Why Did the 9/11 Commission Not "Follow the Money?", by Lars Schall

Submitted by smartknowledgeu on 03/30/2016 22:43 -0400

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-03-30/why-did-911-commission-not-follow-money-lars-schallIn the below article, independent investigative journalist Lars Schall explores the time-honored tradition of following the money in an attempt to discover answers to yet unanswered questions regarding the terrorist attacks of 9/11 in New York City. Here is his report below.



Why Did The 9/11 Commission Not “Follow the Money”?

Lars Schall has put some material together that brings him to the question why the time-proven approach to “follow the money” was dismissed when it came the funding of the biggest terror attack on US soil.
By Lars Schall


Bill:
Howdy! I am an investigative financial journalist from Germany, who’s in the process of finishing a book trilogy on the topic of the so-called “Deep State”. Related to that project, I examined the case of a software program called the Prosecutor's Management Information System (PROMIS), a database system developed by INSLAW Inc., a U.S. information technology company, which was founded by William A. Hamilton, a former analyst with the National Security Agency (NSA). Indeed, in mid-2012, when he became aware of my research connected to PROMIS, Mr. Hamilton contacted me to ask me for help with investigating some certain aspects of the PROMIS case.'

Here’s a recent confirmation for this fact.

Lars:


I am pleased to confirm that I contacted you for help in investigating aspects of the INSLAW Affair in which the U.S. Department of Justice secretly misappropriated the PROMIS legal case management software from INSLAW, Inc., one of its software vendors, and disseminated stolen copies beyond the U.S. Department of Justice for U.S. and Israeli intelligence database projects, including NSA's Follow the Money Project for real-time electronic surveillance of wire transfers of money and letters of credit through the banking system; Israel's sale of a version of PROMIS equipped with a special data retrieval capability to foreign intelligence and law enforcement agencies of both friendly and adversarial governments worldwide to facilitate the theft of their intelligence secrets while producing profits for intelligence insiders; the CIA's deployment of PROMIS to virtually every component of the U.S intelligence community as ’compatible database software’ for the gathering and dissemination of U.S. intelligence information between and among the entities that ’produce’ the intelligence information and the entities that ’consume’ the intelligence product; the CIA's deployment of PROMIS to the leading semi-conductor manufacturers in the world so NSA could exercise real-time electronic surveillance of the manufacturing and illicit sale of integrated circuits engineered for advanced defense and military applications; and the sale by a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) proprietary company in Cyprus to the drug interdiction entities of Middle Eastern governments of a back-door version of PROMIS so DEA could augment its own drug trafficking intelligence information with the intelligence information stolen from these Middle Eastern governments.
Bill Hamilton
Founder and President INSLAW, Inc.
Washington, D.C.

The Prosecutor’s Management Information System (PROMIS) was originally developed by INSLAW for the US Justice Department. However, according to Guy Lawson’s book entitled Octopus, that sophisticated piece of software “had been so successful that the American intelligence agency apparatus had secretly stolen the software to put it to use covertly. The CIA had reconfigured the code and installed it in 32-bit Digital Equipment Corporation VAX minicomputers. The agency had used front companies to sell the new technology to banks and leading financial institutions like the Federal Reserve. Hidden inside the computer was a ‘trapdoor’ that enabled intelligence agencies to covertly monitor financial transactions digitally for the first time. (…) In Bob Woodward’s book Veil, former CIA director William Casey said the secret money-tracking system had been one of his proudest achievements. (1)

In May 1998, Dr. Norman Bailey published a monograph entitled The Strategic Plan That Won The Cold War, which references the importance of NSA’s Follow the Money Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) mission and also includes a Foreword written by William P. Clark, President Reagan’s National Security Advisor in 1982 and 1983, extolling the role of Reagan’s NSC staff in “bringing about the end of the cold war.” (2) Dr. Bailey also acknowledged several years before on the public record while being interviewed by the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) that NSA undertook its so called Follow the Money Program.

While being interviewed by PBS for a July 12, 1989 television documentary entitled Follow the Money, he stated that the Reagan White House tasked the NSA in 1981 with implanting “powerful computing mechanisms” in three major wire transfer clearinghouses: CHIPS (the Clearing House Interbank Payment System) in New York City, which reportedly records payments and settlements for foreign trade, foreign exchange, and syndicated loans for its 139 member banks in 35 countries; CHAPS in London, which reportedly performs similar functions for Sterling-denominated transactions; and SIC in Basel, Switzerland, which reportedly records the same types of transactions when they involve Swiss Francs. Dr. Bailey described the new NSA SIGINT penetration of the banking sector as giving the United States the capability to follow the money flowing from foreign governments to international terrorists through the international banking system, intercepting the fund transfer messages from one bank to another as they occurred in real time. (3)

When he was interviewed for a July 23, 2008 article by Tim Shorrock in Salon Magazine, Dr. Bailey was quoted as stating that INSLAW’s “PROMIS was the principal software element used by the NSA” for its real-time surveillance of bank transfers. (4)

In a personal message that I received in June 2013, Dr. Bailey told me:
“I was appointed Director of Planning and Evaluation on the staff of the National Security Council at the White House in early 1981, when Ronald Reagan took over the presidency. In that capacity I coordinated national security planning throughout the government and evaluated the results of operations undertaken as a result. One of the projects I personally initiated was the tracing of the funding of activities contrary to the national security interests of the United States back to their sources. This activity was given the nickname ’follow the money’. I worked especially with the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve Board and the National Security Agency in carrying out this project (which is very much ongoing today). During this period I visited the NSA twice, and during my visits was told that the principal software utilized for the purpose of tracing money movements was PROMIS. At that time this meant nothing to me, as I was not a computer specialist, but rather a financial and monetary economist. Only much later did I realize that the NSA must have been given this software by the Department of Justice, which had originally utilized it to track cases. I had little to do with the Justice Department in my position, and even if I had known that such a transaction had taken place I would have found nothing wrong with it in principle, assuming the laws regarding patent protection and payment for patented products had been processed normally. That is absolutely all I know from personal experience: the NSA began to use PROMIS software sometime in 1981.”

As mentioned before, in his book, Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981-1987, Bob Woodward quotes CIA Director William Casey as claiming that one of his proudest achievements as President Reagan’s CIA Director was the “penetration of the international banking system, allowing a steady flow of data from the real, secret set of books kept by many foreign banks …” (5)

Moreover, a June 5, 1986 email message from David Wigg to Colonel Oliver North, originally classified SECRET/CODE WORD but later partially declassified and released in redacted form as a result of the Iran-Contra investigations, discusses a Reagan National Security Council (NSC) staff proposal to expand NSA’s SIGINT penetration of the banking sector to add another approximately 400 major commercial banks. The email message reported on a meeting that same day with the two top officials of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel to obtain a legal opinion, binding on the Executive Branch and authorizing the planned expansion. David Wigg, who had served as CIA Director Casey's liaison from the CIA to the NSC staff before transferring to the NSC staff, (6) described its objective as helping to “track financial flows through Syria, Libya, Iran, etc. through the 400 or so principal banks that make up the interbank market; to notify and work with European Govs. To fill gaps in our coverage and to cooperate with us in freezing/seizing assets as appropriate (all on a confidential basis).” (7)

The use of NSA’s bank surveillance project in the fight against international terrorism led to the decision by President Ronald Reagan to bomb Libya. That decision was based on precise Follow the Money SIGINT evidence that Libya had financed a terrorist attack in Germany that killed an American soldier. “The highly classified initiative, known as ‘Follow the Money,’ had allowed the Reagan administration to trace the Libyan government’s secret funding of a terrorist group that had bombed a disco in Berlin in 1986, killing an American soldier and wounding two hundred civilians.“ (8)

In the Preface of The 9/11 Commission Report, released in 2004, the 9/11 Commission writes near the very beginning:
“Our aim has not been to assign individual blame. Our aim has been to provide the fullest possible account of the events surrounding 9/11 and to identify lessons learned.“

It looks as if the lesson learned is that you can ignore the funding of a terror attack that kills more than 3.000 people on American soil, while during the presidency of Ronald Reagan the U.S. Government took the funding issue of a terror attack in Berlin extremely serious. Why do I say so? Because in Chapter 5, the 9/11 Commission states with respect to the funding issue of the 9/11 attacks:
"Ultimately the question is of little practical significance."


However, ask yourself, if you do not really investigate this question, is “the fullest account of the events surrounding 9/11” still possible? Interestingly enough, NSA’s Follow the Money mission exists until today and was expended in recent years. According to the German magazine Der Spiegel in 2013:
“Indeed, secret documents reveal that the main NSA financial database Tracfin, which collects the ’Follow the Money’ surveillance results on bank transfers, credit card transactions and money transfers, already had 180 million datasets by 2011. The corresponding figure in 2008 was merely 20 million. According to these documents, most Tracfin data is stored for five years.” (9)

Furthermore, Der Spiegel reported:

“Classified documents compiled by the US intelligence agency NSA (...) show how comprehensively and effectively the intelligence agency can track global flows of money and store the information in a powerful database developed for this purpose.
’Follow the Money’ is the name of the NSA branch that handles these matters. (…) Financial transfers are the ‘Achilles' heel’ of terrorists, as NSA analysts note in an internal report. Additional fields of activity for their ’financial intelligence’ include tracking down illegal arms deliveries and keeping tabs on the increasingly lucrative domain of cybercrime. Tracing international flows of money could help reveal political crimes, expose acts of genocide and monitor whether sanctions are being respected. (…) The classified documents show that the intelligence agency has several means of accessing the internal data traffic of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a cooperative used by more than 8,000 banks worldwide for their international transactions. The NSA specifically targets other institutes on an individual basis. Furthermore, the agency apparently has in-depth knowledge of the internal processes of credit card companies like Visa and MasterCard. (…) The collected information often provides a complete picture of individuals, including their movements, contacts and communication behavior. The success stories mentioned by the intelligence agency include operations that resulted in banks in the Arab world being placed on the US Treasury's blacklist. (…) [T]he documents reveal the close involvement of the US Treasury in selecting the program's spying targets. Indeed, according to the documents, there is an exchange of personnel in which NSA analysts are transferred for a number of months to the relevant department in the US Treasury.“ (10)

This report by Der Spiegel certainly documents that the NSA and the US Treasury are still interested in the financial activities related to terrorism. This is underlined by the fact that the US Treasury established in 2004 – the same year in which the 9/11 Commission Report was released – a special branch called the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (TFI), which oversees the Office of Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes (TFFC). Its mission: “to combat terrorist financing domestically and internationally”. (11)

CNN stated in a detailed 2010 report that the US Treasury is:
“…one of the key players in the war on terrorism and smack in the middle of nearly every major international conflict in which the United States is involved. (…) Inside Treasury, the work is done by a low-profile but high-impact unit known as the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. (…) Treasury is the world's only government finance agency with its own in-house intelligence unit. It has offices as far flung as Riyadh, Islamabad, Kabul and Abu Dhabi. They're the ones seizing or freezing assets of suspected bad guys -- from terrorists to drug runners. They're a part of the U.S. intelligence apparatus, sharing information with the CIA and the FBI, among others.
‘Treasury is the only finance ministry in the world to have an intel shop that is very much focused on financial intelligence, getting access to information about the networks that support terrorists, weapons proliferation or narcotics traffickers,’ said David Cohen, assistant secretary for terrorist financing. (…) The Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence was put together six years ago following the big federal agency shuffle that created the Department of Homeland Security.
The office has more than 700 attorneys, investigators, analysts and financial experts. And the financial intelligence unit is housed with other Treasury teams, such as the financial crimes unit, that need intel on alleged dirty money transactions. (…) Sometimes the office's work has drawn controversy. For example, since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Treasury has had access to a database of intra-European financial transactions, despite protests about privacy violations.” (12)

Obviously, the U.S. Government disagrees with the 9/11 Commission in a substantial way when it comes to the “practical significance" of this specific issue, i.e. the financing of terrorism. In the 9/11 Commission Report, they tell you not a single thing about the “Follow the Money” program and its capabilities. Moreover, they give you no clue what the U.S. intelligence agencies actually did to track down the financial activities of the alleged 9/11 hijackers and their handlers. And they even made a false statement when they wrote “that the National Money-laundering Strategy Report for 2001 ’didn’t mention terrorist financing in any of its 50 pages’, when in fact that report “mentions it 17 times”. (13)
When you see it through the prism of 9/11, isn’t it justified to ask why the U.S. Government has a “Follow the Money” program at all, if the funding of 9/11 was "of little practical significance"?

Maybe the answer to this question depends on which kind of story the 9/11 Commission had in mind that it wanted to tell the public. An account as the following written by British investigative journalist Nafeez Ahmed is for sure at odds with the “mythical historical narrative” that 9/11 has become. He writes:
“In his book Intelligence Matters (2004), Senator Bob Graham, co-chair of the
Congressional Inquiry into 9/11, discusses the contents of a top secret CIA memo dated 2nd August 2002 about two 9/11 hijackers, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi. The CIA memo concluded that there is ’incontrovertible evidence that there is support for these terrorists within the Saudi government.’
The 28 page section of the Congressional report including discussion of the CIA memo was classified, but some of its contents were leaked, and related issues revealed in press reports. Early in 2000, when Almidhar and Alhazmi arrived at Los Angeles airport, they were picked up by a fellow Saudi, Omar al-Bayoumi, who gave them $1,500 in cash, moved them into his apartment building, and helped them apply for flight school. Al-Bayoumi worked for Dallah Avco, a Saudi-based airline chaired by Prince Bandar’s father, Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz. The firm is a major contractor for the Saudi Ministry of Defense and Aviation.

In the following months, al-Bayoumi and his associates received regular cashier’s cheques of around $2,000 a month, totaling tens of thousands of dollars. These came from Prince Bandar and his wife, Princess Haifa bin Faisal. Both Bandar and his wife claimed the money was donated for charitable purposes (one payment track was made after one of al-Bayoumi’s associates requested assistance from the Saudi embassy for thyroid treatment), and that they had no idea it was being diverted to fund the 9/11 hijackers.
After 9/11, British authorities questioned al-Bayoumi in London about the Saudi money trail to bin Laden’s hijackers. They had discovered secret papers with the private phone numbers of senior Saudi government officials concealed beneath the floorboards of his flat in London. The investigation went nowhere: al-Bayoumi was soon released, and disappeared into Saudi Arabia.” (14)
Fact is, you won’t find this addressed in any way in the final report of the 9/11 Commission. The same is true when it comes to the allegations against a man by the name of Omar Sheikh Saeed. Why should anybody bother about this man?

Well, Nafeez Ahmed writes:
“In his memoirs, In the Line of Fire, Gen. Musharraf revealed that Omar Sheikh Saeed was a MI6 agent who had executed certain missions on behalf of the British intelligence agency, before travelling to Pakistan and Afghanistan where he met Osama bin laden and Mullah Omar. Sheikh Saeed was first recruited by MI6 while at the London School of Economics, recounts Musharraf. The agency persuaded him to join anti-Serb demonstrations during the Bosnia conflict, and later sent him to Kosovo to join the jihad. Musharraf argues that at some point, Saeed likely became ’a rogue or double agent.’
Musharraf’s claims are no doubt self-serving, deflecting from the widely-reported fact that Sheikh Saeed was an ISI asset. But they chime with other facts in the public record. Former US Justice Department prosecutor John Loftus, for instance, who held top secret national security clearances, has confirmed that MI6 was working with leaders of the now banned British group al-Muhajiroun?—?Omar Bakri Mohammed, Abu Hamza and Haroon Rashid Aswat (who would later become bin Laden’s bodyguard)?—?to recruit British Muslims to fight in Kosovo in 1996.
Sheikh Saeed would have been part of that MI6-backed funnel. Others in Musharraf’s government were convinced that Sheikh Saeed was also a CIA asset. In a little-noted article on Saeed’s murky background in March 2002, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported that: ’There are many in Musharraf’s government who believe that Saeed Sheikh’s power comes not from the ISI, but from his connections with our own CIA.’ Officials believe that ’Saeed Sheikh was bought and paid for.’” (15) At the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Brigadier Ijaz Shah, the former Director-General of Intelligence Bureau of Pakistan, was “the handler for Omar Saeed Sheikh, who was involved in the kidnapping of Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002”, reported Pakistani security specialist Arif Jamal. “Omar Saeed Sheikh surrendered to Brigadier Shah who hid him for several weeks before turning him over to authorities.” (16)

As Nafeez Ahmed explains:
“Brig. Shah’s connection to Omar Sheikh Saeed is deeply troubling. Sheikh Saeed was not simply accused of murdering Daniel Pearl?—?he was al-Qaeda’s finance chief during the 9/11 attacks. After 9/11, Indian intelligence officials confirmed that then ISI director Gen. Mahmoud Ahmad had ordered Omar Saeed to wire at least $100,000 to the chief 9/11 hijacker, Mohammed Atta. As I documented in my books The War on Truth (2005) and The War on Freedom (2002), which was among 99 books selected for the 9/11 Commissioners to use as part of their inquiries, multiple US intelligence investigations corroborated the Indian allegations. US authorities had further confirmed that Sheikh Saeed had wired as much as $500,000 if not more to several of the 9/11 hijackers?—?all at the behest of the ISI. Despite this, US authorities took no measures to designate or extradite either Sheikh Saeed or his ISI boss, Mahmoud Ahmad. As former British Cabinet Minister Michael Meacher observed: ‘It is extraordinary that neither Ahmad nor Sheikh have been charged and brought to trial on this count [of financing 9/11]. Why not?’” (17) And John Newman, “a former executive assistant to the director of the NSA who spent 20 years in the US Army Intelligence and Security Command, pointed out that despite Sheikh Saeed’s kidnapping of British citizens and related terror offenses, he faced no indictments from the US or Britain, and was even able to travel back to London in January 2000. He had also kidnapped American citizens, but faced no indictments from the US until after 9/11.
‘Did the United States not indict Saeed Sheikh because he was a British informant? Did the agency [CIA] receive information provided by Saeed Sheikh from British or Pakistani intelligence?’ asked Newman rhetorically at a 2005 Congressional briefing on the findings of the 9/11 Commission Report.
‘This would help explain why Saeed Sheikh was not indicted and escaped justice for his crimes and traveled freely around England… If the foregoing analysis has any merit, Western intelligence agencies were receiving reports from a senior al-Qaeda source. Once again, however, al-Qaeda had used Western intelligence to accomplish its own mission. Saeed Sheikh was probably a triple agent.’ Ahmed Omar Sheikh Saeed’s role in the 9/11 attacks on behalf of the head of the ISI, Newman noted, was completely ignored by the 9/11 Commission Report.“ (18)

Another researcher is skeptical when it comes to the allegations that Nafeez Ahmed is talking about. His name: Peter Dale Scott. The former Professor for English at the University of California in Berkeley writes in his book, The Road to 9/11:
“In October 2001, shortly after the catastrophic events of 9/11, U.S. and British newspapers briefly alleged that the paymaster for the 9/11 attacks was a possible agent of the Pakistani intelligence service ISI, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh (or Sheik Syed). There was even a brief period in which it was alleged that the money had been paid at the direction of the then ISI chief, Lieutenant-General Mahmoud Ahmad. (19) The London Guardian reported on October 1, 2001, that ’U.S. investigators believe they have found the ‘smoking gun’ linking Osama bin Laden to the September 11 terrorist attacks. . . . The man at the centre of the financial web is believed to be Sheikh Saeed, also known as Mustafa Mohamed Ahmad, who worked as a financial manager for Bin Laden when the Saudi exile was based in Sudan, and is still a trusted paymaster in Bin Laden’s alQaida organization.’ (20) This story was corroborated by CNN on October 6, citing a ’a senior-level U.S. government source’ who noted that ’Sheik Syed’ had been liberated from an Indian prison as a result of an airplane hijacking in December 1999.
The man liberated in this way was Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, a notorious kidnapper raised in England and widely reported as a probable agent of the ISI. (21) One newspaper, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, suggested he may have been a double agent, recruited inside al Qaeda and the ISI by CIA. (22) Others have since argued that Saeed Sheikh worked for both the United States and Britain, since ’both American and British governments have studiously avoided taking any action against Sheikh despite the fact that he is a known terrorist who has targeted U.S. and UK citizens.’ (23)
Subsequent newspaper stories reported on the undoubted relationship of Saeed Sheikh to the ISI, to FBI claims that he wired $100,000 to 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta’s bank account, (24) to a CNN report that these funds came from Pakistan, (25) and to the uncontested statement that (as later stated in the indictment of the so-called twentieth hijacker Zacarias Moussaoui) ’on September 11, 2001, Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi left the U.A.E. for Pakistan.’ (26)
The most sensational charge, alluded to earlier, came from Indian intelligence sources: that Saeed Sheikh had wired the money to Atta at the direction of Lieutenant-General Mahmoud Ahmad, then director of the ISI." (27)

"All these important and alarming charges are ignored in the 9/11 Commission Report, in which the Saeed Sheikh born in London is not mentioned. (28) Instead, the report assured its readers in a carefully drafted comment that ’we have seen no evidence that any foreign government—or foreign government official—supplied any funding.’ (29) It was later reported, however, that ’the Pakistan foreign office had paid tens of thousands of dollars to lobbyists in the U.S. to get anti-Pakistan references dropped from the 9/11 inquiry commission report.’ (30) The U.S. government and the mainstream media’s decisions to drop the Saeed Sheikh story in October 2001 were clearly political. On September 20, 2001, President Bush delivered his memorable ultimatum to ’every nation, in every region. . . . Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.’ There was probably no leader for which the choice was more difficult, or the outcome more unpredictable, than General Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan. But on October 7, Musharraf fired his pro-Taliban ISI chief, General Mahmoud Ahmad, along with two other ISI leaders. (31) As the historian John Newman, a former U.S. Army Intelligence analyst, has commented: ’The stakes in Pakistan were very high. As Anthony Zinni explained to CBS on 60 Minutes, ‘Musharaf may be America’s last hope in Pakistan, and if he fails the fundamentalists will get hold of the Islamic bomb.’ Musharaf was also vital to the war effort, and was the key to neutralizing Islamists and rounding up Al Qaeda operatives in Pakistan.’ (32)
A number of books, in reporting the Saeed Sheikh story, have focused on the fact that General Ahmad was in Washington on 9/11, meeting with such senior U.S. officials as CIA director George Tenet. (33) In my opinion the mystery of 9/11 must be unraveled at a deeper level, the ongoing groups inside and outside governments, in both Pakistan and America, which have continued to use groups like al Qaeda and individuals like Ahmad, for their own policy purposes. (…) They [the relationships between these groups] are far too complex to be reduced to two or three individuals. The ongoing collaboration of the ISI and CIA in promoting terrorist violence has created a complex conspiratorial milieu, in which governments now have a huge stake in preventing the emergence of the truth.” (34)


The 9/11 Commission surely would have had the chance to address the issue. But again, it decided the question was “of little practical significance".
Let me remind you on the idea of “follow the money”. Fred Shapiro, author of the book, The Yale Book of Quotations, wrote in 2011 for example: "The forthcoming Dictionary of Modern Proverbs, to be published by Yale University Press, quotes (...) a 1975 book by Clive Borrell and Brian Cashinella, Crime in Britain Today: 'Mr. [James] Crane usually offers this piece of sound advice to all new officers joining his fraud department: ‘Always follow the money. Inevitably it will lead to an oak-paneled door and behind it will be Mr. Big.’ It is a tip that has paid off in scores of cases.'” (35)

The alternative catchphrase "Money trail" refers to the same idea of following the movement of money, e.g. from one person to another, from one organization to another, from one bank account to another, in order to find out what is really happening. So, why did the 9/11 Commission deem this tried and tested approach useless? Yours truly leaves the silent answer to the reader's wisdom.

Best regards,
Lars Schall.

SOURCES:

(1) Guy Lawson: “Octopus – Sam Israel, The Secret Market, and Wall Street’s Wildest Con”, New York, Crown Publishers, 2012, page 144. On the PROMIS saga see also Cherie Seymour: “The Last Circle – Danny Casolaro’s Investigation into The Octopus and the PROMIS Software Scandal”, Walterville, TrineDay, 2011.

(2) See Norman A. Bailey: “The Strategic Plan that Won the Cold War – National Security Decision Directive 75”, published here: http://www.iwp.edu/news_publications/book/the-strategic-plan-thatwon-

the-cold-war

(3) For the transcript of the PBS documentary “Follow the Money” see Lars Schall: “Follow the Money: The NSA’s real-time electronic surveillance of bank transactions”, published at LarsSchall.com on February 2nd, 2014 under: http://www.larsschall.com/2014/02/02/follow-themoney-

the-nsas-real-time-electronic-surveillance-of-bank-transactions/

(4) See Tim Shorrock: “Exposing Bush’s historic abuse of power”, published at Salon on September 23, 2008 under: http://www.salon.com/2008/07/23/new_churchcomm/

(5) Compare Elliot L. Richardson: “INSLAW’s ANALYSIS and REBUTTAL of the BUA REPORT:

Memorandum in Response to the March 1993 Report of Special Counsel Nicholas J. Bua to the Attorney General of the United States Responding to the Allegations of INSLAW, Inc.”, published here: http://textfiles.com/law/rebuttal.txt

(6) David Wigg also earlier worked with William Casey when Casey headed the Export/Import Bank (1974-76).

(7) The National Security Archives at George Washington University published a collection of White House emails that Iran-Contra investigators had recovered from the Reagan National Security Council IBM mainframe computer after the NSC staff had deleted them as the Iran-Contra scandal began to unfold. See here: http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/white_house_email/. The documents

were later also published as a book, see Tom Blanton (ed.):
"White House E-Mail: The Top Secret Computer Messages The Reagan/Bush White House Tried to Destroy", New Press, New York, 1995. For an online reference to the email message from David Wigg to Oliver North see J. Orlin Grabbe: “Plot to Spy on Banks Outlined in White House Email”, January 2, 1997, published at Mem Research under: https://www.memresearch.org/grabbe/email.htm

(8) Guy Lawson: “Octopus”, loc. cit., page 144.

(9) See Laura Poitras, Marcel Rosenbach and Holger Stark: “'Follow the Money': NSA Monitors Financial World”, published at Spiegel Online on September 16, 2013 under:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/how-the-nsa-spies-on-internati...

(10) Ibid.

(11) Compare “U.S. Treasury Department Announces New Executive Office for Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes”, published at the website of the U.S. Treasury on March 3, 2003 under:

https://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Pages/js77.aspx

(12) Compare Jennifer Liberto: “Treasury's quiet war”, published at CNN on February 16, 2010

under: http://money.cnn.com/2010/02/16/news/international/Treasury_intelligence...

(13) Jim Hogue: “Follow the Money? God forbid”, published at Baltimore Chronicle on January 29, 2008 under: http://www.baltimorechronicle.com/2008/012908Hogue.shtml.
Hogue points in this article at “an unusual surge in the currency component of the M1 money supply” in the U.S. in July and August of 2001 that was “never investigated”. Related to this specific case see also Lars Schall:

“How does ’dirty money’ become ’clean money’?”, published at
LarsSchall.com on September 27, 2012 under: http://www.larsschall.com/2012/09/27/how-does-dirty-money-become-clean-m...,

and Lars Schall: "9/11: Currency joins insider trade claims", published at Asia Times Online on September 13, 2013 under: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/GECON-01-

130913.html

(14) Nafeez Ahmed: “The bin Laden death mythology”, published at Insurge Intelligence on July 3, 2015 under:

https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/the-bin-laden-death-mythology-9a...

(15) Ibid.

(16) Ibid. Ahmed writes: “Jamal refers to an interview in 2000 with a Pakistani security official, who disclosed Shah’s relationship with Ahmed Omar Sheikh Saeed on condition of anonymity.”

(17) Michael Meacher: “The Pakistan connection”, published at “The Guardian” on July 22, 2004

under: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/jul/22/usa.september11

(18) Nafeez Ahmed: “The bin Laden death mythology”, loc. cit.

The following footnotes from 19 to 33 are taken from Peter Dale Scott: “The Road to 9/11 – Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America”, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2007, pp. 334-335:

(19) Griffin, 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, 104–7; Ahmed, War on Truth, 137–44; and Peter Dale Scott, “The CIA’s Secret Powers: Afghanistan, 9/11, and America’s Most Dangerous Enemy, Critical Asian Studies 35, no. 2 (2003): 233–58.

(20) Julian Borger and John Hooper, “Trail Links Bin Laden Aide to Hijackers,” Guardian, October 1, 2001, http://www.guardian.co.uk/wtccrash/story/0,,561001,00.html.Cf. Griffin, 9/11

Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, 109–10. The investigators were later identified as the FBI (Wall Street Journal, October 10, 2001; CNN, October 28, 2001; and Times [London], November 16, 2001).

(21) For example, Daniel Klaidman, “Federal Grand Jury Set to Indict Sheikh,” Newsweek, March 13, 2002: U.S. officials suspect “that Sheikh has been a ‘protected asset,’ of Pakistan’s shadowy spy service, the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI.” The story was enhanced by Indian intelligence sources with a more sensational claim: that Saeed Sheikh had wired the money to hijacker Mohamed Atta at the direction of Lieutenant-General Mahmoud Ahmad, the director of the ISI at the time (Wall Street Journal,October 10, 2001). Indian sources later downplayed this anti-Pakistani
allegation by suggesting that the money came instead from a ransom paid to another terrorist, Aftab Ansari in Dubai, when a Kolkata businessman, Partha Roy Burman, was kidnapped in July 2001 (B. Muralidhar Reddy, “Omar Sheikh Arrested, Says Pearl Is Alive,” The Hindu, February 13, 2002).

(22) “Did Pearl Die Because Pakistan Deceived CIA?” Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, March 3, 2002,

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/s_20141.html “There are many in Musharraf’s government who believe that Saeed Sheikh’s power comes not from the ISI, but from his connections with our own CIA. The theory is that with such intense pressure to locate bin Laden, Saeed Sheikh was bought and paid for.”

(23) Ahmed, War on Truth, 142; cf. John Newman, “Omissions and Errors in the Commission’s Final Report: Rep. McKinney 9/11 Congressional Briefing,” August 18, 2005,

http://911readingroom.org/bib/whole_document.php?article_id=422; Musharraf, In the Line of Fire,

225: “It is believed in some quarters that while Omar Sheikh was at the LSE [London School of Economics] he was recruited by the British intelligence agency MI6. It is said that MI6 persuaded him to take an active part in demonstrations against Serbian aggression in Bosnia and even sent him to Kosovo to join the jihad. At some point he probably became a rogue or double
agent.”

(24) Maria A. Ressa, “India Wants Terror Spotlight on Kashmir,” CNN, October 8, 2001,

http://archives.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf/south/10/08/india.ressa/.

(25) “Sources: Suspected Terrorist Leader Was Wired Funds through Pakistan,” CNN, October 1, 2001, http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/10/01/inv.pakistan.funds/: “As much as $100,000 was wired in the past year from Pakistan to Mohamed Atta.” Subsequent developments lent weight to the Pakistani connection, such as the arrest of Atta’s alleged controls, Ramzi Binalshibh and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, in Pakistan.

(26) United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division. United States of America v. Zacarias Moussaoui, #108.

(27) “India Helped FBI Trace ISI-Terrorist Links,” Times of India, October 9, 2001; Wall Street Journal, October 10, 2001.

(28) The appendixes note, in a list of names, a “Sheikh Saeed al Masri” as an “Egyptian; head of al Qaeda finance committee.” Instead, following a previous reversal in the U.S. media, the financial role attributed earlier to Sheikh Saeed is now given to “Mustafa al Hawsawi,” the name (or pseudonym) used for the financial transactions (9/11 Commission Report, 436). The only
reference to any Sheikh Saeed in the text says that the Egyptian (or Kenyan) Sheikh Saeed “argued that al

Qaeda should defer to the Taliban’s wishes” and not attack the United States directly (9/11 Commission Report, 251). The report treats Sheikh Saeed and al-Hawsawi as two people, whereas earlier they had been identified in U.S. media reports as the same person.

(29) 9/11 Commission Report, 172.

(30) “Pakistan Weekly Spills 9/11 Beans,” Telegraph (Calcutta), March 13, 2006,

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1060313/asp/nation/story_5962372.asp. The Telegraph story cited the Friday Times, a Pakistani weekly, which claimed the story was based on “disclosures made by foreign service officials to the Public Accounts Committee at a secret meeting in Islamabad.”

(31) Kamran Khan and Molly Moore, “Leader Purges Top Ranks of Military, Spy Services,” Washington Post, October 8, 2001; Thompson, Terror Timeline, 260–61. It was widely reported that Mahmoud was let go for being too sympathetic to the Taliban (for example, Alan Sipress and Vernon Loeb, “CIA’s Stealth War Centers on Eroding Taliban Loyalty and Aiding Opposition,” Washington
Post, October 10, 2001).

(32) Newman, “Omissions and Errors in the Commission’s Final Report.”

(33) For example, Ahmed, War on Truth, 137–46; Griffin, 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, 103–9.

(34) Peter Dale Scott: “The Road to 9/11”, loc. cit., pp. 132-134.

(35) See Fred Shapiro: “Follow the Money”, published at Freakonomics on September 23, 2011

under: http://freakonomics.com/2011/09/23/follow-the-money/

Uncontrollable—Pentagon and Corporate Contractors Too Big to Audit

March 17, 2016

by Common Dreams

by

Ralph Nader

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/03/17/uncontrollable-pentagon-and-corporate-contractors-too-big-audit

Defense Secretary Ash Carter speaks during a news conference at the Pentagon last year. (Photo: AP/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

The Reuters report put this colossal dereliction simply: “A law in effect since 1992 requires annual audits of all federal agencies—and the Pentagon alone has never complied.”
All $585 billion and more, e.g., for the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts, of your money—not just unaudited, but, in the sober judgement of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) of the Congress, this vast military budget is year after year UNAUDITABLE. That means that the Congressional auditors cannot obtain the basic accounting data to do their job on your behalf.
Auditing the Department of Defense receives left/right support, from Senator Bernie Sanders (Dem. VT) to Senator Ted Cruz (Rep. TX).
H.R. 942, the “Audit the Pentagon Act of 2014,” is supported by both Democrats and Republicans in the House of Representatives. In the statement announcing this legislation, the sponsors declared “The Treasury Department’s Financial Report of the US Government for fiscal year 2012 shows the DOD yet again has nothing to audit—its books are a mess. In the last dozen years, the Pentagon has broken every promise to Congress about when DOD would pass an audit. Meanwhile, Congress doubled Pentagon spending.”
Republican right-winger, Mike Conaway (Rep. TX) used to be a CPA in private life. At a Congressional hearing in 2011, he told Defense Secretary Robert Gates: “I go home to folks in West Texas, and when they find out the Department of Defense can’t be audited, they are stunned.” His constituents may be more stunned to learn that their Congressman also voted for all expanding defense budgets, which is why H.R. 942 is going nowhere unless the people rally to make auditing the Pentagon a presidential election issue.
Secretary Gates and his successor Secretary Panetta agree with Rep. Conway’s observations. Yet it has seemed that the military—this huge expanse of bureaucracy, which owns 25 million acres (over seven times the size of Connecticut) and owns over 500,000 buildings in the U.S. and around the world—is beyond anybody’s control, including that of the Secretaries of Defense, their own internal auditors, the President, tons of GAO audits publically available, and the Congress. How can this be?
Enormous scandal after enormous scandal is reported by newspapers such as Reuters, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal and by news services such as Associated Press and ProPublica. Citizen groups from the left and Right excoriate this runaway budget, including the national Taxpayers Union, POGO, and Taxpayers for Common Sense. TO NO AVAIL!
Have you heard of the $43 million natural gas station in Afghanistan that was supposed to cost $500,000? Do you know about the $150 million villas that were built for corporate contractors in Afghanistan so they could spend another $600 million advising Afghans about starting private businesses in that war-torn country?
Or how about purchase of billions of dollars of spare parts because the Army or Air Force didn’t know the whereabouts of existing spare parts in forgotten warehouses here and there? What about the $9 billion the Pentagon admitted could not be accounted for in Iraq during the first several months of the invasion?
The list goes on, together with massive cost over-runs by the private contractors that are rewarded with more contracts. Soldiers get dirty drinking water, bad food, inadequate equipment, and security breaches by these contractors. No matter.
President Eisenhower’s farewell warning about the “military-industrial complex” becomes ever more of an understatement as it devours over half of the entire federal government’s operating budget.
Mike McCord, the Pentagon’s chief financial officer, has some startling explanations for why the Department is not ready for an audit. It’s not the Department’s “primary mission,” he says, which is “to defend the nation, fight and win wars.” He continues: “We’re too big to just sort of blow up all our systems and go buy one new, gargantuan IT system that runs the entire Department.”
Where are the accounting standards groups when we need them to speak up?
Mr. McCord certainly knows how to enhance his job security. Why no Pentagon audit? Too big to audit? No. Just too many scandals, too much waste, gigantic weapon system redundancies, overlaps between military branches, and many sinecures in bloated, inflexible bureaucracies, so often condemned by commanding generals in the field.
McCord himself has pointed to the areas in which he prefers to cut costs in order to save money: Congressionally-opposed base closures, retiree costs, and consolidating “its Tricare health system.”
In the final analysis, the principal culprits, because they have so much to lose in profits and bonuses, are the giant defense companies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and others that lobby Congress, Congressional District by Congressional District, for more, more, more military contracts, grants and subsidies. They routinely hire ex-Pentagon specialists and top brass who know how to negotiate the ways and means inside of the government.
President Eisenhower sure knew what he was talking about. Remember, he warned not just about taxpayer waste, but a Moloch eating away at our liberties and our critical domestic necessities.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer, and author. His latest book is The Seventeen Solutions: Bold Ideas for Our American Future. Other recent books include, The Seventeen Traditions: Lessons from an American Childhood, Getting Steamed to Overcome Corporatism: Build It Together to Win, and "Only The Super-Rich Can Save Us" (a novel).

When $8.5 Trillion is Chump Change

Posted on August 20, 2015 by DavidSwanson

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/08/when-8-5-trillion-is-chump-change.html 

Three cheers for Reuters pointing out that the Pentagon can’t explain what it did with $8.5 trillion that taxpayers gave it between 1996 and 2013.
Three trillion cheers for a blogger who is pointing out that this fact renders many other concerns ludicrous, and recommending that people bring it up at every opportunity:

“What’s that? Body cameras for all cops will be too expensive? How about we find 1/10,000th of the money we sent to the Pentagon.”
“Oh really? There’s 500 million in provable food stamp fraud going to poor people how about the $8.5 TRILLION the pentagon can’t account for?”
“Oh really? You think Obamacare is going to cost us almost a trillion dollars over 15 years? How about the 8.5 Trillion that just disappeared into the ether at the Pentagon? What’s your take on that?”
“Oh really, you’re concerned about deficit spending and the debt? Fully 1/3 of the national debt is money we sent the Pentagon and they can’t tell us where it went. It’s just gone.”
“College for everyone will cost too much? You must be really pissed at the 8.5 Trillion, with a ‘t’, dollars the pentagon’s spent and can’t tell us where it went.”

This is all very good as far as it goes, whether you like the body cameras or corporate health insurance or other items or not. We could add an unlimited number of items including some expressing our concern for the other 96% of humanity:
“You can end starvation and unclean water for tens of billions of dollars; what about that $8.5 trillion?”
Et cetera.
But here’s my real concern. The $8.5 trillion is just the bit that the Pentagon can’t account for. That’s far from all the money it was given. U.S. military spending, spread across several departments with the biggest chunk of it to the Department of so-called Defense, is upwards of $1 trillion every year. Over 17 years at the current rate, which rose sharply after 2001, that’s upwards of $17 trillion.
Imagine that the Pentagon accounted for every dime of that missing $8.5 trillion, named every profiteer, documented the life history of every man, woman, and child killed, and passed the strictest audit by an independent team of 1,000 accountants reporting to 35 Nobel Laureates — if that happened, I ask you, exactly what difference would it make?
Why is the $8.5 trillion that went to unknown purposes worse than the other trillions that went to known and named weapons and dictators and militants and recruitment campaigns? The documented and accounted for spending all went to evil purposes. Presumably the unaccounted for “waste” did the same. What’s the difference between the two?
As World Beyond War points out, war has a huge direct financial cost, the vast majority of which is in funds spent on the preparation for war — or what’s thought of as ordinary, non-war military spending. Very roughly, the world spends $2 trillion every year on militarism, of which the United States spends about half, or $1 trillion. This U.S. spending also accounts for roughly half of the U.S. government’s discretionary budget each year and is distributed through several departments and agencies. Much of the rest of world spending is by members of NATO and other allies of the United States, although China ranks second in the world.
Wars can cost even an aggressor nation that fights wars far from its shores twice as much in indirect expenses as in direct expenditures. The costs to the aggressor, enormous as they are, can be small in comparison to those of the nation attacked.
It is common to think that, because many people have jobs in the war industry, spending on war and preparations for war benefits an economy. In reality, spending those same dollars on peaceful industries, on education, on infrastructure, or even on tax cuts for working people would produce more jobs and in most cases better paying jobs — with enough savings to help everyone make the transition from war work to peace work.
Military spending diverts public funds into increasingly privatized industries through the least accountable public enterprise and one that is hugely profitable for the owners and directors of the corporations involved — thus concentrating wealth.
While war impoverishes the war making nation, can it nonetheless enrich that nation more substantially by facilitating the exploitation of other nations? Not in a manner that can be sustained.
Green energy and infrastructure would surpass their advocates’ wildest fantasies if the funds now invested in war were transferred there.

Pentagon Completes Review on Mistaken Anthrax Shipments

http://www.military.com/daily-news/2015/07/06/pentagon-completes-review-on-mistaken-anthrax-shipments.html

This is Referee Module No. 2 of the Whole System Live Agent Test at Dugway Proving Ground in Dugway, Utah. (AP photo)

Jul 06, 2015 | by Kris Osborn

The Pentagon has completed its official 30-day review of laboratory procedures and protocols following the mistaken delivery of live Anthrax spores to more than 80 laboratories around the world.
Pentagon leadership expects to announce both findings and recommendations in the coming weeks, Pentagon spokesman Maj. Eric Badger, told Military.com in a written statement.
Multiple mistaken deliveries -- first discovered at the end of May of this year -- raised alarm bells on Capitol Hill -- leading to an immediate Pentagon review of the issue.
"The Department will publicly provide the comprehensive review report and an overview of the next steps by mid-July," Badger said of the review that was led by Pentagon acquisition chief Frank Kendall.
"[The final report] will focus on the root cause for the incomplete inactivation of anthrax samples at DoD laboratories, why post-inactivation sterility testing did not detect the presence of live anthrax, existing DoD laboratory biohazard safety protocols and procedures, DoD laboratory adherence to established procedures and protocols, and identification, and what steps should be taken to fix those problems," Kendall said in June.
Following the discovery of the incident, senior Pentagon officials immediately detailed a host of mitigation efforts such as ordering all DoD labs that have these materials to test all previously inactivated spore-forming anthrax in the inventory.
The number of impacted laboratories has been climbing steadily since the incident was first discovered. Pentagon officials now acknowledge that as many as 84 laboratories in 20 states and Washington, D.C., as well as five foreign countries are now known to have received the live anthrax samples.
The live anthrax, which was mistakenly sent to commercial companies, academic institutions and various federal laboratories, also reached locations in the United Kingdom, Korea, Australia and Canada, a DoD statement said.
  
At least 22 people are now being treated with what’s called Post-Exposure Prophylaxis, a preventative medical treatment given to people after exposure to a pathogen. Seven non-DoD U.S. citizens and 15 DoD employees are among those now being treated, Pentagon officials said.
Speaking to reporters following the incident, Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work said that for the past 10 years, the department has regularly shipped inactivated or killed biological material to federal and private partner labs for development of biological countermeasures.
Work added that there is no risk to the general public from the mistakenly sent live anthrax samples, adding that the concentration of the samples was too low to infect the average healthy individual.
"There are no suspected or confirmed cases of anthrax infection among any workers in any of the labs that have received these samples over the last 10 years. And we continue to work with the CDC to ensure that all possible safeguards are taken to prevent exposure at the labs in question, and that any worker that might have had the risk of exposure, even to these low concentrated samples, they are closely monitored," he said.
Meanwhile, a recent Government Accountability Office report found that the Defense Department failed in the oversight of its high-containment laboratories leading up to the anthrax scandal.  The report from the GAO, a government watchdog group, also found that the Pentagon mismanaged a program to fix its crumbling infrastructure of facilities for chemical and biological defense.
After nearly seven years of trying, DoD's Chemical Biological Defense Program, CBDP, has failed to reach its goal of identifying or correcting shortcomings at facilities in its inventory, the GAO report said.
In response, Assistant Defense Secretary Arthur Hopkins concurred with the GAO's recommendations and said "the Department is actively reviewing and assessing the core capabilities and infrastructure that are crucial to supporting the research, development, testing and evaluation of effective counter-measures against chemical and biological threats."
-- Richard Sisk contributed to this report
-- Kris Osborn can be reached at kris.osborn@military.com

Pentagon Brands 'Belligerent' Journalists As Legitimate "Enemy Combatant" Targets

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 06/24/2015 17:30 -0400

The Pentagon has released an 1,176-page book of instructions on the "The Law Of War" detailing acceptable ways of killing the enemy. The manual also states that journalists can be labeled "unprivileged belligerents," an obscure term that replaces the Bush era "unlawful enemy combatant."
As The Washington Times reports, an eye-catching section deals with a definition of journalists and how they are expected to stay out of the fight -

"In general, journalists are civilians. However, journalists may be members of the armed forces, persons authorized to accompany the armed forces, or unprivileged belligerents."

While the Pentagon did not specify the exact circumstances under which a journalist might be declared an unprivileged belligerent, lumping terrorist writers with bona fide reporters prompted a civilian lawyer who opines on war crime cases to call the wording “an odd and provocative thing for them to write.”

Michael Rubin, a Middle East expert at the American Enterprise Institute, said the manual reflects today’s muddled world of journalism.

“It’s a realization that not everyone abides by the same standards we do,” said Mr. Rubin. “Just as Hamas uses United Nations schools as weapons depots and Iran uses charity workers for surveillance, many terrorist groups use journalists as cover.”

Mr. Rubin recalled that two al Qaeda terrorists posed as journalists to assassinate anti-Taliban leader Ahmad Shah Massoud. Chechen Islamists went on missions with camera crews.

“Journalists are the new consultant. Anyone can claim to be one,” he said. “No American serviceman should ever be killed because a politician told them they had to take a foreign journalist at his or her word.”

As RT adds,

The 1,176-page “Department of Defense Law of War Manual” explains that shooting, exploding, bombing, stabbing, or cutting the enemy are acceptable ways of getting the job done, but the use of poison or asphyxiating gases is not allowed.



Surprise attacks and killing retreating troops have also been given the green light.

But the lengthy manual doesn’t only talk about protocol for those on the frontline. It also has an extensive section on journalists – including the fact that they can be labeled terrorists.

“In general, journalists are civilians. However, journalists may be members of the armed forces, persons authorized to accompany the armed forces, or unprivileged belligerents,” the manual states.

The term “unprivileged belligerents” replaces the Bush-era term “unlawful enemy combatant.”

...

When asked what this means, professor of Journalism at Georgetown Chris Chambers told RT that he doesn’t know, “because the Geneva Convention, other tenets of international law, and even United States law – federal courts have spoken on this – doesn’t have this thing on ‘unprivileged belligerents’.”

This means that embedded journalists, who are officially sanctioned by the military and attached to a unit, will be favored by an even greater degree than before. “It gives them license to attack or even murder journalists that they don’t particularly like but aren’t on the other side,” Chambers said.

Even the Obama Administration’s definition of “enemy combatant” was vague enough, basically meaning any male of a military age who “happens to be there,” Chambers added.

*  *  *
The manual is the Pentagon's first all-in-one legal guide for the four military branches. Previously, each sector was tasked with writing their own guidelines for engagement, which presumably did not list journalists as potential traitors.
The Pentagon did not specify the exact circumstances under which a journalist might be declared an unprivileged belligerent, but Chambers says he is sure “their legal department is going over it, as is the National Press Club and the Society of Professional Journalists.”
*  *  *
Full DoD Law Of War Manual below:
Just click on the link

Track The Real-Time Position Of Ship Which Pentagon Says Was Seized By Iran

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 04/28/2015 11:11 -0400
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-04-28/track-real-time-position-ship-which-pentagon-says-was-seized-iran
Following initial confusion about which ship was shot at, seized and confiscated by Iran, with Arabiya and Farsnews reporting it was a US ship with 34 soldiers on board, while the Pentagon subsequently stating there were no US personnel on the cargo ship which was a Marshall Island-flagged cargo vessel, the Maersk Tigris, the situation still remains fluid, especially considering the latest news out of the Pentagon:

• U.S. SENT DESTROYER AND AIRCRAFT TO MONITOR SHIP, WARREN SAYS

But why if it isn't a US ship? And how will Iran react when the US naval "cavalry" arrives in its territorial waters?
Some more news on the ship in question: according to Bloomberg, the Maersk Tigris cargo vessel was in international waters when taken by Iranian navy, Cor Radings, external spokesman for Rickmers Ship Management, says by phone. Rickmers is manager of vessel. 24 crew on board ship; not known why vessel was taken. Rickmers trying to re-establish contact with vessel.
Meanwhile, those curious can track the confiscated Tigris, in real time courtesy of Marine Traffic (link). One thing is clear: there are no US cargo ships anywhere in the vicinity of the Tigris...

... although there may be some military ones soon. That's a different story.
As for this being "only" a Marshall Islands ship, a good question was asked moments ago:

U.S. Military Changes Drone Rules To Make Targeting Of Civilians Easier

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 12/06/2013 22:22 -0500

Submitted by Michael Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

The drone issue is just another topic in which President Barrack Obama has proven himself to be a world-class liar and master of deception. Despite his claims that drone strikes do little damage to civilian populations, in July we discovered that “of the 746 people killed in drone strikes in Pakistan from 2006-2009, an incredible 20% were civilians and 94 (13% of the total) were children.”

I suppose that number just isn’t good enough, because The Pentagon has decided to change the rules of engagement when it comes to drone strikes, now making it easier to target civilians. From The Washington Times:

The Pentagon has loosened its guidelines on avoiding civilian casualties during drone strikes, modifying instructions from requiring military personnel to “ensure” civilians are not targeted to encouraging service members to “avoid targeting” civilians.

Hey cops, how about you “try to avoid” beating the shit out of people and violating their constitutional rights for no reason. Yeah, because that’ll work.

In addition, instructions now tell commanders that collateral damage “must not be excessive” in relation to mission goals, according to Public Intelligence, a nonprofit research group that analyzed the military’s directives on drone strikes.

Administration officials say the strikes are legal because the U.S. is at war with al Qaeda and its associates. They also insist there is a wide gap between the government’s civilian casualty count and those of human rights groups.

Right, we are at “war with al Qaeda,” when it is convenient to be at war with them. When it is convenient to be allies with al Qaeda, we will do that too.

Despite Mr. Obama’s pledge for more transparency on drone strikes, the administration “continues to answer legitimate questions and criticisms by saying, ‘We can’t really talk about this,’” said Naureen Shah, advocacy adviser at Amnesty International.

Can’t. Make. This. Stuff. Up.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-12-06/us-military-changes-drone-rules-make-targeting-civilians-easier

Obama war chiefs widen drone kill box

Lethality of collateral damage ‘must not be excessive’

by Krista Wong, Washington Times

The Pentagon has loosened its guidelines on avoiding civilian casualties during drone strikes, modifying instructions from requiring military personnel to “ensure” civilians are not targeted to encouraging service members to “avoid targeting” civilians.

In addition, instructions now tell commanders that collateral damage “must not be excessive” in relation to mission goals, according to Public Intelligence, a nonprofit research group that analyzed the military’s directives on drone strikes.

“These subtle but important changes in wording provide insight into the military’s attempts to limit expectations in regards to minimizing collateral damage and predicting the lethal effects of military operations,” Public Intelligence said in a recent report.

The number of civilian casualties caused by U.S. drone strikes is a point of contention among Washington, human rights groups and countries where strikes are conducted, chiefly Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen and Somalia. Because the strikes are classified operations, the U.S. typically does not acknowledge when they occur, or reveal how many combatants and civilians are killed or injured.

An official for the Air Force — the service primarily tasked with carrying out drone strikes — said “tactical directives have changed a number of times over the years to tackle collateral damage concerns not only from aircraft and helicopters but from mortars and other weapons that deliver effects beyond line of sight.”

The official, who requested anonymity to discuss security matters, declined to say how the directives have changed or what the collateral damage concerns are, citing “operational security.”

Military officials, however, said the Joint Chiefs document is one of several that instruct commanders on conducting drone strikes, as well as theater-specific rules of engagement and the overarching Law of Armed Conflict.

The October 2012 document was published on a Pentagon website several months ago but has since been removed, said Public Intelligence founder and editor Michael Haynes, who obtained and analyzed the documents.

A military official confirmed that the document is being used, among others, to provide guidance for drones.

Human rights groups say such secrecy prevents scrutiny and accountability for civilian casualties. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have released reports focused on Pakistan and Yemen that say the strikes could be illegal and that the U.S. has killed more than 4,700 people, including more than 1,000 civilians.

Administration officials say the strikes are legal because the U.S. is at war with al Qaeda and its associates. They also insist there is a wide gap between the government’s civilian casualty count and those of human rights groups.

“Before any strike is taken, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured — the highest standard we can set,” President Obama said in a rare acknowledgment of the strikes in May 2013.

Public Intelligence conducted a word-for-word analysis of an instructional document from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff titled “No-Strike and the Collateral Damage Estimate Methodology,” which was provided to the American Civil Liberties Union in 2009, and a version of the document that was updated in October 2012. The ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain the 2009 version, which is posted on its website.

The 2009 version directs military personnel to take reasonable precautions to ensure that civilians are not targeted in attacks; the 2012 version says service members should “avoid targeting” civilians.

“A requirement to ‘ensure’ that civilians are not the subject of attacks is changed to an admonishment to ‘avoid targeting’ civilians,” Mr. Haynes said.

Moreover, commanders had been instructed to “consider the military necessity for attacking the target, proportionality of the means planned, and reasonableness within the framework of operational objectives.” The modified language tells leaders that collateral damage “must not be excessive” in relation to mission objectives.

What’s more, the updated version adds a paragraph that says the process for estimating collateral damage outlined in the document “does not account for secondary explosions” caused by the strike, such as of a weapons cache or fuel tank, because those explosions “cannot be consistently measured or predicted.”

“The section does say that commanders should be ‘cognizant of the risks’ from secondary explosions, but this is fairly weak wording and does not imply necessary compliance,” Mr. Haynes said.

The earlier version also defines “collateral concern” as objects that are “not considered lawful military targets” under the Law of Armed Conflict. The updated version defines the term as objects “located inside the collateral hazard area.”

The guidance applies only to military drone strikes and not necessarily to those carried out by the CIA, although the military and the CIA work together on some drone operations.

Citing an increase in drone operations last year in Libya, Air Force officials said the number of military drone strikes in 2013 is expected to be lower than in 2012. Officials said military drones last year led to or helped ground troops kill and/or capture more than 1,850 enemy combatants.

Officials declined to specify how many enemy combatants were killed or captured. Pentagon statistics show that 361 Hellfire missiles and six 500-pound laser-guided bombs were fired in 2012. In 2011, 432 Hellfire missiles and 19 500-pound laser-guided bombs were fired.

Military officials say they take great care in differentiating civilians from combatants and sometimes wait several weeks until a target is away from relatives and civilians. But they also acknowledge that it can be difficult to assess civilian casualties or other collateral damage, especially when a target is hiding in a structure or under foliage.

Given this difficulty, the collateral damage estimate “is our best means of minimizing civilian casualties and damages to nearby structures,” said a spokesman for Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“I have talked to Pentagon officials that say they are very, very careful,” said Sarah Holewinski, executive director of Civilians in Conflict. “But it’s not enough to have a conversation and have to trust. There should be a lot more transparency.”

Despite Mr. Obama’s pledge for more transparency on drone strikes, the administration “continues to answer legitimate questions and criticisms by saying, ‘We can’t really talk about this,’” said Naureen Shah, advocacy adviser at Amnesty International.

Senior administration officials recently met with representatives of human rights organizations to discuss reports that the groups published in October, but told participants not to reveal who attended the meetings, where they met or what was discussed.

“To me, this is just yet another example of the unreasonable level of secrecy surrounding this program,” said Letta Tayler, author of Human Rights Watch’s report on U.S. drone strikes in Yemen. “We hope that the U.S. will move swiftly to acknowledge basic details of these strikes.”

Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/dec/3/pentagon-gives-more-room-for-deadly-error-in-drone/#ixzz2mnFqXVO8