Category Archives: Middle East

Trump Indebted to Spooky Dude?

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Big names back Trump tower

Soros, Deutsche Bank said to be in on 90-story building

October 28, 2004|By Thomas A. Corfman, Tribune staff reporter.

ChicagoTribune: Donald Trump has lined up three New York hedge funds, including money from billionaire George Soros, to invest $160 million in his Chicago skyscraper, a key piece in perhaps the largest construction financing in the city’s history, according to sources and public documents.

Despite reports about the project’s record-breaking sales, most of them from Trump himself, many Chicago real estate developers and lenders have expressed doubts about whether the 90-story tower would ever be built.

“It is such a huge project, and the prices he said he was getting were so outside the norm,” said Robert Glickman, president and chief executive of Chicago-based Corus Bank.

“It was reasonable to say, `Is this real?'” he said.

Much of the skepticism springs from Trump’s own hype. “Chicago developers are much less flamboyant,” said Glickman.

The massive financing, which sources say also will include a $650 million construction loan from Deutsche Bank, should quell those doubts.

Trump flies to Chicago Thursday morning for a ceremonial demolition of the former home of the Chicago Sun-Times, 401 N. Wabash Ave., which will be replaced by his 2.5 million-square-foot tower. The demolition is expected to begin for real in January.

On Wednesday Trump declined to comment on the financing, emphasizing instead the luxury project’s record-breaking sales.

The chief executive of New York-based Trump Organization said he has agreements to sell three-fourths of the 461 condominiums and 227 hotel-condo units for a combined $515 million.

“Nobody to my knowledge anywhere in the United States has ever sold more than $500 million worth of apartments prior to construction,” he said. “It’s a great tribute to Chicago, to the location and to a great design.

“And, I guess, to Trump, when you think of it,” he added.

The investor trio is led by Fortress Investment Group LLC, according to a financing statement filed Oct. 19 with the Cook County recorder’s office.

Fortress, which manages more than $10 billion in investments, is familiar with the downtown Chicago condominium market after providing a key $26 million loan on the River East mixed-use development last year.

The document does not identify the other participants, but a key member is Grove Capital LLP, according to sources familiar with the transaction.

The firm manages most of the multibillion-dollar real estate portfolio of the $13 billion Soros Fund Management, from which Grove Capital was spun off last month.

The third investor is Blackacre Institutional Capital Management LLC, the real estate arm of hedge fund Cerberus Capital Management LP, which manages assets totaling $14 billion.

Executives with the three hedge funds could not be reached for comment.

The $160 million investment is in the form of a mezzanine loan, a kind of second mortgage that typically charges a much higher interest rate than a first-mortgage construction loan.

Unlike the mezzanine loan, which has closed, terms of the $650 million construction loan have not yet been finalized, sources said.

Frankfurt, Germany-based Deutsche Bank, an active commercial real estate lender in the U.S., is expected to split up the loan with other banks.

Chicago developer Steven Fifield admits he was a “total skeptic” about the project, which initially included a large portion of office space.

But the elimination of the office space and the steadily climbing condo sales helped change Fifield’s view about Trump’s chances to get financing.

“I thought it was a given with the number of presales he had,” said Fifield, president of Fifield Cos.

After 13 months of marketing, condo prices at Trump International Hotel & Tower Chicago have exceeded $900 a square foot, while hotel-condo units cost nearly $1,100 a square foot, according to an analysis of 53 units by Appraisal Research Counselors, a residential consulting firm.

Trump’s marketing firm recently put those units, including six hotel-condo units, on the Multiple Listing Service of Northern Illinois.

Almost two weeks ago Trump completed a buyout of his former joint venture partner in the project, Hollinger International Inc., the troubled parent of the Sun-Times.

Although lining up the financing was a big step for Trump, he still has hurdles to overcome, including avoiding construction delays and cost overruns.

Still, he expressed no concern about the doubts harbored by some local real estate executives.

“It’s a very expensive building to build because of the quality we are putting into it,” he said. “So people of course would say, `Gee, that’s a lot of money to raise.’

“But for me, it’s not a lot of money. You understand,” he said.

*** Not the first rodeo for Trump and it bears repeating:

Trump picked stock fraud felon as senior adviser

2015: WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump knew a man he named as a senior business adviser in 2010 had been convicted in a major Mafia-linked stock fraud scheme, according to Associated Press interviews and a review of court records.

Trump had worked with Felix Sater previously during the man’s stint as an executive at Bayrock Group LLC, a real estate development firm that partnered with Trump on numerous projects after renting office space from the Trump Organization. But Sater’s past was not widely known at the time because he was working as a government cooperator on mob cases and the judge overseeing Sater’s own case kept the proceedings secret. After Sater’s criminal history and past ties to organized crime came to light in 2007, Trump distanced himself from Sater.

Less than three years later, however, Trump tapped Sater for a business development role that came with the title of senior adviser to Donald Trump. Sater received Trump Organization business cards and was given an office within the Trump Organization’s headquarters, on the same floor as Trump’s own.

Trump said during an AP interview on Wednesday that he recalled only bare details of Sater.

“Felix Sater, boy, I have to even think about it,” Trump said, referring questions about Sater to his staff. “I’m not that familiar with him.”

According to Trump lawyer Alan Garten, Sater’s role was to prospect for high-end real estate deals for the Trump Organization. The arrangement lasted six months, Garten said.

The revelation about Sater’s role is significant because of its timing and directness, and marks the first time the Trump Organization has acknowledged publicly that Sater worked for Trump after the disclosures of Sater’s criminal background. Trump has said that among his secrets of success is that he surrounds himself with the “best and most serious people” and with “people you can trust.”

Sater never had an employment agreement or formal contract with the Trump Organization and did not close any deals for Trump, Garten said.

“He was trying to restart his life,” Garten said. “I believe he was regretful of things that happened in the past.”

Trump did not know the details of Sater’s cooperation with the government when Sater came in-house in 2010, Garten said. But Garten noted that U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch praised Sater’s cooperation with the federal government, when senators asked about him during her confirmation hearings early this year. She said Sater cooperated against his Mafia stock fraud co-defendants and assisted the government on unspecified national security matters.

“If Mr. Sater was good enough for the government to work with, I see no reason why he wasn’t good enough for Mr. Trump,” Garten said.

He pleaded guilty in 1998 to one count of racketeering for his role in a $40 million stock fraud scheme involving the prominent Genovese and Bonanno crime families, according to court records. Prosecutors called the operation a pump-and-dump scheme, in which insiders manipulate the price of obscure stocks and then sell them to hapless investors at inflated prices. Five years earlier, a New York State court had sentenced Sater to more than a year in prison for stabbing a man in the face with a broken margarita glass.

Sater declined to discuss his work with Trump.

“Obviously a Donald-and-the-bad-guy piece is not interesting for me to participate in,” Sater wrote in an email to AP. His lawyer, Robert Wolf, said information about Sater in public records and lawsuits obtained by the AP was defamatory. He credited Sater’s stint as a government cooperator with potentially saving American military lives, although he did not provide details. Wolf told the AP to write about Sater’s past “at your own risk” but did not cite specific concerns.

After his 1998 racketeering conviction, Sater spent more than a decade as an informant on the Mafia and on national security-related matters. Federal prosecutors kept even the existence of Sater’s racketeering case out of publicly available court records for 14 years.

During that time, Sater launched a luxury real estate development career. Sealed court records prevented potential customers or partners from learning about his past association with organized crime. Sater altered his name, to Satter, and became a top executive in Bayrock, a development firm that partnered with Trump on the Trump Soho high-rise hotel in Manhattan and other branded luxury real estate deals.

Civil lawsuits — including a sealed case filed in U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York that was obtained by the AP — have alleged that Bayrock engaged in a pattern of misconduct during Sater’s tenure, sometimes involving potential Trump projects. The AP obtained a copy of the sealed lawsuit, which was refiled last month, when the original complaint was included as part of a lawsuit Sater filed in an Israeli court. Bayrock’s attorney told AP that the firm did not mislead anyone about Sater’s past and denied any misconduct. The firm has not yet responded to a version of the complaint refiled in U.S. court last month.

Trump’s lawyer, Garten, said Trump had no knowledge of alleged improprieties at Bayrock or reason to believe that Sater was a major stakeholder in Bayrock’s projects. Trump only learned of Sater’s troubled past when The New York Times reported details in December 2007. In the article, Trump distanced himself from Sater, saying: “I didn’t really know him very well.”

Garten said Trump had no further interactions with Sater at Bayrock following the revelations of his criminal history. But a new relationship was formed in 2010 when Trump offered Sater office space and a chance to round up new business possibilities for the Trump Organization.

“The guy’s been in business a long time, he’s got a lot of contacts,” Garten said of Sater.

 Dubai  

 Istanbul

 

 

Carlos the Jackal, the PLO and Switzerland

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JPost: ZURICH – Carlos the Jackal, the Marxist guerrilla who became a symbol of Cold War anti-imperialism, has told a newspaper that he moved freely through Switzerland in the 1970s under a “non-aggression pact” between the government and the Palestine Liberation Organization.

He felt so safe that he flew to Zurich rather than Vienna airport on his way to neighboring Austria for his most spectacular coup: the kidnapping of oil ministers at OPEC headquarters in 1975, he told the Neue Zuercher Zeitung (NZZ) in a telephone interview from his prison in France.

His comments, published on Monday, seem sure to inflame a debate about whether Swiss authorities secretly agreed to turn a blind eye to PLO activity in the 1970s and give it diplomatic support in exchange for an end to attacks on Swiss targets.

The NZZ said it had made contact with the 66-year-old Venezuelan, whose real name is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, through his lawyer. Ramirez is serving life sentences in France for a series of attacks.

He told the paper it had been common knowledge among PLO militants that they would not be arrested in Switzerland, on condition was that they refrained from making trouble. “Of course we stuck to that,” he said.

He recalled seeing a wanted poster with his picture on it in the guard’s booth as he stood in line for passport checks after flying into Zurich from Beirut on his way to Vienna, only to be waved through with his fake South American passport.

Ramirez sealed his notoriety by taking OPEC’s oil ministers hostage in the name of the Palestinian struggle, in an attack in which three people were killed, and went on to be an international gun-for-hire with Soviet bloc protectors.

But the revolutionary mystique he once enjoyed – helped by a Che Guevara beret, leather jacket and dark glasses – wore thin after he was captured in Khartoum in 1994 by French special forces.

Switzerland last month began looking into whether a former government minister, now dead, had struck a covert deal with the PLO.

The allegation emerged this year in a book by Swiss journalist Marcel Gyr, who conducted the NZZ interview. The book, “Swiss Terror Years”, has also raised questions about whether such a pact interfered with an investigation into the bombing of a Swissair plane in 1970 that killed 47 people, for which no one was ever charged.

*** Plausible? Seems so…..

 

Named “Ilich” as a paeon to Lenin (whose full name was Vladimir Ilyich Lenin) by his Marxist father, Ramirez was later known as Carlos the Jackal. His nickname came in part from the novel, The Day of the Jackal, a thriller once found by authorities among his belongings.

Background:

Born in 1949 in Caracas, Venezuela, where he was raised. He was also schooled in England, and attended university in Moscow. After his expulsion from the university in 1970, he joined the Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a pan-Arab leftist group then based in Amman, Jordan.

Claim to Notoriety:

Ramirez’ most famous terrorist move was the takeover of OPEC headquarters in Vienna at a 1975 Conference, where he also took 11 members hostage. The hostages were eventually transported to Algiers and freed. Although later debunked, assumptions that Ramirez had a hand in killing two of the Israeli athletes taken hostage at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich added to his reputation as a ruthless and effective terrorist.

Indeed, many of Ramirez’ feats had murky origins and unclear goals and sponsors—which also gave the self-proclaimed terrorist a mysterious glamour.

A 1994 review of David Yallop’s Tracking the Jackal: The Search for Carlos, the World’s Most Wanted Man suggests that the OPEC kidnappings may have been sponsored by Saddam Hussein, rather than by the PFLP, as has been suggested, or by Libyan leader Muammar Al Qaddafi:

Although it has long been thought that the armed attack on a Vienna meeting of the oil cartel and the kidnapping of 11 of the oil ministers were conceived and paid for by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the book makes a persuasive case that behind it was actually Saddam Hussein, seeking an increase in the price of oil to finance his impending war with Iran.

Mr. Hussein intended Carlos to use the kidnapping as a pretext to assassinate the Saudi opponents of a price rise, Mr. Yallop says, but the unreliable Carlos sold out his employer, as he so often did, and instead took a $20 million ransom from the Saudi Government (the hostages were in fact released).

Where He Is Now:

The Jackal was arrested by the French in 1994, in Sudan where he was living. He was convicted for several murders in 1997 and as of 2006 is still in prison.

Cross-Links:

Ramirez has expressed admiration for Osama bin Laden from prison, and more broadly for Revolutionary Islam, which is the title of a 2003 book he published from prison. In it, the jailed terrorist showed shades of his lifelong affiliation with leftist secular groups whose vision of conflict is shaped by class differences describing Islam as the sole “transnational force capable of standing up the ‘enslavement of nations.”

Evidence: Middle East Money in Arizona

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Arizona Atty. Gen. Finds Money Trail Between Middle East, Mexican Smugglers

Months after six Middle Eastern men who entered the U.S. illegally through Mexico were arrested in Arizona state authorities have uncovered an extensive money trail between the Middle East and Mexico. This includes more than a dozen wire transfers sent from the Middle East to known Mexican smugglers in at least two different regions of the Latin American nation, according to the Arizona Attorney General’s Office.

A report issued by the AG exposes the disturbing money trail between Mexico and terrorist nations in the Middle East as well as evidence of smuggling routes tying the region to America’s southern border. An excerpt of the AG’s findings was obtained by a local media outlet that published it this week. It states that the Mexican city of Tapachula, a known human smuggling hub located near the Guatemalan border in the state of Chiapas, was the top destination of Middle Eastern money transfers. Nogales, which is situated adjacent to the Arizona border, is the second destination, the investigation found. “Agents conducted a comprehensive geographic analysis of possible terrorist related transactions and/or money transfers involving human smuggling networks,” the state report says.

Officials launched the probe shortly after six men—one from Afghanistan, five from Pakistan—were arrested in Patagonia, a quaint ranch town that sits 20 miles north of Nogales, on November 17. Judicial Watch investigated the matter as part of an ongoing probe on the dire national security issues created by the famously porous southern border. Special Agent Kurt Remus in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Phoenix headquarters told JW that the agency’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces vetted and interviewed the six men and determined that there were “no obvious signs of terrorism” so they were returned to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody.

But a few days later, in a story reported exclusively by JW, five young Middle Eastern men were apprehended in the nearby Arizona town of Amado, which is located about 30 miles from the Mexican border. Two of the Middle Eastern men were carrying stainless steel cylinders in backpacks, law enforcement and other sources told JW, alarming Border Patrol officials enough to call the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for backup. Only three of the men’s names were entered in the Border Patrol’s E3 reporting system, which is used by the agency to track apprehensions, detention hearings and removals of illegal immigrants. E3 also collects and transmits biographic and biometric data including fingerprints for identification and verification of individuals encountered at the border. The other two men were listed as “unknown subjects,” which is unheard of, according to a JW federal law enforcement source. “In all my years I’ve never seen that before,” a veteran federal law enforcement agent told JW.

The money trail exposed by Arizona officials in the aftermath of these two major incidents is extremely troublesome. The AG’s Financial Crimes Task Force quickly identified suspicious wire transfers sent from Middle Eastern and African nations by people with Middle Eastern names to Mexico. In 2015, one human smuggler in Mexico received 70 money transfers from 69 senders, the task force found. “All of the 69 sender names appeared to be of Middle Eastern origin,” the AG writes in its report. This seems to confirm JW’s reporting in the last few years on the dangerous alliance between Mexican smugglers and Middle Eastern extremists who want to attack the U.S.

Last summer JW broke a story about a Mexican drug cartel operation that smuggles foreigners from countries with terrorist links into a small Texas rural town near El Paso. They use remote farm roads—rather than interstates—to elude the Border Patrol and other law enforcement barriers, according to sources on both sides of the Mexico-U.S. border. The foreigners are then transported to stash areas in Acala, a rural crossroads located around 54 miles from El Paso on a state road – Highway 20. In 2015 JW also reported that the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) is operating camps near the U.S. border in areas known as Anapra and Puerto Palomas west of Ciudad Juárez in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. That information came from high-level sources just months after JW exposed an ISIS plot orchestrated from Ciudad Juárez to attack the U.S. with car bombs or other vehicle borne improvised explosive devices (VBIED). As a result of JW’s reporting Ft. Bliss, the U.S. Army base in El Paso, increased security. The threat was imminent enough to place agents across a number of Homeland Security, Justice and Defense agencies on alert. As far back as 2014 JW reported that four ISIS terrorists were arrested by federal authorities and the Texas Department of Public Safety in McAllen and Pharr.

****

According to a 2010 report, “Close to home: Hezbollah terrorists are plotting right on the U.S. border,” which appeared in the NY Daily News:

Mexican authorities have rolled up a Hezbollah network being built in Tijuana … closer to American homes than the terrorist hideouts in the Bekaa Valley are to Israel. Its goal, according to a Kuwaiti newspaper that reported on the investigation: to strike targets in Israel and the West. Over the years, Hezbollah—rich with Iranian oil money and narcocash—has generated revenue by cozying up with Mexican cartels to smuggle drugs and people into theU.S. In this, it has shadowed the terrorist-sponsoring regime in Tehran, which has been forging close ties with Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, who in turn supports the narcoterrorist organization FARC, which wreaks all kinds of havoc throughout the region.

Another 2010 article appearing in the Washington Times asserts that, “with fresh evidence of Hezbollah activity just south of the border [in Mexico], and numerous reports of Muslims from various countries posing as Mexicans and crossing into the United States from Mexico, our porous southern border is a national security nightmare waiting to happen.” This is in keeping with a recent study done by Georgetown University, which revealed that the number of immigrants from Lebanon and Syria living in Mexico exceeds 200,000. Syria, along with Iran, is one of Hezbollah’s strongest financial and political supporters, and Lebanon is the immigrants’ country of origin. Just like only 19 jihadists were necessary to cause the devastation of September 11, 2001, only a handful of these 200,000 are necessary to wreak havoc north of the border.

A jihadist cell in Mexico was recently found to have a weapons cache of 100 M-16 assault rifles, 100 AR-15 rifles, 2,500 hand grenades, C4 explosives and antitank munitions. The weapons, it turned out, had been smuggled by Muslims from Iraq. According to this report, “obvious concerns have arisen concerning Hezbollah’s presence in Mexico and possible ties to Mexican drug trafficking organizations (DTO’s) operating along the U.S.-Mexico border.”

*** Chicago?

TheBlaze: The city may be nearly 2,000 miles from Mexico, but the country’s drug cartels are so deeply embedded in Chicago that local and federal law enforcement are forced to operate as if they are “on the border,” according to Jack Riley, special agent in charge for the Chicago Field Division of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

 

Because of Chicago’s location in the heart of the United States, its large Mexican population and its abundance of street gang activity, drug cartels have designated the city as one of its main hubs of operation in America, Riley told TheBlaze in an exclusive interview. Inevitably, the increasing presence of cartels has also contributed to the Windy City’s skyrocketing violent crime rates, the DEA boss revealed.

“My opinion is, right now, a number of the Mexican cartels are probably the most organized, well-funded, vicious criminal organizations that we’ve ever seen,” said Riley.

Right now, at least three major Mexican cartels are fighting for control of billions of dollars worth of marijuana, cocaine and heroin in Chicago. That includes the ruthless Zetas and the powerful Sinaloa cartel, run by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, arguably the most wanted man in North America, and perhaps the entire world.

However, the influence of drug cartels is seemingly overlooked repeatedly by the media when it reports on Chicago’s crime rate and rampant drug-related violence.

Europe Calls on NATO to Clean up the Mess

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So, the damage is done, destruction to Europe is throughout the region. European leaders refuse to fully live up to their respective NATO membership and fight the good cause, rather they need NATO to clean up a mess they caused……immigration, migration, crime and broken borders.

It begins in Turkey, a NATO country quite tired of hosting millions of refugees and demanding Assad be removed from power. The next step in Greece, just a few hours boat ride from Turkey where people pay smuggling boat people to take them to the shores of Greece.

Greece itself is broken financially and is happy to stick it to the European Central Bank for not fully bailing out Greece’s socialism.

Please NATO help us out. Stop the migrant insurgency.

Schengen is suspended and likely dead….

NATO Secretary General welcomes expansion of NATO deployment in the Aegean Sea

NATO took swift decisions to deploy ships to the Aegean Sea to support our Allies Greece and Turkey, as well as the EU’s border agency FRONTEX, in their efforts to tackle the migrant and refugee crisis. NATO ships are already collecting information and conducting monitoring in the Aegean Sea. Their activity will now be expanded to take place also in territorial waters.

Our commanders have defined our area of activity in close consultation and coordination with both Greece and Turkey. Our activities in territorial waters will be carried out in consultation and coordination with both Allies. The purpose of NATO’s deployment is not to stop or push back migrant boats, but to help our Allies Greece and Turkey, as well as the European Union, in their efforts to tackle human trafficking and the criminal networks that are fueling this crisis.

NATO’s Maritime Command has also agreed with FRONTEX on arrangements at the operational and tactical level. NATO and FRONTEX will be able to exchange liaison officers and share information in real time, to enable FRONTEX, as well as Greece and Turkey, to take action in real time.

This is an excellent example of how NATO and the EU can work together to address common challenges. I welcome the fact that we were able to finalise these arrangements in such a short time. In this crisis, time is of the essence, and cooperation is key.

**** You are by now asking what is FRONTEX….heh…well it is a European commission that has clearing failed in it’s charter.

Mission and Tasks

Frontex promotes, coordinates and develops European border management in line with the EU fundamental rights charter applying the concept of Integrated Border Management.

Frontex helps border authorities from different EU countries work together. Frontex’s full title is the European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders of the Member States of the European Union. The agency was set up in 2004 to reinforce and streamline cooperation between national border authorities. In pursuit of this goal, Frontex has several operational areas which are defined in the founding Frontex Regulation and a subsequent amendment. These areas of activity are:

Joint Operations— Frontex plans, coordinates, implements and evaluates joint operations conducted using Member States’ staff and equipment at the external borders (sea, land and air).

Training— Frontex is responsible for developing common training standards and specialist tools. These include the Common Core Curriculum, which provides a common entry-level training rationale for border guards across the Union, and mid- and high-level training for more senior officers.

Risk Analysis— Frontex collates and analyses intelligence on the ongoing situation at the external borders. These data are compiled from border crossing points and other operational information as well as from the Member States and open sources including mass media and academic research.

Research— Frontex serves as a platform to bring together Europe’s border-control personnel and the world of research and industry to bridge the gap between technological advancement and the needs of border control authorities.

Providing a rapid response capability— Frontex has created a pooled resource in the form of European Border Guard Teams (EBGT) and an extensive database of available equipment which brings together specialist human and technical resources from across the EU. These teams are kept in full readiness in case of a crisis situation at the external border.

Assisting Member States in joint return operations— When Member States make the decision to return foreign nationals staying illegally, who have failed to leave voluntarily, Frontex assists those Member States in coordinating their efforts to maximise efficiency and cost-effectiveness while also ensuring that respect for fundamental rights and the human dignity of returnees is maintained at every stage.

Information systems and information sharing environment— Information regarding emerging risks and the current state of affairs at the external borders form the basis of risk analysis and so-called “situational awareness” for border control authorities in the EU. Frontex develops and operates information systems enabling the exchange of such information, including the Information and Coordination Network established by Decision 2005/267/EC and European border surveillance system.

While fulfilling its mandate, Frontex liaises closely with other EU partners involved in the development of the area of Freedom, Security and Justice such as Europol, EASO, Eurojust, FRA or CEPOL, as well as with customs authorities in order to promote overall cohesion.

Frontex also works closely with the border-control authorities of non-EU/Schengen countries — mainly those countries identified as a source or transit route of irregular migration — in line with general EU external relations policy.

**** So Turkey, get your act together and take these people back. They are not Turks, few are even Syrians…..but a NATO country must accept them?

Commission Visa Progress Report: Turkey makes progress towards visa liberalisation

The Commission has today adopted the second report on progress by Turkey in fulfilling the requirements of its Visa Liberalisation Roadmap, highlighting the steps made by Turkey since the last report in October 2014. At the EU-Turkey Summit of 29 November, Turkey committed to accelerating the fulfilment of the Roadmap, including by anticipating the application of all the provisions of the EU-Turkey Readmission agreement, with the objective of completing the visa liberalisation process by October 2016, provided all the benchmarks have been met by then. Today’s report welcomes the new level of engagement and determination demonstrated by the Turkish authorities.

 

Whoa, Could This Be on San Bernardino Shooter’s Phone?

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San Bernardino County DA: Dec. 2 terrorist may have been planning cyber attack

SBSun: A legal brief filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Riverside by San Bernardino County’s top prosecutors said Syed Rizwan Farook may have planted a virus on his work-issued iPhone that could launch a cyber attack capable of infecting and crashing the county’s computer network.

iPhone Amicus Brief that explains the infecting malware.

The brief, filed by District Attorney Michael Ramos and Chief Deputy District Attorney Gary Fagan, is one of several that were filed this week supporting a federal magistrate’s Feb. 16 order compelling Apple Inc. to help the FBI access an encrypted work-issued iPhone used by Farook.

“The iPhone is a county owned telephone that may have connected to the San Bernardino County computer network,” Ramos and Fagan wrote in their friend of the court brief, one of several filed this week in support of the government. “The seized iPhone may contain evidence that can only be found on the seized phone that it was used as a weapon to introduce a lying dormant cyber pathogen that endangers San Bernardino County’s infrastructure.”

A plethora of briefs were also filed by some the world’s biggest technology companies, digital privacy advocates and civil liberty organizations including Facebook, Amazon.com, Pinterest, Microsoft, Snapchat, Yahoo, and the American Civil Liberties Union in support of Apple.

Armed with assault rifles and clad in tactical gear, Farook, 28, and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, 29, walked into the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino shortly before 11 a.m. Dec. 2 and opened fire on a crowd of about 70 people, killing 14 people and wounding 22 others. The Redlands couple were killed in a shootout with police hours after the attack.

Most of those killed or wounded in the mass shooting, including Farook, were employees of the county’s environmental health services division, who were attending a training seminar that morning.

FBI agents found two smashed mobile phones in a dumpster behind Farook’s Redlands townhouse, and his work-issued iPhone 5C was found, intact but passcode encrypted, in a black Lexus parked in front of the residence. Investigators believe that phone contains communications between Farook and some of the victims and possible other information that could be germane to the criminal investigation.

Ramos and Fagen are the first to broach the subject of a possible cyber attack Farook may have been planning.

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Farook’s employment with the county provided him access to information that could have made the county vulnerable to a security breach and exposed employees to danger, Ramos said Friday in a telephone interview.

He said survivors of the shooting and family members of those killed in the attack are trying to move on with their lives but still have questions about the attack, such as why they were targeted and if they face future threat.

“All of this information could be on that one phone. (Farook and Malik) were using phones and hard drives, we believe, to prepare for these terrorist attacks,” Ramos said.

He said U.S. Magistrate Sheri Pym’s Feb. 16 order followed the letter of the law, and the U.S. Constitution.

“A federal magistrate determined there was probable cause to issue a search warrant to have Apple allow the FBI access to that information on the phone,” Ramos said. “Nobody’s rights are being violated. No one’s.”

Survivors of the shooting and family members of those who died still have questions about whether there was a third shooter, according to the prosecutors’ brief.

“Although the reports of three individuals were not corroborated, and may ultimately be incorrect, the fact remains that the information contained solely on the seized iPhone could provide evidence to identify, as of yet, unknown coconspirators who would be prosecuted by the district attorney for multiple murders and attempted murders in San Bernardino County,” the brief states.

Those sentiments were raised in another friend of the court brief filed Thursday on behalf of some of the victims of the shooting and surviving family members, one of whom wrote a personal letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook saying many victims claim to have seen “three assailants, not two, walking around in heavy boots as they carried out their murders.”

FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller said that forensic evidence indicates two weapons were fired at IRC, and that victim/witness accounts often vary during traumatic events.

While the majority of victims said they saw two shooters, some said there was only one and others said there were three, Eimiller said in an e-mail.

“Our investigation is continuing and we will continue to evaluate any new information that is developed or that comes our way,” Eimiller said.