Category Archives: Department of Defense

Impeach Jeh Johnson and Then Dis-Bar the Man

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And the 20 others including the lawyers !!!

There is even a Federal employee handbook, this matter begins on page 74. Let the Freedom of Information requests begin and call Judicial Watch, as the Inspector General refuses to comment.

Homeland Security Leaders Bent Rules on Private E-Mail

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Jeh Johnson, the secretary of homeland security, and 28 of his senior staffers have been using private Web-based e-mail from their work computers for over a year, a practice criticized by cyber security experts and advocates of government transparency.

The department banned such private e-mail on DHS computers in April 2014. Top DHS officials were granted informal waivers, according to a top DHS official who said that he saw the practice as a national security risk. The official said the exempt staffers included Deputy Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, chief of staff Christian Marrone and general counsel Stevan Bunnell.

Asked about the exceptions on Monday, the DHS press secretary, Marsha Catron, confirmed that some officials had been exempted. “Going forward,” she said, “all access to personal webmail accounts has been suspended.”

Future exceptions are to be granted only by the chief of staff. Catron said that a “recent internal review” had found the chief of staff and some others were unaware that they had had access to webmail.

The DHS rule, articulated last year after hackers first breached the Office of Personnel Management, states: “The use of Internet Webmail (Gmail, Yahoo, AOL) or other personal email accounts is not authorized over DHS furnished equipment or network connections.” Johnson and the 28 other senior officials sought and received informal waivers at different times over the past year, the official said. Catron said exceptions were decided on a case-by-case basis by the chief information officer, Luke McCormack. DHS employees are permitted to use their government e-mail accounts for limited personal use.

Erica Paulson, a spokeswoman for the DHS Office of the Inspector General, said that the office does not confirm or deny the existence of any open investigations.

It remains unclear whether Johnson and the other officials conducted DHS business on their private webmail accounts. (The DHS spokeswoman said “the use of personal email for official purposes is strictly prohibited.”) If even one work-related e-mail was sent or received, they could be in violation of regulations and laws governing the preservation of federal records, said Jason R. Baron, a former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration.

“I suppose it is remotely conceivable that in seeking a waiver, 20 or more government officials could all be wishing to talk to each other through a Web-based e-mail service about such matters as baseball games or retirement luncheons they might be attending,” he said. “But it is simply not reasonable to assume that in seeking a waiver that the officials involved were only contemplating using a commercial network for personal (that is, non-official) communications.”

In March, the New York Times reported that as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton had used a private e-mail server exclusively to conduct her State Department business. Clinton said she had not violated any transparency laws because the Federal Records Act states that officials are permitted to use private e-mail, so long as they forward on any government-related communications to their government accounts so they can be archived and used to respond to requests under the Freedom of Information Act.

In November 2014, the Federal Records Act was amended to impose a 20-day limit on the time an official has to transfer records from private e-mail to government systems. Clinton transferred over 30,000 e-mails from her private server to the State Department in early 2015. She deleted another 30,000 e-mails on her private server, claiming they were all strictly personal.

It is unclear how Johnson and the other officials used their webmail accounts, and whether they forwarded any messages about government business to their official accounts.

Johnson has used his personal Gmail for government business at least once, before he was head of DHS; that was disclosed during the scandal that led to David Petraeus’s resignation as CIA director. The Justice Department is fighting to keep Johnson from having to give a video deposition in that case.

Anne Weismann, executive director of the Campaign for Accountability and a former Justice Department official dealing with FOIA litigation, said that even by seeking the waivers at DHS, Johnson and the other officials created at least an appearance and opportunity for impropriety.

“How could they possibly justify exempting the secretary and the most senior people from the policy? You are allowing the people who are most likely to create e-mails that are most worthy of preservation to bypass the system that would ensure their preservation,” she said.

The issue of top government officials using private e-mail is widespread and the rules barring such practices are rarely enforced, said Weismann. “What they really want is to have the ability to have off-the-record discussions,” she said. “It creates problems for record keeping and it puts it out of the reach of FOIA.”

Cyber security experts said that allowing the use of commercial webmail on otherwise secure computers increases the risk that those computers could be penetrated by hackers, foreign intelligence services or malware. Webmail messages are often stored without encryption, leaving them vulnerable to theft by anyone who gains access to the webmail server.

“The fundamental issue is that these commercial webmail systems were not designed with the threat in mind that is present when government officials are using consumer tools,” said Johannes B. Ullrich, dean of research for the SANS Technology Institute.

The threat is not just theoretical. In 2008, Sarah Palin’s Yahoo e-mail account was hacked by someone who used a password reset function to gain access, he said.

There’s also a moral hazard.

“If there are just certain individuals being exempted here, it’s setting a bad precedent for the rest of the department. If you say, ‘Hey, it doesn’t apply to everybody over a certain pay grade,’ the idea of these controls gets diminished and people look for workarounds,” said Ullrich.

Aside from the legal risk and the national security risk, exceptions to the department’s policies reinforce the narrative that the Obama administration lets senior officials skirt the rules, including by keeping their communications secret.  The pattern was present in the previous administration as well, but after the OPM hacks and the deletion of Clinton’s e-mails, it is widely criticized and hard to defend.

A Redline for Islamic State Chemical Weapons?

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It was reported last month and confirmed that ISIS hired chemical experts.

Islamic State recruiting chemical weapons experts, Australia’s foreign minister says

In January of 2015, an ISIS chemical expert was killed in an Iraq airstrike.

So, where is that impassioned speech by John Kerry? Where is the United Nations? Where is the White House redline? Where is the UK?

crickets….

NYT’s: ISIS Has Fired Chemical Mortar Shells, Evidence Indicates

A 120-millimeter mortar shell struck fortifications at a Kurdish military position near the Mosul Dam in June, arms experts said, sickening several Kurdish fighters who were nearby. Conflict Armament Research and Sahan Research

The Islamic State appears to have manufactured rudimentary chemical warfare shells and attacked Kurdish positions in Iraq and Syria with them as many as three times in recent weeks, according to field investigators, Kurdish officials and a Western ordnance disposal technician who examined the incidents and recovered one of the shells.

The development, which the investigators said involved toxic industrial or agricultural chemicals repurposed as weapons, signaled a potential escalation of the group’s capabilities, though it was not entirely without precedent.

Beginning more than a decade ago, Sunni militants in Iraq have occasionally used chlorine or old chemical warfare shells in makeshift bombs against American and Iraqi government forces. And Kurdish forces have claimed that militants affiliated with the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, used a chlorine-based chemical in at least one suicide truck bomb in Iraq this year.

Firing chemical mortar shells across distances, however, as opposed to dispersing toxic chemicals via truck bombs or stationary devices, would be a new tactic for the group, and would require its munitions makers to overcome a significantly more difficult technical challenge.

Chemical weapons, internationally condemned and banned in most of the world, are often less lethal than conventional munitions, including when used in improvised fashion. But they are indiscriminate by nature and difficult to defend against without specialized equipment — traits that lend them potent psychological and political effects.

In the clearest recent incident, a 120-millimeter chemical mortar shell struck sandbag fortifications at a Kurdish military position near Mosul Dam on June 21 or 22, the investigators said, and caused several Kurdish fighters near where it landed to become ill.

The shell did not explode and was recovered nearly intact on June 29 by Gregory Robin, a former French military ordnance disposal technician who now works for Sahan Research, a think tank partnered with Conflict Armament Research, a private organization that has been documenting and tracing weapons used in the conflict. Both research groups are registered in Britain.

The tail of the shell had been broken, Mr. Robin said by telephone on Friday, and was leaking a liquid that emanated a powerful odor of chlorine and caused irritation to the airways and eyes.

It was the first time, according to Mr. Robin and James Bevan, the director of Conflict Armament Research, that such a shell had been found in the conflict.

In an internal report to the Kurdish government in Iraq, the research groups noted that the mortar shell appeared to have been manufactured in an “ISIS workshop by casting iron into mold method. The mortar contains a warhead filled with a chemical agent, most probably chlorine.”

Conflict Armament Research and Sahan Research often work with the Kurdistan Region Security Council. Mr. Robin and Mr. Bevan said the council had contracted a laboratory to analyze residue samples removed from the weapon.

He added, “What I don’t know is what kind of burster charge it had,” referring to the small explosive charge intended to break open the shell and distribute its liquid contents. The shell had not exploded, he said, because, inexplicably, it did not contain a fuse.

Whether any finding from tests underwritten by Kurdish authorities would be internationally recognized is uncertain, as the Kurdish forces are party to the conflict.

The week after Mr. Robin collected the shell, on July 6, another investigator found evidence that the research groups said indicated two separate attacks with chemical projectiles in Kurdish territory in the northeastern corner of Syria.

Those attacks, at Tel Brak and Hasakah, occurred in late June and appeared to involve shells or small rockets containing an industrial chemical sometimes used as a pesticide, the investigators said.

In the incidents in Syria, Mr. Bevan said, multiple shells struck in agricultural fields near three buildings used by Kurdish militia forces known as the Y.P.G., or Peoples Protection Units, in Tel Brak. More shells, he said, landed in civilian areas in Hasakah; at least one struck a civilian home.  More on the story here.

Consequences of JPOA with Iran are Being Realized

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It may be real apparent that even the military and Washington DC has not measured all the consequences of the Joint Plan of Action nuclear deal with Iran.

Just for grins, this is the written and verbal text of the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power declaration to the UN this morning to the Security Council, it is full of lies.

U.K. Lifts Export Bans on Arms to Israel

The United Kingdom has lifted all remaining restrictions on arms sales to Israel, according to The Independent. Over the past year, the U.K. government conducted a review of export licenses in light of Operation Protective Edge in Gaza.

 

Washington Examiner: NORAD is not taking any chances by working some air exercises to test missile defense systems, one of which is scheduled for Washington DC this week.

Civil Air Patrol aircraft and a military helicopter will be flying over D.C. between midnight and 2 a.m. Tuesday night into Wednesday morning as part of an exercise designed to hone NORAD’s intercept operations.

The North American Aerospace Defense Command and its geographical component, the Continental United States NORAD Region (CONR), have been conducting these exercises in the U.S. and Canada since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks on U.S. soil.

This particular exercise, called Falcon Virgo 15-10, is part of a series of flights run in coordination with the Federal Aviation Administration, the National Capital Region (NCR) Coordination Center, the Joint Air Defense Operations Center (JADOC), Civil Air Patrol, U.S. Coast Guard and CONR’s Eastern Air Defense Sector, CONR officials said in a statement Sunday.

“Exercise Falcon Virgo is designed to hone NORAD’s intercept and identification operations as well as operationally test the NCR Visual Warning System and training personnel at the JADOC. Civil Air Patrol aircraft and a U.S. Coast Guard MH-65 Dolphin helicopter will participate in the exercise,” CONR said.
From Times of Israel in part: Tehran has announced they WILL NOT CHANGE THEIR BEHAVIOR TOWARDS THE WEST OR ISRAEL

US President Barack Obama says the vote at the UN Security Council sends a “clear message: that the deal with Iran is a path forward.

Germany and Iran soon will hold their first economic conference in a decade in the wake of a deal with world powers over the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program, Iran’s state-run news agency reports.

However, the top German official in a delegation visiting Tehran warned Iran that threatening Israel and not respecting human rights could damage these nascent economic efforts.

Then comes India

Gatestone Institute: India’s Foreign Ministry and media welcomed the Iran deal, much as their counterparts in Western capitals did. But country’s defence establishment and business community are raising their concerns about the newly negotiated deal with Iran.

Recent defence procurements show that India is preparing for a destabilizing Middle East. In the run-up to the Iran deal, India has been ramping up its missile defence capabilities, including building a comprehensive missile defence shield capable of intercepting a ballistic missile fired from a range of 5,000 km — effectively covering the South China Sea and the Persian Gulf region.

India has good reason to be concerned about an Iranian windfall from its oil trade financing Shia militancy across the Muslim world. The Iranian ascendancy could intensify the Shia-Sunni fight for the control of political Islam and spill over into India’s Kashmir region and beyond.

India’s primary concern, however, remains neighbouring Pakistan.

As this nuclear deal sets a Shiite Iran on the highway to a nuclear bomb, rival Sunni-Arab nations are getting jittery about the prospect of living in an Iranian-dominated Middle East.

Pakistan would be the preferred one-stop shop from Sunni-Arab nations to acquire a “turnkey” nuclear bomb. Saudi Arabia has apparently financed Pakistan’s clandestine nuclear program for decades and hopes get an “off the shelf” nuclear bomb in return. U.S. President Barack Obama might be right about not allowing a nuclear Iran “on his watch,” but after he leaves the White House — and because of him — the nuclear landscape of the Middle East might be “radiating” like a pinball machine.

The multi-billion dollar nuclear deals between Pakistan and Sunni-Arab nations will be brokered by the Pakistani Army, and the money will largely go to fund Islamist infrastructure and jihadist insurgencies in Kashmir and beyond.

The Iran deal also ends India’s hopes of oil exploration in Iran. Major Western powers such as Germany and France, which pushed for an agreement, will be lining up to secure trade concessions from Iran in return for removing sanctions and watering down restrictions.

Indians will not be playing in that club of Oil Majors — it will be forced to take a back seat. Political commentators in India who may have hoped for unrestricted access to Iranian cheap oil after the lifting of sanctions, have not factored in that the French and the Germans are eying the same oil reserves.

Both Islamic State (ISIS) and Al Qaeda have repeated their calls for jihad on India. With ISIS in Syria having paraded a captured Scud missile that is capable of carrying a tactical nuclear warhead, it doesn’t take much imagination to picture a nuclear-armed Arab state falling to Islamic State or its affiliates.

Islamic State jihadists parade a mobile-launched Scud tactical ballistic missile, captured from Syrian regime forces, through their capital of Raqaa in June 2014.

The best India can do is to hedge its bets, secure its borders and strengthen its defences.

Like Israel, India too must realize that it is on its own. The Western powers that negotiated the Iran deal have demonstrated that they lack the conviction and resolve to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons — or prevent Arab countries from acquiring nuclear weapons of their own.

And with President Obama shrinking America’s “footprint” in the world, this time the cavalry might not be coming.

 

 

UN Voted FOR the Iran Deal Before Congress

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Secretary of Defense, Ash Carter is on a 3 country tour in the Middle East, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. War gaming on some plan?

This cannot end well.

Israeli Defense Force:

The IDF is seeking government commitment to a multi-year defense spending plan – a commitment that has been absent for the past several years – as it prepares to deal with the possibility of a covert Iranian attempt to break through to nuclear weapons production, a senior defense source said on Sunday.

The source said the IDF needs to assume that its most severe “reference scenarios” regarding Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and ISIS will come true, in order to correctly use the coming years to reshape the military, improve training, and make cost cutting reforms that include the shedding of 100,000 reservists and 5000 career soldiers.

The multi-year budget commitment from the government –  absent for the past several years – will be necessary to reshape the military and improve training to meet those challenges while at the same time, implementing cutting reforms that include the shedding of 100,000 reservists and 5000 career soldiers.

Other proposed changes include military restructuring to create specialized war fighting and border security divisions that do not overlap one another.

 

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The U.N. Security Council on Monday unanimously endorsed the landmark nuclear deal between Iran and six world powers and authorized a series of measures leading to the end of U.N. sanctions that have hurt Iran’s economy.

But the measure also provides a mechanism for U.N. sanctions to “snap back” in place if Iran fails to meet its obligations.

The resolution had been agreed to by the five veto-wielding council members, who along with Germany negotiated the nuclear deal with Iran. It was co-sponsored by all 15 members of the Security Council.

Under the agreement, Iran’s nuclear program will be curbed for a decade in exchange for potentially hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of relief from international sanctions. Many key penalties on the Iranian economy, such as those related to the energy and financial sectors, could be lifted by the end of the year.

The document specifies that seven resolutions related to U.N. sanctions will be terminated when Iran has completed a series of major steps to curb its nuclear program and the International Atomic Energy Agency has concluded that “all nuclear material in Iran remains in peaceful activities.”

All provisions of the U.N. resolution will terminate in 10 years, including the snap back provision.

But last week the six major powers — the U.S., Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany — and the European Union sent a letter, seen by The Associated Press, informing U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that they have agreed to extend the snap back mechanism for an additional five years. They asked Ban to send the letter to the Security Council.

U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power said the nuclear deal doesn’t change the United States’ “profound concern about human rights violations committed by the Iranian government or about the instability Iran fuels beyond its nuclear program, from its support for terrorist proxies to repeated threats against Israel to its other destabilizing activities in the region.”

She urged Iran to release three “unjustly imprisoned” Americans and to determine the whereabouts of Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent who vanished in 2007.

“But denying Iran a nuclear weapon is important not in spite of these other destabilizing actions but rather because of them,” Power said.

She quoted President Barack Obama saying the United States agreed to the deal because “an Iran with a nuclear weapon would be far more destabilizing and far more dangerous to our friends and to the world.”

Embassies Open Today, the Cuban Flag Flies in DC

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A cop killer who fled to Cuba is not part of the deal that the White House or the State Department with the normalized relations with Cuba.

Despite New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s aggravated pleas to President Obama to have Assata Shakur extradited back to the United States, Cuba’s head of North American affairs, Josefina Vidal, has denied that request.

Shakur, formerly known as Joanne Chesimard, was a member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army (BLA).  She became the first woman to ever be placed on the FBI’s most-wanted list for her involvement in a 1973 shootout in which New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster was killed. Shakur was eventually sentenced to life in prison in 1977; however, she managed to flee the cement walls of the penitentiary in 1979, and later fled to Cuba where she was granted political asylum.

Shakur currently remains on the FBI’s most-wanted list and has a bounty of $2 million offered for her capture.  Since President Obama has been attempting to normalize relations with Cuba, NJ Governor Chris Christie has adamantly requested that Obama demand Shakur be extradited to America as a part of Cuba and the United States’ new beginning.  However, Josefina Vidal has denied Cuba’s agreement to hand over Shakur.

“We’ve explained to the U.S. government in the past that there are some people living in Cuba to whom Cuba has legitimately granted political asylum,” Vidal stated.  “There’s no extradition treaty in effect between Cuba and the U.S.  We’ve reminded the U.S. government that in its country they’ve given shelter to dozens and dozens of Cuban citizens.  Some of them accused of horrible crimes, some accused of terrorism, murder and kidnapping, and in every case the U.S. government has decided to welcome them.”

After 54 Years From Stars and Stripes:

The last time the United States and Cuba had diplomatic relations, Dwight Eisenhower was in the White House, Elvis Presley’s “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” topped the charts and a new dance craze, the Twist, was sweeping the country.

The past half-century of U.S.-Cuba relations has been a roller-coaster ride of high hopes for improvement at times, but low points that included mutual acts of terrorism, separation of Cuban families, CIA attempts to kill Fidel Castro, the most dangerous days of the Cold War during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a U.S.-sponsored invasion, Cuba’s alignment with the old Soviet bloc, confiscation of U.S. property, the 1996 shootdown of two Brothers to the Rescue planes by Cuban MiGs, and countless human tragedies on a smaller scale.

The US and Cuba will re-establish diplomatic relations Monday and their embassies will reopen for the first time in 54 years.

On Monday morning, the Cuban government will raise its flag over the its old limestone building on Washington’s 16th Street Northwest, which has been a Cuban Embassy, a Cuban Interests Section in the absence of diplomatic relations, and now again an embassy. Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez will be the highest-ranking Cuban diplomat to visit the State Department in decades when he meets with Secretary of State John Kerry in the afternoon.

For the United States, it begins a new chapter of engagement with Cuba. Kerry plans to travel to Havana later this summer to inaugurate the U.S. Embassy. The interests section will be elevated to embassy status Monday, but US flag won’t fly until Kerry’s arrival.

The respective mission chiefs in Havana and Washington will become chargés d’affaires at the new embassies until ambassadors are named, and new rules for operations at the embassies will take effect.

Even as the Cuban flag is hoisted in Washington, a difficult relationship between the United States and Cuba is expected to remain just that — difficult — but with the difference that the two sides are now talking more freely with each other to work through the many issues that still separate them.

“That will include America’s enduring support for universal values, like freedom of speech and assembly, and the ability to access information,” President Barack Obama said on July 1 when he announced the date for restoring diplomatic ties.

“When the United States shuttered our embassy in 1961, I don’t think anyone expected that it would be more than half a century before it reopened,” Obama said. The old policy of isolation, he said, “shuts America out of Cuba’s future, and it only makes life worse for the Cuban people.”

Roberta Jacobson, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs –– who was the lead U.S. negotiator in normalization talks –– said there is an “obvious groundswell of support” among Cubans on the island for the new policy. But during an appearance at the Wilson Center in Washington in June, Jacobson said Cubans’ very high expectations “must be managed. Because let’s face it, things aren’t going to change overnight.”

The United States officially broke relations with Cuba on Jan. 3, 1961, but they had begun to turn sour within six months of New Year’s Day 1959, when the Cuban Revolution triumphed.

By August 1960, Cuba had expropriated all U.S.-owned industrial and agricultural holdings, and nationalized all U.S. banks. That fall, Eisenhower had begun to phase in the U.S. trade embargo, and in December he eliminated Cuba’s sugar quota for the next quarter. In the last months of 1960, as Cuba complained of air raids coming from the United States and, plans to invade the island were already under discussion in Washington.

Months before Eisenhower decided to break with Cuba, personnel at the U.S. Embassy had been instructed to cut down to two suitcases in case a hasty departure was necessary, said Wayne Smith, then a junior officer at the embassy and later the chief of mission in 1977 when the United States established an interests section in the old embassy building.

“Things had been going so badly; it was inevitable,” Smith said. “It was almost a relief. Relations had been so strained and so bitter and we knew it was coming. But I remember thinking, ‘Let’s hope it won’t be for too long.’”

The tipping point came on Jan. 2, 1961, when Cuban Foreign Minister Raul Roa, speaking before the United Nations Security Council, charged that the United States was planning to invade, and Fidel Castro gave a speech in which he denounced the U.S. Embassy as a “nest of spies” and demanded that the staff be reduced to 11 people, including U.S. diplomats, Marine guards and local employees.

The next day the White House broke off relations with Cuba and asked the Swiss government to represent it in dealings with the island. That representation will end on Monday. Since 1977, when the United States once again sent diplomats to Havana, there hasn’t been much of a role for the Swiss. But from 1961 and 1977, the Swiss ambassador was the U.S. man in Havana.

Because the Swiss were overseeing U.S. interests in Cuba, the old U.S. Embassy building never really closed.

There was only that Swiss representation in Havana four months later during the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the height of the Cold War. Those 13 days in October would be among the most perilous in the U.S.-Cuban relationship, but for most of the next five decades U.S.-Cuba relations remained rocky.

That is until Dec. 17, when Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro announced an opening — the fruit of 18 months of secret negotiations — that included re-establishing diplomatic relations and converting the interests sections into full-fledged embassies.

Rodriguez, who will arrive in Washington Sunday, will lead a 30-person delegation that includes former National Assembly President Ricardo Alarcon, National Assembly Vice President Ana Maria Mari Machado and Josefina Vidal, Jacobson’s Cuban counterpart in the normalization talks.

Other delegation members will be Havana historian Eusebio Leal, members of the Council of State, Ramon Sanchez Parodi, the first head of the Cuban Interests Section; singer Silvio Rodriguez, artist Alexis Leiva (Kcho) who provides a free public Wi-Fi hotspot at his studio, and other figures from the Cuban art and literary world.