Land of the Free?

THE FBI IS BUILDING A NATIONAL WATCHLIST THAT GIVES COMPANIES REAL TIME UPDATES ON EMPLOYEES

Ava Kofman

February 4 2017, 3:19 p.m.

THE FBI’S RAP BACK program is quietly transforming the way employers conduct background checks. While routine background checks provide employers with a one-time “snapshot” of their employee’s past criminal history, employers enrolled in federal and state Rap Back programs receive ongoing, real-time notifications and updates about their employees’ run-ins with law enforcement, including arrests at protests and charges that do not end up in convictions. (“Rap” is an acronym for Record of Arrest and Prosecution; ”Back” is short for background). Testifying before Congress about the program in 2015, FBI Director James Comey explained some limits of regular background checks: “People are clean when they first go in, then they get in trouble five years down the road [and] never tell the daycare about this.”

A majority of states already have their own databases that they use for background checks and have accessed in-state Rap Back programs since at least 2007; states and agencies now partnering with the federal government will be entering their data into the FBI’s Next Generation Identification (NGI) database. The NGI database, widely considered to be the world’s largest biometric database, allows federal and state agencies to search more than 70 million civil fingerprints submitted for background checks alongside over 50 million prints submitted for criminal purposes. In July 2015, Utah became the first state to join the federal Rap Back program. Last April, aviation workers at Dallas-Ft. Worth Airport and Boston Logan International Airport began participating in a federal Rap Back pilot program for aviation employees. Two weeks ago, Texas submitted its first request to the federal criminal Rap Back system.

Rap Back has been advertised by the FBI as an effort to target individuals in “positions of trust,” such as those who work with children, the elderly, and the disabled. According to a Rap Back spokesperson, however, there are no formal limits as to “which populations of individuals can be enrolled in the Rap Back Service.” Civil liberties advocates fear that under Trump’s administration the program will grow with serious consequences for employee privacy, accuracy of records, and fair employment practices.

A fingerprint scanning device that allows for portable FBI-certified fingerprint scanners to be used anywhere.

 

Photo: Alex Hicks Jr./The Spartanburg Herald-Journal/AP

Indefinite Retention

In typical federal background checks, the FBI expunges or returns the fingerprints it collects. But for the Rap Back system, the FBI retains the prints it collects on behalf of companies and agencies so that it can notify employers about their employee’s future encounters with law enforcement. The FBI has the license to retain all submitted fingerprints indefinitely — even after notice of death. Employers are even offered the option to purchase lifetime subscriptions to the program for the cost of $13 per person. The decision to participate in Rap Back is at employers’ discretion. Employees have no choice in the matter.

“This type of infrastructure always tends to undergo mission creep,” explained the ACLU’s Jay Stanley, referring to how agencies often find secondary uses for data beyond its original function.

There are no laws preventing the FBI from using the data it collects for other purposes, said Jeramie Scott, an attorney with the Electronic Privacy Information Center. A massive trove of digital fingerprints collected by the FBI, he noted, could be used to open up devices like smart phones without the owner’s consent. In addition, Scott pointed out that the FBI often collects a photo of Rap Back participants’ faces. “Although the FBI has stated that they do not use these photos in facial recognition searches,” he said, “there is no legal barrier from the Bureau changing this policy.” The agency is no stranger to mission creep. As documents obtained by EPIC show, the FBI’s use of facial recognition searches is increasing and the NGI database continues to expand.

In January, EPIC obtained two years of monthly statistics for the NGI system under the Freedom of Information Act. The summary sheets show that the database’s expansion has been fueled by submissions of non-criminal identifiers, such as the prints submitted for background checks. Fact sheets from January 2015 through August 2016 show the database growing at a much higher rate from its collection of data from civil settings than from criminal justice purposes. During that period, civil submission rates constituted nearly 70 percent of new submissions. “Through the Rap Back program the FBI is collecting biographical and biometric data on potentially millions of civilians for purposes not associated with criminal justice,” Scott said.

At least two dozen separate state laws already include provisions for various kinds of individuals to be entered into the Rap Back Service. Slideshows obtained by EPIC through a FOIA request reveal that the FBI planned as early as 2013 for the Rap Back program to be introduced into various employment-related legislation across states. In a slide identifying “legislating hurdles,” the FBI listed the need to identify state legislators to “champion” the program and to “attach needed language to other legislation already on calendar.” The program’s greatest victory in this respect is a little-known provision of the Affordable Care Act, which awards grants for states to develop the means to implement Rap Back for long-term home healthcare providers as well as other “direct patient access” employees. According to an explainerprovided by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, it is possible that Congress may require states to enroll in Rap Back in order to receive federal funding for health care programs.

In June, Hawaii became the first state to put gun owners into its Rap Back system, which will notify law enforcement whenever a gun owner is arrested for a crime in any state. Jay Stanley, of the ACLU, said that such a real-time database for monitoring might seem like a good idea in theory — until the same logic is applied to all kinds of other groups in practice. In Utah, for instance, anytime an immigrant with a driver’s license generates any sort of criminal record, the state’s Rap Back program will notify ICE, possibly triggering deportation proceedings.

What the program counts as “triggering events” differs depending on how subscribers configure their systems. In Missouri, where public school teachers are entered into the program, a police captain told a local paper that scanning fingerprints triggers the release of closed records, including charges that are not prosecuted and judicial decisions that result in dismissals or not guilty findings.

Such a broad mandate could “provide employers with an unprecedented window into employees’ lives,” according to Jennifer Lynch, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In domestic violence cases reported to the police, for instance, both the abuser and victim can be arrested. “Depending on workplace discrimination laws,” Lynch said, “this could allow employers to use a minor criminal infraction as a reason to demote or fire an employee.”

Lynch said it’s possible that employees could be fired for an arrest where they were exercising their First Amendment rights: filming public officials, attending protests, blocking streets. “It’s unclear if an employer that takes action based on the arrest would know the arrest is tied to First Amendment protected activity.”

Faulty Records

Outdated and incorrect criminal history information already leads to workers losing their jobs. Labor and privacy advocates fear that the national Rap Back program, which draws on a massive NGI database and depends on data sharing between several agencies, will only make these errors worse.

FBI and state databases are not known for their accuracy. As the National Employment Law Project reported in 2013, as many as 50 percent of the FBI’s arrest records fail to include information on the final disposition of a case — that is, whether a person was convicted, acquitted, or if charges against them were dropped. Because many people who are arrested are never charged or convicted, a high percentage of the FBI’s records incorrectly indicate a subject’s involvement with a crime.

“Often this is because states fail to update their own records, and the FBI does not proactively verify the accuracy of information coming from the states,” Lynch explained. “This has a much greater impact on communities of color because all criminal history systems include a disproportionate number of African Americans, Latinos, and immigrants.” An estimated 1.8 million workers a year are subject to FBI background checks, according to the NELP.

An FBI spokesperson from the Rap Back program said that the program “works diligently with all agencies to maintain accurate Identity History Records” and that if discrepancies exist, teams are in place to assist subscribers and individuals.

Jay Stanley, of the ACLU, views the Rap Back program as part of a larger trend toward the monitoring and policing of everyday life. “The whole purpose of program,” he said, “is for people to be fired.”

https://theintercept.com/2017/02/04/the-fbi-is-building-a-national-watchlist-that-gives-companies-real-time-updates-on-employees/

Dark Arts

Dark Arts

Posted: 03 Feb 2017 11:54 PM PST

How a dark money network is taking power on both sides of the Atlantic.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 3^rd February 2017

It took corporate America a while to warm to Donald Trump. Some of his positions, especially on trade, horrified business leaders. Many of them favoured Ted Cruz or Scott Walker. But once he had secured the nomination, the big money began to recognise an unprecedented opportunity.
Trump was prepared not only to promote the cause of corporations in government, but to turn government into a kind of corporation, staffed and run by executives and lobbyists. His incoherence was not a liability but an opening: his agenda could be shaped. And the dark money network that some American corporations had already developed was perfectly positioned to shape it.
Dark money is the term used in the US for the undisclosed funding of organisations involved in political advocacy. Few people would see a tobacco company as a credible source on public health, or a coal company as a neutral commentator on climate change. To advance their political interests, such companies must pay others to speak on their behalf.
Soon after the Second World War, some of America’s richest people began setting up a network of thinktanks to promote their interests. These purport to offer dispassionate opinions on public affairs. But they are more like corporate lobbyists, working on behalf of those who founded and fund them. These are the organisations now running much of the Trump administration.
We have no hope of understanding what is coming until we understand how the dark money network operates. The remarkable story of a British member of parliament provides a unique insight into this network, on both sides of the Atlantic. His name is Liam Fox. Six years ago, his political career seemed to be over.
The scandal he had caused by mixing his private and official interests, that was highly embarrassing to David Cameron’s government, had forced him to resign as Secretary of State for Defence. But today he is back on the front bench, with a crucial and sensitive portfolio: Secretary of State for International Trade.
In 1997, the year the Conservatives lost office to Tony Blair, Liam Fox, who sits on the hard right of the parliamentary Conservative party, founded an organisation called The Atlantic Bridge. Its patron was Margaret Thatcher. On its advisory council sat the future cabinet ministers Michael Gove, George Osborne, William Hague and Chris Grayling. Fox, who became a leading campaigner for Brexit, described the mission of The Atlantic Bridge as “to bring people together who have common interests”. It would defend these interests from “European integrationists who would like to pull Britain away from its relationship with the United States”.
The Atlantic Bridge was later registered as a charity. It was part of the UK’s own dark money network: only after it collapsed did we discover the full story of who had funded it.
Its main sponsor was the immensely rich Michael Hintze, who worked at Goldman Sachs before setting up his own hedge fund, CQS. Hintze is one of the Conservative party’s biggest donors. In 2012, he was revealed as a funder of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, that casts doubt on the science of climate change. As well as making cash grants and loans to The Atlantic Bridge, he lent Liam Fox his private jet to fly to and from Washington.
Another funder was the drug company Pfizer. It paid for a researcher at The Atlantic Bridge called Gabby Bertin. She went on to become David Cameron’s press secretary, and now sits in the House of Lords: Cameron gave her a life peerage in his resignation honours list.
In 2007, a group called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) set up a sister organisation, The Atlantic Bridge Project, to run the US arm of Fox’s initiative. ALEC is perhaps the most controversial of the corporate-funded thinktanks in the US. It specialises in bringing together corporate lobbyists with state and federal legislators to develop “model bills”. The legislators and their families enjoy lavish hospitality from the group, then take the model bills home with them, to promote as if they were their own initiatives.
ALEC has claimed that over 1000 of its bills are introduced by legislators every year, and one in five of them becomes law. It has been heavily funded by tobacco companies, the oil company Exxon, drug companies and Charles and David Koch: the billionaires who founded the first Tea Party organisations. Pfizer, that funded Gabby Bertin’s post at The Atlantic Bridge, sits on ALEC’s corporate board. Some of the most contentious legislation in recent years, such as state bills lowering the minimum wage, bills granting corporations immunity from prosecution and the “ag-gag” laws, forbidding people to investigate factory farming practices, were developed by ALEC.
To run the US arm of Atlantic Bridge, ALEC brought in its director of international relations, Catherine Bray. She is a British woman who had previously worked for the Conservative member of the European Parliament Richard Ashworth and the UKIP member Roger Helmer. She has subsequently worked for the man who brought us Brexit, Daniel Hannan. In 2015, she married Wells Griffith, who became the battleground states director for Trump’s presidential campaign.
Among the members of The Atlantic Bridge’s US advisory council were the ultra-conservative senators James Inhofe, Jon Kyl and Jim DeMint. James Inhofe is reported to have received over $2 million in campaign finance from coal and oil companies. Both Koch Industries and ExxonMobil have been major donors. Coincidentally, he has described man-made global warming as “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people”.
Jon Kyle, now retired, is currently acting as the “sherpa” guiding Jeff Sessions’s nomination as Trump’s attorney general through the Senate.
Jim DeMint resigned his seat in the Senate to become president of the Heritage Foundation, which is probably, after ALEC, the second most controversial thinktank in America. It was founded with a large grant from Joseph Coors, heir to the Coors brewing empire, then built up with money from the banking and oil billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. Like ALEC, it has been richly funded by the Koch Brothers. Heritage, under DeMint’s presidency, drove the attempt to ensure that Congress refused to pass the federal budget, temporarily shutting down the government. Fox’s former special adviser at the Ministry of Defence, an American called Luke Coffey, now works for the foundation.
The Heritage Foundation is now at the heart of Trump’s administration. Its board members, fellows and staff comprise a large part of his transition team. Among them are Rebekah Mercer, who sits on Trump’s executive committee, Steven Groves and Jim Carafano (State Department), Curtis Dubay (Treasury) and Ed Meese, Paul Winfree, Russ Vought and John Gray (Management and Budget). CNN reports that “no other Washington institution has that kind of footprint in the transition”.
Trump’s extraordinary plan to cut federal spending by $10.5 trillion was drafted by the Heritage Foundation, which called it a “Blueprint for a New Administration”. Russ Vought and John Gray, who moved onto Trump’s team from Heritage, are now turning this blueprint into his first budget.
It will, if passed, inflict devastating cuts on healthcare, social security, legal aid, financial regulation and environmental protections, eliminate programmes to prevent violence against women, to defend civil rights and fund the arts, and will privatise the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Trump, as you follow this story, begins to look less like a president and more like an intermediary: implementing an agenda that has been handed down to him.
In July last year, soon after he became trade secretary, Liam Fox flew to Washington. One of his first stops was a place he has visited often over the past 15 years: the office of the Heritage Foundation, where he spoke among others to Jim DeMint. A freedom of information request reveals that one of the topics raised at the meeting was the European ban on American chicken washed in chlorine: a ban that producers hope the UK will lift under a new trade agreement. Afterwards, Fox wrote to DeMint, looking forward to “working with you as the new UK government develops its trade policy priorities, including in high value areas that we discussed such as defence.”
How did Fox get to be in this position, after the scandal that brought him down six years ago? The scandal itself provides a possible clue: it involved a crossing of the boundaries between public and private interests. The man who ran the UK branch of The Atlantic Bridge was his friend Adam Werrity, who operated out of Michael Hintze’s office building. Werrity’s work became entangled with Liam Fox’s official business as defence secretary. Werritty, who carried a business card naming him as Fox’s adviser but was never employed by the Ministry of Defence, joined the secretary of state on numerous ministerial visits overseas, and made frequent visits to Fox’s office.
By the time details of this relationship began to leak, the Charity Commission had investigated The Atlantic Bridge and determined that its work didn’t look very charitable. It had to pay back the tax from which it had been exempted (Hintze picked up the bill). In response, the trustees shut the organisation down. As the story about Adam Werrity’s unauthorised involvement in the business of government began to grow, Fox made a number of misleading statements. He was left with no choice but to resign.
So when Theresa May brought him back into government, and gave him a portfolio that should, in principle, involve setting clear boundaries between public and private interests, it was as strong a signal as we might receive about the intentions of her government.
The trade treaties that Fox is charged with developing set the limits of sovereignty. US food and environmental standards tend to be lower than ours, and they will become lower still if Trump gets his way. Any trade treaty we strike will create a common set of standards for products and services. Trump’s administration will demand that ours are adjusted downwards, so that US corporations can penetrate our markets without having to modify their practices. All the cards, following the Brexit vote, are in US hands: if the UK resists, there will be no treaty. What May needed – even before Trump became president – was a person prepared to strike such a deal.
As the Financial Times reports, “the election of Donald Trump has transformed the fortunes of Liam Fox”. He is now “an indispensable member of Theresa May’s front bench team”. The shadow diplomatic mission he developed through The Atlantic Bridge plugs him straight into the Trump administration.
Long before Trump won, campaign funding in the US had systematically corrupted the political system. A new analysis by US political scientists finds an almost perfect linear relationship, across 32 years, between the money gathered by the two parties for congressional elections and their share of the vote. But there has also been a shift over these years: corporate donors have come to dominate this funding.
By tying our fortunes to those of the United States, the government binds us into this system. This is part of what Brexit is about: European laws protecting the public interest were portrayed by Conservative Eurosceptics as intolerable intrusions on corporate freedom. Taking back control from Europe means closer integration with the US. The transatlantic special relationship is a special relationship between political and corporate power.
In April 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt sent the US Congress the following warning. “The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism.” It is a warning we would do well to remember.
www. monbiot.com

Operation Chaos

Operation Chaos: Trump Will Ignite a Powder Keg in the Middle East

By Ramzy Baroud

February 02, 2017 "Information Clearing House" - "Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Newly inaugurated US President Donald Trump is about to do just that, reversing an historical course that has been in the making for one hundred years.

The inexperienced, demagogic politician hardly understands the danger that lies in his decision to move the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

If he goes through with this, he is likely to unleash an episode of chaos in an already volatile region.

The move, which is now reportedly in the ‘beginning stages’, is not a mere symbolic one, as some naively reported in western mainstream media.

True, American foreign policy has been centered mostly on military power, rarely historical fact.

But Trump, known for his thoughtlessness and impulsive nature, is threatening to eradicate even the little common sense that governed US foreign policy conduct in the Middle East.

If the new president moves forward with his plan, unsympathetic to Palestinian pleas and international warnings, he is likely to regret the unanticipated consequences of his action.

History for the Wise

A century ago, British forces under the command of General Sir Edmund Allenby occupied the Palestinian Arab city of Jerusalem.

That ominous event in December 1917, has disturbed the cultural and political equilibrium that existed in Palestine for nearly a millennia.

It also initiated a war that has proved the longest and one of the most bloody and destabilizing in modern human history.

Although Palestine was wrestled from the hand of its governing bodies operating under the auspices of the Ottoman Empire, its new British rulers understood the unequalled importance of Jerusalem to its people.

That understanding was always present, even when France and Britain signed the Sykes-Picot agreement in May 1916, dividing Ottoman territories amongst themselves, Jerusalem’s status was designated as an international area due to its shared religious significance.

The same emphasis regarding the neutrality of Jerusalem was made time and again, including in the League of Nations’ decision in 1922 to give Britain a political mandate over Palestine, and the United Nations resolution to divide Palestine into two countries, one Arab and one Jewish, in November 1947.

While that envisaged Palestinian state never actualized (thanks to numerous obstacles placed by the US and Israel), Israel became a reality in May 1948. Mere months after an armistice agreement was reached, Israel declared Jerusalem as its capital in December 1949.

It was then that biblical mythology was remolded to fit political exigencies.

Israel’s first Parliament (Knesset) declared in January 1950 that “Jerusalem was, and had always been the capital of Israel.”

The “was” and “always been” are references to a twisted interpretation of history that has no place in modern international law, of which Israel is never a follower to begin with.

After 1500 years of Canaanite rule over Palestine, the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea fell under the rule of numerous invaders, including the Philistines, the Israelites, the Phoenicians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Macedonians, the Romans, the Arabs, the Crusaders, and then it was ruled by various Islamic Caliphates from 1291 until the British mandate in 1922.

The Israelites control barely lasted for 77 years and it is largely contested that Israeli Jews of today are even blood relatives of the groups that inhabited Palestinians 2000 years ago.

Yet that was enough for the modern Israeli national myth, which is now championed by the most right-wing, religious extremists in both the United States and Israel.

In 1967, Israel occupied the rest of historic Palestine, including Palestinian East Jerusalem, annexing the city in 1980.

The international community has continually rejected and condemned the Israeli occupation, with repeated emphasis on Jerusalem.

Countries around the world, even those who are considered allies of Israel, including the United States reject Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem, and refuse Israeli invitation to relocate their embassies from Tel Aviv to the illegally-occupied city.

The American Exception

The United States’ attitude towards Jerusalem, however, has been marred with contradictions. Since 1995, the US position has been divided between the historically pro-Israel US Congress, and equally pro-Israel, but slightly more pragmatic White House.

In October 1995, the US Congress passed the Jerusalem Embassy Act. The act passed by an overwhelming majority in both House and Senate. It called Jerusalem the undivided capital of Israel and urged the State Department to move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

The US administration at the time protested the violation of protocol as such a decision is the responsibility of the executive branch, not lawmakers beholden to Israel’s influential lobby in Washington.

The other dilemma is that if the US walks away from international consensus on the matter it both loses the little credibility it had as a ‘peace broker’ and would be left to contend with the likely terrible consequences included political instability and violence.

It is true that Jerusalem has tremendous spiritual significance for Muslims, Christians and Jews. But the uninterrupted cultural and religious significance it had for Palestinian Christians and Muslims alike makes it unpatrolled as an economic, political and cultural hub as well.

For many years, US administrations under Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama have signed a presidential waiver that deferred the Congressional bill six months at a time.

The last time the waiver was signed by former President Obama was on December 1, 2016.

Bull in China Shop Foreign Policy

Throughout his campaign for the White House, Trump made numerous, wholesale, often contradictory promises. While initially pledged to keep a similar distance between Palestinians and Israel, he later reversed his position, to adopt that of Israel’s rightwing government.

Now, the opportunistic real-estate mogul enters the White House with an eerie agenda that looks identical to that of the current Israeli government of right-wingers and ultra-nationalists.

“We have now reached the point where envoys from one country to the other could almost switch places,” wrote Palestinian Professor, Rashid Khalidi, in the New Yorker.

He wrote, “The Israeli Ambassador in Washington, Ron Dermer, who grew up in Florida, could just as easily be the US Ambassador to Israel, while Donald Trump’s Ambassador-designate to Israel, David Friedman, who has intimate ties to the Israeli settler movement, would make a fine Ambassador in Washington for the pro-settler government of Benjamin Netanyahu.”

The Israeli right is almost in a state of political euphoria. Not only the superfluous references to a ‘peace process’ and a Palestinian state is over, butthey now have a free hand to build illegal Jewish settlements (colonies) in occupied Jerusalem unhindered.

New bills are springing in the Israeli Knesset to annex even the Jewish settlements rendered illegal by Israel’s own definitions, and to remove any restriction on new settlement construction and expansion.

The Trump administration has no qualms with that; to the contrary, this falls squarely in the agenda of the new rulers of the United States who now control the legislative and executive branches.

Careful What You Wish For

The odd thing is that the US is about to violate the very international consensus (as in US-led western consensus) regarding the conflict in Palestine.

Speaking to the Paris peace conference on January 15, French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault warned Trump from the “very serious consequences” that await in case the US embassy is in fact moved to Jerusalem.

The French and other European countries are aware that such a move would end the US-led ‘peace process’ along with the thus far futile quest for a two state solution.

However, this should be the least of anyone’s concern, since both the ‘peace process’ and the ‘two-state solution’ charade have been largely anAmerican investment to maintain US leadership, power and influence over the conflict in Palestine.

The US and its western allies certainly had the needed clout and power to achieve a peaceful and just resolution to the conflict, if that was indeed their overriding priority.

They failed to do so over the course of 25 years, starting in the Madrid Talks in 1991 and ending with the pitiful Paris conference on January 15.

Past American failures notwithstanding, the Trump administration gamble in moving the US embassy is likely to ignite a political fire throughout Palestine and the Middle East with horrific and irreversible outcomes.

Palestinians and Arabs understand that moving the embassy is far from being a symbolic move, but a carte blanche to complete the Israeli takeover of the city, including its holy sites, and complete the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Muslims and Christians.

That escalation will certainly, and explicably lead to violence. Vital US interests in the Middle East could and will also suffer the consequences of such an imprudent move.

Palestinian officials and religious figures alike condemned the US decision. A top Palestinian official referred to it as a declaration of war on Muslims.

Considering the significance of Jerusalem to Palestinian Muslims and Christians, and hundreds of millions of believers around the world, Donald Trump might indeed be igniting a powder keg that would further derail his already embattled presidency.

While some in the mainstream western media are already predicting ‘a fresh wave of Palestinian violence’ shall the embassy be relocated, the new US administration must think carefully before embarking on such self-destructive moves.

Just because Trump intends to reverse the legacy of his predecessor, doesn’t mean the new American president should begin his legacy by inviting more violence and pushing an already volatile region further into the abyss.

– Dr. Ramzy Baroud has been writing about the Middle East for over 20 years. He is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author of several books and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. His books include “Searching Jenin”, “The Second Palestinian Intifada” and his latest “My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story”. His website is

 www.ramzybaroud.net.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/46355.htm

Trump and Iran

What Flynn Could Learn From Kerry About Iran

By Trita Parsi

February 02, 2017 "Information Clearing House" - Even the most inexperienced commander knows not to escalate without having de-escalatory options at hand. That is the most troubling issue with National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s harsh “notice” to Iran yesterday in response to Tehran’s ill-advised missile test. Flynn’s statement may have been bluster. The Donald J. Trump presidency is only a few days old and there is pressure to signal its firmness and the approach it will take in the Middle East. But bluster without having established a channel for de-escalation is profoundly dangerous, and it is likely to increase rather than decrease the administration’s challenges with Iran.

Most pundits and journalists have pressed the White House to specify what it would do in case Iran continues testing ballistic missiles or aiding Houthi rebels in Yemen (a connection that Flynn greatly exaggerated in his statement). Will the U.S. fire at Iranian vessels in the Persian Gulf? Will it impose new sanctions? Will it walk away from the Iranian nuclear deal?

But the more important question is not how the U.S. will escalate, but how it will calm down the situation once it has achieved its yet-to-be revealed objectives. This is what remains unclear.

It is disappointing but unsurprising, given Trump’s campaign and his chosen advisors, that this administration has begun its tenure by raising tensions with Iran without first having established lines of communication with the higher echelons of the Iranian leadership. Twitter is not an acceptable line of communication for U.S. leadership to engage the world. The Obama administration did the opposite ― it first tried to establish strong, authoritative channels before it made any positive gesture or issued any threats.

These lines of communication not only helped secure a nuclear deal that prevented both war with Iran and blocked Iran’s potential paths to a nuclear weapon, but the channels also proved crucial in securing the freedom of 10 U.S. sailors after they had accidentally drifted into Iranian waters. Instead of a standoff that could have taken months to resolve, the Americans were released unharmed within only 16 hours.

The Trump administration does not have any such channels and has not bothered to create them either. While former Secretary of State John Kerry developed an extremely useful rapport with his Iranian counterpart Javad Zarif over the course of two years of negotiations, this channel has not been handed over to Secretary Rex Tillerson (who wasn’t confirmed by the Senate until Wednesday).

And even if an attempt was made now to put it in place, it would begin under the worst circumstances precisely because Trump’s first communique to Iran was a threat. Moreover, Iran is hypersensitive to American signals as it enters the early phases of its political season. The history of U.S.-Iran relations in the past 35 years is ripe with examples of how such tough talk is more likely to cause Tehran to dig in its heels than to cause it to back down.

Kerry secured the release of the 10 American sailors precisely because he did not engage in such language. As I reveal in my forthcoming book Losing an Enemy ― Obama, Iran and the Triumph of Diplomacy, Zarif was first informed about the 10 American sailors as he was leaving a theater in Tehran. His first concern was to ensure that the U.S. wouldn’t make any public threats against Iran as that would dramatically complicate their release and force him to adopt a much harsher position. As Zarif likes to say, Iranians are allergic to threats. “Knowing the United States,” Zarif told me, “the language they’d use would be ‘Iran must release our guys.’ And then Iran would take it as a threat. And then we would have responded, and then this whole thing would have taken a life of its own.”

Fortunately, he already had a scheduled call with Kerry that same evening, so there was time to convey this to Kerry before he would address the media. “Do you know the story?” Kerry asked. “Had you not called, I would have called you,” Zarif replied. Kerry pressed Zarif to quickly release the sailors, arguing the incident otherwise would jeopardize both the nuclear deal, which was nearing “Implementation Day” when sanctions would be lifted in return for Iran’s completion of initial nuclear steps, as well as the secret prisoner swap that was in the making. Zarif, in turn, pressed Kerry not to issue any public threats. If Kerry’s message was, “Don’t let this unravel the nuclear deal,” Zarif’s argument was, “We don’t want the sailors, so don’t force us to keep them by making threats.”

Zarif and Kerry spoke to each other five times that day. Instead of making threats, the Obama administration kept its cool and quietly negotiated the sailors’ release. Clearly, the Iranians were cooperating, and the channels of communication were open and effective. President Obama saw no value in raising the issue in the State of the Union Address, even though the news had broken. By contrast, his critics rushed to declare that it was the start of another hostage crisis and portrayed him as weak, indecisive and foolish, all the while blatantly ignoring the intrusion of the sailors into Iranian waters. “The fact that you have an active conversation going on diplomatically means you’re not going to be talking about this,” a White House official explained.

Had Kerry acted like Flynn, it is possible these 10 Americans could still be stuck in Iran. The prisoner exchange likely would have fallen part, resulting in a prolonged imprisonment for former Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian and several American citizens. And it is extremely difficult to imagine any nuclear deal coming to fruition while American sailors are detained ― torpedoing the Iran deal and leaving the U.S. and Iran on a path to war.

Rather than following Kerry’s successful diplomatic path, Flynn has put the U.S. in an escalatory cycle with no clear exit. Iran is likely to respond to Washington’s notice with another provocative measure, which in turn will beget yet another ― and perhaps a more tangible ― threat from Washington. At some point, what started off as bluster, may turn into a real military conflict or even open warfare precisely because Flynn and the Trump administration prioritized threats over direct diplomacy.

Amateur hour at the Trump White House continues.

Trita Parsi President, National Iranian American Council

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/46361.htm

White Helmet ‘War Porn’ Stars

White Helmet ‘War Porn’ Stars Banned from Oscars Ceremony

FEBRUARY 3, 2017 BY VANESSA BEELEY 2 COMMENTS

21st Century Wire says…

An unexpected silver lining to the cloud of Trump’s visa ban, came to light a few days ago when it was announced that the White Helmet representatives would not be permitted entry into the US, under the new legislation that will be enforced for the next ninety days. The multi million dollar, NATO and Gulf state funded, pseudo humanitarian, Nusra Front aka Al Qaeda “civil defence” group, has, yet again, been thwarted, in its quest for red carpet honour and recognition.

The following is a report from RT:

Two members of the controversial White Helmets organization that operates in Syria have been barred from attending the Academy Awards, the producer of a documentary featuring the NGO said. The film has been nominated for an Oscar.

White Helmets leader Raed Saleh and cinematographer Khaled Khateeb, both Syrian, were invited to the 2017 Academy Awards by Joanna Natasegara, the producer of a short documentary about the organization available on Netflix. The documentary film ‘The White Helmets’ has been nominated for an Oscar, along with four other contestants.

Natasegara expressed her outrage over the new development in a statement:

“They’ve been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize,” she said. “These people are the bravest humanitarians on the planet, and the idea that they could not be able to come with us and enjoy that success is just abhorrent.”

The travel ban for seven predominantly Muslim countries imposed by US President Donald Trump last week also affected acclaimed Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi, whose film The Salesman is nominated in the Foreign Language category, and Syrian woman Hala Kamil, the subject of Watani: My Homeland, another nomination for the short documentary award.

This is not the first time Saleh has been banned from entering the United States. In April 2016, he had to return to Istanbul after discovering that his visa had been cancelled by the US. This prevented him from receiving an award in Washington at a gala party supported by White Helmets sponsor USAID.

The White Helmets, who also call themselves the Syrian Civil Defense, have been touted as a non-political aid organization focused on saving lives in war-torn Syria. The Oscar-nominated documentary depicts them in line with that narrative.

Critics say it is a foreign-funded propaganda vehicle closely aligned with Islamist militant groups opposing the Syrian government. Members of the group have been accused of stealing vehicles, rescue equipment, and its very name from the government-run Syrian Civil Defense, an organization with a decades-long record of rescue operations in Syria.

The following is a film produced by Steve Ezzedine of Hands Off Syria, Sydney exposing the Netflix documentary as a propaganda vehicle for this Al Qaeda support group:

SEE: http://21stcenturywire.com/2017/02/03/white-helmet-war-porn-stars-banned-from-oscars-ceremony/

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LINKS & MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE WHITE HELMETS:

Original investigative report: 
The REAL Syria Civil Defence Exposes Fake White Helmets as Terrorist-Linked Imposters

White Helmets: ‘A Pseudo NGO’
CrossTalk: ‘White Helmets, Really?’ with Vanessa Beeley, Eva Bartlett & Patrick Henningsen

Report by Patrick Henningsen
AN INTRODUCTION: Smart Power & The Human Rights Industrial Complex

Open Letter by Vanessa BeeleyWhite Helmets Campaign for War NOT Peace – Retract RLA & Nobel Peace Prize Nominations

Staged Rescue Videos
(VIDEO) White Helmets: Miraculous ‘Rag Doll Rescue’

Mainstream Media: Fake News
CNN’s Claim That ‘White Helmets Center in Damascus’ Was Hit by a Barrel Bomb

White Helmets and Mayday Rescue:
The Syrian Civil Defence: Wikipedia

21st Century Wire compilation of key information on the White Helmets:
Who are the Syria White Helmets?

21st Century Wire article on the White Helmets:  
Syria’s White Helmets: War by Way of Deception ~ the “Moderate” Executioners

Cory Morningstar report:
Investigation into the funding sources of the White Helmets, Avaaz, Purpose, The Syria Campaign

Report by Scott Ritter:
The ‘White Helmets’ and the Inherent Contradiction of America’s Syria Policy

Open letter to Canada’s NDP Leader on Nobel Prize:
Letter to NDP from Prof. John Ryan protesting White Helmet nomination for RLA and Nobel Peace Prize

White Helmets: Bogus Claims:
‘We Saved 60,000’ – Bogus Claim by Syria’s White Helmets Raises Even More Questions

READ MORE SYRIA NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire Syria Files

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