Is the Ugly German back? Flames of hate haunt a nation

Der Spiegel reports: It’s a Monday night in July and Samuel Osei is frightened to death. Two neo-Nazis have entered the concrete bloc apartment building where Osei is staying, on the edge of Greifswald, a city in eastern Germany. The two men are drunk and swearing. Osei, an asylum-seeker from Ghana, steps out on his balcony and tries to placate them. “I’m sorry,” he calls out. But the right-wing extremists only grow more aggressive. They begin shouting. One of the two takes off his shirt and Osei recognizes a swastika on his chest.

The men storm into the building and begin pounding on the door to Osei’s apartment. They then go down to the basement and remove the fuses, cutting off the power. Osei cowers in his room in the dark. He calls a friend who in turn alerts the police. The attackers have already left by the time officers.
Osei chokes up when he talks about that evening a week and a half ago. Traces of the attack are still visible — the door is dented and its peephole shattered. “These guys wanted to put an end to something,” he says.

Osei, who is 29, has been living in Germany for eight months. He’s taking German lessons and earns his money by helping other refugees move. Osei likes Greifswald, which is located on the Baltic coast — he especially likes the sea and the Old Town. He says most people in the city are friendly and helpful. At the same time, he’s struggling with the animosity he has experienced at the hands of racists. [Continue reading…]

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Eduardo Galeano: The previous sole superpower

Recently, Susan Bergholz, the devoted literary agent of the late Uruguayan writer and planetary great Eduardo Galeano, sent me this brief email: “A friend of Eduardo’s and mine called yesterday to tell me, ‘Now we know where Eduardo went: he became pope!’” Somehow, that thought raised my spirits immeasurably. I was about to turn 71 and feeling my age as the dog days of summer approached. After all, when I flip through my address book — and yes, I’m old enough to have a “dumb” one filled out with that ancient potion, ink — it often reads like a book of the dead. I miss friends and authors I worked with like Chalmers Johnson and Jonathan Schell whose ways of thinking helped me make sense of our world. Eduardo has now entered that realm. I was once his English-language book editor and couldn’t be more proud of it. He remains one of my heroes.

When I’m in such moods, TomDispatch offers me an advantage few have. I can resuscitate the dead — and so, with Pope Francis’s excoriating words about our deteriorating planet in mind, I thought I might bring back from the grave the “pope” of my life. History had a strange way of spilling its secrets to Eduardo Galeano, who died in April, and in his late-in-life masterpiece, Mirrors, a history of humanity in 366 episodes, he took us from our first myths to late last night. He could blend the distant past and yesterday (or even tomorrow) in a fashion that took your breath away. Here, for instance, is a passage he wrote early in Mirrors on the “origin of writing” that captures the essence of those first scratches on clay tablets and of the 2003 invasion of Iraq:

“When Iraq was not yet Iraq, it was the birthplace of the first written words.

The words look like bird tracks. Masterful hands drew them in clay with sharpened canes.

Fire annihilates and rescues, kills and gives life, as do the gods, as do we. Fire hardened the clay and preserved the words. Thanks to fire, the clay tablets still tell what they told thousands of years ago in that land of two rivers.

In our days, George W. Bush, perhaps believing that writing was invented in Texas, launched with joyful impunity a war to exterminate Iraq. There were thousands upon thousands of victims, and not all of them were flesh and blood. A great deal of memory was murdered too.

Living history in the form of numerous clay tablets were stolen or destroyed by bombs.

One of the tablets said:

We are dust and nothing
All that we do is no more than wind.”

If George W. Bush did a remarkable impersonation of the (whirl)wind across the Greater Middle East, with results that grow more horrific by the day, here is a set of passages from Mirrors on the planet’s previous superpower, a small island nation that caused its own kind of devastation. This little history of Great Britain from the Opium Wars to Darwin’s finches ends on a typically spectacular Galeano riff on the nature of humanity. My thanks go to his publisher, Nation Books, for allowing me to bring Eduardo alive again at TomDispatch. I hope his spirit continues to inhabit this planet for a long time to come. Tom Engelhardt

God’s masterpiece or the devil’s bad joke?
Barbarians and apes — from the Opium Wars to the Origin of the Species
By Eduardo Galeano

[The following passages are excerpted from Eduardo Galeano’s history of humanity, Mirrors (Nation Books).]

Origin of Freedom of Oppression

Opium was outlawed in China.

British merchants smuggled it in from India. Their diligent efforts led to a surge in the number of Chinese dependent on the mother of heroin and morphine, who charmed them with false happiness and ruined their lives.

The smugglers were fed up with the hindrances they faced at the hands of Chinese authorities. Developing the market required free trade, and free trade demanded war.

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How trees calm us down

Alex Hutchinson writes: In 1984, a researcher named Roger Ulrich noticed a curious pattern among patients who were recovering from gallbladder surgery at a suburban hospital in Pennsylvania. Those who had been given rooms overlooking a small stand of deciduous trees were being discharged almost a day sooner, on average, than those in otherwise identical rooms whose windows faced a wall. The results seemed at once obvious — of course a leafy tableau is more therapeutic than a drab brick wall — and puzzling. Whatever curative property the trees possessed, how were they casting it through a pane of glass?

That is the riddle that underlies a new study in the journal Scientific Reports by a team of researchers in the United States, Canada, and Australia, led by the University of Chicago psychology professor Marc Berman. The study compares two large data sets from the city of Toronto, both gathered on a block-by-block level; the first measures the distribution of green space, as determined from satellite imagery and a comprehensive list of all five hundred and thirty thousand trees planted on public land, and the second measures health, as assessed by a detailed survey of ninety-four thousand respondents. After controlling for income, education, and age, Berman and his colleagues showed that an additional ten trees on a given block corresponded to a one-per-cent increase in how healthy nearby residents felt. “To get an equivalent increase with money, you’d have to give each household in that neighborhood ten thousand dollars — or make people seven years younger,” Berman told me.

Are such numbers fanciful? The emerald ash borer, which has killed a hundred million trees across North America in recent years, offers a grim natural experiment. A county-by-county analysis of health records by the U.S. Forest Service, between 1990 and 2007, found that deaths related to cardiovascular and respiratory illnesses rose in places where trees succumbed to the pest, contributing to more than twenty thousand additional deaths during the study period. The Toronto data shows a similar link between tree cover and cardio-metabolic conditions such as heart disease, stroke, and diabetes. For the people suffering from these conditions, an extra eleven trees per block corresponds to an income boost of twenty thousand dollars, or being almost one and a half years younger. [Continue reading…]

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Turkey launches massive attack against ISIS’s most effective opponent, the PKK

In a feature article published on Friday under the provocative headline, “America’s Marxist Allies Against ISIS,” the Wall Street Journal reported:

The PKK [Kurdistan Workers’ Party] and its Syrian affiliate have emerged as Washington’s most effective battlefield partners against Islamic State, also known as ISIS, even though the U.S. and its allies have for decades listed the PKK as a terrorist group.

That partnership first emerged last summer when the U.S. launched an operation to save Yazidis besieged on Sinjar Mountain in northern Iraq — victims of ISIS ethnic cleansing and who were led to safety by YPG Kurdish fighters.

U.S. war planners have been coordinating with the Syrian affiliate — the People’s Defense Units, or YPG — on air and ground operations through a joint command center in northern Iraq. And in two new centers in Syria’s Kobani and Jazeera regions, YPG commanders are in direct contact with U.S. commanders, senior Syrian Kurdish officials said.

“There’s no reason to pretend anymore,” said a senior Kurdish official from Kobani. “We’re working together, and it’s working.”

The report also said:

U.S. defense officials said coordination with YPG units, including some inside Syria, has improved the ability of coalition aircraft to strike Islamic State positions and avoid civilian casualties. U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter during a visit to the region this week said YPG forces in Syria are “extremely effective on the ground.”

While not all of the PKK affiliates are classified by the U.S. as terrorist organizations, the presence or absence of such a designation highlights the political nature of the State Department’s classification system.

The PKK says its affiliates — Syria’s YPG and groups called the PJAK in Iran and the HPG in Iraq — are separate but closely linked. PKK fighters and some analysts say they are one and the same.

As Turkish military forces remained spectators during the ISIS assault on Kobane last year, it was clear that the Turkish government likewise sees no meaningful distinction between between the PKK affiliates and views all of them as terrorists.

Perhaps this explains why Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who now operates like a born-again neoconservative, has decided that Turkish participation in the fight against ISIS justifies launching hundreds of bombing strikes on the PKK. As Dick Cheney might have said, they’re all terrorists.


But as David Graeber points on, Turkey has now provided ISIS with the one major element in its arsenal that it previously lacked:

Brett McGurk, the deputy special presidential envoy for the coalition to counter ISIS, claims:


Really?

Turkey agrees to allow the U.S. to use its air bases at Incirlik and Diyarbakir for strikes against ISIS — a “game changer” a senior Obama administration official says — Turkey then starts bombing the PKK and the U.S. responds by confirming Turkey’s right to defend itself while affirming the PKK’s status as a terrorist organization.

The Wall Street Journal reported:

U.S. officials said the base deal shouldn’t affect U.S. air support to Kurdish fighters in Syria and may help increase collaboration with the YPG because jets and drones will be closer to the battlefield.

So if these fighters are shooting at ISIS in Syria, the U.S. may provide them with air support, but if they return to camps in Iraq and get bombed by the Turks, the Obama administration will raise no objections. Is that how it works?

An administration official suggested that it’s difficult for the U.S. to be clear about the affiliations of the fighters for whom it’s providing air support.

“These guys don’t exactly wear patches identifying what groups they’re fighting for,” the official said, “but they are fighting the right guys.”

In fact, patches showing YPG and YPJ affiliation can commonly be seen.

The affiliations that are hardest to decipher right now are those of the Americans.

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Kurds condemn Turkish air strikes inside Iraq

Al Jazeera reports: The leadership of Iraq’s Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) has condemned Turkish air strikes against positions of Kurdish fighters in its autonomous region, echoing the remarks of the leadership earlier.

Masoud Barzani, president of KRG, spoke to Ahmed Davutoglu, Turkey’s prime minister, over telephone on Saturday and “expressed his displeasure with the dangerous level the situation has reached”, according to a KRG statement.

“He requested that the issue not be escalated to that level because peace is the only way to solve problems and years of negotiations are better than one hour of war,” the statement said. [Continue reading…]

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PKK and Ankara still trapped by decisions taken years ago

In an interview with Hürriyet Daily News, Cem Emrence says that decisions taken by both the Turkish state and the PKK years ago have exacerbated the conflict and limited the options of both sides, leading to long-term stalemate produced by “path dependence.”

The basic idea is that both actors – the government and the insurgency – insisted on the same policies throughout the conflict. That’s what we call path dependence. Once you make a choice in anything, as time goes by it becomes harder to reverse. This is what happened in the Kurdish conflict.

Specifically, we identified two sets of policies for both sides that sustained this path dependent relationship. On the government side, the state tried to contain the ethnic threat by creating special administrative regions while also recruiting local allies such as village guards and connecting to various religious orders. On the PKK side, one of the most important issues is what we can call the leadership cult. In the long run, the central position of Abdullah Öcalan in the PKK hampered its territorial expansion. It became very difficult to manage an organization that was trying to expand territorially through the control of just one man. The other thing was that the PKK came up with a nominal ideology about Kurdish identity that ignored or suppressed intra-group differences. In particular, the Alevi identity, the Zaza identity, and the religious Sunni Kurdish identity all became subsidiary as the PKK insisted on a single, monolithic Kurdish identity.

The outcome was that at the end of the Kurdish conflict neither independence nor integration materialized. The Turkish government hoped for integration, the PKK hoped for independence, but neither scenario ended up happening. The outcome has been a stalemate, where a strong state faces a resilient insurgency and ultimately neither can truly consolidate the Kurdish territory. [Continue reading…]

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Assad, in rare admission, says Syria’s army lacks manpower

The New York Times reports: In a striking admission, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria said on Sunday that the country’s army faced a manpower shortage and had ceded some areas to insurgents in order to hold onto other regions deemed more important.

Mr. Assad also acknowledged in a speech televised from Damascus, the Syrian capital, that many Syrians could not watch the address because of the lack of electricity in many areas and noted the economic hardships that people are facing after more than four years of an increasingly complex civil war.

What was unusual was not the fact of the struggles that Mr. Assad mentioned, which have been obvious for some time, but his mentioning them at all. It was his most substantive public nod yet to the magnitude of the challenges to his government and of the struggles confronting ordinary Syrians. In previous public speeches and interviews, he has sometimes seemed at odds with reality, glossing over setbacks and denying that the government is dropping barrel bombs in the northern city of Aleppo, a well-documented and regular occurrence. [Continue reading…]

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After Arab Spring, journalism briefly flowered and then withered

The Washington Post reports: Just three miles from the gleaming center of town, a local journalist in a rusted, old compact car swerves around trash dumpsters set on fire to deter police cars from entering the impoverished, restive Shiite neighborhoods.

The car stops at a cafe with a view of a small group of protesters, the embers in Bahrain of the Middle East uprisings known as the Arab Spring. The discontent is rarely seen on the local television or radio channels, which are all state-owned, or in the four major daily newspapers, all but one of which is aligned with the Sunni ruling family.

Customers enter the cafe rubbing their eyes and complaining about another night of tear gas. In a corner, a small group of demoralized Bahraini journalists who are no longer able to safely practice their craft gathers to commiserate and pass updates about colleagues in prison or exile.

Reading through the newspapers, former sports reporter Faisal Hayat, 41, takes note of three legal cases against the media. One is his, a 2007 defamation suit brought against him by a former sports minister. Hayat says it is a nuisance suit to ruin him financially. Then there are charges against a newspaper editor filed by the Ministry of Information. Finally, there is the three-year sentence of blogger and activist Zainab Khawaja, a.k.a Angry Arabiya, in part for tearing up a picture of the king in public. [Continue reading…]

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Watch out! Millions of angry, impulsive Americans with guns

Another day, another shooting.

While it’s hard to construct a profile of the typical American shooter who engages in random killing, there are a few generalizations that can be made with reasonable confidence:

1. The shooter will be male,
2. his weapon(s) will much more often than not have been acquired legally, and
3. he’ll probably be white.

Whether a demographically disproportionate number of homicidal, gun-wielding Americans are white, I have no idea. But the latest shooting — this time the gunman, at 59-years-old, was probably above average age — illustrates the fundamental problem with the idea that carrying a gun is the best way to defend yourself against another gun owner who’s on the rampage: By the time you’ve figured out who the crazy guy is, it’s too late. Why? Because the crazy guy looks just like the regular guy.

The gun lobby would have everyone believe that guns are really only dangerous if they get in the wrong hands and thus when gun ownership turns deadly we are encouraged to overlook the central fact: guns are designed to kill.

There are lots of things that can be deadly — cars, alcohol, cigarettes, passenger aircraft, and so forth — but when these become instruments of fatality, they are not performing the function for which they were designed.

But when a gun owner goes on the rampage, unless his weapon malfunctions, each time he kills or injures someone, his gun and its ammunition were functioning exactly in accordance with specifications.

Although guns can be used to pop holes in paper targets or shatter bottles, what they’re really meant to do is rip flesh apart and end lives. This is machine tooled, high precision, state of the art, carnage.

Lisa Wade writes:

While it seems that much of the discourse around curbing gun violence focuses on the need to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill, these two issues — gun violence and mental illness — “intersect only at their edges.” These are the words of Jeffrey Swanson and his colleagues in their new article examining the personality characteristics of American gun owners.

To think otherwise, they argue, is to fall prey to the narrative of gun rights advocates, who want us to think that “controlling people with serious mental illness instead of controlling firearms is the key policy answer.” Since the majority of people with mental illnesses are never violent, this is unlikely to be an effective strategy while, at the same time, further stigmatizing people with mental illness.

What is a good strategy, then, short of the unlikely event that we take America’s guns away?

Swanson and colleagues argue that a better policy would be to look for signs of impulsive, angry, and aggressive behavior and limit gun rights based on that. Evidence of such behavior, they believe, “conveys inherent risk of aggressive or violent acts” substantial enough to justify limiting gun ownership.

By Wade’s estimate, based on an unspecified national data set, there are several million American gun owners who pose a risk.

Political realism may dictate that America’s gun owners can’t be deprived of their cherished weapons, but civil libertarians would just as surely guarantee that no screening process would ever be put in place (if such a process could even be devised) that would keep guns out of the hands of impulsive, angry, and aggressive Americans.

The remedy, it seems to me, will have to come from the other end by making legally available weapons less deadly and by holding gun manufacturers legally responsible for the effects of their products.

No other industry enjoys impunity from product liability yet in 2005, Congress, under pressure from the NRA, conspired with the gun makers to protect their profits at the expense of American lives.

The authors of the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act have blood on their hands. Each time the families of victims of yet another mass shooting attempt to sue the gun makers, this law provides them with protection.

The Washington Post reported in 2013 on those stymied efforts.

Marc Bern, a New York trial lawyer representing family members of Aurora victims, said the gun law severely limited his clients’ options. He is pursuing a case against the movie theater company, although some of his clients had expressed interest in trying to pursue companies that provided guns or ammunition to the shooter.

“We looked at the gun industry, but they were able to insulate themselves with this law,” Bern said. “It is absolutely outrageous that the gun industry is not accountable when virtually every other industry in this country is accountable.”

President Obama bemoans the fact that the U.S. does not have “sufficient, common-sense gun safety laws — even in the face of repeated mass killings,” and the chances of new legislation being crafted during what remains of is term are slim.

He could, however, push for the repeal of the 2005 law.

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Iran’s president defends nuclear deal in blunt remarks

The New York Times reports: Pushing back against domestic critics of Iran’s nuclear deal, President Hassan Rouhani suggested on Thursday that the alternative was an economic “Stone Age” and that the accord was the precise reason he was elected two years ago.

The remarks by Mr. Rouhani at a medical conference, broadcast on national television, were among the bluntest he has made in defending the agreement reached with six big powers including the United States on July 14 in Vienna.

Under the agreement, economic sanctions on Iran, including restraints on its oil and financial trade, will be lifted in exchange for significant limits on the country’s nuclear activities, with verifiable guarantees that they remain peaceful. [Continue reading…]

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Poll: Jewish Americans support Iran deal, despite misgivings

Jewish Journal reports: By a wide margin, American Jews support the recently concluded agreement with Iran to restrict its nuclear program, and a clear majority of Jews wants Congress to approve the deal. In fact, as compared with Americans generally, Jews are more supportive of the “Iran deal,” in large part because Jews are more liberal and more Democratic in their identities. It turns out that liberals (Jewish or not) support the deal far more than conservatives (Jewish or not), just as most Democrats are in favor, while most Republicans are opposed.

These results emerge from the new LA Jewish Journal Survey conducted under my direction by Social Science Research Solutions (SSRS), between July 16-20, a few days after the agreement had been announced. SSRS interviewed 501 Jews for the Jewish survey, and for the national survey, 522 respondents by phone (almost a third of which were cellphones). The margin of error is 6 percent for the Jewish survey and 5.2 percent for the national survey (consisting of 505 non-Jews and 17 Jews).

The LA Jewish Journal Survey asked respondents’ views on “an agreement … reached in which the United States and other countries would lift major economic sanctions against Iran, in exchange for Iran restricting its nuclear program in a way that makes it harder for it to produce nuclear weapons.” Almost half – 49 percent of American Jews – voiced support, and 31 percent opposed. Jews differ from the national population. Of all respondents in our national survey, only 28 percent support the deal, 24 percent oppose and the rest (48 percent) “don’t know enough to say.” [Continue reading…]

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Israeli ambassador to House Democrats: Don’t fret about killing Iran deal

Politico reports: Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer’s message to House Democrats is simple: don’t worry about voting against the Iran deal, because no matter what, the U.S. will not allow the Islamic Republic to obtain a nuclear weapon.

The message, described by multiple lawmakers who were on the receiving end, is meant to tamp down fear of what will happen if Congress votes to block the nuclear agreement. The U.S. and Israel have both said they would do anything to ensure Iran never gets a nuclear weapon.

Dermer and other opponents are fighting an uphill battle against the nuclear pact: Capitol Hill insiders say opponents to the deal do not have the votes to override President Barack Obama’s veto. [Continue reading…]

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World Jewry ever more uneasy with Israel, major study finds

The Times of Israel reports: World Jewry is finding it increasingly difficult to support Israel due to its ongoing conflict with the Palestinians, leading many communities to shun discussing the Jewish state altogether, a new major study has found.

The trend is eroding the Diaspora’s support for the Jewish state, warns the report by the Jewish People Policy Institute think tank, to be formally published next week.

While most Jews sympathize with Israel’s needs to wage war in self-defense and believe that its army acts according to high moral standards, there is growing discomfort with some Israeli policies they believe unnecessarily perpetuate conflict, according to the 100-page report by the JPPI, which was made available to The Times of Israel.

Diaspora Jews are not convinced that Israel is doing enough to prevent military conflicts and are troubled by the number of civilian casualties they often produce, though they generally blame Israel’s enemies for the bloodshed. The accusation of the use of “disproportionate force” makes it difficult for these Jews to defend Israeli actions. Somewhat paradoxically, however, Jews in the Diaspora are disappointed that Israel doesn’t manage to end its wars with decisive victories.

“Many Jews doubt that Israel truly wishes to reach a peace settlement with the Palestinians, and few believe it is making the necessary effort to achieve one,” according to the study’s author, Shmuel Rosner. [Continue reading…]

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Mission to purge Syria of chemical weapons comes up short

The Wall Street Journal reports: In May of last year, a small team of international weapons inspectors gained entry to one of Syria’s most closely guarded laboratories. Western nations had long suspected that the Damascus facility was being used to develop chemical weapons.

Inside, Syrian scientists showed them rooms with test tubes, Bunsen burners and desktop computers, according to inspectors. The Syrians gave a PowerPoint presentation detailing the medical and agricultural research they said went on there. A Syrian general insisted that the Assad regime had nothing to hide.

As the international inspectors suspected back then, it was a ruse, part of a chain of misrepresentations by President Bashar al-Assad’s regime to hide the extent of its chemical-weapons work. One year after the West celebrated the removal of Syria’s arsenal as a foreign-policy success, U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that the regime didn’t give up all of the chemical weapons it was supposed to.

An examination of last year’s international effort to rid Syria of chemical weapons, based on interviews with many of the inspectors and U.S. and European officials who were involved, shows the extent to which the Syrian regime controlled where inspectors went, what they saw and, in turn, what they accomplished. That happened in large part because of the ground rules under which the inspectors were allowed into the country, according to the inspectors and officials.

The West was unable, for example, to prevent Mr. Assad from continuing to operate weapons-research facilities, including the one in Damascus visited by inspectors, making it easier for the regime to develop a new type of chemical munition using chlorine. And the regime never had to account for the types of short-range rockets that United Nations investigators believe were used in an Aug. 21, 2013, sarin gas attack that killed some 1,400 people, these officials say.

Obama administration officials have voiced alarm this year about reports that Mr. Assad is using the chlorine weapons on his own people. And U.S. intelligence now suggests he hid caches of even deadlier nerve agents, and that he may be prepared to use them if government strongholds are threatened by Islamist fighters, according to officials familiar with the intelligence. If the regime collapses outright, such chemical-weapons could fall into the hands of Islamic State, or another terror group. [Continue reading…]

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Turkey to allow use of key air bases for U.S. warplanes to bomb ISIS

The New York Times reports: The United States and Turkey have reached an agreement for manned and unmanned American warplanes to carry out aerial attacks on the Islamic State from two Turkish air bases, Obama administration officials said Thursday.

The agreement on the bases, Incerlik and Diyarbakir, was described by one senior administration official as a “game changer” that would significantly strengthen the American military’s ability to strike at ISIS targets in Syria and carry out extended aerial surveillance. It came after months of negotiations that culminated on Wednesday with a phone call between President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, and President Obama, another administration official said.

The development came as Turkish forces were reported to have engaged in the first direct combat with Islamic State forces on the Syrian side of the border. [Continue reading…]

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Pakistan tried to tap international web traffic via underwater cables, report says

AFP reports: Pakistani intelligence sought to tap worldwide internet traffic via underwater cables that would have given the country a digital espionage capacity to rival the US, according to a report by Privacy International.

The report says the country’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency hired intermediary companies to acquire spying toolkits from western and Chinese firms for domestic surveillance.

It also claims the ISI sought access to tap data from three of the four “landing sites” that pass through the country’s port city of Karachi, effectively giving it access to internet traffic worldwide. [Continue reading…]

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Pentagon, CIA instructed to re-investigate whistleblower cases

McClatchy reports: A government watchdog has ordered the CIA and the Pentagon to re-investigate retaliation allegations brought by two intelligence employees who accused their agencies of major institutional failings.

The action by the intelligence community inspector general is the first public indication that a new intelligence appeals system is underway. The panel was set up by President Barack Obama as an independent forum that can evaluate whether whistleblowers were improperly fired or otherwise punished for disclosures after their agencies rejected their claims.
The humvee in which Mike Helms was traveling and serving as a gunner in Iraq on June 16, 2004 hit a roadside bomb that shredded the left front side of the vehicle while it was traveling about 60 miles per hour. Helms was later denied treatment at military hospitals for his injuries. He alerted Congress to the inadequate medical care he and others received. However, he still struggles to find a job in his field after the Army revoked his clearance in what he says was illegal retaliation for his disclosures to Congress.

The cases, nonetheless, demonstrate that the whistleblower system continues to be beset with problems and bureaucratic delays despite being overhauled by Congress and the Obama administration.

“Navigating the system as an intelligence employee is still very burdensome and overwhelming,” said Michael Helms, a former Army intelligence officer whose case is one of the two being kicked back. “A decade after I blew the whistle on inadequate care for military civilians, I’m still waiting for justice.”

Obama pointed to the reforms when former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed he had decided to go to the media with classified documents about the spy agency’s data collection programs instead of relying on the whistleblower system. Snowden asserted that intelligence agencies couldn’t be trusted to look into serious malfeasance or to protect high-profile whistleblowers. [Continue reading…]

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