Category Archives: Terror

Obama Giving Allies Away, Putin Winning Them

Posted on by

In Eastern Europe:

Hungary, a NATO member whose prime minister recently named Putin’s Russia as a political model to be emulated. Or NATO member Slovakia, whose leftist prime minister likened the possible deployment of NATO troops in his country to the Soviet invasion of 1968. Or NATO member Czech Republic, where the defense minister made a similar comparison and where the government joined Slovakia and Hungary in fighting the European Union’s sanctions against Russia. Or Serbia, a member of NATO’s “partnership for peace” that has invited Putin to visit Belgrade this month for a military parade to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Red Army’s “liberation” of the city. Then there is Poland, which until recently was leading the effort within NATO and the European Union to support Ukraine’s beleaguered pro-Western government and punish Putin’s aggression. This month its new prime minister, Ewa Kopacz, ordered her new foreign minister to urgently revise its policy.

Russia recruits U.S. allies in Eastern Europe by raising doubts about security commitment

Russia is trying to slowly strip away U.S. allies in Eastern Europe by playing up fears that Washington will not come to their aid, as promised nearly a decade ago, because of a lack of foreign strategy and commitment to the region, analysts say.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has authorized a string of provocative moves from the Arctic to the Black Sea in recent months in an attempt to intimidate NATO allies along the border for the old Soviet Union, including Hungary, Romania and Latvia, and boost allies of Moscow living in those countries.

Last year, a Russian-friendly party won the largest number of votes in Latvia’s parliamentary elections amid reports that a mayor of a city in eastern Latvia voiced concerns that activists were engaged in door-to-door campaigning in support of the communities’ secession from Latvia to join Russia.

Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban, who helped engineer his country’s successful application for membership in NATO in 1999, now seems to be cozying up to Russia by making large deals with Moscow and criticizing Western sanctions.

In November, Hungary authorized construction of the South Stream pipeline, a Russian-backed project that will bypass Ukraine to funnel natural gas exports to Europe and elsewhere, to the dismay of the European Union. Ukraine is engaged in a fierce political and military standoff with Russian-based separatists.

The fact that some countries along the tense border with Russia may be tempted to switch sides suggests a broader problem of a lack of trust in the U.S. commitment to protect them if they are attacked, said Matthew Rojansky, director of the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

“Why don’t they feel that deterrent effect of America’s commitment to defend them?” he said. “They clearly don’t think that we are committed to that commitment. That’s really where the problem is. They’re doubting the American security commitment.”

NATO’s famous Article 5 declares that an attack against any of the 28 countries in the alliance will be considered an attack against all. As a result, countries that have signed the treaty must come to the defense of others that are threatened or attacked.

Mr. Rojansky likened the U.S. commitment to these countries to life insurance: A 25-year-old healthy person generally has no trouble getting a life insurance policy because the company knows it likely won’t have to pay up soon. A 67-year-old with a history of heart disease, however, could have trouble obtaining a policy and face high premiums.

Seven countries — including Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia — became NATO members in 2004. Because the threat of a Russian attack wasn’t a serious consideration at that time, there was no lengthy debate on the wisdom of letting these Baltic states join, Mr. Rojansky said.

Now that Russia under Mr. Putin has taken a far more aggressive stance in Ukraine, Georgia and elsewhere, the situation has changed, he said.

“We’ve given them the policy coverage, but we gave it to them in a totally different circumstance, and that’s creating doubts on their part about if we’ll honor the policy,” Mr. Rojansky said.

Saber-rattling

Both sides have engaged in saber-rattling in recent weeks, leading to talks on both sides of the European divide of a potential new cold war.

Russian fighter jets have grown increasingly brazen in challenging U.S. and allied surveillance flights, and Sweden this fall scrambled ships and helicopters to track a Russian submarine that was believed to have surreptitiously entered Swedish waters. Planes from Russia’s Northern Fleet this week have begun anti-ship exercises in the Barents Sea.

Pentagon officials said Thursday that they were asking Russia to investigate an incident in early April in which a Russian fighter jet intercepted a U.S. reconnaissance plane in international airspace north of Russia and conducted multiple “unprofessional and reckless and foolish” maneuvers in proximity to the American plane.

Analysts in Moscow say the West has been just as provocative, with the U.S. holding joint exercises with Ukraine’s military, accelerating talks with Poland on a state-of-the-art missile defense system, staging a high-profile military convoy trip through six Eastern European nations, and deploying 12 A-10 Warthog planes to Romania as part of a theater-security effort to counter Russian moves in the region.

“The unit will conduct training alongside our NATO allies to strengthen interoperability and demonstrate U.S. commitment to the security and stability of Europe,” Pentagon spokesman James Brindle said this month in a statement about the action to Military.com.

Pentagon officials told the website that the deployment of the A-10s was part of NATO’s Operation Atlantic Resolve. The mission objective is, in part, to send a message to Russia about the U.S. commitment to NATO allies.

“Operation Atlantic Resolve will remain in place as long as the need exists to reassure our allies and deter Russia from regional hegemony,” Pentagon spokesman Maj. James Brindle said.

Pentagon officials strongly contested criticism that the Obama administration was having second thoughts about fulfilling the U.S. commitment to its allies in Eastern Europe now that Russia poses a significant threat.

“The U.S. thoroughly considered all aspects associated with establishing and joining NATO,” the official said. “The principles contained in opening paragraphs of the Washington Treaty remain as relevant today as they were 66 years ago.”

The U.S. needs to do more to reassure NATO allies of its commitment, including permanently basing troops in Eastern Europe, as well as more frequent and larger-scale deployments, said Boris Zilberman, deputy director of congressional relations at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

The ultimate goal, he said, is to ensure that countries that have been allies remain on the side of the U.S.

At the same time, the U.S. must walk a fine line by increasing its presence enough to reassert its commitment to allies but not so much so as to give Mr. Putin political ammunition to escalate Russian aggression, Mr. Zilberman said.

“How much do we want to mirror image what they’re doing and give Putin a reason to keep doing it?” he said.

The U.S. is deploying small groups of service members to conduct drills in Baltic partner countries and has imposed sanctions on Russia, a policy that Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said is working.

“My observation is that this is having a real effect on the Russian economy and at some point the Russian people are going to ask themselves whether these kinds of adventures are worth the price,” Mr. Carter told reporters in a briefing Thursday.

 

 

 

 

Iran’s Nuke Program Clone in Oak Ridge

Posted on by

We know with near precision the current phase of all Iran’s nuclear program progress stands. How you ask? We have better scientists than Iran does and have been advancing these technologies for far longer. In fact, the United States has a clone operation located in Oak Ridge. This makes the P5+1 negotiations with John Kerry in the lead all the more…well stupid and frankly…reckless.

Primer:

ORNL plays an important role in national and global security by virtue of its expertise in advanced materials, nuclear science, supercomputing and other scientific specialties. Discovery and innovation in these areas are essential for protecting US citizens and advancing national and global security priorities. ORNL supports these missions by using its signature strengths to meet complex national security challenges in a number of areas.

Nuclear Nonproliferation – The laboratory’s expertise and experience covers the spectrum of nuclear nonproliferation work, from basic R&D to “boots-on-the-ground” implementation. This work ranges from uranium fuel cycle research to detection technologies and nuclear forensics. ORNL’s non-proliferation activities include developing, coordinating and helping to implement policies designed to reduce threats from a variety of sources, including nuclear weapons and “dirty bombs.”

National Defense – ORNL works with the US Department of Defense to respond to global challenges by developing and delivering advanced technologies in areas such as special materials; information management, synthesis and analysis; advanced sensor technology; energy efficiency technologies; early warning systems for chemical and biological threats; and unmanned air, ground and sea systems.

Then there is Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago where scientists have been at the forefront of nuclear reactor technology since the lab’s founding in 1946 as the home of the world’s first reactors. Groundbreaking research performed at the lab over the following decades led to the creation of the current generation of American nuclear reactors.

Checks and Balances for negotiations:

In Atomic Labs Across U.S., a Race to Stop Iran

WASHINGTON — When diplomats at the Iran talks in Switzerland pummeled Department of Energy scientists with difficult technical questions — like how to keep Iran’s nuclear plants open but ensure that the country was still a year away from building a bomb — the scientists at times turned to a secret replica of Iran’s nuclear facilities built deep in the forests of Tennessee.

There inside a gleaming plant at the Oak Ridge nuclear reservation were giant centrifuges — some surrendered more than a decade ago by Libya, others built since — that helped the scientists come up with what they told President Obama were the “best reasonable” estimates of Iran’s real-life ability to race for a weapon under different scenarios.

“We know a lot more about Iranian centrifuges than we would otherwise,” said a senior nuclear specialist familiar with the forested site and its covert operations.

The classified replica is but one part of an extensive crash program within the nation’s nine atomic laboratories — Oak Ridge, Los Alamos and Livermore among them — to block Iran’s nuclear progress. As the next round of talks begins on Wednesday in Vienna, the secretive effort remains a technological obsession for thousands of lab employees living the Manhattan Project in reverse. Instead of building a bomb, as their predecessors did in a race to end World War II, they are trying to stop one.

Ernest J. Moniz, the nuclear scientist and secretary of energy, who oversees the atomic labs, said in an interview that as the Obama administration sought technical solutions at the talks, diplomats would have been stumbling in the dark “if we didn’t have this capability nurtured over many decades.” Although Mr. Moniz would not discuss the secret plant at Oak Ridge, parts of which date to the American and Israeli program to launch cyberattacks on Iran’s Natanz enrichment plant, he said more generally that the atomic labs give the United States “the capacity to carry through” in one of the most complex arms-control efforts in history.

It has also changed the labs. In the bomb-making days, the scientists largely kept to their well-guarded posts. But anyone traveling to the Iran talks over the past year and a half in Vienna and Lausanne, Switzerland, saw the Energy Department experts working hard as the negotiations proceeded, and heading out to dinner after long days of talks.

It was over one of those dinners in Vienna last summer that several of the experts began wondering how they might find a face-saving way for Iran to convert its deep-underground enrichment plant at Fordo, a covert site exposed by the United States five years ago, into a research center. That would enable Iran to say the site was still open, and the United States could declare it was no longer a threat.

“The question was what kind of experiment you can do deep underground,” recalled a participant in the dinner. By the time coffee came around, the kernel of an idea had developed, and it subsequently became a central part of the understanding with Iran that Secretary of State John Kerry and Mr. Moniz announced this month. Under the preliminary accord, Fordo would become a research center, but not for any element that could potentially be used in nuclear weapons.

Sometimes, during negotiations in Switzerland, a member of the scientific team would dump a bowl of chocolates on the table and rearrange them to show the Iranians how a proposed site rearrangement might work. “It was a visual way,” an official said, “to get past the language barrier.”

But much of the work was done back at the labs, where specialists who had become accustomed to more 9-to-5 days found themselves on call seven days a week, around the clock, answering questions from negotiators and, at times, backing up the answers with calculations and computer modeling.

A senior official of the National Nuclear Security Administration, Kevin Veal, who has been along for every negotiating session, would send questions back to the laboratories, hoping to separate good ideas from bad. “It’s what our people love to do,” said Thom Mason, the director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “It can be very rewarding.”

Given the stakes in the sensitive negotiations, the labs would check and recheck one another, making sure the answers held up. The natural rivalries among the labs sometimes worked to the negotiators’ advantage: Los Alamos National Laboratory, in the mountains of New Mexico, the birthplace of the bomb, was happy to find flaws in calculations done elsewhere, and vice versa.

“A lot of what we did was behind the scenes,” said Charles F. McMillan, the Los Alamos director.

A prime target of the effort was redesigning Iran’s still-under-construction nuclear reactor at Arak, a sprawling complex ringed by antiaircraft guns. The question was how to prevent the reactor from producing weapons-grade plutonium, a main fuel of atom bombs. Iran insisted the reactor was being built to produce medical isotopes for disease therapy.

Last year, when the Iranians proposed a way to redesign Arak, the job of assessing the plans fell to Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago, one of the world’s most experienced developers of nuclear reactors.

The lab refined the Iranian idea, making sure Arak’s new fuel core would produce no pure bomb-grade plutonium. Eventually, the Iranians signed on. It is one of the few elements of the provisional nuclear deal between Iran, the United States and five other world powers that looks like a permanent fix because in order to produce weapons fuel, the whole reactor would have to undergo an obvious overhaul.

In lauding the deal announced early this month, Mr. Moniz put the redesign of Arak at the top of the achievements list, saying it “shuts down the plutonium pathway.”

At other times, scientists were on tight deadlines to come up with solutions.

Late last year, a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California was traveling by train to visit his children when a call came in that his team had to immediately reassess Natanz, Iran’s main enrichment plant. There in a vast underground bunker mazes of centrifuges spin around the clock to purify uranium, another bomb fuel.

The question was whether a proposed design of Natanz that allowed more than 6,000 centrifuges to spin would still accomplish the administration’s goal of keeping Iran at least a year away from acquiring enough enriched uranium to make a bomb. The answer was yes.

William H. Goldstein, the director of the Livermore lab, said the required turnaround for answers “was hours in some cases.”

Fordo, the most troubling of Iran’s many nuclear sites, was another major challenge. The enrichment complex there is buried so far under a mountain that Israel fears it could not wipe out the site and its nearly 3,000 centrifuges with airstrikes. The United States has only one bunker-busting weapon that might accomplish the job.

Over the dinner last summer in Vienna, the scientists and American negotiators discussed how to turn the mountain fortress into a peaceful research center.

The answer lay in the deep-underground nature of the site, which made it excellent for an observatory to track invisible rays from cosmic explosions, opening a new window onto the universe. (The rocky strata of the site would filter out extraneous signals.) Another idea was to use the installed centrifuges for purifying rare forms of elements used in medicine rather than for uranium.

In early March, Oak Ridge in Tennessee got a call from the negotiators. They needed to learn more about the idea of purifying elements, to make sure that it was possible and that the equipment left in the mountain could not be easily turned to producing nuclear fuel.

An Oak Ridge team went into action, working Friday night into Saturday. That afternoon, Mr. Mason, the Oak Ridge director, was able to send a report to Washington, which was then delivered to Mr. Moniz.

“The answer was ‘yes,’ ” Mr. Mason said. “It was feasible.”

In the interview, Mr. Moniz said he spoke to his lab directors last week and asked them to think hard about other uses for the Fordo complex, an issue that will be on the table when negotiators resume their talks this week.

The world of science, Mr. Moniz said, has lots of peaceful projects that would help move the mountainous fortress off the pathway to atomic bombs.

“We’re going to be thinking,” he said, “about other directions.” The question is whether, in the last weeks of the negotiations, the Iranians will go along.

Did Susan Rice Leak Classified Info on Purpose?

Posted on by

There was a profound moment when the Prime Minister of Israel gave a presentation at the United Nations on Iran’s readiness of their break-out period on their nuclear weapon using a cartoon as a prop. The Obama administration later used it as satire against Netanyahu.

Capture

Seems, a year or so later, the White House is agreeing….pigs fly…..

Did Susan Rice Disclose Classified Info on Iran?

Bloomberg’s Eli Lake reports Tuesday that the Obama administration kept secret until the beginning of April Iran’s two to three month breakout time for a nuclear weapon, saying “the administration only declassified this estimate at the beginning of the month, just in time for the White House to make the case for its Iran deal to Congress and the public.”

Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, speaking to reporters on Monday, said that the administration has held this assessment for “quite some time.” Lake says that Brian Hale, a spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, confirmed Monday “that the two-to-three-month estimate for fissile material was declassified on April 1.”

However, at least one member of the administration publicly spoke about the two-to-three-month breakout time frame prior to April. On March 2, 2015, National Security Advisor Susan Rice addressed the annual AIPAC meeting and said the following [emphasis added]:

This is my third point—a good deal is one that would verifiably cut off every pathway for Iran to produce enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon.  Every single one.

Any deal must prevent Iran from developing weapons-grade plutonium at Arak, or anywhere else.

Any deal must prevent Iran from enriching uranium at its nuclear facility at Fordow—a site we uncovered buried deep underground and revealed to the world in 2009.

Any deal must increase the time it takes Iran to reach breakout capacity—the time it would take to produce a single bomb’s worth of weapons-grade uranium.  Today, experts suggest Iran’s breakout window is just two to three months.  We seek to extend that to at least one year.

Rice’s disclosure suggests that either DNI spokesman Brian Hale is incorrect in his assertion that the assessment was declassified on April 1, or Rice revealed classified information.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Rice’s March disclosure.

From HotAir:

Only a few short weeks later, that framework nuclear deal appears increasingly dubious. Iran has demanded that it sunset after only five rather than ten years. The Islamic Republic also wants to operate twice the number of centrifuges agreed to in Switzerland. The administration insists that it will provide sanctions relief to Iran in stages, but Tehran contends that it will have total relief right up front. According to The Wall Street Journal, the mullahs learned on Friday that they will receive billions in unfrozen funds once a deal is signed even as American and Iranian warships engage in a tense standoff off the coast of Yemen.

Few believe that the complex international sanctions regime in place today, a web of commitments that took years to assemble, could “snap back” in the event that Iran failed to live up to its end of the deal. “[O]nly a credulous sixth-grader could imagine that in the event that there is some evidence of Iranian cheating (and the evidence inevitably will be murky, incomplete, and subject to debate) that countries such as France and Germany, which are eager to do business with Tehran, much less countries such as China and Russia, which are not only cozy with Tehran but hostile to Western interests in general, will agree to reimpose sanctions,” Commentary Magazine’s Max Boot observed.

While Netanyahu might not have accurately assessed Iran’s nuclear capabilities in 2012, he was apparently correct when he insisted earlier this month that “Iran’s breakout time from start of deal will be near zero.” Today, Americans are learning that the administration knew Netanyahu was telling the truth about Iranian breakout times even as it was mocking him before an audience of the president’s sycophantic and naïve Twitter fans. As The Daily Beat’s Eli Lake wrote on Tuesday, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz and a spokesman with the Director of National Intelligence’s office both confirmed that Iran could have the materials necessary to construct a fissionable device before the autumn.

“Here is the puzzling thing,” Lake wrote, “When Obama began his second term in 2013, he sang a different tune.”

He emphasized that Iran was more than a year away from a nuclear bomb, without mentioning that his intelligence community believed it was only two to three months away from making enough fuel for one, long considered the most challenging task in building a weapon. Today Obama emphasizes that Iran is only two to three months away from acquiring enough fuel for a bomb, creating a sense of urgency for his Iran agreement.

Back in 2013, when Congress was weighing new sanctions on Iran and Obama was pushing for more diplomacy, his interest was in tamping down that sense of urgency. On the eve of a visit to Israel, Obama told Israel’s Channel Two, “Right now, we think it would take over a year or so for Iran to actually develop a nuclear weapon, but obviously we don’t want to cut it too close.”

On Oct. 5 of that year, Obama contrasted the U.S. view of an Iranian breakout with that of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who at the time said Iran was only six months away from nuclear capability. Obama told the Associated Press, “Our assessment continues to be a year or more away. And in fact, actually, our estimate is probably more conservative than the estimates of Israeli intelligence services.”

So, why mislead as this White House has misled when it invites an embarrassing rebuke like this? Because the lie is heard by all the right audiences, whereas the correction will languish in the obscure corners of the country where honesty remains a virtue.

Despite its mounting failures, the administration maintains its legitimacy by providing the smug and complacent reasons that justify their self-approbation. For many, the facts are fungible. So long as they believe in their hearts the president is brighter and more capable than his political opponents, no amount of demonstrable mendacity from the White House could shatter that belief. Even amid increasing evidence that this article of faith might not be true, the faithful will accept anything – even hastily constructed Twitter memes – so long as it affirms their creed.

“The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant,” Ronald Reagan said in a pivotal 1964 speech, “it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.” And this White House hopes to keep it that way.

 

There is Spying, Espionage and Stupidity

Posted on by

The Virginia-based cyber security firm Mandiant recently released a report detailing one source of persistent cyber attacks, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. Mandiant estimates that since 2006, a single Chinese army cyberattack unit has compromised “141 companies spanning 20 major industries, from information technology and telecommunications to aerospace and energy,” using a “well-defined attack methodology, honed over years and designed to steal large volumes of valuable intellectual property.”

Mandiant explains that once these hackers have infiltrated an organization’s system, they “periodically revisit the victim’s network … and steal broad categories of intellectual property, including technology blueprints, proprietary manufacturing processes, test results, business plans, pricing documents, partnership agreements, and emails and contact lists”. On average, access to a victimized network is maintained for nearly a year.

Now for the Chinese human operatives….

State Dept. contractor allegedly paid by Chinese agent to spy on Americans – yet no charges filed 

Newly unsealed court documents obtained by Fox News show a State Department contractor allegedly was paid thousands by an individual thought to be a Chinese agent in exchange for information on Americans — but despite an FBI probe, the Justice Department declined to prosecute.

A November 2014 FBI affidavit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, shows the bureau investigated the contractor for her admitted contact with individuals she believed to be Chinese intelligence officers.

The affidavit from agent Timothy S. Pappa states the translator, Xiaoming Gao, was paid “thousands of dollars to provide information on U.S. persons and a U.S. government employee.”

According to the documents, she admitted these meetings took place in hotel rooms in China for years, where she reported on her “social contacts” in the U.S. to an individual who went by the name of “Teacher Zhao.”

The detailed affidavit even goes on to say the translator briefly lived, “for free,” with a State Department employee — who held a top-secret clearance and designed high-security embassies, including the U.S. compound in Islamabad, Pakistan.

The State Department employee, who was not named, initially told the FBI he didn’t discuss his job with Gao, but later changed his statement.

According to the documents, Gao also told the FBI — during interviews in 2013 — that she once told “Teacher Zhao” about the travel plans of an American and ethnic Tibetan. This person told the FBI he ended up being interrogated by Chinese intelligence officers during a trip to Tibet, and a member of his family was imprisoned.

Yet the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D.C., which oversaw the case, recently declined to prosecute, allowing the documents to be unsealed. The office offered no further comment. The FBI also is saying nothing beyond the court documents that were filed to search a storage unit in suburban Washington, D.C.

On its face, a former senior Justice Department official said the decision not to prosecute is perplexing, because the case was unlikely to reveal investigative sources and methods.

“It’s not clear to me, based on the court files that were unsealed, how a prosecution of this person could possibly have compromised U.S. intelligence gathering,” Thomas Dupree, former deputy assistant attorney general under the George W. Bush administration, told Fox News. “If it jeopardizes or threatens to disrupt relations with another country, so be it. That you have to draw the line somewhere, and that we need to send a message that this sort of conduct and activity simply will not be tolerated.”

The State Department confirmed Xiaoming Gao worked for the Office of Language Services over a four-year period beginning in June 2010. This would have covered the tenures of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and sitting Secretary John Kerry.

“She was employed as a contract interpreter until February 2014, is not employed here anymore. And so any additional questions on this, I’d refer you to the FBI,” spokeswoman Marie Harf said.

When told the FBI was referring Fox News’ questions back to State, Harf responded: “I’m referring you back to them.”

The documents do not fully explain Gao’s side of the story.

Emails and phone calls to the consulting firm, which the translator listed on the web as her employer, have gone unanswered. Fox News extended an invitation to discuss the allegations. No attorney of record was filed with the court.

 

So Goes Greece, Goes the European Union?

Posted on by

Stunned Greeks React To Initial Capital Controls And The “Decree To Confiscate Reserves”, And They Are Not Happy

Earlier today, following weeks of speculation, Greece finally launched the first shot across the bow of capital controls, when it decreed that due to an “extremely urgent and unforeseen need” (ironically the need was quite foreseen since about 2010, but that is a different story), it would be “obliged” to transfer – as in confiscate – “idle cash reserves” located across the country’s local governments (i.e., various cities and municipalities) to the Greek central bank.

Several hours later the decree which was posted in the government gazette has finally percolated among the population, and the response to what even ordinary Greeks realize is now the endgame, is less than exuberant.

Bloomberg reports, that “as Greece struggles to find cash to stay afloat, local authorities say they oppose a government decision to use their reserves for short-term financing.”

“The government’s decision to seize our reserves not only raises legal and constitutional issues, but also a moral one,” said George Papanikolaou, mayor of Glyfada, the third-largest municipality in the metropolitan region of Attica after Athens and Piraeus. “We have a responsibility to serve our citizens,” Papanikolaou said by phone on Monday. Glyfada has about 16 million euros in cash reserves, he said.

George is unhappy because as recently as tomorrow, he will find there is precisely zero euros in his public bank account, as all the money has now been forcibly sequestered by the government in order to repay future Troika, pardon, IMF obligations.

Sadly for Greece, this is the only option left as the money has now fully run out: Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras ordered local governments and central government entities to move their cash balances to the central bank for investment in short-term state debt.

From Bloomberg:

The decree to confiscate reserves held in commercial banks and transfer them to the Bank of Greece could raise as much as 2 billion euros ($2.15 billion), according to two people familiar with the decision. The money is needed to pay salaries and pensions at the end of the month, the people said.

 

“It is a politically and institutionally unacceptable decision,” Giorgos Patoulis, mayor of the city of Marousi and president of the Central Union of Municipalities and Communities of Greece, said in a statement on Monday.“No government to date has dared to touch the money of municipalities.”

It took the radical leftist one all of 2 months since coming to power.

And the punchline is that the use of confiscated proceeds is unclear: the government says it is to pay pensions and wages, but recall that the same government recently confiscated pensions to repay the IMF, so according to the chain of logic, the government first raided pensions, and now municipalities, just to repay the dreaded Troika.

The Athens city council and the union of municipalities and communities in Greece will convene tomorrow to debate the order, a press officer of the mayor’s office said.

And one everyone realizes what just happened, expect the riot cam and the Greek Pay-Per-Riot channel, which has been on hiatus since the summer of 2012, to be fully reactivated.