Fleecing of America in Afghanistan Schools

Posted on June 19, 2015June 19, 2015 by Denise Simon

Probes started into potential U.S. spending on “ghost schools” in Afghanistan

Officials in Washington and Kabul are examining whether U.S. funds were spent for schooling in Afghanistan that never occurred

Nils Kauffman, who served as an education officer for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Afghanistan, said he noticed irregularities at a vocational training institute the agency was funding during his visits to its campus in downtown Kabul in 2012 and 2013. He recalls being surprised not to see any students in the institute’s laboratories, where volt meters and scientific equipment remained in their original packaging.

Though Kauffman spied students elsewhere, he said he could never get a reliable account of how many were actually enrolled at the school. He also could not verify that the institute had addressed what a 2011 external audit called a host of “deviations” from sound practices, including a lack of accounting software, a cash-based payment system, and $118,000 in spending by the school over a five month period on weapons, international travel, and salary supplements.

Kauffman didn’t have the authority to demand a new, broader audit of the institute, but he reported his concerns to his superiors at USAID. They never acted, he said, and he recalls an official in the agency’s Office of Afghanistan-Pakistan Affairs expressing worry that canceling the institute’s funding would create what the official called “bad press.”

“Every time something came up, they jumped to keep this guy [the institute’s leader] happy, despite the problems, despite the lack of financial transparency,” said Kauffman, who is now a private development consultant based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In fact, USAID continued giving the institute funds, totaling at least $12.3 million through last Sunday, according to USAID spokesman Sam Ostrander.

Kauffman’s experience is only a small part of the controversy suddenly surrounding the long-running U.S. effort to promote the education and training of the largely illiterate population in Afghanistan. More than three-quarters of a billion dollars in U.S. funds have been used to finance the effort, and USAID has repeatedly depicted it as one of its signal accomplishments there.

Last month, Afghanistan’s newly-appointed education minister raised questions about the veracity of that claim when he told his country’s parliament that some aid funds had flowed to so-called “ghost schools, which are only on paper,” according to several Afghan media accounts of the May 27 session. The minister, Assadullah Hanif Balkhi, said that officials in the previous government — in power from 2004 to 2014 — lied about the number of schools to obtain more foreign funds.

“It is a fact that there are no schools in some parts of the country, but all the expenses — including teachers’ salaries — are being paid, and now we will bring reforms to this waste,” Balkhi told the parliament, according to Tolonews, a publisher and broadcaster based in Kabul.

Asked to provide more detail, a spokesman for the ministry, Kabir Haqmal, later told NBC News — the Center for Public Integrity’s publication partner for this article — that the matter is still under investigation. In some cases, he said, schools may have been closed due to fighting while “permanent absentees” were kept on the books for years, following a requirement of Afghan law.

“There could be schools that do not exist, but we [are] assessing all our records and so far have not found any such instances,” Haqmal said. “That does not mean there are no ghost schools, but we just do not have that information yet. We are taking this very seriously and will share our finding with public very soon.”

The new minister’s claims have provoked the top federal auditor for U.S. reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan, John F. Sopko, to express concern that “U.S. and other donors may have paid for schools that students do not attend and for the salaries of teachers who do not teach.”

In a June 11 letter to acting USAID administrator Alfonso E. Lenhardt, released by Sopko on June 18, Sopko said the allegations about “ghost schools, ghost students, and ghost teachers call for immediate attention,” and asked the agency to explain within two weeks what it is doing to investigate the reliability of its data and the potential misuse of its funds.

Accurate data, Sopko said, “is essential for gauging progress in USAID’s education programs and for making future funding decisions.”

USAID spokesman Ostrander, in an emailed response to questions, said the agency will provide a detailed reply to Sopko by the June 30 deadline. According to a written statement Ostrander provided to the Center for Public Integrity from Larry Sampler, assistant to the USAID administrator for Afghanistan and Pakistan, the agency has already asked the Afghan Education Ministry for more information. USAID currently has a full-time employee assigned to help the ministry improve the reliability of its data, according to Sampler’s statement.

Like all the agency’s projects in Afghanistan, “USAID-implemented education projects adhere to the Agency’s strict practices for monitoring their performance and success,” Sampler wrote.

USAID has repeatedly boasted about its role in raising enrollment rates in Afghanistan, citing Afghanistan Education Ministry data. More than eight million Afghan students were enrolled in 2013, compared to just 900,000 in 2002, according to data that Sopko cited in his most recent quarterly report. He said USAID had acknowledged these figures could not be independently verified, however.

At the Afghanistan Technical Vocational Institute, where Kauffman said he observed irregularities, 4,529 students have so far graduated “with the support of USAID and other sponsors,” Ostrander said. But the institute’s founder and director, Sardar Roshan, reached by cell phone in Kabul, told the Center for Public Integrity that the total number was “close to 7,000.” Ostrander told the Center for Public Integrity he could not explain the discrepancy.

Roshan’s tight connections to Washington

Roshan served as Afghanistan’s ambassador to Pakistan from 1992 to 1994, as the country’s minister of education from 1990 to 1992, and as a “rebel commander” liaising between “anticommunist forces and the U.S. government” in the National Islamic Front of Afghanistan during the 1980’s, according to his Linkedin profile.

Roshan denies that the institute has ever misreported its student population, saying the “ghost schools” are in rural provinces, but that his institute in downtown Kabul “could not fake students even if we wanted to.” He says he is highly proud of the institute. “When I’m in the international airport, when I walk into a bank in Kabul, when I look at the provincial governments, I see my graduates in every corner,” he said.

Rajiv Shah, the administrator of USAID from 2010 until February, singled the vocational institute out for special praise in a July 2013 speech at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington. “Today, we have more than 8 million children in schools with over 30 percent of who are girls. These investments have resulted in over 30,000 young women finishing secondary school and more than 40,000 young women seeking to earn university degrees today,” Shah said. “I’ve had the chance to meet some of these young women on visits to places like the Afghan Vocational Training Institute, watching them come in from around the country to develop marketable skills so they can triple or quadruple their earning potential upon graduation.”

But Kauffman, the former USAID education officer, was not alone in in voicing concerns about the institute’s achievements. In early 2012 – more than a year before Shah’s speech — USAID’s inspector general had reported there was “little evidence” that the agency’s support of the school, known as the Afghanistan Technical Vocational Institute, had strengthened its “overall technical capacity” or empowered Afghan youth. It said the project that included the institute “lacked clearly defined goals, objectives, and priorities.”

The institute began receiving USAID funds in 2007, according to Roshan and Ostrander. The funds were initially for scholarships, and were paid under USAID’s Afghanistan capacity-building program, Roshan said. But the financing was switched to the agency’s education department in 2010, under a subcontract with Education Development Center, Inc., a Massachusetts-based non-profit organization. Students were supposed to be trained in business management, construction, horticulture, information and communication technology, and automotive repair, according to the USAID webpage about the institute.

After the 2011 audit by accounting firm Grant Thornton’s Afghanistan office, USAID staff twice came to inspect the institute. But Kauffman said the institute obstructed efforts by USAID teams to dig deeper into its records, a claim supported by a copy he provided of USAID’s internal report about its site visits in July and August 2011.

The report states that the inspectors were “unable to meet all technical staff, check the systems, or gather sample documentation,” partly because the staff “were instructed by their headquarters not to disclose any documents” to them. It complained that Roshan and his ex-finance officer only met with them for 50 minutes, and said that as a result they were unable to learn whether the Institute had addressed key concerns the audit raised, including many involving its handling and disbursement of donor funds.

One person was, inappropriately, still responsible for handling petty cash, writing checks, and entering financial data into the computer, the report said. And the “most important gap” identified by the auditors — the fact that the institute paid its employees’ salaries in cash rather than traceable bank transfers — was still a problem, the inspectors wrote. Multiple reports by Sopko have described this as a frequent practice in Afghanistan.

Roshan denied making any attempt to obstruct the inspection. He told the Center for Public Integrity that many of these problems were resolved by the institute directly after the audit appeared, though he acknowledged that the institute had continued to use a cash-based payment system until 2013. Ostrander similarly said the institute had made progress since undergoing a separate assessment of its business model.

Roshan sent the Center for Public Integrity a lengthy rebuttal to the Grant Thornton audit, accompanied by documents including templates for payment vouchers, time sheets, a 19-page accounting manual, and its personnel policy. He defended the spending on weapons, saying the institute needed shotguns for the protection of its staff and students. The international travel was for his own visits to the U.S., he said. And the salary supplements were “necessary,” he said, to keep American teachers at the institute.

“I admit shortfalls in the finance/procurement systems,” Roshan told the Center for Public Integrity in an emailed statement, but some were “nothing but symptoms of failure of the counterpart/donor to deliver technical and financial assistance” in a timely and consistent manner.

Roshan said further that the issues raised in the audit stemmed from friction between Education Development Center, Inc. and USAID. Indeed, the agency’s 2012 inspector general report said the two entities had disagreed about “key elements of the design” of the larger educational project that Washington was financing, and said that this had hampered progress. “We were just caught in the tug of war,” Roshan said.

Alison Cohen, a spokeswoman for Education Development Center, Inc., said in an emailed statement that her firm “did as it was required,” and USAID found no mismanagement of its funds “on the part of EDC.” She said the firm is “fully committed to achieving the highest level of compliance” with its contracts, a quality recognized by “dozens of federal agencies, state and local governments, and private organizations” that have given it funds.

Finding various ways to keep the funds flowing

A few months after the USAID site visits, the agency stopped funding the institute through Education Development Center and found what Kauffman described as an alternative path: It modified one of its ongoing funding agreements with the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN Habitat) to add continuing technical and financial support for the institute.

But UN Habitat leaders raised their own concerns about the institute’s accounting and spending practices, informing USAID staff at an April 2012 meeting that Roshan’s salary and benefits package was $17,600 per month, according to a memo five months later from the director of USAID’s Office of Social Sector Development, Carol Horning, to the agency’s Afghanistan mission director. Annual per capita gross national income in Afghanistan was $1,940 that year, according to World Bank data.

Roshan denied he was paid $17,600 but declined to say what his salary was at the time. He said he had salaries that “were not on an Afghanistan scale” because he was an American citizen, and lived in Maryland for periods during the early 2010s. “I singlehandedly created the institute from scratch,” he said. “I was compensated less than half of what I should have received.” Roshan stepped down as the CEO this year, according to both Roshan and Ostrander, but Roshan said he remains the president until its board selects a new one.

The UN Habitat funding method worked for most of 2012, but on November 19, 2012, as it was drawing to a close, Roshan wrote directly to Shah, suggesting that “urgent funding be continued through an appropriate USAID mechanism for a period of time to avoid an abrupt closure” of the institute, according to an email that Roshan provided the Center for Public Integrity.

Shah responded less than four hours later, according to a second email that Roshan provided the Center for Public Integrity, thanking Roshan for his note and sending a copy to USAID’s assistant administrator for Afghanistan and Pakistan “so we could explore this issue and get back to you.” McKenzie Stough, a spokesperson at Georgetown University, where Shah is now a distinguished fellow at the School of Foreign Service, said that she had conveyed a request for comment to Shah’s personal assistant, but no response was forthcoming.

Eleven days after Roshan’s email exchange with Shah, Afghanistan’s then-education minister Farooq Wardak signed a letter to U.S. Ambassador James B. Cunningham — identical in wording to the email that Roshan had sent Shah.

USAID’s Afghanistan mission director at the time, Ken Yamashita, met with Roshan on December 10, 2012, and proposed that USAID continue supporting the institute but disburse the funds as a part of an overall USAID financial support to the Education Ministry, according to an email from USAID official Kerry Pelzman to several colleagues, which was obtained by the Center for Public Integrity. Yamashita, who is now a regional director at the Peace Corps, told the Center for Public Integrity by email that he did not dispute this account.

Twelve days later, Yamashita met with Wardak to seal the deal, according to a December 29, 2012, letter from him to Wardak. In it, Yamashita thanked him for his “receptivity to inclusion of support for ATVI as part of USAID’s on-budget support to the Ministry of Education,” and promised to let Cunningham know that Wardak’s November letter had “borne fruit.” Cunningham, who is now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, did not respond to phoned and emailed requests for comment.

Yamashita’s optimism was premature. Funding for the institute did not end up going through the Education Ministry, according to Kauffman, who said he heard the USAID finance department had objected to providing such general support. But in June 2013, USAID began providing another million dollars in direct funding for the institute, good for the next two years, according to the statement it posted on the Web. That funding expired on June 14, 2015.

Ostrander said the direct grant would not be renewed, but said USAID expects to start funding the institute again soon, this time through The Asia Foundation. The funding is meant to improve administrative functions and — subject to compliance with what Ostrander described as “certain requirements and standards” — cover its operating expenses. Ostrander said he could not immediately tell the Center for Public Integrity how much funding would be transmitted to the institute under the new agreement.

Roshan said however that he expects The Asia Foundation funding to net his institute $300,000 over the next six months. Two spokeswomen for The Asia Foundation did not reply to phoned and emailed requests for comment.

There’s “no way” the institute could continue to exist without international support, Kauffman said.

Welfare Use by Immigrant Households with Children

Posted on June 18, 2015June 18, 2015 by Denise Simon

Some studies speak for themselves. This one is chilling. It demonstrates failure, lack of control and management as well as a continued monetary magnet that wont soon or ever go away.

A Look at Cash, Medicaid, Housing, and Food Programs

by: The Center for Immigration Studies

Thirteen years after welfare reform, the share of immigrant-headed households (legal and illegal) with a child (under age 18) using at least one welfare program continues to be very high. This is partly due to the large share of immigrants with low levels of education and their resulting low incomes — not their legal status or an unwillingness to work. The major welfare programs examined in this report include cash assistance, food assistance, Medicaid, and public and subsidized housing.

Among the findings:

In 2009 (based on data collected in 2010), 57 percent of households headed by an immigrant (legal and illegal) with children (under 18) used at least one welfare program, compared to 39 percent for native households with children.
Immigrant households’ use of welfare tends to be much higher than natives for food assistance programs and Medicaid. Their use of cash and housing programs tends to be similar to native households.
A large share of the welfare used by immigrant households with children is received on behalf of their U.S.-born children, who are American citizens. But even households with children comprised entirely of immigrants (no U.S.-born children) still had a welfare use rate of 56 percent in 2009.
Immigrant households with children used welfare programs at consistently higher rates than natives, even before the current recession. In 2001, 50 percent of all immigrant households with children used at least one welfare program, compared to 32 percent for natives.
Households with children with the highest welfare use rates are those headed by immigrants from the Dominican Republic (82 percent), Mexico and Guatemala (75 percent), and Ecuador (70 percent). Those with the lowest use rates are from the United Kingdom (7 percent), India (19 percent), Canada (23 percent), and Korea (25 percent).
The states where immigrant households with children have the highest welfare use rates are Arizona (62 percent); Texas, California, and New York (61 percent); Pennsylvania (59 percent); Minnesota and Oregon (56 percent); and Colorado (55 percent).
We estimate that 52 percent of households with children headed by legal immigrants used at least one welfare program in 2009, compared to 71 percent for illegal immigrant households with children. Illegal immigrants generally receive benefits on behalf of their U.S.-born children.
Illegal immigrant households with children primarily use food assistance and Medicaid, making almost no use of cash or housing assistance. In contrast, legal immigrant households tend to have relatively high use rates for every type of program.
High welfare use by immigrant-headed households with children is partly explained by the low education level of many immigrants. Of households headed by an immigrant who has not graduated high school, 80 percent access the welfare system, compared to 25 percent for those headed by an immigrant who has at least a bachelor’s degree.
An unwillingness to work is not the reason immigrant welfare use is high. The vast majority (95 percent) of immigrant households with children had at least one worker in 2009. But their low education levels mean that more than half of these working immigrant households with children still accessed the welfare system during 2009.
If we exclude the primary refugee-sending countries, the share of immigrant households with children using at least one welfare program is still 57 percent.
Welfare use tends to be high for both new arrivals and established residents. In 2009, 60 percent of households with children headed by an immigrant who arrived in 2000 or later used at least one welfare program; for households headed by immigrants who arrived before 2000 it was 55 percent.
For all households (those with and without children), the use rates were 37 percent for households headed by immigrants and 22 percent for those headed by natives.
Although most new legal immigrants are barred from using some welfare for the first five years, this provision has only a modest impact on household use rates because most immigrants have been in the United States for longer than five years; the ban only applies to some programs; some states provide welfare to new immigrants with their own money; by becoming citizens immigrants become eligible for all welfare programs; and perhaps most importantly, the U.S.-born children of immigrants (including those born to illegal immigrants) are automatically awarded American citizenship and are therefore eligible for all welfare programs at birth.
The eight major welfare programs examined in this report are SSI (Supplemental Security Income for low income elderly and disabled), TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families), WIC (Women, Infants, and Children food program), free/reduced school lunch, food stamps (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), Medicaid (health insurance for those with low incomes), public housing, and rent subsidies.

Introduction

Concern that immigrants may become a burden on society has been a long-standing issue in the United States. As far back as colonial times there were restrictions on the arrival of people who might become a burden on the community. This report analyzes survey data collected by the Census Bureau from 2002 to 2009 to examine use of welfare programs by immigrant and native households, particularly those with children. The Current Population Survey (CPS) asks respondents about their use of welfare programs in the year prior to the survey,¹ so we are examining self-reported welfare use rates from 2001 to 2009. The findings show that more than half of immigrant-headed households with children use at least one major welfare program, compared to about one-third of native-headed households. The primary reason immigrant households with children tend to have higher overall rates is their much higher use of food assistance programs and Medicaid; use of cash assistance and housing programs tends to be very similar to native households.

Why Study Immigrant Welfare Use?

Use of welfare programs by immigrants is important for two primary reasons. First, it is one measure of their impact on American society. If immigrants have high use rates it could be an indication that they are creating a net fiscal burden for the country. Welfare programs comprise a significant share of federal, and even state, expenditures. Total costs for the programs examined in this study were $517 billion in fiscal year 2008.² Moreover, those who receive welfare tend to pay little or no income tax. If use of welfare programs is considered a problem and if immigrant use of those programs is thought to be high, then it is an indication that immigration or immigrant policy needs to be a adjusted. Immigration policy is concerned with the number of immigrants allowed into the country and the selection criteria used for admission. It is also concerned with the level of resources devoted to controlling illegal immigration. Immigrant policy, on the other hand, is concerned with how we treat immigrants who are legally admitted to the country, such as welfare eligibility, citizenship requirements, and assimilation efforts.

The second reason to examine welfare use is that it can provide insight into how immigrants are doing in the United States. Accessing welfare programs can be seen as an indication that immigrants are having a difficult time in the United States. Or perhaps that some immigrants are assimilating into the welfare system. Thus, welfare use is both a good way of measuring immigration’s impact on American society and immigrants’ adaptation to life in the United States.

Read on if you dare by clicking here.

Russian Brinkmanship is Threatening America

Posted on June 18, 2015June 18, 2015 by Denise Simon

From the Atlantic Council:

The war of words between America and Russia is escalating. So, too, is the movement of implements of war — from U.S. fighter jets to Russian nuclear weapons. So is an actual war imminent?

No one in Russia, NATO or the United States has gone that far yet. Still, the rhetoric and actions from both sides have definitely ratcheted up in recent days, raising concerns of a new arms race — if not worse — amid tensions both sides blame on each other….

Part of it has to do with the unpredictable nature of other actors, like Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine who may broaden their own conflicts by inadvertently or purposefully striking others. The biggest such example may be the 2014 shooting down of a Malaysia Airlines commercial plane over Ukraine by rebels.

Just a few days ago:

The Russian military has successfully test-fired a short-range anti-missile system, the Russian defense ministry announced Tuesday. The latest move comes four days after Pentagon officials said that the United States was considering deploying missiles in Europe to counter potential threats from Russia.

“The launch was aimed at confirming the performance characteristics of missile defense shield anti-missiles operational in the Aerospace Defense Forces,” the defense ministry said, according to Russia’s TASS news agency.

According to Lieutenant General Sergei Lobov, deputy commander of the Aerospace Defense Forces, “an anti-missile of the missile defense shield successfully accomplished its task and destroyed a simulated target at the designated time.”

The test’s timing is crucial as the U.S. government is considering aggressive moves, including deploying land-based missiles in Europe, in response to Russia’s alleged violation of a Cold War-era nuclear arms treaty, the Associated Press (AP) reported.

***

The Pentagon Response

Pentagon Building Cruise Missile Shield To Defend US Cities From Russia

From Defense One:

The Pentagon is quietly working to set up an elaborate network of defenses to protect American cities from a barrage of Russian cruise missiles.

The plan calls for buying radars that would enable National Guard F-16 fighter jets to spot and shoot down fast and low-flying missiles. Top generals want to network those radars with sensor-laden aerostat balloons hovering over U.S. cities and with coastal warships equipped with sensors and interceptor missiles of their own.

One of those generals is Adm. William Gortney, who leads U.S. Northern Command, or NORTHCOM, and North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD. Earlier this year, Gortney submitted an “urgent need” request to put those new radars on the F-16s that patrol the airspace around Washington. Such a request allows a project to circumvent the normal procurement process.

While no one will talk openly about the Pentagon’s overall cruise missile defense plans, much of which remains classified, senior military officials have provided clues in speeches, congressional hearings and other public forums over the past year. The statements reveal the Pentagon’s concern about advanced cruise missiles being developed by Russia.

“We’re devoting a good deal of attention to ensuring we’re properly configured against such an attack in the homeland, and we need to continue to do so,” Adm. Sandy Winnefeld, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said during a May 19 speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington.

In recent years, the Pentagon has invested heavily, with mixed results, in ballistic missile defense: preparations to shoot down long-range rockets that touch the edge of space and then fall toward targets on Earth. Experts say North Korea and Iran are the countries most likely to strike the U.S. or its allies with such missiles, although neither arsenal has missiles of sufficient range so far.

But the effort to defend the U.S. mainland against smaller, shorter-range cruise missiles has gone largely unnoticed.

“While ballistic missile defense has now become established as a key military capability, the corresponding counters to cruise missiles have been prioritized far more slowly,” said Thomas Karako, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington. “In some ways, this is understandable, in terms of the complexity of the threat, but sophisticated cruise missile technologies now out there are just not going away and we are going to have to find a way to deal with this — for the homeland, for allies and partners abroad, and for regional combatant commanders.”

Intercepting cruise missiles is far different from shooting down a missile of the ballistic variety. Launched by ships, submarines, or even trailer-mounted launchers, cruise missiles are powered throughout their entire flight. This allows them to fly close to the ground and maneuver throughout flight, making them difficult for radar to spot.

“A handful of senior military officials, including several current or past NORTHCOM commanders, have been among those quietly dinging the bell about cruise missile threats, and it’s beginning to be heard,” Karako said.

While many of the combatant commanders — the 4-star generals and admirals who command forces in various geographic regions of the world — believe cruise missiles pose a threat to the United States, they have had trouble convincing their counterparts in the military services who decide what arms to buy.

Fast-track requests like Gortney’s demand for new radars on F-16s have been used over the past decade to quickly get equipment to troops on the battlefield. Other urgent operational needs have included putting a laser seeker on a Maverick missile to strike fast-moving vehicles and to buy tens of thousands of MRAP vehicles that were rushed to Iraq to protect soldiers from roadside bomb attacks.

Last August, at a missile defense conference in Huntsville, Ala., then-NORTHCOM and NORAD commander Gen. Charles Jacoby criticized the Army and other services for failing to fund cruise missile defense projects. NORTHCOM, based in Colorado, is responsible for defending the United States from such attacks.

“I’m trying to get a service to grab hold of it … but so far we’re not having a lot of success with that,” Jacoby said when asked by an attendee about the Pentagon’s cruise missile defense plans. “I’m glad you brought that up and gave me a chance to rail against my service for not doing the cruise missile work that I need them to do.”

But since then, NORTHCOM has been able to muster support in Congress and at the Pentagon for various related projects. “We’ve made a case that growing cruise missile technology in our state adversaries, like Russia and China, present a real problem for our current defenses,” Jacoby said.

One item at the center of these plans is a giant aerostat called JLENS, short for the Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System. The Pentagon is testing the system at Maryland’s Aberdeen Proving Ground, a sprawling military complex north of Baltimore. Reporters have even been invited to see the tethered airship, which hovers 10,000 feet in the air.

JLENS carries a powerful radar on its belly that Pentagon officials say can spot small moving objects – including cruise missiles – from Boston to Norfolk, Va., headquarters of the U.S. Navy’s Atlantic Fleet. Since it’s so high in the air, it can see farther than ground radars.

JLENS is in the early stages of a three-year test phase, but comments by senior military officials indicate the Pentagon in considering expanding this use of aerostats far beyond the military’s National Capital Region district.

“This is a big country and we probably couldn’t protect the entire place from cruise missile attack unless we want to break the bank,” Winnefeld said. “But there are important areas in this country we need to make sure are defended from that kind of attack.”

New missile interceptors could also play role in the network too.

“We’re also looking at the changing out of the kinds of systems that we would use to knock down any cruise missiles headed towards our nation’s capital,” Winnefeld said.

Ground-launched versions of ship- and air-launched interceptors could be installed around major cities or infrastructure, experts say. Raytheon, which makes shipborne SM-6 interceptors, announced earlier this year that it was working on a ground-launched, long-range version of the AMRAAM air-to-air missile.

The improvements make the missiles “even faster and more maneuverable,” the company said in a statement when the announcement was made at the IDEX international arms show in Abu Dhabi in February.

The Threat

Driving the concern at the Pentagon is Russia’s development of the Kh-101, an air-launched cruise missile with a reported range of more than 1,200 miles.

“The only nation that has an effective cruise missile capability is Russia,” Gortney said at a March 19 House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee hearing.

Russian cruise missiles can also be fired from ships and submarines. Moscow has also developed containers that could potentially conceal a cruise missile on a cargo ship, meaning it wouldn’t take a large nation’s trained military to strike American shores.

“Cruise missile technology is available and it’s exportable and it’s transferrable,” Jacoby said. “So it won’t be just state actors that present that threat to us.”

During the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, American and Kuwaiti Patriot missiles intercepted a number of Iraqi ballistic missiles, Karako said. But they missed all five cruise missiles fired, including one fired at Marine headquarters in Kuwait. In 2006, Hezbollah hit an Israeli corvette ship with an Iranian-supplied, Chinese-designed, anti-ship cruise missile, Karako said.

Shooting down the missiles themselves is a pricy proposition, which has led Pentagon officials to focus on the delivery platform.

“The best way to defeat the cruise missile threat is to shoot down the archer, or sink the archer, that’s out there,” Gortney said at an April news briefing at the Pentagon.

At a congressional hearing in March, Gortney said the Pentagon needed to expand its strategy to “hit that archer.”

An existing network of radars, including the JLENS, and interceptors make defending Washington easier than the rest of the country.

“[T]he national capital region is the easier part in terms of the entire kill chain,” Maj. Gen. Timothy Ray, director of Global Power Programs in the Air Force acquisition directorate, said in March at a House Armed Services Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee hearing. “We remain concerned about the coverage for the rest of the country and the rest of the F-16 fleet.”

Winnefeld said that the JLENS and “other systems we are putting in place” would “greatly enhance our early warning around the National Capital Region.”

In an exercise last year, the Pentagon used a JLENS, an F-15, and an air-to-air missile to shoot down a simulated cruise missile. In the test, the JLENS locked on to the cruise missile and passed targeting data to the F-15, which fired an AMRAAM missile. The JLENS then steered the AMRAAM into the mock cruise missile.

But there are many wild cards in the plans, experts say. While the JLENS has worked well in testing, it is not tied into the NORTHCOM’s computer network. It was also tested in Utah where there was far less commercial and civil air traffic than East Coast, some of the most congested airspace in the world. At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in March, Gortney acknowledged the project is “not without challenges,” but said that’s to be expected in any test program.

It is also unclear whether the JLENS over Maryland spotted a Florida mailman who flew a small gyrocopter from Gettysburg, Penn., to the U.S. Capitol lawn in Washington, an hour-long flight through some of the most restricted airspace in the country. The JLENS has been long touted by its makers as being ideal for this tracking these types of slow-moving aircraft.

Gortney, in an April 29 House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing about the gyrocopter, told lawmakers the JLENS “has more promise” than other aerostat-mounted radars used by the Department of Homeland Security along the border with Mexico and in South Florida. He deferred his explanation to the classified session after the public hearing.

Experts say JLENS can not just spot but track and target objects like cruise missiles, making it better than other radars used for border security.

Raytheon has built two JLENS, the one at Aberdeen and another in storage and ready for deployment.

If a cruise missile were fired toward Washington, leaders would not have much time to react.

“Solving the cruise missile problem even for Washington requires not just interceptors to be put in place, but also redundant and persistent sensors and planning for what to do, given very short response times,” Karako said.

Hillary DID have Accomplishments at State Dept

Posted on June 18, 2015June 18, 2015 by Denise Simon

Sheesh, it is true she did have many accomplishments but they are not the successes she would use for boasting.

She raised lots of money for the Clinton Foundation, she opened the pathway for Russia to control up to 50% of the uranium output of the United States and she was complicit is the death of four dead Americans.

Her best achievements at State was obstruction and cover-ups.

Sexual harassment complaints at State Department soar under Clinton, Kerry

In part from the Washington Times:

In a disclosure with political implications for 2016, the State Department’s chief watchdog reported Thursday that worker harassment complaints have nearly tripled inside the agency during the tenures of Hillary Clinton and John Kerry but the agency still doesn’t have mandatory training for all employees.

“A significant increase in reported harassment inquiries in the Department of State over the past few fiscal years supports the need for mandatory harassment training,” the department’s inspector general warned in a new oversight report that reviewed the agency’s civil rights office.

The report states that formal harassment claims rose from 88 cases in 2011 during Mrs. Clinton’s third year as America’s top diplomat, to 248 in 2014, Mr. Kerry’s second year as secretary. Hundreds more informal complaints were lodged during the same period.

Last year, 43 percent of the new complaints alleged harassment or unfair hirings or promotions while 38 percent raised sex discrimination or reprisals, the report said.

The report said some of the increases could be attributed to growing knowledge among employees about sexual harassment issues and the procedures for reporting it.

The inspector general said the Office of Civil Rights has made strides in improving the quality, speed and quantity of its work in recent years but that performance issues remains, such as a need to rebalance workloads, reassess positions and complete delinquent performance evaluations. The office has two civil rights complaints pending against itself, it added. More sordid details are here.

Hold on there is more….and personally I read the emails in Wikileaks a few years ago.

Records suggest Hillary chief of staff blocked probe of ambassador nominee

From the Washington Examiner:

Top State Department staff under Hillary Clinton allegedly blocked an investigation into the president’s nominee for ambassador to Iraq.

The ambassador-designate, Brett McGurk, was accused of engaging in inappropriate behavior with a reporter from the Wall Street Journal and funneling her information he was not authorized to disclose.

McGurk withdrew his name from consideration for the ambassadorship in the face of a growing scandal over emails that revealed his extra-marital affair with the reporter, Gina Chon. His relationship with the journalist prompted concerns among Republican lawmakers, although the extent of the internal cover-up of his conduct was not then known.

McGurk is presently one of President Obama’s key advisers on the Islamic State, having survived the scandal in 2012 with the help of higher-ups in the Bureau of Diplomatic Security.

“There were rumors inside the State Department that the investigation into McGurk’s actions in Iraq was squashed at the very highest levels,” Van Buren told the Washington Examiner.

Van Buren retired from the State Department in 2012 after a lengthy legal battle with the State Department over whistleblower disclosures he made in a book about his time in Iraq with the agency from 2009 to 2010.

During his nearly quarter-century at the State Department, Van Buren said he saw a variety of management styles from the secretary’s office as agency leadership shifted.

“I think what a lot of State Department people felt was that previous secretaries were focused more on protecting the institution and, by extension, themselves,” he said. “Whereas the Clinton people were 90 percent concerned about protecting Hillary and maybe 10 percent concerned about protecting the institution.”

Although the investigation was eventually closed in July 2013, speculation that he was about to be named to another high-level position involving Iraq began swirling months earlier.

McGurk is presently Deputy Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL.

His high-profile role puts him at the forefront of the conflict with the Islamic State. For example, he appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday to announce the government’s intention to equip tribal fighters in Iraq to support their fight against the Islamic State.

McGurk’s affair with Chon, to whom he is now married, became the subject of public scrutiny after a 2012 “computer hacking incident” in Baghdad resulted in the publication of racy emails back and forth between the two while he was in line to be the next ambassador to Iraq.

The leaked emails suggested at the time the two had a sexual relationship. But they also suggested the ambassador-designate may have given sensitive information to the reporter.

The communications show McGurk asked Chon to text him on his Blackberry because texting was a “better way to engage in sensitive deliberations” than emailing from his government address.

Several messages between McGurk and the Journal reporter suggested he used his position to provide Chon with access to Iraqi sources. Yes, there are more details on this one too.

In case that is not enough on the details of Iraq, Blackberry phones, emails and more….click here.

The Inner Circle of the Hillary Cover-Up Machine

Posted on June 17, 2015June 17, 2015 by Denise Simon

When it comes to Hillary’s claim on classified material in her emails, her honesty is now being challenged in earnest. Particular emails of interest are found here.

American Bridge has operatives that are dispatched to follow any and all republicans around the country, regardless of who they are to track each word spoken by the politician and the locations as well. Then American Bridge hooks up with Media Matters and other liberal online media sources and publishes twisted versions of events. It is interesting to note that Rodell Mollineau is the treasurer of American Bridge and :

Rodell Mollineau past relationships:

American Bridge 21st Century – president

Mark L. Pryor – communications director

Harry Reid – staff director

Tom Vilsack – communications director

David Brock

Sidney Blumenthal

Then there is ‘Correct the Record’ a website launched by Hillary supporters. Correct the Record is an inside mission launched by American Bridge where the point people include Burns Strider, a top Clinton donor as well as Susie Tompkins.

This is all especially noteworthy based on the recent 8 hour testimony that Sidney Blumenthal just gave to the Trey Gowdy led committee on Benghazi.

For an insightful read on the follow the money doctrine for clues and the continued intrigue, Politico has a breaking summary.

Benghazi panel probes Sidney Blumenthal’s work for David Brock

Republican members of a special congressional committee spent hours on Tuesday grilling Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal about the inner workings of the Clinton’s philanthropic and political operations, going well beyond the 2012 Benghazi attacks that the committee is charged with investigating, according to sources familiar with the hearing.

A particular focus during Tuesday’s closed-door deposition was a network of groups founded by Clinton enforcer David Brock that — POLITICO has learned — paid Blumenthal more than $10,000 a month as they defended Hillary Clinton against conservative attacks, first while she was secretary of state and then as she prepared for and ultimately entered the presidential campaign.

While still secretary of state, Clinton emailed back and forth with Blumenthal about efforts by one of the groups, Media Matters, to neutralize criticism of her handling of the deadly assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, sources tell POLITICO.

“Got all this done. Complete refutation on Libya smear,” Blumenthal wrote to Clinton in an Oct. 10, 2012, email into which he had pasted links to four Media Matters posts criticizing Fox News and Republicans for politicizing the Benghazi attacks and challenging claims of lax security around the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, according to a source who has reviewed the email exchange. Blumenthal signed off the email to Clinton by suggesting that one of her top aides, Philippe Reines, “can circulate these links,” according to the source.

The emails were not included in documents originally turned over by the State Department. The Select Committee on Benghazi obtained the emails through subpoena. And the committee’s Republican members spent much of Tuesday’s nine-hour-session pressing Blumenthal about his role in producing the posts, and his tangled web of business and personal relationships in the Clintons’ orbit and beyond, according to sources.

In addition to Blumenthal’s role at Media Matters, he was involved with the Brock-founded groups American Bridge and Correct the Record, he worked on Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, and then afterward at the $2 billion Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation (which paid Blumenthal about $10,000 a month even as he was on Brock’s payroll). During this time, he also advised a pair of businesses seeking potentially lucrative contracts in Libya, while sharing intelligence on the country with Clinton while she was secretary of state.

Republicans privy to the Benghazi committee’s strategy say it’s important to map out Blumenthal’s many affiliations in order to understand the motivations for the counsel he provided to Clinton, and the degree to which she relied on it. But Democrats argue that Tuesday’s questioning shows that Republicans are conducting a politicized fishing expedition intended to damage Clinton’s presidential campaign and its supporters.

Brock, informed Wednesday by POLITICO of the committee’s line of questioning, called it ironic.

“The Republicans asked more about what our groups do to debunk their false claims about Benghazi than about the attacks in Benghazi? That sounds like a bizarre waste of time,” Brock said. “All our work is made public. And I’d be happy to give Chairman Gowdy a tour of our offices at his convenience,” Brock said, referring to Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), who chairs the Benghazi committee.

A Republican congressional source defended the questioning. “Your background is always relevant: where you worked and who was paying you during that time period? So while he was sending information to Secretary Clinton … you have to ask: Who was paying your salary?” said the source. “He was at one point working for Media Matters, Correct the Record and American Bridge, and some of those entities have quite a bit to say about Benghazi.”

Under Republican questioning, Blumenthal suggested he was merely forwarding the Media Matters posts about Benghazi to Clinton but had no role in writing, editing or placing them.

And when Republicans asked him why he seemed to take credit for such posts in his email, he said he may have overstated his role, according to separate sources familiar with the questioning.

“So the next question is: What did you ‘get done’?” one source said, referring to Blumenthal’s own words from his email. “And he stumbled over that.”

Some of the Media Matters posts Blumenthal forwarded, which were published in the weeks after the attacks, criticize Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) for suggesting the Obama administration tried to cover up the events around the attack and for blaming the State Department for failing to implement sufficient security at the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi.

One post in particular accused Chaffetz of “fundamental hypocrisy” after he admitted in a CNN interview that he had previously voted to cut embassy security funding.

Chaffetz chairs an oversight committee that previously examined the attacks but ceded jurisdiction late last year to the select committee, so he was not present for Tuesday’s hearing. But during the hearing, sources said Gowdy, who is close friends with Chaffetz, suggested Media Matters’s scrutiny bothered the Utah Republican.

Another GOP select committee member asked whether Blumenthal wrote or edited a statement released Monday by Correct the Record that chided the committee for subpoenaing Blumenthal. The statement said Blumenthal “has not one thing to do with what happened in Benghazi or the government’s reaction to it,” and it called the committee “disgraceful” and “a political sideshow,” suggesting a more accurate name for it would be the “Select Committee to Destroy Hillary Clinton.”

Brock said that Blumenthal had no role in Monday’s release scolding Gowdy’s committee, but otherwise declined to comment on Blumenthal’s role.

Sources who have worked with Brock’s groups, however, say that Blumenthal offered high-level strategy and messaging advice on numerous subjects and participated in weekly strategy calls with Brock and other top group officials. The Benghazi debate almost certainly would have been discussed in those calls, said the sources, since it became a major focus of Brock’s groups, which in 2013 helped Brock pen a book called “The Benghazi Hoax.”

Blumenthal’s ideas for Brock’s groups would often be passed along to staff members and were sometimes greeted by eye rolls, said an operative who interacted with Brock and Blumenthal. But, the operative said, “Brock respects and trusts him a lot. And he surely feels he owes him a lot, as well.”

A Clinton loyalist who first earned the family’s trust as an aggressive combatant in the political battles that buffeted Bill Clinton’s presidency, Blumenthal helped recruit Brock to the cause in the late 1990s. After spending much of the decade as a self-proclaimed right-wing hit man and Clinton antagonist, Brock publicly renounced the right and reinvented himself as a liberal crusader against conservative attacks. Brock is now close to the Clintons, and he and his groups are central players in a constellation of big-money outfits supporting Clinton’s presidential campaign.

“It was Sid who basically made David’s current life possible, in many ways,” the operative said.

Blumenthal remains a paid consultant for Media Matters and American Bridge. Since about 2010, the groups have combined to pay Blumenthal more than $10,000 a month, though the payments are impossible to track since they’re made almost entirely through arms of the groups that do not disclose detailed information.

That income was supplemented by the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, which began paying him about $10,000 a month starting in 2009 — not long after he stopped working for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. That arrangement, which ended in March of this year, came at the behest of former president Bill Clinton, for whom Blumenthal had worked in the White House. It appears to have taken shape after Hillary Clinton’s effort to hire Blumenthal at the State Department was rebuffed by top aides to President Barack Obama.

The reason Blumenthal initially came into the select committee’s sights was the Libyan intelligence he emailed to Clinton while she was secretary of state. On Tuesday, he testified that he received the intelligence from a business contact and wasn’t being paid to pass it along to Clinton, according to sources.

But scrutinizing Blumenthal’s work for Brock’s groups and the foundation allows the Benghazi committee a lens into the Clinton political and philanthropic operations, which could provide fodder for campaign trail attacks. Democrats argue that’s the committee’s real motive.

After Tuesday’s hearing, Blumenthal chafed at the committee’s focus on his political work.

“It seems obvious that my appearance before this committee was for one reason and one reason only … politics,” he said. The panel spent “hours asking me questions about things that had nothing to do with Benghazi,” he said, adding, “I hope I have cleared up the series of misconceptions some members of the committee may have held. … My testimony has shed no light on the events of Benghazi — nor could it, because I have no firsthand knowledge.”