Thread: Saudi Arabia Warns of Economic Fallout if Congress Passes 9/11 Bill

There should be an agreeable amount that limit$ Saudi Arabias financial responsibility like $20B or maybe the cost of all damages and $10M to each family of the victims. This has been done with Libya and should serve as a warning to all states that either sponsor or support terrorism that you will be held accountable.

Originally Posted by joe s

There should be an agreeable amount that limit$ Saudi Arabias financial responsibility like $20B or maybe the cost of all damages and $10M to each family of the victims. This has been done with Libya and should serve as a warning to all states that either sponsor or support terrorism that you will be held accountable.

This will open the U.S. to being sued by every person who has had a family member killed in any country by any U.S. military action. They will claim that everyone killed was a civilian and the U.S. owes them $10 million for each person. Every bomb dropped and every missile or drone strike will become a lawsuit.

911 appears to be a case where America's enemies, like Saudi Arabia, were able to conduct attacks on us from within our own nation and then misdirect our national response into invasions of their enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We need the 28 pages released. We need to let US families sue the Saudis. We need to exact justice upon the real 9/11 attackers and expel the influences of Saudi Arabia, Mexico, and China from America because those nations are clearly our enemies and are working in collusion and cooperation with each other to attack, weaken, and dismantle the United States!

W

http://www.alipac.us/f12/mccain-link...arabia-331800/

This will open the U.S. to being sued by every person who has had a family member killed in any country by any U.S. military action. They will claim that everyone killed was a civilian and the U.S. owes them $10 million for each person. Every bomb dropped and every missile or drone strike will become a lawsuit.

Are you equating the military action of the United States government to the terroristic actions carried out by al-Qaida? In both cases there are casualties that are innocent civilians, but the perpetrators are clearly different. This is not the Saudi Air Force mistakingly taking down a jetliner. This is a terroristic organization operating freely within the borders of Saudi Arabia and to what extent they are allowed to train, recruit and receive the necessary paperwork to enter the US w/out even speaking English with the knowledge of the government is at the core of the problem. How much of our money that goes to imported oil ends up as obscure financial contributions to organizations that ultimately funnel the funds to these terroristic organizations designed to kill Americans and others and destabilize economies through fear?

The 9/11 Commission Report, which was published in 2004, calls Saudi Arabia a "problematic ally in combating Islamic extremism."

Originally Posted by joe s

Are you equating the military action of the United States government to the terroristic actions carried out by al-Qaida? . . .

NO. But the foreigners will.

OUR CONDOLENCES

How the U.S. Paid for Death and Damage in Afghanistan


Cora Currier
Feb. 27 2015, 6:22 a.m.


An armored vehicle ran over a six-year-old boy’s legs: $11,000. A jingle truck was “blown up by mistake”: $15,000. A controlled detonation broke eight windows in a mosque: $106. A boy drowned in an anti-tank ditch: $1,916. A 10-ton truck ran over a cucumber crop: $180. A helicopter “shot bullets hitting and killing seven cows”: $2,253. Destruction of 200 grape vines, 30 mulberry trees and one well: $1,317. A wheelbarrow full of broken mirrors: $4,057.
A child who died in a combat operation: $2,414.

These are among the payments that the United States has made to ordinary Afghans over the course of American military operations in the country, according to databases covering thousands of such transactions obtained by TheIntercept under the Freedom of Information Act. Many of the payments are for mundane incidents such as traffic accidents or property damage, while others, in flat bureaucratic language, tell of “death of his wife and 2 minor daughters,” “injuries to son’s head, arms, and legs,” “death of husband,” father, uncle, niece.

The databases are incomplete, reflecting fragmented record keeping in Afghanistan, particularly on the issue of harm to civilians. The payments The Intercept has analyzed and presented in the graphic accompanying this story are not a complete accounting, but they do offer a small window into the thousands of fractured lives and personal tragedies that take place during more than a decade of war.

The Price of Life
The data that The Intercept obtained comes from two different systems that the U.S. military uses to make amends.

The Foreign Claims Act, passed in 1942, gives foreign citizens the ability to request payment for damages caused by U.S. military personnel. But the law only covers incidents that happen outside of combat situations — meaning that civilians caught up in battles have no recourse.

Since the Korean War, however, the U.S. military has realized that it’s often in its best interest to make symbolic payments for civilian harm, even when it occurs in combat. Over the years, the Pentagon authorized “condolence payments” where the military decided it was culturally appropriate.

Such condolence payments were approved in Iraq a few months into the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, and in Afghanistan beginning in 2005. They soon became part of the “hearts and minds” approach to counterinsurgency. To put it another way, in the words of an Army handbook, this was “money as a weapons system.”

Click to view visualization.

While it might seem cynical to offer token compensation for a human life, humanitarian organizations embraced the policy as a way to acknowledge deaths and the hard economic realities of war zones.Condolence payments are meant to be symbolic gestures, and today in Afghanistan, they are generally capped at $5,000, though greater amounts can be approved.

Payments under the Foreign Claims Act take into account any negligence on the part of the claimant, as well as local law. Douglas Dribben, an attorney with the Army Claims Service in Fort Meade, Maryland, said that officers in the field do research, sometimes consulting with USAID or the State Department, to determine the cost of replacing damaged property — “What’s a chicken worth in my area versus what it’s worth in downtown Kabul?”

Claims for injuries incorporate the cost of medical care, and in the case of wrongful death, the deceased’s earning potential and circumstances. “If I have a case of a 28-year old doctor, they are going to be paid more than we’d pay for a child of four,” Dribben said. “In Afghanistan, unfortunately, a young female child would likely be much less than a young boy.”

The system is imperfect, however. Residents of remote areas often can’t access the places where the U.S. military hands out cash. The amounts given out, or whether they are paid at all, often depend on the initiative of individual soldiers — usually the judge advocates who handle claims, or commanders who can authorize condolence payments.

In 2007, the American Civil Liberties Union obtained documents detailing about 500 claims made under the Foreign Claims Act, mainly in Iraq. These were the original, often hand-written records of incidents, their investigations, and the military’s ultimate decision to pay or deny the claim. Jonathan Tracy, a former judge advocate who handled thousands of claims in Iraq and then devoted years to studying the system, analyzed the entire dataset and found that the decisions often relied on over-broad or arbitrary definitions of combat situations, and that people who were denied claims were only sometimes awarded condolence payment.

Yale law professor John Fabian Witt also noted that “relatively minor property awards for damages to automobiles and other personal property often rivaled the death payments in dollar value.”

“They present it as if it’s very black and white, as though there’s the circle of things we can pay for, and you decide if the incident is in or out of that circle, but that’s not the way it happens,” Tracy told The Intercept. “You’d have two different attorneys doing two different things and [civilians] who’d had much the same thing happen to them would get very different compensation.”

Last year the annual defense appropriations bill included a provision, championed by Senator Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., which instructs the Pentagon to set up a permanent process for administering condolence payments. The measure is intended to prevent the delay and inconsistencies that marred the system in the early years in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to improve record keeping, so that the Pentagon doesn’t start from scratch in each new conflict.

A defense official told The Intercept in an emailed statement that the Pentagon has not yet implemented the provision, but is “reviewing the processes related to ex-gratia payments to determine if there are areas where improvements can be made.”

Marla Keenan, managing director of the Center for Civilians in Conflict, believes that “as the conflict in Iraq and Syria has escalated, they are starting to see a reason for this type of policy to exist. It’s unfortunate how a new context where this could be used is the impetus.”

Finding the Data
The United Nations only began keeping track of civilian casualties in Afghanistan in 2009; using a conservative count that requires three sources for each incident, the U.N. now reports that more than 17,700 innocent Afghans have died in the past five years of fighting, the majority of them killed by the Taliban or other groups fighting the Afghan government and coalition forces.

Looking at compensation paid out under the Foreign Claims Act or in condolence payments is one way to get a window into the damage caused by the U.S. presence. Yet it’s difficult to draw conclusions from the military’s records, which are muddled and incomplete, by their own admission.


Sample Afghan claim form

Every cache of documents released comes with caveats. For example,The Nation obtained thousands of pages’ worth of records for payments for condolences and other “battle damage” in 2013. Asked for total figures, a military spokesman told the magazine, “I could wade through the numbers to the best of my ability but my numbers would be a guess and most likely inaccurate.”

The Intercept received several years’ worth of recent data on condolence payments from the military through a Freedom of Information Act request. These records come from a military database keeping track of the Commander’s Emergency Response Program, a special pot of spending money for “goodwill” projects.

The database entries are sparse, giving only the basics of who was killed or injured, with no detail on when or how the incident occurred. Location is given only at the province level. Nonetheless, the data represent the Pentagon’s clearest accounting of how much money it spends on condolence payments. (This data does not include “solatia,” which, just like condolence payments, are compensation for death and injury. But they are paid out of a unit’s operating funds, and the Pentagon has said previously it does not have overall figures for solatia.)

According to the data we received, in fiscal years 2011 through 2013, the military made 953 condolence payments totaling $2.7 million. $1.8 million of those were for deaths, and the average payment for a death was $3,426. Payments for injuries averaged $1,557.
Some payments are for multiple people harmed in one incident. For instance, the largest single payment, from 2012, offers $70,000 for “death of a mother and six children.” The largest payment for a single death occurred in 2011, when the father of “a local national” who was killed was given more than $15,000. Some family members received as little as $100 for the death of a relative.

Traffic accidents were among the most common claims under the Foreign Claims Act.

Asked about records for payments made before 2011, the Pentagon directed questions to the press office for coalition forces in Afghanistan, which did not reply to repeated inquiries from The Intercept.

Also through the Freedom of Information Act, The Intercept received Foreign Claims Act data from the Army, which handles Afghanistan for the entire U.S. military. As with the condolence payments, the database doesn’t include the documentation behind each claim. Rather, it shows a quick synopsis, date and amount for each claim filed.

In all, the Army released 5,766 claims marked for Afghanistan, filed between Feb. 2003 and Aug. 2011, of which 1,671 were paid, for a total of about $3.1 million. Of those claims, 753 were denied completely, and the rest are in various kinds of accounting limbo.

This is only a portion of the claims that were actually made and paid. Douglas Dribben, the attorney with the Army office, described the database as “G.I.G.O. — Garbage In, Garbage Out.”

Judge advocates in the field are supposed to regularly update the database with claims received and paid, but spotty Internet access and erratic schedules often made that impossible. Tracy, the former Army attorney, said that in Iraq, he had to enter all the claims he received weekly. In practice, “that never really happened,” he said.

A 2010 guidance for claims officers takes a pleading tone: “We know [claims] payments are not your only mission and the last thing you really want is another report but in all honesty the last thing any of us want is an unauthorized expenditure of funds.”

A more reliable estimate, Dribben said, comes from Army budget data, which reflects the amount of money transferred out to the field to pay claims. The Army Claims Service did not provide that information, but a training guide from 2009 states that for that fiscal year, the Army had paid $1.35 million in 516 claims in Afghanistan, with 202 denied.

The total for Iraq that year was over $18 million; overall, Afghanistan saw fewer and smaller claims than Iraq, because of remote geography and fewer U.S. troops deployed. Prices for replacement goods or lost wages were generally lower, Dribben said.

The claims synopses typically contain missing words, garbled grammar or obvious errors in the various entry fields. Most refer to a “claimant.” Some are entered in the first person. A few dozen have no synopsis at all. Many are completely enigmatic: what happened when “claimant feared soldiers would open fire and panicked?” The claimant was paid more than $3,200.

“Each one took maybe 30 seconds to enter,” Tracy said. “There wasn’t really room or time to put in a narrative.”

The database categorized just 18 payments as wrongful deaths between 2003 and 2011 — very likely an undercounting, Dribben said. The average of those payments was about $11,000; the highest was $50,000, paid to someone in eastern Afghanistan, because “coalition forces killed his father.”

Correction, March 4th, 2015: This article originally stated that “The United States and its allies do not tally civilian deaths in Afghanistan.” In fact, international forces have kept a database recording civilian casualties since 2008. That information has been only sporadically made public. According to Science Magazine, the military’s figures are generally lower than those of the U.N.

The Intercept’s Margot Williams and Josh Begley contributed research to this report. Eric Sagara, formerly of ProPublica, also contributed.

https://theintercept.com/2015/02/27/...s-afghanistan/

Donald Trump warns of another 9/11-style attack by refugees using ISIS-funded phones

The presumptive Republican nominee appeared on a US Border Patrol radio show

Feliks Garcia New York 20 hours ago

Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trumped warned of an 11 September-level attack led by refugees who enter the US with mobile phones funded by the so-called Islamic State.

In an interview with the National Border Patrol Council’s Green Line radio programme, Mr Trump answered whether or not he believed it would take a large-scale attack on US soil for Americans to “wake up” about border security.

“I do, I actually do,” he said. ““Bad things will happen - a lot of bad things will happen. There will be attacks that you wouldn’t believe. There will be attacks by the people that are right now that are coming into our country, because, I have no doubt in my mind.”

Mr Trump added that refugees are entering the US with mobile phones that brandish the ISIS flag, adding that the militant Islamist organisation is funding their phone bills.

“I mean you look at it, they have cell phones,” he added. “So they don’t have money, they don’t have anything. They have cell phones. Who pays their monthly charges, right? They have cell phones with the flags, the ISIS flags on them. And then we’re supposed to say, ‘Isn’t this wonderful that we’re taking them in?’”

Mr Trump suggested that immigration policies of his Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton would lead to such dangers.

“[Clinton] wants the Syrians to pour into the country - we don’t know if they’re Syrians, by the way,” he said. “We have no idea who they are because much of it is undocumented. A lot of these people don’t have any documents. Wait until you see the problems we’ll have with that.”

Mr Trump did not cite any specific intelligence he had received that would suggest such an attack is imminent.

Once the New York real estate tycoon is formally nominated to be the Republican candidate, then he will receive an intelligence briefing from the Director of National Intelligence - a tradition undergone with candidates in both parties. But his numerous assertions about US national security without formal intelligence briefing indicate the candidate plays by a different set of rules - even in matters of trade.

With regards to the EU referendum, Mr Trump told Piers Morgan in an ITV interview to be aired Monday, that the UK would not fall to the back of a queue when trading with the US, the Guardian reports.

“I mean, I’m going to treat everybody fairly but it wouldn’t make any difference to me whether they were in the EU or not," he said. "You’d certainly not be at the back of the queue, that I can tell you.”

President Barack Obama recently warned that the first priority of the US would to be to negotiate trade deals with the EU - and it could take up to a decade to work out a new arrangement with the UK.

“It could be five years from now, 10 years from now before we’re actually able to get something done,” he said.

Donald Trump warns 9/11-style attack by refugees using ISIS phones

5/17/16

Senate OKs bill letting families of 9/11 victims sue Saudi Arabia, despite threats

‘Prior to 9/11 terrorist attacks, CIA never trained in torture methods’

Published time: 14 May, 2016 12:15

In the aftermath of 9/11 that led to these extreme measures, ignorant people who were not professional intelligence officers were allowed to make these decisions, Larry Johnson, retired CIA and State Department official, told RT.

A US federal appeals court Friday rejected efforts to fully disclose a CIA torture report compiled by the Senate in 2014. It contains findings that CIA officers interrogated detainees using enhanced torture techniques. Only a fraction of the cases have been made public.

RT: Why has the appeals court rejected efforts to disclose the CIA torture report?

Larry Johnson: I am not a lawyer, so I don’t know what their legal rationale is. I simply note that it is important to disclose this information just from the standpoint of trying to reestablish some measure of honor in an intelligence service that has been severely tarnished by these past actions.

RT: What is the logic though? If what you say is true, presumably they are aware that could damage the reputation of the CIA a bit further. So why they would say they don’t want to disclose this further?

LJ: Well, it can very well implicate higher-ups and show that clearly this activity was carried out with the knowledge, permission, and at the direction up to including President George W. Bush. So it is an effort perhaps to try to shield them from further potential litigation on the international front such as in the international court in The Hague. The case could be made that they are protecting sources and methods. But in reality it’s a poor excuse. It is a shameful period, I think it should be disclosed, but certainly my voice is not the determining factor in this.

RT: What sort of pressure, do you think, could be put on the court or the judicial system?

LJ: Here is sort of the irony. I mean it has been labeled ‘CIA torture technics’, but the reality was, prior to 9/11, while there had been some abuses in the past, the CIA, and particularly operations officers, they were never trained in interrogation methods; they were never trained in torture. Why?

Russian intelligence officers know this as well as we do, and even the former KGB: you don’t get your best recruits through coercion, through pressure, through pain. You get your best recruits by getting people who like you; that you have developed a relationship with; which you’ve developed rapport with. So what happened in the aftermath of 9/11 that led to these extreme measures, was really an example where ignorant people who were not professional intelligence officers were allowed to make these decisions. And unfortunately, there were some professional intelligence officers that acquiesced. Several should have properly stood up, threatened to quit and to go public. Unfortunately they did not – they went along with it. But you had political hacks, who allowed this nonsense to come into the intelligence service, and in the process it creates this entire stain upon what the intelligence service was supposed to be.


‘Prior to 9/11 terrorist attacks, CIA never trained in torture methods’