Category Archives: Failed foreign policy

Obama is Selective on Human Rights Violators

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If Barack Obama was really true to his words, why not take on North Korea. The DPRK has operated gulags for 50 years where atrocities are beyond description and on par with Daesh (Islamic State).

‘Starvation food rations, forced labor, routine beatings, systematic torture and executions put the North Korean camps in the ranks of history’s worst prisons for political offenders. Originally modeled on the Soviet gulag, the North Korean camps have developed distinctive features of their own for which no terminology has yet been devised. Particularly horrifying is the incarceration of entire families, including children and grandparents, in order to isolate them from society and punish them because of their relationship to family members accused of political crimes. Rooting out “class enemies for three generations” was specifically ordered by Kim Il-sung, which at times has led to comparisons with Nazi death camps. An equally horrifying practice distinctive to North Korea is forced abortion regularly carried out and in the most brutal manner on women prisoners who illegally crossed the border into China, became pregnant by Chinese men and were forcibly repatriated to North Korea. In cases where the pregnancy is too advanced, guards beat the infants to death or bury them alive after they are born. Still another point of departure in North Korea is that all the residents of the kwan-li-so are denied any correspondence, visits or life saving parcels from family and friends. They are totally incommunicado.’

• Ahn Myong-chol, a former guard, reported that all three of the kwan-li-so at which he worked had isolated detention facilities in which many prisoners died from mistreatment, and that at Kwan-li-so No. 22 there were so many deaths by beatings from guards that the guards were told to be less violent.

• Former Prisoner # 37 was beaten at the Onsong An-jeon-bu police facility during his six month interrogation prior to being tried and sentenced to Chongo-ri kyo-hwa-so for smuggling food back and forth from China.

• Seo Jin was beaten so badly with wooden staves at the Onsong Bo-wi-bu interrogation center, and again at the Musan Bo-wi-bu interrogation center, that she could hardly walk. After transfer to the Musan An-jeon-bu detention facility, she was beaten by younger women guards when she objected to her third vaginal examination. And she was kicked on the legs and beaten on the back by guards at the Oro Kyo-yang-so penitentiary No. 55 when she did not keep up the required pace in her prison labor.

• Former Prisoner # 31 was whipped with a belt by male guards at the Onsong Bo-wi-bu interrogation facility, and severely beaten on her legs and back when, because of severe malnutrition, she was unable to maintain the pace of her prison labor.

• Bang Mi-sun was severely beaten on her legs with a wooden stave because she could not keep up with the work pace at the Musan An-jeon-burun ro-dong-dan-ryeon-dae mobile labor brigade owing to injuries she suffered while trafficked in China prior to her repatriation. Infection from this beating left her partially crippled. At the Musan An-jeon-bu pre-trial detention ku-ryu-jang, she and other prisoners were required to sit motionless for days, with fellow detainees forced to beat other detainees who moved.

For more testimony, documents and photos click here for the report.

Ed Schroeder’s Military Intelligence Report: North Korean Defector Details ‘Human Experiments’

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Im Cheon-yong says that witnessing mentally and physically handicapped children being used in chemical weapons tests carried out by the North Korean military was the last straw.

An officer in North Korea’s special forces, Im had reservations about the nation in which he was living, and the regime that he served to the best of his abilities, but the “special training” he was required to undergo at a military academy in North Pyongan Province for the regime’s elite troops helped to convince him that he needed to defect.

“If you want to graduate from this academy, you need to learn how to confuse the enemy without revealing your own forces, how to carry out assassinations, how to use chemical weapons and so on,” he said.

‘The regime does this because it insists to their people that North Korea is heaven on Earth,’ says Shigemura

“And then we have what they call ‘field learning’. For the biological and chemical warfare tests, we needed ‘objects’,” he added. “At first, they used the chemical agents on mice and showed us how they died. Then we watched the instructors carrying out the tests on humans to show us how a person dies. I saw it with my own eyes,” Im claimed.

He said he got repulsed by what he had witnessed and managed to get over the border into China and arrived in South Korea in the mid 1990s. Now 50 years old, Im is a prominent advocate of the regime change in Pyongyang and president of both the Soldiers’ Alliance for Free North Korea and The Fellowship Foundation for Freedom.

Abuse of citizens

Some North Korea experts say that Im’s experiences tally with other defectors’ tales of abuse of citizens of the world’s most isolated state. Some of that testimony was shared with the United Nations’ Commission of Inquiry before it issued its damning report on the state of human rights in the North in February.

“There are too many of these stories now for them not to be true,” Toshimitsu Shigemura, a professor at Tokyo’s Waseda University, and an authority on North Korean affairs, told DW. “There were reports in the past but it was difficult to confirm them, but the testimony that is emerging now is consistent and from numerous sources,” he added.

“Anyone who goes to Pyongyang will notice that there are no disabled people about at all,” he said. “We now know that they are being taken away as children and incarcerated in special camps. The regime does this because it insists to their people that North Korea is heaven on Earth, and there can be no disabled people in paradise,” he said.

But Kim Myong-chol, executive director of The Centre for North Korea-US Peace, dismisses Im’s claims.

“It is the same nonsense,” he told DW. “This guy – and plenty of others like him – are just looking to make money by attracting the attention of South Korea and the US. That is why they make these lies up. People like him know nothing about the real North Korea and all they care about is making money from their lies.”

Experiments on humans

‘The authorities buy disabled children from their parents for a few kilograms of rice,’ claims Im

According to Im, experiments on humans date back to the late 1960s and one of the first facilities used for chemical and biological weapons tests on humans was constructed on the military controlled island of Mayang-do, just off the east coast port of Sinpo, which is also North Korea’s most important submarine base. A second facility was subsequently constructed on an island off the west coast of the peninsula, while a third is in operation alongside a political prison camp outside the city of Hyanghari, the defector claims.

“They use anthrax bacterium as well as 40 different types of chemical weapons that the regime has developed itself,” Im said. “Through these experiments, they know the effects of the weapons and the amounts to be used.”

To give the regime’s actions legitimacy, children born with mental or physical disabilities are not taken away by force – although, in reality, few citizens of North Korea have the right to resist the authorities’ will, says Im.

“They want to do it ‘legally’ and they don’t want to lose the support of the people, so they buy disabled children from their parents for a few kilograms of rice,” he said. “The officials say they will take care of the children.”

Boehner’s Office Tallying the Obama Lies

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One may really need a calculator to tabulate the lies from Obama, but at least a staffer has been assigned to keep current. While political correctness is part of the verbal DNA in Washington calling lies ‘Pinocchios’, one must understand that no legislator in decades has used the word ‘lie’ out of the whole political deference thing as lies and omissions are as common pork laden bills.

The State of the Union Speech is coming up, so keep your own tally for 2015.

The President’s Year in Pinocchios

December 31, 2014|Matt Wolking –

In 2013, President Obama’s promise that “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it,” was named Politifact’s “Lie of the Year.” In 2014, amid a mountain of stumbles and scandals, his rhetoric wasn’t received any better.

In May, the White House claimed President Obama first heard about secret waiting lists and deaths at the VA on the news, despite evidence to the contrary. CNN’s Drew Griffin said this was absurd, and more of the administration’s sloppy spin prompted National Journal’s Ron Fournier to ask, “How Dumb Does Obama Think We Are?”

It was a prescient question considering comments made by frequent White House visitor and ObamaCare architect Jonathan Gruber, who said “the stupidity of the American voter” was “critical to getting the thing to pass” and bragged repeatedly about helping the president pull one over on the public. When asked about this, President Obama pretended he didn’t know that guy and denied misleading Americans about the law.

His unilateral action was another lowlight. President Obama said 22 times that he couldn’t ignore or create his own immigration law – and then he did. Just like his reasoning for rejecting the Keystone pipeline, his explanations for his flip-flop on executive action didn’t fool anyone.

And that was, of course, just one of these four things he hid from Americans until after the November election.

Looking back on 2014, from the continued cover-up of the IRS scandal, to all the president’s missing hard drives, to his dishonesty regarding the national debt, to the administration’s bogus ObamaCare enrollment numbers, there’s a clear pattern of hiding the truth and misleading Americans.

Indeed, fact checkers had a field day with President Obama this year. The Washington Post alone awarded him a total of 47 Pinocchios, plus one Upside-Down Pinocchio (the worst possible rating).

Here they are, in chronological order:

  • “Unprecedented inspections help the world verify every day that Iran is not building a bomb.” (Two Pinocchios, 2/6/14)
  • “We’ve got close to 7 million Americans who have access to health care for the first time because of Medicaid expansion.” (Four Pinocchios, 2/24/14)
  • “We didn’t have billions of dollars of commercials [for ObamaCare] like some critics did.” (Two Pinocchios, 4/4/14)
  • “Today, the average full-time working woman earns just 77 cents for every dollar a man earns … in 2014, that’s an embarrassment. It is wrong.” (Two Pinocchios, 4/9/14)
  • “Thirty-five percent of people who enrolled through the federal marketplace are under the age of 35.” (Two Pinocchios, 4/22/14)
  • “[Republicans’] willingness to say no to everything — the fact that since 2007, they have filibustered about 500 pieces of legislation that would help the middle class just gives you a sense of how opposed they are to any progress[.]” (Four Pinocchios, 5/9/14)
  • “I want to announce a few more steps that we’re taking that are going to be good for job growth and good for our economy, and that we don’t have to wait for Congress to do. They are going to be steps that generate more clean energy, waste less energy overall, and leave our kids and our grandkids with a cleaner, safer planet in the process.” (Two Pinocchios, 5/16/14)
  • “At the beginning of my presidency, we built a coalition that imposed sanctions on the Iranian economy, while extending the hand of diplomacy to the Iranian government.” (Three Pinocchios, 6/2/14)
  • “When you talk about the moderate opposition [in Syria], many of these people were farmers or dentists or maybe some radio reporters who didn’t have a lot of experience fighting.” (Three Pinocchios, 6/26/14)
  • “So far this year, Republicans in Congress have blocked every serious idea to strengthen the middle class.” (Three Pinocchios, 7/15/14)
  • “If Congress fails to fund it [the Highway Trust Fund], it runs out of money.  That could put nearly 700,000 jobs at risk.” (Two Pinocchios, 7/16/14)
  • “Keep in mind, I wasn’t specifically referring to ISIL [as a jayvee team].” (Four Pinocchios, 9/3/14)
  • “Over the past eight years, the United States has reduced our total carbon pollution by more than any other nation on Earth.” (Two Pinocchios, 9/25/14)
  • “If we hadn’t taken this on, and [health insurance] premiums had kept growing at the rate they did in the last decade, the average premium for family coverage today would be $1,800 higher than they are.  Now, most people don’t notice it, but that’s $1,800 you don’t have to pay out of your pocket or see vanish from your paycheck.  That’s like a $1,800 tax cut.” (Two Pinocchios, 10/17/14)
  • “Health care inflation has gone down every single year since the law [ObamaCare] passed, so that we now have the lowest increase in health care costs in 50 years–which is saving us about $180 billion in reduced overall costs to the federal government and in the Medicare program.” (Three Pinocchios, 11/6/14)
  • “We’ve created more jobs in the United States than every other advanced economy combined since I came into office.” (One Pinocchio, 11/11/14)
  • “Well, actually, my position hasn’t changed [on immigration executive action].” (Upside-Down Pinocchio, 11/18/14)
  • “Understand what this [Keystone XL pipeline] project is. It is providing the ability of Canada to pump their oil, send it through our land, down to the Gulf, where it will be sold everywhere else.” (Three Pinocchios, 11/20/14)
  • “If you look, every president — Democrat and Republican — over decades has done the same thing. George H.W. Bush — about 40 percent of the undocumented persons, at the time, were provided a similar kind of relief as a consequence of executive action.” (Three Pinocchios, 11/24/14)

– See more at: http://www.speaker.gov/general/president-s-year-pinocchios#sthash.8H0npCgI.dpuf

The Secret Back Channels to Putin

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Add sanctions. Remove sanctions. Amend sanctions. Call the old-timers, try anything. Why? Putin is on the rocks financially but remains defiant. Why is the White House attempting to reset relations again? Could it be that Russia has more clandestine missions planned that includes the Baltic States or Europe?

(Reuters) – Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a televised New Year’s address on Wednesday that the “return home” of Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula to Moscow’s control would forever remain an important chapter in Russia’s history.

Putin is facing the biggest challenge of his 15-year rule as the Russian economy is sliding sharply into recession, hurt by Western sanctions over the Ukraine crisis and falling prices for oil, Russia’s chief export.

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Inside Obama’s Secret Outreach to Russia

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President Barack Obama’s administration has been working behind the scenes for months to forge a new working relationship with Russia, despite the fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin has shown little interest in repairing relations with Washington or halting his aggression in neighboring Ukraine.

This month, Obama’s National Security Council finished an extensive and comprehensive review of U.S policy toward Russia that included dozens of meetings and input from the State Department, Defense Department and several other agencies, according to three senior administration officials. At the end of the sometimes-contentious process, Obama made a decision to continue to look for ways to work with Russia on a host of bilateral and international issues while also offering Putin a way out of the stalemate over the crisis in Ukraine.

“I don’t think that anybody at this point is under the impression that a wholesale reset of our relationship is possible at this time, but we might as well test out what they are actually willing to do,” a senior administration official told me. “Our theory of this all along has been, let’s see what’s there. Regardless of the likelihood of success.”

Leading the charge has been Secretary of State John Kerry. This fall, Kerry even proposed going to Moscow and meeting with Putin directly. The negotiations over Kerry’s trip got to the point of scheduling, but ultimately were scuttled because there was little prospect of demonstrable progress.

In a separate attempt at outreach, the White House turned to an old friend of Putin’s for help. The White House called on former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to discuss having him call Putin directly, according to two officials. It’s unclear whether Kissinger actually made the call. The White House and Kissinger both refused to comment for this column.

Kerry has been the point man on dealing with Russia because his close relationship with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov represents the last remaining functional diplomatic channel between Washington and Moscow. They meet often, often without any staff members present, and talk on the phone regularly. Obama and Putin, on the other hand, are known to have an intense dislike for each other and very rarely speak.

In several conversations with Lavrov, Kerry has floated an offer to Russia that would pave the way for a partial release of some of the most onerous economic sanctions. Kerry’s conditions included Russia adhering to September’s Minsk agreement and ceasing direct military support for the Ukrainian separatists. The issue of Crimea would be set aside for the time being, and some of the initial sanctions that were put in place after Crimea’s annexation would be kept in place.

“We are willing to isolate the issues of Donetsk and Luhansk from the issue of Crimea,” another senior administration official told me, naming two regions in Eastern Ukraine under separatist control. “If there was a settlement on Donetsk and Luhansk, there could be a removal of some sanctions while maintaining sanctions with regard to Crimea. That represents a way forward for Putin.”

Meanwhile, Kerry has been proposing increased U.S.-Russian cooperation on a wide range of international issues. Earlier this month, he invited Lavrov to a last-minute diplomatic confab in Rome to discuss the the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

After one meeting with Lavrov in Paris in October, Kerry announced that he had discussed potential U.S.-Russian cooperation on Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea, Syria and Yemen. But the apparent warming was overshadowed by Lavrov’s quick denial of Kerry’s claim that Russia had agreed to assist in the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State in Iraq.

Kerry has seemed more enthusiastic about mending ties with Russia than Obama himself. After the president gave a blistering critique of Russian behavior in a major United Nations speech, saying that “Russian aggression in Europe recalls the days when large nations trampled small ones in pursuit of territorial ambition,” Kerry urged Lavrov to ignore his boss’s remarks, according to Lavrov. “Kerry said we have so many serious things to discuss that of course that was unfortunate, let’s not focus on that,” Lavrov told Russian reporters.

State Department officials insist that Kerry is clear-eyed about the challenges of trying to work with Russia, but that he believes there is no other responsible option than to see what can be accomplished.

“Secretary Kerry is not advocating internally or with Russia for a reset in the relationship, and in fact in meetings he has taken a strong and at times skeptical stance,” one senior State Department official told me. “As the nation’s chief diplomat he is simply always exploring ways to make relationships more productive.”

There is also a belief among many both inside the State Department and the White House that sanctions are working. The Russian economy is tanking, albeit due largely to collapsing oil prices and not targeted punishments. One senior administration official argued that absent the sanctions, Putin might have been even more aggressive in Ukraine. Moreover, this official said, the sanctions need time to work and might yet prove to have greater effect on Putin’s decision-making in the months ahead: “We’ll see how they feel as their economy continues to deteriorate and the Ukrainian economy refuses to collapse.”

If the Russians are getting ready to cave, they aren’t showing it. Putin remains defiant and Russian military assistance to the Ukrainian rebels continues. The Russian leadership has been rejecting Kerry’s overtures both in public and private. Diplomatic sources said that Lavrov has refused to even discuss Kerry’s conditions for partial easing of sanctions. And Putin has made a hobby of bashing the U.S. in public remarks.

To many of the administration’s critics, especially Republicans on Capitol Hill, pursuing engagement with Moscow is based on naivety and wishful thinking.

“It’s a strategy worthy in the finest tradition of Neville Chamberlain,” incoming Senate Armed Services Chairman John McCain told me. “I think the Russians are doing fine. Meanwhile, what price has Vladimir Putin paid? Very little.”

The legislative branch has also been active on Russia this year, but its efforts run counter to the administration’s policy and sometimes have the indirect effect of putting more roadblocks in front of the Obama-Kerry push to find a way forward.

On Dec. 18, Obama reluctantly signed a bill authorizing new Russia sanctions and military aid to Ukraine that was overwhelmingly passed by Congress. Afterward, the White House awkwardly said that the legislation did not signify any change in policy.

And this week, the State Department sanctioned four more Russian officials, but not over Ukraine. The officials were added to a list of human rights violators under the Sergei Magnitsky Act of 2012, named after the anti-corruption lawyer who died in a Russian prison. In response, the Russian foreign ministry issued a statement saying that the Magnitsky Act sanctions “place in question the prospects for bilateral cooperation in resolving the situation surrounding the Iranian nuclear program, the Syrian crisis, and other acute international issues.”

These latest punishments show that it may be impossible to de-link the problems in the bilateral relationship from the opportunities, as the Obama administration wants to do. They also show that there will always be chances for those in Washington and Moscow who want to stoke the tensions to do so, jeopardizing any progress.

Some experts believe that any plan to warm U.S.-Russian relations is unlikely to succeed because it doesn’t have the full support of either president.

“It’s very clear that between the Putin Kremlin and the Obama White House there is a very bad chemistry. Its not a question of simply distrust, it’s a question of intense dislike between the two leaders,” said Dimitri Simes, president of the Center for the National Interest.

Also, some experts feel, placing the diplomacy in the Kerry-Lavrov channel dooms its outcome, because the Russians know that Kerry himself has no power to make major decisions and Lavrov has to be careful not to be seen as cozying up to the U.S.

“The more Kerry creates a perception he has a special relationship with Lavrov, the more he puts Lavrov in a difficult position with officials in his own capital, starting with Putin,” said Simes. “It’s clear that when Kerry deals with Lavrov and hopes that because they have overlapping interests, that would allow cooperation where useful, that is not a model of relationship that Putin is prepared to accept.”

Obama has made it clear that in his last two years in office he is prepared to make big moves on foreign policy even if they face political or legislative opposition, such as normalizing relations with Cuba or pursuing a nuclear deal with Iran. But when it comes to Russia, he is unwilling to place his own credibility behind any outreach to his nemesis Putin.

The administration’s cautious engagement with Moscow is logical: Why not seek a balance in a complicated and important bilateral relationship? But by choosing a middle ground between conciliation and confrontation — not being generous enough to entice Russia’s cooperation yet not being tough enough to stop Putin’s aggression in Eastern Europe — Obama’s policy risks failing on both fronts.

 

Diplomatic Suicide, Iran Celebrates

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WASHINGTON (AP) — While President Barack Obama hasn’t ruled out the possibility of reopening a U.S. Embassy in Iran, Republicans say the Senate will vote within weeks on a bill to impose more sanctions on Tehran over its nuclear program.

Obama was asked in an NPR interview broadcast on Monday whether he could envision opening an embassy there during his final two years in office.

“I never say never,” Obama said, adding that U.S. ties with Tehran must be restored in steps.

Washington and its partners are hoping to clinch a deal with Iran by July that would set long-term limits on Iran’s enrichment of uranium and other activity that could produce material for use in nuclear weapons. Iran says its program is solely for energy production and medical research purposes. It has agreed to some restrictions in exchange for billions of dollars in relief from U.S. economic sanctions.

Then…..

Iran Is Getting Away With Murder

Achieving a nuclear deal with Tehran is hugely important. But stopping Iran from slaughtering innocent Syrians is a worthy goal.

In an interview in late 2006, I asked then-Senator Barack Obama to talk about the challenges to rational deterrence theory posed by the behavior of rogue states. “Whatever you want to say about the Soviets,” Obama answered, “they were essentially conservative. The North Korean regime and the Iranians are driven more by ideology and fantasy.”

Earlier this year, I asked Obama the following question: “What is more dangerous: Sunni extremism or Shia extremism?”

His answer was revealing, suggestive of an important change in the way he has come to view the Iranian regime. He started by saying, as would be expected, “I’m not big on extremism generally.” And then he argued—in part by omission—that he finds the principal proponent of Shiite extremism, the regime in Tehran, more rational, and more malleable, than the main promoters of Sunni radicalism.

“I don’t think you’ll get me to choose on those two issues,” he said. “What I’ll say is that if you look at Iranian behavior, they are strategic, and they’re not impulsive. They have a worldview, and they see their interests, and they respond to costs and benefits. And that isn’t to say that they aren’t a theocracy that embraces all kinds of ideas that I find abhorrent, but they’re not North Korea. They are a large, powerful country that sees itself as an important player on the world stage, and I do not think has a suicide wish, and can respond to incentives. And that’s the reason why they came to the table on sanctions.”

Since becoming president, Obama has made the argument that Iran could be induced, cajoled, and pressured into compromise, a view that has been proven provisionally, partially, correct: Sanctions, plus Obama’s repeated (and, to my mind, at least, credible) threat of military action, convinced Iran to temporarily halt many aspects of its nuclear program in exchange for limited sanctions relief. But Obama and his international partners have been less successful at bringing Iran to permanent denuclearization.

A long-term, verifiable arrangement that keeps Iran perpetually a year or more from nuclear breakout is surpassingly important for the national security of the United States (as Obama noted in this interview); for the health and safety of America’s friends in the Middle East; and for the cause of nuclear nonproliferation in the world’s most volatile and dangerous region. Over the past year, the two sides of international nuclear negotiations have apparently moved somewhat closer to each other, and when the second round of talks came to an end without achieving a deal, both sides agreed that yet another negotiation extension was in order. As Iran and its interlocutors move into what stands to be the fateful year for these negotiations, a credible deal does not look to be achievable; so far, at least, the Iranians seem unwilling to make the truly creative concessions necessary to meet the West’s minimum requirements.

Especially if a deal is ultimately proven to be unachievable, another question will arise: Is the price the U.S. has paid to reach this elusive deal too high? An admirable aspect of Obama’s foreign-policy making is his ability to coolly focus on core issues to the exclusion of what he considers to be extraneous matters. This is also, however, a non-admirable aspect of his policymaking, in particular when the subject at hand is Iran’s role in supporting the killer Assad regime in Syria.

Obama seems to believe that a nuclear deal is, in a way, like Casaubon‘s key to all mythologies: Many good things, he believes, could flow from a nuclear compromise. In an interview last week with NPR’s Steve Inskeep, the president suggested that a nuclear agreement would help Iran become “a very successful regional power that was also abiding by international norms and international rules.” This, he said, “would be good for everybody. That would be good for the United States, that would be good for the region, and most of all, it would be good for the Iranian people.”

This is a wonderful notion, the idea that the end of Iran’s isolation could lead it to moderate its more extreme impulses. But there isn’t much in the way of proof to suggest that Iran’s rulers are looking to join an international order whose norms are defined by the United States and its allies. In fact, there is proof of something quite opposite: Iran seems as interested as ever in becoming a regional hegemon, on its own terms. And its supreme leader, and his closest confidants, have made it clear, over and over again, that he is not interested in normalizing relations with the United States.

Across the greater Middle East, Iran’s efforts to extend its influence have been blunt and brutal: It supports Shiite insurrections in Yemen and Bahrain; it attempts to manipulate Lebanese politics through its Beirut-based proxy, Hezbollah; it intervenes in Gaza and against the already-fading hope for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Arab crisis; and certainly its unceasing threats to eradicate a fellow member-state of the United Nations, Israel, suggest that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has a vision for Iran that differs from Obama’s.

But nothing underscores the Iranian regime’s imperialistic, hegemonic nature more than its support for the Assad regime in Damascus. Without Iran’s assistance, Assad would have fallen a long time ago. The death toll in Syria is more than 200,000; half of Syria’s population has been displaced. These dark achievements of the Assad regime would not have been possible without Iran. Thousands of Hezbollah and Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps troops and advisers, plus Iranian weaponry, have made all the difference for Assad. As a recent study by the Middle East Institute states:

It is no longer accurate to describe the war in Syria as a conflict between Syrian rebels on the one hand and Bashar al-Assad’s regime forces “supported” by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards (IRG), Hezbollah, and Iraqi militias on the other. Most major battles in Syria—along the frontlines of regime-held areas—are now being directed and fought by the IRG and Hezbollah, along with other non-Syrian Shi‘i militias, with Assad forces in a supportive or secondary role. …

One result of this heavy Iranian involvement in the war in Syria has been a change in the nature of the relationship between the Syrian and the Iranian regimes. From historically being mutually beneficial allies, the Iranian regime is now effectively the dominant force in regime-held areas of Syria, and can thus be legally considered an “occupying force,” with the responsibilities that accompany such a role.

There was no commensurate effort made by opponents of Assad to help those Syrians who were trying to overthrow him. President Obama called on Assad to go, but kept the U.S. on the sidelines through the first years of the Syrian civil war, for reasons he has explained in many places, including here.

Today, the U.S. and its allies are fighting in the Syrian theater, but they are fighting Assad’s putative enemies, the Sunni extremists of ISIS, not Assad and his Iranian allies. And yet ISIS is a derivative problem of a larger crisis: Without Assad—which is to say, without Iran—there would be no ISIS “caliphate” in Syria in the first place. The midwives of ISIS are Assad, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, and Ayatollah Khamenei. 

If Assad had been overthrown early in the civil war, a more moderate, multi-confessional Syrian government could have plausibly emerged to take its place. The early rebels, who frightened the Assad regime to its core, were not seeking to build a cross-border caliphate on a foundation of medieval cruelty; they were simply seeking to remove Assad’s boot from their necks. As the Assad regime, with Iran’s invaluable help, recovered from the first blows of the rebellion, many Sunni Syrians, seeking help everywhere but finding it mainly among radicals, became radicalized themselves. This was an explicable, if not justifiable, reaction to the mortal threat posed by what they saw as a massed Shiite threat.

Earlier this year, in a conversation about the Obama administration’s Middle East strategy, Senator John McCain brought me up short when he criticized the president for launching attacks on a symptom of the Syrian civil war, ISIS, rather than its root cause. He told me that the U.S. should be battling the Assad regime at the same time it attacks Sunni terrorists. I asked him the following question: “Wouldn’t the generals say to you, ‘You want me to fight ISIS, and you want me to fight the guys who are fighting ISIS, at the same time? Why would we bomb guys who are bombing ISIS? That would turn this into a crazy standoff.’”

McCain answered: “Our ultimate job is not only to defeat ISIS but to give the Syrian people the opportunity to prevail as well. … If we do this right, if we do the right kind of training and equipping of the Free Syrian Army, plus air strikes, plus taking out Bashar Assad’s air assets, we could reverse the battlefield equation.”

There is even less reason to believe today that the Free Syrian Army, such as it is, is capable of fighting the Assad regime (and ISIS) effectively. So at this late stage, McCain’s policy prescriptions may be unrealistic. But his diagnosis of the core problem seems tragically accurate.

“I don’t think ISIS would exist if Bashar al-Assad had been removed two or three years ago,” McCain told me when we revisited the question earlier this month. “He was on his way out until the Iranians brought in 5,000 Hezbollah fighters, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps came in, to train Assad’s troops and provide them with weapons, including the barrel bombs, which are horrible weapons of war.”

McCain argues that the Obama administration has avoided confronting Assad in part for fear that doing so would alienate Assad’s patrons in Tehran, the same men who are in charge of the nuclear file. “The whole theory hinges on a major breakthrough in the nuclear talks, that once they get their deal, Iran will stop funding Hamas, stop supporting Hezbollah, stop destabilizing Yemen, that they’ll join us in fighting extremism. So they have to get a nuclear deal at all costs, and not do anything in Syria. This is just so farfetched it’s delusional.”

I wouldn’t go so far as to call proponents of this theory delusional, but let’s say that they are not approaching the issue of leverage in an effective way. Gary Samore, a former Obama administration official who was in charge of the National Security Council’s Iran nuclear file, told me this month that he would use Iran’s deep exposure in Syria to U.S. advantage.

“Confronting Iran forcefully in Syria and Iraq increases chances for a nuclear deal because Iran will only meet our nuclear demands if it feels weak and vulnerable,” Samore wrote in an email. “Conversely, Iran’s sense that it is winning in Syria and that it is indispensable in Iraq decreases chances for a nuclear because the Supreme Leader won’t make nuclear concessions if he feels strong and ascendant.”

Is it likely that Obama will move toward a policy of containing Iran in Syria, and away from his more accommodationist stance? Arab states that count Iran as an enemy and the U.S. as a friend have asked him repeatedly over the past two years to treat Iran as a root cause of the Syrian catastrophe. But Obama appears focused solely on achieving a nuclear deal with Iran, in part because he seems to believe that Iran is ready to play the part of rational and constructive actor, rather than extremist would-be hegemon. I hope he’s right, and I hope he achieves a strong nuclear deal, but I worry that he is empowering an Iranian government that isn’t about to change in any constructive way. In the meantime, the Iranian regime continues to get away, quite literally, with murder.

Then there is the economic outlook for the Middle East and Iran and the tribal sects.

Likewise in Iraq, which like Iran has a Shiite majority, Tehran’s consolidated influence since the U.S. troop withdrawal in 2011 has contributed to sectarian polarization and left the government dependent on Iranian-backed militias to fight the Sunni extremist group Islamic State.

With Iran’s economy crippled by the double whammy of international sanctions and falling oil prices, Syria and Iraq will become even more of a burden in 2015.

In the end, Mr. Khamenei’s two big projects could merge into one during 2015 or diverge. A nuclear deal with world powers could open the door to further cooperation with the U.S. in Iraq and Syria. But failure to strike such a deal could spark new tensions on all fronts between Iran and the international community.

Guantanamo Construction Contract for Education?

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Just before Christmas of 2014, Barack Obama made a stunning public announcement regarding normalizing relations with Cuba. It appears that those relations have been underway for some time and the activities are head-shaking.

Just recently a construction contract was awarded for Gitmo. If Obama is releasing detainees and transferring them to destinations unknown, then what is being constructed? If he is going to escalate releases then what needs to be repaired or upgraded and for what? When Russia, Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua are colluding for military build ups and surveillance on the West, can we trust White House decisions on the future of Gitmo? Read on and make your own determination.

Islands Mechanical Contractor, Inc.,* Middleburg, Florida, is being awarded $7,727,970 for firm-fixed-price task order 0015 under a previously awarded multiple award construction contract (N69450-12-D-1274) for refurbishment of the Taurman Avenue Electrical Substation at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay. The work to be performed provides for the design and construction of new outdoor substation infrastructure to recapitalize the existing outdoor substation which has deteriorated and needs to be replaced. The project includes construction of site improvements, new metal support structure with concrete foundations and concrete equipment pads, security fencing surrounding gravel interior space, grounding system, medium voltage busing systems, vacuum circuit breakers, liquid filled transformers, enclosed metal-clad switchgear, manual isolation and bypass switches, lightning and surge protection, and modular enclosure to house solid-state, programmable monitoring, relaying and controlling system equipment. Work will be performed in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and is expected to be completed by August 2016. Fiscal 2015 Navy working capital funds in the amount of $7,727,970 are being obligated on this award and will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. Two proposals were received for this task order. The Naval Facilities Engineering Command, Southeast, Jacksonville, Florida, is the contracting activity.

GUANTANAMO NAVY BASE, Cuba. — The base with the most expensive prison on earth is getting one of the world’s priciest schools — a $65 million building with classroom space for, at most, 275 kindergarten through high school students.

Do the math: That’s nearly a quarter-million-dollars per school child. In Miami-Dade County a new school costs perhaps $30,000 per student.

Congress recently allocated the funds for the new W.T. Sampson School to put the children of American sailors stationed here under one roof. It will meet Americans with Disabilities Act standards, have a proper public address system, computer and science labs, art and music rooms, a playground, cafeteria and gym — just like any new school anywhere in America.

But the investment also illustrates the Pentagon’s intent to keep this base open even if President Barack Obama manages to move out the last 132 war-on-terror captives, and close the prison run by 2,000 or more temporary troops and contractors.

GUANTANAMO NAVY BASE, Cuba. — The base with the most expensive prison on earth is getting one of the world’s priciest schools — a $65 million building with classroom space for, at most, 275 kindergarten through high school students.

Do the math: That’s nearly a quarter-million-dollars per school child. In Miami-Dade County a new school costs perhaps $30,000 per student.

Congress recently allocated the funds for the new W.T. Sampson School to put the children of American sailors stationed here under one roof. It will meet Americans with Disabilities Act standards, have a proper public address system, computer and science labs, art and music rooms, a playground, cafeteria and gym — just like any new school anywhere in America.

But the investment also illustrates the Pentagon’s intent to keep this base open even if President Barack Obama manages to move out the last 132 war-on-terror captives, and close the prison run by 2,000 or more temporary troops and contractors.

And it offers a lesson on the cost of doing business out here on Cuba’s southeastern tip where under the U.S. trade embargo all business is conducted independent of the local economy.

Base not prison

Guantánamo Bay may be best known for its war-on-terror prison separated from the rest of the island by a Cuban minefield. But this 45-square-mile U.S. Navy base, leased from Cuba for $4,085 a year that Havana won’t accept, functions like a small town of 6,000 residents.

Sailors and civilians on long-term contracts run the airport, seaport, public works division and a small community hospital. They bring their families and belongings, get suburban-style homes, scuba dive in the Caribbean — and send their children to two U.S. government schools that are nearer to the base McDonald’s and bowling alley than the Detention Center Zone.

This year, there are 243 students — 164 at the elementary school and the rest at a separate building for middle and high school students whose mascot is a pirate.

In Florida, it typically costs $20,000 to $30,000 per student to build a school, according to Jaime Torrens, chief facilities officer for Miami-Dade County Public Schools. But South Florida has a “competitive environment where labor is readily available, materials are readily available.”

Guantánamo’s costs are so much higher “because all materials must be barged to the island, and the construction contractor’s crews must live on site for the duration of construction,” said Cindy Gibson, spokeswoman for the unit that runs the Department of Defense schools.

She estimated building costs are “70 percent higher than the average construction costs experienced in the United States.”

The money for the new Sampson School is tucked inside the massive, $585 billion national defense spending act that, among other things, funds the war on the Islamic State and requires that new construction projects at Guantánamo have an “enduring military value” independent of the detention operations.

It also funds the renovation or new construction of six other Defense Department schools in Belgium, Japan and North Carolina. The next most expensive is another K-12 school being built on the outskirts of Brussels for another American enclave — the children of Americans assigned to the U.S. Army or NATO at a cost of $173,441 per pupil.

Consider this: Miami High School, with an enrollment of 2,906, spent $55 million to renovate and expand its 1928 Mediterranean Revival building, working out to $18,926 per student.

The Sampson School is being built for a maximum 275-member student body ($237,054 per pupil) at one location, something smaller but similar to the exclusive 1,200-student Miami Country Day School, whose head of school John Davies’ first reaction to the price-tag was “Wow, $65 million?”

For $65 million, he said, “we could probably do our entire new master plan for the campus, a center for the arts, parking garage, new gym, new cafeteria and pretty substantial classroom building.”

But Davies studied the building proposal and found “a pretty adequate but not over-the-top construction program.” He searched the specifications and justification and “it doesn’t strike me as one of those $600 toilets or $1,000 hammer kinds of things that we get every once and a while from the GAO” — the General Accounting Office that sometimes uncovers embarrassing examples of profligate U.S. government spending.

“Obviously we’re thinking we’ll be in Guantánamo for a long time,” he said.

Number crunch

To be sure, there’s no exact science for evaluating costs at the U.S.-controlled corner of Cuba. Any cost-benefit analysis is mired in political debate and difference of opinion.

Last year, for example, some Democrats in Congress got a Pentagon comptroller report on what it costs to run Guantánamo’s sprawling detention center operations, including to maintain its 2,000-plus staff and court system for seven of the last 132 detainees. It put the cost at $2.7 million per prisoner a year.

More prisoners have been released since then, meaning the Congressional crunch is more like $3.1 million per captive a year. And that price is probably higher. Some costs are classified.

In February, however, Marine Gen. John Kelly disputed that soup-to-nuts approach at a Congressional hearing. His Southern Command headquarters, with oversight of the prison, figured it cost “about $750,000” for each prisoner, he said.

Then again, he’s been seeking $69 million to replace a secret prison at Guantánamo that now holds 15 former CIA captives. It works out to $4.6 million per prisoner in construction costs, giving new meaning to the term “high-value detainees.”

Replace not renovate

The school project looks cheap by comparison. As presented to Congress, it consolidates two inefficient schools that were built in the 1970s and ’80s and have deteriorated across the decades.

The separate structures need new ventilation and air-conditioning systems, electrical upgrades of alarms and emergency systems, an updated elementary school kitchen, new bathrooms and insulation and retrofitting to meet new standards, according to a report to Congress by Chuck King, the facilities engineer for the Department of Defense Education Activity, who is based in Peachtree City, Georgia.

Instead, he proposed and Congress agreed to build the new 112,000-square-foot school on the site of today’s smaller, single-story 1983-vintage elementary school on Sherman Avenue — along the road to Camp X-Ray, the original war-on-terror prison, and the frontier with Cuba.

Students will go to school in trailers and other available space while their current building is demolished and replaced by the new one. Once the high school students move in, workers will demolish their 1975 building behind the base pub, O’Kelly’s, not far from the scrubby nine-hole golf course.

Thrice evacuated

The Sampson school system, established in 1931, is named for a 19th Century U.S. Navy rear admiral who was responsible for the blockade of Cuba in the Spanish American war. It has a storied history of closings that no occasional hurricane or snow day can match.

Sampson students were sent home — evacuated back to the United States — during World War II and for three months in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The schools also closed in the mid-’90s when families were sent away as the base coped with a huge influx of tens of thousands of Cuban and Haitian migrants, housed in tent cities, that taxed this isolated outpost’s water desalination and other resources.

The new school’s plan includes state-of-the-art technology in physics, chemistry and video-broadcast labs, a music suite, LED lighting and a wireless network. It will also have space for 50 faculty and administration members, two or more floors and a stucco finish, according to the proposal to Congress.

It’s not possible to ask the kids what they think about it because Department of Defense policy shields school children from speaking with reporters on base. Besides, today’s students are mostly the children of military families that move every few years, meaning they’ll likely be gone by the time the new $65 million school opens.

It’s projected to be finished in April 2018. By then, Obama’s successor will be in office, the Pentagon will have completed a $31 million underwater fiber-optic cable between the base and South Florida and, unless Congress lifts the U.S. embargo on trade with Cuba, the blockade will be in its 57th year.

Miami Herald staff writer Christina Veiga contributed to this report.