Category Archives: The Denise Simon Experience

Hey Obama Hey Kerry, It’s Iran Stupid

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Rights group: Shiite militias behind Iraq revenge attack

SandS: BAGHDAD — Human Rights Watch said Sunday that powerful Iraqi Shiite militias were behind revenge attacks against Sunnis earlier this month that erupted after the Islamic State group bombed a cafe frequented by militiamen.

The New York-based rights group issued a report saying the Badr Brigades and Asaib Ahl al-Haq, two Iran-backed militias, carried out the Jan. 11 retaliation attacks in the town of Muqdadiyah, northeast of Baghdad in the mixed Diyala province. The attacks came after a double suicide bombing at the cafe killed at least 32 people.

Citing unnamed residents, HRW said the militiamen killed at least a dozen people and demolished Sunni mosques, homes and shops. It described the attacks as “heinous” and called for the prosecution of those responsible.

Spokesmen for the militias, who have denied previous accusations of wrongdoing, could not immediately be reached.

Shiite militias led the fight against IS in Diyala and took over much of the province’s security after it was declared liberated in early 2015. Many Iraqis who initially fled IS say security concerns continue to prevent them from returning home. Sunnis make up the vast majority of those displaced by the fighting in Iraq.

The government said Sunday it needs $1.6 billion to respond to the nationwide humanitarian crisis. It said more than 3 million people have been forced from their homes by violence since IS overran the country’s second largest city, Mosul, and large swaths of the north and west in the summer of 2014.

Iraq is also facing a severe financial crisis exacerbated by plunging oil prices. Oil revenue makes up nearly 95 percent of the national budget.

“What (the Iraqi government is) really saying is our back is against the wall, we need help,” said Lise Grande, the U.N.’s deputy envoy to Iraq.

“We’re fighting ISIL on behalf of the international community, but we just don’t have the resources to look after our own people as well and we need international assistance,” she said, using an acronym for IS.

Even before the IS onslaught and the plunge in oil prices, Iraqi authorities struggled to maintain aging infrastructure and provide basic services like electricity. Earlier this month, Iraq was ranked one of the 10 most corrupt countries in the world, according to Transparency International, an international monitoring group.

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Going back to 2015, the White House has been in denial but that is due likely to the Iran P5+1 nuclear talks. Meanwhile, people are dying as John Kerry and Barack Obama could care less. A chilling tale from first hand experience.

Iran’s Shiite Militias Are Running Amok in Iraq

And the White House is still pretending it hasn’t unleashed demons on the country it once could have saved.

FPMagazine: Countless memories haunt me after a decade of service in Iraq. Gripping the hands of an assassin-felled member of the provisional government as the life slipped out of her body in 2003; watching al Qaeda’s beheadings of American hostages in 2004; seeing photos of young Sunni prisoners raped and tortured by Iran-backed Shiite militias serving within the Iraqi police in 2005; and sitting helplessly at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad as news came in of al Qaeda’s 2006 bombing of al-Askari Mosque, one of the holiest sites for Shiite Islam, ushering in the civil war.

But after countless visits to Arlington National Cemetery and Walter Reed Medical Center, nothing upsets me more than the fact that thousands of American soldiers, diplomats, intelligence officers, and contractors are now enabling and emboldening a government in Baghdad that is simply beyond redemption.

It took the fall of Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, for Western elites to finally begin to understand what many of us saw firsthand in the years since 2003:

The Iraqi government is hopelessly sectarian, corrupt, and generally unfit to govern what could be one of the world’s most prosperous nations.

The Iraqi government is hopelessly sectarian, corrupt, and generally unfit to govern what could be one of the world’s most prosperous nations. Washington’s response to the Islamic State’s (IS) advance, however, has been disgraceful: The United States is now acting as the air force, the armory, and the diplomatic cover for Iraqi militias that are committing some of the worst human rights abuses on the planet. These are “allies” that are actually beholden to our strategic foe, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and which often resort to the same vile tactics as the Islamic State itself.

The dictatorship of Saddam Hussein was branded the “Republic of Fear” due to its wanton disregard for the sanctity of human life. Saddam’s abuses were legendary: The invasion of Iran in 1980, where his forces employed chemical and biological weapons; the genocide of more than 100,000 Kurds during the Anfal campaign; the invasion of Kuwait in 1990; and 1991’s massacre of Shiites in Karbala are only a few examples of his gruesome handiwork.

Post-2003 Iraq was supposed to be different. Throughout the past decade, however, countless NGOs and international news organizations have borne witness to the accelerating pace of abuses. The Republic of Fear is being reborn.

Perhaps the most vivid and disturbing evidence that the Iraqi government simply does not share America’s core values emerged on Feb. 6. In a grainy video posted on YouTube, a three-minute horror show plays out on the front lines somewhere in Iraq. Iraqi military officers and presumably Shiite militiamen — dressed in black, skull-adorned “Sons of Anarchy” shirts — crowd an ambulance emblazoned with the Iraqi state seal. Inside, a blindfolded and hog-tied man in military fatigues pleads for mercy as the Iraqi vigilantes beat him over the head, taunting him with expletives.

“We will f— your sisters,” they shout.

“No, God,” the prisoner weeps.

One of the vigilantes picks up a metal toolbox and slams it down on the crying man, as others enter the ambulance to beat and kick the helpless prisoner. A minute into the video, the man is dragged out of the ambulance and onto the ground, still blindfolded, arms bound behind his back. A dozen fighters surround him and begin kicking him until he lies motionless, blood dripping from his head. With some yelling “enough,” a man in camouflaged trousers walks up to the prisoner and beats him over the head repeatedly with a sandal, a gesture of monumental insult. Another man, also in camouflaged trousers, leaps up twice and lands with his full weight on the detainee’s skull. A third man, in full military uniform, kicks and punches the hemorrhaging man, whose blood spills across the sand below.

In the final horrific minute, the vigilantes carry the man a few feet away and drop him to the ground. Several men armed with U.S.-supplied M4 rifles then empty several magazines — perhaps more than 100 rounds — into the man.

The video concludes with one man chillingly yelling, “Enough! What’s wrong with you?”

Any viewer capable of understanding the dialogue overlaying the savage imagery is left in utter shock. But that emotion should soon be replaced by rage, as the realization sets in that countless American lives, families, and taxpayer dollars were sacrificed — and are being risked today — to facilitate such brazen cruelty.

Twitter is abuzz with speculation about the victim’s identity. A Kurdish Peshmerga fighter? An Islamic State spy? Regardless, one thing is clear: These were 196 vivid seconds of a lynching, a field execution, an Iraqi government and Shiite militia-orchestrated war crime broadcast around the world. And the sad reality is that this killing was facilitated by the White House.

Since assuming office in 2009, President Barack Obama and his national security team have turned a blind eye toward the growing crisis in Iraq. They seem to have simply hoped that Bush’s “dumb war,” as Obama once described it, would not distract them from a domestic-driven agenda. Even as the cancer at the heart of the Iraqi government metastasized, senior American officials ignored the countless classified and open sources implicating the Iraqi government in theft, torture, rape, and ethnic cleansing — insisting that the country remained on the right track.

In 2010, Vice President Joe Biden confidently insisted that Iraq “is going to be one of the great achievements of this administration,” lauding Iraqis for “us[ing] the political process, rather than guns, to settle their differences.”

“At every significant step along the way [of Obama’s Iraq policy], many predicted that the violence would return and Iraq would slide back toward sectarian war,” then White House aide and now Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in 2012. “Those predictions proved wrong.”

In its eagerness to withdraw from Iraq, the Obama administration also undermined the country’s central democratic institutions. After preaching the virtues of democracy around the world, Obama chose to bypass the secular, Western-leaning winner of Iraq’s 2010 parliamentary elections, Ayad Allawi, in favor of the runner-up, Nouri al-Maliki. Ignoring Maliki’s sectarian and autocratic tendencies, the White House then repeatedly lobbied Congress to expedite sales of advanced American military equipment, including F-16 fighter jets, AH-64 Apache attack helicopters, and Hellfire missiles — even as the Iranian-allied strongman unleashed a reign of terror and purged his political enemies with less sophisticated American weapons systems.

Paradoxically, after Maliki actually won the 2014 parliamentary election — despite reigniting a Sunni insurgency and a broader civil war — the White House finally pivoted away from him. Washington’s preferred choice this time was Haider al-Abadi, a genuinely moderate and unifying member of the Dawa Islamic Party, which Maliki continues to formally lead.

Nevertheless, the precedent set twice by Obama — that the United States does not actually respect the intent of Iraq’s Constitution nor Iraqi elections results — will haunt the United States and Iraq alike for decades to come.

Nevertheless, the precedent set twice by Obama — that the United States does not actually respect the intent of Iraq’s Constitution nor Iraqi elections results — will haunt the United States and Iraq alike for decades to come.

The administration’s cumulative mistakes have played a decisive role in advancing Iraq’s implosion, the IS’s rise, and Iran’s regional hegemony. From the time that Obama took office until today, violence in Iraq has spiked nearly fourfold from the post-surge lows in 2009 — reaching levels not seen since the height of the civil war in 2006 and 2007. The Islamic State has conquered more than a third of the country while the Iraqi military imploded, despite a $25 billion investment in it by American taxpayers.

The White House responded by dispatching thousands of American military, diplomatic, and intelligence personnel to Iraq in a final bid to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. But this desperate, ill-conceived effort will inevitably fail because the administration is employing the chainsaws of Iraq’s Iranian-backed Shiite militias rather than the scalpels of American special operations forces in its ground war against IS.

When it became clear that the Islamic State posed an existential threat to Iraq’s Shiite-dominated government, the country’s top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, resorted to a measure not taken in a century: He issued a religious edict calling for all able-bodied men to take up arms to defend the state. Within months, hundreds of thousands of young Shiites responded to the call — and today, virtually all of them have been absorbed into Iranian-dominated militias, whose fundamental identity is built around a sectarian narrative rather than loyalty to the state. Recently, one militia commander estimated their total strength at 800,000 men, dwarfing the official Iraqi Security Forces.

Meanwhile, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force, Iran’s special forces unit devoted to operations outside the Islamic Republic’s borders, has filled the void left by Obama’s military and diplomatic disengagement from Iraq. Quds Force commander Gen. Qassem Suleimani has personally led operations from the front lines, buttressing decades-old alliances while at the same time cultivating new proxies.

The staunchly pro-Iranian Badr Organization commander Hadi al-Ameri — who was welcomed in the Oval Office by Obama in 2011, and is known for favoring power drills to murder his victims — has been tasked with leading all Iraqi efforts to secure and pacify the strategically important province of Diyala. Meanwhile, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the alleged mastermind behind the bombing of the U.S. and French embassies in Kuwait in the 1980s, was given command of the Kataib Hezbollah (KH) militia, an Iranian-sponsored group responsible for some of the most lethal attacks against U.S. and coalition forces throughout the war. Muhandis and KH pose such a grave risk to Iraqi stability and American interests that they were designated as terrorists by the U.S. Treasury soon after Obama took office in 2009. Qais al-Khazali, the commander of the Iranian-sponsored Asaib Ahl al-Haq (AAH) militia, which kidnapped and killed five American soldiers at Iran’s behest in the holy city of Karbala in 2007, proudly shared his recent photo with Suleimani via social media.

This constellation of Iranian-backed militias is eclipsing official Iraqi institutions, and sowing the seeds of conflict for decades to come. During a January 2015 press conference celebrating the “liberation” of Iraq’s Diyala province, Ameri stood in front of Iraqi military officers and militia fighters, thanking the Badr Organization and AAH for their efforts — without once mentioning Prime Minister Abadi or the international coalition. One of Ameri’s Badr commanders then told the New York Times that Sunni tribes had backed IS, and pledged that “their punishment will be more severe than [IS’s],” guaranteeing the continuation of vigilante justice and sectarian bloodletting.

These militia leaders are not only operating outside the Iraqi government’s control; many key figures are deeply embedded within Baghdad’s power structure. Hakim al-Zamili, an Iranian-backed militia commander notorious for ethnically cleansing Baghdad of its Sunni inhabitants while serving as Maliki’s deputy health minister, is now chairman of the Iraqi Parliament’s security and defense committee. Ahmad Chalabi, the convicted embezzler allegedly responsible for conspiring to feed false intelligence to Western governments ahead of the Iraq invasion, is now chairman of the Iraqi Parliament’s finance committee. Mohammed Ghabban, a top deputy to Ameri in the Badr Organization, is now interior minister, ostensibly Iraq’s top law enforcement officer. And Mohammed al-Bayati, another Badr leader, serves as Iraq’s human rights minister, with the sacred responsibly of investigating and curtailing the abuses of Iraqi security personnel.

It would be laughable, if it were not so serious. These are the men benefitting today from billions of dollars of American assistance to Iraq.

These Shiite militias’ conquests are being aided by millions of dollars in advanced American military hardware. Countless pictures and videos have emerged featuring Iranian-backed Iraqi militias parading with M1A1 tanks, M1113 armored personnel carriers, M16 and M4 rifles, Humvees, and MRAPs. At times, the militiamen launch into sectarian chants, and religious flags adorn other pictures — some have even taken to plastering their vehicles with photos of former Iranian Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini. These actions directly fuel the regional perception that the conflicts in Syria and Iraq have metastasized into a holy war, pitting Islam’s billion-plus Sunnis against the minority Shiites — a worldview directly responsible for swelling both the Islamic State and the militias’ ranks.

After years of gross neglect, Obama, Abadi, and the broader international community now face the seemingly impossible task of pacifying and reuniting Iraq. The nation is not only a failed state; it is a shattered one:

Decades of misrule, corruption, and genocide at the hands of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party and Nouri al-Maliki’s Dawa Party have totally destroyed the national identity

Decades of misrule, corruption, and genocide at the hands of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party and Nouri al-Maliki’s Dawa Party have totally destroyed the national identity, leaving only tribal, ethnic, and religious affiliations that preceded the founding of the modern Iraqi state in 1932.

It is high time that U.S. officials recognize the Iranian-backed Shiite militias for what they are: a supercharged, multi-headed hydra that represents a clear and present danger to Syria, Iraq, the broader Middle East, and thus to fundamental American national security interests. Although these events occurred less than a decade ago, many in Washington seem to have forgotten that even with 150,000 U.S. troops still in Iraq, these militias operated across Baghdad and southern Iraq much like IS does today: through a deliberate campaign of kidnapping, torture, extortion, and murder that would make Tony Soprano blush.

While pockets of success exist — namely in Iraqi Kurdistan and the holy city of Najaf — by almost any measure, Iraq as a whole today has regressed to a state far worse than it was a decade ago.

The impunity with which the Shiite militias operate is only growing. According to a senior U.S. official with an intimate understanding of the matter, the American Consulate General in Basra recently attempted to ship approximately a dozen used, armored SUVs back to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad for export and disposal, per State Department regulations. En route, the vehicles — still usable, and collectively worth millions of dollars when new — were mysteriously stolen. When senior U.S. diplomats reported the theft to the Basra governor and top security commanders, the locals promised an investigation, but reported little success.

Sometime later, during a routine trip across town, a U.S. security officer spotted one of the vehicles in front of a local garage. Bewildered and shaking his head, the U.S. official told me the Iraqi authorities insisted they could take no action, since that was a garage belonging to Asaib Ahl al-Haq — the very group that had masqueraded as an American diplomatic convoy to kidnap and kill five American soldiers in Karbala in 2007.

It is no wonder, then, that the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, recently insisted to Bloomberg’s Eli Lake that the militias “represent enemies of a stable, secure, and inclusive Iraq,” and that once the IS threat is defeated, “they will very likely turn on us.”

There is no reason to believe that the militias will disarm and disband after IS’s defeat. Indeed, with the central government weaker than ever, trillions of dollars of Iraqi oil wealth up for grabs, and the U.S. military no longer deployed in large numbers to constrain them, the militias have more incentive than ever to stay in business. And let’s not forget that it is in Iran’s strategic interest to use these militias to consolidate its gains over Iraq and the Levant, and to advance its ambitions for regional hegemony, which Iranian commanders are now publicly flaunting.

Iraq is the new, much larger, much wealthier Lebanon, and its battle-hardened militias are the new, much larger, much wealthier Hezbollah. They will haunt the world for decades to come on a scale exponentially more lethal and damaging than Lebanese Hezbollah — whose operations already span six continents, and whose operatives grace the FBI and CIA’s most wanted lists.

The day after the Islamic State is expelled from Iraq is the day Iraq’s next existential struggle for survival will begin.

The day after the Islamic State is expelled from Iraq is the day Iraq’s next existential struggle for survival will begin. Given the militias’ demonstrated sadistic penchant for ethnic cleansing and summary executions, including their joy at beheading enemies — the same savage tactics used by IS — Iraq is destined for endless conflict for the foreseeable future.

It is time to admit that the modern Iraqi state as we have known it is living on borrowed time. Obama’s desperate and delusional strategy to defeat IS — which commits to investing only a fraction of the time and resources former President George W. Bush squandered trying to build viable Iraqi security forces — simply will not work, because we do not have a critical mass of Iraqi political leaders willing to put the country’s interests before their sect, tribe, party, or creed. The thousands of coalition airstrikes will also not succeed, absent a broader political framework under which all Iraqis can peacefully share power and be treated equitably by their government.

In short, as with Ngo Dinh Diem’s government in South Vietnam, no amount of American covert action, carpet bombing, or diplomacy can ever hope to compensate for a fundamentally inept, corrupt, and illegitimate local partner. Despite Washington’s delusions and countless Americans’ sacrifices, Saigon was eventually overrun by Chinese-backed communists — just as Baghdad has already been overrun by Iranian-backed Shiite militias advancing Islamic rule.

Prime Minister Abadi and senior members of his cabinet, including Finance Minister Hoshyar Zebari and Oil Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi, genuinely represent the finest of Iraq’s technocratic, nationalist political elite. However, they simply do not have the critical mass to overcome the hard-liners within their own government, let alone the Iranians. The White House’s myopia, along with Obama’s empowerment of one strategic enemy, the Iranian-commanded militias, to defeat another strategic threat, IS, is precisely why the dream of a stable, peaceful, prosperous, and pluralistic Iraq increasingly seems doomed. In short, Obama’s Iraq strategy is not only morally bankrupt, but operationally bankrupt as well.

Congressional leaders and the White House must stop treating Iraq and other national security matters as arenas for ideological skirmishes. Instead, they must craft a comprehensive Middle East strategy to defend our regional allies and aggressively confront both radical Sunni and Shiite militants, and Iran’s malign regional ambitions. By finally admitting that Baghdad is now firmly entrenched in Iran’s orbit — and is ideologically and operationally an extension of Tehran — Washington can finally begin to develop plans for how to roll back the new Republic of Fear.

 


Where Have all the Refugee Children Gone

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Government does not do anything well, that includes Europe as well as America. In Italy there is the mafia, in the United States there is the mafia…not in the historical sense but quite the same disgusting operational crimes.

Both nations lie, make terrifying decisions and people suffer.

10,000 refugee children are missing, says Europol

It’s another tragic aspect of the migrants’ crisis: at least 10,000 unaccompanied child refugees have disappeared over the past two years after arriving in Europe, according to the EU’s criminal intelligence agency.

Many of these children are feared to have fallen into the hands of criminal groups.

In an interview with the Observer, the sister publication of the Guardian, Europol’s chief of staff, Brian Donald, said half of the missing children disappeared in Italy.

According to the agency, minors accounted for 27 percent of the refugees who arrived in Europe last year.

Europol warns that unaccompanied children are especially vulnerable to traffickers who exploit them for sex work and slavery.

Obama administration placed children with human traffickers, report says 

The Obama administration failed to protect thousands of Central American children who have flooded across the U.S. border since 2011, leaving them vulnerable to traffickers and to abuses at the hands of government-approved caretakers, a Senate investigation has found.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement, an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services, failed to do proper background checks of adults who claimed the children, allowed sponsors to take custody of multiple unrelated children, and regularly placed children in homes without visiting the locations, according to a 56-page investigative report released Thursday.

And once the children left federally funded shelters, the report said, the agency permitted their adult sponsors to prevent caseworkers from providing them post-release services.

Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) initiated the six-month investigation after several Guatemalan teens were found in a dilapidated trailer park near Marion, Ohio, where they were being held captive by traffickers and forced to work at a local egg farm. The boys were among more than 125,000 unaccompanied minors who have surged into the United States since 2011, fleeing violence and unrest in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.


“It is intolerable that human trafficking — modern-day slavery — could occur in our own backyard,” Portman said in a written statement. “What makes the Marion cases even more alarming is that a U.S. government agency was responsible for delivering some of the victims into the hands of their abusers.”

The report concluded that administration “policies and procedures were inadequate to protect the children in the agency’s care.”

HHS spokesman Mark Weber said in a statement that the agency would “review the committee’s findings carefully and continue to work to ensure the best care for the children we serve.”

The report was released ahead of a hearing Thursday before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which Portman co-chairs with Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.). It detailed nearly 30 cases where unaccompanied children had been trafficked after federal officials released them to sponsors or where there were “serious trafficking indicators.”
“HHS places children with individuals about whom it knows relatively little and without verifying the limited information provided by sponsors about their alleged relationship with the child,” the report said.

For example, one Guatemalan boy planned to live with his uncle in Virginia. But when the uncle refused to take the boy, he ended up with another sponsor, who forced him to work nearly 12 hours a day to repay a $6,500 smuggling debt, which the sponsor later increased to $10,900, the report said.

A boy from El Salvador was released to his father even though he told a caseworker that his father had a history of beating him, including hitting him with an electrical cord. In September, the boy alerted authorities that his father was forcing him to work for little or no pay, the report said; a post-release service worker later found the boy was being kept in a basement and given little food.

The Senate investigation began in July after federal prosecutors indicted six people in connection with the Marion labor-trafficking scheme, which involved at least eight minors and two adults from the Huehuetenango region of Guatemala.

One defendant, Aroldo Castillo-Serrano, 33, used associates to file false applications with the government agency tasked with caring for the children, and bring them to Ohio, where he kept them in squalid conditions in a trailer park and forced them to work 12-hour days, at least six days a week, for little pay. Castillo-Serrano has pleaded guilty to labor-trafficking charges and awaits sentencing in the Northern District of Ohio in Toledo.

The FBI raided the trailer park in December 2014, rescuing the boys, but the Senate investigation says federal officials could have discovered the scheme far sooner.

In August 2014, a child-welfare caseworker attempted to visit one of the children, who had been approved for post-release services because of reported mental-health problems, according to the report.

The caseworker went to the address listed for the child, but the person who answered the door said the child didn’t live there, the report added. When the caseworker finally found the child’s sponsor, the sponsor blocked the caseworker from talking to the child.
Instead of investigating further, the caseworker closed the child’s case file, the report said, citing “ORR policy which states that the Post Release Services are voluntary and sponsor refused services.”

That child was found months later, living 50 miles away from the sponsor’s home and working at the egg farm, according to the report. The child’s sponsor was later indicted.

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EU officials find that most of the ‘refugees’ are not refugees. What a mess

Even EU officials are now finally admitting that a lot – or, rather, most – of the people we have been calling ‘refugees’ are not refugees. They are economic migrants with no more right to be called European citizens than anybody else in the world. Even Frans Timmermans, Vice President of the European Commission, made this point this week. In his accounting, at least 60pc of the people who are here are economic migrants who should not be here –  are from North African states such as Morocco and Tunisia. As he told Dutch television:-

“These are people that you can assume have no reason to apply for refugee status.”
Swedish officials are coming to a similar conclusion, saying that as many as 80,000 of the mainly young men who have gone to Sweden as ‘refugees’ in the past year alone are no such thing.

Now there are the usual attempts to crowd-please from certain politicians and officials who are talking about how they might have to deport these people. But they won’t, will they? Does anybody honestly believe that the Swedish authorities are currently preparing to deport 80,000 fake asylum seekers from their country?

Or let us assume that the 60pc figure is correct for Germany and that 60pc of the people who have arrived in Germany in the past year alone should not be there. Given that it has taken in more than a million people in the last twelve months, is Germany now going to deport as many as three quarters of a million fake asylum seekers from its territory? Of course not. They will not even attempt it. Everybody in Europe knows that. And everybody following events and weighing up their chances from outside Europe knows that.

Everybody on earth now knows that Europe’s present leaders lack either the will or the means to enforce their own laws. So more people will come next year, and the year after that and the year after that. All in the knowledge that once you’re in, you’re in. If the facts were otherwise then Sweden, Germany and other countries across the continent would currently be preparing to ship hundreds of thousands of people out of Europe and back to their countries of origin. But they’re not.

And so the numbers coming in will increase, and the politicians will keep posing, and the European peoples will rightly get more and more enraged at the fact that their continent is being taken away from them. Eventually perhaps even the constant bogeyman warnings about the ‘far-right’ will lose their capacity to scare. Not good times ahead, I’d say.

Still, at least we all listened to Benedict Cumberbatch.

 

CNN: Hillary, Republicans are not her Problem, the FBI is

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NYT Reporter: Clinton’s Problem is the FBI, Not Republicans

FreeBeacon: New York Times reporter Peter Baker rebuked Hillary Clinton’s rhetoric over the weekend about Republicans politicizing her private email scandal, suggesting on CNN Sunday that it was the FBI that should be really on Clinton’s mind.

The Obama administration announced Friday it could not release 22 of Clinton’s emails from her private server because they were top-secret, while Clinton maintained her line that those emails were not marked classified when they were sent or received, a statement columnist Ron Fournier remarked was “irrelevant.” The Washington Free Beacon reported Clinton signed a non-disclosure agreement laying out criminal penalties for any mishandling of classified information as secretary of state.

“I take classified information really seriously,” Clinton said on Saturday. “I just think that if the Republicans want to use this for political purposes, that’s their decision.”

King pointed out this was an Obama administration decision, and MSNBC legal correspondent Ari Melber noted on Friday that the administration has prosecuted people for mishandling classified material. Also, the Inspector General of the intelligence community is not a Republican appointee.

“Her problem at this point is not the Republicans,” Baker said. “Her problem is the FBI and the Obama Justice Department. What Democrats are quietly, absolutely petrified about is that come summer, you find an indictment of people around her, of her, a request for a special prosecutor, something that just basically turns this into a complete disaster for the Democrats in which it’s too late to change horses.”

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Those who came before Hillary and her willful decisions on classified material and lying about it, in part from the WashingtonTimes:

JOHN DEUTCH

Deutch was CIA director from May 1995 until December 1996. He came under Justice Department investigation after his resignation when classified material was found on his home computer in Maryland.

An internal CIA investigation found that he stored and processed hundreds of files of highly classified material on unprotected home computers that he and family members also used to connect to the Internet, making the information potentially vulnerable to hackers.

A report by the Defense Department inspector general found that Deutch had failed to follow “the most basic security precautions” and faulted him for rejecting Pentagon requests that security systems be installed on his home computers.

Deutch apologized for his actions and was pardoned by President Bill Clinton before the Justice Department could file a misdemeanor plea deal for mishandling government secrets.

SANDY BERGER

Berger was the national security adviser during Bill Clinton’s second term. After leaving office, he found himself in trouble for destroying classified documents.

Berger, who died in December at age 70, pleaded guilty in 2005 to illegally sneaking classified documents from the National Archives by stuffing papers in his suit. He later destroyed some of them in his office and lied about it. The materials related to terror threats in the United States during the 2000 millennium celebration.

He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of unauthorized removal and retention of classified material, and though he avoided prison time, he lost access to classified material for three years.

A judge fined him $50,000, higher than the amount recommended by prosecutors.

Berger called his actions a lapse in judgment that came as he was preparing to testify before the Sept. 11 commission that examined the events leading up to the 2001 attacks.

“I let considerations of personal convenience override clear rules of handling classified material,” he said at the time.

BRYAN NISHIMURA

Nishimura, a former Naval reservist in Afghanistan in 2007 and 2008 and a regional engineer for the U.S. military, was investigated for downloading and storing classified information on his personal electronic devices.

Prosecutors say he carried the materials with him off-base in Afghanistan and took classified Army records to his home in Folsom, California, after his deployment ended.

His lawyer, William Portanova, said Nishimura never intended to break the law but was a “pack rat” who thought nothing of warehousing Army records at home alongside personal belongings.

FBI agents who searched his home found classified military records, both in hard copy and digital form. Nishimura also admitted to investigators that he had destroyed some of the information.

Nishimura pleaded guilty in July to unauthorized removal and retention of classified materials. A judge fined him $7,500, and he was ordered to surrender his security clearance.

The violation was a technical and unintentional one, Portanova said, but one that the Justice Department nonetheless thought it needed to punish “to make its point.”

DAVID PETRAEUS

The best-known recent prosecution involves the former CIA director who pleaded guilty last year to a misdemeanor count of unlawful removal and retention of classified materials. He was spared prison as part of his plea and was given two years’ probation by a judge who faulted him for a “serious lapse in judgment.”

The retired four-star Army general admitted that he loaned his biographer, Paula Broadwell, with whom he was having an affair, eight binders containing highly classified information regarding war strategy, intelligence capabilities and identities of covert officers. FBI agents seized the binders from an unlocked desk drawer at his home, instead of a secure facility that’s required for handling classified material.

One critical distinction is that while Clinton has repeatedly said she didn’t send or receive anything that was classified at the time – something the State Department now says it’s investigating – the Petraeus plea deal makes clear that he knew the information he provided was classified. He told Broadwell in a recording revealed by prosecutors that the binders had “code-word stuff in there.”

When questioned by the FBI, he denied having given Broadwell classified information, though he avoided being charged with making a false statement.

 

Saudi Arabia Arrests 9 Americans Connected to Terror

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Saudi police arrest 9 American ‘terror’ suspects: report

Riyadh (AFP) – Saudi authorities have arrested nine American citizens among 33 “terror” suspects rounded up over the past week, the Saudi Gazette newspaper reported Sunday.

Four Americans were arrested last Monday and five others over the past four days, the paper reported, citing an unidentified source.

Washington, a strong ally of Riyadh, confirmed it was aware of the report but declined to elaborate.

A US State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told AFP: “We are aware of reports alleging that several US citizens were detained in Saudi Arabia.

“The Department of State takes its obligation to assist US citizens abroad seriously. Due to privacy considerations, we have no further comment.”

The Saudi Gazette said the arrests also included 14 Saudis, three Yemenis, two Syrians, an Indonesian, a Filipino, an Emirati, a Kazakhstan national and a Palestinian.

It did not say if any of the “terror suspects” was linked to the Islamic State jihadist group, which has claimed several deadly attacks against security forces and Shiites in the kingdom since last year.

On Friday, a suicide bomber attacked a Shiite mosque in Eastern Province, killing four people before worshippers disarmed and tied up his accomplice who had fired on them.

IS, a radical Sunni group that considers Shiites heretics, did not claim that attack.

The Saudi Gazette said some 532 IS suspects accused of plotting attacks in the kingdom are being questioned ahead of their trial at the criminal court in Riyadh.

They are members of six cells arrested in “pre-emptive” raids across the kingdom and include a Saudi woman and a Filipina, the paper said.

Also on Sunday, the interior ministry said they were searching for nine suspects allegedly involved in an August suicide bombing that targeted a mosque inside a police headquarters, killing 15 people.

IS had claimed the attack in the southern city of Abha.

The ministry said in a statement that three other suspects, including a member of the kingdom’s special forces, had been arrested in connection with the Abha mosque bombing.

The oil-rich kingdom offered rewards of between one million riyals ($276,000) and seven million riyals ($1.87 million) for anyone who helps in the arrest of a suspect or thwarts an attack.

***

Meanwhile it is important to know and appreciate the work many are in fact doing by the U.S. intelligence community, they are quite aware of terrorists and their locations. It is gratifying that this work occurs with some success.

Four Lebanese arrested in Paris under US request: report

French authorities reportedly detained four Lebanese based on an arrest warrant issued by the United States, local daily As-Safir said Friday.

The newspaper identified the four men as Mohamad Noureddine, Mazen Al-Atat, Ali Zbib and Osama Fahs.

The report said that the French authorities did not inform Lebanese authorities of the arrest until Fahs’ relatives in Paris reported him missing to French police. This prompted the latter to contact the Lebanese embassy in the capital to inform it of the detention of four of its nationals.

The daily added that preliminary information disclosed that French authorities had no charges against any of the four men, but it briefed Lebanese authorities on a U.S. arrest warrant issued against them.

(Note the date and the date of the arrests from Treasury. ) 

Noureddine was targeted in sanctions by the U.S. Treasury Department Thursday, along with another Lebanese Hamdi Zaher, for his alleged activity in money laundering at the behest of Hezbollah.

The department targeted Noureddine and Zaher for providing financial services to Hezbollah, which the U.S. has designated a terrorist organization.

Treasury claims Noureddine has laundered money through his company called Trade Point International S.A.R.L. He is accused of using his network across Asia, Europe, and the Middle East to provide money laundering, bulk cash shipment, black market currency exchange and other financial services to clients, including members of Hezbollah.

The sanctions freeze any assets the two men have under U.S. jurisdiction and prohibit U.S. citizens from doing business with them.

The U.S. has sanctioned more than 100 individuals and entities associated with Hezbollah.

John Kerry Sent Classified Material via iPad to Hillary

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Quietly, this past Friday, January 29, the State Department did release some emails that you are invited to harvest. Here is that link.

Ever wonder where John Kerry has been with regard to Hillary’s emails? After all, he heads the State Department that is tasked with sorting, reviewing, classifying and posting Hillary’s emails? Ever wonder when and if they are going to search personal property including homes for printed material? In fairness, the intelligence community and the FBI assigned this expensive task of Hillary’s emails and server (the whole expense of which she should personally pay for) is quite concerned to determine all the compromised conditions by foreign espionage and intelligence operations. Further, another area for real concern, is the Clinton Global Foundation which appears to be in full violation of IRS ‘foundation’ law a matter that will require a separate huge investigation, that is IF the IRS well….heh would even cooperate legitimately.

Then there is Sidney Blumenthal and those emails.

State Dept. Records Show John Kerry Sent Hillary A ‘SECRET’ Email From His iPad

 Ross/DailyCaller: Emails released by the State Department on Friday show that in 2011, then-Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry sent then-Sec. of State Hillary Clinton an email from his iPad that has been deemed to contain information classified as “Secret.”While previous releases of Clinton’s emails have shown that she and her staff communicated directly with Kerry when he was a senator, the new email is the first from Kerry that the State Department has determined contains sensitive information.

Kerry has largely been silent throughout the Clinton email controversy. He has sent letters asking the State Department’s inspector general to review the agency’s records keeping practices, but he has not publicly criticized Clinton for exclusively using a personal email account and a home-brew email server.

Perhaps now we know why.

In the heavily-redacted email, dated May 19, 2011, Kerry, who then chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, appears to be discussing negotiations between India and Pakistan. Besides Clinton, the email was sent to Tom Donilon, who then served as President Obama’s National Security Advisor.

kerryemail

Clinton forwarded the email to an aide, instructing her to “Pls print” the document.

The redactions in the email are listed under the Freedom of Information Act exemptions 1.4(b) and 1.4(d), which are categories reserved for information gleaned from foreign government sources.

The kicker is that Kerry sent Clinton the information from his iPad, a communications device that would have been much more vulnerable to hackers than an encrypted communications system.

According to the Republican National Committee, which flagged the Kerry email in an email to reporters, the batch of Clinton records released on Friday contained 11 emails that the State Department now says contain “Secret” information. That’s more than double the number of emails that contained similarly classified information released in all of the previous releases combined.

According to the RNC’s calculations, 243 emails released Friday were classified at some level, bringing the overall number of classified Clinton emails to 1,583. The State Department also announced Friday that it is withholding in full and into perpetuity 22 emails that contain “Top Secret” information — the highest classification category.

The State Department says it is uncertain whether the information in those emails was classified at the time they were originated. The Intelligence Community’s inspector general has said that two separate Clinton emails were contained information that was “Top Secret” when sent. That distinction is crucial because Clinton has maintained that none of the classified emails found on her server were classified when created.

As Clinton’s successor at the State Department, Kerry has overseen the release of the work-related emails that the Democratic presidential candidate handed over in Dec. 2014. But the Democrat and his agency have been criticized by many for appearing to side with Clinton in a battle with the intelligence community over the classification status of many of her emails.

During a press conference in Canada on Friday, Kerry declined to comment on the news that the State Department was acknowledging that 22 of Clinton’s emails contain “Top Secret” information.

“I can’t speak to the specifics of anything with respect to the technicalities, the contents … because that’s not our job,” he said, according to Reuters. “We don’t know about it, it’s in other hands.”

He was not asked about his sensitive communications with Clinton.

Another question Kerry hasn’t answered is why, since he knew that Clinton used a personal email account while at the State Department, he failed to demand that she turn her emails over to the State Department until autumn 2014 after agency lawyers uncovered Clinton’s email address while reviewing documents related to the House Select Committee on Benghazi’s investigation.

It is unclear if Kerry knew about Clinton’s use of a private server, though other high-ranking State Department officials likely did. Emails obtained by The Daily Caller earlier this month show that Patrick Kennedy, the under secretary of management, was on an email chain in which Clinton’s server was being discussed.

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It is quite likely that Barack Obama will apply ‘executive privilege’ to both Hillary Clinton and John Kerry. It can be challenged in court as was the case for the Fast and Furious documents and Eric Holder. This month, however a judge did rule that those Fast and Furious documents must be turned over the Congress.

When it comes to the definition of ‘executive privilege’ here is a short summary:

 

So what is executive privilege?

The president can invoke executive privilege in order to withhold some internal executive branch communications from the other branches of government. The privilege is based on the separation of powers between the branches.

Executive privilege has been invoked since the U.S.’s early days but isn’t in the Constitution. It was only in 1974, when Richard Nixon tried to prevent the release of White House tapes during the Watergate investigation, that the Supreme Court upheld its constitutionality, and set some parameters for it. The Court ruled that no claim on executive privilege is absolute, and can also be overcome if evidence is needed in a criminal trial. (For a full legal history, see this report from the Congressional Research Service.)

So what does it usually cover?

Various administrations have set their own policies as to when they can invoke the privilege. (The Washington Post has a handy timeline showing when presidents have used it.)

Bill Clinton used them a lot, 14 times during his presidency. In 1998, his attempt to keep White House aides from testifying about the Monica Lewinsky scandal was struck down, the first time since Nixon that executive privilege was overruled in court. George W. Bush invoked the privilege six times, not always successfully.

Legal challenges have established two general categories of executive privilege: presidential communications and deliberative process.

The presidential communications privilege applies to communications involving the president or his staff that immediately pertain to the president’s decision-making process. The idea, according to Mark Rozell, a professor at George Mason University, and author of a book on executive privilege, is that “the president should have the right to candid advice without fear of public disclosure.”

Deliberative process involves a broader scope of executive branch activity: discussions involving White House staff or within other agencies on legal or policy decisions that don’t necessarily involve the president or his immediate advisers. Again, the argument is that government officials need to feel like they can talk honestly. The deliberative process privilege, Rozell says, is generally easier to challenge than a claim of presidential communications privilege.