Category Archives: Failed foreign policy

Refugees in America Before those in Europe

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We watch in horror the refugee crisis in Europe and the stories are terrifying but for a deeper argument, it has been going on here in America for decades so the slow flow of migrants is not a robust as that currently in Europe.

What is more, global leaders are in full discussion on several tracks including how to find housing, medical care, schools, jobs, transportation and more. Additionally, big talks are underway to create a safe zone for Syrians in their home country. Well, the argument can be made there are at least two of them in Jordan and Turkey now….creating one in Syria? How about creating zones in respective countries in Central America?

Refugee crisis grows in Central America as women ‘run for their lives’

Women and children are increasingly fleeing gang violence in Mexico and Central America in hopes of reaching the US, says new UNHCR report

Thousands of women flee their homes in parts of Central America and Mexico each year to escape armed gangs and domestic violence and seek refuge in the United States, a flow that is becoming a refugee crisis, the UN refugee agency says.

The number of women, some with children, fleeing rampant gang violence in parts of Mexico, and the Northern Triangle region of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, is rising, the UNHCR said in a report published on Wednesday.

More than 66,000 children travelled with their families or alone from the Northern Triangle region – which has the world’s highest murder rates – to the United States in 2014.

More unaccompanied children from the Northern Triangle and Mexico reached the United States in August than in the same month last year, the US government said.

“With authorities often unable to curb the violence and provide redress, many vulnerable women are left with no choice but to run for their lives,” Antonio Guterres, head of the UN refugee agency (UNHCR), said in the report.

While attention is focused on the hundreds of thousands of people fleeing to Europe from countries such as Syria and Iraq, a new refugee crisis is taking shape in Central America, the UNHCR warned.

“The dramatic refugee crises we are witnessing in the world today are not confined to the Middle East or Africa,” Guterres said in a statement. “We are seeing another refugee situation unfolding in the Americas.“

The UNHCR said it had recorded a nearly five-fold increase in asylum seekers arriving in the United States from the Northern Triangle since 2008. In 2014, 40,000 people from these countries and Mexico applied for asylum in the United States.

The UNHCR report includes 160 interviews with women who had fled their homes in the Northern Triangle region and Mexico and travelled to the United States. After crossing the border illegally, they were detained and placed in detention centres.

All the women interviewed had either been recognised as refugees or been screened by US authorities, “and determined to have a credible or reasonable fear of persecution or torture”, the report said.

One 17-year-old Salvadorean girl called Norma says she was gang raped by three members of the notorious M18 gang in a cemetery in late 2014. She said she was targeted because she was married to a police officer.

“They took their turns … they tied me by the hands. They stuffed my mouth so I would not scream,” Norma is quoted as saying in the report. Then “they threw me in the trash”.

Nearly two-thirds of the women said threats and attacks by armed criminal gangs, including rape, killings, forced recruitment of their children and extortion payments, were among the main reasons why they left their home countries.

“The increasing reach of criminal armed groups, often amounting to de facto control over territory and people, has surpassed the capacity of governments in the region to respond,” the report said.

US government figures show that 82% of 16,077 women from the Northern Triangle region and Mexico interviewed by US authorities in the last year were found to have a credible fear of persecution or torture and were allowed to pursue their claims for asylum in the United States.

Violence at the hands of abusive husbands and partners, including rape and beatings with baseball bats, was another key reason why women were fleeing their homes.

“Unable to secure state protection, many women cited domestic violence as a reason for flight, fearing severe harm or death if they stayed,” the report said.

More than three-quarters of the women interviewed said they knew the journey overland to the United States was dangerous, but it was a risk worth taking.

Some said they took birth control pills before starting their journey to avoid getting pregnant as a result of rape by human traffickers or gangs, the report said.

“Coming here [to the United States] was like having hope that you will come out alive,” the report quoted Sara, who fled Honduras and sought asylum in the United States, as saying.

 

Hillary Emails: Deeper Fraud/Collusion at Foundation

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There have been calls for an investigative panel to dig much deeper on the Clinton Foundation, but there are many non-government organizations doing that already.

While the FBI is investigating portable devices, metadata and foreign telecom intrusions into Hillary’s server and those at the State Department, the released emails so far tell an additional story that there was a very blurred line between Foundation work, donors and for sure diplomatic agendas.

So, exactly what is this Clinton Foundation about? Well nothing like one would think and the laws broken fall on that pesky IRS division that Lois Lerner (Loretta Lynch, at the DoJ refused to prosecute) where no one seems interested in proceeding on IRS law violations.

Clinton Foundation Faces Revisions–and Possible Reckoning

By Ken Silverstein

The Clinton Foundation has gotten a good deal of unflattering attention as of late, which isn’t surprising given that its best known namesakes are Bill, a former president and Hillary, who hopes to be the nation’s next leader. The foundation portrays itself as do-gooder nonprofit organization but a cursory look reveals questionable and incomplete disclosures of its activities and accounts, as well as misspending of donor money, virtually since its inception.

Those lapses appear set to catch up with the foundation (now formally known as the Bill, Hillary, & Chelsea Clinton Foundation), which has until November 16 to amend more than ten years’ worth of state, federal and foreign filings. According to Charles Ortel, a financial whistleblower, it will be difficult if not impossible for the foundation to amend its financial returns without acknowledging accounting fraud and admitting that it generated substantial private gain for directors, insiders and Clinton cronies, all of which would be against the law under an IRS rule called inurement.

While inurement may sound obscure to the layman, it’s an ancient legal principle and the IRS is very clear that it is verboten. If you are familiar with it, it becomes immediately clear that Bill Clinton – and arguably Hillary and daughter Chelsea as family members and fellow Clinton Foundation trustees – could have big problems come November 16. So, too, could Clinton cronies like Ira Magaziner (see below) and Doug Band, a Clinton administration and former foundation insider who subsequently became a founding partner of a bipartisan business swamp called Teneo Holdings.

The Clinton Foundation’s returns show revenues of $359.3 million between 2001 and 2006 and claim spending of $164.5 million on all program services, which includes its spending to provide relief to victims of the Tsunami in Asia and of Hurricane Katrina. The same pattern of taking in vast sums from donors and spending far less to help victims has continued ever since.

“It’s illegal to set up a foundation whose primary purpose is to create financial gain,” said Ortel – who helped expose massive financial fraud by GE, GM and AIG, thereby helping trigger the 2008 financial collapse. “That’s bright line illegal.” (Ortel wrote an article at Breitbart.com earlier which showed how “associates of Bill and Hillary Clinton may have attempted to monetize their participation in Clinton family philanthropic activities.”)

Ortel, a former managing director of Dillon, Read & Co, said that under New York law tax authorities don’t have to show criminal intent to get convictions against foundation officials, they need only show that the foundation filed materially misleading financial information and kept fundraising nonetheless.

“The essence of what a charity does is take your money and show you how they spend it,” he told me. “The Clinton Foundation takes your money and obscures how they spend it.” (Note that the Clinton Foundation only started disclosing its donors in 2008, following years of pressure.)

Foundation spokesman Craig Minassian did not reply to repeated requests for comment for this story.

Ortel is hardly alone in raising questions about the Clinton Foundation’s accounting practices. Earlier this year, the watchdog group Charity Navigator put the Clinton Foundation on its “watch list” of dubious non-profit groups and politely described its business practices as “atypical.” A New York Post story about the development noted that in 2013 the family’s foundation “took in more than $140 million in grants and pledges…but spent just $9 million on direct aid.”

Charity Navigator is described by the Chronicle of Philanthropy as the country’s “most prominent” nonprofit watchdog and “ranks more than 8,000 charities and is known for its independence,” New York magazine reported at the same time. That story noted that Charity Navigator’s new ranking of the Clinton Foundation placed grouped it together with other “scandal-plagued charities like Al Sharpton’s National Action Network and the Red Cross.”

Detailed information provided to me by Ortel – and which I carefully reviewed and confirmed — shows that since its founding, the Clinton Foundation has received more than $1 billion to purchase HIV/AIDS drugs for poor people in Africa, Asia and elsewhere. The leading donors to the foundation to support this admirable goal include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and UNITAID.

However, a unit set up to receive the money – the Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative Inc., which was run by Magaziner, a Clinton administration veteran with close ties to Hillary – appears to have spent far less than it took in. The unit’s accounting was so shoddy that in 2008, the state of Massachusetts revoked its license.

Furthermore, the accounting firm that handled much of the paperwork, BKD, has been implicated in a variety of misconduct. For example, last year the Securities and Exchange Commission sanctioned BKD for “violating auditor independence rules when they prepared the financial statements of brokerage firms that were their audit clients.”

(As reported by the Washington Free Beacon, BKD was replaced as the foundation’s accountant by – no, I’m not making this up – PricewaterhouseCoopers, whose previous clients included Enron. That firm’s CEO, Kenneth Lay, died of a heart attack before he was shipped off to prison after engineering one of the biggest financial frauds in American history, with the help of accounting firms like PricewaterhouseCoopers.)

Ortel has issued two little-read reports that strongly suggest that the New York-headquartered Clinton Foundation has violated federal and state laws that bar charities from enriching board members, officers or donors. “The Clinton Foundation is like a Turkish bazaar,” Ortel told me. “You think you’re going into a carpet shop but you’re really going into the back of a truck.” (Ortel says he is politically closer to the GOP than to the Democrats, but says he mostly hates “crony capitalism” as practiced by both parties.)

Last April, Clinton Foundation acting CEO Maura Pally acknowledged “mistakes” in its tax filings and promised they would be corrected by November 16.

The problem for the foundation, Ortel says, is that filing correct returns is impossible for the Clinton Foundation without admitting to criminal felonies. “The foundation has never filed a legitimate, independently certified and complete audit of their financial statements since it was founded, as is required under state, federal and foreign law,” he said.

In 2001, Bill helped set up the Clinton Foundation within weeks of leaving office – after surrendering his law licenses in January for lying under oath during the Monica Lewinsky investigation. That’s not much of a qualification to help run a foundation since those in charge of charities are legally bound to always make truthful declarations.

Bill clearly was in position to exercise significant influence over the foundation and referred to it publicly as “his” charity on numerous occasions. And even though he was not an officer or director of the main foundation until 2013, he had from the very beginning signed legal agreements on the foundation’s behalf and traveled the globe bragging about its alleged good deeds.

Hillary and daughter Chelsea, whom has accomplished little of note in her life but was made a foundation vice chair, basked in the glory. From a branding standpoint, the foundation has been pure gold for the Clintons.

The Clinton Foundation was initially authorized by the IRS to act as a library and research center about Bill Clinton’s presidency. In apparent violation of IRS rules, the foundation expanded its purposes and began raising billions of dollars for other purposes without asking the IRS for permission to do so.

According to the Clinton Foundation’s website, it started its efforts in the HIV/AIDS arena with the “transformational goal” of helping “save the lives of millions of people living with HIV/AIDS in the developing world by dramatically scaling up antiretroviral treatment.”

The Foundation geared up to make HIV/AIDS drug purchases beginning in 2002, but its activities in this area were not disclosed in its 2002 and 2003 tax filings, presumably because it was not legally allowed to engage in such activities at the time.

The Clinton Foundation’s website says it is committed to transparency, but the organization omits much key information from its website, including audits for 2001 to 2004. Its application to form the Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative Inc. and the IRS determination letter for that entity are also omitted.

Since the early-2000s, the Clinton Foundation has taken in at least $1 billion in donations to fight AIDS — from groups like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation and UNITAID, as well as governments including, Australia, Canada, France, Ireland, Sweden and the United Kingdom – Ortel estimates.

The Clinton Foundation’s tax forms are so opaque and convoluted that there’s no way to know the precise figure for sure; Ortel bases this number on his review of statements and filings from foundations and governments that have donated to the Clinton’s charity.

Meanwhile, the Clinton Foundation set up a related non-profit — the Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative, Inc. — to take in cash for its anti-AIDS initiatives. It was an Arkansas non-profit corporation based in Massachusetts and Magaziner – a chief healthcare policy advisor under President Clinton – got paid an undisclosed amount of money to run it out of the offices of his private consulting firm–an arrangement that, Ortel says, crossed the line of legality. In addition to the U.S., the Clinton Foundation set up anti-AIDS entities in at least a score of other countries.

Figures provided by UNITAID show it has given grants to the Clinton Foundation totaling $341.5 million for anti-AIDS drug purchases between 2006 and 2009 (see last page at this link), while the Clinton Foundation claims it spent about $215.4 million.

The fact that that UNITAID apparently donated about $126 million more to the Clinton Foundation for ant-AIDS pharmaceuticals than the Clinton Foundation acknowledges spending on them is alarming enough. And based on this analysis by Judicial Watch, that understates the magnitude of the problem dramatically.

In an emailed statement, Andrew Hurst, a spokesman for UNITAID, said that, “UNITAID is satisfied that the disbursements to William J. Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative/Clinton Health Access Initiative, Inc. have always been fully reconciled and expenditures made in line with grant agreements. Consistent with standard policy, UNITAID commissions independent assessments, audits and programmatic reviews of its grants. The results of all audits conducted so far have been entirely satisfactory.”

When Massachusetts shut down the HIV/AIDS Initiative unit, the Clinton Foundation simply folded its operations into its own and pretended nothing had happened. All of this was flatly illegal, but the IRS, whose tax-exempt wing was led during most of the relevant period by Lois Lerner, did zero. Obama’s Justice Department investigated Lerner on unrelated charges, but never filed charges.

The general shadiness of the whole Clinton Foundations AIDS initiative may well explain why Sir Elton John turned down without explanation an award for fighting AIDS from Bill Clinton during the recent Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting in New York.

“Using a charity that exploits victims of AIDS for your personal gain and advancement puts you in the lower circles of hell, but New York and the IRS haven’t done anything to stop them,” Ortel said.

 

Those Making Decisions About Destiny

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Spooky and deviant people packaged in philanthropic paper and bows have darker missions that is not conspiracy but fact.

The Clinton Foundation is not especially included in this group but the same model of collusion is applied.

Going back to 2009, the agenda was being crafted for the next four years and had a probability of the next eight to ten years. It is working and chilling.

Note, they even call themselves the ‘Good Club’….really?

They’re called the Good Club – and they want to save the world
Paul Harris in New York reports on the small, elite group of billionaire philanthropists who met recently to discuss solving the planet’s problems
It is the most elite club in the world. Ordinary people need not apply. Indeed there is no way to ask to join. You simply have to be very, very rich and very, very generous. On a global scale.

This is the Good Club, the name given to the tiny global elite of billionaire philanthropists who recently held their first and highly secretive meeting in the heart of New York City.

The names of some of the members are familiar figures: Bill Gates, George Soros, Warren Buffett, Oprah Winfrey, David Rockefeller and Ted Turner. But there are others, too, like business giants Eli and Edythe Broad, who are equally wealthy but less well known. All told, its members are worth $125bn.

The meeting – called by Gates, Buffett and Rockefeller – was held in response to the global economic downturn and the numerous health and environmental crises that are plaguing the globe. It was, in some ways, a summit to save the world.

No wonder that when news of the secret meeting leaked, via the seemingly unusual source of an Irish-American website, it sent shock waves through the worlds of philanthropy, development aid and even diplomacy. “It is really unprecedented. It is the first time a group of donors of this level of wealth has met like that behind closed doors in what is in essence a billionaires’ club,” said Ian Wilhelm, senior writer at the Chronicle of Philanthropy magazine.

The existence of the Good Club has struck many as a two-edged sword. On one hand, they represent a new golden age of philanthropy, harking back to the early 20th century when the likes of Rockefeller, Vanderbilt and Carnegie became famous for their good works. Yet the reach and power of the Good Club are truly new. Its members control vast wealth – and with that wealth comes huge power that could reshape nations according to their will. Few doubt the good intentions of Gates and Winfrey and their kind. They have already improved the lives of millions of poor people across the developing world. But can the richest people on earth actually save the planet?

The President’s House of Rockefeller University is on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The university’s private campus, full of lush green trees, lies behind guarded entrances and a metal fence. It overlooks the East River, only a few blocks away from the United Nations.
It was here, at 3pm on 5 May, that the Good Club gathered. The university’s chancellor, Sir Paul Nurse, was out of town but, at the request of David Rockefeller, had allowed the club to meet at his plush official residence. The president’s house is frequently used for university events, but rarely can it have played host to such a powerful conclave. “The fact that they pulled this off, meeting in the middle of New York City, is just absolutely amazing,” said Niall O’Dowd, an Irish journalist who broke the story on the website irishcentral.com.

For six hours, the assembled billionaires discussed the crises facing the world. Each was allowed to speak for 15 minutes. The topics focused on education, emergency relief, government reform, the expected depth of the economic crisis and global health issues such as overpopulation and disease. One of the themes was new ways to get ordinary people to donate small amounts to global issues. Sources say Gates was the most impressive speaker, while Turner was the most outspoken. “He tried to dominate, which I think annoyed some of the others,” said one source. Winfrey, meanwhile, was said to have been in a contemplative, listening mood.

That the group should have met at all is indicative of the radical ways in which philanthropy has changed over the past two decades. The main force behind that change is Gates and his decision to donate almost all his fortune to bettering the world. Unlike the great philanthropists of former ages, Gates is young enough and active enough to take a full hands-on role in his philanthropy and craft it after his own ideas. That example has been followed by others, most notably Soros, Turner and Buffett. Indeed, this new form of philanthropy, where retired elite businessmen try to change the world, has even been dubbed “Billanthropy” after Gates. Another description is “philanthro-capitalism”. Much more here.

Examples:

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grants money to measure your child’s moods via bracelets. Reported by the Chicago Tribune, schools are the basis of the testing and database modeling, where behavior modification is the sole objective.

Warren Buffett’s Foundation has an initiative controlling water and the food supply in Africa and Central America, all in the cause of enhancing agriculture to which population control and sustainability is achieved. To date, Central America is full of bloody criminals and Africa is a continent rife with terror. Buffett is a large funder of abortions globally.

George Soros, the spookiest of the Good Club, has an umbrella organization titled Open Society Institute that funds just about every dark nefarious operation globally, even the IRS scandal, suppressing free speech.

Ted Turner, the media mogul has a ‘one child’ policy emulating that of China.

It appears all of these members of the ‘Good Club’ continue discussion from a 1974 USAID study. Further as the decades pass with new trends emerging, more aggressive and edited objectives are financed.

The matter of eradicated diseases re-emerging, refugees and global financial strife has wrought other billionaires missions yet to be fully realized or understood but take caution.

 

 

Per FBI: Foreign Telecoms Likely Hacked Hillary Emails

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The Justice Department officials also used the words “reckless”, “stunning,” and “unbelievable” in discussing the controversy swirling around Clinton’s use of a private, nongovernment email account.

FBN Exclusive: DOJ Officials Fear Foreign Telecoms Hacked Clinton Emails, Server

FBN: Officials close to the matter at the Department of Justice are concerned the emails Hillary Clinton sent from her personal devices while overseas on business as U.S. Secretary of State were breached by foreign telecoms in the countries she visited—a list which includes China.

“Her emails could have easily been hacked into by telecoms in these countries. They got the emails first, and then routed them back to her home server. They could have hacked into both,” one Justice Department official close to the matter says.

Another Justice Department official adds: “Those telecommunications companies over there often have government workers in there. That telecom in that foreign country could then follow the trail of emails back to her server in the U.S. and break into the server” remotely over the Internet. At various points in this process, there were multiple entry points to hack into Clinton’s server to steal information, as well as eavesdrop, the Justice Department officials say.

This is the first indication that officials at the Justice Department are concerned that foreign telecom workers may have broken into Clinton’s emails and home server. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is currently investigating the national security issues surrounding Clinton’s emails and server.

The Justice Department officials also used the words “reckless”, “stunning,” and “unbelievable” in discussing the controversy swirling around Clinton’s use of a private, nongovernment email account, as well as her use of a personal Blackberry (BBRY), an Apple (AAPL) iPad, and home server while U.S. Secretary of State. The officials did not indicate they have any knowledge of a breach at this point.

As for the effort to designate Clinton’s emails as classified or unclassified, the Justice Department officials agreed that, as one put it: “Every email she sent is classified because she herself is classified, because she is both Secretary of State and a former first lady.”

In addition, there’s a growing belief among cyber security experts at web security places like Venafi and Data Clone Labs that Clinton’s emails were unprotected in the first three months of her tenure in 2009 as the nation’s top diplomat, based on Internet scans of her server Venafi conducted at that time.

“For the first three months of Secretary Clinton’s term in office, from early January to late March, access to her home server was not encrypted or authenticated with a digital certificate,” Kevin Bocek, vice president of security strategy and threat intelligence at Venafi tells FOX Business. “That opens the risk that Clinton’s user name and password were exposed and captured, particularly in places she traveled to at this time, like China or Egypt. And that raises issues of national security,” adding “Attackers could have eavesdropped on communications, particularly in places like China, where the Internet and telecom infrastructure are built to do that.”

Digital certificates are the bedrock of Internet security. They verify the Web authenticity and legitimacy of an email server, and they let the recipient of an email know that an email is from a trusted source. Essentially, digital certificates are electronic passports attached to an email that verifies that a user sending an email is who he or she claims to be.

Because it appears Clinton’s server did not have a digital certificate in the first three months of 2009, “a direct attack on her server was likely at this time, and the odds are fairly high it was successful,” says Ira Victor, director of the digital forensic practice at Data Clone Labs.

In and around January 13, 2009, the day of Clinton’s Senate confirmation hearings, the clintonemail.com domain name was registered. An estimated 62,320 emails were sent and received on Clinton’s private email account during her tenure as U.S. Secretary of State. Later, 31,830 emails were erased from her private server because they were deemed personal.

Although Clinton previously has argued that there was no classified material on her home server in Chappaqua, N.Y., the U.S. Department of State has deemed 403 emails as classified, with three designated “top secret” (the State Dept. itself has been the subject of cyber hacking).

Clinton has maintained her home server did have “numerous safeguards,” but it’s unclear specifically what security measures were installed, and what those layers were. In September, Clinton apologized on ABC News for using a home server to manage her U.S. Department of State electronic correspondence.

Although Clinton and her team have indicated her emails were not hacked, not knowing about a breach is different from being hacked, cyber analysts tell FOX Business. Her campaign staffers did not return calls or emails for comment. “Even the NSA, the CIA, and Fortune 500 companies know they cannot make that claim that they have not been hacked. Everyone can be hacked,” says Bocek.

FOX News recently reported that an intelligence source familiar with the FBI’s probe into Clinton’s server said that the FBI is now focused on whether there were violations of the federal Espionage Act pertaining to “gross negligence” in the safeguarding of national defense information. Sets of emails released show that Clinton and top aides continuously sent information about foreign governments and sensitive conversations with world leaders, among other things, FOX News reported.

Secure communications and devices are routine in the federal government. For example, President Barack Obama received a secure Blackberry from the National Security Agency after he was elected, a former top NSA official tells FOX Business.

“I could not recall that I ever heard that a secure Blackberry was provided to Hillary Clinton.  No one else can either,” the former NSA official says, adding, “There is no way her calls were properly secured if she used her [personal] Blackberry.” Blackberry declined comment.

The former NSA official says the same issue is at play for Clinton’s iPad. “While there have been recent advances in securing iPhones and iPads, these were not available, in my opinion, when she was Secretary of State and there would have to be a record that she sought permission to use them with encryption,” the former NSA official says.

When traveling overseas, U.S. secretaries of states use secure phones that ensure end-to-end encryption, and in some cases, mutual authentication of the parties calling, the former NSA official said. Communications are conducted via secured satellite, digital networks or Internet telephony.

“I think I can say, with some confidence, that once any decent foreign intelligence service discovered she was using her personal phone and iPad, she would be targeted and it would be a high priority operation,” the former NSA official said, adding, “if the calls were unencrypted, it would be no challenge at all while she was overseas — they just have to get to the nearest cell tower.”

The first three months of her tenure as Secretary of State would have been an ideal time for hackers to break in, cyber security experts say.

Specifically, experts point to work done by cyber security experts at Venafi, which has revealed a three-month gap in security for Clinton’s home server after the Palo Alto, Calif. firm’s team had conducted routine, “non-intrusive Internet scanning” in January 2009.

Venafi’s Bocek tells FOX Business that he and his team had picked up Clinton’s domain, clintonemail.com, at that time, and found that her home server had not been issued a digital certificate. That means email traffic to and from her server was unprotected from early January to late March 2009. During that time, Clinton traveled as U.S. Secretary of State to China, Indonesia, South Korea, Japan, Egypt, Palestine, Israel, Belgium, Switzerland, and Turkey.

“It also means anyone accessing her home server, including Clinton and other people, would have unencrypted access, including from devices and via web browsers,” says Bocek. “This means that during the first three months of Secretary Clinton’s term in office, web browser, smartphone, and tablet communications would not have been encrypted.”

Digital certificates are vital to Internet security. All “online banking, shopping, and confidential government communications wouldn’t be possible without the trust established by digital certificates,” says Bocek. “Computers in airplanes, cars, smartphones, all electronic communications, indeed trade around the world depend on the security from digital certificates.”

The Office of Management and Budget has now mandated that all federal web servers must use digital certificates by the end of 2016, Bocek notes.

If cyber hackers broke into Clinton’s server, they also could have easily tricked it into handing over usernames, passwords, or other sensitive information, Bocek noted.

“The concern is that log-on credentials could have been compromised during this time, especially given travel to China and elsewhere,” Bocek says opening the door to more lapses. “As we’ve seen with so many other breaches, to long-term, under-the-radar compromise by adversaries, hacks that Clinton and her team may not be aware of.”

Bocek adds: “Essentially, the cyber hacker would have looked to Clinton’s server like it was Secretary Clinton emailing.”

Digital forensic analyst Victor agrees. “It’s highly likely her emails sent during this time via her devices and on her server were not encrypted. More significantly, her log-on credentials, her user name and passwords, were almost certainly not encrypted,” says Victor, who has testified in cyber security cases as an expert forensic witness. “So that means emails from Clinton’s aides, like Huma Abedin, or anyone who had email accounts on her server, their communications were also likely unencrypted.”

Victor adds: “It’s highly likely all of their user names and passwords were being exposed on a regular basis to potential cyber attackers, with the high risk they were stolen by, for instance, government employees who could get the passwords for everyone Clinton was communicating with.”

Victor explains how Clinton’s emails from her devices could have been hacked, and malware could have been planted on her server. “Say Clinton emailed from her device during her Beijing trip in that 2009 period. Her emails would first get routed through the local, state-controlled Chinese telecom. The Chinese telecom captures those bits of emails that are broken up into electronic packets by the device she uses,” Victor explains.

Any device Clinton emailed from, Victor says, was constantly “polling and authenticating communications” between her device and her server. But all of the back-and-forth communication goes through, say, the Chinese telecom. When the device is polling her server with non-secure communications, it’s giving attackers repeat opportunities to breach.”

He continues: “If the connection was not protected, a state actor at the China telecom transmitting her email back to her server in the U.S. could breach both the device and the server at that point.”

Martin C. Libicki, a senior management scientist and cyber expert at Rand Corp., says that security on Clinton’s devices could have been higher than feared. But he says that, while the Blackberry device does have strong encryption, once Clinton zoomed emails from her Blackberry through the foreign telecom networks during those first three months of her tenure, “it was much easier to hack both the device and the server then.”

Venafi’s team, which included analysts Hari Nair and Gavin Hill, found Clinton and/or her team did eventually purchase digital certificates for the server and the clintonemail.com domain name starting in March 2009.

Victor added: “But the question that needed to be asked then was, once the certificate was installed, did Clinton and her team warn anyone she had emailed during those first three months about the poor security during that time, did they warn them to reset their security passwords on all their devices?”

Obama: ‘No Boots in Iraq, er…Just Kidding’

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One keynote: There will be a selected coalition meeting on troop operations and most stupid and weird and perhaps expected, the White House is including Russia, who was never in the coalition but worse, the White House is including Iran…..WTH…right?

September of 2014, Islamic State taunted Barack Obama about fighting them on the ground in Iraq. The recommendation for troops was recommended today and the White House is likely to accept the request.

This will not be an easy procedure as there is only a 2 page thinly crafted AUMF, Authorization for Use of Military Force. Congress has not approved this since it was dispatched for countless reasons such as the timeline, the funding and the strategy. Another AUMF is in order to advance any operation barely defined by Secretary of Defense Carter.

The chief spokesman for the self-named “Islamic State” (IS), also known as Isis, has given the clearest indication yet that his fighters would actually welcome a ground war in Iraq and Syria against US troops.

In a 42-minute audio message uploaded to the internet the group’s Syrian-born spokesman, who has taken the adopted name of Shaykh Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, mocks recent US air strikes and the moves to build an international coalition against Islamic State.

Addressing President Obama, the spokesman says: “Is this all you are capable of doing in this campaign of yours? Are America and all its allies… unable to come down to the ground?”

Statement on the U.S. Military Strategy in the Middle East and the Counter-ISIL Campaign before the Senate Armed Services Committee

10/27/2015 10:37 AM CDT

Statement on the U.S. Military Strategy in the Middle East and the Counter-ISIL Campaign before the Senate Armed Services Committee

Testimony as Delivered by Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, Washington, D.C., October 27, 2015
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member Reed, Members of the Committee: thanks for inviting us to come here before you to discuss our counter-ISIL campaign in Iraq and Syria, and along the way to address some of the concerns, Mr. Chairman, that you raised and to share with you, Senator Reed, some of the plans and initiatives that the Chairman [of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] and I are formulating for our campaign in both Iraq and Syria. This is the first time for me appearing before this Committee alongside Chairman Joe Dunford, who was just in the region last week, as was noted. I’m grateful to Joe for answering my and the President’s call to step down from what every Marine knows is a higher position – namely Commandant to the Marine Corps to become Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – and to this Committee for confirming Joe. Thank you. I’m glad to have you here with me today. Before I turn to the subject of today’s hearing, I want to reiterate – as I’ve said consistently since March and continue to believe – that Washington needs to come together behind a multi-year budget deal that supports our defense strategy, the troops and their families, and all elements of America’s national security and strength. I understand significant progress was made on this overnight and I am looking forward to reviewing the details, but I welcome this major positive development and applaud the members of this Committee for what you’re doing to help us get there. The Middle East presents a kaleidoscope of challenges, but there, as everywhere, our actions and strong military posture are guided by what’s in America’s interests. That’s our North Star. And amid this region’s complexity and uncertainty, those interests are to deter aggression; to bolster the security of our friends and allies, especially Israel; to ensure freedom of navigation in the Gulf; to check Iran’s malign influence even as we monitor the implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action; and, to degrade and ultimately defeat ISIL. This last one, ISIL, poses a threat to our people and to friendly countries not only in the Middle East but around the world. Today, I will first outline the changes in the execution of our strategy that we have considered, and are now pursuing militarily, to gather battlefield momentum in the fight against ISIL. Then I will address what Russia is doing in Syria, and why we won’t let it interfere with our campaign against ISIL. When I last spoke to this committee about our counter-ISIL campaign and its nine lines of essential military and non-military effort, I made three things clear about the military aspects – first, that we will deliver ISIL a lasting defeat; second, that truly lasting success would require enabling capable, motivated local forces on the ground, recognizing that this will take time and new diplomatic energy; and, third, that our strategy’s execution can and must and will be strengthened. All of that is still true. Our determination is unchanged, even as the situation continues to evolve, and we continue to adapt to execute our campaign more effectively. And today I’d like to elaborate on the third point and explain how we’re adapting our campaign to do more – reinforcing what we know works. The changes we’re pursuing can be described by what I call the “three R’s” – Raqqa, Ramadi, and Raids. Before I explain what they mean, let me also note that I took actions to streamline command-and-control of the counter-ISIL military campaign by assigning the entire effort to a single general officer, Lieutenant General Sean MacFarland, where in the urgency of the early phase of the campaign last year several layers were added to the general officer already present in Iraq. The first “R” is Raqqa, ISIL’s stronghold and administrative capital. We have been clear for some time that we need to keep up pressure on Raqqa, and that to that end we will support moderate Syrian forces fighting ISIL that have made territorial gains near Raqqa – indeed, some of them are within 30 miles of Raqqa today. The Syrian Arab Coalition, which we plan to strengthen through our new equipping approach – more on that in a moment – will work over time with other Syrian anti-ISIL forces to push towards Raqqa. To the south, we plan to further strengthen our partner, Jordan. And from the skies above, we expect to intensify our air campaign, including with additional U.S. and coalition aircraft, to target ISIL with a higher and heavier rate of strikes. This will include more strikes against ISIL high-value targets as our intelligence improves; also its oil enterprise, which is a critical pillar of ISIL’s financial infrastructure. As I said last Friday, we’ve already begun to ramp up these deliberate strikes. Part of this pressure includes our new approach to the Syria train-and-equip program. I, like President Obama and members of this committee, was disappointed with that program’s results. We accordingly examined the program this summer, and have since changed it. I use the word change – not end – change the program. While the old approach was to train and equip completely new forces outside of Syria before sending them into the fight, the new approach is to work with vetted leaders of groups that are already fighting ISIL, and provide equipment and some training to them and support their operations with airpower. This approach builds on successes that local Syrian Arab and Syrian Kurdish forces have made along Syria’s northern border to retake and hold ground from ISIL with the help of U.S. airstrikes and equipment resupplies. If done in concert as we intend, all these actions on the ground and from the air should help shrink ISIL’s territory into a smaller and smaller area and create new opportunities for targeting ISIL – ultimately denying this evil movement any safe haven in its supposed heartland. The second “R” is Ramadi, the capital of Iraq’s Anbar province, which serves as a critical example of the Abadi government’s commitment to work with local Sunni communities with our help to retake and hold ground from ISIL and in turn to build momentum to eventually go northward to Mosul. Under Prime Minister Abadi’s leadership, the Iraqis have begun to use American-made F-16s to support counter-ISIL operations, and have empowered capable battlefield commanders to step forward. As we see more progress towards assembling capable and motivated Iraqi forces under Baghdad’s control and including Sunni elements, we are willing to continue to provide more enabling capabilities and fire support to help them succeed. However, the Iraqi government and security forces will have to take certain steps militarily to make sure our progress sticks. We need to see more in the direction of multi-sectarian governance and defense leadership. For example, we’ve given the Iraqi government two battalions’ worth of equipment for mobilizing Sunni tribal forces; as we continue to provide this support, the Iraqi government must ensure it is distributed effectively. If local Sunni forces aren’t sufficiently equipped, regularly paid, and empowered as co-equal members of the Iraqi Security Forces, ISIL’s defeats in Anbar will only be temporary. The third and final “R” is raids, signaling that we won’t hold back from supporting capable partners in opportunistic attacks against ISIL, or conducting such missions directly, whether by strikes from the air or direct action on the ground. Last week’s rescue operation was led by Iraqi Kurdish forces, with U.S. advisers in support. One of those accompanying advisors, Master Sergeant Joshua Wheeler, heroically acted to ensure the overall success of the mission and lost his life in the process. The death of any service member is a tragedy, and as I told his family and teammates this weekend, we offer our condolences to Master Sergeant Wheeler’s loved ones for their loss. While our mission in Iraq is to train, advise, and assist our Iraqi partners, in situations such as that operation – where we have actionable intelligence and a capable partner force – we want to support our partners and we will. At the same time, the raid on Abu Sayyaf’s home, and strikes against Junaid Hussain and most recently Sanafi al-Nasr, should all serve notice to ISIL and other terrorist leaders that once we locate them, no target is beyond our reach As we’ve looked at how to gather momentum and adapt to the changing battlefield, some have discussed putting a buffer zone, humanitarian zone, or no-fly zone in Syria. We have analyzed various options and the political and military requirements of each. These options are complex and raise some challenges, which I am prepared to discuss in answer to your questions. Let me now turn to Russia’s involvement in Syria. To be clear, we are not cooperating with Russia, and we’re not letting Russia impact the pace or scope of our campaign against ISIL in Iraq and Syria. While we negotiated a document on safety of flight with the Russian Ministry of Defense, we do not align ourselves more broadly with their military actions, because instead of singularly attacking ISIL, as they said they were going to do, they are primarily attacking the Syrian opposition, as the Chairman has noted, which further fuels the tragic civil war there. Their actions suggest a doubling-down on their longstanding relationship with Assad – sending advisers, artillery, and aviation to enable and support the Assad regime and Iranian forces in attacking moderates who oppose the regime and are essential to Syria’s political transition. And it appears the vast majority of their strikes – by some estimates as high as 85 to 90 percent – use dumb bombs, which obviously increases the possibility of civilian casualties. So, as Russia acts in a coalition of two with Iran at its side, the United States will continue to strengthen our 65-nation global coalition. Even as we’ve reached an understanding with the Russians on safety protocols for coalition pilots over Syria, we will keep prosecuting our counter-ISIL campaign unabated. We will keep supporting the moderate Syrian opposition, along with our other commitments to friends and allies in the region. And, consistent with our strong and balanced approach towards Russian aggression elsewhere in the world, including NATO and Ukraine, we will keep the door open for Russia to contribute to efforts toward a political solution, in which – which in the final answer – analysis – is the only answer to the Syrian conflict. I have discussed the military strategy and accompanying campaign, but before I conclude, I remind the Committee that defeating ISIL and protecting America requires coordinated efforts across all of the so-called nine lines of effort – to include supporting effective governance in Iraq, enhancing intelligence collection, disrupting ISIL’s financing, countering ISIL’s messaging, stopping the flow of foreign fighters, providing humanitarian support, and protecting our homeland – where other departments and agencies of our government have the lead. Thank you.