Refugee Resettlement Agency Courtesy of Clinton/Obama Appointees

Posted on August 4, 2016August 4, 2016 by Denise Simon

Revolving Door Sends Millions to Refugee Resettlement Agency Run by Former Clinton and Obama Appointees

A revolving door in the Democratic administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama has sent millions of dollars in federal funding to the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants [USCRI], which is led by two former directors of the Office of Refugee Resettlement [ORR], the federal office that selects the voluntary agencies [VOLAGs] who get lucrative federal contracts to resettle refugees.

Breitbart: President Bill Clinton appointed Lavinia Limon as director of ORR in 1993, a position she held until the end of his administration. After a brief interlude at the Center for New American Communities, a project of the left-leaning National Immigration Forum, Limon was named executive director of USCRI in August 2001, a position she still holds.

In 2009, President Barack Obama appointed Eskinder Negash, an Eritrean refugee on Limon’s USCRI staff, as director of ORR. When Negash resigned abruptly in December 2014, he went back to USCRI, where he now serves as Vice President of Global Development.

Revenues at USCRI, his once and future employer, increased significantly while Negash served as director of the ORR. In FY 2006, USCRI revenues were $19 million. By 2015, they had grown to $50 million, more than 90 percent of which came from “government grants.”

ORR’s budget grew from $492 million in FY 2006 to $1.5 billion in 2014.

During his tenure at ORR, Negash’s performance was spotty at best, particularly with regards to his failure to provide Congress with the statutorily required annual reports in a timely manner. As Ann Corcoran wrote at Refugee Resettlement Watch back in 2012, three years after Negash’s arrival:

The Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), is in complete disarray as regards its legally mandated requirement to report to Congress every year on how refugees are doing and where the millions of tax dollars are going that run the program. The last (and most recent) annual report to be sent to Congress is the 2008 report—so they are out of compliance for fiscal years 2009, 2010 and 2011. . . (The lack of reports for recent years signals either bureaucratic incompetence and disregard for the law, or, causes one to wonder if there is something ORR is hiding.)

To replace Negash as director of ORR, Obama selected another VOLAG executive, Bob Carey, Vice President of Resettlement and Migration Policy at the International Rescue Committee and “chair of Refugee Council USA, a coalition of NGOs working on issues affecting refugees, asylum seekers, displaced persons, victims of trafficking and victims of torture,” the Resettlement Industry’s Lobbying Group.

The twenty members of Refugee Council USA include all of the top VOLAGs whose main source of revenue comes from ORR grants, including Church World Service/Immigration and Refugee Program, Episcopal Migration Ministries, Ethiopian Community Development Council, HIAS, International Catholic Migration Commission, International Rescue Committee, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops/Migration & Refugee Services, U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, and World Relief.

Now the same lobbying group that Carey once chaired, Refugees Council USA, recently announced it wants to more than double the number of refugees allowed in to the United States in 2017—to 200,000, from approximately 70,000 in FY 2015 and an Obama administration “targeted level” of 85,000 in FY 2016, with much of the increase driven by the hasty push to admit 10,000 Syrian refugees this year.

The budget impact of such an increase would be enormous, possibly doubling ORR expenditures from $1.5 billion in FY 2014 to $3 billion or more in FY 2017.

The International Rescue Committee, whose CEO is the former United Kingdom Foreign Secretary David Miliband, had worldwide revenues in 2015 of $691 million, a $138 million increase from its $563 million revenues in 2014.

Most of that revenue (82 percent in 2015—or $572 million) came from “grants and contracts,” most from governments and related agencies around the world, including the federal government of the United States.

In contrast to the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama administrations, George W. Bush’s two appointed directors of ORR, Nguyen Van Nah and Martha E. Newton, did not participate in the revolving door back to lucrative employment at the VOLAGs they oversaw after they left ORR.

Van Nah, director from 2001 to 2006, became a professor of economics at Sacramento State University in California when he left ORR.

Newton, who succeeded Van Nah, went from ORR to become a consultant at her own firm, Health Strategies LLC.

Democratic appointees Limon, Negash, and Carey have worked tirelessly to expand both the budget of ORR and the party’s far-left, pro-refugee agenda.

It was during Limon’s tenure that the “Wilson Fish alternative program”was used as justification, without the corresponding statutory authority, to hire VOLAGS to operate resettlement programs in states that withdrew from the federal program. The enabling legislation made no mention of such a provision, but Limon and her colleagues pushed it through the HHS regulatory process without much public fanfare.

Currently, several USCRI operations–in Twin Falls, Idaho and Lowell, Massachusetts, for instance–are funded by ORR through this statutorily questionable Wilson Fish alternative program mechanism.

It was also during Limon’s tenure at ORR that the mix of nations of origin for refugees shifted dramatically.

In 1992, the year before Limon was named ORR director, the Near East Asia countries of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran, and the African countries of Angola, Burundi, Congo, Ethiopia,Liberia, Libya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, and Uganda —many of them majority Muslim—accounted for only nine percent of all resettled refugees.

But by 2001, Limon’s last year at the helm of ORR, these African and and Near East Asia countries accounted for 46 percent of all resettled refugees.

Operationally, USCRI has had its share of problems under Limon’s leadership.

In 2008, before Negash was named ORR director, USCRI’s Waterbury, Connecticut field office had its resettlement contract there canceled:

The State Department has canceled its contract with the agency responsible for resettling 64 Burmese refugees to Waterbury. In response, Connecticut’s congressional delegation has sent a letter of protest to the state department, asking it to give the International Institute of Connecticut more time to settle its problems.

This follows months of reports of poor housing, fractious relationships with volunteers, missed immunizations for students and insufficient assistance with daily tasks. The State Department brought the refugees here to escape the tyranny in their native Myanmar.

“I’ve heard of agencies being under investigation and there being a threat of canceling a contract, but this is the first time I’ve known about a particular case being canceled,” said Stephanie J. Nawyn, a sociologist at Michigan State University who studies resettlement. “I do think this is unusual.”

In Lowell, Massachusetts last month, a 13-year-old girl was allegedly sexually harassed by a recently arrived Syrian refugee:

A 22-year-old Syrian refugee is behind bars after only two months in the United States after he was accused Thursday night of inappropriately touching a 13-year-old girl at a state-run swimming pool in Lowell.

In Twin Falls, Idaho, USCRI’s local subcontractor, the College of Southern Idaho, is dealing with a national controversy involving three refugees and the sexual assault of a five-year-old girl.

Chobani Yogurt, the company that owns and operates the largest yogurt manufacturing facility in the world in Twin Falls, thanks in part to $54 million in federal and state grants, relies heavily on refugees brought in by USCRI and the College of Southern Idaho as employees. In 2015, CNN reported that 600 of the company’s 2,000 employees are refugees.

Even the far-left Michelle Goldberg, reporting at Slate, concedes, “There had been an incident involving three boys, ages 7, 10, and 14, and a mentally disabled 5-year-old girl [in Twin Falls].”

[Twin Falls county prosecutor Grant] Loebs described it to me as a “very serious felony.” On June 2, an 89-year-old neighbor discovered the children in the laundry room at the Fawnbrook Apartments, a low-income housing complex. The youngest boy is from Iraq while the older ones, brothers, are from an Eritrean family that passed through Sudanese refugee camps. (Most news reports have identified the older boys as Sudanese.) Only the youngest boy, Loebs said, is alleged to have touched the girl, though investigators suspect the 10-year-old might have as well; the elder boys reportedly made a video.

Because everyone involved in the case is a minor, the records were sealed. Nevertheless, on the evening of June 20, Twin Falls Police Chief Craig Kingsbury appeared at the weekly City Council meeting to update the anxious public as best he could. He announced that police had arrested the two older boys the previous Friday and that they were being held in juvenile detention. (Loebs later told me that the 7-year-old was also charged with a felony but wasn’t taken into custody because of his age.)

Despite these operational problems, Limon’s hold on the reins of USCRI appears to be secure.

Her job security, as well as her status within the politically powerful refugee resettlement industry, is undoubtedly enhanced by her ties with the Clinton and Obama administrations, which run long and deep.

In 2015, Limon attended an event sponsored by the Clinton Global Initiative, where she served on the same panel as Hamdi Ulukaya, the founder and CEO of Chobani Yogurt.

Limon appears to have done well from her life time career advancing refugee rights.

A 1972 graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, with a degree in sociology, Limon served as director of the International Institute of Los Angeles prior to being picked by Bill Clinton to head up the ORR in 1993.

In 2012, the last year for which such data is readily available, Limon received over $289,000 in compensation for her job as executive director of USCRI.

Peter Limon, who appears to be Limon’s brother, is also employed by USCRI as director of Business Development.

Passionatepolka, TreasureMap and FLATLIQUID?

Posted on August 4, 2016August 4, 2016 by Denise Simon

I read one of his books several years ago….

The summary below is not classified material. The Intelligence Community including the NSA has declassified a lot of material such as:

Chinese Cyber Espionage in the U.S.

August 10, 2015

China Read Emails of Top U.S. Officials – NBC News

Commentary: The world’s best cyber army doesn’t belong to Russia

by: Bamford

Reuters: National attention is focused on Russian eavesdroppers’ possible targeting of U.S. presidential candidates and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Yet, leaked top-secret National Security Agency documents show that the Obama administration has long been involved in major bugging operations against the election campaigns — and the presidents — of even its closest allies.

The United States is, by far, the world’s most aggressive nation when it comes to cyberspying and cyberwarfare. The National Security Agency has been eavesdropping on foreign cities, politicians, elections and entire countries since it first turned on its receivers in 1952. Just as other countries, including Russia, attempt to do to the United States. What is new is a country leaking the intercepts back to the public of the target nation through a middleperson.

There is a strange irony in this. Russia, if it is actually involved in the hacking of the computers of the Democratic National Committee, could be attempting to influence a U.S. election by leaking to the American public the falsehoods of its leaders. This is a tactic Washington used against the Soviet Union and other countries during the Cold War.

In the 1950s, for example, President Harry S Truman created the Campaign of Truth to reveal to the Russian people the “Big Lies” of their government. Washington had often discovered these lies through eavesdropping and other espionage.

Today, the United States has morphed from a Cold War, and in some cases a hot war, into a cyberwar, with computer coding replacing bullets and bombs. Yet the American public manages to be “shocked, shocked” that a foreign country would attempt to conduct cyberespionage on the United States.

NSA operations have, for example, recently delved into elections in Mexico, targeting its last presidential campaign. According to a top-secret PowerPoint presentation leaked by former NSA contract employee Edward Snowden, the operation involved a “surge effort against one of Mexico’s leading presidential candidates, Enrique Peña Nieto, and nine of his close associates.” Peña won that election and is now Mexico’s president.

The NSA identified Peña’s cellphone and those of his associates using advanced software that can filter out specific phones from the swarm around the candidate. These lines were then targeted. The technology, one NSA analyst noted, “might find a needle in a haystack.” The analyst described it as “a repeatable and efficient” process.

The eavesdroppers also succeeded in intercepting 85,489 text messages, a Der Spiegel article noted.

Another NSA operation, begun in May 2010 and codenamed FLATLIQUID, targeted Pena’s predecessor, President Felipe Calderon. The NSA, the documents revealed, was able “to gain first-ever access to President Felipe Calderon’s public email account.”

At the same time, members of a highly secret joint NSA/CIA organization, called the Special Collection Service, are based in the U.S. embassy in Mexico City and other U.S. embassies around the world. It targets local government communications, as well as foreign embassies nearby. For Mexico, additional eavesdropping, and much of the analysis, is conducted by NSA Texas, a large listening post in San Antonio that focuses on the Caribbean, Central America and South America.

Unlike the Defense Department’s Pentagon, the headquarters of the cyberspies fills an entire secret city. Located in Fort Meade, Maryland, halfway between Washington and Baltimore, Maryland, NSA’s headquarters consists of scores of heavily guarded buildings. The site even boasts its own police force and post office.

And it is about to grow considerably bigger, now that the NSA cyberspies have merged with the cyberwarriors of U.S. Cyber Command, which controls its own Cyber Army, Cyber Navy, Cyber Air Force and Cyber Marine Corps, all armed with state-of-the-art cyberweapons. In charge of it all is a four-star admiral, Michael S. Rogers.

Now under construction inside NSA’s secret city, Cyber Command’s new $3.2- billion headquarters is to include 14 buildings, 11 parking garages and an enormous cyberbrain — a 600,000-square-foot, $896.5-million supercomputer facility that will eat up an enormous amount of power, about 60 megawatts. This is enough electricity to power a city of more than 40,000 homes.

In 2014, for a cover story in Wired and a PBS documentary, I spent three days in Moscow with Snowden, whose last NSA job was as a contract cyberwarrior. I was also granted rare access to his archive of documents. “Cyber Command itself has always been branded in a sort of misleading way from its very inception,” Snowden told me. “It’s an attack agency. … It’s all about computer-network attack and computer-network exploitation at Cyber Command.”

The idea is to turn the Internet from a worldwide web of information into a global battlefield for war. “The next major conflict will start in cyberspace,” says one of the secret NSA documents. One key phrase within Cyber Command documents is “Information Dominance.”

The Cyber Navy, for example, calls itself the Information Dominance Corps. The Cyber Army is providing frontline troops with the option of requesting “cyberfire support” from Cyber Command, in much the same way it requests air and artillery support. And the Cyber Air Force is pledged to “dominate cyberspace” just as “today we dominate air and space.”

Among the tools at their disposal is one called Passionatepolka, designed to “remotely brick network cards.” “Bricking” a computer means destroying it – turning it into a brick.

One such situation took place in war-torn Syria in 2012, according to Snowden, when the NSA attempted to remotely and secretly install an “exploit,” or bug, into the computer system of a major Internet provider. This was expected to provide access to email and other Internet traffic across much of Syria. But something went wrong. Instead, the computers were bricked. It took down the Internet across the country for a period of time.

While Cyber Command executes attacks, the National Security Agency seems more interested in tracking virtually everyone connected to the Internet, according to the documents.

One top-secret operation, code-named TreasureMap, is designed to have a “capability for building a near real-time interactive map of the global Internet. … Any device, anywhere, all the time.” Another operation, codenamed Turbine, involves secretly placing “millions of implants” — malware — in computer systems worldwide for either spying or cyberattacks.

Yet, even as the U.S. government continues building robust eavesdropping and attack systems, it looks like there has been far less focus on security at home. One benefit of the cyber-theft of the Democratic National Committee emails might be that it helps open a public dialogue about the dangerous potential of cyberwarfare. This is long overdue. The possible security problems for the U.S. presidential election in November are already being discussed.

Yet there can never be a useful discussion on the topic if the Obama administration continues to point fingers at other countries without admitting that Washington is engaged heavily in cyberspying and cyberwarfare.

In fact, the United States is the only country ever to launch an actual cyberwar — when the Obama administration used a cyberattack to destroy thousands of centrifuges, used for nuclear enrichment, in Iran. This was an illegal act of war, according to the Defense Department’s own definition.

Given the news reports that many more DNC emails are waiting to be leaked as the presidential election draws closer, there will likely be many more reminders of the need for a public dialogue on cybersecurity and cyberwarfare before November.

(James Bamford is the author of The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA From 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America. He is a columnist for Foreign Policy magazine.)

$400M is but One Payment to Iran, from a 1996 Legal Case

Posted on August 3, 2016August 3, 2016 by Denise Simon

It is not ransom, it is not ransom…okay…well let’s go further shall we?

Justice Department Officials Raised Objections on U.S. Cash Payment to Iran

Some officials worried about message being sent, but were overruled, WSJ

Then, Obama violated his own Executive Order as noted here and dated February 5, 2012.

Why did we convert to cash in various currencies and not just wire the money into designated Iranian banks? Well the excuse is sanctions. And Iran demanded cash such that later purchases or transactions could not be monitored, so John Kerry was cool with that. The result was smuggling $400 million on pallets on an unmarked cargo plane that landed in the middle of the night. Smuggling?

What is bulk cash smuggling?

Bulk Cash Smuggling is a reporting offense under the Bank Secrecy Act, and is part of the United States Code (U.S.C.). The code stipulates:

Whoever, with the intent to evade a currency reporting requirement, knowingly conceals more than $10,000 in currency or other monetary instruments on the person of such individual or in any conveyance, article of luggage, merchandise, or other container, and transports or transfers or attempts to transport or transfer such currency or monetary instruments from a place within the United States to a place outside of the United States, or from a place outside the United States to a place within the United States, shall be guilty of a currency smuggling offense.

What authorities govern bulk cash smuggling offenses?

Title 31 U.S.C. § 5332 (Bulk Cash Smuggling) makes it a crime to smuggle or attempt to smuggle more than $10,000 in currency or monetary instruments into or out of the United States, with the specific intent to evade the U.S. currency reporting requirements codified in Title 31 U.S.C. §§ 5316 and 5317.

ICE HSI relies on other financial authorities granted under Title 31 U.S.C. (Money and Finance), specifically those related to violations of reporting requirements and structuring financial transactions, as well as criminal authorities, such as Title 18 U.S.C. § 1960 (Unlicensed Money Transporter/Transmitter), Title 18 U.S.C. § 1952 (Interstate and Foreign Travel or Transportation in Aid of Racketeering Enterprises) and Title 18 U.S.C. § 1956 (Money Laundering). These authorities allow ICE HSI to disrupt and dismantle criminal networks that move bulk cash, wherever they may operate.

What are monetary instruments?

Monetary instruments are financial instruments that can be used similarly to cash. Specifically, monetary instruments are defined on the second or reverse side of the FinCEN Form 105:

Coin or currency of the United States or of any other country.
Traveler’s checks in any form.
Negotiable instruments (including checks, promissory notes, and money orders) in bearer form, endorsed without restriction, made out to a fictitious payee, or otherwise in such form that title thereto passes upon delivery.
Incomplete instruments (including checks, promissory notes, and money orders) that are signed but on which the name of the payee has been omitted.
Securities or stock in bearer form or otherwise in such form that title thereto passes upon delivery.

Monetary instruments do not include the following:

Checks or money orders made payable to the order of a named person which have not been endorsed or which bear restrictive endorsements.
Warehouse receipts
Bills of lading. More here.

****

Remember the plane was delayed for reasons no one was willing to declare but then John Kerry blamed it on a glitch with the passenger list.

There had been expectations that they would leave on Saturday, while the final round of talks on sanctions were taking place. But the Swiss plane carrying Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post’s Tehran bureau chief, Saeed Abedini, a pastor from Idaho and Amir Hekmati, a former Marine from Flint, Michigan as well as some of their family members did not leave until Sunday morning.

It had been reported when the plane took off that Nosratollah Khosravi-Roodsari, about whom little is known, was on board. But a senior U.S. official later said he was not traveling with the other released prisoners. More here.

It is also important to remember as Iran released 4 prisoners, the United States released 7. It is also important to remember that Obama had to issue a pardon for those 7 to be released.

Iran’s official state news agency, IRNA, named the Iranians set for release as Nader Modanlou, Bahram Mechanic, Khosrow Afghahi, Arash Ghahraman, Tooraj Faridi, Nima Golestaneh and Ali Saboonchi. Mechanic’s lawyer told Reuters that Mechanic, Faridi and Afghahi had been pardoned, but Mechanic and Faridi had not yet been freed from custody as their release was contingent on the four American prisoners leaving Iran. The U.S. government has yet to confirm the identities of the Iranians to be freed. All seven have the option of staying in the U.S. rather than returning to Iran. The U.S. State Department also dropped an international request to detain 14 Iranians on trade violations on Saturday, saying the extradition requests were unlikely to be successful. More here.

Okay, so with all of that, what about the rest of the money allegedly owed to Iran?

Well it seems someone needs to look at the lawsuit in clear detail as it was not filed until 1996. The U.S. response to the lawsuit is here in .pdf.

On August 12, 1996, the Islamic Republic of Iran filed aStatement of Claim (Doc . 1) in a new interpretive dispute againstthe United States, Case No . A/30, alleging that the United Stateshas violated its commitments under the Algiers Accords byinterfering in Iran’s internal affairs and implementing economicsanctions against Iran.

The Government of Iran, which has a long record of using terrorism and lethal force as an instrument of state policy, isseeking a ruling from the Tribunal that the United States hasviolated the Algiers Accords by intervening in Iran’s internalaffairs and enacting economic sanctions against it . Iran assertsthat the United States has violated two obligations under theAlgiers Accords : the pledge in Paragraph 1 of the GeneralDeclaration that it is and will be the policy of the UnitedStates not to intervene in Iran’s internal affairs, and therequirement in Paragraph 10 of the General Declaration to revokeall trade sanctions imposed in response to Iran’s seizing the

U.S . Embassy and taking 52 American hostages on November 4, 1979.

To hear the State Department spokesperson, Admiral Kirby (ret), John Kerry and the White House spokesperson Josh Earnest tell it, the U.S. was about to be rendered a decision by The Hague that we lost the case. Really when it began over kidnapping, hostages and terrorism? C’mon….

$400 Million for Iran is to Prop up Their Economy, ah Yeah, Sure

Posted on August 3, 2016August 3, 2016 by Denise Simon

Press Statement John Kerry Secretary of State Washington, DC January 17, 2016

The United States and Iran today have settled a long outstanding claim at the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal in the Hague.

This specific claim was in the amount of a $400 million Trust Fund used by Iran to purchase military equipment from the United States prior to the break in diplomatic ties. In 1981, with the reaching of the Algiers Accords and the creation of the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal, Iran filed a claim for these funds, tying them up in litigation at the Tribunal.

This is the latest of a series of important settlements reached over the past 35 years at the Hague Tribunal. In constructive bilateral discussions, we arrived at a fair settlement to this claim, which due to litigation risk, remains in the best interests of the United States.

Iran will receive the balance of $400 million in the Trust Fund, as well as a roughly $1.3 billion compromise on the interest. Iran’s recovery was fixed at a reasonable rate of interest and therefore Iran is unable to pursue a bigger Tribunal award against us, preventing U.S. taxpayers from being obligated to a larger amount of money.

All of the approximately 4,700 private U.S. claims filed against the Government of Iran at the Tribunal were resolved during the first 20 years of the Tribunal, resulting in payments of more than $2.5 billion in awards to U.S. nationals and companies through that process.

There are still outstanding Tribunal claims, mostly by Iran against the U.S. We will continue efforts to address these claims appropriately.

*****

Congress Probes White House-Linked Campaign to Deceive Media on Iran Nuclear Deal

Funder of pro-Iran ‘echo chamber’ met with White House nearly 30 times

FreeBeacon: A member of the House Intelligence Committee has launched a probe into whether a leading architect of the campaign to sell the Iran nuclear agreement last summer coordinated with the White House to mislead the media and the American public, according to documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

The inquiry is part of a larger effort by lawmakers to discern the origins of a shadow campaign that top White House officials admitted to running in order to enlist journalists and experts to boost support for the agreement.

The latest probe, launched by Rep. Mike Pompeo (R., Ill.), centers on Joe Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, a left-leaning foundation that quietly bankrolled a core part of the White House’s campaign to sell the nuclear agreement.

Cirincione visited the White House almost 30 times in the past few years during the administration’s diplomacy with Iran, prompting Pompeo to launch a wide-ranging probe into Ploughshares’ efforts to slant reporting on the Iran deal, according to a copy of that inquiry obtained by the Free Beacon.

Ploughshares has been engulfed in controversy since the Free Beacon and other media outlets exposed its efforts to fund media organizations that provided favorable coverage of the Iran deal, including National Public Radio. The organization also held strategy sessions with White House officials to force support for the deal in Congress.

New information from the Pompeo inquiry shows that Cirincione downplayed his ties to the White House’s pro-Iran efforts to create the impression that he was a neutral foreign policy observer. Cirincione did several interviews at NPR and other outlets boosting the nuclear deal, and billed himself as a top source for reporters seeking information about the administration’s diplomacy.

“After the Obama administration cited your organization, the Ploughshares Fund, as a key surrogate in its selling of the Iran nuclear deal, the attention of the media and the American public turned to your group,” Pompeo wrote in a Wednesday letter to Cirincione. “Ploughshares’ contributions, totaling $700,000 to National Public Radio (NPR) over the past several years, raised concerns of bias and journalistic ethics.”

“Specifically, your behavior as the leader of this organization during the Iran deal debate has left many with questions,” wrote Pompeo, who has been investigating these ties since the Free Beacon disclosed that NPR had cancelled an interview with the lawmaker, a deal critic, after receiving funds from Ploughshares.

Cirincione failed to disclose his organization’s close financial ties to the media outlet during multiple appearances on NPR, according to Pompeo.

“After news broke of Ploughshares’ significant financial contributions to NPR, it was also discovered that no disclosure of these gifts were made, either by you or by NPR, when you appeared on NPR on March 23, 2015,” the letter states. “This disclosure ‘breakdown’ prompted the NPR ombudsman to conduct a review of NPR’s processes.”

That internal review found that NPR violated journalistic ethics during its interviews with Cirincione.

“What is disturbing to outside observers is that NPR is ‘looking into why the Cirincione interview in particular did not raise any red flags’ at the time, though it obviously had to be corrected,” Pompeo writes.

“Your enthusiastic defense of Ploughshares’ conduct after these revelations did not acknowledge or apologize for any mistakes,” the lawmaker adds. “I do not yet know if your organization had similar problems with other news outlets. I am concerned that this NPR incident it is part of a broader pattern of deceit.”

Congressional insiders who spoke to the Free Beacon about the latest probe said Cirincionce has not come clean about why he failed to publicly disclose his close ties to the White House’s pro-Iran deal spin machine.

“There’s a real disconnect between what Ploughshares’ president is saying and what he’s doing,” said one senior congressional aide familiar with the inquiry. “The Associated Press’s and NPR’s accusations against him and his group are serious—yet he continues using Obama administration talking points and refuses to recognize the clear errors in how he behaved.”

“You cannot give hundreds of thousands of dollars to public radio and then go on public radio many times without disclosing those contributions,” the source added. “And he is just one member of the organized ‘echo chamber’ promoting Obama’s agenda—imagine how many more like him there are.”

Pompeo seeks to obtain further information about Ploughshares’ efforts to boost the deal, including whether it obfuscated its financial ties to NPR and other organizations.

The probe also asks about potential coordination between Cirincione and the White House.

“Did the White House contact you about your NPR interviews and request you use any material or talking points?” Pompeo writes. “You have visited the White House almost 30 times in the last few years—years that were very critical for debate on the Iran deal.”

“Your official visit to the White House on March 15, 2015 is questionably close to your March 23, 2013 appearance on NPR to discuss the Iran nuclear deal. Similarly, your official White House visit on April 6, 2010 was right before your April 12, 2010 NPR appearance,” the inquiry states.

Cirincione has denied on multiple occasions that the White House had created a pro-Iran deal operation, despite the disclosure of such an operation by top officials.

He also has taken aim at critics of the Iran deal by alleging that they are part of a larger conspiracy to promote war with Iran. This has included criticism of Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol and Sen. Ben Cardin (D., Md.), who Cirincione has referred to as “neocons.”

“Deeply disappointed [Senator Cardin] caved to the neocon, pro-war camp,” Cirincione tweeted in 2015 after Cardin expressed opposition to the deal. “Weak statement excusing his vote against the historic Iran Accord.”

Most recently, Cirincione appeared in a Ploughshares video about the deal titled, “How we won.”

****

What is Iran saying?

(AFP). Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani said Tuesday the United States had wasted the opportunity presented by the nuclear accord and prevented the two countries from working more closely on regional issues.

“As the supreme guide said, the nuclear agreement was a test,” Rouhani said in a televised address.

“If the United States had implemented the nuclear agreement with good faith and precision, and had reduced the obstacles and delays that we see today, we could have had more trust and engaged in negotiations on other subjects, which could have been in the interests of the region, the United States and us,” added the president, a moderate who pushed hard for the deal sealed in July 2015.

The agreement, which came into force in January, saw Iran accept curbs to its nuclear programme in exchange for a lifting of sanctions by world powers.

While observers say Iran has met its commitments, Tehran accuses Washington of continuing to block the Islamic republic from the international banking system, limiting its ability to benefit from the end of sanctions.

“Sadly, (the United States) did not successfully pass the test and has not precisely respected its commitments,” said Rouhani.

Rouhani said the agreement had already led to a significant rise in oil exports, but “in other sectors, things have moved slowly” due to the ongoing concerns of international banks, who fear they are still liable for prosecution by the US Treasury if they do business with Iran.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said Monday that negotiations with the West were like a “lethal poison”.

“Six months on (from the nuclear deal), do we see any effect on people’s lives?” he asked.

The Americans “ask to negotiate on regional questions, but the experience of the nuclear negotiations proves that this would be a lethal poison and that we can’t trust them on any subject”, he said.

October Surprise, POTUS Clearing the Middle East Decks

Posted on August 3, 2016August 3, 2016 by Denise Simon

It is all about politics which is all about timing. Obama is clearing the mess in Iraq and Syria for Hillary and while he is scheduled to take October off to campaign for Hillary, big military operations are planned for Islamic State destruction. Hillary then enters the White House to take on Supreme Court judges and social issues? It is political extortion to sway the elections and the electorate.

Get Ready for Obama’s ‘October Surprise’ in Iraq

If Iraqi and Kurdish troops—with stepped-up U.S. support—retake Mosul as planned, it could be a big boost for Hillary.

Politico: The American public could be treated to a major U.S.-led military victory in Iraq this fall, just as voters are deciding who will be the nation’s next president—but U.S. military officials insist the timing of the operation has nothing to do with politics.

Iraqi and Kurdish military and paramilitary units are preparing for a push on Mosul, the Islamic State-held city that is now in the cross hairs of the U.S.-led coalition battling the terrorist group across the Middle East. “The idea is to isolate Mosul, cut it off, kill it,” a senior U.S. Central Command officer told me.

Senior military officers say the city in northern Iraq, which has been under Islamic State control since June 2014, will be enveloped in a complex pincer movement from Iraqi military forces battling their way into the city from the southeast and Kurdish units storming the city from the northwest. The military offensive, months in the planning, is now tentatively scheduled to begin sometime in early October, with a final battle for Mosul coming at the end of that month.

If Mosul is retaken, it would both mark a major political triumph for Barack Obama and likely benefit his party’s nominee at the polls, Hillary Clinton, undercutting Republican claims that the Obama administration has failed to take off the gloves against the Islamic State. Even so, senior officers at U.S. Central Command who are overseeing the effort scoff at the notion that the Mosul offensive is being timed to help the candidate Obama is now actively campaigning for, his former secretary of state.

“Hurrying this thing along for political benefit would be just about the dumbest thing that we could do,” the senior Centcom officer told me this week, “and there’s been no pressure for us to do that. None. Iraqi and Kurdish fighters are going to fight for the city when they’re damned good and ready, and not before. There’s too much at stake to do it any other way.”

Iraqi and Kurdish fighters are going to fight for the city when they’re damned good and ready, and not before. There’s too much at stake to do it any other way.”

All evidence supports that notion, but U.S. officials have confirmed the Pentagon is planning ways to time their offensive against Mosul with an attack on the Islamic State “capital” in Raqqa, Syria. A coordinated Mosul-Raqqa military offensive could yield a dual defeat to the ISIS caliphate, unhinge ISIS power in both Syria and Iraq and have the added benefit of pinning ISIS units moving into Iraq along interior lines from Syria in place. In late March, the Centcom stepped up its monitoring of the Syria-Iraq border, with the intended purpose of spotting and bombing ISIS units headed toward Mosul.

The ambitious plans for Mosul and Raqqa reflect a shift in tactics and deeper U.S. involvement that has not been fully reported in the U.S. media—or talked about in the presidential campaign. Most recently, Centcom has gained White House permission to deploy U.S. advisers with Iraqi units at the battalion level, which would place U.S. advisers and trainers in greater danger, but would also give them more control of the battlefield. And the U.S. has been quick to flow advisers (an initial tranche of some 200 in all) into al-Qayyarah air base, about 40 miles south of Mosul, which was overrun by Iraqi military forces last week. Washington has also boldly stepped up its support of the Peshmerga, the veteran military units of the Kurdistan Regional Government who will lead the assault on Mosul from the north, despite the risk of upsetting the delicate regional politics—especially suspicions by the Shia-led Iraqi government that the U.S. is favoring the Kurds. On July 12, the U.S. signed an agreement with the KRG to provide Peshmerga units with $415 million for the purchase of ammunition and medical equipment. The agreement would also provide heavy weapons to Peshmerga units, which have been consistently outgunned by ISIS fighters, according to one senior civilian Pentagon official. The $415 million would correct that shortfall, with weapons flowing into Peshmerga units near Mosul.

The stepped-up aid to the Kurds reflects U.S. military confidence that the Islamic State is being rolled back. Since the campaign was initiated on August 8, 2014, the U.S.-led coalition has launched over 13,000 airstrikes on Islamic State military targets. Just as crucially, the four near-term goals laid out by the U.S. military to combat ISIS are on the verge of completion: to stabilize Anbar, prepare coalition ground forces to take Mosul, organize a ground campaign in Syria for a planned assault on Raqqa and ramp up the flow of weapons for anti-ISIS ground forces.

The stepped-up aid to the Kurds reflects U.S. military confidence that Islamic State is being rolled back.”

A dual offensive targeting Raqqa as well as Mosul was hinted at by Lt. General Sean MacFarland, the U.S. officer commanding the anti-ISIS effort, in a July 11 news conference. Seizing control of Raqqa, he said, would mean that ISIS would “lose a base of operations, would “lose financial resources” and would “lose the ability to plan, to create the fake documentation that they need to get around the world.” Centcom military planners say that, from a U.S. military perspective, the fight for Raqqa will be even more important than the fight for Mosul.

“It is clear who will be in the Mosul fight,” former Syrian diplomat Bassam Barabandi told me this week, “but just who will take part in the Raqqa fight is not so clear. It is being negotiated now. But I don’t think there’s any doubt, it will be Raqqa and Mosul, and Iraqi officials have confirmed that they would like to take the city in October.”

The fight for Mosul will be done by a trifecta of military forces: Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces (the controversial Hashd al-Shabi), the Peshmerga and Iraqi Security Forces, large numbers of whom are being trained by U.S. advisers. The U.S. is uncomfortable with the predominantly Shia Hashd forces leading the assault, as they are only nominally controlled by the Baghdad government and have proved recalcitrant in taking American advice. Formed in June 2014 after Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani called on Shias to fight ISIS, some elements of the Hashd are closely aligned with the Iranian al-Quds force, with their commander reporting to Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani.

But according to Robert Tollast, a U.K.-based military analyst who has traveled to Iraq and spoken with a number of Hashd commanders, Hashd is proving to be a bigger help than ever; the group is increasingly recruiting Sunni tribesmen eager to expel ISIS from their towns and villages. “We’re seeing a replay of what happened during the Anbar Awakening,” Tollast says. “ISIS brutality has forced a lot of Anbar’s Sunnis into an alliance with Hashd, just as, back in 2006, Al Qaeda’s brutality forced the Sunnis into the arms of the Americans.” Crucially, the Islamic State’s cultural cleansing of Anbar has begun to increase the appeal of Hashd units to Anbar’s Sunnis, the exact opposite of ISIS’s strategy of maintaining and exacerbating Iraq’s sectarian divide.

But while Sunnis in increasing numbers are now joining the fight against the Islamic State, their presence has not always been welcome by Iraqi Shias already doing the fighting. “The Shias view ISIS as just another form of Sunni Baathism,” Tollast says. In this, at least, they are not wrong: The senior leaders of ISIS were often prominent in the Saddam’s Baath Party, which brutally suppressed Shias during his nearly 25-year rule. The divide is deep. During a recent trip, Tollast had a meeting with a Shia leader whose office included a poster depicting Baathist Republican Guardsmen executing Shia civilians in 1991. Tollast told me that the parallel to the June 2014 Camp Speicher massacre, in which an ISIS unit commanded by a former Saddamist murdered over 1,500 Iraqi Air Force cadets, all of them Shia, was unmistakable.

The Shias view ISIS as just another form of Sunni Baathism,” Tollast says. In this, they are not wrong.

All of which helps explain why the Kurdish Peshmerga are considered a mainstay of the Mosul operation; U.S. military officials have enormous faith in the Peshmerga’s fighting abilities, even as the strong U.S.-Kurdish relationship has proved difficult for the Iraqi central government (which recently accused Peshmerga forces of arresting and torturing Iraqi army soldiers), as well as the commanders of a variety of Popular Mobilization Force units. Turkey is another key player, since the neighboring country also fears growing Kurdish influence with the U.S.—especially since the failed coup attempt earlier in July, which the Turkish government has blamed on a Muslim cleric living in exile in Pennsylvania—as Turkey jockeys for position in a post-conflict Mosul against the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers Party, which now controls an arc of territory from northern Iraq into northern Syria. So far, the fight against ISIS has provided the glue for a tense, if uneasy, truce among these political factions—but U.S. officials concede the informal alliance on the battlefield could be shattered by political disagreements.

According to the senior Pentagon official, the recently negotiated U.S.-Kurdish understanding came with strings attached, including Peshmerga battlefield coordination with Iraqi Security Forces operating on the Mosul front. Peshmerga commanders, according to this official, have now agreed to stand aside when the Iraqi Security Forces pass through their units during the initial assault on Mosul. The move is part of a U.S. effort to make sure that the units involved in the Mosul fight don’t end up battling each other. The memorandum of understanding was signed in Erbil, with the Americans represented by acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs Elissa Slotkin. It was Slotkin who, back in January of 2015, gave the cold shoulder to Sunni Anbar leaders who came to Washington to plead that the U.S. government bypass the Baghdad government to arm them directly. The U.S. refused.

While the refusal of the Obama administration to arm Anbar’s Sunnis met with widespread criticism on Capitol Hill, the administration still maintains that arming the Sunnis directly would be a mistake. In the wake of the visit by Anbar Sunnis in 2015, the administration quietly responded to its critics by pointing out that large numbers of weapons the U.S. had provided the tribes during the Bush years had ended up in the hands of ISIS. “They’re nice people, they mean well,” an administration official told me at the time. “But we can’t trust them.”

The U.S. continues to insist that all support for Anbar’s Sunni tribes be funneled through Iraq’s Ministry of Defense. But while the U.S. is still saying “no” to Anbar leaders who demand the U.S. bypass the Iraqi government in supporting them, the answer now is more nuanced: It’s more of a “no, but … ” More regular support for Anbar’s Sunnis is now possible, U.S. officials say, because the Defense Ministry is under the control of Khaled al-Obaidi, a Sunni from Mosul who has made it a point of touring Iraq military units preparing to storm the town. Obaidi’s appointment in October 2014 was widely criticized by Iraq’s Shia political parties, and there was an assassination attempt on him last September, when his convoy was hit by sniper fire north of Baghdad. Despite the controversy over his appointment, the U.S. told Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi that Obaidi’s presence was essential in the anti-ISIS fight because it would help to heal the rift between the Shia dominated government and Anbar’s tribes.

Still, Sunni tribal leaders complained throughout the early part of 2015 that the Iraqi government was slow to provide them with the weapons they needed. So last October, Pentagon officials say, Defense Secretary Ash Carter increased pressure on the Iraqi government to accelerate weapons’ deliveries to Anbar’s newly created Tribal Mobilization Force. Carter told the Congress that the U.S. had provided “two battalions’ worth of equipment for mobilizing Sunni tribal forces,” adding that it was up to the Iraqis to “ensure it is distributed effectively.” He added that “local Sunni forces need to be “sufficiently equipped and regularly paid.”

The fight for Mosul and Raqaa will likely be a turning point in the war against ISIS.

What Carter didn’t say, but the Pentagon officials now confirm, is that the U.S. has also channeled funding support to key tribal leaders through Obaidi’s ministry, as a kind of replay of the financial support that helped jump-state the Sunni Awakening in 2006. While the new Tribal Mobilization Force cannot match the combat power of the Hashd al-Shaabi (Anbar’s Sunnis can contribute 10,000 soldiers to the Mosul effort, at most, one Centcom officer says), its participation is essential as a symbol of the Abadi government’s attempt to build an anti-ISIS coalition of diverse Iraqi forces. (Suhaib al-Rawi, Anbar’s governor, said he preferred to withhold any comment on this report.)

The fight for Mosul and Raqqa will likely be a turning point in the war against ISIS. But while no one in Baghdad or Washington is guaranteeing victory, the U.S.-led coalition’s control of the air and the continued degradation of ISIS’s battlefield assets (they have lost nearly 150 tanks and over 7,000 reinforced fighting positions, according to Centcom’s precisely tabulated data), means that the Mosul fight could follow the model provided by the Battle for Fallujah, which the Iraqis reconquered from ISIS back in June. In that case, according to Joel Wing who charts events in the country and writes the “Musings on Iraq” blog, “there were tougher outer defenses and then little in the interior.” Mosul, he says, could be “even more like that.” Then too, he adds, the fight for Mosul has become so important that “everyone wants in on it.”

That’s the good news. The bad news is that while the broad U.S.-led coalition to fight ISIS remains unified, the same cannot be said for the forces on the ground. The only thing that unites them, it seems, is that they hate ISIS more than they hate each other. So while senior U.S. military officers are confident that a final assault on Mosul will succeed, they also know that the offensive could break apart even before it is launched.

Which means that while Obama would welcome an October surprise, he continues to caution that the fight against ISIS could take years. And it’s why Prime Minister Abadi has ignored calls that he expel U.S. military advisers, that he seize control of the Shia-dominated Hashd al-Shabi, that he dismiss Obaidi, that he cease all support for Anbar’s Tribal Mobilization Force and that he get tougher with the Kurds. And that’s because Abadi knows that the fight for Mosul is a battle Iraq can’t afford to lose.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/08/iraq-offensive-2016-mosul-islamic-state-isis-isil-obama-foreign-policy-kurdish-214121#ixzz4GG8Oadmu
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Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/08/iraq-offensive-2016-mosul-islamic-state-isis-isil-obama-foreign-policy-kurdish-214121#ixzz4GG80b3Jn
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