Limited Efforts to Keep Taxpayer Funds From Insurgents. - A new audit (pdf) from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) has found significant weaknesses in the oversight intended to keep the Pentagon from giving contracts to Taliban and other insurgent factions. The Section 841 process is designed specifically around the reality that with so many contracts being given out willy-nilly sooner or later terrorist-linked people or groups are going to get them, and empowers them to terminate contracts after the fact if it turns out they outsourced something to their own enemies in a warzone. The SIGAR report notes that this process has been used four times so far, but also notes that the Pentagon is failing to implement the fail-safes designed to either prevent contracts from being given to insurgents or to catch them after the fact. The conclusion is that the Pentagon has ended up contracting out to insurgents in the past, but even more frighteningly that it is almost certainly still doing so unwittingly, with Inspector Sopko urging Centcom to implement additional controls to examine contracts already given, and any future ones.

NYT admits fraudulent Syrian human rights group is UK-based "one-man band" funded by EU and one other "European country." - reality, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has long ago been exposed as an absurd propaganda front operated by Rami Abdul Rahman out of his house in England's countryside. According to a December 2011 Reuters article titled, "Coventry - an unlikely home to prominent Syria activist," Abdul Rahman admits he is a member of the so-called "Syrian opposition" and seeks the ouster of Syrian President Bashar Al Assad. One could not fathom a more unreliable, compromised, biased source of information, yet for the past two years, his "Observatory" has served as the sole source of information for the endless torrent of propaganda emanating from the Western media. Perhaps worst of all, is that the United Nations uses this compromised, absurdly overt source of propaganda as the basis for its various reports - at least, that is what the New York Times now claims in their recent article, "A Very Busy Man Behind the Syrian Civil War’s Casualty Count."

As the latest hunger strike at Guantanamo enters its third grueling month, Americans are getting a long overdue wake up call from the mainstream media. "It’s time to close that shameful political prison and end the lawless indefinite detention," The New York Times proclaimed in an editorial on April 6 that deserves to be quoted at length:

The hunger strike that has spread since early February among the 166 detainees still at Guantanamo Bay is again exposing the lawlessness of the system that marooned them there. The government claims that around 40 detainees are taking part. Lawyers for detainees report that their clients say around 130 detainees in one part of the prison have taken part. The number matters less than the nature of the protest, however: this is a collective act of despair. Prisoners on the hunger strike say that they would rather die than remain in the purgatory of indefinite detention. Only three prisoners now in Guantanamo have been found guilty of any crime, yet the others also are locked away, with dwindling hope of ever being released…. For 86 detainees, this is a particular outrage. They were approved for release three years ago by a government task force, which included civilian and military agencies responsible for national security…The Obama administration justifies the force-feeding of detainees as protecting their safety and welfare. But the truly humane response to this crisis is to free prisoners who have been approved for release, end indefinite detention and close the prison at Guantanamo.

National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation and CBS News have both recently featured Guantanamo, highlighting the lawless morass that is US government policy.

Glen Greenwald: America's regression

UN report reveals Libya as hub for arms deliveries to insurgents in Syria and Mali, fails to identify state sponsors of terrorism and elicits systemic flaws of UN System. - A report, issued by the United Nations Security Council´s group of experts who monitor an arms embargo imposed on Libya in 2011 stresses, that arms shipments which have been organized from various locations in Libya, including Misrata and Bengazi, were transferred to Syria via Turkey and northern Lebanon. The report also confirms that Libya has developed into a hub for illegal arms deliveries to insurgents in Mali and beyond. The report is stopping short of identifying those state actors, who overtly and covertly finance and arm insurgents, including internationally outlawed terrorist organizations, and state actors use of these organizations as mercenaries in unconventional warfare. The report fails to call for an investigation into the arms trade and state sponsored terrorism and reveals deep systemic problems with the UN System as a whole.

Kerry was kicking off four days of talks in East Asia amid speculation that the North's unpredictable regime would launch a mid-range missile designed to reach as far as the US territory of Guam. Kerry also planned to visit China and Japan. Kerry's trip was planned well in advance of the latest danger to destabilize the Korean peninsula: North Korea's apparent preparations for another missile test in defiance of United Nations resolutions. The crisis clearly has overtaken the rest of his Asian agenda.

William Boardman: US Has A Paranoid Policy Towards North Korea
Jason Ditz: Americans Obsessed with North Korea, Overstate Threat

Peter Symonds: Obama issues new threat to North Korea - Far from attempting to lower temperatures on the Korean Peninsula, the Obama administration has been deliberately stoking the crisis. Over the past month, the Pentagon has flown nuclear-capable B-52 and B-2 strategic bombers to South Korea to send a message to Pyongyang, and its ally Beijing, that the US is capable of destroying North Korea’s military and industrial infrastructure. The North Korean regime has in turn played directly into Washington’s hands with its own belligerent rhetoric and empty threats.

CIA's drone campaign in Pakistan has killed dozens
of civilians who had gone to help rescue victims or
were attending funerals (All Hail the Assassin in Chief!)

A media report reveals that the administration of President Barack Obama has fabricated lies and misled the American public about its ongoing controversial drone war.

Leaked intelligence files uncovered by McClatchy Newspapers showed that during 2006-2008 and 2010-2011, the CIA’s Predator and Reaper assassination drones targeted and killed senior leaders of al-Qaeda and allied groups, as well as hundreds of suspected lower-level Afghani, Pakistani and unidentified militants who posed no immediate threat to the US. The US newspaper noted that Washington secretly conducted drone strikes on suspected insurgents who were not listed on any US terrorist list, on alleged organizations that did not exist at the time of 9/11, and on unidentified individuals described as “other militants” and “foreign fighters”. The report also added that many civilians including women and children were also killed in the deadly strikes.

A report by the Washington-based New America Foundation said that there have been 350 US drone strikes since 2004, most of them during President Obama's terms in office. The foundation has put the death toll between 1,963 and 3,293, with 261 to 305 civilians killed. According to the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, between 2,627 and 3,457 people have been killed by US drones in Pakistan since 2004, including between 475 and nearly 900 civilians.

Daily Mail: Pentagon officials 'don't know MOST of the people who are killed in their drone strikes'

Glenda Jackson's attack on Baroness Thatcher drew jeers - but, she tells Andy McSmith, she has no regrets. - Glenda Jackson, the Labour MP who stole the show during Commons tributes to Margaret Thatcher, claimed that messages coming in from the public were ten-to-one in her favour. She was unrepentant about her attack on the “heinous social, economic and spiritual damage” which she said that Mrs Thatcher had wreaked upon the UK during her premiership, which caused uproar when she delivered it. She said she was also struck by the way the tributes are being led by the Conservatives, when it was the Conservative leadership that sacked Margaret Thatcher in 1990. “That’s another thing – the manner of her going hasn’t been touched on. I find that bemusing,” she said.

30 year old British woman, who can’t walk or talk, is incontinent and has the mental age of a 3 year old told to get a job. - Former Labour minister Michael Meacher opened the debate saying that 1,300 people had died after being placed in the “work-related activity group”, for those currently too ill to be employed but expected to start preparing for an eventual return to work. A further 2,200 died before the assessment process was completed and 7,100 died after being judged to be entitled to unconditional support because they are too ill or disabled to work. Mr Meacher asked: “Is it reasonable to pressurise seriously disabled persons into work so ruthlessly when there are already 2.5 million people unemployed and, on average, eight persons chasing every vacancy, unless they are also provided with the active and extensive support they obviously need in order to get and to hold down work, which is certainly not the case at present?”

Banana Giant Fears National Security Archive “Media Campaign”. - [NSA] Chiquita Brands International last week filed a “reverse” Freedom of Information lawsuit to block the release of records to the National Security Archive on the company’s illegal payments to Colombian terrorist groups, according to the complaint filed in U.S. District Court. At issue are thousands of documents the company turned over to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) from 1998-2004 as part of an investigation of the company’s illegal transactions with leftist insurgents and right-wing paramilitaries from the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). Two years ago, the Archive published “The Chiquita Papers,” a declassified collection of more than 5,000 pages of internal Chiquita documents turned over to the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation as part of a criminal investigation of more than $1.7 million in payments to the AUC over six years, and for nearly three years after the group was formally designated as a terrorist organization. That case resulted in a 2007 sentencing agreement in which Chiquita admitted to more than ten years of payments to a variety of Colombian guerrilla and paramilitary groups.

Jerusalem – Israeli undercover units arresting a young
Palestinian during clashes in al-'Eissawiya village

■ During the reporting period, Israeli forces wounded 11 Palestinian civilians, including 3 children and a woman, in the West Bank. They were all wounded during peaceful protests organised by Palestinian civilians against the construction of the annexation wall and settlement activities and in support of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. In the Gaza Strip, Israeli forces continued to open fire at Palestinian fishing boats, restricting the permitted fishing area to 3 nautical miles instead of the 6 nautical mile limit that was agreed in the ceasefire agreement reached between Israel and Palestinian armed groups in November 2012.
■ In the West Bank, in an example of the systematic use of excessive force against peaceful protests organised by Palestinian, Israeli, and international activists against the construction of the annexation wall and settlement activities in the West Bank, Israeli forces wounded Belal Abdul Salam Hassan al-Tamimi, 47, when they sprayed pepper spray in his face. It should be noted that al-Tamimi is a photographer for the Popular Resistance Movement against the Annexation Wall and Settlements in al-Nabi Saleh village. Many more civilians suffered from tear gas inhalation and others sustained bruises.
■ Palestinian civilians organised many peaceful protests in solidarity with Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, especially those on hunger strike. Israeli forces used excessive force against the protesters; as a result, 10 civilians, including 3 children and 1 woman, were wounded. In addition, many civilians suffered from tear gas inhalation and others sustained bruises.

Occupied Palestine | فلسطين: Israeli occupation [soldier] shoots paralysed Palestinian during detention raid

New data shows that over 27 percent of Greeks are jobless, a rate that has tripled since debt crisis struck in 2009. - Greece's unemployment rate reached a new record of 27.2 percent in January, new data has showed, reflecting the depth of the country's recession after years of austerity imposed under its international bailout. The latest figure rose from a revised 25.7 percent in December, the country's statistics service ELSTAT said on Thursday. The jobless rate has almost tripled since the country's debt crisis emerged in 2009, and was more than twice the eurozone's average unemployment reading of 12 percent. "The first quarter will remain tough amid the deep recession, despite an improvement in the previous two months due to seasonal hirings," said Nikos Magginas, an economist at commercial Greek lender National Bank. Unemployment among youth aged between 15 and 24 stood at 59.3 percent in January, up from 51 percent in the same month in 2012. Greece's economy is in its sixth year of recession, battered by tax hikes and spending cuts demanded by its European Union and International Monetary Fund lenders.

Deutsche Welle: Greece's jobless rate has soared to a new high at 27.2%, 18-24yo at 60%

Approximately 710,000 Spanish bank customers and their families have been inappropriately sold preference shares in their banks, according to financial consumer association ADICAE (Association of Bank and Savings Bank Users). Most are ordinary savers who were persuaded to convert their life savings into this much riskier form of investment, which they were told was just as safe. This was a lie. Preference shares are high-risk financial products, potentially generating high returns if the bank in question makes a healthy profit. These are usually sold to professional speculators who know the risk involved. Unlike normal depositors, the government does not insure holders of preference shares against losses. The advantage to the banks is that it makes their capital balance look stronger, because customers have their savings locked up and at the same time they have no voting rights to which shareholders are usually entitled.