PARIS (AP) — The number of people linked to the Islamic State network that attacked Paris and Brussels reaches easily into the dozens, with a series of new arrests over the weekend that confirmed the cell’s toxic reach and ability to move around unnoticed in Europe’s criminal underworld.
From Belgium’s Molenbeek to Sweden’s Malmo, new names are added nearly daily to the list of hardened attackers, hangers-on, and tacit supporters of the cell that killed 130 people in Paris and 32 in Brussels. A computer abandoned by one of the Brussels suicide bombers in a trash can contained not only his will, but is beginning to give up other information as well, including an audio file indicating the cell was getting its orders directly from a French-speaking extremist in Syria, according to a police official with knowledge of the investigation. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak publicly about the investigation.
Ten men are known to be directly involved in the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris; others with key logistical roles then — including the bomber, a logistics handler, and a hideout scout — went on to plot the attack March 22 in Brussels. But unlike Paris, at least two people who survived the attack have been taken into custody alive, including Mohamed Abrini, the Molenbeek native who walked away from the Brussels international airport after his explosives failed to detonate.
But investigators fear it may not be enough to stave off another attack. Abdelhamid Abaaoud, another Molenbeek native whose charisma made him a natural draw to many in the Brussels neighborhood after he joined IS extremists in Syria, said before his death that he returned to Europe among a group of 90 fighters from Europe and the Mideast, according to testimony from a woman who tipped police to his location.
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In part from NYT’s: But only in the months since then has the full scale of Mr. Zerkani’s diligent work on the streets of Molenbeek and beyond become clear, as the network he helped nurture has emerged as a central element in attacks in both Paris and Brussels— as well as one in France that the authorities said last month they had foiled.
“Mr. Zerkani has perverted an entire generation of youngsters, particularly in the Molenbeek neighborhood,” the Belgian federal prosecutor, Bernard Michel, said in February.
But court documents and interviews with Molenbeek residents and activists, as well as with Belgian security officials, suggest that he had direct or indirect connections with several crucial figures who are now dead or under arrest in connection with the November massacre in Paris that killed 130 people and the bombings last month in Brussels that killed 32. Full article here.
Top U.S. intel official: Europe not taking advantage of terror tracking tools
(CNN) A top U.S. counterterrorism official in charge of ensuring terrorists do not make it into the United States said European countries can do more to screen terrorists because they don’t take full advantage of tools the U.S. has offered in the fight against terrorism.
“It’s concerning that our partners don’t use all of our data,” said Terrorist Screening Center Director Christopher Piehota in an exclusive interview with CNN. “We provide them with tools. We provide them with support, and I would find it concerning that they don’t use these tools to help screen for their own aviation security, maritime security, border screening, visas, things like that for travel.”Piehota said the U.S. shares its watch lists with EU countries, but that EU countries don’t systematically utilize it to identify suspected terrorists or screen migrants coming.The European Union does not utilize a central terror database; instead, each country maintains its own terrorist watch list that comes with its own unique set of standards for tracking terrorists. Further complicating matters the 26 European countries that operate inside the “Schengen zone” do not perform routine border checks.Piehota said all European countries cooperate with the United States to varying degrees and information sharing has greatly improved in the wake of the ISIS threat.The daunting task of guarding the United States from foreign terrorists, he says, has become more challenging with the evolving ISIS threat in Europe.One chief concern is foreign nationals from visa-waiver countries who do not appear on any watch list could possibly slip into the U.S. to launch an attack. For example, would-be terrorists can surreptitiously travel to and from Syria from Europe and then travel to the U.S. without ever arousing the suspicion of government officials on either continent.“There are many that we do know about. And unfortunately there are some that we do not know about,” Piehota said.Counterterrorism officials like Piehota also worry about the ISIS terrorists believed to still be in Europe and possibly plotting future attacks. One such person is the man in the hat seen in the Brussels airport surveillance video who remains on the run.“It’s highly concerning,” he said. “We make sure that we know as much as we can. And we take that information and we use it the best we can to minimize threats to our communities. But we can’t know everything all the time.”European officials have acknowledged the gaps in coverage and communication in the weeks following the Brussels attacks.“The fragmented intelligence picture around this dispersed community of suspected terrorists is very challenging for European authorities,” said Rob Wainwright, director of the European Police Agency known as Europol.The EU’s Counter-Terrorism Chief Gilles de Kerchove told CNN that he was aware of problems in getting member states to act.“I do my best to put pressure, to confront them with blunt figures, and we are making progress, but not quickly enough,” he said.The European Union has been examining the sharing of passenger information for at least six years, and the European Parliament is expected to consider a measure related to that issue this month. Some members oppose the idea on privacy grounds.“That will require difficult discussions with European Parliament, because we’re sensitive about balance between security and freedom,” de Kerchove said last month.Piehota also echoed the sentiment from FBI Director James Comey that there’s risk with the U.S. plan of allowing 100,000 refugees into the U.S. a year by 2017 partially because of the lack of intelligence on people in Syria.“Nothing we can guarantee is at a 100% level,” Piehota said, adding he believes the vetting process is rigorous with a layered approach of screening, evaluation and assessment for the refugees who will be cross-referenced with all the U.S. watch lists.Piehota also addressed what he called “incorrect perceptions” about the U.S. watch lists, many that have been repeated by presidential candidates on the campaign trail claiming a majority of people on the lists are innocent Americans.Although declined to say how many people are on the watch list, he did say Americans “comprise less than 0.5% of the total populations. Very small, controlled population,” adding that those on the list are consistently re-evaulated with 1,500 changes to the list on average per day. More here.
Category Archives: DOJ, DC and inside the Beltway
Navy LTC Accused of Spying and Prostitution
Navy Officer Accused of Spying for Foreign Power Held Secretly for 8 Months
The amphibious assault ship USS Boxer transits the East Sea during Exercise Ssang Yong 2016 on March 8. It’s been revealed that a U.S. Navy officer accused of spying was held in secret for eight months.
The redacted charge sheet is here.
By /Newsweek: A U.S. Navy officer accused of spying for an unidentified foreign power was secretly arrested last summer in an espionage investigation that is ongoing, authorities said Saturday.
The heavily redacted charge sheets say the unidentified officer gave secret information “relating to the national defense to representatives of a foreign government.” But the four-page document does not say exactly what information was provided, or for how long a period it was provided, how the information was transmitted or which nation it was provided to.
The multiple charges of espionage and attempted espionage, made public only on Friday, suggest the accused officer was under surveillance by Navy counterespionage agents for an extended period of time. The officer was arrested “about eight months ago,” according to a U.S. official who asked for anonymity in exchange for discussing some details of the case.
The name of the officer, a lieutenant commander who was assigned to a sensitive maritime patrol and reconnaissance group, is being withheld from the public “out of respect for the ongoing investigation” and the privacy rights of the accused, said the official.
The official did not rule out the possibility of further arrests in the case, which is being jointly pursued by both the FBI and Naval Criminal Investigative Service, or NCIS. The officer is being held in the Naval Consolidated Brig in Chesapeake, Va.
The officer’s unit “provides airborne anti-submarine warfare, anti-surface warfare and maritime intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance operations from planes such as the P-8A Poseidon, P-3C Orion and unmanned MQ-4C Triton,” according to the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot newspaper. The command of the Maritime Patrol and Reconnaissance Force is headquartered at Hampton Roads Naval Support Activity in Norfolk, “although it’s not clear whether he was stationed there,” the paper said. The unit has wings at Jacksonville Naval Air Station in Florida, Whidbey Island Naval Air Station in Washington state and Marine Corps Base Hawaii.
The Navy’s charge sheet said the officer is accused of three counts of attempted espionage, three counts of making false official statements and five counts of communicating defense information “to a person not entitled to receive said information.” It also said the officer provided a false address when he was on leave “rather than the actual foreign destination,” and failed to report contacts with foreign nationals.
The Navy also accused the officer, “a married man,” of procuring prostitutes ”on divers occasions” and having sex with “a woman not his wife,” a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, or UCMJ.
The dates of the alleged espionage, the identity of the foreign spy service—if any—and the foreign nationals involved will not likely be disclosed until and if the Navy prefers court martial charges against the accused.
Adm. Philip S. Davidson, commander of Fleet Forces Command, will weigh the results of an Article 32 investigation, the military’s version of a grand jury, to determine whether a court martial is warranted.
The accused officer could face the death penalty if found guilty of the most serious espionage charges.
Under the UCMJ, a service member is eligible for the death penalty for espionage if found “guilty of an offense that directly concerns nuclear weaponry, military spacecraft or satellites, early warning systems, or other means of defense or retaliation against large scale attack, war plans, communications intelligence or cryptographic information, or any other major weapons system or major element of defense strategy.”
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InquisitR: A U.S. Navy officer was charged with giving secrets to China and prostitution at the Norfolk Air Station in Virginia. It is believed that Lieutenant Commander Edward Lin gave secrets about vital communications systems, although the Navy has yet to determine how much and for how long.
CBS News reported that the Navy officer charged worked as a flight officer on an EP-3E Reconnaissance, a sensitive intelligence gathering aircraft. Lin is alleged to have given information on the aircraft’s communications system. The information he gave could be used to counter U.S. eavesdropping capabilities. Additional details here.
The heavily redacted documents released accused Lieutenant Commander Edward Lin of five counts of espionage and attempted espionage, three counts of making false official statements, and five counts of communicating information to a person not authorized to receive it.
Dewey Clarridge Died, What More you Need to Know
Personally, I have been talking about the matter of the Saudis and the Pakistanis nuclear weapons program.
By the way, the New York Times had no use for Clarridge.
Duane R. Clarridge, Brash Spy Who Fought Terror Networks, Dies at 83
Mark Mazzetti
New York Times
April 11, 2016
Duane R. Clarridge, a pugnacious American spy who helped found the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center, was indicted and later pardoned for his role in the Iran-contra scandal, and resumed his intelligence career in his late 70s as the head of a private espionage operation in Afghanistan and Pakistan, died on Saturday in Leesburg, Va. He was 83.
His lawyer, Raymond Granger, said the cause was complications of laryngeal and esophageal cancer.
Mr. Clarridge was an unflinching champion of a brawny American foreign policy and of the particular role played by the C.I.A.’s clandestine service — a cadre he likened to a secret army that “marches for the president” and ought to be subjected to as little outside scrutiny as possible.
Mr. Clarridge, widely known by his nickname Dewey, delighted in the role of rogue. He often arrived at work in white Italian suits or safari jackets and bragged to other C.I.A. officers about the brilliant ideas he had conceived while drinking the previous night.
“If you have a tough, dangerous job, critical to national security, Dewey’s your man,” Robert M. Gates, the former director of central intelligence and later defense secretary, was quoted as saying in “Casey,” a 1990 biography of William J. Casey, the Central Intelligence Agency’s chief during the Reagan administration, by Joseph E. Persico. “Just make sure you have a good lawyer at his elbow — Dewey’s not easy to control.”
He spent years overseas as an undercover officer, but perhaps his most consequential effort at the spy agency was the creation of the Counterterrorism Center (then called the Counterterrorist Center) in 1986 after a string of attacks the previous year, including the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 and the massacres at El Al ticket counters in Rome and Vienna carried out by the Abu Nidal Organization.
Up to that point, the C.I.A. had devoted little effort to understanding international terrorism, and Mr. Clarridge persuaded Mr. Casey to create the center with an unusual arrangement: having undercover spies and intelligence analysts working together to try to dismantle terrorist networks. Within a year, C.I.A. operations had significantly weakened the Abu Nidal organization.
Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Counterterrorism Center has grown into a behemoth, the heart of a spy agency transformed by years of terrorist hunting.
Mr. Clarridge’s efforts against international terrorism came as he was becoming ensnared by investigations into the Reagan administration’s efforts to use proceeds from secret arms sales to Iran to arm the contras, a Nicaraguan rebel group battling troops of the country’s socialist government, known as the Sandinistas.
Mr. Clarridge had been in charge of the C.I.A.’s covert war in Nicaragua in the early 1980s (he told his colleagues that his idea to mine the harbors of Nicaragua in 1983 came while he was drinking gin at home) and had developed a close relationship with Lt. Col. Oliver North, who was running the Iran-contra operation from his perch at the National Security Council.
According to the final report by Lawrence E. Walsh, the independent counsel investigating the Iran-contra affair, Mr. Clarridge testified that he had no knowledge that cargo ships sent to Iran to help secure the release of American hostages contained any weapons. He also denied trying to solicit money from foreign countries to circumvent a congressional prohibition against financing the contras.
“In both instances,” the report said, “there was strong evidence that Clarridge’s testimony was false.”
He was indicted on a charge of perjury in 1991, three years after he had retired from the agency. President George Bush pardoned him on Christmas Eve 1992, along with five other Iran-contra figures. He had the pardon framed, and he eventually hung it in the front hallway of his home near San Diego so it would be the first thing visitors saw upon entering his house.
But the scandal embittered him, and he used his 1997 memoir, “A Spy for All Seasons,” to settle some old scores. He lamented in the book that the C.I.A. had lost its swagger since the end of the Cold War, becoming a risk-averse organization that was beholden to lawyers and was degenerating “into something resembling the style, work ethic and morale of the post office.”
He joined the C.I.A. in 1955, after getting degrees from Brown and Columbia, and served undercover in Nepal, India and Italy before being promoted to run the Latin America division in 1981.
He is survived by a daughter, Cassandra; two sons, Ian and Tarik; and five grandchildren. His first marriage ended in divorce; his second wife, Helga, died before him.
More than two decades after his retirement from the C.I.A., Mr. Clarridge began working as a government contractor when military officials in Kabul hired him and a small team to gather information about militant groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Using sources in the region — he identified them only by cover names, such as Waco and Willi — he would turn their field dispatches into reports he sent to the military command by encrypted email.
Mr. Clarridge worked for a security firm hired by The New York Times in December 2008 to assist in seeking the release of a reporter, David Rohde, who had been kidnapped by the Taliban. Mr. Rohde escaped on his own seven months later, but Mr. Clarridge used his role in the episode to promote his spy network to military officials.
The Pentagon canceled the contract in 2010 after the private spying operation was revealed.
But two years later, after Mr. Clarridge had moved into a retirement home in Northern Virginia, he told a reporter that he still had his “network” intact for the future.
In November 2015, Mr. Clarridge was back in the news when The Times identified him as an adviser to Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon and Republican candidate for president, who had come under criticism for statements he made about foreign affairs during debates. Asked about the candidate’s foreign policy acumen, Mr. Clarridge was typically impolitic.
“Nobody has been able to sit down with him and have him get one iota of intelligent information about the Middle East,” he said.
Panama Papers Snares Another Clinton Tax Haven?
First the Panama Papers revealed the Podesta Group. John and Tony Podesta, the founders have connections to a Russian bank which is blacklisted. John Podesta is the architect of the Hillary presidential campaign.
John Podesta, a real operative in the White House for years.
The mailman must be real busy and overworked at the address below.
This Delaware Address Is Home to 200,000 Shell Companies—Including Hillary Clinton’s
FreeBeacon: The address “1209 North Orange Street” in Wilmington, Del., has become known in recent years as the epicenter of U.S. corporate secrecy. The squat, split-level building is the official address of over 285,000 companies, many of which are looking to take advantage of Delaware’s Panama-like secrecy rules, tax incentives, and business-friendly case law.
In the wake of the recent “Panama Papers” scandal, this unassuming brick office has received renewed scrutiny from the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Telegraph, and advocates for corporate tax reform.
But one of its tenants may come as a surprise—a company owned by Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton.
Hillary and Bill Clinton quietly set up two shell companies listed at “1209 North Orange Street” in 2008 and 2013, the Washington Free Beacon has found. The names of the companies, but not their location, were first made public in tax filings released by Hillary Clinton last year.
According to records, one of the Clintons’ “1209 North Orange Street” companies is WJC, LLC, which was set up by Bill Clinton in 2008 as a pass-through for his consulting fees.
Another company at the same location, ZFS Holdings, LLC, was set up in February 2013, one week after Hillary Clinton left the State Department. Hillary Clinton received $5.5 million from her book publisher, Simon & Schuster, through the company.
The “1209 North Orange Street” building is the headquarters for the Corporation Trust Company. The firm acts as a registered agent for thousands of corporations that are not actually located in Delaware, including the Clintons’ companies.
Anti-secrecy advocates say the building is prime evidence that Delaware has become a corporate haven that’s comparable to more well-known, offshore locales.
“If you imagined a building with 1,000 corporations in it, you’d imagine a building like the Empire State building,” said Richard Phillips, a senior policy analyst with Citizens for Tax Justice. “But apparently 285,000 companies claim [1209 North Orange Street] is their address.”
“What this shows is this is not really the address of companies that are doing real business. This is the address of a lot of companies that are just shell companies,” he added. “In this case, it doesn’t even look like they have mailboxes. They just claim that address as the places they’re doing business, even though they’re not doing business there.”
Similar registered agents have come under scrutiny in recent years. While campaigning in 2008, President Obama slammed the “Ugland House,” a five-story building in the Cayman Islands that is reportedly home to over 18,000 companies.
“That’s either the biggest building in the world, or the biggest tax scam on record,” said Obama.
The Clinton campaign declined to comment on why the Clintons, who live in New York and have no evident residential ties to Delaware, set up companies in the state. But the presidential candidate isn’t alone. Experts say Delaware is the most popular place to register a company in the United States, due in part to its established system of business case law and tax incentives for intellectual property and real estate holdings.
One of the biggest draws may be the state’s lack of disclosure requirements—businesses can be created completely anonymously, allowing the owners to avoid public detection and even hide income from U.S. authorities.
According to advocates for corporate tax reform, Delaware’s laws rival well-known secrecy havens like the Cayman Islands and Panama.
“General secrecy laws and the ability of these corporations to hide the identities of those who own it, that’s what makes [Delaware] an onshore tax haven, and that’s what makes it just as bad as the Cayman Islands,” said Phillips.
Hillary Clinton has promised to crack down on tax havens on the campaign trail. Referring to the Panama Papers last Wednesday, Clinton condemned “outrageous tax havens and loopholes that super-rich people across the world are exploiting in Panama and elsewhere.”
The Clinton Foundation also has three shell companies in Delaware, according to its amended financial disclosures released last year.
One is the Acceso Fund, LLC, which was registered by the Corporation Trust Company at 1209 North Orange Street in 2009. The Clinton Foundation has used the company to channel money to its Colombia-based private equity fund, Fondo Acceso.
The private equity fund, which is run out of the Clinton Foundation’s Bogota office, has invested in telecom and food processing companies in Colombia, the Free Beacon reported last November.
Another Clinton Foundation company, Acceso Worldwide Fund, Inc., was registered in 2013 by the Corporation Services Company, located in Wilmington, Delaware.
A third company, the Haiti Development Fund, LLC, was registered in 2010 by National Corporate Research, Ltd, located in Dover.
In Delaware, limited liability companies such as WJC, LLC, and ZFS, LLC, are not required to file annual statements disclosing their directors or owners. The Clintons also registered both companies in New York after they were established.
There is no evidence the Clintons are using the entities for any nefarious purposes, and it is perfectly legal for non-residents to set up corporations in Delaware. But even if corporations stay within the law, critics say Delaware shell companies can sometimes be used to legally circumvent taxes in other states.
According to a report published last December by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, Delaware’s popularity as a hub for shell companies is “responsible for the loss of billions of dollars in revenue in other U.S. states.”
“It’s legal tax avoidance,” said Phillips. “We would say it’s immoral, or not the best thing for the country.”
Anti-secrecy advocates also say the laws make it easier for criminals to evade federal taxes or finance terrorism, all under the radar of the public and U.S. authorities.
“Some anonymous shell companies have financed terrorism and supported corruption and human trafficking and Delaware is a traditional hub for creating these fake companies,” said Andrew Hanauer, campaign director at the Jubilee USA Network.
Jubilee USA Network and other groups have been advocating for legislative reform. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.), Rep. Peter King (R., N.Y.), and Rep. Carolyn Maloney recently put forward legislation that would force U.S. companies to disclose their actual owners.
The Clinton campaign did comment on whether Hillary Clinton supports the legislation. The campaign also did not comment on whether she or Bill Clinton have any other companies registered in Delaware.
But the concerns over corporate secrecy and tax avoidance have trickled into the Democratic presidential race, with Sen. Bernie Sanders incorporating it into his stump speeches. Clinton has also railed against tax havens on the trail and vowed to take action.
“Some of you may have just heard about these disclosures about outrageous tax havens and loopholes that super-rich people across the world are exploiting in Panama and elsewhere,” said Clinton during a campaign event last Wednesday.
“Now some of this behavior is clearly against the law, and anyone who violates the law anywhere should be held accountable,” she added. “But it’s also scandalous how much is actually legal.”
Venezuela, There She Blows
Statement of Secretary Lew on the Venezuela Executive Order
3/9/2015U.S.Treasury: We are committed to defending human rights and advancing democratic governance in Venezuela through the use of financial sanctions.We will use these tools to target those persons involved in violence against anti-government protesters, serious human rights abuses, and those involved in the arrest or prosecution of individuals for their legitimate exercise of free speech.
Corrupt actions by Venezuelan government officials deprive Venezuela of needed economic resources that could be invested in the Venezuelan people and used to spur economic growth. These actions also undermine the public trust in democratic institutions and the human rights to which Venezuelan citizens are entitled. This Executive Order will be used to protect the U.S. financial system from the illicit financial flows from public corruption in Venezuela.
Beginning in 2013, perhaps earlier:
Venezuela is running out of money fast and has started selling its gold
CNN: The cash-strapped country could default by next year when lots of debt payments are due. Venezuela’s reserves, which are mostly made up of gold, have fallen sharply this year as the country needs cash to pay off debt and tries to maintain its social welfare programs.
Venezuela owes about $15.8 billion in debt payments between now and the end of 2016.
But it doesn’t have enough to make good on its payments. Venezuela only has $15.2 billion in foreign reserves — the lowest amount since 2003. A lot of those reserves are in gold.
Less than $1 billion of Venezuela’s reserves are in cash, and it has a couple billion in reserves at the IMF.
Venezuela risks a descent into chaos
Police arrest students during a protest against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in San Cristobal. Two officers died and four more were hurt
FT: At the main morgue of central Caracas, the stench forces everyone to cover their nostrils. “Now things are worse than ever,” says Yuli Sánchez. “They kill people and no one is punished while families have to keep their pain to themselves.”
Ms Sánchez’s 14-year-old nephew, Oliver, was shot five times by malandros, or thugs, while riding on the back of a friend’s motorcycle. His uncle, Luis Mejía, remarked that in a fortnight three members of their family had been shot, including two youths who were shot by police.
An economic, social and political crisis facing Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s unpopular president, is being aggravated by a rise in violence which is prompting fears that this oil-rich country risks becoming a failed state.
“What can we do?” Mr Mejía asks. “Give up.” The morgue employee in charge of handling the corpses notes that a decade ago he received seven or eight bodies every weekend. These days, he says, that number has risen to between 40 and 50: “This is now wilder than the wild west.”
Critics say that the Venezuelan government is increasingly unable to provide citizens with water, electricity, health or a functioning economy which can supply basic food staples or indispensable medicines, let alone personal safety.
Last month alone, Venezuelans learned of the summary execution of at least 17 gold miners supposedly by a mining Mafia, the killing of two police officers allegedly by a group of students who drove a bus into a barricade, and a hostage drama inside a prison at the hands of a grenade-wielding criminal gang. On Wednesday, three policemen were killed when an armed gang busted a member out of a lock-up in the capital.
At least 10 were killed in a Caracas shanty town after a confrontation between local thugs armed with assault rifles, while a local mayor was gunned down outside his home in Trujillo state last month. There are widespread reports of lynchings.
All this is creating a broad unease that Mr Maduro is unable to maintain order. Venezuela has the world’s fastest inflation and its dire recession is worsening. Mr Maduro last week declared every Friday a holiday for the next two months to save electricity as a prolonged drought has exacerbated chronic power shortages. There is a lack of basic goods. Analysts warn that the economic crisis risks turning in to a humanitarian one.
The evidence of state failure is very concrete in the country that sits on top of the world’s largest oil reserves
– Moisés Naím, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
“Failed state is a nebulous concept often used too lightly. That’s not the case with today’s Venezuela,” says Moisés Naím a Venezuelan distinguished fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The evidence of state failure is very concrete in the country that sits on top of the world’s largest oil reserves.”
Venezuela is already one of the world’s deadliest countries. The Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, a local think-tank, says the murder rate rose last year to 92 killings per 100,000 residents. The attorney-general cites a lower figure of 58 homicides per 100,000.
In 1998, a year before former leader Hugo Chávez took office, the rate was 19 per 100,000, says the think-tank’s director Roberto Briceño León, adding that after 17 years of socialist “revolution”, it is the poor who make up most of the victims.
“I think it is evident that the Venezuelan state cannot act as a state in many areas of the country, so it could be considered failed,” says Mr Briceño, adding that the state now “lacks a monopoly on violence”.
But the state is indeed to blame for some of that violence, according to a report by advocacy groups Human Rights Watch and the Venezuelan Human Rights Education-Action Programme presented to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
“Venezuelans are facing one of the highest murder rates in the hemisphere and urgently need effective protection from violent crime,” said José Miguel Vivanco HRW’s Americas director. “But in multiple raids throughout the country, the security forces themselves have allegedly committed serious abuses.”
Their findings show that police and military raids in low-income and immigrant communities in Venezuela have led to widespread allegations of abuse, including extrajudicial killings, mass arbitrary detentions, maltreatment of detainees, forced evictions, the destruction of homes, and arbitrary deportations.
Country’s bitter power struggle reflects institutional weakness across the region
The government usually blames violence within its borders on Colombian rightwing paramilitaries engaged in a war against its revolution. But as David Smilde and Hugo Pérez Hernáiz of the Washington Office on Latin America, a think-tank, recently wrote: “Attributing violence in Venezuela to paramilitary activity has been a common rhetorical move used by the government over the past year, effectively making a citizen security problem into a national security problem.”
For many Venezuelans it no longer matters who is to blame. “It is a state policy of letting anarchy sink in,” says a former policeman outside the gates of a compound in Caracas.
That former police station now houses the Frente 5 de Marzo, one of the political groups that consider themselves the keepers of socialism’s sacred flame. The gates bear the colours of the Venezuelan flag and are marked with bullet holes. The man believes there is something akin to a civil war going on.
“Venezuela is pure chaos now. It seems to me there is no way back,” he says.
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Iran has been outsourcing for many years and that includes to Iran:
Iran’s ambassador to Venezuela said Tuesday that a check worth about $70 million, found by German authorities in the luggage of Iran’s former central bank chief, was going to be used by an Iranian company for its expenses while building public housing in Venezuela.
Iranian Ambassador Hojattolah Soltani made the remarks in an interview with the Venezuelan television channel Globovision, saying the check for 300 million Venezuelan bolivars was to be used for the expenses of the Kayson Company, a Tehran-based construction business that is building thousands of homes for the Venezuelan government.
The Iranian ambassador noted that the man with the check whom German authorities stopped last month is not currently a government official. Soltani said that Tahmasb Mazaheri, a former chief of Iran’s central bank and former economy minister, has been working as an adviser to the Iranian company.
Venezuelan authorities had to comment on the issue, and stressed that everything was above board (link is external). The Iranian Ambassador to Caracas would later recant his opinion, as cited by AP above, saying about the caught check-courier (link is external) “[he] is by no means an official of the Government (of Iran); neither has his name been affixed to the confiscated check”, and adding that the check “was signed in Iran and Mr. Mazaheri was on his way to Venezuela to bring the check to cash it in Banco Venezuela.”
So Mazaheri, who is not an official of the Government of Iran as per Iran’s Ambassador to Venezuela claims, was entrusted to carry a check worth $70 million, just like that? Mazaheri was a director of Banco Internacional de Desarrollo (link is external), an OFAC-designated entity targeted by the U.S. Treasury Department “for providing or attempting to provide financial services to Iran’s Ministry of Defense and Armed Forces Logistics (MODAFL). (link is external)” The European Union also included the bank in its list of sanctioned entities involved in “nuclear or ballistic missiles activities
– See more at: http://infodio.com/250414/venezuela/corruption/kayson/tahmasb/mazaheri#sthash.8z4z99bY.dpuf