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
As Iran nuclear deadline passes, narrative battle heats up
By Sharmine Narwani | RT | June 30, 2015
It’s D-Day in Vienna, and the parties sitting across the negotiating table still haven’t ironed out terms to settle a 12-year standoff over Iran’s nuclear program. Expect this deadline to be missed. And prepare for a lot of hot air to fill its space.
The “hot air” is calculated narrative-spin from a range of players that seek to 1) scuttle a deal, 2) increase pressure/create leverage at the negotiating table, or 3) frame an upcoming agreement in language favorable to one side.
And the Western media serves as a willing handmaiden in this petty game. Journalists thought nothing of casting a global question mark over Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif’s pre-arranged one-day detour to Tehran – even though his six P5+1 counterparts were also off “seeing to business.”
Western pundits weighed in en masse after Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s June 23 speech, accusing him of rejecting key provisions of the Lausanne framework agreement and walking back from earlier promises.
“It’s not true at all,” says one senior foreign ministry official, appearing perplexed – if not skeptical – at these charges. “Iran is under severe pressure from Western media,” he insists, adding: “It’s not a fair trend. No one seems to care about what Iran is doing, what’s on the table. We just want a fair reflection of what is going on at these negotiations.”
If anything, the Iranians charge that the US team “seems to have experienced buyer’s remorse after Lausanne,” and backtracked on, or revisited, some already ‘resolved’ issues.
According to various sources, at this late date, US negotiators are opening up discussion points that Iran thought they’d already dealt with. These include access to Iranian military sites (which Iran has already rejected), some technical issues around the Fordo nuclear facility, research and development parameters, and the critical issue around the timeline established for staged sanctions relief.
Clearly, for the Iranians, one of the main objectives of these negotiations is the removal of all international sanctions related to the Islamic Republic’s nuclear file.
An official explains: “The sanctions-lifting is not a day’s job – we don’t expect this. The US needs to do some preparatory work to change the culture of sanctions. They have to inform the companies and financial institutions and remove the political and cultural bias/fear of doing business with Iran – the Americans refer to this as the ‘psychological effect of sanctions’ – and this needs at least six months of hard, hard work, including a lot of legal work.”
But the Iranians want the US to work in parallel and simultaneously on sanctions-removal alongside Iran as it undertakes its physical task of disassembling agreed-upon aspects of its nuclear program. Based on technical calculations from official sources, it will take Iran a maximum of three months to implement these steps.
The most significant setback at this stage of negotiations is in fact the insertion of the US Senate into the process. Post-Lausanne, the Senate passed a bill that demanded oversight over the Iran nuclear deal and so Congress gets approximately 52 days to fiddle with whatever gets approved in Vienna.
“It’s a massive setback,” says an Iranian official. “Even if there is an agreement on June 30, we have nothing until the Senate approves it. If Iran had passed a similar bill, do you think the media would be so silent about this development?”
“If we want to be fair, the sanctions removal process should start together, in parallel with Iran’s work, to establish trust. It’s doable within three months. Otherwise – what? We destroy the heart of the Arak (hard water) reactor and then the US changes its mind?” This is a sentiment heard from many Iranians interviewed.
What do the Americans say about this, I ask? “The US is saying we’re still thinking about this.”
The same lack of definition surrounds the much-hyped issue of access to Iran’s military facilities. In the past few months, Western media has highlighted this storyline ad nauseum – to the annoyance of the Iranians at the negotiating table today.
“We never accepted this military site access. Ayatollah Khamenei’s recent speech never established this as a ‘new’ red line – it was one of our biggest problems with the US fact sheet after Lausanne. The Americans created a problem for themselves by saying this repeatedly.”
Iran has agreed in principle on IAEA access based on the ‘Additional Protocol’ which leaves it up to the individual member-state to decide on whether to provide access to requested sites.
The protocol specifically states that “it is permissible not to allow” access – and that inspectors can only use this access for “local environmental sampling,” which the Iranians know full well can be done from outside a facility’s perimeters.
“Even the US demands ‘managed access’ of the IAEA when it does its US inspections,” says a source familiar with the nuclear organization’s procedures.
Says an Iranian close to negotiators: “This issue of ‘access’ is really more an issue that speaks to the integrity of the American position at the negotiating table.”
The thing about Vienna on D-Day is that it is packed to the rafters with journalists of every stripe, straining for the tiniest tidbit of information to get a reading on what is happening at that table.
They congregate until well past midnight in the hotel lobby where most of them stay… or inside the large white tent erected outside the Palais Coburg – site of the talks – next door.
Information is the currency of the media, and when the stakes are this high and on-the-record news is so scarce, every bit of information becomes “newsworthy” – never mind that much of it is purposefully flogged by various parties for gain inside the deal-making room.
It is driving the Iranians nuts. “At this stage we still have joint common interests otherwise we couldn’t sit at the table,” says one. “But the sense outside the negotiating room is that there is a crisis.”
And the media fuels it.
Just last night, for instance, an Iranian official shot down an Agence France Press (AFP) report on the Islamic Republic’s readiness to allow inspections of its military sites. He insists the article, which is based entirely on the claims of a ‘senior US official’, “deliberately distorted information to influence the negotiations.”
“We will never allow anyone to inspect military sites because they are not relevant to the IAEA inspections.” He added: “We have serious doubt about the intentions of those who are pushing for access to our defense installations.”
The Iranian government has, on two separate occasions in 2005, “voluntarily provided access” to the IAEA to inspect a single “suspected site” called Parchin. According to an official source, “we did it because we wanted to close – once and for all – the issue of the ‘potential military dimension’ (PMD), even though we know it’s a fabricated story and we knew the US knew it was fabricated.”
“These (the PMD) are not real issues. They are more a matter of the US trying to prove the credibility of past claims. It was wrong, they knew they were wrong, but they have a need to stick to the script… Kerry himself has said the PMD issue has been distorted ‘a little bit’ – to put it mildly.”
“We don’t care how much they want to be tough on the PMD,” says the source. “It is a security case that doesn’t have any end,” which is why Iran’s top leadership has drawn a firm ‘red line’ under matters that have no reasonable or logical relevance to the IAEA’s task at hand.
Iran’s few red lines are there for good reason.
Prompted by the IAEA’s suspicions, in 2008, the Islamic Republic provided information on their EBW (Exploding Bridgewire) program to the nuclear agency. One of the authors of this study was Darioush Rezaeinejad, a postgraduate electrical engineering student. “The IAEA said this has dual-use applications,” says an Iranian familiar with the case. “Darioush was one of five Iranian scientists assassinated later, in front of his family – the knowledge that he had got him killed.”
“We are not afraid of our past so we are ready to do any kind of activity to clarify this for the whole world,” he explains. “But only within a process that would not lead to the death of our scientists.”
Iran today refuses to provide information or access to 18 scientists, academics and military personnel the US would like to interview. Western media cites this tidbit as though it is a sign of bad faith negotiating – like the Iranians have something to hide. But ask Iranian officials about this sticking point and you learn: “The list of 18 is specifically an American demand. It was a demand already rejected by Iran before the Lausanne framework agreement three months ago. It isn’t even on the table – the Americans haven’t brought up the issue again.”
There are times in Vienna when an agreement seems further away than ever. Everyone agrees that the seven countries at the table want this done, the US and Iran – for different reasons – at the forefront of the ‘hopefuls.’
But when you look at the nitty-gritty of what is being discussed and how far apart the sides are on simple things like ‘process’ and ‘positioning,’ it isn’t hard to wonder whether an Iran nuclear deal is even in the cards.
The press corps huddling over lattes in the lobby may be better-employed researching articles on “what if there is no Iran deal?” After all, as Iran’s Zarif said just a few days ago, “If there’s no deal, it’s not the end of the world.”
Sharmine Narwani is a commentator and analyst of Middle East geopolitics. She tweets @snarwani
READ MORE: Iran, P5+1 extend interim nuclear deal until July 7 to win more time for talks
New rule could prevent website owners from protecting their identity
RT | June 25, 2015
A new rule over domain registration would prevent people from using a third party to sign up for a commercial website. People often use proxies to protect their contact information from the public, particularly when their work is controversial.
Under the new rules, people registering websites for non-personal purposes would have to disclose their name, address and phone number, all of which could be easily searchable by anyone. The plan has privacy advocates like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) opposed to the idea and alarmed that website owners could “suffer a higher risk of harassment, intimidation and identify theft.”
“The ability to speak anonymously protects people with unpopular or marginalized opinions, allowing them to speak and be heard without fear of harm. It also protects whistleblowers who expose crime, waste, and corruption,” wrote EFF in a statement.
At first blush, the change would seem to only affect commercial website registration. But a personally created website that offers a community benefit, but also features ads to help defray the costs of running the site, could be judged as commercial, and has been in past domain name disputes.
It is not clear yet if the organization that oversees the bureaucratic process of naming online domains, the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), will include the broader definition of commercial in the new rules.
ICANN has put up the rules for public comment until July 7. To date, thousands of people have logged comments.
One individual named Brad urged ICANN to “respect internet users’ rights to privacy and due process … Private information should be kept private.”
Another, Sarah Brown, told ICANN that her websites allow her to earn a living full-time online, but she has been stalked, harassed, and had content from her site stolen. She uses a third-party proxy to prevent people from finding her sites, her home address and phone number.
“I implore you to think through the consequences of removing our private WHOIS information. It serves as a buffer to protect us from the crazy people in this world,” wrote Brown. “We are living in unsafe times, where jealousy and greed overtake compassion and ethics. We are real people, with real lives, who can end up in real danger with our information in the wrong hands.” […]
ICANN said the rule change is being driven by discussions with law enforcement. EFF said it is also being driven by US entertainment companies and others who want new tools to discover the identities of website owners and then accuse them of copyright and trademark infringement, without a court order. US entertainment companies told Congress in March that privacy for domain registration should be allowed only in “limited circumstances”.
Read more: US anti-fraud law makes deleting browser history a crime punishable by 20yrs in jail
NATO plans 40,000-strong rapid response force in E. Europe
RT | June 22, 2015
NATO’s rapid response Spearhead Force in Europe might reach 40,000 troops, a tenfold growth from the initial 4,000-strong force deployed last year, the military alliance’s chief said. Most of these troops will be stationed near Russian borders.
“NATO defense ministers … [will] make a decision to further increase the strength and capacity of the 13,000-strong NATO Response Force (NRF) to 30,000 or 40,000 troops,” Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Monday.
The decision is to be officially announced during NATO’s defense ministers meeting on June 24-25 in Brussels.
The troops will be under the command of 6 HQs to be stationed in Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Romania. The Spearhead Force will include Special Forces and rapid response teams, enforced with marine and air components.
A new rapid reaction force ready to be deployed within 48 hours was initially intended to consist of 4,000 troops.
The Spearhead Force has already held its first military drills codenamed Noble Jump in Poland. The war games became “the biggest reinforcement” of defense since Cold War times, said Stoltenberg, adding that the alliance is facing challenges from “the behavior of a more assertive” Russia.
Last week, Stoltenberg criticized Russia for announced plans to add to its nuclear arsenal 40 newly made intercontinental ballistic missiles in 2015.
“This nuclear saber-rattling of Russia is unjustified. It’s destabilizing and it’s dangerous. This is something which we are addressing, and it’s also one of the reasons we are now increasing the readiness and preparedness of our forces,” Stoltenberg said during a news briefing in Brussels last Tuesday.
Russian President Vladimir Putin made the announcement about further development of the strategic nuclear armed forces in response to a report that the US is seriously considering deployment of heavy weapons to new NATO member states on permanent basis.
The chill in Russia-US relations already resemble the worst years of the Cold War, yet experts warn that further escalation of the Ukrainian crisis could lead to an open standoff between Moscow and Washington.
If Washington opts to send armaments to Kiev authorities, as some Republicans congressmen want, Moscow would react immediately, experts quoted in US media believe.
Washington should pursue a diplomatic solution for its conflict with Russia, former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul told The New York Times.
“The US-Russia conflict is not going to be resolved in weeks or months,” McFaul said. “This challenge will take years, even decades.”
Read more
NATO conducting biggest beef up of defenses since Cold War – alliance chief
Moscow will respond to NATO approaching Russian borders ‘accordingly’ – Putin
Bush-era officials can be sued for abuse of 9/11 detainees – court
RT | June 18, 2015
A federal appeals court reinstated a lawsuit against former Justice Department and law enforcement officials for violating the rights of men perceived as Arab or Muslim who were rounded up after 9/11 and held for months, sometimes in solitary confinement.
In a 2-1 ruling, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals decided that Bush-era heads of the Department of Justice, FBI and Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), can be sued for violating the constitutional rights of 762 men, described as “out-of-status aliens” because they either overstayed their visas or worked without permits.
The case, known as Turkmen v. Ashcroft, was filed in 2002 by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). It names as defendants the former Attorney General John Ashcroft, former FBI Director Robert Mueller and former commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service James Ziglar. The CCR is also suing the officials in charge of the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn, New York, and the Passaic County Jail in Paterson, New Jersey, where the plaintiffs were being held for anywhere from three to eight months.
A federal court dismissed the case in 2013, after concluding there was no evidence the officials had any “intent to punish” the plaintiffs. However, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision, ruling that the Justice Department officials were not entitled to “qualified immunity,” and that the confinement conditions of the immigrants were actually established with “punitive intent.”
“We believe, then, that the challenged conditions—keeping detainees in their cells for twenty‐three hours a day, constructively denying them recreation and exposing them to the elements, strip searching them whenever they were removed from or returned to their cells, denying them sleep by bright lights—were not reasonably related to a legitimate goal, but rather were punitive and unconstitutional,” judges Rosemary Pooler and Richard Wesley wrote in the majority opinion.
Pooler and Wesley said the government officials presumed that “all out‐of‐status Arabs or Muslims were potential terrorists until proven otherwise,” and justified the detentions on national security grounds.
The lawsuit claims the mass detentions were part of the FBI’s “hold-until-cleared policy,” holding the men described as “potential recruits” for Al-Qaeda solely because of their Middle Eastern, North African, or South Asian origin. Of the eight current plaintiffs, six are Muslim, one is Hindu, and one is Buddhist.
“It might well be that national security concerns motivated the defendants to take action, but that is of little solace to those who felt the brunt of that decision,” the two judges wrote.
“We are thrilled with the court’s ruling,” said CCR attorney Rachel Meeropol. “The court took this opportunity to remind the nation that the rule of law and the rights of human beings, whether citizens or not, must not be sacrificed in the face of national security hysteria.”
Benamar Benatta, one of the plaintiffs, said he was “delighted” by the ruling. Cleared for release on November 14, 2001, Benatta remained in solitary confinement until April 30 the following year. … Full article
DHS whistleblower ‘almost loses child’ for probing immigration & corruption
RT | June 12, 2015
After voicing concerns about an obscure US immigration program for foreign investors, a Department of Homeland Security agent says she was barred from owning a personal firearm and almost lost custody of her one-year-old adopted daughter.
Taylor Johnson, a senior special agent with a division of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), testified before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs on Thursday. She was at a hearing alongside several other whistleblowers who claim that they have also faced harassment for speaking out against their agencies wrongdoings.
Johnson told the committee her problems started after investigating the so-called EB-5 program, which offers visas to foreign investors. When she questioned whether visas were being approved with enough scrutiny, her managers began to receive complaints about her queries. She was removed from the investigation and the case was closed.
“Some of the violations investigated surrounding the project included bank and wire fraud, and I discovered ties to organized crime and high-ranking politicians and they received promotions that appeared to facilitate the program,” Johnson testified.
The whistleblower discovered that “EB-5 applicants from China, Russia, Pakistan, Malaysia had been approved in as little as 16 days” and that case files didn’t have “the basic and necessary law enforcement queries.”
Johnson told the committee her gun was confiscated. She mentioned her access to her workplace and government databases were revoked and the government vehicle she used was also taken away. “I was told I couldn’t even carry or own a personal weapon, which is a constitutional rights violation,” she added.
“When an adoption social worker tried to contact and verify employment, she was told that I had been terminated for a criminal offense,” Johnson said, choking up. “I almost lost my one-year-old-child.”
Johnson’s testimony comes as the EB-5 program is already under intense criticism due to a report released in March by the DHS’ inspector general John Roth. Roth’s report concluded that Homeland Security deputy secretary Alejandro Mayorkas violated ethics rules by intervening as the head of USCIS on several occasions in EB-5 visa cases involving prominent Democrats, such as Senator Harry Reid and Governor Terry McAuliffe.
Mayorkas has since said, “I regret the perception my own involvement created.” It is unclear however if Johnson’s investigation concerned Mayorkas or any of his associates.
Read more:
TSA whistleblower says agency operates on culture of ‘fear and distrust’ & lax security
US encircling Russia with bioweapons labs, covertly spreads them – Russian FM
RT | June 11, 2015
The US is obstructing international efforts to eradicate biological weapons, seeking to involve other nations covertly in research on weaponized diseases, Moscow charged. America’s record of handling bioweapons is poor.
The accusations of mishandling biological weapons voiced by the Russian Foreign Ministry refer to a recent report that the US military shipped live anthrax by mistake. Last week, the Pentagon admitted sending samples of the highly dangerous disease to at least 51 labs in 17 US states and three foreign countries.
The delivery “posed a high risk of outbreak that threatened not only the US population, but also other countries, including Canada and Australia. Of great concern is the shipment of bacteria to a US military facility in a third country, the Osan Air Base in South Korea,” the Russian ministry said in a statement.
It added that an anthrax outbreak incident occurred in 2001, which also involved a US military lab.
For Russia such incidents are of particular concern, because one of its neighbors, Georgia, hosts a research facility for high-level biohazard agents. The Richard G. Lugar Center for Public and Animal Health Research near Tbilisi is an undercover American bioweapons lab, a branch of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, Russia believes.
“American and Georgian authorities are trying to cover up the real nature of this US military unit, which studies highly dangerous infectious diseases. The Pentagon is trying to establish similar covert medico-biological facilities in other countries [in Russia’s neighborhood],” the Russian ministry said.
Moscow says the US is de facto derailing international efforts under the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC), a 1972 international treaty aimed at eradicating bioweapons worldwide.
“The US administration is obviously not interested in strengthening this convention. It’s known that in 2001 the US unilaterally torpedoed multilateral talks in Geneva to work on a verification mechanism for the BWTC and have since obstructed their restart. Decades of international effort to strengthen the convention were derailed,” the statement said.
The Russian Foreign Ministry’s indictment comes amid a wider list of accusations against the US over what Moscow sees as American violations of various international agreements dealing with weapons control, non-proliferation and disarmament.
The statement came in response to a US annual report on the issue, which accused Russia of various wrongdoings. Moscow considers such reports “megaphone diplomacy.” Such tactics aren’t aimed at resolving any differences, but instead support America’s pretense to be the ultimate judge of other nation’s behavior, the ministry said.
43 years in solitary: Federal court blocks release of last imprisoned Angola 3 inmate
RT | June 9, 2015
Screenshot from RT video
A federal court blocked the release of the last imprisoned member of the Angola 3, after a Louisiana judge ruled the state must release Albert Woodfox. The 68-year-old has spent 43 years in solitary, arguably the longest term of such confinement.
The ‘Angola 3’ ‒ Albert Woodfox, Robert King and Herman Wallace ‒ were inmates accused of murdering a guard at Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola Prison, during a prison riot in 1972. Though they maintained their innocence, the three men were convicted of murder and spent decades in solitary confinement. Woodfox and Wallace insisted that they were implicated solely for their involvement in a prison chapter of the Black Panthers.
On Tuesday, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued an emergency stay of Woodfox’s release, temporarily halting the ruling of US District Judge James Brady. The appeals court will hear arguments from Louisiana on whether or not to overturn Brady’s decision after he issued an unconditional writ of habeas corpus on Monday, citing five main reasons in his ruling to release Woodfox from prison.
“The five factors include: Mr. Woodfox’s age and poor health, his limited ability to present a defense at a third trial in light of the unavailability of witnesses, this Court’s lack of confidence in the State to provide a fair third trial, the prejudice done onto Mr. Woodfox by spending over forty-years in solitary confinement, and finally the very fact that Mr. Woodfox has already been tried twice and would otherwise face his third trial for a crime that occurred over forty years ago,” he wrote.
Woodfox suffers from Hepatitis C, diabetes, renal failure and a history hypertension, his lawyer told the (New Orleans) Times-Picayune.
“He a host of issues that elderly people commonly face, but his are in [the] context of [solitary confinement],” attonrey George Kendall said.
Woodfox has remained in solitary confinement for 43 years, which makes him the longest-serving solitary confinement prisoner in the US, Kendall told the Guardian in September.
Teenie Rogers, the widow of slain prison guard Brent Miller, has said she believes the two men were not involved in her husband’s death, and previously called for the release from prison, the Times-Picayune reported.
“If I were on that jury, I don’t think I would have convicted them,” she wrote in the Los Angeles Times in 2008.
King was exonerated and he was released in 2001, while Wallace’s was overturned in October 2013. Wallace died of liver cancer three days after he was released, even though a Louisiana grand jury re-indicted him on his death bed. He was never retried.
Woodfox was first convicted of second-degree murder in 1973, a verdict that was overturned in 1992 by a state court due to “systematic discrimination.” He was re-indicted by a different grand jury in 1993, then reconvicted in 1998.
Brady overturned Woodfox’s second guilty verdict in 2008, citing ineffective counsel. The state appealed, and the case wound its way up to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. That federal court reversed Brady’s ruling, saying that Woodfox couldn’t prove he would not have been convicted if he’d had a different defense team.
In 2012, Brady again overturned Woodfox’s conviction, and the state appealed to the Fifth Circuit, which then agreed with the case judge. In February, Louisiana state’s attorneys announced that a grand jury had indicted Woodfox for a third time in the Angola 3 case.
In his release order, Brady barred the state from conducting a third trial, ruling that further prosecution “would be unjust,” he wrote.
The state condemned the unconditional writ, having argued before Brady that releasing Woodfox is against the public interest and that the inmate “is a danger to the public and is a flight risk.”
“With today’s order, the Court would see fit to set free a twice-convicted murderer who is awaiting trial again for the brutal slaying of Corrections Officer Brent Miller,” Aaron Sadler, communications director for the Louisiana Department of Justice, told TheTimes-Picayune.
Woodfox’s attorneys, however, applauded the judge’s decision, saying that a third trial would have been unfair to their client.
“Now, because the State’s key witnesses are deceased, and Mr. Woodfox’s alibi witnesses are also deceased, there is no practical way for there to be a third trial which comports with the standards of a fair, American trial,” Kendall and Carine Williams said in a statement.
The state has long denied that Woodfox and Wallace were held in solitary confinement, but rather in a lockdown called “closed cell restricted,” which is designed to protect prisoners and guards.
“Contrary to popular lore, Woodfox and Wallace have never been held in solitary confinement while in the Louisiana penal system,” Louisiana Attorney General James Caldwell wrote in a 2013 statement. “They have always been able to communicate freely with other inmates and prison staff as frequently as they want. They have televisions on the tiers which they watch through their cell doors.”
King and watchdog groups define “closed cell restricted” lockdown as solitary, however. Since his 2001 release, King has advocated against the use of solitary confinement. He also fought for the freedom of his fellow Angola 3 defendants.
Amnesty International ‒ which has been part of a long-running, international campaign to free the Angola 3 ‒ praised the judge’s ruling as a “momentous step toward justice.”
“Woodfox has spent 43 years trapped in a legal process riddled with flaws,” Jasmine Heiss, a senior campaigner for Amnesty, said in a statement. “The only humane action that the Louisiana authorities can take now is to ensure his immediate release.”
Kiev hopes to sell state-run companies to US investors – PM
RT | June 9, 2015
Ukraine’s Prime Minister Arseny Yatsenyuk hopes to sell the country’s state-owned companies to the US. American investors will get the assets “on the most transparent conditions” if they decide to invest, he said.
The statement comes ahead of a Ukrainian-American investment conference in Washington on July 13.
“We want to start the privatization process… We want to see American owners on the territory of Ukraine, they will bring not only investment, but also new standards, new ways of managing the companies, and a new investment culture,” Yatsenyuk was cited as saying during his meeting with the representatives of Ukraine’s diaspora in Washington, UNIAN reported on Tuesday. Yatsenyuk and Ukraine’s Finance Minister Natalia Jaresko are in the US capital on a working visit which will last until June 10.
The massive privatization process of Ukraine’s state-run assets is planned for the second quarter of 2015. In April, the Ukrainian government decided to hold a number of investment conferences in Berlin, Paris and Washington to attract investors and to spread the privatization idea. The Prime Minister then said they expect to see American and European entrepreneurs in agriculture, energy, especially in the modernization of the Ukrainian gas transportation system and the mining industry, as well as in other vital sectors of the economy.
Ukraine is facing a deep economic crisis with the country on the verge of a default. Earlier this month, the IMF’s mission in Ukraine said the country’s GDP is expected to shrink 9 percent in 2015, with annual inflation to hit 46 percent. Ukraine’s total debt is estimated around $50 billion, $30 billion of which is external debt and $17 billion internal debt. Public sector debt rose to 71 percent of Ukraine’s gross domestic product, and is due to rise to 94 percent of GDP in 2015, according to the National Bank of Ukraine.
Last year, Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko invited foreign citizens to become key ministers in the new government of Ukraine, claiming that he views the foreigners as some kind of “anti-crisis management needed due to the difficult situation in economy”. The natives of the US, Georgia and Lithuania – Natalie Jaresko, Aleksandr Kvitashvili, and Aivaras Abromavicius were approved by the parliament to head up the Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Health and Ministry of Economic Development, respectively. All of them have been granted Ukraine citizenship after a decree amending the law to allow foreigners into the government.
Russia has better things to do than start WW3
By Bryan MacDonald | RT | June 8, 2015
Vladimir Putin said this weekend that “Russia would attack NATO only in a mad person’s dream.” Unfortunately, there are a lot of mad people working in western politics and media.
If the G7 were based on GDP, adjusted for purchasing power, it would be comprised of the USA, China, India, Japan, Russia, Germany and Brazil. Such a lineup would have remarkable clout. Members would boast 53% of the globe’s entire GDP and the planet’s 3 genuine military superpowers would be represented.
The problem for Washington is that this putative G7 might actually be a forum for a real debate about the world order.
Instead of a real G7, we have a farce. An American dominated talking shop where the US President allows ‘friendly’ foreign leaders to tickle his belly for a couple of days. There is no dissent. Washington’s dominance goes unquestioned and everyone has a jolly time. Especially since they kicked out Russia last year – Vladimir Putin was the only guest who challenged the consensus.
However, the problem is that this ‘convenient’ G7 is way past its sell-by-date. The days when its members could claim to rule the world economically are as distant as the era of Grunge and Britpop. Today, the G7 can claim a mere 32% of the global GDP pie. Instead of heavyweights like China and India, we have middling nations such as Canada and Italy, the latter an economic basket case. Canada’s GDP is barely more than that of crisis-ridden Spain and below that of Mexico and Indonesia.
Yet, the Prime Minister of this relative non-entity, Stephen Harper, was strutting around Bavaria all weekend with the confidence of a man who believed his opinion mattered a great deal. Of course, Harper won’t pressure Obama. Rather, he prefers to – metaphorically – kiss the ring and croon from the same hymn sheet as his southern master.
NATO and the G7 – 2 sides of 1 coin?
There was lots of talk of “Russian aggression” at the G7. This was hardly a surprise given that 6 of the 7 are also members of NATO, another body at which they can tug Washington’s forelock with gay abandon. Obama was at it, David Cameron parroted his guru’s feelings and Harper was effectively calling for regime change in Russia. It apparently never occurred to the trio that resolving their issues with Russia might be easier if Putin had been in Bavaria? The knee-jerk reaction to remove Russia from the club was hardly conducive to dialogue.
Meanwhile, Matteo Renzi stayed fairly quiet. It has been widely reported that the Italian Prime Minister privately opposes the EU’s anti-Russia sanctions due to the effects on Italy’s struggling economy. Also, Renzi’s next task after the G7 summit is to welcome Putin to Rome.
With that visit in mind, Putin gave an interview to Italy’s Il Corriere della Sera where he essentially answered the questions that Obama, Cameron and Harper could have asked him if they hadn’t thrown their toys out of the pram and excluded Russia from the old G8. Putin stressed that one should not take the ongoing “Russian aggression” scaremongering in the West seriously, as a global military conflict is unimaginable in the modern world. The Russian President also, fairly bluntly, stated that “we have better things to be doing” (than starting World War 3).
Putin also touched on a point many rational commentators have continuously made. “Certain countries could be deliberately nurturing such fears,” he added, saying that hypothetically the US could need an external threat to maintain its leadership in the Atlantic community. “Iran is clearly not very scary or big enough” for this, Putin noted with irony.
A world of ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’
For Washington to maintain its huge military spending, it has to keep its citizens in a state of high alarm. Otherwise, they might insist that some of the armed forces’ cash is diverted to more productive things like hospitals and schools. These services, of course, are not very profitable for weapons manufacturers or useful for newspaper and TV editors looking for an intimidating narrative.
Following the collapse of the USSR, Russia was too weak and troubled to be a plausible enemy. Aside from its nuclear arsenal – the deployment of which would only mean mutual destruction – the bear’s humbled military was not a credible threat. Instead, the focus of warmonger’s venom shifted to the Middle East and the Balkans, where Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Slobodan Milosevic and Osama Bin Laden kept the general public’s attention occupied for roughly a decade and a half. However, they are now all dead and pro-war propaganda needs a new bad guy to play the Joker to America’s Batman.
Kim Jong-un looked promising for a while. Nevertheless, the problem here is that North Korea is too unpredictable and could very feasibly retaliate to provocations. Such a reaction could lead to a nuclear attack on Seoul, for instance, or draw Washington into a conflict with China. Even for neocons, this is too risky. Another candidate was Syria’s Basher Al-Assad. Unfortunately, for the sabre rattlers, just as they imagined they had Damascus in their sights, Putin kyboshed their plan. This made Putin the devil as far as neocons are concerned and they duly trained their guns in his direction.
Russia – a Middle East/North Africa battleground?
In the media, it is noticeable how many neocon hacks have suddenly metamorphosed from Syria ‘experts’ into Russia analysts in the past 2 years. Panda’s Mark Ames (formerly of Moscow’s eXILE ) highlighted this strange phenomenon in an excellent recent piece. Ames focused on the strange case of Michael Weiss, a New York activist who edits the anti-Russia Interpreter magazine (which is actually a blog). The Interpreter is allegedly controlled by Mikhail Khodorkovsky and a shadowy foundation called Herzen (not the original Amsterdam-based Herzen) of which no information is publicly available.
Weiss was a long-time Middle East analyst, who promoted US intervention to oust Assad. Suddenly, shortly before the initial Maidan disturbances in Kiev, he re-invented himself as a Russia and Ukraine ‘expert,’ appearing all over the US media (from CNN to Politico and The Daily Beast ) to deliver his ‘wisdom.’ This is despite the fact that he appears to know very little about Russia and has never lived there. The managing editor of The Interpreter is a gentleman named James Miller, who uses the Twitter handle @millerMENA (MENA means Middle East, North Africa). Having been to both, I can assure you that Russia and North Africa have very little in common.
Weiss and Miller are by no means unusual. Pro-War, neocon activists have made Russia their bete noir since their Syria dreams were strangled in infancy. While most are harmless enough, this pair wields considerable influence in the US media. Naturally, this is dressed up as concern for Ukraine. In reality, they care about Ukraine to about the same extent that a carnivore worries about hurting the feelings of his dinner.
Russia’s military policy is “not global, offensive, or aggressive,” Putin stressed, adding that Russia has “virtually no bases abroad,” and the few that do exist are remnants of its Soviet past. Meanwhile, it would take only 17 minutes for missiles launched from US submarines on permanent alert off Norway’s coast to reach Moscow, Putin said, noting that this fact is somehow not labeled as “aggression” in the media.
Decline of the Balts
Another ongoing problem is the Baltic States. These 3 countries have been unmitigated disasters since independence, shedding people at alarming rates. Estonia’s population has fallen by 16% in the past 25 years, Latvia’s by 25% and Lithuania’s by an astonishing 32%. Political leaders in these nations use the imaginary ‘Russian threat’ as a means to distract from their own economic failings and corruption. They constantly badger America for military support which further antagonizes the Kremlin, which in turn perceives that NATO is increasing its presence on Russia’s western border. This is the same frontier from which both Napoleon and Hitler invaded and Russians are, understandably, paranoid about it.
The simple fact is that Russia has no need for the Baltic States. Also, even if Moscow did harbor dreams of invading them, the cost of subduing them would be too great. As Russia and the US learned in Afghanistan and America in Iraq also, in the 21st century it is more-or-less impossible to occupy a population who don’t want to be occupied. The notion that Russia would sacrifice its hard-won economic and social progress to invade Kaunas is, frankly, absurd.
The reunification of Crimea with Russia is often used as a ‘sign’ that the Kremlin wishes to restore the Soviet/Tsarist Empire. This is nonsense. The vast majority of Crimean people wished to return to Russia and revoke Nikita Khrushchev’s harebrained transfer of the territory to Ukraine. Not even the craziest Russian nationalist believes that most denizens of Riga or Tallinn wish to become Russian citizens.
Putin recalled that it was French President Charles de Gaulle who first voiced the need to establish a “common economic space stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok.” As NATO doubles down on its campaign against Moscow, that dream has never looked as far off.
Bryan MacDonald is an Irish writer and commentator focusing on Russia and its hinterlands and international geo-politics. Follow him on Facebook
US presidential hopeful: Sanctions don’t facilitate ‘rapprochement’ with Russia
RT | June 8, 2015
Former Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chafee, who has entered the race for the Democratic nomination for president, has questioned the US policy of imposing sanctions on Russia. There are “better ways to get rapprochement” with Moscow, he said.
“I should think there would be better ways of getting a rapprochement with Russia,” Democratic presidential hopeful Chafee, a fierce critic of rival frontrunner Hillary Clinton over her 2002 vote on Iraq War, told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.
“They’re so important in the world, and especially to the countries, the former Soviet Republics, such as Ukraine,” said Chafee, who previously served in the Senate as a Republican.
He added: “We need to wage peace in this world. That’s our responsibility. That’s the charge that we’re given with our economic power that we have.”
When asked how he would reshape relations with Russia and President Vladimir Putin, Chafee said to start with the US needs to learn from previous mistakes.
“Stop making mistakes that Secretary Clinton made when we were trying to restart our relations with Russia and Sec. Clinton presented the foreign minister with a symbolic gesture and they got the Russian word wrong. It’s those types of mistakes that set back a relationship – little symbolic mistakes.”
In 2009, the then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presented her Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, with a little gift meant to highlight the Obama administration’s readiness “to press the reset button” in relationships with Moscow. Instead of the Russian word for “reset” (perezagruzka) the box featured a different word – peregruzka, which translates as “overload” or “overcharged.”
“You’ve got it wrong,” Lavrov noted with a smile. The grammatical gaffe created a stir in the media.
The carrot-and-stick policy in regard to Russia has been considered unconstructive and ineffective by a number of politicians and economists. A senior member of Germany’s Social Democrats (SPD), Matthias Platzeck, told Die Welt am Sonntag newspaper in May that among other things, “The process of disintegration in the Middle East, in Iran, Afghanistan and Syria can only be solved with Russia.”
Greece revealed last month it was asked by the US to prolong anti-Russia sanctions. Athens replied that Russia is a strategic ally and the “sanction war” is causing it an estimated loss of €4 billion a year.
“I was asked to support the prolongation of the sanctions, particularly in connection with Crimea. I explained the Ukrainian issue was very sensitive for Greece as some 300,000 Greeks live in Mariupol and its neighborhood, and they feel safe next to the Orthodox Church,” Defense Minister Panos Kammenos was cited as saying on the Ministry of National Defense website.
Italian media also previously reported that the sanctions have affected the country’s economy, with trade turnover falling by 17 percent, and the Italian economy losing 5.3 billion euros. Italian Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni said in May that “Italy can’t afford to close the doors to Russia” and “can’t cut ties” with Moscow. Gentiloni also told La Stampa newspaper that Russia plays a major role in resolving world crises.
European experts estimate that due to the sanctions, the West lost €40 billion last year, which includes a €12 billion loss by European farmers. Despite the economic difficulties that the sanctions against Russia, imposed over its stance on the conflict between Kiev and rebels in eastern Ukraine, have brought to the EU, leaders gathered at the G7 meeting on Sunday called for even tougher measures. Russia was expelled from the club last year in protest over its support for the referendum in Crimea, where the majority of residents voted for secession from Ukraine and in favor of joining Russia.
According to a statement issued by the White House after a one-on-one meeting between Angela Merkel and Barack Obama in Bavaria, it was restated that the “duration of sanctions should be clearly linked to Russia’s full implementation of the Minsk agreements and respect for Ukraine’s sovereignty.”
Ahead of Obama’s visit to Germany, White House spokesman Josh Earnest stated, however, that the introduction of the sanctions on Russia has not brought any positive results.
“I would acknowledge that we have not yet seen the kind of change in behavior that we have long sought now,” Earnest said in his daily press briefing.
The Obama administration has maintained that the longer the sanctions are in place, “the more of an economic bite they take out of the Russian economy.” This, despite the fact a number of EU members have been hit hard by Russian counter-sanctions.
“I think these sanctions are affecting Europe much more as a whole than was expected, and the others on the other side of the Atlantic are not affected at all,” former Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini told RT in November.
The Minsk-2 deal, reached on February 12, includes a requirement to withdraw heavy weapons from the contact line and establish a buffer zone. But tensions have been running high in eastern Ukraine recently, leading to growing concerns that the fragile ceasefire was on the verge of collapse.
Kiev forces shelled Donbass on June 3, killing at least six people and injuring 90 others. The RT crew recorded dramatic footage of the shelling’s aftermath. The US State Department refused to acknowledge that the Kiev authorities are violating the Minsk peace agreements, however, turning a blind eye to daily OSCE reports that equally implicate the government and the rebel forces. The Ukrainian General Staff acknowledged last week that Kiev’s forces were using heavy artillery that had previously been withdrawn from the frontline under February’s Minsk peace deal.
Moscow, meanwhile, believes that the timing of the new tensions is directly connected with the upcoming EU summit, which is to take place in Brussels later this month.
2637716 06/06/2015 Firemen extinguish fire at the Oktyabrksy market caused by a shell hit during the shelling of Donetsk. Irina Gerashchenko/RIA Novosti
“Yes, indeed, in the past Kiev had already heated up tensions amid some large international events. This is the case, and now we are seriously concerned about the next repetition of such activity,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said last week.
At the United Nations Security Council meeting on Friday, Russia’s ambassador to the UN, Vitaly Churkin, told its members that he has noticed “frustration” with Kiev’s “flagrant violation and blunt ignorance of the Minsk agreements” among even those Western states that are “loyal to Kiev.” The UN Security Council members urged both sides in the Ukrainian conflict to exercise restraint and uphold the ceasefire last week.
The conflict erupted in April 2014 after Kiev sent troops to the Donetsk and Lugansk regions as local residents refused to recognize the coup-imposed authorities in the capital. According to the UN Human Rights Office, at least 6,116 people have been killed and 15,474 wounded during a year of fighting.
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The Case for Dismantling the Rules-Based International Order
By Professor Glenn Diesen | December 23, 2024
The so-called “rules-based international order” aims to facilitate a hegemonic world, which entails displacing international law. While international law is based on equal sovereignty for all states, the rules-based international order upholds hegemony on the principle of sovereign inequality.
The rules-based international order is commonly presented as international law plus international human rights law, which appears benign and progressive. However, this entails introducing contradictory principles and rules. The consequence is a system devoid of uniform rules, in which “might makes right”. International human rights law introduces a set of rules to elevate the rights of the individual, yet human-centric security often contradicts state-centric security as the foundation of international law.
The US as the hegemonic state can then choose between human-centric security and state-centric security, while adversaries must abide strictly by state-centric security due to their alleged lack of liberal democratic credentials. For example, state-centric security as the foundation of international law insists on the territorial integrity of states, while human-centric security allows for secession under the principle of self-determination. The US will thus insist on territorial integrity in allied countries such as Ukraine, Georgia or Spain, while supporting self-determination within adversarial states such as Serbia, China, Russia and Syria. The US can interfere in the domestic affairs of adversaries to promote liberal democratic values, yet the US adversaries do not have the right to interfere in the domestic affairs of the US. To facilitate a hegemonic international order, there cannot be equal sovereignty for all states. … continue
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