Iraq: Sallyport Global = Sex Trafficking, Alcohol, Lax Security

Posted on May 5, 2017May 5, 2017 by Denise Simon

Sheesh…..typical for a government contractor and in Iraq.

U.S. Firm in Iraq Overlooks Smuggling, Security for F-16s

WASHINGTON (AP) — The two American investigators felt a sense of foreboding that Sunday as they headed to an emergency meeting with their boss on the Iraqi air base. But they didn’t expect to be surrounded by armed guards, disarmed, detained against their will — and fired without explanation.

It was March 12 — less than two months ago. Robert Cole and Kristie King were in Iraq working as investigators for Sallyport Global, a U.S. company that was paid nearly $700 million in federal contracts to secure Balad Air Base, home to a squadron of F-16 fighter jets as part of the U.S.-led coalition to annihilate the Islamic State.

** Click here for video

Cole and King had spent more than a year together in Iraq investigating all manner of misconduct at Balad and beyond.

They’d uncovered evidence that Sallyport employees were involved in sex trafficking , they said. Staff on base routinely flew in smuggled alcohol in such high volumes that a plane once seesawed on the tarmac under the weight. Rogue militia stole enormous generators off the base using flatbed trucks and a 60-foot crane, driving past Sallyport security guards.

Managers repeatedly shut down Cole and King’s investigations and failed to report their findings to the U.S. government that was footing the bill, the investigators said.

Right before they were fired, Cole and King had opened an investigation into allegations of timesheet fraud among Sallyport employees. In a call with Sallyport lawyers, they said, they were advised to keep two sets of books about potential crimes and contract violations.

“One for the government to see and one for the government not to see,” King told The Associated Press.

The company said that the investigators misinterpreted the instructions.

In a statement to the AP, Sallyport said it follows all contracting rules at the base, home to the F-16s that are a key to the fight against the Islamic State.

“Sallyport has a strong record of providing security and life support services in challenging war zones like Iraq and plays a major but unheralded role in the war against ISIS,” Chief Operating Officer Matt Stuckart wrote. “The company takes any suggestion of wrongdoing at Balad very seriously.”

More than 150 documents obtained by AP, as well as interviews with more than a half-dozen former or current Sallyport employees, show how a contractor ran amok after being hired for lucrative and essential combat support operations. The investigators and other witnesses describe grave security breaches and illegal schemes that went unreported until the government asked about them.

The point behind requiring contractors to employ their own investigators was to limit the waste and corruption that has marred federal security contracting going back to the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.

The Pentagon’s own auditors, who were frequently on the base 50 miles north of Baghdad, were not told of the serious problems until early this year, a potential violation of law. The Pentagon auditors’ reports, obtained by the AP, detail dozens of more minor infractions. That gap illustrates the limits of U.S. oversight for billions of dollars in contracts run by companies that have cashed in on the fight to protect Americans from extremism.

The Defense Department declined to comment.

The morning of March 12, King had gone to church and was still carrying her Bible when she and Cole walked into the office foyer for the meeting with the boss. To their astonishment, they were immediately surrounded by armed security guards and forced to turn over the 9 mm pistols they both routinely carried on the job.

The boss, David Saffold, informed them they were being fired but wouldn’t say why.

“We knew too much,” King told AP in an interview at her home in Amarillo, Texas. “They want to cover it up and move on because it’s a huge amount of money.”

BODYGUARD OR TERRORIST?

In 2004, Rob Cole was a retired California police officer and licensed private investigator when he decided to go to Iraq for a series of contracting jobs. Like many U.S. contractors working in hazardous regions, he went because the work paid a lot more than he could make back home.

Americans have been at Balad on and off since 2003. Sallyport’s parent company, Michael Baker International, announced in 2014 its subsidiaries had been awarded $838 million for work on the base.

Cole’s first job at Balad was cut short in June 2014, a month after he arrived, when the Islamic State group began sweeping across Iraq and Syria. The extremists ultimately made it to the gates of Balad, which was evacuated.

When the Americans went back, they found a looted base largely under the control of Iranian-backed Shiite militias that were supporting the Iraqi government, according to former employees. A former senior manager told the AP that Sallyport reached an understanding with the militias that they would not enter the flight and residential areas. He declined to be named because he wasn’t authorized to discuss the matter and didn’t want to be blacklisted from future jobs.

Cole, now 62, returned to Balad in May 2015, as Sallyport was preparing for the arrival of American F-16s sold to the Iraqi government. Sallyport’s mission, along with its parent company, was to keep the base operating smoothly, train the Iraqis, and most importantly maintain security on the base, where thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of contractors work.

The federal contract required investigations into potential crimes and violations involving the company’s work at Balad. That was Cole and King’s assignment.

“They wanted someone to be competent enough to process an investigation, if there was a crime, or if someone turned up dead,” King said. “The way it was put to me: If someone turned up with a knife in their back, who are you going to call?”

From the start, it was clear that much was awry on the base. Despite the urgency of fighting IS, the delivery of the F-16s had been delayed by months amid security concerns. It would be catastrophic if IS seized the base and its multimillion-dollar jets.

On July 13, 2015, four F-16s flew in from Arizona, the first of 36 fighter jets that the U.S. planned to deliver.

Brett McGurk, then the U.S. deputy envoy for the international coalition against IS, hailed the arrival in a tweet.

“After years of preparation & training in the U.S., Iraqi pilots today landed the 1st squadron of Iraqi F16s in #Iraq,” he wrote.

The first security breach came in less than 24 hours: A long black skid mark on the tarmac was reported. It stopped about 45 yards from the nose of one of the fighter jets. A truck had plowed through a rope barrier in the “no-go” zone, where lethal force is authorized to protect the planes. For more than 10 minutes, no one even responded as the vehicle drove away, according to reports citing surveillance video.

That turned out not to be a terrorist. But Cole says the out-of-control truck was a harbinger. He noted the lax protection for the F-16s in his report and forwarded it to the chief of security, Steve Asher. Under the requirements of the contract, Cole’s report should have then made its way to the Pentagon. But he says Asher kept a lid on the incident.

Three months later, in October 2015, Cole reported another security breach, the theft of a Toyota SUV that Sallyport had assigned to bodyguards to drive VIPs around the base. Cole eventually uncovered a plot by three Iraqi Sallyport staff working with a dangerous Iran-backed militia, known as Kataib Imam Ali.

The Shiite militia was an ongoing headache, politically connected and operating outside the law, with sidelines in theft and gunrunning. It has ties to the leader of the umbrella militia Popular Mobilization Forces, which is on the U.S. list of designated terrorists.

To Cole’s astonishment, the prime suspect threatened to join the militia during his interrogation. He was a Sallyport bodyguard. In fact, the investigators later found a photo of him on his Facebook page, dressed in black militia garb and a patch indicating his allegiance to the group.

He is “viewed by the Investigations Unit as a hard-core recruit to become a terrorist who poses a serious threat to all personnel on this base,” Cole wrote in another report.

The Toyota was recovered within a few days, but Cole was ordered off the case. In an interview with AP, the former senior manager defended the company’s order, saying negotiations with the militias were highly sensitive and had to be handled with Iraqi cooperation. Still, the suspect was supposed to be banned from the base, and Cole later saw the man walking around freely.

GUMMY BEARS SOAKED IN VODKA

The longer Cole was on the base, the more he suspected that management was turning a blind eye to criminal activity.

On the books, Balad is a dry base, where alcohol is restricted. But in reality the booze was everywhere and everyone knew it. Finding out how it got there led to more troubling questions.

A Sallyport employee who worked in the air terminal reported in late 2015 that co-workers were involved in a smuggling scheme. They were bringing in cases and cases of water bottles filled with liquor that they’d sneaked onto planes flying in from Baghdad.

According to investigative documents and people who watched the smuggling in action, three empty suitcases would routinely be loaded onto a flight to Baghdad. Each time, the bags came back with plastic water bottles filled with liquor. When they were unloaded, the bags were not searched but taken directly outside to be picked up — a serious security risk in a war zone.

“You could be putting a bomb in there,” said one former employee who witnessed the smuggling. “You’ve got people just going rogue.” He spoke only on condition of anonymity because he didn’t want to imperil his new job with a different overseas contractor.

Steve Anderson, who worked on flight logistics, says he was pressured to sign off on faked flight manifests that omitted passenger names and falsified the weight of cargo to cover for the alcohol smuggling and other infractions — a violation of international flight regulations. The planes were getting so weighed down he was worried about flight safety.

“They were playing Russian roulette with the passengers’ lives — including mine,” Anderson said.

Think Tank Predicted Russian Cyberwar v. United States

Posted on May 3, 2017May 3, 2017 by Denise Simon

Washington, D.C., May 3, 2017 – A Rand Corporation 1967 paper predicted many of the cyber dilemmas faced by policy makers today, and a 2017 expanded analysis of the “GRIZZLY STEPPE” hacking by Russian cyber operators disclosed key findings about the techniques the hackers used and ways to mitigate them, according to the National Security Archive publication today of 40+ highlighted primary sources from the critically-praised “Cyber Vault” at http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/cybervault.

Compiled and edited by noted intelligence historian Dr. Jeffrey T. Richelson, the Cyber Vault collection of primary sources is growing by a dozen or more documents every week, and includes the declassified briefings provided by the National Security Agency to the George W. Bush and Barack Obama transition teams in 2000 and 2009, respectively. The collection also includes a 2016 order from the U.S. Cyber Command to set up a unit with the mission of debilitating and destroying computer and communications operations of the terrorist group ISIS.

The Cyber Vault team obtained the 2016 order under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The project has filed scores of other FOIA and declassification requests as part of a multi-year documentation contribution to the growing field of cyber studies, with the support of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

The 2000 transition briefing explicitly foreshadowed the Edward Snowden controversy, warning the new White House team that the 4th Amendment-protected communications of Americans were inextricably mixed with those of foreigners on the Internet. The 2016 U.S. Cyber Command order established a joint task force designed to bring the resources of the Defense Department, Intelligence Community, and Justice Department to bear against the terrorist group that the Trump administration has since designated its top foreign policy priority.

Cyber Vault Highlights

By Jeffrey T. Richelson

On March 30, 2016, the National Security Archive opened its Cyber Vault, a repository of documents on all aspects of cyber activity – including computer network defense (and other other aspects of cybersecurity), computer network attack, and computer network exploitation. The more than 750 documents currently in the vault have been drawn from a variety of sources – Freedom of Information Act releases, websites of both U.S. federal and state government organizations, courts, foreign government organizations, NATO, government contractors, think-tanks, advocacy groups, and media websites (including Wikileaks and those that posted documents provided by Edward Snowden).

In addition to relying on a multitude of sources to populate the Cyber Vault, the Archive has sought to accumulate a diverse set of documents – which has guided its collection strategy. As a result, the Cyber Vault includes significant documents from the 1960s and each subsequent decade, on cyber organization, on policy and strategy, on domestic and foreign cyber activities, on cybersecurity requirements, and on cyber crimes and the related investigations. Also included are intelligence assessments and theses. The documents also represent a spectrum of classifications, from unclassified, to formerly classified, and – in the cases of Wikileaks and Snowden documents – currently classified documents. Many of the documents cut across a number of categories.

Among the documents represented from the 1960s and 1970s are two seminal papers. One is Willis Ware’s 1967 effort, Secrecy and Privacy in Computer Systems (Document 1), written for the RAND Corporation, and one of the very first systematic approaches to information leakage, security, and privacy. The other (Document 2), produced by a staff member of Britain’s signals intelligence agency, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), represents the initial development of public key cryptography – although it was not declassified until years after the concept had been made public by American mathematicians.

That document is also one of several illustrating or concerning foreign government cyber efforts. A much more recent GCHQ product (Document 29) was one of the documents provided to Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras by Edward Snowden – a briefing on efforts to deanonymize users of The Onion Router (TOR) network, which had been developed by members of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (Document 32) as a means of protecting online communications. Chinese cyber organization, policy, and operations are covered, collectively, by two documents – an unclassified paper (Document 36) produced under the auspices of the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence and a Top Secret codeword NSA briefing (Document 24) on the People Republic of China’s computer network exploitation activity. Current Russian cyber activities are discussed in an extract (Document 35) from the controversial “Trump Dossier,” written by a former British Secret Intelligence Service officer.

Other documents concern hostile cyber activities from an earlier era. One, from 1998 (Document 12) provides information to the then director of the FBI, Louis Freeh, concerning the SOLAR SUNRISE investigation concerning intrusions into at least 11 unclassified DoD Computer systems at various locations in the United States. Another FBI memo (Document 13), concerns a 1999 investigation into intrusions into computer systems in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Brazil, and Germany – an investigation which took some of the investigators to Moscow. In a newly released portion, it discusses possible response to intrusions – including the creation of “honeypots” containing “beacon” files.

In addition to being the victim of intrusions, the U.S. has also debated and formulated policy, granted authority over, and conducted intrusions in pursuit of national security objectives. In March 1997, Secretary of Defense William Cohen assigned the responsibility for computer network attack and exploitation to the National Security Agency in a short memo (Document 10). During that Spring a senior NSA official addressed the issue of cyberwar in a Secret article (Document 11) in a NSA journal. Many years later, according to a number of accounts, U.S. and Israeli cyber personnel were able to penetrate industrial control systems associated with the Iranian nuclear program and damage centrifuges that could produce weapons-grade material. While there have been no publicly released executive branch documents concerning the “Stuxnet” operation, it has been the subject of reports by RAND and the Congressional Research Service. (Document 26).

Concern over possible Russian intrusion into U.S. computer systems related to elections became a significant subject of discussion in the 2016 presidential election. Apprehensions over the possibility of such intrusions go back at least a decade. A December 2007 report (Document 20) was commissioned by Ohio’s Secretary of State, and contained disturbing results about the vulnerability of Ohio’s electronic voting systems. In the wake of a poorly-received, brief analysis of alleged Russian cyber activity related to the 2016 election, the Department of Homeland Security’s National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center produced more detailed examination (Document 41) of the GRIZZLY STEPPE activity.

By the time the DHS report was issued, President Trump had been presented with a draft executive order on cybersecurity (Document 40 ), which would undoubtedly have been the first of a significant number of presidential actions on cybersecurity – just as President Obama had signed a number of cyber-related executive orders and presidential directives, including one (Document 34) that established a Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center. Ultimately, the Trump draft order became the first in a series of drafts, and no order has yet been signed.

Covert Operations Training for N. Korea Nuclear Sites?

Posted on May 3, 2017May 3, 2017 by Denise Simon

As Iran attempted to launch a cruise missile from a submarine in the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday, the test failed, two U.S. officials told Fox News.

An Iranian Yono-class “midget” submarine conducted the missile launch. North Korea and Iran are the only two countries in the world that operate this type of submarine.

In February, Iran claimed to have successfully tested a submarine-launched missile. It was not immediately clear if Tuesday’s test was the first time Iran had attempted to launch a missile underwater from a submarine.

CHINA has called for all of its citizens to return from North Korea immediately as a US citizen is detained for allegedly trying to overthrow the country’s regime.

The Korea Times reports that the Chinese embassy in North Korea began advising Korean-Chinese residents to return to China.

A Korean-Chinese citizen told Radio Free Asia he was advised to ‘stay a while’ in China, and stated: ‘The embassy has never given such a warning. I was worried and left the country in a hurry.’

But he said most Chinese citizens in North Korea had opted not to heed the warning. More here.

US Commandos Set to Counter North Korean Nuclear Sites

Neutralizing Pyongyang’s nuclear, chemical arms warfighting priority, SOCOM commander says

Gertz: U.S. special operations forces are set to conduct operations against North Korean nuclear, missile, and other weapons of mass destruction sites in any future conflict, the commander of Special Operations Command told Congress Tuesday.

Army Gen. Raymond A. Thomas stated in testimony to a House subcommittee that Army, Navy, and Air Force commandos are based both permanently and in rotations on the Korean peninsula in case conflict breaks out.

The special operations training and preparation is a warfighting priority, Thomas said in prepared testimony. There are currently around 8,000 special operations troops deployed in more than 80 countries.

“We are actively pursuing a training path to ensure readiness for the entire range of contingency operations in which [special operations forces], to include our exquisite [countering weapons of mass destruction] capabilities, may play a critical role,” he told the subcommittee on emerging threats.

“We are looking comprehensively at our force structure and capabilities on the peninsula and across the region to maximize our support to U.S. [Pacific Command] and [U.S. Forces Korea]. This is my warfighting priority for planning and support.”

Disclosure of the commander’s comments comes as tensions remain high on the peninsula. President Trump has vowed to deal harshly with North Korea should another underground nuclear test be carried out. Test preparations have been identified in recent weeks, U.S. officials have said.

Trump said on Sunday that China appears to be pressuring North Korea but that he would be upset if North Korea carries out another nuclear test.

“If he does a nuclear test, I will not be happy,” he said on CBS Face the Nation. Asked if his unhappiness would translate into a U.S. military response, Trump said: “I don’t know. I mean, we’ll see.”

Gen. Thomas’ testimony did not include details of what missions the commandos would carry out.

A spokesman for the Special Operations Command referred questions about potential operations in Korea to the Pacific Command.

Special forces troops would be responsible for locating and destroying North Korean nuclear weapons and missile delivery systems, such as mobile missiles. They also would seek to prevent the movement of the weapons out of the country during a conflict.

Additionally, special operations commandos could be used for operations to kill North Korean leaders, such as supreme leader Kim Jong Un and other senior regime figures.

Special operations missions are said by military experts to include intelligence gathering on the location of nuclear and chemical weapons sites for targeting by bombers. They also are likely to include direct action assaults on facilities to sabotage the weapons, or to prevent the weapons from being stolen, or set off at the sites by the North Koreans.

A defense official said U.S. commandos in the past have trained for covert operations against several types of nuclear facilities, including reactors and research centers. Scale models of some North Korean weapons facilities have been built in the United States for practice operations by commandos.

The most secret direct action operations would be carried out by special units, such as the Navy’s Seal Team Six or the Army’s Delta Force.

Thomas said the command in January took over the role of coordinating Pentagon efforts to counter weapons of mass destruction from the Strategic Command. The mission includes stopping the spread of weapons of mass destruction and dealing with the aftermath of such weapons’ use.

North Korea is believed to have around 20 nuclear devices and is developing nuclear warheads small enough to be carried on long-range missiles. It also has stockpiles of chemical weapons and biological warfare agents.

Many of North Korea’s nuclear facilities are believed to be located underground in fortified locations spread around the country.

The last rotation of special operations forces to South Korea took place in February when parts of the 1st Special Forces Group (Airborne) and the 75th Ranger Regiment joined South Korean troops for training.

The training took place in mountainous parts of South Korea in a bid to simulate the rough terrain commandos would experience during operations in North Korea. Other training took place on the seas.

Gen. Thomas, in his testimony, identified North Korea as one of five “current and enduring” military threats outlined in a new military strategy produced by Marine Corps Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The four other threats are terrorism, Russia, Iran, and China.

Asked about the new strategy, a Joint Chiefs of Staff spokesman said the latest national military strategy is secret. “A classified [National Military Strategy] will make it more difficult for adversaries to develop counter-strategies and also enables the chairman to give the best military advice to the president and secretary of defense,” Navy Capt. Greg Hicks said.

The command “has recently focused more intently on the emerging threat that is of growing concern to us as well as most of our DoD teammates—the nuclear threat of an increasingly rogue North Korea,” Thomas said.

“Although previously viewed as a regional threat, North Korea’s relentless pursuit of nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles, facilitated by a trans-regional network of commercial, military, and political connections, make it a threat with global implications,” the four-star general added.

South Korea’s special operations forces are said to be highly trained but lack the advanced equipment used by American commandos, such as stealth helicopters and aircraft as well as other high technology and advanced weaponry.

A Pentagon report on North Korea’s military published in February 2016 states that North Korea continues to advance its nuclear program.

The North Koreans announced in September 2015 that the nuclear facilities at Yongbyon including a uranium enrichment plant and a reactor that were upgraded for the purpose of building nuclear forces, the report said.

Pacific Command commander Adm. Harry Harris said in congressional testimony last week that North Korea is an immediate threat to the security of the United States and the Asia Pacific region.

“With every test, Kim Jong Un moves closer to his stated goal of a preemptive nuclear strike capability against American cities, and he’s not afraid to fail in public,” Harris said.

Navy Restricted on FON, S. China Sea

Posted on May 3, 2017May 3, 2017 by Denise Simon

The United States Navy has yet to send a ship within 12 miles of any disputed islands in the South China Sea under President Donald Trump.

Although Trump said during his presidential campaign that former President Barack Obama had been weak defending international waters from China, he has yet to increase Navy patrols in the region to cut off the country’s access to the artificial islands.

BusinessInsider

In an interview with The New York Times in March of last year, Trump said those islands built by China were “a military fortress, the likes of which perhaps the world has not seen.”

“Amazing, actually,” he added. “They do that at will because they have no respect for our president and they have no respect for our country.”

Freedom of navigation operations, known as Fonops, have not increased under Trump despite “all of the language, combined with the fact that the Republican foreign policy establishment had been critical of Obama for not carrying out enough Fonops, means there was a wide expectation that Trump would put down a marker early,” Kissinger Institute director Robert Daly told the Times.

“And that hasn’t happened.”

Upon entering office, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called China’s island-building “akin to Russia’s taking of Crimea,” and that Trump’s administration was “going to have to send China a clear signal that, first, the island-building stops” and, “second, your access to those islands also is not going to be allowed.”

Anonymous Defense Department officials told the Times that Pacific Command asked for a naval excursion inside 12 nautical miles of Scarborough Shoal to show Beijing that island-building is a red line.

The officials added that this appeared in-line with the Trump administration’s wishes, though they also said that Defense Secretary James Mattis and Pentagon officials are reviewing the effects of these excursions on national security policy.

*** Image result for china disputed islands Freedom of Navigation Fact Sheet found here.

China’s claim to nearly 90 percent of the South China Sea based on “historical discovery” — a claim largely invalidated by an international tribunal that China ignored last year — has led to boat ramming, arrests and other low-level clashes between China and neighboring nations.

International officials and analysts have voiced repeated concerns that overreaction by any one party could result in a conflict that threatens peace in the region and the global economy.

“We have rebuilt China, and yet they will go in the South China Sea and build a military fortress the likes of which perhaps the world has not seen,” Trump said during a campaign interview last year. “Amazing, actually. They do that, and they do that at will because they have no respect for our president and they have no respect for our country.”

The Navy routinely sends its ships, most often those based with the 7th Fleet in Japan, on regular patrols through the South China Sea’s international waters. However, the White House didn’t approve FON operations, which challenge violations of international norms, for nearly three years in the South China Sea.

In October 2015, the USS Lassen transited within 12 miles of Subi Reef amid Chinese objections. As of 2012, Subi Reef was naturally sea bottom and therefore does not generate territorial waters under international law, despite Chinese claims.

Subi Reef is now roughly the size of Pearl Harbor, according to satellite imagery posted by the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative.

The Navy conducted more FON operations in 2016, with the last coming in October.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson signaled a policy tougher than the Obama administration’s was on the way during his January confirmation hearing.

Lawmakers asked Tillerson what should be done about China’s artificial islands, which include runways long enough for its military aircraft, radar, deep harbors and self-propelled artillery. More here.

College Education is in a Tailspin, Foreign Made?

Posted on May 1, 2017May 1, 2017 by Denise Simon

November of 2016, this site published a related article: Foreign Spies on our College Campuses

***

Retired Col. Larry Sellin, PhD wrote in part under the title “Replace and Repeal Universities“:

Academic political intolerance or Totalitarianism 101 is both deliberate and as old as the Russian Revolution.

It is based on an essay “Repressive Tolerance” written in 1965 by Herbert Marcuse, an adherent of the Soviet-controlled Frankfurt School, which was the cultural arm of the Communist International founded to undermine western Judeo-Christian democracy from within.

Fred Bauer, in his article “The Left and ‘Discriminating Tolerance,'” captures Marcuse’s inverted logic and identifies the origin of the political intolerance presently practiced at U.S. academic institutions:

“Marcuse argued that, because of the radical repressiveness of Western society, a tolerance for all viewpoints actually contributed to social oppression. A pervasive network of assumptions and biases implicitly privileges the viewpoint of the powerful, so that seemingly ‘equal’ presentations of opposite opinions actually end up benefiting the viewpoint of the powerful. He offered the example of a magazine running a piece criticizing the FBI along with one praising the FBI. Fair and balanced? Not so fast, Marcuse said: ‘the chances are that the positive [story] wins because the image of [the FBI] is deeply engraved in the mind of the people.’ Because of social programming, the inhabitants of a given society automatically favor certain values. The ideological playing field’s lack of levelness means that seemingly equal presentations of ideas are not really equal.” Full article here.

*** Yes this is proven and bad enough, but there is more.

On April 13-15, the King Fahd Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Arkansas held a symposium on so-called “honor violence,” as exemplified by honor killings, forced marriage, and other such delightful acts.

The Center, as its website informs us, “was founded with a $20 million endowment from the Saudi government in the mid-1990s. An initial endowment of $2 million, dedicated toward language, literary translation and publication was followed by a much larger $18 million gift designed to spark the foundation of a comprehensive Middle East Studies program at the undergraduate and graduate levels.” Read more here.

Okay, then we have this one:

The FBI raided the school 4…..FOUR years ago!

In an exclusive investigation, Fox News reports:

Based just four miles from the Pentagon in northern Virginia is an innocuous-sounding online school for “management and technology” – which a Fox News investigation reveals has been at the center of multiple federal probes about its leadership’s alleged ties to the Chinese military and whether thousands of records from U.S. service members were compromised.

The University of Management and Technology in Rosslyn, Va., which opened in 1998, touts a campus in Beijing and “partnerships” with universities around the world. The U.S. taxpayer-funded school claims to have had 5,000 graduates in the last five years and to be “especially proud of our students stationed in US military bases around the globe.”

However, there is another side to the school’s leadership that drew the attention of the FBI, the Justice Department, the Pentagon, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) since at least 2012 — and perhaps as early as 2009.

In December 2012, the FBI made two very public raids of UMT and the northern Virginia home of university president Yanping Chen Frame and its academic dean, her husband J. Davidson Frame. Documents reviewed by Fox News show it was a counter-intelligence case, known as a “200d,” one of the most highly sensitive categories for a federal probe.

Photos, exclusively obtained by Fox News, appear to show Chen as a young officer in the People’s Liberation Army, the military wing of China’s communist party. Another photo shows Frame saluting his wife, Chen, who is holding a uniform. Three independent experts said it was a Chinese military colonel’s uniform.

Yet since those FBI raids, UMT has continued to collect more than $6 million from Defense Department tuition assistance programs as well as the Department of Veterans Affairs through the post-9/11 GI bill.

“It’s a bad deal for the soldiers, and it’s a bad deal for the taxpayer,” Stephen Rhoads, a military veteran turned whistleblower who says he worked with the FBI on the case, told Fox News in an exclusive interview. “Nobody’s getting what they paid for.”

Rhoads said he worked at UMT recruiting vets when the FBI approached him in 2012 regarding the federal investigation. Emails and other documents reviewed by Fox News corroborate key elements of Rhoads’ story.

“One of the first sentences she [Chen] ever threw out — after she found out I was an Army officer, was, ‘Well … I was a colonel in the army,’” Rhoads explained. “During our first face-to-face encounter, absolutely … she did not deny it.”

Rhoads said he thought Chen meant the U.S. Army, and asked whether she trained in Texas. “She laughed and said, ‘Oh, no, I was in the Chinese army, you know.’”

Chen, 64, came to the United States in 1987 from Beijing on a non-immigrant visa with her daughter Lele Wang. The Chinese government funded Chen’s research at George Washington University where she received a Ph.D. in Public Policy in 1999, the year after UMT was created.

While Rhoads says Chen was upfront about her Chinese military experience, he claimed she hid those ties on immigration applications. Fox News reviewed Chen’s immigration records where she consistently denied ties to the Chinese or any foreign military. When asked, “Have you ever been a member of, or in any way affiliated with, the communist party or any other totalitarian regime?” Chen checked “no.” She would later become a naturalized U.S. citizen.

While there are no U.S. laws preventing a naturalized citizen from running a school like UMT, the Fox News investigation found that Chen’s ties to the Chinese military appear to run deep.

Three outside experts consulted by Fox News confirmed the authenticity of the Chinese uniforms in the photos of Chen and Frame.

“If somebody was wearing that uniform, I would say that there’s a very great likelihood that they were in the People’s Liberation Army,” Dennis Blasko, a leading Chinese military expert said, referring to the photo of what appears to be Chen in uniform.

Asked about the photo of Frame saluting his wife, Blasko observed, “This is a P.L.A. officer’s uniform — active duty — from between 1987 and 2007 … And from the epaulettes, we can see this — three stars and two red stripes would be a full colonel.”

Blasko emphasized that P.L.A. insignia can only be purchased with the permission of the Chinese military, and “you would have to have a certificate from your unit to buy [it.]”

Blasko, a West Point graduate who worked as a military attache in China, wrote “The Chinese Army Today: Tradition and Transformation for the 21st Century,” one of the definitive books about the Chinese military.

In her George Washington University dissertation, Chen thanks her father, a P.L.A. general, who directed arms and technology development. “My father, General Chen Bin, gave me the inspiration to pursue this area of study,” Chen wrote. “As former Chairman of COSTIND (1982-87), he was an important player in supporting and directing the (Chinese) space program.”

In her 2012 FBI interview, Chen denied she ever was a colonel in the P.L.A., emphasizing she had worked as a doctor in the Chinese space program. Chen said it was a “civilian agency.” The interview summary suggests federal agents challenged Chen’s characterization. Outside experts told Fox News the Chinese civilian and military space programs are intertwined.

While Chen’s immigration application is more than a decade old, and past the five-year statute of limitations, there may be a “continuation” of fraud, according to Ray Fournier who worked with the State Department’s office of diplomatic security for more than 20 years. Fournier, an expert on visa and passport fraud, worked for the Joint Terrorism Task Force in San Diego, where his investigative work led to an arrest warrant for the American-born cleric Anwar Awlaki, who was later killed by the CIA.

Fournier said, “If she has marked ‘no’ on the petition, but if in fact, the answer is yes … then we have a false statement. And where that comes into play, most assuredly, is in the arena of passport fraud. It is this application.” With each renewal of Chen’s U.S. passport, Fournier said, investigators should determine whether the falsehood was repeated. “These are issues of inadmissibility,” he said.

While going through the immigration process, Chen was also launching what would become a multi-million-dollar online academy. But that academy’s work would eventually attract the attention of federal investigators, who questioned whether students’ records were remotely accessed from China.

Before the 2012 raid, Chen’s daughter Lele Wang who also works at UMT, told the FBI that “‘Contractors’ in the UMT Beijing Office have [administrator] privileges” to access the student database.

Rhoads said UMT recruited service members who provided their military history when they enrolled. “It got uploaded into an O-drive, they called it … their personal military bio, you know, where they were trained, how they were trained, how long, that could be remotely accessed.”

Rhoads said Chen had a particular interest in Ohio’s Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, which is a research and technology hub.

And there was more. “She wanted me to go out to these remote reserve and National Guard centers, you know … in small-town America and start gettin’ U.S. soldiers from those centers. Get their information, basically. Who’s out there in the woods? How many units we got?”

Rhoads recalled to Fox News that he was instructed by the FBI to tell Chen that he was going to testify before a Virginia grand jury. “They wanted to, I guess see how … she would react.”

At the time, Rhoads said Chen had no idea he was working with the bureau.

He said, “Well, at this point, she didn’t know I was working for them at all. And she’s like, ‘Oh, you don’t tell them anything. We don’t know each other. You don’t … know what you don’t know,’ was her buzz phrase. ‘You don’t — you don’t know I was a colonel in the P.L.A. They’ll never have proof to say that’.”

Emails obtained by Fox News show Rhoads and at least one FBI agent alerted the Defense Department, but another Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was signed in 2014 through 2019 allowing UMT to collect millions in federal taxpayer aid.

An FBI agent in one email exchange wrote, “I let my management and the AUSAs [assistant U.S. attorneys] know about her renewal with DoD. Incredible.”

Asked about the renewal, as well as whether DoD personnel were warned and additional steps were taken to vet UMT, the DoD chief for Voluntary Education Assistance, Dawn Bilodeau, referred questions to Pentagon spokesperson Laura Ochoa. In an email, Ochoa said, “In light of reports regarding University of Management and Technology (UMT), the Department is reviewing the DoD MOU signed between the institution and the DoD for compliance.”

No one has been charged with any crime in connection with the investigation. Sources told Fox News that Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia James P. Gilllis got the case, but there was a disagreement with the FBI over how to proceed, based on the case law and the extent to which sources and methods would be revealed.

Neither the FBI nor a spokesman for Gillis would comment to Fox News but separately, a spokesman for NCIS said they cannot comment on an “ongoing investigation.” A FOIA request filed by Fox News Senior Executive Producer Pamela Browne confirmed an NCIS investigative file for UMT.

Fox News made repeated requests by phone and via email for interviews with Yanping Chen and J. Davidson Frame. After Chen’s daughter said they were too busy to prepare and traveling out of town, Fox News went to their offices in Rosslyn, Va.

A school representative, who would not identify himself, confirmed Chen and Frame were in the office that day, but after learning Fox News was at the front desk, the couple refused to come out. Fox News’ questions covered how UMT was run, Chen’s suspected military ties, whether service members’ records are secure, and how millions in taxpayer dollars are spent.

Fox News also sent a series of questions to the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C., but there was no immediate response.

According to UMT, nearly 20,000 students have studied there, while 10,710 have earned degrees.