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Congress should sanction China operations due to synthetic opioid production and should also list all variants of synthetic opioids as weapons of mass destruction under the chemical and biological weapons convention. DEA now has offices in China to work with officials there and investigation trafficking patterns.
The United States consumes 85% of all the world’s natural and synthetic opiates, which in 2015 factored in 33,091 U.S. deaths, up more than 4000 from the previous year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Opioid overdoses have quadrupled since 1999. When average U.S. life expectancies for men and women edged downward last year, for the first time in decades, many health professionals blamed opiate abuse.
The opium poppy is no longer the starting point for many of the opiates on the street. The new compounds, often sold mixed with heroin, originate in illicit labs in China. “For the cartels, why wait for a field of poppies to grow and harvest if you can get your hands on the precursor chemicals and cook a batch of fentanyl in a lab?” says Tim Reagan, resident agent in charge of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA’s) Cincinnati office.
In late 2015, the drug agency persuaded its Chinese counterpart to add 116 synthetic drugs to its list of controlled substances; fentanyl and several analogs were included. In response, underground Chinese labs began tweaking the fentanyl molecule, which is easy to alter for anyone with basic knowledge of chemistry and lab tools. By adding chemical groups, unscrupulous chemists have created new, unregulated variants, some of them even more potent than the original.
Hoping to stem the tide of synthetic opiates, DEA has taken the fight to China, as prolific a maker of illicit drugs as it is of legitimate chemicals. According to a U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission report last month, “China is a global source of illicit fentanyl and other [new psychoactive substances] because the country’s vast chemical and pharmaceutical industries are weakly regulated and poorly monitored.” In response to U.S. pressure, China has scheduled fentanyl and several other derivatives. More here.
U-47700 is a short-acting synthetic opioid analgesic that first became available via online vendors in late 2014. It has only a short history of human use. U-47700 has been detected in counterfeit pharmaceutical opioids and associated with deaths.
Mar-Apr 2016 – Fake oxycodone tablets containing U-47700 are seized by law enforcement in Ohio and fake Norco tablets containing U-47700 and fentanyl appear in the Sacramento, CA area.
A fatal overdose in East Portland leads detectives into the Dark Web, where lab-created opioids are bought with Bitcoin.
Courtesy of Jessica Collins
Even by Portland standards, the weather was dreary on the day Aisha Zughbieh-Collins died.
It was late morning Feb. 16 when Jessica Collins drove through a 40-degree drizzle to the pink and yellow townhouse on Southeast 84th Avenue, where Aisha, her 18-year-old daughter, lived.
Collins drove gingerly down the rutted, dead-end gravel street. It’s the kind of street that’s often lined with abandoned shopping carts.
She got out of her truck, walked into Aisha’s townhouse and climbed the stairs with a sense of dread. For the past 12 hours, Collins had been unable to reach her daughter.
Just two weeks earlier, Aisha had overdosed, her life saved when a roommate called paramedics.
As Collins entered her daughter’s bedroom, Aisha was sitting lotus-style on her bed.
“Each step closer I could tell something was really wrong,” Collins recalls.
Aisha had a syringe in her right arm, and a shoelace tourniquet tied around her biceps. She wasn’t breathing. Her skin was cold.
“I know it sounds strange,” Collins says, “but a sense of peace came over me—that she’s OK now—even though she was dead in front of me.”
Drug overdoses now kill more people than firearms or automobile crashes in Oregon, according to state figures, and are the largest cause of accidental death in the U.S. As the country’s overdose death total continues to soar, Oregon officials have responded far more effectively than officials in most states (see chart below).
While opioid overdose deaths nationally rose 57 percent from 2010 to 2015, they actually dropped slightly in Oregon over the same period. Source: Oregon Health Authority
But even in Portland, which has slowed overdose deaths resulting from heroin and prescription opioids such as oxycodone, Aisha’s death is part of a new and dangerous development.
The drug that killed her was a potent “synthetic” opioid manufactured in China—a drug so new that narcotics investigators and Portland’s public health officials had never encountered it before.
“What we don’t have a lot of here yet is the synthetics,” says Dr. Paul Lewis, the Multnomah County health officer. “That could change.”
When Portland Police Bureau detectives arrived at Aisha’s townhouse, they were initially stymied. Their investigation would eventually lead them across the country and into the deepest recesses of the internet: places where the common currency is Bitcoin, and where buyers and sellers are anonymous and far removed from each other. Bitcoin is used for a lot of other purposes though, as people find it a lot easier to buy bitcoin. It just depends on the circumstances though obviously.
The trail would take them to a condo in South Carolina, and to one of the Dark Web’s most prolific synthetic opioid sellers.
“We’d never done a case like this,” says the Police Bureau detective who led the investigation. “We weren’t familiar with the substance. And we had no idea where it came from.”
Aisha Zughbieh-Collins traveled a long way in a short life that started on the Gulf Coast of Florida.
She was petite—barely 5 feet 4 inches tall, with a quick smile. She loved animals: She used to have a cat named Bebe and a Burmese python named Applejack. She liked sushi and Thai food, root beer and cream soda. She listened to Bright Eyes and Nirvana.
In November 2015, Aisha ran away from a foster-care facility in Baltimore, where her mother says she’d been assaulted. Aisha reconnected with her mother, who was also living in Maryland but who had lost custody of Aisha three years earlier.
Rather than return Aisha to foster care, the pair decided to head west to begin new lives. They left shortly before Thanksgiving. “We didn’t know where to go, but we wanted warm weather,” Collins says.
They drove west in a sunflower-colored Nissan Xterra, using throwaway phones and paying cash at cheap motels. They feared authorities might be looking for Aisha, who was 17 years old and still a ward of the state.
They arrived in Oregon in February 2016, and Collins found work as a host in a remote campground in Mount Hood National Forest.
They liked the woods, but for Aisha, there was little in the way of entertainment—nobody her age, nowhere to eat, and no WiFi. “It was hard for Aisha to be without the internet,” Collins says.
In May of that year, Aisha found a place to live on Craigslist and moved to the Brentwood-Darlington neighborhood just east of 82nd Avenue, sharing with several housemates the townhouse where she would eventually die.
Collins says her daughter had been using hard drugs in Maryland, and had started using again when Collins moved to Portland, living near Aisha.
She told her mother she was using a drug called U-47700.
U-47700, known sometimes as U4 or “pink,” was developed by the pharmaceutical company Upjohn in 1976 as an alternative to morphine but never received U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval. As a result, it was never placed on the FDA’s schedule of illicit drugs, so for decades there was no prohibition on its manufacture or distribution. It existed in a gray zone—neither approved for use nor specifically illegal.
And while Upjohn never manufactured the drug, laboratories in China—where law enforcement officials say many synthetic opioids are made—figured out how to do so.
U-47700 is also lethal—nearly eight times more potent than heroin. Records show the feds first became aware that people were using U4 to get high in October 2015, although they weren’t sure where the drug was coming from.
In the next year, they recorded 46 overdose deaths, most on the Eastern Seaboard. In November 2016, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, “responding to the imminent threat to public health and safety,” made U-47700 a schedule I substance, classifying it among the most dangerous street drugs.
“I told Aisha U4 was suicide,” Collins recalls. “You can’t choose whether you live or die. It’s like Russian roulette.”
Rising Synthetic Tide: Overdose deaths from synthetic opioids rose much faster last year than overdose deaths from heroin or prescription pain pills.
Source: Centers for Disease Control
The day Aisha died, Portland narcotics detectives arrived at her townhouse. The lead detective is a stocky cop, with salt-and-pepper hair and, considering his job, a cheery demeanor.
The detective later spoke to WW but insisted on anonymity because he works undercover. He sees a lot of dead bodies: There are about two fatal overdoses a week in Portland, most opioid-related.
But this one stood out, the detective says, not only because he’d never heard of the drug that killed Aisha, but also because she was a woman, and so young—the average overdose victim in Oregon is a man over 35.
The house where Aisha Zughbieh-Collins died. (Hilary Sanders)
Portland’s approach to overdose deaths changed in 2007, when Kraig Crow, a Lincoln High School graduate, fatally overdosed.
“Our policy here is different from other jurisdictions’,” the detective says. “Before, we just walked away and let the medical examiner handle it.
“After the Lincoln case,” he continues, “we started asking, ‘What can we find at the scene that can allow us to investigate further?'”
When Portland detectives respond to an overdose death now, they are looking for witnesses, phones and the packaging in which drugs are delivered.
In the Crow case, prosecutors won convictions of six defendants, including what’s called a “Len Bias conviction” for the top dealer.
That law, named after University of Maryland basketball star Len Bias, who died of a cocaine overdose in 1986 after being picked second overall in the NBA draft, became a potent tool for prosecutors because it replaced lighter sentences with a 20-year prison term for those who deal drugs leading to a death.
Federal prosecutors in Oregon are recognized as national leaders in bringing Len Bias cases.
Investigators try to determine how the fatal dose moved from the original source to the consumer, establishing a chain of custody. “Every person in the chain is potentially liable for the overdose death,” says Steve Mygrant, an assistant U.S. attorney who has prosecuted several dealers in fatal overdose cases. (Local and federal officials often cooperate on Len Bias cases.)
Aisha’s mother told detectives she thought her daughter bought U4 online, and she provided them with Aisha’s email address.
The detectives also found unusual materials in Aisha’s bedroom—distinctive packaging suggested someone had carefully disguised the U-47700 to send it through the mail.
The drug Aisha bought had been hidden in a VeriQuick brand pregnancy test kit—sold only at Dollar Tree stores—and appeared to have arrived from an unknown seller in a U.S. Postal Service shipping envelope from South Carolina.
Those were clues. But the detectives couldn’t work their way up the usual chain of delivery as they do in heroin cases.
“Our calls usually come from people complaining about a neighborhood drug house,” the detective says. “This online stuff is at a completely different level.”
The next day, the detectives asked for help from federal experts who knew how to navigate the deepest recesses of the internet.
In 2013, federal agents busted Silk Road, a vast online bazaar for drugs, child pornography, illegal weapons, stolen credit cards, valuable personal information, hacking services and even contract killers.
Silk Road operated on what’s called the Dark Web. That’s the term used to describe the vast array of websites that operate out of reach of the average web surfer.
The internet is like an iceberg: Experts say less than 5 percent of websites are visible using typical browsers such as Safari, Firefox or Chrome.
Some of what’s under the surface is benign material that is simply password-protected: legitimate financial and medical records, for instance, that are shielded for privacy reasons. But it is also used by dissidents in countries where free speech isn’t allowed—and by criminals of all kinds.
Dark Web users need a couple of things to access such sites: a specialized (and easily downloadable) browser called Tor and, if they want to remain anonymous, a tool that encrypts their communications and preserves their anonymity. Aisha used what’s called a PGP (“pretty good privacy”) key to hide her activity.
And for people who wish to buy or sell goods or services on the Dark Web, using Bitcoin or another virtual currency adds another layer of anonymity. Bitcoin, which Aisha used, allowed her to purchase drugs without creating the kind of easily traceable trail that credit or debit cards leave behind.
“But once you clear the smoke,” says George Chamberlin, chief of the FBI’s Oregon Cyber Task Force, “it’s not that different from the visible internet.”
When Silk Road disappeared because of the indictment and conviction of its creator, other Dark Web marketplaces took its place. One, called AlphaBay, offers a staggering array of illicit drugs.
Sellers hawk their wares aggressively and encourage buyers to rate their experiences just as customers do on conventional sites such as Amazon, Yelp or Trip Advisor. But instead of rating tacos or hotel rooms, buyers are rating heroin, meth or the newest kind of illicit narcotic, synthetic opioids.
“The game is changing,” the FBI’s Chamberlin says, “especially because of synthetics. They are different because of their potency and because they are trafficked on the Dark Web.”
Detectives found that Aisha had written an alphanumeric code on a pad in her bedroom. That code identified her PGP key.
They determined that Aisha’s PGP key had been used to buy drugs on AlphaBay.
The detective learned that, using her PGP, Aisha had purchased U-47700 on Feb. 11, five days before her death, from a vendor who called himself “Peter the Great”—like the Russian emperor.
A U.S. postal inspector determined the envelope found in Aisha’s bedroom had a fictitious return address but was purchased at a post office in Greenville, S.C.
In April, the Portland detective bought U4 over the Dark Web from Peter the Great. The drugs arrived, wrapped in material from Dollar Tree.
The person who purchased the shipping labels—presumably Peter the Great—used secure email addresses. The investigators then filed a subpoena for all records related to those addresses.
They turned up a name: Ted Khleborod, a resident of Greenville.
Peter the Great—who detectives now believed was Khleborod—was a prolific salesman: Figures on AlphaBay showed he’d done 9,553 transactions.
The Portland detective contacted federal officials in South Carolina. “We scared the crap out the assistant U.S. attorney back there when we told him about the substance and volume of sales,” the detective says. “This guy was sending out the equivalent of bombs.”
Ted Khleborod (Spartanburg County Sheriff’s Office)
Khleborod, now 28, was born in Moldova, part of the former Soviet Union. When he was in high school, records show he spent time on bodybuilder chat boards, discussing the benefits of steroid use and posting as “Arnoldismyhero,” a tribute to former California governor and champion body builder Arnold Schwarzenegger.
He later studied at the University of South Carolina, where, according to his Facebook page, he was pre-med. He graduated in 2016.
Khleborod lived well for a college student, records show, driving a BMW—with a vanity plate that read “TEDALICUS”—and a Ducati motorcycle.
In late April, Portland detectives flew to Greenville to coordinate with local police.
For three days, they staked out Khleborod at his condo. They saw his girlfriend, Ana Barrero, leave his place twice to mail dozens of parcels, with labels matching those they’d found earlier in Aisha’s room and identical to those matching labels from the drugs that investigators bought over the Dark Web from Peter the Great.
They also obtained video of Barrero buying 71 VeriQuick pregnancy test kits at a Dollar Tree in Greenville.
On April 26, officers arrested Khleborod as he left work at an urgent care clinic. “He was a quiet guy, contemplative,” says the Portland detective. “I don’t think he used his own product, and based on his numbers, he could have made a million bucks in the past couple years.”
Khleborod, who is now in custody, faces federal charges in South Carolina. (His attorney did not respond to a request for comment.)
When officers served a search warrant on Khleborod’s condo, they wore hazmat suits to guard against the toxicity of U-47700. They hauled away 9 kilos of the drug, worth $270,000.
They also found a book, written for prospective doctors, called Kill as Few Patients as Possible.
The Portland detective says Aisha’s case revealed to him a new world of synthetic opioids and the Dark Web. He says he also realized that despite all the technically sophisticated tools dealers like Peter the Great employ, they are subject to human mistakes.
“Internet privacy—even with encryption—is not as great as you think,” the detective says. “People on the Dark Web still leave breadcrumbs we can follow.”
Jessica Collins says she’s happy police arrested Khleborod. But she remains heartbroken over her daughter’s death.
“I feel like she’s with me every day,” Collins says, “and I worry about how many other families this might happen to.”
Cam Strahm, the DEA chief for Oregon, applauds the police work that led to Khleborod’s capture. But he says after 26 years of chasing drug dealers, he’s come to understand the limits of that work.
“Addiction is a treatable disease,” he says, “and we’re facing an epidemic. We can’t arrest our way out of it.”
Aisha Collins (Courtesy of Jessica Collins)
The Wages of Synthetics
The new challenge from synthetic opioids marketed over the Dark Web comes at a time when the trend in overdose deaths in Oregon is relatively positive.
Opioid deaths here have declined in recent years, while the trend in the rest of the country is still sharply upward. (The New York Times recently reported deaths jumped nearly 20 percent nationally in 2016.)
“When you look at the rest of the country, flat is good,”says Multnomah County Health Officer Dr. Paul Lewis.
There are two reasons for the good news. The first is naloxone, marketed under the brand name Narcan, a nasal spray that reverses overdoses. Under the leadership of former Multnomah County Health Officer Dr. Gary Oxman, the Portland area was a national pioneer in making naloxone widely available (“Who Wants to Save a Junkie?” WW, March 13, 2013).
And Oxman’s successor, Lewis, pushed large metro-area medical systems to decrease the number of opioid pain pills prescribed to patients. That number has decreased each of the past five quarters.
Together, those two developments have caused the number of overdose deaths in Oregon to decline, a result most states would envy.
But deaths such as Aisha Zughbieh-Collins’ highlight a new danger: synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, carfentanil and U-47700 that are not prescribed by physicians but instead manufactured and sold illegally.
Lewis says there have been just two confirmed deaths in the metro area in the past 18 months in which U-47700 was the primary cause. But synthetic opioids are now the nation’s fastest-growing cause of overdose deaths. The death toll in some states is extraordinary: Last year, for instance, there were 34 deaths from synthetics in Oregon in 2015—and 949 in Massachusetts.
“The synthetic thing is new to everybody,” Lewis says. “We thought heroin was the foe, but now these synthetics come along. It’s a new chapter, and we don’t know how it ends.”
Cam Strahm of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration notes that synthetics such as fentanyl and carfentanil are dozens or even hundreds of times stronger than heroin.
Strahm says synthetics are also less predictable than heroin, which is now fairly standard in quality and potency. The dealers who sell synthetics often mix them in nonstandard “cocktails” and also frequently misrepresent what they are selling.
“When you are making illicit purchases from anonymous sources, you can’t depend on purity or that what you think you are buying is what you actually get,” Strahm says. “You really don’t know what you are purchasing. It’s like going on a vacation without knowing your destination.”
You would think by virtue of a UN heritage committee known as United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, they would get history right. Israel has provided proof and historical evidence, where is that from the Palestinians?
The Tomb and the city of Hebron is the second holiest site in Judaism, after the Temple Mount and its Western Wall, he noted. The Bible clearly records its purchase by Abraham. The committee of T21 members are: Angola, Azerbaijan, Burkina Faso, Croatia, Cuba, Finland, Indonesia, Jamaica, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Republic of Korea, Tunisia, Turkey, United Republic of Tnzania, Vietnam and Zimbabwe. Anymore questions on the countries that refuse history and remain Anti-Semitic?
Now is the time for the United States to defund UNESCO and the UNRWA.
Following the resolution passed by the UNESCO World Heritage Committee regarding the Tomb of the Patriarchs, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, today (Friday, 7 July 2017), decided to cut an additional $1 million from the membership funds that Israel pays to the UN and to transfer it to the establishment of “The Museum of the Heritage of the Jewish People in Kiryat Arba and Hebron” and to additional heritage projects related to Hebron.
Against UNESCO’s denial of the past, Prime Minister Netanyahu is determined to present to the entire world the historic truth and the Jewish People’s deep connection – of thousands of years – to Hebron.
***
Tomb of Sarah, wife a Patriarch Abraham
JERUSALEM (Reuters) – The U.N. cultural organisation declared an ancient shrine in the occupied West Bank a Palestinian heritage site on Friday, prompting Israel to further cut its funding to the United Nations.
UNESCO designated Hebron and the two adjoined shrines at its heart – the Jewish Tomb of the Patriarchs and the Muslim Ibrahimi Mosque – a “Palestinian World Heritage Site in Danger”.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called that “another delusional UNESCO decision” and ordered that $1 million be diverted from Israel’s U.N. funding to establish a museum and other projects covering Jewish heritage in Hebron.
The funding cut is Israel’s fourth in the past year, taking its U.N. contribution from $11 million to just $1.7 million, an Israeli official said. Each cut has come after various U.N. bodies voted to adopt decisions which Israel said discriminated against it.
Palestinian Foreign Minister, Reyad Al-Maliki, said the UNESCO vote, at a meeting in Krakow, Poland, was proof of the “successful diplomatic battle Palestine has launched on all fronts in the face of Israeli and American pressure on (UNESCO) member countries.”
Hebron is the largest Palestinian city in the occupied West Bank with a population of some 200,000. About 1,000 Israeli settlers live in the heart of the city and for years it has been a place of religious friction between Muslims and Jews.
Jews believe that the Cave of the Patriarchs is where Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and their wives, are buried. Muslims, who, like Christians, also revere Abraham, built the Ibrahimi mosque, also known as the Sanctuary of Abraham, in the 14th century.
The religious significance of the city has made it a focal point for settlers, who are determined to expand the Jewish presence there. Living in the heart of the city, they require intense security, with some 800 Israeli troops protecting them.
Even before Netanyahu’s budget announcement, Internal Security Minister Gilad Erdan signalled Israel would seek to further make its mark at the Hebron shrine, tweeting: “UNESCO will continue to adopt delusional decisions but history cannot be erased … we must continue to manifest our right by building immediately in the Cave of the Patriarchs.”
(Additional reporting by Ali Sawafta in Ramallah and Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)
Terror-related acts committed by refugees widespread, according to new report
FNC: At least 61 people who came to the United States as refugees engaged in terrorist activities between 2002 and 2016, according to an explosive new report coming on the heels of the Supreme Court’s reinstatement of much of President Trump’s travel ban.
The alarming report by the Heritage Foundation identified scores of refugees, including many who came prior to 2002, as having taken part in activities ranging from lying to investigators about terror plots, to actually taking part in them. The report, aimed at reforming the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, or USRAP, calls for stricter limits and restrictions on refugees.
“There is no universal right to migrate, resettlement is not the solution to mass displacement, and U.S. policymakers have a responsibility to ensure that the United States takes in only as many refugees as it can safely vet and assimilate,” the report states. “The United States operates the program not because it is obligated to resettle refugees, but because the U.S. is a humane country and USRAP serves its national interests.”
Refugee Admissions Totals from Global Regions to the U.S. (The Heritage Foundation )
The report, written by policy analyst David Inserra, could lend weight to the Trump administration’s effort to curtail the number of refugees who come to the U.S. every year. But perhaps most worrisome, the report warns that no amount of refugee vetting can account for the “1.5 generation” — those who come to the U.S. with peaceful intentions and then become radicalized while living in America.
“Given the threat that we found in the 1.5 generation, more needs to be done in the U.S. assimilation process,” said John Cooper, spokesman for the Heritage Foundation. “We can’t vet an 8-year-old to see if he will become a terrorist when he turns 18 or 28. Instead, we as a country need to rethink the way we assimilate refugees, and immigrants as a whole for that matter.
The Vetting Process for Refugees Coming to the U.S. (The Heritage Foundation )
“In the past few decades, the United States has drifted from its strong assimilation ethos, and the terrorism in Europe paints a disturbing picture of where non-assimilation leads,” he added.
The Trump administration has taken measures to both limit and more tightly screen refugees. Earlier this year, the administration reduced the number of refugees that it would accept this fiscal year from the Obama administration’s intended 110,000 to 50,000 – and that cap has almost been reached.
“A review is especially critical following the Obama administration’s rapid, and largely unprecedented, expansion of the program in the final year of his administration,” Cooper added. “Any administration has a responsibility to ensure all existing refugee and immigration programs, including the USRAP, best serve U.S. interests.”
A U.S. State Department official told Fox News the administration will soon provide guidance regarding those already scheduled for travel before last week’s Supreme Court decision lifting an injunction against Trump’s executive order banning travel from six mostly Muslim countries plagued by terror.
But the report leaves little doubt that the perpetrators of future terror attacks are already here, including some who may not yet be radicalized. It recommends a long-term focus be placed on migrants “embracing an American creed, learning English and gaining an education” which will in turn help them to develop and sustain “an American identity and sense of belonging.”
The report also supported the widely reported claim that refugees coming to the U.S undergo more vetting than any other immigrants coming to the country under other types of programs and visa categories. The vetting process for refugees typically takes 18 to 24 months from the time of the initial referral by the U.N. refugee agency, but “in the waning months of the Obama administration the U.S. reduced the time to as little as three months for Syrians by surging resources to the region.”
It also mandated that a “foolproof vetting system” is impossible, with obvious limitations, such as lack of identification or forged documents especially when fleeing war.
“To be as cost-effective as possible – which saves the most lives – the U.S. should focus the majority of its refugee efforts on helping front-line states care for the refugees they shelter,” the report states.
Specifically, the report suggests that the U.S. can do more to urge Middle Eastern countries – most notably the oil-wealthy Gulf States – to resettle Syrian and Iraqi refugees.
“Many Syrian and Iraqi refugees share similar cultural and religious values with the people of the Gulf States, which have the financial capacity for resettlement,” the report found. “Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates have donated hundreds of millions of dollars each for relief efforts, but the U.S. should urge the Gulf States to increase their aid for their Arab Muslim neighbors by resettling Syrians with all the rights and protections due to refugees.”
As it stands, the Gulf States are not signatories to the U.N. Refugee Protocol and thus do not offer refugee status. They will admit some primarily as migrant workers or to reunify families.
Fraud is also a cause for concern, according to the report. It cites as an example the Dadaab refugee camp in northern Kenya, which was exposed several years ago for developing an entire industry centered on “coaching applicants” and selling resettlement slots for as much as $10,000.
The report goes on to outline ways in which the U.S. could minimize fiscal costs and improve economic outcomes by establishing private resettlement programs on a trial basis rather than relying solely on government. But above all, the report emphasizes the need to ensure the program first and foremost puts America first.
It argues that refugee resettlement can indeed advance national interests by enabling the U.S. to “assert American leadership in foreign crisis,” providing “the U.S. with a way to respond positively to intractable crisis” and assisting allies and partners in crisis. But reviews by the Trump team to the program to achieve this objective are crucial.
The Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM) is one of the State Department’s “functional,” as opposed to “geographic” bureaus. This indicates a Bureau that focuses on a particular issue wherever it arises around the world. As described in our mission statement, our focus is refugees, other migrants, and conflict victims. Our goal is to protect these people, who are often living in quite dangerous conditions.
The Bureau’s mission statement:
The mission of the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM) is to provide protection, ease suffering, and resolve the plight of persecuted and uprooted people around the world on behalf of the American people by providing life-sustaining assistance, working through multilateral systems to build global partnerships, promoting best practices in humanitarian response, and ensuring that humanitarian principles are thoroughly integrated into U.S. foreign and national security policy.
What does the Bureau do internationally?
The Bureau works with the international community to develop humane and what are termed “durable” solutions to their displacement. The three durable solutions, are:
Repatriation – going home when they are no longer at risk of persecution
Local Integration – settling permanently in the country to which they have fled
Resettlement – settling permanently in a third country
According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), fewer than 1% of refugees worldwide are ever resettled. However, although resettlement often is the durable solution of “last resort,” it remains a vital tool for providing international protection and for meeting the special needs of individual refugees who are unable to return home.
Are internally displaced persons (IDPs) part of the Bureau’s portfolio?
Internally displaced persons are people who have been displaced from their homes but who have not crossed an internationally recognized border. The Bureau supports the work of UNHCR and ICRC when these organizations respond to the needs of internally displaced persons.
Numerous other organizations, such as UNICEF, the World Food Program, and others also provide assistance to IDPs that complement the activities of UNHCR and ICRC. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) funds the work of these other international organizations as well as non-governmental organizations to respond to IDP needs as well.
Who does the work?
The Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration (PRM) has approximately 130 civil service and foreign service staff. On the foreign aid side, we are divided into geographic offices. Our program to resettle refugees in the United States is handled by our Admissions Office. We also have a policy office that monitors and evaluates the relief work conducted by the organizations we fund.
How does the Bureau deliver assistance to refugees?
The Bureau does not operate refugee camps, or otherwise give aid directly to refugees. Instead, in the interests of effectiveness and efficiency, we work with the United Nations (UN) and other international organizations, as well as with non-governmental organizations, that operate these programs. The Bureau manages the contributions to these organizations, and monitors the programs we fund: we make sure they are working properly and ascertain that they are in line with U.S. government policies.
For instance, take the refugee relief set-up on the border between Thailand and Burma. Many of the camps were built with assistance from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The Burmese refugees receive health services, in part, from a private American charity, International Medical Corps. In Bangkok, the refugee resettlement center, called an “overseas processing entity,” handles cases of Burmese referred for resettlement, and is managed by another U.S.-based group, the International Rescue Committee. All these groups receive funding from the Bureau.
Barack Obama’s sanction and executive order hardly went far enough on Russia. For Russian Laws and Regulations and Implications for Kaspersky Labs and certificates, go here.
WASHINGTON — U.S. intelligence agencies have turned up the heat on Kaspersky Lab, the Moscow-based cybersecurity giant long suspected of ties to Russia’s spying apparatus.
Now, official Kremlin documents reviewed by McClatchy could further inflame the debate about whether the company’s relationship with Russian intelligence is more than rumor.
The documents are certifications issued to the company by the Russian Security Service, the spy agency known as the FSB.
Unlike the stamped approvals the FSB routinely issues to companies seeking to operate in Russia, Kaspersky’s include an unusual feature: a military intelligence unit number matching that of an FSB program.
“That strikes me as much more persuasive public evidence,” said Paul Rosenzweig, a former deputy secretary for policy at the Department of Homeland Security. “It makes it far more likely that much of the rumor and uncertainty about Kaspersky are true.”
For years, suspicions that Kaspersky is connected to Russia’s spying network have dogged the company, a leading global seller of anti-virus programs. Founder and CEO Eugene Kaspersky studied cryptography, programming and mathematics at an academy operated by the KGB, the FSB’s Soviet-era predecessor, and then worked for the Ministry of Defense.
Since he established the company, it has grown to serve more than 400 million users worldwide, according to its website, and is the largest software vendor in Europe. Its security software is also widely available in the United States.
U.S. agencies also use it, with Kaspersky a subcontractor on federal software contracts. The Democratic National Committee has also used the software, even after its emails were breached last summer by Russian hackers.
But during investigations into Russia’s meddling in last year’s U.S. elections, concerns have grown that Kaspersky software could somehow be used to launch a cyberattack on the U.S. electric grid or other critical infrastructure, such as railroads, airlines or water utilities. ABC News reported in May that the FBI warned industry leaders about those risks last year at a meeting confirmed by McClatchy.
One of Kaspersky’s certificates that carries a military intelligence unit number.
GREG GORDON/MCCLATCHY/TNS
In recent days, two events kept Kaspersky in the news: FBI agents fanned out to interview Russian Kaspersky employees based in the United States, and a Senate committee approved legislation to curb federal use of the company’s products.
Even so, no proof has ever been made public to refute the company’s denials that it has connections to Russian intelligence.
The documents obtained by McClatchy, however, could provide additional evidence that the clandestine FSB has a tight relationship with Kaspersky.
In a statement to McClatchy, the company did not directly address the reference to an FSB military unit number in several of its certificates dating to 2007. The certificates are posted on Kaspersky’s website.
Kaspersky said the FSB’s certification review “is quite similar to that of many countries,” including those of the European Union and the United States. It includes an analysis of the company’s source code “to ensure that undeclared functionality and security issues — like backdoors — do not exist,” the company said.
However, Russia’s certification reviews do not require the company to divulge “the necessary information to permit those (spy) organizations to bypass products’ security mechanisms,” Kaspersky said.
After this story was initially published, the company said it and other high-tech companies that seek to sell products to the Russian government receive their certifications from the Center for Information Protection and Special Communications, known by the FSB military unit number on Kaspersky’s certificates.
A former Western intelligence official who examined the documents for McClatchy described as “very unusual” the assignment of a military intelligence number on Kaspersky’s certificates.
In Russia’s closed society, the FSB retains the right to access any company’s data transmissions, and no firm is allowed to use encryption to block the intelligence agency’s intrusions, the former Western spy said.
Kenneth Geers, a former NATO expert who is a fellow at the Washington-based Atlantic Council, also reviewed the company’s FSB certificate.
Geers said he could not say with certainty the degree to which the documents show a connection between Kaspersky and the FSB.
But “the suggestion is that this is a government op (operation), a unit with a direct government affiliation,” he said.
“No one should be surprised if there are closer relationships between IT vendors and law enforcement, worldwide, than the public imagines,” Geers said.
Case in point: Whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that American telecommunications companies shared vast amounts of personal data with the U.S. National Security Agency, where Geers once worked.
It’s possible, Geers said, that Kaspersky’s software contains a secret “backdoor” to allow Russian special services access for law enforcement and counterintelligence purposes.
“If such a secret backdoor exists, I would not be shocked,” Geers said. “A worldwide deployment of sensors may be too great a temptation for any country’s intelligence services to ignore.
“Kaspersky may also have been required by Russian authorities to participate in a quiet business partnership with the government,” he said.
A former CIA station chief in Moscow agreed that Kaspersky may have had little choice.
“These guys’ families, their well-being, everything they have is in Russia,” said Steve Hall, who later headed the agency’s Russian operations before retiring in 2015.
Kaspersky is “a Russian company,” Hall said. “Any time (Russian President Vladimir Putin) wants Kaspersky to do something — anything — he’ll remind them that’s where their families are and where their bank accounts are. There’s no doubt in my mind it could be, if it’s not already, under the control of Putin.”
Kaspersky has rejected any notion that it might be an intelligence front, citing its years of delivering quality products.
“As a private company, Kaspersky Lab has no ties to any government, and the company has never helped, nor will help, any government in the world with its cyber espionage efforts,” Eugene Kaspersky said in May during an “Ask Me Anything” session on the website Reddit.
Many cyber experts, including those with federal government backgrounds, have praised the quality of Kaspersky software. The company also has a record of exposing cyberattacks, including the U.S. government’s Stuxnet attack that disabled Iran’s nuclear weapons development even though the Iranian equipment wasn’t connected to the Internet.
But several other experts said they were “not shocked” by the disclosure of the language in Kaspersky’s FSB certificate.
“It is common view around the intelligence community that (Kaspersky) is treated (by the Kremlin) like an arm of the Russian government,” said a former Obama administration cyber official, who asked for anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.
Kaspersky has attracted an unwanted spotlight lately in the Justice Department’s investigation headed by special counsel Robert Mueller into whether the Kremlin colluded with President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.
At a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in May, Sens. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., raised concerns about Kaspersky.
Rubio asked of intelligence agency chiefs, “Would any of you be comfortable with the Kaspersky Lab software on your computers?”
Before him were, among others, the leaders of the FBI, CIA and the National Security Agency.
Each said “no.”
The FBI interviews of Kaspersky employees were conducted June 27, after disclosures that the company paid retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn more than $11,000 in consulting fees last fall before he began a short-lived stint as Trump’s national security adviser.
The day after the interviews, the Senate Armed Service Committee approved legislation that would bar the Pentagon from buying Kaspersky products.
“The ties between Kaspersky Lab and the Kremlin are very alarming,” said Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H. “This has led to a consensus in Congress and among administration officials that Kaspersky Lab cannot be trusted to protect critical infrastructure, particularly computer systems vital to our nation’s security.”
Her amendment to the defense authorization bill prohibiting Pentagon purchase of the software as of October 2018 won overwhelming approval.
If the amendment becomes law, there could be consequences, a Russian news agency reported. It quoted a top Kremlin communications official, Nikolai Nikiforov, as warning that if the United States freezes out Kaspersky, Putin’s government could not rule out retaliation.
The FBI declined to comment. But the bureau has long suspected that some of Kaspersky’s American-based employees were engaging in intelligence activities, said a U.S. government official, who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter.
Federal agencies have at least 20 contracts in which Kaspersky products are used. The General Services Administration makes them available on an approved product list for much of the government.
CDW, a top government tech contractor that has provided Kaspersky software and maintenance through four contracts with the Consumer Safety Product Commission (as recently as May 23), declined to say whether it plans to continue offering Kaspersky software.
Dell, the giant computer manufacturer, offers Kaspersky in many of its products. The company did not respond to a request for comment.
So why do federal agencies still use Kaspersky software if there has been such uneasiness about it inside national security circles?
“Under acquisition rules, it is very difficult for an agency to rely on classified information in order to make purchasing decisions,” said J. Michael Daniel, White House cybersecurity coordinator during the Obama administration.
“A lot of acquisition officers didn’t seek out that information because they couldn’t use it in the decision-making process,” said Daniel, now president of the Cyber Threat Alliance, a group committed to improving cyber defenses.
The U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Russian cyber operatives pirated thousands of emails from the Democratic National Committee beginning in 2015 helped trigger the inquiries into possible Kremlin interference in the election.
But two months after the DNC disclosed that its servers had been hacked — in an apparent attempt to help prevent further intrusions — the party purchased Kaspersky software on Aug. 25, 2016, for $137.46, according to Federal Election Commission records. It was the only federal political committee that reported buying Kaspersky software in the 2016 cycle, according to FEC records.
A DNC spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
For its part, the company publishes a blog that advises consumers about computer viruses. The U.S. government official said, though, that in the past Kaspersky has aroused suspicions as to why it warns about some computer bugs but not others.
The firm’s presence has become so embedded in the U.S. economy that the company sponsors a Ferrari Formula One racing team, robotic competitions for children and is among the corporate sponsors of an upcoming conference of the National Conference of State Legislatures.
“They have a big public relations wing,” said the U.S. government official who spoke on condition of anonymity. “They’re fully aware they’re under the microscope.”
A federal biologist on the other end of the line told Edward B. Poitevent II that the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service intended to designate a large swath of Louisiana woods that had been in his family for generations a “critical habitat” for the endangered dusky gopher frog.
Poitevent was confused because the frog had been neither seen nor its croak heard on the land since the 1960s. Later he would learn that his land is not, in fact, a suitable habitat for the frog anyway.
“No matter how you slice it or dice it, it’s a taking of my land in that I can’t use it or sell it now,” said Poitevent, a New Orleans lawyer.
A half century after disappearing from the 1,500-acre parcel in Louisiana, the dusky gopher frog will likely appear this month in filings urging the U.S. Supreme Court to settle the matter after years of costly litigation.
The dusky gopher frog.
United States Fish and Wildlife Service
In one sense, the case illustrates the conflicts that arise as conservationists and the government use the Endangered Species Act to protect privately held lands. But legal scholars say the absent amphibian could provide a broader test of just how far the government’s regulatory reach can extend under the Constitution.
The case offers the high court a chance to revisit its “Chevron deference” precedent, named for a landmark 1984 ruling involving the oil giant and environmental activists. It held that when a federal law contains ambiguous language, the courts should defer to the agency’s interpretation unless it is unreasonable. Given that many laws contain ambiguous language – and that “unreasonable” is also a squishy term – Chevron gives federal agencies wide authority not just to interpret but to make law, many critics say.
Although the Trump administration has declared its intentions to rein in the regulatory state, the Interior Department declined to comment on this case, as did the Justice Department’s Office of the Solicitor General. Regardless, only the Supreme Court can overturn Chevron, and it is unclear how the addition of Justice Neil Gorsuch, a noted Chevron skeptic, may influence the litigation. But Columbia Law School professor Philip Hamburger, a trenchant critic of America’s administrative law system, doubts the dusky frog will join Brown, Roe and Citizens United in the annals of court history.
“I would love for them to take it up and overturn Chevron — and this is an opportunity for them to do so if they were so inclined,” he said, “but they’ve shown remarkable dexterity in avoiding it.”
Nevertheless, the case’s history demonstrates how Chevron can force judges to rule against what some perceive as simple common sense. From the outset of this process, some judges who have ruled against Poitevent and fellow plaintiffs have insisted their hands were tied.
“The Court has little doubt that what the government has done is remarkably intrusive and has all the hallmarks of government insensitivity to private property,” U.S. District Judge Martin L.C. Feldman wrote in his 2014 decision siding with the wildlife service and environmental advocacy groups. “The troubling question is whether the law authorizes such action and whether the government has acted within the law. Reluctantly, the Court answers ‘yes’ to both questions.”
The dusky gopher frog, a largely subterranean critter, is on a long list of species whose endangered designations restrict private land use. Currently, development rights are being challenged to protect the habitats of at least four other creatures: the Riverside fairy shrimp (California); the Northern spotted owl (Oregon, Washington and California); the Gunnison sage grouse (Colorado and Utah); and the jaguar (Arizona and New Mexico).
But the Louisiana case stands out because of the frog’s long absence from the land in question.
M. Reed Hopper, an attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation, which sued in 2013 on behalf of some of Poitevent’s relatives, called the gopher frog case an “extreme example” of officials enforcing the Endangered Species Act “contrary to its terms, without regard for other social values such as housing, jobs, food, and production, or when the burdensome cost of species protections fall unfairly on a few landowners that should be shared by society as a whole.”
Fifteen states have filed amicus briefs with the plaintiffs seeking some restriction on federal regulatory reach within critical habitats. But Feldman, an advocate of judicial restraint appointed by President Reagan, wrote in his ruling that in his view a court would be overreaching were it to side with the property owners. He hinted, perhaps facetiously, that what the land owners really needed was an activist judge. Otherwise, he said, Congress would have to amend the Endangered Species Act for the co-litigants to get relief.
Edward B. Poitevent II
Credit: Stone Pigman
Other jurists disagree. U.S. Appeals Court Judge Priscilla Owen, who dissented in the 5th Circuit’s initial upholding of Feldman’s ruling, said there must be regulatory limits. Otherwise the wildlife service would be able to declare any land at all “critical habitat.”
“If the Endangered Species Act permitted the actions taken by the Government in this case, then vast portions of the United States could be designated as ‘critical habitat’ because it is theoretically possible, even if not probable, that land could be modified to sustain the introduction or reintroduction of an endangered species,” she wrote.
What seems highly impractical is the reintroduction of the dusky gopher frog on the Louisiana tract. The dark, warty creature has very particular needs. It can only breed in ephemeral, or temporary, ponds, so no pesky fish can eat its tadpoles. It lives much of its life burrowed underground beneath a longleaf pine canopy. At the moment, about 100 of the creatures are believed to inhabit a small area in and around the DeSoto National Forest in Mississippi, some 80 miles due east of the Poitevent family’s land in St. Tammany Parish, near the Mississippi-Louisiana border.
Ephemeral ponds do form on the Louisiana tract, but the canopy of loblolly pines isn’t conducive to their survival. Additionally, the lack of regular fires creates underbrush the frog dislikes. In other words, the land could become a suitable habitat only if the landowners spent heavily to transform the foliage and re-introduced the frog – steps the government concedes it cannot compel.
So how did the Louisiana tract become entangled with the dusky gopher frog in the first place? Poitevent believes, and the record seems to support, that the case wouldn’t exist but for the prodding of the Center for Biological Diversity, a national environmental advocacy group. The frog was added to the endangered list in 2002 as a result of a lawsuit filed by the center against federal agencies, and it was another center lawsuit that first secured “critical habitat beyond the frog’s main home pond” in 2007. But the center felt those steps were insufficient for the frog’s survival and threatened yet another lawsuit in 2010. Poitevent’s land appears to have been a sacrificial pawn in this maneuvering, and the fateful call to him from the federal biologist came soon after.
Collette Adkins, a senior attorney with the advocacy group, said the frog’s needs trump a landowner’s rights. The fact that its former Louisiana home became uninhabitable because of natural rather than manmade changes does not mean people bear no responsibility for keeping the critter alive, she said. Taking a larger and longer view, she argues that human activity in that region over the centuries has reduced the frog’s habitat. “We are the ones who drove them to extinction,” she said.
At present, the lumber company Weyerhaeuser owns 5 percent of the land in question and has a timber management contract on the remainder with Poitevent and some of his relatives. But the land’s potential value lies in much more than timber. The wildlife service’s own economic impact study estimated the value at some $33 million – if development were unrestricted. But because the wildlife service decided there was no other potentially suitable gopher frog habitat besides his land, no buyer will touch it, Poitevent said.
Campers in DeSoto National Forest in Mississippi, habitat of the dusky gopher frog.
U.S. Forest Service
At least one outside environmentalist thinks a more compromising approach in such conflicts could satisfy the ambitions of landowners and the needs of endangered animals. “This isn’t about biological diversity; this is about land management,” said Reed Watson, executive director of the Property and Environment Research Center in Montana.
The wildlife service disputes the notion it is “taking” any land. The owners aren’t losing their title, regulators insist, just facing limits on what they can do with it. In comments made five years ago that the service says still reflect its position, an assistant regional director for ecological services said regulators would be happy to work with the Poitevents and other land owners.
“We don’t want to take his land,” assistant director Leopoldo Miranda said in a wildlife service video in 2012. “It’s his land to manage. This designation does not stop future development or land use.
“In fact, the service regularly works with landowners around the country to accommodate development while finding creative ways to save the wildlife that our citizens demand we protect.”
Poitevent is unconvinced. “This is a land grab by radical environmentalists,” he said.
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Tomb of Sarah, wife a Patriarch Abraham
