Pritzker, Boxer, Sherman and MoveOn.org, the Strike Force

Posted on March 12, 2018March 12, 2018 by Denise Simon

The top person on John Kerry’s Iran JPOA team was Wendy Sherman. But then we have Obama’s dear friend Penny Pritzker in the mix too, along with Barbara Boxer and Hillary’s Jake Sherman all part of this National Security Action team, which is all things against Trump. So, while we do have the Director of MoveOn in the mix…this group likely has some robust funding from Soros.

This is a strike force that even includes Jeremy Bash.

He served as Chief of Staff of the CIA (2009-2011) and Defense Department (2011-2013), was Panetta’s right hand person and perhaps we should remember it was Panetta that allowed Hollywood access to top secret information to make a movie, that Zero Dark Thirty movie.

According to a June 15, 2011, email from Benjamin Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications, the Obama White House was intent on “trying to have visibility into the UBL (Usama bin Laden) projects and this is likely a high profile one.”

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Ben Rhodes the aspiring novelist became Obama’s top advisor even when Rhodes security clearance was denied.

In early July 2012, Obama’s senior White House adviser on Iran, Puneet Talwar, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s right-hand man, Jake Sullivan, arrived in the sleepy Arabian sultanate of Oman, 150 miles across sparkling Gulf waters from the Iranian coast. It was the first significant back-channel contact with Tehran.

FNC: A group of about 50 former Obama administration officials recently formed a think tank called National Security Action to attack the Trump administration’s national security policies.

The mission statement of the group is anything but subtle: “National Security Action is dedicated to advancing American global leadership and opposing the reckless policies of the Trump administration that endanger our national security and undermine U.S. strength in the world.”

National Security Action plans to pursue typical liberal foreign policy themes such as climate change, challenging President Trump’s leadership, immigration and allegations of corruption between the president and foreign powers.

This organization uses the acronym NSA, which is ironic. Three of its founding members – Ben Rhodes, Susan Rice and Samantha Power – likely were involved in abusing intelligence from the federal NSA (National Security Agency) to unmask the names of Trump campaign staff from intelligence reports and to leak NSA intercepts to the media to hurt Donald Trump politically. This included a leak to the media of an NSA transcript in February 2017 of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s discussion with Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergei Kislyak. No one has been prosecuted for this leak.

Given the likely involvement of Rhodes, Rice and Power to weaponize intelligence against the Trump presidential campaign, will their anti-Trump NSA issue an apology for these abuses?

It is interesting that the new anti-Trump group says nothing in its mandate about protecting the privacy of Americans from illegal surveillance, preventing the politicization of U.S. intelligence agencies or promoting aggressive intelligence oversight. Maybe this is because the founders plan to abuse U.S. intelligence agencies to spy on Republican lawmakers and candidates if they join a future Democratic administration.

It takes a lot of chutzpah for this group of former Obama officials, who were part of the worst U.S. foreign policy in history, to condemn the current president’s successful international leadership and foreign policy.

After all, ISIS was born on President Obama’s watch because of his mismanagement of the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and his “leading from behind” Middle East policy. The Syrian civil war spun out of control because of the incompetence of President Obama and his national security team.

This was a team that provided false information to the American people about the 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi and the nuclear deal with Iran. I wonder if the anti-Trump NSA will include videos on its website of former National Security Adviser Susan Rice falsely claiming on five Sunday morning news shows in September 2012 that the attack on the Benghazi consulate was “spontaneous” and in response to an anti-Muslim video.

And of course there’s the North Korean nuclear and missile programs that surged during the Obama years due to the administration’s “Strategic Patience” policy, an approach designed to kick this problem down the road to the next president. Because of President Obama’s incompetence, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un may have an H-bomb that he soon will be able to load onto an intercontinental ballistic missile to attack the United States.

It must appall this group of former Obama national security officials that President Trump is succeeding as he undoes everything they worked on.

ISIS will soon control no territory in Iraq or Syria because of the Trump administration’s intensified attacks on it and arming of Kurdish militias.

In sharp contrast to President Obama, President Trump drew a chemical weapons red line in Syria and enforced it.

North Korea is pushing for talks with the U.S. in response to strong United Nations sanctions the U.S. worked to obtain in 2017. And compliance with the new sanctions has been significantly improved, especially by China, as the result of President Trump’s actions.

President Trump repaired the damage done to U.S.-Israel relations by President Obama and has recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel – something several previous presidents promised but failed to do.

Iranian harassment of U.S. ships in the Persian Gulf stopped in 2017, likely due to the more assertive Iran policy of President Trump. This includes the president’s successful effort to build a stronger U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia.

President Trump is right when he says he inherited a mess on national security from the Obama administration. This is because President Obama and his national security team undermined U.S. credibility and left President Trump a much more dangerous world. I doubt the new anti-Trump National Security Action think tank will succeed in convincing Americans otherwise.

DACA and the Temporary Protected Status Back in Play, Check Houston

Posted on March 5, 2018March 5, 2018 by Denise Simon

How about some White House officials visit Houston…

More than 100 countries are represented in Houston. Routinely ranked top in the country for job growth, with a school system where 80 percent of students are disadvantaged. For details, go here.

Lee High School for instance has 1700 students, a Vietnamese principal and student are from 40 different countries.

Illegal immigrant “Dreamers” said they staged a sit-in to block the entrance to the Democratic National Committee’s offices in Washington on Monday in order to show they blame Democrats as well as Republicans for missing President Trump’s March 5 deadline for action.

Immigrant-rights activists who are U.S. citizens and who are supporting the Dreamers will also cancel their membership in the Democratic Party in order to make their point, the organizations said.

Monday marked six months since Mr. Trump announced a phaseout of the Obama-era DACA deportation amnesty. The president had said Congress should use the phaseout period to approve a new plan, with full congressional authorization, to grant DACA recipients legal status.

Mr. Trump offered a middle-ground approach, but the security enhancements went too far for Democrats, while his proposed amnesty for illegal immigrants went too far for many Republicans, and the bill stalled.

While Democrats have blamed the GOP, activists made clear Monday they will pin some of the blame on Democrats.

“The Democrats made the calculation to kick the can down the road and allow hundreds of thousands of us undocumented youth to live in uncertainty. We are anxious and we are scared of being torn away from their homes and our community”, said Maria Duarte, one of 683,000 people covered by DACA.

DNC Chairman Tom Perez, though, said Mr. Trump is the problem, calling his phaseout “cruel and reckless.”

“Donald Trump’s decision to end DACA created an unnecessary crisis that has left hundreds of thousands of Dreamers uncertain about their future. And now his arbitrary deadline has passed without any action from the president or Republicans in Congress,” Mr. Perez said in a statement.

The protesters Monday were part of the Seed Project, which staged a march from New York to Washington late last month, in anticipation of the March 5 deadline.

The protesters said they expect Congress to pass a “clean” bill granting perhaps 2 million illegal immigrants citizenship rights — without agreeing to any other provisions such as Mr. Trump’s planned border wall or changes to legal immigration policy.

Work permits expiring March 31 are automatically extended through Sept. 27

WASHINGTON—Current beneficiaries of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) under Syria’s designation who want to maintain their status through Sept. 30, 2019, must re-register between March 5, and May 4, 2018. Re-registration procedures, including how to renew employment authorization documentation, have been published in the Federal Register and on the USCIS website.

All applicants must submit Form I-821, Application for Temporary Protected Status. Applicants may also request an Employment Authorization Document (EAD) by submitting a completed Form I-765, Application for Employment Authorization, when they file Form I-821, or separately at a later date. Both forms are free on USCIS’ website at uscis.gov/tps.

USCIS will issue new EADs with a Sept. 30, 2019, expiration date to eligible Syrian TPS beneficiaries who timely re-register and apply for EADs. However, given the timeframes involved with processing TPS re-registration applications, USCIS is automatically extending the validity of EADs with an expiration date of March 31 for 180 days, through Sept. 27.

To be eligible for TPS under Syria’s current designation, individuals must have continuously resided in the United States since Aug. 1, 2016, and have been continuously physically present in the United States since Oct. 1, 2016, along with meeting the other eligibility requirements.

On Jan. 31, Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen M. Nielsen announced her determination that the conditions supporting Syria’s TPS designation continue. The secretary made her decision after reviewing country conditions and consulting with appropriate U.S. government agencies. Before the 18-month extension ends, the secretary will review conditions in Syria to determine whether its TPS designation should be extended again or terminated.

UN Declares Sadness and Desperation in Venezuela is About Food

Posted on March 5, 2018March 5, 2018 by Denise Simon

Except for the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley that is.

Amid growing food insecurity and rising malnutrition among children on the back of a protracted economic crisis in Venezuela, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) on Friday called on all actors for rapid and coordinated assistance efforts to reach those most in need.

“While precise figures are unavailable because of very limited official health or nutrition data, there are clear signs that the crisis is limiting children’s access to quality health services, medicines and food,” said the UN agency in a news release, Friday, underlining the severity of the situation.

According to UNICEF, national reports in 2009 (the most recent official figures) showed that the prevalence of wasting (low weight to height ratio) in children under five was, at the time, 3.2 per cent.

However, more recent non-official studies indicate “significantly higher rates” of as much as 15.5 per cent, and an additional 20 per cent of children at risk of malnutrition.

Similarly, the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2017 (a comprehensive report on the subject prepared by a number of UN agencies) suggested that undernourishment – a measure of hunger indicating the proportion of population with inadequate energy consumption – in Venezuela rose from 10.5 per cent in 2004-2006 to 13 per cent in 2014-2016.

In response, the Venezuelan Government has implemented measures to mitigate the impact of the crisis on the country’s children, including providing regular food packages at affordable prices to the most vulnerable families, cash transfers, and strengthening of nutritional and recuperation services.

“But more needs to be done to reverse the worrisome decline in children’s nutritional wellbeing,” said UNICEF, calling for the rapid implementation of a short-term response to counter malnutrition, based on disaggregated data and coordinated between the Government and partners.

On its part, the UN agency is working with the Ministry of Health, National Institute of Nutrition and the civil society to strengthen and expand nutritional surveillance at the community level and provide nutritional recuperation services through partners organizations.

The efforts are being implemented through activities such as nutrition screening days aiming to reach over 113,000 children, provision of supplementary and therapeutic foods when required, training programmes and communication campaigns, added UNICEF.

Venezuela has been mired in a socio-economic and political crisis since 2012 and has witnessed rising consumer prices even as the overall economy has contracted.

***

Some 3 million Venezuelans—a tenth of the population—have left Venezuela since late leader Hugo Chavez started his socialist revolution in 1999. More than 500,000 have fled to Colombia—many illegally—hoping to escape grinding poverty, rising violence and shortages of food and medicine in the once-prosperous nation.

Photographer Jaime Saldarriaga joined Reuters journalists at the Paraguachón border crossing to document the exodus from Venezuela, which is now on a scale echoing the departure of Myanmar’s Rohingya people to Bangladesh.

Venezuelans line the street at the border between Venezuela and Colombia, in the city of Cúcuta. Jaime Saldarriaga/Reuters

Hundreds of migrants lugging heavy suitcases and overstuffed backpacks walk along the road to the Colombian border town of Maicao, beneath the blazing sun. The Venezuelans arrive hungry, thirsty and tired, often unsure where they will spend the night—but they are relieved to have escaped the calamitous situation in their homeland.

The broken line snakes back eight miles (13 km) to the border crossing, where more than a hundred Venezuelans wait in the heat outside the migration office.

Venezuelans walk along a highway in Colombia after crossing the border at Paraguachón. Jaime Saldarriaga/Reuters

Money-changers sit at tables stacked with wads of bolívares—Venezuela’s currency—made nearly worthless by hyperinflation under President Nicolas Maduro’s socialist government.

A money changer uses a calculator at the Paraguachón border crossing between Colombia and Venezuela. Jaime Saldarriaga/Reuters

“It’s migrate and give it a try or die of hunger there. Those are the only two options,” Yeraldine Murillo, 27, who left her six-year-old son behind in the Venezuelan city of Maracaibo, told Reuters. “There, people eat from the trash. Here, people are happy just to eat,” she said, adding she hopes to find work in Colombia’s capital, Bogotá, and send for her son.

Migrants told Reuters they were paying up to 400,000 bolívares for a kilo of rice in Venezuela. The official monthly minimum wage is 248,510 bolívares—around $8 at the official exchange rate, or $1.09 on the black market.

Food shortages, which many migrants jokingly refer to as the “Maduro diet,” have left people noticeably thinner than in photos taken years earlier for their identification cards.

Mechanic Luis Arellano and his children were among the lucky ones who found beds at a shelter in Maicao run by the Catholic diocese with help from the U.N. refugee agency. The 58-year-old said his children’s tears of hunger drove him to flee Venezuela. “It was 8 p.m. and they were asking for lunch and dinner and I had nothing to give them,” he said, spooning rice into his 7-year-old daughter’s mouth. He raised his children’s spindly arms and said: “[These aren’t] the size they should be.”

Read More: Venezuela Must Stop Presidential Elections

The shelter, where bunk beds line the walls of the bedrooms, provides food and shelter for three days and, for those joining family already in Colombia, a bus ticket onwards. It will soon have a capacity for 140 people a night—a fraction of the daily arrivals.

At another shelter in the border city of Cucuta, some 250 miles (400 km) to the south, people regularly spend the night on cardboard outside, hoping places will free up. The largest city along the frontier, Cucuta, has borne the brunt of the arriving migrants.

About 30,000 people cross the pedestrian bridge that connects the city with Venezuela on daily entry passes to shop for food.

The mass migration is stirring alarm in Colombia. A migration official told Reuters as many as 2,000 Venezuelans enter Colombia legally through the border crossing at Paraguachón each day, up from around 1,200 late last year. But officials estimate as many as 4,000 people cross illegally every day.

Colombia is letting the migrants access public health care and send their children to state schools. Santos is asking for international help to foot the bill, which the government has said runs to tens of millions of dollars.

Under pressure from overcrowded frontier towns such as Maicao, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos announced a tightening of border controls this month, deploying 3,000 additional security personnel. But the measures are unlikely to stem the flow of illegal migrants pouring across the 1,379-mile (2,219 km) frontier.

While many feel a duty to welcome the migrants, in part because Venezuela accepted Colombian refugees during that country’s long civil war, others fear losing jobs to Venezuelans being paid under the table. After locals held a small anti-Venezuelan protest last month, police evicted 200 migrants who were living on a sports field, deporting many of them.

Migrants are verbally abused by some Colombians who refuse them work when they hear their accents, said Flavio Gouguella, 28, from Carabobo. “Are you a Veneco? Then no work,” he said, using a derogatory term for Venezuelans.

Locals also worry about an increase in crime and support police efforts to clear parks and sidewalks. They already have to cope with smuggled subsidized Venezuelan goods damaging local commerce, and have grown tired of job-seekers and lending their bathrooms to migrants. Spooked by police raids, migrants in Maicao have abandoned the parks and bus stations where they had makeshift camps, opting to sleep outside shuttered shops. Female migrants who spoke to Reuters said they were often solicited for sex.

Despairing of finding work, some entrepreneurial migrants turn the nearly worthless bolivar currency into crafts, weaving handbags from the bills and selling them in Maicao’s park. “This was made from 80,000 bolivars,” said 23-year-old Anthony Morillo, holding up a square purse featuring bills with the face of South America’s 19th-century liberation hero Simon Bolivar. “It’s not worth half a bag of rice.”

Despite four months of violent anti-government protests last year, Chavez’s successor Maduro is expected to win a fresh six-year term at elections on April 22. The opposition, whose most popular leaders have been banned from running, are boycotting the vote. Go here for more photos.

Another Method on How China Spies

Posted on January 29, 2018January 29, 2018 by Denise Simon

There has been so much domestic chatter about the FISA court granting warrants on U.S. citizens or intercepting communications between foreign nationals/diplomats and Americans, but in related reading –> US and Britain refine their ability to tap into airline passenger’s mobile phones while they are in the air.

Meanwhile…. Image result for chinese computer network african union photo

China built and paid for the African Union’s computer network – but inserted a backdoor allowing it access to the continental organisation’s confidential information

In January 2017, the information technology unit at the African Union’s headquarters in Addis Ababa noticed something strange, according to a stunning investigation in French newspaper Le Monde.

Every night, between midnight and 2am, there was a strange peak in data usage – even though the building was almost entirely empty. Upon further investigation, the technicians noticed something even stranger. That data – which included confidential information – was being sent to servers based in Shanghai.

The African Union’s shiny new headquarters was built and paid for by the Chinese government, as a gift to its “African friends”. But when the building was officially opened in 2012, China left a backdoor into the African Union’s computer network, allowing it to access the institution’s secrets at will.

“According to several sources within the institution, all sensitive content could be spied on by China,” wrote Le Monde. “It’s a spectacular leak of data, spread from January 2012 to January 2017.”

The Chinese mission to the AU did not respond to Le Monde’s request for comment.

Once the problem was discovered, African Union officials acted quickly to fix it. The organisation acquired its own servers, and began encrypting its communications. In July 2017, a team of experts from Algeria – a country with a notoriously efficient intelligence community – along with cybersecurity experts from Ethiopia combed the building from top to bottom, looking for hidden microphones and other potential weaknesses.

China would not be the first supposedly friendly superpower to spy on the African Union. A separate investigation in December 2016, conducted by Le Monde and The Intercept, revealed that African Union officials were targeted for surveillance by British intelligence.

*** The CIA and likely the NSA have a handle on all this but does the White House and the Congress, such that there is a cyber policy? Nope…. Just because there is a Chinese network in the Africa Union, does not mean it does not affect connected networks…..

A senior CIA analyst said China is continuing to conduct aggressive cyberespionage operations against the U.S., contrary to claims by security experts who say Beijing curbed cyberattacks in the past few years.

“We know the Chinese are very active in targeting our government, U.S. industry and those of our partners through cyberespionage,” said Michael Collins, deputy assistant CIA director and head of the agency’s East Asia Mission Center.

“It’s a very real, big problem, and we need to do more about it,” Mr. Collins told a recent security conference in Aspen, Colorado.

Mr. Collins said solving the problem of Chinese cyberattacks will require an “all-of-government, all-of-country approach to pushing back against it.”

The comments contradict a number of cybersecurity experts who have said Beijing’s digital spying and information theft decreased sharply as a result of the 2015 agreement between President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

The two leaders announced the cyber deal with great fanfare and said both countries had agreed to curtail cyberespionage against businesses.

WH wants more Nukes, Why? Kanyon

Posted on January 18, 2018January 18, 2018 by Denise Simon

Yesterday, this website published an item regarding the Trump Executive Order requiring a total review and updated summary of the U.S. nuclear posture. Countless media outlets along with liberal think tanks wrote stinging critical articles on this review, mostly promoting the full elimination of nuclear weapons by the United States. This was the clear position of the Obama administration.

As this article is being published, the United Nations is holding a session on nuclear proliferation. Further, President Trump is at the Pentagon as this is being typed.

Trump and his national security team receives intelligence briefings and the summary below will likely explain why President Trump is right.

Image result for kanyon russia photo

Kanyon is designed to wipe out the enemy’s coastlines and make them unlivable for generations.

A key U.S. nuclear weapons document confirms that the Russian government is developing the most powerful nuclear weapon in more than a half century. A leaked copy of the Pentagon’s Nuclear Posture Review states that Russia is developing a “new intercontinental, nuclear-armed undersea autonomous torpedo.”

The existence of the weapon, known as Kanyon to the Pentagon and “Ocean Multipurpose System Status-6” to Russia, was first leaked by Russian television in November 2015. A test involving the Sarov-class submarine mothership was leaked in December 2016. The Nuclear Posture Review report, dated January 2018, lists the weapon as part of Russia’s underwater nuclear arsenal. Here’s a screen capture, with Kanyon circled in red:

Kanyon is reportedly a very long range autonomous underwater vehicle that has a range 6,200 miles, a maximum depth of 3,280 feet, and a speed of 100 knots according to claims in leaked Russian documents.

But what really makes Kanyon nightmare fuel is the drone torpedo’s payload: a 100-megaton thermonuclear weapon. By way of comparison, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima was 16 kilotons, or the equivalent of 16,000 tons of TNT. Kanyon’s nuke would be the equivalent of 100,000,000 tons of TNT. That’s twice as powerful as Tsar Bomba, the most powerful thermonuclear weapon ever tested. Dropped on New York City, a 100-megaton bomb would kill 8 million people outright and injure 6 million more.

Kanyon is designed to attack coastal areas, destroying cities, naval bases, and ports. The mega-bomb would also generate an artificial tsunami that would surge inland, spreading radioactive contamination with the advancing water. To make matters worse there are reports the warhead is “salted” with the radioactive isotope Cobalt-60. Contaminated areas would be off-limits to humanity for up to 100 years.

Kanyon is designed to get around American ballistic missile defenses, primarily the Ground-Based Interceptor missiles based in Alaska and California. Although GBI is meant to counter small numbers of intercontinental ballistic missiles from rogue countries such as Iran and North Korea, Russia wants to make it abundantly clear that it could still penetrate U.S. defenses even if they were scaled up to deal with larger, more powerful nuclear arsenals. More here.

The Pentagon writes:

In addition to modernizing ‘legacy’ Soviet systems, Russia is developing and deploying new nuclear warheads and launchers. These efforts include multiple upgrades for every leg of the Russian nuclear triad of strategic bombers, sea-based missiles, and land-based missiles. Russia is also developing at least two new intercontinental range systems, a hypersonic glide vehicle, and a new intercontinental, nuclear-armed, undersea autonomous torpedo. Link

The Pentagon report notes the Russians plan attacks from the erroneous position that a coercive nuclear “first use” policy might allow Russia to then negotiate terms favorable to itself (this is referred to as the escalate-to-de-escalate doctrine). The Pentagon writes:

Effective U.S. deterrence of Russian nuclear attack and non-nuclear strategic attack now requires ensuring that the Russian leadership does not miscalculate regarding the consequence of limited nuclear first use, either regionally or against the United States itself. Russia must instead understand that nuclear first-use, however limited, will fail to achieve its objectives, fundamentally alter the nature of a conflict, and trigger incalculable and intolerable costs for Moscow. Our strategy will ensure Russia understands that any use of nuclear weapons, however limited, is unacceptable. More here.

The full 64 page document is here.