Category Archives: Human Rights Violations United Nations

Obama’s Retreat from Global Stage, Refugee Crisis

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 Germany

VIENNA (AP) — As regional leaders met Thursday to tackle Europe’s refugee crisis, a gruesome discovery unfolded a short drive from the Austrian capital: An abandoned truck was found with at least 20 — and possibly up to 50 — decomposing bodies of migrants piled inside.

It was the latest tragedy in a year that has seen tens of thousands of people risking all to seek a better life or refuge in wealthy European countries. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said at the Vienna conference she was “shaken by the awful news,” and summit participants held a minute of silence.  More here.

From the United Nations Critical Intelligence Division:

27 August 2015 – Clashes between rival militias in the past few days have forced several thousand people to flee their homes in the Central African Republic (CAR) town of Bambari and seek shelter at a former cotton factory inside the compound of the United Nations peacekeeping mission, the UN refugee agency said today.

“We are extremely concerned by the mounting violence in Bambari and its impact on the civilian population. Our staff have reported the displacement of people who are extremely frightened,” Kouassi Lazare Etien, the Representative of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in CAR, said in a press release.

Mr. Etien said that the agency was also worried about hundreds of Sudanese refugees “trapped in a refugee camp [near Bambari] and at high risk of attacks.” The road leading to the camp had been inaccessible since the weekend, but a UNHCR team escorted by UN peacekeepers reached the Sudanese refugee camp on Wednesday.

“Fresh fighting between rival militia forces erupted on August 20 and triggered new waves of displacement,” the refugee agency reported.

“A spontaneous IDP [internally displaced persons] site had sprung up inside the Bambari compound of the UN peace-keeping force,” the UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in CAR (MINUSCA), according to the refugee agency.

UNHCR staff said the agency’s partner, the National Refugee Commission, had registered about 3,000 displaced persons in the MINUSCA compound as of Tuesday.

“But conditions are dire at the site, a former cotton factory with no sanitation facilities and limited access to water and shelter,” the agency said.

The situation began to ease on Thursday but UNHCR staff say Bambari remains very tense and they fear the situation could deteriorate again.

UNHCR is now able to move around Bambari and is trying to assess the total number of newly displaced. The tension remains with armed groups in control of the streets.

The population and aid workers were isolated and inaccessible, but a humanitarian corridor has been opened to the airport since Tuesday following negotiations between MINUSCA and the rival militia groups.

The latest flare-up in Bambari erupted after a 19-year-old Muslim was killed in the city and beheaded by alleged anti-Balaka fighters, according to the refugee agency. “This triggered violent reprisal attacks between the two communities in Bambari, which have left at least 10 people dead and many injured, including ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) staff,” it said.

The failure of the United Nations Human Rights and the U.S. State Department dismissing crisis conditions

Reuters: Austrian police suspect that a Bulgarian-Hungarian trafficking ring was behind the deaths of 71 migrants found in a truck on an Austrian highway, Hans Peter Doskozil, police chief for the province of Burgenland, told a news conference.

In our own hemisphere, Latin America, terror reigns

FP: Over the past week, an unprecedented crackdown has been underway in the Venezuelan state of Tachira, where a mass expulsion of unnaturalized Colombians has been undertaken by Venezuelan authorities with uncharacteristic efficiency — if with a tragically characteristic lack of due process. To date, nearly 1,100 individuals — including small children and the elderly — have been summarily deported across the two countries’ shared border: their possessions denied to them, their homes bulldozed to the ground to prevent them from returning. To avoid losing everything, many more Colombians have attempted to salvage what they could of their belongings and cross over on foot, fording the narrow river dividing what, in Simón Bolívar’s day, had been a single, united country.

Families have been separated, businesses abandoned, and communities shattered.

Families have been separated, businesses abandoned, and communities shattered. The sheer number of dispossessed has all but overwhelmed the capacity of local Colombian authorities. In nearby Cúcuta, a Boston-sized city just across the border, refugees are now being housed in tents grouped into makeshift camps – their broken livelihoods mere collateral damage for Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro’s latest manufactured crisis.

The area where Venezuelan Tachira’s border meets the Colombian state of North Santander is a bit of an oddity for South America. While Spanish and Portuguese colonial boundaries were usually set along major natural obstacles such as the Andes, major tributaries of the Amazon, or impassable jungles, the Tachira River runs only around a meter deep and can be crossed easily at multiple points. For locals in Cúcuta, cut off from the rest of Colombia to the west by the imposing Cordillera Oriental mountain range, this has long rendered Venezuela more accessible than Colombia itself. Tachira, too, has long been a distinct cultural entity from the rest of Venezuela: a no-man’s-land that once birthed most of the country’s military Caudillo strongmen, and now breeds its most adamant anti-government uprisings. Given the porous national border and the many price distortions caused by Venezuela’s arcane multi-tier exchange rate and heavily subsidized staples, a vibrant illicit trade has flourished among the region’s entrepreneurial population, including gasoline smuggling and food arbitrage. Even in faraway Caracas, the street value of black market dollars is referred to as the “Cúcuta price.” More here.

Syrian refugees major plight

Amman (AFP) – After escaping a devastating war, frustrated Syrian refugees in aid-starved neighbouring states say they must now choose between joining an exodus to Europe or “returning home to die”.  

Millions of Syrians have found shelter in surrounding countries including Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan that are now struggling to cope with the massive influx.

A lack of jobs and humanitarian assistance means that many are now giving up on their host nations.

“What do they expect us to do, to die in silence?” said Mohammed al-Hariri, who lives in Jordan’s vast Zaatari desert refugee camp.

“Syrians now have two choices: either to return and die in their country or to emigrate,” he said.

Around 340,000 migrants reached the EU’s borders in the seven months to July, in the continent’s biggest migration crisis since World War II, with hundreds perishing at sea.

Most are escaping the more than four-year-old conflict in Syria that has claimed over 240,000 lives, and more are expected to follow.

“From the Syrians we have interviewed this year it is clear that many are contemplating making a dangerous journey to try to reach Europe through North Africa or Turkey,” said Adam Coogle, a Middle East researcher at Human Rights Watch.

“Many said they feel that a lack of humanitarian assistance plus an inability to legally work in surrounding countries forces them to choose between a return to the conflict zone in Syria or to attempt a dangerous journey to Europe.”

– ‘Losing hope’ –

The United Nations refugee agency UNHCR estimates that more than four million Syrians have fled the bloodshed which broke out in March 2011, mostly to neighbouring Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey but also Egypt and Iraq. More here.

 

Innovative Words Don’t Change the Global Refugee Crisis

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The battle over the words used to describe migrants

BBC: The word migrant is defined in Oxford English Dictionary as “one who moves, either temporarily or permanently, from one place, area, or country of residence to another”.

It is used as a neutral term by many media organisations – including the BBC – but there has been criticism of that use.

News website al-Jazeera has decided it will not use migrant and “will instead, where appropriate, say refugee“. An online editor for the network wrote: “It has evolved from its dictionary definitions into a tool that dehumanises and distances, a blunt pejorative.” A Washington Post piece asked if it was time to ditch the word.

There are some who dislike the term because it implies something voluntary but that it is applied to people fleeing danger. A UN document suggests: “The term ‘migrant’… should be understood as covering all cases where the decision to migrate is taken freely by the individual concerned, for reasons of ‘personal convenience’ and without intervention of an external compelling factor.”

“Migrant used to have quite a neutral connotation,” explains Alexander Betts, director of the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford University. “It says nothing about their entitlement to cross that border or whether they should be.” But some people believe that the word has recently developed a sour note. It is being used to mean “not a refugee”, argues Betts.

Online searches for migrant are at their highest since Google started collating this information in 2004. And in the past month (to 25 August using the Nexis database), the most commonly used term in UK national newspapers (excluding the Times, the Sun and the Financial Times) was migrant – with 2,541 instances. This was twice as popular as the next most frequently used word, refugee.

A refugee, according to the 1951 Refugee Convention, “is any person who, owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his/her nationality and is unable, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself/herself of the protection of that country”.

“Refugee implies that we have an obligation to people,” says Betts. “It implies that we have to let them on to our territory and give them the chance to seek asylum.”

But there would be many people who would be wary of labelling someone a refugee until that person has gone through the legal process of claiming asylum. In the UK, and other places, claims for “refugee status” are examined before being either granted or denied.

“The moment at which they can officially say whether they are refugees or economic migrants is the moment at which the EU state that is processing their claim makes its decision,” says Tim Stanley, historian and columnist for the Daily Telegraph. “I am not questioning the validity of their narrative, I am not saying that anyone was lying about it. I am saying that it is down to the state in which they have arrived to define what they are.”

Asylum seeker refers to someone who has applied for refugee status and is waiting to hear the result of their claim. But it is also often used about those trying to get to a particular country to make a claim. The word asylum is very old indeed having first been used in 1430 to refer to “a sanctuary or inviolable place of refuge and protection for criminals and debtors, from which they cannot be forcibly removed without sacrilege”.

The most common descriptor for asylum seeker in UK newspaper articles between 2010 to 2012 was the word failed.

But while the term failed asylum seeker describes someone who has gone through a well-defined process, there are less specifically applied terms.

One of the more controversial ones is illegal immigrant, along with illegal migrant.

A study by the Migration Observatory at Oxford University analysed 58,000 UK newspaper articles and found that illegal was the most common descriptor for the word immigrants.

“The term is dangerous,” argues Don Flynn, director of Migrants Rights Network. “It’s better to say irregular or undocumented migrants.” Calling someone an illegal immigrant associates them with criminal behaviour, he adds.

Other critics of the phrase say that it gives the impression that it’s the person that is illegal rather than their actions. “Once you’ve entered the UK and claimed asylum, you are not illegal. Even if your asylum claim is refused, you still can’t be an illegal migrant,” says Zoe Grumbridge from Refugee Action.

The UN and the EU parliament have called for an end to the phrase. Some people have also criticised the use of clandestine. In 2013, the Associated Press news agency and the Los Angeles Times both changed their style guides and recommended against using the phrase “illegal immigrant” to describe someone without a valid visa.

But others disagree, saying that the phrase can be a useful description. “If you are coming into a country without permission and you do it outside the law, that is illegal,” says Alp Mehmet, vice chairman of MigrationWatch UK. “If they haven’t entered yet, they are not illegal immigrants, although potentially they are migrating using illegal means.”

Clearly there are those who want to make a distinction between people using the accepted legal channel to enter a country and those who are entering by other methods.

“I understand why people are uncomfortable with that term but it is accurate when you are talking about someone who has broken the law to enter the country or who has been told to leave the country and is breaking the law by staying,” says Stanley.

Another criticism of the term immigrant, with or without the word illegal added on to it, is that it is less likely to be used to describe people from Western countries. Some commentators have suggested that Europeans tend to be referred to as expats.

“Very often when we talk about British people who migrate,” says Emma Briant, author of the book Bad News for Refugees, “we tend to talk of them as expats or expatriates. They are not immigrants.” There has been some satirical commentary about the differences between the terms.

But the shift towards the neutral blanket term migrant has been pronounced. To again use UK national newspapers as a measurement, 15 years ago, in the month to 25 August, the terms refugee, asylum seeker and illegal immigrant were all used more often than migrants.

And many disagree that migrant is in any way offensive. “It’s a proper description for anyone who has moved across a border,” says Don Flynn from the Migrants Rights Network.

Judith Vonberg, a freelance journalist who has written for the Migrants’ Rights Network about the issue, goes further. She says that ditching the word could “actually reinforce the dichotomy that we’ve got between the idea of the good refugee and the bad migrant”.

Alp Mehmet, from Migration Watch, also believes that migrant should be used but because it is an easy word to understand. “Everyone… knows exactly what we mean by migrants.”

Some people also believe that migrant is an appropriate phrase to use when a group of people could include both refugees and economic migrants. Tim Stanley argues that it does accurately reflect a significant number of people who are making the crossing into Europe. “It is why the UNHCR is absolutely right to describe that group of people as both migrants and refugees,” he says.

The use of the term economic migrant has been much debated. Home Secretary Theresa May used it in May to describe migration into Europe. She said that there were large numbers of people coming from countries such as Nigeria and Somalia who were “economic migrants who’ve paid criminal gangs to take them across the Mediterranean”.

The term economic migrant is “being used to imply choice rather than coercion”, says Betts. “It’s used to imply that it’s voluntary reasons for movement rather than forced movement.”

Some words have fallen almost completely out of favour. Alien was used regularly in the UK press before World War Two, says Panikos Panayi, professor of European history at De Montfort University. “The first major immigration act [in the UK] was called the Aliens Act 1905,” he says.

But in the US, alien remains official terminology for any person who is not a citizen or national.

The Obama administration proposed Dreamers as a new positive way – with its reference to the American Dream – of describing undocumented young people who met the conditions of the Dream act (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors).

There is another word with positive connotations that is not used much anymore. “Exile has gone out of credit,” says Betts, since the end of the Cold War. “It had a slightly sort of dignified and noble connotation,” he argues.

It was used to describe someone who had been forced out of their country but was still politically engaged with it and was planning on going back one day. “I think that today, many Syrians are in that position,” says Betts.

The shifting language of migration might seem petty to some but to those involved in the debate there is no doubt of its importance. “Words matter in the migration debate,” says Rob McNeil from the Migration Observatory.

 

Hillary’s Pay for Weapons State Department

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There is not much we can point to when it comes to tangible and valuable achievements within the Hillary Clinton State Department of 4 years. Perhaps she and her deputies were busy processing orders and depositing checks.

Further, if the world was not so unbalanced and in complete turmoil due to civil wars, terror groups and evacuations of those fleeing their home countries, would countries really need to increase their weapons arsenals? This unto itself is a failure of Barack Obama’s lack of leadership and strategy, that lil miss Hillary exploited.

Too bad she could not find time to approve the Keystone XL pipeline…

Clinton Foundation Donors Got Weapons Deals From Hillary Clinton’s State Department

IBTimes: Even by the standards of arms deals between the United States and Saudi Arabia, this one was enormous. A consortium of American defense contractors led by Boeing would deliver $29 billion worth of advanced fighter jets to the United States’ oil-rich ally in the Middle East.

Israeli officials were agitated, reportedly complaining to the Obama administration that this substantial enhancement to Saudi air power risked disrupting the region’s fragile balance of power. The deal appeared to collide with the State Department’s documented concerns about the repressive policies of the Saudi royal family.

But now, in late 2011, Hillary Clinton’s State Department was formally clearing the sale, asserting that it was in the national interest. At a press conference in Washington to announce the department’s approval, an assistant secretary of state, Andrew Shapiro, declared that the deal had been “a top priority” for Clinton personally. Shapiro, a longtime aide to Clinton since her Senate days, added that the “U.S. Air Force and U.S. Army have excellent relationships in Saudi Arabia.”

These were not the only relationships bridging leaders of the two nations. In the years before Hillary Clinton became secretary of state, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia contributed at least $10 million to the Clinton Foundation, the philanthropic enterprise she has overseen with her husband, former president Bill Clinton. Just two months before the deal was finalized, Boeing — the defense contractor that manufactures one of the fighter jets the Saudis were especially keen to acquire, the F-15 — contributed $900,000 to the Clinton Foundation, according to a company press release.

The Saudi deal was one of dozens of arms sales approved by Hillary Clinton’s State Department that placed weapons in the hands of governments that had also donated money to the Clinton family philanthropic empire, an International Business Times investigation has found.

Under Clinton’s leadership, the State Department approved $165 billion worth of commercial arms sales to 20 nations whose governments have given money to the Clinton Foundation, according to an IBTimes analysis of State Department and foundation data. That figure — derived from the three full fiscal years of Clinton’s term as Secretary of State (from October 2010 to September 2012) — represented nearly double the value of American arms sales made to the those countries and approved by the State Department during the same period of President George W. Bush’s second term.

The Clinton-led State Department also authorized $151 billion of separate Pentagon-brokered deals for 16 of the countries that donated to the Clinton Foundation, resulting in a 143 percent increase in completed sales to those nations over the same time frame during the Bush administration. These extra sales were part of a broad increase in American military exports that accompanied Obama’s arrival in the White House. The 143 percent increase in U.S. arms sales to Clinton Foundation donors compares to an 80 percent increase in such sales to all countries over the same time period.

American defense contractors also donated to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state and in some cases made personal payments to Bill Clinton for speaking engagements. Such firms and their subsidiaries were listed as contractors in $163 billion worth of Pentagon-negotiated deals that were authorized by the Clinton State Department between 2009 and 2012.

The State Department formally approved these arms sales even as many of the deals enhanced the military power of countries ruled by authoritarian regimes whose human rights abuses had been criticized by the department. Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Qatar all donated to the Clinton Foundation and also gained State Department clearance to buy caches of American-made weapons even as the department singled them out for a range of alleged ills, from corruption to restrictions on civil liberties to violent crackdowns against political opponents.

As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton also accused some of these countries of failing to marshal a serious and sustained campaign to confront terrorism. In a December 2009 State Department cable published by Wikileaks, Clinton complained of “an ongoing challenge to persuade Saudi officials to treat terrorist financing emanating from Saudi Arabia as a strategic priority.” She declared that “Qatar’s overall level of CT cooperation with the U.S. is considered the worst in the region.” She said the Kuwaiti government was “less inclined to take action against Kuwait-based financiers and facilitators plotting attacks.” She noted that “UAE-based donors have provided financial support to a variety of terrorist groups.” All of these countries donated to the Clinton Foundation and received increased weapons export authorizations from the Clinton-run State Department.

Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Clinton Foundation did not respond to questions from the IBTimes.

In all, governments and corporations involved in the arms deals approved by Clinton’s State Department have delivered between $54 million and $141 million to the Clinton Foundation as well as hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments to the Clinton family, according to foundation and State Department records. The Clinton Foundation publishes only a rough range of individual contributors’ donations, making a more precise accounting impossible.

Click here to get the interactive chart data.

Winning Friends, Influencing Clintons

Under federal law, foreign governments seeking State Department clearance to buy American-made arms are barred from making campaign contributions — a prohibition aimed at preventing foreign interests from using cash to influence national security policy. But nothing prevents them from contributing to a philanthropic foundation controlled by policymakers.

Just before Hillary Clinton became Secretary of State, the Clinton Foundation signed an agreement generally obligating it to disclose to the State Department increases in contributions from its existing foreign government donors and any new foreign government donors. Those increases were to be reviewed by an official at the State Department and “as appropriate” the White House counsel’s office. According to available disclosures, officials at the State Department and White House raised no issues about potential conflicts related to arms sales.

During Hillary Clinton’s 2009 Senate confirmation hearings, Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., urged the Clinton Foundation to “forswear” accepting contributions from governments abroad. “Foreign governments and entities may perceive the Clinton Foundation as a means to gain favor with the secretary of state,” he said. The Clintons did not take Lugar’s advice. In light of the weapons deals flowing to Clinton Foundation donors, advocates for limits on the influence of money on government action now argue that Lugar was prescient in his concerns.

“The word was out to these groups that one of the best ways to gain access and influence with the Clintons was to give to this foundation,” said Meredith McGehee, policy director at the Campaign Legal Center, an advocacy group that seeks to tighten campaign finance disclosure rules. “This shows why having public officials, or even spouses of public officials, connected with these nonprofits is problematic.”

Hillary Clinton’s willingness to allow those with business before the State Department to finance her foundation heightens concerns about how she would manage such relationships as president, said Lawrence Lessig, the director of Harvard University’s Safra Center for Ethics.

“These continuing revelations raise a fundamental question of judgment,” Lessig told IBTimes. “Can it really be that the Clintons didn’t recognize the questions these transactions would raise? And if they did, what does that say about their sense of the appropriate relationship between private gain and public good?”

National security experts assert that the overlap between the list of Clinton Foundation donors and those with business before the the State Department presents a troubling conflict of interest.

While governments and defense contractors may not have made donations to the Clinton Foundation exclusively to influence arms deals, they were clearly “looking to build up deposits in the ‘favor bank’ and to be well thought of,” said Gregory Suchan, a 34-year State Department veteran who helped lead the agency’s oversight of arms transfers under the Bush administration.

As Hillary Clinton presses a campaign for the presidency, she has confronted sustained scrutiny into her family’s personal and philanthropic dealings, along with questions about whether their private business interests have colored her exercise of public authority. As IBTimes previously reported, Clinton switched from opposing an American free trade agreement with Colombia to supporting it after a Canadian energy and mining magnate with interests in that South American country contributed to the Clinton Foundation. IBTimes’ review of the Clintons’ annual financial disclosures also revealed that 13 companies lobbying the State Department paid Bill Clinton $2.5 million in speaking fees while Hillary Clinton headed the agency.

Questions about the nexus of arms sales and Clinton Foundation donors stem from the State Department’s role in reviewing the export of American-made weapons. The agency is charged with both licensing direct commercial sales by U.S. defense contractors to foreign governments and also approving Pentagon-brokered sales to those governments. Those powers are enshrined in a federal law that specifically designates the secretary of state as “responsible for the continuous supervision and general direction of sales” of arms, military hardware and services to foreign countries. In that role, Hillary Clinton was empowered to approve or reject deals for a broad range of reasons, from national security considerations to human rights concerns.

The State Department does not disclose which individual companies are involved in direct commercial sales, but its disclosure documents reveal that countries that donated to the Clinton Foundation saw a combined $75 billion increase in authorized commercial military sales under the three full fiscal years Clinton served, as compared to the first three full fiscal years of Bush’s second term.

The Clinton Foundation has not released an exact timetable of its donations, making it impossible to know whether money from foreign governments and defense contractors came into the organization before or after Hillary Clinton approved weapons deals that involved their interests. But news reports document that at least seven foreign governments that received State Department clearance for American arms did donate to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary Clinton was serving as secretary: Algeria, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, Thailand, Norway and Australia.

Under a presidential policy directive signed by President Bill Clinton in 1995, the State Department is supposed to specifically take human rights records into account when deciding whether to approve licenses enabling foreign governments to purchase military equipment and services from American companies. Despite this, Hillary Clinton’s State Department increased approvals of such sales to nations that her agency sharply criticized for systematic human rights abuses.

In its 2010 Human Rights Report, Clinton’s State Department inveighed against Algeria’s government for imposing “restrictions on freedom of assembly and association” tolerating “arbitrary killing,” “widespread corruption,” and a “lack of judicial independence.” The report said the Algerian government “used security grounds to constrain freedom of expression and movement.”

That year, the Algerian government donated $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation and its lobbyists met with the State Department officials who oversee enforcement of human rights policies. Clinton’s State Department the next year approved a one-year 70 percent increase in military export authorizations to the country. The increase included authorizations of almost 50,000 items classified as “toxicological agents, including chemical agents, biological agents and associated equipment” after the State Department did not authorize the export of any of such items to Algeria in the prior year.

During Clinton’s tenure, the State Department authorized at least $2.4 billion of direct military hardware and services sales to Algeria — nearly triple such authorizations over the last full fiscal years during the Bush administration. The Clinton Foundation did not disclose Algeria’s donation until this year — a violation of the ethics agreement it entered into with the Obama administration.

The monarchy in Qatar had similarly been chastised by the State Department for a raft of human rights abuses. But that country donated to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary Clinton was running the State Department. During the three full budgetary years of her tenure, Qatar saw a 14-fold increase in State Department authorizations for direct commercial sales of military equipment and services, as compared to the same time period in Bush’s second term. The department also approved the Pentagon’s separate $750 million sale of multi-mission helicopters to Qatar. That deal would additionally employ as contractors three companies that have all supported the Clinton Foundation over the years: United Technologies, Lockheed Martin and General Electric.

Clinton foundation donor countries that the State Department criticized for human rights violations and that received weapons export authorizations did not respond to IBTimes’ questions.

That group of arms manufacturers — along with Clinton Foundation donors Boeing, Honeywell, Hawker Beechcraft and their affiliates — were together listed as contractors in 114 such deals while Clinton was secretary of state. NBC put Chelsea Clinton on its payroll as a network correspondent in November 2011, when it was still 49 percent owned by General Electric. A spokesperson for General Electric did not respond to questions from IBTimes.

The other companies all asserted that their donations had nothing to do with the arms export deals.

“Our contributions have aligned with our longstanding philanthropic commitments,” said Honeywell spokesperson Rob Ferris.

“Even The Appearance Of A Conflict”

During her Senate confirmation proceedings in 2009, Hillary Clinton declared that she and her husband were “committed to ensuring that his work does not present a conflict of interest with the duties of Secretary of State.” She pledged “to protect against even the appearance of a conflict of interest between his work and the duties of the Secretary of State” and said that “in many, if not most cases, it is likely that the Foundation or President Clinton will not pursue an opportunity that presents a conflict.”

Even so, Bill Clinton took in speaking fees reaching $625,000 at events sponsored by entities that were dealing with Hillary Clinton’s State Department on weapons issues.

In 2011, for example, the former president was paid $175,000 by the Kuwait America Foundation to be the guest of honor and keynote speaker at its annual awards gala, which was held at the home of the Kuwaiti ambassador. Ben Affleck spoke at the event, which featured a musical performance by Grammy-award winner Michael Bolton. The gala was emceed by Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe show. Boeing was listed as a sponsor of the event, as were the embassies of the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar — the latter two of which had donated to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state.

The speaking fee from the Kuwait America Foundation to Bill Clinton was paid in the same time frame as a series of deals Hillary Clinton’s State Department was approving between the Kuwaiti government and Boeing. Months before the gala, the Department of Defense announced that Boeing would be the prime contractor on a $693 million deal, cleared by Hillary Clinton’s State Department, to provide the Kuwaiti government with military transport aircraft. A year later, a group sponsored in part by Boeing would pay Bill Clinton another $250,000 speaking fee.

“Boeing has sponsored this major travel event, the Global Business Travel Association, for several years, regardless of its invited speakers,” Gordon Johndroe, a Boeing spokesperson, told IBTimes. Johndroe said Boeing’s support for the Clinton Foundation was “a transparent act of compassion and an investment aimed at aiding the long-term interests and hopes of the Haitian people” following a devastating earthquake.

Boeing was one of three companies that helped deliver money personally to Bill Clinton while benefiting from weapons authorizations issued by Hillary Clinton’s State Department. The others were Lockheed and the financial giant Goldman Sachs.

Lockheed is a member of the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt, which paid Bill Clinton $250,000 to speak at an event in 2010. Three days before the speech, Hillary Clinton’s State Department approved two weapons export deals in which Lockheed was listed as the prime contractor. Over the course of 2010, Lockheed was a contractor on 17 Pentagon-brokered deals that won approval from the State Department. Lockheed told IBTimes that its support for the Clinton Foundation started in 2010, while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state.

“Lockheed Martin has periodically supported one individual membership in the Clinton Global Initiative since 2010,” said company spokesperson Katherine Trinidad. “Membership benefits included attendance at CGI annual meetings, where we participated in working groups focused on STEM, workforce development and advanced manufacturing.”

In April 2011, Goldman Sachs paid Bill Clinton $200,000 to speak to “approximately 250 high level clients and investors” in New York, according to State Department records obtained by Judicial Watch. Two months later, the State Department approved a $675 million foreign military sale involving Hawker Beechcraft — a company that was then part-owned by Goldman Sachs. As part of the deal, Hawker Beechcraft would provide support to the government of Iraq to maintain a fleet of aircraft used for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions. Goldman Sachs has also contributed at least $250,000 to the Clinton Foundation, according to donation records.

“There is absolutely no connection among all the points that you have raised regarding our firm,” said Andrew Williams, a spokesperson for Goldman Sachs.

Federal records show that ethics staffers at the State Department approved the payments to Bill Clinton from Goldman Sachs, and the Lockheed- and Boeing-sponsored groups without objection, even though the firms had major stakes in the agency’s weapons export decisions.

Stephen Walt, a Harvard University professor of international affairs, told IBTimes that the intertwining financial relationships between the Clintons, defense contractors and foreign governments seeking weapons approvals is “a vivid example of a very big problem — the degree to which conflicts of interest have become endemic.”

“It has troubled me all along that the Clinton Foundation was not being more scrupulous about who it would take money from and who it wouldn’t,” he said. “American foreign policy is better served if people responsible for it are not even remotely suspected of having these conflicts of interest. When George Marshall was secretary of state, nobody was worried about whether or not he would be distracted by donations to a foundation or to himself. This wasn’t an issue. And that was probably better.”

UPDATE (7:38pm, 5/26/15): In an emailed statement, a spokeswoman for the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office told IBTimes: “Taiwan’s 2003 donation was for the fund to build the Clinton Presidential Library. This was way before Mrs. Clinton was made the U.S. Secretary of State. We have neither knowledge nor comments concerning other issues.”

Review This 45 Item List from 1963

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Chilling and a real conversation starter, most provocative.

Communist Goals (1963)
Documention below
Congressional Record–Appendix, pp. A34-A35
January 10, 1963

Current Communist Goals

EXTENSION OF REMARKS OF HON. A. S. HERLONG, JR. OF FLORIDA

IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

Thursday, January 10, 1963

Mr. HERLONG. Mr. Speaker, Mrs. Patricia Nordman of De Land, Fla., is an ardent and articulate opponent of communism, and until recently published the De Land Courier, which she dedicated to the purpose of alerting the public to the dangers of communism in America.

At Mrs. Nordman’s request, I include in the RECORD, under unanimous consent, the following “Current Communist Goals,” which she identifies as an excerpt from “The Naked Communist,” by Cleon Skousen:

[From “The Naked Communist,” by Cleon Skousen]

CURRENT COMMUNIST GOALS

1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.

2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.

3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament [by] the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.

4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.

5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.

6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.

7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.

8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev’s promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.

9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.

10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.

11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)

12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.

13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.

14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.

15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.

16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.

17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers’ associations. Put the party line in textbooks.

18. Gain control of all student newspapers.

19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.

20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.

21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.

22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to “eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms.”

23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. “Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art.”

24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them “censorship” and a violation of free speech and free press.

25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.

26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as “normal, natural, healthy.”

27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with “social” religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a “religious crutch.”

28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of “separation of church and state.”

29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.

30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the “common man.”

31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the “big picture.” Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.

32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture–education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.

33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.

34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.

36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.

37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.

38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand [or treat].

39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.

40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.

41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.

42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use [“]united force[“] to solve economic, political or social problems.

43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.

44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.

45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction [over domestic problems. Give the World Court jurisdiction] over nations and individuals alike.

Note by Webmaster: The Congressional Record back this far has not be digitized and posted on the Internet.

It will probably be available at your nearest library that is a federal repository. Call them and ask them.

Your college library is probably a repository. This is an excellent source of government records.

Another source are your Congress Critters. They should be more than happy to help you in this matter.

You will find the Ten Planks of the Communist Manifesto interesting at this point.

Click here to see them listed with brain-challenging comments.

Documentation

Webmaster Forest Glen Durland found the document in the library.
Sources are listed below.
The quote starts on page 259.
Microfilm:

California State University at San Jose
Clark Library, Government Floor
Phone (408)924-2770
Microfilm
Call Number:
J
11
.R5
Congressional Record, Vol. 109
88th Congress, 1st Session
Appendix Pages A1-A2842
Jan. 9-May 7, 1963
Reel 12
The book was found in the off campus stacks, was ordered and checked. The quote below was checked against the original and is correct. The few errors in the copy from the Congressional Record are shown in [ ] .
The quote starts on page 259.

California State University at San Jose, Clark Library stacks call number:
Naked Communist
HX
56
S55

Book title page:
Skousen, W. Cleon. Naked Communist
Salt Lake City, Utah: Ensign Publishing Co.
C. 1961 , 9th edition July 1961.

Who is at Fault When it Comes to Syria Refugees?

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This matter comes down to no policy on the war in Syria and the misguided, yet no less corrupt leaders in this matter include the National Security Council at the White House, Barack Obama himself and the failed control and management at the State Department which began with Hillary Clinton and now with John Kerry.

The United Nations is at the core of the mismanagement and Western countries are left to clean up the mess, while some are now saying NO.

U.N. Calls on Western Nations to Shelter Syrian Refugees

“In the case of Syrian refugees, our intelligence on the ground is alarmingly slim, making it harder to identify extremists,” said Representative Michael McCaul, Republican of Texas and chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee.

The United Nations high commissioner for refugees, António Guterres, has stepped up calls for industrialized countries, including the United States, to shelter 130,000 Syrian refugees over the next two years.

The figure is a fraction of the nearly four million refugees who have poured into the countries bordering Syria — chiefly Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey — straining their resources and plunging many displaced people into poverty.

So far, the high commissioner’s pleas have not been met. Governments around the world have promised to take in just under two-thirds of what the United Nations is urging, while a great many more Syrians have chosen to make perilous journeys by land and sea in search of asylum in Europe. More here from the New York Times.

McCaul Says Admitting Unvetted Syrian Refugees into the U.S. is “Very Dangerous”

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Chairman Michael McCaul, of the House Homeland Security Committee, wrote a letter to President Obama last Thursday expressing concerns over the Administration’s announced plans to resettle some 2,000 Syrian refugees in the United States this year. Terrorists have made known their plans to attempt to exploit refugee programs to sneak terrorists into the West and the U.S. homeland. Chairman McCaul’s letter points out the potential national security threat this poses to the United States.

Chairman McCaul: “Despite all evidence towards our homeland’s vulnerability to foreign fighters, the Administration still plans to resettle Syrian refugees into the United States. The Director of the National Counterterrorism Center and the Deputy Director of the FBI both sat before my Committee this Congress and expressed their concern with admitting refugees we can’t properly vet from the global epicenter of terrorism and extremism in Syria. America has a proud tradition of welcoming refugees from around the world, but in this special situation the Obama Administration’s Syrian refugee plan is very dangerous.”

Read Chairman McCaul’s letter HERE.

 

The Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence will hold a hearing on June 24th to examine the refugee resettlement program and discuss vulnerabilities to our security exposed by the Administration’s plan.

It was last year that Barack Obama lifted restrictions on the refugee program.

U.S. eases rules to admit more Syrian refugees, after 31 last year

President Barack Obama’s administration announced on Wednesday that it had eased some immigration rules to allow more of the millions of Syrians forced from their homes during the country’s three-year civil war to come to the United States.

Only 31 Syrian refugees – out of an estimated 2.3 million – were admitted in the fiscal year that ended in October, prompting demands for change from rights advocates and many lawmakers.

Hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been taken in by neighboring countries such as Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey.

The rules changes granted exemptions on a case by case basis to the “material support” bar in U.S. immigration law, according to an announcement in the Federal Register signed by Secretary of State John Kerry and Jeh Johnson, the Secretary of Homeland Security.

That bar had made it impossible for anyone who had provided any support to armed rebel groups to come to the United States, even if the groups themselves receive aid from Washington.

The advocacy group Human Rights First said, for example, that the existing law had been invoked to bar a refugee who had been robbed of $4 and his lunch by armed rebels, and a florist who had sold bouquets to a group the United States had designated as a terrorist organization.

“These exemptions will help address the plight of Syrian refugees who are caught up in the worst humanitarian crisis in a generation,” Illinois Senator Richard Durbin, chairman of the U.S. Senate subcommittee on human rights, said in a statement.

It was not immediately clear how many Syrians would be affected by the rules change.

By early January, 135,000 Syrians had applied for asylum in the United States. But the strict restrictions on immigration, many instituted to prevent terrorists from entering the country, had kept almost all of them out.

Washington has provided $1.3 billion in humanitarian assistance to aid Syrian refugees. This year, the United Nations is also trying to relocate 30,000 displaced Syrians it considers especially vulnerable. Witnesses at a Senate hearing last month had testified that Washington would normally accept half.