Unfortunately,  HIDING EVIDENCE OF ITS OWN INNOCENCE is too common. with the IDF.

1.      Possibly most damaging was the Al Dura  incident where an IDF officer prematurely rushed to accept Israeli responsibility for the incident.

Later, German TV reported that Palestinians likely killed Gaza boyJerusalem Post - ALLISON KAPLAN SOMMER and HERB KEINON Mar 20, 2002

A German documentary producer who thoroughly investigated the killing of a Palestinian boy a year-and-a- half ago said yesterday it is "much more likely" 12-year- old Muhammad ad-Dura was killed by Palestinian gunmen, and not by Israeli soldiers.

Dura was shot to death in a Gaza Strip cross fire on September 30, 2000, while crouching for safety with his father. The incident was filmed by the France2 television network, and the pictures had a dramatic impact on the public perception of Israel's use of force, with the IDF widely accused of killing the boy.

Among the questions raised were who had an interest in killing the boy; whether France2, which filmed the incident, released all the footage in its possession; whether it was possible to hit Dura from where the soldiers were positioned; where are the bullets taken from the boy's body; why did the Palestinians not investigate the incident; and who ordered the footage broadcast continuously on Palestinian television.

2.      During and after the   Lebanon war of 2006,  Human Rights Watch accused Israel of carrying out indiscriminate air strikes that killed hundreds of civilians . Human Rights Watch said Israel showed "reckless indifference" to the fate of civilians and disputed  its argument that Hezbollah used them as human shields.

In one highly publicized incident a residential tower collapsed some hours after an Israeli air  strike killing many civilian refugees  including women and children. The IDF  had  wing surveillance cameras on the attacking aircraft that showed that the Hezbollah was using the courtyard of that residence  to launch missiles. However the IDF kept the relevant film secret and resisted its  release until well after the accusations  had caused the IDF TO terminate  similar IDF airborne attacks.

3.     During Gaza one, Breaking the Silence accused Israel of employing phosphorus artillery rounds  In attacking targets in areas where civilians were present. IDF and US Army review showed that US policy was followed in more than 98% of the firings, that most of the complaints were from smoke that arose from high explosive shells and the complaints of total number of  casualties were exaggerated as most of them  were reported as  dizziness and nausea. Breaking the Silence refused to accept the findings and continued to make the accusations. Needless to say, the accusations received far wider media circulation than did its rebuttal.

4.     HIDING EVIDENCE OF ITS OWN INNOCENCE By Evelyn Gordon March 16, 2017

[Within about 24 hours of the most high-profile civilian casualty incident of the 2009 Gaza war, Israel had obtained evidence casting doubt on its responsibility for those  deaths. But it sat on this evidence for more than eight years.]

I’m not naïve enough to think that better PR would solve all of Israel’s international relations problems. But there’s no question that incompetent PR makes its situation much worse. As one example, consider Tuesday’s shocking revelation: Within about 24 hours of the most high-profile civilian casualty incident of the 2009 Gaza war, Israel had obtained evidence casting doubt on its responsibility for that death. But it sat on this evidence for more than eight years, finally releasing it only as part of a defense brief in a civil suit by the victims’ father.

The incident in question took place on January 16, 2009, when Israeli troops fighting in Gaza came under sniper fire. The troops fired two shells at an observation post that seemed to be directing the snipers. The observation post was located on the third floor of a building which, unbeknownst to the soldiers, was also the home of a well-known doctor, Izzeldin Abuelaish. Three of Abuelaish’s daughters were killed, along with one of his nieces; several other family members were wounded. Abuelaish, who worked in Israel, maintained good relations with Israelis and advocated for Israeli-Palestinian peace, later became famous worldwide when he published a book about this incident and his response to it, called I Shall Not Hate. Israel was blamed worldwide for the Abuelaish casualties and never publicly challenged the assumption of its guilt. Yet it now turns out that within a day after the incident, it had evidence indicating that its shells may not have caused the carnage.

The evidence came in the form of laboratory tests conducted on six pieces of shrapnel extracted from the two casualties treated in Israel (the other wounded weren’t brought to Israel, nor were any of the dead, so no shrapnel from the other victims was available). The tests showed that alongside traces of various explosives used by both the Israel Defense Forces and Hamas, at least one fragment contained an explosive called R-Salt, which isn’t used by the IDF but is commonly used in improvised explosive devices in Gaza. Moreover, all six fragments contained potassium nitrate, another substance not used in IDF weaponry that is used in Hamas’s homemade Qassam rockets.

A follow-up report a month later, which compared the shrapnel to the specific type of Israeli shells fired, concluded that four of the six fragments could not possibly have come from those shells; a fifth “may have come” from an IDF shell, and apparently, no conclusions were possible about the sixth.

All of the above indicates that Hamas or a smaller Palestinian organization was using the house as a weapons cache. According to the IDF, there is no other way to account for the presence of non-IDF explosives in the shrapnel.

This in no way implies culpability on Abuelaish’s part; Palestinian terrorists routinely store weaponry in civilian houses without the owners’ consent or even knowledge. But it does raise the possibility that the Israeli shells, which were intended to take out the observation post without significant damage to the house, would not have caused such extensive casualties had the house not contained a concealed weapons cache–something the soldiers couldn’t have known–which exploded when the shells hit. And if so, then Israel clearly isn’t responsible for the deaths: It used a reasonable amount of force to respond to a legitimate military threat and could not have foreseen the deadly consequences.

One of the most common accusations leveled at Israel by its critics is that because it possesses precision weaponry capable of feats like destroying a single room without damaging the rest of the building, any civilian casualties it causes must be the result of criminal negligence at best and deliberate murder at worst. That conclusion is obviously possible only if you ignore various salient facts, such as that mistakes are inevitable in wartime when soldiers must often make split-second decisions based on imperfect information.

But one of those salient facts is Hamas’s habit of storing arms and ammunition in civilian houses–without, obviously, informing Israel of the caches’ locations. This means that no matter how carefully Israeli troops choose their munitions, they have no way to protect against the possibility that an arms cache they didn’t know about will set off secondary explosions, resulting in far more extensive damage than they intended.

This fact is essential to understanding why the blame for most civilian casualties actually rests not with Israel, which does try hard to use proportionate military force, but with Hamas, which deliberately endangers its own civilian population by hiding weapons in their houses. Yet since it is frequently not well understood overseas, Israel has every interest in publicizing high-profile examples as heavily as possible.

Instead, it sat on its information about the Abuelaish case for eight years. The lab report was kept so secret that even Abuelaish’s lawyers didn’t know of its existence until last week, although the suit was filed back in 2010. And then, having finally been forced to disclose the report to defend against the lawsuit, the government nevertheless made no attempt to publicize it; it came to light only because a reporter took the trouble to read the defense brief and realized that the information was newsworthy.

Obviously, information like this won’t change a single Israel hater’s mind. But there are many people of goodwill, especially overseas Jews, who sincerely want to believe that the IDF strives to avoid civilian casualties, but can’t understand why, if so, they nevertheless keep occurring.

Israel has many valid answers to that question, including the fact that its civilian-to-military casualty ratio is actually lower than that of other Western armies. But these answers are useless if it doesn’t take the trouble to publicize them. Sitting on exculpatory information about a high-profile case for eight years is hardly the way to assuage its supporters’ concerns.

The State Department - A Systematic Blunderer

Yoram Ettinger   Published on Mar 12, 2017

A review of the mistaken analyses and erroneous conclusions of the US State Department with respect to the Middle East region.

http://bit.ly/2mfXDca 

1. In 2011, the Department of State welcomed the Arab Tsunami, which has   displaced millions of people and murdered hundreds of thousands – and keeps raging - as an Arab Spring, youth revolution, Facebook revolution and a transition towards democracy.

 2. In 2011, the State Department recommended the toppling of Gaddafi in Libya, in spite of Gaddafi's transfer of Libya's nuclear infrastructure to the US in 2003, and irrespective of his fierce battle against Islamic terrorism. The toppling of the ruthless Gaddafi transformed Libya into the largest, lawless platform of Islamic terrorism in the Middle East, spilling over into Africa, Europe and the rest of the world, severely undermining the US national and homeland security.

. 3. The State Department has severely misperceived the Palestinian issue as if it were a core cause of Middle East turbulence, but none of the volcanic events from Iran to Mauritania are related to the Palestinian issue.  The State Department considers the Palestinian issue a crown-jewel of Arab policy-making, but most Arab policy-makers shower Palestinians with talk, but not walk, considering the Palestinian leadership a role-model of treachery, back-stabbing, intra-Arab terrorism and corruption. Palestinian leaders are welcome in Western capitals by red carpets, but in Arab capitals by shabby rugs. In 1991, Kuwait expelled almost 300,000 Palestinians due to their collaboration with Saddam's invasion of Kuwait.

 4. In 1993, the State Department endorsed Arafat as a Nobel Laureate, embracing him as a messenger of peace, in defiance of Arafat’s 40-year-old trail of terrorism against Jews and mostly Arabs in Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Kuwait, and regardless of Arafat's status – from the 1970s - as a role model of anti-Western international terrorism. 

.   5. In 2016 the Department of State embraces Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) as a messenger of peace, in defiance of his track record: a graduate of KGB training, who coordinated PLO ties with the Soviet Bloc; expelled from Egypt (1955), Syria (1966) and Jordan (1970) for subversion; co-planned the murder of eleven Israeli athletes during the 1972 Olympic Games; collaborated with Saddam Hussein's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, which triggered the First Gulf War; a 70-year-trail of terrorism against Jews and mostly Arabs; a repressive and corrupt rule of the Palestinian Authority, exacerbated by the establishment of an anti-Israel, anti-US and anti-Semitic Palestinian hate-education, which is the most effective production-line of terrorists.

6. During the 1980s, the State Department considered Saddam Hussein an ally in the confrontation against Iran, ignoring the fact that the enemy of my enemy could also be my enemy.  Until the August 1990 invasion of Kuwait, Iraq received from the US dual-use commercial and defense technologies, $5BN loan guarantees and vital intelligence, assuming that a well-fed Saddam would be less of a threat.  

. 7. On July 19, 1990, on the eve of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, the US ambassador to Baghdad, April Gillespie, told Saddam Hussein: "an Iraqi invasion of Kuwait would be considered, by Washington, an inter-Arab issue," providing a green light for the invasion of Kuwait, and planting the seeds of the first and second Iraq Wars and their devastating ripple effects. 

8. In 1981, the US Administration punished Israel for the bombing of Iraq's nuclear reactor.  Ten years later, then Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, thanked Israel publicly "for eradicating the Iraqi reactor in 1981, which spared the US a calamitous nuclear confrontation in 1991." 

9. During the late 1970s, the State Department was actively pursuing the downfall of the pro-US Shah of Iran, supporting Ayatollah Khomeini, who was perceived as a human-rights warrior in defiance of an oppressive ruler.  Thus, the Department of State facilitated the transformation of Iran from "the US policeman of the Gulf" to the worst enemy of the US, terrorizing pro-US Arab regimes, sponsoring global Islamic terrorism, collaborating with North Korea in the pursuit of nuclear and ballistic capabilities, supporting anti-US countries in Latin America, and brainwashing Iranian youth to fight "the modern-day arrogant crusader, the Big American Satan."  

. 10. In 1977, Israel and Egypt conducted direct negotiation, focusing on Israel-Egypt issues, in defiance of State Department's pressure to join a futile international peace conference, which was supposed to focus on the Palestinian issue and Jerusalem.  Following a futile pressure, on Israel and Egypt, to abort direct negotiation and join an international conference, the US jumped on the successful Israel-Egypt peace bandwagon.

11. Until 2011, the State Department considered Hafiz, and then Bashar, Assad reliable leaders, pressuring Israel to concede the historically and militarily critical Golan Heights. Syria's track record, in particular, and the tectonic Arab Tsunami, in general, highlight the recklessness of the State Department.

12. In 1948, the US State Department was convinced that the establishment of the Jewish State would trigger a war, which would result in a second Jewish Holocaust; that the Jewish State would be a strategic burden upon the US, and it would join the Communist Bloc. In order to dissuade Ben Gurion from declaration of independence, the State Department convinced President Truman to threaten Ben Gurion with economic sanctions, and to impose a military embargo on the region, while Britain supplied arms to the Arabs.

13. In 2016, the State Department plays an active role in Israel-Palestinian negotiation, prejudging the outcome, by pressuring Israel to reckless retreat to a 9-15 mile-wide sliver along the Mediterranean, over-towered by the mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria. The State Department's involvement has radicalized the Palestinians who expect the US to extract more concessions from Israel.

OBAMA’S THIRD TERM IS HERE

By Daniel Greenfield

After Trump secured the nomination, Obama’s people filed a wiretapping request. As he was on the verge of winning, they did it again. After he won, they are doing everything they can to bring him down.

It was always going to come down to this.

One is the elected President of the United States. The other is the Anti-President who commands a vast network that encompasses the organizers of OFA, the official infrastructure of the DNC and Obama Anonymous, a shadow government of loyalists embedded in key positions across the government.

A few weeks after the election, I warned that Obama was planning to run the country from outside the White House. And that the “Obama Anonymous” network of staffers embedded in the government was the real threat. Since then Obama’s Kalorama mansion has become a shadow White House. And the Obama Anonymous network is doing everything it can to bring down an elected government.

Valerie Jarrett has moved into the shadow White House to plot operations against Trump. Meanwhile Tom Perez has given him control of the corpse of the DNC after fending off a Sandernista bid from Keith Ellison. Obama had hollowed out the Democrat Party by diverting money to his own Organizing for America. Then Hillary Clinton had cannibalized it for her presidential bid through Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Donna Brazile. Now Obama owns the activist, OFA, and organizational, DNC, infrastructure.

But that’s just half the picture.

Obama controls the opposition. He will have a great deal of power to choose future members of Congress and the 2020 candidate. But he could have done much of that from Chicago or New York. The reason he didn’t decide to move on from D.C. is that the nation’s capital contains the infrastructure of the national government. He doesn’t just want to run the Democrats. He wants to run America.

The other half of the picture is the Obama Deep State. This network of political appointees, bureaucrats and personnel scattered across numerous government agencies is known only as Obama Anonymous.

Obama Inc. had targeted Trump from the very beginning when it was clear he would be the nominee.

Trump had locked down the GOP nomination in May. Next month there was a FISA request targeting him. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court denied the request, and it is still unknown whether the request targeted Trump, or only his associates, but it’s silly to pretend that the submission of such a request a month after he became the presumptive GOP nominee was apolitical.

The second, narrower, FISA request came through in October. This one was approved. The reason for getting a FISA request in October was even more obvious than June. October is the crucial month in presidential elections. It’s the month of the “October Surprise” when the worst hit pieces based on the keenest opposition research is unleashed. Obama’s opposition research on Trump involved eavesdropping on a server in Trump Tower. Nixon would have been very jealous.

After the election, Obama Inc. began to spread out its bets. Some of his people migrated into his network of political organizations. Others remained embedded in the government. While the former would organize the opposition, the latter would sabotage, undermine and try to bring down Trump.

An unprecedented campaign for full spectrum dominance was being waged in domestic politics.

Political opposition wasn’t a new phenomenon; even if a past president centralizing control of the organizational and activist arms of his party to wage war on his successor was unprecedented. But weaponizing unelected government officials to wage war on an elected government was a coup.

Obama Anonymous conducted its coup in layers. The first layer partnered congressional Democrats with OA personnel to retain control of as much of the government as possible by the Obama Deep State. They did it by blocking Trump’s nominees with endless hearings and protests. The second layer partnered congressional Democrats with the deeper layer of Obama operatives embedded in law enforcement and intelligence agencies who were continuing the Obama investigations of Trump.

This second layer sought to use the investigation to force out Trump people who threatened their control over national security, law enforcement and intelligence. It is no coincidence that their targets, Flynn and Sessions, were in that arena. Or that their views on Islamic terror and immigration are outside the consensus making them easy targets for Obama Anonymous and its darker allies.

These darker allies predate Obama. The tactics being deployed against Trump were last used by them in a previous coup during President Bush’s second term. The targets back then had included Bush officials, an Iran skeptic, pro-Israel activists and a Democrat congresswoman. The tactics, eavesdropping, leaks, false investigations, dubious charges and smear campaigns against officials, were exactly the same.

Anyone who remembers the cases of Larry Franklin, Jane Harman and some others will recognize them. Before that they were used to protect the CIA underestimates of Soviet capabilities that were broken through by Rumsfeld’s Halloween Massacre and Team B which helped clear the way for Reagan’s defeat of the Soviet Union.

Under Bush, the Deep State was fighting against any effort to stop Iran’s nuclear program. It did so by eliminating and silencing opposition within the national security establishment and Congress through investigations of supposed foreign agents. That left the field clear for it to force a false National Intelligence Estimate on President Bush which claimed that Iran had halted its nuclear program.

Obama broke out the same tactics when he went after Iran Deal opponents. Once again members of Congress were spied on and the results were leaked to friendly media outlets. Before the wiretapping of Trump’s people, the NSA was passing along conversations of Iran Deal opponents to the White House which were used to coordinate strategy in defense of the illegal arrangement with Islamic terrorists.

The same wall between government and factional political agendas that Nixon’s “White House Plumbers” had broken through on the way to Watergate had been torn down. NSA eavesdropping was just another way to win domestic political battles. All it took was accusing the other side of treason.

And worse was to come.

During the Iran Deal battle, the NSA was supposedly filtering the eavesdropped data it passed along.

In its last days, Obama Inc. made it easier to pass along unfiltered personal information to the other agencies where Obama loyalists were working on their investigation targeting Trump. The NSA pipeline now makes it possible for the shadow White House to still gain intelligence on its domestic enemies.

And the target of the shadow White House is the President of the United States.

There is now a President and an Anti-President. A government and a shadow government. The anti-President controls more of the government through his shadow government than the real President.

The Obama network is an illegal shadow government. Even its “light side” as an opposition group is very legally dubious. Its “shadow side” is not only illegal, but a criminal attack on our democracy.

When he was in power, Obama hacked reporters like FOX News’ James Rosen and CBS News’ Sharyl Attkisson. He eavesdropped on members of Congress opposed to the Iran Deal. Two men who made movies he disliked ended up in jail. But what he is doing now is even more deeply disturbing.

Obama no longer legally holds power. His Deep State network is attempting to overturn the results of a presidential election using government employees whose allegiance is to a shadow White House. Tactics that were illegal when he was in office are no longer just unconstitutional, they are treasonous.

Obama Inc. has become a state within a state. It is a compartmentalized network of organizations, inside and outside the government, that claim that they are doing nothing illegal as individual groups because they are technically following the rules within each compartment, but the sheer scope of the illegality lies in the covert coordination between these “revolutionary cells” infecting our country.

It is a criminal conspiracy of unprecedented scope. Above all else, it is the most direct attack yet on a country in which governments are elected by the people, not by powerful forces within the government.

“We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain,” President Lincoln declared at Gettysburg. “That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Obama’s shadow government is not just a war on President Trump. It is a war on that government of the people, by the people and for the people. If he succeeds, then at his touch, it will perish from the earth.

Obama’s third term has begun. Our Republic is in danger.

OBAMA’S THIRD TERM IS HERE

By Daniel Greenfield

After Trump secured the nomination, Obama’s people filed a wiretapping request. As he was on the verge of winning, they did it again. After he won, they are doing everything they can to bring him down.

It was always going to come down to this.

One is the elected President of the United States. The other is the Anti-President who commands a vast network that encompasses the organizers of OFA, the official infrastructure of the DNC and Obama Anonymous, a shadow government of loyalists embedded in key positions across the government.

A few weeks after the election, I warned that Obama was planning to run the country from outside the White House. And that the “Obama Anonymous” network of staffers embedded in the government was the real threat. Since then Obama’s Kalorama mansion has become a shadow White House. And the Obama Anonymous network is doing everything it can to bring down an elected government.

Valerie Jarrett has moved into the shadow White House to plot operations against Trump. Meanwhile Tom Perez has given him control of the corpse of the DNC after fending off a Sandernista bid from Keith Ellison. Obama had hollowed out the Democrat Party by diverting money to his own Organizing for America. Then Hillary Clinton had cannibalized it for her presidential bid through Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Donna Brazile. Now Obama owns the activist, OFA, and organizational, DNC, infrastructure.

But that’s just half the picture.

Obama controls the opposition. He will have a great deal of power to choose future members of Congress and the 2020 candidate. But he could have done much of that from Chicago or New York. The reason he didn’t decide to move on from D.C. is that the nation’s capital contains the infrastructure of the national government. He doesn’t just want to run the Democrats. He wants to run America.

The other half of the picture is the Obama Deep State. This network of political appointees, bureaucrats and personnel scattered across numerous government agencies is known only as Obama Anonymous.

Obama Inc. had targeted Trump from the very beginning when it was clear he would be the nominee.

Trump had locked down the GOP nomination in May. Next month there was a FISA request targeting him. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court denied the request, and it is still unknown whether the request targeted Trump, or only his associates, but it’s silly to pretend that the submission of such a request a month after he became the presumptive GOP nominee was apolitical.

The second, narrower, FISA request came through in October. This one was approved. The reason for getting a FISA request in October was even more obvious than June. October is the crucial month in presidential elections. It’s the month of the “October Surprise” when the worst hit pieces based on the keenest opposition research is unleashed. Obama’s opposition research on Trump involved eavesdropping on a server in Trump Tower. Nixon would have been very jealous.

After the election, Obama Inc. began to spread out its bets. Some of his people migrated into his network of political organizations. Others remained embedded in the government. While the former would organize the opposition, the latter would sabotage, undermine and try to bring down Trump.

An unprecedented campaign for full spectrum dominance was being waged in domestic politics.

Political opposition wasn’t a new phenomenon; even if a past president centralizing control of the organizational and activist arms of his party to wage war on his successor was unprecedented. But weaponizing unelected government officials to wage war on an elected government was a coup.

Obama Anonymous conducted its coup in layers. The first layer partnered congressional Democrats with OA personnel to retain control of as much of the government as possible by the Obama Deep State. They did it by blocking Trump’s nominees with endless hearings and protests. The second layer partnered congressional Democrats with the deeper layer of Obama operatives embedded in law enforcement and intelligence agencies who were continuing the Obama investigations of Trump.

This second layer sought to use the investigation to force out Trump people who threatened their control over national security, law enforcement and intelligence. It is no coincidence that their targets, Flynn and Sessions, were in that arena. Or that their views on Islamic terror and immigration are outside the consensus making them easy targets for Obama Anonymous and its darker allies.

These darker allies predate Obama. The tactics being deployed against Trump were last used by them in a previous coup during President Bush’s second term. The targets back then had included Bush officials, an Iran skeptic, pro-Israel activists and a Democrat congresswoman. The tactics, eavesdropping, leaks, false investigations, dubious charges and smear campaigns against officials, were exactly the same.

Anyone who remembers the cases of Larry Franklin, Jane Harman and some others will recognize them. Before that they were used to protect the CIA underestimates of Soviet capabilities that were broken through by Rumsfeld’s Halloween Massacre and Team B which helped clear the way for Reagan’s defeat of the Soviet Union.

Under Bush, the Deep State was fighting against any effort to stop Iran’s nuclear program. It did so by eliminating and silencing opposition within the national security establishment and Congress through investigations of supposed foreign agents. That left the field clear for it to force a false National Intelligence Estimate on President Bush which claimed that Iran had halted its nuclear program.

Obama broke out the same tactics when he went after Iran Deal opponents. Once again members of Congress were spied on and the results were leaked to friendly media outlets. Before the wiretapping of Trump’s people, the NSA was passing along conversations of Iran Deal opponents to the White House which were used to coordinate strategy in defense of the illegal arrangement with Islamic terrorists.

The same wall between government and factional political agendas that Nixon’s “White House Plumbers” had broken through on the way to Watergate had been torn down. NSA eavesdropping was just another way to win domestic political battles. All it took was accusing the other side of treason.

And worse was to come.

During the Iran Deal battle, the NSA was supposedly filtering the eavesdropped data it passed along.

In its last days, Obama Inc. made it easier to pass along unfiltered personal information to the other agencies where Obama loyalists were working on their investigation targeting Trump. The NSA pipeline now makes it possible for the shadow White House to still gain intelligence on its domestic enemies.

And the target of the shadow White House is the President of the United States.

There is now a President and an Anti-President. A government and a shadow government. The anti-President controls more of the government through his shadow government than the real President.

The Obama network is an illegal shadow government. Even its “light side” as an opposition group is very legally dubious. Its “shadow side” is not only illegal, but a criminal attack on our democracy.

When he was in power, Obama hacked reporters like FOX News’ James Rosen and CBS News’ Sharyl Attkisson. He eavesdropped on members of Congress opposed to the Iran Deal. Two men who made movies he disliked ended up in jail. But what he is doing now is even more deeply disturbing.

Obama no longer legally holds power. His Deep State network is attempting to overturn the results of a presidential election using government employees whose allegiance is to a shadow White House. Tactics that were illegal when he was in office are no longer just unconstitutional, they are treasonous.

Obama Inc. has become a state within a state. It is a compartmentalized network of organizations, inside and outside the government, that claim that they are doing nothing illegal as individual groups because they are technically following the rules within each compartment, but the sheer scope of the illegality lies in the covert coordination between these “revolutionary cells” infecting our country.

It is a criminal conspiracy of unprecedented scope. Above all else, it is the most direct attack yet on a country in which governments are elected by the people, not by powerful forces within the government.

“We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain,” President Lincoln declared at Gettysburg. “That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Obama’s shadow government is not just a war on President Trump. It is a war on that government of the people, by the people and for the people. If he succeeds, then at his touch, it will perish from the earth.

Obama’s third term has begun. Our Republic is in danger.

 House Committee on ‘Russian Hacking’ to  Include Only DNC-Hired Tech Experts

 Witnesses scheduled to appear at the  House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Open Hearings on “Russian Active Measures” includes   only  the technical experts  from CrowdStrike.

Many technical experts  do not agree with the CrowdStrike assessment or with the Obama administration’s claims that the DNC/DCCC hacks were  clearly committed by Russian state actors. A great  deal of  the  criticism  is aimed at the FBI/DHS Joint Analysis Report (JAR) “Grizzly Steppe” that was released at the end of December.

The JAR cited as  “specific indicators of compromise” IP addresses and a PHP malware sample. But what does this really prove?

 Wordfence, a WordPress security company specializing in analyzing PHP malware, examined these indicators and didn’t find any hard evidence of Russian involvement. Instead, Wordfence found the attack software was P.AS. 3.1.0, an out-of-date, web-shell hacking tool. The newest version, 4.1.1b, is more sophisticated. Its website claims it was written in the Ukraine.

Mark Maunder, Wordfence’s CEO, concluded that since the attacks were made “several versions behind the most current version of P.A.S sic which is 4.1.1b. One might reasonably expect Russian intelligence operatives to develop their own tools or at least use current malicious tools from outside sources.”

 Errata Security CEO Rob Graham pointed out in a blog post that while P.A.S is popular among Russia/Ukraine hackers. it is “used by hundreds if not thousands of hackers, mostly associated with Russia, but also throughout the rest of the world.” In short, just because the attackers used P.A.S., that’s not enough evidence to blame it on the Russian government.

Independent cybersecurity experts, such as Jeffrey Carr, have cited numerous errors that the media and CrowdStrike have made in discussing the hacking in what Carr refers to as a “runaway train” of misinformation.

For example, CrowdStrike has named a threat group that they have given the name “Fancy Bear” for the hacks and then said this threat group is Russian intelligence. In December 2016, Carr wrote in a post on Medium:

A common misconception of “threat group” is that [it] refers to a group of people. It doesn’t. Here’s how ESET describes SEDNIT, one of the names for the threat group known as APT28, Fancy Bear, etc. This definition is found on p.12 of part two “En Route with Sednit: Observing the Comings and Goings”:

As security researchers, what we call “the Sednit group” is merely a set of software and the related network infrastructure, which we can hardly correlate with any specific organization.

Unlike CrowdStrike, ESET doesn’t assign APT28/Fancy Bear/Sednit to a Russian Intelligence Service or anyone else for a very simple reason. Once malware is deployed, it is no longer under the control of the hacker who deployed it or the developer who created it. It can be reverse-engineered, copied, modified, shared and redeployed again and again by anyone.

Despite these and other criticisms from technical experts with no political axe to grind, the House Intelligence committee has called no independent cybersecurity professionals to challenge the Democrats’ claims of “Russian hacking” that have been repeated by the media.

Instead of presenting counter-arguments to allow the general public to make up their own minds, the House committee has invited Shawn Henry and Dmitri Alperovitch from CrowdStrike.

The danger is especially high since the subject involves technical details that the public—and most politicians—don’t understand and can be easily fooled about. A presentation with no rebuttal at all from other technical experts will lead to even more disinformation being given to the American people.

There are a number of reasons to be skeptical of the objectivity of CrowdStrike’s assessments.

As Esquire reported in a long profile piece, the DNC specifically used Alperovitch and Henry as part of an anti-Trump publicity plan related to the hacking in early June 2016:

The DNC wanted to go public. At the committee’s request, Alperovitch and Henry briefed a reporter from The Washington Post about the attack.

…

Alperovitch told me he was thrilled that the DNC decided to publicize Russia’s involvement. “Having a client give us the ability to tell the full story” was a “milestone in the industry,” he says. “Not just highlighting a rogue nation-state’s actions but explaining what was taken and how and when. These stories are almost never told.”

The Esquire piece also indicates that as the election wore on, the Obama administration was also using Alperovitch and CrowdStrike’s claims to push the Democrat narrative that the Russians were behind the attack:

On October 7, two days before the second presidential debate, Alperovitch got a phone call from a senior government official alerting him that a statement identifying Russia as the sponsor of the DNC attack would soon be released. (The statement, from the office of the director of national intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security, appeared later that day.)

It is worth noting that CrowdStrike and Alperovitch’s story has evolved over time to match a Democrat narrative. In an article in Inc. on June 14, 2016, titled “Why the DNC Hired This Cybersecurity Firm to Fight Russian Spies,” Alperovitch claimed that the purpose of the DNC hack was to expose Donald Trump:

On Tuesday, it was revealed that the Russian government is implicated in a security breach of the Democratic National Committee’s computer network, through which opposition research on the bombastic presidential candidate was lifted.

“Every world leader is trying to figure out who Mr. Trump is, especially if he’s elected president, and they want to know what his foreign policies would be. Russia is no exception,” says Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder and CTO of CrowdStrike. His firm was hired to manage the breach. “The actors are also interested in any other information the DNC might have in their opposition research to use it against Trump if he becomes president,” says Alperovitch, who leads the Intelligence, Technology and CrowdStrike Labs teams.

There is never any justification for any technical expert  to ascribe motives to any group of hackers or to  make any  statements about what “world leaders” think. It is simply far  outside their  areas of expertise.

But worse, the  Democrats  have been employing [PAYING]  Alperovitch and Henry to promote their “Russian hacking” narrative and  to provide a technical veneer to their story to score political points.

Shawn Henry, the other House witness from CrowdStrike scheduled to testify on March 20 before House Intelligence, said on his LinkedIn page that he also works for NBC News, where he says his role is to “advise NBC News on all aspects of national, homeland, and cyber security, to include on-air appearances on all NBC, MSNBC, and CNBC News programs.” He added that he is to “regularly appear on Nightly News, The Today Show, and MSNBC news programming.”

CrowdStrike also has a financial connection to one of Hillary Clinton and the Democrats’ most high-profile supporters in Silicon Valley: Google.

In 2015, CrowdStrike raised $100 million in a new round of financing, according to the New York Times, which reported that “the investment was led by Google Capital, one of the technology giant’s venture capital arms, in its first cybersecurity deal.”

 Breitbart News reported,that  the WikiLeaks releases showed that Eric Schmidt, executive of Google Capital parent company and financier Alphabet, appeared to be working directly with the Clinton campaign.

 BuzzFeed reported that the FBI did not examine the servers of the Democratic National Committee but, instead, based their assessment on CrowdStrike’s evaluation:

Six months after the FBI first said it was investigating the hack of the Democratic National Committee’s computer network, the bureau has still not requested access to the hacked servers, a DNC spokesman said. No US government entity has run an independent forensic analysis on the system, one US intelligence official told BuzzFeed News.

…

The FBI has instead relied on computer forensics from a third-party tech security company, CrowdStrike, which first determined in May of last year that the DNC’s servers had been infiltrated by Russia-linked hackers, the U.S. intelligence official told BuzzFeed News.

…

“CrowdStrike is pretty good. There’s no reason to believe that anything that they have concluded is not accurate,” the intelligence official said, adding they were confident Russia was behind the widespread hacks.

Despite that claim by an unnamed intelligence official, there are many reason to believe that what CrowdStrike has concluded is not accurate.

 At this point, however, the House Committee and the American people will not see it.

trike,  a firm hired by the Democratic National Committee (DNC)

To-date, no US government official has had access to examine the DNC computers which have been hacked. [The FBI had requested  permission to perform such an examination and was rejected by DNC.]  Thus, CrowdStrike is  the only source of the narrative about “Russian hacking” of the 2016 election and has been the “technical authority” that  the Democrats  and unnamed “intelligence officials”  have been citing  since  June, 2016.

The initial witness list released by House Intelligence includes a number of intelligence officials, all appointed during  Obama administration, such as former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, but the sole technical people on the invitation list are two representatives of CrowdStrike, President Shawn Henry, and the co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch.

Vladimir Putin Has a Plan to Upend the Political Order of the Middle East. Spoiler Alert: It’s Working

by Steven A. Cook       March 6, 2017

http://blogs.cfr.org/cook/2017/03/06/vladimir-putin-has-a-plan-to-upend-the-political-order-of-the-middle-east-spoiler-alert-its-working/#more-5317


This article was originally published here on Salon.com on Sunday, March 5, 2017.
In Washington, whenever the idea of Kurdish independence from Iraq comes up, all kinds of experts, former diplomats and officials declare, “Never going to happen.” Without fail, the assertion is always backed up with an elegant and well-informed statement of the serious challenges facing Iraqi Kurds, leading to the conclusion that a declaration of independence is “not rational.”
Yet there remains the possibility that Iraqi Kurds may decide to make, perhaps in the near future, a decision that would be entirely rational. This gap is linked to the difference between what analysts think Kurds should do — based on these observers’ calculations of Kurdish politics and interests — and the way Kurds and their leaders actually look at the world. It is a problem that can leave American officials surprised by “unexpected” events and behind the curve on developing appropriate policies.
The debate about the Kurds is one among many examples of this questionable thinking that informs U.S. foreign policy. Consider the case of Iran in Syria, for instance. By now the Iranians were supposed to have been exhausted from their support for the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad, in no small part because of the financial strain of maintaining the fight. And yet the Iranians remain.
Then there are the Russians, who were not supposed to move into eastern Ukraine and annex Crimea because of Moscow’s limited capabilities and NATO’s likely punitive response. Here we are, though. The Iranians (and Russians) are helping the Assad regime unencumbered, and the Russians have not backed away from their intervention in Ukraine, despite Western sanctions.
What is missing in the misbegotten analyses about the likely behavior of other people are ideas. For the Kurds, there are important ideas about identity at stake. In Tehran, support for Assad is not measured in financial terms but rather in terms of powerful ideas about the way the Middle East should look and Iran’s place in it. And the tragedy of a superpower lost clearly informs Russian President Vladimir Putin’s nationalist worldview.
This is why Western analysts and American officials often underestimate Russian goals, especially in the Middle East, at their peril. Even as Moscow’s strategic thinking has come into view in the last few months, there continues to be a prevailing sense among foreign policy experts that the Kremlin’s plans in the region have been ad hoc and its successes the result of brutishness rather than brains. There is something to this, if only because the assumptions that the Russian leader had neither a plan nor a lot of resources produced American and Western passivity that, in turn, provided new opportunities for the Russians.
Yet the explanation for Moscow’s behavior in the Middle East does not lie solely in the unwillingness of Barack Obama’s administration to grasp the extent of Moscow’s intentions in the region. President Donald Trump’s team, to the extent it is interested in understanding what the Russians are up to, risks making a similar mistake if it fails to understand the Kremlin’s plan in the Middle East and the important and potent set of ideas that are its inspiration.
Putin seems to be the kind of person who holds on to a grudge. The beef that seems to keep him up at night plotting revenge is the humiliation of Christmas Day 1991.At 7:32 p.m. that evening, the hammer-and-sickle banner was taken down over the Kremlin, where it had flown since 1923, and 13 minutes later the Russian flag was hoisted in its place. It is not so much that the Russian president is an unreconstructed Soviet communist as the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the subsequent decline of Russia’s relative strength seem to have been particularly painful for this Russian nationalist.
To add insult to injury, since that historic moment, NATO has expanded to the east, the Russian economy needed help from international financial institutions to stay afloat, the United States has thrown its weight around the world with little interest or deference to Russian interests, and the Orange Revolution in Ukraine undermined a reliably pro-Moscow leadership there in favor of people who looked to the West. From a certain Russian perspective, this all looked mysteriously like an American effort to surround, destabilize and disrespect Moscow.
So from the time Putin became president of the Russian Federation, he has executed a plan. While Americans were focused on Afghanistan, Iraq, solving the Arab-Israeli conflict, tax cuts, promoting democracy in the Middle East, Obama’s birth certificate, the Tea Party, the debt ceiling, government shutdowns and the Affordable Care Act, Russia rebuilt its military capability and rethought its war-fighting doctrine. At the same time, Putin sought to rebuild Moscow’s global prestige, mostly by taking advantage of American missteps (at home and abroad), to offer an alternative. This has provided the Russians an opportunity to begin building new spheres of influence — which is helped immeasurably by the confusion, polarization and instability that Moscow has sowed in the West through social media, television and cash.
So what does this all mean in the Middle East? It was not that long ago that the United States was the predominant power in the region. In many ways it still is, given Washington’s continued diplomatic, military and commercial influence, especially when it comes to arms sales. Even so, Russia has reestablished itself as a power in the region. At the very least, the reliably pro-American Arab Gulf states understand that they must now take into account Russian interests and objectives. This is something they have not had to do for 25 years.
Much of the shift in regional power dynamics stems from the Russian intervention in Syria, which began in late September 2015 — an operation that a fair number of Western analysts (including this one) thought would be short-lived, ineffective and damaging to the Russian military. As odious as it has proven to be, Moscow has achieved a number of important objectives. The Russians have signaled that they will stand by their allies, drawing a distinction between Moscow and Washington, which many in the region believe to be feckless. They have also forced important American allies like Turkey and Israel to turn to Russia as they seek to achieve their objectives in Syria. Putin has also made common cause with the Iranians who, like the Russians, chafe at the regional political order established by the United States.
The Egyptians, who have benefitted from copious American economic and military assistance over many years, clearly regard Russia as an alternative to the United States. So much so that Egyptian government opposed possible U.S. intervention in Syria late in the summer of 2013 but has supported Russian military operations there.
To be fair, the U.S. has given the Egyptians reason to seek support elsewhere. Egyptian diplomats and military attachés in Washington are keen observers of American politics. In recent years they have begun to worry about the dysfunction on Capitol Hill and the creeping isolationism found within the Republican and Democratic Parties. The Egyptians reason that these developments may adversely affect their annual $1.3 billion allotment in American military aid.
There is also the erroneous Egyptian charge that the United States has supported the Muslim Brotherhood. As fact-free as that may be, it nevertheless provides an opportunity for the Russian leadership, whose views on Islamism are notable for their lack of nuance and thus align closely with those of Egypt’s leaders.
Then there is Libya, where the Russians have met with Gen. Khalifa Haftar, the self-declared leader of the self-proclaimed Libyan National Army. Haftar is as uncompromising to Islamists as his primary patrons, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and United Arab Emirates Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, but there is more going on in Libya than the fight against extremism. The country has the largest proven reserves of high-quality light sweet crude oil in the world. It also has a lot of natural gas. Both make Libya important to Europe. The Russians are clearly thinking ahead. Haftar may end up being Libya’s new strongman, but even if he does not, he is the power in the country’s east, where there is a lot of oil. While the Europeans are looking for ways to diminish their reliance on Russian energy resources, Moscow is looking for ways to keep them locked in and thus vulnerable.
The United States and the West more generally are only now coming to the realization that the Russians are not only back but that they have clear objectives, an understanding of the way to achieve those goals and the national resources to expend in the process. In other words, the Russians have been thinking strategically. The question is, What should Washington and its allies do about it? At one time, the Russian challenge would have been a clarion call for the Western alliance to respond, but the Trump presidency has thrown the very idea of a Russian threat into question.
Trump and his advisers seem so absorbed with the idea of destroying “radical Islamic terrorism” that they are more than willing to partner with the Kremlin. What they fail to see is that while there may be a confluence of interests in fighting extremism, Russia’s strategy goes well beyond this immediate objective. Rather, Putin wants to rewrite the rules of the Middle East and upend the regional political order that has made it easier and relatively less expensive for Washington to ensure the free flow of energy resources from the region, guarantee Israeli security, fight terrorists and prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons. That’s the Russian plan — plain and simple.