Two Colleagues Contradict Brennan's Denial of Reliance on Dossier

Former CIA Director John Brennan’s insistence that the salacious and unverified Steele dossier was not part of the official Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian interference in the 2016 election is being contradicted by two top former officials.

Recently retired National Security Agency Director Michael Rogers stated in a classified letter to Congress that the Clinton campaign-funded memos did factor into the ICA. And James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence under President Obama, conceded in a recent CNN interview that the assessment was based on “some of the substantive content of the dossier.” Without elaborating, he maintained that “we were able to corroborate” certain allegations.

These accounts are at odds with Brennan’s May 2017 testimony before the House Intelligence Committee that the Steele dossier was "not in any way used as the basis for the intelligence community's assessment" that Russia interfered in the election to help elect Donald Trump. Brennan has repeated this claim numerous times, including in February on “Meet the Press.”

In a March 5, 2018, letter to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, Adm. Rogers informed the committee that a two-page summary of the dossier — described as “the Christopher Steele information” — was “added” as an “appendix to the ICA draft,” and that consideration of that appendix was “part of the overall ICA review/approval process.”

His skepticism of the dossier may explain why the NSA parted company with other intelligence agencies and cast doubt on one of its crucial conclusions: that Vladimir Putin personally ordered a cyberattack on Hillary Clinton’s campaign to help Donald Trump win the White House.

Rogers has testified that while he was sure the Russians wanted to hurt Clinton, he wasn't as confident as CIA and FBI officials that their actions were designed to help Trump, explaining that such as assessment "didn't have the same level of sourcing and the same level of multiple sources.”

While faulting Clapper for not following intelligence community tradecraft standards that Clapper himself ordered in 2015, the House Intelligence Committee’s 250-page report also found that the ICA did not properly describe the “quality and credibility of underlying sources” and was not “independent of political considerations."

In another departure from custom, the report is missing any dissenting views or an annex with evaluations of the conclusions from outside reviewers. "Traditionally, controversial intelligence community assessments like this include dissenting views and the views of an outside review group,” said Fred Fleitz, who worked as a CIA analyst for 19 years and helped draft national intelligence estimates at Langley. "It also should have been thoroughly vetted with all relevant IC agencies,” he added. "Why were DHS and DIA excluded?”

Post too long more here:

https:// www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2018/05/14/2_colleagues_contradict_brennan_on_use_of_dossier.html

The 'Black Hole' That Sucks Up Silicon Valley's Money

A fast-growing type of charitable account gets big tax breaks but little oversight.

The San Francisco Bay Area has rapidly become the richest region in the country—the Census Bureau said last year that median household income was $96,777. It’s a place where $100,000 Teslas are commonplace, “raw water” goes for $37 a jug, and injecting clients with the plasma of youth —a gag on the television show Silicon Valley—is being tried by real companies for just $8,000 a pop.

Yet Sacred Heart Community Service, a San Jose nonprofit that helps low-income families with food, clothing, heating bills, and other services, actually received less in individual donations from the community in 2017 than it did the previous year. “We’re still not sure what it could be attributed to,” Jill Mitsch, the funds development manager at Sacred Heart, told me. It’s not the only nonprofit trying to keep donations up—the United Way of Silicon Valley folded in 2016 amidst stagnant contributions.

That’s not to say that Silicon Valley’s wealthy aren’t donating their money to charity. Many, including Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Larry Page, have signed the Giving Pledge, committing to dedicating the majority of their wealth to philanthropic causes. But much of that money is not making its way out into the community.

There are many reasons for this, but one of them is likely the increasing popularity of a certain type of charitable account called a donor-advised fund. These funds allow donors to receive big tax breaks for giving money or stock, but have little transparency and no requirement that money put into them is actually spent. Fidelity Charitable and Schwab Charitable, two of the biggest charities with donor-advised fund programs, held $2.2 billion in donor-advised funds from clients located in San Mateo and Santa Clara Counties in 2014. That’s a 946 percent increase from 2005, according to The Giving Code, a 2016 report about philanthropy in Silicon Valley.

The biggest of these collections of donor-advised funds in the region—and one that’s been in the news frequently in Silicon Valley lately because of a #MeToo scandal first reported by The Chronicle of Philanthropy—is the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. (The Silicon Valley Community Foundation is a current grant maker to The Atlantic.) The foundation said in February that it has $13.5 billion of assets under management, meaning that it surpassed the Ford Foundation to become the philanthropy with the third-largest coffers in the United States, according to The Chronicle of Philanthropy. It has received billions of dollars in donations from dozens of tech titans, including Koum, the former Ebay president Jeff Skoll, the WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton, the Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, the Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, the Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and the Oracle founder Larry Ellison, according to Forbes. Mark Zuckerberg gave $1 billion in shares in 2013. Like any other community foundation—just about any city and lots of small towns have them—it is supposed to be helping local donors give to local causes. Or, as it says on its website, “engaging donors to make our region and world a better place for all.”

Donor-advised funds have been growing nationally as the amount of money made by the top 1 percent has grown: Contributions to donor-advised funds grew 15.1 percent in fiscal year 2016, according to The Chronicle of Philanthropy, while overall charitable contributions grew only 1.4 percent that year. Six of the top 10 philanthropies in the country last year, in terms of the amount of nongovernmental money raised, were donor-advised funds, according to an annual ranking by The Chronicle of Philanthropy. Contributions were especially big in 2017 because of upcoming changes to tax law—people who might just take the standard deduction in future tax filings could put some money into donor-advised funds in 2017 and still deduct that contribution from their income, and then figure out what to do with the money later.

More Here:

https:// www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/silicon-valley-community-foundation-philanthropy/560216/?utm_source=feed

The Chinese Company Selling Iranian Sniper Gear Around the World

‘The proliferation of this technology is illustrative of a supply chain that is truly global and, consequently, is difficult to monitor and control.’

It’s a thermal sniper sight that allows a shooter to see his prey’s body heat against the black of night—and boy, is Iran’s military proud of it. The pricey RU60G sniper sight has gotten the royal treatment in state-linked news outlets, propaganda documentaries, and selfies with senior officers, where it’s trumpeted as a great indigenous optical achievement.

Though Tehran would have you believe its sniper sight is a purely domestic affair, the fact is they had a little help from abroad. Sift through the layers of business registration documents, web hosting records, and photographs from Middle Eastern weapons black markets and you’ll find the trail for Iran’s thermal sniper sight runs from the war in Syria all the way to a cheap motel room in Beijing, where the chairman of one of Iran’s largest defense contractors registered a shell company to invest in Chinese optics manufacturing.

The world got one of its first glimpses of the RU60G sight—and its larger cousins, the RU90G/RU120G—in 2013, during Iran’s International Police Safety & Security Equipment Exhibition in Tehran. Amidst the displays of SWAT-style tactical gear, Iranian news outlets celebrated a new thermal sniper sight, the RU60G, and displayed a larger version of the sight from the same family atop an AM50 sniper rifle.

It’s indeed a valuable piece of equipment. The thermal sniper sights let users see targets during day, night, and under most weather conditions. They allow a shooter to see through most kinds of smokescreens, spot camouflaged targets, and even tell if a vehicle is running or idle.

Two years after their exhibition debut, the sights began to surface, not in Iranian provinces, but on social media weapons black markets run by militants in Iraq and Syria and Yemen—three countries where Iran has been supporting and supplying militant groups. Turkey has already arrested Kurdish militants using the RU60G, in a possible sign that Iran’s arms production is starting to fuel other, unrelated conflicts.

Militants in both Iraq and Syria have carried out a brisk trade in weapons, explosives, and military equipment through Telegram channels, WhatsApp groups, and Facebook pages where optics equipment is especially popular. The markets act as a kind of lint trap for the weapons supplied to different factions in the conflicts. Whether captured from dead fighters, sold through corruption or simply lost through neglect—the chain of custody is rarely clear—arms like the RU60G began to fetch anywhere up to $5,000.

All this time, Iran has told the world that the RU60G is an indigenous product only made by Rayan Roshd Afzar, an Iranian defense company that, according to U.S. sanctions designations, supports the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ drone and aerospace programs. The firm also produces software to help censor social media in Iran.

Chinese business registration documents, however, tell a different story. In 2013, the chairman of Rayan Roshd, Mohsen Parsajam, registered a business, Most Outstanding Beijing Technology Developing Company Globally Ltd, to room 1724 on the 14th floor of a Beijing hotel. Registration documents reveal no activity for the company until 2015—the year when RU-series sights began appearing abroad. That April, Parsajam’s company took an ownership stake in Sanhe Haobang Optoelectronic Equipment Co., Ltd, a Chinese company run by Chinese national Emily Liu.

Sanhe registered websites for Raybeam Optronics and a host of other companies. On Alibaba, a Chinese e-commerce website, Raybeam began marketing military optical equipment from its factory, including a series of sights identical to the RU60G and the RU90G/120G—ever so mildly relabeled as the “RB60G” and “RB90/120G”—and promised it could crank out as many as 600 a month for customers. (China China China)

More Here:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-chinese-company-selling-iranian-sniper-gear-around-the-world

>>1424136

Thanks, I will read, in a bit.