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Hillary Clinton’s emails reveal link with Qatari royal family

RT | July 2, 2015

Emails of former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton published by the State Department expose that the Qatari Royal family made efforts to befriend the American politician through former British PM Tony Blair’s spouse, Cherie Blair.

Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser al-Missned, a wife of the former emir of Qatar and mother of the ruling emir, Sheikh Tamin bin Hamad Al-Thani, established contact with Clinton via Cherie Blair.

The Blair and Clinton families have been political and personal friends since the 1990s.

“Sheika Moser (Sheikha Mozah) has approached me privately saying they are keen to get their relationship with the USA onto a more positive footing and she was hoping for a ‘women to women’ one to one private meeting with you,” Cherie Blair wrote to Clinton in May 2009. “I am sure the conversation would not be confined to these issues but would be about the U.S./Qatar relationship generally,” Blair wrote, mentioning joint philanthropic interests among issues Clinton and Mozah could talk about.

Blair did her best to persuade Hillary Clinton to get acquainted with “someone who has real influence in Qatar,” the newly-released documents show.

“I could make time to meet in DC during the weeks of June 8th and 15th. Would that work?” Clinton gave in on May 26, promising to rearrange her schedule to “fit her time.”

Yet Sheikha Mozah was unable to meet with Clinton on suggested dates in June 2009 “due to prior commitments” and proposed to meet “immediately after Ramadan/Eid week of September 27, 2009.”

Altogether, on Tuesday the State Department released over 1,900 of Clinton’s emails (3,000 pages). Within this bulk of information, there are 19 emails that have to do with Clinton/ Mozah getting acquainted with each other.

The royal Al-Thanis family of Qatar is known for its fabulous wealth gathered on the back of the petroleum and liquefied natural gas trade. Over the last decades, Qatar rulers spent billions on increasing its influence in Western capitals. The Al-Thanis invested particularly heavily in London, the Guardian claims.

The scale of the Qatar royal family’s investment in the British capital remains largely unknown. Al-Thanis own Harrods, the Olympic village and Shard completely, along with certain property in Hyde Park. A quarter of Sainsbury’s, large share of Barclays and 8 percent of the London Stock Exchange all belong to them, as well as the US embassy building in Grosvenor Square.

Earlier this year it emerged that the Clinton Foundation allegedly received multiple foreign donations during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state.

A newly-released book accused the Clinton Foundation, run by presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, her husband Bill Clinton, and their daughter Chelsea, of accepting quid pro quo donations from foreign sources while Hillary was secretary of state.

It was revealed that governments that had received frequent criticism from the State Department for repressive policies – countries like Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Qatar – had donated to the Clinton Foundation and gained State Department clearance to buy caches of American-made weapons.

In late May, the FIFA corruption scandal also cast its shadow over the Clintons, as it emerged that the Clinton Foundation received at least $50,000 and as much as $100,000 from the football governing body.

“I don’t think there’s anything sinister in trying to get wealthy people in countries that are seriously involved in development to spend their money wisely in a way that helps poor people and lifts them up,” Hillary Clinton told NBC News in May.

The Guardian reports that the Blair family has done some favors for Qatar’s rulers, too.

Although Tony Blair stepped down from his post as PM in 2007, his influence remains in place. In 2012 he brokered a $50-billion commodities deal between Glencore and Xstrata, which brought him $1 million.

Later the same year the former Labor leader assisted the Qataris in getting a share in a £1-billion-valued group owning such prestigious hotel as Berkeley, Claridge’s and Connaught, the Guardian claims.

The Blairs’ charitable Faith Foundation, aimed at combating religious extremism, does not hesitate to accept donations from anyone, be it Rupert Murdoch or Ukrainian oligarchs.

In this regard, the Faith Foundation mirrors the Clinton Foundation, set up by the former US President Bill Clinton after leaving his post in 2001.

From 2009 up to 2013, the year the Ukrainian crisis erupted, the Clinton Foundation received at least $8.6 million from the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, which is headquartered in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, a new report claims.

The Clinton Foundation’s donor list includes some 200,000 names, among them foreign financial institutions and Wall Street-based financial organizations, international energy conglomerates and governments, the government of Qatar included, which allegedly has given between $1 million and $5 million in donations to the Clintons.

Read more:

‘Clinton Cash’ book alleges foreign donations to family foundation linked to political favors

Ukraine oligarch ‘top cash contributor’ to Clinton Foundation prior to Kiev crisis

July 2, 2015 Posted by | Corruption | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Repressive governments donated to Clinton Foundation, arms deals approved by Hillary’s State Dept. – report

RT | May 26, 2015

Nations openly chastised by the US for dismal human rights records donated billions to the Clinton Foundation, while gaining clearance for weapons deals approved by the Hillary Clinton-led US State Department, according to a new report.

As the Obama administration increased military weapons exports, Hillary Clinton’s State Department approved transfer of more than $300 billion worth of arms manufactured by US defense contractors to 20 nations that were or have since become donors of the Clinton Foundation, a major philanthropic organization run by the Clinton family. According to a review of available records of foundation donors by the International Business Times, those countries included governments that have received frequent criticism by the State Department for repressive policies.

“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,” IBT wrote.

Algeria, Kuwait, Oman, and Qatar were nations that directly donated to the Clinton Foundation during Clinton’s term as secretary of state, even as they were requesting weapons shipments. The donated money represents a loophole in US law regarding political contributions.

“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,” IBT noted. “But nothing prevents them from contributing to a philanthropic foundation controlled by policymakers.”

The reviewed sales — both commercial and Pentagon-brokered — represent those made during “three full fiscal years of Clinton’s term as secretary of state (from October 2010 to September 2012),” IBT reported. The deals made with the nations in question during this time add up to far more than arms agreements made with the same countries during the last three full fiscal years of George W. Bush’s administration, according to the report.

“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,” Meredith McGehee, policy director at the Campaign Legal Center, told IBT. “This shows why having public officials, or even spouses of public officials, connected with these nonprofits is problematic.”

The Clinton Foundation’s donor list has come under closer examination since Hillary Clinton announced she is seeking the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 2016. In April, the Clintons acknowledged they have made “mistakes” regarding transparency amid increased public scrutiny concerning donations from foreign entities, especially when Mrs. Clinton was secretary of state, from 2009 to 2013.

Earlier this month, former President Bill Clinton defended his family foundation’s donors.

“I don’t think there’s anything sinister in trying to get wealthy people in countries that are seriously involved in development to spend their money wisely in a way that helps poor people and lifts them up,” Mr. Clinton told NBC News.

The Clinton Foundation signed a foreign donor disclosure agreement just before Hillary Clinton became secretary of state, yet neither the department nor the White House raised issues with potential conflicts of interest regarding the weapons agreements.

IBT reported that in 1995 President Clinton signed a presidential policy directive demanding the State Department take into account human rights abuses when considering the approval of military equipment or arms purchases from US companies. Yet Mrs Clinton’s State Department ignored this stipulation, helping the Obama administration increase weapons transfers.

The State Department, under the aegis of Clinton, hammered the Algerian government in its 2010 Human Rights Report for “restrictions on freedom of assembly and association,” allowing “arbitrary killing,” “widespread corruption,” and a “lack of judicial independence.”

“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,” IBT reported. “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.”

IBT also reported that major US weapons manufacturers and financial corporations such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Goldman Sachs paid Bill Clinton lucrative speaking fees “reaching $625,000” just as arms deals they had an interest in were in the works with Mrs Clinton’s State Department.

Hillary Clinton had pledged during her Senate confirmation hearings in 2009 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.”

US weapons sales tripled in 2011 to a new yearly high of $66.3 billion, according to the New York Times, mostly driven by sales to Persian Gulf nations allied against Iran. This dollar total made up nearly 78 percent of all worldwide arms deals that year, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Reuters reported in January 2013 that the State Department office that has oversight of direct commercial arms sales “was on track to receive more than 85,000 license requests in 2012, a new record.”

The boom in arms sales by the Obama administration has continued to the present day, as Arab allies like Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates are using American-made fighter jets against Islamic State and for proxy wars in places like Yemen and Syria.

According to the Times, foreign weapons sales now represent 25 percent to 30 percent of revenue taken in by Lockheed Martin, one of the top US-based arms dealers.

May 27, 2015 Posted by | Corruption, Militarism, War Crimes | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

White House psychologist implicated in CIA torture now helping FBI

RT | May 8, 2015

Before the dust has had a chance to settle on the report detailing the American Psychologists Association’s complicity in the CIA torture program, the psychologist found to have violated the ethics code now appears to be helping the FBI do the same thing.

In late April, a 60-page report entitled ‘All the President’s Psychologists’ pointed to Susan Brandon as the White House architect behind the policies regulating the legality of an interrogator’s actions – something that goes against the APA’s own rulebook, which prohibits psychologists from making such judgments.

The document alleges the APA’s close coordination with the White House, the CIA and the Department of Defense on the formulation of a legal policy that would exempt the interrogators from prosecution, following a scandal involving allegation of torture at Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison. “Susan Brandon … played a central role in the development of the 2005 [Psychological Ethics and National Security] policy,” the report alleges – the second inquiry investigating the medical role in the practice.

“What we see is associations. And the associations with the apparent supervisor of [James] Mitchell and [Bruce] Jessen at each step of the process over a period of three years,” the report said then, in reference to the two masterminds of the CIA torture program, whom Brandon was allegedly in contact with in 2003, as evident from a string of emails.

Brandon’s complete role in the program is at this point unknown, but one particular email she was included on focuses on the pair “doing special things to special people in special places.”

“The issue here is not about what she thinks about torture; the issue is about what she did in the past to knowingly or unknowingly create a legal heat shield for the president using the ethics of the APA. That’s the issue. This is not a question of torture. It’s a question of alleged corruption,” says the report’s co-author and program director at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, Nathaniel Raymond, according to the Huffington Post.

Now Brandon is advising the FBI’s High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group – essentially the Obama’s administration continuation of the CIA program regarded as having crossed the line. She is tasked with research into determining whether a crime has been committed in the course of an interrogation.

The FBI has not officially commented on the claims yet. Journalists might not get a reply from Brandon anytime soon, as she’s still an HIG adviser and is not expected to break protocol – the association has a policy of operating in secrecy, according to fellow member Mark Fallon.

The initial reason for the government’s acceptance of the CIA torture program hinged, in part, on the presence of psychologists and their expertise acting as a check, as is evident from a 2005 Justice Department document.

The reason the APA had to be called in was apparently due to the CIA’s own psychologists’ refusal to sign off on the memo, claiming that the proposed assessments simply strayed outside of medical professionals’ competence.

As a result, Brandon’s Psychological Ethics and National Security policy became the document that could be “seen as opening the door for psychologists to fulfil a function that [CIA Office of Medical Services] health professionals were resisting,” according to the report.

Brandon’s own language went in a separate direction from the CIA doctors’, effectively paving the way for a psychologist’s role in judging the harm and effectiveness of an interrogation.

The APA has denied the report’s findings. Its own review of the complicity in the Bush-era program is ongoing.

Brandon’s role as one of the HIG’s top specialists is now under scrutiny, but she has defenders as well. Fallon, for one, has since said that Brandon “is a research scientist who was helping craft language, from what I can read in those emails, that might in fact be totally appropriate.”

“[Was] it a witting collaboration, or is it an unwitting person within the government who’s a research scientist looking to ensure that we’re at least learning lessons? I just could not conceive that she would ever do anything that would support degrading and inhumane treatment,” he added.

Read more: Study accuses psychologists group of complicity in CIA torture program

May 8, 2015 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Progressive Hypocrite, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

BND helped NSA spy on EU politicians & companies ‘against German interests’

RT | April 23, 2015

Germany’s BND intelligence agency spied on European politicians and companies for the NSA for over a decade, Spiegel Online revealed. But an internal probe showed that at least 40,000 of those spying requests were against German and EU interests.

Over the course of 10 years, the NSA sent the BND thousands of so-called ‘selectors,’ which included IP addresses, emails, and phone numbers, Spiegel reported.

Several times a day, the BND downloaded the NSA selectors into their monitoring system and used them to spy on targets. The results were sent to the German agency’s headquarters in Pullach for evaluation, and then to some extent to the NSA, Zeit Online revealed, adding that the NSA sent about 800,000 ‘selectors’ to the BND in total.

Among the selectors were European politicians, whose names were not revealed. It was mentioned that the list included French authorities. Among the companies spied upon were the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS) and Eurocopter.

Since at least 2008, BND employees felt that some of the selectors ran contrary to the mission profile of the intelligence agency and the goal of the German Foreign Ministry, as they were not covered by the 2002 Memorandum of Agreement between Germany and the US, aimed at combating global terrorism.

However, it wasn’t until 2013, in the midst of the Edward Snowden revelations, that an investigation into the spying activities took place. That probe revealed that 2,000 of the selectors actually violated German and Western European interests, with many used to spy on politicians. However, those revelations were not reported to the Chancellor’s Office. Instead, one of the BND’s department chiefs simply asked the NSA to stop making such requests.

But upon re-examination following parliamentary request, the BND came to the conclusion that up to 40,000 selectors were actually directed against Western European and German interests. The Chancellor’s Office was notified of the findings in March.

Chancellery Minister Peter Altmaier informed members of the parliamentary oversight committee of the latest developments on Wednesday. BND chief Gerhard Schindler was excluded from the meeting.

Konstantin von Notz, deputy parliamentary leaders of the Greens, told Leipziger Volkszeitung newspaper that he found it “hard to imagine” that the Chancellor’s Office was unaware of the collaboration between the two spy agencies.

“The limit has now been exceeded. The chancellor must explain the situation,” he added.

Left Party leader Gregor Gysi has called the collaboration a “scandal” and demanded an end to “conformism with the US administration,” Deutsche Welle reported.

April 23, 2015 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Economics | , , , , | Leave a comment

Ukraine oligarchs ‘top cash contributors’ to Clinton Foundation prior to Kiev crisis

RT | March 22, 2015

From 2009 up to 2013, the year the Ukrainian crisis erupted, the Clinton Foundation received at least $8.6 million from the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, which is headquartered in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, a new report claims.

That places Ukraine as the leading contributor among foreign donators to the Clinton Foundation.

In 2008, Viktor Pinchuk, who made a fortune in the pipe-building business, pledged a five-year, $29-million commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative, a program that works to train future Ukrainian leaders “to modernize Ukraine.” The Wall Street Journal revealed the donations the fund received from foreigners abroad between 2009-2014 in their report published earlier this week .

Several alumni of the program have already graduated into the ranks of Ukraine’s parliament, while a former Clinton pollster went to work as a lobbyist for Pinchuk at the same time Clinton was working in government.

The Pinchuk foundation said its donations to the Clinton-family organization were designed to make Ukraine “a successful, free, modern country based on European values.” It went on to remark that if Pinchuk was hoping to lobby the US State Department about Ukraine, “this cannot be seen as anything but a good thing,” WSJ quoted it as saying.

However, critics have pointed to some disturbing aspects regarding the donations, including the coincidence of the Ukrainian crisis, which began in November 2013, and the heavy amount of cash donations being made to the Clinton Foundation on behalf of wealthy Ukrainian businessmen. In any case, given that Hillary Clinton appears to be considering a possible run in the next presidential elections, more scrutiny will be devoted to her past work with the charity that bears the Clinton name.

First, as already mentioned, Clinton was serving as the US secretary of state at the time that the donations to her family’s charity were being made. Although it is true that the Clinton Foundation refused donations directly from foreign governments while Clinton was serving in the Obama administration, the door remained wide open to donations from public citizens like Pinchuk, who has advocated on behalf of stronger ties between Ukraine and the European Union.

Political connections in the Pinchuk family run deep. Not only did Viktor Pinchuk serve two terms as a Ukrainian parliamentarian, but his wife is the daughter of former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma.

After being introduced to former US President Bill Clinton by Doug Schoen, a political analyst and pollster who has worked for both Clintons, Pinchuk and his wife began making donations to Clinton-family charities, WSJ reported.

During Hillary Clinton’s time at the State Department, Schoen began work as a congressional lobbyist for the Ukrainian oligarch. Schoen defended his lobbying activities, saying there was no connection to Pinchuk’s hefty donations.

“We were not seeking to use any leverage or any connections or anything of the sort relating to the foundation,” he said.

Schoen said he and Viktor Pinchuk met on several occasions with Clinton aides including Melanne Verveer, a Ukrainian-American who holds membership in the influential Council on Foreign Relations, as well as the Trilateral Commission.

The purpose of these meetings, according to Schoen, was to encourage the US government to pressure Ukraine’s former President Viktor Yanukovich to release his jailed predecessor, Yulia Tymoshenko.

Whatever the case may be, Ukraine entered a period of severe crisis on November 21, 2013, when Yanukovich suspended plans for the implementation of an association agreement with the European Union. The announcement triggered mass protests that led to Yanukovich fleeing Kiev on February 22, 2014.

Social unrest eventually consumed the country, as the eastern part of the country attempted to gain more independence from Kiev. Recently, both sides have agreed to a tense ceasefire, hammered out last month in Minsk, Belarus by the leaders of Ukraine, Russia, France, and Germany.

Read more: Putin in film on Crimea: US masterminds behind Ukraine coup, helped train radicals

March 22, 2015 Posted by | Corruption | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

NYPD accused of editing Wikipedia pages for Eric Garner death, other scandals

RT | March 13, 2015

The New York Police Department is reviewing reports that computers connected to the NYPD’s own network edited the Wikipedia pages for some of the more infamous recent events to involve the force, including the choking death of Eric Garner.

Wikipedia articles pertaining to at least three individuals who died as a result of altercations with the NYPD, including Garner, were edited out of the department’s 1 Police Plaza headquarters, Capital New York reported Friday.

According to publicly available records of the online encyclopedia’s revision history, computers connected to Internet Protocol (IP) addresses traced back by the paper to NYPD headquarters edited — and sometimes attempted to delete — entries on alleged instances of police brutality and articles critical of the force’s conduct.

Along with a page on Garner — the Staten Island man who died last July after being placed in a chokehold by NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo — Wikipedia articles detailing no fewer than two others deaths involving the Big Apple’s boys in blue were altered by computers connected to the agency’s complex in downtown Manhattan, Kelly Weill reported for Capital New York this week.

Wikipedia pages for the NYPD’s so-called “stop-and-frisk” tactic, as well as recent scandals that have tarnished the force — such as the 2013 incident in which an undercover cop was caught up in a group beating on the West Side Highway — were edited from headquarters, Capital New York reported, along with the pages for Garner, Sean Bell and Amadou Diallo. Bell died in 2006 after undercover NYPD officers fired 50 times him and two other men, all unarmed, and Diallo was killed in 1999 when a cop mistook his wallet for a gun and opened fire.

Last December, someone connected through the NYPD’s network made multiple edits to the “Death of Eric Garner” page on Wikipedia, Weill reported, within hours of a grand jury’s decision not to charge NYPD Officer Pantaleo in the man’s death. “Garner raised both his arms in the air” was changed to “Garner flailed his arms about as he spoke,” Weill wrote, and “Use of the chokehold has been prohibited” was changed to “Use of the chokehold is legal, but has been prohibited.”

“Instances of the word ‘chokehold’ were replaced twice, once to ‘chokehold or headlock,’ and once to ‘respiratory distress,’” Weill reported, both times from the NYPD network.

With regards to the Bell shooting article, a user connected to the NYPD network initiated an effort to have the entry nixed altogether by filing a complaint on the website’s internal “Articles for deletion” page.

“He [Bell] was in the news for about two months, and now no one except Al Sharpton cares anymore. The police shoot people every day, and times with a lot more than 50 bullets. This incident is more news than notable,” the user wrote.

In 2006, according to Weill, a user of the NYPD network deleted 1,502 characters from the “scandals and corruption” section of Wikipedia’s “New York City Police Department” article. Two years later, another computer connected to the network deleted the entire “Allegations of police misconduct and the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB)” and “Other incidents” sections from the main NYPD page.

Weill, an intern with Capital New York, wrote that there are more than 15,000 IP addresses registered to the NYPD, and information about them can easily be found online for free. A simple computer script programed in Python ran those addresses through Wikipedia, she said, and then flagged instances in which edits were made.

“The matter is under internal review,” NYPD spokeswoman Det. Cheryl Crispin told Capital New York in an email.

Read more – Grand jury doesn’t indict NYPD officer accused in chokehold death

March 13, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Justice Dept set to charge NJ Senator Menendez with corruption

RT | March 6, 2015

An influential US senator will face federal corruption charges, concluding a two-year investigation into Sen. Robert Menendez (D-New Jersey), which has scrutinized a Florida eye doctor, underage prostitutes and accusations against the Cuban government.

Department of Justice prosecutors accuse Menendez, the senior senator from New Jersey and the ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee, used his powerful position to advance the business interests of Dr. Salomon Melgen, a close friend and financial benefactor, in exchange for gifts, several media outlets reported Friday afternoon. Attorney General Eric Holder has signed off on the requested charges, according to CNN.

The senator has consistently denied wrongdoing since the investigation became public in 2013.

“As we have said before, we believe all of Senator’s actions have been appropriate and lawful and the facts will ultimately confirm that,” Menendez spokesperson Tricia Enright said in a statement Friday. “Any actions taken by Senator Menendez or his office have been to appropriately address public policy issues and not for any other reason.”

The investigation began in the fall of 2012, when Menendez was running for reelection. A scandal erupted days before the vote, when he was accused of “inappropriate sexual activities with young prostitutes” on a 2010 trip to the Dominican Republic. Conservative news site the Daily Caller broke the story after GOP political operatives set up several Skype interviews with several women in the Dominican Republic who claimed the senator had paid them for sex.

According to the anonymous tip that launched the probe, Melgen provided the underage women, as well as free flights on his private plane, the Washington Post reported. The women later recanted their stories about meeting Menendez on the 2010 trip.

The New Jersey lawmaker vehemently denied that he employed any sex workers in the Dominican, and accused the Cuban government of hatching a plot to derail his political career; as the son of Cuban immigrants, he is one of several key Latinos in Congress aligned against any relaxation of the embargo on the island-nation.

Despite the women changing their stories, the FBI continued to investigate Menendez’s relationship with the Florida opthamologist.

The investigation began to focus on whether the senator intervened on Melgen’s behalf, asking Medicare to change its reimbursement policies that benefited the eye doctor to the tune of $8.9 million, money that he has since repaid, according to Politico.

Melgen was accused of overbilling the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) for his reimbursement for the drug Lucentis, a costly medication used to treat macular degeneration. During the billing dispute ‒ in 2009 and in 2012 ‒ Menendez urged the government agency to change its policy, which he said he considered to be unfair, the New York Times reported.

”The bottom line is, we raised concerns with CMS over policy and over ambiguities that are difficult for medical providers to understand and to seek a clarification of that and to make sure, in doing so, providers would understand how to attain themselves,” Menendez told the Associated Press in 2013.

In 2013, Menendez paid Melgen back $58,000 in return for the 2010 plane trips, and called his failure to disclose the flights ‒ as required by federal ethics laws ‒ an “oversight.” Along with the flights, the Florida doctor donated heavily to the senator’s campaign coffers, including $700,000 to a Democratic super PAC (political action committee) that spent heavily on Menendez’s 2012 reelection bid.

Prosecutors are also looking into whether the senator illegally advocated for Melgen in the Dominican Republic, where the opthamologist had a government contract for port screening equipment, CNN reported. When the US government was considering donating similar technology to the Caribbean nation, Menendez told both the State Department and the Commerce Department that the Dominican government was trying to get out of a contract with an unnamed American company that authorities there “[didn’t] want to live by.”

Melgen’s relationship with the senator isn’t the only one that might be mentioned in the government’s corruption charges against Menendez. The FBI also investigated his ties to the Isaias family. Brothers Roberto and William were banking magnates in Ecuador when they fled to the US after they were accused of embezzling tens of millions of dollars from the country’s largest bank before it collapsed, Politico reported. The New Jersey lawmaker is accused of illegally helping the brothers gain permanent residency while fighting their extradition cases, according to CNN. Menendez also assisted Roberto’s daughter Estefania with visa problems.

The Isaias family donated $10,000 to Menendez’s 2012 Senate campaign and more than $100,000 to the Democratic Party. The senator served as the chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee ‒ the party’s chief fundraiser for upper chamber candidates ‒ from 2009 to 2011.

If Menendez is unable to remain in office due to the corruption charges, it is unclear who might replace him, the Washington Post reported. New Jersey Democrats are focusing on winning the governorship when current Gov. Chris Christie (R) leaves office in 2017, and members of the state’s delegation in the House are not likely to run for the Senate seat.

March 6, 2015 Posted by | Corruption, Wars for Israel | , , , , | Leave a comment

US admits 1980s aid to Israel’s H-bomb program

RT | February 13, 2015

Conceding to a federal lawsuit, the US government agreed to release a 1987 Defense Department report detailing US assistance to Israel in its development of a hydrogen bomb, which skirted international standards.

The 386-page report, “Critical Technology Assessment in Israel and NATO Nations,” likens top Israeli nuclear facilities to the Los Alamos and Oak Ridge National Laboratories that were key in the development of US nuclear weaponry.

Israelis are “developing the kind of codes which will enable them to make hydrogen bombs. That is, codes which detail fission and fusion processes on a microscopic and macroscopic level,” said the report, the release of which comes before Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s March 3 speech in front of the US Congress in which he will oppose any deal that allows Iran’s legal nuclear program to persist.

“I am struck by the degree of cooperation on specialized war making devices between Israel and the US,” Roger Mattson, a formerly of the Atomic Energy Commission’s technical staff, said of the report, according to Courthouse News.

The report’s release earlier this week was initiated by a Freedom of Information Act request made three years ago by Grant Smith, director of the Washington think tank Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy. Smith filed a lawsuit in September in order to compel the Pentagon to substantially address the request.

“It’s our basic position that in 1987 the Department of Defense discovered that Israel had a nuclear weapons program, detailed it and then has covered it up for 25 years in violation of the Symington and Glenn amendments, costing taxpayers $86 billion,” Smith said during a hearing in late 2014 before Judge Tanya Chutkan in US District Court for the District of Columbia.

Smith described in his federal court complaint how those federal laws were violated by the US in the midst of Israel’s budding nuclear program.

“The Symington Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 prohibits most U.S. foreign aid to any country found trafficking in nuclear enrichment equipment or technology outside international safeguards,” Smith wrote.

“The Glenn Amendment of 1977 calls for an end to U.S. foreign aid to countries that import nuclear reprocessing technology.”

In November, Judge Chutkan asked government lawyers resistant to the report’s release why it had taken years for the government to prepare the report for public consumption.

“I’d like to know what is taking so long for a 386-page document. The document was located some time ago,” Chutkan said, according to Courthouse News Service.

“I’ve reviewed my share of documents in my career. It should not take that long to review that document and decide what needs to be redacted.”

The government’s representatives in the case — Special Assistant US Attorney Laura Jennings and Defense Department counsel Mark Herrington — initially said confidentiality agreements required a “line by line” review of the Defense Department’s report. They later shifted, arguing that its release is optional and not mandatory, as “diplomatic relations dictate that DoD seeks Israel’s review.”

Smith and the US agreed that the government would redact sections of the report on NATO countries, though the passages on Israel remain intact.

“The capability of SOREQ [Soreq Nuclear Research Center] to support SDIO [Strategic Defense Initiative Organization, or “Star Wars”] and nuclear technologies is almost an exact parallel of the capability currently existing at our National Laboratories,” said the report, written by the Institute for Defense Analysis for the Department of Defense.

“SOREQ and Dimona/Beer Sheva facilities are the equivalent of our Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge National Laboratories…[and have] the technology base required for nuclear weapons design and fabrication.”

The report’s authors Edwin Townsley and Clarence Robinson found that Israel had Category 1 capability regarding its anti-tactical ballistic missile and “Star Wars” weapons programs.

“As far as nuclear technology is concerned the Israelis are roughly where the U.S. [w]as in the fission weapon field in about 1955 to 1960,” the report said. “It should be noted that the Israelis are developing the kind of codes which will enable them to make hydrogen bombs.”

In a statement on the report’s release, Smith said Thursday, “Informal and Freedom of Information Act release of such information is rare. Under two known gag orders — punishable by imprisonment — U.S. security-cleared government agency employees and contractors may not disclose that Israel has a nuclear weapons program.”

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s planned address before the US Congress was controversially arranged by Republican leadership without consultation of congressional Democrats or the White House.

The speech will occur weeks before Netanyahu will seek reelection, and is to center around his opposition to any agreement with Iran over its [civilian] nuclear program, a deal the US — while levying heavy sanctions on Tehran — has pursued despite protests from its preeminent ally [sic] in the Middle East, Israel.

Tehran’s nuclear program is legal under the terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to which Israel is one of the few United Nations members that is not a signatory.

February 13, 2015 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Kiev MPs try to fool US senator with ‘proof’ of Russian tanks in Ukraine

RT |February 13, 2015

MPs in Kiev hoodwinked a US senator, presenting his office with photos of columns of Russian military hardware allegedly roaming Ukrainian territory. The photos turned out to have been taken during the conflict in South Ossetia back in 2008.

The photos were “presented to the Armed Services Committee from a delegation from Ukraine in December,” Senator Jim Inhofe’s communications director Donelle Harder told The Washington Free Beacon.

The Americans planned to publish the photos with credits to the Ukrainian MPs, and “they were fine with that,” the spokesperson said.

Yet, after thorough checking, images of the Russian convoys turned out to have been taken years ago, in 2008, during Russia’s conflict with Georgia.

“We are currently making calls to our sources,” Harder said.

“The Ukrainian parliament members who gave us these photos in print form as if it came directly from a camera really did themselves a disservice,” Senator Inhofe said in a statement.

“I was furious to learn one of the photos provided now appears to be falsified from an AP photo taken in 2008,” the lawmaker wrote.

At the same time the revealed forgery “doesn’t change the fact that there is plenty of evidence Russia has made advances into the country with T-72 tanks and that pro-Russian separatists have been killing Ukrainians in cold blood,” the US senator maintains.

February 13, 2015 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Pentagon: Missile defense ‘kill vehicle’ still plagued with problems after years of failure

RT | September 9, 2014

A Pentagon investigation of the “kill vehicle” warhead, part of a weapons system plagued with years of failed tests, found dozens of quality control problems, according to a new report.

The Pentagon’s inspector general said in the report released Monday that the “kill vehicle,” a warhead meant to intercept missiles, fell short of quality standards in 48 specific cases, including issues with software testing, supply chain demands, and design changes, making the kill vehicle “susceptible to quality assurance failures.”

The warhead, known as the Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle (EKV) is built by Raytheon Co. and is part of the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system led by Boeing Co. EKVs are launched by a Ground Based Interceptor (GBI), “which is designed to engage high-speed ballistic missile warheads in space,” according to Raytheon. The current procurement cost for each GBI is around $75 million, said Missile Defense Agency Director Vice Admiral James Syring in July 2013.

The inspector general report, the first of two on the EKV, said the US Missile Defense Agency has agreed with concerns over the interceptor warhead and has started to address 44 of the 48 issues identified.

The GMD missile defense system was deployed in 2004 even before it completed testing to be able to counter what the George W. Bush administration claimed was a looming missile threat from North Korea.

The EKV finally conducted its first successful missile intercept in June after years of failed attempts.

“A combination of cost constraints and failure-driven program restructures has kept the program in a state of change. Schedule and cost priorities drove a culture of ‘use-as-is’ leaving the EKV as a manufacturing challenge,” the report said.

“With more than 1,800 unique parts, 10,000 pages of work instructions, and 130,000 process steps for the current configuration, EKV repairs and refurbishments are considered by the program to be costly and problematic and make the EKV susceptible to quality assurance failures,” it added.

The Pentagon inspector general wrote that most quality management systems on the weapons program were in compliance, but problems were evident. The report found 15 major and 25 minor quality problems with Raytheon’s EKV work. Boeing’s work on the entire system had six major and one minor problem.

Most of the issues identified in the report have been corrected, the inspector general said, but Raytheon is still working on four issues.

Raytheon has a $636 million development and sustainment contract to produce the EKV, though the Pentagon is seeking one of the major defense contracting firms to develop a more reliable, second generation EKV, Reuters reported. Weapons giants Boeing, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin Corp. are all in the running.

September 9, 2014 Posted by | Economics, Militarism | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

EU admits Putin’s comment on ‘storming Kiev’ taken out of context

RT | September 5, 2014

The EU has admitted that Vladimir Putin’s words about “taking Kiev in two weeks” had been “made public out of context,” said a spokeswoman for the European Commission President in a written response to The Wall Street Journal.

José Manuel Barroso’s spokesperson Pia Ahrenkilde-Hansen said on Thursday the EU is going to address the issue “through diplomatic channels, not in the press.”

“I can only add that the president of the Commission informed his colleagues in the European Council in a restricted session of the conversations he had with President Putin. Unfortunately part of his intervention was made public out of context,” Ahrenkilde-Hansen wrote to the WSJ.

Last week Barroso gave a briefing on his phone conversation with President Vladimir Putin, describing the conversation as “very frank.” During the talk, the EU functionary alleged the Russian president had said that if necessary military occupation of the Ukrainian capital would take just a matter of weeks.

Italia’s La Repubblica was among the very first to overblow the scandal, saying that José Manuel Barroso had told European leaders who attended Saturday’s EU summit in Brussels that replying to Barroso’s accusations about regular Russian troop operating in Ukraine, President Putin had said that “If I wanted to, I could take Kiev in two weeks.”

An EU official has confirmed to the WSJ that Putin’s note about Russian forces being able to take Kiev within two weeks did take place during last week’s telephone call, but the context of the comment was not clear.

The unexpected divulgement by the top EU official immediately sparked a political scandal involving Russia’s high ranking officials and diplomats, who accused Barroso of both intentionally wrenching Russian leader’s remarks out of context as well as breaching diplomatic protocol.

According to Russia’s permanent representative to the EU, Vladimir Chizhov, Putin’s words were “clearly taken out of context.”

On Tuesday, September 2, Moscow threatened to reveal the full recording of the controversial phone call “to remove all misunderstandings” if European Commission President Jose Manual Barroso doesn’t object in the next two days, Chizhov said.

Russia’s presidential aide Yury Ushakov lashed at the EU Commission president’s behavior, stressing it is “incorrect and goes beyond the bounds of diplomatic practices.”

“If that was really done, it is not worthy of a serious political figure,” Ushakov added.

As the EU official acknowledged on Thursday, September 4, President Putin possibly made the comment to strengthen Russia’s position of not and never being involved militarily in Ukrainian crisis.

READ MORE:

Moscow ready to expose ‘Kiev in two weeks’ spin with Barroso call transcript

‘Did he mean Alaska?’ Obama wrongly blames Russia for ‘trying to reclaim lands lost in 19th century’

September 5, 2014 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , , | 1 Comment

Wall Street wins again: Bank of America settlement with US government is insufficient, critics say

RT | August 22, 2014

While the US government touted its “record” settlement reached this week with Bank of America for mortgage fraud that helped fuel the 2008 recession, the details of the agreement indicate yet another light punishment for an offending Wall Street titan.

Bank of America agreed to a $16.65 billion settlement with federal authorities for selling toxic mortgages and misleading investors, the US Justice Department announced Thursday.

“This historic resolution – the largest such settlement on record – goes far beyond ‘the cost of doing business,’” Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement.

“Under the terms of this settlement, the bank has agreed to pay $7 billion in relief to struggling homeowners, borrowers, and communities affected by the bank’s conduct. This is appropriate given the size and scope of the wrongdoing at issue,” Holder added.

Yet the $7 billion in “relief” is considered a “soft money” fine, in which the bank will reduce some homeowners’ mortgages. Very few homeowners are eligible for the refinancing pursuant to the settlement, AP reported. Those who are eligible may need to wait years to see any settlement aid, as payouts will be ongoing through 2018.

Those already in the hole following a lost home due to foreclosure or a short sale – when a lender takes less money for a home than what the borrower owes – are unlikely to benefit from the terms of the settlement.

Outside of the $7 billion for consumers, the Bank of America settlement includes a $5 billion cash penalty and $4.6 billion in remediation payments. Large portions of the deal will be eligible to claim as business expenses, allowing the mega bank to treat them as tax write-offs.

The Bank of America settlement includes the appointment of an independent monitor to review the consumer relief portion of the agreement. It is yet to be determined when the monitor will be named.

The deal echoes similar agreements the government reached with other Wall Street players, like JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup, for crimes committed surrounding the recent economic recession.

JPMorgan Chase came to a $13 billion settlement in November. The $4 billion supposedly offered to homeowner relief has yet to benefit many in need, according to the advocacy group Home Defenders League. Citigroup reached a $7 billion deal with the government.

Critics of these deals have blasted the US government for its ongoing, lax attitude regarding mass crimes committed by powerful banks that, they say, are not adequately punished for wrongdoing.

“[T]he latest round of settlements deals with misconduct that even though the banks are getting off on the cheap again, the underlying abuses don’t strike at the heart of the too big to fail mortgage securitization complex,” said Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism.

“So the [Obama] Administration can feign being a little more bloody-minded. Even so, the greater and greater proportion in recent deals of funny money relative to real dough show that this is simply another variant of an exercise in optics.”

No major bank executive has faced criminal charges following the mortgage crisis. Without significant retribution for banks and executives that knowingly passed off fraudulent mortgages, Wall Street players will continue to act with impunity, argued Dean Baker, economist and director of the Center for Economic & Policy Research.

“Knowingly packaging and selling fraudulent mortgages is fraud. It is a serious crime that could be punished by years in jail,” Baker wrote. “The risk of jail time is likely to discourage bankers from engaging in this sort of behavior.”

William D. Cohan, a former senior mergers and acquisitions banker, wrote in the New York Times that, not only has the government barely punished those on the hook for Wall Street crimes, the Justice Department has also offered “sanitized” versions of events that led up to the crimes in its accounts given to the public following investigations.

“The American people are deprived of knowing precisely how bad things got inside these banks in the years leading up to the financial crisis, and the banks, knowing they will be saved the humiliation caused by the public airing of a trove of emails and documents, will no doubt soon be repeating their callous and indifferent behavior,” Cohan wrote.

Bank of America resisted the settlement at first, claiming nearly all bad mortgage securities under scrutiny came from Countrywide and Merrill Lynch. Both firms were purchased by Bank of America amid the 2008 financial crisis.

A federal judge in Manhattan ruled in a separate case that Bank of America was liable for the pre-merger mortgages, issuing a penalty of $1.3 billion. The ruling pushed the bank to agree to the settlement. Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan said Thursday that the deal is “in the best interests of our shareholders and allows us to continue to focus on the future.”

Meanwhile, consumers advocates said the faulty mortgages will continue to haunt homeowners and their own vision of the future.

“It is hard to see how these settlements provide relief commensurate with the harm caused,” said Kevin Stein, associate director of the California Reinvestment Coalition, according to AP. “Countless families and communities have been devastated by predatory loans that should not have been made.”

Following the Thursday announcement of the settlement, Bank of America’s stock rose more than 4 percent.

August 22, 2014 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Economics | , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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