This week, the State Department held a “virtual ribbon cutting” for a new initiative, Leaders Engaged in New Democracies (LEND). LEND will help leaders in fledgling democracies connect with leaders who have experienced democratic transition in their own countries. As Voice of America reports, the initiative will facilitate conversations between leaders “by leveraging voice, video and […]
I am pleased to announce that this week in Washington, D.C., Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton officially released the 12th annual Trafficking in Person’s (TIP) report. The report was openly released on June 19th in the Benjamin Franklin Room at the Department of State. The event was open by invite to key government officials, leading anti-trafficking leaders and […]
It’s called a ‘murder-for-hire’ sting, a standard law enforcement ploy designed to help the criminal find the very worst in his nature and act on it. But sting operations come with their own risks as well as rewards—and attorneys know that ‘entrapment’ can be a strong defense. . .
Informants are like sharks, scouring the underworld for opportunities and targets the feds can use as springboards to career-making cases. It’s the informant’s job to find two sticks (agent and opportunity), to rub them together vigorously, and to blow gently on the sparks of criminal enterprise.
Think about this as well….the ‘downpayment’ for the ‘hit,’ the100k wired to the US undercover bank account is enough to trigger a case for conspiracy, but it still doesn’t prove that the Iranian government was driving the bus. To do that, US authorities must establish a link between the owner of the account in the UAE — or the owner/s of an account held by an international financial institution with correspondent branches/banks around the world — and the government of Iran.
This is a critical point–one that could defuse the Obama Administration’s claim that ‘senior officials at the highest levels of the Iranian government’ were tied to the assassination plot and challenge the call of senior US officials for alterations to current foreign policy, in the US and abroad, toward Iran. If US authorities cannot prove that this was something more than a plot formulated by a small group of non-state actors, the President, the Secretary of State, DEA and the FBI have some explaining to do. . .
The New York Times recently ran an article on the band Native Deen, which took a State Department sponsored tour of several countries and recently released their latest album. When they were first asked to participate in the first tour they had qualms: “We had a debate in the community,” said Abdul-Malik Ahmad, one […]
But let’s talk about bin Laden. The first notion we can discard is that the US pulled this feat off alone–that our intelligence and military capabilities allowed a convoy of Blackhawk helicopters carrying teams of Navy Seals, along with gunships (loaded with 100+ Army Rangers or Marines) flying defense above the Blackhawks, to penetrate, probably from Afghanistan, 100 miles or more into Pakistan’s airspace to one of the country’s most heavily guarded locations (Pakistan’s ‘West Point’) without detection by Pakistan’s intelligence/ military forces or without encountering Pakistani fighter jets.
Last month BBC New Magazine ran a curious story (here) about the US State Department’s International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP), calling it “a little-known scheme run by the US State Department [that] has demonstrated an uncanny capacity to pinpoint these leaders-in-waiting.” Despite the BBC’s assertion, the IVLP is quite well-known and highly regarded. The State […]
This is the new face of global organized crime–a criminal smorgasbord in which players energized by shifting motives still cooperate at intersections in their operational journeys, ‘hooking up’ for a day or an extra dollar when there are benefits all around.
http://www.alliance-exchange.org/policy-monitor/2009/12/09/exchanges-funded-635-million-fy-2010
This comes via Mark Overmann at the Alliance for International Education and Cultural Exchange: President Obama announced Friday his intent to nominate Ann Stock as the Assistant Secretary at the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, Department of State. Stock’s nomination appears on the Senate record, and was also reported by the Chicago Sun-Times and by the Washington […]
President Obama has nominated Stephen Rapp, currently the Prosecutor for the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL), as his Ambassador at Large for War Crimes Issues. As head of the Office of War Crimes Issues, Rapp will report directly to Secretary Clinton regarding a wide range of war crimes issues – from Darfur to Burma […]
Every day I get emailed all the press briefings from the US State Department and yesterday, I found this in my inbox: The State Department has put up bounties of several million dollars, under the Rewards for Justice program, for three men with connections to Al Qaeda, Abu Yahya al-Libi, Baitullah Mehsud, and Sirajuddin Haqqani. […]