Category: Corruption

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NIGHTWATCH Extracts: Bottom-Up Anti Corruption

Civil Society, Commerce, Corruption, Law Enforcement

Mexico: BBC reported on 8 August police officers in Ciudad Juarez in northern Mexico detained their commander at gunpoint, accusing him of corruption and links to drug gangs. More than 200 federal police agents raided the hotel where their commander was staying and accused him of planting drugs on police officers to blackmail them into carrying out extortion. Some of the agents were injured when officers loyal to the commander defended him.

While some agents blocked off nearby streets to prevent their commander from escaping, others moved into the hotel where he was staying. They raided his room, where they say they found weapons and drugs. The federal officers allege that they were part of a stash, which their commander would plant on officers who refused to take part in his corrupt dealings. They say he would then blackmail the agents into carrying out extortion and other crimes.

The police officers held their commander captive until the Federal Police Commissioner General agreed to suspend him, pending an investigation. One of the policemen who took part in the protest told the Associated Press corruption in the higher ranks was putting them in danger. “We risk our lives, we leave families behind and it's the fault of those officers that we go down,” he said.

Phi Beta Iota: The International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) has been a success story, despite some internal issues that are under investigation.  What we are seeing across Central America, with El Salvador recently joining the fray, is the emergence of an anti-corruption culture that sees the value of self-policing.  Four challenges remain:

Continue reading “NIGHTWATCH Extracts: Bottom-Up Anti Corruption”

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Journal: The Unconstitutional Empire

Corruption, Government
Chuck Spinney Recommends

Today we have a Pentagon that is spending more money (in inflation adjusted dollars) on defense than at any time since WWII, yet it can not pass the relatively simple audits required by the Chief Financial Officer's Act of 1990. This law was intended to put teeth into the Accountability and Appropriations clauses of the Constitution.  The audits required by the CFO Act are “checks and balances” audits — they merely describe whether or no any agency of the federal government spends the money Congress appropriated on the items Congress authorized for appropriations — essentially the line between where the money comes from and where it goes.  The attached article helps to put the implications of this travesty into a frightening perspective.  CS

An Empire, If You Can Keep It

BY JUSTIN LOGAN, American Conservative, 1 Mar 2010

Periodically, it is worth remembering just how much the American Founders detested the signs of a bloated state: standing armies, a large fiscal-military federation, and a capacious national bureaucracy. It may be going too far to say that today’s conservatives would denounce the Founding Fathers as unpatriotic conservatives—but not much too far. While members of the Right now flutter like schoolgirls at the mention of military leaders like Gen. David Petraeus, the Founders scorned the prospect of military leaders becoming figures of worshipful esteem. As the historian Arthur Ekirch has highlighted, aversion to standing armies and centralism was at the heart of the American founding.

Full Source Online

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Journal: Wikileaks Afghan Collection Assessed

02 Diplomacy, 03 Economy, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, Corruption, Government, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), Media, Military, Misinformation & Propaganda

Chuck Spinney Recommends

Below is a good summary of the wikileaks database.  It is also a good example of how the secretive conspiratorial mind, trained in the wilderness of mirrors that is the US intelligence establishment, conjures motivations out of the ether.   The author builds a an inferential case to insinuate the massive leak of intelligence data via the wikileaks website was an orchestrated info-operation aimed at influencing the American polity by building the case for leaving Afghanistan.  Left unsaid, but dangling tantalizingly in the last two paragraphs, is a subtle (and unsubstantiated) suggestion that this leak came from very high levels, perhaps the highest level, of the Obama Administration.  Too clever by a half??????  Chuck

Thousands of reasons to leave

By George Friedman, Asia Times, 29 July 2010

On Sunday, The New York Times and two other newspapers published summaries and excerpts of tens of thousands of documents leaked to a website known as WikiLeaks. The documents comprise a vast array of material concerning the war in Afghanistan. They range from tactical reports from small unit operations to broader strategic analyses of politico-military relations between the United States and Pakistan. It appears to be an extraordinary collection.

Tactical intelligence on firefights is intermingled with reports on confrontations between senior US and Pakistani officials in which lists of Pakistani operatives in Afghanistan are handed over to the Pakistanis. Reports on the use of surface-to-air missiles by militants in Afghanistan are intermingled with reports on the activities of former Pakistani intelligence chief Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, who reportedly continues to liaise with the Afghan Taliban in an informal capacity.

FULL APPRAISAL ONLINE

Related:
Wikileaks Afghanistan files: every IED attack, with co-ordinates

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Wyly Brothers, Top Republican Bankrollers, Accused of Massive Fraud

09 Justice, Commerce, Corruption, Open Government, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy
article source

By Dave Levinthal on July 29, 2010

Charles Wyly Jr. and Samuel Wyly, Texas businessmen and brothers who are among the nation's most generous campaign donors to Republican political candidates and causes, were today hit with a Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit accusing them of fraud worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

The SEC accuses the Wylys of pocketing $550 million in undisclosed money over 13 years.

“The cloak of secrecy has been lifted from the complex web of foreign structures used by the Wylys to evade the securities laws,” Lorin Reisner, the SEC’s deputy enforcement director, said in a statement this afternoon. “They used these structures to conceal hundreds of millions of dollars of gains in violation of the disclosure requirements for corporate insiders.”

Beneficiaries of Wyly brothers cash together compose a who's who of the decade's most notable Republicans, with dozens of top GOP partisans' campaign coffers touched by Wyly money.

Together with their wives, the Wyly brothers have donated nearly $2.5 million to Republican candidates and committees during the past 20 years, a Center for Responsive Politics analysis reveals. Continue reading “Wyly Brothers, Top Republican Bankrollers, Accused of Massive Fraud”

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Reference: IC-Zilla Epitaph

03 Economy, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Commerce, Corruption, DHS, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), DoD, Government, Law Enforcement, Media Reports, Military, True Cost

The Final Word from a Three-Agency SIS

28 July 2010

In my opinion the Washington Post series that exposed the exponential increase in the size and cost of the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) was not taken seriously by official Washington and is considered a minor nuisance. That is why the only response to the series, as crafted by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), was largely vintage intelligence agency boilerplate with a few bizarre additions such as the claim that the collection and analysis of intelligence are not essential government functions of intelligence agencies and so can be left to contractor personal. The series did not merit a serious response in the thinking of the Executive Branch and Intelligence Community.

In fact the series, although much touted, was a huge disappointment to readers expecting a more deeply researched and in-depth look at the IC. Clearly the craft of investigative journalism has fallen on hard times.

Also it is the case that in this country quantity always trumps quality. The growth in the size of the Intelligence Community is taken by official Washington as a priori evidence of the value it has provided since 9/11. The facts that the current IC is ruinously expensive to operate, is producing largely worthless intelligence, and has frequently failed even in the most basic warning functions are irrelevant. A bloated IC serves as ‘proof’ that political Washington is serious about protecting American citizens from terrorist threats. As with quantity, in the political arena form always trumps substance.

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