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Armenia’s MFA issues note to Turkey

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August 02, 2013 | 15:56

YEREVAN. – The Armenian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) on Thursday issued a note to Turkey, in connection with the death of the Turkish shepherd at the border.

165310MFA Press Secretary Tigran Balayan informed the aforesaid to Armenian News-NEWS.am.

In the note, the Armenian side extended its condolences concerning the incident, and expressed a hope that such incidents would not repeat in the future.

To note, 35 year-old Turkish shepherd Mustafa Ulker had crossed into the Armenian border on Wednesday. According to preliminary data, he had fired in the direction of the Russian border guards that protect the Armenian-Turkish boundary, and subsequently attempted to trespass into Armenia. The Russian border guards had opened fire in response and wounded the border trespasser.

In turn Anadolu news agency of Turkey stresses that Ulker had crossed into the Armenian border to go after his flock of sheep. He was wounded and he died sometime thereafter.

Turkey records national minorities with secret ‘race codes’: report

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August 2, 2013 – 09:26 AMT

An official document penned by the Istanbul Provincial Education Directorate has surfaced, revealing that Turkey’s population administration system has been recording citizens who have Armenian, Jewish or Anatolian Greek (Rum) origins with secret “race codes,” according to Hurriyet Daily News.

167281The Armenian-Turkish weekly newspaper Agos published as its headline story on Aug 1 a report on an official document that openly states “citizens with Armenian origin are coded with ‘2.’” The implementation is reported to have been in place since 1923, the foundation year of the Turkish Republic.

A Turkish citizen’s mother whose origin is Armenian requested to register her child at an Armenian kindergarden, but the school responded by asking her to prove she had the “2 code” in order to check that she had not changed religion, according to the document. In Turkey, only minority communities’ members can register their children at minority schools, according to the education law.

The document, sent from the Istanbul Provincial Education Directorate to the Şişli District National Education office, stated that “since 1923, the secret code of Armenians is ‘2’ on identity registration certificates,” according to the Agos report.

“Since 1923, identity registration certificates have a secret ‘race code,’” the document added.

The family’s lawyer, İsmail Cem Halavurt, said the struggle to register children at the Armenian kindergarden was still continuing.

“We are now waiting for an official document saying, ‘Yes, your race code is 2, you can register at an Armenian school,’” Halavurt told the Agos.

Interior Ministry officials were not available for comment and referred reporters to the Directorate General for Population and Citizenship Affairs, which is a body working under their own ministry, the HDN said.

An official from the population administration told daily Radikal that the practice was being conducted “to allow minority groups use their rights stemming the Lausanne Treaty,” signed between Turkey and Western countries, which led to the establishment of the modern Turkish Republic.

As part of the practice, Greeks were coded 1, Armenians were coded 2, and Jews were coded 3. Other minorities or groups are not coded, the official told daily Radikal.

While there was no immediate official response to the report, opposition parties’ lawmakers harshly criticized the alleged document.

“If this is true, it is fatal. It must be examined. I will bring this onto Parliament’s agenda,” Sezgin Tanrıkulu, deputy head of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), told the Hürriyet Daily News.

Altan Tan, a deputy of the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), stated that there had long been such allegations, but they were always denied by the authorities. Tan urged Interior Minister Muammer Güler to make a statement on the issue.

“If there is such a thing going on, it is a big disaster. The state illegally profiling its own citizens based on ethnicity and religion, and doing this secretly, is a big catastrophe,” Tan said.

Turkish shepherd fired at Russian border guards: FSB

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August 2, 2013 – 14:01 AMT

The frontier division of the Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) in Armenia is investigating the incident that took place Wednesday, July 31, at the Armenian-167311Turkish border.

According to preliminary data, shepherd identified as Mustafa Ulker, 35, crossed the Armenian border and fired shots at Russian frontier guards, who returned the fire, ITAR-TASS reports.

Meanwhile, according to Anadolu Agency, Ulker, who crossed the border to retrieve a lost sheep, was wounded and later died.

Russian troops protect the Armenian borders with Turley and Iran in compliance with the agreement concluded between Moscow and Yerevan in 1992.

Germany cancels Cold War-era surveillance pact with UK, U.S

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Germany canceled a Cold War-era surveillance pact with the United States and Britain on Friday, Aug 2, the first concrete action taken by Berlin in response to revelations by National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden about those countries’ alleged electronic eavesdropping operations, The Associated Press reports.

167347Chancellor Angela Merkel had raised the issue of alleged National Security Agency spying with President Barack Obama when he visited Berlin in June. But with weeks to go before national elections, opposition parties had demanded clarity about the extent to which her government knew of the intelligence gathering operations directed at Germany and German citizens.

Government officials have insisted that U.S. and British intelligence were never given permission to break Germany’s strict privacy laws. But they conceded that an agreement dating back to the late 1960s gave the U.S., Britain and France the right to request German authorities to conduct surveillance operations within Germany to protect their troops stationed there.

“The cancellation of the administrative agreements, which we have pushed for in recent weeks, is a necessary and proper consequence of the recent debate about protecting personal privacy,” Germany’s Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said in a statement.

A government official said the move was largely symbolic and had no practical consequences for intelligence cooperation between Germany and its NATO allies . Both the U.S. and Britain still have troops based in Germany.

The official said Germany was currently in talks with France to cancel its part of the agreement as well.

Author of book on Genocide confirmed as U.S. envoy to UN, Samantha Power, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author

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August 2, 2013 – 11:37 AMT

Samantha Power, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and foreign policy advisor to President Obama, won confirmation Thursday as the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations with a vote that completes the administration’s foreign policy team for the second term, Los Angeles Times reports.

167298The outspoken former journalist and human rights advocate was confirmed by a vote of 87 to 10, far more support than critics had predicted after her high-profile career as an author and activist.

“As a longtime champion of human rights and dignity, she will be a fierce advocate for universal rights, fundamental freedoms and U.S. national interests,” Obama said in a statement. “I’m grateful that Samantha will continue to be a vital member of my national security team, and I know that under her leadership our UN mission in New York will continue to represent American diplomacy at its best.”

Power, 42, covered the war in Bosnia in the 1990s as a writer for several newspapers and magazines. After she returned, Power earned a degree at Harvard Law School and wrote about the public policy of human rights.

She is best-known for her 2002 book, “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,” the work that caught Obama’s attention as a new member of the U.S. Senate.

The book pointed out the successes and failures of the United States in responding to mass atrocities, ideas that Power echoed in many public speeches and interviews after its publication.

No plans to leave Russia’: Snowden has job offer, awaits reunion with family, girlfriend

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An “exhausted” Edward Snowden will have his own choice of accommodation, has no current plans to leave Russia, and still misses his girlfriend, according to his Russian lawyer Anatoly Kucherena.

“Snowden can live in a hotel or rent a flat in Russia,” said Kucherena, who has repeatedly spoken on behalf of Snowden, while his client was trapped in the transit snowden1zone of Sheremetyevo airport for over a month. “But the personal safety issue is a very serious one for him.”

Apologizing that he could only be “vague” about a “safe location” where Snowden has been taken, Kucherena, who is close to the Kremlin and officially campaigned for Vladimir Putin’s re-election last year, added that that the NSA whistleblower has acquired “new friends, including Americans, who will ensure his security for the time being”.

The US citizen has been issued a 12-month residence permit, which can be extended indefinitely. Snowden only has to register and then has the legal right to travel anywhere in Russia.

Kucherena said that Snowden, who had his luggage pre-packed before he was told he could leave the airport, was “exhausted” and will need “rehabilitation.”

According to Kucherena, an official invitation for the 30-year-old Snowden’s father, Lon, who has vocally supported his son in a series of high-profile TV interviews in the US, “is being finalized”.

There may also be a return for a figure that fascinated the media in the early days after Snowden’s revelations, self-described “pole-dancing superhero” girlfriend Lindsay Mills, who said she felt “betrayed” when her boyfriend disappeared following his initial video to the world.

“When I told him about the people who were calling him, including girls, such Russian girls, he told me ‘Anatoly, I still miss my girlfriend.’”

Snowden is legally allowed to work in Russia, and has already had one job offer. In what may or may not be a serious proposal, the founder of Russia’s Facebook equivalent Vkontakte, the flamboyant Pavel Durov, has offered the computer specialist a seat on his “all-star security team”.

The former NSA contractor has personally promised President Vladimir Putin that he will stop leaking “information that may harm the US”, as a condition of his asylum bid in Russia.

When questioned about how the vow fitted in with new revelations about XKeyscore, the massive information-collecting program exposed in the Guardian on Wednesday using Snowden’s data, Kucherena said that the documents about the surveillance software suite had been passed on to a journalist while Snowden was still in Hong Kong.

Kucherena said that Russia had no plans to prevent Snowden from leaving the country at any moment, saying the whistleblower may even choose to return to the US to face multiple criminal charges. But when asked if Snowden still plans to seek asylum in South America, as appeared to be his original plan, he insisted that Snowden has “no intention to travel abroad as of now”.

Edward Snowden will be entitled to Russian citizenship after spending five years in the country, though the procedure has been speeded up before for high-profile public figures, such as actor Gerard Depardieu.

Source RT

Secret Thatcher Notes: Kohl Wanted Half of Turks Out of Germany

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By Claus Hecking

British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and newly elected Chancellor Helmut Kohl in Bonn in 1982, the day after he told her of his plan to “reduce the number of Turks in Germany by 50 percent.”

Margaret Thatcher 1982 bei Helmut Kohl in BonnUnsealed confidential British documents reveal that in 1982, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl tried to carry out a radical plan. He wanted to reduce the number of Turks living in Germany by 50 percent within four years.

“SECRET,” the top of the densely typewritten document reads. Underneath, an official had added a handwritten note: “NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION.”

ANZEIGE

It was a controversial plan that the newly elected German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, confided to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher during her visit to Bonn, then the West German capital. “Chancellor Kohl said (…) over the next four years, it would be necessary to reduce the number of Turks in Germany by 50 percent — but he could not say this publicly yet,” state the secret minutes of the meeting dated Oct. 28, 1982.

It adds: “It was impossible for Germany to assimilate the Turks in their present numbers.” Only four people were in the room at the time: Kohl, his longtime adviser Horst Teltschik, Thatcher and her private secretary A.J. Coles, the author of the document.

The file, labeled “PREM 19/1036,” smells musty. For three decades, the records of the 1982 and 1983 meetings between Kohl and Thatcher have been sealed, inaccessible to ordinary people. But now that the period of confidentiality has expired, the British National Archives has made them available to the public.

The minutes of the Thatcher meeting outline how Kohl intended to get hundreds of thousands of Turks out of Germany. But they also cast light on how the relationship between the Germans and their Turkish compatriots has improved over the past three decades. Because to a contemporary German sensibility, the apparent social consensus in Kohl’s West Germany seems quite far to the right.

‘No Problems with the Portuguese’

According to the document, Kohl wanted the Turks out. “Germany had no problems with the Portuguese, the Italians, even the Southeast Asians, because these communities integrated well,” wrote minute-keeper Coles of the chancellor, who had only been in office for four weeks. “But the Turks came from a very distinctive culture and did not integrate well. […] Germany had integrated some 11 million Germans from East European countries. But they were European and therefore presented no problem.”

Kohl listed forced marriages and illegal employment by Turks as examples of “a clash of two different cultures.” One out of every two should leave, said the chancellor, and those who remain should be provided special schooling. “Those who were to be integrated must learn German.”

The Rhineland native apparently didn’t think too highly of immigrants from Turkey’s Anatolia region, which made up the country’s largest segment of so-called guest workers. Back when Kohl was merely an opposition leader for the center-right Christian Democratic Union — today the party of Chancellor Angela Merkel — he described them as “incapable of integration and, incidentally, unwilling to integrate.” And in his first policy speech, two weeks before the meeting with Thatcher, he said, “Integration is only possible if the number of foreigners living among us does not increase further.” But Kohl concealed his specific plan to get rid of every second Turk within four years, although public outrage would probably have been limited at the time.

Fear of Being Overrun

“Back then, the societal consensus in Germany was that Turks were guest workers and would have to go home,” Freiburg-based historian and author Ulrich Herbert told SPIEGEL ONLINE. And this wasn’t confined to right-leaning political parties like Kohl’s CDU, but rather “penetrated deep into the SPD,” he added, referring to the center-left Social Democratic Party. SPD member Holger Börner, at the time the governor of the central state of Hesse, said the influx of foreigners had to be “strictly stopped.” Kohl’s Social Democrat predecessor, Helmut Schmidt, was quoted in the summer of 1982 as saying, “Not one more Turk will come over the border.” His chief of staff, Hans-Jürgen Wischnewski, sneered at Muslims who “butcher their sheep in the bathtub.”

Many a German grew tired of having such a large population of guest workers. In 1973, only 12 years after the signing of the immigration agreement with Ankara, the coalition government agreed on stopping recruitment in Turkey. Yet the number of Turks in Germany continued to rise, as women and children joined their male heads of household and, after a coup in Ankara, more and more applied for asylum. By 1982, around 1.5 million Turks were living in Germany. And the country had its own problems to deal with: After the second oil crisis in the early 1980s, the German economy began to slump at rates not seen since World War II. In 1982, 1.8 million people were unemployed — six times as many as in 1973.

Many German citizens began to see immigrants as burdens on the social welfare system and competitors for jobs that were rightfully theirs. A 1982 survey conducted by pollster Infas found that 58 percent of Germans wanted to reduce the number of foreigners in the country. “The politicians in Bonn were overwhelmed,” said Herbert. “They were afraid of being overrun with Turks, and wanted to get rid of them. But they didn’t know how.”

Kohl took a shot at it with his favorite political tool: money. “He intended to capitalize on the (social) insurance payments which Turkish workers had made and give them a lump sum,” the Thatcher logs say. Indeed, in 1983 the center-right government approved a law providing limited assistance for foreigners to return to their country of origin. Bonn hoped that a one-time payment of 10,500 deutsche marks and reimbursement of their retirement insurance payments would entice Turks to return home. But the program turned out to be a flop. “Only about 100,000 Turks left,” said Herbert. At the same time, tens of thousands continued to come to Germany seeking asylum.

 

Global Power Project, Part 8: Banking on Influence with Wells Fargo

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Thursday, 1. August 2013 by AGMarshall BFP:

Wells Fargo- A Mega-Money Laundering, Drug War Profiteering, Prison-Industry Enlarging Global Bank

Just recently, in late July, Wells Fargo surpassed the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) as the world’s largest bank by market capitalization. This followed Wells Fargo reporting a 19% increase in profits over the second quarter as the bank has been busy consolidating the housing market while other big banks 0731_GPP8have retreated from it. Wells Fargo had amassed a share of almost 40% of the U.S. mortgage market by early 2013.

Now, let’s put this in context with the company’s other recent activities.

Wells Fargo, which acquired Wachovia in the wake of the financial crisis, controlled roughly 28.8% of all home loans issued across the United States in 2012, compared to 11.2% of the market it controlled in 2007, just before the housing implosion. In 2012, the bank paid a $175 million settlement following revelations that “mortgage brokers working with Wells Fargo had charged higher fees and rates to more than 30,000 minority borrowers across the country than they had to white borrowers who posed the same credit risk.”

In the settlement, the world’s largest bank “admitted no wrongdoing,” noting in a press release that the bank simply wanted “to avoid a long and costly legal fight.” Then, in 2013, Wells Fargo agreed to a further $42 million settlement because “it neglected the maintenance and marketing of foreclosed homes in black and Latino neighborhoods across the country.” Again, of course, the bank admitted no wrongdoing.

But that’s just the tip of things. A civil mortgage fraud suit was filed against Wells Fargo in late 2012 for hundreds of millions of dollars in damages over “reckless mortgage loans” made by the bank for over a decade in the lead-up to the financial crisis. Even in light of the massive settlement in 2012 over mortgage fraud, which simultaneously forced big banks to adhere to new rules regarding the mortgage market, it was found that both Bank of America and Wells Fargo had “flagrantly violated those obligations,” increasing foreclosure risks for Americans. Also, this past May, Wells Fargo agreed to pay a $105 million settlement in a fraud case brought by Orange County, which also implicated Bank of New York Mellon to the tune of a $114 million settlement.

It gets better. In 2010, Wachovia – which was purchased by Wells Fargo in 2008 – paid a settlement of $160 million for laundering over $100 million in drug money for Mexican and Colombian drug cartels. Further, the bank admitted that it had failed to “apply the proper anti-laundering strictures” regarding the bank’s handling of $378.4 billion in currency exchanges with Mexico between 2004 and 2007. A federal prosecutor commented, “Wachovia’s blatant disregard for our banking laws gave international cocaine cartels a virtual carte blanche to finance their operations,” as tens of thousands of Mexicans were killed in an exponentially violent drug war.

Thus, in the aftermath of the financial crisis, not only did the big banks receive sprawling government bailouts (Wells Fargo got $25 billion from the U.S. government), but according to the UN, proceeds pouring in from the global drug trade ultimately helped keep Wells Fargo and others afloat as “the only liquid investment capital” available to them during the crisis. But Wells Fargo didn’t just profit from laundering money for major drug cartels — it also profited, and continues to profit, at the other end of the drug war as a major investor in the prison-industrial complex, specifically with heavy investments in the GEO Group, the second largest private prison company in the United States.

As the largest bank in the world, Wells Fargo is deeply connected with some of the most powerful U.S. and international institutions to ensure that no matter how many crimes it commits — fraud, illegal foreclosures, money laundering, you name it — it will continue to consolidate markets, grow larger and presumably get away with its criminal activities for relatively small fines. The Global Power Project examined a total of 26 individuals on the executive committee and board of directors at Wells Fargo to assess their institutional affiliations. The most represented institutions (with three individual affiliations each) are the Council on Foreign Relations and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), followed by Harvard, Citigroup, Chevron, the Financial Services Roundtable and Target Corporation (with two individual affiliations each).

Meet the Elites

Elaine L. Chao, who sits on the board of Wells Fargo, was formerly U.S. Secretary of Labor in the George W. Bush administration, from 2001 to 2009. She was a Distinguished Fellow of the Heritage Foundation from 1996 to 2001 and has resumed that position since 2009. She was also the President and CEO of the United Way of America from 1992 to 1996, Director of the Peace Corps from 1991 to 1992, and Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Transportation from 1989 to 1991. Chao is a member of the board of directors of Dole Food Company, News Corporation, Protective Life Corporation, the Institute of Politics of Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and a member of Harvard Business School Board of Dean’s Advisors, as well as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

John S. Chen, also on the board of Wells Fargo, is a senior adviser to Silver Lake Partners, a director of the Walt Disney Company, a member of the Board of Overseers Emeriti of the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, a former member of the President’s Export Council, a member of the board of trustees of the Brookings Institution, chairman of the U.S.-China Policy Advisory Roundtable at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Wells Fargo board member Enrique Hernandez, Jr. is the president and CEO of Inter-Con Security Systems, and sits on the boards of Chevron, Nordstrom, McDonald’s Corporation, and the board of trustees of the University of Notre Dame. He is a member of the Harvard College Visiting and Harvard University Resources Committees and is a member of the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation.

Federico F. Peña, on the Wells Fargo board, was a U.S. Secretary of Transportation and U.S. Secretary of Energy during the Clinton administration, and previously a member of the Colorado House of Representatives and a former mayor of Denver. More recently, he has been a senior adviser to Vestar Capital Partners, on the board of Sonic Corporation and a member of the Diversity Advisory Board of Toyota North America. A former national board member of the Obama-Biden Transition Team, Peña is also former National Co-Chair of Obama For America and currently a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

John G. Stumpf, the president and CEO of Wells Fargo, is a member of the board of directors of the Financial Services Forum and chairman of the board of the Financial Services Roundtable, and is also on the boards of Target Corporation, Chevron, and on the board of trustees of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

For a mega-money laundering, drug war profiteering, prison-industry enlarging global bank like Wells Fargo, the evidence is obvious: it helps to have affiliations with individuals and institutions that make up the U.S. and increasingly the international power elite. Like the other big banks, Wells Fargo is too big to fail, too big to jail, too criminal to control — and too tumorous to tolerate.

# # # #

Andrew Gavin Marshall, BFP Partner Producer, Contributing Author & Analyst
Andrew Gavin Marshall is an independent researcher and writer based in Montreal, Canada, with a focus on studying the ideas, institutions, and individuals of power and resistance across a wide spectrum of social, political, economic, and historical spheres. He has been published in AlterNet, CounterPunch, Occupy.com, Truth-Out, RoarMag, and a number of other alternative media groups, and regularly does radio, Internet, and television interviews with both alternative and mainstream news outlets. He is Project Manager of The People’s Book Project and has a weekly podcast show with BoilingFrogsPost

The Exclusive: NSA pays £100m in secret funding for GCHQ

By

Nick Hopkins and Julian Borger
The Guardian, Thursday 1 August 2013 16.04 BST

• Secret payments revealed in leaks by Edward Snowden
• GCHQ expected to ‘pull its weight’ for Americans
• Weaker regulation of British spies ‘a selling point’ for NSA

GCHQ's site in Bude, CornwallThe NSA paid £15.5m towards redevelopments at GCHQ’s site in Bude, north Cornwall, which intercepts communications from the transatlantic cables that carry internet traffic. Photograph: Kieran Doherty/Reuters

The US government has paid at least £100m to the UK spy agency GCHQ over the last three years to secure access to and influence over Britain’s intelligence gathering programmes.

The top secret payments are set out in documents which make clear that the Americans expect a return on the investment, and that GCHQ has to work hard to meet their demands. “GCHQ must pull its weight and be seen to pull its weight,” a GCHQ strategy briefing said.

The funding underlines the closeness of the relationship between GCHQ and its US equivalent, the National Security Agency. But it will raise fears about the hold Washington has over the UK’s biggest and most important intelligence agency, and whether Britain’s dependency on the NSA has become too great.

In one revealing document from 2010, GCHQ acknowledged that the US had “raised a number of issues with regards to meeting NSA’s minimum expectations”. It said GCHQ “still remains short of the full NSA ask”.

Ministers have denied that GCHQ does the NSA’s “dirty work”, but in the documents GCHQ describes Britain’s surveillance laws and regulatory regime as a “selling point” for the Americans.

The papers are the latest to emerge from the cache leaked by the American whistleblower Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who has railed at the reach of the US and UK intelligence agencies.

Snowden warned about the relationship between the NSA and GCHQ, saying the organisations have been jointly responsible for developing techniques that allow the mass harvesting and analysis of internet traffic. “It’s not just a US problem,” he said. “They are worse than the US.”

As well as the payments, the documents seen by the Guardian reveal:

• GCHQ is pouring money into efforts to gather personal information from mobile phones and apps, and has said it wants to be able to “exploit any phone, anywhere, any time”.

• Some GCHQ staff working on one sensitive programme expressed concern about “the morality and ethics of their operational work, particularly given the level of deception involved”.

• The amount of personal data available to GCHQ from internet and mobile traffic has increased by 7,000% in the past five years – but 60% of all Britain’s refined intelligence still appears to come from the NSA.

• GCHQ blames China and Russia for the vast majority of cyber-attacks against the UK and is now working with the NSA to provide the British and US militaries with a cyberwarfare capability.

The details of the NSA payments, and the influence the US has over Britain, are set out in GCHQ’s annual “investment portfolios”. The papers show that the NSA gave GCHQ £22.9m in 2009. The following year the NSA’s contribution increased to £39.9m, which included £4m to support GCHQ’s work for Nato forces in Afghanistan, and £17.2m for the agency’s Mastering the Internet project, which gathers and stores vast amounts of “raw” information ready for analysis.

The NSA also paid £15.5m towards redevelopments at GCHQ’s sister site in Bude, north Cornwall, which intercepts communications from the transatlantic cables that carry internet traffic. “Securing external NSA funding for Bude has protected (GCHQ’s core) budget,” the paper said.

In 2011/12 the NSA paid another £34.7m to GCHQ.

The papers show the NSA pays half the costs of one of the UK’s main eavesdropping capabilities in Cyprus. In turn, GCHQ has to take the American view into account when deciding what to prioritise.

A document setting out GCHQ’s spending plans for 2010/11 stated: “The portfolio will spend money supplied by the NSA and UK government departments against agreed requirements.”

Other documents say the agency must ensure there has been “an appropriate level of contribution … from the NSA perspective”.

The leaked papers reveal that the UK’s biggest fear is that “US perceptions of the … partnership diminish, leading to loss of access, and/or reduction in investment … to the UK”.

When GCHQ does supply the US with valuable intelligence, the agency boasts about it. In one review, GCHQ boasted that it had supplied “unique contributions” to the NSA during its investigation of the American citizen responsible for an attempted car bomb attack in Times Square, New York City, in 2010.

No other detail is provided – but it raises the possibility that GCHQ might have been spying on an American living in the US. The NSA is prohibited from doing this by US law.

Asked about the payments, a Cabinet Office spokesman said: “In a 60-year alliance it is entirely unsurprising that there are joint projects in which resources and expertise are pooled, but the benefits flow in both directions.”

A senior security source in Whitehall added: “The fact is there is a close intelligence relationship between the UK and US and a number of other countries including Australia and Canada. There’s no automaticity, not everything is shared. A sentient human being takes decisions.”

Although the sums represent only a small percentage of the agencies’ budgets, the money has been an important source of income for GCHQ. The cash came during a period of cost-cutting at the agency that led to staff numbers being slashed from 6,485 in 2009 to 6,132 last year.

GCHQ seems desperate to please its American benefactor and the NSA does not hold back when it fails to get what it wants. On one project, GCHQ feared if it failed to deliver it would “diminish NSA’s confidence in GCHQ’s ability to meet minimum NSA requirements”. Another document warned: “The NSA ask is not static and retaining ‘equability’ will remain a challenge for the near future.”

In November 2011, a senior GCHQ manager working in Cyprus bemoaned the lack of staff devoted to one eavesdropping programme, saying: “This is not sustainable if numbers reduce further and reflects badly on our commitments to the NSA.”

The overriding necessity to keep on the right side of the US was revealed in a UK government paper that set out the views of GCHQ in the wake of the 2010 strategic defence and security review. The document was called: “GCHQ’s international alliances and partnerships: helping to maintain Britain’s standing and influence in the world.” It said: “Our key partnership is with the US. We need to keep this relationship healthy. The relationship remains strong but is not sentimental. GCHQ must pull its weight and be seen to pull its weight.”

Astonishingly, the document admitted that 60% of the UK’s high-value intelligence “is based on either NSA end-product or derived from NSA collection”. End product means official reports that are distillations of the best raw intelligence.

Another pitch to keep the US happy involves reminding Washington that the UK is less regulated than the US. The British agency described this as one of its key “selling points”. This was made explicit two years ago when GCHQ set out its priorities for the coming years.

“We both accept and accommodate NSA’s different way of working,” the document said. “We are less constrained by NSA’s concerns about compliance.”

GCHQ said that by 2013 it hoped to have “exploited to the full our unique selling points of geography, partnerships [and] the UK’s legal regime”.

However, there are indications from within GCHQ that senior staff are not at ease with the rate and pace of change. The head of one of its programmes warned the agency was now receiving so much new intelligence that its “mission management … is no longer fit for purpose”.

In June, the government announced that the “single intelligence account” fund that pays for GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 would be increased by 3.4% in 2015/16. This comes after three years in which the SIA has been cut from £1.92bn to £1.88bn. The agencies have also been told to make £220m savings on existing programmes.

The parliamentary intelligence and security committee (ISC) has questioned whether the agencies were making the claimed savings and said their budgets should be more rigorously scrutinised to ensure efficiencies were “independently verifiable and/or sustainable”.

The Snowden documents show GCHQ has become increasingly reliant on money from “external” sources. In 2006 it received the vast majority of its funding directly from Whitehall, with only £14m from “external” funding. In 2010 that rose to £118m and by 2011/12 it had reached £151m. Most of this comes from the Home Office.

 

 

NYT: Italian Court Upholds 1-Year Prison Sentence for Silvio Berlusconi

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Italy’s highest court on Thursday definitively confirmed a prison sentence for tax fraud for Silvio Berlusconi, dealing a severe blow to Italy’s most dramatic politician. But it also called for a re-examination of a ban on his holding public office, a compromise that might stave off an imminent collapse of Italy’s left-right coalition gBerlusconiovernment.
The sentence the court confirmed was four years, but it was automatically reduced to one year under a law aimed at combating prison overcrowding.
The decision by the Court of Cassation was the first time Mr. Berlusconi has received a definitive conviction in 20 years of tangles with Italy’s judicial system. In the other cases brought against Mr. Berlusconi over the years — which range from tax evasion to buying judges to embezzlement — he was either acquitted on appeal or the statute of limitations ran out.