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Category Archives: Department of Homeland Security
Post from: Washington Blade, America’s Leading LGBT News Source
Judge blocks guidance on bathroom access for trans students
A federal judge has blocked the enforcement of guidance from the Obama administration prohibiting schools from discriminating against transgender students, including denying them access to public restrooms consistent with their gender identity.
In the 38-page order, O’Connor writes the case “presents the difficult issue of balancing” the rights of transgender students and privacy concerns, but he nonetheless sides with states suing the Obama administration.
“The sensitivity to this matter is heightened because defendants’ actions apply to the youngest child attending school and continues for every year throughout each child’s educational career,” O’Connor writes. “The resolution of this difficult policy issue is not, however, the subject of this order. Instead, the Constitution assigns these policy choices to the appropriate elected and appointed officials, who must follow the proper legal procedure.”
In May, the Departments of Justice and Education said schools are barred from discriminating against transgender students, including in bathroom use, under the prohibition of gender bias in Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. That means schools refusing to allow transgender students to use the restroom consistent with their gender identity are at risk of losing federal funds.
The court order doesn’t devote significant discussion to why transgender students should be subjected to schools barring them from restroom use consistent with their gender identity, but cites the intent of Congress in passing Title IX and portions of the law that allow schools to segregate students by gender.
“Without question, permitting educational institutions to provide separate housing to male and female students, and separate educational instruction concerning human sexuality, was to protect students’ personal privacy, or discussion of their personal privacy, while in the presence of members of the opposite biological sex,” O’Connor writes.
Critics say Paxton and the states he represents lacked standing to sue the Obama administration over the guidance, but O’Connor writes they’re able to sue because the guidance is “clearly designed to target plaintiffs’ conduct.”
“Guidelines will force plaintiffs to consider ways to build or reconstruct restrooms, and how to accommodate students who may seek to use private single person facilities, as other school districts and employers who have been subjected to Defendants’ enforcement actions have had to do,” O’Connor writes. “That the guidelines spur this added regulatory compliance analysis satisfies the injury in fact requirement.”
O’Connor writes the injunction “should apply nationwide” and states that don’t wish to comply with the order “can easily avoid doing so by state law that recognizes the permissive nature.” The injunction, O’Connor writes, shouldn’t interfere with similar cases pending before federal courts on transgender bathroom use and “parties should file a pleading describing those cases so the court can appropriately narrow the scope if appropriate.”
Kasey Suffredini, chief program officer for Freedom for All Americans, called the ruling a “step back for transgender protections,” criticizing O’Connor for the decision and refusing to hear from a single transgender student during court proceedings.
“It is shameful that opponents of equality have forced this lawsuit forward in an attempt to make transgender Americans pawns in a political game; but this ruling will not stand the test of time,” Suffredini said. “All transgender Americans – particularly transgender youth – deserve to be treated with dignity and respect. No singular court ruling negates the right of all Americans to receive equal treatment under the law – that’s one of our nation’s founding values.”
Paxton in a statement after the ruling said the plaintiff states are “pleased” with the decision and it restricts “the Obama administration’s latest illegal federal overreach.”
“This president is attempting to rewrite the laws enacted by the elected representatives of the people, and is threatening to take away federal funding from schools to force them to conform,” Paxton said. “That cannot be allowed to continue, which is why we took action to protect states and school districts, who are charged under state law to establish a safe and disciplined environment conducive to student learning.”
Dena Iverson, a spokesperson for the U.S. Justice Department, said the Obama administration is considering the order and whether to appeal to the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
“The department is disappointed in the court’s decision, and we are reviewing our options,” Iverson said.
Given the broad nature of the litigation — which sought not only to bar enforcement of the Obama administration guidance, but general enforcement of federal laws against gender discrimination to protect transgender people — the nature of the injunction is sweeping and one that defies years of legal precedent establishing transgender discrimination amounts to gender discrimination.
Five civil rights organizations that had submitted a friend-of-the-court brief in the lawsuit – Lambda Legal, American Civil Liberties Union and ACLU of Texas, National Center for Lesbian Rights, Transgender Law Center and GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders — issued a joint statement in the aftermath of the injunction saying nothing has changed.
“A ruling by a single judge in one circuit cannot and does not undo the years of clear legal precedent nationwide establishing that transgender students have the right to go to school without being singled out for discrimination,” the statement says. “This unfortunate and premature ruling may, however, confuse school districts that are simply trying to support their students, including their transgender students. So let us make it clear to those districts: your obligations under the law have not changed, and you are still not only allowed but required to treat transgender students fairly.”
The statement also criticizes O’Connor for a decision the organizations say “targets a small, vulnerable group of young people – transgender elementary and high school students – for potential continued harassment, stigma and abuse.”
This ruling isn’t the first anti-LGBT decision made by O’Connor. Prior to the U.S. Supreme Court decision last year in favor of same-sex marriage nationwide, O’Connor issued an injunction allowing married same-sex couples to access benefits under the Family & Medical Leave Act in states without marriage equality.
Interior Enforcement Plummeting Under Obama Admin’s New Deportation Program
DailyCaller: The Obama administration’s new program to work with local and state law enforcement on deportations has resulted in a dramatic decrease in interior immigration enforcement, government data reveals.
Detainer requests to local and state law enforcement are down across the board for aliens who have committed violent, drug, and sex crimes. The data comes from Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse which obtains government statistics through Freedom of Information Act requests. A detainer request is when Immigrations and Custom Enforcement (ICE) asks a state or local jail agency to hold an alien in custody so ICE is able to take them into custody.
ICE shifted from the Secure Communities program to the Priority Enforcement Program (PEP) in the beginning of Fiscal Year (FY) 2015. In FY 2014, ICE had 159,210 requests to local and state law enforcement agencies to detain non-citizens for up to 48 hours. That number dropped 41.3 percent to 95,085 in FY 2015.
The purpose of the PEP is to focus on deportations of aliens who have committed serious “Level 1 offenses.” But, comparing FY 2014 and FY2015, data shows a decrease in detainer requests for aliens who have been convicted of assault, driving under the influence, selling cocaine, robbery, and sexual assault. The amount of detainer requests for aliens convicted of murder dropped from 603 to 343, a 43.2 percent drop.
At the same time as detainer requests have decreased, ICE “notices” have increased. With the announcement of the PEP, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said that ICE is phasing out detainer requests and instead using requests for notifications. These are “requests that state or local law enforcement notify ICE of a pending release during the time that person is otherwise in custody under state or local authority.” (RELATED: ICE Gets Extra Billion To Deport Illegals, Deports 200,000 FEWER)
While notices were supposed to replace detainers, ICE continues to use the latter. In November 2015, a year after PEP was put in place, ICE had 4,942 detainer requests and 1,204 requests for notice.
With the new program in place ICE’s total requests for detainers and requests for notices have plummeted. In October 2014, the last month of the prior Secure Communities program, there were 11,201 detainers. A year later there were 6,146 detainers and requests for notice combined in October.
Detainer requests during the Obama administration peaked with 309,697 in 2011. That same year there were about 225,000 interior deportations. According to the Center for Immigration Studies, ICE is on pace to complete 63,700 interior deportations in 2016.
**** Remember this past June and the Supreme Court decision:
ABAJournal: The U.S. Supreme Court has split 4-4 in a challenge to President Barack Obama’s power to implement a deferred deportation program, leaving in place a nationwide injunction blocking the initiative.
The New York Times calls the tie vote “a sharp blow” to Obama’s program and “a rebuke to his go-it-alone approach to immigration.” The Washington Post called the deadlock “a significant legal defeat” for Obama.
Obama told reporters that the deadlock is “heartbreaking” for millions of immigrants and its effect will be to freeze his deferred immigration program until after the election.
Obama’s program offers deportation deferrals to immigrants who have lived here since at least January 2010, have no serious criminal record, and have children who are U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents. The program is known as Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents, or DAPA.
Challengers had claimed Obama’s executive action violated the Administrative Procedure Act and Obama’s constitutional duty to “take care” that the laws of the United States are faithfully executed. Texas was one of 26 states that challenged the program.
“Today’s decision keeps in place what we have maintained from the very start: one person, even a president, cannot unilaterally change the law,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a statement. “This is a major setback to President Obama’s attempts to expand executive power, and a victory for those who believe in the separation of powers and the rule of law.”
Enslaved in Libya: One woman’s extraordinary escape from Islamic State
Islamic State fighters in Libya have abducted at least 540 refugees in six separate ambushes over the past 18 months. Many of the women captives are being turned into sex slaves to reward the extremist group’s warriors.
HELD: Ruta Fisehaye was kidnapped by Islamic State militants in June last year and finally escaped in April. She is now in Germany. REUTERS/Antonio Parrinello
On the night of June 2, 2015, gunmen blocked a highway on Libya’s northern coast and stopped a white truck speeding toward Tripoli, the capital. The men trained their assault rifles on the driver. Three climbed aboard to search the cargo.
Ruta Fisehaye, a 24-year-old Eritrean, was lying on the bed of the truck’s first trailer. Beside her lay 85 Eritrean men and women, one of whom was pregnant. A few dozen Egyptians hid in the second trailer. All shared one dream — to reach Europe.
The gunmen ordered the migrants off the truck. They separated Muslims from Christians and, then, men from women. They asked those who claimed to be Muslims to recite the Shahada, a pledge to worship only Allah. All of the Egyptians shouted the words in unison.
“There is no god but God. Muhammad is the messenger of God.”
“Allahu Akbar,” the gunmen called back.
Fisehaye realized then that she was in the hands of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Her captors wore robes with beige camouflage print — clothes she had not seen on other men in Libya. Most of them hid behind black ski masks. A black flag waved from one of their pickup trucks.
“We were certain that they were taking us to our deaths,” recalled Fisehaye, a Christian who wears a black-thread necklace to symbolize her Orthodox faith. “We cried in despair.”
Her captors had another end in mind.
As Islamic State battles to expand in Libya, it is rewarding its warriors by exploiting the great exodus of African migrants bound for Europe.
Since the group emerged in Libya in late 2014, some 240,000 migrants and refugees have traversed the war-torn country. Over the past 18 months, Islamic State fighters have abducted at least 540 refugees in six separate ambushes, according to 14 migrants who witnessed the abductions and have since escaped to Europe.
Because of its proximity to southern Europe, and its shared borders with six African nations, Libya is Islamic State’s most important outpost outside Syria and Iraq. It is territory that the group is fighting hard to defend.
In August, U.S. fighter jets bombed Sirte — the stronghold of Islamic State in Libya — in an attempt to wrench the city from the group’s control. The airstrikes have revived a stalled military assault that Libyan brigades launched earlier this summer.
Sirte is strategically important for Islamic State. The city sits on a highway connecting two hubs of Libya’s people-smuggling trade — Ajdabiya in the northeast, where migrants stop to settle fees with smugglers, and fishing ports in the west, where boats depart for Europe every week.
From this bastion, Islamic State has found numerous ways to profit from the refugee crisis, despite the group’s declaration that migration is “a dangerous major sin” in the September issue of its magazine, “Dabiq.”
The extremist group has taxed smugglers in exchange for safe passage and has used well-beaten smuggling routes to bring in new fighters, according to Libyan residents interviewed by phone, a senior U.S. official and a U.N. Security Council report published in July.
Brigadier Mohamed Gnaidy, an intelligence officer with local forces mustered by the nearby town of Misrata, says Islamic State has recruited migrants to join its ranks, offering them money and Libyan brides.
It has also extracted human chattel from the stream of refugees passing through its territory, according to the accounts of Fisehaye and the other survivors who were interviewed. Five of six mass kidnappings verified by Reuters took place on a 160-km stretch near Sirte in March, June, July, August and September of last year. The sixth occurred near Libya’s border with Sudan this January.
This story is based on interviews with Fisehaye, eight other women enslaved by Islamic State, and five men kidnapped by the group. Reuters spoke to the refugees in three European countries over four months. Two women agreed to speak on the record, risking the stigma that besets survivors of sexual violence. Reuters was unable to reach the Islamic State fighters in Libya or independently corroborate certain aspects of the women’s accounts.
BETTER SHOT THAN BEHEADED
Before she left Eritrea, Fisehaye (rhymes with Miss-ha-day) felt trapped in her job as a storekeeper for a government-owned farm. Like most young Eritreans, she was a conscript in the country’s long-term national service, which lasts well beyond the 18 months mandated by law. She could hardly get by on her meager wages of $36 a month. But she also felt she could not quit and risk angering the state, which is often accused of human-rights violations.
Fisehaye, a petite woman whose smile easily takes over her entire face, decided to take a risk. In January 2015, she walked across the border into Sudan with a cousin and two friends, her heart set on Europe.
In Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, Fisehaye spent four months raising the $1,400 she needed to pay a smuggler for a trip to Libya. She tried and failed to find a lucrative job. So, like thousands of refugees before her, she called on relatives abroad to pitch in. She talked to recent émigrés and found an Eritrean smuggler whose clients gave him a glowing review.
Before setting off into the desert, she heard stories about armed outlaws who rape women in Libya. She paid a doctor for a contraceptive injection that would last for three months.
“Once you leave Eritrea, there is no going back. I did what any woman would do,” she said.
The first leg of her journey went off without a hitch. In May, her convoy crossed the Sahara and reached Ajdabiya in northeast Libya. Fisehaye believed the worst was behind her. Though no one counts migrants who die from sickness, starvation and violence in the desert, refugee groups say more may perish there than drown in the Mediterranean Sea.
“No one stopped us in the Sahara … and the smugglers told us we shouldn’t worry about Daesh,” she said, using an Arabic acronym for Islamic State. “I never expected to see an organized state like theirs in Libya.”
She was wrong.
On the night of the kidnapping, the armed Islamic State fighters ordered Fisehaye and the other Christians back onto the truck. The men climbed onto the front trailer and the women, 22 in all, onto the back. They drove east, threading the same road they had driven hours earlier. A pickup truck with a mounted machine gun trailed close behind.
A half hour later, the truck turned right onto a dirt road and the soft glow of a town’s lights shimmered ahead. A few male captives had seen videos of Islamic State beheadings. Realizing the gunmen belonged to the group, the men jumped off and ran into the flat desert. Gunfire erupted. Some fell dead, others were rounded up. A few got away.
“We thought it would be better to get shot than beheaded,” Hagos Hadgu, one of the men who jumped off the truck, said in an interview in Hållsta, Sweden. He wasn’t caught that night and made it to Europe two months later. “We didn’t want to die with our hands and legs bound. Even an animal needs to writhe in the hour of death.”
The fighters deposited the migrants at an abandoned hospital perched in a scrubland near a desert town called Nawfaliyah. They searched the women for jewelry, lifting their sleeves and necklines with a rod, and hauled them into a small room where a Nigerian woman was being kept.
The next morning, one of the fighters’ leaders, a man from West Africa, paid the women a visit. He brought a young boy, one of at least seven Eritrean children Islamic State had kidnapped in March, to serve as his translator.
“Do you know who we are?” the man asked.
The women were silent.
“We are al-dawla al-Islamiyyah,” the man explained, using the Arabic for Islamic State.
EXECUTION: Islamic State militants stand behind Ethiopian Christians along a beach in Libya. This image, taken from an undated video posted on a social media website on April 19, 2015, shows the migrants just before they were killed. REUTERS/Social Media Website via Reuters TV
He reminded the women that Islamic State was the group that had slain 30 Eritrean and Ethiopian Christians back in April, filmed the massacre, and posted the video online. The caliphate would spare their lives because they were women, he assured them, but only if they converted to Islam.
“Or we will let you rot here,” he warned.
Fisehaye found conversion an unholy thought. Along with the other women, she fired a volley of questions at the man: Can we call our families and tell them where we are? Can they pay you a ransom for our freedom? Can you tell us what you did to our brothers? Our husbands?
The man offered few answers and no solace.
Three weeks later, in the first week of Ramadan in June, fighter jets bombed the abandoned hospital compound and some of the buildings collapsed. It is difficult to determine who was behind the attack. Both the U.S. military and western Libyan groups have claimed raids on nearby towns around that time.
In the ensuing chaos, Fisehaye and the other women sprinted past the debris and ran barefoot into the desert. The hot ground seared their feet. The captive men, who had been held in the same compound all along, ran ahead.
Before long, the fleeing captives made out the silhouettes of a pickup truck and men with assault rifles ahead of them. The armed men waved for the migrants to stop then opened fire. The women stopped. Most of the migrant men escaped, but eleven were rounded up and flogged. Their whereabouts are unknown.
The airstrikes continued through the week. Eventually, Islamic State fighters moved the women to the abandoned quarters of a Turkish construction company in Nawfaliyah, two hours away.
PRISON: Fighters allied to Libya’s U.N.-backed government told Reuters this Sirte house was used by Islamic State as a prison. None of the migrants Reuters spoke with were held here, though some were held in similar buildings. REUTERS/Goran Tomasevic
“I could see no other way out. Islam was one more step to my freedom.”
The makeshift prison housed graders and dozers from road-work projects of the mid-2000s, their metal bodies rusting under the intense heat. Itinerant workers had scribbled their names and countries on the compound’s walls. Fisehaye and the other women stayed in a small room where the drywall sweated when temperatures rose. A Korean family — a pediatrician, his wife and her brother — were jailed in another room.
It only took a week for Fisehaye and the other women to attempt another breakout. Nine escaped, but not Fisehaye. Instead, she was brought back to the makeshift prison and whipped for days. The Korean doctor tended to her wounds.
A few weeks later, in early August, 21 other Eritrean women joined Fisehaye’s group. They too had been kidnapped along a stretch of highway in central Libya. One woman came with her three children, aged five, seven and eleven.
CONVERSION
Throughout the summer, Islamic State consolidated its hold in central Libya. In Sirte, Islamic State fighters crushed a Salafist uprising by executing dissenters and hanging their bodies from lampposts. In Nawfaliyah, they paraded decapitated heads to silence dissent.
Then, in September, the group’s emir in Libya, Abul-Mughirah Al-Qahtani (more commonly known as Abu Nabil), advertised his domain’s “great need of every Muslim who can come.” He summoned fighters, doctors, legal experts and administrators who could help him build a functioning state. He levied hefty taxes on businesses and confiscated enemy property, just as his group had done in Syria and Iraq.
The ranks of Islamic State fighters swelled. At its peak, the group may have had 6,000 fighters in Libya, based on the U.S. Army’s estimates, although the Pentagon drastically cut that estimate this month to a thousand fighters in Sirte.
The single men, most of whom flocked from other parts of Africa, needed companions, and Islamic State enlisted older women in Sirte to help. The women, called ‘crows’ because they dressed in black, visited townspeople’s homes and registered single girls older than 15 as potential brides, says Brigadier Gnaidy of the Misrata forces.
BILLBOARD: A sign in Libya reads: “The city of Sirte, under the shadow of Sharia.” Forces aligned with Libya’s new unity government have advanced on the city over the past few months, pushing Islamic State to the south. REUTERS/Reuters TV
As the group’s ambitions grew that summer, so did its need for women. Islamic State’s take on sharia permits men to take sex slaves. The kidnapped women, unprotected and far from home, became easy targets. In mid-August, more than two months after Fisehaye was abducted, Islamic State fighters moved the 36 women in their custody to Harawa, a small town they controlled some 75 kilometers (46 miles) from Sirte.
As Fisehaye and the seven other women Reuters interviewed describe it, life in Harawa was almost quotidian at first.
There were no air strikes, beatings or threats of sexual violence. The captives — the Eritreans kidnapped in June and August, including Fisehaye, two Nigerians, and the Korean couple and their relative — lived in a large compound by the town’s dam. In the next few weeks, they were joined by 10 Filipino medical workers kidnapped from a hospital in Sirte, a Bangladeshi lecturer taken from a Sirte university, a pregnant Ghanaian captured in Sirte, and an Eritrean woman captured with her 4-year-old son on the highway to Tripoli.
It was here that Fisehaye bonded with Simret Kidane, a 29 year-old who left her three children with her parents in Eritrea to seek a better life in Europe. She was among the women kidnapped in August.
Kidane befriended one of the guards, Hafeezo, a Tunisian mechanic turned jihadist in his early 30s. Hafeezo helped the women navigate their new life in captivity. He brought them groceries and relayed their demands to his superiors in Sirte. He comforted them when they cried. He counseled them to forget their past lives and embrace Islam. That way, he promised, they may be freed to find a husband among the militants. They may even be allowed to call home.
The women asked for religious lessons, and Hafeezo brought them a copy of the Koran translated into their first language, Tigrinya. He also brought a small Dell laptop and a flash drive on which he had uploaded religious texts and lessons on the lives of fallen jihadists.
Fisehaye succumbed first. In September, after three months of captivity, she converted to Islam and took on a Muslim name, Rima. Her conversion had a domino effect across the compound; Kidane and the others followed suit a month later.
“I could see no other way out,” Fisehaye said. “Islam was one more step to my freedom. They told us we would have some rights as Muslims.”
After their conversion, Hafeezo brought them black abayas and niqabs, loose garments some Muslim women wear to cover themselves. He kept his distance and refused to make eye contact. Instead, he supervised their piety from afar.
Another guard, an older Sudanese fighter, taught them to pray. He recited verses from the Koran and made the women write down and repeat his words. When the guard moved to a new job in Sirte, Hafeezo brought a flat-screen TV and played them videos of religious lessons and suicide missions. As promised, Hafeezo allowed the women to call their families.
In December, frequent gunfire punctured the relatively quiet life in Harawa. Food became scarce. Hafeezo was often called to the frontline and disappeared for days. One day, he took Kidane aside and told her to prepare for what was to come. The leadership had changed — Islamic State’s emir in Libya had died in a U.S. airstrike a month earlier — and the women’s fate along with it.
FIRE: Libyan forces allied to the U.N.-backed government battle with Islamic State militants in Sirte last month. REUTERS/Goran Tomasevic
“No one ever showed us which part of the Koran says they could turn us into slaves.”
“You are now sabaya,” Hafeezo told Kidane, using the archaic term for slave. There were four possible outcomes for her and the other women, he explained. Their respective owners could make them their sex slaves, give them away as gifts, sell them to other militias, or set them free.
“Do not worry about what will happen to you in the hands of men,” Kidane says Hafeezo told her. “Concern yourself only with where you stand with Allah.”
Kidane did not share this detail with Fisehaye or the other women, hoping to save them from despair.
Later, one of Hafeezo’s superiors came to the compound to take a census. He wrote the women’s names and ages on a ledger. He asked them to lift their veils and examined their faces. He returned a week later and took two of the youngest women, aged 15 and 18, with him. On December 17, he sent for Kidane. That day, he gave her to a Libyan member of an Islamic State brigade in Sirte. Despite her repeated pleas, her new owner refused to reunite her with Fisehaye.
Kidane and the teenage women escaped and are now seeking asylum in Germany.
SABAYA
In late January, a stomach ulcer confined Fisehaye to her bed. Stress made matters worse. Returning from a hospital visit one afternoon, she witnessed a child, no older than 9, shoot a man in the town square.
Soon after, she and the remaining female captives moved to a warehouse in Sirte where Islamic State stored appliances, fuel and slaves. A group of 15 Eritrean women, who had been kidnapped in July, and three Ethiopian women kidnapped in January joined them that week.
The warehouse became, to the women, a last frontier of defiance. As new Muslims, they argued for better healthcare and the abolition of their slavery. They absorbed beatings in response.
Resistance proved futile. An Eritrean fighter called Mohamed, who had often dropped by to survey the women, purchased Fisehaye in February. He never said how much he paid for her. But he seemed gentle at first, asking after her waning health and her past life in Eritrea.
“I was confused. I thought he was going to help me. Maybe he had infiltrated Daesh. Maybe he wasn’t really one of them. I started harboring hope,” Fisehaye said.
Instead, he raped her, repeatedly, for weeks.
“No one ever showed us which part of the Koran says they could turn us into slaves,” Fisehaye said. “They wanted to destroy us…so much evil in their hearts.”
She plotted her escape but could not find a way out.
Then her owner lent her to another man, a Senegalese fighter. Known by the nom de guerre Abu Hamza, the Senegalese had brought his wife and three children to the Libyan frontline. Fisehaye was to work, unpaid, in Abu Hamza’s kitchen.
The work was busy but bearable, until one night in mid-February when Abu Hamza brought an Eritrean woman from the warehouse. He raped the woman all night.
“She was screaming. Screaming. It tore my heart,” Fisehaye recalled. “His wife stood by the door and cried.”
The next morning, Fisehaye convinced the battered woman to run away with her. They left the city behind and ran into the desert. No one stopped to help them and they were caught by religious police on patrol outside the city.
The police returned both women to captivity. The battered Eritrean woman went back to Abu Hamza. Mohamed took Fisehaye to a three-story building in Sirte that he shared with two other fighters.
Fisehaye moved in with a 22-year-old Eritrean woman and her 4-year-old son, both of whom belonged to a Tunisian commander named Saleh. Another 23-year-old Eritrean lived down the hall with her 2-year-old son and a daughter to whom she gave birth while in Islamic State custody. That woman and her children belonged to a Nigerian fighter who called himself al-Baghdadi.
Fisehaye’s roommates said the men raped them on multiple occasions. They told their stories on condition of anonymity.
“There was no one there to help me. So I kept quiet and took the abuse,” the Eritrean mother of two later said. “I stopped resisting. He did as he pleased with me.”
ESCAPE
In April of this year, Libya’s nascent unity government stationed itself in a naval base in Tripoli. Separately, rival factions — the Petroleum Facilities Guard in the east and brigades from towns in the west — plotted to attack Islamic State from opposite flanks.
“There was no one there to help me. So I kept quiet and took the abuse.”
In Sirte, meanwhile, Fisehaye and her roommates learned that one of them, the mother of two, would soon be sold to another man.
The revelation pushed them to plot an escape. They pretended to call their relatives but talked, instead, to Eritrean smugglers in Tripoli. They studied their captors’ schedules. They surveyed their surroundings whenever the Tunisian commander Saleh, in a cruel prank, left the house keys with his slave but took her son with him.
Finally, on the early morning of April 14, the women grabbed 60 Libyan dinars, about $40, from Saleh’s bag and broke out of the house through a backdoor. But Sirte looked ominously deserted in the early morning and, fearing they would be caught, the women returned to the house.
They ventured out again, hours later, when the city came to life. They walked for hours before a cab stopped for them. Fisehaye negotiated with the driver in halting Arabic. She told him they were maids who had been swindled by an employer. She gave him a number for an Eritrean smuggler in Tripoli.
The driver negotiated with the smuggler over the phone. He agreed to drive them for 750 dinars ($540), to be covered by the smuggler once the women arrived in Bani Walid, five hours away.
In the end, it took the women 12 hours to get to Bani Walid. As promised, the Eritrean smuggler paid for their escape and took them to a holding cell. There, they shucked off their niqabs and cried with joy. They prayed for the dozens they had left behind.
Fisehaye borrowed the smuggler’s phone and called her father in Eritrea. Soon, word of her escape spread among her friends and relatives. They settled her debt and paid the smuggler another $2,000 to get her on a boat to Europe.
In May, during a month when 1,133 refugees drowned at sea, Fisehaye crossed the Mediterranean. Her 10 months of captivity had come to an end.
She traversed a path trod by many refugees, across Italy and Austria, and reached Germany a month after her escape. She is now seeking asylum there.
Gebrekidan reported from Ulm and Hanover, Germany; Catania and Rome, Italy; and Hållsta, Fur and Vetlanda, Sweden. Additional reporting by Patrick Markey and Aidan Lewis in Sirte, Libya; Ali Al-Shouky in Marsa Matrouh, Egypt; and Jonathan Landay in Washington.
Former New York congressman Anthony Weiner Photo: Illustration Emil Lendof/New York Post
NYP: First he was Carlos Danger. Now — in yet another sexting scandal — he’s a randy “mongoose.”
Sext fiend Anthony Weiner boasted of his animal prowess — claiming he was “deceptively strong . . . like a mongoose” — and gave his cellphone number to a college student during a flirty, private online chat on a recent trip to Los Angeles, The Post has learned.
But the joke was on the horndog pol, whose wife, Huma Abedin, is a top aide and close confidante of Hillary Clinton.
The target of his online affection was really a dude. More here. **** But back to Huma…
Hillary Clinton’s top campaign aide, and the woman who might be the future White House chief of staff to the first female US president, for a decade edited a radical Muslim publication that opposed women’s rights and blamed the US for 9/11.
One of Clinton’s biggest accomplishments listed on her campaign Web site is her support for the UN women’s conference in Bejing in 1995, when she famously declared, “Women’s rights are human rights.” Her speech has emerged as a focal point of her campaign, featured prominently in last month’s Morgan Freeman-narrated convention video introducing her as the Democratic nominee.
Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin arrive for a NATO Foreign Minister family photo in front of the Brandenburg Gate in 2011. Photo: Getty Images
Hillary Clinton talks with aide Huma Abedin. Photo: Getty Images
Clinton and Abedin in Queens. Photo: Getty Images
Hillary Clinton greets people. Huma Abedin is seen at center. Photo: Getty Images
However, soon after that “historic and transformational” 1995 event, as Clinton recently described it, her top aide Huma Abedin published articles in a Saudi journal taking Clinton’s feminist platform apart, piece by piece. At the time, Abedin was assistant editor of the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs working under her mother, who remains editor-in-chief. She was also working in the White House as an intern for then-First Lady Clinton.
Headlined “Women’s Rights are Islamic Rights,” a 1996 article argues that single moms, working moms and gay couples with children should not be recognized as families. It also states that more revealing dress ushered in by women’s liberation “directly translates into unwanted results of sexual promiscuity and irresponsibility and indirectly promote violence against women.” In other words, sexually liberated women are just asking to be raped
“A conjugal family established through a marriage contract between a man and a woman, and extended through procreation is the only definition of family a Muslim can accept,” the author, a Saudi official with the Muslim World League, asserted, while warning of “the dangers of alternative lifestyles.” (Abedin’s journal was founded and funded by the former head of the Muslim World League.)
“Pushing [mothers] out into the open labor market is a clear demonstration of a lack of respect of womanhood and motherhood,” it added.
In a separate January 1996 article, Abedin’s mother — who was the Muslim World League’s delegate to the UN conference — wrote that Clinton and other speakers were advancing a “very aggressive and radically feminist” agenda that was un-Islamic and wrong because it focused on empowering women.
“‘Empowerment’ of women does more harm than benefit the cause of women or their relations with men,” Saleha Mahmood Abedin maintained, while forcefully arguing in favor of Islamic laws that have been roundly criticized for oppressing women.
“By placing women in the ‘care and protection’ of men and by making women responsible for those under her charge,” she argued, “Islamic values generate a sense of compassion in human and family relations.”
“Among all systems of belief, Islam goes the farthest in restoring equality across gender,” she claimed. “Acknowledging the very central role women play in procreation, child-raising and homemaking, Islam places the economic responsibility of supporting the family primarily on the male members.”
She seemed to rationalize domestic abuse as a result of “the stress and frustrations that men encounter in their daily lives.” While denouncing such violence, she didn’t think it did much good to punish men for it.
She added in her 31-page treatise: “More men are victims of domestic violence than women . . . If we see the world through ‘men’s eyes’ we will find them suffering from many hardships and injustices.”
She opposed the UN conference widening the scope of the definition of the family to include “gay and lesbian ‘families.’ ”
Huma Abedin does not apologize for her mother’s views. “My mother was traveling around the world to these international women’s conferences talking about women’s empowerment, and it was normal,” she said in a recent profile in Vogue.
Huma continued to work for her mother’s journal through 2008. She is listed as “assistant editor” on the masthead of the 2002 issue in which her mother suggested the US was doomed to be attacked on 9/11 because of “sanctions” it leveled against Iraq and other “injustices” allegedly heaped on the Muslim world. Here is an excerpt:
“The spiral of violence having continued unabated worldwide, and widely seen to be allowed to continue, was building up intense anger and hostility within the pressure cooker that was kept on a vigorous flame while the lid was weighted down with various kinds of injustices and sanctions . . . It was a time bomb that had to explode and explode it did on September 11, changing in its wake the life and times of the very community and the people it aimed to serve.”
Huma Abedin is Clinton’s longest-serving and, by all accounts, most loyal aide. The devout, Saudi-raised Muslim started working for her in the White House, then followed her to the Senate and later the State Department. She’s now helping run Clinton’s presidential campaign as vice chair and may end up back in the White House.
The contradictions are hard to reconcile. The campaign is not talking, despite repeated requests for interviews.
Until now, these articles which Abedin helped edit and publish have remained under wraps. Perhaps Clinton was unaware she and her mother took such opposing views.
But that’s hard to believe. Her closest adviser served as an editor for that same Saudi propaganda organ for a dozen years. The same one that in 1999 published a book, edited by her mother, that justifies the barbaric practice of female genital mutilation under Islamic law, while claiming “man-made laws have in fact enslaved women.”
And in 2010, Huma Abedin arranged for then-Secretary of State Clinton to speak alongside Abedin’s hijab-wearing mother at an all-girls college in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. According to a transcript of the speech, Clinton said Americans have to do a better job of getting past “the stereotypes and the mischaracterizations” of the oppressed Saudi woman. She also assured the audience of burqa-clad girls that not all American girls go “around in a bikini bathing suit.”
At no point in her long visit there, which included a question-and-answer session, did this so-called champion of women’s rights protest the human-rights violations Saudi women suffer under the Shariah laws that Abedin’s mother actively promotes. Nothing about the laws barring women from driving or traveling anywhere without male “guardians.”
If fighting for women’s rights is one of Clinton’s greatest achievements, why has she retained as her closest adviser a woman who gave voice to harsh Islamist critiques of her Beijing platform?
We are angry at the media for either not reporting at all or only part of the story. Bill O’Reilly is famous for saying the ‘spin stops here’ but sadly….the spin never stops. The spin even happens in regular intimate conversations and debate where some real facts are spoken while other facts are negated.
So, get over the anger when it comes to the news. The reliability factor has shifted from that ‘drive-by-media’ to alternative media like PJ Media or Breitbart. Okay, cool right? Those outlets among so many others do in fact produce stories that are quite important and useful, deserving huge praise. But wait…not all is that glitter is gold reporting….what you say?
The truth is often painful but facts, truths and money still creates spin and the word ‘but’ comes up often overlooking that which should be held as sacrosanct.
Here is a set up question: Where did the term Lyin’N Ted come from? Okay…set that question aside for a moment as you read on….yikes right?
(This is a long read, so sit back and focus. Facts and truths and money matters, just like words matter.)
TheHill: In late January, Breitbart News chairman Steve Bannon was tipped off about a story that he hoped would damage Ted Cruz.
Bannon, who this week became CEO of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, was told that a radio advertisement would be landing in Iowa aimed at hurting Cruz with evangelical voters — the very constituency the senator was depending on to win the state’s caucuses on Feb.1.
The line of attack, which was being pushed by Cruz’s presidential rival Mike Huckabee, was that Cruz had donated only a small fraction of his income to his church, not enough to fulfill his tithing duties of 10 percent.
Bannon was excited by the story, stating that it could spell the end of Cruz’s candidacy. He told his reporters to chase the story hard, though their efforts turned up nothing new.
Bannon didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment from The Hill, but a spokeswoman for the conservative news sight downplayed any work Breitbart’s reporters did on the tithing story.
“With regards to your question on Ted Cruz: Breitbart did virtually zero reporting on this,” Breitbart spokeswoman Alexandra Preate said.
Preate would not comment further, however, and did not deny that Bannon was pushing reporters to pursue the storyline.
In the early stretch of the presidential campaign, Breitbart was seen as a staunch supporter of Cruz, with Bannon leading the charge. Coverage of the Texas senator was favorable, with Breitbart at one point getting an exclusive look at Cruz getting his children ready for bed.
But Breitbart’s allegiances shifted as Trump’s campaign caught fire.
The story of how that happened, which has never before been told in such detail, provides a vivid illustration of how Trump’s rise has changed the balance of power in the conservative media, and by extension, the entire Republican Party.
In Cruz’s corner
To report this account, The Hill spoke at length to 12 sources with intimate knowledge of Breitbart’s internal operations, including several former staffers who were upset with the company’s direction. Most refused to be identified by name and several talked entirely off the record, only to confirm details.
All of the sources agreed that Bannon was once enthusiastic about Cruz’s presidential candidacy.
In early 2014, a source who attended a gathering at Bannon’s Capitol Hill townhouse, known as the Breitbart “Embassy” among staff, said that Bannon was telling anybody who would listen that Cruz was the most hardcore conservative likely to run for president and a guy he thought could win.
“He didn’t outright say he was endorsing Cruz, but he made it clear that Cruz was his guy,” said the same source who was with Bannon that night.
A year later, Bannon’s opinion had changed.
The first strike against Cruz came in July 2014, when Cruz joined Bannon’s sworn enemy, the conservative radio host Glenn Beck, on a trip to the U.S.-Mexico border. Cruz’s staff described the trip as a “humanitarian” mission to help a church provide supplies to needy families.
Bannon thought the trip painted Cruz as soft on illegal immigration, and Breitbart ran a story titled, “Ted Cruz Joins Glenn Beck for ‘Soccer Balls and Teddy Bears’ Event.”
“Steve was still ranting about that trip six months later,” said a source who worked with Bannon at the time.
Cruz spokeswoman Catherine Frazier declined to comment for this story.
The second strike against Cruz came in April 2015, when the senator signaled his support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal and the fast-track legislation needed to push it through Congress.
Making matters worse, Cruz promoted his support for fast-track authority in a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed with Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.).
Bannon made clear to Breitbart staffers that he wanted to destroy Ryan’s political career and what he called his “globalist” agenda. Shortly after Ryan became Speaker last October, Bannon began instructing reporters to look for ways to take him down. That effort culminated earlier this month in an unsuccessful bid to unseat Ryan in his Wisconsin primary, with the challenger heavily promoted in Breitbart coverage.
Cruz ultimately walked back his support for trade promotion authority, voting against fast-track legislation and explaining his decision in an exclusive for Breitbart News. But that conciliatory gesture wasn’t enough to win back Bannon, or at least not enough to overcome his growing affection for Trump.
“Steve has always been basically an anti-trade guy,” said a second source who worked closely with Bannon at the time. “That’s one of the fissures with the Trump and Cruz support.
“When push comes to shove, Cruz is basically a free-trade guy, and part of the reason why he saw Cruz as the weaker second option, and why he was willing to go after Cruz, was because he didn’t trust that Cruz would hold the line on trade.”
Embracing Trump
Soon after the trade flap, Bannon concluded that Trump was his guy, sources who worked with him at the time assessed.
He saw the billionaire as the most effective tribune of Breitbart’s populist nationalist movement. Bannon and other senior editors at Breitbart also believed that Trump had all but stitched up the nomination.
Breitbart’s slow turn against Cruz was complicated by the fact that a major funder behind Cruz’s presidential campaign, New York hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, is also a major funder of Breitbart.
Several prominent Cruz allies registered their distress about Breitbart’s coverage to Mercer’s daughter Rebekah, asking her why she was supporting an outlet that was hurting her candidate, Cruz.
The Mercers, who never opposed Cruz and resolutely backed Bannon as being fair to the senator, eventually came around to Trump. They are now funding an anti-Hillary Clinton super-PAC and are increasingly influential figures in Trump’s orbit, as The Hill has previously reported. They were seen as influential players in Trump’s decision to hire Bannon as his campaign CEO.
When Breitbart’s coverage shifted toward Trump, some say the tone of Breitbart coverage about Cruz never became overly hostile.
“To be completely honest, I felt like Breitbart were more than fair to [the Cruz camp],” said the source defensive of Bannon.
“Breitbart had a standing offer to the Cruz folks that Breitbart would print anything they pitched,” the same source said. “Only problem is they didn’t pitch anything.”
But while Breitbart continued to publish stories favorable to Cruz, the website’s sympathies soon became clear, with pro-Trump coverage overtaking the site.
A directive went out to Breitbart staff over their internal Slack channel in mid-2015 that any stories involving Trump or Cruz, or conflicts between the two of them, needed to be approved by Bannon and editor-in-chief Alex Marlow.
The move was explained to staff as necessary to ensure that politically consequential stories were appropriately vetted, but several staff members said they felt that it was a means of tipping coverage in Trump’s favor.
On the attack
In January, When Trump began raising questions about Cruz’s Canadian birthplace and his eligibility to be president, Breitbart jumped on the storyline.
Bannon ultimately scored a concession out of the Cruz camp. When the Cruz campaign decided to release the birth certificate of the senator’s mother, it did so by giving it exclusively to Breitbart.
Another anti-Cruz storyline Breitbart pursued aggressively was what Trump called the “weak” and “pathetic” informal alliance between Cruz and John Kasich late in the primary season.
On April 25, Breitbart published seven stories about the alliance, which quickly fell apart.
The same source defending Bannon pointed out that Breitbart never supported the “birther” movement questioning President Obama’s birthplace. The source defended the coverage of Cruz’s citizenship and said that the Breitbart chairman simply wanted Cruz to explain the issue to voters.
The source also said Breitbart would’ve gotten fully behind Cruz or any other Republican had they won the nomination, in keeping with the philosophy of the site’s founder, the late Andrew Breitbart.
Caught in the middle
Three sources familiar with Breitbart’s internal operations said that Bannon didn’t want to have to choose between Cruz and Trump and found it an uncomfortable position to be in.
“Their hope was that they would get both sides together to fight the establishment,” one of these sources, who no longer works at Breitbart, said. “So they were hedging their bets, but it was clear when push came to shove they would side with Trump.”
By late 2015, sources working at Breitbart — both those sympathetic and hostile to his leadership — believed that Bannon was privately all-in for Trump but trying at the same time to keep on good terms with the other candidates in case Trump didn’t win.
“As general chairman of Breitbart, he might as well have been general chairman of Trump for president,” said Kurt Bardella, Breitbart’s former spokesman who resigned because he was upset with the company’s direction.
Bardella, who has publicly criticized Breitbart and Bannon, was in constant contact with Bannon for two years. He said it was “almost like [Bannon was] placing bets” during the primaries.
“You have some chips on some numbers,” Bardella said. “They kind of flirted with Rand Paul; they flirted with Ted Cruz.
“I think Steve kind of astutely saw that there was something more than a novelty of Donald Trump being temporary and began moving his chips into the Trump side of the betting table.”
Bannon’s underlings felt that he’d hitched his wagon to Trump by the time of the first Fox News debate in August — the one where Trump had a famous confrontation with co-moderator Megyn Kelly.
And by January 2016, when Cruz stopped praising Trump and started attacking him as a liberal, Bannon became increasingly enraged and instructed his reporters to hammer Cruz.
Throughout this period, Breitbart staff made no secrets of their close ties to the Trump campaign.
Bannon kept colleagues abreast of his near constant contact with Trump and Corey Lewandowski, who was then Trump’s campaign manager.
Breitbart’s Washington political editor, Matthew Boyle, had long since established himself as one of Trump’s favorite reporters. That dynamic was on display last summer when, according to The Washington Post, “Boyle, 28, asked Trump about his rising poll numbers … [and] Trump broke into a broad smile and high-fived the young journalist in front of startled onlookers in the post-debate spin room.”
A source who observed several of Boyle’s interactions with Trump staff said that on the campaign trail, Boyle was “actively giving consulting advice to the Trump campaign staffers and strategizing with them while he was reporting on the primary.”
Boyle declined to comment.
Another chance for Cruz?
Since refusing to endorse Trump in the most aggressive way possible — in a speech at the Republican National Convention that got him booed from the stage — Cruz has been back at work in the Senate.
**** Yes of course there is more….
As this site has posted more than once regarding Ukraine, Paul Manafort and John Podesta, how and why did this all become important? Something like the old KGB model, money and influence. Rather like that ‘drive-by-media’ thing right? Yes.
Exclusive: How Ukraine Wooed Conservative Websites
Passion or payola? A source describes being offered $500 for an article, and a consultant doesn’t deny payments.
Hat tip to Rosie at BuzzFeed: WASHINGTON — Several conservative bloggers repeated talking points given to them by a proxy group for the Ukrainian government — and at least one writer was paid by a representative of the Ukrainian group, according to documents and emails obtained by BuzzFeed.
The Ukrainian campaign began in the run-up to high-stakes Ukrainian parliamentary elections last year, and sought to convince skeptical American conservatives that the pro-Russian Party of Regions, led by President Viktor Yanukovych, deserved American support. During that period, articles echoing Ukrainian government talking points appeared on leading conservative online outlets, including RedState, Breitbart, and Pajamas Media.
The emails and documents, which include prepackaged quotes from election officials and talking points that some writers copied nearly word-for-word, offer a glimpse into how foreign governments dodge tight Justice Department regulations on foreign propaganda to covertly lobby in the United States: The payments were routed through a front group in Belgium to an American consultant, who has urged writers not to cooperate with a reporter investigating the campaign.
The model resembles a recent stealth campaign in which bloggers were paid by the Malaysian government to write favorable stories, though the Ukraine campaign appears to have involved smaller sums of money.
One of the writers who participated in the campaign, who spoke on the condition of anonymity and because of lingering qualms about the arrangement, they said, described being offered $500 for a blog post praising Ukraine’s ruling Party of Regions. The payment was arranged by George Scoville, a libertarian media strategist, and Scoville’s name was on the check, the source said.
An email from October 26, 2012 shows Scoville inviting writers to join a conference with Mikhail Okhendovskyy of Ukraine’s Central Election Commission. The call was organized by the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine, a Brussels-based group headed by Leonid Khazara, a former senior member of parliament from the pro-Russian Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions. According to its website, it is a “a unique ‘Modern Ukraine’ organisation based in Brussels and operating internationally as an advocate for enhancing EU-Ukraine relations.”
In practical terms, the ECFMU exists to promote Yanukovych and the party — but its nominal independence means that its representatives in Washington do not need to register as foreign agents and make the extensive disclosures required under that program. Instead, the only evidence of its activity comes in the far more relaxed domestic lobbying disclosure law, which shows that the Brussels-based group employs two well-connected Washington lobbying firms, The Podesta Group and Mercury/Clark and Weinstock.
One email from October 29, the day after the election, shows Scoville sending out documents full of exit poll results and prepackaged statements from election observers.
“I just wanted to share the attached documents with you in case you were interested,” Scoville writes. “You’re under no obligation to write anything, but I wanted you to have this info in case you were feeling nostalgic and/or entrepreneurial :)”.
“But in all seriousness, if you could spend a few minutes today tweeting about the results using #ukrainevotes and promoting some of the pieces you wrote, that would be very helpful to us,” Scoville writes.
His next email, sent five minutes later, consists of a list of “talking points that are mostly tweetable — some may need to be shortened.” These include “Ukraine has demonstrated its commitment to democracy and passed the test put forth by the international community of holding transparent elections” and “The victory for the Party of Regions is a victory for the people, for Ukraine and for democracy.”
Yanukovych’s party has been criticized for reverting to Soviet-style tactics such as jailing opposition figures including former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. Europe’s human rights court ruled earlier this year that Tymoshenko’s pre-trial imprisonment on charges of illegally making a gas deal with Russia was “arbitrary,” and the U.S. and European Union have called for her release.
The source who provided BuzzFeed with the emails and documents said that other writers involved in the Scoville campaign had included Breeanne Howe of RedState and Warner Todd Huston, a freelance conservative writer. The source estimated that around five or six writers were on the October 26 conference call.
Writers involved in the campaign had been individually warned by Scoville not to talk to BuzzFeed during the reporting of a story on this subject that appeared in March, and to deny any payment if asked, according to the source.
Howe denied having accepted payment for her pro-Party of Regions blog posts published in October when asked about it in March. “I can’t speak for anyone else that wrote on the subject, I can assure you that my employment at RedState is an unpaid labor of love and I was absolutely not employed by or on the payroll for the Ukranian gov’t (or any other gov’t for that matter),” she said at the time.
But her posts hew closely to talking points issued by Scoville, sometimes nearly verbatim.
A document titled “BACKGROUND INFO FOR MESSAGING (NOT FOR PUBLIC DISTRIBUTION)” includes the following: “The current Ukrainian government is also reforming its energy sector to ensure efficient use of its resources and preserve its important role as an energy corridor between the Caspian Basin and Europe — a corridor that is not subject to Russian interference.”
On October 8, Howe wrote: “Ukraine actually has a large reserve of natural gas and serves as an energy corridor between the Caspian Basin and Europe. A corridor which, incidentally, is not subject to Russian interference.”
Howe also used some of the quotes from election observers that were provided in an email attachment from Scoville in a post after the election on October 29 about “Ukraine Election Success.” She did not respond to requests for comment from BuzzFeed this week.
Warner Todd Huston was one of the more prolific of the writers tasked with writing pro-Yanukovych stories. He posted Ukraine content on Family Security Matters, a website that used to be run by the Center for Security Policy, anti-Muslim pundit Frank Gaffney’s think tank. Other posts appeared on small sites like Right Wing News, ChicagoNow’s Publius Forum, and Canada Free Press.
“Too many in the west imagine that she was arrested by a Ukraine backsliding into a Soviet-styled police state where all opposition leaders are squelched,” Huston wrote. “This, however, just isn’t the case.” Huston called Tymoshenko “one of Putin’s best assets in the former Soviet-satellite nation.”
At the end of the talking point sheet provided for writers, there is a note addressing the Tymoshenko jailing:
NOTE: There is also a controversy surrounding the former Prime Minister of Ukraine (Tymoshenko) who has been convicted and jailed on corruption charges. It is a complex issue — she definitely was a Putin crony and there is an independent investigation going on now — but this is more about Ukraine’s elections, its geopolitical importance and encouraging the current (and likely next) Ukrainian
administration. If you have questions about the former PM, let me know.
Huston told BuzzFeed that he hadn’t been on the conference call but that he knew Scoville and had often received pitches from him.
“Of course, I see George whenever I’ve gone to a conference in D.C.,” Huston said.
“I got some press release-like emails from George back then like I do many other issues (like all the union stuff I have written) but I don’t get money for all those type of pitches,” Huston said. “I am always looking for stuff to write and ask organizations for their stuff so I can see if it catches my interest.”
Huston didn’t directly deny being paid by Scoville.
“I would not be open to say who pays me and who doesn’t,” he said.
Other writers who were producing incongruous pro-Party of Regions stories at the time include Ben Shapiro of Breitbart and Seton Motley, a conservative blogger.
Shapiro said he hadn’t been paid by anyone other than his employers to do the posts.
Scoville “was not the one pitching me as far as I recall,” Shapiro said.
Motley wrote a post for Human Events about Ukraine’s gas dealings with Russia on October 15, and one for Pajamas Media on October 5 titled “Ukraine is Leading West — Not Bowing East” that cites most of the statistics about Ukraine’s economy contained in the talking points provided by Scoville.
“I wasn’t on whatever emails you have, I wasn’t on them,” Motley said when reached by BuzzFeed. “I wasn’t paid anything by George Scoville.”
After multiple requests for comment, Scoville did not deny that he had paid writers to place stories having to do with Ukraine. He wouldn’t elaborate further, nor would he detail his relationship with the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine.
“Thanks for reaching out. I also received your voicemail,” Scoville said in an email. “I don’t discuss either my clients or the specifics of my project work with media.”
ID: 1371187
Description of European Centre for a Modern Ukraine call
Text of talking points sent from Scoville to bloggers
BACKGROUND INFO FOR MESSAGING (NOT FOR PUBLIC DISTRIBUTION)
Pivoting Towards the E.U. – Ukraine’s Economic Future
Ukraine is fully committed to integration into the E.U. – this is one of the priorities of the current administration. Furthermore, Ukraine is ready to undertake the tough measures needed to implement the Association Agreement, which is the next step in the E.U. ascension process.
As part of this effort, Ukrainian authorities are undertaking an effort to transform Ukraine into a more transparent market economy in line with European standards. And results are already apparent: despite the global economic slowdown, Ukraine’s economy grew by 4.2% in 2010 and 5.2% in 2011 with exports growing 37% in 2011.
These gains will be further locked in by the Deep and Comprehensive FTA (DCFTA) with the E.U. initialled in March 2012. The DCFTA, which is still pending is final signing and ratification, is a major step in reinforcing Ukraine’s ties with the E.U. and building on an already strong trading relationship. In 2010, the E.U. exported to Ukraine €17.3 billion worth of goods, with Ukraine’s exports to the E.U. worth €11.4 billion.
The current Ukrainian government is also reforming its energy sector to ensure efficient use of its resources and preserve its important role as an energy corridor between the Caspian Basin and Europe – a corridor that is not subject to Russian interference. As a sign of Ukraine’s commitment to Western values, Ukraine is
opening the country to international election observers this October as it elects a new parliament.
Russia and Geopolitics
Tymoshenko, both before and during her tenure as Prime Minister, fostered close relationships with Russian officials, most notably President Putin. These relationships led directly to Tymoshenko unilaterally signing a long-term gas contract on behalf of Ukraine’s state owned gas company that leaves Ukraine bound to buy Russian natural gas at above market rates. The deal was explicitly opposed by
Viktor Yushchenko, the former Ukrainian President that ushered in the Orange Revolution alongside Tymoshenko.
President Putin remains a vocal ally of Tymoshenko and recently told reporters, “We never sign contracts contradicting the laws of the contract partner country, in this case Ukraine.” He has previously questioned her imprisonment.
President Putin is also actively trying to bring Ukraine back into Russia’s sphere of influence by pushing the country to join its Customs Union, designed to rival the EU. The EU Association Agreement, which the Ukraine is actively pursing, is seen as
incompatible with Customs Union membership and Ukraine has demonstrated a clear preference to joining Europe. The EU cannot turn its back on Ukraine at this pivotal moment; this is an opportunity to firmly bring Ukraine into the Western order, an outcome that is favoured by both Ukraine and the West.
Ukraine has a longstanding and productive relationship with NATO and supports the mission in Afghanistan in addition to conducting key training exercises with NATO forces. [NOTE: Prior to Yanukovych’s Presidency, Ukraine was considering joining NATO. Negotiations began with the 1997 Charter on a Distinctive Partnership, which established the NATO-Ukraine Commission. Ukraine’s ambitions ended in 2010 when President Yanukovych submitted a law for ratification that bans the
country from joining military alliances.]
Reform of the Judicial System
Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s Parliament, recently adopted significant reforms to its judicial system that will replace its Soviet-era Criminal Procedure Code (CPC). Proposed by Ukraine’s President, the new CPC equalizes the powers of defence and prosecution lawyers in addition to numerous other reforms that bring Ukraine’s justice system in line with European standards.
Ukraine’s current government is the first to take on the country’s long-standing problem with corruption, which was bad under Soviet rule before worsening in the period following independence. A recent report by the Council of Europe’s Group of States against Corruption notes the country’s recent moves to combat the problem by establishing liability for corrupt actions and the introduction of liability for bribery, trading in influence and other corrupt actions. These reforms are part of a long-term effort to undergo judicial reform within the framework of European integration while also strengthening Ukraine’s democratic society.
NOTE: There is also a controversy surrounding the former Prime Minister of Ukraine (Tymoshenko) who has been convicted and jailed on corruption charges. It is a complex issue — she definitely was a Putin crony and there is an independent investigation going on now — but this is more about Ukraine’s elections, its geopolitical importance and encouraging the current (and likely next) Ukrainian
administration. If you have questions about the former PM, let me know.
