„Do you believe you bear any responsibility in the way that withdrawal played out?“ Harris was asked by a moderator.
„Well, I will tell you, I agreed with President Biden‘s decision to pull out of Afghanistan.“ she said.
„Four presidents said they would and Joe Biden did.“
During the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, 13 U.S. service members were killed in a terrorist attack.
If Democrats were concerned about anything amounting to a repeat of Biden’s shoddy debate performance in late June, which led to his dropping out, it was quickly erased. Harris returned to the form that made her the runaway winner of the early 2020 Democratic primary debates.
More than that, though, with a premium on Trump defining the lesser-known Harris, she made sure the debate was overwhelmingly about Trump and his less-appealing traits.
(today)
The Isfahan Nuclear Technology Center is Iran’s largest nuclear research complex and employs approximately 3,000 scientists, according to the nonprofit Nuclear Threat Initiative. It was built with Chinese assistance and opened in 1984. It operates three small Chinese-supplied research reactors, the NTI says, adding that the facility is also the target of both U.S. and U.N. sanctions.
We are already halfway through Ramadan, a month-long holy period marked by pronounced grief and suffering in the Palestinian territories. The Israeli campaign in Gaza has killed more than 32,000 Palestinians, including many women and children, forced the overwhelming majority of people in Gaza to flee their homes and plunged more than half of Gaza’s population into a de facto famine. Small children are dying of malnutrition in what U.N. officials describe to be the broadest and most severe food crisis in the world.
(02.03.2024)
The statement‘s signatories include legislators from Israel‘s top allies and weapons suppliers, including the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Canada. Just two U.S. lawmakers—Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Cori Bush (D-Mo.)—backed the statement.
The statement includes six signatories from Germany, which is facing an International Court of Justice (ICJ) case alleging complicity in genocide against Palestinians.
The lawmakers argued that an arms embargo on Israel is both „a moral necessity“ and „a legal requirement,“ given the ICJ‘s interim ruling in late January.
Washington has approved more than 100 separate military sales to Israel since its invasion of Gaza, even as officials complain Israeli leaders have not done enough to protect civilians
He has estimated the cost of the project to be around $5 billion and has indicated in the past that Saudi Arabia or the Chinese might be interested in investing in the venture.
All sounds good until one factors in Hamas, which is considered a terrorist organization by Israel, the United States and the European Union.
The Washington Post analyzed satellite imagery, airstrike data and U.N. damage assessments, and interviewed more than 20 aid workers, health-care providers, and experts in munitions and aerial warfare. The evidence shows that Israel has carried out its war in Gaza at a pace and level of devastation that likely exceeds any recent conflict, destroying more buildings, in far less time, than were destroyed during the Syrian regime’s battle for Aleppo from 2013 to 2016 and the U.S.-led campaign to defeat the Islamic State in Mosul, Iraq, and Raqqa, Syria, in 2017.
The Post’s analysis shows:
– The rooms connected to the tunnel network discovered by IDF troops showed no immediate evidence of military use by Hamas.
– None of the five hospital buildings identified by Hagari appeared to be connected to the tunnel network.
– There is no evidence that the tunnels could be accessed from inside hospital wards.
Hours before IDF troops entered the complex, the Biden administration declassified U.S. intelligence assessments that it said bolstered Israel’s claims. In the aftermath of the raid, Israeli and U.S. officials have stood firm behind their initial statements.
The Israeli raid on al-Shifa Hospital last month, which was preceded by an evacuation order aimed at thousands of people sheltering at the hospital and hundreds of sick patients, produced one of the grisliest scenes in the country’s ground invasion of the Gaza Strip: a “death zone” that included a mass grave at the entrance of the hospital and dozens of desperate patients inside, according to the World Health Organization, whose aid workers arrived at the facility on Nov. 18 as part of a humanitarian mission.
Forty patients, including four premature babies, died in the hospital due to a lack of electricity in the days surrounding the raid, hospital administrators told the United Nations.
(01.12.2023)
Netanyahu has stopped short of apologizing for the attack, and has said that determining blame will have to come after the war is waged. Critics say he is attempting to escape responsibility for myriad intelligence failures leading to the deadliest day in Israeli history.
Thousands of people are expected to rally Saturday in Washington, joining a push from people across the world to demand both a cease-fire in the Israel-Gaza war and an end to U.S. aid to Israel.
Brian Becker, the executive director of the ANSWER Coalition, one of the organizers of the march, said he hopes this gathering will be “the largest demonstration in support of the Palestinian people in the history of the United States.”
(September 08, 2023)
The way this typically works is that groups claim to employ “disinformation experts” – a brand new and fake expertise they created overnight – and then produce studies that purport to document who is either circulating harmful disinformation or who is permitting it to be heard. This latter accusation, permitting dangerous disinformation to be heard, always means that one social media company or another is failing to censor in accordance with the demands of the group and its funders. They then get corporate media outlets who crave censorship to melodramatically trumpet their accusatory studies using flamboyant headlines that claim a disobedient technology platform has the blood on their hands, knowing that it will spread virally, but very few people actually read the study to determine if the accusations have any validity.
(Jan 13, 2021)
Campbell, the top U.S. diplomat for Asia under Democratic President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is considered an architect of their “pivot to Asia” strategy, a vaunted but so far still limited rebalancing of resources to the region.
The deliberate cherry picking of allies and partners is the brainchild, insiders tell me, of Biden’s key Asia policy czar, Kurt Campbell. It is likely to continue, as Campbell has pointed out in a discussion earlier this year at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.
(Updated August 31, 2023 at 6:22 p.m.)
The United States has voiced public concern about the reports of violence against civilians, which circulated among diplomats and U.N. officials for more than a year before being thrust into wider public view, and called for a Saudi investigation.
U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic conversations, say they are also pushing the Saudis to identify the units who, according to eyewitnesses and victims, used mortars, small-arms fire and close-range executions to kill hundreds or possibly thousands of people, many of them women and children.
Four days after the central African nation held disputed presidential elections that incumbent Ali Bongo was reported to have won, army officers appeared on state television to announce they’d canceled the Aug. 26 vote and dissolved the country’s institutions. Bongo first took office in 2009, succeeding his late father, who had held power since 1967. While the oil producer hasn’t had to deal with the jihadist attacks or spreading insecurity that’s dogged much of West Africa, the ruling family’s grip on power has come under pressure in recent years.
(August 20, 2023)
Iran has been trying to evade sanctions and continue selling its oil abroad, while the U.S. and its allies have been seizing cargoes since 2019 after the country’s nuclear deal allowing the trade collapsed.
The main thing the Saudis would get in exchange — security guarantees — wouldn’t come from Israel but from its closest ally — the US. Israel, a high-tech power, would play a major role in ambitious Saudi plans to move its economy beyond oil. It would also be expected to make concessions to the Palestinian self-ruling authority in the West Bank. The US would regain some of its influence over Saudi Arabia, stemming efforts by China to expand its sway in the Middle East. The deal offers significant rewards to all four governments, not least of them additional ways of dealing with Iranian military activity in the region. But the prospect of the pact stirs populist forces among all of their constituencies, posing risks to those in power.
(August 10, 2023)
In Smila, a small city in central Ukraine, baker Alla Blyzniuk, 42, said she sells sweets for funeral receptions daily as parents prepare to bury their children killed on the front hundreds of miles away. (…)
Blyzniuk also lives in fear that her husband or two sons of fighting age will be mobilized. She has already noticed that far fewer men walk the streets of her city than before. Ukraine does not disclose its military casualty counts, but everyone shares stories, she said, of new soldiers at the front lasting just two to three days.
(August 8, 2023 at 10:09 a.m. EDT)
4. What else is planned?
• Changing the way judges are chosen. Currently, Supreme Court justices are selected by a committee made up of two ministers, two lawmakers (one of whom is traditionally from the opposition), two members of the bar association and three justices. The government wants to increase the role of politicians in picking judges but the details are still being debated. Some suggestions are to shift the balance of legal professionals and politicians on the committee, others to remove the judges and bar members entirely, replacing them with a mix of coalition and opposition politicians. Netanyahu says he will seek consensus and will wait till November before making his next move.
(04.07.2023)
As Democrats reel from another painful set of defeats at the Supreme Court in recent weeks, President Biden is facing renewed pressure from a range of elements in his party, from liberal lawmakers to abortion rights activists, to more forcefully embrace far-reaching changes to the high court.
In practice, constitutions can: achieve near-unalterable status, as in the United States; be frequently rewritten, as in many other countries in the Western hemisphere; be used to justify authoritarian forms of rule; or come to be entirely disregarded.
Israel, Britain and New Zealand are outliers, as they do not have constitutions, said Hanna Lerner, the author of “Making Constitutions in Deeply Divided Societies.” The United Kingdom and New Zealand rely on common law, bodies of legal thinking and precedent developed over centuries, which serve a de facto constitutional role.
As Israeli lawmakers prepare to vote on the judicial overhaul plans backed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, demonstrators are blocking the entrance to parliament, and security forces are using water cannons to disperse them
Protesters chained themselves to fences, linked arms and lay down in roads to block access to the Knesset, Israel’s parliament in central Jerusalem.
Police dragged prone demonstrators from the pavement and deployed water cannons to clear routes to the compound.
We voted for billions of dollars in military aid for Ukraine and strongly believe we must continue to help the Ukrainian people defend themselves against Russian aggression. But supplying Kyiv with cluster munitions would come at an unsupportable moral and political price. Knowing that these weapons cause indiscriminate terror and mayhem, both of us — like many others in the international community — have worked for years to end their use.
As Democrats reel from another painful set of defeats at the Supreme Court in recent weeks, President Biden is facing renewed pressure from a range of elements in his party, from liberal lawmakers to abortion rights activists, to more forcefully embrace far-reaching changes to the high court.
Part 2 of a two-part series takes a deep dive into the history of the CIA’s central role in orchestrating news and editorial coverage in America’s most influential liberal national media outlets — and its continued hold today.
Part 1 of a two-part series takes a deep dive into the history of the CIA’s central role in orchestrating news and editorial coverage in America’s most influential liberal national media outlets — and its continued hold today.
Kennedy’s positions on many other issues also cut against the media grain. His most controversial stance is on the war in Ukraine, where he strongly opposes American involvement (though his son volunteered to serve alongside Ukrainians). Back home, he believes transgender athletes should not participate in female sports; and, at time when the media itself seems to be hiring directly out of Langley, he’s harshly critical of America’s intelligence community, and particularly the CIA, which he believes is responsible for the assassination of his uncle, John F. Kennedy.
(14.06.2023)
In a joint written testimony from the Biden administration witnesses, the NSA, FBI and CIA all cited Section 702’s usefulness for cybersecurity.
(June 6, 2023)
Details about the plan, which have not been previously reported, were collected by a European intelligence service and shared with the CIA in June 2022. (…)
The source’s information could not immediately be corroborated, but the CIA shared the report with Germany and other European countries last June, according to multiple officials familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence operations and diplomatic discussions.
Earlier this week, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said the House has no plans to take up legislation that would boost military aid to Ukraine above levels included in the recent debt ceiling legislation, a position that put him at odds with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.).
(December 29, 2022)
Kovalchuk considered flooding the river. The Ukrainians, he said, even conducted a test strike with a HIMARS launcher on one of the floodgates at the Nova Kakhovka dam, making three holes in the metal to see if the Dnieper’s water could be raised enough to stymie Russian crossings but not flood nearby villages.
The test was a success, Kovalchuk said, but the step remained a last resort. He held off.
Belgorod’s governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov, blamed the attacks on Ukraine’s military, but two anti-Putin paramilitary groups have claimed credit for them. (…)
The pro-Ukrainian militias, which claimed to have carried out a series of cross-border incursions in recent days, said their forces had mounted another attack on government facilities and taken Russian soldiers prisoner over the weekend.
(June 3, 2023)
Three of the Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, also known as MRAPs, taken into Russia by the fighters were provided by the United States and the fourth was from Poland, according to people familiar with the U.S. intelligence finding, which has not previously been reported.
(…)
The fighters also carried rifles made by Belgium and the Czech Republic and at least one AT-4 antitank weapon in common use among U.S. and Western troops, according to photos verified by The Washington Post.
No data is available on how often the cameras are used for this purpose. But the previously unreported practice highlights how efforts to make public housing safer are subjecting many of the 1.6 million Americans who live there — overwhelmingly people of color — to round-the-clock surveillance. If evicted, former tenants can face difficulties finding housing and employment for the rest of their lives.
(May 13, 2023)
The documents, which have not been previously disclosed, are part of a broader leak of U.S. secrets circulated on the Discord messaging platform and obtained by The Washington Post. They reveal a leader with aggressive instincts that sharply contrast with his public-facing image as the calm and stoic statesman weathering Russia’s brutal onslaught. The insights were gleaned through intercepted digital communications, providing a rare look at Zelensky’s deliberations amid Russian missile barrages, infrastructure attacks and war crimes.
(24. Juli 2010)
– Von den 854.000 Personen mit dem Sicherheitszugang “Top Secret” sind 265.000 kommerzielle Vertragsnehmer, rund 30 Prozent des Arbeitspersonals im Spionage-Komplex.
– Im “Ministerium für Heimatschutz” (“Department of Homeland Security” DHS) arbeiten genauso viele staatliche Beamte wie Vertragsnehmer, in der Spionageabteilung stellt das “private” Personal sogar 60 Prozent. Das Heimatschutz-Ministerium hat Verträge mit 318 Konzernen, von denen allein 19 sich ausschließlich mit der Rekrutierung neuer Vertragsnehmer beschäftigen.
– 56 Firmen im Spionage-Komplex sind nur damit beschäftigt, ständig neue Linguisten, Sprachwissenschaftler und Dolmetscher zu rekrutieren. Anschliessend werden sie an die US-Regierungsbehörden weitervermietet, um auf dem ganzen Planeten abgehörte Telefonate und Gespräche, sowie abgefangene emails und Telekommunikation zu übersetzen und zu interpretieren.
– für die 16 US-Spionagedienste erstellen allein 400 Konzerne Datenverarbeitungs- und informationstechnische Systeme zur internen Kommunikation zwischen den Diensten und deren jeweiliger Computernetzwerke.
– die “National Security Agency” (NSA), die weltweite Telekommunikation abfängt und elektronische Überwachungen durchführt, bezahlt zur Zeit 484 Konzerne, u.a. für die Entwicklung neuer Spionage-Technologien.
– die planetare Satelliten-Spionage des “National Reconnaissance Office” (NRO), einem der wichtigsten von offiziell 16 Spionagediensten der USA, wäre nicht möglich ohne die Zuarbeit von vier großen Konzernen, die als Vertragsnehmer für die NRO arbeiten.
– Bei der CIA sind von (offiziell) 30.000 Personalstand 10.000 Personen externe, nichtstaatliche Vertragsnehmer aus sage und schreibe 114 Firmen. Viele von ihnen sind nur für zeitlich begrenzte Jobs oder Operationen an Bord und kommen aus der Militärspionage.
Die CIA ist das Beispiel für eine Regierungsagentur, welche nicht mehr ohne dieses kommerzielle Hilfspersonal auskommt, obwohl gerade sie Operationen durchführt, die keiner anderen Behörde gesetzlich erlaubt ist.
(July 20, 2010)
The Post investigation uncovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America created since 9/11 that is hidden from public view, lacking in thorough oversight and so unwieldy that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.
It is also a system in which contractors are playing an ever more important role. The Post estimates that out of 854,000 people with top-secret clearances, 265,000 are contractors. There is no better example of the government‘s dependency on them than at the CIA, the one place in government that exists to do things overseas that no other U.S. agency is allowed to do.
(…)
Most of these contractors do work that is fundamental to an agency‘s core mission. As a result, the government has become dependent on them in a way few could have foreseen: wartime temps who have become a permanent cadre.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power in November elections after a year and a half on the sidelines, propelled by a bloc of once-fringe, far-right partners. In the two weeks since its inauguration, his government has embarked on a blitz of legislative initiatives, characterizing them as a “revision” to right the “imbalance among the three branches of government.”
But critics say the measures amount to a “coup d’etat” that will destroy the nation’s system of checks and balances to save Netanyahu from prosecution in three separate corruption cases and embolden his extremist religious partners to advance legislation supporting the expansion of Jewish settlement in the West Bank and the application of conservative Jewish law to public institutions.
For decades, Ben Gvir was a political untouchable. His roots in the overtly racist Kach party — founded by a radical American rabbi, Meir Kahane, and banned by Israel — put him beyond the fringe of even the most right-wing parties. That changed last year when then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who had lost his governing coalition and was desperate for a few more parliamentary votes, invited Ben Gvir into his alliance.
Netanyahu downplayed his maneuver, largely dismissing Ben Gvir as a backbencher who wouldn’t play a major role in government.
What a difference a year makes.
With defeat looming, Putin is trotting out a new strategy: He will annex Ukrainian territory and then threaten to use nuclear weapons if the Ukrainians and their allies in the West don’t let him get away with it. If the West were to give in to his nuclear blackmail, what would stop him from announcing tomorrow that Kyiv is also Russian territory (which he clearly believes)? Or Tallinn? Or Tbilisi? Or even Warsaw or Helsinki? We cannot live in a world where an evil dictator can redraw international borders at will with threats of nuclear annihilation. And we don’t have to.
The complaint from former head of security Peiter Zatko, a widely admired hacker known as “Mudge,” depicts Twitter as a chaotic and rudderless company beset by infighting, unable to properly protect its 238 million daily users including government agencies, heads of state and other influential public figures.
Die 84 Seiten starke Beschwerde des Whistleblowers liegt nun bei der US-Börsenaufsicht Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), der Handelsbehörde Federal Trade Commission (FTC) und beim US-Justizministerium. Eine Fassung des Dokuments, die an den US-Kongress ging, wurde gestern teils geschwärzt von der Washington Post veröffentlicht.
Der als „Mudge“ bekannte Hacker Peiter Zatko wurde 2020 vom damaligen Twitter-Chef Jack Dorsey angestellt. Nach einem schweren Sicherheitsvorfall, bei dem die Twitter-Konten von Joe Biden, Jeff Bezos und anderen Prominenten gekapert wurden, sollte Zatko die Systeme des Kurznachrichtendienstes verbessern.
Ausrichten konnte Zatko jedoch offenbar nicht viel: Seine intern vorgebrachten Warnungen seien in den Wind geschlagen worden, zitiert die Washington Post mehrere ungenannte Insider.
The unprecedented FBI search of former president Donald Trump’s Palm Beach, Fla., home might go down as one of the most catastrophic mistakes in law enforcement history — one already widely seen by Republicans as an act of political retribution by a bureau whose relentless pursuit of Trump has destroyed its credibility. It also makes it far more likely that Trump will win the GOP nomination and take back the White House in 2024.
(video)