Whistleblowing

There is no stealth whistleblowers in the world

Trump: "We’re trying to find out about a whistleblower"

President Trump said he's "trying to find out" about the whistleblower who filed an anonymous complaint against him.

"We’re trying to find out about a whistleblower. We have a whistleblower that reports things that were incorrect," the President said at the White House moments ago.

An important note: Many details in the whistleblower's complaint about Trump's July 25 call with the Ukrainian president match up with the White House's rough transcript of the call. Both the complaint and the transcript were released last week.

Trump over the weekend demanded to meet the whistleblower, whom he referred to as his "accuser."

Today, Trump again defended his phone call with the Ukrainian leader.

"The statement I made to the president of Ukraine — a good man, a nice man, new — was perfect. It was perfect. But the whistleblower reported a totally different statement like the statement was not even made," Trump said.

Air defense

Stealthy no more? A German radar vendor says it tracked the F-35 jet in 2018 — from a pony farm

In the illustrious history of the F-35 fighter jet, add a pony farm outside Berlin as the place where one company claims the plane’s stealth cover was blown.

The story that follows is a snapshot in the cat-and-mouse game between combat aircraft — designed to be undetectable by radar — and sensor makers seeking to undo that advantage. In the case of the F-35, the promise of invisibility to radar is so pronounced that it has colored much of the jet's employment doctrine, lending an air of invincibility to the weapon: The enemy never saw it coming.

But technology leaps only last so long, and Russia and China are known to be working on technology aimed at nixing whatever leg up NATO countries have tried to build for themselves.

Now, German radar-maker Hensoldt claims to have tracked two F-35s for 150 kilometers following the 2018 Berlin Air Show in Germany in late April of that year. The company’s passive radar system, named TwInvis, is but one of an emerging generation of sensors and processors so sensitive and powerful that it promises to find previously undetectable activities in a given airspace.

Electronic surveillance

Surveillance Capitalism And Anti-Capitalism

In the last few years, the computer scientists and entrepreneurs who fuel Silicon Valley have gone through a bewildering series of transformations.
Once upon a time they were ostracised nerds.
Then they were the lovable geeks of the Big Bang Theory TV show, and for a short while they were superheroes.
(In case you’re wondering, geeks wonder what sex in zero gravity is like; nerds wonder what sex is like.)
Then it all went wrong, and now they are the tech bros; the anti-heroes in the dystopian saga of society’s descent into algorithmic rule by Big Brother, soon to be followed by extermination by Terminators.
Techlash is in full swing, and Shoshana Zuboff is its latest high priestess. She is professor emerita at Harvard Business School, and author of “Surveillance Capitalism,” a 600-page book on how the tech giants, especially Google and Facebook, have developed a “rogue mutation of capitalism” which threatens our personal autonomy and democracy.

Electronic surveillance

Documents reveal how Russia taps phone companies for surveillance

In cities across Russia, large boxes in locked rooms are directly connected to the networks of some of the country’s largest phone and internet companies.

These boxes, some the size of a washing machine, house equipment that gives the Russian security services access to the calls and messages of millions of citizens. This government surveillance system remains largely shrouded in secrecy, even though phone and web companies operating in Russia are forced by law to install these large devices on their networks.

But documents seen by TechCrunch offer new insight into the scope and scale of the Russian surveillance system — known as SORM (Russian: COPM) — and how Russian authorities gain access to the calls, messages and data of customers of the country’s largest phone provider, Mobile TeleSystems (MTS) .

The documents were found on an unprotected backup drive owned by an employee of Nokia  Networks (formerly Nokia Siemens Networks), which through a decade-long relationship maintains and upgrades MTS’s network — and ensures its compliance with SORM.

Zack

Whistleblowing

Lawyer claims whistleblower is 'in harm’s way' from Trump

The intelligence official who raised concerns about President Trump's July phone call with the president of Ukraine is worried about reprisal from the Trump administration and its supporters.

A letter from the legal team for the unnamed whistleblower, whose complaint helped to spur an impeachment inquiry by House Democrats, indicates an urgent concern for this person's safety.

Andrew Bakaj, the lead attorney for the whistleblower, wrote to acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maquire on Saturday regarding safety concerns, noting that the events of the past week "have heightened our concerns that our client's identity will be disclosed publicly and that, as a result, our client will be put in harm's way."

Bakaj began by thanking Maguire for saying in testimony last week that the whistleblower "did the right thing." Maguire's initial refusal to hand over complaint to the House and Senate intelligence committees, in defiance of the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act, led to a standoff with Congress. Maguire said he was only acting in accordance with the determination of the Justice Department, which deemed the complaint to be outside the jurisdiction of the statute because it involved someone outside the U.S. Intelligence Community.

Cited in the letter is Trump's remarks on Thursday to a group of staff from the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in which he alluded to punishment for spies.

Smuggling

Smugglers busted while trying to hide $300,000 worth of gold on & IN their bodies

Seven people have been arrested after they tried to smuggle some 5.5kg of gold from Dubai to India by converting the precious metal into paste before either swallowing or concealing it under their clothes.

Officials at Devi Ahilyabai Holkar Airport in India’s central Madhya Pradesh said that seven members of the alleged smuggling ring were caught red-handed right in the middle of their intricate operation, shortly after they disembarked an India-bound plane from Dubai early on Saturday.

The passengers, including one woman, went to great lengths to avoid detection. Officials say they recovered some of the cargo from the smugglers’ rectums, while the rest was stashed in their clothes, including undergarments.

In their bid to trick customs officials, the suspects turned the gold into a kind of a paste and put it into capsules, so it would be easier to swallow or conceal.

The smugglers, who are said to be repeat offenders, were to fly to Mumbai later on Saturday,  where they would likely sell the gold on the black market. The recovered haul is worth some $298,000.

While the preferred mode of transportation might be unusual in this particular case, gold smuggling in India is a common crime. In one of the biggest busts in May this year, officials seized 110kg of gold in Mumbai, which had been declared as brass metal in customs papers.

Robots

New Intelligence: China’s Navy To Unveil Large Underwater Robot

China is about to show the world what it has been working on. The government is expected to put on its largest military parade ever October 1 in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to mark the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. It will be jam-packed with the latest weapons technologies. Much of the new equipment that will be on show is still under wraps, literally. Pouring over grainy candid smartphone photographs of the rehearsals posted on Chinese language social media, military watchers have spotted something hiding under a canvas that I believe will be significant.

One of the camouflage tarpaulins barely hides the outline of what appears to be a very large new underwater robot. Autonomous underwater vehicles, known as AUVs, are the naval equivalent of the killer drones that have rapidly become part of the air warfare landscape. Already a staple of U.S. war-fighting, weaponized unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) are now cropping up in the hands of non-state actors from Syria to Colombia. AUVs, on the other hand, are still the domain of serious navies. And large AUVs are even more elite – most AUVs in service are still very small.

Opinion

Ex-MI6 chief says British spies are angry with John Le Carré for making them look heartless and immoral

He has written some of Britain’s best-loved espionage novels, filled with Cold War double agents inspired by real people he met while spying for the British Government in West Germany.

John Le Carré, whose real name is David Cornwell, left MI6 in 1963 and built a new career on secret plots of a fictional kind.

But the novelist has been accused by a real-life spymaster of being "obsessed" with his secret service career, despite having only serving for three years, and writing "corrosive" books that undermine the UK’s intelligence services.

Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, said Le Carré’s novels are “exclusively about betrayal” and trade on the author’s limited experience as an intelligence officer to make spying seem immoral.

Speaking yesterday to an audience at Cliveden Literary Festival, Sir Richard said MI6 spies were angry with Le Carré, now 87, for portraying them as duplicitous and untrustworthy.

Air defense

Pentagon May Replace Patriot Systems in US Pacific Territories After Saudi Aramco Attacks

The Saudi oil facility was reportedly protected by two Patriot systems, but despite that, it was crippled in a combined missile-drone attack on 14 September. A source in the Russian Defence Ministry linked their failure to the system's "low efficiency".

Commander of the Pacific Air Forces (PACAF) General Charles Brown has stated in an interview with Aviation Week that he is interested in equipping US military bases across the Indo-Pacific region with laser weapons powered by "a small nuclear reactor" to better protect them from aerial attacks. The general suggested that such systems may be more effective than "larger and heavier interceptor-based systems", such as Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) or Patriot systems.

The latter's reputation recently suffered a blow after the much vaunted system failed to avert the devastating attack of missiles and drones on Saudi Aramco oil refineries on 14 September. The US reacted to the incident by deploying an additional battalion of Patriots to Saudi Arabia.

Law & order

JUDICIAL WATCH SUES STATE DEPARTMENT FOR RECORDS ON FIRING OF BIDEN-UKRAINE PROSECUTOR


Judicial Watch announced today it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit for records about the firing of Ukraine’s top prosecutor after then-Vice President Joe Biden threated to withhold aid. The lawsuit was filed yesterday against the U.S. Department of State (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:19-cv-02893)).

The suit was filed after the State Department failed to respond to a May 7, 2019, FOIA request seeking access to the following records:

1. Any and all records regarding, concerning, or related to Viktor Shokin’s investigation of Mykola Zolchevsky and Shokin’s resignation at Ukraine’s Prosecutor General.

2. Any and all records of communication between any official, employee, or representative of the Department of State and any official, employee, or representative of the Office of the Vice President regarding Viktor Shokin.

In a widely distributed video, Joe Biden confirmed that he successfully pressured, under threat of withholding $1 billion in U.S. government aid, the Ukrainian government to fire Shokin, who had allegedly launched an investigation into Burisma, which had purportedly paid Biden’s son Hunter $50,000 a month.

“The latest assault on President Trump is an obvious attempt to protect Joe Biden from the corruption scandals involving his son,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “Judicial Watch’s latest lawsuit will be the first of many to try to get to the bottom of this influence-peddling scandal.”

Public security

New Tools to Alert on Active Shooter Attacks at Schools

First responders in the US have been coping with the growing challenges involved with school safety. Between 2010-2017 there were 52 active shooter attacks in US education institutions. Instead of waiting to deal with these events once they’ve already taken place, predictive analytics could prevent them from happening.

Predictive analytics are statistical techniques from data mining, predictive modelling, and machine learning, that analyze current and historical facts to make predictions about future or otherwise unknown events.

Predictive analytics reviews data to predict the event early on by aggregating all a facility or organization’s current and historical data. The aggregation allows facility managers to review and monitor for trends or patterns so they can make informed predictions of events that may happen in the future.

For schools, this data can include attendance records, dates, times and locations of alarm notification, visitor logs, just as a few examples. Having the data all in one place helps to reveal patterns or trends that tell a story and give insight into incidents. As a result, staff, administrators and facility managers have access to essential information to take the proper steps to protect their buildings and most importantly students, according to securityinfowatch.com. 

Schools are already collecting all kinds of data, including attendance, tardiness, grades, trips to the nurse, suicide attempts, and more. When these data points are all compiled in one place or on one platform, they begin to reveal patterns that may have otherwise gone unnoticed. 

Innovations & technologies

Innovative Developments in Nonlethal Systems

Rubber bullets and tear gas are not the only nonlethal weapons available in dispersing illegal demonstrations. The US Marines have been recently testing a new crowd control system. The Corps’ Joint Nonlethal Weapons Directorate is currently testing an 81mm mortar round that delivers a shower of flashbang grenades to disperse troublemakers. 

Marine Col. Wendell Leimbach Jr., director of the Joint Nonlethal Weapons Directorate, says intermediate force capabilities are needed more than ever to deal with threats that show up in humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, — scenarios that are just below armed conflict and often referred to as “gray zone” operations, according to military.com.

Nonlethal capabilities are also needed when military units transition from high-intensity combat to stabilization efforts.

Another tool under development is the Radio Frequency Vehicle Stopper. It can be used at roadblocks and checkpoints to disable vehicles. It is designed to use radio-frequency electromagnetic waves to interfere with the electronics of the target engine.

The Corps is also continuing to work on a “Solid-State Active Denial Technology” to disrupt hostile crowds without causing “permanent physical harm.” It relies on radio frequency millimeter waves at 95 GHz traveling at the speed of light to create a “brief intolerable heating sensation on the person’s skin,” Marine officials said.

Whistleblowing

MSM Defends CIA’s ‘Whistleblower,’ Ignores Actual Whistleblower

...A CIA officer who exposes information about CIA wrongdoings without the CIA’s permission is a whistleblower. A CIA officer who exposes information about someone else is just a spook doing spook things. You can recognize the latter by the way the mass media supports, applauds and employs them. You can recognize the former by the way they have been persecuted, imprisoned, and/or died under mysterious circumstances.

But if you listen to the billionaire media, we should be calling this CIA officer a whistleblower, we should be enraged at The New York Times for exposing that CIA officer’s identity, and we should be raising a small fortune on GoFundMe for “legal aid” that this CIA officer will never need.

“The idea that the media needs to ‘protect’ a high-level CIA officer making explosive claims about the president, which have now been used as the basis for impeachment proceedings, is such an insane perversion of journalistic ethics,” journalist Michael Tracey tweeted today on this new development.

Whistleblowing

Intel Community Secretly Gutted Requirement Of First-Hand Whistleblower Knowledge

Between May 2018 and August 2019, the intelligence community secretly eliminated a requirement that whistleblowers provide direct, first-hand knowledge of alleged wrongdoings. This raises questions about the intelligence community’s behavior regarding the August submission of a whistleblower complaint against President Donald Trump. The new complaint document no longer requires potential whistleblowers who wish to have their concerns expedited to Congress to have direct, first-hand knowledge of the alleged wrongdoing that they are reporting.
The brand new version of the whistleblower complaint form, which was not made public until after the transcript of Trump’s July 25 phone call with the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and the complaint addressed to Congress were made public, eliminates the first-hand knowledge requirement and allows employees to file whistleblower complaints even if they have zero direct knowledge of underlying evidence and only “heard about [wrongdoing] from others.”
The internal properties of the newly revised “Disclosure of Urgent Concern” form, which the intelligence community inspector general (ICIG) requires to be submitted under the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act (ICWPA), show that the document was uploaded on September 24, 2019, at 4:25 p.m., just days before the anti-Trump complaint was declassified and released to the public. The markings on the document state that it was revised in August 2019, but no specific date of revision is disclosed.

Information security

Douglas MacKinnon: Did CIA Deep State spy trigger Trump impeachment probe? Dangerous leaks like this must end

Several news organizations have reported that the whistleblower behind the “Ukraine impeachment” feeding frenzy is a CIA officer who was detailed to the White House.

If accurate, that raises some very troubling questions and scenarios.

Not for President Trump. But rather, for the CIA and others in the Deep State who may be leaking confidential and top secret information for personal or partisan reasons.

The Trump White House and CIA have a history. Part of it has been adversarial from the very beginning of the Trump administration.

Over two years ago, new organizations reported that career officials within the CIA were doing everything in their power to remove Ezra Cohen-Watnick, Trump’s then-senior director for intelligence on the National Security Council.

The CIA officials were reportedly outraged that Cohen-Watnick, along with his previous boss, Michael Flynn, saw eye-to-eye about what they believed to be the failings of CIA human intelligence operations.

In a news report at the time, an intelligence community insider said CIA officials viewed Cohen-Watnick as a "threat," so they tried to replace him with an "agency loyalist."

Drones

Nearly 100 countries have military drones, and it's changing the way the world prepares for war

The number of countries with military drones has skyrocketed over the past decade, a new report revealed, showing that nearly 100 countries have this kind of technology incorporated into their armed forces.

In 2010, only about 60 countries had military drones, but that number has since jumped to 95, a new report from Bard College's Center for the Study of the Drone revealed.

Dan Gettinger, the report's author, identified 171 different types of unmanned aerial vehicles in active inventories. Around the world, there are at least 21,000 drones in service, but the number may actually be significantly higher.

...Newer systems are appearing at a rapid rate. "I think drones will be a ubiquitous presence on future battlefields," Gettinger told Insider Thursday, explaining that drone technology is contributing to an evolution in warfare. "They represent an increase in combat capacity, an increase in the ability of a nation to wage war."

"We are likely to see drones featuring more prominently in global events, particularly in areas that are considered to be zones of geopolitical tension," he added, noting that "we see this playing out in the Persian Gulf, Yemen, the Ukraine, and other conflicts."

Corruption

POLICING GLOBAL GRAFT
Odds Favored The Grafters, Until Now

National republics, like all forms of government, must provide effective means of policing and punishing graft and corruption by their officials. Anything short of fully efficient justice will produce a fallen government in short order, because appetites of grafters are insatiable when corruption infects the highest levels of government power.
Experienced politicians learn at a still-productive age that complications of partisan politics and international relations sharply increase the odds that crimes of self-enrichment will never be discovered or punished.

Meet The Bidens

     Meet Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. Joe was U. S. Senator from Maryland long enough to be put on the national ticket as Vice President, and he served eight years in that high office while Barack H. Obama held the presidency. Being VP provided what was easily recognized as a target-rich environment for eliciting “emoluments” capable of enriching Joe’s personal financial condition.

     Say, for example, that Joe noticed a country on the other side of the world, Ukraine, had experienced a bloody coup which overthrew its elected government. Joe would know the coup was sponsored (secretly, but in-your-face) by the U. S. State Department, and that the new government (though some described it as “Nazi”) was “friendly” and beholden to the U. S. government. In short, Joe might easily identify Ukraine as a likely prospect in that target-rich environment mentioned earlier.

Assessing The Risks

     If Joe were to decide to ply such an opportunity, say for self-enrichment, what would be his chances of getting away with it? While still in office, his chances would be practically a 100% sure-thing, because no one in that administration would call Joe out for measly (some say $50,000/mo, some say $166,000/mo) payments to his son from an energy company in Ukraine. Same answer if his own party’s candidate were to win the next presidency, which appeared to be a “lock” as late as November 6, 2016...

Immigration security

Italy: Salvini Out, Migrants In

Italy's new government, which has pledged to reverse former Interior Minister Matteo Salvini's hardline approach to migration policy, appears to have triggered a new wave of mass migration from northern Africa.

More than 1,400 migrants reached Italian shores since the new government took office on September 5, according to data compiled by the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

During just the past several weeks, the number of migrant arrivals to Italy has increased incrementally: 59 migrants arrived on September 6; 67 arrived on September 9; 121 arrived on September 14; 259 arrived on September 15; 275 arrived on September 18; and 475 arrived between September 19 and September 25, according to the IOM. Overall, the number of migrant arrivals in September 2019 is up by more than 100% over the number of arrivals in September 2018.

Many of the new arrivals are reaching Italy by using new people-smuggling routes that originate in Turkey. In recent weeks, at least five migrant boats have landed in Calabria, in the far south of Italy. On September 21, for instance, 58 migrants, all Pakistani males, reached the Calabrian port of Crotone.

Arms trade

China, the world’s second largest defense spender, becomes a major arms exporter

Beijing has not only become a major defense spender, but increasingly analysts say China is also turning into a top arms exporter.

Over the past five years, China was one of the largest exporters along with the United States, Russia, France and Germany and China, according to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) published in March. Those nations accounted for three-quarters of the total volume of arms exported, the data showed.

China has exported 16.2 billion units of ammunition — mostly to countries in Asia, the Middle East and Africa — over the past 12 years, according to SIPRI data.

Beijing is set to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Communist China on Oct. 1. The country did not open up its economy until 40 years ago and since then quickly became the world’s second largest.

Military

Military suicides continue to rise

Deaths by suicide in the US military continue to rise with 541 service members dying in 2018, according to a Pentagon report issued Thursday.

Military leaders are continuing to express concern and frustration about the rising number of deaths as they attempt to understand why the numbers are increasing.

"I wish I could tell you we have an answer to prevent further, future suicides in the armed services. We don't. We are caught up in what some call a national epidemic of suicide among our youth. And not just our youth, but it's something we continue to wrestle with," Defense Secretary Mark Esper told reporters Wednesday.

There were 511 deaths by suicide in 2017, and there was a particular increase in 2018 among active duty service members.

Decryption

How Decryption Helped Beat The Nazis, And What It Means For Infosec Today

During World War II, the Allied powers intercepted huge volumes of radio communications being used by the Axis powers to coordinate military activity. Many intercepted messages had been encrypted using the most sophisticated algorithms available at the time, and the encryption keys were changed as frequently as every day. Because Allied codebreaking and decryption efforts were too slow in the early years of the war, cracking those codes yielded information that became irrelevant almost as soon as it was gleaned.

Nonetheless, the Allies were able to derive useful information about the timing, location, and scale of Axis operations by tracking metadata about the transmissions. By triangulating transmissions via High Frequency Direction Finding (HF/DF) and cross-referencing their volume and number against the call signs of transmission stations, Allied forces could locate where enemy forces were assembling, and even infer the order of battle expected for specific engagements. 

Innovations & technologies

DARPA aims to make networks 100 times speedier with FastNIC

Having a slow connection is always frustrating, but just imagine how supercomputers feel. All those cores doing all kinds of processing at lightning speed, but in the end they’re all waiting on an outdated network interface to stay in sync. DARPA  doesn’t like it. So DARPA wants to change it — specifically by making a new network interface a hundred times faster.

The problem is this. As DARPA estimates it, processors and memory on a computer or server can in a general sense work at a speed of roughly 10^14 bits per second — that’s comfortably into the terabit region — and networking hardware like switches and fiber are capable of about the same.

“The true bottleneck for processor throughput is the network interface used to connect a machine to an external network, such as an Ethernet, therefore severely limiting a processor’s data ingest capability,” explained DARPA’s Jonathan Smith in a news post by the agency about the project. (Emphasis mine.)

Economic security

Dow Suddenly Plummets After Bloomberg Exposes China Bombshell

The Dow suddenly plunged during late-morning trading on Friday after Bloomberg published a report exposing that the Trump administration is debating a new policy that would ramp up pressure on the Chinese economy as the two countries prepare to return to the negotiating table.

The policy, if enacted, would limit American investors’ access to the Chinese market, threatening the “goodwill” Beijing and Washington had exchanged in recent weeks.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average and its fellow Wall Street stock indices quickly erased their daily gains in response to the report.

The Dow, which had plowed toward a triple-digit rally to close the week in positive territory, briefly plunged into decline and now remains little changed for the day. At last check, the DJIA had gained 20.74 points or 0.08% to trade at 26,911.86.

The S&P 500 and Nasdaq slid firmly into the red, falling 0.13% to 2,973.63 and 0.34% to 8,003.24.

Politics

Boris Johnson could soon be forced to stand down as prime minister to make way for Jeremy Corbyn

Boris Johnson could soon be forced out of office, in order to make way for Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn to become prime minister. Here's why.

The UK prime minister is currently the leader of a minority government, following the defection of one former Conservative MP to the Liberal Democrats and Johnson's own decision to expel 21 members of his own party.

Johnson's advisers originally believed this would only be temporary and that opposition parties would swiftly vote for a general election, which some polls suggest he would win.
However, the opposition has other ideas and are currently blocking a general election until Brexit has been delayed beyond its current deadline of October 31.

You will know them by their fruits (Matthew, 7:16)

Sekulow: ‘Whistleblower’ Complaint ‘Written by a Law Firm’

Trump attorney Jay Sekulow on Friday’s “Fox & Friends” commented on the “whistleblower” complaint alleging President Donald Trump urged Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to probe former Vice President Joe Biden.

Sekulow called the probe into alleged Trump wrongdoing a “faux investigation” over something that would not be admitted in court, hinting at a conspiracy because the complaint appears to have been “written by a law firm.”

“When you start with a witness saying, Steve and Brian, ‘I have no knowledge of the events I’m depicting here, and I’m basing this on conversations I had with colleagues of mine, and I think they’re trustworthy,’ well, do you know if they heard it correctly? I don’t know because I don’t have firsthand knowledge. And do you think the whistleblower drafted that complaint? I mean, realistically?” Sekulow posited.

“You think they had help?” co-host Brian Kilmeade asked. “Did they have help?”

“Look at the phraseology, the endnotes, and the footnotes,” Sekulow replied. “This wasn’t drafted by this individual. This was written by a law firm. And you know what? The American people see it for what it is. Nobody has the appetite for this anymore. They want to keep doing it — call for a vote. … Tell Jerry Nadler and Adam Schiff. Call for a vote. Just go ahead and do it. See what happens.”

Corruption

Ukrainian prosecutor: I WAS fired for investigating Hunter

Citing a sworn affidavit prepared for a European court, former Ukraine inspector general Viktor Shokin testified he was told that the reason he was fired in March 2016 was because Joe Biden was unhappy with his probe of a natural gas company that was paying the vice president's son $50,000 a month.

The Hill investigative reporter John Solomon reported Shokin was fired within hours of Joe Biden's threat to withhold $1 billion in aid if the Ukrainian president did not fire the prosecutor.

Biden is on video, at a Council on Foreign Relations event, boasting of his threat.

Biden is on video, at a Council on Foreign Relations event, boasting of his threat.

Special operations

MORE U.S. COMMANDOS ARE FIGHTING INVISIBLE WARS IN THE MIDDLE EAST

THE PERCENTAGE OF commandos deployed to the Middle East is on the rise, according to new statistics provided to The Intercept by U.S. Special Operations Command. On average, more than 4,000 Special Operations forces — Navy SEALs, Army Green Berets, and Marine Corps Raiders among them — are deployed to the region each week, more than anywhere else in the world.

The increase comes at a time when the United States is apparently planning a troop drawdown in Afghanistan, despite a peace agreement with the Taliban having fallen apart. It also coincides with President Donald Trump’s announcements that the Islamic State has been defeated and that the U.S. is “rapidly pulling out of Syria.” Gone are the military surges that brought tens of thousands of conventional U.S. forces to Iraq and Afghanistan. Gone, too, is the faddish fixation with counterinsurgency, rehabilitated from the Vietnam War dustbin (only to be deep-sixed again) and the military’s “government in a box” pipe dreams.

Today, American warfare is increasingly typified by a reliance on Special Operations Forces, private contractors, local proxies working with and for the military and CIA, and air power. These low-visibility forces make greater secrecy and less accountability more likely for U.S. military actions in the Middle East, said Daphne Eviatar, director of the Security with Human Rights program at Amnesty International USA, who views the growing reliance on commandos as both predictable and troubling.