We’re Sorry Israel, We Are Embarrassed by POTUS

Posted on June 19, 2015June 19, 2015 by Denise Simon

The president during his entire term has been petulant and his actions and decisions regarding the Middle East are epically wrong and dangerous.

After a particular report released this week by the State Department by the Bureau of Terrorism, in simple words, one could easily conclude that under Barack Obama, the grace delivered to Iran during years of talks would have a hidden objective that Iran fulfills its pledge to destroy Israel, relieving Obama’s ultimate mission. There is no question that all top leaders in the foreign policy side of the Obama administration are consumed with disdain for Israel.

The report gives special recognition to Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority giving praise for positive actions to keep peace in the region. Another summary by Jonathan Tobin in Commentary has an out-take of the report that reads:

The report also restates the widely reported fact that Iran “continued to be in noncompliance with its international obligations regarding its nuclear program.” But unless the Obama administration grows a spine and changes its policies within weeks the United States will sign a nuclear deal with Tehran that will soon result in a vast windfall of cash falling into Iran’s hands. Yet nowhere in the nuclear framework agreement is there any promise, however lacking in credibility, that Iran will foreswear the same activities that the State Department just reported and which, by U.S. law, ought to mandate continued sanctions rather than an end to restrictions on doing business with the Islamist regime.

Iran is also a primary obstacle to peace between Israel and the Palestinians because of its funding and arms supplies funneled to terror groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Iran had previously been a primary supporter of Hamas but broke with the rulers of the independent Palestinian state in all but name in Gaza over differences on Syria. But now that Iran and Assad appear to be in no danger and short of money and arms after last summer’s war, Hamas appears to have come back into Tehran’s good graces. But even during their split, Iran was still doing its best to keep other radicals so as to ensure that Palestinian leaders are too afraid to make peace with Israel even if they wanted to do so.

But in spite of this activity reported by its own State Department, there is little doubt that the administration is bound and determined to go ahead and sign a nuclear deal with Iran.

So, when it comes to the broken relationship between the White House and Israel, here is a first hand account of key disgusting moments at the hands of the Obama regime.

An Inside Look At How Obama Killed The U.S.-Israel Relationship

Oren book reveals Immense hostility, anger at Israel

In his new memoir, former Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren documents the rapid dissolution of the historically close U.S.-Israel alliance under President Barack Obama. Oren recounts being threatened and intimidated at multiple junctures by Obama and his senior officials, marking many firsts in a relationship that has long been the cornerstone of American foreign policy.

The memoir, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide, has already rushed to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list. It provides a window into the daily stresses and strains Obama and his allies heaped upon the Jewish state—from placing unprecedented demands on Israel regarding the peace process to fabricating crises in the U.S.-Israel alliance.

“Prophecy was not required to foresee that an Obama presidency might strain the U.S.-Israel alliance,” Oren writes in the early pages of his book.

Obama stacked his administration with senior officials hostile to Israel and pursued a policy of “daylight” with Jewish state, Oren recounts.

“The first thing Obama will do in office is pick a fight with Israel,” Oren recalls a confidant as telling him in the early days of the administration.

Below are a series of passages that reveal in detail how the U.S.-Israel alliance hit historic lows under the Obama administration.

1. ‘I know how to deal with people who oppose me’

The tension between Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel began during their first meeting at the White House, Oren recalls. While the meeting appeared to go “smoothly,” behind the scenes Obama outwardly threatened Netanyahu.

“Face-to-face, I later heard, Obama had demanded that Netanyahu cease all building not only in the territories but also in the disputed areas of Jerusalem,” Oren writes. “‘Not a single brick,’” the president purportedly said. ‘I know how to deal with people who oppose me.’”

2. Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Commanders Never Trusted Obama

Oren recounts listening to Obama’s 2009 speech in Cairo while stationed in the IDF’s headquarters. “Their reactions typified that of a great many Israelis.”

These commanders “scoffed at what they regarded as Obama’s inexperience with the Middle East, where magnanimity is often seen as weakness. They cringed at his tendency to equate America’s moral foibles with the honor killings, human trafficking, and the suppression of women, foreign workers, and indigenous minorities rampant in many Muslim countries,” Oren writes.

Their opinions only grew dimmer when Obama “linked that legitimacy [of Israel] to the Jews’ ‘tragic history’ in the Holocaust. That linkage seemed to me to be the most damaging part of his speech.”

3. The Anti-Israel State Department

Oren’s first meeting with then-Deputy Secretary of State Jim Steinberg was fraught and filled with demands that Israel consent to Obama administration demands for a total building freeze in Jerusalem. Such intimidation and threats would be a cornerstone of Oren’s meetings with senior officials at Foggy Bottom.

“Discord indeed mired my initial meeting with Deputy Secretary of State Jim Steinberg,” Oren writes.

“Under the administration’s policy, a Jew could only build his home in certain Jerusalem neighborhoods but an Arab could build anywhere—even illegally—without limit. ‘In America,’ I said, ‘that’s called discrimination.’”

Later in his tenure, Steinberg would again upbraid Oren. State Department staffers apparently “listened in on” the angry meeting and “cheered,” according to Oren.

4. Congressional Democrats Scold Oren

A handful of congressional Democrats berated Oren during his first trip to Capitol Hill as ambassador.

“In our first conversation, Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida caught me off guard with a letter from a constituent alleging ‘Israeli economic apartheid’ in the territories,” Oren recalls.

Later, “Senator Dianne Feinstein offered me a glass of select California wine and said, ‘I am a peacemaker but you are a fighter.’”

Later in the book, Oren recalls taking a call from Sen. Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.), who “railed at me so furiously [about Israeli criticism of Obama] that I literally had to hold the phone form my ear.”

5. Obama Tells Off Prominent American Jewish Leaders in Private Meeting

Obama’s first meeting with a delegation of top American Jewish leaders was tense, according to Oren.

While such gatherings “had become standard” for previous White Houses, “for Obama … the briefings were less a means of garnering support than of muting opposition. Indeed, what many American Jewish leaders saw as the placing of undue pressure on Israel, the president regarded as displays of restraint.”

Obama invited the anti-Israel fringe group J Street to participate in these private meetings, a move that angered more mainstream Jewish leaders.

6. Rahm Emanuel’s Angry Outbursts

Former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, notorious for his profanity-laden outbursts, woke Oren one morning with an angry call.

“I don’t like this f***ing shit,” Oren quotes Emanuel as saying about Israel’s refusal to stop building Jewish homes in disputed territories.

“Rahm, I knew, was not enamored of my boss or of the American Jewish leaders whom he faulted for backing Netanyahu unconditionally,” Oren writes.

Later in the book, Oren recalls Emanuel referring to a settlement dispute between Israel and the U.S. as “a pimple on the ass of the U.S.-Israel friendship.”

7. White House Orders Senior Officials to Criticize Israel

In addition to privately embracing the anti-Israel fringe group J Street, the Obama administration sent top officials to speak at its first national conference in Washington, D.C.

Oren, who refused to participate in the event, reveals that Obama administration officials had direct orders to criticize Israel publicly.

Hannah Rosenthal, the administration’s former adviser on anti-Semitism, “issued her first denunciation not of anti-Semites, but rather of me for boycotting the summit,” Oren writes.

“Hannah eventually became a friend and I never took her comment personally,” he adds. “Nor did I believe that she acted on her own, since I later learned that some of the criticism emanated directly from the White House.”

8. Hillary Clinton Refuses to Meet With Oren

Oren reveals that in the early days of his tenure, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton refused to meet with him in person.

“I reached out to Hillary Clinton, asking for a private meeting, only to be rebuffed,” Oren recalls.

9. Hillary Blows Her Top

When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton learned of Israeli plans to transform a slum in Jerusalem into a ritzy tourist mall, “she nearly blew her top,” according to Oren.

The slum was deemed controversial due to its location in an East Jerusalem neighborhood the administration considered as disputed.

“We practically had to scrape her off the ceiling,” according to a senior American official who spoke to Oren.

10. White House Wrongly Accuses Oren Of Interfering in U.S. Politics

When U.S.-Israel tensions hit a high point in 2010, Oren frantically sought to diffuse the hostility by setting up a meeting with then-Senior White House Adviser David Axelrod.

“I urged him to find a way out of a situation that I feared might become dangerous for Israel, but Axelrod calmly brushed this aside,” Oren recalls. “Instead, he accused me of urging congressmen to hold on until [the] 2012 [elections], that Obama would never get reelected. That charge of interfering in internal American politics could have rendered me persona non grata and resulted in my expulsion from the United States.”

11. Obama Withholds Vital Arms From Israel

After working furiously to secure a deal with U.S. officials for 20 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, Obama cancelled the arms sale, according to Oren.

“The impact, for Israel, was calamitous,” Oren writes. “Editorials—apparently fanned by official sources—suggested that the F-35s has been an Israeli demand, rather than an American offer.”

12. Robert Gates Has A ‘Visceral Dislike of Netanyahu’

A $60 billion U.S. arms sale to Saudi Arabia in 2010 sent Israeli officials scrambling.

U.S. and Israeli leaders saw the sale as an affront to the Jewish State’s Qualitative Military Edge (QME), a longstanding deal in which the United States has assured Israel’s military supremacy in the region.

“Such concerns [about maintaining the QME] unnerved Netanyahu in a July 6 meeting with [former Secretary of Defense] Robert Gates,” who had “long harbored a visceral dislike of Netanyahu,” according to Oren.

“The animus” between Netanyahu and Gates “was discernible in the Blair House reception room, where Netanyahu promptly took Gates to task for the Saudi sale.”

13. White House Orders Israel to Hold Off On Iran Strike

As the Iranian march for nuclear weapons hit a critical point in the summer of 2009, the Obama administration publicly affirmed Israel’s right to defend itself.

Behind the scenes, though, the White House ordered Israel to lay off Tehran.

“Off camera … the message was ‘Don’t you dare,’” Oren recalls. “Washington quietly quashed any military option for Israel.”

14. Obama Destroys ‘More Than 40 Years of American Policy’ Toward Israel

On the eve of a critical vote at the United Nations on a Palestinian-backed resolution to condemn Israeli settlements, Obama held a 50-minute phone call with President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority .

Obama, during that call, promised to “renew America’s demand for a total freeze on Israeli construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.” He also promised to lend his support “for a Palestinian state based on the 1967 lines,” an unprecedented call from a U.S. president, Oren writes.

Israel “was never consulted about this conversation nor even informed,” Oren writes, claiming that the White House even lied about the conversation. “The White House spokesman insisted the subject was Egypt.”

“The Prime Minster’s Office had learned of Obama’s offer to Abbas from U.N. sources, not the United States, and was outraged,” Oren recounts. “The White House has overnight altered more than forty years of American policy” and “Israel felt abandoned.”

15. Susan Rice Yells At Oren

Following the White House’s move to leave Israel in the dark on the U.N. vote, Oren met with then-U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice.

Rice sat in her New York office “brooding and peevishly tapping her forehead with her finger,” according to Oren.

“Israel must freeze all settlement activity,” Oren recalls her saying. “Otherwise the United States will not be able to protect Israel from Palestinian actions at the U.N.”

“’If you don’t appreciate the fact that we defend you night and day, tell us,’ Rice fumed, practically rapping her forehead. ‘We have other important things to do.’”

16. ‘The President is Going to Take On the Prime Minister’

Ahead of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s (AIPAC) annual conference in Washington, a senior U.S. official told Oren that Obama was out to “take on” Netanyahu directly.

Both leaders were scheduled to give talks at the pro-Israel lobbying group’s annual confab.

“The president is going to take on the prime minster in front of AIPAC,” former White House Chief Of Staff Bill Daley told Oren. “And if he gets booed, so what?”

17. Obama Officials Embrace ‘Israel Lobby’ Canard

Writing in the New York Times after Netanyahu’s address to AIPAC, columnist Tom Friedman asked if “Netanyahu understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.”

“I called Tom the moment the article came online and urged him to retract it,” Oren recalls. “You’ve confirmed the worst anti-Semitic stereotype, that Jews purchase seats in Congress,” Oren informed him.

Friedman’s response: “For every call I’ve received protesting, I’ve gotten ten congratulating me for finally telling the truth. … Many of those calls were from senior administration officials.”

18. Senior State Department Official Curses at Oren

Disagreements between the United States and Israel reached another boiling point when the Palestinian Authority moved to gain unilateral recognition at the U.N.

Congressional law mandated that such a move should result in the closure of the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s Washington office, the cut off of U.S. aid to the PA, and the termination of all U.S. funding to any U.N. organization that recognized Palestine.

“Israel strongly endorsed all three repercussions, which the White House just as vehemently opposed,” Oren writes.

While pushing Israel’s cause at the State Department, Oren was chastised by Deputy Secretary Tom Nides.

“You don’t want the fucking U.N. to collapse because of your fucking conflict with the Palestinians, and you don’t want the fucking Palestinian Authority to fall apart either,” Nides purportedly said to Oren.

19. Obama Hearts Erdoğan

During a meeting at the White House with Israeli leaders, Obama allegedly expressed great support and faith in Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a notorious critic of Israel who has promoted anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

“He’s not living in the sixteenth century,” Obama told the Israelis present in the meeting, according to Oren. “We could do much worse than have a bunch of Erdogans in the Middle East.”

20. Obama Keeps Israel In Dark About Syria Strikes

When the United States first decided to launch airstrikes against Syria, Israel was left in the dark, another first in the U.S.-Israel relationship, according to Oren.

The ambassador learned about the strikes while listening to the radio.

“The razor froze in mid-shave,” he writes. “Wiping the foam from my face, I rushed to the embassy. The once-sacred principle of ‘no surprises’ in the U.S.-Israel alliance had fallen into desuetude during the Obama period, but never to this depth on an issue so vital to our immediate security.”

21. Obama Only Backs Israel ‘Because That’s What the American People Want’

During yet another meeting between Obama and Netanyahu, the president attempted to reassure Israel that it would defend it in any war with Iran.

Obama revealed that he only backs Israel because a plurality of Americans demands it.

“If war comes, we’re with you, because that’s what the American people want,” Oren recalls Obama saying.

Jeh Johnson Fighting Deposition

Posted on June 19, 2015June 19, 2015 by Denise Simon

In Tampa back in 2012, there was a scandal brewing that led to an FBI investigation, some compromising emails, generals and some women. In the end, James Clapper called General Petraeus and told him to resign. But the story does not end there.

Another lawsuit is in the pipeline.

Feds fight Jeh Johnson testimony in Petraeus-related lawsuit

From Politico:

The Justice Department is fighting an effort to force Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson to give a deposition in a privacy invasion lawsuit a Florida woman has filed over the federal government’s handling of the investigation into former CIA Director David Petraeus.

Lawyers for Jill Kelley subpoenaed Johnson to testify about his knowledge of a complex inquiry that unfolded after Kelley complained to the FBI in 2012 that someone was sending derogatory statements and threats about her to various of her associates, including Marine Gen. John Allen and Petraeus, and seemed aware of private details about their schedules.

The probe revealed an extramarital relationship between Petraeus and his biographer, Paula Broadwell. That discovery led to Petraeus’s resignation shortly after the 2012 elections. However, in a lawsuit filed in 2013 Kelley alleged that the FBI and the Defense Department leaked personal information about her to the media, including suggestions that she had a sexual relationship with Allen. Kelley has adamantly denied any impropriety.

Johnson was the Defense Department’s general counsel at the time and played a key role in managing the agency’s response. But in a court filing Thursday evening (posted here), government lawyers argue that as a busy cabinet member Johnson should simply be required to answer written questions in the lawsuit and not be subjected to the videotaped depositions most witnesses face.

“Presently, as the head of the Department of Homeland Security, the third largest cabinet-level agency, Secretary Johnson oversees more than 240,000 federal employees. He holds ultimate responsibility for DHS’s mission, which includes preventing terrorism and enhancing national security; managing the borders of the United States; administering immigration laws; securing cyberspace; and ensuring disaster resilience,” the Justice Department argues. “Owing to these responsibilities and the incredible demands they impose on the Secretary’s time and resources, defendants informed plaintiffs that they object to Secretary Johnson’s deposition absent a clear and convincing showing that he possesses unique, non-privileged, relevant information that cannot be obtained through other means.”

The court filing also reveals that lawyers for Kelley have already obtained records of at least one journalist’s communications with Johnson about the Petraeus investigation. In an email sent to U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson and attached to the filing, Kelley lawyer Alan Raul said he wants to question Johnson about a Kelley-related email Daily Beast reporter Dan Klaidman sent to Johnson on his personal gmail account in November 2012.

Raul also wants to ask about “Mr. Johnson’s responses and/or prior communications to or from Mr. Klaidman, who addressed him as ‘Jeh’ and to whom it appears he subsequently granted an ‘exclusive’ story about his nomination as DHS Secretary.”

Klaidman—now an editor at Yahoo News—declined to comment.

Kelley’s lawyers also want to question Johnson about the identity of anonymous sources described as “senior defense officials” or “senior military officials” who discussed the investigation with journalists at around the same time. Raul pointed to articles from the Associated Press, USA Today and Washington Post as ones of particular focus. Kelley’s team is also asking for information on Johnson’s contact with Tampa Tribune reporter Howard Altman and for information on who at the Department of Defense may have spoken with one or more reporters for ABC News about Kelley.

It’s possible the journalists themselves could face demands to testify in the case, but that does not appear to have happened yet.

The Justice Department filing does disclose that the government has agreed to make three former senior officials available for depositions in the suit: former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta for a two-hour session, Panetta’s former chief of staff Jeremy Bash for a four-hour session and former Defense Department public affairs chief George Little for a seven-hour session.

Kelley’s lawyers face an uphill battle in trying to force a sitting Cabinet member like Johnson into a deposition. Last year, another federal judge in Washington ordered Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to appear at a deposition in lawsuit brought by fired Ag Department employee Shirley Sherrod, but an appeals court issued an unusual order blocking the deposition.

The government also has one more argument in the current dispute: Johnson is a lawyer, so at least some of his actions on the Petraeus/Kelley matter may have been covered by attorney-client privilege or protection for attorney “work product.”

Johnson was originally subpoenaed to appear for his deposition on Friday, but the session has been postponed until Jackson rules on the dispute.

In April, Petraeus pleaded guilty to a change of mishandling classified information by sharing classified briefing books with Broadwell and maintaining classified information at his home after he was required to turn it in. He was sentenced to two years probation and a $100,000 fine.

The FBI also investigated Broadwell in connection with the episode. No charges have been filed. The status of that inquiry is unclear.

Fleecing of America in Afghanistan Schools

Posted on June 19, 2015June 19, 2015 by Denise Simon

Probes started into potential U.S. spending on “ghost schools” in Afghanistan

Officials in Washington and Kabul are examining whether U.S. funds were spent for schooling in Afghanistan that never occurred

By: The Center for Public Integrity

Nils Kauffman, who served as an education officer for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Afghanistan, said he noticed irregularities at a vocational training institute the agency was funding during his visits to its campus in downtown Kabul in 2012 and 2013. He recalls being surprised not to see any students in the institute’s laboratories, where volt meters and scientific equipment remained in their original packaging.

Though Kauffman spied students elsewhere, he said he could never get a reliable account of how many were actually enrolled at the school. He also could not verify that the institute had addressed what a 2011 external audit called a host of “deviations” from sound practices, including a lack of accounting software, a cash-based payment system, and $118,000 in spending by the school over a five month period on weapons, international travel, and salary supplements.

Kauffman didn’t have the authority to demand a new, broader audit of the institute, but he reported his concerns to his superiors at USAID. They never acted, he said, and he recalls an official in the agency’s Office of Afghanistan-Pakistan Affairs expressing worry that canceling the institute’s funding would create what the official called “bad press.”

“Every time something came up, they jumped to keep this guy [the institute’s leader] happy, despite the problems, despite the lack of financial transparency,” said Kauffman, who is now a private development consultant based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In fact, USAID continued giving the institute funds, totaling at least $12.3 million through last Sunday, according to USAID spokesman Sam Ostrander.

Kauffman’s experience is only a small part of the controversy suddenly surrounding the long-running U.S. effort to promote the education and training of the largely illiterate population in Afghanistan. More than three-quarters of a billion dollars in U.S. funds have been used to finance the effort, and USAID has repeatedly depicted it as one of its signal accomplishments there.

Last month, Afghanistan’s newly-appointed education minister raised questions about the veracity of that claim when he told his country’s parliament that some aid funds had flowed to so-called “ghost schools, which are only on paper,” according to several Afghan media accounts of the May 27 session. The minister, Assadullah Hanif Balkhi, said that officials in the previous government — in power from 2004 to 2014 — lied about the number of schools to obtain more foreign funds.

“It is a fact that there are no schools in some parts of the country, but all the expenses — including teachers’ salaries — are being paid, and now we will bring reforms to this waste,” Balkhi told the parliament, according to Tolonews, a publisher and broadcaster based in Kabul.

Asked to provide more detail, a spokesman for the ministry, Kabir Haqmal, later told NBC News — the Center for Public Integrity’s publication partner for this article — that the matter is still under investigation. In some cases, he said, schools may have been closed due to fighting while “permanent absentees” were kept on the books for years, following a requirement of Afghan law.

“There could be schools that do not exist, but we [are] assessing all our records and so far have not found any such instances,” Haqmal said. “That does not mean there are no ghost schools, but we just do not have that information yet. We are taking this very seriously and will share our finding with public very soon.”

The new minister’s claims have provoked the top federal auditor for U.S. reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan, John F. Sopko, to express concern that “U.S. and other donors may have paid for schools that students do not attend and for the salaries of teachers who do not teach.”

In a June 11 letter to acting USAID administrator Alfonso E. Lenhardt, released by Sopko on June 18, Sopko said the allegations about “ghost schools, ghost students, and ghost teachers call for immediate attention,” and asked the agency to explain within two weeks what it is doing to investigate the reliability of its data and the potential misuse of its funds.

Accurate data, Sopko said, “is essential for gauging progress in USAID’s education programs and for making future funding decisions.”

USAID spokesman Ostrander, in an emailed response to questions, said the agency will provide a detailed reply to Sopko by the June 30 deadline. According to a written statement Ostrander provided to the Center for Public Integrity from Larry Sampler, assistant to the USAID administrator for Afghanistan and Pakistan, the agency has already asked the Afghan Education Ministry for more information. USAID currently has a full-time employee assigned to help the ministry improve the reliability of its data, according to Sampler’s statement.

Like all the agency’s projects in Afghanistan, “USAID-implemented education projects adhere to the Agency’s strict practices for monitoring their performance and success,” Sampler wrote.

USAID has repeatedly boasted about its role in raising enrollment rates in Afghanistan, citing Afghanistan Education Ministry data. More than eight million Afghan students were enrolled in 2013, compared to just 900,000 in 2002, according to data that Sopko cited in his most recent quarterly report. He said USAID had acknowledged these figures could not be independently verified, however.

At the Afghanistan Technical Vocational Institute, where Kauffman said he observed irregularities, 4,529 students have so far graduated “with the support of USAID and other sponsors,” Ostrander said. But the institute’s founder and director, Sardar Roshan, reached by cell phone in Kabul, told the Center for Public Integrity that the total number was “close to 7,000.” Ostrander told the Center for Public Integrity he could not explain the discrepancy.

Roshan’s tight connections to Washington

Roshan served as Afghanistan’s ambassador to Pakistan from 1992 to 1994, as the country’s minister of education from 1990 to 1992, and as a “rebel commander” liaising between “anticommunist forces and the U.S. government” in the National Islamic Front of Afghanistan during the 1980’s, according to his Linkedin profile.

Roshan denies that the institute has ever misreported its student population, saying the “ghost schools” are in rural provinces, but that his institute in downtown Kabul “could not fake students even if we wanted to.” He says he is highly proud of the institute. “When I’m in the international airport, when I walk into a bank in Kabul, when I look at the provincial governments, I see my graduates in every corner,” he said.

Rajiv Shah, the administrator of USAID from 2010 until February, singled the vocational institute out for special praise in a July 2013 speech at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington. “Today, we have more than 8 million children in schools with over 30 percent of who are girls. These investments have resulted in over 30,000 young women finishing secondary school and more than 40,000 young women seeking to earn university degrees today,” Shah said. “I’ve had the chance to meet some of these young women on visits to places like the Afghan Vocational Training Institute, watching them come in from around the country to develop marketable skills so they can triple or quadruple their earning potential upon graduation.”

But Kauffman, the former USAID education officer, was not alone in in voicing concerns about the institute’s achievements. In early 2012 – more than a year before Shah’s speech — USAID’s inspector general had reported there was “little evidence” that the agency’s support of the school, known as the Afghanistan Technical Vocational Institute, had strengthened its “overall technical capacity” or empowered Afghan youth. It said the project that included the institute “lacked clearly defined goals, objectives, and priorities.”

The institute began receiving USAID funds in 2007, according to Roshan and Ostrander. The funds were initially for scholarships, and were paid under USAID’s Afghanistan capacity-building program, Roshan said. But the financing was switched to the agency’s education department in 2010, under a subcontract with Education Development Center, Inc., a Massachusetts-based non-profit organization. Students were supposed to be trained in business management, construction, horticulture, information and communication technology, and automotive repair, according to the USAID webpage about the institute.

After the 2011 audit by accounting firm Grant Thornton’s Afghanistan office, USAID staff twice came to inspect the institute. But Kauffman said the institute obstructed efforts by USAID teams to dig deeper into its records, a claim supported by a copy he provided of USAID’s internal report about its site visits in July and August 2011.

The report states that the inspectors were “unable to meet all technical staff, check the systems, or gather sample documentation,” partly because the staff “were instructed by their headquarters not to disclose any documents” to them. It complained that Roshan and his ex-finance officer only met with them for 50 minutes, and said that as a result they were unable to learn whether the Institute had addressed key concerns the audit raised, including many involving its handling and disbursement of donor funds.

One person was, inappropriately, still responsible for handling petty cash, writing checks, and entering financial data into the computer, the report said. And the “most important gap” identified by the auditors — the fact that the institute paid its employees’ salaries in cash rather than traceable bank transfers — was still a problem, the inspectors wrote. Multiple reports by Sopko have described this as a frequent practice in Afghanistan.

Roshan denied making any attempt to obstruct the inspection. He told the Center for Public Integrity that many of these problems were resolved by the institute directly after the audit appeared, though he acknowledged that the institute had continued to use a cash-based payment system until 2013. Ostrander similarly said the institute had made progress since undergoing a separate assessment of its business model.

Roshan sent the Center for Public Integrity a lengthy rebuttal to the Grant Thornton audit, accompanied by documents including templates for payment vouchers, time sheets, a 19-page accounting manual, and its personnel policy. He defended the spending on weapons, saying the institute needed shotguns for the protection of its staff and students. The international travel was for his own visits to the U.S., he said. And the salary supplements were “necessary,” he said, to keep American teachers at the institute.

“I admit shortfalls in the finance/procurement systems,” Roshan told the Center for Public Integrity in an emailed statement, but some were “nothing but symptoms of failure of the counterpart/donor to deliver technical and financial assistance” in a timely and consistent manner.

Roshan said further that the issues raised in the audit stemmed from friction between Education Development Center, Inc. and USAID. Indeed, the agency’s 2012 inspector general report said the two entities had disagreed about “key elements of the design” of the larger educational project that Washington was financing, and said that this had hampered progress. “We were just caught in the tug of war,” Roshan said.

Alison Cohen, a spokeswoman for Education Development Center, Inc., said in an emailed statement that her firm “did as it was required,” and USAID found no mismanagement of its funds “on the part of EDC.” She said the firm is “fully committed to achieving the highest level of compliance” with its contracts, a quality recognized by “dozens of federal agencies, state and local governments, and private organizations” that have given it funds.

Finding various ways to keep the funds flowing

A few months after the USAID site visits, the agency stopped funding the institute through Education Development Center and found what Kauffman described as an alternative path: It modified one of its ongoing funding agreements with the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN Habitat) to add continuing technical and financial support for the institute.

But UN Habitat leaders raised their own concerns about the institute’s accounting and spending practices, informing USAID staff at an April 2012 meeting that Roshan’s salary and benefits package was $17,600 per month, according to a memo five months later from the director of USAID’s Office of Social Sector Development, Carol Horning, to the agency’s Afghanistan mission director. Annual per capita gross national income in Afghanistan was $1,940 that year, according to World Bank data.

Roshan denied he was paid $17,600 but declined to say what his salary was at the time. He said he had salaries that “were not on an Afghanistan scale” because he was an American citizen, and lived in Maryland for periods during the early 2010s. “I singlehandedly created the institute from scratch,” he said. “I was compensated less than half of what I should have received.” Roshan stepped down as the CEO this year, according to both Roshan and Ostrander, but Roshan said he remains the president until its board selects a new one.

The UN Habitat funding method worked for most of 2012, but on November 19, 2012, as it was drawing to a close, Roshan wrote directly to Shah, suggesting that “urgent funding be continued through an appropriate USAID mechanism for a period of time to avoid an abrupt closure” of the institute, according to an email that Roshan provided the Center for Public Integrity.

Shah responded less than four hours later, according to a second email that Roshan provided the Center for Public Integrity, thanking Roshan for his note and sending a copy to USAID’s assistant administrator for Afghanistan and Pakistan “so we could explore this issue and get back to you.” McKenzie Stough, a spokesperson at Georgetown University, where Shah is now a distinguished fellow at the School of Foreign Service, said that she had conveyed a request for comment to Shah’s personal assistant, but no response was forthcoming.

Eleven days after Roshan’s email exchange with Shah, Afghanistan’s then-education minister Farooq Wardak signed a letter to U.S. Ambassador James B. Cunningham — identical in wording to the email that Roshan had sent Shah.

USAID’s Afghanistan mission director at the time, Ken Yamashita, met with Roshan on December 10, 2012, and proposed that USAID continue supporting the institute but disburse the funds as a part of an overall USAID financial support to the Education Ministry, according to an email from USAID official Kerry Pelzman to several colleagues, which was obtained by the Center for Public Integrity. Yamashita, who is now a regional director at the Peace Corps, told the Center for Public Integrity by email that he did not dispute this account.

Twelve days later, Yamashita met with Wardak to seal the deal, according to a December 29, 2012, letter from him to Wardak. In it, Yamashita thanked him for his “receptivity to inclusion of support for ATVI as part of USAID’s on-budget support to the Ministry of Education,” and promised to let Cunningham know that Wardak’s November letter had “borne fruit.” Cunningham, who is now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, did not respond to phoned and emailed requests for comment.

Yamashita’s optimism was premature. Funding for the institute did not end up going through the Education Ministry, according to Kauffman, who said he heard the USAID finance department had objected to providing such general support. But in June 2013, USAID began providing another million dollars in direct funding for the institute, good for the next two years, according to the statement it posted on the Web. That funding expired on June 14, 2015.

Ostrander said the direct grant would not be renewed, but said USAID expects to start funding the institute again soon, this time through The Asia Foundation. The funding is meant to improve administrative functions and — subject to compliance with what Ostrander described as “certain requirements and standards” — cover its operating expenses. Ostrander said he could not immediately tell the Center for Public Integrity how much funding would be transmitted to the institute under the new agreement.

Roshan said however that he expects The Asia Foundation funding to net his institute $300,000 over the next six months. Two spokeswomen for The Asia Foundation did not reply to phoned and emailed requests for comment.

There’s “no way” the institute could continue to exist without international support, Kauffman said.

Russian Brinkmanship is Threatening America

Posted on June 18, 2015June 18, 2015 by Denise Simon

From the Atlantic Council:

The war of words between America and Russia is escalating. So, too, is the movement of implements of war — from U.S. fighter jets to Russian nuclear weapons. So is an actual war imminent?

No one in Russia, NATO or the United States has gone that far yet. Still, the rhetoric and actions from both sides have definitely ratcheted up in recent days, raising concerns of a new arms race — if not worse — amid tensions both sides blame on each other….

Part of it has to do with the unpredictable nature of other actors, like Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine who may broaden their own conflicts by inadvertently or purposefully striking others. The biggest such example may be the 2014 shooting down of a Malaysia Airlines commercial plane over Ukraine by rebels.

Just a few days ago:

The Russian military has successfully test-fired a short-range anti-missile system, the Russian defense ministry announced Tuesday. The latest move comes four days after Pentagon officials said that the United States was considering deploying missiles in Europe to counter potential threats from Russia.

“The launch was aimed at confirming the performance characteristics of missile defense shield anti-missiles operational in the Aerospace Defense Forces,” the defense ministry said, according to Russia’s TASS news agency.

According to Lieutenant General Sergei Lobov, deputy commander of the Aerospace Defense Forces, “an anti-missile of the missile defense shield successfully accomplished its task and destroyed a simulated target at the designated time.”

The test’s timing is crucial as the U.S. government is considering aggressive moves, including deploying land-based missiles in Europe, in response to Russia’s alleged violation of a Cold War-era nuclear arms treaty, the Associated Press (AP) reported.

***

The Pentagon Response

Pentagon Building Cruise Missile Shield To Defend US Cities From Russia

From Defense One:

The Pentagon is quietly working to set up an elaborate network of defenses to protect American cities from a barrage of Russian cruise missiles.

The plan calls for buying radars that would enable National Guard F-16 fighter jets to spot and shoot down fast and low-flying missiles. Top generals want to network those radars with sensor-laden aerostat balloons hovering over U.S. cities and with coastal warships equipped with sensors and interceptor missiles of their own.

One of those generals is Adm. William Gortney, who leads U.S. Northern Command, or NORTHCOM, and North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD. Earlier this year, Gortney submitted an “urgent need” request to put those new radars on the F-16s that patrol the airspace around Washington. Such a request allows a project to circumvent the normal procurement process.

While no one will talk openly about the Pentagon’s overall cruise missile defense plans, much of which remains classified, senior military officials have provided clues in speeches, congressional hearings and other public forums over the past year. The statements reveal the Pentagon’s concern about advanced cruise missiles being developed by Russia.

“We’re devoting a good deal of attention to ensuring we’re properly configured against such an attack in the homeland, and we need to continue to do so,” Adm. Sandy Winnefeld, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said during a May 19 speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington.

In recent years, the Pentagon has invested heavily, with mixed results, in ballistic missile defense: preparations to shoot down long-range rockets that touch the edge of space and then fall toward targets on Earth. Experts say North Korea and Iran are the countries most likely to strike the U.S. or its allies with such missiles, although neither arsenal has missiles of sufficient range so far.

But the effort to defend the U.S. mainland against smaller, shorter-range cruise missiles has gone largely unnoticed.

“While ballistic missile defense has now become established as a key military capability, the corresponding counters to cruise missiles have been prioritized far more slowly,” said Thomas Karako, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington. “In some ways, this is understandable, in terms of the complexity of the threat, but sophisticated cruise missile technologies now out there are just not going away and we are going to have to find a way to deal with this — for the homeland, for allies and partners abroad, and for regional combatant commanders.”

Intercepting cruise missiles is far different from shooting down a missile of the ballistic variety. Launched by ships, submarines, or even trailer-mounted launchers, cruise missiles are powered throughout their entire flight. This allows them to fly close to the ground and maneuver throughout flight, making them difficult for radar to spot.

“A handful of senior military officials, including several current or past NORTHCOM commanders, have been among those quietly dinging the bell about cruise missile threats, and it’s beginning to be heard,” Karako said.

While many of the combatant commanders — the 4-star generals and admirals who command forces in various geographic regions of the world — believe cruise missiles pose a threat to the United States, they have had trouble convincing their counterparts in the military services who decide what arms to buy.

Fast-track requests like Gortney’s demand for new radars on F-16s have been used over the past decade to quickly get equipment to troops on the battlefield. Other urgent operational needs have included putting a laser seeker on a Maverick missile to strike fast-moving vehicles and to buy tens of thousands of MRAP vehicles that were rushed to Iraq to protect soldiers from roadside bomb attacks.

Last August, at a missile defense conference in Huntsville, Ala., then-NORTHCOM and NORAD commander Gen. Charles Jacoby criticized the Army and other services for failing to fund cruise missile defense projects. NORTHCOM, based in Colorado, is responsible for defending the United States from such attacks.

“I’m trying to get a service to grab hold of it … but so far we’re not having a lot of success with that,” Jacoby said when asked by an attendee about the Pentagon’s cruise missile defense plans. “I’m glad you brought that up and gave me a chance to rail against my service for not doing the cruise missile work that I need them to do.”

But since then, NORTHCOM has been able to muster support in Congress and at the Pentagon for various related projects. “We’ve made a case that growing cruise missile technology in our state adversaries, like Russia and China, present a real problem for our current defenses,” Jacoby said.

One item at the center of these plans is a giant aerostat called JLENS, short for the Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System. The Pentagon is testing the system at Maryland’s Aberdeen Proving Ground, a sprawling military complex north of Baltimore. Reporters have even been invited to see the tethered airship, which hovers 10,000 feet in the air.

JLENS carries a powerful radar on its belly that Pentagon officials say can spot small moving objects – including cruise missiles – from Boston to Norfolk, Va., headquarters of the U.S. Navy’s Atlantic Fleet. Since it’s so high in the air, it can see farther than ground radars.

JLENS is in the early stages of a three-year test phase, but comments by senior military officials indicate the Pentagon in considering expanding this use of aerostats far beyond the military’s National Capital Region district.

“This is a big country and we probably couldn’t protect the entire place from cruise missile attack unless we want to break the bank,” Winnefeld said. “But there are important areas in this country we need to make sure are defended from that kind of attack.”

New missile interceptors could also play role in the network too.

“We’re also looking at the changing out of the kinds of systems that we would use to knock down any cruise missiles headed towards our nation’s capital,” Winnefeld said.

Ground-launched versions of ship- and air-launched interceptors could be installed around major cities or infrastructure, experts say. Raytheon, which makes shipborne SM-6 interceptors, announced earlier this year that it was working on a ground-launched, long-range version of the AMRAAM air-to-air missile.

The improvements make the missiles “even faster and more maneuverable,” the company said in a statement when the announcement was made at the IDEX international arms show in Abu Dhabi in February.

The Threat

Driving the concern at the Pentagon is Russia’s development of the Kh-101, an air-launched cruise missile with a reported range of more than 1,200 miles.

“The only nation that has an effective cruise missile capability is Russia,” Gortney said at a March 19 House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee hearing.

Russian cruise missiles can also be fired from ships and submarines. Moscow has also developed containers that could potentially conceal a cruise missile on a cargo ship, meaning it wouldn’t take a large nation’s trained military to strike American shores.

“Cruise missile technology is available and it’s exportable and it’s transferrable,” Jacoby said. “So it won’t be just state actors that present that threat to us.”

During the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, American and Kuwaiti Patriot missiles intercepted a number of Iraqi ballistic missiles, Karako said. But they missed all five cruise missiles fired, including one fired at Marine headquarters in Kuwait. In 2006, Hezbollah hit an Israeli corvette ship with an Iranian-supplied, Chinese-designed, anti-ship cruise missile, Karako said.

Shooting down the missiles themselves is a pricy proposition, which has led Pentagon officials to focus on the delivery platform.

“The best way to defeat the cruise missile threat is to shoot down the archer, or sink the archer, that’s out there,” Gortney said at an April news briefing at the Pentagon.

At a congressional hearing in March, Gortney said the Pentagon needed to expand its strategy to “hit that archer.”

An existing network of radars, including the JLENS, and interceptors make defending Washington easier than the rest of the country.

“[T]he national capital region is the easier part in terms of the entire kill chain,” Maj. Gen. Timothy Ray, director of Global Power Programs in the Air Force acquisition directorate, said in March at a House Armed Services Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee hearing. “We remain concerned about the coverage for the rest of the country and the rest of the F-16 fleet.”

Winnefeld said that the JLENS and “other systems we are putting in place” would “greatly enhance our early warning around the National Capital Region.”

In an exercise last year, the Pentagon used a JLENS, an F-15, and an air-to-air missile to shoot down a simulated cruise missile. In the test, the JLENS locked on to the cruise missile and passed targeting data to the F-15, which fired an AMRAAM missile. The JLENS then steered the AMRAAM into the mock cruise missile.

But there are many wild cards in the plans, experts say. While the JLENS has worked well in testing, it is not tied into the NORTHCOM’s computer network. It was also tested in Utah where there was far less commercial and civil air traffic than East Coast, some of the most congested airspace in the world. At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in March, Gortney acknowledged the project is “not without challenges,” but said that’s to be expected in any test program.

It is also unclear whether the JLENS over Maryland spotted a Florida mailman who flew a small gyrocopter from Gettysburg, Penn., to the U.S. Capitol lawn in Washington, an hour-long flight through some of the most restricted airspace in the country. The JLENS has been long touted by its makers as being ideal for this tracking these types of slow-moving aircraft.

Gortney, in an April 29 House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing about the gyrocopter, told lawmakers the JLENS “has more promise” than other aerostat-mounted radars used by the Department of Homeland Security along the border with Mexico and in South Florida. He deferred his explanation to the classified session after the public hearing.

Experts say JLENS can not just spot but track and target objects like cruise missiles, making it better than other radars used for border security.

Raytheon has built two JLENS, the one at Aberdeen and another in storage and ready for deployment.

If a cruise missile were fired toward Washington, leaders would not have much time to react.

“Solving the cruise missile problem even for Washington requires not just interceptors to be put in place, but also redundant and persistent sensors and planning for what to do, given very short response times,” Karako said.

China did Not Hack OPM, Operative Just Signed In

Posted on June 17, 2015June 17, 2015 by Denise Simon

Per ARS Technica: Not only were the database records of POM not encrypted, it simply did not matter. At least 14 million personnel files have been compromised and protecting social security numbers by encryption did not mater.

But even if the systems had been encrypted, it likely wouldn’t have mattered. Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Cybersecurity Dr. Andy Ozment testified that encryption would “not have helped in this case” because the attackers had gained valid user credentials to the systems that they attacked—likely through social engineering. And because of the lack of multifactor authentication on these systems, the attackers would have been able to use those credentials at will to access systems from within and potentially even from outside the network.

House Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) told Archuleta and OPM Chief Information Officer Donna Seymour, “You failed utterly and totally.” He referred to OPM’s own inspector general reports and hammered Seymour in particular for the 11 major systems out of 47 that had not been properly certified as secure—which were not contractor systems but systems operated by OPM’s own IT department. “They were in your office, which is a horrible example to be setting,” Chaffetz told Seymour. In total, 65 percent of OPM’s data was stored on those uncertified systems.’

Even more chilling, a person or team just found a way to sign in as a root user.

Some of the contractors that have helped OPM with managing internal data have had security issues of their own—including potentially giving foreign governments direct access to data long before the recent reported breaches. A consultant who did some work with a company contracted by OPM to manage personnel records for a number of agencies told Ars that he found the Unix systems administrator for the project “was in Argentina and his co-worker was physically located in the [People’s Republic of China]. Both had direct access to every row of data in every database: they were root. Another team that worked with these databases had at its head two team members with PRC passports. I know that because I challenged them personally and revoked their privileges. From my perspective, OPM compromised this information more than three years ago and my take on the current breach is ‘so what’s new?'”

Given the scope and duration of the data breaches, it may be impossible for the US government to get a handle on the exact extent of the damage done just by the latest attack on OPM’s systems. If anything is clear, it is that the aging infrastructure of many civilian agencies in Washington magnify the problems the government faces in securing its networks, and OPM’s data breach may just be the biggest one that the government knows about to date.

Future consequences of lack of security of data systems is blackmail

Reuters: The same hackers breached several health insurance companies last summer and made off with the medical records of 11 million people, including members of Blue Cross/Blue Shield’s District of Columbia affiliate CareFirst.

Media pundits spent all week talking about how Deep Panda could compile all this information to craft a potential blackmail database on U.S. operatives for its patron, presumably China. But that’s ridiculous. Beijing is smarter than that.

Espionage is a long game, not a race, and countries are patient. Blackmail is a quick, brutal method of acquiring information in the short term.

It typically begins when foreign agents play on a target’s existing weakness — a penchant for gambling, for example, or deviant sexual behavior — enticing the target to indulge in it and then threatening exposure.

That’s a lot of work for a short-term gain. Blackmail targets are almost always found out, or turn on their blackmailers or end their lives. No, a better use for that database is as a reference to create the background for the perfect mole. Many additional details found here.

An additional security concern of real proporations is this cyber intrusion has affected Hill and Congressional staff.

In Part from the Hill: Officials had initially said the breach only encompassed 4.2 million federal employees, all within the executive branch. But the discovery of a second breach that compromised security clearance data has many expecting the breach to eventually expose up to 14 million people.

According to an email sent to House staff members shortly before midnight Tuesday and obtained by The Hill, many of them are at risk.

“It now appears likely that the service records of current House employees employed previously by ANY federal government entity (including the House, if an individual left the House and later returned to a House position) may have been compromised,” said the email said, sent by House Chief Administrative Officer Ed Cassidy.

When staffers leave Capitol Hill, or any federal agency, their retirement records are forwarded to the OPM.

“In addition, the background investigation files of individuals holding security clearances (whether currently active or not) may have been exposed,” the email added.

Senate staffers received a similar email from the Senate Sergeant at Arms several hours earlier on Tuesday, according to multiple reports.