Category Archives: UN United Nations Fraud Corruption

Raise Your Hand if You Think You’re Going Back to Iraq

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You’re correct, and it could be a ten year war.

With sequestration and even worse defense contractors without advance platform orders and enemies in the same technology as the United States, ten years is not out of the limits of acceptance. The next commander in chief faces a daunting reality as Islamic State, al Nusra, the Taliban, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Houthis and countless other terror operation cells have nothing but time and a constant flow of new generational fighters.

Listen to the Generals. The new standard before America is the endless war condition, but is the West ready and is Congress or the American people able to dismiss the battlefield weariness? There is no choice. Questions emerge and they include funding for the Authorization of Use of Military Force (AUMF) and possibly the draft, if in fact ground operations are needed. Today our troop levels are at a low point near that of pre-World War ll and this calls for some exceptional decisions to be made in the near future. Additionally, conditions could also call for more civilian contractors to be used in both offensive and defensive duties.

There is Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, Lebanon, Nigeria, Sudan, Asia and the bigger issue and the bear in the room everyone ignores, Russia.

Throw in Iran…well the future is bleak.

Is the U.S. Ready for an Endless War Against the Islamic State?
op generals predict the fight against ISIS will last more than a decade. It’s not a message the White House or Congress wants to hear.

FP Magazine: Looking out over rows of young American soldiers sitting in a dusty hall in Baghdad, the U.S. military’s top-ranking officer had a few questions for the troops.

Had they deployed to Iraq before, Gen. Martin Dempsey asked.

Out of about 200 soldiers in the hall, three-quarters raised their hands.

“How many of you think you’ll serve a tour in Iraq again?”

They all put up their hands.

“I think you may be right about that,” Dempsey said. “We’re going to be at this for a while.”

The exchange, which came in July during what is likely to be Dempsey’s final visit to Iraq before he steps down in October, captured what top Pentagon brass view as a “generational conflict” against the Islamic State. Despite optimistic assessments from the White House, the generals believe the war will extend far into the future, long after President Barack Obama leaves office.

In an interview with Foreign Policy in July, shortly before stepping down as vice chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Sandy Winnefeld likened the campaign against the Islamic State to the Cold War.

“I do think it’s going to be a generational struggle,” Winnefeld said.

The Army’s outgoing chief of staff, Gen. Ray Odierno, meanwhile, told reporters that “in my mind, ISIS is a 10- to 20-year problem; it’s not a two years problem.”

But White House officials, and most members of Congress, are reluctant to speak publicly about how long the campaign may last, much to the frustration of military commanders. For members of both political parties, acknowledging that the war could drag on for another 10 to 20 years is politically risky, if not poisonous, and would require confronting difficult decisions about ordering troops into combat, budgets, and strategy.

Instead, the White House has vaguely spoken of a “long-term” effort, without specifically addressing the generals’ expectations of a potentially decade-long war. But officials have acknowledged that the fight will continue after the end of Obama’s presidential term in 2017, leaving his successor with tough choices about whether, and how, to expand the flagging campaign.

While the administration has shied away from talking about precisely how long the war may last, some Republican lawmakers, including Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), and defense analysts have accused the White House of offering an overly positive account of the faltering campaign.

Now the administration faces explosive allegations that the military may have sought to water down intelligence reports to convey a more optimistic portrayal of the war.

The Defense Department’s inspector general has launched an investigation into the allegations after an analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency alleged that assessments had been revised improperly by U.S. Central Command, according to the New York Times.

The allegations raise questions about the possible politicization of the air campaign and carry echoes of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, as officials under then-President George W. Bush were later accused of distorting intelligence reports about suspected stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction to bolster the rationale for military action.

The Senate Intelligence Committee “is aware of the allegations that intelligence assessments may have been improperly used or revised,” a staffer for Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), chairman of the committee, told Foreign Policy on Thursday.

But as the case involves an alleged whistleblower, congressional aides said they could not discuss any aspect of the investigation or whether lawmakers would launch their own separate probe.

Obama has long condemned how intelligence was distorted in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. And in his Aug. 5 speech defending the recently negotiated nuclear agreement with Iran, Obama said the ill-fated U.S. war in Iraq had been the product of “a mindset that exaggerated threats beyond what the intelligence supported.”

After entering office, Obama vowed to carry out a campaign promise to bring the war in Iraq to “a responsible end” by withdrawing U.S. troops in 2011.

The war, however, did not end on his schedule. Obama has had to send 3,400 troops back to Iraq to help local forces battle the Islamic State, a virulent incarnation of the extremist threat that bedeviled the nearly nine-year U.S. occupation. A U.S.-led air campaign has carried out more than 6,400 strikes against Islamic State targets.

Taken together, that means Obama will leave office with no prospect of an end to the American role in the conflict, which has cost more than $3.7 billion after just one year and has undercut the Pentagon’s plans to “reset” the force after years of grinding counterinsurgency warfare.

While administration officials have been reluctant to offer more specific forecasts about the campaign’s duration, Odierno told reporters in July that the Islamic State will be “a long-term problem” over the next decade or more, though he cautioned that he wasn’t sure about how serious a threat it would be in the years ahead.

Odierno was voicing a widely held view among American commanders, who often privately complain about what they see as a lack of coherent strategic planning from the White House or Congress.

“This is not a two- to three-year task. We’re talking a decade-long effort,” a senior military officer said.

A senior administration official declined to say whether the White House agreed with Odierno’s forecast, saying, “It’s impossible to give any precise answer beyond a long-term schedule.”

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, added: “This administration believes the effort should last as long as it takes to degrade and ultimately destroy ISIL. There are more than a few variables involved in that.”

There are few signs that the current campaign has turned the tide against the Islamic State in any meaningful way, reinforcing the sense of a long struggle ahead. U.S. officials have touted the success that Iraqi and Kurdish forces, backed by American air power, have had in retaking Tikrit and in recapturing territory in northern Syria, while blunting Islamic State offensives around Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq. But the Islamic State still holds broad swaths of Iraq and Syria, including the major Iraqi cities of Mosul and Ramadi, and American intelligence officials estimate that the group has been able to replenish its ranks of fighters and replace those killed by Washington and its allies.

Despite the marked lack of progress, there are no heated policy debates inside the White House now about how to conduct the war against the Islamic State, administration officials and military officers said.

And there is no indication that the White House is planning to revisit its strategy, despite the disappointing results on the ground.

Dempsey and other top military leaders — scarred by the disastrous experience that followed the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 — are not advocating a radical departure from the current approach, as they do not see a viable alternative without risking another quagmire on the ground.

Administration officials insist that the top generals are not pushing to send in a large force of ground troops or to have special operations commandos embedded with Iraqi troops in combat.

“Our military is not pressing for this,” said a senior administration official familiar with policy discussions, adding that commanders mostly support the current approach.

Most Republican presidential candidates, who castigate Obama for his handling of the Islamic State and promise to take a tougher approach, are also not pressing for the deployment of U.S. combat forces.

Some of them have said they might send special operations forces to accompany Iraqi troops into battle, but the Republicans have offered few details about precisely what they would be willing to do differently and have sidestepped the question of how many years the United States may have to wage war against the Islamic State.

Only one candidate, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), has explicitly called for a major ground force, urging the deployment of at least 10,000 U.S. troops to Iraq and more to Syria.

Graham opposes any limits on U.S. military action against the Islamic State, and his spokesman, Kevin Bishop, said the senator would support “whatever it takes for as long as it takes.”

Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia has argued for a more honest public debate about the open-ended war, but he blames the Republican-led Congress for failing to hold a vote to authorize the use of military force in Iraq and Syria, his office said.

“In my opinion, this is less about candor on the part of the administration and much more about twelve months of congressional abdication of its most solemn constitutional responsibility — whether or not to send our service members into harm’s way,” Kaine said in an email.

Gen. Joseph Dunford, who is due to take over from Dempsey as chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff in October, told lawmakers in July he agreed that a congressional vote to authorize force against the Islamic State would send a signal of unity to allies and adversaries while offering reassurance to troops in the field.

But Congress has opted against a vote that might entail a full-fledged debate on the war and the resources it will require. And the White House has made clear it will stay the course in its military campaign, with no major policy review in the works.

The administration, however, may be open to a more public discussion of the campaign. A senior administration official indicated that the White House may attempt to engage in a broader public discussion of the war later this year, after it is able to shift its focus from the upcoming congressional vote in September on the Iran nuclear agreement.

“Once we get through the Iran nuclear deal, it’s probably time to have a discussion about the broader Middle East,” the official said.

 

Obama’s Retreat from Global Stage, Refugee Crisis

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 Germany

VIENNA (AP) — As regional leaders met Thursday to tackle Europe’s refugee crisis, a gruesome discovery unfolded a short drive from the Austrian capital: An abandoned truck was found with at least 20 — and possibly up to 50 — decomposing bodies of migrants piled inside.

It was the latest tragedy in a year that has seen tens of thousands of people risking all to seek a better life or refuge in wealthy European countries. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said at the Vienna conference she was “shaken by the awful news,” and summit participants held a minute of silence.  More here.

From the United Nations Critical Intelligence Division:

27 August 2015 – Clashes between rival militias in the past few days have forced several thousand people to flee their homes in the Central African Republic (CAR) town of Bambari and seek shelter at a former cotton factory inside the compound of the United Nations peacekeeping mission, the UN refugee agency said today.

“We are extremely concerned by the mounting violence in Bambari and its impact on the civilian population. Our staff have reported the displacement of people who are extremely frightened,” Kouassi Lazare Etien, the Representative of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in CAR, said in a press release.

Mr. Etien said that the agency was also worried about hundreds of Sudanese refugees “trapped in a refugee camp [near Bambari] and at high risk of attacks.” The road leading to the camp had been inaccessible since the weekend, but a UNHCR team escorted by UN peacekeepers reached the Sudanese refugee camp on Wednesday.

“Fresh fighting between rival militia forces erupted on August 20 and triggered new waves of displacement,” the refugee agency reported.

“A spontaneous IDP [internally displaced persons] site had sprung up inside the Bambari compound of the UN peace-keeping force,” the UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in CAR (MINUSCA), according to the refugee agency.

UNHCR staff said the agency’s partner, the National Refugee Commission, had registered about 3,000 displaced persons in the MINUSCA compound as of Tuesday.

“But conditions are dire at the site, a former cotton factory with no sanitation facilities and limited access to water and shelter,” the agency said.

The situation began to ease on Thursday but UNHCR staff say Bambari remains very tense and they fear the situation could deteriorate again.

UNHCR is now able to move around Bambari and is trying to assess the total number of newly displaced. The tension remains with armed groups in control of the streets.

The population and aid workers were isolated and inaccessible, but a humanitarian corridor has been opened to the airport since Tuesday following negotiations between MINUSCA and the rival militia groups.

The latest flare-up in Bambari erupted after a 19-year-old Muslim was killed in the city and beheaded by alleged anti-Balaka fighters, according to the refugee agency. “This triggered violent reprisal attacks between the two communities in Bambari, which have left at least 10 people dead and many injured, including ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) staff,” it said.

The failure of the United Nations Human Rights and the U.S. State Department dismissing crisis conditions

Reuters: Austrian police suspect that a Bulgarian-Hungarian trafficking ring was behind the deaths of 71 migrants found in a truck on an Austrian highway, Hans Peter Doskozil, police chief for the province of Burgenland, told a news conference.

In our own hemisphere, Latin America, terror reigns

FP: Over the past week, an unprecedented crackdown has been underway in the Venezuelan state of Tachira, where a mass expulsion of unnaturalized Colombians has been undertaken by Venezuelan authorities with uncharacteristic efficiency — if with a tragically characteristic lack of due process. To date, nearly 1,100 individuals — including small children and the elderly — have been summarily deported across the two countries’ shared border: their possessions denied to them, their homes bulldozed to the ground to prevent them from returning. To avoid losing everything, many more Colombians have attempted to salvage what they could of their belongings and cross over on foot, fording the narrow river dividing what, in Simón Bolívar’s day, had been a single, united country.

Families have been separated, businesses abandoned, and communities shattered.

Families have been separated, businesses abandoned, and communities shattered. The sheer number of dispossessed has all but overwhelmed the capacity of local Colombian authorities. In nearby Cúcuta, a Boston-sized city just across the border, refugees are now being housed in tents grouped into makeshift camps – their broken livelihoods mere collateral damage for Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro’s latest manufactured crisis.

The area where Venezuelan Tachira’s border meets the Colombian state of North Santander is a bit of an oddity for South America. While Spanish and Portuguese colonial boundaries were usually set along major natural obstacles such as the Andes, major tributaries of the Amazon, or impassable jungles, the Tachira River runs only around a meter deep and can be crossed easily at multiple points. For locals in Cúcuta, cut off from the rest of Colombia to the west by the imposing Cordillera Oriental mountain range, this has long rendered Venezuela more accessible than Colombia itself. Tachira, too, has long been a distinct cultural entity from the rest of Venezuela: a no-man’s-land that once birthed most of the country’s military Caudillo strongmen, and now breeds its most adamant anti-government uprisings. Given the porous national border and the many price distortions caused by Venezuela’s arcane multi-tier exchange rate and heavily subsidized staples, a vibrant illicit trade has flourished among the region’s entrepreneurial population, including gasoline smuggling and food arbitrage. Even in faraway Caracas, the street value of black market dollars is referred to as the “Cúcuta price.” More here.

Syrian refugees major plight

Amman (AFP) – After escaping a devastating war, frustrated Syrian refugees in aid-starved neighbouring states say they must now choose between joining an exodus to Europe or “returning home to die”.  

Millions of Syrians have found shelter in surrounding countries including Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan that are now struggling to cope with the massive influx.

A lack of jobs and humanitarian assistance means that many are now giving up on their host nations.

“What do they expect us to do, to die in silence?” said Mohammed al-Hariri, who lives in Jordan’s vast Zaatari desert refugee camp.

“Syrians now have two choices: either to return and die in their country or to emigrate,” he said.

Around 340,000 migrants reached the EU’s borders in the seven months to July, in the continent’s biggest migration crisis since World War II, with hundreds perishing at sea.

Most are escaping the more than four-year-old conflict in Syria that has claimed over 240,000 lives, and more are expected to follow.

“From the Syrians we have interviewed this year it is clear that many are contemplating making a dangerous journey to try to reach Europe through North Africa or Turkey,” said Adam Coogle, a Middle East researcher at Human Rights Watch.

“Many said they feel that a lack of humanitarian assistance plus an inability to legally work in surrounding countries forces them to choose between a return to the conflict zone in Syria or to attempt a dangerous journey to Europe.”

– ‘Losing hope’ –

The United Nations refugee agency UNHCR estimates that more than four million Syrians have fled the bloodshed which broke out in March 2011, mostly to neighbouring Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey but also Egypt and Iraq. More here.

 

Innovative Words Don’t Change the Global Refugee Crisis

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The battle over the words used to describe migrants

BBC: The word migrant is defined in Oxford English Dictionary as “one who moves, either temporarily or permanently, from one place, area, or country of residence to another”.

It is used as a neutral term by many media organisations – including the BBC – but there has been criticism of that use.

News website al-Jazeera has decided it will not use migrant and “will instead, where appropriate, say refugee“. An online editor for the network wrote: “It has evolved from its dictionary definitions into a tool that dehumanises and distances, a blunt pejorative.” A Washington Post piece asked if it was time to ditch the word.

There are some who dislike the term because it implies something voluntary but that it is applied to people fleeing danger. A UN document suggests: “The term ‘migrant’… should be understood as covering all cases where the decision to migrate is taken freely by the individual concerned, for reasons of ‘personal convenience’ and without intervention of an external compelling factor.”

“Migrant used to have quite a neutral connotation,” explains Alexander Betts, director of the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford University. “It says nothing about their entitlement to cross that border or whether they should be.” But some people believe that the word has recently developed a sour note. It is being used to mean “not a refugee”, argues Betts.

Online searches for migrant are at their highest since Google started collating this information in 2004. And in the past month (to 25 August using the Nexis database), the most commonly used term in UK national newspapers (excluding the Times, the Sun and the Financial Times) was migrant – with 2,541 instances. This was twice as popular as the next most frequently used word, refugee.

A refugee, according to the 1951 Refugee Convention, “is any person who, owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his/her nationality and is unable, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself/herself of the protection of that country”.

“Refugee implies that we have an obligation to people,” says Betts. “It implies that we have to let them on to our territory and give them the chance to seek asylum.”

But there would be many people who would be wary of labelling someone a refugee until that person has gone through the legal process of claiming asylum. In the UK, and other places, claims for “refugee status” are examined before being either granted or denied.

“The moment at which they can officially say whether they are refugees or economic migrants is the moment at which the EU state that is processing their claim makes its decision,” says Tim Stanley, historian and columnist for the Daily Telegraph. “I am not questioning the validity of their narrative, I am not saying that anyone was lying about it. I am saying that it is down to the state in which they have arrived to define what they are.”

Asylum seeker refers to someone who has applied for refugee status and is waiting to hear the result of their claim. But it is also often used about those trying to get to a particular country to make a claim. The word asylum is very old indeed having first been used in 1430 to refer to “a sanctuary or inviolable place of refuge and protection for criminals and debtors, from which they cannot be forcibly removed without sacrilege”.

The most common descriptor for asylum seeker in UK newspaper articles between 2010 to 2012 was the word failed.

But while the term failed asylum seeker describes someone who has gone through a well-defined process, there are less specifically applied terms.

One of the more controversial ones is illegal immigrant, along with illegal migrant.

A study by the Migration Observatory at Oxford University analysed 58,000 UK newspaper articles and found that illegal was the most common descriptor for the word immigrants.

“The term is dangerous,” argues Don Flynn, director of Migrants Rights Network. “It’s better to say irregular or undocumented migrants.” Calling someone an illegal immigrant associates them with criminal behaviour, he adds.

Other critics of the phrase say that it gives the impression that it’s the person that is illegal rather than their actions. “Once you’ve entered the UK and claimed asylum, you are not illegal. Even if your asylum claim is refused, you still can’t be an illegal migrant,” says Zoe Grumbridge from Refugee Action.

The UN and the EU parliament have called for an end to the phrase. Some people have also criticised the use of clandestine. In 2013, the Associated Press news agency and the Los Angeles Times both changed their style guides and recommended against using the phrase “illegal immigrant” to describe someone without a valid visa.

But others disagree, saying that the phrase can be a useful description. “If you are coming into a country without permission and you do it outside the law, that is illegal,” says Alp Mehmet, vice chairman of MigrationWatch UK. “If they haven’t entered yet, they are not illegal immigrants, although potentially they are migrating using illegal means.”

Clearly there are those who want to make a distinction between people using the accepted legal channel to enter a country and those who are entering by other methods.

“I understand why people are uncomfortable with that term but it is accurate when you are talking about someone who has broken the law to enter the country or who has been told to leave the country and is breaking the law by staying,” says Stanley.

Another criticism of the term immigrant, with or without the word illegal added on to it, is that it is less likely to be used to describe people from Western countries. Some commentators have suggested that Europeans tend to be referred to as expats.

“Very often when we talk about British people who migrate,” says Emma Briant, author of the book Bad News for Refugees, “we tend to talk of them as expats or expatriates. They are not immigrants.” There has been some satirical commentary about the differences between the terms.

But the shift towards the neutral blanket term migrant has been pronounced. To again use UK national newspapers as a measurement, 15 years ago, in the month to 25 August, the terms refugee, asylum seeker and illegal immigrant were all used more often than migrants.

And many disagree that migrant is in any way offensive. “It’s a proper description for anyone who has moved across a border,” says Don Flynn from the Migrants Rights Network.

Judith Vonberg, a freelance journalist who has written for the Migrants’ Rights Network about the issue, goes further. She says that ditching the word could “actually reinforce the dichotomy that we’ve got between the idea of the good refugee and the bad migrant”.

Alp Mehmet, from Migration Watch, also believes that migrant should be used but because it is an easy word to understand. “Everyone… knows exactly what we mean by migrants.”

Some people also believe that migrant is an appropriate phrase to use when a group of people could include both refugees and economic migrants. Tim Stanley argues that it does accurately reflect a significant number of people who are making the crossing into Europe. “It is why the UNHCR is absolutely right to describe that group of people as both migrants and refugees,” he says.

The use of the term economic migrant has been much debated. Home Secretary Theresa May used it in May to describe migration into Europe. She said that there were large numbers of people coming from countries such as Nigeria and Somalia who were “economic migrants who’ve paid criminal gangs to take them across the Mediterranean”.

The term economic migrant is “being used to imply choice rather than coercion”, says Betts. “It’s used to imply that it’s voluntary reasons for movement rather than forced movement.”

Some words have fallen almost completely out of favour. Alien was used regularly in the UK press before World War Two, says Panikos Panayi, professor of European history at De Montfort University. “The first major immigration act [in the UK] was called the Aliens Act 1905,” he says.

But in the US, alien remains official terminology for any person who is not a citizen or national.

The Obama administration proposed Dreamers as a new positive way – with its reference to the American Dream – of describing undocumented young people who met the conditions of the Dream act (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors).

There is another word with positive connotations that is not used much anymore. “Exile has gone out of credit,” says Betts, since the end of the Cold War. “It had a slightly sort of dignified and noble connotation,” he argues.

It was used to describe someone who had been forced out of their country but was still politically engaged with it and was planning on going back one day. “I think that today, many Syrians are in that position,” says Betts.

The shifting language of migration might seem petty to some but to those involved in the debate there is no doubt of its importance. “Words matter in the migration debate,” says Rob McNeil from the Migration Observatory.

 

IAEA out of Inspection Money While PMD’s Expand

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Cash-Strapped IAEA to Stop Monitoring Iran Next Month?

“Yukiya Amano, head of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), announced on Tuesday that his organization’s funds to monitor Iran’s nuclear program will run out next month, indicating a potential road block for last month’s Iran nuclear deal…

The IAEA chief asked member states to fork over more funds to continue the monitoring of the Islamic regime, revealing that the 800,000 euros ($924,000) a month that it has received to this point will run out by the end of September.

Amano detailed the expenses needed in order to monitor Iran until the nuclear deal is implemented – presumably early next year – listing them at 160,000 euros (over $184,000) per month. He added that 9.2 million euros (over $10.5 million) a year will be needed by the IAEA to monitor Iran under the framework of the deal.

The IAEA’s annual budget hit 350 million euros (over $402 million) last year, and according to Amano he will seek to incorporate the costs of monitoring Iran as part of the deal into the IAEA’s regular annual budget starting in 2017.

Aside from the Iran nuclear deal signed between the Islamic regime and world powers, Iran sealed a classified deal with the IAEA on the same day that the US Congress is not being allowed to review.

At least one caveat from those side deals has come out, and according to it Iran will inspect its own covert nuclear facility Parchin…”

Meanwhile…Iran has expanded nuclear sites….

Iran may have built extension at disputed military site: U.N. nuclear watchdog

Reuters: Iran appears to have built an extension to part of its Parchin military site since May, the U.N. nuclear watchdog said in a report on Thursday delving into a major part of its inquiry into possible military dimensions to Tehran’s past atomic activity.

A resolution of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Parchin file, which includes a demand for fresh IAEA access to the site, is a symbolically important issue that could help make or break Tehran’s July 14 nuclear deal with six world powers.

The confidential IAEA report, obtained by Reuters, said:

“Since (our) previous report (in May), at a particular location at the Parchin site, the agency has continued to observe, through satellite imagery, the presence of vehicles, equipment, and probable construction materials. In addition, a small extension to an existing building appears to have constructed.”

The changes were first observed last month, a senior diplomat familiar with the IAEA investigation said.

The IAEA says any activities Iran has undertaken at Parchin since U.N. inspectors last visited in 2005 could jeopardize its ability to verify Western intelligence suggesting Tehran carried out tests there relevant to nuclear bomb detonations more than a decade ago. Iran has dismissed the intelligence as “fabricated”.

Under a “roadmap” accord Iran reached with the IAEA parallel to its groundbreaking settlement with the global powers, the Islamic Republic is required to give the Vienna-based watchdog enough information about its past nuclear activity to allow it to write a report on the long vexed issue by year-end.

“Full and timely implementation of the relevant parts of the road-map is essential to clarify issues relating to this location at Parchin,” the new IAEA report said.

According to data given to the IAEA by some member states, Parchin might have housed hydrodynamic experiments to assess how specific materials react under high pressure, such as in a nuclear blast.

“We cannot know or speculate what’s in the (extended) building. The building itself is not related to the most interesting building for us … It’s something we will technically clarify over the course of the year,” the senior diplomat said.

GROUNDBREAKING NUCLEAR ACCORD

Under its Vienna accord with the powers, Iran must put verifiable limits on its uranium enrichment program to create confidence it will not be put to developing nuclear bombs, in exchange for a removal of sanctions crippling its oil-based economy. Iran has said it seeks only peaceful nuclear energy.

Iran has for years been stonewalling the IAEA inquiry into possible military dimensions (PMD) to its nuclear project. But the Islamic Republic delivered on a pledge under the roadmap to turn over more information by Aug. 15.

The IAEA report said the agency was still reviewing the PMD information Iran provided. Agency Director-General Yukiya Amano said on Tuesday that the information was substantive but it was too early to say whether any of it was new.

A second diplomat familiar with the Iran file said he did not expect any breakthrough from the documents provided by Iran.

While sticking to its mandate of securing compliance with its non-proliferation mandate, diplomats see the IAEA as being keen not to imperil Iran’s pact with the powers, who tout it as crucial to reducing conflict in the Middle East.

The success of that deal will hinge on IAEA verification of Iranian compliance, but the agency must still issue reports that are technically sound. “It’s a question of how they will reflect this in a more or less elegant way,” a third diplomat said.

The IAEA has come under pressure, especially from U.S. lawmakers who will hold a critical vote next month on whether to ratify the deal between Iran and the powers, for not publishing its roadmap agreement with Tehran.

On that point, the senior diplomat said: “The agency is doing nothing in Iran in this area that it hasn’t been doing or is not doing somewhere else. There are no cutting corners in Iran.”

Amano last week rejected as “a misrepresentation” suggestions from hawkish critics of the nuclear accord that the IAEA had quietly agreed to allow Iran to inspect sections of Parchin on the agency’s behalf.

Hillary’s Pay for Weapons State Department

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There is not much we can point to when it comes to tangible and valuable achievements within the Hillary Clinton State Department of 4 years. Perhaps she and her deputies were busy processing orders and depositing checks.

Further, if the world was not so unbalanced and in complete turmoil due to civil wars, terror groups and evacuations of those fleeing their home countries, would countries really need to increase their weapons arsenals? This unto itself is a failure of Barack Obama’s lack of leadership and strategy, that lil miss Hillary exploited.

Too bad she could not find time to approve the Keystone XL pipeline…

Clinton Foundation Donors Got Weapons Deals From Hillary Clinton’s State Department

IBTimes: Even by the standards of arms deals between the United States and Saudi Arabia, this one was enormous. A consortium of American defense contractors led by Boeing would deliver $29 billion worth of advanced fighter jets to the United States’ oil-rich ally in the Middle East.

Israeli officials were agitated, reportedly complaining to the Obama administration that this substantial enhancement to Saudi air power risked disrupting the region’s fragile balance of power. The deal appeared to collide with the State Department’s documented concerns about the repressive policies of the Saudi royal family.

But now, in late 2011, Hillary Clinton’s State Department was formally clearing the sale, asserting that it was in the national interest. At a press conference in Washington to announce the department’s approval, an assistant secretary of state, Andrew Shapiro, declared that the deal had been “a top priority” for Clinton personally. Shapiro, a longtime aide to Clinton since her Senate days, added that the “U.S. Air Force and U.S. Army have excellent relationships in Saudi Arabia.”

These were not the only relationships bridging leaders of the two nations. In the years before Hillary Clinton became secretary of state, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia contributed at least $10 million to the Clinton Foundation, the philanthropic enterprise she has overseen with her husband, former president Bill Clinton. Just two months before the deal was finalized, Boeing — the defense contractor that manufactures one of the fighter jets the Saudis were especially keen to acquire, the F-15 — contributed $900,000 to the Clinton Foundation, according to a company press release.

The Saudi deal was one of dozens of arms sales approved by Hillary Clinton’s State Department that placed weapons in the hands of governments that had also donated money to the Clinton family philanthropic empire, an International Business Times investigation has found.

Under Clinton’s leadership, the State Department approved $165 billion worth of commercial arms sales to 20 nations whose governments have given money to the Clinton Foundation, according to an IBTimes analysis of State Department and foundation data. That figure — derived from the three full fiscal years of Clinton’s term as Secretary of State (from October 2010 to September 2012) — represented nearly double the value of American arms sales made to the those countries and approved by the State Department during the same period of President George W. Bush’s second term.

The Clinton-led State Department also authorized $151 billion of separate Pentagon-brokered deals for 16 of the countries that donated to the Clinton Foundation, resulting in a 143 percent increase in completed sales to those nations over the same time frame during the Bush administration. These extra sales were part of a broad increase in American military exports that accompanied Obama’s arrival in the White House. The 143 percent increase in U.S. arms sales to Clinton Foundation donors compares to an 80 percent increase in such sales to all countries over the same time period.

American defense contractors also donated to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state and in some cases made personal payments to Bill Clinton for speaking engagements. Such firms and their subsidiaries were listed as contractors in $163 billion worth of Pentagon-negotiated deals that were authorized by the Clinton State Department between 2009 and 2012.

The State Department formally approved these arms sales even as many of the deals enhanced the military power of countries ruled by authoritarian regimes whose human rights abuses had been criticized by the department. Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Qatar all donated to the Clinton Foundation and also gained State Department clearance to buy caches of American-made weapons even as the department singled them out for a range of alleged ills, from corruption to restrictions on civil liberties to violent crackdowns against political opponents.

As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton also accused some of these countries of failing to marshal a serious and sustained campaign to confront terrorism. In a December 2009 State Department cable published by Wikileaks, Clinton complained of “an ongoing challenge to persuade Saudi officials to treat terrorist financing emanating from Saudi Arabia as a strategic priority.” She declared that “Qatar’s overall level of CT cooperation with the U.S. is considered the worst in the region.” She said the Kuwaiti government was “less inclined to take action against Kuwait-based financiers and facilitators plotting attacks.” She noted that “UAE-based donors have provided financial support to a variety of terrorist groups.” All of these countries donated to the Clinton Foundation and received increased weapons export authorizations from the Clinton-run State Department.

Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Clinton Foundation did not respond to questions from the IBTimes.

In all, governments and corporations involved in the arms deals approved by Clinton’s State Department have delivered between $54 million and $141 million to the Clinton Foundation as well as hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments to the Clinton family, according to foundation and State Department records. The Clinton Foundation publishes only a rough range of individual contributors’ donations, making a more precise accounting impossible.

Click here to get the interactive chart data.

Winning Friends, Influencing Clintons

Under federal law, foreign governments seeking State Department clearance to buy American-made arms are barred from making campaign contributions — a prohibition aimed at preventing foreign interests from using cash to influence national security policy. But nothing prevents them from contributing to a philanthropic foundation controlled by policymakers.

Just before Hillary Clinton became Secretary of State, the Clinton Foundation signed an agreement generally obligating it to disclose to the State Department increases in contributions from its existing foreign government donors and any new foreign government donors. Those increases were to be reviewed by an official at the State Department and “as appropriate” the White House counsel’s office. According to available disclosures, officials at the State Department and White House raised no issues about potential conflicts related to arms sales.

During Hillary Clinton’s 2009 Senate confirmation hearings, Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., urged the Clinton Foundation to “forswear” accepting contributions from governments abroad. “Foreign governments and entities may perceive the Clinton Foundation as a means to gain favor with the secretary of state,” he said. The Clintons did not take Lugar’s advice. In light of the weapons deals flowing to Clinton Foundation donors, advocates for limits on the influence of money on government action now argue that Lugar was prescient in his concerns.

“The word was out to these groups that one of the best ways to gain access and influence with the Clintons was to give to this foundation,” said Meredith McGehee, policy director at the Campaign Legal Center, an advocacy group that seeks to tighten campaign finance disclosure rules. “This shows why having public officials, or even spouses of public officials, connected with these nonprofits is problematic.”

Hillary Clinton’s willingness to allow those with business before the State Department to finance her foundation heightens concerns about how she would manage such relationships as president, said Lawrence Lessig, the director of Harvard University’s Safra Center for Ethics.

“These continuing revelations raise a fundamental question of judgment,” Lessig told IBTimes. “Can it really be that the Clintons didn’t recognize the questions these transactions would raise? And if they did, what does that say about their sense of the appropriate relationship between private gain and public good?”

National security experts assert that the overlap between the list of Clinton Foundation donors and those with business before the the State Department presents a troubling conflict of interest.

While governments and defense contractors may not have made donations to the Clinton Foundation exclusively to influence arms deals, they were clearly “looking to build up deposits in the ‘favor bank’ and to be well thought of,” said Gregory Suchan, a 34-year State Department veteran who helped lead the agency’s oversight of arms transfers under the Bush administration.

As Hillary Clinton presses a campaign for the presidency, she has confronted sustained scrutiny into her family’s personal and philanthropic dealings, along with questions about whether their private business interests have colored her exercise of public authority. As IBTimes previously reported, Clinton switched from opposing an American free trade agreement with Colombia to supporting it after a Canadian energy and mining magnate with interests in that South American country contributed to the Clinton Foundation. IBTimes’ review of the Clintons’ annual financial disclosures also revealed that 13 companies lobbying the State Department paid Bill Clinton $2.5 million in speaking fees while Hillary Clinton headed the agency.

Questions about the nexus of arms sales and Clinton Foundation donors stem from the State Department’s role in reviewing the export of American-made weapons. The agency is charged with both licensing direct commercial sales by U.S. defense contractors to foreign governments and also approving Pentagon-brokered sales to those governments. Those powers are enshrined in a federal law that specifically designates the secretary of state as “responsible for the continuous supervision and general direction of sales” of arms, military hardware and services to foreign countries. In that role, Hillary Clinton was empowered to approve or reject deals for a broad range of reasons, from national security considerations to human rights concerns.

The State Department does not disclose which individual companies are involved in direct commercial sales, but its disclosure documents reveal that countries that donated to the Clinton Foundation saw a combined $75 billion increase in authorized commercial military sales under the three full fiscal years Clinton served, as compared to the first three full fiscal years of Bush’s second term.

The Clinton Foundation has not released an exact timetable of its donations, making it impossible to know whether money from foreign governments and defense contractors came into the organization before or after Hillary Clinton approved weapons deals that involved their interests. But news reports document that at least seven foreign governments that received State Department clearance for American arms did donate to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary Clinton was serving as secretary: Algeria, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, Thailand, Norway and Australia.

Under a presidential policy directive signed by President Bill Clinton in 1995, the State Department is supposed to specifically take human rights records into account when deciding whether to approve licenses enabling foreign governments to purchase military equipment and services from American companies. Despite this, Hillary Clinton’s State Department increased approvals of such sales to nations that her agency sharply criticized for systematic human rights abuses.

In its 2010 Human Rights Report, Clinton’s State Department inveighed against Algeria’s government for imposing “restrictions on freedom of assembly and association” tolerating “arbitrary killing,” “widespread corruption,” and a “lack of judicial independence.” The report said the Algerian government “used security grounds to constrain freedom of expression and movement.”

That year, the Algerian government donated $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation and its lobbyists met with the State Department officials who oversee enforcement of human rights policies. Clinton’s State Department the next year approved a one-year 70 percent increase in military export authorizations to the country. The increase included authorizations of almost 50,000 items classified as “toxicological agents, including chemical agents, biological agents and associated equipment” after the State Department did not authorize the export of any of such items to Algeria in the prior year.

During Clinton’s tenure, the State Department authorized at least $2.4 billion of direct military hardware and services sales to Algeria — nearly triple such authorizations over the last full fiscal years during the Bush administration. The Clinton Foundation did not disclose Algeria’s donation until this year — a violation of the ethics agreement it entered into with the Obama administration.

The monarchy in Qatar had similarly been chastised by the State Department for a raft of human rights abuses. But that country donated to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary Clinton was running the State Department. During the three full budgetary years of her tenure, Qatar saw a 14-fold increase in State Department authorizations for direct commercial sales of military equipment and services, as compared to the same time period in Bush’s second term. The department also approved the Pentagon’s separate $750 million sale of multi-mission helicopters to Qatar. That deal would additionally employ as contractors three companies that have all supported the Clinton Foundation over the years: United Technologies, Lockheed Martin and General Electric.

Clinton foundation donor countries that the State Department criticized for human rights violations and that received weapons export authorizations did not respond to IBTimes’ questions.

That group of arms manufacturers — along with Clinton Foundation donors Boeing, Honeywell, Hawker Beechcraft and their affiliates — were together listed as contractors in 114 such deals while Clinton was secretary of state. NBC put Chelsea Clinton on its payroll as a network correspondent in November 2011, when it was still 49 percent owned by General Electric. A spokesperson for General Electric did not respond to questions from IBTimes.

The other companies all asserted that their donations had nothing to do with the arms export deals.

“Our contributions have aligned with our longstanding philanthropic commitments,” said Honeywell spokesperson Rob Ferris.

“Even The Appearance Of A Conflict”

During her Senate confirmation proceedings in 2009, Hillary Clinton declared that she and her husband were “committed to ensuring that his work does not present a conflict of interest with the duties of Secretary of State.” She pledged “to protect against even the appearance of a conflict of interest between his work and the duties of the Secretary of State” and said that “in many, if not most cases, it is likely that the Foundation or President Clinton will not pursue an opportunity that presents a conflict.”

Even so, Bill Clinton took in speaking fees reaching $625,000 at events sponsored by entities that were dealing with Hillary Clinton’s State Department on weapons issues.

In 2011, for example, the former president was paid $175,000 by the Kuwait America Foundation to be the guest of honor and keynote speaker at its annual awards gala, which was held at the home of the Kuwaiti ambassador. Ben Affleck spoke at the event, which featured a musical performance by Grammy-award winner Michael Bolton. The gala was emceed by Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe show. Boeing was listed as a sponsor of the event, as were the embassies of the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar — the latter two of which had donated to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state.

The speaking fee from the Kuwait America Foundation to Bill Clinton was paid in the same time frame as a series of deals Hillary Clinton’s State Department was approving between the Kuwaiti government and Boeing. Months before the gala, the Department of Defense announced that Boeing would be the prime contractor on a $693 million deal, cleared by Hillary Clinton’s State Department, to provide the Kuwaiti government with military transport aircraft. A year later, a group sponsored in part by Boeing would pay Bill Clinton another $250,000 speaking fee.

“Boeing has sponsored this major travel event, the Global Business Travel Association, for several years, regardless of its invited speakers,” Gordon Johndroe, a Boeing spokesperson, told IBTimes. Johndroe said Boeing’s support for the Clinton Foundation was “a transparent act of compassion and an investment aimed at aiding the long-term interests and hopes of the Haitian people” following a devastating earthquake.

Boeing was one of three companies that helped deliver money personally to Bill Clinton while benefiting from weapons authorizations issued by Hillary Clinton’s State Department. The others were Lockheed and the financial giant Goldman Sachs.

Lockheed is a member of the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt, which paid Bill Clinton $250,000 to speak at an event in 2010. Three days before the speech, Hillary Clinton’s State Department approved two weapons export deals in which Lockheed was listed as the prime contractor. Over the course of 2010, Lockheed was a contractor on 17 Pentagon-brokered deals that won approval from the State Department. Lockheed told IBTimes that its support for the Clinton Foundation started in 2010, while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state.

“Lockheed Martin has periodically supported one individual membership in the Clinton Global Initiative since 2010,” said company spokesperson Katherine Trinidad. “Membership benefits included attendance at CGI annual meetings, where we participated in working groups focused on STEM, workforce development and advanced manufacturing.”

In April 2011, Goldman Sachs paid Bill Clinton $200,000 to speak to “approximately 250 high level clients and investors” in New York, according to State Department records obtained by Judicial Watch. Two months later, the State Department approved a $675 million foreign military sale involving Hawker Beechcraft — a company that was then part-owned by Goldman Sachs. As part of the deal, Hawker Beechcraft would provide support to the government of Iraq to maintain a fleet of aircraft used for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions. Goldman Sachs has also contributed at least $250,000 to the Clinton Foundation, according to donation records.

“There is absolutely no connection among all the points that you have raised regarding our firm,” said Andrew Williams, a spokesperson for Goldman Sachs.

Federal records show that ethics staffers at the State Department approved the payments to Bill Clinton from Goldman Sachs, and the Lockheed- and Boeing-sponsored groups without objection, even though the firms had major stakes in the agency’s weapons export decisions.

Stephen Walt, a Harvard University professor of international affairs, told IBTimes that the intertwining financial relationships between the Clintons, defense contractors and foreign governments seeking weapons approvals is “a vivid example of a very big problem — the degree to which conflicts of interest have become endemic.”

“It has troubled me all along that the Clinton Foundation was not being more scrupulous about who it would take money from and who it wouldn’t,” he said. “American foreign policy is better served if people responsible for it are not even remotely suspected of having these conflicts of interest. When George Marshall was secretary of state, nobody was worried about whether or not he would be distracted by donations to a foundation or to himself. This wasn’t an issue. And that was probably better.”

UPDATE (7:38pm, 5/26/15): In an emailed statement, a spokeswoman for the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office told IBTimes: “Taiwan’s 2003 donation was for the fund to build the Clinton Presidential Library. This was way before Mrs. Clinton was made the U.S. Secretary of State. We have neither knowledge nor comments concerning other issues.”