Category Archives: government fraud spending collusion

Teaching Immigrants to Unionize, Chicago

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The National Labor Relations Board is signing agreements with Mexico, Ecuador and other countries. Of note: Lafe Soloman being investigated for violating ethics. Richard Griffin is devoted to big labor.

August 26, 2013 the Chicago Office of the NLRB and the Mexican Consulate in Chicago will sign a local agreement to strengthen cooperation and collaboration between the NLRB and the Consulate and improve access to information and education regarding rights and responsibilities for Mexican workers, their employers, and Mexican business owners in the United States.

On July 23, 2013 the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the United Mexican States signed a national letter of agreement in Washington D.C.  The NLRB is the independent government agency responsible for enforcing the National Labor Relations Act, the primary law governing relations between employers and employees in the private sector. The Act guarantees workers the right to join together, with or without a union, to improve their wages and working conditions, or to refrain from such activities. Employers and employees alike are protected from unfair labor practices.

Under the framework, the NLRB and the Mexican Embassy in Washington, D.C., as well as NLRB Regional Offices and Mexican Consulates nationwide, will cooperate to provide outreach, education, and training, and to develop best practices. The Agreement is an outgrowth of initial negotiations between the NLRB’s Chicago office and the Mexican Consulate in Chicago. The framework has been used by other federal labor agencies, including the Department of Labor and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which have similar agreements with the Mexican Embassy and its consulates.

“With coordination from the consulates, we expect to meet with Mexican workers around the country to help forge innovative solutions to issues specific to their needs,” Acting NLRB General Counsel Lafe Solomon said. He noted the letter of agreement will also increase the NLRB’s ability to provide employers, including Mexican business owners in the United States, with resources directly available to them, including access to education and training resources regarding rights and responsibilities under the Act.

*** There is more:

U.S. signed agreement with Mexico to teach immigrants to unionize

The federal government has signed agreements with three foreign countries — Mexico, Ecuador and the Philippines — to establish outreach programs to teach immigrants their rights to engage in labor organizing in the U.S.

The agreements do not distinguish between those who entered legally or illegally. They are part of a broader effort by the National Labor Relations Board to get immigrants involved in union activism.

The five-member board is the agency that enforces the National Labor Relations Act, the main federal law covering unions. In 2013, Lafe Solomon, the board’s then-acting general counsel, signed a “memorandum of understanding” with Mexico’s U.S. ambassador. The current general counsel, Richard Griffin, signed additional agreements with the ambassadors of Ecuador and the Philippines last year.

“Those are the only countries that the NLRB has MOUs with,” said spokeswoman Jessica Kahanek.

The agreements are substantially similar, with several sections repeated verbatim in each one. All three documents state that the No. 1 outreach goal is “to educate those who may not be aware of the Act, including those employees just entering the work force, by providing information designed to clearly inform [that nation’s] workers in the United States of America their rights under the Act and to develop ways of communicating such information (e.g., via print and electronic media, electronic assistance tools, mobile device applications, and links to the NLRB’s web site from the [country’s] web sites) to the … workers residing in the United States of America and their employers.”

The board has said the law’s protections for workers engaged in union organizing extend even to people who are not legally authorized to work in the U.S. An employer who fires an illegal immigrant worker — which is required under federal immigration law — can be sanctioned by the board if it decides the worker’s union activism was the real reason for the dismissal.

In the documents, the countries’ foreign consulates agree to help locate foreign nationals living in the U.S. “who might aid the NLRB in investigations, trials or compliance matters” involving businesses and to develop a system for the consulates to refer complaints from foreign workers to the board’s regional offices.

The documents also call for systems to inform foreign businesses operating in the U.S. of their responsibilities to their employees under federal labor law. In testimony before the House Appropriations Committee on March 24, Griffin characterized that as the principal focus of the agreements.

“We have executed letters of agreement with foreign ministries designed to strengthen collaborative efforts to provide foreign business owners doing business in the United States, as well as workers from those countries, with education, guidance and access to information regarding their rights and responsibilities under our statute,” he told lawmakers.

Griffin, formerly a top lawyer for the International Union of Operating Engineers, testified that the agreements save taxpayer money because they would “pay dividends as employers will be able to avoid unintentionally violating our statute and workers will be educated about their statutory rights to engage with one another to improve their conditions of employment, both of which benefits taxpayers, and the country as a whole, through increased economic growth.”

If the main intention is to provide legal information to foreign employers, it is not clear why the board pursued agreements with those countries, which represent a relatively small portion of businesses operating the in the U.S.

A November study by the Bureau of Economic Analysis found that Mexican businesses operating in the U.S. employ slightly less than 69,000 people total. The numbers employed by Ecuadorian and Philippine businesses operating in the U.S. are so small, the bureau doesn’t publish a measurement for either one.

By comparison, Canadian businesses employ well over a half-million people in the U.S. British businesses employ nearly a million, Japanese nearly 720,000 and German 620,000.

Mexico and the Philippines, one the other hand, represent two of the countries providing the most immigrants to the U.S. Mexico accounts for 11.6 million immigrants living in the U.S., the most from any single country, according to the Migration Policy Institute. The Philippines is fourth overall, accounting for 1.8 million.

A 2013 board press release stated the Mexican agreement was “an outgrowth of initial negotiations between the NLRB’s Chicago office and the Mexican Consulate in Chicago. The framework has been used by other federal labor agencies, including the Department of Labor and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which have similar agreements with the Mexican Embassy and its consulates.”

The release quoted Solomon saying, “With coordination from the consulates, we expect to meet with Mexican workers around the country to help forge innovative solutions to issues specific to their needs.”

Last month, Griffin instituted a new policy in which the board will “facilitate” obtaining visas for illegal immigrants if their status impedes it from pursuing a labor violation case against a business. The policy gives illegal immigrants living in the U.S. a strong incentive to engage in labor activism, because doing so will make employers reluctant to fire them and potentially get them a visa, and therefore legal status, if they are fired.

What About the P5+1 and Iran/North Korea

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If you are inclined to read about the technical cooperation agreement between North Korea and Iran go here.

 

Ed Schroeder’s Military Intelligence Report: Does Iran Have Secret Nukes in North Korea?

In October 2012, Iran began stationing personnel at a military base in North Korea, in a mountainous area close to the Chinese border. The Iranians, from the Ministry of Defense and associated firms, reportedly are working on both missiles and nuclear weapons. Ahmed Vahidi, Tehran’s minister of defense at the time,denied sending people to the North, but the unconfirmed dispatches make sense in light of the two states announcing a technical cooperation pact the preceding month.

The P5+1—the five permanent members of the Security Council and Germany—appear determined, before their self-imposed March 31 deadline, to ink a deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran regarding its nuclear energy program, which is surely a cover for a wide-ranging weapons effort. The international community wants the preliminary arrangement now under discussion, referred to as a “framework agreement,” to ensure that the country remains at least one year away from being able to produce an atomic device.

The P5+1 negotiators believe they can do that by monitoring Tehran’s centrifuges—supersonic-speed machines that separate uranium gas into different isotopes and upgrade the potent stuff to weapons-grade purity—and thereby keep track of its total stock of fissile material.

The negotiators from the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, and China are trying to get Tehran to adhere to the Additional Protocol, which allows anytime, anyplace inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog. If Iran agrees to the IAEA’s intrusive inspections, proponents of the deal will claim a major breakthrough, arguing for instance that Iran will not be able to hide centrifuges in undisclosed locations.

There were so many North Korean nuclear and missile scientists, specialists, and technicians at Iran’s facilities that they took over their own coastal resort there.

But no inspections of Iranian sites will solve a fundamental issue: As can be seen from the North Korean base housing Tehran’s weapons specialists, Iran is only one part of a nuclear weapons effort spanning the Asian continent. North Korea, now the world’s proliferation superstar, is a participant. China, once the mastermind, may still be a co-conspirator. Inspections inside the borders of Iran, therefore, will not give the international community the assurance it needs.

The cross-border nuclear trade is substantial enough to be called a “program.” Larry Niksch of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., estimates that the North’s proceeds from this trade with Iran are “between $1.5 billion and $2.0 billion annually.” A portion of this amount is related to missiles and miscellaneous items, the rest derived from building Tehran’s nuclear capabilities.

Iran has bought a lot with its money. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, thought to be Tehran’s chief nuclear scientist, was almost certainly in North Korea at Punggye-ri in February 2013 to witness Pyongyang’s third atomic test. Reports put Iranian technicians on hand at the site for the first two detonations as well.

The North Koreans have also sold Iran material for bomb cores, perhaps even weapons-grade uranium. The Telegraph reported that in 2002 a barrel of North Korean uranium cracked open and contaminated the tarmac of the new Tehran airport.

In addition, the Kim Jong Un  regime appears to have helped the Islamic Republic on its other pathway to the bomb. In 2013, Meir Dagan, a former Mossad director,charged the North with providing assistance to Iran’s plutonium reactor.

The relationship between the two regimes has been long-lasting. Hundreds of North Koreans have worked at about 10 nuclear and missile facilities in Iran. There were so many nuclear and missile scientists, specialists, and technicians that they took over their own coastal resort there, according to Henry Sokolski,  the proliferation maven, writing in 2003.

Even if Iran today were to agree to adhere to the Additional Protocol, it could still continue developing its bomb in North Korea, conducting research there or buying North Korean technology and plans. And as North Korean centrifuges spin in both known and hidden locations, the Kim regime will have a bigger stock of uranium to sell to the Iranians for their warheads. With the removal of sanctions, as the P5+1 is contemplating, Iran will have the cash to accelerate the building of its nuclear arsenal.

So while the international community inspects Iranian facilities pursuant to a framework deal, the Iranians could be busy assembling the components for a bomb elsewhere. In other words, they will be one day away from a bomb—the flight time from Pyongyang to Tehran—not one year as American and other policymakers hope.

The North Koreans are not the only contributors to the Iranian atom bomb. Iran got its first centrifuges from Pakistan, and Pakistan’s program was an offshoot from the Chinese one.

Some argue that China proliferated nuclear weapons through the infamous black market ring run by Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan. There is no open source proof of that contention, but Beijing did nothing while Khan merchandised Chinese parts, plans, and knowhow—its most sensitive technology—from the capital of one of its closest allies. Moreover, Beijing did its best to protect the smuggler when Washington rolled up his network in the early part of last decade. The Chinese, for instance, supported General Pervez Musharraf’s controversial decision to end prematurely his government’s inquiry, which avoided exposing Beijing’s rumored involvement with Khan’s activities.

And there are circumstances suggesting that Beijing, around the time of Khan’s confession and immediate pardon in 2004, took over his proliferation role directly, boldly transferring materials and equipment straight to Iran. For example, in November 2003 the staff of the IAEA had fingered China as one of the sources of equipment used in Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons effort. And as reported in July 2007 by The Wall Street Journal, the State Department had lodged formal protests with Beijing about Chinese enterprises violating Security Council resolutions by exporting to Tehran items that could be used for building atomic weapons.

Since then, there have been continual reports of transfers by Chinese enterprises to Iran in violation of international treaties and U.N. rules. Chinese entities have been implicated in shipments of maraging steel, ring-shaped magnets, and valves and vacuum gauges, all apparently headed to Iran’s atom facilities. In March 2011, police in Port Klang seized two containers from a ship bound to Iran from China. Malaysian authorities discovered that goods passed off as “used for liquid mixing or storage” were actually components for potential atomic weapons.

In the last few years, there has been an apparent decline in Chinese shipments to Iran. Beijing could be reacting to American pressure to end the trade, but there are more worrying explanations. First, it’s possible that, after decades of direct and indirect illicit transfers, China has already supplied most of what Iran needs to construct a weapon. Second, Beijing may be letting Pyongyang assume the leading proliferation role. After all, the shadowy Fakhrizadeh was reported to have traveled through China on his way to North Korea to observe the North’s third nuclear test.

Fakhrizadeh’s passage through China—probably Beijing’s airport—suggests that China may not have abandoned its “managed proliferation.” In the past, China’s proxy for this deadly trade was Pakistan. Then it was China’s only formal ally, North Korea. In both cases, Chinese policymakers intended to benefit Iran.

In a theoretical sense, there is nothing wrong with an accommodation with the Islamic Republic over nukes, yet there is no point in signing a deal with just one arm of a multi-nation weapons effort. That’s why the P5+1 needs to know what is going on at that isolated military base in the mountains of North Korea. And perhaps others as well.

Cheryl Mills, the Firewall for Hillary’s SpyNet

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Cheryl Mills: The Woman Who Knew Too Much?

The New York Times reports that Cheryl Mills, Hillary Clinton’s long-time henchwoman will not be joining the Presidential campaign now presumably in the final stages of formation. Why? Perhaps Mills is, to borrow a phrase from Alfred Hitchcock, the woman who knew too much.

Mills, who was the State Department’s counselor and chief of staff during the entirety of Hillary’s tumultuous tenure, is up to her waist in the Benghazi matter, where the overwhelming evidence is that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put politics before the security and safety of U.S. citizens serving their country in that hell-hole.

Earlier this month, Judicial Watch obtained emails  through a federal lawsuit which contained multiple references to the, “so-called Benghazi Group. A diplomatic source told Fox News that was code inside the department for the so-called Cheryl Mills task force, whose job was damage control.”

Clearly Clinton, and Obama, were concerned about the “optics” and potential political fallout of the al-Qaeda 9/11 assault on the Benghazi consulate where four Americans were murdered less than 60 days from election day. The emails show Mills “running interference internally during the 2012 Benghazi terror attack.”

Specifically, Mills instructed then State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland “to stop answering reporter questions about the status of Ambassador Chris Stevens, who was missing and later found dead.” Nuland quickly demurred.

This is the same Nuland who objected to the original Benghazi talking points drafted by the CIA because they included references to the al Qaeda affiliate Ansar al-Sharia and to previous CIA warnings about terror threats in Benghazi. Nuland worried that any mention of the the CIA warnings “could be used by Members [of Congress] to beat the State Department for not paying attention to Agency warnings so why do we want to feed that? Concerned …”

Surely Nuland was given guidance by Mills.

Mills continued the cover-up by telling State Department employees to obstruct the 2013 congressional investigation. In June, 2013 Gregory Hicks, the former deputy chief of mission in Libya during the Benghazi attack, testified to Congress that Mills was “personally instructed to allow the RSO [Regional Security Officer], the acting deputy chief of mission, and myself to be personally interviewed by Congressman Chaffetz.”

In true Clinton form, Hicks said in a September 2013 interview that as a result of cooperating with Congress he was “punished” and “shunted aside, put in a closet,” not receiving a new assignment from State.

Like Nixon and his White House tapes, Hillary is now arguing that the e-mails are her personal property and she should decide what the American people get to read. While serving as secretary of State, Hillary Clinton no doubt sent and received countless emails pertaining to personal issues with no relevance to State Department issues via her private account. But Supreme Court precedent in the Nixon case seems clear: she doesn’t get to decide what to release and what not to.

What does this have to do with Ms. Mills? Mills is the trusted aide who reviewed the e-mail to decide which e-mails to erase. Mills joined Hillary in eschewing government e-mail so e-mails between her and her boss are illegally kept from public view  when they conducted public business.

Mills has another darker distinction. When the Palm Beach police seized the address book of convicted billionaire pedophile and friend of Bill, Jeffrey Epstein, they found the cell phone and personal e-mail address for Mills.

What did Hillary know of Epstein’s sexual abuse of underage girls? What did Hillary think Bill was doing when he and his now disaffected wingman Doug Band visited Epstein’s palatial Palm Beach home where neighbors say the POTUS partied until the wee hours with scores of women who were dropped off by limousine after the arrival of the presidential motorcade.

What did Hillary think Bill was doing on Epstein’s hedonistic island retreat where he was seen in the company of two 17 year-olds flown in from New York for the former Presidents amusement? Perhaps Mills can tell us.

Mills is a member of the Clinton Foundation’s Board of Directors, now under fire for taking millions from foreign governments, particularly those in the Middle East who oppress women and deny them the most basic human rights. Perhaps Mills has seen the e-mails that show the self-dealing nexus between Hillary’s stint at State and the avalanche  of cash the Clintons have scammed from foreign powers for a charity that spends more on luxury travel for the Clintons and a huge staff of political retainers than they do on charitable works to help actual people.

Pine not for Ms. Mills. As the Clintons demonstrated when they placed Epstein’s pedophilic pimp Ghislaine Maxwell in a job at a non-profit funded by the Clinton Foundation, the Clintons sometimes buy silence. Maxwell was granted immunity for her role in procuring underage girls for Epstein to molest. She was present when Bill partied in both Palm Beach and on Epstein’s orgy island, his private retreat in the carribean. Like Mills, Maxwell knows too much.

Or perhaps Mills should be concerned. Cheryl Mills figures into every scandal dogging Hillary Clinton and probably a few we don’t know about yet. As they did with James Carville, Dick Morris, Doug Band, and others the Clinton’s have no problem discarding staff when they are no longer useful. But sometimes, as in the case of former Clinton Security Chief Jerry Parks who knew chapter and verse on Bill Clinton’s sexual peccadilloes and whose brutal murder goes unsolved, those who know too much are silenced.

**** As an aside, my buddy Larry Klayman, at Freedom Watch filed a lawsuit against Hillary Clinton for operating a criminal enterprise, charges of racketeering.

 

Remember that Senate Immigration Bill? Background…

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Barack Obama pushed hard for the House to pass the Senate immigration bill. It was dead on arrival and with good reason. But there is a lil bit of history that somehow was never fully revealed.

The Senate immigration bill: Here’s what you need to know Months after their Jan. 28 announcement of a tentative compromise on immigration reform, the bipartisan “Gang of Eight” has finally unveiled its bill, or at least a summary of the proposal. It includes sweeping changes in treatment of both existing undocumented workers and aspiring immigrants.

Here are the key points, culled from summaries in the Post and Politico as well as the actual bill summary, posted by Talking Points Memo here. A good cheat sheet  is here.

There are several key items in this bill which has stalled however, there is a danger in coming months that new lifelines may be provided. Here is a disturbing sample inside the bill.

Six months after the bill’s passage, the Department of Homeland Security would have to submit two plans, one outlining a strategy for reducing traffic over high-risk areas on the Mexican border, and another for increasing fencing. The bill appropriates $3 billion for the department to carry out the first plan (through better drone surveillance and more border patrol officers, among other things) and $1.5 billion for it to carry out the latter. The National Guard would be allowed to be deployed to the border, and 3,300 new customs agents hired. If, by the fifth year the bill is in effect, 90 percent of crossers aren’t being apprehended and 100 percent of the border isn’t being surveilled, the bill would establish a commission of four border-state governors and add another $2 billion in security funding. The bill also requires the establishment of an electronic exit checking system at airports and sea ports in order to track the movements of visa holders. The real kicker on the influence of items in this bill must be noted. Put your seat belt on….Ask some hard questions of these names as you read below.

October 29, 2013

The Soros-funded National Immigration Forum (NIF) organized today’s “fly-in” of some 600 people to lobby House Republicans to pass the Schumer-Rubio amnesty bill (which Senator Rubio himself has now disavowed).
It started with a two-hour teach-in at the U.S Chamber of Commerce, with the usual suspects saying the usual things. (Watch it here.) I couldn’t stomach the whole thing, but there were some amusing bits: Al Cardenas, head of the American Conservative Union, said that we need immigration because our population is declining (in fact, even with zero immigration — zero — our population would continue to increase for generations, beyond which projections are meaningless).
Also, Tony Massif, lobbyist for California agribusiness, said that if we we don’t import more stoop labor from abroad, then we’ll have to import more food, meaning our enemies would “control our food supply.” (You know, because all that corn and wheat in the Midwest is being hand-harvested by Guatemalan peasants.)
Speakers were also pretending that amnesty and increased immigration were conservative initiatives by claiming that environmentalists and labor unions are responsible for the opposition to the Schumer-Rubio bill when, obviously, they’re among the bill’s chief backers. Anyway, that’s all boilerplate and hardly worth commenting on, as much as it might irk me. But I got to thinking about the groups hosting this thing and thought it’d be interesting to match up their principals and supporters with the Forbes 400 list.
Turns out that “Billionaires for Open Borders” isn’t just a catchy name — it’s the reality. Joining Soros (#19 on the Forbes 400) in backing today’s lobbying effort are a broad collection of his fellow billionaires. One of the co-hosts was Partnership for a New American Economy. Among the group’s co-chairmen: Michael Bloomberg (#10 on the Forbes 400), Steve Ballmer (#21), Rupert Murdoch (#30), Douglas M. Baker Jr. (#161), and Bill Marriott (#296). Another co-host was Fwd.us, founded by Mark Zuckerberg (#20) and including among its supporters Bill Gates (#1), Eric Schmidt (#49), Reid Hoffman (#103), John Doerr (#184), Stanley Druckenmiller (#184), John Fisher (#193), Barry Diller (#260), Sean Parker (#273), Jim Bryer (#352), Mark Pincus (was #212 in 2011, but fallen off since), Matt Cohler (worth a measly $400 million, but on the Forbes Future 400 list), Fred Wilson (#16 on Forbes Midas List of top tech investors), Ron Conway (#41 on the Midas List), and Richard Kramlich (#73 on the Midas List). That’s not to mention a whole list of mere multi-millionaires and even billionaires who didn’t make the cut. To adapt WFB’s famous quip, I’d rather be governed by the first 400 names in the Boston phone directory than the Forbes 400 List. JUST DAMN….

Hamas, War Crimes and the DC Fundraiser

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Gaza FRThe very left leaning organization known as Amnesty International, which enjoys financial support from Open Society, a George Soros organization has come to admit that Hamas was steeped in war crimes in Gaza last year.   What is most shocking however, is a planned fundraising event in Washington DC for Hamas.

Location Rock Creek Park- Intersection of 16th St. NW & Kennedy St. NW, Washington DC 20011

Date & Time Saturday, May 16 2015 7:00 AM

Gaza sponsors

 

Hamas guilty of war crimes in Gaza clash, Amnesty Internat’l charges

HAIFA, Israel – A horrific missile attack that killed 11 children in Gaza during last summer’s war between Israel and Hamas, for which Israel was broadly condemned at the time, was actually caused by a Palestinian missile misfiring and killing its own people, Amnesty International charged in a report released Thursday.

“In the deadliest incident believed to have been caused by a Palestinian armed group during the conflict, 13 Palestinian civilians – 11 of them children – were killed when a projectile exploded next to a supermarket in the crowded al-Shati refugee camp in Gaza on 28 July 2014, the first day of Eid al-Fitr,” Amnesty’s report said. “The children had been playing in the street and buying crisps and soft drinks in the supermarket at the time of the attack.”

“Although Palestinians have claimed that the Israeli military was responsible for the attack, an independent munitions expert, who examined the available evidence on behalf of Amnesty International, concluded that the projectile used in the attack was a Palestinian rocket.”

The report highlights the fact that the blast could not have been caused by a drone attack or as the result of Israeli shelling. The crater was too shallow, it said, while “its circumference was too wide to have been caused by a tank shell.”

“Palestinian armed groups, including the armed wing of Hamas, repeatedly launched unlawful attacks during the conflict killing and injuring civilians,” said Philip Luther, director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Amnesty International. “In launching these attacks, they displayed a flagrant disregard for international humanitarian law and for the consequences of their violations on civilians in both Israel and the Gaza Strip.”

Israel’s insistence from the start that the 13 deaths were caused by one of Hamas’ own missiles going astray was generally disregarded as Hamas rushed to accuse Israel. Even repeated testimony from an Italian journalist in Gaza at the time that indicated a number of journalists were convinced the deaths had been caused by a Hamas shell, failed to persuade most people that the Israel Defense Force (IDF) was telling the truth.

The journalist, Gabriele Barbati, tweeted, “International journos [journalists] say: feeling today’s massacre in Shaati beach playground #gaza was misfired rocket by Hamas or factions.” The following day he added, “@IDFSpokesperson said truth in communique released yesterday about Shati camp massacre. It was not #Israel behind it”.

Barbati subsequently fled for his life from Gaza once his tweets were noticed by Hamas, but later that day tweeted again, “Out of #Gaza far from #Hamas retaliation: misfired rocket killed children y’day in Shati. Witness: militants rushed and cleared debris.”

Amnesty also made note of “other violations of international humanitarian law by Palestinian armed groups during the conflict, such as storing rockets and other munitions in civilian buildings – including UN schools – and cases where Palestinian armed groups launched attacks or stored munitions very near locations where hundreds of displaced civilians were taking shelter.”

The Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas, which against the wishes of the U.S. and others, intends to apply for membership of the International Criminal Court, next week, may be liable for this and other war crimes committed by Palestinians during the war if accepting ICC jurisdiction. The PA officially became jointly responsible for Gaza as part of the unity government with Hamas on June 2, 2014, some 5 weeks before the conflict began.

Earlier this week, in a special report, FoxNews.com highlighted a new documentary revealing Hamas’ pride at training child soldiers released ahead of an imminent decision by the EU on whether or not to re-instate Hamas’ designation as a terrorist organization that lapsed three months ago due to an EU technicality.

Thursday’s report is the third of four from Amnesty International detailing the human rights organization’s opinion of events in Gaza during the 2014 war. The first two reports mainly focused on the activities of the IDF and included strong criticisms of the Israeli military and accusations of “callous indifference “ and “war crimes”, which were again mentioned by Philip Luther. “The fact that Palestinian armed groups appear to have carried out war crimes by firing indiscriminate rockets and mortars does not absolve the Israeli forces from their obligations under international humanitarian law,” he said.

Luther added, “The devastating impact of Israeli attacks on Palestinian civilians during the conflict is undeniable, but violations by one side in a conflict can never justify violations by their opponents.”

Israel disputes the number and status of the casualties, suggesting that independent analysis of the names of the 2,000 Palestinians reportedly killed shows that nearly 50 percent of the dead were actually combatants. Amnesty has suggested the figure is nearer a quarter. To date, there has been no reaction from Hamas to today’s highly critical report, and across Palestinian media there appears not to have been any coverage of the issue.

“Unlike Hamas, Israel is vigorously investigating its conduct, aiming to draw lessons and minimize civilian harm,” a spokesperson for Israel’s Embassy in London told the Jerusalem Post. “Meanwhile, Hamas continues to incite terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians, boast of building new cross-border assault tunnels, and test-fires rockets, in preparation for further violence against Israelis.”

The fourth and final report from Amnesty into the 50-day conflict is expected later this year and will focus on allegations of Hamas’ executions and summary killings of opposition supporters, and anyone else who questioned their rule of the Islamist enclave during hostilities.