, minister of social action in the Pol Pot regime, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, so severe that she could not function in the courtroom. She was released. Then in March 2013, Ieng Sary, her husband and former minster of foreign affairs, died. He was eighty-seven years old.
That left only eighty-six-year-old Nuon Chea, who was known as “Brother No. 2” after Pol Pot, and Khieu Samphan, eighty-one, former president of the so-called Democratic State of Kampuchea. Both are frail and sickly.
The court has said it will need another year to complete these trials. Whether there will ever be a verdict, and if there is, whether the remaining defendants will live to see it, are questions on everyone’s mind. Also, we can’t know what deleterious acts Hun Sen may still have planned.
As the Cambodian government’s Office of the Royal Prosecutor recently put it: The prime minister “has an obligation to ensure political stability and the well being of the Kingdom of Cambodia,” suggesting that Hun Sen can do whatever he wants about the trial and say his actions are intended to assure “stability.”
But Ou Virak, president of the Cambodian Center for Human Rights, is pessimistic—like so many Cambodians. “This really is a case of now or never,” he said. “Both the ECCC’s reputation and justice for victims of the Khmer Rouge are in the last-chance saloon.”
One last question: Where was Jane Fonda on the Khmer Rouge?
Pew forecast shows number of Muslims will nearly equal that of Christians world-wide by 2050
The world’s Islamic population is growing so rapidly that by 2050, the number of Muslims will be nearly equal to the number of Christians across the planet—possibly for the first time in history.
The new forecast is part of a sweeping religious-population study released Thursday by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center that projects significant demographic shifts across the global religious landscape.
Most major religions—including Christianity—will see their numbers increase. But the exceptional growth of Islam, as well as the rise of those unaffiliated with any religion, is poised to alter historic religious balances across Europe, the U.S. and Africa over the next four decades, the study suggests.
By 2050, the study says, there will be more Muslims than Jews in the U.S.—though both groups will remain small minorities. Researchers note that their count only includes those who identify as Jewish by religion, not those who may consider themselves culturally Jewish but decline to claim it as a religion.
The U.S. will remain a majority Christian nation, though the number of people identifying themselves as Christian is expected to decline from more than three-quarters of the population to two-thirds, the study says. The number of Christians in Europe is expected to decrease by about 100 million people to 454 million.
Christians will remain a large or even the largest group in countries including France, the U.K. and Australia, but they will no longer make up the majority. Many European countries will experience a rise in the number of people unaffiliated with any religion, as well as nearly a doubling of the Muslim share of Europe’s population—to 10% from 5.9%.
The study, based primarily on census and survey data, takes into account the effects of migration, conversion and the ages of religious populations, but “fertility is the single most important factor driving outcomes,” said Conrad Hackett, the study’s demographer.
Muslims have an average of 3.1 children per woman—the highest rate of all religious groups, he said. Christians are second, with 2.7 children per woman. Hindus have 2.4 children per woman, and Jews have an average of 2.3 children per woman.
The projections come as Europe struggles to assimilate its burgeoning Muslim minorities, amid tensions spurred by economic forces and the rise of the terrorist group known as Islamic State.
It also comes as Americans battle over the claims of religious believers who say their rights need protection as society becomes more accepting of gay rights, and as more people in the U.S. turn away from religion.
By 2050, Muslims will make up 30% of the global population, with 2.8 billion adherents, while Christians will comprise 31%, with 2.9 billion followers.
The only other time in history the population figures may have been as close to parity is between the years 1000 and 1600, as Islam expanded and deadly plague ravaged Christian populations in Europe, according to scholars cited in the study.
If population trends continue, Muslims could outnumber Christians by 2100, the study says.
Researchers said that although the Muslim population is expected to increase by more than 70% by 2050, Muslims will still be in the minority in Western Europe and the U.S. Although India will remain a Hindu majority nation, they said, it will also be the country with the largest number of Muslims.
By comparison, Christianity is expected to see an increase of 35% over the same period, enough to hold its current share of the global population as it grows to a projected 9.3 billion from 6.8 billion.
As Islam grows in the U.S. and Europe, Christianity is expected to become more prominent in Africa. By 2050, the Pew study projects, four out of 10 Christians will live in sub-Saharan Africa.
Such global shifts may already be visible on a smaller scale.
In the Quad Cities, a cluster of communities straddling Iowa and Illinois, the small, aging Jewish community of about 500 seems to be getting smaller as people die or leave the area, says Allan Ross, the executive director of the Jewish Federation there.
Funerals are too common, he says, and as children—including his son—grow up and move away to larger cities “they don’t come back to work in daddy’s store.”
Meanwhile, Muslim congregations recently built two mosques in the area.
